* The ADL is up in arms about Amazon.com selling a title of which the self-appointed censors disapprove. This time it is the well-known, underground bestseller "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." The ADL wrote in a letter to Amazon.com founder and Chief Executive Officer, Jeff Bezos wailing that the ADL didn't ask for censorship, only that, in the future, Amazon.com indicate the books' extremist nature.
Yet Amazon has, so far, refused to label all denial books "extreme." Bezos replied to Foxman: "I do not think that (censoring) is our role - we are not endowed with sufficient wisdom to judge what books are extremist or otherwise offensive to certain people."
* A widely circulated German daily, the Frankfurter Allgemeine, ran an extensive article in its March 30, 2000 issue documenting that at the beginning of the Red Terror, in 1934, Jews made up the majority of Stalin's Soviet Secret Police leadership with 39 % representation. Such an article is a breakthrough for the heavily censorship-policed German press.
* In a stunning ruling, Israel's High Court has affirmed what the UN already ruled in 1975 - that Zionism is racist. This opens the door for legal inroads by the Arabs such as the Palestinians, who have so far been excluded from living where they like to live and moving where they like to move - perhaps right back into their occupied homeland, "Israel".
* The fall-out from the Irving-Lipstadt trial continues. The Jewish papers reflect not only glee at having won, but also amazing ambivalence and unease. Van Pelt confessed to having felt "nervous" and called the trial "disconcerting" and "surreal." Lipstadt expressed similar angst. The Jewish papers are filled with oy veys that many in the mainstream media, so far, have refused to treat Irving like an outcast and grant him many high profile interviews.
* A military historian, Dr. Joel Hayward of Zealand, who wrote a revisionist master's thesis questioning the major tenets of the "Holocaust" has done the requested kneefall and crawled back into the ethnic fold. The Chronicle published his letter saying that Hayward had withdrawn his main conclusions - namely, that there were no gas chambers, that fewer than six million Jews perished, and that Germany had no means to carry out a plan of mass murder. Shades of the thumbscrews applied to David Cole.
* David Irving responded to an article in the Independent accusing him of racism, wherein he pointed out that "Lipstadt has written entire books and newspaper articles urging that Jews never marry outside their own race . . . yet I stand condemned as a racist on the basis of one nineteen word ditty - all they found in a 20 million word diary."
* John Lucacs, writing for Newsweek, (4/24/2000) put the finger on what may have aborted a potential Irving victory: ". . . Irving's presentation almost always reveals his purpose, which is that of a fanatical admirer of Hitler. Yet Irving, who is not a coward, does not quite have the courage of his conviction."
As evidence of Irving's "fanaticism", Lucacs cites the following, referring to Hitler's invasion of Poland: "...ancient German land was coming under German rule again..." and "There seemed no coincidence that the Jews were at the bottom of the spreading partisan movement everywhere."
One does not have to be a Hitler admirer to find out with very little checking that both these claims are true.
* J.J. Goldberg, writing for the Jewish Telegraphic agency (4/24/2000) tells of a poll conducted by Zogby International that shows that unlike five other groups to which they were compared - Hispanics, Asian, African, Arabs, and Italian Americans - Jews are emotionally attached not to the country where they or their forebears came from, but to Israel. (82% of Israelis are Ashkenazis who are converts to Babylonian Talmudism; their forebears are Khazars, not Biblical Jews)
Writes Goldberg: "For Zogby, the specific characteristics marking American Jews - attachment to Israel, distinctive political values, mistrust of the United Nations - all point to the enduring influence of Judaism on the Jews inner lives." Concludes Goldberg: "...wherever it comes from, they're not getting it in synagogue."
* One of the Lipstadt defense witnesses has already landed a political plum for his services, it would seem. Cambridge U historian professor, Richard Evans, has been appointed to serve on a government panel dealing with compensation for "art stolen from Holocaust victims" now to be found in British museums.
Writes Irving: "The appointment...to this panel smacks of a reward; it is bound to raise fresh questions about his pro-Jewish sympathies."
* Bruno Doesseker, a literary fraudster who claimed repressed memories of concentration camp horrors in his memoirs "Fragments" has had his home searched by Swiss police. Inquiring minds would like to know what the authorities were looking for. A Swiss attorney by the name of Kuhn has pressed fraud charges against the author.
* A column titled "From the Editor's Desk" in the Canadian Jewish News of April 28, 2000 says this: "The recently concluded libel trial in London in which David Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt for having called him a Holocaust denier, reminds us like a hammer hitting our forehead that there are still people in the world who harbour evil intentions toward the Jewish people."
That same column, same page, runs a blood-curdling poem, prefaced by these italicized words: The Bible avows that the Creator "Will avenge the blood of His Servants". The creator of this poem is one Rabbi Louis Farrell, and its title is "The Oath of the Holocaust".
"May the curse that is theirs be their sons,
May they die by their sword and their guns,
May their rivers flow red,
their first born be dead
May they perish from earth like Huns.
* In the same paper, we also get a glimpse of Holocaust Education, Canadian style:
"(A) teacher searched for a way to make comprehensible the incomprehensible, namely the number 6,000,000. He asked his young students who were familiar with baseball and baseball stadiums to imagine the Skydome in Toronto filled to capacity, every seat occupied and then to imagine 20 such stadiums filled to capacity and placed side by side. Then his students would have an idea of the number - but not of the suffering - of the Jewish children murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices."
* Pope John Paul II's visit to Israel last month gets a comment or two in the same Canadian Jewish News as well. The visit is seen as 'a historic triumph for Israel and the Jewish people.' By contrast, Pope Paul VI gets a posthumous rebuff because he spent only 12 hours in Israel, refused to utter the name of the Jewish state, and snubbed the chief rabbis ". . . on the basis of equality." And something else was missing: "There was no discussion of anti-Semitism or complicity in the Holocaust."
Thought for the Week:
"Use the courts, use the judges, use the constitution of the country, use its medical societies and its laws to further our ends. Do not stint in your labor in this direction. And when you have succeeded you will discover that you can now effect your own legislation at will and you can, by careful organization, by constant campaigns about the terrors of society, by pretense as to your effectiveness, make the capitalist himself, by his own appropriation, finance a large portion of the quiet Communist conquest of that nation."
(Lawrentia Beria, in charge of Soviet's NKWD, in the Communist Textbook on Psychopolitics, page 8)