Here is my week's worth of summary, for your files and my archives.
* A ZGram reader sent word that a new computer game, called "Medal of Honor", is available for those who want to kill Germans symbolically. The game is published by Dreamworks Interactive. One owner of that company is reported to be Steven Spielberg. The aim of the game is to kill as many German soldiers as possible. Pictures in the game are from WWII.
* Hungarian textbooks are under fire. A new study reviewed 50 textbooks dealing with history, geography and literature. According to various wire reports, these textbooks ". . . fail to describe in details the horrors of the Holocaust," and some refer to Jews as "murderers of Christ", "enemies of Germans" and "capitalists of Germany". The American Jewish Committee is protesting.
* No such problem, apparently, exists in America. Here is an excerpt from an article by Bill Roberts in the Idaho Statesman, May 12, 2000:
"An eighth-grade math teacher at East Junior High School who offended some parents and Jews by asking students to calculate the volume of gas needed to fill a Nazi extermination chamber apologized for his actions Thursday. Jim McGuire, 37, also asked students ... to calculate the surface area of a mass grave where bodies were dumped following their extermination."
Instructions included: "Draw a line on a map between the Nazi concentration camps and see what shapes the lines produce. Using trigonometry, plot an escape from a concentration camp with right angles."
* Ever more proponents of the traditional "Holocaust" version are bemoaning the lack of interest in the topic, and ever more feel that "witnesses" are crucial to keeping it hoisted - inferentially making the point that it was "witnesses" and not hard, cold, forensic evidence that bolstered the tales from the start.
Take this Letter to the Editor of the Calgary Sun, May 12, 2000:
"Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis will only become more prevalent unless the public steps in to fill the void left by dwindling numbers of Second World War soldiers, says the head of the Jewish War Veterans of Canada.
"It's very important among the Jews, particularly, that we try to pass that torch to the non-Jewish public. . . . I'm perplexed by the low level of reaction by the public at large."
* A well-known researcher of "fringe groups" - both on the left and on the right - has found that "human rights" organizations supposedly fighting these groups collect millions of dollars for their crusades against an exaggerated danger.
Laird Wilcox, speaking of the right, says the total numbers of active, organized "extremists" is not much more than 10,000 in a nation of more than 270 million.
Simple arithmetic tells you that means that Morris Dees's Southern Poverty Law Center, which has amassed an endowment of $113 million, has $11,300 to spend per "extremist".
Wilcox is quoted as saying: "There is an anti-racist industry entrenched in the United States that has attracted bullying, moralizing fanatics, whose identity and livelihood depend upon growth and expansion of their particular kind of victimization. . . the anti-racist movement has become a massive extortion racket."
* And coming back to Spielberg: According to an article in the Seattle Times, ". . . eye contact is what you need to bring alive the lessons of the Holocaust."
Spielberg, attending a $250-a-plate breafast fundraiser for his Shoah Visual History Foundation, added: "In the public-school system, "tolerance education is no better than it was when I was a student." Washington State's governor, Gary Locke, who shared a table with Spielberg at the breakfast, according to the Seattle Times, ". . . sang the director's praises but said he didn't know if the state would get involved in financial support for the project."
Spielberg also feels another movie coming on about World War II, but he let it be known that it wouldn't be ". . . another Holocaust story." He also has plans to broaden his foundation's outreach to "civil rights and slavery and Japanese Americans being interned in American concentration camps in World War II, as well as the story of the Turks and Armenians, the story of the Native Americans over the past 200 years, the story of gay-bashing and Vietnam veterans who came back to return to America to become pariahs."
Adds Spielberg: "I'm talking about this whole kind of rainbow blend of racial bias. You just can't teach the Holocaust by itself."
* A six-part Holocaust mini-series is being planned by Germany's ZDF television that is going to run into trouble with the usual censorship suspects, because it has appropriated a dangerous revisionist theme - namely that ". . . The Holocaust emerged in a piecemeal, step-by-step way and not as the result of a single order from Nazi leaders."
Haven't Revisionists said so all along - that the Führer (or the Pope, for that matter) knew nothing of the alleged gassings?
U.S. "paper historian" Christopher Browning, serving as a consultant on this project, opines that "new evidence" has shown that the emergence of the Holocaust was ''a very complex development, and often quite ambiguous along the way.'' He must have learned something during the 1988 Great Holocaust Trial during which he admitted under cross-examination that he had never done any primary research and had simply used photos of "gas vans" plus captions supplied by Yad Vashem.
* European insurance companies, under increasing extortion, have rejected hundreds of claims submitted on behalf of Holocaust victims. So far, only five companies, participating in the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims, have agreed to settle claims, but are rejecting claims left and right.
Insurance regulators proclaim to be shocked. Says Deborah Senn, the insurance commissioner for Washington State: "I am very seriously concerned about how the companies have participated in this process. The companies are turning down claims even when they are well documented. If three out of four claims are being rejected in the fast track, how are the larger groups of survivors or their heirs going to see some justice?''
Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, had this to say: "I have found my experience in the international commission as dispiriting; it has been a struggle every step of the way.''
* In Austria, President Thomas Klestil expressed the requisite dismay ". . . at the role (Austria) played in the horrors of the Holocaust." This presidential kneefall happened at the ceremonies marking the 55th anniversary of the "liberation" of the Mauthausen camp by the Allies. Vienna's Philharmonic Orchestra' played Ode to Joy, which some suvivors found offensive.
Worse yet, the very Philharmonic found itself under attack and, according to several articles, ". . . only relatively recently acknowledged that 47 percent of its members also belonged to the Nazi party."
And its get better yet: Even applause, became an issue for the Philharmonic performance. As a compromise, the orchestra decided to let people clap after the piece, before a moment of silence and lighting of candles. The reason for censoring applause was "not to disturb the dead."
* The AIDS deniers are luckier than the Holocaust Deniers, according to the Chicago Tribune. An AIDS conference in South Africa ". . . has world-recognized experts on AIDS seated at the same table as the medical establishment's equivalent of Holocaust deniers - researchers who don't believe AIDS exists."
* Officials at the Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, are lying through their teeth about the Irving-Lipstadt trial.
"The greater significance of the case is that it has proved the existence of the Holocaust," Lisa Davidson, a spokesman, said.
Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, was more realistic. "I think the results would have been terrible if the verdict had been different," he said.
=====
Thought for the Day:
"We may one day forgive the church for what it did to us," said Yosef "Tommy" Lapid, a Holocaust survivor who heads a populist party.
(Sent to the Zundelsite)