* The Syrian newspaper article that went around the globe because it denied the existence of the Holocaust is still making gigantic political waves.
The article stated that no one had mastered "lying, dodgery and creating myths" as the Israelis have, and stated their most "famous myth" was the "so-called Holocaust."
* The Holocaust Hucksters have come up with a brand new wrinkle. A 1789 US law called the "Alien Tort Claims Act," that authorizes victims of human rights abuses anywhere in the world to seek redress in US courts is being used to sue a French railroad company by two Canadians and "ten others".
* Professor Norman Finkelstein's little booklet, "The Holocaust Industry", which I am presently reading, is still the hot potato in Lapdog-Medialand. In a biting essay titled "Shoah Business", Salon News writer Viktor Frölke (August 30, 2000) told what is going on:"
"With his clever, explosive and sometimes even wryly funny little book, "The Holocaust Industry," Norman G. Finkelstein, the 47-year-old enfant terrible of Holocaust studies from Brooklyn, N.Y., hit a nerve. Such a big nerve, in fact, that it caused a blackout of virtually all intellectual circuits -- at least in this country.
"While the book created a firestorm all over Europe, notably in England and Germany, in the U.S. a deafening silence has descended on it. Nobody wants to touch it."
* And speaking of Salon News of September 5, 2000 in an article on Lieberman, we found a pithy little paragraph that seems to speak volumes:
"Earlier this year, the organization released its list of the top 10 issues and events that affected American Jewry in 1999.
"Seven of the 10 involved anti-Semitism or the Holocaust. Nowhere was there any reference to the vitriolic debates within the Jewish community over pluralism and continuity."
Quote unquote!
* The Germans are stiffening their resolve against demands for reparations. In the latest negotiations for so-called "slave labor" during the Hitler years, the German government wants reassurance that if it pays protection money (my words) the deal will in fact hold.
I give you a representative quote from dailynews.yahoo.com:
"A German fund set up to compensate Nazi-era slave workers and other Third Reich victims is unlikely to start payments this year, the official overseeing the fund said.
"Ex-economics minister Otto Lambsdorff blamed the delay on the time being taken by U.S. courts to agree to dismiss existing class action suits brought by surviving Nazi forced laborers against German firms.
``It is more than doubtful whether this agreement can be reached in time to achieve legal closure this year,'' he wrote in a contribution for the Welt am Sonntag newspaper released on Saturday.
``Without complete legal closure, no money,'' he added. (...)
A precondition for payments to be released to the mainly central and east European victims was that all of the 60-odd suits against German firms or their subsidiaries in U.S. courts be dismissed and future legal action ruled out. We Germans call that "fromme Hoffnung" - pious hope!
* Spain is also in quicksand over its past, according to an article in The Observer, which ran way back in June but which was sent to me just recently. It notes that ". . . the word 'Spain' has been practically wiped out.
Instead the phrase "territorial limits" is used,' complained Gonzalo Anes, a well-known Spanish scholar, who added. 'The role of politicians should be to learn, and not to take it upon themselves to write history.'
Sergi Pamiès, a prominent Catalan writer, added: 'This is an old argument - part of Spain's inability to understand its many nations. It can show up in laws, in the economy, in the way some resources are distributed. This ghost still walks: not wanting to admit that this is a multi-national country.'
He added: 'I know that when my children study history they will be told lies, so it doesn't make any difference if it's a nationalist lie or a Spanish lie - what hurts is that they do it with my taxes.'
* And Jews blame us for wanting to set the record straight on history? Listen to this one.
A Jewish boy's 1858 kidnapping is said to "clouds rites for Pope Pius IX." A 6-year-old Jewish boy, Edgardo, is said to have been abducted in 1858 during the papacy of Pius IX and virtually adopted by the Italian pope.
He should have known better. Now this act is threatening his beatification, the last step before possible sainthood. `
"We always thought that this ordeal was in the past,'' Elena Mortara, Edgardo's great-great niece, said, surrounded by the Mortara family. ``We are sorry that it has become a scandal of the present.''
* Even in South Africa, where terror and mayhem reign, the Holocaust is routinely invoked to justify the unjustifiable. According to a UPI release, dated September 6, 2000,
". . . over and over again, apartheid was said to have exactly the same crime-against-humanity status as the Holocaust. Whites who denied responsibility for apartheid were equivalent to David Irving-style Holocaust-deniers.
"And, just as the Germans paid Israel reparations after the war to atone for the Holocaust, so whites must now pay reparations for apartheid."
This specific article has it all straight:
"The problem with the Holocaust analogy for most whites is not just that African numbers, per capita income and life expectancy increased under apartheid but that if the analogy is taken seriously there can be precious little room for a political opposition to the ANC government, which clearly equates itself with the righteous Holocaust victims."
* At the suggestion of Elie Wiesel, Sweden plans to host international conference in 2001 on "fighting Neo-Nazis".
The conference, which Prime Minister Persson estimates will get 40-50 nations to attend, will be a follow-up of the so-called Holocaust conference on war atrocities held in Stockholm earlier this year.
* Hillary Rodham Clinton was one of 11 public figures being honored by the World Jewish Congress for "helping bring about the various restitution settlements of the last few years," according to WJC executive director Elan Steinberg.
The reason she was included was because she arranged a meeting between the president and WJC president Edgar Bronfman in 1996. Bronfman was recently made a co-chair of Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign-advisory committee on Jewish issues. You see how these things work?
* Udo Voigt, the leader of the Far-Right Party, convinced that his father's generation had been unfairly sullied, and even more convinced that the Holocaust has become an industry intended to impose permanent shame on Germany, had this to say:
"When the Jews speak of collective German guilt for the Third Reich, we get angry. Their aim is an extension of the Morgenthau plan for the dismemberment of Germany, an attempt to paralyze us by passing guilt from generation to generation."
(In World War II, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., suggested turning Germany into a politically meaningless state by destroying industry and allowing only an agrarian economy.)
"We have handed out more than
100 billion in reparations. I was born in 1952, and my generation had no responsibility. Those who are young today have even less. But the imposition of guilt continues."
Mr. Voigt said the constant "intimidation" of Germany is intended to ensure that no new national sentiment is possible. It is also meant to create a guilt complex feeding a sense of obligation in Germany that leads it to take in more and more foreigners to prove its tolerance.
"We would have a five-year plan to send foreigners back," he said. "A large number will go. Not in 24 hours. But I believe that in the end 80 to 90 percent would leave." He will have his work cut out, for there are more than seven million foreigners in Germany, 9 percent of the population.
* Viewers of 20/20, an American television news program, were treated to a controversial feature on Ed Fagan, an attorney who made his name representing "Holocaust survivors" in Europe. Fagan is reported to have opened a second front, charging Japanese companies with using thousands of Asians and others as forced labor during World War II.
"It's like a posse," the tall, curly-haired and engaging Mr. Fagan said. "There are all these bad guys all over the world, and we have to track them down."
However, an investigation by The New York Times and the ABC News program "20/20" has found that Mr. Fagan is facing his own reckoning. The picture emerging from the documents and stacks of unopened client letters in his office is described as chaotic, as he promised more than he could deliver.
"I wanted to be a rabbi," he mourned.