Today, three dissimilar and yet related items.
One is a yammering letter to the National Post
For once, this dishonest organization that has made a cushy living by vilifying, criminalizing and bankrupting people they don't like have gotten a taste of what it feels like to be themselves exposed and held up for hatred and contempt. The letter speaks for itself.
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Disaster in Durban | Leo Adler
The World Conference against Racism is becoming a farce. As Arab nations demonize Israel, other issues are ignored. It is as if the whole world were in a state of blissful tolerance -- except Israel.
The failure and hypocrisy on display in Durban was foreseen by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. As a UN-accredited non-governmental organization, it was involved in every preparatory meeting leading up to the WCAR -- except for the Asian regional conference that took place earlier this year in Tehran. The Center's representative, Dr. Shimon Samuels, had been active for three years in the European Network Against Racism, an umbrella group for over 860 anti-racist NGOs in the European Union. Yet he was deliberately blocked from going to Teheran. It was at that meeting that objectionable language castigating Israel was originally put forward.
Despite the gloomy outlook, the Simon Wiesenthal Center decided to come to Durban and fight for human rights. Unfortunately, a majority of NGOs took the Arab nations' lead and focused their attention on Israel. Some NGOs gave out pamphlets containing anti-Semitic cartoons, blocked Jewish delegates from speaking and helped create what one European delegate described as "a feeling [of] racism."
To their credit, at least a dozen major international human rights groups, some of whom have at times criticized Israel, had the courage to disassociate themselves from a NGO Forum resolution declaring Israel to be a "racist apartheid state." But they were in a minority.
We refuse to give up on the idea that nations and NGOs can meet in good faith to address the problems of racism and intolerance. Hopefully, when governments see the shambles that has unfolded in Durban, they will ensure that future conferences are not dominated by narrow-minded partisan interests.
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Canada may well be a vassal of Israel, as is the United States, but it is certainly not an ally, not politically, not militarily and not spiritually.
Most knowledgeable Canadian Christians and Muslims, because of Israeli desecration of the Holy Land and unforgivably cruel subjugation of the native Palestinians, on the contrary, see Israel as the enemy.
The media, of course, in the service of their co-religionists and with heads well into the sand, fastidiously conceal or ignore the ominous reality of growing Gentile resentment. If history is any guide, they do so at their peril.
Ian V. Macdonald
The third item comes from the opposite end of the world - from a courtroom where, for the first time in postwar history, an accused murderer and torturer of Germans stands trial. Here is one brief account:
POLAND: WHEN GERMANS WERE MALTREATED
Witnesses recount postwar atrocities in Polish camps
Calgary Herald June 14, 2001
Roger Boyes Times of London OPOLE, POLAND --
German women were drowned in latrines and prisoners were buried alive during postwar internment in Poland, according to witnesses at the trial of a Polish camp commandant.
Czelaw Geborski, a stooped, snowy-haired pensioner of 76, is accused of murdering German women who, after the Second World War, were herded into deportation camps prior to being expelled from Silesia.
His trial is the first to be held in post-communist Europe for crimes committed against Germans. About 14 million of them [German people] were expelled from territory that is now part of Poland and the Czech Republic; two million [German people] died mainly of hunger, exhaustian [sic] and disease as they trekked westward.
The revelations, coupled with the disclosure that Polish villagers took part in a bloodthirsty massacre of Jews during the war, have forced Poland to reassess its image of itself as one of the primary victims of Hitler. The Silesian atrocities occurred in 1945 and 1946, after the end of the war.
The Soviet Union laid claim to what was once eastern Poland and, in return, Poles gained territory in the west. Germans living there were thrown out. Once resettled in Germany, they formed powerful political associations that kept alive memories of camps such as Lamsdorf (now known as Lambinowice) 30 kilometres from Opole. [The German town of Oppeln]
Geborski, sitting in the dock next to his often embarrassed lawyer, interrupted loudly as the witnesses tried to reconstruct everyday life in the camp.
"It was like a holiday camp!" he barked out, banging his stick on the floor. "They all had their own beds and three modest meals."
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"We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed."
(Thomas Jefferson)