Still trying to master my backed-up e-mail - the best I can do is just give to you some glimpses of the churning "Holocaust" cauldron in many corners of our globe!
* Starting with a cheerful note, an enterprising Pittsburgh high school student wants alternative views of Holocaust taught!
Kris Mamula, of the Associated Press, reports on February 29, 2000 that
"High school class president Robbie Joswiak wants revisionist views of the Holocaust taught in his Beaver County school district - and that, said one teacher, is proof enough that students are not receiving enough information about Nazi Germany.
"In a recent e-mail message to teacher Stephanie Mazzei, the high school senior argued that the number of European Jews killed in Nazi Germany may have been 1.1 million - not the six million deaths that are usually cited.
"Mazzei, who teaches gifted students and lectures on the Holocaust, said Joswiak's views are proof that the Riverside Beaver County School District, with 2,067 students, needs to expand its Nazi-era classes.
"He told me what I was teaching was, in effect, folklore," said Mazzei, who has been a teacher in the district for 30 years. "That's what alarmed me." (...)
"Joswiak told Mazzei that he'd read 13 books about the Holocaust, three of which challenged conventional information about the Nazi death camps.
"Joswiak cited works by British historian David Irving as a reason why other views of the Holocaust should be taught."
* Sharon Samber of the Jewish Telegraph Agency penned an article on March 15, 2000, documenting that there are "fewer hate groups, but they're growing more dangerous."
Not surprisingly, immediately the Southern Poverty Law Center pipes in.
"The count is down so it sounds encouraging, but it's not," warned Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a human rights organization based in Alabama (...)
"A Nazification of the white supremacist movement is helping to bring about increased targeting of Jews and a rise in Holocaust denial, Potok said.
"According to Potok, the new alliance has the potential to draw millions and form a mass, very dangerous movement. Potok says censoring Nazi groups or trying to legislate them out of existence doesn't work.
"We have to shine a light on these groups," he said, adding that parents must talk to their children about racism, anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial."
Which sounds like good advice!
* 3000 Israeli teen-agers held an anti-Haider rally on March 15, 2000, described by Mark Lavie, an AP journalist, as follows:
"The program looked more like a rock concert or football rally than a political gathering. Teen-agers, their shirts plastered with ''No to Haider'' stickers and carrying anti-racism signs, chanted off-color slogans combining Haider's name with a selection of unprintables.
"Rock singers and dance troupes alternated with officials speaking from a podium at the convention center. All had the same message -- though Haider himself is not a part of the Austrian government, his ideology is a threat to minorities all over.
"A film showed grisly scenes from Nazi concentration camps as the announcer described the upsurge of extremist, racist and neo-Nazi movements in the United States, France, Russia, Yugoslavia and other countries.
"Speakers at the rally and at a smaller, more solemn ceremony earlier at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial warned that Haider's ideology, springing from the home of the founder of Nazism, Adolf Hitler, could lead to similar results if it is not stopped."
* The Jewish Telegraph Agency of March 19, represented by Lev Gorodetsky, worries about
". . . the march by SS veterans through Latvia's capital . . . a procession of old soldiers commemorating their struggle against communism." (...)
"I saw people who could have been my murderers," said Effraim Meydan, who works at the Riga office of the Jewish Agency for Israel.
Nikolajs Romanovskis, chairman of the National Soldiers Association, which organized the March 16 event, viewed the demonstration differently.
"The truth is that only a small number from the Arajs Kommando," (Latvia's wartime security police) "were involved in these activities. To say that many of us were involved in shooting Jews is nonsense."
During this demonstration, high-school students distributed a nationalist paper called "Latvian in Latvia". According to the Union of Councils for Soviet Jewry,
". . . a new openly Nazi youth monthly 'Patriots'" was just launched in the Latvian seaport city of Liepaja. Writes Gorodetzky:
"To be a patriot, according to the this magazine, means to fight for a "Latvian Latvia," to praise the service of the Arajs Kommandos, to see Jewish conspiracies everywhere and to deny the Holocaust."
* This next item is scary - and needed food for thought for the goyim who still choose to snooze. (Source: UPI, March 20, 2000, titled "UN report: Sovereignty can be forfeited on humanitarian grounds" by William Reilly):
"A United Nations University study of NATO 's intervention in Kosovo said Monday a profound change in world politics has emerged, mainly that ***sovereignty can be forfeited on humanitarian grounds.*** (emphasis added)
"Kosovo and The Challenge of Humanitarian Intervention" is billed as a '. . . compendium of authoritative viewpoints on many dimensions of the 1999 crisis' and offers recommended 'follow-up steps'."
But the study co-edited by the Tokyo-based institution's vice rector, Ramesh Thakur, and Albrecht Schnabel with contributor Ray Funnel, a retired Australian air marshal, warned (a) precedent will have dangerously undermined international order unless world powers can agree on principles to guide future interventions in similar circumstances.
The study said, in part:
"The bottom line question for us is this: Faced with another Holocaust or Rwanda-type genocide on the one hand, and a Security Council veto on the other, what would we do?. . . A new consensus on humanitarian intervention is urgently needed. . . Selective indignation is inevitable, for we simply cannot intervene everywhere, every time. But we must still pursue policies of effective indignation."
This study, released at U.N. headquarters in New York, warned that
". . . continuing fallout from Kosovo has the potential to redraw the landscape of international politics, with significant ramifications for the UN, major powers and regional organizations, and the way in which world politics are understood and interpreted."
The full and eerily fascinating study is available at <http://www.unu.edu>
* This one, in turn, provides comic relief for the bystander but will be taken seriously by devout Catholics, as well it should. It has to do with a religious curse, called "Pulsa de nura" put on the visiting Pope. For this curse, several people have already been arrested, with emotions running high. According to Herb Keinon and the Jerusalem Post Staff, March 23, 2000, the judge who presided over the preliminary hearing of one of the zealots stated that he felt like he was in "a Zulu tribe."
The good judge offered that he could not rule whether the mystical ceremony in itself constituted incitement, or whether it might have been merely a publicity stunt, but it was sufficient that enough people might take it seriously to endanger the cursee's - that is, the Pope's - life.
The accused, a man named Baranes, 32, was alleged to have initiated the ceremony. He is suspected of belonging to a terrorist organization, harming religious sensibilities, and threatening to harm a world leader. He said he and the others were followers of the late Lubavitcher rebbe, who had banned meeting the pope.
"It is a shame for the Jewish people to go crawling to the gentile pope," said Baranes.
Participants in the cursing ceremony, sounding ritual calls on ceremonial ram's horns, cursed the pope as a "hater of Israel." While they were at it, they also singled out Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat and Syrian President Hafez Assad for curses. It makes you wonder if Holocaust Deniers will be next.
* For those who need a hearty laugh - here is a telling article entitled "French Jewish chief under fire for Auschwitz jibe", courtesy of a Paris Reuters article, March 30, 2000:
"The head of France's main Jewish religious body is under pressure to resign for writing to a long-time rival: "If Auschwitz had not existed, it is likely you would have invented it.'' (...)
Jean Kahn, president of the Central Israelite Consistory of France, made the comment in an angry letter to Moise Cohen, president of the consistory for the Paris area, Reuters was told.
Next, trying to calm the dispute, former Council of French Jewish Institutions head, Theo Klein, waded even deeper into the mire with this astounding gem:
"We are deeply appreciative of all that Jean Kahn has done for the Jewish community. But we think it is time he protects his past without compromising the present."
* In Zurich, Switzerland, according to Associated Press - date missing in the e-mail sent to me - an American-sponsored survey ". . . Eyes Swiss Anti-Semitism" with a very jaundiced eye.
The survey, sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, found that 16 percent of the Swiss population holds anti-Semitic views. The survey documented furthermore that an increase in prejudice against Jews came about in the 1990s, when the international community began scrutinizing neutral Switzerland's treatment of Holocaust assets and Jewish refugees during World War II. The survey's sponsors worried that "latent anti-Semitism could be much more widespread."
Ruth Dreifuss, who served last year as Switzerland's first-ever Jewish or woman president, warned in a newspaper interview Saturday against a "creeping acceptance" of anti-Semitism in the country. One-third of the Swiss People's Party's voters ". . . think anti-Semitically." Dreifuss surmises.
Christoph Blocher, the outspoken billionaire industrialist who is the party's best-known leader, must make it clear he does not support such tendencies, demanded Dreifuss. The Blocher party is the furthest to the right of the four parties, including Dreifuss' Social Democrats, in the governing coalition. The Swiss People's Party has opposed closer ties to the European Union and called for curbs on immigration.
"The creeping acceptance of anti-Semitism is very dangerous," Dreifuss opined. "Racism must never become acceptable.''
And, finally:
* Jen Rosenberg, known to many of us as the webmaster of the ever-so-orthodox "About.com's Guide to the Holocaust" site, has decided to move on to greener pastures and explore ". . . additional areas of history."
Explains Rosenberg:
"I sincerely apologize for this sudden announcement. I've truly appreciated the warm emails from so many of you over the years and the support so many of you have given.
"I hope that those of you who also enjoy the history of the 20th century will join me in my new endeavor by subscribing to my new email newsletter, "The Histo-Gram."
The ZGram now salutes the Histo-Gram across the Great Divide!
Who said that imitation is the finest form of flattery?
Ingrid
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Thought for the Day:
"It doesn't depend on you whether or not we exist. If you don't like us, don't accept our invitations, and don't invite us to come and see you. Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!"
(Nikita Khrushchev, November 18, 1956)