The Yahoo! fiasco is all over the Internet. By now most Internetters know that a French court ordered Yahoo!, a giant of an American Internet, to censor itself, lest French Jews feel offended by some of its auctions of World War II memorabilia. After a few noisy statements about not ever going to buckle under, the company did a disgraceful switcheroo and agreed to doing just that. Some bravado, there!
The details are still being worked out. It looks like Yahoo! has agreed to remove most "hate" items but it will continue to permit sales of coins and stamps issued by Nazi Germany.
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A council official in the German town Lennestadt has been suspended from his job for doing something foolish: He sent colleagues Christmas cards wishing them ". . . lots of Sieg and Heil".
Now the words themselves are not on the Forbidden List of Utterances, for "Sieg" means "Victory" and "Heil" means "Greetings". Terms such as "Sieg," "Heil" and "Fuehrer" are not formally outlawed, but nevertheless avoided by most Germans, especially public servants and opinion leaders.
One wonders which of his "colleagues" ratted the councilman out.
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In French Quebec, the "Michaud Crisis" has caused some amazing results - which shall be featured in tomorrow's ZGram. It started as a minor disagreement, in that a former provincial Cabinet minister vying for the Parti Québécois nomination in a Montreal by-election, aroused the anger of Canadian Jews when he opined that Jews thought they were ". . . the only people in the world who have suffered in the history of humanity."
His Separatist party boss, Mr. Bouchard, who just happened to be the Premier of Quebec, knew which side his bread was buttered on and genuflected: "I deplore (Michaud's comments), condemn them and completely disassociate myself from them." Whereupon other leading Separatists, one of them a former Premier, took out full page ads supporting dissident Michaud.
Mr. Michaud, a feisty felling, decided to dig in his heels, stating he would not retract his earlier comments. He accused Mr. Bouchard of "demonizing" him and of triggering a "fratricidal war" - meaning French Canadians against French Canadians.
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A British rabbi visiting in Germany was attacked by three young rowdies in a Berlin subway station. He received hits in the face and had his glasses broken. Immediately, the shrieks of "Neo-Nazi" and "Skinhead" were heard all over Germany. Upon closer inspection, however, it was revealed that one of the youths was a Lebanese kid and the other an Iraqi teenager. The third is still at large. Maybe that is the one!
''It's (the) Middle East conflict spilling over into Germany,'' decided the rabbi. ''It's got nothing to do with the Holocaust and with German guilt and all the garbage that comes out in these situations.''
The rabbi's wife, too, tried to calm emotions by issuing a press release.
''They were three teen-agers possibly slightly drunk, certainly out of bed too late at night, excitable, too much testosterone and not enough common sense!'' she wrote. ''I just don't think it's worth making it into a national or international scandal,'' her husband added.
A penny for your thoughts.
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This one out of Britain is telling. THE BBC has allowed the government to exercise editorial control over a series of broadcasts to mark Britain's first Holocaust Memorial Day later this month. The odd arrangement came to light in correspondence between the BBC and Armenian groups in Britain who are furious that the genocide of their compatriots in 1915-16 is being ignored and all attention given to the Jewish Holocaust.
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France is knuckling under to a renewed Holocaust reparations raid and expects to sign what is described as a "Pact" by the end of the month - gingerly referred to as a "multi-million dollar settlement". The deal is described as having "... the potential of heading off a major diplomatic row between Washington and Paris."
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Germany's foreign minister, the snotty Joschka Fischer, arch enemy of German conservatives and nationalists, is in deep trouble. Somebody dug up some photographs and other evidence that showed Fischer as having belonged to what is carefully described as a "militant, left-wing movement" and having engaged in uncivilized ways.
Bettina Röhl, daughter of the late Ulrike Meinhof, a member of the terrorist Red Army Faction, is threatening to ask police to file charges against Mr. Fischer for attempted murder. Ms. Röhl claims that Mr. Fischer was involved in a 1976 firebombing that nearly killed a police officer.
Not too surprisingly, the weekly magazine, Focus, reported that police of the City of Frankfurt could not find Mr. Fisher's files. Nobody has any idea where the documents are now.
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The Sunday Times of January 7 2001 has a couple of interesting paragraphs about Mr. Churchill's furtive behavior at the end of World War II.
On August 31, 1944, the head of MI6 forwarded to the prime minister, Winston Churchill, an intercepted coded signal. It was a telegram from the Reichsführer-SS and chief of German police, Heinrich Himmler. The telegram has not survived. But it must have been highly sensitive - in a handwritten reply to the head of MI6, Churchill noted: "Himmler telegram kept and destroyed by me."
Out of some 14,000 decrypts that the British prime minister personally saw, this was the only one he felt he had to destroy. And it was the only signal emanating from Himmler.
David Irving to the fore!
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From Abnews, an abstract service, came these telling quotes:
(1) Jaber, Samah. "Jewish Settlers: Non-Jews Are Animals In Human Form", in Palestine Times, December 24, 2000.
During the horror that faces us daily in the West Bank, the following are excerpts from some of the interviews heard on television.
One Israeli settler, when asked how he felt about the death of 12-year-old Muhammad al-Durra, a Palestinian boy in Gaza, he said, "Our kids are the kids of God; theirs are the kids of Satan." Another Jewish settler, reflecting on Muhammad al-Durra's death, said with "motherly" passion, "They [Palestinians] are not humans...they are animals. In a way, those Palestinians aren't even animals. Animals care for their offspring. Palestinians send their children out to kill or be killed."
(Samah Jabr is a freelance writer and medical student in Jerusalem. This article was written with the assistance of Elizabeth Mayfield.)
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