From irimland@zundelsite.org Tue, 31 Jul 2001 22:49:14 -0700 Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2001 22:49:14 -0700 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 7/31/2001 - "Brazilian stats" Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny July 31, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: Why the dickens Brazilians, of all people, should concern themselves with matters of the "Holocaust" is something left for the reader to ponder. However, self-serving surveys tell a story - and there is an interesting story enbedded in this one: [START] Thursday July 26, 8:08 am Eastern Time Press Release SOURCE: American Jewish Committee American Jewish Committee Survey: One-Third of Brazilians Completely Unaware of Holocaust SAO PAULO, Brazil, July 26 /PRNewswire/ -- One-third of Brazilians have no awareness at all of the Nazi extermination of Jews during World War II, and 11 percent say it is possible that the Holocaust never happened, according to a new American Jewish Committee survey released today at a news conference in Sao Paulo. ``The level of ignorance in the largest South American country about the systematic Nazi murder of one-third of the Jewish people, including 1.5 million children, is very troubling,'' said Shulamit Bahat, acting executive director of the American Jewish Committee. ``Latin America may be far removed from the events surrounding World War II, but we would hope that the greatest human tragedy of the 20th century would be an integral part of any country's educational system.'' Told directly about the ``Nazi extermination of the Jews during the Second World War,'' and asked ``Are you at all aware of the episode?'' 68 percent of Brazilians answer ``yes'' and 32 percent ``no,'' according to the AJC survey. With regard to the particulars of the Holocaust, only 5 percent of Brazilians correctly identify Auschwitz, Dachau, and Treblinka as concentration camps, while 95 percent answer ``don't know.'' Similarly, only 8 percent of Brazilians correctly cite the yellow star or a variant as the symbol that Jews were forced to wear during the Second World War, while 86 percent answer ``don't know.'' Still, despite a weak knowledge base, a majority of Brazilians favor keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive, according to the AJC survey. * 63 percent of Brazilians maintain that Holocaust education should be included in schools, while 31 percent disagree. * 67 percent of Brazilians feel that they "should keep remembrance of the Nazi extermination of the Jews strong even after the passage of time." In contrast, 28 percent of Brazilians maintain that "more than 50 years after the end of World War II, it is time to put the memory of the Nazi extermination of the Jews behind us." * 61 percent of Brazilians deem it "essential" or "very important" that "all Brazilians know about the Nazi extermination of the Jews," while 34 percent see it as "only somewhat important" or "not important." The AJC survey found a measure of openness to Holocaust denial among Brazilians, a factor that may be a result of the widespread ignorance about the Holocaust. Eleven percent of Brazilians said it seems possible that the Nazi extermination of the Jews never happened, while 76 percent feel certain that it happened. The 11 percent figure was the highest among the 13 countries surveyed so far by the AJC. The AJC survey also found negative feelings about Jews prevalent among a significant portion of the Brazilian population. Asked about their willingness to live as neighbors with various minority groups, 37 percent ``prefer not to have'' Jewish neighbors, the highest figure for any of the 13 countries in which the AJC has fielded the question. Some 47 percent state that it ``wouldn't make any difference'' and 12 percent said they would like to have Jewish neighbors. Brazilians also were asked to react to the statement ``Now, as in the past, Jews exert too much influence on world events.'' Forty-five percent ``agree'' (``strongly agree'': 21 percent; ``somewhat agree'': 24 percent), 32 percent ``disagree'' (``strongly disagree'': 18 percent; ``somewhat disagree'': 14 percent), and 22 percent ``don't know.'' The Jewish community in Brazil numbers 98,000, about 0.6 percent of the total population. The survey was conducted for the American Jewish Committee by IBOPE, a leading opinion-research organization based in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, between March 22 and 25, 2001. The survey of 1,000 respondents, who were interviewed face to face, has a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points. Since 1992, AJC has carried out public opinion polls on knowledge and remembrance of the Holocaust in the following countries: United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Poland, Russia, Australia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, and Argentina. SOURCE: American Jewish Committee [END] ===== Thought for the Day: "By God, Mr. Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation." (Robert, Lord Clive) From irimland@zundelsite.org Wed, 1 Aug 2001 00:16:19 -0700 Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2001 00:16:19 -0700 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/1/2001 - "It's 'twice-a-year' again!" Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 1, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: Twice a year, as posted on my website, I ask my readers to support the Zundelsite with a free-will donation. The dates are August 1 and February 1. Today is the day, and I'm asking. I ask all of you who love the cause to make an earnest contribution. There is no set "fee". Please send me what you can - and what you decide my service is worth it to you. If I don't hear from you by August 14, I will assume you choose to be taken off my list. I will gladly make exceptions if the following applies to you: _____You are a ***regular*** supporter of my work and receive my monthly print letter, "Lebensraum!". _____You have made a donation ***last February*** that you consider sufficient to cover a year _____You have sent in a donation ***recently*** _____You have joined the ZGram list ***only a short while ago*** and would like to have a grace period _____You are one of my ***cyber comrades*** who are helping me with research, consultation, pro bono legal advice, typing, product donations, stamp donations etc. _____You are a member of the private ***"symbio"*** list _____You simply cannot make a contribution at this time because of ***special circumstances*** _____You live in a ***foreign country*** with weak currencies where American dollars are prohibitively expensive _____You have a ***publication exchange*** arrangement with me _____Other (please tell me what I left out...) All others, please do what you can! My work is entirely dependent on you. Please help share the load and shoulder at least a small part of the financial burdens I incur - because our struggle is serious and very time-consuming. As many of you have found out, I am no longer even able to answer personal letters or help you in your research. Long gone are the days when I could take care of individual problems. My website gets anywhere from 8,000 to 20,000 hits a day (not even counting the many mirror sites that Zundelsite volunteers have set up) and the e-mail spin-off from those mirror sites is simply "out of this world"! Those of you who are passive consumers of news, please understand: Those of us who put our heads on the block need you. We can't keep on going without you. We need not only your verbal support and occasional expression of appreciation - we need your financial support. There is no set fee for receiving my ZGrams - I ask that you do what you can - or if you can't, that you simply tell me the reasons. And I will gladly make an exception - for believe me, I know what it means to live on the edge. I work full time at this information outreach mission, and I don't have a regular income. But I must hear from you! ***I don't keep names with e-mail addresses***, and if you don't respond and I don't recognize your screen name, chances are you will be taken off my list. However, you can still read them on the Zundelsite where I am posting them ***as time permits*** - but often weeks, even several months late! By myself, I can only do so much - but with your help, I can do ever so much more and help advance the cause. I can hire the skilled help to double and quadruple my outreach and effectiveness. Help me do more by giving me the means, the tools - along with your love, your trust and vote of confidence. My mailing address is: Ingrid Rimland, Ed.D. 3152 Parkway Suite 13, PMB 109, Pigeon Forge, TN 37863 USA Thank you so very much! And let me pledge to you I will not disappoint you. We Revisionists all over the world have the truth; we have the will; and we shall prevail. The ghetto will not win! Ingrid From irimland@zundelsite.org Sat, 04 Aug 2001 01:57:44 -0400 Date: Sat, 04 Aug 2001 01:57:44 -0400 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/2/2001 - "Doug Collins speaks his mind" - Part I Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 2, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: The "Doug Collins Story" has been told many times in many different shades on our beloved Internet, and I will not repeat it here - other than to say that, singlehandedly, this crusty old reporter is good for one more round. This veteran columnist had hurt the feelings of the Chosenites by saying Jews ran Hollywood and by a cheeky reference to "Swindler's List." The essay below, which he penned, is good for a juicy two-part ZGram, and I have been waiting for a tie-in to shoot it into cyberspace. It sets the stage for the continuing struggle before the Human Rights Tribunal sharks in British Columbia, Canada. Here speaks a man to minions: START] July 12, 2001 Statement to Human Rights Tribunal Before Mr. Tom W. Patch By Doug Collins To begin with, I am not making this submission to discuss the often incomprehensible intricacies of that scarecrow of a law known as the B.C. Human Rights Code. I'll leave that to the lawyers and to the courts, before which I hope to appear. What is at issue, of course, is whether the order issued by this tribunal against myself and the North Shore News on Feb. 2, 1999, infringes Section (2b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and whether the tribunal had the constitutional right to issue that order. In their wisdom, the courts have determined that you should rule on the issue before I can apply for a judicial review of the law, and I submit that what you did cannot be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society, which is what the Charter stipulates. As far as the outcome of this hearing is concerned, I believe that we are wasting our time. There is about as much chance of your deciding that your order was invalid as there is of my becoming the next NDP premier of British Columbia. Nevertheless, I comply with the court's direction and also wish to put on the record what otherwise might not be on the record. We live at a time in which the decay of moral and political values is rampant, and when it finds many willing servants in the annexes of authority, such as human rights systems that deny human rights. It also seems to be a time without shame. If it were otherwise there would be no such thing as a Human Rights Code that in itself is a travesty of human rights. It's a pity that George Orwell isn't around to write about it. He might denounce it as moral illiteracy. This tribunal produced the most dangerous attack on freedom of the press that has been seen since the Alberta Press Act went down to defeat at the hands of the courts in 1938. The intention at that time was to force the press to print what the government wanted it to print. This tribunal did the same thing in instructing the North Shore News to print its decision, something that no regular court has attempted to do, and as I understand it, could not do. I was also ordered to stop writing columns with which you and the complainant Harry Abrams found fault. To be precise, you instructed myself and the North Shore News "to cease publishing statements that are likely to expose Jewish persons to hatred and contempt [which I submit I have not done] and to refrain from committing the same or a similar contravention". That was a publication ban, and in no way reflected the principles of a democratic society. It also amounted to prior restraint of opinion. That being so, I have taken no notice of your order. Firstly, no judge or jury could find that I or the North Shore News had exposed anyone to anything harmful, and you yourself admitted that my writing had done no discernible harm; secondly, the verdict in my view demonstrated the bias of this tribunal and that of the NDP government; thirdly, if the Charter of Rights and Freedoms means anything, it must mean that that decision was unconstitutional. On which more later. The columns on which you ruled and many others like it are in a book I have published. I would be glad to give you a a free copy. There's a lot in it about free speech. According to your reasoning the four columns that were complained about didn't contravene the B.C. Human Rights Code separately, but did collectively. That's a bit like saying that while four pints of sour milk are sour, one of those pints would not be. There was no sense in such reasoning, and lawyers who are not in the pay of the government or of the pressure groups behind the complaints against me say that such a decision would never survive in a court of law. But this tribunal is, apparently, a court that can make its own rules. Mr. Geoff Plant put it well. As the Liberal rights critic in the legislature, he stated while in Opposition that something has to be done about a human rights system that produces, and I quote, "too many goofy decisions". I live in hope that as a member of the new government he will do something about it. I also live in hope that Premier Gordon Campbell will honour the promise he made on Oct. 15, 1993, and on subsequent occasions, when he said he would get rid of the B.C. Human Rights Act Amendments that restrict free speech. The Human Rights Commission and the lawyers who sit in this place denying my right and that of the people of British Columbia to free speech claim, predictably, that this tribunal's verdict is constitutionally valid in a free and democratic society. If it is, then free speech in this province has been cast into the dustbin of history. It would mean that opinions that are hateful only to those who claim they are hateful, are not permissible. It would mean that only politically correct opinions approved by government are safe. As Federal District Court Justice Robert Warren pointed out in a case in the United States, "The suppression of speech, even where the speech's content appears to have little value and great costs, amounts to government thought control". Which of course is exactly what we are seeing here. I draw your attention now to what the B.C. Press Council said in its analysis of the amended Human Rights Code at the time of my first tribunal, the one that found itself obliged, reluctantly, to acquit me. It said that the Code is designed to kill speech that is not criminal. Regarding legislative intent, Mr. Corky Evans, an NDP MLA who became a cabinet minister, made the extraordinary statement when it was being drafted that the government needed this law because the courts didn't always do what the government wanted them to do. He seemed to dislike the role of an independent judiciary, and favored a system that would indeed do what the government wanted it to do. The law was passed in June, 1993, and was introduced because the NDP and its special interest supporters took exception to what I was writing in the North Shore News. During the debate in the legislature my name came up 17 times. That's why it was called the Kill Collins Act. But what I was writing could never have been seen by the courts as hate literature. If it could have been, I would have been charged under the hate speech provisions of Section 319 of the Criminal Code. But neither the NDP government nor the complainants dared to risk that. Hence Mr. Evans's statement. What was required was a new set of rules, and tribunals often described as kangaroo courts. As the secretary of the B.C. Press Council put it, under this Human Rights Code, anyone uttering a Newfie joke could be hauled before a tribunal. The late Mel Smith, a distinguished constitutional lawyer, said that the law was so broad that even a business putting up "male" and "female" signs in its washroom could be charged. Section 71(b) of the Code states that no person shall publish or display any notice, sign, symbol or other representation that INDICATES discrimination or an INTENTION to discriminate, or that is LIKELY to expose a person or groups of persons to hatred or contempt. Indicate. Intention. Likely. What could be looser than that? It should be of interest that INDICATING criticism of the government was an offence in Fascist Italy, and the LIKELIHOOD of opposing the communists was enough to send people in the USSR to the gulag. The B.C Press Council has noted, too, that this law is almost exactly the same as the South African Publications Act that was passed during the time of apartheid. Those who support it and work for it are not in very good company. In British Columbia, under this law, organizations like the Canadian Jewish Congress, B'Nai Brith, the Race Relations Association and similar groups can harass and indimidate those who hold opinions to which they object. Moreover, after Mr. Ujjal Dosanjh became Attorney General, he brought in rules that permit the government itself to make complaints and to harass people, whether or not complaints come from members of the public. To him, too, hate literature is anything he sees as hate literature. That's why a lengthy and bitter debate took place in the legislature in June of 1993, after which the Amendment to the Act was steamrollered through. Let me offer you some comments made by the Opposition, all of which I take from Hansard. I mention them in order to emphasize that this legislation was pushed through in a discreditable way by a discredited government, and that it did not represent the wishes of the people of this Province, who were not consulted about it. Nor was it ever part of an election program. Mr. Gordon Wilson, then the leader of the Liberal Party but later an NDP cabinet minister, stated on June 17: Hansard, Page 7370. "This Act does more to extinguish the right to freedom of expression than it does to look after hate literature and the propagation of hate literature." Mr. H. De Jong, Social Credit, Page 7373: "The government is at last showing its true colours in its total disregard for individual freedom whenever it comes in conflict with the collective...I cannot take pleasure in the obvious political harm the government is doing to itself by introducting this Orwellian police-state bill, saying that only politically correct Newspeak will be tolerated in the socialist government of British Columbia." Mr. de Jong referred to the bill as "compulsory niceness".... "Under this legislation," he declared, "it seems that the only allowable bumper sticker would be "Love thy neighbour, or else"." Mr. David Mitchell, a Liberal MLA, had this to say, Page 7401: "Who are the great democrats who have brought forward this legislation? Who are they who claim to be democrats in defining and defending the rights of all of us in a free and democratic society? The name of their party is the New Democratic Party. But if their legislation is to be their legacy they are certainly not democratic and they are certainly not new...They're trying to bring forward an idea that they propose, to compel all citizens to think like them. That's what's wrong with this legislation....They are neither new nor democratic." Mr. Jeremy Dalton told the House how the proposed amendment removed the right to free speech in British Columbia. (See Page 7371). "How is freedom of expression being compromised....? I will read into the record the provision that will be removed from the current Human Rights Act if this bill is passed. In Section 2 (sub-section 2) of the Act it states: 'Notwithstanding subsection (1) but subject to the Civil Rights Protection Act, a person may, by speech or in writing, freely express his opinions on a subject...' that's what's being eliminated by the proposed change in legislation through this bill. It will clearly compromise freedom of expression." I could give you many more examples but the point has been made. This law was by no means the will of the people at large; nor was it submitted for prior discussion by those most likely to be affected by it, as is usual. It was drawn up in secret, in consultation with the groups that wanted it, and was essentially a conspiracy. Mr. Aziz Khaki of the government-subsidized Committee for Racial Justice met with the attorney general of that time, Mr. Colin Gabelman. He also met with Miss Anita Hagen, who was responsible for multiculturalism. The Canadian Jewish Congress also made representations. References were made by government members during the debate in the legislature to the Ku Klux Klan, cross burnings, White Aryan Resistance, Nazi-like activity, Molotov cocktails and other things that had nothing to do with anything I had written or done; or, as far as I know with what anyone else had written or done. And as I have already stated, it was never shown that any harm had been done by anything I had written. The government's case was an exercise in vacuity and vagueness. It didn't like what I was saying. So ghosts and monsters were made to walk. [END} ===== Tomorrow: Part II ===== Thought for the Day: "It is a wretched taste to be gratified with mediocrity when the excellent lies before us." (D'Israeli) From irimland@zundelsite.org Sat, 04 Aug 2001 01:58:31 -0400 Date: Sat, 04 Aug 2001 01:58:31 -0400 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/3/2001 - "Doug Collins speaks his mind" - Part II Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 3, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: Just to refresh your memory, yesterday I concluded Doug Collins's fiery missile in the following way: "Mr. Aziz Khaki of the government-subsidized Committee for Racial Justice met with the attorney general of that time, Mr. Colin Gabelman. He also met with Miss Anita Hagen, who was responsible for multiculturalism. The Canadian Jewish Congress also made representations. References were made by government members during the debate in the legislature to the Ku Klux Klan, cross burnings, White Aryan Resistance, Nazi-like activity, Molotov cocktails and other things that had nothing to do with anything I had written or done; or, as far as I know with what anyone else had written or done. And as I have already stated, it was never shown that any harm had been done by anything I had written. The government's case was an exercise in vacuity and vagueness. It didn't like what I was saying. So ghosts and monsters were made to walk." And now, with great pleasure I give you Part II of Doug Collins versus the Human Rights Tribunal of British Columbia: [START] Claims were made by government members that freedom of expression would not be affected by this legislation. I quote Mr. Evans again, who stated, incredibly (see Page 7341 of the Hansard of June 17): "We have brought in a law that guarantees freedom of speech." That theme was echoed by Ms. Joyce MacPhail, MLA, who stated (see Page 7339: "Free speech is not the issue. It is not a law that is aimed to suppress freedom of expression. In fact, the bill expands freedom of expression...". That's something for Alice In Wonderland. If freedom of expression has been expanded, why I have faced two tribunals? She must have walked through the looking glass. In the Hansard of June 16, Page 7338, she referred to the Civil Rights Protection Act of British Columbia, which had been passed in the early 1980s, and stated: "The Protection Act is punitive and provides no remedy to the victim of hatred. In order to convict someone, a charge of promoting hatred and contempt must be approved according to a criminal standard; that is, beyond a reasonable doubt... and those who are familiar with our court system know how difficult that can be." That was yet another admission that the NDP government did not want to trust the courts and that it preferred its own kind of court. How could such statements be made? Because they suggest that free speech is one thing and what our rulers and certain axe-grinders choose to see as hate speech is another. In other words, everyone must conform to the views of the Thought Police. And the NDP government was not willing to brook any delay. The Opposition wanted a six month hiatus during which this issue could be properly examined - by the media, by the public and by the Law Society. That was refused. In the normal course of events they would have consulted the B.C. Press Council before introducing this legislation.They never failed, for instance, to consult the B.C. Federation of Labour when labor laws were on the agenda. They didn't choose to do that in this case because they knew that what they were doing was outrageous and that it restricted freedom of the press. So let me tell you what else the Press Council had to say in its submission to my first tribunal. The submission was titled, In Defence of a Free Press In British Columbia. And here are some of its main points, as listed by the Council's lawyers. (1) The whole proceeding is an intolerable violation of Charter free speech rights (2) It is the most serious threat to freedom of the press since Alberta's Press Law was enacted in 1937. (3) The intention of the Code is to stifle speech that is not criminal. (4) Since Confederation, and as far as is known, before that, no other newspaper or writer has been forced to appear before a government-appointed trubunal to defend an opinion column. (5) Dissident expression is threatened with extinction. Section 7 (1) (of the Code) is a law that is but one step removed from a law that simply says: "If there is a complaint about speech, government shall gag the speaker." (6) The Code permits a legal environment that has none of the safeguards that apply to civil courts' proceedings. (7) Innocent intent is not a defence (8) Truth is not a defence. (9) Fair comment on facts is not a defence. (10) Publication in the public interest is not a defence. (11) Work done for artistic, academic, scientific or research purposes is not a defence. (12) There is no right of appeal and no trial by jury. A defendant can only apply to the Supreme Court for a judicial review, which is not a true right of appeal. (13) A defendant cannot recover legal costs. (And I might mention here that the successful defence against the complaint in the first tribunal made by the Canadian Jewish Congress cost the North Shore News $203,000, none of which was recoverable. That alone is a strong deterrent to allowing politically incorrect editorial opinions to be expressed.) (14) Damages can be unlimited, and enforced by action against the assets of the defendant. (15) B.C. is the only jurisdiction that prohibits so-called "discriminatory" publications in newspapers. The Press Council stated on Page 34 of its submission that with the exception of Manitoba, every other human rights statute in the provinces and territories which contains a prohibition against discriminatory publications also contains an exemption for expression of opinion. And even in Manitoba the Code does not apply to newspapers and does not contain a group defamation provision of the type found in the B.C. Code. (16) In contrast to the B.C. Code, the Canadian Human Rights Code does not apply to newspapers. (17) The B.C. Code is a Heresy Act and a Censorship Law, and the provincial government has pre-empted the role of the Canadian Parliament. I referred earlier to what appeared to be a government conspiracy prior to the introduction of Bill 33, which became the Amendment to the Human Rights Act. On Page 125 of the Press Council's analysis there is a reference to the government's reluctance to disclose the facts of the matter. The Council stated: "Rather than candidly disclose the government's complete basis for introducing Section 7 (1) of the Code in 1993, the Ministry of the Attorney General and the Ministry of Multiculturalism expunged huge sections of their records and have successfully sought shelter behind the exemptions in sections 12, 13, and 14 of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act." That was described by the Council as "a refusal to disclose all relevant information". The submission goes on to declare: "It will readily be seen that the documents sought by Mr. Porter [the Press Council Secretary] were highly germane. Accordingly, there should be a strong presumption that the non-disclosed documents would not support the government’s position." The Press Council was also critical of this tribunal's ruling in my case. In a press release dated Feb. 3, 1999, it stated that the speech restrictions in the Code are an unjustified violation of the principle of the freedom of the press, that this tribunal's order to print the summary of your verdict is not authorized by the B.C. Human Rights Code, and that no court in a common law province has ever seen fit to demand that a newspaper publish its findings. It added that the government has no business setting up special tribunals to tell newspapers what to print. Earlier, I mentioned this tribunal's view that while none of the columns in question were in contravention of the Code individually, they were collectively. You went on to say that they had to be taken in context, a foggy area, shall we say, in which intellectual footpads may lurk. It was even stated that I express hatred or contempt "indirectly and subtly", cunning fellow that I am, and that I MAY increase the likelihood that OTHERS will manifest their views in a more directly harmful manner. In other words, some simple souls may catch something from me. Strange, is it not, that people with Aids can roam this country without let or hindrance, while those with dangerous thoughts must be put behind the barbed wire of political correctness. This tribunal also accepted evidence relating to something called psycholinguistics, in other words, psychobabble, since it relates to what was described as "the gloss of respectability" that covers my writings. You also claimed in your verdict that the Jews are still a vulnerable group. Are Izzy Asper and his son Leonard vulnerable? Their corporation, Canwest Global, owns 13 daily newspapers in Canada, 126 community newspapers, half of the National Post, and over eighty trade publications.They also own a string of nineteen television stations, including the biggest one on the West Coast - BCTV. In British Columbia they control thirty-two newspapers including The Vancouver Sun, The Province, and the Victoria Times-Colonist. Or how about Mr. Robin Rabinovitch, the president of the CBC? The biggest bookselling company in Canada is controlled by a Jewish lady, Heather Reisman., and surveys have shown that Jews are the most prosperous ethnic group in the country. Is there anything wrong with all that? In general, no. In particular, yes. In the CanWest- Global case, yes. No one should be allowed to control so many media outlets. Its predecessor, Hollinger/Southam, controlled by David Radler, never published the B.C. Press Council rebuttal of the Human Rights Code, and we can be quite sure that CanWest-Global never will. But my point is that all this makes nonsense of this tribunal's claim of Jewish vulnerability. Your statement displays a profound ignorance. If you're looking for vulnerability, look at me. I have no money to speak of and no powerful friends in government. If anyone is a victim, I am it, and I've been a victim since 1994. Another bad joke is that the Human Rights Code is remedial, not punitive. Put that in the same box of illusions as the claim by Miss McPhail that free speech is not the issue. As George Orwell said, Two and two make five, war is peace, and freedom is slavery. Let us also not forget the hateful claim by the complainant, Harry Abrams, who was quoted in a local newspaper as saying that I am preparing the ground for a new holocaust. How's that for hatred? Maybe I should complain about hurt feelings. But I don;t think I would get very far. The B.C. Human Rights Commission is not there to help people of my political and social persuasion. We now come to the core of this affair, which was my suggestion in the column "Hollywood Propaganda" that the six million figure of Jewish deaths in the holocaust is grossly exaggerated and that we have been subjected to an unceasing stream of propaganda on that subject, courtesy of Hollywood. Fifty-six years after the war ended we are still getting weekly features about it in the movies or on TV, and you can hardly pick up a newspaper without seeing some reference to it. It is said to be the job of journalists to question everything, but curiosity can kill the cat, and the enemies of free speech have certainly done their best to kill this cat. I don't intend to defend my views on the holocaust here, truth in these tribunals being no defence. What matters under this law is not the truth but whether Harry Abrams claims to be hurt. In that sense, I am guilty - in a Kafa-esque sort of way. And if you don't know what I mean by that, read Kafka's book, The Prisoner. But, to repeat, I am the victim, not Abrams, not B'Nai Brith, and not the Canadian Jewish Congress. So-called "holocaust denial" is not a crime in Canada. It is in Germany, France, Switzerland, Belgium, Poland, France, Austria, Lithuania and Spain. But it isn't here. Not yet. The presssure groups get around that unfortunate omission, however, by making complaints to human rights tribunals. What they can't do by entering the front door, they do by way of the back door. I know more about the Nazis than most people, and certainly more than Harry Abrams. I was there. I was there from 1939 right through to 1945. My puny efforts even brought me a Military Medal. I escaped from prison camps in Germany, Hungary and Romania, and have sat in Gestapo cells. I rejoined the army before the war was over and in 1945 saw Bergen-Belsen. In 1946 I became a Political Intelligence Officer with the British Control Commission in Germany and was active in the de-Nazification of that country. No, I don't need any lessons on that subject from Mr. Abrams, human rights tribunals or anyone else. And especially not from Lionel Kenner, a retired Jewish philosophy professor who needs some lessons in philosophy and was quoted in your report. Kenner had the gall to state that I am "the voice of the neo-Nazi movement in North Vancouver". Well, I have never heard of any neo-Nazi movement in North Vancouver. Does it have an office? How many members does it have? I don't know about that but I do know about Kenner. He is a professional hater and speech suppressor. When I was awarded the Confederation Medal in 1992 he organized an unsuccessful national attempt to have the award cancelled. In a 40,000-word complaint to the Press Council he called me a liar about forty times and was cautioned by the Council Chairman to mind his language. The late NDP government, as represented by the Attorney General's office, the Human Rights Commission and this tribunal, has done its best to prevent me from applying to the courts for a judicial review of the Human Rights Act. It strenuously opposed my application at the B.C. Supreme Court level and also before the B.C. Court of Appeals. That's why I am here today. Obviously, that government had something to hide, and it was afraid to test its Code under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But tested it will be, if not today then tomorrow. In a letter to Premier Glen Clark dated May 17, 1997, the Writers' Union of Canada deplored my being brought before a human rights tribunal. It also deplored the desire to censor journalists who express controversial points of view. It supported my right to freedom of expression and asked that the amendment to British Columbia's human rights legislation be repealed. The Canadian Community Newspaper Association, representing 300 newspapers, stated that while I stand proudly on the right of Canadian thought I do not write hate literature. In an editorial dated June 19, 1993, the Globe & Mail declared that B.C.'s new human rights law was "A Criminal Abuse of Human Rights". On March 13, 1998, David Schreck, a former NDP MLA who helped to draft the law, was quoted in the Western Jewish Bulletin as stating that in my case the law was being misused. Free speech is often unpopular. It was unpopular in Israel two thousand years ago. It was unpopular in Martin Luther's time and it is unpopular today. But if freedom of speech means anything, it means the right to say what some people don't want to hear. The right to say only what is seen to be the right thing is no right at all. You could stand outside the Kremlin all day and sing Stalin's praises. You could stand outside the Reichs Chancellery in Berlin and sing Hitler's praises. But you were out of luck if you didn't go with the stream. The same principle applies now in Canada, and especially in British Columbia, admittedly in reduced form. Truly controversial views will be vilified and their authors hauled before special courts like this one. And the psychobabble of that "expert witness" from Simon Fraser University who talked about psycholinguistics isn't too far removed from recommending that subtle fellows like me should be put in lunatic asylums until they repent, as they were in Russia. Onwards and downwards. For my part, I don’t intend to swim with the stream if the stream is a dirty one, and this one repels me. So does that crowd of professional anti-free speech academic performers who have testified before you and have doctorates in the dangers of free speech. To repeat: There is no way, in a sane society, in which your order against myself and the North Shore News can be regarded as being demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society. There is nothing about it that is free and there is nothing about it that is democratic. And the sinister thing is that the NDP's would-be totalitarians know that. Before Mr. Ujjal Dosanjh became premier he was the attorney general, and he was reported in the Western Jewish Bulletin of October 18, 1996, as admitting that the Human Rights Code may be unconstitutional. "That may be so at the end of the day" he was quoted as saying. Which shows, again, why he has been so keen to keep this case out of court. I pointed out earlier that I have no money to speak of and certainly no friends in the worst government this Province has ever seen. But I have friends. They are the Canadian Free Speech League, the Canadian Association for Free Expression, and many concerned citizens. Of the $203,000 the North Shore News spent on defence costs in the first tribunal, the public subscribed $150,000. Governments, of course, have unlimited funds at their disposal, but we have had to rely again on public subscriptions in order to keep this case going. But such support is a sign that you can't fool all Canadians all of the time, and that there are many who are alarmed by what is going on. Doug Collins [END] Thought for the Day: "Woodman, spare that tree! Tough not a single bough! In youth it sheltered me, And I'll protect it now!" (George Pope Morris) From irimland@zundelsite.org Sat, 04 Aug 2001 01:57:02 -0400 Date: Sat, 04 Aug 2001 01:57:02 -0400 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/4/2001 - "Additional detail regarding the charges against Sharon" Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 4, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: Many ZGram readers have written to me for additional detail regarding the charges against Sharon. The quickest way to summarize is to ship you this brief but poignant press release from the Islamic Association of Palestine: [START] (1) Mallat, Chibli. Press Release: Re: Case Against PM Sharon in Belgium. Palos Hills, Ill.: July 1, 2001. (From: Chibli Mallat, Adv., Beirut, June 22, 2001.) On Monday June 18 2001, at 9.30 am three lawyers filed before an investigating judge (Madame le juge d'instruction Sophie Huguet), in Brussels, Belgium, a complaint on behalf of of 28 plaintiffs and witnesses, all survivors of the Sabra/Shatila massacres. With this act, a case has been formally opened against Ariel Sharon, Prime Minister of Israel, on counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Under recent Belgian legislation, introduced in 1993 and modified in 1999, the possibility of bringing war criminals to account was extended both in terms of citizenship and time. Using established legal concepts of universal customary law, Belgian legislators have set aside limitations of time, citizenship and status: foreign heads of state can be held accountable for crimes committed before the recent evolution of international law. It is worth remembering that Israel invoked universal customary law when it tried Eichmann for war crimes, and this case, and that of Demjanjuk in the US, and others, are cited at length in the complaint. As Minister of Defence, Sharon planned and directed the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. When Bashir Gemayel was assassinated on September 14, it was Sharon who ordered the Israeli Army to penetrate West Beirut and surround the Sabra/Shatila area. It was Sharon who gave the order for the Lebanese militias to enter the camps. The complaint is filed againt Ariel Sharon, Amos Yaron and any Israeli or Lebanese person responsible for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes that happened between the 16th and 18th of September, including the killing, torture, rape and "disappearance" of from 1000 to 3500 civilians - children and women as well as men, Lebanese as well as Palestinians. The complaint is based on jus cogens, international and Belgian law. The full text of the complaint (in French) can be read on http://www.mallat.com/complaint.htm Even though the Kahan Commission judged Sharon "personally responsible" for the massacre no further legal actions arose from this judgement. With Sharon's resignation from Defense, Israeli and world public opinion soon forgot the massacre and its victims. The 23 plaintiffs and 5 witnesses (the distinction is made for mere procedural reasons under Belgian law) now accusing Sharon represent a far larger number of people who have never been recognized as victims nor indemnified for loss. All the plaintiffs lost close family members, in some cases mother and father as well as siblings. Reading their testimonials brings back the horrific scale and character of a massacre that ranks among the worst of the 20th century. The plaintiffs are represented by three lawyers: Luc Walleyn, Michael Verhaeghe, and Chibli Mallat. The day following the formal lodging of the complaint, Patrick Collignon was formally appointed juge d'instruction to carry out the enquiry. He will conduct the proceedings, and the enquiry has officially started. The Sabra and Shatila victims and survivors have had their first day in court. Chibli Mallat, Adv., Beirut, June 22, 2001. ===== Thought for the Day: "...when the snowball starts to roll, PUSH!!!" THis is decades overdue! (Letter to the Zundelsite) From irimland@zundelsite.org Sat, 04 Aug 2001 01:56:40 -0400 Date: Sat, 04 Aug 2001 01:56:40 -0400 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/5/2001 - "The bastards changed the rules!" Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 5, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: Again, we have a stunning article that shows how fear has gripped the Jewish state. We intersperse with comments: Ha'aretz | July 31, 2001 The bastards changed the rules | Yoel Marcus Marcus: The world used to admire Israel. Our ability to set up a modern state while under all-out attack by Arab states was considered amazing. "The long arm" of Israel, of which we were once so proud, reached everywhere. Zundelsite: For the umpteenth time: The "Holocaust" was the shield and sword which was used to accomplish all this - while a perturbed, war-weary world, besotted and numbed by Holocaust horror propaganda, cut Jewish terrorists far too much slack! Marcus: ("The long arm of Israel") reached Entebbe in Uganda to rescue hostages, and it reached inside Beirut - once to blow up the airport, and another time to eliminate three Arafat's aides. It plucked Adolph Eichmann out of Argentina, reached the nuclear reactor in Iraq and Abu Jihad's villa in Tunis. Zundelsite: All punishable crimes and war crimes! Good that there are so many bragging, self-confessing books on all these "heroic", nay, criminal activities and acts! They will all serve as incontrovertible evidence in the court cases to come! Marcus: ("The long arm of Israel") reached each and every one of the planners and executors of the Munich Olympics Massacre. It reached all the way to the Suez Canal in the Six Day War - an operation studied in military colleges the world over to this day. Zundelsite: Al Capone's exploits are also taught in police colleges and criminal justice courses. Marcus: The world loved this strong and righteous Israel and it was fun to travel the world and proudly admit "yes, we're from Israel." Who would have believed that the day would come when a prime minister of Israel would have a threat hanging over his head of being put on trial for "crimes against humanity?" Zundelsite: When one reads today's mail from all parts of the world, one realizes very quickly that the love affair with things Israeli - or Jewish, for that matter - is over! It's history! The bride has woken up to the groom's darker side. Marcus: Suddenly, Israel is faced with a new situation that echoes Spiro Agnew's famous moan: "The bastards changed the rules and didn't tell me." All those wonderful things we did in the past are now not only forbidden, but retroactively punishable. Zundelsite: That must be how all those SS men must have felt after the war. What bastards changed the rules? Israel and Diaspora Jews all over the world brought about these changes to get at their defeated enemies. Now they will be caught and judged by these very same "changed laws". Some people call that sweet justice! Marcus: International war crimes trials are supposed to create a new culture of toeing a legal line of protecting people from their leaders, of preserving human rights and punishing the violators even if they acted purely out of the security interests of their countries. Zundelsite: That's exactly what will be done to Sharon and others! The Palestinians and all the other countries and people so glibly enumerated in the first three paragraphs need to be protected from the leaders of Israel and their underlings' criminal acts initiated by criminal minds, mostly terrorists who became generals and prime ministers. Marcus: If other countries pass laws like the Belgian one, allowing foreigners, including heads of state, to be tried for crimes against humanity, we could end up with the "bad guys" - terrorists and anarchists - remaining free to act while those protecting their countries would be considered war criminals. Zundelsite: The German leaders and military men were prosecuted in Nuremberg and all over postwar Europe for fighting armed terrorists, often Jewish communists in civilian garb in Partisan and Resistance groups. Let's see how Israeli officers and generals will like it to justify their actions! Marcus: The controversy in Denmark over the appointment of Carmi Gillon as ambassador, because of his past role as head of the Shin Bet, is evidence of a cloud of madness, confusion and hypocrisy in Europe as it tries to formulate a new righteous world. Zundelsite: It's not a "cloud of madness, confusion or hypocrasy"! The hypocrisy is on the Jewish side. It is no secret to the cats how Israelis/Jews have always operated under a double standard. "Jews were always right"? Logic is being applied for the first time because the blinkers have come off. Criminal behavior is the problem - not "confusion". Marcus: If Sharon is liable for events from 20 years ago, and for which he already paid a price here, why is Arafat the darling of Europe instead of under arrest and on trial - his hands are bloody for the past 36 years and he supported the invasion of Kuwait. Zundelsite: Israel kidnapped Euchmann for things he allegedly did 20 years before. Israel tried John Demjanjuk for things he allegedly did 40 years ago. Jewish "activists" and O.S.I. personnel are hounding people who allegedly did things 60 years ago. These precedents are now part of the record and will become the standard. There will be trials of Israelis and Jews for the next 50 years under these precedents for crimes committed in Palestine and elsewhere right now. Today! Marcus: Why shouldn't presidents, secretaries of state and chiefs of staff from America be put on trial for massacres in Vietnam, Iraq and Libya? And what about Fidel Castro, who used torture to eliminate thousands of his opponents? Why isn't Denmark raising hell and high water over the way the Chinese trample human rights? And what about the ambassadors already in Copenhagen? Are they all perfect, representing pure countries? Zundelsite: Good points, Mr. Marcus! Very good points! Those very same thoughts have occurred to a lot of other people - mainly Germans. Marcus: Righteousness is a matter of geography, politics, interests and the new legal system, combined with Europe's double standards, could end up being a serious annoyance for Israel. Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein identified the danger early on, in the days of the Barak administration. Zundelsite: "Annoyance" is speaking euphemistically. The double standard was foisted on Europe by the Allied conquerors and their Jewish-inspired Nuremberg double-standard-kangaroo-courts, where the Allies, especially the Soviets, were judgign German leaders for crimes they were committing at the very time all over Eastern Europe in their brutal Gulag system. No Allied leaders or soldiers were charged for Allied war crimes. There you have your double standard - 55 years old! Marcus: At one of the cabinet meetings he warned about changes in the international community's legal values and the new dangers we could face. "It was so sudden, that we didn't understand what he was trying to say and what it had to do with us," says Yossi Sarid. Now it looks like we're candidates for the accused bench. Zundelsite: It took the advent of the Revisionist movement to expose the Holocaust as a fraud - to make European intellectuals and political leaders realize that all that empathy and sympathy Israel got was due to calculated, deliberate fraud. Marcus: The 50 years of history of aggression and terror against Israel simply don't interest Europe, which regards us as the last occupying power in a world with no more occupations. In their eyes, we're ruling another people. Zundelsite: Had Israel not declared itself a state obtained through terror, but had Jews lived like any other law-abiding minority, there would be no terror to direct against a state. You can't displace people, steal their land and then not expect a reaction. Did the native people of Africa, Asia, India not rise against their colonial invaders? Did native Americans not fight against the settlers stealing their land? Marcus: By this twisted logic, the horror and terror against us will be considered legitimate, while our defensive action, from investigating attacks to eliminating terrorists or striking back at the source of fire, will be considered oppressing another people and a crime against humanity, so everyone involved is liable for legal action. Zundelsite: Did the Germans in Russia, in France, in the Balkans and did the Rhodesian Whites not have the same arguments that were not granted them? Why should it be granted Jewish land grabbers and invaders? Marcus: The righteousness and hypocrisy in the European community may be at play, but it's growing legal claws and the government will have to take the new situation into account. Israelis can take a lot, but the leaders of the nation and their loyal servants will never be able to put up with some awful decree that prevents them from traveling abroad. Zundelsite: The Jewish position is and has been the position of hypocrites with a double standard - one rule for Jews permitting crimes to be committed with impunity, and another standard for their enemies, being punished often for no crimes committed. It is not righteousness or hypocrisy - it is purely logical thinking and judicial systems finally bestirring themselves to apply laws equally, without regard to special exemptions or special pleading, just because the criminals are Jewish! Jews made a fetish of equality - now they will have to live with it. (Source: http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=58498 ) ===== Thought for the Day: "With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost." (William Lloyd Garrison) From irimland@zundelsite.org Mon, 6 Aug 2001 14:48:27 -0700 Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2001 14:48:27 -0700 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/6/2001 - "A bit off topic but telling of the times" Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 6, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: "A Traveler's Story" was written by an American attorney and long-time supporter of our efforts. He and his wife have had an experience they are not likely to forget. I have heard many similar tales. I have no comments to add. [START] Apropos the reaction of people to Israelis in general I have a personal story to tell. My wife and I recently enjoyed a two week escorted bus tour of beautiful Ireland. This is the height of the tourist season there and many buses follow similar routes, so one runs into other tour groups on the same route from time to time. At one stop, outside a shop, many tourists were enjoying an Irish music and dance group. Conspicuous in the audience were a group occupying many benches. There was little space. My wife asked a man if he could move his sweater aside on the bench so she could sit. I didn't hear it, but he declined and suggested she sit somewhere else (there were no other places). When my wife told me the story I observed the group more closely. As a group they were conspicuously ugly and swaggering. I suspected their nationality at the time. From their dress and demeanor my guess is that they had some military connections, both men and women. Anyway, we moved on. At a later venue we met them again and I asked one of their members where they were from. Israel. The man I spoke to was quite affable. He suggested that the Jews and the Irish had much in common (which may be true in certain historic senses which I won't go into here) in that they had large diaspora populations. I avoided pointing out the differences (I was proud of my restraint!). Finally, at the end of the tour several bus-loads of tourists attended the usual "singing pub" cabaret event. Not high culture, but pleasant Irish music and very good traditional dancing by four charming young lady dancers were the feature and were enthusiastically received by all the groups (people from the U.S., Scotland and England) - except one. You guessed it. The Israelis. They talked loudly among themselves in conspicuous Hebrew during the entire performance. I would characterize their attitude as "in your face" rudeness and contempt. They did not applaud the performers and exuded an angry hostility. Most of them sauntered out during the performance to the relief of the other attendees. Lest you think me too subjective, a fellow-tourist in our group (a teacher) whispered to me, "Why do they come to Ireland if it makes them so angry!". I have no idea why they had the attitude they exhibited. Ireland is the friendliest of countries with warm people - but its culture is notably Catholic, which may have something to do with it. Although they are inundated with tourists, they are still remarkable for their courtesy to visitors (naturally I am completely objective), not any easy thing for people overrun by tourists, as you may have noticed if you travel. I have heard from others that Israeli tourists are not welcome in many places because of their conduct - not politics. I got a graphic illustration. I recognize of course that all Israelis are not such boors but it seems their "success" is making them arrogant. [END] ===== Thought for the Day: "Just face {it}, the Christian guilt is just about over- Isreal today is a global and specifically ... an American and European liability." (Letter to the Zundelsite) From irimland@zundelsite.org Tue, 7 Aug 2001 19:57:14 -0700 Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2001 19:57:14 -0700 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/7/2001 - "Israel tortures children" Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 7, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: With credits to Al-Ahram Weekly Online http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2001/544/re3.htm : [START] Israel tortures Palestinian children Two human rights reports reveal horrifying details about Israel's practice of torturing Palestinian children, Rasha Saad reports Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups are alarmed by the horrifying experience of more than 140 Palestinian children who have been detained and tortured by Israeli security bodies since the beginning of the Intifada. Fourteen-year-old Palestinian girl Sanaa' Amer saw the many faces of injustice when she was detained, tortured and sentenced to 12 month's imprisonment for a crime she did not commit. Amer, along with her sister Abir, were accused of carrying a knife with the intent to stab an Israeli settler at the West Bank town of Hebron. However, as Amer recalls the events of her arrest: "I was standing away from my sister at the end of the street. Suddenly she went towards a settler and the soldiers arrested her. I was talking to a journalist about what happened and a soldier came and grabbed my arm and took me to a military jeep. He hit me on my cheek with a strong blow, so strong that my ear hurt for a week." And this was just the beginning of Amer's suffering. An international, Geneva-based human rights group, Defence For Children International/Palestine section (DCI/PS), expressed grave concern about Amer's case in a statement issued last week. DCI/PS said the sentence passed against her on 12 July by an Israeli military court was "shocking as it did not take into account her age or the fact that she did not carry out any violent act whatsoever." The group noted the sharp contrast between the sentence meted out to Amer and that passed on 37-year-old Nahum Korman, an Israeli settler, who received six months of community service last year for the brutal slaying of 11-year-old Palestinian boy Hilmi Shawasheh in 1996. Korman was originally acquitted by an Israeli court, but prosecutors sought a retrial because the sentence was "mild." DCI/PS also expressed grave concern over Amer's detention conditions following her arrest on 20 February 2001. According to the statement, Amer was detained in Ramle prison, where she has been subjected to severe human rights abuses including beating and harassment by prison staff. Amer was detained along with nine other female Palestinian political detainees, seven adults and two children, who suffered the same maltreatment. During a riot by prisoners in early June to protest the inhumane detention conditions, Amer was beaten with sticks on her arms and legs. Her arms were tied behind her back and she was kicked by Israeli soldiers in her stomach, inducing her to cough up blood. As of 12 July, Amer had received no medical treatment and suffered pain whenever she ate or drank. Amer's case, although shocking, is only one of many cases which have brought to light the plight of Palestinian minors in Israeli jails, and Israeli violations of international law concerning the treatment of juvenile Palestinian detainees. According to Palestinian sources, more than 140 Palestinian minors have been detained and tortured in Israeli prisons on suspicion of throwing stones since the Intifada began. An Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem, issued a statement on 15 July exposing the systematic torture and abuse of Palestinian minors detained at the police station in Gush Etzion, near the West Bank town of Bethlehem. The report stated that these practices were commonly carried out there by police officers. In most cases, police arrested Palestinian children in their homes in the middle of the night and took them to the police station in Gush Etzion, where police interrogators tortured them until the morning to obtain confessions and information about other minors. Methods of torture described in the report included forcing the juvenile detainees to stand in painful positions for prolonged periods; beating them severely for hours at a time with various objects; splashing cold water on the detainees in the facility's courtyard in wintry conditions; pushing their heads into the toilet bowl and flushing the toilet; making death threats and cursing and degrading them. The report also included first-hand testimonies of 10 boys, aged 14 to 17, who have experienced these horrors. More than one policeman was involved in the torture of 14-year-old minor Mohamed Sabatin. As Sabatin recalls, "A strong, dark-skinned man of average height ... beat me with great force, kicked me for about five minutes, and put me in a room where four policemen were seated. Two of the policemen bound my hands and feet, blindfolded me, and took me into a room which I couldn't see. The four of them took turns beating me for about four hours. They struck me with a mop stick, kicked me all over my body, and swore at me in filthy language." The fortune of 15-year-old Sultan Mahdi was no better. His hands and feet were tied to a chair. When Mahdi denied throwing stones at army vehicles on the main road, he was taken to the bathroom near the interrogation room. "One of the interrogators grabbed me by the hair and put my head in the toilet. I was frightened. When they took me back to the interrogation room, I decided to confess. I told them that I threw five stones at a settler's vehicle. They wrote up a detailed testimony and forced me to sign it," he said. Another victim, 17-year-old Isma'il Sabatin, was left hanging in the air with his legs up and his head down. "They removed the chair from under me and left me hanging in the air, with my handcuffed hands holding onto the pipe and the weight of my body hanging in the air, drawing my hands downwards," he said. Sixteen-year-old Ibrahim Za'ul was ready to make a false confession to save a friend from torture. "They brought me to a room," he said. "Inside was an officer who identified himself as 'Ayub'. He said he was a merciless person and was ready to kill me if I didn't tell him the name of the youths who threw stones. Another guy opened the door and said in Arabic that Ahmed A'ref Sabatin had died during interrogation. The officer turned to me and said, 'What are we going to do with the body of Ahmed? Do you want to change places with Ahmed?' I was blindfolded. The interrogator said he was going to electrocute me and that I would die like Ahmed. I felt the sensation of two iron wires being stuck on me, but nothing happened. I was taken to the room where Ahmed Sabatin was. The interrogators began to beat him right in front of me. Ahmed began to cry and scream at the top of his voice. I asked them to stop because Ahmed did not throw stones, and I told them that I was ready to confess that I threw stones." [END] ===== Thought for the Day: "As he brews, so shall he drink." (Ben Johnson) From irimland@zundelsite.org Wed, 8 Aug 2001 19:52:48 -0700 Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2001 19:52:48 -0700 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/8/2001 - "What is Zionism if not racism?" - Part I Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 8, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: The following annotated essay appeared in the following Newsgroups: talk.politics.mideast, soc.culture.mideast, soc.culture.palestine, soc.culture.israel, soc.culture.usa The essay below is one of the most thoughtful, highly condensed, critically honest looks at Israel's midwives, founders and present leaders as well as Israeli policies and society in general. Unfortunately, the author regurgitates the standard, one-dimensional Hollywood version of National Socialist (German) policies and aims, but this is not the place for an ABC on National Socialism, and the rest of the essay is ruthlessly frank. It bears careful study and deserves wide distribution. The essay is titled: What is Zionism if not racism? [START] Israeli Democracy: A Promise As Yet Fulfilled by Michael Lopez-Calderon The Chinese, wonderful expositors of allegories, maxims, and proverbs, have an ancient saying that still resonates with truth: "The first step on the long road to wisdom is to call everything by its proper name." Israels political system, often touted as the only democracy in the Middle East, invites the scrupulous wisdom of the Chinese sages. An intellectually honest appraisal of Israeli democracy, an appraisal motivated by a deep commitment to democratic pluralism and Enlightenment rationalism, leads one to judge Israels democracy as an unfulfilled promise for both Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs, and of course, the Palestinians. Defenders of Israel will challenge such an assertion by pointing out how all democracies are flawed. For example, an unconditional supporter of Israel, citing the Supreme Courts Brown v Board decision of 1954, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Title Nine, will argue that American democracy only recently began to fulfill its promise to African-Americans, Asians, Latinos, Native Americans, women, and yes, even American Jews.(1) He or she would be right, and recent evidence of disenfranchisement of the poor predominantly, though not exclusively, Black and Latino in the 2000 Presidential Election only lends support to critics of Americas flawed democracy. However, though America often failed and, occasionally, continues to fail its democratic promise, we can speak of a "promise" because it is both enshrined in our founding national documents and rooted in our cultural, political, and social structures. Israels "promise" is far more tenuous and far less obvious; neither her founding documents nor ideological, cultural, and social roots give much impetuous to democratic pluralism. In fact, a number of structural factors work against the establishment of democratic pluralism in Israel. Let us examine these structural factors: * Zionism. A late-19^th century European ideology influenced by German Romantic nationalism that emerged as anti-Enlightenment, anti-Semitic reactionaries in France, Germany, and Austria grew more numerous and vociferous. Zionism also arose in reaction to the wave of murderous pogroms in Czarist Russia and Eastern Europe. However, Zionism did not escape the influence of retrogressive thinking then prevalent throughout Europe. Zionism absorbed much of the European colonial mindset, replete with racism towards non-European people, particularly Africans, Arabs, and "Orientals." The original Zionists, far from the enlightened socialists and anarchists of legend, arrived in Palestine with the cultural baggage of European racism and colonialism. * Zionism emerged in a German nation that was still engaged in the debate over national identity. The German (Frankfurt) Liberals identified with the French Revolutionary Enlightenment liberal ideal - the belief that a nation consisted of abstract citizens, laws, and membership in "a rational and just social order constructed on shared political i.e. democratic values."(2) Their opposites were the German Romantic Nationalists, who detested everything French, in part because of the manner in which French ideals had been introduced to the Germanic states, namely, under the boots of la Grand Armee during the Napoleonic conquest. Another reason the German Romantic Nationalists opposed the French ideal was their need to define an authentic, German alternative, one that was rooted in German culture and tradition, in other words, anything but French. This brand of German Romantic national and political identity evolved into late 19th century Pan-Germanism. Pan-Germanism stressed "blood and soil"; it "was based on the idea that all persons who were of the German race, blood, descent, wherever they lived or to whatever state they belonged, owed their primary loyalty to Germany and should become citizens of the German state, their true homeland."(3) Worse, this belief in the organically bound membership of citizens was infused with an element of hostility to Enlightenment rationalism and especially, liberalism and democratic pluralism. Pan-Germans, like their Romantic predecessors, delved into the smorgasbord of Gothic mysticism, Teutonic "volk" legends, the intuitive, and two lethal, late 19th century additions: racism and Social Darwinism. This was the setting in which Theodor Herzl formulated his nationalist philosophy of Zionism. * Herzls Zionism, however, was in a strange way an accommodation to, not resistance against, the ideological premise of modern anti-Semitism. "Throughout the Diaspora, its [Zionisms] adherents argued, Jews constituted an alien presence amidst states belonging to other, numerically preponderant, nationalities. Anti-Semitism was the natural impulse of an organic whole infected by a foreign body (or too obtrusive a foreign body)."(4) Herzls Zionism solved the Jewish Question by accepting the underlying premise of Europes anti-Jewish, anti-Enlightenment, and ultimately, anti-democratic reactionaries: Jews were an inassimilable people who were in need of a State of their own. Two versions of Zionism gradually emerged: Labor and Cultural Zionism. The latter argued that the real threat to Jewish survival was "an increasingly secular civilization that rendered them [Jews] anachronisms. The real danger was not the Gentiles' icy reception but, rather, their seductive embrace."(5) Cultural Zionism, now wedded to the only viable form of Zionism that remains in Israel, namely religious Zionism, is one of the greatest obstacles to genuine democratic pluralism in Israel. * Israels founders had a choice: create an Israeli nation with secular, liberal-democratic pluralism as its centerpiece, or forge a "blood and soil" Jewish State with citizenship subordinated to an ethno-religious, racial identity of Jewish exclusivity. The so-called left-wing Labor Zionists chose exclusion over pluralism, ethno-religious and racial identity over abstract citizenship, and rabbinical religious authority instead of secular to manage the institutions of civil society. They chose a colonial style of rule rather than a shared pluralistic democracy that would have made citizenship equally available for all who lived in Israel-Palestine.(6) A secular, liberal-democratic, pluralistic Israel would have provided all of her inhabitants with equal citizenship and full participation in every aspect of the nation. That was never even considered. Israel now reaps what it had sown fifty-three years ago. She reaps a bitter harvest. * Israels policy of redeeming the land by placing ownership exclusively in Jewish hands ranks as one of the worlds most discriminatory. The very notion that land possessed by another is unredeemed smacks of the worst kind of national chauvinism since an Austrian paperhanger insisted that the Wehrmacht "liberate" the ethnic-German populated Sudetenland from the Czechs. In his controversial book, Jewish History, Jewish Religion, Israel Shahak examined the religious ideology of Israels land policy. Shahak wrote about the ideology of "Redemption of Land," an exclusivist ideology that holds that "the land which has been redeemed is the land which has passed from non-Jewish to Jewish ownership. The ownership can be either private, or belong to either the [Jewish National Fund] JNF or the Jewish State. The land which belongs to non-Jews is, on the contrary, considered to be unredeemed."(7) The unredeemed stigma applies even in cases where the non-Jewish owners are decent, moral human beings. A criminal or slothful Jewish atheist who "buys a piece of land from a virtuous non-Jew [will make] the unredeemed land redeemed by such a transaction."(8) Redemption of Land logically blends with another notorious exclusivist policy: the Law of Return. [END] Tomorrow: Conclusion ===== Thought for the Day: "Democratic nations care but little for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be." (Alexis de Tocqueville) From irimland@zundelsite.org Thu, 9 Aug 2001 18:53:31 -0700 Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2001 18:53:31 -0700 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/9/2001 - "What is Zionism if not racism?" - Conclusion Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 9, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: I am repeating the brief introduction I sketched yesterday for the conclusion of the annotated essay below which appeared in the following Newsgroups: talk.politics.mideast, soc.culture.mideast, soc.culture.palestine, soc.culture.israel, soc.culture.usa Here we continue with one of the most thoughtful, highly condensed, critically honest looks at Israel's midwives, founders and present leaders as well as Israeli policies and society in general. Unfortunately, the author regurgitates the standard, one-dimensional Hollywood version of National Socialist (German) policies and aims, but this is not the place for an ABC on National Socialism, and the rest of the essay is ruthlessly frank. It bears careful study and deserves wide distribution. The essay is titled: What is Zionism if not racism? - Conclusion [START] * Recently, a number of Israeli intellectuals and supporters around the world have expressed horror over the prospect of the Palestinian refugees "right of return." Israeli doves like Amos Oz and David Grossman express grave reservations about this potentiality. Israeli political analyst and journalist, Julian Schvindlerman, argues that the Palestinians "right of return" is "but a euphemism for the destruction of Israel." (9) Others, including Prime Minister Ehud Barak, have invoked the expression "national suicide." And it is not limited to Israeli political thinkers. =46or example, in his New York Times Op-Ed^ (10), Elie Wiesel complained tha= t Israels absorption of four million Palestinians would be tantamount to committing "national suicide." These transparent racists assume that all four million Palestinians will return to their homeland, a highly unlikely prospect. However, let us grant them their fear that if all four million Palestinian exiles were permitted to return, they would. The Israeli objection to their return is not based on the matter of absorbing four million people, an extraordinarily difficult demographical and logistical nightmare for countries far larger than Israel. No, their fear of a massive Palestinian immigration wave is based solely on preserving "the Jewish character of the Jewish State." If for example, four million Jews from around the world decided to migrate en masse to Israel, the Jewish State would be compelled to take in each and every one of them. The Law of Return imposes just such a policy. Any Jew, regardless of origins, has a legal right to automatic citizenship upon "return," and that right takes precedence over Palestinian Muslims and Christians who wish to return to the land of their birth. An interesting note: How a Jew who was not born in Israel/Palestine can "return" is beyond comprehension. * All inhabitants of Israel are required to carry with them at all times an ID card. Israel Shahak informs us that the "ID cards can list the official nationality of a person, which can be Jewish, Arab, Druze, and the like, with the significant exception of Israeli." (11) Even when a number of left-wing Israelis applied for ID cards that identified them as "Israeli" or "Israeli-Jew", the Ministry of Interior rejected their requests. (12) One is hard pressed to find a "democracy" that requires of its citizens ID cards that stipulate their ethno-religious identity without ever mentioning nationality. ID cards were common in the Soviet Union, and today can be found in such bastions of democracy like Saudi Arabia (the Saudi "eqama" designates both national and religious identity), Iraq, Singapore, China, North Korea, and Cuba. * Israel's illegal occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and the Gaza Strip, is the linchpin of an expansionist policy that harkens back to its founding. Israels settlement policy is no different than Lord Protector Oliver Cromwells "Plantation of Ulster" nearly 345 years ago in Ireland. Cromwell settled thousands of Scottish Protestants in the hope of rendering Ulster free of indigenous Irish Catholics. Ideally, Israel would love the "holy land" to be "Palestinenser-Frei" in the way that National Socialists wished for a "Juden-Frei Europa." Expulsion may not be so far off. However, Israeli settlement policy has made one fact abundantly clear: it is not the Palestinians whom Israel desires to control, it is their land. Now the "only democracy" in the Middle East touts the virtues of segregation, of ethno-religious separation. Such odious policies formed the backbone of the Kibbutzim system, and apply to modern-day settlements. Settlements marked by Jewish-only housing supported by a network of Jewish-only bypass roads, laughingly called "security roads" that secure nothing but the permanent "Bantustanization" of formerly integral Palestinian lands. Again, try locating a single democracy that continues with ethnic and racial segregationist housing polices. Find a democracy that espouses the virtues of separation. An Israeli apologist might point out the plight of Native Americans. Their plight remains a national disgrace, however, no reasonable person can argue that Israeli Arabs and occupied Palestinians have equal or more rights than Americas indigenous people. * Israeli Arabs continue to exist as second-class citizens of Israel. Their housing, education, social services, and employment opportunities resemble the second-rate conditions offered African-Americans less than a generation ago. Israels Ashkenazi elites discriminated against the Sephardim for decades; it does not require a Ph.D. to imagine the treatment meted out to non-Jews, given the history of racial hostility experienced by the Sephardim. Evidence mounts that Israel is a pariah State. The Israeli Army (13) openly admits that soldiers routinely circumvent rules against random use of lethal force. The recent murder of thirteen Israeli Arabs during some of the worst rioting in Israel-proper only adds more evidence to the charge that Israel is a pariah nation. (14 ) * Democracies do not routinely fire upon their citizens, and when such tragedies occur, the offending nation is traumatized. For example, on May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard killed four students at Kent State. That tragedy traumatized America for an entire generation. The police departments' excessive use of lethal force to suppress Americas urban riots in the late 1960s led to a number of reforms. Another example occurred in South Korea. Throughout most of the 1980s, pro-democracy South Korean students and workers violently clashed with security forces and police. The protesters often threw Molotov cocktails, iron bolts, hammers, rocks, lead-packed bottles, yet the South Korean police forces never resorted to lethal force. (15) But the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) apparently has never heard of water cannons, smoke and tear gas grenades, and the use of anti-riot forces in large formations. True, the last option may no longer be feasible, since Palestinian gunmen occasionally commit the crime of retaliatory return-fire. However, had Israel used just such methods during the first Intifada (1987-1992), perhaps the current lethal crossfire between opposing forces would occur with less frequency. Instead, Israel sends a tiny number of soldiers in lightly armored vehicles to man checkpoints that fall under a barrage of stones. There is an old adage: "Soldiers make bad policemen." Heavily armed young soldiers, with weapons at the ready, are going to use whatever is immediately available. Israels policy of sending small patrols of soldiers into situations that demand the use of a large number of riot-trained police indicates a total disregard for the safety of both these soldiers and the Palestinians. The net effect of such "policing" methods is hundreds of dead and thousands of wounded Palestinians. Today, in Israel, the news of yet another Palestinian teenager shot dead is treated with blas=E9. Israel. A "democracy" that does not offer its citizens civil marriage and divorce. A "democracy" that requires ID cards that do not designate nationality but rather race and ethnicity. Israel. A "democracy" that has placed a major part of her civil society in the hands of the Rabbinate, a medieval theocratic body that once refused DNA evidence in a case involving an Israeli who tried to prove his children were "Jewish." Israel. A "democracy" that openly boasts of segregation as in a June 1999 Barak campaign billboard near Jaffa that stated: "Peace Through Separation: Us Here - Them Over There." (16) A "democracy" that implements the "Law of Return" patterned on the National Socialists Nuremberg Laws. Israel. A "democracy" that establishes exclusionary housing, bypass roads, and shopping centers in illegally occupied territory. Israel. A "democracy" on the verge of electing a longtime, well-known war criminal as Prime Minister, a man who has promised to implement a national political agenda that resembles Italy and Germany several decades ago. Israel. A "democracy" of assassinations (17), blockades, checkpoints, curfews, torture, administrative detention, collective punishment, segregated housing, theocratic rule over marriage and divorce, home demolition, arbitrarily administered "entry passes" to Jerusalem, open defiance of international laws and conventions (Hague, Geneva, UN Resolutions 242, 338, 181, 194), and noncompliance with nuclear nonproliferation. A "democracy" in possession of a NATO-caliber Army, Tank Corps, and Air Force, not to mention over two hundred nuclear warheads (18) that in turn makes her the Sparta of the Middle East and Mediterranean region. Israel could have established herself as a secular, pluralistic, liberal democracy - an Israeli Nation as opposed to an exclusivist Jewish State. What makes this so tragic and reprehensible is the fact that Israel remains the last European colonizer of non-Europeans. And worse, this occurred in 1948, after the calamities of two World Wars dispelled the legitimacy of colonialism. True, France, Great Britain, and even the United States dabbled in colonial adventures in Indochina, North Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean shortly after World War Two. However, a combination of Third World resistance and morally outraged citizenries in the respective countries put an end to those misadventures. The prospects for a similar moral awakening in Israel are dim. Until such a movement emerges in the "Jewish State" there will be no fulfillment of any democratic promise for all the inhabitants of Israel-Palestine. We return to the wisdom of the ancient Chinese. Let us call Israels political system by its proper name: Israel is not a democracy; it is an Apartheid Garrison-State, a modern-day Sparta. Notes: 1 Recall the prolific amount of anti-Semitism in the South, indeed in the general culture. Hollywood tackled such bigotry in a 1950s classic, Gentlemen's Agreement, starring Gregory Peck. Even the Defense and State Departments, respectively, discriminated against American Jews, withholding high-level positions solely on the anti-Semitic charge of "dual loyalty." 2 Norman G. Finkelstein, Image and Reality of The Israel-Palestine Conflict, (London: Verso, 1997), 7. 3 Ibid., 8. Finkelstein cites Hans Kohn, whom he calls the "most eminent authority on modern nationalism." 4 Ibid., 8. 5 Ibid., 9. 6 See Boas Evron. Jewish State or Israeli Nation? Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995. 7 Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, (London: Pluto Press, 1994), 7. 8 Ibid., 7. 9 Julian Schvindlerman, "The Right To Destroy Israel," The Miami Herald, January 4, 2001, 7B. 10 Elie Wiesel, "Jerusalem In My Heart, " The New York Times, January 24, 2001. See NYT Internet address of Wiesel Op-Ed: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/24/opinion/24WIES.html 11 Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion, 6. 12 Ibid., 6. * See Nomi Morris, "Possible Election Boycott By Israeli Arabs Could Benefit Sharon," The Miami Herald, January 26, 2001, 5A. 13 See Independent Media Center, Israeli Army admits to unprovoked shootings of Palestinians.Tuesday 23 Jan 2001, Israel http://www.indymedia.org.il / Author: AFP Newswire Service. 14Ori Nir, "We Accuse," Haaretz, January 22, 2001. See also, "Israel Must End The Hatred Now," The Observer, October 15, 2000. 15 The controversy over the Kwanju [sic] Massacre still lingers; South Korean dissidents claim the ROK Army, supported by the US military, shot down over 2,000 student protesters in 1980. The ROK and police demonstrated reform was possible from 1981 onwards. Only one South Korean student died in confrontations with police; he fell and hit his head against a sidewalk curb during a scuffle. 16 This was mentioned on National Public Radios Weekend Edition, Sunday, October 29, 2000, in a commentary by Allegra Pacheco. Ms. Pacheco is a human rights attorney who represents Palestinians. Hear her commentary: http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/wesun/20001029.wesun.09.ram. 17 Keith B Richburg, "Israelis Confirm Wider Policy of Assassinations: Palestinian Peace Activist Among Targeted Victims," The Washington Post, January 8, 2001. 18 See Israel Shahak. Open Secrets: Israeli Nuclear and Foreign Policies. London: Pluto Press, 1997. =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D [END] =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D Thought for the Day: "The child's sob in the silence curses deeper than the strong man in his wrath." (Elizabeth Barrett Browning) From irimland@zundelsite.org Fri, 10 Aug 2001 20:19:48 -0700 Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2001 20:19:48 -0700 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/10/2001 - "War is coming!" Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 10, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: No introduciton is necessary for this one! [START] =46rom: "Lawsociety" Sent: Friday, August 10, 2001 1:06 PM Israeli seizure of Palestinian organisations in Jerusalem F16 shelling of Palestinian targets; tanks trespass PA-controlled areas Following a suicide attack by a Palestinian on the ground floor of a two-story pizzeria in West Jerusalem at 2pm on Thursday 9 August 2001 that killed 17 Israelis and wounded more than 100 other customers and passers-by, Israel in the past 20 hours has committed a number of military attacks on Palestinian organisations. Among these have been the seizure of Orient House and other Palestinian institutions in occupied Jerusalem, and the military escalation represented in the F16 and American Apache helicopter shelling attacks on Palestinian targets. In addition, Israeli tanks and armoured vehicles trespassed into several PA-controlled areas where they destroyed outposts. According to LAW's documentation, at around 2am on Friday 10 August 2001, about 150 Israeli special forces, accompanied by police dogs, border guards, police and a helicopter hovering overhead, blocked the streets leading to the Orient House and Al Nuzha building in the middle of occupied Jerusalem. They removed the building's outside doors, badly assaulted two guards and broke into the Orient House before spreading within the building and replacing the Palestinian flag flying overhead with an Israeli one. 57-year-old Ishaq Ahmad Budeiri from Jerusalem, Director General of the Arab Studies Society inside the Orient House, stated that the Israeli forces carried out a thorough search of the Orient House and Arab Studies Society offices, confiscating many important files, documents and maps relating to Jerusalem and its citizens, as well as some office equipment. Eyewitnesses living in the Orient House area stated that the Israeli troops loaded large boxes full of the confiscated items into military vans and took them away. The Orient House's attorney requested the Israeli officers present to show him a warrant for their inspection of Orient House and other institutions. However, they prevented anyone from accessing the area. At around 3am, during the search, one of the officers produced an order, issued by Israeli Interior Security minister Uzi Landau, for the closure until further notice of Orient House and all its Jerusalem offices. When the attorney requested a list of confiscated items and to be able to witness the search, they showed him an Israeli magistrate court decision permitting them to inspect the buildings and confiscate their contents without the presence of any Orient House representatives. Both the Security Minister's order and the court judge's decision were signed on Friday 10 August 2001 and stated that the owners of the closed institutions could contact the Interior Security minister's legal consultant within seven days should they wish to prosecute. The following branches of Orient House have been affected: =85 Planning section =85 Prisoners and detainees protection =85 Relief and Repair committee =85 Small Projects development centre =85 The High Tourism council The soldiers also arrested the Orient House security guards present at the time, all of whom are from Jerusalem: =85 Mahdi Al Halabi, 32 =85 Ammar Sider, 22 =85 Sami Sarhan, 37 =85 Abdullah Al Sibawi, 22 =85 Fahed Al Basiti, 25 =85 Ishaq Hijazi, 26 =85 Radi Jubran, 40 The guards were taken to the Russian Compound detention centre in West Jerusalem, where they were informed that they would be detained for 20 days. The soldiers also forced the three Palestinian families living there to evacuate the house at gunpoint, holding them on the road outside the building until 4am. The families of Taher Husseini, his sister Ruwayda and Abdil Salam Husseini own the Orient House building. Israeli forces also broke into Hind Husseini College, Dar Attifel Al Arabi, a charitable educational institute with an intermediate girls' orphanage and school, and forced around 100 boarding students and their supervisors to gather in a room in the building's yard until 4am. In addition, Israeli troops besieged the 5-storey Al Nuzha building at the entrance to Al Nuzha Street (leading to the Orient House). The building contains the offices of six Palestinian non-governmental organisations, including the LAW Society's Children's Unit, the Arab Studies Society's Land Research Centre, Al Qasabeh Theatre and Al Nuzha Theatre, as well as the British Council and more than 40 professional and commercial offices, including the office of Israeli attorney Li'a Tseimel, who is known for her support for the Palestinian cause. At the same time, Israeli troops also closed the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce building and the Palestinian Prisoner's Club in Wadi Al Joz. Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce director Mr. Azzam Abu Al Su'uod stated that around 10:30 am on Friday 10 August he attempted to enter his office but was prevented from doing so by Israeli security men surrounding the building. On the door was hanging a closure order signed by Uzi Landau, which claimed that the Chamber of Commerce has =EBpolitical involvement'. This is the first time that the chamber has been closed since its establishment in 1936. It has 10 employees and the Orient House has 62 employees. At around 2:15am, Israeli troops entered the east Jerusalem districts of Bethany and Abu Deiss, took over the Jerusalem governorate building in Abu Deiss, replaced its Palestinian flag with an Israeli one, occupied the Ministry of Religious Endowments and Palestinian Religious Affairs in Bethany, imposed curfew on both districts and randomly arrested a number of civilians. LAW was unable to record their number as the Israeli authorities have made all communication with them impossible. According to information gathered by LAW from the Palestinian Civil Liaison, the Jerusalem governorate building in Abu Deiss contains offices belonging to the Palestinian Ministry of Interior, the Preventative Security and the Palestinian police and intelligence. In conformity with the agreement signed between the Palestinian Civil Affairs Ministry and the Israeli Civil Administration, the Jerusalem governorate building is considered =EBArea A,' which Israel cannot transgress. At noon, demonstrators including Palestinian and Israeli peace activists, as well as International Solidarity Campaign members, convened at the entrances to Al Nuzha Street protesting at the Israeli action against the Palestinian institutions. However, Israeli forces hindered their demonstration, arresting six and taking them to Al Qashleh police station. They were: =85 Charles Lechter, Israeli citizen =85 Ronaro Dubini, Italian =85 Jon Pierre Sling Yu, French =85 Angie Zilter, British =85 Rif'at Nasr Addeen, Palestinian =85 Imad Sub Laban, Palestinian In the early hours of Friday 10 August, Israeli F-16 fighter jets fired four air-to-surface missiles at the police headquarters in the Al Tireh suburb of Ramallah, destroying it completely. Eyewitnesses stated that two missiles hit the Abu Ja'far housing complex near the police headquarters, causing severe damage and fire in a number of apartments. In the early hours of Friday morning in the Gaza Strip, Israeli troops destroyed a Palestinian national security force post, east Gaza. According to information gathered by LAW, Israeli forces with tanks and bulldozers trespassed 2,000m into the city to the hills of Al Shuja'iyeh quarter, shelling the post before an armoured bulldozer levelled its ruins to the ground. On their way back, the bulldozers demolished a cattle farm belonging to Iyada Bakroun north of the post. Palestinian security sources reported that a large number of Israeli soldiers in tanks and armoured cars broke into the area from two directions, before breaking into a juice factory east of Martyrs' Cemetery, and settling at the eastern route west of the factory. LAW Society is firmly against the taking of civilian life as happened yesterday in Jerusalem, because the right to life is a fundamental universal human right. However, it is clear that Israel, especially Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and War Minister Benjamin Ben Eliezer, is totally responsible for the escalating tension in the region due to its repeated and sustained assault on Palestinian life and property over the past eleven months. LAW Society urgently calls for the following: 1. The Israeli Government to: =85 Halt its non-stop aggression against Palestinians, their public organisations and private property, and put an end to the policy of killing Palestinian civilians. =85 Withdraw from the Palestinian offices seized by its military forces and return all the confiscated possessions and documents. =85 Release the Palestinians who were detained and imprisoned inside Israel= =2E =85 Return its military forces to their pre-28 September 2000 positions. =85 Openly investigate the conditions of the killings committed by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian civilians in conformity with Article 146 of the 1949 IV Geneva Convention, which stipulates =ECthe high contracting parties undertake to enact any legislation necessary to provide effective penal sanctions for persons committing, or ordering to be committed, any of the grave breaches, and shall bring such persons, regardless of their nationality, before its courts. =EE 2. The United States of America to: =85 Impose restrictions on the export of American weapons to Israel since i= t uses them in the commission of grave human rights violations in the Occupied Territories. =85 Halt its advocacy of aggressive Israeli policies in the Occupied Territories. =85 Fulfil its legal and moral responsibilities in the region. 3. The UN Security Council to: =85 Hold an urgent meeting to discuss Israel's violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in general and in Jerusalem in particular. =85 Form an international investigation committee in conformity with International Security Council resolution 1322 of 7/10/2000 so as to investigate the crimes committed by the Israeli authorities within the Occupied Territories. =85 Form an international criminal court to bring Israeli war criminals to justice. =85 Place Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Territories under international protection. =85 Force Israel to implement all the resolutions issued by the International Security Council on the Palestinian issue. 4. The European Union to: =85 Take effective steps in conformity with Article 2 of the Israeli-European partnership agreement that stipulates Israel's adherence to human rights. 5. The International Community to: =85 Hold a meeting for the High Contracting Parties to the IV Geneva Convention to take practical measures to ensure Israel's compliance with and implementation of the Convention. =85 Immediately work on ending the Israeli occupation of Palestinian Territories and implement the relevant international resolutions. ************************************************ LAW publications and press releases since 1994 are available on our website at http://www.lawsociety.org LAW =F1 The Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment is a non-governmental organisation dedicated to preserving human rights through legal advocacy. LAW is affiliate to the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), =46=C8d=C8ration Internationale des Ligues de Droits de l'Homme (FIDH), Worl= d Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) and Member of the Euro- Mediterranean Human Rights Network --- To sign Al-Awda's petition to terminate US aid to Israel go to: http://al-awda.org/terminate_aid_petition.htm Do it Today! [END] =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D Thought for the Day: "History is little else than a picture of human crimes and misfortunes." (Voltaire) From irimland@zundelsite.org Mon, 13 Aug 2001 15:18:42 -0400 Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 15:18:42 -0400 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/13/2001 - Trouble with ZGram list To my ZGram readers: Please note that since Saturday, I have not been able to send out any ZGrams, even though they were written and ready to go on time. I don't know where the problem lies and have not been able to correct it. I believe it is a server problem and not enemy sabotage - but in our work, one never knows. I am on an automatic program, but we are sending out the last three programs by hand until we have straightened this out. Hang in there! Ingrid From irimland@zundelsite.org Mon, 13 Aug 2001 15:16:42 -0400 Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 15:16:42 -0400 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/11/2001 - "Doug Collins in the news again!" Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 11, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: A few of us made benign bets that freedom-of-speech seeking WWII veteran and controversial columnist, Doug Collins, was going to be snubbed by the highest court of Canada, the less-than-venerable Supreme Court. And sure enough, according to the Toronto Star, August 9, 2001, you are served up the entire, disgraceful schlamassel titled "High court won't hear appeal of hate decision: Doug Collins' columns exposed Jews to hatred, rights tribunal ruled." [START] Toronto Star: OTTAWA (CP) - Canada's top court has closed its door to a British Columbia man whose newspaper columns were deemed to expose Jews to hatred. Doug Collins was ordered by the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal in 1999 to pay $2,000 to Harry Abrams, a Victoria Jewish man who complained in 1994 about four columns in North Shore News, a publication in suburban Vancouver. The Supreme Court of Canada on Thursday dismissed Collins' bid to challenge that ruling. As is usual in applications for leave to appeal, the court's three-judge panel offered no reasons for refusing to hear the case. Zundelsite: Those Jewish-sponsored and -paid trips for Canada's Supreme Court judges to meet with their apartheid-approving, torture-sanctioning Israeli counterparts are paying big dividends for the underwriters of these trips! Toronto Star: Top court cases usually involve legal issues that have split appeal courts, or matters of national, precedent-setting importance. Zundelsite: Let that burn a hole in your tongue! To rule against curtailment of freedom of speech by a blatantly self-serving minority, or at the very least consider the issue, supposedly guaranteed under Canada's Charter of Rights, is obviously in this Supreme Court's mind not of "national, precedent-setting importance"! Toronto Star: The tribunal found in 1999 that Collins' columns "repeatedly reinforce some of the most virulent forms of anti-Semitism, and perpetuate the most damaging stereotypes of Jews: that they are selfish, greedy and manipulative." Zundelsite: Some people just cannot take criticism, however obviously true and clear for all to see that criticism happens to be. Let's call a spade a spade. Censorship of inconvenient critics was the issue all along. Toronto Star: Collins, who retired from the paper in 1997, referred in one column to the Holocaust movie Schindler's List as "Swindler's List." He challenged historical estimates of how many Jews were killed by Nazis during the Second World War, citing "the inflated six million story." Zundelsite: That magic mantra of the new temporal religion - "Six Million!" - is wearing pretty thin. Even the blind are beginning to see that ever more million survivors line up to cash in on the extorted billions from the Germans, the Swiss, and now the Poles. Toronto Star: And (Collins) said Holocaust-deniers Ernst Zundel and Jim Keegstra were prosecuted for breaking hate crime laws because they have "the wrong opinions." Zundelsite: Oy vey! Is that a crime if Collins said that? The Toronto Star has once more neglected to do even minimal research. Ernst Zundel was never prosecuted, much less convicted for breaking "hate crime laws." His conviction for "false news" was overturned by a Supreme Court still fairly morally intact because it had not yet gone on those Jewish-paid "sensitivity training" junkets to Israel. Toronto Star: After the ruling, North Shore News managing editor Tim Renshaw decried that the paper would have to run "government-dictated content." Zundelsite: Maybe the Canadian media cannot look that far ahead, but they will rue the day for their non-defence of Freedom of Speech for dissidents because they feared Jewish pressure. Toronto Star: Collins refused to take part in the tribunal hearing, calling it a "kangaroo court" meant to "enforce political correctness." But he submitted a written challenge to Section 7 of B.C.'s Human Rights Code and how it should be interpreted and tested. That section prohibits publication of material that's "likely to expose a person or a group of persons to hatred or contempt." Zundelsite: Maybe people might want to take another look at Doug Collins's written submission and judge for themselves. Chances are you find it at www.freedomsite.org - a likely future target for censorship, Absurdistan-style. Be sure to use the search engine since it is a behemoth of a website with millions of truth-seeking visitors. Toronto Star: The current legal test asks whether a reasonable person would understand that a message expresses hatred or contempt, and consider the message likely to expose its target group to increased risk of hatred or contempt. Zundelsite: Jewish movie producers, columnists, shameless schmierfinks like Elie Wiesel and Daniel Goldhagen have exposed Germans to plenty of hatred and contempt. Bronfman called the Austrians "a nation of anti-semitic dogs." The police refused to lay charges under the hate law. Toronto Star: Among other things, Collins had hoped to argue before the high court that the act poses an unconstitutional threat to freedom of the press. Zundelsite: Canadians are in for a rude awakening. Doug Collins supposedly fought for their "freedom" - in World War II and since. One wonders how old soldiers like Collins must feels when they look at the cesspool that Canada has become. Toronto Star: (Collins) had retained lawyer Doug Christie, who has also represented Holocaust deniers Zundel and Keegstra. Zundelsite: So what? Attorney Rosen, who represents the Wiesenthalers, an outfit notorious for trying to curtail other people's speech, represented serial killer Paul Bernardo who took a saw to a young girl's strangled body, cut her into eight pieces, submerged them in cement, and laughed when her severed head kept bobbing up. When Ernst Zundel hired Attorney Christie to represent him, all he ever wanted was the freedom to speak the truth about the falsehoods of the Holocaust as he had come to know them after decades of diligent study. A lawyer should not be smeared by insinuation and innuendo for defending a politically incorrect client, as the Toronto Star perfectly well know! Toronto Sun: A gathering billed as a free-speech meeting in Vancouver in October, 1999 by Collins and Christie to raise money for the legal challenge drew loud protest from Jewish and labour activists. Zundelsite: An unruly rent-a-mob, tolerated by Vancouver's pussyfooting, ultra-liberal police cowed by the rabble, prevented people from attending that perfectly legal meeting in a Vancouver library. A shocking video exists. The police are a large problem in this erosion of constitutional rights in Canada. Toronto Sun: Collins and North Shore News were ordered to pay $2,000 to Abrams "as compensation for the injury they have caused to his dignity and self-respect." Zundelsite: With this precedent, lots of "hurt feelings" will lead to a parasites' bonanza. It is going to rain human rights complaints. The pay-offs will fall into receiving laps like prayed-for manna from heaven. Whatever happened to that nation that used to stand up and sing with manly gusto: "...the true North, strong and free..."? ===== Thought for the Day: "For these people, a righteous gentile is one who exemplifies abject submissiveness in the face of Jewish arrogance. All the rest of us are, of course, "anti-Semites," "bigots," "racists," and what have you." (Letter to the Zundelsite) From irimland@zundelsite.org Mon, 13 Aug 2001 15:16:55 -0400 Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 15:16:55 -0400 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/12/2001 - "Revisionist Week in Review" Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 12, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: In Germany, the excitement over the (to us) hilarious poster - "The Holocaust never happened" - continues to baffle some brains. Shortly after the posters appeared, to the delight of some and shrieking horror of others, officials found themselves confronted with Manfred Roeder, 72, always described as a recalcitrant, incorrigible "Neo-Nazi", who came up with a smart poster variation of his own. Mr. Roeder used a gigantic poster from the foundation at the Brandenburg Gate by rolling out a banner of his own underneath. The Roeder poster said: "Crimes by Nazi Germany's military didn't happen either!" The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which has lately - rather cheekily! - started showing a tiny bit of its own rather withered patriotic sentiments, titled one write-up of this incident as "More 'Crimes' that weren't". (!) For his pains, Mr. Roeder has netted himself yet another conviction of one year's worth of prison in repressive Germany - this time, luckily, with probation. ===== Spokesmen for the "Foundation for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews", responsible for these controversial posters, stated that even though the posters were "well-meaning", they caused "too much misunderstanding." The posters have been pulled. Now the Foundation plans to continue its campaign with a far milder poster reading: "The future requires memory -- get involved in the construction of the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe.'' Lessons for Cyber Fighters: The enemy knows how potent our revisionist slogans are. "The Holocaust never happened!" "No holes - no Holocaust!" "Six Million did not die!" etc. Keep hammering away! ===== A panel of Jewish and Catholic eager beaver historians were recently trying to dig up dirt on Pope Pius' XII actions - or better, lack thereof - during the so-called Holocaust, but resigned from their tasks in a huff, claiming that Vatican archivists were not as forthcoming as they expected them to be. For their part, Vatican officials have let it be known that they resent being pestered by what they call a "slanderous campaign" mounted against the Roman Catholic Church over the "Holocaust-era Pope". They are accusing the dirt-digging historians of "clearly incorrect behavior." To that effect, a Vatican statement reads: "In recent days, a violent attack has again been unleashed against the Catholic Church. The occasion for this slanderous campaign has been furnished by the decision of the Jewish-Catholic study group to suspend its activity." Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, called the Vatican statement a "disgraceful slap in the face to Jews and Catholics who have worked for reconciliation and understanding." "To defend the silence of Pope Pius XII is to defend the indefensible," Steinberg said. ===== From Warsaw comes word that the mayor of Jedwabne, the town where Poles murdered hundreds of their Jewish neighbors in 1941, resigned from his post because town councilors failed to support efforts to memorialize the wartime massacre. The mayor's resignation happened after the July 10 commemoration in which Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski begged forgiveness for the massacre - but still insisted Nazi occupiers were behind it all. Think about it: Asking for "forgiveness" for an act he still blames on the Germans, in spite of evidence to the contrary! ===== The Israeli daily, Ha'aretz, reports that flight crews from the Dutch airline KLM will no longer stay overnight in Israel because of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian violence. Swissair recently adopted a similar policy a few weeks ago - as did Lufthansa and Air France, under shrill protests from the Israelis. ===== An historical debate has broken out over the Jewish leader Leo Baeck (1873-1956), currently the subject of an exhibition at Frankfurt's Jewish Museum, and his involvement with the Nazi regime. Baeck was president of the Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden (Jewish Council of the German Reich), an umbrella organization founded in 1933 in reaction to the National Socialists' seizure of power. Hermann Simon, director of the foundation for the new synagogue in Berlin, stated that in 1942, Baeck compiled a study for the Gestapo of the legal status of the Jews. "Baeck was under unbelievable pressure" and was "writing for his life," Simon wrote. ZGram readers will be happy to learn that it was Leo Baeck and his organization who suggested, and agitated for, the wearing of the Yellow Jewish Star. He was opposed by Dr. Goebbels who anticipated the negative impact the symbol would have in the world. ===== Marc Ellis is an American Jew who says that if Israelis are going to continue to oppress and kill Palestinians, then they've forfeited their moral right to play victim. In particular, says Ellis rather smartly and admirably, Jews should "stop talking about the Holocaust". A real brainer, that one! Ellis is a rabbi with his own congregation in Los Angeles. He is also the author of a book, if my memory serves me right, titled "Why should Jews exist?" I have read excerpts some time ago; I remember it as a book well worth reading. ===== Arab American activism is fighting back in pockets of America. School officials of Fairfax County, Virginia, a county with a sizable Arab-American and Muslim population, have agreed to remove an ethnically offensive novel from the list of recommended summer reading for the seventh and eighth grades. The book, autored by Caroline B. Clooney, is titled "The Terrorist" and was published by Scholastic, Inc. The Clooney book is described as a poorly written novel with an absurd plot. It deals with a 15 year old Muslim girl who explodes a bomb to kill a classmate in an effort to escape a forced marriage to a 54 year old man. German-Americans ought to take heed and retire to the dustbin of history the Anne Frank Diary, long unmasked as a shameless fraud perpetuated by politically motivated, profit-seeking con-men, along with titles such as Elie Wiesel's "Night", his hateful "Legends of our Time" and Goldhagen's "Hitler's Executioners". ===== Bishop Donald J. McCoid of Pittsburgh, one of the high echelon candidates for an important post within the Lutheran church, was part of a Christian delegation that met with Secretary of State Colin Powell earlier this year. Upon that occasion, McCoid delivered a strongly worded rebuke of Israeli policies, to which the American Jewish Committee responded that it was "terribly unbalanced" and "rather un-Christian." According to yesterday's Los Angeles Times, the nation's largest Lutheran church has called on the U.S. government this week to withhold all economic and military aid to Israel until it improves conditions for Palestinians. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America passed a strongly worded resolution that stated they were following the words of Jesus to comfort "the poor, the powerless and the outcast." That resolution, opines the Los Angeles Times, "signals a growing frustration--increasingly aimed at Israel--among the mainline Protestant churches with the ongoing violence." Good news, that one! The sacrifice of the Palestinians against the backdrop of their ordeals is finally melting the hearts of stone of some of the befuddled and Israel-besotten Christian churches. ===== Home-schooling parents are flexing their muscle as well. T-shirts emblazoned with a decrepit mobile home and the words ``Home Skooled'' were hastily pulled from J.C. Penney stores Wednesday after outraged customers, who said that the T-shirts demeaned home-schooling, threatened a boycott. Tim Lyons, a spokesman for J.C. Penney, said he did not know how many of the T-shirts had appeared in stores around the country but they would forthwith disappear. People Power at work! The voiceless are finding their voices - and are scoring points! The American Silent Majority is stirring! According to a study released this month by the Education Department, about 850,000 of the United States' 50 million schoolchildren are being taught at home. ===== And, finally, take heart! This story, referenced as having come from the Knoxville News-Sentinel of April 3, 2001, was picked from a weekly e-mailing of "unusual news stories": Several days after Moema Furtado's "exhibit" opened in March, municipal officials in Knoxville, Tenn., told her to remove her installation of thin-latex likenesses of large pieces of pulled human skin hanging from walls and ceiling, which she said were "testaments to the horrors of the Holocaust". City official Mickey Foley said that the exhibit reminded her too much of huge, used condoms - and that East Tennessee was not ready for "that kind of art". ===== From irimland@zundelsite.org Mon, 13 Aug 2001 15:17:02 -0400 Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 15:17:02 -0400 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/13/2001 - "Lindbergh on the eve of World War II" Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 13, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: Lots of dramatic developments in connection to the incident at the Orient House in Jerusalem, where about 35 demonstrators from many parts of the world as part of the International Solidarity Movement were peacefully demonstrating against Israeli brutality - and got a first taste of that brutality when Israeli police charged them and started brutalizing them. I have at least 20 reports, which need to be sifted and prioritized, which will take some time. I hope to start doing an Orient House series tomorrow. Meanwhile, here is an interesting and very revealing speech by Charles Lindbergh at the eve of World War II. You can see that the lies and deceptions we are experiencing today are nothing new - and that the spiritual war Americans are fighting today was already in full swing in 1941. Worldwide truth-education continues: [START] Lindbergh's Des Moines Speech It is now two years since this latest European war began. From that day in September, 1939, until the present moment, there has been an over-increasing effort to force the United States into the conflict. That effort has been carried on by foreign interests, and by a small minority of our own people; but it has been so successful that, today, our country stands on the verge of war. At this time, as the war is about to enter its third winter, it seems appropriate to review the circumstances that have led us to our present position. Why are we on the verge of war? Was it necessary for us to become so deeply involved? Who is responsible for changing our national policy from one of neutrality and independence to one of entanglement in European affairs? Personally, I believe there is no better argument against our intervention than a study of the causes and developments of the present war. I have often said that if the true facts and issues were placed before the American people, there would be no danger of our involvement. Here, I would like to point out to you a fundamental difference between the groups who advocate foreign war, and those who believe in an independent destiny for America. If you will look back over the record, you will find that those of us who oppose intervention have constantly tried to clarify facts and issues; while the interventionists have tried to hide facts and confuse issues. We ask you to read what we said last month, last year, and even before the war began. Our record is open and clear, and we are proud of it. We have not led you on by subterfuge and propaganda. We have not resorted to steps short of anything, in order to take the American people where they did not want to go. What we said before the elections, we say [illegible] and again, and again today. And we will not tell you tomorrow that it was just campaign oratory. Have you ever heard an interventionist, or a British agent, or a member of the administration in Washington ask you to go back and study a record of what they have said since the war started? Are their self-styled defenders of democracy willing to put the issue of war to a vote of our people? Do you find these crusaders for foreign freedom of speech, or the removal of censorship here in our own country? The subterfuge and propaganda that exists in our country is obvious on every side. Tonight, I shall try to pierce through a portion of it, to the naked facts which lie beneath. When this war started in Europe, it was clear that the American people were solidly opposed to entering it. Why shouldn't we be? We had the best defensive position in the world; we had a tradition of independence from Europe; and the one time we did take part in a European war left European problems unsolved, and debts to America unpaid. National polls showed that when England and France declared war on Germany, in 1939, less than 10 percent of our population favored a similar course for America. But there were various groups of people, here and abroad, whose interests and beliefs necessitated the involvement of the United States in the war. I shall point out some of these groups tonight, and outline their methods of procedure. In doing this, I must speak with the utmost frankness, for in order to counteract their efforts, we must know exactly who they are. The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration. Behind these groups, but of lesser importance, are a number of capitalists, Anglophiles, and intellectuals who believe that the future of mankind depends upon the domination of the British empire. Add to these the Communistic groups who were opposed to intervention until a few weeks ago, and I believe I have named the major war agitators in this country. I am speaking here only of war agitators, not of those sincere but misguided men and women who, confused by misinformation and frightened by propaganda, follow the lead of the war agitators. As I have said, these war agitators comprise only a small minority of our people; but they control a tremendous influence. Against the determination of the American people to stay out of war, they have marshaled the power of their propaganda, their money, their patronage. Let us consider these groups, one at a time. First, the British: It is obvious and perfectly understandable that Great Britain wants the United States in the war on her side. England is now in a desperate position. Her population is not large enough and her armies are not strong enough to invade the continent of Europe and win the war she declared against Germany. Her geographical position is such that she cannot win the war by the use of aviation alone, regardless of how many planes we send her. Even if America entered the war, it is improbable that the Allied armies could invade Europe and overwhelm the Axis powers. But one thing is certain. If England can draw this country into the war, she can shift to our shoulders a large portion of the responsibility for waging it and for paying its cost. As you all know, we were left with the debts of the last European war; and unless we are more cautious in the future than we have been in the past, we will be left with the debts of the present case. If it were not for her hope that she can make us responsible for the war financially, as well as militarily, I believe England would have negotiated a peace in Europe many months ago, and be better off for doing so. England has devoted, and will continue to devote every effort to get us into the war. We know that she spent huge sums of money in this country during the last war in order to involve us. Englishmen have written books about the cleverness of its use. We know that England is spending great sums of money for propaganda in America during the present war. If we were Englishmen, we would do the same. But our interest is first in America; and as Americans, it is essential for us to realize the effort that British interests are making to draw us into their war. The second major group I mentioned is the Jewish. It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany. The persecution they suffered in Germany would be sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race. No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences. Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastations. A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government. I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people. Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war. We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we also must look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction. The Roosevelt administration is the third powerful group which has been carrying this country toward war. Its members have used the war emergency to obtain a third presidential term for the first time in American history. They have used the war to add unlimited billions to a debt which was already the highest we have ever known. And they have just used the war to justify the restriction of congressional power, and the assumption of dictatorial procedures on the part of the president and his appointees. The power of the Roosevelt administration depends upon the maintenance of a wartime emergency. The prestige of the Roosevelt administration depends upon the success of Great Britain to whom the president attached his political future at a time when most people thought that England and France would easily win the war. The danger of the Roosevelt administration lies in its subterfuge. While its members have promised us peace, they have led us to war heedless of the platform upon which they were elected. In selecting these three groups as the major agitators for war, I have included only those whose support is essential to the war party. If any one of these groups--the British, the Jewish, or the administration--stops agitating for war, I believe there will be little danger of our involvement. I do not believe that any two of them are powerful enough to carry this country to war without the support of the third. And to these three, as I have said, all other war groups are of secondary importance. When hostilities commenced in Europe, in 1939, it was realized by these groups that the American people had no intention of entering the war. They knew it would be worse than useless to ask us for a declaration of war at that time. But they believed that this country could be entered into the war in very much the same way we were entered into the last one. They planned: first, to prepare the United States for foreign war under the guise of American defense; second, to involve us in the war, step by step, without our realization; third, to create a series of incidents which would force us into the actual conflict. These plans were of course, to be covered and assisted by the full power of their propaganda. Our theaters soon became filled with plays portraying the glory of war. Newsreels lost all semblance of objectivity. Newspapers and magazines began to lose advertising if they carried anti-war articles. A smear campaign was instituted against individuals who opposed intervention. The terms "fifth columnist," "traitor," "Nazi," "anti-Semitic" were thrown ceaselessly at any one who dared to suggest that it was not to the best interests of the United States to enter the war. Men lost their jobs if they were frankly anti-war. Many others dared no longer speak. Before long, lecture halls that were open to the advocates of war were closed to speakers who opposed it. A fear campaign was inaugurated. We were told that aviation, which has held the British fleet off the continent of Europe, made America more vulnerable than ever before to invasion. Propaganda was in full swing. There was no difficulty in obtaining billions of dollars for arms under the guise of defending America. Our people stood united on a program of defense. Congress passed appropriation after appropriation for guns and planes and battleships, with the approval of the overwhelming majority of our citizens. That a large portion of these appropriations was to be used to build arms for Europe, we did not learn until later. That was another step. To use a specific example; in 1939, we were told that we should increase our air corps to a total of 5,000 planes. Congress passed the necessary legislation. A few months later, the administration told us that the United States should have at least 50,000 planes for our national safety. But almost as fast as fighting planes were turned out from our factories, they were sent abroad, although our own air corps was in the utmost need of new equipment; so that today, two years after the start of war, the American army has a few hundred thoroughly modern bombers and fighters--less in fact, than Germany is able to produce in a single month. Ever since its inception, our arms program has been laid out for the purpose of carrying on the war in Europe, far more than for the purpose of building an adequate defense for America. Now at the same time we were being prepared for a foreign war, it was necessary, as I have said, to involve us in the war. This was accomplished under that now famous phrase "steps short of war." England and France would win if the United States would only repeal its arms embargo and sell munitions for cash, we were told. And then [illegible] began, a refrain that marked every step we took toward war for many months--"the best way to defend America and keep out of war." we were told, was "by aiding the Allies." First, we agreed to sell arms to Europe; next, we agreed to loan arms to Europe; then we agreed to patrol the ocean for Europe; then we occupied a European island in the war zone. Now, we have reached the verge of war. The war groups have succeeded in the first two of their three major steps into war. The greatest armament program in our history is under way. We have become involved in the war from practically every standpoint except actual shooting. Only the creation of sufficient "incidents" yet remains; and you see the first of these already taking place, according to plan [ill.]-- a plan that was never laid before the American people for their approval. Men and women of Iowa; only one thing holds this country from war today. That is the rising opposition of the American people. Our system of democracy and representative government is on test today as it has never been before. We are on the verge of a war in which the only victor would be chaos and prostration. We are on the verge of a war for which we are still unprepared, and for which no one has offered a feasible plan for victory--a war which cannot be won without sending our soldiers across the ocean to force a landing on a hostile coast against armies stronger than our own. We are on the verge of war, but it is not yet too late to stay out. It is not too late to show that no amount of money, or propaganda, or patronage can force a free and independent people into war against its will. It is not yet too late to retrieve and to maintain the independent American destiny that our forefathers established in this new world. The entire future rests upon our shoulders. It depends upon our action, our courage, and our intelligence. If you oppose our intervention in the war, now is the time to make your voice heard. Help us to organize these meetings; and write to your representatives in Washington. I tell you that the last stronghold of democracy and representative government in this country is in our house of representatives and our senate. There, we can still make our will known. And if we, the American people, do that, independence and freedom will continue to live among us, and there will be no foreign war. back to Primary Sources Program Description | Enhanced Transcript | Reference THE FILM & MORE | SPECIAL FEATURE | TIMELINE | MAPS | TEACHER'S GUIDE THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE | KIDS | SEARCH | FEEDBACK WGBH | PBS Online Reference Interview Transcripts | Bibliography | Primary Sources From irimland@zundelsite.org Tue, 14 Aug 2001 08:02:08 -0700 Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 08:02:08 -0700 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/11/2001 - "Doug Collins in the news again!" Please note: Both MacKenzie Paine and I are encountering the same problem sending out to our mail list. Sabotage? I have not been able to get through since Saturday! This is my fifth try! Title: "Doug Collins in the news again!" ===== Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 11, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: A few of us made benign bets that freedom-of-speech seeking WWII veteran and controversial columnist, Doug Collins, was going to be snubbed by the highest court of Canada, the less-than-venerable Supreme Court. And sure enough, according to the Toronto Star, August 9, 2001, you are served up the entire, disgraceful schlamassel titled "High court won't hear appeal of hate decision: Doug Collins' columns exposed Jews to hatred, rights tribunal ruled." [START] Toronto Star: OTTAWA (CP) - Canada's top court has closed its door to a British Columbia man whose newspaper columns were deemed to expose Jews to hatred. Doug Collins was ordered by the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal in 1999 to pay $2,000 to Harry Abrams, a Victoria Jewish man who complained in 1994 about four columns in North Shore News, a publication in suburban Vancouver. The Supreme Court of Canada on Thursday dismissed Collins' bid to challenge that ruling. As is usual in applications for leave to appeal, the court's three-judge panel offered no reasons for refusing to hear the case. Zundelsite: Those Jewish-sponsored and -paid trips for Canada's Supreme Court judges to meet with their apartheid-approving, torture-sanctioning Israeli counterparts are paying big dividends for the underwriters of these trips! Toronto Star: Top court cases usually involve legal issues that have split appeal courts, or matters of national, precedent-setting importance. Zundelsite: Let that burn a hole in your tongue! To rule against curtailment of freedom of speech by a blatantly self-serving minority, or at the very least consider the issue, supposedly guaranteed under Canada's Charter of Rights, is obviously in this Supreme Court's mind not of "national, precedent-setting importance"! Toronto Star: The tribunal found in 1999 that Collins' columns "repeatedly reinforce some of the most virulent forms of anti-Semitism, and perpetuate the most damaging stereotypes of Jews: that they are selfish, greedy and manipulative." Zundelsite: Some people just cannot take criticism, however obviously true and clear for all to see that criticism happens to be. Let's call a spade a spade. Censorship of inconvenient critics was the issue all along. Toronto Star: Collins, who retired from the paper in 1997, referred in one column to the Holocaust movie Schindler's List as "Swindler's List." He challenged historical estimates of how many Jews were killed by Nazis during the Second World War, citing "the inflated six million story." Zundelsite: That magic mantra of the new temporal religion - "Six Million!" - is wearing pretty thin. Even the blind are beginning to see that ever more million survivors line up to cash in on the extorted billions from the Germans, the Swiss, and now the Poles. Toronto Star: And (Collins) said Holocaust-deniers Ernst Zundel and Jim Keegstra were prosecuted for breaking hate crime laws because they have "the wrong opinions." Zundelsite: Oy vey! Is that a crime if Collins said that? The Toronto Star has once more neglected to do even minimal research. Ernst Zundel was never prosecuted, much less convicted for breaking "hate crime laws." His conviction for "false news" was overturned by a Supreme Court still fairly morally intact because it had not yet gone on those Jewish-paid "sensitivity training" junkets to Israel. Toronto Star: After the ruling, North Shore News managing editor Tim Renshaw decried that the paper would have to run "government-dictated content." Zundelsite: Maybe the Canadian media cannot look that far ahead, but they will rue the day for their non-defence of Freedom of Speech for dissidents because they feared Jewish pressure. Toronto Star: Collins refused to take part in the tribunal hearing, calling it a "kangaroo court" meant to "enforce political correctness." But he submitted a written challenge to Section 7 of B.C.'s Human Rights Code and how it should be interpreted and tested. That section prohibits publication of material that's "likely to expose a person or a group of persons to hatred or contempt." Zundelsite: Maybe people might want to take another look at Doug Collins's written submission and judge for themselves. Chances are you find it at www.freedomsite.org - a likely future target for censorship, Absurdistan-style. Be sure to use the search engine since it is a behemoth of a website with millions of truth-seeking visitors. Toronto Star: The current legal test asks whether a reasonable person would understand that a message expresses hatred or contempt, and consider the message likely to expose its target group to increased risk of hatred or contempt. Zundelsite: Jewish movie producers, columnists, shameless schmierfinks like Elie Wiesel and Daniel Goldhagen have exposed Germans to plenty of hatred and contempt. Bronfman called the Austrians "a nation of anti-semitic dogs." The police refused to lay charges under the hate law. Toronto Star: Among other things, Collins had hoped to argue before the high court that the act poses an unconstitutional threat to freedom of the press. Zundelsite: Canadians are in for a rude awakening. Doug Collins supposedly fought for their "freedom" - in World War II and since. One wonders how old soldiers like Collins must feels when they look at the cesspool that Canada has become. Toronto Star: (Collins) had retained lawyer Doug Christie, who has also represented Holocaust deniers Zundel and Keegstra. Zundelsite: So what? Attorney Rosen, who represents the Wiesenthalers, an outfit notorious for trying to curtail other people's speech, represented serial killer Paul Bernardo who took a saw to a young girl's strangled body, cut her into eight pieces, submerged them in cement, and laughed when her severed head kept bobbing up. When Ernst Zundel hired Attorney Christie to represent him, all he ever wanted was the freedom to speak the truth about the falsehoods of the Holocaust as he had come to know them after decades of diligent study. A lawyer should not be smeared by insinuation and innuendo for defending a politically incorrect client, as the Toronto Star perfectly well know! Toronto Sun: A gathering billed as a free-speech meeting in Vancouver in October, 1999 by Collins and Christie to raise money for the legal challenge drew loud protest from Jewish and labour activists. Zundelsite: An unruly rent-a-mob, tolerated by Vancouver's pussyfooting, ultra-liberal police cowed by the rabble, prevented people from attending that perfectly legal meeting in a Vancouver library. A shocking video exists. The police are a large problem in this erosion of constitutional rights in Canada. Toronto Sun: Collins and North Shore News were ordered to pay $2,000 to Abrams "as compensation for the injury they have caused to his dignity and self-respect." Zundelsite: With this precedent, lots of "hurt feelings" will lead to a parasites' bonanza. It is going to rain human rights complaints. The pay-offs will fall into receiving laps like prayed-for manna from heaven. Whatever happened to that nation that used to stand up and sing with manly gusto: "...the true North, strong and free..."? ===== Thought for the Day: "For these people, a righteous gentile is one who exemplifies abject submissiveness in the face of Jewish arrogance. All the rest of us are, of course, "anti-Semites," "bigots," "racists," and what have you." (Letter to the Zundelsite) From irimland@zundelsite.org Tue, 14 Aug 2001 08:10:21 -0700 Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 08:10:21 -0700 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/12/2001 - "Revisionist Week in Review" ===== ===== Sorry to be late with this Sunday Summary. I have been encountering server problems and have been blocked for several days! Title: Revisionist Week in Review ===== Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 12, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: In Germany, the excitement over the (to us) hilarious poster - "The Holocaust never happened" - continues to baffle some brains. Shortly after the posters appeared, to the delight of some and shrieking horror of others, officials found themselves confronted with Manfred Roeder, 72, always described as a recalcitrant, incorrigible "Neo-Nazi", who came up with a smart poster variation of his own. Mr. Roeder used a gigantic poster from the foundation at the Brandenburg Gate by rolling out a banner of his own underneath. The Roeder poster said: "Crimes by Nazi Germany's military didn't happen either!" The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which has lately - rather cheekily! - started showing a tiny bit of its own rather withered patriotic sentiments, titled one write-up of this incident as "More 'Crimes' that weren't". (!) For his pains, Mr. Roeder has netted himself yet another conviction of one year's worth of prison in repressive Germany - this time, luckily, with probation. ===== Spokesmen for the "Foundation for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews", responsible for these controversial posters, stated that even though the posters were "well-meaning", they caused "too much misunderstanding." The posters have been pulled. Now the Foundation plans to continue its campaign with a far milder poster reading: "The future requires memory -- get involved in the construction of the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe.'' Lessons for Cyber Fighters: The enemy knows how potent our revisionist slogans are. "The Holocaust never happened!" "No holes - no Holocaust!" "Six Million did not die!" etc. Keep hammering away! ===== A panel of Jewish and Catholic eager beaver historians were recently trying to dig up dirt on Pope Pius' XII actions - or better, lack thereof - during the so-called Holocaust, but resigned from their tasks in a huff, claiming that Vatican archivists were not as forthcoming as they expected them to be. For their part, Vatican officials have let it be known that they resent being pestered by what they call a "slanderous campaign" mounted against the Roman Catholic Church over the "Holocaust-era Pope". They are accusing the dirt-digging historians of "clearly incorrect behavior." To that effect, a Vatican statement reads: "In recent days, a violent attack has again been unleashed against the Catholic Church. The occasion for this slanderous campaign has been furnished by the decision of the Jewish-Catholic study group to suspend its activity." Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, called the Vatican statement a "disgraceful slap in the face to Jews and Catholics who have worked for reconciliation and understanding." "To defend the silence of Pope Pius XII is to defend the indefensible," Steinberg said. ===== From Warsaw comes word that the mayor of Jedwabne, the town where Poles murdered hundreds of their Jewish neighbors in 1941, resigned from his post because town councilors failed to support efforts to memorialize the wartime massacre. The mayor's resignation happened after the July 10 commemoration in which Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski begged forgiveness for the massacre - but still insisted Nazi occupiers were behind it all. Think about it: Asking for "forgiveness" for an act he still blames on the Germans, in spite of evidence to the contrary! ===== The Israeli daily, Ha'aretz, reports that flight crews from the Dutch airline KLM will no longer stay overnight in Israel because of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian violence. Swissair recently adopted a similar policy a few weeks ago - as did Lufthansa and Air France, under shrill protests from the Israelis. ===== An historical debate has broken out over the Jewish leader Leo Baeck (1873-1956), currently the subject of an exhibition at Frankfurt's Jewish Museum, and his involvement with the Nazi regime. Baeck was president of the Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden (Jewish Council of the German Reich), an umbrella organization founded in 1933 in reaction to the National Socialists' seizure of power. Hermann Simon, director of the foundation for the new synagogue in Berlin, stated that in 1942, Baeck compiled a study for the Gestapo of the legal status of the Jews. "Baeck was under unbelievable pressure" and was "writing for his life," Simon wrote. ZGram readers will be happy to learn that it was Leo Baeck and his organization who suggested, and agitated for, the wearing of the Yellow Jewish Star. He was opposed by Dr. Goebbels who anticipated the negative impact the symbol would have in the world. ===== Marc Ellis is an American Jew who says that if Israelis are going to continue to oppress and kill Palestinians, then they've forfeited their moral right to play victim. In particular, says Ellis rather smartly and admirably, Jews should "stop talking about the Holocaust". A real brainer, that one! Ellis is a rabbi with his own congregation in Los Angeles. He is also the author of a book, if my memory serves me right, titled "Why should Jews exist?" I have read excerpts some time ago; I remember it as a book well worth reading. ===== Arab American activism is fighting back in pockets of America. School officials of Fairfax County, Virginia, a county with a sizable Arab-American and Muslim population, have agreed to remove an ethnically offensive novel from the list of recommended summer reading for the seventh and eighth grades. The book, autored by Caroline B. Clooney, is titled "The Terrorist" and was published by Scholastic, Inc. The Clooney book is described as a poorly written novel with an absurd plot. It deals with a 15 year old Muslim girl who explodes a bomb to kill a classmate in an effort to escape a forced marriage to a 54 year old man. German-Americans ought to take heed and retire to the dustbin of history the Anne Frank Diary, long unmasked as a shameless fraud perpetuated by politically motivated, profit-seeking con-men, along with titles such as Elie Wiesel's "Night", his hateful "Legends of our Time" and Goldhagen's "Hitler's Executioners". ===== Bishop Donald J. McCoid of Pittsburgh, one of the high echelon candidates for an important post within the Lutheran church, was part of a Christian delegation that met with Secretary of State Colin Powell earlier this year. Upon that occasion, McCoid delivered a strongly worded rebuke of Israeli policies, to which the American Jewish Committee responded that it was "terribly unbalanced" and "rather un-Christian." According to yesterday's Los Angeles Times, the nation's largest Lutheran church has called on the U.S. government this week to withhold all economic and military aid to Israel until it improves conditions for Palestinians. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America passed a strongly worded resolution that stated they were following the words of Jesus to comfort "the poor, the powerless and the outcast." That resolution, opines the Los Angeles Times, "signals a growing frustration--increasingly aimed at Israel--among the mainline Protestant churches with the ongoing violence." Good news, that one! The sacrifice of the Palestinians against the backdrop of their ordeals is finally melting the hearts of stone of some of the befuddled and Israel-besotten Christian churches. ===== Home-schooling parents are flexing their muscle as well. T-shirts emblazoned with a decrepit mobile home and the words ``Home Skooled'' were hastily pulled from J.C. Penney stores Wednesday after outraged customers, who said that the T-shirts demeaned home-schooling, threatened a boycott. Tim Lyons, a spokesman for J.C. Penney, said he did not know how many of the T-shirts had appeared in stores around the country but they would forthwith disappear. People Power at work! The voiceless are finding their voices - and are scoring points! The American Silent Majority is stirring! According to a study released this month by the Education Department, about 850,000 of the United States' 50 million schoolchildren are being taught at home. ===== And, finally, take heart! This story, referenced as having come from the Knoxville News-Sentinel of April 3, 2001, was picked from a weekly e-mailing of "unusual news stories": Several days after Moema Furtado's "exhibit" opened in March, municipal officials in Knoxville, Tenn., told her to remove her installation of thin-latex likenesses of large pieces of pulled human skin hanging from walls and ceiling, which she said were "testaments to the horrors of the Holocaust". City official Mickey Foley said that the exhibit reminded her too much of huge, used condoms - and that East Tennessee was not ready for "that kind of art". ===== From irimland@zundelsite.org Tue, 14 Aug 2001 08:15:27 -0700 Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 08:15:27 -0700 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/13/2001 - "Lindbergh on the eve of World War II" ===== PLEASE NOTE: THERE ARE SERVER PROBLEMS AT THE ZUNDELSITE. IF THERE IS A DISRUPTION OF SERVICE, THE REASONS ARE TECHNICAL. THIS IS MY FIFTH TRY! ===== Title: Lindbergh on the eve of World War II ===== Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 13, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: Lots of dramatic developments in connection to the incident at the Orient House in Jerusalem, where about 35 demonstrators from many parts of the world as part of the International Solidarity Movement were peacefully demonstrating against Israeli brutality - and got a first taste of that brutality when Israeli police charged them and started brutalizing them. I have at least 20 reports, which need to be sifted and prioritized, which will take some time. I hope to start doing an Orient House series tomorrow. Meanwhile, here is an interesting and very revealing speech by Charles Lindbergh at the eve of World War II. You can see that the lies and deceptions we are experiencing today are nothing new - and that the spiritual war Americans are fighting today was already in full swing in 1941. Worldwide truth-education continues: [START] Lindbergh's Des Moines Speech It is now two years since this latest European war began. From that day in September, 1939, until the present moment, there has been an over-increasing effort to force the United States into the conflict. That effort has been carried on by foreign interests, and by a small minority of our own people; but it has been so successful that, today, our country stands on the verge of war. At this time, as the war is about to enter its third winter, it seems appropriate to review the circumstances that have led us to our present position. Why are we on the verge of war? Was it necessary for us to become so deeply involved? Who is responsible for changing our national policy from one of neutrality and independence to one of entanglement in European affairs? Personally, I believe there is no better argument against our intervention than a study of the causes and developments of the present war. I have often said that if the true facts and issues were placed before the American people, there would be no danger of our involvement. Here, I would like to point out to you a fundamental difference between the groups who advocate foreign war, and those who believe in an independent destiny for America. If you will look back over the record, you will find that those of us who oppose intervention have constantly tried to clarify facts and issues; while the interventionists have tried to hide facts and confuse issues. We ask you to read what we said last month, last year, and even before the war began. Our record is open and clear, and we are proud of it. We have not led you on by subterfuge and propaganda. We have not resorted to steps short of anything, in order to take the American people where they did not want to go. What we said before the elections, we say [illegible] and again, and again today. And we will not tell you tomorrow that it was just campaign oratory. Have you ever heard an interventionist, or a British agent, or a member of the administration in Washington ask you to go back and study a record of what they have said since the war started? Are their self-styled defenders of democracy willing to put the issue of war to a vote of our people? Do you find these crusaders for foreign freedom of speech, or the removal of censorship here in our own country? The subterfuge and propaganda that exists in our country is obvious on every side. Tonight, I shall try to pierce through a portion of it, to the naked facts which lie beneath. When this war started in Europe, it was clear that the American people were solidly opposed to entering it. Why shouldn't we be? We had the best defensive position in the world; we had a tradition of independence from Europe; and the one time we did take part in a European war left European problems unsolved, and debts to America unpaid. National polls showed that when England and France declared war on Germany, in 1939, less than 10 percent of our population favored a similar course for America. But there were various groups of people, here and abroad, whose interests and beliefs necessitated the involvement of the United States in the war. I shall point out some of these groups tonight, and outline their methods of procedure. In doing this, I must speak with the utmost frankness, for in order to counteract their efforts, we must know exactly who they are. The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration. Behind these groups, but of lesser importance, are a number of capitalists, Anglophiles, and intellectuals who believe that the future of mankind depends upon the domination of the British empire. Add to these the Communistic groups who were opposed to intervention until a few weeks ago, and I believe I have named the major war agitators in this country. I am speaking here only of war agitators, not of those sincere but misguided men and women who, confused by misinformation and frightened by propaganda, follow the lead of the war agitators. As I have said, these war agitators comprise only a small minority of our people; but they control a tremendous influence. Against the determination of the American people to stay out of war, they have marshaled the power of their propaganda, their money, their patronage. Let us consider these groups, one at a time. First, the British: It is obvious and perfectly understandable that Great Britain wants the United States in the war on her side. England is now in a desperate position. Her population is not large enough and her armies are not strong enough to invade the continent of Europe and win the war she declared against Germany. Her geographical position is such that she cannot win the war by the use of aviation alone, regardless of how many planes we send her. Even if America entered the war, it is improbable that the Allied armies could invade Europe and overwhelm the Axis powers. But one thing is certain. If England can draw this country into the war, she can shift to our shoulders a large portion of the responsibility for waging it and for paying its cost. As you all know, we were left with the debts of the last European war; and unless we are more cautious in the future than we have been in the past, we will be left with the debts of the present case. If it were not for her hope that she can make us responsible for the war financially, as well as militarily, I believe England would have negotiated a peace in Europe many months ago, and be better off for doing so. England has devoted, and will continue to devote every effort to get us into the war. We know that she spent huge sums of money in this country during the last war in order to involve us. Englishmen have written books about the cleverness of its use. We know that England is spending great sums of money for propaganda in America during the present war. If we were Englishmen, we would do the same. But our interest is first in America; and as Americans, it is essential for us to realize the effort that British interests are making to draw us into their war. The second major group I mentioned is the Jewish. It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany. The persecution they suffered in Germany would be sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race. No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences. Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastations. A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government. I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people. Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war. We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we also must look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction. The Roosevelt administration is the third powerful group which has been carrying this country toward war. Its members have used the war emergency to obtain a third presidential term for the first time in American history. They have used the war to add unlimited billions to a debt which was already the highest we have ever known. And they have just used the war to justify the restriction of congressional power, and the assumption of dictatorial procedures on the part of the president and his appointees. The power of the Roosevelt administration depends upon the maintenance of a wartime emergency. The prestige of the Roosevelt administration depends upon the success of Great Britain to whom the president attached his political future at a time when most people thought that England and France would easily win the war. The danger of the Roosevelt administration lies in its subterfuge. While its members have promised us peace, they have led us to war heedless of the platform upon which they were elected. In selecting these three groups as the major agitators for war, I have included only those whose support is essential to the war party. If any one of these groups--the British, the Jewish, or the administration--stops agitating for war, I believe there will be little danger of our involvement. I do not believe that any two of them are powerful enough to carry this country to war without the support of the third. And to these three, as I have said, all other war groups are of secondary importance. When hostilities commenced in Europe, in 1939, it was realized by these groups that the American people had no intention of entering the war. They knew it would be worse than useless to ask us for a declaration of war at that time. But they believed that this country could be entered into the war in very much the same way we were entered into the last one. They planned: first, to prepare the United States for foreign war under the guise of American defense; second, to involve us in the war, step by step, without our realization; third, to create a series of incidents which would force us into the actual conflict. These plans were of course, to be covered and assisted by the full power of their propaganda. Our theaters soon became filled with plays portraying the glory of war. Newsreels lost all semblance of objectivity. Newspapers and magazines began to lose advertising if they carried anti-war articles. A smear campaign was instituted against individuals who opposed intervention. The terms "fifth columnist," "traitor," "Nazi," "anti-Semitic" were thrown ceaselessly at any one who dared to suggest that it was not to the best interests of the United States to enter the war. Men lost their jobs if they were frankly anti-war. Many others dared no longer speak. Before long, lecture halls that were open to the advocates of war were closed to speakers who opposed it. A fear campaign was inaugurated. We were told that aviation, which has held the British fleet off the continent of Europe, made America more vulnerable than ever before to invasion. Propaganda was in full swing. There was no difficulty in obtaining billions of dollars for arms under the guise of defending America. Our people stood united on a program of defense. Congress passed appropriation after appropriation for guns and planes and battleships, with the approval of the overwhelming majority of our citizens. That a large portion of these appropriations was to be used to build arms for Europe, we did not learn until later. That was another step. To use a specific example; in 1939, we were told that we should increase our air corps to a total of 5,000 planes. Congress passed the necessary legislation. A few months later, the administration told us that the United States should have at least 50,000 planes for our national safety. But almost as fast as fighting planes were turned out from our factories, they were sent abroad, although our own air corps was in the utmost need of new equipment; so that today, two years after the start of war, the American army has a few hundred thoroughly modern bombers and fighters--less in fact, than Germany is able to produce in a single month. Ever since its inception, our arms program has been laid out for the purpose of carrying on the war in Europe, far more than for the purpose of building an adequate defense for America. Now at the same time we were being prepared for a foreign war, it was necessary, as I have said, to involve us in the war. This was accomplished under that now famous phrase "steps short of war." England and France would win if the United States would only repeal its arms embargo and sell munitions for cash, we were told. And then [illegible] began, a refrain that marked every step we took toward war for many months--"the best way to defend America and keep out of war." we were told, was "by aiding the Allies." First, we agreed to sell arms to Europe; next, we agreed to loan arms to Europe; then we agreed to patrol the ocean for Europe; then we occupied a European island in the war zone. Now, we have reached the verge of war. The war groups have succeeded in the first two of their three major steps into war. The greatest armament program in our history is under way. We have become involved in the war from practically every standpoint except actual shooting. Only the creation of sufficient "incidents" yet remains; and you see the first of these already taking place, according to plan [ill.]-- a plan that was never laid before the American people for their approval. Men and women of Iowa; only one thing holds this country from war today. That is the rising opposition of the American people. Our system of democracy and representative government is on test today as it has never been before. We are on the verge of a war in which the only victor would be chaos and prostration. We are on the verge of a war for which we are still unprepared, and for which no one has offered a feasible plan for victory--a war which cannot be won without sending our soldiers across the ocean to force a landing on a hostile coast against armies stronger than our own. We are on the verge of war, but it is not yet too late to stay out. It is not too late to show that no amount of money, or propaganda, or patronage can force a free and independent people into war against its will. It is not yet too late to retrieve and to maintain the independent American destiny that our forefathers established in this new world. The entire future rests upon our shoulders. It depends upon our action, our courage, and our intelligence. If you oppose our intervention in the war, now is the time to make your voice heard. Help us to organize these meetings; and write to your representatives in Washington. I tell you that the last stronghold of democracy and representative government in this country is in our house of representatives and our senate. There, we can still make our will known. And if we, the American people, do that, independence and freedom will continue to live among us, and there will be no foreign war. END] From irimland@zundelsite.org Tue, 14 Aug 2001 19:53:49 -0700 Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 19:53:49 -0700 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/14/2001 - "Orient House" - Part I Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 14, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: Less than a week ago, a Palestinian suicide bomber walked into an Israeli pizzeria and blew himself up, leaving the hall strewn with more than a hundred dead and wounded, almost all of them young Israeli children. What follows is a horror story in 10 parts. It is one of the most difficult ZGram series I have ever compiled. I am on several e-mail lists that cover the intifada. I get hundreds of letters a day just on that topic alone. Most of the information I use in this ZGram series has apparently been sent to me from the offices of one George N. Rishmawi, Projects' Coordinator of the Palestinian Centre for Rapprochement Between People, Star Street No. 64 P.O.Box 24, Beit Sahour - Palestine. These e-mails include several articles by Robert Fisk writing for the British daily, the Independent. Fisk is, in my opinion, one of the most gifted, courageous and honest English-language journalists covering the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy, and the world owes him a lot to understand and be informed of the non-Israel side to this tragedy. We don't get any of that information from traditional lapdog media beholden to the Zionists. I start this ZGram series called "Orient House" with an Open Letter to the Israelis by Khalid Amayreh, a Palestinian: [START] To begin with, I 'd like to state in unequivocal terms that I genuinely sympathize with the victims of the human-bomb attack on the Pizza restaurant in West Jerusalem on 9 August. At the personal level, the pain and tears of the families and friends of the victims are no less genuine than the pain and tears of hundreds of Palestinian families who have fallen victim to the bloody showdown since it broke out ten months ago. Humans are humans; they react similarly when calamity strikes. A bereaved Jewish mother's pain is no less and no more real than that of a bereaved Palestinian mother's pain. Our dear neighbors: I fully agree with you that the bombing was horrible, shocking, and extremely ugly, but it was also inevitable and inescapable, thanks to your government's and army's equally horrible, shocking and extremely ugly actions against our people, including children. These actions, needless to say, made the mayhem inevitable and inescapable. Let us be honest about this, the human-bomb attack on the King George Street , was gruesome and even barbaric in a textual sense, (you can justifiably use all the nasty labels in all the lexicons to describe the tragedy), but it was also of your making. When your army so impetuously, so callously, and so brazenly created a calamity (or two) in every Palestinian household, a boomerang effect was inevitable, and only imbeciles (and you are not reputed, God forbid, for stupidity) would have calculated that the tormented Palestinians would turn the other cheek. They wouldn't and they won't. You, the people of Israel, have narrowed our horizons, so much that you have made us feel that only two "choices" are awaiting us, either to die as suicidal bombers or be slaughtered as sheep. Therefore, I can dare say that blood of the "personally-innocent victims" of the bombing is primarily on the hands of Sharon, Benalizer, Peres and other members of your diabolic government of assassins and war criminals. Open your eyes! A government that sends its murderers, whether humans or machines, to murder people, without charge, without trial, without arrest, without questioning, without nothing, is not a "government," but a gang, for it is the mafia gangs that liquidate opponents through assassinations. And, honestly, how, do you think, the Palestinians should have reacted to your unabated rampage of murder and terror, especially after you used the F-16s and the Apaches against a defenseless and essentially unarmed people? Shame on you for tormenting and terrorizing and seeking to enslave a small nation, already decimated by decades of demonizing military occupation, an occupation which all the languages of the world can't communicate its evils. Your behavior in the last ten months have been an affront to civilization and an insult to many of the lofty principles that you falsely claim to be part of your value system. Your brutality, savagery, criminality, impetuousness, hypocrisy, mendacity and insolence defy linguistic description. You, as Harry Truman once said, are like all underdogs, when you get on the top, you become as merciless and brutal to your new victims as your former oppressors were to you when you were underneath. Our dear neighbors, Why wasn't there any uproar in Israel when your criminal soldiers murdered Muhammed Durra before the eyes of the world? And, now, we have hundreds of Muhammed Durras! You even didn't have the moral courage to say sorry. When will you ever say "sorry?" Perhaps when Kosher pigs fly! Your eyes didn't blink at the daily funerals in the streets of Gaza and the West Bank, your hearts didn't ache, nor did your minds experience any compunctions, because the poor kids belonged to the wrong tribe, they were children of a lesser God. Or, as your former Prime Minister, Barak, said "their dead are mere numbers, ours are stories." Numbers and stories!..And snakes, ants, cockroaches, and what have you! Our dear neighbors: you are condemned, first and foremost, for electing a war criminal to be your prime minister, whose hands are drenched in the blood of the innocent. Could it be that you elected him on that account? Your are also condemned for your gleeful support for the killing, maiming, and wounding of tens of thousands of Palestinians whose only "crime" is their desire to be free from your slavery. (Is desiring freedom from slavery so a great crime in your thinking that the desirees ought to be put to death?). And all these homes that you destroyed and the people you made homeless - and all the trees and habitats you obliterated with your satanic bulldozers! Don't you know that your holy book, the Torah, contains clear injunctions against destroying trees even in time of war..? You once prided yourself, rightly or falsely, on having turned the desert into a verdant bloom, now, after the shame you have done, you can boast of having turned the previously-blooming Palestinian orchards, vineyards and fields into a desert. Maybe, just maybe, you will start to have some "hishbon nefesh" or soul searching, maybe you start to view your neighbors as full human beings created by the same God, maybe, just maybe, you begin to respect the life and property of the non-Jew as you do those of Jews. Maybe, just maybe, your start to understand that occupation is wrong, apartheid is wrong, oppression is wrong, and, yes, Zionism is wrong. I won't give you the benefit of the doubt, I would be [an] idiot if I did. But remember this, the ball is in your court, and until you begin to view us as humans, with equal human and legal rights, I'm absolutely sure that much more young blood, on our side (and yours) will still be spilled. What else can moral blindness lead to? To sign Al-Awda's petition to terminate US aid to Israel go to: http://al-awda.org/terminate_aid_petition.htm Do it TODAY! [END] ===== From irimland@zundelsite.org Wed, 15 Aug 2001 19:29:09 -0700 Date: Wed, 15 Aug 2001 19:29:09 -0700 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/15/2001 - "Orient House" - Part II Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 15, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: Part II of my ZGram series of "Orient House" continues. I have three pieces before me, written on August 11, referring to the Palestinian suicide bomber and the subsequent seizure by the Israelis of the Palestinian Orient House in Jerusalem. I am missing a condensed article of the seizure of Orient House itself, but the reader can easily fill in the gaps. This one below is titled "Israeli Brutality: Internationals, Palestinians attacked and arrested" and the the next two ZGrams will be Robert Fisk reporting on location. What is significant for us is that, in front of whirring cameras, Israelis abuse, beat up and arrest Americans who have come peacefully to help the Palestinians, and this will have public relations and political fallout consequences the Israelis are going to rue. We continue: [START] JERUSALEM On Saturday, August 11, 2001, foreign civilians, demonstrating against the illegal occupation of the Orient House in East Jerusalem, were violently attacked, abused and arrested by the Israeli police. At approximately 2:00pm, 35 internationals arrived at the American Colony Hotel, located a couple hundred meters from the Orient House. Bearing signs calling for an end to the occupation of the Orient House, an end to violence and justice for all people, the demonstrators formed a line along the sidewalk in front of the American Colony and began chanting: "No justice, No peace, End the occupation". Within five minutes and without warning the demonstrators were rushed by no less than 30 of Israel's Border Policemen who began violently snatching signs and elbowing people. After snatching most of the signs, the police officers then surrounded the demonstrators began pushing them violently, kicking them and cursing at them. Some of the demonstrators receiving the blows began screaming, others pleaded for "no violence." Eleven people were arrested, 7 foreign civilians and 4 Palestinians (3 minors and 1 adult), -- the Palestinians detained were all observers and not participating in the international demonstration. Those arrested were: Andrew Clareno 26 years old Austin, Texas (doctoral student, University of Michigan) Edward Mast 46 years old Seattle, Washington (playwright) Heidi Arraf 25 years old Detroit, Michigan (University of Michigan graduate) Linda Beavis 40 years old Seattle, Washington (high school history teacher) Sofia Ahmed 26 years old Chicago, Illinois (social worker) Julian Salingue 23 years old Paris, France (university student, Paris) Peter Friis-Neilson 35 years old Denmark (Lutheran priest) 31-year-old Palestinian male 16-year-old Palestinian male 16-year-old Palestinian male 17-year-old Palestinian female (released after interrogation) The next day, 3 Americans, one French, one Danish and one Palestinian were released. Two Americans, Andrew Clareno and Sofia Ahmed, and the two Palestinian minors remain in jail. Andrew and the two Palestinians are being charged with attacking a police officer. This, despite video footage that clearly shows that the demonstrators were attacked by the Israeli forces and that they did not fight back nor resist arrest. Other verbal and physical abuse All of the internationals bear bruises from being kicked and dragged by the Israeli police. One American, Andrew Clareno, has bruises and welts on his right neck and shoulder as a result of being choked and dragged in a chokehold by an Israeli Border patrolman. The Palestinian males were beaten, most noticeably, one of the 16-year-old Palestinian males, who was limping severely after the police interrogation. All demonstrators were verbally abused and subject to vulgarities. The young Palestinian girl, afraid and crying, was mocked by Israeli policemen. At a similar non-violent demonstration the day before, injuries included: a baton to the head of an elderly Frenchman as he attempted to put himself in between an Israeli officer and a Palestinian being beaten; an injury to the ankle of a young Italian woman, as a result of trampling by Israeli police horses; severe beating to the face and body of an elderly Palestinian man. The International Solidarity Movement The International Solidarity Movement is an umbrella organization that is reaching out and working with foreign civilians concerned with the Palestinian struggle for freedom and seeing an end to the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. The International Solidarity Movement together with their Palestinian hosts initiated a "Campaign Against Occupation". Thirty-eight internationals from Europe and the USA arrived to the Occupied Palestinian Territories last week to engage in direct non-violent actions, together with the Palestinian people, against the illegal Israeli occupation. The breakdown of the first delegation is as follows: 21 Americans 8 Italians 4 French 4 British 1 Danish These activists will be joined by 25 more Italians on August 13, 2001 and 8 more French on August 15, 2001. The International Solidarity Movement calls on Israel to comply with all UN Resolutions and International law. We call on our respective governments to cease active support of Israeli's aggression against Palestinian civilians. The ISM has formed an unofficial international presence and urges the international community to deploy an official international protection force in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and to take immediate and concrete action to pressure Israel to comply with UN resolutions and international law. For more information about actions, the arrests, or the ongoing Campaign Against Occupation, please call: Heidi Arraf: +972-52-290-173 Neta Golan: +972-52-481-261 Palestinian Center for Rapprochement: +972-2-277-2018 [END] From irimland@zundelsite.org Thu, 16 Aug 2001 15:44:54 -0700 Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2001 15:44:54 -0700 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/16/2001 - "Orient House" - Part III Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 16, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: Up-front, please do a bit of cyber activism. Take the time to write BBC America and ask them to air "The Accused" (about Ariel Sharon's role in the bloody Sabra and Shatila massacre) here in the USA. Just click on the following link, fill out the form and send it to "BBC America": http://www.bbcamerica.com/contactus_suggestion.html Now to my series: This Robert Fisk article is part of my "Orient House" series. Fisk, as you will remember, writes for the Independent, but his articles are flooding the Internet and are distributed by MER. I know this one will be particularly meaningful to you in understanding what is going on with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was written on August 11 - five days ago. Since then, a lot has happened, as you will see in subsequent ZGrams of this "Orient House" series. By the way, many more members of the International Solidarity movement have arrived on location and are offering their lives as "human shields" by dispersing anonymously into the Palestinian communities and daring the Israelis to attack the villages, thus creating a public relations nightmare for them. [START] 11 August 2001 Who trains the Israeli border police? Who, in heaven's name, taught them to help sacrifice the world's sympathy for Israel by sending horses and baton-wielding police into a crowd of American, Jewish and Christian "peace" activists in front of 20 television cameras? For, while Israelis were burying their dead after Thursday's murderous suicide bombing, the country's police force was proving how quickly it could turn into a rabble. It didn't have to be like this. The "Women in Black" and the Jewish and Christian groups sat on the road the moment the horses advanced, then linked arms. The Palestinians ran away but none of them was likely to break through the barricades towards Orient House; there was a legion of border guards and soldiers, riot visors down, sticks in hand, horses pawing the ground. Earlier, ladies in long frocks and girls wearing sun hats tried to talk to the cops in Hebrew. Some of the police would clearly have preferred to have left it at that. One of them wanted to chat about Israel's need for peace, Arafat's "stupidity" in not accepting Barak's offers at Camp David. We chatted about the police horses, the oldest of them 13 years old. "It's time for his bar mitzvah," one of the cops announced. It was like that; a bit overdone, far too many policemen, but not really hostile. Then a border policeman wearing shades walked through the barrier and ordered the horses forward. The "peace" folk began crying and a horseman grabbed a banner which read: "All human life is sacred: end the occupation." And then a kind of mild insanity seemed to grip the police. One of them began smashing his baton onto the iron barrier like a centurion, shouting and hammering the stick on the metal. Two cops began pushing and shoving two middle-aged women, another used his baton to punch a youth in the chest. And so the cameras whirred and snapped as European and American ladies, Christians and Jews alike, held up Palestinian flags in front of angry policemen armed with Galil assault rifles. Five of them were arrested. When the police advanced, the Westerners linked arms and sat on the road while the Palestinians present turned and ran. The cops had not experienced this before; these odd ladies and rather elderly gentlemen were not afraid. They simply waited to be ridden over. The police stopped. Then one of them grabbed the Israeli girl; and when she reached for his identity tag, he grabbed her neck and pushed her to the road. Here, the cameras moved in - until an officer restrained the policeman. She shouted for his ID in Hebrew and she too was arrested. Yes, of course, the Israeli police were fearful; fearful of demonstrators, of suicide bombers, of opposition, of anyone who might protest the seizure of Orient House. But, in less than two hours, they helped to turn Israel's tragedy into a nasty bit of bullying. An elderly French tourist watched. "Why on earth are they behaving like this?" he asked incredulously. We left him in his ignorance. [END] Zundelsite comment: The French tourist can be forgiven for his ignorance because the French mainstream media have never critically examined, much less reported on Israel's violent birth, its arrogant claim to represent "God's Chosen People" and its racist doctrine of Jewish superiority responsible for its apartheid legislation relegating the original inhabitants of Palestine to second class citizenship having to live in Israeli occupied Bantustans. This kind of political set-up can only result in treating all non-Israelis, non-Zionists as less than they think they are - as "Untermenschen", to use a term well-known. "We are all Palestinians to the Jews" - as one of my Zgram correspondents puts it. That's what the world is finally finding out! The gentle Palestinians are ripping the spin-doctors' veil right off the ugly faces of the bullying torturers! High time! As Fisk has put it and as many people repeat it, if these Israeli thugs in uniform behave like this towards people in front of running TV cameras, what do you think they do to their victims when nobody is there to watch them? This is done with American acquiescence - and largely with American and other Western countries' money. It is done with the world's acquiencence and silence. It will get much worse - unless good people step in and speak up. From irimland@zundelsite.org Fri, 17 Aug 2001 14:28:18 -0700 Date: Fri, 17 Aug 2001 14:28:18 -0700 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/17/2001 - "Orient House" - Part IV Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 17, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: When I prepared these "Orient House" series, I had hoped to free myself a bit from being tied to the computer - however, things are moving much more rapidly in the conflict-ridden Middle East territories, and I will try to bring you first, the original Zgram, followed by a brief update. Things are now moving very fast! Today's Part IV is the the story of an eyewittness. This man, obviously a politically incorrect Jew who tried to aid the Palestinians - there are a few such rare individuals! - was arrested among others at the protest against the closure of the Orient House. ===== [START] By Charles Lenchner, Olive Tree Summer 1:48pm Sun Aug 12 '01 clenchner@foe.org On Thursday all hell broke loose; a suicide bomber blew himself up, with more than a hundred dead and wounded as a result. The Islamic Jihad took responsibility and promised more to come. But of course, this was hell primarily for the Israelis. Another kind of hell, the kind that produces suicide bombers in limitless supply, has been going on for many months in the Palestinian Territories. The bombing makes for many satisfied Palestinians, who support such actions by at least 70%. And it makes for very angry Israelis, who support assassinations, even when the targets are political leaders and the victims include innocent children, by a similar margin. It is difficult to be an Israeli or Palestinian peace activist, who rejects these manifestations of hate and rage, even while sharing in many of the emotions of our respective peoples. My response to the bombing, sadly and as usual, was to be very very cynical. I can't really repeat the off-color comments that floated in my head. Of course, visiting the site of the bombing and witnessing the impromptu demonstration of Kahana supporters did little to get me feeling pensive. Too much blood, too much dancing on the blood, too many things to do. Anyway, I was in a hurry: to join the activities of the International Solidarity Movement and others, in support of nonviolent resistance to the occupation. My impressions of the 'internationals' camp are many, and will be addressed elsewhere. Suffice to say that the people involved are generally thoughtful, concerned peace activists, who are giving of their time and money to support a just cause. No one can say that this sort of behavior is not called for at this time, even if the community of seekers of justice and peace have a variety of opinions on some of the details. I wish it could be written that the camp included a large delegation of Jews from abroad, interested in making a statement about the possibility of Palestinian - Jewish cooperation for peace. At least seven Jews are involved, on a full or part time basis; but the Jews most interested in participating in this sort of activity are in many cases the least willing to come together as Jews, and explore together the emotional, spiritual, and religious content of our actions in this context. This saddens me, and I hope it will change. On Thursday evening, the day of the bombing, the Israeli police stormed the Orient House, known as the political representation for Palestinians in the city of Jerusalem. Minister of Internal Security, Uzi Landau, had wanted to shut it down since entering office, five months ago. The bombing was used, cynically, as an excuse; no one had accused the Orient House of being anything other than a political headquarters for mainstream Palestinians. (Uri Avnery from Gush Shalom has written an excellent article on the takeover: http://www.avnery-news.co.il/english/index.html ) On Friday morning, the group of 30 or so Americans, Italians, French, and British peace activists made their way to the closed off street that houses the Orient House, right next to the American Colony Hotel. We joined a small number of Palestinians, and a large number of journalists. The protestors, led by the leading activists of the International Solidarity Movement, moved against the police barricade that sealed off the street. Occasionally they were able to push aside or pull a metal barricade, forcing the police to link arms and push the demonstrators back. Occasionally, police on horseback rode around menacingly, forcing the demonstrators to lie down, a tactic aimed and preventing the horses from kicking people. One of our members, a lovely English woman with all the glorious history of the British anti-nuclear movement radiating from her, insisted on entering the street. Her insistence paid off, and she was finally admitted and arrested. A bit later, as I was standing near the barricade, I saw that the police had opened it up and were massed along the breach. The protesters were not next to it, although I was. I turned around, and saw two policemen with an elderly Palestinian man between them being half carried, half dragged, coming towards me quickly. Stunned a bit by the escalation in mood and police tactics, I was motionless until the three had passed me and were crossing the barricades, some of which were on the ground. The Palestinian man had tripped, or was shoved down, and was lying face down getting beaten, as the police tried to get a better grip on him to drag him away. I instinctively, and perhaps foolishly, jumped on the lower part of his body to protect what I could from the blows. (This man looked about 60 years old.) Seconds later I was dragged by my belt into the sealed off street, as an officer asked what should be done with me. A second later, someone else said authoritatively that I was to be arrested. I was not given the chance to stand up, but carried by my belt and arms for the fifty meters or so to the police van, while I remained silent and in a fetal position. For the entire time, I was beaten by 5-7 police officers with batons, punches, and kicks. I was also dropped and kicked along the way. One officer was unable to reach me because the others were in his way, and he shoved his baton up my bottom as forcefully as possible, sometimes hitting my genitals. Upon reaching the police van, the police did their best to shove me in awkwardly, taking advantage of the metal doorway as leverage for more beating and punching. The most active participant was the plainclothes officer in a white t-shirt and earring who was also the one I saw hitting the Palestinian man I tried to protect. After I was pushed all the way inside, I remained curled up in a fetal position, as I had been since being first picked up. I saw that same officer enter the van, shouting and pushing another Palestinian man, as well as a French man. At one point, the officer simply slapped the Palestinian man hard, unprovoked, and when the man tried to defend himself by shouting and pushing the officers hands away from his face, he was brutally beaten by at least three officers. The action was so intense, that I was carried out to give the police more space to beat up the occupants of the van. I think that I was carried out also because my behavior made it clear that I was willing to be completely submissive, unlike the Palestinian man, who made the mistake of protecting himself. While standing outside the van, I turned and spoke in Hebrew to the officers, informing them that I am an Israeli who is planning on submitting all that I have seen as evidence in a complaint of police brutality. The violence ended shortly thereafter, and did not continue. I suspect that my statement is the basis for getting accused of assaulting the police. All of this was done by policemen or border police, who serve professionally, not by conscripts or young officers. Most were men between the ages of 30-40. Many had insignia that showed them to be mid level non-commissioned officers or officers. None of them was wearing a badge or name tag that allowed people to get their name or number. At least seven different ones hit me after I was arrested, and this was witnessed by at least twenty five police, including senior officers who seemed to be in charge of the situation. We were duly handcuffed with plastic ties by an officer. A few minutes later, the plainclothes officer came in, and yanked all of our plastic ties with great force. A few minutes later, another officer came in and cut all the ties off. A few minutes later, that plainclothes officer came in and re-applied the dreaded plastic ties. This time I knew to hold my hands in such a way that the sudden tug wouldn't leave my wrists bound too tightly. Nonetheless, I have scabs where they cut into my flesh. At one point, that same plainclothes officer walked around the van, shutting the windows one by one from the outside, and shutting the back door of the van, the one on the other side of the security door that kept us locked up inside. He said in Hebrew to another officer that the arrestees should sweat as much as possible. As a result of the heat, I suffered a migraine headache, which forced me to seek medical attention afterwards. The doctor who examined me was convinced that my condition might be related to blows to my head. Perhaps she was right; I'm not sure that makes any difference. At the moment, my back is covered with large bruises, up to a foot long. Most of them are from police batons, although some could be kicks. They look quite shocking. I'm getting a perverse pleasure of out of showing off my back to unsuspecting friends; none of them has ever seen such a battered piece of flesh as my back. In a few days the colors will fade, along with all the other pains, scratches, and bruises on my body. I will not forget. The next day, the police were even more brutal, choosing to beat people both before and after arrest. The head of the Jerusalem police was filmed punching a Palestinian woman in the stomach, while she was pinned down by other burly policemen. On that day I got a call from a peace activist who had read the initial report of my arrest, and wanted to know what could be done on my behalf. I explained that this is the country we live in, and just because I was beaten severely today, does not give me much pause for thought. Other friends of mine were beaten at other times, and more will be beaten in the future. This is one of the many faces of Israel: a smirking cop shoving his baton into the ass of one of the citizens he has sworn to protect, another one shutting off the fresh air to a van full of detainees. But please, do not discount my Israeli face, which I hope is also an important part of the picture. Some Jewish Israelis are deeply concerned about what we are doing to Palestinians, and are deeply concerned about the violence done to our own national soul as a people. Some Palestinians, facing incomparably more difficult circumstances, are trying to present a vision of the future that includes respect for both peoples. Whoever behaves with great violence and inhumanity, Israeli or Palestinian, is obviously suffering from severe psychological scars and intense fear. Without trying to promote an obviously false symmetry, let me say that all of us here, Israeli and Palestinian, need the active participation of the international community to resolve our conflict. We need it to come from a place of love and understanding, and we need it now more than ever before. [END] ===== Update today, August 17, 2001: ADC Action Alert: Third Day of Washington Post Campaign to Incite Israeli Attack on Palestinians In a third day of relentless warmongering designed to incite, and lay the rhetorical groundwork in case of, an all-out Israeli assault on the Palestinians of the Occupied Territories, right-wing columnist George Will today adds his voice to the others demanding that Israel launch an massive war. Following appalling anti-Palestinian incitement from: Michael Kelly and Charles Krauthammer , Will demands "a short war" designed "to kill or capture those terrorists (and those who direct them) whom Arafat has permitted to remain at large," "to destroy the Palestinian Authority's military infrastructure" and "to destroy other physical infrastructure useful to the Palestinian Authority, including all newspaper and broadcasting facilities." Finally, Will urges Israel to complete this aggression by "defining, with finality, Israel's borders, around which a wall should be built. All of Jerusalem should be within the wall." Unlike Kelly and Krauthammer, Will does not explicitly call for the expulsion of any Palestinians from the occupied territories, but he does advocate massive violence by Israel against a population living under its occupation, including attacks on civilian infrastructures such as newspapers and broadcasting facilities. ACTIONS REQUESTED: 1) If you want to write a letter intended for publication, please send a brief letter to the editor of the Post Email: Mail: Letters to the Editor The Washington Post 1150 15th Street Northwest Washington, DC 20071 The Post website says "Letters must be exclusive to The Washington Post, and must include the writer's home address and home and business telephone numbers." Try to keep these letters under 200 words. 2) Also consider writing directly to the man responsible for the Post commentary section and hence this campaign of incitement, Editorial Editor Fred Hiatt, at the same addresses listed above. Please let the Post know that its campaign of relentless anti-Palestinian incitement and attempts to goad Israel into war are completely unacceptable and irresponsible. ===== ADC is the largest Arab-American grassroots organization in the United States. It was founded in 1980 by former Senator James Abourezk. To receive membership information, please send us your name and mailing address or visit our website. To receive or stop receiving ADC's email updates, send a message to with the following in the body: to subscribe type "subscribe updates" to unscubscribe type "unsubscribe updates" ===== From irimland@zundelsite.org Sat, 18 Aug 2001 11:25:52 -0700 Date: Sat, 18 Aug 2001 11:25:52 -0700 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/18/2001 - "Orient House" - Part V Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 18, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: Herwith Part V of "Orient House" - again a Robert Fisk article, followed by Zundelsite comments and Today's Update: [START] Sharon hides his failure with clich=E9s of 'terror' Brutalised and subjugated, Palestinians have lost the one thing that kept them in their place: fear By Robert Fisk The Independent | August 12, 2001 In just one paragraph last week, Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, used the word "terrorism" five times. Terror. Terrorism. Global terror. International terror. Arab terror, of course. Even the BBC was back using the Israeli lexicon, its reporter at the funerals of the Israelis murdered in last week's suicide bombing talking about "Palestinian terrorism"; it's not a word that the BBC used when an Israeli settlers group murdered a Palestinian baby and two other members of its family just over a week ago. "Terror" is now both an Israeli punctuation mark and a definition, an all-purpose escape clause and a form of delusion. For it conceals from the Israelis as well as the world an important truth about the Palestinian-Israeli war which is only now emerging: that the Palestinians are no longer afraid. This is the fundamental lesson that the Israelis have not yet understood and which the US administration - forever hoping that Mr Sharon can "crack down" on the Palestinians hard enough to make them come to heel, but softly enough to avoid any massacres - has not grasped. Ehud Barak was promising to break the intifada last October. Ariel Sharon was elected in February promising "security" for Israel. Barak failed. And now so has Sharon. Last week's wicked suicide bombing in Jerusalem was not just a sign of Palestinian cruelty. It was also a catastrophic failure on the part of the Israeli police and army. Throughout last week, every Arab found on his own in the area of Jaffa Street was being arrested and questioned. Just two days before the pizzeria slaughter, I saw soldiers haul a Palestinian worker to the side of Ben Jehuda Street - 200 yards from the restaurant - and only 24 hours before the bombing, I watched seven Palestinians being lined up for interrogation by Israeli border police in a side road. Yet on Thursday, a Palestinian weighed down with explosives and nails managed to walk into a cafe packed with Israeli women and children. True, the Israelis have prevented several bombings. The Israeli murder of a Hamas member in Tulkarem just over a week ago may well have stopped a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. But in the end, the suicide bomber always gets through. The Palestinian celebrations - the joy-shooting, the sweets, the dancing in the refugee camps in Lebanon - were grotesque, obscene. But in their terrible way, they contained a fearful message: that Israelis, however innocent, however young, can be made to suffer, just as Palestinian innocents have been made to suffer. This may still not be apparent to the Israelis themselves. When Palestinian children were gunned down by Israeli soldiers for throwing stones - or for being in an area where stones were being thrown - Israeli spokesmen invented the myth of "child sacrifice". Palestinians, they would have us believe, were deliberately sending their dearly beloved sons and daughters to their deaths for that arch "terrorist" Yasser Arafat. On =46riday night, Dore Gold, the Israeli government spokesman, announced that Mr Arafat's Palestinians - there apparently being no difference between the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and Islamic Jihad - were deliberately targeting Israeli children. Thus when Palestinian children died, it was the fault of Mr Arafat. When Israeli children died, it was the fault of Mr Arafat. The truth, however, is that Israel is going through a delusional crisis. Refusing to acknowledge that their troops are occupying somebody else's land, that their Jewish settlers - the French word colons is more accurate, for this is a colonial exercise - are building houses on Arab land at an ever-expanding rate, that they have always refused to allow Palestinians a capital in the smallest part of Jerusalem, Israelis have convinced themselves that they are under siege. What is really happening is that the old modalities have collapsed. For years after the 1967 war which brought the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights under Israeli occupation, Palestinians existed in a state of vegetative humiliation. They worked for their new Israeli masters, they built Jewish settlements on Palestinian land for their Israeli masters. They worked as collaborators on a massive scale. I remember, in 1976, meeting in Jerusalem two Palestinians openly employed as "policemen" by Israel. In southern Lebanon, the smallest Israeli incursion would send Palestinian guerrillas fleeing northwards towards Beirut in panic. If it was a Saturday, they would arrive, clutching their rifles, and pack themselves into Beirut's cinemas for the matinee performance, especially if the movie was a war film. Loud on rhetoric, low on courage, the Palestinians did what the Israelis wanted them to do. They were largely quiescent, humbled, obedient. Whether Lebanon changed this - the example of Hizbollah's defeat of the Israeli army is still the subject of daily conversation in Gaza - or whether their own dispossession and defeat simply grew too much to stomach, the Palestinians slowly understood that they no longer needed to obey. Thus, after the initial killing of Palestinian stone-throwers last year, the Palestinians began shooting back. Israeli tank attacks were met by Palestinian mortar fire. Palestinian suicide bombings were met by Israeli death squads, who were met by more Palestinian suicide bombing. President Bush's favourite clich=E9 - the "cycle of violence" - is accurate. In the ol= d days, any Palestinian who dared to resist Israel was ruthlessly crushed. There was no "cycle"; merely repression. The language of force, the Israelis called it then. Mr Sharon believed in it. When he practised it in Lebanon in 1982, it turned into a tragedy for Israel as well as for the Lebanese and Palestinians. But Mr Sharon didn't learn. The old man still believes in "teaching the Palestinians a lesson" - even though this involves re-teaching the same lesson to that other old man of the Lebanon war, Mr Arafat. But the lesson is disregarded. The Israeli public would like a re-occupation of the entire West Bank and Gaza - since Israel is supposedly under Palestinian "siege", they do not apparently understand that most of the West Bank and Gaza is occupied anyway - and, in the sinister words of an Israeli who escaped last week's bombing, a "sterilisation" of Palestinian territories. Senior Israeli army officers realise this would be madness. So Mr Sharon is left astride two powerful animals, his right-wing supporters and his army, which is why his "retaliation" for Thursday's bombing involved the destruction of an empty police barracks and the seizure of the one institution in Jerusalem that might have helped restore a peace: Orient House. If Mr Arafat promised his people a nation and failed to deliver, so Mr Sharon promised his people security - and failed to deliver. The problem is one which Israelis will eventually have to face. When a people lose their fear, they are never afraid again. You cannot re-inject a subject people with fear once they have lost it. An all-powerful Israel thus finds itself confronting a vulnerable but unsubmissive subject population. And as every belligerent knows, once your antagonist has lost his fear, the war is unwinnable. [END] Zundelsite comment: Robert Fisk, long-time brilliant analyst of Middle East affairs, lays bare the problem but refuses to go the final step in this article. 70% of Israelis support Sharon - therefore they are of - or at least approve of - his delusional mindset. For Israelis to claim with a straight face that they are the aggrieved party, that they are "under siege", is proof of a paranoid state of mind. These people seem incapable of examining their own behavior patterns and always look for fault in others. Cause and effect has no meaning for them! Actions do have consequences! That Palestinians have lost their fear after prolonged and systematic, all-encompadssing abuse and terror ought to deliver to the victimizers one loud and powerful lesson! Does it sink in? Not in the least! Watch what will happen next! Israel is exorably creating its very own Vietnam in Palestine - with nowhere to escape to! =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D UPDATE: International-Palestinian march from Bethlehem to Jerusalem - TODAY, August 18, 2001 News Advisory - Call for Media Residents of Bethlehem, Beit Sahour and Beit Jala and other villages of the area together with the International Solidarity Movement will join hand in hand marching from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, challenging the enforced checkpoint. The meeting and starting point will be at 6:00 pm in front of the Paradise Hotel on the Bethlehem - Jerusalem Road (Near Rachel's Tomb). There will be groups from the Italy, Britain, United States of America, =46rance, Denmark, Sweden and internationals from many other countries. For more information, please contact: George S. Rishmawi 052-281843 Heidi Arraf 052-290173 George N. Rishmawi , 052-299310, Projects Coordinator, Rapprochement Centre (Until 5:00 pm only) George N. Rishmawi - The Palestinian Centre for Rapprochement Between People - Star Street No. 64 P.O.Box 24 - Beit Sahour - Palestine - www.rapprochement.org Telefax: +972-2-2772018 =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D Thought for the Day: "No Germans on this list, apparently! 'Holocaust' fall-out!" (Ernst Z=FCndel) From irimland@zundelsite.org Sun, 19 Aug 2001 14:26:44 -0700 Date: Sun, 19 Aug 2001 14:26:44 -0700 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/19/2001 - "Orient House" - Part VI Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 19, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: I remember clearly my undergraduate years in the Midwest when the professors and some of the text books repeatedly accused the Germans for not having stood up and protested against laws, rules, regulations and policies adopted against the Jewish minority, the gypsies etc. Although I was not "alive to history" then, I still felt the sting of that criticism and promised myself that if ever in my lifetime blatant violations of human rights occurred, I would speak out, and speak clearly. Things are now moving so fast that even ZGrams and notes prepared a few days ago on an event or topic are now almost more than pass=E9 as new events overtake the "old" ones, often greater in impact or importance: =46isk keeps on hammering away at the whorish mainstream media glossing over the murderous things the Israelis do and magnifying the cornered Palestinian reaction to Jewish torment - putting it succinctly: "Editors around the world are requesting their journalists to be ever softer, ever more mealy-mouthed in their reporting of any incident which might upset Israel." Nice free press we have, nyet? Denmark is in a near-open diplomatic crisis about the Israeli "Torturer/Ambassador" who is clearly not welcome in Denmark, that little bastion of liberalism only yesterday. Amnesty International - for once in its long, shameful history of suppression of Israeli's terrorist tactics - has finally for once come out on the side of the Palestinian, as has the Danish Red Cross. Students all over our continent are getting ready for demonstrations and rallies on the side of the underdog. The Palestinians' cause is gaining an ever wider sympathetic response on Canadian and American campuses. There is ferment wherever you look. On the other side, there has been blatant saber-rattling in the leftist Washington Post via its most prestigious pro-Zionist columnists, virtually demanding that Israel start an all-out war of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians. Hundreds of readers have called them to task for "inciting war crimes" with their poisonous agitation and unwarranted attacks on the desperate Palestinians. Yesterday it took me half an hour to even access their website - apparently it was just clogged with irate readers giving the editors hell. I thought I should postpone my "Revisionist Week in Review" Sunday ZGrams for once and keep on with my "Orient House" series. It's filling in the gaps for many around the world, from Argentine to Namibia, from Russia to the US Armed Forces in Turkey, the Arab Emirates and the Balkans where English speaking readers don't have access to the many revisionist Websites and rely on what I send them for news updates. Here, then, are several noteworthy items: --For Immediate Release-- Bethlehem, Occupied Palestine August 13, 2001 On Saturday, August 11, 2001, American citizens, including Beth Daoud from Denver, participated in a peaceful demonstration in East Jerusalem when they found themselves facing American guns and other lethal military hardware in the hands of a hostile and violent police and military force. = =20 Several of the Americans were knocked down, others were hit, kicked, and insulted for exercising their human rights =92 all without prior warning or = a request to cease and desist. =20 The demonstration was the immediate consequence of the Israeli government's escalation of tension with the Palestinian people through its seizure of the Orient House in East Jerusalem, an action that has been roundly condemned by the international community. The Americans were present in association with the International Solidarity Movement to Free Palestine (=92=C4=FAISMFP=92=C4=F9), an organiza= tion encompassing individuals from many nations who are dedicated to the use of non-violent means to advance the cause of justice for Palestinians. =20 Beth Daoud has submitted the following statement the American consul in Jerusalem, Israel: Beth and the other Americans so assaulted ask their government the following question: How is it that their tax dollars - collectively well in excess of $3 billion annually - have come to be used against Americans exercising their human and civil rights? [Note to editor: Beth's address and phone number are available for confirmation but not for publication.] For further information, please contact: Thomas H. Nelson Attorney at Law Americans United for Palestinian Human Rights 825 N.E. Multnomah, Suite 925 Portland, OR 97232 Phone: (503) 230-8311 e-mail: <thnelson@thnelson.com Temporary phone in Middle East: 001-972-53-876-142 =20 =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D Salam all: This is going to be a huge event with a target of 20,000 people. In addition to Montreal and Ottawa, we are hoping to get people from Kingston, Toronto, London Ontario, Quebec City and anywhere from Canada or the USA close enough to drive or fly. Bring the whole family and show your support while enjoying the trip to Montreal. For those who prefer to bus it, JDC will chart buses to Montreal from Ottawa and other Canadian cities. Please reserve seats with us in advance. Provide home city and number of people interested. Please do so now to help us plan ahead. Regards................................./Salah Musa Coordinator, Jerusalem Defense Committee 2700 members worldwide, help us reach 5,000 by 2002. Standing up for Arabs and Muslims anywhere, anyhow, anytime. *********************************************************8 On September 15, you are invited to come to Montreal to rally for Palestine Montreal - Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR), a non-profit, student association based in Montreal with the aim of educating the Canadian public about the human rights status of the Palestinian people, is organizing a mass rally for Palestine to be held in Montreal, on September 15th, 2001. The theme of this rally will be "End Israeli colonialism- Unite for Justice." The rally will be held in the memory of Sabra and Shatila massacre. It is hoped that this event will achieve its goals of being one of the largest pro- Palestinian events in North America, and between 15-20,000 people are expected to attend. Support from all groups from all around North America is needed to make this rally a real success, and it is hoped that people outside of Montreal and Quebec will make an effort to come to this rally, especially from Toronto and Ottawa. Details of the event: The rally will begin with an information bazaar, to be held at the corner of DeMaisonneuve and Guy in downtown Montreal (close to Concordia University) at 10:00 AM of the 15th, in which all participating organizations will take part, and they can set up their own information tables. A big tent has been rented to house the bazaar. From there, the demonstrators will make their way to the American Consulate, and then back to the corner of Guy and DeMaisonneuve, passing by the Israeli Consulate on the corner of Peel and Rene Levesque Blvd. The bazaar will continue throughout the day. How can you participate? Organizations can help by doing one or all of the following: - Endorsing the rally. To endorse send an e-mail to: demo@sphr.org - Participating in the bazaar. To reserve a table e-mail: bazaar@sphr.org - Mobilizing people to attend in your area. The posters and the flyers of the rally are ready and are also available at the SPHR website (www.sphr.org) - Advertise for the rally in all possible ways, including word of mouth. The detailed proposal of the event is available at the SPHR website (www.sphr.org) in both English and French. Purpose of the event: The main purpose of this demonstration is: 1) Bring attention to the plight of the Palestinian people by uniting all active organisations in speaking out for the Palestinian people, 2) Inform the Canadian public and attract media attention concerning the continued human rights abuses perpetrated by the Israeli occupation force on Palestinians. 3) To inform the Canadian public of the discrimination against Palestinians living under Israeli law. 4) To pressure the Canadian government to support the Palestinians right to self-determination. 5) To pressure the Canadian government to recognize the right of return of all Palestinians to their homeland. 6) To provide a forum for activists to facilitate the communication of their ideas to one another and to the public. Demonstrator's demands: Some of the demands the demonstrators will be making is that the Canadian government put economic and diplomatic pressure on Israel until it stops its continuous violation of International Law, the end of all human rights abuses against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and in the refugee camps, the full implementation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and of all the UN resolutions pertaining to Palestine and to Palestinians, and that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon be brought before an International tribunal to be tried for war crimes against the Palestinian and Lebanese people. Your feedback is always appreciated. It is imperative that those who are concerned for the cause of Human Rights and Justice support this effort and, in addition, let the general Canadian public know the real truth of what is taking place in Palestine. For More Information: Please phone or email Sami Nazzal for details and if your organization would like to sponsor this event - Phone: (514) 909-6084. E-mail: concordia@sphr.org or Montreal@muslimsonline.com Please visit the SPHR website at www.sphr.org =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D Thought for the Day: [1] The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 10, 1948, provides in part: =20 Article 19. Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. Article 20. Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association. =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D From irimland@zundelsite.org Mon, 20 Aug 2001 19:38:54 -0700 Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2001 19:38:54 -0700 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/20/2001 - "Orient House" - IX Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 20, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: "Orient House # 9" - two more to go! Yesterday I read the extraordinary and disturbing essay by Israel Shamir titled "Cornerstone of Violence" and I am thinking of making it #10, replacing the Robert Fisk article I had planned to use on the capture and beating of a Palestinian - a brutally honest report that can make your heart stop beating. But the Shamir article gives a dimension into the occult world of the Israelis. I feel I need to pass this information on, for many things become much clearer and easier to understand after reading Shamir's expose. Here is what I had prepared for today: [START] (No date, but I received it on August 13) It is building up. You are invited to join. This is a report about the International solidarity movement activities. Ghassan Andoni How can we support the non-violent Palestinians and Israelis? was the intelligent question asked me yesterday. This nicely avoids the childish question of who-hit-who-first. Or the complex questions of international law and UN resolutions governing military occupations, resistance to oppression, protection of civilian populations, refugees, torture, arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, or how one ethnic/religious group claims the right to return thousands of years later to ethnic cleanse the territory of another. In fact there are dozens of actions on the ground in occupied Palestine, by dozens of different groups and individuals, designed to protect and bring relief to thirsty, hungry, besieged, and bombarded civilian populations. Here's one recent report. Internationals are not as killable as Palestinians. Internationals enjoy more freedom of movement, but still risk bombs, bullets, broken bones, beatings and arrest while bringing food, water, medicine and protection to the victims of the savage Israeli ethnic cleansing campaign for apartheid Jewish settlements. Well, I too shudder at all this, and begin and end my conversations by referring to the likelihood of regional nuclear warfare. Were you there for all the 60's talk of the global effects of nuclear fallout? Have you forgotten? _________________________________________ Reprint from Jordan Times, August 9, 2001 BRING ON THE 'HUMAN SHIELDS' By Michael Jansen TO MAKE up for the international community's failure to send a protection force, or even monitors, to the occupied Palestinian territories, foreign human rights activists are volunteering to shield Palestinian civilians from Israeli abuse and military action. Private citizens are doing the job their governments have refused to undertake. A group of 40 fresh volunteers from the US and Europe arrived yesterday. Heidi Arraf, spokeswoman of the International Solidarity Movement, told this correspondent that the volunteers will receive training so they can take part alongside Palestinians in a campaign to lift the siege and end the blockade of Palestinian towns and villages. Arraf, who comes from Detroit, Michigan, said that volunteers will participate in mass actions designed to open roads, demolish earthworks and fill trenches around Palestinian population centres. Volunteers will also accompany Palestinian farmers to their fields so they can harvest their crops without Israeli army and settler harassment. Earlier arrivals and locally based volunteers continue to spend nights in repeatedly shelled Palestinian homes in the village of Beit Jala adjacent to Bethlehem. Arraf said that as long as Israeli tanks menaced Beit Jala an average of 30 "human shields" were deployed, two to a house, every night. At present eight deploy, one in each home. The volunteers maintain secrecy about their positions so the Israeli army does not know exactly where they are, forcing gunners to curb random fire. While this policy puts the volunteers at considerable risk, it also restrains the Israelis who, Arraf said: "Do not want a public relations disaster on their hands." Taking part in the Beit Jala "human shield" endeavour were 18 US Anglican Church members who returned home on Sunday. Ronald Forthofer, 57, from Longmount, Colorado, was in this group. He explained why they had come: "We believe that we who are protected in America should experience and live in the same way that Palestinians are living." Brenda Holliday, 60, from Orange County, California, said that no part of the house where she stayed was safe. "If children live under this kind of oppression... a vicious cycle will be repeated. The child who was oppressed will become the adult doing the oppressing." At a news conference last week the volunteers called on the international community to intervene "to cease active support of Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people." Volunteers include members of other Christian denominations as well as European, Japanese and Israeli peace activists. Neta Golan, one of two Israeli women acting as "human shields," has been staying in the village for the past few weeks. "I am living with a family in which a five-year-old boy lost a hand from Israeli fire a few weeks ago." She said that activists "are not deluded into believing" that they can prevent Israeli shooting. "We aren't here to provide cover for Palestinian snipers but for the civilians who are hit by Israeli fire," she stated. In her view most Palestinian firing at the nearby Israeli settlement of Gilo is ineffectual and Israeli responses are "exaggerated." One of the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) sponsoring the campaign is the Palestinian Centre for Rapprochement in Beit Sahour, next to Beit Jala. The centre's offices have been repeatedly shelled, Arraf observed. In addition to the volunteers coming from abroad, there are 200 locally resident foreign activists participating in the "human shield" campaign, most of them based in the area with international and local NGOs. Israeli defence ministry spokesman Shlomo Dror called the group's deployment in Beit Jala a provocation and expressed his opinion that participants are anti-Israeli. While middle-aged US citizens put their lives on the line in Beit Jala, on the roads and in the fields of the occupied West Bank, Washington continues to dither over the sending of "observers" to monitor flash points in the escalating Israeli war of attrition. According to a report published in The Guardian last Friday, the Bush administration "is secretly drawing up detailed plans.. resurrecting an idea that seems to have been killed off by Israeli objections two weeks ago." It would appear, however, that the administration has been put off, once again, by the flat rejection of monitors by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The administration's resolve has also been weakened by divisions within its own ranks. This was exposed by last week's statement by Vice President Dick Cheney justifying Israel's policy of assassinating alleged Palestinian activists. It is clear that Cheney disagrees with Secretary of State Colin Powell who opposes Israel's liquidation policy. A statement by the White House issued on August 3rd said that the US remained opposed to Israel's targeted assassinations of suspected Palestinian militants. But the administration has done nothing to force Israel to desist from its murderous tactics. Instead, this week the Israeli army loosened its rules of engagement, giving Israeli soldiers and hit squads a freer hand in dealing with Palestinians resisting the occupation. "Bring on the "human shields." _____ George N. Rishmawi Projects' Coordinator The Palestinian Centre for Rapprochement Between People Star Street No. 64 P.O.Box 24 Beit Sahour - Palestine www.rapprochement.org Telefax: +972-2-2772018 ===== UPDATE: >From Damascus comes a report that more than 500,000 Syrians demonstrated in support of the Palestinians. Syrian's vice president, Mohammed Zuhair Masharqah, is quoted as saying: "Israel can increase tension, but it cannot stop it. Syria will not stand idle. Israel does not want peace." ===== From irimland@zundelsite.org Tue, 21 Aug 2001 19:20:23 -0700 Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2001 19:20:23 -0700 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/21/2001 - "Orient House" - Part VIII Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 21, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: My apologies! I got into the desk top folder yesterday and made a mistake in the number of my "Orient House" ZGrams. Yesterday's was # 7. Here comes # 8. Two more still to go before I return to more narrowly defined Revisionist topics. The essay below offers one of the most remarkable insights into what is really going on in Israel that any of us have likely ever read. In fact, it is quite inadequate to call it an "insight" - it takes us into a different dimension. Please read it slowly and think about what it might mean. One doesn't have to be religious to feel a shiver. And please remember that this analysis was not written by some religious kook who has gone off the deep end - this is the razorsharp analysis of one of the most penetrating Jewish minds writing from inside Israel. [START] Cornerstone of Violence By Israel Shamir As F-16's again bomb cities of Palestine, and young men again sacrifice their lives and the lives of others, Martin Indyk, writing in the New York Times, proclaims that the "Violence is worsening". The BBC and CNN reports, like a Greek chorus, echo Indyk with their reports of "Violence in Palestine". The White House issues another plea to "break the cycle of Violence". This faceless and causeless "Violence" should probably be capitalized, as the "Wrath" in the first line of Iliad. This eternal poem begins with a call to "sing the Wrath of Achilles". In Homer's world the Wrath (or Fury, War, Love, Hope) was a condition personified. Nowadays, we tend to see an angry Achilles or a violent husband, rather than Wrath or Violence per se. Unless, the abuser is the Jewish state. In which case, we revert to the Homeric concept of Violence as an independent being, rather then a man-made action. People seriously discuss, how to "deal with" Violence in order to bring Peace. In the real world, Violence is not like the weather. Somebody does it, and we can usually identify the patch of clouds responsible for the rain. So it was, that when the "Mitchell" process was invoked and the daily quota of killed slowly crawled down, the Jewish supremacists replayed the provocative visit of Sharon to the Haram a-Sharif by laying the cornerstone of the Third Temple. Immediately after the cornerstone provocation, Israel followed up with a wave of assassinations in Nablus, Ramallah and elsewhere, trying to get Palestinians to respond in kind. It seems to be a pattern. Last September, after Sharon's visit to Haram a-Sharif, Israeli Border Police murdered seven worshippers in the Jerusalem mosque and ushered in the second Intifada. Sharon's assassins did not stop murders until a suicide bomber obliged by responding. It is no coincidence. Israel wants the Palestinian uprising to go on. Israel wants not peace, but low intensity conflict. A war with Palestinians allows the Israeli leaders to keep their heterogeneous communities together, away from each other's throat. What is more important, the war allows the Jewish leaders over the world to continue their arduous task of reviving World Jewry, a medieval run-down construct. That is why it makes no sense to speak against "Violence" and for "Peace". As long as the supremacist Jewish state exists, it will ensure violence and avoid peace. The recent assassinations also had the intent of covering up the cornerstone provocation under a heap of corpses. The meaning of this obscure ceremony was further obscured by the mainstream media, and all references to it mysteriously vaporised. For instance, Reuters reported on August 3, 2001: "Israeli police stormed the Temple Mount, revered by Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif, after Palestinians threw stones at Jews worshipping at the Western Wall below". Why, all of a sudden, did Palestinians begin to stone Jews? The cornerstone story was omitted, and the average American or European was left with the impression that the "wild" Muslims attacked peaceful worshipping Jews just out of spite. On this count, the unanimity of the English-language media was horrifying. The BBC, once more objective than American networks, closed the gap. They also reported of "Israeli soldiers who entered the mosques responding to the Muslim stone throwers", moving a reference to the cornerstone to the end of the item. It now appears that the airing of the BBC documentary on Sharon was a singular act of courage that will not soon be repeated. As for the American networks, their coverage continues to be consistent. They market the Israeli line without hesitation. That is why we shall revisit the details of the strange, already forgotten story of the cornerstone. This was not your average Israeli provocation. It brought to mind the black magic incantations of Pulsa diNura, the cabbalistic formula used on the Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin. In 1995, the Israeli media covered a gathering of the important Cabbalists who invoked evil spirits and beseeched them to extinguish the Prime Minister's life. Soon afterwards, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish religious fanatic. An organizer of the Pulsa diNura ceremony was tried by Israeli court of law and sent to jail, for incitement to murder. You do not have to believe in black magic in order to understand the logic of the judge. In order to comprehend the idea of the cornerstone laying, imagine: you wake up one beautiful Sunday morning in your suburban home, have your coffee and proceed to your church. There you encounter a commotion. In front of the church, a band of men, well protected by armed soldiers and police, are busy installing a huge billboard saying "On this place, a synagogue will be erected in 2001". On the background, there is the roar of bulldozer engines and the amplified voice of a Rabbi blessing the new synagogue. You would probably feel as hysterical as the hero of the Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy. Supplant your parish church by St Peter or the Holy Sepulchre, and you will understand the feelings of Jerusalemites. Though the Temple Mount Loyalists, the group that performed this magic ceremony, is tiny and hardly mainstream, one can't say that about the body that gave them the green light. Overruling the police' objection, the Supreme Court, the highest Jewish legal authority, permitted them to do their act on an auspicious date, the 9th day of the Moon month of Ab, with all its mystic meaning. All the might of the Jewish state, including thousands of policemen and army, was mobilized to allow the ceremony to take place. That is why one can compare the pithy Loyalist band with the sharp thin end of the dental pick in the hands of a dentist, pushing it far inside the tooth, in order to check whether the nerve is dead. The results of this painful examination were unambiguous. The nerve was apparently alive, and the quick mobilization of the Palestinians forced the Jews to re-route the Loyalists' procession. The ceremony took place outside the Old City, a little earlier than planned. It lasted for a few minutes, and the stone was returned to its usual place, in the deep protective shadow of the US Consulate. This push of the pick caused sharp pain and the predictable response of the Jerusalemites, and afterwards, the vicious attack of the police on the believers in the mosque. What was the reason of all the trouble? Why did the Palestinian kids dare to confront the Border Police, famous for their brutality? Why was the cornerstone so important? Many Jews and their Christian-Zionist allies believe the precious beauty of Haram a-Sharif, the 7th century mosques of Jerusalem should be destroyed and on their ruins, a Jewish temple should be erected. Why should this be done? People provide different explanations, historical and eschatological. It is not for some historical justice, or for the purpose of prayer, as traditional Judaism forbade all interaction with the Mountain of the Lord. Some mystically inclined Jews believe this act will make Jewish domination of the world total and irreversible. This belief is not an exclusive domain of kooks and freaks, nor even of Zionists only, but rather a widespread conviction. The mainstream media of the West usually presents the conflict in terms of Muslims vs. Jews. But the conflict as seen by these Jews, is Jews vs. Gentiles. In their minds, the Temple Mount is a magic Ring of Power, one they should assume when the time is right. As the Ring in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (the British professor was a very learned man), it should bring forth the Messiah. For the Jewish mystics, this Messiah is not the Christian Messiah. In their book, the Messiah is not a gentle Jesus with a message for all mankind. Their Messiah would forever enslave the nations of the earth and make the Chosen people the masters of the universe. Their Messiah, Lord Enslaver of the Peoples of Earth, is the Antichrist of prophecies. As the digits of millennia jump from 1 to 2 on the meter of our Cosmic Cabby, apocalyptic thoughts come into otherwise sane heads. This is not the first time some Jews dream of world domination and of the eternal kingdom of Antichrist. Only now, they have in their possession nuclear weapons, the latest jets and battleships, huge wealth, the blind support of the US, tens of millions of willing "Christian Zionist" slaves, and a broad web of tame and docile international media. It is not mystics only. Ten years ago, a leading Israeli journalist, Nahum Barnea, wrote in Yediot Aharonot: "For decades the Jews tried hard to refute the myth (of Jewish domination of the world and of enslavement of Gentiles) treating it as a morbid manifestation of anti-Semitism. Now some Jews even believe it". The late Jewish thinker, Israel Shahak commented: "The ruling Likud party (let alone the extreme right-wing) genuinely believes in the myth". The leading Israeli daily, Haaretz, reported that Sharon, like Barak before him, sneaks out to visit the wizards of Cabbala for advice. It is all quite fashionable; Cabbala schools, courses and shops drew their net over the Jewish state. The Holy Land turns into a Waste Land according to their guidelines. This is not a matter of chance. Cabbala is ascribed to the first century mystic Simeon b. Yohai, whose best known maxim reads, "Smash the head of the best of snakes, kill the best of Gentiles". This archaic model of domination, genocide and enslavement calls for archaic religious content. Many Israelis sense the re-emergence of the ancient spirit of hate and dominance. The weekend supplement of Haaretz published a short story of an American president who tried to disobey the orders of the Cabbalists and was removed by his subordinates. The Jews are destined to rule the world, preached Rabbi Leichtman, a leading Cabbalist, in a long article printed in Vesti, a Russian-Israeli paper. In the chat rooms of the Israeli Internet, one can find more heady stuff. They quote an old poem by Uri Zvi Greenberg, a late Hebrew poet, who called for extermination of the Gentiles. Greenberg did not limit himself to Palestinians, like the late Menachem Begin, nor only to Arabs, like the highest spiritual authority in Israel, Rabbi Obadiah Joseph. The extermination of Edom, a traditional code word for European and American Gentiles, appears as a plausible option in the feverish minds of Cabbala followers. This feeling spills into the Jewish diaspora. In the heart of the US, in Atlanta, there was a recent debate in the Jewish Community Centre in presence of the Israeli Consul, a Jewish businessman, a prominent Atlanta rabbi and a NY Times reporter. An observer wrote to me, "I was struck mostly by the comments of the rabbi. While claiming to be a non-Zionist, he declared (we have him on tape) that the ultimate reason for creating Israel, as he interprets it, is to become the world's controller of power and wealth. Jews will eventually overthrow world governments and be assigned positions to lead the world. This, he felt, will occur in a short number of years". At the other end of the world, in Russia, a Jewish follower of Sharon's own ultra-Nationalist Jabotinsky movement, "Eliezer Dacevich-Voronel", who described himself as a Jewish University Professor, composed a poem: "We, the Chosen Ones, are united by hatred to the slave tribes that rose, dethroned our ancestors and rejected our God. Once you knew of your place in the world, a swine must stay in its sty. You revolted, and forced us to serve you, but now your end is nigh. We are your masters. You are our slaves. This is God's design. Soon our sun will rise again, and the slaves would not dare to look at it. And then, the Lord of My People will appear in Heaven, while we, the dozen of dozen thousands (i.e. 144,000) of Chosen Ones will sit it the great amphitheatre and watch the miserable columns of souls crawling into their paradise. By God's will, we shall name it Auschwitz". They even speak of genetically re-constructing the King of the Antichrist. The brilliant maverick, Dr Avi Ben Abraham, seems to be the man behind the project. This unusual man recently returned to Israel after some years in California, where he worked on a Star Trek-like Deep Freeze project for very wealthy Jews. Loaded with money, Ben Abraham built a palace in Caesarea on the seashore of Mediterranean, some 50 km north of Tel Aviv, and contacted the Italian genetic expert, Dr Severino Antinori. Ben Abraham, who received his doctor of medicine degree at the unheard of age of 18, hinted at his plans in an interview with Haaretz. A few days ago, his project received some benign attention from The New York Daily News, the newspaper of Mortimer Zuckerman, a Jewish supremacist billionaire and the head of Conference of Jewish American Organisations. The men of hate and vengeance are ready to seize the magic ring of power, the Temple Mount, to enforce and perpetuate the rule of the Antichrist. But it can not be done by brute force, due to a medieval prohibition, Issur Homah. A premature action could backfire. A Jewish religious leader from Brooklyn, Lubavitcher Rebbe, was considered by his disciples a potential Messiah, and that is why he never ever came to the Holy Land. He did not feel himself ready for the trial of forces. Meanwhile, the children of Palestine, brothers of Faris Ode, nephews of Christ keep these religious fanatics at bay. Now, Sharon and his band of mad believers try their hand by snatching the Orient House, a Husseini mansion in Jerusalem. If this is allowed to quietly pass, it will make for one more step to the Ring of Power. The soul-searching Russian writer, Eugene Zamyatin, composed a short fable of Gospel quality. It is a story of a man who decided to build a temple, but had no money. He waylaid a merchant on the highway, tortured him to death, extracted a lot of cash and built the temple. He invited a Bishop and many priests and ordinary folks, but in a short time they left the church: the place stank of murder. One can not build the temple on the blood of innocents. An elder contemporary of Zamyatin, a Jewish thinker from Odessa, the "spiritual Zionist" Ahad HaAm, put it in simple and beautiful words: - If this be the Messiah, I do not wish to see his coming. [END] This article, as all writings of Israel Shamir, may be freely distributed in the Internet, but hard copy publications must ask permission. Responses and requests: shamiri_@netvision.net.il From irimland@zundelsite.org Wed, 22 Aug 2001 13:33:53 -0700 Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2001 13:33:53 -0700 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/22/2001 - "Orient House" - VIII Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 22, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: A Zgram reader wrote, expressing the sentiments of many in countries near and far: "I wouldn't want 500 million Muslims hating my guts who believe in Paradise after self-life sacrifice." With that as a preface, I bring you now "Orient House" VIII. This Robert =46isk report was written about a week ago and describes an incident one would not think can happen in a civilized country inhabited by people we support with our tax money - people, if you can call them that, who drip "human rights" out of both sides of their mouths and hush us morning, noon and night about their "Holocaust" so we don't bruise their tender feelings. [START] Israeli police 'carry out routine, organized cruelty' By Robert Fisk in Jerusalem 14 August 2001 The Arabs called it a "day of rage" but the Israelis were the ones demonstrating their rage outside Orient House yesterday. The Palestinian youth who dared to hold up a Palestinian flag made of paper was seized by six border guards and plain-clothes police, kicked, beaten, punched in the face and back and then kneed in the groin in front of us all. Many of the police had been brought down from Haifa, where a Palestinian suicide bomber had blown himself up a few hours earlier in a vain effort to murder Israelis in a caf=E9, and there was a tangible desire to inflict pain on some of the crowd. A tall, thin young man with shaggy brown hair who tried to escape a policeman's grasp at the iron security barriers was dragged back into the police lines and set on by eight men. There must have been 20 television cameras and a score of photographers running level with the Shin Bet intelligence boys as they dragged the man screaming up the road towards Orient House, kicking him in the chest and forcing back his head until he choked. The moment he was in the back seat of a white police van, an Israeli plain-clothes man in a red shirt set upon him. As he was held down from the other side of the vehicle, the Israeli kicked him again and again between the legs until the young man was crying in a high, animal voice. It was, as one of the foreign protesters muttered, enough to turn a Palestinian into a suicide-bomber. It was also very, very weird. Here we were, perhaps a hundred journalists watching a hundred "peace" demonstrators, European, American, Christian and Jew, and Palestinian, and every few minutes, on a signal from a fat policeman in a blue shirt, his colleagues would run amok. After all the talk of Israel being a peace-loving state among the nations, founded upon the rule of law, the police would suddenly prove that those constant Palestinian complaints of beatings and brutality were true, right in front of us. A border guard became so fascinated by the beating of one man - he could not take his eyes off the fists that were hammering into the man's stomach and ribs - that he forgot to keep the press at bay and allowed me to walk up to the van as one of his colleagues viciously assaulted another man. Every police force can lose its cool - we have our bad eggs in Britain - but this was calculated, routine, organized cruelty. A lot of the border guards were grinning when the Palestinians screamed. After a while it was obscene to watch. I walked over to the Israeli mounted police. One of the officers was sitting in the saddle, smoking a cigarette and laughing as he talked on a mobile phone. A Shin Bet man patted the lead horse. "Most of these are Hannovers," he said of the breed. "We've got Hannovers and quarters. They take really good care of them." Up the street, closer to Orient House, his colleagues were taking good care of their prisoners. In front of the horrified eyes of a group of humanitarian workers, one of them American, they beat the captured Palestinians all over again. The crowd had no chance of seizing back Orient House, occupied by Israeli troops and police after Thursday's Jerusalem suicide bombing that massacred 15 Israelis. They were kept all of a quarter of a mile from the building. But the horses were ridden into the crowd; a couple of stun grenades were fired into it. Just one officer realized, after more than an hour, that this piece of state bullying was a public relations disaster. "Stop carrying them," he shouted as two Palestinians were dragged past the cameras under a rain of blows. "Let them walk." But they could no longer stand upright. One of them had his shirt dragged over his head to reveal a back covered in red welts. A thought kept recurring in our minds: if this is what the Israeli police do to Palestinians in front of us, what do they do to them behind our backs? Nor was it difficult to guess what these young men were thinking. Just a few hours before, they had heard that a 10-year-old Palestinian girl had been shot dead by Israeli troops in Hebron, in another of those notorious "clashes", as the press likes to call them, and that, after a night of grieving, her 60-year-old grandmother had died of a heart attack. A little after midday yesterday, the little girl and her grandmother were buried together in the same grave. =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D From irimland@zundelsite.org Thu, 23 Aug 2001 19:30:46 -0700 Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2001 19:30:46 -0700 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/22/2001 - "Orient House" - IX Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 23, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: An ardent ZGram reader and surfer of the Internet prefaced today's ZGram provocatively. He wrote: "Can nihilist hedonism, however well-armed, ever be a match for the ready to sacrifice my all ethos of the suicide-bombers, questing after the martyrdom which brings eternal salvation? "The Jews have locked horns with a foe who is their exact opposite: One who is ready to die - and one whose wrath they raised to an unquenchable fever pitch. "The kamikaze cultus appears to be gaining ground in the Occupied Territories. Soon, a new generation of suicide bombers will arise armed with canisters of ricin nerve gas and vials of anthrax. "Even as the decadence of the Holocaust Lobby falls far beyond all bounds of normal decency. (Note the rats now publicly deserting the ADL ship.)" =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D Dr. Azzam Tamimi, Director of the London-based Institute of the Islamic Political Thought, gives us additional insights into the voices articulating what is going on in the beleaguered Middle East: [START] =20 www.ptimes.com =20 Vulnerable, exposed and disempowered, the Palestinians under Israeli occupation pray that the Arabs, the Muslims and the rest of the world will come to their aid, having recognized the seriousness of the situation in Palestine. With superior military power and thorough intelligence infiltration into Palestinian ranks, the Israelis have been liquidating what they claim to be potential "perpetrators of terror", =1D bulldozing houses, turning Palestinian olive groves into restricted military zones and letting loose herds of settlers who insist on proving to the world that they have very little in common with humanity. =20 Perhaps the most distressing thing for the Palestinians amid all the pain and suffering is the Arab inaction and even lack of interest in what is happening to their brethren in occupied Palestine, the bleeding heart of the Arab homeland. Previously, Palestine was the Arab cause and prior to that it was the Islamic cause. Now, the Palestinians feel abandoned, though their predicament is not exclusively of their own making. While Israel escalates both its language and action, the Arabs around Palestine continue to hide their heads in the sand, and there is no shortage of sand in the Arab land. In spite of undeniable support and sympathy for Palestine and the Palestinians on the part of the Arab masses, they are well short of being able to persuade their governments to shift from inaction to action. It is no secret that many of these governments are more interested in negative action, one involving suppressing their public and combating any effort aimed at helping the Palestinians. What should the Palestinians do in such circumstances? Materially speaking, they are no match against the Israeli war machinery. While suffering suffocating measures by Israeli occupation authorities, stringent controls are imposed on their movement, trade and communication by their Arab brothers across the borders. Worst of all has been the role played by collaborating individuals and agencies from amongst the Palestinians themselves with their oppressors, the Israelis. Many of the assassinations carried out by Israeli secret agents, the so-called Arabist units, might not have succeeded without the collaboration of Palestinian traitors, not infrequently acting in their capacity as PA officials or members of joint security teams. It is becoming increasingly evident that the days to come are likely to bear more pain and more suffering for the Palestinians than all the days that have passed since their predicament ensued with the creation of Israel more than 50 years ago. =20 Notwithstanding, the Palestinians who live under occupation in Gaza and the West Bank have no option but to remain steadfast in their land and to resist the persistent Israeli attempts to drive them away. Such resistance will not be pain-free. More than ever before the Israeli public is shifting in the direction of uprooting the Palestinians from their homeland. Hence the election of Sharon as Prime Minister of Israel, in spite of his war crimes records and overt anti-Arab and anti-Muslim views. =20 In response to my July article on Palestine, I received two messages from Israelis who read my article with seeming disgust. What both respondents agree on, and seem to have copied each other in expressing their opinions, is denying the Palestinians the right to exist and despising Islam and the Muslims. =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D One of them wrote: =20 * You fail to mention [that] Palestinians tell these suicide bombers that when they kill Jews, they will go to heaven and be with 72 virgins. Can you tell me [of] another religion so savage and evil? Then you say how Israel robbed the Palestinians of [their] homeland. What homeland? There was never in history any State called Palestine. The Palestinians never controlled or governed any land before 1993. The Palestinians are really unwanted Arabs from Egypt and Syria, who immigrated to the land from 1831 to 1947. Palestine is a fake, invented Roman name, which the Romans named after the Greek Philistines. The Palestinians are totally unrelated to the Philistines. [The second letter] =1D * Judea and Samaria and all of Jerusalem are liberated Israeli land. Tell us when did it ever belong to Palestinians? Answer: never. It was never Palestinian land to begin with, so your question is invalid. The Palestinians never governed or controlled any land before 1993. To make it simple, please tell me one Palestinian President before 1993. Keep thinking. The Palestinians want a capital that they never had in a country that never existed. The Palestinians are really unwanted Arabs from Egypt and Syria, who immigrated to the land from 1831 to 1947. Palestine is a fake, invented Roman name, which the Romans named after the Greek Philistines. The Philistines are totally unrelated to the current-day Palestinians. Israel existed 1,500 years before Muhammad was born. Besides Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the entire Middle East and North Africa was stolen from the native peoples by Muhammad in the 7th century. Anyone that resisted Muhammad had their heads cut off. Look at Islamic countries and look at shariah laws. It's a brutal, violent and intolerant religion. There is a primary historical fact that must be established now. There has never been, I repeat NEVER been, a civilization, entity or a nation referred to as Palestine. There was never a Palestinian tribe, and there was never a Palestinian country in the land of Israel to begin with! =1D =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D I do not subscribe to the opinion that all Jews think in the way those two do. But I have no doubt in my mind that what is expressed in the messages of these two readers is a reflection of the racist and fascist Zionist ideology. Zionism was founded on myths created by greedy and desperate individuals. Today, it is defended and supported by a majority of Jews and a minority of Christians who accept these myths as facts. Zionists cherish the idea, which no respectable historian would entertain, that since the destruction of the Second Temple at around 70 AD, Palestine remained mysteriously unpopulated waiting for them to come back and claim it as a divine right for being God's chosen people. It is an idea that cannot be debated around a respectable discussion table. You simply cannot reach a middle ground on an idea, a lie, that is illogical, unfair and merely aimed at justifying the unjustifiable and legitimizing the illegitimate. By virtue of the exposure of Zionist beliefs, especially since Sharon took over, it is only now that some of those who once thought they could talk sense into the minds of Zionists in the hope of reaching some middle ground with them have begun to realize the gravity of their ill-judgment. =20 The Palestinians need to brace themselves for the worst, which is yet to come. For Israel is no ordinary occupying power and its colonialism of Palestine is no conventional imperialist project, though it shares many of the features of European colonial enterprises. Past colonial projects ended with the occupiers withdrawing to their motherlands, be it Britain, France, Italy, Holland, Portugal or Spain. In the case of Palestine, Israelis are not comfortable withdrawing - not even from an inch of the land they occupy. For in spite of Arab weakness, the Israelis can never feel secure if limited to a strip of land along the Mediterranean coast. They are haunted by the prospect of being flushed out completely. Where would they withdraw? Some of them may know by now that they have no future except as a Jewish community living in the region as some Jewish communities lived there before for more than 13 centuries. But this clearly means an end to Zionism and an end to Israel. As the Israelis feel more threatened and vulnerable, they act less orderly, less predictably and much more desperately. But why should the Israelis be made more vulnerable if this is likely to backfire on the Palestinians? This is the enigma of the vicious cycle initiated by the Israelis. Their policies, their ambitions and their lack of confidence, which is most probably the outcome of a mixture of inherent guilt and insecurity, are expressed eventually in one way: oppressive action against the Palestinians, the victims of their occupation. This is the nature of tyranny. =20 Politicians in the Arab region, in Europe and in the United States have constantly warned against the danger of war engulfing the region as a result of the inability on the part of both Palestinians and Israelis to resolve their dispute. But war has actually started. What else may one describe what the Israelis are doing? It is a war, but one that is between a military superpower and a beleaguered civilian population. The Palestinians have no option but to take on the Israelis and meet their challenge. It is true they have every right to be dismayed by Arab and Muslim lack of response to Israel's atrocities. However, no one will ever rise to help them, and coming generations will not forgive them, if they do not prove to be willing to make the utmost of sacrifice for a cause that, in spite of a shortage of support today, is a sublime and most honourable one. Nothing justifies giving up the struggle in anticipation of an Arab or Muslim renaissance of some sort. The Palestinians are not short of means and methods that will deter the Israelis and awaken them from their intoxication. If the message Israelis send to Palestinian young men is that they are destined to lose their youth and have their lives taken away from them by Israeli snipers or Israeli Arabist units or Israeli apache helicopters, the response will be one of defiance rather than capitulation. Israeli politicians and strategists are clearly mistaken if they think that the Palestinians are afraid of war or that they would prefer a humiliating life to an honourable death. =20 [END] =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D Thought for the Day: "Let that be a reality check for the Israelis." (Ernst Z=FCndel) From irimland@zundelsite.org Fri, 24 Aug 2001 17:35:28 -0700 Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2001 17:35:28 -0700 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: 8Zgram - 8/24/2001 - "Orient House" - Conclusion Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 24, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: I thought it would be appropriate to end my "Orient House" ZGrams by giving Thumbs up to one courageous American mainstream paper that did not censor the article below. We still have a free press here - and as long as the Zionist Lobby cannot prevent writers and articles like this one from being published, there is still a chance for the poor Palestinians. This one appeared in the Philadelphia Enquirer on August 16, 2001. [START] In the debate on Middle East, both sides worthy of criticism By Jerry Long When debating what level of support the United States should give to the state of Israel, the "self-hating Jew" may have a range of options. The self-thinking Gentile, unfortunately, is allowed only two: Love it or fund it. We must accept the arrogant defiance of the Israeli statesman bluntly telling us to stay out of his country's internal affairs as he strolls up to Capitol Hill to pocket billions of our tax dollars. Above all, we must never suggest that Palestinians have as much right to their own independent state as the Israelis do, lest we be portrayed as modern-day Kristallnacht enablers. Personally, I have never considered the phrase God gave this to us an acceptable policy position. As though some Ancient Omnipotent Landlord mistakenly drew up a lease agreement with a 3,000-year sublet option. Yes, the Palestinians refused to compromise in 1947, but if the Lenape showed up today with a 300-year-old claim to the Delaware Valley, I doubt we'd be packing up and partitioning. Yes, there have been Jews on the land for millennia, but there have also been Palestinians. And before either, there were Canaanites and Philistines amid the milk and honey. The Jews dealt with these peoples the old-fashioned way: They smote some, co-opted others, and constantly made bloody war among themselves. In fact (on the off-chance that facts matter to the discussion), the entire period of a "Greater Israel," the basis for the current settlement controversy, lasted no more than 80 years and ended around 920 B.C. Some Jewish groups are properly unceasing in their efforts to teach the world the lessons of the Holocaust. But when a country institutes a policy of preemptive assassination, it may be about time to ask what lessons Israel has learned, and from which side it learned them. While Israeli government rationales have never been strangers to hypocrisy, shouldn't someone at least mention that if the British had pursued a strategy of assassinating militants deemed to be threats to security, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir would have been killed in the 1940s and Count Folke Bernadotte, the man appointed U.N. mediator in Palestine in 1948 (and promptly assassinated), would have spent the 1950s in a suite at the King David Hotel? So Yasir Arafat is a terrorist - but should Israelis then feel superior because their current prime minister is merely a war criminal? Granted, Arafat must exert greater control over his murderers - but couldn't Sharon have trundled down from his perch above Sabra and Shatilla to stop Christian Phalangists >from bashing the heads of Palestinian children against stone walls? OK, Yasir Arafat is a corrupt fraud - but should the United States really be in the business of denying a people their rights based on the inadequacies of their leader? Please spare me the hackneyed analogies about how Americans would feel if subjected to terrorist bombings from Canada. Last time I checked, we weren't surrounding Montreal with troops. We weren't diverting the water supply of Edmonton, bulldozing homes on the outskirts of Toronto, or erecting roadblocks and checkpoints throughout Quebec. Perhaps there can never be peace in the Middle East as long as Arafat is alive. But there will also never be peace until the Holocaust is seen for what it was: a rancid and unspeakably obscene chapter in a 20th-century book of depravity that includes Armenians, Cambodians, Rwandans and Kulaks - and not an Accountability E-ZPass for a government to view its policies as somehow beyond criticism. Meanwhile, the United States continues to deplore all violence while pursuing policies that indulge the lunacy of the settlers and fuel the lunacy of Hamas. Our government can never be an honest broker of Arab hopes until it finds the political courage to cease being a willing executor of Israeli demands. These are the only absolute truths about the Middle East: Barbarity and goodness exist on both sides while innocent children are dying. Jerry Long (JerryBeggar@aol.com) and his brother Joe are known as the satirists - the Sturdy Beggars. [END] ===== Thought for the Day: "Remember that Rabbi Cooper and Rabbi Hier and others of their ilk are *de*facto* publicists for Revisionism." (Letters to the Zundelsite) From irimland@zundelsite.org Sat, 25 Aug 2001 09:35:05 -0700 Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2001 09:35:05 -0700 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/25/2001 - "Abe Foxman gets it on the snout!" Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 25, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: No introductory words are necessary for this one! [START] Abe Foxman: Disgrace to my Religion By Monty Warner FrontPageMagazine.com | August 21, 2001 AS AN EARLY TEEN, I was playing in a YMCA basketball league in Sumter, South Carolina, a leafy, sleepy southern town of about 35,000 where I was born and raised. Being of Jewish descent, I had to play for a Methodist team because the Jewish population in the county - indeed, in the state, at that time - was limited enough to preclude its own league. The YMCA was agreeable to this, and a few other Jewish kids from surrounding areas played as well. After one of the games, I remember standing by the scoreboard. Ahead of me was one of the Jewish parents, shouting at one of the coaches. The woman wasn't demanding more playing time for her son, nor was she a diehard seeking an explanation for why we were so bad that year. The woman, in full view of and to the distraction and discomfort of many, was demanding an apology from the coach for hurting her son's feelings. The coach's sin? Taking her boy out of the game for poor play and making him cry. I thought the whole episode somewhat amusing until two well-respected men in the community passed by, and I overheard one of them say to the other: "That is exactly why our kind has trouble with their kind." Upon hearing this, I didn't find myself offended; at thirteen years old, I found myself agreeing with them. Today we have our very own national Jewish basketball mom. Just as shrill, just as petulant, just as obnoxious, and useless to boot. Our advocate, armed with a $50 million annual budget to ensure the meanies never get us, is Abraham Foxman. Foxman heads the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a once proud, worthy and worthwhile protector of Jews and their faith. Under Foxman's brand of leadership, the ADL has devolved into an opportunistic, intolerant, grief-grubbing stench - a "rights" group for any and all who wish to feel offended - one which, in bottomless efforts to remain PC-safe, unconditionally aligns itself with groups like the Black Caucus and NAACP, both of which strongly support the pending anti-Semitic U.N. Conference on Racism. Think about that. You hate me, so by all means I support you. Why? Because I'm pathetic. This past June, Carl Pearlston, a Board Member of the ADL and longtime loyalist to its early causes, resigned from the organization after 25 years of service. Pearlston began to receive increasingly hostile responses from other Board Members for his more conservative views, and was informed by Foxman that "he would have to realize that over 95% of those involved in the ADL were liberal and would be unsympathetic to his views." Notwithstanding the adage that for every five Jews in the room there are 10 opinions on everything, the notion that 95 percent (or even 55 percent) of all Jews support bilingual education, gun control, feminism, affirmative action, abortion and the homosexual agenda across the board is not only unfathomable, but further evidence that Foxman has absolutely no legitimate claim to representing the interests of the Jewish masses. For years now, despite numerous unflattering (and under-the-radar) news stories about his complicity in various scandals too numerous and squalid to confine to this space, Abraham Foxman has held himself and been held forth by others as one of the chief national political voices of Jewish people. His misuse of and/or recklessness with ADL funds (see Henry Lyons), his whorish behavior in the Marc Rich pardon, and his general odor in defending such cosmopolitan thuggery; to say nothing of self-righteous condemnations of what he arbitrarily decides to be someone else's "intolerance," is brought to the public's attention almost weekly. Last year, during the presidential election, Foxman, using extreme examples, pulled incendiary comments off the Web to imply that anyone that didn't want Joe Lieberman on the national ticket was probably anti-Semitic. Well, in some cases that's entirely possible. It's also possible that they simply thought Joe Lieberman was a putz. Or more significantly, they just might not have agreed with him on the issues. But the substance of disagreement is not important to Mr. Foxman. Regrettably, whatever legitimacy may have accompanied such charges has been diluted by the frequency with which Foxman lodges them, largely in an effort to secure more media attention to raise more money to continue the never-ending battle to tell everyone else how not to offend Abraham Foxman. To his credit, it's a pretty good gig. In April, Foxman was quoted in the New York Times assaulting David Horowitz's campus ad campaign as "just another means of fomenting racism and hate." The quip was so lacking in resonance it was almost as if he was walking out to lunch and asked what to do about the Horowitz situation, and in reply he said "put something together, use some of the old text, and throw in uh....racism and hate." Instead of joining Horowitz in showing the guts to condemn the racist, anti-American black Left, Foxman threw his own to the wolves for a short-term political pop. Foxman: the man, the myth - the self-loathing maggot. And so it is that, as an observer of all these "anti-hate, don't hurt my feelings" campaigns, a logical, rational Jew can't help but logically ask himself: "Exactly what is it that this man has ever actually accomplished?" Surely he can take credit for the fact that there might be one less KKK group in the world (which would bring the grand total to four), or the fact that more Jews are now allowed in certain country clubs (lawsuits have a way of greasing such processes)... but concretely, what is it that Abraham Foxman has done besides bend the ADL over for the Leftist agenda of the Democratic Party, and give much of America an image of most Jews as whiny, petulant, hate-thought shylocks? Sure, he sticks his nose in just about everything that gets him headlines (i.e. the future and futile U.N. Conference on Racism), but the real answer is pretty simple: not much. To be sure, I am very proud of my heritage. I believe Jewish people are some of the most brilliant and determined people on the planet. From Walter Annenberg to Max Fisher to much of the work of Steven Spielberg, Jews have consistently risen from humble, even punishing beginnings to not only enjoy great power and success, but pave the way for others of all stripes to enjoy the same. And yet somewhere along the way - in oft-embarrassing displays of uninformed hyperemotion a la Foxman - many children and grandchildren of those who suffered so horribly in the Holocaust have awarded themselves the right to gripe about this country as if it were not the one that gave their ancestors their liberty. As if they themselves were in the Holocaust. As if we are all just one conservative Attorney General or High Court appointment away from being stripped of our "rights," which have basically expanded to include what any sniveling Manhattan/LA liberal feels like doing at any given moment. The ignorance of how embarrassing, foolish and distasteful this is to the rest of the country is glaringly front and center, and a textbook example of how some Jews contribute heartily to their own alienation. This in turn allows hucksters such as Abraham Foxman to emerge - the kid nobody liked but who is determined to make others like you - and raise millions to salve the wounds of the very people he helps afflict with a crippling sense of victimhood. Self-aggrandizing hustles such as this have in recent years become an indisputable national pastime. Angst-ridden souls with massive inferiority complexes now frequently cloak themselves in the mantras of groups such as "The National Organization for Women," and then use the broad title to imply that they in fact represent everyone who might fall into such categories. This is a cynical, manipulative, outright lie, and in this regard there are few bigger demagogues than Abraham Foxman. Under his leadership, the mission statement of the ADL, the organization created solely to safeguard Jewish interests, now reads: "dedicated to translating democratic ideals into a way of life for all Americans in our time." One translation would be aligning itself with Americans like the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, which in its school workshops has taken the liberty of edifying our teens on the finer points of "fisting." Another translation is more simple: Whatever raises us money to continue projecting our misery onto you. It is an old axiom in politics that the longer an assertion goes unchallenged, the quicker it becomes an article of faith. This axiom has lent significant legitimacy to people like Jesse Jackson and Abraham Foxman. No one questions them. No one looks at the sinister, highly unproductive leadership they have attempted to peddle to millions and stops for a moment to say: "Who anointed this person? What makes Abraham Foxman the ultimate arbiter of who is anti-Semitic and who isn't? Is there a school for this? Why do I have to listen to him or Jesse Jackson as an authority on anything?" Of course, anyone who tenders such a challenge would immediately be branded a racist (or, in my case, a self-hating Jew) for not lining up to pull the collective pimp wagon, but at this point even that seems worthwhile. It is worthwhile because these men are not leaders. These men are liars - the corrupt, failed and demagogic sort - who have proven repeatedly that they will, to the clear detriment of their own people, pursue or create any cause that generates them media or money. To wit, one of Abe Foxman's recent public forays on behalf of Jews was to loudly condemn the naming of the Hurricane Israel as discriminatory against Jews. If this is what has the Jewish community atwitter, then surely a lot of people have missed something. Moreover, that Mr. Foxman could even consider this to be a matter worth ten seconds of his life indicates that perhaps it's time for him to begin to come to terms with the fact that he hasn't accomplished much in it. In a Washington Post op-ed recently, Mr. Foxman almost gleefully talked up the pending U.N. Conference on Racism (which President Bush has wisely pulled the U.S. out of) as an excellent antidote to combat racism around the world. What he failed to foresee (or acknowledge in his zeal to support the Mutual Admiration Society event) was the potential for the U.S. to withdraw from the event, a move largely predicated on the insistence of Palestinians that language condemning Jews in very harsh tones be adopted for the Conference. Again, this is the leader of my people? I don't think so. This is a snot-nosed man-child who represents everything neither I nor many other Jews want anything to do with. Leaders provide leadership, not handkerchiefs and crutches. [END] Monty Warner is Senior Director for the Center for the Study of Popular Culture. Readers may e-mail him at montywarner@yahoo.com. ===== Thought for the Day: "We bludgeoned them and bludgeoned them and bludgeoned them - but at what price?" Abe Foxman, speaking of the Swiss "Holocaust" extortion racket From irimland@zundelsite.org Sun, 26 Aug 2001 19:47:19 -0700 Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2001 19:47:19 -0700 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/27/2001 - "Revisionist Week in Review" Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Revisionist Week in Review August 27, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D Ha'aretz calls it "Goodwill hunting" - telling its readers of a new initiative that recruits American students "...to learn more about the Middle East." The purpose? To be sent back to American campuses sufficiently brainwashed so they can be "Israel's ambassadors." =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D In a similar mode, The New York Times reports that 400 students from 155 colleges and universities spent an entire day "...training to defend Israel, arming themselves for the public relations war over the Middle East raging on campuses from Berkeley to Boston." Leaders of Jewish organizations dread the coming of the Fall semester, anticipating a surge of campus protests over Israel's Middle East politics. Arab-American groups plan a similar campaign this fall, to urge universities to divest themselves of holdings in companies doing business with Israel. The California State University at Berkeley, the campus where historical protest movements are hatched, will be host this fall to a conference where Arab students hope to start the "divestment drive", complete with mock refugee camps like the shantytowns of another era. =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D In Germany, the March in Memory of Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, drew more than 800 participants to Wunsiegel, the town where Germany's Most Feared Martyr is buried - the first time in a decade that a march in Hess's honor has been permitted by the ever more jumpy government. The participants could go as far as the gate to the cemetery, but were not allowed to enter. =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D The Holocaustonians have found a new racket - so-called "Nazi violins", supposedly stolen from Jews by Hitler's disciples. These instruments, proclaim the mainstream media, stand to become the next area of inquiry by those seeking reparations from the Holocaust. The Chicago Tribune is kick-starting this one, claiming that their sleuthing found some hitherto unknown classified documents. Many an old fiddle will turn, as if by magic, into a rare heirloom Stradivarius overnight. Just watch! =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D Having completed one Holocaust project, Steven Spielberg's Shoah Visual History Foundation is already launching into another. More than 50,000 Holocaust survivors have immortalized themselves on those Holocaust tapes. Naturally, none were asked critical cross-examination type questions. No fact checkers were employed. "Every survivor had an astonishing eyewitness account to tell so that the horrors of the 20th century might not be repeated in the 21st,'' enthuses Spielberg, hoping, no doubt, that this collection of faces will not fall into the wrong hands - like those of skeptical Revisionists who would flush out hordes of fabricators, fabulators and self-engrandizers. His new mission, by the way? "Emphasizing worldwide education'' about the Holocaust. "Holocaust Indoctrination 101"? =3D=3D=3D=3D Hangdog-face Elie Wiesel is going to be the honorary chairman of a pro-solidarity rally planned for New York next month. Bagel King Marvin Lender will have that honor on Sept. 23 at a rally sponsored by North American Jewish groups described as "...from across the religious and political spectrums." Their very own Rainbow Coalition? Are they afraid too few Jewish people will show up? =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D While Concordia University in Montreal is making noises about not allowing Arab students to drum up support for the beleaguered Palestinians, the 8th Annual Anti-Racist Action Network Conference will take place in Montreal, Quebec, Canada on the weekend of October 19-21, 2001. ARA groups are notorious for their rings in their noses and elsewhere and for their anarchist tactics. During the Z=FCndel Trials in Toronto, they buzzed around B'nai Brith like flies around a stench and carried live rats into the halls of the court house. =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D Now here is an interesting Jerusalem Post poll, released August 20, 2001. Responding to the question: "...Do you think Israel should offer citizenship to the estimated 4,200 SLA forces that fought with it in Lebanon and are currently in Israel?" Yes 79 % No 21 % Total Votes: 9557, certainly a respectable sample. Is Israel in need of more skilled torturers and assassins? =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D After some 56 years of helping in the systematic brainwashing of almost three generations of Germans, the current leader of Germany's Jews warned Tuesday that "...neo-Nazi violence (is) now posing possibly a greater threat than at any time in the country's post-war history." Which is totally refuted, incidentally, by police statistics. "Intervention must be so massive that all citizens in this country really have the feeling the state is doing something," Spiegel counseled, adding: "The situation in the Federal Republic of Germany is perhaps more critical than at any time in its young history." What Spiegel obviously fears is the steady growth of Revisionism and subsequent rejection of Germany's "re-education"-imposed artificial guilt complex. And then he let loose with a real zinger: Whether or not the Jewish community in Germany really had a future, Spiegel speculated, did not depend on the Jews but rather on non-Jewish Germans. Now is that a brainer, or what? Spiegel noted that Germany's Jewish population has grown to 90,000 today from 28,000 in 1990. The Germans have an uneasy feeling that there are many, many more Jews than that. Germany's total population, incidentally, is 82 million. =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D The hapless Germans will start paying compensation to the Russian foundation "Mutual Understanding and Reconciliation" representing Russian citizens who were prisoners in Nazi concentration camps and ghettoes during World War II In all, over 400,000 Russians are slated to receive compensation totaling some DM835 million. We wait with bated breath for the day when millions of Germans, soldiers and civilians alike, will demand compensation for their slave labor in Siberia for 10-15 years at a stretch. =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D A small group of people protested outside the editorial offices of the Washington Post on August 22, 2001. The protesters accused the paper of "...having a pro-Israel bias and of running more Op-Ed pieces that were pro-Israel than pro-Palestinian." Op-eds by Charles Krauthammer et al had called for Israel to virtually vaporize any and every vestige of Palestinian resistance to a decades-old brutal military occupation of Palestinian land, with the clear implication that any 'collateral damage' to civilian life would get a tacit stamp of approval by the Israel Firsters. =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D You will find this one hard to believe, but scout's honor! A state legislator apologized Wednesday for forwarding to fellow lawmakers an e-mail that said, "Two things made this country great: White men & Christianity.'' Don Davis, a politically incorrect white Republican, said at first blithely that he didn't consider the letter racist. However, shortly thereafter he added: "I humbly want to apologize if the e-mail forwarded from my office on Monday night was offensive or disrespectful to any one in this General Assembly, state or nation." One wonders who his Monica Lewinsky or Chandra Levi might be. =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D A thoroughly detested German official, Otto Schily, Interior Minister of the prostrated Vaterland, has announced that he will come to America to teach the Americans a thing or two about Free Speech in cyberspace. He will alert them to a number of websites he has decided are an irritant. He wants America to censor them or shut them down completely. I quote from an unreferenced source: "The spectacle of the German Interior Minister lobbying U.S. officials to close Web sites hosted in the U.S. - albeit sites that most people would find disgusting - is likely to catch the attention of American free speech advocates who believe that even hate speech should be protected." =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D Not even US celebrities, always ready to shine Zionist shoes with their spittle, are showing their faces in Israel these days. Several celebrities were invited to a recent socialite wedding, but only one lone pop singer showed up. During the wedding, guards flanked the nervous celeb and were posted at the entrances to the hotel for good measure. =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D 350 Islamic clerics from 15 countries attended a three-day conference, held to discuss ways of supporting the Palestinian uprising. These Muslim clerics declared that Palestinian suicide bombers are martyrs acting in accordance with Islam's holy teachings. =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D Romania's Jews are fuming about another anti-semitic book, this time penned by an ultranationalist lawmaker, Vlad Hogea, a member of the Greater Romania Party. This book contains the phrase: ``Whoever fights the Jews, fights the devil.'' Local media chirped in unison that it downplayed the horrors of the Holocaust and implied that Jews had too much power. Hogea briskly denied being anti-Semitic, but then proved that he knows his country's history. He stated that in Romania ``the tentacles of Jewry'' had spread into political life and opined that ``Romania should be run by Romanians.'' To many people's horror, his book bears the stamp of approval of the Romanian Academy, the country's most prestigious academic and cultural institution. =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D The talk on the Internet is an Israeli deputy minister's suggestion on national television that Israeli security forces should kill the fathers of suicide bombers. Gideon Ezra, who gave birth to that typically Zionist idea, followed up by another similar one: He said the remains of suicide bombers should be buried wrapped in animal skins, which, reportedly, would prevent the detonators from going to heaven. Some people wonder what cabbalistic scribe came up with this idea? And from what century - 200 B.C.? =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D A near miracle: Israel's army has brought criminal charges against several of its own men. For the first time since the start of an 11-month old intifada in which Israeli soldiers killed babies in their mothers' laps, shot out the eyes of teenagers and killed hundreds of Palestinian protesters, beat civilians in full view of the foreign press, fired on journalists and threatened diplomats, a military court has handed down some indictments. The four soldiers accused of abusing Palestinian civilians reportedly forced a group of young Arabs to beat each other up for the entertainment of the Israelis - a practice that was widespread during World War II, when Jewish Communist Partisans forced captured German soldiers to torture and mutilate each other, often filming and photographing the brutal scenes before they executed their victims. =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D Another small step for the Guardian but a giant step for Revisionism was a recent article admitting that Britain and the US bombed small towns in Germany in the final stages of the Second World War simply because they would burn easily and not because they were strategically important. In March of 1945, when the war was as good as lost, the Royal Air Force dropped more bombs on Germany than in any previous month. More than 30,000 tons fell on towns and cities. =46or instance, in just 17 minutes, the Allies dropped nearly 1,000 tons of bombs on W=FCrzburg, a beautiful medieval town in the Southern part of Germany - a small city with no industry. 82 percent of the town was destroyed and almost 5,000 people were killed. Pforzheim, near Ernst Z=FCndel's home town, was incinerated at the end of =46ebruary, with nearly 20,000 people being roasted to death in 20 minutes i= n a vast firestorm. No wonder Germans are allergic to the chronic whining about the Jewish "Holocaust"! =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D A new Revisionist conference has been announced, this time in Trieste, Italy - right in the heart of Europe. The latest we heard, the dates are 6-7 of October, 2001. A ZGram reader writes: "Naturally, this will cause a great deal of consternation among those who refuse to allow history to be questioned. Their stern opposition will no doubt generate a great deal of publicity. Webmasters who host sites with Revisionist content will, I dare say, likely see their visitor count soar up through the stratosphere as a result. Nor should this be a surprising result. Remember that Rabbi Cooper, Rabbi Hier and others of their ilk are *de*facto* publicists for Revisionism. =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D From irimland@zundelsite.org Mon, 27 Aug 2001 11:29:08 -0700 Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2001 11:29:08 -0700 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/27/2001 - "The ADL: A snooping/smearing enterprise" Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 27, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: The writer below is the kind of man we used to know, admire and respect in America - straightforward, blunt, courageous, ethical - no nonsense. These days, you have to look for them with a magnifying glass. Read and enjoy! [START] Dear Editor, Home News and Tribune; (New Brunswick NJ) Your article about the ADL giving sensitivity training to Somerville police left the casual reader with the impression the ADL is working to eliminate hatred. This is not always the case. They are used to silence criticism of bloody Israel, a secular nation. I am now a retired TWA Captain, as well as a retired LCDR USN. During the 1970's, I flew many trips to Tel Aviv. What I saw there was just the opposite of what I read about the place in the newspapers. The media claims that Israel was "The only Democracy in the Mid-East" were shockingly wrong. Israel is as much a two-tier society today as Germany was in 1939. They just inverted the place, put the Jews on top, and the Gentiles underfoot. This was not outwardly noticeable at first. The place was obviously Jewish, but I figured, "Naturally, it's The Jewish State". There were a few minor inconveniences but all in all, a layover in the Tel Aviv Hilton was considered a good one. The crews were given the same rooms each trip, so I got the same housekeeper, who I assumed was a nice Jewish lady. As is the custom, I brought her a small box of chocolates each trip. She was very thankful. On one occasion, I got talking with her. It was Saturday, and she was working. I asked her if she was violating Jewish law by working. To my surprise, she told me she was not Jewish, but an Orthodox Christian. We spoke further about how things were for a Christian in The Jewish State. "Bad, real bad, Captain" was her reply. I questioned her further and got such a hard luck story as to be almost unbelievable, but this was a very open and honest woman. She told me of the discrimination she faced on a daily basis, the hardships of having to live in a segregated area far from work, the lower wages paid to Christians, pat-down body searches by Israeli soldiers at check points, and so on. She was in tears when she finally finished. I was very mad. I started writing critical letters to the editor of local newspapers describing what was going on in Israel. Getting information critical of Israel, before I had access to the internet, was difficult. Finally, I discovered titles and addresses of good sources of information on the subject. Soon, I had a compact library of material. My letters became more hard-hitting, and more difficult to rebut. Enter Mr. Suall, of the ADL. In a letter to my Chief Pilot, he complained loudly about how there was an anti-Semite flying TWA's airplanes, to Tel Aviv, of all places. How does TWA expect it's Jewish passengers feel with a maniac like this flying them? I was hauled in to the office and asked to explain myself. I did. I told my boss I was exercising my freedom of the press, and I was not involving the company in my letters. I also pointed out that the Gentiles in Israel were Semites, whereas most of the Jews were not. Apparently Suall became enraged that no action was taken. More letters followed in which I was described as insane, dangerous, a poor pilot, a drunk, a wife beater, a child abuser, etc. and for G-d's sake, shut this man up!. All this was nonsense, of course. I have a lovely Irish wife and 6 healthy, happy children. When asked by the boss what I had to say for myself, I called Suall a liar. I asked if there was any proof of what he said. There was none. By this time I brought the union into the picture. I was a member of the Air Line Pilots Association. It was agreed that so long as I did not mention TWA, or ALPA in my letters, it was hands off. I wanted to sue the ADL with these letters as the basis of a libel suit. The union contract called for my jacket to be available to me, and that I was entitled to be copied on any negative material in it. There was nothing in it. It was then I discovered that there were 2 jackets, one of which was kept from me, which was in violation of the contract. I went to Queens DA Mario Merolla and told him about this, and pointed out that libel was a criminal as well as civil offense in NY (I was working out of JFK). He promptly told TWA to cease this, and hand over the other jacket. By the time I went back to the office, it had "accidentally" gone into the shredder. Too bad, but the harassment ceased, and I continued my career to get 30 years in, retiring in 1987 at the age of 56. The ADL is a branch of B'Nai B'Rith, itself an exclusive organization, whose membership is limited to Jewish men, only. If I were the Chief of the Somerset County Police Academy, I would be wary of the advice of this group. For Publication, Ed Toner 481B Jason Place Brick NJ 08724 (732) 840-4203 ===== Thought for the Day: "Why not, to use Churchill's phrase, collar the lot?" (Robert Fisk, speaking of war criminals but applicable to all crooks and moral misfits.) From irimland@zundelsite.org Tue, 28 Aug 2001 18:25:34 -0700 Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2001 18:25:34 -0700 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/28/2001 - "Revisionism going mainstream in Britain" Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 28, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: Below is quite an astonishing, rather lengthy book review carried in London's Daily Mail which I spotted at David Irving's website, http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/ (A STRANGE Enemy People: Germans Under The British 1945-50, by Patricia Meehan, will be published by Peter Owen Publishers in September at GBP 17.99) Of course the reviewer feels dutybound - don't they all? - to preemptively smear the Germans by loading his write-up up front with all kinds of horror images to be laid at the feet of the enternally wicked Nazis - but disregarding that, and getting into the meat of the matter, namely solid ***mainstream*** Revisionism about World War II and its atrocious aftermath, we are already one step closer to an intelligent assessment of what really happened after World War II - and not what your yammering yarmulkes dream up in their faverish brains. I'll give you first the book review, followed by a brief Ernst Zundel commen= t. {START} Daily Mail London, Augfust 25, 2001 UNDER THE BRITISH JACKBOOT Rape, torture, execution and the horrors of interrogation camps. A new book paints a chilling picture of Germany under British rule in the aftermath of World War II By Christopher Hudson TRY to imagine Britain occupied by a victorious Germany after World War II. A young boy is executed for displaying a picture of Churchill on his birthday. Theft carries the death penalty, so does possession of any kind of firearm. Firing squads are expensive. Hanging wastes time. The Nazi Penal Branch asks permission to use the guillotine, which can carry out six single executions in 14 minutes. Meanwhile, internment camps have sprung up across the country. Almost 40,000 British civilians and prisoners of war, men and women aged 16-70 have been swept up into these camps and are held without charge or expectation of a trial. They include not only 'war criminals', profiteers and anti-Nazi agitators, but anyone who 'ridicules, damages or destroys' German culture, along with any persons 'considered dangerous to the Occupation or its objectives', even if they have not committed any offence. One English mother of four has been imprisoned for a year because she hid in a ditch to snatch a word with her husband who was out on a working party. Conditions in these camps are brutal. Inmates sleep in their clothes, packed five at a time like sardines on beds constructed from old pieces of wood. There is so little to eat that the majority of them are emaciated. Family visits are restricted to 30 minutes every three months. Internees are frequently kept in dark cellars to prepare them for interrogation. According to a report compiled by a courageous German bishop, they are 'terribly beaten, kicked, and so mishandled that traces can be seen for weeks afterwards. 'The notorious Third Degree methods of using searchlights on victims and exposing them to high temperatures are also applied.' All this really happened -- but in reverse. It happened in Germany, and we, the British occupying forces, carried it out. =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D According to a new book by Patricia Meehan, historian and former BBC TV producer and documentarist who worked in Germany in 1945, the first few years of our Occupation were tarnished by deeds which would not have seemed out of place in Hitler's Third Reich. Besides internment centres and holding camps for returned prisoners of war, there were also secret camps known by the initials DIC -- Direct Interrogation Centres. One day in February 1947, two of the inmates of No.74 DIC (Bad Nenndorf) were dumped at an Internee Hospital. One patient was skeletal, suffering from frostbite, unable to speak; the other was unconscious, with no discernible pulse -- cold, skeletal and covered in 'thick cakes of dirt; frostbite to arms and legs'. BOTH men died within hours. A third, who had been arrested on suspicion of drug trafficking, committed suicide while undergoing interrogation. The resulting investigation uncovered horror stories of deprivation amounting to torture. Men were treated for injuries without anaesthetic. One prisoner, after eight days of solitary confinement, was put in an unheated punishment cell in midwinter. Buckets of cold water were thrown into the cell which the prisoner had to mop up with a rag. His jacket and boots were removed, and he had to stand with bleeding feet for about ten hours in extreme cold on a concrete floor. Finally he had to crawl on hands and knees to interrogation. The Camp Commandant, Medical Officer and three interrogators were suspended and charged. But charges were dropped or reduced to negligence. All three courts-martial, including the Commandant's, petered out, and the men were allowed to leave the service. True, Bad Nenndorf was an extreme case, which made the headlines. And after fighting Germany in two world wars, it was hardly surprising if there were outbreaks of vindictiveness among British officers who had fought and suffered in them. CERTAINLY Hitler and Himmler would not have concerned themselves with the legality of such crimes. Nevertheless, the very fact that this barbarism could have gone unnoticed or neglected by higher authorities for nearly two years is evidence of the chaos which engulfed defeated Germany, upon which no number of bureaucrats and administrators could at first impose order. After Germany surrendered in May 1945, it was divided into sectors, with Russians in the east, Americans in the south, French in the west and the British occupying the northwest, from Bonn to Hamburg. Millions of Germans were on the roads -- women, children and old people, pushing bicycles, prams and carts, or crowding into cattle wagons, to escape the Red Army which was killing and raping as it advanced, laying waste to millions of homes and driving soldiers and civilians alike back to forced labour in the USSR. Meanwhile, thousands of Displaced Persons -- Germany's slave labourers from the East -- were roving the countryside, raping and pillaging, driven by hunger and vengeance. Hatred for the Germans knew no bounds. Thousands of them died in Polish camps. In Czech camps, babies were drowned in latrines while their mothers were made to watch; German doctors were made to crawl and eat human excrement. Hence the panic-driven migration to the western sectors, where 50 million Germans crowded into territory where 38 million had lived before the war. Britain inherited the most heavily populated zone. Hamburg, the second biggest city after Berlin, lay in ruins. From July 24 to 29, 1943, five RAF raids had created a firestorm which rose two and a half miles above the city. In those five nights, most of Hamburg was destroyed. Some 750,000 people were made homeless, and up to 150,000 killed -- many more than died from air raids in Britain in the whole of World War II. When the occupying forces arrived in Hamburg, they discovered a land of cave-dwellers. Thousands of people were living in windowless concrete air-raid shelters; thousands more crammed into cellars under the rubble or else climbed a ladder into rooms suspended in some teetering ruin, amid falling masonry. Water supply was a standpipe in the ruins for a few hours a day, for those lucky enough to have a receptacle which could hold liquid. There were no knives, forks, pots, pans, needles, scissors, shoelaces, soap or household medicines. Urban Germany had become a nation of rag-and-bone people, dragging little trailers after them in case they spotted something in the rubble, and rooting in dustbins for food which the newly-arrived occupying forces had thrown away. The human response of British servicemen might have been one of sympathy, but by order of the London government, the C-in-C of the British Zone, =46ield Marshal Montgomery, was ordered to enforce a strict policy of 'non-fraternisation'. 'You must keep clear of Germans -- man, woman and child -- unless you meet them in the course of duty,' he instructed. 'You must not walk with them or shake hands or visit their homes.' There was to be no smiling, no playing with children; (soldiers were put on a charge for 'permitting children to climb on an Army vehicle'). General Eisenhower, in the U.S. sector, thought this self-defeating -- how were the Allies supposed to influence the Germans if they could not speak to little children? It took Montgomery three months to persuade London of the sense of this, and it was another three months before the Cabinet cancelled the non-fraternisation order. Relations immediately eased between the conquerors and the conquered, although a system of apartheid remained in place. British and Germans travelled in separate carriages on the Under- ground. They did not worship together, or see films together, or sit together to listen to music. Officers' wives attending dances would have to be warned in advance if Germans were present. It was unnatural; more than that, it put a brake on every aspect of administering Germany. In May 1947 a new instruction was handed down: 'We should behave towards the Germans as the people of one Christian and civilised race towards another whose interests in many ways converge with our own and for whom we no longer have any ill-will.' The trouble was that it had been drummed into British personnel going out to the British Zone that the Germans were a race of pariahs. In November 1945, the Foreign Office had set out the principles by which Germany should be governed: 'The primary purpose of the JACKBOOT Occupation is destructive and preventive, and our measures of destruction and prevention are only limited by consideration for (1) the security and wellbeing of the forces of Occupation, (2) prevention of unrest among the German people, (3) broad considerations of humanity.' The consequence was that in the early years all Germans were regarded as equally guilty, except by a handful of German specialists. Ignorance started at the top. The new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, had not forgotten his time as an infantry officer in the trenches of World War I. He once confided in the late Lord Longford that he had always disliked Germans very much, but that he and his wife had once had a nice German maid. His Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, explained: 'I try to be fair to them but I 'ates them, really.' Neither of them ever visited the British Occupied Zone. British attitudes towards Germans had hardened since the pre-war maxim that: 'All Germans are intelligent, honourable and pro-Hitler, but never more than two of these three.' Media hostility played its part. Several newspaper correspondents in Germany were under tacit instructions not to send back reports which were complimentary to the Germans -- a line which did not really change until the Queen's visit in 1965. Three factors contributed to the failure of the British administration to get to grips with the situation in the Occupied Zone despite the efforts of the native population to help. The first was a diktat laid down to the Allies by President Roosevelt that all Nazi party members were to be excluded from public office and from important positions in private enterprise. He was told that party membership had been virtually a condition of employment in most of the German civil service, and that whole new departments would have to be recruited and trained up. But Roosevelt was unyielding. The second was that the existence of a genuine opposition to Hitler within Germany, which had culminated in the failed July 1944 plot on his life, had been concealed from the British public for propaganda reasons during the war; it was easier to rally arms against an undivided evil. Nor did people recall the 20 million Germans who had voted against Hitler in the last election before the war. This left the Zone administrators with no more sophisticated a view of the German people than was provided in a booklet handed out to all new arrivals. Entitled The German Character, it explained how the Germans 'stress fanatical willpower, work and sacrifice' and described their sadism, fatalism and sentimentality, warning that to 'try and be kind or conciliatory will be regarded as weakness'. Thoughtful British officials might have raised an eyebrow at this, but -- which was the third factor -- recruits to the central administration of the British Zone, known as the Control Commission Germany (CCG), tended not to be of high calibre. They included demobbed servicemen with nowhere to go, officers who could not find a good job in 'civvy street', and in the words of a Foreign Office memo, 'retired drain-inspectors, unsuccessful businessmen and idle ex-policemen'. Very few of them could speak German. Encouraged to believe that non-Nazis were as dangerous as Nazis, they kept all Germans at arm's length. No one could apply for public employment who had not been de-nazified, which meant they had to fill in a form demanding their record of employment and income, and their memberships of every party, group, club, union or institute since Hitler came to power. More than one million of these forms were issued. Checking them became a nightmare for the CCG officials, who knew no German and could not conceive the reality of life under a dictatorship. Anybody who had not risked death by openly resisting the Nazi authorities became liable to dismissal or even internment. The process meant that Germans with invaluable knowledge and experience were being removed from their posts. The Germans joked about Hitler's 1,000-year Reich -- 12 years of Nazism and 988 years of de-nazification. The CCG took the point. Soon it was no longer necessary to de-nazify all the typists, only the head typist. Finally, in October 1947, the task was handed over to the German Lander or local government areas, to sort out properly. There was plenty left to administer. It was a condition of the peace treaty that swathes of German industrial plant had to be dismantled and equipment destroyed. Meanwhile the CCG regulated matters which even the Nazis had never interfered with. And even songs came under scrutiny in case they had links to the Nazis. By the end of 1946, the CCG numbered 24,785 personnel, their American opposite numbers merely 5,008. Overmanning brought boredom, drunkenness and corruption to the CCG as well as to servicemen. They were, after all, living in a country where everything could be bartered. German food rations averaged 1,500 calories a day: too much to die on but not enough to live comfortably. Cigarettes were the only viable currency and all sales were black market. Even girls from good families found that they had nothing to offer except their bodies -- either that or join the 'rubble ladies' who cleared the roads and ruins and emptied basements of half-decomposed corpses. There were three women to every man. In Berlin, by December 1946, half a million women were selling sex for Western goods. In the British zone, where one cigarette was worth five marks and troops had a free weekly allowance of 50 (plus chocolate and soap), 80 per cent of the girls suffered from VD, and penicillin had to be flown in from Britain. On the grounds that the standard of morality of German women was so low, the British Army and Government agreed that troops should officially be excused from paying maintenance for any offspring that they conceived. The Army C-in-C responded to the scandal by organising 'Leadership Courses' and early morning runs. So much negligence, and so much callousness. But it has to be weighed against the loathing that existed for all things German -- a loathing which was being deepened by revelations of Nazi atrocities. Newsreel of the death camps had been seen across the Western world. Unlike eastern Europeans, the British in occupied Germany had no bloodlust for revenge. AND their behaviour, even the worst of it, has to be set against the plans Hitler had for Occupied Britain, which decreed that Britain's entire able-bodied male population aged 17-45 would be dispatched to the Continent, thus bringing the UK effectively to a standstill. And, slowly, some of the right decisions were made. With a gigantic effort, German education in the British Zone was put back on its feet and the years of Nazi indoctrination overcome. In June 1948 the three Western allies introduced the new currency, the Deutschmark, thus in a stroke destroying the black market and allowing shopkeepers to put goods on their shelves for sale in real money. Finally, in July 1951, after six years, came the formal announcement of the end of 'the state of war with Germany'. The Army stayed on, but the Occupation was at an end. [END] =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D Ernst Z=FCndel comments: Apart from the usual, premptive, knee-jerk excusing of Allied brutality because of what the Germans had allegedly done, or planned to do - such as the ludicrous idea of wanting to ship all able-bodied Brits to the Continent, after Hitler's Wehrmacht had conquered England - this book is obviously an important first step of Britain, for once, coming to terms with its past. Don't hold your breath, however, in seeing war crimes actions opened against the British torturers and murderers of Germans! Even where charges were brought at the time, they petered out. Nobody was demoted or stripped of their rank - nobody! Not for torture leading to death, or multiple gang rape of girls, or simply robbing and beating a German to death! Nobody was ever tried or convicted by American, French, British or Russian courts. Germans were "demons" - and you could do anything you liked to a demon. The book reviewer, and possibly the authoress, are blatantly wrong when they claim the Germans - naming Hitler and Himmler by name - "would not have concerned themselves with the legality of such crimes as were committed by the camp commandant, medical officer and three interrogators in Bad Nenndorf. The historic facts are: Hitler heard of rumors about irregularities in the camp administrations, as did Heinrich Himmler, who promptly took action by setting up a special office, headed by SS-Judge Morgan, who vigorously investigated the cases broght to his attention. Minor infractions lead to the "Degradierung" - that is, a reduction in rank - a demotion of SS camp guards or personnel, an entry in their service record of the investigated event and the punishment that followed etc. SS soldiers guilty of mistreating prisoners were sent as punishment to the Russian front - for instance, for slapping an inmate or booting them in the rear, as happened on occasion, since cruelties are part of any war, and World War II was no exception. Moreover: Several SS Camp Commanders and staff were tried by Judge Morgan's office for more serious infranctions - and by Himmler's orders, ***executed with all the camp inmates assembled to watch the execution by Nazi authorities of SS Camp Commandants*** who had abused their power over the prisoners and had broken strict camp regulations and discipline, which was harsh and strict but did not permit the abuse, torture, murder or even theft from prisoners! And to come back to the silly claim that Hitler wanted to deport all able-bodied Brits etc. - Listen: Germany had conquered most of France, all of Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Poland, the Baltic states, the Balkans, the Ukraine, to name a few - did they deport "all the able-bodied men" back to the Reich? To claim that they had such plans for a conquered England is a ludicrous idea! It is simply one more kick at the Nazis in order to offset the very real and carried-through Allied acts of brutality, torture, murder and ethnic cleansing agreed to in Yalta, Teheran and Potsdam! That's why the world needs Revisionists! =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D If you would like to learn more what life was really like in post-war Germany, the Zundelsite sells a booklet, "Gruesome Harvest: The Costly Attempt to Exterminate the People of Germany" by Ralph Franklin Keeling. Send $15 to Ingrid Rimland, 3152 Parkway, Suite 13, PMB 109, Pigeon Forge, TN 37863, USA. =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D Thought for the Day: "Why not, to use Churchill's phrase, collar the lot." (Robert Fisk, speaking of ***all*** war criminals)=0B From irimland@zundelsite.org Wed, 29 Aug 2001 11:03:38 -0700 Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2001 11:03:38 -0700 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/29/2001 - "The Other War" Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 29, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: This article appeared yesterday in the Jordan Times. It was written by Zaid Nabulsi and is titled "The Other War". Pass it on to your Christian-Zionist friends and supporters for their elucidation: [START] THERE IS little one can write about the daily massacres of the abandoned and helpless Palestinians that the readers have not already seen on their TV screens. Rather than trying to imagine it through words, the harrowing ferocity of the ongoing butchery is best visualised by actual images, delivered daily for all to witness in laser sharp satellite footage. Hence, I want to talk about another unseen weapon in this uneven war. It is the deliberate manipulation of words and language in the Western media to distort the facts in order to exonerate Israel. While this apparatus of war is not as easily detectable as bombs and bullets, it is equally evil and demented. For example, early in the current Intifada, Newsweek carried a report in its Nov. 13 issue last year, titled "Beyond Slingshots and Rubber Bullets" which had a chart comparing the actual military capabilities of Israel and the Palestinians. While listing some of the arsenal Israel possessed and unleashed against the Palestinians (warplanes, tanks, etc.), the column for the Palestinian "arsenal" simply stated that "the Oslo accords allowed 30,000 weapons but the Palestinian National Authority has an estimated 40,000 - 45,000". "Weapons"? Indeed, Edward Said's thesis that American Zionists are far more obsessive than their Israeli counterparts could not have more glaring truth to it. Not even that professional fabricator and outright liar, Dori Gold, could have used such a generic term in the context of comparing and quantifying the military strength of the two sides. The next thing I expected to read was that Israel "confiscated fifty land", or that it "cut off a hundred water". Not too far fetched from the same debased propagandists. The game of words keeps getting uglier. Recently, when deputy Israeli Police Minister Gideon Esra, on the pages of Yediot Aharonot, called for Palestinian suicide bombers to be buried with pig skin or pig blood, CNN did not even pretend to conceal any outrage and simply volunteered to convey the bizarre fabrication that "according to Muslim belief, being buried in pig skin or blood could make the body ineligible for martyr status", and therefore such practice, CNN narrated, "could deter potential attackers". So, we learn, there is a useful deterrence after all from the prehistoric and barbaric ritual of mutilating dead bodies. The above is only a small example of the journalistic debauchery littering the American media in particular and the Western media in general when reporting the Israeli massacres of Palestinians. Of course, it is impossible to catalogue all the lies - many activists have been tirelessly monitoring and exposing the travesty - but it would be accurate to say that for each Israeli bullet or missile fired during this Intifada, there was a written or spoken twin attack in the media. The same kind of people who could not care to explain whether "weapons" referred to meagre pistols and rifles (currently in the hands of the Palestinians) or to nuclear warheads, are still waging a parallel war against the Palestinians by murdering the truth or deforming it beyond recognition. These are the same organisations that have been reporting the televised Israeli practice-shooting of Palestinian schoolchildren simply as "violent incidents". These are the same news outlets describing Israeli targeted bombings of civilian homes by stating that "some buildings were damaged during the clashes". When a Palestinian family is wiped out in their home by tank fire, there are always "conflicting reports" about how they were killed. When passengers are blown up in their car by a helicopter gunship, they are instantly described as "potential terrorists on their way to plant a bomb". When Palestinian infants are torn by Israeli bullets and shells, "crossfire" is most likely to have caused their deaths. But when the victims are Israeli, there is none of that. You suddenly start learning the names of the victims, that they had a loving mother and a father, that they had a bright future ahead of them, that they even had a beautiful smile, extinguished by cruel, barbaric creatures. None of this of course applies to our children who, the Zionists claim, get sent by their parents to die as a media ploy. In the frenzy of this dual-frontier war, we must pause to address the real causes of this immoral, almost criminal, falsification of facts by people who otherwise seem to be normal, law-abiding citizens and professionals. We have to face the fact that underlying this media war, as with the roots of the original Israeli military aggression, there lurks a very potent disease; a severe sickness of the mind that needs specialists to cure, if it can ever be cured. This disease is the subject of the major UN conference next month in Durban, South Africa. This affliction is racism. The most pernicious manifestation of this venom is the blatant racism imbedded deep within the Zionist psyche, the racism that arrogantly refuses to admit or relate to the catastrophe that befell the Palestinian people when the colonial Zionists arrived and forcibly stole - yes stole - their land in 1948, the land they inhabited for thousands of years. This is the same poisoned ideology upon which entire generations of Israelis were brought up, totally oblivious to the five million human beings who have been paying the heavy price of their obnoxious Zionist dream for the last 53 years. This racism - the basic belief that Jewish life is more valuable than Arab life coupled with the zealous insistence that fulfilling an incongruous biblical prophecy is a justification for ethnic cleansing and war crimes - is the only explanation of how the murders of hundreds of Palestinians in the Intifada can be turned into mere statistics, while the taking of an Israeli life prompts immediate reflection, anguish and endless grieving and questioning of the humanity of the other side. It is all about racism. What else can explain the intellectual fervour driving an incessant disinformationist like Lee Hockstader to devote a full report in the Washington Post (Aug. 19) to quote an interview with a father of a victim of the Jerusalem pizzeria bombing? Of course all civilian deaths are tragic and deplorable, but would this reporter ever consider publishing one word from an agonising Palestinian mother whose child was ripped apart, not by a lone bomber, but by direct Israeli military orders? Would he ever contemplate doing that, just for the sake of perceived, if not real, impartiality? Of course not, and you can understand why from the excerpts he chose from this interview. The words of the grieving Israeli father that were music to Hockstader's ears were the assertion that the "profound hatred" Israelis encounter from Palestinians (referred to throughout the interview only as "barbarians") was "baseless ... imponderable hatred", a kind of hatred that "doesn't really have any basis to it." This is the message that these deranged Zionists in the Western media want to disseminate to the rest of the world. That there is no occupation, there is no dehumanisation, there is no collective punishment, there are no arbitrary home demolitions, illegal detentions, humiliating road blocks, land confiscation, uprooting of trees, torture inside awful prison camps, sanctioned assassinations, blockades of food and urgent medical assistance, and indiscriminate bombings of civilian homes. None of these crimes exist. What drives the Palestinians to kill themselves, we are told, is pure inexplicable anti-Semitic hatred that has no basis or background. Basically, people like Hockstader, who know too well that their ideology is built upon a racist premise, are in constant need for a justification for this racism - the justification being that Palestinians are an irrational murderous species - so that they can continue to keep a facade of humanism while looking upon the Palestinian people as a group of untamed beasts that need to be put down by force. And brutal force is what they are advocating. A despicable character in the name of Michael Kelly called upon Israel in the Washington Post (Aug. 15) to "unleash an overwhelming force" against the Palestinians, to "go right ahead and escalate the violence" and to "destroy, kill, capture and expel the armed Palestinian forces." Two equally astonishing pleas for Palestinian blood to be spilled were voiced by Charles Krauthammer (Aug. 16) and George Will (Aug. 17 in the same newspaper. If anyone dared incite the Apartheid regime to do the same against the ANC in South Africa some years ago, this person would immediately have been castigated as a mad racist, if not arrested and charged. But the Palestinians have already been dehumanised and demoted down to a breed of unreasonable, homicidal, violent beings by the Zionist instigators, and that is why such bigotry goes unchecked. On this note, the delegates meeting in South Africa next month should put up a fight and recall the well known fact that when the Apartheid regime was squeezed and isolated by the entire world, Israel was its only lifeline and ever faithful ally. Maybe it would be an occasion for the world to remember that the state of alleged Holocaust survivors was the only country having a full scale political, economic, military and scientific cooperation with that abhorrent neo-Nazi regime throughout its long reign, and was the country directly responsible for prolonging the life of Apartheid being its only breathing outlet (the long-term arms supply contracts between Israel and the Apartheid regime were even the subject of a UN resolution in 1987 calling upon Israel to desist from its scandalous partnership with this racist regime). Perhaps, if the issue of Zionist racism is explored in an objective and scientific manner - and it cannot be more timely than during the upcoming Durban conference - then maybe the present shameless onslaught by the anti-Palestinian media can be exposed and confined to its narrow-minded perspective; that of raving xenophobia, rampant bigotry and disguised Jewish supremacy. [END} The writer is a Jordanian attorney working in Geneva. ===== Thought for the Day: (A thoughtful gem from Israel Shamir) "Dear American Friends, in the American press there were hysterical reports of the dangerous life of Jews in Palestine. What do you think of a sideline campaign "Bring the Jews (from Israel) to the real Promised Land of the US"? So many good slogans: "Let My People Come to the US", "Green Card to Every Jew". Actually, not bad an idea, the Russians would move to the US before you would say Jack Robinson, and the remaining Oriental Jews would blend into Arab Middle East. The rich Ashkenazi Israelis anyway have American passports and live mainly in LA. As a bonus, we can call every objector to this scheme, 'an anti-Semite'". From irimland@zundelsite.org Thu, 30 Aug 2001 14:11:23 -0700 Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2001 14:11:23 -0700 From: Ingrid Rimland irimland@zundelsite.org Subject: ZGram - 8/30/2001 - "Pleading words out of South Africa for the Palestinians" Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny August 30, 2001 Good Morning from the Zundelsite: Israel stands morally indicted before the eyes of the world! Here are the moving words from the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerances - sent to us from Mohamed S. Kamel - sherif@unforgettable.com ===== Address by Hanan Ashrawi Durban, South Africa August 28, 2001 Sisters and Brothers, From Jerusalem, from the heart of Palestine, a land besieged, and repeatedly violated by a most brutal Israeli military occupation, I have come to join you today. From the midst of the people of Palestine, a tortured nation, guilty only of an unwavering commitment to freedom, dignity, and independence, I have come to join you today. From the depths of unredeemed history, I have come to join you today. I represent a narrative of exclusion, denial, racism, and national victimization, but I also come with a message of hope, redemption, and historical vindication embodied in the spirit and the will of a people that has refused to succumb to all forces of oppression, violence, cruelty, and injustice. In convening this conference, you are the authentic embodiment of courage in withstanding the forces of domination, subjugation, and enslavement. We stand together today to launch a truly global mission of empowerment and solidarity, to give voice to the silenced, to give a reality to the invisible, to give recognition to the denied, and to give credence to the victimized. In times of adversity, and during the darkest nights of the soul, we look to you for affirmation and action as an antidote to the failure of established power systems, including governments - a failure characterized by self-interest, power politics, absence of will, and impotence. I take this opportunity to recognize before you those valiant men and women who had left the comfort of their homes in Europe and the US and joined us in Palestine to provide popular protection, a human shield in the face of Israeli abuses, violence, and violations against the Palestinian people. I come to you today with a heavy heart leaving behind a nation in captivity held hostage to an ongoing Nakba [catastrophe], as the most intricate and pervasive expression of persistent colonialism, apartheid, racism, and victimization. More than half a century ago [53 years], the Palestinians as a people were slated for national obliteration, cast outside the course of history, their identity denied, and their very human cultural and historical reality suppressed. We became victims of the myth of a land without a people for people without a land whereby the West sought to assuage its guilt over its horrendous anti-Semitism by the total victimization of a whole nation. Zionism sought to implement its agenda of exclusivity by usurping not only the lands and rights of the Palestinians, but also by confiscating their utterance and distorting their historical narrative. In 1948, we became subject to a grave historical injustice manifested in a dual victimization: on the one hand, the injustice of dispossession, dispersion, and exile forcibly enacted on the population that has come to be known as the refugee question that currently encompasses more than 5 million Palestinians. On the other hand, those that remained were subject to the systematic oppression and brutality of an inhuman occupation that robbed them of all their rights and liberties including their national identity on their own land. The creation of the state of Israel was no heroic and legendary accomplishment as depicted by the version of history propagated by the conquerors. It is time to lift the veil, to examine the facts themselves, and to come to grips with the horrific price paid by an innocent nation for the mere fact of its existence as well as for the greed and moral blindness of others. The days of denial must come to an end. The Palestinian people deserve their day in the sun as an equal among nations, and as a tribute to the human will that cannot be broken. As a Palestinian, as a woman, and on behalf of my people, I stand before you today to lay claim to my/to our humanity. From the "non-existent Palestinians - 'there is not such thing as Palestinians; they never existed' (Golda Meir, 1969) - we have undergone a metamorphosis willfully inflicted upon us by Israeli-imposed diction and policies that have variously depicted us as two-legged vermin, cockroaches, beasts walking on two legs, a people that have to be exterminated unless they are resigned to live as slaves, grasshoppers to be crushed, crocodiles, and vipers. [A comprehensive list with representative samples is available] Such a systematic and racist dehumanization was also accompanied by policies of violent expulsion. _____ 'There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries, not one village, not one tribe should be left' (Joseph Weitz, 1940). _____ 'There is no choice: the Arabs must make room for the Jews in Eretz Yisrael. If it was possible to transfer the Baltic peoples, it is also possible to move the Palestinian Arabs' (Vladimir Jabotinsky, 1939). _____ 'Zionist colonization must either be terminated or carried out against the wishes of the native population. It is important to speak Hebrew, but it is even more important to be able to shoot or else I am through at playing with colonizing' (Vladimir Jabotinsky, 1939). _____ 'We must do everything to insure they never return. The old will die and the young will forget.' (However, for those that remained in spite of all of Israels military coercion and attempts at forced expulsion, other (and equally sinister) plans were in the making): 'We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters.' (David Ben Gurion). To the rest of the world, we were reduced to the Aristotelian dualism of pity and fear - the pitiful refugees, of the fearful terrorists. But never were we perceived or addressed in the fullness of our humanity. The Palestinians today continue to be subject to multiple forms and expressions of racism, exclusion, oppression, colonialism, apartheid, and national denial. Our right to self-determination, hence sovereignty and statehood, has been withheld by force and made subject to the approval of our oppressor. The refugee populations, mostly stateless people, are bereft of the rudimentary civil, human, political, and national rights, left at the mercy of host countries that view them either as a demographic threat, or as unwelcome guests. While Israel has legislated a law of return to bring in Jews from all over the world into historical Palestine, it persists in rejecting the Palestinian refugees Right of Return and in refusing to abide by UN res. 194, a legal commitment which the international community was supposed to guarantee and implement. The Palestinians who remained in what has become Israel are experiencing in their historical homeland the worst system of apartheid, exclusion, and racial discrimination--their towns and cities either taken over entirely, or turned into ghettos and enclaves as the non-Jewish population of Israel. Many continue to be displaced persons in their own land, witnesses to the destruction of their villages. Over 500 villages were razed in the original ethnic cleansing campaign that accompanied the creation of the state of Israel. Those of us who came under Israeli occupation in 1967 have languished in the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip under a unique combination of military occupation, settler colonization, and systematic oppression. Rarely has the human mind devised such varied, diverse, and comprehensive means of wholesale brutalization and persecution. Since 1967, Palestinian land has been expropriated at an increasing pace, while whole Jewish populations have been brought in, in a calculated scheme of settler colonization. Throughout the land, an artificial and colonial grid of infrastructure was superimposed on our authentic reality to create a spurious settler superstructure as a means of Israeli demographic, geographic, and extraterritorial incursions into Palestine. So-called bypass roads for the exclusive use of the illegal Jewish settler population, tear through the heart of Palestinian land, to bypass Palestinian realities and create a unique form of racism. In the meantime, settler vigilantes habitually unleash the full force of their extremism and violence, carrying out campaigns of terror against defenseless Palestinian families and villages. Israels state terrorism is implemented by both military and settler perpetrators with political duplicity and legal impunity. Another unique manifestation of Israeli racism is the blatant and sinister policy of demographic engineering. To maintain the Jewish character, or the purity of the state of Israel, the Palestinians have been depicted and dealt with as a demographic threat. Proposed remedies included calls for forced birth control and population management, to transfer and expulsion of whole communities, to the racist and punitive unilateral separation scheme currently being advocated. In Jerusalem, land expropriation, ID confiscations, home demolitions, withholding of building permits, and the importation of settler colonies within and around the city have become constant elements of Israels demographic engineering through ethnic cleansing. Jerusalem is also under siege in an attempt to isolate it from its Palestinian context and environment, and to extricate it from the heart of Palestine, as the center of political, cultural, economic, social, and educational activity and as the future capital of our state. Such Israeli unilateral measures seek to consolidate Israels illegal annexation of occupied Jerusalem, and to impose a Jewish exclusivity on a Palestinian city that has always been pluralistic and tolerant. Onslaughts on Christian and Islamic holy sites and activities while banning Palestinian worshipers from reaching their holy places of worship betray a willful policy of intolerance and a violation of the right and freedom to worship. A state of siege has been imposed not only on the West Bank and Gaza, but also within these territories, to transform each village, town, and city into an isolated prison thereby destroying every aspect of human life, including economic, educational, health, and social cohesiveness in an attempt to sever every fiber of the fabric of normal life. Israeli occupation troops using tanks, helicopter gunships, F-16s, military barges, and checkpoints not only render a whole Palestinian population captive in 64 isolated bantustans, they also use the full force of their military power against a vulnerable and defenseless people. Daily, they shell Palestinian homes, assassinate Palestinian activists and leaders, destroy crops and fields, indulge in cold-blooded murder of children and other innocents while implementing a policy of deliberate humiliation and suffocation at every checkpoint. The Israeli occupation has also hijacked the concept of security rendering it applicable only to Israelis while depriving the Palestinians of every aspect of personal, political, legal, territorial, historical, cultural, economic, and even human security. As a blanket cover for its systematic abuses, Israel has also abused the essence of the concept, exploiting it for the sake of eradicating any mention of the occupation, and claiming the illogical right to have a secure or even a safe and pleasant military occupation that is in itself the very antithesis of peace, security, and human rights. As the world watches, Israel has succeeded in evolving and imposing another grand deception in the form of an official spin that not only dehumanizes and demonizes the Palestinians, but also as an attempt at blaming the victim and resuscitating labels that represent us as subhuman species, and genetically violent terrorists, hence undeserving of any human treatment. At best, a false symmetry is manufactured between occupier and occupied, oppressor and oppressed, (as in the call on both sides to stop the violence) serving to eradicate the full horror of the occupation while depriving the victims of their right to resist. Given the disequilibrium of power, the American insistence on a bilateral solution only serves to give Israel license to exploit the asymmetry of power and to pursue its policies of subjugating a whole nation and imposing a unilateral and unjust solution. The Israeli solution is firmly imbedded in the tainted mentality of occupation as license to dictate by force of arms illegal and punitive realities that would further exacerbate the conflict and the suffering of the Palestinian people. Refusal to intervene by the US and the international community as a whole has given Israel a free hand to continue to act with impunity and immunity as a country above the law and beyond accountability, while the Palestinians continue to be deprived of protection of the law and the minimal imperatives of moral and human decency. We continue to plead for a global rule of law that would check the aggression of the powerful, and eliminate the ongoing dehumanization of the Palestinian people. Such absence of will and abrogation of responsibility on the part of the international community has not only perpetuated the Nakba and prolonged the suffering and victimization of the Palestinian people, but has also served to undermine the quest and chances for peace throughout the region. When we joined the peace process launched in Madrid in 1991, we did so as an act of will, as a commitment to a peaceful resolution of the conflict with the aim of ending the occupation of 22% of historical Palestine and the establishment of our independent state on the territory occupied by Israel in 1967. As victims, we rose above the pain of the moment and reached out to our occupiers to wrench the course of history away from inevitable conflict, towards reconciliation based on justice and parity. Buttressed by the confidence of the peoples will to endure and resist oppression, as manifested in the intifada of 1987, we offered Israel and the world a unique opportunity to legitimize a daring pursuit of peace, and to gain a constituency for an equitable resolution. Unfortunately, the peace process became a punitive process manipulated by Israel to pursue its policies of expansion, ethnic cleansing, colonialism, and subjugation of the weaker side by force. It further served as a guise to rationalize the separation of the people from the land and to fragment both the people and the land, transforming the occupied Palestinian territories into a series of isolated reservations or Bantustans while maintaining full Israeli hegemony and direct control. While seeking to bestow retroactive legitimacy on illegal Israeli settlements, and on Israels annexation of Jerusalem by force, it also sought to negate the Palestinian refugees right of return thereby denying the very essence of peace and destroying its foundations. The so-called generous offer of Barak has been exposed for the sham that it is - an occupiers version of what's good for the natives, based only on what's good for Israel, thus ensuring further conflict and instability rather than cementing a fair and durable solution. Having been historically the victims of war and conflict, we found ourselves the victims of a flawed and unjust peace process. Sharons incursion into the Haram Al-Sharif on September 28, 2000, was only the calculated spark that ignited a powder keg already in place as a result of the inequities of the process itself. The use of live ammunition and lethal force against the unarmed Palestinian protestors unleashed horrific forces of hostility, racism, and orchestrated violence against the captive Palestinian people. The continued intensification of these measures sends an ominous and stark message of brutality and is symptomatic of the regression to fundamentalist Zionism witnessed in the bloodbaths of the 1940s. By claiming that this is the continuation of Israels War of Independence, Sharon is sending a message to the Palestinian people and to the whole world that the national eradication and the ethnic cleansing of the 1948 Nakba are still in process. The current Israeli government represents the most lethal combination of extremist right-wing political ideology, religious fundamentalism and zealotry, and unbridled forces of militarism with a deceptive veneer of the civilized face of the Labor party. Sharon is the same army general who had committed crimes against humanity in such atrocities as the Qibya massacre of 1953, the cleansing of Gaza in 1973, the invasion of Lebanon and the massacres of Sabra and Shatilla of 1982. Intent on pursuing this bloody path and on repeating the mistakes of history, Sharon has not learned that no amount of brutality, cruelty, or violence can break the will of a people determined to gain its freedom, dignity, and independence. He shows no signs of drawing the right historical conclusions that colonialism is by nature a temporary form of enslavement, and that a people colonized cannot be brought to their knees by the colonizers stifling measures of subjugation and containment. Sisters and brothers, I appeal to you today, to restore the absent Palestinians to the agenda of humanity, to validate our reality and rights, to recognize and alleviate the pain and suffering of this tortured nation, and to give recognition to the Palestinian narrative long denied. You are the only source of empowerment for a people who feel abandoned and disempowered, but who have never lost faith in human solidarity and a shared vision of emancipation. I appeal to you, as I have often done to governments and global fora, not to adopt the stance of cowardly neutrality, for in the struggle against oppression, injustice, racism, intolerance, colonialism, and exclusion, there can be NO neutrality. We are all called upon to take sides on behalf of the victim, the disenfranchised, and the oppressed, and to stem the tide of evil and prevent the forces of darkness from prevailing. Here, there is no US veto to deprive us of protection and our rights, nor is there censorship or blackmail to intimidate governments ruled by self- interest. Let this meeting radiate the pure light of the human spirit that can never be dimmed or contained. Our path to the future must be based on the redemption of history and the past, free of the shackles of inherited inequities. Our legacy to the future must be based on the rectification of the painful legacies of the past. Sisters and brothers, Never before has an occupation army imposed such a total and suffocating siege on a captive civilian population, then proceeded to shell their homes, bomb their infrastructure, assassinate their activists and leaders, destroy their crops and trees, murder their civilians at will, steal their lands, and then demand that they acquiesce like lambs to the slaughter. Never before have the victims been denied the right to articulate, and gain recognition for, the horrendous atrocities being committed against them as a matter of policy, but were rather blamed and punished for the fact of their victimization. On behalf of the Palestinian people I appeal to you to have the courage to intervene, to ensure that the oppressor is held accountable and the victim is protected, to enact those principles and values that not only protect lives but that also imbue life with the human qualities that make it worth living. Despite our overwhelming pain, we have not surrendered to the forces of occupation, colonization, racism, and dehumanization - nor have we adopted their moral distortions. I ask you also not to succumb, but to maintain and enhance the struggle for dignity, equality, freedom, and justice as an act of collective affirmation on behalf of humanity as a whole. ===== Thought for the Day: The United States has sacrificed its interests and betrayed its principles in its support of the state of Israel. The policy may be bad for the country, but it seems to be lucrative for our politicians. (Joseph Sobran)