- Peter,
-
- Sixteen or 20 physicians were put to execution by American
judges at Nuremberg. I have also heard of 50 physicians being executed.
- Here is a sample claim -- from http://www.auschwitz.dk/doctors.htm
-
- "At Auschwitz extermination was conducted on an
industrial scale with three million persons eventually killed through gassing,
starvation, shooting, and burning. Josef Mengele was the chief provider
for the gas chambers - and did well! When it was reported that one block
was infected with lice, Mengele solved the problem by gassing all the 750
women assigned to it. Mengele did a number of medical experiments of unspeakable
horror at Auschwitz, using twins. These twins as young as five years of
age were usually murdered after the experiment was over and their bodies
dissected."
-
- I submit that this is a total fabrication. Doctors would
not be used for such experimentation when doctors were so badly needed
for the war effort. The fact is that Auschwitz was a work camp, that Jews
were saved from death by the firebombing of German cities. The doctors
were murdered by the Nuremberg kangaroo court because they had spent years
acting as physicians for the Jews at Auschwitz. The claims about these
doctors are incredible and completely unsubstantiated. Many -- see below
-- are outrageously transparant lies.
- Here is what Asuchwitz really was: http://judicial-inc.biz/Auschwitz.htm
-
-
- Why were doctors sentenced to death and executed on June
2, 1948? The claims are the most outrageous propaganda to cover for the
elimination of these credible witnesses (doctors are humanitarians and
their testimony is highly credible) -- and so they had to be eliminated
in order to carry out the Holocaust propaganda, the Big Lie to cover up
the real crime of International Jewry in perpetrating monstrous crimes
behind both world wars.
-
- I notice that you have stopped putting anything from
me in your clipping service -- still I would like a personal reply. I also
notice that you write people off as "hardliners" and only favor
"the moderates" -- which kind of talk makes me suspect that in
your pride in your objectivity, the man with the opened mind, you have
allowed some dishonesty to enter in order to burnish that reputation in
the eyes of Zionists you want to impress. Still I like you and appreciate
all of the good information you send. I just don't expect you to be honest
on this subject any more. (Not knowing the reason behind this change of
course, I will not judge you for it.) I assume you also no longer think
that Israel could have been involved in 9-11?
-
- I don't post to be liked or disliked, to be though objective
and fair; to be considered a signficiant intellectual. I post to save billions
of innocent lives with the facts. And I think you are in conflict with
yourself regarding your own objectives.
- Here are some of the outrageous acusations against these
doctors that your position on the holocaust forces you to defend:
-
- "The defendants in this case are charged with murders,
tortures, and other atrocities committed in the name of medical science.
The victims of these crimes are numbered in the hundreds of thousands.
A handful only are still alive; a few of the survivors will appear in this
courtroom. But most of these miserable victims were slaughtered outright
or died in the course of the tortures to which they were subjected. For
the most part they are nameless dead. To their murderers, these wretched
people were not individuals at all. They came in wholesale lots and were
treated worse than animals."
-
- After almost 140 days of proceedings, including the testimony
of 85 witnesses and the submission of almost 1,500 documents, the American
judges pronounced their verdict on August 20, 1947. Sixteen of the doctors
were found guilty. Seven were sentenced to death. They were executed on
June 2, 1948.
-
- Exactly 50 years ago, the world learned of the moral
depravity of the 20 Nazi physicians who were tried and convicted in Nuremberg
for the part they played in the brutal human experiments at Auschwitz
-
- "To measure the limits of the human body, the Nazi
physicians subjected concentration-camp inmates to high-altitude experiments,
confining them in low-pressure chambers until their lungs exploded"
(Silverstein, 1996).
-
- "To discover the most effective way of rewarding
German pilots who had been downed in the North Sea, they immersed prisoners
in tanks of freezing water for hours, lowering their body temperatures
to 26 degrees" (Silverstein, 1996).
-
- "To gain specimens for their Jewish skeleton collection,
the Nazi physicians murdered and stripped the flesh from 100 Jewish prisoners"
(Silverstein, 1996).
-
- "To compare the effectiveness of vaccines, they
injected inmates with malaria, typhus,smallpox, cholera, and spotted fever"
(Silverstein, 1996).
- "They physician broke their subjects' bones and
then infected the wounds, fed them sea water until they had seizures and
suffered cardiac arrest, operated on them with out anesthesia, . . ."
(Silverstein, 1996).
-
- "Some bodies were dissected, and their brains sent
to research institutes, where scientists tried to determine the physical
causes of mental illness" (Fishkoff, 1996).
-
- "Aviram interviewed on woman who survived a killing
procedure as a small child, when she was brought along with other children
from a mental hospital to the Brandenburg euthanasia center, . . . [She
describes] a German nurse hurling German toddlers into the gas chamber,
while she herself dawdled over untying her bootlaces" (Fishkoff, 1996).
-
- Eva Mozes-Kor, the president of Children of Auschwitz:
Nazi Deadly Camp Lab Experiments Survivors (CANDLES), was, in her words,
"a human guinea pig in the Birkenau laboratory of Dr. Josef Mengele."
Dr. Mengele conducted experiments with twins in whom he would inject one
twin with a germ or disease, and if that twin died, they would kill the
other to compare organs at autopsy. "Mozes-Kor almost died after a
series of germ injections, but survived with her sister for liberation.
She provides this pointed description of atrocity, among others: "A
set of Gypsy twins was brought back from Mengele's lab after they were
sewn back to back. Mengele had attempted to create a Siamese twin by connecting
blood vessels and organs. The twins screamed day and night until gangrene
set in, and after three days, they died" (Tarantola, 1993).
-
- Silverstein, M. (1996, October 10). "When Ethics
Turned Evil: Symposium explores role of doctors in the Holocaust."
Jewish Exponent.
- Katz J. The consent principle of the Nuremberg Code:
its significance row and then. In: Annas GJ, Grodin MA, eds. The Nazi Doctors
and the Nuremberg Code. Human Rights in Human Experimentaticn. New York:
Oxford Univ pr; 1992:231-3.
- Moreno JD, Lederer SE. Revising the history of Cold War
research ethics Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal. 1996; 6:223-38.
-
- Tarantola, Daniel-Mann, Jonathan. (1993, January 1).
"Medical ethics and the Nazi legacy." World & I, Vol. 8,
p.358.
- Zukier, H. (1994). "The twisted road to genocide:
On the psychological
- Horst H. Freyhofer, The Nuremberg Medical Trial: The
Holocaust and the Origin of the Nuremberg Medical Code (Studies in Modern
European History, V. 53.)
- Alexander L. Medical science under dictatorship. N Engl
J Med. 1949; 241:39-47.
- Snell, M. (1993). "Germany's heart: The modern taboo."
New Perspectives Quarterly, pp. 1-20.
- Lerner BH, Rothman DJ. Medicine and the holocaus:: learning
more of the lessons. Ann Intern Med 1995; 122:793-4.
- Caplan AL, ed. When Medicine Went Mad. Totowa, NJ: Humana
Pr; 1992.
- Barondess JA. Medicine against society. Lessons from
the Third Reich. JAMA. 1966; 276:1657-61.
- Judgement and aftermath. In: Annas GJ, Grodin MA, eds.
The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human Rights in Human Experimentation.
New York: Oxford Univ Pr; 1992:102-3.
-
-
- The total number of deaths in conflicts since 1950 numbers
about 85,000,000 -- all with borrowed money.
-
-
- From: peter.myers@mailstar.net
- February 13, 2009
-
- (1) Collective Guilt
- (2) Mark Weber criticises Robert Faurisson as "irresponsible"
- (3) Kevin MacDonald on Irving/Lipstadt trial: "I
am not a Holocaust revisionist or denier"
- (4) Kevin MacDonald on Jewish sense of group endangerment
and historical grievance
- (5) MacDonald on Irving Trial: "Nor do I have any
reason to deny the reality of the Holocaust"
- (6) MacDonald on his Decision to Testify for Irving;
and on Lipstadt
- (7) "Polish report backs Leucher Report" -
IHR
- (8) Mark Singer on Leuchter - from Irving's website
- (9) The Van Pelt Report on the Leuchter Report - Irving/Lipstadt
trial transcript
-
-
- (1) Collective Guilt
-
- From: bill Date: 14.02.2009 04:25 PM
-
- Several of your correspondents have suggested that the
problem is a few bad Jews rather than the Jewish people collectively. I
beg to differ.
-
- From time immemorial, the Jews have been a plague on
every society that tolerated them. This has been true of no other race
of mankind. Other peoples have had their ups and downs, their pros and
cons. The Jews have been consistently evil throughout their history. This
is a fact which must never be forgotten in evaluating them. The Jews consistently
act as a collective, cohesive force in international affairs. Yet when
they are confronted with the evil they do, their apologists proclaim: "But
it is only a few bad apples!" I submit that the Jews cannot act as
a unified force "A people, one people!" (Theodore Herzl) and
then demand to be judged individually, as though they were not a people.
Collective guilt is not a concept which appeals to an Anglo-Saxon mind.
But here we are not dealing with Anglo-Saxons. Here we are dealing with
the oldest tribal mentality in existence. This people has expelled dissenters
and free thinkers throughout its history. It has no value above "Is
it good for the Jews?" For such a people to hide behind concepts of
individual guilt is a mask. It is a trick that should deceive no one.
-
- Collective guilt should be applied to the Jews. They
certainly apply it to their opponents. Punishment should be collective.
How else can the power and the evil of the Jews be broken? All communist,
zionist and socialist organizations should be declared "criminal organizations".
Their funds should be confiscated and their members sent to the gulags.
Individual guilt or innocence is irrelevant. The methods of the Jewish
commissars should be used in reverse. None of this is a proposal for National
Socialism. I find National Socialism offensive on many grounds, not the
least of which is that it was copycat Judaism. Hitler merely substituted
Germans for the master race rather than Jews. But to treat Jews as individuals,
the mere victims of their leaders, is fantasy. It does not describe the
reality of the unified Jewish international nation. It is a means of evading
a hard task, not a means of facing it.
-
- Reply (Peter M.):
-
- There are Jews who are neither Zionists nor promoters
of the Cultural Revolution (Open Border immigration, Gay Rights, Children's
Rights etc). Why should they be treated like the others? Can they help
having been born & raised in Jewish culture? In any case, even with
the Zionists and Trotskyists/Cultural Revolutionaries, the standard practice
(holding the leaders responsible, not the followers) should be followed.
Otherwise, apart from being unfair to innocent people, you go to extremes,
and become "the issue" yourself, because of those extreme measures.
Self-restraint is required, even in exasperating times.
-
-
- (2) Mark Weber criticises Robert Faurisson as "irresponsible"
-
- {Both Weber and Faurisson are Deniers. Weber is a moderate,
the sort of person that non-Deniers can talk with, whereas Faurisson is
a hardliner. Other hardliners took Weber to task for his recent paper}
-
- From: reportersnotebook <msantom629@aol.com> Date:
14.02.2009 06:19 PM
-
- Follow Up: A Reply to Critics of My Essay on the Relevance
of Holocaust Revisionism
-
- By Mark Weber
- Director, Institute for Historical Review
-
- February 13, 2009
-
- http://www.ihr.org/weber_revisionism_feb09.html
-
- My January 7 essay, How Relevant is Holocaust Revisionism?,
( http://www.ihr.org/weber_revisionism_jan09.html ) has generated a lot
of discussion, including a report in the nationally-distributed Jewish
community weekly Forward. ...
-
- In my essay I distanced myself from the efforts of some
revisionists to promote Holocaust revisionism for political purposes. Robert
Faurisson, for one, has been emphatic in spelling out a political agenda
for revisionism. In a recent interview with an Algerian newspaper ( http://www.globalfire.tv/nj/09en/history/faurisson_echorouk.htm
) he said:
-
- We all have the means to help in the liberation of Palestine.
These means consist in making known to the whole world the findings of
revisionist research. All credibility must be taken away from the alleged
`Holocaust, which has become the number one weapon of Zionism and the State
of Israel; this lie is the sword and shield of that State. It would be
absurd to try to defend against the Israelis military armament whilst sparing
their number one worldwide propaganda weapon.
-
- Whoever allows himself to claim that the alleged Nazi
gas chambers and the alleged genocide of the Jews are a historical reality
is, whether he likes it or not, giving support to a horrid lie that has
become the number one war propaganda weapon of the State of Israel, a colonialist,
racist and imperialist State. Let whoever has the nerve to support the
`Holocaust myth look at his hands. His hands are red with the blood of
Palestinian children!.
-
- In my view, such rhetoric is irresponsible. I do not
accept that the hands of Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer, Kevin MacDonald,
Norman Finkelstein, Mahathir Mohammed or George Galloway, to name just
a few who embrace the familiar Holocaust narrative, are red with the blood
of Palestinian children. ...
-
-
- (3) Kevin MacDonald on Irving/Lipstadt trial: "I
am not a Holocaust revisionist or denier"
-
- http://www.fpp.co.uk/HNet/Morse190500.html
-
- Kevin MacDonald on the Irving Trial[*]
-
- Posted on: H-NET List for Antisemitism<http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~antis/
-
- Author: Jonathan Morse
-
- May 10, 2000
-
- List Editor: Jonathan Morse
-
- In an off-list message, Jonathan Morse wrote:
-
- But you know what I'd really like to read from you? Not
one more of your "The trouble with you people" articles but something
personal about the Irving trial. After all, you've now testified before
an international readership on behalf of a man who has been shown in court
to be unquestionably a racist, otherwise a common scoundrel, and -- worst
of all, I should think, for your professional standing -- a falsifier of
data. At the risk of sounding like the 6 o'clock news, I'll ask the question:
How does that make you feel?
-
- [Kevin MacDonald:] Not good. A few days prior to the
verdict Irving sent me an email saying he was "moderately optimistic"
about the outcome, but that turned out to be wishful thinking. Immediately
after the verdict, I was very depressed about it, especially because of
the rather harsh and uncompromising language to be found in the opinion.
All the newspaper accounts emphasized that he had been found to be an anti-Semite
and a falsifier, and there is a sort of common sense suggestion that since
I voluntarily testified for him, I was in favor of these things as well.
I took heart from [Sir] John Keegan's Daily Telegraph column because he
clearly had the same ambivalence in deciding to testify. Keegan wrote:
-
- "As the trial date drew nearer, talk turned to the
question of who had been asked to give evidence. Eventually I was. I --
like others I knew -- declined. Earlier experiences had persuaded me that
nothing but trouble comes of taking sides over Irving. Decide against him,
and his associates accuse one of prejudice. On this occasion I was accused
of cowardice. Decide for him, and the smears start. I have written complimentary
reviews of Irving's work as a military historian to find myself posted
on the internet as a Nazi sympathiser."
-
- Since then I have become increasingly comfortable with
the decision, at least at the intellectual level. On the one hand I can
take solace in knowing that the issues that motivated me to testify (at
least at a conscious intellectual level--there may be some self-deception
here), were ratified by the judge's opinion. Judge Gray acknowledged that
there was a campaign by certain Jewish activist organizations to suppress
Irving's freedom of expression, and he implicitly acknowledged that Lipstadt
had gone too far in saying that no historian takes Irving seriously and
that he is no historian at all.
-
- On the other hand, my life right now is mainly devoted
to answering my critics with many more looming on the horizon. Recent local
publicity about my role in the trial has made life difficult at the face-to-face
level where I work where there have been calls for censorship, breaches
in long-time friendships, and letters to the president of the university
demanding that I be fired. And I am still ambivalent about the decision.
Before the trial, my only real doubt was when I read Richard Evans' highly
detailed charges against Irving on his use of sources etc. Frankly, when
I read the document, I felt that it was very unlikely Irving could win
if for no other reason than that the charges were so numerous and so detailed.
But Irving assured me he could deal with them, and in any case Evans' charges
were not really germane to the suppression of the Goebbels book.
-
- There is much fault to be found with Irving, just as
there is much of the same with many people and organizations whose free
speech is protected in this country. When the ACLU sued to allow Nazis
to march in Skokie, Illinois some years ago (as I recall), their actions
did not imply that they endorsed Nazi ideology, and that is certainly the
case with me. I am not a Holocaust revisionist or denier. As indicated
in a previous post here, I now accept that Irving has made anti-Semitic
statements. I also knew going in that, despite Irving's personal assurances
to the contrary, he did in fact associate with the political far right
and has pandered to the many right-wing groups that he addressed. In other
words, I had questions about his character, and nothing that occurred during
my stay in London or thereafter has changed my mind about that. I think
there is a natural tendency to want to shut such people up, especially
by those who see themselves as the target of his rhetoric. The suppression
of Irving's book, Goebbels, was a case of a publisher caving into pressure
from an activist group. However, one can agree with the goals of a group
without agreeing with the tactics, and in this case I think the tactics
of the ADL and Lipstadt's endorsement of those tactics raise serious questions.
(Just a few days ago the ADL was ordered to pay $10.5 million to a Denver-area
couple for invasion of privacy and unsubstantiated charges of anti-Semitism.)
As with the first amendment, academic freedom is not needed by those whose
views are (at a certain point in time) generally accepted. Standing up
for academic freedom means doing so precisely for those whose ideas are
distasteful to many.
-
- Kevin MacDonald ...
- http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd
-
- * Note, "Irving trial," not Lipstadt Trial.
. !
-
-
- (4) Kevin MacDonald on Jewish sense of group endangerment
and historical grievance
-
- {Holocaust Denial only reinforces that sense of danger,
and in consequence, separatism plus social avtivism eg supporting immigration
because "whites" are seen as, at best, "bystanders"
and, at worst, "perpetrators"}
-
- Understanding Jewish Influence I: Background Traits for
Jewish Activism
-
- Kevin MacDonald
-
- http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/UnderstandJI-1.htm
-
- ... A good start for thinking about Jewish ethnocentrism
is the work of Israel Shahak, most notably his co-authored Jewish Fundamentalism
in Israel.15 Present-day fundamentalists attempt to re-create the life
of Jewish communities before the Enlightenment (i.e., prior to about 1750).
During this period the great majority of Jews believed in Cabbala-Jewish
mysticism. Influential Jewish scholars like Gershom Scholem ignored the
obvious racialist, exclusivist material in the Cabbala by using words like
"men," "human beings," and "cosmic" to suggest
the Cabbala has a universalist message. The actual text says salvation
is only for Jews, while non-Jews have "Satanic souls."16
-
- The ethnocentrism apparent in such statements was not
only the norm in traditional Jewish society, but remains a powerful current
of contemporary Jewish fundamentalism, with important implications for
Israeli politics. For example, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel
Schneerson, describing the difference between Jews and non-Jews:
-
- We do not have a case of profound change in which a person
is merely on a superior level. Rather we have a case ofa totally different
species. The body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality
from the body of [members] of all nations of the world. The difference
of the inner quality [of the body]is so great that the bodies would be
considered as completely different species. This is the reason why the
Talmud states that there is an halachic difference in attitude about the
bodies of non-Jews [as opposed to the bodies of Jews]: "their bodies
are in vain". An even greater difference exists in regard to the soul.
Two contrary types of soul exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic
spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness.17
-
- This claim of Jewish uniqueness echoes Holocaust activist
Elie Wiesel's claim that "everything about us is different."
Jews are "ontologically" exceptional.18
-
- The Gush Emunim and other Jewish fundamentalist sects
described by Shahak and Mezvinsky are thus part of a long mainstream Jewish
tradition which considers Jews and non-Jews completely different species,
with Jews absolutely superior to non-Jews and subject to a radically different
moral code. Moral universalism is thus antithetical to the Jewish tradition
in which the survival and interests of the Jewish people are the most important
ethical goal:
-
- Many Jews, especially religious Jews today in Israel
and their supporters abroad, continue to adhere to traditional Jewish ethics
that other Jews would like to ignore or explain away. For example, Rabbi
Yitzhak Ginzburg of Joseph's Tomb in Nablus/Shechem, after several of his
students were remanded on suspicion of murdering a teenage Arab girl: "Jewish
blood is not the same as the blood of a goy." Rabbi Ido Elba: "According
to the Torah, we are in a situation of pikuah nefesh (saving a life) in
time of war, and in such a situation one may kill any Gentile." Rabbi
Yisrael Ariel writes in 1982 that "Beirut is part of the Land of Israel.
[This is a reference to the boundaries of Israel as stated in the Covenant
between God and Abraham in Genesis 15: 18-20 and Joshua 1 3-4]our leaders
should have entered Lebanon and Beirut without hesitation, and killed every
single one of them. Not a memory should have remained." It is usually
yeshiva students who chant "Death to the Arabs" on CNN. The stealing
and corruption by religious leaders that has recently been documented in
trials in Israel and abroad continues to raise the question of the relationship
between Judaism and ethics.19
-
- Moral particularism in its most aggressive form can be
seen among the ultranationalists, such as the Gush Emunim, who hold that
-
- Jews are not, and cannot be a normal people. The eternal
uniqueness of the Jews is the result of the Covenant made between God and
the Jewish people at Mount Sinai. The implication is that the transcendent
imperatives for Jews effectively nullify moral laws that bind the behavior
of normal nations. Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, one of Gush Emunim's most prolific
ideologues, argues that the divine commandments to the Jewish people "transcend
the human notions of national rights." He explains that while God
requires other nations to abide by abstract codes of justice and righteousness,
such laws do not apply to Jews.20
-
- As argued in the second paper in this series, it is the
most extreme elements within the Jewish community that ultimately give
direction to the community as a whole. These fundamentalist and ultranationalist
groups are not tiny fringe groups, mere relics of traditional Jewish culture.
They are widely respected by the Israeli public and by many Jews in the
Diaspora. They have a great deal of influence on the Israeli government,
especially the Likud governments and the recent government of national
unity headed by Ariel Sharon. The members of Gush Emunim constitute a significant
percentage of the elite units of the Israeli army, and, as expected on
the hypothesis that they are extremely ethnocentric, they are much more
willing to treat the Palestinians in a savage and brutal manner than are
other Israeli soldiers. All together, the religious parties represent about
25% of the Israeli electorate21-a percentage that is sure to increase because
of the high fertility of religious Jews and because intensified troubles
with the Palestinians tend to make other Israelis more sympathetic to their
cause. Given the fractionated state of Israeli politics and the increasing
numbers of the religious groups, it is unlikely that future governments
can be formed without their participation. Peace in the Middle East therefore
appears unlikely absent the complete capitulation or expulsion of the Palestinians.
...
-
- The profound depths of Jewish ethnocentrism are intimately
tied up with a sense of historical persecution. Jewish memory is a memory
of persecution and impending doom, a memory that justifies any response
because ultimately it is Jewish survival that is at stake:
-
- Wherever we look, we see nothing but impending Jewish
destruction. I was walking across the beautiful square in Nuremberg a couple
of years ago and stopped to read a public sign. It told this story: During
the Middle Ages, the town governing body, wishing to clear space for a
square, burned out, burned down, and burned up the Jews who had formerly
filled up the space. End of story. After that, I felt very uneasy walking
through the square and I eventually stopped doing it. I felt endangered,
of course, a woman going about through Germany wearing a star of David.
But more than that, I experienced a conspicuous and dreadful self-reproach
at being so alive, so happily on vacation, now that I had come to think
about the murder of my people hundreds of years before. After reading that
plaque I stopped enjoying myself and began to look for other signs and
traces of the mistreatment of the former Jewish community. If I had stayed
longer in Nuremberg, if I had gone further in this direction, I might soon
have come to believe that I, personally, and my people, currently, were
threatened by the contemporary Germans eating ice cream in an outdoor cafe
in the square. How much more potent this tendency for alarm must be in
the Middle East, in the middle of a war zone!
-
- Notice the powerful sense of history here. Jews have
a very long historical memory. Events that happened centuries ago color
their current perceptions.
-
- This powerful sense of group endangerment and historical
grievance is associated with a hyperbolic style of Jewish thought that
runs repeatedly through Jewish rhetoric. Chernin's comment that "any
negativity, criticism, or reproach, even from one of our own, takes on
exaggerated dimensions" is particularly important. In the Jewish mind,
all criticism must be suppressed because not to do so would be to risk
another Holocaust: "There is no such thing as overreaction to an anti-Semitic
incident, no such thing as exaggerating the omnipresent danger. Anyone
who scoffed at the idea that there were dangerous portents in American
society hadn't learned 'the lesson of the Holocaust.' "23 Norman Podhoretz,
editor of Commentary, a premier neoconservative journal published by the
American Jewish Committee, provides an example:
-
- My own view is that what had befallen the Jews of Europe
inculcated a subliminal lesson. The lesson was that anti-Semitism, even
the relatively harmless genteel variety that enforced quotas against Jewish
students or kept their parents from joining fashionable clubs or getting
jobs in prestigious Wall Street law firms, could end in mass murder.24
-
- This is a "slippery slope" argument with a
vengeance. The schema is as follows: Criticism of Jews indicates dislike
of Jews; this leads to hostility toward Jews, which leads to Hitler and
eventually to mass murder. Therefore all criticism of Jews must be suppressed.
With this sort of logic, it is easy to dismiss arguments about Palestinian
rights on the West Bank and Gaza because "the survival of Israel"
is at stake. Consider, for example, the following advertisement distributed
by neoconservative publicist David Horowitz:
-
- The Middle East struggle is not about right versus right.
It is about a fifty-year effort by the Arabs to destroy the Jewish state,
and the refusal of the Arab states in general and the Palestinian Arabs
in particular to accept Israel's existence. The Middle East conflict is
not about Israel's occupation of the territories; it is about the refusal
of the Arabs to make peace with Israel, which is an expression of their
desire to destroy the Jewish state.25
-
- "Survival of Israel" arguments thus trump concerns
about allocation of scarce resources like water, the seizure of Palestinian
land, collective punishment, torture, and the complete degradation of Palestinian
communities into isolated, military-occupied, Bantustan-type enclaves.
The logic implies that critics of Israel's occupation of the West Bank
and Gaza also favor the destruction of Israel and hence the mass murder
of millions of Jews. ...
-
- (5) MacDonald on Irving Trial: "Nor do I have any
reason to deny the reality of the Holocaust"
-
- http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/Slate.htm
-
- After a great deal of consideration, I decided to testify
on behalf of David Irving whose libel trial against Deborah Lipstadt has
received a great deal of international attention. My decision to testify
resulted in a column by Judith Shulevitz of Slate, the internet magazine,
condemning me as "Evolutionary Psychology's Anti-Semite." ...
-
- The charge of anti-Semitism is a serious one because
of the long and tragic history of the Jews and because the reverberations
of that history permeate contemporary life. I consider myself a student
of Judaism and anti-Semitism and would like to think that I have attempted
a fair-minded and accurate account of these phenomena. Nor do I have any
reason to deny the reality of the Holocaust. In Separation and Its Discontents
I define anti-Semitism as "negative attitudes or behavior directed
at Jews because of their group membership" (p. 1). By this definition
I am not an anti-Semite. I do not think ill of Jews simply because of their
group membership. I am unequivocally not an anti-Semite. Unfortunately,
some who may disagree with my scientific work evidently interpret my findings
as indicative of personal prejudice. My science may be proven wrong. I
welcome the standard scientific gauntlet. I reject the accusation of personal
prejudice. By the same logic, I testified in the trial that I had no reason
to suppose that David Irving is an anti-Semite, and it was this definition
that I had in mind. At the same time, Irving is clearly quite hostile toward
the Jewish organizations that have attempted to ruin his career, and I
would be disingenuous if I denied that I am also deeply troubled by the
tactics of some of these organizations. My testimony in the trial largely
involved going over passages in a lengthy document provided by Irving that
was filled with newspaper accounts and internal documents of Jewish organizations
detailing this campaign against him. This testimony was not contested by
the defense.
-
- A post-trial aside: Having read the relevant section
of Judge Gray's opinion, I agree that Irving's "words are directed
against Jews, either individually or collectively, in the sense that they
are by turns hostile, critical, offensive and derisory in their references
to semitic people, their characteristics and appearances." It is noteworthy
that Judge Gray also made the following comment in his opinion:
-
- I have more sympathy for Irving's argument that Jews
are not immune from his criticism. He said that he was simply expressing
legitimate criticisms of them. Irving gave as an example what he claimed
was his justified criticism of the Jews for suppressing his freedom of
expression. [KM: obviously this was a major concern for me.] Another legitimate
ground of criticism might be the manner in which Jews in certain parts
of the world appear to exploit the Holocaust. I agree that Jews are as
open to criticism as anyone else. But it appears to me that Irving has
repeatedly crossed the divide between legitimate criticism and prejudiced
vilification of the Jewish race and people. I can well understand too that,
because of his perceived views, Irving and his family have from time to
time been subjected to extreme pressure, for example when his flat house
was besieged by rioters in 1994.... In the heat of the moment ill-considered
remarks are often made. But it is in just such circumstances that racial
prejudice manifests itself. s that racial prejudice manifested. In my view
that is what occurred in 1994.
-
- In other words, Irving's attitude toward Jews was a mixture
of legitimate grievances and illegitimate generalizations about Jews as
a group. (I was not aware of the latter when I made my statement in court.)
Perhaps he is a textbook case of the social identity theory of anti-Semitism
presented in Separation and Its Discontents: a complex interplay between
fantasy and reality in which real aspects of actual conflict become exaggerated
and over-generalized as a result of evolved psychological mechanisms. ...
==
-
- (6) MacDonald on his Decision to Testify for Irving;
and on Lipstadt
-
- http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/slate-tooby.html#My%20Decision%20to%20Testify%20for
-
- The decision to testify for David Irving was an agonizing
one for me and I want to make clear exactly why I did so.
-
- Irving approached me to testify in the trial because
I had included the suppression of his book on Goebbels as an example of
Jewish tactics for combating anti-Semitism in Separation and Its Discontents.
Actually the suppression of Irving goes far beyond what I included in my
book. Irving has been prevented from publishing his original archival research,
from traveling to several countries, and even from giving lectures. The
second defendant in the case, Deborah Lipstadt, has contributed to this
effort at censorship. My statement to the court and my entire testimony
in court involved this issue, not the Holocaust or the culpability of Hitler.
Irving's book on Goebbels was rescinded by St. Martin's Press not because
of its scientific merit. (It had passed their review process.) The effort
to pressure St. Martin's press was spearheaded by certain Jewish ethnic
activist organizations, especially the Anti-Defamation League and by newspaper
columnists, such as Frank Rich of the New York Times, who are not professional
historians, and by people like Deborah Lipstadt who do not have the expertise
to evaluate a manuscript on Goebbels. In other words, the effort occurred
independently of the analytic content of the manuscript and was therefore
an illegitimate intrusion on free speech. This is part of a pattern in
which certain Jewish activist organizations have attempted to prevent the
publication of writings conflicting with their constructions of reality,
including books critical of Israel (see Wilcox, 1996; Separation and Its
Discontents, Ch. 2 and 6), and they have condemned books, such as those
by Hannah Arendt and Arno Mayer that take disapproved positions on certain
aspects of the Holocaust (Guttenplan, 2000). ...
-
- I was also swayed by finding that Lipstadt is a Jewish
ethnic activist whose own writings have been criticized by a well-recognized
historian as exaggerating the role of anti-Semitism in the Western response
to the Holocaust during World War II. Lipstadt is thus part of a pattern
discussed extensively in Separation And Its Discontents in which some (but
by no means all) Jewish historians engage in ethnocentric interpretations
of history. It is highly significant that Lipstadt's book Denying the Holocaust
was written with extensive aid from various Jewish activist organizations,
including the ADL. Lipstadt's book was commissioned and published by The
Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism of the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In her acknowledgements, she credits the
research department of the Anti-Defamation league, the Simon Wiesenthal
Center, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Institute for Jewish Affairs
(London), the Canadian Jewish Congress, and the American Jewish Committee'all
activist organizations.
-
- Lipstadt is the Chair of the Institute for Jewish Studies
at Emory University. Historian Jacob Katz finds that academic departments
of Jewish studies are often linked to Jewish nationalism: "The inhibitions
of traditionalism, on the one hand, and a tendency toward apologetics,
on the other, can function as deterrents to scholarly objectivity"
(p. 84). The work of Jewish historians exhibits "a defensiveness that
continues to haunt so much of contemporary Jewish activity" (1986,
85). Similarly the preeminent scholar of the Jewish religion, Jacob Neusner,
notes that "scholars drawn to the subject by ethnic affiliation'Jews
studying and teaching Jewish things to Jews' turn themselves into ethnic
cheer-leaders. The Jewish Studies classroom is a place where Jews tell
Jews why they should be Jewish (stressing "the Holocaust" as
a powerful reason) or rehearse the self-evident virtue of being Jewish."
(Times Literary Supplement, March 5, 1999).
-
- Perhaps the best indication of Lipstadt's Jewish activism
is that she serves as Senior Editorial Contributor at the Jewish Spectator,
a Jewish publication for conservative, religiously observant Jews. Her
column, Tomer Devorah (Hebrew: Under Deborah's Palm Tree), appears in every
issue and touches on a wide range of Jewish issues, including anti-Semitism,
relations among Jews, and interpreting religious holidays. In her column
she has advocated greater understanding and usage of Hebrew to promote
Jewish identification, and, like many Jewish ethnic activists, she is strongly
opposed to intermarriage. "We must say to young people 'intermarriage
is something that poses a dire threat to the future of the Jewish community.'
" Lipstadt writes that Conservative Rabbi Jack Moline was "very
brave" for saying that number one on a list of ten things Jewish parents
should say to their children is "I expect you to marry a Jew."
She suggests a number of strategies to prevent intermarriage, including
trips to Israel for teenagers and subsidizing tuition at Jewish day schools
(Jewish Spectator, [Fall, 1991], 63).
-
- In his recent book, The Holocaust in American Life, historian
Peter Novick clearly thinks of Lipstadt as an activist, although not as
extreme as some. He repeatedly cites her as an example of a Holocaust propagandizer.
He notes that in her book Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming
of the Holocaust 1933-1945, Lipstadt says Allied Policy "bordered
on complicity" motivated by "deep antipathy" toward "contemptible
Jews." Novick says that while there is no scholarly consensus on the
subject, "most professional historians agree that "the comfortable
morality tale ... is simply bad history: estimates of the number of those
who might have been saved have been greatly inflated, and the moralistic
version ignores real constraints at the time" (Novick, 1999, 48).
Novick characterizes Lipstadt as attributing the failure of the press to
emphasize Jewish suffering as motivated by "willful blindness, the
result of inexcusable ignorance'or malice" (p. 65) despite the fact
that the concentration camp survivors encountered by Western journalists
(Dachau, Buchenwald) were 80% non-Jewish. Lipstadt is described as an implacable
pursuer of Nazi war criminals, stating that she would "prosecute them
if they had to be wheeled into the courtroom on a stretcher" (p. 229).
In a discussion of the well-recognized unreliability of eye-witness testimony,
Novick writes: "When evidence emerged that one Holocaust memoir, highly
praised for its authenticity, might have been completely invented, Deborah
Lipstadt, who used the memoir in her teaching of the Holocaust, acknowledged
that if this turned out to be the case, it 'might complicate matters somewhat,'
but insisted that it would still be 'powerful as a novel.' " Truth
is less important than the effectiveness of the message.
-
- The intrusion of ethnocentrism into historical scholarship
is a well-recognized problem in Jewish historiography, discussed at length
in Separation and Its Discontents. Historians such as Jacob Katz (1986)
and Albert Lindemann (1997) have noted that this type of behavior is commonplace
in Jewish historiography. A central theme of Katz's analysis 'massively
corroborated by Albert Lindemann's recent work, Esau's Tears' is that historians
of Judaism have often falsely portrayed the beliefs of gentiles as irrational
fantasies while portraying the behavior of Jews as irrelevant to anti-Semitism.
To quote the well-known political scientist, Michael Walzer: "Living
so long in exile and so often in danger, we have cultivated a defensive
and apologetic account, a censored story, of Jewish religion and culture"
(Walzer 1994, 6).
-
- The salient point for me is that Jewish historians who
have been reasonably accused of bringing an ethnocentric bias to their
writing nevertheless are able to publish their work with prestigious mainstream
academic and commercial publishers, and they often obtain jobs at prestigious
academic institutions. A good example is Daniel Goldhagen. In his written
submission to the court on behalf of Deborah Lipstadt, historian Richard
Evans, describes Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, as a book which
argues "in a crude and dogmatic fashion that virtually all Germans
had been murderous antisemites since the Middle Ages, had been longing
to exterminate the Jews for decades before Hitler came to power, and actively
enjoyed participating in the extermination when it began. The book has
since been exposed as a tissue of misrepresentation and misinterpretation,
written in shocking ignorance of the huge historical literature on the
topic and making numerous elementary mistakes in its interpretation of
the documents."
-
- These are exactly the types of accusations leveled by
Lipstadt at Irving. Yet Goldhagen maintains a position at Harvard University;
he is lionized in many quarters and his work has been massively promoted
in the media while his critics have come under pressure from Jewish activist
organizations (Guttenplan, 2000).
-
- I should say, however, that after I agreed to testify
on behalf of Irving, I was horrified to read the report written by Cambridge
University historian Richard Evans and several research associates on Irving.
This massive report, written on behalf of the defense, is a scathing summary
of alleged misrepresentations and misinterpretations by Irving spanning
over his entire career. I expressed my reservations to Irving and he assured
me that he would be able to defend himself against these allegations (see
Appendix). He stated that "I have a clean conscience, but I am not
sure how to bring that across" and then provided me with several detailed
examples where the Evans report misrepresented his writings. As a result,
I felt that he was playing by the rules of scholarly discourse. Nevertheless,
the judge clearly agreed with Evans that Irving had indeed engaged in scholarly
malfeasance, and I have no reason to doubt his judgment on this matter.
...
-
- (7) "Polish report backs Leucher Report" -
IHR
-
- From: Rolando Lequeux <lequeuxr@gmail.com> Date:
13.02.2009 06:03 PM
-
- This might deserve being read and pondered upon.
-
- An official Polish report on the Auschwitz 'gas chambers'
-
- http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v11/v11p207_Staff.html
-
- An official Polish report on the Auschwitz 'gas chambers'
-
- Krakow Forensic Institute Confirms Leuchter's Findings
-
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