Remarkable nonsense

• Terrorists distort and defile message of the Koran

By PAUL JACKSON ([email protected])

The Calgary Sun ([email protected])| August 26, 2001

I look at the photograph on my wall and see a marvelous picture of Yitshak Rabin and I shaking hands, and I finger the Star of David medallion given me by Benjamin Netanyahu.

Jewish friends from Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa phone and e-mail me and tell as to how they fear walking down the streets, sitting in sidewalk cafes, or going to the theatre.

Nowhere is safe.

Living in Israel today is like living in Nazi Germany.

It’s open-season on the Jewish people, and, as in Nazi Germany, the world apparently doesn’t care.

Didn’t we learn from our indifference to the Holocaust?

Apparently not.

Just as Nazi mobs raged through the streets of Germany smashing the windows of Jewish stores and beating up Jewish men, women and children, so the terrorists of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad tear apart the bodies and lives of Israelis today.

[…]

Jackson, associate editor of the Sun, can be reached at ([email protected])

Letters to the editor should be sent to ([email protected])

(A new sign at the Auschwitz main camp.)
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OUTRAGE AT ISRAEL CONCERT

By BILL HOFFMANN

July 9, 2001

A world-famous conductor has broken a decades-old Israeli taboo by playing a piece by Richard Wagner, an anti-Semite who was Hitler’s favorite composer.

Daniel Barenboim, who is Jewish, stunned the crowd at the Israel Festival in Jerusalem when he announced, “I’m now going to play a piece from Wagner’s opera ‘Tristan and Isolde.'”

He invited anybody who was offended by the choice to leave, prompting protesters to bang doors and shout, “Go home!” “Fascist!” and “Juden raus!” — which means “Jews out!” in German.

Jerusalem’s Mayor Ehud Olmert slammed Barenboim’s move as “brazen, arrogant, uncivilized and insensitive.”

Ephraim Zuroff, Israel director of the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center, said what Barenboim did amounted to “cultural rape.”

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said: “I would rather it hadn’t been played. There are a lot of people in Israel for whom this issue is very hard, and it is perhaps still too early.” With Post Wire Services

The Secret History of World War II

• This series sheds new light on key events of World War II. The stories are based on some of the more than 3 million files declassified under a 1999 executive order.

By Mark Fritz

Globe Staff

July 1, 2001

COLLEGE PARK, Md. — A newly discovered document that reads like a rough draft of the Final Solution provides the earliest evidence yet that the United States knew the Nazis planned to eradicate the Jews, and that Hitler’s executioners vowed to speed the slaughter “in proportion to the USA increasing its attacks on the Reich.”

The November 1941 document, a pilfered German order sent to Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, clearly signals Hitler’s intent to broaden the persecution, plunder, and ultimate extermination of Jews. It also suggests that the US entry into the war influenced the timetable for terminating an entire people.

[…]

The commission plans to release a report on the significance of the document this week.

[…]

Most of the new documents in this country are from the OSS. They literally recreate the war in real time, with the persecution of Jews unfolding amid global chaos and killings of every conceivable kind. The flimsy narrative that surfaces early in the records comes to a screaming climax with the 1945 liberation of the death camps and the OSS interrogations of German guards who ripped off prisoners’ ears for entertainment, and of Nazi doctors who removed vital organs, then sewed the patients back up just to see what would happen.

[…]

Revelations that were treated at the time with considerable skepticism proved tragically true when Allied troops found evidence that Jews were baked in ovens, gassed in showers, starved into sickness, worked to death, and bulldozed into holes. […] A majority of Soviet soldiers defeated by the Nazis in battle were executed rather than held as POWs.

[…]

Jews deported to Poland and Terezin were sent there to be killed, Breitman said, and American diplomats suspected as early as late 1941 that Jews deported to the East were to be annihilated.

[…]

Mark Fritz’s email address is [email protected]

Holocaust Survivors Visit School

By JASON STRAIT, Associated Press Writer

Thursday May 24 4:06 AM ET

WHITWELL, Tenn. (AP) — For two years, students at Whitwell Middle School collected paper clips with the goal of reaching 6 million — one for each Jew killed in the Holocaust.

On Wednesday, as they wrapped up a project that had far exceeded their expectations, they began putting faces and names with the statistics through firsthand accounts from survivors of the Nazi concentration camps of World War II.

Rachel Gleitman, now 77 and among four survivors who traveled from New York to the school in southeast Tennessee, told the students how close she came to being a victim of the Holocaust.

She recalled standing in a gas chamber at Auschwitz with her sister and aunt, but the gas never came. Years later she learned that only a mechanical error had spared their lives.

“I remember getting goose bumps right here,” said Gleitman, touching her chest over her heart. “I was in that group.”

Bernie Igielski, another survivor, said he narrowly avoided being sent to a crematorium three times and finally escaped during a two-mile death march to a gas chamber. […]

Holocaust Education Assistance Act (Introduced in the House)

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