with an afterword by Michael A. Hoffman II
January 24, 2008: Professor Faurisson in police custody for questioning and a search of his home.
Retired University of Lyon Professor Robert Faurisson resides in the central French town of Vichy. At 9 AM on January 24 he answered a summons to appear at the local police station. No sooner had he arrived than he was notified by three senior police officers, sent from Paris the day before, that he was now in their custody for questioning and that a search of his house would be carried out.
Some background: In December, 2006, the French President at that time, Jacques Chirac, publicly called for an investigation into Dr. Faurisson's participation in the conference in Tehran, Iran on "the Holocaust" (December 11 and 12, 2006).
That conference was open to all, including revisionists. A British subject before he became a French citizen, Professor Faurisson spoke to the audience in Tehran in English. Faurisson is a specialist in "the appraisal of texts and documents (literature, history, media)." He briefly sketched for the benefit of those in attendance in Iran, the results of his research on "the Holocaust". His address was titled, "The Victories of Revisionism". In it he didn't conceal his belief that the more revisionism gained ground, particularly on the Internet, the more revisionists would face repression, first by being smeared in the media, and then at the hands of the police and the law courts.
After President Chirac's announcement, the French Minister of Justice put a Paris prosecutor in charge of the investigation demanded by one who, dubbed "Superliar" by French television, was now anxious to come to the aid of an imperiled "Superlie".
On April 16, 2007, French Police Lieutenant Séverine Besse and a colleague of hers were sent to Vichy to question the professor. But to each of their queries he was to reply stubbornly: "No answer", and he had them put down the following statement in their official record: "I refuse to collaborate with the French police and justice system in the repression of historical revisionism".
Nine months later, on January 24, 2008, the thought police re-offended. In the meantime an examining magistrate, Marc Sommerer, was assigned to Faurisson's case. He dispatched the same Lieutenant Séverine Besse to Vichy, accompanied this time by two officers of the Judicial Police (Police Judiciaire, "OPJ").
Lieutenant Besse made it known to Professor Faurisson that he was henceforth in custody for questioning and that after a session with them in a room in the police station his house would be searched.
There followed a bodily search, confiscation of his wallet and change purse, pen, watch and… belt (whereas the chances are nil of a man of nearly 79 hanging himself in a police station office in the presence of three officers). In fact, it was all probably just his interrogators' way of trying to intimidate a notorious recalcitrant, whose wife, as the police are aware, is, for serious medical reasons, in need of his constant presence.
However, with the stubbornness of a Scottish mother's son (Dr. Faurisson is half-Scottish) Faurisson persisted in replying "No answer" to every question the police put to him. He reiterated his refusal to collaborate with the police and the justice system against revisionism.
Then he was told that he was the target not of one but of three penal actions that had led to the issuing of as many warrants by examining magistrate Sommerer.
The first two cite the professor directly for his participation in the Tehran conference; while another of these, originating both from the prosecution service and from a slew of pious organisations, attacked him for "disputing crimes against humanity" (under the Fabius-Gayssot law of 1990); the other, from the LICRA (Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l'antisémitisme), charged him with "defamation". The third action, tortuously worded, was brought "against persons unknown" by the daily Libération for the "pirating" of one of its pieces in the review Dubitando where, the police officers said, twenty of the professor's articles had appeared.
Dr. Faurisson was then taken to his home. The three OPJ officers and a Vichy policewoman proceeded with the search of his house. They drew a blank. They discovered neither the coveted computer nor, in a mountain of documents, the papers sought. At the end, towards 3 PM, the professor, making careful note of the three officers' names, affirmed to them, as he'd had occasion to do before judges in court: "It may turn out that your existence will be noted in history only insofar as I'll have mentioned your names and according to how I'll have mentioned you".
On January 25, the day after this six-hour arrest for interrogation, and the search of his house, R. Faurisson celebrated his 79th birthday, remembering those revisionist friends of his who were already in prison or who risked finding themselves there before long.
He had a special thought for the heroic Vincent Reynouard, a father of seven. Ten years ago this mathematics teacher, revered by his pupils, was kicked out of the state school system in France for the "crime" of writing and speaking revisionist thoughts about the alleged homicidal gas chambers of WWII; at present his living conditions are more precarious than ever, but he nonetheless continues to perform copious research and regularly produces revisionist writings. He stands up defiantly in person to the courts where the judges, noting his resolve, deny him the right to make a defense grounded in the substance of the case as he sees it, and they sentence him with increasing severity; prison awaits him.
Faurisson would also be thinking of his fellow revisionists imprisoned in either Austria or Germany, for example Ernst Zündel, Germar Rudolf, Wolfgang Fröhlich, Gerd Honsik and former defense attorney Silvia Stolz, "the German Joan of Arc".
Over the past nearly sixty years, the list of revisionists who have paid with their tranquillity, their health, their freedom and, sometimes, their lives for an attachment to the freedom of thought, the freedom of research (which, in history, should not see itself assigned any limits) and, finally, the freedom of expression, has grown very long indeed. At age 79, Robert Faurisson continues to be caught within the wheels of this machine.
MICHAEL HOFFMAN'S AFTERWORD: This inquisition is conducted without disapprobatory editorial comment from the moralists so quick to decry Muslim censorship and repression. Why is this? In reading Dr. Faurisson's compatriot, Pierre Bayle, in his encyclopedic "Dictionary" of the history of ideas (which Thomas Jefferson nominated as one of the one hundred indispensable works of the early Library of Congress), we encounter Bayle's account of the persecution of the Anabaptists. Europe in the twenty-first century imagines itself far superior to the Protestant and Catholic churches of that European era, all of whom (not just the Catholic) ruled that Anabaptists who suffered and died for their faith were not really martyrs, since they were of the wrong faith.
Incredibly, across the expanse of four centuries, this ecclesiastical category remains intact in the otherwise agnostic and "liberated" post-modern Europe. The reason that Faurisson can be persecuted in France without protest from the mandarins of western liberal conscience, is that in their view, he is not a martyr to freedom of speech because he is of the wrong epistemology.
Consequently, whatever is done to him, however disgraceful, including invading his home, jailing and fining him, hounding and bankrupting him, is no proper subject for liberal indignation. The Church still rules in France, but a Church sans Christ, sans the Gospels, sans mercy, justice and decency, but a type of Church nonetheless; a counter-church actually, with repression more onerous than in the original. The original Church did not hide its repression of heretics behind democratic euphemisms.
Those writers and filmmakers who are victimized by Muslim radicals in Europe are worthy of commemoration and veneration by the West, by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and the New York Times, because they have the correct faith: abhorrence of Islam. The heretic R. Faurisson, however, even in his old age, is fair game for government repression. The thought police and the judges and politicians who dispatch them, may do with him as they please.
www.RevisionistHistory.org
***
Monday, January 28, 2008
A Policy Statement from the Cryptocracy
Waving Goodbye to Hegemony
By Parag Khanna
New York Times Sunday Magazine | January 27, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/magazine/27world-t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=print
The following is from a much longer article in the Sunday NY Times Magazine which mirrors the views of the non-Zionist (or less Zionist than thou) faction within the Cryptocracy and which this writer regards as a major statement of its views.
The writer, Parag Khanna, is too smart to diss the Israelis by name, but by omitting them altogether and barely making any reference to the "Islamic terror menace," he sends a transparent message that the Bush administration's obsession with the apocalyptic requirements of Israeli colonialism and rabbinic religious zealotry have severely diminished America's standing in the world, even as Asia, and in particular China, not burdened with mystical rapture-Talmudism and war-Zionism, are aggressively using the realities of business and finance to conquer the planet.
Khanna, simply by leaving the supposed "global scourge of Islamic radicalism" out of his analysis, demonstrates that the threat has been inflated out of all proportion, commensurate with the Israeli need to be on a perpetual war-footing with the Arab and Muslim world, a policy that makes no business sense for America whatsoever.
I recommend that you read Khanna's article in its entirety. I am singling out a couple of paragraphs from it here in this column in order to underscore the depth of the Cryptocracy's antipathy toward Russia, as well as Khanna's hard-nosed assessment of Russia's future prospects (unless Russia's men and women will voluntarily increase their nation's birthrate dramatically).
But Russia as a world power must go, in the eyes of the Cryptocracy, at least until such time as its current anti-Zionist and pro-Christian orientation is discarded. By "Christian" I am denominating not the anti-Biblical dispensationalist innovation that has taken control of fundamentalist American Protestantism in the past 70 years, but the much older, traditional Christianity which is reluctant to cooperate with the murderous demands for perpetual war and sectarian hatred that Zionism imposes on its allies.
The Left wing of the American Cryptocracy, while much less Zionist than George W. Bush (and Bill Clinton, for that matter), is still inextricably linked to the Israeli project and to Judaism generally, as are all American elites. They do not propose a challenge to Zionism so much as a resistance to the hotheads in Israeli ranks, the Likudniks, religious-Zionist settler factions and the newly emergent, so-called "hilltop youth," comprised of bloodthirsty Talmudic-inspired killers.
The Cryptocracy is not going to abandon the Israelis; that's out of the question. But neither are they willing to sacrifice American power on the altar of religious-fanatic Zionism. They do this from pro-Israeli motives. After all, a diminished America cannot back up the Israelis like a muscular one can, so it is in the best interest of the bankers and the more moderate Zionists if cooler heads prevail in Jerusalem.
The problem with that view, is that the Right wing of the Cryptocracy, led by the "New American Century" neocons have shaped, with their "second Pearl Harbor" stealth on 9/11, a world defined in cataclysmic, clash-of-civilizations terms, as an Israeli-America vs. Islam, fight to the death.
The Left wing of the Cryptocracy allowed this to happen, possibly persuaded that various oil and gas fields would be gained as a result of the invasions of Afghanistan and Irag and eventually, Iran. It is more likely however, that they signed off on the 9/11 Pearl Harbor stratagem and the resulting "perpetual cosmic conflict with Islam" scenario, as a means of discrediting the neo-con wing by giving them enough rope with which to hang themselves. Which indeed they have done, as Khanna's article tends to show in its astute analysis of the staggering rise of China, Asia and the countries of the "second world," at great loss to the U.S.
The American Cryptocracy's ability to control the world through trade and financial markets is in dramatic decline because pragmatism and the economy are not the driving forces behind George W. Bush's administration; but rather its crusade against anti-Israeli "evil," which in terms of finances, treaties, alliances, trade and good will, has turned out to be a disaster.
No other nation drives another nation's foreign policy and controls its politics and legislature as the Israelis do in the United States. It's a recipe for decline because it contradicts every proverb of power politics: no foreign nation can have the best interests of another as its primary consideration. Despite the delusional mystifications of the ministers of Judeo-Churchianity, and the partisaniship of Israeli dual loyalists, putting America at the disposal of Israeli policy (subjugation of the Arab masses by constant war and low-intensity Warsaw ghetto-style police actions), results in the slow but inexorable disposal of America itself in the rubbish bin of history.
Khanna states these facts in much more subtle terms than I am doing here, and makes several points -- as noted -- by omission, but these are so glaring that they will not be lost on alert readers.
Here now is the Cryptocracy's assessment of the future of the Russian Orthodox nation, as articulated by Khanna, up to and including the "annexation" of Russia (!):
"Apparently stabilized and resurgent under the Kremlin-Gazprom oligarchy, why is Russia not a superpower but rather the ultimate second-world swing state? For all its muscle flexing, Russia is also disappearing. Its population decline is a staggering half million citizens per year or more, meaning it will be not much larger than Turkey by 2025 or so — spread across a land so vast that it no longer even makes sense as a country. Travel across Russia today, and you’ll find, as during Soviet times, city after city of crumbling, heatless apartment blocks and neglected elderly citizens whose value to the state diminishes with distance from Moscow.
"The forced Siberian migrations of the Soviet era are being voluntarily reversed as children move west to more tolerable and modern climes. Filling the vacuum they have left behind are hundreds of thousands of Chinese, literally gobbling up, plundering, outright buying and more or less annexing Russia’s Far East for its timber and other natural resources. Already during the cold war it was joked that there were 'no disturbances on the Sino-Finnish border,' a prophecy that seems ever closer to fulfillment.
"Russia lost its western satellites almost two decades ago, and Europe, while appearing to be bullied by Russia’s oil-dependent diplomacy, is staging a long-term buyout of Russia, whose economy remains roughly the size of France’s. The more Europe gets its gas from North Africa and oil from Azerbaijan, the less it will rely on Russia, all the while holding the lever of being by far Russia’s largest investor.
"The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development provides the kinds of loans that help build an alternative, less corrupt private sector from below, while London and Berlin welcome Russia’s billionaires, allowing the likes of Boris Berezovsky to openly campaign against Putin. The E.U. and U.S. also finance and train a pugnacious second-world block of Baltic and Balkan nations, whose activists agitate from Belarus to Uzbekistan. Privately, some E.U. officials say that annexing Russia is perfectly doable; it’s just a matter of time. In the coming decades, far from restoring its Soviet-era might, Russia will have to decide whether it wishes to exist peacefully as an asset to Europe or the alternative — becoming a petro-vassal of China." (End quote)
Khanna's complete article, "Waving Goodbye to Hegemony," is available at this link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/magazine/27world-t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=print
***
By Parag Khanna
New York Times Sunday Magazine | January 27, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/magazine/27world-t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=print
The following is from a much longer article in the Sunday NY Times Magazine which mirrors the views of the non-Zionist (or less Zionist than thou) faction within the Cryptocracy and which this writer regards as a major statement of its views.
The writer, Parag Khanna, is too smart to diss the Israelis by name, but by omitting them altogether and barely making any reference to the "Islamic terror menace," he sends a transparent message that the Bush administration's obsession with the apocalyptic requirements of Israeli colonialism and rabbinic religious zealotry have severely diminished America's standing in the world, even as Asia, and in particular China, not burdened with mystical rapture-Talmudism and war-Zionism, are aggressively using the realities of business and finance to conquer the planet.
Khanna, simply by leaving the supposed "global scourge of Islamic radicalism" out of his analysis, demonstrates that the threat has been inflated out of all proportion, commensurate with the Israeli need to be on a perpetual war-footing with the Arab and Muslim world, a policy that makes no business sense for America whatsoever.
I recommend that you read Khanna's article in its entirety. I am singling out a couple of paragraphs from it here in this column in order to underscore the depth of the Cryptocracy's antipathy toward Russia, as well as Khanna's hard-nosed assessment of Russia's future prospects (unless Russia's men and women will voluntarily increase their nation's birthrate dramatically).
But Russia as a world power must go, in the eyes of the Cryptocracy, at least until such time as its current anti-Zionist and pro-Christian orientation is discarded. By "Christian" I am denominating not the anti-Biblical dispensationalist innovation that has taken control of fundamentalist American Protestantism in the past 70 years, but the much older, traditional Christianity which is reluctant to cooperate with the murderous demands for perpetual war and sectarian hatred that Zionism imposes on its allies.
The Left wing of the American Cryptocracy, while much less Zionist than George W. Bush (and Bill Clinton, for that matter), is still inextricably linked to the Israeli project and to Judaism generally, as are all American elites. They do not propose a challenge to Zionism so much as a resistance to the hotheads in Israeli ranks, the Likudniks, religious-Zionist settler factions and the newly emergent, so-called "hilltop youth," comprised of bloodthirsty Talmudic-inspired killers.
The Cryptocracy is not going to abandon the Israelis; that's out of the question. But neither are they willing to sacrifice American power on the altar of religious-fanatic Zionism. They do this from pro-Israeli motives. After all, a diminished America cannot back up the Israelis like a muscular one can, so it is in the best interest of the bankers and the more moderate Zionists if cooler heads prevail in Jerusalem.
The problem with that view, is that the Right wing of the Cryptocracy, led by the "New American Century" neocons have shaped, with their "second Pearl Harbor" stealth on 9/11, a world defined in cataclysmic, clash-of-civilizations terms, as an Israeli-America vs. Islam, fight to the death.
The Left wing of the Cryptocracy allowed this to happen, possibly persuaded that various oil and gas fields would be gained as a result of the invasions of Afghanistan and Irag and eventually, Iran. It is more likely however, that they signed off on the 9/11 Pearl Harbor stratagem and the resulting "perpetual cosmic conflict with Islam" scenario, as a means of discrediting the neo-con wing by giving them enough rope with which to hang themselves. Which indeed they have done, as Khanna's article tends to show in its astute analysis of the staggering rise of China, Asia and the countries of the "second world," at great loss to the U.S.
The American Cryptocracy's ability to control the world through trade and financial markets is in dramatic decline because pragmatism and the economy are not the driving forces behind George W. Bush's administration; but rather its crusade against anti-Israeli "evil," which in terms of finances, treaties, alliances, trade and good will, has turned out to be a disaster.
No other nation drives another nation's foreign policy and controls its politics and legislature as the Israelis do in the United States. It's a recipe for decline because it contradicts every proverb of power politics: no foreign nation can have the best interests of another as its primary consideration. Despite the delusional mystifications of the ministers of Judeo-Churchianity, and the partisaniship of Israeli dual loyalists, putting America at the disposal of Israeli policy (subjugation of the Arab masses by constant war and low-intensity Warsaw ghetto-style police actions), results in the slow but inexorable disposal of America itself in the rubbish bin of history.
Khanna states these facts in much more subtle terms than I am doing here, and makes several points -- as noted -- by omission, but these are so glaring that they will not be lost on alert readers.
Here now is the Cryptocracy's assessment of the future of the Russian Orthodox nation, as articulated by Khanna, up to and including the "annexation" of Russia (!):
"Apparently stabilized and resurgent under the Kremlin-Gazprom oligarchy, why is Russia not a superpower but rather the ultimate second-world swing state? For all its muscle flexing, Russia is also disappearing. Its population decline is a staggering half million citizens per year or more, meaning it will be not much larger than Turkey by 2025 or so — spread across a land so vast that it no longer even makes sense as a country. Travel across Russia today, and you’ll find, as during Soviet times, city after city of crumbling, heatless apartment blocks and neglected elderly citizens whose value to the state diminishes with distance from Moscow.
"The forced Siberian migrations of the Soviet era are being voluntarily reversed as children move west to more tolerable and modern climes. Filling the vacuum they have left behind are hundreds of thousands of Chinese, literally gobbling up, plundering, outright buying and more or less annexing Russia’s Far East for its timber and other natural resources. Already during the cold war it was joked that there were 'no disturbances on the Sino-Finnish border,' a prophecy that seems ever closer to fulfillment.
"Russia lost its western satellites almost two decades ago, and Europe, while appearing to be bullied by Russia’s oil-dependent diplomacy, is staging a long-term buyout of Russia, whose economy remains roughly the size of France’s. The more Europe gets its gas from North Africa and oil from Azerbaijan, the less it will rely on Russia, all the while holding the lever of being by far Russia’s largest investor.
"The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development provides the kinds of loans that help build an alternative, less corrupt private sector from below, while London and Berlin welcome Russia’s billionaires, allowing the likes of Boris Berezovsky to openly campaign against Putin. The E.U. and U.S. also finance and train a pugnacious second-world block of Baltic and Balkan nations, whose activists agitate from Belarus to Uzbekistan. Privately, some E.U. officials say that annexing Russia is perfectly doable; it’s just a matter of time. In the coming decades, far from restoring its Soviet-era might, Russia will have to decide whether it wishes to exist peacefully as an asset to Europe or the alternative — becoming a petro-vassal of China." (End quote)
Khanna's complete article, "Waving Goodbye to Hegemony," is available at this link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/magazine/27world-t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=print
***
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Biological warfare: Weaponizing the Smallpox Virus?
Scientists Take New Step Toward Man-Made Life
New York Times | Jan. 24, 2008
"...researchers reported Thursday that they had manufactured the entire genome of a bacterium by painstakingly stitching together its chemical components.
...“What we are doing with the synthetic chromosome is going to be the design process of the future,” said Dr. J. Craig Venter, the boundary-pushing gene scientist. He assembled the team that made the bacterial genome as part of his well publicized quest to create the first synthetic organism. The work was published online Thursday by the journal Science.
But there are concerns that synthetic biology could be used to make pathogens, or that errors by well-intended scientists could produce organisms that run amok. The genome of the smallpox virus can in theory now be synthesized using the techniques reported on Thursday, since it is only about one-third the size of the genome manufactured by Dr. Venter’s group.
...Dr. Venter, who runs the nonprofit J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md., has been a pioneer in genomics. He is best known for sequencing the human genome in a race with the publicly funded Human Genome Project. The method his team used was novel at the time, but is now widely accepted. It turned out that the genome his team sequenced was his own, making Dr. Venter the first person to have his complete DNA sequence published.
Some activist groups say Dr. Venter is going too far, too fast, this time, and that the entire field of synthetic biology needs outside regulation to prevent the introduction of dangerous organisms, created either by evil intent or by innocent error.
“The fact that he’s pushing ahead with this without any societal oversight is very worrying,” said Jim Thomas, a program manager at the ETC Group, an activist group based in Canada.
***
New York Times | Jan. 24, 2008
"...researchers reported Thursday that they had manufactured the entire genome of a bacterium by painstakingly stitching together its chemical components.
...“What we are doing with the synthetic chromosome is going to be the design process of the future,” said Dr. J. Craig Venter, the boundary-pushing gene scientist. He assembled the team that made the bacterial genome as part of his well publicized quest to create the first synthetic organism. The work was published online Thursday by the journal Science.
But there are concerns that synthetic biology could be used to make pathogens, or that errors by well-intended scientists could produce organisms that run amok. The genome of the smallpox virus can in theory now be synthesized using the techniques reported on Thursday, since it is only about one-third the size of the genome manufactured by Dr. Venter’s group.
...Dr. Venter, who runs the nonprofit J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md., has been a pioneer in genomics. He is best known for sequencing the human genome in a race with the publicly funded Human Genome Project. The method his team used was novel at the time, but is now widely accepted. It turned out that the genome his team sequenced was his own, making Dr. Venter the first person to have his complete DNA sequence published.
Some activist groups say Dr. Venter is going too far, too fast, this time, and that the entire field of synthetic biology needs outside regulation to prevent the introduction of dangerous organisms, created either by evil intent or by innocent error.
“The fact that he’s pushing ahead with this without any societal oversight is very worrying,” said Jim Thomas, a program manager at the ETC Group, an activist group based in Canada.
***
Robert Faurisson Interview in honor of his 79th Birthday
Interview with Professor Robert Faurisson at the Guest House of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Islamic Republic of Iran
Introduction by Michael A. Hoffman II
In honor of World War II revisionist historian Dr. Robert Faurisson's 79th birthday, January 25, 2008, we are publishing this interview conducted in Tehran, December 13, 2006 by a German citizen, immediately after Iran's revisionist conference had concluded.
In spite of some bitter disputes we have had in the past with Dr. Faurisson (any friendship which cannot weather such disputes it not a true friendship), and the fact that we continue to disagree with some of his ideas and conclusions, Robert Faurisson is undoubtedly one of the bravest men it has been our privilege to know.
The sacrifices he has made, both in his career as a university professor, and in his personal life, have been so enormous they would have driven a lesser man to madness or recantation and surrender. In addition to losing his professorship and being saddled with huge court fines, he has been repeatedly physically assaulted, culminating in a brutal attack in 1989 that required his hospitalization.
Robert would not want to be regarded as a martyr, but the fact is, he is indeed a martyr to freedom of speech and inquiry. Nobel prizes go to obscure campaigners for human rights in Third World countries, while under the very nose of the Nobel committee is Faurisson of France. His courageous campaign and the rights of revisionists, mean nothing to the West that otherwise is so pompous in its moralizing lectures to the Muslim world, on the need for "democracy and freedom of expression." What they mean by that slogan is freedom for the dominion of Zionism, Judaism and its offshoot religion for gentiles, Holocaustianity, and jail -- or worse -- for all who dissent.
Dr. Faurisson is currently being prosecuted by the government of France for having spoken at the Tehran revisionist conference. He has been repeatedly prosecuted and fined in the past for his revisionist books and essays. Meanwhile, Germar Rudolf, Ernst Zundel, Georges Thiel, Wolfgang Frohlich and incredibly, Sylvia Stolz, Mr. Zundel's defense attorney, are all either serving prison terms or have been sentenced to prison in Europe for blaspheming the Holy People's Holy Auschwitz Gas Chamber relic. Attorney Stolz's "crime" was offering too vigorous a defense of Zundel during his trial in Germany! This is beyond absurd. Even Lewis Carrol and his Alice would be lost in this Kafkaesque nightmare world, wherein the supposedly oh-so cool agnostics of hip, liberated Europe, who have cast off God, fall prostrate in abject obeisance to the false gods of Judaism and Zionism. --Michael A. Hoffman II
Interviewer: Hello Professor Faurisson, and thank you for granting me this interview.
Dr. Faurisson: Hello. It's I who thank you for your willingness to put questions.
Interviewer: Professor, may I ask what your reasons were for deciding to take part in this conference in Tehran on the Holocaust on December 11th and 12th, 2006?
Dr. Faurisson: It's because I know of no other country, no place where a conference on this subject could welcome me. Even in the United States the holding of such a conference would be risky; to begin with, upon arrival on American territory any foreign revisionist could well find himself being sent straight back to where he'd come from. In France, any similar gathering would be out of the question. I don't see a single European country that would tolerate a public conference or debate on the "Holocaust". In Germany, your country, the prohibition of any form of revisionism is draconian. Canada, Australia and New Zealand are merciless.
Furthermore, it may be that in other parts of the world some countries are indifferent to the matter. Thus it was an altogether unexpected bit of luck that Iran should offer to host an international seminar on the "Holocaust" that, for once, would be open to all comers. It was not actually a revisionist conference but, as indicated by the title ("Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision")?, a new look at the "Holocaust" from a comprehensive viewpoint and not a biased or fragmentary one. I didn't think this could come about in my lifetime.
Interviewer: What goal have you been looking to achieve in coming here?
Dr. Faurisson: I want to make public what the mainstream media of the Western world stubbornly conceal. When those media speak of revisionists, it's to insult us or ascribe to us ideas that we've never expressed. For example, they readily assert that the revisionists are people who claim the German concentration camps never existed. That's putting sheer nonsense in our mouths. Unhappily the nonsensical assertion, amongst the French in any case, is widespread. On this score, the French in general have the idea that the revisionists are lunatics who go so far as to deny the obvious and this is why, coining a barbarism, they call us "négationnistes" ("denialists")?.
Interviewer: Have you the impression, at the end of this gathering, that you've achieved your goal?
Dr. Faurisson: In part. The world has been able to note that we exist and that we can conduct ourselves peaceably and courteously with people who don't share our convictions. Time was wanting for any real debate. And then I suppose the media will relate virtually nothing of the content of our papers. They'll keep silent about our arguments and discoveries. To obtain a real debate we'll need a new conference, on condition that our opponents don't shy away from taking part. I must say that, for an instant, I was able to have the beginnings of a public confrontation with a professor who was hostile to revisionism, and that this confrontation turned dramatically to our advantage. I'll tell you about it a bit later on, if you like.
Interviewer: Most gladly.
Dr. Faurisson: There've been, above all, the echoes made by this conference throughout the world. It has provoked vehement protests, starting yesterday in Washington with a statement by White House spokesman Sean McCormack denouncing an Iranian regime that "perversely seeks to call the historical fact of those [Nazi]? atrocities into question and provide a platform for hatred". Then it was in Brasilia that a government had its say in the matter with an official protest. Then in England. Then, at the UN, Kofi Annan gave tongue. The Vatican as well. According to all these authorities, there are no grounds for asking oneself questions about the "Holocaust" of the Jews. The "Holocaust" took place and that's that.
But I've promised you that example of the beginnings of a public confrontation. Here it is. That match of yesterday pitted me against an Iranian professor from Shiraz University, who also teaches at the University of the State of Washington (USA)?; his name is Gholam Vatandoust. At one point in his presentation he dared to say that the "Holocaust" was "fully documented", that is, wholly confirmed by valid documentation. Then, after his talk, when the audience was able to put questions, I asked this professor to name me a document, and I insisted on the fact that I didn't care to hear about a set of documents; I wanted just one. He started answering by saying how Churchill, in his memoirs, had denounced the Nazi atrocities. I pointed out that never had Churchill mentioned the "gas chambers" and that such was the case as well with Eisenhower, de Gaulle and others of their stature. I reminded him that what I was waiting for was the designation of a document. I had him note that Winston Churchill, in the remarks alluded to, was a politician expressing his sentiments. However, I was not looking to know anyone's sentiments, be they even those of a personality like Churchill.
At that point, the Iranian professor believed he'd come up with another argument. He told me it would be enough to accompany him to the American National Archives, where I should find documents. This wasn't an answer since, again, I was demanding to hear of but one document. Just then the situation reminded me of the story of the angler and the big fish. An angler boasts of recently making an extraordinary haul, a truly miraculous catch, and, when I ask to see the fish, retorts: "How's that? Are you calling my word into doubt? If you're a doubting Thomas and won't grant me your trust, I can show you the place where I caught that fish." Obviously my reply will be that the place doesn't interest me: the fish does. Let him show me it! Thus, "Show me or draw me a Nazi gas chamber!" That's what I've been asking for ages.
I told this professor that I was familiar with those National Archives. I'd even consulted them at three different places: in Washington proper, then, not far from there, in Suitland and at the opulent installation of College Park. In short, I was getting no answer to my request. The man made three more vague attempts, all equally futile, and part of the audience, noticing how decidedly unable he was to respond, interrupted the verbal jousting with laughter and applause. This morning I had the occasion to meet him. I found much humbler than yesterday and he exhibited a lively curiosity about an argument that he seemed to be just discovering. We exchanged addresses and perhaps our discussion will continue. I also had two brief talks in private with one of the six anti-Zionist rabbis who'd come to take part in the proceedings: he was from Britain and appeared surprised but not shocked by the findings of revisionist research. Finally, I had a short and cordial exchange with an Austrian chief rabbi.
It seems that another participant, Viktor Nadein-Rayevsky of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of World Economy and International Relations, said at some point: "Faurisson demands documents, but some very important events have occurred which haven't left any documents. In these cases, no document can be produced." I'd like to know what these "very important events" can be to which no document attests!
Interviewer: I think he was talking about the Khmer Rouge.
Dr. Faurisson: Perhaps. But then, I'm very sorry! We possess a large number of documents or alleged documents on the subject. I'll recall here the meaning of the term "document". In general, a document is something written, but it may also be a material object. "Document" comes from a Latin verb signifying "that which tells, which teaches you something". A knife on a table, a chair, a room, a building can all have the value of a document. It is altogether normal that, for example, a great mind such as Fustel de Coulanges (1830-1889)?, who, for us French, is the founder of scientific history, should have adopted a motto like "No documents, no history".
I've just given you the example of two speakers who disputed what the revisionists have concluded after completing their research work. I insist on this. People are quick to call us "négateurs" (at least the word is French)? or "négationnistes" (a lapse into barbarism)?. These two words mean that revisionists are persons who deny obvious facts. They would seem, in a way, to be inspired by the Devil. As in Goethe's phrase, we revisionists would be partisans of "the spirit that ever denies", wouldn't we? In reality, we deny nothing at all; simply, after completing our research work, we challenge certain affirmations and come forth with our own findings. Galileo "denied" nothing but, at the end of his labours, he stated that a certain idea, generally admitted, was wrong and that another idea was right.
Interviewer: Can you sum up the substance of your own contribution to the conference?
Dr. Faurisson: My talk was on "the victories of revisionism", in other words the concessions that the antirevisionists have over the years been forced to make to us. I recommend that people consult the text itself, which I entitled simply "The Victories of Revisionism" and in which I provide a selection of twenty instances of such victories. They run from 1950 to 2004, and some of them are quite dramatic. Unfortunately the general public know nothing of it all because we have no access to the media.
Interviewer: An example, if you please, of these victories?
Dr. Faurisson: I could cite the case of Jean-Claude Pressac. For years, that protégé of the Klarsfeld couple had presumed to state he'd discovered proof of the "Nazi gas chambers'" existence. A book of his, in 1993-1994, was laden with praise throughout the big media. In 1994 I replied with a booklet that earned me new criminal proceedings. Happily I got Pressac subpoenaed to appear at the trial. This was in May 1995, in Paris. His collapse under examination was spectacular. He never got back up again. To her credit, Valérie Igounet, a French historian hostile to revisionism, reproduced in her 2000 book Histoire du négationnisme en France a sort of act of surrender signed by Pressac. The latter, in effect, had ended up admitting that the dossier on the German concentration camps was "rotten" — his word, that — with too many lies. He even added that a definitively "rotten" dossier had been got up around wartime suffering that was all too real and — in his own phrase — that dossier was "bound for the rubbish bins of history".
Interviewer: Surprising! What became of Pressac?
Dr. Faurisson: His Jewish friends, of course, disowned him. He died in 2003, aged 59. The media's silence was total. Pressac is one of the host of people who have proved unable to take up the challenge I launched back in the 1970s. At that time I'd demonstrated how the case for the existence of the alleged Nazi gas chambers ran into some radical impossibilities. The Leuchter Report and the Rudolf Report, not to mention a few other reports or views expressed by men of science, subsequently confirmed my demonstration.
Interviewer: Here, in Tehran, you began your talk with a word of warning about the photographs said to be of Nazi atrocities. Why?
Dr. Faurisson: Because people's minds are steeped in them. In the business of lying propaganda nothing's more simple and effective than the use of photographs. You don't even need any complicated montages. It's enough to show images of the sick, the dying or the dead and, in relation to these, speak of the killed, the murdered or the slaughtered. Ordinary decent folk will be taken in. They'll feel revulsion, indignation, anger.
They'll no longer see what's in front of them (the dead)? but only what's been put into their minds (the killed)?. They'll become fixated on it. They won't take time to think things over. In the area of false massacres the procedure stays unchanged. The alleged massacres at Auschwitz are, from this point of view, comparable, relatively speaking, to all the alleged massacres that may be conveniently blamed on the defeated side of any conflict, be it at Andersonville (alleged extermination camp of the American Civil War)?, Timosoara (Romania)? or Kuwait City. Corpses of women and children will do the trick especially well.
It's the procedure that, in 1945, was resorted to by the Americans and the British, on the one hand, and by the Soviets on the other hand. Teams of photographers or cameramen enter such or such German camp at the moment of its liberation. The first step is to have everything photographed or filmed. The second is to set aside for later use, after selection, only the most pitiful or revolting images, notably from the hospital barracks or their vicinity; pains will particularly have been taken to get images of the typhus-sufferers, veritable walking skeletons. The third step is to prepare commentary that will lead the public to believe the German commandants and guards had purposely reduced those poor wretches to such a state, as they were quite simply carrying out a policy of physical extermination of the detainees. Exceptions aside, the photographs of some very large groups of healthy-looking inmates, jubilant at being freed, will be hidden away.
It will not be revealed that, in these camps, there could well exist for the benefit or use of the inmates, as was the case at Auschwitz, vast kitchens and all sorts of sanitary, medical, dental or surgical facilities, bakeries, post offices, workshops, places for artistic or musical recreation whose mere presence renders implausible, at the least, the existence of any intent whatsoever on the part of the Germans to exterminate those inmates. On the contrary, with the propagandists, a scalpel will fraudulently be shown as proof that people were killed or tortured; a disinfection gas chamber will become proof that people, and not vermin, were gassed; a can of Zyklon-B, a disinfection or anti-infestation substance (Entseuchung, Entwesung)? that was, accordingly, used to preserve lives against certain deadly diseases or epidemics, will become proof that the Germans employed it to suppress human life. The real horrors of all those camps were the overcrowding, the close quarters and the violence incidental to detention in such circumstances ("men are like apples: the more they're heaped on top of each other, the more they rot")?, the prison violence, the hunger, the harsh weather, the diseases, the epidemics. Revisionist author and activist Paul Rassinier told of all this very well indeed. Thus, at times, many inmates were going through hell.
Interviewer: You brought up, in particular, the British propaganda about Bergen-Belsen…
Dr. Faurisson: Yes. Winston Churchill's compatriots achieved quite some feat there. It's what I call the "Bergen-Belsen bulldozer job". In April 1945, that camp, overcrowded, ravaged by epidemics coming from the East, famished, deprived of water in recent days due to the Anglo-American bombing raids, had become a veritable den of infection. For this reason the Germans sent out a delegation to Montgomery's approaching troops to warn them of the state of things there (and probably of the risks for everyone, including the civilian population, should the internees all be immediately released without any screening)?. The British agreed to cooperate with the Wehrmacht, but not with the SS, in order to attempt to remedy the situation. Then they saw fit to open the numerous common graves, count the bodies and finally, pile those bodies into great, deep ditches. To push all the corpses towards the ditches they used a bulldozer. In a film shot on site we are shown the bulldozer in action.
A selection of these images has been passed on to posterity, notably thanks to the documentary (documendaciary?)? Night and Fog (1955)?. Millions of viewers have believed that here they've seen proof of the Germans' killing their captives, day after day, on an industrial scale. Very rare indeed must be those who've been able to make out that the bulldozer driver is a British soldier and not a German soldier. In 1978 a book published in South Africa with the aim of thwarting any revision of the "Holocaust" presented a still photo of the bulldozer and the bodies but not without "cutting off" the driver's head: the obvious intent was to have us believe the driver was German.
Moreover, with time, in the minds of some, amongst whom Maurice Druon of the Académie française, "that" bulldozer, in the singular, has, of course, become "those" bulldozers. One could go on and on listing the very crudest procedures of this propaganda rooted in atrocity stories. Thus it is that we're cunningly shown piles of shoes and eyeglasses or heaps of hair as if they were evidence that the people they came from were gassed; here the propagandists are sure to avoid reminding us that, in a Europe subjected to blockade and reduced to general penury, nothing was thrown away: everything was recovered and recycled, including hair, which served a particular purpose in the textile industry. There were countless workshops recycling leather, glass, metal or wood, both in the camps and in the towns and villages. The "suitcase job" is also worth noting. A very well-known photograph shows us, at Auschwitz, suitcases carefully stacked and presented as the pieces of luggage on which each doomed owner had taken the trouble to write his or her name and address before being sent to the gas chamber. However, a close look shows that the names and addresses are all written in the same hand and with the same white substance.
Consequently, here it is a question, in reality, of a task performed at the entrance of every detention centre: new prisoners' belongings are tagged and registered by the prison clerks. Thus had Marcel Bloch-Dassault, long after the war, been able to receive from Germany the wallet confiscated from him upon entry at Buchenwald. One evening he could be seen, on French television, exhibiting that wallet, opening it and taking out the four-leaf clover that was in it at his arrival in the camp. That said, there's no doubt the German authorities must have drawn from the vast stores and confiscated effects to distribute some of them to the civilian population ravaged by the bombings and deprived of everything.
Interviewer: Wasn't it at Bergen-Belsen that Anne Frank and her sister Margot died?
Dr. Faurisson: Yes, in late February or early March of 1945. They died of typhus. Still long after the war the official truth had it that that they'd been gassed at Auschwitz, a camp where they effectively spent some time before their transfer to Bergen-Belsen. Their fate makes them deserving of pity. But a good deal more pitiable still was the fate of the German civilian populations killed or burned alive by the Anglo-American bomber squadrons. A German man had the idea, after the war, to consult a book with the register of those killed in the bombing of the city of Würzburg in the night of March 24, 1945 alone; in that list of more than 5,000 he noted, I think, 128 women or girls bearing the Christian name Anne or a closely associated one. There's hardly much talk of those women or girls systematically killed solely for being German, is there?
Interviewer: Do you think that the National Socialist regime committed crimes against the European Jews?
Dr. Faurisson: That regime did not pursue, with regard to the Jews, any criminal policy. That said, some crimes were indeed committed, especially in wartime, and they were what are generally called "excesses". Crimes of this kind were either against Jews as individuals or against Jews taken in groups, for instance, in the course of a military operation or indeed during reprisals. Still, if one looks closely, nothing should distinguish those crimes from the odious acts that the victors perpetrated against, for example, Germans or Japanese. I am now going to insist on a fact that's important and that even the revisionists don't exploit enough.
We have proof, we've had it ever since the Nuremberg trial, that soldiers, officers and functionaries, tried by the military tribunals or courts martial of the Third Reich, were, during the war, sentenced to death and executed for the murder of a single Jewish man or woman. One day in the Ukrainian town of Marinka, the mayor, who happened to be a "Volksdeutscher", an ethnic German, and who had been appointed mayor probably because he spoke German, killed a local Jewess. Brought before a military tribunal, he was condemned to death and shot. I'll come back to his case.
We have the example of a young German lieutenant in Budapest who, upon entering a Jewish woman's house with his men, saw a radio set — forbidden to Jews — and wanted to take it away, along with some jewellery. With the woman threatening to go to the police, he ended up killing her. Court-martialled, he was sentenced to death and executed. As for the soldiers who'd accompanied him, they were given heavy prison terms.
Interviewer: Were they from the Wehrmacht or the SS?
Dr. Faurisson: They were from an air-defense unit. But, you know, this distinction made between the Wehrmacht and the SS is valid in certain cases and not at all so in others. For example, when in military action, they were on the same footing. But anyhow, if there had existed any order whatsoever to kill all the Jews simply because they were Jews, the Reich authorities wouldn't have gone and shot someone who, breeching discipline, had killed a Jew or a Jewess.
Interviewer: According to you, are these few examples sufficient evidence for one to say that the whole Wehrmacht and the whole SS conducted themselves in such a manner?
Dr. Faurisson: Can a German order to kill the Jews — and I am saying to kill — have existed? It's ruled out if I can, as I'm doing here, present you with even just a single case of a German military tribunal trying and condemning to death a single person, then having that person executed for the murder of a single Jew. I haven't been speaking of "sufficient evidence" but of evidence. A piece of evidence is an element that one may take into consideration in order, at the end of proceedings, to hand down a decision. The judge has before him a set of evidence or testimonies and he draws his conclusions therefrom. Let's begin at the beginning, that is with cases like those I've brought up here or with the one, which comes to mind just now, of a Luftwaffe man who, in southern France, was sentenced to death for "excesses" against a Jewish woman.
I personally experienced the German occupation. In 1939 I was ten years old and in 1945, when the Germans left France, I was fifteen.
Interviewer: Where did you live?
Dr. Faurisson: First, up until July 1943, in Marseille, then in Paris. Never ever could someone, catching sight of a Jew, have picked up a weapon and killed him with impunity. The consequences for the murderer would have been extremely grave.
It so happens that, since 1957, I've lived in Vichy. One night in August 1941 a little bomb went off in front of the gate of the synagogue, without injuring anyone. The culprits were found the next day: they were a certain number of young Doriotistes, French supporters of collaboration with Germany in the fight against "Judeo-Bolshevism". They were quickly tried and convicted. I've found the text of the court decision. And, thanks to someone who, during the war, was in the police, I've learnt that one of the young participants in the "attack", a "pupille de la nation", that is, the son of a serviceman who died in the First World War, was so badly beaten inside Vichy police station that he subsequently died. Never during the entire war could a Frenchman have allowed himself to strike a Jew in the street.
A Jew as such was of course considered by the State as a potentially dangerous citizen. He was living under a sort of probation. He might have good reason to keep on his guard. His movements and rights were subject to severe restrictions, but there was no lack of Jews who, all during the German occupation, continued to go about their business in plain view of everyone, even running their shops or practicing their trades. Still in Vichy, Marshall and Mrs Pétain's regular chemist was a Jew by the name of Maurice Benhamou, and the kosher butcher's in the rue Bardiaux seems to have stayed open throughout the Occupation. In May 1944 in Lyon an American bombing raid left a number of people dead. Amongst the services held for these victims was an ecumenical ceremony led by the Cardinal-Archbishop, with an imam and a rabbi by his side. But this does not, of course, cancel out the fact that in Vichy, Lyon and in all the rest of the country the Jews could experience deportation, and either return or not return afterwards.
Interviewer: Here you're speaking of France?
Dr. Faurisson: Yes, of France under the Occupation.
Interviewer: And in the East, do you think things were the same?
Dr. Faurisson: If you have any specific cases, do present them. You're German. I should readily invite any German to read an extraordinary document on the day-to-day life, during the whole war, of certain Jews in the very heart of the Third Reich. It's the memoirs of Victor Klemperer. I possess all three versions: German, French and English. I like to compare the different versions of a book. In the case at hand, the most interesting version is the French one; instead of stopping at June 1945, it continues on to December of that year and contains a letter of January 1947 in which the author, quite obviously under the influence of the propaganda that had been about since the war's end, piles up lies and exaggerations on what he'd really lived through and which he'd so accurately described, day after day, in his memoirs proper.
Victor Klemperer, a Dresden Jew, is married to an Aryan woman. Very anti-Nazi, he recounts his torments. I'll tell you the summit of those torments: being Jewish, he had to wear the Jewish star in public and he did a grand total of eight days in prison, in June 1941, for having broken the Civil Defence rules after curfew. He spent the eight days in the cells of Dresden police headquarters, where, he tells us, he was treated quite correctly. In his book he constantly stresses how the Germans he's met on the tram, in the street, at the grocer's, far indeed from ill-treating him or coming across antagonistic, have by and large shown themselves to be considerate and helpful. Vogel the grocer keeps coffee, a precious commodity at the time, aside for him. Civil servants are agreeable and polite. "Passers-by sympathised with the star bearers". He has several "favourable experiences with the star […]?
There is no doubt that the people feel the persecution of the Jews to be a sin". That said, he takes delight in Germany's military disasters and in the bombing raids and is sad to note that it seems impossible to shatter the civilians' morale. These memoirs (at least 5,000 typewritten pages)? amount to a scathing refutation of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's thesis claiming that "ordinary Germans", by their anti-Semitism, contributed to what is called "the Holocaust".
Interviewer: You talk there of France, of Germany, but if one goes further eastward, it's Poland, the Generalgouvernement, and then, in regard to that country and Russia, the "Einsatzgrupen" have to be discussed. What do you say here?
Dr. Faurisson: It's above all in Russia that those police units operated. The war in the East was a savage one. The Soviet State had not signed on to the Geneva and Hague conventions and the Germans found themselves up against a partisan war. At the Soviet end there were no rights, no law. Thus could the Germans, when there'd been a group of partisans in a village, be led to destroy everything in it, even if there were women and children. German soldiers' safety was the paramount concern. With Germany at war, what German wife, what father or mother would have agreed that a husband or son should be liable to be killed by an individual in civilian dress shooting from behind, then slipping away? In such moments there inevitably came about instances of military savagery, acts as are displayed in similar circumstances by all the armies of the world.
Coming back to my personal experience in France, I was able to see at work first the French soldier, then the German soldier, the Italian soldier, and, finally, the Canadian soldier, the British soldier and the American soldier. I, who, during the war, was so anti-German, must admit that I only ever saw extremely correct Germans; I can even mention some startling cases. When, afterwards, I saw the Americans arrive, I thought it was wonderful. Sure enough, many of them were likeable and well-behaved but there were also, amongst the American soldiers, NCOs and officers, some real louts. And then, on another score, I was especially distressed on seeing the horrors of the Big Purge. But here I'm getting off the subject.
Interviewer: You wanted to talk about the "Kommissarbefehl", the "Einsatzgruppen" and Babi Yar.
Dr. Faurisson: Yes, three parts of one same subject. We're told that there existed a "Kommissarbefehl", described as an order to kill systematically the Soviet political commissars who oversaw the troops, and here the occasion is seized to add that the "Einsatzgruppen's" task was to kill the Jews. It's false. First of all, there never existed any "Kommissarbefehl" as such. Some historians have acquired a habit of designating by this term a set of documents concerning the sorting of prisoners or of certain civilians just behind the front. The Einsatzgruppen, established at the time of the Anschluss in 1938, were assigned the job of this sorting. On the immense Russian front, they were a mere 3,000 (three thousand)?, drivers and clerks included. At the outset of the military campaign, they were given rigorous instructions. People should read these instructions. They amount to saying that, as the rules of war are unknown to the Soviets, a strict sorting of prisoners will be in order. Certain captives will have to be executed forthwith because they are not soldiers but fanaticised political commissars who cannot be left in prisoner-of-war camps; others will perhaps be useful to Germany. One document, labelled USSR-014 at the Nuremberg trial, spells out eight categories of suspect persons who must, after sorting, be separated (Aussonderung)? from the military or civilian prisoners.
It's interesting to note that the Jews are mentioned in eighth (and last)? place; it's specified in this order of October 29, 1941, that only a category of Jews is concerned. I quote: "8)? Soviet Russian and Jewish intellectuals, insofar as they are professional revolutionaries or political activists, authors, editors, Komintern officials etc.". With their customary dishonesty, the officials in charge of summarising the documents presumed to write that "those affected" "are above all Soviet commissars and other leading personalities, also Jews and members of the intelligentsia"; in their résumé they go so far as to write of "directives… for the 'purging' by special commandos of the prisoner-of-war camps", whereas, let me repeat, for this document, it's a matter of "sorting". When the troops advance and take a town, the Einsatzgruppen, a kind of military police in the field, will have to try to check the identity of prisoners and civilians. This doesn't mean that these people are going to be killed. Only some of them will be slated for execution. On the other side, with the Communists, no bones were made about executions. Therefore in first place came the political commissars. Neither here nor elsewhere did there exist any order to kill the Jews.
Interviewer: Then, if I understand you correctly, these instructions didn't specify that all the political commissars were to be executed, even though the said commissars were mentioned first.
Dr. Faurisson: That's right. Often, it seems, those commissars were Jews; however, even in their case, there was a sorting to be carried out. But you'll understand well enough that, in practice, this meant there were prisoners that one had the right, in effect, to execute in contravention of the laws of war. Also, as you're perhaps aware, the German military commanders did not want to act like the Red Army and, in the end, refused to follow through with the harshest provisions of the orders in question.
As for Babi Yar, no material investigation of the type carried out at Katyn during the war has been made there; nothing has surfaced to support the accounts generally heard on the subject, which seem implausible. I'll come back to Babi Yar.
Interviewer: You wanted to add something about that town in the Ukraine, Marinka.
Dr. Faurisson: Yes, but first, at risk of surprising you, I give you notice that for a brief moment we're going to leave the realm of history for that of fiction. Here is the drama that I imagine.
The German mayor of Marinka, recently sentenced to death for killing a Jewish woman, is going to be shot by firing squad. He is in a prison cell awaiting execution. It is night. He is in the throes of death. Just now, a man appears at the cell door and addresses him as follows: "You are a German whom German soldiers, in a short while, are going to shoot because you've killed a Jewess. However, be advised that, in a few years' time, Germany will have been flattened. Her conquerors will prove ruthless. They'll make a clean sweep of everything you've learnt and believed. They'll make up a lie-ridden history of this war. They'll impose the winners' version. This new official historical truth, forced upon Germany and propagated nearly everywhere else in the world as well, will be that, during this war, Germans had every licence to do what you've done. Yes, its promoters will go so far as to claim that the Germans spent the better part of their time hunting down, torturing and slaughtering the Jews. They'll state that Hitler had given the order to murder all the European Jews.
They'll add that, in order to succeed in a task of such colossal proportions, he'd had weapons of mass destruction built, weapons so diabolical that after the war not a trace will be found of them. Television sets, still so rare today in 1942, will be in every home; morning, noon, afternoon, evening and night, year in year out, they'll be spreading this universal neo-truth that will be taught in the primary and secondary schools, the universities and even in the catechism, to your children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A bit everywhere monuments will be put up and ceremonies instituted in honour of the new religion. The few who dare to dispute this dogma will be taken to court, thrown into prison, outlawed from society. And do you know who the most fervent apostles of this new creed will be, a creed of what will be called 'the Holocaust of the Jews'? Don't go searching! It will be the Germans themselves.
In the very firing squad that's going to shoot you there are perhaps some men who'll survive the war and who, once they've got back home, will start believing the lie of 'the Holocaust'. In any case, their children, their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren will believe it." The mayor of Marinka will receive this message as an overwhelming shock. Indeed, he'll go out of his mind as a result, and it's a madman that they'll be leading to the stake.
Such is the tragedy I imagine. I see in it the story line of a stage play or film to be made. This tragedy is that of Germany, whose very soul has been harried to death with the "Holocaust".
Let's leave fiction and come back to history. I'd like to dwell a little on the case of Babi Yar. Currently, certain Jewish organisations, sensing that the myth of the gas chambers is taking in water all around, are trying a diversion, asking us to turn our attention away from the alleged gas chambers and gas vans and towards the "Einsatzgruppen". This is, for example, what a French Jewish personality like Jacques Attali has recently done in writing "The vast majority of Jews slain were killed by the individual weapons of German soldiers and policemen, between 1940 and 1942, and not by the death-works that were put into place afterwards". Employing a brand new phrase, these Jews call this the "Shoah by bullets"! This "Shoah by bullets" is now summoned to replace the "Shoah by gas".
And so it is that we're being served up again with the "Babi Yar massacre". At the Nuremberg trial, the place name "Babi Yar" (in fact, the name of a ravine outside Kiev)? didn't come up, but a certain document simply reported, in one sentence, that the Germans in Kiev, which they'd recently taken, had, following a spate of arson attacks blamed on NKVD agents, arrested, in a reprisal measure, all the city's Jews, then, on the 29th and 30th of September 1941, had apparently transported a number of them in the direction of the locality known as Babi Yar to execute, in the end — take note of this figure: marvel at the precision — no fewer than 33,771! The document is neither dated nor signed.
It's one of a set selected by a lieutenant Walter Rothschild of London. In itself, what this sentence relates is implausible. The real massacre of Katyn, perpetrated by the NKVD and later imputed to the Germans, had left about 4,400 men — formally attested — dead, in over two months (March-April 1940)?. By comparison, in the Babi Yar massacre there would thus, in two days, have been nearly eight times more victims than at Katyn in two months. Such a fantastic butchery would have left countless traces and the surroundings themselves would have been turned upside down, if only by the efforts made in the forbidding task of mass burial, and then, as some will tell us, of unearthing followed by open-air cremations.
However, the aerial photographs of the time show no signs of any such thing and no material evidence of this huge crime is available. These days, in the Ukraine, there's a Roman Catholic priest who's been getting a lot of attention, father Patrick Desbois, a Frenchman and great friend of the Jews. His speciality consists in travelling the length and breadth of the land in search of "mass Jewish graves". He has the good Ukrainian peasants of a given area informed that he'll soon be calling at such or such locale and that he intends to garner testimonies about the slaughters of Jews by the Germans during the war. It's wholly in the inhabitants' interest to be able to boast that the environs actually possess such mass graves over which, afterwards, may be erected monuments that may in turn attract the odd foreign tourist. The "witnesses" get together and prepare a story. The priest then pays his visit and has his photograph taken with the country-folk as they point towards some spot or other. One may, to begin with, be astonished at the age of certain witnesses photographed thus far: they are quite plainly below the necessary age, which would normally be about 80.
But there's something more astonishing still: these supposed mass graves will not be dug open; no disinterment or any material verification will be carried out, all under the admirable pretence that the Jewish religion prohibits the touching of Jewish corpses; however, it's enough to look in the Encyclopedia Judaica (1978)? at the entry "Autopsies [plural]? and Dissection [singular]?" to see that there is no such prohibition at all. Only at a single location, Busk outside Lvov, have fifteen common graves been dug open, but none of the skeletons found there were examined and the sites were all covered over with a thick layer of concrete, meaning no authentication will be very possible in future! A curious way of respecting a body in accordance with Jewish law! The historian will thus have to be satisfied with what father Desbois, a clever man, tells us the witnesses told him. Hence, unverified numbers of unfound and unshown victims will be added up and, at the end, we shall be told that the Ukraine contains so many mass graves with so many Jewish victims.
And all this under the seal of the respective representatives of the Roman Catholic Church, the "Yahad-in-Unum" association and "Zaka", a group presenting itself as "dedicated individuals determined […]? to accord the proper respect for the dead in accordance with Jewish law, heritage and tradition". As at Auschwitz, tourism will stand some chance of thriving.
Interviewer: One question. You speak of "Shoah by bullets" and of documents. I myself think I recall seeing documents showing maps with sketches of coffins accompanied by the number of Jews executed at the spots thus indicated. Apparently, these would be documents of the SS or the Einsatzgruppen sent from the Russian front to Berlin. They would show how many Jews had been killed by Einsatzgruppen A, B, C and D. Is this not evidence? What's your view here?
Dr. Faurisson: I know those documents and, in particular, the one with the coffins and the figures. It was the American author Arthur R. Butz who first dealt with them in a critical manner, in 1976, in his remarkable work The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. Too often it's a question of suspect, unsigned documents, coming from Soviet sources. The one that you're speaking of makes me think of the aerial photos of Auschwitz, published in 1979 by Brugioni and Poirier, two former CIA men. In these photos one can make out the Auschwitz crematoria with a naïve indication bearing the words "Gas Chamber[s]?". Here, on the sketches of coffins, an anonymous hand has written figures supposedly representing the totals of Jews slain. There's no indication of any sources that might make possible a verification of the figures' origins.
Have you noted how each time a common grave is discovered in Russia and trouble is taken to make an examination, it's found that it contains victims of Stalin and not of Hitler?
Finally, it's a good idea, in any case, to be circumspect as concerns the evaluations sent by military men to superiors in Berlin.
One might say that, caught up in the war, the Germans who had to send reports to Berlin hadn't the leisure to draw up, as in peacetime, impeccable reports with all the necessary signatures on them.
Interviewer: That's merely a hypothesis on your part, for countless German documents of that era show they remained quite meticulous indeed.
Dr. Faurisson: A hypothesis, so be it, but isn't it asking a bit too much, insisting on perfect evidence, which perhaps has never existed?
When there is no evidence to hand, one refrains from making accusations. One's entitled to say "Rumour has it…" or "It seems plausible that…", but not to go any further. To sum up here, I'd say that, as concerns the great massacres of Jews imputed to the Einsatzgruppen, I'm waiting for criminal investigations to be carried out, like those that were made for Katyn. And don't let anyone come and tell us the corpses all went up in smoke! Even if those mounds of bodies had been burnt in the open air, that would have called for quite unlikely quantities of wood or fuel, and, what's more, traces would be easy to find, if only in the form of teeth or bone fragments. Still today, bones of men of Napoleon's army are found from time to time in Russia.
Interviewer: But what do you make of the trials and the clues that demonstrate the crime and allow a judgment to be made?
Dr. Faurisson: Clues are but apparent signs that simply render the existence of a thing probable. They're what Jean-Claude Pressac, that friend of the Klarsfeld couple, called in his big American book "beginnings of proof" or "traces". Let's be wary of people who've got the idea that by adding a quarter-proof to a quarter-proof plus a half-truth, you obtain one proof. That practice was, it seems, employed in certain witchcraft trials of centuries past and it's what was done in a number of court proceedings in the 20th century, especially against those modern-day sorcerers known as the satanic "Nazi war criminals".
Interviewer: That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that these days there are trials where real proof cannot be produced but where clues suffice to try the accused.
Dr. Faurisson: Quite right. In France, for example, the judges can even invoke what they call their "innermost conviction". A judge can do that, but not the historian. How many times has it been discovered, with the passing of time, that a judicial error was committed at some moment or other? In the particular instance of the gigantic case brought against Germany, I ask that no one be content with his or her "innermost conviction". I demand proof, one single piece of actual proof. I note that the accusing historians like Poliakov and Hilberg, and a fair number of others, have wound up acknowledging that there is no proof. You're well aware that Raul Hilberg, at first (in 1961)?, had the nerve to write that Hitler had given two orders to exterminate the Jews.
He added that this extermination had been carefully organised from top to bottom within the chain of command. However, in 1983, under the revisionists' pressure, he had to admit (and later, in 1985 at the first Zündel trial in Toronto, confirmed under oath)? that there hadn't been, after all, either an order, a plan or a budget. Then he fell back on the most pitiful of explanations: according to his new analysis, all had been done without an order and without a plan through "an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus-mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy", the bureaucracy of the Third Reich. I call that "invoking the workings of the (Jewish)? Holy Spirit".
May I give you still another point?
Interviewer: Naturally.
Dr. Faurisson: Personally, something that really struck me, speaking of false proof, was that solemn session at the UN, where American Defence Secretary Colin Powell was seen claiming to demonstrate the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I can assure you that the revisionist I am perceived at the very instant that it was all a sham. Glaringly obvious. We laugh about it today but it's disquieting that no one, there at the UN, should have risen to cry out his indignation and proclaim before the whole assembly: "I raise a solemn protest against this stunt of Mr Powell's, who takes us for fools.
We all know that, in the phial he's brandishing, there's surely nothing but some harmless liquid; here we're just being served a cinematic ploy. We all know as well that, in the photographs projected on the screen, nothing but innocuous buildings have been shown, and that it's laughable to write, again up on the screen, that those structures house weapons of mass destruction." It's quite precisely the same put-up job that in 1979 Brugioni and Poirier, those ex-CIA men, went in for when, showing us crematoria, they presumed to tell us those buildings housed weapons of mass destruction called "gas chambers". Same sort of inscriptions, same crude lies.
Interviewer: To pick up on a question that I've already put, do you think the German National Socialist regime committed injustices towards the Jews?
Dr. Faurisson: You said "crimes" and here you say "injustices". I don't know how to qualify the measures that Germany was led to take regarding people whom, not without reason, she held to be hostile or potentially dangerous. Any nation at war may be led to take measures that will certainly be cruel for the families affected. If, tomorrow, war broke out between France and Italy, it's obvious that the French government would intern or put under house arrest all Italians residing in France and that the Italians would act likewise with respect to the Frenchmen who happened to be in Italy.
Interviewer: So then, for you, Germany was at war with those whom one calls "the Jews".
Dr. Faurisson: Yes, she was at war with "the Jews" just as "the Jews" were at war with Germany.
And if we take things to their logical conclusion when observed from a military viewpoint, at bottom, the totality of those potentially dangerous persons could have been put in concentration camps or kept under house arrest. But their numbers were such that it wasn't practicable. Germany therefore decided to take measures which, as the war intensified, grew progressively harsher. Let's take the example of the compulsory wearing of the star, from a certain moment and in certain parts of German-occupied Europe (in the southern zone of France, the Jews didn't have to wear the star)?.
This measure amounted to placing the Jews under probationary supervision. But do note that it's less cruel and far less of an exaction than locking families away in camps as the Germans did in certain cases and as the Americans and Canadians themselves did, not only with the Japanese on their territory, which was normal, but also with Americans and Canadians of Japanese origin. As for the reason why the Germans decided to implement the wearing of the star, it was above all with a view to ensure the German soldier's safety.
Many Jews belonged to groups of those whom the Allies called Résistants and whom the Germans, for their part, called terrorists. You can well imagine that the German soldiers weren't going to look hard and close at other pedestrians in the street in an attempt to see whether they were walking near possibly dangerous individuals. That star warned them. In Paris, in the underground, where each train was made up of five carriages, the star-wearers had to get on the fifth carriage, in which the German soldiers weren't allowed to ride.
Interviewer: According to you, was this treatment of the Jews just? Couldn't it be argued that in France or Germany the Jews were well assimilated and that, for example, the links between the Jews of Paris and those of New York were, anyhow, not very strong?
Dr. Faurisson: It's not a matter, strictly speaking, of a moral question but of military necessity. From a moral viewpoint I can tell you that the treatment of the Jews in Germany shortly before the war, at the time of Kristallnacht, seems to me unworthy, even though I understand the exasperation that the Germans could feel in the face of the growing number of Jewish provocations, the Jewish organisations' ceaseless calls for a crusade against the New Germany and, most notably, the assassination in Paris of vom Rath, the embassy counsellor, by the Jew Grynszpan. Just as unworthy, in my eyes, was the fact that Goering should impose on the Jews a fine of a billion marks for the damage then caused. But, you know, "to judge is to compare" and, as concerns horrors of all kinds visited on minorities, no nation has the right to dispense lessons to others. As
I've had occasion to say, every war is a butchery; the winner is a good butcher and the loser, a less good one; thus, at the end of a war, the winner may give the loser lessons in butchery but he's not entitled to mete out lessons in rights, justice and virtue to him. Yet that is indeed what, at Nuremberg, the winners of the Second World War did to the losers, in proceedings of a rare hypocrisy.
Interviewer: But you do agree, after all, with the principle that international justice must be able to punish war crimes and, as it's said today, "crimes against humanity"?
Dr. Faurisson: As a principle I'll agree readily enough; but see how, in practice, it's almost always, at the end of any war, the loser that this justice finds guilty. It's a revolting spectacle, this hunting party of prosecutors and judges in black robes, all grouped around soldiers crushed by defeat who now see their conquerors parading about in a courtroom. The American army, although the bloodiest of all armies, never has any explaining to do before the international community. To come back to the Second World War, how can one allow that those who made alliance with Stalin should be able to address the least rebuke to those who made alliance with Hitler?
Let's suppose, taking up the usual comparison, that Stalin was the plague and Hitler, cholera; I don't see how those who have, in reality, chosen the plague, can find fault with others for having, in reality, chosen cholera. What right had the French general Leclerc, who was more or less in American uniform, on May 8, 1945, when Germany had surrendered, to have a group of twelve or thirteen prisoners taken out of a hospital and shot without trial just for being in a more or less German uniform? Let's point out that it was mainly from horror or fear of Soviet-style communism that so many young Frenchmen had signed up with either the Milice or the German army.
Interviewer: Do you justify the nature of the reprisals carried out by the German army in France?
Dr. Faurisson: Let's talk about the bomb attacks and assassinations in France against the German occupation forces or French partisans of Collaboration. A large number of Germans died or were injured as a result of such attacks. There were also many acts of destruction against the means of transport and communication — for example telephone cables — , army barracks and depots, crop harvests; there were weapons trafficking operations, espionage for the Allies, aid to deserters, escape networks, there was the Communist propaganda calling for ever more bomb and sniper attacks. What could the German army officers in charge do? At first they had either the culprits themselves or hostages shot by firing squad. Then, they realised that the French population, on the whole, both strongly disapproved of the murders of German soldiers and felt considerable indignation at the reprisals made by the occupation forces. The Germans risked alienating this population.
Thus, from a certain point, they preferred, in numerous instances, to apply deportation instead of execution. Towards the end, what with the big increase in Résistance attacks in the wake of the Allied landings in Normandy, they turned again to shootings, carrying out a large number of them. In France, the total number of persons shot by sentence of a German military tribunal or court martial seems to be situated, for the entire duration of the war, between 4,520 and 4,540, and not, as was stated at the Nuremberg trial, at 29,660. The Communists have long endorsed far greater figures: they haven't shrunk from presenting their party as "the Party of the 75,000 firing squad victims"; for his part, Communist chief Maurice Thorez dared to tell Stalin, on November 18, 1947: "In France during the war, 350,000 Communists were shot by the Germans" (in the review Communisme, summer 1996, p. 47)?.
In France, the number of Communists shot by firing squad was, in reality, a few hundred. When, in 1945, French troops occupied their part of Germany, they didn't find themselves confronted with any armed, organised resistance bent on killing French soldiers. Otherwise they would have behaved as mercilessly as their army had done at the time of the Ruhr valley occupation or in its actions against "the rebels" in Madagascar, Indochina or Algeria. I have in mind a poster that was put up all over one German city in the French zone, showing the corpses photographed in a concentration camp and stating that any person caught removing it would be condemned to death! From the moment a country becomes the occupying power in another territory, it will be inclined to instate a reign of terror there if those being occupied rebel, and especially if they take up weapons to do so.
Interviewer: Going on to quite another question, today in Germany, in the trials for disputing the Holocaust, the judges, in accordance with the law, warn both the accused and his lawyer telling them: "The Holocaust is common knowledge. It's an established fact. You haven't the right to dispute it, nor even to try to prove your good faith or to justify yourself by spelling out the reasons why you don't believe in the reality of the genocide of the Jews and the Nazi gas chambers". What do you think of this?
Dr. Faurisson: This "common knowledge" argument stems from Article 21 of the Charter of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, which states: "The Tribunal shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge but shall take judicial notice thereof". It's outrageous. What, here, does "common knowledge" mean? Facts of "common knowledge" for whom? According to what criteria does the Nuremberg Tribunal decide that such or such a fact is of "common knowledge" while some other fact isn't? The answer is it's the Tribunal that, without giving its reasons, arbitrarily pronounces that such or such a fact is of "common knowledge", and grants itself permission to make its assessments in this regard without adducing any relevant evidence. Pre-emptively, from the very start it forbids anyone to remind it that in proper justice all must be proved.
As there exists no instance of appeal, here we have a court that grants itself full power to violate the duties of the judge. It's in the secrecy of their deliberations, without consulting anyone, that these judges choose such or such a "fact" and decree that it need not be proved. The procedure is a cynical one.
In regard to revisionism, I've had dealings with people of the judiciary in France, England, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and English-speaking Canada. I delight in hearing them all use a complicated and pretentious language to express the simplest and clumsiest ideas. So it was that at Nuremberg the judges, at bottom, decreed: "It's like this because this is how it is", or else: "This is how it is because we've decided that it should be so".
But Article 21 of that strange Tribunal's Charter has an even bigger surprise in store for us in its next sentence, and here the very peak of cynicism is attained. Listen to this: "[The Tribunal]? shall also take judicial notice of official governmental documents and reports of the United Nations, including the acts and documents of the committees set up in the various allied countries for the investigation of war crimes, and of records and findings of military or other Tribunals of any of the United Nations", that is, any of the States that happen to be the declared enemies of the accused. Here's what amounts to saying: "On these matters the prosecution is automatically right and the defence need only hold its tongue".
Hence one will not be surprised at the fact, for example, that the document of Soviet origin concluding that the Katyn massacre was a German crime (with 11,000 victims, it was stated!)? should have been considered right from the start as being "of probative value". The German barristers Stahmer and Laternser, who wanted to challenge it, found themselves being shut up by a reminder of the magical Article 21 given all at once by the Soviet prosecutor, by presiding judge Lawrence, and — the extreme of the extreme — by Soviet judge Nikitchenko acting as if he himself were a prosecutor.
Interviewer: But, Professor Faurisson, if, in Germany, it's said that the Holocaust is "offenkundig", and so of common knowledge, this is because our libraries are cram-full of books on the subject. This being the case, how can one not agree that it's "common knowledge"?
Dr. Faurisson: Those masses of books all take up, with some variations, one and the same argument, that of Germany's conquerors. It's the law of the victor here that's being applied in the land of the vanquished. If one looks closely, one sees that this argument is not at all proved, and even that there exists a quantity of evidence to prove it wrong. For the historian, "common knowledge" doesn't constitute either argument or evidence. It used to be common knowledge that the Sun revolved around the Earth; it used to be common knowledge that Nero burned Rome; it used to be common knowledge that witches existed. In 1914 it was common knowledge for the Allies that the Huns were cutting off Belgian children's hands. It has, in a more recent past, — if only by virtue of a decree from the Nuremberg judges — been common knowledge that the Katyn massacre was carried out by the Germans.
Interviewer: So then, as you see it, Raul Hilberg and his like are either lying or stupid.
Dr. Faurisson: Not necessarily. It may be that they more or less believe what they relate. This is what I tried to explain during our conference when, at the start of my talk, I spoke of a "historical lie". This lie sets itself apart from the ordinary lie in that, developing over a long period of time, it becomes, historically, a sort of standard truth. People then sincerely believe what they call truth and which, at its origin, is but a lie. These people err more by way of conformism, laziness and lack of intellectual curiosity than by way of dishonesty. These faults are to be put down to Man's imperfect nature. We can't spend our existence verifying everything: that would be too burdensome. Hence we often prefer to swallow, eyes closed, a product advertised as wholesome and genuine whereas, in fact, it's doctored.
Interviewer: Do you mean they might well be "men of good will"?
Dr. Faurisson: In order to answer, I'd have to be able to probe their hearts and entrails. I don't know how much honest conviction there may be in any particular one of them. On the other hand, what I do know is that there exists ordinarily in life something called the "white lie", that is, the lie people allow themselves to tell "for the cause". That cause may happen to be a political or religious one, or it may serve the interests of a group, a professional body or certain individuals. In such cases, people take leeway as concerns the exactness of facts or figures and they may even end up finding themselves tailoring testimony to circumstances.
The permanent care of exactitude is quite a constriction. I believe, moreover, in the force of fear as well as in the need for comfort. That force and that need dictate a good part of our behaviour. That said, amongst those who argue the case for "the Holocaust" there are some brazen liars. The revisionists have caught them in the act a thousand times. Simon Wiesenthal and Elie Wiesel are superb false witnesses.
And then there are the bluster merchants. Take the Austro-American Jew Raul Hilberg, whom I've already spoken to you about. It's worthwhile to come back to his case and bring up some more specific points. He is Number One amongst the historians who propagate the extermination myth. Hilberg commenced his research on the alleged "destruction of the European Jews" in 1948. He published his book in 1961. On page 177 thereof, he didn't shrink from affirming that there had been two orders from Hitler to exterminate the Jews.
The first order, given in the spring of 1941, instructed his men, apparently, to go and kill the Jews on the spot, in Soviet territory, and, soon afterwards (no date specified)?, the second order was, apparently, to transport all the other Jews of Europe to extermination camps. But Hilberg mentioned no sources, no documents, no designation of those orders and no precise dates. However, no one stood up to challenge his statements and all the historians seem to have agreed to consider Raul Hilberg a first-rate historian. He's simply Number One amongst the historians who defend a certain official truth that's imposed on us.
Interviewer: How do you account for the fact that, subsequently, Raul Hilberg should have had a change of heart and abandoned his 1961 explanation?
Dr. Faurisson: The big revisionist offensive was in the late 1970s. Clearly Hilberg was jolted by it and, in 1982, he told the French weekly Nouvel Observateur: "In a certain way, Faurisson and others, without wanting to, did us a favour. They raised questions which had the effect of engaging historians in new research. They have obliged us to once again collect information, to re-examine documents and to go deeper into the understanding of what took place". What we didn't know at the time was that Hilberg, shaken by the advent of the revisionists, had gone back to work again and was revising his old argument, with its two alleged orders from Hitler, from top to bottom.
In 1983, in a talk at a conference in New York, he suddenly presented his new thesis, an altogether strange one that ought to have disqualified him forever in the eyes of the historical community. According to the new line, there hadn't in fact been, for the immense enterprise of destroying an entire people on a whole continent, any order, plan or budget but merely a kind of tacit understanding, a spontaneous plot of German bureaucrats! Hilberg's words then were exactly the following: "But what began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures.
[Those measures]? were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus-mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy". You'll have noticed that he specifies "no budget"; it's a response to a point that I personally had brought up. I'd said that, as nothing is done without money, above all in wartime, someone had to show me what huge sum had indeed been allocated to the alleged campaign of mass destruction of the Jews of Europe.
You see how Hilberg, in fact, dodges the questions and comes up with a staggering "explanation". All in all, for him, the whole presumed vast criminal operation was carried out… by the workings of the Holy Spirit or through some phenomenon of spontaneous generation. He himself speaks of an "incredible meeting of minds" amongst countless bureaucrats; let it be asked in passing: if it is "incredible"; that is, unbelievable, how can people be required to believe it, on pain of fine and imprisonment? And what is thought transmission if not a paranormal phenomenon, something in which one should be still less obliged to believe?
The day in Toronto when Raul Hilberg confirmed under oath that that was how he accounted for "the destruction of the European Jews" we had a good laugh round the big table where Ernst Zündel welcomed us each evening as we returned from court. I for my part remember coming out with this: "We're entering a new epoch. From now on, whenever I need the salt and pepper or the water pitcher, I'll no longer even have to say so. We'll use the 'incredible meeting of minds' and 'consensus-mind reading'. After all, if the German bureaucrats, reputedly the most thick-headed of all, practised that system, why should we do without it?"
In the new edition of his work, which was at press at the very moment the trial was going on, Hilberg didn't use those stupefying phrases but he did resort to their equivalents in convoluted and academic form, writing: "In the final analysis, the destruction of the Jews was not so much a product of laws and commands as it was a matter of spirit, of shared comprehension, of consonance and synchronization". And all that, he specifies, without leaving any written trace!
Interviewer: Mr Faurisson, according to you, how many Jews died, all told, during the Second World War due to actions of the Germans? How many, amongst those, in the concentration camps? In which camps, exactly? How many through the use of gas chambers or gas vans?
Dr. Faurisson: No Jew was killed in any execution gas chamber or gas van. Here it's a question of weapons of mass destruction of which no trace has ever been found and of which no one has been able to provide a technical description. There is no possibility that the alleged gas chambers shown, here and there, to tourists can ever have been actual gas chambers. I shall not here be returning to that subject, with which I have so often dealt, and I note that the opposing side stubbornly persist in their refusal to provide us with a technical and scientific study of the presumed crime weapon. As for the total number of Jews of Europe who died during the war due to actions of the Germans, that's not yet possible to determine, and this is so, to a large extent, because of the scandalous conduct of the wartime Allies and the State of Israel, who stand close guard over the enormous mass of archives stored in Germany, at Bad Arolsen, by the International Tracing Service (ITS)?.
From time to time, it's heard that these archives are at last going to be opened to researchers. Jewish or Zionist organisations claim to demand such an opening. Don't believe any of it. I've devoted quite a lot of attention to the matter and can tell you that, if those archives were completely opened up to all researchers without restriction, it would spell catastrophe for the upholders of the "Holocaust" argument. It would be revealed how carefully the Third Reich authorities recorded data about every camp detainee's — Jewish or non-Jewish — arrival, departure, hospitalisations if any, successive jobs, transfers from one camp to another and, in the event, decease. And then there'd be access to the precise number of cremations done at each crematorium as well as the number of Jewish "survivors", that is of those millions of miraculously spared inmates who, after the war, spread throughout the world, many of them forming the original population of the State of Israel.
In the late 1970s revisionists began getting interested in those archives: at the time there existed, on the premises of the ITS, a "historical section" (Historische Abteilung)?. In 1978 the authorities suddenly closed it. For my part, I ask that it be reopened, with permission given to all researchers to consult the totality of the material.
But you've just asked about the number of Jews who died due to actions of the Germans. No one, for the time being, is able to say. To begin with, it would be necessary to set apart those who died of natural causes from those who died as a consequence of actions on the part of either the Germans or the Allies. Be that as it may, I have observations to make on the considerable number of Jews who survived the war and who are in themselves as many clues to suggest that there cannot have been a policy of killing all the Jews.
In the Israeli daily Haaretz of April 18, 2004, correspondent Amiram Barkat had an article entitled "U.S. court to discuss question of who is a Holocaust survivor"; it told of how two Jewish demographics experts who'd had the job of reckoning the number of Jewish survivors still alive in 2004 had arrived, respectively, at the figures of 687,900 and 1,092,000. The difference is explained by the second expert's inclusion of the Jewish population of North Africa, Syria and Lebanon, territories occupied for a certain time either by the Germans and Italians or by the forces of the Vichy government. I'll refer here therefore only to the lower figure and point out that 687,900 European Jews having experienced the German occupation and still alive nearly sixty years on imply that, just after the war, the number of Jewish survivors must necessarily have amounted to several million (probably 3,250,000)?.
What sort of alleged extermination policy can there have been if millions of survivors or miraculously spared targets were left alive in its wake? At that period, Europeans were amazed at the influx to their countries of Jews who, they'd been told, had disappeared forever. The camps for displaced persons were full of them. We have at our disposal a great many photographs showing, in particular, Jewish youngsters arriving by train from Central Europe or housed in countless children's homes. Their physical appearance was identical to that of children of non-Jewish populations of the time.
As far as France is concerned, we know that, of a Jewish population of about 350,000, around 75,700 Jews, foreigners for the most part, were deported, but we're not told how many survived. The figure we're sometimes given — 2,500 out of 75,721 — results from numerous tricks that I haven't the time to list right now but I've explained them elsewhere. If you want an idea of how large and lively the French Jewish community was on the morrow of the war I recommend you look in a certain yearbook entitled L'Annuaire du judaïsme. The 1952 edition describes, in 415 pages, the situation of French and world Jewry. Believe me, it's instructive. By itself, the number of Jewish associations listed, with telephone numbers and addresses, is staggering. And behold the flood today of books, memoirs, testimonies of "miraculous" Jewish survivors, not to mention the applications for indemnity or compensation.
But in Germany they never quit repeating the figure of six million Jews either gone missing or killed; it's neither five nor seven but always six.
Even as conformist a historian as Martin Broszat long ago admitted that it was a "symbolic" figure, that is a mythical one. I'll add that it's part of the general Jewish symbology. Read the study, published in 2003, by Don Heddesheimer: The First Holocaust. The author demonstrates, with newspaper reproductions to back it up, that from the year 1900 — but it might be possible to go back still further — the American Jewish press was already launching the slogan "Six million European Jews are dying".
He provides examples from 1900, 1919, 1920, 1926, 1938, 1940. In Jewish circles it had become a leitmotiv. In Jerusalem, the specialists at the Yad Vashem Memorial set out, years ago, to establish a list of the names of the six million Jews who died in the "Holocaust". They have barely reached three million but on the basis, in good part, of simple unverified declarations emanating from unverified sources and processed in such a way that one and the same person can be recorded as having died several times, even, it seems, as many as ten times. On this subject I recommend certain studies published in the French-language review Dubitando, produced in Holland, whose contents can be downloaded at http://www.aaargh.com.mx/fran/revu/dubitando.
Interviewer: But, according to you, of what size may the number of Jews be whose deaths were imputable to the Germans or their allies?
Dr. Faurisson: There again, I'll refer you to the Suchdienst or International Tracing Service located at Bad Arolsen, to which non-approved historians have been barred entry since 1978.
Interviewer: Fair enough, but give us a figure as concerns the dead of Auschwitz.
Dr. Faurisson: Of the outrageous figures, the best known is that of four million but there have been, even officially, rather higher ones. The Nuremberg tribunal decided on four million; it's the figure that was inscribed on the commemorative stones at Auschwitz-Birkenau and which stayed there till 1990. Suddenly it was removed and, in 1995, after five years of dithering, that of a million and a half was put in its place after being chosen by Lech Walesa, then president of the Polish Republic. But those in charge of the Museum there and the official historians or researchers reduced it anew to 1,100,000, then progressively to 800,000, to a bit more than 600,000 and, finally, in 2002, to 510,000 (Fritjof Meyer)?.
Personally I reckon that the total number of dead, Jewish and non-Jewish, for the entire duration of Auschwitz's use by the Germans (May 1940-January 1945)? must have reached the level — a considerable one — of 125,000 in the thirty-nine camps of that vast complex; those deaths are to be put down, above all, to the typhus epidemics whose devastating effects spread even to the ranks of the Germans there and, in particular, to the medical personnel (striking, for example, two head physicians: Drs Popiersch and Schwela)?. I base this estimate on the data in the Sterbebücher and a few other documents. The total of deaths registered therein is 80,010 but, considering that a known number of Sterbebücher are missing, I suppose this total must be put at around 125,000. As for the figure of 74,000 that's sometimes proposed, it seems to me to have arisen from a journalistic error.
Interviewer: You mention physicians at Auschwitz. What have you to say on the subject of Dr Mengele?
Dr. Faurisson: I've looked into his case. I don't believe I'm wrong in stating that Josef Mengele was probably one of the most slandered men of his era. In all likelihood, he deserved the reputation, which he had amongst his fellow citizens of Günzburg, of "ein Kavalier". I've had a look through his manuscripts (unpublished)?, which show a man steeped in Greco-Roman culture, very keen on science and curious about everything.
He didn't hide it from his close acquaintances that the gassing stories were pure invention. During a posthumous show-trial of Mengele held in Jerusalem before the world's television cameras, his "victims" came forth to impute the worst atrocities to him: according to them, he used to pin gouged-out human eyeballs on the walls of his office, or pour acid into the eyes of his "guinea pigs" to see whether it made them turn from black to blue. There's hardly a class of things, real or imagined, that lends itself as readily to nonsensical jabber as that of medical monstrosities, especially when they can be blamed on a white-coated "Herr Doktor". Here it's easy to have the layman believe any atrocity story at all. On this score, I highly recommend a book by two British lawyers about the Dering case (Mavis Hill & L. Norman Williams, Auschwitz in England / A Record of a Libel Action, London, MacGibbon and Kee, 1965)?.
In his 1959 book Exodus, the Jew Leon Uris had the gall to write that, from the beginning of his internment at Auschwitz, the Polish surgeon Wladislaw Alexander Dering (spelt Dehring by Uris)? had carried out "seventeen thousand surgical experiments without anaesthesia" on women. Note that figure, along with the word "experiments". After the war, Dr Dering had settled in England, then had practised in Somalia and, finally, went back to England where he received an O.B.E., comparable to our Légion d'Honneur in France.
From April 13 to May 6, 1964 there ran the trial in London of Dering's libel suit against Uris and his publisher. During the proceedings, an extraordinary quantity of lies were to be exposed thanks, especially, to the discovery of the records of surgical operations performed in Block 21 of Auschwitz where Dr Dering had worked. The defendants were driven progressively to reduce the number of dreadful operations imputed to the retired surgeon. Also, the women became "men and women" and the figure seventeen thousand was dropped and replaced by "a very large number", then "a figure between one hundred and two hundred" and, at the end, it seems the defence settled for the case of three women identified only by their Christian names. What's more, it had to be acknowledged that the operations had been done not without anaesthesia but with rachidian (spinal column)? anaesthesia, and a renowned English anaesthetist testified that in his view Dr Dering had been right to choose that type.
A dramatic moment arose when Dr Dering was able to prove the surgical records had been falsified by their Polish custodians starting from a certain page for August 1943, a date when he was no longer performing operations and was no longer in Block 21. The Germans at Auschwitz had scrupulously kept those records, partly in Latin, and with, I recall, the occasional mention of a "casus explorativus", the term applied to surgical tasks performed "in order to see". Dr Dering was to win his case and be awarded damages of one farthing — a quarter of an old penny! The judge then ruled peremptorily that the physician, although he'd been abominably libelled, would have to bear court costs, which were considerable, and denied him leave to appeal. All due to the fact that, throughout the whole trial, the shadow of Auschwitz and the "gas chambers", constantly evoked — even by the judge — had never ceased to cast itself on the plaintiff. If I recall correctly Dering was to declare: "Here I am ruined, but I've saved my honour", and it seems he died not long afterwards.
Interviewer: Some people will ask you the following question: "But where did all those Jews go, those who you say weren't exterminated?"
Dr. Faurisson: My answer is: "To Palestine and fifty other countries throughout the world, of which I can give you the list". A good many of the nearly six million Jews who today inhabit the State of Israel are "survivors" or descendants of "survivors" of what they call "the Holocaust". Besides, when Steven Spielberg decided to launch his vast project of gathering together fifty thousand survivors' "testimonies" he sent his interviewers to about fifty countries of the world; that's the number of countries to which those Jews scattered after the war.
Interviewer: Some participants at the conference held that, when the Wehrmacht started its offensive in the East, many Jews fled or were transported towards the Soviet Union; what are your thoughts on this?
Dr. Faurisson: That's quite correct, but it's still hard to reckon the number of those Jews who settled, for example, in Uzbekistan (Tashkent, Samarkand)?, Tajikistan or elsewhere, perhaps even in the Jewish autonomous region of Birobijan.
Interviewer: How do you account for the fact that almost all the former concentration camp inmates state they can attest to the reality of the gas chambers there?
Dr. Faurisson: They're repeating a rumour that allows them to grant themselves, with no inconvenience, the status of heroes or miraculous survivors. They generally do so risk-free since there's very little chance that anyone will put their backs to the wall and ask for explanations. During one of my trials, a super-excited Jew came up to me at the courtroom entrance shouting and showing me his Auschwitz registration tattoo. "How dare you say the gas chambers didn't exist?", he said. "I'm a witness to their existence." I looked him in the eye and told him: "Describe a gas chamber for me."
Losing his composure, he answered: "If I'd seen one I wouldn't be here to talk to you about it." I then pointed out that, like all the Jews who'd returned from Auschwitz, he was rather a witness to there never having been a policy amongst the Germans of physically exterminating the Jews, since there he was, very much alive. I'll remind you that in 1985 at the first Zündel trial, in Toronto, we had the rare chance to cross-examine the Number One Jewish witness to the "Holocaust", a certain Rudolf Vrba. Look up the trial transcripts to see how that arrogant individual was in the end put to rout and how he had to confess that, in his book on Auschwitz, reputed to be so exact and meticulous, he'd resorted to "poetic licence": "licentia poetarum" as he let fly, in Latin.
Interviewer: According to you, what happened to the Jews selected on what's called "the Auschwitz (or Birkenau)? ramp"?
Dr. Faurisson: The men were put on one side and the women and children on the other. In separate columns, either on foot or, for some, in lorries, they all went off to the Sauna where they showered and were disinfected. Photos, well-known ones, from what's called The Auschwitz Album attest to these arrivals on the ramp. It's in this sector that a football ground ("Sportplatz")? was located, and the newly arrived inmates could see it just beside the ramp; there was a volleyball court and there were also a great number of hospital barracks, at one side for the women, at the other for the men.
It's in this same sector that two big crematoria stood flanked by little gardens and visible from all around; also, large settling tanks for wastewater, shower and disinfection installations, vast storehouses for personal belongings which, as at the entrance to any prison or any camp, were confiscated from the newcomers.
Interviewer: What do you make of the speech given by Adolf Hitler at the Kroll Opera House in Berlin on January 30, 1939? He said then — these were his words — : "If international finance Jewry within Europe and abroad should succeed once more in plunging the peoples into a world war, then the consequence will be not the Bolshevisation of the world and therewith a victory of Jewry, but on the contrary, the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe".
Dr. Faurisson: In that pre-war speech there is positively no question of a physical extermination of the Jews. To those who were blowing on the embers and desired with all their hearts a crusade against Germany, Hitler was saying in his way: "Don't harbour any illusions: if you succeed in triggering a war, it's not we who'll be annihilated but our Communist and Jewish enemies". I'll refer you to the analysis that the late Wilhelm Stäglich made of that declaration in Der Auschwitz Mythos.
Dr Stäglich also dealt with Heinrich Himmler's speeches at Posen, in 1943, speeches to which people in certain quarters have tagged on the attention-grabbing adjective "secret"; before and during the war, and up to the very last months, Himmler tried everything he could to convince the Allies to take the Jews, whom they seemed to find so marvellous, into their own countries.
Interviewer: Therefore, contrary to what other historians say, for you that speech of Hitler's doesn't constitute proof that he wanted to annihilate the Jews.
Dr. Faurisson: Obviously not. And you'll no longer find, I believe, any historians who hold that it does.
Interviewer: And what do you say about Adolf Hitler's political testament? In it can be read, for instance:
"But nor have I left any doubt that if the nations of Europe are once more to be treated only as collections of stocks and shares of these international conspirators in money and finance, then those who carry the real guilt for the murderous struggle, this people will also be held responsible: the Jews [das Judentum]?! I have further left no one in doubt that this time it will not be only millions of children of Europeans of the Aryan peoples who will starve to death, not only millions of grown men who will suffer death, and not only hundreds of thousands of women and children who will be burned and bombed to death in the cities, without those who are really responsible also having to atone for their crime, even if by more humane means [wenn auch durch humanere Mittel]?".
By "more humane means" didn't Hitler mean "the gas chambers"?
Dr. Faurisson: Pure speculation! Hitler signed that text on April 29, 1945, that is the eve of his suicide (let's note in passing that, according to the Vulgate, the "gas chambers" had no longer been operating since late November 1944)?. He had before him the appalling spectacle of a country laid to waste and its men, women and children being systematically torched with phosphorous. He promises those behind this inhuman war that they'll have to atone for their crime but not, all the same, through the horrible and barbarous means that the Allies were using.
The pinnacle of horror is to go and burn people alive. It was the British leaders, Churchill at their head, who, as of 1940-1941, decided that from then on war would be waged systematically on the German civilians and who, to that purpose, undertook the production of heavy bomber aircraft designed to destroy the German cities. Until then, military men strictly limited themselves to making war against other military men and, when they did happen to kill civilians, they put the case, rightly or wrongly, that it was as a consequence — a regrettable one — of military action (for example, during a tactical bombardment)?. The British gentlemen were innovators in the art of war: on the one hand, they elected to slaughter German civilians systematically in order to make the opposing military leaders give in and, on the other hand, they went about stirring up and maintaining the cowards' war, that of snipers or "Résistants", against German soldiers.
There might have been some courage in blowing oneself up with a bomb to kill some of the enemy in the process but there was hardly any in the sniper who acted under cover and then fled the scene, thus wittingly setting off bloody reprisals against numerous innocent people. Soviet savagery and American brutality then joined in.
From Hitler's point of view, the unnatural alliance of the City's and Wall Street's capitalism with Muscovite Communism had been sealed in the deliberate holocaust of the German people; the Ark of the Covenant between those two opposites united the Jews of the whole world, so powerful and influential particularly in the financial spheres of the English-speaking countries, in the media and in the international Communist movement. The German historian Ernst Nolte had already offered me that argument of the "more humane means" being evidence of the gas chambers' existence. It goes to show how destitute of real evidence such historians are.
Interviewer: Doesn't the report of the Berlin-Wannsee conference prove the existence of a plan to exterminate the Jews?
Dr. Faurisson: Not in the least. Undated, unsigned, bearing no stamp of any bureau, this piece has the look of a draft report telling of a meeting held on January 20, 1942 in the Berlin suburbs. Nowhere is it a question of killing or exterminating the Jews but, for those Jews able to work, of evacuation eastwards for them to be put to work, whilst those aged 65 and over were to be sent to Theresienstadt, in Bohemia.
There appears several times in this document the expression "final solution of the Jewish question in Europe", which is sometimes shortened to "final solution of the Jewish question" or to "final solution" or even, quite simply, to "solution". The original phrase, in its complete form, was "a final territorial solution of the Jewish question" (understood: the Jewish question in Europe)?. A certain Martin Luther, under-secretary of State in the German foreign office, employed that phrase on page 4 of his famous memorandum of August 21, 1942. That adjective "territorial" means that the question will have to be settled by finding the Jews a territory of their own; any other solution would be inadequate.
For if, for example, after the war, the Jews became free again in Europe, they would soon, as history shows, manage to regain their power and influence there; whereas, in the event of a transfer for good somewhere outside Europe, those who'd survived the hardships entailed would make up an elite capable of forming the germinal cell of a Jewish renewal. It's silly to talk here of an extermination project. Even Yehuda Bauer, professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, ended up, in 1992, denouncing "the silly story of Wannsee". He stated: "The public still repeats, time after time, the silly story that at Wannsee the extermination of the Jews was arrived at".
Interviewer: Some claim that the number of Jews killed by the Germans doesn't matter. Whether it's a question of six million, two million or 500,000, the crime remains enormous.
Dr. Faurisson: The remark is a common one. In my judgment I've already answered it, in substance, by showing you that Germany never had a policy of exterminating the Jews. That said, figures matter, and sometimes they even matter greatly. First of all, there's an important difference between dying and being killed. Then, it's far more grave an act to kill a mass of people than one person alone. Finally, the difference between six million and 500,000 being 5,500,000, there you have, in any case, 5,500,000 persons who, instead of having died or been killed, turn out to be well and truly alive. Still, when a modest-sized community can claim that six million of its members have been methodically done away with (six million being the equivalent of the population of a country like Switzerland)?, it will obtain, most assuredly, more compassion from the rest of the world than if it only invokes the figure of 500,000 dead or killed.
With six million dead or killed it can demand and obtain a good deal more moral understanding, financial compensation, assorted powers and privileges. For a small people, the ability to boast of being a millionaire six times over in dead or murdered opens up the chance to demand and garner, with no great difficulty, billions in hard cash. A Shoah estimated at six million victims is the guarantee of a "Shoah business" that will bear fruit proportionately. By this I don't mean that lies have been told and exaggerations made in order to make money or acquire privileges. Lies have been told and the subsequent success of the lies has been turned to good account.
Interviewer: Are you of the opinion that Germany has contracted a moral responsibility towards Israel and the Jews, a responsibility that must also be borne in the form of financial reparations?
Dr. Faurisson: I am rather of the opinion of the American author Arthur Robert Butz, the Number One revisionist. The text of his masterly book, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, ends with this comment on the colossal German "reparations": "… it then develops that Israel owes Germany a lot of money, because the proposed justification for the reparations has been invalidated". It is worth noting that the German version of the book is, on this point, rather different and, unhappily, less clear-cut.
Interviewer: In your view, do the Jews who survived the Second World War deserve financial compensation?
Dr. Faurisson: All the true victims of that atrocious conflict and its aftermath deserve respect, consideration and indemnity; amongst the victims I should mention, in particular, the Germans — but not their leaders — and the entire Palestinian people.
Interviewer: Are you an anti-Semite, that is an enemy of the Jews?
Dr. Faurisson: You mean anti-Jewish. No, I don't consider myself anti-Jewish as I don't wish the Jews any ill. I don't wish for anyone to touch a hair on their head, if only so as not to have to hear them yell still more loudly. What I do want, on the other hand, is for them not to do me any harm; nor to others. I want the deafening drumming of their holocaustic propaganda to end, drumming behind which one can all too often make out the drum rolls leading up to new wars. There are none so whining and warlike as that Jewish, Zionist and neo-con nomenklatura which never quits demanding censorship, repression, wars and crusades in the name of the "Holocaust", that is in the name of an especially degrading lie.
Interviewer: Are you a racist?
Dr. Faurisson: No.
Interviewer: What future do you wish for "the Holocaust"?
Dr. Faurisson: If by that word are meant, all together, the alleged policy of physical extermination of the Jews, the alleged Nazi gas chambers and the alleged Six Million, I wish that abominable slander a speedy end in the rubbish bins of history. As an academic, I want it to be possible to write on the Second World War without having to dread the effects of special laws put on the books at the behest of the Jewish nomenklatura. Hitler died more than sixty years ago and it remains "streng verboten" to write "on" Hitler; one may write only "against" Hitler. This is either childishness or else treating people like children. I wish to see us all entitled to write about him just as we're allowed to do with Napoleon, Churchill or Stalin.
Interviewer: Have you a word to say in conclusion?
Dr. Faurisson: My conclusion is that we are here in Tehran the day after a conference, held on December 11th and 12th of 2006, dealing with "the Holocaust". That conference was truly international. We'd have liked to see and hear Raul Hilberg and Norman Finkelstein. The latter says the revisionists are "crackpots", lunatics. If he'd come here, I'd have asked him quite politely in what respect I personally deserved that epithet, and I'd also have inquired as to what writings of ours he might in fact have read before pronouncing such a judgment on revisionist authors.
The conference ended with the forming of a "Holocaust" research group, with an Iranian, Dr Ramin, as its president and, provisionally, five members: an Australian, a Briton, a Dane, a Frenchman and a Swiss. The year 2006 will go down in history, not just the history of Iran but that of the whole world as well. Iran, this amazing country, will have had the heroism, in one and the same year, to say no, first to American imperialism, then to the "Holocaust" crusaders. I won't hide it from you that this heroism scares me. Perhaps President Ahmadinejad will in future have to pay dearly for his temerity.
Interviewer: Were you able to have a word with him?
Dr. Faurisson: Yes, we talked for a few minutes face to face, amidst a lot of other conference participants. I expressed my admiration for his courage, along with our gratitude for this astonishing seminar, open to all, revisionists and non-revisionists alike. To me, the one whom the world press depicts as a dangerous fanatic appeared, both in his closing speech and in our brief conversation, to be a man of refined spirit, sincere and soft-spoken.
And besides, you know he's never said that the State of Israel must be "wiped off the map", but he has thought it enough to adopt a phrase of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, in whose view the Zionist State would one day be erased from the chart of time and history. He's expressed the opinion that in the Middle East Zionism is bound to disappear just as Communism did in Russia. He wishes to see all the communities in Palestine, including the Jewish community, find their respective places one again. Hence that delegation of six rabbis at the conference, wearing a sort of badge with the message that they were Jews but not Zionists.
As I've told you, I myself conversed and got on quite well with two of those rabbis. One of them said to me, in the presence of a witness: "I ask your forgiveness for what 'they' have done to you, if it's at all forgivable". To which I replied "Let's stay united", meaning we should make a united stand against those who, holding all the power, abuse that excess of power.
Interviewer: You've paid dearly for this revisionist struggle that you've been waging since, at least, 1974.
Dr. Faurisson: Yes, I've paid dearly but less so than other revisionists. I'm talking not only about the physical assaults that I've had to endure and the hospitalisations but also of the avalanche of court cases and, sometimes, their scandalous outcome. I'm well placed to know that with regard to a revisionist, as formerly with regard to sorcerers or witches, the judges, apart from a few exceptions, no longer recognise any moral principles, any laws, any rights. As for the media, they've heaped onto my name an extravagant load of abuse, insults, slanders. In over thirty years they've never spontaneously offered me the chance to present my defence. With but one exception: in December 1980, on the radio, I had the time to utter a sixty-word sentence summing up the findings of my research, but the axe came down in the form of a lawsuit and judgment against me precisely because of that sentence.
It's a disgrace that, from 1974 to the present day, journalists have been able to say my name a hundred thousand times to brand me as a "gangster of history" without a single one of them ever asking me for an interview, if only to hear me talk for a few minutes in my defence. No less distressing is the general silence of my colleagues, French academics and intellectuals who otherwise are so quick to proclaim their desire to defend the freedom of inquiry.
The American Noam Chomsky has, on one occasion, spoken up in favor of my right to freedom of expression but, since then, he's only ever spoken of revisionists as of "crackpots". The only people in France to take the risk of defending me have been, besides my lawyer (and his friends)?, Pierre Guillaume, Serge Thion, Jean-Gabriel Cohn-Bendit (and their friends, amongst whom the courageous Jacob Assous)?. But I have no right to complain if I compare my lot with that of so many other revisionists, to begin with the heroic Ernst Zündel and a good number of other Germans or Austrians who either have experienced long years of imprisonment or will be imprisoned in future. In Sweden, the ever-steadfast Ahmed Rami has himself also tasted prison life. And then we were saved by the Internet. Maybe I've been lucky. I shouldn't say the same for my wife and children.
Interviewer: Will you agree to let this interview be published?
Dr. Faurisson: Yes, on condition that you submit the text to me and that, if need be, I may make corrections and additions, either on my own initiative or at your request.
Interviewer: Then we're agreed. I thank you.
Dr. Faurisson: Danke sehr. And, addressing myself to your country, I'll add: "Armes Deutschland!" [Poor Germany!]?.
Interviewer: Leider. [Unfortunately]?
Dr. Faurisson: Leider.
THE END
All translation rights strictly reserved.
***
Introduction by Michael A. Hoffman II
In honor of World War II revisionist historian Dr. Robert Faurisson's 79th birthday, January 25, 2008, we are publishing this interview conducted in Tehran, December 13, 2006 by a German citizen, immediately after Iran's revisionist conference had concluded.
In spite of some bitter disputes we have had in the past with Dr. Faurisson (any friendship which cannot weather such disputes it not a true friendship), and the fact that we continue to disagree with some of his ideas and conclusions, Robert Faurisson is undoubtedly one of the bravest men it has been our privilege to know.
The sacrifices he has made, both in his career as a university professor, and in his personal life, have been so enormous they would have driven a lesser man to madness or recantation and surrender. In addition to losing his professorship and being saddled with huge court fines, he has been repeatedly physically assaulted, culminating in a brutal attack in 1989 that required his hospitalization.
Robert would not want to be regarded as a martyr, but the fact is, he is indeed a martyr to freedom of speech and inquiry. Nobel prizes go to obscure campaigners for human rights in Third World countries, while under the very nose of the Nobel committee is Faurisson of France. His courageous campaign and the rights of revisionists, mean nothing to the West that otherwise is so pompous in its moralizing lectures to the Muslim world, on the need for "democracy and freedom of expression." What they mean by that slogan is freedom for the dominion of Zionism, Judaism and its offshoot religion for gentiles, Holocaustianity, and jail -- or worse -- for all who dissent.
Dr. Faurisson is currently being prosecuted by the government of France for having spoken at the Tehran revisionist conference. He has been repeatedly prosecuted and fined in the past for his revisionist books and essays. Meanwhile, Germar Rudolf, Ernst Zundel, Georges Thiel, Wolfgang Frohlich and incredibly, Sylvia Stolz, Mr. Zundel's defense attorney, are all either serving prison terms or have been sentenced to prison in Europe for blaspheming the Holy People's Holy Auschwitz Gas Chamber relic. Attorney Stolz's "crime" was offering too vigorous a defense of Zundel during his trial in Germany! This is beyond absurd. Even Lewis Carrol and his Alice would be lost in this Kafkaesque nightmare world, wherein the supposedly oh-so cool agnostics of hip, liberated Europe, who have cast off God, fall prostrate in abject obeisance to the false gods of Judaism and Zionism. --Michael A. Hoffman II
Interviewer: Hello Professor Faurisson, and thank you for granting me this interview.
Dr. Faurisson: Hello. It's I who thank you for your willingness to put questions.
Interviewer: Professor, may I ask what your reasons were for deciding to take part in this conference in Tehran on the Holocaust on December 11th and 12th, 2006?
Dr. Faurisson: It's because I know of no other country, no place where a conference on this subject could welcome me. Even in the United States the holding of such a conference would be risky; to begin with, upon arrival on American territory any foreign revisionist could well find himself being sent straight back to where he'd come from. In France, any similar gathering would be out of the question. I don't see a single European country that would tolerate a public conference or debate on the "Holocaust". In Germany, your country, the prohibition of any form of revisionism is draconian. Canada, Australia and New Zealand are merciless.
Furthermore, it may be that in other parts of the world some countries are indifferent to the matter. Thus it was an altogether unexpected bit of luck that Iran should offer to host an international seminar on the "Holocaust" that, for once, would be open to all comers. It was not actually a revisionist conference but, as indicated by the title ("Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision")?, a new look at the "Holocaust" from a comprehensive viewpoint and not a biased or fragmentary one. I didn't think this could come about in my lifetime.
Interviewer: What goal have you been looking to achieve in coming here?
Dr. Faurisson: I want to make public what the mainstream media of the Western world stubbornly conceal. When those media speak of revisionists, it's to insult us or ascribe to us ideas that we've never expressed. For example, they readily assert that the revisionists are people who claim the German concentration camps never existed. That's putting sheer nonsense in our mouths. Unhappily the nonsensical assertion, amongst the French in any case, is widespread. On this score, the French in general have the idea that the revisionists are lunatics who go so far as to deny the obvious and this is why, coining a barbarism, they call us "négationnistes" ("denialists")?.
Interviewer: Have you the impression, at the end of this gathering, that you've achieved your goal?
Dr. Faurisson: In part. The world has been able to note that we exist and that we can conduct ourselves peaceably and courteously with people who don't share our convictions. Time was wanting for any real debate. And then I suppose the media will relate virtually nothing of the content of our papers. They'll keep silent about our arguments and discoveries. To obtain a real debate we'll need a new conference, on condition that our opponents don't shy away from taking part. I must say that, for an instant, I was able to have the beginnings of a public confrontation with a professor who was hostile to revisionism, and that this confrontation turned dramatically to our advantage. I'll tell you about it a bit later on, if you like.
Interviewer: Most gladly.
Dr. Faurisson: There've been, above all, the echoes made by this conference throughout the world. It has provoked vehement protests, starting yesterday in Washington with a statement by White House spokesman Sean McCormack denouncing an Iranian regime that "perversely seeks to call the historical fact of those [Nazi]? atrocities into question and provide a platform for hatred". Then it was in Brasilia that a government had its say in the matter with an official protest. Then in England. Then, at the UN, Kofi Annan gave tongue. The Vatican as well. According to all these authorities, there are no grounds for asking oneself questions about the "Holocaust" of the Jews. The "Holocaust" took place and that's that.
But I've promised you that example of the beginnings of a public confrontation. Here it is. That match of yesterday pitted me against an Iranian professor from Shiraz University, who also teaches at the University of the State of Washington (USA)?; his name is Gholam Vatandoust. At one point in his presentation he dared to say that the "Holocaust" was "fully documented", that is, wholly confirmed by valid documentation. Then, after his talk, when the audience was able to put questions, I asked this professor to name me a document, and I insisted on the fact that I didn't care to hear about a set of documents; I wanted just one. He started answering by saying how Churchill, in his memoirs, had denounced the Nazi atrocities. I pointed out that never had Churchill mentioned the "gas chambers" and that such was the case as well with Eisenhower, de Gaulle and others of their stature. I reminded him that what I was waiting for was the designation of a document. I had him note that Winston Churchill, in the remarks alluded to, was a politician expressing his sentiments. However, I was not looking to know anyone's sentiments, be they even those of a personality like Churchill.
At that point, the Iranian professor believed he'd come up with another argument. He told me it would be enough to accompany him to the American National Archives, where I should find documents. This wasn't an answer since, again, I was demanding to hear of but one document. Just then the situation reminded me of the story of the angler and the big fish. An angler boasts of recently making an extraordinary haul, a truly miraculous catch, and, when I ask to see the fish, retorts: "How's that? Are you calling my word into doubt? If you're a doubting Thomas and won't grant me your trust, I can show you the place where I caught that fish." Obviously my reply will be that the place doesn't interest me: the fish does. Let him show me it! Thus, "Show me or draw me a Nazi gas chamber!" That's what I've been asking for ages.
I told this professor that I was familiar with those National Archives. I'd even consulted them at three different places: in Washington proper, then, not far from there, in Suitland and at the opulent installation of College Park. In short, I was getting no answer to my request. The man made three more vague attempts, all equally futile, and part of the audience, noticing how decidedly unable he was to respond, interrupted the verbal jousting with laughter and applause. This morning I had the occasion to meet him. I found much humbler than yesterday and he exhibited a lively curiosity about an argument that he seemed to be just discovering. We exchanged addresses and perhaps our discussion will continue. I also had two brief talks in private with one of the six anti-Zionist rabbis who'd come to take part in the proceedings: he was from Britain and appeared surprised but not shocked by the findings of revisionist research. Finally, I had a short and cordial exchange with an Austrian chief rabbi.
It seems that another participant, Viktor Nadein-Rayevsky of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of World Economy and International Relations, said at some point: "Faurisson demands documents, but some very important events have occurred which haven't left any documents. In these cases, no document can be produced." I'd like to know what these "very important events" can be to which no document attests!
Interviewer: I think he was talking about the Khmer Rouge.
Dr. Faurisson: Perhaps. But then, I'm very sorry! We possess a large number of documents or alleged documents on the subject. I'll recall here the meaning of the term "document". In general, a document is something written, but it may also be a material object. "Document" comes from a Latin verb signifying "that which tells, which teaches you something". A knife on a table, a chair, a room, a building can all have the value of a document. It is altogether normal that, for example, a great mind such as Fustel de Coulanges (1830-1889)?, who, for us French, is the founder of scientific history, should have adopted a motto like "No documents, no history".
I've just given you the example of two speakers who disputed what the revisionists have concluded after completing their research work. I insist on this. People are quick to call us "négateurs" (at least the word is French)? or "négationnistes" (a lapse into barbarism)?. These two words mean that revisionists are persons who deny obvious facts. They would seem, in a way, to be inspired by the Devil. As in Goethe's phrase, we revisionists would be partisans of "the spirit that ever denies", wouldn't we? In reality, we deny nothing at all; simply, after completing our research work, we challenge certain affirmations and come forth with our own findings. Galileo "denied" nothing but, at the end of his labours, he stated that a certain idea, generally admitted, was wrong and that another idea was right.
Interviewer: Can you sum up the substance of your own contribution to the conference?
Dr. Faurisson: My talk was on "the victories of revisionism", in other words the concessions that the antirevisionists have over the years been forced to make to us. I recommend that people consult the text itself, which I entitled simply "The Victories of Revisionism" and in which I provide a selection of twenty instances of such victories. They run from 1950 to 2004, and some of them are quite dramatic. Unfortunately the general public know nothing of it all because we have no access to the media.
Interviewer: An example, if you please, of these victories?
Dr. Faurisson: I could cite the case of Jean-Claude Pressac. For years, that protégé of the Klarsfeld couple had presumed to state he'd discovered proof of the "Nazi gas chambers'" existence. A book of his, in 1993-1994, was laden with praise throughout the big media. In 1994 I replied with a booklet that earned me new criminal proceedings. Happily I got Pressac subpoenaed to appear at the trial. This was in May 1995, in Paris. His collapse under examination was spectacular. He never got back up again. To her credit, Valérie Igounet, a French historian hostile to revisionism, reproduced in her 2000 book Histoire du négationnisme en France a sort of act of surrender signed by Pressac. The latter, in effect, had ended up admitting that the dossier on the German concentration camps was "rotten" — his word, that — with too many lies. He even added that a definitively "rotten" dossier had been got up around wartime suffering that was all too real and — in his own phrase — that dossier was "bound for the rubbish bins of history".
Interviewer: Surprising! What became of Pressac?
Dr. Faurisson: His Jewish friends, of course, disowned him. He died in 2003, aged 59. The media's silence was total. Pressac is one of the host of people who have proved unable to take up the challenge I launched back in the 1970s. At that time I'd demonstrated how the case for the existence of the alleged Nazi gas chambers ran into some radical impossibilities. The Leuchter Report and the Rudolf Report, not to mention a few other reports or views expressed by men of science, subsequently confirmed my demonstration.
Interviewer: Here, in Tehran, you began your talk with a word of warning about the photographs said to be of Nazi atrocities. Why?
Dr. Faurisson: Because people's minds are steeped in them. In the business of lying propaganda nothing's more simple and effective than the use of photographs. You don't even need any complicated montages. It's enough to show images of the sick, the dying or the dead and, in relation to these, speak of the killed, the murdered or the slaughtered. Ordinary decent folk will be taken in. They'll feel revulsion, indignation, anger.
They'll no longer see what's in front of them (the dead)? but only what's been put into their minds (the killed)?. They'll become fixated on it. They won't take time to think things over. In the area of false massacres the procedure stays unchanged. The alleged massacres at Auschwitz are, from this point of view, comparable, relatively speaking, to all the alleged massacres that may be conveniently blamed on the defeated side of any conflict, be it at Andersonville (alleged extermination camp of the American Civil War)?, Timosoara (Romania)? or Kuwait City. Corpses of women and children will do the trick especially well.
It's the procedure that, in 1945, was resorted to by the Americans and the British, on the one hand, and by the Soviets on the other hand. Teams of photographers or cameramen enter such or such German camp at the moment of its liberation. The first step is to have everything photographed or filmed. The second is to set aside for later use, after selection, only the most pitiful or revolting images, notably from the hospital barracks or their vicinity; pains will particularly have been taken to get images of the typhus-sufferers, veritable walking skeletons. The third step is to prepare commentary that will lead the public to believe the German commandants and guards had purposely reduced those poor wretches to such a state, as they were quite simply carrying out a policy of physical extermination of the detainees. Exceptions aside, the photographs of some very large groups of healthy-looking inmates, jubilant at being freed, will be hidden away.
It will not be revealed that, in these camps, there could well exist for the benefit or use of the inmates, as was the case at Auschwitz, vast kitchens and all sorts of sanitary, medical, dental or surgical facilities, bakeries, post offices, workshops, places for artistic or musical recreation whose mere presence renders implausible, at the least, the existence of any intent whatsoever on the part of the Germans to exterminate those inmates. On the contrary, with the propagandists, a scalpel will fraudulently be shown as proof that people were killed or tortured; a disinfection gas chamber will become proof that people, and not vermin, were gassed; a can of Zyklon-B, a disinfection or anti-infestation substance (Entseuchung, Entwesung)? that was, accordingly, used to preserve lives against certain deadly diseases or epidemics, will become proof that the Germans employed it to suppress human life. The real horrors of all those camps were the overcrowding, the close quarters and the violence incidental to detention in such circumstances ("men are like apples: the more they're heaped on top of each other, the more they rot")?, the prison violence, the hunger, the harsh weather, the diseases, the epidemics. Revisionist author and activist Paul Rassinier told of all this very well indeed. Thus, at times, many inmates were going through hell.
Interviewer: You brought up, in particular, the British propaganda about Bergen-Belsen…
Dr. Faurisson: Yes. Winston Churchill's compatriots achieved quite some feat there. It's what I call the "Bergen-Belsen bulldozer job". In April 1945, that camp, overcrowded, ravaged by epidemics coming from the East, famished, deprived of water in recent days due to the Anglo-American bombing raids, had become a veritable den of infection. For this reason the Germans sent out a delegation to Montgomery's approaching troops to warn them of the state of things there (and probably of the risks for everyone, including the civilian population, should the internees all be immediately released without any screening)?. The British agreed to cooperate with the Wehrmacht, but not with the SS, in order to attempt to remedy the situation. Then they saw fit to open the numerous common graves, count the bodies and finally, pile those bodies into great, deep ditches. To push all the corpses towards the ditches they used a bulldozer. In a film shot on site we are shown the bulldozer in action.
A selection of these images has been passed on to posterity, notably thanks to the documentary (documendaciary?)? Night and Fog (1955)?. Millions of viewers have believed that here they've seen proof of the Germans' killing their captives, day after day, on an industrial scale. Very rare indeed must be those who've been able to make out that the bulldozer driver is a British soldier and not a German soldier. In 1978 a book published in South Africa with the aim of thwarting any revision of the "Holocaust" presented a still photo of the bulldozer and the bodies but not without "cutting off" the driver's head: the obvious intent was to have us believe the driver was German.
Moreover, with time, in the minds of some, amongst whom Maurice Druon of the Académie française, "that" bulldozer, in the singular, has, of course, become "those" bulldozers. One could go on and on listing the very crudest procedures of this propaganda rooted in atrocity stories. Thus it is that we're cunningly shown piles of shoes and eyeglasses or heaps of hair as if they were evidence that the people they came from were gassed; here the propagandists are sure to avoid reminding us that, in a Europe subjected to blockade and reduced to general penury, nothing was thrown away: everything was recovered and recycled, including hair, which served a particular purpose in the textile industry. There were countless workshops recycling leather, glass, metal or wood, both in the camps and in the towns and villages. The "suitcase job" is also worth noting. A very well-known photograph shows us, at Auschwitz, suitcases carefully stacked and presented as the pieces of luggage on which each doomed owner had taken the trouble to write his or her name and address before being sent to the gas chamber. However, a close look shows that the names and addresses are all written in the same hand and with the same white substance.
Consequently, here it is a question, in reality, of a task performed at the entrance of every detention centre: new prisoners' belongings are tagged and registered by the prison clerks. Thus had Marcel Bloch-Dassault, long after the war, been able to receive from Germany the wallet confiscated from him upon entry at Buchenwald. One evening he could be seen, on French television, exhibiting that wallet, opening it and taking out the four-leaf clover that was in it at his arrival in the camp. That said, there's no doubt the German authorities must have drawn from the vast stores and confiscated effects to distribute some of them to the civilian population ravaged by the bombings and deprived of everything.
Interviewer: Wasn't it at Bergen-Belsen that Anne Frank and her sister Margot died?
Dr. Faurisson: Yes, in late February or early March of 1945. They died of typhus. Still long after the war the official truth had it that that they'd been gassed at Auschwitz, a camp where they effectively spent some time before their transfer to Bergen-Belsen. Their fate makes them deserving of pity. But a good deal more pitiable still was the fate of the German civilian populations killed or burned alive by the Anglo-American bomber squadrons. A German man had the idea, after the war, to consult a book with the register of those killed in the bombing of the city of Würzburg in the night of March 24, 1945 alone; in that list of more than 5,000 he noted, I think, 128 women or girls bearing the Christian name Anne or a closely associated one. There's hardly much talk of those women or girls systematically killed solely for being German, is there?
Interviewer: Do you think that the National Socialist regime committed crimes against the European Jews?
Dr. Faurisson: That regime did not pursue, with regard to the Jews, any criminal policy. That said, some crimes were indeed committed, especially in wartime, and they were what are generally called "excesses". Crimes of this kind were either against Jews as individuals or against Jews taken in groups, for instance, in the course of a military operation or indeed during reprisals. Still, if one looks closely, nothing should distinguish those crimes from the odious acts that the victors perpetrated against, for example, Germans or Japanese. I am now going to insist on a fact that's important and that even the revisionists don't exploit enough.
We have proof, we've had it ever since the Nuremberg trial, that soldiers, officers and functionaries, tried by the military tribunals or courts martial of the Third Reich, were, during the war, sentenced to death and executed for the murder of a single Jewish man or woman. One day in the Ukrainian town of Marinka, the mayor, who happened to be a "Volksdeutscher", an ethnic German, and who had been appointed mayor probably because he spoke German, killed a local Jewess. Brought before a military tribunal, he was condemned to death and shot. I'll come back to his case.
We have the example of a young German lieutenant in Budapest who, upon entering a Jewish woman's house with his men, saw a radio set — forbidden to Jews — and wanted to take it away, along with some jewellery. With the woman threatening to go to the police, he ended up killing her. Court-martialled, he was sentenced to death and executed. As for the soldiers who'd accompanied him, they were given heavy prison terms.
Interviewer: Were they from the Wehrmacht or the SS?
Dr. Faurisson: They were from an air-defense unit. But, you know, this distinction made between the Wehrmacht and the SS is valid in certain cases and not at all so in others. For example, when in military action, they were on the same footing. But anyhow, if there had existed any order whatsoever to kill all the Jews simply because they were Jews, the Reich authorities wouldn't have gone and shot someone who, breeching discipline, had killed a Jew or a Jewess.
Interviewer: According to you, are these few examples sufficient evidence for one to say that the whole Wehrmacht and the whole SS conducted themselves in such a manner?
Dr. Faurisson: Can a German order to kill the Jews — and I am saying to kill — have existed? It's ruled out if I can, as I'm doing here, present you with even just a single case of a German military tribunal trying and condemning to death a single person, then having that person executed for the murder of a single Jew. I haven't been speaking of "sufficient evidence" but of evidence. A piece of evidence is an element that one may take into consideration in order, at the end of proceedings, to hand down a decision. The judge has before him a set of evidence or testimonies and he draws his conclusions therefrom. Let's begin at the beginning, that is with cases like those I've brought up here or with the one, which comes to mind just now, of a Luftwaffe man who, in southern France, was sentenced to death for "excesses" against a Jewish woman.
I personally experienced the German occupation. In 1939 I was ten years old and in 1945, when the Germans left France, I was fifteen.
Interviewer: Where did you live?
Dr. Faurisson: First, up until July 1943, in Marseille, then in Paris. Never ever could someone, catching sight of a Jew, have picked up a weapon and killed him with impunity. The consequences for the murderer would have been extremely grave.
It so happens that, since 1957, I've lived in Vichy. One night in August 1941 a little bomb went off in front of the gate of the synagogue, without injuring anyone. The culprits were found the next day: they were a certain number of young Doriotistes, French supporters of collaboration with Germany in the fight against "Judeo-Bolshevism". They were quickly tried and convicted. I've found the text of the court decision. And, thanks to someone who, during the war, was in the police, I've learnt that one of the young participants in the "attack", a "pupille de la nation", that is, the son of a serviceman who died in the First World War, was so badly beaten inside Vichy police station that he subsequently died. Never during the entire war could a Frenchman have allowed himself to strike a Jew in the street.
A Jew as such was of course considered by the State as a potentially dangerous citizen. He was living under a sort of probation. He might have good reason to keep on his guard. His movements and rights were subject to severe restrictions, but there was no lack of Jews who, all during the German occupation, continued to go about their business in plain view of everyone, even running their shops or practicing their trades. Still in Vichy, Marshall and Mrs Pétain's regular chemist was a Jew by the name of Maurice Benhamou, and the kosher butcher's in the rue Bardiaux seems to have stayed open throughout the Occupation. In May 1944 in Lyon an American bombing raid left a number of people dead. Amongst the services held for these victims was an ecumenical ceremony led by the Cardinal-Archbishop, with an imam and a rabbi by his side. But this does not, of course, cancel out the fact that in Vichy, Lyon and in all the rest of the country the Jews could experience deportation, and either return or not return afterwards.
Interviewer: Here you're speaking of France?
Dr. Faurisson: Yes, of France under the Occupation.
Interviewer: And in the East, do you think things were the same?
Dr. Faurisson: If you have any specific cases, do present them. You're German. I should readily invite any German to read an extraordinary document on the day-to-day life, during the whole war, of certain Jews in the very heart of the Third Reich. It's the memoirs of Victor Klemperer. I possess all three versions: German, French and English. I like to compare the different versions of a book. In the case at hand, the most interesting version is the French one; instead of stopping at June 1945, it continues on to December of that year and contains a letter of January 1947 in which the author, quite obviously under the influence of the propaganda that had been about since the war's end, piles up lies and exaggerations on what he'd really lived through and which he'd so accurately described, day after day, in his memoirs proper.
Victor Klemperer, a Dresden Jew, is married to an Aryan woman. Very anti-Nazi, he recounts his torments. I'll tell you the summit of those torments: being Jewish, he had to wear the Jewish star in public and he did a grand total of eight days in prison, in June 1941, for having broken the Civil Defence rules after curfew. He spent the eight days in the cells of Dresden police headquarters, where, he tells us, he was treated quite correctly. In his book he constantly stresses how the Germans he's met on the tram, in the street, at the grocer's, far indeed from ill-treating him or coming across antagonistic, have by and large shown themselves to be considerate and helpful. Vogel the grocer keeps coffee, a precious commodity at the time, aside for him. Civil servants are agreeable and polite. "Passers-by sympathised with the star bearers". He has several "favourable experiences with the star […]?
There is no doubt that the people feel the persecution of the Jews to be a sin". That said, he takes delight in Germany's military disasters and in the bombing raids and is sad to note that it seems impossible to shatter the civilians' morale. These memoirs (at least 5,000 typewritten pages)? amount to a scathing refutation of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's thesis claiming that "ordinary Germans", by their anti-Semitism, contributed to what is called "the Holocaust".
Interviewer: You talk there of France, of Germany, but if one goes further eastward, it's Poland, the Generalgouvernement, and then, in regard to that country and Russia, the "Einsatzgrupen" have to be discussed. What do you say here?
Dr. Faurisson: It's above all in Russia that those police units operated. The war in the East was a savage one. The Soviet State had not signed on to the Geneva and Hague conventions and the Germans found themselves up against a partisan war. At the Soviet end there were no rights, no law. Thus could the Germans, when there'd been a group of partisans in a village, be led to destroy everything in it, even if there were women and children. German soldiers' safety was the paramount concern. With Germany at war, what German wife, what father or mother would have agreed that a husband or son should be liable to be killed by an individual in civilian dress shooting from behind, then slipping away? In such moments there inevitably came about instances of military savagery, acts as are displayed in similar circumstances by all the armies of the world.
Coming back to my personal experience in France, I was able to see at work first the French soldier, then the German soldier, the Italian soldier, and, finally, the Canadian soldier, the British soldier and the American soldier. I, who, during the war, was so anti-German, must admit that I only ever saw extremely correct Germans; I can even mention some startling cases. When, afterwards, I saw the Americans arrive, I thought it was wonderful. Sure enough, many of them were likeable and well-behaved but there were also, amongst the American soldiers, NCOs and officers, some real louts. And then, on another score, I was especially distressed on seeing the horrors of the Big Purge. But here I'm getting off the subject.
Interviewer: You wanted to talk about the "Kommissarbefehl", the "Einsatzgruppen" and Babi Yar.
Dr. Faurisson: Yes, three parts of one same subject. We're told that there existed a "Kommissarbefehl", described as an order to kill systematically the Soviet political commissars who oversaw the troops, and here the occasion is seized to add that the "Einsatzgruppen's" task was to kill the Jews. It's false. First of all, there never existed any "Kommissarbefehl" as such. Some historians have acquired a habit of designating by this term a set of documents concerning the sorting of prisoners or of certain civilians just behind the front. The Einsatzgruppen, established at the time of the Anschluss in 1938, were assigned the job of this sorting. On the immense Russian front, they were a mere 3,000 (three thousand)?, drivers and clerks included. At the outset of the military campaign, they were given rigorous instructions. People should read these instructions. They amount to saying that, as the rules of war are unknown to the Soviets, a strict sorting of prisoners will be in order. Certain captives will have to be executed forthwith because they are not soldiers but fanaticised political commissars who cannot be left in prisoner-of-war camps; others will perhaps be useful to Germany. One document, labelled USSR-014 at the Nuremberg trial, spells out eight categories of suspect persons who must, after sorting, be separated (Aussonderung)? from the military or civilian prisoners.
It's interesting to note that the Jews are mentioned in eighth (and last)? place; it's specified in this order of October 29, 1941, that only a category of Jews is concerned. I quote: "8)? Soviet Russian and Jewish intellectuals, insofar as they are professional revolutionaries or political activists, authors, editors, Komintern officials etc.". With their customary dishonesty, the officials in charge of summarising the documents presumed to write that "those affected" "are above all Soviet commissars and other leading personalities, also Jews and members of the intelligentsia"; in their résumé they go so far as to write of "directives… for the 'purging' by special commandos of the prisoner-of-war camps", whereas, let me repeat, for this document, it's a matter of "sorting". When the troops advance and take a town, the Einsatzgruppen, a kind of military police in the field, will have to try to check the identity of prisoners and civilians. This doesn't mean that these people are going to be killed. Only some of them will be slated for execution. On the other side, with the Communists, no bones were made about executions. Therefore in first place came the political commissars. Neither here nor elsewhere did there exist any order to kill the Jews.
Interviewer: Then, if I understand you correctly, these instructions didn't specify that all the political commissars were to be executed, even though the said commissars were mentioned first.
Dr. Faurisson: That's right. Often, it seems, those commissars were Jews; however, even in their case, there was a sorting to be carried out. But you'll understand well enough that, in practice, this meant there were prisoners that one had the right, in effect, to execute in contravention of the laws of war. Also, as you're perhaps aware, the German military commanders did not want to act like the Red Army and, in the end, refused to follow through with the harshest provisions of the orders in question.
As for Babi Yar, no material investigation of the type carried out at Katyn during the war has been made there; nothing has surfaced to support the accounts generally heard on the subject, which seem implausible. I'll come back to Babi Yar.
Interviewer: You wanted to add something about that town in the Ukraine, Marinka.
Dr. Faurisson: Yes, but first, at risk of surprising you, I give you notice that for a brief moment we're going to leave the realm of history for that of fiction. Here is the drama that I imagine.
The German mayor of Marinka, recently sentenced to death for killing a Jewish woman, is going to be shot by firing squad. He is in a prison cell awaiting execution. It is night. He is in the throes of death. Just now, a man appears at the cell door and addresses him as follows: "You are a German whom German soldiers, in a short while, are going to shoot because you've killed a Jewess. However, be advised that, in a few years' time, Germany will have been flattened. Her conquerors will prove ruthless. They'll make a clean sweep of everything you've learnt and believed. They'll make up a lie-ridden history of this war. They'll impose the winners' version. This new official historical truth, forced upon Germany and propagated nearly everywhere else in the world as well, will be that, during this war, Germans had every licence to do what you've done. Yes, its promoters will go so far as to claim that the Germans spent the better part of their time hunting down, torturing and slaughtering the Jews. They'll state that Hitler had given the order to murder all the European Jews.
They'll add that, in order to succeed in a task of such colossal proportions, he'd had weapons of mass destruction built, weapons so diabolical that after the war not a trace will be found of them. Television sets, still so rare today in 1942, will be in every home; morning, noon, afternoon, evening and night, year in year out, they'll be spreading this universal neo-truth that will be taught in the primary and secondary schools, the universities and even in the catechism, to your children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A bit everywhere monuments will be put up and ceremonies instituted in honour of the new religion. The few who dare to dispute this dogma will be taken to court, thrown into prison, outlawed from society. And do you know who the most fervent apostles of this new creed will be, a creed of what will be called 'the Holocaust of the Jews'? Don't go searching! It will be the Germans themselves.
In the very firing squad that's going to shoot you there are perhaps some men who'll survive the war and who, once they've got back home, will start believing the lie of 'the Holocaust'. In any case, their children, their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren will believe it." The mayor of Marinka will receive this message as an overwhelming shock. Indeed, he'll go out of his mind as a result, and it's a madman that they'll be leading to the stake.
Such is the tragedy I imagine. I see in it the story line of a stage play or film to be made. This tragedy is that of Germany, whose very soul has been harried to death with the "Holocaust".
Let's leave fiction and come back to history. I'd like to dwell a little on the case of Babi Yar. Currently, certain Jewish organisations, sensing that the myth of the gas chambers is taking in water all around, are trying a diversion, asking us to turn our attention away from the alleged gas chambers and gas vans and towards the "Einsatzgruppen". This is, for example, what a French Jewish personality like Jacques Attali has recently done in writing "The vast majority of Jews slain were killed by the individual weapons of German soldiers and policemen, between 1940 and 1942, and not by the death-works that were put into place afterwards". Employing a brand new phrase, these Jews call this the "Shoah by bullets"! This "Shoah by bullets" is now summoned to replace the "Shoah by gas".
And so it is that we're being served up again with the "Babi Yar massacre". At the Nuremberg trial, the place name "Babi Yar" (in fact, the name of a ravine outside Kiev)? didn't come up, but a certain document simply reported, in one sentence, that the Germans in Kiev, which they'd recently taken, had, following a spate of arson attacks blamed on NKVD agents, arrested, in a reprisal measure, all the city's Jews, then, on the 29th and 30th of September 1941, had apparently transported a number of them in the direction of the locality known as Babi Yar to execute, in the end — take note of this figure: marvel at the precision — no fewer than 33,771! The document is neither dated nor signed.
It's one of a set selected by a lieutenant Walter Rothschild of London. In itself, what this sentence relates is implausible. The real massacre of Katyn, perpetrated by the NKVD and later imputed to the Germans, had left about 4,400 men — formally attested — dead, in over two months (March-April 1940)?. By comparison, in the Babi Yar massacre there would thus, in two days, have been nearly eight times more victims than at Katyn in two months. Such a fantastic butchery would have left countless traces and the surroundings themselves would have been turned upside down, if only by the efforts made in the forbidding task of mass burial, and then, as some will tell us, of unearthing followed by open-air cremations.
However, the aerial photographs of the time show no signs of any such thing and no material evidence of this huge crime is available. These days, in the Ukraine, there's a Roman Catholic priest who's been getting a lot of attention, father Patrick Desbois, a Frenchman and great friend of the Jews. His speciality consists in travelling the length and breadth of the land in search of "mass Jewish graves". He has the good Ukrainian peasants of a given area informed that he'll soon be calling at such or such locale and that he intends to garner testimonies about the slaughters of Jews by the Germans during the war. It's wholly in the inhabitants' interest to be able to boast that the environs actually possess such mass graves over which, afterwards, may be erected monuments that may in turn attract the odd foreign tourist. The "witnesses" get together and prepare a story. The priest then pays his visit and has his photograph taken with the country-folk as they point towards some spot or other. One may, to begin with, be astonished at the age of certain witnesses photographed thus far: they are quite plainly below the necessary age, which would normally be about 80.
But there's something more astonishing still: these supposed mass graves will not be dug open; no disinterment or any material verification will be carried out, all under the admirable pretence that the Jewish religion prohibits the touching of Jewish corpses; however, it's enough to look in the Encyclopedia Judaica (1978)? at the entry "Autopsies [plural]? and Dissection [singular]?" to see that there is no such prohibition at all. Only at a single location, Busk outside Lvov, have fifteen common graves been dug open, but none of the skeletons found there were examined and the sites were all covered over with a thick layer of concrete, meaning no authentication will be very possible in future! A curious way of respecting a body in accordance with Jewish law! The historian will thus have to be satisfied with what father Desbois, a clever man, tells us the witnesses told him. Hence, unverified numbers of unfound and unshown victims will be added up and, at the end, we shall be told that the Ukraine contains so many mass graves with so many Jewish victims.
And all this under the seal of the respective representatives of the Roman Catholic Church, the "Yahad-in-Unum" association and "Zaka", a group presenting itself as "dedicated individuals determined […]? to accord the proper respect for the dead in accordance with Jewish law, heritage and tradition". As at Auschwitz, tourism will stand some chance of thriving.
Interviewer: One question. You speak of "Shoah by bullets" and of documents. I myself think I recall seeing documents showing maps with sketches of coffins accompanied by the number of Jews executed at the spots thus indicated. Apparently, these would be documents of the SS or the Einsatzgruppen sent from the Russian front to Berlin. They would show how many Jews had been killed by Einsatzgruppen A, B, C and D. Is this not evidence? What's your view here?
Dr. Faurisson: I know those documents and, in particular, the one with the coffins and the figures. It was the American author Arthur R. Butz who first dealt with them in a critical manner, in 1976, in his remarkable work The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. Too often it's a question of suspect, unsigned documents, coming from Soviet sources. The one that you're speaking of makes me think of the aerial photos of Auschwitz, published in 1979 by Brugioni and Poirier, two former CIA men. In these photos one can make out the Auschwitz crematoria with a naïve indication bearing the words "Gas Chamber[s]?". Here, on the sketches of coffins, an anonymous hand has written figures supposedly representing the totals of Jews slain. There's no indication of any sources that might make possible a verification of the figures' origins.
Have you noted how each time a common grave is discovered in Russia and trouble is taken to make an examination, it's found that it contains victims of Stalin and not of Hitler?
Finally, it's a good idea, in any case, to be circumspect as concerns the evaluations sent by military men to superiors in Berlin.
One might say that, caught up in the war, the Germans who had to send reports to Berlin hadn't the leisure to draw up, as in peacetime, impeccable reports with all the necessary signatures on them.
Interviewer: That's merely a hypothesis on your part, for countless German documents of that era show they remained quite meticulous indeed.
Dr. Faurisson: A hypothesis, so be it, but isn't it asking a bit too much, insisting on perfect evidence, which perhaps has never existed?
When there is no evidence to hand, one refrains from making accusations. One's entitled to say "Rumour has it…" or "It seems plausible that…", but not to go any further. To sum up here, I'd say that, as concerns the great massacres of Jews imputed to the Einsatzgruppen, I'm waiting for criminal investigations to be carried out, like those that were made for Katyn. And don't let anyone come and tell us the corpses all went up in smoke! Even if those mounds of bodies had been burnt in the open air, that would have called for quite unlikely quantities of wood or fuel, and, what's more, traces would be easy to find, if only in the form of teeth or bone fragments. Still today, bones of men of Napoleon's army are found from time to time in Russia.
Interviewer: But what do you make of the trials and the clues that demonstrate the crime and allow a judgment to be made?
Dr. Faurisson: Clues are but apparent signs that simply render the existence of a thing probable. They're what Jean-Claude Pressac, that friend of the Klarsfeld couple, called in his big American book "beginnings of proof" or "traces". Let's be wary of people who've got the idea that by adding a quarter-proof to a quarter-proof plus a half-truth, you obtain one proof. That practice was, it seems, employed in certain witchcraft trials of centuries past and it's what was done in a number of court proceedings in the 20th century, especially against those modern-day sorcerers known as the satanic "Nazi war criminals".
Interviewer: That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that these days there are trials where real proof cannot be produced but where clues suffice to try the accused.
Dr. Faurisson: Quite right. In France, for example, the judges can even invoke what they call their "innermost conviction". A judge can do that, but not the historian. How many times has it been discovered, with the passing of time, that a judicial error was committed at some moment or other? In the particular instance of the gigantic case brought against Germany, I ask that no one be content with his or her "innermost conviction". I demand proof, one single piece of actual proof. I note that the accusing historians like Poliakov and Hilberg, and a fair number of others, have wound up acknowledging that there is no proof. You're well aware that Raul Hilberg, at first (in 1961)?, had the nerve to write that Hitler had given two orders to exterminate the Jews.
He added that this extermination had been carefully organised from top to bottom within the chain of command. However, in 1983, under the revisionists' pressure, he had to admit (and later, in 1985 at the first Zündel trial in Toronto, confirmed under oath)? that there hadn't been, after all, either an order, a plan or a budget. Then he fell back on the most pitiful of explanations: according to his new analysis, all had been done without an order and without a plan through "an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus-mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy", the bureaucracy of the Third Reich. I call that "invoking the workings of the (Jewish)? Holy Spirit".
May I give you still another point?
Interviewer: Naturally.
Dr. Faurisson: Personally, something that really struck me, speaking of false proof, was that solemn session at the UN, where American Defence Secretary Colin Powell was seen claiming to demonstrate the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I can assure you that the revisionist I am perceived at the very instant that it was all a sham. Glaringly obvious. We laugh about it today but it's disquieting that no one, there at the UN, should have risen to cry out his indignation and proclaim before the whole assembly: "I raise a solemn protest against this stunt of Mr Powell's, who takes us for fools.
We all know that, in the phial he's brandishing, there's surely nothing but some harmless liquid; here we're just being served a cinematic ploy. We all know as well that, in the photographs projected on the screen, nothing but innocuous buildings have been shown, and that it's laughable to write, again up on the screen, that those structures house weapons of mass destruction." It's quite precisely the same put-up job that in 1979 Brugioni and Poirier, those ex-CIA men, went in for when, showing us crematoria, they presumed to tell us those buildings housed weapons of mass destruction called "gas chambers". Same sort of inscriptions, same crude lies.
Interviewer: To pick up on a question that I've already put, do you think the German National Socialist regime committed injustices towards the Jews?
Dr. Faurisson: You said "crimes" and here you say "injustices". I don't know how to qualify the measures that Germany was led to take regarding people whom, not without reason, she held to be hostile or potentially dangerous. Any nation at war may be led to take measures that will certainly be cruel for the families affected. If, tomorrow, war broke out between France and Italy, it's obvious that the French government would intern or put under house arrest all Italians residing in France and that the Italians would act likewise with respect to the Frenchmen who happened to be in Italy.
Interviewer: So then, for you, Germany was at war with those whom one calls "the Jews".
Dr. Faurisson: Yes, she was at war with "the Jews" just as "the Jews" were at war with Germany.
And if we take things to their logical conclusion when observed from a military viewpoint, at bottom, the totality of those potentially dangerous persons could have been put in concentration camps or kept under house arrest. But their numbers were such that it wasn't practicable. Germany therefore decided to take measures which, as the war intensified, grew progressively harsher. Let's take the example of the compulsory wearing of the star, from a certain moment and in certain parts of German-occupied Europe (in the southern zone of France, the Jews didn't have to wear the star)?.
This measure amounted to placing the Jews under probationary supervision. But do note that it's less cruel and far less of an exaction than locking families away in camps as the Germans did in certain cases and as the Americans and Canadians themselves did, not only with the Japanese on their territory, which was normal, but also with Americans and Canadians of Japanese origin. As for the reason why the Germans decided to implement the wearing of the star, it was above all with a view to ensure the German soldier's safety.
Many Jews belonged to groups of those whom the Allies called Résistants and whom the Germans, for their part, called terrorists. You can well imagine that the German soldiers weren't going to look hard and close at other pedestrians in the street in an attempt to see whether they were walking near possibly dangerous individuals. That star warned them. In Paris, in the underground, where each train was made up of five carriages, the star-wearers had to get on the fifth carriage, in which the German soldiers weren't allowed to ride.
Interviewer: According to you, was this treatment of the Jews just? Couldn't it be argued that in France or Germany the Jews were well assimilated and that, for example, the links between the Jews of Paris and those of New York were, anyhow, not very strong?
Dr. Faurisson: It's not a matter, strictly speaking, of a moral question but of military necessity. From a moral viewpoint I can tell you that the treatment of the Jews in Germany shortly before the war, at the time of Kristallnacht, seems to me unworthy, even though I understand the exasperation that the Germans could feel in the face of the growing number of Jewish provocations, the Jewish organisations' ceaseless calls for a crusade against the New Germany and, most notably, the assassination in Paris of vom Rath, the embassy counsellor, by the Jew Grynszpan. Just as unworthy, in my eyes, was the fact that Goering should impose on the Jews a fine of a billion marks for the damage then caused. But, you know, "to judge is to compare" and, as concerns horrors of all kinds visited on minorities, no nation has the right to dispense lessons to others. As
I've had occasion to say, every war is a butchery; the winner is a good butcher and the loser, a less good one; thus, at the end of a war, the winner may give the loser lessons in butchery but he's not entitled to mete out lessons in rights, justice and virtue to him. Yet that is indeed what, at Nuremberg, the winners of the Second World War did to the losers, in proceedings of a rare hypocrisy.
Interviewer: But you do agree, after all, with the principle that international justice must be able to punish war crimes and, as it's said today, "crimes against humanity"?
Dr. Faurisson: As a principle I'll agree readily enough; but see how, in practice, it's almost always, at the end of any war, the loser that this justice finds guilty. It's a revolting spectacle, this hunting party of prosecutors and judges in black robes, all grouped around soldiers crushed by defeat who now see their conquerors parading about in a courtroom. The American army, although the bloodiest of all armies, never has any explaining to do before the international community. To come back to the Second World War, how can one allow that those who made alliance with Stalin should be able to address the least rebuke to those who made alliance with Hitler?
Let's suppose, taking up the usual comparison, that Stalin was the plague and Hitler, cholera; I don't see how those who have, in reality, chosen the plague, can find fault with others for having, in reality, chosen cholera. What right had the French general Leclerc, who was more or less in American uniform, on May 8, 1945, when Germany had surrendered, to have a group of twelve or thirteen prisoners taken out of a hospital and shot without trial just for being in a more or less German uniform? Let's point out that it was mainly from horror or fear of Soviet-style communism that so many young Frenchmen had signed up with either the Milice or the German army.
Interviewer: Do you justify the nature of the reprisals carried out by the German army in France?
Dr. Faurisson: Let's talk about the bomb attacks and assassinations in France against the German occupation forces or French partisans of Collaboration. A large number of Germans died or were injured as a result of such attacks. There were also many acts of destruction against the means of transport and communication — for example telephone cables — , army barracks and depots, crop harvests; there were weapons trafficking operations, espionage for the Allies, aid to deserters, escape networks, there was the Communist propaganda calling for ever more bomb and sniper attacks. What could the German army officers in charge do? At first they had either the culprits themselves or hostages shot by firing squad. Then, they realised that the French population, on the whole, both strongly disapproved of the murders of German soldiers and felt considerable indignation at the reprisals made by the occupation forces. The Germans risked alienating this population.
Thus, from a certain point, they preferred, in numerous instances, to apply deportation instead of execution. Towards the end, what with the big increase in Résistance attacks in the wake of the Allied landings in Normandy, they turned again to shootings, carrying out a large number of them. In France, the total number of persons shot by sentence of a German military tribunal or court martial seems to be situated, for the entire duration of the war, between 4,520 and 4,540, and not, as was stated at the Nuremberg trial, at 29,660. The Communists have long endorsed far greater figures: they haven't shrunk from presenting their party as "the Party of the 75,000 firing squad victims"; for his part, Communist chief Maurice Thorez dared to tell Stalin, on November 18, 1947: "In France during the war, 350,000 Communists were shot by the Germans" (in the review Communisme, summer 1996, p. 47)?.
In France, the number of Communists shot by firing squad was, in reality, a few hundred. When, in 1945, French troops occupied their part of Germany, they didn't find themselves confronted with any armed, organised resistance bent on killing French soldiers. Otherwise they would have behaved as mercilessly as their army had done at the time of the Ruhr valley occupation or in its actions against "the rebels" in Madagascar, Indochina or Algeria. I have in mind a poster that was put up all over one German city in the French zone, showing the corpses photographed in a concentration camp and stating that any person caught removing it would be condemned to death! From the moment a country becomes the occupying power in another territory, it will be inclined to instate a reign of terror there if those being occupied rebel, and especially if they take up weapons to do so.
Interviewer: Going on to quite another question, today in Germany, in the trials for disputing the Holocaust, the judges, in accordance with the law, warn both the accused and his lawyer telling them: "The Holocaust is common knowledge. It's an established fact. You haven't the right to dispute it, nor even to try to prove your good faith or to justify yourself by spelling out the reasons why you don't believe in the reality of the genocide of the Jews and the Nazi gas chambers". What do you think of this?
Dr. Faurisson: This "common knowledge" argument stems from Article 21 of the Charter of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, which states: "The Tribunal shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge but shall take judicial notice thereof". It's outrageous. What, here, does "common knowledge" mean? Facts of "common knowledge" for whom? According to what criteria does the Nuremberg Tribunal decide that such or such a fact is of "common knowledge" while some other fact isn't? The answer is it's the Tribunal that, without giving its reasons, arbitrarily pronounces that such or such a fact is of "common knowledge", and grants itself permission to make its assessments in this regard without adducing any relevant evidence. Pre-emptively, from the very start it forbids anyone to remind it that in proper justice all must be proved.
As there exists no instance of appeal, here we have a court that grants itself full power to violate the duties of the judge. It's in the secrecy of their deliberations, without consulting anyone, that these judges choose such or such a "fact" and decree that it need not be proved. The procedure is a cynical one.
In regard to revisionism, I've had dealings with people of the judiciary in France, England, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and English-speaking Canada. I delight in hearing them all use a complicated and pretentious language to express the simplest and clumsiest ideas. So it was that at Nuremberg the judges, at bottom, decreed: "It's like this because this is how it is", or else: "This is how it is because we've decided that it should be so".
But Article 21 of that strange Tribunal's Charter has an even bigger surprise in store for us in its next sentence, and here the very peak of cynicism is attained. Listen to this: "[The Tribunal]? shall also take judicial notice of official governmental documents and reports of the United Nations, including the acts and documents of the committees set up in the various allied countries for the investigation of war crimes, and of records and findings of military or other Tribunals of any of the United Nations", that is, any of the States that happen to be the declared enemies of the accused. Here's what amounts to saying: "On these matters the prosecution is automatically right and the defence need only hold its tongue".
Hence one will not be surprised at the fact, for example, that the document of Soviet origin concluding that the Katyn massacre was a German crime (with 11,000 victims, it was stated!)? should have been considered right from the start as being "of probative value". The German barristers Stahmer and Laternser, who wanted to challenge it, found themselves being shut up by a reminder of the magical Article 21 given all at once by the Soviet prosecutor, by presiding judge Lawrence, and — the extreme of the extreme — by Soviet judge Nikitchenko acting as if he himself were a prosecutor.
Interviewer: But, Professor Faurisson, if, in Germany, it's said that the Holocaust is "offenkundig", and so of common knowledge, this is because our libraries are cram-full of books on the subject. This being the case, how can one not agree that it's "common knowledge"?
Dr. Faurisson: Those masses of books all take up, with some variations, one and the same argument, that of Germany's conquerors. It's the law of the victor here that's being applied in the land of the vanquished. If one looks closely, one sees that this argument is not at all proved, and even that there exists a quantity of evidence to prove it wrong. For the historian, "common knowledge" doesn't constitute either argument or evidence. It used to be common knowledge that the Sun revolved around the Earth; it used to be common knowledge that Nero burned Rome; it used to be common knowledge that witches existed. In 1914 it was common knowledge for the Allies that the Huns were cutting off Belgian children's hands. It has, in a more recent past, — if only by virtue of a decree from the Nuremberg judges — been common knowledge that the Katyn massacre was carried out by the Germans.
Interviewer: So then, as you see it, Raul Hilberg and his like are either lying or stupid.
Dr. Faurisson: Not necessarily. It may be that they more or less believe what they relate. This is what I tried to explain during our conference when, at the start of my talk, I spoke of a "historical lie". This lie sets itself apart from the ordinary lie in that, developing over a long period of time, it becomes, historically, a sort of standard truth. People then sincerely believe what they call truth and which, at its origin, is but a lie. These people err more by way of conformism, laziness and lack of intellectual curiosity than by way of dishonesty. These faults are to be put down to Man's imperfect nature. We can't spend our existence verifying everything: that would be too burdensome. Hence we often prefer to swallow, eyes closed, a product advertised as wholesome and genuine whereas, in fact, it's doctored.
Interviewer: Do you mean they might well be "men of good will"?
Dr. Faurisson: In order to answer, I'd have to be able to probe their hearts and entrails. I don't know how much honest conviction there may be in any particular one of them. On the other hand, what I do know is that there exists ordinarily in life something called the "white lie", that is, the lie people allow themselves to tell "for the cause". That cause may happen to be a political or religious one, or it may serve the interests of a group, a professional body or certain individuals. In such cases, people take leeway as concerns the exactness of facts or figures and they may even end up finding themselves tailoring testimony to circumstances.
The permanent care of exactitude is quite a constriction. I believe, moreover, in the force of fear as well as in the need for comfort. That force and that need dictate a good part of our behaviour. That said, amongst those who argue the case for "the Holocaust" there are some brazen liars. The revisionists have caught them in the act a thousand times. Simon Wiesenthal and Elie Wiesel are superb false witnesses.
And then there are the bluster merchants. Take the Austro-American Jew Raul Hilberg, whom I've already spoken to you about. It's worthwhile to come back to his case and bring up some more specific points. He is Number One amongst the historians who propagate the extermination myth. Hilberg commenced his research on the alleged "destruction of the European Jews" in 1948. He published his book in 1961. On page 177 thereof, he didn't shrink from affirming that there had been two orders from Hitler to exterminate the Jews.
The first order, given in the spring of 1941, instructed his men, apparently, to go and kill the Jews on the spot, in Soviet territory, and, soon afterwards (no date specified)?, the second order was, apparently, to transport all the other Jews of Europe to extermination camps. But Hilberg mentioned no sources, no documents, no designation of those orders and no precise dates. However, no one stood up to challenge his statements and all the historians seem to have agreed to consider Raul Hilberg a first-rate historian. He's simply Number One amongst the historians who defend a certain official truth that's imposed on us.
Interviewer: How do you account for the fact that, subsequently, Raul Hilberg should have had a change of heart and abandoned his 1961 explanation?
Dr. Faurisson: The big revisionist offensive was in the late 1970s. Clearly Hilberg was jolted by it and, in 1982, he told the French weekly Nouvel Observateur: "In a certain way, Faurisson and others, without wanting to, did us a favour. They raised questions which had the effect of engaging historians in new research. They have obliged us to once again collect information, to re-examine documents and to go deeper into the understanding of what took place". What we didn't know at the time was that Hilberg, shaken by the advent of the revisionists, had gone back to work again and was revising his old argument, with its two alleged orders from Hitler, from top to bottom.
In 1983, in a talk at a conference in New York, he suddenly presented his new thesis, an altogether strange one that ought to have disqualified him forever in the eyes of the historical community. According to the new line, there hadn't in fact been, for the immense enterprise of destroying an entire people on a whole continent, any order, plan or budget but merely a kind of tacit understanding, a spontaneous plot of German bureaucrats! Hilberg's words then were exactly the following: "But what began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures.
[Those measures]? were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus-mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy". You'll have noticed that he specifies "no budget"; it's a response to a point that I personally had brought up. I'd said that, as nothing is done without money, above all in wartime, someone had to show me what huge sum had indeed been allocated to the alleged campaign of mass destruction of the Jews of Europe.
You see how Hilberg, in fact, dodges the questions and comes up with a staggering "explanation". All in all, for him, the whole presumed vast criminal operation was carried out… by the workings of the Holy Spirit or through some phenomenon of spontaneous generation. He himself speaks of an "incredible meeting of minds" amongst countless bureaucrats; let it be asked in passing: if it is "incredible"; that is, unbelievable, how can people be required to believe it, on pain of fine and imprisonment? And what is thought transmission if not a paranormal phenomenon, something in which one should be still less obliged to believe?
The day in Toronto when Raul Hilberg confirmed under oath that that was how he accounted for "the destruction of the European Jews" we had a good laugh round the big table where Ernst Zündel welcomed us each evening as we returned from court. I for my part remember coming out with this: "We're entering a new epoch. From now on, whenever I need the salt and pepper or the water pitcher, I'll no longer even have to say so. We'll use the 'incredible meeting of minds' and 'consensus-mind reading'. After all, if the German bureaucrats, reputedly the most thick-headed of all, practised that system, why should we do without it?"
In the new edition of his work, which was at press at the very moment the trial was going on, Hilberg didn't use those stupefying phrases but he did resort to their equivalents in convoluted and academic form, writing: "In the final analysis, the destruction of the Jews was not so much a product of laws and commands as it was a matter of spirit, of shared comprehension, of consonance and synchronization". And all that, he specifies, without leaving any written trace!
Interviewer: Mr Faurisson, according to you, how many Jews died, all told, during the Second World War due to actions of the Germans? How many, amongst those, in the concentration camps? In which camps, exactly? How many through the use of gas chambers or gas vans?
Dr. Faurisson: No Jew was killed in any execution gas chamber or gas van. Here it's a question of weapons of mass destruction of which no trace has ever been found and of which no one has been able to provide a technical description. There is no possibility that the alleged gas chambers shown, here and there, to tourists can ever have been actual gas chambers. I shall not here be returning to that subject, with which I have so often dealt, and I note that the opposing side stubbornly persist in their refusal to provide us with a technical and scientific study of the presumed crime weapon. As for the total number of Jews of Europe who died during the war due to actions of the Germans, that's not yet possible to determine, and this is so, to a large extent, because of the scandalous conduct of the wartime Allies and the State of Israel, who stand close guard over the enormous mass of archives stored in Germany, at Bad Arolsen, by the International Tracing Service (ITS)?.
From time to time, it's heard that these archives are at last going to be opened to researchers. Jewish or Zionist organisations claim to demand such an opening. Don't believe any of it. I've devoted quite a lot of attention to the matter and can tell you that, if those archives were completely opened up to all researchers without restriction, it would spell catastrophe for the upholders of the "Holocaust" argument. It would be revealed how carefully the Third Reich authorities recorded data about every camp detainee's — Jewish or non-Jewish — arrival, departure, hospitalisations if any, successive jobs, transfers from one camp to another and, in the event, decease. And then there'd be access to the precise number of cremations done at each crematorium as well as the number of Jewish "survivors", that is of those millions of miraculously spared inmates who, after the war, spread throughout the world, many of them forming the original population of the State of Israel.
In the late 1970s revisionists began getting interested in those archives: at the time there existed, on the premises of the ITS, a "historical section" (Historische Abteilung)?. In 1978 the authorities suddenly closed it. For my part, I ask that it be reopened, with permission given to all researchers to consult the totality of the material.
But you've just asked about the number of Jews who died due to actions of the Germans. No one, for the time being, is able to say. To begin with, it would be necessary to set apart those who died of natural causes from those who died as a consequence of actions on the part of either the Germans or the Allies. Be that as it may, I have observations to make on the considerable number of Jews who survived the war and who are in themselves as many clues to suggest that there cannot have been a policy of killing all the Jews.
In the Israeli daily Haaretz of April 18, 2004, correspondent Amiram Barkat had an article entitled "U.S. court to discuss question of who is a Holocaust survivor"; it told of how two Jewish demographics experts who'd had the job of reckoning the number of Jewish survivors still alive in 2004 had arrived, respectively, at the figures of 687,900 and 1,092,000. The difference is explained by the second expert's inclusion of the Jewish population of North Africa, Syria and Lebanon, territories occupied for a certain time either by the Germans and Italians or by the forces of the Vichy government. I'll refer here therefore only to the lower figure and point out that 687,900 European Jews having experienced the German occupation and still alive nearly sixty years on imply that, just after the war, the number of Jewish survivors must necessarily have amounted to several million (probably 3,250,000)?.
What sort of alleged extermination policy can there have been if millions of survivors or miraculously spared targets were left alive in its wake? At that period, Europeans were amazed at the influx to their countries of Jews who, they'd been told, had disappeared forever. The camps for displaced persons were full of them. We have at our disposal a great many photographs showing, in particular, Jewish youngsters arriving by train from Central Europe or housed in countless children's homes. Their physical appearance was identical to that of children of non-Jewish populations of the time.
As far as France is concerned, we know that, of a Jewish population of about 350,000, around 75,700 Jews, foreigners for the most part, were deported, but we're not told how many survived. The figure we're sometimes given — 2,500 out of 75,721 — results from numerous tricks that I haven't the time to list right now but I've explained them elsewhere. If you want an idea of how large and lively the French Jewish community was on the morrow of the war I recommend you look in a certain yearbook entitled L'Annuaire du judaïsme. The 1952 edition describes, in 415 pages, the situation of French and world Jewry. Believe me, it's instructive. By itself, the number of Jewish associations listed, with telephone numbers and addresses, is staggering. And behold the flood today of books, memoirs, testimonies of "miraculous" Jewish survivors, not to mention the applications for indemnity or compensation.
But in Germany they never quit repeating the figure of six million Jews either gone missing or killed; it's neither five nor seven but always six.
Even as conformist a historian as Martin Broszat long ago admitted that it was a "symbolic" figure, that is a mythical one. I'll add that it's part of the general Jewish symbology. Read the study, published in 2003, by Don Heddesheimer: The First Holocaust. The author demonstrates, with newspaper reproductions to back it up, that from the year 1900 — but it might be possible to go back still further — the American Jewish press was already launching the slogan "Six million European Jews are dying".
He provides examples from 1900, 1919, 1920, 1926, 1938, 1940. In Jewish circles it had become a leitmotiv. In Jerusalem, the specialists at the Yad Vashem Memorial set out, years ago, to establish a list of the names of the six million Jews who died in the "Holocaust". They have barely reached three million but on the basis, in good part, of simple unverified declarations emanating from unverified sources and processed in such a way that one and the same person can be recorded as having died several times, even, it seems, as many as ten times. On this subject I recommend certain studies published in the French-language review Dubitando, produced in Holland, whose contents can be downloaded at http://www.aaargh.com.mx/fran/revu/dubitando.
Interviewer: But, according to you, of what size may the number of Jews be whose deaths were imputable to the Germans or their allies?
Dr. Faurisson: There again, I'll refer you to the Suchdienst or International Tracing Service located at Bad Arolsen, to which non-approved historians have been barred entry since 1978.
Interviewer: Fair enough, but give us a figure as concerns the dead of Auschwitz.
Dr. Faurisson: Of the outrageous figures, the best known is that of four million but there have been, even officially, rather higher ones. The Nuremberg tribunal decided on four million; it's the figure that was inscribed on the commemorative stones at Auschwitz-Birkenau and which stayed there till 1990. Suddenly it was removed and, in 1995, after five years of dithering, that of a million and a half was put in its place after being chosen by Lech Walesa, then president of the Polish Republic. But those in charge of the Museum there and the official historians or researchers reduced it anew to 1,100,000, then progressively to 800,000, to a bit more than 600,000 and, finally, in 2002, to 510,000 (Fritjof Meyer)?.
Personally I reckon that the total number of dead, Jewish and non-Jewish, for the entire duration of Auschwitz's use by the Germans (May 1940-January 1945)? must have reached the level — a considerable one — of 125,000 in the thirty-nine camps of that vast complex; those deaths are to be put down, above all, to the typhus epidemics whose devastating effects spread even to the ranks of the Germans there and, in particular, to the medical personnel (striking, for example, two head physicians: Drs Popiersch and Schwela)?. I base this estimate on the data in the Sterbebücher and a few other documents. The total of deaths registered therein is 80,010 but, considering that a known number of Sterbebücher are missing, I suppose this total must be put at around 125,000. As for the figure of 74,000 that's sometimes proposed, it seems to me to have arisen from a journalistic error.
Interviewer: You mention physicians at Auschwitz. What have you to say on the subject of Dr Mengele?
Dr. Faurisson: I've looked into his case. I don't believe I'm wrong in stating that Josef Mengele was probably one of the most slandered men of his era. In all likelihood, he deserved the reputation, which he had amongst his fellow citizens of Günzburg, of "ein Kavalier". I've had a look through his manuscripts (unpublished)?, which show a man steeped in Greco-Roman culture, very keen on science and curious about everything.
He didn't hide it from his close acquaintances that the gassing stories were pure invention. During a posthumous show-trial of Mengele held in Jerusalem before the world's television cameras, his "victims" came forth to impute the worst atrocities to him: according to them, he used to pin gouged-out human eyeballs on the walls of his office, or pour acid into the eyes of his "guinea pigs" to see whether it made them turn from black to blue. There's hardly a class of things, real or imagined, that lends itself as readily to nonsensical jabber as that of medical monstrosities, especially when they can be blamed on a white-coated "Herr Doktor". Here it's easy to have the layman believe any atrocity story at all. On this score, I highly recommend a book by two British lawyers about the Dering case (Mavis Hill & L. Norman Williams, Auschwitz in England / A Record of a Libel Action, London, MacGibbon and Kee, 1965)?.
In his 1959 book Exodus, the Jew Leon Uris had the gall to write that, from the beginning of his internment at Auschwitz, the Polish surgeon Wladislaw Alexander Dering (spelt Dehring by Uris)? had carried out "seventeen thousand surgical experiments without anaesthesia" on women. Note that figure, along with the word "experiments". After the war, Dr Dering had settled in England, then had practised in Somalia and, finally, went back to England where he received an O.B.E., comparable to our Légion d'Honneur in France.
From April 13 to May 6, 1964 there ran the trial in London of Dering's libel suit against Uris and his publisher. During the proceedings, an extraordinary quantity of lies were to be exposed thanks, especially, to the discovery of the records of surgical operations performed in Block 21 of Auschwitz where Dr Dering had worked. The defendants were driven progressively to reduce the number of dreadful operations imputed to the retired surgeon. Also, the women became "men and women" and the figure seventeen thousand was dropped and replaced by "a very large number", then "a figure between one hundred and two hundred" and, at the end, it seems the defence settled for the case of three women identified only by their Christian names. What's more, it had to be acknowledged that the operations had been done not without anaesthesia but with rachidian (spinal column)? anaesthesia, and a renowned English anaesthetist testified that in his view Dr Dering had been right to choose that type.
A dramatic moment arose when Dr Dering was able to prove the surgical records had been falsified by their Polish custodians starting from a certain page for August 1943, a date when he was no longer performing operations and was no longer in Block 21. The Germans at Auschwitz had scrupulously kept those records, partly in Latin, and with, I recall, the occasional mention of a "casus explorativus", the term applied to surgical tasks performed "in order to see". Dr Dering was to win his case and be awarded damages of one farthing — a quarter of an old penny! The judge then ruled peremptorily that the physician, although he'd been abominably libelled, would have to bear court costs, which were considerable, and denied him leave to appeal. All due to the fact that, throughout the whole trial, the shadow of Auschwitz and the "gas chambers", constantly evoked — even by the judge — had never ceased to cast itself on the plaintiff. If I recall correctly Dering was to declare: "Here I am ruined, but I've saved my honour", and it seems he died not long afterwards.
Interviewer: Some people will ask you the following question: "But where did all those Jews go, those who you say weren't exterminated?"
Dr. Faurisson: My answer is: "To Palestine and fifty other countries throughout the world, of which I can give you the list". A good many of the nearly six million Jews who today inhabit the State of Israel are "survivors" or descendants of "survivors" of what they call "the Holocaust". Besides, when Steven Spielberg decided to launch his vast project of gathering together fifty thousand survivors' "testimonies" he sent his interviewers to about fifty countries of the world; that's the number of countries to which those Jews scattered after the war.
Interviewer: Some participants at the conference held that, when the Wehrmacht started its offensive in the East, many Jews fled or were transported towards the Soviet Union; what are your thoughts on this?
Dr. Faurisson: That's quite correct, but it's still hard to reckon the number of those Jews who settled, for example, in Uzbekistan (Tashkent, Samarkand)?, Tajikistan or elsewhere, perhaps even in the Jewish autonomous region of Birobijan.
Interviewer: How do you account for the fact that almost all the former concentration camp inmates state they can attest to the reality of the gas chambers there?
Dr. Faurisson: They're repeating a rumour that allows them to grant themselves, with no inconvenience, the status of heroes or miraculous survivors. They generally do so risk-free since there's very little chance that anyone will put their backs to the wall and ask for explanations. During one of my trials, a super-excited Jew came up to me at the courtroom entrance shouting and showing me his Auschwitz registration tattoo. "How dare you say the gas chambers didn't exist?", he said. "I'm a witness to their existence." I looked him in the eye and told him: "Describe a gas chamber for me."
Losing his composure, he answered: "If I'd seen one I wouldn't be here to talk to you about it." I then pointed out that, like all the Jews who'd returned from Auschwitz, he was rather a witness to there never having been a policy amongst the Germans of physically exterminating the Jews, since there he was, very much alive. I'll remind you that in 1985 at the first Zündel trial, in Toronto, we had the rare chance to cross-examine the Number One Jewish witness to the "Holocaust", a certain Rudolf Vrba. Look up the trial transcripts to see how that arrogant individual was in the end put to rout and how he had to confess that, in his book on Auschwitz, reputed to be so exact and meticulous, he'd resorted to "poetic licence": "licentia poetarum" as he let fly, in Latin.
Interviewer: According to you, what happened to the Jews selected on what's called "the Auschwitz (or Birkenau)? ramp"?
Dr. Faurisson: The men were put on one side and the women and children on the other. In separate columns, either on foot or, for some, in lorries, they all went off to the Sauna where they showered and were disinfected. Photos, well-known ones, from what's called The Auschwitz Album attest to these arrivals on the ramp. It's in this sector that a football ground ("Sportplatz")? was located, and the newly arrived inmates could see it just beside the ramp; there was a volleyball court and there were also a great number of hospital barracks, at one side for the women, at the other for the men.
It's in this same sector that two big crematoria stood flanked by little gardens and visible from all around; also, large settling tanks for wastewater, shower and disinfection installations, vast storehouses for personal belongings which, as at the entrance to any prison or any camp, were confiscated from the newcomers.
Interviewer: What do you make of the speech given by Adolf Hitler at the Kroll Opera House in Berlin on January 30, 1939? He said then — these were his words — : "If international finance Jewry within Europe and abroad should succeed once more in plunging the peoples into a world war, then the consequence will be not the Bolshevisation of the world and therewith a victory of Jewry, but on the contrary, the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe".
Dr. Faurisson: In that pre-war speech there is positively no question of a physical extermination of the Jews. To those who were blowing on the embers and desired with all their hearts a crusade against Germany, Hitler was saying in his way: "Don't harbour any illusions: if you succeed in triggering a war, it's not we who'll be annihilated but our Communist and Jewish enemies". I'll refer you to the analysis that the late Wilhelm Stäglich made of that declaration in Der Auschwitz Mythos.
Dr Stäglich also dealt with Heinrich Himmler's speeches at Posen, in 1943, speeches to which people in certain quarters have tagged on the attention-grabbing adjective "secret"; before and during the war, and up to the very last months, Himmler tried everything he could to convince the Allies to take the Jews, whom they seemed to find so marvellous, into their own countries.
Interviewer: Therefore, contrary to what other historians say, for you that speech of Hitler's doesn't constitute proof that he wanted to annihilate the Jews.
Dr. Faurisson: Obviously not. And you'll no longer find, I believe, any historians who hold that it does.
Interviewer: And what do you say about Adolf Hitler's political testament? In it can be read, for instance:
"But nor have I left any doubt that if the nations of Europe are once more to be treated only as collections of stocks and shares of these international conspirators in money and finance, then those who carry the real guilt for the murderous struggle, this people will also be held responsible: the Jews [das Judentum]?! I have further left no one in doubt that this time it will not be only millions of children of Europeans of the Aryan peoples who will starve to death, not only millions of grown men who will suffer death, and not only hundreds of thousands of women and children who will be burned and bombed to death in the cities, without those who are really responsible also having to atone for their crime, even if by more humane means [wenn auch durch humanere Mittel]?".
By "more humane means" didn't Hitler mean "the gas chambers"?
Dr. Faurisson: Pure speculation! Hitler signed that text on April 29, 1945, that is the eve of his suicide (let's note in passing that, according to the Vulgate, the "gas chambers" had no longer been operating since late November 1944)?. He had before him the appalling spectacle of a country laid to waste and its men, women and children being systematically torched with phosphorous. He promises those behind this inhuman war that they'll have to atone for their crime but not, all the same, through the horrible and barbarous means that the Allies were using.
The pinnacle of horror is to go and burn people alive. It was the British leaders, Churchill at their head, who, as of 1940-1941, decided that from then on war would be waged systematically on the German civilians and who, to that purpose, undertook the production of heavy bomber aircraft designed to destroy the German cities. Until then, military men strictly limited themselves to making war against other military men and, when they did happen to kill civilians, they put the case, rightly or wrongly, that it was as a consequence — a regrettable one — of military action (for example, during a tactical bombardment)?. The British gentlemen were innovators in the art of war: on the one hand, they elected to slaughter German civilians systematically in order to make the opposing military leaders give in and, on the other hand, they went about stirring up and maintaining the cowards' war, that of snipers or "Résistants", against German soldiers.
There might have been some courage in blowing oneself up with a bomb to kill some of the enemy in the process but there was hardly any in the sniper who acted under cover and then fled the scene, thus wittingly setting off bloody reprisals against numerous innocent people. Soviet savagery and American brutality then joined in.
From Hitler's point of view, the unnatural alliance of the City's and Wall Street's capitalism with Muscovite Communism had been sealed in the deliberate holocaust of the German people; the Ark of the Covenant between those two opposites united the Jews of the whole world, so powerful and influential particularly in the financial spheres of the English-speaking countries, in the media and in the international Communist movement. The German historian Ernst Nolte had already offered me that argument of the "more humane means" being evidence of the gas chambers' existence. It goes to show how destitute of real evidence such historians are.
Interviewer: Doesn't the report of the Berlin-Wannsee conference prove the existence of a plan to exterminate the Jews?
Dr. Faurisson: Not in the least. Undated, unsigned, bearing no stamp of any bureau, this piece has the look of a draft report telling of a meeting held on January 20, 1942 in the Berlin suburbs. Nowhere is it a question of killing or exterminating the Jews but, for those Jews able to work, of evacuation eastwards for them to be put to work, whilst those aged 65 and over were to be sent to Theresienstadt, in Bohemia.
There appears several times in this document the expression "final solution of the Jewish question in Europe", which is sometimes shortened to "final solution of the Jewish question" or to "final solution" or even, quite simply, to "solution". The original phrase, in its complete form, was "a final territorial solution of the Jewish question" (understood: the Jewish question in Europe)?. A certain Martin Luther, under-secretary of State in the German foreign office, employed that phrase on page 4 of his famous memorandum of August 21, 1942. That adjective "territorial" means that the question will have to be settled by finding the Jews a territory of their own; any other solution would be inadequate.
For if, for example, after the war, the Jews became free again in Europe, they would soon, as history shows, manage to regain their power and influence there; whereas, in the event of a transfer for good somewhere outside Europe, those who'd survived the hardships entailed would make up an elite capable of forming the germinal cell of a Jewish renewal. It's silly to talk here of an extermination project. Even Yehuda Bauer, professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, ended up, in 1992, denouncing "the silly story of Wannsee". He stated: "The public still repeats, time after time, the silly story that at Wannsee the extermination of the Jews was arrived at".
Interviewer: Some claim that the number of Jews killed by the Germans doesn't matter. Whether it's a question of six million, two million or 500,000, the crime remains enormous.
Dr. Faurisson: The remark is a common one. In my judgment I've already answered it, in substance, by showing you that Germany never had a policy of exterminating the Jews. That said, figures matter, and sometimes they even matter greatly. First of all, there's an important difference between dying and being killed. Then, it's far more grave an act to kill a mass of people than one person alone. Finally, the difference between six million and 500,000 being 5,500,000, there you have, in any case, 5,500,000 persons who, instead of having died or been killed, turn out to be well and truly alive. Still, when a modest-sized community can claim that six million of its members have been methodically done away with (six million being the equivalent of the population of a country like Switzerland)?, it will obtain, most assuredly, more compassion from the rest of the world than if it only invokes the figure of 500,000 dead or killed.
With six million dead or killed it can demand and obtain a good deal more moral understanding, financial compensation, assorted powers and privileges. For a small people, the ability to boast of being a millionaire six times over in dead or murdered opens up the chance to demand and garner, with no great difficulty, billions in hard cash. A Shoah estimated at six million victims is the guarantee of a "Shoah business" that will bear fruit proportionately. By this I don't mean that lies have been told and exaggerations made in order to make money or acquire privileges. Lies have been told and the subsequent success of the lies has been turned to good account.
Interviewer: Are you of the opinion that Germany has contracted a moral responsibility towards Israel and the Jews, a responsibility that must also be borne in the form of financial reparations?
Dr. Faurisson: I am rather of the opinion of the American author Arthur Robert Butz, the Number One revisionist. The text of his masterly book, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, ends with this comment on the colossal German "reparations": "… it then develops that Israel owes Germany a lot of money, because the proposed justification for the reparations has been invalidated". It is worth noting that the German version of the book is, on this point, rather different and, unhappily, less clear-cut.
Interviewer: In your view, do the Jews who survived the Second World War deserve financial compensation?
Dr. Faurisson: All the true victims of that atrocious conflict and its aftermath deserve respect, consideration and indemnity; amongst the victims I should mention, in particular, the Germans — but not their leaders — and the entire Palestinian people.
Interviewer: Are you an anti-Semite, that is an enemy of the Jews?
Dr. Faurisson: You mean anti-Jewish. No, I don't consider myself anti-Jewish as I don't wish the Jews any ill. I don't wish for anyone to touch a hair on their head, if only so as not to have to hear them yell still more loudly. What I do want, on the other hand, is for them not to do me any harm; nor to others. I want the deafening drumming of their holocaustic propaganda to end, drumming behind which one can all too often make out the drum rolls leading up to new wars. There are none so whining and warlike as that Jewish, Zionist and neo-con nomenklatura which never quits demanding censorship, repression, wars and crusades in the name of the "Holocaust", that is in the name of an especially degrading lie.
Interviewer: Are you a racist?
Dr. Faurisson: No.
Interviewer: What future do you wish for "the Holocaust"?
Dr. Faurisson: If by that word are meant, all together, the alleged policy of physical extermination of the Jews, the alleged Nazi gas chambers and the alleged Six Million, I wish that abominable slander a speedy end in the rubbish bins of history. As an academic, I want it to be possible to write on the Second World War without having to dread the effects of special laws put on the books at the behest of the Jewish nomenklatura. Hitler died more than sixty years ago and it remains "streng verboten" to write "on" Hitler; one may write only "against" Hitler. This is either childishness or else treating people like children. I wish to see us all entitled to write about him just as we're allowed to do with Napoleon, Churchill or Stalin.
Interviewer: Have you a word to say in conclusion?
Dr. Faurisson: My conclusion is that we are here in Tehran the day after a conference, held on December 11th and 12th of 2006, dealing with "the Holocaust". That conference was truly international. We'd have liked to see and hear Raul Hilberg and Norman Finkelstein. The latter says the revisionists are "crackpots", lunatics. If he'd come here, I'd have asked him quite politely in what respect I personally deserved that epithet, and I'd also have inquired as to what writings of ours he might in fact have read before pronouncing such a judgment on revisionist authors.
The conference ended with the forming of a "Holocaust" research group, with an Iranian, Dr Ramin, as its president and, provisionally, five members: an Australian, a Briton, a Dane, a Frenchman and a Swiss. The year 2006 will go down in history, not just the history of Iran but that of the whole world as well. Iran, this amazing country, will have had the heroism, in one and the same year, to say no, first to American imperialism, then to the "Holocaust" crusaders. I won't hide it from you that this heroism scares me. Perhaps President Ahmadinejad will in future have to pay dearly for his temerity.
Interviewer: Were you able to have a word with him?
Dr. Faurisson: Yes, we talked for a few minutes face to face, amidst a lot of other conference participants. I expressed my admiration for his courage, along with our gratitude for this astonishing seminar, open to all, revisionists and non-revisionists alike. To me, the one whom the world press depicts as a dangerous fanatic appeared, both in his closing speech and in our brief conversation, to be a man of refined spirit, sincere and soft-spoken.
And besides, you know he's never said that the State of Israel must be "wiped off the map", but he has thought it enough to adopt a phrase of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, in whose view the Zionist State would one day be erased from the chart of time and history. He's expressed the opinion that in the Middle East Zionism is bound to disappear just as Communism did in Russia. He wishes to see all the communities in Palestine, including the Jewish community, find their respective places one again. Hence that delegation of six rabbis at the conference, wearing a sort of badge with the message that they were Jews but not Zionists.
As I've told you, I myself conversed and got on quite well with two of those rabbis. One of them said to me, in the presence of a witness: "I ask your forgiveness for what 'they' have done to you, if it's at all forgivable". To which I replied "Let's stay united", meaning we should make a united stand against those who, holding all the power, abuse that excess of power.
Interviewer: You've paid dearly for this revisionist struggle that you've been waging since, at least, 1974.
Dr. Faurisson: Yes, I've paid dearly but less so than other revisionists. I'm talking not only about the physical assaults that I've had to endure and the hospitalisations but also of the avalanche of court cases and, sometimes, their scandalous outcome. I'm well placed to know that with regard to a revisionist, as formerly with regard to sorcerers or witches, the judges, apart from a few exceptions, no longer recognise any moral principles, any laws, any rights. As for the media, they've heaped onto my name an extravagant load of abuse, insults, slanders. In over thirty years they've never spontaneously offered me the chance to present my defence. With but one exception: in December 1980, on the radio, I had the time to utter a sixty-word sentence summing up the findings of my research, but the axe came down in the form of a lawsuit and judgment against me precisely because of that sentence.
It's a disgrace that, from 1974 to the present day, journalists have been able to say my name a hundred thousand times to brand me as a "gangster of history" without a single one of them ever asking me for an interview, if only to hear me talk for a few minutes in my defence. No less distressing is the general silence of my colleagues, French academics and intellectuals who otherwise are so quick to proclaim their desire to defend the freedom of inquiry.
The American Noam Chomsky has, on one occasion, spoken up in favor of my right to freedom of expression but, since then, he's only ever spoken of revisionists as of "crackpots". The only people in France to take the risk of defending me have been, besides my lawyer (and his friends)?, Pierre Guillaume, Serge Thion, Jean-Gabriel Cohn-Bendit (and their friends, amongst whom the courageous Jacob Assous)?. But I have no right to complain if I compare my lot with that of so many other revisionists, to begin with the heroic Ernst Zündel and a good number of other Germans or Austrians who either have experienced long years of imprisonment or will be imprisoned in future. In Sweden, the ever-steadfast Ahmed Rami has himself also tasted prison life. And then we were saved by the Internet. Maybe I've been lucky. I shouldn't say the same for my wife and children.
Interviewer: Will you agree to let this interview be published?
Dr. Faurisson: Yes, on condition that you submit the text to me and that, if need be, I may make corrections and additions, either on my own initiative or at your request.
Interviewer: Then we're agreed. I thank you.
Dr. Faurisson: Danke sehr. And, addressing myself to your country, I'll add: "Armes Deutschland!" [Poor Germany!]?.
Interviewer: Leider. [Unfortunately]?
Dr. Faurisson: Leider.
THE END
All translation rights strictly reserved.
***
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
William Kristol: amnesiac neocon moron
To the Editor of the New York Times
William Kristol, the profoundly pedestrian pedant you have newly hired to disgrace your Op-Ed page, wants us to be "neo-Victorian" (Jan. 21) like John McCain, and quote William Ernest Henley's 1875 poem, "Invictus." Kristol writes, "Maybe a dose of this type of neo-Victorianism is what the 21st century needs."
Mr. Kristol is ignorant of the fact that the 21st century has already had a "dose" of it -- from Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh -- who appropriated Henley's poem as his last words, at his execution in 2001.
Neocon Kristol is so ignorant he recommends Mr. McVeigh's favorite poem to the nation, without qualifying his recommendation with the caveat that it was McVeigh's favorite. Either Kristol needs a fact-checking copy editor assigned to him, or you need to reconsider your decision to hire this smirking buffoon, whose claim to the title of scholar and savant is as bogus as his pro-war agit prop.
Moreover, how a "conservative" who is the darling of the Protestant and Catholic Right wing can recommend an ungodly poem like Mr. Henley's is anyone's guess. The notion that it is "unmodern" is ridiculous. It is the very spirit of modernity.
Sincerely,
Michael A. Hoffman II
(The Times did not publish this letter)
NEW YORK TIMES, JUNE 13, 2001: "...Timothy J. McVeigh...offered no last words and instead left behind a sheet of notebook paper on which he'd copied 'Invictus,' by William Ernest Henley..."
NEW YORK TIMES, JUNE 12, 2001: "While he did not have any last words, he asked prison officials to share with reporters an 1875 poem called 'Invictus ...It is a poem favored by teenagers who are rebelling against their parents."
THE GUARDIAN, JUNE 11, 2001: "He handed a handwritten copy of William Ernest Henley's poem to the prison warden, Harley Lappin, just before his death."
[A poem in response to Henley's follows Kristol's column]
Thoroughly Unmodern McCain
By WILLIAM KRISTOL |OP-ED COLUMNIST | NY Times | January 21, 2008
In his victory speech after winning the South Carolina primary Saturday night, John McCain acknowledged the economic challenges we face, and then said: “But nothing is inevitable in our country. We are the captains of our fate.”
McCain comes from a generation that, in its youth, was made to memorize poetry. And when I was able to get in touch with him Sunday in Florida, he told me that one of the poems he had memorized in school was William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus” (1875). McCain actually recited snatches of the poem in our cellphone conversation — not something he does every day on the campaign trail, he pointed out. In any case, here’s Henley’s Victorian warhorse:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud,
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbow’d.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
The young Henley had written this following the amputation of his foot because of tubercular infection. He lived until age 53, apparently unbow’d and unafraid, a productive poet, critic and editor. (The one-legged Henley also served as an inspiration for his close friend Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” character Long John Silver.)
One can see why “Invictus” might have appealed to the young McCain. One can see why snatches of it might have stuck in his mind while a prisoner of war, and after. But his allusion to its coda reminds us of what’s so distinctive about McCain as a contemporary political figure: He’s not thoroughly modern.
In this he differs from his competitors. Mitt Romney is the very model of a modern venture capitalist. Mike Huckabee is the very model of a modern evangelical. Rudy Giuliani is the very model of a modern can-do executive. They are impressive modern men all. But John McCain is a not-so-modern type. One might call him a neo-Victorian — rigid, self-righteous and moralizing, but (or rather and) manly, courageous and principled.
Maybe a dose of this type of neo-Victorianism is what the 21st century needs. A fair number of Republican and independent voters seem to think so, if one can infer as much from their support of McCain at the polls. But, amazingly, a neo-Victorian straightforwardness might also turn out to be strategically smart.
McCain has been the only Republican candidate who hasn’t tried to out-think the process. Perhaps out of sheer necessity, after his campaign imploded last summer, he simply picked himself up and made his case to the voters in the various states.
Meanwhile, the other G.O.P. candidates are creatures of our modern age of analysis and meta-analysis, and their campaigns have sometimes been too clever by half. Rudy Giuliani believed it would look bad to contest states he might not win. He therefore pulled back from Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan and South Carolina — and in the process surrendered his lead in Florida and nationally.
Conservatives were excited about Fred Thompson last spring. But Thompson apparently decided it would be too simple to strike while the iron was hot. He never recovered. And Mike Huckabee, after an extraordinary run in the fall, brought on experienced campaign pros, changed his position on immigration, raised the issue of the Confederate flag — and lost South Carolina.
Meanwhile, trying to be clever, Mitt Romney left South Carolina and headed to Nevada, thinking he could get more attention for his expected victory in the caucus there. If he had stayed and campaigned in South Carolina, he still would have won Nevada. And he might have cost McCain enough votes that McCain would have lost South Carolina to Huckabee, a much better outcome for the Romney campaign.
Yesterday, on “Fox News Sunday,” using his most up-to-date talking points, Romney claimed to be an outside-the-Beltway candidate, by contrast with John McCain, “who has been in Washington all [his] life.”
Romney might have paused before charging McCain with being a prisoner of Washington. In the late 1960s and early 70s, while Romney was a missionary in France and a law and business student at Harvard, McCain wasn’t living the good life here in the nation’s capital. He was “tied up at the time,” as he once reminded the audience in a Republican candidates’ debate, tied up and perhaps reciting to himself lines from “Invictus.”
[End quote from William Kristol]
Here is a Christian's response to Henley’s poem:
My Captain
by Dorothea Day
Out of the night that dazzles me,
Bright as the sun from pole to pole,
I thank the God I know to be
For Christ the conqueror of my soul.
Since His the sway of circumstance,
I would not wince nor cry aloud.
Under that rule which men call chance
My head with joy is humbly bowed.
Beyond this place of sin and tears
That life with Him! And His the aid,
Despite the menace of the years,
Keeps, and shall keep me, unafraid.
I have no fear, though strait the gate,
He cleared from punishment the scroll.
Christ is the Master of my fate,
Christ is the Captain of my soul.
***
William Kristol, the profoundly pedestrian pedant you have newly hired to disgrace your Op-Ed page, wants us to be "neo-Victorian" (Jan. 21) like John McCain, and quote William Ernest Henley's 1875 poem, "Invictus." Kristol writes, "Maybe a dose of this type of neo-Victorianism is what the 21st century needs."
Mr. Kristol is ignorant of the fact that the 21st century has already had a "dose" of it -- from Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh -- who appropriated Henley's poem as his last words, at his execution in 2001.
Neocon Kristol is so ignorant he recommends Mr. McVeigh's favorite poem to the nation, without qualifying his recommendation with the caveat that it was McVeigh's favorite. Either Kristol needs a fact-checking copy editor assigned to him, or you need to reconsider your decision to hire this smirking buffoon, whose claim to the title of scholar and savant is as bogus as his pro-war agit prop.
Moreover, how a "conservative" who is the darling of the Protestant and Catholic Right wing can recommend an ungodly poem like Mr. Henley's is anyone's guess. The notion that it is "unmodern" is ridiculous. It is the very spirit of modernity.
Sincerely,
Michael A. Hoffman II
(The Times did not publish this letter)
NEW YORK TIMES, JUNE 13, 2001: "...Timothy J. McVeigh...offered no last words and instead left behind a sheet of notebook paper on which he'd copied 'Invictus,' by William Ernest Henley..."
NEW YORK TIMES, JUNE 12, 2001: "While he did not have any last words, he asked prison officials to share with reporters an 1875 poem called 'Invictus ...It is a poem favored by teenagers who are rebelling against their parents."
THE GUARDIAN, JUNE 11, 2001: "He handed a handwritten copy of William Ernest Henley's poem to the prison warden, Harley Lappin, just before his death."
[A poem in response to Henley's follows Kristol's column]
Thoroughly Unmodern McCain
By WILLIAM KRISTOL |OP-ED COLUMNIST | NY Times | January 21, 2008
In his victory speech after winning the South Carolina primary Saturday night, John McCain acknowledged the economic challenges we face, and then said: “But nothing is inevitable in our country. We are the captains of our fate.”
McCain comes from a generation that, in its youth, was made to memorize poetry. And when I was able to get in touch with him Sunday in Florida, he told me that one of the poems he had memorized in school was William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus” (1875). McCain actually recited snatches of the poem in our cellphone conversation — not something he does every day on the campaign trail, he pointed out. In any case, here’s Henley’s Victorian warhorse:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud,
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbow’d.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
The young Henley had written this following the amputation of his foot because of tubercular infection. He lived until age 53, apparently unbow’d and unafraid, a productive poet, critic and editor. (The one-legged Henley also served as an inspiration for his close friend Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” character Long John Silver.)
One can see why “Invictus” might have appealed to the young McCain. One can see why snatches of it might have stuck in his mind while a prisoner of war, and after. But his allusion to its coda reminds us of what’s so distinctive about McCain as a contemporary political figure: He’s not thoroughly modern.
In this he differs from his competitors. Mitt Romney is the very model of a modern venture capitalist. Mike Huckabee is the very model of a modern evangelical. Rudy Giuliani is the very model of a modern can-do executive. They are impressive modern men all. But John McCain is a not-so-modern type. One might call him a neo-Victorian — rigid, self-righteous and moralizing, but (or rather and) manly, courageous and principled.
Maybe a dose of this type of neo-Victorianism is what the 21st century needs. A fair number of Republican and independent voters seem to think so, if one can infer as much from their support of McCain at the polls. But, amazingly, a neo-Victorian straightforwardness might also turn out to be strategically smart.
McCain has been the only Republican candidate who hasn’t tried to out-think the process. Perhaps out of sheer necessity, after his campaign imploded last summer, he simply picked himself up and made his case to the voters in the various states.
Meanwhile, the other G.O.P. candidates are creatures of our modern age of analysis and meta-analysis, and their campaigns have sometimes been too clever by half. Rudy Giuliani believed it would look bad to contest states he might not win. He therefore pulled back from Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan and South Carolina — and in the process surrendered his lead in Florida and nationally.
Conservatives were excited about Fred Thompson last spring. But Thompson apparently decided it would be too simple to strike while the iron was hot. He never recovered. And Mike Huckabee, after an extraordinary run in the fall, brought on experienced campaign pros, changed his position on immigration, raised the issue of the Confederate flag — and lost South Carolina.
Meanwhile, trying to be clever, Mitt Romney left South Carolina and headed to Nevada, thinking he could get more attention for his expected victory in the caucus there. If he had stayed and campaigned in South Carolina, he still would have won Nevada. And he might have cost McCain enough votes that McCain would have lost South Carolina to Huckabee, a much better outcome for the Romney campaign.
Yesterday, on “Fox News Sunday,” using his most up-to-date talking points, Romney claimed to be an outside-the-Beltway candidate, by contrast with John McCain, “who has been in Washington all [his] life.”
Romney might have paused before charging McCain with being a prisoner of Washington. In the late 1960s and early 70s, while Romney was a missionary in France and a law and business student at Harvard, McCain wasn’t living the good life here in the nation’s capital. He was “tied up at the time,” as he once reminded the audience in a Republican candidates’ debate, tied up and perhaps reciting to himself lines from “Invictus.”
[End quote from William Kristol]
Here is a Christian's response to Henley’s poem:
My Captain
by Dorothea Day
Out of the night that dazzles me,
Bright as the sun from pole to pole,
I thank the God I know to be
For Christ the conqueror of my soul.
Since His the sway of circumstance,
I would not wince nor cry aloud.
Under that rule which men call chance
My head with joy is humbly bowed.
Beyond this place of sin and tears
That life with Him! And His the aid,
Despite the menace of the years,
Keeps, and shall keep me, unafraid.
I have no fear, though strait the gate,
He cleared from punishment the scroll.
Christ is the Master of my fate,
Christ is the Captain of my soul.
***
Ehud Barak: When will this child-murderer be prosecuted?
"...lethal fire against civilians, among them many children"
Here is more evidence of how the world ignores child-killing Israeli war-criminals, while hunting down Sudanese, Iraqis and Serbians and "divesting" from Iran. It's a farce, folks. The Israeli Self-"Chosen People" are our gods and the world refuses to put them on trial for their crimes and shedding of innocent blood. In which case, don't come preaching to the rest of us about the other supposed war criminals. Either there is one law for all, or we are dealing with a lawless system that is set-up by the kosher criminals themselves.
FROM AMIRA HASS, HAARETZ (ISRAELI NEWSPAPER) JAN. 23, 2008:
"(Ehud) Barak was prime minister in September 2000, when the Israel Defense Forces responded with escalation to popular demonstrations against the Israeli occupier and to the throwing of stones: lethal fire against civilians, among them many children. Not surprisingly, the Palestinians did not understand the lesson and turned to escalation tactics of their own. That is how we reached the point where we are now - homemade rockets of all kinds, which become even developed, the more Israel escalates its punishment measures in response to them." [Barak is currently Israeli "defense" minister].
EHUD BARAK UPHOLDS COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT OF A CIVILIAN POPULATION (Unless that population is Judaic, of course)
"As far as I'm concerned, all the residents of Gaza can walk and have no fuel for their cars, because they have a murderous terrorist regime that doesn't allow people in the south of Israel to live in peace ... We are trying to attack terrorists, but we also show the population that it cannot shed itself of responsibility for the situation. We won't allow the Palestinians to fire on us and destroy life in Sderot, while in Gaza life is going on as usual." --Haaretz, Jan. 22, 2008
Life goes on "as usual" in Gaza? Is Barak referring to malnutrition, disease, lack of medical care, sewers, clean water, and the giant concentration camp which the Israelis have turned Gaza into?
Now let's hoist Barak by his own petard: As far as I'm concerned, all the Israelis can walk and have no fuel for their cars, because they have a murderous terrorist regime that doesn't allow people in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank, to live in peace ... We are trying to attack only Israeli terrorists, but we also show the Israeli population that it cannot shed itself of responsibility for the situation. We won't allow the Israelis to fire on us and destroy life in Gaza, while in Tel Aviv life is going on as usual.
***
Here is more evidence of how the world ignores child-killing Israeli war-criminals, while hunting down Sudanese, Iraqis and Serbians and "divesting" from Iran. It's a farce, folks. The Israeli Self-"Chosen People" are our gods and the world refuses to put them on trial for their crimes and shedding of innocent blood. In which case, don't come preaching to the rest of us about the other supposed war criminals. Either there is one law for all, or we are dealing with a lawless system that is set-up by the kosher criminals themselves.
FROM AMIRA HASS, HAARETZ (ISRAELI NEWSPAPER) JAN. 23, 2008:
"(Ehud) Barak was prime minister in September 2000, when the Israel Defense Forces responded with escalation to popular demonstrations against the Israeli occupier and to the throwing of stones: lethal fire against civilians, among them many children. Not surprisingly, the Palestinians did not understand the lesson and turned to escalation tactics of their own. That is how we reached the point where we are now - homemade rockets of all kinds, which become even developed, the more Israel escalates its punishment measures in response to them." [Barak is currently Israeli "defense" minister].
EHUD BARAK UPHOLDS COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT OF A CIVILIAN POPULATION (Unless that population is Judaic, of course)
"As far as I'm concerned, all the residents of Gaza can walk and have no fuel for their cars, because they have a murderous terrorist regime that doesn't allow people in the south of Israel to live in peace ... We are trying to attack terrorists, but we also show the population that it cannot shed itself of responsibility for the situation. We won't allow the Palestinians to fire on us and destroy life in Sderot, while in Gaza life is going on as usual." --Haaretz, Jan. 22, 2008
Life goes on "as usual" in Gaza? Is Barak referring to malnutrition, disease, lack of medical care, sewers, clean water, and the giant concentration camp which the Israelis have turned Gaza into?
Now let's hoist Barak by his own petard: As far as I'm concerned, all the Israelis can walk and have no fuel for their cars, because they have a murderous terrorist regime that doesn't allow people in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank, to live in peace ... We are trying to attack only Israeli terrorists, but we also show the Israeli population that it cannot shed itself of responsibility for the situation. We won't allow the Israelis to fire on us and destroy life in Gaza, while in Tel Aviv life is going on as usual.
***
Monday, January 21, 2008
Jerusalem Post on Bobby Fischer: Schizo-Jew-Genius
By Michael A. Hoffman II
The following Judaic commentary on Bobby Fischer is revealing. It illuminates the extent to which race pride and ethnic nationalism keeps "The Tribe" from completely disavowing Fischer. They hate him at the same time they want to take credit for his genius.
This article also contains an interesting association between Khazar ("Jewish") genius and schizophrenia: Bobby was smart because he was allegedly descended of a Judaic mother (his German physicist father appears not to have made a noteworthy contribution), but he was insane because he opposed Judaism and believed in Judaic ritual murder of Christian children (like Bar-Ilan University Prof. Ariel Toaff, son of the Chief Rabbi of Rome did, before he was threatened with imprisonment and termination of his teaching career).
But, says the Jerusalem Post, there is a better Gaon ("Judaic genius," usually applied to a rabbi): chess champ Gary Kasparov, the campaigner for Zionist suzerainty in Russia, against Putin.
This JP column is really a mess but it testifies to the Talmudic mentality: even when dealing with one of their worst enemies, they can't quite stop taking genetic credit for his intelligence.
The article is also inaccurate. Bobby's public campaign against Judaism and Zionism commenced not in the 1990s but in the 1980s, when he lived in Pasadena, California and began handing out IHR (Institute for Historical Review) revisionist pamphlets in front of the Los Angeles Public Library.
As a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press, I believe very little the media asserts, about the ethnicity of Regina Wender, Bobby's mother, or much of anything else (not even "global warming" -- tell that to the Green Bay Packers), without some form of independent collaboration. The media claim that Bobby's mother was of ethnic Judaic descent. That's all we have, an assertion. It makes no real difference, but since he refused the "honor," I see no reason not to question the fundamental validity of the allegation itself.
Calling Bobby a "Jew" is just another means of ritually defiling him. The Bush regime sought to extradite and jail him (as recently as March 23, 2005 State Department Deputy Spokesman Adam Ereli told reporters, "There are outstanding charges against Mr. Fischer that we believe should be addressed in the United States"), while the Zionists want to claim his genius for their own, even as they term his opposition to their ideology, a form of sickness.
Bobby stated in writing that "fraudulently misrepresenting me to be a Jew" constituted "dishonestly abusing my name."
Then as now, the abuse continues.
(Incidentally, "the Fisher King" is a symbol in the occult, specifically in Grail alchemy. Robert James Fischer was a disenchanter--he smashed people's illusions--not an enchanter. Therefore, even the title of the Jerusalem Post column is a falsification).
***
ANALYZE THIS: THE TRAGIC ENDGAME OF THE FISCHER KING
By Calev Ben-David
E-mail: Calev@jpost.com
Jerusalem Post | Jan 20, 2008
In 1901, The New York Times published an articled titled "Jews and Chess" that began: "No player has yet made a fortune out of chess, and many of the great masters find it difficult to make even a mere living from the game. That makes it all the more remarkable that such a large percentage of the most famous players are Jews."
The most famous Jewish player, of course - the most famous, period - was Bobby Fischer, who died Thursday at 64. This eccentric genius who became a Cold War hero when he checkmated the Soviet champion Boris Spassky in an historic showdown in 1972 made much more than a living, and had lost it several times over by the time of his reclusive, impoverished death in Iceland, scene of his greatest triumph.
That this child of a Jewish mother (and possibly a Jewish father) went to his grave spouting anti-Semitic notions far more extreme than the one cited above makes his story even remarkable.
Although already well known within the chess world as a brilliant prodigy, it was only when he took on Spassky and became the only American (still) to be recognized as world champion that Fischer - and perhaps the game itself - entered the public consciousness.
Since no player or match has subsequently come close to matching the publicity and genuine interest that the Reykjavik showdown generated, it is likely difficult for anyone who wasn't around at the time to understand just how important it seemed.
This wasn't just a chess match, or even a sporting event - it was a clash in which a thoroughly individual (if odd) spirit of the free West triumphed over a manufactured talent of the Soviet totalitarian system.
Although Jews certainly took pride in having one of their own as the torchbearer of freedom in this epic contest, even then Fischer was never a "Jewish hero" in the sense of someone like Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz, another champion competitor of 1972.
Fischer made no claim to his maternal heritage, and was already known back then for having been associated with some of the more esoteric branches of fundamentalist Christianity.
But the fact that both he and Spassky were born to Jewish mothers increased the sense at the time of some long-standing Jewish claim on this most cerebral of games. That too was exaggerated - a game of Indo-Persian origin, chess was derided for centuries as a waste of time and worse by leading rabbis, including the Rambam (Maimonides).
It was only in the 19th century, when the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) enabled Jewish minds to ponder subjects outside the range of the Talmud, that chess became one of several abstract intellectual pursuits (music, math, philosophy) in which Jews demonstrated an exceptional aptitude.
Bobby Fischer was never "one of ours" - indeed, he was too much the loner to ever be one of anybody's - and in 1984 he sent a letter to the Encyclopedia Judaica asking he not be included in its pages (pointing out, among other things, that he was uncircumcised).
Still, it was a shock when in the 1990s he began to publicly spout truly vicious and hoary anti-Semitic nonsense - including that the Jews had committed mass murder of Christian children, fabricated the Holocaust as a "money-making invention," and, of course, were behind a plot to persecute him personally.
Fischer's anti-Semitism was all of a piece with what appears to have been a clinical case of paranoid schizophrenia that eventually overcame his towering mental gifts. The specific roots of his ethnic self-hatred, though, appear to lie in a tangled familial history.
His mother, Regina Wender, was an assimilated American Jew of German descent with far-left political views who supposedly gave birth to her son after a brief marriage to a German-Gentile scientist, Hans-Gerhadt Fischer, whom Bobby never knew and who may have assisted in the Nazi war effort.
A few years ago, researchers uncovered evidence that suggests his biological father was actually Paul Nemenyi, a Hungarian-Jewish physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project.
Out of this convoluted parentage he clearly inherited both an advanced IQ (rated as 181) and perhaps also the seeds of incipient madness.
One might draw on Fischer's twisted Jewish obsessions as an indicator that even in this day and age, anti-Semitism remains a particular form of madness that can overwhelm even the keenest mind. Yet despite the Jewish angle, there is surely more tragic irony in the fact that the man whom Americans rallied around as their champion at the height of the Cold War eventually turned against his country to the extent that he celebrated the terrorist attacks of 9/11 by declaring: "This is wonderful news. It is time to finish off the US once and for all."
Despite Fischer's final pathetic decades, several chess experts still rate him as the game's greatest player. It is fitting, though, that the one player many others rank higher is Garry Kasparov, another player of partial Jewish descent, who in recent years has also became a symbol of the fight for freedom against a resurgent Russian authoritarianism.
The difference is that there is nothing inadvertent about Kasparov's heroism, and he is no less admirable when he steps away from the chessboard.
Though Bobby Fischer's strange case was the most extreme example yet of the phenomenon dubbed "chess madness," Garry Kasparov reminds us that in life, as in chess, no endgame is predetermined.
***
The following Judaic commentary on Bobby Fischer is revealing. It illuminates the extent to which race pride and ethnic nationalism keeps "The Tribe" from completely disavowing Fischer. They hate him at the same time they want to take credit for his genius.
This article also contains an interesting association between Khazar ("Jewish") genius and schizophrenia: Bobby was smart because he was allegedly descended of a Judaic mother (his German physicist father appears not to have made a noteworthy contribution), but he was insane because he opposed Judaism and believed in Judaic ritual murder of Christian children (like Bar-Ilan University Prof. Ariel Toaff, son of the Chief Rabbi of Rome did, before he was threatened with imprisonment and termination of his teaching career).
But, says the Jerusalem Post, there is a better Gaon ("Judaic genius," usually applied to a rabbi): chess champ Gary Kasparov, the campaigner for Zionist suzerainty in Russia, against Putin.
This JP column is really a mess but it testifies to the Talmudic mentality: even when dealing with one of their worst enemies, they can't quite stop taking genetic credit for his intelligence.
The article is also inaccurate. Bobby's public campaign against Judaism and Zionism commenced not in the 1990s but in the 1980s, when he lived in Pasadena, California and began handing out IHR (Institute for Historical Review) revisionist pamphlets in front of the Los Angeles Public Library.
As a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press, I believe very little the media asserts, about the ethnicity of Regina Wender, Bobby's mother, or much of anything else (not even "global warming" -- tell that to the Green Bay Packers), without some form of independent collaboration. The media claim that Bobby's mother was of ethnic Judaic descent. That's all we have, an assertion. It makes no real difference, but since he refused the "honor," I see no reason not to question the fundamental validity of the allegation itself.
Calling Bobby a "Jew" is just another means of ritually defiling him. The Bush regime sought to extradite and jail him (as recently as March 23, 2005 State Department Deputy Spokesman Adam Ereli told reporters, "There are outstanding charges against Mr. Fischer that we believe should be addressed in the United States"), while the Zionists want to claim his genius for their own, even as they term his opposition to their ideology, a form of sickness.
Bobby stated in writing that "fraudulently misrepresenting me to be a Jew" constituted "dishonestly abusing my name."
Then as now, the abuse continues.
(Incidentally, "the Fisher King" is a symbol in the occult, specifically in Grail alchemy. Robert James Fischer was a disenchanter--he smashed people's illusions--not an enchanter. Therefore, even the title of the Jerusalem Post column is a falsification).
***
ANALYZE THIS: THE TRAGIC ENDGAME OF THE FISCHER KING
By Calev Ben-David
E-mail: Calev@jpost.com
Jerusalem Post | Jan 20, 2008
In 1901, The New York Times published an articled titled "Jews and Chess" that began: "No player has yet made a fortune out of chess, and many of the great masters find it difficult to make even a mere living from the game. That makes it all the more remarkable that such a large percentage of the most famous players are Jews."
The most famous Jewish player, of course - the most famous, period - was Bobby Fischer, who died Thursday at 64. This eccentric genius who became a Cold War hero when he checkmated the Soviet champion Boris Spassky in an historic showdown in 1972 made much more than a living, and had lost it several times over by the time of his reclusive, impoverished death in Iceland, scene of his greatest triumph.
That this child of a Jewish mother (and possibly a Jewish father) went to his grave spouting anti-Semitic notions far more extreme than the one cited above makes his story even remarkable.
Although already well known within the chess world as a brilliant prodigy, it was only when he took on Spassky and became the only American (still) to be recognized as world champion that Fischer - and perhaps the game itself - entered the public consciousness.
Since no player or match has subsequently come close to matching the publicity and genuine interest that the Reykjavik showdown generated, it is likely difficult for anyone who wasn't around at the time to understand just how important it seemed.
This wasn't just a chess match, or even a sporting event - it was a clash in which a thoroughly individual (if odd) spirit of the free West triumphed over a manufactured talent of the Soviet totalitarian system.
Although Jews certainly took pride in having one of their own as the torchbearer of freedom in this epic contest, even then Fischer was never a "Jewish hero" in the sense of someone like Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz, another champion competitor of 1972.
Fischer made no claim to his maternal heritage, and was already known back then for having been associated with some of the more esoteric branches of fundamentalist Christianity.
But the fact that both he and Spassky were born to Jewish mothers increased the sense at the time of some long-standing Jewish claim on this most cerebral of games. That too was exaggerated - a game of Indo-Persian origin, chess was derided for centuries as a waste of time and worse by leading rabbis, including the Rambam (Maimonides).
It was only in the 19th century, when the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) enabled Jewish minds to ponder subjects outside the range of the Talmud, that chess became one of several abstract intellectual pursuits (music, math, philosophy) in which Jews demonstrated an exceptional aptitude.
Bobby Fischer was never "one of ours" - indeed, he was too much the loner to ever be one of anybody's - and in 1984 he sent a letter to the Encyclopedia Judaica asking he not be included in its pages (pointing out, among other things, that he was uncircumcised).
Still, it was a shock when in the 1990s he began to publicly spout truly vicious and hoary anti-Semitic nonsense - including that the Jews had committed mass murder of Christian children, fabricated the Holocaust as a "money-making invention," and, of course, were behind a plot to persecute him personally.
Fischer's anti-Semitism was all of a piece with what appears to have been a clinical case of paranoid schizophrenia that eventually overcame his towering mental gifts. The specific roots of his ethnic self-hatred, though, appear to lie in a tangled familial history.
His mother, Regina Wender, was an assimilated American Jew of German descent with far-left political views who supposedly gave birth to her son after a brief marriage to a German-Gentile scientist, Hans-Gerhadt Fischer, whom Bobby never knew and who may have assisted in the Nazi war effort.
A few years ago, researchers uncovered evidence that suggests his biological father was actually Paul Nemenyi, a Hungarian-Jewish physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project.
Out of this convoluted parentage he clearly inherited both an advanced IQ (rated as 181) and perhaps also the seeds of incipient madness.
One might draw on Fischer's twisted Jewish obsessions as an indicator that even in this day and age, anti-Semitism remains a particular form of madness that can overwhelm even the keenest mind. Yet despite the Jewish angle, there is surely more tragic irony in the fact that the man whom Americans rallied around as their champion at the height of the Cold War eventually turned against his country to the extent that he celebrated the terrorist attacks of 9/11 by declaring: "This is wonderful news. It is time to finish off the US once and for all."
Despite Fischer's final pathetic decades, several chess experts still rate him as the game's greatest player. It is fitting, though, that the one player many others rank higher is Garry Kasparov, another player of partial Jewish descent, who in recent years has also became a symbol of the fight for freedom against a resurgent Russian authoritarianism.
The difference is that there is nothing inadvertent about Kasparov's heroism, and he is no less admirable when he steps away from the chessboard.
Though Bobby Fischer's strange case was the most extreme example yet of the phenomenon dubbed "chess madness," Garry Kasparov reminds us that in life, as in chess, no endgame is predetermined.
***
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Israeli Assassinations
One Law for the Holy Israelis and another for everyone else
It's not Nazism when the Israelis call Arabs "rats" and it's not terrorism when they order assassinations:
ISRAELI OFFICIALS CALL ARAB LEADER 'SEWER RAT' AND CALL FOR HIS ASSASSINATION
Ministers call for assassination of Hezbollah leader Nasrallah
By Barak Ravid and Amos Harel, Haaretz Jan. 20, 2008
After Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said Saturday that his organization is holding the remains of Israel Defense Forces soldiers killed in the Second Lebanon War, several government ministers on Sunday called for the militant chief's assassination.
"Nasrallah is a cruel and crazy man," said Minister Yitzhak Cohen (Shas), during the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem. "I don't understand why he is still breathing. We should have liquidated him a long time ago. I recommend the cabinet assassinate the man.
Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit (Kadima) echoed the sentiment, saying, "Nasrallah is a person who has crossed all lines of inhumanity. We don't need to negotiate with him, we need to destroy him."
Absorption Minister Ze'ev Boim called Nasrallah a "sewer rat," adding, "we must make sure he does not see the light of day."
***
The Israeli Office of Assassination
(Orwellian label: "Preventive activity")
"Many children" killed by Israeli assassins:
STATE TO REVIEW 2007 IDF ASSASSINATIONS IN GAZA, W. BANK
By Yuval Yoaz, Haaretz Jan. 20, 2008
The government is working on guidelines for establishing committees to review army assassinations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that killed civilians in the past year.
The Israel Defense Forces, Military Advocate General office, Justice Ministry and other bodies are involved in setting up the review boards, Haaretz has learned.
This comes on the order of the High Court of Justice, in its definitive ruling on "the policy of assassinations" in the territories. That ruling set criteria for when it would be necessary to establish objective review panels to examine the legality of assassinations in which civilians died.
However, the State Prosecutor's Office and Military Advocate General recently rejected a demand that the Military Police launch criminal investigations into six assassinations in Gaza, between March 2006 and May 2007, in which 35 Palestinian civilians were killed, including many children.
The IDF claims the court ruling refers only to assassination operations that occured after the December 2006 ruling, and claims these six incidents either do not fit the time frame or cannot be considered targeted assassinations.
One of Aharon Barak's final verdicts as Supreme Court president, in which Israel's "assassination policy" was sanctioned, stipulates, "Preventive activity by the army that causes the death of nearby innocent civilians requires a retroactive examination of the army's conduct, and this examination must be objective."
Following this ruling, the IDF agreed to review the assassination of Salah Shehadeh, in July 2002. Shehadeh was killed by a one-ton bomb dropped on an apartment building in Gaza, along with 14 civilians.
The Israeli human rights group B'Tselem then sought to get the army to probe six assassinations in Gaza that were carried out in the past two years. B'Tselem's executive director, Jessica Montel, asked Attorney General Menachem Mazuz six months ago to order the MAG to launch a criminal Military Police investigation or to set up a mechanism for objective reviews of these killings.
"Having a mechanism of this sort is particularly crucial in view of the MAG's policy since the start of the second intifada, of not opening criminal investigations in the vast majority of cases in which Palestinian civilians are killed, including non-combatants," Montel wrote to Mazuz. "The MAG makes do with an internal inquiry, but it is clear that a probe by someone in the chain of command cannot be considered objective."
The state does not deem the criteria set in the High Court ruling as requiring an objective review in every case of civilian fatalities in assassinations. "There is no room to accede to your sweeping request," Montel was informed by Mazuz's deputy for special affairs, Shai Nitzan. "The MAG examines every matter according to its circumstances and when a criminal investigation is justified, he orders one."
Nitzan added that he sees no reason to create a permanent mechanism to replace or supplement the MAG's inquiry. "We do not believe there is a legal obligation to establish a sweeping review committee that would examine every case over and above the examination performed by the Military Advocate General," he said.
B'Tselem's demand for a criminal investigation of the six assassinations in the past two years was also rejected. Four have been rejected, and the last two are still officially under review by the MAG...
***
It's not Nazism when the Israelis call Arabs "rats" and it's not terrorism when they order assassinations:
ISRAELI OFFICIALS CALL ARAB LEADER 'SEWER RAT' AND CALL FOR HIS ASSASSINATION
Ministers call for assassination of Hezbollah leader Nasrallah
By Barak Ravid and Amos Harel, Haaretz Jan. 20, 2008
After Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said Saturday that his organization is holding the remains of Israel Defense Forces soldiers killed in the Second Lebanon War, several government ministers on Sunday called for the militant chief's assassination.
"Nasrallah is a cruel and crazy man," said Minister Yitzhak Cohen (Shas), during the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem. "I don't understand why he is still breathing. We should have liquidated him a long time ago. I recommend the cabinet assassinate the man.
Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit (Kadima) echoed the sentiment, saying, "Nasrallah is a person who has crossed all lines of inhumanity. We don't need to negotiate with him, we need to destroy him."
Absorption Minister Ze'ev Boim called Nasrallah a "sewer rat," adding, "we must make sure he does not see the light of day."
***
The Israeli Office of Assassination
(Orwellian label: "Preventive activity")
"Many children" killed by Israeli assassins:
STATE TO REVIEW 2007 IDF ASSASSINATIONS IN GAZA, W. BANK
By Yuval Yoaz, Haaretz Jan. 20, 2008
The government is working on guidelines for establishing committees to review army assassinations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that killed civilians in the past year.
The Israel Defense Forces, Military Advocate General office, Justice Ministry and other bodies are involved in setting up the review boards, Haaretz has learned.
This comes on the order of the High Court of Justice, in its definitive ruling on "the policy of assassinations" in the territories. That ruling set criteria for when it would be necessary to establish objective review panels to examine the legality of assassinations in which civilians died.
However, the State Prosecutor's Office and Military Advocate General recently rejected a demand that the Military Police launch criminal investigations into six assassinations in Gaza, between March 2006 and May 2007, in which 35 Palestinian civilians were killed, including many children.
The IDF claims the court ruling refers only to assassination operations that occured after the December 2006 ruling, and claims these six incidents either do not fit the time frame or cannot be considered targeted assassinations.
One of Aharon Barak's final verdicts as Supreme Court president, in which Israel's "assassination policy" was sanctioned, stipulates, "Preventive activity by the army that causes the death of nearby innocent civilians requires a retroactive examination of the army's conduct, and this examination must be objective."
Following this ruling, the IDF agreed to review the assassination of Salah Shehadeh, in July 2002. Shehadeh was killed by a one-ton bomb dropped on an apartment building in Gaza, along with 14 civilians.
The Israeli human rights group B'Tselem then sought to get the army to probe six assassinations in Gaza that were carried out in the past two years. B'Tselem's executive director, Jessica Montel, asked Attorney General Menachem Mazuz six months ago to order the MAG to launch a criminal Military Police investigation or to set up a mechanism for objective reviews of these killings.
"Having a mechanism of this sort is particularly crucial in view of the MAG's policy since the start of the second intifada, of not opening criminal investigations in the vast majority of cases in which Palestinian civilians are killed, including non-combatants," Montel wrote to Mazuz. "The MAG makes do with an internal inquiry, but it is clear that a probe by someone in the chain of command cannot be considered objective."
The state does not deem the criteria set in the High Court ruling as requiring an objective review in every case of civilian fatalities in assassinations. "There is no room to accede to your sweeping request," Montel was informed by Mazuz's deputy for special affairs, Shai Nitzan. "The MAG examines every matter according to its circumstances and when a criminal investigation is justified, he orders one."
Nitzan added that he sees no reason to create a permanent mechanism to replace or supplement the MAG's inquiry. "We do not believe there is a legal obligation to establish a sweeping review committee that would examine every case over and above the examination performed by the Military Advocate General," he said.
B'Tselem's demand for a criminal investigation of the six assassinations in the past two years was also rejected. Four have been rejected, and the last two are still officially under review by the MAG...
***
Friday, January 18, 2008
Bobby Fischer, Chess Champion Hounded by U.S., is dead
NEWS SUMMARY
1. Zundel's Defense Lawyer Sentenced to 3 1/2 Years in Prison in Germany.
Revisionist Writer Wolfgang Frohlich Sentenced to 6 1/2 Years in Prison in Austria
2. Bobby Fischer, Chess Champion Hounded by the U.S. government, is dead
-----
1. This news is almost too sickening and Kafkaesque to report: Sylvia Stolz, the lady-attorney who defended Ernst Zundel against charges of "Holocaust Denial" has herself been sentenced to prison in the Israeli colony known as Germany for the "crime" of being a "fanatic anti-semite." In the same month, Wolfgang Frohlich has been sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison in Austria. I hope the Muslim world is paying attention to these examples of western "Democracy."
ZUNDEL'S LAWYER GOING TO JAIL, TOO
(JTA) 01/14/2008
Photo of Sylvia Stolz here: http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=38848§ionid=351020604
The lawyer for jailed Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel is going to prison.
Sylvia Stolz, 44, was sentenced Monday to 3 1/2 years in jail by a German court for denying the Holocaust while defending Zundel last year. Stolz, the girlfriend of jailed right-wing extremist Horst Mahler, also was banned from working as an attorney for five years.
The Mannheim court, explaining its sentence, said Stolz "lives in a make-believe world and wants to restore Germany's honor." The judge also called Stolz a "fanatic anti-Semite." Stolz while defending Zundel in the courtroom referred to the Holocaust as "the biggest lie in world history." She also reportedly signed a court paper with the greeting "Heil Hitler."Stolz was ejected from the trial, with another attorney taking over.
Zundel, 68, eventually was convicted on charges of incitement to hate and anti-Semitism, and Holocaust denial. He was sentenced to a five-year prison term.
AUSTRIAN HOLOCAUST-DENIER GETS SIX-AND-A-HALF YEARS IN PRISON
(AFP) 14/Jan/2008
Photo of Mr. Frohlich here: http://www.ejpress.org/article/23149
VIENNA (AFP)---A Vienna court sentenced Monday a former extreme-right city councillor to four years in prison for Holocaust denial, adding another two-and-a-half years of a previous suspended sentence, a report said. It was the third time that Wolfgang Frohlich, 56, had been found guilty on similar charges, following letters to Austrian members of parliament and Pope Benedict XVI denouncing the Holocaust as a "Satanic lie," the APA news agency said. Pleading "absolutely not guilty," according to APA, Frohlich had already served 23 months behind bars since 2003 -- and gasped in court as the other 29 months were added. Frohlich -- kicked out of the populist far-right FPOe party in 1994 -- is to appeal, said his lawyer, Harald Schuster. Austria has one of the strictest sets of laws surrounding Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi activity. British revisionist historian David Irving spent 13 months in jail after his arrest in 2005 before being expelled to the UK.
-----
2. BOBBY FISCHER, CHESS CHAMPION HOUNDED BY THE US GOVERNMENT, HAS DIED IN EXILE IN ICELAND AT AGE 64
In the mid-1980s, Bobby Fischer, the world chess champion, was living in the Los Angeles and Pasadena, California areas at a time when your editor was residing in nearby Torrance, California and working for the Institute for Historical Review (IHR). We exchanged correspondence and I was honored by the fact that Bobby would sometimes distribute my revisionist pamphlets and other IHR literature in front of the Los Angeles County Library.
In their obituary reporting today, both the NY Times and National Public Radio (NPR)-Morning Edition have omitted the extent to which Mr. Fischer was harassed by the Talmudic-vindictive US government. They are not reporting the disgraceful fact that at the time of his death, Bobby was a hunted fugitive, allegedly for playing a chess game in Yugolsavia without Bill Clinton's permission, but in actuality for the "crime" of being an outspoken critic of Judaism and Zionism.
Here is the letter I wrote to the editor of the NY Times this morning, protesting their whitewashed obituary.
To the editor
The New York Times' Jan. 18 obituary for Bobby Fischer makes almost no mention of how the U.S. government hounded him across the globe, finally forcing him into exile in Iceland. When he died he was a fugitive wanted --since the 1990s-- by the U.S. government, on trumped up charges related more to his opposition to Judaism and Zionism than to his having played chess in Yugoslavia while that nation was under sanctions.
Moreover, you claim that his mother was Judaic. I have a letter from him stating that he was not of Judaic descent, an assertion he maintained throughout his life.
Michael A. Hoffman II
Here's what the Times (and NPR) omitted (courtesy of AP):
"Fischer played -- and won -- an exhibition rematch against Spassky on the resort island of Sveti Stefan, but the game was in violation of U.S. sanctions imposed to punish then-President Slobodan Milosevic. In July 2004, Fischer was arrested at Japan's Narita airport for traveling on a revoked U.S. passport and was threatened with extradition to the United States to face charges of violating sanctions. He spent nine months in custody before the dispute was resolved when Iceland granted him citizenship..." (end quote from the AP)
America's only world chess champion was jailed for nine months for more or less the same reasons that Sylvia Stolz and Wolfgang Frohlich have been jailed. Western Syphillization, which presents a "Democratic" front to the Muslim world, maintains its power, when its lies are no longer believed, by jailing writers, defense attorneys and national chess heroes.
***
1. Zundel's Defense Lawyer Sentenced to 3 1/2 Years in Prison in Germany.
Revisionist Writer Wolfgang Frohlich Sentenced to 6 1/2 Years in Prison in Austria
2. Bobby Fischer, Chess Champion Hounded by the U.S. government, is dead
-----
1. This news is almost too sickening and Kafkaesque to report: Sylvia Stolz, the lady-attorney who defended Ernst Zundel against charges of "Holocaust Denial" has herself been sentenced to prison in the Israeli colony known as Germany for the "crime" of being a "fanatic anti-semite." In the same month, Wolfgang Frohlich has been sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison in Austria. I hope the Muslim world is paying attention to these examples of western "Democracy."
ZUNDEL'S LAWYER GOING TO JAIL, TOO
(JTA) 01/14/2008
Photo of Sylvia Stolz here: http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=38848§ionid=351020604
The lawyer for jailed Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel is going to prison.
Sylvia Stolz, 44, was sentenced Monday to 3 1/2 years in jail by a German court for denying the Holocaust while defending Zundel last year. Stolz, the girlfriend of jailed right-wing extremist Horst Mahler, also was banned from working as an attorney for five years.
The Mannheim court, explaining its sentence, said Stolz "lives in a make-believe world and wants to restore Germany's honor." The judge also called Stolz a "fanatic anti-Semite." Stolz while defending Zundel in the courtroom referred to the Holocaust as "the biggest lie in world history." She also reportedly signed a court paper with the greeting "Heil Hitler."Stolz was ejected from the trial, with another attorney taking over.
Zundel, 68, eventually was convicted on charges of incitement to hate and anti-Semitism, and Holocaust denial. He was sentenced to a five-year prison term.
AUSTRIAN HOLOCAUST-DENIER GETS SIX-AND-A-HALF YEARS IN PRISON
(AFP) 14/Jan/2008
Photo of Mr. Frohlich here: http://www.ejpress.org/article/23149
VIENNA (AFP)---A Vienna court sentenced Monday a former extreme-right city councillor to four years in prison for Holocaust denial, adding another two-and-a-half years of a previous suspended sentence, a report said. It was the third time that Wolfgang Frohlich, 56, had been found guilty on similar charges, following letters to Austrian members of parliament and Pope Benedict XVI denouncing the Holocaust as a "Satanic lie," the APA news agency said. Pleading "absolutely not guilty," according to APA, Frohlich had already served 23 months behind bars since 2003 -- and gasped in court as the other 29 months were added. Frohlich -- kicked out of the populist far-right FPOe party in 1994 -- is to appeal, said his lawyer, Harald Schuster. Austria has one of the strictest sets of laws surrounding Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi activity. British revisionist historian David Irving spent 13 months in jail after his arrest in 2005 before being expelled to the UK.
-----
2. BOBBY FISCHER, CHESS CHAMPION HOUNDED BY THE US GOVERNMENT, HAS DIED IN EXILE IN ICELAND AT AGE 64
In the mid-1980s, Bobby Fischer, the world chess champion, was living in the Los Angeles and Pasadena, California areas at a time when your editor was residing in nearby Torrance, California and working for the Institute for Historical Review (IHR). We exchanged correspondence and I was honored by the fact that Bobby would sometimes distribute my revisionist pamphlets and other IHR literature in front of the Los Angeles County Library.
In their obituary reporting today, both the NY Times and National Public Radio (NPR)-Morning Edition have omitted the extent to which Mr. Fischer was harassed by the Talmudic-vindictive US government. They are not reporting the disgraceful fact that at the time of his death, Bobby was a hunted fugitive, allegedly for playing a chess game in Yugolsavia without Bill Clinton's permission, but in actuality for the "crime" of being an outspoken critic of Judaism and Zionism.
Here is the letter I wrote to the editor of the NY Times this morning, protesting their whitewashed obituary.
To the editor
The New York Times' Jan. 18 obituary for Bobby Fischer makes almost no mention of how the U.S. government hounded him across the globe, finally forcing him into exile in Iceland. When he died he was a fugitive wanted --since the 1990s-- by the U.S. government, on trumped up charges related more to his opposition to Judaism and Zionism than to his having played chess in Yugoslavia while that nation was under sanctions.
Moreover, you claim that his mother was Judaic. I have a letter from him stating that he was not of Judaic descent, an assertion he maintained throughout his life.
Michael A. Hoffman II
Here's what the Times (and NPR) omitted (courtesy of AP):
"Fischer played -- and won -- an exhibition rematch against Spassky on the resort island of Sveti Stefan, but the game was in violation of U.S. sanctions imposed to punish then-President Slobodan Milosevic. In July 2004, Fischer was arrested at Japan's Narita airport for traveling on a revoked U.S. passport and was threatened with extradition to the United States to face charges of violating sanctions. He spent nine months in custody before the dispute was resolved when Iceland granted him citizenship..." (end quote from the AP)
America's only world chess champion was jailed for nine months for more or less the same reasons that Sylvia Stolz and Wolfgang Frohlich have been jailed. Western Syphillization, which presents a "Democratic" front to the Muslim world, maintains its power, when its lies are no longer believed, by jailing writers, defense attorneys and national chess heroes.
***
Thursday, January 17, 2008
"Anti-Semitic Bigotry" Kept Archaelogist from Revealing that Jesus Did Not Resurrect
By Michael A. Hoffman II
"Holocaust-denial"? A crime in more than a half dozen European nations and Canada.
Resurrection-denial? Subject of lavish publicity and praise; a boon to cable television.
To claim that the burial tomb of Jesus Christ has been located (not the cave where the stone was rolled away and He was resurrected, but the burial place for his corpse after He did not resurrect, according to the Zionists) is probably the most serious anti-Christian slur and attack on Christians anyone could make.
As the Apostle Paul stated: "if Christ is not risen, then is our preaching in vain, and your faith also is in vain. Yes, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that He raised up Christ...if Christ is not raised...you are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable." (1 Cor. 15: 12-19).
In other words, if there is a tomb on earth where the mortal remains of Jesus have been found, then the Apostles were false witnesses, there is no Atonement, and the Christian religion is a hoax.
In February, 2007, the Israeli-born Simcha Jacobovici, together with Hollywood director James Cameron ("Titanic") had their dishonest docu-drama,"The Lost Tomb of Jesus" broadcast on the Discovery Channel across America, and around the world in non-Islamic countries like Canada, Britain and of course on Israeli TV Channel 8 (which also took part in the production).
"The Lost Tomb of Jesus" entails more than Resurrection-denial. It also entails notions that Jesus lived past age 33, wed the supposed prostitute and latter-day Christian leader Mary Magdalene and sired a son named "Yehudah" (Judah).
Since the broadcast of this degrading fiction, Zionists and Talmudists have done their best to publicize the film, most recently in January, 2008 in Jerusalem, at the prestigious Third Princeton Symposium on Judaism and Christian Origins, funded in part by millionaire communications mogul George Blumenthal.
At Jacobovici's website, after some mendacious double-talk about how his movie does not "challenge the fact of the Resurection," Jacobovici admits a few paragraphs later: "If Jesus’ mortal remains have indeed been found, this would contradict only the idea of a physical ascension. However, it says nothing against the possibility of a spiritual one..." (http://www.jesusfamilytomb.com/movie_overview/disclaimer.html)
Compare Jacobovici's words with those of the Apostle Paul, to determine if Jacobovici's qualification of "only" constitutes much of a consolation to Christians. Jacobovici knows very well that if Christ did not physically resurrect, then the rabbis of the Talmud are right: Christianity is a hoax. Attempting to soften the blow by suggesting a possible "spiritual resurrection" is little more than mockery.
Certainly no film asserting the truth that rabbinic Judaism is an anti-Biblical pagan revival of Babylonian magic and superstition, can be broadcast on a major cable television or satellite outlet like the Discovery Channel. But from somewhere within the American and Israeli establishment a huge amount of money and publicity has been made available for the lies about Jesus Christ presented in Jacobovici's movie.
In America, the supposed Christian nation that forms a counterpoint to the "wicked empire" of Islam, "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" is broadcast, publicized and studied (it is banned in virtually all Islamic nations). Could it be that America is not Christian, but rather "Churchian"? Could it be that America's population of Israeli-worshipping Caucasians comprise a type of Kabbalistic golem who serve the rabbis and Zionists as enforcer and public relations agent?
One blogger gave a harbinger of the kind of spin which the "Jesus tomb" allegations are being presented by the Israelis: "The real show-stopper happened when the widow of archaeologist Yosef Gat was called onstage to receive an award for her late husband, who had catalogued the bone boxes back in 1980....She told the audience in Hebrew that her husband had always suspected that the cluster of famous names might be linked to THAT Jesus; but as a holocaust survivor, he was reluctant to unleash a possible backlash onto the Jews with his dramatic find. 'The world has changed in our lifetime,' she had said, accepting the honors."
So you see, fellow Christians, don't you dare get indignant about the outrageous campaign to furnish bogus "evidence" attacking the very foundation of Christianity, but rather, bow your heads and genuflect in shame at the thought of casting any aspersions on the fomentors of this anti-Christian attack, because, as it turns out, Yosef Gat, a "Holocaust Survivor," is involved. Therefore, you must proceed no further, lest the more sacred religion of "Holocaustianity" should suffer the least indignity. Far better that the whole of Christianity, the witness of the apostles and of Jesus Himself be trashed, than for one hair on the head of a noble and saintly, Israeli holocaust-surviving archaeologist, should be subject to some critical scrutinty or opprobrium. Hashem forbid!
How clever are these brilliant chessmasters! They turn the table in this fashion in making the aggressors against Christ into victims of --what else?--"anti-semitic biogtry."
Is there ever a time when the followers of Christ can be considered victims of anti-Christian Zionist bigots? Apparently not; not even when the central axiom of Christian belief is being attacked and rubbed into the dirt. No, not even then. The claims to scholarship, victimhood and the right to demolish Christianity on the part of Judaic and Zionist agents and activists, as always, reigns with supreme immunity. Any serious attempt to combat their campaign is forbidden, since our opposition is placed in the spurious context of deriving from bigoted motives of rotten anti-semitism. To defend Jesus is, therefore, "bigotry." The ultimate rabbinic logic and Talmudic mentality rules the media roost.
[Hoffman is the leading researcher in the English-speaking world in the field of Orthodox Judaism. He is raising funds for the completion and publication of his book, "Judaism Discovered." To donate in support of Hoffman's work, see: http://www.revisionisthistory.org/page1/page2/paypal.html ]
ARCHAEOLOGIST HID 'JESUS TOMB' FOR FEAR OF -SEMITISM, WIDOW SAYS
By Jonathan Lis | Haaretz | Jan. 17, 2007
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/945672.html
The widow of the archaeologist who discovered the tomb in Talpiot that some believe to be that of Jesus of Nazareth, explained Wednesday in Jerusalem to a gathering of senior archaeologists and other scholars why her husband kept his discovery a secret.
In an emotional voice, Ruth Gat said that Yosef Gat, a Holocaust survivor, was afraid a wave of anti-Semitism would ensue if he did so. Speaking at the three-day Third Princeton Symposium on Judaism and Christian Origins at Mishkenot She'ananim in the capital, Gat also said, "I thank God his fears did not come true in light of the discovery of the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth."
"As a boy, he wandered around the lion's den of occupied Poland," she also said. "The memory of those days never left him. It was one of the things that held him back as an archaeologist and that was also the reason for his great caution."
Yosef Gat worked as an inspector for the Israel Antiquities Authority for 27 years. He uncovered some 400 sites in the Negev and many other sites in Jerusalem.
The cave was uncovered in 1980, but was not made public until the mid-1990s. Last year, the story became widely known with the release of the documentary film "The Lost Tomb of Jesus"
The film presents a cave uncovered in 1980 during construction work on an apartment building in the southern Jerusalem neighborhood of Talpiot. The tomb contained 10 ossuaries. Hebrew letters were inscribed on some, including those Jacobovici says should be read: Yehuda bar Yehoshua, Matya, Yose, Maria, and Yeshua bar Yehosef. The bones of 35 individuals were also uncovered, interred over three to four generations.
"I fell off the chair," Jacobovici said Wednesday following Gat's presentation. "She said the leading archaeologist, who I thought had claimed it was nothing, actually thought he had discovered the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth, and as a Holocaust survivor was afraid it might lead to anti-Semitism."
Although most of those who spoke at Wednesday's seminar said it was possible the tomb was that of Jesus, Jacobovici's film was taken with a grain of salt.
"What Simcha did was good work, as long as it stays in the right perspective," said archaeologist Professor Shimon Gibson of the University of North Carolina. "We, the archaeologists and the historians, spend our lives trying to evaluate the information collected over time. The journalist, however, makes one film and moves on."
Professor Israel Knohl of Hebrew University said Wednesday that he saw no reason not to evaluate the tomb as Jesus' family tomb, although there was no unambiguous proof. He said surrounding caves should be excavated in order to obtain more proof, and explanations for various contradictions in existing evidence should be sought.
For example, Knohl said the tomb might not be impressive despite the fame of those purported to be buried there, because tombs were considered a source of great impurity. Other significant contemporaneous figures were also buried in unadorned tombs, with no evidence that they had become destinations of pilgrimage.
He said it was not surprising that the tomb, despite its presumed famed occupants, was forgotten. "Jerusalem was destroyed almost entirely at that time, and only a few people were left in the city."
The cave currently serves the residents of a nearby building as a storage place for worn Torah scrolls. A short time after its discovery in 1980, the bones and the ossuaries were reintered at a Jewish cemetery. Under pressure from the ultra-Orthodox, they were never studied and their age was never determined.
Following the pressure, it was also decided to seal another tomb found nearby in which a number of complete ossuaries were found, and apartments were built above it.
In response to arguments by scholars against his film, Jacobovici said Wednesday that it was a great honor that such an august group had gathered to discuss the matter. He said that when they made the film, the feeling of the public and the scientific community was that there was no chance it was the tomb of Jesus. Now, Jacobovici said, the consensus is that it might be true.
***
"Holocaust-denial"? A crime in more than a half dozen European nations and Canada.
Resurrection-denial? Subject of lavish publicity and praise; a boon to cable television.
To claim that the burial tomb of Jesus Christ has been located (not the cave where the stone was rolled away and He was resurrected, but the burial place for his corpse after He did not resurrect, according to the Zionists) is probably the most serious anti-Christian slur and attack on Christians anyone could make.
As the Apostle Paul stated: "if Christ is not risen, then is our preaching in vain, and your faith also is in vain. Yes, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that He raised up Christ...if Christ is not raised...you are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable." (1 Cor. 15: 12-19).
In other words, if there is a tomb on earth where the mortal remains of Jesus have been found, then the Apostles were false witnesses, there is no Atonement, and the Christian religion is a hoax.
In February, 2007, the Israeli-born Simcha Jacobovici, together with Hollywood director James Cameron ("Titanic") had their dishonest docu-drama,"The Lost Tomb of Jesus" broadcast on the Discovery Channel across America, and around the world in non-Islamic countries like Canada, Britain and of course on Israeli TV Channel 8 (which also took part in the production).
"The Lost Tomb of Jesus" entails more than Resurrection-denial. It also entails notions that Jesus lived past age 33, wed the supposed prostitute and latter-day Christian leader Mary Magdalene and sired a son named "Yehudah" (Judah).
Since the broadcast of this degrading fiction, Zionists and Talmudists have done their best to publicize the film, most recently in January, 2008 in Jerusalem, at the prestigious Third Princeton Symposium on Judaism and Christian Origins, funded in part by millionaire communications mogul George Blumenthal.
At Jacobovici's website, after some mendacious double-talk about how his movie does not "challenge the fact of the Resurection," Jacobovici admits a few paragraphs later: "If Jesus’ mortal remains have indeed been found, this would contradict only the idea of a physical ascension. However, it says nothing against the possibility of a spiritual one..." (http://www.jesusfamilytomb.com/movie_overview/disclaimer.html)
Compare Jacobovici's words with those of the Apostle Paul, to determine if Jacobovici's qualification of "only" constitutes much of a consolation to Christians. Jacobovici knows very well that if Christ did not physically resurrect, then the rabbis of the Talmud are right: Christianity is a hoax. Attempting to soften the blow by suggesting a possible "spiritual resurrection" is little more than mockery.
Certainly no film asserting the truth that rabbinic Judaism is an anti-Biblical pagan revival of Babylonian magic and superstition, can be broadcast on a major cable television or satellite outlet like the Discovery Channel. But from somewhere within the American and Israeli establishment a huge amount of money and publicity has been made available for the lies about Jesus Christ presented in Jacobovici's movie.
In America, the supposed Christian nation that forms a counterpoint to the "wicked empire" of Islam, "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" is broadcast, publicized and studied (it is banned in virtually all Islamic nations). Could it be that America is not Christian, but rather "Churchian"? Could it be that America's population of Israeli-worshipping Caucasians comprise a type of Kabbalistic golem who serve the rabbis and Zionists as enforcer and public relations agent?
One blogger gave a harbinger of the kind of spin which the "Jesus tomb" allegations are being presented by the Israelis: "The real show-stopper happened when the widow of archaeologist Yosef Gat was called onstage to receive an award for her late husband, who had catalogued the bone boxes back in 1980....She told the audience in Hebrew that her husband had always suspected that the cluster of famous names might be linked to THAT Jesus; but as a holocaust survivor, he was reluctant to unleash a possible backlash onto the Jews with his dramatic find. 'The world has changed in our lifetime,' she had said, accepting the honors."
So you see, fellow Christians, don't you dare get indignant about the outrageous campaign to furnish bogus "evidence" attacking the very foundation of Christianity, but rather, bow your heads and genuflect in shame at the thought of casting any aspersions on the fomentors of this anti-Christian attack, because, as it turns out, Yosef Gat, a "Holocaust Survivor," is involved. Therefore, you must proceed no further, lest the more sacred religion of "Holocaustianity" should suffer the least indignity. Far better that the whole of Christianity, the witness of the apostles and of Jesus Himself be trashed, than for one hair on the head of a noble and saintly, Israeli holocaust-surviving archaeologist, should be subject to some critical scrutinty or opprobrium. Hashem forbid!
How clever are these brilliant chessmasters! They turn the table in this fashion in making the aggressors against Christ into victims of --what else?--"anti-semitic biogtry."
Is there ever a time when the followers of Christ can be considered victims of anti-Christian Zionist bigots? Apparently not; not even when the central axiom of Christian belief is being attacked and rubbed into the dirt. No, not even then. The claims to scholarship, victimhood and the right to demolish Christianity on the part of Judaic and Zionist agents and activists, as always, reigns with supreme immunity. Any serious attempt to combat their campaign is forbidden, since our opposition is placed in the spurious context of deriving from bigoted motives of rotten anti-semitism. To defend Jesus is, therefore, "bigotry." The ultimate rabbinic logic and Talmudic mentality rules the media roost.
[Hoffman is the leading researcher in the English-speaking world in the field of Orthodox Judaism. He is raising funds for the completion and publication of his book, "Judaism Discovered." To donate in support of Hoffman's work, see: http://www.revisionisthistory.org/page1/page2/paypal.html ]
ARCHAEOLOGIST HID 'JESUS TOMB' FOR FEAR OF -SEMITISM, WIDOW SAYS
By Jonathan Lis | Haaretz | Jan. 17, 2007
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/945672.html
The widow of the archaeologist who discovered the tomb in Talpiot that some believe to be that of Jesus of Nazareth, explained Wednesday in Jerusalem to a gathering of senior archaeologists and other scholars why her husband kept his discovery a secret.
In an emotional voice, Ruth Gat said that Yosef Gat, a Holocaust survivor, was afraid a wave of anti-Semitism would ensue if he did so. Speaking at the three-day Third Princeton Symposium on Judaism and Christian Origins at Mishkenot She'ananim in the capital, Gat also said, "I thank God his fears did not come true in light of the discovery of the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth."
"As a boy, he wandered around the lion's den of occupied Poland," she also said. "The memory of those days never left him. It was one of the things that held him back as an archaeologist and that was also the reason for his great caution."
Yosef Gat worked as an inspector for the Israel Antiquities Authority for 27 years. He uncovered some 400 sites in the Negev and many other sites in Jerusalem.
The cave was uncovered in 1980, but was not made public until the mid-1990s. Last year, the story became widely known with the release of the documentary film "The Lost Tomb of Jesus"
The film presents a cave uncovered in 1980 during construction work on an apartment building in the southern Jerusalem neighborhood of Talpiot. The tomb contained 10 ossuaries. Hebrew letters were inscribed on some, including those Jacobovici says should be read: Yehuda bar Yehoshua, Matya, Yose, Maria, and Yeshua bar Yehosef. The bones of 35 individuals were also uncovered, interred over three to four generations.
"I fell off the chair," Jacobovici said Wednesday following Gat's presentation. "She said the leading archaeologist, who I thought had claimed it was nothing, actually thought he had discovered the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth, and as a Holocaust survivor was afraid it might lead to anti-Semitism."
Although most of those who spoke at Wednesday's seminar said it was possible the tomb was that of Jesus, Jacobovici's film was taken with a grain of salt.
"What Simcha did was good work, as long as it stays in the right perspective," said archaeologist Professor Shimon Gibson of the University of North Carolina. "We, the archaeologists and the historians, spend our lives trying to evaluate the information collected over time. The journalist, however, makes one film and moves on."
Professor Israel Knohl of Hebrew University said Wednesday that he saw no reason not to evaluate the tomb as Jesus' family tomb, although there was no unambiguous proof. He said surrounding caves should be excavated in order to obtain more proof, and explanations for various contradictions in existing evidence should be sought.
For example, Knohl said the tomb might not be impressive despite the fame of those purported to be buried there, because tombs were considered a source of great impurity. Other significant contemporaneous figures were also buried in unadorned tombs, with no evidence that they had become destinations of pilgrimage.
He said it was not surprising that the tomb, despite its presumed famed occupants, was forgotten. "Jerusalem was destroyed almost entirely at that time, and only a few people were left in the city."
The cave currently serves the residents of a nearby building as a storage place for worn Torah scrolls. A short time after its discovery in 1980, the bones and the ossuaries were reintered at a Jewish cemetery. Under pressure from the ultra-Orthodox, they were never studied and their age was never determined.
Following the pressure, it was also decided to seal another tomb found nearby in which a number of complete ossuaries were found, and apartments were built above it.
In response to arguments by scholars against his film, Jacobovici said Wednesday that it was a great honor that such an august group had gathered to discuss the matter. He said that when they made the film, the feeling of the public and the scientific community was that there was no chance it was the tomb of Jesus. Now, Jacobovici said, the consensus is that it might be true.
***
Shanker of NY Times claims Pentagon didn't fake audio
Q & A: Keeping Score on U.S.-Iran Confrontation
By Mike Nizza | The Lede
New York Times | January 16, 2008, 3:55 pm
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/16/q-a-keeping-score-on-us-iran-confrontation/index.html?hp
For all the heads still spinning in the aftermath of a recent incident between the United States Navy and a group of Iranian speedboats in the Strait of Hormuz, let’s take it from the top, with the help of Thom Shanker, who covers national security and foreign policy for The New York Times.
Question: The Lede: The audio — was it a hoax?
Answer: Mr. Shanker: There are many questions about the audio threats, to be sure. But if by “hoax” you mean, was it completely manufactured? Then the answer is no.
(End quote)
Shanker's Omniscience not Good Enough
By Michael A. Hoffman II
What kind of omniscient inside line does New York Times reporter Thom Shanker have, to be able to know, definitively, that when the Pentagon added the audio track to the separate video portion of the tape, which they have admitted doing, that the threatening audio was not manufactured by their psychological warfare directorate?
I don’t understand how Mr. Shanker can know for absolutely certain that this was not the case. He offers no evidence in suport of his claim, except, I suppose, his own authority and prestige, which is not good enough for this reader.
Much more digging needs to be done. Was the Pentagon trying to manufacture a causus belli with Iran? Trying to start a war is a crime under international law. Should not the full resources of the American media be engaged, to discover whether or not “our” government is trying to agitate the American people with fictional tales of Iranian aggression?
***
By Mike Nizza | The Lede
New York Times | January 16, 2008, 3:55 pm
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/16/q-a-keeping-score-on-us-iran-confrontation/index.html?hp
For all the heads still spinning in the aftermath of a recent incident between the United States Navy and a group of Iranian speedboats in the Strait of Hormuz, let’s take it from the top, with the help of Thom Shanker, who covers national security and foreign policy for The New York Times.
Question: The Lede: The audio — was it a hoax?
Answer: Mr. Shanker: There are many questions about the audio threats, to be sure. But if by “hoax” you mean, was it completely manufactured? Then the answer is no.
(End quote)
Shanker's Omniscience not Good Enough
By Michael A. Hoffman II
What kind of omniscient inside line does New York Times reporter Thom Shanker have, to be able to know, definitively, that when the Pentagon added the audio track to the separate video portion of the tape, which they have admitted doing, that the threatening audio was not manufactured by their psychological warfare directorate?
I don’t understand how Mr. Shanker can know for absolutely certain that this was not the case. He offers no evidence in suport of his claim, except, I suppose, his own authority and prestige, which is not good enough for this reader.
Much more digging needs to be done. Was the Pentagon trying to manufacture a causus belli with Iran? Trying to start a war is a crime under international law. Should not the full resources of the American media be engaged, to discover whether or not “our” government is trying to agitate the American people with fictional tales of Iranian aggression?
***
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Homosexuals Afflicted by Deadly Necrotizing Fasciitis
NEW BACTERIA STRAIN IS STRIKING GAY MEN
By Lawrence K. Altman
New York Times | January 15, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/health/15infe.html
A new, highly drug-resistant strain of the “flesh-eating” MRSA bacteria is being spread among gay men in San Francisco and Boston, researchers reported on Monday. In a study published online by the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, the bacteria seemed to be spread most easily through anal intercourse but also through casual skin-to-skin contact and touching contaminated surfaces.
The authors warned that unless microbiology laboratories were able to identify the strain and doctors prescribed the proper antibiotic therapy, the infection could soon spread among other groups and become a wider threat. The new strain seems to have “spread rapidly” in gay populations in San Francisco and Boston, the researchers wrote, and “has the potential for rapid, nationwide dissemination” among gay men.
The study was based on a review of medical records from outpatient clinics in San Francisco and Boston and nine medical centers in San Francisco. The Castro district in San Francisco has the highest number of gay residents in the country, according to the University of California, San Francisco. One in 588 residents is infected with the new multidrug-resistant MRSA strain, the study found. That compares with 1 in 3,800 people in San Francisco, according to statistical analyses based on ZIP codes.
A separate part of the study found that gay men in San Francisco were about 13 times more likely to be infected than other people in the city. The San Francisco researchers suggested that scrubbing with soap and water might be the most effective way to stop skin-to-skin transmission, particularly after sexual activities.
MRSA, for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, was once spread chiefly in hospitals. But in recent years, a number of healthy people have acquired it outside hospitals. Nearly 19,000 people died in the United States from MRSA infections in 2005, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported.
The infection can cause unusually severe problems, including abscesses and skin ulcers. The bacteria can invade through the skin to produce necrotizing fasciitis, giving them the popular name of flesh-eating bacteria. They can also cause pneumonia, damage the heart and produce widespread infection through the blood. Among gay men in the study, MRSA was spread by skin contact, causing abscesses and infection in the buttocks and genital area. The new strain is closely related to earlier ones. Both are known as MRSA USA300. The strain is much more difficult to treat because it is resistant not just to methicillin, but also many more of the antibiotics used to treat the earlier strains, said Dr. Henry F. Chambers, an author of the new study.
The new strain contains a plasmid called pUSA03.
“This particular clone is resistant to at least three other drugs, clindamycin, tetracycline and mupirocin,” Dr. Chambers said in a telephone interview. Of the alternatives recommended by the C.D.C. and the Infectious Diseases Society of America, trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole (Bactrim), clindamycin and a tetracycline, “this strain is resistant to two of those three,” he added. “In addition, the new strain is resistant to mupirocin, which has been advocated for eradicating the strain from carriers.”
***
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Subscribe to "The Hoffman Wire"
Send an e-mail to:
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***
By Lawrence K. Altman
New York Times | January 15, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/health/15infe.html
A new, highly drug-resistant strain of the “flesh-eating” MRSA bacteria is being spread among gay men in San Francisco and Boston, researchers reported on Monday. In a study published online by the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, the bacteria seemed to be spread most easily through anal intercourse but also through casual skin-to-skin contact and touching contaminated surfaces.
The authors warned that unless microbiology laboratories were able to identify the strain and doctors prescribed the proper antibiotic therapy, the infection could soon spread among other groups and become a wider threat. The new strain seems to have “spread rapidly” in gay populations in San Francisco and Boston, the researchers wrote, and “has the potential for rapid, nationwide dissemination” among gay men.
The study was based on a review of medical records from outpatient clinics in San Francisco and Boston and nine medical centers in San Francisco. The Castro district in San Francisco has the highest number of gay residents in the country, according to the University of California, San Francisco. One in 588 residents is infected with the new multidrug-resistant MRSA strain, the study found. That compares with 1 in 3,800 people in San Francisco, according to statistical analyses based on ZIP codes.
A separate part of the study found that gay men in San Francisco were about 13 times more likely to be infected than other people in the city. The San Francisco researchers suggested that scrubbing with soap and water might be the most effective way to stop skin-to-skin transmission, particularly after sexual activities.
MRSA, for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, was once spread chiefly in hospitals. But in recent years, a number of healthy people have acquired it outside hospitals. Nearly 19,000 people died in the United States from MRSA infections in 2005, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported.
The infection can cause unusually severe problems, including abscesses and skin ulcers. The bacteria can invade through the skin to produce necrotizing fasciitis, giving them the popular name of flesh-eating bacteria. They can also cause pneumonia, damage the heart and produce widespread infection through the blood. Among gay men in the study, MRSA was spread by skin contact, causing abscesses and infection in the buttocks and genital area. The new strain is closely related to earlier ones. Both are known as MRSA USA300. The strain is much more difficult to treat because it is resistant not just to methicillin, but also many more of the antibiotics used to treat the earlier strains, said Dr. Henry F. Chambers, an author of the new study.
The new strain contains a plasmid called pUSA03.
“This particular clone is resistant to at least three other drugs, clindamycin, tetracycline and mupirocin,” Dr. Chambers said in a telephone interview. Of the alternatives recommended by the C.D.C. and the Infectious Diseases Society of America, trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole (Bactrim), clindamycin and a tetracycline, “this strain is resistant to two of those three,” he added. “In addition, the new strain is resistant to mupirocin, which has been advocated for eradicating the strain from carriers.”
***
RECEIVE HOFFMAN'S COLUMNS BY E-MAIL FREE OF CHARGE
Subscribe to "The Hoffman Wire"
Send an e-mail to:
HoffmanWire-subscribe@topica.com
When you receive Topica's e-mail in response to your subscription request, simply click on your reply button; that's all there is to it. You need NOT visit Topica's website in order to subscribe.
THERE IS NO COST OR OBLIGATION. YOU CAN EASILY UNSUBSCRIBE AT ANY TIME. Your e-mail address is never sold, bartered, exchanged or otherwise divulged to anyone.
***
Monday, January 14, 2008
Trigger-Happy Warmonger John McCain
Is Republican Presidential John McCain insane? He sings songs that are supposed to be funny about bombing Iran and says the US may have to be in Iraq for 100 years.
From Dan Froomkin | January 14, 2008; 2:06 PM ET
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2008/01/14/BL2008011401233_pf.html
What Bush Has in Mind for Iraq: In a short interview with David Gregory on Friday (Jan. 11), Bush indicated that he intends for U.S. forces to be in Iraq for the long term. Gregory: "John McCain has been saying on the campaign trail that the American people would accept U.S. troops remaining in Iraq for 100 years. Do you agree with that?"
Bush: "I -- I don't know if 100 years is the right number. That's a long time."
Gregory: "Sort of long-term presence?"
Bush: "It could very well be. But it's going to be on the invitation of the Iraqi government. A long-term presence -- and again, I'm not exactly sure how you would define long-term, but it's --"
Gregory: "Ten years?"
Bush: "Yeah, it could easily be that, absolutely."
From Adam Nagourney | April 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/20/us/politics/20edwards.html?scp=1&sq=In+the+Beverly+Hills+Style
Senator John McCain, a Republican hopeful, was captured on camera in South Carolina on Wednesday (April 18) when he was asked about sending “an air-mail message to Teheran.”
“Remember that old Beach Boys song ‘Bomb Iran?’ ” Mr. McCain asked and burst out with the first three notes of “Barbara Ann,” with slightly different words. “Bomb, bomb, bomb,” he sang.
From Michael A. Hoffman II:
If McCain had sung "Bomb Israel...Bomb, bomb, bomb," his election prospects would not even encompass the office of dog catcher, much less the Republican candidate for the presidency.
Imagine: one hundred years in the killing fields of Iraq. Kennedy gave us a vision of a New Frontier, the Peace Corps and man on the moon. Bush and McCain envision perpetual wars and bombings. The inmates are running the insane asylum.
***
From Dan Froomkin | January 14, 2008; 2:06 PM ET
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2008/01/14/BL2008011401233_pf.html
What Bush Has in Mind for Iraq: In a short interview with David Gregory on Friday (Jan. 11), Bush indicated that he intends for U.S. forces to be in Iraq for the long term. Gregory: "John McCain has been saying on the campaign trail that the American people would accept U.S. troops remaining in Iraq for 100 years. Do you agree with that?"
Bush: "I -- I don't know if 100 years is the right number. That's a long time."
Gregory: "Sort of long-term presence?"
Bush: "It could very well be. But it's going to be on the invitation of the Iraqi government. A long-term presence -- and again, I'm not exactly sure how you would define long-term, but it's --"
Gregory: "Ten years?"
Bush: "Yeah, it could easily be that, absolutely."
From Adam Nagourney | April 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/20/us/politics/20edwards.html?scp=1&sq=In+the+Beverly+Hills+Style
Senator John McCain, a Republican hopeful, was captured on camera in South Carolina on Wednesday (April 18) when he was asked about sending “an air-mail message to Teheran.”
“Remember that old Beach Boys song ‘Bomb Iran?’ ” Mr. McCain asked and burst out with the first three notes of “Barbara Ann,” with slightly different words. “Bomb, bomb, bomb,” he sang.
From Michael A. Hoffman II:
If McCain had sung "Bomb Israel...Bomb, bomb, bomb," his election prospects would not even encompass the office of dog catcher, much less the Republican candidate for the presidency.
Imagine: one hundred years in the killing fields of Iraq. Kennedy gave us a vision of a New Frontier, the Peace Corps and man on the moon. Bush and McCain envision perpetual wars and bombings. The inmates are running the insane asylum.
***
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Associated Press Upholds Pentagon Tale on Iran Boats
Bush Urges Arab Allies to Confront Iran
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 13, 2008 | Filed at 2:56 p.m. ET
"...Also Sunday, the U.S. focused new attention on the Jan. 6 confrontation between American and Iranian naval vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.U.S. Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgriff, commander of the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet, which patrols the Gulf, briefed Bush on the incident before the president left Bahrain on Sunday morning.
"Cosgriff told Bush that he took it 'deadly seriously' when an Iranian fleet of high-speed boats charged at and threatened to blow up a three-ship U.S. Navy convoy passing near Iranian waters." (End quote)
Dear Associated Press
Where is the evidence that the Iranians "threatened to blow up" three US Navy ships? It appears you are upholding the fabricated audio on the alleged Pentagon tapes of the encounter. This tends to show how the Zionist, war-loving Associated Press deals in Big Lies.
--Michael A. Hoffman II
Former reporter, NY Bureau of the Associated Press
For further reference:
NY Times & Reuters send reports of Pentagon faking Iran audio down memory hole (previous post on this blog)
Pentagon Faked Audio on Iran Boat Video (previous post on this blog)
***
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 13, 2008 | Filed at 2:56 p.m. ET
"...Also Sunday, the U.S. focused new attention on the Jan. 6 confrontation between American and Iranian naval vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.U.S. Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgriff, commander of the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet, which patrols the Gulf, briefed Bush on the incident before the president left Bahrain on Sunday morning.
"Cosgriff told Bush that he took it 'deadly seriously' when an Iranian fleet of high-speed boats charged at and threatened to blow up a three-ship U.S. Navy convoy passing near Iranian waters." (End quote)
Dear Associated Press
Where is the evidence that the Iranians "threatened to blow up" three US Navy ships? It appears you are upholding the fabricated audio on the alleged Pentagon tapes of the encounter. This tends to show how the Zionist, war-loving Associated Press deals in Big Lies.
--Michael A. Hoffman II
Former reporter, NY Bureau of the Associated Press
For further reference:
NY Times & Reuters send reports of Pentagon faking Iran audio down memory hole (previous post on this blog)
Pentagon Faked Audio on Iran Boat Video (previous post on this blog)
***
Saturday, January 12, 2008
NY Times & Reuters send reports of Pentagon faking Iran audio down memory hole
By Michael A. Hoffman II
In an article in the Saturday Jan. 12 edition of the New York Times, reporting on the "encounter" between US Navy ships and Iranian speedboats, the Times omitted all reference to the Pentagon having faked the audio on the videotapes purporting to prove that the Iranians meant to threaten to blow up the American ships (see our previous post of Jan. 10, "Pentagon faked audio on Iran Boat Video").
The article that makes no mention of the audio on the videotapes being suspect is: "Iran Encounter Grimly Echoes '02 War Game" by Thom Shanker, a remarkable piece of nonsense that oozes melodrama and takes at face value the current Pentagon fantasy and plays it up with a tale of a U.S. war game fantasy about Iran that was staged in 2002.
Another article, in Reuters for Jan. 12 (posted on the morning of Jan. 12 at the NY Times' website www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-iran-nuclear.html) also makes no mention of the news that the Pentagon appears to have faked the audio on the dramatic tape it presented to the world as evidence of Iranian evil. The Reuters report is titled, "Iran Says Atom Cooperation to Prove West Wrong" (filed at 7:43 a.m. ET), but after reporting the nuclear issue, under the sub-heading "Tension," Reuters states:
"His (International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei) two-day trip to Tehran, which began on Friday, coincides with renewed tension between Iran and the United States over a naval incident in the oil-rich Gulf last Sunday (Jan. 6)...ElBaradei's visit coincides with a Middle East tour by U.S. President George W. Bush, who has called Iran a 'threat to world peace' and is seeking Arab support to rein in Iran. In Washington on Friday, the top U.S. military officer said last Sunday's encounter between U.S. Navy ships and Iranian boats in the Gulf showed Iran posed a threat and that the United States was ready to counter it." (End quote from Reuters article written by Fredrik Dahl and edited by Peter Millership).
We can think of few crimes more serious than attempting to start a war with a sovereign nation by means of propaganda. The establishment media never tire of reminding us of the crimes of Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels in this line. We are supposed to never forget his deceitful justifications for invasions and wars sixty years after the fact. But six days after the Pentagon appears to have faked the threats on the audio portion of their alleged video record of the confrontation with Iranian boats, just two days after revelations from US government personnel that the audio is dodgy, and just one day after a report along the same lines by Robin Wright in the Washington Post (p. A13) and the whole matter is being quietly put to bed, the momentum that should be building for exposure of dangerous Pentagon propaganda techniques, nipped in the bud, so as not to alert the infantilized American people concerning the true nature of the Bush administration.
Instead, the corporate media act as a mouthpiece for repeatedly hammering into our minds Goebbelsesque slogans such as "Iran is a threat to world peace" and "Iranians have been seeking to provoke a violent confrontation."
Manipulation of the audio portion of a videotape by the Pentagon in order to justify a violent confrontation with Iran, a supposition backed up by evidence, is left out of reporting by the NY Times and Reuters today, the better to enhance the bellicose slogans of Bush and his crooked, crisis-creation team.
What about "The Lede," the New York Times blog that was one of the first to explore the likelihood that the Pentagon had faked the audio? 1. "The Lede" is an online blog that is not published in the print edition of the Times, so there is no hard copy record or trail for its data. 2. "The Lede" may be the NY Times' way of buying insurance for the future against charges that in its print edition it used Orwellian memory hole tactics to help shore up Pentagon and Bush administration propaganda. And as we see today on the Times' website, even online the main push of the NY Times is against any follow-up publicity for what is a remarkable story of potentially war-provoking Pentagon manipulation of an account of a military incident that includes attributing words to Iranian sailors ("I am coming to you. … You will explode after … minutes") that were never actually said by them.
***
IRAN ENCOUNTER GRIMLY ECHOES '02 WAR GAME
By Thom Shanker
www.nytimes.com/2008/01/12/washington/12navy.html?ref=world
NY Times | January 12, 2008
WASHINGTON — There is a reason American military officers express grim concern over the tactics used by Iranian sailors last weekend: a classified, $250 million war game in which small, agile speedboats swarmed a naval convoy to inflict devastating damage on more powerful warships.
In the days since the encounter with five Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz, American officers have acknowledged that they have been studying anew the lessons from a startling simulation conducted in August 2002. In that war game, the Blue Team navy, representing the United States, lost 16 major warships — an aircraft carrier, cruisers and amphibious vessels — when they were sunk to the bottom of the Persian Gulf in an attack that included swarming tactics by enemy speedboats.
“The sheer numbers involved overloaded their ability, both mentally and electronically, to handle the attack,” said Lt. Gen. Paul K. Van Riper, a retired Marine Corps officer who served in the war game as commander of a Red Team force representing an unnamed Persian Gulf military. “The whole thing was over in 5, maybe 10 minutes.”
If the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, proved to the public how terrorists could transform hijacked airliners into hostage-filled cruise missiles, then the “Millennium Challenge 2002” war game with General Van Riper was a warning to the armed services as to how an adversary could apply similar, asymmetrical thinking to conflict at sea.
General Van Riper said he complained at the time that important lessons of his simulated victory were not adequately acknowledged across the military. But other senior officers say the war game and subsequent analysis and exercises helped to focus attention on the threat posed by Iran’s small, fast boats, and helped to prepare commanders for last weekend’s encounter.
“It’s clear, strategically, where the Iranian military has gone,” Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters on Friday. “For the years that this strategic shift toward their small, fast boats has taken place, we’ve been very focused on that.”
In the simulation, General Van Riper sent wave after wave of relatively inexpensive speedboats to charge at the costlier, more advanced fleet approaching the Persian Gulf. His force of small boats attacked with machine guns and rockets, reinforced with missiles launched from land and air. Some of the small boats were loaded with explosives to detonate alongside American warships in suicide attacks. That core tactic of swarming played out in real life last weekend, though on a much more limited scale and without any shots fired.
According to Pentagon and Navy officials, five small patrol boats belonging to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps charged a three-ship Navy convoy, maneuvering around and between an American destroyer, cruiser and frigate during a tense half-hour encounter. The location was where the narrow Strait of Hormuz meets the open waters of the Persian Gulf — the same choke point chosen by General Van Riper for his attack.
In the encounter last Sunday, the commander of one American warship trained an M240 machine gun — which fires upward of 10 armor-piercing slugs per second — on an Iranian boat that pulled within 200 yards of the American vessel. But the Iranians turned away before the commander gave the order to fire.
That was not the case in the simulation, sponsored by the military’s Joint Forces Command. The victory of the force modeled after a Persian Gulf state — a composite of Iran and Iraq — astounded sponsors of what was then the largest joint war-fighting exercise ever held, involving 13,500 military members and civilians battling in nine live exercise ranges in the United States, and double that many computer simulations to replicate a number of different battles.
General Van Riper’s attack was much more complex and sophisticated than anything that could have involved the Iranian boats last weekend. The broad outline of the 2002 war game was reported at the time, but in interviews since last weekend’s episode, General Van Riper and other officers have provided new details about the simulation.
In the war game, scores of adversary speedboats and larger naval vessels had been shadowing and hectoring the Blue Team fleet for days. The Blue Team defenses also faced cruise missiles fired simultaneously from land and from warplanes, as well as the swarm of speedboats firing heavy machine guns and rockets — and pulling alongside to detonate explosives on board.
When the Red Team sank much of the Blue navy despite the Blue navy’s firing of guns and missiles, it illustrated a cheap way to beat a very expensive fleet. After the Blue force was sunk, the game was ordered to begin again, with the Blue Team eventually declared the victor.
In a telephone interview, General Van Riper recalled that his idea of a swarming attack grew from Marine Corps studies of the natural world, where insects and animals — from tiny ant colonies to wolf packs — move in groups to overwhelm larger prey.
“It is not a matter of size or of individual capability, but whether you have the numbers and come from multiple directions in a short period of time,” he said.
Although Washington and Tehran continue to duel over details of the encounter, American officials say the Iranians may have been seeking to provoke a violent confrontation as President Bush was about to visit the region. Or, the officials say, they might have been hoping to test the American reaction. Yet there is no certainty that the encounter was ordered by the government in Tehran.
Pentagon officials on Friday said there were two encounters with small Iranian boats in the region last month. In one, a Navy warship fired warning shots and in the other a warning whistle was sounded. Both encounters ended without injury after the Iranian vessels turned away.
Regardless, American sailors have not forgotten how a small boat that hid among refueling and garbage vessels off a port in Yemen detonated alongside the American destroyer Cole in October 2000, killing 17 Americans and crippling the warship.
***
Go to www.RevisionistHistory.org for updates
***
In an article in the Saturday Jan. 12 edition of the New York Times, reporting on the "encounter" between US Navy ships and Iranian speedboats, the Times omitted all reference to the Pentagon having faked the audio on the videotapes purporting to prove that the Iranians meant to threaten to blow up the American ships (see our previous post of Jan. 10, "Pentagon faked audio on Iran Boat Video").
The article that makes no mention of the audio on the videotapes being suspect is: "Iran Encounter Grimly Echoes '02 War Game" by Thom Shanker, a remarkable piece of nonsense that oozes melodrama and takes at face value the current Pentagon fantasy and plays it up with a tale of a U.S. war game fantasy about Iran that was staged in 2002.
Another article, in Reuters for Jan. 12 (posted on the morning of Jan. 12 at the NY Times' website www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-iran-nuclear.html) also makes no mention of the news that the Pentagon appears to have faked the audio on the dramatic tape it presented to the world as evidence of Iranian evil. The Reuters report is titled, "Iran Says Atom Cooperation to Prove West Wrong" (filed at 7:43 a.m. ET), but after reporting the nuclear issue, under the sub-heading "Tension," Reuters states:
"His (International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei) two-day trip to Tehran, which began on Friday, coincides with renewed tension between Iran and the United States over a naval incident in the oil-rich Gulf last Sunday (Jan. 6)...ElBaradei's visit coincides with a Middle East tour by U.S. President George W. Bush, who has called Iran a 'threat to world peace' and is seeking Arab support to rein in Iran. In Washington on Friday, the top U.S. military officer said last Sunday's encounter between U.S. Navy ships and Iranian boats in the Gulf showed Iran posed a threat and that the United States was ready to counter it." (End quote from Reuters article written by Fredrik Dahl and edited by Peter Millership).
We can think of few crimes more serious than attempting to start a war with a sovereign nation by means of propaganda. The establishment media never tire of reminding us of the crimes of Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels in this line. We are supposed to never forget his deceitful justifications for invasions and wars sixty years after the fact. But six days after the Pentagon appears to have faked the threats on the audio portion of their alleged video record of the confrontation with Iranian boats, just two days after revelations from US government personnel that the audio is dodgy, and just one day after a report along the same lines by Robin Wright in the Washington Post (p. A13) and the whole matter is being quietly put to bed, the momentum that should be building for exposure of dangerous Pentagon propaganda techniques, nipped in the bud, so as not to alert the infantilized American people concerning the true nature of the Bush administration.
Instead, the corporate media act as a mouthpiece for repeatedly hammering into our minds Goebbelsesque slogans such as "Iran is a threat to world peace" and "Iranians have been seeking to provoke a violent confrontation."
Manipulation of the audio portion of a videotape by the Pentagon in order to justify a violent confrontation with Iran, a supposition backed up by evidence, is left out of reporting by the NY Times and Reuters today, the better to enhance the bellicose slogans of Bush and his crooked, crisis-creation team.
What about "The Lede," the New York Times blog that was one of the first to explore the likelihood that the Pentagon had faked the audio? 1. "The Lede" is an online blog that is not published in the print edition of the Times, so there is no hard copy record or trail for its data. 2. "The Lede" may be the NY Times' way of buying insurance for the future against charges that in its print edition it used Orwellian memory hole tactics to help shore up Pentagon and Bush administration propaganda. And as we see today on the Times' website, even online the main push of the NY Times is against any follow-up publicity for what is a remarkable story of potentially war-provoking Pentagon manipulation of an account of a military incident that includes attributing words to Iranian sailors ("I am coming to you. … You will explode after … minutes") that were never actually said by them.
***
IRAN ENCOUNTER GRIMLY ECHOES '02 WAR GAME
By Thom Shanker
www.nytimes.com/2008/01/12/washington/12navy.html?ref=world
NY Times | January 12, 2008
WASHINGTON — There is a reason American military officers express grim concern over the tactics used by Iranian sailors last weekend: a classified, $250 million war game in which small, agile speedboats swarmed a naval convoy to inflict devastating damage on more powerful warships.
In the days since the encounter with five Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz, American officers have acknowledged that they have been studying anew the lessons from a startling simulation conducted in August 2002. In that war game, the Blue Team navy, representing the United States, lost 16 major warships — an aircraft carrier, cruisers and amphibious vessels — when they were sunk to the bottom of the Persian Gulf in an attack that included swarming tactics by enemy speedboats.
“The sheer numbers involved overloaded their ability, both mentally and electronically, to handle the attack,” said Lt. Gen. Paul K. Van Riper, a retired Marine Corps officer who served in the war game as commander of a Red Team force representing an unnamed Persian Gulf military. “The whole thing was over in 5, maybe 10 minutes.”
If the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, proved to the public how terrorists could transform hijacked airliners into hostage-filled cruise missiles, then the “Millennium Challenge 2002” war game with General Van Riper was a warning to the armed services as to how an adversary could apply similar, asymmetrical thinking to conflict at sea.
General Van Riper said he complained at the time that important lessons of his simulated victory were not adequately acknowledged across the military. But other senior officers say the war game and subsequent analysis and exercises helped to focus attention on the threat posed by Iran’s small, fast boats, and helped to prepare commanders for last weekend’s encounter.
“It’s clear, strategically, where the Iranian military has gone,” Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters on Friday. “For the years that this strategic shift toward their small, fast boats has taken place, we’ve been very focused on that.”
In the simulation, General Van Riper sent wave after wave of relatively inexpensive speedboats to charge at the costlier, more advanced fleet approaching the Persian Gulf. His force of small boats attacked with machine guns and rockets, reinforced with missiles launched from land and air. Some of the small boats were loaded with explosives to detonate alongside American warships in suicide attacks. That core tactic of swarming played out in real life last weekend, though on a much more limited scale and without any shots fired.
According to Pentagon and Navy officials, five small patrol boats belonging to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps charged a three-ship Navy convoy, maneuvering around and between an American destroyer, cruiser and frigate during a tense half-hour encounter. The location was where the narrow Strait of Hormuz meets the open waters of the Persian Gulf — the same choke point chosen by General Van Riper for his attack.
In the encounter last Sunday, the commander of one American warship trained an M240 machine gun — which fires upward of 10 armor-piercing slugs per second — on an Iranian boat that pulled within 200 yards of the American vessel. But the Iranians turned away before the commander gave the order to fire.
That was not the case in the simulation, sponsored by the military’s Joint Forces Command. The victory of the force modeled after a Persian Gulf state — a composite of Iran and Iraq — astounded sponsors of what was then the largest joint war-fighting exercise ever held, involving 13,500 military members and civilians battling in nine live exercise ranges in the United States, and double that many computer simulations to replicate a number of different battles.
General Van Riper’s attack was much more complex and sophisticated than anything that could have involved the Iranian boats last weekend. The broad outline of the 2002 war game was reported at the time, but in interviews since last weekend’s episode, General Van Riper and other officers have provided new details about the simulation.
In the war game, scores of adversary speedboats and larger naval vessels had been shadowing and hectoring the Blue Team fleet for days. The Blue Team defenses also faced cruise missiles fired simultaneously from land and from warplanes, as well as the swarm of speedboats firing heavy machine guns and rockets — and pulling alongside to detonate explosives on board.
When the Red Team sank much of the Blue navy despite the Blue navy’s firing of guns and missiles, it illustrated a cheap way to beat a very expensive fleet. After the Blue force was sunk, the game was ordered to begin again, with the Blue Team eventually declared the victor.
In a telephone interview, General Van Riper recalled that his idea of a swarming attack grew from Marine Corps studies of the natural world, where insects and animals — from tiny ant colonies to wolf packs — move in groups to overwhelm larger prey.
“It is not a matter of size or of individual capability, but whether you have the numbers and come from multiple directions in a short period of time,” he said.
Although Washington and Tehran continue to duel over details of the encounter, American officials say the Iranians may have been seeking to provoke a violent confrontation as President Bush was about to visit the region. Or, the officials say, they might have been hoping to test the American reaction. Yet there is no certainty that the encounter was ordered by the government in Tehran.
Pentagon officials on Friday said there were two encounters with small Iranian boats in the region last month. In one, a Navy warship fired warning shots and in the other a warning whistle was sounded. Both encounters ended without injury after the Iranian vessels turned away.
Regardless, American sailors have not forgotten how a small boat that hid among refueling and garbage vessels off a port in Yemen detonated alongside the American destroyer Cole in October 2000, killing 17 Americans and crippling the warship.
***
Go to www.RevisionistHistory.org for updates
***
Friday, January 11, 2008
Vote Fraud in New Hampshire Primary?
81% OF THE NEW HAMPSHIRE PRIMARY BALLOTS WERE COUNTED IN SECRET BY A PRIVATE CORPORATION
Compiled by Michael A. Hoffman II
Kucinich asks for New Hampshire recount in the interest of election integrity
From: http://www.dennis4president.com/go/homepage-items/kucinich-asks-for-new-hampshire-recount-in-the-interest-of-election-integrity/
DETROIT, MI – Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, the most outspoken advocate in the Presidential field and in Congress for election integrity, paper-ballot elections, and campaign finance reform, has sent a letter to the New Hampshire Secretary of State asking for a recount of Tuesday’s election because of “unexplained disparities between hand-counted ballots and machine-counted ballots.”
He added, “Ever since the 2000 election – and even before – the American people have been losing faith in the belief that their votes were actually counted. This recount isn’t about who won 39% of 36% or even 1%. It’s about establishing whether 100% of the voters had 100% of their votes counted exactly the way they cast them.”
Kucinich, who drew about 1.4% of the New Hampshire Democratic primary vote, wrote, “This is not about my candidacy or any other individual candidacy. It is about the integrity of the election process.” No other Democratic candidate, he noted, has stepped forward to question or pursue the claims being made.
“New Hampshire is in the unique position to address – and, if so determined, rectify – these issues before they escalate into a massive, nationwide suspicion of the process by which Americans elect their President. Based on the controversies surrounding the Presidential elections in 2004 and 2000, New Hampshire is in a prime position to investigate possible irregularities and to issue findings for the benefit of the entire nation,” Kucinich wrote in his letter. “Without an official recount, the voters of New Hampshire and the rest of the nation will never know whether there are flaws in our electoral system that need to be identified and addressed at this relatively early point in the Presidential nominating process,” said Kucinich.
RECOUNT, IF NOT DONE RIGHT, COULD BE USED BY THE CRYPTOCRACY
From "The Brad Blog"
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5544
80% of New Hampshire's ballots have been "counted" only by a hackable, prone-to-error, Diebold optical-scan machine. The systems were entirely programmed, serviced and controlled by one somewhat less-than-reputable company (LHS Associates). The machines are the very same model shown being hacked in the Emmy-nominated HBO documentary Hacking Democracy, in which the results of a live mock election were flipped via the gaming of the machine's memory card.
...We've put the words "count" and "recount" in quotes, given what we know about these machines, and given the fact that approximately 80% of the New Hampshire ballots have not actually been counted or examined by anyone. To our knowledge, only Diebold optical-scanners were used for tabulating those ballots, without any secondary cross-check or audit, to ensure accuracy. In other words, until now, 80% of New Hampshire results have been "faith-based". The other 20% or so of the ballots were counted by hand at the polling place on Election Night.
We would also caution Kucinich and his team to closely inspect the chain of custody for the ballots in question, and what has happened to them, and the vulnerable op-scan memory cards, since the election two days ago, during the period that concern has been widely expressed about the seemingly anomalous results of Tuesday's election. It's important that the chain of custody be both secure, fully logged, and transparent.
Nancy Tobi of New Hampshire for Democracy, a Granite State election integrity watchdog group, previously noted her concerns in earlier discussions about the possibility of hand counting the state's op-scan primary ballots.
"We have no control over the ballot chain of custody and we have learned the pain from the 2004 Nader recount, in which only 11 districts were counted, chosen by a highly questionable person, and then nothing showed up," she wrote recently. "Now all we hear is how the Nader recount validated the machines. A candidate asking for a recount may well be a tool used to 'prove" everything was okay and then that candidate will be further discredited," she warned.
...Kucinich mentions one of the reasons for the count is the "unexplained disparities between hand-counted ballots and machine-counted ballots." Indeed, there are disparities between the hand-counted and Diebold counted ballots, as we reported last night. Hillary Clinton seems to have received a full 7 point advantage in Diebold precincts, versus hand-counted ones.
THE ONLY HONEST VOTING METHOD:
PAPER BALLOTS HAND-COUNTED WITH 100% CITIZEN OVERSIGHT
From: DEMOCRACY FOR NEW HAMPSHIRE
http://www.democracyfornewhampshire.com
81% of our ballots were counted in secret by a private corporation, and this resulted in an outcome that is called into question. That's what happened. No recount is going to change this. What will change this is to get rid of corporate controlled secret vote counting in our elections.
New Hampshire holds exemplary elections in 45% of our polling places; elections where our paper ballots are counted by hand by our neighbors in full public view with 100% citizen oversight and checks and balances. These hand count elections, of which New Hampshire is the “hands down” expert, provide the only method known today that can guarantee open and honest elections. These are elections where every ballot, every vote, every mark made by the voter, is observed and tallied in full public view with multiple sets of eyes watching and checking and balancing each count.
***
For Updates visit Hoffman's website: www.RevisionistHistory.org
***
Compiled by Michael A. Hoffman II
Kucinich asks for New Hampshire recount in the interest of election integrity
From: http://www.dennis4president.com/go/homepage-items/kucinich-asks-for-new-hampshire-recount-in-the-interest-of-election-integrity/
DETROIT, MI – Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, the most outspoken advocate in the Presidential field and in Congress for election integrity, paper-ballot elections, and campaign finance reform, has sent a letter to the New Hampshire Secretary of State asking for a recount of Tuesday’s election because of “unexplained disparities between hand-counted ballots and machine-counted ballots.”
He added, “Ever since the 2000 election – and even before – the American people have been losing faith in the belief that their votes were actually counted. This recount isn’t about who won 39% of 36% or even 1%. It’s about establishing whether 100% of the voters had 100% of their votes counted exactly the way they cast them.”
Kucinich, who drew about 1.4% of the New Hampshire Democratic primary vote, wrote, “This is not about my candidacy or any other individual candidacy. It is about the integrity of the election process.” No other Democratic candidate, he noted, has stepped forward to question or pursue the claims being made.
“New Hampshire is in the unique position to address – and, if so determined, rectify – these issues before they escalate into a massive, nationwide suspicion of the process by which Americans elect their President. Based on the controversies surrounding the Presidential elections in 2004 and 2000, New Hampshire is in a prime position to investigate possible irregularities and to issue findings for the benefit of the entire nation,” Kucinich wrote in his letter. “Without an official recount, the voters of New Hampshire and the rest of the nation will never know whether there are flaws in our electoral system that need to be identified and addressed at this relatively early point in the Presidential nominating process,” said Kucinich.
RECOUNT, IF NOT DONE RIGHT, COULD BE USED BY THE CRYPTOCRACY
From "The Brad Blog"
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5544
80% of New Hampshire's ballots have been "counted" only by a hackable, prone-to-error, Diebold optical-scan machine. The systems were entirely programmed, serviced and controlled by one somewhat less-than-reputable company (LHS Associates). The machines are the very same model shown being hacked in the Emmy-nominated HBO documentary Hacking Democracy, in which the results of a live mock election were flipped via the gaming of the machine's memory card.
...We've put the words "count" and "recount" in quotes, given what we know about these machines, and given the fact that approximately 80% of the New Hampshire ballots have not actually been counted or examined by anyone. To our knowledge, only Diebold optical-scanners were used for tabulating those ballots, without any secondary cross-check or audit, to ensure accuracy. In other words, until now, 80% of New Hampshire results have been "faith-based". The other 20% or so of the ballots were counted by hand at the polling place on Election Night.
We would also caution Kucinich and his team to closely inspect the chain of custody for the ballots in question, and what has happened to them, and the vulnerable op-scan memory cards, since the election two days ago, during the period that concern has been widely expressed about the seemingly anomalous results of Tuesday's election. It's important that the chain of custody be both secure, fully logged, and transparent.
Nancy Tobi of New Hampshire for Democracy, a Granite State election integrity watchdog group, previously noted her concerns in earlier discussions about the possibility of hand counting the state's op-scan primary ballots.
"We have no control over the ballot chain of custody and we have learned the pain from the 2004 Nader recount, in which only 11 districts were counted, chosen by a highly questionable person, and then nothing showed up," she wrote recently. "Now all we hear is how the Nader recount validated the machines. A candidate asking for a recount may well be a tool used to 'prove" everything was okay and then that candidate will be further discredited," she warned.
...Kucinich mentions one of the reasons for the count is the "unexplained disparities between hand-counted ballots and machine-counted ballots." Indeed, there are disparities between the hand-counted and Diebold counted ballots, as we reported last night. Hillary Clinton seems to have received a full 7 point advantage in Diebold precincts, versus hand-counted ones.
THE ONLY HONEST VOTING METHOD:
PAPER BALLOTS HAND-COUNTED WITH 100% CITIZEN OVERSIGHT
From: DEMOCRACY FOR NEW HAMPSHIRE
http://www.democracyfornewhampshire.com
81% of our ballots were counted in secret by a private corporation, and this resulted in an outcome that is called into question. That's what happened. No recount is going to change this. What will change this is to get rid of corporate controlled secret vote counting in our elections.
New Hampshire holds exemplary elections in 45% of our polling places; elections where our paper ballots are counted by hand by our neighbors in full public view with 100% citizen oversight and checks and balances. These hand count elections, of which New Hampshire is the “hands down” expert, provide the only method known today that can guarantee open and honest elections. These are elections where every ballot, every vote, every mark made by the voter, is observed and tallied in full public view with multiple sets of eyes watching and checking and balancing each count.
***
For Updates visit Hoffman's website: www.RevisionistHistory.org
***
FBI worker says Israelis spy on American nuclear facilities
EDITOR'S NOTE: Until recently, Sibel Edmonds was under a gag order by the Federal government.
Report: FBI translator says Israel planted nuclear 'moles' in U.S.
By Yossi Melman, Jan. 6, 2008 | Haaretz
A Britsh newspaper on Sunday (Jan. 6) published allegations by a former FBI translator that Israel has planted "moles" in United States institutions dealing with nuclear technology. According to the report in The Sunday Times, Sibel Edmonds worked on translating "thousands of hours of conversations by Turkish diplomatic and political targets" that had been secretly taped by the FBI.
The report says that the recordings, which go back more than 10 years, were used in an FBI investigation "into links between the Turks and Pakistani, Israeli and U.S. targets." The Times also says that Edmonds had claimed there were "senior officials in the Pentagon" who had provided assistance to Israeli and Turkish agents.
Edmonds also claims, according to The Sunday Times, that the "moles," mainly PhD students, received assistance from a "high-ranking State Department official" who gave them security clearance to work in "sensitive nuclear research facilities."
The paper says that among these institutions was the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, which is "responsible for the security of the U.S. nuclear deterrent."
According to Edmonds, the FBI investigation also stretches to the Pentagon. She also claims the involvement of former Pentagon analyst Lawrence Franklin, jailed in 2006 for delivering U.S. defense information to lobbyists and sharing classified information with an Israeli diplomat. The Times quotes her as saying that Franklin "was one of the top people providing information and packages during 2000 and 2001."
***
Report: FBI translator says Israel planted nuclear 'moles' in U.S.
By Yossi Melman, Jan. 6, 2008 | Haaretz
A Britsh newspaper on Sunday (Jan. 6) published allegations by a former FBI translator that Israel has planted "moles" in United States institutions dealing with nuclear technology. According to the report in The Sunday Times, Sibel Edmonds worked on translating "thousands of hours of conversations by Turkish diplomatic and political targets" that had been secretly taped by the FBI.
The report says that the recordings, which go back more than 10 years, were used in an FBI investigation "into links between the Turks and Pakistani, Israeli and U.S. targets." The Times also says that Edmonds had claimed there were "senior officials in the Pentagon" who had provided assistance to Israeli and Turkish agents.
Edmonds also claims, according to The Sunday Times, that the "moles," mainly PhD students, received assistance from a "high-ranking State Department official" who gave them security clearance to work in "sensitive nuclear research facilities."
The paper says that among these institutions was the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, which is "responsible for the security of the U.S. nuclear deterrent."
According to Edmonds, the FBI investigation also stretches to the Pentagon. She also claims the involvement of former Pentagon analyst Lawrence Franklin, jailed in 2006 for delivering U.S. defense information to lobbyists and sharing classified information with an Israeli diplomat. The Times quotes her as saying that Franklin "was one of the top people providing information and packages during 2000 and 2001."
***
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Pentagon Faked Audio on Iran Boat Video
"Pentagon officials said the commander of the Hopper had been on the verge of issuing an order to fire on the Iranian speedboat..."
EDITOR'S NOTE: Americans need to disabuse themselves of their naive, boy scout view of the Federal government as some kind of pro-American, patriotic institution. In fact it is led by gangsters who will use any means, including lying us into war, to achieve the goals of the Cryptocracy they serve.
Keep in mind that Fox News on cable TV signed off on the Iranian boats tape as authentic, as did most of the media, who simply regurgitated it to the American people, serving as unquestioning mouthpieces for the US government. While Iran's heated denial that the tape's audio was authentic helped spark interest in an inquiry, much of the significant drumbeat for an exposé was first begun by skeptical readers of the blog, "The Lede" at the NY Times. Keep in mind that the Pentagon conceded that the audio was contrived ONLY after the NY Times launched an informal investigation, which included e-mail from US Navy personnel contradicting the official story. Initially the Pentagon claimed that skepticism about the tape was "absurd."
Iranian Boats May Not Have Made Radio Threat, Pentagon Says
By Robin Wright
Washington Post | January 11, 2008; Page A13
The Pentagon said yesterday that the apparent radio threat to bomb U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf last weekend may not have come from the five Iranian Revolutionary Guard speedboats that approached them -- and may not even have been intended against U.S. targets. The communication Sunday was made on radio channel 16, a common marine frequency used by ships and others in the region. "It could have been a threat aimed at some other nation or a myriad of other things," said Rear Adm. Frank Thorp IV, a spokesman for the Navy.
Degrees of Confidence on U.S.-Iran Naval Incident
By Mike Nizza
The Lede | New York Times | January 10, 2008
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/degrees-of-confidence-on-us-iran-naval-incident/
The list of those who are less than fully confident in the Pentagon’s video/audio mashup of aggressive maneuvers by Iranian boats near American warships in the Strait of Hormuz now includes the Pentagon itself.
Unnamed Pentagon officials said on Wednesday that the threatening voice heard in the audio clip, which was released on Monday night with a disclaimer that it was recorded separately from the video images and merged with them later, is not directly traceable to the Iranian military.
That undercuts one of the most menacing elements from the Pentagon’s assertion that Iranian forces threatened the Navy ships: The voice on the radio saying, “I am coming to you. … You will explode after … minutes.”
Here’s an excerpt from an article in this morning’s New York Times on the Pentagon’s assessment of the audio:
The audio includes a heavily accented voice warning in English that the Navy warships would explode. However, the recording carries no ambient noise — the sounds of a motor, the sea or wind — that would be expected if the broadcast had been made from one of the five small boats that sped around the three-ship American convoy.
Pentagon officials said they could not rule out that the broadcast might have come from shore, or from another ship nearby, although it might have come from one of the five fast boats with a high-quality radio system.
Update, 3:36 p.m: ABC News just reported more details from the spokesperson for the U.S. admiral in charge of the Fifth Fleet, who confirmed the above and explained why they concluded that the threat came from the Iranian boats:
“It happened in the middle of all the very unusual activity, so as we assess the information and situation, we still put it in the total aggregate of what happened Sunday morning. I guess we’re not saying that it absolutely came from the boats, but we’re not saying it absolutely didn’t.”
Earlier on Wednesday, a reader posted a comment on The Lede claiming to be a former Navy officer with experience in the Strait of Hormuz and offering an explanation for how easily a mistake could have been made by Navy personnel trying to sift through radio transmissions filled with chatter:
All ships at sea use a common UHF frequency, Channel 16, also known as “bridge-to bridge” radio. Over here, near the U.S., and throughout the Mediterranean, Ch. 16 is used pretty professionally, i.e., chatter is limited to shiphandling issues, identifying yourself, telling other ships what your intentions are to avoid mishaps, etc.
But over in the Gulf, Ch. 16 is like a bad CB radio. Everybody and their brother is on it; chattering away; hurling racial slurs, usually involving Filipinos (lots of Filipinos work in the area); curses involving your mother; 1970’s music broadcast in the wee hours (nothing odder than hearing The Carpenters 50 miles off the coast of Iran at 4 a.m.)
On Ch. 16, esp. in that section of the Gulf, slurs/threats/chatter/etc. is commonplace. So my first thought was that the “explode” comment might not have even come from one of the Iranian craft, but some loser monitoring the events at a shore facility. The commenter, who signed his posting “SWO officer,” went on to say, “I hope everybody exercises great caution here and doesn’t jump to conclusions.”
President Bush was criticized today for doing the opposite. According to The Washington Post, “some diplomatic and military officials in Washington” said that Mr. Bush’s statements on arriving in Israel Wednesday “inflated the significance of the brief incident” in the strait. In his remarks, Mr. Bush warned Iran that “all options are on the table to protect our assets.”
Meanwhile, the video images that were released by the Pentagon came in for some more contradiction from Iran, which has contended that the United States was exaggerating a workaday encounter between two naval powers in the Persian Gulf: A competing video purporting to show Sunday’s incident from the Iranian side was broadcast today on Iranian television.
Here is how the semiofficial Fars News Agency described it: The four-minute video showed an Iranian commander in a speedboat contacting an American sailor via radio, asking him to identify the U.S. vessels and state their purpose.
“Coalition warship number 73 this is an Iranian patrol,” the Iranian commander is heard to say in good English.
“This is coalition warship number 73. I am operating in international waters,” comes the reply. That would seem to be a much less aggressive interaction between the American and Iranian forces, of course. But the timing of the recording could not be confirmed, and as Iran itself has said, these types of exchanges happen all the time...
IRAN ACCUSES US OF FAKING PERSIAN GULF VIDEO
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/world/middleeast/10iran.html?hp
JAN. 9, 2008 TEHRAN — Iran's Revolutionary Guards accused the United States of fabricating a video showing Iranian speedboats confronting United States Navy warships in the Persian Gulf over the weekend, according to a report carried by the semi-official Fars news agency and state-run television. “Images released by the U.S. Department of Defense about the Navy vessels are from archive, and sounds on it are fabricated,” an unnamed Revolutionary Guards official said, according to Fars. The news agency has close links to the Revolutionary Guards. The comments were Iran’s first on the video, which the Pentagon released Tuesday.
The Pentagon immediately dismissed the assertion. Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, told correspondents that Iran’s “allegation is absurd, factually incorrect and reflects the lack of seriousness with which they take this serious incident.” The unnamed Revolutionary Guards official asserted that the video had been released to coincide with Mr. Bush’s trip and “was in line with a project of the Western media to create fear.” The [Iranian] official said the sounds and the images on the video did not go together. “It is very clear that they are fake,” the official said...
BUSH CASTIGATES IRAN, CALLING NAVAL CONFRONTATION 'PROVOCATIVE ACT'
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Thom Shanker
New York Times | January 9, 2008
WASHINGTON — President Bush chastised Iran on Tuesday (Jan. 8) for committing a “provocative act” by confronting United States Navy warships in the Persian Gulf over the weekend. The Pentagon released video showing Iranian speedboats maneuvering around the American convoy.
“We viewed it as a provocative act,” Mr. Bush told reporters in the Rose Garden, just hours before he left for a weeklong trip to the Middle East. “It is a dangerous situation, and they should not have done it, pure and simple.”
The episode took place Sunday in the strategic Strait of Hormuz and was initially described by American officials on Monday. They said five armed Iranian speedboats approached three United States Navy warships in international waters, then maneuvered aggressively as radio threats were issued that the American ships would be blown up. The confrontation ended without shots fired or injuries.
The video runs just over four minutes and, according to Pentagon officials, was shot from the bridge of the guided missile destroyer Hopper. It supported the American version of events, by showing Iranian speedboats maneuvering around and among the Navy warships, quite close to the convoy.
“I am coming to you,” a heavily accented voice says in English. “You will explode after a few minutes.”
Navy officials said the voice was recorded from the internationally recognized bridge-to-bridge radio channel.
An American sailor then is heard repeating the threat, stating, “He says, ‘You will explode after a few minutes.’” The American is also heard identifying the Navy vessel as a “coalition warship” and announcing: “I am engaged in transit passage in accordance with international law. I intend no harm.”
Iranian officials have played down the encounter, but administration officials say they believe that Iran was trying to provoke the United States on the eve of the president’s visit to the Middle East. Mr. Bush said pointedly on Tuesday that he would use the trip to remind American friends and allies in the region that Iran poses a danger.
“I’m going to remind them what I said in that press conference when I sat there and answered some of your questions,” Mr. Bush said.
“Iran was a threat, Iran is a threat, and Iran will continue to be a threat if they are allowed to learn how to enrich uranium,” he added. “And so I’m looking forward to, you know, making it clear that the United States of America sees clearly the threats of this world, and we intend to work with our friends and allies to make that part of the world more secure.”
Mr. Bush made his comments, his first on the event, during an appearance intended to put a spotlight on the first anniversary of his speech announcing a troop buildup in Iraq....
The video may also help Mr. Bush make his case. While it is difficult to judge exact distances, Pentagon officials said at least one Iranian boat came within about 200 yards of the Hopper, a distance that could have been covered in a matter of seconds at top speed.
In the tape, horns are sounded, and the American crew member also radios to the Iranian vessels: “Inbound small craft: You are approaching a coalition warship operating in international waters. Your identity is not known. Your intentions are unclear.”
The American warns the Iranians that if they do not “alter course immediately to remain clear,” then the small boat will be “subject to defensive measures.”
Pentagon officials said the commander of the Hopper had been on the verge of issuing an order to fire on the Iranian speedboat with a high-powered machine gun when the Iranian craft suddenly steered away.
***
EDITOR'S NOTE: Americans need to disabuse themselves of their naive, boy scout view of the Federal government as some kind of pro-American, patriotic institution. In fact it is led by gangsters who will use any means, including lying us into war, to achieve the goals of the Cryptocracy they serve.
Keep in mind that Fox News on cable TV signed off on the Iranian boats tape as authentic, as did most of the media, who simply regurgitated it to the American people, serving as unquestioning mouthpieces for the US government. While Iran's heated denial that the tape's audio was authentic helped spark interest in an inquiry, much of the significant drumbeat for an exposé was first begun by skeptical readers of the blog, "The Lede" at the NY Times. Keep in mind that the Pentagon conceded that the audio was contrived ONLY after the NY Times launched an informal investigation, which included e-mail from US Navy personnel contradicting the official story. Initially the Pentagon claimed that skepticism about the tape was "absurd."
Iranian Boats May Not Have Made Radio Threat, Pentagon Says
By Robin Wright
Washington Post | January 11, 2008; Page A13
The Pentagon said yesterday that the apparent radio threat to bomb U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf last weekend may not have come from the five Iranian Revolutionary Guard speedboats that approached them -- and may not even have been intended against U.S. targets. The communication Sunday was made on radio channel 16, a common marine frequency used by ships and others in the region. "It could have been a threat aimed at some other nation or a myriad of other things," said Rear Adm. Frank Thorp IV, a spokesman for the Navy.
Degrees of Confidence on U.S.-Iran Naval Incident
By Mike Nizza
The Lede | New York Times | January 10, 2008
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/degrees-of-confidence-on-us-iran-naval-incident/
The list of those who are less than fully confident in the Pentagon’s video/audio mashup of aggressive maneuvers by Iranian boats near American warships in the Strait of Hormuz now includes the Pentagon itself.
Unnamed Pentagon officials said on Wednesday that the threatening voice heard in the audio clip, which was released on Monday night with a disclaimer that it was recorded separately from the video images and merged with them later, is not directly traceable to the Iranian military.
That undercuts one of the most menacing elements from the Pentagon’s assertion that Iranian forces threatened the Navy ships: The voice on the radio saying, “I am coming to you. … You will explode after … minutes.”
Here’s an excerpt from an article in this morning’s New York Times on the Pentagon’s assessment of the audio:
The audio includes a heavily accented voice warning in English that the Navy warships would explode. However, the recording carries no ambient noise — the sounds of a motor, the sea or wind — that would be expected if the broadcast had been made from one of the five small boats that sped around the three-ship American convoy.
Pentagon officials said they could not rule out that the broadcast might have come from shore, or from another ship nearby, although it might have come from one of the five fast boats with a high-quality radio system.
Update, 3:36 p.m: ABC News just reported more details from the spokesperson for the U.S. admiral in charge of the Fifth Fleet, who confirmed the above and explained why they concluded that the threat came from the Iranian boats:
“It happened in the middle of all the very unusual activity, so as we assess the information and situation, we still put it in the total aggregate of what happened Sunday morning. I guess we’re not saying that it absolutely came from the boats, but we’re not saying it absolutely didn’t.”
Earlier on Wednesday, a reader posted a comment on The Lede claiming to be a former Navy officer with experience in the Strait of Hormuz and offering an explanation for how easily a mistake could have been made by Navy personnel trying to sift through radio transmissions filled with chatter:
All ships at sea use a common UHF frequency, Channel 16, also known as “bridge-to bridge” radio. Over here, near the U.S., and throughout the Mediterranean, Ch. 16 is used pretty professionally, i.e., chatter is limited to shiphandling issues, identifying yourself, telling other ships what your intentions are to avoid mishaps, etc.
But over in the Gulf, Ch. 16 is like a bad CB radio. Everybody and their brother is on it; chattering away; hurling racial slurs, usually involving Filipinos (lots of Filipinos work in the area); curses involving your mother; 1970’s music broadcast in the wee hours (nothing odder than hearing The Carpenters 50 miles off the coast of Iran at 4 a.m.)
On Ch. 16, esp. in that section of the Gulf, slurs/threats/chatter/etc. is commonplace. So my first thought was that the “explode” comment might not have even come from one of the Iranian craft, but some loser monitoring the events at a shore facility. The commenter, who signed his posting “SWO officer,” went on to say, “I hope everybody exercises great caution here and doesn’t jump to conclusions.”
President Bush was criticized today for doing the opposite. According to The Washington Post, “some diplomatic and military officials in Washington” said that Mr. Bush’s statements on arriving in Israel Wednesday “inflated the significance of the brief incident” in the strait. In his remarks, Mr. Bush warned Iran that “all options are on the table to protect our assets.”
Meanwhile, the video images that were released by the Pentagon came in for some more contradiction from Iran, which has contended that the United States was exaggerating a workaday encounter between two naval powers in the Persian Gulf: A competing video purporting to show Sunday’s incident from the Iranian side was broadcast today on Iranian television.
Here is how the semiofficial Fars News Agency described it: The four-minute video showed an Iranian commander in a speedboat contacting an American sailor via radio, asking him to identify the U.S. vessels and state their purpose.
“Coalition warship number 73 this is an Iranian patrol,” the Iranian commander is heard to say in good English.
“This is coalition warship number 73. I am operating in international waters,” comes the reply. That would seem to be a much less aggressive interaction between the American and Iranian forces, of course. But the timing of the recording could not be confirmed, and as Iran itself has said, these types of exchanges happen all the time...
IRAN ACCUSES US OF FAKING PERSIAN GULF VIDEO
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/world/middleeast/10iran.html?hp
JAN. 9, 2008 TEHRAN — Iran's Revolutionary Guards accused the United States of fabricating a video showing Iranian speedboats confronting United States Navy warships in the Persian Gulf over the weekend, according to a report carried by the semi-official Fars news agency and state-run television. “Images released by the U.S. Department of Defense about the Navy vessels are from archive, and sounds on it are fabricated,” an unnamed Revolutionary Guards official said, according to Fars. The news agency has close links to the Revolutionary Guards. The comments were Iran’s first on the video, which the Pentagon released Tuesday.
The Pentagon immediately dismissed the assertion. Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, told correspondents that Iran’s “allegation is absurd, factually incorrect and reflects the lack of seriousness with which they take this serious incident.” The unnamed Revolutionary Guards official asserted that the video had been released to coincide with Mr. Bush’s trip and “was in line with a project of the Western media to create fear.” The [Iranian] official said the sounds and the images on the video did not go together. “It is very clear that they are fake,” the official said...
BUSH CASTIGATES IRAN, CALLING NAVAL CONFRONTATION 'PROVOCATIVE ACT'
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Thom Shanker
New York Times | January 9, 2008
WASHINGTON — President Bush chastised Iran on Tuesday (Jan. 8) for committing a “provocative act” by confronting United States Navy warships in the Persian Gulf over the weekend. The Pentagon released video showing Iranian speedboats maneuvering around the American convoy.
“We viewed it as a provocative act,” Mr. Bush told reporters in the Rose Garden, just hours before he left for a weeklong trip to the Middle East. “It is a dangerous situation, and they should not have done it, pure and simple.”
The episode took place Sunday in the strategic Strait of Hormuz and was initially described by American officials on Monday. They said five armed Iranian speedboats approached three United States Navy warships in international waters, then maneuvered aggressively as radio threats were issued that the American ships would be blown up. The confrontation ended without shots fired or injuries.
The video runs just over four minutes and, according to Pentagon officials, was shot from the bridge of the guided missile destroyer Hopper. It supported the American version of events, by showing Iranian speedboats maneuvering around and among the Navy warships, quite close to the convoy.
“I am coming to you,” a heavily accented voice says in English. “You will explode after a few minutes.”
Navy officials said the voice was recorded from the internationally recognized bridge-to-bridge radio channel.
An American sailor then is heard repeating the threat, stating, “He says, ‘You will explode after a few minutes.’” The American is also heard identifying the Navy vessel as a “coalition warship” and announcing: “I am engaged in transit passage in accordance with international law. I intend no harm.”
Iranian officials have played down the encounter, but administration officials say they believe that Iran was trying to provoke the United States on the eve of the president’s visit to the Middle East. Mr. Bush said pointedly on Tuesday that he would use the trip to remind American friends and allies in the region that Iran poses a danger.
“I’m going to remind them what I said in that press conference when I sat there and answered some of your questions,” Mr. Bush said.
“Iran was a threat, Iran is a threat, and Iran will continue to be a threat if they are allowed to learn how to enrich uranium,” he added. “And so I’m looking forward to, you know, making it clear that the United States of America sees clearly the threats of this world, and we intend to work with our friends and allies to make that part of the world more secure.”
Mr. Bush made his comments, his first on the event, during an appearance intended to put a spotlight on the first anniversary of his speech announcing a troop buildup in Iraq....
The video may also help Mr. Bush make his case. While it is difficult to judge exact distances, Pentagon officials said at least one Iranian boat came within about 200 yards of the Hopper, a distance that could have been covered in a matter of seconds at top speed.
In the tape, horns are sounded, and the American crew member also radios to the Iranian vessels: “Inbound small craft: You are approaching a coalition warship operating in international waters. Your identity is not known. Your intentions are unclear.”
The American warns the Iranians that if they do not “alter course immediately to remain clear,” then the small boat will be “subject to defensive measures.”
Pentagon officials said the commander of the Hopper had been on the verge of issuing an order to fire on the Iranian speedboat with a high-powered machine gun when the Iranian craft suddenly steered away.
***
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
"Jewish-American academic deplores Israel's massacres"
Finkelstein visits sabra, shatila, qana, recounts 'hysterical' campaign against him in us
By Adam Jewell
Daily Star (Lebanon) | January 8, 2008
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=1&article_id=87870
EXCERPT: Why are the Lebanese welcoming the US president here? Whenever a foreign diplomat travels to Israel, he or she has to go to Yad Vashem [the Israeli holocaust memorial]. So why don't the Lebanese have at least that much dignity to say that [US President George W.] Bush has to come here (to the site of the Israeli-perpetrated Qana massacre) before he meets them?" Finkelstein asked.
BEIRUT -- American political scientist and author Norman Finkelstein, who is in Lebanon touring some of the country's front lines in the Arab-Israeli conflict, gave over the weekend two talks on the subject, on which the former professor has written six books. On Saturday evening, following a tour of the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps, Finkelstein delivered a lecture titled "Memoirs of an anti-Zionist" at the Babel Theater in Hamra.
The US-based academic's speech, read in English and translated into Arabic, centered on how Finkelstein became involved in the conflict and the repercussions in academia which ensued, culminating in a blocked tenure bid at De Paul University in Chicago conducted by supporters of pro-Israeli policy.
Finkelstein's involvement in the issue began following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, a date until which he had read "practically nothing on the subject." The day after the invasion began, the author participated in a daily vigil outside of the Israeli consulate in Manhattan in New York City to protest the war. Finkelstein recalled the placard he held at the rally which read: "This son of survivors of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, Auschwitz, and Majdanek will not be silent. Israeli Nazis stop the Holocaust in Lebanon."
The protest reached its height four months later, Finkelstein said, when Israel and its allies orchestrated the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Beginning on September 15, 1982, the Israeli Army, having driven the Palestinian Liberation Organization from Beirut, surrounded the camps and, providing logistical and material support, allowed members of the Phalange militia to kill up to 3,500 Palestinians.
Taking up a position in a mainly Jewish area of Manhattan, Finkelstein stood with a placard reading: "Another massacre in Lebanon, how long will we be silent?"
When a passerby asked, "Do you have to do this on Sabbath?" Finkelstein responded: "I wouldn't have to if Israel didn't massacre Arabs on the Sabbath."
The political scientist's name became entrenched in the literature of the Arab-Israeli conflict with Finkelstein's exposition of Joan Peters' "From Time Immemorial." Peters' book, supported by a demographic study and 2,000 footnotes, claimed that Palestine was empty before the onset of the Zionist movement and that modern Palestinians were immigrants from neighboring Arab countries who came after the Zionists purportedly "made the desert bloom."
After pouring over the best-seller book, Finkelstein found that a key number in the demographic study was "plainly wrong and there couldn't be any doubt that the error was intentional." Receiving support from linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky, to whom he sent his preliminary findings, Finkelstein began to research the book's footnotes. The result, which found that "nearly all of [the book's] quotations had misrepresented the original and large parts of [the] book were plagiarized from Zionist propaganda tracks," became Finkelstein's doctoral thesis.
However, the thesis, and other similar works critical of Israeli policies that followed, impeded the Princeton PhD graduate from attaining a tenure-tracked position at a university up through the 1990s. While Finkelstein eventually landed a job at De Paul University, during the year of his tenure decision, a "hysterical national campaign of slander and defamation" was carried out against him.
The attacks, led by Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz, whose book "The Case for Israel" Finkelstein had derided as fraudulent and plagiarized, claimed that the Jewish academic was "a holocaust denier, an anti-Semite, that my mother was a Nazi collaborator, that I was mentally unstable and that I was a serial abuser of faculty, administrators and students."
Despite a nine to three vote by his department and a unanimous vote by the university's tenure committee, the dean of the college stated Finkelstein, "didn't respect the individual" and voted against tenure. A massive outcry from academics, university students and people across the globe was not enough to alter the position of the university, which Finkelstein left after reaching an out-of-court settlement with the administration.
In the settlement De Paul admitted that Finkelstein was "a prolific scholar and an outstanding teacher." Such a statement makes evident, the author said, that the decision was politically based and for which "an excuse was needed, and my allegedly defective character was the one they fabricated."
On Sunday, Finkelstein toured the south of Lebanon and visited the site of the second Qana massacre, where he met with survivors of the attack and made a brief statement. During the 2006 war, Israeli warplanes bombed a Qana apartment building where two families were seeking refuge in the basement, killing 28, among them 16 children.
"First of all I want express my horror and the difficulty it is to be in the presence of people who are the survivors of those who died. And it should be obvious that there are no words to convey those feelings of horror," he said.
"Number two, [I want to express] those feelings of shame, because the simple fact is that the war and those deaths were caused by the US government. People should not fool themselves that this war was done by Israel; this was an American war and for American interests.
"The third feeling I have is disgust; Why are the Lebanese welcoming the US president here? Whenever a foreign diplomat travels to Israel, he or she has to go to Yad Vashem [the Israeli holocaust memorial]. So why don't the Lebanese have at least that much dignity to say that [US President George W.] Bush has to come here (to the site of the Israeli-perpetrated Qana massacre) before he meets them?" Finkelstein asked.
"The last thing I want to say is: After the horror and after the shame and after the anger, there still remains the hope. And I know I can get in a lot of trouble for what I'm about to say, but I think that Hizbullah represents the hope. They are fighting to defend their homeland, they are fighting to defend the independence of their country, they are defending themselves against foreign marauders, vandals and murderers and I consider it to be genuinely to be an honor to be in their presence."
***
By Adam Jewell
Daily Star (Lebanon) | January 8, 2008
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=1&article_id=87870
EXCERPT: Why are the Lebanese welcoming the US president here? Whenever a foreign diplomat travels to Israel, he or she has to go to Yad Vashem [the Israeli holocaust memorial]. So why don't the Lebanese have at least that much dignity to say that [US President George W.] Bush has to come here (to the site of the Israeli-perpetrated Qana massacre) before he meets them?" Finkelstein asked.
BEIRUT -- American political scientist and author Norman Finkelstein, who is in Lebanon touring some of the country's front lines in the Arab-Israeli conflict, gave over the weekend two talks on the subject, on which the former professor has written six books. On Saturday evening, following a tour of the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps, Finkelstein delivered a lecture titled "Memoirs of an anti-Zionist" at the Babel Theater in Hamra.
The US-based academic's speech, read in English and translated into Arabic, centered on how Finkelstein became involved in the conflict and the repercussions in academia which ensued, culminating in a blocked tenure bid at De Paul University in Chicago conducted by supporters of pro-Israeli policy.
Finkelstein's involvement in the issue began following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, a date until which he had read "practically nothing on the subject." The day after the invasion began, the author participated in a daily vigil outside of the Israeli consulate in Manhattan in New York City to protest the war. Finkelstein recalled the placard he held at the rally which read: "This son of survivors of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, Auschwitz, and Majdanek will not be silent. Israeli Nazis stop the Holocaust in Lebanon."
The protest reached its height four months later, Finkelstein said, when Israel and its allies orchestrated the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Beginning on September 15, 1982, the Israeli Army, having driven the Palestinian Liberation Organization from Beirut, surrounded the camps and, providing logistical and material support, allowed members of the Phalange militia to kill up to 3,500 Palestinians.
Taking up a position in a mainly Jewish area of Manhattan, Finkelstein stood with a placard reading: "Another massacre in Lebanon, how long will we be silent?"
When a passerby asked, "Do you have to do this on Sabbath?" Finkelstein responded: "I wouldn't have to if Israel didn't massacre Arabs on the Sabbath."
The political scientist's name became entrenched in the literature of the Arab-Israeli conflict with Finkelstein's exposition of Joan Peters' "From Time Immemorial." Peters' book, supported by a demographic study and 2,000 footnotes, claimed that Palestine was empty before the onset of the Zionist movement and that modern Palestinians were immigrants from neighboring Arab countries who came after the Zionists purportedly "made the desert bloom."
After pouring over the best-seller book, Finkelstein found that a key number in the demographic study was "plainly wrong and there couldn't be any doubt that the error was intentional." Receiving support from linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky, to whom he sent his preliminary findings, Finkelstein began to research the book's footnotes. The result, which found that "nearly all of [the book's] quotations had misrepresented the original and large parts of [the] book were plagiarized from Zionist propaganda tracks," became Finkelstein's doctoral thesis.
However, the thesis, and other similar works critical of Israeli policies that followed, impeded the Princeton PhD graduate from attaining a tenure-tracked position at a university up through the 1990s. While Finkelstein eventually landed a job at De Paul University, during the year of his tenure decision, a "hysterical national campaign of slander and defamation" was carried out against him.
The attacks, led by Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz, whose book "The Case for Israel" Finkelstein had derided as fraudulent and plagiarized, claimed that the Jewish academic was "a holocaust denier, an anti-Semite, that my mother was a Nazi collaborator, that I was mentally unstable and that I was a serial abuser of faculty, administrators and students."
Despite a nine to three vote by his department and a unanimous vote by the university's tenure committee, the dean of the college stated Finkelstein, "didn't respect the individual" and voted against tenure. A massive outcry from academics, university students and people across the globe was not enough to alter the position of the university, which Finkelstein left after reaching an out-of-court settlement with the administration.
In the settlement De Paul admitted that Finkelstein was "a prolific scholar and an outstanding teacher." Such a statement makes evident, the author said, that the decision was politically based and for which "an excuse was needed, and my allegedly defective character was the one they fabricated."
On Sunday, Finkelstein toured the south of Lebanon and visited the site of the second Qana massacre, where he met with survivors of the attack and made a brief statement. During the 2006 war, Israeli warplanes bombed a Qana apartment building where two families were seeking refuge in the basement, killing 28, among them 16 children.
"First of all I want express my horror and the difficulty it is to be in the presence of people who are the survivors of those who died. And it should be obvious that there are no words to convey those feelings of horror," he said.
"Number two, [I want to express] those feelings of shame, because the simple fact is that the war and those deaths were caused by the US government. People should not fool themselves that this war was done by Israel; this was an American war and for American interests.
"The third feeling I have is disgust; Why are the Lebanese welcoming the US president here? Whenever a foreign diplomat travels to Israel, he or she has to go to Yad Vashem [the Israeli holocaust memorial]. So why don't the Lebanese have at least that much dignity to say that [US President George W.] Bush has to come here (to the site of the Israeli-perpetrated Qana massacre) before he meets them?" Finkelstein asked.
"The last thing I want to say is: After the horror and after the shame and after the anger, there still remains the hope. And I know I can get in a lot of trouble for what I'm about to say, but I think that Hizbullah represents the hope. They are fighting to defend their homeland, they are fighting to defend the independence of their country, they are defending themselves against foreign marauders, vandals and murderers and I consider it to be genuinely to be an honor to be in their presence."
***
Ron Paul and the Death of the Great White Hope Syndrome
1. Thoughts on the New Hampshire Primary: A Spooky, Thorazine Passivity
2. Ron Paul and the Death of the Great White Hope Syndrome
3. Bush in the Middle East
****
THOUGHTS ON THE NEW HAMPSHIRE PRIMARY: A SPOOKY, THORAZINE PASSIVITY
By Michael A. Hoffman II
The New Hampshire primary, in spite of being a disappointment, has much to teach.
First, though it will not stop the System from continuing to promote their media hoax -- that "polls" can predict outcomes of events with a "plus or minus three percent margin of error" -- it was still amusing to see how erroneous the polls were when it came to forecasting the Obama/Hillary contest, wherein some polls had Obama far in the lead. Polls are a means of telling us what the future will be so we will conform ourselves to the Cryptocracy's desired outcome.
Second and not so amusing is the dumbing-down of campaign coverage from issues-oriented, hard news reporting, to reporting the primaries from the vantage of celebrity/entertainment news. The emphasis is on Mrs. Clinton's teary-eyed, "new-found vulnerability" which she presented in New Hampshire, or Huckabee's guitar-pickin' "relaxed persona," or Obama as the iconic black man who at last will assume the mantle of the presidency based on the novelty of his racial identity.
There is a spooky, Thorazine passivity pervading this primary campaign; a campaign that has become little more than political theatre. In 1999, Bill and Hillary Clinton, in league with NATO, carpet-bombed Serbia into the Stone Age, killing hundreds of civilians and destroying clearly marked historic Christian churches and monasteries (http://www.revisionisthistory.org/nato.html).
It was so gruesome and bloody one local Idaho girl wrote a poem expressing the thought that the Columbine school shooters were motivated by the culture of violence the Clintons were promoting as a "solution" in Bosnia and Serbia.
If the Clintons and NATO had done anything approaching the atrocities they committed in Serbia, against Israeli civilians and Israeli synagogues, militant Judaics would now be dogging Hillary at every campaign stop, shouting Murderer!" and "Anti-Semite!" at her and asking her heated and embarrassing questions at public forums.
To the best of this writer's knowledge, no significant protest by Serbian-Americans has been registered in Iowa or New Hampshire. Be assured that the Cryptocracy closely gauges such things. Thus far they have seen that Christian populations can be murdered and the survivors will do little or nothing by way of redress. Hence there is no price to be paid for such crimes. This tends to assure that they will happen again.
America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have squandered billions of dollars that could have gone toward non-profit health care, a mass transit system of high speed intercontinental trains, and local light rail, special programs for gifted children in our schools, support for rebuilding roads and bridges and other crucial infrastructure. None of these issues are on the table in any dramatic way and when they are, the corporate media ignores them in favor of commentary on the candidates' style, hair, clothing and celebrity image.
RON PAUL AND THE DEATH OF THE GREAT WHITE HOPE SYNDROME
As millions of dollars were raised for Ron Paul I heard Dr. Paul called " our last hope." Really? I thought that after Jesus Christ, our last hope on this earth was ourselves and the people in our communities with whom we should be helping to build an alternative society. Does the suggestion that Rep. Paul is our last hope (this was also said about Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, David Duke, and in 1988 of "Pat" Robertson), imply that if Paul does not gain the presidency we will all be watching television all day and "veg" out in defeat, for the rest of our lives?
The presidency of the United States is the bought and paid for domain of the Cryptocracy. But don't blame the theft of the presidency solely on the Cryptocrats. Everyday Americans are also responsible. They have been put through a human alchemy process and they are not the same people they were in 1808 or even 1908. This occult processing has culminated in the security state, as evidenced by Fox News on television, whose broadcasts can be described as "all terrorism, all the time." Fox could cover the opening of a nursery school that was decorated with balloons and graced by an appearance by Winnie the Pooh and they'd still manage to find a terror angle ("what's in those balloons?").
The formerly fighting, up-on-their-hind-legs, American yeomanry who wanted to "live free or die," as the citizens of New Hampshire parsed that yearning, have been transformed into consumers and more recently, subjects of King George (W).
The financial, corporate and governmental forces of tyranny and control are viewed by many Americans as so overwhelming that they can no longer be challenged at any radical level. Americans in Iowa and New Hampshire heaved a collective sigh of resignation and voted for second, third or fourth best for president. This translates into another rabid-Zionist warlover in the White House for four more years. Whether that president's name will be McCain, Clinton, Obama, Giuliani or Romney matters not. Any one of these stooges is acceptable to the banksters, bureaucrats and occultists who form the authentic governing body of these United States.
Ron Paul is a fine man, though I think he's horribly mistaken in his admiration for Ayn Rand and Martin Luther King Jr. But a Ron Paul presidency would be light years ahead of any of the System shills (with the exception of Dennis Kucinch), who are his rivals.
Dr. Paul has been the recipient of millions of dollars in donations and these have drained funds and support from other causes and projects at least as worthy. If the donors who poured those funds into the Paul campaign did so because they wanted publicity for libertarian policies and philosophy, then it was probably money well-spent.
But if they donated those huge sums because they thought Rep. Paul could be elected president, then they were deluded. He couldn't even do well in New Hampshire, which Buchanan won in 1996, and which has a more honest voting system than most states, and a population widely regarded as among the most libertarian in America. If Paul can't win in New Hampshire, where else is he likely to prevail? [JAN. 11 UPDATE: There may have been vote fraud in New Hampshire after all. See: http://revisionistreview.blogspot.com/2008/01/vote-fraud-in-new-hampshire-primary.html ]
It is unfortunate that Great White Hope politics occlude the vision of its proponents. A genuine victory is possible, through education and community.
The millions that went into Ron Paul's campaign could have been used to build "Ron Paul University" instead, with a brick and mortar campus and degrees in American history, law, economics, journalism and education, to start. Graduates would take their place in the lower courts, in business, in the media and as teachers in the high schools and college classrooms of the U.S.
Next would come the building of a community of like-minded persons. Yes, it's slow and decidedly not as "sexy" a process as elections, which dangle the hope of "our man in the White House." Every four years that chimera is tossed at us like cotton candy in front of kids, and we grab for it. After our candidate loses and our money gets flushed, we go back to another four years in our cocoon. Is this a picture of victory?
Our enemies own hundreds of colleges and universities, have billions of corporate dollars at their command, millions of audience members tuned to their broadcasts and reading their newspapers; and the FBI, the NSA, the army, the navy, the air force and the marines.
Except for Youtube and letters to the editor and hyper-space, virtual reality phantoms and cheshire cats, we have next to nothing, no "sociological presence," no brick and mortar college campus to act as a haven, a refuge, a think-tank and the makings of a community. Yes, this writer insists on face-to-face, human community. It can't be done mainly through e-mail or the Internet. The benefit derived from common bonds and solidarity forged by dwelling in the same town with like-minded mentors and sympathizers, is incalculable. The System has intuited to us that in a "wired" universe we need not bother with brick and mortar communities. We have dutifully obeyed their lethal hypnotic suggestion.
Our vision is seriously fractured by a process of human alchemy that has been imposed on us. We must address this psychological warfare and build for the future by means which are independent of the national presidential election campaigns. We must offer hope to an America in which one million of our children have been "diagnosed" by child psychiatrists on the payroll of the incredibly avaricious, pill-pushing pharmaceutical industry, as "bi-polar" psychotics who are to be drugged almost from infancy.
We must offer hope to an America that is silent about the media and the government's story that Sept. 11, 2001 was solely perpetrated by Arab terrorists even as Pres. Bush is allied with the nations that supposedly produced those terrorists, against an Iran that had no role in 9/11 and was itself under attack by bin Laden and the Taliban.
Our fellow Americans are spiritually ill because they do not bring to justice the surviving killers of President Kennedy, they do not shut down the Satanic abortion mills and they do not care to prosecute George W. Bush and his administration for invading and waging aggressive war on a sovereign nation while facilitating an attack on our own people on Sept. 11, 2001.
This dizzying occult funhouse state of mind of our fellow Americans is not going to be resolved by business as usual, politics as usual or any other political remedy from the pre-2001 past. Only a new paradigm led by occult-busting disenchanters working at the grassroots of education and community can begin, by God's grace, to turn our nation around and we are referring to work that will take decades, not months or a few years.
The New Hampshire primary is eloquent testimony to the complete, total and utter irrelevance of national politics. I can support voting in a block in local, municipal and even state-wide elections and referendums, but I cannot countenance voting in national primaries and presidential elections. In that latter case, the best "protest vote" we can register is to picket and march outside the polling places while refusing to play their game by going inside to vote. What would the Establishment have said or done on the morning of Jan. 9, if on Jan. 8, ninety-five percent of New Hampshire voters had refused to cast ballots? What could the media have said, except that such a low turnout would constitute a stark and dramatic referendum on the bankruptcy of the System itself. In some cases, in national elections, not to cast a ballot is a vote of no-confidence that resonates louder and longer and to better effect, than actually casting a ballot.
Instead, the Establishment's television, radio and newspapers (including newspapers with a huge online audience, like the New York Times) order us to play our parts in the Establishment's election-stageplay, and millions of deluded, processed people are doing as they are told.
BUSH IN THE MIDDLE EAST
I wish I had more time to analyze in-depth Mr. Bush's "peace" trip to the Middle East, but I am continuing the daily work on my book about Judaism (yesterday on the Geonic era, today on the Mishnah halachos approving bribery of judges, tomorrow on Biblical nullification as practiced with regard to shmita).
I will allow myself four paragraphs on this topic of President Bush's travels, mainly to say that the trip is intended to burnish for posterity's sake, Bush's otherwise dreadful record of war-Zionist mass-murder (as for example in Lebanon in 2006), with token gestures and stagecraft. In terms of realpolitik, it's an exercise in futility. Bush is a lame duck. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is, politically, a dead duck. Olmert's alleged "peace partner" among the Palestinians, Mahmoud Abbas, is equally lacking a popular base, and the tragic and self-defeating Palestinian penchant for becoming what they oppose by imitating Zionist tactics and firing rockets from Gaza at Israeli civilians, is costing them their capital as victims.
What Bush will actually be doing on this trip is helping the Israelis build an anti-Iranian coalition. The Gulf of Tonkin-style incident with the big, bad Iranian speedboats (fit for little more than a daring afternoon of water-skiing), was intended to establish the necessary ominous mood concerning the "threat from Iran." The Islamic Republic of Iran is a bulwark against the shylock usury system of the West, as all nations faithful to Islam are (and before I am accused of being an Islamist, permit me to add: as all nations faithful to Christianity and the Bible would be as well).
Iran is not controlled by the Cryptocracy and is not part of the New World Order, so it must fall -- whether by covert CIA assassination, subversion and terror, or overt invasion and bombing on the Iraq-invasion model. A client regime with an Islamic facade, like the ones in Pakistan, Egypt and Jordan, must be established, one way or another. To the extent that Arab states can cajole Russia and China into cooperating in the overthrow of the independent Persians, so much the better.
There will be no peace in Palestine for the foreseeable future. The Palestinians are hostage to a resistance movement that imitates the methods, not of the Koran, but of the Communist partisan resistance of World War II and the Zionist Stern gang of the 1940s; terrorists all. By cleverly exploiting the violence of the Palestinian resistance to justify further violence and collective punishment of the Palestinian people, the Israelis can say they have "no partner for peace." By the same process, George W. Bush will be presented to history as "having done his best to bring peace and freedom to a troubled region."
***
Michael A. Hoffman II is working on a massive study of the religion of the rabbis, "Judaism Discovered." Donations toward the completion and most especially, the publication, of this huge book, are gratefully accepted.
***
2. Ron Paul and the Death of the Great White Hope Syndrome
3. Bush in the Middle East
****
THOUGHTS ON THE NEW HAMPSHIRE PRIMARY: A SPOOKY, THORAZINE PASSIVITY
By Michael A. Hoffman II
The New Hampshire primary, in spite of being a disappointment, has much to teach.
First, though it will not stop the System from continuing to promote their media hoax -- that "polls" can predict outcomes of events with a "plus or minus three percent margin of error" -- it was still amusing to see how erroneous the polls were when it came to forecasting the Obama/Hillary contest, wherein some polls had Obama far in the lead. Polls are a means of telling us what the future will be so we will conform ourselves to the Cryptocracy's desired outcome.
Second and not so amusing is the dumbing-down of campaign coverage from issues-oriented, hard news reporting, to reporting the primaries from the vantage of celebrity/entertainment news. The emphasis is on Mrs. Clinton's teary-eyed, "new-found vulnerability" which she presented in New Hampshire, or Huckabee's guitar-pickin' "relaxed persona," or Obama as the iconic black man who at last will assume the mantle of the presidency based on the novelty of his racial identity.
There is a spooky, Thorazine passivity pervading this primary campaign; a campaign that has become little more than political theatre. In 1999, Bill and Hillary Clinton, in league with NATO, carpet-bombed Serbia into the Stone Age, killing hundreds of civilians and destroying clearly marked historic Christian churches and monasteries (http://www.revisionisthistory.org/nato.html).
It was so gruesome and bloody one local Idaho girl wrote a poem expressing the thought that the Columbine school shooters were motivated by the culture of violence the Clintons were promoting as a "solution" in Bosnia and Serbia.
If the Clintons and NATO had done anything approaching the atrocities they committed in Serbia, against Israeli civilians and Israeli synagogues, militant Judaics would now be dogging Hillary at every campaign stop, shouting Murderer!" and "Anti-Semite!" at her and asking her heated and embarrassing questions at public forums.
To the best of this writer's knowledge, no significant protest by Serbian-Americans has been registered in Iowa or New Hampshire. Be assured that the Cryptocracy closely gauges such things. Thus far they have seen that Christian populations can be murdered and the survivors will do little or nothing by way of redress. Hence there is no price to be paid for such crimes. This tends to assure that they will happen again.
America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have squandered billions of dollars that could have gone toward non-profit health care, a mass transit system of high speed intercontinental trains, and local light rail, special programs for gifted children in our schools, support for rebuilding roads and bridges and other crucial infrastructure. None of these issues are on the table in any dramatic way and when they are, the corporate media ignores them in favor of commentary on the candidates' style, hair, clothing and celebrity image.
RON PAUL AND THE DEATH OF THE GREAT WHITE HOPE SYNDROME
As millions of dollars were raised for Ron Paul I heard Dr. Paul called " our last hope." Really? I thought that after Jesus Christ, our last hope on this earth was ourselves and the people in our communities with whom we should be helping to build an alternative society. Does the suggestion that Rep. Paul is our last hope (this was also said about Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, David Duke, and in 1988 of "Pat" Robertson), imply that if Paul does not gain the presidency we will all be watching television all day and "veg" out in defeat, for the rest of our lives?
The presidency of the United States is the bought and paid for domain of the Cryptocracy. But don't blame the theft of the presidency solely on the Cryptocrats. Everyday Americans are also responsible. They have been put through a human alchemy process and they are not the same people they were in 1808 or even 1908. This occult processing has culminated in the security state, as evidenced by Fox News on television, whose broadcasts can be described as "all terrorism, all the time." Fox could cover the opening of a nursery school that was decorated with balloons and graced by an appearance by Winnie the Pooh and they'd still manage to find a terror angle ("what's in those balloons?").
The formerly fighting, up-on-their-hind-legs, American yeomanry who wanted to "live free or die," as the citizens of New Hampshire parsed that yearning, have been transformed into consumers and more recently, subjects of King George (W).
The financial, corporate and governmental forces of tyranny and control are viewed by many Americans as so overwhelming that they can no longer be challenged at any radical level. Americans in Iowa and New Hampshire heaved a collective sigh of resignation and voted for second, third or fourth best for president. This translates into another rabid-Zionist warlover in the White House for four more years. Whether that president's name will be McCain, Clinton, Obama, Giuliani or Romney matters not. Any one of these stooges is acceptable to the banksters, bureaucrats and occultists who form the authentic governing body of these United States.
Ron Paul is a fine man, though I think he's horribly mistaken in his admiration for Ayn Rand and Martin Luther King Jr. But a Ron Paul presidency would be light years ahead of any of the System shills (with the exception of Dennis Kucinch), who are his rivals.
Dr. Paul has been the recipient of millions of dollars in donations and these have drained funds and support from other causes and projects at least as worthy. If the donors who poured those funds into the Paul campaign did so because they wanted publicity for libertarian policies and philosophy, then it was probably money well-spent.
But if they donated those huge sums because they thought Rep. Paul could be elected president, then they were deluded. He couldn't even do well in New Hampshire, which Buchanan won in 1996, and which has a more honest voting system than most states, and a population widely regarded as among the most libertarian in America. If Paul can't win in New Hampshire, where else is he likely to prevail? [JAN. 11 UPDATE: There may have been vote fraud in New Hampshire after all. See: http://revisionistreview.blogspot.com/2008/01/vote-fraud-in-new-hampshire-primary.html ]
It is unfortunate that Great White Hope politics occlude the vision of its proponents. A genuine victory is possible, through education and community.
The millions that went into Ron Paul's campaign could have been used to build "Ron Paul University" instead, with a brick and mortar campus and degrees in American history, law, economics, journalism and education, to start. Graduates would take their place in the lower courts, in business, in the media and as teachers in the high schools and college classrooms of the U.S.
Next would come the building of a community of like-minded persons. Yes, it's slow and decidedly not as "sexy" a process as elections, which dangle the hope of "our man in the White House." Every four years that chimera is tossed at us like cotton candy in front of kids, and we grab for it. After our candidate loses and our money gets flushed, we go back to another four years in our cocoon. Is this a picture of victory?
Our enemies own hundreds of colleges and universities, have billions of corporate dollars at their command, millions of audience members tuned to their broadcasts and reading their newspapers; and the FBI, the NSA, the army, the navy, the air force and the marines.
Except for Youtube and letters to the editor and hyper-space, virtual reality phantoms and cheshire cats, we have next to nothing, no "sociological presence," no brick and mortar college campus to act as a haven, a refuge, a think-tank and the makings of a community. Yes, this writer insists on face-to-face, human community. It can't be done mainly through e-mail or the Internet. The benefit derived from common bonds and solidarity forged by dwelling in the same town with like-minded mentors and sympathizers, is incalculable. The System has intuited to us that in a "wired" universe we need not bother with brick and mortar communities. We have dutifully obeyed their lethal hypnotic suggestion.
Our vision is seriously fractured by a process of human alchemy that has been imposed on us. We must address this psychological warfare and build for the future by means which are independent of the national presidential election campaigns. We must offer hope to an America in which one million of our children have been "diagnosed" by child psychiatrists on the payroll of the incredibly avaricious, pill-pushing pharmaceutical industry, as "bi-polar" psychotics who are to be drugged almost from infancy.
We must offer hope to an America that is silent about the media and the government's story that Sept. 11, 2001 was solely perpetrated by Arab terrorists even as Pres. Bush is allied with the nations that supposedly produced those terrorists, against an Iran that had no role in 9/11 and was itself under attack by bin Laden and the Taliban.
Our fellow Americans are spiritually ill because they do not bring to justice the surviving killers of President Kennedy, they do not shut down the Satanic abortion mills and they do not care to prosecute George W. Bush and his administration for invading and waging aggressive war on a sovereign nation while facilitating an attack on our own people on Sept. 11, 2001.
This dizzying occult funhouse state of mind of our fellow Americans is not going to be resolved by business as usual, politics as usual or any other political remedy from the pre-2001 past. Only a new paradigm led by occult-busting disenchanters working at the grassroots of education and community can begin, by God's grace, to turn our nation around and we are referring to work that will take decades, not months or a few years.
The New Hampshire primary is eloquent testimony to the complete, total and utter irrelevance of national politics. I can support voting in a block in local, municipal and even state-wide elections and referendums, but I cannot countenance voting in national primaries and presidential elections. In that latter case, the best "protest vote" we can register is to picket and march outside the polling places while refusing to play their game by going inside to vote. What would the Establishment have said or done on the morning of Jan. 9, if on Jan. 8, ninety-five percent of New Hampshire voters had refused to cast ballots? What could the media have said, except that such a low turnout would constitute a stark and dramatic referendum on the bankruptcy of the System itself. In some cases, in national elections, not to cast a ballot is a vote of no-confidence that resonates louder and longer and to better effect, than actually casting a ballot.
Instead, the Establishment's television, radio and newspapers (including newspapers with a huge online audience, like the New York Times) order us to play our parts in the Establishment's election-stageplay, and millions of deluded, processed people are doing as they are told.
BUSH IN THE MIDDLE EAST
I wish I had more time to analyze in-depth Mr. Bush's "peace" trip to the Middle East, but I am continuing the daily work on my book about Judaism (yesterday on the Geonic era, today on the Mishnah halachos approving bribery of judges, tomorrow on Biblical nullification as practiced with regard to shmita).
I will allow myself four paragraphs on this topic of President Bush's travels, mainly to say that the trip is intended to burnish for posterity's sake, Bush's otherwise dreadful record of war-Zionist mass-murder (as for example in Lebanon in 2006), with token gestures and stagecraft. In terms of realpolitik, it's an exercise in futility. Bush is a lame duck. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is, politically, a dead duck. Olmert's alleged "peace partner" among the Palestinians, Mahmoud Abbas, is equally lacking a popular base, and the tragic and self-defeating Palestinian penchant for becoming what they oppose by imitating Zionist tactics and firing rockets from Gaza at Israeli civilians, is costing them their capital as victims.
What Bush will actually be doing on this trip is helping the Israelis build an anti-Iranian coalition. The Gulf of Tonkin-style incident with the big, bad Iranian speedboats (fit for little more than a daring afternoon of water-skiing), was intended to establish the necessary ominous mood concerning the "threat from Iran." The Islamic Republic of Iran is a bulwark against the shylock usury system of the West, as all nations faithful to Islam are (and before I am accused of being an Islamist, permit me to add: as all nations faithful to Christianity and the Bible would be as well).
Iran is not controlled by the Cryptocracy and is not part of the New World Order, so it must fall -- whether by covert CIA assassination, subversion and terror, or overt invasion and bombing on the Iraq-invasion model. A client regime with an Islamic facade, like the ones in Pakistan, Egypt and Jordan, must be established, one way or another. To the extent that Arab states can cajole Russia and China into cooperating in the overthrow of the independent Persians, so much the better.
There will be no peace in Palestine for the foreseeable future. The Palestinians are hostage to a resistance movement that imitates the methods, not of the Koran, but of the Communist partisan resistance of World War II and the Zionist Stern gang of the 1940s; terrorists all. By cleverly exploiting the violence of the Palestinian resistance to justify further violence and collective punishment of the Palestinian people, the Israelis can say they have "no partner for peace." By the same process, George W. Bush will be presented to history as "having done his best to bring peace and freedom to a troubled region."
***
Michael A. Hoffman II is working on a massive study of the religion of the rabbis, "Judaism Discovered." Donations toward the completion and most especially, the publication, of this huge book, are gratefully accepted.
***
Monday, January 07, 2008
Big Bad Iranian Navy Menaces Poor Little US Navy
Why do we automatically believe the US government’s version of events without independent corroboration? We know that war policy involves psychological warfare and propaganda (i.e. lying). I find the reports of the big bad Iranian Navy “harassing” the poor little old US Navy to be preposterous; along with the claim that the Iranian Guards are looking to provoke an incident. We are the ones seeking to provoke something by our very presence in the region. What if Iranian gunboats were keeping the waters around Cuba “safe” from US intervention against Castro? Would the world blame the US if our ships closely patroled off Key West? We need an independent media not a mouthpiece for the US government.
***
***
Saturday, January 05, 2008
Ron Paul's Christian critics
The following is from the third comment that follows the main article, "Is Ron Paul what he says he is?" at the Maurice Pinay blog: http://mauricepinay.blogspot.com/2008/01/is-ron-paul-what-they-say-he-is.html
"Evidently, Ron Paul is an honest, straightforward man who may not be fully cognizant of dialectics and alchemical syncretism. He is correct on most issues, but may be vulnerable to subtle manipulation.
He is influenced by Ayn Rand's rhetoric about liberty (Paul's son 's first name is Rand). He does not seem to be concerned about the fact that Ayn Rand learned all about "liberty" at the University of Petrograd in Lenin's Soviet Union, or about Rand's Objectivism being just another "Man" playing God scheme (Re: Her use of the term "Man" with a capital M in her novels), with dollar worship added as a kind of hood ornament. Is Rand's Objectivism the Rightward side of the Bolshevik coin?
Paul has accused Ayn Rand disciple Alan Greenspan of abandoning his Objectivist principles after becoming chairman of the Fed. Paul does not seem to realize that the Fed, a state capitalist/corporate socialist organization headed by Greenspan, a libertarian Objectivist, is an alchemically synthesized hybrid beast suited to the economic objectives of "America" (read: the Masonic Imperium).
Paul is a member of the libertarian Von Mises Society. Von Mises was a Judaic Austrian economist who worked on currency issues with a once major, but now virtually defunct, Pan-European organization dedicated to building a united Europe predicated upon Christian principles. Did he help sabotage this organization?
Paul is a well intentioned representative of the people who opposed Bush/Cheney's Zionist war crimes from the beginning. He does not take any money from AIPAC.
If he is truly honest with no axe to grind, how Hegelian/Kabbalistic dialectics pertain to modern issues can be explained to him later. Right now, the two most important things are that he start talking about the rigged vote issue, and his supporters develop some local independent-minded candidates. Otherwise, Paul will be just another failed "Great Hope" candidate, and his supporters will be burned out." (End quote)
HOFFMAN'S AFTERWORD:
"Ayn Rand" (Alice Rosenbaum) was an extreme anti-Christian, atheist-capitalist usurer who spread the doctrine of selfishness with the same brazen shamelessness that Zionist pornographers have peddled their odious wares in our society. She made selfishness respectable. It is shocking that Ron Paul would claim to be a Christian and at the same time a follower of Ayn Rand.
Having said that, the reality is that the Zionist New York Times, Zionst Fox News and most of the rest of the media transparently fear and despise Ron Paul. They do so because he represents an alternative to their rabid Israeli nationalism and perpetual war-Zionism. In spite of his serious errors in ideological cognition and perception, Dr. Paul is at heart an honest man. Compared to Elmer Gantry Huckabee, who thinks the crypto-rabbi John Hagee is a fine Christian, Paul is worthy of support only if as an irritant to the System, extravagant libertarian claims for his philosophic vision not withstanding.
***
"Evidently, Ron Paul is an honest, straightforward man who may not be fully cognizant of dialectics and alchemical syncretism. He is correct on most issues, but may be vulnerable to subtle manipulation.
He is influenced by Ayn Rand's rhetoric about liberty (Paul's son 's first name is Rand). He does not seem to be concerned about the fact that Ayn Rand learned all about "liberty" at the University of Petrograd in Lenin's Soviet Union, or about Rand's Objectivism being just another "Man" playing God scheme (Re: Her use of the term "Man" with a capital M in her novels), with dollar worship added as a kind of hood ornament. Is Rand's Objectivism the Rightward side of the Bolshevik coin?
Paul has accused Ayn Rand disciple Alan Greenspan of abandoning his Objectivist principles after becoming chairman of the Fed. Paul does not seem to realize that the Fed, a state capitalist/corporate socialist organization headed by Greenspan, a libertarian Objectivist, is an alchemically synthesized hybrid beast suited to the economic objectives of "America" (read: the Masonic Imperium).
Paul is a member of the libertarian Von Mises Society. Von Mises was a Judaic Austrian economist who worked on currency issues with a once major, but now virtually defunct, Pan-European organization dedicated to building a united Europe predicated upon Christian principles. Did he help sabotage this organization?
Paul is a well intentioned representative of the people who opposed Bush/Cheney's Zionist war crimes from the beginning. He does not take any money from AIPAC.
If he is truly honest with no axe to grind, how Hegelian/Kabbalistic dialectics pertain to modern issues can be explained to him later. Right now, the two most important things are that he start talking about the rigged vote issue, and his supporters develop some local independent-minded candidates. Otherwise, Paul will be just another failed "Great Hope" candidate, and his supporters will be burned out." (End quote)
HOFFMAN'S AFTERWORD:
"Ayn Rand" (Alice Rosenbaum) was an extreme anti-Christian, atheist-capitalist usurer who spread the doctrine of selfishness with the same brazen shamelessness that Zionist pornographers have peddled their odious wares in our society. She made selfishness respectable. It is shocking that Ron Paul would claim to be a Christian and at the same time a follower of Ayn Rand.
Having said that, the reality is that the Zionist New York Times, Zionst Fox News and most of the rest of the media transparently fear and despise Ron Paul. They do so because he represents an alternative to their rabid Israeli nationalism and perpetual war-Zionism. In spite of his serious errors in ideological cognition and perception, Dr. Paul is at heart an honest man. Compared to Elmer Gantry Huckabee, who thinks the crypto-rabbi John Hagee is a fine Christian, Paul is worthy of support only if as an irritant to the System, extravagant libertarian claims for his philosophic vision not withstanding.
***
Jonathan Yardley's omission
"A rare manuscript illuminates lives from medieval Spain to modern-day Sarajevo"
Review: PEOPLE OF THE BOOK By Geraldine Brooks, Viking. 372 pp. $25.95
By Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post, Sunday, January 6, 2008; Page BW15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/03/AR2008010303221.html?hpid=features1&hpv=national
Dear Mr. Yardley
yardleyj@washpost.com
Is there any mention in Geraldine Brooks' "People of the Book" of the Palestinian "other" victimized by Israeli nationalists? Or is the author's frame of reference solely in terms of Judaic nationalism, the Judaics as the perpetual victims, never the executioners?
You don't tell us, or even ask the question.
Sincerely,
Michael A. Hoffman II
Geraldine Brooks as cited by Jonathan Yardley:
"Well, from what you've told me, the book has survived the same human disaster over and over again. Think about it. You've got a society where people tolerate difference, like Spain in the Convivencia, and everything's humming along: creative, prosperous. Then somehow this fear, this hate, this need to demonize 'the other' -- it just sort of rears up and smashes the whole society. Inquisition, Nazis, extremist Serb nationalists . . . same old, same old. It seems to me the book, at this point, bears witness to all that."
***
Review: PEOPLE OF THE BOOK By Geraldine Brooks, Viking. 372 pp. $25.95
By Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post, Sunday, January 6, 2008; Page BW15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/03/AR2008010303221.html?hpid=features1&hpv=national
Dear Mr. Yardley
yardleyj@washpost.com
Is there any mention in Geraldine Brooks' "People of the Book" of the Palestinian "other" victimized by Israeli nationalists? Or is the author's frame of reference solely in terms of Judaic nationalism, the Judaics as the perpetual victims, never the executioners?
You don't tell us, or even ask the question.
Sincerely,
Michael A. Hoffman II
Geraldine Brooks as cited by Jonathan Yardley:
"Well, from what you've told me, the book has survived the same human disaster over and over again. Think about it. You've got a society where people tolerate difference, like Spain in the Convivencia, and everything's humming along: creative, prosperous. Then somehow this fear, this hate, this need to demonize 'the other' -- it just sort of rears up and smashes the whole society. Inquisition, Nazis, extremist Serb nationalists . . . same old, same old. It seems to me the book, at this point, bears witness to all that."
***
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Terrorists are "partisans" when fighting the Nazis
From the Judaic "Forward" newspaper, Jan. 4, 2008: " In 1940, he and his Wild West show even toured Nazi-occupied Poland with a German circus, playing in Warsaw, Krakow, Kielce and other towns. The tour was cut short in Lodz — which the Nazis renamed Litzmannstadt — when an explosion and fire ripped through the circus-train carriage that housed Jenkins’s trained birds. Jenkins was seriously injured trying to rescue them. Rumor had it that anti-Nazi partisans set the fire."
Someone set fire to a circus and they are described as "partisans." Arson is not terror when its target is a German-affiliated circus.
When anti-Zionist Palestinians commit such acts against Israeli-Nazis, they are definitively labeled "terrorists."
In defiance of the Talmudic double-standard, from henceforward I am going to call the Hamas people, partisans.
***
Someone set fire to a circus and they are described as "partisans." Arson is not terror when its target is a German-affiliated circus.
When anti-Zionist Palestinians commit such acts against Israeli-Nazis, they are definitively labeled "terrorists."
In defiance of the Talmudic double-standard, from henceforward I am going to call the Hamas people, partisans.
***
Andy Rosenthal on William Kristol
It's all about conferring respectability. New York Times editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal described their newest columnist, neocon William Kristol as " a guy who is a serious, respected conservative intellectual."
Kristol is a warmonger. He is a fanatical enthusiast for war on Iraq and on Iran. He loves war and bloodshed when it entails the destruction of Zionism's perceived enemies. In the eyes of the New York Times shedding blood is "conservative and respectable."
In the eyes of sane humanitarians this is not respectable, it is despicable and ensures only more wars for neocon goals of shoring up Israeli occupation and colonialism.
Kristol is a militarist who will use the megaphone that is the New York Times to advocate further warfare and killing as a remedy for the world's ills. There is nothing "conservative" about such disastrous views. They are neo-conservative, i.e Zionist fascism. Kristol's appointment to the Times' editorial page is a step backward for humanity. The Christian standard is "blessed are the peacemakers." The New York Times blesses the warmakers. God help us.
***
Kristol is a warmonger. He is a fanatical enthusiast for war on Iraq and on Iran. He loves war and bloodshed when it entails the destruction of Zionism's perceived enemies. In the eyes of the New York Times shedding blood is "conservative and respectable."
In the eyes of sane humanitarians this is not respectable, it is despicable and ensures only more wars for neocon goals of shoring up Israeli occupation and colonialism.
Kristol is a militarist who will use the megaphone that is the New York Times to advocate further warfare and killing as a remedy for the world's ills. There is nothing "conservative" about such disastrous views. They are neo-conservative, i.e Zionist fascism. Kristol's appointment to the Times' editorial page is a step backward for humanity. The Christian standard is "blessed are the peacemakers." The New York Times blesses the warmakers. God help us.
***
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
William Kristol and the Decline of the New York Times
EDITOR'S NOTE: William Kristol has been wrong about nearly everything connected with the US government's war in Iraq. He is one of the more obtuse of Fox TV's hardened neo-con Zionist ideologues. Now this blockheaded war-lover has been rewarded by the New York Times with a position as a columnist.
Kathleen Reardon: My Husband's Farewell to The New York Times
December 29, 2007 | My husband, Chris Noblet, just sent this to The New York Times. Feel free to use it as a model for your e-mail to them.
"I have read the Times for over three decades, have many times been a home subscriber, and have been a premium internet subscriber since you offered the service. Many times, I have emailed friends and associates with interesting Times articles. Many years, in many places, such as Connecticut, Manhattan and California, I subscribed to the paper edition of the Times.
As a former journalist, I admired the Times immensely. As a corporate communications professional for many years, I worked with the Times on numerous occasions, and in the last 15 years have been very disappointed to see the slip in the quality and objectivity of your reporters. I accepted, even occasionally admired, William Safire. I accepted David Brooks.
All that said, if you hire William Kristol, it will be the final cut. You will have betrayed everything I have ever admired in the Times. I am serious about this. I will terminate my email and any premium subscription. I will no longer purchase the Times or the Herald Tribune at newsstands. My interest in the success of your publication will cease, and I will get all my news from elsewhere.
Any regrets I may have will be assuaged by my knowledge that your hiring of that arrogant, blockheaded, smirking, war-monger proves you have finally lost your way." --Chris Noblet
The Times Adds an Op-Ed Columnist
NY Times | December 30, 2007
William Kristol, one of the nation's leading conservative writers and a vigorous supporter of the Iraq war, will become an Op-Ed page columnist for The New York Times, the newspaper announced Saturday. Mr. Kristol will write a weekly column for The Times beginning Jan. 7, the newspaper said. He is editor and co-founder of The Weekly Standard, an influential conservative political magazine, and appears regularly on Fox News Sunday and the Fox News Channel.
He was a columnist for Time magazine until that relationship was severed this month. Mr. Kristol, 55, has been a fierce critic of The Times. In 2006, he said that the government should consider prosecuting The Times for disclosing a secret government program to track international banking transactions. In a 2003 column on the turmoil within The Times that led to the downfall of the top two editors, he wrote that it was not "a first-rate newspaper of record," adding, "The Times is irredeemable." In the mid-1990s, Mr. Kristol led the Project for the Republican Future, an influential policy study group. Before that, he was chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle. A native of New York City, he holds a bachelor's degree and a doctorate from Harvard. His father is Irving Kristol, one of the founding intellectual forces behind modern conservatism.
***
Kathleen Reardon: My Husband's Farewell to The New York Times
December 29, 2007 | My husband, Chris Noblet, just sent this to The New York Times. Feel free to use it as a model for your e-mail to them.
"I have read the Times for over three decades, have many times been a home subscriber, and have been a premium internet subscriber since you offered the service. Many times, I have emailed friends and associates with interesting Times articles. Many years, in many places, such as Connecticut, Manhattan and California, I subscribed to the paper edition of the Times.
As a former journalist, I admired the Times immensely. As a corporate communications professional for many years, I worked with the Times on numerous occasions, and in the last 15 years have been very disappointed to see the slip in the quality and objectivity of your reporters. I accepted, even occasionally admired, William Safire. I accepted David Brooks.
All that said, if you hire William Kristol, it will be the final cut. You will have betrayed everything I have ever admired in the Times. I am serious about this. I will terminate my email and any premium subscription. I will no longer purchase the Times or the Herald Tribune at newsstands. My interest in the success of your publication will cease, and I will get all my news from elsewhere.
Any regrets I may have will be assuaged by my knowledge that your hiring of that arrogant, blockheaded, smirking, war-monger proves you have finally lost your way." --Chris Noblet
The Times Adds an Op-Ed Columnist
NY Times | December 30, 2007
William Kristol, one of the nation's leading conservative writers and a vigorous supporter of the Iraq war, will become an Op-Ed page columnist for The New York Times, the newspaper announced Saturday. Mr. Kristol will write a weekly column for The Times beginning Jan. 7, the newspaper said. He is editor and co-founder of The Weekly Standard, an influential conservative political magazine, and appears regularly on Fox News Sunday and the Fox News Channel.
He was a columnist for Time magazine until that relationship was severed this month. Mr. Kristol, 55, has been a fierce critic of The Times. In 2006, he said that the government should consider prosecuting The Times for disclosing a secret government program to track international banking transactions. In a 2003 column on the turmoil within The Times that led to the downfall of the top two editors, he wrote that it was not "a first-rate newspaper of record," adding, "The Times is irredeemable." In the mid-1990s, Mr. Kristol led the Project for the Republican Future, an influential policy study group. Before that, he was chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle. A native of New York City, he holds a bachelor's degree and a doctorate from Harvard. His father is Irving Kristol, one of the founding intellectual forces behind modern conservatism.
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