CHILDLESS EUROPE
No Babies?
By Russell Shorto
New York Times Sunday Magazine | June 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/magazine/29Birth-t.html?ref=magazine
IT WAS A SPECTACULAR LATE-MAY AFTERNOON IN SOUTHERN ITALY,but the streets of Laviano — a gloriously situated hamlet ranged across a few folds in the mountains of the Campania region — were deserted. There were no day-trippers from Naples, no tourists to take in the views up the steep slopes, the olive trees on terraces, the ruins of the 11th-century fortress with wild poppies spotting its grassy flanks like flecks of blood. And there were no locals in sight either.
The town has housing enough to support a population of 3,000, but fewer than 1,600 live here, and every year the number drops. Rocco Falivena, Laviano’s 56-year-old mayor, strolled down the middle of the street, outlining for me the town’s demographics and explaining why, although the place is more than a thousand years old, its buildings all look so new. In 1980 an earthquake struck, taking out nearly every structure and killing 300 people, including Falivena’s own parents. Then from tragedy arose the scent of possibility, of a future. Money came from the national government in Rome, and from former residents who had emigrated to the U.S. and elsewhere. The locals found jobs rebuilding their town. But when the construction ended, so did the work, and the exodus of residents continued as before.
When Falivena took office in 2002 for his second stint as mayor, two numbers caught his attention. Four: that was how many babies were born in the town the year before. And five: the number of children enrolled in first grade at the school, never mind that the school served two additional communities as well. “I knew what was my first job, to try to save the school,” Falivena told me. “Because a village that does not have a school is a dead village.” He racked his brain and came up with a desperate idea: pay women to have babies. And not just a token amount, either; in 2003 Falivena let it be known he would pay 10,000 euros (about $15,000) for every woman — local or immigrant, married or single — who would give birth to and rear a child in the village.
The “baby bonus,” as he calls it, is structured to root new citizens in the town: a mother gets 1,500 euros when her baby is born, then a 1,500-euro payment on each of the child’s first four birthdays and a final 2,500 euros the day the child enrolls in first grade. Falivena has a publicist’s instincts, and he said he hoped the plan would attract media attention. It did, generating news across Italy and as far away as Australia.
Finally, as we loitered in front of a mustard-colored building up the street from the town’s empty main square, a car came by. Falivena — a small, muscular man in a polo shirt, with gray hair and a deeply creased, tanned face — flagged it down, for the young woman behind the wheel, Salvia Daniela, was one of the very people he was looking for. They exchanged a few words, and we followed Daniela back to her apartment to meet her family. Daniela, who is 31, and her 36-year-old husband, Gerardo Grande, have two children: Pasquale, 10, and Gaia, who is 5 and was one of the first “baby bonus” babies. Daniela and Grande say they are committed to being a traditional family, but it isn’t easy. Grande works for a development company and manages a bar in the evenings so that his wife can devote herself to the home. Their apartment, though cheery (with lots of enlarged photos of the kids), is cramped. “The baby bonus helped us,” Grande told me. He added, gesturing toward Falivena, “We think this man is a great mayor.”
There are some indications that Falivena’s baby bonus is succeeding — the first-grade class has 17 students this year — but that figure may be misleading. As it turns out, many of the new parents who have taken advantage of the bonus are locals who planned to have a child anyway. (Ida Robertiello, another of the baby-bonus mothers who sang Falivena’s praises for me, admitted that she was already pregnant with her son Matteo when Falivena announced his scheme.)
The main effect of the bonus money may be on the timing of births. Last year Falivena was out of office, and the temporary replacement canceled the payments. “I know several women in Laviano who are pregnant now,” Daniela told me, and her husband added, with a rakish grin, that couples got busy because they knew Falivena was coming back as mayor, with a promise to restart the payments.
But with close to 50 mothers now eligible, Falivena doesn’t know how long he can keep the baby bonus going. And Laviano is still losing population.
DEMOGRAPHICALLY SPEAKING, Laviano is not unique in Italy, or in Europe. In fact, it may be a harbinger. In the 1990s, European demographers began noticing a downward trend in population across the Continent and behind it a sharply falling birthrate. Non-number-crunchers largely ignored the information until a 2002 study by Italian, German and Spanish social scientists focused the data and gave policy makers across the European Union something to ponder. The figure of 2.1 is widely considered to be the “replacement rate” — the average number of births per woman that will maintain a country’s current population level. At various times in modern history — during war or famine — birthrates have fallen below the replacement rate, to “low” or “very low” levels.
But Hans-Peter Kohler, José Antonio Ortega and Francesco Billari — the authors of the 2002 report — saw something new in the data. For the first time on record, birthrates in southern and Eastern Europe had dropped below 1.3. For the demographers, this number had a special mathematical portent. At that rate, a country’s population would be cut in half in 45 years, creating a falling-off-a-cliff effect from which it would be nearly impossible to recover. Kohler and his colleagues invented an ominous new term for the phenomenon: “lowest-low fertility.”
To the uninitiated, “lowest low” seems a strange thing to worry about. A few decades ago we were getting “the population explosion” drilled into us. The invader species homo sapiens, we learned, was eating through the planet’s resources and irretrievably fouling and wrecking its fragile systems. Has the situation changed for the better since Paul Ehrlich set off the alarm in 1968 with his best seller “The Population Bomb”? Do current headlines — global food shortages, climate change — not indicate continuing signs of calamity?
They do, as far as some are concerned, but things have changed somewhat. For one thing, around the world, even in developing countries, birthrates have plummeted — from 6.0 globally in 1972 to 2.9 today — as populations have shifted from rural areas to cities and people have adopted urban lifestyles, and the drop has perhaps lessened the urgency of the overpopulation cry. Meanwhile, in recent years another chorus of voices has sounded. Yes, we’re straining resources, they say, and it’s undeniable that some parts of the globe are overrun with humanity. But other regions now confront a very different fate. In Europe, “lowest low” isn’t just a phenomenon of rural areas like Laviano.
Cities like Milan and Bologna have recorded some of the lowest birthrates anywhere, in part because the high cost of living forces couples either to move or to have fewer children. After the term was invented, “lowest-low fertility” got the attention of leaders in Brussels and national capitals across the Continent — and by now everyone from Seville to Helsinki seems to be aware of it. In Greece, the problem is so well situated in the national psyche that it is conversationally compacted: people refer simply to “the demographic.” Putting the numbers in a broader world-historical context stirred a debate about Europe’s future. Around the time that President Kennedy went to Germany and gave his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, Europe represented 12.5 percent of the world’s population. Today it is 7.2 percent, and if current trends continue, by 2050 only 5 percent of the world will be European.
To many, “lowest low” is hard evidence of imminent disaster of unprecedented proportions. “The ability to plan the decision to have a child is of course a big success for society, and for women in particular,” Letizia Mencarini, a professor of demography at the University of Turin, told me. “But if you would read the documents of demographers 20 years ago, you would see that nobody foresaw that the fertility rate would go so low. In the 1960s, the overall fertility rate in Italy was around two children per couple. Now it is about 1.3, and for some towns in Italy it is less than 1. This is considered pathological.”
There is no shortage of popular explanations to account for the drop in fertility. In Athens, it’s common to blame the city’s infamous air pollution; several years ago a radio commercial promoted air-conditioners as a way to bring back Greek lust and Greek babies.
More broadly and significant, social conservatives tie the low birthrate to secularism. After arguing for decades that the West had divorced itself from God and church and embraced a self-interested and ultimately self-destructive lifestyle, abetted above all by modern birth control, they feel statistically vindicated. “Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future,” Pope Benedict proclaimed in 2006. “Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present.” In Germany, where the births-to-deaths ratio now results in an annual population loss of roughly 100,000, Ursula von der Leyen, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s family minister (and a mother of seven), declared two years ago that if her country didn’t reverse its plummeting birthrate, “We will have to turn out the light.”
Last March, André Rouvoet, the leader of the Christian Union Party in the Netherlands (and a father of five), urged the government to get proactive and spur Dutch women to have more babies. The Canadian conservative Mark Steyn, author of the 2006 best seller “America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It,” has warned his fellow North Americans, whose birthrates are relatively high, that, regarding their European allies, “These countries are going out of business,” and that while at the end of the 21st century there may “still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands,” these will “merely be designations for real estate.”
The spiritual concerns aside, though, the main threats to Europe are economic. Alongside birthrate, the other operative factor in the economic equation is lifespan. People everywhere are living longer than ever, and lifespan is continuing to increase beyond what was once considered a natural limit. Policy makers fear that, taken together, these trends forecast a perfect demographic storm.
According to a paper by Jonathan Grant and Stijn Hoorens of the Rand Europe research group: “Demographers and economists foresee that 30 million Europeans of working age will ‘disappear’ by 2050. At the same time, retirement will be lasting decades as the number of people in their 80s and 90s increases dramatically.” The crisis, they argue, will come from a “triple whammy of increasing demand on the welfare state and health-care systems, with a decline in tax contributions from an ever-smaller work force.” That is to say, there won’t be enough workers to pay for the pensions of all those long-living retirees.
What’s more, there will be a smaller working-age population compared with other parts of the world; the U.S. Census Bureau’s International Database projects that in 2025, 42 percent of the people living in India will be 24 or younger, while only 22 percent of Spain’s population will be in that age group. This, in the wording of a Demographic Fitness Survey by the Adecco Institute, a London-based research group, will result in a “war for talent.” And the troubles for Europe are magnified by other factors in the existing welfare states of many of its countries. Europeans are used to early retirement — according to the Adecco survey, only 60 percent of men in France between the ages of 50 and 64 are still working.
Then there is the matter of what kind of society “lowest low” will bring. How will the predominance of one- and two-child families affect family cohesion, sibling relationships, care for elderly parents? Imagine a society in which family reunions consist of three people, in which nearly all of a child’s relatives are in their 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. Laviano’s empty streets echo with something strange and seemingly new. As the social scientists Billari, Kohler and Ortega put it, Europe is entering “an uncharted territory in demographic history.”
The issue of immigration is related to “lowest low” as well. The fears on the right are of a continent-wide takeover by third-world hordes — mostly Muslim — who have yet to be infected by the modern malady called family planning and who threaten to transform, if not completely delete, the storied, cherished cultures of Western Europe. And to venture into even-deeper waters, no one knows how Europe’s birthrate might play out globally: whether it will contribute to the diminishing of Western influence and Western values; whether, as Steyn’s book title suggests, America will have to go it alone in this regard.
Will Europe as we know it just peter out? Will ethnic Greeks and Spaniards become extinct, taking their baklava and paella to the grave with them, to be replaced by waves of Muslim immigrants who couldn’t care less about the Acropolis as a majestic representation of Western culture? Venice has lost more than half its population since 1950; its residents believe their city is destined to become a Venice-themed attraction. Is the same going to happen to Europe as a whole? Might the United States see its closest ally decay into a real-life Euro Disney?
All interesting questions, but most are beside the main point. As it turns out, the deeper answer to the question “Where have all Europe’s babies gone?” goes far beyond the boundaries of the Continent.
TO BEGIN TO UNDERSTAND the global meaning of the low-birthrate phenomenon requires first examining Europe’s “baby bust.” Maybe the most striking way to set up the issue is via a statistic that emerged from a 2006 Eurobarometer survey by the European Commission. Women were asked how many children they would like to have; the average result was 2.36 — well above the replacement level and far above the rate anywhere in Europe. If women are having significantly fewer children than they want, there must be other forces at work.
As it turns out, the situation differs by region. “It’s a mistake to think of Europe as a single entity in this respect,” Alasdair Murray, director of CentreForum, a London-based research group, told me. “There are really four different population changes happening in Europe.” One concerns Eastern Europe, where trends date from the Communist period and portend a special, and especially virulent, class of social problems. Bulgaria’s birthrate is 1.37, and life expectancy for males is seven years less than in Belgium or Germany; the E.U. estimates that Bulgaria’s population will drop from 8 million today to 5 million in 2050.
Since 1989, Latvia’s population has dropped 13 percent; its fertility rate is one of the lowest in the world, and its divorce rate is among the highest in Europe, according to Linda Andersone, the deputy director of the Latvian Department of Children and Family Policy. Throughout most of Eastern Europe you see the same dark elixir of forces at play, which commentators attribute to Westernization, though it’s difficult to fix causes precisely. “We can see that birthrate declines date to the fall of the Soviet Union,” Murray said, “but is that due to the switch to a market economy or something else?”
Germany and Austria are in something of a category of their own. They share many of the same characteristics of other Western European countries with regard to forces affecting family life, but in addition childlessness is peculiarly high in these countries, and has been for some time. A 2002 study found that 27.8 percent of German women born in 1960 were childless, a rate far higher than in any other European country. (The rate in France, for example, was 10.7.)
When European women age 18 to 34 were asked in another study to state their ideal number of children, 16.6 percent of those in Germany and 12.6 percent in Austria answered “none.” (In Italy, by comparison, this figure was 3.8 percent.) The main reason seems to be a basic change in attitudes on the part of some women as to their “natural” role. According to Nikolai Botev, population and development adviser at the United Nations Population Fund, many observers have been surprised to find that in recent years “childlessness emerges as an ideal lifestyle.” No one has yet figured out why some countries are more predisposed to childlessness than others.
But the true fertility fault line in Europe — the fissures of which spread outward across the globe — runs between the north and the south. Setting aside the special case of countries in the east, the lowest rates in Europe — some of the lowest fertility rates in the world — are to be found in the seemingly family-friendly countries of Italy, Spain and Greece (all currently hover around 1.3).
I asked Francesco Billari of Bocconi University in Milan, an author of the 2002 study that introduced the “lowest low” concept, to account for this. “If we look at very recent data for developed countries, we see that Italy has two records that are maybe world records,” he said. “One, young people in Italy stay with their parents longer than maybe anywhere else. No. 2 is the percentage of children born after the parents turn 40. These factors are related, because if you have a late start, you tend not to have a second child, and especially not a third.”
Plenty of anecdotal evidence squares with this. When I visited a day-care center for 3-month-olds to 3-year-olds in Milan, the manager, Mara Vavassori, showed me her roster of enrollment sheets. On one line of each was a date — 1964, 1967, 1963: the birth years of the parents of her toddler-clients. She had been in this business for 20 years, she said. It used to be that first-time parents were in their early to mid-20s. Today, she said, more than half were in their 40s.
On the surface there are economic explanations for why this phenomenon has occurred in southern Europe. Italy, for example, pays the lowest starting wages of any country in the E.U., which causes young people to delay striking out on their own. And as the British politician David Willetts has noted, “Living at home with your parents is a very powerful contraception.”
But the deeper problem may lie precisely in the family-friendly ethos of these countries. This part of the self-definition of southern European culture — the “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” ideal — has a flip side. “In all of these countries,” Billari said, “it’s very difficult to combine work and family. And that is partly because, within couples, we have evidence that in these countries the gender relationships are very asymmetric.”
There, according to waves of recent evidence, is the rub — the result of a friction between tectonic plates in modern society that has been quietly at work for decades. The accepted demographic wisdom had been that as women enter the job market, a society’s fertility rate drops.
That has been broadly true in the developed world, but more recently, and especially in Europe, the numbers don’t bear it out. In fact, something like the opposite has been the case. According to Hans-Peter Kohler of the University of Pennsylvania, analysis of recent studies showed that “high fertility was associated with high female labor-force participation . . . and the lowest fertility levels in Europe since the mid-1990s are often found in countries with the lowest female labor-force participation.” In other words, working mothers are having more babies than stay-at-home moms.
How can this be? A study released in February of this year by Letizia Mencarini, the demographer from the University of Turin, and three of her colleagues compared the situation of women in Italy and the Netherlands. They found that a greater percentage of Dutch women than Italian women are in the work force but that, at the same time, the fertility rate in the Netherlands is significantly higher (1.73 compared to 1.33).
In both countries, people tend to have traditional views about gender roles, but Italian society is considerably more conservative in this regard, and this seems to be a decisive difference. The hypothesis the sociologists set out to test was borne out by the data: women who do more than 75 percent of the housework and child care are less likely to want to have another child than women whose husbands or partners share the load. Put differently, Dutch fathers change more diapers, pick up more kids after soccer practice and clean up the living room more often than Italian fathers; therefore, relative to the population, there are more Dutch babies than Italian babies being born. As Mencarini said, “It’s about how much the man participates in child care.”
The broad answer to the “Where are all the European babies?” question thus begins to suggest itself. Accompanying the spectacular transformation of modern society since the 1960s — notably the changing role of women, with greater opportunities for education and employment, the advent of modern birth control and a new ability to tailor a lifestyle — has been a tension between forces that, in many places, have not been reconciled. That tension is perfectly apparent, of course. Ask any working mother. But some societies have done a better job than others of reconciling the conflicting forces. In Europe, many countries with greater gender equality have a greater social commitment to day care and other institutional support for working women, which gives those women the possibility of having second or third children.
This is a crucial difference between the north — including France and the United Kingdom and the Scandinavian countries — and the south. The Scandinavian countries have both the most vigorous social-welfare systems in Europe and — at 1.8 — among the highest fertility rates.
To better understand this north-south divide, I met with two sociologists who personify it: Mencarini and Arnstein Aassve, a Norwegian who last year took a position at Bocconi University, a university in Milan that is becoming a center of demographic research in Europe. Demographically speaking, the two make an interesting contrast. She is a small, dark, fiery woman from southern Tuscany, given to spicing her analysis with passionate invective toward policy makers. He is a tall, reserved Scandinavian who speaks in calm tones and with precise British diction, tending to smooth his colleague’s edges with scholarly qualifications. Over lunch of linguine with walnuts and arugula at an airily modern neighborhood trattoria in Milan, they dissected their cultures.
When Aassve moved from Norway to Italy last year to study fertility issues, he said, he found himself with a case of culture whiplash. As women advanced in education levels and career tracks over the past few decades, Norway moved aggressively to accommodate them and their families. The state guarantees about 54 weeks of maternity leave, as well as 6 weeks of paternity leave. With the birth of a child comes a government payment of about 4,000 euros.
State-subsidized day care is standard. The cost of living is high, but then again it’s assumed that both parents will work; indeed, during maternity leave a woman is paid 80 percent of her salary. “In Norway, the concern over fertility is mild,” Aassve told me. “What dominates is the issue of gender equity, and that in turn raises the fertility level. For example, there is a debate right now about whether to make paternity leave compulsory. It’s an issue of making sure women and men have equal rights and opportunities. If men are taking leave after the birth of a child, the women can return to work for part of that time.”
What Aassve found in Italy was strikingly different. While Italian women tend to be as highly educated as Scandinavian women, he said, about 50 percent of Italian women work, compared with between 75 percent and 80 percent of women in Scandinavian countries. Despite its veneer of modernity, Italian society prefers women to stay at home after they become mothers, and the government reinforces this.
There is little state-financed child care, especially for new mothers, and most newlyweds still find homes close to one or both sets of parents, the assumption being that the extended family will help raise the children. But this no longer works as it once did. “As couples tend to delay childbearing,” Aassve says, “the age gap between generations is widening, and in many cases grandparents, who would be the ones relied upon for child care, themselves become the ones in need of care.”
Meanwhile, the same economic forces are at work in both northern and southern Europe — it’s just as hard to make ends meet in Madrid or Milan or Athens as in Oslo or Stockholm — which gives the predominantly two-income families in the northern countries an edge. This in turn leads to another disparity between north and south. In Scandinavia, thanks in part to state support, the more children a family has, the wealthier it is likely to be, whereas in southern Europe having children is a financial sinkhole, which drags a family toward poverty. Such an analysis flies in the face of social conservatives, who argue that simply encouraging people to have more babies will raise the population and add fuel to the economic engine.
If this reading of southern European countries is correct — that their superficial commitment to modernity, to a 21st-century lifestyle, is fatally at odds with a view of the family structure that is rooted in the 19th century — it should apply in other parts of the world, should it not? Apparently it does. This spring, the Japanese government released figures showing that the country’s under-14 population was the lowest since 1908. The head of Thailand’s department of health announced in May that his country’s birthrate now stands at 1.5, far below the replacement level.
“The world record for lowest-low fertility right now is South Korea, at 1.1,” Francesco Billari told me. “Japan is just about as low. What we are seeing in Asia is a phenomenon of the 2000s, rather than the 1990s. And it seems the reasons are the same as for southern Europe. All of these are societies still rooted in the tradition where the husband earned all the money. Things have changed, not only in Italy and Spain but also in Japan and Korea, but those societies have not yet adjusted. The relationships within households have not adjusted yet.” Western Europe, then, is not the isolated case that some make it out to be. It is simply the first region of the world to record extremely low birthrates.
WHICH BRINGS US TO A sparkling exception. Last year the fertility rate in the United States hit 2.1, the highest it has been since the 1960s and higher than almost anywhere in the developed world. Factor in immigration and you have a nation that is far more than holding its own in terms of population. In 1984 the U.S. Census Bureau projected that in the year 2050 the U.S. population would be 309 million. In 2008 it’s already 304 million, and the new projection for 2050 is 420 million.
“Europeans say to me, How does the U.S. do it in this day and age?” says Carl Haub of the Population Reference Bureau in Washington. According to Haub and others, there is no single explanation for the relatively high U.S. fertility rate. The old conservative argument — that a traditional, working-husband-and-stay-at-home-wife family structure produces a healthy, growing population — doesn’t apply, either in the U.S. or anywhere else in the world today. Indeed, the societies most wedded to maintaining that traditional family structure seem to be those with the lowest birthrates.
The antidote, in Western Europe, has been the welfare-state model, in which the state provides comprehensive support to couples that want to have children. But the U.S. runs counter to this. Some commentators explain its healthy birthrate in terms of the relatively conservative and religiously oriented nature of American society, which both encourages larger families. It’s also true that mores have evolved in the U.S. to the point where not only is it socially acceptable for fathers to be active participants in raising children, but it’s also often socially unacceptable for them to do otherwise.
But one other factor affecting the higher U.S. birthrate stands out in the minds of many observers. “There’s much less flexibility in the European system,” Haub says. “In Europe, both the society and the job market are more rigid.” There may be little state subsidy for child care in the U.S., and there is certainly nothing like the warm governmental nest that Norway feathers for fledgling families, but the American system seems to make up for it in other ways.
As Hans-Peter Kohler of the University of Pennsylvania writes: “In general, women are deterred from having children when the economic cost — in the form of lower lifetime wages — is too high. Compared to other high-income countries, this cost is diminished by an American labor market that allows more flexible work hours and makes it easier to leave and then re-enter the labor force.” An American woman might choose to suspend her career for three or five years to raise a family, expecting to be able to resume working; that happens far less easily in Europe.
So there would seem to be two models for achieving higher fertility: the neosocialist Scandinavian system and the laissez-faire American one. Aassve put it to me this way: “You might say that in order to promote fertility, your society needs to be generous or flexible. The U.S. isn’t very generous, but it is flexible. Italy is not generous in terms of social services and it’s not flexible. There is also a social stigma in countries like Italy, where it is seen as less socially accepted for women with children to work. In the U.S., that is very accepted.”
By this logic, the worst sort of system is one that partly buys into the modern world — expanding educational and employment opportunities for women — but keeps its traditional mind-set. This would seem to define the demographic crisis that Italy, Spain and Greece find themselves in — and, perhaps, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and other parts of the world.
Indeed, demographers have been surprised to find rapid fertility changes in the third world, as more and more women work and modern birth-control methods become standard options. “The earlier distinct fertility regimes, ‘developed’ and ‘developing,’ are increasingly disappearing in global comparisons of fertility levels,” according to Edward Jow-Ching Tu, a sociologist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. According to the United Nations, the birthrate in 25 developing countries — including Cuba, Costa Rica, Iran, Sri Lanka and China — now stands at or below the replacement level. In some cases — notably China — the drop is explained by a concentrated effort at containing the population. In the rest, something else is happening. The lesson of southern Europe is perhaps operative: embrace the modern only partway and you put your society — women in particular — in a vise. Something has to give, and that turns out to be the future.
FOR $100 OR SO YOU CAN buy online a Third Reich “Mother’s Cross” (officially, a Cross of Honor of the German Mother). The medals were struck, beginning in 1938, in bronze for women who had four children, in silver for mothers of six and in gold for women who gave birth to eight. They were given out annually on Hitler’s mother’s birthday to heroines of the cause of fertility, which the Führer referred to as “the battlefield of women.” Natalism — the state-sponsored policy to increase the birthrate — has a rather tainted pedigree. Nevertheless, in the age of “lowest-low fertility,” it has made a comeback. If your population is falling, one logical, or seemingly logical, way to build it up again is to encourage people to have more babies.
Appeals to patriotism are one means of encouragement. Money is another. Mayor Falivena of Laviano is not the only one doling out cash for babies. Natalist plans in effect today in Europe include tax incentives, state-subsidized child care and both onetime and ongoing payments. The Netherlands, for an example of the latter, gives every family a kinderbijslag, or child supplement, of an average of about $1,300 per child per year to age 13, and less thereafter. (While not a direct cash payment, the U.S. has a per-child tax credit of $1,000 a year.)
While some of those pushing natalist policies have nationalistic or religious motivations — and a driving concern to preserve cultural identity — few advocate a return to stay-at-home motherhood. Indeed, as David Willetts declared in a 2003 speech on Europe’s shrinking and aging population, “Feminism is the new natalism.” That is, even conservatives like Willetts acknowledge that societies that support working couples have higher birthrates than those in which mothers are housewives.
The problem is that nobody is sure if natalist policies have much of an impact on birthrate, let alone on population. Most studies show an uptick in the birthrate in countries that implement some pro-child program, but a very small one. Perhaps the most comprehensive study to date, which was conducted in 1997 and analyzed 22 countries, found that a 25 percent increase in child-related subsidies to couples resulted in an average of 0.07 more births per woman. Some experts conclude that — as the case of Laviano seems to suggest — the real impact is on the timing of births: a woman who knows she wants to have another child may do so sooner in order to take advantage of a payment.
In 2003, the same year Falivena introduced his 10,000-euro “baby bonus,” Italy adopted a national policy of offering 1,000 euros to every mother who had a second child. (Falivena hastened to tell me that his policy came first.) But when the Berlusconi government fell in 2006, the national scheme was dropped. Then, in his first address on returning to power in 2008, Berlusconi suggested that the government might revive natalist programs. Letizia Mencarini invoked this back-and-forthing with disdain: “A policy for families has to be implemented over a long period. In Italy we’re changing our minds all the time.”
France would seem to provide one example in support of natalist policies; if so, it may be the comprehensive and long-term nature of French commitment that proves decisive. After World War I, with the population decimated, a public outcry and debate led to the government’s weaving natalist policies into the social fabric. The 1939 “code de la famille,” included financial incentives for motherhood. While Germany moved far away from its tainted natalist policies after the war, France kept its programs alive throughout the 20th century.
Today, they run from tax breaks to the carte famille nombreuse, or “large-family card,” which gives discounts on travel and museum entrances. According to Claude Martin, a research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research, France has one of Europe’s highest birthrates, at 1.9. Martin says that this may be because of “the permanent public investment to facilitate conciliation between work and child-care responsibility.”
Then again, for the past several decades France’s fertility rate has been about the same as that in the United Kingdom, which has much more limited pro-natalist policies. Claude Martin notes an adjunct to child-related subsidies that may be more of a factor: 80 percent of French women between ages 25 and 50 are employed. It seems that money in itself isn’t a sufficient lure to get couples to have babies. They may want another child, but adding a few euros to their bank accounts doesn’t solve the underlying problems. As Alasdair Murray of CentreForum put it, “Structural problems in the labor and housing markets are the biggest barriers to fertility.” The crux, Murray says, is that countries with low fertility “are still geared toward a male, single-wage-earning model. Women are expected to exit the labor market when they have children.”
Besides natalist strategies, there is another obvious approach to increasing the population. If you can’t breed them, lure them. The population flow largely went the other way during the first half of the 20th century, but immigration is quickly transforming European societies. Some are looking to Canada or Australia as models: there, the focus is on selective immigration — opening the door for those who have knowledge and training that will benefit the economy.
The United Kingdom is going through a radical transformation in its social makeup, largely as a result of immigration. Where a few years ago people were worrying about birthrate and falling population projections, a government report in late 2007 projected Britain would have 11 million more people by 2031 — an increase of 18 percent — and by one estimate 69 percent of the growth would come from immigrants and their children. Liam Byrne, Britain’s immigration minister, called earlier last year for “radical action” to manage the system.
The British situation today seems a far cry from “lowest low,” but it doesn’t mean that immigration is the answer to low birthrates. The actual numbers, according to several authorities, are discouraging over the long run. By one analysis of U.N. figures, Britain would need more than 60 million new immigrants by 2050 — more than doubling the size of the country — to keep its current ratio of workers to pensioners, and Germany would need a staggering 188 million immigrants in the same time period.
One reason for such huge numbers is that while immigration helps fill cities and schools and factories in the short term, the dynamic adjusts over time. Immigrants who come from cultures where large families are standard quickly adapt to the customs of their new homes. And eventually immigrants age, too, so that the benefit that incoming workers give to the pension system today becomes a drag on the system in the future. A European Commission working document published in November 2007 concludes that “truly massive and increasing flows of young migrants would be required” to offset current demographic changes. Few Europeans want that. Immigration already touches all sorts of raw nerves, forcing debates about cultural identity, citizenship tests, national canons, terrorism and tolerance, religious versus secular values.
Meanwhile, in the midst of arguments about natalist and immigration policies come other voices and more elemental questions. Is it even possible to increase the population significantly? Is it even necessary? There are those who think that “lowest low” is not in itself a looming disaster but more of a challenge, even an opportunity. The change that’s required, they say, is not in breeding habits but thinking habits.
ONE DAY IN MARCH, I was standing on a platform at the top of a smokestack attached to a defunct sausage factory in the German city of Dessau, looking out on a ragged urban landscape: derelict factory buildings, brick homes and shops, a railroad track snaking through a swath of grass and dirt. Even the brilliant spring weather didn’t improve the view. But the bearish middle-aged man beside me was full of enthusiasm. He waved an arm expansively, indicating a distant tree line. “From here you see that the city is embedded in a protected nature area,” he said through an interpreter. “We will bring that into the city.” Listening to Karl Gröger, director of the city’s department of building, is disorienting; where local politicians are supposed to cheer development, he was standing in the midst of his city’s industrial infrastructure and saying, in effect, “Someday all of this will be wilderness.”
Like Laviano, Dessau is a harbinger of the demographic decline the rest of Europe faces. But where Rocco Falivena went natalist in an attempt to confront the issue of decline head-on, a consortium of 17 cities in this part of Germany has adopted a more innovative strategy. A decade or so after the fall of the Berlin Wall, politicians and town planners in eastern Germany were forced to realize that the growth they were expecting with the turn to capitalism and representative government wasn’t coming. They were in the crosswinds of two European phenomena: the economic malaise of the former Communist states and plummeting birthrates across the Continent.
“This was the first time in human history that cities started to shrink rather than grow,” Dr. Karl-Heinz Daehre, minister of land development and traffic for the province of Saxony-Anhalt, told me — with a trace of hyperbole — as we sat in his office in the provincial capital of Magdeburg. “There was a mental barrier that people had to overcome, that we had to tear down parts of our cities in order to grow, or to move forward. We understood that this wasn’t a Saxony-Anhalt problem, or even a German problem, but was part of an international problem. So we sought help.”
It so happens that Dessau is the city where, in 1926, the architect Walter Gropius planted the Bauhaus school of design, which embraced — and to some extent defined — Modernism and tried to mesh design and architecture with the ways people lived and worked in the 20th century. “Nothing seemed more logical to us than to remember the 1920s and Gropius and the Bauhaus,” Daehre said.
The original Bauhaus building still stands in Dessau. It is sleek and cool and simple, with retro touches that remind you of every 1950s-era school building, every mid- or late-20th century office or factory, because it is in a sense the granddaddy of them all. The current director of the Bauhaus Institute, Omar Akbar, greeted me in his office there. Akbar is a dapper man and a gentle visionary who was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, and immigrated with his parents to Germany as a small boy. He talked about the high-flying ideals of Gropius and his colleagues, and how their approach to design was so revolutionary it became politically dangerous (it was considered “un-German” by the Nazis).
Akbar said that after officials approached him, he came to see the demographic challenges of Europe as a renewed opportunity for the Bauhaus Institute, a chance for it once again to play a role in defining the modern. “We said to the government of Saxony-Anhalt, ‘Shrinkage is a completely new phenomenon,’ ” Akbar told me. “We have to look for new ways to deal with it.” According to some, a declining population presents certain opportunities: to increase efficiency and livability, to change lifestyle and environment for the better. The plan that Akbar’s team came up with was for 18 cities in the region (two cities now share one government) to submit to an exhaustive process of review and soul-searching under the direction of Bauhaus planners and, by the year 2010, to come up with long-term redevelopment strategies appropriate to each — to find a way for each city to shrink constructively.
Dessau itself, Akbar said, had two distinctive features. One, as Karl Gröger indicated from the sausage-factory lookout, is that it is surrounded by protected national forest. The other is that it has no historic town center (80 percent of the city was destroyed in World War II) and thus no core. The plan, therefore, calls for demolishing underused sections of the city and weaving the nature on the periphery into the center: to create “urban islands set in a landscaped zone,” as Sonja Beeck, a Bauhaus planner, told me. “That will make the remaining urban areas denser and more alive.”
The city has lost 25 percent of its population in recent years. “That means it is 25 percent too big,” Gröger said. “So far we have erased 2,500 flats from the map, and we have 8,000 more to go.” Beeck and Gröger walked with me through an area where a whole street had been turned into a grassy sward. Many residents were dubious at first, they told me, but as we walked, a woman recognized the government official and marched up to chat about when promised trees and flowers would be planted in front of her building.
Eisleben, another of the cities in the consortium, has a picture-perfect 16th-century downtown but is losing people fast, and many of its historic buildings have been long unused and uninhabitable. Eisleben’s shrinkage strategy centers on history: it happens to be the birthplace of Martin Luther. The city is laying out a tourist route — from the house in which Luther was born to his first church to the church in which he gave the last sermon before he died — that shows off its old center and turns its many derelict buildings and empty lots into art installations related to the father of Protestantism.
The idea is to attract more tourists and money and build up the locals’ pride in their history. There is a certain paradox here: thanks to its Communist heritage, this part of Germany has the distinction of being one of the least religious places on earth. Eisleben gets 100,000 religious pilgrims a year, but only 14 percent of its population are churchgoers, and hardly anybody expects a turnaround.
But while few locals themselves may feel religiously inclined, the thinking is that if religious pilgrimage is the best card in your hand, you play it. This notion — embrace shrinkage in order to revitalize your economy, rather than trying to coax women to have more babies — is, according to more than a few observers of the European scene, the right tack. Or better said, it is one part of the best overall strategy — one that embraces population decline.
For there are those who argue that low birthrate in itself is not a problem at all. Paul Ehrlich, the Stanford scientist who warned us about the “population bomb” in the 1960s, is more certain than ever that the human race is catastrophically straining the planet. “It’s insane to consider low birthrate as a crisis,” he told me. “Basically every person I know in my section of the National Academy of Sciences thinks it’s wonderful that rich countries are starting to shrink their populations to sustainable levels. We have to do that because we’re wrecking our life-support systems.”
Low birthrates and an aging population, according to Vladimir Spidla, director of employment, social affairs and equal opportunities for the European Commission, “is the inevitable consequence of developments that are fundamentally positive, in particular increased life expectancy and more choice over whether and when to have children.”
Alasdair Murray of CentreForum made the case this way: “There is an error whereby birthrate is being blamed for future economic woes. The European population is declining, and I don’t see that you can do much about that. But the real question is: How necessary is population growth to economic growth? I say not much. A huge number of people in Europe are underemployed or out of work. Get them back in the labor force, and some of these problems are mitigated. That should be the first target, rather than getting people pregnant.”
To this end, there are efforts afoot to increase working life at both ends of the spectrum. In the Netherlands, for example, where thanks to early-retirement plans, only 20 percent of people over age 60 are working, the government has recently mounted a campaign to get people used to the idea of working to age 65.
Those inclined to see the glass as half-full include some people who are closest to the numbers. James W. Vaupel, founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, looking in particular at Germany’s demographic status, is downright sunny on the future. He, too, says that the shrinking and graying of European societies is inevitable, but he suggests that “on balance, the future will probably be better than the past. People will probably live longer, healthier lives. Continued economic growth, even if at a slower pace than in the past, will further raise standards of living.”
I put this to Carl Haub of the Population Reference Bureau, who monitors global fertility on a daily basis from his perch in Washington. Is it possible that these are basically “good problems,” that Europeans, having trimmed their birthrates, are actually on the right path? That all they have to do is adjust their economies, find creative ways to shrink their cities, get more young and old people into jobs, so that they can keep their pension and health-care systems functioning?
Haub wasn’t buying it. “Maybe tinkering with the retirement age and making other economic adjustments is good,” he said. “But you can’t go on forever with a total fertility rate of 1.2. If you compare the size of the 0-to-4 and 29-to-34 age groups in Spain and Italy right now, you see the younger is almost half the size of the older. You can’t keep going with a completely upside-down age distribution, with the pyramid standing on its point. You can’t have a country where everybody lives in a nursing home.”
Russell Shorto is a contributing writer for the magazine. His most recent book, “Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason,” will be published in October.
***
Monday, June 30, 2008
Idiotic Filth from Degenerate Hollywood: The Love Guru
The Love Guru
by MARYANN JOHANSON
http://www.inlander.com/bigscreen/98760953484886.php
It's not enough, these days, if you want to make a stupid, crass, juvenile movie, merely to be stupid, crass, and juvenile: Everyone's doing that, and a filmmaker likes to distinguish himself, right? So here we have the next step in taking movies to levels so new and so base that they stand apart — though only by making other stupid, crass, juvenile movies look good by comparison.
There's little point in complaining, for instance, that The Love Guru is positively infested with toilet humor, with nonstop references to the male sexual organ apparently aimed at those who are unfamiliar with its general characteristics and several uses. That's just par for the course these days at the multiplex. You're getting a little closer to the new low here if you ask, pondering one of the movie's many imponderables, "How can a man wearing a metal chastity belt get punched in the nuts?"
Here's the thing: The Love Guru isn't merely endlessly crude: It's also dishonest and contemptuous of itself. And thank you so much, Mike Myers, for making me have to concede that there's something nice to be said about many of the other recent movies rife with poop jokes and adolescent terror of all things sexual: At least they were honest about it. But Guru doesn't even believe in itself. All those other idiot movies are at least genuine in their mission to be stupid, crass and juvenile. Guru resorts to tittering over penises fully aware that it has nothing else to offer, even though it would like to, and is hoping you won't notice while you're tittering over penises.
Myers' Guru Pitka — who's supposed to be America's No. 2 self-help sage, after Deepak Chopra — doesn't ring true in any sense of the word, even as the protagonists of dumb comedies go. You'd have to be a lobotomized squirrel to find anything meaningful or uplifting in Pitka, yet we're supposed to accept that this is the case for millions of Pitka's fans. Pitka introduces the movie by telling us this will be the story about "my most resistant student who became my greatest teacher ... or some such bullshit." Myers — who wrote the script with Graham Gordy — is telling us right there not to believe a word of any of this, that it's all a joke, though not in the way that it's meant to be a joke. If they can't even be bothered to take themselves seriously — and comedy is certainly serious business, or should be, if it's going to work — then why should we?
Pitka is all nonstop sexual innuendo and not a whit of spirituality, not even phony spirituality — he doesn't even pretend to be what his fans are supposed to believe he is. He's Austin Powers disguised as a guru, not an actual guru. But Powers' randiness in the hands of an actual guru is icky. Really, really icky, in that way that pedophile priests are particularly wrong — and Myers leering as Pitka is truly disturbing. It's not even as if Pitka's obsession with the scatological were his path to transcendence, which could be funny, too, if it were done right. It's that there's absolutely nothing transcendent about Pitka at all. (Rated PG-13).
***
Production "Credits"
Director - Marco Schnabel
Screenplay - Mike Myers
Producer - Mike Myers
Executive Producer - Roger Birnbaum
Co-Producer - Josh Bratman
Company Information
Paramount Pictures - Studio
***
by MARYANN JOHANSON
http://www.inlander.com/bigscreen/98760953484886.php
It's not enough, these days, if you want to make a stupid, crass, juvenile movie, merely to be stupid, crass, and juvenile: Everyone's doing that, and a filmmaker likes to distinguish himself, right? So here we have the next step in taking movies to levels so new and so base that they stand apart — though only by making other stupid, crass, juvenile movies look good by comparison.
There's little point in complaining, for instance, that The Love Guru is positively infested with toilet humor, with nonstop references to the male sexual organ apparently aimed at those who are unfamiliar with its general characteristics and several uses. That's just par for the course these days at the multiplex. You're getting a little closer to the new low here if you ask, pondering one of the movie's many imponderables, "How can a man wearing a metal chastity belt get punched in the nuts?"
Here's the thing: The Love Guru isn't merely endlessly crude: It's also dishonest and contemptuous of itself. And thank you so much, Mike Myers, for making me have to concede that there's something nice to be said about many of the other recent movies rife with poop jokes and adolescent terror of all things sexual: At least they were honest about it. But Guru doesn't even believe in itself. All those other idiot movies are at least genuine in their mission to be stupid, crass and juvenile. Guru resorts to tittering over penises fully aware that it has nothing else to offer, even though it would like to, and is hoping you won't notice while you're tittering over penises.
Myers' Guru Pitka — who's supposed to be America's No. 2 self-help sage, after Deepak Chopra — doesn't ring true in any sense of the word, even as the protagonists of dumb comedies go. You'd have to be a lobotomized squirrel to find anything meaningful or uplifting in Pitka, yet we're supposed to accept that this is the case for millions of Pitka's fans. Pitka introduces the movie by telling us this will be the story about "my most resistant student who became my greatest teacher ... or some such bullshit." Myers — who wrote the script with Graham Gordy — is telling us right there not to believe a word of any of this, that it's all a joke, though not in the way that it's meant to be a joke. If they can't even be bothered to take themselves seriously — and comedy is certainly serious business, or should be, if it's going to work — then why should we?
Pitka is all nonstop sexual innuendo and not a whit of spirituality, not even phony spirituality — he doesn't even pretend to be what his fans are supposed to believe he is. He's Austin Powers disguised as a guru, not an actual guru. But Powers' randiness in the hands of an actual guru is icky. Really, really icky, in that way that pedophile priests are particularly wrong — and Myers leering as Pitka is truly disturbing. It's not even as if Pitka's obsession with the scatological were his path to transcendence, which could be funny, too, if it were done right. It's that there's absolutely nothing transcendent about Pitka at all. (Rated PG-13).
***
Production "Credits"
Director - Marco Schnabel
Screenplay - Mike Myers
Producer - Mike Myers
Executive Producer - Roger Birnbaum
Co-Producer - Josh Bratman
Company Information
Paramount Pictures - Studio
***
Friday, June 27, 2008
New Book by David Irving: Online and Free of Charge
"Banged Up: Survival as a Political Prisoner in 21st Century Europe" This is a memoir of English historian David Irving's 400 days in solitary confinement in Austria's oldest jail, convicted under a 1945 Stalin-era law because of a lecture in history he had delivered in Vienna sixteen years before.
***
Israeli Settlers Advocate Gas Chambers for Palestinians
Graffiti which Zionazi Israeli settlers painted on a wall in Hebron, according to the former Prime Minister of Holland, Andreas "Dries" Van AgtDutch 'Jimmy Carter' accuses Israel of terrorism in new book
By Cnaan Liphshiz, Haaretz | June 27, 2008
The emotion in Andreas Van Agt's voice as he lambastes Israel's behavior seems puzzling for a man of his status. It is especially intriguing when one is reminded that this blue-eyed professed idealist is an astute statesman who presided as the Dutch prime minister for five years, until 1982.
"My involvement in the Middle East is certainly unusual," Van Agt confessed in an interview with Haaretz at his home in Nijmegen, where he discussed Israel, the Palestinians, European foreign policy, the Holocaust and anti-Semitism.
Currently, Van Agt is writing a book about the Israeli-Arab conflict. In December he launched an info-site (www.driesvanagt.nl) about the subject, in which he accuses Israel of brutal treatment of the Palestinians, violating international law and implementing racist policies.
Among other illustrations, the site contains one snapshot of a graffiti slogan said to have been sprayed by Jewish settlers on a Hebron wall, reading: "Arabs to the gas chambers."
Last year, Van Agt spoke as keynote speaker at a controversial solidarity rally with the Palestinian people in Rotterdam, where he lamented the Dutch boycott of Hamas, calling it wrong "and even stupid." He has also been outspoken in accusing the Israel Defense Forces of acting like a terrorist organization.
"In my country, people are highly surprised by my demeanor. Some even say it should be ascribed to my advanced age; that I'm not fully in my right mind anymore," the 77-year-old says with a snicker while sitting under the outdated portrait of the Queen, which hangs on the wall of his modern-style, taupe-colored den.
Van Agt hails from the ranks of the ruling party, the Christian Democratic Appeal. Such statements about Israel can therefore be seen as embarrassing for the current leadership, which is considered one of Israel's staunchest supporters in the European Union.
When Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen was asked earlier this year during a visit to Israel whether he regarded the statements by the former premier as embarrassing to the government, his first response was a hearty laugh. He then distanced himself from the former leader. "Dries Van Agt represents the opinion of one man: Dries Van Agt," Verhagen told Haaretz.
Van Agt nonetheless maintains his statements are embarrassing to CDA top-brass, adding that the embarrassment is not an undesirable effect as far as he is concerned. "I could say that maybe what I'm doing is not as embarrassing to them as it should be," he says.
His penchant for criticizing Israel to varying degrees of acrimoniousness was not characteristic of his term in office. "The Dutch Jimmy Carter", as local media sometimes dub him, says he became vocal after 1999, when his "eyes were opened" during a traditional catholic pilgrimage trip to religious sites in the Holy Land.
"I'm driven partly by my shame for not speaking up for the Palestinians when I was in power, and partly by some striking experiences I had when visiting the Occupied Territories in the recent past," he says. "People often ask me how come I'm so outspoken now, but did not speak up when I was in a position of power. And it's true, I never spoke up for the Palestinians, except for when Sabra and Shatila happened. And even that was in soft terms."
Van Agt says he is still "ashamed" that he made effort to sooth matters for Israel after the 1982 massacre of hundreds of Palestinian refugees by Lebanese Christian militiamen in an IDF-controlled area of Lebanon. "That was my inclination, that was how I was mentally structured vis-à-vis Israel at the time," he says.
But much more than Sabra and Shatila, it was the story of one Palestinian young man from Bethlehem which put Van Agt on his present course, according to the ex-premier.
"In one of my visits to Bethlehem I heard a story, which now I know is just one of many," Van Agt recalls. "It was a story horrendous humiliation of a Palestinian student trying to get to university for a collective exam. His story, which the university president told me, struck me like lightening."
At the last IDF checkpoint on the way, according to the story which Van Agt says he heard from the university president, the student was pulled over and ordered to climb out of the window. "Then the humiliation began. He fell down and was then ordered to walk on hands and feet and bark. Then the soldiers laughed about the Palestinians all being dogs."
That story, Van Agt says, served to undermine his former conviction that "everything which Israel does is what it needs to do for its survival." It launched him into the problem, he says.
"I began studying, figuring out what's going on there. I found one story after the other. Then I started thinking about the 39 United Nations resolutions begging, demanding and imploring Israel to vacate the Occupied Territories. All were dismissed by Israel. Saddam Hussein was attacked after four resolutions, but Israel got 39 and nobody talks about applying even the slightest pressure on Israel to comply with them," he complains.
Europeans, he says, have a political obligation toward the Palestinians which they have overlooked. "All the other Arabs, in some way or another, happy or unhappy, dictatorial or not, have their only states. The only Arabs that never got a state were the Palestinians. That has to do with the former colonialist powers, the U.K. and France."
The second reason for his feeling of commitment toward the Palestinians, Van Agt says, is that "without the worst crime in the history of humanity, the Holocaust, the Shoa, Israel would not have come into existence in that time and in that formula."
Most Western nations, he says, are in some form complicit in the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis, be it by denying shelter for Jewish refugees, or collaborating with the Germans. This resulted in guilt which prompted Europeans "to sacrifice the Palestinians for Israel," he proposes. "The Palestinians paid the price for something they were not responsible for. That is my drive," he says after a short dramatic pause. "And the emotions you see are real and authentic, and they stem from this injustice."
The self-proclaimed commitment that European nations have for democracy, Van Agt argues, means that they should recognize Hamas as a legitimate representative of the Palestinians. "It is not Hamas' government which is illegitimate," he says, alluding to Hamas' victory in the 2006 elections over Fatah. "It is counterproductive and unwise not to talk to Hamas - also because the legitimacy of the current government in Ramallah is questionable."
The three conditions for recognizing Hamas as stipulated by Israel and the Quartet strike Van Agt as stupid. "The first requirement, that Hamas recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state is biased because Israel does not recognize Hamas' right to rule. Where's the reciprocity there?" he complains. Besides, he says, "Israel has never defined its own borders, so demanding Hamas to recognize an entity without clear borders is totally unreasonable."
The demand that Hamas honor the Palestinian Authority's past agreements with Israel is also unpalatable to Van Agt, on the grounds that they were not signed and conducted by a democratically elected, and hence legitimate, regime. To him, the Palestinian Authority consists of a bunch of small, fragmented Bantustans," he says.
"The Oslo Accords and the talks that followed were the most self-defeating thing Arafat had ever done," the former premier observes. "The Accords didn't provide any guarantees to the Palestinians and were not based on international law. And Abbas is continuing with this endeavor which runs contrary to the rights and interests of the Palestinians."
As for the third demand, which is to renounce violence, Van Agt says: "First of all, Israel is still employing violence, so again there's no reciprocity. But besides that, since when does international law renounce the right of occupied people to resist the occupying power?"
When the subject of Hamas' own debatable level of commitment to democratic values comes up - along with the question of whether the Islamist organization should be afforded the protection of a set of values that it does not honor ? Van Agt acknowledges that "things could be better."
He adds: "Hamas' behavior is reason for great concern, that's right. But it's ignorant to judge how Hamas is ruling without taking into account the impossible conditions in Gaza, the biggest prison in the world."
Hamas' suicide bombings are "illegal and detestable" to Van Agt, he says, but he would only agree to call Hamas a terrorist organization if the definition is applied to the Israeli army as well. "If one party is called a terrorist entity because it carries out deliberate attacks against civilians to pursue political goals, then the Israeli army is guilty of state terrorism. That needs to be said, too. Human rights organizations report that the Israeli army has killed more than 3000 Palestinian civilians since the beginning of the second Intifada."
Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin, he recalls, "introduced the bombing of civilians as a military tactic in the run up to the establishment of Israel, and were therefore called terrorists."
The perceived failure of Israel's neighbors to live up to Western standards of democracy is also a result of their conflict with Israel, according to Van Agt. "Maybe I'm a naïve idealist, but I think that if Israel had not evolved into being a disaster for its neighbors then they would behave much batter. Not perfectly, not to the full standard, but much better. I cannot help but put much of the blame on Israel itself, and the pressure that it has placed on its neighboring countries."
However, Van Agt is willing to acknowledge that Israel is currently fighting extremist Muslim groups who are also committed to the destruction of societies like the Netherlands.
In Van Agt's eyes, Israel "is not behaving like a country that deserves to be called a member of the family of civilized nations." This observation applies to the U.S. too, he says, "which is co-responsible for the injustice we have been facing for decades."
According to Van Agt, Israel is making frequent and excessive use of deadly force against the Palestinians. This accusation has been seen as hypocritical of Van Agt by some pro-Zionist detractors in the Netherlands, most notably by the Hague-based Center for Information and Documentation (CIDI.)
In 1977, when Van Agt was justice minister, a group of Moluccan militants seeking autonomy for their group of Indonesian islands hijacked a train in northeast Holland and took its 50 passengers hostage for 20 days. Rather than resolve the situation through dialogue, Van Agt voted in favor of a military operation that left six of the nine hijackers dead, along with two hostages.
The analogy between the use of force in the Moluccan hijacking case and use of force by Israelis against Palestinians is farfetched, Van Agt says. "Given the same set of circumstances, I would still authorize the use of force," he says.
According to his account, it was Van Agt who cast the deciding vote in favor of the action in a small forum of five.
"The prime minister was against the action and another minister was also opposed. I was for it along with two others. We had tried to negotiate for long enough - weeks.
The situation on the train, Van Agt recalls, was becoming critical." Doctors warned us that people on the train might have heart attacks. There was also the possibility that someone might go berserk and attack one of the highjackers - and who knows what kind of bloodshed might have ensued. I would do the same exactly all over again."
The militants' demands nonetheless seem justified to Van Agt, he says. The South-Moluccans, who were seen by many Indonesians as collaborators with the Dutch colonizing power, came to Holland in the 1950s for a temporary stay. They had been promised by the Dutch government that they would get their own independent state, but felt betrayed after the Netherlands failed to deliver.
Over the years, several opinion-shapers, including the German writer and journalist Henryk Broder have accused Van Agt of anti-Semitism because of his criticism of Israel. People from organizations which are critical of Israel and regularly confer with Van Agt, like "A Different Jewish Voice" and United Civilians for Peace, say he is anything but anti-Semitic.
He says he has had to face the accusation because "It's the most effective way of keeping countless others from following my example and speaking about what they really feel."
The accusers, however, allege Van Agt demonstrated anti-Semitism before he became so involved with the Palestinian cause. In 1972, one year after he left his position as a lecturer on criminal law to become justice minister, Van Agt sparked a heated debate by attempting to pardon the last three Nazi war criminals still in Dutch prisons.
At a press conference that same year, he said to a journalist: "I am only an Aryan" in speaking about his intention to bring about the Nazi prisoners' release for health reasons.
"I was what is called a progressive thinker," Van Agt explains. "Now, in the last years of my life, I'm returning to that. I had some very modern ideas about the use and uselessness of applying criminal law sanctions. I have very serious doubts about the use, and hence justification, of detaining people for anything but the heaviest crimes."
"I had these kinds of ideas long before I came to a position of power. I wrote about them and promulgated them in books and articles. So that was nothing new. Then all of a sudden, to the surprise of everyone, including myself and my wife, I became justice minister. And that meant I got the problem of the three remaining Germans war criminals in Dutch prisons on my plate."
The two previous justice ministers, Teun Struycken and Carel Polak, also supported releasing the prisoners in principle, according to Van Agt. "Polak was one of the many highly gifted sons of the Jewish people", Van Agt says. "And justice minister Ivo Samkalden, also Jewish, had released one of the Dutch war criminals already in the 1960's."
"These ministers agreed that holding on to the prisoners was senseless," he adds. "I would still support their release if it happened today. They were of bad health, and one or two of them was senile. I still believe it's nonsense to keep a senile person in prison, and when detaining people doesn't make sense, then it's injustice."
Injustice in the case of the Nazi criminals was not the way to celebrate the reestablishment of Dutch constitutional state (Rechtstaat in Dutch) after the Nazi occupation, he argues. "It needed to be shown in its full potential. Keeping these people in jail served no legal purposes. Specific prevention? They couldn't even handle a pen. And as for general prevention, well, did anyone think the Germans would start another war if the prisoners were released?" Two of the Breda Three were released in 1989. A third died in the southern-Holland prison in 1979.
The famous "Aryan" statement, which grabbed headlines in 1972, needs to be understood in context, he says. "When I just got my appointment as a minister, the first thing I did was meet the press. I was totally inexperienced and green. It was a very informal cocktail party. I went around, mingled, made jokes and was basically having fun with the new friends to come."
Then the question came up. "I should have known it, but I was so naïve then. One journalist asked if I would act to end the continued detention of the three German prisoners. And then I made the gravest mistake. I said that even my Jewish predecessor was unsuccessful in getting them out of jail - 'and I'm only an Aryan.'"
Slowly shaking his head, Van Agt repeats the short explosive sentence. "It was made in self-deprecation. I was deriding myself, a style which has always characterized my presentations. But that wretched word was in the newspapers the next morning. One guy picked out that one sentence from that informal conversation."
The explanations eventually satisfied the Dutch electorate and the press, Van Agt says. "I hadn't heard about the story for 30 years, but when I started becoming critical of the state of Israel, it resurfaced in an effort to silence me. Those who criticize me and others who speak out, always target the person bearing the message. They are not interested in a fair and open debate. Kill the messenger, if you can't beat the message." In earnest tone of voice, he concludes: "I am definitely not an Anti-Semite."
Moreover, he says that no anti-Semite could ever reach a position of power in the Netherlands. "It's absolutely impossible. Even among those who have become highly critical of Israel's illegal policies, there is a deep respect for the Jewish people."
That respect, he says, has developed into a "deeply engrained consciousness of the contribution that European Jews have made over the years to European culture. No one with anti-Jewish sentiments could come to power here."
***
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Economy based on usury cannot provide for the people
"Some live by rapine...and some in usury." (Barclay, 1514)
Credit Crisis Moves Westward
R. W. FORSYTH
http://online.barrons.com
"...huge costs to insure GM and Ford's debt against default indicate the market's assessment of their financial conditions is perilous indeed. Which raises the obvious question in the post-Bear Stearns rescue world:
"What happens if GM and Ford find themselves out of cash with no sources of financing?
How does the Federal Reserve refuse the Detroit car makers when it provided financing for a Wall Street broker-dealer's takeover by the descendant of the Morgan Bank?
"The widely misquoted statement of former GM chief executive Charlie Wilson held that what was good for General Motors was good for the U.S. The precedent of the Chrysler loan guarantees from the federal government nearly three decades ago stands. If JPMorgan Chase got taxpayer backing to take over Bear Stearns, how can GM or Ford be denied?
"The sad truth about the American economy is that it has shifted from producing things to moving money; in other words, from manufacturing to finance. That's not only true in New York but even in Detroit. The profound consequences of this transition only now are becoming apparent." (End quote from Forsyth)
This is what we "manufacture" now in the era of NAFTA, the WTO and GATT:
"...the bigger issue is what kind of business is going to generate any return for its investors. When you can’t lend or trade — and you can’t invest with the leverage that juiced returns to support seven- and eight-figure bonuses — how exactly are you going to make money?" -Andrew Ross Sorkin, NY Times
This is how our Masters "make money" - through parasitic loans and fees on all those shylock transactions in Erewhon.
Attention "Christian" supporters of Bush and McCain - do you think usury is scriptural? Do you think that God agrees with predatory capitalism's motto - that greed is a virtue?
Does any sane person, religious or not, believe that a nation and a people can be sustained by usury?
USURY
1 .The fact or practice of lending money at interest. (The Oxford English Dictionary)
***
Credit Crisis Moves Westward
R. W. FORSYTH
http://online.barrons.com
"...huge costs to insure GM and Ford's debt against default indicate the market's assessment of their financial conditions is perilous indeed. Which raises the obvious question in the post-Bear Stearns rescue world:
"What happens if GM and Ford find themselves out of cash with no sources of financing?
How does the Federal Reserve refuse the Detroit car makers when it provided financing for a Wall Street broker-dealer's takeover by the descendant of the Morgan Bank?
"The widely misquoted statement of former GM chief executive Charlie Wilson held that what was good for General Motors was good for the U.S. The precedent of the Chrysler loan guarantees from the federal government nearly three decades ago stands. If JPMorgan Chase got taxpayer backing to take over Bear Stearns, how can GM or Ford be denied?
"The sad truth about the American economy is that it has shifted from producing things to moving money; in other words, from manufacturing to finance. That's not only true in New York but even in Detroit. The profound consequences of this transition only now are becoming apparent." (End quote from Forsyth)
This is what we "manufacture" now in the era of NAFTA, the WTO and GATT:
"...the bigger issue is what kind of business is going to generate any return for its investors. When you can’t lend or trade — and you can’t invest with the leverage that juiced returns to support seven- and eight-figure bonuses — how exactly are you going to make money?" -Andrew Ross Sorkin, NY Times
This is how our Masters "make money" - through parasitic loans and fees on all those shylock transactions in Erewhon.
Attention "Christian" supporters of Bush and McCain - do you think usury is scriptural? Do you think that God agrees with predatory capitalism's motto - that greed is a virtue?
Does any sane person, religious or not, believe that a nation and a people can be sustained by usury?
USURY
1 .The fact or practice of lending money at interest. (The Oxford English Dictionary)
***
Deir Yassin Remembered Member Pickets Synagogue
Deir Yassin Remembered (DYR) Board Member Henry Herskovitz Speaks Truth to Power at the Ann Arbor SynagogueOnce again, the country’s only weekly vigil is held in front of the synagogue where DYR member Henry Herskovitz is not allowed to address his fellow congregation members on the suffering caused by Zionists in the quest to build a Jewish state.
Henry’s local group, known as Jewish Witnesses for Peace and Friends, held their banner in front of the fortress-like Beth Israel Congregation in an effort to continue to support Torture Awareness Month, sponsored by the Interfaith Council for Peace and Justice.
Please visit: www.deiryassin.org
***
Saturday, June 21, 2008
News About Hoffman's book "Judaism Discovered"
COEUR D'ALENE, IDAHO - I have now, through God's assistance, completely finished Judaism Discovered, wherein I will present both to your judgment as well as my poor ability and other interloping employments would permit, the unlawfulness, paganism, and anti-gentile and anti-Biblical qualities and effects of Judaism.
What grounds is there in the Word of God for investing anyone with a Nebuchadnezzarean power over the Middle East, the US government, the media of mass communication, our educational system, and churches once Christian and now more aptly denominated as Churchianity?
The book will weigh nearly five pounds and consist of 1102 pages in hardcover, profusely illustrated. It was turned in to our printer last week with a printing schedule that should see it finished the first week of August. It will then take a week by truck to reach us here in Idaho and we estimate that we will begin shipping the book to buyers in mid-August. (These are estimates, not fixed dates).
Many people have inquired about a pre-publication sale and we will indeed offer such a sale beginning around July 7. Watch for complete details at that time.
We thank everyone who contributed so generously to this project and who kept faith that we would complete it!
Sincerely in Christ,
Michael A. Hoffman II
www.RevisionistHistory.org
***
What grounds is there in the Word of God for investing anyone with a Nebuchadnezzarean power over the Middle East, the US government, the media of mass communication, our educational system, and churches once Christian and now more aptly denominated as Churchianity?
The book will weigh nearly five pounds and consist of 1102 pages in hardcover, profusely illustrated. It was turned in to our printer last week with a printing schedule that should see it finished the first week of August. It will then take a week by truck to reach us here in Idaho and we estimate that we will begin shipping the book to buyers in mid-August. (These are estimates, not fixed dates).
Many people have inquired about a pre-publication sale and we will indeed offer such a sale beginning around July 7. Watch for complete details at that time.
We thank everyone who contributed so generously to this project and who kept faith that we would complete it!
Sincerely in Christ,
Michael A. Hoffman II
www.RevisionistHistory.org
***
Friday, June 20, 2008
Messianic "Jews" under increasing violent Israeli attack
[MICHAEL HOFFMAN'S ANALYSIS OF THIS ARTICLE FOLLOWS IMMEDIATELY AFTER IT].
Israel's Messianic Jews: Police indifferent to threats against us
By The Associated Press
June 20, 2008
Safety pins and screws are still lodged in 15-year-old Ami Ortiz's body three months after he opened a booby-trapped gift basket sent to his family. The explosion severed two toes, damaged his hearing and harmed a promising basketball career. Police say they are still searching for the assailants. But to the Ortiz family the motive of the attackers is clear: The Ortizes are Jews who believe that Jesus was the Messiah.
Israel's tiny community of Messianic Jews, a mixed group of 10,000 people who include the California-based Jews for Jesus, complains of threats, harassment and police indifference. The March 20 bombing was the worst incident so far. In October, a mysterious fire damaged a Jerusalem church used by Messianic Jews, and last month ultra-Orthodox Jews torched a stack of Christian holy books distributed by missionaries.
The Foreign Ministry and two chief rabbis were quick to condemn the burning, but the Ortiz family says vigorous police action is needed.
"I believe that it will happen again, if not to us, then to other Messianic believers," said Ami's mother, Leah Ortiz, 54-year-old native of South Orange, N.J.
Proselytizing is strongly discouraged in Israel, a country whose population consists of a people that suffered centuries of persecution for not accepting Jesus and has little tolerance for missionary work.
At the same time, Israel has warm relations with U.S. evangelical groups, which strongly support its cause, but these generally refrain from proselytizing inside Israel. Even the Mormon church, which has mission work at its core worldwide, agreed when it opened a campus in Jerusalem to refrain from missionary activity.
"Historically the core of Christianity ... was 'convert or die,' so it was seen and is still seen as an assault on Jewish existence itself," said Rabbi David Rosen, who oversees interfaith affairs for the American Jewish Committee. "When you are called to join another religion, you are being called on to betray your people."
Messianic Jews consider themselves Jewish, observing the holy days and reciting many of the same prayers. The Ortiz family lights candles on the Sabbath, shuns pork and eats matzoth on Passover.
Ami Ortiz, interviewed at the Tel Aviv hospital where he is being treated, comes across as no different from any Jewish Israeli his age. He's a sabra, or native-born Israeli, who speaks English with a Hebrew accent, has an older brother in an elite Israeli army unit and was hoping to join the youth squad of Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team.
But his religion also holds that one can embrace Jesus - Ami calls him by his Hebrew name, Yeshua - as the Messiah and remain Jewish. Orthodox Jews, on the other hand, believe that the Messiah has yet to come, that he will do so only when he chooses, and that any attempt to pre-empt his coming is a grievous sin.
Rabbi Sholom Dov Lifschitz, head of the ultra-Orthodox Yad Leahim organization that campaigns against missionary activity in Israel, says Messianic Jews give him great pain. "They are provoking... it's a miracle that worse things don't happen," he said. Messianic activists appear to have had some success among couples with one non-Jewish spouse, as well as immigrants from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union who have loose ties to Judaism.
Or Yehuda, a town in central Israel with many immigrants as well as ultra-Orthodox Jews including a deputy mayor, Uri Aharon, was the scene of the May 15 book-burning. Ami Dahan, a local police official, says hundreds of Christian religious books were burned on May 15 in an empty lot in town. He said Deputy Mayor Uzi Aharon, has been questioned on suspicion that he instructed youths to collect the books from homes where they had been distributed and told them to burn them. Aharon denies ordering the burning. He says the books were collected from a neighborhood of mostly Ethiopian immigrants who are easily persuaded by missionaries. "There are three missionaries who live and work in the town, and every Saturday they take people to worship and try to brainwash them," Aharon said.
Many Messianic Jews say they recognize the sensitivities involved and do not distribute religious material or conduct high-profile campaigns. But Aharon noted a recent Jews for Jesus campaign with signs on buses that equated two similar Hebrew words - Jesus and salvation. Public outrage quickly forced the bus company to remove the signs.
Lawyer Dan Yakir of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel says the law allows missionaries to preach provided they don't offer gifts or money or go after minors.
"It is their right according to freedom of religion to maintain their religious lifestyle and disseminate their beliefs, including through literature," he said.
But the obstacles are evident, raised not just from religious activists but by the state. Calev Myers, a lawyer who represents Messianic Jews, said he has fought 200 legal cases in the past two years. Most involve authorities' attempts to close down houses of worship, revoke the citizenship of believers or refuse to register their children as Israelis. In one case, Israel has accused a German religion student of missionary activity and has tried - so far unsuccessfully - to deport her. "In incidents of violence, police are reluctant to press charges," Myers said.
The book-burning caused shock among U.S. evangelicals. Dave Parsons, spokesman of the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem, which represents evangelical Christian communities, said the test would be how vigorously authorities pursued the case. "We believe there is a link to a series of incidents here in the land that involve harassment, intimidation and physical violence," he said.
The Ortiz family moved from the United States to Israel in 1985, qualifying as immigrants under Israel's Law of Return because Leah, the mother, is Jewish. In 1989 they moved into Ariel, a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, and established a small Messianic group which now numbers 60, most of them immigrants from the former Soviet Union, according to David Ortiz, the pastor and Ami's father.
He said that he built the community through conversations with friends and neighbors, but did not actually go door-to-door distributing religious material to strangers in the traditional sense of missionary work. David Ortiz says he has also proselytized in the Palestinian areas - prompting Islamic leaders there to warn against contact with him. Ortiz said he had no problem if Messianic Jews discuss their religious views with others and persuade them to believe in Jesus. When the family began holding study sessions, a rabbi warned Ortiz not to speak about Jesus outside the home.
In 2005, fliers were distributed in Ariel warning that there were believers of Jesus in the community. One day, two men wearing the black skullcaps of Orthodox Jews knocked on the door and photographed Ortiz when he answered. Recently the photo turned up on a flier with the family's address. When the basket was left at the door Ami wasn't surprised, since it was Purim, a holiday when Jews exchange gifts. "I opened it up and I heard it and then I was on the floor and I didn't hear anything, I didn't see anything, the lanky boy recalls." Ami was in critical condition, with severe gashes in his legs and feet and one that just missed his jugular vein. His tryout for the Maccabi team was canceled.
His family initially suspected Palestinians; Ariel is in the heart of the West Bank and surrounded by Palestinian towns and villages and, like most Jewish settlements, has been the target of Palestinian attacks. But police immediately told him the bomb was more sophisticated than those made by Palestinians since it contained plastic explosives. "Nobody ever suspected that a Jewish group would do such a thing, that they would put a bomb in somebody else's house," David Ortiz said.
Police have since told the family that Palestinians were not behind the bombing. The family has footage from a security camera of a man delivering the package, according to a person close to the family who spoke on condition of anonymity because police say disclosing details could harm the investigation. Police spokesman Danny Poleg would not discuss the case, saying only that no arrests have been made. Meanwhile, the Messianic Jewish believers are taking no chances. These days they worship under the protection of an armed guard.
HOFFMAN'S AFTERWORD:
The AP can't bring itself to mention that the "Christian religious books" that were burned were Bibles, i.e. copies of the New Testament.
"Messianic Jews" are enthusiastic Zionists who reject historic Christianity and embrace a hybrid of Judaism and Christianity (darkness and light) that retains some Talmudic traditions and a great deal of Judaic racial prestige utterly contrary to the New Testament. "Jews for Jesus" is on record as refusing to criticize the Talmud.
Note the guilt-inducing mind control statement aimed at wavering Judaics by Rabbi David Rosen, of the American Jewish Committee. "When you are called to join another religion, you are being called on to betray your people."
When an Anglican Englishman joins the Catholic Church he's betraying the English? When a Catholic Italian joins the Methodist Church he's betraying the Italian people? When an am ha'aretz in first century A.D. Jerusalem joined Jesus and the early apostles he was betraying the Jews?
AP reports: "The (Israeli) Foreign Ministry and two chief rabbis were quick to condemn the burning..."
Yes, for purposes of public relations they condemned it, but they do nothing to amend the rabbinic texts or correct the culture that breeds anti-Christian violence and bigotry; they just can't be seen to publicly advocate it.
AP writes, "Proselytizing is strongly discouraged in Israel, a country whose population consists of a people that suffered centuries of persecution for not accepting Jesus..."
Would AP ever report, "Judaism is strongly discouraged in Russia, a country whose Orthodox Christian population consists of a people that suffered 70 years of persecution for not accepting the Communism of circumcised Bolsheviks"?
Pope John Paul II and the leaders of Protestant fundamentalism all discouraged attempts to convert Judaics to Christ, in league with the American Jewish Committee and Israeli Zionists. The current Pope Benedict meets with rabbis in synagogues in Cologne and New York as equal partners in the worship of God.
AP states: "Messianic Jews consider themselves Jewish, observing the holy days and reciting many of the same prayers. The Ortiz family lights candles on the Sabbath, shuns pork and eats matzoth on Passover."
Yom Kippur is one of the "holy days of Judaism" and includes the permission to lie, in a rite called "Kol Nidrei" or the nullification of "all vows." If "Messianic Jews" are participating in the Kol Nidrei they are liars and not Christians. There is no New Testament warrant for following the rabbinic rite of shabbos candle lighting, eating unleavened bread on Passover or shunning pork. (Pork is an unhealthy food but we have the Christian freedom to eat it. Rabbinic Judaism does not ban pork in fidelity to the Old Testament. Rabbis secretly regard the pig as a sacred animal and eschew its flesh for that reason).
If Messianic Judaism is such a counterfeit, why is it persecuted? Orthodox Judaism is distinguished by its dictatorial tyranny over the mind of man. The totalitarian control exerted during the Communist revolution in Russia had Talmudic roots. No iota of deviation from the Oral Law is permitted, including any nostalgia for Jesus Christ, who is regarded as an idol who practiced sorcery and is now in gehenna boiling in his own feces.
What is instructive about this AP article is the fact that it showcases the Israeli penchant for violence - using bombs, book-burning and arson against any who deviate, however minutely, from the dogma of Judaism or the Israeli state.
Judaism considers western civilization to be Edom and despises it with far greater rancor than even Muslim fundamentalists. The current alliance between the West and the Israelis and rabbis, is very tenuous and temporary, predicated on the denial of New Testament doctrine and the transformation of an erstwhile Christian western civilization into a collective golem that bombs and fights Muslims for the benefit of the Israelis.
When this proxy function is no longer needed, the Israelis will dump the West in Red China's lap and proceed on their supremacist path as the self-appointed judge of the entire world. The reconstituted Sanhedrin court in Tiberias is one harbinger of this masterplan, aided and abetted by powerful "Christian" allies like Senator McCain, President Bush and Supreme Court Justice Scalia, among tens of thousands of other "conservative" golem in the top ranks of the American government, military, media, culture and business.
Hoffman's book, "Judaism Discovered" will be published in August by Independent History and Research.
Click on the following links for other products:
In the meantime, you can obtain a huge collection of his writing, all 44 back issues of his bulletin, "Revisionist History," newly issued in pdf.Or
Obtain his three hour conversation with talk show host Alex Jones
***
Israel's Messianic Jews: Police indifferent to threats against us
By The Associated Press
June 20, 2008
Safety pins and screws are still lodged in 15-year-old Ami Ortiz's body three months after he opened a booby-trapped gift basket sent to his family. The explosion severed two toes, damaged his hearing and harmed a promising basketball career. Police say they are still searching for the assailants. But to the Ortiz family the motive of the attackers is clear: The Ortizes are Jews who believe that Jesus was the Messiah.
Israel's tiny community of Messianic Jews, a mixed group of 10,000 people who include the California-based Jews for Jesus, complains of threats, harassment and police indifference. The March 20 bombing was the worst incident so far. In October, a mysterious fire damaged a Jerusalem church used by Messianic Jews, and last month ultra-Orthodox Jews torched a stack of Christian holy books distributed by missionaries.
The Foreign Ministry and two chief rabbis were quick to condemn the burning, but the Ortiz family says vigorous police action is needed.
"I believe that it will happen again, if not to us, then to other Messianic believers," said Ami's mother, Leah Ortiz, 54-year-old native of South Orange, N.J.
Proselytizing is strongly discouraged in Israel, a country whose population consists of a people that suffered centuries of persecution for not accepting Jesus and has little tolerance for missionary work.
At the same time, Israel has warm relations with U.S. evangelical groups, which strongly support its cause, but these generally refrain from proselytizing inside Israel. Even the Mormon church, which has mission work at its core worldwide, agreed when it opened a campus in Jerusalem to refrain from missionary activity.
"Historically the core of Christianity ... was 'convert or die,' so it was seen and is still seen as an assault on Jewish existence itself," said Rabbi David Rosen, who oversees interfaith affairs for the American Jewish Committee. "When you are called to join another religion, you are being called on to betray your people."
Messianic Jews consider themselves Jewish, observing the holy days and reciting many of the same prayers. The Ortiz family lights candles on the Sabbath, shuns pork and eats matzoth on Passover.
Ami Ortiz, interviewed at the Tel Aviv hospital where he is being treated, comes across as no different from any Jewish Israeli his age. He's a sabra, or native-born Israeli, who speaks English with a Hebrew accent, has an older brother in an elite Israeli army unit and was hoping to join the youth squad of Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team.
But his religion also holds that one can embrace Jesus - Ami calls him by his Hebrew name, Yeshua - as the Messiah and remain Jewish. Orthodox Jews, on the other hand, believe that the Messiah has yet to come, that he will do so only when he chooses, and that any attempt to pre-empt his coming is a grievous sin.
Rabbi Sholom Dov Lifschitz, head of the ultra-Orthodox Yad Leahim organization that campaigns against missionary activity in Israel, says Messianic Jews give him great pain. "They are provoking... it's a miracle that worse things don't happen," he said. Messianic activists appear to have had some success among couples with one non-Jewish spouse, as well as immigrants from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union who have loose ties to Judaism.
Or Yehuda, a town in central Israel with many immigrants as well as ultra-Orthodox Jews including a deputy mayor, Uri Aharon, was the scene of the May 15 book-burning. Ami Dahan, a local police official, says hundreds of Christian religious books were burned on May 15 in an empty lot in town. He said Deputy Mayor Uzi Aharon, has been questioned on suspicion that he instructed youths to collect the books from homes where they had been distributed and told them to burn them. Aharon denies ordering the burning. He says the books were collected from a neighborhood of mostly Ethiopian immigrants who are easily persuaded by missionaries. "There are three missionaries who live and work in the town, and every Saturday they take people to worship and try to brainwash them," Aharon said.
Many Messianic Jews say they recognize the sensitivities involved and do not distribute religious material or conduct high-profile campaigns. But Aharon noted a recent Jews for Jesus campaign with signs on buses that equated two similar Hebrew words - Jesus and salvation. Public outrage quickly forced the bus company to remove the signs.
Lawyer Dan Yakir of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel says the law allows missionaries to preach provided they don't offer gifts or money or go after minors.
"It is their right according to freedom of religion to maintain their religious lifestyle and disseminate their beliefs, including through literature," he said.
But the obstacles are evident, raised not just from religious activists but by the state. Calev Myers, a lawyer who represents Messianic Jews, said he has fought 200 legal cases in the past two years. Most involve authorities' attempts to close down houses of worship, revoke the citizenship of believers or refuse to register their children as Israelis. In one case, Israel has accused a German religion student of missionary activity and has tried - so far unsuccessfully - to deport her. "In incidents of violence, police are reluctant to press charges," Myers said.
The book-burning caused shock among U.S. evangelicals. Dave Parsons, spokesman of the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem, which represents evangelical Christian communities, said the test would be how vigorously authorities pursued the case. "We believe there is a link to a series of incidents here in the land that involve harassment, intimidation and physical violence," he said.
The Ortiz family moved from the United States to Israel in 1985, qualifying as immigrants under Israel's Law of Return because Leah, the mother, is Jewish. In 1989 they moved into Ariel, a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, and established a small Messianic group which now numbers 60, most of them immigrants from the former Soviet Union, according to David Ortiz, the pastor and Ami's father.
He said that he built the community through conversations with friends and neighbors, but did not actually go door-to-door distributing religious material to strangers in the traditional sense of missionary work. David Ortiz says he has also proselytized in the Palestinian areas - prompting Islamic leaders there to warn against contact with him. Ortiz said he had no problem if Messianic Jews discuss their religious views with others and persuade them to believe in Jesus. When the family began holding study sessions, a rabbi warned Ortiz not to speak about Jesus outside the home.
In 2005, fliers were distributed in Ariel warning that there were believers of Jesus in the community. One day, two men wearing the black skullcaps of Orthodox Jews knocked on the door and photographed Ortiz when he answered. Recently the photo turned up on a flier with the family's address. When the basket was left at the door Ami wasn't surprised, since it was Purim, a holiday when Jews exchange gifts. "I opened it up and I heard it and then I was on the floor and I didn't hear anything, I didn't see anything, the lanky boy recalls." Ami was in critical condition, with severe gashes in his legs and feet and one that just missed his jugular vein. His tryout for the Maccabi team was canceled.
His family initially suspected Palestinians; Ariel is in the heart of the West Bank and surrounded by Palestinian towns and villages and, like most Jewish settlements, has been the target of Palestinian attacks. But police immediately told him the bomb was more sophisticated than those made by Palestinians since it contained plastic explosives. "Nobody ever suspected that a Jewish group would do such a thing, that they would put a bomb in somebody else's house," David Ortiz said.
Police have since told the family that Palestinians were not behind the bombing. The family has footage from a security camera of a man delivering the package, according to a person close to the family who spoke on condition of anonymity because police say disclosing details could harm the investigation. Police spokesman Danny Poleg would not discuss the case, saying only that no arrests have been made. Meanwhile, the Messianic Jewish believers are taking no chances. These days they worship under the protection of an armed guard.
HOFFMAN'S AFTERWORD:
The AP can't bring itself to mention that the "Christian religious books" that were burned were Bibles, i.e. copies of the New Testament.
"Messianic Jews" are enthusiastic Zionists who reject historic Christianity and embrace a hybrid of Judaism and Christianity (darkness and light) that retains some Talmudic traditions and a great deal of Judaic racial prestige utterly contrary to the New Testament. "Jews for Jesus" is on record as refusing to criticize the Talmud.
Note the guilt-inducing mind control statement aimed at wavering Judaics by Rabbi David Rosen, of the American Jewish Committee. "When you are called to join another religion, you are being called on to betray your people."
When an Anglican Englishman joins the Catholic Church he's betraying the English? When a Catholic Italian joins the Methodist Church he's betraying the Italian people? When an am ha'aretz in first century A.D. Jerusalem joined Jesus and the early apostles he was betraying the Jews?
AP reports: "The (Israeli) Foreign Ministry and two chief rabbis were quick to condemn the burning..."
Yes, for purposes of public relations they condemned it, but they do nothing to amend the rabbinic texts or correct the culture that breeds anti-Christian violence and bigotry; they just can't be seen to publicly advocate it.
AP writes, "Proselytizing is strongly discouraged in Israel, a country whose population consists of a people that suffered centuries of persecution for not accepting Jesus..."
Would AP ever report, "Judaism is strongly discouraged in Russia, a country whose Orthodox Christian population consists of a people that suffered 70 years of persecution for not accepting the Communism of circumcised Bolsheviks"?
Pope John Paul II and the leaders of Protestant fundamentalism all discouraged attempts to convert Judaics to Christ, in league with the American Jewish Committee and Israeli Zionists. The current Pope Benedict meets with rabbis in synagogues in Cologne and New York as equal partners in the worship of God.
AP states: "Messianic Jews consider themselves Jewish, observing the holy days and reciting many of the same prayers. The Ortiz family lights candles on the Sabbath, shuns pork and eats matzoth on Passover."
Yom Kippur is one of the "holy days of Judaism" and includes the permission to lie, in a rite called "Kol Nidrei" or the nullification of "all vows." If "Messianic Jews" are participating in the Kol Nidrei they are liars and not Christians. There is no New Testament warrant for following the rabbinic rite of shabbos candle lighting, eating unleavened bread on Passover or shunning pork. (Pork is an unhealthy food but we have the Christian freedom to eat it. Rabbinic Judaism does not ban pork in fidelity to the Old Testament. Rabbis secretly regard the pig as a sacred animal and eschew its flesh for that reason).
If Messianic Judaism is such a counterfeit, why is it persecuted? Orthodox Judaism is distinguished by its dictatorial tyranny over the mind of man. The totalitarian control exerted during the Communist revolution in Russia had Talmudic roots. No iota of deviation from the Oral Law is permitted, including any nostalgia for Jesus Christ, who is regarded as an idol who practiced sorcery and is now in gehenna boiling in his own feces.
What is instructive about this AP article is the fact that it showcases the Israeli penchant for violence - using bombs, book-burning and arson against any who deviate, however minutely, from the dogma of Judaism or the Israeli state.
Judaism considers western civilization to be Edom and despises it with far greater rancor than even Muslim fundamentalists. The current alliance between the West and the Israelis and rabbis, is very tenuous and temporary, predicated on the denial of New Testament doctrine and the transformation of an erstwhile Christian western civilization into a collective golem that bombs and fights Muslims for the benefit of the Israelis.
When this proxy function is no longer needed, the Israelis will dump the West in Red China's lap and proceed on their supremacist path as the self-appointed judge of the entire world. The reconstituted Sanhedrin court in Tiberias is one harbinger of this masterplan, aided and abetted by powerful "Christian" allies like Senator McCain, President Bush and Supreme Court Justice Scalia, among tens of thousands of other "conservative" golem in the top ranks of the American government, military, media, culture and business.
Hoffman's book, "Judaism Discovered" will be published in August by Independent History and Research.
Click on the following links for other products:
In the meantime, you can obtain a huge collection of his writing, all 44 back issues of his bulletin, "Revisionist History," newly issued in pdf.Or
Obtain his three hour conversation with talk show host Alex Jones
***
Monday, June 16, 2008
The Sistine Chapel and the Kabbalah
The new Da Vinci Code: Secrets of the Sistine Chapel
...Experts are now convinced that Michelangelo painted subversive messages into his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. Is there any truth in their claims — or are their imaginations running away with them?
Cristina Ruiz | The Sunday Times (UK) | June 15, 2008
...it is not just crackpots who believe in a Michelangelo Code. The latest scholarly proponents are Rabbi Benjamin Blech, an associate professor of Talmud at Yeshiva University in New York, and Roy Doliner, a writer based in Rome who gives tours of the city and the Vatican to visiting Jewish VIPs. In their forthcoming book, The Sistine Secrets: Unlocking the Codes in Michelangelo’s Defiant Masterpiece, published by JR Books, they argue that the entire Sistine Chapel should be read as a radically subversive decorative cycle that insults the pope who commissioned it, diverges from Catholic doctrine of the time, and proposes a “lost mystical message of universal love”, which Michelangelo intended as “a bridge” between the church and the Jewish faith. They say the key to this reading is found by unravelling the secret messages placed in the paintings by the artist “in the hope that eventually there would be those who would crack his code”.
Where Gonzalez saw hidden portraits, Blech and Doliner have found Hebrew letters. They say the figure of David in the painting showing his battle with Goliath is in the shape of the Hebrew letter gimel, which in the mystical Jewish tradition known as Kabbalah symbolises g’vurah, or strength. On the opposite wall, the scene showing Judith and her handmaiden carrying the head of the Assyrian general Holofernes is in the shape of the Hebrew letter chet, which represents chesed, or the characteristics of “loving kindness”. The figures of David and Judith were intended by the artist to be seen as the two sides of the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life, say Blech and Doliner.
Their theory goes like this: as a teenager Michelangelo spent two years under the patronage of Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence, mixing with the leading thinkers of the day. Lorenzo’s court was a liberal hotbed of ideas, some of which were later branded heretical by the church. And there was strong interest in Jewish culture and esoteric Hebrew texts that came to Florence when Lorenzo’s grandfather, Cosimo, allowed the Jews into the city, where some of them prospered for a time. At the Medici court, Michelangelo was exposed to the humanist philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, a proponent of Neoplatonism, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who incorporated a wide variety of texts into his teachings, including the Kabbalah. Michelangelo absorbed these syncretic philosophies, and some 20 years later he used the Sistine Chapel to illustrate them.
The problem with this argument is that it is highly speculative. Michelangelo did absorb classical and humanist philosophies in Florence, and there is evidence of this in his paintings, but the authors stretch the idea to breaking point, invalidating any legitimate arguments. The figures of Judith and David may seem to be the same shape as Hebrew letters, but there is no proof that Michelangelo intended this. The conjecture continues throughout the book, where the interpretation of almost every painting is wildly skewed to give a Jewish reading. In a bizarre example, the authors say the figure of St Lawrence beneath Christ in The Last Judgement is not holding the instrument of his execution, as tradition would have it (Lawrence is said to have been burnt alive on a gridiron by the Romans in the 3rd century): he is holding a ladder. “Jacob’s Ladder, to be exact,” they write. “This is the link between heaven and earth, humanity and angels, the material and spiritual worlds. The Kabbalah teaches that the entire creation revolves around this ladder.” And so they discover it at the centre of The Last Judgement.
Blech is an adviser to the Pave the Way Foundation, an organisation that describes itself as “dedicated to achieving peace by bridging the gap in tolerance and understanding between religions”. In January 2005 the foundation organised a visit of Jewish delegates to Rome to meet Pope John Paul II. Blech led the mission “to express thanks to the pope for all he had done for the Jewish people. He was the first pope to visit the [Wailing] Wall in Jerusalem, where he inserted a prayer asking God and the Jews for forgiveness”. In 2006, Blech also accompanied the current pope, Benedict XVI, to Auschwitz. Much of the rabbi’s life has been devoted to inter-faith dialogue, and his book would have us believe that Michelangelo was an early proponent of the same ideals and that he placed hidden messages illustrating these throughout the Sistine Chapel. This argument has two elements in common with all the other Michelangelo Code theories. The authors believe they are the first to have interpreted the paintings as the artist would have wished. Doliner likens the experience of writing the book to “finding a letter on the pavement and delivering it 500 years later."
Here’s what we do know: in 1505, Pope Julius II summoned Michelangelo to Rome to create a funerary monument on a grand scale. The artist was considered the pre-eminent sculptor of his day, a reputation sealed a year earlier when he unveiled his statue of David showing him at the moment he has decided to battle Goliath. The work, hailed as a masterpiece, was placed in front of Florence’s town hall in Piazza della Signoria as a symbol of the city’s freedom. Once in Rome, Michelangelo began work on the pope’s tomb, but this stopped when Julius II decided to focus on the rebuilding of St Peter’s. After a dispute over money, Michelangelo fled Rome and returned to Florence.In 1508 the artist, then 33, was back. He had begrudgingly accepted the pope’s commission to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine with frescoes (Michelangelo considered himself a sculptor, not a painter).
It took him four years, working with a team of assistants, and he decorated 12,000 sq ft, most of this being taken up by nine scenes from the Book of Genesis at the top and the figures of seven prophets and five pagan sibyls, who were believed to have predicted the arrival of Christ, around the base of the ceiling. Julius II had originally wanted Michelangelo to paint the ceiling with the figures of the 12 apostles and a vast geometric pattern. The artist argued against this. The pope “gave me a new commission to do what I liked”, he later wrote, a claim viewed with suspicion by most scholars, who generally believe that Michelangelo would have been guided by the pope’s theologians and advisers. This was, after all, an age when religious imagery was strictly controlled. But no information about this survives. Twenty-two years later he returned to paint The Last Judgement on the entire wall of the chapel behind the altar, following a commission from Pope Clement VII, filling it with the figures of the resurrected awaiting Christ’s verdict on their fate.
...So where does the truth lie? Which of the Michelangelo Code theories is most plausible? In the end...these theories are “impossible to refute. But they are also impossible to prove”. One thing is certain: the Sistine Chapel is a complex decorative cycle containing over 300 figures...The Sistine Chapel is the most important church in the Catholic world. It has to be. It’s the pope’s private chapel. Not only does the conclave that selects the popes actually take place in here, but the chapel is also where the popes went for their private services, where they greeted important visitors and mounted special prayers. So the crucial question that anyone trying to understand the real meaning of the Sistine Chapel has to ask themselves is: would any pope have allowed any artist to do as they pleased inside the Sistine Chapel? Is it really likely, or possible, that Michelangelo would have filled the most important church in the Christian world with heresy and Judaism?...
To receive these columns by e-mail, 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. It is simple and easy to unsubscribe at any time. There is no cost or obligation for this service.
***
...Experts are now convinced that Michelangelo painted subversive messages into his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. Is there any truth in their claims — or are their imaginations running away with them?
Cristina Ruiz | The Sunday Times (UK) | June 15, 2008
...it is not just crackpots who believe in a Michelangelo Code. The latest scholarly proponents are Rabbi Benjamin Blech, an associate professor of Talmud at Yeshiva University in New York, and Roy Doliner, a writer based in Rome who gives tours of the city and the Vatican to visiting Jewish VIPs. In their forthcoming book, The Sistine Secrets: Unlocking the Codes in Michelangelo’s Defiant Masterpiece, published by JR Books, they argue that the entire Sistine Chapel should be read as a radically subversive decorative cycle that insults the pope who commissioned it, diverges from Catholic doctrine of the time, and proposes a “lost mystical message of universal love”, which Michelangelo intended as “a bridge” between the church and the Jewish faith. They say the key to this reading is found by unravelling the secret messages placed in the paintings by the artist “in the hope that eventually there would be those who would crack his code”.
Where Gonzalez saw hidden portraits, Blech and Doliner have found Hebrew letters. They say the figure of David in the painting showing his battle with Goliath is in the shape of the Hebrew letter gimel, which in the mystical Jewish tradition known as Kabbalah symbolises g’vurah, or strength. On the opposite wall, the scene showing Judith and her handmaiden carrying the head of the Assyrian general Holofernes is in the shape of the Hebrew letter chet, which represents chesed, or the characteristics of “loving kindness”. The figures of David and Judith were intended by the artist to be seen as the two sides of the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life, say Blech and Doliner.
Their theory goes like this: as a teenager Michelangelo spent two years under the patronage of Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence, mixing with the leading thinkers of the day. Lorenzo’s court was a liberal hotbed of ideas, some of which were later branded heretical by the church. And there was strong interest in Jewish culture and esoteric Hebrew texts that came to Florence when Lorenzo’s grandfather, Cosimo, allowed the Jews into the city, where some of them prospered for a time. At the Medici court, Michelangelo was exposed to the humanist philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, a proponent of Neoplatonism, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who incorporated a wide variety of texts into his teachings, including the Kabbalah. Michelangelo absorbed these syncretic philosophies, and some 20 years later he used the Sistine Chapel to illustrate them.
The problem with this argument is that it is highly speculative. Michelangelo did absorb classical and humanist philosophies in Florence, and there is evidence of this in his paintings, but the authors stretch the idea to breaking point, invalidating any legitimate arguments. The figures of Judith and David may seem to be the same shape as Hebrew letters, but there is no proof that Michelangelo intended this. The conjecture continues throughout the book, where the interpretation of almost every painting is wildly skewed to give a Jewish reading. In a bizarre example, the authors say the figure of St Lawrence beneath Christ in The Last Judgement is not holding the instrument of his execution, as tradition would have it (Lawrence is said to have been burnt alive on a gridiron by the Romans in the 3rd century): he is holding a ladder. “Jacob’s Ladder, to be exact,” they write. “This is the link between heaven and earth, humanity and angels, the material and spiritual worlds. The Kabbalah teaches that the entire creation revolves around this ladder.” And so they discover it at the centre of The Last Judgement.
Blech is an adviser to the Pave the Way Foundation, an organisation that describes itself as “dedicated to achieving peace by bridging the gap in tolerance and understanding between religions”. In January 2005 the foundation organised a visit of Jewish delegates to Rome to meet Pope John Paul II. Blech led the mission “to express thanks to the pope for all he had done for the Jewish people. He was the first pope to visit the [Wailing] Wall in Jerusalem, where he inserted a prayer asking God and the Jews for forgiveness”. In 2006, Blech also accompanied the current pope, Benedict XVI, to Auschwitz. Much of the rabbi’s life has been devoted to inter-faith dialogue, and his book would have us believe that Michelangelo was an early proponent of the same ideals and that he placed hidden messages illustrating these throughout the Sistine Chapel. This argument has two elements in common with all the other Michelangelo Code theories. The authors believe they are the first to have interpreted the paintings as the artist would have wished. Doliner likens the experience of writing the book to “finding a letter on the pavement and delivering it 500 years later."
Here’s what we do know: in 1505, Pope Julius II summoned Michelangelo to Rome to create a funerary monument on a grand scale. The artist was considered the pre-eminent sculptor of his day, a reputation sealed a year earlier when he unveiled his statue of David showing him at the moment he has decided to battle Goliath. The work, hailed as a masterpiece, was placed in front of Florence’s town hall in Piazza della Signoria as a symbol of the city’s freedom. Once in Rome, Michelangelo began work on the pope’s tomb, but this stopped when Julius II decided to focus on the rebuilding of St Peter’s. After a dispute over money, Michelangelo fled Rome and returned to Florence.In 1508 the artist, then 33, was back. He had begrudgingly accepted the pope’s commission to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine with frescoes (Michelangelo considered himself a sculptor, not a painter).
It took him four years, working with a team of assistants, and he decorated 12,000 sq ft, most of this being taken up by nine scenes from the Book of Genesis at the top and the figures of seven prophets and five pagan sibyls, who were believed to have predicted the arrival of Christ, around the base of the ceiling. Julius II had originally wanted Michelangelo to paint the ceiling with the figures of the 12 apostles and a vast geometric pattern. The artist argued against this. The pope “gave me a new commission to do what I liked”, he later wrote, a claim viewed with suspicion by most scholars, who generally believe that Michelangelo would have been guided by the pope’s theologians and advisers. This was, after all, an age when religious imagery was strictly controlled. But no information about this survives. Twenty-two years later he returned to paint The Last Judgement on the entire wall of the chapel behind the altar, following a commission from Pope Clement VII, filling it with the figures of the resurrected awaiting Christ’s verdict on their fate.
...So where does the truth lie? Which of the Michelangelo Code theories is most plausible? In the end...these theories are “impossible to refute. But they are also impossible to prove”. One thing is certain: the Sistine Chapel is a complex decorative cycle containing over 300 figures...The Sistine Chapel is the most important church in the Catholic world. It has to be. It’s the pope’s private chapel. Not only does the conclave that selects the popes actually take place in here, but the chapel is also where the popes went for their private services, where they greeted important visitors and mounted special prayers. So the crucial question that anyone trying to understand the real meaning of the Sistine Chapel has to ask themselves is: would any pope have allowed any artist to do as they pleased inside the Sistine Chapel? Is it really likely, or possible, that Michelangelo would have filled the most important church in the Christian world with heresy and Judaism?...
To receive these columns by e-mail, 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. It is simple and easy to unsubscribe at any time. There is no cost or obligation for this service.
***
Saturday, June 14, 2008
New Zionist Air Force Chief Chosen for War on Iran?
"(General Norton) Schwartz has since risen up the ranks and on June 9 was appointed Air Force chief by Defense Secretary Robert Gates...With his appointment, Schwartz becomes the third Jew in the top ranks of the military, alongside Lieutenant General Steven Blum, who heads the National Guard, and General Robert Magnus, who is the assistant commandant of the Marines. Schwartz...was promoted to the rank of general in August 2005...Gates tapped Schwartz to be secretary of the Air Force. Schwartz’s Jewish identity did not go unnoticed after his appointment, particularly given the current military tensions with Iran. Press TV, an Iranian English language media outlet, wrote an article last week, titled 'U.S. Names Jewish as Air Force Chief.'"There have long been rumors that Schwartz’s predecessor, Michael Moseley, was opposed to a military attack on Iran. The appointment of Schwartz has prompted speculation in the Iranian press and on some blogs that the Bush administration is yet again seriously considering the military option to thwart Tehran’s nuclear ambitions."
Source: Forward (Zionist newspaper) | June 12, 2008
http://www.forward.com/articles/13574/
***
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Kabbalistic rabbi converts to Jesus at the end of his life?
HOFFMAN'S NOTE: This story is more than a year old, but if it is true (and we have no proof that it is), then it merits publicity and rejoicing because it signals that God is reaching out to lost Judaics, including even prominent and powerful rabbis, to bring them to His sheepfold. There is hope for all. There is grace for all. This is the most complete account of the affair which we have seen in print. The Establishment media do not want to report it or recall it.
Rabbi Reveals Name of the Messiah
By IsraelToday | April 30, 2007
http://www.israeltoday.co.il/default.aspx?tabid=128&view=item&idx=1347
Shortly before he died, one of Israel's most prominent rabbis wrote the name of the Messiah on a small note which he requested would remain sealed until now. When the note was opened, it revealed what many have known for centuries: Yehoshua, or Yeshua (Jesus), is the Messiah.
A few months before he died, one of the nation’s most prominent rabbis, Yitzhak Kaduri, supposedly wrote the name of the Messiah on a small note which he requested would remain sealed until now. When the note was unsealed, it revealed what many have known for centuries: Yehoshua, or Yeshua (Jesus), is the Messiah.
With the biblical name of Jesus, the Rabbi and kabbalist described the Messiah using six words and hinting that the initial letters form the name of the Messiah. The secret note said:
Concerning the letter abbreviation of the Messiah’s name, He will lift the people and prove that his word and law are valid.
This is I have signed in the month of mercy,
Yitzhak Kaduri
The Hebrew sentence (translated above in bold) with the hidden name of the Messiah reads: Yarim Ha’Am Veyokhiakh Shedvaro Vetorato Omdim
The initials spell the Hebrew name of Jesus, Yehoshua. Yehoshua and Yeshua are e ectively (sic) the same name, derived from the same Hebrew root of the word “salvation” as documented in Zechariah 6:11 and Ezra 3:2. The same priest writes in Ezra, “Yeshua son of Yozadak” while writing in Zechariah “Yehoshua son of Yohozadak.” The priest adds the holy abbreviation of God’s name, ho, in the father’s name Yozadak and in the name Yeshua.
With one of Israel’s most prominent rabbis indicating the name of the Messiah is Yeshua, it is understandable why his last wish was to wait one year after his death before revealing what he wrote.
When the name of Yehoshua appeared in Kaduri’s message, ultra-Orthodox Jews from his Nahalat Yitzhak Yeshiva (seminary) in Jerusalem argued that their master did not leave the exact solution for decoding the Messiah’s name.
The revelation received scant coverage in the Israeli media. Only the Hebrew websites News First Class (Nfc) and Kaduri.net mentioned the Messiah note, insisting it was authentic. The Hebrew daily Ma'ariv ran a story on the note but described it as a forgery.
Jewish readers responded on the websites' forums with mixed feelings: “So this means Rabbi Kaduri was a Christian?” and “The Christians are dancing and celebrating,” were among the comments.
Israel Today spoke to two of Kaduri’s followers in Jerusalem who admitted that the note was authentic, but confusing for his followers as well. “We have no idea how the Rabbi got to this name of the Messiah,” one of them said.
Yet others completely deny any possibility that the note is authentic. Kaduri’s son, Rabbi David Kaduri, said that at the time the note was written (September 2005), his father’s physical condition made it impossible for him to write.
KADURI'S PORTRAYAL OF THE MESSIAH
A few months before Kaduri died at the age of 108, he surprised his followers when he told them that he met the Messiah. Kaduri gave a message in his synagogue on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, teaching how to recognize the Messiah. He also mentioned that the Messiah would appear to Israel after Ariel Sharon’s death. (The former prime minister is still in a coma after suffering a massive stroke more than a year ago.)
Other rabbis predict the same, including Rabbi Haim Cohen, kabbalist Nir Ben Artzi and the wife of Rabbi Haim Kneiveskzy.
Kaduri’s grandson, Rabbi Yosef Kaduri, said his grandfather spoke many times during his last days about the coming of the Messiah and redemption through the Messiah.
His spiritual portrayals of the Messiah—reminiscent of New Testament accounts—were published on the websites Kaduri.net and Nfc:
“It is hard for many good people in society to understand the person of the Messiah. The leadership and order of a Messiah of flesh and blood is hard to accept for many in the nation. As leader, the Messiah will not hold any office, but will be among the people and use the media to communicate. His reign will be pure and without personal or political desire. During his dominion, only righteousness and truth will reign.
“Will all believe in the Messiah right away? No, in the beginning some of us will believe in him and some not. It will be easier for non-religious people to follow the Messiah than for Orthodox people.
“The revelation of the Messiah will be fullled in two stages: First, he will actively confirm his position as Messiah without knowing himself that he is the Messiah. Then he will reveal himself to some Jews, not necessarily to wise Torah scholars. It can be even simple people. Only then he will reveal himself to the whole nation. The people will wonder and say: ‘What, that’s the Messiah?’ Many have known his name but have not believed that he is the Messiah.”
FAREWELL TO A 'TSADIK'
Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri was known for his photographic memory and his memorization of the Bible, the Talmud, Rashi and other Jewish writings. He knew Jewish sages and celebrities of the last century and rabbis who lived in the Holy Land and kept the faith alive before the State of Israel was born.
Kaduri was not only highly esteemed because of his age of 108. He was charismatic and wise, and chief rabbis looked up to him as a Tsadik, a righteous man or saint. He would give advice and blessings to everyone who asked. Thousands visited him to ask for counsel or healing. His followers speak of many miracles and his students say that he predicted many disasters.
When he died, more than 200,000 people joined the funeral procession on the streets of Jerusalem to pay their respects as he was taken to hisfinal resting place.
“When he comes, the Messiah will rescue Jerusalem from foreign religions that want to rule the city,” Kaduri once said. “They will not succeed for they will fight against one another.”
THE RABBI'S FOLLOWERS REACT
In an interview with Israel Today, Rabbi David Kaduri, the 80-year-old son of the late Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri, denied that his father left a note with the name Yeshua just before he died.
“It’s not his writing,” he said when we showed him a copy of the note.
During a nighttime meeting in the Nahalat Yitzhak Yeshiva in Jerusalem, books with the elder Kaduri’s handwriting from 80 years ago were presented to us in an attempt to prove that the Messiah note was not authentic.
When we told Rabbi Kaduri that his father’s official website (www.kaduri.net) had mentioned the Messiah note, he was shocked. “Oh no! That’s blasphemy. The people could understand that my father pointed to him [the Messiah of the Christians].”
David Kaduri confirmed, however, that in his last year, his father had talked and dreamed almost exclusively about the Messiah and his coming. “My father has met the Messiah in a vision,” he said, “and told us that he would come soon.”
Israel Today was given access to many of the rabbi's manuscripts, written in his own hand for the exclusive use of his students. Most striking were the cross-like symbols painted by Kaduri all over the pages. In the Jewish tradition, one does not use crosses. In fact, even the use of a plus sign is discouraged because it might be mistaken for a cross.
But there they were, scribbled in the rabbi's own hand. When we asked what those symbols meant, Rabbi David Kaduri said they were “signs of the angel." Pressed further about the meaning of the “signs of the angel," he said he had no idea. Rabbi David Kaduri went on to explain that only his father had had a spiritual relationship with God and had met the Messiah in his dreams.
Orthodox Jews around the Nahalat Yitzhak Yeshiva told Israel Today a few weeks later that the story about the secret note of Rabbi Kaduri should never have come out, and that it had damaged the name the revered old sage.
Rabbi Reveals Name of the MessiahBy IsraelToday | April 30, 2007
http://www.israeltoday.co.il/default.aspx?tabid=128&view=item&idx=1347
Shortly before he died, one of Israel's most prominent rabbis wrote the name of the Messiah on a small note which he requested would remain sealed until now. When the note was opened, it revealed what many have known for centuries: Yehoshua, or Yeshua (Jesus), is the Messiah.
A few months before he died, one of the nation’s most prominent rabbis, Yitzhak Kaduri, supposedly wrote the name of the Messiah on a small note which he requested would remain sealed until now. When the note was unsealed, it revealed what many have known for centuries: Yehoshua, or Yeshua (Jesus), is the Messiah.
With the biblical name of Jesus, the Rabbi and kabbalist described the Messiah using six words and hinting that the initial letters form the name of the Messiah. The secret note said:
Concerning the letter abbreviation of the Messiah’s name, He will lift the people and prove that his word and law are valid.
This is I have signed in the month of mercy,
Yitzhak Kaduri
The Hebrew sentence (translated above in bold) with the hidden name of the Messiah reads: Yarim Ha’Am Veyokhiakh Shedvaro Vetorato Omdim
The initials spell the Hebrew name of Jesus, Yehoshua. Yehoshua and Yeshua are e ectively (sic) the same name, derived from the same Hebrew root of the word “salvation” as documented in Zechariah 6:11 and Ezra 3:2. The same priest writes in Ezra, “Yeshua son of Yozadak” while writing in Zechariah “Yehoshua son of Yohozadak.” The priest adds the holy abbreviation of God’s name, ho, in the father’s name Yozadak and in the name Yeshua.
With one of Israel’s most prominent rabbis indicating the name of the Messiah is Yeshua, it is understandable why his last wish was to wait one year after his death before revealing what he wrote.
When the name of Yehoshua appeared in Kaduri’s message, ultra-Orthodox Jews from his Nahalat Yitzhak Yeshiva (seminary) in Jerusalem argued that their master did not leave the exact solution for decoding the Messiah’s name.
The revelation received scant coverage in the Israeli media. Only the Hebrew websites News First Class (Nfc) and Kaduri.net mentioned the Messiah note, insisting it was authentic. The Hebrew daily Ma'ariv ran a story on the note but described it as a forgery.
Jewish readers responded on the websites' forums with mixed feelings: “So this means Rabbi Kaduri was a Christian?” and “The Christians are dancing and celebrating,” were among the comments.
Israel Today spoke to two of Kaduri’s followers in Jerusalem who admitted that the note was authentic, but confusing for his followers as well. “We have no idea how the Rabbi got to this name of the Messiah,” one of them said.
Yet others completely deny any possibility that the note is authentic. Kaduri’s son, Rabbi David Kaduri, said that at the time the note was written (September 2005), his father’s physical condition made it impossible for him to write.
KADURI'S PORTRAYAL OF THE MESSIAH
A few months before Kaduri died at the age of 108, he surprised his followers when he told them that he met the Messiah. Kaduri gave a message in his synagogue on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, teaching how to recognize the Messiah. He also mentioned that the Messiah would appear to Israel after Ariel Sharon’s death. (The former prime minister is still in a coma after suffering a massive stroke more than a year ago.)
Other rabbis predict the same, including Rabbi Haim Cohen, kabbalist Nir Ben Artzi and the wife of Rabbi Haim Kneiveskzy.
Kaduri’s grandson, Rabbi Yosef Kaduri, said his grandfather spoke many times during his last days about the coming of the Messiah and redemption through the Messiah.
His spiritual portrayals of the Messiah—reminiscent of New Testament accounts—were published on the websites Kaduri.net and Nfc:
“It is hard for many good people in society to understand the person of the Messiah. The leadership and order of a Messiah of flesh and blood is hard to accept for many in the nation. As leader, the Messiah will not hold any office, but will be among the people and use the media to communicate. His reign will be pure and without personal or political desire. During his dominion, only righteousness and truth will reign.
“Will all believe in the Messiah right away? No, in the beginning some of us will believe in him and some not. It will be easier for non-religious people to follow the Messiah than for Orthodox people.
“The revelation of the Messiah will be fullled in two stages: First, he will actively confirm his position as Messiah without knowing himself that he is the Messiah. Then he will reveal himself to some Jews, not necessarily to wise Torah scholars. It can be even simple people. Only then he will reveal himself to the whole nation. The people will wonder and say: ‘What, that’s the Messiah?’ Many have known his name but have not believed that he is the Messiah.”
FAREWELL TO A 'TSADIK'
Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri was known for his photographic memory and his memorization of the Bible, the Talmud, Rashi and other Jewish writings. He knew Jewish sages and celebrities of the last century and rabbis who lived in the Holy Land and kept the faith alive before the State of Israel was born.
Kaduri was not only highly esteemed because of his age of 108. He was charismatic and wise, and chief rabbis looked up to him as a Tsadik, a righteous man or saint. He would give advice and blessings to everyone who asked. Thousands visited him to ask for counsel or healing. His followers speak of many miracles and his students say that he predicted many disasters.
When he died, more than 200,000 people joined the funeral procession on the streets of Jerusalem to pay their respects as he was taken to hisfinal resting place.
“When he comes, the Messiah will rescue Jerusalem from foreign religions that want to rule the city,” Kaduri once said. “They will not succeed for they will fight against one another.”
THE RABBI'S FOLLOWERS REACT
In an interview with Israel Today, Rabbi David Kaduri, the 80-year-old son of the late Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri, denied that his father left a note with the name Yeshua just before he died.
“It’s not his writing,” he said when we showed him a copy of the note.
During a nighttime meeting in the Nahalat Yitzhak Yeshiva in Jerusalem, books with the elder Kaduri’s handwriting from 80 years ago were presented to us in an attempt to prove that the Messiah note was not authentic.
When we told Rabbi Kaduri that his father’s official website (www.kaduri.net) had mentioned the Messiah note, he was shocked. “Oh no! That’s blasphemy. The people could understand that my father pointed to him [the Messiah of the Christians].”
David Kaduri confirmed, however, that in his last year, his father had talked and dreamed almost exclusively about the Messiah and his coming. “My father has met the Messiah in a vision,” he said, “and told us that he would come soon.”
Israel Today was given access to many of the rabbi's manuscripts, written in his own hand for the exclusive use of his students. Most striking were the cross-like symbols painted by Kaduri all over the pages. In the Jewish tradition, one does not use crosses. In fact, even the use of a plus sign is discouraged because it might be mistaken for a cross.
But there they were, scribbled in the rabbi's own hand. When we asked what those symbols meant, Rabbi David Kaduri said they were “signs of the angel." Pressed further about the meaning of the “signs of the angel," he said he had no idea. Rabbi David Kaduri went on to explain that only his father had had a spiritual relationship with God and had met the Messiah in his dreams.
Orthodox Jews around the Nahalat Yitzhak Yeshiva told Israel Today a few weeks later that the story about the secret note of Rabbi Kaduri should never have come out, and that it had damaged the name the revered old sage.
Harvard official in favor of Israeli & German ban on free speech
FREDERICK SCHAUER Harvard University - John F. Kennedy School of Government
Dear Mr. Schauer
According to the NY Times you have no problem with Israelis or Germans abridging freedom of speech "because of their past history." Germar Rudolf a former scientist at the Max Planck Institute is serving several years in prison in Germany for publishing chemical studies of Auschwitz gas chambers at variance with the official version of events. You have no problem with this young man rotting in prison for publishing his scientific skepticism?
If you have been quoted correctly, would you also have no problem with Palestinians banning yeshiva texts that refer to them as "Amalek" and suggest they be extruded or extirpated from their lands?
What about American Indians - given their past history - getting a ban on the writings of General Sherman and Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum, both of whom strongly suggested that the annihilation of native Americans was a good thing?
There you are, at the august Kennedy school of government, and you can't comprehend that our First Amendment is not based on the travails of past history. It is a guarantee against the establishment of not just a religion, but of any ideology that is so surfeited with its own hubris that it imagines that it's most rigorous philosophical and political rivals should not be heard.
Sincerely,
Michael A. Hoffman II
---
AMERICAN EXCEPTION
Unlike Others, U.S. Defends Freedom to Offend in Speech
By ADAM LIPTAK | June 12, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/us/12hate.html?hp
VANCOUVER, British Columbia — A couple of years ago, a Canadian magazine published an article arguing that the rise of Islam threatened Western values. The article’s tone was mocking and biting, but it said nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States do not say every day without fear of legal reprisal.
Things are different here. The magazine is on trial.
Two members of the Canadian Islamic Congress say the magazine, Maclean’s, Canada’s leading newsweekly, violated a provincial hate speech law by stirring up hatred against Muslims. They say the magazine should be forbidden from saying similar things, forced to publish a rebuttal and made to compensate Muslims for injuring their “dignity, feelings and self respect.”
The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, which held five days of hearings on those questions here last week, will soon rule on whether Maclean’s violated the law. As spectators lined up for the afternoon session last week, an argument broke out.
“It’s hate speech!” yelled one man.
“It’s free speech!” yelled another.
In the United States, that debate has been settled. Under the First Amendment, newspapers and magazines can say what they like about minority groups and religions — even false, provocative or hateful things — without legal consequence.
The Maclean’s article, “The Future Belongs to Islam,” was an excerpt from a book by Mark Steyn called “America Alone” (Regnery, 2006). The title was fitting: The United States, in its treatment of hate speech, as in so many areas of the law, takes a distinctive legal path.
“In much of the developed world, one uses racial epithets at one’s legal peril, one displays Nazi regalia and the other trappings of ethnic hatred at significant legal risk, and one urges discrimination against religious minorities under threat of fine or imprisonment,” Frederick Schauer, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, wrote in a recent essay called “The Exceptional First Amendment.”
“But in the United States,” Professor Schauer continued, “all such speech remains constitutionally protected.”
Canada, England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, Australia and India all have laws or have signed international conventions banning hate speech. Israel and France forbid the sale of Nazi items like swastikas and flags. It is a crime to deny the Holocaust in Canada, Germany and France.
Earlier this month, the actress Brigitte Bardot, an animal rights activist, was fined $23,000 in France for provoking racial hatred by criticizing a Muslim ceremony involving the slaughter of sheep.
By contrast, American courts would not stop the American Nazi Party from marching in Skokie, Ill., in 1977, though a march would have been deeply distressing to the many Holocaust survivors there.
Six years later, a state court judge in New York dismissed a libel case brought by several Puerto Rican groups against a business executive who had called food stamps “basically a Puerto Rican program.” The First Amendment, Justice Eve M. Preminger wrote, does not allow even false statements about racial or ethnic groups to be suppressed or punished just because they may increase “the general level of prejudice.”
Some prominent legal scholars say the United States should reconsider its position on hate speech.
“It is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken,” Jeremy Waldron, a legal philosopher, wrote in The New York Review of Books last month, “when they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against certain forms of vicious attack.”
Professor Waldron was reviewing “Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment” by Anthony Lewis, the former New York Times columnist. Mr. Lewis has been critical of attempts to use the law to limit hate speech.
But even Mr. Lewis, a liberal, wrote in his book that he was inclined to relax some of the most stringent First Amendment protections “in an age when words have inspired acts of mass murder and terrorism.” In particular, he called for a re-examination of the Supreme Court’s insistence that there is only one justification for making incitement a criminal offense: the likelihood of imminent violence.
The imminence requirement sets a high hurdle. Mere advocacy of violence, terrorism or the overthrow of the government is not enough; the words must be meant to and be likely to produce violence or lawlessness right away. A fiery speech urging an angry mob to immediately assault a black man in its midst probably qualifies as incitement under the First Amendment. A magazine article — or any publication — aimed at stirring up racial hatred surely does not.
Mr. Lewis wrote that there was “genuinely dangerous” speech that did not meet the imminence requirement.
“I think we should be able to punish speech that urges terrorist violence to an audience, some of whose members are ready to act on the urging,” Mr. Lewis wrote. “That is imminence enough.”
Harvey A. Silverglate, a civil liberties lawyer in Cambridge, Mass., disagreed. “When times are tough,” he said, “there seems to be a tendency to say there is too much freedom.”
“Free speech matters because it works,” Mr. Silverglate continued. Scrutiny and debate are more effective ways of combating hate speech than censorship, he said, and all the more so in the post-Sept. 11 era.
“The world didn’t suffer because too many people read ‘Mein Kampf,’ ” Mr. Silverglate said. “Sending Hitler on a speaking tour of the United States would have been quite a good idea.”
Mr. Silverglate seemed to be echoing the words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., whose 1919 dissent in Abrams v. United States eventually formed the basis for modern First Amendment law.
“The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” Justice Holmes wrote.
“I think that we should be eternally vigilant,” he added, “against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death.”
The First Amendment is not, of course, absolute. The Supreme Court has said that the government may ban fighting words or threats. Punishments may be enhanced for violent crimes prompted by racial hatred. And private institutions, including universities and employers, are not subject to the First Amendment, which restricts only government activities.
But merely saying hateful things about minority groups, even with the intent to cause their members distress and to generate contempt and loathing, is protected by the First Amendment.
In 1969, for instance, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the conviction of a leader of a Ku Klux Klan group under an Ohio statute that banned the advocacy of terrorism. The Klan leader, Clarence Brandenburg, had urged his followers at a rally to “send the Jews back to Israel,” to “bury” blacks, though he did not call them that, and to consider “revengeance” against politicians and judges who were unsympathetic to whites.
Only Klan members and journalists were present. Because Mr. Brandenburg’s words fell short of calling for immediate violence in a setting where such violence was likely, the Supreme Court ruled that he could not be prosecuted for incitement.
In his opening statement in the Canadian magazine case, a lawyer representing the Muslim plaintiffs aggrieved by the Maclean’s article pleaded with a three-member panel of the tribunal to declare that the article subjected his clients to “hatred and ridicule” and to force the magazine to publish a response.
“You are the only thing between racist, hateful, contemptuous Islamophobic and irresponsible journalism, and law-abiding Canadian citizens,” the lawyer, Faisal Joseph, told the tribunal.
In response, the lawyer for Maclean’s, Roger D. McConchie, all but called the proceeding a sham.
“Innocent intent is not a defense,” Mr. McConchie said in a bitter criticism of the British Columbia hate speech law. “Nor is truth. Nor is fair comment on true facts. Publication in the public interest and for the public benefit is not a defense. Opinion expressed in good faith is not a defense. Responsible journalism is not a defense.”
Jason Gratl, a lawyer for the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association and the Canadian Association of Journalists, which have intervened in the case in support of the magazine, was measured in his criticism of the law forbidding hate speech.
“Canadians do not have a cast-iron stomach for offensive speech,” Mr. Gratl said in a telephone interview. “We don’t subscribe to a marketplace of ideas. Americans as a whole are more tough-minded and more prepared for verbal combat.”
Many foreign courts have respectfully considered the American approach — and then rejected it.
A 1990 decision from the Canadian Supreme Court, for instance, upheld the criminal conviction of James Keegstra for “unlawfully promoting hatred against an identifiable group by communicating anti-Semitic statements.” Mr. Keegstra, a teacher, had told his students that Jews are “money loving,” “power hungry” and “treacherous.”
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Brian Dickson said there was an issue “crucial to the disposition of this appeal: the relationship between Canadian and American approaches to the constitutional protection of free expression, most notably in the realm of hate propaganda.”
Chief Justice Dickson said “there is much to be learned from First Amendment jurisprudence.” But he concluded that “the international commitment to eradicate hate propaganda and, most importantly, the special role given equality and multiculturalism in the Canadian Constitution necessitate a departure from the view, reasonably prevalent in America at present, that the suppression of hate propaganda is incompatible with the guarantee of free expression.”
America’s distinctive approach to free speech, legal scholars say, has many causes. It is partly rooted in an individualistic view of the world. Fear of allowing the government to decide what speech is acceptable plays a role. So does history.
“It would be really hard to criticize Israel, Austria, Germany and South Africa, given their histories,” for laws banning hate speech, Professor Schauer said in an interview.
In Canada, however, laws banning hate speech seem to stem from a desire to promote societal harmony. While the Ontario Human Rights Commission dismissed a complaint against Maclean’s, it still condemned the article.
“In Canada, the right to freedom of expression is not absolute, nor should it be,” the commission’s statement said. “By portraying Muslims as all sharing the same negative characteristics, including being a threat to ‘the West,’ this explicit expression of Islamophobia further perpetuates and promotes prejudice toward Muslims and others.”
A separate federal complaint against Maclean’s is pending.
Mr. Steyn, the author of the article, said the Canadian proceedings had illustrated some important distinctions. “The problem with so-called hate speech laws is that they’re not about facts,” he said in a telephone interview. “They’re about feelings.”
“What we’re learning here is really the bedrock difference between the United States and the countries that are in a broad sense its legal cousins,” Mr. Steyn added. “Western governments are becoming increasingly comfortable with the regulation of opinion. The First Amendment really does distinguish the U.S., not just from Canada but from the rest of the Western world.”
***
Dear Mr. Schauer
According to the NY Times you have no problem with Israelis or Germans abridging freedom of speech "because of their past history." Germar Rudolf a former scientist at the Max Planck Institute is serving several years in prison in Germany for publishing chemical studies of Auschwitz gas chambers at variance with the official version of events. You have no problem with this young man rotting in prison for publishing his scientific skepticism?
If you have been quoted correctly, would you also have no problem with Palestinians banning yeshiva texts that refer to them as "Amalek" and suggest they be extruded or extirpated from their lands?
What about American Indians - given their past history - getting a ban on the writings of General Sherman and Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum, both of whom strongly suggested that the annihilation of native Americans was a good thing?
There you are, at the august Kennedy school of government, and you can't comprehend that our First Amendment is not based on the travails of past history. It is a guarantee against the establishment of not just a religion, but of any ideology that is so surfeited with its own hubris that it imagines that it's most rigorous philosophical and political rivals should not be heard.
Sincerely,
Michael A. Hoffman II
---
AMERICAN EXCEPTION
Unlike Others, U.S. Defends Freedom to Offend in Speech
By ADAM LIPTAK | June 12, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/us/12hate.html?hp
VANCOUVER, British Columbia — A couple of years ago, a Canadian magazine published an article arguing that the rise of Islam threatened Western values. The article’s tone was mocking and biting, but it said nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States do not say every day without fear of legal reprisal.
Things are different here. The magazine is on trial.
Two members of the Canadian Islamic Congress say the magazine, Maclean’s, Canada’s leading newsweekly, violated a provincial hate speech law by stirring up hatred against Muslims. They say the magazine should be forbidden from saying similar things, forced to publish a rebuttal and made to compensate Muslims for injuring their “dignity, feelings and self respect.”
The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, which held five days of hearings on those questions here last week, will soon rule on whether Maclean’s violated the law. As spectators lined up for the afternoon session last week, an argument broke out.
“It’s hate speech!” yelled one man.
“It’s free speech!” yelled another.
In the United States, that debate has been settled. Under the First Amendment, newspapers and magazines can say what they like about minority groups and religions — even false, provocative or hateful things — without legal consequence.
The Maclean’s article, “The Future Belongs to Islam,” was an excerpt from a book by Mark Steyn called “America Alone” (Regnery, 2006). The title was fitting: The United States, in its treatment of hate speech, as in so many areas of the law, takes a distinctive legal path.
“In much of the developed world, one uses racial epithets at one’s legal peril, one displays Nazi regalia and the other trappings of ethnic hatred at significant legal risk, and one urges discrimination against religious minorities under threat of fine or imprisonment,” Frederick Schauer, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, wrote in a recent essay called “The Exceptional First Amendment.”
“But in the United States,” Professor Schauer continued, “all such speech remains constitutionally protected.”
Canada, England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, Australia and India all have laws or have signed international conventions banning hate speech. Israel and France forbid the sale of Nazi items like swastikas and flags. It is a crime to deny the Holocaust in Canada, Germany and France.
Earlier this month, the actress Brigitte Bardot, an animal rights activist, was fined $23,000 in France for provoking racial hatred by criticizing a Muslim ceremony involving the slaughter of sheep.
By contrast, American courts would not stop the American Nazi Party from marching in Skokie, Ill., in 1977, though a march would have been deeply distressing to the many Holocaust survivors there.
Six years later, a state court judge in New York dismissed a libel case brought by several Puerto Rican groups against a business executive who had called food stamps “basically a Puerto Rican program.” The First Amendment, Justice Eve M. Preminger wrote, does not allow even false statements about racial or ethnic groups to be suppressed or punished just because they may increase “the general level of prejudice.”
Some prominent legal scholars say the United States should reconsider its position on hate speech.
“It is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken,” Jeremy Waldron, a legal philosopher, wrote in The New York Review of Books last month, “when they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against certain forms of vicious attack.”
Professor Waldron was reviewing “Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment” by Anthony Lewis, the former New York Times columnist. Mr. Lewis has been critical of attempts to use the law to limit hate speech.
But even Mr. Lewis, a liberal, wrote in his book that he was inclined to relax some of the most stringent First Amendment protections “in an age when words have inspired acts of mass murder and terrorism.” In particular, he called for a re-examination of the Supreme Court’s insistence that there is only one justification for making incitement a criminal offense: the likelihood of imminent violence.
The imminence requirement sets a high hurdle. Mere advocacy of violence, terrorism or the overthrow of the government is not enough; the words must be meant to and be likely to produce violence or lawlessness right away. A fiery speech urging an angry mob to immediately assault a black man in its midst probably qualifies as incitement under the First Amendment. A magazine article — or any publication — aimed at stirring up racial hatred surely does not.
Mr. Lewis wrote that there was “genuinely dangerous” speech that did not meet the imminence requirement.
“I think we should be able to punish speech that urges terrorist violence to an audience, some of whose members are ready to act on the urging,” Mr. Lewis wrote. “That is imminence enough.”
Harvey A. Silverglate, a civil liberties lawyer in Cambridge, Mass., disagreed. “When times are tough,” he said, “there seems to be a tendency to say there is too much freedom.”
“Free speech matters because it works,” Mr. Silverglate continued. Scrutiny and debate are more effective ways of combating hate speech than censorship, he said, and all the more so in the post-Sept. 11 era.
“The world didn’t suffer because too many people read ‘Mein Kampf,’ ” Mr. Silverglate said. “Sending Hitler on a speaking tour of the United States would have been quite a good idea.”
Mr. Silverglate seemed to be echoing the words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., whose 1919 dissent in Abrams v. United States eventually formed the basis for modern First Amendment law.
“The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” Justice Holmes wrote.
“I think that we should be eternally vigilant,” he added, “against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death.”
The First Amendment is not, of course, absolute. The Supreme Court has said that the government may ban fighting words or threats. Punishments may be enhanced for violent crimes prompted by racial hatred. And private institutions, including universities and employers, are not subject to the First Amendment, which restricts only government activities.
But merely saying hateful things about minority groups, even with the intent to cause their members distress and to generate contempt and loathing, is protected by the First Amendment.
In 1969, for instance, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the conviction of a leader of a Ku Klux Klan group under an Ohio statute that banned the advocacy of terrorism. The Klan leader, Clarence Brandenburg, had urged his followers at a rally to “send the Jews back to Israel,” to “bury” blacks, though he did not call them that, and to consider “revengeance” against politicians and judges who were unsympathetic to whites.
Only Klan members and journalists were present. Because Mr. Brandenburg’s words fell short of calling for immediate violence in a setting where such violence was likely, the Supreme Court ruled that he could not be prosecuted for incitement.
In his opening statement in the Canadian magazine case, a lawyer representing the Muslim plaintiffs aggrieved by the Maclean’s article pleaded with a three-member panel of the tribunal to declare that the article subjected his clients to “hatred and ridicule” and to force the magazine to publish a response.
“You are the only thing between racist, hateful, contemptuous Islamophobic and irresponsible journalism, and law-abiding Canadian citizens,” the lawyer, Faisal Joseph, told the tribunal.
In response, the lawyer for Maclean’s, Roger D. McConchie, all but called the proceeding a sham.
“Innocent intent is not a defense,” Mr. McConchie said in a bitter criticism of the British Columbia hate speech law. “Nor is truth. Nor is fair comment on true facts. Publication in the public interest and for the public benefit is not a defense. Opinion expressed in good faith is not a defense. Responsible journalism is not a defense.”
Jason Gratl, a lawyer for the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association and the Canadian Association of Journalists, which have intervened in the case in support of the magazine, was measured in his criticism of the law forbidding hate speech.
“Canadians do not have a cast-iron stomach for offensive speech,” Mr. Gratl said in a telephone interview. “We don’t subscribe to a marketplace of ideas. Americans as a whole are more tough-minded and more prepared for verbal combat.”
Many foreign courts have respectfully considered the American approach — and then rejected it.
A 1990 decision from the Canadian Supreme Court, for instance, upheld the criminal conviction of James Keegstra for “unlawfully promoting hatred against an identifiable group by communicating anti-Semitic statements.” Mr. Keegstra, a teacher, had told his students that Jews are “money loving,” “power hungry” and “treacherous.”
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Brian Dickson said there was an issue “crucial to the disposition of this appeal: the relationship between Canadian and American approaches to the constitutional protection of free expression, most notably in the realm of hate propaganda.”
Chief Justice Dickson said “there is much to be learned from First Amendment jurisprudence.” But he concluded that “the international commitment to eradicate hate propaganda and, most importantly, the special role given equality and multiculturalism in the Canadian Constitution necessitate a departure from the view, reasonably prevalent in America at present, that the suppression of hate propaganda is incompatible with the guarantee of free expression.”
America’s distinctive approach to free speech, legal scholars say, has many causes. It is partly rooted in an individualistic view of the world. Fear of allowing the government to decide what speech is acceptable plays a role. So does history.
“It would be really hard to criticize Israel, Austria, Germany and South Africa, given their histories,” for laws banning hate speech, Professor Schauer said in an interview.
In Canada, however, laws banning hate speech seem to stem from a desire to promote societal harmony. While the Ontario Human Rights Commission dismissed a complaint against Maclean’s, it still condemned the article.
“In Canada, the right to freedom of expression is not absolute, nor should it be,” the commission’s statement said. “By portraying Muslims as all sharing the same negative characteristics, including being a threat to ‘the West,’ this explicit expression of Islamophobia further perpetuates and promotes prejudice toward Muslims and others.”
A separate federal complaint against Maclean’s is pending.
Mr. Steyn, the author of the article, said the Canadian proceedings had illustrated some important distinctions. “The problem with so-called hate speech laws is that they’re not about facts,” he said in a telephone interview. “They’re about feelings.”
“What we’re learning here is really the bedrock difference between the United States and the countries that are in a broad sense its legal cousins,” Mr. Steyn added. “Western governments are becoming increasingly comfortable with the regulation of opinion. The First Amendment really does distinguish the U.S., not just from Canada but from the rest of the Western world.”
***
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
'Holocaust Survivors' immune from war crimes charges?
HOFFMAN'S NOTE:
For the word "partisan" in the following news report, substitute Hezbollah or Hamas. If this ex-partisan fighter, Fania Branstovsky, is innocent, as she claims, then so too are members of Hezbollah and Hamas ("heroes of the anti-Zionist resistance").
---
Holocaust survivors facing war-crimes trials
Jewish Chronicle (JC) June 6, 2008
By Dana Gloger
Elderly Jews say they are outraged that Lithuania is pursuing them over their wartime role as anti-Nazi partisans
Fania Branstovsky was just 20 when she joined the Jewish partisan movement fighting the Nazis in her home country of Lithuania. In the Vilnius ghetto, she and her fellow partisans carried out attacks against the occupying German forces. By the end of the war, almost her entire family — more than 50 people –— had perished at the hands of the Nazis. Yet now, over 60 years later, she is the one being branded unpatriotic, and is reportedly under investigation by Lithuanian authorities for alleged war crimes.
National and local newspapers and television stations are referring to the 86-year-old Holocaust survivor, who now works as a librarian at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, as a murderer and a terrorist. Earlier this year, the Vilnius-based newspaper Lietuvos Aidas called for her to be put on trial. The allegation levelled against her is that during her time as a partisan, she committed crimes against Lithuanians. But she strongly denies that she and her partisan colleagues ever targeted groups of local people.
“It’s very upsetting and shocking,” says Branstovsky, a mother of two, with six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. “We fought against the powers of the Nazis. Not against the locals. The Nazis wanted to annihilate all Jews and all people who loved freedom, and I joined the underground partisan organisation in September 1943 to defend myself and my people. It was a matter of honour.”
Even with a possible war-crimes prosecution hanging over her, she has no regrets. “I didn’t want all Jewish people to die with no resistance. I feel very proud and I’m very glad that I had the opportunity to do something for honour and humanity.”
She vows that the prospect of being put on trial for war crimes will not drive her out of her country. “I’m very patriotic. I was born here and have always lived here. Of course I am worried, but I am not planning to leave because of this. By doing this they want to rewrite history.”
Branstovsky is not the only Holocaust survivor being pursued by the Lithuanian authorities. Yitzhak Arad, a historian and former chairman of Israel’s Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, is also being investigated over similar alleged crimes.
Arad joined the partisan movement in the Vilnius ghetto during the war. His parents had already been taken by the Nazis two years earlier, eventually dying in Warsaw. So the teenage Arad decided to try to make it alone. “The night before we had to go to the ghetto, I escaped to Belorussia [then part of the Soviet Union, now Belarus],” he recalls. “In doing that, I escaped the killings. Forty members of my family were killed as well as many people from my village.”
He returned to Vilnius as a member of the pro-Soviet partisan movement, whose main activity was sabotaging German trains. Having fought so hard to survive the Nazi killings, Arad, who settled in Israel after the war, says he is “upset and disappointed” at being branded a war criminal.
“In doing this they are trying to rewrite history and to turn the murderers of thousands of Jews into heroes and the few survivors into criminals,” he says.
Although he has had no formal confirmation from the authorities that they are looking into his partisan activities, or that a prosecution is planned, he says he has heard through other channels that a group of anti-Soviets in the country filed a complaint against him to Lithuanian prosecutors. This led to an investigation being launched. The local media have also reported that an investigation is under way, accusing both Arad and Branstovsky of massacring civilians in the village of Kaniukai.
The prospect of standing trial has, naturally enough, left Arad reluctant to return to his home town. “I have not been back for two years, and I’m not planning on going back now,” he says.
If trials do go ahead, it seems that a third Jewish partisan could be the primary witness for the prosecution. Rachel Margolis, founder of Vilnius’s Jewish museum, has written a memoir recounting her escape from the ghetto and her time as a partisan. Extracts from her book, she fears, could be used as evidence by prosecutors.
Margolis, who lost her family in the Holocaust and now lives in Israel, was unavailable to talk to the JC. But according to Efraim Zuroff, director of the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, an investigator was sent to the address which she uses in Lithuania. He says the investigator interviewed Rachel Konstanian, the director of the Vilnius Jewish Museum, and told her that he was looking for Margolis in order to question her regarding an investigation into Fania Branstovsky.
Margolis’s cousin, Budd Margolis, who lives in London, fears that the stress of going through a trial could prove life-threatening to Holocaust survivors now in their eighties. “This is very shocking and upsetting,” he says. “My cousin, as well as the other two people involved, are all quite elderly now, and it’s very unfortunate that they have to deal with this at this stage of their lives. It’s terribly unjust.”
He adds that his cousin is now too scared to return to Lithuania. “She is worried she may get arrested.”
Rachel Margolis’s memoir, which has been published in Lithuania, contains a description of how a group of partisans, including Fania Branstovsky, attacked a Nazi garrison in the village of “Kanyuki”. She writes: “The partisans had surrounded the garrison, but the Nazis were exceptionally well armed and beat off all attacks. They broke the flanks of the Jewish detachments, and the partisans withdrew precipitously. Then Magid jumped up on a rock and yelled: ‘We are Jews. We will show them what we are capable of. Forward, comrades!’ This sobered the men up; they ran back and won.”
A willingness to prosecute alleged war criminals is something not often displayed by the Lithuanian authorities. Even though around 212,000 of its Jews were killed, the Baltic country has only ever brought three of its citizens to trial over war crimes, two of whom — Kazys Gimzauskas and Algimantas Dailide — were convicted, but were excused imprisonment, in Gimzauskas’s case because of illness, in Dailide’s because of advanced age. Dailide was 85, a year younger than Fania Branstovsky is now.
According to the Lithuania embassy in London, there are currently no plans to prosecute Branstovsky. In an emailed statement, Minister Counsellor, Deputy Head of Mission Jonas Grinevicius said: “There is no lawsuit against Mrs Branstovsky and there are no charges by the Prosecution General against Mrs Branstovsky, nor there is any other legal action against Mrs Branstovsky initiated. Mrs Branstovsky is only asked to appear in the court hearings as a witness in the case of the massacre by Soviet partisans of peaceful inhabitants of Kaniukai village in Salcininkai district. The killing of 38 Kaniukai inhabitants occurred in January 1944, it was committed by 120-150 Soviet partisans.”
Lithuanian denials do not impress Efraim Zuroff. He has written a strongly worded letter to Asta Skaisgiryté–Liauskienè, the Lithuanian ambassador in Israel. In it he accuses the Lithuanian authorities of “launching a campaign to discredit Jewish resistance fighters by falsely accusing them of war crimes in order to deflect attention from widespread Lithuanian participation in the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust”.
He tells the JC that this is a “malicious campaign against the innocent heroes of the anti-Nazi resistance. We are hoping the investigations will be dropped,” he says. And so are Fania Branstovsky, Yitzhak Arad and Rachel Margolis.
---
For the word "partisan" in the following news report, substitute Hezbollah or Hamas. If this ex-partisan fighter, Fania Branstovsky, is innocent, as she claims, then so too are members of Hezbollah and Hamas ("heroes of the anti-Zionist resistance").
---
Holocaust survivors facing war-crimes trials
Jewish Chronicle (JC) June 6, 2008
By Dana Gloger
Elderly Jews say they are outraged that Lithuania is pursuing them over their wartime role as anti-Nazi partisans
Fania Branstovsky was just 20 when she joined the Jewish partisan movement fighting the Nazis in her home country of Lithuania. In the Vilnius ghetto, she and her fellow partisans carried out attacks against the occupying German forces. By the end of the war, almost her entire family — more than 50 people –— had perished at the hands of the Nazis. Yet now, over 60 years later, she is the one being branded unpatriotic, and is reportedly under investigation by Lithuanian authorities for alleged war crimes.
National and local newspapers and television stations are referring to the 86-year-old Holocaust survivor, who now works as a librarian at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, as a murderer and a terrorist. Earlier this year, the Vilnius-based newspaper Lietuvos Aidas called for her to be put on trial. The allegation levelled against her is that during her time as a partisan, she committed crimes against Lithuanians. But she strongly denies that she and her partisan colleagues ever targeted groups of local people.
“It’s very upsetting and shocking,” says Branstovsky, a mother of two, with six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. “We fought against the powers of the Nazis. Not against the locals. The Nazis wanted to annihilate all Jews and all people who loved freedom, and I joined the underground partisan organisation in September 1943 to defend myself and my people. It was a matter of honour.”
Even with a possible war-crimes prosecution hanging over her, she has no regrets. “I didn’t want all Jewish people to die with no resistance. I feel very proud and I’m very glad that I had the opportunity to do something for honour and humanity.”
She vows that the prospect of being put on trial for war crimes will not drive her out of her country. “I’m very patriotic. I was born here and have always lived here. Of course I am worried, but I am not planning to leave because of this. By doing this they want to rewrite history.”
Branstovsky is not the only Holocaust survivor being pursued by the Lithuanian authorities. Yitzhak Arad, a historian and former chairman of Israel’s Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, is also being investigated over similar alleged crimes.
Arad joined the partisan movement in the Vilnius ghetto during the war. His parents had already been taken by the Nazis two years earlier, eventually dying in Warsaw. So the teenage Arad decided to try to make it alone. “The night before we had to go to the ghetto, I escaped to Belorussia [then part of the Soviet Union, now Belarus],” he recalls. “In doing that, I escaped the killings. Forty members of my family were killed as well as many people from my village.”
He returned to Vilnius as a member of the pro-Soviet partisan movement, whose main activity was sabotaging German trains. Having fought so hard to survive the Nazi killings, Arad, who settled in Israel after the war, says he is “upset and disappointed” at being branded a war criminal.
“In doing this they are trying to rewrite history and to turn the murderers of thousands of Jews into heroes and the few survivors into criminals,” he says.
Although he has had no formal confirmation from the authorities that they are looking into his partisan activities, or that a prosecution is planned, he says he has heard through other channels that a group of anti-Soviets in the country filed a complaint against him to Lithuanian prosecutors. This led to an investigation being launched. The local media have also reported that an investigation is under way, accusing both Arad and Branstovsky of massacring civilians in the village of Kaniukai.
The prospect of standing trial has, naturally enough, left Arad reluctant to return to his home town. “I have not been back for two years, and I’m not planning on going back now,” he says.
If trials do go ahead, it seems that a third Jewish partisan could be the primary witness for the prosecution. Rachel Margolis, founder of Vilnius’s Jewish museum, has written a memoir recounting her escape from the ghetto and her time as a partisan. Extracts from her book, she fears, could be used as evidence by prosecutors.
Margolis, who lost her family in the Holocaust and now lives in Israel, was unavailable to talk to the JC. But according to Efraim Zuroff, director of the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, an investigator was sent to the address which she uses in Lithuania. He says the investigator interviewed Rachel Konstanian, the director of the Vilnius Jewish Museum, and told her that he was looking for Margolis in order to question her regarding an investigation into Fania Branstovsky.
Margolis’s cousin, Budd Margolis, who lives in London, fears that the stress of going through a trial could prove life-threatening to Holocaust survivors now in their eighties. “This is very shocking and upsetting,” he says. “My cousin, as well as the other two people involved, are all quite elderly now, and it’s very unfortunate that they have to deal with this at this stage of their lives. It’s terribly unjust.”
He adds that his cousin is now too scared to return to Lithuania. “She is worried she may get arrested.”
Rachel Margolis’s memoir, which has been published in Lithuania, contains a description of how a group of partisans, including Fania Branstovsky, attacked a Nazi garrison in the village of “Kanyuki”. She writes: “The partisans had surrounded the garrison, but the Nazis were exceptionally well armed and beat off all attacks. They broke the flanks of the Jewish detachments, and the partisans withdrew precipitously. Then Magid jumped up on a rock and yelled: ‘We are Jews. We will show them what we are capable of. Forward, comrades!’ This sobered the men up; they ran back and won.”
A willingness to prosecute alleged war criminals is something not often displayed by the Lithuanian authorities. Even though around 212,000 of its Jews were killed, the Baltic country has only ever brought three of its citizens to trial over war crimes, two of whom — Kazys Gimzauskas and Algimantas Dailide — were convicted, but were excused imprisonment, in Gimzauskas’s case because of illness, in Dailide’s because of advanced age. Dailide was 85, a year younger than Fania Branstovsky is now.
According to the Lithuania embassy in London, there are currently no plans to prosecute Branstovsky. In an emailed statement, Minister Counsellor, Deputy Head of Mission Jonas Grinevicius said: “There is no lawsuit against Mrs Branstovsky and there are no charges by the Prosecution General against Mrs Branstovsky, nor there is any other legal action against Mrs Branstovsky initiated. Mrs Branstovsky is only asked to appear in the court hearings as a witness in the case of the massacre by Soviet partisans of peaceful inhabitants of Kaniukai village in Salcininkai district. The killing of 38 Kaniukai inhabitants occurred in January 1944, it was committed by 120-150 Soviet partisans.”
Lithuanian denials do not impress Efraim Zuroff. He has written a strongly worded letter to Asta Skaisgiryté–Liauskienè, the Lithuanian ambassador in Israel. In it he accuses the Lithuanian authorities of “launching a campaign to discredit Jewish resistance fighters by falsely accusing them of war crimes in order to deflect attention from widespread Lithuanian participation in the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust”.
He tells the JC that this is a “malicious campaign against the innocent heroes of the anti-Nazi resistance. We are hoping the investigations will be dropped,” he says. And so are Fania Branstovsky, Yitzhak Arad and Rachel Margolis.
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