National Bank Honors Gentile-Hating Rabbi with Silver Coin

By Michael Hoffman

Copyright ©2012 • www.revisionisthistory.org

The Chatam Sofer coin issued by the National Bank of Slovakia

The "Chatam Sofer," (sometimes spelled "Hatam Sofer”), Moses Schreiber, was a gentile-hating rabbi based in Bratislavia (Pressburg), formerly Hungary, and now the capital of the independent nation of Slovakia.

Rabbi Sofer despised the unborn children of gentile women to such an extent that he issued rulings forbidding Judaic medical personnel from assisting gentile women in giving birth. By refusing to help them, Sofer's Judaics avoided what the rabbi termed "multiplying the seed of Amalek." (1)

Rabbi Sofer so hated gentiles that he sought to sufficiently embellish the language of Yiddish so as to establish it as the completely separate, premier Judaic language, thereby eschewing the languages of the goyim, in keeping with the Eighteen Degrees of Separation decreed by Beis Shamai and Beis Hillel in the first century A.D. (2)

The western banking sytem, alleged by apologists to be merely a rational financial enterprise, has been entwined with the occult since its inception. Corroboration of this fact comes from Slovakia, specifically from the National Bank of Slovakia, whose headquarters building, dedicated to the Euro currency, bears a resemblance to a completed version of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1563 painting of the unfinished Tower of Babel.

National Bank of Slovakia headquarters

This month the National Bank of Slovakia issued a silver coin honoring the life of Rabbi Sofer. (3) The coin features male and female (upward and downward pointing) triangles, obviously intended to symbolize the two parts of the Kabbalistic Seal of Solomon icon (often as misrepresented as the "Star of David").

"Many esoteric traditions, including Jewish Kabbalah and Hermeticism - ancient Alexandrian and Renaissance - resort to this occult Solomon as the patron of magic and alchemy.” (4)

Note that the preceding statement refers not to the Biblical Solomon, but to the "occult Solomon," just as there are two Noahs, the Biblical Patriarch, and the occult Noah of the Talmud, Midrash and "Noahide" laws. (5)

Rabbi Sofer was a backward bigot whose “scholarship” oppressed thousands of Judaics who sought to free themselves from Talmudic Judaism during the "Haskalah," even as he helped to institutionalize ever deeper, Orthodox Judaism's savage contempt for the goyim.

The sinister Chatam Sofer was an oppressor and enslaver, the opposite of a liberator. Why would a modern East European bank, a member of the European Union whose country is part of NATO, adopt an occult symbol and use it to honor a fundamentalist bigot who hated gentiles, as well as any Judaic person who tried to get free of the suffocating "Oral traditions" of the Talmudic-derived halacha, which micro-manages the lives of every frum Judaic?

Is the coin intended as a form of propitiation of the dark forces represented by the love of money?

Coupled with the minting of this silver coin is the invocation of the graveyard-and-corpse cult which is central to the Kabbalah, in this case the newly refurbished grave of Rabbi Sofer.

Here is the June 26, 2012 press release from the World Jewish Congress:

Slovakia honors 18th century rabbinical scholar with silver coin

The National Bank of Slovakia has issued a new coin marking the 250th anniversary of the birth of Chatam Sofer (1762-1839), one of Europe's most noted scholars of the Talmud and founder of the Bratislava Yeshiva which continued as a primary institute of Hebrew education until the outbreak of World War II.

Born in Frankfurt as Moses Schreiber, Sofer traveled to Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic) as a scholar in 1782 where he became recognized as an authority in the teachings of the Talmud. The yeshiva he founded in Bratislava in 1806 eventually became the most influential institute of Hebrew studies.

The graves of Sofer and other Jewish scholars were covered by a tramway after World War II, but have since been restored. The site is now a memorial managed by the local Jewish community and draws a great number of visitors every year.

The € 10 silver coin is the work of designer Pavel Károly and depicts a portrait of Sofer inspired from an oil painting by Ber Frank Halevi's original drawing.

The depiction is placed within a triangle, one half of a traditional Star of David, and a menorah is positioned below the portrait. His year of birth and death, 1762 and 1839 is seen on either side of the menorah. The scholar's name is placed around the upper left edge and the same – in Hebrew letters is positioned on the right side.

The reverse design includes a scenic depiction of the Slovak capital Bratislava during the time of the founding of Sofer's yeshiva. (End quote from the World Jewish Congress).

NOTES

1. Hoffman, Michael, Judaism Discovered (2008), p. 478.

2. Ibid., p. 592.

3. The coin was struck at the Kremnica Mint on June 18, 2012 in both proof and FDC or UNC quality. Both versions are minted in .900 fine silver with a weight of 18 grams and a diameter of 34 mm. Mintage figures for the proof version is authorized at 7,900 coins and the FDC version has an authorized mintage of 5,800 coins.

4. Bloom, Harold, New York Times (in a review of Marina Warner's Stranger Magic), March 23, 2012.

5. Hoffman, Michael, Judaism's Strange Gods (2011), pp. 93 and 108.

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Michael Hoffman’s On the Contrary column is a public service of Independent History and Research, Box 849, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho 83816 USA. Our catalog of books, recordings, newsletters and pamphlets is online at http://revisionisthistorystore.blogspot.com/

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African immigrants will be put in Israeli concentration camps

Preparations are underway to hold thousands of African immigrants in a vast concentration camp in southern ‘Israel’

By Michael Hoffman

www.revisionisthistory.org 

Imagine any Republican or Democrat politician in the U.S. saying anything like what these Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Netanyahu, officials in Netanyahu's government, and his close political allies, are saying:

Among Israelis, "Tensions over the presence of the migrants have been stoked by rightist politicians. In a speech at last month’s Hatikva neighborhood protest, Miri Regev, a parliament member from the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, called the Africans 'a cancer in our body.'


Israeli "Interior Minister Eli Yishai, who has promised to clear out all the migrants, told the Maariv newspaper in a recent interview that they were creating 'a state within a state' and that 'most of the people coming here are Muslims who think that this country doesn’t belong to us, to the white man.'


“If we don’t stop the entry, the problem, whose extent now is 60,000 illegal infiltrators, could easily develop to 600,000, which would flood the country and, to a large degree, nullify our character as a Jewish and democratic state,” Prime Minister Netanyahu said at a meeting of his cabinet last month.'


"In a television interview, Yishai described the moves to deport the foreigners as an act of national self preservation, to maintain Israel’s Jewish majority. 'If we wouldn’t do it, we wouldn’t have a country,” he said.


“...preparations are underway to hold thousands more Africans in a vast tent camp in southern Israel." 

(All quotes are from the Washington Post, June 23, 2012: "African immigrants in Israel face threats, deportations”)

Imagine Mitt Romney or Ron Paul saying America cannot accept any more immigrants from China and India because we need to preserve our character as a Christian nation!

Imagine Republican leaders declaring that our nation will not grant amnesty to millions of Latinos immigrants "who think that this country doesn’t belong to us, to the white man."

If any notable American politician were to express these sentiments, the Zionist press would howl at him like a pack of rabid coyotes, and the American leader who uttered the forbidden words would be utterly disgraced and his political career thoroughly ruined, within hours. Yet when Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu speaks before Congress he is ardently applauded and accorded numerous standing ovations, and the media are either respectful toward him or at least circumspect, even as our tax dollars subsidize what would be called, if it were taking place in the U.S., the wildest and most retrograde racialism and xenophobia imaginable.

The grandiose vision of the Zionists, with their special immunities, privileges and exceptional right to be racist, was articulated by the supposed Conservative hero, President Ronald Reagan, in an ominous passage from his 1988 speech to dedicate the cornerstone of the taypayer-financed synagogue disguised as the "U.S. Holocaust Museum" in Washington, D.C. In his "Holocaust" oration, Mr. Reagan made the following macabre prophecy, "We must make sure that when the tall towers of our greatest cities have crumbled to dust in the turnings of time, the Jewish people will still be on this earth to cast their blessings."

The Zionist nation must survive, long after America has crumbled to ruin -- as it is well on its way to doing -- under the policies of both the Democrats and the Republicans who support a strict, racial-nationalist agenda for "Israel," and a virtual open border here in the low-wage plantation known as the United States of America.

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Followers of the Talmud charged with Intimidating Witness

(The alleged intimidation is based on the Talmudic law against mesirah -- against handing fellow Judaic persons over to gentile police or government officials. Denial of kosher certification was, allegedly, also used as a weapon. -- Michael Hoffman)

4 Hasidic Men Facing Charges of Intimidation

Sharon Otterman | New York Times (excerpt) | June 22, 2012, pp. A1 and A21

The Brooklyn district attorney, facing a wave of public criticism about his handling of sexual abuse allegations in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, on June 21 charged four men with attempting to silence an accuser by offering her and her boyfriend a $500,000 bribe, and threatening her boyfriend’s business.

The district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, alleged that the men were part of an effort to protect a prominent member of the Satmar Hasidic community, Nechemya Weberman, who has been accused of 88 counts of sexual misconduct, including oral sex with a child younger than 13 years old. The charges all involve one girl, now 17, who was referred by her school to get counseling by Mr. Weberman, and then alleged she was abused by him during therapy sessions.

The charges are the first time in at least two decades that Mr. Hynes has charged Hasidic Jews with intimidation of a witness in a sexual abuse case, even though victims, their advocates and prosecutors say intimidation has long been a major obstacle to prosecution of abuse among the ultra-Orthodox. In recent weeks, Mr. Hynes has been saying that the intimidation of witnesses in the ultra-Orthodox community is worse than in the world of organized crime.

“I’m hoping that this will be a message to those who are intimidated that they should come forward and help us,” Mr. Hynes said at a news conference. “No one can engage in this kind of conduct and feel free that, based on prior experience, nothing can happen to them.”

Prosecutors charged Abraham Rubin, 48, of Williamsburg with bribery, witness tampering and coercion. They said that he had been recorded offering the accuser’s boyfriend the money, and he suggested that the young couple could flee to Israel to avoid testifying. He also offered to provide them with a lawyer who could help them avoid cooperating with prosecutors.

Prosecutors also charged three brothers, Jacob, Joseph and Hertzka Berger, with coercion, saying they threatened and then removed the kosher certification of a restaurant run by the accuser’s boyfriend. The brothers are sons of a local rabbi who issues kosher certifications to stores.

The four men pleaded not guilty on Thursday in a Brooklyn courtroom packed with benches full of their supporters, dressed in the dark clothing worn by Hasidic men.

Hertzka Berger’s lawyer, Bruce Wenger, said after the arraignment that the four men “all deny the allegations. They are all obviously going to be fighting these cases vehemently,” he said. “They are looking forward to their day in court.”

But a prosecutor, Josh Hanshaft, said the men had been “telling witnesses to forget what they know, not to come to court, to disappear,” and said prosecutors had “clear, substantial evidence” that part of the plan to silence witnesses involved offering money to dissuade their testimony.

If convicted, Mr. Rubin faces up to seven years in prison. Joseph and Hertzka Berger each face a year in jail, and Jacob Berger faces up to four years. Mr. Weberman has denied the abuse allegations, and his lawyer, George Farkas, said Mr. Weberman knew nothing of the alleged intimidation.

“Mr. Weberman, and his attorneys, are appalled by these allegations, which if true, are reprehensible,” Mr. Farkas said. The intimidation charges, a moment of triumph for Mr. Hynes, come as his office has been criticized by victims, victims’ advocates, former Mayor Ed Koch and others for an insufficiently aggressive response to the sexual abuse of minors within the ultra-Orthodox community.

...In the Williamsburg case, the accuser was in sixth grade when she was referred to Mr. Weberman, an unlicensed therapist, by her Williamsburg religious school, a close family member said in an interview last month. Her parents were told she would be expelled from school unless they paid $150 an hour for him to provide her with therapy.

Instead, Mr. Weberman, who is now 53, repeatedly sexually molested her over three years, when she was 12 to 15, and told her that she would be expelled from school if she told anyone, the relative said. The girl then changed schools and told a licensed therapist what had happened. The therapist reported the girl’s allegations to the police.

After Mr. Weberman’s arrest in 2011, a campaign of intimidation is alleged to have begun against the accuser, her boyfriend and her family members. Prominent Hasidic Jews publicly proclaimed their support for Mr. Weberman, and, on May 16, hosted hundreds of Hasidic men at a local wedding hall to raise money for Mr. Weberman’s legal defense. To promote the fund-raiser, his supporters hung posters on lampposts and brick walls around the neighborhood, accusing the young woman, in Yiddish, of libel.

The girl’s boyfriend, 24-year-old Hershy Deutsch, organized a demonstration outside the fund-raiser. In an interview at the time, he said that he had faced intimidation because of his girlfriend’s allegations, and that he had decided to speak out. He said that a restaurant he manages in Williamsburg, the Old Williamsburg Cafe on Lee Avenue, was targeted by a flood of false complaints to city authorities in late April.

And, he said, men from the neighborhood had offered him $500,000 if he could persuade the girl to drop her case.

“For those of you questioning the credibility of the victim’s story,” Mr. Deutsch wrote in a letter he posted on his Facebook page, “ask yourself the following question: Would a non-guilty person offer someone a half a million dollars if they drop the charges?”

“Speak up!” he wrote. “Face the facts, our community has been covering up these stories for way too long. We have to put an end to this!”

On Thursday afternoon a metal gate was rolled down over the entrance to the Old Williamsburg Cafe, and a sign taped to the door said that the store “will be closed until further notice.”

Victims’ advocates said June 21 that they were glad that Mr. Hynes had brought an intimidation case, and hoped it would begin to ease the problem. While some ultra-Orthodox rabbis now say that a child molester should be reported to the police, others strictly adhere to an ancient Jewish prohibition against mesirah, the turning in of a Jew to non-Jewish authorities, and instruct victims to either remain silent or let rabbinical authorities quietly handle the allegations.

“This is a big threshold,” said Mark Appel, the founder of Voice of Justice, a nonprofit agency that helps ultra-Orthodox victims. And Joel Engelman, the founder of the Jewish Survivors Network, also praised Mr. Hynes for bringing the intimidation case, because, he said, “in the Williamsburg Hasidic community, intimidation is rampant.”

Colin Moynihan contributed reporting.
[End quote from the New York Times]

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Canada tosses out Internet ‘Hate Speech’ Law

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Canada tosses out Section 13 — Internet 'Hate Speech' law

By Michael Hoffman

www.revisionisthistory.org

Both of the following reports from the establishment media in Canada are defective. They omit the role of lawyer Doug Christie in battling for free speech in Canada for more than 25 years. This is an enormous omission in that British Columbia's Christie, together with Ontario attorney Barbara Kulaszka and independent activists Paul Fromm and Marc Lemire, have fought most assiduously for the civil liberties of Canadians. Christie has been constantly harassed and threatened, and pilloried in the media. While the media prefer to showcase as Canada's principal poster-boy for Internet freedom,  Ezra Levant, who publicized Danish anti-Muhammad cartoons, the main victims of this Zionist "Section 13" law have been "Holocaust" revisionist Ernst Zundel, Marc Lemire, Terry Tremaine, Heritage Front, Catholic Insight Magazine and Canadian Liberty Net, in addition to hundreds of thousands of Canadian Internet users who have been intimidated by the Stalinist "Section 13" of Canada's "human rights" law. 

A couple of caveats: with Section 13 gone, the Canadian Criminal Code itself continues to provide for up to two years in jail for "spreading hate against identifiable groups" (with the exception of identifiable German, Palestinian and Christian groups who can be hated to the full measure of Zionist fury without fear of prosecution). The difference between Section 13 prosecution and prosecution under the Criminal Code is that under the latter, prosecution must be initiated by a provincial attorney general, whereas under the now defunct Section 13, the "Human Rights" commissars themselves could begin a prosecution on flimsy grounds and in hearings in which truth was not a defense (!).

Second, Haroon Siddiqui of The Star, who is, unfortunately, in favor of censorship, nonetheless has some sobering words for those now conferring on Canada's hypocritical neocon Conservative politicians, laurel wreaths of freedom for having eliminating Section 13: "Those hailing the death of Section 13 as a victory for free speech include many of the same people who routinely muzzle those whose views they do not like. They delayed the entry of Al Jazeera English (television) to Canada. They pressure universities to shut down the annual Apartheid Week that highlights the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. The Harperites cancelled federal grants to Kairos, the ecumenical Christian aid group, as well as to the Canadian Arab Federation and Palestine House, because they would not toe Ottawa's (Zionist) foreign policy line..."

Furthermore, wherever lawyers are steeped in conformity to the legal standards of the British Commonwealth of Nations, freedom of speech is abridged. Here in the U.S. a New Zealand-trained attorney has written a book, The Harm in Hate Speech,  published by Harvard University and endorsed by former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, which insinuates that opponents of Talmudism and Zionism should be prosecuted in the U.S. and speech should be regulated. A characteristic of the rabbinic/Talmudic mentality is the delegitimization of opposition. Radical contradiction is not tolerated by Talmudic rabbis and their epigones (though the appearance of dissent is essential to the p.r. image of their tyranny). 


At present the First Amendment is unassailable, but let U.S. intelligence stage another 9/11 type of "terrorist outrage," and the resulting panic and stampede of fear may very well result in "national security" abridgements to our Bill of Rights, such as were in place after America's entry into the First and Second World Wars; and since the "War on Terror" is perpetual, any such limitations would likely be permanent. The Harm in Hate Speech helps to prepare the path to the overthrow of our God-given rights. 

By all means let us lift a glass to the Canadians who may now use the Internet with less fear, but at the same time we must remain vigilant concerning the threat to our own precious rights in these United States. 

Conservatives strike blow for freedom

Tories yank Section 13 of human rights act like noxious weed

By Ezra Levant | Winnipeg Sun

To understand how Canada got an Internet censorship law, also known as Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, you must go back in time to 1913. That’s when John Ross Taylor was born in Toronto. Something about Taylor just wasn’t right. In his 20s, as the world lurched towards the Second World War, Taylor openly sided with the Nazis. He was interned during the war. After the war, despite the absolute repudiation of Nazism, Taylor didn’t give up hope. He continued to call for Canadians to throw off our liberal democracy in favour of dictatorship. And, of course, he seasoned that with a dose of anti-Semitism and anti-black racism, too.

It was pitiful: He’d print up some pamphlets, climb to the top of an office tower, and dump them off the roof, like confetti, hoping that would foment a revolution. What a deluded loser. But Taylor was never violent. If you turn the sound off when watching reels of him on the news, you’d mistake him for a banker — always dressed in a three-piece suit, the kind of thing you’d expect from the grandson of a Toronto alderman. But he just wanted an all-white Reich here in Canada.

Obviously this bothered right-minded people after the war, especially Jews in Canada, many of whom were survivors of the Holocaust. Canada’s Official Jews — the bosses of the now-defunct Canadian Jewish Congress — pressed their friends in the Liberal Party for laws banning Taylor’s anti-Semitic rants. And in 1966, a committee appointed by the justice minister proposed new laws to ban hateful speech. The Cohen Commission specifically mentioned Taylor by name as a rationale.

Using this harmless buffoon as an excuse, they recommended infringing on freedom of speech for all Canadians. “There is an evident distinction between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ public discussion, and the state has as great an obligation to discourage the latter as it has to maintain the former,” they wrote. So in 1977, Parliament passed the Canadian Human Rights Act, and Section 13 made it illegal to publish anything “… likely to expose a person … to hatred or contempt.”

Well, around that time, telephone answering machines were all the rage. And Taylor, now a senior citizen, saw this as his magic weapon for convincing Canadians to go fascist. He would stand around street corners in Toronto, handing out cards inviting people to get a racist message by calling his answering machine. Seriously.

Taylor was charged — and convicted — of having a mean answering machine message. He appealed it all the way to the Supreme Court — which heard the case in 1990, when he was 80. They ruled against him, four to three.

Gentle reader, do you think after such a stubborn life Taylor complied and unplugged his answering machine? He did not. And thus he served nine months in jail — more than most Canadian rapists do.

For more than 30 years, Section 13 had a 100% conviction rate for the thought crime of hurting someone’s feelings. What an abusive law. What an un-Canadian law. What a ridiculous law in the age of the Internet. Last week that law was pulled out, like a noxious weed. In 20 years time, I predict it will be regarded as one of the Conservatives’ greatest legacies: Freedom.

Section 13: How the battle for free speech was won 

Charlie Gillis on five years, two tribunals, a raft of secret hearings, a Supreme Court challenge and a turning point

By Charlie Gillis, Maclean’s magazine, June 19, 2012  

For all the passion it stirred, you’d think it would get a noisier send-off. An ovation, maybe. Or tears.  Instead, Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act slipped quietly beneath the waves last week during a night-time sitting of the House of Commons—victim of a private member’s bill and a trailer load of toxic publicity. Brian Storseth, Conservative MP for Westlock-St. Paul, had glanced anxiously around the chamber as his kill bill went through its third reading. “The benches weren’t full,” he recalls. “That always makes for a bit of extra heart pumping.”

Justice Minister Rob Nicholson had voiced support for the legislation. So had the Prime Minister. The result, then, was never in doubt: at 9:35 p.m. on June 6, by a vote of 153-136,  Parliament got Canada’s human rights bureaucrats out of the business of policing speech on the Internet. There was a scattering of applause, and handshakes for Storseth (the bill requires the rubber stamp of Senate approval). “To be honest, it’s all a blur,” says the three-term MP, laughing. But if the passage of Bill C-304 represents a fundamental shift in Canadian culture, you’d never have known it that night. Members dealt with a few housekeeping matters, then waded through a supply bill. Finally, one by one, they trickled out into the cool Ottawa night.

The effect of killing Section 13 will be debated for years among anti-racist groups and civil libertarians. But it is undoubtedly a turning point. Since 1999, Canadians who felt aggrieved by material transmitted online have been encouraged to seek redress under federal human rights law, which targeted material “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt” based on grounds of discrimination like race, religion or sexual orientation. Storseth’s bill repeals the provision outright, leaving the Criminal Code as the primary bulwark against the dissemination of hate propaganda by electronic means.

With it will go one of the most divisive disputes to grip the country since the introduction of the Charter of Rights itself—a contest of values that over the past five years has pitted Canadians’ desire to protect minorities from discrimination against the bedrock principle of free speech. Mainstream media outlets, most notably Maclean’s, have been hauled before commissions to answer for their published content. The commissions themselves have come under fire for allowing their processes to be used as a bludgeon against legitimate expression, tailored as they are to encourage complainants to come forward. Meantime, a Saskatchewan law similar to Section 13 has become the subject of a Supreme Court challenge that could invalidate hate-speech provisions in most provincial human rights codes. By year’s end, it is conceivable that no human rights commission in the country will be in the business of adjudicating published material.

Is Canada ready for this brave new world of unfettered expression? There was no shortage of critics last week predicting a flood of online hate now that the legislation is gone. “It leaves a huge gap,”says Darren Lund, a University of Calgary professor and human rights activist. “There are so many hate sites right now on the Internet, and I think some reasonable monitoring of the hatred they’re spewing fits with the Canadian ethos of living harmoniously in a democracy.”

The question, of course, is what constitutes “reasonable” and, on that, our values appear to be shifting. The story of Section 13’s demise is in part one of evolving opinion among interest groups, politicians and institutions who were appalled by the spectre of rights commissions being used as instruments of press control, worried that it would make free-speech martyrs out of basement-dwelling hate-mongers. “We recognized the inevitable,” says Marvin Kurz, national legal counsel for B’nai Brith Canada, the Jewish organization that once regarded the legislation as its best weapon against neo-Nazi hate propaganda. “We saw that public respect for Section 13 had ebbed, to the point that even our own people no longer supported it. For a law like that to work, it has to be supported by the people.”

Some folks like to offend. Ezra Levant knew he would stir anger, for instance, when in 2006 he published the notorious Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in his now-defunct magazine, the Western Standard. Yet even Canada’s leading right-wing gadfly—hungry to get his Calgary-based biweekly some attention—never imagined his decision would land him before a provincial human rights bureaucrat, with the looming threat of hefty financial penalties. Syed Soharwardy, a Calgary imam, complained to the Alberta Human Rights Commission, claiming the illustrations were an affront to the dignity of all Canadian Muslims. Two years later, Levant sat, scarlet with anger, at a pro forma interview as Shirlene McGovern, an investigator with the commission, blandly asked his “intent and purpose” in publishing the images.

Levant had demanded the right to video-record the proceedings, and the resulting footage became a YouTube sensation. Hunching over a conference table, he unleashed a rant that began with him proclaiming the right to “publish what the hell we want, no matter what the hell you think,” and ended with him inviting McGovern to assume the worst about his intentions. “I published the cartoons in the most unreasonable manner. Whatever offends you, I reserve the right to publish, for whatever offensive reason I want. I reserve the right to publish the cartoons for exactly the reason they complain about.”

If there was a watershed moment in the debate, this was it. Levant’s interview (or, as he put it, “interrogation”) became a top 10 hit on YouTube, sparking unaccustomed conversation about the chilling effect of Islamic sensitivities on public discourse. By then, Maclean’s was facing similar complaints over 18 separate articles, including a book excerpt in which columnist Mark Steyn argued high birth rates and the spread of radical ideology in Muslim countries represent a threat to Western values and ways of life.

To maximize publicity—or to raise its chance of winning—the Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) complained not just to the federal commission but to those in Ontario and B.C. as well. The Ontario commission ruled it did not have jurisdiction to hear the complaint; the Canadian commission dismissed the case without referring the matter to a tribunal. But the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal went ahead with a hearing, combing the content of Steyn’s excerpt for offending material, judging the articles fit for public consumption but chiding Steyn for trying to “rally public opinion by exaggeration and causing the reader to fear Muslims.”

The CIC claimed moral victory. “We are delighted the tribunal has discredited the content of the articles that Maclean’s and Mark Steyn have been publishing,” said lawyer Faisal Joseph. But few others were cheering. Even long-time believers in Section 13 were astounded by the spectacle of a state tribunal reviewing a newsmagazine’s content, while questions of fairness abounded. With no evidence of intent, and without proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, critics noted, the tribunal was clearly prepared to brand someone a racist—one of the most reviled labels in Canadian society. “This is a serious business,” Wayne Sumner, a University of Toronto philosophy professor who has studied hate speech, told Maclean’s in 2008. “The proper place for it is in a criminal court, not a human rights tribunal.”

More troubling signs would later emerge, as the procedures and practices of human rights panels came under scrutiny. It turned out that one man, a former commission employee, had been lodging practically all of the Section 13 complaints investigated by the Canadian Human Rights Commission. For a time, Richard Warman had been acting as an investigator while complaints he’d made were before the commission. Officials’ insistence that Warman never wore both hats on the same file was less than reassuring.

Small wonder, then, that Storseth’s bill struck a chord, gaining support from unexpected quarters. B’nai Brith, which had used Section 13 to shut down the website of notorious hate-monger Ernst Zundel, got behind the legislation. “The whole Maclean’s-Mark Steyn fiasco was one of the spurs,” says Kurz, the group’s lawyer. So did the Toronto Star, a normally staunch supporter of state protections for minorities. “Most Canadians have no sympathy for hate-mongers,” the left-leaning paper said last December in an editorial. “But an unwarranted, creeping chill is being cast over free speech, absent any real problem.”

That broad-based backing might explain the muted political response to last week’s vote—a nominally free one which nevertheless split down party lines. While the opposition NDP lamented the end of a tool that helped shut down hate sites, the Liberals let the vote pass with no comment, as did most interest groups representing the country’s minorities. “The only guys I see speaking up for it are a couple of white lawyers who might profit from it,” Levant crowed earlier this week. “It is one of the great pleasures of my life to see the tide turn on this issue, and to know that I played a small role in it.”

Still, the section had its fans, many of whom now wonder what the future holds for the remaining patchwork of provincial human rights law meant to combat hate. In Alberta, Premier Alison Redford is on record saying that province’s provision, Section 3, should be repealed. In Saskatchewan, the government is awaiting a Supreme Court decision in the case of William Whatcott, an anti-gay activist sanctioned for distributing handbills labelling homosexuals as “sodomites” seeking to socialize children into accepting their lifestyle. Incendiary as Whatcott’s rhetoric was, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin suggested during a hearing last winter that he might not have known he was running afoul of Saskatchewan’s vaguely worded rights code. “An ordinary Lutheran pastor should be able to look at the act,” she said, “and without being a Supreme Court scholar, be able to know whether he can say this or that.”

Even if the provincial statutes survive, notes Lund, the Calgary professor, they are aimed only at printed material; only the federal act empowered commissions to crack down online, where most of today’s hate propaganda is spread. That leaves web-promulgated hate under the exclusive domain of the criminal justice system, where the standards of proof are much higher, and convictions rarer. To even lay a charge, says Stephen Camp, president of the Alberta Hate Crime Committee and a former commander of the Edmonton police hate crime unit, officers must be able to show the material was wilfully promoted; that it targeted an identifiable group; that it met the common-law test of a hate material—and all beyond a reasonable doubt. In short, a lot of complainants will go away dissatisfied.

The rest, presumably, will fall to civil society, which is arguably where the onus belonged to start with. 

For decades, interfaith groups and non-religious organizations have been promoting tolerance. In recent years they’ve been complemented by hard-core activists who patrol the Internet, ferreting out hate sites and gathering information for the benefit of police. One such organization, the Anti-Racist Canada Collective, told Maclean’s it would keep up its efforts despite the loss of Section 13. “There is an irony, in that its absence might actually make it easier for us to collect intelligence,” a spokesman said in an email. “Online haters may become less reticent about posting their real views.”

That’s not much comfort to groups seeking to silence speech that merely offends. But as the battles of the past five years ease into perspective, even they are reconsidering their positions. Not long after Syed Soharwardy filed his complaint against Levant, for instance, the Calgary imam found himself on the receiving end of his own human rights complaint—from a group of women who claimed they’d been prevented from speaking and subjected to abusive language during a meeting at his mosque.

Experiencing the human rights ordeal from the other side was an eye-opener, he later acknowledged, telling Maclean’s: “I am now quite certain that the best way is for the parties to have dialogue. We need to be able to listen to each other. Human rights commissions should be there, but they are for questions of housing and employment and access to the workplace—not for disputes that are about freedom of speech.” (End quote from Maclean’s). 

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French Revisionist Roger Garaudy, 1913-2012

By Michael Hoffman

The New York Times has decided to deny the French philosopher Roger Garaudy, who died June 15, an obituary notice, even though he was mentioned in the Times 45 times during his lifetime. 

We shall indeed note his passing here, however, and commemorate his life. He was the author of The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics  for which the French government fined him thousands of dollars and imposed a suspended prison sentence. In recent years, he claimed that the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. were perpetrated by the Bush administration in order to launch wars in Afghanistan and later Iraq. After Garaudy published his controversial book, one of the most famous men in France came to his defense. This was the Catholic priest Abbé Pierre (1912-2007), a champion of the poor who opinion polls said was among the best-loved men in France.  

Abbé Pierre brought down wrath on himself by defending Garaudy's work which stated that (counterfeit)-Israel exploited the "Holocaust" to put itself "above all international law." Abbé Pierre sent Mr. Garaudy a five-page letter lauding his "passion for the truth," his "astonishing and illuminating erudition" and his "scrupulous" research. 

The priest, born Henry Grouès, took on the nom-de-guerre of Abbé Pierre while resisting the Nazis in World War II, when he helped rescue Judaic people and others sought by the Nazis, including the younger brother of General Charles de Gaulle. Abbé Pierre founded an international humanitarian movement, Emmaüs, in 1949. He shot to fame in 1954 when he launched a national campaign for the homeless. With his familiar beret, walking stick and brown robes of a Capuchin monk, he enjoyed access to the offices of the president and prime minister. Even after endorsing Garuady, French television viewers in 2005 voted Abbé Pierre the third greatest French person of all time, after de Gaulle and Pasteur. 

Now to Mr. Garaudy himself, first from the French media and then from a Muslim source:

French Holocaust revisionist philosopher Garaudy dies

(AFP) – June 15, 2012 

PARIS — Roger Garaudy, a communist and darling of French intellectual society until he denied that the Nazis used gas chambers to kill Jews during World War II, has died aged 98, officials said Friday.

Garaudy was fined 120,000 francs (18,000 dollars) by a Paris court in 1998 for his anti-Zionist work "The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics". The court found that his account had distorted the wartime deaths of an estimated six million Jews.

He died on Wednesday in the Paris suburb of Chennevieres, local officials said. Garaudy, who converted to Protestantism, Catholicism and finally Islam, joined the French resistance and was held in Algeria as a prisoner of war of France's collaborationist Vichy regime. He joined the French Communist Party after the war, was elected to the French parliament and became a member of the Senate. But he was expelled from the Communist Party in 1970 after he criticised the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, although he had defended the Soviet intervention in Hungary 12 years earlier.

A big man with glasses as thick as his southern French accent, Garaudy was for years seen as someone who symbolised the "dialogue of civilizations." The author of around 70 books, Garaudy described himself as a Don Quixote fighting the windmills of capitalism. Within the Communist Party hierarchy he was known as "the Cardinal" both for his sense of authority and his attraction towards the Church. 

He was for years the darling of the French media and intellectual milieu for his philosophical work and his political courage. But that ended with his conversion to Islam in 1982 and subsequent criticism of Zionism, which turned him into a pariah. The head of Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, in 2006 cited his treatment as an example of the West's "hypocrisy and duplicity".

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Roger Garaudy, renowned French Muslim thinker, passes away

June 17, 2012

Paris-- World renowned French Muslim thinker Roger Garaudy died on Friday in the Paris suburb of Chennevieres after prolonged illness. He was 99. He will be laid to rest on Monday in Paris.

Formerly a prominent communist author, he converted to Islam and wrote several books which have been controversial due to his anti-Zionist positions and denial of the Holocaust.

Widely acclaimed as the most important international Muslim cultural personality of the 20th century, Garaudy was the winner of several prestigious awards, including the King Faisal International Prize for Services to Islam in 1986.

His masterpiece – Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israelienne – was the most controversial because of his boldness to deny the Holocaust by calling it a myth and that it had not taken place.

Garaudy was born to Catholic and atheist parents in Marseilleson July 17, 1913. He converted at age 14 and became a Protestant. During World War II, Garaudy joined the French Resistance, for which he was imprisoned in Djelfa, Algeriaas a prisoner of war of VichyFrance.

Following the war, Garaudy joined the French Communist Party. As a political candidate he succeeded in being elected to the National Assembly and eventually rose to the position of deputy speaker, and later senator. He became a leading party theoretician for the FCP and authored scores of scholarly works.

Garaudy remained a Christian and eventually re-converted to Catholicism during his political career. In 1970, Garaudy was expelled from the Communist Party following his outspoken criticism of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Garaudy converted to Islam in 1982, later writing that “The Christ of Paul is not the Jesus of the Bible,” and also forming other critical scholarly conclusions regarding the Old and New Testaments. As a Muslim he adopted the name “Ragaa” and became a prominent Islamic commentator and supporter of the Palestinian cause.

Garaudy authored more than 50 books, mainly on political philosophy and Marxism. In 1996 Garaudy published his most controversial work, Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israelienne, later translated into English as The Founding Myths of Modern Israel. Because the book contained Holocaust denial, French courts banned any further publication and on 27 February 1998 fined him 240,000 French francs. He was sentenced to a suspended jail sentence of several years.

Following his trial and conviction in France, Garaudy was hailed in the Muslim world and received substantial public support. In Iran, 160 members of the parliament signed a petition in Garaudy’s support. Senior Iranian officials invited him to Tehran and received him warmly. Iranian leaders condemned Israel and the West for bringing Garaudy to trial. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei cited Garaudy for his work in exposing the Zionists’ “Nazi-like behavior.”

Garaudy has been hailed throughout the Islamic World as “the most important international cultural personality of the 20th century,” “Europe’s greater philosopher since Plato and Aristotle.” Even in recent interviews, Garaudy repeated his claim that the Holocaust is a myth, stating that the genocide of Jews by the Nazis during the Second World War was “invented as a myth by Churchill, Eisenhower and De Gaulle to justify the destruction and occupation of Germany. In December 2006 Garaudy was unable to attend the international conference to review the global vision of the Holocaust due to health reasons. (End quote)

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Worst case of ethnic cleansing in western history

The Hoffman Wire

June 18, 2012

The European Atrocity You Never Heard About

In the largest episode of forced migration in history, millions of German-speaking civilians were sent to Germany from Czechoslovakia (above) and other European countries after World War II by order of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union.

By R.M. Douglas

THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION • June 11, 2012 
http://chronicle.com/article/The-European-Atrocity-You/132123/

The screams that rang throughout the darkened cattle car crammed with deportees, as it jolted across the icy Polish countryside five nights before Christmas, were Dr. Loch's only means of locating his patient. The doctor, formerly chief medical officer of a large urban hospital, now found himself clambering over piles of baggage, fellow passengers, and buckets used as toilets, only to find his path blocked by an old woman who ignored his request to move aside. On closer examination, he discovered that she had frozen to death.

Finally he located the source of the screams, a pregnant woman who had gone into premature labor and was hemorrhaging profusely. When he attempted to move her from where she lay into a more comfortable position, he found that "she was frozen to the floor with her own blood." Other than temporarily stanching the bleeding, Loch was unable to do anything to help her, and he never learned whether she had lived or died. When the train made its first stop, after more than four days in transit, 16 frost-covered corpses were pulled from the wagons before the remaining deportees were put back on board to continue their journey. A further 42 passengers would later succumb to the effects of their ordeal, among them Loch's wife.

An estimated 500,000 people died in the course of the organized expulsions; survivors were left in Allied-occupied Germany to fend for themselves.

During the Second World War, tragic scenes like those were commonplace, as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin moved around entire populations like pieces on a chessboard, seeking to reshape the demographic profile of Europe according to their own preferences. What was different about the deportation of Loch and his fellow passengers, however, was that it took place by order of the United States and Britain as well as the Soviet Union, nearly two years after the declaration of peace.

Between 1945 and 1950, Europe witnessed the largest episode of forced migration, and perhaps the single greatest movement of population, in human history. Between 12 million and 14 million German-speaking civilians—the overwhelming majority of whom were women, old people, and children under 16—were forcibly ejected from their places of birth in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and what are today the western districts of Poland. As The New York Times noted in December 1945, the number of people the Allies proposed to transfer in just a few months was about the same as the total number of all the immigrants admitted to the United States since the beginning of the 20th century. They were deposited among the ruins of Allied-occupied Germany to fend for themselves as best they could. The number who died as a result of starvation, disease, beatings, or outright execution is unknown, but conservative estimates suggest that at least 500,000 people lost their lives in the course of the operation.

Most disturbingly of all, tens of thousands perished as a result of ill treatment while being used as slave labor (or, in the Allies' cynical formulation, "reparations in kind") in a vast network of camps extending across central and southeastern Europe—many of which, like Auschwitz I and Theresienstadt, were former German concentration camps kept in operation for years after the war. As Sir John Colville, formerly Winston Churchill's private secretary, told his colleagues in the British Foreign Office in 1946, it was clear that "concentration camps and all they stand for did not come to an end with the defeat of Germany." Ironically, no more than 100 or so miles away from the camps being put to this new use, the surviving Nazi leaders were being tried by the Allies in the courtroom at Nuremberg on a bill of indictment that listed "deportation and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population" under the heading of "crimes against humanity."

By any measure, the postwar expulsions were a manmade disaster and one of the most significant examples of the mass violation of human rights in recent history. Yet although they occurred within living memory, in time of peace, and in the middle of the world's most densely populated continent, they remain all but unknown outside Germany itself. On the rare occasions that they rate more than a footnote in European-history textbooks, they are commonly depicted as justified retribution for Nazi Germany's wartime atrocities or a painful but necessary expedient to ensure the future peace of Europe. As the historian Richard J. Evans asserted in In Hitler's Shadow (1989) the decision to purge the continent of its German-speaking minorities remains "defensible" in light of the Holocaust and has shown itself to be a successful experiment in "defusing ethnic antagonisms through the mass transfer of populations."

Even at the time, not everyone agreed. George Orwell, an outspoken opponent of the expulsions, pointed out in his essay "Politics and the English Language" that the expression "transfer of population" was one of a number of euphemisms whose purpose was "largely the defense of the indefensible." The philosopher Bertrand Russell acidly inquired: "Are mass deportations crimes when committed by our enemies during war and justifiable measures of social adjustment when carried out by our allies in time of peace?" A still more uncomfortable observation was made by the left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz, who reasoned that "if every German was indeed responsible for what happened at Belsen, then we, as members of a democratic country and not a fascist one with no free press or parliament, were responsible individually as well as collectively" for what was being done to noncombatants in the Allies' name.

That the expulsions would inevitably cause death and hardship on a very large scale had been fully recognized by those who set them in motion. To a considerable extent, they were counting on it. For the expelling countries—especially Czechoslovakia and Poland—the use of terror against their German-speaking populations was intended not simply as revenge for their wartime victimization, but also as a means of triggering a mass stampede across the borders and finally achieving their governments' prewar ambition to create ethnically homogeneous nation-states. (Before 1939, less than two-thirds of Poland's population, and only a slightly larger proportion of Czechoslovakia's, consisted of gentile Poles, Czechs, or Slovaks.)

For the Soviets, who had "compensated" Poland for its territorial losses to the Soviet Union in 1939 by moving its western border more than 100 miles inside German territory, the clearance of the newly "Polish" western lands and the dumping of their millions of displaced inhabitants amid the ruins of the former Reich served Stalin's twin goals of impeding Germany's postwar recovery and eliminating any possibility of a future Polish-German rapprochement. The British viewed the widespread suffering that would inevitably attend the expulsions as a salutary form of re-education of the German population. "Everything that brings home to the Germans the completeness and irrevocability of their defeat," Deputy Prime Minister Clement Richard Attlee wrote in 1943, "is worthwhile in the end." And the Americans, as Laurence Steinhardt, ambassador to Prague, recorded, hoped that by displaying an "understanding" and cooperative attitude toward the expelling countries' desire to be rid of their German populations, the United States could demonstrate its sympathy for those countries' national aspirations and prevent them from drifting into the Communist orbit.

The Allies, then, knowingly embarked on a course that, as the British government was warned in 1944 by its own panel of experts, was "bound to cause immense suffering and dislocation." That the expulsions did not lead to the worst consequences that could be expected from the chaotic cattle drive of millions of impoverished, embittered, and rootless deportees into a war-devastated country that had nowhere to put them was due to three main factors.

The first was the skill with which the postwar German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, drew the expellees into mainstream politics, defusing the threat of a potentially radical and disruptive bloc. The second was the readiness of most expellees—the occasionally crass or undiplomatic statements of their leaders notwithstanding—to renounce the use or threat of force as a means of redressing their grievances. The third, and by far the most important, was the 30-year-long "economic miracle" that made possible the housing, feeding, and employment of the largest homeless population with which any industrial country has ever had to contend. (In East Germany, on the other hand, the fact that the standard of living for the indigenous population was already so low meant that the economic gap between it and the four million arriving expellees was more easily bridged.)

The downside of "economic miracles," though, is that, as their name suggests, they can't be relied upon to come along where and when they are most needed. By extraordinary good fortune, the Allies avoided reaping the harvest of their own recklessness. Nonetheless, the expulsions have cast a long and baleful shadow over central and southeastern Europe, even to the present day. Their disruptive demographic, economic, and even—as Eagle Glassheim has pointed out—environmental consequences continue to be felt more than 60 years later. The overnight transformation of some of the most heterogeneous regions of the European continent into virtual ethnic monoliths changed the trajectory of domestic politics in the expelling countries in significant and unpredicted ways. Culturally, the effort to eradicate every trace of hundreds of years of German presence and to write it out of national and local histories produced among the new Polish and Czech settler communities in the cleared areas what Gregor Thum has described as a state of "amputated memory." As Thum shows in his groundbreaking study of postwar Wroclaw—until 1945 and the removal of its entire population, the German city of Breslau—the challenge of confronting their hometown's difficult past is one that post-Communist Wroclawites have only recently taken up. In most other parts of Central Europe, it has hardly even begun.

Still less so in the English-speaking world. It is important to note that the expulsions are in no way to be compared to the genocidal Nazi campaign that preceded them. But neither can the supreme atrocity of our time become a yardstick by which gross abuses of human rights are allowed to go unrecognized for what they are. Contradicting Allied rhetoric that asserted that World War II had been fought above all to uphold the dignity and worth of all people, the Germans included, thousands of Western officials, servicemen, and technocrats took a full part in carrying out a program that, when perpetrated by their wartime enemies, they did not hesitate to denounce as contrary to all principles of humanity.

The degree of cognitive dissonance to which this led was exemplified by the career of Colonel John Fye, chief U.S. liaison officer for expulsion affairs to the Czechoslovak government. The operation he had helped carry out, he acknowledged, drew in "innocent people who had never raised so much as a word of protest against the Czechoslovak people." To accomplish it, women and children had been thrown into detention facilities, "many of which were little better than the ex-German concentration camps." Yet these stirrings of unease did not prevent Fye from accepting a decoration from the Prague government for what the official citation candidly described as his valuable services "in expelling Germans from Czechoslovakia."

Today we have come not much further than Fye did in acknowledging the pivotal role played by the Allies in conceiving and executing an operation that exceeded in both scale and lethality the violent breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. It is unnecessary to attribute this to any "taboo" or "conspiracy of silence." Rather, what is denied is not the fact of the expulsions themselves, but their significance.

Many European commentators have maintained that to draw attention to them runs the risk of diminishing the horror that ought properly to be reserved for the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities, or giving rise to a self-pitying "victim" mentality among today's generation of Germans, for whom the war is an increasingly distant memory. Czechs, Poles, and citizens of other expelling states fear the legal ramifications of a re-examination of the means by which millions of erstwhile citizens of those countries were deprived of their nationality, liberty, and property. To this day, the postwar decrees expropriating and denationalizing Germans remain on the statute book of the Czech Republic, and their legality has recently been reaffirmed by the Czech constitutional court.

Some notable exceptions aside, like T. David Curp, Matthew Frank, and David Gerlach, English-speaking historians—out of either understandable sympathy for Germany's victims or reluctance to complicate the narrative of what is still justifiably considered a "good war"—have also not been overeager to delve into the history of a messy, complex, morally ambiguous, and politically sensitive episode, in which few if any of those involved appear in a creditable light.

By no means are all of these concerns unworthy ones. But neither are they valid reasons for failing to engage seriously with an episode of such obvious importance, and to integrate it within the broader narrative of modern European history. For historians to write—and, still worse, to teach—as though the expulsions had never taken place or, having occurred, are of no particular significance to the societies affected by them, is both intellectually and pedagogically unsustainable.

The fact that population transfers are currently making a comeback on the scholarly and policy agenda also suggests that we should scrutinize with particular care the most extensive experiment made with them to date. Despite the gruesome history, enthusiasts continue to chase the mirage of "humane" mass deportations as a means of resolving intractable ethnic problems. Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, in a much-cited study, has advocated population transfers as a valuable tool so long as they are "conducted in a humane, well-organized manner, like the transfer of Germans from Czechoslovakia by the Allies in 1945-47." John Mearsheimer, Chaim Kaufmann, Michael Mann and others have done likewise.

Few wars today, whether within or between states, do not feature an attempt by one or both sides to create facts on the ground by forcibly displacing minority populations perceived as alien to the national community. And although the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court has attempted to restrain this tendency by prohibiting mass deportations, Elazar Barkan maintains that such proscriptions are far from absolute, and that "today there is no single code of international law that explicitly outlaws population transfers either in terms of group or individual rights protections."

The expulsion of the ethnic Germans is thus of contemporary as well as historical relevance. At present, though, the study of many vital elements of this topic is still in its earliest stages. Innumerable questions—about the archipelago of camps and detention centers, the precise number and location of which are still undetermined; the sexual victimization of female expellees, which was on a scale to rival the mass rapes perpetrated by Red Army soldiers in occupied Germany; the full part played by the Soviet and U.S. governments in planning and executing the expulsions—remain to be fully answered. At a moment when the surviving expellees are passing away and many, though far from all, of the relevant archives have been opened, the time has come for this painful but pivotal chapter in Europe's recent history to receive at last the scholarly attention it deserves.

R.M. Douglas is an associate professor of history at Colgate University. 

This essay is adapted from his new book, published by Yale University Press, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War.

Editorial Reviews for Orderly and Humane

Review

“Orderly and Humane is an outstanding and well-written work that fills a significant gap in books written in English about this large subject and the very period of its compass. It ought to be in every serious American library and should be required reading for scholars interested in the history of the end of the Second World War and the years thereafter in Europe.”—John Lukacs, author of The Future of  History and Five Days in London, May 1940

(John Lukacs )

“R.M. Douglas has written a fair-minded, deeply researched and courageous book that carefully demystifies the claims and accusations surrounding the awful history of the expulsion of the ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe. A first-rate work, Orderly and Humane compels us to admit that the postwar expulsions were not simply a regrettable accident but a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing on a breathtaking scale that decisively shaped postwar Europe’s history.”—William I. Hitchcock, author of The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Consequences of Allied Victory in World War II Europe

(William I. Hitchcock )

“The tragedy of the post-World War II ethnic German refugees and expellees has been told before but no account is based on so many original documents from so many countries as Douglas’s eminently readable work.”—Istvan Deak, Columbia University (Istvan Deak )

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