Why is One War Crime Worth More than Another?

Why is One War Crime Worth More than Another?

By Michael Hoffman 

March 10, 2022 • www.RevisionistHistory.org 

In Memory of Herman Aihara and John Hvosda

We write these words in the midst of the type of microscopic examination of war crimes in Ukraine that we have often longed for in regard to the ongoing war crimes perpetrated in the Middle East—in Lebanon and Palestine —where the Israelis pulverized Beirut and Gaza into the dust with bombs, missiles, artillery shelling and even cluster bombs—and Yemen, where Israeli de facto ally Saudi Arabia has starved and bombed civilians in the hundreds of thousands.

None of these acts of mass murder have ever elicited from the newly minted humanitarians of the American media anything remotely comparable to the coverage of what the Russian military under Vladimir Putin has perpetrated in Ukraine.

For decades Soviet Russia's crimes against Ukraine, from the 1930s onward, were denied by the New York Times and minimized by Left-leaning media well into the 1980s. I first learned of this myopia from John Hvosda, my Ukrainian-American Professor of Political Science. Dr. Hvosda was himself relentlessly criticized while a graduate student at Syracuse University for his “Ukrainian nationalism.” What form did his sin take? His protest and remembrance of Soviet crimes against his homeland. In the 1960s Ukraine was not the darling of the western press that it is today. 

“They gave him a terrible time.” That was the view of another of my professors, the Palestinian political scientist Faiz Abu-Jaber, who, I learned, had been Dr. Hvosda's roommate at Syracuse. Hvosda was no Russophobe. He loved Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Russian anti-Communists in general. But he was infuriated by the Stalinist hangover that afflicted American university faculties in the 1960s and '70s, where studies of the extent of Soviet atrocities and the lessons to be learned from the evils of coercive collectivism, were derogated and obstructed. 

At Hobart College this writer crossed polemical swords in 1978 with Prof. Walter Ralls, who proudly displayed a large photograph of the Bolshevik homicidal maniac Vladimir Lenin on his office wall. The Jacobins were running amok in U.S. academia well before the dreary Age of Political Correctness we now inhabit.

The capitalists are not far behind. In class, Prof. Hvosda would on occasion refer to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev as “the butcher of the Ukraine.” Throughout the 1930s, as Joseph Stalin's executioner in that land, Khrushchev murdered tens of thousands of Ukrainians and shipped hundreds of thousands to concentration camps where they died of privation. In the March 9 Wall Street Journal, columnist Holman W. Jenkins Jr. displays grotesque amnesia in the course of informing us that this despicable mass murderer earned the well-deserved thanks of the world:

“Six decades ago, Khrushchev lived in the real world. He'd held many administrative jobs under Stalin and participated in the defense of Stalingrad. When he understood the depth of his Cuba miscalculation, he concentrated on avoiding nuclear war, earning the world's thanks…”

Administrative jobs? What happened to the years Khrushchev led Stalin's Murder Inc. operation in Ukraine? The slaughterhouse he erected appears now to be via col vento.

The horror over Putin, the 21st century's butcher of Ukraine, coupled with the warm praise showered on NATO butchers of Serbia like General Wesley Kanne Clark, leads one to believe the whole argument reeks of hypocrisy (to borrow a phrase from Murray Rothbard).

In 2022 the New World Order has been reborn as the defender of the Ukrainian people's human rights and aspirations, against the Russian behemoth. Does anyone believe this defense is sincere? That the U.S., British and German cryptocracies actually care about what happens to Ukraine and their expendable Ukrainian assets? How can their professed sympathy be honest and true when it is corrupted by a conspicuous selectivity?

On May 12, 1996 Madeleine Albright, the U.S. Secretary of State, informed Leslie Stahl of CBS News that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children as the result of U.S. sanctions “was worth it.” These are the words of one of the honored ambassadors of 'Team Humanity” now showcasing their supposed humanitarian angst in the face of the carnage in Ukraine.

On Purim 2003, President George W. Bush, in an act of naked aggression, invaded the sovereign nation of Iraq. The Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal declared aggressive war to be “the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

Key principals in that “supreme international crime,” former Vice-President Dick Cheney and former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, have lately been recipients of praise and laurels. Mr. Cheney was rapturously applauded in Congress on January 6, and Miss Rice is a regular guest on television news shows seeking “expert insight into the crimes of Russia.” The crimes of Cheney and Rice are studiously ignored by the "humanitarians."

Washington D.C. bureaucrats and the New York media have contempt for the piles of innocent bodies which Saudi and Israeli bombs and shelling have produced. The roots of that contempt run deep, derived from the seldom-discussed doctrine of the alleged "collective guilt" of civilians for the war crimes of the government that rules them.

It was upon the foundation of that odious postulation that the United States government unleashed unparalleled savagery upon the civilian populations of Germany and Japan during a Second World War that has been branded “The Good War,” an inferno that cremated 500,000 “collectively guilty” German civilians — fried to ashes by the air forces of Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt — those monsters of iniquity for whom post-war encomiums are circulated with monotonous regularity. When mass murderers are the subject of panegyrics, we know that their victims are less than zero on the scale of ersatz brotherhood ostentatiously exhibited by our virtue-signaling politicians.

Today, March 10, is the 77th anniversary of what may be the most unconscionable war crime perpetrated in modern history.

Anyone sincerely outraged by what is happening in Ukraine would also devote themselves to kindling the memory of the mass murder that took place in 1945.

Peruse the pages of your daily paper and the coverage of your television news and corporate media websites for March 10 and see how much (if any) time or space was accorded the mass slaughter of civilians, after the armed forces of the United States government turned the residential sections of Tokyo into a gargantuan human barbecue pit.

If “Never Again” are the watchwords in the noble campaign to prevent future holocausts, should not the incineration of Tokyo's civilian population be remembered on the date it occurred, and its lessons imparted to all the people, in our schools, Congress and the cathedrals of media?

Yes, that would be the case if the media pronouncements and communiqués pouring forth daily from Ukraine concerning Putin's victims, were indeed genuine and not a cynical show. But they are transparently just that—a tool of the information warfare the West wields as the hammer they are betting will help drive Putin from power, and install a regime in Moscow friendly to the agenda of the NATO assassins of Gaddafi in Libya and the thousands of Christian civilians NATO burned alive in Serbia; crimes committed with the enthusiastic approval of those now execrating Putin.

Six Hours in the Fires of Hell

  On March 10, 1945 hundreds of thousands of napalm explosives were dropped from three hundred B-29 Superfortress bombers on the residential sections of the city of Tokyo, intentionally setting afire 16 square miles of densely packed wooden dwellings mainly inhabited by women, children and men too old to fight. In a single morning at least 100,000 people were killed, and one million were made refugees.

In a candid assessment by the the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, U.S. officials stated, “probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six-hour period than at any time in the history of man.” 

Testimony of First Lieutenant Richard Gross, 874th Bomb Squadron, 498th Bomb Group, U.S. Army Air Force: “I was a navigator. At the time, you just didn”t think about those things. We had a job to do and we did it. We were burning houses, but we didn”t think about the people.”

Testimony of Second Lieutenant Jim Marich, 869th Bomb Squadron, 497th Bomb Group, U.S. Army Air Force: “You could smell, I”m sorry to say, burning flesh in the airplane…We safely went on with the mission and went on with lesser-known missions. But by then, the Japanese fighter response was practically nil.”

Testimony of Technical Sergeant Ed Lawson, 882nd Bomb Squadron, 500th Bomb Group, U.S. Army Air Force: “My job was to stand by the open bomb-bay doors and throw chaff out — these long strips of aluminum foil to confuse Japanese radar. Can you imagine standing in front of an open bomb-bay door and smelling a city burn up? It was terrifying. At low altitude like that, I didn”t wear an oxygen mask. All I can say is that the smell was nauseating. I”ve never smelled anything like it since, and I don't want to…When we did the firebombings, we were killing civilians.”

Firebombs dropped by the United States in  a total of sixty cities  killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese people prior to the atomic bombs that wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and spread carcinogenic radioactive sickness among the population. 

Our Japanese-American teacher, Herman Aihara of Oroville, California, became a pioneering specialist in lessening the severity of radioactive cancers through the use of traditional Japanese medicinal foods such as miso and sea vegetables, and the avoidance of a diet high in protein, as well as sugars and sweeteners of all types, all of which he believed contribute to the growth of cancer tumors. 

Herman was a lover, not a hater, and while he deeply mourned the loss of civilian life in his native land, he was a proponent of gratitude to America for its Constitution and the opportunities afforded to immigrants like him. He understood that there were more questions than answers in this life and that it behooved human beings to maintain humility in the face of that reality.

If they had known each other I surmise that Sensei Aihara and Dr. Hvosda would have been friends, and I like to think they would have asked the same questions which this writer is asking of the media, Congress, and the Biden White House:

Why do you employ accusations of mass murder as a weapon to distract from the mass murders you commit with impunity? 

Are the people of Japan, Palestine, Serbia and Iraq lesser humans than Ukrainians, Israelis or Americans?

If perpetual reporting of Putin's bloody aggression were to inspire revulsion and remembrance for all of the war crimes against humanity of recent history, then the repetition of the themes and talking points we see on television and online would represent a commendable cultivation of human conscience.

At present however, the 24/7 atrocity reports constitute not much more than a tool of a retrograde Orwellian jingoism, the chant of the Neanderthal: “Our crimes good, your crimes bad!”

How tragic is the refusal of the American political class to learn the lessons of their previous quagmire forays in utopian, “nation-building” and war —in Vietnam, Iraq and during twenty futile years in Afghanistan. Defiance of this memory is a  self-willed dementia which mocks America's righteous trumpeting of lofty claims to morality in comparison with the Russians. 

We observe the pompous parade of passionate concern for Ukraine while in Palestine and Yemen the routine murders of civilians perpetrated by the Israeli and Saudi governments is a reality of daily life. Unlike this year's Ukrainians, these victims are expendable and the atrocities committed against them are diminished to the level of the infinitesimal, down to a business-as-usual that scarcely attracts our attention.

America's “staunch Israeli ally in the Middle East” is guilty of war crimes funded by U.S. taxpayers, while the Saudi onslaught in Yemen has been enriched by oil revenue and American banking. This double standard leads us to ask, in the midst of the wall-to-wall Ukrainian coverage, why the sufferings of one people are more deserving of our attention and remonstration in this vale of tears than that of the Palestinians or the Yemenis?

Who decides where our indignation will be focused? 

Who determines what we will protest and detest, and what we will overlook and forget? 

Why is one war crime worth more than another?

 Historian Michael Hoffman is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press and the editor of the periodical Revisionist History®. He is the the author of ten books, including Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare; Usury in Christendom, and his latest, Twilight Language.

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Independent History and Research

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Israeli war criminal: General Yoav Gallant

Editor's Note: Mass murderer Yoav Gallant is not being sought as a war crime suspect anywhere in the West and he is hardly even known outside of Palestine.

Man responsible for Israel's cruelest wars only attracts praise

By Gideon Levy | Haaretz | July 16, 2009

A huge weight has been lifted off our chests: Maj. Gen. Yoav Gallant will stay in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Although Gallant was not named deputy chief of staff, Defense Minister Ehud Barak publicly declared that he views him as a candidate to succeed Gabi Ashkenazi as chief of staff. The military correspondents, those who only spoke glowingly of Gallant during the entire appointments commotion, put their minds at ease. And the brainwashed public, which shows no interest in learning what our soldiers did in Gaza, were also put at ease.

The fact that this feted general is directly responsible for two brutal military operations in Gaza which have no equal - Summer Rains and Cast Lead - did not even warrant a mention in the public forum. While more and more suspicions and well-founded allegations over the IDF's behavior in Gaza, especially during Operation Cast Lead (December 2008 - January, 2009), surface all over the world, here a general of this "war" - really a brutal assault on a helpless population - only attracts praise.

Suspected war crimes? Violations of High Court rulings? No mention of those at all. Gallant has always been in favor of large operations in Gaza. He kept pushing for more strikes and more destruction, as much as possible. In the summer of 2006, his wish was granted and he took command of Operation Summer Rains. The result was 394 Palestinian deaths and a thousand wounded. The lone power station in Gaza was bombed along with the university and a number of bridges. A grand success.

At the time, nobody wondered why all this killing was necessary and who benefited from all this destruction. What was the reason for bombing a power station, except for meting out collective punishment, which has long proven to not only be a criminal act, but also a foolish one? Gallant emerged from "Summer Rains" unblemished.

He had the same success following Cast Lead. A war with almost no Israeli deaths is always a success, without commissions of inquiry and with no questions asked. To hell with the horrible price exacted from the other side, including the hundreds of women and children killed and the thousands of homes destroyed. Gallant commanded the most cruel war in Israel's history. In order to understand what happened in Gaza, it is worthwhile to read the report issued Wednesday (July 15) by the (army) reservist group "Breaking the Silence." The group recorded 54 testimonials of 30 combat troops that should come to represent the dark period in history that was this war, a war over which a blacker-than-black flag flies.

From the "neighbor procedure" of using people as human shields, which is a gross violation of a High Court ruling, a public scandal in itself; to the spirit of words uttered by a commander who is quoted by a number of the soldiers as saying that was preferable to harm bystanders than to hesitate in hurting the enemy. "If you are not sure, shoot," one of the soldiers quoted him as saying. The soldier added, "The firepower was insane ... In urban warfare, everyone is an enemy. There is no difference between innocent civilians and enemies."

It is for this that Gallant is responsible. He orchestrated a war in which there were almost no instances of combat, all the while inculcating an awful attitude within the IDF, one that says it is permissible for us to do anything: to drop thousands of bombs, shells, and missiles in addition to phosphorus shells and flechettes; to kill whole families and to sow destruction on a horrific scale while considering it all a success.

"They didn't set a goal for us," one of the combat soldiers said in the report, which recounts the destruction the soldiers wreaked just for its own sake. "I don't know what the objective of the war was."

Our Southern Command chief is a hero against the weak. While he rose through the ranks at sea, where his resumé is full of top-secret missions, his stint on land is nothing to write home about. He always makes sure to be photographed wearing dark sunglasses, his personal weapon while "on duty." In the meantime, the deep baritone voices of the military correspondents on television shower praise upon him in light of his grand achievements. But the truth is that this is a joke, a sad military joke that is drenched in blood. It was one of the most advanced arsenals of weapons in the world against those who launch empty pipes; hundreds of tons of smart and stupid bombs against factories and schools; precision-guided unmanned aerial vehicles that killed children; the tiny few of our dead, many from friendly fire incidents. In summation: military heroism on the cheap.

All these factors will not hold up Gallant's promotion. They will be credited to him as sparkling successes on his way to the top. And it is only the soldier who gave the 54th testimonial in the "Breaking the Silence" report who understood what the general who is a candidate for chief of staff did not: "I didn't leave there with a feeling of heroism or great sacrifice. Just plain disgusted, bored and stupid. I did not feel I did anything significant. I convinced myself, 'Okay, I was in Gaza, I can tell my buddies.'" Like him, Galant also told his buddies, and the buddies bought it with giddiness and blind admiration.

***

War Criminals who are professors at Tel Aviv University

Asa Kasher: Academic Ethics, Censorship, and Assassination – Philosopher of pragmatics and ethics, Kasher is an Israel Prize winner (2000) and the Laura Schwarz-Kipp Chair In Professional Ethics and Philosophy of Practice at Tel Aviv University (TAU).

Kasher combines his work at TAU with instruction at the National Security College and has written the ethical codes for scores of state sectors, including the Police, the National Bank, and for Knesset Members. Notably, he is the author of the military's ethical code: The Spirit of the IDF: Values and Basic Norms (1994). Kasher has developed the rationale and justification for military doctrines including the use of anti-personnel munitions, assassinations, and torture.

From TAU he co-headed the army team which composed Israel's revisionist "Doctrine of Just War" defining "terrorism" as all armed activity 'not on behalf of any state', something 'always morally unjustified'. Kasher thereby produced Israel's "Doctrine of the Just War of Fighting Terror" where 'from the point of view of Military Ethics, a terrorist is a terrorist is a terrorist', and must be met with overwhelming force. This includes torture, assassination ("preventive killing"), and pre-emptive violence. Kasher is a member of the Military Censorship Committee, has served on the National Security Council, and is Head of the Inter-University Committee on Academic Ethics.

Yitzhak Ben-Israel: Weapons Design & Deployment: Former head of the Israeli air force's R&D program and the military's overall R&D Directorate (MAFAT), and is a double Israel Prize winner for security contributions.

As Chair of the Defense Industry Lobby Ben-Israel is one of the most powerful figures in Israel's arms industry – a status reflected in his additional post as Chair of the Israel-India Parliamentary Friendship League (India is Israel's largest weapons client). A TAU professor since 2002, Ben-Israel is the key figure responsible for bringing together each of the academic, industrial, political, and military components of Israel's arms industry, with TAU providing both venue and resources.

Since mid-2006, Ben-Israel has been linked with the live "testing" of so-called "DIME" (Dense Inert Metal Explosive) munitions (delivered by unmanned aerial vehicles) in Gaza; and since early 2007, Ben-Israel has been advocating a major ground and air assault on the Gaza Strip...With the commencement of the Gaza campaign, Ben-Israel threw his weight behind (Defense Minister) Barak, praising his leadership in the offensive and encouraging greater force: 'If we hit them hard enough, they might come to the conclusion that they shouldn't fire any more rockets.'

Following the ceasefire, Ben-Israel heralded the advent of a 'a milestone that would be etched in the historic memory of the Middle East for many years' –foremost amongst the gains of the conflict he perceived was the shift in the army's approach to targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure: 'the recent operation showed that even mosques [...] are no longer an obstacle in the face of Israel using its military power' he wrote, arguing that the civilian losses meant that for Palestinians 'the path of resistance has failed, big time.'

Commissioning War Crimes: TAU and the Doctrine of Disproportionality

War Crimes and TAU's INSS Dept. - In the wake of the Lebanon War, in which Israel introduced various new weapons technologies as well as doctrinal innovations, high-ranking officers and senior planners set about developing a strategy to remedy the perceived damage done to Israel's 'balance of deterrence.' The "Dahiya Doctrine", named for the Shi'ite residential quarter of Beirut reduced to rubble in the war, was first articulated regarding Lebanese civilian populations.

In late 2008, Giora Eiland, ex-chair of the National Security Council and now INSS senior research fellow, produced a strategic document at TAU's INSS in which he argued the 'impossibility of defeating Hizbullah' meant Israeli forces were henceforth to plan for a war 'between Israel and Lebanon and not between Israel and Hizbollah.'

This, Eiland argued, would 'lead to the elimination of the Lebanese military, the destruction of the national infrastructure, and intense suffering among the population,' ends he justified by arguing 'the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people are consequences that can influence Hizbollah's behavior more than anything else.'Acknowledging that such a doctrine 'may damage Israel's legitimacy, incur international pressure, and even prompt a clear directive from the United States to stop the destruction', Eiland concluded by advocating 'high level professional military dialogue between Israel and [...] military leaders in these countries' in order to foster 'the requisite support.'

Eiland's TAU colleague and head of the INSS's "IDF Force Structure" unit, Gabriel Siboni, expanded on the new doctrine in an October 2008 INSS Insight bulletin entitled "Disproportionate Force:

"Israel's Concept of Response in Light of the Second Lebanon War."In it, he made explicit the need for the military to target civilian over and above military targets: The army, he wrote, must 'refrain from the cat and mouse games of searching for Qassam rocket launchers [... and] not be expected to stop the rocket and missile fire against the Israeli home front through attacks on the launchers themselves.' Instead, Israel was to:

'[...] act immediately, decisively, and with force that is disproportionate to the enemy's actions and the threat it poses. Such a response aims at inflicting damage and meting out punishment to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction processes. The strike must be carried out as quickly as possible, and must prioritize damaging assets over seeking out each and every launcher.'

Siboni's paper identified Syria and Lebanon, while noting that the 'approach is applicable to the Gaza Strip as well'; he concluded by positing the army's 'primary goal' as now being to 'leave the enemy floundering in expensive, long term processes of reconstruction.'

This doctrine of disproportionality and civilian infrastructure targeting developed at TAU by its preeminent strategic planners and military officers is clearly in extreme violation of international law, not least Articles 52 and 54 of Protocol 1 of the Geneva Conventions which govern the protection of civilian infrastructure in war. The principle of distinction between civilian and military objects and populations in war is a foundational precept of International Humanitarian Law and failure to abide by this principle constitutes one of the most serious war crimes. To do so as part of an explicitly premeditated strategy is rare in its wilful contempt for international law.

Less than two months after the TAU scholars' documents were made public Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip began. At its end, three weeks later, preliminary assessments confirmed an overwhelming civilian death toll, with 895 of more than 1300 dead classified as civilian and an estimated 43% of all fatalities made up of women and children. Following their preliminary investigations, Amnesty International wrote to outgoing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on January 16th 2009, asking her to impress upon her Israeli counterpart the need for Israel to allow investigations of war crimes. The letter, apparently written without knowledge of the doctrinal debates covered above, observed 'there is growing evidence that Israel has failed to adhere to the principles of distinction and proportionality in its military action'; Amnesty noted that '[e]vidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity is mounting daily'.

The UN's Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Palestine stressed the apparent premeditative character of these crimes when he described the carnage in Gaza as raising 'the spectre of systematic war crimes.' The civilian focus of Israel's offensive was indeed neither accidental nor mysterious; it was – in good part – designed and enabled by generals, scholars, scientists working out of Tel Aviv University.

The same week, Tel Aviv University announced the appointment of the army's Col. Pnina Sharvit-Baruch to teach international law.

Sharvit-Baruch is the army's principal international law counsel and was responsible for green-lighting the decision to target civilian infrastructure and for a 'relaxing of the rules of engagement' regarding civilians on the part of the army's International Law Division. Col Pnina Sharvit-Baruch provided legal cover for war crimes during the Gaza invasion.

Col. Sharvit-Baruch and her staff manipulated standard interpretations of international law to expand the scope of army operations to include civilian targets. Haim Ganz has called Col. Sharvit-Baruch's approach to international law "devious jurisprudence that permits mass killing". According to the Israeli media, she personally approved the first wave of air strikes in Gaza that targeted a police graduation ceremony, killing at least 40 cadets. Although police forces have civilian status in international law, and are therefore protected from military reprisal, Col Sharvit-Baruch is reported to have revised her opinion of the attack's legality during the many months of planning.

In addition, she is said to have "relaxed" the rules of engagement, approved widespread house demolitions and the uprooting of farmland, and sanctioned the use of incendiary weapons such as white phosphorus over the densely populated enclave.

She also offered legal justification for the targeting of buildings in which civilians were known to be located as long as they had been warned first to leave. Schools, mosques and a university were among the many civilian buildings shelled by the Israeli army during the 22-day operation.

Her decisions have been widely criticized by international human rights organisations as well as by international law experts in Israel. Professor Yuval Shany, who teaches public international law at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, stated regarding the strike against the police cadets: "If you follow that line, there is not much that differentiates [the cadets] from [Israeli] reservists or even from 16-year-olds who will be drafted [into the Israeli army] in two years."

Col Sharvit-Baruch's predecessor, Daniel Reisner, noted that her staff had stretched the accepted meanings of international law. The army's operating principle, he added, was: "If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it."

Orna Ben-Naftali, the dean of law at the College of Management in Rishon Letzion, said the army's conduct in Gaza had made international law "bankrupt". "A situation is created in which the majority of the adult men in Gaza and the majority of the buildings can be treated as legitimate targets. The law has actually been stood on its head."

Most academic staff in Israel supported Col. Sharvit-Baruch's appointment, said Daphna Golan, a program director at the Minerva Center for Human Rights at Hebrew University.

Adi Ophir, Jan. 12, 2009: "...In order to save one Jewish child, one is ready to sacrifice the lives of 100,000 of theirs. The number may vary of course; 100,000 is the figure I heard this morning with exactly this formulation from a colleague, a distinguished professor of Hebrew and Yiddish literature (at Tel Aviv University). He was speaking in public, very conscious of and proud in his position...."

***

The effect of Israeli war crimes in Gaza six months later

Editor's note: Here is more testimony of the ongoing Israeli holocaust against the Palestinians, war crimes by the so-called "Jewish state," which most of the rulers, intelligentsia, media, and human rights mavens of the West deny. Consequently, they are all holocaust deniers. The Zionists claim that Pope Pius XII was "silent" about the Nazi "Holocaust" and this is a major issue in the western media confronting the Catholic Church. But how much of an issue is the silence regarding the Israeli holocaust -- a holocaust which continues to this day? Are you silent about --and therefore complicit in-- Israeli mass murder of the Palestinian people?

online slideshow of Israeli war crimes in Gaza

A life in Ruins

In the immediate aftermath of Israel's bloody three-week war with Hamas in January, Peter Beaumont travelled to Gaza and met the Palestinians devasted by the death of their families and the destruction of their neighborhoods. Six months later he returns to find they are still waiting - to rebuild both their homes and their lives

by Peter Beaumont • The Observer, July 5, 2009

Shifa Salman, in the ruins of her family home, which was destroyed by the Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip in January 2009. Photographs: Antonio Olmos

The force of the explosion that destroyed Shifa Salman's house in the northern Gaza district of Jabal al-Rayas folded floor into floor as easily as pastry. It pushed pillars through concrete, reconfiguring her home into a bristling dome. The tail-fin of one of the Israeli bombs responsible still sits on top of the rubble, innocuous as a child's discarded toy. These days, pigeons and sparrows nest in the cave-like space carved out by the detonation inside the ruins where mattresses and bags of flour are stored, the latter stencilled with the initials of the World Food Programme. Sleek, aggressive cockerels patrol the floor, flying at intruders.
Six months after Israel's war against Gaza, Shifa, a 20-year-old student, sleeps with her family behind the fallen house. A trodden path leads through the rubble to a row of cramped, ramshackle shelters open to the elements and roofed with hessian sacks. They are identical to the cattle pens that stand beside them.

On closer examination I can see that the frames have been constructed out of cast-off sections of wood and metal lashed together. What walls that exist are fashioned out of old pallets and branches woven into crude wicker. Or more sacking, staked into the soil to make rudimentary windbreaks.

Shifa's family are Bedouin. Until recently they farmed this land close to the barrier, in an area once used for missile launches against the Jewish communities on the far side. This was one of Gaza's limited areas of agricultural production in a densely crowded urban area, home to 1.4 million people. Because of the missiles, this neighbourhood of farms and little factories was treated to a scorched earth policy.

Inside Shifa's own tiny, dirt-floored "compound" a fire pit has been scooped out of the earth and filled with twigs. On it sits the blackened pan in which Shifa and her mother make stews of molokhiya - spinach-like greens - with chicken, garlic and onions. "This is my kitchen," says Shifa shyly, in English. A piece of broken board is propped on two drums to function as table. Here a jam jar sits, holding a pestle and a solitary sharp knife.

I first came to this house in January, in the immediate aftermath of Israel's war against Gaza, visiting the Salman family almost every day. The family were sleeping in the ruins to shelter from the rain, surrounded by the stinking bodies of their sheep, killed during the assault. Then, Shifa complained that the frightened younger children were kept awake at night by the sound of packs of dogs scavenging among the carrion outside.

A slight and pretty woman with dark brows, Shifa is walking along a road where the ruined houses of her neighbourhood stand on each side like stone-piled graves in a desert. It is 7am and she is on her way to meet the bus that will take her to university. She is wearing a black abaya, the head-to-ankle veil that is the uniform of the university, and carrying a pile of her books. Both books and the veil were donated by the college after Shifa's family lost most of what it owned. "There used to be a factory here," says Shifa, pointing at a collapsed, blue-painted metal structure. I am reminded of the last time I saw this building. A herd of cows lay slaughtered in the field outside.

"My life used to be so good when we had a home. Now it is awful." She wipes a tear away, trying to hide what she is doing. "This street used to be full of cars," Shifa explains. "It was easy to get to university. Now I have to walk for half an hour before I can get a ride. There used to be houses here, but everyone fled after the F-16s attacked. After the tanks attacked. Only a few of us have stayed."

So few, in fact, I quickly learn their names. There is the Khader family, who have built a complex cloth-walled shelter on top of the ruins of one of their houses, a structure that has expanded over the months as new rooms have been added. One day I find the men of the family crawling into a dark hole beneath the house to chip out tiles from what was once their ground floor to sell for food, disturbing a nest of pinkly squirming newborn mice.

There is the owner of the dairy parlor, Mohammed al-Fayoun, whose cattle were killed. He has set up business again beneath the bent and twisted rafters of his metal roof, where he sits daily in a plastic chair. He complains his customers are still too scared to visit him this close to the border with Israel.

While her fathers and uncles work the land, Shifa is representative of a new generation - the first from her family to go to university. She says she wants to be a geography teacher and has an exam today. "I used to have a television in my room," she says, passing the house of Nabil Nasser Hassan, once one of her neighbours, whose demolished home is now surrounded by a stockade of corrugated metal sheeting to keep out looters hunting for pipes and wire to recycle. "At the beginning, people came to give us coupons and blankets. But no one has come to see us for a long time. No one has spoken to us about rebuilding our home. I'm scared living where we live. All of the family is, especially my sister Safa when she hears the [Israeli] jets."

It is not only Shifa's daily walk at 7am through the ruins to reach the Islamic University that is a mark of her changed life. Before the destruction visited by the bombs, tanks and bulldozers, Shifa says, she would sit up after dark, reading her books in her own room, which was decorated with posters of animals. Now when the light fades, she must cease her studying. "I used to spend all night working. I'm good," she says with confidence. "But now I'm struggling. And I know if I can succeed, I can make life better for my family."

Israel's Operation Cast Lead began on 27 December 2008. By the time of its conclusion on 18 January, with the declaration by both Israel and Hamas - which governs Gaza - of their own unilateral ceasefires, more than 1,300 Palestinians had been killed, many of them civilians. They had perished under an Israeli rain of bombs, bullets, missiles and artillery fire, including white phosphorous munitions.

While Israel insisted the war was designed to bring a halt to the launching of home-made missiles out of the Gaza Strip, its targets suggested wider aims, not least the dismantling of Palestinian institutions. Police stations, ministries, schools and hospitals were hit. Orange groves and tunnel tents for growing strawberries and vegetables were uprooted. And thousands of houses were damaged.

On my return, I scour Gaza for evidence that anything has changed for the better in the months since the war ended. But houses and other buildings destroyed during the conflict remain as hollowed-out and dusty monuments to violence. In places, some owners have experimented with repairing buildings with an adobe made of mud and straw baked in the sun. But it is a very temporary solution.

In the office of Dr Ibrahim Radwan, the man appointed by the Hamas government to record the damage done in Israel's three-week war, I jot down the numbers that describe what happened. Some 3,800 homes and businesses badly damaged in one way or another - although he admits this includes some damaged in previous Israeli attacks. In addition, 80 government buildings were hit. Radwan has his own categories to describe the degrees of destruction, but after a week driving around Gaza, the damage conforms to its own types. The big metal walls of the workshops on Salahadeen Road, where the heaviest fighting took place, now leak light through hundreds of bullet perforations; other walls are splashed with the shrapnel of missiles fired from drones; blocks of flats hit by artillery fire show scorched holes. And across the north of the Gaza Strip stand the weird igloos of the bomb-flattened houses.

There are changes that I do register in the six months since the war ended. The bodies of dead animals have been removed and cleared away; the ruins have been sifted for human remains. It has expunged the odour of decay that was once tangy with the chemical flavour of explosives and spent phosphorous. The tangled remnants of an orange grove I drove past every day, tipped over and torn by military bull-dozers, has disappeared, razed for firewood.

And without concrete and steel, aluminium and glass, without tiles for roofs and cladding for stairs and bathrooms - all prevented from entering Gaza by Israel's continuing economic blockade - no rebuilding has begun. For those who suffered most, the war continues.

I run into Shifa's father by chance one day at Gaza City's flea market, in the Yarmouk district. He tells me he comes once every fortnight to look through stalls selling broken and unwanted things in the hope of finding something that might alleviate their circumstances. He shows me the contents of his white plastic shopping bag: two plastic joints for connecting water pipes. Bought in the hope that he might one day have a use for them.

It is not only the physical symptoms that persist as a reminder of what happened in Gaza. Sana al-Ar's family live in a light but sparsely furnished fifth-floor flat in a tower block in Shujaiya. There are photographs on the wall of 16-year-old Sana's younger brothers, Rakan and Ibrahim, and her father Mohammed - all killed during Israel's attack. Missing are pictures of her 18-year-old sister, Fida, and her brother's wife, Iman, who also perished. In a room decorated with gold curtains and floor cushions, Malak, the youngest surviving child, plays on the carpet, in a T-shirt printed with the slogan "Daddy's Little Tiger". But Daddy is gone.

Holocaust survivor Sana al-Ar

On 3 January, Israeli tanks attacked the area where Sana and her family lived. Their house - like Shifa's - was located close to the border, not far from a pretty, gold-domed mosque and a graveyard. Shifa Salman's family managed to flee. But Sana's family - her mother says - were blown to "pieces of meat". It is left to Sana's grandmother to recount the story, while the girl and her mother listen. She tells how a rocket hit the house, injuring Fida with shrapnel. She quickly bled to death. The father told the family to flee in their donkey cart, but a second missile exploded, fatally injuring him, too. I listen as Sana's grandmother describes how in the smoke from the explosion the weeping mother found her son Ibrahim "missing half his face". The family gathered what they could of their dead in a blanket and took them to a neighbour's house, where they were trapped, sitting with the bodies, for five days.

I had heard about Sana in January, from Dr Fadel Abu Hein at Gaza City's Community Training Center and Crisis Management. Fadel was sending teams of social workers and therapists to run workshops for the most badly affected children, even working with them as they sat on blankets in the rubble. As we talked about the types of trauma suffered by children during the conflict, he mentioned a girl who had seen most of her family die and had spent days trapped with their bodies. I had met her the following day, at the house of an uncle she was staying with. And I had tried to talk to Sana then. But sitting on a bed in a cold, bare basement room, she had been withdrawn behind a wall of grief, managing to speak barely a handful of words. Instead, it was the other relatives who had crowded the room who supplied answers to my questions. The only thing I learned was that she liked to paint, and so I had bought her pens and paper, since all of hers were lost.

Sitting in her new flat, Sana fetches the only drawing she says she has done since the killing of her brothers - in charcoal grey, against a shaded blue background, are the names of the boys. A day later, I learn from Nahid Hanrarah, the social worker who has worked most closely with Sana, that she has done other paintings, paintings of her family drenched in blood.

"Painting their names is an improvement," Nahid says. He adds that Sana is much improved, but when I ask her questions, she answers in fragmented sentences: "Things aren't too much better. Everything is still... I feel things are separate. The anger and the sadness. The one who could make us happy [Sana's father] is the one we've lost."

There are long pauses when Sana looks away. "People have tried to help me. There have been people at school ... " Sana mentions her irritation at those among her friends who insist on trying to talk to her about what happened on 3 January and in the days that followed. "I feel I can't concentrate at school like I used to," Sana explains. "I hate it because people at school keep asking how my family died. They think if I talk then it will help me. That is why I went to see Nahid. Because it makes me so upset.

I don't want to talk about it." Sana is also scared to go to the bathroom alone and, she tells me, she suffers with nightmares. I learn from talking to Nahid that Sana was suicidal when she was first referred to him. "She didn't want to live. She had no hope," he explains quietly.

It has not only been at school where Sana has been confronted by what happened. At home, too, she has had to deal with constant reminders of her loss from her mother, Laila, whose grief is even more debilitating.

"I think," Nahid suggests, "that Sana is the only one in the immediate family who really understands what happened to them, and who can help the family. Her mother can't do anything, really. So the responsibility has fallen on Sana. Sana is growing [as a person] from the knowledge of all the things that she passed through, which is helping her to overcome. But it is a process that is far from complete. They were a family of nine, now only four are left."

There are moments when you see an echo of how this family must once have been. Before the Israeli soldiers came. Before the war. Malak crawls on to her mother's knee with her doll and squeals loudly: "Bite her! Bite her!" Suddenly I realise that Sana is smiling at her mother. It is the first time in five visits to this family that I have seen her smile. And when she does, another girl is briefly visible.

And Sana is smiling again when I next see her. We are talking about ordinary things other than the horror that befell her; about the films she likes to watch - Bollywood and action films, X-Men - about her new computer, and the internet connection she is waiting for with excitement: "Before, we didn't have a computer. I've had it two weeks." Then the pain is in the room again. "The first thing I'm going to do is put pictures on it of my father and my sister and my brothers."

She seems sad, but not unreachable. I ask Sana if she will be going to the beach in the holidays, but it is her mother who answers: "We used to go to the sea, all of us together. We don't go any more ... " There are ghosts in the room that Laila cannot ignore. And because Laila cannot ignore them, Sana is also bound to observe them, and to mirror her mother's grief.

Laila says she has nothing left, and I remind her of Sana and Malak. She looks up at the pictures above her. "Rakan was the most beautiful," she sobs, as Sana begins to cry, quietly. "He was only four and a half. He was a very naughty boy. People kept saying to his father: 'This boy will be someone.'" When his sister went to carry him, I did not recognise him. He had come to pieces."

In Dr Fadel's office, decorated with pictures of dead Palestinian fighters, he tries to assess what has changed and what has not. Some people have begun to rebuild their lives, while others living in tents, or displaced, or living - like Shifa's family - among the ruins remain largely in the circumstances they were in when the war ended. "The biggest obstacle that we are facing is among those people whose problems have not ended - who live in a continuing war atmosphere. Nothing is happening about the destroyed homes, because we live in a continuing state of economic siege. So there are people still living in tents, or in the rubble."

Visiting his office one day I am confronted with evidence of how those dealing with damage from the conflict can progress. Hanging on one wall are pictures drawn by trauma-affected children, before-and-after images whose real subject is the effects of exposure to violence, and how it can be mediated. The "before" pictures show soldiers with guns, tanks and jets, images of destruction and death. The "after" pictures show the ordinary stuff of childhood: flying kites and images of family and friends and flowers, produced after lengthy work with the centre's social workers.

I mistakenly believe that they come from the recent conflict. I am informed that they pre-date the war - describing the experience of Israeli military incursions and air strikes. When I ask to see drawings produced after the January war I am led to another series of sketches that depict - so far - only fighting. And examining them, I am reminded of another picture I had seen a few days before in Khan Younis, in Gaza's south, in a child's bedroom.

I had first encountered Rewa'a Omer, aged 30, in the Nasser Hospital, standing between the beds of her two children, her daughter Ola and her son Yahya. It was a few days after the ceasefire and Rewa'a was clutching a bloody piece of clothing. An hour or so before, 10-year-old Ola, and Yahya, nine, had been standing close to their school gates with a group of other primary school children, waiting for a lift to take them home. As they stood chatting, an Israeli drone had fired a missile at a passing Hamas fighter on a motorbike three metres from the children. The blast had driven shrapnel into the legs of the children and a sliver into Yahya's eye.

Until I see the poster in Ola's bedroom, I think she has recovered better than her brother. It depicts a baby's smiling face. But someone has drawn trickles of blood coming from the nose and mouth, and added small scarlet cuts. Rewa'a tells me it was Ola who had disfigured it. I notice, too, that she has shaded around the baby's eyes so that the skin appears yellow. I think of how her brother's face was in his hospital bed, bruised under the bandages and stained with something like iodine.

Rewa'a's family are what passes for middle class in Gaza. Her husband was a police captain in the Palestinian National Authority before Hamas's assumption of full executive power in 2007, at the end of the most violent period of the so-called "internal fighting" between Fatah and Hamas. He does not work now but still receives his salary. Well-educated, Rewa'a speaks excellent English.

The family asks me for a copy of the photograph I took on the day the children were injured, and Rewa'a shows me an image saved on her phone, given to her by a neighbour, that shows her son being carried from the scene in someone's arms, his head limp and bloody. "It was on the television. And I was not there to protect them."

There are still some marks on her daughter's legs, like dark bruises. "My son was injured worse," she says. "He is still shy about wearing shorts because of the scarring. There was shrapnel in his eye that we did not know about. He had to go to Egypt to be operated on. They have recovered physically," Rewa'a adds, "but emotionally my daughter is more damaged than my son. That first time that she saw her brother bleeding has stuck with her. I think it will always be inside. She talks about what happened and her grades at school have suffered. It was a month and a half before she was ready to go back to school."

Rewa'a says that Ola is still frightened to go to the bus stop, and "the children are always fighting now. I worry all the time about them, waiting for them to come home from school."

Ola wants to tell the story of what happened to her. "The car was late. There was a sound and I woke up and everything was black. Things were broken and bleeding. Then people came to rescue my brother. Someone took my hand. I said: 'My brother! My brother!'" I ask Ola what she would like most. She does not have to think about it: "I would like to live somewhere safe."

Yahya wants to talk about Egypt, where he went to have the shrapnel taken from his eye.

"I went to the zoo and saw the pyramids!"

"I feel that there is nowhere safe in Gaza any more," adds Rewa'a. "I used to think before that ... you know, we are ordinary people. This [the violence] had nothing to do with me."

When I visit Rewa'a again we climb up on to the flat roof of their building. Fading home-made kites are propped in tangles of string against the balustrade. Rewa'a seems oppressed by the thought of what has happened. "I wish that they could have a normal childhood. I didn't grow up in Gaza, I grew up in Saudi Arabia. I came back to Gaza when I was 16. I had a beautiful childhood. I want the same for them. Not this.

"Every time the summer holidays come round I wish there was something that they could do. Hobbies that could help them grow. But there is nothing here like that." I remind her of something that Yahya told me when I asked what he wanted to be when he grew up. He replied that he wanted to be a fighter. "Yahya says that. But it is just an idea in his head."

As we are leaving I ask Rewa'a if she has any hope that things might change in Gaza. She seems sad. "Nothing ever changes. There is no rebuilding. Everything becomes worse.

Nothing here ever changes for the better."

Child survivors of the Israeli Holocaust in Gaza

The Secret Life of War: Journeys Through Modern Conflict by Peter Beaumont will be published in the U.S. on Sept. 1, 2009.

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Amnesty International: Israeli war crimes in Gaza Dec. 08-Jan. 09

Amnesty International Confirms Israeli War Crimes

On 27 December, as 2008 drew to a close, Israeli jets launched an aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip, where 1.5 million Palestinians live, crowded into one of the most densely populated areas of the planet. In the following three weeks, more than 1,400 Palestinians were killed, including some 300 children, and some 5,000 were wounded. 

Israeli forces repeatedly breached the laws of war, including by carrying out direct attacks on civilians and civilian buildings and attacks targeting Palestinian militants that caused a disproportionate toll among civilians.

Israel said it launched the attacks in order to stop Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups firing rockets at towns and villages in southern Israel. In 2008, seven Israeli civilians were killed by these mostly homemade, indiscriminate rockets or in other attacks by Palestinians from Gaza; three Israeli civilians were killed during the three-week conflict that began on 27 December.



The sudden conflict followed an 18-month period in which the Israeli army had subjected the inhabitants of Gaza to an unremitting blockade, preventing virtually all movement of people and goods in and out of the territory and stoking a growing humanitarian catastrophe. The blockade throttled almost all economic life and led growing numbers of Palestinians to become dependent on international food aid; even terminally ill patients were prevented from leaving to obtain medical care that could not be provided by Gaza’s resource- and medicine-starved hospitals.

(Emphasis supplied)

For Further Research

Amnesty International: Israelis Killed Hundreds of Children in Lebanon

Amnesty International Documents Israeli War Crimes in Lebanon in 2006

Israelis Massacre Children in Qana

Let us not forget the business-as-usual element. The Israelis have slaughtered thousands of innocent Arab civilians in Lebanon and the occupied territories but nothing substantive is done to prevent future massacres and war crimes. We in the West continue our leisure and recreational activities while fellow humans in Palestine are in desperate circumstances. The Palestinians are carted off to concentration camps (the Israelis did this through proxy forces in Lebanon at the El Khiam concentration camp which was eventually liberated by Hizbollah). Palestinians are killed; they are starving for food and medicine, and we're going about pursuing our lovely, lavish lifestyles. If these were "Jews" who were dying, starving, denied medicine and medical care, the most demanding moral question of the Age would become, "What did you do while the 'Jews' suffered and died in 2009?!" The Palestinian gentiles, who are less than human, as Orthodox Judaism has always taught, do not merit any such pressing, haunting concerns. The burning question of the Age is sixty-five years old and still being forced down our throats, "What did ____ [fill in the blank: the Catholic Church, Pope Pius XII, President Franklin Roosevelt, the Red Cross etc.] FAIL TO DO during The Holocaust?" 

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Professor under fire for comparing Israelis to Nazis

"You can criticize Israel; you can criticize the war in Gaza," Foxman said. "But to compare what the Israelis are doing in defense of their citizens to what the Nazis did to the Jews is clearly anti-Semitism." -Abe Foxman, ADL Thought Cop

Professor's comparison of Israelis to Nazis stirs furor

The UC Santa Barbara sociologist, who is Jewish, sent images from the Holocaust and from Israel's Gaza offensive to students in his class. He has drawn denunciation and support.

By Duke Helfand

Los Angeles Times | April 30, 2009

Controversy has erupted at UC Santa Barbara over a professor's decision to send his students an e-mail in which he compared graphic images of Jews in the Holocaust to pictures of Palestinians caught up in Israel's recent Gaza offensive.

The e-mail by tenured sociology professor William I. Robinson has triggered a campus investigation and drawn accusations of anti-Semitism from two national Jewish groups, even as many students and faculty members have voiced support for him.

The uproar began in January when Robinson sent his message -- titled "parallel images of Nazis and Israelis" -- to the 80 students in his sociology of globalization class.

The e-mail contained more than two dozen photographs of Jewish victims of the Nazis, including those of dead children, juxtaposed with nearly identical images from the Gaza Strip. It also included an article critical of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and a note from Robinson.

"Gaza is Israel's Warsaw -- a vast concentration camp that confined and blockaded Palestinians," the professor wrote. "We are witness to a slow-motion process of genocide."

Two Jewish students dropped the class, saying they felt intimidated by the professor's message. They contacted the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which advised them to file formal complaints with the university.

In their letters, senior Rebecca Joseph and junior Tova Hausman accused Robinson of violating the campus' faculty code of conduct by disseminating personal, political material unrelated to his course.

"I was shocked," said Joseph, 22. "He overstepped his boundaries as a professor. He has his own freedom of speech, but he doesn't have the freedom to send his students his own opinion that is so strong."

Robinson, 50, who is Jewish, called the accusations and the campus investigation an attack on academic freedom. He said his former students, the Wiesenthal Center and the Anti-Defamation League had all confused his criticism of Israeli policies with anti-Semitism.

"That's like saying if I condemn the U.S. government for the invasion of Iraq, I'm anti-American," he said. "It's the most absurd, baseless argument."

Robinson said he regularly sends his students voluntary reading material about current events for the global affairs course, and that no one raised questions when he subsequently discussed his e-mail.

"The whole nature of academic freedom is to introduce students to controversial material, to provoke students to think and make students uncomfortable," said Robinson, a UC Santa Barbara professor for nine years.

As the dispute over his e-mail plays out, UC Santa Barbara has become the most recent U.S. university to confront campus unrest over issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In recent years, Jewish and Muslim groups have quarreled repeatedly at UC Irvine about the Holocaust and Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. Professors and students at Columbia University have also argued over issues of intimidation and academic freedom amid debates on the Mideast.

In Robinson's case, reaction has been strong -- on both sides. Shortly after hearing from the two students in January, the Wiesenthal Center produced a YouTube video titled "Jewish Students Under Siege from Professor at UC Santa Barbara." The clip shows one of Robinson's former students, her face obscured to protect her identity, reading from his e-mail.

The head of the ADL's Santa Barbara region sent Robinson a letter in February calling on him to repudiate his statements about Israel. Last month, the ADL's national director, Abraham Foxman, in a meeting with faculty members at the campus, urged the university to conduct an investigation into Robinson. He was told that an inquiry was already underway.

"You can criticize Israel; you can criticize the war in Gaza," Foxman said. "But to compare what the Israelis are doing in defense of their citizens to what the Nazis did to the Jews is clearly anti-Semitism."

Robinson's supporters say the professor is being maligned for exercising his right to challenge his students to think critically about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Students on campus have formed a group, the Committee to Defend Academic Freedom at UCSB, which is chronicling the saga on its website. Letters of support also have arrived from academics across the country, including one from California Scholars for Academic Freedom, which says it represents 100 professors at 20 college campuses. The group argues that the allegations have been raised against Robinson to "silence criticism of Israeli policies and practices."

Some UC Santa Barbara faculty members also are speaking up for Robinson. History professor Harold Marcuse, who attended the March meeting with the ADL's Foxman, said the pictures e-mailed by Robinson were "well within the bounds of appropriateness on campus. It's something I could have used in a course."

Marcuse, who is Jewish and teaches about the Holocaust in his world history and German history classes, said he would not have injected his own views into such a message to students, but added: "I don't think Bill Robinson's e-mail is anti-Semitic in any way. I think criticism of Israel is OK."

One UC Santa Barbara official has already looked into the allegations against Robinson, and a faculty committee is being formed to decide whether to forward the case to UC Santa Barbara Chancellor Henry Yang. A university spokesman declined to comment on the case.

Robinson has hired an attorney, and the student committee supporting him has scheduled a May 14 campus forum on the matter. Joseph and Hausman, the students who filed the original complaints, said they plan to attend. So do Hausman's parents from Los Angeles and Rabbi Aron Hier, director of campus outreach for the Wiesenthal Center.

"I just want to bring awareness," said Hausman, 20. "I want people to know that educators shouldn't be sending out something that is so disturbing."

End quote

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Read the record of rabbinic censorship in

Judaism Discovered by Michael Hoffman

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Archbishop Theodosius: Pope not welcome in Jerusalem

Archbishop Theodosius of Sebaste

By Israel Shamir | March 9, 2009

“Pope Benedict is not welcome in the Holy Land in the present circumstances", - said Archbishop Theodosius of Sebaste, the highest ranking native Palestinian Christian clergyman in Jerusalem, after it was announced in Israel that the head of the Church of Rome will begin his May pilgrimage to the Holy City with obeisance to the Jewish Holocaust Memorial ‘Yad Vashem’.

- We are not against the Pope’s visit to Yad Vashem, but before expressing solidarity with the Jews, he should show solidarity with the Christians of Palestine. We have our own tragic memories; our Yad Vashem is in Gaza, said the Archbishop, and then added: “let the Pope begin his visit with Gaza first”.

Tall and fortyish, blue-eyed, of commanding presence, the Galilean-born Archbishop is a citizen of Israel, an outspoken critic of Jewish excesses and a most visible supporter of the One Democratic State idea calling for full equality for Jew, Christian and Muslim in the whole, undivided Holy Land. Archbishop Theodosius Atallah Hanna is a man of his own mind: he refused to meet with President Bush, befriended the Muslim Mufti of Jerusalem and defended Pope Benedict when he was attacked for what was considered anti-Muslim talk. Now he expresses the feelings of many Palestinian Christians, this oldest Christian community in the world. While the Church of Rome was established by Christ’s apostle St Peter, the Church of Jerusalem was established by Christ Himself. In many villages and towns of the Holy Land memories of the Saviour’s presence still linger. The majority of Jerusalem Christians belong to the Archbishop’s Orthodox church, while a minority are Catholic.

Regarding the papal visit, the Catholics and the Orthodox are of one mind. Before the Gaza war, Father Manuel Musallam, head of the Roman Catholic Church in the Gaza, said that it is Gaza’s right not to die, and if it dies it will be in the battlefield. The Catholic believers, priests and monks of the Holy Land forwarded the Pope a secret letter calling on him to postpone his visit to some future time. The Vatican read the letter but decided to disregard it. Now, when the blood shed by Jews in Gaza is still warm, Israel will certainly portray this visit as a sign of papal approval.

“If the Pope wants to come to the Holy Land, he should begin the visit by coming to the local Catholic church in Gaza", said Archbishop Theodosius Atallah Hanna. "The church was denied visits by the priests and bishops, and Gazan Christians were unable to worship in Jerusalem and Bethlehem. At first, the Pope should meet with Palestinian Christians, who carry the light of Christ in the darkness of Israeli occupation. Otherwise, this is not a visit to us, but a visit to Israel, an item on the Pope’s agenda vis-à-vis the Jewish organizations. We ask the Pope to speak for the people of Palestine, for Palestinian Christians are part and parcel of Palestine. Palestinian Christians suffer together with their Muslim brothers. Let the Pope advocate our cause”, said he.

Many Palestinian Christians feel that the Vatican has become a plaything of Jewish intrigues. Why does Vatican spend so much effort trying to woo and please the Jews? Is not the Church of Rome still an independent body? Why is the See of St Peter heeds to Jewish veto even regarding church affairs?

The Pope’s visit to the Holocaust Memorial is troubling.

The Museum adjacent to Memorial contains some rude defamation of the late Pope Pius; and the Jews have refused to remove it.

Even worse, the Holocaust is used to justify mass murder in Gaza; coming first to Yad vaShem sends a wrong symbol of accepting Jewish superiority over Christendom.

Moreover, the Holocaust Memorial is a religious symbol, an idol of a new heathen, godless cult.
Its boss Dr Judah Bauer has openly denied God and the Creation, while its previous boss is considered a war criminal and his extradition is being sought.

Tom Segev, a prominent Israeli writer, correctly said that the Holocaust has become "an object of worship." Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League has declared: “The Holocaust is a near successful attempt on the life of God's Chosen children and, thus, on God himself”.

We know of a near-successful attempt on the life of God’s Son, and thus on God Himself, and it took place in Jerusalem, on Calvary. Yad va-Shem is a pretender, a place of idolatry. Abraham refused to pay obeisance to idols -- why can’t the Pope follow his lead?

The forthcoming visit of the Pope was engendered by a ruse: traditionalist Bishop Msgr. Williamson was re-communicated with the Church, and at the same time his interview regarding the Jewish holocaust was aired. The scandal was enormous. If Williamson were to blaspheme Christ and the Church he would be applauded for his free mind; as things are, the Pope was forced to beg forgiveness of his "elder brothers the Jews," and even depart on this Canossa-like trip with its scheduled meetings with Israeli war criminals.

In Palestine, the Pope and the Catholics may learn a thing or two from the Church of Jerusalem. Despite its minority position in the Jewish state, the Orthodox Church is still free and un-subverted. Its theology is shiningly, implacably triumphalist; we believe in Christ and in victory of Orthodoxy as we celebrated it last Sunday, the first Sunday of Lent. Our Church is universal and catholic, for we of Jerusalem and Moscow, Antioch and Constantinople are joined by one communion, though we do not have a single shepherd. We have no elder brothers; we have no Zionists in our midst. We have no special relations with Jews – unless they want to join. We reject heresies, and we do not hesitate to anathematise heretics, including the popes of Rome who went too far in their desire to submit to worldly powers. Our Church does not seek better public relations, she does not change her rules in a vain attempt to attract more worshippers. She venerates icons, but does not bow down to idols.

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