Véronique De Keyser: "One must wring the neck of the European and German culpability on the Shoah"

In April, Belgian MEP Véronique De Keyser (French-speaking Socialist Party), Pasionaria of the Palestinian cause and harsh critic of Israel, in a most dramatic outpouring informed a group of MEPs that: "If the Israeli ambassador comes in the future to speak of Israel’s security, I feel like I want to strangle him." De Keyser then praised the "moderation and maturity" of the Palestinians.

The EJP reported: "De Keyser also used the opportunity to call on the German EU presidency "to make a difference in its positions between the Holocaust against the Jews and the current policy of the State of Israel" and spoke out against what she called the "European and German culpability" on the Holocaust. While stressing the horror of the Holocaust, she said: "One must wring the neck of the European and German culpability on the Shoah.""

In 2004, De Keyser visited Israel and declared on Belgian national TV that the security wall was in fact an "apartheid wall" which called up the image of a "concentration camp". This month, at the European Parliament, the indefatigable Véronique De Keyser once again called Gaza a "ghetto" where "people are dying little by little with cameras trained on them."

The EU Monitoring Centre definition of anti-Semitism includes: "Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis". Why is it that when Ms De Keyser uses words with unmistakable Nazi connotations such as "ghetto", "apartheid", "concentration camp", there is no reaction from either the European Parliament or the European Commission?

"Ich Nicht", a memoir by Joachim Fest

"Ich Nicht" by Joachim Fest was published in Germany 13 months ago. Regrettably it has not yet found an English-language publisher. John Vinocur reports:

"It describes his father, his family and growing up in Nazi Germany.

The book is exceptional because it tells in a modest, believable, quietly bitter and totally proud way of the family's extraordinary decency - no ironically "good" Germans here - and its refusal to bend before Hitler.

The title packs it all in: Ich nicht, Fest's father's phrase, borrowed from the Book of Matthew. Others betray you, Ich nicht. ...

Fest has written with remarkable detail about being a teenager in that awful time, describing his father's unfailing resistance to the Nazis, how a family could work to learn of Germany's atrocities and mass exterminations, avoid having its middle son get pulled into the SS and keep its honor to the end. ...

Fest's book, in its description of his family's difficult life in Berlin, also testifies to the absolute trivialization of the Nazi era (and demonization of America) present in blogs seeking to create a category of Good Americans, comparable in their submissiveness on Iraq to the so-called Good Germans who went along with Hitler.

Superimpose this episode from "Ich Nicht," for example, against all those crushing terrors and pressures for political conformity in American suburban life in 2007:

Fest's father, Johannes, is out of a job as a school principal because he will not sign a statement of allegiance to the Nazis. His little girls are celebrating a birthday in the backyard. Herr Henschel, their vicious neighbor, is standing on his balcony in his black SS uniform, "fists balled on his fat hips, screaming that he forbids the Fest girls" to bring disorder to a garden that is not his own.

As Fest makes clear, nobody in Berlin in 1940 was listening to radio call-in shows debating whether the invasions of France and Poland were morally acceptable.

Rather: One night, Fest overheard his mother asking his father, the Roman Catholic, Prussian nationalist, and friend of Jews, can't you join the Nazi Party? We won't really be changing, she said, and lying is how little people have always dealt with the powerful."We are not little people," Fest's father shot back. "Not on this subject!"

Read now, Fest's memoir can work as a warning to today's easy claimants of righteousness, and against the reflex appropriation of the moral high ground by any person, or faction.

"Ich Nicht," is strong and unique."

Neo-Nazi cartoon acceptable to "progressive" website

It is getting ever more difficult to tell who is "progressive" and who is "regressive", as both draw their inspiration from the same sources.
Judeosphere makes the point:

"A few months back I blogged about how a reader of the "progressive" news site Media With Conscience (MWC) complained about the publication of cartoons by Ben Heine (who took part in the infamous 2006 Tehran Holocaust cartoon contest). Predictably, these complaints were dismissed by the site's editors for the usual reasons (suppressing creative expression, confusing anti-zionism with anti-semitism).
Well, now an article at MWC attacking "Jewish hate groups" features this cartoon, depicting an ADL boot kicking over a Church. I was curious about the origins of the cartoon, and discovered that it orginally appeared on the neo-Nazi site, rense.com. It's an illustration accompanying articles denouncing hate crime legislation that will allegedly lead to the "creation of a vast Orwellian anti-hate bureaucracy and police state with the ADL lurking behind the scenes to seize and silence the politically incorrect anywhere in America. From a supreme position of power over all federal and local law enforcement, the ADL will be able to enforce its twisted definition that 'hate' means bias against federally protected groups, particularly Jews and homosexuals. All Bible-believing Christians will become 'haters.'"
Yep, Media With Conscience...Can you feel the love?"

Robert Fisk on the "sinister goings-on in Lebanon"

Blogger SnoopyTheGoon at Simply Jews points out that the "venerable master of bent mirrors", Robert Fisk, has not mentioned in his latest article on Lebanon the "I" country which for him is virtually the root cause of all evil. Could the "controversy" provoked by his conspirationist article on 9/11 explain Fisk's silence for now (Even I question the 'truth' about 9/11) ? "Fisk: it is all downhill from now on... It is with deep worry that I notice that in the latest article on sinister goings-on in Lebanon, this venerable master of bent mirrors forgot to mention a certain neighboring country. The name starting with I. I am worried about his mental state. Confused, too. Oops..."

Three European 2007 Nobel prize-winners also recipients of Israeli Wolf Prize

Three European 2007 Nobel prize-winners have also been awarded – and accepted, in other words did not boycott - the prestigious Israeli Wolf Prize. To date, a total of 241 scientists and artists from 21 countries have been awarded the Wolf Prize (created "to promote science for the benefit of mankind"). Laureates receive their awards from the President of the State of Israel at a ceremony at the Knesset (Parliament) in Jerusalem. Gerhard Ertl of Germany was awarded the Wolf Prize in chemistry (shared with Gabor A. Somorjai) in 1989 "for their outstanding contributions to the field of the surface science in general and for their elucidation of fundamental mechanisms of heterogeneous catalytic reactions at single crystal surface in particular." Albert Fert of France and Peter Grünberg of Germany share the Nobel Prize in physics, and were also jointly awarded the Wolf Prize in physics in 2006 "for their independent discovery of the giant magnetoresistance phenomenon (GMR), thereby launching a new field of research and applications known as spintronics, which utilizes the spin of the electron to store and transport information." The Wolf Prizes in physics and chemistry are often considered the most prestigious awards in those fields after the Nobel Prize. In medicine, the prize is probably the third most prestigious, after the Nobel Prize and the Lasker Award. In mathematics, for which there is no Nobel prize, the Wolf Prize is particularly prestigious, second to only the Fields medal.

Nazism: Saul Friedländer describes the ostracisation of Max Liebermann

“Max Liebermann, at eighty-six possibly the best-known German painter of the time, was too old to emigrate when Hitler came to power. Formerly president of the Prussian Academy of Arts, and in 1933 its honorary president, he held the highest German decoration, the Pour le Mérite. On May 7 Liebermann resigned from the academy. As the painter Oskar Kokoschka wrote from Paris in a published letter to the editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung, none of Liebermann’s colleagues deemed it necessary to express a word of recognition or sympathy. Isolated and ostracised, Liebermann died in 1935; only three “Aryan” artits attended his funeral. His widow survived him. When, in March 1943, the police arrived, with a stretcher, for the bedridden eighty-five-year-old woman to begin her depotation to the East, she committed suicide by swallowing an overdose of the barbiturate Veronal.”

In Nazi Germany & the Jews, the Years of Persecution 1933-39, by Saul Friedländer, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1997)

Self-portrait and portrait of his wife Martha Liebermann

Saul Friedländer, professor of history at the University of California, was awarded the Peace Prize at the annual Frankfurt Book Fair. The German Book Trade association said:
"Saul Friedländer gave a voice to the grievances and cries of those human beings who were turned to dust. He gave them memory and a name. The acknowledgment of human dignity forms the basis for peace among mankind, and Saul Friedlander returned to the murdered millions the dignity of which they had been robbed."
"Friedländer is one of the last historiographers to have witnessed and experienced the Holocaust — a genocide that was announced early on, planned openly and carried out with machinelike precision. Friedlander rejects the distanced approach often associated with the writing of history: He creates a space for incomprehensibility — the only possible reaction to such an unfathomable crime."

Papageienallee (1902)

K. Plevris: "I am a Nazi and a fascist, I am racist, anti-democratic and I am an anti-Semite"

At long last, one anti-Semite was found in Europe and he is going to be taken to court ! Do you really need to declare "I am a Nazi and a fascist, I am racist, anti-democratic and I am an anti-Semite", deny the Holocaust, and ask that Europe be ridden of Jews to be considered an anti-Semite and taken to court ?

This posting in the ECJ speaks volumes:
"In a letter to Greek Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis, EJC President Moshe Kantor commended the Greek authorities for taking to court a notorious Greek author for his 400-page book entitled "The Jews - the Whole Truth."
The text of the lettter :
Dear Mr. Karamanlis,
On September 11th 2007, the anti-Semitic author K. Plevris will stand on trial in the Greek Court for his 1,400-page book entitled "The Jews - the Whole Truth". In his book Mr Plevris declares, "I am a Nazi and a fascist, I am racist, anti-democratic and I am an anti-Semite".
He openly calls the Holocaust into question while justifying Nazism, given that in his opinion, "ridding Europe of the Jews is necessary because Judaism poses a threat to the freedom of Nations" (page 432). To this he adds, "I constantly blame the German Nazis for not ridding our Europe of Jewish Zionism when it was in their power to do so," (page 1,221).
We must commend the law enforcement authorities in Greece, in particular the General Prosecutor, for having taken Mr. Plevris to court.
However, along with the Neo-Nazi rally, which was supposed to take place in Greece exactly two years ago, this has become a worrying chain of events in which anti-Semitism has reared its ugly head too many times in Greece during the last few years.
The Greek people and the Jewish people share the common honour of being the founders of European Civilization. Sixty years after the Holocaust, the resurgence of a threat to the Jewish people is also a threat to European culture as a whole.
We will be following this trial closely. We hope Greece will go along with other European states in the common struggle against racism and anti-Semitism."