Darfur: Will the peacekeepers find them before the Janjaweed do?

Luxembourg boys school: physics or incitement to hatred?

Pupils at the Lycée de Garçons in Luxembourg were given a physics problem to solve (after protests, it was removed from the school website and young stone-thrower Mohamed was replaced by a golf player ...).

"Mohamed lives in Gaza. He is a Palestinian child and is throwing stones at the occupying Israelis. He wants to hit a soldier who is sitting on the top of a tank 60 metres away. ...
3. The child throws the stone at a speed of 20 metres/second. How long does it take for the soldier - from the moment he realises the stone has been thrown - to dodge ?
4. A second soldier, crouching on the ground, reacts by shooting once at the child with his rifle. The bullet leaves the rifle at a horizontal speed of 500 metres/second. How long does it take for the bullet to hit Mahomed?"
H/T: UPJF

Kosta Plevris: Hitler could have rid Europe of the Jews but did not

The trial of Kostas Plevris, a Greek lawyer, neo-Nazi militant and author of Jews: The Whole Truth, and of the far-right newspaper Eleftheros Cosmos, on charges of breaking the anti-racism law, has opened in Athens on 3 December. Mr. Plevris stands accused of publishing anti-Semitic material and of "inciting actions that could provoke discrimination, hatred and violence against persons and groups of persons, solely because of their racial and ethnic origins". Here are some quotes from his book:

Adolf Hitler: The tragic leader of the German Third Reich is certainly the most impressive leadership figure of the modern age… Human history will blame Adolf Hitler for the following: 1. He could have rid Europe of the Jews, but did not; 2. He did not use the special chemical weapons, which only Germany possessed, to gain a victory... Because of the defeat of Germany then, the White Race and Europe are at risk now… The day will come when Europeans will either dominate or be destroyed. Either way they will acknowledge that Hitler was right... (p. 881)
Heinrich Himmler: Chief in Command of the SS… facts and arguments verify the high moral standing of the Man who, despite the fact that in one day he could have issued the order for all Jews to be put to death, chose to expel them from Europe so as to rid the continent of the White Race of the non-European Semites …. The SS, in particular the combatant SS (Waffen SS,) were the knights in armor of the modern age, indomitable fighting men from every country in Europe, who sacrificed their lives for the ideal of a New Order for civilized peoples. Unfortunately for the human race, they were defeated… They were all fine examples of faith, discipline and fighting skill, serving the ideals of National Socialism. Their bearing reflected the greatness of their character so only the very best of the Aryan Race were included in the ranks of the SS…. (p. 869)
Joseph Goebbels: One of the brightest minds of the century. A philosopher and fighter with a deep understanding of mass psychology, on every battlefield he vanquished Jewish Bolshevism and headed his country's all out war. (p. 885)
Hitler was blamed for something that did not actually take place. Later the history of humanity will blame him for not ridding Europe of the Jews, though he could have … My dear Jews, I do not ask you to suffer all the things that your holy books tell you that we should suffer from you… You are criminals because that is what your religion has taught you to be. You are murderers because crime is instilled in you from an early age. Therefore we others have the right to deal with you. And that is what we will do. (p. 852)
ZYKLON B, so extensively publicized as the gas used to put Jews to death in the special gas chambers (which have not been found) was merely a poisonous gas used to fumigate the concentration camps…everything else [said about it] is fiction produced for the purposes ofpropaganda. (p. 1008)
The SS divisions fought with unparalleled heroism. (p. 853)
In 1945 the White Race suffered the greatest catastrophe in its history. Hitlerian Germany's epic struggle for dominance by Aryans ended without a victory. (p. 869)

"From Superman to the Rabbi's Cat", an exhibition at the Museum of Jewish Art and History, Paris

Article by Jeffrey T. Iverson in TIME Magazine
"In Search of Superman's Inner Jew
The debate has raged for decades: is he Jewish, Methodist, Kryptonian Raoist? But finally, it's been settled: Superman is definitely... a non-Aryan Protestant. The complex origins of many a comic book character are deconstructed at the engaging and erudite exhibit, "From Superman to the Rabbi's Cat" - through Jan. 27 at the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris - which explores the impact of the Jewish experience on the evolution of the comic strip and graphic novel. …
And it is in that committed comic-book aficionado spirit that "From Superman to the Rabbi's Cat" presents some 230 American and European works dating back to 1890, including the 1940 strip How Superman Would End the War. "I'd like to land a strictly non-Aryan sock on your jaw," grumbles the Man of Steel as he drags Adolf Hitler off to be tried for crimes against humanity. For the late comic-book artist Will Eisner, the Jewish people, faced with the rise of fascism, "needed a hero who could protect us against an almost invincible force." Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's Superman in 1938 was only the first and - like Bob Kane's Batman in 1939, Jack Kirby's Captain America in 1940 and many more that followed - he was created by sons of Jewish immigrants living in New York.
Like their characters, many of these artists took on dual identities, says author and comic book historian Didier Pasamonik, a consultant on the exhibit: "There was a kind of diffused anti-Semitism at the time, and it was better to use a good American commercial name to reach the wider public." Even as Robert Kahn had become Bob Kane and Jacob Kurtzberg worked as Jack Kirby, their superheroes reflected some of the identity they were masking, evoking Jewish concepts such as tikkun olam (repairing the world through social action) and legends such as the Golem of Prague, the medieval superhero of Jewish folklore who was conjured from clay by a rabbi to defend his community when it was under threat.
Years later, some comic superheroes would actually be identified as Jews, like Auschwitz survivor Magneto and - the Golem myth incarnate - Ben Grimm (The Thing) of the Fantastic Four. But despite the rumors, the Man of Steel is no Supermensch, says Pasamonik. "Superman is not Jewish," he says. "When Superman gets married it's not at the synagogue!" Pasamonik has not missed the heavy dose of Jewish culture Siegel and Shuster instilled in their character: baby Superman's passage through space in a cradle-like vessel and subsequent adoption "is the story of Moses," he says, adding that El of Superman's given name Kal-El is a Hebrew word for God. But with a Methodist upbringing and extra-terrestrial origins, Superman, says Pasamonik, is best described simply as a "non-Aryan" hero.
And why not? Non-Aryan describes most of the southern and eastern European and Asian immigrants that crossed the oceans with the Siegels, Shusters, Kahns and Kurtzbergs in the late 19th and early 20th century. For the Pulitzer-prize- winning cartoonist Jules Feiffer, World War II-era superheroes embodied the American dream shared by the countless foreigners. "It wasn't Krypton that Superman came from; it was the planet Minsk or Lodz or Vilna or Warsaw," wrote Feiffer in his essay The Minsk Theory of Krypton. "Superman was the ultimate assimilationist fantasy."
After World War II, the comic book genre became an unlikely vehicle for civic protest and consolidation of memory. "The hour of immigrant assimilation gave way to the fight for minorities and civil rights," explains Pasamonik. Harvey Kurtzman used the medium to tackle racial segregation, the Cold War and McCarthyism in his satirical MAD magazine. In 1955, when popular awareness of the Holocaust was scant, Bernard Krigstein and Al Feldstein caused a shock by revisiting the concentration camps with the seminal graphic story Master Race. During the '60s and '70s the genre opened up to the banal and biographical, with Pekar and Crumb's darkly humorous American Splendor and Eisner's landmark graphic novel, A Contract with God.
"Eisner brought an absolutely revolutionary dimension to the graphic novel, which was to make it an instrument of memory," says Pasamonik. Finally, with a nod toward Edmond-François Calvo's 1944 La Bête est Morte (The Beast is Dead) - which uses animals to tell the story of World War II - Art Spiegelman brought the graphic novel worldwide recognition by winning a Pulitzer prize in 1992 for his Holocaust saga, Maus. Eisner and Spiegelman's heirs now litter the globe, from Frenchman Joann Sfar (The Rabbi's Cat) to Iranian Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis). "From Superman to the Rabbi's Cat" pays homage to these artists, inviting the viewer to consider the subtexts at work even in comic books about men in tights."

We who live beneath a sky still streaked with the smoke of crematoriums..., François Mauriac

"We who live beneath a sky still streaked with the smoke of crematoriums have paid a high price to find out that evil is really evil."




François Mauriac (1885-1970), French novelist, essayist, literary critic and journalist

Israel and American politics: moving beyond Professors Mearsheimer and Walt and President Jimmy Carter

From the Scholars for Peace in the Middle East website:
"Mark Lichbach, Professor, Comparative Politics Chair of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland and Alan Zuckerman, Professor of Political Science at Brown University will convene a formal conference this summer of invited distinguished scholars to formally academically critique the work of Walt and Mearsheimer, Jimmy Carter and others which have gained so much attention recently.
In spring 2005, two well known political scientists, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, of the University of Chicago and Harvard University respectively, wrote a much discussed essay about the "Israel Lobby" and American foreign policy. Suddenly, the rumors of the power of American Jews were brought from the fringes of American politics into the faculty club, or rather the pages of The London Review of Books. In September 2007 Professors Mearsheimer and Walt published their book, The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, to a continuing storm of controversy. In winter 2006, former President Jimmy Carter wrote a book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. In defending his book in major news outlets, Carter repeatedly fell back on canards about the power of the Jews to influence political dialogue and public policies in America. The storm over President Carter’s book also continues.
This conference and an edited volume is thus a response to an American embarrassment. Historians and political scientists have known for decades that the far right and the far left thrive on crackpot conspiracy theories of American society and politics. Among the most enduring of these fantasies is that American Jews, whose six million members comprise two percent of the American population, exert disproportionate control over the nation’s foreign and domestic policies. Before the Second World War and the Holocaust, such ideas were respectable enough to be found in country clubs and corporate offices. But it has been many decades since professors at distinguished universities and former Presidents of the United States have lent credence to ideas that had been the stock in trade of modern anti-Semitism. At their core lay the notion that the Jews, few in number yet possessed of much intelligence and no morality, ran affairs of state behind the scenes to the detriment of the vast non-Jewish majority. Whether the "Israeli Lobby" is responsible for the current war in Iraq and a future war with Iran is now debated on PBS, with the national director of the Anti-Defamation League serving as a witness for the defense. ...
We would ask them to address questions such as the following:
1. When and why did the United States conclude that the survival of the state of Israel is in the vital national interest of the United States? In view of the hostility of the Arab and Islamic world to the Jewish state, and in view of the presence of vast amounts of oil in the Arab states, how, when and why did American foreign policy make the defense of Israel a priority? When, how and why did some American diplomats and military leaders change their views on this issue?
2. Why did the United States go to war in Iraq and what, if anything, did that have to do with American support for Israel? Who were the key decision makers and what did the decision process look like? What role did "Jewish neo-conservatives" play in these decisions? As the war did not proceed as key decision makers hoped and expected it would, when and in what form did the focus on "Jewish neo-conservatives" and the "Israel Lobby" emerge?
4. What role does public opinion, the mass media, and elections play in deciding American foreign policy toward the Middle East? And who or what moves opinions, media, and elections? 5. How does the Congress and the executive branch, particularly the State Department and the Department of Defense, influence U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East? And who or what influences these decision-makers? How important is the "Israel lobby" compared to these other influences?
6. What is the connection between the lobbying efforts of American Jewish organizations, most famously but not only the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or AIPAC, and the formation of American foreign policy? What arguments have supporters of Israel made to politicians and why have these arguments struck a responsive chord? How do the lobbying efforts of supporters of Israel compare to efforts of other ethnic or religious groups or interest groups (African Americans, Irish, or, for that matter, non-ethnic lobbies such as big oil, the auto industry, high-tech) in general?
7. With respect to the Middle East, has the financial and corporate worlds - including Big Oil - taken sides? And which side on which issues have they taken?
8. What have Israel’s foreign policy priorities been in recent years and what do they have, if anything, to do with the war in Iraq? What were Israeli leaders saying about Iraq and Iran before and after 9/11?
9. What is the connection between American support for Israel and the rise of the terrorism of Islamic radicalism-Bin Laden’s declaration of war of 1998; bombings in Africa; 9/11; and general spread of anti-Americanism in the Middle East and Europe? What is the connection between anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism? Why did anger at Israel grow as international terrorism became more destructive, frequent and vile?
10. Regardless of the authors’ intent, does the Mearsheimer/Walt and Carter statements stand in a longer tradition of anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic analysis? If yes, why and if not, why not?"

Algerian Minister attributes Sarkozy's rise to power to the "Jewish lobby"

Le Figaro reported that, ahead of French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s visit to Algeria next week, Mohamed Cherif Abbès, War Veterans Minister, had attributed Mr. Sarkozy’s rise to power to the "Jewish lobby". As evidence of this, Mr Abbès referred to the appointment of Bernard Kouchner as Foreign Minister and underlined his Jewish "origins": "Why did Bernard Kouchner, a man of the Left, decide to change sides and join the government ? His move was not guided by personal convictions. It was the result of a movement that reflects the aims of the real architects of Sarkozy’s rise to power, the Jewish lobby that has a monopoly on French industry." Mr. Abbas also hinted at President Sarkozy's "origins" - an explicit reference to his maternal grandfather who was Jewish: "You are aware of the roots of the French president and of those who brought him to power". He further added that, during the French electoral campaign, the Israeli authorities had issued a stamp bearing Sarkozy’s portrait. There is nothing new about this. Last year, when a member of the Socialist party visited Algiers, the issue of the party’s infiltration (noyautage) by Jews was raised privately …