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Mar 3, 2011

"Will Foxman Apologize to Charlie Sheen?"

 




WILL FOXMAN APOLOGIZE TO CHARLIE SHEEN?

By Rev. Ted Pike
3 Mar 11

In 1918 Vladimir Lenin recorded and sent throughout Russia a phonograph record threatening death to any Russian who revealed the Jewish name of a Bolshevik leader. [1] A photo of the first People's Commissariat at that time reveals the nearly total dominion of Jews over Bolshevism: All five were Jewish. (See Jewish Activists Created Communism)

On February 24, actor Charlie Sheen committed an offense that would have sentenced him to death in Jewish-controlled Bolshevik Russia. In an internet radio interview he used the Jewish name (Chaim Levine) of Chuck Lorre, producer of his sitcom. Instantly, "Amerika's" thought crime commissar, ADL head Abe Foxman, sprang into action.

By invoking television producer Chuck Lorre's Jewish name in the context of an angry tirade against him, Charlie Sheen left the impression that another reason for his dislike of Mr. Lorre is his Jewishness. This fact has no relevance to Mr. Sheen's complaint or disagreement, and his words are at best bizarre, and at worst, borderline anti-Semitism.

Unlike other public figures attacked with Foxman's highly nuanced objections, Sheen demands an apology. His attorney Marty Singer says that Lorre referred to himself as Chaim on a vanity card in February and that Sheen's statement was not anti-Semitic. Sheen says he was referring to Lorre's real name "because I wanted to address the man, not the bulls**t TV persona." Sheen himself was given another name at birth. "So you're telling me, anytime someone calls me Carlos Estevez, I can claim they are anti-Latino?"

Foxman would be well advised to apologize. In 2001 ADL smeared as anti-Semitic a Colorado filmmaker, William Quigley, whose career depended on good relations with Hollywood. Quigley sued and the court agreed that, since Hollywood was in fact Jewish-dominated, ADL had severely damaged his economic future. ADL was fined $10.5 million, a sum whose interest accrued to nearly $14 million after several years of appeals. (See Jews Confirm Big Media Is Jewish)

On February 25, CBS canceled the final four tapings of Sheen's sitcom. It could be argued that ADL's accusations—not Sheen's attention-getting behavior—is to blame. The smear of "anti-Semitism" could even lead to a boycott by entertainment media for the rest of Sheen's life. The actor may be in an excellent position to sue ADL, perhaps demanding hundreds of millions. If the court agrees that Sheen has been maliciously stereotyped, ADL could suffer financially to a much greater degree than under the Quigley judgment. If Sheen decides to sue ADL, it will be a well-deserved legal whack on the snout. Even if Foxman realizes he has overstepped and apologizes, it will significantly tarnish his authority as speech crimes commissar.

Nuancing Thought Crime

With world criticism raging against Israel's entrenched brutality to the people of Gaza, Foxman and other Jewish leaders are becoming much more extreme and nuanced in their demands that matters Jewish remain a "no free speech zone." They fear that Europe's anti-Israel mood will spread to conservative leaders like Glenn Beck.

Like Foxman, liberal Jewish religious leaders have denounced Beck for what they consider borderline anti-Semitic inferences. Some 600 primarily Reform (secular) rabbis want Beck fired from FOX. His only crime is calling his enemies "Nazis" or describing abortion deaths as a "Holocaust." Liberal Jewish propagandists claim that no genocide in history can compare to the evil that Nazis inflicted on the Jews. Beck's use of "Holocaust" terms thus trivializes the near-deified memory of Jewish dead.

Joseph Stalin authorized the assassination of countless opponents as he climbed the ladder of political power in Russia. The more he purged his enemies, the more sensitive he became to the smallest hint of disloyalty. At the end, a comrade who merely failed to look him straight in the eye was doomed as an enemy of the state. This is the paranoid destiny of America under Foxman, the new high executioner of thought correctness. Many American political and religious leaders are beginning to realize they are in the crosshairs of ADL, vulnerable to the slightest slip of tongue about Judaism or Israel.

What should they do? The opposite of groveling Glenn Beck, who apologized for his true statement that Reform (secular) Jews are primarily political, not spiritual, in emphasis. They should follow the lead of fighters like Helen Thomas and even the train wreck that is Charlie Sheen. His demand for ADL's apology may be fueled by "crack courage," but it is courage nonetheless. It is outrageous that this degenerate addict is virtually the only public figure in modern times to fight back at ADL.


Footnote:

1. Encyclopedia Judaica . "Communism," p. 798.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Rev. Ted Pike is director of the National Prayer Network, a Christian/conservative watchdog organization.

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Deborah Lipstadt: Simon Wiesenthal and the Ethics of History

 

Simon Wiesenthal and the Ethics of History

by DEBORAH E. LIPSTADT

Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends 
by Tom Segev 
Doubleday, 496 pp., $35

If there was anything in particular that prevented Simon Wiesenthal from becoming, after S.Y. Agnon, the second Jew from Buczacz to win a Nobel Prize, it was probably his relationship with Kurt Waldheim. Back in the 1960s, when he was Austria's foreign minister, Waldheim had helped Wiesenthal to defend himself against rumors spread by Communist bloc countries that he had been a Nazi collaborator during World War II. 
Two decades later, after he had served as Secretary-General of the UN and was running for the presidency of Austria, Waldheim's actual Nazi past finally came to light. Grateful for his earlier support, Wiesenthal, who should have known better (and probably did), dismissed the case against Waldheim as mere "gossip" spread by his political adversaries. This landed him in a nasty public battle with the World Jewish Congress, which lobbied to have Waldheim labeled a war criminal, placed on the United States' Watch List, and banned from entering the country. In 1986, at the height of this scandal, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to fellow survivor Elie Wiesel. "It is reasonable to assume," writes Tom Segev in his new biography, "that Wiesenthal didn't get the prize" at the same time "because he was at the center of a raging controversy."

Odessa FileThis was scarcely the only controversy that Wiesenthal sparked. Throughout his career as a Nazi hunter he had both fervent admirers and angry detractors. In the eyes of some, he was the matchless hero who inspired Frederick Forsyth's novelThe Odessa File, a man who had dedicated himself, often at risk to his own personal safety, to tracking down Nazi war criminals, and bringing them to justice. Sitting in a modest office in Vienna, behind heavily fortified steel doors, he managed—without a state's intelligence apparatus or financial resources—to find what he called "the murderers among us." A United States Congressional Resolution lauded him as being "instrumental in the capture and conviction of more than 1,000 Nazi war criminals, including Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Nazi plan to annihilate European Jewry." But Isser Harel, the mastermind who headed Israel's Security Services at the time of Eichmann's capture, insisted that Wiesenthal played no role in the operation. In fact, according to Harel, Wiesenthal almost sabotaged the whole effort when he shared information that had been given to him in strictest confidence. While Harel's account of this episode in The House on Garibaldi Street may be somewhat self-serving, he is by no means the only one to denounce Wiesenthal as a self-promoter and even a fraud. Other critics have accused him of falsely taking credit for finding criminals and repeatedly inventing information unsupported by any data.

This criticism has been echoed by government agencies. In 1986, the Canadian government's Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals submitted a 1,000-page report to the country's Governor General. While acknowledging that there were indeed Nazi war criminals in Canada and urging action against them, the report also castigated Wiesenthal for having "grossly exaggerated" their numbers. The lists he gave the Canadian government were "nearly totally useless" and he refused to turn over to the Commission information they needed for their investigation, which he claimed to have in his files. The Office of Special Investigations (OSI) of the US Department of Justice was also severely critical of him. In 1979, the OSI's director told Wiesenthal in strict confidence that it had traced one of Eichmann's accomplices to California. Wiesenthal proceeded to leak the information to the press in a way that suggested that it was he who had found the man. The OSI eventually severed all contact with him.

Was Simon Wiesenthal an intrepid hunter of mass murderers who was worthy of all the tributes he received from such figures as Jimmy Carter and Elizabeth Taylor (who wrote to him "I love you and we all need you")? Or was he in fact more of a charlatan than a hero? While writing a book on the Eichmann trial, I often had occasion to ask myself these questions. Upon discovering that Wiesenthal's numerous autobiographies and innumerable interviews tell a variety of different and irreconcilable stories, my suspicions of the man grew markedly. I was excited, therefore, when I heard that Tom Segev was writing his biography. Segev has made a career of slaughtering the sacred cows of contemporary Jewish and Israeli history. A newspaper columnist who is also the author of several works of history, he has more than once plunged deep into the archives. If Wiesenthal was in fact a fraud, Segev would be able to prove it—and would do so, no doubt, with relish. A little later, when I learned that Segev had actually come to the conclusion that Wiesenthal's critics were wrong, I was pleasantly surprised, albeit curious.

Wiesenthal and TaylorSegev makes his position clear from the beginning of this substantial and thoroughly researched volume. With uncharacteristic enthusiasm, he describes Wiesenthal as a man of "broad humanity," a "tireless warrior against evil and a central figure in the struggle for human rights." He even goes so far as to agree with an official at the Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles' observation that "if he had not existed, Wiesenthal would have to be invented, because people all over the world, both Jews and gentiles, needed him as an emblem and a source of hope." He not only "sparked" the imaginations of Jews and gentiles, but "enchanted them, thrilled them . . . weighed on their consciences, and"-one is surprised to hear Segev say such a thing about anyone-"granted them a consoling faith in good."

Nevertheless, despite his high regard for Wiesenthal, Segev gives due attention to the other side of the story. Indeed, he confirms many of the charges made by his critics. Consider some of the terms he uses to describe Wiesenthal's modus operandi: He "fabricated" evidence, "snatched" stories out of thin air, "fantasize[d]", was "often inaccurate," "came up with things that never happened," "invented" facts, "claim[ed] credit" for things he never did. Indeed, he sometimes "wove things out of his imagination."

As Segev shows, Wiesenthal's account of his experiences during the years of the Holocaust is clearly fabricated. When he visited Auschwitz in 1994, he told a biographer who accompanied him that he had been brought to Auschwitz on a death train. Miraculously, he had been transferred a few days later. Segev acknowledges that this typified Wiesenthal's "set pattern" of "magnify[ing] his ordeal" while adding "a dash of drama." He did the same thing when he enumerated the camps and prisons in which he had been incarcerated. Immediately after liberation he said he had spent time in four camps. During the 1950s, the number grew to nine and then to eleven. By the early 1980s, it had reached twelve, including Auschwitz. Joseph Wechsberg, who co-authored Wiesenthal's autobiography, wrote in the introduction that he had been in "over a dozen."

The miraculous was also woven into his account of how he had been saved from a certain death in Janowska. On April 20, 1943, Hitler's birthday, he was among a group of prisoners who were taken outside the camp to be shot. Just as his turn came he was pulled out of line and told to return to camp to draw a birthday poster for Hitler. He was the only one in the group to survive. The main elements of this story are indeed true. On that day in 1943 a group of prisoners were taken from Janowska and shot. One was pulled from the line just before he was to be killed and told to return to the camp. But it wasn't Wiesenthal's story. The man to whom this happened was apparently Leon Wells, Wiesenthal's friend.

Wiesenthal's claims about tracking war criminals in the post-war years are likewise riddled with exaggerations, if not outright falsehoods. Let us return to the Eichmann case. In 1953, Wiesenthal learned from an Austrian stamp collector that Eichmann was in Argentina. He passed this information along to the World Jewish Congress, which in turn transmitted it to the CIA, which did nothing. Had someone acted on this information at the time or even remembered it six years later, when Eichmann was found in Argentina by others, Wiesenthal would have deserved some of the credit. But that didn't happen.

In fact, the key information that led to Eichmann's capture came from three unlikely characters: Lothar Hermann, a nearly blind, half-Jewish  German immigrant to Argentina; Hermann's teenage daughter Silvia; and Fritz Bauer, a German Jew who had returned to Germany after the war and became a Federal prosecutor. It is true, as Wiesenthal claims in one of his autobiographies, that in 1959, even as preparations were being made to capture Eichmann, he shared with the Israelis his strong suspicions about Eichmann's whereabouts. But what he told them was that he was virtually certain that Eichmann was hiding in northern Germany, a hemisphere away from his actual location.

Wiesenthal also claimed to have tracked down Dr. Josef Mengele to the Greek island of Kythnos, where he sent a reporter to find him. On Wiesenthal's account, the reporter found only two buildings on the island, an inn and a monastery. The innkeeper told him that on the preceding day a yacht had ferried away "a German and his wife." The reporter showed Mengele's picture to the innkeeper and some monks who confirmed that he had been there. However, when the reporter subsequently read Wiesenthal's account, he said that there was no monastery on the island and, more importantly, no report of a German who had recently visited the island or left the previous day. It was, simply put, "all wrong." Over the years, Wiesenthal repeatedly announced that he knew precisely where Mengele was. Most of these pronouncements, it seems, were mere guesses designed to win media attention.

Wiesnthal Magnifying GlassWiesenthal did indeed help to track down a number of war criminals, far fewer than the 1,000 for which he is often credited, but probably far more than anyone else. More importantly, he shone a public spotlight on the question of Nazi war criminals who had not been brought to justice. He did so despite the opposition of those who wished to push the whole matter under the rug, lest it open old wounds by calling attention to the wrongs committed by people who had been "rehabilitated" and fully integrated into post-war society. Believing that the demand for justice trumped all other considerations, Wiesenthal went wherever the trail led and sometimes, as we now know, where it did not lead. It is thus unfortunate that his fabrications and falsehoods now threaten to overshadow his real accomplishments.

Somewhat surprisingly, Tom Segev, a journalist who is usually zealous in his search for truth and contemptuous of those who distort it, is not unduly bothered by Wiesenthal's mendacity. He makes excuses for him, claiming that Wiesenthal's proclivity for "exaggerat[ing] his suffering" and spinning "fantasies about his survival" was a means of "push[ing] out of his consciousness the real atrocities he had experienced." His untrue statements emanated, Segev suggests, from a "profound sense of guilt" for having survived when his whole family had perished.

Why is Segev so forgiving of Simon Wiesenthal's many lapses? Perhaps we can arrive at an answer by considering Wiesenthal's most egregious distortion of the historical record and Segev's response to it. In the 1970s, Wiesenthal began to refer to "eleven million victims" of the Holocaust, six million Jews and five million non-Jews, but the latter number had no basis in historical reality. On the one hand, the total number of non-Jewish civilians killed by the Germans in the course of World War II is far higher than five million. On the other hand, the number of non-Jewish civilians killed for racial or ideological reasons does not come close to five million (though it no doubt would have exceeded it if the war had ended in a German victory). Nevertheless, Wiesenthal's contrived death toll, with its neat almost-symmetry, has become a widely accepted "fact." Jimmy Carter's Executive Order, which was the basis for the establishment of the US Holocaust Museum, referred to the "eleven million victims of the Holocaust." I have been to many Yom Hashoah observances-including those sponsored by synagogues and Jewish communities-where eleven candles were lit. When I tell the organizers that they are engaged in historical revisionism, their reactions range from skepticism to outrage. Strangers have taken me to task in angry letters for focusing "only" on Jewish deaths and ignoring the five million others. When I explain that this number is simply inaccurate, in fact made up, they become even more convinced of my ethnocentrism and inability to feel the pain of anyone but my own people.

When Israeli historians Yehuda Bauer and Yisrael Gutman challenged Wiesenthal on this point, he admitted that he had invented the figure of eleven million victims in order to stimulate interest in the Holocaust among non-Jews. He chose five million because it was almost, but not quite, as large as six million. When Elie Wiesel asked Wiesenthal who these supposed five million victims were, Wiesenthal exploded and accused him of suffering from "Judeocentrism." In recent months, Wiesenthal's concoction has been further improved upon by a group of rabbis and imams who visited Auschwitz under the aegis of the US State Department. The statement they issued after their visit referred to the "twelve million victims, six million Jews and six million non-Jews." Now we have parity. One wonders what's next.

Segev, for his part, explains away Wiesenthal's invention of the "eleven million" as his means of stressing "the brotherhood of all the victims," something Jews generally fail to do. He lauds Wiesenthal for "judg[ing] people by their deeds and merits rather than by their group affiliation. This was the basis for his humanistic views and his faith in justice. It was the basis for his belief in good and his longing for conciliation."

Segev, who is deeply troubled by what he perceives as Israel's leaders' narrow, particularistic Weltanschauung, apparently sees Wiesenthal's broad universalist revisionism as therapeutic. He doesn't seem to grasp that it can also be quite injurious. Any falsification with respect to the Holocaust, whatever its purpose may be, gives comfort and solace, not to speak of ammunition, to Holocaust deniers. It enables them to turn the tables and to claim that the "defenders of the Holohoax" are the ones guilty of fabricating history.

However, inventions such as the figure of "eleven million" would be unjustifiable even if there were no Holocaust deniers. The best reason to stick to the truth is the one offered by the members of Oyneg Shabbes, the group that dedicated itself to documenting every aspect of life in the Warsaw ghetto. In Who Will Write our History? Samuel Kassow quotes Emanuel Ringelblum, the group's leader:

           We wanted the simplest most unadorned account possible of what happened in each shtetl and what  
           happened to each Jew (and in this war each Jew is like a world in itself). Any superfluous word, any 
           literary exaggeration grated and repelled . . . [I]t is unnecessary to add an extra sentence.

The goal, Ringelblum said, was "a photograph of life. Not literature but science." The situation was bad enough. No exaggeration was necessary.

In 1944, Ringelblum's associate, Rachel Auerbach, said much the same thing in different words: "The mass murder, the murder of millions of Jews by the Germans is a fact that speaks for itself . . . one must approach this subject with the greatest caution, in a restrained and factual manner." But the most succinct statement of this position was penned by an anonymous individual who filled out a survey distributed by Oyneg Shabbes to inhabitants of the ghetto. The respondent scrawled a single word in the margin of the questionnaire, in capital letters: FACTS.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Deborah Lipstadt is Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, and the author of The Eichmann Trial (Nextbook/Schocken), coming this spring.

 


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Thank you and remember: 

Peace is patriotic!

Michael Santomauro
253 W. 72nd Street
New York, NY 10023

Call anytime: 917-974-6367

E-mail me anything:
ReporterNotebook@Gmail.com

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Moused Kidnaps Gazan Engineer in Ukraine, Now Held Incommunicado in Israeli Prison

 


Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place
March 3, 2011 1:21 PM

Mossad Kidnaps Gazan Engineer in Ukraine, Now Held Incommunicado in Israeli Prison

abu seesi

Abu Seesi, kidnapped Gaza engineer, with three of his six children

A Ukrainian news source reported in late February that the Mossad kidnapped the chief engineer of Gaza's only power plant in Ukraine:

The wife of a Palestinian engineer has accused the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad of abducting her husband. Derar Abu Sisi

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My Lai Massacre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre

Peace.
Michael Santomauro
@ 917-974-6367

What sort of TRUTH is it that crushes the freedom to seek the truth?

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Barriers to Historical Accuracy

 

First Published in

INCONVENIENT HISTORY

Barriers to Historical  Accuracy

Richard A. Widmann

 

Harry Elmer Barnes is a controversial figure whose memory is blurred both by his detractors and his supporters. His long and distinguished career crossing many subjects and interests is often left in the shadows of his historical revisionism. Even much of his revisionist work, which began in the years following World War One and continued through the Cold War, are forgotten in light of his work to debunk the myths of World War Two.

 

The emotions stirred by World War Two remain high. To question any aspect of this conflict still meets solid resistance and ad hominem attacks. Barnes once wrote that in the minds of anti-revisionists the term "revisionism" savors of malice and vindictiveness. Barnes's few brief statements regarding the Holocaust, his positive book review of Paul Rassinier's trail-blazing work, The Drama of the European Jews, and his involvement in the publication of a few  

early Holocaust revisionist titles have resulted in wild attacks on his character from the anti-revisionist crowd.

 

In Deborah Lipstadt's highly acclaimed screed, Denying the Holocaust, she charges that Barnes was anti-Semitic. 1 She also charges Barnes with twisting "information and misrepresent[ing] established historical fact." 2 She claims that Barnes sought to exculpate Nazi Germany and even questions his standing as a historian. 3 The widely read (and highly inaccurate) on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia goes even further. The anti-revisionists who edit Wikipedia call Barnes a "Holocaust Denier" and a "Nazi Sympathizer."4 

 

Barnes's memory has also suffered from some of his supporters. The magazine that is emblazoned with his name changed its byline several years back to "A Journal of Nationalist Thought & History." 5 The association suggests that Barnes would not only embrace nationalist thought but somehow was a major proponent of such a movement. The truth is quite the opposite.

Barnes addressed the subject of the relationship between nationalism and historical writing in his History and Social Intelligence (1926). After running through a brief history of the importance of nationalism on world history, Barnes addressed the impact of nationalism on the writing of history. Barnes considered the nationalist movements in several nations including Germany, France, England, and the United States. Barnes was very negative about the impact of such writing including the work of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and those he called "the blatant Teutonists."



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Michael Santomauro 
@ 917-974-6367 

What sort of TRUTH is it that crushes the freedom to seek the truth?

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Are Jewish Intellectuals Beggars?

 

Are Jewish Intellectuals Beggars?
From Michael Santomauro


Spring 2001

Dear Friend,

A couple of years back I was visiting my old office location, near the Garment district, in New York City. It was late night and I was hungry for a prune Danish. It was around midnight on a cold Saturday night. The only store I found was a large kosher bakery, packed with young ultra-orthodox Jewish customers entering and leaving on a constant basis.

In front of the store was a Hasidic man with a cup. From a distance I was not sure what he was doing. He was getting more dollar bills than coins. I thought maybe he was raising money for a fundraising drive.

As I got closer, the more I saw of this man the more I doubted he was raising money for a cause. The Hasidic was disheveled and the garb he was wearing was filthy. Where I live is the most concentrated block in Manhattan of kosher eateries. It may come as surprise to many outside of New York City, to see a man with a yarmulke in front of a kosher restaurant begging for money. It happens. In my old Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx in the 1970s it was a common sight to see old Jewish people dig through store garbage for food. Even today, in Brooklyn, there are many former Soviet Jews on welfare. Across the street from where I live is a religious Yemenite Jew who begs on the weeknights. Those who attend the same shul as him, know him on a first name basis. One, in particular, I have spoken with, prides in living under the tunnel in a nearby park. His name is Buttons. His clothing is always covered with buttons. All his buttons are political slogans and pictures with a socialist theme. Once I saw him at a food fair, that was being sponsored by the Italian Chamber of Commerce, where free food samples were being offered. He recognized me from the neighborhood and greeted me. I asked him if he liked the food. He would tell me he couldn't eat it, because it wasn't kosher. Go figure. A homeless man searching for free kosher food.

Sorry for the digression. This was the first time I ever saw an Hasidic begging. I couldn't help but stare at him, while I was hailing for an available cab. He was near the curb and I spoke to him. I asked him a stupid question, "are you begging?" He shook his head yes. There was silence on his activity after I asked the question. As the yellow cab stopped to the side of me to enter, he rushed up to me yelling "no!" to say: "a Gentile begs; a Jew asks."

It was mind-boggling. I couldn't get it out of my head the entire cab ride home. 

Two years later, I'm listening to Norman Finkelstein at the Brecht Forum I attended this past February (2001). In his talk he said: "American-Jewish intellectuals are diseased." I thought he was being harsh. In reflecting on those remarks, I'm now wondering about the Jewish beggar who says: "A Gentile begs; a Jew asks."

Is it an "ask" or a "beg"? We say a writer is being intellectually dishonest or intellectual honest, when we are referring to his work.

The honest intellectual doesn't "ask" for you to believe him. When you need to have an understanding, the honest intellectual welcomes the question. He will explain his thinking with a response that is artful, logical and cogent. He doesn't "beg" for a cover.

The dishonest intellectual "asks" to believe him. The dishonest intellectual wants to manipulate you. He will often have an artless response. When a dishonest intellectual is caught exaggerating or lying in his "asking" he "begs" for a cover.

Elie Wiesel is caught "asking" the reader to believe in his lying. He "begs" for a cover. By name calling those who question the integrity of his written work. He often says "they are anti-Semitic."

Even when the writer is faking it as a Jew. As in the famous case of Binjamin Wilkomirski. He accused his critics (truth-seekers) of the most "begged" cover in the history of our times -- anti-Semitism. When this Swiss writer (his wife is Jewish) was caught lying about his book Fragments the following was the reaction of Jewish intellectuals, as summarized by Mark Weber in the Journal of Historical Review:


Reaction by Jewish Holocaust scholars to the new revelations has been instructive, because they seem more concerned about propagandistic impact than about historical truth. Their primary regret seems merely to be that the fraud has been detected, not that it was perpetrated.

In an essay published in a major Canadian newspaper (Ottawa Citizen, Nov. 18, 1998), Jewish writer Judith Shulevitz arrogantly argued that it doesn't really matter much if Fragments is authentic. Her main misgiving, apparently, is that the deceit was not more adroit: "I can't help wishing Wilkomirksi-Doesseker [sic] had been more subtle in his efforts at deception, and produced the magnificent fraud world literature deserves."

Deborah Dwork, director of the Center for Holocaust Studies at Clark University (Worcester, Mass.), and co-author of Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (Yale Univ. Press, 1996), agrees that Fragments now appears to be fraudulent. At the same time, though, she expressed sympathy for Wilkomirski, saying that when she met him he appeared "to be a deeply scarred man." Amazingly, Dwork does not blame him for the imposture, "because she believes in his identity." Instead, she takes the publishers to task for having "exploited" Wilkomirski. (New York Times, Nov. 3, 1998).

Deborah Lipstadt, author of the anti-revisionist polemic Denying the Holocaust, has assigned Fragments in her Emory University class on Holocaust memoirs. When confronted with evidence that it is a fraud, she commented that the new revelations "might complicate matters somewhat, but [the work] is still powerful." Daniel Ganzfried reports that Jews have complained to him that even if Fragments is a fraud, his exposé is dangerously aiding "those who deny the Holocaust."

American Jewish writer Howard Weiss makes a similar point in an essay published in the Chicago Jewish Star (Oct. 9-29, 1998): "Presenting a fictional account of the Holocaust as factual only provides ammunition to those who already deny that the horrors of Nazism and the death camps ever even happened. If one account is untrue, the deniers' reasoning goes, how can we be sure any survivors accounts are true ... Perhaps no one was ready to question the authenticity of the [Wilkomirski] account because just about anything concerning the Holocaust becomes sacrosanct. Wilkomirski himself has responded to the new revelations by going into hiding, although he did issue a defiant statement describing the climate of discussion about his memoir as a "poisonous" atmosphere of "totalitarian judgment and criticism."
[http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v17/v17n5p15_Weber.html]


And so...

For most of the above intellectuals, any constructive criticism (of a Jewish agendum) you make will be construed or twisted as "anti-Semitic." And if you are Jewish as "self-hating."

You have a noted Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein (always accused of being a self-hating Jew) saying "American-Jewish intellectuals are diseased." I've encountered an Hasidic beggar, who thinks only Gentiles are beggars.

Now, I think to myself, what's the difference between a diseased Jewish intellectual who is always trying to explain to me, that his critics are anti-Semitic, or self-hating Jews; if the diseased Jewish beggar is trying to explain to me only Gentiles beg. If you tell the beggar he is lying, why can't he defend himself the same way as the diseased intellectual. Should he meet a non-diseased Jewish beggar, who disagrees with him, his cover will be, that the other beggar is a self-hating Jew. In this diseased beggar's mind, if a you are a Gentile that disagrees, his cover will be, that you are anti-Semitic. One begs for your money, the other begs for your brain. 

For both it's "asking" and "begging" with a cover.


Peace.

Michael Santomauro
Editorial Director

http://www.tadp.org





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Tikun Olam : Top Israeli Academics Censure Bar Ilan for Firing Professor Over Political Beliefs

 

Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

March 3, 2011 12:16 AM

70 senior Israeli academic signed a letter to the Council for Higher Education denouncing Bar Ilan University for using political considerations in its hiring and firing decisions.  Dr. Ariella Azoulay, an international authority on photography and visual culture, was denied tenure after teaching there since 1999.  Her appeal too was denied, which motivated the professors




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