More on Sebastian Gorka

LATE ADDITION AT BOTTOM

Since I wrote on this topic last, right wing bloggers and journalists have circled the wagons around Sebastian Gorka, Trump's deputy adviser for national security and purported anti-terrorism expert. Responding to reporting by the Forward, on the Lobelog blog, and in the Hungarian press, Richard Miniter – among other writers – responded on the Forbes Web site.

Miniter's defense of Gorka is remarkable for its sheer length and comprehensiveness. Going point by point, Miniter begins with the assertion that charges of anti-Semitism on Gorka's part, on the basis of his having cofounded a political party with former members of the Jobbik far-right party, are a matter of guilt by association. He elaborates:

Gorka founded a party that included some people who came from another party and that other party had some figures who… Really? This is the argument here? Gorka wrote for a newspaper that also published content that critics called “anti-Semitic” and hung around opposition figures that included people that critics say are “anti-Semitic,” therefore…. Even if the critics were right about the alleged “anti-Semitism” of the other journalists and the other politicians (and there are good reasons to believe that their characterizations are highly questionable), it reveals nothing about Gorka or his beliefs. Sharing a room with Helen Keller does not make one blind; sharing a subway car with Albert Einstein does not make one a genius.

Miniter has something of a point – the mere fact of a relationship between Gorka and some loathsome characters on Hungary's far right cannot be used alone to establish the political leanings of Gorka himself.

However, the analogy that ends the quote above is inapt. No, sharing a room with Helen Keller does not make one blind; however, sharing a political party with her might result in the reasonable assumption that the person sharing that party is a socialist, as Keller herself was. Moreover, it's certainly true that sharing a subway car with Albert Einstein does not make one a genius; however, publishing scholarly articles in the same journals with Einstein might reasonably result in the assumption that the person in question is a theoretical physicist.

Taking Miniter's argument about Gorka's political assumptions one by one, we can begin with the assertion that "Gorka wrote for a newspaper that also published content that critics called 'anti-Semitic' and hung around opposition figures that included people that critics say are 'anti-Semitic.'" What's irksome about this passage is not only the sneer quotes around "anti-Semitic" but also what even a cursory examination of the people in question reveals about their political points of view.

Among the photos making the rounds is one of Gorka standing to Támás Molnár (above), one of the former Jobbik members referred to above. As the screenshot shown below reveals, the two men are Facebook friends. To be fair, Gorka has more than 2,000 "friends" on Facebook, but there are several other Jobbik members and political allies not on Gorka's friends list. We might assume (and I do believe that the evidence suggests that Gorka should address this issue directly) that the two men are friends.

So what does Molnár believe? Apparently at least some of what informs Molnár's ideology is a belief in "double genocide" -- a popular right-wing theory in countries subjected to occupation by both the Nazis and the Soviets. Where the theory has seen expression most publicly since 1991 has been in the Baltic states, including Latvia, where members of the Latvian Legion of the Waffen-SS have marched in parades with the status of heroes for having fought the Soviets.

Double genocide proponents in Hungary focus on Soviet repression, which began with the Soviet invasion in 1945 and extended through the late 1990s, with the peak occurring in 1956. These proponents suggest not only that the Soviet repression was as costly as Nazi occupation in terms of human lives (it was not: thousands were killed in 1956 vs. hundreds of thousands in 1944), but often, that the perpetrators of Soviet repression were Jewish.

This uncanny focus on the Jewish ancestry of some Hungarian communists is something we've seen before -- see Sergey Romanov's insightful comment on our blog. Molnár is apparently a firm believer, having co-signed an open letter on a Web site indicating refusal of the party (of which Gorka was cofounder) to sign a proclamation denouncing racism and anti-Semitism.

(I am in the process of seeking translation from Hungarian for this material and will post it when I do.)

Incidentally, this Web site features several bloggers from the party, one of whom is Gorka himself.

Lest we think that Molnár's views have moderated since he collaborated with Facebook friend Gorka in the mid-2000s, we need only consider the story of Eszter Solymosi, a Hungarian girl at the center of a blood libel in Hungary in the late 19th century. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the case has been revived since 1989 by Jobbik. Daniel Véri writes:

Besides the revival of Eszter Solymosi’s imaginary portrait, which will be examined in the next part of the study, two further works were created, showing the girl as a Christian martyr. Both were published on kuruc.info, the major news portal of the Hungarian extreme right. The first was created in 2008 by an unknown artist, the second – inspired by the previous one – in 2009 by painter Tamás Molnár.

The name Támás Molnár, it turns out, is not terribly rare in Hungary. It was the name of a conservative Catholic philosopher and U.S. resident, who died some time ago. It's also the name of a Hungarian Olympic water polo player. And, finally, it's the name of two artists -- one of whom was also a member of Jobbik.

Should Mr. Miniter be reading this, we can disagree over whether a double genocide theory is anti-Semitic. On blood libel, I don't think the jury is still out. Gorka has to answer for his friend.

====

Added at 5:30 p.m. EDT

The Forward has just published video of Gorka defending Jobbik's Garda paramilitary. An interview with Gorka from 2007 has him appearing to do the same.

Key Concepts in Nazi Antisemitism: 5. Paranoid Nihilism

In this final blog of the series, I address the nihilistic nature of Nazism: the fact that it was a state whose central aim was to destroy other systems, cultures and physical beings. Such nihilism was not unique to the Nazis - it can also be found in Communism, Italian fascism, and some episodes in the history of European and American imperialism - but it was applied more systematically by the Nazis, and was framed in racial terms that made it more genocidal in its effects, deliberately targeting millions of women and children as well as adult males, for no other purpose than to destroy their group. Moreover, I argue below that Nazi nihilism was more paranoid than the other destructive systems, and this explains why it was more willing to undertake a high risk, pre-emptive total 'war of annihilation' rather than the limited wars that are associated with the other regimes.

Read more!

The origins of nihilism have been studied by such seminal figures as Franz Borkenau, George Orwell, Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin. Borkenau observed that Bolshevik and Nazi oligarchies were akin to a "religious order of professional revolutionaries" (cited in Erika Gottlieb, "The Orwell Conundrum", 1992, p.108) Their Messianic faith in the perfection of their political philosophy removed all moral constraints from using state power to kill those who did not share it. Orwell argued that totalitarianism stemmed from the failure of modern societies to replace religious morality with a socialist-humanist one. Instead, Orwell argued, these societies (in which he included Britain and the US) were obsessed with "orthodoxies" which made them indifferent to mass murder. Obedience to systems became an excuse to cast aside one's conscience and humanity in pursuit of conformity to a political utopia.

Orwell's view was similar to Hannah Arendt's argument, in the "Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951), that recourse to the "laws of nature" (Nazism) or "laws of history" (Marxism) gave a charismatic leader unlimited arbitrary destructive power, because he could claim that any act of violence was historically necessary. Liberal or religious qualms about mass killing could thus be dismissed as irrational or sentimental. Eric Voegelin echoed this view in his concept of 'radical alienation', or 'deculturation', defined as "a sort of apocalyptic construction by which all past history is thrown out as more or less irrelevant..." Voegelin went a step further, however, by arguing that totalitarianism is a form of gnosticism that seeks to "immanentize the eschaton"; i.e. to create utopia, redemption and salvation in this life rather than the afterlife. This utopianism, especially when placed in a Manichean political context in which two potential utopias are fighting against each other, creates the potential for unlimited slaughter and genocide because any group that is viewed as a barrier to utopia (Jews, 'the bourgeoisie', 'infidels', Communists) is now, not only 'polluting the body politic', but preventing that body from fulfilling its destiny.

These political theorists can therefore point to common causative features of genocidal potentials in Hitlerism, Maoism and Stalinism; but what about the features that made Nazism more systematic and universal in its genocidal killing than the others?

I would argue that two points stand out. Firstly, under Communism, ultra-conservative western imperialism, ultra-Zionism or radical Islam, the blockage to utopia is a rival ideology or system. It is not placed in a biological system in which the body of every political opponent must be exterminated, including the possibility of future generations. Thus it was only the Nazis whose ideology led them to insist that:

The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as a the seed of a new Jewish revival (see the experience of history.)

Secondly, Nazism took more risks with its own survival in order to carry out an all-or-nothing war of extermination. This was racist paranoia gone berserk. There was no need to take on Stalin (who had purged his officer corps) in 1941. Stalin and Mao did not take reckless risks in order to export their revolutions. They believed that the global historical laws of Marxist-Leninism would work themselves out over generations. Hitler, by contrast, believed that he had to be pre-emptive and risk the entire German state and economy in an all-out gamble for supremacy.

This, in turn, can be explained by the Nazi obsession with biology and Pollution. The Nazis could not live with a Cold War in which Superpowers faced off for decades. Their eschatology was more urgent and required a more immediate return. Nazism could not defer political and religious gratification. Hitler's greater intensity of genocidal impulse, generated by a more intense eschatology and racism than was felt by Stalin and Mao, created a short-termism and addiction to reckless gambling that they never shared. This is why they lived a natural lifespan and he did not.

The Thin Edge of the Wedge Gets a Big Thicker

The deniers have been concentrating their efforts primarily on the Middle East for some time, seeing a general opportunity to exploit anti-Zionist sentiment in the region. While it's true that they have gained significant ground in the region and that anti-Semitism has grown by leaps and bounds, every now and then a prominent Arab from the region comes along and shoots the deniers down.

The latest to do so is Israel Knesset member Dr. Ahmad Tibi of the United Arab List party. Tibi published an article Wednesday on Al-Arabiya's Web site in which he denounced Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial and the denial by other Arabs and Muslims.

Dr. Tibi wrote, "The Holocaust was the expression of one of the most despicable crimes against humanity carried out by the Nazi enemy during one of the human history's most shameful eras." He added, "We mustn't deny the fact that the Jews were victims of the Nazis. Denial is an immoral act. We need to understand the other and its distress, and recognize its sacrifice."

Dr. Tibi now joins several prominent Palestinian spokespersons who have unequivocally rejected Holocaust denial, including Ali Abuminah, Hussein Ibish, and Mahmoud Darwish. And what interest would the rest of the Arab world have in denying the Holocaust if the Palestinians themselves refused to?

Zichronem livracha

Today is Yom ha-Shoah (literally "Day of the Holocaust" in Hebrew), an observance of the Holocaust instituted by the State of Israel in 1959. It has become for many countries an official or unofficial observance of Holocaust remembrance. However, other countries observe Holocaust remembrance on other days. The U.K. commemorates the Holocaust on January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Germany, over the sixty years since the Holocaust ended, has commemorated it either on January 27 or on November 9, the anniversary of Kristallnacht.

I have very mixed feelings about Yom ha-Shoah, though I think it’s obvious I find value in Holocaust remembrance, or I wouldn’t be involved with this blog, with the Holocaust History Project, or with RODOH, all of which I view as important ways of keeping memory alive. However, as I have written earlier, I am among the minority of Jewish Holocaust scholars who are not Zionists, and, as such, I shy away from Israeli-ordained commemorations. Two chief considerations cause me to reject Yom ha-Shoah as a date of commemoration of the millions of victims of the Nazis.

First, it is not a rejection of Israel’s legitimacy that moves me to instead observe Holocaust remembrance on 10 Tevet, a minor fast day and the day set aside on the Jewish calendar for those people whose yahrzeit (death anniversary) is not known. It is what I would consider the highly politicized use of the Holocaust by the Zionist movement from the discovery of the Holocaust to the present day. For instance, one might consider why, given the Holocaust’s obvious role in the immediate superpower recognition of the State of Israel, why it took until 1959 to set a day aside on the Jewish calendar to commemorate the day.

The answers are several, but principal among them were the political considerations of David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, who was dealing with a handful of scandals in the same period of time, among them the Lavon Affair becoming public knowledge and a highly controversial arms deal with West Germany (Ben-Gurion agreed to sell weapons to Konrad Adenauer, a move many Israelis saw as treasonous). To raise his political capital, Ben-Gurion signed into law the creation of Yom ha-Shoah. At the same time, he prepared to bring Adolf Eichmann to Jerusalem to try him for crimes against the Jewish people.

In the end, Ben-Gurion ended up retiring before Israel’s next turning point in its relationship with the Holocaust, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Genuinely faced with destruction for the first time since its independence, Israel found itself face to face with a possible second Holocaust. The effect on the state has been profound. Not only did history repeat itself with the 1973 war, but the aftermath of that war catapulted into power the only leader of Israel who lost his family in the Holocaust –- Menachem Begin.

Begin made immense use of the Holocaust in his leadership over Israel, comparing Yasir Arafat to Hitler, comparing every enemy of Israel’s to Nazi Germany, and evoking the memory of 1.5 million murdered Jewish children in justifying his military actions against Lebanon and the Palestinians. The height of immorality is for the Jewish State to use the Holocaust as a bludgeon to beat down the Palestinian people, but far too often this has been the case in Israel over the last thirty years. The New Historians in Israel, most notably Tom Segev in his landmark study The Seventh Million, have made this a focus of their research.

The second consideration upon which my rejection of Yom ha-Shoah is based is the question of whether it is appropriate that Holocaust remembrance take place in every nation of the world. Certainly it is appropriate in Israel, and I do not begrudge the state its right to set aside a day for remembrance. But is it necessary, for instance, for the U.K. to have an official day of remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust? After all, the U.K. did not carry out the Holocaust. Neither did the United States, but there are more Holocaust museums in this country than there are in Israel. Granted, there are also more Jews here than in Israel, but the largest museum is in the nation’s capital where the Jewish community is rather small. New York’s museum in Battery Park seems appropriate (over 10 percent of New York’s population is Jewish), but an American landscape dotted with Holocaust museums seems a bit much to me.

What would be appropriate, then? Well, it seems that Germany, being the successor to the perpetrator state during the Holocaust has done a fine job of creating memorials where concentration camps once stood, as have the Poles, who live where most of the mass killing was carried out. Russia lost an immense number of people in World War II, both in the Holocaust and in other circumstances, and Holocaust remembrance there seems logical and right.

But what of the U.S., U.K., and other European nations who were more victimized than victimizers during the Third Reich? I would much rather see a museum in Washington, D.C., dedicated to remembrance of the tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of aboriginal peoples of this continent exterminated by successive French, Dutch, British, and American regimes. And it would seem also seem right that the U.K. and other nations with colonialist histories build museums and set aside days of remembrance for the victims of imperialism.

As David E. Stannard, author of American Holocaust, points out in his brutally frank essay, “Uniqueness as Denial: The Politics of Genocide Scholarship,” to commemorate the Holocaust and promote its uniqueness at the expense of remembering other equally brutal genocides both before and since degrades both Holocaust remembrance and the memory of peoples who have been made to disappear from the face of the earth in the name of white supremacy in the Western Hemisphere or fell victim to political democide in Europe and Asia in the twentieth century. I, for one, could not agree more.

Nevertheless, all that being said, as a Jew it is important to me to remember the Holocaust, not just on a day set aside by a government, but every day that genocides continue to be carried out all over the world. And so I say “Zichronem livracha” (“May their memories be a blessing”) and bow my head for a moment of silence in spite of myself.

Those "Nazi analogies"

There's simply no way comparison to the Nazis is inapplicable to recent outbursts of a certain savage:

They are very depressed by the weakness that America is showing to these psychotics in the Muslim world. They say, "Oh, there's a billion of them." I said, "So, kill 100 million of them, then there'll be 900 million of them." I mean, would you rather die -- would you rather us die than them? I mean, what is it going to take for you people to wake up? Would you rather we disappear or we die? Or would you rather they disappear and they die?

Or take Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler's hysterical rant:

The majority of paleswinians just decided that they want war until every last Joooo is dead. They had a choice. They made the wrong one.

Now wipe the kaffiyeh’ed genocidal subhumans out.

No excuses, no more diplomatic kabuki theater, no more waffling.

Wipe them out.

They want war.

Let them have it.

Now.

NEVER AGAIN!

What about children? Should they be murdered?

Why not? Think of it as post partum abortion…

After all, they just grow up to be mass murderers...

Now, this is a very familiar logic. Here's what police secretary Walter Mattner (from Vienna) was writing from Mogilev to his wife in October of 1941 (C. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, 2004, University of Nebraska Press, p. 298; emphasis mine):

When the first truckload [of victims] arrived my hand was slightly trembling when shooting, but one gets used to this. When the tenth load arrived I was already aiming more calmly and shot securely at the many women, children, and infants. Considering that I too have two infants at home, with whom these hordes would do the same, if not ten times worse. The death we gave to them was a nice, quick death compared with the hellish torture of thousands upon thousands in the dungeons of the GPU. Infants were flying in a wide circle through the air and we shot them down still in flight, before they fell into the pit and into the water. Let's get rid of this scum that tossed all of Europe into the war and is still agitating in America. ... I am actually already looking forward, and many say here that after our return home, then it will be the turn of our own Jews. Well, I'm not allowed to tell you enough.

Galloway: 'I’m always telling Muslims never to get involved in the debate about the Holocaust'

George Galloway is a name now familiar even to many Americans after the left-wing British Member of Parliament pwn3d a Senate committee enquiring into his involvement over the Iraqi oil-for-food program last year. Over in Britain, we're more weary of his antics, which have stretched from saluting Saddam Hussein for his 'courage and indefatigability', to unseating a popular Labour MP in Bethnal Green under the banner of the Respect Party in the 2005 British General Election, to appearing on Celebrity Big Brother earlier this year and crawling round the floor pretending to be a cat.

After that particular embarrassment, his latest stunt, however, has many cheering him on again. For years, the British Sunday tabloid has been employing the services of an undercover reporter, Mazher Mahmood, who is most famous for posing as a rich Middle Eastern sheikh and catching out a collection of celebrities (including England manager Sven-Goran Eriksson), royalty (Sophie Wessex, Princess Michael of Kent) and professional criminals. The 'fake sheikh', as Mahmood is known, has claimed more scalps than any other undercover reporter in Britain.

Unfortunately for Mahmood, he has now met his match in Galloway. On March 31, Galloway announced that Mahmood and an accomplice had "sought to implicate me in what would be illegal political funding and sought my agreement to anti-Semitic views, including Holocaust denial"..

The reason that this story has bubbled up again is because the News of the World sought an injunction preventing Galloway from publishing a photo of Mahmood on his website, claiming that this would place his life in danger from criminals he has exposed; a High Court judge, however, ruled that all that was endangered was the 'fake sheikh's livelihood.

The facts are these: two men posing as businessmen approached him to discuss matters relating to the British Muslim community, one of Galloway's strongest bedrocks of support in his Bethnal Green constituency. According to Galloway, they offered to 'sponsor' Members of Parliament, an offer he claims to have refused, saying 'absolutely not, it's completely illegal'.

As Galloway's statement indicates, the most controversial aspect of the meeting is where we at Holocaust Controversies take an interest. Galloway claims that his discussion partners

then made offensive statements about Jewish people and invited me to agree with them. For example, when I said the Daily Express was the worst pro-war, anti-Muslim paper in the land they asked, "Because it's owned by a Jew?"
"No," I said, "Because it’s owned by a pro-war anti-Muslim pornographer."

Galloway is here referring to Richard Desmond, owner of the Express Group, who built his fortune selling adult magazines. Then came the crunch:

More seriously, they then moved on to doubt the Holocaust. "You're not allowed even to quibble about the numbers," said Fernando, "Not even to say it might have been 5 million..."
I weighed in, “People should never go down that road….David Irving isn't quibbling about the numbers…in his heart he supports the Holocaust… I’m always telling Muslims never to get involved in that debate. The Holocaust is the greatest crime in human history and it should be accepted as such."

When one of the most prominent pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel leftwing politicians in Britain says don't go there, then you have to conclude that he knows what he's talking about. Not only does Galloway's statement undermine the efforts of the Muslim Parliament to create a moral equivalence between the Holocaust and the treatment of Palestinians, it also calls into question the sanity of Revisionists eager to ally with President Ahmadinejad of Iran - ironically, another Mahmoud...

Ahmadinejad is at it again

Mahmoud the Moonbat sez about the Holocaust:

If such a disaster is true, why should the people of this region pay the price? Why does the Palestinian nation have to be suppressed and have its land occupied?

Pray tell, what does the Holocaust have to do with the Palestinian situation?

Or is Ahmadinejad under impression that without the Holocaust there would be no Israel? Well, he's predictably wrong. Evyatar Friesel, Professor Emeritus of Modern Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, concludes in "The Holocaust: Factor in the Birth of Israel?":

On May 15, 1948, the State of Israel was proclaimed. A new political reality was thus established. In the words of the Israeli diplomat Walter Eytan: If this Jewish state came into being...it was not primarily because the United Nations had recommended it...When the day of independence dawned, the decision was Israel's alone.

[...]

Was there, then, a connection between the Holocaust and the creation of Israel? Is it conceivable that the two most decisive events in modern Jewish history could occur almost simultaneously and not be linked? Is it possible that the emergence of the Jewish state was unrelated to the terrible disaster of the Jewish people and to the remorse of the nations of the world? Regarding the deliberations of the United Nations and its bodies in 1947-1948, it is difficult to find evidence that the Holocaust played a decisive or even significant role. No bloc of nations proclaimed during the UN discussions on Palestine that its foremost aim was the creation of a Jewish state. (On the other hand, an important group of countries did favor the transformation of Palestine into an Arab state.) What impelled the international body was the practical problem of the Jewish refugees and, even more, the awareness that the Palestinian problem was drifting toward chaos and war.

[...]

True, some of the countries of the Western bloc did display an understanding - and, in a few cases, even a genuine interest - in Jewish and Zionist aspirations, but, for most of the states represented at the UN, the Jewish problem was something far removed from their concerns. It was, however, natural and understandable for them to go along with the Soviet-American proposition, given the great political and moral weight of such an agreement between the super-powers.

And since the measure of agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union neutralized clear-cut international rivalries, their tendency was to consider the Palestine question in terms of political realities. Factors such as the historical connection of the Jewish people to Palestine, or feelings of remorse because of the recent Jewish tragedy were hardly heard, if at all. Indeed, were they to be expected? It is only reasonable to assume that the great majority of UN members considered the Palestine question in "practical" terms. That attitude was well expressed in Article XII of the UNSCOP principles, which stressed that there could be no connection between the Palestinian issue and the Jewish problem.

Consequently, when at the beginning of 1948, it became increasingly clear that partition was not going to prevent a war in Palestine, the UN (spurred by the United States) started looking for a different, "practical" solution. All of which only emphasizes how modest a role the facts about and the reactions to the Holocaust played in the considerations of the international community. Even if there were a similarity in the actual outcome under consideration, there was little in common between the reasons impelling Jews and Zionists toward Jewish statehood and the reasoning behind the United Nations resolution for the partition of Palestine.

'Commentary' mangles Prof. Charny's letter

[Source]

`Protestcide' - The Killing of Protest of a Denial of Genocide

Armenian News Network / Groong
March 27, 2006

by Israel W. Charny

To what extent does a publication have the right to alter a Letter to
the Editor that criticizes the publication, and then to publish their
altered version of the letter without the full permission of the
letter writer, especially in light of his explicit refusal to approve
their revision?

In December 2005, Commentary published a lengthy article denying the
Armenian Genocide by one, Guenter Lewy, a retired professor who has
previously published denials of other genocides as well, including a
denial that the Gypsies were victims of genocide in WW II (Simon
Wiesenthal defended the role of the Gypsies as fellow victims of the
Holocaust, and on several occasions wrote and told passionately of
seeing the Gypsies in Auschwitz in the barracks right next to his);
and including a denial that the Native Americans (Indians) were
victims of genocide in America. It is clear that Lewy has established
himself as an arch specialist in denial who has now relegated no less
than three victim peoples to some kind of status of sufferers other
than victims of genocidal mass murder. I think that readers of this
current Commentary piece denying there was a genocide of the Armenians
had a right to know of the author's previous publications of denials
(one of which was also in Commentary), but not a word was mentioned.

Lewy's article in Commentary is entitled, `The first genocide of the
20th century?' Lewy himself mentions in his article that the
International Association of Genocide Scholars, of which I am the
current president, had passed a unanimous resolution some years ago
confirming the validity of the Armenian Genocide. When Commentary was
approached by a colleague as to whether they would publish a rejoinder
to Lewy's article by me, the editor agreed immediately to receive a
600-word statement from me. So far to their credit. But then in the
grotesque sequence of censorship and revisions of my rejoinder that
follows, Commentary at first refused to identify my connection to the
same Association that passed the resolution, and finally did in fact
identify me as somehow affiliated with the Association but eliminated
identifying my leadership role. A personal slight? Then it's
irrelevant. Or is it a diminution of the significance of my protest?
In the meantime, Commentary published a lengthy rejoinder by Lewy in
the same issue with the following statement that, by a wave of the
Lewy-Commentary wand removes any significance to our association's
informed judgment: `I am less than impressed by the unanimous vote of
the International Association of Genocide Scholars that the Armenian
case `was one of the major genocides of the modern era' writes Denier
Lewy conclusively and then presumptuously slams the members of the
association that virtually no one (but him) has done real research.

No matter. Commentary commits more serious infringements to the point
of not allowing me to voice my definite judgment about their question,
`The first genocide of the 20th century?'

In my letter I write about how the Turks also killed other Christian
(therefore non-Turkish) groups such as the Assyrians and Greeks as
well as the Armenians (the first Christian people of Europe) and that
this was `outright genocidal murder.' Commentary removed this vital
statement from my letter. Remember, the article by Lewy they have
published is asking explicitly if this was genocide, and the section
of Letters to the Editor in February is re-entitled, `Genocide?' but
my clear-cut rejoinder that it was `outright genocidal murder' was not
permitted.

Moreover, what does Lewy do? I say in my letter that I wonder if
readers of the Jewish-sponsored Commentary (this remark by me is also
censored out) know that the Turks were also responsible for two forced
expulsions of Jews from Jaffa-Tel Aviv in 1914 and 1917, both of which
resulted in losses of life of the elderly, infirm and ill. As if
referring to this information, Lewy says to me in his rejoinder,
`Mr. Charny stops short of calling these occurrences `genocide,'' but
he and the hard-working editor who we have seen manages to censor my
writing so fastidiously, thus manage to get across a message that
seems to refer to the whole bigger original issue of the Armenian
Genocide. Now, not only have I not been allowed to say what I did say
that there was clear-cut genocide, but it is as if claimed explicitly
that I too don't call the Ottoman murders genocide.

Higher-class deniers, like Lewy and Commentary, are a fascinating
study in the propagandistic logic-defying language mechanisms they
employ -- Commentary also removed from my letter a reference to an
article that Daphna Fromer and myself published in the British
journal, Patterns of Prejudice in which we analyzed the language-logic
of earlier deniers of the Armenian Genocide.

Ultimately, my most serious criticism is that Commentary is fully
responsible alongside of its author for publishing a bald exposition
of denial of an established major genocide. Thus, I conclude my
letter, `Regrettably, Mr. Lewy and Commentary too have now earned
places in the pantheon of genocide Deniers,' but -- by now you guessed
it -- you will never see that sentence, or an earlier statement
similarly critical of Commentary in the letter they published.

I ask, do responsible publications in a free world have the right to
censor and arbitrarily revise Letters to the Editor beyond
considerations of space, bad language such as epithets, and ad hominem
attacks (but not legitimate major criticisms of an author or the
publication!)? Obviously a publication holds the ultimate power and
can simply decline to publish a letter (who will ever know?). But to
cut and revise and remove and distort the thrust of the original
message, and fail to advise and fail to get approval of changes? I
don't know if there are legal controls against such tampering with the
lowly institution of a Letter to an Editor and/or op-ed writing, but I
do know such tampering violates the `natural law' of journalistic
integrity, and I think Commentary should be told so by an informed
public.

--
Prof. Israel W. Charny, Ph.D. is President of the International
Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) Editor-in-Chief, Encyclopedia
of Genocide [www.abc-clio.com/product/109124] Executive Director,
Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, Jerusalem Prof. of Psychology
& Family Therapy, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Tel & Fax:
972-2-672-0424 e-mail: encygeno@mail.com Author of forthcoming book,
Fascism and Democracy in the Human Mind, by the University of Nebraska
Press, May 2006

An e-mail transcript of all texts and correspondence between me and
Commentary is available immediately on request to encygeno@mail.com

ADL Supports Polish Effort to Redesignate Auschwitz

ADL, WJC, AIPAC, they're all the same thing, right?

Wrong.

WJC representative shows lack of logic

We have already written about Poland's request to change the designation of Auschwitz from "Auschwitz Concentration Camp" to "Former Nazi German Concentration Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau".

Now World Jewish Congress chimes in:

Polish request to rename Auschwitz site met with criticism

07 April, 2006

The Polish government's request to change the official name of the "Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp" to "Former Nazi German Concentration Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau" has been met with criticism. Maram Stern, deputy secretary general of the World Jewish Congress, said that "they want to redefine history by changing the name". Although the camp had been built and run by Nazi Germany, everybody in the area had known about its existence and workers were recruited from the Polish population in the neighboring village. The government in Warsaw wants the history of Auschwitz, which is listed as a UNESCO world heritage site, to be separated from Polish history and make it clear that Poland had no involvement in the death camp. Officials in Warsaw expect an answer to the renaming request from UNESCO later this year.

Let's be frank here: Mr. Stern's claim is silly. To repeat, the proposed new designation is "Former Nazi German Concentration Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau". This describes the camp absolutely correctly. How can a correct description "redefine history"?

That "everybody in area knew about its existence", etc., does not change the fact that Auschwitz Birkenau was a German Nazi camp.

Really, it's not rocket science, Mr. Stern.

Update: the news item disappeared from the site. It will be available through the Google cache, until it expires.

More about Pete McCloskey and Holocaust denial

JFYI, here's McCloskey's IHR address:
Machinations of the Anti-Defamation League
Whether McCloskey, along the way, makes some good points is a non-issue - they're overshadowed by his remarks, such as:

And a very brave editor, John Peter Zenger -- maybe the David McCalden or the Mark Weber of his time...

When people finally learn the truth, they turn against those who have been lying to them. And I think that if the movement of which you people are the cutting edge can retain dispassion in the face of outrages, setbacks and humiliations, the truth can ultimately prevail.

You are doing something worse than criticizing the government of the United States; you're threatening the security of the state of Israel. And the Jewish community is dedicated to preserve that state, and to destroy those who speak against it. Good luck!

It's for you to decide whether he has a thing for neo-Nazis, or is just naive enough to greet any anti-Zionist out there, no matter how odious.

Nevertheless, he does not seem to be a Holocaust denier:

I want to make a polite suggestion. So many of my friends and relations personally saw the Nazi death camps during the last days of World War II that I myself am convinced that there was a deliberate policy of extermination of Jews, Poles, gypsies, and homosexuals by the Nazi leadership. Numbers of the specific events can be challenged, but it is my personal view that the IHR would be far more effective if it were to concede that a holocaust did occur and focus on the ADL’s distortions of truth. Andy Killgore’s and Dick Curtiss’ publication would be an ideal example to follow.


Paul N. McCloskey, Jr.
Redwood City, Calif.

McCloskey and the Memory Hole

I despise the man like I despise sewage, but I have to give kudos to Robert Novak for publishing the following in a recent column:

Holocaust politics

Former Rep. Pete McCloskey, the liberal Republican attempting a comeback congressional campaign in California, faces charges of association with an organization accused of Holocaust denial.

At a 2000 conference of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), McCloskey was quoted in a transcript of his speech to the group as referring to "the so-called Holocaust." Mark Weber, the institute's director, told this column that McCloskey was granted a request to remove from the IHR's Web site an expression of "esteem" for the organization's "mission." The Web site offers for sale books questioning the Holocaust.

The fact is that Pete McCloskey has had an long association with the IHR and its neo-Nazi leader, Mark Weber. This is something his potential constituency should know, so if you live in CD-11, spread the word.

"All comparisons to Adolf Hitler are not equal"

Chris Castle gets it right in his WaPo letter to the editor:

All comparisons to Adolf Hitler are not equal. Kristina Vanden Heuvel's March 26 Outlook article, "Had It With Hitler," left out an important part of the argument -- relevance.

Indeed, why shun from Nazi/Hitler analogies when they are relevant? Sure, comparisons with the "Hitler of the Holocaust" are probably not fair in most cases today. Not so with "budding Hitler/Nazism" analogies. What are the lessons of the Holocaust, and how can such events be prevented, if one cannot even compare specific trends the led to the Holocaust with specific trends in today's world?
So, yes, comparisons with Hitler's/NSDAP's early years can be legitimate.

Poland Seeks Designation Change For Auschwitz

This in from The Washington Post, The Guardian,BBC and dozens more newspapers:

WARSAW, Poland -- Poland wants to change the official name of the Auschwitz death camp on the U.N.'s world heritage directory to emphasize that it was run by German Nazis, not Poles, an official said Thursday.
The government requested that UNESCO, the U.N.'s educational and cultural body, change the name from "Auschwitz Concentration Camp" to "Former Nazi German Concentration Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau," Culture Ministry spokesman Jan Kasprzyk said.
Polish officials have complained in the past that foreign media sometimes refer to Auschwitz - a death camp located in occupied Poland where Nazi Germans killed 1.5 million people during World War II - as a "Polish concentration camp."

The casual description of German concentration camps on Polish soil as 'Polish camps' has long caused considerable offense to many Poles. If the initiative helps avoid some of these slips of the tongue, so much the better, yet I fear that the English language being what it is, the phrase will keep on recurring.

Connoisseurs of fact-checking and accuracy might be intrigued to know that of the three media outlets cited above, only the BBC got the numbers right:

More than a million people, almost all Jews, died there between 1940 and 1945.

In 1991, Franciszek Piper of the Auschwitz State Museum authored a work, Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz , which gave the death toll as 1.1 million. Since then, new research has indicated that 80,000 more Hungarian Jews than were previously assumed survived the selections during May to July 1944 to be deported to other concentration camps. Piper himself demolished the attempt by Spiegel editor Fritjof Meyer to reduce the Auschwitz death toll to under half a million on the basis of dubious source interpretations.

What They Won't Tell You At CODOH

Somehow, I doubt Hargis/Hannover will ever link over CODOH to this particular story from the Middle East Times in his pro-Iranian Zeal.

Former Iranian president attacks Ahmadinejad over Holocaust
By Stefan Smith
AFP
Published March 1, 2006

Iran's former reformist president Mohammad Khatami has described the Holocaust as a "historical reality" - a stinging attack on his controversial and revisionist successor Mahmud Ahmadinejad.
"We should speak out if even a single Jew is killed. Don't forget that one of the crimes of Hitler, Nazism and German national socialism was the massacre of innocent people, among them many Jews," the cleric said in comments carried in the Iranian press on Wednesday. The Holocaust, he asserted, should be recognized "even if this historical reality has been misused and there is enormous pressure on the Palestinian people".

Ahmadinejad has caused international outrage by insisting that the Holocaust - the killing of an estimated 6 million Jews by the Nazis and their allies during World War II in death camps and elsewhere - was a myth used to justify the creation of Israel. He has also said that the Jewish state "must be wiped off the map" or moved as far away as Alaska - comments that have provoked anger in the West and even condemnation from the UN Security Council. Ahmadinejad's violent rhetoric has also served to increase tensions over Iran's atomic energy drive, seen in the West as a mask for weapons development.
Khatami served as Iran's president from 1997 to 2005, and attempted to open up Iran to the West and initiate a "dialogue among civilizations" - in stark contrast to the ultraconservative agenda of Ahmadinejad. The mild-mannered former president, who has shied away from the political limelight since leaving office, also asserted Muslims were not out to persecute Jews. "The persecution of Jews, just like Nazism, is a Western phenomenon. In the east, we have always lived side by side with them. And we follow a religion that states that the death of an innocent person is the death of all of humanity," Khatami said.
He also argued that it was of little importance "whether the number killed [during the Holocaust] was high or not" - but at the same time went on to accuse Israel's leaders as being "victims of fascism and practicing fascist policies today".
Ahmadinejad also came under attack from the prominent and centrist Shargh newspaper, which complained that "the Holocaust has, as wished for by the president, become a topic of our foreign policy".
"The Jewish question was never a problem for Iran or Islam, and is a Christian-European problem," the paper argued. "Don't we have enough with the nuclear question, human rights, free elections and political in-fighting, so do we need to add another problem to that?" it said, saying that Iran would be better off "thinking of the creation of a Palestinian state rather than the destruction of Israel". But an editorial in the ultra-hardline Kayhan newspaper, a firm supporter of Ahmadinejad, continued to champion Holocaust revisionism. The president's controversial remarks, the paper said, were "like a dagger in the side of the US and its allies".
Iran's top-selling daily, Hamshahri, is also running a contest for cartoons of the Holocaust in a tit-for-tat move over European newspaper publications of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed that have angered Muslims worldwide. And Iran's foreign ministry is sticking by its plan to host a conference on the Holocaust - an idea that British Prime Minister Tony Blair has described as "shocking, ridiculous, stupid". Last month Iran's Ambassador to Portugal Mohammed Taheri also questioned the Holocaust, telling Portuguese public radio that "to incinerate 6 million people, you'd need around 15 years". Iran has nevertheless offered to send a team of "independent investigators" to the former Nazi death camps.