205 Wiesenthal Center condemns Oliver Stone's statement that Hitler is a scapegoat

(1) Wiesenthal Center condemns Oliver Stone's statement that Hitler is a scapegoat
(2) Israel's Growing Insanity - Avigail Abarbanel
(3) Nazis Left Dutch Gays Untouched, Says Historian
(4) Japan to Come Clean on Secret Nuke Deals With U.S.
(5) Witch-doctors reveal extent of child sacrifice in Uganda
(6) Egypt tombs suggest pyramids not built by slaves

(1) Wiesenthal Center condemns Oliver Stone's statement that Hitler is a scapegoat
From: Josef Schwanzer <donauschwob@optusnet.com.au>  Date: 19.01.2010 04:55 AM

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3835486,00.html

Jewish group slams Oliver Stone's Hitler remark

01.18.10

Simon Wiesenthal Center says American director's statement that Nazi leader was a scapegoat 'desecrates memory of millions murdered'. This only serve to legitimize those who would be prepared to march against Jews again, says Rabbi Marvin Hier

Ynetnews

The Simon Wiesenthal Center rebuked remarks made by director Oliver Stone during a press conference for his new history documentary. Stone said, “Hitler is an easy scapegoat throughout history and it’s been used cheaply. He’s the product of a series of actions. It’s cause and effect.”

 The director is using the series to expose what he calls lies and biases behind the conventional interpretation of American history and that would include reexamining WWII history and putting Hitler “into context.”

“To talk about ‘placing Adolf Hitler in context’ is like placing cancer in context, instead of recognizing cancer for what it really is - a horrible disease, just as we must recognize Hitler as the ultimate expression of evil,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Wiesenthal Center.

 “Oliver Stone has every right to interpret history in an unconventional manner and not follow the script of a History Channel documentary. And yes, it is true, there were many, including American corporations, who helped prop up the Third Reich in its infancy,” he added.

 “But we desecrate the memory of the millions murdered when we attempt to place its architect in context. No theory of cause and effect can ever explain away an Auschwitz of how human beings could debase themselves and escort children into the gas chambers,” Hier continued.

 “Oliver Stone’s remarks only serve to legitimize revisionists and those who would be prepared to march against Jews again,” he concluded.

Rabbi Hier is the recipient of two Academy Awards for Best Documentary Feature—the first in 1981 for "Genocide" and the second in 1987 for "The Long Way Home".

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations with over 400,000 member families in the United States. It is an NGO at international agencies including the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, the OAS, the Council of Europe and the Latin American Parliament (Parlatino). ==

Oliver Stone says Hitler an 'easy scapegoat' / Reuters

Published: January 11, 2010

American director's upcoming Showtime documentary promises to put mass-murderers 'in context'. According to Stone, 'Stalin, Hitler, Mao and McCarthy have been vilified pretty thoroughly by history'
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3832828,00.html

(2) Israel's Growing Insanity - Avigail Abarbanel

From: WVNS <ummyakoub@yahoo.com> Date: 16.01.2010 06:37 PM

Israel's Growing Insanity

Avigail Abarbanel

http://www.avigailabarbanel.me.uk/growing-insanity.html

I wrote this on 9th February 2009, the day before Israel's election, after seeing an interview with Benjamin Netanyahu's father on Israeli TV. Benjamin Netanyahu's father—described as "sharp as a razor" at the ripe old age of 99—gave a rare interview to Amit Segel of Israel's Channel 2 to support his son's election campaign (Channel 2 website. 7 Feb. 2009).

At some point in the interview Professor Ben-Zion Netanyahu said, "Today we are facing plain and simple, a danger of annihilation. This is not only the ongoing existential danger to Israel, but a real danger of complete annihilation. People think that the Shoah (Holocaust) is over — but it is not, it is continuing all the time" (My translation from the Hebrew).

The views of Netanyahu Senior do not represent a lunatic fringe, but the Israeli mainstream. When I was growing up in Israel, things were much the same. I and everyone I knew believed in earnest that we were always at risk of annihilation. Fear of annihilation is at the heart of Jewish, not just Israeli culture and it pre-dates the Holocaust. But the climate in Israel today is far more extreme than it was in my time, as Israel on the whole moves further and further to an irrational fanatic position.

When a person's perception of reality is completely out of touch with reality itself, we begin to get an uneasy feeling that something might be wrong with his or her mind. Where is the evidence that the Jews, right now are facing a "real danger of complete annihilation"? Where is the evidence that the Holocaust, a systematic and deliberate plan to eliminate all Jews during the Second World War, is still being carried out?

I would even argue that saying this is an insult to the victims of the real Holocaust. Israel is rumoured to have one of the most powerful military forces in the world but Israelis still believe that they are right now being annihilated. This is insanity.

Someone is indeed facing a risk of cultural, economic, political and even physical annihilation, but it's not Israel or Jews, it's the Palestinians, and the annihilator is Israel itself.

Our politics and our economics are both a product of our psychology, not something separate. We make political and economic choices based on who we are and what we feel and believe. Many rational people search for a rational analysis—often political or economic—for what is happening in Israel-Palestine. But the only way to interpret Israel's behaviour during the past 61 years is through understanding the psychology of its society and its leaders.

To ignore Israel's psychology is dangerous because it means that any intervention based only on political considerations, will miss the mark and risk being irrelevant. Indeed if you look at the history of diplomacy and `peace negotiations' in the region, it is quite obvious that they have achieved nothing at all. Things seem to be progressing on a trajectory determined by something that to someone in my profession, looks more like a mental illness than a political plan, bearing no relation to any rational diplomatic efforts, `roadmaps', peace plans or truces.

Israel's behaviour is a direct product of its psychological struggle with the implications of Jewish identity, which in turn determines Israel's very reason for existence. In his book Alternative to a Psychotic State Akiva Orr asks if Israel is a `Jewish state' or a `state for the Jews'. Since it is clearly not a Jewish state—Israeli state law is different to religious law—then it must be a state for the Jews. And this begs the question of `who or what is a Jew', and to that there has never been a satisfactory legal answer.

Israel has no constitution precisely because it cannot resolve the question of who or what it wants to be. The de-facto, modern secular Zionist definition of a Jew is someone who would have been considered a Jew by Hitler. Effectively Jews are allowing themselves to be defined by those who hated them and sought their annihilation. In other words, this identity was formed as a reaction to a particular set of circumstances.

But what happens if the circumstances change? What does that do to this identity? In other words, if the world is now safe for Jews and is no longer what Jewish people thought it was, then Jewish people no longer know who they are, in which case either Jewish identity needs to change, or you make sure that the world is back to what it was when the Jews were persecuted. That way there is no need to go through the difficult process of self-examination or live in a world that doesn't make sense.

The reason for the existence of the state of Israel is a direct result of Jewish self-perception as victims of persecution. Israel was created to offer a safe haven for Jews from persecution. I could be wrong, I might be naïve, but I don't believe that Israeli leaders are conscious that they are now hyping up more traditional forms of anti-Semitism—that is to say, I don't think that they are consciously plotting to do it. They are operating without awareness and they probably believe in their own explanations for what they are doing, for example that they attacked Gaza to weaken Hamas. But we must look at the real consequences of Israel's actions in Gaza and three years ago in Lebanon for example, to understand Israel's real motivation.

If Israel's actions lead to an increase in fanaticism and in anti-Jewish sentiment, this is because this is what Israel wants to achieve, albeit unconsciously.

But why does Israel need more fanaticism and antisemitism? An increase in real anti-Semitism and attacks on Jews would bring current reality into line with the outdated imaginary reality, and would help keep Jewish identity unchanged. The reality is that Jews have not been victims, certainly not of a genocidal regime for over sixty years—the Holocaust is not happening now and there is no attempt by anyone to annihilate the Jews.

The fact that Jews live in safety everywhere and are not persecuted makes Israel uncomfortable. If the Jews are doing well everywhere, then Jewish identity is being put to question, and so is the very reason for the existence of Israel. The very state that was created to save the Jews from persecution, now needs them to be persecuted again so that it can continue to exist. Escalating the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians is one of the means to achieving this end.

The Palestinians, who are desperately trying to understand what has been happening to them, are caught in this madness and are the victims of it. It's not because of who they are or something they did, that they are suffering. It's because they had the misfortune of living on the land that a neurotic Zionist movement was determined to take for itself regardless of cost. I think many Palestinians are beginning to recognise this but the world leaders still believe Israel's racist propaganda, which says that there is something inherent in the Palestinian people that means that they deserve what they get.

This is why it is essential that the world intervene decisively. I do not trust Israel to suddenly develop sufficient self-awareness to understand what it's doing and put a stop to it. Israel's growing delinquency demonstrates the exact opposite. The Palestinians do not have any more time to spare.

(3) Nazis Left Dutch Gays Untouched, Says Historian

NRC Handelsblad (The Netherlands)

http://www.nrc.nl/international/Features/article2444718.ece

Published: 23 December 2009 17:19 | Changed: 24 December 2009 11:52

All homosexual acts were considered criminal in the Netherlands during the German occupation. But only men who had intercourse with young boys were prosecuted, says historian Anna Tijsseling.

By Bart Funnekotter

The Dutch traditionally remember their victims of the Second World War on May 4th. As the queen attends the official ceremonies on Amsterdam's Dam Square, a procession walks to the ‘Homomonument’ near the Western Church. The gay monument was established in 1987 to commemorate the victims of the Nazi regime who were "persecuted because of their homosexual feelings".

In fact, very few of those people were persecuted in the Netherlands, says historian Anna Tijsseling, who obtained her doctoral degree at Utrecht University on Wednesday for her thesis Guilty sex. Homosexual indecency offences around the German occupation. Actually, the legal prosecution of homosexuals was more intense before and immediately after the war, her research shows.

Her conclusions counter the generally accepted view of Dutch homosexuals as victims of the Nazis. Tijsseling calls this image "a persistent fiction, created by the gay-emancipation movement in the 1970s."

Overloaded judiciary
The historian for the International Institute of Social History and the Netherlands' Institute for War Documentation studied the topic for four years. Part of her research involved investigating all the cases brought before the The Hague district court. "The Hague was the gay capital of the Netherlands, the way Amsterdam is now. Moreover, many of the cases the Germans did institute against homosexuals took place in The Hague," she explains.

After the Germans invaded the Netherlands in 1940, they made homosexuality a crime. Before and after the war, only those who had sex with minors were prosecuted. "Homosexuality was seen as a disorder, with older men infecting younger boys, " Tijsseling said.

In theory, the German legislation made it possible to prosecute all gay people. But that didn't happen. Tijsseling’s research shows all the homosexuals who appeared before the court were there for having sex with young boys.

One reason why fewer gays were prosecuted was the overloaded judiciary. "The system was practically buried in/ up to its ears in financial and political crimes. The The Hague police still had a sex crimes department, but fewer cases came before the court. Those convicted were not imprisoned because of a shortage of cells."

Death camps

Several anecdotes Tijsseling found in court files illustrate the relatively safe position of Dutch homosexuals during the occupation. One The Hague pub became an openly gay bar in 1943. And there was one gay man who organised weekly parties in his attic. These became so popular that even German soldiers started attending them. The host was prosecuted in the end, for serving liquor without a licence.

But even if few homosexuals were prosecuted, couldn't it be that they were simply sent to death camps without any form of trial? Tijsseling doesn't think so. "I searched everywhere for evidence of this, but I couldn't find any."

"Homosexuals in Germany were clearly victims of the Nazi regime. They were one of the first groups to be sent to the death camps," says Tijsseling. "But this wasn’t true for the Netherlands."

Gay presecution in Germany

Between 1933 and 1945 an estimated 100,000 men were arrested as homosexuals, of which some 50,000 were officially sentenced. Most of these men served time in regular prisons, and an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 were incarcerated in concentration camps. It is unclear how many died there.

In the 1950, the emerging gay press wrote mostly about its solidarity with the German victims. In the 1970s a lobby was started to have gays officially recognised as victims of the Nazis. With this status, gay people could apply for reparations. "And although no evidence had surfaced about gay persecution by then, that idea is now firmly established in people's minds."

She realises her conclusions will not go down well with the gay movement. "The people who rally around the victimisation of homosexuals will have to face the facts: the Second World War was a relatively quiet time for Dutch gays."

(4) Japan to Come Clean on Secret Nuke Deals With U.S.

From: IHR News <news@ihr.org> Date: 14.01.2010 06:55 PM

The Associated Press
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,582728,00.html?test=latestnews

Japan to Come Clean on Secret Nuke Deals With U.S.

Sunday, January 10, 2010

TOKYO — To the government's critics, it was a long and shocking act of official stonewalling: Agreements long hidden in Foreign Ministry files allowed nuclear-armed U.S. warships to enter Japanese ports, violating a hallowed principle of postwar Japan. Yet their very existence was officially denied.

Now, in a clear break from the past, a new prime minister has gone where none of his predecessors dared go: He has ordered a panel of ministry officials and academics to investigate the secret agreements.

The findings, due out this month, are part of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's wide-ranging campaign to wrest power from the bureaucracy and make government more open than under the conservatives, who ruled Japan for most of the past 50 years.

They also could intensify public debate about the future of Japan's long-standing security alliance with the U.S., which has bases here. Hatoyama, a liberal who took office in September, has called for making the relationship more balanced, starting with efforts to evict an unpopular U.S. base from the island of Okinawa.

That Japan agreed to let nuclear-armed ships enter its ports and waters ceased to be a secret some years ago with the declassification of American documents. Such ships had routinely docked in various Japanese ports since the 1960s, sometimes setting off protests.

But in a nation where memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki drive a fierce aversion to nuclear weapons, a formal admission of the secret agreements would be a stunning reversal, and confirm that previous governments systematically lied to the public.

"The Foreign Ministry repeatedly denied their existence, even in statements before Parliament," lawmaker Muneo Suzuki said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Suzuki held top political posts at the Foreign Ministry, yet although he had heard about the secret documents, he said that even he could not pry them out of his officials.

"The Foreign Ministry should be held deeply accountable," said Suzuki, who has switched sides and is now a member of Hatoyama's coalition.

Historical accounts show that Prime Minister Masayoshi Ohira, who died in office in 1980, considered going public on the secret pacts, but was advised against it by his aides as politically too dangerous.

Only a few Foreign Ministry bureaucrats have spoken out in recent years.

One, Kazuhiko Togo, said he and other high-ranking officials kept quiet for fear that disclosure of the agreements would trigger riots and perhaps topple the prime minister.

"The political costs were too great," Togo told the AP.

Even after American officials acknowledged the pacts in the 1990s, leaders of the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party persistently denied them, right up to Taro Aso, the last LDP prime minister before Hatoyama's Democrats took over.

"They did not exist," Aso said in a nationally televised response to a reporter's question last July.

"It all goes to show how far behind Japan is in administrative transparency," said Koichi Nakano, professor of political science at Sophia University in Tokyo.

Even the name of revered Eisaku Sato, the prime minister viewed as the architect of Japan's postwar pacifism and resistance to nuclear weapons, has been thrust into the debate.

Three weeks ago, Sato's son revealed a document he found in Sato's desk after his death in 1975 and which he kept hidden.

The 1969 document, signed by Sato and President Richard Nixon, showed they agreed that U.S.-occupied Okinawa would be returned to Japan, but the U.S. would retain the right to have nuclear weapons on the island if the necessity arose. The agreements on Okinawa were a key part of the secret pacts that also covered U.S. warships entering ports throughout Japan.

Back then, it was the height of the Cold War, and the U.S. felt it needed a free hand to confront nuclear-armed China and the Soviet Union.

But the deal with Nixon was a clear violation of Sato's pledge that Japan would not make, own or allow the entry of nuclear weapons. Sato won the 1974 Nobel Peace Prize in large part for pushing those principles. According to Japanese media accounts, the trade-off drove him to tears of remorse. But the principles became policy all the same.

The previously declassified U.S. documents include State Department papers on the 1960 U.S.-Japan security pact, accounts of meetings at which the entry of warships with nuclear weapons was discussed and a memorandum on the 1969 Nixon-Sato meeting, where the Okinawa deal was discussed.

And even in the 1990s, after U.S. warships stopped carrying battle-ready nukes and the issue became moot, it remained sensitive enough for governments to go on misleading the public.

Japanese today are more shocked by the cover-up than by the deed itself, but they remain attached to the non-nuclear principle.

A survey by the Mainichi newspaper, which interviewed more than 4,500 people, found 72 percent of the 2,600 respondents want to stick with the principles, and the number rose to about 80 percent among Japanese in their 20s and 30s. No margin of error was given.

Shoji Niihara, a scholar of U.S.-Japan relations, said Japanese are hoping their new reformist prime minister will redefine Japan's relationship with the U.S. and work with President Barack Obama in his call for a world free of nuclear weapons.

"There's a strong feeling that Japan was never truly treated as an independent country," he said.

Robert A. Wampler, a senior fellow at the National Security Archive, an American group that seeks to declassify historical documents, welcomed Hatoyama's investigation.

"The longer they denied this, the harder it was for them to come forward and say they weren't telling the truth. They backed themselves into a corner on this one," Wampler said in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C.

Bunroku Yoshino, a former Foreign Ministry official who oversaw relations with the U.S., did his part on Dec. 1.

Testifying in a lawsuit brought by a former newspaper reporter, 91-year-old Yoshino reversed his earlier denials and acknowledged signing some of the Okinawa agreements.

"It is a major historical truth," he said afterward.

(5) Witch-doctors reveal extent of child sacrifice in Uganda

From: IHR News <news@ihr.org> Date: 12.01.2010 09:05 AM

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/8441813.stm

Page last updated at 09:45 GMT, Thursday, 7 January 2010

By Tim Whewell

BBC News, Uganda

A BBC investigation into human sacrifice in Uganda has heard first-hand accounts which suggest ritual killings of children may be more common than authorities have acknowledged.

One witch-doctor led us to his secret shrine and said he had clients who regularly captured children and brought their blood and body parts to be consumed by spirits.

Meanwhile, a former witch-doctor who now campaigns to end child sacrifice confessed for the first time to having murdered about 70 people, including his own son.

The Ugandan government told us that human sacrifice is on the increase, and according to the head of the country's Anti-Human Sacrifice Taskforce the crime is directly linked to rising levels of development and prosperity, and an increasing belief that witchcraft can help people get rich quickly.

In the course of our investigation we witnessed the ritual torching of the shrine of a particularly active witch-doctor in northern Uganda by anti-sacrifice campaigners.

The witch-doctor allowed ceremonial items including conch shells and animal skins to be burned in his sacred grove after agreeing to give up sacrifice.

He told us that clients had come to him in search of wealth.

"They capture other people's children. They bring the heart and the blood directly here to take to the spirits… They bring them in small tins and they place these objects under the tree from which the voices of the spirits are coming," he said.

Asked how often clients brought blood and body parts, the witch-doctor said they came "on average three times a week - with all that the spirits demand from them."

We saw a beaker of blood and what appeared to be a large, raw liver in the shrine before it was destroyed, although it was not possible to determine whether they were human remains.

Extortion

The witch-doctor denied any direct involvement in murder or incitement to murder, saying his spirits spoke directly to his clients.

He told us he was paid 500,000 Ugandan shillings (£160 or $260) for a consultation, but that most of that money was handed over to his "boss" in a nationwide network of witch-doctors.

Head of the Anti-Human Sacrifice and Trafficking Task Force, assistant commissioner Moses Binoga of the Ugandan police, said he knew of the boss referred to - involved in one of five or six witch-doctor protection rackets operating in the country.

"The senior ones extort money from lower people because they deal in illegal things," he told us.

Mr Binoga said police had opened 26 murder cases in 2009, in which the victim appeared to have been ritually sacrificed, compared with just three cases in 2007.

"We also have about 120 children and adults reported missing whose fate we have not traced. We cannot rule out that they may be victims of human sacrifice," he said.

But child protection campaigners believe the real number is much higher, as some disappearances are not reported to police.

Activism

Former witch-doctor turned anti-sacrifice campaigner Polino Angela says he has persuaded 2,400 other witch-doctors to give up the trade since he himself repented in 1990.

To punish retrospectively would cause a problem... if we can persuade Ugandans to change, that is much better than going back into the past
James Nsaba Buturo, Uganda's Minister of Ethics and Integrity

Mr Angela told us he had first been initiated as a witch-doctor at a ceremony in neighbouring Kenya, where a boy of about 13 was sacrificed.

"The child was cut with a knife on the neck and the entire length from the neck down was ripped open, and then the open part was put on me," he said.

When he returned to Uganda he says he was told by those who had initiated him to kill his own son, aged 10.

"I deceived my wife and made sure that everyone else had gone away and I was with my child alone. Once he was placed down on the ground, I used a big knife and brought it down like a guillotine."

Asked if he was afraid he might now be prosecuted as a result of confessing to killing 70 people, he said:

"I have been to all the churches… and they know me as a warrior in the drive to end witchcraft that involves human sacrifice, so I think that alone should indemnify me and have me exonerated."

Uganda's Minister of Ethics and Integrity James Nsaba Buturo believes that "to punish retrospectively would cause a problem... if we can persuade Ugandans to change, that is much better than going back into the past."

Child protection activists in organisations such as FAPAD (Facilitation for Peace and Development) and ANPPCAN (African Network for the Prevention and Protection against Child Abuse and Neglect) have highlighted recent cases of ritual killing and called for new legislation to regulate so-called "traditional healers".

Witness testimony

In some cases against alleged witch-doctors due to come to trial later this year, police will use the testimony of children who managed to survive abduction.

One such witness is a three-year-old boy called Mukisa, who was left for dead after his penis was hacked off by an assailant.

He survived thanks to quick work by surgeons, and later told police he had been mutilated by a neighbour who is known to keep a shrine.

Mukisa's mother told us: "Every time I look at him, I ask myself how his future is going to be - a man without a penis - and how the rest of the community will look at him, with private parts that can neither be attributed to a man or a woman. Every time I recall the normal birth that I had and the way Mukisa is now, it is like the end of the world."

(6) Egypt tombs suggest pyramids not built by slaves

From: ReporterNotebook <RePorterNoteBook@Gmail.com> Date: 11.01.2010 11:48 AM

CAIRO

Sun Jan 10, 2010 12:30pm EST

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6091E720100110

CAIRO (Reuters) - New tombs found in Giza support the view that the Great Pyramids were built by free workers and not slaves, as widely believed, Egypt's chief archaeologist said on Sunday.

Films and media have long depicted slaves toiling away in the desert to build the mammoth pyramids only to meet a miserable death at the end of their efforts.

"These tombs were built beside the king's pyramid, which indicates that these people were not by any means slaves," Zahi Hawass, the chief archaeologist heading the Egyptian excavation team, said in a statement.

"If they were slaves, they would not have been able to build their tombs beside their king's."

He said the collection of workers' tombs, some of which were found in the 1990s, were among the most significant finds in the 20th and 21st centuries. They belonged to workers who built the pyramids of Khufu and Khafre.

Hawass had earlier found graffiti on the walls from workers calling themselves "friends of Khufu" -- another sign that they were not slaves.

The tombs, on the Giza plateau on the western edge of Cairo, are 4,510 years old and lie at the entrance of a one-km (half mile)-long necropolis.

Hawass said evidence had been found showing that farmers in the Delta and Upper Egypt had sent 21 buffalo and 23 sheep to the plateau every day to feed the builders, believed to number around 10,000 -- or about a tenth of Greek historian Herodotus's estimate of 100,000.

These farmers were exempted from paying taxes to the government of ancient Egypt -- evidence that he said underscored the fact they were participating in a national project.

The first discovery of workers' tombs in 1990 came about accidentally when a horse stumbled on a brick structure 10 meters (yards) away from the burial area.

(Writing by Marwa Awad; Editing by Alison Williams and Michael Roddy)