Tuesday, June 29, 2010

French Nazi collaborators to be exposed as official reports published online

from the Mail Online:


Thousands of French people who collaborated with the Nazis are to be unmasked as secret files from 70 years ago are finally made public. The records, which include information passed on to the Gestapo by those who lived during the Occupation of 1940-44, will be published online. The archive will give survivors and their relatives an opportunity to discover what happened to their loved ones - and if any countrymen played a part in their betrayal.

Since the liberation of Paris, all documentation relating to the Second World War has been kept in cardboard boxes in the basement of the city's Police Museum. A museum spokesman said: 'They include notes from interrogations, as well as information passed on to the authorities willingly.' The archive includes every police log from stations across France, as well as details of every arrest, fine and interview.

In addition to shedding light on the work of the Gestapo across France, the files will illuminate the role of the Brigade Speciale, which tracked down resistance fighters and other 'enemies' of the Nazi regime.



Read more here.

Monday, June 28, 2010

Global trade union rebuffs Israel boycott

from the Jewish Chronicle:

An organisation representing trade unions in more than 150 countries and 176 million workers worldwide has rejected calls to boycott Israel and pledged its “universal recognition” of the country’s right to exist.

At its world congress in Vancouver, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) stated its rejection of “the extremist policies of Hamas”.

And in a defiant slap to the boycott movement, the leader of Israel's Histadrut, its umbrella trade union body, Ofer Eini, has been elected as one of ITUC’s vice presidents and given a place on its 25-member executive board.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Justin Raimondo's racism

Blogger Justin Raimondo has looked at Israel and figured out exactly what's wrong with it. It's filled with people who just aren't white enough for him.

It is often said, by Israel’s defenders, that the Jewish state is part and parcel of the West: that Israel, the only democracy in the region, must be defended because they are, after all, reliable allies who share our values, the heritage of Athens and Jerusalem. That has been the conventional wisdom – and it’s wrong. The Mediterranean Massacre underscores the wrongness of this assumption.
Israel is not a Western country, and hasn’t been for some time: helped along by this latest incident, the realization of this fact by Western governments and peoples will represent a turning point in the Jewish state’s relations with the civilized world, especially including Jews in the Diaspora. I have argued this for years: that the successful aliya program pushed by the Israeli government has displaced the old European-derived Israeli elites with a new,more Asiatic influence, one that is now – with the rise of the Israel far right – the dominant factor in Israeli politics.

Birthed by leftist Zionists who sought to build an egalitarian community in the midst of a desert, the modern state of Israel has taken on the characteristics of its neighbors – gone native, so to speak, both culturally and politically. The large scale infusion of North African and Asiatic populations has changed Israeli society irrevocably, so that, today, the rise of a thuggish fascist demagogue like Avigdor Lieberman, the former bouncer turned Foreign Minister, is all too believable.

I don't claim to understand that last sentence about "Asiatic populations" making Avigdor Lieberman's "rise" "believable".  But I never did understand the ravings of racists.

Read the rest of his column here, if you must: The Mediterranean Massacre by Justin Raimondo --Antiwar.com.  There he explains that Jews and/or "Asiatics" have a...

...savage mind... (which) works differently. Shorn of what we would recognize as a moral sense, the savage glories in his capacity for pitiless violence. It’s a survival mechanism: in his world, red in tooth and claw, instilling fear in your opponent means winning more than half the battle. As a survival strategy, it’s like the one inmate who mutters ominously to himself while exhibiting all the characteristics of a violent psychotic: the other prisoners give him plenty of space because they think he’s liable to do anything.

That bit about ignoring people who mutter ominously reminds me why I generally ignore Raimondo.

Eye-rolling headline of the day

Forbes originally headlined a column posted on their website today "Leave BP Alone". They've since changed it to Don't Forget The Fruits Of Freedom. I guess I wasn't the only one who thought their original headline was hysterically funny. Funnier still is the fact that the original headline accurately describes the contents of the column, which argues that regulating the oil industry means that it won't be able to learn by experience.

Freedom means responsibility. It also means failure, accidents and mistakes. This, in turn, leads to learning, which is why successes outweigh the failures. However, humans must be free to understand the consequences of their actions. Without consequences, there is little learning.
When freedom prevails, the ingenuity and inventiveness of people creates incredible wealth. This is the source of the natural improvement of the human condition. Capitalism is created by free people. Socialism, on the other hand, is what happens when people trade their freedom for the perception of safety. And when people trade in their freedom, they trade it in for a less dynamic, less safe, life.


So there you have it: regulation = ignorance. Paging George Orwell.


Having trouble reading this e-mail? Click here for mobile version.


FORBES.COM COMMENTARY NEWSLETTER JUNE 08, 2010

Leave BP Alone
Brian S. Wesbury and Robert Stein
When government tries to eliminate risk, it often creates even more.

Analyzing Altruism
Oren Harman
Is it an evolutionary inheritance or a cultural construction? We may never know.

BP's Endless Nightmare In The Gulf
Richard A. Epstein
Punitive damages and criminal prosecutions will only make matters worse.

The Government's Peculiar Assault On Profits
John Tamny
Why further fining oil companies and airlines will do more harm than good.

Turkey's Two-Faced Aid For Gaza
Claudia Rosett
On real humanitarian relief, Erdogan talks big and gives small.

A partial retraction

Last week, I used this blog in a way I usually don't, to support a particular project: the proposal to build an Islamic center called Cordoba House in the neighborhood adjacent to the World Trade Center site.  I described the imam who's behind the project, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, as a moderate, a modernist, someone intent on building good interfaith relations.  This assessment was based on my having heard him speak and on my knowing people who attended his small mosque in Tribeca, which is located 10 blocks uptown from the proposed Cordoba House site.   I was also moved by his interview on WNYC's Brian Lehrer show, in which he made clear his opposition to violence in the name of religion and his desire to build bridges between his and other religions.  Support for precisely those causes motivated me to support Imam Rauf's project.

I am sad to say that I must retract at least part of statement of support for the Cordoba House project, having learned that Imam Rauf has been reported to be on the board of the Perdana Global Peace Organization, a group led by former Malaysian Prime Minister Tun Mahathir.  (Read here.)   This group, which purports to  be pacificist, devotes itself largely to campaigning against Israel in ways which betray deep bias on that subject.  The NY Post article that brought this to my attention focuses on Perdana's support for the Gaza flotilla, to which they were the largest donor.  While that alone presents issues, the group's fundamental bait and switch -- it's deception -- is more troubling.  It promotes hate in the name of promoting peace.  Understand that I have no objection to peace organizations focusing attention on Israel, so long as they are truthful about their reasons.  This group calls itself a campaign against all war, but acts very differently.  For Mahathir, this organization is part of a strategic campaign of anti-Semitism, via which he has blamed Jewish financiers for Malaysia's problems and charged his domestic political opponents with working on behalf of Jewish interests.  (Ian Baruma, writing in the New Yorker, had a great article on Mahathir which discusses this subject here.  A brief interview about it is here.)  Imam Rauf, who has roots in Malaysia, must know of Mahathir's troubling history (troubling for other reasons as well).  In addition to misusing peace groups such as Perdana to demonize Israel, Asia Times Online reports that he has similarly used conferences designed to promote Islamic culture to promote anti-Semitism (read here).

Freedom of religion is the paramount issue in determining the government's role, if any, with respect to the plans for Cordoba House.  Opponents of the project who advocate government interference must understand that it isn't the government's role in this country to determine what religious institutions can go where.  That idea is repugnant.    Moreover, Muslims are already fully part of the life of the community.  Muslims were among the victims of 9/11 and were among the first responders.   Muslims live and work in the area.  Those who oppose a Muslim presence near "Ground Zero" are too late.  It's been there all along.  Sadly, the tone of much of the opposition to Cordoba House has been hateful and designed to create fear.  (Read here for an example.)  Those who have leveled charges that this mosque could be the home of a terror cell or would somehow dishonor by its mere presence those who died on 9/11 betray a bias that calls both their motivation and their conclusions into question.  I feel much more comfortable honoring the memory of 9/11 by promoting peace.

That being said, I now have questions as to what Imam Rauf means when he says that he's moderate.  I hope that he addresses those questions by addressing his role in the Perdana group and his connection with Mahathir.  While I still strongly support the imam's constitutional right to build Cordoba House, I now need to be convinced that this will be a place where interfaith includes Jews like me who support Israel's right to live in peace with its neighbors.  I hope that Imam Rauf addresses these questions and that Cordoba House lives up to its hype.  I would like such a place to exist. But now I need to be convinced.

Sunday, June 6, 2010

Ron Paul supporters react to Helen Thomas comments

Helen Thomas has been roundly criticized for her statement (subsequently retracted) advocating that Jews be ethnically cleansed from Israel.  But this is not that case at the Daily Paul, the house organ of the the Ron Paul campaign. (Read here.) As you can read below, the Ron Paul supporters who commented on this subject at the Daily Paul expressed support for Thomas' comment that Israeli Jews "go back to Germany and Poland".  (NOTE: I shouldn't have to point out, but I do, that more than half of Israel's Jews were born in Israel, and most of the rest were born in North Africa or the Middle East).   The people who read the Daily Paul not only agreed with Thomas' bigoted comment,  claiming her as a part of "the liberty movement", they went on to up the ante and use it as an opportunity to promote the myth of Khazar descent, then segue directly into Holocaust denial.  They also took the opportunity to post links to several bigoted YouTube videos in the process.  Nice crowd at the Daily Paul.


This was

linked on the drudge report. The liberty movement is becoming more main stream every day.

Helen should have said: " go

Helen should have said: " go back to Khazaria!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLbFXE6kGC0

Ooooh! They would flip out

if she ever said that.
They don't really want anyone to know about that.
I'm sure that it's really getting their goats that the word is getting out.
All they can do is scream their ad-hominem BS, and hope not many people catch on.

.

For anyone who knows their history on how modern day Israel got to be modern day Israel...Helen is right.
If it weren't again due to the U S meddling via Harry Truman there would be no modern day Israel. It would still belong to the Palestinian people.
Instead the Palestinians have been pushed off their land and relegated to a small patch of earth controlled by the Israeli government who decide what they are allowed to have and what they are not allowed to have.
How many Americans would put up with this treatment?

The 6 was a planned #, part of prophecy

and they then determined million would be the right amount afterward. WW2 was not the first time it was attempted.
Be careful, if you are writing from certain EU countries, you can do felony prison time for what you just said. Did you know that? When they make discussing scientific evidence about the Holocaust a felony, you know they are SCARED about the truth getting out. So many lies were exposed after the Nuremberg trials, and Soviet controlled territory was the only thing that prevented the rest of the camps to be examined earlier and proven that the #'s were way exaggerated.
Oh why not, I know in my heart some of you are ready and can look beyond me and my antics, and I know the more learned of you knew before me. By the way, this video has Alex Jones and other names in it, but whomever posted the video must have put them there just for hits. Good research for anyone who hasn't seen the this, called "One Third of the Holocaust", and if you haven't seen enough evidence yet, I'm fairly sure you will after this. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9174186302325317179#

correct me if I am wrong but

correct me if I am wrong but didn't the 6 million number get floated around after WWI along with the notions of human skin lamps and soap made of human fat?
I started watching your video though I don't know if I have time to watch the whole thing.

Headline of the day

from the Patrick J. Buchanan -- Right from the Beginning blog:

"VIDEO: Zionists are Vile, Hypocrites, They Are Repugnant!"

The Buchanan blog post consists of Neturei Karta members speaking.  The text of the post, in its entirety, accurately sums up what they have to say, although *slightly* inflates their importance:

Top Jewish Rabbis condemn Israeli Flotilla Massacre – call upon all the world to unite against Israel.

Thursday, June 3, 2010

This is an outrage and must be stopped

Facebook | execution MK Haneen Zoubi

That's a link to a Facebook page promoting the killing of an Arab Knesset member who was on board the Gaza flotilla.  Do everyone a favor and report this to Facebook by clicking the "Report" button on the lower left margin of that Facebook page.  Choose "Direct call for violence" from the drop down and click the "Submit" button.  (I hope that, by the time you do this, that Facebook page will be gone, but try it just in case.)



(Hat tip: Joshua Holland at Alternet.)

Is BP committing environmental fraud on NYC streets?

Earlier today, I was walking into the local food co-op here in Brooklyn to buy some organic produce, and I was stopped by a college-aged guy holding a clipboard.  He told me that he represented a group (he didn't use the word "corporation") that offered a cleaner alternative source of electricity to that provided by Con Ed.  He gave me the hard-sell to sign up for the service, saying that I could only sign up via him, not on the internet.  I asked him for a brochure so I could think it over, but he told me that they didn't have any because they're not environmentally sound.  He held up some literature with a drawing of a windmill on it, which, of course, I didn't have time to read.  He assured me that his "group" would provide my family with electricity from clean sources, and that I could pay via my usual Con Ed bill.  He stressed that the only way I could sign up was with him, right there on the sidewalk.  What he neglected to tell me was that the "group" he works for, Green Mountain Energy, is 1/3 owned by BP.  (Read here.)

I wonder how many New York City environmentalists are being duped into signing up to have their electricity provided by BP as we speak.  They might be a bit upset if they knew, don't you think?  

UPDATE (June 4, 2010):

According to SiteMeter and Google Analytics, this blog post has gotten a large number of hits from ISPs in Austin and Plano, Texas.  Some of these ISPs are registered to Green Mountain Energy.   This group of readers all enter at this post, then look around at the rest of the blog to see what it's about.

Looks like I stepped on somebody's toes.  My guess is that the management of Green Mountain Energy would rather not have their connection to BP revealed.  Also, it's kind of interesting that Green Mountain Energy seems to have their corporate offices in Texas.  With a name like "Green Mountain", I thought they'd be in Vermont.  I guess that's what they wanted me to think.

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Biden: Israel right to stop Gaza flotilla from breaking blockade

from Haaretz:


"you can argue whether Israel should have dropped people onto that ship or not -- but the truth of the matter is, Israel has a right to know -- they're at war with Hamas -- has a right to know whether or not arms are being smuggled in.'"

Thomas Friedman on the flotilla

I have no problem with Turkey or humanitarian groups loudly criticizing Israel. But I have a big problem when people get so agitated by Israel's actions in Gaza but are unmoved by Syria's involvement in the murder of the prime minister of Lebanon, by the Iranian regime's killing of its own citizens demonstrating for the right to have their votes counted, by Muslim suicide bombers murdering nearly 100 Ahmadi Muslims in mosques in Pakistan on Friday and by pro-Hamas gunmen destroying a U.N.-sponsored summer camp in Gaza because it wouldn't force Islamic fundamentalism down the throats of children.

Headline of the day

From the Council of Conservative Citizens website: Jewish Owned Monsanto Contaminating Food?

UPDATE (June 3, 2010): 

The CCC website has changed the headline to something innocuous.  Don't they understand that people can still see the text of the original headline in the post's URL "http://cofcc.org/2010/06/jewish-owned-monsanto-contaminating-food/"?

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