What Are The Chances Of That Happening?
Reuters reports:
UNITED NATIONS, Sept 23 (Reuters) - Argentine President Cristina Fernandez asked Iran on Tuesday to hand over several citizens suspected of planning the deadly 1994 bombing of an Argentine Jewish center, so they can face a local trial.
“I would ask the Islamic Republic of Iran in accordance with international law … accept that Argentine justice can put on trial … those citizens who have been accused,” Fernandez told the U.N. General Assembly in New York.
Argentina has asked for the arrest of former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, seven other Iranians and a former Hezbollah guerrilla leader on charges they masterminded the blast, which killed 85 people.
Interpol, the international police agency, has issued arrest orders for six of the suspects. Interpol notices seek the arrest of a suspect so that they can be extradited. But they do not force a country to arrest a suspect.
Iran has repeatedly denied any involvement in the attack and blames the United States for trying to implicate the Islamic Republic.
Tehran has made an Interpol request for the arrest of five Argentines for making false charges against Iran and bribery.
The bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Argentina came two years after an explosion destroyed the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires and killed 29 people. Neither crime has been solved. (Reporting by Patrick Markey in New York)
via Adam Holland
Comments
| 4 October 2008, 11:46 pm |
It would be interesting to see what evidence they would file to justify the extradition. In some ways, it would be even more effective to publish it than to secure the actual extradition, which I’d say is rather less likely than a horde of pigs taking flight and doing loop-the-loops over the UN building.
| 5 October 2008, 12:31 am |
There was enough evidence to convince the General Assembly of Interpol to issue Red Notices for six of the accused.
http://www.interpol.int/public/ICPO/PressReleases/PR2007/PR200754.asp
| 5 October 2008, 1:59 am |
Rafsanjani? But he’s a moderate. We were assured so by Jack Straw, the BBC and all the quality newspapers.
What do you mean he’s accused of plotting the murder of innocent civilians on the soil of other countries?
| 5 October 2008, 2:13 am |
Killing 85 people is horrible.
Killing 1,580 is much worse. That’s the number of ethnic Germans killed by Solomon Morel, a Polish Jew, in a concentration camp set up in Poland immediately after World War II. While Morel was avenging the murder of most of his family, the Germans he murdered had had nothing to do with the genocide.
Morel fled to Israel shortly after the Polish justice began to prosecute him. He currently faces charges of genocide, and the evidence is so overwhelming that the General Assembly of Interpol has issued a Red Notice for him. Of course, Israel refuses to hand him over.
If the most moral country in the world doesn’t set the example, how can we expect Iran to extradite Rafsanjani?
| 5 October 2008, 2:45 am |
I think that Morel died about ten years ago. If memory serves me right he refused to serve in the Polish army in 1939 preferring instead to run a bandit gang that preyed on Polish civilians. I think that is why the Russians used him in 1945 as he was not connected to the Polish government in London and had his gang already to go.
Also if memory serves me right the camp that he operated was a part of the Auschwitz complex.
| 5 October 2008, 2:45 am |
Would be a bit difficult since he’s been dead for a while.
| 5 October 2008, 3:22 am |
interesting. On reading about how rafsanjani and others are implicated in the murder of 85 jews in Buenos Aires, “hasbara buster”s first instinct is to go and dredge up the case of a dead jew, obviously embittered beyond sanity by the holocaust and his family’s murder in it, to draw some sort of weird equivalence. One doubts, if it were an atrocity against brits, that he would drag up the memory of Bomber Harris — though one never can tell with such twisted individuals. One could delve into the psychological motivations of such an individual, or one could call him a blatant anti-semite, both of which would be valid. But i prefer to think of him as a miserable asshole of a human being.
| 5 October 2008, 3:33 am |
Sorry, you’re right, Morel died in 2007. God, it’s been a while since I last had to bring him up! I’ll have to update my anti-hasbaric data base.
Still, the essence of my argument holds. If the most moral country in the world didn’t extradite a certified mass killer, why would we expect Iran to extradite a person who may or may not be linked to the 1994 AMIA bombing? Especially if the extradition is requested by Argentina, a country that has one of the most corrupt justice systems in the world.
| 5 October 2008, 3:57 am |
Bottom line from THB: there’s absolutely no reason why anyone should be brought to justice for murdering 85 people in Buenos Aires in 1994.
| 5 October 2008, 4:18 am |
Not at all what I said.
Iran should extradite Rafsanjani & Co., as requested by Argentina; it would be the right thing to do, even in the knowledge that their chances of a fair trial in Argentina are slim. Just like when my house is burglarized and I go and report it to the police: it’s the right thing to do, even when I know that the Argentinian police actively collaborate with the burglars and will use the information I give them for further thefts.
I’m only saying it’s unreasonable to expect Iran to hand over suspects when other, more moral countries, like Israel, have refused to extradite people who were not just suspects, but certified mass killers.
| 5 October 2008, 4:22 am |
I love THB’s handle. The Hebrew word ‘hasbara” means explanation, and comes from the verb ‘le’hasbeer’, to explain. Israeli Hasbara is the Israeli government’s attempt, usually pretty pathetic - seeing as it is run by civil servants and is chronically underfunded - to explain Israel’s angle and viewpoint to the world.
The fact that someone sees fit to call himself a Hasbara Buster pleases me no end. They must be doing a less awful job of explaining things than we all assume.
| 5 October 2008, 4:52 am |
THB: Sorry, you’re right, Morel died in 2007. God, it’s been a while since I last had to bring him up! I’ll have to update my anti-hasbaric data base.
It’s a systematic campaign. Very impressive. Who is funding this, I wonder. They bring out the big guns to combat the villainous Hasbara.
| 5 October 2008, 4:53 am |
I would hope the trials of the Iranians if in Argentina, would be run better than the trials of the former generals from Argentina.
My friend Troutsky has a serious troll problem at his blog.
| 5 October 2008, 6:18 am |
It’s hard to follow your concept of logic, Buster. Your ironic description of Israel as “the most moral country in the world” is a reminder that you and those like you peddle the notion of Israel as the least moral country, the only one fit to be ostracised, quarantined and dismantled. So are you trying, in your own sad way, to say that no country in the world can be held to any standard because Israel is so irredeemably awful? Or is it that nothing can be demanded of Israel since its moral betters all practice what you accuse Israel of?
| 5 October 2008, 8:05 am |
“What Are The Chances Of That Happening?”
Zero. But at least, Cristina asked it.
This “Hasbara Buster”, who was before “Ibrahim Ibn Yussuf” is a moral degenerate.
| 5 October 2008, 8:07 am |
Actually, I can remember that Ibrahim Ibn Yussuf thought that “Hasbara” was a physical institution (like the Tax Ministry) of the State of Israel.
He probably thinks he is Don Quijote.
| 5 October 2008, 10:07 am |
For anyone that is interested, The Ministry of Justice, Office of the State Attorney, Department of International Affairs’ June 6, 2005 letter explaining why Israel did not extradite Solomon Morel to Poland can be found here
It makes for interesting reading and calls into question the allegations made by THB that Morel was responsible for the death of 1,580 Nazi collaborators held at Swietochlowice-Zgoda camp (which was a branch of Auschwitz during the war).
According to the letter, the number of casualties (as a result of a country wide typhoid epidemic) at the camp apparently ranged from 60-100 and not 1500 as claimed. Moreover, there were only 600 prisoners in the camp.
Finally, in the period immediately following the war, approximately 1000 Jews were killed by Polish citizens in Poland and many of those responsible for those crimes were never brought to justice by the Polish authorities.
| 5 October 2008, 10:37 am |
Hey Hasbara Buster, you still haven’t answered my request for clarification of your casualty figures for the Lebanon war. Why not? Have you realised it was bullshit?
| 5 October 2008, 10:53 am |
Killing 1,580 is much worse.
And killing 1,580,000 is so much more, right?
Right?
No, of course not. Funny that.
It’s always good to see what’s inspiring new HP posters. Zgoda was set up by the Soviets and UB, but guess who gets the blame. And also the blame for the period when he was not at the camp.
These were bloody times, what with the Jedwabne pogrom and all that. Even looking at the period post-liberation, Polish Jews weren’t safe. The Kielce pogrom was not isolated, and non-Jews were by no means safe from other non-Jews. But guess which we hear about.
| 5 October 2008, 10:54 am |
The usual antisemitic rants from the turd ‘hasbara buster’.
| 5 October 2008, 10:56 am |
Fabian, Hasbara is a physical department and building in Tel-Aviv, part of the Global Mossad Foundation for Intergalactic Jooish Domination.
| 5 October 2008, 10:59 am |
Israel, have refused to extradite people who were not just suspects, but certified mass killers
Certified, eh? Not just suspects, but tried and convicted by this certifiable antisemitic lunatic?
| 5 October 2008, 12:01 pm |
Nearly Oxfordian: no, really, the idiot believes it!
He once sent me this link that for him proves that “the Hasbara” is like “the Mossad”.
http://www.infoisrael.net/
| 5 October 2008, 12:02 pm |
And he thinks that I and all the Jewish bloggers work for the IHC!
| 5 October 2008, 12:39 pm |
….Even slimmer, considering that body’s categorical refusal to cooperate with the Islamic Republic’s on this case:
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=71217§ionid=351020105
| 5 October 2008, 1:30 pm |
How to be a Hasbara Buster
1. select text on David Irving’s website
2. [copy]
3. Click on HP comments box
4. [paste]
5. Buster, your dinner’s on the table!
6. Coming, mummy…
7. Go to 1.
| 5 October 2008, 2:29 pm |
Actually, Ibrahim Ibn Yussuf did not select it from Irving’s site, but from the Adelaide Holocaust revisionism institute site. He just rewrote it slightly.
| 5 October 2008, 2:32 pm |
Which is logical, since the guy is an ignoramus in everything related to Israel. It is just that because of all this nazi Toben issue, he saw the story of Solomon Morel on the Adelaide home page.
That is his methodology: pick up things from nazi sites and pass them as his contributions to debate.
| 5 October 2008, 3:26 pm |
THB - you have an anti-Hasbara database? What does your psychiatrist think about that?
| 5 October 2008, 3:47 pm |
The Ministry of Justice, Office of the State Attorney, Department of International Affairs’ June 6, 2005 letter explaining why Israel did not extradite Solomon Morel to Poland
But Interpol did issue a Red Notice for Morel.
Oh, I see. When Interpol issues Red Notices for 7 Iranians, it’s the international justice system at work and it must be respected. On the other hand, when Interpol issues a Red Notice for an Israeli, it’s just the antisemitic international community once again blaming — guess who? — that’s right: the Joos.
| 5 October 2008, 4:41 pm |
Buster, are you getting all of this from Wiki? I’d love to know what you think of Peter Serafinowicz’s grandfather. Definite conflict of interest there, what with your turning two threads now about attacks on Jews as Jews into a diversion.
| 5 October 2008, 4:44 pm |
So we can’t ask Iran to extradite suspects to Argentina, because Israel didn’t send Morel to Poland. Can’t fault that logic. And of course it therefore follows that the day Morel died, still in Israel, the entire apparatus of international extradition ground to a halt — all because of the unresolved case of that one man. We can tell this must be correct reasoning because it puts Israel where it belongs, at the root of everything wrong in the world.
Or maybe not. Why does your logic start with Morel, Buster? What’s special about him, other than that he was Jewish and Israeli? It’s perfectly plain that Morel couldn’t be extradited because all the German and Polish war criminals who came before him hadn’t been brought to justice. But of course they couldn’t be, could they? Because not every war criminal from the First World War had been tried, and that’s to be expected because there were still unresolved crimes from the American and French civil wars….
Buster, why do you bother to offer arguments that you yourself don’t believe?
| 5 October 2008, 4:59 pm |
How does THB know that Interpol issued a Red Notice for Morel? When I googled Solomon Morel + Interpol all I could find alluding to an interpol notice for Morel were disreputable sites like rense.com, a hack author named John Sack (whose work appears on David Irving’s site), Jew watch and the Holocaust revisionist site ihr. Not even the Wikipedia artiicle on Morel mentions an Interpol notice. Can THB provide a link to a reputable source demonstrating an Interpol notice for Morel?
| 5 October 2008, 5:33 pm |
I always wonder about trolls who give themselves the first name “The”. “The Hasbara Buster”, kind of like The Caped Crusader. Is that how you picture yourself, Buster, as some sort of masked superhero? The picture I get is of a man with his underwear outside his tights.
| 5 October 2008, 6:55 pm |
Allow me to repeat myself:
“Iran should extradite Rafsanjani & Co., as requested by Argentina; it would be the right thing to do, even in the knowledge that their chances of a fair trial in Argentina are slim.”
So, it’s clear from my words that I did NOT say that the 7 Iranians should not be extradited because Israel didn’t extradite Morel.
My only observation is: what’s so noteworthy about Iran refusing to extradite suspects? Countries do not normally extradite their own citizens to other countries. Chile didn’t extradite Pinochet to Argentina where he was sought for one particular crime. Argentina didn’t extradite Capt. Astiz to France where he had been convicted in absentia for the murder of two nuns. Israel didn’t extradite Morel to Poland. Israel didn’t extradite Michel Harari to Norway, where he was to stand trial for machine-gunning a Moroccan waiter.
So if we talk of Iran refusing to extradite its own citizens, we’re talking of a dog-bites-man situation, which is getting a lot of attention ONLY because the dog is Iranian.
Why single out Iran for demonization?
| 5 October 2008, 7:23 pm |
Why single out Iran for demonization?
Who’s singling Iran out for anything, let alone demonization? Now, about the questions made of you? Or are you going for the moron’s way out of repeated subject changes?
| 5 October 2008, 7:46 pm |
Who’s singling Iran out for anything, let alone demonization?
Yes, we are! Of all the countries that refuse to extradite their own citizens, this site is only concerned with the case of Iran. If that’s not singling out, what is?
Now, about the questions made of you? Or are you going for the moron’s way out of repeated subject changes?
The problem is that when you get too many questions asked, you don’t know where to begin.
I’ll answer this one from you:
Buster, are you getting all of this from Wiki? I’d love to know what you think of Peter Serafinowicz’s grandfather.
My source is John Sack, the author of An Eye for an Eye. Google him up.
As for Peter Serafinowicz’s grandfather, allow me to confess that I hadn’t the faintest idea of who P.S. was, any more than you have ever heard of Marcelo Tinelli, Dady Brieva or other Argentinian TV stars.
I have read a little about this man’s grandfather’s case and it looks like he was judged not mentally able to stand trial. That was not what was alleged in Morel’s case.
| 5 October 2008, 7:49 pm |
The picture I get is of a man with his underwear outside his tights.
The picture I get is of a 14-year old with acne, who is too shy to talk to girls (for good reason, mind you) so he visits Nazi websites and invents this fearless warrior who will rid the world of Jewish evil.
| 5 October 2008, 7:50 pm |
And of course it therefore follows that the day Morel died, still in Israel, the entire apparatus of international extradition ground to a halt — all because of the unresolved case of that one man
:-)
| 5 October 2008, 7:51 pm |
And he thinks that I and all the Jewish bloggers work for the IHC!
You mean he’s WRONG???
| 5 October 2008, 8:35 pm |
Of all the countries that refuse to extradite their own citizens, this site is only concerned with the case of Iran.
Just how thick are you? Have you read the Toben thread?
My source is John Sack, the author of An Eye for an Eye. Google him up.
Which, I suspect, is all you’ve done. Are you working only from names you found in Wiki?
As for Peter Serafinowicz’s grandfather, allow me to confess that I hadn’t the faintest idea of who P.S. was, any more than you have ever heard of Marcelo Tinelli, Dady Brieva or other Argentinian TV stars.
An absolutely pointless statement. Who was presuming omnipotent knowledge of all attempted extraditions of war-crimes suspects? That’s right. No-one.
I have read a little about this man’s grandfather’s case [...]
Don’t you think you should read a little more rather than make snap judgements after a brief google? Oh, right…
… now, about the Interpol warrant for Morel and what relevance an attack on a Jewish community centre has to Israel.
| 5 October 2008, 9:59 pm |
Here’s my source:
http://www.johnsack.com/an_eye_for_an_eye_corroboration.htm
Not Wikipedia, not David Irving.
| 5 October 2008, 10:39 pm |
“I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands,
organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same
food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases,
heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter
and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If
you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the
rest, we will resemble you in that.”
| 5 October 2008, 10:53 pm |
One page! One barely attributed page which is so basic that it doesn’t use frames! One page of a man who died four years ago and didn’t include information from later than 1998! You really are a brain dead twunk aren’t you?
Now, about the Interpol warrant.
| 6 October 2008, 12:16 am |
“Hasbara Buster” can’t you stay in the shithole with Mark Elf on his website of tools, losers, neo nazis and beheading lovers? That way you can all agree with one another in a great big Nazi circle jerk over exterminating all the Jews? Why can’t you do that? Are you one of those people who would rather be hated than ignored? And if you hate this posting - please please go to incinerateallthejews.com and see if you can get an international court to declare me a warcriminal. Please do.
| 6 October 2008, 4:26 am |
You’re starting to tap dance, Buster. “What’s so noteworthy about Iran refusing to extradite suspects?” was not your only observation. Your first words on the subject were “If the most moral country in the world doesn’t set the example, how can we expect Iran to extradite Rafsanjani?”: You took a problem between Argentina and Iran and made it an issue of Israel’s supposed immorality. It’s a poor sign when you’re reduced to selectively quoting yourself.
| 6 October 2008, 5:46 am |
Not so, Paul M. Both quotes you cite are variations of the same line of reasoning. The idea of which is that extradition requests are usually turned down by morally sound countries, such as Israel (which, in fact, is the most moral one in the world) or Chile.
Should, then, Iran be expected to set a new standard of compliance with international law by extraditing its own citizens to a corrupt country where fair trials are exceptional? If not, why should we be wringing our hands at the likelihood of Iran behaving like every other country in the world?
| 6 October 2008, 6:20 am |
i’m not sure I agree that Israel is THE most moral country in the world, but I would group it in the top 10 or 20, that’s for sure. Glad you’re seeing the light, THB. :))
| 6 October 2008, 6:33 am |
Buster, give up the tap dancing. It’s a waste of your energy, my time and everyone’s intelligence. You’ve made yourself well enough known here that you fool no-one with word games.
| 6 October 2008, 11:39 am |
Buster: a) the Interpol warrant; b) who is demonizing Iran; c) why the Toben thread doesn’t show you to be a gobby twat.
| 6 October 2008, 2:23 pm |
Alec:
a) I already gave you my source; it’s as satisfactory as the source given by Pfeiffer in the post about the Budapest theater, don’t you believe?
b) no one is demonizing Iran; I was just mocking the argument that Israel is demonized (and I don’t really believe you didn’t grasp it);
c) the Toben thread was not about “how bad Britain is that it doesn’t extradite Toben;” it was about whether Holocaust denial should be criminalized, and whether a country should extradite people to stand trial for actions it does not recognize as crimes.
| 6 October 2008, 4:39 pm |
THB comes up with quite the source John Sacks
: keynote speaker for of Holocaust Revisionists, friend and admirer of neonazis Jurgen Graf, David Irving and Ernst Zundel and critic and denouncer of Deborah Lipstadt.
| 6 October 2008, 4:49 pm |
The dubious methodology and historiography
of John Sacks’ ‘An Eye for an Eye’
Unfortunately, Jon Wiener’s demolition of Sacks’ ‘An Eye for an Eye’ in The Nation isn’t available on-line.
| 6 October 2008, 5:53 pm |
Buster, given that you’ve thoroughly poo-pooed Karl’s source, I bet you thought you were saying something else.
No-one in this thread is demonizing Iran. Some are demonizing Israel, though.
You ain’t good at satire.
The Toben thread was about me and David, and others, defending a man we believe to be a virulent antisemite from deportation to Germany for Holocaust denial. A point which contradicts somewhat your position that this site and I are reflexive supporters of Israel and Jewish exceptionalism.
Now, about the Interpol warrant…
| 6 October 2008, 7:32 pm |
You ain’t good at satire.
Others beg to differ. In fact, on other blogs my satire has gotten ravishing reviews. But bias (theirs, not yours, of course) may be playing a role.
Buster, given that you’ve thoroughly poo-pooed Karl’s source
I must apologize. It was, again, satirizing the fact that Karl didn’t give any source at all, while I at least gave one. Over at Jews Sans Frontières they would have grasped it, but I can understand that more intelligent and reasonable people like you don’t.
Now, about the Interpol warrant
Sorry, haven’t gotten the photocopy yet. My Hizbullah contacts are working on it, though.
| 6 October 2008, 7:49 pm |
So, is that code for I’m a gobby twat who can’t even find his ‘answers’ via Google? You stated that Morel had been issued with an arrest warrant. Why did you do that if the corroboration was not forthcoming?
Non gobby twats are waiting.
| 6 October 2008, 8:50 pm |
Alec,
Come away from the troll. He’s not the kind that can be chased away by showing up his arguments; Buster is the kind that presses on, pretending his real point was different than what he plainly said, or that he was joking really (sorry, “mocking” — so much more knowing and superior), or that he’s only doing what someone else has done (as if that would be justification). Somewhere right now, on someone else’s blog, he’s claiming that we all hate him because he beat us in debate (for illustration see the end of this thread: http://www.hurryupharry.org/2008/10/01/how-the-ucu-reminded-me-that-i-am-a-zionist/#comments)
He’s the kind of troll who gets his jollies by prancing and capering long after both his arguments and the idea that he’s serious have been shot down. Leave him be.
| 6 October 2008, 9:02 pm |
So, is that code for I’m a gobby twat who can’t even find his ‘answers’ via Google? You stated that Morel had been issued with an arrest warrant. Why did you do that if the corroboration was not forthcoming?
I provided you with a link that plainly says that Morel was sought by Interpol. That’s my corroboration.
If you believe the source to be lying, report it to CAMERA and they’ll debunk it. But up to now, as far as I know, no one has called into question the assertion. And it’s been there for quite a few years now.
| 6 October 2008, 9:09 pm |
Paul, I’m enjoying this.
No, Buster. You did not provide a link which demonstrated the particular warrant you claimed had been issued against Morel had been issued. You merely provided an unattributed piece of secondary reporting which is as much worth as the following:
http://www.busterisagobbytwat.com
So, go on, answer the question. Or are you a gobby twat?
| 6 October 2008, 10:43 pm |
a tip about Jewish women: they LOVE foreskins. It’s not because you’re not circumcized that they dump you; it’s not because of your looks; it’s not because of your intelligence. It’s because you’re a BORE.
| 6 October 2008, 10:45 pm |
False Witness
By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
An Eye For An Eye: The Untold Story
of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945
by John Sack
(Basic Books, 252 pp., $23)
How might a book of “history” from a tabloid publishing house be made? It
would have a suggestive title that conjures up, and appeals to, old
prejudices: An Eye For An Eye, say, since it echoes an anti-Semitic cliche
that contrasts the wrathful Jewish God to the merciful Christian God. It would
have an explanatory subtitle that promises a shock, the revelation of
something suppressed, the story of a crime or some other malfeasance on a
grand scale: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945 would
do very well.
The jacket copy of the book would offer a teaser of developments so astounding
that no browser could pass it up. “The worst thing that happened to some
Holocaust survivors was that they became like Nazis” would do the trick. It
would have a sensational set of stories inside, riddled with exaggerations and
misportrayals, and fundamentally misleading in their overall effect, but based
on a nugget or two of truth. It would have an ostentatiously presented pseudo-
scholarly apparatus of dense and bewildering endnotes, calculated to persuade
most readers of the seriousness of the enterprise before them, and of the
weight of the material behind the book’s indictments. Fifty pages of notes,
say, and fifteen pages listing sources, appended to 160 pages of text. To
protect the author against the (truthful) charge of misrepresentation, our
tabloid publisher’s product would have to include, tucked away in the
voluminous endnotes, scarcely noticeable disclaimers that contain some of the
truth that the book’s narrative systematically and colossally exaggerates and
distorts. It would adorn itself, on its back cover, with a testimonial from a
reputable historian (for example, Antony Polonsky) from a reputable university
(for example, Brandeis University): “I am satisfied that the author is a
serious researcher…. The book is in fact a major contribution to our
understanding…. I certainly recommend publication.” It would undoubtedly
contain pronouncements from the author to the effect that his book is heroic,
that it would have amounted to moral turpitude on his part to have sat on the
unpleasant truths that he alone, the humble servant of the truth, has
indefatigably unearthed. And finally it would have a lurid picture on its
cover, a cleverly designed hook for a calumnious book dressed up as history.
The only one of all these twisting and vulgarizing elements that is missing
from John Sack’s book is the picture on the cover. All of the examples cited
above are from his book, which strings together facts and pseudo-facts about
individual Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust with the effect of creating
a sometimes subtle and sometimes not so subtle indictment of Jews in general.
The book fails disgracefully in much of what it does present–misshapen
stories and wild innuendo–and in all of what it does not present, namely a
serious consideration of the context and the meaning of the events that it
describes, and the analytical and moral concepts that it employs. Oh, and the
tabloid publisher in question is Basic Books.
Sack’s book tells us something about the sufferings of Germans during the
months that followed the end of World War ii. This suffering needs to be
acknowledged. After the war, in the eastern parts of Germany that were
occupied by Poland and eventually ceded to it, Poles set up internment camps
for tens of thousands of Germans suspected of having committed crimes during
the war. They also expelled several million Germans from these territories, so
that the land could be settled by Poles and become securely Polish. Drawing on
the testimony of perpetrators, victims and bystanders, including more than 300
hours of interviews, Sack describes the horrible treatment that Germans
suffered, the murders of Germans and the typhus epidemics that claimed
thousands of German lives. Again, the torments were great, and they deserve to
be documented.
It is also true that some of the people serving in these postwar Polish
institutions were Jews, and that some of these Jews committed crimes against
Germans. The commander of the internment camp in Gleiwitz, Lola Potok
Ackerfeld, on whom Sack concentrates a large part of his attention, was a 24-
year-old Jewish survivor of Auschwitz. In Sack’s account, which is based, he
says, on extensive interviews with her and with those who knew her and served
with her, the agony and the anger of this young woman led her to beat Germans
and to allow her underlings to brutalize them further. Some of the treatment
that Jews meted out to Germans, as described in the book, was blood-curdling
and ought to have been severely punished. Some Jews, in sum, became murderers.
If Sack had told the story of German suffering, and of the small number of
Jews who participated in its infliction, and also the story of how those Jews
eventually decided to stop their participation, if he had told this story
faithfully and without exaggeration or embellishment, then he would have
produced a historical monograph that would have contributed, in a minor but
real way, to our understanding of those terrible years. But a monograph would
have been little noticed and little read. And so instead we have this book.
There is nothing sober or learned about it. In no sense does its empirical
basis justify its packaging; or the recent segment on “60 Minutes” about one
of the book’s characters, Solomon Morel, the former commander of the camp at
Schwientochlowitz, which allowed Sack to air some of his more outrageous
claims; or its sensational portrait of Jews dominating Poland after the war
and employing their allegedly vast power in a conspiratorial way to take
revenge for their own recent sufferings by torturing and murdering innocent
German men, women and children.
Sack calls this the “untold story of Jewish revenge against Germans in 1945.”
“Jewish” wrath, not the wrath of some individual Jews, is the central agent of
his story. In Sack’s overheated and stylized world, it was Jews who were
greatly responsible for the crimes committed against these Germans, most of
whom were innocent civilians. It was Jewish survivors of Auschwitz and other
Nazi camps who formed the backbone of the Polish Office of State Security, the
institution likened by Sack to the Gestapo, which masterminded and implemented
this “Holocaust” of Germans. (Sack takes the word approvingly from an expelled
woman from Gleiwitz.) Burning with hatred for things German, these Holocaust
survivors, to quote the astounding first words of the book’s jacket, “became
like Nazis.”
One of the many telling sections of Sack’s book concerns the camp at Lamsdorf.
He introduces the camp by telling us that its commander lost his parents and
his siblings during the war and was himself a survivor of Auschwitz, where he
contracted tuberculosis. According to Sack, this camp was set up as part of a
program to remove Germans living in the surrounding region, which was to be
resettled by Poles. The guards in Lamsdorf murdered in the most brutal ways,
according to Sack, about 6,500 of the 8,000 Germans admitted into the camp.
One of the book’s most vivid and horrific descriptions applies to this camp.
In Sack’s account, the commander of the camp ordered the German women from the
town of Gruben to dig up the bodies of hundreds of Poles whom the s.s. had
killed during the war:
The women did, and they started to suffer nausea as the bodies, black as the
stuff in a gutter, appeared. The faces were rotten, the flesh was glue, but
the guards–who had often seemed psychopathic, making a German woman drink
urine, drink blood and eat a man’s excrement, inserting an oily five-mark bill
in a woman’s vagina, putting a match to it–shouted at the women of Gruben,
“Lie down with them!” “Make love with them!” and, with their rifles, pushed on
the backs of the women’s heads until their eyes, noses and mouths were deep in
the Polish faces’ slime. The women who clamped their lips couldn’t scream, and
the women who screamed had to taste something vile. Spitting, retching, the
women at last stood up, the wet tendrils still on their chins, fingers,
clothes, the wet seeping into the fibers, the stink like a mist around them as
they marched back to Lamsdorf. There were no showers there, and the corpses
had all had typhus, apparently, and sixty-four women of Gruben died.
This is as gruesome a story as one will find in the annals of the Holocaust.
There is one problem with it, and with Sack’s larger account of the camp: its
protagonists were not Jewish.
Sack’s narrative implies, about this camp and about many other places, that
the deeds he discusses are to be inscribed in a ledger of “Jewish” revenge. By
telling us that the commander was an Auschwitz survivor, Sack assures that
most readers will assume that he was Jewish. By not discussing the identities
of the guards of this camp (except to say suggestively that they had “Polish-
sounding names”), he can rely on the reader to make the same false inference
about them, especially in light of his frequent emphasis in the preceding
pages on the grievous crimes of so many putatively Jewish guards. It is only
in the notes, eighty pages away, at the end of an unnumbered paragraph that
consists of a half-page list of meaningless names of witnesses with archival
notations, that the unusually diligent reader will discover the identity of
the commander at Lamsdorf: he was a Polish Catholic. And it is only in the
middle of the previous paragraph of the endnotes that Sack himself admits that
“I don’t know if any guards at Lamsdorf were Jews.” There is no reason to
believe, in other words, that they were Jews. And there is no reason,
therefore, to incorporate this story into this book, at least without a
careful identification of the culprits and a consequent justification of this
camp’s inclusion in a book on “Jewish” revenge.
This technique, employed again and again, of suggesting in the main text that
certain crimes were committed by Jews and burying a disclaimer in the notes,
is just one of the many devices that are repeatedly used to paint a wildly out
of focus and exaggerated portrait of “Jewish revenge.” It should be noted that
whenever a Jew was involved in some brutality, no matter how irrelevant to the
deed this single aspect of his identity (and frequently Sack knows nothing
more of the person than that he was a Jew, nothing of his life or motives),
Sack leaps to identify him as a “Jewish guard,” or simply as a “Jew.” Yet he
repeatedly leaves vague the identity of non-Jewish actors. Sack’s account of
the Lamsdorf camp should itself suffice to warrant the conclusion that his
book aims more at myth than at history, more at defamation than at truth.
An Eye For An Eye contains one demonstrably misleading episode after another,
written in the spirit of the one just discussed. Indeed, virtually every
significant example of Sack’s “Jewish revenge” deserves to be subjected to the
severest sort of criticism. I cannot accomplish that in this space. Instead I
must make do with an inventory of the major techniques of misrepresentation
that Sack uses to create the image of “Jewish revenge.”
There is, for a start, Sack’s tricky way of identifying every Jew involved in
a beating or killing and highlighting his or her behavior, which cumulatively
suggests that Jews were more prominent, and more numerously involved, and more
central to the terrible deeds, than they were. Then there is the imputation of
Jewishness to actors who were not Jews, the example of Lamsdorf being only
among the most blatant. Describing the initial arrival of Germans at the camp
under Lola’s command, a scene in which the guards abuse the Germans, the
narrative tells us that there were fifty guards, “some Jews, some not” and
mentions only three members of the camp’s staff individually (Lola, her
adjutant and one guard). These three were all Jews, giving the impression of a
heavy Jewish representation; but the endnotes inform us that of the fifty
guards, Sack knows the religion of eight, only three of whom were Jews. (This
camp, misrepresented in this way, is the major focus of Sack’s tale.)
Then there is Sack’s skill in making the least relevant into the most
relevant. For surely the Jewishness of most of these Jews is not pertinent to
the description of their deeds. Some Jews–and many more non-Jews–worked in
the Polish internment camps, prisons and security forces. With the exception
of a very few individuals, this book presents no evidence whatsoever that
these Jews were moved by motives different from those of non-Jews, or that
there was anything “Jewish” about their behavior. Neither Sack nor any
reputable historian speaks of the brutalities perpetrated on Germans by
Catholic Poles or Orthodox Russians incensed by the German killings of priests
as “Catholic,” “Orthodox” or “Christian” revenge. Jews were Polish democrats,
Polish Socialists and Polish Communists, just as non-Jews were. And non-Jews
harbored a hatred for Germans as a consequence of German crimes, just as Jews
did. The harping on a single aspect of a person’s identity as an explanation
of his behavior, the reducing of complicated thoughts and deeds to a single
racial or ethnic or religious essence, is a classic method of bigotry. This
method has characterized anti-Semitic literature through the ages.
Excising deeds from their context is another of Sack’s favorite procedures.
Only toward the end of the narrative does the reader come across information
indicating that the horrible deeds imputed to Jews were done under the
auspices of the Polish government and its agencies, which set up the camps,
ordered the internments and coordinated the brutal policies. The discussion of
the book’s Jewish actors is not accompanied by an explicit discussion of the
deeds of non-Jewish actors. Since direct comparisons between the quantity and
the quality of the crimes of Jews and of non-Jews are not offered, the reader
gets no inkling that the horrific behavior of the few Jews described was not
at all exceptional in the context of what non-Jewish Poles or, for that
matter, Czechs and Russians, did to Germans in the aftermath of the war.
And Sack’s outright omission or virtual concealment of relevant numbers must
also not go unmentioned. You would think that such a book would provide a
breakdown of how many Jews were involved, what percentage they were of the
population of perpetrators, how significant they were in the crimes against
the Germans. Not Sack’s book. And I understand why not. To have provided such
information would have undermined the entire thrust of the book. In an endnote
to the preface, with virtually no evidence, Sack tells us: “Hundreds of Jews
joined the organization that ran the prisons and camps for German civilians in
Poland and Poland-administered Germany.” Later in the notes, based on highly
impressionistic estimates with no documentary evidence, we are instructed that
the Jewish percentage of certain selected city police forces was high.
Hundreds of Jews. Sounds like a lot. Yet we learn still elsewhere in the text
that, according to Sack’s generous figures, there were 1,255 internment camps
for Germans, that the Poles incarcerated 200,000 Germans in them and expelled
10 million. How many non-Jews were involved? The book fails to tell us. The
obvious conclusion from these figures spread haphazardly around the book–a
conclusion that the book neglects to mention–is that Jews formed a trivial
percentage of those carrying out the Polish government’s policies against
Germans, and that these policies were in no sense Jewish policies, the
Jewishness of these Jews being utterly irrelevant to them.
Of all of Sack’s methodological failings, his insouciance about hard evidence
is perhaps the worst. In the last few years a large historiographical
literature has been published, in Polish and in English, on precisely these
subjects, but Sack ignores it, relying for his information on accounts, some
of them demonstrably false, of first- and second-hand witnesses. (Needless to
say, the book comes with no serious investigation of the methodological
problems posed by such testimony.) But the facts are that Jews did not run the
Polish Office of State Security and Jews did not engineer the deeds that Sack
recounts. Sack’s assertion to the contrary, and his claim that 75 percent of
those in the Office of State Security in Silesia were Jews (which he and Basic
Books have repeated in an awkward and defensive “News Release”), are sheer
inventions.
For we know how many Jews were in the Office of State Security. According to a
tabulation of November 21, 1945, by Boleslaw Bierut, then President of Poland,
the Office of State Security had 25,600 members, of whom 438 were Jews. 438!
Not Sack’s 75 percent, but 1.7 percent of its members were Jewish. There were
sixty-seven Jews among the 500 people in leading positions. Moreover, the
Polish historiographical literature shows that those Jews who were in the
Office of State Security did not act as Jews but as Polish Communists (many of
them had scarcely any attachment to their Jewishness), and did not act in a
manner different from the 25,000 non-Jewish Polish Security officers. Finally,
the Office of State Security was not ultimately run by Jewish Poles or non-
Jewish Poles. It was run by the Soviets.
These are the most salient facts about the extent of Jewish involvement and
responsibility for whatever privations Germans in Poland actually suffered;
but none of these facts is to be found anywhere in Sack’s book. Instead he
proceeds with an indictment by means of false comparisons. Thus the accounts
of the deeds attributed to Jews are repeatedly accompanied by irrelevant or
unilluminating references to the crimes of Nazis. At one point the book
compares all of the German deaths in 1,255 Polish internment camps to the
number of Jews who died in Buchenwald alone, to the number who died in Bergen-
Belsen alone, and who died in each of a thousand other places, saying that the
number of German dead was greater. The comparison is perverse, but it suits
Sack’s purpose of suggesting that Jews were like Nazis. (He does acknowledge
that more Jews died in Auschwitz.)
Sack is not beneath resorting to outright fictionalization. Again and again,
he presents highly choreographed scenes of “Jewish” crimes, though the scenes
did not happen as they are related. In the endnotes, one finds the following
sentences and variants of them: “Some incidents [described in the narrative to
have occurred] at the Germans’ arrival may have taken place later on,” and
“some of the conversation at the interrogation [as presented in the narrative]
may have happened at later interrogations” and “I have `reconstructed’ the
conversation,” and so on. How on earth could a serious publisher put out a
book on such a sensitive subject, that makes such startling and damaging
historical claims, when important sections of it are obviously fictionalized?
No wonder Sack’s story of Jewish revenge has gone “untold.”
Sack’s penchant for invention provides one of the “historical” and rhetorical
linchpins of the entire book. Stalin is presented by Sack as a friend–indeed,
a sort of soulmate–of the Jews. He is described in this book twice as the
“Good Fairy” of the Jews, who knew that the loyal Jews would serve him
faithfully: “Stalin’s fondness for Jews wasn’t strange to the Jews, who
assumed that he wanted the Germans pursued by the hounds of hell: themselves.”
Thus Stalin decides as early as 1943 to place the Jews in charge of Poland, so
that they can do his bidding. (On page 53, the book makes a passing mention of
some Catholic Poles, though Sack says no more about them.) This, we are
supposed to believe, is how Jews became so powerful in Poland after the war
and, by implication, why we should lay the crimes at their feet. Of course,
the book presents not a shred of evidence to support this fantasy. Sack gives
not an inkling of Stalin’s well-known and rather spectacular anti-Semitism, of
his destruction of Jewish life in the Soviet Union, of his persecution of
Jews, of his plan to deport the Jews to Siberia. Instead he enlists Stalin in
a myth of Jewish conspiracy of the kind that the paranoid Stalin himself liked
to imagine.
Imust end this abridged inventory of methodological miscreancy here, except to
note that Sack also employs a host of minor methods of misrepresenting the
truth and misleading the reader. German words shouted from the mouths of
brutal Jewish interrogators are presented without translation, as in cheap
fiction, as if the content does not matter, because the sound of the language
is itself supposed to be sufficiently suggestive of an analogy between Jews
and Nazis; and the narrative is frequently ambiguous on the authorship of
words and thoughts. Thus, after recounting a brutal interrogation, which
concludes with the German being dragged away from Lola by her underlings, and
with Lola hearing his screams for mercy, Sack writes, without quotation marks
and with no explanation of whose words these are or where these words
originate, “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew passions? If you wrong the
Jews, will they not take revenge?” Is this Sack or Lola? Many readers will not
know. In fact, this passage is Sack at his crudest, a purposely imprecise use
of Shylock’s great speech.
There are many forms of intellectual tawdriness. The ones I have listed so far
have to do with historiographical matters, with the scruples of historical
research. Not least in a time of “Holocaust revisionism,” a violation of these
scruples is worth exposing; and John Sack’s and Basic Books’s violation of
these scruples is a scandal. (As is Sack’s grotesque insistence on presenting
the book as an expression of his own Jewishness, even invoking the Torah’s
injunction to “bear honest witness.”) But the scandal is greater still. For
Sack is as sloppy morally as he is methodologically. The moral categories upon
which he bases his analysis are seriously flawed, and the most flawed one of
them all is the central concept of his book, I mean the concept of “Jewish
revenge.”
Imagine that 6 million Americans–or, speaking proportionately, tens of
millions of Americans today–were systematically slaughtered. Imagine that a
few hundred Americans lived in another country under a foreign government, a
government to which they gave their allegiance, and that these few hundred
were members of that government’s institutions. Imagine that those
institutions employed tens of thousands of people who killed thousands of
people from the country that had initially slaughtered the millions of
Americans, and also killed many people of the country now exacting
retribution. Imagine that the remaining scores of millions of Americans took
absolutely no part in the deeds, and did not even know about them. Would we
call this “American revenge”? Would a reputable publisher publish the “untold
story” of “American revenge”?
But this is what has been done with Jews. Not surprisingly, there is a
disclaimer deep in Sack’s endnotes, in what appears to be a random location, a
place to which no reader would think of turning for information of such
importance, and it reads: “They hadn’t mobilized all the Jews and the Jewish
state: there was no Jewish state [emphasis in original].” In the same
paragraph Sack also acknowledges that there are vast differences between what
these Jews did to Germans and what the Germans did to Jews, since the Jews did
not plan to exterminate the entire German people “and, in the end, didn’t kill
even 2 percent of what the Germans did.” So, even if Sack here wrongly
attributes all of the German deaths to the Jews, he does seem to know that the
Holocaust was incommensurate with the subsequent atrocities. Why, then, does
he not state all of these points clearly and prominently in the body of his
text, to prevent the grievous misunderstandings? But then he might have robbed
himself of a sensation.
And even in this disclaimer, Sack makes matters worse. He suggests, the
numbers of dead aside, that the Jews were in some ways worse than the Germans,
because they acted willfully, while most Germans in his view did not act
willfully, since they were obeying orders from the Nazi leadership. This
misunderstands a great deal. For the routine brutality of so many German
killers, and the zeal with which they killed, can be described only as
willful. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that the Jews whom Sack is
indicting were any less working under orders. Sack’s whitewashing of the
responsibility of the German perpetrators is extraordinary. And the Jews, Sack
astonishingly continues, were worse also because they, unlike the Germans,
knew that what they were doing was wrong.
In another note Sack gives himself away still more unequivocally. After
writing that German prisoners of war were beaten in American camps, he
discusses (not surprisingly) only a single instance, namely, that of an
American Army interrogator who was Jewish (and whom he refers to,
characteristically, as “the Jew”) kicking an s.s. general. Discussing what
might be motivating the interrogator to kick the s.s man (he delivered only
one kick, which Sack obscures), Sack writes, with absolutely no evidence:
“More likely, the Jew was doing some heavy-handed status-seeking, as though he
were saying to [George] Orwell [who was present, and wrote about the incident
in the Tribune in November 1945], the s.s general and particularly himself,
`I’m doing what the s.s. did, so I’m as good as the s.s.’” With this, Sack
unwittingly reveals one of his primary methods, namely the projection of his
own fanciful thinking into the mind of “the Jew.” Jews, Sack imagines, want to
emulate the s.s.!
Sack does acknowledge that the harsh treatment of these Germans by these Jews
was not without “provocation.” Still, he cannot be bothered to explore
seriously the sources and the meanings of revenge, or the differences between
the behavior of a few Jews “taking revenge” (however criminally) and the
systematic, willful, unprovoked and unimaginably cruel slaughter of European
Jewry by tens of thousands of Germans. The reality of Jewish “revenge” against
Germans after the war is never actually discussed in this book. For the
reality is that there was virtually none. It is astounding how little the
survivors of the Holocaust, and those who identified with them, sought to take
vengeance upon Germans. Indeed, the absence of the avenging impulse was almost
abnormal.
Jews in Western occupation forces, soldiers and administrators alike,
inflicted no punishment upon Germans. The many survivors of the Holocaust who
ended up in Germany after the war did not exact retribution on their former
tormentors. And not least for this reason, thousands of German mass murderers,
who manned the mobile killing squads and the concentration camps, have lived
during the postwar period unmolested in Germany and elsewhere. Jews have not
tried to kill them. The only significant “revenge” (and one could hardly call
it that) was symbolic. Wagner was banned from Israeli national radio; many
individual Jews (though not the state of Israel) decided not to buy German
goods or to travel to Germany; and Jews have accepted reparations from the
government of the Federal Republic and called for the trials of German mass
murderers.
The full story of the Jewish response to Germans after the war, in sum, would
have shown that the deeds described in Sack’s book (those deeds, that is, that
were actually committed by Jews) are only a small footnote to the story. When
one strips away the book’s sixty pages that precede the period of “revenge”
and the fifteen self-congratulatory pages that tell us of its author’s
tireless detective work, one is left with a thin eighty pages of narrative of
the sort that I have exposed here. The book is only a congeries of anecdotes–
many of them dubious and farfetched, and also uncheckable, since they are
based almost completely on personal interviews–about the deeds of merely a
handful of people. (It is important to note that neither Lola, the book’s main
protagonist, nor her guards, however much they beat prisoners, ever killed.
The deaths in Lola’s camp, like most of the German deaths, and the deaths of
Germans that occurred in American internment camps after the war, were due to
outbreaks of typhus and other diseases.)
Some untold story! How satisfying Sack’s analogy between Jews and Nazis will
be to anti-Semites, neo-Nazis and the deniers of the Holocaust, here and in
Germany. What a relief from guilt, what an opportunity for spurious
vindication and wild hatred, his book will give them. I have no personal
knowledge of John Sack. I know nothing of his motives. I am not saying that he
is an anti-Semite. For a student of anti-Semitism, however, the methods of
John Sack’s book ring a bell. Or more precisely, an alarm.
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, assistant professor of government and social studies
at Harvard University, is completing a book on the perpetrators of the
Holocaust.
| 6 October 2008, 10:52 pm |
I know that Jewish women love foreskins because
a) I am one (inside)
b) I am so sexually experienced and fulfilled that I spend my life obsessing on Jews and Israel and maintaining my ‘Hasbara’ database.
| 6 October 2008, 11:01 pm |
You’re really not helping your case of not being a rather creepy antisemite, Buster.
Daniel, I *think* you’re arguing that Sacks was of the Nicholson Baker mould, yes?
| 6 October 2008, 11:51 pm |
Baker was at least openly a writer of fiction.
| 7 October 2008, 12:28 am |
Not any more, Daniel!
| 7 October 2008, 1:25 am |
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, assistant professor of government and social studies
at Harvard University, is completing a book on the perpetrators of the
Holocaust.
In fact he completed it years ago, and its childish thesis was completely dismissed by scholars all over the world. As was his following book, which got the following review:
While some of these books (Zucotti, Phayer, Kertzer) are the works of historians and contain at times relatively nuanced presentations of some of the materials they study, Goldhagen consistently eschews all historical ambiguities, seeing the chaotic maelstrom of events that was World War II in comforting (for him) blacks and whites, with “the Catholic Church” (which is object of his unremitting indictment) painted heavily and solely in black.
I’m not sure an anti-Catholic bigot is the appropriate person to respond to Sacks.
Raul Hilberg has said of this clown: “[He] was totally wrong about everything. Totally wrong. Exceptionally wrong.” See:
| 7 October 2008, 2:17 am |
Slagging off goldhagen might make you feel better, but you might be more persuasive if you actually addressed goldhagen’s points. This is a mistake so many people on all sides of an issue make. they think they can kill the issue by slagging off the writer. Even if the writer is the biggest moron the world has ever known, if he makes a good point, it’s a good point, and all the slagging off will never change that. So hasbara hunter, address goldhagen’s points, we all know you don’t like him.
| 7 October 2008, 2:21 am |
i once had a run-in with a woman on alternet.org much like this hasbara bird. Her argument was that hitler himself was kind to jews, had all these jewish friends, and it was his henchmen who did all those terrible things while hitler himself did his best to save the jews he liked. she really believed this garbage and wouldn’t listen to reason. this gal here reminds me of her a lot. my response to her was “i’d like to see you make that speech in person to an audience of holocaust survivors and see what happens.” she actually gave me her phone number to continue the “debate,” but I declined, as the stench from that online discussion was quite enough.
| 7 October 2008, 2:24 am |
and finally, how can you “mock” the argument that Israel is demonized when all you do is demonize it?
| 7 October 2008, 4:17 am |
For instance, look at the sentence:
(It is important to note that neither Lola, the book’s main
protagonist, nor her guards, however much they beat prisoners, ever killed. The deaths in Lola’s camp, like most of the German deaths, and the deaths of Germans that occurred in American internment camps after the war, were due to outbreaks of typhus and other diseases.)
This stinks of genocide denial.
Anne Frank died from typhus. A genocide is no less a genocide when instead of putting people into gas chambers you starve them and let them die from disease. By dismissing all those deaths that were not caused by direct murder, Goldhagen is dismissing about three quarters of all the victims of the Holocaust, who died from disease and overwork rather than from exposure to Zyklon B.
Really a piece of crap of a review.
| 7 October 2008, 7:12 am |
that’s one point addressed (rather poorly). there are lots of others. care to address them?
| 7 October 2008, 7:26 am |
well at least Goldhagen was right about one thing in the review:
“How satisfying Sack’s analogy between Jews and Nazis will
be to anti-Semites, neo-Nazis and the deniers of the Holocaust, here and in Germany.”
He did however forget “in South America too” for HasbaraBuster.
| 7 October 2008, 8:11 am |
Who apart from neonazis, nazi and holocaust revisionist sympathisers would take seriously the notion that Nazis and Nazi collaborators at post WW2 American internment camps were victims of an American orchestrated genocide?
Alberto, aka THB, and clearly a holocaust revisionist sympathiser, deliberately hides the fact that after WW2 there was a typhoid epidemic all over Poland not just in the internment camps, which is a far cry from the conditions inside Nazi concentration and death camps where disease epidemics which murdered Holocaust victims never affected any populations outside the camps.
And from where did Alberto get the statistic asserting that 3/4 of the victims of the Holocaust died of disease and overwork and the other 1/4 died from exposure to Zyklon B?
Alberto is really quite a piece of work. I wish him all the best success ingratiating himself with Holocaust Revisionist luminaries. Maybe if he’s really nice they’ll let him lick their soiled leather boots clean at their next soiree.
| 7 October 2008, 10:05 am |
If only Auschwitz had had a 25% mortality rate, as did Zgoda. I expect Rastalion is going to appear and combat the neo-Nazis and Deniers who are minimizing the murder of Jews for being Jews. Any time now.
| 7 October 2008, 2:14 pm |
“Really a piece of crap of a review.”
A hit, a very palpable hit!
| 7 October 2008, 5:31 pm |
From what I have heard, it seems that Alberto is not very far from the boots, even when standing up.
| 7 October 2008, 7:44 pm |
deliberately hides the fact that after WW2 there was a typhoid epidemic all over Poland not just in the internment camps
That typhoid epidemic didn’t kill Lola, though.
And from where did Alberto get the statistic asserting that 3/4 of the victims of the Holocaust died of disease and overwork and the other 1/4 died from exposure to Zyklon B?
We should ask Alberto.
As for mine, I’ve been doing some research. About 16% died in Auschwitz from Zyklon B. Some 25% died in other extermination camps, not from Zyklon B, but from other killing means. Erm, it looks I was wrong, and overwork and disease may have accounted for some 40% of all deaths.
Still, those who died in labor camps from overwork and disease were also part of the Holocaust, weren’t they?
Is there any breakdown of Holocaust victims by death cause available on the web?
From what I have heard, it seems that Alberto is not very far from the boots, even when standing up.
Not content with forcing Apartheid on the Palestinians, you now expose yourself as an anti-short-guy bigot, eh? That’s what happens when you start down the slippery slope of hate.
| 7 October 2008, 8:26 pm |
that’s rich, the holocaust denier who gets his research from the “institute for historical review” or “zundelsite” or wherever talking about the slippery slope of hate. you slid down that slope long ago, you’re just too stupid and/or blinded to see it. as i said at the beginning of this thread, simply a miserable asshole of a human being.
| 7 October 2008, 9:53 pm |
vildechaye
I second that conclusion. The guy is talking about a major historical event and doesn’t even appear to have read the source literature and clearly doesn’t know what he is talking about.
| 7 October 2008, 10:00 pm |
the holocaust denier who gets his research from the “institute for historical review” or “zundelsite” or wherever
I must be the first Holocaust denier who states that six million Jews died in the Holocaust, and that of these six million at least 41% were directly murdered, and many others were intentionally overworked and underfed to death by the Nazis. But of course, you must charge me with something.
Next thing, you’ll claim I organized a pogrom or two in this or that city. But before you start down the slippery slope, I warn you:
Please refrain –REFRAIN– from claiming that I decreed and organized the Final Solution.
I was just following orders.
| 7 October 2008, 11:15 pm |
As for mine, I’ve been doing some research. About 16% died in Auschwitz from Zyklon B. Some 25% died in other extermination camps, not from Zyklon B, but from other killing means. Erm, it looks I was wrong, and overwork and disease may have accounted for some 40% of all deaths.
And what percentage does holocaust revisionism sympathiser THB’s “source” mention were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen and their collaborators that THB doesn’t even bother mentioning undoubtedly because most of their victims weren’t murdered either by exposure to Zyklon B, overwork or disease but by gunshot and firing squads (like my grandparents and aunt)?
| 8 October 2008, 12:06 am |
16% (ZyklonB) + 25% (other methods in death camps) + 40% (overwork, malnourishment & desease) = 81% of all Holocaust victims.
The remaining 19% died in other ways, for example firing squads.
These are my estimates, but other estimates will be welcome.
Is there any online breakdown of Holocaust victims by death cause?
| 8 October 2008, 12:19 am |
Well, Wiki does have one.
Hilberg estimates 2.9 M deaths in camps (no breakdown between labor and extermination camps), 1.5 M in shootings and .8 M in ghettos.
I was wrong on all counts.
| 8 October 2008, 3:24 am |
I was wrong on all counts.
-tell us something we don’t know.
| 8 October 2008, 10:37 am |
Á propos of nothing in particular, my Welsh Wlpan teacher this year is Argentinian. She learnt Welsh in Patagonia. English is only her 2nd language. When she started speaking, I thought, Have I come to the Spanish class by mistake?
Pretty cool. Anyhow, the legacy of Welsh colonialism. And Jewish, since the Wlpan teaching methodology is based on the Israeli Ulpan.


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