Harry’s Place

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.

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

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?

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?

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.

Would be a bit difficult since he’s been dead for a while.

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.

Yes, I think that’s called changing the subject.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

“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.

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.

Sorry, the “Tax Authority”. There is no Tax Ministry.

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.

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?

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.

The usual antisemitic rants from the turd ‘hasbara buster’.

Fabian, Hasbara is a physical department and building in Tel-Aviv, part of the Global Mossad Foundation for Intergalactic Jooish Domination.

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?

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/

And he thinks that I and all the Jewish bloggers work for the IHC!

….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&sectionid=351020105

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.

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.

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.

THB - you have an anti-Hasbara database? What does your psychiatrist think about that?

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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

:-)

And he thinks that I and all the Jewish bloggers work for the IHC!

You mean he’s WRONG???

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.

Here’s my source:

http://www.johnsack.com/an_eye_for_an_eye_corroboration.htm

Not Wikipedia, not David Irving.

“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.”

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.

“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.

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.

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?

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. :))

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.

Buster: a) the Interpol warrant; b) who is demonizing Iran; c) why the Toben thread doesn’t show you to be a gobby twat.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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 methodologic