Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, January 27, 2005

Now no one will mourn her

Notice how this story completely went under the radar:

IDF: Palestinian Child Was Killed by a Kassam Fragment

(IsraelNN.com) IDF officials report that the preliminary investigation into the death of a five-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza points to a Kassam rocket.

Military officials report the girl was killed when the rocket landed several hundred meters from her in the Dir el-Balah area of Gaza sending shrapnel flying in all directions. Officials explain the preliminary report indicates she was not killed by IDF gunfire at is being reported by PA sources.

George McGovern on Bombing Auschwitz

by Stephen J. Solarz and Rafael Medoff

(Rep. Solarz served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1975 to 1993. Dr. Medoff is director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, which focuses on issues related to America’s response to the Holocaust - www.WymanInstitute.org)

World leaders will gather at Auschwitz, site of the former Nazi death camp, on January 26 to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the Allies’ liberation of the camp. The event will help focus needed attention on the horrors of genocide, then and now. But it will be haunted by the knowledge in 1944, that Allied bomber pilots had Auschwitz within their gun sights, yet were never given the order to attack.

George McGovern was one of those pilots.

McGovern, the former U.S. Senator and 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, recently spoke on camera for the first time about his experiences as one of the American pilots who flew over Auschwitz. In a meeting with interviewers from Israel Television and the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, McGovern recalled his days as the pilot of a B-24 “Liberator” in the 455th Bomb Group, targeting German synthetic oil plants in occupied Poland--many of them within a few miles of the Auschwitz gas chambers.

After the Allies gained control of the Foggia air base in Italy in December 1943, Auschwitz was for the first time within striking distance of Allied planes. In June 1944, U.S. diplomats and Jewish leaders in Switzerland received a detailed report about Auschwitz, prepared by two escapees. They described the mass-murder facilities, and drew diagrams showing where the gas chambers and crematoria were located.

As a result, Jewish organizations repeatedly asked the Roosevelt administration to order the bombing of Auschwitz and the railroad lines leading to the camp. The War Department rejected the proposals as “impracticable,” claiming such raids would require “considerable diversion” of planes needed for the war effort. U.S. officials claimed to have conducted a “study” which found that bombing Auschwitz was not militarily feasible. But no evidence of the alleged study has ever been found.

Ironically, military resources were diverted for various other non-military reasons. Secretary of War Henry Stimson blocked the Air Force’s plan to bomb the Japanese city of Kyoto, because of its artistic treasures, and his deputy John McCloy --who rebuffed many of the requests to bomb Auschwitz-- diverted U.S. bombers from striking the German city of Rothenburg, because of its famous medieval architecture. General George Patton even diverted U.S. troops in order to rescue 150 Lipizzaner horses in Austria.

The administration’s “diversion” argument was just “a rationalization,” Senator McGovern said in the interview. How much of a “diversion” would it have been, when he and other U.S pilots were already flying over the area?

In the summer and fall of 1944, the Allies repeatedly bombed the oil factories near Auschwitz--at a time when hundreds of Jews were being gassed daily in the camp. On December 26, McGovern’s squadron dropped fifty tons of bombs on oil plants in Monowitz, an industrial section of Auschwitz, located less than five miles from the site where an estimated 1.6-million people were murdered during 1942-1944.

“There is no question we should have attempted ... to go after Auschwitz,” McGovern said in the interview. “There was a pretty good chance we could have blasted those rail lines off the face of the earth, which would have interrupted the flow of people to those death chambers, and we had a pretty good chance of knocking out those gas ovens.”

Even if there was a danger of accidentally harming some of the prisoners, “it was certainly worth the effort, despite all the risks,” McGovern said, because the prisoners were already “doomed to death” and an Allied bombing attack might have slowed down the mass murder process, thus saving many more lives.

Some years ago, in a supermarket in my old Congressional district in Brooklyn, I (Stephen Solarz) chanced to meet a woman who had a tattooed number on her arm. When she told me she had been in Auschwitz, I asked her what she thought of the argument that bombing the camp would have been wrong because prisoners would have been killed. She replied: “It would have been our finest hour, because we assumed we would all be killed anyway and this would at least have shown us that the world had not forgotten us and some of the Nazis would certainly have been killed as well.”

“Franklin Roosevelt was a great man and he was my political hero,” McGovern said. “But I think he made two great mistakes in World War Two.” One was the internment of Japanese-Americans; the other was the decision “not to go after Auschwitz ... God forgive us for that tragic miscalculation.”

One hopes the world leaders meeting at the Auschwitz site on January 26 will reflect not only upon the savagery of the Nazis, but also on the role of bystanders, then and now. As Senator McGovern emphasized, the Auschwitz experience should produce “a determination that never again will we fail to exercise the full capacity of our strength in that direction ... we should have gone all out [against Auschwitz], and we must never again permit genocide.”

Sharon is happy with Abbas, FM says cease-fire is a "ticking bomb"

I wouldn't mind this doubletalk and mixed signals if Israel had ever demonstrated the ability to play the game well. As it stands, the country just looks incompetent in both its desire for defense and its desire for peace. -EoZ

Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said Thursday that the cease-fire forged by Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbbas was a 'ticking bomb which will blow up in our faces.' Shalom made the comments hours after an interview with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was published in which Sharon said he is 'very satisfied' with the steps being taken by Abbas to end the violence.

On Wednesday, the Fatah Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades threatened to end the new, tenuous cease-fire, after undercover Border Police troops shot dead a Hamas activist and wounded two members of the Brigades in the West Bank city of Qalqilyah.

The killing came hours after Israeli officials hinted at a change in assassination policy, stating that if quiet obtained on the Palestinian side, Israel would respond with quiet as well.

But Shalom, speaking to Army Radio after talks with newly-confirmed U.S. Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice, said 'A cease-fire as such is not a goal.'

'Whoever thinks a halt is the right thing, is mistaken. A cease-fire is a ticking bomb which will blow up in our faces,' Shalom said.

'Therefore, you cannot take a cease-fire as a long-range goal, while they are are still preserving their infrastructure, the extremist organizations can rebuild them and bring about a situation in which at a time they choose they can carry out one terrorist attack or a series of terror attacks, which will bring down this whole process and send it to hell.'

US book exposes secret US military presence in Israel

This makes sense to me, both that the US military has a much higher presence in Israel than officially acknowledged and that the US tries to keep it secret. -EoZ

A new book published in the US, “Code Names,” by William M. Arkin, exposes information about a US military presence in Israel, including US Army bases at secret locations. It gives a long list of code names that describe milestones in strategic cooperation between Jerusalem and Washington.

The book’s revelations about ongoing cooperation between the US Armed Forces and the Israel Defense Forces impart a new dimension to the saying by late Republican Senator Jesse Helms that Israel is America’s aircraft carrier in the Middle East, and that this fact alone justifies the military aid that the US grants Israel every year.
...
The book lists US military bases in Israel. According to the book, these bases are called sites, and numbered Site 51, Site 53, Site 54, Site 55, and Site 56. The form indicates that other unspecified “sites” exist, but this is not explicitly stated.

Remembering the Wannsee Conference and the Liberation of Auschwitz

This article is posted as part of the January 27, 2005, BlogBurst (see list of participants on the right side) to remember the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, sixty years ago, on January 27, 1945.

On January 20th, we marked the anniversary of the 1942 Wannsee Conference. In the course of that Conference, the Nazi hierarchy formalized the plan to annihilate the Jewish people. Understanding the horrors of Auschwitz requires that one be aware of the premeditated mass-murder that was presented at Wannsee.

Highlighting these events now has become particularly important, even as the press reports that '45% of Britons have never heard of Auschwitz' (Jerusalem Post, December 2, 2004)

The Holocaust, symbolized by Auschwitz, the worst of the death camps, occurred in the wake of consistent, systematic, unrelenting anti-Jewish propaganda campaigns. As a result, the elimination of the Jews from German society was accepted as axiomatic, leaving open only two questions: when and how.

As Germany expanded its domination and occupation of Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, the Low Countries, Yugoslavia, Poland, parts of the USSR, Greece, Romania, Hungary, Italy and others countries, the way was open for Hitler to realize his well-publicized plan of destroying the Jewish people.

After experimentation, the use of Zyklon B on unsuspecting victim was adopted by the Nazis as the means of choice, and Auschwitz was selected as the main factory of death (more accurately, one should refer to the “Auschwitz-Birkenau complex”). The green light for mass annihilation was given at the Wannsee Conference, January 20, 1942.

The Wannsee Conference formalized "the final solution" - the plan to transport Europe's Jews to eastern labour and death camps. Ever efficient and bureaucratic, the Nazi kept a record of the meeting, which were discovered in 1947 in the files of the German Foreign Office. The record represents a summary made by Adolf Eichmann at the time, even though they are sometime referred to as "minutes".

Several of the Conference participants survived the war to be convicted at Nuremberg. One notorious participant, Adolf Eichmann, was tried and convicted in Jerusalem, and executed in 1962 in Ramlah prison.

The mass gassings of Europe's took place in Auschwitz between 1942 and the end of 1944, when the Nazis retreated before the advancing Red Army. Jews were transported to Auschwitz from all over Nazi-occupied or Nazi-dominated Europe and most were slaughtered in Auschwitz upon arrival, sometimes as many as 12,000 in one day. Some victims were selected for slave labour or “medical” experimentation before they were murdered or allowed to die. All were subject to brutal treatment.

Children, victims of Nazi "medical" experiments

In all, between three and four million people, mostly Jews, but also Poles and Red Army POWs, were slaughtered in Auschwitz alone (though some authors put the number at 1.3 million). Other death camps were located at Sobibor, Chelmno, Belzec (Belzek), Majdanek and Treblinka. Adding the toll of these and other camps, as well as the mass executions and the starvation im the Ghettos, six million Jews, men, women, the elderly and children lost their lives as a consequence of the Nazi atrocities.

Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army on 27 January 1945, sixty years ago, after most of the prisoners were forced into a Death March westwards. The Red Army found in Auschwitz about 7,600 survivors, but not all could be saved.

For a long time, the Allies were well aware of the mass murder, but deliberately refused to bomb the camp or the railways leading to it. Ironically, during the Polish uprising, the Allies had no hesitation in flying aid to Warsaw, sometimes flying right over Auschwitz.

There are troubling parallels between the systematic vilification of Jews before the Holocaust and the current vilification of the Jewish people and Israel. Suffice it to note the annual flood of anti-Israel resolutions at the UN; or the public opinion polls taken in Europe, which single out Israel as a danger to world peace; or the divestment campaigns being waged in the US against Israel; or the attempts to delegitimize Israel’s very existence. The complicity of the Allies in WW II is mirrored by the support the PLO has been receiving from Europe, China and Russia to this very day.

If remembering Auschwitz should teach us anything, it is that we must all support Israel and the Jewish people against the vilification and the complicity we are witnessing, knowing where it inevitably leads.

Where are the Orthodox "in-reach" programs?

I am still relatively new at the blogosphere stuff, and the purpose of this blog is more politics than religion, but I might as well break the rules occasionally.

As I have been surfing around the Jewish blogosphere I have been profoundly disturbed at the sheer number of blogs by those who are either formerly Orthodox, or, maybe worse, those who fake a frum lifestyle but don't believe anymore.

It is hard to extrapolate from these blogs how much of a problem this is in real life, after all, bloggers are a self-selected group and cannot be considered proportionally representative of the population as a whole. But it is clear that this is a problem, and a it is a failure of the frum community to deal with this.

As I see it, it appears to be a problem in the educational system. We have wonderful kiruv projects that are phenomenally successful, the Aishes and the Ohr Somayachs and the Gateways, that can talk about frumkeit on an intellectual level and that aren't afraid to answer the hard questions. A solid belief system is happy to defend itself.

But how many schools in the frum world are as open to basic questions as Aish is? How many employ decent school counselors that can be understanding and available for these sorts of issues? How many even acknowledge the problems in the frum community without marginalizing them or using glib answers like "if he did that, then he is not frum"?

The Orthodox community will always lose people just like we will always gain people. But it seems to me that there should be a priority placed on investing in our own. Otherwise we are just making ourselves and our children more vulnerable to becoming lost.

If a religious kid graduates from high school without the ability to articulately defend his beliefs and his practices, then we have failed him or her badly.

Hamas: Temporary Cease Fire if Israel Surrenders

OK, where have we heard this before...."pay our price and we won't hurt you"...sounds so familiar...Yes! That's it! It's what the Mafia says when they set up a protection racket!

Ending days of speculation about whether they had agreed to a cease-fire with Israel, Hamas and Islamic Jihad on Tuesday denied that they would halt terrorist attacks 'without making Israel pay a price.'

Hamas leader, Khaled Mashaal, the Syria-based head of the movement's political bureau, said there would be no discussion of a truce before the Palestinians test Israel's intentions and receive assurances from the international community that Israel would halt its attacks on the Palestinians.

He described the recent talks between Hamas officials in the Gaza Strip and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas as 'positive.'

'We agreed that the message that we should send to the international community is that the Palestinian resistance is not the problem, but it is Israel's aggression,' he said. 'We also agreed that our message to the Zionist enemy is that there would be no solution unless the occupation ends.'

Asked if the two sides had discussed ways of calming the situation, Mashaal told the London-based daily Al-Hayat: 'There is talk about calm, but a conditioned one. If the occupation meets our conditions, including ending the occupation and releasing all the prisoners, we will be prepared to consider a temporary truce.'

Belgian ambassador met Hizbollah leader

Let's see. There is a non-governmental organization operating out of Southern Lebanon with tons of weapons and millions of dollars, which bankrolls Palestinian terror cells, whose website says "Hezbollah's ideological ideals sees no legitimacy for the existence of 'Israel' ", which doesn't accept UN-defined borders between Israel and Lebanon, which has taught West Bank Palestinians the art of suicide bombing - and Belgium can't quite yet figure out that this is a terrorist organization.

The Foreign Ministry called in Belgium's ambassador Jean-Michel Veranneman de Watervliet on Monday to protest a meeting that his colleague, the Belgian ambassador to Lebanon, held last week with Hizbullah chief Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.

The meeting with Nasrallah took place at a time when Israel is pressing the EU to place Hizbullah on its list of terrorist organizations.

De Watervliet was called to the Foreign Ministry for a meeting with Ran Curiel, the ministry's deputy director-general and head of its Western Europe department, and Jeremy Issacharoff, deputy directory-general and head of the Division for Strategic Affairs, which deals with antiterrorism issues.

"We expressed our displeasure," Issacharoff said. "We believe these meetings accord the organization – which kills innocent civilians – a legitimacy it doesn't deserve."

Issacharoff said the timing of this meeting with Nasrallah was particularly inopportune, inasmuch as Hizbullah is trying to scuttle attempt to calm down the situation in the territories by trying to carry out terrorist actions in Israel, and trying to ignite the northern border.

"We explained Hizbullah's activities in the territories, and how they are bankrolling terror cells and passing on expertise," Issacharoff said.

According to the Foreign Ministry, Hizbullah is currently running some 50 terrorist cells within the Palestinian Authority.

In 2004, according to the ministry, Hizbullah transferred some $9 million to these cells, which carried out 60 attacks and killed 24 Israelis.

De Watervliet told The Jerusalem Post that he has already passed on Israel's protests to the Belgian Foreign Ministry. He said that he was unaware, before he was called to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, that such a meeting with Nasrallah took place.

"The Belgian government has always condemned terrorism," the ambassador said, adding that the Belgian government does not have a firm stand on whether Hizbullah should be added to the EU's list of terrorist organizations.

Don't vote for me!

The Jewish and Israeli Blog Award voting is now in (almost) full swing. Alas, I am so far under the radar (in either visibility or quality) that this blog didn't rate being nominated, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't check out the many excellent blogs (most with actual readers!) that are nominated for one of the various awards.

Cat power (from HonestReporting)

A Palestinian bulldozer tears down a shop on Gaza City's beach road

Hey, are those Caterpillar bulldozers the Palestinian Authority is using to destroy buildings in Gaza?

Wonder what the 'Boycott Caterpillar' folks -- in the US and the Arab world -- have to say about this...

Color me cynical

The UN finally acknowledging the Holocaust? Israel's Foreign Minister making a heartfelt speech there? Kofi Annan admitting that Jews were the primary victims? An Israeli charity recognized as UN-ECOSOC Advisor?

Is the UN moving away from its traditional anti-Israel, anti-semitic stance?

Sorry, but I don't buy it for a minute.

All that is happening is that the UN, like always, is practicing self-preservation above its charter. Israel has wisely decided that the UN was irrelevant, and the US was headed in that direction. The UN wants desperately to be relevant or else it has no reason to exist.

The UN's historic anti-semitism, coddling of terrorists and rabid anti-Zionism was becoming too extreme even for the EU. The EU at least would pay some lip service to Israel's rights; the UN would do no such thing in its one-sided resolutions.

Finally, during the aborted roadmap plan, the UN realized that Israel has no incentive to treat the UN with any respect whatsoever. But how can the UN re-assert itself as the leader in peacemaking in the world without the cooperation of the one democracy in the region?

This is what is behind the UN's newfound acceptance of Israeli issues and institutions. The UN needs a fig-leaf to cover its anti-Israel agenda and to impose its perverted vision of "peace" on Israel. In the coming months, the next time a UN resolution comes down against Israel for defending herself, just wait: Kofi Annan will proudly point to the UN track record of evenhandedness in regards to Jews and Israel and use that as proof that when it asks Israel to allow millions of Palestinian Arabs to move into Israel and go back to the 1947 borders, that it has no anti-Israel agenda whatsoever.

In other words, the UN's one-sidedness was so absurd that even it couldn't deny it anymore, so it hopes by pretending to address the issues then it can once again renew its calls for Israel's ultimate destruction without fear of appearing biased.

UPDATE: Check out Israpundit's take on this.

Official anti-semitism re-appears in Russia

Another good example showing that democracy does not mean freedom and it does not mean enlightenment. This is particularly egregious, though, and quite shocking.

Russian Lawmakers Targets Jewish Groups

MOSCOW (AP) - A group of nationalist Russian lawmakers called Monday for a sweeping investigation aimed at outlawing all Jewish organizations and punishing officials who support them, accusing Jews of fomenting ethnic hatred and saying they provoke anti-Semitism.

In a letter dated Jan. 13, about 20 members of the lower house of parliament, the State Duma, asked Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov to investigate their claims and to launch proceedings 'on the prohibition in our country of all religious and ethnic Jewish organizations as extremist.'

The letter, faxed in part to The Associated Press by the office of lawmaker Alexander Krutov, said, 'The negative assessments by Russian patriots of the qualities and actions against non-Jews that are typical of Jews correspond to the truth ... The statements and publications against Jews that have incriminated patriots are self-defense, which is not always stylistically correct but is justified in essence.'

The stunning call to ban all Jewish groups raised concerns of persistent anti-Semitism in Russia.

Jewish leaders have praised President Vladimir Putin's government for encouraging religious tolerance, but rights groups accuse the authorities of failing to prosecute the perpetrators of anti-Semitic and racial violence.

Russia's chief rabbi, Berel Lazar, said lawmakers were looking for support 'by playing the anti-Semitic card.'

The prosecutor general's office could not immediately be reached for comment on the letter, which the Interfax news agency said was signed by lawmakers from the nationalist Rodina and Liberal Democratic parties as well as the Communist Party.

Krutov, a Rodina member, is deputy chief of the Duma's Committee on Information Policy.

With Putin planning to join events this week commemorating the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp by Soviet troops, Russia's Holocaust Foundation head Alla Gerber said it was "horrible that as we're marking the 60th anniversary of this tragic and great day ... we can speak of the danger of fascism in the countries that defeated fascism."

While the Russian state itself is no longer anti-Semitic, there are "anti-Semitic campaigns that are led by all sorts of organizations," she said.

"The economic situation is ripe for this. An enemy is needed, and the enemy is well-known, traditional," Gerber said.

Echoing anti-Semitic tracts of the Czarist era, the letter's authors accuse Jews of working against the interests of the countries where they live and of monopolizing power worldwide. They say the United States "has become an instrument for achieving the global aims of Judaism."

"It is possible to say that the entire democratic world today is under the monetary and political control of international Judaism, which high-profile bankers are openly proud of," the letter says.

Along with outlawing Jewish organizations, the lawmakers call for the prosecution of "individuals responsible for providing these groups with state and municipal property, privileges and state financing."

Hamas in Gaza wants money to replace Hizbollah funds before ceasefire

(Hebrew-Maariv)

A senior IDF officer explained Sunday that the principal obstacle in cease-fire negotiations between Abu Mazen and the terror groups is the amount of money he is willing to pay them to replace the funds they currently receive from Hizballah to conduct attacks.
"There are thousands of activists who regularly receive funds from Hizballah which directs the attacks, and they don't want to find themselves unemployed," he said.
The officer emphasized that Hizballah, together with Iran and Syria, is acting to block Abu Mazen's attempts to achieve quiet, out of fear that the IDF will then be free to act in the north.

This shows again how important it is to stop the funding of terrorism, whether by lawsuits or by alternate fuels or by impounding assets. When the money disappears the ability to terrorize is severely limited.

BRITISH Muslims are to boycott this week’s commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz because they claim it is not racially inclusive and does not commemorate the victims of the Palestinian conflict.

Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, has written to Charles Clarke, the home secretary, saying the body will not attend the event unless it includes the “holocaust” of the Palestinian intifada.

This might be a good idea - the next time there is a rally demonizing Israel, other groups should mention the failed "Intifada" in Hama and the mass killings of Palestinians in Jordan and the expulsions of hundreds of thousands Palestinians from Kuwait.....

My letter to The Spectator

I am livid at this article, yet another that is written with the purpose of demonizing Jews and equating Israelis with Naziism. The fact that it is written by someone who is nominally Jewish (yet considers himself Anglican) just adds insult to injury.

It is nothing short of obscene to put the words "Jenin" in the same sentence as Nazi crematoria. For someone who brags about having read a couple of books on the Holocaust, it betrays not only profound ignorance but incredible offensiveness. To invoke Auschwitz as he sanctimoniously compares Israelis to those who were hell-bent on destroying Judaism itself is a breathtaking example of what real Jews would call chutzpah.

Mr. Lippman, you are no Jew except as an accident of birth. You know nothing about your religion, you know nothing about the feelings of those of your relatives who perished and you know nothing about modern Middle East history. This accident makes you no more qualified to lecture Israelis who are living in fear day after day than any other self-righteous European who uses fictional Israeli "crimes" like Jenin as a way to feel a little less guilty about the Holocaust.

I really am Jewish. My parents really are Holocaust survivors. Using your own peculiar circumstances where your parents denied their own heritage and you use that heritage for convenience to justify being able to write about your own hatred for Israel is an insult to real Jews, to real Holocaust survivors and to people who really care about their own heritage and religion.

Do us all a favor and don't try to invoke your own pretense of being "Jewish" as a reason to bash your co-religionists who want more than you can comprehend to live in peace and security. As it was, this little essay that was supposedly about hate showed far more hate than your Anglican mind can conceive. It was beneath contempt, and I am always amazed to see such drivel printed in major newspapers as if it means anything.

(Melanie Phillips' excellent reaction to the article can be found here. )