Judea Pearl Denounces ‘Zionophobic Thuggery’ in Receiving Algemeiner’s ‘Warrior for Truth’ Award From Sharon Stone
Speaking at the inaugural Algemeiner West Coast gala last week, Professor Judea Pearl, father of slain journalist Daniel Pearl, said his late son had become an icon of “three cherished values — truth, humanity and Jewishness.”
“And these are precisely three values that have been unprecedentedly attacked in our millennium,” Judea Pearl noted, as he accepted the “Warrior for Truth” award on behalf of his son in front of a crowd of nearly 300 people at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles.
Those same values, Pearl pointed out, were “championed” by The Algemeiner.
“It is a paper that would not hesitate to expose fake news,” he said. “It is a paper that views the existence of Israel as a human rights issue, not as a capricious luxury of white aristocrats. And it is a paper that has given voice to Jewish students on BDS-occupied universities, and has echoed their demands for protection from Zionophobic thuggery.”
Pearl was introduced by actress Sharon Stone, who was honored with the “Warrior for Truth” award at The Algemeiner’s annual New York gala last September.
“While I haven’t had the tragedy in my life that the Pearl family has had, I do understand that without faith we do not know how to move through these dark times,” Stone said. “It is in these times that we have to rely on the integrity of what we really believe, and that we believe in the God that is within ourselves, the God that is love within, the greater love, the love that guides us.”
The Problem With Ocasio-Cortez’s Shameful Ignorance Of History
In April 1944, two Slovakian Jews named Alfred Weczler and Rudolf Vrba escaped from Auschwitz, and provided one of the first eyewitness accounts of the horrors of the European concentration camps. Both men had been rounded up with a group of their countrymen and sent to the Birkenau section of the camp in the spring of 1941, where they were immediately put to work as slave labor.
This was before the German regime had properly streamlined and industrialized efforts to destroy European Jewry. In the early days of the camp, any man incapable of labor was immediately executed. Those who survived were sent to do the grueling work of construction.
The men began their work at sunrise, and except for a half-hour break at noon, when the prisoners were fed cabbage and turnip soup, they worked until 6 p.m. For dinner, the men were given an ounce of moldy bread made from “ersatz flour and sawdust.” Lice and fleas tortured their emaciated bodies as they slept on wooden boards. “Rats were so bold they gnawed at the toes and fingers of sleepers and stole the crumbs they had left in their pockets,” wrote Robert Conot in his book “Justice at Nuremberg.”
A third of the prisoners died every week. If a worker was hurt, he was allotted three days of recovery time. If they failed to heal, the infirmary—where Dr. Mengele had already begun his nefarious work on women and children—would inject a fatal dose of phenol directly into their hearts.
Of the 2,722 Slovakian Jews who had been rounded up with Weczler and Vrba, only 159 survived to the summer of 1942. Those who died had been dumped, with another approximately 105,000 bodies, into shallow trenches around Birkenau. “As they decomposed” Conot noted, “the earth rose like a yeasty mixture of dough and bubbled up nauseating gases, which spread for miles.”
I think of that last sentence whenever some modern-day know-nothing begins comparing the United States to a proto-Nazi state. Maybe it’s because their analogies are embarrassingly ignorant and intellectually lazy, or maybe it’s because people like Ocasio-Cortez, perhaps unknowingly, diminish the suffering of millions of dead. Or maybe it’s because my own grandfather was taken as slave labor in Austria.
Auschwitz Museum Reaches Out To MSNBC’s Chris Hayes After He Defends Ocasio-Cortez
The official Twitter account for Auschwitz Museum advised MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes to follow it on the platform after Hayes tried to argue that concentration camps were historically different from death camps.
“[Chris Hayes,] Please consider following @AuschwitzMuseum where everyday we commemorate and educate about the tragic human history of [Auschwitz],” Auschwitz Museum tweeted on Tuesday.
The comment was seemingly in response to an exchange between Hayes and Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney that occurred earlier in the day. After Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed that the U.S. government is “running concentration camps on our southern border” to hold illegal immigrants, Cheney advised the freshman congresswoman to “spend just a few minutes learning some actual history.”
“[Six] million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust,” Cheney tweeted at Ocasio-Cortez. “You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.”
“If you spend a few minutes learning some actual history, you will find out that concentration camps are different from death camps and have a history that both predates and extends far past the Nazis,” Hayes replied to Cheney.
Hayes, however, seemed to dismiss that Ocasio-Cortez was specifically referring to the concentrations camps under Nazi occupation. While on an instagram live stream, she specifically said that she wants “to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that ‘Never Again’ means something.”
“Never Again” is the phrase that Jews all over the world use to make sure that the extermination between 1939 and 1945 never happens again.
The Holocaust Memorial Museum considers Auschwitz to be a concentration camp & says that of the 1.3 million people deported there ~1.1 million died, including one million Jews.
— Jerry Dunleavy (@JerryDunleavy) June 18, 2019
Does the @HolocaustMuseum need to “learn some actual history”, @chrislhayes?https://t.co/qnfJvebC4L https://t.co/XVLA3rjLdW