Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, January 28, 2005

The UN's Cynical Use of "Never Again"

by Anne Bayefsky

On Monday, the United Nations marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp with a day-long special session of the U.N. General Assembly, followed by the opening of an exhibition. Throughout the event, the words "never again" were repeated many times. But what exactly did they mean to U.N. members and officials?

Here is the cynical response: They meant that the secretary-general has been seriously weakened by the Oil-for-Food scandal and ongoing congressional and criminal investigations, as well as the sexual abuse of refugees in the Congo by U.N. peacekeepers and the mishandling of sexual-harassment charges in-house. A secretary-general seeking to serve out his remaining two years in office finds throwing something toward the Jews, in the form of commemorating a 60-year-old catastrophe, a relatively inexpensive means of redemption.

The scope of the exercise was strictly controlled. The Europeans agreed to promote the special session on the condition that there were no resolutions and no final declaration — in other words no lasting statement of purpose or resolve. They were not prepared to do battle with Arab and Muslim states over texts or outcomes. Not a single substantive U.N. document was distributed. The ground rules for the special sessions of the General Assembly for the previous decade were completely different — this one would be "commemorative" only.

One hundred thirty-eight U.N. members agreed with the proposition to hold the special session, and one more decided to speak at the actual event. Of the remaining 50 U.N. members, half were from the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

U.N. member states delivered 41 speeches over the course of the day. Only five of those speeches mentioned Israel. Even the speeches of the United States, the European Union, Canada, and Australia failed to refer to Israel. Nobel-laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Weisel, who spoke at the outset, mentioned Israel once; citing a number of examples of steps that the allies might have taken, he added "if Britain had allowed more Jews to return to Palestine, now Israel, their ancestral land...it would have prevented or reduced the scope of the tragedy." Weisel also called for condemnation and prosecution of suicide-terrorism as a crime against humanity (without mentioning the context).

An evening reception brought hundreds of Jews to the public entrance of the U.N. where an exhibit containing photographs and artwork from Yad Vashem was unveiled. Walking through it, one comes across the word "Israel" on one occasion, in the last sentence, which reads: "Most of the Holocaust survivors immigrated to the state of Israel after its establishment in 1945 following a resolution of the United Nations." When the exhibit was opened, the assembled crowd sang Hatikva, the Israeli national anthem — although this breach of U.N. protocol is said to have been approved on the grounds that the song was for all victims of the Holocaust.

The rules of the game were articulated by U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz while speaking on behalf of the United States: "We have agreed today to set aside contemporary political issues, in order to reflect on those events of 60 years ago in a spirit of unanimity." And except for an indirect comment by Jordan and a direct reference to Palestinians by Venezuela during the day's speeches, the game plan was followed.

The upshot? The United Nations looks better in the eyes of many. The secretary-general improved his image. Israel, the perpetual U.N.-loser, was queen-for-a-day.

But the nagging question is, where does this leave "never again"?

Widening the lens, we notice that last month the U.N. adopted 22 resolutions condemning the state of Israel, and four country-specific resolutions criticizing the human-rights records of the other 190 U.N. member states. Also in December the public entrance of the U.N. sported the annual solidarity with the Palestinian people exhibit, featuring a display about Palestinian humiliation at having to bare midriffs at Israeli checkpoints. (No mention was made of the purpose of the checkpoints or the Israelis who have died from suicide belts on Palestinians who circumvent them.) On exactly the same day that the secretary-general announced the holding of the commemorative session, January 11, 2005, he also pushed forward the U.N. plan to create a register of the Palestinian victims of Israel's non-violent security fence. (There are no plans to create a register of Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorism.) In March the U.N. will begin its annual session of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, at which Israel will be the only U.N. member state not allowed to participate in full because U.N. states continue to prevent it from gaining equal membership in a regional group. The U.N. remains without a definition of terrorism, never having transformed the names of Palestinian terrorists from abstract entities into the targets of specific U.N. condemnation or consequences of any kind. And any day now we can expect the secretary-general to continue his pattern of denouncing Israel's lawful exercise of self-defense as "extrajudicial killing" or as a morally reprehensible contribution to "a cycle of violence." In other words, U.N. demonization of Israel and the green light to the killers of Israelis that such demonization portends will not skip a beat. This is the face of modern anti-Semitism.

Jews everywhere are indebted to the willingness and ability of Israelis to live and breathe self-determination. When contemporary political issues are set aside, and an affirmation of the centrality of the Jewish state's well-being to the Jewish people's well-being is not key to a commemoration of the Holocaust, "never again" is an empty phrase. Worse, situated in a place where a U.N. General Assembly resolution said Zionism was racism until 1991 and the 2001 U.N. Durban Declaration delivers the same message, it plays into the hands of those who would separate Jews from Israel for no other reason than to divide and conquer.

The speaker of the Italian senate, Marcello Pera, was the only non-Israeli participant who was prepared to stand against the wheeling and dealing in the backrooms, telling the General Assembly that the anti-Semitism of "today...feeds on...insidious distinctions...made between Israel and the Jewish state, Israel and its governments, Zionism and Semitism. Or...when the struggle for life led by...Israelis is labelled 'state terrorism.'"

The less-cynical response to our original question — about the meaning of "never again"? Some Holocaust survivors such as Nesse Godin and Congressman Tom Lantos were able to speak directly — during the unofficial lunchtime break organized by Bnai Brith, in a room far from the General Assembly. Some people listened. Some people heard. The pictures of Auschwitz are still in the front hall of the U.N. for a little while longer. A blow was struck against Holocaust deniers. And for one day, the democratic state of Israel was not the most reviled member of the U.N. (less than half of whose members can be called "free" according to Freedom House).

When all was said and done, however, the U.N. got a lot more than it gave. Improving the image of the U.N. and its secretary-general could prove more costly than Israelis have bargained.

Canada sued over Israel passport policy

Why exactly is West Jerusalem considered not Israel but the rest of the areas between the 1947 partition line and the Green Line is?

The Canadian government is being sued for listing Jerusalem as the birthplace of a Toronto teenager instead of Israel, the Toronto Star said Thursday.

Eliyahu Yehoshua Veffer, 17, was born in West Jerusalem, and is angry with the Canadian government's stance on the embattled region.

There are 28 Jerusalems in the world, Veffer said. I'm from the one in Israel. I want the government to recognize that.

Under current passport regulations, Canadians born in Jerusalem cannot list Israel as their place of birth because of its ongoing classification as a disputed territory. That policy has been in effect since Israel was formed in 1948.

Veffer's lawyer, David Matas, also the legal counsel for B'nai Brith Canada, filed the initial application Wednesday for the review in a Winnipeg federal court, where Matas lives.

My client wants his country of birth on his passport, Matas said. Everybody else in the world can have it, but the government is denying him the right to do it. It's discriminatory.

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.