Gaza's ruling Islamist movement Hamas has resisted suggestions that Palestinian children should be taught about the Holocaust in UN-run schools.
The head of its education committee in Gaza, Abdul Rahman el-Jamal, told the BBC that the Holocaust was a "big lie".
He said that to teach it would be to "grant a big favour" to Israel, which has been fighting Hamas for years.
The UN, which runs most Gazan schools, recently asked local groups whether the Holocaust should be taught.
It uses local textbooks and, in Gaza, that means using material from neighbouring Egypt, the BBC's Tim Franks reports.
But over the past seven years the UN has added its own coursework about human rights.
Mr Jamal told the BBC that the UN should, instead, teach about the Naqba, the term Palestinians use to describe the establishment of the state of Israel and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees.
A spokesman for the UN said that no final decision on this year's curriculum had yet been made. Some 200,000 children are taught in schools run through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
During the Holocaust, Nazi Germany murdered some six million Jews.
However, the event's significance is often disputed in parts of the Middle East where Israel is seen as the enemy and the Holocaust is seen as a tool used by Israel to justify its actions.
‘Simon Wiesenthal’s reputation is built on sand. He was a liar and a bad one at that. From the end of the war to the end of his life, he would lie repeatedly about his supposed hunt for Eichmann as well as his other Nazi-hunting exploits.
“Wiesenthal would also concoct outrageous stories about his war years and make false claims about his academic career.”
With these words, the historian Guy Walters begins his examination of the career of the world’s most famous Nazi hunter. It forms one of the main themes of his new book, Hunting Evil, a history of the Nazi war criminals who escaped and the effort to bring them to justice. And it is impossible to read it without feeling deeply uncomfortable.
There are two reasons for this, and only one of them is to do with Wiesenthal. The first reason for discomfort is simply that Walters lays bare, in what is a fine, very readable but nonetheless important, book about how the victors simply let criminals, thousands upon thousands of terrible murderers, walk away after the war.
A couple of years ago, at the end of a drama documentary on the Wannsee conference, the sentences handed out to the conspirators were rolled on the screen just before the credits. I remember watching aghast as I read that one after another of these monsters appeared to have gone back to Bavaria or wherever and lived a quiet life as a greengrocer. Walters explains how this happened.
To start with, the Allies simply had what they regarded as more important things to do. They didn’t want to spend any time or money catching Nazis. Walters prints a tragi-comic correspondence between a set of war crimes investigators and their superiors in which headquarters declined a request for an English-German dictionary, saying that it was out of print and wouldn’t be available for a year.
The victors were also fighting each other. Nazis were recruited to help fight the Soviets, and thus protected from justice. The Allies were fearful, too, that legal proceedings would expose their own soldiers to liability.
They failed to comprehend the scale of the Nazi crime until the units were disbanded and it was too late. Into the vacuum stepped privateers. And Wiesenthal was the most famous. He did a wonderful thing. He kept the issue in the public eye, kept the memories alive, kept the pressure on.
This made him a secular saint. Until now, criticising Wiesenthal has been the occupation only of cranks and antisemites. Walters is most definitely neither of those. But has he erred by providing them with ammunition? Should Jews welcome his book, or shun it? Very firmly the former, in my view.
Walters’s documentary evidence on Wiesenthal’s inconsistencies and lies is impeccable. He shows how the Nazi hunter’s accounts of his wartime experiences are contradictory and implausible. He demonstrates that he had no role, contrary to his own assertion, in the capture of Adolf Eichmann. He pitilessly dissects Wiesenthal’s overblown claims about the numbers he brought to justice, suggesting it was not much more than a handful.
When you read Hunting Evil, you know its author is telling the truth. And, above all — above everything — the truth matters. The truth however painful, the truth however embarrassing, the truth wherever it takes you. Jews can never be hurt by the truth about the Holocaust and must never fear it, never run away from it.
Ben Barkow, the director of the Wiener Library, the institution that my grandfather established to document the truth, has lent his voice to that of Walters, agreeing that a revaluation of Wiesenthal’s contribution was in order. Barkow argues that a nuanced view is possible. That accepting that Wiesenthal was a showman and a braggart and, yes, even a liar, can live alongside acknowledging the contribution he made.
Surely he is right. But even if he is not, Walters has done a service to history and therefore to Jews.
Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds [sic, sic] has been hyped as World War II action movie-cum-sadistic gorefest. In reality, it is a self-indulgent snorefest. I thought I would need a gin and tonic before I went in, but it turns out what I needed was a cup of coffee. Yes, there is some gore and sadism, but frankly I found myself hoping for more of it. Anything, really, to relieve the sheer boredom.
This is Quentin Tarantino’s worst movie, and that is saying a lot, given how bad Kill Bill
, vol. I is. Pulp Fiction was Tarantino’s Citizen Kane, and it has been The Magnificent Ambersons ever since. If you find this review entertaining, let me assure you that it is far more entertaining than the movie itself. Nothing here should be interpreted as encouragement for you to waste your time and money on this preposterous and dull film.
Inglourious Basterds
is about a team of American terrorists, consisting of seven Jews led by a gentile, Aldo “the Apache” Raine (played by Brad Pitt), who hails from Tennessee and claims to be part American Indian. The character is clearly based on Tarantino himself, since he too has an Italian name, hails from Tennessee, and claims to be part Cherokee. The mission of the Basterds is to terrify the Nazis by killing them in the most sadistic manner possible and mutilating their corpses. The dead are scalped. The survivors have swastikas carved in their foreheads.
Holocaust narratives are filled with tales of thousands of Jews herded to their doom by relative handfuls of Germans and their collaborators. Although this sheep-like behavior seems rather unlike the hyper-aggressive and unruly Jews of my acquaintance, most people accept it at face value and then wonder: What was wrong with these people? Why didn’t they fight back?
Tarantino has asked the same question: “When you watch all the different Nazi movies, all the TV movies, it’s sad, but isn’t it also frustrating? Did everybody walk into the boxcar? Didn’t somebody do something?”
Inglourious Basterds
is his answer. During WW II, the Jews needed the leadership of someone like Aldo the Apache, a mostly white man with a bit of red savage mixed in, just like the people who have churned out six million holocaust flicks need to take direction from Quentin Tarantino. With Tarantino in charge, the war would have had a very different end, and Inglourious Basterds shows us how.
Should Jews be insulted by this premise? Of course they should. But the movie itself is far more insulting still. Indeed, this is probably the most anti-Semitic movie ever released by Hollywood. Tarantino’s Jewish characters are one-dimensional, inhuman monsters.
The Jewish Basterds are all as ugly as Der Sturmer cartoons. They have virtually no lines in the entire movie. All they do is skulk around, waiting for Aldo the Apache’s commands to murder and torture Germans.
The most prominent of the Basterds is played by Eli Roth, just another degenerate Jewish director of repulsive horror films. Roth plays the “Bear Jew,” who beats Germans to death with a baseball bat. He is the funniest thing in the entire movie, with his pouting, prissy mouth, drag queen makeup, and shiny brilliantined coiffure. Roth’s large, hairy body (anyone can take steroids) looks menacing until one hears his high, hysteria-edged voice. There was laughter in the audience every time this castrated gorilla opened his mouth on screen.
Too shallow to realize that he was playing a monstrous buffoon, Roth really got into the role, praising Inglourious Basterds as “kosher porn” (is there any other kind?). He really gets off on fantasies of killing Nazis: “It’s almost a deep sexual satisfaction of wanting to beat Nazis to death, an orgasmic feeling. My character gets to beat Nazis to death. That’s something I could watch all day. My parents are very strong about Holocaust education.” They sound like lovely people, and I am sure they are really proud of what a successful boy Eli turned out to be.
Other Jews were equally smitten: Tarantino’s producer, Lawrence Bender, told Tarantino, “As your producing partner, I thank you, and as a member of the Jewish tribe, I thank you, motherfucker, because this movie is a fucking Jewish wet dream.” Harvey and Bob Weinstein, the film’s executive producers, also reportedly enjoyed the film’s theme of Jewish revenge.
Tarantino also reported received uniformly positive reactions from his Jewish friends: “The Jewish males that I’ve known since I’ve been writing the film and telling them about it, they’ve just been, ‘Man, I can’t fucking wait for this fucking movie!’” he told me. “And they tell their dads, and they’re like, ‘I want to see that movie!’”
If all these Jews have no objection to their tribe being portrayed as one-dimensional vengeful sadists, who am I to complain? Perhaps the shoe fits.
The most prominent Jewish character in the movie is the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Shoshanna (played by Mélanie Laurent), the daughter of a Jewish dairy farmer (that got the first laugh of the movie). Her family is massacred in 1941 by the SS, and somehow she turns up a few years later with an assumed French identity running a movie theater in Paris with her Negro lover. When her theater is chosen to premiere a new German movie in the presence of Hitler, Goebbels, Goring, Borman, and other leading Nazis, she plans to bolt the doors and burn the place down as an act of revenge.
Shoshana is a character of reptilian inhumanity. A young German, Frederick Zoeller (played by Daniel Brühl) is obviously smitten with her. A film enthusiast, he tries to strike up a conversation about movies. The contrast could not be clearer. He is warm, sincere, and polite. He sees her as a fellow human being and a fellow film-enthusiast.
She sees him only as a racial enemy. She takes no interest in him until she discovers that he is both a film star and a war hero, which she thinks she can use to her advantage. (He does not reveal these things to her initially, for he does not merely wish to impress her, but to befriend her.)
Her only flash of human emotion comes at the end of a scene in which she meets the SS man, Standartenführer Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), who murdered her family, but it just heightens the impression that she is a cold-blooded master of deception and intrigue.
Shoshanna’s inhumanity is heightened by comparison to Uma Thurman’s revenge-driven character “The Bride” in the Kill Bill movies. The difference is not just a matter of who played the role (although Tarantino decided that as well) but of how the actresses were directed.
Hans Landa claims that he is effective at hunting Jews because he knows how they think. The meaning of this is made clear at the end of the film, when he turns out to be a traitor.
The Allies do not come off much better than the Jews. Aldo the Apache is the only American. He is a loud-mouthed, sadistic, duplicitous jackass with a hillbilly accent. Brad Pitt plays him for laughs, and he is genuinely funny.
There are three Britons: the handsome German Michael Fassbender as film-critic Lt. Archie Hicox, Mike Myers as General Ed Fenech, and the wreck of Rod Taylor as Winston Churchill. The first two come off as effete wankers, and Churchill might as well be Jabba the Hutt.
All of this is in strong contrast to the portrayal of the Germans, even the German traitors. First of all, they are mostly quite good-looking and sexy. (As P. J. O’Rourke said: “Nobody has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually revished by someone dressed as a liberal.”) Second, they are dignified, charming, and polite with strangers; warm, playful, and fun-loving among friends. Even though the Germans are supposed to be the bad guys, they are the only people in the film with whom most white people can readily identify themselves. This means that white audiences can only feel revulsion at the sadistic Jews who murder them.
Hitler, of course, is portrayed as a monster. He first appears wearing a cape, which is appropriate, since he is played as nothing more than a comic book villain. (Martin Wuttke is surely the ugliest Hitler ever.)
Goebbels, although he is portrayed as somewhat arrogant (like a film director, perhaps), comes off overall as warm, sincere, playful, and even a bit lovable(!). Tarantino has obviously immersed himself in German films of the era, and it is clear that he has some admiration for what Goebbels accomplished. (In a scene set in England, it is stated as plain fact that Jews run Hollywood, and Goebbels is given credit for giving them a run for their money.)
The true star of the film is Christoph Waltz, whose portrayal of Hans Landa is absolutely riveting. He is such a magnificent character that Tarantino had to turn him into a traitor in the end, otherwise he would be the true hero of the film as well.
The other star is Daniel Brühl who plays Frederick Zoeller, the young war hero who becomes smitten with Shoshanna. His character is the most likable and most tragic of the film.
Now let’s examine the climax of the movie. I have no qualms about giving it away, since I don’t want any of you to see it anyway. Shoshanna hosts the premiere. Hitler and all the top Nazis come to the theater. She splices her face into the fourth reel of the film. Once the fourth reel is playing, her Negro lover bars the doors to the theater. Suddenly, Shoshanna’s face appears on the screen: “This is the face of Jewish vengeance!” she screams, while the Negro sets the building on fire. The kindling he uses are movies printed on highly flammable nitrite film. (Jews use movies — and Negroes — to create mass death and destruction in this country too.)
Meanwhile, two of the Jewish Basterds (including the preposterous Eli Roth), who have infiltrated the theater without knowing of Shoshanna’s plot, run amok with machine guns, killing Hitler and Goebbels and other Nazis. The theater then explodes. Everybody dies, Jews and Germans alike. Götterdämmerung.
The climax of Inglourious Basterds is obviously based on the Oscar night massacre in neo-Nazi Harold Covington’s novel The Brigade
. If you don’t believe me, read the novel for yourself.
The symbolism and the message could not be clearer: Jews use movies and movie theaters as tools to destroy their enemies. And since the white people in the audience can most readily identify with the Germans, the message gets through: the Jewish movie business is a tool of hatred and vengeance directed against all white people.
Why would Quentin Tarantino make a movie about World War II in which Germans are portrayed as attractive human beings, Americans are portrayed as sadistic buffoons, Englishmen are portrayed as effete wankers, and Jews are portrayed as cold-blooded, inhuman mass murderers?
Why would Quentin Tarantino borrow plot elements from neo-Nazi Harold Covington’s The Brigade
to craft a climax for his movie? Why would he use that climax to expose the true anti-white agenda of Hollywood?
Is Quentin Tarantino a Nazi-sympathizer?
Of course not. Nothing could be further from the truth. Quentin Tarantino is simply a nihilist with an unfailing instinct for finding and desecrating anything sacred. In Pulp Fiction — his one great movie, and his most sincere — Tarantino showed a profound grasp of the spiritual meaning of the duel to the death over honor, symbolized by the Samurai sword. In Kill Bill, vol. I, he made a giant joke of it.
In Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino has taken the one truly sacred myth in modern Jew-dominated America — especially in modern Hollywood — namely WW II and the holocaust, and he has desecrated it by inverting all of its core value judgments and reversing its stereotypes. In the process, he has exposed the true anti-white agenda of Hollywood. Why? Just because he can.
The fact that Quentin Tarantino could desecrate the holocaust, expose Hollywood’s agenda, and sell it back to Hollywood’s Jews is a testament to his twisted genius and their shallowness and moral imbecility.
I wish Inglourious Basterds were a better movie, since I think that many white people would benefit from seeing it. Yes, the explicit message is that it is good for Jews and their hillbilly dupes to sadistically murder Germans (and any other enemies of the Jews, for that matter). But the largely white audience with which I saw the film did not seem terribly comfortable with this message.
Yes, they found Brad Pitt funny. He really was funny. But the sadism directed at Germans did not amuse. In the last scene of the film, where Aldo the Apache graphically carves a swastika in the forehead of Hans Landa and pronounces it “my masterpiece” — pathetically enough, this is probably Tarantino’s view of the film — there was no laughter.
For the subliminal message was coming through loud and clear: we are all Germans now, and every time we turn our eyes to a movie screen we are seeing the face of Jewish vengeance.
(Israelnationalnews.com) U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy, who died late Tuesday of brain cancer at the age of 77, was one of the first American legislators to study Israel's health care system, President Shimon Peres noted Wednesday in a statement of condolence.
He called Ted Kennedy a "great American leader who was also a great friend of the State of Israel."
Peres recalled the 1986 visit to the Jewish State by the Massachusetts senator, which he said had been specifically aimed at learning about Israel's health care system. It "was basically for the first time to study the health insurance system in Israel because he saw already at that time that the health issues are going to be central ones for the American people," said Peres.
Kennedy, who called health care reform "the cause of my life," once said "the achievements of yesterday are the problems of today, namely that we have to achieve things anew and not just be satisfied with the past," Peres said.
The issue did indeed become Kennedy's signature cause and also continued to dog American administrations throughout the senator's career. Health care reform is a major centerpiece of the current Obama White House as well.
The Senate committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, which was headed by Kennedy, passed new health care legislation last month. The bill is now being debated in Congress.
'Family Knew Great Tragedies' Senator Edward "Ted" Kennedy served as a federal Democratic lawmaker for 46 years. Two of his older brothers, one a U.S. president and the other also a U.S. senator, were both shot to death by assassins while serving in office.
President John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963 during a motorcade in Texas by 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine. The assassin was himself killed within hours by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby as he was being transferred from police headquarters to the county jail, leading to decades of speculation by conspiracy theorists.
U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy was killed in 1968 while celebrating his successful primary election campaign in California for the Democratic U.S. presidential nomination. The assassin was a 24-year-old Palestinian Arab immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan, who remains incarcerated in a U.S. prison to this day.
Ted Kennedy came from a family "that knew great tragedies," Peres noted, "but also has shown greatness in many ways. We listened to him as a world leader because he was great on all issues of our time and our generation. It is a real loss to the American people it is also a painful loss for us," he said.
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) - A New Jersey blogger facing charges in two states for allegedly making threats against lawmakers and judges was trained by the FBI on how to be deliberately provocative, his attorney said Tuesday.
Hal Turner worked for the FBI from 2002 to 2007 as an "agent provocateur" and was taught by the agency "what he could say that wouldn't be crossing the line," defense attorney Michael Orozco said.
"His job was basically to publish information which would cause other parties to act in a manner which would lead to their arrest," Orozco said.
Prosecutors have acknowledged that Turner was an informant who spied on radical right-wing organizations, but the defense has said Turner was not working for the FBI when he allegedly made threats against Connecticut legislators and wrote that three federal judges in Illinois deserved to die.
"But if you compare anything that he did say when he was operating, there was no difference. No difference whatsoever," Orozco said.
Special Agent Ross Rice, a spokesman for the FBI in Chicago, said he would not comment on or even confirm Turner's relationship with the FBI.
Orozco spoke to reporters after a court hearing in Hartford on Tuesday. Turner, 47, of North Bergen, N.J., did not appear, because he is in federal custody in Illinois. His arraignment on the Connecticut charges was rescheduled to Oct. 19.
In June, Turner urged his readers to "take up arms" against Connecticut lawmakers and suggested government officials should "obey the Constitution or die," because he was angry over legislation—later withdrawn—that would have given lay members of Roman Catholic churches more control over their parish's finances.
He wrote in Internet postings the same month that the Illinois federal appeals judges "deserve to be killed" because they issued a ruling that upheld ordinances in Chicago and suburban Oak Park banning handguns. He included their photos and the room numbers of their chambers at the courthouse.
Orozco officially joined Turner's defense team in the Connecticut case on Tuesday, with approval from Superior Court Judge David Gold. Orozco said his Newark, N.J.-based firm has been representing Turner for the past five years, including during his FBI informant years.
Turner's Connecticut attorney, Matthew R. Potter, said it's too early to tell which trial will move forward first. Orozco said he plans First Amendment defenses in both cases.
Randall Samborn, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Chicago, said the office would not comment on Orozco's statements.
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