From the Art of Rolf Armstrong

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Iraq: More Post-Election De-Baathification

ΤΟ ΜΑΥΡΟ, ΑΣΠΡΟ: ΑΝΕΞΑΡΤΗΤΩΣ ΤΗΣ ΔΙΩΞΕΩΣ ΤΟΥ ΚΟΜΜΑΤΟΣ ΜΠΑΑΘ, Η ΥΠΟΘΕΣΙΣ 'ΕΧΕΙ  ΠΛΑΚΑ': ΟΙ ΚΑΤΑΚΤΗΤΑΙ 'ΣΤΗΝΟΥΝ' ΨΗΦΟΦΟΡΙΑΝ ΜΕ ΥΠΟΨΗΦΙΟΥΣ ΕΚ ΤΩΝ ΔΟΣΙΛΟΓΩΝ ΔΙ' ΕΚΛΟΓΗΝ ΚΥΒΕΡΝΗΣΕΩΣ ΔΟΣΙΛΟΓΩΝ, ΚΑΙ ΑΥΤΟ ΛΕΓΕΤΑΙ Democracy!!!!

More Post-Election De-Baathification: Another Blow to the Idea of Democracy in Iraq

Reidar Visser

April 26, 2010 Iraq’s powerful de-Baathification committee has dealt another blow to the idea of democracy in Iraq: After many conflicting reports over the weekend, it is becoming increasingly clear that the board’s attempt to de-Baathify 55 of the replacement candidates for other candidates that were themselves de-Baathified has been sustained by the special judicial board for the elections, along with an acceptance of its proposal to annul the personal votes for these candidates instead of transferring them to their list. With respect to the politics of this, the de-Baathification committee, of course, is largely controlled by the pro-Iranian Iraqi National Alliance, whereas the special judicial board for the elections is seen as leaning towards Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki after its decision to allow a Baghdad recount. The main victim of these decisions, Iraqiyya, has no significant influence in either body. The Kurdish chief of the elections commission IHEC, Faraj al-Haydari, had previously expressed his distaste for the idea of annulling the votes altogether. Because of the messy process in which candidates were struck from the ballots right until the last minute, it is still unclear exactly which individuals are subject to the new decision. Candidates that could be in trouble include Ibrahim al-Mutlak, the replacement candidate for Salih al-Mutlak who got some 5,400 personal votes and a seat in Baghdad. The same situation may possibly apply for candidate number two for Iraqiyya in Anbar, another Mutlak (Hamid Abid), who was not listed on most IHEC lists prior to the election and therefore may have also been a replacement candidate – in this case representing some 14,700 personal votes. Crucially, these examples show that this is about more than candidates – it is also about voters. Here we have two examples and some 20,000 Iraqis whose votes may simply be stolen from them according to procedures that are not based on any law or even any IHEC regulation. In particular, the decision to penalise voters who used the open-list system by annulling their active use of the ballot (a passive list vote would not have been cancelled) risks putting the whole idea of democracy in disrepute in Iraq. The de-Baathified candidates have been given one month to complain the decision – another ad hoc legal concoction by IHEC and something which firmly pushes certification of the results towards June, regardless of what happens to the Baghdad recount as well as further demands for recounts by the Kurds in some of the northern governorates (which apparently remain pending). http://www.uruknet.info/index.php?p=m65413&hd=&size=1&l=e

Why USA Won’t Leave Afghanistan or Iraq

Yes, We Could... Get Out! 
Why We Won’t Leave Afghanistan or Iraq

By Tom Engelhardt

Tomdispatch, April 25, 2010 Yes, we could.  No kidding.  We really could withdraw our massive armies, now close to 200,000 troops combined, from Afghanistan and Iraq (and that’s not even counting our similarly large stealth army of private contractors, which helps keep the true size of our double occupations in the shadows).  We could undoubtedly withdraw them all reasonably quickly and reasonably painlessly. Not that you would know it from listening to the debates in Washington or catching the mainstream news.  There, withdrawal, when discussed at all, seems like an undertaking beyond the waking imagination.  In Iraq alone, all those bases to dismantle and millions of pieces of equipment to send home in a draw-down operation worthy of years of intensive effort, the sort of thing that makes the desperate British evacuation from Dunkirk in World War II look like a Sunday stroll in the park.  And that’s only the technical side of the matter. Then there’s the conviction that anything but a withdrawal that would make molasses in January look like the hare of Aesopian fable -- at least two years in Iraq, five to ten in Afghanistan -- would endanger the planet itself, or at least its most important country: us.  Without our eternally steadying hand, the Iraqis and Afghans, it’s taken for granted, would be lost. Without the help of U.S. forces, for example, would the Maliki government ever have been able to announce the death of the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq?  Not likely, whereas the U.S. has knocked off its leadership twice, first in 2006, and again, evidently, last week. Of course, before our troops entered Baghdad in 2003 and the American occupation of that country began, there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq.  But that’s a distant past not worth bringing up.  And forget as well the fact that our invasions and wars have proven thunderously destructive, bringing chaos, misery, and death in their wake, and turning, for instance, the health care system of Iraq, once considered an advanced country in the Arab world, into a disaster zone(that -- it goes without saying -- only we Americans are now equipped to properly fix).  Similarly, while regularly knocking off Afghan civilians at checkpoints on their roads and in their homes, at their celebrations and at work, we ignore the fact that our invasion and occupation opened the way for the transformation of Afghanistan into the first all-drug-crop agricultural nation and so the planet's premier narco-nation.  It’s not just that the country now has an almost total monopoly on growing opium poppies (hence heroin), but according to the latest U.N. report, it’s now cornering the hashish market as well.  That’s diversification for you. It’s a record to stand on and, evidently, to stay on, even to expand on.  We’re like the famed guest who came to dinner, broke a leg, wouldn’t leave, and promptly took over the lives of the entire household.  Only in our case, we arrived, broke someone else’s leg, and then insisted we had to stay and break many more legs, lest the world become a far more terrible place. It’s known and accepted in Washington that, if we were to leave Afghanistan precipitously, the Taliban would take over, al-Qaeda would be back big time in no time, and then more of our giant buildings would obviously bite the dust.  And yet, the longer we’ve stayed and the more we’ve surged, the more resurgent the Taliban has become, the more territory this minority insurgency has spread into.  If we stay long enough, we may, in fact, create the majority insurgency we claim to fear. It’s common wisdom in the U.S. that, before we pull our military out, Afghanistan, like Iraq, must be secured as a stable enough ally, as well as at least a fragile junior democracy, which consigns real departure to some distant horizon.  And that sense of time may help explain the desire of U.S. officials to hinder Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s attempts to negotiate with the Taliban and other rebel factions now.  Washington, it seems, favors a "reconciliation process" that will last years and only begin after the U.S. military seizes the high ground on the battlefield. The reality that dare not speak its name in Washington is this: no matter what might happen in an Afghanistan that lacked us -- whether (as in the 1990s) the various factions there leaped for each other’s throats, or the Taliban established significant control, though (as in the 1990s) not over the whole country -- the stakes for Americans would be minor in nature.  Not that anyone of significance here would say such a thing. Tell me, what kind of a stake could Americans really have in one of the most impoverished lands on the planet, about as distant from us as could be imagined, geographically, culturally, and religiously?  Yet, as if to defy commonsense, we’ve been fighting there -- by proxy and directly -- on and off for 30 years now with no end in sight. Most Americans evidently remain convinced that "safe haven" there was the key to al-Qaeda’s success, and that Afghanistan was the only place in which that organization could conceivably have planned 9/11, even though perfectly real planning also took place in Hamburg, Germany, which we neither bombed nor invaded. In a future in which our surging armies actually succeeded in controlling Afghanistan and denying it to al-Qaeda, what about Somalia, Yemen, or, for that matter, England?  It’s now conveniently forgotten that the first, nearly successful attempt to take down one of the World Trade Center towers in 1993 was planned in the wilds of New Jersey.  Had the Bush administration been paying the slightest attention on September 10, 2001, or had reasonable precautions been taken, including locking the doors of airplane cockpits, 9/11 and so the invasion of Afghanistan would have been relegated to the far-fetched plot of some Tom Clancy novel. Vietnam and Afghanistan Have you noticed, by the way, that there’s always some obstacle in the path of withdrawal?  Right now, in Iraq, it’s the aftermath of the March 7th election, hailed as proof that we brought democracy to the Middle East and so, whatever our missteps, did the right thing.  As it happens, the election, as many predicted at the time, has led to a potentially explosive gridlock and has yet to come close to resulting in a new governing coalition.  With violenceon the rise, we’re told, the planned drawdown of American troops to the 50,000 level by August is imperiled.  Already, the process, despite repeated assurances, seems to be proceeding slowly. And yet, the thought that an American withdrawal should be held hostage to events among Iraqis all these years later, seems curious.  There’s always some reason to hesitate -- and it never has to do with us.  Withdrawal would undoubtedly be far less of a brain-twister if Washington simply committed itself wholeheartedly to getting out, and if it stopped convincing itself that the presence of the U.S. military in distant lands was essential to a better world (and, of course, to a controlling position on planet Earth). The annals of history are well stocked with countries which invaded and occupied other lands and then left, often ingloriously and under intense pressure.  But they did it. It’s worth remembering that, in 1975, when the South Vietnamese Army collapsed and we essentially fled the country, we abandoned staggering amounts of equipment there.  Helicopters were pushed over the sides of aircraft carriers to make space; barrels of money were burned at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon; military bases as large as anything we’ve built in Iraq or Afghanistan fell into North Vietnamese hands; and South Vietnamese allies were deserted in the panic of the moment.  Nonetheless, when there was no choice, we got out.  Not elegantly, not nicely, not thoughtfully, not helpfully, but out. Keep in mind that, then too, disaster was predicted for the planet, should we withdraw precipitously -- including rolling communist takeovers of country after country, the loss of "credibility" for the American superpower, and a murderous bloodbath in Vietnam itself.  All were not only predicted by Washington’s Cassandras, but endlessly cited in the war years as reasons not to leave. And yet here was the shock that somehow never registered among all the so-called lessons of Vietnam: nothing of that sort happened afterwards. Today, Vietnam is a reasonably prosperous land with friendly relations with its former enemy, the United States.  After Vietnam, no other "dominos" fell and there was no bloodbath in that country.  Of course, it could have been different -- and elsewhere, sometimes, it has been.  But even when local skies darken, the world doesn't end. And here’s the truth of the matter: the world won’t end, not in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, not in the United States, if we end our wars and withdraw.  The sky won’t fall, even if the U.S. gets out reasonably quickly, even if subsequently blood is spilled and things don’t go well in either country. We got our troops there remarkably quickly.  We’re quite capable of removing them at a similar pace.  We could, that is, leave.  There are, undoubtedly, better and worse ways of doing this, ways that would further penalize the societies we’ve invaded, and ways that might be of some use to them, but either way we could go. A Brief History of American Withdrawal Of course, there’s a small problem here.  All evidence indicates that Washington doesn’t want to withdraw -- not really, not from either region.  It has no interest in divesting itself of the global control-and-influence business, or of the military-power racket.  That’s hardly surprising since we’re talking about a great imperial power and control (or at least imagined control) over the planet’s strategic oil lands. And then there’s another factor to consider: habit.  Over the decades, Washington has gotten used to staying. The U.S. has long been big on arriving, but not much for departure.  After all, 65 years later, striking numbers of American forces are still garrisoning the two major defeated nations of World War II, Germany and Japan.  We still have about three dozen military bases on the modest-sized Japanese island of Okinawa, and are at this very moment fighting tooth and nail, diplomatically speaking, not to be forced to abandon one of them.  The Korean War was suspended in an armistice 57 years ago and, again, striking numbers of American troops still garrison South Korea. Similarly, to skip a few decades, after the Serbian air campaign of the late 1990s, the U.S. built-up the enormous Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo with itsseven-mile perimeter, and we’re still there.  After Gulf War I, the U.S. either built or built up military bases and other facilities in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, as well as the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.  And it’s never stopped building up its facilities throughout the Gulf region.  In this sense, leaving Iraq, to the extent we do, is not quite as significant a matter as sometimes imagined, strategically speaking.  It’s not as if the U.S. military were taking off for Dubuque. A history of American withdrawal would prove a brief book indeed.  Other than Vietnam, the U.S. military withdrew from the Philippines under the pressure of "people power" (and a local volcano) in the early 1990s, and from Saudi Arabia, in part under the pressure of Osama bin Laden. In both countries, however, it has retained or regained a foothold in recent years.  President Ronald Reagan pulled American troops out of Lebanon after a devastating 1983 suicide truck bombing of a Marines barracks there, and the president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, functionally expelled the U.S. from Manta Air Base in 2008 when he refused to renew its lease.  ("We'll renew the base on one condition: that they let us put a base in Miami -- an Ecuadorian base," he said slyly.)  And there were a few places like the island of Grenada, invaded in 1983, that simply mattered too little to Washington to stay. Unfortunately, whatever the administration, the urge to stay has seemed a constant.  It’s evidently written into Washington’s DNA and embedded deep in domestic politics where sure-to-come "cut and run" charges and blame for "losing" Iraq or Afghanistan would cow any administration.  Not surprisingly, when you look behind the main news stories in both Iraq and Afghanistan, you can see signs of the urge to stay everywhere. In Iraq, while President Obama has committed himself to the withdrawal of American troops by the end of 2011, plenty of wiggle room remains.  Already, the New York Times reports, General Ray Odierno, commander of U.S. forces in that country, is lobbying Washington to establish "an Office of Military Cooperation within the American Embassy in Baghdad to sustain the relationship after... Dec. 31, 2011."  ("We have to stay committed to this past 2011," Odierno is quoted as saying. "I believe the administration knows that. I believe that they have to do that in order to see this through to the end. It’s important to recognize that just because U.S. soldiers leave, Iraq is not finished.") If you want a true gauge of American withdrawal, keep your eye on themega-bases the Pentagon has built in Iraq since 2003, especially giganticBalad Air Base (since the Iraqis will not, by the end of 2011, have a real air force of their own), and perhaps Camp Victory, the vast, ill-named U.S. base and command center abutting Baghdad International Airport on the outskirts of the capital.  Keep an eye as well on the 104-acre U.S. embassy built along the Tigris River in downtown Baghdad.  At present, it’s the largest "embassy" on the planet and represents something new in "diplomacy," being essentially a military-base-cum-command-and-control-center for the region.  It is clearly going nowhere, withdrawal or not. In fact, recent reports indicate that in the near future "embassy" personnel, including police trainers, military officials connected to that Office of Coordination, spies, U.S. advisors attached to various Iraqi ministries, and the like, may be more than doubled from the present staggering staff level of 1,400 to 3,000 or above.  (The embassy, by the way, has requested $1,875 billion for its operations in fiscal year 2011, and that was assuming a staffing level of only 1,400.)  Realistically, as long as such an embassy remains at Ground Zero Iraq, we will not have withdrawn from that country. Similarly, we have a giant U.S. embassy in Kabul (being expanded) and another mega-embassy being built in the Pakistani capital Islamabad.  These are not, rest assured, signs of departure.  Nor is the fact that in Afghanistan and Pakistan, everything war-connected seems to be surging, even if in ways often not noticed here.  President Obama’s surge decision has been described largely in terms of those 30,000-odd extra troops he’s sending in, not in terms of the shadow army of 30,000 or more extra private contractors taking on various military roles (and dying off the books in striking numbers); nor the extra contingent of CIA types and the escalating drone war they are overseeing in the Pakistani tribal borderlands; nor the quiet doubling of Special Operations units assigned to hunt down the Taliban leadership; nor the extra State department officials for the "civilian surge"; nor, for instance, the special $10 million "pool" of funds that up to 120 U.S. Special Operations forces, already in those borderlands training the paramilitary Pakistani Frontier Corps, may soon have available to spend "winning hearts and minds." Perhaps it’s historically accurate to say that great powers generally leave home, head elsewhere armed to the teeth, and then experience the urge to stay.  With our trillion-dollar-plus wars and yearly trillion-dollar-plus national-security budget, there’s a lot at stake in staying, and undoubtedly in fightingtwo, three, many Afghanistans (and Iraqs) in the years to come. Sooner or later, we will leave both Iraq and Afghanistan.  It’s too late in the history of this planet to occupy them forever and a day.  Better sooner. Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. His latest book, The American Way of War (Haymarket Books), will be published in June. http://www.uruknet.info/index.php?p=m65398&hd=&size=1&l=e

Israel’s Apartheids-The meaning of a Jewish state

Israel’s Big and Small Apartheids
The meaning of a Jewish state

by Jonathan Cook

April 26, 2010 Below is the text of a talk delivered to the fifth Bilin international conference for Palestinian popular resistance, held in the West Bank village of Bilin on April 21 Israel’s apologists are very exercised about the idea that Israel has been singled out for special scrutiny and criticism. I wish to argue, however, that in most discussions of Israel it actually gets off extremely lightly: that many features of the Israeli polity would be considered exceptional or extraordinary in any other democratic state. That is not surprising because, as I will argue, Israel is neither a liberal democracy nor even a "Jewish and democratic state", as its supporters claim. It is an apartheid state, not only in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, but also inside Israel proper. Today, in the occupied territories, the apartheid nature of Israeli rule is irrefutable — if little mentioned by Western politicians or the media. But inside Israel, itself, it is largely veiled and hidden. My purpose today is to try to remove the veil a little. I say "a little", because I would need far more than the time allotted to me to do justice to this topic. There are, for example, some 30 laws that explicitly discriminate between Jews and non-Jews — another way of referring to the fifth of the Israeli population who are Palestinian and supposedly enjoy full citizenship. There are also many other Israeli laws and administrative practices that lead to an outcome of ethnic-based segregation even if they do not make such discrimination explicit. So instead of trying to rush through all these aspects of Israeli apartheid, let me concentrate instead on a few revealing features, issues I have reported on recently. First, let us examine the nature of Israeli citizenship. A few weeks ago I met Uzi Ornan, an 86-year-old professor from the Technion university in Haifa, who has one of the few ID cards in Israel stating a nationality of "Hebrew". For most other Israelis, their cards and personal records state their nationality as "Jewish" or "Arab". For immigrants whose Jewishness is accepted by the state but questioned by the rabbinical authorities, some 130 other classifications of nationality have been approved, mostly relating to a person’s religion or country of origin. The only nationality you will not find on the list is "Israeli". That is precisely why Prof Ornan and two dozen others are fighting through the courts: they want to be registered as "Israelis". It is a hugely important fight — and for that reason alone they are certain to lose. Why? Far more is at stake than an ethnic or national label. Israel excludes a nationality of "Israeli" to ensure that, in fulfilment of its self-definition as a "Jewish state", it is able to assign superior rights of citizenship to the collective "nation" of Jews around the globe than to the body of actual citizens in its territory, which includes many Palestinians. In practice, it does this by creating two main classes of citizenship: a Jewish citizenship for "Jewish nationals" and an Arab citizenship for "Arab nationals". Both nationalities were effectively invented by Israel and have no meaning outside Israel. This differentiation in citizenship is recognised in Israeli law: the Law of Return, for Jews, makes immigration all but automatic for any Jew around the world who wishes it; and the Citizenship Law, for non-Jews, determines on any entirely separate basis the rights of the country’s Palestinian minority to citizenship. Even more importantly, the latter law abolishes the rights of the Palestinian citizens’ relatives, who were expelled by force in 1948, to return to their homes and land. There are, in other words, two legal systems of citizenship in Israel, differentiating between the rights of citizens based on whether they are Jews or Palestinians. That, in itself, meets the definition of apartheid, as set out by the United Nations in 1973: "Any legislative measures or other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups." The clause includes the following rights: "the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression." Such separation of citizenship is absolutely essential to the maintenance of Israel as a Jewish state. Were all citizens to be defined uniformly as Israelis, were there to be only one law regarding citizenship, then very dramatic consequences would follow. The most significant would be that the Law of Return would either cease to apply to Jews or apply equally to Palestinian citizens, allowing them to bring their exiled relatives to Israel – the much-feared Right of Return. In either a longer or shorter period, Israel’s Jewish majority would be eroded and Israel would become a binational state, probably with a Palestinian majority. There would be many other predictable consequences of equal citizenship. Would the Jewish settlers, for example, be able to maintain their privileged status in the West Bank if Palestinians in Jenin or Hebron had relatives inside Israel with the same rights as Jews? Would the Israeli army continue to be able to function as an occupation army in a properly democratic state? And would the courts in a state of equal citizens be able to continue turning a blind eye to the brutalities of the occupation? In all these cases, it seems extremely unlikely that the status quo could be maintained. In other words, the whole edifice of Israel’s apartheid rule inside Israel supports and upholds its apartheid rule in the occupied territories. They stand or fall together. Next, let us look at the matter of land control. Last month I met an exceptional Israeli Jewish couple, the Zakais. They are exceptional chiefly because they have developed a deep friendship with a Palestinian couple inside Israel. Although I have reported on Israel and Palestine for many years, I cannot recall ever before meeting an Israeli Jew who had a Palestinian friend in quite the way the Zakais do. True, there are many Israeli Jews who claim an "Arab" or "Palestinian" friend in the sense that they joke with the guy whose hummus shop they frequent or who fixes their car. There are also Israeli Jews — and they are an extremely important group — who stand with Palestinians in political battles such as those here in Bilin or in Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem. At these places, Israelis and Palestinians have, against the odds, managed to forge genuine friendships that are vital if Israel’s apartheid rule is to be defeated. But the Zakais’ relationship with their Bedouin friends, the Tarabins, is not that kind of friendship. It is not based on, or shaped by, a political struggle, one that is, itself, framed by Israel’s occupation; it is not a self-conscious friendship; and it has no larger goal than the relationship, itself. It is a friendship — or at least it appeared that way to me — of genuine equals. A friendship of complete intimacy. When I visited the Zakais, I realised what an incredibly unusual sight that is in Israel. The reason for the very separate cultural and emotional worlds of Jewish and Palestinian citizens in Israel is not difficult to fathom: they live in entirely separate physical worlds. They live apart in segregated communities, separated not through choice but by legally enforceable rules and procedures. Even in the so-called handful of mixed cities, Jews and Palestinians usually live apart, in distinct and clearly defined neighbourhoods. And so it was not entirely surprising that the very issue that brought me to the Zakais was the question of whether a Palestinian citizen is entitled to live in a Jewish community. The Zakais want to rent to their friends, the Tarabins, their home in the agricultural village of Nevatim in the Negev — currently an exclusively Jewish community. The Tarabins face a serious housing problem in their own neighbouring Bedouin community. But what the Zakais have discovered is that there are overwhelming social and legal obstacles to Palestinians moving out the ghettoes in which they are supposed to live. Not only is Nevatim’s elected leadership deeply opposed to the Bedouin family entering their community, but so also are the Israeli courts. Nevatim is not exceptional. There are more than 700 similar rural communities — mostly kibbutzim and moshavim — that bar non-Jews from living there. They control most of the inhabitable territory of Israel, land that once belonged to Palestinians: either refugees from the 1948 war; or Palestinian citizens who have had their lands confiscated under special laws. Today, after these confiscations, at least 93 per cent of Israel is nationalised — that is, it is held in trust not for Israel’s citizens but for world Jewry. (Here, once again, we should note one of those important consequences of the differentiated citizenship we have just considered.) Access to most of this nationalised land is controlled by vetting committees, overseen by quasi-governmental but entirely unaccountable Zionist organisations like the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund. Their role is to ensure that such communities remain off-limits to Palestinian citizens, precisely as the Zakais and Tarabins have discovered in the case of Nevatim. The officials there have insisted that the Palestinian family has no right even to rent, let alone buy, property in a "Jewish community". That position has been effectively upheld by Israel’s highest court, which has agreed that the family must submit to a vetting committee whose very purpose is to exclude them. Again, the 1973 UN Convention on the "crime of apartheid" is instructive: it includes measures "designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups … [and] the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups or to members thereof." If Jewish and Palestinian citizens have been kept apart so effectively — and a separate education system and severe limits on interconfessional marriage reinforce this emotional and physical segregation — how did the Zakais and Tarabins become such close friends? Their case is an interesting example of serendipity, as I discovered when I met them. Weisman Zakai is the child of Iraqi Jewish parents who immigrated to the Jewish state in its early years. When he and Ahmed Tarabin met as boys in the 1960s, hanging out in the markets of the poor neighbouring city of Beersheva, far from the centre of the country, they found that what they had in common trumped the formal divisions that were supposed to keep them apart and fearful. Both speak fluent Arabic, both were raised in an Arab culture, both are excluded from Jewish Ashkenazi society, and both share a passion for cars. In their case, Israel’s apartheid system failed in its job of keeping them physically and emotionally apart. It failed to make them afraid of, and hostile to, each other. But as the Zakais have learnt to their cost, in refusing to live according to the rules of Israel’s apartheid system, the system has rejected them. The Zakais are denied the chance to rent to their friends, and now live as pariahs in the community of Nevatim. Finally, let us consider the concept of "security" inside Israel. As I have said, the apartheid nature of relations between Jewish and Palestinian citizens is veiled in the legal, social and political spheres. It does not mirror the "petty apartheid" that was a feature of the South African brand: the separate toilets, park benches and buses. But in one instance it is explicit in this petty way — and this is when Jews and Palestinians enter and leave the country through the border crossings and through Ben Gurion international airport. Here the façade is removed and the different status of citizenship enjoyed by Jews and Palestinians is fully on show. That lesson was learnt by two middle-aged Palestinian brothers I interviewed this month. Residents of a village near Nazareth, they had been life-long supporters of the Labor party and proudly showed me a fading picture of them hosting a lunch for Yitzhak Rabin in the early 1990s. But at our meeting they were angry and bitter, vowing they would never vote for a Zionist party again. Their rude awakening had come three years ago when they travelled to the US on a business trip with a group of Jewish insurance agents. On the flight back, they arrived at New York’s JFK airport to see their Jewish colleagues pass through El Al’s security checks in minutes. They, meanwhile, spent two hours being interrogated and having their bags minutely inspected. When they were finally let through, they were assigned a female guard whose job was to keep them under constant surveillance — in front of hundreds of fellow passengers — till they boarded the plane. When one brother went to the bathroom without first seeking permission, the guard berated him in public and her boss threatened to prevent him from boarding the plane unless he apologised. This month the court finally awarded the brothers $8,000 compensation for what it called their "abusive and unnecessary" treatment. Two things about this case should be noted. The first is that the El Al security team admitted in court that neither brother was deemed a security risk of any sort. The only grounds for the special treatment they received was their national and ethnic belonging. It was transparently a case of racial profiling. The second thing to note is that their experience is nothing out of the ordinary for Palestinian citizens travelling to and from Israel. Similar, and far worse, incidents occur every day during such security procedures. What was exceptional in this case was that the brothers pursued a time-consuming and costly legal action against El Al. They did so, I suspect, because they felt so badly betrayed. They had made the mistake of believing the hasbara (propaganda) from Israeli politicians of all stripes who declare that Palestinian citizens can enjoy equal status with Jewish citizens if they are loyal to the state. They assumed that by being Zionists they could become first-class citizens. In accepting this conclusion, they had misunderstood the apartheid reality inherent in a Jewish state. The most educated, respectable and wealthy Palestinian citizen will always fare worse at the airport security check than the most disreputable Jewish citizen, or the one who espouses extremist opinions or even the Jewish citizen with a criminal record. Israel’s apartheid system is there to maintain Jewish privilege in a Jewish state. And at the point where that privilege is felt most viscerally by ordinary Jews to be vulnerable, in the life and death experience of flying thousands of feet above the ground, Palestinian citizens must be shown their status as outsider, as the enemy, whoever they are and whatever they have, or have not, done. Apartheid rule, as I have argued, applies to Palestinians in both Israel and the occupied territories. But is not apartheid in the territories much worse than it is inside Israel? Should we not concern ourselves more with the big apartheid in the West Bank and Gaza than this weaker apartheid? Such an argument demonstrates a dangerous misconception about the indivisible nature of Israel’s apartheid towards Palestinians and about its goals. Certainly, it is true that apartheid in the territories is much more aggressive than it is inside Israel. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the apartheid under occupation is much less closely supervised by the Israeli civilian courts than it is in Israel. You can, to put it bluntly, get away with much more here. The second, and more significant, reason, however, is that the Israeli system of apartheid in the occupied territories is forced to be more aggressive and cruel — and that is because the battle is not yet won here. The fight of the occupying power to steal your resources — your land, water and labour — is in progress but the outcome is still to be decided. Israel is facing the considerable pressures of time and a fading international legitimacy as it works to take your possessions from you. Every day you resist makes that task a little harder. In Israel, by contrast, apartheid rule is entrenched — it achieved its victory decades ago. Palestinian citizens have third or fourth class citizenship; they have had almost all of their land taken from them; they are allowed to live only in their ghettoes; their education system is controlled by the security services; they can work in few jobs other than those Jews do not want; they have the vote but cannot participate in government or effect any political change; and so on. Doubtless, a related fate is envisioned for you too. The veiled apartheid facing Palestinians inside Israel is the blueprint for a veiled — and more legitimate — kind of apartheid being planned for Palestinians in the occupied territories, at least those who are allowed to remain in their Bantustans. And for this very reason, exposing and defeating the apartheid inside Israel is vital to the success of resisting the apartheid that has taken root here. That is why we must fight Israeli apartheid wherever it is found — in Jaffa or Jerusalem, in Nazareth or Nablus, in Beersheva or Bilin. It is the only struggle that can bring justice to the Palestinians. Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). http://www.uruknet.info/index.php?p=m65411&hd=&size=1&l=e

Britain’s Ominous Smiley-Face Election

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4397

Britain’s Ominous Smiley-Face Election

From the desk of A. Millar on Mon, 2010-04-19 08:25

With a general election set for May 6, the two main parties have, as Peter Goodspeed notes in Canada’s National Post, busied themselves “adopting U.S. policies, personnel and practices.” The British press, too, is full of talk about “presidential-style” TV debates and “first lady politics”. The Americanizing of the British election becomes even more evident if one listens to Conservative party leader David Cameron, who routinely references president Barack Obama – as an apparent inspiration – and who has even, on a few occasions, cited John F. Kennedy as “a great American president.”

But despite the US-UK “special relationship,” the British, as well as other Europeans, misread American culture. They admire the US’s vitality, yet believe it to be entirely separated from its traditional, Constitutional values.

To the European mindset, free speech (which necessarily includes “hate speech”), gun ownership, etc., are the sort of unsophisticated convictions that the nation’s dynamism should be evolving away from.

This mindset is illustrated in how the EU  has been formed. Although  consciously modeled after the US, many national “independence” parties -– not to mention Soviet dissidents such as Vladimir Bukovksy -– believe the EU resembles something much closer to the USSR.

The US’s Constitution was designed to empower its citizens, and those values fuel America’s dynamism. In contrast, the EU’s constitution – pushed through despite “no” votes from member states – is meant to empower the EU state.

As Britain and other European nations find their sovereignty draining away to the European Union (EU), and facing the ideologies of Islamism and political multiculturalism, wouldn’t it be more fitting to reference a president like Ronald Regan, synonymous with the destruction of Communism?

Even though the Conservatives in the UK are often seen as the British equivalent of the US’s Republicans, they are no longer the party of Margaret Thatcher -- a leader of character and resolve, who considered Reagan to be one of her “closest political and dearest personal friends.”

Rather, like Labour, they are, if anything, to the Left of the US’s Democrats: Labour leader and Prime Minister Gordon Brown hired Obama strategist Joel Benenson more than a year ago. The “progressive” Conservatives have since hired Anita Dunn and Bill Knapp – both advisors to Democrats.

The experience of EU membership should consequently offer a warning:  The intentional and showy Americanization of politics in Europe is superficial, and rarely if ever embodies the adoption of American values.

Although a cursory look at the Conservative party’s manifesto might leave one believing that the party is on the right track, almost every policy seems to include wording that hints at its possible sliding in the opposite direction once inside government.

Take, for example, “Big Government”. Cameron claims to oppose it -- not because he necessarily believes in individual liberty, but because, under Labour,  Big Government has grown to a point where it is “inhibiting, not advancing the progressive aims of reducing poverty, fighting inequality, and increasing general well-being.”

Instead, with Big Government having failed the “progressive” agenda, and also so discredited in the eyes of the public, the Conservatives arepromoting the rather Orwellian “Big Society” – which will require “strong and concerted government action to make it happen.”

As part of “Big Society,” the party plans a “national army of community organisers” who will be actively involved in local communities. Read: Intruding into private life -- or Big Government.

According to the Conservative party website, “This plan is directly based on the successful community organising movement established by Saul Alinsky,” a California-based  revolutionary, generally regarded as Marxist.

It is perhaps a minor detail, but it is amusing to see that the party has chosen to advertize the “Big Society” by use of a smiley face logo, reminiscent of the cover of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism. In this bestseller, Goldberg contends that fascism is actually Left-wing, not Right-wing as reputed, and notes that, like modern liberalism, it always regarded itself as “progressive.”

Goldberg is an American Conservative, so perhaps we should not expect Cameron and his team to be familiar with his book. But the book’s cover image was inspired by comedian George Carlin’s comment that, “when fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with jackboots. It will be Nike sneakers and smiley shirts.”

Belgian Stalemate

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4404

Belgian Stalemate: King Prohibits Parliament 

from Convening, Prevents BHV Vote and Burka Ban

From the desk of Alexandra Colen on Fri, 2010-04-23 12:26

Belgium, the state of origin of EU president Herman Van Rompuy, is proving its status of non-country once again. For the fifth time since he was elected in 2007 the prime minister Yves Leterme, a Christian Democrat of Van Rompuy’s party, has either failed to put or keep a government together. Yesterday, he submitted his resignation to the King after one of his Flemish coalition parties, the Liberal VLD, withdrew from the government.

Leterme resigned after the umpteenth deadline had expired within which he had promised to settle the issue of the unconstitional electoral district of Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde (generally referred to as BHV). All that is needed to settle this issue is a vote in parliament. At the committee level this vote has already been passed, with a majority voting to separate the Flemish (linguistically and territorially) towns of Halle and Vilvoorde from the electoral district of the bilingual capital of Brussels. To prevent the vote from being passed in the general assembly, the francophone parties of Wallonia and Brussels employed a number of procedures, buying time for the government to negotiate a “solution” where the Flemish would be put under pressure to make political, financial or territorial concessions to the francophones in exchange for a redrawing of BHV.

Leterme’s latest attempt failed, again because the francophone parties have no intention of settling the issue at all and are making demands that would undo five decades of careful constitutional reform and upset the precarious political balance. However, the monarchy has come to the rescue. After receiving Leterme, he refused to accept the resignation and immediately summoned the Speaker of the Belgian parliamant, Patrick Dewael, a member of the VLD, and put him under pressure not to convene parliament, and so to prevent any initiative that might lead to the BHV issue being tabled and voted in the general assembly.

By preventing Parliament from convening the King also thwarted the final vote on the burka ban, which was scheduled for yesterday

See also:

Belgium Will Survive For Now, But Not For Long, 7 November 2007

Belgium Will Survive for Now, but Not for Long

From the desk of Paul Belien on Wed, 2007-11-07 21:54

This afternoon, on the 150th day after the June 10th elections, the Home Affairs Committee of the Belgian House of Representatives voted to divide the electoral constituency of Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde (BHV) into a Flemish constituency (Halle-Vilvoorde) and a bilingual constituency (Brussels). The politicians from the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders voted in favour of the split-up, while the politicians from the French-speaking region of Wallonia left the room in protest. The majority of the Belgians are Flemish, but the country has always been dominated by Wallonia. It is the first time in Belgium’s 177 years of existence that he Flemings use their demographic majority of 60% to impose their will.

In Flanders, Belgium’s Dutch-speaking northern half, last June’s elections were won by two parties. The first of these was CD&V (Christen-Democratisch & Vlaams), an alliance of Christian-Democrats and Flemish-Nationalists which aims to transform Belgium into a confederacy of Flanders and Wallonia, the country’s French-speaking southern half. The second of these were the Flemish-secessionists, who aim for downright Flemish independence. Together they polled 56.1% of the Flemish electorate. The CD&V leader Yves Leterme, the son of a Walloon father and a Flemish mother, became the most popular politician in Flanders, with more than 800,000 votes to his name.

The huge gains of Flemish confederalists and secessionists resulted from the deep frustration with the political stalemate concerning the BHV electoral constituency. In a 2003 ruling the Belgian Constitutional Court ordered the Belgian government to abolish this constituency, which allows French-speaking politicians to stand for election in the Halle-Vilvoorde region, which is Flemish, while Dutch-speaking politicians are not allowed to stand for election in Wallonia. The Constitutional Court ruled that this is a discrimination of the Flemings and exhorted the government to rectify the situation by July 2007 at the latest. The governing Liberal and Socialist parties in the coalition of Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt (a Flemish Liberal) failed to do this. Consequently the Liberals and Socialists lost the elections in Flanders, but won in Wallonia.

It is an unwritten rule of Belgian politics that a government has to consist of the largest parties from both parts of the country. Since the elections Yves Leterme has been trying in vain to form a government of Christian-Democrats and Liberals. The Christian-Democrats and the Liberals, however, could not agree on the BHV issue. As Parliament has now asserted its authority over the issue, it is expected that soon a government will be put together which will leave the BHV issue to Parliament rather than trying to solve it at the governmental level.

It will take months before the BHV issue will be put to the vote in the plenary parliament. The Belgian Constitution contains a provision which stipulates that a majority decision taken by the Flemish majority against the French-speaking minority can be objected to by the latter on the grounds that its “vital interests” have been violated. Tonight the leaders of all the French-speaking parties convened and invoked the "violation of vital interests" clause. The procedure requires that now a 60 day "cooling" period is observed. Another result is that the Belgian Parliament can only settle the issue with a two-third majority and a majority within each language group. This makes it virtually impossible to split BHV against the will of the Walloon minority. In the meantime, however, a time-consuming procedure will have to be followed, which will postpone a decision in the plenary parliament for several months – perhaps even until after the regional elections in June 2009. Consequently Mr. Leterme will be able to govern until June 2009, when the political deadlock will resume.

A poll published yesterday in Het Laatste Nieuws, the largest newspaper in Flanders, shows that the Flemings do not expect Belgium to survive. 63% of the Flemish people think that Belgium’s end is near. 87% answered no when asked whether compromises should be made with the Walloon parties in order to save Belgium. 84% said that a reform of the State which grants greater autonomy to Flanders, should be the government’s absolute priority.

From the Art of Billy De Vorss

http://www.thepinupfiles.com/devorss.html

holocaust debate in Hungary

National Journal: First published 25/04/2010

Holocaust debate in Hungary

The Jobbik-Party, a major power in the Hungarian Parliament and also strongly represented in the European Parliament, had the holocaust-debate between Jürgen Graf / Otto Perge vs Dr. Laszlo Karsai, Hungary's well known Jewish holocaust propenent, published through its mouthpiece kuruc.info. Kuruc.info enjoys an Alexa-Ranking of about 11.000. The Website's FrontPage showed prominentally the photo of revisionist scholar Jürgen Graf.

The holocaust debate between Otto Perge and Dr. Laszlo Karsai in Hungary

In March 2010 the Hungarian parliament adopted an anti-revisionist law making it illegal to dispute the orthodox version of the "holocaust" At the same time, Hungarian nationalist and revisionist Otto Perge suggested a debate on the topic. One of the country’s most prominent "holocaust" scholars, Dr. Laszlo Karsai, accepted the challenge. Having learned this, I contacted Mr. Perge, who fortunately knows English (I neither read nor speak Hungarian) and offered him my assistance, which he accepted. Thereupon I sent him 17 questions for his opponent. Dr. Perge translated them into Hungarian and had them published on the website of the nationalist Jobbik party (http://kuruc.info/). Having read them, Dr. Karsai told Perge that he he did not intend to answer these questions, and it is indeed highly improbable that he will.

For his part, Dr. Karsai attempted to refute the revisionist point of view by making 15 statements, which he sent to Otto Perge. Mr. Perge, who has a sound knowledge of the subject, but is not a specialist, translated these statements into English and forwarded them to me. As some of these arguments are often adduced by our adversaries, I took great care to answer them in detail. On 24 April, my answers to the first eight statements were published on the Jobbik website. The other ones will follow within a few days.

One of Hungary’s most renowned historians, Dr. Krisztian Ungvary, offered Dr. Karsai his help and prepared eight questions for Otto Perge. Perge is now translating them into English; as soon as I will have received them, I will answer them, and the Hungarian translation will then be published on the above-mentioned website. All of you will be kept abreast of the developments.

I urge everybody to spread the text of this debate. I will soon translate it into German and publish it on my own website.

Jürgen Graf, Moscow, 25 April 2010

Questions to Dr. Laszlo Karsai

1) In August 1944, a few weeks after the liberation of the Majdanek concentration camp by the Red Army, a Polish-Soviet commission wrote an "expert report" about the camp in which they claimed that no fewer than 1,5 million prisoners had been murdered there [1]. This document was presented by the Soviets as evidence at the Nuremberg trial [2]. As early as in 1948, Polish historian Zdzislaw Lukaszkiewicz reduced the Majdanek death toll to 360.000 [3]. A further reduction took place in 1992 when Polish historian Czeslaw Rajca spoke of 235.000 victims [4]. Another 13 years later, in 2005, Thomas Kranz, director of the research department of the Majdanek museum, stated that 78.000 prisoners had perished in the camp [5]. For a comparison: In their 1998 book KL Majdanek. Eine historische und technische Studie the revisionist authors Jürgen Graf and Carlo Mattogno came to the conclusion that approximately 42.200 people died at Majdanek [6]. So the new figure of the Majdanek museum is still higher by 35.800 than the revisionist one, but lower by 1.422.000 than the one claimed at Nuremberg and lower by 157.000 than the official figure of the Majdanek museum until 2005. - Any comment?

2) In its English language edition, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported on 18 April 2004 that 687.000 Jews who had lived in the countries under German control during the Second World War were still alive at that moment. Consequently, there must have been several million Jews in the same countries in May 1945. How does this figure square with an extermination policy?

3) If the National Socialists had really intended to exterminate the Jews, almost no Jewish concentration camp inmates would have survived. But the "survivor reports" fill whole libraries. Many of these former Jewish prisoners had been transferred from one camp to the other without ever being exterminated. An extreme case is the Polish Jew Samuel Zylberstztain who survived ten camps: The "extermination camp" Majdanek, the "extermination camp" Auschwitz and eight "normal concentration camps" into the bargain [7]. The Austrian Socialist and Jew Benedikt Kautsky spent six years in the camps (Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz and again Buchenwald) before being liberated in spring 1945 [8]. The Jew and anti-Nazi resistance fighter Arno Lustiger is "a survivor of the concentration and extermination camps" (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 27 April 1995). The newspaper did not reveal which "extermination camps" Lustiger had been interned in, but he cannot have been exterminated in any of them, because he was still very much alive in 1995. These examples can be multiplied. How does this square with the assertion that the aim of the German leadership was the physical annihilation of the Jews?

4) According to the "Holocaust" story, from spring 1942 at Auschwitz all Jews unable to work were gassed upon arrival without previous registration. If this assertion were true, no names of old Jews or Jewish children would figure in the Sterbebücher of Auschwitz. But a study of these documents, which were published in printed form in 1995 [9], reveals that many old Jews and Jewish children were registered at Auschwitz:

- 2 Jews over 90 years of age;
- 73 Jews from 80 to 90 years of age;
- 482 Jews from 70 to 80 years of age;
- 2.083 Jews from 60 to 70 years of age;
- 2.584 Jews from 0 to 10 years of age [10].

Considering these statistics, how can one seriously claim that Jews unfit to work were gassed without registration at Auschwitz?

5) The documents of the Auschwitz camp administration show that on 31 december 1943, there were 85.298 inmates at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. No fewer than 19.699, i. e. more than 20%, belonged to the category "unfit to work" [11]. Why were these "useless eaters" not exterminated, as the "Holocaust" legend claims?

6) On 27 July 1944, the administration of the Auschwitz camp compiled a statistics about the prisoners  "temporarily quartered in the camp of the Hungarian Jews". The document shows that until that date 3.138 Hungarian Jews had received medical treatment at the camp hospital.1.426 of them had undergone surgical operation [12]. According to the "Holocaust" story, a huge number of Hungarian Jews were gassed at Auschwitz between 15 May and 9 July 1944. While not a single of these alleged gas chamber murders is confirmed by a German document, the medical treatment of 3.138 Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz until 27 July is indeed documented. What conclusions will a logically thinking person draw from these bare facts?

7) As Polish historian Henryk Swiebocki has documented, 11.246 prisoners underwent surgical operations at Auschwitz between 10 September 1942 and 23 February 1944 [13]. What kind of "extermination camp" was this where more than 11.000 prisoners were not only not exterminated, but operated on in a period of  just 18 months?

8) The "Holocaust" historians are unable to present even a shred of documentary evidence for the alleged "gassing" of Hungarian Jews between May and July 1944. The whole accusation rests on "eyewitness testimony". Two of the most prominent "witnesses" to these alleged mass murders are the Hungarian Jew Miklos Nyiszli and the Slovak Jew Filip Müller. In his book about Auschwitz, which first appeared in Hungarian in 1946 [14] and later was translated into German, English and French, Nyiszli claims that 20.000 people were gassed and burned every day in the Auschwitz crematoria, and that another 6.000 people were shot or burned alive every day in the nearby forest. In his 1979 book Sonderbehandlung [15], Filip Müller describes how he had to undress the bodies of the gassed Jews in the gas chamber. Once he found a piece of cake in the pocket of one of the victims, which he devoured greedily. As Müller can not have devoured this cake with his gas mask on, we cannot but conclude that he was immune to Prussic acid. Futhermore, Müller states that three bodies were simultaneously burned in a crematoria muffle within 15 minutes. In 1975, a group of British cremation experts came to the conclusion that the minimum duration of the cremation of an adult corpse in a crematoria muffle is 63 minutes [16], so Müller’s figure is nine times too high. Do you consider Nyiszli and Müller credible witnesses? If you don’t, could you please name a credible witness to the gassing of the Hungarian Jews, and could you quote his testimony, so that we can analyze it?

9) According to the French Jew Georges Wellers, the number of Hungarian Jews gassed at Birkenau between May and July 1944 amounted to 409.640 [17], while leading Jewish "Holocaust" historian Raul Hilberg contents himself with "over 180.000" [18].

Where were the bodies of the victims cremated? In order to clarify this question, we have to take into account the following facts:

a) At the time, there were four crematoria in Birkenau (Krema II, III, IV and V; crematorium I at the main camp Auschwitz I had been inactive since July 1943).

b) Crematoria II and III had 15 muffles each, crematoria IV and V 8 muffles each. So the 4 crematoria had altogether 46 muffles.

c) If we assume that the incineration of a body in a muffle took 60 minutes, that the crematoria were active 20 hours per day, and that they functioned perfectly during the whole period (a rather unrealistic assumption!), they could thus burn 920 corpses a day. In order to allow for the presence of childrens’ bodies, we will increase this figure to 1000.

d) In the 55 days between 15 May and 9 July, the crematoria could thus theoretically incinerate 55.000 bodies. If Wellers’ figure of murdered Hungarian Jews is correct, there were therefore (409.000 – 55.000 =) 354.000 unburned human bodies at Birkenau after 9 July. If Hilberg’s figure is accurate, there were still (180.000 – 55.000 =) 125.000 unburned corpses. The "Holocaust" historians cannot claim that these bodies were burned after 9 July, because according to them, the gassings continued until late October 1944, albeit on a lesser scale. Furthermore, the bodies of prisoners who had died from natural causes at Auschwitz-Birkenau had to be incinerated too. So how did the Germans make these mountains of corpses disappear?

10) Based on the declaration of "eyewitnesses", such as Filip Müller and Szlama Dragon, the "Holocaust" historians claim that the corpses of the gassed Hungarian Jews were partially burned in huge ditches near the crematoria. During the critical period, Birkenau was photographed several times by allied planes. None of these pictures show any "incineration pits" or large open fires [19]. How do you explain this fact?

11) Two German wartime documents quoted by Carlo Mattogno in one of his articles [20] definitely prove that the morgues of the Birkenau crematoria were not used as homicidal gas chambers, as the official historians claim. On 20 July 1943, SS physician Dr. Wirths asked the Central Construction Office of Auschwitz to set up provisional morgues in several sectors of the Birkenau camp. At that time, the bodies of prisoners who had died in the camp were stored in wooden sheds before being taken to the crematoria. As Birkenau was infested with rats, these rodents were attracted by the bodies and feasted on them. In his letter Dr. Wirths stated that the rats were the carriers of flees which could spread plague, and an outbreak of this disease would have dire consequences for the staff and the prisoners. On 4 August 1943, Karl Bischoff, chief of the Central Construction office, answered that no provisional morgues were needed, as the corpses of deceased prisoners would henceforth be taken to the crematoria twice a day [21]. This proves that the morgues of the crematoria could be used as such any time and were not used as homicidal gas chambers.

In May 1944, the problem appeared again. On the 22th of that month, the new chief of the Central Construction Office of Auschwitz, Jothann, wrote a letter in which he stressed that the corpses of prisoners who had died in the camp would be removed every morning, so that there was no need for the construction of provisional morgues [22]. Jothann did not state explicitly that the corpses would be taken to the crematoria, but the context allows for no other explanation. The date of this letter is especially important. According to Danuta Czech’s Kalendarium [23], 62.000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau between 17 and 22 May 1944, 41.000 of them were "gassed without registration", which means that the morgues of the crematoria must have been used as gas chambers day and night during the whole period. How could any bodies of prisoners who had died from natural causes during the same time be stored in these same morgues?

12) On 27 January 1945, Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army. The Soviet soldiers found 8.000 prisoners whom the Germans had left behind because they were too weak to be evacuated with the others.  On 2 February, the Pravda published an article by the well-known Soviet Jewish war correspondent Boris Polevoi entitled "The Death Factory at Auschwitz". In this article, Polevoi spoke of a conveyor belt on which prisoners were killed by means of electric current. This conveyor belt was never heard of again. Polevoi also mentioned "gas chambers", but located them neither at Birkenau nor at the main camp Auschwitz I, but in the "east" of Auschwitz, were nobody has located them either before or after him. How do you explain that:

a) The Germans had not killed these 8000 weak prisoners as "useless eaters";

b) The Germans, who allegedly destroyed the evidence of their genocidal crimes, allowed 8000 witnesses to survive so that they could tell the world what they had seen;

c) That the witnesses did not tell Polevoi about crimes they had seen but about crimes they could not have seen, as there was neither an electrified conveyor belt at Auschwitz, nor were they gas chambers in the eastern sector of the camp?

13) Can you adduce any documentary evidence proving that even a single Jew was killed in a gas chamber in any National Socialist concentration camp? If your answer is yes, please quote this document and publish a copy in the internet, so that we can analyze it together.

14) Are you ready to sign an appeal for an international expert commission, consisting of historians, architects, engineers, chemists, cremation experts and air photo specialists, to evaluate the evidence for the alleged mass murders at Auschwitz and to publish their results in a detailled report? If your answer is yes, let us formulate the text of this appeal together!

15)  According to the official version of the events, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were extermination camps were a huge number of Jews were murdered by engine exhausts. But during the war and in the immediate post-war period, completely different reports were spread about what transpired in these camps. Here is a concise (and incomplete) list of the extermination techniques allegedly used in these camps:

Belzec: Quicklime in trains [24];
An electrified plate in a huge underwater basin [ 25].

Sobibor: A black substance poured into the chamber through holes in the ceiling [26]; Chlorine [27].

Treblinka: A mobile gas chamber which moved along the mass graves and discharged the corpses into these graves [28]; Lethal gasses with a retarded effect which allowed the victims to walk to the mass graves before swooning and falling into the graves [29]:Pumping the air out of the chambers [30];
Steam [31].

Any comment? (Please do not argue that during the war it was impossible to ascertain how the victims were killed; as late as in December 1945, more than half a year after the end of the war, it was claimed at the Nuremberg trial that steam had been used at Treblinka to kill "hundreds of thousands" of Jews[32].)

16) According to "Holocaust" literature, the Sobibor "extermination camp" had a "gassing building" containing first three and later six gas chambers. This building was about 18 m long and was made of concrete [33]. How do you explain that two teams of qualified archeologists, the first one headed by Prof. Andrzej Kola of the University of Torun [34], the second one by Israeli archeologists I. Gilead and Y. Haimi and Polish archeologist W. Mazurek [35], were unable to find any trace of this bulding despite extensive digging and drilling on the territory of the former camp of Sobibor?

17) When the Germans found the bodies of over 4.000 Polish officers murdered by the Soviets at Katyn, they invited experts from several countries to inspect the site of the crime and to carry out autopsies. They then published a detailled forensic report about the massacre [36]. They did the same thing after discovering the bodies of over 8.000 Ukrainians shot by the Bolshevists at Winnitza before the war [37]. Do you know of any similar forensic reports published by the Soviets about mass graves containing the bodies of Jews who had been murdered by the Germans on the Eastern front? (I do not claim that no such reports exist, I simply do not know any, and I would like you to help me. In his enormous three volume study The Destruction of the European Jews, Raul Hilberg does not quote a single such report, which ought to make us pause, to say the least.)

Answers to Dr. Laszlo Karsai’s arguments

Argument 1: Serious historians do not accept the revisionist arguments. They regard them as absurd.

Answer: In Austria, revisionist poet Gerd Honsik was sentenced to 5 years in prison, revisionist engineer Wolfgang Fröhlich (who specialized in the use of gas to eradicate vermin and microbes and repeatedly pointed out the technical impossibility of the alleged mass gassings with Zyklon B) to 6 years. In Germany, the schoolteacher Günter Deckert spent 5 years behind bars, the writer Udo Walendy more than 2 years, the chemist Germar Rudolf 3 years and 6 months,, the revisionist activist Ernst Zündel 5 years. The revisionist lawyer Sylvia Stark got a prison term of 3 years and 3 months, Horst Mahler was sentenced to almost 13 years in jail for his revisionist writings and utterances. How many historians will be prepared to risk not only the abrupt end of their carreer, but stiff prison terms, for the sake of historical truth? Very few indeed!

It is true that many countries, such as the USA and Britain, do not have anti-revisionist laws, but even there a revisionist historian teaching at a university or a school would immediately become free game for Jewish and left-wing organizations, plus for the media, and he would most probably lose his job.

The fact that the supporters of the official «holocaust» story depend on repressive laws, censorship and intimidation to defend their version of the events clearly shows that these people have something to hide. Only a free debate can show which side is right (or at least closer to the truth). However, the «holocaust» historians and the media shun such a discussion. In Hungary, Dr. Laszlo Karsai, who at first had accepted a debate with the revisionist Otto Perge, immediately threw the towel after receiving Mr. Perge’s questions. By the way, no one could have done better than Dr. Karsai. If leading Jewish «holocaust» historian Raul Hilberg, who passed away in 2008, were still alive, he could not answer these questions either, because they are based on solid facts. An old adage says: Facts are tyrans, they tolerate no dissent.

Argument 2: In a speech delivered in the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, Adolf Hitler predicted that the effect of a new war would be the annihilation of the Jewish race.

Answer: In today’s language, "annihilation" is a synonym for "physical liquidation". But if we analyze Hitler’s writings and speeches, we discover that he often used the word "annhiliation" ("Vernichtung"), as well as the word "extermination" ("Ausrottung"), in the sense of "depriving someone of his power". An example from Mein Kampf clearly illustrates this point. In this book, Hitler wrote that in the Hapsburg monarchy the German population had been threatened by "langsame Ausrottung" ("slow extermination")[38]. Did Hitler insinuate that Austrian emperor Franz Josef planned to gas or to shoot all 10 million Austrians of German nationality? Of course not; he simply feared that in the multi-national Hapsburg empire the Germans would gradually lose their dominating position to the Slavs.

Hitler’s speech from 30 January 1939 is often quoted in "holocaust" literature, so it is not surprising that Dr. Karsai uses it to "prove" that Hitler wanted to exterminate the Jews. Unfortunately, the "holocaust" historians always "forget" to quote the continuation of Hitler’s speech, and Dr. Karsai is no exception, so we shall quote it ourselves: "The times where the non-Jewish peoples were defenseless in the field of propaganda are gone. National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy now have institutions which in case of necessity enable them to enlighten the world about the essence of a question of which many peoples are instinctively conscious, but lack scientific knowledge." [39]

So the "annihilation" of the Jews simply meant the enlightenment of the non-Jewish nations about the Jewish peril!

Argument 3: On 27 March 1942, Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary that "barbaric methods", which he preferred not to describe, were used against the Jews, and that 60% of them would be liquidated; the other 40% would be used for labour.

Answer: No revisionist has ever been able to furnish a satisfactory explanation for this passage. But let us compare it with what Goebbels wrote in the same diary only 20 days earlier, on 7 March 1942: "There are about 11 million Jews in Europe [a heavily inflated figure!]. Later it will be necessary to concentrate them in the East. After the war some island such as Madagascar can be assigned to them." [40]

The deportation of the European Jews to Madagascar was not Dr. Goebbel’s brainchild. The so-called "Madagascar plan" was taken very seriously by the National Socialist leadership, but finally abandoned as unworkable [41]. Now the "holocaust" historians may argue that the German government dropped this plan between 7 and 27 March and decided to exterminate the Jews instead; this would explain the discrepancy between the two diary entries. However this argument would be untenable for the following reason: According to the "holocaust" story, the first "extermination camp", Chelmno, started to function as early as in December 1941. Since it is unthinkable that a local commander would have set up an "extermination camp" without an order from the highest authorities, an extermination policy must already have existed in late 1941, if the claims about Chelmno are correct (which the revisionists dispute [42]). Being one of the leading figures of the Third Reich, Dr. Goebbels would of course have known about such an extermination policy, so how do the "holocaust" historians explain the fact that he spoke of the concentration of the Jews in the East and advocated assigning them Madagascar (or another island) as late as on 7 March 1942?

Let’s sum up: While the revisionists are unable to explain the second entry in Goebbels’ diary, the "holocaust" historians are at a loss to explain the first one! It is unlikely that this mystery will ever be solved.

Argument 4: In a letter to Franz Rademacher, the chief of the "Judenreferat" in the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Adolf Eichmann wrote that the Serbian Jews should be shot.

Answer: In Serbia, the partisan movement was very active; this created huge problems for the occupying powers (Germany and Italy). As a reprisal for attacks by the partisans, the German and Italian armies frequently shot hostages, among them many Jews (because the percentage of Jews in the resistance movement was particularly high).

On 8 September 1941, the German plenipotentiary in Belgrade, Felix Benzler, sent a telegram to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in which he stated that the Serbian Jews were involved in numerous acts of sabotage and rebellion. For this reason, the "removal" (Entfernung) of the male Jews (about 8,000) was a necessity. It would be advisable to deport them to an island in the Danube Delta, on Romanian territory [43].

On 11 September 1941, Martin Luther of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs answered that the expulsion of the Jews to Romania was not desirable. Benzler should take the necessary measures to have these Jews interned in labour camps [44]. On the following day, Benzler sent yet another telegram to Berlin, in which he objected that this solution was not feasible for security reasons because the labor camps constituted a threat to the German troups. For this reason, the labour camp Sabac would have to be dissolved, as it was situated in a combat zone and surrounded by thousands of rebels. In case his request to have the Jews deported to Romania was again rejected, they would have to be expelled to the General Government or to Russia [45].

Franz Rademacher, chief of the "Judenreferat" at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, then called Eichmann and asked him for advice, whereupon he summarized the results of their discussion: According to Eichmann, the deportation of the Jews to the General Governement or Russia was impossible; Eichmann suggested shooting them [46]. On 2 October, Joachim Ribbentrop, minister of foreign affairs, decided to contact Himmler in order to ascertain if he could take care of 8.000 Serbian Jews, deporting them to East Poland or somewhere else [47]. On 25 October, Rademacher summarized the negotiations which had ensued: The male Jews would be shot. As to the remaining 20.000 Serbian Jews (women, children and old people), they would be evacuated by ship to the camps in the east ("auf dem Wasserwege in die Auffanglager im Osten abgeschoben") [48].

What conclusions can we draw from these documented facts?

a) In Serbia a large number of Jews were indeed shot.

b) These shootings were not part of a policy which aimed at the total destruction of the Jews because of their race and/or religion, but a brutal and excessive reaction to the activity of the partisans among whom there were numerous Jews.

c) The shooting of the male Serb Jews was preceded by long discussions, during which less brutal measures were suggested (and finally rejected).

d) Jewish women and children, as well as old Jews, were not killed.

Argument 5: Paul Wurm wrote a letter to Franz Rademacher in which he stated that the Jews would be murderd "with special methods".

Answer: On 23. October 1941, Paul Wurm, a member of the Anti-Jewish World League, wrote to Franz Rademacher: "On my journey home to Berlin, I met an old party comrade who is working on the solution of the Jewish question in the East. In the near future, much of the Jewish vermin will be annihilated by special measures" ("In nächster Zeit wird von dem jüdischen Ungeziefer durch besondere Massnahmen manches vernichtet werden").

It should be pointed out that this is not an official document. Paul Wurm, who was a complete nonentity and had no influence whatsoever on the policy of the German leadership, did not even mention the name of the "old party comrade" to whom he owed this piece of information! Under these cirumstances, his letter proves very little.

Of course, this does not mean that no Jews were killed on the Eastern front; no revisionist has ever made such an absurd assertion. The revisionists basically contest two things:

1) That there was a policy to kill all Jews because of their race and/or religion.

2) That the number of Jews shot in the East was even remotely as high as the «holocaust» historians argue (2,2 million according to H. Krausnick and H. H. Wilhelm[49], 1,3 million according to R. Hilberg[50]). Since there are no reliable documents (as we will see later, the Einsatzgruppen reports are highly suspect), the real number cannot be determined with any degree of accuracy before new evidence becomes available.

Argument 6: Why was Jewish emigration from the countries under Geman control forbidden in October 1941? Obviously because the Nazis wanted to exterminate the Jews!

Answer: Had the Jews been allowed to emigrate, they would of course have supported the allied war effort as soldiers, technicians and scientists. This was hardly in the interest of the Germans.

Argument 7: French priest Patrick Desbois has located more than 600 mass graves with murdered Jews in Ukraine. This is hard evidence for the reality of the holocaust.

Answer: In order to judge the value of Patrick Desbois’ book about the "holocaust by bullets" [51], we can do no better than quote what two French revisionists, Vincent Reynourd and Prof. Robert Faurisson, have written under the headline "Father Desbois is one hell of a prankster":

Vincent Reynouard: "The alleged mass graves have not been dug open and never will be. […] The people claiming to have discovered the ‚mass graves’ have not, in reality, carried out any excavations, hence no inventory of remains, no verification, forensic or physical or material certification of the standard, compulsory kind made in the inquest following the discovery of even a single corpse or skeleton. No police or justice official has been to any of the sites to do any examination whatsoever. […] Two Jewish associations […] have gone about gathering ‚testimonies’ […] Ukrainian villagers, mustered for the occasion, are filmed giving their accounts from wich, subsequently, only choice bits will be picked. […] But, coming back to those alleged mass graves, how is the value of testimony to be assessed in the material reality of the facts has not been established beforehand?" [52]

Robert Faurisson: "These supposed mass graves will not be dug open; no disinternment or any material verification will be carried out, all under the pretence that the Jewish religion prohibits the touching of Jewish corpses; however it is enough to look in the Encyclopedia Judaica (1978) at the entry ‚Autopsies’ (plural) and ‚Dissection’ (Singular) to see that there is no such prohibition at all." [53]

Argument 8: The Einsatzgruppen used gas vans to kill huge numbers of Jews on the Eastern front.

Answer: Nobody has ever been able to prove that even one person, Jew or non-Jew, was killed by the Germans in a gas van. No such vehicle has ever been found. The vast body of "holocaust" literature does not contain a single photograph of such a van, or a blueprint for it. (The only exception is Gerald Fleming’s book Hitler und die Endlösung [54], which shows a picture of a lorry allegedly used as a gas van. But as an anti-revisionist researcher, Jerzy Halberstadt, has pointed out, the vehicle shown by Fleming was found in november 1945 on the territory of a Polish factory and thereupon examined by a Polish war crime commission, which came to the conclusion that it had not been used for homicidal purposes, but only to transport furniture [55].)

The "holocaust" historians often quote two documents which allegedly prove the use of gas van for the killing of Jews. As the German Ingrid Weckert[56] and the Frenchman Pierre Marais[57] have demonstrated, these documents are grotesque forgeries. According to the first of them, the "Becker document[58]", these vans could only ciruculate in good weather and became absolutely useless as soon as it started to rain! The alleged author of this ridiculous document, purportedly a German officer, describes how he had to bribe other Germans to obtain the necessary spare parts for these murder vans! In this case, the forgery is so blatant that E. Kogon, H. Langbein and A. Rückerl did not dare to include this "piece of evidence" in their well-known "documentation" Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas[59] ("National Socialist Mass Killings by Poison Gas").But the second "documentary evidence", the "Just document[60]", which is teeming with technical absurdities, is just as preposterous.

If Dr. Karsai persists in his claim that the Germans used homicidal gas vans for the murder of Jews, we think he is obliged to tell us where we can see one of these vehicles. If he cannot do this, let him at least show us a German wartime blueprint of it, or a document proving the use of such vans – a genuine document, please, and not a third-rate fake!

Argument 9: The amount of Zyclon B delivered to Auschwitz was too large to be used exclusively for delousing procedures.

Answer: No, it wasn’t. In 1942, 7,500 kg of Zyklon B were delivered to Auschwitz, in 1943, 12,000 kg[61]. (The amount for 1944 is not known.) Auschwitz was infested with lice, the carriers of the extremely dangerous spotted fever, which was the main cause of the frighteningly high mortality at the camp. Hundreds of barracks and a large number of workshops had to be deloused regularly, and Auschwitz had about 30 satellite camps.

A report written on 22 July 1943 by SS-Untersturmführer Johann Schwarzhuber, the Schutzhaftlagerführer of the male section of the Birkenau camp, demonstrates the extent of the use of Zyklon B for desinfection:

"By mid-May 1943, the old male camp in Birkenau, B 1 b, was nearly free from lice and – with a few exceptions – also free from spotted fever. This could only be reached by the daily use of the delousing installation. Starting in mid-May, the whole gipsy camp plus the straw sacks, wollen blankets, underwear and clothes form the female camp were deloused too." [62]

By the way, Jean-Claude Pressac, who was once hailed by the media as the leading Auschwitz expert, wrote that 97 to 98% of the Zyclon B delivered to Auschwitz were used for delousing procedures and only 2 to 3% for homicidal gassings [63]. In view of the fact that the difference between 100% and 97-98% is not statistically significant, even according to Pressac the amount of Zyklon B delivered to the Auschwitz camp does not prove that some of it was used to kill human beings.

Argument 10: The Leuchter report contains many mistakes. The fact that Leuchter did not find significant concentrations of ferrocyanides in the walls of the Auschwitz gas chambers is irrelevant, because ferrocyanides dissolve as a result of rain, snow, wind etc.

Answer: Yes, the Leuchter report [64] indeed contains a certain number of errors. They can at least partially be explained by the fact that Leuchter had to write his report in a great hurry. It was to be presented at the trial of Ernst Zündel in Toronto, which then (April 1988) was approaching its end. But Leuchter’s result were fully confirmed by Germar Rudolf in a much more scientific study [65].

Dr. Karsai’s assertion that ferrocyanides dissolve as a result of rain, snow, wind etc. is incorrect. In his above-mentioned report Rudolf quotes specialist literature proving that these cyanides are well-known for their extraordinary stability. They dissolve about as slowly as the walls they are contained it. We advise Dr. Karsai to have a look at the gas chambers of Majdanek (which were authentic Zyklon B gas chambers, but only used for the eradication of insects, as revisionist researchers Carlo Mattogno and Jürgen Graf have shown in their book about the Majdanek camp[66]). The walls of these rooms are still covered with blue spots. The same is true of the delousing chambers in Bauwerk 5a of Auschwitz-Birkenau. (No one has ever alleged that human beings were gassed in this building.) On the other hand, there are no blue spots whatsoever on the walls of the alleged homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz I (the morge of Krematorium I) and Birkenau (the morgue of Krematorium II).

Argument 11:  The Nazis killed more than 200.000 mentally disabled people in the frame of their "Euthanasia" action, which proves that they did not shrink from mass killings. Many of the men who had taken part in the euthanasia program were later employed in the camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. This is strong evidence that these camps were murder factories.

Answer: While the figure of 200.000 euthanasia victims is certainly inflated, the euthanasia program itself is indeed an indisputable fact.

In Sobibor. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality, a book authored by Jürgen Graf, Thomas Kues and Carlo Mattogno and scheduled to come out in the USA in May or June 2010, the question why certain men who had been involved in the euthanasia program were later stationed in the above-mentioned three camps is discussed in detail. Although they cannot adduce documentary evidence, the authors think that a certain number of Jews (the mentally ill and people suffering from infectious diseases) were killed in these three camps, probably by lethal injection. In Germany, euthanasia had been stopped after Catholic bishop Clemens von Galen and Lutheran bishop Theophil Wurm had protested against this practice, but in occupied Poland, the German authorities did not have to heed possible protests from the church, or other institutions. From the National Socialist point of view, if would have been meaningless to send mentally ill Jews, or Jews with infectious diseases, to the Eastern territories, as the Germans did with the other Jews deported to the  Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. (As a matter of fact, these three camps were transit camps; see the following question.)

Argument 12: Large numbers of Jews were sent to the camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Where did these Jews go if they were not gassed?

Answer: After the German leadership had abandonded the Madagascar plan, it pursued a new policy: The European Jews were to be resettled in the occupied Soviet territories. On 10 February 1942, Franz Rademacher wrote a letter to envoy Harald Bielfeld of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in which he stated:

"The war against the Soviet Union has meanwhile opened up the possibility of providing other territories for the final solution. The Führer has decided accordingly that the Jews will not be deported to Madagascar but to the East. Hence, Madagascar need no longer be considered for the final solution." [67]

This clearly shows that the "final solution" was a territorial one!

The construction of the transit camps Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor must be seen in this context:

a) On 17 March 1942, Fritz Reuter, an employee in the Department of Population Matters at the office of he General Governor for the Lublin district, wrote a memorandum on a conversation he had had the day before with SS-Hauptsturmführer Julius Höfle. According to this memorandum, Höfle had explained that "Jews unfit for work" would all be taken to Belzec, "the outmost border station in Zamosc county". 4 to 5 transports of 1,000 Jews each would be "taken across the border and would never return to the General Government" [68];

b) On 13 August 1942, SS general Karl Wolff wrote to Albert Ganzenmüller of the Reichsbahn, who had previously informed him that since 22 July there had been a daily train with 5,000 Jews from Warsaw to Treblinka, that he was very glad to learn that the Germans were now able "to accelerate this population transfer" [69];

c) On 5 July 1943, Himmler ordered the "transit camp Sobibor" to be converted into a concentration camp [70].

The "holocaust" historians expect us to believe that the National Socialist leadership used a "coded language" even in their private correspondance, and that expressions such as "be taken across the border", "transit camp" and "population transfer" were euphemisms for "physical extermination". This claim is ridiculous beyond comment. To back up their monstruous fantasies about chemical slaughterhouses where huge numbers of Jews were gassed (in the case of Belzec and Treblinka with Diesel exhaust, although it is generally known that Diesel exhaust, which contains a high amount of oxygene and very low quantities of carbon monoxide, is relatively harmless), these historians can present no better evidence than grotesque "eyewitness testimony". That the witnesses contradict each other on just about everything and that there reports are teeming with absurdities does not seem to bother these splendid scholars at all.

The whole gassing story hinges on the existence of the gas chamber buildings described by the self-styled "eyewitness". Between 1997 and 2000, a highly qualified Polish archeologist, Prof. Andrzej Kola, performed extensive excavations and drillings on the territory of the former camps Belzec and Sobibor[71]. He was unable to find the slightest trace of the alleged gas chamber buildings, which definitely settles the matter.

The authors of the above-mentioned book Sobibor. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality adduce solid evidence for the presence of French, Belgian, Dutch and other Western Jews in the occupied Eastern territories during the war. Two examples will suffice here:

During the German wartime occupation of Lithuania, the Jew Herman Kruk kept a Yiddish-language diary which was later translated into English [72]. In his entry of 16 April 1943 Kruk mentioned the presence of 19.000 Dutch Jews in the Lithuanian town of Vievis. On 20 April 1943, he wrote that furniture belonging to Dutch Jews had been brought to the locals workshops for repair and that Dutch documents had been found in the drawers. As there is no reason on earth why Kruk should have made up this story, this proves that Dutch Jews allegedly gassed at Auschwitz and Sobibor were transferred to Lithuania (the "holocaust" literature knows nothing about Dutch Jews in the Eastern territories).

In April 1944, the communist French underground newspaper Notre Voix reported that 8,000 Jews from Paris had been "rescued" by the Red Army in Ukraine [73]. According to "holocaust" literature, the only French Jews ever deported to the East went to Estonia and Lithuania in May 1944 [74], so the Parisian Jews found in the Ukraine in April 1944 must by necessity have gone there via Auschwitz. In the "holocaust" statistics, they figure as "gassed people".

Now the supporters of the orthodox "holocaust" story will ask why there are no German documents about railway transports of these Jews to the occupied Eastern Territories and about Jewish settlements in the East. Furthermore, they will ask what happened to those of the deported Jews who survived the harsh wartime conditions. To these questions, the revisionists can only oppose a hypothesis, but a reasonable and well-founded one.

For several reasons, the victorious allies decided to continue propagating the Jewish extermination story after the war. First of all, this enabled them to excuse their own crimes, such as the terror bombing of the German cities or the inhumane expulsion of more than 15 million civilians from East Germany and the Sudetenland, by accusing the vanquished of far worse atrocities. But there were other, even more important reasons. By charging Germany with an unparalleled crime, the victors hoped to crush the national spirit of the German people and to prevent any resurgence of German nationalism. Finally the "holocaust" story prepared the ground for the foundation of the State of Israel, which both the USA and the Soviet Union wholeheartedly supported. (In view of the communist sympathies of many Jews, Stalin undoubtedly hoped that Israel would become a Soviet bulwark in the Near East; as the further developments showed, this hope was illusionary.) Now if the Jewish extermination story was to be belived, the documents about the transfer of the Jews to the East had to disappear. For the victorious powers, it was certainly not difficult to destroy, or to hide, some piles of paper.

The number of the Jews transferred to the occupied Soviet territories was about 1,9 million (for details see the above-mentioned book Sobibor. Holocaust Propaganda and Reality). A clear majority of them were Polish Jews. The authors of the book assume that the Soviet prevented the deportees who had survived the grim wartime conditions from returning to their homelands after 1945.

Argument 13: What happened to the Jews if they were not gassed? After the war, most Eastern European Jews were gone.

Answer: There are only two detailled studies about Jewish population losses during World War II. In 1983, the revisionist Walter Sanning wrote The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry [75] in which he came to the conclusion that the number of Jewish victims amounted to about 300.000. Eigh years later, Walter Benz edited a collective volume entitled Dimension des Völkermords [76]; according to his statistics, between 5,29 and 6,01 million Jews perished as a result of National Socialist persecution.

Sanning’s book is far from perfect. He ignores a vital German wartime document, the Korherr report[77], and puts too much trust in the statements of a Soviet Jewish propagandist, David Bergelson, who had claimed that 80% of the Jews in the Soviet territories later conquered by the Germans had been evacuated and thus "saved". The real number of the evacuees was most probably much lower. Sanning’s own figure of 300.000 Jewish victims is certainly too low. Such obvious shortcomings notwithstanding, Sanning’s book is still the most serious one about the question, whereas the Benz book is utterly fraudulent.

In an article comparing Sanning and Benz[78], Germar Rudolf has demonstrated the methods used by the swindler Benz and his team to corroborate the official "holocaust" statistics:

a) For Benz and his team, every Jew who died during World War II was a "holocaust victim". So if a Jewish soldier of the Red Army was killed in combat, or if a Jew evacuated to Siberia before the arrival of the German troups died from cold or starvation, he was a victim of National Socialist racism!

b) As everybody knows, numerous territories in Eastern Europe changed their owners during World War II. In most cases, Benz and his team count Jews who (really or allegedly) perished in these territories twice, as citizens of state A and as citizens of state B! Thanks to this cheap trick, Benz gains over 500.000 "exterminated Jews".

c) Benz virtually ignores the vast post-war Jewish emigration to Palestine, the US and numerous other countries (unlike Sanning, who treats this fundamental question in great detail).

The fact that most Jews had vanished from Eastern Europe after the war was not only due to war, persecution and emigration. Many Polish, Soviet etc. Jews disappeared in the statistics. The years after World War Two saw a rapid acceleration of Jewish assimiliation. In the USSR, every citizen could himself chose what nationality he wanted to belong to, so in the postwar population census many Jews, who did not feel any emotional ties to the creed of their ancestors, simply called themselves "Russians", "Ukrainians" etc. As we see, very much depends on the definition of the word "Jew".

For this simple reason, official population statistics cannot help us to ascertain the real magnitude of Jewish losses. A more rational method consists in calculating how many Jews perished as a result of concrete acts of persecution. As far as the Jews who died in the NS concentration camps are concerned, their number can be established with a certain amount of accuracy, because the German documents about the camps have largely survived. The figure is approximately 340.000 [79].

On the other hand, it is impossible to determine how many Jews were shot on the Eastern front. In order to prove a gigantic slaughter allegedly committed by the German troups, especially the so-called "Einsatzgruppen" whose primary task was the struggle against partisans, the "holocaust" historians regularly quote the Einsatzgruppen reports, which were found in the Reichskanzlei in 1945 (why did the Germans not destroy these incriminating documents???), but the reports are highly suspect for two reasons:

a) Their contents is not confirmed by forensic evidence.

b) They contain obvious anomalies and are contradicted by other documents.

One example will suffice to illustrate the second point. According to a report from Einsatzgruppe A from February 1942, there had been 153.743 Jews in Lithuania before the outbreak of the German-Soviet war. 136.421 had been liquidated since, and 34.500 were still living in ghettos [80]. A simple addition shows that something is wrong here. But this is not the only inexplicable thing. If the Germans allowed a fraction of the Lithuanian Jews to survive, this could only be due to the fact that they wanted to use them as cheap labour, so one would expect that only able-bodied Jews were spared. However, in late May 1942 14.545 Jews lived in the ghetto of Vilnius, 3,693 of whom were children under 16. There were also many old people among them; the oldest one, a woman, had been born in 1852 [81]. In view of these facts, every self-respecting historian will treat the Einsatzgruppen reports with utter caution.

Dr. Karsai’s last two arguments have nothing to do with the alleged extermination of the Jews, but we will answer them all the same.

Argument 14: The Nazis killed about 2,5 million Soviet prisoners of war.

Answer: The vast majority of the Sovient POWs who died in German captivity were not "killed", but succumbed to starvation, exhaustion and disease, just like the vast majority of German POWs who did not survive Soviet captivity.

Not having studied this subject, we are unable to comment on the figure mentioned by Dr. Karsai, but as a matter of fact all sources agree that the mortality among the Soviet POWs was staggeringly high. For this tragedy there were basically two reasons: After the rapid German victories in the first phase of the war, millions of Soviet soldiers were taken prisoners. The Germans, who had not forseen this, did not have enough food to nourish them adequately. But even later the Soviet prisoners of war received inadequate food rations and died in large numbers, unlike the POWs from Western countries, who were treated correctly. There can be no doubt whatsoever that this policy towards the Soviet prisoners (which Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago explains by the fact that the USSR had not signed the Geneva Convention) was criminal. That the German POWs in Soviet camps were also treated dismally and died in huge numbers is no justification, because one crime does not excuse another one.

Argument 15: According to the "Plan Ost", the Nazis planned to kill 30 million Soviet citizens.

Answer: This assertion is based on a declaration of Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, former SS-Obergruppenführer and Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer Russland-Mitte, during the Nuremberg trial. In Nuremberg, von dem Bach-Zelewski stated that in early 1941, Heinrich Himmler had said at the Wewelsburg that the purpose of the coming campaign in Russia would be the reduction of the Slavic population by 30 million [82]. The problem is that such statements made after the war are totally worthless, because the victorious powers could easily force any German to confess anything. Quite often the confessions were extorted by torture. The most famous case is the one of Rudolf Höss, the first commander of Auschwitz, who declared in British captivity that up to November 1943 two and a half million people had been gassed at the Auschwitz camp, while another 500.000 had perished from starvation and disease [83]. (It should be remembered that today’s «holocaust» historians usually claim about one million Auschwitz victims, which is still an insane exaggeration, as the real number of people who died at Auschwitz, both Jews and non-Jews, was about 135.000 [84].) In his book Legions of Death[85] British writer Rupert Butler has documented how the British obtained the confession of Höss: They mercilessly beat him for three days before he finally signed the text they had prepared for him!

Of course, not all German defendants were tortured to obtain the desired confessions. There were other, more refined methods. Let us have a closer look at Oberstgruppenführer von dem Bach-Zelewski’s fate[86]. According to the official «holocaust» story, he was one of the worst criminals. He is supposed to have ordered the murder of 27.800 Jews near Riga and the massacre of tens of thousands of Soviet civilians. Under these circumstances, one would assume that he was certainly put on trial and sentenced to hang after the war, but precisely this did not happen. At the Nuremberg trial, he was used as a witness for the prosecution and then released. Obviously this lenient treatment was the reward for having made statements as the one quoted above, which allowed the allies to accuse the Germans of having planned not only the total extermination of the Jews, but also a gruesome genocide of tens of millions of Slavs.

It is true that von dem Bach-Zelewski was later tried by the West German justice, but not for his alleged role in the «holocaust» or the slaughter of Soviet citizens. He was tried for two murders he was accused of having committed in 1934 [87].

References:

1	Communique of the Polish-Soviet Extraordinary Commission for investigating the crimes committed by the Germans in the Majdanek concentration camp, Foreign Language Publishing House, Moscow 1944.
2	USSR-29.
3	Zdzislaw Lukaszkiewicz, „Oboz koncentracyjny i zaglady Majdanek“, in: Biuletyn Glownej Komisji Badania Zbrodni Niemieckich w Polsce, Volume 4, Warsaw 1948, p. 63-105.
4	Czeslaw Rajca, „Problem liczby ofiar w obozu na Majdanku“, in: Zeszyty Majdanka, IV, 1992, p. 122-132.
5	Tomasz Kranz, „Ewidencja zgonow i smiertelnosc wiezniow KL Lublin“, in: Zeszyty Majdanka, 23 (2005).
6	Jürgen Graf und Carlo Mattogno, KL Majdanek. Eine historische und technische Studie, Castle Hill Publishers, Hastings 1998, chapter 4.
7	Samuel Zylberstztain, „Pamietnik wieznia diesieciu obozow“, in: Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego w Polsce, Nr. 68, Warsaw 1968, p. 53 ff.
8	Benedikt Kautsky, Teufel und Verdammte, Büchergilde Gutenberg, Zürich 1948.
9	Staatliches Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau (ed.), Die Sterbebücher von Auschwitz, Saur Verlag, Munich 1995.
10	Germar Rudolf, Vorlesungen über den Holocaust, Castle Hill Publishes, Hastings 2005, p. 271-273.
11	Archiwum Glownej Komisji Badania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu, Warsaw, NTN, 134, p. 277 f.
12	Gosudarstevenny Arkhiv Rossiskoj Federatsii, Moscow, 7021-108-32, p. 76.
13	Henryk Swiebocki, „Widerstand“, in: Auschwitz. Studien zur Geschichte des Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslagers, Band IV, Verlag des Staatlichen Museums Auschwitz-Birkenau 1999, p 330.
14	Miklos Nyiszli, Boncoloorvosa voltam az Auschwitz-i krematoriumban, Vilag, Budapest 1946.
15	Filip Müller, Sonderbehandlung, Verlag Steinhausen, Frankfurt a.M. 1979.
16	„Factors which affect the process of cremation“, in: Annual Cremation Conference Report, Cremation Society of Great Britain, 1975, p. 81.
17	Georges Wellers, „Essai de détermination du nombre des juifs morts au camp d’Auschwitz“, in: Le Monde Juif, Octobre-Décembre 1983.
18	Raul Hilberg, Die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 1000 (Volume 3).
19	John Ball, Air Photo Evidence, Ball Resource Services, Delta, Canada 1992.
20	Carlo Mattogno, „Die Leichenkeller der Krematorien von Birkenau im Licht der Dokumente“, in: Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung, Nr. 3, 4/2003.
21	Rossiskij gosudarstvenny voyenny arkhiv, Moscow, 502-1-170, p. 262, 263.
22	Rossiskij gosudarstvenny voyenny arkhiv, Moscow, 502-1-170, p. 260.
23	Danuta Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939-1945, Rowolt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1989.
24	Jan Karski, Story of a Secret State, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston 1944, p. 339 f.
25	Stefan Szende, Der letzte Jude aus Polen, Europa Verlag, Zürich 1945, p. 290 f.
26	Alexander Petscherski, „La rivolta di Sobibor“, in: Y. Suhl, Ed essi si ribellarono, Milano 1969, p. 31.
27	N. Blumental, Dokumenty i Materialy, Lodz 1946, p. 17.
28	K. Marczewska, W. Wazniewski, „Treblinka w swietle akt Delegatury Rzadu RP na Kraj“, in: Biuletyn Glownej Komisji Badania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu, Volume XIX, Warsaw 1968, p. 137 f.
29	Ibidem, p. 138 f.
30	Gosudarstvenny Arkhiv Rossiskoj Federatsii, Moscow, 7021-115-9, p. 108.
31	K. Marczewska, W. Wazniewski, op. cit. p. 139 f.
32	A. Kola, „Badania archeologiczne terenu bylego obozu zaglady zydow w Sobiborze“, in: Przeszlosc i pamiec. Biuletyn Rady Ochrony Pamieci Walk i Meczenstwa, Nr. 4 (21), 2001.
33	Julius Schelvis, Vernietigingskamp Sobibor, De Bataafsche Leeuw, Amsterdam 2008, p. 125.
34	I. Gilead, Y. Haimi, W. Mazurek, „Ecavating Nazi extermination centers“, in: Present Pasts, vol. 1, 2009.
35	Idem
36	Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Katyn, Berlin 1943.
37	Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Winniza, Berlin 1944.
38	Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Franz Eher Verlag, 1933, p. 13, 14.
39	Max Domarus, Hitlers Reden und Proklamationen 1932-1945, Löwit, Wiesbaden 1973, Band II, p. 1058.
40	R. G. Reuter, Joseph Goebbels. Tagebücher, Band IV, München 1991.
41	Magnus Brechtkens, „Madagaskar für die Juden“. Antisemitische Idee und politische Praxis, R. Oldenbourg Verlag, München 1998.
42	According to the revisionists, Chelmno was a transit camp. See Carlo Mattogno, Il campo di Chelmno tra storia e propaganda, Effepi, Genua 2009.
43	R. M. Kempner, Eichmann und Komplizen, Europa Verlag, Zürich, Stuttgart, Wien 1961, S. 289, 290.
44	Idem, p. 290.
45	Idem, p. 291, facsimile of the document.
46	Idem, p. 292. Nuremberg document NG-3354.
47	Idem.
48	Idem, p. 293.
49	H. Krausnick, H. H. Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1981, p. 621.
50	Raul Hilberg, Die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1997, p. 409 f.
51	Patrick Desbois, Porteur de mémoires: Sur la trace de la Shoa par balles, Michel Lafon, Paris 2007.
52	http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=578569
3	Idem.
54	Gerald Fleming, Hitler und die Endlösung, Limes Verlag, Wiesbaden und München 1982.
55	http://dss.ucsd.edu/-lzamosc/chelm00.htm
56	Ingrid Weckert, „The Gas Vans. A critical assessment of the evidence“, in: Germar Rudolf (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust, Theses and Dissertation Press, Chicago 2003.
57	Pierre Marais, Les camions à gas en question, Polémiques, Paris 1994.
58	Nuremberg document PS-501.
59	E. Kogon, H. Langbein, A. Rückerl and others, Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1983.
60	Bundesarchiv Koblenz, R 58/871.
61	William B. Lindsay, „Zyklon B, Auschwitz, and the Trial of Dr. Bruno Tesch“, Journal of Historical Review, volume 4, nr. 3, Fall 1983, p. 261 f.
62	Rossiskij Gosudarstvenny Vojenny Arkhiv, Moscow, 502-1-336, p. 227.
63	Jean-Claude Pressac, Auschwitz. Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, New York 1989, p. 188.
64	Fred A. Leuchter, An Engineering Report on the alleged „Gas Chambers“ at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, Poland, Samisdat Publishers, Toronto 1988.
65	Germar Rudolf, The Rudolf Report. Expert Report on Chemical and Technical Aspects of the „Gas Chambers“ of Auschwitz, Theses and Dissertation Press, Chicago 2003.
66	Jürgen Graf und Carlo Mattogno, KL Majdanek. Eine wissenschaftliche und technische Studie, Castle Hill Publishers, Hastings 1998.
67	Nuremberg document NG-5770.
68	Jüdisches Historisches Institut Warschau (ed.), Faschismus – Ghetto – Massenmord, Röderberg Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1981, p. 269 f.
69	Raul Hilberg, Sonderzüge nach Auschwitz, Dumjahn, Munich 1981, p. 181.
70	Nuremberg document NO-482.
71	Andrzej Kola, Belzec. The Nazi Camp for Jews in the Light of Archeological Sources. Excavations from 1997 – 2000, Warsaw/Washington 2000. – Andrzej Kola, „Badania Archeologiczne terenu bylego obozu zaglady Zydow w Sobiborze“, in: Przeszlosc i Pamiec, No 4 (21), 2001.
72	Herman Kruk, The last days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, Yale University Press, New Haven/London 2002.
73	Adam Raisky, La presse antiraciste sous l’occupation hitlérienne, Paris 1950, p. 179.
74	Serge Klarsfeld, Le mémorial de la déportation des juifs de France, Paris 1978.
75	Walter Sanning, The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry, IHR. New Port Beach 1983.
76	Wolfgang Benz (ed.) Dimension des Völkermords, Verlag Oldenbourg, Munich 1991.
77	Nuremberg document N0-5194.
78	Germar Rudolf, „Statistisches über die Holocaust-Opfer“, in: Ernst Gauss (Hg.), Grundlagen zur Zeitgeschichte, Grabert Verlag, Tübingen 1983.
79	Jürgen Graf, „National Socialist Concentration Camps. Legends and Reality“, in: Germar Rudolf (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust, Theses and Dissertation Press, Chicago 2003.
80	Einsatzgruppe A. Tätigkeitsbericht für den Zeitraum vom 16. Oktober 1941 bis zum 31. Januar 1942. Rossiskij Gosudarstvenny Vojenny Arkhiv, 500-4-92, p. 57 f.
81	Vilnius Ghetto: List of prisoners, Volume 1, Vilnius 1996.
82	Internationales Militärgericht (IMG), Band IV, p. 535/536.
83	Nuremberg document 3868-PS.
84	Carlo Mattogno, „Franciszek Piper und die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz“, Vierteljahreshefte für freie Geschichtsforschung 1/2003.
85	Rupert Butler, Legions of Death, Arrow Books Ltd., London 1986, p. 235 f.
86	http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_von_dem_Bach-Zelewski
87	Idem.