WHILE “LIBERAL” HA’ARETZ, N.Y.T. DOWNPLAY WARSAW UPRISING & HOLOCAUST, LOOTED J. ART, PARIS ’42, ARE REMEMBERED

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Ha’aretz Debases Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Isi Leibler, Israel Hayom, Dec. 26, 2013 — I rubbed my eyes in disbelief this week when I read an article prominently featured on Haaretz's website titled "The Warsaw Ghetto Myth."

Will Victims of the Greatest Theft in History Finally Get a Fair Hearing?: Amanda Borschel-Dan, Times of Israel, Dec. 27, 2013 — In the chaotic days ending World War II, the Allies quickly realized they had collected more than a million looted art objects from across the Third Reich.

The Eyewitness: Bernard Edinger, Jerusalem Report, Dec. 15, 2013 —  “I stayed silent for many years because, when I did talk about what I had seen, people said I was making it up, or showing off.

Abetting the Holocaust: Arthur Hays Sulzberger and the New York Times: David Horowitz, Frontpage, Dec. 9, 2013— As the New York Times enables the anti-Jewish axis created by Islamic Nazis in the Middle East who are preparing a new Holocaust of the Jews, it is important to remember that this is nothing new and has happened before.

On Topic Links

The Boycott Israel Campaign: a Taste of 1930s Berlin: Edgar Davidson, Jewish Press, Dec. 6, 2013

Downplaying the Holocaust — Sulzberger & NY Times: Anna Blech (Video): Youtube, Oct. 30, 2013

Eight Things Holocaust Survivors Need You to Know: Debbie Callahan, Jewish Press, Dec. 6, 2013

‘Tis the Season 2013: How Anti-Israel NGOs Manipulate Christmas: NGO Monitor, Dec. 23, 2013

Thessaloniki to Build Holocaust Museum and Research Center: Jerusalem Post, Dec. 23, 2013

HA’ARETZ DEBASES WARSAW

GHETTO UPRISING                                                        

Isi Leibler  

Israel Hayom, Dec. 26, 2013                                                                                                                                        

I rubbed my eyes in disbelief this week when I read an article prominently featured on Ha’aretz's website titled "The Warsaw Ghetto Myth." The story asserts that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the largest single revolt by Jews under Nazi occupation, was extremely limited in scope and duration. The most obscene aspect of the article is the allegation that the fighters were responsible for the death of the 50,000 Jews inside the ghetto who had not yet been deported. This unquestionably distorted interpretation of events typifies the historical revisionism to which Ha’aretz is predisposed, not only with regard to post-Zionism but now also to Jewish history. That such an article is given prominence in an Israeli daily newspaper with a wide Internet English readership reflects adversely on us all.

The author, Eli Gat, is a Holocaust survivor who, in 2009 privately published a shoddy book, "Not Just Another Holocaust," describing his sufferings and alluding to the revisionist nonsense incorporated in his current article. His book was completely ignored and very few people would have even heard his name until Ha’aretz published his article. In his article, Gat dishonors the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and diminishes its historical and symbolic significance. He insists that there were fewer than 700 ghetto fighters and that the revolt lasted a mere two days, after which time many fighters fled. Gat has the gall to repudiate the accepted view that the most significant portion of the uprising took place over the course of a month and specifically dismisses the assertion confirming this by the late Professor Israel Gutman, a respected Holocaust historian and participant in the uprising.

The most obscene aspect of "The Warsaw Ghetto Myth" is the allegation that the ghetto fighters were responsible for the death of the 50,000 Jews who remained in the ghetto and were working in factories producing goods for the Nazi war effort, claiming that these Jews might have survived had the revolt not taken place. He justifies the tragically mistaken and failed policies of most of the Judenrat, the Jewish council appointed by the Nazis to oversee the ghetto inhabitants, who opposed resistance and were convinced that acquiescing to the Nazis demands might save them. The unqualified fact, however, is that the Nazis were unaffected by the Warsaw Ghetto heroes' decision to die with honor rather than be led to slaughter; their commitment to a program of complete extermination was already absolute.

This article is only one example of Ha’aretz's irresponsible and biased journalism. Over recent years the newspaper has served as the primary vehicle for promoting destructive post-Zionism. It has engaged in deliberate campaigns to demonize Israel and frequently published articles promoting the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. Indeed, its online edition now represents one of the principal sources of fodder for global hatred against the Jewish state by the hostile international media and anti-Israeli politicians. It has inflicted and continues to inflict enormous damage on Israel. A most blatant example of Ha’aretz's self-hating approach was its vitriolic campaign against the Israel Defense Forces, in which it published numerous examples of alleged war crimes committed by individual soldiers. These allegations were subsequently proved to be unfounded, but only after the damage had been done. The stories were reproduced on the front pages of the major media outlets throughout the world, fomenting the hostile climate which paved the way for the notorious Goldstone Report.

There are a number of Ha’aretz journalists who are often indistinguishable from Palestinian propagandists. In April this year, after an incident in which a 3-year-old Israeli girl was critically injured when a car driven by her mother was struck by a stone, Amira Haas, notorious for her pro-Palestinian bias, even justified the act, stating, "Throwing stones is the hereditary right and duty of someone under a foreign power." Ha’aretz publisher Amos Schocken defended her, stating, "Sometimes you have to fight violence with violence." Gideon Levy, who regularly churns out articles that quote verbatim obscene Palestinian allegations of Israeli oppression and criminality, produced a front page story in October last year titled "Most Israelis support apartheid regime in Israel." Israelis were outraged and five days later, Ha’aretz was forced to publish an apology. But again, the damage was done and newspapers throughout the world widely disseminated this lie.

There are endless similar examples of the constant rabid maligning of Israel and blaming it as solely responsible for the failure to reach a peace settlement with the Palestinians. But in recent years, Ha’aretz has extended its post-Zionism to promoting a revisionist narrative that undermines the core of Jewish continuity, questions links of today's Jewish people with the biblical era, and challenges the validity of a Jewish nation. Last year it published an article resurrecting the theory that the majority of Jews are descendants of the Khazars, converted in the eighth century, who now represent the bulk of European Jewry. This absurd notion was employed in the past by anti-Semites and is now heavily promoted by the Arabs to prove that the Jews of today have no link to the biblical land of Israel.

Ha’aretz's unprofessionalism is simply inexcusable. In its zeal to undermine the core principles of Zionism, it has done irrevocable damage. The distortion of facts and outright lies have aided our enemies and confused our friends, including Jews living in the Diaspora, with limited understanding of Jewish or Israeli history. The Gat article demonstrates to what depths Ha’aretz will sink, twisting the facts — even of Holocaust history — in order to provoke its readers and disallow them even the smallest measure of Jewish pride. Freedom of the press allows Ha’aretz, like any newspaper in Israel, the right to publish what it deems fit. However, newspapers are dependent on readers and the rapidly diminishing number of Ha’aretz subscribers should do what is necessary and take the most effective steps to influence the publisher and editor to prevent the paper from serving as a launching pad for enemies of Israel and the Jewish people.

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WILL VICTIMS OF THE GREATEST THEFT IN

HISTORY FINALLY GET A FAIR HEARING?                                   

Amanda Borschel-Dan                                        

Times of Israel, Dec. 27, 2013

In the chaotic days ending World War II, the Allies quickly realized they had collected more than a million looted art objects from across the Third Reich. Some were found in rubble, others saved by the now legendary Monuments Men from a network of Nazi depots in far-flung monasteries and castles, including a huge trove in booby-trapped salt mines in rural Austria. With a mass of art and Judaica in hand, the Allied forces converted two Nazi administration buildings into collecting points in Munich, Germany, dubbed Gallery One and Gallery Two. It was hoped the art would be expeditiously documented and restored to institutions or individuals with passable provenance records. Makeshift catalogue systems were created by the few staff members who understood the thorough research needed for restitution. Works were returned as early as fall 1945.

Despite the best of intentions, resources were tight and mistakes made. Owners were dead and their scattered heirs impossible to find. The surviving heirs, struggling to forge a new life, were uninformed of their property rights and didn’t seek their family treasures. In Germany, by August 1948, the Allies relinquished control of the art to the German Trustee Administration for Cultural Property and restitution efforts continued there. Eventually most art was returned, aside from 2,300 works and some 10,000 coins and books, which are still today under German government custodial protection. Many of the 2,300 are on long-term loan to museums, government buildings and institutions, which are ordered to continue the provenance research, and since the late 1990s, numerous claims have been made against them by would-be heirs with varied results.

While modern-day Germany is currently drawing criticism from the international community over a lack of transparency and expediency following the shocking November publication of a controversial Munich art collection case, legislators in Bavaria are attempting to amend statute of limitations laws, a move that just may open up art restitution claims against private individuals — an area relatively untouched by heirs. Last month Bavarian Justice Minister Winifred Bausback told leading German newspaper Der Spiegel his team was drafting legislation that would address “bad faith acquisitions” — namely forced sales or Nazi-tainted art — and prevent invoking the statute of limitations for these civil law claims.

This week the German Culture Ministry confirmed the pending legislation and, raising the stakes, told The Times of Israel, “The federal government is going to look into the legislative initiative.” As to whether the notorious Munich collection would be open to claims under this new legislation, the ministry cryptically wrote, ”The German constitution will only allow repercussions of such a law within narrow, strict limits on those cases whose statute of limitations has already expired.”

Hidden for 70 years and sold piecemeal to cover 81-year-old “owner” Cornelius Gurlitt’s ballooning medical bills, the collections is surrounded by legal questions that involve the expiration of the statute of limitations — and just whose property is it anyway? The legal ramifications are so complicated that, as German solicitor Peter Bert laughs, “If you had come up with this case as an exam question, people would say it’s a professor’s imagination gone wild.”…

[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link –ed.]

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THE EYEWITNESS                                                              

Bernard Edinger

Jerusalem Report, Dec. 15, 2013

“I stayed silent for many years because, when I did talk about what I had seen, people said I was making it up, or showing off. And when the subject became a topic of national interest in 2010, journalists were not interested in what I had to say because they assumed a non-Jew didn’t have anything to contribute.” Denise Tavernier is now 94 years old, and people are finally listening. When she was 23 and a trainee social worker with the Paris police, she was present in the French capital’s indoor cycling stadium, the Vélodrome d’Hiver, into which collaborationist authorities packed away more than 8,000 Jews during the biggest anti-Jewish roundup in France in World War II.

On July 16-17, 1942, during the cynically codenamed operation, Vent Printanier (Spring Wind), thousands of French police swooped down on Paris neighborhoods where Jews lived to arrest 13,152 immigrant and foreign refugee Jews from Poland, Russia, Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia at the behest of the occupying German authorities. Childless couples and unmarried adults were taken to existing internment camps. But families, including 1,129 men, 2,916 women and 4,115 children, were bussed to the totally ill-equipped stadium, known colloquially as Vel’ d’Hiv, where they were held in increasingly dire conditions for between four and six days.

Tavernier was the youngest member of a department tasked with handling the needs of policemen’s families. A trained nurse, she had only recently graduated from a course for social welfare workers, and had been at her new job for just four months. Her office sent her to the Vel’ d’Hiv because the Red Cross had complained about the situation there. “I arrived on the second day and it was already awful. More than 8,000 people, half of them children, including many newly born babies, were packed together with no water whatsoever,” Tavernier recalls in an interview with the Jerusalem Report.

“Conditions were so terrible that I went back to police headquarters in a daze and reported what I saw to the head of my department. She arranged for me to be seen almost immediately by the chief secretary to the head of the police force. I told him that animals were not treated as badly as the people I’d seen. I said it was enough to make one ashamed of being French, and he became angry and said he did not believe what I was describing to him. He also warned me against repeating to people outside of the police what I had told him.” But the senior official did write an official memo that duly noted: “Miss Tavernier, social worker, reports: ‘Jews starting to react. Women: epileptic fits, nervous breakdowns, sick children, toilets clogged… noodles not arrived, no water, not enough bread, soup served irregularly, only two doctors present, raining inside.”

Some 41 years later, French Nazi-hunter and Holocaust historian Serge Klarsfeld found the note while delving through police archives and published it in “Paris-Auschwitz,” one of his many books on the fate of French Jewry during the war. Between 1942 and 1944, some 76,000 Jews, a quarter of those in France at the time, were killed, most of them gassed after being transported to the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz in Poland. Speaking to the Report, Klarsfeld says, “In 2010, the feature film, “La Rafle”, (The Roundup), which is about the 1942 events, was released, and it was a monumental success seen by more than three million people in France. It brought the subject up again for national examination and introspection. There were debates on television and radio day after day, with some of the few survivors offering their testimony. “One day, I received a telephone call from a woman who identified herself as Denise Tavernier to say she was an eyewitness towhat she had to say. I soon remembered the note I’d found in police records years before and we met later that very day,” relates Klarsfeld.  

Since then, Tavernier has become a noted personality whose reminiscences are now sought after by historians and journalists. She also speaks to children’s groups. Klarsfeld also introduced her to French President François Hollande. This summer, in recognition of her conduct, that of a very junior official denouncing conditions at Vel’ d’Hiv to her powerful superiors, Hollande made Tavernier a member of the Legion of Honor, the French national order. It was Klarsfeld who pinned the Legion’s red ribbon on Tavernier’s lapel during the annual ceremony marking the anniversary of the July 1942 roundup. The ceremony took place in the presence of hundreds of members of the Association of the Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees from France (FFDJF) that Klarsfeld founded and heads. Klarsfeld, who has tracked down Nazi war criminals as far as South America and who is known for his iron will and nerves, was overcome with emotion and his voice cracked when he made the presentation. Klarsfeld’s own father, arrested in 1943 in southern France, was killed at Auschwitz.

Tavernier recalled during the ceremony that six weeks after the roundup, nearly all of the 13,152 people arrested on July 16-17 had been handed over to the Germans and shipped to Auschwitz. When the war ended in May 1945, only about 100 of the adults had survived. None of the 4,115 children returned. “What I did then [in denouncing conditions at the Vel’ d’Hiv to her superiors] was very simple and I could not have done anything else,” she said. Speaking to the Report in Klarsfeld’s office in November, Tavernier says: “Those events were so powerful that they remain imprinted in my mind in such a way that I sometimes think I am looking at them as if I were looking into a mirror.”…

[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link –ed.]

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ABETTING THE HOLOCAUST: ARTHUR HAYS

SULZBERGER AND THE NEW YORK TIMES

David Horowitz                                                                        

Frontpage, Dec. 9, 2013  

As the New York Times enables the anti-Jewish axis created by Islamic Nazis in the Middle East who are preparing a new Holocaust of the Jews, it is important to remember that this is nothing new and has happened before. Take ten minutes to view this talk, posted below, by Anna Blech: ”Downplaying the Holocaust: Arthur Hays Sulzberger and the New York Times.”

Anna Blech won first prize at the New York City History Day competition for her research paper, “Downplaying the Holocaust: Arthur Hays Sulzberger and the New York Times.” For this paper, she also was awarded The Eleanor Light Prize from the Hunter College High School Social Studies Department and membership in the Society of Student Historians. Anna’s paper on anti-slavery sentiment in pre-Civil War children’s literature was published in The Concord Review. Anna was a finalist at the 2013 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, where she won third place in microbiology for her project, “Reinventing Antibiotics.” She has received national and regional Scholastic Writing awards, mostly for her one-act musical comedies, and she is an active member of the Hunter theater community.                            

[To View the Video Click the Following Link –ed.]   

CIJR wishes all its friends and supporters Shabbat Shalom!

                                               Contents

The Boycott Israel Campaign: a Taste of 1930s Berlin: Edgar Davidson, Jewish Press, Dec. 6, 2013 — While Israel continues to be subject to intensified terrorist atrocities – six attacks in the last 2 days – (ignored as usual by the main stream media), the campaign to boycott Israel also intensifies.
Downplaying the Holocaust — Sulzberger & NY Times: Anna Blech (Video): Youtube, Oct. 30, 2013

Eight Things Holocaust Survivors Need You to Know: Debbie Callahan, Jewish Press, Dec. 6, 2013 — Dying at an alarmingly fast rate (nearly one per hour in Israel), Holocaust survivors, some of the last first-hand witnesses to the atrocities committed during World War II, will soon become just another memory, and their words left to just mere paragraphs in text books.

‘Tis the Season 2013: How Anti-Israel NGOs Manipulate Christmas: NGO Monitor, Dec. 23, 2013 — As in previous years, NGOs (non-government organizations) and well-known charities are exploiting the 2013 Christmas season with political warfare against Israel.

Thessaloniki to Build Holocaust Museum and Research Center: Jerusalem Post, Dec. 23, 2013 — The northern Greek city of Thessaloniki will build a Holocaust research center at the site where some 50,000 of the city’s Jews were deported to Nazi death camps.

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