Author: Webb

Studies counted on to allocate funds for the distressed are far apart on the number.

Stewart Ain — Staff Writer

The Jewish Week

11/28/2003

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Two new studies to determine the location of Jewish Holocaust survivors, for use in making future allocations to the most needy, differ widely on the number of survivors worldwide, The Jewish Week has learned.

Sergio Della Pergola, a demographer for the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, found 1,092,000 survivors worldwide. Jacob Ukeles, a policy researcher in Manhattan, found 688,000.

[..]

“Survivors are dying at the rate of 15 percent a year,” Singer said. […]

[…]

Sep 30, 9:10 PM (ET)

By TONY CZUCZKA

BERLIN (AP) — Nazi Germany used hundreds of hospitals and clinics to kill at least 200,000 handicapped, mentally ill and other institutional patients who were deemed physically inferior, researchers said Tuesday.

The conclusion is based on what researchers said was the most comprehensive analysis of Nazi records on the sites that helped carry out Adolf Hitler’s program to purify, as he saw it, the German race.

In a report compiled by Germany’s Federal Archive, researchers found new evidence on the program under which doctors and hospital staff used gas, drugs or starvation to kill disabled men, women and children at medical facilities in Germany and in present-day Austria, Poland and the Czech Republic.

Even in internal documents, the Nazis cynically referred to the deaths as mercy killings, said Harald Jenner, a researcher at the federal archive.

The program originated at the Nazi regime’s highest levels, Jenner said in a recent essay.

[…]

Webmaster note: If this report is to be believed, there are documents that support claims that during the Third Reich, the infirm were euthanized. (Such euthanizations would not have been far-fetched, given that many forward-thinkers of that time urged the mercy killing of the infirm). Yet if these documents exist, they lend more weight to arguments that Holocaust extermination claims are false, as the Holocaust claims deal with an order of magnitude more victims, and there is no documentary evidence whatsoever.

A “book burning” scandal has erupted at Canterbury University over an article on controversial Holocaust scholar Joel Hayward.

The decision to recall and destroy copies of the history department’s journal History Now — and dump editor Ian Campbell — is dividing the academic community.

Canterbury lecturer Thomas Fudge, who wrote the offending article, has resigned in disgust and plans to leave at the end of the year.

Dr Fudge said he could not remain at a university that suppressed academic freedom.

“It made me a hypocrite trying to teach my students to think critically and ask the tough questions — all of the academic values that universities are about — and here my department was saying, effectively, we’re going to burn books.”

The article revisits the storm that surrounded the 1993 masters thesis of former Canterbury student Joel Hayward, which questioned the validity of Holocaust history.

Dr Fudge, who lectures on medieval religious dissent and witch-hunting, explored what for Dr Hayward became a career-ending controversy.

He revealed in the article that Dr Hayward had been harassed and received death threats against his children.

Dr Hayward suffered an emotional breakdown and left his teaching post at Massey University in June last year. He now cannot get a job.

The Fate of Joel Hayward in New Zealand Hands: From Holocaust Historian to Holocaust? played on the title of his thesis, The Fate of Jews in German Hands.

The article appeared on May 6. Next morning, Professor Campbell was asked to appear before his editorial committee and history department head Peter Hempenstall.

Professor Campbell said he was effectively pushed: “The fact is that board disapproved of my editorial decision and, as a result, I couldn’t continue as editor.”

An embargo was slapped on the journal and 500 copies recalled.

Staff were later advised that copies of the offending journal had been destroyed on the authority of Professor Hempenstall.

Another May edition of History Now was printed without the Fudge article and an editorial discussing truth and martyrdom.

On May 14, Dr Fudge defended his article at a special meeting of history department academics, calling the censorship “unconscionable.”

Last week, he confirmed to his students that he had resigned.

Professor Hempenstall declined to speak, saying the matter had now become an employment issue between the university and Dr Fudge.

– NZPA

Source: NZ Herald

To the editor: http://hnn.us/articles/865.html#revisionism7-15-03

Last week, when his administration was criticized for justifying the Iraq invasion with forged evidence, President Bush accused his critics of attempting to “rewrite history.” Then Ari Fleisher sneered at “revisionist historians.” As historians, we are troubled by these remarks.

It is central to the work of historians to search for accuracy, and to revise conclusions that prove to be unsupported by evidence. Revision, based on fresh evidence, is a good thing. The argument about the use of misleading claims in the State of the Union address is not about revising history; it is about whether public statements were founded on honestly presented evidence.

Joyce Appleby, University of California/Los Angeles

Alan Brinkley, Columbia University

Linda Gordon, New York University

Hendrik Hartog, Princeton University

Michael Kazin, Georgetown University

Linda Kerber, University of Iowa

Alice Kessler-Harris, Columbia University

Vicki Ruiz, University of California/Irvine

Richard White, Stanford University

(Institutions listed for identification only.)

Rewriting Yesterday

By GARY LEUPP

June 20, 2003

Speaking to small business owners in New Jersey June 16, President Bush said there was no doubt that Saddam had posed “a threat to the United States” since 1991. “This nation acted to a threat from the dictator of Iraq. Now there are some who would like to rewrite history—revisionist historians is what I like to call them. Saddam Hussein was a threat to America and the free world in ’91, in ’98, in 2003.”

As a revisionist historian, I believe the president misunderstands what the term “revisionist history” really means. He has spoken out about Holocaust revisionism in the past, a very evil form of revisionist history that denies there ever was a Holocaust, and perhaps that is his sole contact with the phrase. He seems to think revisionist history is generically bad. But there are good forms as well. All revisionist history entails is a new interpretation of some period or topic in the past based on a changed environment and maybe the collection of new information. For example, certain French revisionist historians in the 1980s began challenging the traditional view of the French Revolution as a heroic struggle for liberty, fraternity, equality, and instead interpreted it as the harbinger of modern totalitarianisms.

I myself specialize in Japanese history, and study the Tokugawa period (1603-1868). Western scholars of Japan writing in the 1930s and 40s interpreted this period as one of brutal oppression and economic stagnation. Since the 1960s, western scholars (including revisionist myself) have depicted it as one of social progress, cultural vibrancy, and incipient capitalism. The earlier scholars were influenced by the fascist character of the Japanese government in their own time; the later, by Japan as a rapidly-growing economy wedded to the U.S. Contemporary political conditions inevitably affect how we look at the past. My point, again, is just to defend revisionist history in itself as neither good nor bad but part of the intellectual process.

But back to Bush’s remark. He implies that everybody used to realize that Iraq posed a threat to the United States, but that now the revisionists are saying that it never did. We know , Bush tells us, that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction (which of course no one anywhere denies, since they were discovered and destroyed by UN inspectors from 1991-98). That’s not the issue. Those Bush targets as historical revisionists are just people who believed that by 1998 Iraq wasn’t, in fact, a threat.

The lack of any WMD discoveries to date would indicate that those maintaining that view were right on target. These include a host of former top government officials, former arms inspectors, even the heads of state of all the nations around Iraq. Bush is deriding those who contend that the war was based on disinformation. On the defensive, he is posturing as someone taking the high road, as he has done in condemning Holocaust revisionism (which maybe, in his own head, he conflates with critical discussion of his actions).

But when Bush announced in Poland that the US had found WMDs (in the form of mobile labs for germ warfare) he was engaging in what Ilike to call historical revisionism. Up until then, the British suppliers and Iraqi military had viewed them as facilities for the production of hydrogen to fill weather balloons . Rather like the people denying the Holocaust, seems he was just making the germ lab story up. I also see revisionism in Bush’s repeated denunciations of Saddam for “attacking his neighbors,” implying he thinks this was a terrible thing. Yes, Saddam attacked two of his six neighbors (Iran and Kuwait), and the Reagan administration, with George Bush I as vice-president, supported the first of these. The Reagan administration sent Donald Rumsfeld in 1983 to cozy up with Saddam and restore full diplomatic and trade ties, arms sales, and sharing of military intelligence. Twenty-four U.S. firms exported arms and materials to Baghdad. The US only provided about one percent of the total military assistance, but it provided some particularly nasty commodities.

Richard L. Armitage, a senior defense official in 1988 (and now a deputy secretary of state), argued that the U.S. should not let Iraq lose the war, and told Congress there was no international law preventing a leader from using WMDs on his own people. The senior intelligence officer at the time, Col. Walter P. Lang, has said both D.I.A. and C.I.A. officials “were desperate to make sure that Iraq did not lose” to Iran, and ” The use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern .”

In September 1988, a Maryland company sent 11 strains of germs—four types of anthrax— developed at Fort Detrick for germ warfare, to Iraq . The Commerce Department approved the sale of WMDs. This was six months after the infamous massacre at Halabja —the gassing of the Kurds. Perhaps the president would like someone to revise that history.

Gary Leupp is an an associate professor, Department of History, Tufts University and coordinator, Asian Studies Program.

He can be reached at: [email protected]

By News Agencies

Haaretz — Anti-Semitism is rising at a rate unseen since the end of World War Two, fuelled in part by an explosion of hate sites on the Internet, Jewish leaders told an international conference on intolerance Monday.

From just one Web site in 1985, there were now more than 4,000 promoting terrorism, hate and historical revisionism, according to a report released at the conference held at the Paris headquarters of UNESCO, the UN scientific and cultural body.

The three-day conference, which plans to combat anti-Semitism through “education for tolerance”, is attended by religious leaders and experts, as well as political representatives including Minister for Diaspora Affairs Natan Sharansky; U.S. congressman Robert Beauprez, Republican of Colorado; and France’s Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.

Also scheduled to attend are the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Sergio Vieira de Mello and former NATO commander in Europe General Wesley Clark.

“Not since the end of World War Two has the world seen such a proliferation of anti-Semitism,” Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center which preserves the memory of the Holocaust, said in a conference address.

“I believe that you have a new generation of professional haters who are serving as leaders, demagogues, and they’re inspiring young people to do their bidding while they often hide,” he told journalists earlier.

Hier cited cartoons in Western newspapers and a range of comments by leading Arab officials as evidence of the rise in anti-Semitism.

It was wrong to blame poverty or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the upsurge, which could only be confronted by speaking out, he said.

“There is nothing new about the oldest hatred,” he said. “Some will hide behind what Israel is doing … but those are just excuses, that’s a ruse.”

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal center, presented a report detailing 4,000 international Web sites that he said promote terrorism, hatred or Holocaust denial.

“We are seeing now a very sophisticated manipulation of the Internet by terrorists and their supporters,” he said. “They are ahead of the curve in understanding the possibilities of the Internet.”

But protesters outside, including many Jews and members of the Americans Against the War coalition, said Cooper had deliberately excluded radical Zionist groups from the list.

In a letter to the conference host, UNESCO Director-General Koichiro Matsuura, the protesters said the Wiesenthal center, “under the deceitful cover of the struggle against anti-Semitism, is on the contrary encouraging intolerance and racism in our societies.”

Protesters also denounced the decision to invite Sharansky, who is also in charge of Jerusalem affairs, claiming he “is avidly against making even the slightest concession toward the Palestinians.”

Two-thirds of the 313 acts of violence reported in France last year were directed at Jews, Hier said, while in Britain, new figures showed a 75 percent rise in anti-Semitic incidents.

The rise in attacks in France over the past year have been mostly attributed to Muslim youths of North African origin angered by the continued Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy told the conference he refused “categorically to explain the madness of anti-Semitism by the situation in the Middle East,” and repeated his “zero tolerance” policy on all racially-motivated attacks.

Shimon Samuels of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Paris branch said anti-globalization protests had degenerated into attacks “on what they see as the vultures of society [who] are in most cases the United States and the Jewish people.”

“They have taken the old stereotypes and simply modernized them … thereby proliferating and having a multiplier effect they were never able to do in previous decades,” he said.

In his opening remarks, Matsuura said efforts to combat anti-Semitism include promoting unbiased teaching, revising school textbooks to reflect universal values and introducing classes on religious, ethnic and racial tolerance.

Beauprez said “Americans are all acutely aware of the devastating impact that hate crimes … have on innocent communities.”

He said he had come to Paris to “express on behalf of the American people our solidarity with the victims of these [hate] crimes in France and wherever they have occurred.”