The tattoo has faded with the passing of the years, but memories of the hell that was Auschwitz are as sharp as ever for Anne Frank’s stepsister. The smudged, blue numbers — A/5272 — were indelibly etched on Eva Geiringer’s lower left arm soon after she and the rest of her family arrived at the notorious Nazi twin concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1944 after being deported in cattlewagons from The Netherlands …
Continue readingAuthor: Webb
Denial denial
“Senior editors at … publishing houses still welcome me warmly as a friend, invite me to lunch in expensive New York restaurants and then lament that if they were to sign a contract with me on a new book, there would always be somebody in their publishing house who would object.” Thus the English historian David Irving, famous for his histories of Nazi Germany. He made these remarks last week in the opening statement to the lawsuit that he has brought against Penguin Books and Prof. Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University.
Continue readingLA Times gets it wrong
Getting It Very Wrong
How and why the L.A. Times failed in its report on Holocaust deniers
Continue readingMisleading, inaccurate, distorted, and uninformed reporting
Kim Murphy’s article “Danger in Denying the Holocaust” could be dismissed as amateurish at best were it not the Jan. 7 Column One story of the Los Angeles Times. Because of where it appeared, some of the issues it raised must be addressed. She doesn’t present the stakes in the Irving vs. Lipstadt libel case and she falls into the traps set by the deniers, hook, line and sinker.
Continue readingDid six million die for this?
‘Holocaustology’ May Create a New Form of Anti-Semitism
THE HOLOCAUST DOMINATED the moral imagination of the 20th century. Before the rise of Hitler, anti-Semitism was a parochial concern of the Jews; after the war it was everyone’s concern, and everyone regarded it with horror. The cause of anti-Semitism is a mystery to most Jews and most Gentiles. One school of thought, wrongly, I believe, blames anti-Semitism on Christianity itself.
Continue readingIs eyewitness testimony reliable?
The headlines are familiar: Another inmate is freed after being cleared by DNA testing. Ever wonder why so many innocent people were behind bars in the first place?
Experts say it’s often mistaken eyewitness testimony that puts innocent people in prison … and lets the real criminal roam free.
Continue readingWith firing, Israel takes stand in Judaism debate
JERUSALEM — The topic for the day in one Israeli army classroom was the status of women in Judaism. Sixty soldiers sat awaiting the lecture, part of an education series where attendance is mandatory.
Continue readingNo ‘Mein Kampf’ But Adolf cartoon is fine
No ‘Mein Kampf’ But Adolf Cartoon Fine
FRANKFURT (Reuters) — “Mein Kampf” may have been voted one of the 100 books that shaped the century — but it was no show on Friday for Adolf Hitler’s seminal work at the world’s biggest book fair.
Continue readingFragments of a fraud
Christopher Hope called it “achingly beautiful”; the New York Times said it was written “with a poet’s vision; a child’s state of grace”; Anne Karpf in this paper described it as “one of the great works about the Holocaust”; all were agreed it was a masterpiece. There is just one problem — Binjamin Wilkomirski’s memoir of surviving as a Jewish child alone in the Nazi concentration camps of Majdanek and Auschwitz was a fabrication, invented from beginning to end, one of the great hoaxes in publishing history.
Stop ‘Holocaust obsession’
Williams as ‘Jakob the Liar.’
I HAVE A CONFESSION to make. Recently, I experimented with the latest product of a shameful industry. No, not porn. Though the experience did involve pictures — moving pictures.
Continue reading