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Benny Morris says he was always a Zionist. People were mistaken when they labeled him a post-Zionist, when they thought that his historical study on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem was intended to undercut the Zionist enterprise. Nonsense, Morris says, that’s completely unfounded. Some readers simply misread the book. They didn’t read it with the same detachment, the same moral neutrality, with which it was written. So they came to the mistaken conclusion that when Morris describes the cruelest deeds that the Zionist movement perpetrated in 1948 he is actually being condemnatory, that when he describes the large-scale expulsion operations he is being denunciatory. They did not conceive that the great documenter of the sins of Zionism in fact identifies with those sins. That he thinks some of them, at least, were unavoidable. Continue reading →

Chinese workers in Israel sign no-sex contract

Chinese workers at a company in Israel have been forced to agree not to have sex with or marry Israelis as a condition of getting a job.

Charedi Rabbis Rush To Disavow Anti-Gentile Book

Leaders of the country’s most prominent ultra-Orthodox yeshiva are scrambling to distance themselves from a book by one of their disciples, which argues that gentiles are “completely evil” and Jews constitute a separate, genetically superior species.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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]

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.

• Torrance: At least 80 other homes are damaged in the powerful explosion. Officials say some sustain buckled walls or collapsed roofs.

A house tented for termite fumigation in Torrance blew up about dawn Tuesday, damaging at least 80 homes and injuring 10 people, none seriously.