Remarkable nonsense

Holocaust Education Assistance Act (Introduced in the House)

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Actors gain painful look into the past

By Yvette Craig

Star-Telegram Staff Writer

Updated: Saturday, Mar. 17, 2001 at 22:25 CST

FORT WORTH — It’s dress rehearsal at Sage & Silo Theater, and actor Kit Hussey is in the uniform of a Nazi SS captain.

Removing the costume’s black hat and lowering his eyes, Hussey asks 80-year-old Lena Factor to describe how Nazi soldiers treated her in the concentration camps.

[…]

‘Bent’ focuses not on Jews but on homosexuals, who were also victims of the Nazis. […] The play is for adults; a love story involving two men, it contains nudity and foul language.

Factor says she didn’t see gays persecuted firsthand but was aware of it. […] But she wanted to help them get the historical details right.

[…]

THOUSANDS OF IRISH AMERICANS WEAR A SHAMROCK TO CELEBRATE ST PAT’S DAY BUT BOSTON FOLK SAY IT’S LIKE A NAZI SWASTIKA … IT MAKES THEM FEEL UNWELCOME

Julian Brouwer

In New York

LOONY Americans are set to ban the Shamrock in Boston following complaints from minority groups.

They have bizarrely compared Ireland’s three-leafed emblem to the Nazi swastika.

Now the shamrock will become a thing of the past as the emblems are torn down from playgrounds, doors and windows in housing developments all over the city.

The decision has been made by Boston Housing Association following complaints from blacks and Hispanics.

Lydia Agro, BHA’s communications director said housing managers are advising residents that shamrocks and other “bias indicators” are offensive to some minority residents and should not be publicly displayed.

“There are a number of symbols that have been identified by some of our residents as making them uncomfortable and unwelcome,” she said.

“In response to those concerns, we’re including shamrocks along with swastikas, Confederate flags and other symbols which may give offence.

“We’re aware that symbols such as shamrocks can reflect racial and ethnic pride,” Miss Agro said.

“We respect that, but at the same time we want to promote a sense of community here. We’re asking our residents to avoid public displays of any bias indicators.”

The decision has been greeted with outrage by many of the city’s large population of Irish American residents.

Jean McDonald, who is leader of a residents group in Boston’s Mary Ellen McCormack Development, said elderly tenants are anxious about the policy.

She said it sent them the message that their traditions are no longer acceptable.

“Some of the women here already feel like they’re living in a prison colony,” she said. “Some of them have been here more than 20 years.

“You’d think they’d be entitled to some respect. Instead, they’re actually living in fear, not knowing what to expect next.”

James Kelly, president of the Boston City Council, said the percentage of whites and Irish Americans in the city’s public housing has been dropping sharply in recent years.

“There’s only a small number of Irish Americans left, mostly elderly on fixed income,” he said.

“Having them take down their shamrocks is a hateful way of letting them know their time has passed.

“Believe me, the ‘no Irish need apply’ mentality is very much alive and well at the BHA.”

According to Kelly, minority residents now constitute the majority of every family development in the city, and the BHA is administered almost exclusively by blacks and Hispanics.

Although the anti-shamrock policy was supposedly designed to foster harmony among a diverse population of residents, it is having the opposite effect.

But residents’ leader Jean McDonald is to defy the BHA ban by putting a wooden shamrock outside her home in the build-up to St Patrick’s Day.

“You’ll probably be seeing even more shamrocks around here now, and I hope we don’t have any violence over this,” added Miss McDonald.

Many residents are angry that the BHA is putting shamrocks and swastikas in the same category.

The shamrock, a trifoliate plant said to have been picked by St. Patrick as a symbol to illustrate the doctrine of the Trinity, is regarded as the national emblem of Ireland, while the swastika is the anti-Semitic emblem of Nazi Germany.

Jeannie Flaherty from the McCormack development said that she’ll be putting a shamrock on her door any day now.

“I’d like to see someone try to get me to take it down,” she said. “There’s a Chinese man who lives across the hall with some kind of Oriental sign on his door.

“Maybe they should check that out when they come around to talk to me.”

A city youth worker added that shamrocks, which still adorn basketball courts and murals in the development, were symbols of pride when he was growing up there.

“Even the Italian kids wore shamrocks,” he said. “We had our differences, but we got along OK.

“Nowadays, the kids here would rather shoot heroin than basketballs.

“This place has been going downhill for years, and kids are literally dying from drugs. It’s a real sad situation, and the BHA’s talking about banning shamrocks?”

Sunday Mirror, February 18, 2001

Holocaust Education and Awareness Act of 2001 (Introduced in the House)

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SYDNEY, Australia, Dec. 24 (JTA) — A New Zealand university has apologized to the Jewish community for awarding a master’s degree to a student who had written a thesis denying the Holocaust.

The 1993 thesis by Joel Hayward is cited regularly by neo-Nazis and other Holocaust deniers as evidence that they have academic support for their positions.

[…]

In 1998, Fredrick Toben, whose advocacy of Holocaust denial has been found to be unlawful by both the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission and the Federal Court of Justice in Germany, tried to submit Hayward’s thesis as his defense against charges that Holocaust denial was not a legitimate academic subject.

Canterbury University awarded a degree to the author of the thesis, “The Fate of Jews in German Hands,” but after a study has concluded that it had a “perverse and unjustified conclusion.”

The university’s vice chancellor, Daryl Le Grew, apologized to the Jewish community but said the university had no power to revoke the granting of the degree.

The president of the New Zealand Jewish Council, David Zwartz, said the council is “deeply concerned that after all that has happened the Jewish community is left with a Holocaust denial thesis.”

“There is a fundamental difference in our attitudes,” Zwartz said. “The university has been concerned with how the thesis came to be awarded a first-class honors M.A., and how it can prevent such things happening again. The Jewish council doesn’t want it to happen again, but it is also concerned with the effect the thesis has and will have in the future in encouraging Holocaust deniers to think they have academic support for their poisonous views.”

[…]

Source: jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/news/article/20001224Schoolapologizesfo.html
By Jeremy Jones
Published: 12/24/2000

Sigi Ziering; Tycoon Survived Nazi Camps

• Executive Became a Philanthropy and High-Tech Leader

By: MYRNA OLIVER TIMES STAFF WRITER

Obituaries

Los Angeles Times, Home Edition

Tuesday, November 14, 2000

Metro Section: Metro

Page B-6

SEE CORRECTION APPENDED

It must have been the “training” of the Holocaust, the self-described workaholic speculated to Fortune magazine a couple of years ago. “Unless you work,” he said, “you are destined for the gas chamber.”

And work he did — as a teenager relocated to the ghetto in Riga, Latvia, then to Fuhlsbuttel prison near Hamburg, Germany, and on to a Kiel concentration camp. He survived the Nazis but never stopped working until about a year ago, when he was diagnosed with brain cancer.

Sigi Ziering, who turned a chemist’s bright idea into Diagnostic Products Corp., one of Los Angeles’ most successful international high-tech companies, died Sunday. He was 72.

[…]

Toward the end of the war, the Zierings were moved to the Fuhlsbuttel prison. Every week, they watched Nazis load 10 or so Jews into a truck destined for Bergen-Belsen and the gas chambers. “With German precision,” Ziering told Fortune in 1998, “the guards went at their job alphabetically — and never got to Z.”

Later, the Zierings were marched to a Kiel concentration camp, where males were routinely murdered if they failed a physical test — running a mile carrying a heavy piece of wood. Ziering and his brother passed.

[…]

—- START OF CORRECTION —-

For the Record;

Los Angeles Times Saturday, November 18, 2000 Home Edition; Metro; Part B; Page 6; Metro Desk; 1 inches; 22 words;

Type of Material: Correction

Bergen-Belsen — The obituary of Sigi Ziering in Tuesday’s Times incorrectly stated that there were gas chambers at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

—- END CORRECTION TEXT —-

The Elderly Jews of South Florida … and 62 Years Ago Tonight

[…]

To many of you, World War II and the Holocaust probably seems like ancient history. The truth is, there are tens of thousands of people who lived through that horror, escaped the ovens, and are now living out their final years in South Florida. None of us can imagine what they went through; first to survive, and then to somehow make it to a country where they believed they would be free and their voice would be heard. These immigrants worked hard to raise families in America, contribute to our society, and make this country a better place for all of us. They took their citizenship duties very seriously, to the point where many of us have probably rolled our eyes a time or two over their extreme patriotism and love of America. Silly old people!

[…]

Yours,

Michael Moore

www.michaelmoore.com

Posted 11.10.00