Israel owes reparations
Germany has just agreed to double the money it provides for the at-home care of elderly Holocaust survivors. That makes perfect sense, since the Nazis stole the houses and property of so many Jews, left them homeless and changed the courses of their lives so unjustly.
But what about Palestinians who have suffered the same fate at the hands of the government of Israel?
If Jews are entitled to reparations from Germany, why aren't Palestinians entitled to reparations from Israel?
After all, fair is fair and the Jews themselves have created the international legal precedent.
Mike Burch; Nashville
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-- An asylum for the sane would be empty in America. - George Bernard Shaw
-- It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly American criminal class — except congress.
- Mark Twain
-- 30 million christianist fundamentalists (probably the largest voting bloc in the world) voted for bush, war and occupation in 2004, about as far away from a Christian approach to other people as it is possible to get. As Chris Hedges says, "The gospels are the one book the [christianist] fundamentalists know nothing about."
— The Palestinian intifada is a war of national liberation. We Israelis enthusiastically chose to become a colonialist society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities ... we established an apartheid regime.
- Michael Ben-Yair, Israeli attorney general in the1990s, quoted in The Guardian (U.K.), April 11, 2002
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Daniel Stone
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Three dozen top Israeli rabbis threw their support Tuesday behind a religious ruling barring Jews from selling or renting homes to non-Jews -- an indication of growing radicalism within the rabbinical community at a time of mounting friction between Israeli Arabs and Jews. The action by the clerics -- chief rabbis in some of Israel's largest cities and influential among the devout -- fueled charges of racism. 
... The pretend patriots who use the national security argument to gut what remains of our most important security asset -- our constitutional guarantees of a truly free press -- are just what President George Washington feared when in his farewell address he warned "against the mischiefs of foreign intrigue, to guard against the Impostures of pretended patriotism. ..." ... It is unconscionable to target Assange for publishing documents on the Internet that mainstream media outlets have attested had legitimate news value. 
... In 1940, an obscure cypher clerk at the American Embassy in London came across documents which, in his judgment and that of many reputable historians subsequently, proved conclusively that Roosevelt both directly and through his agents was engaged in activities designed to foment a war and eventually to compel American participation in it. I was that cypher clerk ... The new basic law of nations requires only one clause, very simply: "It pays to be on the winning side." 
... Medieval England was not only far more prosperous than previously believed, it also actually boasted an average income that would be more than double the average per capita income of the world's poorest nations today, according to new research. Living standards in medieval England were far above the "bare bones subsistence" experience of people in many of today's poor countries, a study says... "The majority of the British population in medieval times could afford to consume what we call a 'respectability basket' of consumer goods that allowed for occasional luxuries," said University of Warwick economist Professor Stephen Broadberry, who led the research. 
... With his decision to abandon efforts to persuade Israel to renew a freeze on illegal settlement building on the occupied West Bank, he [Obama] has proved that the makers of American policy for resolving the conflict are Israel's leaders and their lobby in the U.S. (including its many stooges in Congress and the mainstream media), not the man who occupies the Oval Office in the White House ... As all seriously well informed people know (sadly the very few, not the very many), unconditional American support for the criminal state of Israel is not in America's own interests. 
This winter seems to have unearthed numerous elderly Nazis, and today has proved to be no exception. Israel's Yedioth Ahronoth is reporting the finding by an American called Mark Gould of a 97-year-old former SS officer, Bernhard Frank, who, according to the report, "was responsible for signing the first order of the Reich instructing the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews".This claim is pure junk. Although I've no doubt that Frank was in the SS, the significance of his role in the Holocaust has been blown grossly out of proportion. ... Frank himself has been living openly in Germany for years, and there is no evidence to link him to committing any war crimes. 
Israel has reacted angrily to Argentina's recognition of a Palestinian state within 1967 borders. Monday's move by Argentina comes days after a similar step by South American neighbour Brazil. The Argentinian foreign ministry said recognition was in line with the Palestinians' right to build an independent state. More than 100 states around the world recognise Palestine, their mission at the United Nations says. "The time has come to recognise Palestine as a free and independent state," Foreign Minister Hector Timerman said, adding that Argentina was "frustrated" that peace talks had stalled. Brazil recognised Palestine on Friday, and Uruguay said it would do the same next year. Costa Rica, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela have already done so. 
Helen Thomas said that she stands by her comments about Israel she made earlier this year that led to her resignation as a national columnist. And she went further, saying that Zionists control U.S. foreign policy and other institutions. ... Thomas, a longtime White House correspondent who grew up in Detroit as the daughter of Lebanese immigrants, was in Dearborn for a workshop on anti-Arab bias. ... "Congress, the White House and Hollywood, Wall Street are owned by the Zionists. No question, in my opinion," she said. "They put their money where their mouth is. We're being pushed into a wrong direction in every way." 
... Over the past half-century, Pearl Harbor revisionism has come of age. From the first writings of John T. Flynn, to George Morgenstern's masterful study, to the work encouraged by Harry Elmer Barnes, the testimony of participants in the events, and the latest findings of "second-generation" historians who are not satisfied merely to retell the standard accounts, this endeavor to uncover the truth has not been marked by paranoid "conspiracy theories" or reactionary "Roosevelt baiting." What revisionists have accomplished is a sober re-appraisal of the origins of the Pacific War, and the making of a strong case for remembering December 7, 1941 as President Roosevelt's "Day of Infamy." 
... The U.S. State Department does not need to wait for the next wave of leaks in order to know that any promise Netanyahu makes in a meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or President Barack Obama often lasts only until the prime minister's next meeting with Interior Minister Eli Yishai, or even Likud MK Tzipi Hotovely. In the best case. Clinton recently received another reminder about Netanyahu's trustworthiness: In closed conversations, the secretary of state has said the prime minister put words in her mouth that were never uttered at her last one-on-one meeting with him. 
The movie "Habermann" tells the tragic tale of the Germans and Czechs living in the Sudetenland from the day the Nazis marched in until the Germans were expelled after World War II. That history remains a touchy topic. The expulsion and murder of the so-called "Sudeten" Germans by war-weary Czechs after World War II traumatized the German-Czech relationship ... The film opens with a dramatic scene from 1945: the violent expulsion of the Germans by a mob of murderous Czechs. 
... America's middle class is disappearing. A lifestyle sustained for 30 years by rising debt is dissolving as the credit dries up. And the question beyond the crisis is: can it ever come back? Figures released last month by the US Census Bureau show it will be hard. Middle incomes are lower, in real terms, than in 1999. The median income, stagnate for a decade, fell by 4.2% once the crisis hit. Since December 2007 more than six million Americans have been pushed below the official poverty line. 
The number of very poor countries has doubled in the last 30 to 40 years, while the number of people living in extreme poverty has also grown two-fold, a UN think-tank warned Thursday. In its annual report on the 49 least developed countries (LDCs) in the world, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) said that the model of development that has prevailed to date for these countries has failed and should be re-assessed. 
A classified document obtained by Spiegel shows notes from a meeting between a top German diplomat and Condoleezza Rice just weeks before the Iraq invasion. It indicates steps by the German government to prevent the war and undermines claims in George W. Bush's memoir that Gerhard Schröder indicated he would support the president should the US go to war. ... The objections and predictions put forward by Berlin on that Tuesday have turned out to be legitimate and correct. The crux of the German argument was that the political costs of a war in Iraq would be "higher than (the) political returns." 
Russia's parliament on Friday declared Stalin responsible for ordering the Katyn massacre of Polish officers in World War II, a crime Moscow spent decades blaming on the Nazis to the fury of Poland. The resolution came amid reports that President Dmitry Medvedev intended to launch a major new "de-Stalinisation" drive that reminded Russians of the Soviet dictator's crimes and declassified once-secret information. The resolution of the State Duma lower house of parliament broke more than half a century of official reluctance to admit that the Soviet leadership under Joseph Stalin ordered the killing of thousands of Polish officers in 1940. 
Even before his election, President Nicolas Sarkozy convinced the US he was the most pro-American French leader since the war and even discussed sending French troops to Iraq, leaked cables showed ... "Sarkozy is instinctively pro-American and pro-Israel," the embassy wrote, according to the memos, noting what they called Sarkozy's "Jewish heritage" a reference to his French Catholic mother's Greek Jewish father. The US embassy was also delighted that Sarkozy chose to appoint Bernard Kouchner, a staunch Atlanticist despite his left-wing credentials, as "the first Jewish foreign minister of the Fifth Republic." 
As the WikiLeaks documents steadily reveal more and more controversial actions taken by the government in its international operations, one report from July 2009 shows Secretary of State Hillary Clinton authorizing US diplomats to spy and collect personal information on members of foreign agencies. The cable, entitled "Reporting and Collection Needs: The United Nations" and sent to 36 American embassies, missions and consuls around the world, details a program called the National HUMINT (human intelligence) Collection Directive (NHCD) and ordered US diplomats to collect a wealth of information on members of the United Nations abroad. 
U.S. diplomats have been asked by Washington to gather detailed financial data on their foreign counterparts, including the kinds of information usually sought by spies, according to diplomatic cables made public on Sunday. The cables, part of a massive release of secret U.S. dispatches by the activist website Wikileaks, show that U.S. diplomats have been asked to gather foreign diplomats' credit card, frequent flier numbers and iris scans, as well as information on their internet identities and the telecommunications networks they use. 
The United States was catapulted into a worldwide diplomatic crisis today, with the leaking to the Guardian and other international media of more than 250,000 classified cables from its embassies, many sent as recently as February this year. At the start of a series of daily extracts from the US embassy cables -- many designated "secret" - the Guardian can disclose that Arab leaders are privately urging an air strike on Iran and that US officials have been instructed to spy on the UN leadership. These two revelations alone would be likely to reverberate around the world. But the secret dispatches, which were obtained by Wikileaks, the whistleblowers' website, also reveal Washington's evaluation of many other highly sensitive international issues. 
A Lithuanian historian quit his civil service job Thursday after seven ambassadors from fellow European nations accused him of denying the Holocaust. Lithuania's interior ministry said that Petras Stankeras, an independent historian who also held a middle-ranking post in its planning department, had left at his own request ... An article by Stankeras in the mainstream weekly Veidas on the Nuremberg trials, where thevictorious Allies tried top Nazi German officials after World War II. Stankeras wrote that the trials "provided a legal basis to the legend about the six million purportedly murdered Jews" 
... What do the Israeli airport security people do that American airport security do not do? They profile. They question some individuals for more than half an hour, open up all their luggage and spread the contents on the counter -- and they let others go through with scarcely a word. And it works. Meanwhile, this administration is so hung up on political correctness that they have turned "profiling" into a bugaboo. They would rather have electronic scanners look under the clothes of nuns than to detain a Jihadist imam for some questioning. Will America be undermined from within by an administration obsessed with political correctness and intoxicated with the adolescent thrill of exercising its new-found powers? 
Turkey's Islamist-rooted Prime Minister "simply hates Israel" on religious grounds, US cables released by WikiLeaks say, reflecting growing US misgivings over Ankara's foreign policy. The scathing assessment comes in a memo on a conversation with Israeli ambassador to Turkey, Gabby Levy, about Recep Tayyip Erdogan's frequent outbursts against Israel following the Jewish state's operation against Hamas in the Gaza Strip last year. "Our discussions with contacts both inside and outside of the Turkish government... tend to confirm Levy's thesis that Erdogan simply hates Israel," the cable said. Levy reportedly dismissed domestic political calculations as the motive behind Erdogan's hostility, and instead attributed it to the prime minister's Islamist background. 
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has asked the US to release Israeli agent Jonathan Pollard as part of a series of gestures made to Israel in an effort to restart peace talks with the Palestinians, sources with knowledge of the talks told The Jerusalem Post over the weekend. Sunday is the 25th anniversary of Pollard's arrest at the gates of the Israeli Embassy in Washington. He is serving a life sentence in prison in Butner, North Carolina, for passing classified information to an ally, a charge that normally carries a sentence of no more than ten years. 
One hundred famous Norwegians, led by the country's national football coach, have signed a petition demanding a cultural and academic boycott of Israel, accusing its educational institutions of "playing a key role in the occupation" and equating it with apartheid ... Egil Drillo Olsen, coach for the national Norwegian football team, recently wrote in Aftenposten, the country's second largest paper, that the call to boycott Israel was "in line with what 90 percent of the world's population believes. There cannot be many other opinions." The petition is the last item in a string of similar and high-profile initiatives to have taken place in Norway over the past two years. 
In the second attack on Israel by Liberal Democrat politicians in the same week that the party's leader said the party got it wrong on Israel, Jenny Tonge claimed on Friday that Israel's treatment of Palestinians is the root cause of terrorism worldwide. Possibly "Holocaust guilt" allows this treatment to go unchecked, Tonge said, adding that it might also be the "power of the pro-Israel lobby" in the UK and US ... Last week, Liberal Democrat peer Lord Phillips told a meeting of the radical fringe group Palestine Solidarity Campaign in parliament that "Europe cannot think straight about Israel because of the Holocaust, and America is in the grip of the well-organized Jewish lobby." 
Igor Bunich, a Russian historian, says that Stalin was actively preparing to invade western Europe in 1941 before plans were made for Germany's "Operation Barbarossa" strike against the Soviet Union. In three published volumes titled "Operatsia Groza" ("Operation Thunderstorm"), Bunich documents Stalin's plan for a massive military strike westward against central and western Europe, to be launched on July 10, 1941. Bunich is not the only Russian historian who has rejected the legend of "Hitler's treacherous surprise attack against the peace loving Soviet Union." 
St. Louis overtook Camden, N.J., as the nation's most dangerous city in 2009, according to a national study released Sunday. The study by CQ Press found St. Louis had 2,070.1 violent crimes per 100,000 residents, compared with a national average of 429.4. That helped St. Louis beat out Camden, which topped last year's list and was the most dangerous city for 2003 and 2004. Detroit, Flint, Mich., and Oakland, Calif., rounded out the top five. For the second straight year, the safest city with more than 75,000 residents was Colonie, N.Y. The annual rankings are based on population figures and crime data compiled by the FBI. 
The Balfour Declaration may be the most extraordinary document produced by any government in world history. It took the form of a letter from the government of His Britannic Majesty King George the Fifth, the Government of the largest empire the world has even known, on which -- once upon a time -- the sun never set; a letter to an international financier of the banking house of Rothschild who had been made a peer of the realm ... Malcolm's belief in the Balfour Declaration as a means of bringing the United States into the war was confirmed by Samuel Landman, secretary to the Zionist leaders Weizmann and Sokolow, and later secretary of the World Zionist Organization. 
... Roosevelt was not the first or the last American president to lie to the people. But rarely has a major American political figure given a speech as loaded with brazen falsehood as Franklin Roosevelt did in his Navy Day address of October 27, 1941 ... Roosevelt went on to reveal that he also had in his possession "another document made in Germany by Hitler's government. It is a detailed plan to abolish all existing religions -- Catholic, Protestant, Mohammedan, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jewish alike" which Germany will impose "on a dominated world, if Hitler wins." 
... The increasingly hostile attacks by the American President Roosevelt have reached the point that he has ordered the U.S. navy, in complete violation of international law, to immediately and everywhere attack, fire upon and sink German and Italian ships. American officials have even boasted about destroying German submarines in this criminal manner ...The American President and his plutocratic clique have called us the "have not" nations. That is correct! But the "have nots" also want to live, and they will certainly make sure that what little they have to live on is not stolen from them by the "haves." 
The latest episode of the AIPAC spy scandal turned sordid last week, with the pro-Israeli lobby releasing its deposition of fired official Steven J. Rosen in which he confesses he engaged in extra-marital sex and watched pornography on his office computer ... Rosen says his actions were common practice at the organization. He said his next move is to show that AIPAC, Washington's major pro-Israeli lobbying group by far, regularly traffics in sensitive U.S. government information, especially material related to the Middle East. 
... Palin is something quite different, and a good deal more dangerous than the lumpish and frequently strident Gingrich. She knows nothing of foreign policy and even less of security and defense related issues and is basically a neocon creation being promoted by them as a national candidate ... Tea partiers must begin to understand that accepting the calls of leaders like Palin and Gingrich for smaller and more sensible government and a return to constitutionalism without also understanding that they stand for an incoherent foreign policy, perpetual war, and ballooning deficits is self defeating. They are both traditional Republicans who want nothing more than to return the GOP to power. 
British Bishop Richard Williamson has appointed a radical right-wing lawyer to defend him in a German trial over his denial of scope of the Holocaust, Spiegel news magazine reported Saturday. The lawyer, Wolfram Nahrath, is a member of the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD), the magazine wrote. He also led the Viking Youth, a neo-Nazi organization modeled on the Hitler Youth, until it was banned in 1994. ... Williamson, of the ultra-orthodox Catholic Society of St Pius X (SSPX), denied in a television interview last year that the Nazis had systematically murdered millions of Jews. The interview, for a Swedish television channel, took place in Germany, where Holocaust denial is a criminal offence. 
... Washington is flooding financial markets with $600 billion of worthless dollars, hoping a rising tide of Monopoly money will somehow lift America out of recession. The Fed's first QE effort was a fizzle. The US government is stoking worldwide inflation in order to lower its outstanding debt by repaying creditors with depreciated dollars. The rest of the world is boiling angry at Washington ... So it seems the US will stagger along under a mountain of unsustainable debt while the world economy suffers widening shocks and turmoil. More empires have been undone by financial collapse than invasion or battlefield defeats. The once mighty United States is staggering in this direction. 
Hajo Herrmann 
The British government has rejected pleas to grant a royal pardon to Boer War soldier Harry Breaker Morant ... In 1901 his unit, the Bushveldt Carbineers, killed 12 prisoners of war and one German witness. The men admitted the shooting but it was not clear whether they had been ordered to kill the prisoners or not. Commander Unkles said that a double standard was applied because soldiers of other nationalities had done the same thing without similar punishment. Morant's story was made into the film Breaker Morant in 1980 starring the late Edward Woodward. 
Cinemas across Turkey are showing a trailer for an upcoming Turkish action movie based on a true event: the Israeli raid on a Gaza-bound, blockade-busting flotilla that killed nine activists in May. And if the trailer of the film is any indication, the movie, "The Valley of the Wolves - Palestine," could worsen tense relations between Turkey and Israel when it is released Jan. 28. The anti-Israel melodrama is a spinoff of the controversial but popular Turkish TV series "Valley of the Wolves," about a nationalist undercover agent -- Turkey's answer to James Bond and Rambo -- who takes on Turkey's enemies. 
Trailer, with English subtitles, of forthcoming Turkish action film based in part on Israel's May 2010 attack on a humanitarian aid ship. "The Valley of the Wolves - Palestine," is set for release on Jan. 28, 2011. 
Latinos now make up a majority of California's public school students, cracking the 50 percent barrier for the first time in the state's history, according to data released Friday by the state Department of Education. Almost 50.4 percent of the state's students in the 2009-10 school year identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino, up 1.36 percent from the previous year. In comparison, 27 percent of California's 6.2 million students identified themselves as white, 9 percent as Asian and 7 percent as black. Students calling themselves Filipino, Pacific Islander, Native American or other total almost 7 percent. 
Travelers along the "original" West Bank roads, the ones enabling drivers to bypass Palestinian villages, can see signs declaring "USAID from the American People." The roads are one of the initiatives of the United States Agency for International Development for building infrastructure in underdeveloped countries ... According to a June 2010 fact sheet on the USAID Internet site, last year American taxpayers funded the paving of 63 kilometers of asphalt roads in the West Bank ... This is not the only occupation-perpetuating road funded by American money. 
Soon-to-be GOP House Majority Leader Eric Cantor met on Wednesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu -- the same day when the actual U.S. Secretary of State met with Netanyahu -- and vowed that he and his GOP colleagues would protect and defend Israeli interests against his own Government. According to a statement proudly issued by Cantor's own office: Regarding the midterms, Cantor may have given Netanyahu some reason to stand firm against the American administration. "Eric stressed that the new Republican majority will serve as a check on the Administration and what has been, up until this point, one party rule in Washington," the readout continued. 
Interview with Israel Shahak, author of the book, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, published in 1994. Israel Shahak 
... The richest one percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. ... The United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana. C.E.O.'s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001 ... We've reached a banana republic point where our inequality has become both economically unhealthy and morally repugnant. 
Tuesday night's election result was a victory for deep partisan stalemate, polarization, dysfunction, and acrimony throughout the halls of government ... It's now guaranteed that the hapless soul who succeeds to the White House in January 2013 will preside over a nation with $15 trillion of reported public debt, that is, debt at 100% of GDP and counting ... The fact is, the Social Security trust fund has $3 trillion of paper IOUs issued by the Treasury Department over the last 70 years, but not one dime of real money ... The world's leading central bank is now dispensing pure monetary heroin. And, ironically, that's likely to kill the patient before the fiscal question is even addressed. 
The economy, new restrictions approved by voters, phantom savings in the budget and the end of temporary taxes add to gloomy forecast by Legislative Analyst's Office for the next 18 months. / As Jerry Brown prepares to take over as governor, California faces a $25.4-billion deficit -- far larger than state officials were projecting only days ago -- the state's chief budget analyst said Wednesday ... The report shows $20-billion annual shortfalls in future years as well. "There is no good news," said Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor. Simply keeping K-12 public schools funded at their current level would expand the deficit, Taylor said. 
... The theory that Americans are better than everybody else is endorsed by an overwhelming majority of U.S. voters and approximately 100 percent of all U.S. politicians, although there is less and less evidence to support it. A recent Yahoo poll (and I resist the obvious joke here) found that 75 percent of Americans believe that the United States is "the greatest country in the world." ... The 2010 elections, for all their passion and vitriol, are basically irrelevant. Some people are voting Tuesday for calorie-free chocolate cake, and some are voting for fat-free ice cream. Neither option is actually available. Neither party's candidates seriously addressed the national debt, except with proposals to make it even worse. 
... Tens of thousands of tons of material are involved. It is estimated that over a million separate items must be handled, and that they are, very likely, practically all the scientific, industrial and military secrets of Nazi Germany. One Washington official has called it "the greatest single source of this type of material in the world, the first orderly exploitation of an entire country's brain-power." ... This one war secret alone, many American steel men believe, will revolutionize dozens of our metal fabrication industries. In textiles the war secrets collection has produced so many revelations that American textile men are a little dizzy ... Army Air Force experts declare publicly that in rocket power and guided missiles the Nazis were ahead of us by at least ten years. 
German central banker Thilo Sarrazin is being pilloried over his polemic chastising of Muslims, but there are a few things his critics clearly fail to understand. You can't cast away what the man embodies: The anger of a German people who are tired of being cursed at when they offer to help foreigners to integrate. Nothing is as it used to be. In this season of public outrage, the case of Thilo Sarrazin has grown far bigger than Sarrazin. It's much bigger than the man or the Islam-critical book he wrote ... Germans are not only demographically working towards their own demise, but also that they are bidding farewell to their cultural and educational background. 
The Supreme Court [of Israel] rejected an appeal on Sunday opposing the leasing of land in Jaffa's Ajami neighborhood for the exclusive use of members of the religious Zionist community. The appeal was brought by Jaffa residents along with human rights groups, in an effort to challenge a decision by the Israel Lands Administration and the Tel Aviv municipality to lease the land in question to B'Emuna, a company specializing in housing complexes for the religious Zionist community. The Tel Aviv District Court rejected the same appeal earlier this year. 
... We've always loved victimization, not only when we were real victims, as often was the case in our history, but also when we were the aggressors, occupiers and abusers. And we don't only cast ourselves as victims, but as the only victims. But observe our perception of our wrongdoing. It started with denial, then changed to suppression, then to shamelessness, then to dehumanization and demonization, until we arrived at the current stage: A pride parade. 
... Thousands of German and Russian corpses recovered from the battlefields around Berlin have been stripped of medals, papers, rank badges, ID discs and other items to feed a worldwide multi-million pound military souvenir industry.... Nazi-era insignia and papers are much sought after. Medals, particularly Iron Crosses, are torn off to fetch up to £500 a time. 
A huge number of American households are still relying on government assistance to buy food as the recession continues to batter families. Food stamp recipients ticked up in August, children consumed millions of free lunches and nearly five million low-income mothers tapped into a government nutrition program for women and young children. Some 42,389,619 Americans received food stamps in August, a 17% rise from the same time a year ago, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which tracks the data. That number is up 58.5% from August 2007, before the recession began. By population, Washington, D.C. had the largest share of residents receiving food stamps. 
An achievement gap separating black from white students has long been documented -- a social divide extremely vexing to policy makers and the target of one blast of school reform after another. But a new report focusing on black males suggests that the picture is even bleaker than generally known. Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys. Poverty alone does not seem to explain the differences: poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty ... 
Hajo Hermann, a World War II Luftwaffe hero and a courageous postwar civil rights attorney, is dead. Aged 97, he died on Friday, Nov. 5. During World War II he flew 320 missions as a bomber pilot, and more than 50 night fighter missions. He played a major role in strengthening his homeland's wartime air defenses. In later years he was a defense attorney for such "thought criminals" as Otto Ernst Remer and David Irving. He addressed an IHR meeting in California on Nov. 8, 1998, where he provided fascinating details about his remarkable life, and insights into the climate of intellectual repression in Germany.
Many of those who view "Titanic," the blockbuster motion picture, may leave the movie theater believing that the April 15, 1912, sinking of the great British liner, with the loss of 1,523 men, women and children, was history's greatest maritime disaster ... But these disasters are dwarfed by the sinkings of the Wilhelm Gustloff, the General Steuben and the Goya, three German ships crowded with evacuated refugees and wounded soldiers that were struck by Soviet submarines during the final months of the Second World War. 
... The big winner of the American election is none other than Binyamin Netanyahu ... As to the Congress: as far as Israel is concerned, there is no change. The senators and congressmen dance to the tune of the Israel lobby, and in this respect there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans. It "crosses party lines", as one of the leaders of the lobby recently boasted ... Both in the State Department and in the Pentagon, the experts know that the present Israeli policy is contrary to the American national interest. 
Seventeen people have been charged in the US with the theft of $42 million of Holocaust compensation funds provided by the German government. Prosecutors alleged the 17 fooled a non-profit-making group that distributes the funds into making 5,500 false payments. Six of those charged work for the group - the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. The chairman of the group said it was "outraged" at the alleged thefts. It had detected the matter itself and contacted the FBI. If convicted, the defendants could face up to 20 years in jail. 
... Mr Schroeder responded to Mr Bush's claims, accusing him of "not telling the truth." In a statement, he confirmed that he had told Mr Bush he would "stand reliably on the side of the US" if it was confirmed that Iraq was sheltering those responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks. "But this link, as it became clear during 2002, was false and contrived..." .... "We noticed that the intellectual reach of the president of the most important nation at the time was exceptionally low," said Uwe-Karsten Heye, Mr Schroeder's spokesman at the time told German news channel N24. "For this reason it was difficult to communicate with him. He had no idea what was happening in the world. He was so fixated on being a Texan. I think he knew every longhorn in Texas." 
US Vice President Joe Biden delivered an impassioned speech in support of Israel at the Jewish Federations of North American's General Assembly in New Orleans on Sunday, saying whatever differences have recently existed between the White House and Jerusalem these were tactical rather than fundamental. ... "When it comes to Israel's security there can be no daylight - no daylight - between Israel and the US," he said. ... "All these years later I still feel that our support for Israel must continue forever." 
... What of World War II? Surely, it was necessary to declare war to stop Adolf Hitler from conquering the world and conducting the Holocaust. Yet consider ... The Holocaust was not a cause of the war, but a consequence of the war. No war, no Holocaust. Britain went to war with Germany to save Poland. She did not save Poland. She did lose the empire. And Josef Stalin, whose victims outnumbered those of Hitler 1,000 to one as of September 1939, and who joined Hitler in the rape of Poland, wound up with all of Poland, and all the Christian nations from the Urals to the Elbe. 
... Americans have lived beyond their means for decades. It was a culture long defined by a mantra of entitlement, one that promised opportunities for all while ignoring the risks. Relentless and seemingly unstoppable upward mobility was the secular religion of the United States ... The country has always been a little paranoid, but now it's also despondent, hopeless and pessimistic. ... The naked fear of the undertow is palpable throughout the entire country, where people who once considered themselves part of the middle class, the solid center of the country, now feel threatened. 
Decades after its dramatic demise, the Third Reich continues to fascinate millions and provoke heated discussion ... Consistent with the author's strong plea for a more thoughtful and objective look at the phenomenon of Hitler and National Socialism, Nolte presents his often highly unorthodox views without polemics, indeed with a certain reserve and tentativeness. Unlike those who incessantly insist that "we" must "never forget" the "lessons of the Holocaust," Nolte calls for an evaluation of the Hitler era as free as possible of strident, emotion-laden polemics and self-serving purposes. 
A court on Tuesday ordered a French mayor to take down a portrait of Philippe Petain, leader of France's wartime Vichy regime, from the wall of a town hall. The portrait of Petain, branded an anti-semitic Nazi collaborator, hung in a municipal marriage chamber in Gonneville-sur-Mer, near the Normandy landing beaches used in World War II by Allied forces. The court overruled a decision by Bernard Hoye, the town's independent mayor, to keep the portrait which he said had been hanging there for years. It had nevertheless been taken down pending Tuesday's decision. 
One tragedy of war is that its victors write its history and often do so with bias and dishonesty. That's true about our War of 1861, erroneously called a civil war. Civil wars, by the way, are when two or more parties attempt to take over the central government. Jefferson Davis no more wanted to take over Washington, D.C., than George Washington, in 1776, wanted to take over London. Both wars were wars of independence. 
Nowhere is the Volga River more hallowed than in the city named after it: Volgograd, better known to history as Stalingrad. During World War II, perhaps the bloodiest battle in history took place there. A total of two million people were lost on both sides in the fighting from the summer of 1942 to February 1943. Hitler's army, fighting to reach the Volga and seize the country's energy resources to the south in the oil-rich Caucasus, was met by the tenacious Soviet Red Army and a city that would not yield. 
... This relentless cult of novelty, with its assertion that art need not be good or pure, just so long as it is new, newer, and newer still, conceals an unyielding and long-sustained attempt to undermine, ridicule and uproot all moral precepts ... To decorate public spaces we put up sculptures that aestheticize pure ugliness -- but we no longer register surprise. And if visitors from outer space were to pick up our music over the airwaves, how could they ever guess that earthlings once had a Bach, a Beethoven and a Schubert, now abandoned as out of date and obsolete? 
One prominent pro-Israel lobbying group in Washington is already praising the GOP takeover of the House of Representatives as a net benefit for Israel. "While Democrats are likely to keep control of the U.S. Senate, Republicans will take over the U.S. House of Representatives following Tuesday's elections. This is likely to have implications for Israel-related issues such as Israel's relationship with the United States and the push for sanctions against Iran," said an e-mail blasted out by The Israel Project only minutes after news stations called the turnover of House control a certainty. 
... The celebrities from Comedy Central and the trash talk show hosts on Fox are in the same business. They are entertainers. They provide the empty, emotionally laden material that propels endless chatter back and forth on supposed left- and right-wing television programs. It is a national Punch and Judy show. But don't be fooled. It is not politics. It is entertainment. It is spectacle. All national debate on the airwaves is driven by the same empty gossip, the same absurd trivia, the same celebrity meltdowns and the same ridiculous posturing. It is presented with a different spin. But none of it is about ideas or truth. None of it is about being informed. It caters to emotions. It makes us confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge. 
Rare photos taken by a German soldier of the devastated beaches of Dunkirk after the evacuation have been found 70 years on by the family of a British war veteran. The pictures were taken a few hours after 330,000 Allied soldiers were rescued from the beaches by an armada of little ships having been defeated by the Nazis. The remarkable album was later taken from a German house as a memento by British serviceman Corporal Frank Smith. It includes shots of the Germans surveying the wreckage of downed aircraft and scores of damaged trucks and tanks on the battle-scarred shores of Dunkirk. 
Israel ranks among the most corrupt countries in the Western world, according to a study released by the International Transparency Organization on Tuesday ... The least corrupt countries were listed as Denmark, New Zealand and Singapore ... The United States, meanwhile, has dropped out of the "top 20" in a global league table of least corrupt nations, tarnished by financial scandals and the influence of money in politics. The U.S. fell to 22nd from 19th last year, with its CPI score dropping to 7.1 from 7.5. This was the lowest score awarded to the U.S. in the index's 15-year history and also the first time it had fallen out of the top 20. 
The German government has ignited a row with the country's Orthodox Jews after it stopped funding the training of Orthodox rabbis. The authorities have been subsidising the training of rabbis for several years, but the interior ministry recently announced that it would only fund Liberal rabbis from now on. Thomas de Maziere, the interior minister, blamed "the budget situation" for the decision, the Times reports. However, the move has upset the Jewish community ... Since the Second World War, Germany has been trying to re-establish a Jewish presence in the country. There are now some 120,000 Jews living in Germany, and many are Orthodox. 
The Dutch authorities have urgently recalled "Nazi" number plates issued to drivers after a computer error. Over 100 car owners received licence plates with the letters "NSB" on them, a Dutch equivalent of the word Nazi. NSB is the notorious abbreviation for the Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging, the Dutch fascist party which collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War. Number plates displaying the offending letters were recalled by the Dutch Vehicle Authority on Monday after the first angry complaints by drivers. 
For the Jews, the term "Holocaust" does not simply denote a single catastrophic era in history, but is a grim metaphor for the meaning of Jewish history. The "Holocaust" lies at the heart of the Jewish experience of time itself. One is either anxiously awaiting persecution, experiencing persecution, recovering from it, or living in a period that is a temporary reprieve from it ... Thus the "reality" of the Holocaust is inextricably part of the myth in which it is woven -- and for which myth it serves as further confirmatory evidence for the timeless Jewish theme that the world is in conspiracy to annihilate them, one way or another, at least eventually. 
As usual, the Arabs knew. They knew all about the mass torture, the promiscuous shooting of civilians, the outrageous use of air power against family homes, the vicious American and British mercenaries, the cemeteries of the innocent dead. All of Iraq knew. Because they were the victims. Only we could pretend we did not know. Only we in the West could counter every claim, every allegation against the Americans or British with some worthy general - the ghastly US military spokesman Mark Kimmitt and the awful chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Peter Pace, come to mind - to ring-fence us with lies. 
The second annual list of the nation's smartest and dumbest cities. What makes a city "smart" or "dumb," per this list? The education level of the city's citizens, for one, and also its "intellectual environment," as measured by nonfiction book sales and the prevalence of colleges and libraries. Draw your own conclusions about what the list means in terms of a city's desirability. But one thing that seems to be objectively true is that there's an economic element to the rankings: The continuing economic malaise just reinforces a perennial fact: A city's potential lies mostly with the ingenuity and brainpower of its citizens. Regions with intellectual vigor are more likely to bounce back; those without risk a stupor. 
A delegation from the British Legion met Adolf Hitler in July 1935, recently uncovered photographs show. The 148 images were in a swastika-embossed album found by an employee. They show British veterans of World War I being saluted by Germans, and delegation leader Maj Francis Fetherston-Godley shaking hands with Hitler's deputy Rudolph Hess ... The five members of the Legion (now known as the Royal British Legion) met Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe. There were photos of German ex-servicemen in wheelchairs giving Nazi salutes as the delegation parade passed with the Union flag, and pictures of the delegation at Commonwealth war graves in Germany. 
Lesson plan: Buddy Stalin Subject matter: It can't be easy to put a positive spin on Stalin, under whose leadership more than 20 million Russians lost their lives. But that's what's being attempted in Russia today ... Aleksandr Filippov, the author of a new Kremlin-approved textbook told the Times, "It is wrong to write a textbook that will fill the children who learn from it with horror and disgust about their past and their people." His book devotes 83 pages to Joseph Stalin's industrialization plans, but only one paragraph to the Great Famine of 1932 to 1933 in which millions starved as a result of deeply flawed agricultural policy. 
German television news report on "no go" areas in Berlin, populated by immigrants from outside Europe. These areas are so crime-ridden and disorderly that even police sometimes cannot patrol them without being insulted, spit upon or physically attacked. Runtime: 4:07 mins. 
... Over the past decade, about 10,000 women have been trafficked into Israel in what Keidar calls "modern slavery." The women are locked, beaten, raped, starved and forced to receive 15-30 men a day 365 days a year, according to the attorney. About three years ago, Israeli police greatly reduced women trafficking by pouring resources into the problem. 
The influential conservative publishing house Regnery has just released a book that argues, contrary to popular belief, that aviator and political leader Charles Lindbergh was neither anti-semitic nor pro-German, but rather was the victim of an unfounded smear campaign by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. According to promotional material, the book, "Lindbergh vs. Roosevelt: The Rivalry That Divided America" by James Duffy, argues that Lindbergh was the target of a "vicious personal vendetta by President Roosevelt" that "blighted his reputation forever." 
The foreclosure crisis in the US has spread across a wider area of the country, according to RealtyTrac, which monitors repossession activity. The organisation said foreclosure notices increased across a majority of large metropolitan areas, including Chicago and Seattle. Previously, these cities had seen relatively low levels of activity ... The trend is the latest sign that the US foreclosure crisis is worsening as homeowners -- facing high unemployment, slow job growth and uncertainty about house prices -- continue to fall behind on their mortgage payments ... Earlier in the week, data from rating agency Standard and Poor's showed that US house prices also began falling again in August, mainly in response to the expired tax credit. 
The Vatican has issued one of its strongest condemnations yet of Israel's "occupation" of the West Bank. It has rejected the use of biblical texts by Jewish settlers to justify "injustices." Releasing a strongly worded document by the synod of bishops for the Middle East, a senior Archbishop also challenged the notion of Jews as "the chosen people", saying such a concept no longer existed. After a two-week conference, which ended with a meeting with the Pope, the bishops called on the international community to pressure Israel to end the occupation. "Recourse to theological and biblical positions, which use the word of God to wrongly justify injustices, is not acceptable," the statement said. 
Led by Glenn Beck -- who was once condemned by the Anti-Defamation League for saying Al Gore used "the same tactic" as Adolf Hitler -- Fox News personalities have frequently invoked Nazi Germany in their political commentary, often comparing progressives to Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and the Nazi "brownshirts." Beck regularly invokes Nazis, Hitler, Goebbels, other Nazi imagery 
...The popular image of this man, particularly in the United States, is a crude caricature... Contrary to popular belief, Goebbels was successful as a propagandist not because he was a master of the "Big Lie," but rather as a result of his fidelity to facts and truth. As biographer Heiber notes: "Goebbels was accordingly able to celebrate his information policy as being not only superior to the enemy's in its monolithic character, but also of a `seriousness and credibility' which `simply cannot be surpassed.' The boast could be made with some justification: Seen in the long view, Goebbels preached, the best propaganda is that which does no more than serve the truth." 
A sobering look at the fall of a once thriving American city. Gary, Indiana, home to what is still US Steel Corp's biggest plant, is suffering from one of the most advanced cases of urban blight in the developed world. Its city centre is near-deserted by day. The texture of the urban landscape is cracked stone, grass, crumbled brick and buddleia. Gary is one-third poor, 84% African American, and has seen its population halve over the past three decades. This city's decline is a symbol of the intractable problems gripping the world's biggest economy. We tramped through the remains of the post office, opened by Henry Morgenthau in 1936 as a New Deal reconstruction project. Runtime: 15:50 mins. 
Film director Jean-Luc Godard will not appear in person to accept an honorary Oscar that some have urged be withdrawn because of views deemed anti-Semitic. The news announced Monday by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences elicited little surprise in Hollywood and came exactly two months after the academy's invitation to Godard kicked off a lively discussion about the New Wave filmmaker's alleged anti-Semitism and acknowledged anti-Israel record. The charges were first examined by the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles and the Forward. The Zionist Organization of America and other critics have pressed for the withdrawal of the award for the French-Swiss director. 
... There is one book, however, that is not only Buchanan's best and most important book; it is one of the best and most important books ever written. I am referring to his latest book on World War II: Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War ... It explains how Hitler never wanted war with Britain. Hitler wanted absolute power in Germany. Hitler wanted to overturn the Versailles Treaty. Hitler wanted to restore lands to Germany. Hitler wanted to enlarge the German empire to the east. Hitler wanted to cleanse Germany of Jews. Hitler wanted to destroy Bolshevism. Hitler wanted Germany to achieve economic self-sufficiency ... It confirms that Hitler was not a threat to the United States. 
Rudolf Hess was lured to Britain in an elaborate MI6 sting, according to a new book that claims to solve one of the most enduring mysteries of the Second World War. The reason for Hitler's deputy making his solo flight to Scotland in May 1941 has kept conspiracy theorists busy for decades. He was arrested in Renfrewshire and spent the rest of his life in prison. Nearly 70 years on, a fresh theory has emerged. Author John Harris claims that Hess was lured to Britain in an MI6 plot led by Tancred Borenius, a Finnish art historian who was working as an agent for the British secret service. 
The Obama administration said Friday the federal deficit hit a near-record $1.3 trillion for the just-completed budget year. That means the government had to borrow 37 cents out of every dollar it spent as tax revenues continued to lag while spending on food stamps and unemployment benefits went up as joblessness neared double-digit levels in a struggling economy. 
The fury of the "pro-Israel" lobby lately has truly been something to behold. It has abandoned bipartisanship by setting up front organizations like the so-called Emergency Committee for Israel, which is running ads across the country calling on voters to defeat Democratic members of the House and Senate for signing a letter urging President Obama to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. With all the problems average Americans are facing, the lobby is so out-of-touch that it thinks that hard-hit Pennsylvanian voters (the ads runs most often in the Keystone State) will actually cast their votes based on the lobby's litmus test of who is and who isn't hawkish enough on Israel. 
U.S. Jews, who, next to African Americans, have constituted the minority most supportive of Barack Obama, are growing more sceptical of his performance and increasingly hawkish on Iran, according to a new poll released Tuesday by the American Jewish Committee (AJC).... Support for U.S. military action against Iran "to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons... if diplomacy and sanctions fail" rose from 53 percent to 59 percent since last March, while opposition to such a course fell from 42 percent to 35 percent over the same period. 
Lincoln University [Pennsylvania] History Professor Kaukab Siddique is in the eye of a new storm in the United States, after several statements he made calling for the destruction of Israel prompted US senators to urge an investigation in the matter. Speaking at a recent Labor Day rally, Siddique said: "We must stand united to defeat, to destroy, to dismantle Israel - if possible by peaceful means... For the Jews, I would say, 'See what could happen to you if the Muslims wake up.' And I say to the Muslims, Dear brothers and sisters - unite and rise up against this hydra-headed monster which calls itself Zionism'," 
The Anti-Defamation League's (ADL) annual Holocaust Education Workshop, which emphasizes Holocaust education in the classroom and will feature four sessions Nov. 3-10, will, for the first time, overlap with "Bearing Witness," the organization's long-running, three-day workshop for Catholic-school teachers, seminarians and priests, which takes place Nov. 7-9. Attendees from the two programs will come together for an eight-hour intensive learning session Nov. 7 at American Jewish University ... 
... Holocaust remembrance is not, as its supporters claim, a noble effort motivated by sincere concern for humanity. Instead, this relentless campaign is an expression of Jewish-Zionist power, and is designed to further Jewish-Zionist interests ... Jewish death and suffering do not deserve to be venerated more than the death and suffering of non-Jews. The Holocaust remembrance campaign deserves scorn, not support, because it is a one-sided effort that serves narrow Jewish and Israeli interests and bolsters Jewish-Zionist power. 
... It's happening everywhere, from potholed interstate highways and grimy railways, to congested airports and a creaking air traffic control system that only adds to the increasingly third world experience of flying in the US. And hold your breath when you cross an American bridge: a 2005 study found that fully a quarter of them were structurally inadequate or obsolete ... Another reminder is when friends return from foreign trips marvelling at the high-speed rail networks in Europe, Japan and China, or at other man-made wonders such as the Millau Viaduct in southern France. Why, they ask, can't we have this sort of thing? To be fair, they can and do. 
Former US Vice President Spiro Agnew expressed "outrage" over "the domination of this country by Zionists" in a 1982 letter. He also wrote of the "Zionist control of our media" and "the 70 years of indoctrination" that has "brainwashed the western world." 
... No one is found guilty for starting an unnecessary war that has killed 4,425 Americans and many thousands of Iraqis. No one is punished or even tarnished by his or her role. On the contrary, all are, in fact, richly rewarded for their presumed dedication to their country ... Until that culture is eradicated by something like a Nuremberg trial demonstrating that no one is above the law the United States will continue to be a place that the rest of the world quite rightly regards as preaching respect for rules and values while rewarding just the opposite. 
A massive cache of secret U.S. field reports from the Iraq war provides grim new details about the toll of that conflict, indicating that more than 100,000 Iraqis were killed during a six-year stretch and that American forces often failed to intervene as the U.S.-backed government brutalized detainees, according to news organizations given access to the documents by the WikiLeaks Web site. The nearly 400,000 records are described as offering a chilling, pointillist view of the war's peak years, documenting thousands of civilian deaths - including hundreds killed at checkpoints manned by U.S. soldiers - and the burgeoning role that American contractors came to play in the conflict. 
Nearly 17 percent of U.S. medical costs can be blamed on obesity, according to new research that suggests the nation's weight problem may be having close to twice the impact on medical spending as previously estimated. One expert acknowledged that past estimates likely low-balled the costs and said the new study, which places obesity-related medical costs at around $168 billion, probably is closer to the truth. 
... Forty percent of all children in America are now born out of wedlock. Among Hispanics, it is 51 percent. Among African-Americans, it is 71 percent. Food stamps are feeding children abandoned by their own fathers. Taxpayers are taking up the slack for America's deadbeat dads ... What we have accepted today is a vast permanent underclass of scores of millions who cannot cope and must be carried by the rest of society -- fed, clothed, housed, tutored, medicated at taxpayer's expense for their entire lives. We have a new division in America : those who pay a double fare, and those who forever ride free. 
... Putting different people together into larger, unnatural entities brings disaster. Mutual vilification and name calling eventually become the norm. Among the similarities between the former Soviet Union and present-day America is a comparably linear and static view of history .. It seems to me that the only way to stop the process of Western collective suicide is by discarding the ideology of progress, the myth of egalitarianism, and the theology of market democracy. ... The linear concept of the "end of history," a currently fashionable notion that holds that liberal democracy is a final or a permanent form of social order, is a willful act of intellectual stupidity. 
One of the great goals of education is to initiate the young into the conversation of their ancestors; to enable them to understand the language of that conversation, in all its subtlety, and maybe even, in their maturity, to add to it some wisdom of their own. The modern American educational system no longer teaches us the political language of our ancestors. In fact our schooling helps widen the gulf of time between our ancestors and ourselves, because much of what we are taught in the name of civics, political science, or American history is really modern liberal propaganda. 
... Although it is mind-boggling to realize that five percent of the world's population (the United States) now spends more on defense than the other 95 percent put together, this situation is hard to avoid when you see threats emerging virtually everywhere and when you think all of them are best met by an ambitious and highly interventionist foreign policy ... If you want to cut defense spending significantly, in short, you have to make some non-trivial adjustments in U.S. grand strategy. As some of you know, I think the United States would be both more prosperous and safer if we had a more restrained grand strategy and a more intelligent foreign policy. 
The sole purpose of non-Jews [Goyim] is to serve Jews, according to Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the head of Shas's Council of Torah Sages and a senior Sephardi adjudicator. "Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world - only to serve the People of Israel," he said in his weekly Saturday night sermon on the laws regarding the actions non-Jews are permitted to perform on Shabbat. According to Yosef, the lives of non-Jews in Israel are safeguarded by divinity, to prevent losses to Jews. 
Attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany have "utterly failed", Chancellor Angela Merkel says. She said the so-called "multikulti" concept - where people would "live side-by-side" happily - did not work, and immigrants needed to do more to integrate - including learning German. The comments come amid rising anti-immigration feeling in Germany. A recent survey suggested more than 30% of people believed the country was "overrun by foreigners". 
Somebody eventually had to say it -- and German chancellor Angela Merkel deserves credit for being the one who had the courage to say it out loud. Multiculturalism has "utterly failed." Multiculturalism is not just a recognition that different groups have different cultures. We all knew that, long before multiculturalism became a cult that has spawned mindless rhapsodies about "diversity," without a speck of evidence to substantiate its supposed benefits. In Germany, as in other countries in Europe, welcoming millions of foreign workers who insist on remaining foreign has created problems so obvious that only the intelligentsia could fail to see them. It takes a high IQ to evade the obvious. 
"Hitler and the Germans," an exhibition in Berlin's German Historical Museum which investigates the society that created Hitler, has seen more than 10,000 visitors walk through its doors since opening Friday. Rudolf Trabold, a spokesman for the museum, said there were 4,000 visitors to the exhibition on the first day alone. People visiting the exhibition said they had waited as long as one and a half hours to get in. Ravi Nair, a 73-year-old Indian visitor, said: "I had to queue for about an hour but it was worth it. The exhibition should help people in democratic countries realize that their vote is very valuable." 
... Few Catholics were ever directly taught to hate Jews. Yet Catholic teaching could not get around the New Testament account that Jews provoked the Crucifixion. ... "It is a sign of the times," the Archbishop said, "that a layman, and a Jewish layman at that, has become the originator of a Council decree." ... Its claim that the Church was being infiltrated by Jews would intrigue anti- Semites. For, in fact, ordained Jews around Rome working on the Jewish declaration included Father Baum, as well as Msgr. John Oesterreicher, on Bea's staff at the Secretariat. 
.. A classic 1986 interview with the Arizona senator in which he lights into lobbyists in general -- and the Israel lobby in particular: "Kolbe: Is the Israeli lobby too powerful? Goldwater: God, yes, way too powerful. Kolbe: Has that had some detrimental effects on what comes out of Congress? Goldwater: Yes. See, we have no treaty with Israel, but we have pledged ourselves to go to war if she has to go to war. And there are some of the actions that some of the Israeli groups take that, at times, I've felt would hasten that day when we have to live up to our promise. I can understand the feeling, but I'm getting awfully tired of the great influence they have and there's no question about it." 
He's one of the titans of 20th Century architecture, but Le Corbusier is suddenly feeling the weight of history working against him. The modernist master's legacy is coming under pressure after Switzerland's largest bank dropped an ad campaign featuring the architect and artist last week. Now, Zurich authorities are debating whether to dump plans to name a square after him. Letters made public in recent years and a 2008 biography suggest that the visionary known for his cool, spare designs and revolutionary urban planning ideas was a Nazi sympathizer whose Fascist tendencies went far beyond what was previously known. 
Mao Zedong, founder of the People's Republic of China, qualifies as the greatest mass murderer in world history, an expert who had unprecedented access to official Communist Party archives said yesterday ... Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years; the worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million. 
... Because Eisner and the others who run the motion picture and television industries are able to shape the public's barely conscious basic assumptions about life and society, thereby profoundly influencing the thinking and actions of millions, they wield greater power than even our elected lawmakers ... Eisner's transformation of Disney parallels, and contributes to, the cultural, social and political transformation of the United States as a whole. Like America's political leaders, Eisner and his Disney colleagues reassuringly display familiar symbols and trademarks from an earlier era, exploiting reputations and good-will painstakingly built up over decades. 
... The Jewish denial that Hollywood is controlled by Jews is a great lie which can be attested to by anyone who has ever been associated with the film industry ... It is positively insulting for them to deny their influence and power -- particularly when they themselves are continually boasting in their own circles about their "overrepresentation" in these fields. And it is absolutely infuriating when this denial reaches the point that non-Jews are attacked by Jewish agitators and Zionist zealots for stating obvious facts and truth. 
... The Jews are so dominant, I had to scour the trades to come up with six Gentiles in high positions at entertainment companies. When I called them to talk about their incredible advancement, five of them refused to talk to me, apparently out of fear of insulting Jews ... As a proud Jew, I want America to know about our accomplishment. Yes, we control Hollywood. Without us, you'd be flipping between "The 700 Club" and "Davey and Goliath" on TV all day ... I don't care if Americans think we're running the news media, Hollywood, Wall Street or the government. I just care that we get to keep running them. 
... This was evident in all its inglory yesterday when the Israeli cabinet approved a measure requiring candidates for Israeli citizenship to pledge loyalty to "the state of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state". The naturalisation oath would not apply to Jews, who are granted automatic citizenship under the law of return, so it is, by definition, discriminatory. The existing text binds individuals to declare their loyalty to the state of Israel. The new version requires future citizens to declare their loyalty not just to a state but an ideology, one specifically designed to exclude one fifth of its citizens who see themselves as Palestinian. Palestinian Israeli leaders have described this proposal as racist. 
The Oklahoma City public school district is taking a second look at a plan to teach at-risk students using rap and hip-hop after receiving complaints over one lesson referring to the Founding Fathers as "old dead white men." .... One particularly controversial song entitled "Old Dead White Men,"describes President James Monroe's presidential term by saying: "White men getting richer than Enron. They stepping on Indians, women and blacks. Era of Good Feeling doesn't come with the facts." ... Flocabulary CEO and co-founder Alex Rappaport says that the lyrics are meant to keep students engaged and promote discussion. 
Claudio Moffo, an avid supporter of Ahmadinejad and an Italian professor of political science at Teramo University teaches a special course, named "Not exactly a holocaust - the lies and inaccuracies". The professor teaches his students information that explains how, in his opinion and according to his research, the Jewish people has rewritten history. According to Moffa, whose controversial story was published in the Italian newspaper "La Repubblica," the gas chambers and crematoria never existed. He also questions the number of victims murdered by the Nazi regime. 
A court in Vienna sentenced Wolfgang Fröhlich on Monday, Oct. 4, to two years in prison for "Holocaust denial" writings sent to prominent public figures. He was found guilty of violating Austria's law against "attempted National Socialist re-activism" for having distributed writings in which he said that mass gassings with Zyklon B are technically impossible, and that the familiar figure of six million Jewish Holocaust victims is a fraud. This latest sentence was his fourth for such "denial" writings. Fröhlich, 59, has already served six and a half years in prison. 
The revelation that Rich Iott, a Republican candidate for Congress from Ohio, was an active member of a group dedicated to understanding the experience of soldiers who served in the Nazi Waffen SS by dressing up in their uniforms -- and staging recreations of their battles -- has forced historical re-enactors to defend their hobby. 
Hitler is back in town. An extremely nervous Germany is staging the first exhibition dedicated to the Nazi leader since the Fuhrer killed himself in his Berlin bunker in 1945. The exhibition, entitled Hitler and the Germans, shatters a taboo. Since World War II there have been scores of museum displays on the Holocaust, on slave labour, on the murdering doctors, cruel judges and massacring soldiers, and all have triggered debates and protests. Hitler, himself, however, has always been out of bounds - and in Berlin most of all, lest neo-Nazis swarm to the museum to pay tribute to the dictator of the Third Reich. 
Western countries have no tradition of circumcision. In antiquity, the expansion of the Greek and Roman Empires brought Westerners into contact with the peoples of the Middle East, some of whom marked their children with circumcision and other sexual mutilations. To protect these children, the Greeks and Romans passed laws forbidding circumcision. Over the centuries, the Catholic Church has passed many similar laws. The traditional Western response to circumcision has been revulsion and indignation 
'The Party." That is the commonest phrase in Germany today. It denotes that all-powerful organization, NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party) which dominates, energizes, and directs the Third Reich. Just what is the Party, and what are its relations with the Nation, the State Administration, and those numberless organizations characteristic of German life? That was one of the first questions I put when I got to Germany ... One thing seems certain: The National Socialist upheaval that has created the Third Reich goes far deeper than the Fascist regime in Italy, and is perhaps a more defiant breach with the historic past than even the Communism of Soviet Russia. 
The Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the 20th century is often cited as the most famous example of unethical medical research. Now, evidence has emerged that it overlapped with a shorter study, also sponsored by U.S. government health agencies, in which human subjects were unknowingly being harmed by participating in an experiment. Research from Wellesley College professor Susan Reverby has uncovered evidence of an experiment in Guatemala that infected people with sexually transmitted diseases in an effort to explore treatments. The U.S. government apologized for the research project on Friday, more than 60 years after the experiments ended. 
The CIA used a secret prison in Europe to torture its most important terrorism suspect, according to an official who first uncovered a secret network of prisons for holding suspects. He told the BBC there was now reliable evidence that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man accused of masterminding the 9/11 attacks, was tortured in Poland in the months before that country joined the European Union. 
An 81-year-old German woman was convicted of Holocaust denial and fined. The woman, identified as Ursula H. [Ursula Haverbeck] on Wednesday was given a suspended sentence of six months and fined nearly $1,400 by a Munich judge. Ursula, the former president of a banned right-wing extremist group, admitted to distributing a text among schoolchildren that she had written in which she denied the Holocaust. Her 91-year-old co-defendant had allowed his name to be used on the pamphlet and was fined more than $800, the German news agency DPA reported. 
Nearly 130 years after his death, Richard Wagner still provokes a maelstrom of emotions. Katharina Wagner, the German composer's great-granddaughter, has pulled out of a trip to Israel where she was to announce that the Israel Chamber Orchestra would be invited to open the next season of the prestigious Bayreuth festival, the annual celebration of Wagner's music. Ms. Wagner canceled the trip after the orchestra's participation was leaked to the Israeli media, prompting a hostile reaction in Israel. Wagner is widely shunned there for his anti-Semitic writings, which drew admiration from Adolf Hitler. Israeli orchestras have largely honored a seven-decade boycott of Wagner's work ...
Joe Sobran, who left this world on Sept. 30, was perhaps the most brilliant man I have ever known. Not brilliant in all ways, of course, and even obtuse in some, but in his power to see the essential, to lay bare hypocrisy, to capture an idea with a turn of phrase, to mock with gentle humor, and to treat the heaviest subjects with the lightest touch, I have never met his equal and never expect to. 
Staring out from their air-conditioned bus, the tourists pass tattooed gang members, bullet-marked buildings and homeless drug users / Only a few miles from the celebrity mansions of Hollywood, they are getting their first glimpse into the gang heartland of America on a guided tour with a big difference. Passengers embarking on the "Los Angeles Gang Tour" sign release forms acknowledging they could be crime victims and put their fate in the hands of a group of former gangsters who act as guides and protection. 
Politicians, lobbyists, and propagandists have spent nearly two decades pushing the lie that Iran poses a nuclear weapons threat to the United States and Israel. After a brief respite in the intensity of the wolf cries over the past two years, the neoconservative movement has decided to relaunch the "Must Bomb Iran" brand. The fact that Iran is not and has not been a nuclear threat to either nation is rendered irrelevant by a narrative of universal "concern" about its nuclear program. 
US President Barack Obama is under pressure to consider a military strike on Iran, according to the Financial Times. Both Senator Joe Lieberman and Howard Berman, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, have urged the president to consider setting a time limit of just a few months on the effectiveness of the most recent sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic for its nuclear advances. 
The United States apologized on Friday for an experiment conducted in the 1940s in which U.S. government researchers deliberately infected Guatemalan prison inmates, women and mental patients with syphilis. In the experiment, aimed at testing the then-new drug penicillin, inmates were infected by prostitutes and later treated with the antibiotic. "The sexually transmitted disease inoculation study conducted from 
CNN newscaster Rick Sanchez has been fired. The news comes one day after Sanchez appeared on Pete Dominick's Sirius radio show, where he called "The Daily Show's" John Stewart a "bigot" (he later amended the term to "prejudicial") and suggested that "everybody who runs CNN" was Jewish. 
Joseph Sobran, a hard-hitting conservative writer and moralist whose outspoken antipathy to Israel and what he saw as the undue influence of a Jewish lobby on American foreign policy led to his removal as a senior editor of National Review in 1993, died on Thursday ... "Nobody has ever accused me of the slightest personal indecency to a Jew," he said in a speech delivered at a 2002 conference of the Institute for Historical Review. "My chief offense, it appears, has been to insist that the state of Israel has been a costly and treacherous 'ally' to the United States. As of last Sept. 11, I should think that is undeniable. But I have yet to receive a single apology for having been correct." 
With the resumption of settlement construction in the West Bank yesterday, Israel's powerful settler movement hopes that it has scuttled peace talks with the Palestinians. It would be misleading, however, to assume that the only major obstacle to the success of the negotiations is the right-wing political ideology the settler movement represents. Equally important are deeply entrenched economic interests shared across Israeli society. These interests took root more than six decades ago with Israel's establishment and have flourished at an ever-accelerating pace since Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip after the 1967 war. 
The base line in Europe for what politicians say and do about immigration and the role of Islamic communities in their countries is moving. It is shifting in a way that mainstream politics now permits its leaders to say flatly that immigrants, Muslims in large part, must accommodate the rules and traditions of the societies they enter, rather than vice versa. In recent weeks, there have been paroxysms of controversy in Germany over a critical book on the place of immigrants there, which found substantial public support. 
... Without a common foe and without agreement that the Atlantic alliance is an overwhelming priority, politics in Europe has lost its moorings. The politics of Gemeinschaft (community) is replacing the politics of Gesellschaft (society). New communities of true believers are forming all over Europe. Those who trace their national woes to immigrants -- or nuclear power, or the EU, or Muslims, or Jews, or market economics, or the United States -- are uniting in new political communities, all of them harmful to society. To its splintering communities behind a vision that can say more than no. 
In 1974 Richard Nixon, the US president, was ready to support the release on humanitarian grounds of prisoner number 7, but his efforts were thwarted by unwavering Soviet opposition. So Rudolf Hess, Hitler's former deputy, dubbed "the loneliest man in the world" as sole occupant of Spandau prison, remained locked up, according to secret documents released today by the National Archives at Kew. The files cover a period when there was an international campaign to free Hess as his 80th birthday approached. It included an application to the European commission of human rights by his wife, Ilse, and public demands by his son, Wolf. 
.... He spent 46 years -- half his life -- behind bars, a victim of a cruel victor's justice. More than any other man, Rudolf Hess symbolizes the vindictiveness and hypocrisy of the Nuremberg Tribunal ... Known as the "conscience of the party," he often used what power and influence he had to intervene on behalf of victims of persecution by extremists in the National Socialist party. In his detailed study, Justice at Nuremberg, which is generally very critical of the German defendants, historian Robert E. Conot called Hess a "decent and honest" man and "a pacifist at heart." ... Rudolf Hess was a prisoner of peace and a victim of a vindictive age. 
After controversially declaring last April as Confederate History Month Virginia's Republican governor Bob McDonnell has decided to cancel the event for next April. McDonnell made his announcement at a conference titled "Race, Slavery, and the Civil War," which was being held at Norfolk State University. 
Ever wonder what happened to your high school valedictorian? He or she might just have wound up in Washington, D.C. That metro area has the nation's highest percentage of residents with college degrees. Call it America's brainiest place to live. In the District and surrounding suburbs, 47.3% of people 25 years or older have bachelor's, master's, professional school or doctorate degrees, according to new Census Bureau data released Tuesday. The national average barely tips 25% ... In second-place San Francisco, 43.5% of residents have college degrees or better; San Jose, Calif., the hub of Silicon Valley, ranked third at 43.2%. 
If Israel's stranglehold over U.S. foreign policy is to be broken, Americans will need to be informed about the harm that Washington 's unconditional support for the Jewish state is doing to American interests, say leading analysts of U.S.-Israeli relations. ... Philip Giraldi , executive director of the Council for the National Interest, believes that Tel Aviv's stranglehold over Washington can be broken "only by directly challenging the power of the Israel lobby and the false narrative about how it is of value to the United States ." ... "The American people must learn that Israel is and always has been a strategic liability that has done immense damage to the United States and its worldwide interests," ... 
... If ever a foreign country has stuck its thumb in the eye of Uncle Sam, it is Israel in its willingness to take the United States for a ride while always demanding still more. And when it demands more it is invariably given more, with US politicians and mainstream media ever willing to genuflect and do what is right for the kleptocracy in charge in Tel Aviv ... That means that the congressmen in question, who actually took an oath to uphold the US Constitution, know that they are doing nothing but throwing yet another bone to Israel. 
Some of the critical players in President Obama's national security team doubt his strategy in Afghanistan will succeed and have spent much of the last 20 months quarreling with one another over policy, personalities and turf, according to a new book. The book, "Obama's Wars," by the journalist Bob Woodward, depicts an administration deeply torn over the war in Afghanistan even as the president agreed to triple troop levels there amid suspicion that he was being boxed in by the military. Mr. Obama's top White House adviser on Afghanistan and his special envoy for the region are described as believing the strategy will not work. 
In his farewell address, delivered to the American people on national television, Jan. 17, 1961, President Eisenhower spoke firmly, and in carefully chosen words, to warn against the dangers in the years to come of the great "military-industrial complex." Excerpt. Runtime: 1:54 mins. "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." 
Almost 92 years after the guns fell silent on the Western Front, the final act of the First World War will be played out on Sunday when Germany pays the last chunk of reparations imposed by the victorious allied powers. The payment of 59.5 million pounds ($96.9 million Canadian) ends the crippling debt that was the price of one world war and laid the foundations for the next. Germany was forced to pay the reparations under the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 as compensation to the war-ravaged nations of Belgium and France and to pay the Allies some of the costs of waging what was then the bloodiest conflict in history, leaving nearly ten million soldiers dead. 
These are the maps that show the racial breakdown of America's biggest cities. Using information from the latest U.S. census results, the maps show the extent to which America has blended together the races in the nation's 40 largest cities ... The resulting maps may not represent what many might expect Barack Obama's integrated rainbow nation to look like, as many cities have clear racial dividing lines. Detroit, for example, is infamous for its divide between black and white. 
... . Adjusted for inflation, we have spent more on Iraq and Afghanistan than on any war in our history except World War II. They have cost more in real dollars than the Korean and Vietnam wars combined . ... We should have learned from these experiences that money and military force are not enough to redesign the world to suit us. The record also indicates that ambitious interventions abroad are more likely to erode our security than enhance it, bankrupting us in the process. 
... Boston University history and international relations professor Andrew J. Bacevich. His engaging and insightful book, "Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War," is a timely analysis and critique of contemporary and historical defense policies ... He argues that the country would be better off if its military policy adhered to three principles: Our military's main goal isn't to combat evil or remake the world but to defend the country and its interests; the main "duty station" of military personnel is at home; the nation should use force as a last resort and only in self-defense. 
A controversial new movie telling the story behind an anti-Semitic film made in 1940 has been released in Germany. Jud Süss - A Film Without Conscience looks at why the earlier film, also called Jud Süss [Jew Süss], was a huge success under the Nazi regime. It focuses on the leading actor's decision to join the cast, suggesting he was forced into it by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. The original movie was banned in 1945 ... The real-life Joseph Süss Oppenheimer was a Jewish financier executed in Stuttgart in 1738. 
Joseph Sobran died peacefully on Thursday afternoon, Sept. 30, age 64. The 20th century produced many great conservative writers, but none brought together wit, erudition, and humanity on a single page so well as Joseph Sobran. He was a remarkable man: even seeming quite frail at a gathering in his honor last December, he had a mind as accurate as precision clockwork, able to recall Shakespearean verses he had memorized decades earlier. He lived T.S. Eliot's dictum that there are no lost causes because there are no gained causes, and he hated cant and injustice. News of his death today is a terrible shock, despite his long illness. He will be missed. 
... Since 1965, America has invested trillions in education with a primary goal of equalizing test scores among the races and genders. Measured by U.S. test scores, it has been a waste -- an immense transfer of wealth from private citizens to an education industry that has grown bloated while failing us again and again. Perhaps it is time to abandon the goal of educational equality as utopian -- i.e., unattainable -- and to focus, as we do in sports and art, on excellence. ... The beginning of wisdom is to recognize this world as it is, not as what we would wish it to be. 
A new film tells the terrible story of Stalin's own Final Solution - and Churchill's shameful complicity / … This is the harrowing scene of a devastating new film, Katyn. It takes its name from the village in western Russia where the bodies of more than 4,000 Polish prisoners of war were dug up in 1943. But these bodies were by no means the only ones to be disinterred. Near the Soviet city of Kalinin, now known as Tver, another 6,000 bodies were unearthed. Near Kharkov in Ukraine there were 4,000. In all, more than 22,000 Poles -- roughly two-thirds of them officers and policemen, the rest political prisoners -- suffered the same appalling fate: to be executed, without trial or even warning, and thrown like carcasses into mass graves. 
Germar Rudolf, 44, a German chemist and intellectual dissident who had been serving a prison sentence for violating Germany's law against "Holocaust denial," was released from Mannheim prison on July 4 after three years and nine months behind bars. Upon his release, he was met by his American wife and four-year-old US-born daughter. In October 2005 he was arrested in Chicago, and deported to his homeland, where he was tried, sentenced, and imprisoned. 
In a tour of the western US, David Irving is addressing meetings in 17 cities, including Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Costa Mesa, and Kansas City. His topic is "Hitler, Himmler and `Enigma': Re-writing World War II history using Nazi messages decoded by the British Secret Service." The best-selling British historian also has available copies of his prison memoir, which tells of his headline-making arrest and harrowing prison ordeal in Austria, 2005-06. 
In Russia it is not only the future that is unpredictable; often the past is equally in doubt … When authorities in Estonia removed a monument to Soviet soldiers from the centre of Tallinn two years ago, riots between police and ethnic Russian citizens of Estonia ensued, and the Kremlin made furious noises. With its new commission and law, Moscow is upping the stakes. Russia accuses the governments of Estonia and Latvia of glorifying partisan regiments which fought on the side of the Nazis. In recent years, relations between Latvia and Russia have normalised in many spheres, but the Second World War is still a thorny issue. 
A Jewish group in Ukraine is objecting to a criminal case brought over the "Great Famine" committed in the 1930s. The nation's security service is pressing the case against a list of former Soviet officials accused of committing the Holodomor, which caused the deaths of millions in Ukraine in 1932-33. Most of the names on the list were Jewish. 
It has always been those few who can see through the political correctness and hypocrisy of popular attitudes who are considered dangerous. "Holocaust denial laws" are now in place in about a dozen countries. Defenders of these laws claim that the expression of unconventional views about the Jewish genocide is "hate speech" and "incitement to violence" and therefore must be suppressed. But history shows the greatest purveyors of lies, hatred and incitement to violence are those with the power to spread their poison by manipulating popular opinion via the control or complicity of the mass media. 
President Barack Obama's refusal to take a stand on protests in Iran stands in sharp contrast to demands he has made on Israel, Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, says in a Newsmax interview … Klein says leaders of Jewish organizations are rethinking their support of Obama in light of his attitude toward Israel. "There are many leaders in the organized Jewish world who have privately discussed this issue with me, and say they are deeply concerned about Obama's actions and policies toward Israel, and now they're rethinking their support for Obama during the campaign and the election," says Klein … 
Britain is in the grip of a "virulent" new strain of anti-Semitism, according to the Chief Rabbi. Sir Jonathan Sacks told The Times in an interview that in January the number of anti-Semitic incidents reached the highest level since records began. Jews have been physically attacked, schools targeted and cemeteries desecrated … Although the new "mutation" was different from the anti-Semitism promoted by Hitler, it was dangerous because it was international, he said. "The internet means that we no longer have national cultures; we have global cultures and the new anti-Semitism is very much a phenomenon of the global culture." Whereas in the past, hatred was focused against Judaism as a religion or Jews as a race, the focus this time was on Jews as a nation. 
… Not counting money projected for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the presidentially approved budget plan would continue increasing the Pentagon's budget: by another $8.1 billion in 2011 (up 1.5 percent), another $9 billion in 2012 (up 1.6 percent), and $10.4 billion in 2013 (up1.8 percent), and so on all the way out to 2019. If we add in the costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon budget for the current fiscal year - 2009 - exceeds any year since the end of World War II, including the spending peaks for the Korean and Vietnam wars. President Obama's plan is to increase that lead. Obama also will outspend Ronald Reagan on defense. 
… Reality can be so easily stood on its head when it comes to Israel because the misreading of Israeli declarations is a long-established practice among commentators and journalists in the United States. In fact, a special vocabulary has been developed for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the United States. It filters and structures the way in which developing stories are misread here, making it difficult for readers to fully grasp the nature of those stories -- and maybe even for journalists to think critically about what they write. The ultimate effect of this special vocabulary is to make it possible for Americans to accept and even endorse in Israel what they would reject out of hand in any other country. 
… In Iran's system, election fraud has no purpose, because a small select group of ruling mullahs select the candidates who are put on the ballot. If they don't like an aspiring candidate, they simply don't put him on the ballot. When the liberal reformer Khatami ran for president, he won with 70% of the vote and served from 
Adolf Hitler's obsessive hatred for Jews was sparked by his experiences after World War One, according to a new book. Respected historian Ralf-George Reuth argues the dictator blamed them for both the Russian revolution and the collapse of the German economy. The claim is a stark contrast to previous theories … At the time almost half of all German private banks were Jewish owned, the stock exchange dominated by Jewish stockbrokers, almost half of the nation's newspapers were Jewish run as were 80 per cent of chain stores. It became fashionable to decry the loss of the war on Jewish financiers. But Hitler, according to Reuth, also blamed Jews for the Russian revolution … 
Americans like to think of themselves as martyrs to work. They delight in telling stories about their punishing hours, snatched holidays and ever-intrusive BlackBerrys … But when it comes to the young the situation is reversed. American children have it easier than most other children in the world, including the supposedly lazy Europeans. They have one of the shortest school years anywhere, a mere 180 days compared with an average of 195 for OECD countries and more than 200 for East Asian countries. German children spend 20 more days in school than American ones, and South Koreans over a month more. 
An ex-candidate in Canada is suing the country's leading Jewish advocacy groups, alleging they ruined her political career. Lesley Hughes, who was dumped as a Liberal candidate in a Winnipeg-area electoral district, claims the Canadian Jewish Congress and B'nai Brith Canada made false and defamatory accusations that she is anti-Semitic. In a lawsuit filed June 16, Hughes alleges that as a result of the actions of the CJC and B'nai Brith, former federal Liberal leader Stephane Dion revoked her candidacy in last September's federal elections. 
… The state-run radio station's Washington correspondent, Nathan Guttman, obtained data from a recent unpublished poll, conducted by the Israel Project, an organization that works to improve Israel's image in the United States. The Israel Project has been conducting a periodic running poll, asking American registered voters questions about Israel … There is a steep decline in the percentage of Americans who say that the U.S. should support Israel. That has dropped from 71% in March 2008 (at the time of the Annapolis process) to only 44% now. 
… Thus President Obama faces a choice. He can play along with the Israelis, pretending to believe their promises of good intentions and the significance of the distinctions they offer him. Such a pretense would buy him time and favor with Congress. But the Israelis would be playing him for a fool, and he would be seen as one in the Mideast and beyond. Alternatively, the president could break with two decades of American compliance, acknowledge publicly that the emperor is indeed naked, dismiss Mr. Netanyahu for the cynic he is and remind Israelis that all their settlements are hostage to American goodwill. He could also remind Israelis that the illegal communities have nothing to do with Israel's defense, much less its founding ideals of agrarian self-sufficiency and Jewish autonomy. 
… I sometimes fear there's a genetically inbred survival characteristic of the Jews that predisposes us to try to beat the system, to get away with things, a characteristic that came in very handy for all those many centuries during which the nerve and cleverness to beat the system enabled survival, but that has now become a dysfunctional anachronism. Be that as it may, Netanyahu's stance will likely turn out to be a serious miscalculation of Obama's intentions and abilities. Obama has no intention of endangering Israel, but when it comes to outsmarting a would-be outsmarter, he is not exactly a beginner. 
… The idea of the Palestinian state has now become a part of the national consensus, and only a handful of ultra-rightists reject it directly. But this is only the beginning. The main struggle will be about turning the idea into reality. The entire speech was addressed to one single person: Barack Obama. It was not designed to appeal to the Palestinians … Obama is not seeking a frontal collision with the Israeli government. It seems that he wants to exert "soft" pressure, vigorously but quietly. To my mind, that is a wise approach. 
There is growing concern among the American Jewish community over Obama's Mideast initiatives, this according to the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Malcolm Hoenlein. "President Obama's strongest supporters among Jewish leaders are deeply troubled by his recent Middle East initiatives, and some are questioning what he really believes," Hoenlein, said in an interview published Monday. 
Only a few years ago, Edward Fagan was a world-renowned lawyer for the underdog, brash and audacious enough to take on Swiss banks and even whole countries to win judgments for Holocaust survivors and victims of South African apartheid. This week, the Supreme Court announced he was barred from practicing law in New Jersey, completing one of the steepest falls from grace in the state's law community. The court found Fagan, 56, misappropriated nearly $400,000 of the money he won for the victims he so effectively championed. 