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Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust
A CALL FOR ACTION !
I HOPE YOU CAN PARTICIPATE
The United Nations has a "Holocaust outreach program." This was established in response to the Iranian Conference on the Holocaust where I spoke in December 2006. Despite the political motive behind the UN outreach program, it is not necessarily only a propaganda tool.
CODOH supports such ideals as scholarly research and fair and honest discussion of the Holocaust question. See http://www.un.org/holocaustremembrance/ However, the generally laudable goals of the UN program have been corrupted by Believer extremists who have made conferences supported by the UN into forums designed to bash Iran, Muslims, Palestinians, and Revisionists.
Such sordid exhibitions cannot withstand any independent thought or minority views. Because of this the most recent conference held in Dublin excluded Iranian, Islamic or Revisionist speakers and blacklisted Revisionists from even being in the audience. For background see: http://bradleysmithsblog.blogspot.com/
IN YOUR OWN WORDS.
Following is the text of a draft letter that will perhaps spark you to write a letter to Ms. Kimberly Mann yourself. It is important that the UN hear from people who are outraged at the censorship exploited at the HETI Dublin Conference. USE YOUR OWN VOCABULARY express your own thoughts, your own feelings-and please-be civil. That's important. What happened in Dublin is not Kimberly Mann's fault.
THEN, send your letter to the email address below. In your own words. Long or short. Copy me if you will as a Bcc.
And remember, if you don't like the News, go out and make your own!
Thank you.
SAMPLE LETTER FOLLOWS.
USE YOUR OWN LANGUAGE, YOUR OWN THOUGHTS
YOUR OWN REFLECTIONS -- SIGN IT
===============
Kimberly Mann, Editor
United Nations Outreach
Department of Public InformationNews and Media Division ·
New York
Tel: 212 963 6835
E-mail: mann@un.org,
Web: www.un.org/holocaustremembrance.
Re: Holocaust Education Trust of Ireland/United Nations Conference on Holocaust Denial
Dear Ms. Mann:
I am writing to protest the exclusion of Iranian, Islamic and Revisionist speakers from the HETI organized Conference on Anti-Semitism and Holocaust Denial held in Dublin. A conference on "Denial" and Iran without speakers representing the views of those two parties is a farce. Too many of the Conference speakers have made a career of bashing Iranians, Islam, Palestinians and Revisionists.
It is inconceivable that a UN-sponsored Conference addressing historical issues would blacklist and exclude any writer or scholar who might represent a minority view on those issues, rather than the orthodox one. That this is what indeed happened underscores a sordid misuse of the UN's good name to evade the laudable purposes of the Conference.
The United Nations Outreach Program has a useful agenda which addresses important issues.
It should not participate in a grubby and baseless censorship. It should not allow the perversion
of its real mission, through the use of crass propaganda, to forward the political goals of special interests. It should encourage open discussion and real debate as well as research and education.
I hope that you can help avoid future use of United Nations funds and its good name to support such Conferences as this one.
Thank you for your consideration of this letter.
Sincerely yours,
[SIGN "YOUR" NAME HERE]
... 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 (1913-2010) was an outstanding German Luftwaffe pilot who also distinguished himself during the Second World War as a courageous air force commander and innovative air defense tactician. After the war he built a new career as an attorney, and became known for his role in civil rights cases, defending patriots and "Holocaust deniers" accused of violating German laws against free speech. Until his recent death at the age of 97, he remained steadfastly loyal to his people, his heritage, and the ideals of his youth. 
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 (1933-2001),was a Polish-born Israeli professor of chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was also a Holocaust survivor. During World War II he was in the Warsaw ghetto, and was later a prisoner at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. He was a critic of the Israeli government, and his writings on Judaism and Zionism have been controversial. Runtime: 59 mins. 
... 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. 
