Anti-Zionists : The New Heretics

Anti-Zionists: The New Heretics
By Jeff Gates
Source: Criminal State

“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
– George Santayana

How quickly we forget. With the Inquisition still fresh in memory, America’s Founders embraced democracy as a means to protect liberty from the manipulations of faith. That’s why facts were enshrined at the core of self-governance grounded in the rule of law. The duplicity at the heart of the U.S.-Israeli relationship puts that founding principle at risk.

For seven terrifying centuries, heretics were punished under canon law. In 1633, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei was condemned for “grave suspicion of heresy” when he showed that the Sun—not the crown—was the center of the universe despite what the King’s subjects—with help from the Church—had been induced to believe.

With the merger of church and state in the 4^th Century Roman Empire, anyone daring to dispute papal authority—by challenging with facts the One True Faith—was condemned as both a heretic and an enemy of the state. That practice continues in modern times.

The New Heretics are those few who challenge America’s faith in its “special relationship” with an extremist enclave granted nation state recognition in 1948 by a Christian-Zionist president, Harry Truman. Critics of this enclave invite condemnation as “anti-Semites,” a modern form of social excommunication.

Defenders of the Zionist Faithful were forced to become more vigilant in monitoring this heresy after Israeli troops used U.S.-provided arms and munitions to kill more than 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza, one-third of them reportedly children.

That well-timed attack, planned for more than a year, was scheduled between Christmas and the January 20^th presidential inaugural. Within 48 hours of ending its assault, Israel had dispatched an army of bloggers to counter anti-Zionist websites. By early February, the Anti-Defamation League was bemoaning a “pandemic of anti-Semitism.” The massacre fueled outrage worldwide even as the ADL portrayed that anger as “anti-Semitism.”

By early March, Israeli policy was being described as a threat to international peace and security, a violation of international human rights and a crime against humanity. By associating the U.S.—its ally—with this behavior, the U.S.-Israeli “special relationship” fueled anti-American hatred, fanned the flames of extremism and set the stage for more terrorism. Meanwhile a wave of modern-day excommunications swept college campuses:

• At Hampshire College in Massachusetts, students urged the school to divest from firms whose operations support the Israeli occupation of Palestine. When Israeli policies were compared to apartheid-era South Africa, Zionist Law Professor Alan Dershowitz condemned the students as “rabidly anti-Israel” (enemies of the state).
• At Canada’s Ottawa College, Students Against Israeli Apartheid were prohibited from displaying a poster condemning Zionist policies that president Jimmy Carter had already condemned in his 2007 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
• At the University of California, Santa Barbara, Professor William Robinson (Jewish) was attacked as an anti-Semite in an ADL-coordinated silencing campaign. His heresy: sharing with students a photo-essay critical of Israeli policy that had circulated for weeks online. [See “Treason in Plain Sight?” and “The ADL Thought Police.”]

Media-Manipulated Mindsets

Meanwhile Pope Benedict XVI attacked an Argentine cleric whose excommunication he had lifted. As head of the Roman Catholic Church, Benedict claimed he was unaware that Bishop Richard Williamson had challenged key facts of the Holocaust. When condemned by the Pontiff, Williamson apologized. The Vatican insisted he recant, a concept lifted directly from the Inquisition.

Critics suspect this early February dispute was meant to distract attention from the carnage in Gaza and create sympathy for Israel by evoking memories of the Holocaust. No media outlet mentioned that this German Pope, the first since 1523, previously led the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a direct descendant of the Church’s 16^th century tribunal, the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition.

The fiercest condemnation of the bishop’s reluctance to recant came not from Rome but from Angela Merkel in Berlin who was elected German Chancellor in 2005. No media outlet mentioned that in 2003 Zionist media mogul Haim Saban acquired control of ProSiebenSat.1, Germany’s second largest broadcaster.

While wielding a major opinion-shaping media outlet during Merkel’s ascendancy as Germany’s first female chancellor, Saban described himself as an “Israeli-American” and “a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.” Steve Rattner, Saban’s financial adviser, explained the motive for his media acquisition: “He thinks Germany is critical to Israel.” Rattner re-emerged as president Barack Obama’s auto industry “car czar” before resigning in mid-July due to a pension fund scandal.

To put these media-dependent developments in historical perspective requires a grasp of how—in the Information Age—warfare is waged not on a traditional battlefield but in the shared field of consciousness. In the public’s shared mindset—where consensus opinions are created, shaped and sustained—facts are routinely displaced with what “the mark” can be induced to believe.

That’s why national security agencies must monitor media czars such as Saban who is candid about using his influence to advance Zionist goals. In June 2006, a Saban-led group acquired Univision, the largest Spanish-language broadcaster in the U.S. With Latinos the fastest-growing voting bloc in the U.S., Univision is critical to Israel’s ability to sustain its control of U.S. foreign policy. Univision is the fifth largest television network in the U.S., reaching 98% of Spanish-speaking households through 62 television stations, 90 affiliate stations and more than 2,000 cable affiliates. [See “How the Israel lobby took control of U.S. foreign policy.”]

For a system of self-governance reliant on informed consent, it is difficult to overstate the threat to democracy when policy-making is filtered through the pro-Israeli bias of media-owning Zionists. In addition to emerging as a reliable EU advocate for Israeli policies, Merkel threatened to arrest Williamson for Holocaust denial on a EU-wide warrant. A search of her phone records would doubtless uncover a discussion with a key supporter, Haim Saban.

Zionists and the lawmakers they groom are well positioned to advance a modern-day Inquisition—as when Bishop Williamson simultaneously faced arrest in Europe and expulsion from Argentina, the site of a seminary he directed and home to the largest Jewish population in Latin America.

The People In Between

In October 2007, Defense Secretary Robert Gates coined a generic phrase to describe the most perilous combatants when waging what he called “unconventional warfare.” A former C.I.A. Director, he portrayed this enemy as “the people in between.” Between Galileo and the facts was Church doctrine deployed to displace science with beliefs or, in modern-day parlance, with consensus opinion. Between the German people and the ballot box was Haim Saban for whom the election of Angela Merkel was critical to Israel. Next is Univision.

To gain credence (believability) for the displacement of facts with beliefs requires that the public’s shared mental environment be fed a steady diet of supportive impressions. Thus the agenda-advancing assistance when “unrelated” events emerge in the same timeframe to reinforce the intended orthodoxy. For example, following the Israeli assault on Gaza, news reports in February included several high profile accounts, including:

• The suspension of U.K. diplomat Rowan Laxton for allegedly making anti-Semitic remarks while riding an exercise bike in a London gymnasium.
• Reports of police protection provided in Dubai to Andy Ram, an Israeli tennis star, reinforcing the media-induced narrative that Israelis were at risk.
• A White House announcement that the Obama administration would attend a planning session for a 2009 World Conference Against Racism but may boycott it.

These narrative-advancing impressions were reinforced by the release in 2008 of eight Holocaust-themed films, including The Reader starring Kate Winslet who received a high profile Academy Award for best actress in a leading role. She even joked about the influence wielded by pro-Israelis in Hollywood and popular culture. In a 2005 filming of Extras, a comedy series in which she played herself, an actor congratulated her on her role in a Holocaust-related film, to which she responded:

“I don’t think we need another film about the Holocaust, do we? It’s like, how many have there been? We get it. It was grim. Move on. No, I’m doing it because I’ve noticed that if you do a film about the Holocaust, [you’re] guaranteed an Oscar. I’ve been nominated four times—never won. The whole world is going, ‘Why hasn’t Winslet won one?’ That’s it. That’s why I’m doing it. Schindler’s bloody List. The Pianist. Oscars coming out of their ass!”

Duplicity – From Antiquity to Modernity

Framers of the U.S. Constitution viewed democracy as a form of governance that resides not in a royal court or the papacy but in a mindset shared by its participants. Where else could self-governance reside? Thus the key role envisioned for media as an “in-between” domain essential to convey the facts required for informed consent. Absent widespread access to unbiased information, liberty would succumb to the exploitation of those skilled at preying on ignorance and beliefs. On that key point, the Framers were proven correct.

Thus the perils when those who mean to live free rely on media with an undisclosed bias. It is precisely such “people in between” that routinely displace facts with what an unsuspecting public (“the mark”) can be deceived to believe. In an Information Age, such fraudulent behavior is not akin to treason, that agenda-advancing duplicity is treason. Haim Saban is unusual only in conceding the pro-Israeli bias he brings to his media operations.

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Some Elementary Comments on The Rights of Freedom of Expression

Some Elementary Comments on The Rights of Freedom of Expression
(Appeared as a Preface to Robert Faurisson, Mémoire en défense, October 11, 1980)
By Noam Chomsky
Source: Chomsky.Info

The remarks that follow are sufficiently banal so that I feel that an apology is in order to reasonable people who may happen to read them. If there is, nevertheless, good reason to put them on paper — and I fear that there is — this testifies to some remarkable features of contemporary French intellectual culture.

Before I turn to the subject on which I have been asked to comment, two clarifications are necessary. The remarks that follow are limited in two crucial respects. First: I am concerned here solely with a narrow and specific topic, namely, the right of free expression of ideas, conclusions and beliefs. I have nothing to say here about the work of Robert Faurisson or his critics, of which I know very little, or about the topics they address, concerning which I have no special knowledge. Second: I will have some harsh (but merited) things to say about certain segments of the French intelligentsia, who have demonstrated that they have not the slightest concern for fact or reason, as I have learned from unpleasant personal experience that I will not review here. Certainly, what I say does not apply to many others, who maintain a firm commitment to intellectual integrity. This is not the place for a detailed account. The tendencies to which I refer are, I believe, sufficiently significant to merit attention and concern, but I would not want these comments to be misunderstood as applying beyond their specific scope.

Some time ago I was asked to sign a petition in defense of Robert Faurisson’s “freedom of speech and expression.” The petition said absolutely nothing about the character, quality or validity of his research, but restricted itself quite explicitly to a defense of elementary rights that are taken for granted in democratic societies, calling upon university and government officials to “do everything possible to ensure the [Faurisson’s] safety and the free exercise of his legal rights.” I signed it without hesitation.

The fact that I had signed the petition aroused a storm of protest in France. In the Nouvel Observateur, an ex-Stalinist who has changed allegiance but not intellectual style published a grossly falsified version of the contents of the petition, amidst a stream of falsehoods that merit no comment. This, however, I have come to regard as normal. I was considerably more surprised to read in Esprit (September 1980) that Pierre Vidal-Naquet found the petition “scandaleuse,” citing specifically the fact that I had signed it (I omit the discussion of an accompanying article by the editor that again merits no comment, at least among people who retain a commitment to elementary values of truth and honesty).

Vidal-Naquet offers exactly one reason for finding the petition, and my act of signing it, “scandaleuse”: the petition, he claims, presented Faurisson’s “‘conclusions’ comme si elles etaient effectivement des decouvertes [as if they had just been discovered].” Vidal-Naquet’s statement is false. The petition simply stated that Faurisson had presented his “finding,” which is uncontroversial, stating or implying precisely nothing about their value and implying nothing about their validity. Perhaps Vidal-Naquet was misled by a faulty understanding of the English wording of the petition; that is, perhaps he misunderstood the English word “findings.” It is, of course, obvious that if I say that someone presented his “findings” I imply nothing whatsoever about their character or validity; the statement is perfectly neutral in this respect. I assume that it was indeed a simple misunderstanding of the text that led Vidal-Naquet to write what he did, in which case he will, of course, publicly withdraw that accusation that I (among others) have done something “scandaleuse” in signing an innocuous civil rights petition of the sort that all of us sign frequently.

I do not want to discuss individuals. Suppose, then, that some person does indeed find the petition “scandaleuse,” not on the basis of misreading, but because of what it actually says. Let us suppose that this person finds Faurisson’s ideas offensive, even horrendous, and finds his scholarship to be a scandal. Let us suppose further that he is correct in these conclusions — whether he is or not is plainly irrelevant in this context. Then we must conclude that the person in question believes that the petition was “scandaleuse” because Faurisson should indeed be denied the normal rights of self-expression, should be barred from the university, should be subjected to harassment and even violence, etc. Such attitudes are not uncommon. They are typical, for example, of American Communists and no doubt their counterparts elsewhere. Among people who have learned something from the 18th century (say, Voltaire) it is a truism, hardly deserving discussion, that the defense of the right of free expression is not restricted to ideas one approves of, and that it is precisely in the case of ideas found most offensive that these rights must be most vigorously defended. Advocacy of the right to express ideas that are generally approved is, quite obviously, a matter of no significance. All of this is well-understood in the United States, which is why there has been nothing [not in 1980, anyhow] like the Faurisson affair here. In France, where a civil libertarian tradition is evidently not well-established and where there have been deep totalitarian strains among the intelligentsia for many years (collaborationism, the great influence of Leninism and its offshoots, the near-lunatic character of the new intellectual right, etc.), matters are apparently quite different.

For those who are concerned with the state of French intellectual culture, the Faurisson affair is not without interest. Two comparisons immediately come to mind. The first is this. I have frequently signed petitions — indeed, gone to far greater lengths — on behalf of Russian dissidents whose views are absolutely horrendous: advocates of ongoing U.S. savagery in Indochina, or of policies that would lead to nuclear war, or of a religious chauvinism that is reminiscent of the dark ages. No one has ever raised an objection. Should someone have done so, I would regard this with the same contempt as is deserved by the behavior of those who denounce the petition in support of Faurisson’s civil rights, and for exactly the same reason. I do not read the Communist Party press, but I have little doubt that the commissars and apparatchiks have carefully perused these petitions, seeking out phrases that could be maliciously misinterpreted, in an effort to discredit these efforts to prevent the suppression of human rights. In comparison, when I state that irrespective of his views, Faurisson’s civil rights should be guaranteed, this is taken to be “scandaleuse” and a great fuss is made about it in France. The reason for the distinction seems obvious enough. In the case of the Russian dissidents, the state (our states) approves of supporting them, for its own reasons, which have little to do with concern for human rights, needless to say. In the case of Faurisson, however, defense of his civil rights is not officially approved doctrine — far from it — so that segments of the intelligentsia, who are ever eager to line up and march off to the beat of the drums, do not perceive any need to take the stance accepted without question in the case of Soviet dissidents. In France, there may well be other factors: perhaps a lingering guilt about disgraceful behavior of substantial sectors under Vichy, the failure to protest the French wars in Indochina, that lasting impact of Stalinism and more generally Leninist doctrines, the bizarre and dadaistic character of certain streams of intellectual life in postwar France which makes rational discourse appear to be such an odd and unintelligible pastime, the currents of anti-Semitism that have exploded into violence.

A second comparison also comes to mind. I rarely have much good to say about the mainstream intelligentsia in the United States, who generally resemble their counterparts elsewhere. Still, it is very illuminating to compare the reaction to the Faurisson affair in France and to the same phenomenon here. In the United States, Arthur Butz (whom one might regard as the American Faurisson) has not been subjected to the kind of merciless attack leveled against Faurisson. When the “no holocaust” historians hold a large international meeting in the United States, as they did some months ago, there is nothing like the hysteria that we find in France over the Faurisson affair [of course, this has changed over the decades]. When the American Nazi Party calls for a parade in the largely Jewish city of Skokie, Illinois — obviously, pure provocation — the American Civil Liberties Union defends their rights (though of course, the American Communist Party is infuriated). As far as I am aware, much the same is true in England or Australia [this, too, has changed], countries which, like the United States, have a live civil libertarian tradition. Butz and the rest are sharply criticized and condemned, but without any attack on their civil rights, to my knowledge. There is no need, in these countries, for an innocuous petition such as the one that is found “scandaleuse” in France, and if there were such a petition, it would surely not be attacked outside of limited and insignificant circles […]. The comparison is, again, illuminating. One should try to understand it. One might argue, perhaps, that Nazism and anti-Semitism are much more threatening in France. I think that this is true, but it is simply a reflection of the same factors that led to the Leninism of substantial sectors of the French intelligentsia for a long period, their contempt for elementary civil libertarian principles today, and their current fanaticism in beating the drums for crusades against the Third World. There are, in short, deep-seated totalitarian strains that emerge in various guises, a matter well worth further consideration, I believe.

Let me add a final remark about Faurisson’s alleged “anti-Semitism.” Note first that even if Faurisson were to be a rabid anti-Semite and fanatic pro-Nazi — such charges have been presented to me in private correspondence that it would be improper to cite in detail here — this would have no bearing whatsoever on the legitimacy of the defense of his civil rights. On the contrary, it would make it all the more imperative to defend them since, once again, it has been a truism for years, indeed centuries, that it is precisely in the case of horrendous ideas that the right of free expression must be most vigorously defended; it is easy enough to defend free expression for those who require no such defense. Putting this central issue aside, is it true that Faurisson is an anti-Semite or a neo-Nazi? As noted earlier, I do not know his work very well. But from what I have read — largely as a result of the nature of the attacks on him — I find no evidence to support either conclusion. Nor do I find credible evidence in the material that I have read concerning him, either in the public record or in private correspondence. As far as I can determine, he is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort. In support of the charge of anti-Semitism, I have been informed that Faurisson is remembered by some schoolmates as having expressed anti-Semitic sentiments in the 1940s, and as having written a letter that some interpret as having anti-Semitic implications at the time of the Algerian war. I am a little surprised that serious people should put such charges forth — even in private — as a sufficient basis for castigating someone as a long-time and well-known anti-Semitic. I am aware of nothing in the public record to support such charges. I will not pursue the exercise, but suppose we were to apply similar standards to others, asking, for example, what their attitude was towards the French war in Indochina, or to Stalinism, decades ago. Perhaps no more need be said.

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Chomsky Signs Petition to Free Prominent Revisionist

Chomsky Signs Petition to Free Prominent Revisionist
September 17th, 2010
Source: Rue 89

A petition to free Vincent Reynouard, a French revisionist who is serving a prison sentence for his research, and to abrogate the Gayssot Act, was initiated by two academics (Paul-Eric Blanrue and Jean Bricmontin) in opposition to the efforts of the Jewish/Zionist Lobby. The petition has so far been signed by 1,000 people. The initiators are proud that it carries Noam Chomsky’s support. His letter of support reads as follows:

“I understand that Vincent Reynouard has been condemned and jailed under the Gayssot law, and that a petition is being circulated in protest against these actions. I know nothing about Mr. Reynouard, but regard the Gayssot law [which restricts free speech and punishes academic inquiry] as entirely illegitimate, inconsistent with the basic principles of a free society as these have been understood since the Enlightenment.

The law in effect grants the state the right to determine historical truth and to punish departure from its edicts […] If the justification of the Gayssot law is to ban “horrendous views”, or to protect the right to “live free from fear of an atmosphere” of prejudice and racism, then it should be obvious that, if such laws were applied impartially, they would criminalize a vast range of public discourse, which, however despicable one may find it, should certainly be permitted in a free society, and indeed is, with no question being raised.

Accordingly, I would like to register my support for the petition protesting the application of this law in this (or any) case.
September, 5th 2010.”

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Debating the Holocaust: A New Look at Both Sides

Debating the Holocaust: A New Look at Both Sides
Author: Thomas Dalton, Theses & Dissertations Press, 280 pages, 2009.
Reviewed by Martin Gunnels
Source: Inconvenient History

As we all know, Holocaust books tend to be pretty boring. Graphs, charts, numbers, rambling footnotes. When thrown together, page after page, the literature can be exhausting. Whereas most histories are driven by their narratives, by their tales of life, Holocaust scholarship follows a different path. Because reputable Holocaust histories can’t really frame a coherent narrative out of such a mysterious and strangely undocumented event, Holocaust historiography constitutes a unique genre within contemporary history. Of course, Holocaust fans can also get their kicks by reading tales like The Diary of Anne Frank or Elie Wiesel‘s latest blockbuster. But as we all know, these texts aren’t exactly “history”: they tell us very little about what really happened to the Jews in the Reich.

Because orthodox Holocaustiography masquerades as both history and hard science, it has to take itself very seriously. Believing its own myths about unique evil and unprecedented criminality, Holocaust historiography operates in an un-ironic, funereal atmosphere where alternative possibilities simply don’t exist. Yet Holocaust revisionism, on the other hand, does something completely different. It is disputatious, dialogical, and aggressive. Without the traditional Holocaust narrative, it couldn’t exist. Dissent is revisionism’s raison d’etre. It is an exercise in intellectual commensalism; it latches onto the gills of mainstream Holocaust scholarship, where it passes basically unnoticed as its gnarly host devours everything in sight.

The key word here, of course, is unnoticed. If the Holocausters paid attention to their little revisionist fellow traveler, the Holocaust, like all other historical events, would then be open to legitimate historical debate. And that’s the last thing establishment Holocaust historians want. So we’re not fooled when Thomas Dalton swears that he is not a revisionist, that he’s merely a neutral observer trying to objectively present a scholarly debate. As far as the true blue Holocausters are concerned, there is no debate. By simply positing that a dialog exists—and by refusing to subtitle his book with some overblown, sensational reference to “assassinated” or “assaulted” memory—Dalton is throwing in his lot with “the dark side.” He is, alas, one of us.

Nonetheless, Debating the Holocaust: A New Look at Both Sides is a new kind of revisionism. Because he is careful to appear nonpartisan, Dalton doesn’t make any new discoveries or devise any new theories. What he does, however, is synthesize a wide range of mainstream and revisionist scholarship in an attempt to patch together the most important challenges that revisionism has posed to conventional Holocaust opinion. But because his work is a synthesis, he has to do more than recite the strongest work of Graf, Mattogno, Rudolf, and Faurisson (his favorite revisionists); he must also present the cases of Pressac, van Pelt, and Hilberg (his favorite Holocausters). Fortunately, Dalton knows both sides well, and so his text is especially valuable to non-experts who are interested in a straightforward presentation of how mainstream Holocaustiography measures up to its revisionist response.

Dalton begins by reminding us why the Holocaust is so important to re-vise [that is, to take a second look at]. “Why not let the Jews have their ol’ Holocaust?,” he poses to himself rhetorically. After giving the obligatory reply that we have to dedicate ourselves to historical truth, he quickly proceeds to the good stuff. He describes why we can’t just move on and forget about the Holocaust debate:

“We are not allowed to forget about it, even if we wanted to. Coverage of the Holocaust is standard fare in every school curriculum. Children the world over read The Diary of Anne Frank, Number the Stars, Waiting for Anya, Butterfly. Students learn about the gas chambers and the six million, about the Nazi atrocities. We watch Holocaust miniseries on television, Schindler’s List, and Night and Fog. We celebrate ‘Holocaust Education Week,’ and we acknowledge January 27 each year as the ‘International Day of Commemoration’ of Holocaust victims, as declared by the UN in 2005. School children collect six million pencils, or six million paperclips. We visit Holocaust museums. We take college courses (for full credit) from endowed chairs in Holocaust studies. This is not by accident. It is a deliberate plan, to make sure we ‘never forget.’ And if we can never forget, then we should at least get the story straight.“

Dalton gets it. Instead of repeating the orthodox garbage about “never forget” and “never again,” he reminds us that, if we’re going to canonize a historical event in state and popular culture, and if we’re going to let this historical event dominate our foreign policy rhetoric and guide the actions of our empire, we better keep an open mind about what really happened. By reminding us of the ubiquity of the Holocaust in our lives—and in the lives of the other 6 billion people residing under the jurisdiction of the United Nations—Dalton points out that, despite his earlier claims about needing to set the record straight for mere historical truth, the Holocaust really needs to be revised because of the tyranny it imposes upon the world’s publics. Because of the Holocaust campaign, the old protest refrain we hear so often is as true for us as it is for anyone: “We are all Palestinians now.” We have all been thoroughly colonized by the Holocaust, and to decolonize, we must first revise. As Dalton himself points out, by indicting one of the central myths of the postwar liberal order, “Revisionists challenge not only orthodoxy; they challenge the power of the State.”

After describing what’s at stake in the debate, Dalton moves onto the basic complaints of the revisionists: the unreliability of the eye-witnesses, the dubiousness of the six million figure, the strange dematerialization of most of the death camps (along with their millions of victims), the impracticality of the murder weapons, the wartime photos’ failure to corroborate the mainstream narrative, the lack of any explicit order from Hitler or the Nazi bureaucracy, and the preponderance of “survivors” who somehow managed to live through the omnipotent, satanic Nazi death machine. After reciting a thorough list of standard revisionist “concessions”—among them the regrettable and atrocious persecution of Europe’s Jews, at least hundreds of thousands of whom died—Dalton debunks several “myths” about revisionism. He trashes the clichés that circulate about revisionists: that they are all neo-Nazis, for example, or that they all believe that the Holocaust was some sort of “hoax,” the unfortunate vocabulary of which evokes images of tinfoil hats and Luftwaffe exoduses to the moon.

Dalton breaks down the six “death” camps, one-by-one, presenting the traditionalist narrative before detailing revisionists’ critiques. What we get are not dry, feeble regurgitations of revisionist research; instead we find well-analyzed summaries of the work conducted by contemporary revisionism’s strongest researchers. Further, Dalton’s information is up-to-date, as he relies much more upon Rudolf, Mattogno, and Graf than he does the groundbreaking work of Arthur Butz. The work’s strongest feature, indeed, is its scope: never before has an author written such an accessible yet comprehensive and critical synthesis of revisionist as well as traditionalist sources.

That’s not to say that the book doesn’t make some pretty weird choices. The cover, to my utter confusion, is adorned with a giant Star of David and an even more giant Swastika, as if those are the two “sides” of the Holocaust debate. Since Dalton spends so much time emphasizing that revisionists are not just Nazis, and that traditionalists aren’t just Zionist Jews, this is a most bizarre, dissonant flaw; and because these images are emblazoned on the book’s front cover, they’re difficult to sweep under the rug. But despite this minor yet conspicuous mistake, I think Debating the Holocaust is an important contribution to the current state of revisionist scholarship, and I can only hope that, in future editions (this successful book is already in its third printing), the book’s menacing, misleading cover will be replaced by something more befitting its reasonable and inoffensive content.

In closing, I want to address why this book is so important and timely. To put it bluntly, we needed a valuable addition to the revisionist literature. With Germar Rudolf out of commission, book-length revisionism has lost its most energetic contributor. It is heartening to see Theses and Dissertations Press alive and well, and we should commend them for continuing to bring us the kind of vital scholarship that keeps historical revisionism dynamic and alive. Along with the recent appearance of Inconvenient History, I’m hopeful that Dalton’s new volume signals a reawakening of serious revisionist work. After all, the book is a very potent effort at setting the record straight about revisionist claims, and it’s done in such a reasonable, straightforward way that you could give the book to your mom without apology. It is the kind of book that resists drowning its reader in statistics, opting instead for a concise, memorable, camp-by-camp analysis of what Dalton calls “the great debate.” In Debating the Holocaust, the revisionist community now has the closest thing yet to an encyclopedic handbook of revisionist arguments. This is the work’s most remarkable achievement, and I hope it will only mark the very beginning of Thomas Dalton’s promising new career in the fight for historical truth.

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Trees

Trees
By Hermann Hesse
Source: Order of ATWA

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves.

Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”

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Portland’s Self-Appointed P.C. Polizei

Anti-Fascist Front: A Portland anti-racist group has had a busy—and controversial—summer
BY JAMES PITKIN
Source: Willamette Week

TARGETED: Tim Titrud poses in front of his camper, which reads “911 was an inside job.” On the right are materials he received by mail Sept. 15. PHOTO: Darryl James

On the afternoon of Sept. 15, Tim Titrud arrived home in Clackamas County after finishing his workday as a self-employed landscaper and checked his mailbox.

Along with the usual assortment of bills and junk mail was a pink envelope postmarked from Portland with no return address. Titrud opened it and found a greeting card covered with pink flowers. The card read, “Thinking of You.”

Also included was a color photo of Hitler, with runic symbols scrawled across his face and around his head. On the back of the photo were Germanic runes that spelled out the words “Destroy Yourself.” [Veiztu hvé rísta skal? Veiztu hvé ráða skal? Apparently not!]

Titrud, who is 50 years old and lives with his wife, was not surprised, nor did he call police. The letter included a calling card for Rose City Antifa, a Portland anti-racist group that recently tried to shut down an event Titrud helped organize featuring a speaker who’s been accused of anti-Semitism.

“They don’t really scare me,” Titrud says of the group. “These guys are idiots. It’s just kind of weird. Kind of creepy-weird.”

Little is known publicly about Rose City Antifa—a group that anonymously posts articles about its activities on the Portland Indymedia website [is it really independent?]. Its members, who wear bandannas over their faces when they protest in public, declined repeated requests from WW over the past five weeks to be interviewed for this story.

Despite its secrecy [the PUSSY on their calling card says it all], Rose City Antifa has had an active summer of publicly exposing Titrud and others who members accuse of spreading racist ideas in Portland—including a call for longtime Portland activist Tim Calvert to be fired from his job on the board of CityBikes Workers’ Cooperative. They accuse Calvert of harboring anti-Semitic beliefs.

“We believe that those pushing organized Jew-hatred and pogrom politics should be collectively resisted,” they write on Indymedia. “No compromises and no half-measures!”

The resulting controversy has not only driven a wedge into Portland’s close-knit protest community. It also raises serious questions about the outer limits of free expression and civil protest in a city that puts great value in both.

Some have praised Rose City Antifa for rooting out alleged [key word there] racists in our midst. Others criticize the group’s zero-tolerance approach as nothing more than ideological bullying.

“They’re worse than the early colonists with the heretics, where you were removed out into the wilderness to die,” says Grace Grant, a member of the left-wing Laughing Horse Book Collective in Northeast Portland. “I don’t want to be part of that kind of community. It’s pretty heartless. I don’t know who’s setting these standards and norms.”

Anti-fascism first arose in Europe in the 1920s to oppose violent far-right groups, and has since spread to the Americas and Australia. Rose City Antifa is part of the Anti-Racist Action Network, which boasts 20 chapters in cities across the U.S. and Canada.

Rose City Antifa was founded in 2007, when anti-racists organized to shut down a meeting of the neo-Nazi Hammerskin Nation set for the Sherwood Elks Lodge (see “Skin Cancer,” WW, Oct. 3, 2007). The group posts cards and fliers at the Red & Black Cafe, the Black Rose Collective Bookstore and other places where anarchists and the far-left gather, but its total membership is unknown.

On Saturday, Sept. 19, the group set up a recruitment table at a punk concert in North Portland benefiting the volunteer group Portland Books to Prisoners. Stanislav Vysotsky, a Willamette University sociology professor who studies anti-racist groups, was at the table laying out anti-fascist literature next to a sign that said “Rose City Antifa.”

Vysotsky denied he’s a member of the group. But he defended its tactics in an interview with WW.

Vysotsky says publicly outing one’s enemies—including publishing their home addresses and pressuring their employers to fire them—is a widely accepted practice by progressive social movements. (It’s also used by right-wing [Christian fundamentalists], which publishes addresses of abortion doctors on far-right websites.) [Isn’t this what the Leftists commonly bewail as McCarthy-era “blacklisting”? Are they over that grievance, or what?]

“The strategy is to shut them down.” Vysotsky says. “Someone can’t be active if they are out looking for a job, and homes are their base of operation. If you put yourself in the shoes of a movement member, there is very much a logic to this.”

Not everyone agrees. Chip Berlet, a nationally renowned journalist and activist who’s devoted his career since 1967 to fighting hate groups, says wearing masks and relying on intimidation is counterproductive to the cause.

“What you learn early on is that these kinds of stunts are completely ineffective for social change work. It does really nothing to help the people who are being oppressed,” Berlet says. “This is immature, inexperienced organizing from people who haven’t figured out that macho is passe.”

Polite Portland may seem the last city in the U.S. in need of anti-fascist squads. But the city has gained a measure of infamy in anti-racist circles as the birthplace of Volksfront, a racist skinhead group founded in 1994 that is still active locally and now boasts chapters in seven countries. [Understand this, however: you needn’t be a skinhead, a violent bigoted thug, or a racial supremacist belonging to any organization whatsoever to find yourself on the receiving end of Antifa’s frankly fascistic tactics of suppression. It is enough of an “offense,” in their eyes, to be unashamedly White and to hold any perspectives which conflict with theirs.]

The Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center and other organizations that track hate groups have reported a steep rise in extremist activity since Barack Obama was elected the nation’s first black president. [The real truth is, “extremists” (if that’s what you want to call them) disapproved of Obama on the basis of policy, not on the basis of his heritage.] The killing of a security guard at the National Holocaust Memorial in June, reports of right-wing extremists recruiting at conservative tea parties, and a rise in militia activity have all stoked worries that the extreme right is gaining a new foothold.

“We see a mainstreaming of white nationalism that we haven’t seen previously,” [right — not for a few decades, anyhow] says Eric Ward, national field director for the Center for New Community, an anti-racism nonprofit in Chicago. He supports Rose City Antifa’s efforts, saying white nationalists may now be infiltrating[?!] the environmental movement and other progressive causes—in part because lefties haven’t taken the threat seriously enough.

Against that backdrop came Rose City Antifa’s busy summer, starting with the episode that led to Titrud finding a snapshot of Hitler in his mailbox.

Titrud and Calvert belong to the Portland 9/11 Truth Alliance, a group that challenges the accepted explanation for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Some alternative theories assign Mossad a secret role in the attacks. Titrud recently removed signs on his camper, which used to read “End Wars for Oil or Israel” and “Israel, Stop Killing Peace.”

In June, his group organized a talk in Portland by Valdas Anelauskas, a scholar born in the former Soviet Union. Some of Anelauskas’ work has been labeled anti-Semitic, and he’s closely associated with the Pacifica Forum, a discussion group in Eugene that’s been accused of hosting other anti-Semitic speakers.

According to its account on Indymedia, Rose City Antifa learned Anelauskas was set to speak June 10 at Laughing Horse Books and pressured the collective to cancel the event. The fallout led Calvert and two others to leave the collective, and the 9/11 Truthers no longer meet at the bookstore—they’re meeting instead in Milwaukie.

Anelauskas’ talk was moved to the Old Wives’ Tales restaurant on East Burnside Street. About 12 people showed up to hear his talk on the Frankfurt School, a group of 20th-century Marxist scholars Anelauskas accuses of sabotaging Western culture. In a video of the lecture available online, Anelauskas makes no overtly anti-Semitic remarks.

Nonetheless, Rose City Antifa posted a statement June 25 on Indymedia identifying Titrud and Calvert as organizers of what the group identified as an “anti-Semitic” event. [After all, where would they be without this accusation?] They called on CityBikes to fire Calvert, saying his “conspiracy theories about Jewish power and his denial of the Nazi genocide against the Jewish people have been an open secret in Portland for years.”

Calvert refuses even to defend himself against that charge, saying he’s being accused of a thought crime.

“Free speech means hearing people you don’t agree with,” he says. “This totally hearkens back to the days of heresy and the Inquisition, the idea that people are somehow infected and need to be purged. It’s Stalinist. It’s Catholic Church. It’s intellectually embarrassing.”

Some commenters on the Indymedia site were supportive of Rose City Antifa. [Then again, Indymedia happen to reserve the right, in their own words, “to hide posts” which do not meet with their moderators’ approval. Is it a huge stretch of the imagination to suggest that the thoughtful counterpoint of any alleged “anti-Semite” might, then, automatically be “hidden” — i.e. censored — thus preventing any accurate assessment of what kind of support or opposition Rose City Antifa might really have?]

“You can bash a fellow’s politics all day long but trying to run him out of a living is going too far,” one commenter wrote. “Or was it OK to do to queers back in the day?”

Few Portlanders can boast Calvert’s lefty credentials. Besides demonstrating against every U.S. invasion from Grenada to Iraq, he volunteered for the sister-city organization linking Portland to the Nicaraguan town of Corinto, helped start Laughing Horse Books in 1985, and built up the Red Rose School for activists in the late 1980s. He made CityBikes a workers’ co-op in 1990 after being hired there in 1989.

Calvert says it’s the first time he’s been attacked in more than 25 years as an activist. He’s kept his $13.50-an-hour job at CityBikes, despite graffiti calling him a Nazi [not that his detractors ever knew what the word meant] that’s sprung up on the co-op’s Southwest Ankeny Street shop. Staff has cleaned up the graffiti without calling police.

CityBikes’ board posted a letter on Indymedia supporting Calvert, then retracted it 12 days later, saying not all its members had been consulted.

“They’re scared, and I still feel threatened,” Calvert says.

Meanwhile, Rose City Antifa’s campaign continues.

On July 7, the group put up 200 fliers along Northwest 21st and 23rd avenues with the name, photo and address of Nob Hill resident Julian Lee. The fliers accuse Lee of plastering the neighborhood with racist stickers, call him “Nazi trash,” and urge residents to “make it clear” that his “racist propaganda is unwelcome” (see WW, July 15, 2009).

The decision to out Lee makes even the head of one of Oregon’s largest Jewish congregations uncomfortable.

“I would caution people to be exceedingly careful about identifying people and where they live for fear of crazies out there who will take the law into their own hands and do something violent [in retaliation],” says Rabbi Daniel Isaak, who leads more than 1,000 member households at Congregation Neveh Shalom in Southwest Portland. “On some level, they [meaning Antifa] have responsibility for any serious harm that would come as a result.”

The tactic can also prove clumsy. In May, Rose City Antifa published the addresses of two Volksfront members living in Southeast Portland, including a telephone number for the skinheads’ landlord. Trouble was, the landlord had died more than two months before of diabetes and heart disease. Callers, instead, reached his grieving widow.

“I wish they wouldn’t have done that,” she told WW, declining to give her name. “I’m a Christian, and I don’t support anything like [Nazism].”

Rose City Antifa’s biggest summer coup came July 19, when the group learned the time and location of a Portland talk by David Irving, the notorious British historian who once spent 10 months in an Austrian prison for [allegedly] denying the Holocaust. [In truth, he questions many of the central details — including, though not limited to, the numbers.]

About 50 people showed up to protest Irving’s talk at the Embassy Suites Airport Hotel. They failed to shut down Irving’s event, but Rose City Antifa members congratulated themselves on Indymedia anyway, saying they were “successful in sending a clear message that fascist organizing is not welcome in our community.” [They cannot discern the valid distinction between a Fascist and a National Socialist, for they have a weak understanding of both. They cannot discern the valid distinction between an anti-Semite and an anti-Zionist, for they have an especially weak understanding of the latter. They cannot discern the distinction between a Holocaust revisionist and someone who wants to shove people into ovens, because they appear to understand (or even care to understand) very little, altogether.]

See a video of Rose City Antifa protesting Irving’s appearance July 19 below:

Find this story at http://www.wweek.com/editorial/3546/13087 [Text in brackets, my own. -W.]

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The Truth about the Jewish Role in the Slavetrade

Part I: What Jewish Historians Say

Part II: The [Occupied] Media Cover-Up

Explore further: HERE.

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Evolutionary Strategy and the Question of Survival

Explore further:
The Occidental Observer
Professor Kevin MacDonald

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