No. 107, 1 June 2011 /28 Iyar 5771
Manfred Gerstenfeld
- In recent decades, the Holocaust has become the major contemporary symbol of absolute evil. As such, it has acquired a central place in the collective memory of Western societies. This development has been accompanied by an ongoing intentional distortion of its meaning.
- At the origins of this abuse are a multitude of motivations, such as anti-Semitism, including anti-Israelism; politics; desire for absolution of guilt; peer pressure; wanting to draw attention or provoke, and so on.
- Distortions can be categorized according to eight themes, namely: Holocaust justification and promotion, Holocaust denial, Holocaust deflection and whitewashing, Holocaust de-Judaization, Holocaust equivalence, Holocaust inversion, Holocaust trivialization, and obliterating Holocaust memory. In several cases these categories overlap.
- Education plays a central role in maintaining Holocaust memory. So do museums to a lesser extent. Other important issues in upholding Holocaust memory are monuments and memorials, ceremonies and remembrance days, art and literature, commemorative projects, and correctly mentioning the Holocaust in public discourse.
The issue concerning guilt requires further explanation. American political scientist Andrei S. Markovits noted:
The constant analogizing of Israelis with Nazis comes from the European gut. This, of course, is a double effrontery. By doing this, Europeans absolve themselves of their own history. At the same time they succeed in accusing their former victims of behaving like their worst perpetrators. This discourse is not new. It was already widespread during and after the 1982 Lebanese War when - for instance - a German newspaper featured side-by-side on its front page the infamous photograph in the Warsaw ghetto of a Nazi soldier marching behind a little Jewish boy who was holding up his hands, and a parallel photo of an IDF soldier marching behind Arab youngsters in Beirut.[2]This author's book, The Abuse of Holocaust Memory: Distortions and Responses,[3] presents many illustrations of such abuse of the Shoah. The latest examples given are from August 2009. The flow of Holocaust distortions has continued unabated since, and the examples given below are mainly recent ones. This article thus extends the data in the book.
Distortions can be categorized according to eight themes, namely: Holocaust justification and promotion, Holocaust denial, Holocaust deflection and whitewashing, Holocaust de-Judaization, Holocaust equivalence, Holocaust inversion, Holocaust trivialization, and obliterating Holocaust memory. [4] In several cases these categories overlap.
Some issues return frequently; one is the attitude of Pope Pius XII toward the Jews in World War II, as well as whitewashing of his behavior. Other examples of such exoneration will be discussed further on.
Another subject that attracts recurrent attention in many different ways concerns the memory of Anne Frank. In August 2010, an event of seemingly worldwide interest occurred in Amsterdam: the chestnut tree Anne Frank had seen from her hiding place was felled during a storm.[5] Hundreds of media from all over the world showed photos of the fallen tree or reported on it. Saplings were taken to be planted in the United States, Israel, and other countries so that the tree will live on. It was announced that segments of the fallen tree will be placed in museums in various countries.[6]
In April 2011, a new book revealed that Karl Joseph Silberbauer, the Austrian SS officer who arrested the Frank family, was one of hundreds of Nazis employed by the German postwar intelligence service.[7] A month later, retired New York Giants football player Tiki Barber drew the wrath of the Anti-Defamation League's national director Abe Foxman. The footballer said that when he separated from his wife, he was hiding with his girlfriend in the attic of his Jewish agent. Barber referred to it as "a reverse Anne Frank thing." Foxman called his words a Holocaust trivialization.[8]
Holocaust Justification, Promotion, and Denial Holocaust justification posits that the Jews bore responsibility for their own destruction. Holocaust promotion consists of the continued incitement toward genocide against the Jews or Israel. For instance, in July 2010, on the website of the German concentration camp Buchenwald, neo-Nazi hackers replaced the list of victims with far-right slogans. They posted messages such as "We will return" and "Brown is beautiful." The latter is a reference to the brown uniforms of the Nazi SA storm troopers. The website of another camp, Mittelbau-Dora, was hacked as well.[9]
One also finds that in public abuse the motif of Holocaust promotion recurs. In February 2011, John Galliano, chief designer of the Paris fashion house Christian Dior, was arrested for a short time after he had publicly insulted a couple by saying, "Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be f---ing gassed." He had also exclaimed "I love Hitler."[10] Thereafter he was fired by his employer.
Holocaust denial can be defined as the negation of the main facts of the extermination of the Jews in World War II. New deniers emerge frequently and sometimes in unexpected places. Anders Mathisen of the Norwegian Labor Party, a member of the indigenous parliament of the small Sami ethnicity, wrote on Facebook that the Holocaust is a lie and that he is proud to be an anti-Semite.[11]
Deflection and Whitewashing The essence of Holocaust deflection is the admission that the Shoah happened, while simultaneously denying the responsibility of specific groups or individuals who participated in it. Typical cases have been countries such as Austria and Romania.[12] There has also been much whitewashing concerning institutions and professions in German wartime society. One by now well-known fallacy is the claim that the German army, the Wehrmacht, was not involved in the atrocities of the Shoah.[13]
A number of recent studies and admissions have provided new information about some specific sectors of German bureaucracy and society that had diminished or whitewashed their role under the Nazi regime. In October 2010, Germany's foreign minister Guido Westerwelle presented a study compiled by historians about the Foreign Ministry and the Nazis. He noted that the Foreign Ministry had been heavily involved in the violent policies of the Nazis after Hitler took power. The ministry knew early on about the crimes committed by the German war machine. It was also involved administratively in the destruction of European Jewry.[14] A former German diplomat, Manfred Steink?hler, declared that after the war there was great resistance to confronting history in the ministry and that he had regularly met fellow diplomats who had Nazi pasts.[15]
The next month, Hans-Peter Ullmann, one of the historians investigating the wartime role of the German Finance Ministry, revealed that the ministry had played a more active role in the persecution of the Jews than was generally thought. It let monies plundered from the Jews and others be channeled through it. These represented 30 percent of the funds used for the German army during the war.[16]
In December 2010, Frank Schneider, president of the German Society for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Treatment of Nervous Diseases, admitted that the race and euthanasia policies of the Third Reich had not been forced on German psychiatrists. They had, rather, been among their initiators.[17]
In March 2011, it became known that a new study had found that almost half of the German medical doctors were members of the Nazi Party. Doctors murdered hundreds of thousands, and most doctors remained silent about the crimes.[18]
In the same month, the TV station ARD broadcast a documentary on how the German police had increasingly served the criminal aims of the Nazi government during its rule. Concurrently, an exhibition at the German Historical Museum covered this subject as well. One example of "adaptation" is Walter Zirpins, who in 1932 carried out a professional investigation into the arson of the Reichstag, the German parliament. Later, when Germany was under Nazi rule, Zirpins joined the SS and was the commander of the ghetto police in Lodz for a year. He also performed other functions that required him to commit crimes. Yet, in democratic postwar West Germany, he became head of the criminal police in Hanover.[19]
New information on other countries has come to light as well. In November 2010, it became known that American intelligence officials had created a "safe haven" in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after the war. This was one of the items revealed in a six-hundred-page report that the U.S. Justice Department had kept secret for over four years.[20]
Another regularly recurring theme is that new information is revealed about the wartime past of well-known Germans or their parents. One such case involved the father of Hannelore Kohl, the first wife of former chancellor Helmut Kohl. It has emerged that her father was the personnel director of a military industry and, in that role, was one of the people responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jewish slave workers.[21]
In May 2011,the Swedish German-born Queen Sylvia announced that she had, together with other family members, taken the initiative to have the activities of her father Walter Sommerlath investigated. It was known since 2002 that he was a member of the Nazi Party, even though he had denied this during his lifetime. However, recent information indicates that he had also taken over a German factory belonging to a Jewish owner in 1939 as part of the German government's "Aryanization" program.[22]
Pope Pius XII One personality whose wartime past has been continuously whitewashed by the Catholic Church is Pope Pius XII. This distortion of the past is of a radically different nature than that of the German institutions. While this Pope did save many Jews, the main claims against him concern his silence in the face of the genocide during the Shoah.
In December 2010, The Guardian revealed that the Vatican had wanted to join the International Task Force on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research (ITF). A U.S. diplomatic cable from October 2009, however, stated that the Vatican had backed out of this, perhaps because of its desire to avoid having to declassify records from the war during the pontificate of Pope Pius XII.[23]
During the same month, Pope Benedict XVI issued a decree on Pope Pius XII's "heroic virtues" together with those of Pope John Paul II. This brought the wartime Pope's sainthood a step closer, prompting much criticism from various Jewish organizations. In view of the criticism, Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi issued a statement that the beatification process of Pope Pius addressed his "Christian life" and not the historical impact of his operative decisions. Lombardi was, in effect, splitting the Pope's personality.[24]
In January 2010, Pope Benedict XVI visited the main synagogue in Rome. The president of the Jewish community, Ricardo Pacifici, said during the visit that the silence of Pius XII at a time when hundreds of thousands of Jews were being rounded up across Europe and sent to death camps was still hurtful.[25]
In February, eighteen leading Catholic scholars wrote an unusual letter to the Pope imploring him to hold off with the canonization of Pius XII. The letter warned that if this Pope was made a saint before all archival material was released to the public, it could cause major damage to Catholic-Jewish relations.[26]
In November, Italian Jewish leaders sharply criticized an Italian TV documentary that showed how Pope Pius XII had made a major effort to save the Jews of Rome during the Holocaust. Pacifici called the documentary "unacceptable revisionism." Rome's Chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni called the miniseries "junk."[27]
Europe Obscures Holocaust Criminals The Austrian political scientist Elisabeth Kuebler writes that in the Holocaust remembrance programs of the Council of Europe, "evil ideologies and subsequent crimes are being denounced without clearly pointing to the individuals and societies who are guilty thereof."
As one extreme example she mentions the book Teaching about the Holocaust in the 21st Century. It was written by French educator Michel Lecomte and published under the auspices of the Council of Europe. Kuebler observes that "the discussion of post-Holocaust anti-Semitism in it is restricted to the Polish pogroms of the late 1940s and 1950s."[28]
Shoah De-Judaization Shoah de-Judaization encompasses a wide range of distortions. These include the broadening of the term Holocaust to include people other than Jews who were murdered or died in World War II. Another de-Judaization method is to void, or to a large extent, minimize the Jewish character of the victims. One major example of the de-Judaization of the Shoah is the presentation of the Anne Frank story as that of a universal symbol of victimhood, relegating her Jewishness to the background. This particular de-Judaization process covers a long period.[29]
Chief Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs of the Dutch Provincial Rabbinate said he had never visited the house where Anne Frank was hidden during the war "because this one example is an exception. The Anne Frank House encourages the belief in the fairy tale that the Dutch [hid] all the Jews from the Nazis."[30]
International myths about Dutch wartime behavior continue until today, and are mostly fed by the romanticizing of the Anne Frank story. Sander Pleij, a Dutch journalist, was involved in the late 1990s in investigating the shortcomings of the postwar restitution of looted Jewish possessions. Pleij told this author that he then realized that he did not live "in the country where Anne Frank had been hidden, but in the land where Anne Frank had been betrayed."[31]
Louise Arbour gave a lecture to the Dutch Auschwitz Committee on Holocaust Remembrance Day, 27 January 2010. A Canadian, she had been the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2004 to 2008. In Arbour's speech, entitled "Auschwitz Never Again," she mentioned the words Shoah and Holocaust a number of times yet somehow managed to avoid saying the word Jew. She did not even state that the Shoah was unprecedented. Anyone who knew little about the subject did not learn from her speech that there had been a mass murder of Jews.
Those who invited Arbour could have known that her career as High Commissioner was a very checkered one. An analysis of her tenure by UN Watch concluded that "Arbour held back from criticizing many countries that wield power and influence at the UN." Specific examples were China, Russia, and Egypt. "She failed...to address President Ahmadinejad's anti-Semitic campaign of Holocaust denial and incitement to genocide."[32]
Alvin Rosenfeld considers the de-Judaization of the Holocaust almost inevitable.
A less taxing version of a tragic history begins to emerge - still full of suffering, to be sure, but a suffering relieved of many of its weightiest moral and intellectual demands and, consequently, easier to bear. Made increasingly familiar through repetition, it becomes normalized. And, before long, it turns into something else - a repository of "lessons" about "man's inhumanity to man," a metaphor for victimization in general, a rhetoric for partisan politics, a cinematic backdrop for domestic melodramas.[33]
Holocaust Equivalence Shoah equivalence consists of three subcategories. The first two, prewar and wartime equivalence, are based on the false claim that the German genocidal behavior under the Nazi regime was similar to that of other nations before and during the war. The third, the postwar variant, has several motifs. One is that Communist rule after the war was similar to that of the Nazis. Another is that some events today - often including trivial ones - are equivalent to those caused by Germany under Hitler's rule. A third element of postwar Holocaust equivalence is that certain bodies or individuals behave like Nazis. For instance, during a demonstration in Athens in June 2011 against EU pressures on Greece to reduce expenses, a poster was unfolded saying: Merkel = Nazi.[34]
In September 2010, former Cuban leader Fidel Castro accused France of carrying out a "racial holocaust" against the Roma, of whom one thousand had been expelled from the country in the preceding weeks. The French Foreign Ministry spokesman said that these words showed Castro's ignorance of history and disdain toward its victims.[35] Viviane Reding, the EU's justice commissioner, characterized the French treatment of the Roma as a disgrace that reminded her of World War II roundups of Gypsies and Jews.[36]
Shoah Inversion Shoah inversion is a derivative of Holocaust equivalence. The inverters seek to delegitimize Israel by claiming that it behaves like Nazi Germany. Holocaust denial is commonly considered the most damaging type of Holocaust distortion. Shoah inversion, however, is far more dangerous as it can be used by inciters to justify a possible Second Holocaust.
This possibility of a new Holocaust is discussed frequently. Ahmadinejad's genocidal remarks against Jews have stimulated this debate. Iranian leaders have said many times that Israel has to be removed from the Middle East. Many experts think Iran is not far from the production of its first nuclear bomb.[37]
This fuels public discussion about whether or not Israel will be destroyed. For instance, former Spanish prime minister Jos? Maria Aznar wrote: "If Israel goes down, we all go down."[38] An opinion poll by the Spanish government found that 9 percent of Spaniards thought that Israel ought to disappear (while 77 percent disagreed). Almost 35 percent of the population had anti-Semitic opinions (while 46 percent had favorable opinions of Jews).[39] Earlier studies had already indicated the prevalence of anti-Semitism in Spanish society.[40]
Holocaust inversion has now become a mainstream view in both Western and Eastern Europe. A report by the University of Bielefeld on behalf of the German Friedrich Ebert Foundation details its permeation into a number of European societies. The study found that 63 percent of Poles think Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians. The lowest figures in the study are from the Italians and the Dutch, with 38 percent and close to 39 percent, respectively. In Hungary, Britain, Germany, and Portugal, 40-50 percent of the population consider this to be true.[41]
The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has suggested links between the Holocaust and structural elements of modern society. He notes that the Holocaust was a product of men who were educated in the most refined of the Western cultures. The Shoah was thus a product of Western society and civilization. Since nothing fundamental has changed in Western societies, the study of the Holocaust is of more than academic interest. In Bauman's view, even though another Holocaust may not occur, the infrastructure and mechanisms for a similar event are still in place.[42] One should extend Bauman's analysis and ask in what ways postmodern society contains additional elements that constitute a foundation for such a new Holocaust.
Holocaust Trivialization Another derivative of Holocaust equivalence is the trivialization of the Shoah. This is a category of abuse that does not necessarily result from anti-Semitism. It is often used by politically motivated activists to metaphorically compare phenomena they oppose with the industrial-scale extermination of the Jews. This may include remarks about "the environmental holocaust," "the abortion holocaust," "the animal holocaust," "the tobacco holocaust," "the human rights holocaust," and so on.
A second type of Holocaust trivialization takes place in a commercial framework; there are many examples. In March 2011, Sony Music and the American TV network MTV apologized after the Japanese pop group Kishidan appeared on primetime TV wearing Nazi uniforms. The performers subsequently apologized.[43]
Red Bubble, an Australian-based online vendor, sold t-shirts with texts such as: "Eastside, Westside, Genocide," "Back to the Fuhrer," and "Three Reichs and You're Out." After protests, it took the shirts off its website.[44]
In September 2010, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi told a youth rally a joke: Adolf Hitler was asked by his supporters to take power again after they discovered that he was still alive. Hitler, according to Berlusconi, replied: "I'll come back, but on one condition...next time I'm going to be evil."[45] More than a month later on his birthday, Berlusconi told another joke making fun of a Jew hiding another Jew during the Holocaust. The incident was condemned by both L'Osservatore Romano of the Vatican and Avvenire of the Italian bishops.[46]
Danish film director Lars von Trier jokingly called himself a Nazi at the May 2011 Cannes Festival, and said about Hitler, "I think I understand the man..... He's not what you would call a good guy, but I understand much about him and I sympathize with him a little bit. But come on, I'm not for the Second World War, and I'm not against Jews. I am of course very much for Jews. No, not too much because Israel is a pain in the ass. But still how can I get out of this sentence?"[47] Von Trier apologized later but was still expelled from the festival.
Obliterating Holocaust Memory Collective Holocaust memory is attacked directly and indirectly in many ways. One type of the former is the defacing or destruction of memorials. Another type is disturbances during Holocaust ceremonies or memorial gatherings for the dead. On 4 May 2011, the memorial ceremony in Utrecht on the Dutch National Memorial Day was disrupted by three people in a passing car who shouted anti-Semitic slogans. Similar things have happened in the Netherlands in recent years.
Chief Rabbi Jacobs reported that in 2010, "during a memorial meeting for Holocaust victims, Dutch youngsters shouted 'Heil Hitler' during my speech."[48] This occurred at a remembrance gathering for a child transport from the Dutch camp Vught. From there, in 1943, 1,296 children were deported to the extermination camp Sobibor, where they were subsequently murdered.[49]
There are many other examples of efforts to obliterate the Holocaust. In December 2009, the sign "Arbeit macht Frei" ("Work Sets You Free") from the former Auschwitz death camp was stolen.[50] It was recovered the next month.[51] A Polish court convicted three men for the theft in March 2010.[52] A Swedish neo-Nazi, Anders H?gstr?m, who was suspected of initiating the theft, was extradited to Poland in April to face trial.[53] In December 2010, a Polish court sentenced him to thirty-two months in jail. H?gstr?m admitted in a plea bargain that he was behind the theft.[54]
Another mode of obliterating the Holocaust is allowing the history of locations of important events to fade away. Yet another example of Holocaust obliteration is accusing Jews of Holocaust-memory abuse. This has become increasingly frequent. The best- known proponent is Norman Finkelstein, whose books are sold in large numbers and have been translated into many languages.
In January 2010, shortly before International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek, a former head of the Polish Bishops Conference, gave an interview in which he said this tragedy should not be expropriated for propaganda. He added that "they, the Jews, enjoy good press because they have powerful financial means behind them, enormous power and the unconditional backing of the United States and this favors a certain arrogance that I find unbearable." Pieronek later said that one of his statements in the original interview: "The Holocaust as such is a Jewish invention," had been manipulated by the interviewer.[55]
How to Fight the Distortions
A fundamental open question is, to what extent does the maintenance of Holocaust memory succeed in counteracting the reemerging anti-Semitism?
Or in the words of UK Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks a decade ago:
Let me state the point as simply as I can: anti-Semitism is alive, active and virulent in the year 2002, after more than half a century of Holocaust education, interfaith dialogue, United Nations declarations, dozens of museums and memorials, hundreds of films, thousands of courses, and tens of thousands of books dedicated to exposing its evils; after the Stockholm Conference, after the creation of a National Holocaust Memorial Day, after 2,000 religious leaders came together in the United Nations in August 2000 to commit themselves to fight hatred and engender mutual respect.... What more could have been done? What more could and can we do to fight anti-Semitism?[56]What can one do to fight the massive attacks on Holocaust memory?
The youngest witnesses who retain any memory of the Shoah are currently in their seventies. Their testimonies remain the most powerful tool against forgetfulness and distortion. Video-recorded testimonies are an important yet less effective substitute.
Another important activity that will be ending in the coming years is the trials of war criminals. Even if these are presently few and far between, the public debates that center on them often bring major aspects of the Holocaust accurately into the open.
Nazi death-camp guard John Demjanjuk was taken into custody in Germany in May 2009 after he was deported from the United States.[57] When German doctors decided in July that he was fit to stand trial, this received much international media attention.[58] In November 2009 in Munich, the German trial against Demjanjuk began. It has gone on since with some interruptions due to health problems of the accused.[59] In May 2011, Demjanjuk was condemned to five years in jail - and freed immediately in light of his advanced age.[60] Still, the trial facilitated public debate.
As time passes, the role of the testimonies of survivors will have to be replaced by a combination of many other activities. Further documentation and research of the Holocaust must remain an ongoing priority. Yad Vashem has recently launched a major campaign to collect personal artifacts, photographs, and documents related to the Holocaust. The institute's chairman Avner Shalev said, "A large part of what we do here at Yad Vashem including our educational and research work is based on such documentation. That's why we're encouraging people who may have items related to the Holocaust to bring them in so that they may be viewed for posterity."[61]
Trends in Holocaust Research The Dutch Holocaust scholar, Johannes Houwink ten Cate, has identified a number of current trends in Holocaust research. He mentions, for example, the rise of "Holocaust history as local history." He writes: "Historians are attempting to tell the large story of the Holocaust through the perspective of the history, not of one region but of one single city, or even in one major labor camp." Other trends he observes are the integration of perpetrator and victim histories, the analysis and explanation of perpetrator behavior in ideological terms, and the study of the history of the different types of camps.
Houwink ten Cate has speculated about future developments in Holocaust studies. He predicts that there will be more discussion on the possible outlawing of Holocaust denial in European countries. Another problem, he adds, involves the dangers of unbounded freedom of expression.
Concerning research, Houwink ten Cate says more research should be done on bystanders of the Holocaust and other modern genocides. He warns, however, that research on the passivity of foreign bystanders is useless without underlining the responsibility of the local perpetrators.[62]
Post-Holocaust Studies It would be of great importance to establish a new discipline of post-Holocaust studies. Many books and articles have dealt with issues that occurred after the Holocaust. Yet all of these are based on research that is done more or less in isolation. Many of the relevant subjects concerning the Holocaust in postwar society, however, are not only interrelated but also interwoven.
Such a field of post-Holocaust studies would group subjects such as repatriation and migration of survivors, their reception in postwar societies, the reestablishment of Jewish communities, restitution issues, official attitudes toward Holocaust perpetrators, Holocaust memorials, memories vs. myths, post-Holocaust education, postwar art related to the Holocaust such as literature, theater, music, movies, and so on, psychological issues concerning survivors as well as the second generation, the role of Holocaust survivors in the societies they live in, legal developments stemming from the Holocaust, Holocaust research and documentation, abuse of the Holocaust, and so on.[63]
How to Maintain Memory How to maintain the memory of the Holocaust has been discussed in great detail in this author's earlier-mentioned book.[64] Holocaust education plays a central role here. One among several positive developments was that in April 2011, Israel and UNESCO signed an agreement to promote Holocaust education and fight its denial.[65] In 2010, Prospects, UNESCO's quarterly journal of comparative education, devoted two issues to international perspectives on policies and practices of Holocaust education.[66]
Another important role in maintaining Holocaust memory is played by museums. In March 2010, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum welcomed its thirty-millionth visitor. Of these eight million were schoolchildren, and eighty-eight visitors were heads of state. The museum opened in April 1993.[67] In 2009, the former death camp Auschwitz had a record 1.3 million visitors. Among their nationalities were fifty-eight thousand Germans, which put them in fifth place after Poland, Britain, Italy, and Israel.[68]
In June 2010, the mayor of Rome Gianni Alemanno announced the creation of the first Italian Shoah Museum. It will open in 2013 and be located in Villa Torlonia in Rome.[69] In October 2010, the first stone was laid for a new Holocaust-museum building in the Belgian town of Mechelen.[70] The museum is an expansion of the Jewish Museum for Deportation and Resistance, which has existed since 1995. At the end of May 2011, however, the museum at the Sobibor death camp in eastern Poland was closed due to a lack of funding.[71] A few days later the Polish government announced that it would reopen the museum, and that from January 2012 it would become a branch of the museum at Majdanek, another camp.[72]
As stated before, absolute freedom of speech has led to major abuse and distortion of the Holocaust. Legal measures to limit this abuse can play an important role in diminishing its harmful effects.
In February 2010, the Hungarian parliament approved a law making Holocaust denial punishable by up to three years' imprisonment. The law was aimed at the right-wing Jobbik Party; the Hungarian Guard, a radical nationalist movement; and other right-wing extremists.[73] Jobbik gained almost 17 percent of the votes and forty-seven seats in parliament to become Hungary's third largest party in April 2010.[74]
Other important issues in maintaining Holocaust memory are monuments and memorials, ceremonies and remembrance days, art and literature, commemorative projects, correctly mentioning the Holocaust in public discourse, and so on. In May 2010, Athens became the last European capital to establish a monument to honor its nation's Holocaust victims. The remnants of the Jewish community had campaigned many years for this. Sixty-five thousand Greek Jews were murdered in Auschwitz from 1941 to 1944.[75]
A crucial element in maintaining the memory of the Shoah will be to increase the effectiveness of Holocaust education, museums, and visits to concentration and extermination camps. It should be noted here that interviewing staff members at such camps will offer many insights into the current attitudes of local populations toward the Shoah, attitudes with which these people are confronted. Achieving greater effectiveness will again require major research. This is yet one more reason why the establishment of a specific field of post-Holocaust studies is so crucial. Within this framework the overall issue of how to properly memorialize the Holocaust could also be investigated.
The Holocaust indeed is over, but the threats to the Jewish people and to Israel in contemporary society have mutated into many new forms. Better understanding of what occurred both during the Holocaust and in the post-Holocaust period is imperative in fighting the more recent manifestations of large-scale global hatred.
* * *
Notes
[1] Manfred Gerstenfeld, The Abuse of Holocaust Memory: Distortions and Responses (Jerusalem:
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2009), 30-31. The second edition
of this book can be viewed for free online at:
www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/showpage.asp?DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=84&FID=843&PID=0.
[2] Manfred Gerstenfeld, interview with Andrei S. Markovits, "European Anti-Americanism and Anti-Semitism: Similarities and Differences," Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism, 16, 1 January 2004.
[3] Gerstenfeld, Abuse of Holocaust Memory.
[4] Ibid., 23-28.
[5] "Anne Frankboom omgewaaid in Amsterdam," Trouw, 23 August 2010. [Dutch]
[6] "Resten Anne Frankboom naar museum," Telegraaf, 8 September 2010. [Dutch]
[7] Tony Patterson, "The Nazi who arrested Anne Frank 'became a spy for West Germany,'" The Independent, 11 April 2011.
[8] "ADL slams retired footballer Tiki Barber for Anne Frank joke," JTA, 27 May 2011.
[9] "Hackers hit Buchenwald website," JTA, 29 July 2010.
[10] Theunis Bates, "Fashion Designer Galliano Rants: 'I Love Hitler,'" AOL News, 28 February 2011.
[11] "Norwegian lawmaker under fire for denying the Holocaust," Haaretz, 24 March 2011.
[12] Laurence Weinbaum, "The Banality of History and Memory: Romanian Society and the Holocaust," Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism, 45, 1 June 2006.
[13] "Es ist nie zu Ende," Die Zeit, 21 January 2004. [German]
[14] Guido Westerwelle, "Man konnte Mord als Dienstgesch?ft abrechnen," FAZ, 29 October 2010. [German]
[15] "Ausw?rtiges Amt wollte nichts von NS-Vergangenheit wissen," Die Welt, 28 October 2010. [German]
[16] "German Treasury aided Nazis more than we thought," Jerusalem Post, 9 November 2010.
[17] Joachim M?ller-Jung, "Wir haben geschwiegen!," FAZ, 3 December 2010. [German]
[18] Basil Wegener, "Fast jeder zweite Arzt war Mitglied der NSDAP," Die Welt, 24 March 2011. [German]
[19] Sven Felix Kellerhof, "Als der 'Freund und Helfer,' zum M?rder wurde," Die Welt, 23 March 2011. [German]
[20] Eric Lichtblau, "Nazis Were Given 'Safe Haven' in U.S., Report Says," New York Times, 13 November 2010.
[21] Torsten Krauel, "Verst?rende Details aus dem Leben Hannelore Kohls," Die Welt, 11 June 2011. [German]
[22] "Swedish queen probes her father's Nazi past," The Local, 16 May 2011.
[23] "WikiLeaks: Vatican backed out of Holocaust Task Force," Jerusalem Post, 22 December 2010.
[24] Rachel Donadio, "Vatican Defends Status of WWII Pope," New York Times, 24 December 2009.
[25] Nick Squires, "Jewish leaders confront Pope over Vatican's Holocaust 'silence,'" The Telegraph, 17 January 2010.
[26] Philip Pullella, "Catholic scholars urge pope to slow Pius sainthood," Reuters, 17 February 2010.
[27] "Miniseries glorifying wartime Pope Pius decried," JTA, 3 November 2010.
[28] Elisabeth Kuebler, "Holocaust Remembrance in the Council of Europe: Deplorable Victims and Evil Ideologies without Perpetrators," Jewish Political Studies Review 22:3-4 (Fall 2010): 45-58.
[29] David Barnouw, Anne Frank: voor beginners en gevorderden (The Hague: Sdu, 1998). [Dutch]
[30] "Jacobs: Geef tolerantie plek in onderwijs," Reformatorisch Dagblad, 6 July 2010. [Dutch].
[31] Manfred Gerstenfeld, Judging the Netherlands: The Renewed Holocaust Restitution Process, 1997-2000 (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2011), 134.
[32] "The Right to Name and Shame: An Analysis of the Tenure of Former UN High Commissioner Louise Arbour with Recommendations for New High Commissioner Navanethem Pillay," UN Watch, 4 August 2008.
[33] Alvin H. Rosenfeld, The End of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 11.
[34] Boris K?lnoky, "Die Griechen haben einen S?ndenbock - Deutschland," Die Welt, 20 June 2011
[35] "France condemns Castro Roma 'holocaust' remark," BBC News, 11 September 2010.
[36] Bruno Waterfield and Henry Samuel, "Europe compares France Roma expulsion to Nazi deportations," The Telegraph, 15 September 2010.
[37] Mark Mazzetti and David E. Sanger, "U.S. Assures Israel That Iran Threat Is Not Imminent," New York Times, 19 August 2010.
[38] "Former Spanish PM: If Israel goes down, we all go down," Haaretz, 18 June 2010.
[39] Barak Ravid, "Poll: One in three Spaniards is anti-Semitic," Haaretz, 12 September 2010.
[40] "Polluting the Public Square: Anti-Semitic Discourse In Spain," Anti-Defamation League, 21 September 2009; "Unfavorable Views of Jews and Muslims on the Increase in Europe," Pew Research Center, Spring 2008.
[41] library.fes.de/pdf-files/do/07908-20110311.pdf.
[42] Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 84ff.
[43] Justin McCurry, "Japanese pop group Kishidan's 'Nazi' outfits force Sony to apologise," The Guardian, 2 March 2011.
[44] JTA, "'Hipster Hitler' T-Shirt line goes offline in Australia," Jerusalem Post, 6 June 2011.
[45] Tom Kington, "Berlusconi jokes about Hitler at youth rally," The Guardian, 13 September 2010.
[46] Saviona Mane, "Berlusconi's Jewish joke draws rebuke from Vatican," Haaretz, 4 October 2010.
[47] Mike Collett-White and Nick Vinocur, "Cannes expels 'shocked' Von Trier for Hitler remarks," Reuters, 19 May 2011.
[48] "Jacobs: Geef tolerantie plek in onderwijs," Reformatorisch Dagblad, 6 July 2010. [Dutch]
[49] "Kindertransport-herdenking pijnlijk verstoord," Hakehillot Nieuws, 9 June 2010. [Dutch]
[50] "Auschwitz death camp sign stolen," BBC News, 18 December 2010.
[51] "Auschwitz entrance sign returned," BBC News, 21 January 2010.
[52] "Three jailed for Auschwitz theft," BBC News, 18 March 2010.
[53] "Auschwitz suspect sent to Poland," BBC News, 9 April 2010.
[54] "Swede jailed for Auschwitz sign theft," The Local, 30 December 2010.
[55] "Polish bishop accuses Jews of using Holocaust propaganda," Haaretz, 25 January 2010.
[56] Jonathan Sacks, "The New Anti-Semitism," Haaretz, 10 September 2002.
[57] Karin Matussek, "Demjanjuk 'Fit Enough' to Stay in Jail, Official Says," Bloomberg, 13 May 2009.
[58] Nicholas Kulish, "Germany: Demjanjuk Cleared for Trial," New York Times, 4 July 2009.
[59] Johannes Houwink ten Cate, "The Demjanjuk Trial: An Interim Assessment," Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism, 99, 1 July 2010.
[60] "Demjanjuk wird trotz Verurteilung aus Haft entlassen," Die Welt, 12 May 2011. [German]
[61] Gil Shefler, "Yad Vashem wants to collect privately held Holocaust papers," Jerusalem Post, 8 April 2011.
[62] Johannes Houwink ten Cate, "The Future of Holocaust Studies," Jewish Political Studies Review 22:2 (Spring 2010): 33-41
[63] The notion of post-Holocaust studies has been defined in Manfred Gerstenfeld, Europe's Crumbling Myths: The Post-Holocaust Origins of Today's Anti-Semitism (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Yad Vashem and World Jewish Congress, 2003).
[64] Gerstenfeld, Abuse of Holocaust Memory, ch. 11.
[65] "Israel, UNESCO to jointly promote Holocaust education," JTA, 8 March 2011.
[66] www.ibe.unesco.org/en/services/online-materials/publications/prospects.html.
[67] "30 millionth visitor to U.S. Holocaust Museum," JTA, 11 March 2010.
[68] "Former death camp Auschwitz saw record 1.3 million visitors in 2009," Haaretz, 3 January 2010.
[69] "Museo della Shoah, ecco il progetto Alemanno: 'Pronto entro il 2013,'" la Repubblica, 30 June 2010. [Italian]
[70] "Vandaag eerste steenlegging nieuw Holocaustmuseum," Joods Actueel, 22 October 2010. [Dutch]
[71] Jennifer Lipman, "Death camp museum closed over money worries," Jewish Chronicle, 2 June 2011.
[72] Gil Shefler and Reuters, "Poland says it will reopen Nazi death-camp museum," Jerusalem Post, 5 June 2011.
[73] "Hungary criminalises holocaust denial," The Independent, 23 February 2010.
[74] Bruno Waterfield, "Hungary elections: first step to power for far-Right since Nazi era," The Telegraph, 11 April 2010.
[75] Helena Smith, "Athens unveils its first Holocaust memorial," The Guardian, 9 May 2010.
* * *
Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld is chairman of the Board of Fellows of the
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He has authored fifteen books and
edited five. Among his most recent books are American Jewry's Comfort Level: Present and Future, with Steven Bayme, 2010, The Decay: Jews in a Rudderless Netherlands (Dutch), 2010, Judging The Netherlands: The Renewed Holocaust Restitution Process, 1997-2000, 2011.
Other related articles:
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1. Netanyahu: Arab Democracy Would Solve the Problem of Peace
by Elad Benari
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is continuing to answer questions from the public on his YouTube channel, and this time he is addressing the current situation in the Middle East and how it affects Israel.
Email readers: click HERE and scroll down to view video.
“Your nation is completely surrounded with instability,” said the inquirer. “There’s instability in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Iraq, Iran, and many other places in the Middle East. What steps do you intend to take to keep the nation of Israel safe in the midst of all of this instability?”
In his reply, Netanyahu emphasized that Israel is indeed surrounded – by countries that have not undergone reform.
“Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East and in North Africa,” he said. “The first thing I can do as the leader of my country is to join the hundreds of millions of others, in the Arab world and beyond, who are hoping that Israel will no longer be the only democracy in the Middle East.”
Netanyahu added that “if the Arab Spring materializes into real democracies, the problem of peace will be resolved. If the Arab world really becomes a collection of democracies, that’ll be the best thing that could happen to Israel.”
Finally, the Prime Minister said that Israel is continuing to build up its economy and defenses, all the while “extending our hand to any neighbor who wants to make peace with us.”
Comment on this story
by Elad Benari
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is continuing to answer questions from the public on his YouTube channel, and this time he is addressing the current situation in the Middle East and how it affects Israel.
Email readers: click HERE and scroll down to view video.
“Your nation is completely surrounded with instability,” said the inquirer. “There’s instability in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Iraq, Iran, and many other places in the Middle East. What steps do you intend to take to keep the nation of Israel safe in the midst of all of this instability?”
In his reply, Netanyahu emphasized that Israel is indeed surrounded – by countries that have not undergone reform.
“Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East and in North Africa,” he said. “The first thing I can do as the leader of my country is to join the hundreds of millions of others, in the Arab world and beyond, who are hoping that Israel will no longer be the only democracy in the Middle East.”
Netanyahu added that “if the Arab Spring materializes into real democracies, the problem of peace will be resolved. If the Arab world really becomes a collection of democracies, that’ll be the best thing that could happen to Israel.”
Finally, the Prime Minister said that Israel is continuing to build up its economy and defenses, all the while “extending our hand to any neighbor who wants to make peace with us.”
Comment on this story
2. Glenn Beck and Knesset Member to Ascend Temple Mount
by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
Glenn Beck and Knesset Member Danny Danon plan to ascend the Temple Mount next week. Beck also will speak with a Knesset committee that Danon heads.
Beck will arrive in Israel Monday, an organizer of his visit told Israel National News. He declined to reveal any timetable or details of the visit, but a Knesset source confirmed the visit to the Temple Mount.
Beck will appear at the Knesset Committee on Aliyah to speak about the anti-Israeli effort to present the Jewish state as being illegitimate.
The controversial and fiery personality, who several days ago broadcast his last show on Fox News, has been a constant champion of Israel. He visited the Temple Mount earlier this year and later announced a “Restoring Courage” rally in Jerusalem August 24. After his previous visit to the holy site, he said, "The Temple Mount almost pulsated. I could feel it.”
He is hoping for a repeat of last year’s massive turnout in Washington for a “Restoring Honor” rally. His web page encourages people to sign up for the tour but warns that the price tag is high. It also states that both American and Israel firms will be deployed to ensure security.
In his announcement of the rally in Israel, he stated, “It is time for us to courageously stand with Israel” and said that high security will be required because “the very gates of hell will open up against us.”
Beck added, “The only power broker, the only seat of government that can and will solve this problem with or without us is G-d. It is time to return inside the walls that surround Jerusalem and stand with people of all faiths, all around the world.
“There are people that will promise you ‘peace’ in the coming months. They are going to attack the center of our faith; our common faith, and that is Jerusalem, but it won't be with bullets or bombs. It will be with a two-state solution that cuts off Jerusalem; the Old City, from the rest of the world."
Comment on this story
by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
Glenn Beck and Knesset Member Danny Danon plan to ascend the Temple Mount next week. Beck also will speak with a Knesset committee that Danon heads.
Beck will arrive in Israel Monday, an organizer of his visit told Israel National News. He declined to reveal any timetable or details of the visit, but a Knesset source confirmed the visit to the Temple Mount.
Beck will appear at the Knesset Committee on Aliyah to speak about the anti-Israeli effort to present the Jewish state as being illegitimate.
The controversial and fiery personality, who several days ago broadcast his last show on Fox News, has been a constant champion of Israel. He visited the Temple Mount earlier this year and later announced a “Restoring Courage” rally in Jerusalem August 24. After his previous visit to the holy site, he said, "The Temple Mount almost pulsated. I could feel it.”
He is hoping for a repeat of last year’s massive turnout in Washington for a “Restoring Honor” rally. His web page encourages people to sign up for the tour but warns that the price tag is high. It also states that both American and Israel firms will be deployed to ensure security.
In his announcement of the rally in Israel, he stated, “It is time for us to courageously stand with Israel” and said that high security will be required because “the very gates of hell will open up against us.”
Beck added, “The only power broker, the only seat of government that can and will solve this problem with or without us is G-d. It is time to return inside the walls that surround Jerusalem and stand with people of all faiths, all around the world.
“There are people that will promise you ‘peace’ in the coming months. They are going to attack the center of our faith; our common faith, and that is Jerusalem, but it won't be with bullets or bombs. It will be with a two-state solution that cuts off Jerusalem; the Old City, from the rest of the world."
Comment on this story
3. It’s Final: Barak Won’t Transfer Terrorist Bodies
by Elad Benari
Defense Minister Ehud Barak made a final decision on Tuesday evening regarding the transfer of bodies of Hamas terrorists to the Palestinian Authority, and has ordered that no bodies of terrorists who committed attacks against Israeli citizens be transferred to the PA.
Earlier, Barak had suspended Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s instruction to transfer 84 bodies of terrorists to the Palestinian Authority, explaining the move might hurt efforts to free kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit.
Netanyahu’s announcement on Monday said the bodies would be handed over to the PA as a “goodwill” gesture towards the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which begins in August.
The terrorists whose bodies would have been transferred include some who have committed some of the most gruesome terror attacks against Israelis since 1967.
The list included, among others, the body of Hanadi Jaradat, the PA woman who blew herself up in Haifa’s Maxim restaurant in 2003, killing 21 people, as well as the bodies of Amar Ali Abdullah who carried out a suicide bombing operation in the Carmel market in Tel Aviv in 2004, and Abdullah Abdullah, who blew himself up in the Stage nightclub in Tel Aviv in 2005, killing four.
Barak reportedly ordered not to negotiate with the PA about returning the bodies of those three terrorists. In addition, he also instructed not to include terrorists who were residents of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip in future talks on handing over bodies of terrorists.
Barak’s decision was met with anger by the Palestinian Authority, which demanded that Israel return any terrorist bodies in its possession “regardless of their affiliation,” as senior PA official Hassan a-Sheikh was quoted as saying.
Comment on this story
by Elad Benari
Defense Minister Ehud Barak made a final decision on Tuesday evening regarding the transfer of bodies of Hamas terrorists to the Palestinian Authority, and has ordered that no bodies of terrorists who committed attacks against Israeli citizens be transferred to the PA.
Earlier, Barak had suspended Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s instruction to transfer 84 bodies of terrorists to the Palestinian Authority, explaining the move might hurt efforts to free kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit.
Netanyahu’s announcement on Monday said the bodies would be handed over to the PA as a “goodwill” gesture towards the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which begins in August.
The terrorists whose bodies would have been transferred include some who have committed some of the most gruesome terror attacks against Israelis since 1967.
The list included, among others, the body of Hanadi Jaradat, the PA woman who blew herself up in Haifa’s Maxim restaurant in 2003, killing 21 people, as well as the bodies of Amar Ali Abdullah who carried out a suicide bombing operation in the Carmel market in Tel Aviv in 2004, and Abdullah Abdullah, who blew himself up in the Stage nightclub in Tel Aviv in 2005, killing four.
Barak reportedly ordered not to negotiate with the PA about returning the bodies of those three terrorists. In addition, he also instructed not to include terrorists who were residents of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip in future talks on handing over bodies of terrorists.
Barak’s decision was met with anger by the Palestinian Authority, which demanded that Israel return any terrorist bodies in its possession “regardless of their affiliation,” as senior PA official Hassan a-Sheikh was quoted as saying.
Comment on this story
4. ‘A Diplomatic Eye for an Eye,’ Lieberman Warns PA
by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman warns that if the Palestinian Authority takes unilateral steps for statehood, Israel will reply in kind.
He did not detail to reporters what measures Israel could take, but he has previously suggested that Israel could cancel previous agreements with the Palestinian Authority and annex parts of Judea and Samaria. The PA has violated virtually all previous agreements, and the Oslo Accords and the American Roadmap Plan are considered to be dead by almost all observers.
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas plans to appeal to the United Nations to recognize the Palestinian Authority as an independent state within Israel’s current borders. The move violates previous agreements that call for a negotiated pact with Israel.
Lieberman said that accepting the PA in the United Nations would allow it to request a seat on the International Court in The Hague, where it accused Israel of war crimes in its counterterrorist campaign, Operation Cast Lead, in Gaza more than two years ago.
Concerning Abbas' demands of Israel, the Foreign Minister said in a meeting with the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Security Committee, "I do not think Abbas deserves any kind of gesture from Israel.”
He also said that he wants to improve ties through a diplomatic compromise but added Israel doesn’t have to subject itself to “humiliation” by apologizing for the Navy commando action against IHH-terrorist activists on the flotilla last year that was headed for Hamas-controlled Gaza.
Lieberman said that apologizing would be an act of “abandoning soldiers” who were brutally attacked on the Mavi Marmara ship until they were able to take control of the boat and prevent it from continuing to Gaza.
Comment on this story
by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman warns that if the Palestinian Authority takes unilateral steps for statehood, Israel will reply in kind.
He did not detail to reporters what measures Israel could take, but he has previously suggested that Israel could cancel previous agreements with the Palestinian Authority and annex parts of Judea and Samaria. The PA has violated virtually all previous agreements, and the Oslo Accords and the American Roadmap Plan are considered to be dead by almost all observers.
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas plans to appeal to the United Nations to recognize the Palestinian Authority as an independent state within Israel’s current borders. The move violates previous agreements that call for a negotiated pact with Israel.
Lieberman said that accepting the PA in the United Nations would allow it to request a seat on the International Court in The Hague, where it accused Israel of war crimes in its counterterrorist campaign, Operation Cast Lead, in Gaza more than two years ago.
Concerning Abbas' demands of Israel, the Foreign Minister said in a meeting with the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Security Committee, "I do not think Abbas deserves any kind of gesture from Israel.”
He also said that he wants to improve ties through a diplomatic compromise but added Israel doesn’t have to subject itself to “humiliation” by apologizing for the Navy commando action against IHH-terrorist activists on the flotilla last year that was headed for Hamas-controlled Gaza.
Lieberman said that apologizing would be an act of “abandoning soldiers” who were brutally attacked on the Mavi Marmara ship until they were able to take control of the boat and prevent it from continuing to Gaza.
Comment on this story
5. Officials Ignored Chief Rabbi’s Plea to Avoid Disgracing Rabbis
by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
Chief Sephardi Rabbi Shlomo Amar said Wednesday that officials and rabbis ignored his pleas several months ago to meet with him to prevent the disrespect for Torah scholars involved in the police arresting Rabbis Dov Lior and Yaakov Yosef for questioning about a controversial book on Jewish legal dilemmas in times of war.
The Chief Rabbi told Voice of Israel government radio that the requested meeting never occurred.
In a meeting after the incidents at the invitation of President Shimon Peres, Rabbi Amar, called on Israeli rabbis and public officials “to refrain from any statements that might be interpreted as extremist", intimating that these will be used against the religious community by those looking for ways to malign it.
The questioning of the rabbis by police the past week met with massive street protests from the national religious community as well as a demonstration that included Hareidi-religious Jews . Several Knesset Members from secular-based parties also said that the police showed disrespect for the rabbis’ honor by taking them out of their cars when they could have been questioned at home.
The rabbis had each written a “haskama” to the Torat HaMelech [King's Torah] book which concerns Jewish legal dilemmas, including the politically incorrect issue of priorities of Jews versus non-Jews in time of war. Leftists contended that the book contained incitement against non-Jews.
A “haskama” is a letter of approbation, but does not necessarily mean approval of the opinions of Jewish law expressed in a book. It attests to its halakhic coherence and the respect shown the author.
Their questioning by police also gave rise to statements asserting that Halakha, Jewish law, comes before the laws of the country when there is a contradiction between them.
Mainstream journalists, most of whom are not knowledgeable in Jewish law, pounced on the reactions to try to make a black-and-white issue out of a complex matter. They charged that rabbis hold themselves to be beyond the law, whereas Rabbi Lior, for example, is a Holocaust survivor who heads a hesder yeshiva where he encourages students to enlist as combat soldiers.
Rabbi Amar diplomatically admonished rabbis and public officials to “distant themselves from extremism” in general, adding, “Rabbis are entrusted to uphold the honor of the Torah. Rabbis and public leaders must be careful what they say and avoid possible interpretations of extremism.
“I call on the public to distance itself from extremist statements that destroy the truth. Rabbis and public leaders must be careful in choosing their words so that youth will not be drawn into extremist actions.”
President Peres told Rabbi Amar, that everyone is equal before the rule of law, which is the basis of the establishment of Israeli society.” He was referring to the rabbis being subjected to police questioning, not to their writings, as Israel does not limit freedom of speech.
Comment on this story
by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
Chief Sephardi Rabbi Shlomo Amar said Wednesday that officials and rabbis ignored his pleas several months ago to meet with him to prevent the disrespect for Torah scholars involved in the police arresting Rabbis Dov Lior and Yaakov Yosef for questioning about a controversial book on Jewish legal dilemmas in times of war.
The Chief Rabbi told Voice of Israel government radio that the requested meeting never occurred.
In a meeting after the incidents at the invitation of President Shimon Peres, Rabbi Amar, called on Israeli rabbis and public officials “to refrain from any statements that might be interpreted as extremist", intimating that these will be used against the religious community by those looking for ways to malign it.
The questioning of the rabbis by police the past week met with massive street protests from the national religious community as well as a demonstration that included Hareidi-religious Jews . Several Knesset Members from secular-based parties also said that the police showed disrespect for the rabbis’ honor by taking them out of their cars when they could have been questioned at home.
The rabbis had each written a “haskama” to the Torat HaMelech [King's Torah] book which concerns Jewish legal dilemmas, including the politically incorrect issue of priorities of Jews versus non-Jews in time of war. Leftists contended that the book contained incitement against non-Jews.
A “haskama” is a letter of approbation, but does not necessarily mean approval of the opinions of Jewish law expressed in a book. It attests to its halakhic coherence and the respect shown the author.
Their questioning by police also gave rise to statements asserting that Halakha, Jewish law, comes before the laws of the country when there is a contradiction between them.
Mainstream journalists, most of whom are not knowledgeable in Jewish law, pounced on the reactions to try to make a black-and-white issue out of a complex matter. They charged that rabbis hold themselves to be beyond the law, whereas Rabbi Lior, for example, is a Holocaust survivor who heads a hesder yeshiva where he encourages students to enlist as combat soldiers.
Rabbi Amar diplomatically admonished rabbis and public officials to “distant themselves from extremism” in general, adding, “Rabbis are entrusted to uphold the honor of the Torah. Rabbis and public leaders must be careful what they say and avoid possible interpretations of extremism.
“I call on the public to distance itself from extremist statements that destroy the truth. Rabbis and public leaders must be careful in choosing their words so that youth will not be drawn into extremist actions.”
President Peres told Rabbi Amar, that everyone is equal before the rule of law, which is the basis of the establishment of Israeli society.” He was referring to the rabbis being subjected to police questioning, not to their writings, as Israel does not limit freedom of speech.
Comment on this story
6. INN Exclusive: Shocking Report of Norway's Anti-Semitism
by Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld
In the past few years, foreign interest in the widespread anti-Israelism among the Norwegian elite and the corresponding anti-Semitism in Norwegian society have increased. Up until last month, there were no official statistics to back this information up.
This enabled the Norwegian government and media to deny the hate-inciting reality, while trying to demonize those who dared to tell the truth.
Last month’s publication of a study ordered by the Oslo municipality on racism and anti-Semitism among students of the 8th through 10th grades in the town’s schools came as a shock. The study found that 33 percent of the Jewish students regularly experience bullying at school. According to the definition used, this means that at least two or three incidents of verbal or physical abuse target these Jewish students per month.
It would be hard to find similarly extreme data anywhere else in Western Europe. The study also rendered it difficult to blame anti-Semitism exclusively on Muslim children, as it became evident that autochthonous Norwegians are also heavily involved.
After Jews, the next most pestered group was Buddhists, with 10 percent experiencing bullying; “Others” were at 7 percent and Muslims at slightly over 5 percent. Fifty-one percent of all students believe that the term “Jew” is used pejoratively, 41percent had heard ethnic jokes about Jews and 35 percent heard insulting comments. Close to 5 percent had been present when the Holocaust was denied in class. Only 25 percent of the students never witnessed anything negative about Jews in school.[1]
All this happens in a country where among a general population of about 5 million, the membership of the organized Jewish community is only 800. The total number of Jews in the country which includes Israelis, who often leave after a few years, is estimated at 2,000.
For those who desired to know the truth, the findings came as no surprise. Already in 2002, Martin Bodd, a representative of the Jewish community in Oslo reported at an international conference of the Anti-Defamation League, that there had been more harassment of Jews in the preceding two years than at any time since 1945.
Bodd mentioned that “most of the incitement and harassment against Jews has not been reported. Hardly any of the children or the adults offended by anti-Semitic statements or the like are willing to come forward publicly.” He said that there were approximately 15 incidents in which 10 children had been harassed.[2]
A year later in an interview, Irene Levin, Professor of Social Work at Oslo University College said:
“Some Jewish children were told they would not be allowed to attend a birthday party because of Israeli actions. When there were anti-Semitic incidents at school, Jewish parents discussed this with some school principals, who supported the aggression. One told a Jewish girl to remove her ‘provocative’ Magen David. These incidents are important, but at present remain exceptions.”[3]
Last year, a courageous TV journalist Tormod Strand, succeeded in convincing the state TV NRK to broadcast a program about anti-Semitism in primary and other schools. This broadcast focused mainly on bullying of Jews by Muslims.[4]The teachers who discussed the ugly facts did so under the condition of anonymity. This was another indication of the Norwegian reality.
Kristin Halvorsen, Minister of Education and Leader of the Left Socialist Party reacted with surprise and said that this information was all new to her.
A few weeks later, the publisher of my book in Norwegian, "Anti-Semitism in Norway; Behind the Humanitarian Mask," arranged a press conference in Oslo. This gave me an opportunity to ask the journalists present how it was possible that I, who lived far away and did not speak their language, have been aware of this problem in Norwegian schools for a long time, while their own minister did not. There was no reply.
I then felt as if I had to console them. I told them that this did not mean that I wanted to become minister of education in their country.
After the broadcast, Halvorsen ordered a national study on racism in schools, which is still underway. After the study of the Oslo municipality was made public, Halvorsen announced that she will provide more than $1,000,000 to familiarize teachers with the issue and how it should be handled in schools.
This effort is unlikely to be very successful. Halvorsen and her party colleagues are extremist anti-Israeli hate mongers. In 2006, she promoted a consumer boycott of Israeli goods. The Norwegian government had to distance itself from her statements after the then U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice threatened Norway with serious political consequences.[5]
In 2009, when Halvorsen was Minister of Finance, she announced that the Norwegian government had decided that the state pension plan should divest from the Israeli company Elbit because it was involved in the construction of Israel’s security barrier.[6]This was considered incompatible with the so-called investment ethics which had been laid down for the pension fund. At the same time however, the fund continued to hold shares in companies in other countries involved in highly unethical activities.
In 2009 during the Cast Lead war in Gaza, Halvorsen was the only Western minister to participate in an anti-Israeli demonstration. She was photographed standing close to someone holding a poster saying: U.S. and Israel – the Axis of the Greatest Evil.[7]At the demonstration, shouts of “Death to the Jews” could also be heard.
The main question concerning the actions to be taken is: Can a minister with a continuing arsonist record become a fireman at the same time?
It is obvious to those who do not wish to close their eyes that widespread anti-Semitism in Oslo schools is directly linked to the extreme anti-Israel hate mongering in Norway expressed by government ministers, politicians, media, trade unions, academics, certain Church leaders and others.
One important subject not being investigated in the Oslo study is how many teachers discuss the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in class and to what extent their remarks are biased. This will probably serve to be another example of how arsonists may now simultaneously be taught to become firemen.
Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld is Chairman of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
[1]“Religious racism shocks officials,” 8 June 2011. www.newsinenglish.no/2011/06/08/religious-racisim-shocks-officials/
[2] Martin Bodd, “Country Reports: Norway,”Anti-Defamation League Conference on Global Anti-Semitism, 2002,www.adl.org/anti_semitism/as_conference_proceedings.pdf.
[3]Manfred Gerstenfeld, interview with Irene Levin, “Norway: The Courage of a Small Jewish Community; Holocaust Restitution and Anti-Semitism,” Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism, 10, 1 July 2003..
[4]Katharina Schmidt-Hirschfelder, “So verbreitet ist die Angst,” Judische Allgemeine, 10 June 2010. [German]
[5]“USA Threats after Boycott Support,” Aftenposten, 12 January 2006.
[6]Maayana Miskin, “Norway Boycotts Israeli Security Firm Elbit,” Israel National News, 3 September 2009.
[7]http://tundratabloid.blogspot.com/2009/03/norwegian-finance-minister-kristin.html, 31 March 2009.
Comment on this story
by Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld
In the past few years, foreign interest in the widespread anti-Israelism among the Norwegian elite and the corresponding anti-Semitism in Norwegian society have increased. Up until last month, there were no official statistics to back this information up.
This enabled the Norwegian government and media to deny the hate-inciting reality, while trying to demonize those who dared to tell the truth.
Last month’s publication of a study ordered by the Oslo municipality on racism and anti-Semitism among students of the 8th through 10th grades in the town’s schools came as a shock. The study found that 33 percent of the Jewish students regularly experience bullying at school. According to the definition used, this means that at least two or three incidents of verbal or physical abuse target these Jewish students per month.
It would be hard to find similarly extreme data anywhere else in Western Europe. The study also rendered it difficult to blame anti-Semitism exclusively on Muslim children, as it became evident that autochthonous Norwegians are also heavily involved.
After Jews, the next most pestered group was Buddhists, with 10 percent experiencing bullying; “Others” were at 7 percent and Muslims at slightly over 5 percent. Fifty-one percent of all students believe that the term “Jew” is used pejoratively, 41percent had heard ethnic jokes about Jews and 35 percent heard insulting comments. Close to 5 percent had been present when the Holocaust was denied in class. Only 25 percent of the students never witnessed anything negative about Jews in school.[1]
All this happens in a country where among a general population of about 5 million, the membership of the organized Jewish community is only 800. The total number of Jews in the country which includes Israelis, who often leave after a few years, is estimated at 2,000.
For those who desired to know the truth, the findings came as no surprise. Already in 2002, Martin Bodd, a representative of the Jewish community in Oslo reported at an international conference of the Anti-Defamation League, that there had been more harassment of Jews in the preceding two years than at any time since 1945.
Bodd mentioned that “most of the incitement and harassment against Jews has not been reported. Hardly any of the children or the adults offended by anti-Semitic statements or the like are willing to come forward publicly.” He said that there were approximately 15 incidents in which 10 children had been harassed.[2]
A year later in an interview, Irene Levin, Professor of Social Work at Oslo University College said:
“Some Jewish children were told they would not be allowed to attend a birthday party because of Israeli actions. When there were anti-Semitic incidents at school, Jewish parents discussed this with some school principals, who supported the aggression. One told a Jewish girl to remove her ‘provocative’ Magen David. These incidents are important, but at present remain exceptions.”[3]
Last year, a courageous TV journalist Tormod Strand, succeeded in convincing the state TV NRK to broadcast a program about anti-Semitism in primary and other schools. This broadcast focused mainly on bullying of Jews by Muslims.[4]The teachers who discussed the ugly facts did so under the condition of anonymity. This was another indication of the Norwegian reality.
Kristin Halvorsen, Minister of Education and Leader of the Left Socialist Party reacted with surprise and said that this information was all new to her.
A few weeks later, the publisher of my book in Norwegian, "Anti-Semitism in Norway; Behind the Humanitarian Mask," arranged a press conference in Oslo. This gave me an opportunity to ask the journalists present how it was possible that I, who lived far away and did not speak their language, have been aware of this problem in Norwegian schools for a long time, while their own minister did not. There was no reply.
I then felt as if I had to console them. I told them that this did not mean that I wanted to become minister of education in their country.
After the broadcast, Halvorsen ordered a national study on racism in schools, which is still underway. After the study of the Oslo municipality was made public, Halvorsen announced that she will provide more than $1,000,000 to familiarize teachers with the issue and how it should be handled in schools.
This effort is unlikely to be very successful. Halvorsen and her party colleagues are extremist anti-Israeli hate mongers. In 2006, she promoted a consumer boycott of Israeli goods. The Norwegian government had to distance itself from her statements after the then U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice threatened Norway with serious political consequences.[5]
In 2009, when Halvorsen was Minister of Finance, she announced that the Norwegian government had decided that the state pension plan should divest from the Israeli company Elbit because it was involved in the construction of Israel’s security barrier.[6]This was considered incompatible with the so-called investment ethics which had been laid down for the pension fund. At the same time however, the fund continued to hold shares in companies in other countries involved in highly unethical activities.
In 2009 during the Cast Lead war in Gaza, Halvorsen was the only Western minister to participate in an anti-Israeli demonstration. She was photographed standing close to someone holding a poster saying: U.S. and Israel – the Axis of the Greatest Evil.[7]At the demonstration, shouts of “Death to the Jews” could also be heard.
The main question concerning the actions to be taken is: Can a minister with a continuing arsonist record become a fireman at the same time?
It is obvious to those who do not wish to close their eyes that widespread anti-Semitism in Oslo schools is directly linked to the extreme anti-Israel hate mongering in Norway expressed by government ministers, politicians, media, trade unions, academics, certain Church leaders and others.
One important subject not being investigated in the Oslo study is how many teachers discuss the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in class and to what extent their remarks are biased. This will probably serve to be another example of how arsonists may now simultaneously be taught to become firemen.
Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld is Chairman of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
[1]“Religious racism shocks officials,” 8 June 2011. www.newsinenglish.no/2011/06/08/religious-racisim-shocks-officials/
[2] Martin Bodd, “Country Reports: Norway,”Anti-Defamation League Conference on Global Anti-Semitism, 2002,www.adl.org/anti_semitism/as_conference_proceedings.pdf.
[3]Manfred Gerstenfeld, interview with Irene Levin, “Norway: The Courage of a Small Jewish Community; Holocaust Restitution and Anti-Semitism,” Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism, 10, 1 July 2003..
[4]Katharina Schmidt-Hirschfelder, “So verbreitet ist die Angst,” Judische Allgemeine, 10 June 2010. [German]
[5]“USA Threats after Boycott Support,” Aftenposten, 12 January 2006.
[6]Maayana Miskin, “Norway Boycotts Israeli Security Firm Elbit,” Israel National News, 3 September 2009.
[7]http://tundratabloid.blogspot.com/2009/03/norwegian-finance-minister-kristin.html, 31 March 2009.
Comment on this story
7. Large Asian Investor Snaps Up $400 Million in Govt. Bonds
by David Lev
The government on Tuesday said that it had sold $400 million worth of bonds to one of the largest sovereign funds in Asia. It did not name the government that made the purchase, but industry insiders noted that China's sovereign investment fund, CIC, and Singapore's sovereign investment fund, Temasek, were among the largest sovereign funds in Asia.
The bonds were sold with a one-year term and were underwritten by Goldman-Sachs. The bond bears a nominal interest rate of 1.599%, but Treasury officials said that it will cost the government less, as the shekel financing cost for the same period is lower by about 0.3%. In any event, officials said, the financing rate is considered very low.
The bonds were issued at the request of the Asian fund as part of Government’s European Medium Term Note shelf prospectus plan, which is open to all investors. In a statement, the Treasury said that the investment is the fund's first in Israel, and that they are considered “a strategic global investor in capital markets.”
Officials said that this was the third large offering to Asian investors in the past year and a half, with the most recent issue in March 2011. The officials said they were continuing to seek out similar investments, which will “significantly reduce the cost of raising money for the government.”
Comment on this story
by David Lev
The government on Tuesday said that it had sold $400 million worth of bonds to one of the largest sovereign funds in Asia. It did not name the government that made the purchase, but industry insiders noted that China's sovereign investment fund, CIC, and Singapore's sovereign investment fund, Temasek, were among the largest sovereign funds in Asia.
The bonds were sold with a one-year term and were underwritten by Goldman-Sachs. The bond bears a nominal interest rate of 1.599%, but Treasury officials said that it will cost the government less, as the shekel financing cost for the same period is lower by about 0.3%. In any event, officials said, the financing rate is considered very low.
The bonds were issued at the request of the Asian fund as part of Government’s European Medium Term Note shelf prospectus plan, which is open to all investors. In a statement, the Treasury said that the investment is the fund's first in Israel, and that they are considered “a strategic global investor in capital markets.”
Officials said that this was the third large offering to Asian investors in the past year and a half, with the most recent issue in March 2011. The officials said they were continuing to seek out similar investments, which will “significantly reduce the cost of raising money for the government.”
Comment on this story
8. A Tale of Torture in Syria
by Chana Ya'ar
Protesters is Syria are being beaten and tortured when caught by government forces, a young demonstrator has told CNN in an interview conducted clandestinely over the Internet.
Twitter is being monitored by the government. Facebook isn't safe either. The best bet for communications, he told the news network, is Google chat, within strict limits.
Even then, he used a pseudonym.
The description of torture techniques used on “Ahmed” matches those in past stories from the Soviet gulag and interrogations in Latin America. Electrocution was included. Amnesty International has accused Syria of crimes against humanity.
The human rights watchdog organization has demanded that the United Nations ask the International Criminal Court at The Hague to investigate the allegations of murder and torture of civilian protesters by government forces.
In Ahmed's case, his interrogators wanted to know whether he was involved in a particular political party. They had other questions as well. “How much money do you get from Israel? Who are your outside connections? Why did you protest, you animal?”
Forced to sign a confession, he was repeatedly whipped for three days that seemed to last years and then was “re-educated” on patriotism, loyalty to President Bashar al-Assad (who personally faces international sanctions for the brutality), conspiracy in Syria and fighting Israel, CNN reported.
Did it stop him from returning to the demonstrations?
No. Only now, he lies to his mother in order not to worry her when he goes out to protest with friends and family.
For himself, he does not worry. Ahmed knows there is a chance he may be arrested again, face the interrogators and the electric prod again. The prospect of arrest is used by the government to frighten people, he said. “But they don't understand that will only make people angrier – and that is what will bring their end.”
Comment on this story
by Chana Ya'ar
Protesters is Syria are being beaten and tortured when caught by government forces, a young demonstrator has told CNN in an interview conducted clandestinely over the Internet.
Twitter is being monitored by the government. Facebook isn't safe either. The best bet for communications, he told the news network, is Google chat, within strict limits.
Even then, he used a pseudonym.
The description of torture techniques used on “Ahmed” matches those in past stories from the Soviet gulag and interrogations in Latin America. Electrocution was included. Amnesty International has accused Syria of crimes against humanity.
The human rights watchdog organization has demanded that the United Nations ask the International Criminal Court at The Hague to investigate the allegations of murder and torture of civilian protesters by government forces.
In Ahmed's case, his interrogators wanted to know whether he was involved in a particular political party. They had other questions as well. “How much money do you get from Israel? Who are your outside connections? Why did you protest, you animal?”
Forced to sign a confession, he was repeatedly whipped for three days that seemed to last years and then was “re-educated” on patriotism, loyalty to President Bashar al-Assad (who personally faces international sanctions for the brutality), conspiracy in Syria and fighting Israel, CNN reported.
Did it stop him from returning to the demonstrations?
No. Only now, he lies to his mother in order not to worry her when he goes out to protest with friends and family.
For himself, he does not worry. Ahmed knows there is a chance he may be arrested again, face the interrogators and the electric prod again. The prospect of arrest is used by the government to frighten people, he said. “But they don't understand that will only make people angrier – and that is what will bring their end.”
Comment on this story
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La défense de DSK campe
sur la thèse de l'affabulation
Pressée d'en finir, la défense de Dominique Strauss-Kahn est bien
décidée à profiter de son avantage pour obtenir un non-lieu rapide.
» Le procureur de New York s'apprêterait à abandonner les charges
»
Les cartes magnétiques du Sofitel parlent
.
L'accusatrice de DSK porte plainte contre le New York Post
Nafissatou Diallo accuse le tabloïd américain de diffamation après la publication d'articles la présentant comme une prostituée.
.
.
Tristane Banon : «Je n'en peux plus d'entendre dire que je mens»
Huit ans après les faits supposés et en pleine affaire Sofitel, Tristane
Banon a porté plainte ce mardi contre Dominique Strauss-Kahn pour tentative de viol. Elle s'explique sur ce calendrier.
» Plainte pour tentative de viol : ce qui attend DSK en France
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.
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Le feuilleton DSK exaspère le PS
Les rebondissements judiciaires empêchent, selon certains socialistes, le bon déroulement de la primaire.
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.
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France-États-Unis :
le choc des féminismes
Le cas DSK a réveillé la pensée féministe. Mais d'un côté à l'autre de l'Atlantique, les féministes ne se battent pas de la même façon. Focus sur ces militantes françaises ou américaines pour qui sexe et culture procèdent de deux visions du monde différentes.
.
.
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Soudan : 197 migrants se noient
après un incendie sur un bateau
Seuls trois passagers de ce bateau qui naviguait en direction de l'Arabie saoudite ont survécu.
.
.
.
La guerre sans ennemis sur le Vieux Port
LE BONHEUR D'ÊTRE
FRANÇAIS (2) - Marseille est un cas d'école, témoignage d'un certain
état d'esprit français. L'affrontement y est incessant. Éboueurs,
grutiers, chauffeurs de bus ou de train se passent le relais de
l'indignation jour après jour, comme une torche olympique.
» Abonnez-vous à Mon Figaro Select pour consulter cet article
.
.
Le Portugal devient un investissement risqué pour l'agence Moody's
L'agence de notation américaine, qui a dégradé de quatre crans la note du Portugal, ne croit pas ce pays capable de réduire
son déficit de 9,1% à 5,9% d'ici la fin de l'année.
» Le monde vu par les agences de notation
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.
Les résultats du bac en légère hausse
En dépit d'une fuite et d'un changement de barème, les notes de mathématiques du bac S n'ont pas varié.
» Baccalauréat : les pistes d'une réforme
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.
Bernard Arnault reste l'homme
le
plus riche de France
La fortune du PDG de LVMH s'élève à 22,76 milliards d'euros et devance le fondateur d'Auchan,
Gérard Mulliez, et l'héritière de L'Oréal, Liliane Bettencourt, selon un classement établi par le magazine Challenges.
» A quoi ressemblent les grandes fortunes du monde ?
» Bernard Arnault est la quatrième fortune mondiale
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Un Français sur cinq envisage
de participer à la primaire PS
Près de 60% des sympathisants de gauche n'ont pas l'intention d'aller voter pour départager les candidats socialistes, selon un sondage Ifop.
.
.
Les gardes à vue ont chuté de 26%
en juin
INFO LE FIGARO - Le premier bilan du comité de suivi de la réforme fait état d'une importante baisse de la productivité policière le mois dernier, par rapport à juin 2010.
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Annecy, candidate pour les JO d'hiver 2018
DOSSIER SPÉCIAL - Le Comité international olympique rendra
sa décision mercredi sur l'organisation des Jeux olympiques d'hiver
2018. Deux autres dossiers sont en compétition: Munich et Pyeongchang.
Avec Sport24.com
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Le gouvernement Merkel déstabilisé
par des ventes d'armes
L'achat de 200 Leopard par l'Arabie saoudite ferait peser une menace sur Israël et les révoltes arabes.
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.
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Décès du peintre
Cy Twombly
Coup du destin, mardi après-midi on apprenait la mort à Rome de Cy Twombly, l'un des derniers géants de l'art «postwar» américain. Éric Mézil, directeur de la collection Lambert en Avignon avaient conçu avec lui l'exposition dont il est question ici et qui révèle les 60 ans de photographie du peintre dans son atelier.
.
.
Dans son rapport, le PS
épargne Jean-Noël Guérini
La commission présidée par Alain Richard exclut la mise sous tutelle de la fédération des Bouches-du-Rhône, réclamée par Arnaud Montebourg.
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.
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FMI : Lagarde aura le même salaire que DSK
La nouvelle directrice général du Fonds monétaire international recevra une rémunération annuelle de 551.700 dollars. Le volet éthique du contrat de travail a été musclé.
.
.
Une première journée chargée
pour Christine Lagarde au FMI
La nouvelle directrice générale du Fonds monétaire international prononcera un discours attendu devant les employés de l'institution.
.
.
Hippodrome de Compiègne : Woerth alerté sur les risques liés à la vente
Selon Le Canard enchaîné, le cabinet de l'ex-ministre avait été alerté à plusieurs reprises sur les problèmes juridiques posés par cette vente et disposait d'estimations bien supérieures au prix auquel le terrain a finalement été cédé.
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Posez
vos questions à Benoist Apparu
Le secrétaire d'Etat chargé du Logement sera l'invité du Talk
Orange-Le Figaro ce mercredi, en direct à 18h. Posez-lui toutes vos
questions.
» Dépendance : l'importance d'avoir un logement adapté
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La contre-attaque des mousquetaires
de l'UMP
Les «quadras» de la droite dineront ensemble mercredi soir au ministère de l'Agriculture. Ils veulent afficher la solidité de leur alliance, une semaine après le remaniement qui a vu s'affronter violemment Bruno Le Maire et François Baroin.
.
.
La croisade des antitabac
gagne les plages
À La Ciotat, une plage est devenue non-fumeur. Une initiative qui suscite l'intérêt de nombreuses autres communes.
.
L'UMP rouvre le débat des 35 heures
L'éventuelle suppression des lois Aubry et la mise en place d'une TVA sociale divisent la majorité.
.
.
Acquittement dans un procès d'infanticide sulfureux
Bien plus que la saga DSK, l'histoire de Casey Anthony et de sa petite fille Caylee a déchaîné les passions et mobilisé les médias aux Etats-Unis.
.
.
.
Le message pompidolien de Sarkozy
Le chef de l'État a rendu mardi hommage à Georges Pompidou à l'occasion du centième anniversaire de sa naissance.
.
.
Le portable d'une adolescente assassinée piraté pour un scoop
News of the world, le tabloïd britannique de Rupert Murdoch, aurait intercepté et effacé les messages téléphoniques d'une adolescente, retrouvée assassinée, détruisant de possibles preuves et donnant de faux espoirs à la famille.
.
.
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Le ton monte entre la Chine et le Saint-Siège
Le Vatican accuse Pékin d'avoir ordonné un nouvel évêque sans son aval.
» BLOG - Le constat d'échec du Vatican en Chine
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Assurance-maladie : 2,2 milliards d'économies proposées en 2012
L'assurance-maladie va adresser au gouvernement ses propositions pour le budget 2012 de la Sécurité sociale. Les laboratoires pharmaceutiques seraient fortement mis à contribution.
.
.
«Flottille» : un bateau français
en route pour Gaza
Le Dignité Al-Karama, qui s'oppose au blocus d'Israël sur le territoire palestinien, a déjoué les gardes-côtes grecs. A bord se trouve notamment Olivier Besancenot, ex-leader du Nouveau parti anticapitaliste.
.
.
.
Joly joue la prudence, Hulot son va-tout
Les 32.896 inscrits à la primaire écolo ont jusqu'à mercredi, 9 heures, pour voter sur internet, ou jusqu'à jeudi, minuit, par courrier.
.
.
Coup de feu à Genève :
le fils d'Alain Delon inculpé
Une jeune fille a été blessée par balle jeudi au domicile suisse de l'acteur, lors d'une soirée organisée par son fils, Alain-Fabien.
.
.
Faux communiqué du Sénat :
le questeur socialiste désavoué
Épinglé pour des notes de frais douteuses, Jean-Marc Pastor a diffusé un faux communiqué du président du Sénat pour tenter d'étouffer l'affaire. Le questeur a promis de rembourser ses dépenses.
.
.
Des députées afghanes se battent
en plein hémicyle
VIDEO - Après un échange verbal, elles ont dû être séparées par leurs collègues masculins alors qu'elles se battaient à coups de poing.
.
.
Abilio Diniz, au centre
de la bataille Casino-Carrefour
INTERVIEW - Associé de Casino, l'entrepreneur brésilien veut se rapprocher de Carrefour. Il s'en explique au Figaro.
.
.
Guerre des régimes :
le Dr Dukan perd son procès
Le tribunal correctionnel de Paris a estimé que les propos contre la méthode Dukan tenus par le Dr Cohen, inventeur d'un régime concurrent, n'étaient pas diffamatoires.
.
.
.
Sur la route du queer
Le road movie «Too Much Pussy!» vient bousculer les sorties ciné
de la semaine. Ce documentaire décomplexé rappelle le film de Matthieu
Amalric, «Tournée», mais dans une version féministe beaucoup moins soft.
Interview de sa réalisatrice, Emilie Jouvet.
» EN IMAGES - Les actrices
.
.
.
Paris se met à l'heure du bon café
Après des décennies de noisettes avalés au comptoir, voici venir le règne de l'espresso grand cru. Après San Francisco, Stockholm et Berlin, Paris monte dans le train du bon café. On en parle avec quelques acteurs majeurs de ce renouveau.
.
.
24 heures photo
Découvrez les meilleures images du jour sélectionnées par Le Figaro Magazine.
_____________________________________________________________________
Security Grifters Partner-Up
on Sinister Cyber-Surveillance Project
By Tom Burghardt
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25503
Global Research, July 4, 2011
Antifascist Calling... - 2011-07-03
Last week, the White House released its National Strategy for Counterterrorism, a macabre document that places a premium on "public safety" over civil liberties and constitutional rights.
Indeed, "hope and change" huckster Barack Obama had the temerity to assert that the President "bears no greater responsibility than ensuring the safety and security of the American people."
Pity that others, including CIA "black site" prisoners tortured to death to "keep us safe" (some 100 at last count) aren't extended the same courtesy as The Washington Post reported last week.
As Secrecy News editor Steven Aftergood correctly points out, the claim that the President "has no greater responsibility than 'protecting the American people' is a paternalistic invention that is historically unfounded and potentially damaging to the political heritage of the nation."
Aftergood avers, "the presidential oath of office that is prescribed by the U.S. Constitution (Art. II, sect. 1) makes it clear that the President's supreme responsibility is to '...preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.' There is no mention of public safety. It is the constitutional order that the President is sworn to protect, even if doing so entails risks to the safety and security of the American people."
But as our former republic slips ever-closer towards corporate dictatorship, Obama's mendacious twaddle about "protecting the American people," serves only to obscure, and reinforce, the inescapable fact that it's a rigged game.
Rest assured, "what happens in Vegas," Baghdad, Kabul or Manama--from driftnet spying to political-inspired witchhunts toillegal detention--won't, and hasn't, "stayed in Vegas."
Cyber Here, Cyber There, Cyber-Surveillance Everywhere
Last month, researcher Barrett Brown and the OpMetalGearnetwork lifted the lid on a new U.S. Government-sponsored cyber-surveillance project, Romas/COIN, now Odyssey, a multiyear, multimillion dollar enterprise currently run by defense and security giant Northrop Grumman.
With some $10.8 billion in revenue largely derived from contracts with the Defense Department, Northrop Grumman was No. 2 on the Washington Technology 2011 Top 100 List of Prime Federal Contractors.
"For at least two years," Brown writes, "the U.S. has been conducting a secretive and immensely sophisticated campaign of mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world, allowing the intelligence community to monitor the habits, conversations, and activity of millions of individuals at once."
Information on this shadowy program was derived by scrutinizing hundreds of the more than 70,000 HBGary emails leaked onto the web by the cyber-guerrilla collective Anonymous.
Brown uncovered evidence that the "top contender to win the federal contract and thus take over the program is a team of about a dozen companies which were brought together in large part by Aaron Barr--the same disgraced CEO who resigned from his own firm earlier this year after he was discovered to have planned a full-scale information war against political activists at the behest of corporate clients."
Readers will recall that Barr claimed he could exploit social media to gather information about WikiLeaks supporters in a bid to destroy that organization. Earlier this year, Barr told theFinancial Times he had used scraping techniques and had infiltrated WikiLeaks supporter Anonymous, in part by using IRC, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites.
According to emails subsequently released by Anonymous, it was revealed that the ultra rightist U.S. Chamber of Commerce had hired white shoe law firm Hunton & Williams, and that Hunton attorneys, upon recommendation of an unnamed U.S. Department of Justice official, solicited a set of private security contractors--HBGary, HBGary Federal, Palantir and Berico Technologies (collectively known as Team Themis)--and stitched-up a sabotage campaign against WikiLeaks, journalists, labor unions, progressive political groups and Chamber critics.
Amongst the firms who sought to grab the Romas/COIN/Odyssey contract from Northrop when it came up for a "recompete" wasTASC, which describes itself as "a renowned provider of advanced systems engineering, integration and decision-support services across the intelligence, defense, homeland security and federal markets."
According to Bloomberg BusinessWeek, TASC's head of "Cybersecurity Initiatives," Larry Strang, was formerly a Vice President with Northrop Grumman who led that firm's Cybersecurity Group and served as Northrop's NSA Account Manager. Prior to that, Strang, a retired Air Force Lt. Colonel, was Vice President for Operations at the spooky Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).
Brown relates that emails between TASC executives Al Pisani, John Lovegrow and former HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr, provided details that they "were in talks with each other as well as Mantech executive Bob Frisbie on a 'recompete' pursuant to 'counter intelligence' operations that were already being conducted on behalf of the federal government by another firm, SAIC, with which they hoped to compete for contracts."
In fact, HBGary Federal and TASC may have been cats-paws for defense giant ManTech International in the race to secure U.S. Government cyber-surveillance contracts. Clocking in at No. 22on Washington Technology's "2011 Top 100 list," ManTech earned some $1.46 billion in 2010, largely derived from work in "systems engineering and integration, technology and software development, enterprise security architecture, intelligence operations support, critical infrastructure protection and computer forensics." The firm's major customers include the Defense Department, Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon's geek squad that is busily working to develop software for their Cyber Insider Threat (CINDER) program.
Both HBGary Federal and parent company HBGary, a California-based security firm run by the husband-wife team, Greg Hoglund and Penny Leavy, had been key players for the design of malware, undetectable rootkits and other "full directory exfiltration tools over TCP/IP" for the Defense Department according to documents released by the secret-shredding web site Public Intelligence.
Additional published documents revealed that they and had done so in close collaboration with General Dynamics (Project Cand Task Z), which had requested "multiple protocols to be scoped as viable options ... for VoIP (Skype) protocol, BitTorrent protocol, video over HTTP (port 80), and HTTPS (port 443)" for unnamed secret state agencies.
According to Brown, it appears that Romas/COIN/Odyssey was also big on social media surveillance, especially when it came to "Foreign Mobile" and "Foreign Web" monitoring. Indeed, documents published by Public Intelligence (scooped-up by the HBGary-Anonymous hack) was a ManTech International-HBGary collaboration describing plans for Internet Based Reconnaissance Operations. The October 2010 presentation described plans that would hand "customers," presumably state intelligence agencies but also, as revealed by Anonymous, corporate security entities and public relations firms, the means to perform "native language searching" combined with "non-attributable architecture" and a "small footprint" that can be "as widely or narrowly focused as needed."
ManTech and HBGary promised to provide customers the ability to "Locate/Profile Internet 'Points of Interest'" on "individuals, companies, ISPs" and "organizations," and would do so through "detailed network mapping" that will "identify registered networks and registered domains"; "Graphical network representation based on Active Hosts"; "Operating system and network application identification"; "Identification of possible perimeter defenses" through "Technology Research, Intelligence Gap Fill, Counterintelligence Research" and "Customer Public Image Assessment."
The presentation described the social media monitoring process as one that would "employ highly skilled network professionals (read, ex-spooks and former military intelligence operatives) who will use "Non-attributable Internet access, custom developed toolsets and techniques, Native Language and in-country techniques" that "utilize foreign language search engines, mapping tools" and "iterative researching methodologies" for searching "Websites, picture sites, mapping sites/programs"; "Blogs and social networking sites"; "Forums and Bulletin Boards"; "Network Information: Whois, Trace Route, NetTroll, DNS"; "Archived and cached websites."
Clients who bought into the ManTech-HBGary "product" were promised "Rapid Non-attributable Open Source Research Results"; "Sourced Research Findings"; "Triage level Analysis"; "Vulnerability Assessment" and "Graphical Network and Social Diagramming" via data mining and extensive link analysis.
Undoubtedly, readers recall this is precisely what the National Security Agency has been doing since the 1990s, if not earlier, through their electronic communications intercept program Echelon, a multibillion Pentagon project that conducted corporate espionage for American multinational firms as researcher Nicky Hager revealed in his 1997 piece forCovertAction Quarterly.
Other firms included in Lovegrove's email to Barr indicate that the new Romas/COIN/Odyssey "team" was to have included: "TASC (PMO [Project Management Operations], creative services); HBGary (Strategy, planning, PMO); Akamai (infrastructure); Archimedes Global (Specialized linguistics, strategy, planning); Acclaim Technical Services (specialized linguistics); Mission Essential Personnel (linguistic services); Cipher (strategy, planning operations); PointAbout (rapid mobile application development, list of strategic partners); Google (strategy, mobile application and platform development--long list of strategic partners); Apple (mobile and desktop platform, application assistance--long list of strategic partners). We are trying to schedule an interview with ATT plus some other small app developers."
Recall that AT&T is the NSA's prime telecommunications partner in that agency's illegal driftnet surveillance program and has been the recipient of "retroactive immunity" under the despicable FISA Amendments Act, a law supported by then-Senator Barack Obama. Also recall that the giant tech firm Apple was recently mired in scandal over reports that their mobile phone platform had, without their owners' knowledge or consent, speared geolocational data from the iPhone and then stored this information in an Apple-controlled data base accessible to law enforcement through various "lawful interception" schemes.
"Whatever the exact nature and scope of COIN," Brown writes, "the firms that had been assembled for the purpose by Barr and TASC never got a chance to bid on the program's recompete. In late September, Lovegrove noted to Barr and others that he'd spoken to the 'CO [contracting officer] for COIN'." The TASC executive told Barr that "the current procurement approach" was cancelled, citing "changed requirements."
Apparently the Pentagon, or other unspecified secret state satrapy told the contestants that "an updated RFI [request for information]" will be issued soon. According to a later missive from Lovegrove to Barr, "COIN has been replaced by a procurement called Odyssey." While it is still not entirely clear what Romas/COIN or the Odyssey program would do once deployed, Brown claims that "mobile phone software and applications constitute a major component of the program."
And given Barr's monomaniacal obsession with social media surveillance (that worked out well with Anonymous!) the presence of Alterian and SocialEyez on the procurement team may indicate that the secret state is alarmed by the prospect that the "Arab Spring" just might slip from proverbial "safe hands" and threaten Gulf dictatorships and Saudi Arabia with the frightening specter of democratic transformation.
Although the email from TASC executive Chris Clair to John Lovegrow names "Alterion" as a company to contact because of their their "SM2 tool," in all likelihood this is a typo given the fact that it is the UK-based firm "Alterian" that has developed said SM2 tool, described on their web site as a "business intelligence product that provides visibility into social media and lets you tap into a new kind of data resource; your customers' direct thoughts and opinions."
This would be a highly-profitable partnership indeed for enterprising intelligence agencies and opaque corporate partners intent on monitoring political developments across the Middle East.
In fact, a 2010 press release, announced that Alterian had forged a partnership with the Dubai-based firm SocialEyez for "the world's first social media monitoring service designed for the Arab market."
We're informed that SocialEyez, a division of Media Watch Middle East, described as "the leading media monitoring service in the Middle East," offers services in "television, radio, social media, online news and internet monitoring across most sectors including commercial, government and PR."
That Barr and his partners were interested in bringing these firms to the Romas/COIN table is not surprising considering that the Alterian/SocialEyez deal promises "to develop and launch an Arabic language interface for Alterian SM2 to make it the world's first Arab language social media monitoring tool." Inquiring minds can't help but wonder which three-lettered American agencies alongside a stable of "corporate and government clients, including leading Blue Chips" might be interested in "maximising their social media monitoring investment"?
Pentagon "Manhunters" in the HouseOn an even more sinister note, the inclusion of Archimedes Global on the Romas/COIN team should set alarm bells ringing.
Archimedes is a small, privately-held niche security firm headquartered in Tampa, Florida where, surprise, surprise, U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) has it's main headquarters at the MacDill Air Force Base. On their web site, Archimedes describes itself as "a diversified technology company providing energy and information solutions to government and businesses worldwide." The firm claims that it "delivers solutions" to its clients by "combining deep domain expertise, multi-disciplinary education and training, and technology-enabled innovations."
While short on information regarding what it actually does, evidence suggests that the firm is chock-a-block with former spooks and Special Forces operators, skilled in the black arts of counterintelligence, various information operations, subversion and, let's be frank, tasks euphemistically referred to in the grisly trade as "wet work."
According to The Washington Post, the firm was established in 2005. However, although the Post claims in their "Top Secret America" series that the number of employees and revenue is "unknown," Dana Priest and William M. Arkin note that Archimedes have five government clients and are have speared contracts relating to "Ground forces operations," "Human intelligence," Psychological operations," and "Specialized military operations."
Brown relates that Archimedes was slated to provide "Specialized linguistics, strategy, planning" for the proposed Romas/COIN/Odyssey project for an unknown U.S. Government entity.
Based on available evidence however, one can speculate that Archimedes may have been chosen as part of the HBGary Federal/TASC team precisely because of their previous work as private contractors in human intelligence (HUMINT), running spies and infiltrating assets into organizations of interest to the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) throughout the Middle East, Central- and South Asia.
In 2009, Antifascist Calling revealed that one of Archimedes Global's senior directors, retired Air Force Lt. Colonel George A. Crawford, published a chilling monograph, Manhunting: Counter-Network Organizing for Irregular Warfare, for the highly-influential Joint Special Operations University (JSOU) at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa.
JSOU is the "educational component" of United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). With a mission that touts its ability to "plan and synchronize operations" against America's geopolitical adversaries and rivals, JSOU's Strategic Studies Department "advances SOF strategic influence by its interaction in academic, interagency, and United States military communities."
Accordingly, Archimedes "information and risk" brief claim they can solve "the most difficult communication and risk problems by seeing over the horizon with a blend of art and science." And with focus areas that include "strategic communications, media analysis and support, crisis communications, and risk and vulnerability assessment and mitigation," it doesn't take a rocket scientist to infer that those well-schooled in the dark art of information operations (INFOOPS) would find a friendly home inside the Romas/COIN contract team.
With some 25-years experience "as a foreign area officer specializing in Eastern Europe and Central Asia," including a stint "as acting Air and Defense Attaché to Kyrgyzstan," Crawford brings an interesting skill-set to the table. Crawford writes:
Indeed, "hope and change" huckster Barack Obama had the temerity to assert that the President "bears no greater responsibility than ensuring the safety and security of the American people."
Pity that others, including CIA "black site" prisoners tortured to death to "keep us safe" (some 100 at last count) aren't extended the same courtesy as The Washington Post reported last week.
As Secrecy News editor Steven Aftergood correctly points out, the claim that the President "has no greater responsibility than 'protecting the American people' is a paternalistic invention that is historically unfounded and potentially damaging to the political heritage of the nation."
Aftergood avers, "the presidential oath of office that is prescribed by the U.S. Constitution (Art. II, sect. 1) makes it clear that the President's supreme responsibility is to '...preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.' There is no mention of public safety. It is the constitutional order that the President is sworn to protect, even if doing so entails risks to the safety and security of the American people."
But as our former republic slips ever-closer towards corporate dictatorship, Obama's mendacious twaddle about "protecting the American people," serves only to obscure, and reinforce, the inescapable fact that it's a rigged game.
Rest assured, "what happens in Vegas," Baghdad, Kabul or Manama--from driftnet spying to political-inspired witchhunts toillegal detention--won't, and hasn't, "stayed in Vegas."
Cyber Here, Cyber There, Cyber-Surveillance Everywhere
Last month, researcher Barrett Brown and the OpMetalGearnetwork lifted the lid on a new U.S. Government-sponsored cyber-surveillance project, Romas/COIN, now Odyssey, a multiyear, multimillion dollar enterprise currently run by defense and security giant Northrop Grumman.
With some $10.8 billion in revenue largely derived from contracts with the Defense Department, Northrop Grumman was No. 2 on the Washington Technology 2011 Top 100 List of Prime Federal Contractors.
"For at least two years," Brown writes, "the U.S. has been conducting a secretive and immensely sophisticated campaign of mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world, allowing the intelligence community to monitor the habits, conversations, and activity of millions of individuals at once."
Information on this shadowy program was derived by scrutinizing hundreds of the more than 70,000 HBGary emails leaked onto the web by the cyber-guerrilla collective Anonymous.
Brown uncovered evidence that the "top contender to win the federal contract and thus take over the program is a team of about a dozen companies which were brought together in large part by Aaron Barr--the same disgraced CEO who resigned from his own firm earlier this year after he was discovered to have planned a full-scale information war against political activists at the behest of corporate clients."
Readers will recall that Barr claimed he could exploit social media to gather information about WikiLeaks supporters in a bid to destroy that organization. Earlier this year, Barr told theFinancial Times he had used scraping techniques and had infiltrated WikiLeaks supporter Anonymous, in part by using IRC, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites.
According to emails subsequently released by Anonymous, it was revealed that the ultra rightist U.S. Chamber of Commerce had hired white shoe law firm Hunton & Williams, and that Hunton attorneys, upon recommendation of an unnamed U.S. Department of Justice official, solicited a set of private security contractors--HBGary, HBGary Federal, Palantir and Berico Technologies (collectively known as Team Themis)--and stitched-up a sabotage campaign against WikiLeaks, journalists, labor unions, progressive political groups and Chamber critics.
Amongst the firms who sought to grab the Romas/COIN/Odyssey contract from Northrop when it came up for a "recompete" wasTASC, which describes itself as "a renowned provider of advanced systems engineering, integration and decision-support services across the intelligence, defense, homeland security and federal markets."
According to Bloomberg BusinessWeek, TASC's head of "Cybersecurity Initiatives," Larry Strang, was formerly a Vice President with Northrop Grumman who led that firm's Cybersecurity Group and served as Northrop's NSA Account Manager. Prior to that, Strang, a retired Air Force Lt. Colonel, was Vice President for Operations at the spooky Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).
Brown relates that emails between TASC executives Al Pisani, John Lovegrow and former HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr, provided details that they "were in talks with each other as well as Mantech executive Bob Frisbie on a 'recompete' pursuant to 'counter intelligence' operations that were already being conducted on behalf of the federal government by another firm, SAIC, with which they hoped to compete for contracts."
In fact, HBGary Federal and TASC may have been cats-paws for defense giant ManTech International in the race to secure U.S. Government cyber-surveillance contracts. Clocking in at No. 22on Washington Technology's "2011 Top 100 list," ManTech earned some $1.46 billion in 2010, largely derived from work in "systems engineering and integration, technology and software development, enterprise security architecture, intelligence operations support, critical infrastructure protection and computer forensics." The firm's major customers include the Defense Department, Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon's geek squad that is busily working to develop software for their Cyber Insider Threat (CINDER) program.
Both HBGary Federal and parent company HBGary, a California-based security firm run by the husband-wife team, Greg Hoglund and Penny Leavy, had been key players for the design of malware, undetectable rootkits and other "full directory exfiltration tools over TCP/IP" for the Defense Department according to documents released by the secret-shredding web site Public Intelligence.
Additional published documents revealed that they and had done so in close collaboration with General Dynamics (Project Cand Task Z), which had requested "multiple protocols to be scoped as viable options ... for VoIP (Skype) protocol, BitTorrent protocol, video over HTTP (port 80), and HTTPS (port 443)" for unnamed secret state agencies.
According to Brown, it appears that Romas/COIN/Odyssey was also big on social media surveillance, especially when it came to "Foreign Mobile" and "Foreign Web" monitoring. Indeed, documents published by Public Intelligence (scooped-up by the HBGary-Anonymous hack) was a ManTech International-HBGary collaboration describing plans for Internet Based Reconnaissance Operations. The October 2010 presentation described plans that would hand "customers," presumably state intelligence agencies but also, as revealed by Anonymous, corporate security entities and public relations firms, the means to perform "native language searching" combined with "non-attributable architecture" and a "small footprint" that can be "as widely or narrowly focused as needed."
ManTech and HBGary promised to provide customers the ability to "Locate/Profile Internet 'Points of Interest'" on "individuals, companies, ISPs" and "organizations," and would do so through "detailed network mapping" that will "identify registered networks and registered domains"; "Graphical network representation based on Active Hosts"; "Operating system and network application identification"; "Identification of possible perimeter defenses" through "Technology Research, Intelligence Gap Fill, Counterintelligence Research" and "Customer Public Image Assessment."
The presentation described the social media monitoring process as one that would "employ highly skilled network professionals (read, ex-spooks and former military intelligence operatives) who will use "Non-attributable Internet access, custom developed toolsets and techniques, Native Language and in-country techniques" that "utilize foreign language search engines, mapping tools" and "iterative researching methodologies" for searching "Websites, picture sites, mapping sites/programs"; "Blogs and social networking sites"; "Forums and Bulletin Boards"; "Network Information: Whois, Trace Route, NetTroll, DNS"; "Archived and cached websites."
Clients who bought into the ManTech-HBGary "product" were promised "Rapid Non-attributable Open Source Research Results"; "Sourced Research Findings"; "Triage level Analysis"; "Vulnerability Assessment" and "Graphical Network and Social Diagramming" via data mining and extensive link analysis.
Undoubtedly, readers recall this is precisely what the National Security Agency has been doing since the 1990s, if not earlier, through their electronic communications intercept program Echelon, a multibillion Pentagon project that conducted corporate espionage for American multinational firms as researcher Nicky Hager revealed in his 1997 piece forCovertAction Quarterly.
Other firms included in Lovegrove's email to Barr indicate that the new Romas/COIN/Odyssey "team" was to have included: "TASC (PMO [Project Management Operations], creative services); HBGary (Strategy, planning, PMO); Akamai (infrastructure); Archimedes Global (Specialized linguistics, strategy, planning); Acclaim Technical Services (specialized linguistics); Mission Essential Personnel (linguistic services); Cipher (strategy, planning operations); PointAbout (rapid mobile application development, list of strategic partners); Google (strategy, mobile application and platform development--long list of strategic partners); Apple (mobile and desktop platform, application assistance--long list of strategic partners). We are trying to schedule an interview with ATT plus some other small app developers."
Recall that AT&T is the NSA's prime telecommunications partner in that agency's illegal driftnet surveillance program and has been the recipient of "retroactive immunity" under the despicable FISA Amendments Act, a law supported by then-Senator Barack Obama. Also recall that the giant tech firm Apple was recently mired in scandal over reports that their mobile phone platform had, without their owners' knowledge or consent, speared geolocational data from the iPhone and then stored this information in an Apple-controlled data base accessible to law enforcement through various "lawful interception" schemes.
"Whatever the exact nature and scope of COIN," Brown writes, "the firms that had been assembled for the purpose by Barr and TASC never got a chance to bid on the program's recompete. In late September, Lovegrove noted to Barr and others that he'd spoken to the 'CO [contracting officer] for COIN'." The TASC executive told Barr that "the current procurement approach" was cancelled, citing "changed requirements."
Apparently the Pentagon, or other unspecified secret state satrapy told the contestants that "an updated RFI [request for information]" will be issued soon. According to a later missive from Lovegrove to Barr, "COIN has been replaced by a procurement called Odyssey." While it is still not entirely clear what Romas/COIN or the Odyssey program would do once deployed, Brown claims that "mobile phone software and applications constitute a major component of the program."
And given Barr's monomaniacal obsession with social media surveillance (that worked out well with Anonymous!) the presence of Alterian and SocialEyez on the procurement team may indicate that the secret state is alarmed by the prospect that the "Arab Spring" just might slip from proverbial "safe hands" and threaten Gulf dictatorships and Saudi Arabia with the frightening specter of democratic transformation.
Although the email from TASC executive Chris Clair to John Lovegrow names "Alterion" as a company to contact because of their their "SM2 tool," in all likelihood this is a typo given the fact that it is the UK-based firm "Alterian" that has developed said SM2 tool, described on their web site as a "business intelligence product that provides visibility into social media and lets you tap into a new kind of data resource; your customers' direct thoughts and opinions."
This would be a highly-profitable partnership indeed for enterprising intelligence agencies and opaque corporate partners intent on monitoring political developments across the Middle East.
In fact, a 2010 press release, announced that Alterian had forged a partnership with the Dubai-based firm SocialEyez for "the world's first social media monitoring service designed for the Arab market."
We're informed that SocialEyez, a division of Media Watch Middle East, described as "the leading media monitoring service in the Middle East," offers services in "television, radio, social media, online news and internet monitoring across most sectors including commercial, government and PR."
That Barr and his partners were interested in bringing these firms to the Romas/COIN table is not surprising considering that the Alterian/SocialEyez deal promises "to develop and launch an Arabic language interface for Alterian SM2 to make it the world's first Arab language social media monitoring tool." Inquiring minds can't help but wonder which three-lettered American agencies alongside a stable of "corporate and government clients, including leading Blue Chips" might be interested in "maximising their social media monitoring investment"?
Pentagon "Manhunters" in the HouseOn an even more sinister note, the inclusion of Archimedes Global on the Romas/COIN team should set alarm bells ringing.
Archimedes is a small, privately-held niche security firm headquartered in Tampa, Florida where, surprise, surprise, U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) has it's main headquarters at the MacDill Air Force Base. On their web site, Archimedes describes itself as "a diversified technology company providing energy and information solutions to government and businesses worldwide." The firm claims that it "delivers solutions" to its clients by "combining deep domain expertise, multi-disciplinary education and training, and technology-enabled innovations."
While short on information regarding what it actually does, evidence suggests that the firm is chock-a-block with former spooks and Special Forces operators, skilled in the black arts of counterintelligence, various information operations, subversion and, let's be frank, tasks euphemistically referred to in the grisly trade as "wet work."
According to The Washington Post, the firm was established in 2005. However, although the Post claims in their "Top Secret America" series that the number of employees and revenue is "unknown," Dana Priest and William M. Arkin note that Archimedes have five government clients and are have speared contracts relating to "Ground forces operations," "Human intelligence," Psychological operations," and "Specialized military operations."
Brown relates that Archimedes was slated to provide "Specialized linguistics, strategy, planning" for the proposed Romas/COIN/Odyssey project for an unknown U.S. Government entity.
Based on available evidence however, one can speculate that Archimedes may have been chosen as part of the HBGary Federal/TASC team precisely because of their previous work as private contractors in human intelligence (HUMINT), running spies and infiltrating assets into organizations of interest to the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) throughout the Middle East, Central- and South Asia.
In 2009, Antifascist Calling revealed that one of Archimedes Global's senior directors, retired Air Force Lt. Colonel George A. Crawford, published a chilling monograph, Manhunting: Counter-Network Organizing for Irregular Warfare, for the highly-influential Joint Special Operations University (JSOU) at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa.
JSOU is the "educational component" of United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). With a mission that touts its ability to "plan and synchronize operations" against America's geopolitical adversaries and rivals, JSOU's Strategic Studies Department "advances SOF strategic influence by its interaction in academic, interagency, and United States military communities."
Accordingly, Archimedes "information and risk" brief claim they can solve "the most difficult communication and risk problems by seeing over the horizon with a blend of art and science." And with focus areas that include "strategic communications, media analysis and support, crisis communications, and risk and vulnerability assessment and mitigation," it doesn't take a rocket scientist to infer that those well-schooled in the dark art of information operations (INFOOPS) would find a friendly home inside the Romas/COIN contract team.
With some 25-years experience "as a foreign area officer specializing in Eastern Europe and Central Asia," including a stint "as acting Air and Defense Attaché to Kyrgyzstan," Crawford brings an interesting skill-set to the table. Crawford writes:
Manhunting--the
deliberate concentration of national power to find, influence, capture,
or when necessary kill an individual to disrupt a human network--has
emerged as a key component of operations to counter irregular warfare
adversaries in lieu of traditional state-on-state conflict measures. It
has arguably become a primary area of emphasis in countering terrorist
and insurgent opponents. (George A. Crawford, Manhunting:
Counter-Network Organization for Irregular Warfare, JSOU Report 09-7,
The JSOU Press, Hurlburt Field, Florida, September 2009, p. 1)
Acknowledged manhunting masters in their own right, the Israeli settler-colonial security apparat have perfected the art of "targeted killing," when they aren't dropping banned munitions such as white phosphorus on unarmed, defenseless civilian populations or attacking civilian vessels on the high seas.
Like their Israeli counterparts who come highly recommended as models of restraint, an American manhunting agency will employ similarly subtle, though no less lethal, tactics. Crawford informs us:
Acknowledged manhunting masters in their own right, the Israeli settler-colonial security apparat have perfected the art of "targeted killing," when they aren't dropping banned munitions such as white phosphorus on unarmed, defenseless civilian populations or attacking civilian vessels on the high seas.
Like their Israeli counterparts who come highly recommended as models of restraint, an American manhunting agency will employ similarly subtle, though no less lethal, tactics. Crawford informs us:
When
compared with conventional force-on-force warfare, manhunting
fundamentally alters the ratio between warfare's respective firepower,
maneuver, and psychological elements. Firepower becomes less significant
in terms of mass, while the precision and discretion with which
firepower is employed takes on tremendous significance, especially
during influence operations. Why drop a bomb when effects operations or a
knife might do? (Crawford, op. cit., p. 11, emphasis added)
Alongside actual shooters, "sensitive site exploitation (SSE) teams are critical operational components for Pentagon "manhunters." We're told that SSE teams will be assembled and able to respond on-call "in the event of a raid on a suspect site or to conduct independent 'break-in and search' operations without leaving evidence of their intrusion." Such teams must possess "individual skills" such as "physical forensics, computer or electronic exploitation, document exploitation, investigative techniques, biometric collection, interrogation/debriefing and related skills."
As if to drive home the point that the target of such sinister operations are the American people and world public opinion, Crawford, ever the consummate INFOOPS warrior, views "strategic information operations" as key to this murderous enterprise. Indeed, they "must be delicately woven into planned kinetic operations to increase the probability that a given operation or campaign will achieve its intended effect."
Alongside actual shooters, "sensitive site exploitation (SSE) teams are critical operational components for Pentagon "manhunters." We're told that SSE teams will be assembled and able to respond on-call "in the event of a raid on a suspect site or to conduct independent 'break-in and search' operations without leaving evidence of their intrusion." Such teams must possess "individual skills" such as "physical forensics, computer or electronic exploitation, document exploitation, investigative techniques, biometric collection, interrogation/debriefing and related skills."
As if to drive home the point that the target of such sinister operations are the American people and world public opinion, Crawford, ever the consummate INFOOPS warrior, views "strategic information operations" as key to this murderous enterprise. Indeed, they "must be delicately woven into planned kinetic operations to increase the probability that a given operation or campaign will achieve its intended effect."
Personnel
skilled at conducting strategic information operations--to include
psychological operations, public information, deception, media and
computer network operations, and related activities--are important for
victory. Despite robust DoD and Intelligence Community capabilities in
this area, efforts to establish organizations that focus information
operations have not been viewed as a positive development by the public
or the media, who perceive government-sponsored information efforts with
suspicion. Consequently, these efforts must take place away from public
eyes. Strategic information operations may also require the
establishment of regional or local offices to ensure dissemination of
influence packages and assess their impact. Thus manhunting influence
may call for parallel or independent structures at all levels..."
(Crawford, op. cit., pp. 27-28, emphasis added)
While we do not as yet have a complete picture of the Romas/COIN/Odyssey project, some preliminary conclusions can be drawn.
"Altogether, then," Brown writes, "a successful bid for the relevant contract was seen to require the combined capabilities of perhaps a dozen firms--capabilities whereby millions of conversations can be monitored and automatically analyzed, whereby a wide range of personal data can be obtained and stored in secret, and whereby some unknown degree of information can be released to a given population through a variety of means and without any hint that the actual source is U.S. military intelligence."
Although Brown's initial research concluded that Romas/COIN/Odyssey will operate "in conjunction with other surveillance and propaganda assets controlled by the U.S. and its partners," with a firm like Archimedes on-board, once information has been assembled on individuals described in other contexts as "radicals" or "key extremists," will they subsequently be made to "disappear" into the hands of "friendly" security services such as those of strategic U.S. partners Bahrain and Saudi Arabia?
We're reminded that "Barr was also at the center of a series of conspiracies by which his own company and two others hired out their collective capabilities for use by corporations that sought to destroy their political enemies by clandestine and dishonest means."
Indeed, "none of the companies involved," Brown writes, have been investigated; a proposed Congressional inquiry was denied by the committee chair, noting that it was the Justice Department's decision as to whether to investigate, even though it was the Justice Department itself that made the initial introductions. Those in the intelligence contracting industry who believe themselves above the law are entirely correct."
Brown warns that "a far greater danger is posed by the practice of arming small and unaccountable groups of state and military personnel with a set of tools by which to achieve better and better 'situational awareness' on entire populations" while simultaneously manipulating "the information flow in such a way as to deceive those same populations."
Beginning, it should be noted, right here at home...
While we do not as yet have a complete picture of the Romas/COIN/Odyssey project, some preliminary conclusions can be drawn.
"Altogether, then," Brown writes, "a successful bid for the relevant contract was seen to require the combined capabilities of perhaps a dozen firms--capabilities whereby millions of conversations can be monitored and automatically analyzed, whereby a wide range of personal data can be obtained and stored in secret, and whereby some unknown degree of information can be released to a given population through a variety of means and without any hint that the actual source is U.S. military intelligence."
Although Brown's initial research concluded that Romas/COIN/Odyssey will operate "in conjunction with other surveillance and propaganda assets controlled by the U.S. and its partners," with a firm like Archimedes on-board, once information has been assembled on individuals described in other contexts as "radicals" or "key extremists," will they subsequently be made to "disappear" into the hands of "friendly" security services such as those of strategic U.S. partners Bahrain and Saudi Arabia?
We're reminded that "Barr was also at the center of a series of conspiracies by which his own company and two others hired out their collective capabilities for use by corporations that sought to destroy their political enemies by clandestine and dishonest means."
Indeed, "none of the companies involved," Brown writes, have been investigated; a proposed Congressional inquiry was denied by the committee chair, noting that it was the Justice Department's decision as to whether to investigate, even though it was the Justice Department itself that made the initial introductions. Those in the intelligence contracting industry who believe themselves above the law are entirely correct."
Brown warns that "a far greater danger is posed by the practice of arming small and unaccountable groups of state and military personnel with a set of tools by which to achieve better and better 'situational awareness' on entire populations" while simultaneously manipulating "the information flow in such a way as to deceive those same populations."
Beginning, it should be noted, right here at home...
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July 6, 2011
In-Depth Issues:
After Hama...No Reform in Syria - Tariq Alhomayed (Asharq Al-Awsat)
After hundreds of thousands of Syrians came out to demonstrate in Hama, President Bashar al-Assad relieved the governor of Hama from his duties.
The security forces and the army did not interfere with the demonstrators in Hama on Friday; this action is believed to have led to the dismissal of the city's governor.
In other words, the governor was not fired because there were large numbers of dead and wounded, rather his offense was allowing peaceful demonstrations to take place.
Rather than implement promises of reform, the Syrian regime sacked a governor that protected unarmed demonstrators from the wrath of the security forces.
Swiss Company Cancels Deal to Sell Cement to Gaza Flotilla Organizers - Amira Hass (Ha'aretz)
The Swiss company Interbulk, that had sold 3,000 tons of cement to Swedish activists planning to sail to Gaza as part of the flotilla, said Wednesday that it had decided to cancel the deal.
Syria's Digital Revolution (Deutsche Welle-Germany)
As the uprising in Syria has swelled in number, so too has the activity on social media networks. The Facebook page, "The Syrian Revolution 2011," has amassed more than 200,000 followers.
YouTube video uploads from Syria have exploded, showing rallies, demonstrations and violence.
Tapping into Turkish cell phone providers has allowed Syrians to send messages without being tracked by authorities.
The online images have also served to waken Syrians from a four-decade-long slumber: Faced with raw, unedited proof of President Assad's brutal tactics, many have been forced to take a stance.
Iran's Execution Binge - Mark D. Wallace (Los Angeles Times)
Since January, Iran has been on an execution binge. In February, the UN reported that the rate of executions in Iran had increased threefold in 2011 over the previous year. It is estimated that more than 140 people have been executed in Iran so far this year.
Amnesty International reported that Iran is the only country this year known to have executed juvenile offenders, a violation of international law.
13 people had been hanged in public by the end of April, evidence of Iran's effort to intimidate and terrorize its own population. In a number of instances, those executed have been left hanging high in the air on construction cranes for all to see.
Israel's Defense Expenditures as Share of GDP Drop Sharply - Avital Lahav (Ynet News)
In 2009, Israel devoted 7.8% of its gross domestic product (GDP) to defense expenditures, a study by the Central Bureau of Statistics shows.
After the Yom Kippur War, from 1976 to 1995, defense expenditures dropped gradually, but in 1996 an upward trend began. Since the economy experienced rapid growth in those years, the defense expenditure as a percentage of the GDP continued to drop.
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- UN to Discuss Palestine Membership in July
The UN Security Council plans to discuss in July the possibility of Palestine becoming a UN member state. An open debate on the Middle East has been scheduled for July 26. "I think (that) will be an occasion to explore the various options that might exist on the Palestinian side," said German Ambassador Peter Wittig, UN Security Council president. (Reuters-Telegraph-UK) - Weapons Prove Iranian Role in Iraq, U.S. Says - Ed O'Keefe and Joby Warrick
James F. Jeffrey, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, said Tuesday that fresh forensic testing on weapons used in the latest deadly attacks in the country bolsters assertions by U.S. officials that Iran is supporting Iraqi insurgents with new weapons and training. "We're seeing more lethal weapons, more accurate weapons, more longer-range weapons," Jeffrey added. "We're seeing more sophisticated mobile and other deployment options, and we're seeing better-trained people." In some cases, insurgents made no effort to remove from the weapons identification numbers suggesting that they came from Iran, "which in itself is troubling," Jeffrey said. (Washington Post) - Egypt Secular Party Leader: 9/11 "Made in USA"; Holocaust a "Lie" - Ben Birnbaum
Ahmed Ezz El-Arab, a vice chairman of Egypt's top secular party - the Wafd Party, told the Washington Times in an interview that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were "made in the USA," Osama bin Laden was "an American agent," and that the Holocaust is "a lie." Last month, Wafd announced it would run jointly in September's parliamentary elections with the Muslim Brotherhood.
But Mr. Ezz El-Arab said there is "no chance at all" that Egypt might cancel its 1979 peace treaty with Israel. "Egypt will not go to war unless it's attacked," he said. (Washington Times)
See also Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood Expels Five Influential Young Members - Jeffrey Fleishman
The Muslim Brotherhood has expelled five of its youth members in a purge, signaling that the Brotherhood's conservative elders can no longer command loyalty from all of its estimated 600,000 members. "The decision to expel young Brotherhood members shows the absolute control conservatives have over the group, especially members of the politburo, who are known for their religious radicalism," said Nabil Abdel Fattah, an analyst from the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. "Those traditionalists and conservatives consider young members and their thoughts a threat." (Los Angeles Times)
- Israel, Turkey Rush to End Flotilla Crisis before UN Report - Herb Keinon
Israeli and Turkish representatives are trying to reach a formula to end the Mavi Marmara affair before a UN report on the incident, expected to be issued on Thursday, that could potentially exacerbate tensions between the two countries. The Turks are demanding an Israeli apology and compensation to the victims, but Israel has said that while it was willing to pay compensation, it would not apologize. (Jerusalem Post)
See also Turkey Reaches Out to the New Middle East - Semih Idiz
Turkey is realigning its Middle East policy and coordinating its movements much more closely with the West than was the case a few months ago. Clearly the period of "idealism" in Ankara's foreign policy ended with the events in Libya and Syria. Now is the time of realism and pragmatism. This is also what is behind the much reported talks between Turkey and Israel aimed at overcoming the bad blood resulting from the Mavi Marmara incident.
Meanwhile, Iran is reemerging as a problematic neighbor for Ankara, firstly because the Mullah regime is badmouthing Turkey for speaking out against Syria's Assad, and secondly because of Iran's threats to hit U.S./NATO bases in the region, backed up by ballistic missile tests. (Hurriyet-Turkey) - Israel: Fly-in "Hooligans" Will Be Deported - Ahiya Raved
In response to an announced pro-Palestinian fly-in to Ben-Gurion International Airport, Internal Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch said Tuesday: "In the coming days we're expecting hundreds of radical activists to arrive from all over Europe with the intent of creating provocations and illegal protests aimed at hurting our legitimacy....Any hooligans who might try to break the law will not be permitted to enter Israel and will be sent back to their countries of origin." (Ynet News) - Two Palestinians Preparing to Launch Rocket at Israel Killed in IDF Airstrike - Yaakov Katz
Mohammed Sa'id and Kamal Abu Moamer, members of a Global Jihad terror cell preparing to launch a rocket into Israel, were killed Tuesday in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza. Minutes later, Palestinians opened fire at Israeli workers along the Gaza border. A car passing nearby was hit and the driver wounded. (Jerusalem Post)
- Does Iran's Latest Military Exercise Signal a New Defense Doctrine? - Lt. Col. (ret.) Michael Segall
Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) is in the midst of a large-scale missile exercise called "Great Prophet 6." In a wide-ranging interview aimed at Arab audiences on the Arabic-language TV channel Al-Alam, Brig.-Gen. Amir Ali Hagizadeh discussed at length the IRGC exercise and its objectives. The extensive interview with Hagizadeh suggests that Iran is devoting much thought to its deterrence doctrine against those it regards as its main threats in the region, namely, Israel and the U.S.
He said the U.S. had made things easier for Iran by building 40-50 bases at a distance of 200-300 km. from Iran, so Iran does not need to build missiles with a range longer than 2,000 km. (which covers Israel and part of Europe). The air force commander referred directly to regions where Iran is already implementing its asymmetric operational strategy regarding the use of surface-to-surface missiles (SSMs) of different ranges. He went on to imply that Iran has good intelligence-gathering capabilities for Israel because, using radar, it can detect the departure of Israeli planes at the moment of take-off from the "Palestinian territories" (meaning Israel).
Responding to a question about how many missiles Iran has and their deployment areas, Hagizadeh noted that since this information is classified he will answer indirectly. He then said that during the Second Lebanon War (the "Thirty-Three Day War"), Hizbullah kept firing missiles throughout the conflict and, unlike in usual circumstances where the ability to fire decreases with time, Hizbullah in fact increased its rate of fire and even the range of the missiles, while Israel failed to destroy the organization's weapons caches. It is evident that Hagizadeh views Lebanon as a forward missile base for Iran. (Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs) - More Diplomatic Theater? - Gerald M. Steinberg
Some key European officials realize that the UN effort is yet another means for Abbas and the PLO to avoid direct negotiations with Israel along with the necessary compromises on refugee claims, Jerusalem and recognizing the Jewish right to national sovereignty. There are also signs that some parts of Palestinian society - particularly in the West Bank - are less than enthusiastic about this scenario of symbolic independence and possible confrontation. In recent years their economic situation has improved dramatically. Another period of instability, terrorism and the necessary Israeli responses to protect Israeli civilians would quickly destroy all of these gains.
The Jordanian leadership has never been enthusiastic about a Palestinian state on its borders, with its potential spillover into Jordan's own Palestinian population. The writer, professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University, is the founder of NGO Monitor. (bitterlemons.org)
- The assumption on which the 1990s Oslo peace process was based is precisely the same as President Obama's premise as outlined in his May 19 State Department speech: The Palestinians are eager to get a state of their own; consequently they are willing to make concessions, they will live up to their commitments, and international security guarantees can be relied upon as a fail-safe.
- Palestinians eager? They aren't eager. Many Palestinian leaders frequently say that it is worth decades of not getting a state and continuing to fight in order to get everything in the end. They also say the current generation has no right to close the door to total victory and Israel's destruction by future generations. They mistakenly believe time is on their side.
- Consequently are they willing to make concessions? Neither Palestinian public opinion nor the political balance of forces allows for the more moderate sector of the leadership (which is very small) to make the needed concessions and compromises.
- They will live up to their commitments? Systematically stopping and punishing terrorism? No. Preparing their people for peace? No. Ending incitement against Israel? No. Refraining from violence? No.
- International
guarantees? Worthless. There is a long list of examples, including most
recently the failure to stop Hizbullah's return to southern Lebanon and
the end to Syrian-Iranian arms smuggling to the group, as pledged by
the U.S. and UN after 2006.
The writer is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center at IDC Herzliya.
News stories
| July 6, 2011 |
|
The Indian Army is set to place orders for additional Arjun main battle tanks (MBT) mkII version, Combat Vehicles Research and Development Establishment director P Sivakumar has said.
Lockheed Awarded US Army T2K Missile Systems Contract
Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control has been awarded a $145.46m firm-fixed-price contract by the US Army Contracting Command for army tactical missile systems (TACMS) block 1A.
Russian Armed Forces to Remain at a Million
The number of Russian Armed Forces personnel will not be downsized to fewer than a million, Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov has said.
India to Test New Tactical Missile
India will flight-test a new short-range tactical surface-to-surface missile, Prahaar (which means to strike), for the first time on 17 July 2011.
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