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Where Have You Gone, Smedley Butler?
Danny Sjursen
There once lived an odd little man – five feet nine inches tall and barely 140 pounds sopping wet – who rocked the lecture circuit and the nation itself. For all but a few activist insiders and scholars, U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington Butler is now lost to history. Yet more than a century ago, this strange contradiction of a man would become a national war hero, celebrated in pulp adventure novels, and then, 30 years later, as one of this country’s most prominent antiwar and anti-imperialist dissidents … In 1935 during the Great Depression, in what became a classic passage in his memoir, which he titled “War Is a Racket,” he wrote: “I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service … And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers.”
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Franz Boas: Liberal Icon, Scientific Fraud
Sam Francis
Two of the major superstitions of our time are the notion that man is merely a blank slate whose behavior is merely the product of the social environment and its sister, that race doesn’t exist. Yet one by one, the pseudo-scientific sources of these myths are being discredited by serious scientists, and last week, one of the biggest sources of all took a nose dive. Franz Boas, often called the grandfather of modern anthropology and a pioneer pusher of the idea that race is not a very meaningful concept, merely a “social construct” not found in nature, probably ranks with Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud as one of the most influential thinkers of the modern age.
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Dog Breeds Really Do Have Distinct Personalities – And They’re Rooted in DNA
E. Pennisi - Science (AAAS)
American Kennel Club descriptions of dog breeds can read like online dating profiles: The border collie is a workaholic; the German shepherd will put its life on the line for loved ones. Now, in the most comprehensive study of its kind to date, scientists have shown that such distinct breed traits are actually rooted in a dog’s genes. The findings may shed light on human behaviors as well. “It’s a huge advance,” says Elaine Ostrander, a mammalian geneticist at the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, who was not involved with the work. “It’s a finite number of genes, and a lot of them do make sense.” … Trainability, chasing, and a tendency to be aggressive toward strangers were the most highly heritable traits, the scientists report in a paper posted this month …
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Leading Ireland Parties Support Boycott of Israeli 'Settlement' Produce
Middle East Monitor
Leading Irish political parties, Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil, have published election manifestos which support the adoption of the Occupied Territories Bill in Ireland. The bill, first tabled in 2018, bans trade with territories which are considered to be under occupation. Adopting the bill into law would effectively stop trade between Ireland and illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Fianna Fáil’s manifesto, published on 24 January, said the party would “progress the Occupied Territories Bill” in government … Sinn Féin promised to “ban goods from Israel’s illegal colonial settlements in Palestine from entering the Irish market by implementing the Occupied Territories Bill” … A Sinn Fein politician, said that “this Bill aims to uphold international law … clearly this applies to the ongoing disgraceful actions of Israel in the Palestinian West Bank”.
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Austrian Parliament Unanimously Passes Condemnation of Anti-Israel Boycotts
The Times of Israel
The Austrian parliament on Thursday unanimously passed a resolution that calls on the government to condemn the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. All five parties represented in Austria’s National Council — including the Greens and the far-right Freedom Party — supported the text of the “Israel-related anti-Semitism” resolution, which urges the government to “strongly condemn the BDS movement and its goals, especially the call for a boycott of Israeli products, businesses, artists, scientists or athletes.” “The National Council emphatically condemns all kinds of anti-Semitism, including Israel-related anti-Semitism, and calls on the federal government to confront these tendencies resolutely and consequently,” the resolution states.
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Get Ready for Jewsploitation, as Kill Squad Chases Nazis in Amazon’s ‘Hunters’
J. Hoffman – The Times of Israel
… This is the fundamental push-pull I felt watching “Hunters,” of which the first five of 10 episodes were made available to critics. It is undeniably enjoyable — I for one very much want to see the architects of the Final Solution killed by a band of highly skilled Jews in ways that mirror their wartime cruelties — but it’s just too stupid to take seriously … The acts of vengeance are violent and, I suppose I may as well be honest here, gratifying. And many of the flashback scenes to the ghettos and camps are troubling and brutal. But then things go too far in weirdly opposite directions. The series breaks from reality in ways that are grotesque, to the point that it is borderline offensive … Despite this misstep (and others like it) “Hunters” has no shortage of finely-observed Jewish moments.
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The Auschwitz Memorial criticized Amazon Prime’s new show about Nazi hunters on Sunday, calling its depiction of the Holocaust “dangerous foolishness.” “Hunters,” starring Al Pacino, premiered Friday and chronicles a group of people trying to stop Nazis living in 1970s New York City. In one scene, the show features a human chess game in a Nazi concentration camp where people die when a piece in the game is eliminated. The Auschwitz Memorial, which preserves the site of the former German Nazi concentration and extermination camp in Poland, took to Twitter to criticize this scene for its historical inaccuracy and its ramifications. “Inventing a fake game of human chess for [‘Hunters’] is not only dangerous foolishness & caricature. It also welcomes future deniers,” the Memorial said.
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The Big Hollywood Lie: Denying Jewish Control
New American View
… The Jewish denial that Hollywood is controlled by Jews is a great lie which can be attested to by anyone who has ever been associated with the film industry … It is positively insulting for them to deny their influence and power — particularly when they themselves are continually boasting in their own circles about their “overrepresentation” in these fields. And it is absolutely infuriating when this denial reaches the point that non-Jews are attacked by Jewish agitators and Zionist zealots for stating obvious facts and truth.
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The Bulgarian government has prevented an annual neo-Nazi march in Sofia, the country’s capital. The march was to take place last weekend [Feb. 22-23]. The annual torch-lit Lukov march is named after Bulgarian Gen. Hristo Lukov, founder of the pro-Nazi Union of Bulgarian National Legions movement … Lukov was responsible for a Bulgarian law, based on the 1935 Nuremberg Laws in Germany, that stripped Jews of their civil rights. He was assassinated in 1943 by Communist partisans. The Lukov demonstration usually draws thousands of neo-Nazis and right-wing extremists. Bulgaria’s Supreme Administrative Court prohibited the march, ruling that the far-right demonstrators could only lay wreaths at Lukov’s home.
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While the rest of Europe commemorates 75 years of being freed from the scourge of Adolf Hitler, an estimated 600 neo-Nazis from across the continent met up in a Budapest park on Saturday [Feb. 8] to mourn. They gathered in Hungary’s capital for what they call the “Day of Honour”, commemorating an attempted breakout by besieged Nazi forces in 1945. Draped in black and carrying flags of their respective far-right movements from across Europe, they laid wreaths to honour the Nazis and their collaborators who they call “heroes” … After the commemoration, an estimated several thousand people began an overnight march from Budapest, following the almost 60 km (37 mile) route of the attempted breakout to a village northwest of the city. Organisers were also due to host a concert in the evening …
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John Toland on 'Living History'
Video - Institute for Historical Review Video
A fascinating, insightful and inspiring talk by a great American historian. Among John Toland’s outstanding works was The Rising Sun, which earned a Pulitzer Prize, and a best-selling biography, Adolf Hitler. In this lecture at an IHR conference, he looks back at the experiences that made him an acclaimed author. He recalls, for example, his youthful travels across the country on rail freight cars, and his life-long love of the theater. Throughout his decades-long quest for objectivity and non-partisanship in writing real, “living” history, Toland says, he tried to present the past as a dramatic saga of human nobility, defect, triumph, foible, suffering and joy. He humorously relates how he was denounced as a “Nazi” for his efforts to write objectivity, and with understanding, about Hitler and Third Reich Germany.
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Diversity Obsession
Walter E. Williams
A common feature of our time is the extent to which many in our nation have become preoccupied with diversity … By the way, Israel, Japan and South Korea are among the world’s least racially diverse nations. In terms of academic achievement, their students run circles around diversity-crazed Americans. There is one area of college life where administrators demonstrate utter contempt for diversity, and that’s in sports. It is by no means unusual to watch a Saturday afternoon college basketball game and see that the starting five on both teams are black. White players, not to mention Asian players, are underrepresented. Similar underrepresentation is practiced in college football. Where you find whites overrepresented in both sports is on the cheerleading squads, which are mostly composed of white women.
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One in five Europeans believes that a secret network of Jews influences global political and economic affairs, a recent survey found. The same number also agreed with the statement “Jews exploit Holocaust victimhood for their own needs.” The poll queried 16,000 respondents from 16 European countries. It was conducted in December and January in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Poland, and other countries … Other findings: A quarter of respondents agreed with the statement that Israel’s policies make them understand why some people hate Jews; … More than a third agreed with the assertion that “During World War II, people from our nation suffered as much as Jews.”
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Fat Women Are Not a National Priority
Eric Margolis
… While our presidential debate focuses on overweight women and health care, the US and Russia have come terrifyingly close to open war in the Mideast. But barely any mention of this in the debates. Trump and his big money men from New York and Las Vegas are trying to push Iran into an air war. The US is seeking to overthrow the governments of Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, and Iran. Clashes between China and the US are a major danger. Former defense chief Sam Nunn warns the US and Russia are closer to a nuclear conflict than any time since the 1960’s Cuban missile crisis. No matter. Americans want entertainers for their made-for-TV politicians.
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There is growing opposition in Hungary to the government’s modified national curriculum, which aims to instil a spirit of national pride in school pupils. Critics – including many schools and teachers’ organisations – draw parallels with the Communist period, when the governing party imposed its own ideology … Szilard Demeter is a key figure in Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s “culture war” on liberalism … Mr Demeter says he was not consulted on the curriculum, but broadly approves of it. “We must be able to hand our heritage on to future generations. If we have a clear idea of what we mean by family, work, respect, love of the homeland, then we’re duty-bound to transmit that. That’s what public education is about.”
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Amazon has stopped sales of some books on its platform following protests that the titles, including some for children, were Nazi-era propaganda, a source familiar with the matter said Tuesday. The move came days after the Auschwitz museum called on the US tech firm to remove Nazi-era anti-Semitic children’s books from sale. The Auschwitz Memorial tweeted Friday on its official account the books included “hateful, virulently antisemitic Nazi propaganda.” Among the books is an anti-Semitic children’s book titled “The Poisonous Mushroom” authored by Nazi party member Julius Streicher and originally published in 1938. Amazon declined to comment on specific items but said it does take action against some materials which may be offensive.
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Israeli foreign minister Israel Katz on Thursday urged authorities in Belgium to ban an annual parade known for its depictions of anti-Semitic effigies and symbols. The carnival, located in Aalst, is known for its depictions of offensive Jewish caricatures, such as parade floats with oversized dolls and big noses sitting on top of money piles, according to The Jerusalem Post. The organizers of the event have reportedly sold hundreds of “rabbi kits,” which include wearable oversized noses, payot (sidelocks or sideburns), and black hats. “Belgium as a Western democracy should be ashamed to allow such a vitriolic antisemitic display,” Katz said Thursday. “I call upon the authorities there to condemn and ban this hateful parade in Aalst.”
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A Belgian city has defended as “just fun” a carnival featuring caricatures of Orthodox Jews wearing huge fur hats, long fake noses and ant costumes. Israel, Jewish groups and Belgian Prime Minister Sophie Wilmès were among many who strongly condemned the costumes in Sunday’s parade in Aalst. Some critics said likening Jews to ants was similar to Nazi anti-Semitism, which persecuted Jews as “vermin”. The Aalst mayor’s spokesman told the BBC “it’s our humour… just fun”. Peter Van den Bossche said “there isn’t a movement behind it” and “we don’t wish harm to anyone”. “It’s our parade, our humour, people can do whatever they want,” he said. “It’s a weekend of freedom of speech.”
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Trump’s Betrayal of Julian Assange
Ron Paul
… The real tragedy of the Trump presidency is nowhere better demonstrated than in Trump’s 180 degree turn away from Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange. “I know nothing about Wikileaks,” he said as president. “It’s really not my thing.” US pressure and bribes to the Ecuadorian government ended Assange’s asylum and his seven years in a room at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. After his dramatic arrest by London’s Metropolitan Police last April, he has been effectively tortured in British jails at the behest of the US deep state … The Trump Administration – led by a man who praised Assange’s work – seeks a show trial of Assange worthy of the worst of the Soviet era. The US is seeking a 175-year prison sentence.
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The Secret Sharer: Tyler Kent
Peter Rand - History Net
… In 1940 Americans were wary of global conflict. Isolationists took comfort in the Neutrality Act, passed five years before and amended three times since to keep FDR from joining foreign frays or even aiding combatants … Pacifists and isolationists in the Senate and the State Department suspected Ivy Leaguers in the diplomatic corps of dragging the United States into war. Tyler Kent knew those suspicions to be true, and with the copies of telegrams showing Roosevelt violating the Neutrality Act, at least in spirit and probably in deed, he had the papers to prove it. He meant to show his purloined documents to well-placed isolationists, including family friends high in the State Department.
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Sanders Says AIPAC Gives Platform to ‘Express Bigotry,’ Won’t Go to Conference
The Times of Israel
Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders said Sunday that he would skip the upcoming American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference. The Vermont senator said the pro-Israel lobby’s annual confab, which draws top Israeli and US officials, provided a venue for other leaders to disparage Palestinians. “The Israeli people have the right to live in peace and security. So do the Palestinian people,” Sanders tweeted. “I remain concerned about the platform AIPAC provides for leaders who express bigotry and oppose basic Palestinian rights. For that reason I will not attend their conference.”
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Franz Boas: How a 19th Century Progressive Jewish Scientist’s Ideas Beat Out Racist Eugenics
Rich Tenorio - The Times of Israel
In the late 19th century, Americans suddenly became increasingly curious about world cultures … The trendy interest could have taken two different directions: One was a widely-accepted racist worldview built upon the pseudoscience of eugenics. The other was developed by German-Jewish immigrant scholar Franz Boas, who promoted the idea that all cultures are equal and exist along the same continuum. The discipline that Boas founded, today called “anthropology,” is studied worldwide … It was only at the end of World War II that the world finally accepted the approach founded by Boas, which was then brought into mainstream America … Many of the scholars who were influenced by Boas’ work and made important contributions into the 20th century and beyond, were female. They included such household names as Margaret Mead …
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How the Science Wars Ruined the Mother of Anthropology
Matthew Blackwell - Quillette
… [Margaret] Mead was considered a respected honorary member of the society, and her research project blossomed … In 1928, she published the results of her research, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization. It was her instructor, the ‘father’ of American anthropology Franz Boas, who had sent her on a mission to Samoa. In The Mind of Primitive Man, Boas had set out to draw a sharp distinction between race and culture in order to defend his thesis that differences between the world’s peoples are overwhelmingly the result of upbringing rather than evolved traits … The world fell in love with Mead’s romantic description of a paradise of free love gemmed away in the tropical South Pacific – a society with little jealousy, violence, or rape.
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Margaret Mead and the Great Samoan Nurture Hoax
Christopher Badcock, Ph.D. – Psychology Today
… Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa purported to provide ethnographic proof that nurture was the dominant factor in child development and adolescence. Subtitled A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization, Mead’s book was widely read … Whereas Mead claimed that Samoa was permissive about adolescent sex, there was in fact a cult of virginity … He devastatingly demonstrated that Margaret Mead had not written an ethnographic account, but had published a work of social science fiction, albeit one that became enormously influential in modern American culture …
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A former priest involved in Poland’s nationalist movement has been indicted on hate speech and Holocaust denial charges. The District Prosecutor’s Office in the city of Wrocław, in western Poland, brought three indictments against Jacek Miedlar. Another claims that he insulted the late prime minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki. Miedlar, who pleaded not guilty, could face up to three years in prison if convicted on the charges. “Dear ladies and gentlemen, that synagogues can stand here on our Polish soil in Wroclaw, and that Dutkiewicz [mayor of Wroclaw] and Jews can get drunk in them with Talmudic hatred, this is only the result of our tolerance,” Miedlar said at a nationalist march in Wroclaw on Nov. 11, 2017. The prosecutor’s office said the speech incited hatred.
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Employees of the Dutch national railways sang a soccer song about Jews for train passengers that the state-owned company said was “wholly inappropriate.” Nederlandse Spoorwegen, or NS, apologized on Sunday for the incident, which happened just after midnight aboard a train heading from a parade in the southern city of Tilburg to Rotterdam. “Where do the Jews come from? From Israel, far away. Do super Jews live there, too? Yeah, super Jews live there, too. Do Jews like soccer? Only when they’re rooting for Ajax,” the employees sang, the AD newspaper reported based on complaints by some of the passengers.
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Hitler Website in 'Safe Hands'
E. Zlatkis - AJN
A Melbourne [Australia] Jewish businessman has been honoured with the Anti-Defamation Commission (ADC)’s Making a Difference Award for purchasing a website domain named after Adolf Hitler when it was listed for auction last month. The man, who wishes to remain anonymous, bought the domain name adolfhitler.com.au to ensure “this disgusting domain does not end up in the hands of antisemites and neo-Nazis”. The website was being auctioned by Australian domain name platforms Netfleet and Drop, and when contacted by the ADC, a representative of Netfleet replied, “You are quite welcome to bid on the domain yourself, then you can own the domain.” The individual who purchased the domain name donated it to the ADC, and those who visit the website are redirected to the ADC’s home page.
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Collusion: Franklin Roosevelt, British Intelligence, and the Secret Campaign to Push the US Into War
Mark Weber - Institute for Historical Review
… Secretive and unlawful collusion by an American leader with a foreign power that subverts the US political process is not new. The most far-reaching and flagrant case was by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1940-41 … In the months before December 1941, when the US formally entered the war in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt did everything he could to get America into the global conflict without actually declaring war … This cooperation with British intelligence by the President and other high-ranking US officials, as well as with the FBI, the US federal government’s main domestic security and police agency, was quite illegal. Such collusion by the nominally neutral US to further the war aims of a foreign government was contrary to both US law and universally accepted international norms.
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ACLU Has Abandoned Civil Liberties for Crowd-Pleasing Gestures, Former Director Warns
H. Buyniski - RT News
The ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union], once the flagship US civil liberties organization, has abandoned its post right when it’s most needed. Unlike other groups that have sold out for political expediency, it can’t be easily replaced … Former ACLU executive director Ira Glasser recently told UK outlet Spiked he doesn’t think the ACLU would take the Skokie case again … Instead of “defend all speech, as long as it’s legal,” internal ACLU memos leaked to the public in the wake of Charlottesville have urged staffers to keep in mind “the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values” before taking a case.
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Iranians are voting in elections in an exercise widely expected to result in a more hardline parliament loyal to the country’s supreme leader. It is the first such poll since the US renewed sanctions over Iran’s nuclear programme, battering its economy. Thousands of moderate would-be candidates were barred from running for not meeting strict election criteria. Observers say authorities will be hoping for a high voter turnout as a sign of support for the regime … Critics of Iran’s rulers have called on citizens to boycott the polls as a way of showing their opposition to what they say is widespread repression of human rights and intolerance of dissent. The field of candidates running in the election is dominated by conservatives and hardliners, with the outcome likely to politically weaken President Hassan Rouhani, a relative moderate.
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Trends in Iran’s Parliamentary Election 2020
U.S. Institute of Peace (Washington, DC)
Iranians go to the polls on February 21 to vote for all 290 seats in the unicameral Majles. Parliamentary elections, held every four years, often presage which political faction wins the presidency a year later / … 285 seats are directly elected and five are reserved for the following minorities: One seat for Zoroastrians; One seat for Jews; One seat for Assyrian and Chaldean Christians; One seat for Armenian Christians in the north of the country ; One seat for Armenian Christians in the south of the country … To be approved by the Ministry, a candidate must: Be an Iranian citizen; Support the Islamic Republic and pledge loyalty to the constitution; Be a practicing Muslim (except religious minorities candidates); Be in good health and between the ages of 30 and 75; Hold at least a Master’s degree or the equivalent.
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Amazon Stops Selling Hitler-Defending Author’s Book That Says Jews Play 'Exceptionally Active Role in War'
The Jewish Chronicle (Britain)
Amazon has removed two books from sale by an author whose works accuse Jews of having “played an exceptionally active role in promoting and inciting war” and Hitler. The latest book by “Thomas Dalton PhD” — Eternal Strangers: Critical Views of Jews and Judaism Through the Ages — was released last week and follows The Jewish Hand in the World Wars. Both were available to buy through the online retailer, listed as “dispatched from and sold by Amazon”, until antisemitism campaigners raised the alarm.
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NATO’s public image in the United States and France worsened sharply last year, according to a Pew Research Center study, after U.S. President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron questioned the value of the Western alliance. Positive views of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, which relies on the commitment of its allies to collective defence, fell to 52% in the United States last year, from 64% in 2018, the study released on Monday said … Overall, the study said 53% of people in 16 NATO members had a positive opinion of NATO, with less than a third expressing a negative view. The alliance is seen most favorably in Poland and least liked in Turkey.
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Many People in NATO Countries Say `No’ to Supporting a NATO Ally in a Military Conflict With Russia
A. Dick - Ron Paul Institute
NATO is marketed as providing each member nation with the benefit that the other member nations are committed to coming to its aid militarily in the event of an attack by another nation, especially Russia. However, Pew Research Center poll results released Sunday indicate that the majority or plurality of people in 11 of 16 NATO countries where individuals were questioned oppose their respective governments meeting this commitment, at least if the military adversary were Russia. These poll results indicate that serious thought should be given to disbanding NATO, an organization with a primary objective that appears to be at odds with public opinion in many NATO countries.
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… What the small exhibit marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz lacked was any mention of Ford’s role in building the Nazi machine. American Ford retained majority control of its German subsidiary until May of 1942 — three years into the war, nine years after Nazis rose to power, and five months after the United States entered the war — by which time it had built a third of the German army’s trucks … Documents — some of them in possession of the National Archives — show that Ford Motor Company encouraged French Ford to collaborate with Nazis after the Nazi occupation of France … In 1939, Ford Germany contributed 35,000 marks to a 50th birthday gift for Hitler. Company founder Henry Ford, moreover, was a notorious and influential anti-Semite …
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Anti-BDS Laws Violate Our Freedom
Sheldon Richman
Americans’ free-speech and other rights are being violated by state laws aimed at stifling the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) Movement against Israel’s illegal rule of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip … Twenty-eight states have enacted anti-BDS laws or executive orders that prohibit state agencies and state-financed entities, such as colleges, from doing business with any person or firm that hasn’t pledged never to boycott Israeli goods … That those laws have passed state legislatures and been signed by governors is more evidence of the influence – dare I say power? – the Israel lobby routinely wields in American politics. The lobby along with the Israeli government works overtime to destroy the BDS movement and discredit the activists who participate in it.
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An Illegal Assassination and the Lawless President
D. Larison - The American Conservative
The Trump administration’s legal justification for the Soleimani assassination is as preposterous as you would expect it to be … The administration is no longer pretending that the assassination had anything to do with stopping an “imminent” attack. They no longer claim that this is why the assassination was ordered. That by itself is a remarkable admission of the illegality of the strike. If there was no “imminent” attack, the U.S. was taking aggressive action against a high-ranking official from another country. There is no plausible case to be made that this was an act of self-defense. Not only did the president lack the authority to do this on his own, but it would have been illegal under international law even if he had received approval from Congress before doing it.
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… The core issue that the United States is in Syria illegally as a proxy for Israel and Saudi Arabia is not touched on, nor the criminal role in “protecting the oil fields” and stealing their production, which he mentions but does not explain. Nor the issue of the legitimate Syrian government seeking to recover its territory against groups that most everyone admits to be terrorists. Virtually every bit of “evidence” that Jeffrey cites is either false or inflated … It is the United States that must change its policies by getting out of Syria and Iraq for starters while also stopping the deference to feckless “allies” Israel and Saudi Arabia that has produced a debilitating cold war against both Iran and Russia. Another good first step to make the U.S. a “normal, decent country” would be to get rid of the advice of people like James Jeffrey.
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In the two weeks since U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled his “Deal of the Century” for Israel and Palestine, an international tug-of-war has unfolded between two opposing visions … The UN Human Rights Council on Wednesday released a database of 112 businesses that are involved in Israeli settlements … The report’s unveiling is itself an accomplishment, as it provides an important basis for promoting corporate accountability around the Israeli occupation … Palestinians have traditionally enjoyed a majority in this forum; but as the lead-up to this week’s Security Council meeting showed, the United States is prepared to use all the leverage at its disposal to shield Israel’s settlement project from international censure and to force other countries into line.
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Tactics of Organized Jewry in Suppressing Free Speech
Prof. Tony Martin – Institute for Historical Review
… I’m going to try to extract from my experience certain basic sort of tactics that I think the Jewish lobby has used over the years pertaining to my particular situation … The first and major tactic that I discovered in their attack on me was their reliance on lies — just straight-up lies. There’s no other way to describe it, just telling lies. Many of the categories that I will enumerate overlap, and many of them could also come under this general rubric of telling lies. But I think that if one had to isolate a single tactic, it was a tactic of telling lies. I think they’ve elevated telling lies to a very high artistic form.
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America Has Given Up Trying to Define Success in Afghanistan
Eric Boehm - Reason
The United States has spent more than $64 billion rebuilding Afghanistan’s military and police forces since 2001 — but there is literally no way for American taxpayers to know whether their investment has been worth it. “Most of the [indicators] of measuring success are now classified, or we don’t collect it. So I can’t tell you, publicly, how well a job we’re doing on training,” John Sopko, the special inspector general for the Afghanistan reconstruction effort told members of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee on Tuesday [Feb. 11].
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'That’s Classified!' See How Afghanistan War Lies Are Made
B. Boland - The American Conservative
The Afghan government classifies all metrics that would show its failure to reach goals, or stops collecting the information entirely, a government watchdog told a Senate subcommittee led by Sen. Rand Paul today [Feb. 11]. “Do any specific trends lead you to believe that Afghan security forces will one day be able to hold off the Taliban… from being able to stave off attacks on the U.S. homeland?” asked Sen. Josh Hawley, the Republican junior Senator from Missouri. “That’s the 64 billion dollar question,” said John Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. “Most of the indicia for measuring success are now classified, or are not collected…. $64 billion spent and I cannot tell the American people [whether we’ve reached these goals or not] and that’s because we allow the Afghan government to classify the information.”
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Two GOP Senators Rip Afghanistan War: $1 Trillion Spent and ‘We Cannot Show Any Progress’
Washington Examiner
Two key Republican senators, channeling President Trump, this week decried the continued U.S. presence in Afghanistan, arguing that, after 19 years, the goals are muddled, the costs in money and lives unjustifiably high, and the accomplishments unclear. “I want to find a way to end the war,” said Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a longtime opponent of the war … Trump has privately been urging to withdraw troops, as he promised in his 2016 campaign, but has been stalled by Republicans worried about what will happen there in the aftermath. In the meantime, he has been trying to work a peace deal that will ease the withdrawal of troops.
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… A CBS News investigation has found that many accused American pedophiles flee to Israel, and bringing them to justice can be difficult. Jewish Community Watch (JCW), an American organization that tracks accused pedophiles, has been trying for years to find Karow and help bring him to justice. JCW says Karow and other wanted men and women have been able to exploit a right known as the Law of Return, whereby any Jewish person can move to Israel and automatically gain citizenship. Since the small organization started tracking accused pedophiles in 2014, it says more than 60 have fled from the U.S. to Israel. Given its limited resources to identify these individuals, JCW says the actual number is likely much larger.
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‘Whether They Accept It or Not, It’s Going to Happen’ — Netanyahu Lays Out Palestinian Submission to Trump Plan
Philip Weiss
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told American Jews that he and the Trump administration are moving ahead with plans to remap the West Bank to give Israel sovereignty over large portions of occupied territory, and Palestinians are going to have to live with that plan “whether they accept it or not.” Netanyahu’s discussion of Palestinian submission to the “radical” and “historic” terms of the Trump “peace plan” including annexation of all “Jewish communities” and military control of the West Bank sounded very much like surrender … He also said that American Jews depend on Israel. “Without the state of Israel, there is no future for the Jewish people,” he said. “With the state of Israel – secure, powerful – there’s no limit.”
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… Even if Congress agrees to all of President Trump’s cuts, federal deficits will still be over one trillion dollars for the next several years. However, President Trump claims the budget will balance in 15 years. In order to show a balanced budget by 2035, the administration assumes three percent economic growth for most of the next decade. This level of growth is unlikely to come to pass. Instead, the current boom will likely end soon, and the economy will experience another major recession. Signs that we are on the verge of a downturn include rising homelessness and the Federal Reserve’s bailout of the repurchasing market. The current economic boom is built on debt, and the debt-based economy is facilitated by the Federal Reserve’s easy money policies.
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Wake Up, Senators!
Eric Margolis
… Last week, the Senate voted 55-45 for a new bipartisan War Powers Act to constrain military action against Iran. The Congress [House] voted a similar act. Both are designed to start returning the right to make war to Congress, as the Constitution clearly intended. The president is not the Warlord-in-chief in spite of what he thinks. The Senate has been supine until now, intimidated by an unholy alliance of pro-war Christian evangelists and the Israel lobby, and over $100 million given to the Republican Party by casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. Senators who dare oppose this powerful special interest risk their political futures. The lifting of limits on political contributions has given Adelson enormous power over Trump and his friend, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
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With Sanders Surging in the Polls, Israel Lobby Spends Big Bucks to Sink His Chances in Nevada
RT News
After emerging as the Democratic frontrunner in wake of Iowa and New Hampshire primaries, Bernie Sanders heads to Nevada leading in polls but facing new opposition: the Israel lobby and its vast cash reserves … Sanders now faces fresh attacks from the powerful Israel lobby. Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) is a super PAC headed by Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. With a week to go until the Nevada showdown, the group has been airing ads criticizing Sanders’ “electability” … The ads begin airing on Saturday. For Mellman’s organization, the strategy is not a new one. DMFI spent $800,000 on anti-Sanders ads in Iowa, prompting Sanders himself to slate the “big-money interests” for attempting to derail his campaign with “negative ads.” The exact amount spent in Nevada is still unknown.
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White House Memo Justifying Suleimani Strike Cites No Imminent Threat
The New York Times
The White House told Congress on Friday that President Trump authorized the strike last month that killed Iran’s most important general to respond to attacks that had already taken place and deter future ones, contradicting the president’s claim that he acted in response to an imminent threat … The document confirmed what lawmakers had privately suspected as the Trump administration has offered a shifting set of justifications for the strike against General Suleimani in Baghdad — taken with no congressional consultation — which brought the United States and Iran to the brink of war. “This official report directly contradicts the president’s false assertion that he attacked Iran to prevent an imminent attack against United States personnel and embassies,” Representative Eliot L. Engel of New York … said …
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As Goes the Holocaust, So Goes the West
David Cole - Taki’s mag
… Most of Europe’s hate-speech laws were initially crafted to imprison Holocaust revisionists and deniers … The current war against speech “falsity” originated not with our Founders, but with Jews arguing that “false speech” endangers the memory of the Holocaust and pours salt on the wounds of survivors. We forget the Holocaustian origins of European, Canadian, and (proposed) American anti-speech laws, because these days those laws have metastasized to include protections for every nonwhite non-Christian non-straight non-male “victim group.” … What happened with Holocaust history will soon happen with topics like male/female biology and IQ inheritability.
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'Holocaust Denial' Laws Are Disgraceful
Mark Weber – Institute for Historical Review
… In Germany, France, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland and several other European countries, as well as in Israel, it is a crime publicly to dispute the official version of Holocaust history … “Holocaust denial” laws violate ancient and universal standards of justice. They criminalize even factual or truthful statements that “play down” or “whitewash” the Holocaust. They are selective and one-sided. In countries where they are on the books, the Holocaust is the only chapter of history that cannot be freely discussed. They inhibit historical inquiry and restrict free speech. They are a disgrace, and should be repealed.
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Advisor to British PM Johnson Quits Over Race and Eugenics Controversy
The Guardian (Britain)
A controversial new adviser to Boris Johnson resigned on Monday night after MPs and experts accused No 10 of condoning his controversial claims that intelligence is linked to race. Andrew Sabisky … became the subject of intense media scrutiny after details emerged of his views on subjects ranging from black people’s IQs to whether benefits claimants should be encouraged to have fewer children … A political furore broke out after some of Sabisky’s past writings on genetics emerged over the weekend. In one post from 2014, he suggested that politicians should pay attention to “very real racial differences in intelligence” when designing the immigration system, and another from that year suggested black people on average have lower IQs than white people.
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Israel’s prime minister on Sunday hailed what he called efforts by friendly states to stop the International Criminal Court opening an investigation into alleged war crimes against Palestinians. The court’s chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said in December there was enough evidence for an investigation into thousands of killings – but asked the court to rule on whether it had the jurisdiction over the Palestinian territories. Brazil, Hungary, Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic and Australia have asked the court over the past two weeks to let them file “amicus brief” opinions on the case, ICC records show. Some, including Germany, said they would argue the court’s jurisdiction did not extend to the Palestinian territories.
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Israeli President Rivlin Addresses Germany’s Parliament, Decries Rising Anti-Jewish Sentiment in Europe
European Jewish Press
Rivlin stressed that Europe today “is again pursued by the ghosts of the past.’’ “Conceptions of superiority, nationalist purity, xenophobia, ugly and blatant antisemitism drift across Europe. From the right to the hard left, antisemitism permeates the heart of European leadership.” / For the first time in ten years, an Israeli leader joined German lawmakers in the Bundestag, the federal parliament in Berlin, in marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, amid rising anti-Semitism in Germany. Rivlin and his German counterpart, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, both addressed the Bundestag … Rivlin, who spoke in Hebrew, is only the second Israeli leader to address German lawmakers on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
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A Minnesota congresswoman called AIPAC a “hate group” inciting against her after the Israel lobby featured her in an attack ad. “AIPAC claims to be a bipartisan organization, but its use of hate speech actually makes it a hate group,” US Rep. Betty McCollum, a Democrat, said Wednesday in a statement. “By weaponizing anti-Semitism and hate to silence debate, AIPAC is taunting Democrats and mocking our core values.” The American Israel Public Affairs Committee declined to comment. The lobby removed and apologized last week for at least two Facebook ads that slammed “radical” Democrats in Congress, and altered an online petition that said Israel’s harshest critics in Congress pose a threat “maybe more sinister” than ISIS and other terror groups. “This is not a call to action, it is incitement,” McCollum said.
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'Hate Speech Makes AIPAC a Hate Group'
Betty McCollum (US Congresswoman, Dem.-Minn.)
… The decision by AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] to use my image in paid Facebook ads weaponizing anti-Semitism to incite followers by attacking me, my colleagues, and my work promoting human rights for Palestinian children detained in Israeli military prisons is hate speech … This is not empty political rhetoric. It is hate speech. AIPAC’s language is intended to demonize, not elevate a policy debate. Vile attacks such as this may be commonplace in the Trump era, but they should never be normalized. Hate speech is intentionally destructive and dehumanizing, which is why it is used as a weapon by groups with a stake in profiting from oppression … AIPAC claims to be a bipartisan organization, but its use of hate speech actually makes it a hate group.
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How AIPAC is Losing Bipartisan Support in Washington
Middle East Eye
… AIPAC, short for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has always presented itself as a bipartisan organisation aiming to maintain support for Israel from across the US political spectrum. Republican and Democratic presidents have praised the group, and some of the measures it has pushed have gained unanimous bipartisan support in Congress. But times are changing. Once dubbed “the most effective general interest group” by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, AIPAC was called a “hate group” by a senior Democratic congresswoman on Wednesday. “Hate is used as a weapon to incite and silence dissent. Unfortunately, this is my recent experience with AIPAC – the American Israel Public Affairs Committee,” Congresswoman Betty McCollum said in a blistering statement.
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US Senate Approves Bipartisan Measure to Limit Trump on Military Force Against Iran
Associated Press
The Senate approved a bipartisan measure Thursday limiting US President Donald Trump’s authority to launch military operations against Iran. The measure, authored by Democratic Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, says Trump must win approval from Congress before engaging in further military action against Iran. Eight Republicans joined with Democrats to pass the resolution by a 55-45 vote. Kaine and other supporters said the resolution was not about Trump or even the presidency, but instead was an important reassertion of congressional power to declare war … The Senate vote continues a pattern in which Republican senators have shown a willingness to challenge Trump on foreign policy, a sharp departure from their strong support during impeachment and on domestic matters.
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The United Nations Human Rights Council on Wednesday released its long-delayed list of more than 100 companies it said were in violation of Palestinian human rights for operating within Israeli settlements in the contentious West Bank. The “database” was created to single out companies contributing to the settlements, which are considered illegal by the vast majority of the international community. The attempt to name and shame the businesses is largely symbolic and has no direct impact. While a majority of the companies are Israeli, including banks and construction firms, others included international businesses from the United States, Netherlands, France, and the United Kingdom. Travel companies Airbnb, Expedia, TripAdvisor, Booking.com and Opodo were among the names of U.S. companies.
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The chairman and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday slammed a report by a United Nations human rights body for blacklisting U.S. companies that operate in the Israeli-controlled parts of the West Bank. In separate statements, Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho), the panel’s chairman, and Sen. Bob Menendez (N.J.), the committee’s top Democrat, criticized the report, saying it was politically motivated and encouraged the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. “It is unacceptable that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has released this incredibly biased report which is in direct support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction movement against our close ally Israel,” Risch said in his statement.
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American Policy Toward Europe: The Wilson And Roosevelt Legacy
Karl Otto Braun – Institute for Historical Review
… How did America come to war against Germany, the heart of Europe? Could not Roosevelt have acted as a great peacemaker by mediating the Danzig conflict in 1939, instead of instigating the Poles against Germany? … The American President could very possibly have saved the peace in 1939. Instead, he fed the American people inventions about a hypothetical German plot to take over the United States and the whole world. Of course, a Germany which was incapable of crossing the English Channel to conquer Britain had not the slightest ability (or intention) of conquering America from across the Atlantic Ocean.
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Holocaust is a Story Used by Israel to Extort the West, Says Jordanian TV Host
Arutz Sheva (Israel)
Jordanian TV host Omar Ayasra said in a recent show on Yarmouk TV that the story of the Holocaust is not the story about massacres, crimes against humanity, and anti-Semitism that people are told it is. Ayasra claimed in the interview, which was broadcast on January 27 and translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), that the Holocaust is a story used politically by Israel to promote itself and to extort the West by getting sympathy and support. He criticized the Secretary-General of the Muslim World League for visiting Auschwitz and praying there, and he said that doing this is assisting the survival of the State of Israel.
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In Sweden, Where Anti-Semitism Has Risen, ‘Big Brother’ Catches Contestants Confessing Jew Hatred
JTA
Two contestants were kicked off a Swedish reality show after having a conversation in which one said she hates Jews, while a third who remains has previously expressed support for neo-Nazi ideas on social media. The comments, made during a live airing of the popular show “Big Brother,” drew a swift response from the network airing the show, as well as wide media coverage in Sweden. Jewish community leaders also responded with concern, noting a rise in anti-Semitism across the Scandinavian country.
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Into the Inferno: Families Boiled Alive. A Vivid First-Hand Account of the Allied Bombing of Dresden
Victor Gregg, Rick Stroud – Daily Mail (Britain)
During the final months of World War II, from February 13 to 15, 1945, Allied forces bombed the ancient, cathedral city of Dresden, in eastern Germany … By February 15, however, it was a smouldering ruin — 2,400 tons of high explosives and 1,500 tons of incendiary bombs were dropped on the city. An unknown number of civilians, somewhere between 35,000 and 135,000, were dead. British rifleman Victor Gregg was one of hundreds of men being held as a Po in the city by the Germans., On the 75th anniversary of the start of the bombing, this is his eyewitness account of the devastation he left behind.
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Dresden: The World War Two Bombing 75 Years On
T. Luckhurst - BBC News
“The firestorm is incredible… Insane fear grips me and from then on I repeat one simple sentence to myself continuously: ‘I don’t want to burn to death’. I do not know how many people I fell over. I know only one thing: that I must not burn.” On 13 February 1945, British aircraft launched an attack on the eastern German city of Dresden. In the days that followed, they and their US allies would drop nearly 4,000 tons of bombs in the assault … Dresden was not unique. Allied bombers killed tens of thousands and destroyed large areas with attacks on Cologne, Hamburg and Berlin, and the Japanese cities of Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the bombing has become one of the most controversial Allied acts of World War Two.
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Apocalypse at Dresden
R. H. S. Crossman - Esquire magazine
… The Western democracies were responsible for the most senseless single act of mass murder committed in the whole course of World War II. The devastation of Dresden in February, 1945, was one of those crimes against humanity whose authors would have been arraigned at Nuremberg if that Court had not been perverted into the instrument of Allied justice … No one knows how many women and children were actually killed by those dive-bombing attacks. But in the legend of Dresden destruction, they have become the symbol of Yankee sadism and brutality … A fire storm was deliberately created in order to kill as many people as possible, and that the survivors were machine-gunned as they lay helpless in the open — all this has been established without a shadow of a doubt.
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The Bombing War in Europe 1939-1945: A Review
J. Stephenson – Times Higher Education (Britain)
… One of Overy’s major preoccupations is with the morality of bombing civilians. At the start of the war, all sides agreed that the intentional bombing of civilians was illegal and that bombing should be confined to military targets. But desperate straits on the Western Front in spring 1940 (rather than the German bombing of Rotterdam) led the British to abandon this policy in favour of bombing targets in Germany for a military purpose even where civilians would undoubtedly be in the firing line. Both Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee were strongly in favour of this approach. For Overy, one of the many myths of the Second World War was that the Germans were the first to bomb civilians: in his view, the British got their retaliation in first.
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In Amazon’s Bookstore, No Second Chances for the Third Reich
The New York Times
Amazon is quietly canceling its Nazis. Over the past 18 months, the retailer has removed two books by David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as several titles by George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party. Amazon has also prohibited volumes like “The Ruling Elite: The Zionist Seizure of World Power” and “A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind.” While few may lament the disappearance of these hate-filled books, the increasing number of banished titles has set off concern among some of the third-party booksellers who stock Amazon’s vast virtual shelves. Amazon, they said, seems to operate under vague or nonexistent rules.
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Remember the IHR in Your Will
Institute for Historical Review
Please consider a bequest to the IHR in your will. Your thoughtfulness now will help to keep the Institute fighting for truth and freedom for years to come. Leaving money to the IHR in this way is not complicated. Over the years the IHR has benefited from numerous bequests by men and women who have remembered the Institute in their wills.
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Was the Holocaust Inevitable?
Patrick J. Buchanan
… What of World War II? Surely, it was necessary to declare war to stop Adolf Hitler from conquering the world and conducting the Holocaust. Yet consider … The Holocaust was not a cause of the war, but a consequence of the war. No war, no Holocaust. Britain went to war with Germany to save Poland. She did not save Poland. She did lose the empire. And Josef Stalin, whose victims outnumbered those of Hitler 1,000 to one as of September 1939, and who joined Hitler in the rape of Poland, wound up with all of Poland, and all the Christian nations from the Urals to the Elbe.
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US Agreed to Counter Iran in Iraq While Israel Fights It in Syria, Says Israeli Minister
The Times of Israel
Jerusalem and Washington have divided up the fight against Iran, with Israel taking responsibility for countering the Islamic Republic in Syria and the United States in Iraq, Defense Minister Naftali Bennett said Saturday. Last Thursday, Bennett returned from a working visit to Washington, in which he met US Defense Secretary Mark Esper and other senior American officials. Speaking at a campaign event on Saturday, he said the two countries had agreed to work in tandem to block Tehran’s efforts to create a corridor through which it could move men and materiel from Iran, through Iraq and Syria, and out to Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea.
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Israel Armed Syrian Rebels, Israeli General Acknowledged
Haaretz (Israel)
In his final days as the Israel Defense Forces’ Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General Gadi Eisenkot confirmed, on the record, that Israel had directly supported anti-Assad Syrian rebel factions in the Golan Heights by arming them. This revelation marks a direct break from Israel’s previous media policy on such matters. Until now, Israel has insisted it has only provided humanitarian aid to civilians (through field hospitals on the Golan Heights and in permanent healthcare facilities in northern Israel), and has consistently denied or refused to comment on any other assistance. In short, none other than Israel’s most (until recently) senior serving soldier has admitted that up until his statement, his country’s officially stated position on the Syrian civil war was built on the lie of non-intervention.
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… Fantasies about Trump being an agent of Putin or trying to get Ukraine to help him win the election are presented as urgent reasons Trump must be removed from office. Real-life violations of the Constitution and reckless militarism that may get us embroiled in another Middle East war are shrugged off as “business as usual” by both Democrats and Republicans in Washington. Democrats won’t move against Trump for what may be real “high crimes” and “misdemeanors” because they support his overseas aggression. They just wish they were the ones pulling the trigger.
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SAS, the top airline of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, has restricted the reach of a video commercial declaring the entire Scandinavian culture borrowed and featuring a black guy saying he is no better than his ‘Viking ancestors. ’ … Scandinavian Airlines, or SAS, had its own tone deaf disaster of a commercial pulled after public outcry. The ad published on Monday starts with a punchline that nothing is “truly Scandinavian” before going down the list of things that people in Denmark, Norway and Sweden take pride of — wind power plants, popularity of bicycles, parental care rights and democracy — and declares them “copied.” … It’s served with the notion that “we are no better than our Viking ancestors,” read by a bespectacled black man.
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The Allied Destruction of Dresden, 75th Anniversary
Brett Wilkins – Antiwar.com
The Allied destruction of Dresden wasn’t the biggest or deadliest aerial bombardment of a German city during World War II. But it is by far the most infamous, largely due to Kurt Vonnegut’s antiwar masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five. February 13 marks the 75th anniversary of what Vonnegut, who survived the bombing as a prisoner-of-war, called “carnage unfathomable.” … The Dresden bombing shocked the world’s conscience. Churchill, not known for outpourings of compassion, was appalled by the savagery of the attack, calling it “an act of terror and wanton destruction.” … As many as 600,000 German civilians were killed by Allied bombing over the course of the war. Many of these victims died during the war’s final months, when Germany’s defeat was certain and such slaughter served no valid military purpose.
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The Blood of Dresden
Kurt Vonnegut
… In February 1945, American bombers reduced this treasure to crushed stone and embers; disembowelled her with high explosives and cremated her with incendiaries … It is with some regret that I here besmirch the nobility of our airmen, but, boys, you killed an appalling lot of women and children. The shelter I have described and innumerable others like it were filled with them. We had to exhume their bodies and carry them to mass funeral pyres in the parks, so I know … The “Get Tough America” policy, the spirit of revenge, the approbation of all destruction and killing, have earned us a name for obscene brutality.
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A British Soldier Movingly Recalls the Dresden Bombing
BBC Breakfast (Britain) - Video
Victor Gregg, now 95 years old, movingly recalls the firebombing of Dresden. When the city was attacked by British and American bombers in mid-February 1945, he was being held there as a British prisoner of war. During this touching guest appearance on a morning television show, he relates that it took him 40 years to get over what he experienced and saw in this “evil” attack. Runtime: 9:08 mins.
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The Dark Side of the 'Good War'
Michael Bess -- Los Angeles Times
World War II is widely considered one of the most morally unambiguous military conflicts in history — the quintessential “Good War,” as journalist Studs Terkel once described it … At the same time, 60 years of research and reflection have gradually brought to light numerous aspects of this conflict that do not fit a straightforward pattern of black-and- white moral clarity… Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo — entire cities, tens of thousands of noncombatant civilians at a time, incinerated or blasted to bits under a steady torrent of British and American bombs. The large-scale killing of children, women and old people had now become routine facets of Allied warfare.
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Journalist Abby Martin Sues State of Georgia Over Israel Loyalty Oath
Dave DeCamp – Antiwar.com
Journalist and filmmaker Abby Martin agreed to speak at a media conference that was set to take place at Georgia Southern University on February 28th. The university sent Martin a contract for the event that included a clause not to boycott Israel. Seeing it as a clear affront to her constitutional rights, Martin refused to sign, and the speech was canceled. In response, Martin filed a lawsuit against the State of Georgia with the help of two civil rights groups, The Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. In 2016, Georgia passed a law that prohibits the state from contracting with individuals or companies that boycott Israel. The legislation is an effort to thwart the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
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On February 10, Abby Martin filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging a Georgia law requiring all independent contractors to sign a pro-Israel pledge, promising to not participate or advocate the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions [BDS] movement against Israeli crimes. Abby is working with two renowned civil rights organizations, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF). Runtime: 20:15 mins.
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Valerie Plame Accepts More Campaign Donations From Prominent 'Holocaust Denier'
The Washington Free Beacon
Democratic congressional candidate Valerie Plame, who faced criticism after sharing multiple anti-Semitic [?] articles from a white supremacist [?] media outlet, has accepted multiple campaign contributions from a prominent Holocaust denier [?], financial disclosures show. Plame accepted three contributions from Holocaust denier [?] Pete McCloskey, a former California congressman who referenced the “so-called Holocaust” during a May 2000 speech to a historically anti-Semitic organization. “Earlier here today I listened to speeches about the courage of men in France, Britain, Germany, and New Zealand who have spoken out against the commonly accepted concept of what occurred during the Second World War in the so-called Holocaust,” McCloskey said in his address to the Institute for Historical Review (IHR).
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Machinations of the Anti-Defamation League
Paul N. (Pete) McCloskey, Jr. - Institute for Historical Review
… I was in politics for fifteen years, and I think you should start with the assumption: never trust a politician … When people finally learn the truth, they turn against those who have been lying to them. And I think that if the movement of which you people are the cutting edge can retain dispassion in the face of outrages, setbacks and humiliations, the truth can ultimately prevail. You are doing something worse than criticizing the government of the United States; you’re threatening the security of the state of Israel. And the Jewish community is dedicated to preserve that state, and to destroy those who speak against it. Good luck!
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American Lawmakers Must Pledge to Support Israel or Risk Funding, Says Former US Member of Congress
Video - Press TV (Iran)
Former US lawmaker Cynthia McKinney says every candidate for Congress must pledge to support Israel’s military superiority in the region and continued large-scale US funding for the Zionist state, or risk losing the ability to raise funds for election campaigns. “If you don’t sign the pledge, you don’t get money,” she says in this interview with Marzieh Hashemi, an American-born journalist who lives in Iran. “You make a commitment that you would vote to support the military superiority of Israel, that the economic assistance that Israel wants, that you would vote to provide that,” she adds. If a candidate does not sign the pledge or perform accordingly, “then you do not get money to run your campaign,” McKinney says. After she made the pledge public, she says, the tactic changed, but the basic requirement remained. Runtime: 9:51 mins.
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Foreign Interference in U.S. Elections is Even Worse Than You Thought
Paul R. Pillar - Responsible Statecraft
…The foreign government that has long been most active in interfering in U.S. politics and U.S. elections is that of Israel. The only reason Israel’s most organized and influential advocates in the United States have not registered as foreign agents is that the influence thus bought has dissuaded U.S. politicians from pushing for such registration. This week Trump is pushing to new extremes what has become two-way interference in the politics of the United States and Israel, designed to benefit the empowered right-wing in each country. Trump had already moved far along this line, putting U.S. policy toward Israel and the disputes to which it is a party more closely in line with the preferences of the Likud-dominated Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
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Anti-Semitism in the US Today is a Variation on an Old Theme
Pamela S. Nadell
… This was not the first time on American soil that Jews were charged with financial cunning, government manipulation and questionable loyalty … In the January 1897 Atlantic Monthly a friend of Harvard professor and ambassador James Russell Lowell recalled how Lowell – a minister’s son who knew Hebrew – decried Jewish bankers, brokers and the ones who had slipped into politics and diplomacy … Lowell’s sentiment was typical of many of his generation’s well-bred, well-educated public servants, intellectuals and civic leaders … With anti-Semitism today bombarding American Jews from the right and the left, the moment appears new, but its language is not. It’s a very old theme.
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The Vexing 'Jewish Question'
Goldwin Smith (1894)
…. Those who maintain that there is nothing in the character, habits, or disposition of the Jew to provoke antipathy have to bring the charge of fanatical prejudice not only against the Russians or against Christendom, but against mankind … Critics of Judaism are accused of bigotry of race, as well as of bigotry of religion. The accusation comes strangely from those who style themselves the Chosen People, make race a religion, and treat all races except their own as Gentiles and unclean … We have given up the fancy that the Jew is accursed. We must cease to believe that he is sacred.
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Here is the complete text of the remarkable, eye-opening book about Judaism and the Jewish heritage, written by a Jewish scholar who for years was a professor in Israel. Shahak explains how invidious religious orthodoxies shape modern Israel’s character and policies. Jewish chauvinism and religious fanaticism, he shows, are rooted in the Jewish Talmud and rabbinical laws. During World War II, the author lived in the Warsaw Ghetto, and was later interned in the Bergen-Belsen camp. He arrived in Palestine in 1945, and lived there until his death in 2001. This rather brief but substantive book has earned praise. “Shahak is an outstanding scholar, with remarkable insight and depth of knowledge,” wrote Noam Chomsky.
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Review: Shahak’s 'Jewish History, Jewish Religion'
Edna Homa Hunt – WRMEA
… For all who have been troubled by the policies and practices of the “Jewish State” — indeed, by the very concept — but did not know how or whom to ask, Professor Shahak’s book, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, is essential reading. Over a period of at least 30 years, among his many other activities, this professor of chemistry at Hebrew University pursued a quest which culminated in the publication of the present book … Shahak takes readers through an erudite tour of Jewish history. The exposition is detailed enough to cite chapter and verse of halachic laws, specifying discriminatory action, or inaction, against non-Jews in every conceivable situation and in all spheres of living.
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The Nazi Tunnels Rescuing Wildlife
Video – BBC News
These tunnels were once part of Third Reich Germany’s extensive and technologically advanced fortification system, to defend against possible attack from the East.
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The Battle of Moscow
Video
This wartime German newsreel highlights the fateful battle for Moscow, Oct.-Dec. 1941.
The failure of German forces to take the Soviet Russian capital was an important and probably decisive setback for the Axis campaign in the East. Portion of the weekly German newsreel “Die Deutsche Wochenschau” of Nov. 5, 1941. With English subtitles. Runtime: 24:08 mins. Contents include: Aerial combat with British planes. The Italian foreign minister and, later, two Turkish generals, visit Hitler’s headquarters. Finnish soldiers fight to take the city of Petroskoi. German forces counter Soviet break-out attempts. German units fight to take the city of Kaluga. Long columns of captured Soviet prisoners. Intense fighting for the city of Borodino. Details of the extensive Soviet defense fortifications of Moscow. Medical aid for wounded soldiers.
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Pernicious Myths About World War II
Eric Margolis
… Germany’s army and air force were broken on the Eastern Front’s titanic battles. The numbers speak for themselves. The Soviets destroyed 75-80 percent of all German divisions – four million soldiers — and most of the Luftwaffe. Russia lost at least 14 million soldiers and a similar number of civilians. The Red Army destroyed 507 Axis divisions. On the Western Front after D-Day, the Allies destroyed 176 badly under-strength German divisions … World War II was not a good and evil struggle between “western democracies” and “totalitarian powers,” as we are still wrongly taught.
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Democracy and Tyranny
Walter E. Williams
During President Donald J. Trump’s impeachment trial, we hear a lot of talk about our rules for governing. One frequent claim is that our nation is a democracy. If we’ve become a democracy, it would represent a deep betrayal of our founders, who saw democracy as another form of tyranny. In fact, the word democracy appears nowhere in our nation’s two most fundamental documents, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution … Here are a few quotations that demonstrate the contempt that our founders held for a democracy … John Adams reminded us: “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” … The framers gave us a Constitution replete with undemocratic mechanisms.
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Winston Churchill Has as Much Blood on His Hands as the Worst Genocidal Dictators, Claims Indian Politician
The Independent (Britain)
An Indian politician has put Winston Churchill in the same category as some of “the worst genocidal dictators” of the 20th century because of his complicity in the Bengal Famine. Dr Shashi Tharoor, whose new book Inglorious Empire chronicles the atrocities of the British Empire, argued the former British Prime Minister’s reputation as a great wartime leader and protector of freedom was wholly miscast given his role in the Bengal famine which saw four million Bengalis starve to death. In 1943, up to four million Bengalis starved to death when Churchill diverted food to British soldiers and countries such as Greece while a deadly famine swept through Bengal. … He added: “Churchill has as much blood on his hands as Hitler does …” …
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Winston Churchill's Shocking Use of Chemical Weapons
G. Milton – The Guardian (Britain
The use of chemical weapons in Syria has outraged the world. But it is easy to forget that Britain has used them – and that Winston Churchill was a powerful advocate for them / … Britain’s imperial general staff knew there would be outrage if it became known that the government was intending to use its secret stockpile of chemical weapons. But Winston Churchill, then secretary of state for war, brushed aside their concerns. As a long-term advocate of chemical warfare, he was determined to use them against the Russian Bolsheviks. In the summer of 1919, 94 years before the devastating strike in Syria, Churchill planned and executed a sustained chemical attack on northern Russia. The British were no strangers to the use of chemical weapons.
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Winston Churchill: An Unsettled Legacy
Mark Weber
The well-entrenched idealization of Churchill is part and parcel of a drastically misleading view of the Second World War that Americans have been fed for decades. One common deceit is to give the impression that Hitler sought war against Britain and France, and that Germany aggressively attacked those two countries … Churchill’s enduringly stellar image is all the more remarkable considering that his views on a range of issues were, by today’s standards, hopelessly backward and politically incorrect … Along with most Britons (and Americans) of his era, he was also an unabashed racist.
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Top Polish Educator Blames Jews for Communist Atrocities
B. Cohen - Algemeiner
A leading Polish educator engaged in an angry Facebook rant about alleged Jewish responsibility for Soviet atrocities against Polish citizens, amid deepening anger in Poland over international objections to new legislation that criminalizes public discussion of collusion between Poles and the Nazi occupation forces during World War II. “Young Jews should finally understand where the unhealed wounds of the Poles are!” wrote Ryszard Nowak – the director of the highly-regarded Lyceum XII public high school in the city of Krakow – in a Facebook post uncovered [March 2018] by the liberal newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. Claiming that Jews dominated the court system in communist Poland after “your Holocaust,” Nowak named several communist officials as responsible for the 1953 execution of Polish General Emil August Fieldorf …
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Behind 'An Eye for An Eye': Postwar Revenge and Hate
John Sack – Institute for Historical Review
… I learned that the Office of State Security [in Poland] ran 227 prisons for German civilians like Lola’s. It also ran 1,255 concentration camps, and I interviewed four of the commandants. They were also Jews … He picked up a wooden stool and he started beating the Germans to death. For this one camp, I found the death certificates for 1,583 Germans. In other camps and other prisons, thousands of German civilians died. German men, women, children, babies. At one camp there was a barracks for fifty babies.
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More than 90,000 Jews braved the cold at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey Wednesday [Jan. 1] to celebrate the historic completion of the study of the entire Talmud … The Siyum HaShas celebrates the study of the Talmud, which is said to be among the most challenging religious texts in the world. The book, comprised of 2,711 double-sides pages, takes seven-and-a-half years to complete, with one page read per day. Jewish communities across the globe eagerly anticipate and celebrate completing the study. In addition to the 92,000 people who filled the seats at MetLife for this year’s event, 20,000 others gathered in Barclays Center in Brooklyn, along with thousands more at satellite locations across the U.S. and Israel.
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In Jerusalem, the World of Talmud Study Fetes Women
The Times of Israel
If the plaza outside the Jerusalem Convention Center were a manuscript read from on high, the restless, long lines of people scoring the space on Sunday evening [Jan. 5] could be seen as uneven script, penned in a rush of inspiration. Over 3,000 people were eager to enter and they weren’t hiding it. They were young, middle-aged, elderly. Most were Orthodox Jewish women … The women who successively stepped into the limelight were teachers of the ancient Babylonian Talmud, the seminal, 2,711-page text of Jewish thought and law. They were celebrating the end of the 7.5-year cycle of a daily study of a double-sided page of the Talmud, known as daf yomi …
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Oddities of the Jewish Religion
Ron Unz
… Essentially almost everything I had known — or thought I had known — about the religion of Judaism, at least in its zealously Orthodox traditional form, was utterly wrong … If the Gentile population became aware of these Jewish religious beliefs and the behaviors they promote, major problems for Jews might develop, so an elaborate methodology of subterfuge, concealment, and dissimulation has come into being over the many centuries to minimize this possibility … By the 1950s, nearly all of America’s leading concentrations of electronic media power — with the sole major exception of Disney Studios — were solidly in Jewish hands … These are the central levers of political influence, and over the next generation or so, America’s long-dominant and heavily Anglo-Saxon ruling elite was replaced by a mostly Jewish one …
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Disputed NY Times '1619 Project' Already Shaping Schoolkids' Minds on Race
J. Murawski - RealClearInvestigations
… Since its publication in August, the `1619 Project’ has been adopted in more than 3,500 classrooms in all 50 states, according to the 2019 annual report of the Pulitzer Center, which has partnered with the Times on the project. Five school systems, including Chicago and Washington, D.C., have adopted it district-wide … Even as it is being embraced by schools, the project is facing strong pushback from some leading scholars who say it presents a false version of American history. They dispute The New York Times’ claim that America’s true founding date is not 1776, the year the colonies declared independence from Great Britain, but 1619, when 20 to 30 enslaved Africans were brought to Jamestown, Va., leading to the creation of a “slavocracy” …
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… The White House has discarded the traditional US pose as an “honest broker” between Israel and the Palestinians. Palestinian leaders were not invited to the ceremony, and would not have come had they been … Importantly for Israel, it will get Washington’s permission to annex all of its illegal settlements, now littered across the West Bank, as well as the vast agricultural basin of the Jordan Valley. Israel will continue to have military control over the entire West Bank. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced his intention to bring just such an annexation plan before his cabinet as soon as possible … By allowing Israel to keep its ill-gotten gains from its 1967 conquest of Palestinian territories, Washington has officially endorsed one of the modern era’s great colonial aggressions.
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Trump’s Middle East Peace Plan Exposes the Ugly Truth
Nathan Thrall - The New York Times
… The Trump plan merely puts the finishing touches on a house that American lawmakers, Republican and Democrat alike, spent dozens of years helping to build. During the last several decades, as Israel slowly took over the West Bank, putting more than 600,000 settlers in occupied territory, the United States provided Israel with diplomatic backing, vetoes in the United Nations Security Council, pressure on international courts and investigative bodies not to pursue Israel, and billions of dollars in annual aid. Some of the Democrats now running for president have spoken of their disapproval of Israeli annexation, even as they propose nothing to stop it.
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The Sixth International Conference in Support of the Palestinian Intifada [Feb. 2017] “shows wide-range resistance against what Israeli regime is doing in Palestine. It’s important right now when Palestine is very much in the news in terms of the US relationship with the Israeli regime and the US position about Palestine”, American historian Mark Weber told Alwaght. The Iranian capital, Tehran, is hosting the second day of an international forum in support of the Palestinian cause, with hundreds of foreign guests, including senior Palestinian leaders and officials of Muslim nations, in attendance. The American author, who is also director of the Institute for Historical Review, said US President Donald Trump is supporter of “the so-called one-state solution,” that is “a break from US Policy”.
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The European Jewish Congress (EJC) has announced the launch of a worldwide, star-studded social media campaign against what it calls “antisemitism,” but which is often advocacy for Palestinian human rights and opposition to Israeli apartheid. EJC is the regional affiliate of the World Jewish Congress, one of whose main missions is to advocate for Israel. The EJC considers anti-Zionism to be a form of anti-Semitism … The campaign says it has enrolled a number of “international stars” and “international influencers, each of them with millions of followers.” … The individual behind the new campaign is EJC President Moshe Kantor … Kantor is a Russian-Israeli billionaire dedicated to Israel.
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German Foreign Minister Proposes Action Plan to Fight Anti-Semitism
The Algemeiner (Brooklyn, NY)
Germany’s Foreign Minister expressed fear on Sunday that Jews may flee his country due to antisemitic violence and proposed an action plan to prevent it. In a Spiegel op-ed, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas wrote … “We urgently need to take action so that such thoughts do not become bitter reality and large numbers of Jews do not leave Germany,” he said … To counter the rise of antisemitism, Maas proposed what should be a pan-European action plan. The plan calls for creating a network of “commissioners” appointed by the member states to combat antisemitism and secure Jewish sites, fighting online hate speech by legal means, making Holocaust denial a crime and forming a global task force to fight it, and increasing Holocaust education in EU member states.
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President Trump Leads the Fight Against Anti-Semitism
David Friedman - The Jerusalem Post (Israel)
… In every measurable metric, President Trump has done more to combat antisemitism than any of his predecessors. He has condemned antisemitism in the strongest of terms, with soaring and unflinching rhetoric worthy of the subject. (For example: “The scourge of antisemitism cannot be ignored, cannot be tolerated and it cannot be allowed to continue … the Jews have endured terrible persecution… those seeking [the Jews’] destruction, we will seek their destruction” – Oct. 27, 2018). He has backed up his words with groundbreaking actions, including most recently his Executive Order holding colleges and universities accountable to end antisemitic activity. He has imposed crushing sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran, the world’s leading sponsor of antisemitic terror.
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In Continuing Dispute Over World War II With Russia, Poland Notes Soviet-Imposed ‘Terror, Atrocities and Economic Exploitation’
Associated Press
In a continuing dispute with Russia, Poland’s Foreign Ministry on Saturday listed cultural and economic losses the country suffered after Soviet troops took control of its territory at the end of World War II. In a series of tweets, the ministry condemned attempts at rewriting history and called on Russia to “accept its difficult past.” The tweets were part of Poland’s reaction to Russia’s recent allegations that Poland bears some of the blame for World War II, and that it has shown no recognition of the Red Army’s effort in driving the Nazis from Poland. The ministry said the liberation brought “decades of communist oppression” and huge material losses, including looted industrial installations, natural resources and works of art, some of which remain in Russia.
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French wartime newsreel report on the Katyn massacre of thousands of Polish officers by the Soviets. From a “France actualité” newsreel of 1943. Runtime: 2:17 mins. While people in France, Germany and other European countries were told the truth about the atrocity, US officials made sure that Americans were kept in ignorance. In keeping with Allied wartime policy and propaganda, US officials and the American mass media blamed Germans for the killings.
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Spend any amount of time talking about slavery on the internet, and you’ll eventually encounter the claim that there were “black Confederates” that fought for the South. “Over the past few decades, claims to the existence of anywhere between 500 and 100,000 black Confederate soldiers, fighting in racially integrated units, have become increasingly common,” writes historian Kevin Levin in his new book, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth … Levin’s book explains how this myth came about — while neatly dismantling it. We spoke recently about actual Confederates’ perspectives on black soldiers; why former “body servants” attended Confederate reunions during Jim Crow; and how the World Wide Web gave this story legs.
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Yes, There Were Black Confederates. Here’s Why
John Stauffer - The Root
The myth of black Confederates is arguably the most controversial subject of the Civil War … A few thousand blacks did indeed fight for the Confederacy … How many supported it? No one knows precisely. But by drawing on these scholars and focusing on sources written or published during the war, I estimate that between 3,000 and 6,000 served as Confederate soldiers … The total number of black Confederate soldiers is statistically insignificant … But they carry immense symbolic weight … A small number of African Americans were slave owners … Confederates impressed slaves as laborers and at times forced them to fight. In effect, they put guns to their heads, forcing them to fire on Yankees.
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Myths About Lincoln and the Civil War
Mark Weber – Podcast
Abraham Lincoln is honored as “The Great Emancipator,” as a champion of equal rights for all, regardless of race, and as the president who waged war to “free the slaves.” In fact, he sought to make the US an all-white republic that would be “an outlet for free white people everywhere, the world over.” He supported ambitious efforts to resettle or “colonize” blacks in Africa or central America. A common mistake in trying to learn from the past is to evaluate the behavior and motives of people in history on the basis of attitudes and values that prevail in the present.
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The Trump administration’s Mideast peace plan will not end the decades-old conflict but could actually extend it, Israel watchers and Palestinians warn. “Is it going to lead to an agreement with the Palestinians? Categorically not,” said Yossi Mekelberg, a professor of international relations at Regent’s University in London. “In fact, it will harden their position.” Palestinian leaders lost no time in rejecting the plan, which was presented by President Donald Trump in Washington on Tuesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by his side … The plan would allow Israel to extend its sovereignty to the vast majority of its settlements in the occupied West Bank, which it captured from Jordan in 1967 in the Six-Day War. The settlements are viewed as illegal by most of the international community.
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Trump Lays an Egg: The Israel/Palestine Vision
Sheldon Richman
Trump’s long-dreaded diktat to the Palestinians is now public … Suffice it say here that this “plan” is dead on arrival. The Palestinians will not be bribed by a $50 billion jobs program to give up their hope of full rights, which would never be achieved in Trump’s proposed Palestinian “state,” a fragmented territory surrounded and border-controlled by Israel … Israel would annex the Jordan Valley to the east of Palestine and the areas of the exclusively Jewish settlements in the West Bank – all of it territory having been acquired through war, which is illegal under international law … The International Court of Justice nearly 20 years ago declared the occupation of the territories and the Jewish settlements illegal.
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Leaders from around the world are reacting to US President Donald Trump’s long-awaited Middle East plan, with some denouncing it as “aggressive” and “one-sided” and others saying the proposal initiative “could prove a positive step forward” … Palestinian leaders, who cut off all ties with Washington in late 2017 after Trump controversially recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, immediately rejected the plan … On the international stage, Turkey and Iran issued some of the strongest condemnations, with the first branding the plan “stillborn” and the latter describing it as “doomed to fail” … The United Kingdom, meanwhile, gave the warmest reaction, with Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab calling it a “serious proposal, reflecting extensive time and effort”.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a law allowing to use Nazi symbols in works of science, literature and art on condition of condemning Nazism … Under the new law, public display of Nazi symbols in works of science, literature and art, as well as in educational and information purposes will not be considered as extremism when it is done to form negative attitude to the ideology of Nazism and on condition of the absence of signs of its propaganda or justification.
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In a meeting Tuesday with Orthodox Jewish leaders in Brooklyn, U.S. Attorney General William Barr pledged to track and prosecute hate crimes more aggressively on the federal level while also blaming the rise of anti-Semitism on what he called “militant progressivism.” Barr’s concrete proposals for stopping anti-Semitism included an enhanced system for reporting hate crimes, as well as better tracking of white supremacists on social media. He pledged that the Trump administration and his Justice Department would have “zero tolerance” for anti-Semitism, which he said “strikes at the very core of what this country is about.”
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Attorney General Barr Orders New Federal Government Measures to Counter Anti-Jewish 'Hate Crimes'
Associated Press
Attorney General William Barr ordered federal prosecutors across the U.S. to step up their efforts to combat anti-Semitic hate crimes as he met with Jewish leaders in Brooklyn, New York … The attorney general said the Trump administration would have “zero tolerance for this kind of violence.” … Barr directed U.S. attorneys’ offices to ensure they have a specific point of contact to handle outreach to the Jewish community and someone responsible for reporting hate crimes. He said he was also working with FBI Director Christopher Wray to create a national plan to combat anti-Semitic violence, and he announced federal charges in Brooklyn against a woman who allegedly had slapped three Jewish women.
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The 'Wave of Anti-Semitism' is Exaggerated
Philip Giraldi
One of the few growth industries in Donald Trump’s United States is the protection of Jewish citizens and their property from a largely contrived wave of anti-Semitism that is allegedly sweeping the nation. Even while potentially catastrophic developments in the Middle East continue to unfold, the threat of anti-Semitism continues to dominate much of the news cycle in the mainstream media … Politicians, the media, and Jewish leaders have all blamed much of the alleged violent anti-Semitism on “white supremacists,” but any examination of the actual incidents does not support that view … Most of the physical attacks on Jews actually are carried out by blacks and most of those attacks are based on aggressive behavior by the largely Hasidic Jewish communities in New York City and surrounding areas.
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… The real godfather in this historic theft was sitting almost unnoticed by media next to the presidential podium, looking very much the proverbial cat that swallowed the canary. Billionaire gambling mogul Sheldon Adelson and his wife beamed as their ‘boys’, Trump and Bibi, proclaimed their newly configured Mideast. Close by was Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a friend of the Netanyahu clan … Such is the milieu from which real estate developer Trump emerged … The Greater Israel crowd in the US has almost total control of America’s Senate. This is mainly thanks to Adelson’s donations of over $100 million to the Republicans and relentless support from pro-Israel media like Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, NBC and Hollywood.
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Jimmy Carter said Thursday that US President Donald Trump’s Middle East plan would violate international law, and urged the United Nations to stop Israel from annexing Palestinian land. “The new US plan undercuts prospects for a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians,” the former US president said in a statement. “If implemented, the plan will doom the only viable solution to this long-running conflict, the two-state solution,” said Carter, who brokered the landmark 1978 Camp David Accords that brought peace between Israel and Egypt … His office said in a statement that Trump’s plan, unveiled Tuesday, “breaches international law regarding self-determination, the acquisition of land by force, and annexation of occupied territories.”
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Trump Declared the Third Nakba
Gideon Levy - Haaretz (Israel)
… The Palestinians were tossed by the side of the road and abandoned to their fate. Right-wing Israel is delighted, left-wing Israel is lost as usual, and the world is silent. It’s the end of the world. The White House looked like Habayit Hayehudi [“Jewish Home”] the other day, awash in kippot [yarmulkes] and Yiddishkeit [Jewishness]. Does one have to be an anti-Semite to wonder about this? With all the wheeler-dealer peacemakers – all these Friedmans, Adelsons, Greenblatts, Kushners and Berkowitzes, these supposedly fair and unbiased mediators, it’s impossible to even think about the start of a fair accord. It’s not hard to guess what goes through the mind of every Palestinian and every seeker of justice at the sight of this all-Jewish and all-right-wing class picture.
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United Nations Rejects Trump’s 'Deal of the Century'
Middle East Monitor
The United Nations has rejected US President Donald Trump’s ‘deal of the century’ and reiterated that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be solved based on UN resolutions and international law … It is worth noting that Trump has ignored the two-state solution adopted by the UN and the international community, and proposed his own view of the two-state solution, which ignores the 1967 borders and has all of Jerusalem under full Israeli sovereignty.
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Former teleSUR presenter and creator of The Empire Files Abby Martin was blocked from delivering a keynote speech at Georgia Southern University for refusing to “sign a contractual pledge to not boycott Israel” to comply with the anti-Boycott, Divest and Sanctions state law. “After I was scheduled to give a keynote speech at an upcoming Georgia Southern conference, organizers said I must comply with Georgia’s anti-BDS law,” Martin tweeted on Friday. Since 2014, 28 states, among those Georgia, have adopted anti-boycott laws, including five executive orders issued by governors. “I refused and my talk was canceled. The event fell apart after colleagues supported me.” Martin is an outspoken critic of Israel’s apartheid government and anti-Palestinian policies.
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Killing Free Speech in America
Philip Giraldi
… Many in government at all levels repeatedly boast about their undying love for the Jewish state, which is a foreign nation and no ally, even as they enthusiastically sign on to legislation that criminalizes criticism of Israel or requires recipients of government funding to sign a no-boycott pledge … Twenty-eight states currently have legislation penalizing those who support the non-violent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and there are several bills pending in Congress that would do the same on the federal level … There have recently been two stories that illustrate what might happen when one wants to limit what people can say. The first involves highly respected international journalist Abby Martin … Her crime consisted of refusing to “sign a contractual pledge to not boycott Israel” …
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More than 15 percent of respondents to a poll in Italy said the Holocaust never happened. The results are part of the annual Eurispes Italy Report published Thursday. The poll by the non-governmental organization probes Italians’ views on a number of subjects, including the credibility of the government, the media and history, this year including the Holocaust … Nearly 24% of the respondents said Jews control the economy and media, and 26% said they control US policy. Nearly two-thirds indicated that recent cases of anti-Semitism are isolated and have no bearing on the real scope of anti-Semitism in Italy. About 20% agreed with that statement that many think that Benito Mussolini, Hitler’s ally and mentor and the father of 20th-century fascism, “was a great leader who only made a few mistakes.”
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The Last Days of the 'Holocaust'
Eric Striker – National Justice
Holocaust revisionism is perhaps the most institutionally reviled, criminally punished and socially persecuted field of research in modern Western history. Yet, … the gatekeepers of the Holocaust continue to give ground, kicking and screaming along the way. The latest example is a new book by former Museum of Jewish Heritage director David G. Marwell, “Unmasking the ‘Angel of Death’,” which grants many revisionist challenges to the legend of Joseph Mengele … In it, he cross references witness testimony from “survivors” with hard evidence and primary sources, only to conclude that their “memories” were “unreliable.” … Mengele’s main achievement at the camp, which Marwell credits him for, was containing and preventing a massive outbreak of typhus at Auschwitz in difficult circumstances.
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Lessons of the Mengele Affair
Mark Weber
With the possible exceptions of Hitler and Himmler, no man has been so vilified in recent years as the personification of Nazi evil as Dr. Josef Mengele. The Mengele legend was the basis for two novels that Hollywood turned into popular movies … While no sane person would excuse or whitewash atrocities, no matter who commits them, a basic regard for truth and decency compels another, more thoughtful look at the Mengele legend. How much truth is there to the fantastic accusations? The stock allegation that Mengele “sent 400,000 Jews to the Auschwitz gas chambers” is a falsehood based in part on misrepresentation.
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Gas Chamber Door Fraudulently Portrayed at U.S. Holocaust Museum
The Journal of Historical Review
Visitors at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, [in 1993] will find on display a casting of a door of a supposed extermination gas chamber. This artifact is presented as graphic evidence of the chemical slaughterhouses supposedly used by the Germans to systematically exterminate masses of Jews during the Second World War. According to the March 1990 issue of the Museum’s official Newsletter, this is “a casting of the door that sealed one of the gas chambers at the Majdanek killing center in Poland.” … This door did indeed close on a gas chamber at Majdanek. However, as he concedes (on pages 555 and 557 of his book), this was a delousing chamber used to disinfest clothing. The only living things killed in this gas chamber were lice.