Headlines

A new book out in Germany reveals how President Kennedy was a secret admirer of the Nazis … Kennedy’s travelogues and letters chronicling his wanderings through Germany before WWII, when Adolf Hitler was in power, have been unearthed and show him generally in favour of the movement … On August 21, 1937 … he wrote: ‘The Germans really are too good – therefore people have ganged up on them to protect themselves.’ … Having visited Hitler’s Bavarian holiday home in Berchtesgaden … he declared; ‘Who has visited these two places can easily imagine how Hitler will emerge from the hatred currently surrounding him to emerge in a few years as one of the most important personalities that ever lived.’

In late July and early August 1945, just weeks after the end of the war in Europe, the 28-year-old John F. Kennedy visited war-devastated Germany … These diary entries show the youthful Kennedy’s wide-ranging curiosity and eye for telling detail … Kennedy wrote a remarkable commentary in his diary, dated August 1, 1945, about Hitler and his place in history: “After visiting these places, you can easily understand how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived…”

The number of names on a highly classified U.S. central database used to track suspected terrorists has jumped to 875,000 from 540,000 only five years ago, a U.S. official familiar with the matter said. Among those was suspected Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, whose name was added in 2011 … Maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center, the highly classified database is not a “watchlist” but instead is a repository of information on people whom U.S. authorities see as known, suspected or potential terrorists from around the world. The “Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment” is a master database …

A nuclear-armed Iran would not pose a fundamental threat to the United States and its regional allies like Israel and the Gulf Arab monarchies, according to a new report released here Friday by the Rand Corporation … The report reaches several conclusions all of which generally portray Iran as a rational actor in its international relations. While Nader calls it a “revisionist state” that tries to undermine what it sees as a U.S.-dominated order in the Middle East, his report stresses that “it does not have territorial ambitions and does not seek to invade, conquer, or occupy other nations.”

The Scottish Council of Jewish Communities said that, despite recent revisions, the Church of Scotland’s report on Israel remains “unacceptable.” The report, entitled “The Inheritance of Abraham,” was endorsed by the church’s general assembly Thursday in Edinburgh. It is a revision of an earlier text the church’s Church and Society Council published earlier this month and then withdrew amid Jewish condemnations of its assertion that Jews have no special claim to Israel. The report further said that Israel should be boycotted and that Western support for Israel is rooted in Holocaust guilt.

Ira Forman, the Jewish outreach director during President Obama’s re-election bid and a former founder and CEO of the National Jewish Democratic Council, is the new U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism, it was announced Monday by Secretary of State John Kerry … To start, Forman will be joining a group of imams during their visit to the Auschwitz concentration camp, an activity Rosenthal began to counter Holocaust deniers. He then will attend the International Conference of the Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism in Jerusalem.

… It’s obviously true that Jews have flourished in the United States and, as Biden says, have achieved massively disproportionate representation in fields like science, culture, politics, academia, and so on … It’s also true that, while Jewish opinions run the ideological gamut, they have clustered heavily on the left end of the political spectrum. When you combine that fact with the fact of disproportionate Jewish representation in politics and culture, you have a weirdly shared belief among philo-Semites and anti-Semites … Biden may find it “all to the good” that Jews have used their influence over popular culture to change societal attitudes toward homosexuality, but lots of people don’t find it good at all.

Foreign Office files kept secret for more than 70 years have revealed details of how MI6 kidnapped and killed a French double agent during World War Two – and ordered the creator of James Bond to help them cover it up. In July 1941 British Intelligence learned that ‘deeply trusted’ Captain Pierre Lablache-Combier – a Royal Navy commander recruited by M16 and posted to Spain – had divulged secrets to the Nazi-backed French Vichy government. James Bond writer Ian Fleming – then a Naval Intelligence officer – issued an official report stating the officer was ‘missing believed drowned’. In fact, the ‘complete double-crosser’ was killed as Secret Service operatives scrambled to smuggle him out of Spain.

A poll released Tuesday by the BBC confirms Israel remains one of the world’s least popular countries, with more than half of those surveyed identifying its influence as “mainly negative.” Only North Korea, Pakistan and Iran fared worse. Fifty-two percent of respondents view Israel in a negative light; 21% rated it in positive terms, placing it far behind China’s 42% and Russia’s 30%. The global survey ranked Germany as the country with the best public image — 59% described Europe’s economic powerhouse as playing a “mainly positive” role in international affairs, ahead of runners-up Canada and the UK.

Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin enjoyed a seven hour drinking binge as they discussed likelihood if Britain opening a second front in the war, previously secret files show. The British Prime Minister met the Soviet leader in Moscow in August 1942 and the pair end up eating and drinking in to the early hours. The meeting was described in graphic detail by Sir Alec Cadogan, the permanent secretary of the Foreign Office who was with Mr Churchill.

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.

… The truth about Winston Churchill is that he was a menace to liberty, and a disaster for Britain, for Europe, for the United States of America, and for Western Civilization itself … With his lack of principles and scruples, Churchill was involved in one way or another in nearly every disaster that befell the 20th century. He helped destroy laissez-faire liberalism, he played a role in the Crash of 1929, he helped start World War I, and by bringing in America to help, prolonged the war and created the conditions for the rise of Nazism, prolonged World War II, laid the groundwork for Soviet domination, helped involve America in a cold war with Russia, and pioneered in the development of total war and undermining western civilized standards.

… Irving went on us describe several sources of secret financial support enjoyed by Churchill. In addition to money supplied by the Czech government, Churchill was financed during the “wilderness years” between 1930 and 1939 by a slush fund emanating from a secret pressure group known as the Focus … Irving then revealed further details of Churchill’s financing by the Czechs, as well as the facts of Churchill’s financial rescue by a wealthy banker of Austro-Jewish origins, Sir Henry Strakosch … Irving then gave a detailed account of the cynical maneuverings of Churchill to escalate the aerial campaign against Germany’s civilian population …

During his career, Mao Tse-Tung was responsible for more deaths – murder, starvation, torture…the usual ways of dying, plus a few novelties added by Mao and his thugs – than any other man in history. Seventy million is the sum given by Chang and Halliday. Even the entire Mongol reign of Genghis Khan and his whole line – who conquered three civilizations… Muslim, Chinese, and Hindu…and threatened to conquer Christendom too … didn’t match Mao in killing people.

… Auschwitz thereupon became the center of a complex of nearly 40 camps and subsidiary camps, as well as the capital of a vast agricultural and industrial complex (including mines, petrochemical works, and munitions factories) where numerous prisoners, particularly Polish and Jewish prisoners, worked side by side with civilian workers. At the same time, or successively, Auschwitz was a prisoner-of-war camp, an important transit camp, a hospital camp, a concentration camp, and a camp of both forced and free laborers. It was never an “extermination camp” (a term invented by the Allies).

… It was only in the final days of the war and during his tenure as military governor of Germany — after he had gotten to know both the Germans and America’s “gallant Soviet allies” — that Patton’s understanding of the true situation grew and his opinions changed. In his diary and in many letters to his family, friends, various military colleagues, and government officials, he expressed his new understanding and his apprehensions for the future … This conviction, that the politicians had used him and the U.S. Army for a criminal purpose, grew in the following weeks.

A once prominent name has been erased from the history of the American Right after World War II. Readers of National Review in the late 1950s and early ’60s would have found it difficult to miss the contributions of Revilo P. Oliver, among the most frequent book reviewers for the magazine. Oliver, who taught at the University of Illinois and read 11 languages, including Sanskrit, was a classical philologist of great distinction, and his articles for the magazine displayed his remarkable erudition.

Plans to assassinate key German figures, including Erwin Rommel, in the run-up to D-Day are revealed in newly-released British intelligence files. It was discussed in communications between the British government, military and intelligence services with the aim of aiding the landings. They planned to target those involved in the Gestapo and enemy logistics. However it was dismissed as “the type of bright idea which… produces a good deal of trouble and does little good”.

… These elementary analogies are enough to show that the murder of seven million Ukrainians in 1933 could not have been motivated by socio-economic or “class” reasons alone. Conflicts claim millions of victims only in struggles between nations, as in wars, colonial struggles, and so forth, when the national question is paramount. Moscow needed a holocaust. The imposed famine of 1933 and the whole range of repressive mass killings during the 1930s were an expression of the empire’s struggle for self-preservation. It was this instinct, and not the economic doctrine of collectivization, that impelled the Kremlin to carry out the horrors of the 1930s.

Germany is the most positively viewed nation in the world in this year’s annual Country Ratings Poll for the BBC World Service. More than 26,000 people were surveyed internationally for the poll. They were asked to rate 16 countries and the European Union on whether their influence in the world was “mainly positive” or “mainly negative”. Germany came out top, with 59 percent rating it positively. Iran was once again the most negatively viewed. Global views of Europe’s biggest country have improved significantly in 2013, according to the poll.

Retirees in the United States are worse off than those living in Norway, Israel, Slovenia and more than a dozen other countries. / The U.S. ranks 19th in overall retirement security worldwide, according to an index compiled by Natixis Global Asset Management, a Paris-based asset management firm. Norway ranked first in the index, which assessed how well current retirees live in 150 countries, based on measures of health care, finances, material well-being and quality of life. Known for its strong healthcare and social programs, Western Europe dominated the index, with countries from the region filling all of the top ten spots.

… Why can’t we be consistent and memorialize all the dead? All people are precious, regardless of their background. Why should we apotheosize one group of people at the expense of everyone else? The more we learn about the Holocaust business, the more ridiculous the business becomes … Almost every year we are discovering that the Holocaust industry is a one of the biggest rackets in the twentieth century. But the issue of racketeering goes much deeper — and it is the by-product of an ideology.

One of the most lurid and slanderous Holocaust claims is the story that the Germans manufactured soap from the bodies of their victims. Although a similar charge during the First World War was exposed as a hoax almost immediately afterwards, it was nevertheless revived and widely believed during the Second. More important, this accusation was “proved” at the main Nuremberg trial of 1945-1946, and has been authoritatively endorsed by numerous historians in the decades since.

Vice President Joe Biden offered praise for the Jewish community that raised some eyebrows and seems to have delighted anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists. At a DNC [Democratic National Committee] event for Jewish American Heritage Month on Tuesday evening, after noting Jewish Americans’ disproportionate representation in Congress, impressive share of Nobel Prizes, and role in the civil-rights and womens’-rights movements, Biden then praised their work in behalf of gay marriage via their control of the media … “Think behind of all that, I bet you 85 percent of those changes, whether it’s in Hollywood or social media are a consequence of Jewish leaders in the industry.”

Vice President Joe Biden spoke at length Tuesday night about the influence of Judaism on the United States, dating back to the country’s founding and to the present day as Jews helped shape views on gay rights … “Jewish heritage has shaped who we are – all of us, us, me – as much or more than any other factor in the last 223 years. And that’s a fact,” he said. “We talk about it in terms of the incredible accomplishments and contributions” of Jews in America, Biden added, but it’s deeper “because the values, the values are so deep and so engrained in American culture, in our Constitution.”

… What America’s imperialists did not understand was that the collapse of Communism meant that Washington had less power to control world events. Fear of Communist terror meant that other nations always followed Washington’s lead. Once the threat was gone, they didn’t need to obey us any more. Think of Turkey, a prime example, and even Germany and Japan, which refused to support the invasion of Iraq … Most conservative leaders, including the neocons, knew little of the outside world and almost nothing about the developing world. In fact, those who knew the least about the outside world were the most enthusiastic to go to war in Iraq the second time.

Senator John McCain … summed up his underlying national-security philosophy by saying that “our interests are our values, and our values are our interests.” This lays bare the essence of McCain’s foreign policy. What does it mean to conflate values with interests? Where does it lead? It leads to a messianic foreign policy … The government of the United States was created to serve the souls of America, not the souls of the world. That is the lesson of the last decade of U.S. global involvement, and it is a lesson that John McCain seemingly has yet to learn.

Britain paid millions of pounds to military and political leaders in Spain to ensure they remained neutral during the Second World War, secret files reveal. Some $10 million was paid to one double agent alone to distribute to key individuals, including General Franco’s brother Nicholas, in the hope they would not enter the conflict. But despite the money, intelligence officers later suspected General Franco of ordering his officials to pass on secrets to the Germans. The effective bribes also sparked a row with the US after the Americans froze the money planned for Britain’s “friends in Spain”.

At a Jewish American Heritage Month reception last night in Washington, D.C., Vice President Joe Biden talked about Jews, power, and influence. … “No group has had such an outsized influence per capita as all of you … I believe what affects the movements in America, what affects our attitudes in America are as much the culture and the arts as anything else,” he said … “Think behind of all that, I bet you 85 percent of those changes, whether it’s in Hollywood or social media are a consequence of Jewish leaders in the industry. The influence is immense, the influence is immense. And, I might add, it is all to the good,” he said.

… It’s permissible to discuss the power of every other group, from the Black Muslims to the Christian Right, but the much greater power of the Jewish Establishment is off-limits. That, in fact, is the chief measure of its power … Explicitly “Jewish” organizations like the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League enforce a dual standard. What is permitted to Israel is forbidden to America. This is not just thoughtless inconsistency. These organizations consciously support one set of principles here — equal rights for all, ethnic neutrality, separation of church and state — and their precise opposites in Israel, where Jewish ancestry and religion enjoy privilege.

Up to 20 percent of children in the United States suffer from a mental disorder, and the number of kids diagnosed with one has been rising for more than a decade, according to a report released on Thursday by the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention. In the agency’s first-ever study of mental disorders among children aged 3 to 17, researchers found childhood mental illnesses affect up to one in five kids and cost $247 billion per year in medical bills, special education and juvenile justice.

Not even a year ago, German intelligence predicted Syrian autocrat Bashar Assad’s regime would soon collapse. Now, the agency instead believes the rebels are in trouble. Government troops are set to make significant advances, it predicts. / Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), has fundamentally changed its view of the ongoing civil war in Syria. Spiegel Online has learned that the BND now believes the Syrian military of autocrat Bashar Assad is more stable than it has been in a long time and is capable of undertaking successful operations against rebel units at will.

The Spanish Interior Minister has justified an awards ceremony earlier this month to honour Francoist volunteers who fought for Hitler’s ‘Blue Division’ in World War II. Jorge Fernández Díaz, Spain’s Interior Minister, responded to critics by stating that tribute ceremonies like the one held on May 11th to honour ex-combatants of Hitler’s Blue Division “have taken place since 2003.”

Once upon a time, animal sacrifice was an important part of Hindu life, Catholic priests weren’t celibate and visual depictions of the Prophet Muhammad were part of Islamic art. And soon some churches in the UK may be marrying gay couples. How do religions manage to change their mind? … Similarly, at the time of the Iranian revolution in 1979, the ulama there said that birth control was haraam, but now the use of condoms is encouraged, with state-supported condom factories and pre-marital family planning lessons.

The State Department has appointed a special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism as a new report documents a global increase in incidents of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. Ira Forman, former CEO of the National Jewish Democratic Council, was chosen as special envoy as the State Department released its annual report on religious freedom around the world … The 2012 report said expressions of anti-Semitism by government officials, religious leaders and the media were of great concern, particularly in Venezuela, Egypt and Iran. At times such statements led to desecration and violence, the report said.

Visitors to a Second World War-themed event celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Dambuster have turned out in Nazi uniforms despite a ban on the costumes. Organisers of the 1940s weekend in Haworth, West Yorkshire, faced complaints last year … But again the event – which attracts 25,000 visitors a year and raises thousands of pounds for charity – saw visitors dressing up in Nazi uniform. Emma Cox, one of the organisers of the celebrations, said those involved were getting more stubborn about flaunting their regalia every year.

Danish museum officials say that an archaeological dig last year has revealed 365 items from the Viking era, including 60 rare coins. Danish National Museum spokesman Jens Christian Moesgaard says the coins have a distinctive cross motif attributed to Norse King Harald Bluetooth, who is believed to have brought Christianity to Norway and Denmark. Sixteen-year-old Michael Stokbro Larsen found the coins and other items with a metal detector in a field in northern Denmark.

Vice President Joe Biden is praising Jewish leaders for helping change American attitudes about gay marriage and other issues. Biden says culture and arts change people’s attitudes. He cites social media and the old NBC TV series “Will and Grace” as examples of what helped changed attitudes on gay marriage. Biden says, quote, “Think — behind of all that, I bet you 85 percent of those changes, whether it’s in Hollywood or social media, are a consequence of Jewish leaders in the industry.” Biden says the influence is immense and that those changes have been for the good. Biden was speaking Tuesday night at a Jewish American Heritage Month reception hosted by the Democratic National Committee. He says Jewish values are an essential part of who Americans are.

The world is celebrating 200 years since the birth of Richard Wagner – but not Israel, where his music is taboo. Is it fair that Wagner’s works are tainted by his anti-Semitism and the Nazis’ enthusiasm for them? / … Certainly there are few cultural figures as divisive as the composer, polemicist, dramatist and conductor born in Leipzig on 22 May 1813. Yet nobody, whatever their thoughts on the man, can overstate Wagner’s significance to music … A Jewish prohibition on playing Wagner only came into effect later due to what Barenboim describes as the “use, misuse and abuse” of his music by Hitler, who had related in Mein Kampf the experience of seeing Lohengrin as a 12-year-old: “In one instant I was addicted. My youthful enthusiasm for the Bayreuth Master knew no bounds.”

Katharina Wagner, who co-runs the legendary Bayreuth Festival dedicated to the works of her great-grandfather Richard Wagner, dampened hopes Sunday that letters between Adolf Hitler and the Wagner family could be published … Katharina reiterated her pledge to hand over the private papers of her father, Wolfgang Wagner, to the Bavarian State Archive, with the aim of shedding new light on the festival’s history … But she gave little hope that the potentially more explosive private correspondence between the Wagner family and Hitler would similarly be made available to the public anytime soon.

A far-right French historian shot himself in the head beside the altar of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris … Dominique Venner, 78, a former member of the nationalist terrorist movement, OAS, placed a pistol in his mouth and shot himself dead in front of scores of tourists inside the most visited building in France. Mr Venner, a presenter on a Catholic-traditionalist radio station and controversial historian and essayist, posted an essay on his website earlier in the day calling for “new, spectacular and symbolic actions to shake us out of our sleep, to jolt anaesthetized minds and to reawaken memory of our origins”.

The historian Dominique Venner committed suicide in Notre Dame de Paris cathedral by shooting himself in the head in protest against the destruction of Europe. His suicide note: … “In the evening of my life, facing immense dangers to my French and European homeland, I feel the duty to act as long as I still have strength. I believe it necessary to sacrifice myself to break the lethargy that plagues us. I give up what life remains to me in order to protest and to found … While I defend the identity of all peoples in their homes, I also rebel against the crime of the replacement of our people.”

Schoolchildren in the northern Spanish region of Asturias will no longer be able to call Christmas by its name now that a new law passed by the local education ministry prohibits the use of “religious” terms in the classroom when referring to the December and spring holidays. Teachers and pupils in Asturias classrooms will now have to refer to Christmas as “winter holidays” and Easter as “second term holidays”. The region’s socialist-led government has decided to introduce the new terminology in a bid to restrict religious references in the next school year.

Los Angeles has elected its first Jewish mayor, Eric Garcetti, a three-term city councilman. Mr Garcetti received 54% of the vote to City Controller Wendy Greuel’s 46%. The 42-year-old takes office in America’s second-most populous city in July, when he will also become its second-consecutive Latino mayor. The campaign was the most expensive in city history at $30 million overall, but only about one in four Los Angelenos voted on Tuesday. A tight election on 5 March had resulted in a run-off between the two city officials.

… After nearly 27 months of turmoil, the public opinion pendulum is markedly shifting back in support of the current regime … Many among Syria’s 23 million citizens, who initially supported the uprising following government reaction to event in Deraa in March 2011, now have serious second thoughts about who exactly would replace the current government. Events in Syria are also making plain that the army is still loyal to the Assad government, and according to Jane’s Defense Weekly, is actually gaining experience and strength …

Israeli settlers on their morning commute got quite the eyeful Monday morning when they saw a swastika-emblazoned red flag flying near a mosque in Beit Omar, a Palestinian village outside of Hebron. Thousands of residents of Jewish settlements near Hebron and Bethlehem in Judea (the southern [Zionist- occupied] West Bank) drive to and from work on the road from which the flag was visible. The Tazpit News Agency, which photographed the flying Nazi flag, reports residents “were astounded” to see the symbol …

… Prior to 1863, the year of the Gettysburg Address, American foreign policy was based mostly on the Washington/ Jefferson ideology of commercial relations with all nations, entangling alliances with none. It was considered to be a virtue to remain neutral in disputes between two other countries … Obama repeated the continuing revolution theme in his inaugural address. “What makes us exceptional,” he intoned, is “our allegiance to an idea, articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago …” He then promised “a never-ending journey, to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time.” Never-ending military aggression in the Middle East and elsewhere, in other words.

… Even though the Germans were the foe, more often than not, they treated us better than Stalin’s Reds. My dad was picked up by the Germans after being left for dead by Stalin’s troops, and was taken to one of their field hospitals. When he felt strong enough he left with the help of peasants and made his way home … For many in the West it may seem hard to believe, but Nazi occupation, despite reprisals, was better than being under Stalin. Because, for the first time, farmers could work the land free of the disastrous Bolshevik collective system, bumper crops were harvested. The Germans organized efficient food distribution. At last there was no starvation in the land.

Is anti-Semitism at the root of German national identity? … At the behest of an editor from the German newspaper Die Zeit, Tenenbom spent six months interviewing hundreds of Germans, from artists to lawyers to politicians. Anti-Semitism came up in almost every interview; some Germans blamed Jews for controlling the global economy, and some actually wished Jews dead … “I never expected it to be a book about Jews,” Tenenbom told The Jewish Week. “But it turned out that Germans have a huge obsession with Jews — and usually in negative ways.”

Barack Obama has been accused of reneging on his disarmament pledges after it emerged the administration was planning to spend billions on upgrading nuclear bombs stored in Europe to make the weapons more reliable and accurate. Under the plan, nearly 200 B61 gravity bombs stockpiled in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Turkey would be given new tail fins that would turn them into guided weapons that could be delivered by stealth F35 fighter-bombers. “This will be a significant upgrade of the US nuclear capability in Europe,” said Hans Kristensen, a nuclear weapons expert …

… The claim that Iran has called for another Holocaust is sheer lie. With its 25,000 Jews Iran has the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside Israel. Iranian Jews have been free to practice their religion. There are 18 synagogues active in Tehran alone, whereas the government has not allowed Iranian Sunnis, which represent ten percent of the population, to have a single mosque in Tehran. The Ahmadinejad administration provided extra funds to the Jewish hospital in Tehran … And, the Iranian Jews have their own representative to the Iranian parliament, set aside for them by Iran’s Constitution, a practice going back decades.

The Arab world has given birth to many thinkers and many inventions – among them the three-course meal, alcohol and coffee. The best coffee bean is still known as Arabica, but it’s come a long way from the Muslim mystics who treasured it centuries ago, to the chains that line our high streets … At first, coffee had been viewed with suspicion in Europe as a Muslim drink, but around 1600 Pope Clement VIII is reported to have so enjoyed a cup that he said it would be wrong to permit Muslims to monopolise it, and that it should therefore be baptised.

Americans of all political stripes have embraced the promotion of democracy as a centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy. But this American democracy crusade has caused huge, and largely overlooked, collateral damage since the 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks against the United States in 2001. The fall of authoritarian regimes throughout the greater Middle East has fueled growing persecution of minority Christian communities … In the aftermath of 9/11 and the “Arab Spring,” Christian communities throughout the greater Middle East find themselves increasingly besieged.

… In fact, the conflict in Syria and the American invasion of Iraq are linked by a common thread: the failure of the U.S. to consider the effect of its foreign policy on vulnerable religious communities, especially Middle Eastern Christians … The Obama administration, bewilderingly, has chosen to support Syria’s rebel groups without any apparent thought of the consequences … Democracy in the Middle East is proving less tolerant than the regimes it has succeeded. Unless swift action is taken, these democracies will evolve into bastions of intolerance and violence beyond our comprehension.

… Syria is the latest example of Henry Kissinger’s famous quip, “being a US ally is often more dangerous than being its enemy.” … After two years of vicious fighting, the Syrian civil war appears stalemated. The cautious US President Obama seems reluctant to get US forces involved in a Mideast ground war – and for good reason … What is clear: Syria is being ground up and pulverized. Like Iraq, it is being severely punished for a defiant, independent policy and refusing to comply with western plans for the Mideast. Syria is also serving as a whipping boy in the place of Iran – a graphic message to Tehran of what can happen if its nuclear program is not switched off.

The tempo of events in Syria has accelerated in recent weeks. The government forces have scored significant battlefield victories over the rebels, and this has provoked a mixture of war provocations and peace offers from the U.S. and its anti-Assad allies … Similarly bad news about the U.S.-backed rebels committing large scale ethnic/ religious cleansing and numerous human rights violations didn’t manage to make it on to the front pages either … The U.S. position is weakened further by the fact that the majority of the rebel fighters are Islamic extremists, who are fighting for jihad and sharia law, not democracy.

The United Nations general assembly has overwhelmingly approved a resolution calling on Israel to open its nuclear programme for inspection. The resolution, approved [Dec. 3, 2012] by a vote of 174 to six with six abstentions, calls on Israel to join the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) “without further delay” and open its nuclear facilities to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Those voting against were Israel, the US, Canada, Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau. Resolutions adopted by the 193-member general assembly are not legally binding but they do reflect world opinion and carry moral and political weight.

The European Union is the new sick man of Europe. The effort over the past half century to create a more united Europe is now the principal casualty of the euro crisis. The European project now stands in disrepute across much of Europe. Support for European economic integration – the 1957 raison d’etre for creating the European Economic Community, the European Union’s predecessor – is down over last year in five of the eight European Union countries surveyed by the Pew Research Center in 2013. Positive views of the European Union are at or near their low point in most EU nations, even among the young, the hope for the EU’s future.

A statue honoring Confederate soldiers that has stood for more than 100 years outside a Leesburg, Va., courthouse is now at the center of a battle between an attorney and residents. The statue, which reads “In memory of the Confederate Soldiers of Loudoun County, Va. Erected May 28, 1908,” shows a soldier standing guard with his rifle, WTOP reports. John Flannery, an attorney who regularly hears cases inside the courthouse, said the statue intimidates clients and should be moved into a museum or graveyard. “It deters people. It chills them from believing they can get a fair shake in court,” Flannery told WTOP.

The first German settlers arrived in Texas over 150 years ago and successfully passed on their native language throughout the generations – until now. German was the main language used in schools, churches and businesses around the hill country between Austin and San Antonio. But two world wars and the resulting drop in the standing of German meant that the fifth and sixth generation of immigrants did not pass it on to their children. Still the biggest ancestry group in the US, according to Census data, a large majority of German-Americans never learned the language of their ancestors.

One of my clearest memories from childhood is peeking around the doorway from the kitchen to the den as my mother ironed and watched “Days of Our Lives.” … A genre whose very existence could be credited to a Jewish woman. Irna Phillips was the youngest of ten children; her father died when she was young, and her mother raised Irna and her siblings alone. Strong female matriarchs were a staple of many of the soap operas that Phillips helped create, which included not only “Days” but also “Guiding Light,” “As the World Turns” and “Another World.”

It’s hardly news that the US instituted and for years maintained a systematic torture regime, but the success of the Obama administration in blocking all judicial proceedings has meant there has been no official decree that this is so. A comprehensive report just issued by a truly bipartisan group of former high-level Washington officials (including military officials) is as close as we are likely to get to such an official proclamation. … It concludes – in unblinking and definitive fashion – that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture”; this finding is “offered without reservation” …

While campaigning for the presidency, Barack Obama tells an audience that his uncle was among the first US troops to liberate the Auschwitz camp during World War II. What Obama said was not true, first, because he had no uncle who served in the US armed forces, and second, because Soviet troops, not US forces, took control of the Auschwitz camp complex.
 

Since the end of World War II, authoritative claims about the character and scope of killings at the Auschwitz concentration camp have changed drastically. One particularly striking change concerns the various “official” estimates of the number of victims — a number that since 1945 has been steadily declining … Aumeier’s testimony, which Meyer accepts as valid, suggests that Jews were killed at Auschwitz not as part of an comprehensive extermination program systematically to kill all European Jews, but rather as an exceptional measure to curb the horrific epidemics that were ravaging the Auschwitz I and Birkenau camps … Compared to the recently “authoritative” figure of approximately one million Auschwitz deaths, Meyer has reduced the number of Jewish victims there by at least 450,000.

… The Russians released on September 21 [1989] the Auschwitz death books. That was an ugly blow for the battleship Auschwitz and its crew … By releasing the 46 death books of Auschwitz — which cover the years 1942 completely, 1943 almost completely, and 1944 incompletely — the Russians have revealed that the set of Auschwitz death books, which they have released, now show a total of 74,000 deaths. 74,000 deaths by all causes … An admission, ladies and gentlemen, that in Auschwitz I [main camp], der Stammlager Auschwitz, the crematorium and the gas chambers that are shown to tourists from all over the world, is a post-war dummy, put up for the benefit of the tourists!

Tens of thousands of Palestinians marked the 65th anniversary of their mass displacement during the war over Israel’s 1948 creation, marching in the streets and in some parts of the West Bank clashing with Israeli security forces. Every May 15, Palestinians hold rallies to commemorate the “nakba,” or “catastrophe” — the term they use to describe the displacement, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes during the fighting. The dispute over the fate of those Palestinians and their descendants, now numbering several million people, remains at the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

American Muslims for Palestine launched an ad campaign this week on San Francisco buses condemning Israeli apartheid. Predictably, local branches of the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, as well as the Jewish Community Relations Council, immediately issued a statement in effect calling the ad hate speech for using the word ‘apartheid’.

Still plugging away with more bus ads, Washington state activists rolled out a creative bus advertising campaign this week in Seattle and several other cities: “Equal Rights for Palestinians: The Way to Peace.” The ads are sponsored by Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign and will be running in Bellevue, Redmond and Kirkland, as well as on buses in Port Angeles and Clallam County– in addition to Seattle, of course.

One of the last remaining Lancaster Bombers has taken part in a flypast to pay tribute to the 70th anniversary of the legendary Dambusters raid. The veteran aircraft flew over the Derwent reservoir dam in Derbyshire where the original crews practiced for the World War II attack … The Dambusters raid was meant to strike right at the heart of the Nazi industrial war machine by taking out three dams in the Ruhr valley, flooding the area. A new type of weapon, the bouncing bomb, was designed and tested by Barnes Wallis specifically for the mission. Two of the dams were breached while another sustained only minor damage. In the valley, 1,600 people drowned.

The most savage and devastating conflict in modern European history was the 1941-45 German-Soviet War. The struggle, however, did not merely pit German soldiers against their Soviet counterparts. Over twenty European countries and national groups sent contingents of troops to assist the German Wehrmacht in its attempt to destroy the communist state. This “crusade against Bolshevism” drew in a minimum of 3,962,000 men from across Europe, organized in both large national armies from states allied to Germany as well as in volunteer contingents integrated directly into the Wehrmacht — both army and Waffen-SS – itself.

Right after the June 1941 attack against the Soviet Union, young men across Europe volunteer to join in the World War II struggle against Soviet Bolshevism. The first battalion of the Danish volunteer corps ”Danmark” departs for training. Spanish volunteers of the famed “Blue Division” depart from Madrid. Italian troops prepare for combat on the eastern front. From the German weekly newsreel “Deutsche Wochenschau” of July 30, 1941. With English subtitles (not entirely accurate). Runtime: 1:11 minutes.

… One could say quite reasonably that this is the pure expression of the crux of US political discourse on such matters: they must abide by rules from which we’re immune, because we’re superior. So much of the pseudo-high-minded theorizing emanating from DC think thanks and US media outlets boils down to this adolescent, self-praising, tribalistic license: we have the right to do X, but they do not. Indeed, the entire debate over whether there should be a war with Iran over its nuclear enrichment activities, as Israel sits on a massive pile of nuclear weapons while refusing UN demands to permit any international inspection of it, is also a perfect expression of this mentality.

It is nearly impossible to dig into any chapter of Jewish history without uncovering lessons for our own age. Spain during the 15th and 16th centuries is a particularly striking example. Even today, our view of this period, and particularly of the Spanish Inquisition, colors our attitudes regarding relations between Jews and non-Jews. The Inquisition is considered one of Jewish history’s darkest chapters — and one of Christian history’s most shameful.

An MP for the ultra-right Golden Dawn party, Panayiotis Iliopoulos, was ejected from a session in Parliament on Friday after the deputy used derogatory language to revile fellow MPs and cries of “Heil Hitler” were heard in the House. Originally assumed to have been uttered by far-right MPs, Parliament’s minutes revealed that it was actually leftist Syriza MP Christos Pantzas who first cried ‘Heil Hitler’ in the House, not the far-right MPs.

A British lawyer who said she “cannot stand Jewish people” during an office rant was found guilty of discrimination by a disciplinary panel. In a ruling published last week, the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal in London fined Danielle Morris, 34, some $3,840 and ordered her to pay $8,060 in costs for the 2009 remarks, according to a report by the Lancashire Telegraph daily newspaper. Her comments came after a Jewish man cut in line at a medical center before Morris, an assistant solicitor at Mulderiggs Solicitors in Rawtenstall near Manchester and mother of two.

… It is leading Jewish organizations and their in-the-pocket politicians that have quite plausibly been the sine qua non in unleashing a series of actual and impending wars against the Muslim world … The shaping of the narrative to minimize the role of organizations that are demonstrably Jewish – albeit unrepresentative of Jewish opinion in America – has also been very effective in some media circles … The reality is that if progressives (and the rest of us) really want to stop a proxy war against Syria followed by a catastrophic conflict with Iran we have to take the blinkers off and be willing to confront Jewish groups like AIPAC and the ADL directly and persistently.

White Britons are ‘retreating’ from areas dominated by ethnic minorities, a study has revealed. Analysis of census figures shows that white Britons are leaving areas where they are in a minority and are being replaced by immigrants and other ethnic minorities. As a result, nearly half of ethnic minorities – four million people – live in communities where whites make up less than half the population, the study by the Demos think-tank found. Demos said the survey showed a ‘spiral of white British demographic decline’ as white Britons choose to leave minority-dominated areas.

… Like those before him, Luhrmann needed to decide how to portray the minor but essential character of Meyer Wolfsheim, the Jewish gangster and bootlegger who is Gatsby’s mentor, the Svengali figure responsible for the transformation of the modest Midwestern ex-soldier James Gatz into the wealthy, reclusive socialite Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, on his way toward trying to win back the heart of his beloved Daisy (played this time by Carey Mulligan). The 1974 version watered down some of the more vulgar, offensive stereotypical aspects that Fitzgerald gave Wolfsheim.

… Angry Americans wanted to know why their Pacific fleet was caught by surprise, and who was responsible for the woeful lack of preparedness … As its title indicates, Scapegoats was written with the goal of exonerating Kimmel and Short. Author Edward Beach tries to show why the Pearl Harbor naval base was unprepared for the Japanese attack, and who was to blame for the Pacific Fleet’s lack of readiness. More specifically, Beach presents strong evidence to show that Kimmel and Short were unjustly blamed for the misdeeds of Roosevelt, Marshall and other higher-ups in the US military command.

It may have been a surprise to the U.S. people, but it certainly was not a surprise to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the select few persons who surrounded him or the U.S. Army intelligence officer working under his direct orders. I previously worked in a civilian capacity for LTC Clifford M. Andrew, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, who temporarily was assistant chief of Staff, military intelligence, general staff, United States Army. … Upon at least three occasions in his home in Tigard [Oregon] he related to me the history of his military life and personal involvement in the actions of Roosevelt and other officials surrounding the Pearl Harbor attack.

… Jewish American Heritage Month was established by presidential decree in 2006, after lobbying efforts by the Jewish Museum of Florida, the South Florida Jewish community, Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter … The Library of Congress, the National Archives, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Gallery of Art, the National Park Service, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have partnered to create a website for JAHM, featuring selections from their digital collections on Jewish American history, oral histories and online exhibits.

Two organizations bearing Anne Frank’s name are in a bitter dispute over the possession of the Frank family archive, in an echo of a court battle they fought in the 1990s over which one had the right to trademark the Holocaust victim’s name. The conflict between the Basel, Switzerland-based Anne Frank Fund and the Amsterdam, Netherlands-based Anne Frank Foundation is in part a struggle to control the late Jewish teen’s legacy. But, with one side even comparing the other to Nazi Germany, it also threatens to damage both institutions’ reputations.

A decision by world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking not to attend a conference in Israel in support of an academic boycott of the country has sparked controversy in Israel and a vitriolic debate online … His decision to boycott the conference, hosted by Israeli President Shimon Peres, a Nobel peace laureate, has prompted a “Twitterstorm.” Some tweeters accuse him of anti-Semitism or comment on his physical disabilities, while others applaud his support for the Palestinian academics. One tweeter, Ali Abunimah, observes: “Amazing how many Israelis on Facebook want Stephen Hawking dead, electrocuted or made to suffer in other nasty ways.”

President Obama’s foreign policy team might want to think up some new compliments for global allies. A Danish broadcaster has found that Obama uses versions of a particular boxing phrase — punching above one’s weight — with an awful lot of leaders from smaller countries … On Danish television, Thomas Buch-Andersen broadcast clips of Obama using the same or nearly the same phrase with the leaders of Norway, Ireland, the Netherlands and the Philippines.

Last month, an article by Jen Graves in Seattle’s weekly paper The Stranger exposed the artist Charles Krafft as a white nationalist and Holocaust denier, and former admirers of his work are now stripping it from their walls. Krafft, who is sixty-five, has been a respected figure in the Seattle art world for decades; his work has been shown in galleries around the world and featured in Harper’s, Artforum, and The New Yorker … The revelations about Krafft’s repugnant personal opinions have cast his work in a new light, and brought up knotty questions about how an artist’s intent should influence our evaluation of his work.

A militant Zionist underground organization, the Irgun, carried out the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946. This was the deadliest attack directed at the British authorities in Palestine during the Mandate era (1920-1948). It was harshly condemned as an act of despicable terrorism by the British government, leading academics, and major international periodicals, including The New York Times. As this British documentary film makes clear, Zionist Jews “invented” modern terrorism. The 1946 Irgun attack established the model of modern terrorism.

If anyone had doubts that Syria’s gruesome civil war is already spinning into a wider Middle East conflict, the events of the past few days should have laid them to rest. Most ominous was Israel’s string of aerial attacks on Syrian military installations near Damascus, reportedly killing more than 100. The bombing raids, unprovoked and illegal, were of course immediately supported by the US and British governments … The irony of the US and other western governments – let alone Israel – once again making common cause with al-Qaida, after a decade of a “war on terror” aimed at destroying it, is one factor holding Obama back.

Slide show with photos and short texts explaining how life in these seven states is bad and is getting worse.
 

Mao Zedong, founder of the People’s Republic of China, qualifies as the greatest mass murderer in world history, an expert who had unprecedented access to official Communist Party archives said … Frank Dikötter, a Hong Kong-based historian … who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years …

As a child growing up in rural China, Dali Yang, Assistant Professor in Political Science, heard the stories of his parents and others about the horrors of the Great Leap Forward, a time of suffering for China that came soon after the Communist revolution in 1949 … In pursuit of its goals, the government executed people who did not agree with the pace of radical change. The crackdown led to the deaths of 550,000 people by 1958 … Scholars have estimated that somewhere between 16.5 million and 40 million people died before the experiment came to an end in 1961, making the Great Leap famine the largest in world history.

… Historians have known for some time that the Great Leap Forward resulted in one of the world’s worst famines … In all, the records I studied suggest that the Great Leap Forward was responsible for at least 45 million deaths. Between 2 and 3 million of these victims were tortured to death or summarily executed, often for the slightest infraction. People accused of not working hard enough were hung and beaten; sometimes they were bound and thrown into ponds. Punishments for the least violations included mutilation and forcing people to eat excrement.

… Ancient Rome was a curious mixture of civilisation and barbarism. As the sculpture of Pan and the goat attests, sex pervaded Roman culture as much as violence … A bronze bust of a Roman banker is so creased and lifelike that we believe we can grasp his character. A bone vessel still contains pink pigment that a Roman matriarch probably used to rouge her cheeks. But then a sculpture such as that of Pan making love to a goat plunges us back into darkness and uncertainty, and makes the chasm of two millennia feel as abyss-like as ever.

“Nazi chic” is a term that describes the use of Nazi imagery, paraphernalia or fashion either for the exhilaration of breaking taboos or for sensational shock value, but not for the express purpose of sympathizing with the ideology of Nazism. Cosplay is a popular phenomenon in Asia where practitioners dress up as characters from their favorite manga, video games and anime … This recent interest in Nazi cosplay is likely inspired by such Nazi-themed anime and manga …

In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Director of National Intelligence reaffirmed what the U.S. intelligence community has been saying for years: Iran has no nuclear weapons program, is not building a nuclear weapon and has not even made a decision to do so. The annual “Worldwide Threat Assessment,” which compiles the collective conclusions of all American intelligence agencies, has long held that Iran maintains defensive capabilities and has a military doctrine of deterrence and retaliation, but is not an aggressive state actor and has no intention of beginning a conflict, let alone triggering a nuclear apocalypse.

… Today there’s no hiding the staggering numbers on sexual assault in the military any more. The Pentagon has just released a new report that shows sexual assaults in the military are up sharply, up to the rate of 70 per day. That translates into almost three rapes every hour, all day long, all night long, every twenty-four hours. This shocking report comes just after the Air Force officer in charge of the Air Force’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office was charged with sexual battery, and following a string of reports on sexual assault in the military, especially in the Air Force.

The Syrian conflict is a sectarian war in a volatile region whose potential to spread and directly threaten American interests would only be increased by U.S. intervention … That risk has been compounded by the recent Israeli bombing of weapons sites inside Syria. Whatever their justification, the attacks convey to some Arabs the sense that there is an external plot against them. That impression would be solidified if the U.S. were now to enter the fight, suggesting a de facto American-Israeli-Saudi alliance, which would play into the hands of the extremists.

The World Jewish Congress approved on Tuesday a resolution that calls on countries around the world, “in particular those whose Jewish populations were decimated in the Shoah,” to outlaw the public denial of the Holocaust, and where appropriate constitutional provisions exist, to consider banning neo-Nazi parties. The resolution also urges Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and other national leaders and legislators in Europe to join the 125 legislators from more than 40 countries in signing the 2009 London Declaration on Combating Anti-Semitism.

A staging of Richard Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” — set during the Holocaust and including a gas chamber and a shooting scene — shocked audience members so badly that some had to be given medical attention. The theater has now cancelled the production out of fear it will damage its artistic reputation. / … Among the staging’s most shocking scenes is a sequence during the famous “Tannhäuser” overture, in which nude actors are lowered to the floor on a cross made of glass cubes that are slowly filled with fog to represent the gas chambers. The Venusberg, the site of hedonistic love in Wagner’s opera, becomes the site of a brutal shooting scene.

A controversial Nazi-themed production of Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser has been cancelled after it caused some audience members to seek medical help and prompted others to walk out in anger. The Rheinoper in Düsseldorf said it was in a state of shock after being deluged with complaints by members of the public who called the opera tasteless and unnecessarily provocative … Includes scenes of people dying in gas chambers, being shot and raped, and of members of a family having their heads shaved before their execution.

Jean-Claude Pressac’s book, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, is the first serious and detailed response to the revisionist critique of the generally accepted Auschwitz extermination story … His book features hundreds of valuable illustrations, including many good-quality reproductions of previously unpublished original diagrams and documents that simply cannot be reconciled with the generally accepted Holocaust extermination story. Reproduced on the following pages are a few of these illustrations, which were selected from Pressac’s book by Mark Weber, who also provided the captions.

Born in 1939, Jacques Baynac is a French historian who is the author of several books. A scholar whose sympathies lean to the left, he harbors a definite hostility toward revisionists … In 1996, though, Baynac acknowledged in two lengthy articles published in a Swiss daily newspaper that, taking everything into account, one is forced to admit — even if it is “as painful to say as it is to hear” — that the well-known “testimonies” are not sufficient proof of wartime homicidal gas chambers, and that it is simply not possible to prove, scientifically, that the homicidal gas chambers actually existed.

Auschwitz is regarded as the most notorious Nazi extermination center. During World War II, we are told, hundreds of thousands of prisoners — most of them Jewish — were systematically killed there, especially in gas chambers. Auschwitz was unquestionably a place of horror, where many perished under terrible circumstances. And yet, much of what has been said about the camp is untrue or exaggerated. A closer look at the facts calls into question at least some aspects of its reputation as a center of systematic mass extermination.

A female lawyer who blurted out: ‘I cannot stand Jewish people’ during an office rant has been left with a huge legal bill after a discrimination case was brought against her by a former colleague. Danielle Morris, 34, was subject of a three-and-a-half year investigation in front of two legal tribunals and almost lost her career after she made the remark during an office conversation. The mother-of-two complained a Jewish man had jumped the queue at a medical centre while she was waiting to take one of her children to see a doctor. Later she relayed the incident in the presence of a Jewish cashier at her law practice in Rossendale, Lancashire.

Semen Domnitser, the former Claims Conference employee who was charged with leading a $57 million fraud scheme at the Holocaust restitution organization, was found guilty. Domnitser and two others, Oksana Romalis and Luba Kramrish, were found guilty on all counts Wednesday by a US District Court jury in Manhattan. Their trial lasted four weeks. Twenty-eight others charged in the fraud scheme had pleaded guilty … The fraud was discovered in 2009 and dated back to 1993.

… The portrait of America that emerges is of a nation not overly interested in what is going on in Syria, but which overwhelmingly wants to stay out of the war. But it is also a nation whose foreign policy elites are far more interventionist and far more supportive of sending weapons to the rebels and using U.S. air power … America has not gone isolationist, but has become anti-interventionist. This country does not want its soldiers sent into any more misbegotten adventures like Iraq and Afghanistan, and does not see any vital national interest in who comes out on top in Syria … In short, the war criminals may be the people on whose behalf we are supposed to intervene.

You don’t have to be a teenager to want to fit in at the school lunchroom. Some wild animals seem to follow similar monkey-see, monkey-do behavior to follow the crowd and find the best eats, new research suggests. South African monkeys switched foods purely because of peer pressure, and humpback whales off the coast of New England copied a new way to round up a fish meal, according to two studies in Thursday’s journal Science. “We’re not as unique as we would like to think,” said monkey study lead author Erica van de Waal of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. “We can find many of the roots of our behaviors in animals.”

… Opening eyes to the architectural mastery of Albert Speer has been Mr. Krier’s mission ever since he interviewed him in the months before his death in 1981… Mr. Stern believes that Mr. Krier should be praised for spotlighting Speer “because what transpired in Germany was so extraordinary — reprehensible politically but perhaps also laudable architecturally.” … In “Albert Speer, Architecture 1932- 1942,” he rails against industrialization and, in particular, what the Marshall Plan wreaked upon West Germany. He pours scorn on modernists … After all, he concludes: “The Führer had cherished all things beautiful.”

British cosmologist Stephen Hawking has pulled out of an Israeli conference, joining an academic boycott of Israel to protest against its occupation of Palestinian lands, Cambridge University said on Wednesday. The wheelchair-bound Hawking, who has won international recognition for his work on black holes, had been due to speak at a prestigious conference in June organized by Israeli President Shimon Peres that draws hundreds of leading world figures. However, his name was quietly dropped from the list of participants earlier this week, giving a major boost to supporters of pro-Palestinian groups that want to isolate Israel on the international stage over the continued occupation.

Discrimination of women, Arabs and Ethiopians, mistreatment of refugees and asylum seekers and violations of migrants’ rights – Israel is guilty of all these charges, according to a State Department report on human rights practices around the world … One of the most pressing problems, according to the report, is “the institutional and societal discrimination against Arab citizens, in particular in access to equal education and employment opportunities.”

The Church of Scotland published a paper denying that “scripture” provides a basis for Jewish claims to Israel . The paper, entitled “The Inheritance of Abraham,” rejects “claims that scripture offers any peoples a privileged claim for possession of a particular territory.” The paper further states that “reconciliation can only be possible if the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the blockade of Gaza are ended.”

More than 500,000 pounds (US$760,000) is to be awarded to a scheme which gives schoolchildren the chance to visit the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The Scottish government announced the funding for the Holocaust Educational Trust, which was set up in 1988. It will allow two youngsters from every school and college in Scotland to go to the site in Poland and hear the testimony of a Holocaust survivor. More than 1,000 Scottish students have taken part in the project to date.

Radical anti-government “patriot” groups and militias, galvanized against gun control, will continue to grow even as the number of groups operating in the USA reached an all-time high in 2012, a report Tuesday by the Southern Poverty Law Center finds. The center tracked 1,360 radical militias and anti-government groups in 2012, an eightfold increase over 2008, when it recorded 149 such groups. The explosive growth began four years ago, sparked by the election of President Obama and anger about the poor economy, the center says. That growth is likely to continue …

… It is a story which has captivated Germany. Er ist wieder da (He’s back) has already sold 400,000 copies. The audio version, too, is a best –seller. Translations into 28 languages are on the way. So is a film. The appeal is well worn, that of a throw-back from a previous age trying to cope with our own times – Rip van Hitler, as you might call him, is baffled by computers and mobile phones and all the paraphernalia of Berlin today … But some critics are troubled by this. They fear Germans might start to feel comfortable about Hitler. It’s a thin line between humanising him in an absurd situation and making him

… Israel’s image seems to be under challenge as never before, in Europe as well as in America. A number of incidents suggest a cultural shift is emerging that could presage a reexamination of the nature of America’s political ties to Israel. This shift is rooted in a mounting perception that Israel cannot be exempted from culpability for its current predicament; that it is isolating itself from its neighbors in ways that are problematic for itself and for its one staunch ally, America; that its robust and illegal expansion of settlements — including in East Jerusalem, where more than five hundred thousand Israelis live — is inimical to any chance of peace; that its recent initiative to segregate Israelis and Palestinians on separate buses represents just another step toward colonization; and that it must strike out on a new course or risk becoming an international pariah.

… One measure of this impunity is brought to bear by the pro-Israel Lobby that operates in the political sphere of the U.S. I am a former Member of Congress because pro-Israel sympathizers known as the “pro-Israel Lobby” ensured my ouster from Congress and that of many other Members of Congress who dared to try and draw attention to U.S. law, Israel’s human rights violations, Israel’s misuse of U.S. weapons, or any other inconvenient facts that were better buried and left unknown … I thought it was important to mention not only how the pro-Israel Lobby skews politics in the U.S. against the Palestinians, but also against African-descendants inside the U.S.

It isn’t every day or night that a tax-exempt non-profit American charity rakes in $27 million in the space of a few hours. When it happens in New York at such a well-known landmark as the Waldorf-Astoria, arguably the city’s most famous hotel, it should be news, right? Wrong, apparently, since not a single TV station nor any New York newspaper, all of which are known for their attention to events in the city’s Jewish community as well as their devotion to Israel, saw fit to cover the annual dinner of the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF) this past March 12 which raised that enormous sum.

… 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!

Eye-opening Dutch television documentary on the power of the pro-Israel Lobby in the US, with stress on the impact of the “Israel Lobby” paper by professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Made by the Netherlands public television association VPRO, and broadcast on Tegenlicht (“Counterlight”). Includes interviews with John Mearsheimer, Lawrence Wilkerson (former chief of staff to Secy. of State Colin Powell), John Hagee (cofounder of Christians United for Israel), Richard Perle, and Tony Judt (historian). Runtime: 52 mins.

… It is high time that now, at last, a real understanding should be reached among the nations. This must be an understanding based on mutual respect for one another, because only such an understanding can endure … Again and again Adolf Hitler has asserted that Germany demands equality of rights in all spheres, including that of armament. Once such an understanding as I have been speaking of is arrived at between Germany and her neighbors, Germany can easily be content with the minimum amount of armament necessary for her own internal security and the guaranteeing of peace.

History will remember the 46-year imprisonment of Rudolf Hess as an act of injustice and inhumanity. Hitler’s one-time deputy flew from Germany to Britain on May 10, 1941, in a courageous effort to end the war between the two nations. His plea for peace was promptly rejected, and he was imprisoned … Hess was sentenced to life imprisonment at Nuremberg for ”crimes against peace,” a charge invented for the occasion. As Robert A. Taft and other Americans pointed out, this was a blatant violation of our own tradition against ex post facto laws … Rudolf Hess will be remembered as a prisoner of peace and a victim of a vindictive age.

For many years Rudolf Hess was Hitler’s colleague, friend and deputy. In a final statement to the Nuremberg Tribunal, on August 31, 1946, he looked back on that close association: “I had the privilege of working for many years of my life under the greatest son my nation has brought forth in its thousand-year history. Even if I could, I would not wish to expunge this time from my life. I am happy to know that I have done my duty toward my people, my duty as a German, as a National Socialist, as a loyal follower of my Führer. I regret nothing. No matter what people may do, one day I shall stand before the judgment seat of God Eternal. I will answer to Him, and I know that He will absolve me.”

America’s nuclear negotiators with Iran got it all wrong, according to a growing chorus of critics arguing that over-reliance on pressure and sanctions may be jeopardizing a diplomatic deal. The Obama administration has implemented a host of crippling sanctions on Iran targeting its central bank and lifeblood oil exports … Now a number of senior former US officials and analysts say a White House obsession with the pressure track may be backfiring, and are calling for a pivot toward the diplomatic track to reestablish balance.

Once a year, Israel’s Jewish war veterans don suit jackets and uniforms dripping in Red Army medals, the shiny bronzes and silvers pinned to their chests in tight rows like armor. About 500,000 Jews served in the Soviet Red Army during World War II. Most of those still alive today — about 7,000 — are said to live in Israel. … About 1.5 million Jews fought in Allied armies, including 500,000 in the Red Army, 550,000 in the American army, 100,000 in the Polish army and 30,000 in the British army, according to Israel’s Holocaust museum Yad Vashem. Some of those who fought in the Red Army served in the highest levels of command.

What is happening to you America? Once upon a time, the United States was a place where free enterprise thrived and the greatest cities that the world had ever seen sprouted up from coast to coast … Cities such as Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Philadelphia and Baltimore were all teeming with economic activity and the rest of the globe looked on our economic miracle with a mixture of wonder and envy. But now look at us. Our once proud cities are being transformed into poverty-stricken hellholes …

The latest available data from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) shows that a record number 23 million households in the United States are now on food stamps. The most recent Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program (SNAP) statistics of the number of households receiving food stamps shows that 23,087,886 households participated in January 2013 – an increase of 889,154 families from January 2012 …

Twenty-nine percent of registered voters think that an armed revolution might be necessary in the next few years in order to protect liberties, according to a Public Mind poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University. The poll, which surveyed 863 registered voters and had a margin of error of +/-3 or 4 percent, focused on both gun control and the possibility of a need for an armed revolution in the United States to protect liberty.

The nationwide shortage of ammunition has left many police departments scrambling to get their hands on the necessary rounds – with some even bartering among each other. Meanwhile, Rep. Timothy Huelskamp (R-Kansas) says the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has failed to respond to multiple members of Congress asking why DHS bought more than 1.6 billion [rounds] in the past year.

Republican Party Animals operator David Stein says he is really David Cole, and that he still holds controversial views / … Stein was not who he claimed. His real name can be revealed for the first time publicly – a close circle of confidants only found out the truth recently – as David Cole. And under that name he was once a reviled Holocaust revisionist who questioned the existence of Nazi gas chambers. He changed identities in January 1998 … Cole’s brazen reinvention as a social networker and political pundit deceived a roll-call of conservative politicians, filmmakers, journalists and broadcasters who had no clue about his past.

Historian Mark Weber and Jewish revisionist researcher David Cole exchange contrasting views with Jewish “Holocaust survivors” on the nationally syndicated “Montel Williams Show,” broadcast April 30, 1992, on television stations across the US. They discuss “Holocaust” myths and reality, including Germany’s World War II policy toward Europe’s Jews, the familiar “Six Million” figure, and homicidal gas chambers. Emotional and blunt comments by audience members add to the heated mood of this much-discussed broadcast. Runtime: 44:04 mins.

The high point of my visit … was my interview with Dr. Franciszek Piper, Senior Curator of the Polish government’s Auschwitz State Museum… On tape, he admits that the so-called gas chamber in Crematory Building (Krema) I, which is shown to half a million visitors a year as a genuine homicidal gas chamber, is in fact a reconstruction — even down to the holes cut into the ceiling. Piper also admits that walls were knocked down and bathroom facilities removed. He went on to tell us that the remains of the “white cottage,” supposed site of the first preliminary gassings at Birkenau, are also reconstructed. This was hardly news to me.

A 93-year-old alleged former guard at the Auschwitz extermination camp has been arrested in southern Germany. Hans Lipschis was taken into custody in Aalen after prosecutors concluded there was “compelling evidence” that he had been complicit in murder. Mr Lipschis acknowledges he served with the Waffen SS at the camp in occupied Poland, but claims he was only a cook. Last month, the Simon Wiesenthal Center named him as number four on its list of most-wanted Nazis. The organization accused him of participating in the mass murder and persecution of innocent civilians, primarily Jews, at Auschwitz between October 1941 and 1945.

A rally by Hungary’s Jobbik party, the third largest in the country’s parliament, has been held despite government efforts to ban it because of its anti-Semitic nature. About 1,000 supporters of the far-right party attended Saturday’s rally where speakers complained about a meeting of the World Jewish Congress starting on Sunday in Budapest. They also prayed for the end of Zionism and said any public servants holding dual Hungarian-Israeli citizenship should resign. Members of the New Hungarian Guard, a far-right, uniformed group whose predecessor was banned in 2009 took part in the rally.

… For most Americans, reality is whatever our media organs tell us, and since these have largely ignored the facts and adverse consequences of our wars in recent years, the American people have similarly forgotten … Author James Bovard has described our society as an “attention deficit democracy” … The events of the last dozen years should have bankrupted any faith we have in our government or media. Once we acknowledge this, we should begin to accept the possible reality of important, well-documented events even if they are not announced on the front pages of our major newspapers.

The suicide rate among middle-aged Americans rose 28 percent in a decade, a new report from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has found. Among adults 35-64, white people and American Indians saw the sharpest increases from 1999 to 2010 … Suicides by white people increased 40 percent, from 16 per 100,000 to 22. Experts are unsure about what caused the increase in suicides to be so disproportionately steep among Native Americans and white people, during a period which spanned the recession. The sharpest increase in suicides in the study was among 50 to 64-year-olds of all ethnic backgrounds.

… To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

… Modern-day scientists have now developed a far more compelling argument for the genetic and neurological components of criminal behavior … The field of neurocriminology — using neuroscience to understand and prevent crime — is revolutionizing our understanding of what drives “bad” behavior … Most people are still deeply uncomfortable with the implications of neurocriminology … With each passing year, neurocriminology is winning new adherents, researchers and practitioners who understand its potential to transform our approach to both crime prevention and criminal justice. The genetic basis of criminal behavior is now well established.

… Expulsion, ethnic cleansing as well as the ongoing abuse of human right in Palestine, are actually consistent with Jewish nationalist supremacist culture and also with a strict interpretation of Jewish Biblical heritage … The early Zionists, were neither blind nor were they stupid. They saw the Arabs in the land of Palestine – in the fields, in the villages and in the towns – but, being driven by a racial, supremacist and expansionist philosophy, they probably regarded the Arab as sub-human and so easily dismissed their rights, their culture, their heritage and indeed, their humanity.

…. 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.

Sources at Israel’s Embassy in Washington say negative representation of Jewish state on television series like ‘Veep,’ ‘House of Cards’ justifies ‘conspiracy theories about the Israeli and Jewish control of American politics’ / Popular American television shows are presenting Israel in a highly critical manner, sources in Israeli Embassy in Washington say, expressing their concern that the negative characterization will badly affect the Jewish state’s image among viewers … “These series present Israel as a country which one should be very careful not to offend, and that anyone daring to criticize it is reprimanded by the Jewish lobby,” a senior state official says.

The BBC has been accused of ‘political naiveté’ after dropping a controversial documentary which called into question the mass exile of Jewish people from Jerusalem in AD 70 after their failed uprising against the Romans … The Jews were expelled from Jerusalem following an uprising against the Romans, with hundreds of thousands killed and many more sent into exile. After the revolt there were still pockets of Jews left living in Jerusalem, but the centre of gravity for the Jewish people shifted to the Galilee. A Radio Times preview said the documentary, which questioned the scale of the exile, would have ‘severe ramifications for relations in the region’ … Angry viewers took to the magazine’s website to accuse the corporation of ‘pandering to a small interest group.’

German broadcaster ZDF has dropped repeat showings of a popular detective series after it emerged its late star had hidden his Waffen SS past. Archives released last month reveal Horst Tappert, who played Derrick in the show of the same name, had served in the Totenkopf panzer division. Tappert, who died in 2008, had remained tight-lipped about his war record. According to the archives, the 19-year-old panzer grenadier was wounded on the Eastern Front in 1943.

… A key Netanyahu rival, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, accused some Israelis of exaggerating the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program and strongly hinted that covert Israeli operations have hindered the Iranians. Speaking to a New York conference, Olmert noted that a decade ago, intelligence experts predicted that Iran would have nuclear weapons by 2009. “Now we are in the middle of 2013, and they still don’t have it,” he said. He also said his government “did no less” than any other Israeli government in dealing with the threat.

A former chief of Israel’s Mossad spy agency has come out against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policy of setting “red lines” for Iran’s nuclear program, saying that the Islamic Republic’s [alleged] effort to develop nuclear weapons can be countered at any time … Dagan alluded to a fateful meeting during which he, then-Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin, and then-chief of the General Staff Gabi Ashkenazi met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, then-defense minister Ehud Barak and other members of the cabinet in a Mossad club room to discuss the prospect of attacking Iran.

The U.S. economy has recovered for households with net worth of $500,000 or more, a new study shows. The recession continues for almost everyone else. Wealthy households boosted their net worth by 21.2 percent in the aftermath of the recession, according to the study released today by the Pew Research Center. The rest of America lost 4.9 percent of household wealth from 2009 to 2011 … The Pew report, based on the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation, reinforces a body of evidence that the U.S. is becoming a nation of haves and have-nots.

… Forbes Israel, the Tel Aviv offshoot of the American business magazine, has a cover story on Jewish billionaires. The Israeli edition has made up a list, drawn from Forbes‘s overall ranking of the world’s 1,426 billionaires, of the 165 richest Jews in the world. “Per capita, Jews are a little over 100 times more likely to become billionaires than the rest of the human race.” … Jews are usually said to comprise about 0.2% of the world’s population, so 11% of the world’s billionaires means they’re doing pretty well.

Israel inaugurated its fifth nuclear-capable Dolphin-class submarine April 29 in Kiel, Germany, home of the shipbuilding division of Thyssen-Krupp Marine Systems (TKMS). The INS Rahav, the fifth of six Israeli submarines built at the German shipyard with funding assistance from Berlin, is expected to arrive here sometime next year following weapon system integration and sea trials … Like its predecessor and the sixth submarine now undergoing hull construction at the TKMS shipyard, INS Rahav features an air-independent propulsion (AIP) system that allows for extended mission range and endurance.

Renowned and controversial journalist Carl Bernstein told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough Friday that the “insane” Iraq War was brought to bear by Bush, Cheney and “the Jewish neo-cons who wanted to remake the world.” Bernstein then justified his barb about Jews by saying that since he himself is Jewish, “maybe I can say that.” … “This was an insane war that brought us low economically, morally,” Bernstein began. “We went to war against a guy who had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. It was a total pretext! It’s inexplicable and there you go to Cheney, there you go to Bush, there you go to the Jewish neo-cons who wanted to remake the world. Maybe I can say that because I’m Jewish …”

More than 600,000 white British Londoners have left the capital in a decade. Census figures show that between 2001 and 2011 the level of ‘white flight’ reached 620,000. It is the equivalent of a city the size of Glasgow – made up entirely of white Britons – moving out of the capital. The figures, reported by the BBC yesterday, mean that for the first time, white Britons are now in a minority in the country’s largest city. At the same time, the census shows, some rural areas have seen a rise in the proportion of people who describe their ethnicity as ‘white British’.

Culpeper County [Virginia] public school officials have decided to stop assigning a version of Anne Frank’s diary, one of the most enduring symbols of the atrocities of the Nazi regime, after a parent complained that the book includes sexually explicit material and homosexual themes. “The Diary of a Young Girl: the Definitive Edition,” which was published on the 50th anniversary of Frank’s death in a concentration camp, will not be used in the future, said James Allen, director of instruction for the 7,600-student system … The version of the diary in question includes passages previously excluded from the widely read original edition …

Holocaust denial? It wasn’t me! This is the new political game played by Iran’s leaders on the eve of a problematic presidential election. Almost eight years ago, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad shocked Iranians and many others by claiming that the Holocaust never happened … Yet last week, Muhammad Shariatmadari, an Ahmadinejad friend and now a presidential candidate, claimed the president “never doubted that Holocaust had happened.” … In fact, Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism in general have never been an Iranian preoccupation.

… Present-day America is in the grip of what can only be called “Holocaustomania.” The purveyors of this contagion in New York, in Hollywood, in Washington, and in schools all across America have been working industriously for years now to convert the Holocaust from an alleged historical event to an active present reality. Their mastery of the media has enabled them to vend Holocaust propaganda as edification and entertainment to tens of millions … Intelligent, concerned Americans — and people everywhere — owe the Holocaust revisionists a fair hearing.

European Parliament president Martin Schulz paid tribute to the victims of German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau during a visit on April 20. “The visit to Nazi German death camp Auschwitz changes you. It changed me,” he said. “There are no words to describe the enormity of this crime. We must never, ever forget.” During his first official visit to Poland, Mr Schulz also took part in the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising and met with Polish politicians.

Children who are given anti-racism lessons in school are more likely to be intolerant outside the classroom, a major study found yesterday. It said accusing white pupils of racism causes animosity, and discussing sensitive ethnic concerns such as honour killings paints minority group children in a bad light. The survey said children who live in mixed neighbourhoods are often free of hostility towards other racial groups. But it found that ‘when more attention in class is being paid to the multicultural society, the liberalising effect of positive contact in class on youngsters’ xenophobic attitude decreases’.

… If Barack Obama plunges into Syria’s civil war, it could consume his presidency, even as Iraq consumed the presidency of George W. Bush … Why stay out? Because it is not our war. There is no vital U.S. interest in who rules Syria. Hafez Assad and Bashar have ruled Syria for 40 years. How has that ever threatened us? … Do we really wish to expend American blood and treasure to bring about a victory of Islamists and jihadists in Syria? … To attack Syria would compound Obama’s folly in drawing the red line. Better to have egg on Obama’s face than for America to be dragged into another unnecessary war.

… Let no-one mistake how far above the rest of the world the US has risen. It would take a lot – a catastrophic event – to dent the most powerful military the world has ever known – especially when the US spends more on its military than the next twelve big spenders … It is important to remember America is still a very young country, with very bright dreams. It’s a teenager, admiring its muscles, throwing tantrums, amazed and scared by the wider world. It is still wondering what it will be when it grows up, still hoping for greatness. But uncertain of its identify, asking itself profound questions about the way it is changing.

Elderly survivors of the Holocaust and the veterans who helped liberate them are gathering for what could be their last big reunion at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Some 1,000 survivors and World War II vets are coming together with President Bill Clinton and Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust activist and writer, on Monday when the museum marks its 20th anniversary … The museum also launched a campaign to raise $540 million by 2018 to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive and to combat anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial and contemporary genocide. It has already secured gifts totaling $258.7 million. The campaign will double the size of the museum’s endowment by its 25th anniversary.

The United States marked the 20th anniversary of the nation’s Holocaust Museum, with leaders promising to heed the lessons of one of the worst genocides in recorded history. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton helped preside over the museum’s opening in Washington … “The Holocaust memorial will be our conscience and will be here as our conscience from now forever,” said Clinton. Clinton also said the lessons of the Holocaust are as relevant as ever … Since the museum opened in 1993, it has welcomed more than 34 million visitors, including more than 100 heads of state and 10 million students.

… Actually, this “moving reunion” is a staged fraud. “It’s a lie,” confirmed McConnell in 1993. “We were nowhere near these camps when they were liberated … No black troops participated in the liberation of either Buchenwald or Dachau … In spite of the 1993 revelations, the US Holocaust Museum — a federal government center operated by the taxpayer-funded United States Holocaust Memorial Council — has continued to propagate this fraud. … Similarly, two books published with the cooperation and approval of the US Holocaust Museum also perpetrate the “black liberators” story.

Visitors at the recently opened US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, 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 … As Pressac correctly notes, 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.

At an IHR meeting in southern California, three seasoned speakers provided informed perspective on Iran and Iranian society, the threats of war by Israel and the US, the impact of the US-organized sanctions campaign against the Islamic Republic, and the prospects for military conflict. Paul Sheldon Foote, a California professor with years of experience in the Middle East, and Art Olivier, a filmmaker and former mayor in southern California, joined IHR director Mark Weber at the spirited gathering …

Two speakers provide informed perspective on Iran and Iranian society, Islam, religious attitudes in the region, the impact of the US-organized sanctions campaign against Iran, and US policy in the Middle East. Paul Sheldon Foote, a California professor with years of experience in the Middle East, and Art Olivier, a filmmaker and former mayor in southern California who recently visited Iran, address an IHR meeting on March 2, 2013. Dr. Foote, who teaches at California State Univ., Fullerton, lived for years in Iran and other countries in the region, and for a time worked at the US embassy in Tehran.