Headlines

If you want to know how the United States wound up with “government by stupid” one need only look no farther than some of the recent propaganda put out by members of Congress, senior military officers and a certain former president. President George W. Bush, who started the whole sequence of events that have culminated in the disaster that is Afghanistan, is not yet in prison, but one can always hope … “How perverse we have become. We chastise President Biden for a messy ending of the war in Afghanistan and fail to indict George Bush for its illegal beginning.” … Many of those war criminals from the Bush and Obama cliques who are still alive are sitting fat and pretty in retirement or in lucrative private sector positions, while the only ones who have been punished are the whistleblowers who tried to stop the madness.

After the Taliban captured Kabul far faster than anyone in Washington forecast, secretary of state Tony Blinken went on Sunday morning talk shows and announced that the US mission in Afghanistan had been “successful.” Unfortunately, there will be plenty of robotic civil servants and political appointees who recite that deranged verdict in the coming years. There is no reason to expect the twenty-year US debacle in Afghanistan to humble Washington policymakers … Foreign policy makers will likely remain arrogant and myopic regardless of how many more nations they despoil. On a winter hike almost a decade ago, I witnessed firsthand both the haughtiness of officialdom and its human cost.

… . The Taliban have had no heavy weapons at all, a budget a tiny fraction enjoyed by the Afghan state, let alone the United States, and numbers that have also been much smaller than those (on paper at least) of the Afghan security forces. Yet the Taliban have won, by sheer resilience, better strategy, and superior public appeal. American generals have led America to unnecessary defeat in Afghanistan … Generals like McMaster systematically misinformed multiple administrations, Congress, and the American people about the real state of the Afghan forces that they had created and shaped … The most important question Americans need to ask in the wake of the fall of Kabul is therefore how they were lied to so systematically over so many years, and what it is about the US system that allowed these lies to pass with too little challenge.

As social media companies increasingly face public scrutiny over their moderation of hateful content, a number of Jewish writers on the question-and-answer platform Quora are calling on the company to stamp out the spread of antisemitic misinformation and harassment, often disseminated by pseudonymous users … “Quora earned a reputation as a platform for serious and informative discussion and advice,” Josh Korn, a longtime and active Quora user, told The Algemeiner. “But over the past four years, it has become a den of unchecked hatred, notably Jew-hatred, not just Israel-bashing.” … Other prolific contributors to Quora have also shared the frustration at combating antisemitic content on the site …

A critical look at Joe Biden’s record as an ardent supporter of Israel. Since 1973, Biden has been an emphatic backer of Israel, in spite of policies by the Zionist state that most of the world regards as outrageous and illegal. He’s boasted about his relationship with Israeli prime minister Netanyahu, and for decades has worked to funnel money to Israel despite its human rights abuses and violations of international law. This video report is by Jeremy Scahill and Paul Abowd of The Intercept. Runtime: 7:42 mins.

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday accused US President Joe Biden’s administration of making the same demands as his predecessor Donald Trump in talks to revive a nuclear accord [the JCPOA of 2015] … “America’s current administration is no different from the previous one because what it demands from Iran on the nuclear issue is the same thing that Trump demanded,” Khamenei said in televised remarks. He said that Biden’s administration wants “the same thing today, it’s no different. (Trump) said it in one way and these (say it) in different words.” “The Americans truly have no shame on the nuclear issue, and even though they withdrew from the JCPOA … they now talk in a way and make demands as it was (Iran) that withdrew,” he said …

According to a report from Israeli TV, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) has requested a major budget increase worth billions of shekels to prepare for potential attacks against Iran. Israel’s public broadcaster Kan reported on Wednesday that the request was made during preliminary meetings on the budget Israel’s new government under Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is expected to pass in the coming months. The report said the discussions over the increased IDF budget took place to prepare for the possibility that the indirect negotiations between the US and Iran to revive the nuclear deal would fall apart … Israeli officials have also made veiled threats that Israel would attack Iran if the JCPOA was revived. They claim the agreement is a path to a nuclear-armed Iran because it eventually expires.

An eminent British historian provides a brilliant, devastating critique of the widely accepted, “official” view of the origins of World War II. The war between Germany, Poland, Britain and France that broke out in September 1939, he shows, was not the result of an intentional plan by Hitler. “Far from wanting war, a general war was the last thing he wanted,” Taylor writes. “The war of 1939, far from being premeditated, was a mistake, the result on both sides of diplomatic blunders.” This edition includes a bibliography and index, and a “Second Thoughts” response to critics. This controversial and intensely discussed work earned praise from respected British journals. The New Statesman called it “A masterpiece: lucid, compassionate, beautifully written.”

We’re often told that Hitler started World War II. In fact, the German leader did not want and did not prepare for a general war in 1939. He sincerely sought peace with Britain and France. US President Franklin Roosevelt secretly encouraged Britain, France and Poland to adopt belligerently anti-German policies, and reject any peaceful resolution of Germany’s valid grievances. The British and French declarations of war against Germany transformed a limited German-Polish conflict into a global war.

… As for the American people’s appetite for intervention in future wars for democracy and nation building, that is almost surely gone … One of the principal casualties of Kabul is the establishment’s grand vision of a U.S. foreign policy for the new century — where liberalism and democratic capitalism have won the battle for the future, and the U.S., victorious in the Cold War, would lead the world in the realization of a new world order where we would write the rules and police the planet. Biden depicted that new world struggle as between democracy and authoritarianism, and America as leading mankind toward the triumph of democracy. The debacle in Kabul begins Biden’s leadership of that struggle with America’s worst humiliation in living memory.

As the tragedy in Afghanistan continues, there is at least one positive consequence. The warmongers in Israel and their allies in the neoconservative Washington, D.C. war party will find it even harder to convince the American public to support an invasion and “regime change” in Iran. The idea was already absurd and dangerous. But now the Afghanistan debacle should bury it permanently … Iran’s population is 83 million, more than twice Afghanistan’s 38 million. It is economically advanced, with a large, educated, technically skilled middle class … The regime-changers do not understand a simple human truth; people anywhere will fight to resist foreign invaders, even if they dislike their own government, especially when the outsiders have a different religion and culture.

With the American media as master of ceremonies, pundits and politicians — all partners in the neocon-neoliberal joint venture in Afghanistan — are barking mad over the images coming out of the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, and the reality these optics portend. Naturally, media “reporting” from Afghanistan is nothing but an unremitting sentimental gush, aimed at creating a state of heightened emotions … After Afghanistan, we can all agree that American foreign policy is an angels-and-demons Disney production — starring the prototypical evil dictators killing their noble people, until the US rides to the rescue …

… What leads to catastrophes like the US war in Afghanistan is not the absence of convincing antiwar voices but that our political and media systems routinely marginalize and ignore voices like those of Barbara Lee, Ben Ferencz and ourselves. That is not because we are wrong and the belligerent voices they listen to are right. They marginalize us precisely because we are right and they are wrong, and because serious, rational debates over war, peace and military spending would jeopardize some of the most powerful and corrupt vested interests that dominate and control US politics on a bipartisan basis … Most of our neighbors have grasped by now that these forces and the dysfunctional US political system that keeps them at its disposal pose a serious threat to peace and to their own aspirations for democracy.

The remains of thousands of people believed to be victims of Stalin’s Terror have been discovered in Ukraine’s southern city of Odessa, local authorities said on Wednesday. The bones of between 5,000 to 8,000 people were found in over two dozen graves close to Odessa’s airport, making it one of the largest mass graves unearthed in Ukraine so far. Sergiy Gutsalyuk, the head of the regional branch of the National Memory Institute, believes they were executed in 1930s by Stalin’s notorious NKVD secret police unit … Gutsalyuk told AFP that the number of victims may increase as the excavations continue … Millions of Ukrainians also died in the great famine of 1932-1933, which Ukraine regards as a genocide orchestrated by Stalin.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Sunday his country won’t accept Afghan refugees because he doesn’t want to deal with “militants” masquerading as asylum-seekers. The Russian strongman slammed Western nations for placing Afghan refugees in countries even near his border while their US and European visas are being processed. “Does that mean that they can be sent without visas to those countries, to our neighbors, while they themselves don’t want to take them without visas?” Putin raged to the Russian TASS news agency. “Why is there such a humiliating approach to solving the problem?’ He said he will not accept “militants showing up here under cover of refugees.” The US has negotiated with various countries to at least temporarily accept Afghans who are fleeing their country after its swift takeover by the Taliban.

After taking criticism from several Holocaust scholars and Jewish organizations, a Spanish university has canceled a course titled “Auschwitz/Gaza: A Testing Ground for Comparative Literature,” according to the European Jewish Congress. The course at the University of Santiago of de Compostela in Galicia trivialized the Holocaust by comparing it to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Jewish groups argued. The Simon Wiesenthal Center condemned the seminar in a letter sent Monday to Spain’s minister of universities, Manuel Castells Oliván. “This very title and expected content is not an issue of ‘freedom of expression,’ but a banalization of the Holocaust, which can incite hatred and violence against Jews of today,” wrote Shimon Samuels, the center’s director for international relations.

America’s prestigious Harvard University, founded by Puritan settlers almost 400 years ago, has a new chief chaplain — and he doesn’t believe in God. Greg Epstein, 44, took up the role this week, becoming the first atheist elected president of Harvard’s organization of chaplains. “I’m obliged and honored,” he wrote on Twitter. Epstein has been Harvard’s humanist chaplain since 2005 and is the author of the bestselling book “Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe.” He will lead a group of more than 40 chaplains who represent some twenty different religions and beliefs including Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism. His appointment comes as young people in the United States increasingly identify as spiritual but without a religious affiliation.

A court filing in the case of a high-profile Neo-nazi group member has ousted Joshua Caleb Sutter as a longtime informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Sutter, the publisher of Martinet Press, is allegedly an Atomwaffen member and key figure in the satanic group known as the O9A Tempel ov Blood, according to investigative reporter Ali Winston … “Martinet Press has been essentially bankrolled by the feds, pumping out a steady stream of extremist lit,” tweeted Winston … According to the court filing, alleged FBI informant and devout satanist Sutter earned more than $140,000 while working for the US federal government.

Few Americans are aware of the fact that no U.S. government official, to include congressmen, can in any way mention or discuss Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which is estimated by some observers to consist of as many as 200 tactical nuclear weapons which can be delivered on target by air, land or sea. The prohibition is spelled out in a Department of Energy “classification bulletin” graded Secret, which was issued on September 6, 2012, and bears the file number WPN-136. The subject line reads “Guidance on Release of Information Relating to the Potential for an Israeli Nuclear Capability.” … The memo is basically a gag order … Israel, as is so often the case, gets a free pass on what is for others criminal behavior. Its nuclear program was created by stealing American uranium and weapons technology.

… Much has happened in the decades since President Richard Nixon first promised Israeli Prime Minster Golda Meier never to publicly discuss Israel’s nuclear weapons. US Senators Stuart Symington and John Glenn learned that Israel (with help from some proxies in the US) in the 1960s diverted enough US weapons grade uranium from the government contractor NUMEC to build a dozen bombs … In 2012 the Obama administration passed a gag regulation forbidding any US federal agency employee or contractor from discussing Israel’s nuclear weapons … Since Symington and Glenn became law, the US has transferred nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars in publicly known foreign assistance to Israel, and additional billions in covert assistance.

On July 5, 1963, President John F. Kennedy sent the new Prime Minister of Israel Levi Eshkol a three page letter … Kennedy told Eshkol that the American commitment and support of Israel ‘could be seriously jeopardized’ if Israel did not let the United States obtain ‘reliable information’ about Israel’s efforts in the nuclear field. In the letter Kennedy presented specific demands on how the American inspection visits to Dimona should be executed. Since the United States had not been involved in the building of Dimona and no international law or agreement had been violated, Kennedy demands were indeed unprecedented. They amounted, in effect, to American ultimatum.

… Today, alongside the European Union, the United States has adopted the position that its mission is to promote democracy worldwide. Leaders in Washington regularly argue that if they fail to take up this mission, authoritarian governments will exploit American restraint and join forces — not just to undermine American power, but to destroy democracy itself, depriving the United States of its cherished freedoms … At the heart of this approach is the presupposition that democracy is inherently superior to other forms of government, both morally and in terms of its ability to deliver prosperity and security … Yet Democracy does not have a stellar record throughout history …. Contrary to America’s democratic triumphalism, there is no iron law in history that dictates that democracies will always prevail over their autocratic opponents.

… The real explanation for the Taliban’s “surprise” success is that western publics were being duped all along. The United States’ longest war was doomed from the start … According to Forbes magazine, as much as $2 trillion was poured into Afghanistan over the past 20 years – or $300 million a day. The truth is that western politicians and the media intentionally colluded in a fiction, selling yet another imperial “war” in a far-off land as a humanitarian intervention welcomed by the local population … A good part of the reason the Pentagon can keep recycling its lies is because neither Congress or the media is holding it to account. The US media have performed no better.

After the Taliban captured Kabul far faster than anyone in Washington forecast, secretary of state Tony Blinken went on Sunday morning talk shows and announced that the US mission in Afghanistan had been “successful.” Unfortunately, there will be plenty of robotic civil servants and political appointees who recite that deranged verdict in the coming years. There is no reason to expect the twenty-year US debacle in Afghanistan to humble Washington policymakers … Foreign policy makers will likely remain arrogant and myopic regardless of how many more nations they despoil. On a winter hike almost a decade ago, I witnessed firsthand both the haughtiness of officialdom and its human cost.

In Afghanistan, the mission failure appears complete. The trillion-dollar project to plant Western democracy in a Muslim nation historically fabled for driving out imperial intruders has crashed and burned after 20 years, and the Taliban are suddenly back in power. After investing scores of billions in training and arming a force of 350,000 Afghani troops, the U.S. could not stand up an army and a government that could survive our departure … Nor is the failure ours alone … The leader of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party and possibly the next chancellor of Germany, Armin Laschet, calls the withdrawal “the biggest debacle that NATO has suffered since its founding.” … As for the damage done to Joe Biden’s presidency, it is significant and permanent.

… Through April of this year, this is the death toll of America’s fiasco in Afghanistan: 2,448 American soldiers, 3,846 American military contractors, 66,000 Afghan soldiers and police, 1,144 allied soldiers (mostly from NATO countries), 47,245 Afghan civilians, 51,191 Taliban and other opposition fighters, 444 aid workers and 72 journalists … No wonder military vet suicide rate is so high. They knew they’d been had, with many figuring out, even way before they were discharged, that they didn’t serve their beloved country but help to destroy its treasury, credibility and even soul.

This copy of the Eighth Grade Exam for Bullitt County Schools in 1912 was donated to the museum. We thought you might like to see what the test looked like a hundred years ago. Obviously it tested some things that were more relevant at that time than now … Bullitt County Schools were mostly one-room schools in those days, scattered around the rural county. Students came together at the county courthouse once or twice a year to take this “Common Exam.” It was apparently a big deal. The local newspaper urged students to do well, even urging seventh graders that it was not too early to start preparing. Some scholarships were provided to those who passed to go on to high school, which was also a big deal back then.

The Anti-Defamation League has inserted itself into American politics in variety of ways over the decades, primarily in the guise of a non-partisan, civil rights organization. Currently it has been allowed to have great influence nationally on bullying, diversity, equity and inclusivity issues in K-12 education systems in particular. This note does not analyze ADL in depth, but only critiques specific sections of the [ADL’s “No Place For Hate”] NPFH Handbook, and provides excerpts from 59 linked articles about ADL’s politics and activities. These materials should give pause to organizations or institutions, especially public ones, that partner with ADL in any enterprise … ADL has long engaged in smear attacks and hate-mongering against organizations and politicians who push for enforcement of immigration laws …

This weekend the US experienced another “Saigon moment,” this time in Afghanistan. After a 20-year war that drained trillions from Americans’ pockets, the capital of Afghanistan fell without a fight. The corrupt Potemkin regime that the US had been propping up for two decades and the Afghan military that we had spent billions training just melted away. The rush is on now to find somebody to blame for the chaos in Afghanistan. Many of the “experts” doing the finger-pointing are the ones most to blame … The US war on Afghanistan was not lost yesterday in Kabul. It was lost the moment it shifted from a limited mission to apprehend those who planned the attack on 9/11 to an exercise in regime change and nation-building.

After 20 years of B-52 carpet bombing of Afghanistan, murderous drone strikes, 350,000 puppet soldiers, 20,000 mercenaries, nearly two trillion dollars in US spending, destruction of countless Afghan villages, the killing up to one million Afghans, spreading the opium trade around southeast Asia and Europe, abetting wide scale torture…. after all this the US-run Afghan’s puppet `president’ and his drug-dealing cronies have fled embattled Kabul like thieves in the night … The fathers of these Pashtun fighters were the men who formed the anti-Soviet ‘mujahidin’ (holy warriors) that defeated the mighty Soviet Red Army with the secret help of US, British and most of all Pakistani intelligence … What we are so far seeing is the liberation of this war-ravaged land from four decades of first Soviet, then US occupation.

… Afghanistan’s implosion is a tragedy. And blame falls on those who misled the American people while constructing castles in the Afghan sky … As usual, the War Party defined honor and heroism as making other people risk their lives thousands of miles from home in conflicts that long ago lost their original purpose … The Trump administration did its best to hide the ongoing deterioration by classifying figures on the performance of Afghan security forces … Afghanistan is both disaster and tragedy. US forces went in for the right reasons and almost immediately achieved their objectives. Then they stayed for the wrong reasons and failed spectacularly … Washington policymakers must better absorb the meaning of Afghanistan, lest they again tragically repeat history.

Built and trained at a two-decade cost of $83 billion, Afghan security forces collapsed so quickly and completely — in some cases without a shot fired — that the ultimate beneficiary of the American investment turned out to be the Taliban. They grabbed not only political power but also U.S.-supplied firepower — guns, ammunition, helicopters and more. The Taliban captured an array of modern military equipment when they overran Afghan forces who failed to defend district centers. Bigger gains followed, including combat aircraft … A U.S. defense official on Monday confirmed the Taliban’s sudden accumulation of U.S.-supplied Afghan equipment is enormous … The reversal is an embarrassing consequence of misjudging the viability of Afghan government forces — by the U.S. military as well as intelligence agencies …

Do the ethno-nationalistic ideologies of today’s “right wing” parties and movements resemble those of the “Nazis” who gained broad support in Germany during the 1920s and early 1930s. Yes, says this video presentation of a German government media outlet. This presentation, which is very critical of the nationalist movements that have been growing across Europe, claims that Germany’s “far-right” or “neo-Nazi” scene is now bigger than at any time since the end of World War II. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which has become a factor in both national and state parliaments, allegedly shares the nationalist and often “racist’ outlook of nationalists during the 1930s. Runtime: 42 mins.

The German government said Wednesday it will strengthen its battle against the quickly growing antisemitism in the country by investing 35 million euros ($41.5 million) into research and educational projects focused on understanding its causes and effectively fighting hatred of Jews … Karliczek said the government wants to invest millions into researching the causes of antisemitism “because we need deep knowledge in order to be able to efficiently fight” it. She said millions would be given to universities to examine the different facets of hatred against Jews and to develop strategies on what to best do against it. Various projects will focus on antisemitism in schools, in the German justice system or on the internet and social media.

At a time of rising antisemitism, the Australia/ Israel & Jewish Affairs Council’s latest webinar guest was Dave Rich, Director of Policy at the U.K’s Community Security Trust. The CST advises and represents the UK Jewish community on matters relating to antisemitism, terrorism and extremism … To counter antisemitism, he said, it’s crucial there’s a cost, whether criminal prosecution, bans from social media or ostracism. …“So”, he concluded, “those are the forms of leadership we need in society … to basically make sure antisemitism is socially unacceptable and that there is … a cost, even if it’s an informal cost, that people suffer for expressing these views.” We also need proper regulation of social media to stop hate online, he added.

Over the centuries, rage and hostility against Jews has repeatedly erupted in terrible violence. Again and again, Jews have been driven out of countries where they’d been living. Why does anti-Semitism exist? And why has furious hostility toward Jews broken out, again and again, in the most varied nations, eras and cultures? … Anti-Semitism is not a mysterious “disease.” As Herzl and Weizmann suggested, and as history shows, what is often called anti-Semitism is the natural and understandable attitude of people toward a minority with particularist loyalties that wields greatly disproportionate power for its own interests, rather than for the common good.

My name is Mary Phagan-Kean and I am the great-niece and namesake of “Little Mary Phagan,” the thirteen-year-old girl who was raped and murdered by Leo Max Frank, the president of Atlanta’s B’nai B’rith Lodge No. 144, on April 26, 1913 … In fact, the evidence of his guilt was overwhelming, and on August 25, 1913, after a month-long trial in the Fulton County Superior Court, Leo Frank was found guilty by a jury of his peers, and on the next day, he was sentenced to hang for the murder of Mary Phagan. What followed was an unprecedented effort by Leo Frank and his legal team and supporters to pin this horrific crime on everyone but himself. It is an effort that continues to this very day … Driven by the need to exonerate a Jewish leader, they intend to convict an innocent African American man, James Conley …

The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume Three: The Leo Frank Case, The Lynching of a Guilty Man is a 536-page study referenced with thousands of footnotes and illustrated with maps, diagrams, and graphics that touch on every aspect of this controversial case. Here are a few of The Secret Relationship’s documented findings … Anti-Semitism was virtually absent from the case, but anti-Black racism was brutally present: Leo Frank, as leader of B’nai B’rith, publicly and openly referred to Blacks as “niggers.” … Both private detective agencies hired by Frank concluded that Leo Frank was the murderer of Mary Phagan … After Frank’s conviction powerful Jewish leaders rallied to his defense, but in private documents they admitted that they could not stand Frank’s personality and that he probably was guilty.

“The Taliban regime is coming to an end,” announced President George W. Bush at the National Museum of Women in the Arts on December 12, 2001 — almost twenty years ago today … For two decades, the message Americans heard from their political and military leaders about the country’s longest war was the same. America is winning. The Taliban is on the verge of permanent obliteration … Just as they did for the war in Afghanistan, U.S. political and military leaders lied for years to the American public about the prospects for winning in Vietnam … It is vital not just to take note of how easily and frequently U.S. leaders lie to the public about its wars once those lies are revealed at the end of those wars, but also to remember this vital lesson the next time U.S. leaders propose a new war using the same tactics of manipulation, lies, and deceit.

If, after the horrors of this week in Afghanistan, the 4-Starry-eyed generals responsible for this 20-year March of Folly are not held accountable, there will be still worse to come. None were held accountable for the disasters of Vietnam or Iraq, and now the allegedly smart 4-Star Generals and Admirals are – get this – preparing for war with China and Russia … Many old hands in intelligence and the military were also highly skeptical, but Congress and the mainstream media remained bedazzled by the medals and merit badges of Petraeus and other generals, some of whom looked forward to another star and kept their mouths shut … This time there must be accountability for Afghanistan. The more so since generals and admirals, active duty and retired, are going off half-cocked.

California’s Asian population grew by 25% in the past decade, making it the fastest growing ethnic group in the nation’s most populous state, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau released Thursday. California’s white population plummeted by 24% between 2010 and 2020, confirming California is one of three states — along with New Mexico and Hawaii — where whites are not the largest ethnic group. Hispanics surpassed whites as California’s largest ethnic group in 2014. The Census data show California’s Hispanic population grew by 11% to 15.5 million people, making up just shy of 40% of the state’s nearly 40 million residents.

Poland on Monday recalled its ambassador to Israel two days after Jerusalem did the same, over a Polish law curbing World War II-era property claims, which the Israelis have slammed as “antisemitic.” President Andrzej Duda on Saturday approved legislation that will severely restrict claims on properties seized by the state after World War II. Warsaw says it will bolster legal certainty in the property market, but opponents say that it is unjust to people with legitimate claims, including Holocaust survivors and their families … The move came, it said, in response to the “recent unjustified actions of the State of Israel, including the unfounded decision to lower the level of diplomatic relations” and “unacceptable statements” by Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, among others.

Poland and Israel have all-but severed diplomatic ties after Poland ratified a new law anning Holocaust-era property restitutions … Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki complained of “growing hatred towards Poland and Polish citizens in Israel”, while promising to “safely bring back home the children of Poland’s ambassador to Israel”. Israel’s Lapid also criticised Poland in strident terms. “The days of Poles harming Jews without consequence have passed and will not return,” Lapid said. The new law was “antisemitic and unethical” and Poland had become “an anti-democratic and illiberal country,” he added … Israel was “exploiting this tragedy [WW2] for party-political reasons” in an “irresponsible way”, Poland’s Morawiecki also said.

Poland on Monday said it was examining the option of suspending annual Israeli youth trips to Holocaust memorial sites in the country, amid a major diplomatic crisis between the nations. Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Pawel Jablonski claimed in a Monday radio interview that “the trips do not take place in a proper manner. They sometimes instill hatred for Poland in the heads of young Israelis.” “We are dealing with anti-Polish sentiment in Israel, and one of the reasons for this is the way in which Israeli youth are educated and raised,” Jablonski charged. “This propaganda, based on hatred of Poland, seeps into the heads of young people from an early age in school,” he claimed.

… The reassessment of Lee’s position in American history has almost everything to do with a shift in the way we talk about race … Whereas earlier Americans understood slavery primarily as a problem of liberty, today’s Americans understand it primarily as a problem of race. It seemed for several generations that the end of slavery had removed the only obstacle to honoring both sides of the Civil War. But in the newest generation, the persistence of American racial prejudice can be a reason to honor neither.

With host James Edwards and co-host Keith Alexander, Mark Weber talks about the drastic rewriting of American history in recent years, pushed by the “politically correct” mass media, politicians and educators. Perhaps the most striking expression of this campaign has been the tearing down of statues of Robert E. Lee, the great Confederate commander. For more than a century, Weber notes, Lee was widely esteemed as a man of exemplary honor, courage and character. “A nation of men of Lee’s caliber would be unconquerable in spirit and soul,” wrote President Eisenhower in a 1960 letter explaining why “I proudly display a picture of this great American in on my office wall.” All healthy and enduring nations have regarded the traits that Lee personified as important virtues. That’s not at all the case in today’s America.

If you get to Spain this summer, watch your tongue. A careless word that could be construed as sympathetic to General Francisco Franco, who ruled Spain from his victory in the country’s civil war (1936-9) until his death in 1975, could land you with a hefty fine. The proposed democratic memory bill, which will honour people who suffered under Spain’s fascist dictatorship, also has sanctions for those who remember it fondly. Penalties range from €200 [$237], for a casual expression of admiration for the dictator … This is the latest in a series of moves by European states to outlaw the expression of inconvenient or unpalatable historical views … But would a judge necessarily look kindly on anyone who might point out that the Spanish economy grew under Franco or that many Poles were happy to see their Jewish neighbours removed?

Israel recalled its envoy to Warsaw for consultations on Saturday, in a fierce response to Poland’s passage of a law that severely restricts World War II-era restitution claims. Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said that “Poland, not for the first time, passed an antisemitic and immoral law,” in a Hebrew-language statement released on Saturday. “Today Poland turned into an anti-democratic, illiberal country that doesn’t respect the greatest tragedy in human history,” he charged … Lapid’s statement came after Poland’s President Andrej Duda approved the law, defying strong opposition from Israel and the United States. Lapid said on Saturday that Israel was in touch with the US on how to respond … Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said the approval of the legislation is “a shameful decision and disgraceful contempt for the memory of the Holocaust.”

… Who is responsible for the colossal U.S. failure in Afghanistan? Who is responsible for America’s impending defeat in her longest war? Over the last 20 years, the U.S. lost 2,500 troops with 20,000 wounded and invested $1 trillion to create an Afghan army, only to see that army crumble and disintegrate as soon as we departed … We are facing in Afghanistan a wipeout of the investment of a generation to convert Afghanistan into a democracy with the ability to hold the allegiance of its people and to defend itself … How many U.S. generals knew what was going on but declined to risk their careers by telling Congress or the country that the Afghan army and regime we had stood up would likely collapse like a house of cards once the Americans departed and they had to face the Taliban alone?

… In the 21st century, the United States has attacked, invaded or occupied the sovereign states of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Despite the US record, Western corporate media overwhelmingly reserve the word “aggression” for official enemy nations — whether or not it’s warranted. In contrast, US behavior is almost never categorized as aggressive, thereby giving readers a misleading picture of the world … For months, media had been awash with stories, based on US officials’ proclamations, that Iranian aggression was just around the corner … Corporate media even present the Taliban’s actions in their own country against Western occupation troops as “aggression” …

… There have been various estimates of just exactly how many elections the United States has interfered in since the Second World War, the numbers usually falling somewhere between 80 and 100 … As a CIA officer stationed in Europe and the Middle East in and 1970s through the early 1990s, I can assure him that I personally know about nearly continuous interference in elections in places like France, Spain, Portugal and Italy, all of which had prominent communist parties, some of which were on the verge of government entry. Bags of money went to conservative parties, politicians were bribed and journalists bought. In fact, during that time period I would dare to say there was hardly an election that the United States did not somehow get involved in.

… The U.S. has a long history of attempting to influence presidential elections in other countries – it’s done so as many as 81 times between 1946 and 2000, according to a database amassed by political scientist Dov Levin of Carnegie Mellon University. That number doesn’t include military coups and regime change efforts following the election of candidates the U.S. didn’t like, notably those in Iran, Guatemala and Chile … The U.S. hasn’t been the only one trying to interfere in other countries’ elections, according to Levin’s data. Russia attempted to sway 36 foreign elections from the end of World War II to the turn of the century – meaning that, in total, at least one of the two great powers of the 20th century intervened in about one of every nine competitive, national-level executive elections in that time period.

Austrian media report that a town in the west of the country is planning to remove a memorial to three soldiers who were members of the Waffen SS during World War II. Public broadcaster ORF reported Friday that the mayor of Imst, Stefan Weirather, confirmed that the municipal workers will dismantle the site. The memorial was built in the 1970s for three men who were portrayed as having been executed by American troops on May 19, 1945 — more than a week after Nazi Germany had capitulated to the Allies.

A Belgian town is removing from a local square most of its references to a group of Latvian soldiers who were part of Nazi Germany’s SS forces, following allegations that the square honored them. Briviba Square in Zedelgem, a small town 70 miles west of Antwerp, contained a statue of and a plaque about the “Latvian Beehive,” hundreds of Latvian prisoners of war who were interred briefly at a POW camp in the village following World War II. They were part of the 15th and 19th Waffen SS Grenadier Divisions, which were under the administration of the Nazis … Many Latvians admire the “Beehive” for their efforts in fighting Russia. Latvia’s capital Riga has its own Briviba Square, and veterans of the local former SS units hold annuals marches through the city.

For seven months in 1944, Estonian, Latvian and German Waffen SS troops fiercely defended the strategically important Narva Isthmus against Soviet forces. This wartime newsreel shows Estonian and Latvian infantrymen in combat, artillery and rocket launchers in action, flaks guns firing at Soviet aircraft, tanks moving up for deployment, and captured Soviet prisoners. (Latvian-language narration. Runtime: 3:18 mins.) Some 124,000 Waffen SS men fought against 200,000 Soviet troops in this northern sector of the Eastern Front. The Soviets had about 100 tanks, against 32 for the defenders, and 800 combat aircraft, against 137 for the defenders. Casualties were heavy, with 68,000 for the defenders (including 14,000 dead or missing), and 480,000 on the Soviet side (including 100,000 dead or missing).

A gripping first-person memoir of soldierly sacrifice, heroism and fierce combat against numerically superior Soviet forces during World War II, by a charismatic Belgian writer and politician turned front-line infantryman. New, revised IHR edition, with index and photos. Here is the epic story of the Walloon Legion, a volunteer Belgian unit of the World War II pan-European SS force, as told – in absorbing prose — by the legendary Degrelle. Captures the grit, terror and glory of Europe’s crusade against Communism.

… Not once in this century has the U.S. decisively won one of the wars it launched — in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen or Libya. And the sole superpower status we enjoyed as the 21st century began is gone with the wind … Police, under attack and abuse from the elites and people they protect, are resigning and retiring in record numbers … America is unable to win the wars she chooses to fight. She cannot or will not control and defend her borders from a mass migrant invasion. She cannot halt an outbreak of criminality and killing in her great cities. She has not run a trade surplus in four decades. Her dependency upon foreign producers is unprecedented. And her budget deficits continue to break records every year — as does her soaring national debt. Is that not the description of a failed or failing state?

The state of Oregon will no longer require its students to demonstrate proficiency in math, reading and writing in order to earn a high school diploma in a bid to bolster minority students. Gov. Kate Brown signed a bill late last month suspending the state’s ‘essential skills’ requirement for graduation for the next three years while its Department of Education seeks alternative graduation requirements … Charles Boyle, a spokesman for Brown, said the suspension will benefit ‘Oregon’s black, Latino, Latina, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color’ … In fact, only eleven states in the country require passing a test for high school students to graduate, according to Education Week. And some states that do, such as New York, have proposed removing testing requirements for graduation, according to Chalk Beat.

The U.S. became more diverse and more urban over the past decade, and the non-Hispanic white population dropped for the first time on record, the Census Bureau reported Thursday as it released a trove of demographic data that will be used to redraw the nation’s political maps. The new figures offered the most detailed portrait yet of how the country has changed since 2010 … The share of the white population fell from 63.7% in 2010 to 57.8% in 2020, the lowest on record, driven by falling birthrates among white women compared with Hispanic and Asian women. The number of non-Hispanic white people shrank from 196 million in 2010 to 191 million. White people continue to be the most prevalent racial or ethnic group, though that changed in California, where Hispanics became the largest racial or ethnic group …

… Many once widely accepted “facts” about the Dachau camp are now discredited. It wasn’t long ago, however, when it was seriously and authoritatively claimed that people were killed in a gas chamber there. Eyewitness testimony was cited to “prove” that as many as 250,000 people were put to death in this gas chamber … No reputable historian still contends that anyone was ever killed in a Dachau “gas chamber.” … The German troops had surrendered; they were not killed in battle but were executed while prisoners of war. Germans were put on trial and executed for similar acts, but, then, the victors were the prosecutors, judges and executioners, and they write the official history … Of all the atrocities committed at Dachau (by either the Germans or the Allies) the liberation day massacre of German prisoners was probably the worst.

Israel’s Ambassador to the US and UN Gilad Erdan said that Jerusalem would ultimately like to see Iran’s ayatollahs overthrown, in one of the most far-reaching comments by an Israeli official in favor of regime change in Tehran. “In the end, we would ultimately like to see [the government] overthrown and [for there to be] regime change and Iran,” Erdan told Army Radio on Thursday [Aug. 5], when asked about Israel’s strategy vis-à-vis the Islamic Republic … Until now, Israel has avoided publicly calling for regime change in Iran … Israel has also at times carried out military and espionage operations designed to curtail Tehran’s atomic drive and targeted Iranian military personnel and proxies throughout the region.

… The Anti-Defamation League is using its standing as an authority on hate to try to shut down speech they deem to be unworthy of protection. The group, which has transitioned from being the apolitical defender of the Jewish community to a partisan outfit allied to the “progressive” movement, is working with some of the same Big Tech oligarchs to engage in an even more sophisticated form of censorship … By acting as a willing accomplice to what seems to be the latest episode in an ongoing corporate assault on free expression it is, ironically, becoming one of the chief enablers of those undermining the democratic values it claims to be defending … The ADL began promoting internet censorship in 2019, ostensibly to stop Holocaust denial on social media. This helped create a slippery slope …

The British and Russian ambassadors to Iran have angered the country by recreating a World War Two image of Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, when Iran was under Allied occupation. The Russian embassy posted a photo of the two diplomats recalling a famous picture of the wartime leaders in 1943. Iran’s foreign minister described the image as “extremely inappropriate”. The Russians say no harm was intended, and they only meant to pay tribute to the Allied fight against Nazi Germany … Russian embassy posting the picture received thousands of angry replies. “The ambassadors are insulting all Iranians,” said Tehran English literature professor Seyed Marandi. “The Tehran conference was a violation of Iranian sovereignty and symbolic of the historic crimes committed by the US, Russia and the UK against Iranians.”

… Though the Shah remained neutral when World War II broke out, London remained suspicious of his cordial relations with Berlin … Not only did the United Kingdom rely upon the eight million barrels of oil annually that the Abadan oil refinery produced … In July and August 1941, London issued ultimatums demanding the Shah expel the Germans. He refused … Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin had agreed to secure Iran by force. Though the United States was not yet a belligerent in World War II, Churchill green-lit the invasion with Pres. Franklin Roosevelt … Finally on Aug. 29 [1941] the Shah agreed to a ceasefire … The British and Soviets commandeered much of Iran’s grain supplies for their own troops, causing hyperinflation and some starvation … The Allies invaded a neutral country to secure vital oil fields and supply lines.

A German court has set a trial date for a 100-year-old man who is charged with 3,518 counts of accessory to murder on allegations he served as a Nazi SS guard at a concentration camp on the outskirts of Berlin during World War II … The suspect is alleged to have worked at the Sachsenhausen camp between 1942 and 1945 as an enlisted member of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing … Sachsenhausen was liberated in April 1945 by the Soviets, who turned it into a brutal camp of their own … Her case and the charges against the 100-year-old suspect both rely on recent legal precedent in Germany establishing that anyone who helped a Nazi camp function can be prosecuted for accessory to the murders committed there.

Iranian cartoonist Masud Shojaei-Tabatabai has said that Serbia has refused to give him a visa allegedly over his Holocaust denial exhibitions … He had been invited to preside on the jury of the 21st Kragujevac Salon of Antiwar Cartoon in Serbia. He also said that the organizers had sent him a plane ticket to Serbia and made all arrangements for his attendance at the event, however, the embassy said that he had no chance to get a visa to enter the country … “Since we started running international cartoon contests about Palestine and the Holocaust, the Israeli media has stated that we are denying the Holocaust. However, we have never denied it. We simply have asked why the Palestinian people should be made to pay the price for the Holocaust,” he said at that time.

… With America leaving Afghanistan and U.S. troops in Iraq transiting out of any “combat” role, now is not the time to get us ensnared in a new war with Iran. Lest we forget. It was in an August, 57 years ago, that the Tonkin Gulf incident occurred, which led America to plunge into an eight-year war in Vietnam … Whoever launched the drone strike sought to ensure that no new U.S.-Iran deal is consummated, that U.S. sanctions remain in place, and that a U.S. war with Iran remain a possibility. But, again, why would Tehran carry out such a drone attack and kill crewmen on an Israeli-owned vessel — then loudly deny it? … Those behind this attack on the Israeli-owned vessel do not want to reduce the possibility of war between the United States and Iran. They want to make it a reality. We ought not accommodate them.

Several US senators have called on the Biden administration to declassify and make available key documents related to Saudi Arabia’s alleged role in the 9/11 attacks … Saudi Arabia has long denied involvement in the attacks, in which almost 3,000 people died as hijacked jetliners crashed into New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in western Pennsylvania. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudi – as was Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda’s leader at the time. Families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks are party to a lawsuit against Saudi Arabia, and have accused the country of being involved. They have been seeking US government documents related to Riyadh’s alleged role in aiding or financing any of the 19 individuals who carried out the devastating attacks.

… While ‘hysteria culture’ in the US is rampant, not least when it comes to the appropriation of the government’s foreign policy priorities … the China challenge is unique, because it is projecting genuine insecurity into America’s collective sense of esteem concerning its own place and status in the world. This phenomenon is not so much grounded in a direct fear of imminent attack, as it is the perception that a country that may overtake it and outgrow it, ending a default perception that America always ought to dominate the world and shape it to its own direction … Slogans such as ‘Make America Great Again!’ and ‘America is Back!’ reflect the innate thinking that the US has lost something and has to regain its place in the world. China is perceived to be the primary reason for this …

… The degree of this national suffering may be seen in the fact that between 1840 and 1949 almost 100 million Chinese people died in wars, which directly resulted from foreign intervention, or were victims of civil wars and famines related to those interventions. China had suffered the longest Second World War, from 1937 to 1945 (with a civil war following that lasted until 1949); the death toll was at least 14 million … From 1978, with the introduction of “reform and opening up,” China achieved the fastest economic growth ever calculated by a major country in recorded history. From 1978 to 2020, China’s annual average GDP growth was 9.2 percent. Since 1978, China’s household consumption has increased by 1,800 percent, twice that of any major country.

America’s leaders understood Japan’s desperate position: the Japanese were willing to end the war on any terms, as long as the Emperor was not molested. If the US leadership had not insisted on unconditional surrender — that is, if they had made clear a willingness to permit the Emperor to remain in place — the Japanese very likely would have surrendered immediately, thus saving many thousands of lives … General Curtis LeMay, who had pioneered precision bombing of Germany and Japan (and who later headed the Strategic Air Command and served as Air Force chief of staff), put it most succinctly: “The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war.”

The world changed forever when a US bomber dropped the first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima 70 years ago. The Americans said they took the drastic step to put an early end to World War II and save the lives of hundreds of thousands of US soldiers, but this official narrative is now being overturned … Many historians say the bombings did not lead to the Japanese surrender, and the Soviet declaration of war on Japan two days later was a bigger shock …. America believed the shock and awe of the devastating power of the new bombs would force Japan into surrender, but experts say inside Japan it was viewed differently. The Americans had already destroyed 66 Japanese cities with a massive fire bombing campaign. In just one night, 100,000 civilians were killed in Tokyo.

… We need to remember some of the earliest opponents of presidential overreach, Sens. Morse and Ernest Gruening, the only two senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964 … When Gruening, a Democrat from Alaska, and [Wayne] Morse [of Oregon] cast their dissenting votes in the lopsided 88-2 roll call, they did not know the extent to which President Johnson had lied to Congress and the public about the supposed incident in the Gulf of Tonkin … Morse and Gruening appealed to the national interest, moral conscience, and constitutional and international law in their opposition to the resolution and the ensuing war. They were overwhelmingly outnumbered at first, but within just a few years they were vindicated. Their example should be an inspiration to advocates of peace and restraint today.

Sen. Wayne Morse was one of only two members of Congress to vote against the fateful Gulf of Tonkin resolution of August 1964, which gave President Lyndon Johnson blank check authority to wage war against North Vietnam. This authorization, warned Sen. Morse, was unconstitutional. Moreover, it was later established that the alleged North Vietnamese attack against US warships, which the White House cited to justify the sweeping resolution, either never took place, or had been greatly exaggerated.

The opening and closing ceremonies of the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin. This footage captures some of the imposing grandeur of the international sports event that deeply impressed the many visitors from around the world who converged on the German capital. Excerpts from the film documentary “Olympia,” by Leni Riefenstahl, the German actress and film maker who was perhaps the greatest woman film artist of the twentieth century. Runtime: 7:20 mins.

On Monday, Israel’s Defense Minister Benny Gantz threatened Iran, and said Israel must take action against the Islamic Republic “right now” over last week’s drone attack on an Israeli-operated ship near Oman. Israel, the US, and the UK have blamed Tehran, but Iran denies the accusation, calling the allegations “baseless.” … While it was more toned down, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken also threatened action against Iran … Attacks on commercial shipping are common in the region, and Israel has been behind several attacks on Iranian ships … Israel has also carried out covert attacks inside Iran over the past year …

PayPal, one of the world’s biggest digital payments companies, and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an “anti-hate organization” that regularly pushes for increased online censorship, have announced a new partnership that will focus on “attacking” the revenue sources of groups and individuals that they deem to be “profiting from all forms of hate and bigotry against any community.” … The ADL added: “PayPal and ADL will focus on further uncovering and disrupting the financial pipelines that support extremist and hate movements. In addition to extremist and anti-government organizations, the initiative will focus on actors and networks spreading and profiting from all forms of hate and bigotry against any community.”

Contemporary British Pathé newsreel film report on the stunning performance of Jesse Owens, and some other athletes, at the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin. Runtime: 1:00 mins. The African-American track and field athlete won international fame by winning four gold medals at the Summer Olympics in the capital of Third Reich Germany. For years the mainstream American media promoted the story that Hitler was so upset by the African-American’s achievement that he refused to shake his hand. Actually, the German leader was more respectful of Owens than the US president. As Owens himself once put it: “Hitler didn’t snub me. It was FDR who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram.”

… The next day — August 3, 1936 — Owens won his first gold medal in the 100-meter dash. Hitler did not meet or shake hands with Owens. That said, there are several reports of a salute or wave. According to sports reporter and author Paul Gallico, writing from Berlin, Owens was “led below the honor box, where he smiled and bowed, and Herr Hitler gave him a friendly little Nazi salute, the sitting down one with the arm bent.” Owens himself later confirmed this, claiming that they exchanged congratulatory waves. So, Owens was not personally snubbed by Hitler. However, Owens did feel that he had been snubbed by someone: U.S. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt … Only white Olympians were invited to the White House in 1936.

A tweet in which the editor-in-chief of the recently established National Press Agency (NTA) labels Adolf Hitler a hero has raised dust in the Slovenian public and drew condemnation from part of politics, with opposition parties demanding a response from the government and relevant authorities. Urban Purgar, the NTA editor-in-chief and president of the Association for the Promotion of Traditional Values, which operates the media outlet, tweeted on Sunday that “Hitler is #hero” to spark strong reactions and condemnations … Several political parties have said that such posts are unacceptable, with the opposition Marjan Šarec List (LMŠ) demanding that the government and relevant authorities launch appropriate proceedings against Purgar ex officio.

Thousands gather at this anti-Communist rally in the Slovenian city of Ljubljana, June 29, 1944. Speakers call for solidarity of Slovenes with Germany and the other nations fighting to defend the freedom and heritage of the European peoples. Among the prominent Slovene community leaders addressing this mass meeting is Leon Rupnik. Until April 1941 he had served as a high-ranking commander in the army of Yugoslavia. After the collapse of the multi-ethnic state, he served as mayor of Ljubljana, and then as President of the Slovene provincial government. In 1944 he established the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was put to death in 1946 by authorities of the new Communist regime of Yugoslavia.

A new spate of lawsuits suggests that despite legislation and prosecutions by foreign governments, alleged investment fraud remains a lucrative business in Israel, with local law enforcement doing little to crack down on suspected online scammers … Israeli law enforcement has indicted almost no online fraudsters, despite the fact that the industry employed thousands of people and allegedly stole billions of dollars. Prosecutors in a European country recently told The Times of Israel that while investment scam call centers are now located throughout Europe, time after time investigators have found that a scam website’s service providers are Israeli or that fraud proceeds end up in Israeli bank accounts or in the bank accounts of individuals of Israeli origin.

Israel’s second-ever Olympic gold medalist, Artem Dolgopyat, cannot legally get married in his home country, as he is not Jewish by the standards of the Chief Rabbinate, his mother lamented on Sunday … Dolgopyat’s mother is not Jewish, but the entirety of his father’s side is, she said. At least one Jewish grandparent is required in order to immigrate to Israel and become a citizen. But getting married as a Jew through the Chief Rabbinate, the only possibility in Israel, requires that both parties be Jewish according to Orthodox practice — i.e., having a Jewish mother … In addition to many immigrants from mixed families or ones that are not recognized as Jewish, those unable to wed in Israel also include gays and lesbians, non-Orthodox converts to Judaism, and various others.

Brazil’s president effusively welcomed a far-right German lawmaker whose grandfather was a senior Nazi officer, causing an uproar among Jewish groups. Jair Bolsonaro, who has been highly divisive among Brazilian Jewish voters despite his openly pro-Israel speech, met with Beatrix von Storch, the deputy leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and a member of the German parliament since 2017. The right-wing Bolsonaro was all smiles while meeting on Monday with von Storch, who is a granddaughter of Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, a former finance minister during Adolf Hitler’s Nazi rule.

Israeli terror is at it again. The Israel Defense Forces’ death squads chalked up another successful week: four bodies of innocent Palestinians piled up between the two Fridays. There doesn’t seem to be a connection between the four incidents in which four sons were killed, but the link cannot be broken. In all these cases, soldiers chose shooting to kill as the preferred option. In all four cases another way could have been chosen … They kill because they can. They kill because they’re convinced that this is how they’re expected to act. They kill because they know that nothing is cheaper than the life of a Palestinian. They kill because they know that the Israeli media will yawn and not report a thing. They kill because they know that no harm will come to them, so why not?

… Israel always features prominently in the annual FBI report called Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage. The 2005 report states: “Israel has an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States, these collection activities are primarily directed at obtaining information on military systems and advanced computing applications that can be used in Israel’s sizeable armaments industry.” It adds that: “Israel recruits spies, uses electronic methods, and carries out computer intrusion to gain the information.” … The GAO [General Accounting Office] concluded that: “Israel conducts,” and this is a quote, “conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any U.S. ally.” … So Israel gets yet another pass on its spying against the United States.

Ben & Jerry’s decision to halt its operations in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in Jerusalem has pro-Israel editors working overtime … What’s striking about the editorial reaction to the Ben & Jerry’s news isn’t that it supports Israel, but that it insinuates that the tactic of boycotting Israel is extreme and illegitimate when, in fact, boycotts have long been considered one of the most effective nonviolent ways people and groups can have political agency beyond the ballot box … Israeli government supporters in the press fear that if Ben & Jerry’s and its parent company don’t suffer economically for their decision on the Occupied Territories, then support for this kind of political pressure will become less taboo, and other groups could follow suit. And those editorialists have reason to worry.

World War Two black-and-white photos were researched and colorized in detail by Doug and other artists of the “Colourisehistory Group.” These 50 colorized photos look like they were taken yesterday.

… The greatest difference between former Allied veterans and the Germans was that many of the Americans and British were rather well known in their own countries. The Germans were virtually unheard of, as if the German people wanted to simply forget the Third Reich and the men who fought for it … Another mission I have embarked upon is to dispel the myths and rumors regarding the total sainthood of all of the Allied soldiers and the complete evil of every German or Japanese serviceman. Good and evil exist everywhere. Recognizing the truth behind the post war propaganda and assigning blame where warranted preserves the truth.

A fascinating, insightful and inspiring talk by a great American historian. Among John Toland’s outstanding works was The Rising Sun, which earned a Pulitzer Prize, and a best-selling biography, Adolf Hitler. In this lecture at an IHR conference, he looks back at the experiences that made him an acclaimed author. He recalls, for example, his youthful travels across the country on rail freight cars, and his life-long love of the theater. Throughout his decades-long quest for objectivity and non-partisanship in writing real, “living” history, Toland says, he tried to present the past as a dramatic saga of human nobility, defect, triumph, foible, suffering and joy. He humorously relates how he was denounced as a “Nazi” for his efforts to write objectivity, and with understanding, about Hitler and Third Reich Germany.

Jackie Mason, who died Saturday at 93, did not always set out to be a comedian. In fact, it wasn’t until he was 30 that he left behind the Orthodox rabbinate for irreverent open-mic nights. Mason, born Yacov Moshe Maza to Orthodox parents, was one of the last survivors of the Borscht Belt comedy circuit … His comedy, delivered in a distinctive cadence inflected with the Yiddish of his childhood on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, offered a window into the American Jewish psyche for non-Jews and, for Jews, held up a mirror that reflected their complicated relationship with their Americanness … For many years, he supported Meir Kahane, who, as the founder of the Jewish Defense League organized violent efforts to combat antisemitism and lobbied to expel Arabs from Israel.

In the early morning hours of July 4, 1984, the offices of the Institute for Historical Review in Torrance, southern California, were destroyed in a devastating arson attack … For a long time the perpetrators’ identity remained a mystery. It was only 18 years later that responsibility for the attack was publicly and authoritatively established … Based on its investigation of the crime, the report notes, in December 1984 the Torrance Police Department submitted the case to the District Attorney’s office for criminal complaints against Irv Rubin, Earl Krugel, Michael Canale and Danny Nichols on arson and conspiracy charges. But no arrest was ever made.

It wasn’t so long ago that the US was reportedly close to rejoining the Iran nuclear deal, and diplomats were saying many of the terms had been worked out. Now, the US is growing pessimistic, suggesting that the return may be politically impossible. Biden Administration spin is heavily on the incoming Iranian government, and predictions that they’ll be hard to deal with. The real issue, however, is very much on the American side, and restoring US trustworthiness in the deal after the Trump era. The real issue is that the US never implemented its sanctions relief requirements under the deal, then unilaterally withdrew from the deal, then continued to undermine its implementation for the rest of the P5+1 for years … Iran wants specific assurances that if the US returns to the deal, they promise not to just unilaterally leave it again.

The economy of the People’s Republic of China has been growing much faster than that of the United States for decades. So too has China’s average real wage. China is now the world’s second superpower, catching up to the United States economically if not (yet) militarily. Its political influence grew alongside its GDP. Where once the chief scapegoat for the U.S. was the USSR/Russia, China has replaced the latter in that position. The global tourist industry courts Chinese big spenders. China’s technical advances continue to amaze and impress most of the world … As denials of what China continues to accomplish economically lose their rhetorical power, attention likely will turn increasingly to the Chinese model, to exploring whether and how the capitalisms of western Europe, North America, and Japan can learn from and coexist with China.

… A new study from Princeton and Northwestern Universities concluded that the U.S. government represents not the interests of the majority of citizens but those of the rich and powerful … The resulting data empirically verifies that U.S. policies are determined by the economic elite. “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence,” says the peer-reviewed study.

The 26th U.S. president …Theodore Roosevelt was an environmentalist and progressive social reformer who laid the groundwork for the modern Democratic party. But he was also an advocate for white nationalism and eugenics. So how should his presidency be remembered? Roosevelt’s views were racist, says Gary Gerstle, a professor of American history at the University of Cambridge. But he was very much “a man of his time.” … Perhaps the most visible piece of Roosevelt’s legacy is the National Park System, which grew during his presidency, Gerstle says. “ … “He was a white supremacist, but he was a fierce opponent of slavery. He regarded slavery as a sin visited upon America by aristocratic Englishmen who came close to ruining the experiment of America by placing people of African descent on his glorious continent.”

It has frequently been observed how Jewish organizations in the United States and Western Europe exploit their claimed perpetual victimhood to excuse their own ethnocentric manipulations while also providing cover for Israeli war crimes. What they refer to as the “Holocaust” is, of course, central to the effort, complete with a standard narrative that has more holes in it than a slice of Swiss cheese. To suit their purposes, Jewish suffering has to be unique, which has in the past led to successful efforts to deny the reality of other genocides … As the number of avowed Zionists in Western government and media increases, efforts to use the legal system to silence critics have also become more common. In a number of European countries, questioning the holocaust narrative is a crime punishable by punitive fines and even prison sentences.

The White House on Friday announced its appointment of Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt to serve as US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, drawing praise from Jewish groups across the political spectrum … Lipstadt, 74, is the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, where she was the founding director of the Institute for Jewish Studies … Lipstadt is best known to the wider public from her appearance in a landmark British legal case in which she fought a libel suit brought by Holocaust denier David Irving. That experience was portrayed by superstar actor Rachel Weisz in the Hollywood feature film “Denial.” She has also served in several roles at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum …

A verdict has finally been reached in the much publicized Irving-Lipstadt libel trial in London. Judge Charles Gray, in a lengthy ruling made public on April 11, 2000, called David Irving an anti-Semitic and racist “Holocaust denier” who has “deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence.” The judgment could hardly have been more severe. The 62-year-old British historian is now obliged to pay some $3 million in legal costs to the two defendants: Jewish American writer Deborah Lipstadt, and Penguin Books, the British publisher of her anti-revisionist work, Denying the Holocaust.

… It’s Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, “working off the past.” It means re-interpreting your history as something shameful. It’s what Germany’s rulers have forced on their people, and it’s what the Washington Post wants to do to us … Germany is not free. The state arrests citizens for saying the wrong things … A politician from the governing “conservative” party openly told her constituents that they shouldn’t worry about being a minority in their own country. Few Germans think they can speak openly … Great nations are defined by pride and confidence in themselves, not self-loathing … Germany endures humiliation because it was a defeated, conquered nation … World War II wasn’t just another conflict. It established the founding myth of the postwar period.

The “Rivers of Blood” speech, given in 1968 by a prominent British political figure, continues to resonate more than 50 years later, above all because it seems so prophetic, given what has happened in the decades since. Large-scale immigration of non-whites, said Enoch Powell, will have dire long-term social, political and cultural consequences. Citing the persistent racial strife in the United States, he warned against allowing similar problems in Britain. “I am filled with foreboding,” he said. “That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect … Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now.”

… For eight decades, the greatest mass murder in modern history has been shamefully covered up or ignored … If we keep demanding that Germany and Japan atone for their wartime crimes, is it not time for our governments to finally recognize and atone their alliance with the biggest mass murderer in history, Josef Stalin, a man whose crimes exceeded those of Adolf Hitler by a factor of at least three or four times? Particularly so in the United States, where World War II has become something of a state religion and is endlessly invoked by conservatives and neocons to justify foreign military adventures.

Ben & Jerry’s decision to stop selling ice cream in Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories may prove a pivotal moment in the campaign against Israel’s apartheid system, Palestinian rights advocates say. The United States-based ice cream maker, known for its creative, chunky flavours and progressive social stances, is already facing a punishing blowback by the Israeli government and rabbinical organisations worldwide … The Israeli government is now threatening to use controversial anti-boycott laws that pro-Israel advocates have won in more than 30 US states to try to punish the ice cream maker for its decision. If Israel fails in criminalising Ben & Jerry’s actions, that is likely to set a crucial precedent as the world increasingly views Israel as an apartheid state subject to boycotts like South Africa in the 1980s.