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What Israel Has Done to Palestinian Children With U.S. Taxpayers' Dollars
Saturday, December 31, 2005
I knew Adolf Hitler
Names Son for Hitler, But Sees No Handicap
New York Times (1857-Current file). New York, N.Y.: Feb 9, 1943. pg. 14, 1 pgs
Document types:
article
ISSN/ISBN:
03624331
Text Word Count
198
Document URL:
Abstract (Document Summary)
There's another baby, the seventh in nine years, at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Mittel, at 27-37 First Street, Astoria, Queens, and he has been named Adolf Hitler.
I remember Adolf from when I was a boy. Now he was also known as "Teddy" because after the uproar Mr. Mittel changed the name from Adolf Hitler to Theodore Roosevelt, but he was always Adolf to me.
We lived at 40-08 Twelfth Street, apartment 1D in Queensbridge and I think it was one or two floors above us that the Mittel's had their suite, two apartments cojoined to accomodate their numbers. My mom always warned me to stay away from Teddy, because he was sick and his dad had named him Adolf Hitler.
I remember an image (we're talking fifty plus years now) of one of Teddy's sisters standing on the staircase, pregnant. I remember asking my mom how that could be if the girl wasn't married and my mom saying a very shocking thing about Mr. Mittel.
I have a recollection of being pinned against the mailboxes in the building entrance by Adolf, his bony fingers around my neck, his face red his eyes bulging and me struggling to break free, then someone coming and pulling him off of me. I don't recall what precipitated the attempted strangulation but I do remember that terrifying few moments.
Story had it that Adolf killed a candy store man near Ravenswood Projects and got caught. I don't know if he was executed or not.
I remember his dad always walking around Queensbridge with a bunch of fancy cameras strapped around his shoulders. His dad reminded me then of a fatter version of Bathless Groggins.
Yep, I knew Adolf Hitler.
Friday, December 30, 2005
HATE RADIO
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER I'm going to set it up for all of you to record your rants and comments over the telephone and post them here as MP3's. Now my cell phone has thousands of rolled over minutes, but I'm not 100% with putting my cell number out here. Maybe I can get private numbers blocked so I can track down anyone who would abuse the privilege of recording rants onto my blog. I have also thought of setting it up on an answering service or of getting a 1-900 number and see if any of you would pay to rant here at the fat guy's blog. (Probably not, right?).
Anyhow I've wanted to be a shock jock as a fun hobby so within the next few days, one way or the other I'm going to open the fat Jewish guy's hate radio station.
Stay tuned.
Israel Shamir, David Duke and Me
I really needed this like a hole in the head, but one thing led to another, and so let me explain for a minute, okay?
I like a lot of what Israel Shamir has to say. Plus, he's a stand up guy who probably could make a lot of money and live a fun soft uncontroversial life without people hating him - and can this guy write! In I don't know how many languages - a lot of them. Okay, Mr. Shamir has a website and a newsgroup that he posts on exclusively and another newsgroup for people who are intersted in his writings.
Now, Mr. Shamir has some very strong opinions. For one thing he's an ex "Left" Zionist turned vehement supporter of Palestinians' right of return to their homes, a sharp critic not only of Zionism but of the Judaic religion, and of the negative impact that the organized Jews have on many areas of existence. Now he doesn't hate any one person for the circumstances of birth. (After all he is a son of a rabinical family himself) - but he doesn't have much mercy in tearing up lots of false ideas that most Jewish people have.
Mr. Shamir went so far as to convert to Orthodox Christianity and is a member of a mainly Palestinian Arab Christian congregation in the land where Jesus is said to have preached and performed miracles. He really doesn't consider hmself to be Jewish at all and he believes that people who are Jewish could easily not be and ought not be. Okay I respect his opinion, I see where he's coming from. For me at my age especially I don't see being an ex - Jew, but I have no beef at all with his self definition as being not Jewish. Okay? You with me so far?
Mr. Shamir is seeking to create and maybe even to personally embody (I'm guessing here) a coalition of all from left to right who are for the Palestinian cause and against the organized Jewish political power. - Hey, no complaint from me on that either. You only have to agree with someone on one thing alone to work with him on that one matter, no matter how deeply you may dislike his other opinions. Right?
Now, Israel Shamir likes a few things I have said here on this blog and on his open newsgroup (and he probably does not like some also). Now, here comes David Duke. Mr. Shamir put an article on his exclusive website that he alone posts to that mentioned me in a kind and generous light (thanks, I appreciate it) but went on to say a few things about David Duke that I wholeheartedly do not agree with. Now for my money I don't care much or think much about David Duke. He's not in charge of much of anything (like me I suppose) although he surely has more fans than I do and has been out there singlemindedly almost forever.
Had my name not been in Mr. Shamir's article generally that praised Duke I would not have said "boo" about it. Duke's world and mine do not intersect. Or didn't until that article.
So, here is the exchange I had with Mr. Shamir and his longtime friend and ally Joh Domingo and some other people about all of this:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/togethernet/messagesearch/20030?query=%22Mr+Duke%22&submit=Search+More
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/togethernet/messagesearch?query=%22Mr%20Duke%22
Finally I got an email direct from Mr. Shamir and I'm putting it here with my reply:
Me to Mr. Shamir:
----- Original Message -----
From: Eugene Weixel
To: Israel Shamir
Sent: Monday, December 26, 2005 6:33 PM
Subject: Re: Meet Mr Duke
"Jew-obsessed shiksa" /:)
Yes, Duke stinks but not as much as Bloomberg or Mort Zuckerman.
To the extent he tells some truth is the extent to which he is "okay by me."
But no, Israel, he has not cleaned up any act regarding American Blacks, just cleaned up his language. Just as you cannot make him "kosher" not you nor I can make him into anyone's soul brother. For one I wouldn't want to try.
In a message dated 12/29/2005 1:15:09 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, info@israelshamir.net writes:
Eugene, he is a weapon, not a cuddly teddy-bear. We need fighters, not only soul brothers. Let him fight Zuckerman for all he can :-)
Me To Mr. Shamir:
Who does he actually fight? Has he organized any action against the Iraq war, or a contingent in someone else's demo? Why is he always overseas? If he has a growing following let them do something besides demonize Black Americans and cover for Bush and the neo cons like he did over New Orleans, which, although the zionist and corporate media has blurred into obscurity, was a test of who was on what side. He was on Mort Zuckerman's side.
He can always do something good. When he does, please let me know about it.
How Nicholas Scopetta and Giuliani reformed Administration for Children's Services
I was part of that first wave of reformingly new more highly qualified thoroughly tested and rigorously trained caseworkers who were hired by Rudolph Giuliani in early 1996 to be in the vanguard of the reformed, efficient and competent new A.C.S.
We went through the equivalent of thirty college credits of high level training at the Satterwhite Academy. At that time the Agency was still part of the much larger Human Resources Administration (commonly called "the welfare department") but the separation was already planned and in process. There was to be a new Agency with a cabinet level head and its own budget. The first commissioner was to be Nicholas Scopetta, a former prosecutor, one time foster child and personal friend of the mayor.
At the same time on the New York State level, a new computer system called "Connections" was being introduced. Gradually caseworkers who had fought over telephone access, desk space and places to store their paper cases were assigned more modern work stations with at first a telephone for each two, and later, for each one. While "Connections" did not eliminate the paper record, it reduced the need to refer to it, and as time moved on it became more all encompasing although it was only this year that new builds were added to make computer access to case information almost total. (I recall being told that this was on the way in October, 1997).
I don't feel like discussing the entire reform package as it was initially presented to staff and the press but I will take on two facets of the PR package called ACS reform. For one there was to be an upgrading in the qualifications for supervisory positions. It was announced and trumeted in the press that supervisors were going to be required to hold Masters Degrees in either social work or related fields. The Civil Service/union minded "supervisor dinosaurs" (people who got their jobs by passing competitive examinations) were to be phased out and replaced by the new lean mean highly qualified personal picks of management. A Republican judge okayed this icing of the Civil Service concept and what had already been set into motion became legal. The Supervisor Two exam (senior supervisor) was terminated and those who had passed it were left dangling without their promotions. Old titles of "Supervisor One" and "Supervisor Two" were changed into "Child Protective Specialist Supervisor One" (and Two), caseworkers were turned into "Child Protective Specialists", a raise was given out above and beyond the union contract and all seemed well with the world. The "disonsaurs" were shipped to various bureaus of the welfare department and an entire cohort of Supervisor Ones who had never passed a Supervisor Two exam and did not have the vaunted Master Degrees were lifted up into the "two spot." Supervisor One exams didn't happen and a cohort of Child Protective Supervisor Ones were promoted on managerial say so. (These had to have either Masters Degrees or thirty graduate credits in anything from Public Administration to Sociology to Criminal Justice.)
After years of no Civil Service exams and all provisional promotions into supervisory spots finally a union court case forced the city to reopen the supervisor one exam and hire off the list.
Today we have Supe Two's who never went to graduate school and never passed a Supe Two exam over Supe One's who have Master Degrees and have passed a newly rigorous test. Because there have not been enough who both have the degree and passed the exam we have many Supe Ones serving under the Scopetta made Twos who have failed the exam once and even twice. Under them are some caseworkers, (ooops Child Protective Specialists) who do not have graduate school credits but who have passed the test).
The media will never again re create the furor over that they did over the two Lisa's - Steinberg and Izquierdo- that fueled the revamping. In my opinion because the powers that be in New York have decided that to spend more money (which reform means in part) is to throw good money after bad. Better, they believe, (in my opinion) to tell the world the reform has happened and leave things at that. Hence we get the following:
New Study of New York City Child Deaths Shows Continued Problems .....
Poor Practice, Flawed Investigations Continue to Mark New York ...
NEW STUDY OF NEW YORK CITY CHILD DEATHS SHOWS CONTINUING PROBLEMS ....
Studies, but no press campaigns with "legs."
This kiddies, is very much the legacy of Rudolph Giuliani.
This post is the work of and property of Eugene Weixel copyright 2005. It may be republished in any form so long as it is reproduced in its entirety and credit given to this website:
Thursday, December 29, 2005
Sunday, December 25, 2005
Christmas Eve At Emergency Children's Services
I got to work early, at around 11:30 pm. I found out that one of my co workers had been attacked by two Pit Bull Terriers, them having jumped for his throat, him having raised his arm and having it a bit mangled.
I don't know how he's doing. It seems that he was knocking on someone's door, as we do every night, and someone who lives upstairs opened his door and let loose the dogs. Rumor has it there has been no arrest.
Management and the Union both keep these sorts of incidents on the quiet. We never know how many have happened throughout ACS and we never hear about these matters in any media. Recently a good law was passed making it a felony to attack a transit worker while on duty.
Are our lives worth as much as theirs?
Crown Heights, So - Called Anti - Semitism and the Ox Being Gored
by Eugene Weixel
The fourteenth anniversary of any historical event would not usually call for any special remembrance except by those most intimately connected. The fourteenth anniversary of the so-called "Crown Heights Riots" is different this year, coming during a New York mayoral campaign season in which Michael Bloomberg, a Jewish billionaire media mogul running as a Republican is set to trounce the once mighty New York City Democratic Party, a Party that was deeply wounded by the Crown Heights events.
On the night of August 19, 1991, a police sanctioned and guarded weekly motorcade consisting of the Jewish Lubavitcher Grand Rabbi and his entourage came careening down President Street on its way to the Lubavitcher headquarters on Eastern Parkway. The last car in the motorcade, a Mercury Grand Marquis station wagon driven by Yosef Lifsh a member of the Lubavitcher sect who drove through a red light to keep up with the rest of the motorcade, collided with a Chevrolet Malibu and went up onto the sidewalk, killing a seven year old African Guyanese boy, Gavin Cato, and breaking the leg of another Black child, Angela Cato. Often called a "tragic accident" in the press, this was no accident, as accidents happen in spite of reasonable efforts to prevent them. Here was a driver who with accustomed impunity had taken a red light and as a result killed one Black child and seriously injured another.
What followed immediately is fairly clear. An ambulance crew affiliated with the Orthodox Jewish Hotzoloh organization, (a private ambulance service for orthodox Jews that operates in Crown Heights) came to the scene before the municipal ambulance arrived. The Hotzoloh crew was at first attending to the two Black children but stopped doing so when the City crew arrived and they took Lish the Jewish driver (who had taken the red light in the semi official motorcade and had driven his car onto the sidewalk and killed Gavin Cato) away from the accident scene for his safety as an angry crowd of Black residents began forming at the intersection of Utica Avenue and President Street.
It is said that Black community members shouted "get the Jews" and "kill the Jews" and that a group of young Black men came upon Lubavitcher member Yankel Rosenbaum of Australia and that one of the youths, Lemrick Nelson, stabbed Rosenbaum with a knife. Charged with murder, Nelson was acquitted when it was proven that the stab wound had not been fatal and should not have caused Rosenbaum's death, but that Rosenbaum died due to what some people call the typical incompetence at Kings County Hospital, a hospital that has an overwhelmingly Black patient population. Rosenbaum's family in fact sued Kings County and won an undisclosed settlement from them.
What followed the so- called "tragic accident" were three days and four nights of sporadic outbursts of anger from the Black community against the organized political/ religious cult of Lubatvitcher Jews that because they had had the run of the streets of the community ended up killing a black child and crippling another. One non Jewish white man was killed and there was some property damage during the three days and four nights of incidents.
At the time New York City had its first African American mayor, David Dinkins and also an African American Police Commissioner named Lee Brown, often called "out of town Brown" by cops. Dinkins had ousted "white power" Jewish mayor Ed Koch, who had presided over what was probably the most corrupt administration the city had ever had in the Democratic primary and had narrowly beaten another white power politician, Rudolph Giuliani, running as a Republican in the four - to - one Democratic city. A new election was around the corner with Dinkins who was no Stokely Carmichael facing off with Giuliani in a rematch. Dinkins was a mainstream politician who had always nurtured close ties with Jewish leaders and who had stood with Zionists on more than one instance. He had been criticized by Blacks as having worn "one too many yarmulkes."
White and particularly Jewish New Yorkers were infuriated that the New York Police Department did not massacre a few dozen Blacks but instead used ordinary police crowd control tactics that contained and eventually dissipated the disorders with minimal loss of life. White power and Jewish power politicians united to denounce and attack Dinkins who went on to lose his second race against Giuliani by a narrow margin due to a considerable loss of ordinarily liberal Jewish supporters.
Lemrick Nelson was prosecuted for a second time in spite of constitutional guarantees against double jeopardy, this time in a Federal Court where judge David Trager sentenced him to the maximum allowed for violating Yankel Rosenbaum's civil rights. The driver, Yosef Lifsh, escaped prosecution and civil action by fleeing to Israel, where he still resides.
Michael Bloomberg, a Jewish billionaire who says that he smoked pot and liked it a lot but who presides over imprisonment of marijuana smokers, and who says his life as a billionaire bachelor in Manhattan was a virtual wet dream but who locks up women trying to earn their livelihoods selling sex, is about to be re elected as a Republican in what is still nominally Democratic and liberal New York City.
The political charge of anti - Semitism is a fake and phony charge in New York City. It is used and taken seriously against Black political leaders while others are immune. There are the famous (for fifteen minutes) Giuliani anecdotes from his tenure as US Attorney in New York regarding his arresting of a Jewish man who is said to have survived Auschwitz concentration camp and having him brought into a room where on the blackboard was the inscription "Arbeit Macht Frei" and another in which publicity hound Giuliani had several Jewish stock brokers arrested and handcuffed at their offices with television news cameras on hand in time for the local evening news show, with the brokers quietly released the following morning for lack of evidence. One can imagine the outcry were these escapades to have been presided over by a Black politician or one who ever showed the slightest sympathy for the Palestinian cause yet these incidents are virtually unknown. Giuliani went on after these events to unseat friend of Israel (but Black) David Dinkins with the help of considerable normally Democratic Jewish votes cast on the bogus "Liberal Party" line, in full throat about the so called "Crown Heights pogrom" (i.e. Dinkins' failure to massacre Blacks).
It should be said that in New York City's political culture most Jews would rather choke to death than cast their votes for the Republican Party. It is for this reason that Giuliani bought the use of the Liberal Party line, to give these traditional and religiously so Democratic Jewish voters a way to vote for a Republican without actually pulling the Republican Party lever on their voting machines.
Having called in the leading mainly Jewish Democratic Party fund raisers and warned them not to bankroll the Democrats this year, and having bought for a pittance the support of historically Democratic municipal labor union heads, Bloomberg has taken measures to get himself a non Republican line on the ballot in order to completely assure his victory. This year he is not dealing with the now dead Liberal Party but with a new force in town, the so called Independence Party and its leaders Fred Newman and Leonora Fulani.
Newman and Fulani have been criticized and attacked for making statements deemed by some to be "anti Semitic." Fulani once said and does not retract :
"Bloomberg Ally Stands by Her Remarks About Israel
New York Times/April 15, 2005
By Jim Rutenberg and Michael Slackman
Lenora B. Fulani, an important political ally of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's, has refused to disavow comments attributed to her in the late 1980's saying that Jews "had to sell their souls to acquire Israel" and had to "function as mass murderers of people of color" to keep it.
Asked about the comments on NY1 News on Wednesday night, Dr. Fulani, a high-profile official with the Independence Party, said, "What is anti-Semitic about it?" She added, "It's raising issues that I think need to be explored." ....
While this author has no quarrel with Fulani's statements and others attributed to her mentor Fred Newman it does seem odd, does it not, that a Jewish Billionaire politician would donate $250,000 of his own money to such a group and arrange for city moneys to fund one of their front organizations, the All Stars Talent Show Network. http://www.rickross.com/reference/new_alliance/new_alliance42.html
The All Stars Talent Network is an after school program affiliated with Bloomberg's "anti Semitic allies" aimed mainly towards Black youths that is presently showing a production called " Crown Heights" which according to reviewers does not tow the predominant line that Blacks were bad and Jews innocent in Crown Heights fourteen years ago.
Politics make strange bedfellows and the cry of anti Semitism is as phony as a three dollar bill. It all depends on whose ox is being gored.
NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS: To get my hands on Yosef Lifsh's DMV record. To do what I can to see the 15th anniversary not pass in silence.
Dennis King's Complaint (Originally posted October 10, 2005)
Dennis King is a long time philo semitic activist who has a complaint about the Anti Defamation League, Michael Bloomberg and The New York Times.
Michael Bloomberg, Jewish Billionaire and Republican New York City Mayor, was elected Mayor with the indespensible help of Jewish cult leader Fred Newman and his follower Leonora Fulani and he is about to duplicate this feat, having spent $50 million and still counting of his own money to repurchase his lease at Gracie Mansion.
New York was once a solidly Democratic party stronghold that doesn't elect ordinary Republicans to govern itself, but only special, quasi Democratic ones like Fiorello Laguardia, John Lindsay and Rudolph Giuliani. These Republicans, and Michael Bloomberg also, have always needed a non Republican ballot line to accomodate voters who although they might want to vote for a particular Republican have emotional issues about voting for the Republican Party. It's been the Fusion Party, the Liberal Party and lately the Independence Party that plays this role. Michael Bloomberg won the mayorality by a margin of less than 50,000 votes that he received on the Independence Party line.
The problem with this for Dennis King and some others is that the Independence Party in New York has been nominally led by Fred Newman cult follower Leonaora Fulani - and Leonora Fulani, a Black woman, has made some remarks about Israel and Jews that some would call "anti Semitic." In fact Ms. Fulani had made some truthful comments, many years ago, and when confronted about them years later refused to take them back.
King has quite a wish list: King wants Bloomberg to forgo Newman's support in the upcoming election. He also wants The New York Times to report honestly that Newman still dominates the New York City Independence Party operation and that Bloomberg is knowingly in an alliance with a cult that supports pedophilia and functions through mind control. More than that, he wants the Anti Defamation League to stop whoring after Jewish billionaires like "sociopath" and Clinton pardonee Marc Rich.
King also raises the issue of the Newman Cult's offbeat views on sexuality and young people and Bloomberg's apparent personal connections with the cult.
King's complaint is that in being in bed with cultmaster Newman, The New York Times, Bloomberg and Abe Foxman's ADL all undermine "the struggle against Farrakhan" by cheapening and discrediting the charge of "anti semitism" against Farrakhan. After all, if Bloomberg can play ball with Newman/Fulani, what's wrong with anyone else supporting Farrakhan and the Millions More Movement? My short answer: Nothing is wrong with supporting the Millions More Movement!
Thank goodness there is a living movement in the United States that opposes the slide to a warfare state and barbarism; that movement is the Millions More Movement led by Minister Louis Farrakhan.
Saturday, December 24, 2005
AHRP Testimony: Protections for Foster Children Enrolled in Clinical Trials
AHRP Testimony: Protections for Foster Children Enrolled in Clinical Trials Submitted to Cong.Ways & Means Hearing
Wed, 18 May 2005
THE ALLIANCE FOR HUMAN RESEARCH PROTECTION (AHRP)
Tel. 212-595-8974 Fax: 212-595-9086
http://www.ahrp.org
142 West End Ave. Suite 28P
New York, NY 10023
Testimony by The Alliance for Human Research Protection
Committee on Ways and Means Hearing on Protections for Foster Children Enrolled in Clinical Trials
May 18, 2005
On March 10, 2004, The ALLIANCE FOR HUMAN RESEARCH PROTECTION (AHRP) filed a complaint with both the Food and Drug Administration and the federal Office of Human Research Protection (OHRP) when we learned that 36 Phase I and Phase II AIDS drug experiments had been conducted on infants and children who were under the guardianship of the New York City Administration for Children's Services (ACS). The children were living at Incarnation Children's Center, a foster care facility under contract with ACS and the Catholic Archdiocese. We had reason to believe that the experiments were unethical, illegal, and coercive--and that federal regulations have been violated. We did not know at the time that children in foster care nationwide were subjected to research exploitation at prestigious medical research institutions. ..
READ THE WHOLE REPORT ON THIS TESTIMONY!
FYI
The invited panel of witnesses to the hearing are:
Panel: Alan Fleischman, M.D., Senior Advisor, The New York Academy of Medicine, New York, New York Roberta Harris, Deputy Secretary, Wisconsin Department of Health and Family Services, Madison, Wisconsin Marjorie Speers, Ph.D., Executive Director, Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs, Inc. Moira Szilagyi, M.D., Ph.D., Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, on behalf of the American Academy of Pediatrics
Not a single invited witness remotely represents the interest of the children who were targeted and used as human guinea pigs to test experimental AIDS drugs and vaccines!
Not a single invited witness represents the concern of the African-American and Latino community whose children were targeted.
Not a single invited witness represents any of the child welfare agencies or research institutions that are under federal investigation for their role in the enrollment of these children.
http://fatoldjewishguywholivesintheprojects.blogspot.
com/2005/11/enough-with-broken-windows-already_29.html
Unethical Experimentation on Foster Children
Timeline and
Links - Unethical Experimentation on Foster Children
Letters
Challenge NY Times Report re: AIDS drug/ vaccine experiments
on foster children
OHRP
preliminary findings fault Columbia University Medical
Center
Congressional
Hearings - Testimony by Roberta Harris, Deputy Secretary,
Wisconsin Dept. of Health / Family Services
Congressional
Hearings - AHRP statement and recommendations for the
record
A National Scandal: AIDS Drug
Experiments on Foster Care Children - AP
AHRP Letter of Complaint:
Phase I AIDS Drug/Vaccine Experiment on Foster Children
Thursday, December 22, 2005
TWU Local 100 - Our Knights in Shining Armor
Billionaire media mogul and mayor Mike Blumstein was out on the Brooklyn Bridge hatless and in his leather jacket (doing his best James Dean) calling the mostly black men and women who work all hours all days moving seven million people to places they need to be "thuggish" and "selfish."
Apparently he got the message and did shut his stupid mouth long enough for the MTA honcho Peter Kalikow (he of the cost overrun) to reach out in the middle of the night to Roger Toussaint and make an offer. This was a big climb down from the pose of the previous day, in which talks were not going to resume unless the "thuggish" and "selfish" workers upon whose toil the metropolitan area depends went back to work.
Reports are that the MTA pension cutback proposal is substantially modified.
This strike, just its taking place, is a big victory for all workers in New York and everywhere else. That the bosses backed off their insulting and stupid rhetoric and starting seeing sweet reson is the result of the sobering fact that it's workers who make everything happen and who make everything worth anything.
The ongoing attack on civil servants in new York is in fact an attack on the main bastion of the solid Black and minority working class of our city. Remember it's Mike Blumstein's New York where a white felon has a better shot at a job than a Black with no record. The civil service is one of the only places where Black workers have a chance to get in and advance. the Blumsteins and Kalikows of New York would McDonaldize as much of this base as they could, but finally they've met their match.
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
INTAKE REPORT FROM UPTOWN GENERAL HOSPITAL TO THE NEW YORK STATE OFFICE OF CHILDREN AND FAMILY SERVICES; CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES
INTAKE REPORT FROM UPTOWN GENERAL HOSPITAL TO THE NEW YORK STATE OFFICE OF CHILDREN AND FAMILY SERVICES; CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES:Date of Intake: Sunday, June 29, 2003
Time of Intake: 7:15 PM
REPORTER INFORMATION
Name: Irma Fubar Relationship: Social Worker Agency: Uptown General Hosp First Avenue, New York, New York (212)$$$=@@@@
Call Narrative:
Child's entire body is covered with bruises that mother cannot explain. Mother brought child to hosp. complaining ch. has a rash. There is no rash. Mother denies harming the child, and the child appears to be very attached to his mother. The child has a cold and a mild fever. Mother has allowed serious harm to child and cannot explain injuries. Request immediate CPS contact.
Misc. Information:
A Law Enforcement Referral has been completed.
Family speaks Spanish only. Request Spanish speaking CPS worker....
Case is referred to NY County
Emergency Children's Services Casework Investigative TemplateInvestigative Actions:
Source contact:
(Instant Response Team - Fax To Special Victim's Squad)8:20 PM CPS worker called the reporter, Social Worker Rita Fubar at Uptown General Hospital at (212) $$$=@@@@. A person who wouldn't give her name told CPS worker to hold on. After ten minutes CPS got a dial tone, and a message that there appears to be a phone off the hook.
8:30PM CPS worker called the reporter. Pediatric Emergency Room Triage Nurse Ms. Hernandez spoke with CPS worker. Reporter is gone for the weekend. Ms. Hernandez said that the child is covered with bruises over "his entire body." The child has a fever of 100.1 degrees. Bruises do not appear to be inflicted by belt, coat hanger, wire, or other object. Bruises are highly suspicious. Mother has no explanation and continues to complain about the child's "rash." There is no explanation for the bruises. Staff suspects the child has been abused by person other than the mother, however mother is failing to protect the child by not explaining the bruises or naming other caregivers. Medical Record # 122121212A, Attending Physician is Dr. Dukilvashvilio. Triage time was 2:12 PM. Mother claims that she and the bio. father alternate child care. Bio father drives taxi nightshifts. He cannot be contacted. Child is ready to be discharged from the hospital, as the bruises are not serious, just suspicious.
11:00PM CPS worker arrived at the Pediatric Emergency Room of Uptown Manhattan General Hospital. Dr. Dukilvashvilio was gone for the day. He is expected back on Monday morning. Medical Resident Dr. Handler said that the child is covered with unexplained bruises over his entire body. Dr. Handler said that the mother has not given any explanation for the bruises. The child, who is three years old, appears to be very attached to his mother and has been clinging to her since she brought him into the Emergency Room. This is why the ER staff does not believe that the mother herself inflicted the injuries.
CPS proceeded to Examination Room C where the mother and child were sitting. The child was on mother's lap holding her tightly. The mother was crying. CPS worker asked ER Administrator if he could provide a Spanish/English speaking staff member to assist in the investigation.
Interview with the mother: (Assisted by UGH Manhattan Practical Nurse Millie Ortiz)
Ms. Anunciacion said that she had noticed over the past few days a rash spreading over the child's body.
CPS worker asked the mother to remove the child's clothing except his underpants and in her presence and in the presence of P.N. Ortiz CPS worker examined the child. The child has several bruise marks over his body. The bruises were mainly in the shape of "thumb marks" and also small circles. They appeared to be purple with some of them red/purple. CPS worker pointed to several of the bruises and asked Ms. Anunciacion if this was the rash she was talking about. CPS explained to the mother that these were bruises. The mother insisted that they could not be bruises because no one had hit or hurt her child. The child is always with his mother, his father and his maternal grandmother who resides in the home. The mother said also that the child has three older siblings: Margarita Anunciacion d.o.b. 01/23/93; Herman Anunciacion d.o.b. 07/12/95; Esther Anunciacion d.o.b. 04/12/97. CPS asked where these children were now, and the mother stated that they were at the case address (34 Corona Boulevard, Apartment 4D, Corona, Queens, NY 11368) being watched by their maternal grandmother Hermoine Vega. CPS asked the mother if the father would be home tonight. She said that she had called his taxi dispatcher and that he was on his way to the Hospital.
CPS asked the mother why she decided to take the reported child, Oscar Anunciacion (d.o.b. 12/30/99) to the hospital today. Ms. Anunciacion said that over the past few days she had noticed the marks on the child's body as she bathed him. She said that at first there were a few marks on his arms and legs, which she attributed to normal playground bumps and bruises. She said that she asked the child repeatedly over the past few days if anyone had hurt him and the child had told her that no one had hurt him. The child in all other ways appeared to be normal. This morning the child also had a fever. CPS asked mother if he ate normally and she stated that he had )prior to this morning) been eating normally. CPS asked the mother if the child was complaining of pains and the mother said that he had not been. The marks increased and did not go away. This morning Ms. Anunciacion decided to take the child to see a doctor. CPS asked Ms. Anunciacion why she took the child to Uptown in Manhattan, when she resides in Corona, Queens. Ms. Anunciacion stated that her children all were born here at Uptown Manhattan and that she had only moved from East Harlem to Corona three months ago. She said that she trusted the doctors at Uptown Manhattan and that she assumed that they have all of the child's records, and so she felt that the best place to bring the child would be Uptown Manhattan.
Interview with the child Oscar Annunciacion:
The child was clinging tightly to his mother and it was not possible to attempt the interview in her absence. The child would not answer CPS worker's questions but repeated in Spanish (according to Nurse Ortiz) that he loves his mother and that he does not want to go to a home. He also repeated in Spanish several times that his mother had not hurt him.
CPS discussed the matter again with Doctor Handler. CPS asked Doctor Handler if the child's injuries could have any explanation beyond one of force, violence or injury. Doctor Handler said that it was possible and not likely that the child could have a blood condition. CPS asked Doctor Handler if the child had been tested or checked for any condition of his blood. Doctor Handler asked the CPS worker if he wanted that to be done. CPS advised Doctor Handler that before CPS makes any decision about the child and his siblings, it would be useful to rule out any disease that could be causing the bruises, and that it also would probably be beneficial to the child's health to rule any such condition out. The doctor consulted with the child's mother and had her sign a release. The doctor drew blood from the child's left arm.
11:30 PM The child's father Herman Anunciacion arrived at the Pediatric Emergency Room.
12:30 AM Doctor Handler stated that the child's blood platelet count is near zero and that he must be admitted immediately.
12:35 PM CPS called Supervisor and was directed to:
1- Call Detective Schwartz at Special Victims to update her on the case. (S.V.S. had been unable to dispatch a detective to the location due to heavy case load).
2- Proceed to the case address to
1- Assess the safety of the children in the home.
2- Address the allegations with all of the children.
3- Have all of the children examined, preferably at UGH today.
12:40 AM CPS reached Detective Schwartz by telephone and briefed her on the case. She stated that SVS will not be doing anything on this case tonight.
1:30 AM CPS arrived at the case address accompanied by the father.....
This part will make no sense to anyone... (to be continued)
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
A chat with my zionist alter ego
"I just wanted to share a thought that is always with me whenever I read about the situation in the Middle East: I can't help recalling the medieval Crusader States, artificial western European enclaves in a Muslim "ocean"... sooner or later, sooner or later."
Sooner or later, what? The world will regress to isolated city states? Get real, dude.
Hi.
I am a fellow fat old Jewish guy. Could be your twin brother.
You have a nice blog.
You have the Right of Return.
This country, Israel, was made for you.
Should you feel despondent about the inborn antisemitism of the people you work for and love, should you understand the quixotic sacrifice you are doing, you are welcome to find your own people.
Any time you wish to care for Ethiopian children here, you can come. You and your family.
Your Zionist alter ego.
Dear "Alter":
Maybe we can call you "The Fat Old Jewish Guy Who Lives In Someone Else's House."(Without Permission).
I'm going to recommend a bit of reading for you by someone whose name probably makes you see red, Israel shamir. I am not a "Shamireite" he and I do not agree on lots of things, but he gets right to the heart of your slander against six billion people. I know you really believe this stuff about how the six billion inherently cannot give you a fair shake, so sit down, take a chill pill and read this:
http://mediamonitors.net/shamir15.html
THE THIRD DOVE
Now, Mr. Lives in someone else's house, I won't stand here and lie and say that I never met a Jew hater, but I've met those who hate so many kinds of people, and who may say terrible things about this or that group and then befriend indviduals of that group, that I know it's not "all about the Jews" and that problems of bigotry are pretty mundane, and more complicated than meet the eye.
Just as Polish Americans of the Third generation are not going to shove people in Poland out fo threri homes to escape "Polish Jokes" I'm not joining you in someone else's house, and someone else's country.
"I've met those who hate so many kinds of people, and who may say terrible things about this or that group and then befriend indviduals of that group..."
How does becoming a buddie to a jew negate the fact that this someone may be a raging anti-semite? Pre-civil war southern children commonly grew up with a 'buddie' companion, a slave child assigned to him by his slave-owning parents. And yet these children with a lifelong black friend grew up to view negroes as only good for subservient work.
Fat Ol' Jewish dude, do everyone a favor and DON'T move to Israel. They have enough 'free thinkers' there as it is.
Chow for now,
Gene, the anonymous dude of the last few comments (except for that last one).
Hi, It´s "The Fat Old Jewish Guy Who Lives In Someone Else's House"(Without Permission) here. No, Israel Shamir makes me see no red at all. The Dir Yassin web site makes me see no red. It is natural that American Jews want to dissociate themselves from Zionism. The first reaction to Herzl´s Altneuland feuilleton was a vehement public condemnation by German and Austrian communal leaders. Herzl´s project casts doubt on their loyalty to their fatherlands, they said. One hundred years after, where are they?
I have no argument with you. I for one was a card carrrying Communist - 40 years ago - and actually studied Marx. I would love to say that I got disillusioned after reading the Acts of the 1934 Congress of Biological Sciences (where the Weismannian theory in genetics was condemned as idealist and Lysenko was elected president of the Academy) but in fact I went to the Hashomer because of the girls.
All I am trying to do is to point out the grotesqueness of your participation in Durban style jamborees.
Be well.
Dear Fat Old Jew of the Projects,
It´s me again. I read Israel Shamir as indicated. The man is not talking to me, he leaves me indifferent and a bit amazed how "desubicado" (cueless) he seems to be. He invites me to open the door and walk out to fresh air and see that antisemitism has evaporated. What, he doesn't know?
There never was an antisemitism such as he seems to assume.
The ghetto was not imposed from outside, any time a Jew wanted to be accepted, he could do it easily. Henry Heine went to a Protestant priest for a "passport to European culture" and had it made out in ten minutes no questions asked nor dipping required. Did Marx ever complained of antisemitism? No. Judaism exists and survives because Jews want it to, not because of antisemitism. Regarding Israel, any idiot can see that this is not a safe refuge for persecuted Jews, in fact it is the most unsafe and dangerous place to be. Always was. From where I stand, Israel Shamir's good news that humanity welcomes us is meaningless. Ancient Greeks were the first universalist people, but they hated Jews not less than the others who came after them. I was always fascinated by their writings about Jews, they accused us of misanthropy of all things, hate of humanity. Shamir's restrictive antisemitism existed only for very limited periods and only in certain places. Mostly it was us who rejected the world because wanted to be Jews. I could do what Kerry's grampa did, change my name and travel to another country and forget the whole Jewish business. I would be more than welcome everywhere, a hardworking intelligent person with a trade in good demand. Even without changing anything, being what I am, am welcome everywhere. I could go and teach in the Gulf countries for a very good salary. But I do not want to. Thus Shamir is meaningless for me.
PS. Tierra para el que la trabaja is a slogan of the Reforma Agraria, meaning that land belongs to those to work it, who live on it.
Dear La Tierra: "Me Again?" Which "Me" is that?
I smell zionist justificationizing here though, with that remark about land belonging to those who work it. You're taking a slogan of the Cuban Revolution and perhaps (if you're the so called "illegal immigrant" and if I read you right (maybe you're a different "Me") you're staking claim to the land stolen from Palestinians, people who are still alive and kicking and walking around with the keys to the house you're living in. (If you're not "illegal immigrant", a thousand pardons).
Dear "Illegal immigrant":
You're no "illegal immigrant" you're a colonialist zionist usurper. There's a big difference between people who travel from poor countries in order to do the drudge work at subminimum wages of the rich countries. That just doesn't fit the description.
Had the Jews come to Palestine as immigrants and refugees in stead of colonizers and conquerors maybe all this mess wouldn't be going on. Have your kids start learning Arabic and have them practice it well. Learn to appreciate the customs and at least respect the religions of the people who will, one way or another, sooner or later, be back. Maybe they'll let you stay. If not there's always
http://www.usgovernmentinformation.com/land_62.html
and
http://money.cnn.com/2004/12/22/real_
estate/buying_selling/thursday_freeland/
and
http://www.motherearthnews.com/library/1970_
May_June/Locating_and_Buying_Low_Cost_Land
...all places where y'all can find free land to live on.
It's me once more, the happy colonialist zionist usurper. Thanks for the real estate pointers, but really you should have not bothered, we already own land in Birobidjan, Eastern Siberia. Regarding teaching my daughters Arabic, they do in school and the Army. You may be surprised to learn that I speak some Arabic (I have a knack for languages). In fact, the majority of Israelis speak Arabic as first language, as they or their parents were born in Arab countries. They know exactly the meaning of Muslim tolerance.
Have a nice day.
Hey usurper:
I see that my tax moneys are not going to waste with you Israelis buying up former Soviet lands. Well, then there is someplace for you to go to.
Why do I feel though that you're driving the
^^^^^^^^^^^^
BULLSHIT TRUCK '""";.., _.
......__== ....., ] ________
"(@ )'(@ )""""(@ )(@ )**(@)(@)
Monday, December 19, 2005
Bloomberg is really screwing this thing up!
He made such a big show about riding the subeays. Doesn't he realize that millions of people must ride the subways? Doesn't he understand that stores, and their workers, must have customers for the news four days? Has he heard of Christmas? Why is this billionaire pot smoking playboy mayor taking the city tio the edge?
The media says that Transit is not under the mayor's control, but that didn't stop him from shooting off his fool mouth and we all know that he and Pataki run the MTA through their sock puppets on that board. And they had money to go and guild a stadium, they had money for a boondoggle mega buxcost over run new headquarters, and they had monney to give a "holiday" fare reduction. Well, what good is a fare reduction if the trains and buses aren't running?
The transit workers deserve a raise. Grown men and women who work all day should be able to pay rent and save money for their kids' college educations, don't you think so? And speaking of incompetence, have you been down to where the World Trade Center used to be? How long does it take these geniuses Bloomberg and Pataki to pick a plan and follow it through!?
World WQar TWo didn't last theis long! Really figure it out, how many days from Pearl Harbor till the surrender of Japan? How many days from the deomolition of the WTC and today? Duhh these are leaders? I don't thing so!
It's time to stop it!
^^^^^^^^^^^^
BUSH--IT TRUCK '""";.., _.
......__== ....., ] ________
"(@ )'(@ )""""(@ )(@ )**(@)(@)
^^^^^^^^^^^^
BUSH--IT TRUCK '""";.., _.
......__== ....., ] ________
"(@ )'(@ )""""(@ )(@ )**(@)(@)
Sunday, December 18, 2005
Friday, December 16, 2005
HOW THIS BLOG IS DOING
There is a little button on the bottom of this page (Site meter) which you can click on to see all kinds of statistics about this site and the people who are coming to see it.
I had another service until yesterday that didn't give me quite all this information, but yesterday this site topped over three hundred different visitors.
and you come from all over the world, something I didn't know yesterday.
Here is a graph of the last hundred visitors and the places you come from. I'm happy to welcome you from Italy, Iran, India,and all points between and beyond.
I'm going to have to work some more to get New York better represented, because after all, this site's heart is in New York.
FUNNY VIDEOS I'VE DUG UP FOR YOOZE GUYS
"THIS VIDEO IS MADE AVAILABLE TO YOU GRATIS.
IT WILL OPEN IN YOUR OWN MEDIA PLAYING
SOFTWARE. LIKE IT? PASS THIS PAGE ALONG TO
YOUR FRIENDS. - IF I HAD TO RATE THIS VIDEO I'D MAKE IT PG 13 OR PG
BREWERY WORKERS' DREAM BREWERY
WORKERS' DREAM
VIDEOS ARE PROVIDED AS IS. YOU SHOULD BE
AWARE THAT WE MAKE EVERY EFFORT TO
SCREEN OUT FILES THAT CARRY DANGEROUS
DATA SUCH AS VIRUSES AND SPY WARES. WE
SUGGEST THAT EVERY INTERNET USER GET
AN ANTI SPY WARE PROGRAM AND USE IT
REGULARLY.
I'M GOING TO TAG A FEW OF MY OLD POSTS WITH FUNNY VIDEOS.
Thursday, December 15, 2005
Transport Workers Union Gear Up
I'm Union and I'm with the subway and bus workers. Their fight is every working person's fight. Let's back them all the way!
Thursday, December 15, 2005
(Sometimes google serves up inapropriate ads that you, my readers, do not appreciate. I don't either. For this reason I am adding some "keywords" to the posts:
Question authority, Palestine will win, Bring the troops home now, Labor Unions are good, child protective service reform, stop police brutality, end poverty, reform child welfare.)
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
MY ITEMS ABOUT CHILD WELFARE
HUGO CHAVEZ, JEWISH KIDS AND LOCKING UP GOOD PARENTS IN NEW YORK
ENOUGH WITH THE BROKEN WINDOWS ALREADY
ON BEING A COP FOR THE SHELTER SYSTEM
border="0" />BUY CLOTHES AND SHOES WITH A CLEAR CONSCIENCE - BUY UNION
A few facts about Child Protective Services THAT YOU SHOULD KNOW when they come to your door:
1- You do not have to let them into your house unless they have a court order or unless they are with a police officer who believes someone is in imminent danger in your house then and there.
2- Child Protection caseworkers will say "I need you to take a drug test." What that means is that the worker has a need. Do you? NO, not without a court order.
3- You do not have to allow your child to answer questions, especially without you being in the room with her.
4- You do not have to let the caseworker undress your child to check him for bruises.
5- They are not allowed to tell you who made a report against you.
6- Just using drugs alone is not grounds for any punitive action by the caseworker. She must show that by using a drug you are hurting your child or putting her in danger. For example, if a parent smokes marijuana with friends while the child is being baby sat elsewhere, and the child is fine there is no lawfull CPS case against the parent.
7- They must have valid ID on them.
8- They may take your child without court order if they believe the child is in imminent danger.
9- Most cases end with no problem. Be calm.
10-Rights of parents with children in foster care.
11-ACS Parents Rights Unit: 212-676-9421
POSTS ABOUT ISRAEL/PALESTINE
ABOUT ABOUT MY RIGHT TO RETURN (TO THE HOLY LAND)
WHERE IS THE REAL ANTI WAR MOVEMENT?
DEBATE ABOUT WHAT THE HOLOCAUST IS OR WAS
CLICK ON ROSIE TO SHOP UNION MADE, NON SWEATSHOP, NON PRISON LABOR MADE GARMENTS>>>>>>>>>>
Stan "Tookie" Williams is dead and I apologize.
I have been so busy setting up this blog and Benjamindawgg, as well as going to my job and so forth that the whole matter of Tookie Williams went right by me. Now, I'm not here to defend the man who started the notorious Crips gang. In principle I can see instances where capital punishment would be needed - for example if there is a very dangerous person in jail and civil authority is under attack and it is not at all certain that the jail can keep him in - like revolutionary situations - yes it might be justified then.
I cannot justify what Schwartzenegger did this morning. He killed a long time effective anti gang violence activist and truly redeemed man twenty- five years after the fact of his crimes. So I apologize for not even knowing what was going on in this case until yesterday. I apologize for not raising my voice.
The world is well rid of the Tookie of twenty - five years ago and will miss the Tookie of this morning. My condolences to all who cared about him.
From Tookie's website:
Discovery Motion Reveals Police, Prosecutorial Misconduct in Tookie's Original Trial
Tookie's Letter To Incarcerated Youth, No. 1"Across the nation, young men and women like you are vegetating in juvenile halls and in youth authorities. More and more prisons are being constructed to accommodate your generation...(click here to read complete letter)
Tookie's Letter To Incarcerated Youth, No. 2"What is the relationship between prisoner and guard? Is it slave versus master? Interactions between captor and captive can vary from person to person...." (click here to read complete letter)
Amicus (Friend-of-the-Court) Brief Filed By ACLU On Tookie's BehalfThe ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), the national NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and several other civil rights groups have filed an amicus (Friend-of-the-Court) brief urging the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to consider racist injustices in jury selection during Tookie's 1981 trial. (click here to read the story)
Court Recommends Clemency For TookieRead about the ruling against Stanley "Tookie" Williams by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals -- and the Court's unprecedented recommendation to spare his life -- in this San Francisco Chronicle article by reporter Bob Egelko.
Presstitutes is a cool blog
Do check them out:
December 12, 2005
Where Is The Media On New Orleans?
Considering the round-the-clock coverage afforded to a missing girl in Aruba a few months ago, don't you think the media could pay more attention to stories like this: Bush Advisor To Reporter: Katrina “Has Fallen So Far Off The Radar Screen, You Can’t Find It”
Bush's grandiose promises on Katrina have already evaporated. But instead of letting the American public know about his lies, Pre$$titutes are too busy airing his zillionth Iraq-terror-freedom speech and crowing about his 'rising' poll numbers.
Monday, December 12, 2005
About My Right To Return (To The Holy Land)
I got a lot of response, (considering how new this blog is) to my simple declaration that as a New Yorker, I do not want and do not feel I really have, a "right to return" to the place some people call "The Holy Land."
I happen to have been "Born Jewish" which is a status that doesn't particularly say anything about me. My upbringing was in a strange, unnamed, non centralized but very real branch of Judaism that has probably brought me here, where I live, to the General Grant Houses, and to writing this blog, fighting with people at my office, and being a nuisance to powers that be.
Check this blog out with its stories about Child Welfare, about the locking up of good parents, articles about Israel and Palestine and more.
Sunday, December 11, 2005
On Being a Cop for the Shelter System: Shove it!
How does it happen that I get called to go to a shelter on a bullsh$t tip like this?:
Melinda is sixteen years old. She is in the shelter commissary right now because her mother habitually leaves her unsupervised. Reporter is requesting immediate LCPS response.
"Enough With The Broken Windows Already"
Starasia's Nightmare, Cold Night In Hell.
Back to The Projects (AND A FUNNY VIDEO)
Now 41 years later I've gone full circle, I'm back in the projects! I like it!
I work nights in Child Protective Services which is going to get more attention here because my job evinces some very strong reactions in my neighborhood and of course it is pretty central to my life right now. I'd need legal advice before talking too much about my office, the politics there, etc.I also have to be careful about how I speak about the cases I work over the phone and the cases I go out into the field on. It's going to have to be realo - fictitious, I think, like Starasia's Nightmare, or Cold Night In Hell. By that I mean this stuff didn't exactly happen, and the names and places are not related in ways I would know to anything like what's described, but at the same time reality is being depicted and respected. Get it?
Now "Enough With The Broken Windows Already" is about stuff that ought to be spoken of at least once in a while at least in the local media but is not. I am really going to have to find a way to get large scale readership and get the input of people who have experiences in things that I am talking about. If your information about how the "little people" in New York live comes from the newspapers or TV you don't know anything about some of the stuff I talk about, yet it impacts so many New Yorkers who just do not seem to count for anything as far as the powers that be be.
I am encuraging people who work in child protection, people who are impacted by it and also people who have interesting storiesor complaints about life in the City, especially (but not only) if you live in the projects to hit this link and tell me how we can get your stuff on line here.
I have something to say to the fat old Jewish guy who lives in the projects.
When I was around five years old we moved to Sheepshead Nostrand Houses from a flat out slum tenement. My dad was a somewhat shell shocked veteran who had got a job selling insurance. Sheepshead Nostrand was in those days a "middle income project" as they had them divided into two. I think my dad lost his job as I remember lots of walks down by Plum Beach with him. ( I remember calling it "Bum Beach" which was how I could pronounce it).
I also remember that year being sick with a combination of measles and
pneumonia. I hardly went to school for a few months.
Not long after we moved
into Sheepshead Nostrand we moved out. We were now low income and not middle
income and we moved down to Queensbridge Projects.
I remember Queensbridge very well, we kids were like "Our Gang Comedies" most
of the time except at times some kids would be really pissed at me, like around
Easter, and I didn't know or understand how my parents were active in the
Queensbridge Tenants and the defense of the Rosenbergs.
I remember the bedroom I shared with my little sister and how one night a
blast came through the window that looked onto the playground (we were on the
first floor.) There was glass everywhere and as I recall my folks did not call
the cops.
I lived in Queensbridge until just before my bar mitzvah at Adath Israel, a
modern Orthodox synagogue. Funny how my parents were both orthodox and atheists both at the same time that is. That meant they rejected religion, however the Reform and Conservative were beneath rejection, beneath contempt, while the orthodox was the synagogue of
their parents, the one they respectfully rejected (almost). Just when I moved from Queensbridge to the middle income projects nearby, Ravenswood, so did the synagogue Adath Israel move, almost at the exact same time.
I lived in Ravenswood Projects from age 13 till 18.
IT WILL OPEN IN YOUR OWN MEDIA PLAYING
SOFTWARE. LIKE IT? PASS THIS PAGE ALONG TO
YOUR FRIENDS.
DON'T TAKE A FLARE GUN WITH YOU IF YOU'RE
GOING SKY DIVING
VIDEOS ARE PROVIDED AS IS. YOU SHOULD BE
AWARE THAT WE MAKE EVERY EFFORT TO
SCREEN OUT FILES THAT CARRY DANGEROUS
DATA SUCH AS VIRUSES AND SPY WARES. WE
SUGGEST THAT EVERY INTERNET USER GET
AN ANTI SPY WARE PROGRAM AND USE IT
REGULARLY
Thursday, December 08, 2005
My debate with Sue Blackwell, friend of Palestinian and Jew, about the holocaust.
There are so many comments over on my item about "right to return" that someone visiting this blog might miss something interesting: my debate with an English lady who feels she is a friend to Palestinians and Jews too, about the events in Nazi occupied Europe during the 30's and 40's. I'm putting it over here. wiotrh all my dyslexic typos (proving how tired and rushed I was making these posts) so it doesn't get lost:
Sue Blackwell said...
Hey Eugene! This shiksa socialist in Birmingham
(UK) thinks that post was brilliant. And since
you ask people to link to your site, I've put
one in from my website on Palestine and Israel.
Check it out:
www.sue.be/pal
Since you link to Lenni Brenner I presume you
don't mind being listed under "anti-Zionist
Jewish sites" (click on "Zionism")
but if you'd prefer me to put you somewhere
else, just let me know.
Sue Blackwell
Fat Old Jewish Guy Who Lives In The Projects said...
Hello sue!
Thanks for your support. Link me under any classification you deem appropriate. Y'all come back soon, okay?
Levi9909 said...
Hey! I'm Jewish and I'm offended by this blog. I look pretty much the same age and size as you but I don't go round calling myself "fat old Jewish guy from London." But I've linked you all the same in spite of you being a self-hating fat oldie.
Fat Old Jewish Guy Who Lives In The Projects said...
If you called yourself "Pots and Pans" it would be alright by me. Thanks for the link Levi, and relax. Now, life is not so bad is it?
Sue Blackwell said...
Well, Levi9909, I was just wondering how long
it would be before the phrase "self-hating"
appeared in the comments on this blog. But
apparently Eugene is a "self-hating fat oldie"
not a self-hating Jew. So that's all right then. LOL.
Michael Brenner said...
Oh yeah, beautiful post. From now on, I'll say that pro-Palestinian will use any Jew they can find to make their case for them, even the fat old Jewish guy who lives in the projects.
I see that the "we're not antisemites we're anti-Zionists even though we have no problem with people who traffic in classic Jewish stereotypes" crowd is here, including the Christian fundamentalist nutjob turned radical nutjob from London who tried to launch a boycott of Israeli universities who offer Arabs the best education in the Middle East, the self-hating Stalinist who throws a hissy fit when someone writes comments on his blog that doesn't toe the party line, and even the Middle East editor of Global Voices, who doesn't understand why Jews find articles from Nationalvanguard.com offensive.
All so that they don't have to confront anyone who actually disagrees with them since that might require actually dealing with the reality, which is that most Jews believe in the right to self-determination and right to one Jewish state in the sea of Muslim states with much worse human rights records.
Yes, a beautiful post for the fat old Jewish guy who lives in the projects. It's too bad that you don't want your right of return, but somehow, I don't feel too bad about it.
Anonymous said...
Dear Eugene,
I am grateful for this post. Your honesty and earthiness is most welcome.
I was born into exile, my folks were expelled/deported from their homes in Palestine in '48. I don't hear many Israelis questioning this event, questioning their moral obligation to the Palestinians. Instead, we get labelled as anti-semites, or, as in your case 'self-hating', for speaking out for our basic rights.
Up until early last century, Palestinians of all backgrounds lived side by side.
I always get a kick out hearing Palestinians being wrongly labelled as anti-semites; Palestinians are semites!
I guess that makes Palestinians 'self-hating semites'(???).
Anyhoo, I don't have you linked up, but rest assured you will be as soon as my blog is sorted out.
Peace.
annie said...
Divide and conquer, distract and destroy... interesting thing about the insults carefully chosen by Tim to dismiss those who dared enthusiastically support you speaking out on the Palestinian right of return. Take for instance the hot button issue of Holocaust denial. Not hard for Tim to find my web page of published letters and actually see that over and over again I in fact, use a capital "H" and refer to the Holocaust with horror, too frequently in fact for some peace activists who think such a response on my part helps empower the whole Holocaust industry thing. Who knows- they might be right. Meanwhile, from what I have seen Sue Blackwell, very active with advocating boycotts, is totally repulsed by any hint of Holocaust denial. She's no dummy. Insults and targeted character assassinations are quite a Zio-Nazi art form. Carefully chosen barbs that aren't as sloppy as they might appear. Intentionally trying to fracture, undermine, and dissolve resistance to Israeli racism.
But then again- neither are Zion-Nazis: Divide and conquer....
By the way that Tim phrased it , you would have no way of knowing unless you already did that Al Awda is the Palestine Right to Return Coalition. The primary goal is advocating human rights, mainly by educating the international community to fulfill its legal and moral obligations vis-a-vis Palestinian refugees based on The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, International law and through the implementation of United Nations Resolutions upholding the inalienable right of Palestinians to return to their homes of origin and to restitution of all their confiscated and destroyed property (see fact sheet). ( I confess I didn't write that part- just did a quick cut and paste from the Al Awda page)
Sure wish I had a zingy line to finish with- but I don't.
Fat Old Jewish Guy Who Lives In The Projects said...
I'm going to post an excellent item by Paul Eisen about this whole "Holocaust thing."
Ibrahamav said...
Well, you're certainly Jewish enough for Hitler to kill, but not jewish enough to be actually Jewish. You just happened to have been accidentally born to Jewish parents. Go figure.
(so that's the flavor of the zionist attack, now here comes Sue and the "anti zionist" attack:)
Sue Blackwell said...
Eugene please do not give space on your
excellent blog to Holocaust revisionists
like Paul Eisen and his soulmate Israel
Shamir. They do no favours to the Palestinians,
and by suggesting that all Jews are Zionists
of one sort or another Eisen is insulting
all those Jews who genuinely oppose Zionism -
which apparently includes yourself.
I have a whole page about these people at:
http://www.sue.be/pal/nazis.html
Fat Old Jewish Guy Who Lives In The Projects said...
Dear Sue:
I am saddened by your post here at this blog. Let me tell you why.
I have been aware of the differences between you, and Paul Eisen, and Israel Shamir. I have participated in Shamir's group togethernet at yahoo and have corresponded briefly with both of them prior to starting this blog, not about this blog but about a world of issues and opinions.
I can feel your opinions because two years ago ago they were mine more or less too. I think they are honest on your part but off the mark, and seriously so. However, I did not attack or even bring up this difference with you because people who oppose the Israeli state or even who oppose its actions need to show as much unity as is possible. It's not as though the zionists are on the run and we have the luxury of a cat fight, a public one at that.
Let me tell you how broadly I mean this. I have differed with Shamir on some things on his yahoo group, and trust me when I say I despise a David Duke. (Read my post about tripping over the code of military justice, it's a true story) and in that I have not changed a whit, except perhaps I'm stronger about racism.(Read my stuff about NYC snatching Black and Hispanic Kids and locking up their parents).
However, I have not sought to go out of my way to amplify differences with Shamir. He has guts like few others and he tells the truth about Israel, about Judaism and about zionism. and he does not say, nor does Eisner, that there are no anti zionist Jews. In fact they point out, at least Shamir does, how few and far between they are and how little they (we) represent. If anything, in being the exception for the present we tend to prove the rule.
Shamir thinks a Jew can and has to stop being one. I frankly don't know if this is either possible or entirely desireable. I've gone back and forth on this inside my own head, but I'm satisfied to go on living and be who and what I am, which is a commie pinko Jewish subversive.
Shamir has an honest opinion.
If I can dialogue with the zionists who have come here to my blog to disrupt and threaten, if I could want with all my might to have my pieces about Child Welfare be in the Zionist newspapers here in New York, why on earth would I not dialogue with any other racist?
It's Bloomberg's New York where a Black man with a clean police record has a harder time in getting a job than a white felon. it's Zuckerman's Daily News that demonized the Black people of New Orleans, and though David Duke copied his garbage and put it on his website, like a dog yapping and running alongside his master, it's no doubt who does the most damage.
When I use the term "Zionazi I mean it.
Then Sue gets a little Nudge from the Zionist peanut gallery:SnoopyTheGoon said...
"I have a whole page about these people at:
http://www.sue.be/pal/nazis.html"
Now, honey cake, you can add your dear ole Eugene to the list. He belongs there.
Next time choose your friends more carefully.
Oh, gosh, you have been already told so. Repeatedly, too...
And Sue Comes through....
Sue B said...
"People who oppose the Israeli state or even who oppose its actions need to show as much unity as is possible" - sorry Eugene, I want no unity with Holocaust
deniers and anti-semites. (I know that "unity" stuff is exactly what
Shamir says. BTW I don't believe he is even Jewish, not that it matters.)
Choice quote from Eisen:
"True, there was little hard evidence, but what there was could so easily be made to fit. After all, everyone knew that the Germans had engaged in purposeful mass extermination of Jews therefore 'special treatment' and 'deportation to the East' must be euphemisms for extermination, and any sealed chamber attached to a crematorium especially if used for disinfestations by gas, must have been a homicidal gas chamber."
If that's not Holocaust denial I don't know what is. You really want "unity" with such people?
Fat Old Jewish Guy Who Lives In The Projects said...
Dear Sue,
I don't want to end up mixing apples and oranges here. I've read what David Irving said at his trial in Canada and I've read quite a lot more.
I know enough about Shamir to say he hates what the Nazis did in the USSR and the rest of Europe. I know he was and still is pro Soviet in fact.
I read Eisen's stuff pretty closely. He is referring to holes in the official or accepted, or taught to the school children in Harlem version of what took place in Europe between 1938 and 1945.
The holes in that narrative are glaring. Sue when I was a boy I knew that four million Jews wee murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz and that the toal of Jews murdered was six million.
Now they say one million or one and a half million or perhaps six hundred thousand were murdered at Auschwitz, yet the official total six million (or five million one hundred thousand if you read Raul Hillberg) remains. Isn't there an inconsitency here? Have you read Arno Mayer?
The stories I grew up on, about the human flesh rendered into soap, about the whole vicinity around Auschwitz stinking from the ashes of human beings, about gas chambers in Dachau are just not true. And there is a challenge to the notion that the gas chambers at Auschwitz and crematoria there could have physically been accessories to the number of said to be murdered inmates, and I have not seen any rebuttal. If you have, please p[ost it here on my website.
I'm not making light of what the Nazis did, Sue, nor do I think Eisen is, nor Atzmon, nor Shamir. I have a problem though with little children being indoctrinated with propaganda that was used to justify the imperialist side of World War Two (it seved other purposes as well, even contradictory ones, but still war propaganda.) Worse this narrative serves as Zionist propaganda and indoctrination.
Let me take it one step further. Holocaust propaganda serves to shield the most priviledged group (religion, ethnicity,nationality, call it what you will, what "the Jews" are is a mystery to me) from just crticism of many of its members and of its collective conduct.
About "unity":
In a united front diverse and even antagonistic forces work or fight in one direction on one or several related matters in which they share common interest. "One direction" doesen't mean in lockstep on all matters. If Shamir and my differences of opinion were important at this moment I'd be bringing them out in detail. In fact they're hypothetical and theoretical for the most part.
Shamir shakes the Jewish world and that's a good thing!
Paul Eisen's stuff?
To quote you quoting Paul Eisen:
"'Choice quote from Eisen:
"True, there was little hard evidence, but what there was could so easily be made to fit. After all, everyone knew that the Germans had engaged in purposeful mass extermination of Jews therefore 'special treatment' and 'deportation to the East' must be euphemisms for extermination, and any sealed chamber attached to a crematorium especially if used for disinfestations by gas, must have been a homicidal gas chamber.'"
Even Yehuda Bauer said that the story of Wannsee is a myth.
What the Nazis did to the Jews was bad enough Sue. It was part of their anti Communist crusade (a fact buried today in "the narrative" - an insult to those who fought the Nazis from the start.)
It was bad Sue but it was not the crime of all history, it does not equal the ongoing holocaust of hunger and death from curable disease that kills as many children every year as the Nazis are said to have killed the Jews over seven years, it does not equate with the slave trade.It might be right up there with the slaughter of the Indochina war and other crimes too.
Sue B said...
I'm not an expert on the Holocaust and I don't have as much time as you do, Eugene, otherwise I'd start my own blog! I will respond to just a few of your points and let others deal with the rest of them, if anyone else is still reading this.
You said in an earlier post:
>I did not attack or even bring up this difference with you because people who oppose the Israeli state or even who oppose its actions need to show as much unity as is possible. It's not as though the zionists are on the run and we have the luxury of a cat fight, a public one at that.
Well if you prefer to continue this debate off-line you are welcome: I have sent you my e-address. But I thought the whole point of blogging was to have one's arguments in a public forum. You can't expect to post several pages of crap by Paul Eisen and not get a response, indeed I'm sure you were trying to provoke one and that's what you got.
You suggest that Eisen is merely referring to the "holes" in the official version. But the passage I quoted indicates to me that he is denying the existence of gas chambers at all, not just quibbling over the numbers who died in them. And I'm sure most people would read it the same way.
> And there is a challenge to the notion that the gas chambers at Auschwitz and crematoria there could have physically been accessories to the number of said to be murdered inmates, and I have not seen any rebuttal. If you have, please post it here on my website.
Try this one:
http://www.holocaust-history.org/
auschwitz/body-disposal/
Of course Zionists make propaganda out of the Holocaust, distort it, divert money intended for the survivors etc. etc. But you don't counter that propaganda by encouraging people who deny the existence of gas chambers.
I'm all for bona-fide academic research which gets us closer to the real numbers and the whole truth about the Holocaust - including the millions of non-Jewish victims who are often overlooked. To say that there have been other acts of genocide and the Nazi holocaust was not unique is not at all the same thing as denying what the Nazis actually did.
To anyone in the UK I would recommend the current BBC2 series "Auschwitz, the final solution" which is shown around 8.15 on Saturdays. It includes numerous interviews with both survivors and perpetrators. Perhaps Eisen thinks they were all lying?
This will be my last post on this page -
I'll see y'all elsewhere on the web before
long.
Fat Old Jewish Guy Who Lives In The Projects said...
http://www.vho.org/GB/c/
CM/jcz.html
Sue, try that one on for size if you have the time.
You're right,a blog is exactly a place for controversy. I was not looking for attacks from within the camp opposed to Israel and its actions to the level of calling activists like Eisen a nazi. I think that's over the top, Sue.
Here's the kernel of your argument with Eisen (correct me here if I'm wrong):
"'Choice quote from Eisen:
"'True, there was little hard evidence, but what there was could so easily be made to fit. After all, everyone knew that the Germans had engaged in purposeful mass extermination of Jews therefore 'special treatment' and 'deportation to the East' must be euphemisms for extermination, and any sealed chamber attached to a crematorium especially if used for disinfestations by gas, must have been a homicidal gas chamber.'"
It seems quite reasonable to me that Paul could be speaking of Dachau, a camp I knew of as a boy. You will have to agree that the war propaganda that identified Dachau as a place of mass gassings and creamations turned out to be false. It turns out that indeed there was a gas chamber at Dachau in which clothing of inmates was in fact rid of lice. As distateful as that expresson is it's accepted today.
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/
DachauScrapbook/GasChamber/Index.html
Gas Chambers at Dachau
"Baracke X, erected May 1942 to April 1943. It was to serve both as a killing facility and to remove the dead, but the gas chamber in the middle of the building was not used for mass murder. Survivors have testified that the SS did, however, murder individual prisoners and small groups here using poison gas."
Building where Dachau gas chamber was located
The photograph above, taken in May 2003, shows the building where the infamous Dachau gas chamber is located. The gas chamber room is right behind the white table, which has a memorial inscription to the victims. The low shrub on the left hides a memorial plaque on the ground which marks the spot where the gallows stood.
When soldiers of the US Seventh Army arrived on April 29, 1945 to liberate the concentration camp at Dachau, they found that the inmates in the camp, who were predominantly Communists and other anti-Nazi political prisoners, had organized into an International Committee headed by a Belgian Communist named Albert Guérisse who was using the fake name of Patrick O'Leary and pretending to be Canadian. Patrick O'Leary spoke perfect English and he and his fellow Committee members were very anxious to give a guided tour of the camp to the American heroes and the newspaper reporters who accompanied them. They particularly wanted to show them the five gas chambers outside the prison compound in the new crematorium building, named Baracke X. Many of the soldiers and newspaper reporters who took this tour wrote their descriptions of the gas chambers. I have put these eye-witness descriptions on a separate page.
The official report of the US Seventh Army was printed as a book entitled Dachau Liberated: The Official Report of The U.S. Seventh Army, Released Within Days of the Camp's Liberation by Elements of the 42nd and 45th Divisions. The following quote is from this book:
"When the American troops arrived on 29 April 1945, there were approximately 32,500 estimated internees of all nationalities, the Poles predominating. During this period, the camp was notorious for its cruelty, but within the last six or eight months, some 'token' improvement was noted in the treatment of the internees. However, the new crematorium was completed in May 1944, and the gas chambers, a total of five, were used for the executions and the disposals of the bodies."
Shortly after the liberation of Dachau, the American Army released a photograph which clearly showed that a gas chamber was in operation there. The photograph was published in American newspapers and magazines and was then shown in a traveling exhibit which started in St. Louis and ended in Washington, DC. Films of Dachau taken at the liberation of the camp were shown in the weekly newsreels in American movie theaters. American congressmen traveled to Dachau in early May 1945 and stood in the largest gas chamber, examining its fake shower heads. Their Congressional Report, based on this visit, was entered into the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg as evidence that a homicidal gas chamber was used to murder prisoners at Dachau.
After the liberation of Dachau, the Army quickly set up a museum in the new crematorium and General Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered that as many American soldiers as possible should be brought to the camp to view the evidence of Nazi atrocities, particularly the notorious gas chamber disguised as a shower room. However, Eisenhower himself never visited any of the three major Nazi concentration camps in Germany, nor did he mention any gas chambers in his book, Crusade in Europe.
At the Nuremberg war crimes trial, eye-witness testimony about prisoners being killed in the Dachau gas chamber was given by Dr. Franz Blaha, a Czech Communist who was a prisoner in the camp and a prominent member of the International Committee at Dachau. At the Nuremberg trial of the Nazi war criminals, a film was shown which included some footage of the Dachau gas chamber. Visitors to the Memorial Site can see the gas chamber footage from this film in a 22-minute movie shown every half hour in the museum.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, there was no doubt whatsoever in anyone's mind that there was indeed a homicidal gas chamber in the new crematorium building at Dachau and that prisoners in the camp had been murdered there. In 1972 a fictional Hollywood film called Justice at Nuremberg confirmed this belief. Dachau was the only concentration camp mentioned in the movie, giving some people the impression that 6,000,000 Jews had been gassed to death there.
Up until 1960, it was an accepted fact that a gas chamber, disguised as a shower room, had been used to murder prisoners at the Dachau concentration camp. Then on August 19, 1960 on page 16, Die Zeit, a German magazine, published a letter from Martin Broszat, head of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. Herr Broszat stated that the Dachau gas chamber had never been completed and had not been put into operation..."
Ah, yes, the movie "Judgement at Nuremberg" by which I a youth learned that the Jews were mass murdered at Dachau. I was like the entire generation of Jewish youths at that time indoctrinated and traumatized by a Hollywood lie. For shame!
Guttenplan in The Guardian:
"Although the grisly tale of the soap figured in some of the earliest accounts of Nazi-occupied Europe, it is now rejected by historians as a fabrication - similar to the atrocity stories of Allied propaganda during the first world war. Dachau did have a gas chamber, but it was never used. This week the BBC referred to the "death camp" at Belsen, but there were no gas chambers at Belsen.
Nor did the Nazis come first for the Jews; as Peter Novick explains in his brilliant and provocative new book, The Holocaust in American Life, "First they came for the Communists" - a circumstance acknowledged by Niemöller, who continued, "but I was not a Communist - so I said nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat - so I did nothing. Then came the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew - so I did little. Then when they came for me, there was no one left who could stand up for me." The Holocaust Museum in Washington DC is just one of those who, in Novick's phrase "prudently omits" Communists from Niemöller's homily.
But prudence and political calculation have influenced our knowledge of the Holocaust from the beginning. Even the word itself - from the Greek holos, for whole, and kaustos, for burnt - is contested. In some circles, the Hebrew word Shoah, meaning destruction, is preferred. The Princeton historian Arno Mayer coined the term "Judeocide" to describe the subject of his study Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? For a long time after the war, the fate of European Jewry was hardly mentioned, partly because, as the cartoonist Art Spiegelman's father says in Maus, his survivor's tale in cartoon format, "No one wants anyway to hear such stories," and partly because in camps liberated by British and American troops including Dachau, Belsen and Buchenwald, only a minority of the prisoners were Jews. In Ed Murrow's famous 1945 broadcast from Buchenwald the words Jew and Jewish are never spoken.
In her first book, Beyond Belief, Lipstadt wrote that even when confronted by the evidence, many correspondents were reluctant to admit to themselves and their readers the reality of genocide. She attributes some reluctance to anti-Semitism. Novick, who teaches history at the University of Chicago, suggests a different reason for postwar reticence: with the realignment of the cold war, talk of the Holocaust was inimical to US interests. In 50s America few besides Communists shouted "Remember the six million!"
or most Americans, including Jews, the Holocaust was "the wrong atrocity" - mention of it was at best an embarrassment, at worst a cause for suspicion. Today the Holocaust is ubiquitous. Films such as Schindler's List, television programmes, novels, memoirs all add to what we know - or think we know - about what Raul Hilberg called "the destruction of the European Jews". His book with that title was published in 1961. The first reviews were mostly hostile: it was years before Hilberg won prizes. Merely consider the reception of Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments (1995) to see how much has changed: it won the National Jewish Book Award for autobiography. Even after evidence mounted that Wilkomirski was really Bruno Dössekker, a Swiss musician whose account of a childhood in the camps is fictional, Fragments attracted readers, such is the appetite for Holocaust literature.
How did this change come about? Novick mentions a gradual easing of the cold war, outbreaks of neo-Nazism in Germany and the US, the 1952 publication of Anne Frank: The Diary of A Young Girl, adapted to stage and screen. But the single greatest catalyst was the trial of war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Much of the initial response was negative. But as the trial wore on, the mass of detail overcame scepticism. The trial was televised, and for the first time the American public was confronted with the Holocaust distinct from the general carnage of war.
Now, nearly 40 years after, Eichmann's name again echoed in a court. For over nine weeks in Courtroom 73 of the Royal Courts of Justice the Holocaust has been on trial as Charles Gray presided over David Irving v. Penguin Books Ltd and Deborah Lipstadt. Towards the end of the trial, which, thanks to British libel laws, forced Lipstadt to prove the truth of the claim in her book Denying the Holocaust that Irving knowingly distorted or suppressed evidence regarding the Nazi massacre of European Jewry, it was announced that the Israeli authorities had agreed to release Eichmann's diaries. But the problem of Lipstadt and her lawyers couldn't be solved by new evidence. The problem was how to interpret what was already there.
To Irving, author of numerous books on the Third Reich, the Holocaust is "an ill-fitting legend". He didn't deny many Jews died; he denied that any of them were killed in gas chambers, that Hitler directly ordered the annihilation of Jewry, and that the killings were in any significant way different from the war's other atrocities.
In Hilberg's insight, the destruction of European Jewry was a bureaucratic process, the result of "a series of administrative measures". In their pursuit of the Endlösung - the Final Solution to the Jewish question - the Nazis left the detritus of any large organisation: memoranda, requisition forms, purchase orders and blueprints. A million Jews were murdered at Auschwitz and all had to be taken there by train in the middle of a war in which the railways were the lifelines of the German army. The Zyklon B gas to kill them had to be paid for. And the ovens that disposed of the bodies had to be specially built, by Topf and Sons, a firm that patented the design. For each Stück - piece, as the Nazis referred to a Jew - processed, items had to be accounted for: money, dental gold, hair. Hilberg mapped this bureaucracy in three volumes, but the essential facts are in a series of tables. Deaths by cause shows that more than 800,000 Jews died from "ghetto-isation and general privation," more than 1.3m by "open-air shootings," and up to 3m were murdered in camps - as many as 2.7m in specialised extermination centres such as Sobibór, Treblinka, and Belzec; 150,000 died in other camps, including concentration camps such as Dachau and Buchenwald.
In deaths by country, Hilberg's list ranges from the 3m Jews of Poland to the fewer than 1,000 from Luxembourg, and in deaths by year charts the genocide's rise and fall. But the total is the same: 5.1m Jews. Other historians dispute Hilberg's arithmetic, arguing for 6m. Scholars remain divided on when and why the Nazis shifted from encouraging Jewish emigration (which saved half of Germany's Jews) to extermination (which murdered 90% of Greece's Jews). They argue about the role of the camps in the German economy.
Irving used these disagreements to get into the debate. But his arguments were of a different order. He filed for libel in September 1996; that spring, his US publishers, St Martin's Press, had cancelled the publication of his Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich. Given his history, controversy was to be expected, even courted. Publishers Weekly pronounced the book "repellent"; Jewish organisations expressed outrage; Deborah Lipstadt was quoted as saying that St Martin's would hardly sign up a white supremacist for a book on race relations.
St Martin's at first stood firm, but between a March Daily News report about the uproar and Frank Rich's April New York Times column calling Irving "Hitler's Spin Artist," it lost nerve and cancelled publication. The principal effect of this, as Christopher Hitchens pointed out in Vanity Fair, was to transform a man with "depraved ideas" about the Holocaust into a poster boy for free speech. This lent the book the cachet of suppressed literature. and gave rise to Gordon Craig's declaration, in a review in the New York Review of Books, that "silencing Mr Irving would be a high price to pay for freedom from the annoyance that he causes us". Craig continued: "He knows more about National Socialism than most professional scholars in his field, and students of the years 1933-1945 owe more than they are always willing to admit" to his research. "Such people have an indispensable part in the historical enterprise, and we dare not disregard their views." On Tuesday, Mr Justice Gray found otherwise.
The argument is familiar. In the late 70s, French intellectuals were convulsed over l'affaire Faurisson. Robert Faurisson, professor of literature at the University of Lyons, wrote in Le Monde the "good news" that the gas chambers had not existed. "The alleged Hitlerian gas chambers," he said, "and the so-called genocide of the Jews form a single historical lie whose principal beneficiaries are the State of Israel and international Zionism."
Hitchens described Irving as "not just a Fascist historian, but a great historian of Fascism". He also assumed that what Irving really wanted was a debate with his critics. If that had been Irving's objective, all he had to do was bide his time. "Someone," Hitchens asserted, "will no doubt pick up where St Martin's left off." Instead, Irving blamed Lipstadt for his troubles in the US and sued her and her publisher, Penguin Books, for libel in England. At which point it became more difficult to defend the proposition that what was at stake was Irving's freedom of speech.
Faurisson's chief antagonist, French classicist Pierre Vidal-Naquet, argued : "To live with Faurisson? Any other attitude would imply that we were imposing historical truth as legal truth, which is a dangerous attitude." Vidal-Naquet opposed his government's use of torture in Algeria and supports the rights of Palestinians. Perhaps because both his parents were deported by the Nazis (his mother died in Auschwitz), he felt it just as important to expose Faurisson's distortions as to support his right to distort. His scepticism about the role of the state has no echo in Lipstadt, unlike his argument against debating the Holocaust.
He wrote: "Confronting an actual Eichmann, one had to resort to armed struggle and, if need be, to ruse. Confronting a paper Eichmann, one should respond with paper... In so doing, we are not placing ourselves on the same ground as our enemy. We do not debate him; we demonstrate the mechanisms of his lies and falsifications, which may be methodologically useful for the younger generations." We need only set this passage from Assassins of Memory, his restrained, yet devastating, response to Faurisson, beside a similar passage from Denying the Holocaust to see the extent of Lipstadt's indebtedness. "Not ignoring the deniers does not mean engaging them in debate; it means not doing that. We cannot debate them for two reasons, one strategic and the other tactical... The deniers long to be considered the "other" side. Engaging them in discussion makes them exactly that. . They are contemptuous of the very tools that shape any honest debate: truth and reason. Debating with them would be like trying to nail a glob of jelly to the wall." Though she relies on his arguments, Lipstadt is no Vidal-Naquet. She lacks his intellectual breadth, clarity of thought and expression, and, sadly, his stature as a Jew who has never confined his political engagement to Jewish causes.
In Israel, as you might expect in a country where in the 40s the slang for Holocaust survivor translated as soap, the battle over representing the Nazi genocide has always been bare-knuckled and open. The arguments go back to the war, when supporters of mainstream Zionism sought to discredit the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe (agitating noisily for rescue) as a vehicle of the right-wing Zionist terrorist group Irgun. As indeed it was. David Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders were not thought lessly "writing off" European Jewry, Peter Novick says, but just making a "chilling... appraisal of what was and was not possible".
Though it is impolite to mention it, there are still live questions about the Holocaust. The dispute between intentionalists, who say that genocide was always part of Hitler's plan, and functionalists, who argue the Final Solution evolved in response to changing conditions and fortunes of war, is far from settled. Another open, though stifled, question is about the number of survivors. Irving's claim that Jews inflated the number of victims to extort money from Germany merely demonstrates his ignorance. The payments to Israel were for resettling refugees, and it would have been in Israel's interest to exaggerate the number of survivors, not the number of victims. But that doesn't mean there weren't individuals who, to qualify for payment, claimed to have spent the war hiding in Poland when they had been living, in relative safety if not comfort, deep in the Soviet Union.
More delicate is the question of survivor testimony. According to Elie Wiesel: "Any survivor has more to say than all the historians combined about what happened." Would Wiesel censure Lipstadt for saying: "Lots of survivors who arrived at Auschwitz will tell you they were examined by [Dr Josef] Mengele. Then you ask them the date of their arrival, and you say, 'Mengele wasn't in Auschwitz at that point'." Would he censure her, or any historian, for daring to ask for evidence, documents, corroborating testimony? That is what historians do. And when they are prevented from doing it, either by Jewish groups who feel that the Holocaust belongs to them or by Zionists seeking to preserve Israel's "moral capital", the result is a blurring between memory and propaganda that serves only the interests of the Nazi perpetrators and their political legatees.
Yet time and again those who insist on the truth in all its complex, unsentimental, paradoxical, and ambiguous detail are shouted down. It isn't only anti-Semites who, in T S Eliot's phrase, find a "large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable". The many obstacles thrown up by the history of our understanding of the Holocaust make Judge Gray's ruling all the more remarkable.
But his reasoned arguments are unlikely to make an impact on either the Holocaust deniers or their opponents. Holocaust deniers, as the latest incarnation of a paranoid tradition, are by nature impervious to fact. For them, Irving's defeat confirms his martyrdom; the scale of his undoing proves the power of the forces against them. For the growing Holocaust industry, victory over Irving is more likely to be a stimulus than a restraint.
In her statement after the trial, Lipstadt described the struggle against denial as unending. Let me be clear: Lipstadt deserved to win. But the encouragement that her victory will give to some groups supporting her - such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews or the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai Brith - in their efforts to police public discussion of the Holocaust and of Israeli policies, is no cause for celebration.
Thanks to the efforts of her lawyers and their experts, we now know a great deal about what is wrong with Irving's scholarship. But the trial did not contribute to our understanding of the Holocaust. There was one aspect of Judge Gray's decision that, left unchallenged, will make greater understanding of the Holocaust even less likely. Time and again, he referred to what an "objective historian" might do. But if judges aren't historians, historians shouldn't be expected to be judges. Irving's problem wasn't detachment but dishonesty. The Holocaust has always had a political as well as historical meaning; in America, that meaning has shifted a great deal from the days when conservatives saw a Communist behind every mention of the 6m.
Perhaps with Irving safely consigned to the dustbin of history, the rest of us can join the debates that, in scholarly circles, have raged for some time. This may mean giving up comfortable certainties about the distinctness of Jewish suffering, the exterminationist nature of German anti-Semitism and the redemptive force of Zionism. But if the effect of the Irving decision is to strengthen the hand of those who wield the Holocaust like a totem, or a truncheon, then truth and history might as well never have had their day in court.
• DD Guttenplan is currently writing an account of the trial for Granta Books, to be published next year. A longer version of this was first published in Atlantic Monthly.
Sue B said...
This really will be my last say on this page!
Look, Eugene, Paul Eisen's article "The
Holocaust wars" is on the Zundel site. Zundel
is a full-blown Holocaust denier. He is
currently on or awaiting trial for Holocaust
denial in Germany, having been extradited from
Canada. Eisen writes a passionate defence of
Zundel, describing him as a "gentle, good-humored man, kind and honest" etc. etc.
This is the man who was involved in a book
called "The Hitler We Loved and Why".
Eisen's eulogy is here:
http://www.zundelsite.org/zundel_persecuted/may20-05_eisen.html
I rest my case m'lud.
Anonymous said...
You rest your case Sue?
And what case would thast be?
You don't want to be associated with "deniers" and "anti-semites",
would you care to define what you meant by those terms?
And what narrative of the Holocaust are you going with?
And just because Zundel links to Eisen, then you assume Eisen is a denier?
This is your argument?
Fat Old Jewish Guy Who Lives In The Projects said...
Wow am I tired. I had a few days vacation, then I fell ill for a few days. I used these days to a large extent right here. NO. the sick days were for real. I have the kind of a job that a sixty year old man cannot do while he's actually sick, it's tough tough tough tough tough, not like blogging.
My job is at night and it's taxing a hell. Sometimes, like today, I have an errand or two to do in the daylight hours. then I come to my computer, rub my eyes, and go for it. Like most night workers I sleep in fits and starts; two hours here, three hours there, unless I take some Niteall or Valerian. Even then it tends to be fits and starts so it may seem as though I'm always here!
Anyhow,it seems we really are rapping up this Sue B adventure.I think I pretty much took her position apart and so she runs to Zundel. She runs to Eisen's defense of Zundel. I recommend everyone read that article. I'm going to put a link up to it.
Eisen is defending Zundel's right to speak.Also as a fellow anti zionist he is closing ranks in the face of the enemy.
Zundel is sentimental about Hitler. A lot of Germans are. Why? Well you don't have to be a nazi or even like them to want to understand how they came to power. Hitler and the nazis played on a vast antipathy for communism in Germany. Germany had been sundered by the revolutionary upheavals after the First World War,led largey by Jews. I like Rosa Luxemburg! But as in moist revolutions, it's a determined minority who support it until it's won. Rarely is it a majority even of the working class. Well, if a revolution loses, you know the story: "nobody likes a loser." Sadly the reds lost. Those then determined to finish off Bolshevism had the momentum and the result was Hitler.
To get this traction Hitler not only pushed fantasy and mytholgical supremacism (like the zionists and Judaists do), he also delivered for a lot of people.
And guess what? Not a few subjectively good Germans, who were kind to children and animals, who honored their parents and gave to charities were motivated by love for their neighbors and culture liked Hitler, and werent particularly angry at Jews, either. In fact in the elections running up to Nazi power, the played down the whole Jewish Card. They were more about "Law and order" as well as "us (Germans) against them" (the world), not unlike Jewish paranoia also.
That kind of stuff sells. Anyhow not for nothing did millions of Germans, including some really nice guys and gals, stupidly follow Hitler to the gates of hell, just as Jews who are charming and have great senses of humor and love children and animals are also zionazis.To fight this stuff you have to understand it and not simply trash the confused. Of course in war it's different. You demonize every soldier on the other side no matter how stupidly naive and idealistic he is. After all, you are tryint to get other nice guys worked up enough to go out and try to kill them at the peril of their own lives.
So Zundel is another of these nice guys who happens to be a non zionist racist and non zionist anti communist who has spent years of his life attacking a mytholgy that demonizes his own people.
NAzis did lots of horrible crimes in WWII. So did allies. Except for the Soviet people, the Chinese revolutionaries and the antifascist fighters in the underground movements no one was really on the side of the angels in that scrap. Except for those above mentioned the war was a vicious scramble to redivide and suck the life out of most of the world and its resources, people included.
The imperialists who were last at the table, like Germany, Italy and Japan, were no worse for wanting "their fair share" of the booty than were those who got there first, Britain, France and the United States, for not wanting to allow them to the table.
Anyhow I ramble. Goodbye Sue it's been good to know you. You hae not rested any case and it's past my bedtime.
I deny that the Jews are the people who have suffered more than all others. I deny that the Jewish people were helpless victims. I deny that Hitler was primarily about Jews - he was about destroying the Soviet Union, just like the zionists and Pat Buchanan were together. G'night.
Saturday, December 03, 2005
A Cold Night In Hell
A COLD NIGHT IN HELL (This could never have happened)
1.
Eddie and Elroy are a team. "Salt and pepper" wouldn't be an original name for them. Give them five cases, six cases, even seven sometimes. From Staten Island to the Bronx, they're always ready and willing to go, they never complain and they do what's expected of them. They've worked together for two years now.
Eddie is older than he looks and has lived alone in a furnished room in the Bronx for the past nine years. He has two grown sons, one finishing college this year and the other is a psychiatric intern at a hospital in Chicago.
Elroy is a father of two teenaged daughters, one by his ex wife and one by Lauren, who he's lived with for six years now in a big old rickety wooden house with a back yard with two big old oak trees and a musty garage on Staten Island.
They both have their reasons, then, for showing up when others look outside, see a blizzard and call in sick. For Elroy sick days show no overtime or night differential. And for Eddie he hates the four walls he sleeps inside of.
They both will also tell you that they love their job.
They were clearing their cases through CONNECTIONS, P.A. and CCRS Eddie got a Field Office Request to do a removal in the Red Hook Projects in Brooklyn. In Connections he saw that the case had come in in early January, an anonymous complaint that said :
Mother and father both use marijuana and ecstasy in front of the children and fail to provide minimal care to the children. The home is filthy and infested with roaches. The children often ask neighbors for food. Six year old Luana goes to the school bus alone. The parents curse and argue in front of the children. Grandmother does not use drugs.
(Date of this report is three weeks ago. The worker should have been out there at least twice already, all they have is a safety assessment that says the kids are safe, the grandmother is in charge and now this fax from Brooklyn calling for an emergency removal without any explanation.)
The Investigation showed nothing but a Safety Assessment that said "The children are safe. Grandmother provides all necessities that may be lacking."
Jose says "It doesn't make sense but maybe something happened today. Save it for last, see what's going on, take the cops with you and call me from there. If it's okay I'll try and talk with the lady here." (Jose glances towards the manager's office).
It's a freezing cold night in February and it's snowing hard. Half the people didn't show for the 4 to 12 shift and Eddie and Elroy have six cases in three boroughs. Off they go, into the freezing snowfilled night...
Two in the Bronx:
1-Hunts Point: A domestic violence case. Mom got the locks changed and the Order of Protection "is going to be mailed to me." The alleged subject, step father of two, biological father of the infant, is incarcerated. He will be out tomorrow sometime. Mom thinks he's not dumb enough to come around now. Okay Elroy gets the demographics, while Eddie checks the fridge and so forth. The kids are snoozing and the two give them the old look at their bare backs and belly while they sleep (using our flashlights and mom lifts up their shirts. They both look okay. The kids are safe, and team heads out to
2- Kingsbridge: A Sex Abuse case. The school called it in after 4:00pm and Elroy couldn't get hold of the teacher who made the report. And so the team doesn't know how the teacher knows that this stuff even happened. It could be something another kid told the teacher just before the bell rang. Or they could have had ten interviews with the guidance counselors, school shrink and teachers. The Team won't know. They go with cops and separate everyone out so the kids can talk to Eddie and Elroy privately. The girl is 12 years old. She denies she was touched by the alleged subject (Step father). She denies she ever said anything like "I was abused by him". The other two kids swear up and down they're safe, and happy and no one ever beats them. The ten year old boy says his bruises on his back are from "falling out of bed." They look linear to Eddie and linear to Elroy too but they're barely visible, pretty old. They tell mom it would be a good idea for her to take them both to a doctor (maybe one of the kids will say something - and then maybe something can be done).
Three in Queens:
3- Queensbridge: Another Sex Abuse. They bring cops. No one's home.
"That one sounded real nasty. I wonder if they ran? Call Jose and see if there's any other address in the last case......
Jose says "move on" they'll flag it to the morning crew.....
4- Jackson Heights: Drug allegations from a neighbor. She says the kids are hungry and mom has strange men in the house all the time. Mom has an indicated case for drug abuse (cocaine) two years ago. The kids went to their father. Now they're back with her. No cops for this one. They ring the front doorbell for the apartment (4A). You can see they're doing a renovation of this building, maybe they're going to co op it. No answer. Elroy and Eddie wait and in ten minutes someone comes in. They sort of slide in behind him and semi ask permission and we're in the building. After five minutes of knocking and ringing the buzzer she comes to the door, opens it part way and asks for a few minutes to get covered up. She comes back a few minutes later and lets the team in. You could eat off the floors. There's a deep freeze packed with meats and poultry. Two bedrooms. Two boys in one, two girls and mom in the other, there's a smoke alarm, window guards it's okay, good to go . Mom says her landlord wants her out. "I'm on Section Eight and he can get more money once he fixes this place up" and that the cops come to the place two or three times a week. "Now it's ACS. Mister please I'm really scared please. please don't take my children, please. Okay yeah I used to do coke and yooze caught me. Even then no one ever abused my kids, I never let anyone touch my kids, never. They always had all their shots. I'm a good mother. I always was a good mother. At least I could always say my kids come first. Now listen I got to tell you something. I don't do coke anymore but yeah, sometimes at a party I will smoke some weed." (Eddie thinks to himself: Damn why'd you have to tell us that?) "I got my papers from the program, here... My counselor's name was Sharon. Here I got my Parenting Skills certificate here, see?
"Okay any of your kids have trouble in school?"
"Yeah Jennifer she's fresh and disrespectful. I don't know what to do......
"Has she been left back?"
"Once last year and I couldn't make her go to summer school. I had to work too...... (Elroy thinks to himself: God help you poor lady. This is stuff is getting deeper and deeper...)Elroy: "Well okay mom, don't worry you have Eddie and me our Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval... Right Eddie?"
Eddie: "Yeah. Don't worry and remember the worker will say she needs you to take a drug screen. Well, she'll be is asking you remember that."
Out into the night and on to Corona. The team stops at the Boulevard diner. Natasha Legs as they call her, their favorite midnight mid Queens waitress is on duty. She plays them like two old fiddles, and they come back for more at every opportunity. You need a break in the middle of hell.
In the car:
"She's in for a world of hurt on Monday." Eddie said to Elroy. "Yeah but there wasn't no damned emergency. She's taking good care of those kids."
Elroy says "Natasha ain't in no damn trouble."
"Not her, Meathead, that mom."
"Yeah they're gonna be on her like white on rice."
5- Corona: Excessive Corporal punishment. Welts, bruises and lacerations called in by the school at 4:15. No contact with the reporter, no history in Connections. It's Eddie's case. He says they don't call the cops. Case address is a basement apartment of a two family converted to maybe five families. Mom comes to the door. She has a nightgown on she lets them in right away.
Eddie: "where's Junior? Is he home?"
"Yeah he's asleep."
Eddie "sorry but would you please wake him up? Can I look him over? I want you please to take his shirt and pants off. Poor kid he's still sleeping. Can you wake him, mom? Okay mom., if you don't mind my partner and I would like to ask him a few questions. Tell him it's okay would you please? And ma'am after he's ready would you mind going into your room and closing the door? Okay he's up please tell him now that this is all right, okay? And put his stuff back on okay?"
Eddie: "Hi Junior do you know why we're here?"
The kid rubs his eyes, He's eight years old, little for his age, black hair Beatles haircut his back and legs are covered with belt marks.
Eddie: "Junior how old are you?"
"Eight."
Eddie: "Junior are you good in school?"
"My teacher told me mommy has to come to school."
Eddie" "Junior. What happened to your back and to your legs?"I Fell outside."
(These are linears, red as hell and parallel five on his back alone and they look fresh.)
Elroy: "B, what happened in school today?"
"The teacher asked me."
Elroy: "What did she ask you?"
"Why was I crying."
Eddie: "What did you tell her? What did you tell Miss Green?"
"That my mommy did it."
Eddie: "What did mommy do?"
(From down the hall, the mom): "Excuse me. Excuse me." (She comes into the room). Junior has problems. (No shit, Sherlock). He's hyper and he gets into fights. Tell the man Junior, a boy did that to you in the playground."
Eddie: "Ma'am please, we don't want to have to get the cops now, please..."
(She leaves the room, we know now she's right outside.)
Eddie: "Elroy would you have her go back into her room and sort of ask her to stay there?"
Eddie: "Junior, now tell the truth I know you love mommy right?"
"Yes." (He's crying).
Eddie: "And I know you don't want to tell anything that will get her in trouble, right?"
(He shakes his head "yes", then "no".)
Eddie: "When you do something wrong Junior what does mommy do?"
"Punishes me?"
Eddie: "How?"
"Sometimes she yells and sometimes she takes away my Nintendo."
"Anything else?"
"Spanks me?"
Eddie: "How does she spank you, I mean with something?"
"The belt."
Eddie: "What happened to your back?"
"I was bad in school."
Eddie: "And so what happened?"
"Mommy had to come to the school to get me."
Eddie: "And when you got home what happened?""Mommy hit me with the belt."
"Eddie: "Where? On what part of you?""Here my back, and here the legs."
Uhhhhhhhh okay.......
Eddie: "Ma'am, would you come here? Come here Elroy too."
Eddie: "We would like for you to take your two kids to the hospital now."
Elroy: "I'm calling 911."
Eddie "Yeah. I'll call Jose."
The cops come and EMS too. Eddie gives the belt to the Sergreant. Before mom is arrested they go to Queens Memorial with her and the kids, the other one's a little baby.
At the hospital they don't let Junior know his mom will be going to jail tonight. The cops are pretty cool.
Eddie: "Mom is there anyone who can take care of these kids for a while? Their dad?"
"He's gone."
"Granma, God mother, you have a sister ?"
"(Crying) "I got no one I don't have anyone...
Elroy: "Now mom we are going to have to take the children with us to the emergency nursery. They will be fine. Here is a paper that tells you your rights, and it has Eddie's number on it. And here is the safety conference the pamphlet. Maybe they can work out a different way. They'll call you and set an appointment for Wednesday or Thursday. Be sure you go to the Family Court, okay? It could work out for you. Officers please let her take the kids with us to the car with us? Okay thanks...."
They take the kids down the FDR Drive to the Center Nursery with their clearances, and Eddie signs them in. The kids are now in the loving arms of the Commissioner of Social Services. Mom will have her day in court the day after tomorrow. She can tell the judge why she should have the kids back. Eddie and Elroy are on overtime now.
Jose: "Only two people came in on the midnight and they're gone. You still have to go to Brooklyn."
Eddie: "On that bull---- removal."
More to come as the night isn't over yet..........
(Sometimes google serves up inapropriate ads that you, my readers, do not appreciate. I don't either. For this reason I am adding some "keywords" to the posts:
Question authority, Palestine will win, Bring the troops home now, Labor Unions are good, child protective service reform, stop police brutality, end poverty, reform child welfare.)
Where is the real anti war movement?
The Antiwar Movement Isn’t Where You Think It Is
By Dave Stratman,
November 21, 2005
[newdemocracyworld.org]
On October 29 of this year there was an antiwar rally on Boston Common. My wife and I and our daughter and two young granddaughters took part. After a few speakers one of the rally organizers announced to loud cheers that a contingent of antiwar demonstrators had gone to join gay activists who had been since 8 a.m. two blocks away outside the Tremont Temple Baptist Church. Later many other antiwar demonstrators plus the rally sound truck reportedly joined the gay activists outside the Temple, screaming and chanting their anger at what was going on within. The focus of their rage? A conference entitled "Love Won Out," organized by Focus on the Family, on recovering from homosexuality.
Whatever else they did that day, the antiwar rally organizers certainly made clear who is welcome in their antiwar movement, and it doesn’t include anyone who is unenthusiastic about homosexuality or gay marriage.
The curse of the real antiwar movement is that it is largely invisible. It may show glimpses of itself in polls or in heartfelt letters from military families or interviews with bereaved mothers like Cindy Sheehan. But for the most part the profound antiwar sentiment of the majority of Americans is more likely to register only as a few words exchanged between friends at a local bakery or dry cleaner or a conversation over coffee at a diner. The real antiwar movement is not on the radar screen of the corporate media and appears to be just as invisible to the official Left-wing antiwar movement–the one that organizes periodic demonstrations in Washington, DC and which organized the demonstration on Boston Common–and also to its Libertarian Right-wing counterpart on the Internet.
The invisibility of the real antiwar movement to those involved in the visible ones struck me once again when reading a new by John Walsh, "A Fractured Antiwar Movement," posted on Counterpunch and Antiwar.com. Walsh proposes that the Left and Right wings of the antiwar movement unite. It seems to me, however, that he has completely missed the real problem of the visible wings of the antiwar movement and has thereby come up with a strategy that has no chance of working.
The American people are overwhelmingly opposed to the war in Iraq and want an immediate end to it, and yet these millions of ordinary people remain invisible and unwelcome to the Left wing of the antiwar movement, represented by such organizations as United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) and Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (A.N.S.W.E.R). Whatever their conflicting views of the Democratic Party and the timing of withdrawal, the Left organizations are united in their contempt for people who do not pass the Left’s litmus tests of civic virtue: support for gay marriage, gun control, affirmative action, and unlimited abortion rights. The Left wing of the antiwar movement remains united in the conscious exclusion from its movement of the great majority of Americans who oppose the war.
Unfortunately ordinary Americans are also absent from Walsh’s article. While Walsh acknowledges the overwhelming antiwar sentiment among Americans, he doesn’t propose that the Left overcome its contemptuous and exclusionary approach to ordinary people. Instead he proposes that two self-isolated groups come together: the gay-marriage-loving Left should unite with the unfettered-capitalism-loving, Social-Security-and-Medicare-hating Libertarian Right. Surely that will solve the problem.
Walsh apparently believes a powerful antiwar movement can be built by wrenching the war free from its social context, thereby allowing Left and Right to bury their disagreements–as if these two puny groups have the power to overcome the Great American War-Making Machine without engaging and effectively mobilizing the majority of Americans against it. This is sheer fantasy.
The war in Iraq is part of the class war being waged not only against Iraqis but also against American working people and workers everywhere, and it can be successfully opposed only on this basis. The war in Iraq and the war on terror are meant to frighten us and drive us into the arms of our leaders while they steal our pensions, cut our wages, out-source our jobs, test our children into despair at school, and construct a police state around us. As Steve Lopez wrote in the "There’s a dirty secret [behind this war] no one has told you, and here it is: This war is not about changing Iraq, it’s about changing America....The whole idea is to train you to expect less and to feel patriotic about it."
Ordinary American workers–the people who build our cars, teach our children, nurse our sick, build our houses, harvest our crops, keep our offices and hospitals and airlines running–are under attack as never before. They are opposed to this war–it is, after all, their sons and daughters who are being "poverty-drafted" or "stop-lossed" to fight it–but the sheer ferocity of the assault on them at work and their children at school and their elderly parents in their homes is distracting and debilitating. People are under assault from so many different directions that they find it hard just to keep running in place.
The only strategy to oppose the war-makers that can succeed is one that makes the connections between the many-sided corporate and government assaults on people’s lives and the savage assault of the war-makers on the people of Iraq. Our analysis of the war and our strategy for mobilizing against it must be firmly rooted in the class war. The strategy must have as its goal not merely to stop this war or even to dismantle the war-making machine. The strategy must have as its goal the overthrow of the class of war-makers and exploiters here and abroad–the capitalist (and, in China, communist) ruling elite, the Wall Street financiers, the masters of great wealth–and the rebuilding of society on a new and democratic basis.
The only people who can accomplish these things are working people who, for the most part, fail the litmus tests of Left and Right. They largely oppose gay marriage and gun control, and they support Social Security and Medicare and reject any attempt to dismantle them. And yet they are deeply opposed to the war.
What needs to be done is not to join marginal Left and Right groups together in splendid isolation but to organize the movement on a new and revolutionary basis, rooted in the lives and decency of ordinary working Americans. This movement should reach out to the silent majority of people who oppose the war and help them find their voice. It should have as its goal to win the class war.
Back to "World At War"
www.newdemocracyworld.org
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The Battle of The Bulge
You might have gathered from the title of this blog that I have a weight problem - well, I do and I've had it since my toncilectomy when I was eight years old. (Before that my mother had to just about force feed me - after that - look out!)
Now, in the past couple of years, since Marbella and I got serious and I just about moved in I've been eating quite well, not just because Marbella is a great cook and takes pride in her cooking - both true - but you see there's all this stress to my job, and I work nights and sleep in fits and starts and get tired, which I compensate with carbs, well all true, but who cares - my weight has gone from Very Bad (around 250 lbs) to Quite A Bit Worse (290, yikes!) - It's not her fault - I've had this problem forever, as I said since I was eight years old.
There have been bright spots, and that gives me hope for even now, at this late stage of the game, that I might get on the road to a newer, slimmer, healthier me. Why, when I finished Basic Training at Fort Jackson back in September, 1967 , and came home for a weekend pass, I had to fight off the girls, which I did due to my Stalinist mid Victorian upbringing, which was virtually Catholic, but that's another story for another page. I have a picture of me then somewhere, and if I find it I'll post it here.
Things drifted, yo-yo dieting, fits and starts, gains and losses, people with this problem will identify I think.
Fast forward to the 90's. My first marriage of 25 years came to an end and I was out there, a taxi driver paying child support and living in a furnished room. I got hold of this thing called a bullworker, depicted below. Now with that bullworker and other exercises and diet I went from a flabby 250 pounds to a body building physique of 195 in six months, no joke! (Also I workerd out a regimen of exercise to do during my twelve hour night shifts, isometrics with the steering wheel, getting out of the cab at red lights, tossing my heel onto the hood, touching my toes and getting back in the car, ankle and wrist weights.) For diet I ate only vegetable been curd soup and brown rice, and took lots of vitamin mineral supplements.
The results were as explained above, dramatic. (Also I had shaken off this mid Victorian hangup;).
Okay now here I am fifteen years later, it's never been worse. Here in public before my friends and foes alike and at the risk of great ridicule I set the challenge to myself:
Beancurd soup, lots of walking stairs, vitamins and bullworker.
I'll keep you posted, and I'll get a photo of me in a day or two to put up here.
Friday, December 02, 2005
Starasia, Broken Windows, Jewish Kids and Hugo Chavez.
When under the name of Bernard Marx I wrote the piece "Hugo Chavez Snatches Jewish Kids From Their Mothers" I was trying hard to make a point and be heard. This is the same point I've tried to make with my realo - fiction "Starasia's Nightmare" and the Piece "Enough With The Broken Windows Already."
One way a person might hope to get attention to an idea is to say something that gets Jewish people angry. That was part of what I was trying to do. Never would I wish that any kid, Jewish or otherwise, go through what my "fictitious" Starasia or hundeds of mothers, fathers, and custodial relatives has gone through as mentioned in "Enough With The Broken Windows Already."
This stuff is really happening to Black, Hispanic and once in a while an immigrant family that is neither Black nor Hispanic.
I think we are speaking about the Palestinians of North America.
Hugo Chavez never snatched any Jewish kid from his mother, as I am certain the United Nations would be in session had he ever done so, and as I am almost equally certain he would never want to do.
Bernard Marx And the Holocaust Agnostic Revisited
THE HOLOCAUST AGNOSTIC REVISITED
I have a confession to make: I have blogged before
under another name, that of Bernard Marx,
a fictitious character from Huxley's
Brave New World with whom I identify
somewhat. I did it because I was scared.
The piece can be read at "Democrats In Airplanes."
I have something to say about "Anti - Semitism":
Michael, Bloomberg, billionaire Jewish media mogul,
who bought his way into the office of New York City Mayor
and who just trounced Democrat Fernando Ferrer in his
re-election, has been playing footsie with a cult that has engaged
some language that would be called "anti semitic", but this cult, led
by another Jew, Fred Newman, had control over a ballot line that
would allow some Democrats to vote for a Republican without
pulling the lever for the Republican Party. Both Giuliani and Bloomberg
beat the Democrats this way.
Click this link to see one reason why I say "anti semitism is bullsh@t."
Bloomberg's" billions and democracy.
The Holocaust Agnostic
by Bernard Marx
That the victors in a war write its history
and that The Truth is the first casualty of
war are time honored facts. Also well known
is that propaganda and the management of
information are
tools of war.
Like others of Jewish descent, I experience
the question of nazi genocide against Jews
in the Europe of the Second World War as a
very emotional matter, one which until not
long ago I would never even discuss or imagine
debating. I'm nearly sixty years old and for as
long as I can remember I was told, and I took
it as a matter of faith, that Hitler killed
six million Jews. While I was not religious,
and not raised in a religious home, I insisted
on learning to read Hebrew (phonetically)
memorizing my parsha and sitting through cheder
after my regular secular school day to be Bar
Mitzvahed in an Orthodox synagogue "to spite Hitler."
A close relative of mine researched and
created a family tree for a Master's Thesis
depicting the Polish Jewish relatives we were
never to know because of Hitler and The Nazis.
When I read in the Village Voice years ago
of Noam Chomsky writing a forward to Faurisson's
book I was ready to go to Cambridge and whip him.
(Let me apologize, Mr. Chomsky, and Mr. Faurisson,
for everything I said and thought about you
back then).
Since those times I have been exposed to different
ideas and facts. Reading Israel Shahak, Norman
Finkelstein, Israel Shamir and others has changed
my outlook on the world, one which I used to think
of as most progressive and even anti - Zionist.
The course of my life has taken me out of the world
of "The Jewish Community" for the most part. I'm
married "out", I live in a New York ghetto, my
workmates are mainly not Jewish. I eat ham and
Swiss sandwiches.
Still, I've always thought of myself as
being a Jew and never thought of the Nazi
murder of Europe's Jews as something up for
discussion ordebate.
When I was a boy of eleven or twelve I met a
Polish Jew who had survived Auschwitz. He
told of being captured because he did not
leave the Soviet occupied zone of Poland even
though the Red Army sent out trucks with
loudspeakers urging the Jews to flee to the
East. He told of being a part of a group of
physically tough young men who woke themselves
up in their Auschwitz barracks to exercise, even
nude in the snow in order to stay tough and to
survive the physical labor and hunger they lived
with every day. But he did not speak of any gas
chamber. He did not speak of skies blackened
and air made putrid from the smell of burning
corpses. He spoke of having been an inmate in
more than one concentration camp. I wondered
about this man's experience: I had always thought
that Jews were rushed off the trains at Auschwitz
and hustled to a "selection" managed by
Dr. Mengele. Most, I thought, were then
immediately sent to the gas chambers. The
strongest were selected for forced hard labor
and were soon worked and starved to death.
He spoke of hard work and hunger, and the will to
survive.
Norman Finkelstein, a friend of Palestine and a
harsh critic of organized Jewry, but a man who
does not deny the nazi genocide of the Jews, said
about the people who comprise what he calls
"The Holocaust Industry":
http://www.freedomsite.org/pipermail/
fs_discussion/2001-February/001470.html
"I worry that these individuals are lending
credibility to that ugly stereotype, and I
think those of us who are concerned about the
spread of anti-Semitism have a responsibility
to expose these individuals, to repudiate these
individuals and to work so that these individuals
are no longer part of public life, or are allowed
to represent themselves as they do as representing
American or world Jewry.
"Abba Eban [the legendary Israeli foreign minister]
makes the joke 'there's no business like Shoa business'.
That is shameful and it ought to be rebuked, repudiated,
exposed."
But would he worry if the stand he's taken gave
comfort to Holocaust deniers?
"Holocaust deniers and the holocaust industry have
a symbiotic relationship. The Holocaust industry
needs the deniers so that it can continue to claim
the world is awash with Holocaust deniers so we need
more museums, more conferences, more books, to justify
their quote-unquote 'Holocaust education'. The holocaust
deniers, they love the Holocaust industry, because the
Holocaust industry supplies them with all the ammunition
for their arguments. It's the Holocaust industry which
continues to wildly inflate the number of survivors.
As my late mother used to say, 'if everybody who
claims to be a Holocaust survivor actually is one,
who did Hitler kill,' and that's exactly what the
Holocaust industry is doing. It's become the main
exponent of Holocaust denial in the world today."
I have seen and heard assertions that six million
Jews were killed by the Nazis in World War Two Europe.
The laws of several nations make it risky to"minimize"
this figure or it's significance as being "unique" and
even "unsurpassed." Still, the man called "the dean"
of Holocaust historians,Professor Raul Hilberg, author
of the standard reference work, The Destruction of the
European Jews, sets the total numbers of Jews dead in
Europe from 1939 - 1945 "from all causes" as five
million, one hundred thousand.
One article of faith I grew up with was that the Nazis
made soap from the bodies of Jews they murdered. This
turns out to be at the least quite controversial.
Regarding the long held belief Nizkor says:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/
jsource/Holocaust/soap01.html
"Nizkor takes no position as to the reliability of
this evidence, as it is not clear to us whether there
is consensus among historians on the issue. The reader
may make up his or her own mind. The important thing
is that the evidence does exist, and that the
revisionist tracts we shall examine ignore that
evidence in an attempt to confuse the lay reader."
Yehuda Bauer, an Israeli Historian, called the notion
that extermination of Jews was decided on and planned
at the Wansee Conference [Canadian Jewish News,
January 30, 1992]: "the silly story that at Wannsee
the extermination of the Jews was
arrived at."
When Professor Hilberg republished his "The Destruction
of the European Jews" in 1988 he dropped references
to two orders by Hitler that he cited in the 1961
original edition of his book that purportedly mandated
the extermination of the Jews.
PBS Airdate: October 31, 2000 "The Holocaust on
Trial": David Irving, a widely known Historical
Revisionist sued Deborah Lipstadt for libel in a
London court. Read some of the transcripts of that
PBS program about the trial.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/
transcripts/2711holocaust.html
Irving's take on Wansee is not a fringe
or an extremist position.
Yehuda Bauer, an Israeli Historian, called the
notion that extermination of Jews was decided
on and planned at the Wansee Conference [Canadian
Jewish News, January 30, 1992]: "the silly story
that at Wannsee the extermination of the Jews was
arrived at."
When Professor Hilberg republished his "The Destruction
of the European Jews" in 1988 he dropped references to
two orders by Hitler that were cited in the 1961
original edition of his book that mandated the
extermination of the Jews.
In my opinion David Irving is a racist and an
apologist for Hitler. This does not make the
Holocaust narrative now taught in schools and
held to be sacred and beyond debate true, nor
does it mean David Irving has nothing valid to
say about The Holocaust. David Irving may be a
racist with an axe to grind, but so are the
apologists of Israel racists with axes to grind.
Who but a true believer with a determination to
smash an icon might be among the first to dig
in to the inconsistencies of a sacred and
unquestioned dogma ?
*******************
So, listen to the fat guy: The nazis and their
cohorts committed a vast crime against the Jews Of Europe,
It appears that the extent of this crime and its
nature has been exagerated, first to help justify
WWII and then to justify Israel.
The Jews of Europe by and large were enemies of the
nazis and were involved in resistance to them from
early out. The image of helpless sheep or lambs being
led to a meaningless slaughter, one propounded by the
zionists, is offensive to me and to the Jewish people
who fought the fascists from the earliest times.
Thursday, December 01, 2005
About my right to return
People want to know what I, a Jewish guy, think about Israel.
I want to make something clear. I live in New York. I am from New York. I do not have a right and do not want a right to "return" to Israel. I never was there. I want to skip all the arguments about whether or not today's Jews descend from the people of the Old Testament. I don't care if I do or I don't. It doesn't matter nor should it.
The territory that is known to many as Palestine had been peopled by Arabic speaking folks for centuries, mainly they were Muslims, many were Christians, and a few of them Jewish too. Most of those people were kicked out of their lands and homes in 1948 by people like David Ben Gurion and Ariel Sharon and more were expelled in 1967. They are the ones who have a right to return, not me.
Actually there is a place I want to return to. The New York of my youth. That was a place where the schools were the best. Where a first class education to the university level was there for free, with extra money for the most gifted. It was a place where a widow working as a sales clerk could pay the rent for an apartment for her kid and herself, not a room in someone else's place.
The place I want to go back to was called a "Union Town." There were factories and warehouses and eleven or twelve newspapers that hired typesetters, proofreaders, truck drivers and more, people who could on their wages, pay a going rent.
Yes, let the Palestinians return to their homes, and let me return to mine.
Links about Israel and Palestine:
On the Fiftieth Anniversary of Deir Yassin—
A View from the Arab World By Rami G. Khouri
Lenni Brenner
Zionism in the Age of the Dictators
7. Hitler Looks at Zionism
This item may be reporoduced only in its entirety with credit to this website Fat Old Jewish Guy Who Lives In the Projects
Eugene Weixel
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