HOLOCAUST WAS A JEWISH INVENTION, SAYS TOP POLISH BISHOP

The Holocaust, as such, is a Jewish invention [invenzione ebraica]. We could just as well establish a day of remembrance to the numerous victims of communism, when Catholics and Christians were persecuted," he told the Pontifex.Roma web site on Sunday. In remarks that will outrage Jews the world over, Bishop Pieronek said that in his opinion the memory of the Holocaust is often used as a “propaganda weapon” by Israel. The Krakow-based bishop said: “Undoubtedly, the majority of those who died in the concentration camps were Jews, but also on the list were Poles, Gypsies, Italians and Catholics. So do not steal this tragedy in the name of propaganda.” “But they, the Jews, have a good press, because the powerful have the financial resources - extremely powerful with the unconditional support of the United States. And this promotes a kind of arrogance, which I consider to be unbearable,” Bishop Pieronek continued. The bishop expressed his opinion that the Palestinians are victims of injustice at the hands of the Israelis. “Seeing the photographs of the [Gaza] wall we can conclude that a colossal injustice has been committed against the Palestinians, who are treated like animals and their rights are being violated.” “Let them establish [the international lobby] a Memorial Day for them also.”

We are still in the shadow of the Holocaust

This Wednesday we remember the greatest crime ever inflicted by man against his fellow man. Holocaust Memorial Day allows us to reflect on the bleakest chapter in the history of the 20th century. And there is a special urgency in the call to remember this year, of all years - because the shadow of the Holocaust continues to fall over the world today.

Mass murder is still deployed as a political tool by tyrants, from Burma to Zimbabwe. Racism is returning to the streets of Europe, from St Petersburg to Antwerp. And, hard though it is to credit after the horrors of the last century, anti-Semitism is creeping back into the corridors of power.

We know that Nazi ideology still has the power to motivate evil men. From the Swedish fascist who tried to acquire the "Arbeit macht frei" sign which hung over the gates of Auschwitz, to the British fascists of the BNP, there is an ominous resurgence of extremist activity visible across our Continent.

It is because we face a new fascist threat, and because the extremism of the BNP is mirrored in the equally toxic ideology of anti-Semitic groups such as Islam4Uk and Hizb-ut Tahrir, that we need, all of us, to make an additional effort to remember how the Holocaust started. And where it ended.

The history of the Holocaust is the history of a society which blamed the Jews for its miseries, sought to push them to the margins and then sought, literally, to make them vanish from sight. In our time we can see the same trends returning. The calls for boycotts of Jewish thinkers at Israeli universities, the rise in anti-Semitic incidents on our streets, the inflamed rhetoric of vilification which culminates in the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's call to wipe Israel off the map, are all connected.

As the chief rabbi, Lord Sacks, has so presciently pointed out, anti-Semitism is a virus which mutates. Originally it was the Jewish people's religious identity which came under attack, and the Church led a programme of forced conversion. Then, as society replaced religion with science as a source of authority, anti-Semitism mutated so that the Jewish people came under attack on racial grounds. Now it is Jewish identity expressed through the right of Israel to self-determination which is the focus of anti-Semitism. Israel, like any state, makes mistakes. Sometimes grievous ones. But many of Israel's enemies now risk repeating one of the greatest errors of history by infusing anti-Semitism with a new and toxic vibrancy. We see it in some of those who have attached themselves to recent anti-war campaigns, with Britons marching through the streets of London declaring "We are all Hezbollah now" even though Hezbollah is a fascist organisation whose leader is a Holocaust-denier who believes the Jews are "grandsons of apes and pigs". And we also see the apparent mainstreaming of anti-Semitism in comments such as those of a former ambassador who recently objected to the composition of the Iraq inquiry team because two of its members were Jewish.

When prejudice is unleashed in this way we are all affected. As the chief rabbi has pointed out, what starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews. The Nazis targeted gay men and women, Roma, the disabled and Christians of conscience. The BNP are, similarly, as homophobic, Islamophobic and plain, downright racist as they are anti-Semitic.

History teaches us many lessons, if we are willing to pay attention. And one of the most profound is that the best guide to the health of a society has always been how secure its Jewish community feels. Throughout history the freest societies, from 17th-century Holland to 20th-century England, have been those in which Jewish people have felt safest. And over the ages the surest sign that a country is moving away from liberalism has been a growing prejudice towards the Jewish community, whether Vienna a hundred years ago, Germany in the thirties or Russia in the last decade.
It is because that lesson of history is so important that Holocaust Memorial Day is so crucial. And it is because we must ensure the next generation learns those lessons that the work of the Holocaust Educational Trust is so vital. The Trust provides the tools for schools to communicate the lessons of the Holocaust – so that young people can understand the consequences of allowing prejudice to grow. The Trust provides schools with books, maps, images and artefacts from the past as well as a Bafta award-winning production containing the testimonies of survivors. And two students from every school in the country are given the chance to visit Auschwitz and see the site of mankind's most terrible atrocity with their own eyes.
As the survivors of the Holocaust grow older and we face losing their vivid living testimonies, so the risk of forgetting grows stronger, and with it the risk of repeating history's mistakes. That is why the Holocaust Educational Trust's work has never been more necessary, the lessons of history never more relevant and the act of commemoration never more important. Whatever else may divide politicians, the lesson of the last century is that the resurgence of anti-Semitism requires us all to unite against this most poisonous of prejudic


Daily Telegraph

Is Nazism still a problem in today's society?

This week at the University of Huddersfield a couple of students are in trouble for setting up a Facebook page for a Nazi-inspired drinking game. The rules includes giving Nazi salutes, calling a player Mein Fuhrer, laying out the cards in swastika shape and drinking a pint of alcohol called ‘The Holocaust’. This is obviously being taken ‘very seriously’ by the University.

I am sure we all also remember the incident in 2005 with Prince Harry wearing a swastika armband to a fancy dress party, and the public outcry that followed.

WW2 ended over 60 years ago – does it really matter whether a group of kids use the terminology of the Nazi party in a drinking game? Or if a public figure wears a costume? Is it just another example of a nanny state and political correctness gone mad?

But human nature allow us to laugh at things that were once horrifying or scary once the danger has passed, which would imply that the Nazi party are no longer relevant in today’s society. So are we failing to make our younger generation aware of how close the modern-day far-right are to the Nazi party, with their Hitler worship and hate codes? Are we failing to make sure the next generations will not forget the lessons learnt by the defeat of Hitler and the Third Reich?

Most of us are outraged by this type of story because we understand what the Nazi’s did to millions of people, and that the Nazi party is not dead and gone. It is alive and well in most Western countries; Neo-Nazism is on the rise and here in the UK we are fighting the BNP, who have learnt to present a more watered-down, user-friendly version of themselves in an attempt to gain political power.

It is our responsibility to make sure the fate of the millions people murdered by the Nazi Party must continue to be taught to make sure history is never allowed to repeat itself.

Original BBC Story

Witness In The Last Holocaust Trial Gives Harrowing Account

The independent Today reports on the trial of what people are calling “the last Holocaust trial” that of the former Nazi SS guard John Demjanjuk, Ukrainian citizen, who was extradited to Germany from America last year, is accused of complicity in the murder of 27,900 mainly Dutch Jews.

One eye witness to the attrocites of the Nazi a Mr Thomas Blatt, who was a
Sobibor survivor said 'I polished SS boots as dying people screamed'

Yet Thomas "Toivi" Blatt is no ordinary senior citizen. Aged 82, he is one of the last people alive to have survived the hell of the Nazi extermination camps in which millions were systematically slaughtered by brutal German and Ukrainian SS henchmen during the Second World War.
Only 82 people are still alive of the people who survived the death factory camps of Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec and Auschwitz-Birkenau in Nazi-occupied Poland. Thomas Blatt is one of them. He still has a bullet lodged in his jaw to show for it. He got it when he was shot in the face and had to "play dead" after a miraculous escape from Sobibor in October 1943.

This Tuesday, having travelled from his home in California, he will enter the witness box in the clinical surroundings of Munich's modern neon-lit criminal court and recall the horror he endured as a 15-year-old Jewish prisoner in Sobibor, where 250,00 people including his parents and his 10-year-old brother were murdered.

For more on this please click below

the independent

Last Of The Ann Frank Hiders Dies

Miep Gies the last survivor of the people who hid and tried to save Ann Frank and her family has died. She and other employees of Anne Frank's father Otto supplied food to the family as they hid in a secret annex above the business premises in Amsterdam.

Ann’s diary of her time hiding has become a legendary symbol of the Nazi hate imitative seen through the eyes of a child. Miep found the diary in the annex after Ann and the family where arrested and kept it safe until later she managed to return it to Otto, Ann’s father.

Miep Gies died in a nursing home aged 100 just before Christmas.

Please click this link to see a video news broadcast about this item.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXSpRlTttCE