Suspect in Auschwitz sign theft arrested in Sweden

STOCKHOLM—Swedish police on Thursday arrested a former neo-Nazi leader that Polish investigators suspect of involvement in the theft of the "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign at Auschwitz.

Swedish Prosecutor Agneta Hilding Qvarnstrom said 34-year-old Anders Hogstrom was detained in Stockholm on a European arrest warrant.
Hilding Qvarnstrom said Hogstrom will be appointed a defense lawyer and questioned by Swedish investigators before authorities can decide on extraditing him to Poland.
Polish officials have said Hogstrom is suspected of incitement to commit theft of a cultural treasure.
The infamous sign, which means "Work Sets You Free" in German, was stolen in December from the site of the Nazis' former Auschwitz death camp in Poland. Polish police found it in the woods three days later, cut into three pieces, and charged five Polish men with its theft.
The Polish prosecutor has said he has evidence that Hogstrom visited Auschwitz together with two Poles last spring and told them to steal the sign.
Experts on Sweden's extreme-right say Hogstrom founded and led the Swedish neo-Nazi group National Socialist Front in the 1990s. During that time he helped organize yearly celebrations of Adolf Hitler's birthday and advocated repatriation of refugees to their home countries, according to Expo, a research foundation that has mapped right-wing extremists. However, Expo said he left National Socialist Front in 1999 after two of its members were convicted of a high-profile police murder and became an active opponent to the extreme-right.
Hogstrom has reportedly given conflicting information about his alleged role in the theft. Tabloid Aftonbladet quoted Hogstrom as saying he was acting as a middleman between the Polish thieves and an English-speaking buyer. But in a video clip posted Jan. 9 on the Web site of another tabloid, Expressen, Hogstrom said he had simply been tipped off about the theft and tried to stop it.
The Auschwitz sign is one of the most well-known slogans for Nazi Germany's atrocities during World War II and the Holocaust.
Between 1940 and 1945 more than 1 million people, mostly Jews, were killed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau or died of starvation or disease while forced to perform hard physical labor at the camp.

YDR

Rod Liddle puts potential editors job at The Independent at risk with another controversial blog post

Ron Liddle the Former BBC Radio 4 Today editor has once again drawn attention to himself through controversial views posted online.

In December 2009 he referring to the case where two teenage rappers tried to murder a pregnant 15-year-old, described the perpetrators as "human filth" before adding "It could be an anomaly, of course. But it isn't."

Then again he wrote in a blog for The Spectator
The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community.

Diane Abbot, MP for Hackney North, stated at the time "It is obviously statistically false to say that the 'overwhelming majority' of the crimes listed by Rod are committed by young black men... The interesting thing is why he chose to post something which, if you chose another set of hysterical racial stereotypes and substituted Jew for Afro-Caribbean, would not have been out of place in a speech by Oswald Mosley.

On these occasions the has stated he was highlighting multi-culturism and not being racist.

Yet the following item was posted in the Guardian today.

Rod Liddle defends quip about Auschwitz on Millwall fans' forum

It began as a series of tasteless, vulgar conversations about race, religion and sex on a football fan website, but it could end with Rod Liddle, the former Today editor turned controversial columnist, being denied the chance to edit the Independent.

Liddle felt compelled to explain in the Jewish Chronicle today why he posted a comment on the fan forum Millwall Online complaining that he couldn't smoke at Auschwitz. In his article for the paper, Liddle described as "absurd" suggestions that he is anti-Semitic.

He has used Millwall Online, which has no official links to the south London club, to say: "It's fucking outrageous that you can't smoke in Auschwitz. I had to sneak round the back of the gas chambers for a crafty snout. Also, I wasn't convinced by the newish Auschwitz Burger Bar and Grill."

Liddle used the Chronicle to claim: "My point … was that I felt it had been stripped of its awfulness and bleakness … festooned with no smoking signs and disabled access ramps."

His intervention came at the end of a week when his credentials as a possible editor of the Independent had been called into question.

Alexander Lebedev, the Russian billionaire who last year acquired a controlling stake in the London Evening Standard, is in negotiations to buy the Independent from its Irish owners. He is thought to have lined up Liddle, who writes for the Spectator and the Sunday Times, to replace the incumbent editor, Roger Alton.

Liddle has posted dozens of messages on Millwall Online using the pseudonym Monkeymfc, including, allegedly, derogatory comments about Somalis, insulting references to the ITV newsreader Mary Nightingale and racist comments.

Posting under the user name of

'Monkeymfc'

Rod Liddle has been attacked for comments he posted on a Millwall supporters website under the moniker Monkeymfc. This is what he is quoted as saying and his response:

What "Monkeymfc" wrote about black people: "On average a little under 10 per cent thicker than whites; 15 per cent thicker than east Asians. I thought everyone knew, too." What Liddle says: "Someone's hacked in [using Liddle's password].

Monkeymfc on Swindon's black footballer Kevin Amankwaah: "**** off you spearchucking African ****." What Liddle says: "I was quoting what had been allegedly said to a black player from another team and JUSTIFYING why that player then said something very nasty indeed in return."

Monkeymfc on blogger Jo Owen. He wrongly assumes he is a woman: "Stupid bitch. A year eight sociology lecture from someone who knows fck all … Someone kick her in the cnt". Liddle [in reply to a blogger]: "I don't remember saying it and it certainly doesn't read like me, but it's quite possible that at some point I might use that terminology to make a certain point, perhaps the opposite to the one you imagine."

I let you be the judge of whether Mr Liddle is racist or not.

For the full story

The Guardian

Pope says Vatican helped Jews during Holocaust

Pope Benedict XVI has defended the Vatican against accusations of indifference towards the Nazis' annihilation of Europe's Jews in WWII. On a landmark visit to Rome's main synagogue, the Pope said the Vatican helped Jews and "provided assistance, often in a hidden and discreet way".
The pontiff responded after an Italian Jewish leader spoke of the painful "silence" of wartime Pope Pius XII.
It comes amid Jewish anger at Benedict's moves to beatify Pius.

The Pope conceded that "unfortunately, many remained indifferent", to the suffering of the Jews, six million of whom were killed in the Holocaust.

But he said "The Apostolic See [the Vatican] itself provided assistance, often in a hidden and discreet way," without mentioning Pius XII by name.

His remarks came directly after the president of Rome's Jewish community, Riccardo Pacifici, told him "the silence of Pius XII before the Shoah [Holocaust], still hurts because something should have been done".

"Maybe it would not have stopped the death trains, but it would have sent a signal, a word of extreme comfort, of human solidarity, towards those brothers of ours transported to the ovens of Auschwitz," he said.
Some in the Jewish community, including at least one senior rabbi and a Holocaust survivor, boycotted the event.
The BBC's Duncan Kennedy in Rome says some Jewish leaders have called on the Vatican to open up its secret archives to study the record of Pius XII in closer detail.
That this issue is souring otherwise increasingly healthy relations between the two religions will frustrate many on both sides, but it is an issue that is unlikely to go away whilst Pius' path to sainthood is under consideration, our correspondent adds.

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

Facebook Argue Holocaust Denial Not Anti-Semitic Hate Speech

In 2009 an interesting article appeared on the UK’s BBC web site that has largely been over looked.

It relates to the internet and does Facebook have the right to decide that a holocaust denial group is not hate speech yet a KKK group is. As holocaust denial in its essence expresses a denial of events rather than a impartial examination isn’t it in fact Anti-Semitic and obviously a tool

for the promotion of hate speech.

The full article be found here.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8097979.stm