ISRAEL'S SICK JUDICIARY

The Jewish Press
Wedensday, June 28 2006

Plaut Verdict A Symptom Of Israel's Sick Judiciary
By: Allyson Rowen Taylor

In section 24 of said verdict Judge Naddaf [an Israeli-Arab woman] wrote the following, cited here verbatim and with no embellishment:

At times we are witness to the phenomenon in which some people “dare” to re-examine the Holocaust and its dimensions, from various aspects, whether it be the human, historic, scientific, political, etc., and where such people automatically are turned into objects for attack and accusations of being anti-Semites and Holocaust Deniers, deserving of being called Judenrat or Jews for Hitler. More

THE WATCH DOGS OF WAR

Swans Commentary » swans.com

June 19, 2006

by Diana Johnstone


Memory or history?

The transformation of "memory" into a sacred cult silences dissent and prevents open-minded examination of recent events and their context. To understand the conflicts that tore apart Yugoslavia, there needs to be much more free inquiry, more information, more analysis. But all that would imply "revisionism." The ideological watch dogs are there to bark and snarl at any deviation, frightening the mass of conformists back into the sheepfold. More

A GRISLY BUSINESS IN AUSTRALIA

First it was the grisly business of the downward sprial of murders at Auschwitz, now the same grisly business is being forwarded with respect to the murders of the Aboriginal populations of Australia and Tasmainia. Where will this evil end?

THE AGE, AUSTRALIA

The man behind the history wars takes on Aunty
David Rood and Simon Mann
June 16, 2006

JUST when the history wars that have gripped the Australian academy seemed to be quietening, the Howard Government has rolled a fresh grenade into the debate. There could have been few greater acts of provocation than the appointment of historian Keith Windschuttle — so-called martyr of the right — to the ABC board.

Mr Windschuttle is charged with starting the history wars with his 2002 book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, which argues frontier warfare between Aborigines and colonial settler is a myth. He accuses historians — Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan among them — of inaccuracy and dishonesty. In the book he rejects suggestions that the history of settlers was one of genocide. He says that between 1801 and 1834, 187 Europeans were killed and 120 Aboriginals in Tasmania.

His critics have drawn the bow, aimed, and all but fired the arrow of historical revisionism. "This is a grisly business," wrote Melbourne University professor Stuart Macintyre. "The downward revision of deaths in the Holocaust is an industry that has brought censure on David Irving and the revisionist school". (More..)

INTERDISCIPLINARY HOLOCAUST HISTORY

(I have only perused this article but it looks pretty interesting. Mr. Aly may respect the work of Hilberg rather more than some, but we'll forgive him that. I met Hilberg briefly in Toronto when I appeared as a witness at one of Ernst Zundel's trials in the mid-1980s [when I get the date right I'll put it in here]. I was struck by Hilberg's response to my question about whether he supported the right of the State to prosecute a man for thought crimes. Hilberg asked me to repeat the question. When I did, he waved his hand in a dismissive manner and said: "Oh, I'm not interested in that." He may have meant that he was not interested in intellectual freedom in that moment, or with respect to Zundel, or with respect to revisionism generally. I'll never know.

The Logic of Horror

The time is ripe for a complete overhaul of the historical contextualisation of the Holocaust.

By Götz Aly

Die Zeit
1 June, 2006.
Translation: Nicholas Grindell

Historians, like journalists, ask their questions from a position in the present, but in the case of historians, these questions are directed backwards. Most history books quickly reach their sell-by date. Future generations will still be reading Goethe, Benn and Grass when Treitschke, Stürmer and Nipperdey are gathering dust. But Raul Hilberg's unwieldy three-volume work "The Destruction of the European Jews" will remain. The reason is simple: this book embodies the work of a man who has spent his entire life trying to see something that many of his contemporaries did not see and did not want to see. Hilberg does not judge, he reconstructs political processes. (Read more)

GERMAN MAGAZINE DEFIES HOLOCAUST HATE LAWS

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Dr. Sahib Mustaqim Bleher

The German magazine Der Spiegel has landed a major coup in its latest edition not for doing a rare exclusive interview with the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, but for allowing him to express views which would have resulted in a lengthy prison sentence had they been stated by a German national. It is not clear whether this was the intention of Der Spiegel, which in an editorial distanced itself from the remarks by the Iranian president, but the publication will have been as decisive a step towards scrapping the thought crime laws dating from the period of allied occupation as the publication of "Crabwalk" by the famous German author Günther Grass a few years ago. (Read more)