More from my masked correspondent AC. My suspicion is that he's an Anglo-Asian. I'll let you know if I find out anything:
B'Tselem has specifics on the Samouni family massacre. 31 members of the a-Samuni family killed in southern Gaza City. Family has one cell phone. It is taken by Israeli soldiers as a survivor is talking on it.
Regarding
the treatment of collaborators, as you correctly mentioned, it is
entirely consistent with the history of resistance movements and freedom fighters. The following
might prove a particularly enlightening example: The Bielski partisans
were essentially Jewish resistance fighters, freedom fighters,
guerrilla warriors, or as is in vogue nowadays, insurgents. They
engaged in armed resistance to the Nazis and are known for their utter
intolerance for and ruthless treatment of collaborators. According to
this article
in the Guardian, they armed women and even children. The French
resistance imprisoned or summarily executed the miliciens — the police
arm of the collaborationist Vichy regime — who couldn't escape to
Germany after liberation.
the treatment of collaborators, as you correctly mentioned, it is
entirely consistent with the history of resistance movements and freedom fighters. The following
might prove a particularly enlightening example: The Bielski partisans
were essentially Jewish resistance fighters, freedom fighters,
guerrilla warriors, or as is in vogue nowadays, insurgents. They
engaged in armed resistance to the Nazis and are known for their utter
intolerance for and ruthless treatment of collaborators. According to
this article
in the Guardian, they armed women and even children. The French
resistance imprisoned or summarily executed the miliciens — the police
arm of the collaborationist Vichy regime — who couldn't escape to
Germany after liberation.
And I complain about being losing work with the mainstream media…
Well as long as you're approving these methods, would you be in favor of the Jewish community "icing" those who collaborate with Arabs?
It happens all the time, historically, right Phil? Just a mundane fact of the history of resistance movements, right?
Well, you've convinced me!
Who is Tuvia Bielski?
He was born in 1906 in a small village near Nowogrodek (today Navahrudak, Belarus) as the son of a Jewish miller. He had a Polish passport, served briefly in the Polish army, spoke Polish and Yiddish.
He was probably a smuggler, the Soviet border was just 50 kilometres away from his home village of Stankiewicze (Stankievichy). Matched and wed for money to an unattractive merchant daughter, he became a respected textile trader in the town of Sobotniki (today Subotniki).
Following the Soviet invasion of Poland on 17 September 1939, he offered support to the new regime and began an official career. When Hitler invaded Russia two years later, Bielski avoid the ghetto by fleeing to the forest. Together with his three brothers (and a new wife) they set up a partisan camp, in which some 1,000 Jews survived the war. Initially independent, Tuvia, Zus, Asael, and the teenage Aron from the winter of 1942/1943 were subordinated to Soviet command. Until the Polish government in exile remained Stalin's official ally, the Bielski brothers and the local Home Army fought together. After Katyn, in 1943, a Polish-Soviet war broke out in the Nowogrodek area. The Bielski Jews took part in some of the over 100 documented clashes between Polish and Soviet forces – fighting on the Soviet side, of course. Tuvia personally fought against neither the Germans nor the Poles, but his people attacked Home Army units. The Bielski partisans participated, for instance, in the treacherous disarmament of Polish partisans by the Soviets on 1 December 1943.
What happened in Naliboki?
The most well-known crime that Soviet partisans committed in the Nowogrodek area was the murder of 128 inhabitants, including women and children, of the village of Naliboki, a settlement in the heart of the Naliboki Forest. In 1993, a former Naliboki resident, Wacław Nowicki, published a book Żywe echa (Living Echoes) in which he attributed the massacre to the Bielski brothers. The accusation was then repeated by various Polish and Belarussian historians, such as Zygmunt Boradyn, author of the monograph Niemen – rzeka niezgody (Neman – a River of Discord , Warsaw 1999). In 2001, the Canadian Polish Congress caused the National Remembrance Institute (IPN) to launch an inquiry against the partisans of the 'so called Tuvia Bielski brigade.' The inquiry is pending.
Nothing is black and white. Bielski chose to align himself with enemy of Poland – Soviet's bloody occupation has always been less well represented in collective memory but it was brutal.
The last living Bielski brother, Aharon Bielski, who changed his name to Aron Bell when he emigrated to the US in 1951, was arrested in Florida last year on suspicion of swindling around US$250,000 in life savings from his Polish Catholic neighbour Janina Zaniewska, who herself survived Nazi imprisonment during the war.
I am not writing this to engage in blackening names of the Jewish insurgents. Far from it. I am making the point to stop Richards Witties of this world brandishing the meme "Hamas kills collaborators" as some proof of moral degeneracy of THOSE insurgents.
You do not need to be a saint to be a resistance fighter. Lets salut the bravery of those who stand up to occupiers while condemning their failings.
prof Israel Shahak's memories of the fate of Jewish collaborators in the Warsaw ghetto:
I disagree with the opinion of Haim Baram that the Israeli education system has managed to instil a 'Holocaust awareness' in its pupils (Kol Ha'Ir 12.5.89). It's not an awareness of the Holocaust but rather the myth of the Holocaust or even a falsification of the Holocaust (in the sense that 'a half-truth is worse than a lie') which has been instilled here.
As one who himself lived through the Holocaust, first in Warsaw then in Bergen-Belsen, I will give an immediate example of the total ignorance of daily life during the Holocaust. In the Warsaw ghetto, even during the period of the first massive extermination (June to October 1943), one saw almost no German soldiers. Nearly all the work of administration, and later the work of transporting hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths, was carried out by Jewish collaborators. Before the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (the planning of which only started after the extermination of the majority of Jews in Warsaw), the Jewish underground killed, with perfect justification, every Jewish collaborator they could find. If they had not done so the Uprising could never have started. The majority of the population of the Ghetto hated the collaborators far more than the German Nazis. Every Jewish child was taught, and this saved the lives of some them "if you enter a square from which there are three exits, one guarded by a German SS man, one by an Ukrainian and one by a Jewish policeman, then you should first try to pass the German, and then maybe the Ukrainian, but never the Jew".
One of my own strongest memories is that, when the Jewish underground killed a despicable collaborator close to my home at the end of February 1943, I danced and sang around the still bleeding corpse together with the other children. I still do not regret this, quite the contrary.
It is clear that such events were not exclusive to the Jews, the entire Nazi success in easy and continued rule over millions of people stemmed from the subtle and diabolical use of collaborators, who did most of the dirty work for them. But does anybody now know about this ? This, and not what is 'instilled' was the reality. Of the Yad Vashem (official state Holocaust museum in Jerusalem – Ed.) theatre, I do not wish to speak, at all. It, and its vile exploiting, such as honouring South Africa collaborators with the Nazis are truly beneath contempt.
Therefore, if we knew a little of the truth about the Holocaust, we would at least understand (with or without agreeing) why the Palestinians are now eliminating their collaborators. That is the only means they have if they wish to continue to struggle against our limb-breaking regime.
Letter to the editor by Prof. Israel Shahak, published on 19 May 1989 in Kol Ha'ir, Jerusalem
link at homepage
I agree with Steve R that we should ice the collaborators working
against US interests by funding, rubber-stamping, and propagandizing in behalf the Zionist enterprise at the expense
of regular Americans who naturally have a more universal view of the dignity of man.
I was merely pointing out the ugly little moral universe where Phil lives. A. If Arabs do something, it must be good B. If Jews do something it must be bad C. If Arabs do something bad, it can be excused because it can be found that a Jew also did it once.
Even BHL could see through that logic.
Nobody is doing excusing – its the explaining that is being attempted here.
Equivalence under oppression is lost on Steve R.
No one is absolved. The Palestinians are just suffering with more boundaries, namely more press coverage and a panoply of Orientalism that they are obligated to follow.
Irish. Algerian. American. Tamil. Kashmiri. Pakistani. Zimbabwean. Palestinian. Jew. They have all been victims and they have all destroyed who they viewed were enemies.
*****************************************
FROM ABOVE: "Family has one cell phone. It is taken by Israeli soldiers as a survivor is talking on it."
ME:"Cockroaches" with a cell phone? RIGHT!!!
Eva,
It seems that excusing is exactly what is presented.
Richard,
No, it is actually contrary to what you've concluded. You're projecting yet again. Get your top out of your bottom.