We’re reminded of the Swedish “organ-harvesting” story. Israel is known to steal organs (from Israelis as well as from Palestinians), it’s known to be a major source of trafficked organs and it’s not impossible they did harvest organs. But there’s no evidence for it and the suspicions were all a long time ago. So why, when there is so much good evidence, come out with something so feeble and offensive?

Mind you, Palestinians themselves are not much better – go to PalestineRemembered.com and find the entry for the village of Sirin. You’ll see almost nothing humanising in the article and it repeats the unlikely canard that it was evacuated under Arab orders. It’s unlikely because Sirin is so much off the beaten path on the border between two Mandatory regions, and unlikely because it’s known there were people there when it was destroyed. (At most, the the suggestion is that Arabs might have been ordered the people to leave and many went back). Why do Palestinians record this nasty piece of utterly worthless hasbara? Ilan Pappe has good information on the place, making it sound like a little Garden of Eden and noting that the ethnic cleansers didn’t want it and there are none there now.

link to alternet.org
Search the page for Jabalia. Looks like it was Nolan’s poetic license.

“I don’t know the details.” I used to know them, because they were amazing, right up to the airlift. We betrayed the Russians in those two years after the war ended and we caused the Cold War as a result. No wonder we were known as The Ugly Americans.

Did you ever see the World Almanac figures for the number of Jews by country, supplied by the American Jewish Committee, for 1938 and, I think 1948 or 49? The deniers have glommed onto them, but I would love to hear a description of the discrepancies.

I don’t know the details, but the Russians let us have our sectors of Berlin as they’d agreed – and we proceeded to cause chaos. One trick was to replace all the currency in West Germany only, completely undermining the economy of the East and triggering the Berlin blockade. We hired all the ex-Nazi spies under their leader Gehlen, who defended their interests (ie not facing justice!) by embarking on the Cold War. Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal worked for US intelligence. “In over thirty years he had never criticized American intelligence for hiring Nazis. During the same thirty years, Soviet propaganda had frequently denounced Wiesenthal as an agent of Western intelligence, accusing him of hunting only those Nazis who were not on NATO’s payroll.” (from a weird book by John Loftus “The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed The Jewish People” which also justifies Israel attacking and trying to sink the USS Liberty).

Back to the Holocaust – histories of WWII in the immediate aftermath don’t mention it. Don’t mention Jews, gas-chambers or Auschwitz or any of the other things we’re told were so central to the story. Liddell Hart was a particular favorite of the Israeli military up until the 1960s – and he doesn’t mention the Holocaust either!

However, it’s still dumb to doubt the “6 million” number because it’s near enough genuine and true.

Say it isn’t so: Charles Johnson trivializes the Holocaust

Holocaust denial is one of the few things that is either black or white.

link to israelmatzav.blogspot.com

Then again, Krauthammer said there was “moral clarity” in Gaza.

I agree.
———————
Since no one is going to come to this thread, allow me to copy an op-ed from the LA Times that the excellent Benjamin Schwarz, literary editor for The Atlantic Monthly wrote. I add it here because of your mention of the Russians. He wrote it in response to Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation. The link probably doesn’t work because it was behind a fee firewall, which I paid to access.

http://articles.latimes.com/2000/jun/22/local/me-43656

Archive for Thursday, June 22, 2000

A Serious Case of Mistaken Identity
By Benjamin Schwarz
June 22, 2000 in print edition B-11

Each June, Americans rightfully honor the bravery and sacrifice of the men who invaded Normandy in 1944. Recently, however, this celebration has too often lapsed into a solipsistic and deeply flawed revision of the U.S. role in World War II, which leads to equally self-congratulatory but far more dangerous conclusions about America’s purpose in the world today. If Americans are to get a more balanced view of their history and their global role, we should remember another June anniversary: today, the 59th anniversary of Germany’s invasion of Russia.

A national mythology has emerged that in 1941 the United States, appalled by the horrific policies of the Nazis, deliberately embarked on a crusade to rid the world of Hitler and to stop the Holocaust. D-Day was, according to this version of events, the decisive point in the “Good War,” when American troops, piously aware of the noble cause for which they fought, began the military operations that defeated Nazi Germany. Having beat Hitler and made possible a better world, the United States remains to this day what Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declares “the indispensable nation.”

Some reminders are in order.

First, of course, such a view slights the anti-Japanese dimension of the U.S. war, which was the real reason the United States had gone to war in the first place. Nazi Germany declared war on the United States in accord with its treaty with Japan; only then did the U.S.declare that Germany was its enemy too. For most Americans, the purpose of the war remained to exact revenge on the Japanese.

Second, stopping the mass murder of the Jews didn’t figure in any way in either American war aims or conduct. As for American soldiers and sailors, they fought the war, as historian and critic Paul Fussell declares, “in an ideological vacuum.” The war was “about your military unit and your loyalty to it.” Plainly put, they fought the war to end it so that they could go home, a point of view entirely reasonable and even courageous, but hardly high-minded.

As far as the U.S. contribution to defeating the Nazis goes, even though Time magazine anointed Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower as “The Man Who Defeated Hitler,” if any one man deserves that label, it’s Soviet Army Marshal G.K. Zhukov, or possibly Josef Stalin. The main scene of the Nazis’ defeat wasn’t Normandy or anywhere else Americans fought, but rather the Eastern Front, where the conflict was the most terrible war fought in history. It claimed 50 million Soviet civilian deaths and 29 million Soviet military casualties. But more to the point, Americans should recall that about 88% of all German casualties fell in the war with Russia.

Until the Normandy invasion–from June 1941 to June 1944–almost the whole of the Nazi war machine was concentrated in the East; and even two months after D-Day, well over half the German army was still fighting the Soviets. Military historians date the war’s turning point two years before D-Day when, at Stalingrad, the Soviets eradicated 50 divisions from the Axis order of battle, or nearly one year before when, at the Battle of Kursk, the Red Army smashed the Wehrmacht’s strategic tank force, breaking the Nazis’ capacity for large-scale attack. And it was the Red Army that liberated Auschwitz and bore down on Hitler’s bunker.

The moral narcissism that characterizes recent American discussion of our role in World War II breeds within too many of our statesmen a smug and reckless pride. After all, the thinking goes, if history has shown the United States to be so virtuous, then any that oppose us must be evil.

Today, Americans need not honor the Russian dead as we do our own, but we should give credit where credit is due, and we must not make exaggerated claims for ourselves. In contemplating how our WWII role influences our conduct in the contemporary world, Americans should remember that self-righteousness is bad enough, but when it springs largely from a self-serving mythology, it is insufferable.

79 million Russians died. Stunning.

Now, there is the appearance of funny business, because the number “6 million” was being thrown round in 1919. Yad Vashem can only find 3 million names, and Israel has multiplied the number of survivors by 10 (from 100,000 to 1 million) in order to cheat real survivors and buy friends. But there’s no good reason to doubt the 6 million number – and some of the people doing so are more than just stupid.

Remind the racists what Miles Lerman, Chairperson, United States Holocaust Memorial Council said in 1995: “Auschwitz teaches us that we cannot remain indifferent, that we cannot look the other way when atrocities take place, that we must always be ready to speak out against evil no matter where it takes place and no matter who the victims are.”