Is this predictable, or what?

by on September 17, 2012 46
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Newsweek

About Annie Robbins

Annie Robbins is Editor at Large for Mondoweiss, a mother, a human rights activist and a ceramic artist. She lives in the SF bay area. Follow her on Twitter @anniefofani
Posted in Israel/Palestine

{ 46 comments... read them below or add one }

  1. mondonut says:
    September 17, 2012 at 10:34 am

    Sadly, yes.

    The good news is that Google is displaying enough backbone to keep the video up/

    • Annie Robbins says:
      September 17, 2012 at 11:13 am

      backbone? please explain. what powerful forces are breathing down google’s necks? it requires no such backbone to align with islamophobes. i’ve seen videos critical of zionism go down in a flash.

    • lareineblanche says:
      September 17, 2012 at 12:54 pm

      The good news is that Google is displaying enough backbone to keep the video up

      Yes. It would be a shame if they backed down to administration pressure to remove it because of anti-American sentiment. It would be sad that the 1st Amendment were sacrificed for the faults of Washington’s belligerence and policies.
      See the “Heckler’s Veto” principle:
      link to rbs2.com
      Clearly the protests have to be situated in the context of decades of US foreign policy, even if the film was the ostensible reason for them for many people. So, ultimately it was in certain respects the last straw after decades of bombing, sanctions and other humiliation.

      That said, it’s clear that one goal of disseminating this, ahem, “film”, was to provoke.
      link to mcclatchydc.com

    • lareineblanche says:
      September 17, 2012 at 1:08 pm

      Oh, and it should also be said that those protesting were really a small minority of each country’s respective population. Most have not participated, and even have condemned the more violent aspects.
      This story has spread like wildfire mostly because Americans are not used to being victims of violence, more that not being the ones wreaking the havoc themselves, so it stands out like a sore thumb.

      “How could They do this to Us? It’s not supposed to work that way!…”

      • Annie Robbins says:
        September 17, 2012 at 1:14 pm

        This story has spread like wildfire mostly because Americans are not used to being victims of violence

        the story is spreading like wildfire because of examples like this cover feeding the flames. frankly, i doubt it’s changing the minds of americans. people will double down on opinions they already hold. it will become magnified whose pushing this meme and their will be resulting revulsion. yes, there will likely be some whose opinions will flip, but that will be miniscule on each side of the issue. that’s my prediction.

        • lareineblanche says:
          September 17, 2012 at 1:40 pm

          “frankly, i doubt it’s changing the minds of americans. people will double down on opinions they already hold”

          Yes, unfortunately I agree. And this kind of orientalist, tabloid trash unfortunately sells copies because it allows people to reinforce their already-held beliefs about “teh Muslims”…

          Another aspect to highlight is the different conceptions of free speech and government involvement between countries like the US and elsewhere. In this report, Ali Abdel Mohsen interviews several protesters, which is pretty revealing:

          Misguided as their efforts may be — like most protesters at the scene, Ibrahim believes “The Innocence of Muslims” is a Hollywood production that, like any local or international film released in Egypt, and presumably elsewhere, passes through several rounds of censorship and receives official state approval from its own government before seeing the light of day — there is little doubt over the severity of the situation, and its potential fallout.

          link to egyptindependent.com

          So, some people find it inconceivable that such a film was not officially sanctioned by the US government, or at least tacitly supported by it. Hence, the accusations of collective responsibility (US embassies, etc.). Just different conceptions on the government’s role in regulating speech, which has resulted in a sort of culture shock.

  2. seafoid says:
    September 17, 2012 at 10:44 am

    Newsweek is trash.
    Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a rent a gob. Like her beau, Niall Ferguson.

    • lysias says:
      September 17, 2012 at 11:23 am

      Sidney Harman (Jane Harman’s husband) bought Newsweek in 2010. Sidney Harman died the next year, so I am not sure of its current ownership. I wonder if Jane Harman inherited her husband’s interest.

      • seafoid says:
        September 17, 2012 at 12:40 pm

        I remember reading a copy of Newsweek just after the Iraq invasion that featured an article by Farid Zakaria about how America was right and it would all work out. I think I stuck in my diary.
        Newsweek is all about middle class trust us we know what we are doing America.
        And the last 10 years have shown up that theory to be very wrong.

        • Rusty Pipes says:
          September 17, 2012 at 2:51 pm

          I do not know whether it has just occurred since the Harman purchase of Newseek, but it has become a Zionist mouthpiece. At least two major stories per issue in the recent copies I have seen looked as though they could have been outsourced to the Brand Israel campaign — whether the subject was Iran, Syria, Muslims or the Manhattan Technion campus.

        • stevieb says:
          September 18, 2012 at 11:43 am

          Yours(Rusty Pipes) and seafoid’s comments are very prescient and could also be describing the Canadian equivalent of Newsweek here in Canada – ‘Macleans’. IN the last few years the cover stories would make Netanyahu very proud – not to mention the Zionist rubbish inside. ..

          I would imagine that Maclean’s is also owned by a Zionist linked corporation(‘Zio-Corp’, as I like to call it)…

      • PeaceThroughJustice says:
        September 17, 2012 at 1:26 pm

        from Wikipedia: “Newsweek is jointly owned by the estate of the late Harman and the diversified American Internet company IAC.”

        (IAC Chairman and CEO is Barry Diller.)

        Come on people, you’ve got to start keeping tabs on who owns your media. Otherwise we’ll be forever talking about “antisemitic canards”.

    • MRW says:
      September 17, 2012 at 2:19 pm

      Like her beau, Niall Ferguson

      Forgot that.

  3. Tzombo says:
    September 17, 2012 at 10:51 am

    How she survived it? By stabbing her family in the back and lying to Dutch authorities to get into the country. Best rolemodel since Ayn Rand.

  4. braciole says:
    September 17, 2012 at 11:18 am

    Stop kissing Saudi arses! When it suited America (during the Cold War), America was fully willing to support political Islamists as a counterweight to socialists and nationalists (not national socialists because they had already been co-opted by Washington) in the Middle East.

  5. bilal a says:
    September 17, 2012 at 1:27 pm

    This is all beginning to look organized. perhaps worth an update post on MW?

    adding to the geller link already identified by mondoweiss

    Pamela Geller’s Blog Solicited Funds For anti-Muhammad Film-Daily Kos

    http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/16/1132429/–Pamela-Geller-s-Blog-Solicited-Funds-For-anti-Muhammad-Movie

    or facebook question of the day

    Cindy Lee Garcia [Davis of the anti muslim film] : Steven [Goldenberg ] what happened with the movie Dessert Warriors [Innocence of Muslims] , haven’t heard anything mor
    e about it

    Twenty Questions – LIVE – with Steven Goldenberg-facebook

  6. Les says:
    September 17, 2012 at 1:59 pm

    Google, just like Apple and Face Book, is part of our big media and no less biased. Take note that Apple killed an app that keeps an up to date accounting of all the people (presumably all Muslims) being killed in our drone strikes.

  7. Amar says:
    September 17, 2012 at 2:10 pm

    Surprised to see this. The Telegraph’s ‘rage’ against Newseeks cover:

    “A sickening piece of shock journalism that cheapens a once great magazine.”

    link to blogs.telegraph.co.uk

  8. ColinWright says:
    September 17, 2012 at 2:32 pm

    Ayaan Hirsi Ali is bit much for the author of the cover piece in Newsweek.

    It’d be a different matter if Nasrallah was going to write next week’s cover piece — but these magazine almost invariably purvey the latest in middle-of-the road pablum.

    When Hirsi Ali is that pablum, we’re in trouble.

  9. ColinWright says:
    September 17, 2012 at 2:35 pm

    Pretty funny. This is from Ali’s piece, apparently:

    “…The governments will begin to fail as soon as they set about implementing their philosophy: strip women of their rights; murder homosexuals; constrain the freedoms of conscience and religion of non-Muslims; hunt down dissidents; persecute religious minorities; pick fights with foreign powers, even powers, such as the U.S., that offered them friendship…”

    That’s the Muslim Brotherhood’s platform? Do tell…on second thought, don’t. When I want to read Der Sturmer, I’ll go for the real thing.

  10. quercus says:
    September 17, 2012 at 3:03 pm

    In Haaretz today is an article about Martin Indyk’s comment on the Sunday airing of Face the Nation, in which he stated that he thought the United States would go to war against Iran in 2013.

    I need to ask a question and it is a perfectly serious one. Does Indyk and those who make comments such as he does, have the mentality of a child in grade school? Imagine, your neighboring telling you, I don’t like what you are doing, and I think I will do something to you next year. I ask this in deadly earnestness, as these are not the words or actions of grownups, and the world is too complicated to be left to children such as Indyk, Netanyahu, Lieberman, et al.

    Will the grownups please take charge.

    • Donald says:
      September 17, 2012 at 4:00 pm

      “I need to ask a question and it is a perfectly serious one. Does Indyk and those who make comments such as he does, have the mentality of a child in grade school? ”

      In answer to your question and I also mean this perfectly seriously, no, they are worse than a child in grade school. One of the first things a person should notice about mainstream discussions of US foreign policy is the incredibly low moral level–in particular the participants seem to have forgotten something they should have learned in kindergarten, that two wrongs don’t make a right. They seem virtually incapable of empathizing with someone who might have a problem with the US–in fact, they almost seem to think it’s a mark of shame if you can do such a thing. And that’s the liberals almost as much as it is the conservatives.

      • Mooser says:
        September 17, 2012 at 6:36 pm

        “They seem virtually incapable of empathizing with someone who might have a problem with the US–in fact, they almost seem to think it’s a mark of shame if you can do such a thing.”

        This started (as I saw it) with the passage of the Civil Rights Bills. Yup! Or rather, as a way of harnessing the resentment against those bills into “conservative” political power. Thus, these bills and the policies and actions resulting from them were portrayed, by “conservatives”,not as remedial, a way of trying to correct a wrong, (which correction would be good for everybody) but as benefits, entitlements or advantages to certain groups(women, ethnic or racial minorities, disabled, gay) obtained by demagoguery and political manipulation. When viewed this way, it was the end of America as they thought they knew it, where a fair meritocracy had taken whites to the top, and the beginning of the end as this enforced and artificial egalitarianism sapped our vigor and strength. This view was eventually extended to anyone who got, or seemed to get, certain protections or benefits from the US government. And the corollary was, of course, that America would need a purifying traumatic event, war or severe depression, to get it back on track, and that such an event was preferable, inevitable. So why avoid it?
        This fascistic, and nihilistic (and obviously self-serving) view was normalised in the media all during the late 70′s and 80′s and that’s when it become the norm in many ways for “liberals” too, (except we make allowances for the favored victims of the moment.) By now, it’s become normalised in most of a generation of children too young to know its origins or consequences. But they know it makes them feel good to hold what they consider to be the opinions of the elite.
        That’s the way I saw it develop, and I admit not a very good explication of it. It was no fun to watch.

        • bilal a says:
          September 18, 2012 at 2:42 am

          Perhaps the civil rights movement chaneled elite resentment towards minorities in a new way, but some might argue that was part of the intended effect. In order to weaken a majority culture you must take down its moral legitimacy. But the almost satanic sociopathic amorality of the foreign policy elite in America did not begin then, it was perhaps initiated in the Great World Wars , especially the second, where the wholesale industrial war crimes of the Allied powers during war were eclipsed by retail soldier level atrocities in the peace of surrender, notably in torture and gynocide in the east, but also in the Allied death camps where Eisenhower deliberately starved to death millions of German men and boys.
          “The reason for the notoriety is the author’s conclusion that Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, as head of the American occupation of Germany in 1945, deliberately starved to death German prisoners of war in staggering numbers. Mr. Bacque charges that “the victims undoubtedly number over 800,000, almost certainly over 800,000 and quite likely over a million. Their deaths were knowingly caused by army officers who had sufficient resources to keep the prisoners alive.”

          Eisenhower’s method, according to Mr. Bacque, was simple: he changed the designation of the prisoners from “Prisoners of War” (P.O.W.), required by the Geneva Convention to be fed the same rations as American G.I.’s, to “Disarmed Enemy Forces” (D.E.F.), which allowed him to cut their rations to starvation level. Mr. Bacque says the D.E.F. were also denied medical supplies and shelter. They died by the hundreds of thousands. Their deaths were covered up on Army records by listing them as “other looses” on charts showing weekly totals of prisoners on hand, numbers discharged and so forth. ”
          James Bacque’s ‘Other Losses’, A Review by Stephen E. Ambrose

          Some senior officers were opposed to the hunger pacification program, patton took a rather ugly jewish identity politics interpretation of the events:

          George Patton. “Evidently the virus started by Morgenthau and Bernard Baruch of a Semitic revenge against all Germans is still working,” wrote the general in private. “I am frankly opposed to this war-criminal stuff. It is not cricket and it is Semitic… I can’t see how Americans can sink so low.”

          Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany (1944-1947) “

        • Rusty Pipes says:
          September 18, 2012 at 11:38 am

          The Nixon Southern Strategy has not only become institutionalized in the Bible Belt platform of the Republican Party, but has used outlets like Fox News to pull the nation’s discourse to the right. Rather than fight back against the Republican framing, Democrats like the Clintons and Obama have pre-compromised with third way policies and rhetoric that have allowed the Overton Window to shift to the right.

        • Mooser says:
          September 18, 2012 at 1:00 pm

          bilal a, I’m not saying there isn’t more to the story, but I can only relate the little bit I’ve seen. And by now, the facistic idea of America in moral and cultural crisis and needing a drastic measures to redeem it has become part of the normative discourse, even among liberals, unaware of its provenance.

        • Mooser says:
          September 18, 2012 at 1:03 pm

          “This view was eventually extended to anyone who got, or seemed to get, certain protections or benefits from the US government.”

          But of course, not corporations, who all pulled themselves up by their own stock offerings.

        • American says:
          September 18, 2012 at 1:20 pm

          Some senior officers were opposed to the hunger pacification program, patton took a rather ugly jewish identity politics interpretation of the events:

          “George Patton. “Evidently the virus started by Morgenthau and Bernard Baruch of a Semitic revenge against all Germans is still working,” wrote the general in private. “I am frankly opposed to this war-criminal stuff. It is not cricket and it is Semitic… I can’t see how Americans can sink so low.”..bilal a

          First, it wasn’t Eisenhower’s idea to starve the Germans. He was ordered to do it and you can read his correspondence with the President and the Jewish leaders who were influencing the President and demanding it. Look it up. You can find the official correspondence on line.
          And Patton was totally accurate about Morgenthau who used his position as a “Jewish Avenger” on the German population.
          Let me tell you how bad Morgenthau’s program of punishment was for the Germans…it was SO bad and inhumane that when the US congress finally realized what he was doing it led to George Marshall and the Marshall Plan.
          Go familiarize yourself with the facts.

        • American says:
          September 18, 2012 at 2:27 pm

          To start you off.
          Here is the Morgenthau Plan that he got implemented….the one he hoped no one would ‘’recongize as the Morgenthau Plan”. ..as having come from him. If zionism is represented by any individuals in it’s current incantation in Israel it is by the Morgenthaus, the Netanyahus and those zios in congress who said the way to cure I/P was to put the Palestines ‘on a diet’.
          And take note of, beside the inhumane aspects, the economic damage to others in this policy on Germany…and all because there was one vengeful Zio Jew in a position in the US government to push his personal revenge policy thru.
          This is what these zionist are and they are evil, consumed by a” my people and no others deserve to live’’ sickness. They have to be disappeared just like the nazis.

          On May 10, 1945 Truman signed the JCS 1067.[48] Ignoring the amendments to JCS 1067 that had been inserted by McCloy of the War Department, Morgenthau told his staff that it was a big day for the Treasury, and that he hoped that “someone doesn’t recognize it as the Morgenthau Plan.”[6]

          In occupied Germany Morgenthau left a direct legacy through what in OMGUS commonly were called “Morgenthau boys”. These were U.S. Treasury officials whom Dwight D. Eisenhower has “loaned” in to the Army of occupation. These people ensured that the JCS 1067 was interpreted as strictly as possible. They were most active in the first crucial months of the occupation, but continued their activities for almost two years following the resignation of Morgenthau in mid 1945 and some time later also of their leader Colonel Bernard Bernstein, who was “the repository of the Morgenthau spirit in the army of occupation”.[49]

          Morgenthau had been able to wield considerable influence over Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive 1067. JCS 1067 was a basis for U.S. occupation policy until July 1947, and like the Morgenthau Plan, was intended to reduce German living standards. The production of oil, rubber, merchant ships, and aircraft were prohibited. Occupation forces were not to assist with economic development apart from the agricultural sector.

          In his 1950 book Decision in Germany, Clay wrote, “It seemed obvious to us even then that Germany would starve unless it could produce for export and that immediate steps would have to be taken to revive industrial production”.[50]Lewis Douglas, chief adviser to General Lucius Clay, U.S. High Commissioner, denounced JCS Directive 1067 saying, “This thing was assembled by economic idiots. It makes no sense to forbid the most skilled workers in Europe from producing as much as they can in a continent that is desperately short of everything” [51] Douglas went to Washington in the hopes of having the directive revised but was unable to do so.

          The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee asserted: “During the first two years of the Allied occupation the Treasury program of industrial dismantlement was vigorously pursued by American officials.”[52]

          In July 1947 JCS 1067, which had directed the U.S. forces of occupation in Germany to “…take no steps looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany [or] designed to maintain or strengthen the German economy”, was replaced by JCS 1779 which instead stated that “An orderly, prosperous Europe requires the economic contributions of a stable and productive Germany.”[11]

          It took over two months for General Clay to overcome continued resistance to the new directive JCS 1779, but on July 10, 1947, it was finally approved at a meeting of the SWNCC (State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee). The final version of the document “was purged of the most important elements of the Morgenthau plan.”[53]

          Vladimir Petrov, an expert on the financial aspects of the occupation, wrote: “By forbidding the American Army to maintain price, wage, and market controls, it (JCS 1067) literally decreed, as a State Department official put it, economic chaos.”[52]

          In 1947 the U.S. Congress warned that the continuation of the present policies

          …can only mean one of two things, (a) That a considerable part of the German population must be “liquidated” through diseases, malnutrition, and slow starvation for a period of years to come, with the resultant dangers to the rest of Europe from pestilence and the spread of plagues that know no boundaries; or (b) the continuation both of large occupying forces to hold down “unrest” and the affording of relief mainly drawn from the United States to prevent actual starvation.[54]
          Conditions in Germany reached their lowest point in 1947. Living conditions were considered worse in 1947 than in 1945 or 1946. At an average ration of 1040 calories a day, malnutrition was at its worst stage in post-war Germany. Herbert Hoover asserted that this amount of rations was hardly more than the amount which caused thousands in the Nazi concentration camps to die from starvation.[55]

          Vladimir Petrov concluded: “The victorious Allies… delayed by several years the economic reconstruction of the war torn continent, a reconstruction which subsequently cost the U.S. billions of dollars.”[56]

          link to en.wikipedia.org

          American food policy in occupied Germany refers to the food supply policies enacted by the U.S., and to some extent its dependent Allies, in the western occupation zones of Germany in the first two years of the ten-year occupation of Western Germany following World War II.

          Food relief shipments to Germany had been prohibited by the U.S. until December 1945, since “they might tend to negate the policy of restricting the German standard of living to the average of the surrounding European nations”.[1] “CARE Package shipments to individuals remained prohibited until 5 June 1946″.[2]

          In June 1946 a relief worker described the situation encountered in Germany thus:

          “ Starvation is not the dramatic thing one so often reads and imagines… of people in mobs crying for food and falling over in the streets. The starving… those who are dying never say anything and one rarely sees them. They first become listless and weak, they react quickly to cold and chills, they sit staring in their rooms or lie listlessly in their beds… one day they just die. The doctor usually diagnoses malnutrition and complications resulting therefrom. Old women and kids usually die first because they are weak and are unable to get out and scrounge for the extra food it takes to live. It is pretty hard for an American who has lacked enough food to become ravenously hungry perhaps only once or twice in a lifetime to understand what real starvation is.[3]

          Throughout all of 1945 the Allies forces of occupation ensured that no international aid reached ethnic Germans.[9] It was directed that all relief went to non-German displaced persons, liberated Allied POWs, and concentration camp inmates.[10]

          General Lucius Clay, then Deputy to General Eisenhower, stated:

          “ I feel that the Germans should suffer from hunger and from cold as I believe such suffering is necessary to make them realize the consequences of a war which they caused.[11] ”

          The German Red Cross was dissolved, and the International Red Cross and the few other allowed international relief agencies were kept from helping Germans through strict controls on supplies and on travel.[10] The few agencies permitted to help Germans, such as the indigenous Caritas Verband, were not allowed to use imported supplies. When the Vatican attempted to transmit food supplies from Chile to German infants the U.S. State Department forbade it.[12]

          During 1945 it was estimated that the average German civilian in the U.S. and the United Kingdom occupation zones received 1,200 calories a day.[13] Meanwhile non-German Displaced Persons were receiving 2,300 calories through emergency food imports and Red Cross help.[14] In early October 1945 the UK government privately acknowledged in a cabinet meeting that German civilian adult death rates had risen to four times the pre-war levels and death rates amongst the German children had risen by 10 times the pre-war levels. [13]

          General Lucius Clay stated in October 1945 that:

          “ undoubtedly a large number of refugees have already died of starvation, exposure and disease…. The death rate in many places has increased several fold, and infant mortality is approaching 65 percent in many places. By the spring of 1946, German observers expect that epidemics and malnutrition will claim 2.5 to 3 million victims between the Oder and Elbe.[13] ”

          U.S. occupation forces were under strict orders not to share their food with the German population, and this also applied to their wives when they arrived later in the occupation. The women were under orders not to allow their German maids to get hold of any leftovers; “the food was to be destroyed or made inedible”, although in view of the starving German population facing them many housewives chose to disregard these official orders.[15] Nevertheless, according to a U.S. intelligence survey a German university professor reportedly said: “Your soldiers are good-natured, good ambassadors; but they create unnecessary ill will to pour twenty litres of left-over cocoa in the gutter when it is badly needed in our clinics. It makes it hard for me to defend American democracy amongst my countrymen.”[16]

          In January 1946, 34 U.S. Senators petitioned that private relief organizations be allowed to help in Germany and Austria, stating that the desperate food situation in occupied Germany:

          “presents a picture of such frightful horror as to stagger the imagination, evidence which increasingly marks the United States as an accomplice in a terrible crime against humanity.”[17]
          Criticism of the situation increased, Senator William Langer stated in a speech in the United States Congress:

          “ …among the crimes with which this (Nazi) leadership has been charged (at Nuremberg) is the crime of systematic and mass starvation of racial or political minorities or opponents…. Yet to our utter horror, we discover that our own policies have merely spread those same conditions…I hold in my hands absolutely authentic photographs which have been taken at the beginning of the winter in the city of Berlin. These photographs are interchangeable for horror with the photographs with which we became familiar from Dachau, Mauthausen, Buchenwald, and other extermination camps. These are photographs of children between the ages of 5 and 14…[18] ”

          In early 1946 U.S. President Harry S. Truman bowed to pressure from Senators, Congress and public to allow foreign relief organization to enter Germany in order to review the food situation. In mid-1946 non-German relief organizations were permitted to help starving German children.[19] During 1946 the average German adult received less than 1,500 calories a day. 2,000 calories was then considered the minimum an individual can endure on for a limited period of time with reasonable health.[20] Providing an adequate supply of food to Germany involved some difficulties. According to Lucius Clay,to ensure every German bare sustenance would require Germany to import 4 million tons of food annually–more than the total UNRRA food shipments between VE day and March,1946.[21] The German food situation became worst during the very cold winter of 1946–47, when German calorie intake ranged from 1,000–1,500 calories per day, a situation made worse by severe lack of fuel for heating.[22] Average adult calorie intake in U.S was 3,200–3,300, in UK 2,900 and in U.S. Army 4,000.[23]

          In a comparative U.S. government study[24] run by former U.S. President Herbert Hoover and published in February 1947, the nutritional situation surveyed in some of Germany’s neighbor states (Italy, France, Belgium, Netherlands and the UK) was close to pre-war normal, while the nutritional situation for certain population groups in Germany (mainly children and the elderly) was disastrously low.

          In his third study report on Germany, dated March 18, 1947, Hoover stated:

          “There is the illusion that the New Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a ‘pastoral state’. It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it.”[25]
          The precise effect of the food crisis on German health and mortality has been a matter of some contention. Speaking of the Anglo-American zones, Hoover reported that in the fall of 1946, starvation produced a 40 percent increase in mortality among Germans over 70.[26] However, John Farquharson cites statistics indicating that the incidence of hunger oedema was low in 1946-1947.[27] According to the British Medical Journal, mortality in the British zone was above its pre-war level until June, 1946, when the death rate fell below that of 1938.[28]

          The historian Nicholas Balabkins notes that the Allied restrictions placed on German steel production, and their control over to where the produced coal and steel was delivered, meant that offers by Western European nations to trade food for desperately needed German coal and machinery were rejected. Neither the Italians nor the Dutch could sell the vegetables that they had previously sold in Germany, with the consequence that the Dutch had to destroy considerable proportions of their crop. Denmark offered 150 tons of lard a month; Turkey offered hazelnuts; Norway offered fish and fish oil; Sweden offered considerable amounts of fats. The Allies were however not willing to let the Germans trade.[29]

          Another consequence of the Allied policy of “Industrial Disarmament” (see The industrial plans for Germany) was that there was a drastic fall in fertilizer available for the German agriculture, further decreasing the food production.[30]

          German infant mortality rate was twice that of other nations in Western Europe until the close of 1948.[31]

          The adequate feeding of the German population in occupied Germany was an Allied legal obligation[32] [33] under Article 43 of The 1907 Hague Rules of Land Warfare.[34]

          JCS 1067

        • MHughes976 says:
          September 18, 2012 at 3:00 pm

          Ambrose’s review of Bacque is actually quite hostile and far from endorsing Bacque’s claims. I’m not sure that the ‘war-criminal stuff’ had a Jewish origin. It came from the Moscow Conference between the Big Three and had something to do with the dynamics of their relationships.
          Maybe some Jewish influence was at work, though the Moscow Declaration on Atrocities makes, as far as I can see, no specific mention of Jewish suffering, which one might expect if Morgenthau and Baruch had been very influential at that point. The Morgenthau Plan shouldn’t be forgotten but it was a bit of a fantasy.
          I don’t deny that there was much hypocrisy at work in the Moscow Declaration and its putting into effect. I don’t deny that the history of the immediate postwar years is shrouded in obscurity. The intense, harsh light shone again and again on the war years is a way of covering the slightly later period in shadows.

  11. ColinWright says:
    September 17, 2012 at 3:37 pm

    What Newsweek did wouldn’t be so bad — except that it’s really pretty bad.

    To make a few more bucks, they are lending an imprimatur of respectability to what is fairly clearly pathological Islamophobia to begin with.

    If some unknowable number running perhaps into the hundreds of thousands or even the millions lie dead a decade from now in consequence, if the world is riven by hatreds that have become genuinely irreconcilable, Newsweek may or may not look back and realize the part it played in bringing it about.

    It won’t matter. They won’t be able to take it back. This is disgustingly irresponsible.

  12. eGuard says:
    September 17, 2012 at 5:18 pm

    Hirshi Ali, muslims are allowed to protest right? Curious you make no distinction between the protest and the violence.

    They are even allowed to burn your books right (fire safety regulations observed: outside, keep distance, no children nearby, use a single match, tear pages for better effect, mind the wind)? You can be generous in admitting, they don’t know you.

    link to angryarab.blogspot.nl

    • eGuard says:
      September 17, 2012 at 5:22 pm

      Hirshi Ali: The American ambassador to Libya and three of his staff members were murdered by a raging mob in Benghazi, Libya, possibly under the cover of protests

      No. The protest was at the embassy, the killing near a safe house. You think a “raging mob” could find such a house, taking RPGS with them, and handle these RPGs?

  13. pogomutt says:
    September 22, 2012 at 12:42 am

    “alleged Muslim intolerance”

    My word, how do these heresies ever find purchase?