Wiesenthal Center

ojewriej

Morlar wrote: »

Not quite - going from the quotes you yourself provided in this thread ....

If he was capable of lying consistently on that scale - (ie to the entire world while knowing that certain people bound by official oaths knew the truth), repeatedly over that many years then in my view he is 100% unreliable.

I can see your point here. Mine is:

We have two sides of the story - and we don't, and probably ever will which one is true. My guess is that the truth is somewhere in the middle as usual.

As convincing as his opponents might sound, the truth is that Wiesenthal is viewed as an Ultimate nazi Hunter, the person who kept the pressure on the Nazis when the rest of the world was busy with the Cold War.

Fair enough, there are doubts about his part in catching Eichman for example, but there is plenty of other cases where his role was well documented. I.E. catching an officer who arrested Anne Frank and her family.

He received US Congressional Gold Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and an honorary British knighthood. After he died, Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman said: "''Simon Wiesenthal acted to bring justice to those who had escaped justice, In doing so, he was the voice of 6 million.".

I just find it hard to believe that the achieved all that only because he could sell himself.

Morlar wrote: »

Considering they also tried to ban the sale of militaria on ebay (as one other example) publicity seeking with regard to the wiesentahl centre is not an isolated episode in my view. Besides re the Hunt saga - reproaching the head of state of Ireland . . . . I dont believe that that would happen without senior wiesentahl people planning that one out in advance. Organisations dont take on (even symbolic) heads of state without agreeing fully in advance. They chose this route at the highest levels of the organisation rather than correct a mistake they chose to continue their belligerence to bluster the opposition aside. They have had years to correct their approach and consistently failed to do so. Its not an isolated blip on their record - its at highest levels and consistently over years.

As I said, I agree, they are no angels, and there are things they could do better. But I still think that doing what they do, they managed to stepped on very few toes.

Morlar wrote: »

Technically, no, but the institute carries his name and is supposedly based on his lifes work so I am not sure how relevant your point here is.

The way I understand it, it was called after him as a tribute rather than to indicate that they will follow him and his work blindly. What I mean is, even if Wiesenthal said he was done, there are others who are not, and won't be until there are still Nazis at large.

Morlar wrote: »

i am just curious as to what the actual evidence is (aside from the fact that the allegation has been made).

Witnesses accounts, his journal, the fact that he was a SS Doctor working in a KL? Even if he didn't use body parts as decoration - he still experimented on alive, healthy people.

I know that there is a lot of exaggerated accounts of attrocities, for example I don't believe in the soap story myself, but there is plenty well documented ones too. Like Ilse Koch colecting tatoos. I also read a lot of books written by former KL inmates, and mentions of things like this happening are just to numerous to be dismissed.

But again, that's beside the point - I agree that before they go after someone, they should be damn sure that they have a right person.

So let me ask you this - if Dr. Mengele was found alive and well, living somewhere in South America - do you think he should be left alone, because he is old?

As for survivors living in poverty - as much as I agree that it's not right, I don't really see how it's relevant in this thread. Wiesenthal Centre's focus is on chasing Nazi hunters and preserving memory of the Holocaust, this is what they raise money for and this is what they do. So you can hardly epect them to help every Jew who fell on hard times.

Morlar

Looks like those Wiesenthal Centre charmers are at it again :

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2009/0414/1224244629878.html

AN INTERNATIONAL Jewish organisation has criticised the Government for failing to respond to a report on alleged links between the founders of the Hunt Museum in Limerick and Nazi sympathisers.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Paris accused the Government of “total discourtesy” for failing to even acknowledge the report, which was sent to the Taoiseach last December.

The Department of Arts, while acknowledging Government departments erred in not responding to the centre, says there is nothing new in the report about the late John and Gertrude Hunt and no reason to believe any of the 2,000 items in the collections of the Hunt Museum, which they founded, had been looted by the Nazis.

However, the director of the centre, Dr Shimon Samuels, said that by consigning the report “to oblivion” Ireland showed it was in “a state of denial” over the past activities of Nazi sympathisers in the country. He said he planned to embarrass Ireland over the issue at international conferences and in the US media.

The report by museum consultant Erin Gibbons detailed business relationships between the Hunts and Nazi sympathisers and traffickers of looted art. It claimed investigations by the Irish authorities up to now were inadequate and called for further research.

Supporters of the couple have pointed out that the author of the latest report, Ms Gibbons, was the person who started the controversy in 2004.

“The report contains not one single piece of evidence to support the assertion that the museum contains any looted art objects,” said Brian O’Connell, director of Shannon Heritage. “No evidence has ever been produced by Dr Samuels that the Hunts had any connection of any kind with any Nazi in the pre-war period, apart from contact in the normal course of his business as an art dealer with the director of the National Museum of Ireland, Adolf Mahr.”

An earlier report by Dr Lynn Nicholas, a world authority on Nazi-looted art, cleared the Hunts of involvement in Nazi-era spying and trafficking in looted art.

Dr Samuels said Ireland was the one neutral country in Europe that had not faced up to the challenges of the past. The fall of the Berlin Wall had led to the discovery of fresh information in archives throughout Europe which shed light on the period, he said. “That process was never confronted in Ireland and so you haven’t had the healthy catharsis of other countries which have refreshed their view of history from this time.”

The official dealing with the matter in the Department of Arts acknowledged a mistake had been made in not acknowledging receipt. He insisted there was “nothing new or specific” in Ms Gibbons’s report.

The department has funded research into the provenance of the items in the museum, which have been catalogued online. “We’re satisfied with the research that has been carried out. No link has been found between any item in the museum and any list of stolen Nazi or Holocaust items,” the official said.

Dr Nicholas told The Irish Times she stood by her report.
__________

This seems to be to be the height of absurdity.

The Wiesenthal centre claim that an Irish art collection contains looted art - but will not specify which pieces of art.

They then force the collection owners (at their own expense) to fund an investigation which subsequently clears them.

The Wiesentahl centre instead of apologising - reject this due to their claims that the investigation was biased.

This forces the Irish Govt to fund an seperate additional investigation. The subsequent state funded investigation also clears the Hunt Family (whose Art collection the wiesentahl centre have their eyes on) and the wiesentahl centre now say that this was 2nd investigation was an 'inadequate' investigation and the Irish govt should now fund more investigations into their (wiesentahl centre's) non specific unsubstantiated claims !! This is all straight out of a Kafka novel imo.

Their intention now to 'embarass Ireland' on the flimsiest of accusations is disgusting in my view and further confirms the earlier assessment of this particular lobby group. The arrogance and recklessness of these people is staggering.

ilkhanid

It appears that no investigation will please the Wiesenthal centre. No body that could conduct one would be considered impartial by them. For some reason they are starting from an initial point that considers the guilt of the Hunts to be a given. So obviously all investigations are inadequate that don't produce the 'correct' result. It seems that-contrary to all investigative logic-the Wienthal centre, in the absence of hard evidence of dubious dealing and Nazi sympathies on the part of the hunts, is demanding that their innocence be proved.It's time the Government stopped indulging them and ingnored their yelping.

marcsignal

ilkhanid wrote: »

It's time the Government stopped indulging them and ingnored their yelping.

HERE HERE !!

Mahatma coat

I'm reminded of this story
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/4563133.stm

the old womans family had been in Austria but fled before the Anschluss

AANYWAY, in 1925 the Paintings were Willed to the national gallery in Austria, then the Nazi's pinched them, then the Austrians got them back, then this burd popus up and says wait, my Uncle said that they were to remain in the Family, and they were of great sentimental value as thats a pic of my aunt, Boo hoo poorme, I'm a victim etc etc........

after the arbitration ( I think less than a week after) they were Auctioned off to private collections and the collection was split up.

it sickens me what means some people will use to get their own way

Morlar

I remember a documentatary about that story. The film participants filmed themselves throughout or had a documentary crew along (for some parts of the ride). From what I recall she kept saying was 'never, ever about the money'.

There were all sorts of shenanigans over the years where the Austrians had decided to give her family some paintings but not the Klimt ones in question as they were willed to the National Gallery and considered a national treasure.

So the family sold those (paintings they had been given by the Austrians gratis) off and lived very comfortably throughout the 1950's/60'e/70's etc on the proceeds. Then they decided to go for the Klimts in addition to the above.

They were asked the day of the judgement if they were going for auction the following week their response was in effect NO. The following week they are up for auction and sold off. So they went from the National Gallery in Austria where they were enjoyed by countless art lovers from around the world over the years into private hands.

The family member who originally owned them left clear unambigious instruction in their will that the paintings should go to the National Gallery of Austria (which from what I recall was the artists wishes also). Then another family member I believe sold them. They changed hands a few times and ended up in the National Gallery of Austria anyway. Until the american court judgement which gave them to the woman above who sold them in record time. I thought the whole story was pretty sickening.

Morlar

Today's whim is that they now desire someone (else) to fund an investigation into any european MEP candidates which the wiesentahl centre have not given the ring-kiss of approval to. One of the candidates the wiesentahl centre do not approve of is Ryzard Bender (whose grandparents perished in Auschwitz). Apparently he is not virulent enough in his opposition to alleged anti-semitism.

The wiesentahl centre are trying to inveigle themselves into having a position of influence (or even a role for themselves) within european politics where they could have some kind of approval/veto power over candidates who do not (in their opinion) conform to their ideals with enough enthusiasm. Very much like the jewish lobby waives a disproportionate amount of power within the United States political system. If the wiesentahl centre were run by non jews instead of Jews it is hard to see how the media would pander to, and give credence to, this inane drivel.

Their new timely allegation is that 2 of the Libertas party's 600 candidates in Europe 'support' a Polish radio station the wiesentahl centre have alleged may (in the view of the wiesentahl centre) be anti-semitic. Of course they throw in some overly dramatic guff about 1933 etc to cheapen things up.


Irish Times article on this

The Jewish human rights group, which is famous for hunting down Nazi war criminals,

(this is not all it is famous for)

has written to the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency asking for it to undertake an investigation on its links with several members of the Polish League of Familes.

So the wiesentahl centre would like you (as an EU taxpayer) to fund an investigation which would serve to promote the wiesentahl brand.

If you read the rest of the article in the link be sure to replace the word 'anti-semitic' with the words 'alleged by us anti-semitic', and the word 'racist' with words 'alleged by our group to be a racist'. Also worth bearing in mind the motives and agenda of the people behind generating all of this free publicity for themselves.

Libertas initially responded to this by saying this :

(Wiesentahl centre are) " Beneath contempt" "it is only a matter of time before the establishment got so desperate that they resorted to calling Libertas Nazi's"

"The only surprise here is that we had to wait so long before they could find a willing idiot to come and say it"

Then promptly backed down and now say this :

"In response, Party Leader Declan Ganley said Libertas would work with the centre to combat racism and anti-semitism in the European Parliament"

All of which kind of re-inforces this soap bubble of an illusion that jews are the eternal victims of us pesky europeans. This time of EU parliament anti-semitism which, even if you make a leap and take these allegations as sincere & at face value all they do is display an utter jewish persecution complex / fantasy which only serves to advance the centre's groundless & mandateless attempt at gaining power and influence through PC fear and mudslinging.

Here is another link to this story

Wiesenthal Centre slams Libertas Holocaust deniers
http://ganleydeclan.blogspot.com/2009/06/wiesenthal-centre-slams-libertas.html

Quite co-incidental I am sure that they chose to time this on the eve of European elections. I think Caroiline Simmons got it right first time around - they are beneath contempt. They should keep their nose out of european politics and stick to persecuting elderly art collectors who have done nothing wrong whatsoever.

Dinter

There's as much chance of the Wiesenthal Centre admitting that all nazis are dead as there is of Concern saying, "actually the developing world's all right for food these days".

The centre pays its staff wages and the more mud slinging and muck raking they carry out the longer donations will continue to support this.

Mahatma coat

Another Klimt up for Auction, similarly sketchy provenance.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/arts/rare-klimt-to-fetch-26-m/2010/01/13/1263058299758.html

its a shame but if the Nazi's had gotten hold of the collections during the Anschluss most of these paintings would be in the Austrian National Gallery.

Morlar

I don't normally resurrect dead threads but these recent articles are relevant to the discussion on wiesentahl and his character :

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1310725/Why-I-believe-king-Nazi-hunters-Simon-Wiesenthal-fraud.html

Why I believe the king of the Nazi hunters, Simon Wiesenthal, was a fraud

By Guy Walters
Last updated at 2:43 PM on 10th September 2010


For millions around the world, Simon Wiesenthal is seen as a hero.

Often credited with bringing to justice some 1,100 war criminals, the Nazi hunter and Holocaust survivor is regarded almost as a saint, a man who did more than any government to lock up the perpetrators of some of the worst crimes the world has witnessed.

Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, the recipient of a knighthood and more than 50 other honours, Wiesenthal is particularly remembered for his role in tracking down the notorious architect of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann.
Revered: But did the Nazi hunter build his reputation on fantasy?

Revered: But did the Nazi hunter build his reputation on fantasy?

After he died at the age of 96 in September 2005, the eulogies poured in from around the world.

Wiesenthal was lauded as the ‘permanent representative of the victims’, a man who had not only sought justice, but prided himself on never forgetting his six million ‘clients’, as he called those who died in the Holocaust.

Those who read his memoirs could only marvel at his wartime heroism and incredible escapes from death at the hands of the Nazis.

It seemed as if Wiesenthal’s mission was almost divinely given, the gods sparing his life for some higher purpose.

The accounts of his hunts for fugitives were no less sensational, as Wiesenthal told how he engaged in a battle of wits against the sinister postwar Nazi networks and their sympathisers.

It was the ultimate feelgood story of revenge, and the world lapped it up.
Rewriting history: Wiesenthal is shown attending a trial of suspected Nazi war criminals in Vienna, Austria in 1958

Rewriting history: Wiesenthal is shown attending a trial of suspected Nazi war criminals in Vienna, Austria in 1958

TV programmes and movies were made, and soon Wiesenthal became a household name, a symbol for the triumph of hope over evil.

Those who thrilled at his life story can now do so once more, thanks to a new biography written by the Israeli historian Tom Segev.

The figure who emerges in the book is far more complex than one might expect.

Dr Segev shows that so much of Wiesenthal’s account of his life was the product of exaggeration and self-mythologising.

Appearing on Radio 4’s Today programme this week, the author said Wiesenthal was ‘a storyteller, a man who lived between reality and fantasy’.

He excused Wiesenthal’s inclination to fabricate stories about his past,saying it was his way of making it easier to deal with the real atrocities he had experienced in the concentration camps.

I’m sorry, but this compassionate approach simply does not wash with me. For the truth is that the great Nazi hunter is far, far worse than Dr Segev makes out.

In my view, Simon Wiesenthal was a liar and a fraud. In fact, I’d go so far as to say he was one of the biggest conmen of the 20th century.

I spent four years working on a history of Nazi-hunting that was published last year, and the material I gathered on Wiesenthal was enough to make me scream out loud.

When I started my book, I too believed that the great man was just that — great.

But when I looked at all his memoirs, biographies and original archive material, I realised that, like so many others, the image I had built up of Simon Wiesenthal was hopelessly incorrect.

The Lvov State Archives have no record of Simon Wiesenthal having studied at Lvov Technical University

There were too many distortions and inconsistencies, too many outright lies — none of which could be explained away by sympathetic psycho-babble offered by the likes of Dr Segev.

The fact is that Wiesenthal lied about nearly everything in his life.

Let us, for example, start at the beginning and look at his educational record.

If you visit the website of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, you’ll learn that he ‘applied for admission to the Polytechnic Institute in Lvov’, but was turned down ‘because of quota restrictions on Jewish students’.

The website then claims that he went to the Technical University of Prague, ‘from which he received his degree in architectural engineering in 1932’.

Other biographies — published during Wiesenthal’s lifetime — state that he did in fact go to Lvov, in either 1934 or 1935, and gained a diploma as an architectural engineer in 1939.

All of these accounts are rubbish.

The Lvov State Archives have no record of Simon Wiesenthal having studied at Lvov Technical University.

The archives have records for other students from that period, but not for Wiesenthal — and there were no quota restrictions on Jewish students at that time.

Neither did he graduate from Prague. Although he matriculated on February 21, 1929, Wiesenthal never completed his degree. He passed his first state examination on February 15, 1932, and then he left that same year.

Despite a lack of academic credentials, he would fraudulently use his supposed engineering diploma on his letter paper for the rest of his life.

During the war, Wiesenthal claimed to have spent years in and out of a succession of concentration camps.

Although he certainly spent time in camps such as Mauthausen, he also said he had been in Auschwitz — a claim for which there is no record.

Then there is his supposed career as a brave partisan. In two of his memoirs, he claims to have joined a group of partisans after escaping from a camp in October 1943.

According to an interview he gave the American army in 1948, he claimed he was immediately made a lieutenant ‘on the basis of my intellect’.

Since there exist at least four wildly differing accounts of Wiesenthal’s activities, serious questions about what he actually did should surely be raised

He was soon promoted to major, and he was instrumental in ‘building bunkers and fortification lines’.

‘We had fabulous bunker constructions,’ he said.

‘My rank was not so much as a strategic expert as a technical expert.’

One only needs a basic grasp of World War II military history to know that Wiesenthal’s claims are highly dubious.

Partisan groups do not build ‘ fabulous bunker constructions’, they instead rely on mobility to outwit the enemy.

As a Jew, it is also highly unlikely that he would have been made an officer in such a group, which was usually anti-semitic.

Wiesenthal would also give another account of his experience in the partisans, in which he joined a more ad hoc and smaller band — hardly one to build bunkers and fortifications or have a formalised promotion structure.

Since there exist at least four wildly differing accounts of Wiesenthal’s activities between October 1943 and the middle of 1944, serious questions about what he actually did should surely be raised.

Some of those who doubted his version of events — such as the lateformer Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky — went so far as to accuse Wiesenthal repeatedly in the 1970s and the 1980s of being a collaborator with the Gestapo.

Kreisky’s claims were supported by unsubstantiated evidence provided by the Polish and Soviet governments, and when Wiesenthal took Kreisky to court, it was Wiesenthal who won.

Two affidavits made by former members of the German army also asserted that the Nazi hunter was a collaborator, but such claims must be treated with extreme caution.

Smearing Wiesenthal is a popular pastime for anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, so-called ‘Revisionists’ and other such cranks.

But the multiplicity of conflicting accounts demands that questions about the authenticity of his story must be raised by those who, like me, have no agenda.

However, I have no compunction in stating that the biggest lie he spun was over his involvement in the hunt and eventual capture of Adolf Eichmann, a supposed coup with which he will always be associated — and quite unjustifiably.

According to the myth, Simon Wiesenthal star ted hunting Eichmann almost as soon as the war was over.

By the early 1950s, he had all but given up, until he had a supposedly chance meeting with an Austrian nobleman called Baron Mast in the late autumn of 1953.

Unfortunately, Wiesenthal’s intelligence was useless

Baron Mast showed Wiesenthal a letter he had received in May that year from a former army comrade now living in Argentina, in which the writer had come across the ‘pig Eichmann’, who was living in Buenos Aires and working nearby.

In his first published memoirs, I Hunted Eichmann, Wiesenthal recalls how he was terribly excited by the news, but realised that he was out of his depth.

A few months later, on March 30, 1954, Wiesenthal finally sent a dossier on Eichmann to the World Jewish Congress and the Israeli consul in Vienna, in which he shared the contents of the Baron’s letter and revealed that the criminal was working at the construction site of a power station 65 miles from Buenos Aires.

Unfortunately, Wiesenthal’s intelligence was useless. Not only was he unable to supply Eichmann’s alias — Riccardo Klement — but at the time of the Baron’s letter, Eichmann was in fact working more than 800 miles from Buenos Aires, and by March 1954 he was living in the Argentine capital trying to establish his own business.

However, there was worse to come.

In 1959, when the hunt for Eichmann was heating up, the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, asked Wiesenthal if he had any more information on the criminal.

On September 23, he wrote to the Israelis and told them that he suspected Eichmann was in ‘northern Germany’ and that he ‘does visit Austria from time to time’.

Once again, he was supplying useless information.

From other sources, the Israelis had established that the fugitive was in fact in Buenos Aires, and the Wiesenthal lead was another dead end.

After Eichmann was kidnapped the following year by Mossad agents, Wiesenthal at least had the grace to deny that he ‘personally had something to do with Eichmann’s arrest’, and that he had deposited all his files in Jerusalem.

However, with the Israelis remaining tight-lipped about his involvement,he decided to fill the information vacuum and started placing himself right at the heart of the hunt.

He would write that although he said he had sent all his files to Israel, he had actually always kept the Eichmann file. This was completely untrue.

Perhaps Wiesenthal’s most shocking lie concerning the Eichmann affair was to claim that he told the Israelis in his letter of September 1959 that the Nazi was actually in Argentina.

As we have seen, he told them that Eichmann was likely to be in Germany — a minor difference of several thousand miles.

Curiously, Dr Segev has seen both the September 1959 letter and the later claim, yet he chooses to ignore the differences in his book.

The plain facts are that Wiesenthal lied about his degree, his wartime experiences and his ‘hunt’ for Adolf Eichmann.

Any man who utters so many untruths does not deserve to be revered. Although some excuse Wiesenthal’s ‘story-telling’, there are simply too many other lies to take him seriously.

Furthermore, by stating that Wiesenthal ‘lived between reality and fantasy’ to deal with his wartime experiences is an insult to all those Holocaust survivors who merely told the truth.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/guywalters/100056051/why-cant-old-etonians-criticise-holocaust-survivors/

Why can't Old Etonians criticise Holocaust survivors?

As regular readers of this blog will know, my bonnet has an apian infestation concerning Simon Wiesenthal, who I believe to be one of the greatest frauds of the twentieth century. As I show in my book Hunting Evil, Wiesenthal’s claims were either vastly exaggerated, or worse, simply invented. I won’t go into detail here, but suffice to say, I’m not a fan.

Of course, my stance has earned me a few enemies, but far fewer than I had expected. Those who have read my claims have seen that they are the result of diligent research, and not one of my charges against Wiesenthal has been refuted. I have also found support from members of the Jewish community, and I’m particularly grateful to Daniel Finkelstein for his sympathetic words in the Jewish Chronicle a while back.

Yesterday, that same paper carried a review by Robert Low of Tom Segev’s biography of Simon Wiesenthal. At the beginning of his piece, Low identified that Wiesenthal attracted many enemies, of whom I am the latest. After observing that I had made my criticisms in my ‘biography’ of Simon Wiesenthal – I have no written no such thing – Low then observes:

“It takes a special kind of chutzpah for an Old Etonian born 26 years after the war who has made a good living writing potboilers about fictional Nazis to blacken the name of a Holocaust survivor who devoted his life to tracking down real ones…”

This is the worst kind of ad hominem criticism, and the literary editor of the JC should think again before commissioning Low. What I infer from Low’s words is the awful notion that my age, profession and scholastic background should disqualify me from writing about Holocaust survivors. I can only assume that in Low’s World, the only people who can do so are, er, Holocaust survivors.

Let’s get this straight: I most certainly have no beef with genuine Holocaust survivors as a group, and I count Simon Wiesenthal among them. As my friend and colleague Ed West has observed, Low has managed to employ both ends of the victimhood hierarchy to make his attack: Old Etonian (evil) versus Holocaust Survivor (good). This is a specious little argument, and implies that I am using a position of privilege to attack someone who bears the ultimate victimhood status.

I find Low’s words offensive and moronic. Would I have been magically more qualified had I been educated at a deprived school? Would it have helped had I been born in 1921 and not 1971? By suggesting that my age and background makes me unsuited to do my job as an historian is bizarre, and verging on censorship.

That’s the thing with Eton. A good schoolfriend of mine once said that you can be prime minister, attempt a coup in a West African state, even be a king, but to others, first and foremost, you’ll always be an Eamonn. I can live with it, even if Mr Low can’t.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2010/1002/1224280148855.html

The strange case of the Nazi hunter
Nazi nemesis: Simon Wiesenthal. Photograph from Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and LegendsNazi nemesis: Simon Wiesenthal. Photograph from Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends

CARLA KING

BIOGRAPHY: Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends By Tom Segev Jonathan Cape, 482pp. £25

SOON AFTER it ended the facts about the atrocities committed during the second World War became generally known. But although executions were carried out locally, and the Nuremburg Trials brought about 200 Nazi leaders to court, there was surprisingly little further sustained effort to track down Nazi war criminals.

Governments were struggling to rebuild shattered societies; collaboration had been widespread; some felt it would be better not to reopen old wounds; and the priorities of the cold war meant several Nazis had new roles serving European or US masters.

A man whose name became identified with the continued search for Nazi criminals was Simon Wiesenthal, who for decades operated almost alone from a small apartment in Vienna. Against a tide of opinion that would have preferred to forget the crimes of the Holocaust, he made sustained efforts to track down the former Nazi leadership, even as their numbers dwindled over the decades.

His work depended to a large degree on information supplied by hundreds of informants, often simply individuals seeking justice for one reason or another. A Holocaust survivor, Wiesenthal, who came from Buczacz in eastern Galicia (now part of Ukraine), worked as an architect in Lviv before the war. With the invasion of Poland he, his wife and his mother were taken prisoner by the Nazis; although he and his wife, Cyla, survived, they lost 89 relatives between them during the Holocaust.

After helping US forces track down former Nazi officers and working with Jewish refugees, Wiesenthal set himself up in an office in Linz, appointing himself president of the Organisation of Jewish Concentration Camp Prisoners in Austria – it was not the last time he would exaggerate his status. He worked at gathering information against Nazis, helped to smuggle Jews to Israel and was employed as a secret agent for the US and Israel. Over a life devoted almost obsessively to his task, he was involved in locating and prosecuting hundreds of Nazi criminals and assisted in the conviction of dozens.

The most famous of Wiesenthal’s quarries was Adolf Eichmann, who had directed the deportation of the Jews of Europe first to ghettos and then to the death camps. After the war he went into hiding and became the most senior of the wanted Nazis. Wiesenthal located his wife, and in 1953 he was able to inform both the Israeli and US governments that Eichmann was in Argentina. His reports were ignored, however, and it was seven more years before Eichmann was abducted from Argentina and brought to Israel, where he was tried and executed.

Autobiographical memoirs apart, this is the first full-length biography of Wiesenthal. Tom Segev, a weekly columnist for the newspaper Haaretz, has published books on the Israelis and the Holocaust, the 1967 war, and Jews and Arabs under the British mandate. He is among a group called the New Historians, who have challenged Israel’s traditional accounts of its past. Although clearly sympathetic to his subject, his is by no means an uncritical study. Wiesenthal is shown to have been egotistical, contentious and willing, on occasion, to falsify information to suit his purposes. Many of the “legends” of the title were self-generated by Wiesenthal about his own experiences and achievements.

A man of the right since his student days, in the 1920s, Wiesenthal became caught up in the cold war to the point where his judgment was clouded. In the 1970s he engaged in an unedifying struggle with Bruno Kreisky, the Austrian Social Democratic chancellor. Both men, who were of Jewish background, attempted to portray each other as associating or having collaborated with Nazis.

On the other hand, Wiesenthal concerned himself with violations of human rights worldwide, from Kurdistan to Argentina. He formulated a convention for the protection of political prisoners, joined the campaign against anti- personnel mines and supported prominent figures such as the Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov and the Dalai Lama. He differed sharply with other Jewish leaders, such as Elie Wiesel, in seeking to include gypsies, homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses in Holocaust remembrance rather than confining it to Jews alone.

By the end of his life Wiesenthal had become a celebrity, honoured by governments from the Netherlands to the US, presented with some 20 honorary doctorates and admired by personalities such as Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra. Two feature films were based on his life story, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center was established in Los Angeles; today it also maintains offices in New York, Toronto, Palm Beach, Paris, Buenos Aires and Jerusalem.

Nonetheless, he also had to face constant threats of attack from neo-Nazis: his home was lit by spotlights and guarded following an attempt to blow it up; and he carried a gun, which he kept under his pillow at night. His lifestyle took its toll on Cyla, who suffered repeated nervous breakdowns. Segev points out that Wiesenthal’s determination to remain in Austria, a country that took so long to come to terms with its Nazi past, was hard on his wife and daughter. Wiesenthal claimed the right as a naturalised Austrian citizen to criticise his adopted country from within.

In the final chapter Segev describes Wiesenthal’s astonishing friendship with Albert Speer, formerly one of Hitler’s closest allies. He also provides a convincing analysis of what motivated Wiesenthal, suggesting the hunt for Nazis was a self-inflicted punishment for the fact he survived the Holocaust and suffered less than some of its victims.

This is a fascinating study of a complex man and his task: thoughtful, carefully researched and a thoroughly absorbing read.

Fuinseog

apparently the wiesenthal center was too extreme even for Simon Wiesenthal, who wanted nothing to do with it

Stovepipe

Morlar,
Do I read you correctly when you say that old age should prevent the arrest of old Nazis for Holocaust crimes? By that mark, should the perpetrators of mass murder and other war crimes in the recent Yugoslavian wars and the horrors of Rwanda and Congo and Sudan should escape justice because they qualify for a bus pass?! How old is too old?
regards
Stovepipe

Mahatma coat

Depends on the Crime Dosent it.

How about the SonderKomando?? should they get strung up or their part??
What about John Demanjuk?? Should he be Tried over and Over again til they find something he's guilty of???

What happens after they are Found Guity and charged? Some posters here dont seem to think thats enough for SOME of them, they want to see some of the sadistic tortures meted out on men intheir 90's that they wish these men to be tried for inthe first place.

And Finally What about the War Criminals on 'Our' side?
what about the RAF Pilots that Killed thousands at Dresden and other cities??
What about the Us Soldiers that Murdered the SS Camp Guards????
What about the Russians who Raped and Pilaged their way across Europe??

Then theres the American War Crimes in Vietnam etc... Feel the same way about those??????


What about Israels Ethnic cleansing program? what about Ariel Sharon and his involvement in Sabra and Chatilla????

How about the Balkan Conflict, Should Radavan Karadich be tried for Warcrimes, if you think Yes then why havent Blair and Bush been tried for the Same crimes






I'd love to live in the B&W World of some posters here, but everything is shades of Grey

marcsignal

Mahatma coat wrote: »

I'd love to live in the B&W World of some posters here, but everything is shades of Grey

+1

The indisputable fact is that Holocaust rememberance has become a 'brand' and like any other brand it needs to be reinvented every now and again so it doesn't become tired and boring (Madonna and Kylie spring to mind).

Take Auschwitz, as an example. Auschwitz has it's own Facebook page ffs. In fact there are 3 seperate pages relating to it on Facebook.

http://www.facebook.com/auschwitzmemorial

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Auschwitz/106293256076688

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Auschwitz-Institute-for-Peace-and-Reconciliation/106689706513?v=info

There was even some controversy relating to the launch of the first one.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/15/auschwitz-facebook-page-taken-down

It has already been mentioned that these organisations (Wiesenthal Cntr and Anti Defamation League. etc) have staff that have to be paid.

If no evidence of 'Anti-Semitism' or 'Old Nazis hiding out in Paraguay' can be found, then how would these organisations justify whatever funding they get (from governments or individuals). So consequently the 'evidence', irrespective of how small, irrelevant and dodgy it is, is dug up from anywhere it might yield a monetary gain.

In this instance, it's business, and there's no business like Shoah Business.

jonniebgood1

marcsignal wrote: »

+1

The indisputable fact is that Holocaust rememberance has become a 'brand' and like any other brand it needs to be reinvented every now and again so it doesn't become tired and boring (Madonna and Kylie spring to mind).

Take Auschwitz, as an example. Auschwitz has it's own Facebook page ffs. In fact there are 3 seperate pages relating to it on Facebook.

http://www.facebook.com/auschwitzmemorial

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Auschwitz/106293256076688

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Auschwitz-Institute-for-Peace-and-Reconciliation/106689706513?v=info

I understand where you are coming from in relation to the Facebook pages, it seems tacky and maybe disrespectful in ways. Your view however is too cynical.
It could also be seen that the purpose of having a memorial or museum at Auschwitz is educational, i.e. to try and learn from our past in the hope that it is never repeated. Thus it follows that with living memory of WWII fading that new technologies such as social networking are used to try and educate a younger generation.
I believe that attractions such as this are a growing business, i.e. 3rd reich tours, Battle of somme tours, even shankill/ falls tours in Belfast!

marcsignal

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

I understand where you are coming from in relation to the Facebook pages, it seems tacky and maybe disrespectful in ways. Your view however is too cynical.

If i'm honest, I can't deny my cynicism. It seems that the cracks are beginning to show with some of the organisations mentioned. Is it because they know the nazis will all soon be dead ? and they will be confronted with thinking up of new reasons to justify their funding, or indeed, their existance. They appear to be squabbling now over the meager remains, or the ashes of nazism, for the want of a better phrase.

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

It could also be seen that the purpose of having a memorial or museum at Auschwitz is educational, i.e. to try and learn from our past in the hope that it is never repeated.

100% agree, it's just I have found that the concept seems to be lost on some the people you'd least expect, in my opinion.

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

Thus it follows that with living memory of WWII fading that new technologies such as social networking are used to try and educate a younger generation.
I believe that attractions such as this are a growing business, i.e. 3rd reich tours, Battle of somme tours, even shankill/ falls tours in Belfast!

Again, agreed, it certainly will always be a source of interest for future generations.

I need to be clear here, that I've nothing at all against commeration, but think the parameters of what could be defined as restitution have become very blurred in recent times.

marcsignal

Dutch seeks extradition of former SS volunteer sentenced to death

DEREK SCALLY in Berlin

DUTCH AUTHORITIES have asked Germany to extradite a former SS volunteer who was sentenced to death for murder in 1947.

Authorities in The Hague confirmed yesterday that they had issued a European arrest warrant for Klaas Carel Faber (88), who served in a firing squad at the Westerbork transit camp.

It was from Westerbork that Anne Frank and her family were transferred to Auschwitz.

After the war, a Dutch court dubbed Faber and his brother Pieter “two of the worst criminals of the SS”. Pieter was executed in 1948, while Klaas Faber’s death sentence was commuted to life.

He escaped to Germany with six others in 1952 and settled in the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt, where he worked for Audi.

A German court acquitted him of wrongdoing in 1952. Yesterday a Bavarian justice official said the new request would be considered, “but as far as I know, there is nothing new”.

Faber received German citizenship in 1952 under a Nazi-era law, still on the statute books at the time, that granted citizenship to foreign Nazi collaborators. Yesterday’s application is understood to query the legality of this citizenship application, originally made during the war. It is the third application after two failed extradition attempts, in 1954 and 2004.

Faber is the fifth most wanted man on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre list of wanted Nazis.

The centre has called on Germany to extradite him, citing his membership of the Sonderkommando Feldmeijer execution squad, which executed members of the Dutch resistance, Nazi opponents and those hiding Jews.

Full article Here

Jesus, at this rate, if I was working as a tea lady in the SS canteen I'd be getting a little worried by now. God knows where the Wiesenthal centre are going to draw the line if this guy was No. 5 on their hit list. :rolleyes:

jonniebgood1

marcsignal wrote: »

Full article Here

Jesus, at this rate, if I was working as a tea lady in the SS canteen I'd be getting a little worried by now. God knows where the Wiesenthal centre are going to draw the line if this guy was No. 5 on their hit list. :rolleyes:

An SS tea lady??? I think that comment does not take due cognisance of the crimes for which he is convicted.

He was convicted of complicity to murder 22 people. He escaped his sentence and was protected by Germany since then. I think his case is a disgrace to Germany in their protection of him.

The Wiesenthal centre draw the line at this- I don't particularly understand where you think that they should draw the line or not? Is your position that the crime he is convicted of is not correct or do you think that to much time has now passed to warrant him serving his time for the crime.

If his death comes before his sentence is served it will be tragic as it was with Samuel Kunz. At least this publicity highlights his crimes.

Fuinseog

he fought for a cause in which he believed. those he 'murdered' were terrorists. he committed no crime.
he is a German citizen, not Dutch and has been for more than sixty years.

maybe the Irish should have imposed deaths sentences on those who collaborated with the British and who murdered their on countrymen.

jonniebgood1

Fuinseog wrote: »

he fought for a cause in which he believed. those he 'murdered' were terrorists. he committed no crime.
he is a German citizen, not Dutch and has been for more than sixty years.

maybe the Irish should have imposed deaths sentences on those who collaborated with the British and who murdered their on countrymen.

Perhaps you have more information on his crimes than I do, If you could substantiate your point that those people he killed were 'terrorists', I would appreciate the chance to read this.

My understanding was that he was involved in the killing of his own countrymen (dutch) in retaliation for resistence operations. In other words when the resistance attacked a leading Nazi, Fabers role was to assasinate local dutch loyalists (not necessarily resistence) with the aim of scaring the local population into collaboration with Nazi rule. As I pointed out above I am open to correction on that if you can point out some genuine source material that backs up your view that he only killed terrorists.

He is a German citizen due to a Nazi law that allowed collaberaters to become citizens of Germany. I don't think thats a good enough reason to evade justice, i.e. if he commited crimes on behalf of the Nazi's he should not evade punishment on the back of a Nazi law. Thats not really important in this anyway.

Mahatma coat

ITS OK Mark, once the Weisenthall Centre finishes persecuting these old men for their Wartime Allegiances there are plenty of Surviving SonderKomando Living in the State of Israel, I'm sure these men and Women did Equally horrible things under Orders from the Nazis. And I KNOW that in the pursuit of Equality and Fairness the Weisenthall Centre Treats ALL War Criminals Equally :rolleyes:

Morlar

There is another interesting article about wiesentahl on the Der Spiegel ww2 site :

http://www.spiegel.de/international/topic/world_war_ii/

A Critical Look at Simon Wiesenthal
Examining the Legacy of the Nazi Hunter

09/16/2010

A Critical Look at Simon Wiesenthal
Examining the Legacy of the Nazi Hunter

By Jan Friedmann

Until his death in 2005, Simon Wiesenthal was the world's best-known Nazi hunter. But a new biography finds fault with the way he pursued his quarry and asks whether his "soaring ego" and "tendency to fantasize" actually got in the way of his mission.

The Austrian police were searching for Adolf Eichmann. He was rumored to be hiding in a house at Fischerndorf 8 in the central Alpine village of Altaussee.

But the officers accidentally knocked on the wrong door, at Fischerndorf 38. Instead of finding the logistical genius behind the Holocaust at the door, as expected, they came upon Anton Burger, a former colleague of Eichmann who went on to become the commandant of the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

It was a mistake -- but one that turned out to be a stroke of luck.

Simon Wiesenthal, who had tipped off the police, was overjoyed by the inadvertent catch shortly after the end of the war. And of course he was there on the scene, Wiesenthal said in describing the incident, adding that he personally handed Burger over to the US Army after the capture.

The Nazi Hunter's Other Side

Drawing attention to himself and his successes was the Nazi hunter's modus operandi -- and he became world-famous in the process. Having survived the Holocaust himself, Wiesenthal spent the next 60 years ferreting out Nazi war criminals who had managed to disappear.

Indeed, Wiesenthal's tireless search turned him into a celebrity. He was portrayed as a hero in films, American presidents invited him to the White House, and dozens of universities awarded him honorary doctorates.

But there was also another side to the Nazi hunter: He used questionable methods. He took credit for the achievements of others. And, over the years, he succeeded in antagonizing many people who actually shared the same goals.

This side of Wiesenthal is presented in "Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends," a new biography by Tom Segev, an Israeli historian and journalist. Although Segev describes Wiesenthal as a "brave man who launched some breathtaking ventures," he also writes that Wiesenthal had a "soaring ego" and a harmful "tendency to fantasize."

Wiesenthal's Roots

Wiesenthal's activities had a lot to do with the country he lived in. Austria was even more indulgent than the young Federal Republic of Germany in its treatment of Nazi functionaries who had slipped into ordinary civilian life. They were protected by right-wing sympathizers in positions of political leadership and in the judiciary, but also by a widespread desire to forget. To make himself heard, Wiesenthal had to be very loud.

Wiesenthal had a love-hate relationship with the Austrians. "I am their bad conscience," he once said, "because each one of them should have taken upon himself what I have done for Austrian society." In return, he received bushels of insulting and threatening letters, such as the one that found its way to him despite only being addressed to "The Jew Pig, Austria."

Wiesenthal was born in 1908 in Buchach, a city in what is now western Ukraine, into a family that supported the Habsburg monarchy. His father, a sales representative for a sugar refinery, died in World War I. Simon studied architecture in Prague and then moved to what was then the eastern-Polish city of Lvov (now the western Ukrainian city of Lviv). There, he married Cyla Müller, also Jewish, in 1936.

When German troops occupied Lvov in 1941, life became a living hell for its Jewish inhabitants. Only 3,400 of the Jewish community's 160,000 members survived. Wiesenthal was forced to work as a slave laborer in a railroad repair yard. He later escaped, was recaptured and then spent time in a series of concentration camps -- including Plaszow, Gross-Rosen, Buchenwald and Mauthausen -- before being liberated by American soldiers on May 5, 1945.

After the war, he discovered that his wife had survived, working as a forced laborer with a forged passport in the western German city of Solingen. When the couple was reunited in a refugee camp in Linz, Austria, they calculated that 89 of their relatives had been murdered.

The Birth of the Nazi Hunter

Wiesenthal then assumed a role that hardly anyone had envisioned at the time. Working for the US military administration, he interviewed Jewish survivors to document their memories of their tormentors.

The register that emerged would go on to become the cornerstone of the archive that Wiesenthal first set up in Linz and later moved to Vienna. He funded the effort with donations -- and regular payments from the Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence agency. For Wiesenthal, emigrating to Israel wasn't an option. Instead, it was his duty, he once wrote, to serve as an "Austrian patriot" and to "provide a warning against future excesses."

Wiesenthal spent his days in a small office filled with files, cards and registration records. He had a secretary and a few volunteers, who addressed him as "Herr Engineer." But that was it. "Contrary to the myths he spun around himself," Segev writes, "he never operated a worldwide dragnet, but worked almost on his own from a small apartment, surrounded by high piles of old newspapers and yellowing index cards." The Nazi hunter made up for a lack of resources with a pronounced sense of mission. And he scuffled with the competition. He once, for example, denounced Nazi hunter Beate Klarsfeld by telling West German authorities that she was working for the Stasi, East Germany's secret police -- despite a lack of evidence for the claim.

Concocting Stories

In 1960, after tracking down Eichmann in Buenos Aires, Mossad agents took him to Israel. When Eichmann's trial began in Jerusalem, Wiesenthal published a book entitled "Ich jagte Eichmann" ("I Hunted Eichmann"). Given the fact that it was an armada of researchers and intelligence agencies that hunted down the Nazi war criminal, rather than just Wiesenthal by himself, the title was a bit of a stretch. Still, Wiesenthal did play a key role: Several years earlier, in 1953, it was he who had alerted the Israelis that Eichmann was living in Argentina.

Nevertheless, much of the other information Wiesenthal provided was wrong, such as his conclusions on the whereabouts of the Nazi concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele. Information he provided once sent a reporter working for the German magazine Quick to the Greek island of Kythnos. When the journalist returned empty-handed, Wiesenthal claimed that Mengele had left the island only 12 hours earlier. In reality, though, Mengele was in Brazil -- one of the few countries Wiesenthal had never mentioned -- where he died in a swimming accident in 1979.

Wiesenthal also concocted legends surrounding the story of the Holocaust and his own suffering. It was years before he corrected a claim he made after the war that the Nazis had used the bodies of dead Jews to make soap. Similarly, the number of camps he was supposedly interned in grew over time -- until the list eventually included 12 camps, including Auschwitz.

In one of their memorandums, even the Israelis found that he was a "publicity hound" and complained that he often made assertions that couldn't be proven. The memo hinted that he was egomaniacal and was addicted to publicity.

Part 2: 'Sleazenthal'

Those words were written at the peak of Wiesenthal's feud with Bruno Kreisky, Austria's charismatic Social Democratic chancellor. Kreisky, who was Jewish, ironically came into power in 1970 with the help of the right-wing Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ). Because he led a minority government, he was forced to bring several ministers with unappetizing pasts into his cabinet. The ministers of agriculture, construction, transportation and the interior were all former members of the Nazi Party.

By publicizing the histories of the new ministers, Wiesenthal provoked Kreisky, who saw himself as a man of the people and sensed that Austrians were not interested in rehashing the past. "I'm just waiting for Mr. Wiesenthal to come up with proof that I was in the SS, too" the chancellor once caustically quipped. He was quoted in the press as saying that Wiesenthal was a "Jewish fascist."

Kreisky even had his staff search for incriminating information about Wiesenthal. Although he was never able to prove the allegation, Kreisky told the press that Wiesenthal only survived the war by collaborating with the Nazis. In 1987, the two rivals ended up in court. In the end, Kreisky was found liable for defamation, but he died soon thereafter without having paid the court-ordered fine. Segev characterizes the conflict as a dispute between two Jews who desperately wanted to be a "part of Austrian society."

Wiesenthal's behavior in another Nazi affair underscored his yearning for approval. When it was revealed that Austrian President Kurt Waldheim had concealed certain aspects of his service in the German military during the war, Wiesenthal backed the politician, with whom he was in close contact.

Wiesenthal's reputation suffered as a result. In internal World Jewish Congress documents, he was dubbed "Sleazenthal." During an interview on German television for a 1996 documentary on Wiesenthal, Eli Rosenbaum, the US Justice Department's chief Nazi hunter at the time, described Wiesenthal as "incompetent," "an egomaniac," "a spreader of false information" and "a tragic figure." Rosenbaum's office once wrote to Wiesenthal's center that not a single one of its accusations had led to a trial.

Wiesenthal's Legacy

It is practically impossible to verify whether Wiesenthal truly brought 1,100 war criminals to justice, as he himself claimed. He was always more of a PR man than a serious investigator -- perhaps his primary service to a society determined to forget the past.

Today, the Simon Wiesenthal Center continues to perform this PR role. Derided by criminal prosecutors, the center issues a list of the most-wanted Nazi criminals as well as an annual assessment of the efforts of individual countries to track them down.

Wiesenthal died in September 2005, at 96, two years after his wife Cyla. Speaking about her life at the side of the famous Nazi hunter, she once said: "I am not married to a man I am married to thousands, maybe millions, of dead."

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

jonniebgood1

Mahatma coat wrote: »

ITS OK Mark, once the Weisenthall Centre finishes persecuting these old men for their Wartime Allegiances there are plenty of Surviving SonderKomando Living in the State of Israel, I'm sure these men and Women did Equally horrible things under Orders from the Nazis. And I KNOW that in the pursuit of Equality and Fairness the Weisenthall Centre Treats ALL War Criminals Equally :rolleyes:

Maybe I am not understanding your post correctly, forgive me for paraphrasing but you saying that a convicted war criminal should not be punished because 'other people were made do bad things'. That is just absurd.

Mahatma coat

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

Maybe I am not understanding your post correctly, forgive me for paraphrasing but you saying that a convicted war criminal should not be punished because 'other people were made do bad things'. That is just absurd.

No You've got that totally AssBackwards

I'm saying that IF you Convict someone of a Specific Crime, and then find that other people have committed the same Crime, then those other individuals should swing from the Gallows too.

What I am against is the Baying for the Blood of these old men, whilst conveniently ignoring the Crimes of other Old Men because they happen to have been Jews.

All should be Equal in the eyes of the Law.

jonniebgood1

Mahatma coat wrote: »

No You've got that totally AssBackwards

I'm saying that IF you Convict someone of a Specific Crime, and then find that other people have committed the same Crime, then those other individuals should swing from the Gallows too.

What I am against is the Baying for the Blood of these old men, whilst conveniently ignoring the Crimes of other Old Men because they happen to have been Jews.

All should be Equal in the eyes of the Law.

It may have been as you put it 'assbackwards' but after your clarification (which was all I was looking for) I would agree with you almost 100%.

Unlike other cases (like the one posted in a different post of Frank) I would feel that Faber is slightly different in that he was already convicted for his crime and subsequently escaped his sentence and thus should serve his sentence. Similarily I would agree that people of all extractions who have committed of serious crimes should serve their time which basically equates to your last statement. But because others have escaped justice it should not follow that Faber escapes in the same way IMO.

Morlar

Here's another example of their outstanding and important work, labelling a uk independent newspaper journalist anti-semitic

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/christina-patterson/christina-patterson-how-i-was-smeared-as-an-antisemite-2167310.html

Christina Patterson: How I was smeared as an anti-Semite

Thursday, 23 December 2010

The Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal died five years ago, at 96. Just, perhaps, before he could hunt me down, too

At the end of a long and exhausting year, it's sometimes hard to know what will hit the spot. A spa break in Thailand? A month-long marathon of black and white weepies? Or, perhaps, a little surprise. The surprising news, for example, that an organisation famed for hunting down Nazis has named you as one of its top 10 villains for 2010.

It was on Twitter, that online refuge for the bored and wanting-to-be-witty, that I suddenly saw my name next to the words "Simon Wiesenthal". I clicked on the link and there, on something called "Fishbowl LA", I was. "This," it said, "is definitely an awards season Top Ten list no one wants to be on". The LA Simon Wiesenthal Centre had, it said, "unveiled its Top Ten Anti-Semitic Slurs" for 2010 and I – nestling between a Lithuanian Holocaust-denier, who described the Nuremberg trial as "the biggest legal farce in history", and anonymous contributions on the Goldman Sachs message boards, which begged for the return of the Gestapo and exhorted readers to "burn all the Jews" – was at No 9.

Simon Wiesenthal, as far as I could remember, was the Holocaust survivor who was involved in the capture and conviction of Adolf Eichmann. A quick check online (but not on the Goldman Sachs message boards) established that he was also involved in the capture of Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka death camp, and Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan, who had ordered the torture and murder of thousands of women and children at Majdanek, and Karl Silberbauer, the Gestapo officer responsible for the arrest of Anne Frank. Wiesenthal died five years ago, at the age of 96. Just, perhaps, before he could hunt me down, too.

The work he started continues in his name. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, based in LA but with franchises in New York, Toronto, Miami, Paris, Buenos Aires and Jerusalem, is "an international Jewish human rights organisation" that "confronts anti-Semitism", "stands with Israel" and "defends the safety of Jews worldwide". Its last press release, before the one in which I star, was headed "Wiesenthal Centre Welcomes Rejection by Budapest Court of Libel Suit by Convicted Nazi War Criminal Against its Chief Nazi-Hunter Dr Efraim Zuroff". Personally, I think I'd put that in my Top Ten Unsnappy Headlines With Way Too Many Capital Letters of 2010, to be unveiled on my new website, Fishbowl Hackney, but style, it's clear from the cake stands, fig baskets and salt and pepper shakers in the online store of the Simon Wiesenthal's "Museum of Tolerance", isn't anyone's top priority.

The "Museum of Tolerance", by the way, is a "human rights laboratory and educational centre" funded by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre. There's one in New York and there's going to be one in Jerusalem, on the site of a Muslim cemetery, which the Muslims haven't regarded as all that tolerant, which the Muslims have, in fact, been quite upset by. Since their protests have got them nowhere, they might consider taking part in the "Museum of Tolerance" online poll about bullying. "Have you been bullied?" it asks, and then invites you to tick the box for "race", "religion", "appearance", "sexual orientation" or "other", which pretty much ensures that the proportion of the world's population who can claim to be a victim is around 100 per cent.

Is it my style that the Wiesenthal lot don't like? My prose style, or the hairstyle in my photo? It is, to be honest, rather hard to work out, because next to a photo of me – looking, no doubt, just like Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan – they've simply chucked a chunk of text from a column I wrote in July. The column was about the limits of multiculturalism. In it, I criticised the bad manners of some of my Hasidic Jewish neighbours and, much more importantly, certain practices, in different religious communities, which conflict with some of the values in British society – free speech, sexual equality, gay rights, the rights of children not to be mutilated by their parents – that have been hardest won. The bad manners, I argued, were the acceptable face of multiculturalism. Some of the practices weren't.

The column, it's true, created a bit of a stir. On the blogosphere, I was Stoke Newington's answer to Eichmann. In my email inbox, however, I was Julian Assange, and with almost as many offers of what we might politely call marriage. Some of them, or at least some of the messages of support, were from people called Solomon, Symons or Greenfeld. Some were from some of my Hasidic Jewish neighbours. Some of them wanted to meet me, to tell me more about the pressures of living in a community that "survives because of the virtual imprisonment of its participants". Fearing discovery, they, at the last minute, didn't.

The day after Twitter's not-so-secret Santa, I had an email from an Orthodox Jew ("you may even," he said, "say 'Ultra' Orthodox") from New York. He had, he said, seen the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's list. "What you said," he said, "is not anti-Semitic. I apologise to you for their wrong". A Jewish man in Canada wrote to say that the Simon Wiesenthal Centre "purposely gave an inaccurate impression" and that he had written to them to complain. Another said that the Wiesenthal Centre had been "irresponsible". Another that they were "obviously desperate". The Wiesenthal Centre, he said, was, "quite simply, not serious".

Well, I don't know if they're desperate, but they seem pretty damn serious to me. They, and their friends in this country, seem pretty damn serious that anyone, anywhere, who criticises the behaviour of anyone who happens to be Jewish should be stuck in the stocks and slapped with a label that marks them out as not just racist, but a hater of a particular, entire race, so that when anyone puts their name in Google, what pops up is words like "anti-Semitic", "prick" and "bigot". They seem pretty damn serious that their support for "Jewish Rights in the World" translates into direct support of Israel, too. "Had enough of Israel-bashing?" asks the Wiesenthal website. "Act now!" To speed things along, it has even written the letter. "To the President, Prime Minister and Leaders of Israel," it says. "We are with you!! Don't heed the world's Israel-bashers. We, Jewish and non-Jewish lovers of peace, are with you in your just defensive war against Hamas terror."

It doesn't matter if a UN report says that Israel's raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla "betrayed an unacceptable level of brutality". It doesn't matter if its soldiers use weapons banned by the Geneva Convention. It doesn't matter if they use a nine-year-old child as a human shield. It doesn't matter if its citizens raze homes and build new ones on someone else's land. Or if they destroy their neighbours' crops and treat them like criminals. It doesn't matter what they do. "We stand," says the Wiesenthal website, "in solidarity." And we know what they call those who don't.

When Hannah Arendt, whose book about Eichmann she called "a report on the banality of evil", was told by her fellow German-Jewish philosopher, Gershom Scholem, that he could find "little trace" of "love of the Jewish people" in her work, she said this. "You are quite right," she told him in a letter. "I am not moved by any 'love' of the sort, and for two reasons: I have never in my life 'loved' any people or collective... The only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons." The same, she didn't add, but might have, goes for hate, too.

The article which triggered this response is here :

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/christina-patterson/christina-patterson-the-limits-of-multiculturalism-2036861.html

jonniebgood1

Only fair to post the other side of the argument to be thorough on this:

Response to her linked article in previous post- copied from http://www.thejc.com/blogpost/the-limits-multi-culturalism

I have just finished reading one of the ugliest, most vile pieces ever published in the British press. It is actually dripping with venom.

I am speaking, of course, of Christina Patterson's piece in the Indy today, The Limits of Multi-Culturalism. Her piece begins as a mild rant against her annoying and rude neighbours in the Charedi neighbourhood of Stamford Hill. They drive while using their mobile phones; park in the wrong spots, don't say please or thank you in their shops and occasionally disdain their non-Jewish customers.

Fine. I daresay all these things really happened to her. Certainly they are all complaints that have aired so often they have become cliches.

But that's only the first couple of paragraphs. After she gets her complaints about the "armies of children" and the "funny suits and hats" out of the way, she really gets going:

When I moved to Stamford Hill, 12 years ago, I didn't realise that goyim were about as welcome in the Hasidic Jewish shops as Martin Luther King at a Klu Klux Klan convention. I didn't realise that a purchase by a goy was a crime to be punished with monosyllabic terseness, or that bus seats were a potential source of contamination, or that road signs, and parking restrictions, were for people who hadn't been chosen by God. And while none of this is a source of anything much more than irritation, when I see an eight-year-old boy recoiling from a normal-looking woman (because, presumably, he has been taught that she is dirty or dangerous, or, heaven forbid, dripping with menstrual blood) it makes me sad.

"Normal-looking woman"? What's that? A woman who looks like you, Ms Patterson?

She then goes on about a series of Muslim practices that similarly make her "sad" - including little girls "being taught that their tiny bodies, and their lovely hair, are things to be protected from the male gaze". The very concept of modesty - in clothing, in contact between the sexes - actually offends her. I'd love to hear what she has to say, by contrast, on the armies of young girls in London sleeping around, drinking and minimally dressed. That's what offends me.

All these things make me sad, but I accept that people should, except in certain professional situations which involve dealing with the public, be allowed to wear whatever they like, and that laws which prevent this are self-defeating, and that you can't stop parents, or rabbis, teaching little boys that adult women shouldn't even be brushed against on a bus, and I accept that some of these things are an inevitable consequence of a modern, and in many ways magnificent, multi-cultural society.

Again, she seems to think that she is the 'normal', normative one, and that the rabbis preaching modesty are the 'modern' ones. She fails to grasp that in the context of history, she's the modern, new one, not them.

I love, by the way, she pays lip service to the "in many ways magnificent" multi-cultural society. In her political milieu, she has to profess to believe in it, but at the end of the day, she's not exactly live-and-let-live, is she? You rather get the feeling that she (a) hates the Jews and Muslims really, seriously more than is strictly necessary and (b) feels they really ought to thank her for generously giving them permission to exist.

G-d, this is painful, but let's go on.

But there's one thing I will never accept. In the next few weeks, between 500 and 2,000 British schoolgirls – yes, British schoolgirls – will be sent abroad, ostensibly on holiday, and taken to the home of a woman who will, using an often dirty razor, and no anaesthetic, slice off their labia, and clitoris, and then, using sewing thread or horse-hair and an often dirty needle, stitch their vaginas closed. Sometimes, the girls faint. Sometimes, they die. But the people who do this to them (in East Africa and India and Pakistan and the Middle East) believe that it's what God wants. They believe that it promotes "cleanliness" and "chastity". Oh, and men's sexual pleasure. But not, for obvious reasons, women's.

Female circumcision has been illegal in Britain since 1985. Since 2003, it has also been illegal to take girls out of the country to have them "cut" abroad. The maximum penalty is 14 years. So far, there have been no prosecutions. Not a single one. I don't care if evidence is difficult to get, and I don't care if parents think they're doing the right thing for their children, and I don't care if it's a "sensitive" issue. This is a total and utter disgrace. Parents are being allowed to mutilate their children, and the institutions in this country are doing sweet FA.

There is, I'm sure, nothing in the Koran to indicate that hacking off a girl's labia is an all-round great idea, just as there's nothing in the Torah to say that Volvos should always be driven with a mobile phone in hand, and goyim should be treated with contempt.

Wow. We started off with rude Jewish drivers and somehow, four columns later, we've got to Muslims "hacking off a girl's labia". Amazing - no one at the Indy has yet spotted that the two things really have nothing to do with each other. Except that they are both carried out by those repulsive foreigners.

People will believe what they believe, but a civilised society will have laws to indicate what is acceptable in that society and what isn't, and it will act on those laws. A properly civilised society would also ensure that children are not subject to the crazed whims of their parents, and hived off into "faith schools" where they're taught that the world was created in seven days, or that they need special gadgets to switch on the lights on a Saturday, or that women who show their face are sluts.

"Crazed whims of parents"? Now we get to the nub. She dislikes Islam and Judaism and sees them and their practitioners as irrational and "uncivilised". That is what this is all about, as evidenced by the next paragraph:

A properly civilised society would accept that while lovely little C of E schools were once an excellent place for children to learn about the religion that shaped their culture, art and laws, you can't have them without having the madrassa run by the mad mullah next door, and therefore, sadly, you can't have either, but have, instead, a system of compulsory state secular education, in which children learn to get on with people from all religious backgrounds and none, and are taught about all religions, but also that the culture of the country they're living in was, for 2,000 years, largely based on one.

Hold on - she doesn't hate all religions. C of E schools = "lovely"! Muslim and Jewish schools = bad! I understand, Ms Patterson.

By now, of course, her tone is totally crazed - hate-filled and hateful. Even if I were reading this with the most charitable of attitudes, and wished to assume that Ms Patterson did not mean to come across as a complete bigot, this is how it reads to me. Maybe we ought to send her to visit one of those state schools where children "learn to get on with people from all religious backgrounds and none". She certainly sounds like she needs a refresher course.