Media Watch

In Defense of Transparency at the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra

Posted on 20 June 2015 by Defending History

O P I N I O N   /    M U S I C

by Ronald C. Kent

◊

In January 2012 I became aware of a then-upcoming performance of Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana” by the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. Since I knew that Carl Orff was a Nazi-approved composer, who created this work in 1936, I wrote a letter to Maestro Andreas Delfs and Music Director Edo de Waart, requesting that they place the biography of Orff during the Nazi period in the program, in the interest of enlightenment, transparency, and full disclosure, thereby situating “Carmina Burana” in its historical context for listeners.

Continue reading

Posted in Christian-Jewish Issues, Collaborators Glorified, Germany, Media Watch, Music, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on In Defense of Transparency at the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra

New Conflict Over Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery, As New Heritage Commission Gets Underway

Posted on 12 June 2015 by Defending History

Updates on the new conflict over the old Vilna Jewish cemetery site at Piramónt (now part of the Šnipiškės [Yiddish: Shnípishok] district), and the related issues surrounding a concurrently established new commission on Jewish heritage will be added here as they become available.

THE PAGE IS HERE

 

Posted in Cemeteries and Mass Graves, Human Rights, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views, Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery at Piramónt (in Šnipiškės / Shnípishok), Politics of Memory | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on New Conflict Over Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery, As New Heritage Commission Gets Underway

“The Naked Truth” on Lithuanian Television

Posted on 21 May 2015 by Defending History

O P I N I O N

by Geoff Vasil

◊

The national Lithuanian television channel Lietuvos rytas TV recently (on May 4) broadcast a show by veteran talk-show host Rūta Grinevičiūtė (surname recently changed to Janutienė) called Nuoga Tiesa, “Naked Truth,” which posed the question, “Do you want the Jews to return again [sic] to Lithuania?” Viewers were invited to call in and/or vote by special telephone lines for Yes and No with a one euro toll per call. For that and a number of other reasons the entire program had something of the macabre about it, and although some of the guests made some important points, all of them seemed to miss certain glaring details which would have been the center of attention in the West.

Continue reading

Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Dr. Arūnas Bubnys and State Holocaust Revisionism in Lithuania, Geoff Vasil, History, Human Rights, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Ponár (Ponary, Paneriai), Rūta Vanagaitė | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on “The Naked Truth” on Lithuanian Television

Purveyor of Racist, Misogynist, Antisemitic, Homophobic, Nazist “Art” is Alleged to Work in Lithuania’s Economy Ministry

Posted on 3 May 2015 by Defending History

VILNIUS—Defending History has still had no reply to its open letter of August 2013 to the Minister of the Economy, asking him to look into multiple media reports that the pseudonymous “Zeppelinus,” Lithuania’s best-known purveyor of hate-popart on the internet is indeed a senior civil servant in his own ministry. The issue came to the fore once again in recent weeks with his “appeal” to the head of the Jewish community, and his latest production following a recent controversial conference (conference report).

The following are samples of his “art” in the service of racism, misogyny, homophobia, antisemitism alongside glorification of Nazism. Samples can readily be found for other prejudices, including anti-Polish and anti-Russian hate. Hopefully human rights organizations will continue to counter such materials, first and foremost by establishing, in partnership with law enforcement, the identity of the purveyor of the hate materials, and the answer to the question about alleged continued high employment in a government ministry. An earlier smaller sampling with full translation is available here. Full disclosure: This journal’s editor has on occasion been a target of Mr. Zeppelinus, too.

Continue reading

Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Human Rights, LGBTQ Equal Rights, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views, Opinion, Russian Speakers' Personal Status, UŽGAVĖNĖS (SHROVETIDE), Women's Rights | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Purveyor of Racist, Misogynist, Antisemitic, Homophobic, Nazist “Art” is Alleged to Work in Lithuania’s Economy Ministry

A Russian Observer Replies to Recent Feast of an American Daily Beast

Posted on 18 February 2015 by Defending History

O P I N I O N

by Alex Nosovich (Kaliningrad)

◊

*Editor’s note

◊

The governments of the Baltic countries, while cheerleading the introduction of new sanctions against the Russian Federation, are also doing something else that is going unnoticed. They are exploiting tensions between the West and Russia to settle scores with local dissidents, who advocate equal rights for national minorities and oppose glorification of Nazi collaborators. They are prevented from holding events, and impacted at the personal level, while their activities are marginalized so that they might become invisible in the eyes of the international community. This is done with help of American Neocons (neoconservatives), including the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), an organization established in 2009.

Continue reading

Posted in Collaborators Glorified, Latvia, Media Watch, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A Russian Observer Replies to Recent Feast of an American Daily Beast

Run-Up to the 16 Feb. 2015 Neo-Nazi March in Central Kaunas

Posted on 15 February 2015 by Defending History

Baltic Nazi-Glorifying Marching Season Underway

COME JOIN US IN KAUNAS, MONDAY 16 FEB. at 1 PM (1300), AT RAMYBĖS PARK, TO MONITOR, SILENTLY PROTEST, & REMEMBER THE  CITY’S MORE THAN 30,000 MURDERED JEWISH CITIZENS.

Continue reading

Posted in Celebrations of Fascism, EU, Events, Kaunas, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, Neo-Nazi & Fascist Marches, News & Views, Politics of Memory | Comments Off on Run-Up to the 16 Feb. 2015 Neo-Nazi March in Central Kaunas

Defending History Team in Vilnius Thanks Targum Shlishi for Support

Posted on 5 February 2015 by Defending History

VILNIUS—The Defending History team based here wrote today to Targum Shlishi in the United States to thank its board and director for offering support to the Defending History project at a critical juncture in its seven year history. The Vilnius-based project began in the spring of 2008, its web journal Holocaust in the Baltics got underway in 2009 and was renamed Defending History in 2010.

Targum Shlishi cited Defending History’s work in its newsletter today. The relevant paragraph reads as follows:

Continue reading

Posted in Lithuania, Media Watch, News & Views | Comments Off on Defending History Team in Vilnius Thanks Targum Shlishi for Support

Peter Jukes Tweets on Documentary that Glorifies Alleged Nazi Collaborator

Posted on 7 December 2014 by Defending History

O P I N I O N

LONDON—British author Peter Jukes, best known for his screenplays, literary criticism and political journalism, tweeted last week on the release in the United States of a new documentary film that heroizes certain postwar anti-Soviet “forest brothers” in Lithuania. The film, “The Invisible Front,” that premiered in Greenwich Village’s prestigious Cinema Village theater on 7 November, fails to even mention the view that various of the specific figures it glorifies for their post 1944 activities were in fact alleged recycled Nazi collaborators of 1941. That was the year when, in the days following the Nazi invasion launched on 22 June, the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF) started butchering local civilian Jews, often elderly rabbis or young women, before the first German forces had arrived. Premeditation becomes evident from perusal of the LAF’s prewar leaflets.

Continue reading

Posted in Arts, Collaborators Glorified, Debates on Juozas Lukša, Film, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views, Peter Jukes, Politics of Memory | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Peter Jukes Tweets on Documentary that Glorifies Alleged Nazi Collaborator

Lithuanian TV Nixes LGBT Rights Video, Again

Posted on 20 August 2014 by Defending History

L G B T   R I G H T S    /   H U M A N   R I G H T S

The following report appeared today on the LGL website, and is reposted here by permission of LGL.

Continue reading

Posted in Human Rights, LGBTQ Equal Rights, Lithuania, Media Watch, News & Views, Opinion | Comments Off on Lithuanian TV Nixes LGBT Rights Video, Again

Hungary’s Supreme Court Forbids Local Media to Use the Term “Far Right” in Describing the Far Right Jobbik Party

Posted on 9 June 2014 by Defending History

JERUSALEM—The Simon Wiesenthal Center today harshly criticized a decision by Hungary’s Supreme Court which recently ruled that local media cannot refer to the Jobbik party as “far right.”

UPDATE: See now Efraim Zuroff’s 14 June 2014 op-ed in the Jerusalem Post

Continue reading

Posted in Efraim Zuroff, Free Speech & Democracy, Human Rights, Hungary, Media Watch, News & Views, Politics of Memory | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Hungary’s Supreme Court Forbids Local Media to Use the Term “Far Right” in Describing the Far Right Jobbik Party

Reply to a Roger Cohen Opinion Piece on Ukraine and Lithuania

Posted on 6 May 2014 by Defending History

The following is the text of a letter to the editor sent to the New York Times on 8 March 2014 in response to Roger Cohen’s “Ukraine Fights for its Truth.” As it was not published, it is now included here for the record, and for the sake of the continuing discussion. The embedded links, and square-bracketed updates, have been added today.

Even the brightest can have a blind spot. Yet again, razor-sharp, liberal humanist Roger Cohen has been taken in by PR from the ultranationalists in Eastern Europe. Missing from his “Ukraine Fights for its Truth” (INYT, 6 March) — where he discusses both Ukraine and his ancestral town here in Lithuania — is all that is wrong with the revisionist narrative that is based on a far-right rewriting of history known as “Double Genocide.”

Continue reading

Posted in Dovid Katz, Free Speech & Democracy, Media Watch, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Ukraine, Zháger (Žagarė) | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Reply to a Roger Cohen Opinion Piece on Ukraine and Lithuania

Respublika “Slightly” Edits Efraim Zuroff’s Obituary for Shimon Alperovich

Posted on 4 April 2014 by Defending History

M E D I A   W A T C H

Vitas Tomkus’s daily tabloid, Respublika has, alongside its sister title, Vakaro Žinios (Evening News, also owned by Tomkus) in many views inflicted tangible damage upon Lithuania and its image. The papers leave a long trail of racist, antisemitic, and homophobic invective, not seldom in sensationalistic formats that mirror the 1930s.

The most notorious instance was perhaps the 2004 front page featuring the unseemly cartoon of the The Jew and The Gay holding up a globe under the headline “Who runs the world?” recycled (and again, on page 1), in 2009. Vakaro Žinios (Evening News) even featured a sickening photo montage of the then head of the Jewish community Dr. Shimon Alperovich, and a Soviet-era abacus, with text suggesting the Jews were conspiring to defraud the Lithuanian people. More recently, a front page was devoted to a local rabbi with a headline about Jews not having to pay taxes. The word Žydai (Jews) alone was in massive size type, as on numerous occasions, e.g. when the paper accused “The Jews” of plotting to steal the building housing the Culture Ministry. It is almost all out of a dark satire.

Continue reading

Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Efraim Zuroff, Media Watch, News & Views, Obituaries, Politics of Memory, Shimon Alperovich (1928 – 2014) | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Respublika “Slightly” Edits Efraim Zuroff’s Obituary for Shimon Alperovich

Efraim Zuroff on Tablet Magazine’s Co-Sponsorship of Lithuanian Government’s Yivo Event, and a Suggestion for Yivo’s Audience

Posted on 10 February 2014 by Defending History

Dr. Efraim Zuroff, Holocaust historian, Nazi-hunter, and director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office, has posted the following comment on the website of Tablet magazine, as one of the comments to a new book review. The comment also appears separately on Facebook.

Continue reading

Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, Double Games, Double Genocide, Efraim Zuroff, Events, Foreign Ministries: Holocaust Politics Abuse?, Identity Theft of Litvak Heritage, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, United States, Yivo Manipulated? | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Efraim Zuroff on Tablet Magazine’s Co-Sponsorship of Lithuanian Government’s Yivo Event, and a Suggestion for Yivo’s Audience

More Mainstream Media Coverage of the Swastika Issue in Lithuania

Posted on 7 February 2014 by Defending History

The following, for our readers’ information, is Geoff Vasil’s translation of a 3 February 2014 article that appeared in 15min.lt. Please see the original Lithuanian for the photos referenced herein by their captions in square brackets.

Continue reading

Posted in Celebrations of Fascism, EU, Human Rights, Lithuania, Media Watch, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Swastikas in Lithuania, Symbology | Tagged | Comments Off on More Mainstream Media Coverage of the Swastika Issue in Lithuania

Swedish Film Director Speaks Out on the Lithuanian Holocaust, Sort of, a Little Bit

Posted on 1 February 2014 by Defending History

O P I N I O N

by Geoff Vasil

 

Jonas Öhman is a Swede who has been coming to Lithuania and living here on and off from almost the beginning of modern independence in the 1990-1991 period. During that time he has produced a number of films, only one of which appears to his credit on the internet film database imdb.com, but all of which deal more or less with a mythologized version of the history of Lithuanian anti-Soviet partisans.

Continue reading

Posted in Arts, Film, Geoff Vasil, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Sweden | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Swedish Film Director Speaks Out on the Lithuanian Holocaust, Sort of, a Little Bit

Respublika’s 18 January 2014 Front Page Article “Kaunas Jewish Community Chairman Gercas Žakas: One Point for Discord between Lithuanians and Jews”

Posted on 23 January 2014 by Defending History

The following translation, by Geoff Vasil, is of a front page article in the Vilnius daily Respublika (18 January 2014), featuring an interview with Kaunas Jewish community leader Gercas Žakas (the words superimposed on the photo roughly translate: “Perhaps someone really is provoking us and sowing discord intentionally”). The Lithuanian original is available online.

See also the the front page spread featuring interviews with Faina Kukliansky and Moshe Beirakas which appeared two days earlier, on 16 January 2014.

 ZAKAS in Respublika

 

Kaunas Jewish Community Chairman Gercas Žakas: One Point for Discord between Lithuanians and Jews

January 18, 2014

by Olava STRIKULIENĖ

Kaunas Jewish Community chairman Gercas Žakas was initially surprised when the daily newspaper Respublika, where his son Arijus worked as a reporter, was deemed an antisemitic newspaper. And now Žakas is surprised our politicians sported a Wehrmacht symbol during Defenders of Freedom Day.

Žakas: “What symbol are you talking about?” Žakas asked. “I know nothing, I was away. Apparently someone wasn’t paying enough attention.”

Respublika: “During the commemoration of January 13 at parliament forget-me-not pins were passed out, which are really a symbol of the Nazi German Wehrmacht military.”

Continue reading

Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views | Comments Off on Respublika’s 18 January 2014 Front Page Article “Kaunas Jewish Community Chairman Gercas Žakas: One Point for Discord between Lithuanians and Jews”

Respublika’s Editorial on Nazi Symbols in Use

Posted on 22 January 2014 by Defending History

 

The following is a translation, by Geoff Vasil for Defending History, of the editorial that appeared on 17 January 2014 in the Vilnius daily Respublika (p. 4), a day after the front page story (16 Jan.) featuring photographs of Faina Kukliansky and Moishe Beirakas, and a day before the front story (17. Jan) featuring Gercas Žakas.

Continue reading

Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Human Rights, Lithuania, Media Watch, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Symbology | Comments Off on Respublika’s Editorial on Nazi Symbols in Use

Heritage Articles from Lithuanian Jewish Community’s “Jerusalem of Lithuania” Going Online

Posted on 21 January 2014 by Defending History

A new page has been launched to provide selected articles from the English edition of the Lithuanian Jewish Community’s Jerusalem of Lithuania. The newspaper was regularly published in four separate editions (English, Lithuanian, Russian and Yiddish) from 1989 to early 2011. These selections are from the years 1999-2011, when the quadrilingual publication was edited by Milan Chersonski, now a senior staff writer at Defending History. The page is being developed in close consultation with Mr. Chersonski.

Continue reading

Posted in Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, Milan Chersonski (1937-2021), News & Views, Yiddish Affairs | Tagged , | Comments Off on Heritage Articles from Lithuanian Jewish Community’s “Jerusalem of Lithuania” Going Online

Respublika’s 16 January 2014 Front Page Article “Jews Don’t Want to Wear Nazi Symbols a Second Time”

Posted on 20 January 2014 by Defending History

The following translation, by Geoff Vasil, is of a front page article in the Vilnius daily Respublika (16 January 2014). The Lithuanian original is available online. See also: Geoff Vasil’s comment on the article which may serve as an introduction to some of the local issues and nuances.

Respublika Jan 2014 interviews with Faina Kukliansky and Moishe Beirak

 

Jews Don’t Want to Wear Nazi Symbols a Second Time

January 16, 2014 by Asta MARTIŠIŪTĖ and Olava STRIKULIENĖ, Respublika reporters MEP Vytautas Landsbergis, chairman of the Supreme Soviet/Restored Parliament of Lithuania, speaking at a solemn event to commemorate January 13 [1991], spoke in his speech about the Holocaust as well. Was it necessary to mention this at a ceremony dedicated to the 14 defenders of Lithuanian freedom who died and who hadn’t even been alive during Holocaust times? Beyond this, January 13 [commemorations] didn’t come off without yet another curiosity. A Wehrmacht symbol was used in the “Forget-me-not” campaign and MP Rasa Juknevičienė said next January it will be possible to acquire these symbols [lapel pins] throughout Lithuania, and not exclusively in the capital. Continue reading

Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Human Rights, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Swastikas in Lithuania, Symbology | Comments Off on Respublika’s 16 January 2014 Front Page Article “Jews Don’t Want to Wear Nazi Symbols a Second Time”

Forget Me Knot

Posted on 17 January 2014 by Defending History

O P I N I O N

by Geoff Vasil

 

In an attempt to maintain their reputation as the most anti-Semitic major newspaper in Lithuania, the editors at Respublika have fired a new salvo in their information war against the international forces of Communist Zionism with a straw-man argument designed to rehabilitate the swastika as a Lithuanian cultural heritage symbol.

Continue reading

Posted in Double Games, Geoff Vasil, Human Rights, Media Watch, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory | Comments Off on Forget Me Knot