VILNIUS—The pseudonymous neo-Nazi blogger “Zeppelinus,” long alleged to be the alias of a high official in the Ministry of the Economy (DH still awaits a reply to our open letter of 2013 to the relevant minister), is notorious for his racist, antisemitic, and homophobic images that continue to needlessly damage Lithuania’s good name (sampling at end of article). This web journal’s editor has long been one of his many photoshop and photofake targets, naturally a source of pride for any and all within Vilnius’s bona fide human rights community. As some Lithuanian human rights activists put it, “If you didn’t make it into Zeppelinus’s sicko gallery, you’re not really doing enough for human rights in this country.”
Media Watch
Neo-Nazi Alleged to Work in Lithuanian Economy Ministry Didn’t Like DH’s Report on Vilnius Conference
Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Human Rights, LGBTQ Equal Rights, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views, Racism
Tagged Antisemitism in Lithuania, human rights in Lithuania, Lithuanian Ministry of Economy, Lithuanian Ministry of Finance, Zeppelinus
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Public Shrines to a Holocaust Collaborator and a “Secret” Petition: A Summer’s Strange Media Circus
O P I N I O N / C O L L A B O R A T O R S G L O R I F I E D
by Evaldas Balčiūnas
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In the midst of this past summer’s heatwave here in Lithuania, Delfi.lt, one of the most popular news portals in the land, exploded with discussions on commemorations and memorials for Nazi collaborators in our country. Rimvydas Valatka, a columnist for the portal and signatory of the Declaration of Independence, started it all with his article of 26 July. The “current events background” was the recent removal of the controversial Soviet-era statues of soldiers on Vilnius’s Green Bridge. Valatka, a veteran of Lithuanian journalism with the rarefied street-cred of a Declaration of Independence signatory, appealed for removal of the memorial plaque for Nazi collaborator Jonas Noreika (“Generolas Vėtra”) from a central Vilnius library building, and wrote about a petition for its removal signed by a group of intellectuals and public figures, and addressed to the mayor of Vilnius as well as to the director of the relevant library (Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences), where the plaque hangs prominently in the heart of Lithuania’s capital.
The stone honoring Holocaust collaborator Jonas Noreika tops the lot on the facade of the Genocide Museum on Gedimino Boulevard in the Lithuanian capital, a stone’s throw from the nation’s parliament. When are we going to stop glorifying those who helped annihilate Lithuanian Jewry during the Holocaust? When is this going to come down?
Posted in Debates on the Postwar "Forest Brothers", Dr. Arūnas Bubnys and State Holocaust Revisionism in Lithuania, Evaldas Balčiūnas, History, Human Rights, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, State Glorification of Holocaust Collaborator J. Noreika, Vilnius's Genocide Center and the Genocide Museum it Manages
Tagged Evaldas Balciunas, Holocaust collaborators Glorified, Holocaust in Lithuania, Jonas Noreika (Generolas Vetra)
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Wiesenthal Center Praises Vytautas Bruveris’s Call for Investigating Scope of Local Holocaust Participation
TAURAGĖ (TÁVRIK), LITHUANIA—The Simon Wiesenthal Center today praised an op-ed in the popular Lithuanian news portal Lrytas.lt by prominent journalist Vytautas Bruveris calling upon the government to finally undertake a comprehensive investigation of the scope of Lithuanian complicity in Holocaust crimes. In a statement issued here today by its chief Nazi hunter, Dr. Efraim Zuroff, who is currently in Lithuania on a research expedition, the Center expressed its appreciation and support for the content of the article and expressed the hope that the government would indeed implement the ideas raised by Bruveris.
Posted in Bold Citizens Speak Out, Efraim Zuroff, History, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory
Tagged Efraim Zuroff, Holocaust in Lithuania, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Taurage (Tavrik)
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Double Genocide Discourse Now Standard for the New York Times?
O P I N I O N / M E D I A W A T C H
VILNIUS—Naturally the New York Times cannot publish or even post very many of the Letters to the Editor that it receives. But when a dozen or so reactions from different parts of the world to a single article are all discarded, it is perhaps worth someone posting a submitted letter elsewhere for the record. This is especially true where there is a larger concern. In this case, it is the paper’s imposition, in recent years, of a wall of silence about the Holocaust Obfuscation, World War II revisionism and far-right historiography peddled by East European countries. These are, as it happens, the same countries who are in today’s geopolitics America’s and the West’s most reliable European allies in the New Cold War against the authoritarian, revanchist Putin regime.
The Times’ policy has sometimes extended to misrepresenting the East European far right’s history revisionism as accepted fact by publishing multiple op-eds from only one side of the argument. When the Times did (obliquely) cover the Seventy Years Declaration in early 2012, its reporter, tightly controlled by the State Department, would not mention the declaration by name, would not meet any of the government’s critics to hear their views, confused the two declarations in contest, and quoted a famous Brandeis professor without mentioning he was in town to receive a medal from the Lithuanian president for helping the state’s PR.
Posted in Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Dovid Katz, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, Museums, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory
Tagged Double Genocide + Lithuania, Dovid Katz, Genocide Center Vilnius, Genocide Museum Vilnius, New York Times + Holocaust, New York Times + Jewish Affairs, New York Times + Lithuania, Western media + Eastern Europe
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What Does the Mayor of Vilnius Think About His City’s Thousands of Jewish Graves?
O P I N I O N
by Julius Norwilla
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Back in May, the story broke about an electrical station on an uninhabited hillside by a highway here in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, being made out of pilfered old Jewish gravestones. It quickly spread to the international press, including London’s Daily Mail. The city’s recently elected mayor, Remigijus Šimašius reacted with lightning speed, getting the city’s sign-making maestros to create and mount a handsome solid-metal smartly round-edged bilingual sign condemning the “example of Soviet barbarism” and promising the rapid removal of the stones to a place of dignity where they will form part of a memorial. A PR disaster was spun into a rapid reaction force’s PR triumph against discrimination that could only do our great city proud.
Posted in Defense of Old Jewish Cemeteries and Mass Grave Sites, Double Games, Julius Norwilla, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views, Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery at Piramónt (in Šnipiškės / Shnípishok), Opinion, Politics of Memory, Vilnius Mayor Remigijus Šimašius
Tagged Jewish gravestones in Vilnius, Lithuania + matseyves / maceva / macevot, Lithuanian Jewish cemeteries, Remigijus Šimašius
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In Defense of Transparency at the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra
O P I N I O N / M U S I C
by Ronald C. Kent
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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.
Posted in Christian-Jewish Issues, Collaborators Glorified, Germany, Media Watch, Music, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory
Tagged Andreas Delfs, Carl Orff, Carmina Burana, Edo de Waart, ILHA, International Labor History Association, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, Ronald C. Kent
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New Conflict Over Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery, As New Heritage Commission Gets Underway
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 Defense of Old Jewish Cemeteries and Mass Grave Sites, Human Rights, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views, Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery at Piramónt (in Šnipiškės / Shnípishok), Politics of Memory
Tagged Commission on Jewish heritage in Lithuania, Jewish cemeter at Piramont (Snipiskes, Old Vilna Jewish cemetery, Shnipishok)
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Purveyor of Racist, Misogynist, Antisemitic, Homophobic, Nazist “Art” is Alleged to Work in Lithuania’s Economy Ministry
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.
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 Antisemitism in Lithuania, Economy Ministry of Lithuania, homophobia in Lithuania, human rights in Lithuania, LGBT rights in Lithuania, misogyny in Lithuania, Zeppelinus
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A Russian Observer Replies to Recent Feast of an American Daily Beast
O P I N I O N
by Alex Nosovich (Kaliningrad)
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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.
Posted in Collaborators Glorified, Latvia, Media Watch, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory
Tagged Alex Nosovich, Anti-Nazi Group Secretly Helping Kremlin, Daily Beast, Daily Beast + World Without Nazism, James Kirchick, Neocons (Neoconservatives) + antisemitism, Neoconservatives + Holocaust + Russia, World Without Nazism
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Run-Up to the 16 Feb. 2015 Neo-Nazi March in Central Kaunas
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.
Posted in Celebrations of Fascism, EU, Events, Kaunas, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, Neo-Nazi & Fascist Marches, News & Views, Politics of Memory
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Defending History Team in Vilnius Thanks Targum Shlishi for Support
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:
Posted in Lithuania, Media Watch, News & Views
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Peter Jukes Tweets on Documentary that Glorifies Alleged Nazi Collaborator
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.
Posted in Arts, Collaborators Glorified, Debates on Juozas Lukša, Film, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views, Peter Jukes, Politics of Memory
Tagged Belarusian Humanities University, Cinema Village theater (NY), Darius Udrys, European Humanities University (EHU) in Vilnius, Forest Brothers Lithuania, Holocaust collaborators in Forest Brothers, Holocaust in Lithuania, Jonas Öhman, Juozas Luksa, Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF), New York Times + Holocaust, Peter Jukes, The Invisible Front, Vincas Sruoginis
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Lithuanian TV Nixes LGBT Rights Video, Again
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.
Posted in Human Rights, LGBTQ Equal Rights, Lithuania, Media Watch, News & Views, Opinion
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Hungary’s Supreme Court Forbids Local Media to Use the Term “Far Right” in Describing the Far Right Jobbik Party
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
Posted in Efraim Zuroff, Free Speech & Democracy, Human Rights, Hungary, Media Watch, News & Views, Politics of Memory
Tagged Antisemitism in Hungary, Efraim Zuroff, Jobbik
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Reply to a Roger Cohen Opinion Piece on Ukraine and Lithuania
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.”
Posted in Dovid Katz, Free Speech & Democracy, Media Watch, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Ukraine, Zháger (Žagarė)
Tagged Roger Cohen (New York Times), Roger Cohen + Lithuania, Zhager (Zagare)
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Respublika “Slightly” Edits Efraim Zuroff’s Obituary for Shimon Alperovich
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.
Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Efraim Zuroff, Media Watch, News & Views, Obituaries, Politics of Memory, Shimon Alperovich (1928 – 2014)
Tagged Efraim Zuroff, Respublika, Simon Alperovich (Simonas Alperavicius), Simon Wiesenthal Center Israel Office, Vakaro zinios, Vytis Tomkus
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Efraim Zuroff on Tablet Magazine’s Co-Sponsorship of Lithuanian Government’s Yivo Event, and a Suggestion for Yivo’s Audience
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.
Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, Double Games, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Efraim Zuroff, Events, Foreign Ministries: Holocaust Politics Abuse?, Identity Theft of Litvak Heritage, In the Era of Yivo's 100th, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, United States
Tagged Double Genocide, Efraim Zuroff, Holocaust in Lithuania, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Yivo + Holocaust, Yivo Lithuania
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More Mainstream Media Coverage of the Swastika Issue in Lithuania
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.
Posted in Celebrations of Fascism, EU, Human Rights, Lithuania, Media Watch, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Swastikas in Lithuania, Symbology
Tagged swastikas in Lithuania
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Swedish Film Director Speaks Out on the Lithuanian Holocaust, Sort of, a Little Bit
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.
Posted in Arts, Film, Geoff Vasil, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Sweden
Tagged Double Genocide, Geoff Vasil, Holocaust in Lithuania, Jonas Öhman
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