News & Views

Kristallnacht Becomes PR Hook for Double Genociders at Berlin Events of the “Prague Process Platform”


The Platform of European Memory and Conscience is the name of one of the main European engines of Double Genocide and Holocaust Obfuscation. Apparently funded by the European Union in part (or more), its name is inspired by the full name of the 2008 “Prague Declaration” (on European Conscience and Communism), which is prominently advertised on its home page. Informally it is referred to as the “Prague Process Platform” (PPP)  and is based in the Czech Republic.

THE REPORT FROM THE “PLATFORM”

Kristallnacht, 74 years ago tonight, was the Night of Broken Glass, in which widespread coordinated violence against Jewish citizens of Germany, supported by the Nazi regime, resulted in at least 91 deaths, 30,000 arrests and transfers to concentration camps, and over a thousand synagogues burned down. The event was a major harbinger of the imminent genocide of European Jewry.

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Outgoing Lithuanian PM, Red-Brown Commission and Genocide Center Joining Forces for Mid-November Vilnius Conference Promoting “Double Genocide”


With the recent Lithuanian elections barely out of the way, and the ruling right-wing Homeland Union Conservatives the undisputed losers, the ultranationalist right is losing no time in pressing ahead aggressively with the Double Genocide “red-equals-brown” agenda, reverting to one of the movement’s original slogans: “United Europe — United History.” For pro-tolerance and liberal forces, the profoundly undemocratic message implied is that a united Europe has to also be united (i.e. have one opinion) on questions of history, and that Double Genocide and its central document, the 2008 Prague Declaration, are inviolable truths.

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Posted in "Red-Brown Commission", Antisemitism & Bias, Collaborators Glorified, Double Games, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Events, Free Speech & Democracy, Human Rights, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Vilnius's Genocide Center and the Genocide Museum it Manages, Yad Vashem and Lithuania | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Outgoing Lithuanian PM, Red-Brown Commission and Genocide Center Joining Forces for Mid-November Vilnius Conference Promoting “Double Genocide”

Seventy Years Declaration: Summary Coverage to 1 November 2012



The Seventy Years Declaration

Solemnly commemorates the Holocaust and reaffirms human rights of all people. Opposes the Prague Declaration and ‘Double Genocide’ politics. Rejects glorification of the Waffen SS of Estonia and Latvia and the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF).

Lithuania’s foreign minister’s “moustache response” came within minutes of SYD’s release.

 ———

TEXT AND LIST OF FOUNDING SIGNATORIES

PRESENTED TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT

UPDATE: DOCUMENTARY FILM RELEASED

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Ukrainian Holocaust Revisionists Woo Canada, Exposed by Historian from Lund, Sweden . . .



SUMMARY OF EVENTS AND COVERAGE:

1: Ultranationalists sponsor a North American lecture tour for a Lviv-based museum director (his museum features a profoundly photoshopped image). Harvard University (18 Oct) and a meeting with Canada’s prime minister (19 Oct) are included; the PM unwittingly lends credence to the Holocaust revisionist campaign emanating from Eastern Europe.

2: Lund University (Sweden) historian Dr. Per Anders Rudling protests.

Dr. Per Anders Rudling (Lund University, Sweden)

3: Canadian missile lands in Sweden: nationalist organizations complain to the vice-chancellor at Lund University in Sweden about Dr. Rudling.

4: Exclusive: Per Anders Rudling in DefendingHistory.

5: Scholars issue open letter.

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Jewish Center in Ukraine Apparently Duped into Honoring a Nazi Collaborationist Organization


According to a report received today from a publication in Ukraine (reproduced in full below), the launch of the new Menorah complex in the city of Dnipropetrovsk, billed as the city’s largest building, includes a new museum containing an exhibit that naively whitewashes the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), an infamous pro-Hitler fascist organization responsible for many Jewish deaths during the Holocaust. The exhibit is quoted in the report as including information on Jews “saved” by the OUN, with no mention of its large-scale record of murder.

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“Red-Brown Commission” is Formal Member of Revisionists’ “Platform of European Memory and Conscience”


It was today confirmed by the Platform of European Memory and Conscience that the Lithuanian government’s “International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes of Lithuania” (known for brevity as the “Red-Brown Commission”) is a formal member of the “Platform.” This is further confirmed on the Platform’s website under the list of “Platform Members” (right hand column).

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The Real Truth



O P I N I O N

by Efraim Zuroff

Note: The following letter to the editor in today’s edition of the Baltimore Jewish Times is republished here with the author’s permission. 


 

According to the title chosen for Simone Ellin’s review (Oct. 19) of Ellen Cassedy’s book, We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust, the author “explores the Lithuanian Holocaust from all vantage points.” In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Cassedy neglects the most important vantage point of the history of the Shoa in Lithuania, the uniquely extensive role played by Lithuanians in the mass murder of Jews (not only in Lithuania, but also in Belarus and Poland), a fact incredibly omitted from Ellin’s review. In that respect, it is clear that Ellin was so captivated by Cassedy’s narrative that she failed to realize that the author presented her readers with a very one-sided picture of contemporary Lithuanian-Jewish relations in the wake of the Holocaust.

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Self-Induced Confusion



B O O K S

by Olga Zabludoff

Review of We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust by Ellen Cassedy. University of Nebraska Press, 2012.


Had this title been billed as a simple memoir of Cassedy’s trip to Lithuania in the summer of 2004, my criticism of her book would be tempered. She had gone to the land of her ancestors to study Yiddish at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute and to connect with her Jewish roots. The professors and mentors she encounters at the Yiddish Institute come alive, as do the various Lithuanians and Jews with whom she connects. Cassedy is a good writer who captures physical details well. But even at that, this reviewer found the memoir to be superficial.

The major problem is that Cassedy’s book is being promoted as the Bible of the Lithuanian Holocaust by advocates for the current Lithuanian government and elite establishment which aspire to paint for the outside world a distorted version of the Holocaust. A version defined in shades of gray and the confusion they generate.  A version that incorporates the mythology of equivalency between crimes committed by the Nazi and Soviet occupation regimes.

SEE ALSO THE REVIEWS BY

Dovid Katz in the Algemeiner Journal

Allan Nadler in the Forward

Efraim Zuroff in Haaretz

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Juozas Šibaila, Another “Hero” with a Suppressed Biography


 


O P I N I O N

by Evaldas Balčiūnas

Following the Lithuanian parliament’s recognition of the February 16, 1949 declaration of the Council of the Union of the Struggle for Lithuanian Freedom as an act with the force of law, there was a natural interest in questions about who the partisans who signed that declaration were. It would seem the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania would be the organization to present the most comprehensive biographies for these people.

Unfortunately that’s not the case.

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Happy 91st Birthday to Dr. Rachel Margolis



Tel Aviv’s Leivick House Releases Video of 2009 tribute by the late Ambassador Chen Ivri Apter ♦ Also: FORMER UK PRIME MINISTER GORDON BROWN ♦ 5 MEMBERS OF US CONGRESS ♦ LATE LITHUANIAN PM ALGIRDAS BRAZAUSKAS ♦ TABLET MAGAZINE ♦ ACADEMIC STUDIES PRESS ♦ KEENE STATE COLLEGE ♦ SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE ♦ LORD JANNER OF BRAUNSTONE ♦ ADL DIRECTOR ABRAHAM FOXMAN ♦ NCSJ ♦ METRO WEST HOLOCAUST COUNCIL ♦ JEWISH CHRONICLE ♦ ALGEMEINER JOURNAL (& 2) ♦ RACHEL MARGOLIS.COM ♦ FACT SHEET

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Swedish Historian Stands up to Ukrainian Ultranationalists’ “Conquest of Canada”



1: Ultranationalists sponsor a North American lecture tour for a Lviv-based museum director. Harvard University (18 Oct) and a meeting with Canada’s prime minister (19 Oct) included

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Canadian Prime Minister Manipulated into Praising Holocaust-Distorting Museum in Ukraine


In the course of remarks criticizing the current Ukrainian government for its human rights abuses, made in Gatineau, Quebec, Canada’s prime minister Stephen Harper added words of praise for a visiting director of a Holocaust-distorting museum in Ukraine who was on a Canada lecture tour last week, and for the museum itself. The museum, in Lviv, Ukraine, glorifies and sanitizes some of the local Holocaust perpetrators and collaborators. An account of the prime minister’s remarks appeared in a 19 October 2012 report in the Toronto Sun.

There is no suggestion that the Canadian prime minister agrees with the Ukrainian Holocaust revisionists, or would wish to compliment those glorifying the local perpetrators. Instead, the episode is seen as yet another instance of a well-oiled lobby being able to confuse, combine and confound issues in dealings with Western personalities and institutions that stand far from these issues.  Attempts to make heroes of the local Holocaust perpetrators and collaborators, in the spirit of antisemitic East European (ultra)nationalism, have also been documented this year in Estonia, Hungary, Latvia and Lithuania.

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Open Letter in Support of Per Anders Rudling



O P I N I O N

 

Recently, Dr. Per Anders Rudling of Lund University in Sweden has articulated his criticism of a highly problematic lecture tour in North America, which features Ruslan Zabily, the director of the Lontsky Street Prison Memorial Museum in Lviv, Ukraine. Mr. Zabily, whose academic credentials are slim, is given a forum as a speaker at several prestigious universities. His role in nationalist history activism in Ukraine and his links and contributions to organizations that diminish the violence, ethnic and political, of Ukrainian World War Two nationalism are not problematized.

This is not the place to reiterate Dr. Rudling’s precise and fair criticism in detail. Full documentation can be found at:

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Tel Aviv’s Leivick House Releases 2009 Video of Ambassador Chen Ivri Apter at Margolis Event


Israel’s Ambassador Chen Ivri Apter presenting Dr. Rachel Margolis with a certificate of merit at Leivick House in Tel Aviv. Dr. Margolis is seen wearing the medals won for her bravery fighting against the Nazis in the forests of Lithuania during the Holocaust. Her entire family perished.

Leivick House, one of Israel’s (and the world’s) last Yiddish-in-Yiddish cultural institutions, has released a video clip of the June 2009 visit to its Dov Hoz Street headquarters in central Tel Aviv by Israel’s then ambassador to Latvia and Lithuania, the late Chen Ivri Apter, at an event to honor Dr. Rachel Margolis. It is posted on YouTube (partial English translation here). The event itself was reported in DefendingHistory and the Leivick House website, among other venues.

Dr. Margolis, due to celebrate her 91st birthday next week, is a Vilna Ghetto survivor and anti-Nazi resistance hero who has been targeted by Lithuanian prosecutors, in effect according to some for “the crime of surviving.” Tributes to Dr. Margolis have come from around the world, including former UK prime minister Gordon Brown in 2011.

Ambassador Ivri Apter died last month at the age of 54 after a long battle with cancer that friends always said he never allowed to cloud his love of life and the day ahead.

His short speech at Leivick House is thought likely to go down in history for its courage and forthrightness at a time when his nation’s foreign policy was noticeably starting to tilt in a contrary direction. The Tel Aviv event was organized jointly by DefendingHistory.com and Leivick House.

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The Disquieting 2010-2012 Record of the American Embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania



Posted in "Red-Brown Commission", Double Games, Foreign Ministries: Holocaust Politics Abuse?, Human Rights, LGBTQ Equal Rights, News & Views, Politics of Memory, The Great SLS About-Face, United States, US State Dept Manipulated? | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Disquieting 2010-2012 Record of the American Embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania

Lithuanian President’s Decree on “Red-Brown Commission” is Re-issued with “New Sentence”


Baltic News Service (BNS) has just released yet more convoluted news on the renewal of the “red-brown commission” by, it appears, yet another revised presidential decree. Full text of the BNS report follows below.

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Yivo and the Lithuanian Government: Box coverage to 16 October 2012


New York: Yivo’s Lithuanian Circus—Blow to Holocaust Survivors and their Families—Coming to Town on Tuesday

Milan Chersonski (Vilnius)

Allan Nadler (Drew University)

Faye Ran (New York)

Efraim Zuroff (Jerusalem)

From surrendering books to surrendering history: “sad and mad” Yivo saga continues. When it all started

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Former Director of Yivo Speaks Out on Current Policies Concerning Lithuania


The comments on Dr. Efraim Zuroff’s 14 Oct. 2012 op-ed in The Times of Israel on Yivo’s current policies regarding Lithuanian issues include one (dated 15 Oct.) from Yivo’s former director, Professor Allan Nadler of Drew University. His comment:

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US Documentary Film Maker Releases Correspondence with Yad Vashem on Alliance with Lithuanian “Red-Brown Commission”


The American documentary film maker Richard Bloom, who has produced a number of documentaries on the Holocaust, today released for publication his recent correspondence with Yad Vashem. He said his decision was taken after he failed to receive substantive replies to his recent queries about Yad Vashem rejoining the Lithuanian government’s “red-brown commission.”

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Major New History Paper on the Ukrainian Waffen SS


A major new paper on the history and nationalist mythology of the Ukrainian Waffen SS, by Dr. Per Anders Rudling of Lund University, Sweden, has appeared in the Journal of Slavic Military Studies. Its title is “‘They Defended Ukraine’: The 14. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS (Galizische Nr. 1) Revisited.”

The abstract reads as follows:

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