Tag Archives: Double Genocide

Seventy Years Declaration: Summary Coverage to 1 November 2012

Posted on 1 November 2012 by Defending History

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.

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TEXT AND LIST OF FOUNDING SIGNATORIES

PRESENTED TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT

UPDATE: DOCUMENTARY FILM RELEASED

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

Posted on 20 October 2012 by Defending History

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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Lithuanian Foreign Ministry Planning to (Ab)use EU Presidency to Push Red-Brown Politics

Posted on 17 July 2012 by Defending History

In spite of the repeated visible damage to Lithuania’s standing emanating from previous attempts, the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has now announced that red-brown politics in the service of Double Genocide would be one of the goals of its upcoming stint in the rotating presidency of the European Union.

There was diplomatic blood on the floor following the foreign ministry’s failed attempt to insinuate Double Genocide into the Stockholm Program in 2010 (reports here, here, and here).

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Baltic “Double Genocide” Discourse Slips into Naive American Jewish Articles on Lithuania

Posted on 24 April 2012 by Defending History

O P I N I O N

by Dovid Katz

Can history be bought up by even a small state’s nationalist government that has talked itself into the idea that revision of history and wide acceptance of that revision is somehow a national cause? It becomes a serious issue when that state is willing to invest heavily in the enterprise, at a time when the targeted influential foreigners are far from the issues at hand and easily manipulated.

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Lithuania Tries to Whitewash its Role in the Holocaust

Posted on 23 April 2012 by Defending History

O P I N I O N

by Olga Zabludoff

Note: The following letter to the editor appeared in today’s Baltimore Sun.  It is republished here by permission of the author. [Update of 2 May 2012: The editor of VilNews, in a 29 April article, said of the letter’s author: “In this case, she goes too far.” This in turn elicited a response from the editor of DefendingHistory on 1 May.]

 

In response to Ellen Cassedy’s “We are here” (April 18), I offer a second opinion.

Can there be hope for a country that claimed the highest percentage of Jewish deaths in all of Europe? More than 95 percent of Lithuania’s Jews were annihilated — most of them murdered by Lithuanian collaborators who began the frenzied executions of their Jewish neighbors even before the Germans had marched into Lithuania. Yes, there can be hope — if lessons are learned from their past and if the truth is faced by this nation which is now an EU/NATO democracy.

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The Red-Brown Commission in Vilnius and Its Role in the Double Genocide Campaign in Europe

Posted on 25 March 2012 by Defending History

Selection of Documents on the Role of the “International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania” (“The Red-Brown Commission”) in the Double Genocide Campaign in Europe

 

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Joe Melamed, Head of Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel, calls on ‘Real Litvaks’ to Stay Away from Tel Aviv ‘Gala Sham’ on March 5th

Posted on 17 February 2012 by Defending History

Developments have started moving quickly in the ill-starred project to host the current foreign minister of Lithuania as “guest of honor” at a Tel Aviv “gala” at the Dan Panorama Hotel on March 5th.

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Lithuanian Foreign Ministry’s ‘Dual Track Jewish Politics’: At Home & Abroad

Posted on 28 January 2012 by Defending History

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AT HOME. . .

♦ Foreign Minister’s remarks on Jewish conspiracies

♦ An emergency Jewish Community board meeting with twenty-one members in attendance agrees unanimously on a letter of protest to the president of Lithuania; report

♦ Says moustache length is the one difference between Hitler & Stalin and calls eight parliamentarians ‘pathetic’ for signing the Seventy Years Declaration on the anniversary of the Wannsee ‘Final Solution’ conference

♦ Responses from Social Democratic MP Andiukaitis; Milan Chersonski; Roger Cohen in the New York Times; DefendingHistory.com; Adar Primor in Haaretz

♦ Leads Double Genocide moves

♦ Ministry hosts attack on Jewish anti-Nazi partisans

♦ When there’s no Jewish audience, the peoples of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania are Lithuanians, Poles, Belarusians. . .

♦ But the Ministry’s website professes endless love for Jews and Jewish culture

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& ABROAD. . .

♦ Washington DC PR campaign

♦ Vassal ‘King of Litvaks’ anointed

♦ DC embassy’s ‘Sunflowers’

♦ Response

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♦ Tel Aviv embassy’s ‘IsraeLita’

♦ Ambassador defends pro-Nazi ‘partisan’, misinforms about harassment of Jewish survivors who joined the anti-Nazi resistance

♦ Gala event to honor the foreign minister of Lithuania

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♦ NY consulate awards Zimroth the ‘Millennium Star’

♦ Consulate attempts political takeover of Yivo

♦Response

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♦ London embassy’s ‘Graywash’

♦ Response I

♦ Response II

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♦ But former foreign minister, now EU ambassador to Afghanistan, tells WSJ that Nazi rule was a ‘respite from the communists’

♦ Wiesenthal Center’s responses I and II; the debate; German parliamentarians’ response

 

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The Seventy Years Declaration

Posted on 20 January 2012 by Defending History

The Seventy Years Declaration

on the Anniversary of the Final Solution Conference at Wannsee

 

On this the 70th anniversary of the formal adoption by the Nazi leadership of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem” we the undersigned

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The Seventy Years Declaration

Posted on 18 January 2012 by Defending History

O P I N I O N

by Danny Ben-Moshe

This comment appeared today in the Jerusalem Post and is republished here with the author’s permission.

 

On January 20, 1942, the Nazi leadership gathered in a villa on the outskirts of Berlin and adopted the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” The Wannsee Conference, as this became known, from the suburb where the meeting was held, formalized the process that exterminated so much of European Jewry.

As we mark the seventieth anniversary of that 90-minute meeting in which fifteen people condemned millions to death, there are many crucial lessons to learn from the Holocaust. I wish to highlight two.

Firstly, the killing of a people begins not with violence, but through race-based hatred, progressing to institutionalized discrimination and only then culminating in murder. This is why antisemitism, racism and institutionalized discrimination must be addressed, for if left to fester the consequences can be tragic, severe and widespread.

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How the Zingeris-Račinskas Red-Brown Commission “Gently” Pushed Along the Conversion of Holocaust Studies into Double Genocide Studies

Posted on 23 November 2011 by Defending History

O P I N I O N

by Rachel Croucher (Melbourne)

Although not seeking to deny the Holocaust, the ultimate consequence of the movement to redefine genocide is the equalization of National Socialist and Soviet crimes. The characterization of Soviet crimes as genocide is a misrepresentation that hinders authentic remembrance of the Holocaust in Lithuania by helping to obscure the extent and nature of Lithuanian complicity in the killings of the local Jewish population.

The idea that the crimes of Hitler and successive Soviet regimes are in fact equal has been a growing force behind public discourse on the Holocaust since the formulation of the national Holocaust and Genocide Education Program at the sixth meeting of The International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania in June 2002.

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Lithuania Cannot Appease Both World Jewry and Far-Right Extremists

Posted on 22 October 2011 by Defending History

 

O P I N I O N

by Olga Zabludoff

 

I commend Didier Bertin’s knowledgeable and sensitive observations in his article “Lithuania and the Memory of the Holocaust.” My comments here are more in the form of a PS to Mr. Bertin’s words. My take-off point is his reference to the term “Double Genocide,” a government-endorsed concept that has been bandied about in Lithuanian political circles in recent times. But more about this later. Mr. Bertin borrows the term for application in a different dual context: the original genocide of the Jewish people and the current movement on the part of the Lithuanian government to neutralize if not to obliterate the remembrance of the Holocaust.

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A Strange Hearing at the European Parliament, and a Big Fish called Montero

Posted on 19 October 2011 by Defending History

E Y E W I T N E S S  R E P O R T  /  O P I N I O N

by Dovid Katz

Today’s “EPP Hearing on the Commission’s Report: The Memory of the Crimes Committed by Totalitarian Regimes in Europe” (PDF) at the European Parliament in Brussels was a polished and triumphal affair that has reconfirmed — if reconfirmation is necessary — how right MEP Edward McMillan-Scott was in 2009 when he refused to accede to his then party, the British Conservatives, entering the political European Parliament tent of the far-right ECR (European Conservatives and Reformists), when the latter chose as leader a politician with a record of antisemitism and Holocaust Obfuscation, one for whom “Jewish apologies for communism” was a condition for recognition of the facts of the Holocaust.

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Professor Konrad Kwiet Quits the Lithuanian Government’s ‘Red-Brown Commission’

Posted on 13 July 2011 by Defending History

The Holocaust Obfuscation movement suffered a severe blow today with the public resignation from the Lithuanian government’s red-brown commission of Professor Konrad Kwiet, a major international scholar of the Lithuanian Holocaust. The resignation had been announced verbally at the recent ‘Aftermath’ conference held in Melbourne at the Australian Centre for the Study of Jewish Civilisation.

Professor Konrad Kwiet (right) makes a point to Dovid Katz at the June 2011 Aftermath conference at Monash University in Melbourne. Photo: Ariella Leski.

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Litvaks and their Descendants Issue Public Letter Calling for Change in Lithuanian Government’s Holocaust Policies

Posted on 23 June 2011 by Defending History

 

Text of the public letter follows. Queries may be sent to Professor Danny Ben-Moshe at: Danny.Ben-Moshe@vu.edu.au.  UPDATES: Covered by JTA and the Jewish Chronicle.

We the undersigned Litvaks — Jews of Lithuanian origin and their direct and immediate descendants — hereby express:

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DefendingHistory.com announces Media Chronicle of Opposition to the 2008 ‘Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism’

Posted on 5 June 2011 by Defending History

DefendingHistory.com has announced the free availability of a frequently updated resource page that provides links for select major expressions of opposition to the 2008 Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism.  The page is available here or by visiting:

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‘Prague Process’ Crowd, with Lithuanian Jewish politician for cover (as usual), now proceeding with plans to ‘overhaul European history textbooks’ for Double Genocide and Holocaust Obfuscation

Posted on 22 May 2011 by Defending History

The Prague Declaration proponents in European Parliamentary circles, having renamed their movement the ‘Prague Process’, are triumphantly reporting on their latest initiative to bring to fruition yet another of the movement’s stated objectives: to overhaul all the history textbooks in Europe to reflect the supposed ‘equality’ of Nazi and Soviet crimes, in other words to continue with the far right’s revision-of-history project to downgrade the Holocaust in the course of Double Genocide ideology.

As ever, the group is able at critical moments to wheel out Lithuania’s right-wing Jewish MP, Emanuelis Zingeris, himself a signatory of the Prague Declaration, who publicly resigned from his country’s Jewish community many years ago, but continues to run the ‘Jewish track’ of a complicated double-game policy that has led, in 2011, to the absurdity of a year to remember the Holocaust as well as a year to commemorate some of its local perpetrators who are glorified as ‘anti-Soviet heroes’ (see here, here and here).

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Reply to Rokas Grajauskas: Condemnation of Communism Does Not Require Submission to Double Genocide, Holocaust Obfuscation, or the Recent Deterioration in Civil Society and Free Speech in Lithuania

Posted on 7 March 2011 by Defending History

 

O P I N I O N

by Dovid Katz

NOTE: This reply to the Lithuanian Foreign Policy Review paper by Rokas Grajauskas first appeared on the website of LFPR (direct link here).

[UPDATE of 1 March 2013]: The journal refused to publish a reply, but after an intervention from Prof. MEP Leonidas Donskis it was uploaded on the journal’s website for a time, and then removed.]

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Rokas Grajauskas cites me in his recent article on these pages as invoking the notion Holocaust Obfuscation (a term I proposed at a London seminar in February 2008, then formally in 2009) to refer to “the efforts of the post-Communist countries to revive the memory of Stalin’s crimes.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The web journal I edit, DefendingHistory.com, although dedicated primarily to the battle against trivialization of the Holocaust and the concomitant racism and antisemitism of the new Far Right in Eastern Europe, contains a page on Soviet crimes, where I wholeheartedly embrace such Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly resolutions as 1096 (1996) and 1481 (2006), which wisely and rightly condemn Soviet crimes. It is vital that the full extent of these crimes be documented, the victims honored, the subject properly taught in international curricula, museums and memorializing institutions established, and justice pursued to the full extent of law. It is every bit as vital that Western commitment to Baltic security and independence remain unwavering, what with a huge unpredictable neighbor “with a certain past” (and unclear future) situated to the immediate east.

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Six Countries Try to ‘Slip in’ Double Genocide in the ‘Stockholm Programme’; European Commission says ‘No’

Posted on 2 January 2011 by Defending History

Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry had announced on 14 December 2010 that it was the initiator of a new demand from six East European countries ― Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania  — to Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship, that Double Genocide sentiments, and support for effective  criminalization of  the view that the Holocaust was a unique genocide, be incorporated in the new Stockholm Programme before the end of 2010. Less than a week earlier, Lithuania’s president took the same demand with her to a meeting in Brussels.

The Road from Prague to Stockholm (via Vilnius?)

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Does the Road from Prague to Stockholm Go Through Vilnius?

Posted on 16 December 2010 by Defending History

Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry announced on 14 December 2010 that it was the initiator of a new demand from six East European countries ― Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania  — to Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship, that Double Genocide sentiments, and support for effective  criminalization of  the view that the Holocaust was a unique genocide, be incorporated in the new Stockholm Programme before the end of 2010. Less than a week earlier, Lithuania’s president took the same demand with her to a meeting in Brussels.

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