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Post by Noelfitz on Jan 27, 2009 21:17:53 GMT
Some time ago when I was working in Kuwait the local paper noted that three Jews were elected to the Irish Parliament, Ben Briscoe (FF), Alan Shatter (FG) and Myrvyn Taylor (Lab). Surely not the results expected from an anti-Semitic people. However we also elected a Muslim, when we had one Indian and 165 cowboys in the Dail.
I feel it correct to condemn in the most emphatic way the murder of innocent civilians in Gaza, which can be compared to a ghetto or to a concentration camp.
One of the worst atrocities of the nazis I heard was the rounding up of Jews, locking them in a barn and then setting fire to it. This is similar to Israelis locking Palestinians in a building and then destroying it. Can the world not do something and make "never again" mean something?
Is there any international forum to condemn people or countries for war crimes or crimes against humanity (e, phosphorus bombs on civilian populations).
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Post by Michael O'Donovan on Jan 27, 2009 22:05:20 GMT
Is there any international forum to condemn people or countries for war crimes or crimes against humanity (e, phosphorus bombs on civilian populations). I'm not taking sides on this, but I did read that members of the Israeli security forces have been warned by their authorities not to travel to certain countries for fear of being arrested for war crimes.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 27, 2009 22:56:39 GMT
Noelfitz: I entirely agree that the Israeli attacks on Gaza have been disproportionate (the use of phosphorous bombs being particularly horrific) and have been carried out without due regard for civilian life. The comparison to a ghetto is I think apt, but the comparison to a concentration camp (if by this you mean the Nazi extermination camps) is excessive. Saying that antisemitism has existed and still exists in Ireland does not mean that Ireland as a nation is antisemitic.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 27, 2009 23:00:17 GMT
By the way, before the issue comes up, let me point out that the lifting of the excommunication of the wretched Bishop Richard Williamson does not imply Vatican approval of his notorious anti-semitic and holocaust-denying views, which have rendered him unfit for decent company. Let us pray that he may repent and apologise for his foul statements which have been the occasion of so much scandal, then take a vow of silence or engage in some other fitting reparation.
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Post by Harris on Jan 29, 2009 9:11:33 GMT
By the way, before the issue comes up, let me point out that the lifting of the excommunication of the wretched Bishop Richard Williamson does not imply Vatican approval of his notorious anti-semitic and holocaust-denying views, which have rendered him unfit for decent company. Let us pray that he may repent and apologise for his foul statements which have been the occasion of so much scandal, then take a vow of silence or engage in some other fitting reparation. Unfortunately, I think a personality such as his would find it almost impossible to endure a vow of silence! People like him always have something to say.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jan 29, 2009 12:25:38 GMT
By the way, before the issue comes up, let me point out that the lifting of the excommunication of the wretched Bishop Richard Williamson does not imply Vatican approval of his notorious anti-semitic and holocaust-denying views, which have rendered him unfit for decent company. Let us pray that he may repent and apologise for his foul statements which have been the occasion of so much scandal, then take a vow of silence or engage in some other fitting reparation. Unfortunately, I think a personality such as his would find it almost impossible to endure a vow of silence! People like him always have something to say. I am with Harris on this. But Williamson's latest outburst relates to the Fred Leuchter report. Leuchter was an execution technician who allegedly carried studies on the gas chambers in Auschwitz and Birkenau and who didn't find evidence for their existence. David Irving presented this as evidence in his infamous libel suit against a defendant whose name I don't recall...Deborah Lip....I remember she won. Now I just read through Wikipedia on this and I know no person of any repute takes Leuchter's propositions seriously (as Williamson does), but can anyone tell me the best refutation of the report apart from the film Mr Death: the Rise and Fall of Fred Leuchter?
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Post by Noelfitz on Jan 29, 2009 17:23:51 GMT
Hibernicus You wrote:
"but the comparison to a concentration camp (if by this you mean the Nazi extermination camps) is excessive."
I do not mean this.
The Brits had concentration camps in South Africa, but in spite of huge fatalities they were not extermination camps.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 30, 2009 12:48:38 GMT
Noelfitz: Your qualification is noted. It is in my opinion reasonable to compare Gaza to the sort of "concentration camps" used by the Spaniards in Cuba in the 1890s, the British in South Africa during the Boer War and again in Malaya in the 1950s, and by the US in Vietnam (where they were called "strategic hamlets"). It is necessary to be careful when using the term because for most readers "concentration camps" = those used by the Nazis, where the intent was specifically to exterminate the inmates; and one form of holocaust denial consists precisely in the claim that the Nazi camps were not extermination camps but camps of the other sort, where inmates died from hunger and disease but were not intentionally exterminated. (This is the siginifcance of the denial by Bishop Williamson and such persons that the gas chambers existed.)
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 30, 2009 13:12:19 GMT
The Wikipedia entry on Leuchter and the Leuchter Report links to a refutation by a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences posted on the Nizkor Report site. There is a 2002 book DENYING HISTORY by Michael Shermer of SKEPTIC magazine which does discuss deniers' arguments (Lipstadt does not on the grounds that the deniers are so self-evidently fraudulent that even to publish refutations of them gives them more apparent respectability than they deserve); I do not own this book myself but I have browsed it in shops and I believe it does discuss the Leuchter Report. I should mention that the film MR. DEATH has been criticised because it accepts Leuchter's claim that he was not a Holocaust denier when he undertook the report (even though Errol Morris, the film-maker, makes it clear that he thinks Leuchter was driven by vanity which renders him incapable of questioning his own methodology or reassessing his conclusions once he has made them. When I watched the old X-FILES TV series I remember thinking that a real-life Fox Mulder would be very like the Leuchter portrayed in Morris's film, and that what the portrayal of Mulder left out was the inordinate vanity which this sort of crank often displays). Others have claimed that Leuchter was already anti-semitic when he undertook the Report, and that he had a degree of financial motivation since he had been commissioned to produce his report by supporters of the holocaust denier Ernest Zundel, who was being tried for his utterances under Canadian law. (Incidentally, one of Bishop Williamson's most noxious holocaust denial, Jewish conspiracy utterances was made at the presentation of a "defender of free speech" award to Zundel's defense lawyer, Doug Christie, whose cross-examinations of concentration camp survivors included questions such as "Did you personally measure the pit to see how many bodies were in it?" and "Isn't it true that to survive in the camps you had to be a very good liar". At subsequent holocaust denier trials, such as the Irving case, survivors have generally not been called as witnesses for fear that they would be subjected to similar tactics - this is why none testified in Lipstadt's defence when Irving sued her, for example. By his friends shall ye know Bishop Williamson.) The question of whether Leuchter is a sincere crank corrupted by vanity or a conscious swindler blinded by hatred tends to get caught up in the issue of whether it is ever a good idea to debate holocaust deniers or not; in any case it is clear that his report is worthless (e.g. he took samples in areas which had been exposed to many years of rain and without checking whether the samples he took were from original gas chamber bricks or bricks added when the chamber was reconstructed after the retreating Nazis destroyed it; the chemical analysis was taken from large chunks of brick rather than just the surface which is where the deposits would be found; he assumed that it takes more cyanide to kill a person than to kill a louse when the opposite is the case).
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Post by Noelfitz on Feb 3, 2009 10:09:22 GMT
I referred to Gaza as a concentration camp. This was criticized. I note in the current issue of 'Alive!' that Gaza is "like one big concentration camp.
I note in the last few days there are few messages. Antone like to contribute.?
Incidentally I am going away for two weeks and may not be able to contribute myself.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 3, 2009 11:05:19 GMT
The fact that "Alive" says it doesn't mean that they are correct to do so; I don't approve of the comparison for the reasons given above. I am under a lot of work pressure so for the next couple of weeks I will be posting less frequently.
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Post by Noelfitz on Feb 3, 2009 12:26:07 GMT
Hibernicus,
Thanks for your post.
You will be missed here.
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Post by sceilg on Feb 4, 2009 15:40:04 GMT
(3) In my opinion it is not anti-semitic to say the state of Israel should never have been establsihed in the first place (a view held by many Jews) provided the person who argues this is prepared to acknowledge the right of Jews to equal citizenship in other states, a right which they were so often and shamefully denied at the time of the Holocaust - and, though it pains me to say it, with large and influential sections of Catholic opinion amongst those who denied it to them. But why was this so? You're speaking as if you know better than generations of holy men and Catholic kings, who had their reasons for expelling the Jews from their respective homelands. This isn't some vile, unprovoked hatred they concocted during their sleep one night, you know. I do not believe Israel will be destroyed from without as you have said; it will only ever collapse from within, perhaps now that the generations who built that "country" are now dying out. On the other hand, if it did happen the way you describe, it would be a consequence of history. The very existence of the state of Israel is itself a crime against humanity, and every Jewish settler who forced a Palestinian from his land to set up his own home is complicit in that crime, and should be punished accordingly. Also, I find it hard to be equal in my contempt for Israel and the Muslims when one side is fighting with sticks, stones and homemade rockets, and the other with billions upon billions of dollars worth of military hardware. The extremities of Islam aside - and there are many - any Catholic who openly sympathises with Zionism (which is as anti-Christian as it is anti-Muslim) should be denied the Sacraments.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 5, 2009 10:40:03 GMT
Let us decode Sceilg's views: (a) Any mistreatment Jews get they deserve. Jews should not be treated as equal citizens within a nation-state. (b) Those countries which refused to admit Jewish refugees at the time of the holocaust were perfectly correct to do so, even though this led directly to the extermination of the Jews who were expelled. (c) If this is the same Sceilg who runs the "Irish Bulletin" blog, he declares himself to be a nationalist - that is he believes the world should be organised on the basis of nation-states. He proclaims Jews cannot be members of any other nation, glorifies those "holy men and Catholic kings" who expelled Jews from their nations (so he goes beyond the ghetto solution, then...), and at the same time he denies they should have a nation-state of their own. What then does he propose doing with them? (d) He regards all Israelis as collectively guilty for the displacement of the Palestinians, and thinks that if they were to be exterminated this would be no more than they deserve. He declares that any "Catholic who sympathises with Zionism" should be excommunicated. Given the general tenor of his post, this means not just those who hold the view (from which I dissent) that support for Zionism is a divine mandate, but those who hold the position which I reaffirm that the State of ISrael should continue to exist. I reaffirm also that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is and has been abominable. Military weakness is not a sign of moral superiorirty any more than the reverse; neo-nazi terrorists are generally less well-armed than the police forces who pursue them. Any further exchanges I have with Sceilg will be for the purpose of refutation only; I hereby express my unmitigated contempt for him and repudiation of his views. As he is so free with excommunication and has a blog of his own, may I suggest that the moderator keep a close watch on him and consider excommunicating him from this forum?
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Post by Michael O'Donovan on Feb 5, 2009 23:31:46 GMT
As he is so free with excommunication and has a blog of his own, may I suggest that the moderator keep a close watch on him and consider excommunicating him from this forum? Thank you for that. I disagree completely with Sceilg's opinions but I suppose he or she has the same rights here as one of our atheist members; i.e. they can post unwelcome opinions as long as they are not openly abusive or insulting to other members. Notwithstanding that, I have banned members before for posting time-wasting nonsense and I will do it again if it is necessary.
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