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| February 20, 1998 |
The Honourable Anne McLellan, P.C., M.P.
Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada
Room 360, Justice Building
239 Wellington Street
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0H8
E-mail: mclela@parl.gc.ca
Dear Ms. McLellan:
In my letter to you of February 6, 1998, I pointed out the lack of proportion between the people who had committed the great war crimes of World War II, and the people who your Department of Justice was singling out for action. In that letter, I focused on the example of Japanese war crimes, and promised that I would provide further examples in subsequent letters.
In the present letter, I pursue that same theme — that as the great war crimes falling within living memory were not committed by Ukrainians, your current prosecution of Ukrainians demonstrates a lack of proportion. In the present letter, furthermore, I will address the question of Jewish war crimes, a question which is particularly relevant as the impetus for your current prosecutions seems to come from Jewish groups.
I will present my evidence in four parts; namely, Jewish war crimes and crimes against humanity committed: (1) under Communism, (2) under German occupation during World War II, (3) immediately following World War II, and (4) today in the Middle East.
In every case, I ask you to notice that all my evidence comes from always reputable — and, in fact, usually distinguished — sources, and almost all of it also happens to come from Jewish sources. And as you scrutinize the evidence below, I ask you also continually to compare the magnitude of the crimes being described with the magnitude of the crimes which the Nazi-hunting arm of your Justice Department is alleging against individual Ukrainian Canadians in your current rash of prosecutions.
In presenting the evidence below, I found myself in the uncomfortable position of venturing far into realms of political incorrectness. For this reason, I have judged it necessary to present the evidence in considerable detail. With any briefer presentation, the reader would have found it possible to conclude that because the evidence was scant, no strong conclusions were warranted. It is only by demonstrating how abundant and how unanimous the evidence is that there can be any hope of convincing.
| CONTENTS: | |
| Top Jewish Crimes Under Communism Jewish Crimes Under German Occupation | Jewish Crimes Following WW II Jewish Crimes in the Middle East Conclusions |
Jewish War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity
Under Communism
The Pre-German Slaughter of Ukrainians by the NKVD
Out of the voluminous material on the topic of Jewish war crimes and crimes against humanity under Communism, I will limit myself to a single event: the slaughter by the Jewish-dominated NKVD of non-Jews, primarily Ukrainians, in the summer of 1941 immediately prior to the occupation of Ukraine by German forces.
Concerning the pre-German slaughter of Ukrainians by the NKVD, there appears to be widespread agreement, the slaughter being widely acknowledged in a diversity of sources, and in particular detail in the Einsatzgruppen reports reproduced farther below:
| While the movement to the East was taking place, the NKVD carried out mass arrests and executions, chiefly of Ukrainians — especially those who tried to avoid evacuation. In the jails most prisoners whose period of imprisonment was more than three years were shot; others were evacuated if possible. In several cities the NKVD burned prisons with prisoners in them. (Volodymyr Kubijovyc, editor,Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1963, Volume I, p. 878, Vsevolod Holubnychy and H. M. wrote this section) |
| The Bolsheviks succeeded in annihilating some 10,000 political prisoners in Western Ukraine before and after the outbreak of hostilities (massacres took place in the prisons in Lviv, Zolochiv, Rivne, Dubno, Lutsk, etc.). (Volodymyr Kubijovyc, editor, Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, Volume 1, p. 886) |
| Before fleeing the German advance the Soviet occupational regime murdered thousands of Ukrainian civilians, mainly members of the city's [Lviv's] intelligentsia. (Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Volume 3, p. 222) |
| The Soviets' hurried retreat had tragic consequences for thousands of political prisoners in the jails of Western Ukraine. Unable to evacuate them in time, the NKVD slaughtered their prisoners en masse during the week of 22-29 June 1941, regardless of whether they were incarcerated for major or minor offenses. Major massacres occurred in Lviv, Sambir, and Stanyslaviv in Galicia, where about 10,000 prisoners died, and in Rivne and Lutsk in Volhynia, where another 5000 perished. Coming on the heels of the mass deportations and growing Soviet terror, these executions added greatly to the West Ukrainians' abhorrence of the Soviets. (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, University of Toronto Press, Toronto Buffalo London, 1994, p. 461) |
| Right after the entry [of German forces] we were shown 2,400 dead bodies of Ukrainians liquidated with a shot at the scruff of the neck at the city jail of Lemberg [Lviv] by the Soviets prior to their marching off. (Hans Frank, In the Face of the Gallows, p. 406) |
| In Lvov, several thousand prisoners had been held in three jails. When the Germans arrived on 29 June, the city stank, and the prisons were surrounded by terrified relatives. Unimaginable atrocities had occurred inside. The prisons looked like abattoirs. It had taken the NKVD a week to complete their gruesome task before they fled. (Gwyneth Hughes and Simon Welfare, Red Empire: The Forbidden History of the USSR, 1990, p. 133) |
| We learned that, before the Russian troops had left, a very great number of Lemberg [Lviv] citizens, Ukrainians and Polish inhabitants of other towns and villages had been killed in this prison and in other prisons. Furthermore, there were many corpses of German men and officers, among them many Air Corps officers, and many of them were found mutilated. There was a great bitterness and excitement among the Lemberg population against the Jewish sector of the population. (Erwin Schulz, from May until 26 September, 1941 Commander of Einsatzkommando 5, a subunit of Einsatzgruppe C, in John Mendelsohn, editor,The Holocaust: Selected Documents in Eighteen Volumes, Garland, New York, 1982, Volume 18, p. 18) |
| On the next day, Dr. RASCH informed us to the effect that the killed people in Lemberg amounted to about 5,000. It has been determined without any doubt that the arrests and killings had taken place under the leadership of Jewish functionaries and with the participation of the Jewish inhabitants of Lemberg. That was the reason why there was such an excitement against the Jewish population on the part of the Lemberg citizens. (Erwin Schulz, from May until 26 September, 1941 Commander of Einsatzkommando 5, a subunit of Einsatzgruppe C, in John Mendelsohn, editor, The Holocaust: Selected Documents in Eighteen Volumes, Garland, New York, 1982, Volume 18, p. 18) |
| Chief of Einsatzgruppe B reports that Ukrainian insurrection movements were bloodily suppressed by the NKVD on June 25, 1941 in Lvov. About 3,000 were shot by NKVD. Prison burning. Hardly 20% of Ukrainian intelligentsia has remained. (Operational Situation Report USSR No. 10, July 2, 1941, in Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, and Shmuel Spector, The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selections from the Dispatches of the Nazi Death Squads' Campaign Against the Jews July 1941-January 1943, Holocaust Library, New York, 1989, p. 2) |
| Location: Lvov According to reliable information, the Russians, before withdrawing, shot 30,000 inhabitants. The corpses piled up and burned at the GPU prisons are dreadfully mutilated. The population is greatly excited: 1,000 Jews have already been forcefully gathered together. (Operational Situation Report USSR No. 11, July 3, 1941, in Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, and Shmuel Spector, The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selections from the Dispatches of the Nazi Death Squads' Campaign Against the Jews July 1941-January 1943, Holocaust Library, New York, 1989, p. 4) |
| Location: Zviahel (Novograd-Volynski) ... Before leaving, the Bolsheviks, together with the Jews, murdered several Ukrainians; as an excuse, they used the attempted Ukrainian uprising of June 25, 1941, which tried to free their prisoners. According to reliable information, about 20,000 Ukrainians have disappeared from Lvov, 80% of them belonging to the intelligentsia. The prisons in Lvov were crammed with the bodies of murdered Ukrainians. According to a moderate estimate, in Lvov alone 3-4,000 persons were either killed or deported. In Dobromil, 82 dead bodies were found, 4 of them Jews. The latter were former Bolsheviki informers who had been killed because of their complicity in this act. Near Dobromil an obsolete salt mine pit was discovered. It was completely filled with dead bodies. In the immediate neighborhood, there is a 6X15m mass grave. The number of those murdered in the Dobromil area is estimated to be approximately several hundred. In Sambor on June 26, 1941, about 400 Ukrainians were shot by the Bolsheviks. An additional 120 persons were murdered on June 27, 1941. The remaining 80 prisoners succeeded in overpowerng the Soviet guards, and fled. ... As early as 1939, a larger number of Ukrainians was shot, and 1,500 Ukrainians as well as 500 Poles were deported to the east. Russians and Jews committed these murders in very cruel ways. Bestial mutilations were daily occurrences. Breasts of women and genitals of men were cut off. Jews have also nailed children to the wall and then murdered them. Killing was carried out by shots in the back of the neck. Hand grenades were frequently used for these murders. In Dobromil, women and men were killed with blows by a hammer used to stun cattle before slaughter. In many cases, the prisoners must have been tortured cruelly: bones were broken, etc. In Sambor, the prisoners were gagged and thus prevented from screaming during torture and murder. The Jews, some of whom also held official positions, in addition to their economic supremacy, and who served in the entire Bolshevik police, were always partners in these atrocities. Finally, it was established that seven [German] pilots who had been captured were murdered. Three of them were found in a Russian military hospital where they had been murdered in bed by shots in the abdomen. ... ... Prior to their withdrawal, the Bolsheviks shot 2,800 out of 4,000 Ukrainians imprisoned in the Lutsk prison. According to the statement of 19 Ukrainians who survived the slaughter with more or less serious injuries, the Jews again played a decisive part in the arrests and shooting. ... The investigations at Zlochev proved that the Russians, prior to their withdrawal, arrested and murdered indiscriminately a total of 700 Ukrainians, but, nevertheless, included the entire [local] Ukrainian intelligentsia. (Operational Situation Report USSR No. 24, July 16, 1941, in Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, and Shmuel Spector, The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selections from the Dispatches of the Nazi Death Squads' Campaign Against the Jews July 1941-January 1943, Holocaust Library, New York, 1989, p. 29-33) |
| Location: Pleskau [Pskov] ... The population is in general convinced that it is mostly the Jews who should be held responsible for the atrocities that are committed everywhere. ... As it was learned that the Russians before they left have either deported the Ukrainian intelligentsia, or executed them, that is, murdered them, it is assumed that in the last days before the retreat of the Russians, about 100 influential Ukrainians were murdered [in Pleskau]. So far the bodies have not been found — a search has been initiated. About 100-150 Ukrainians were murdered by the Russians in Kremenets. Some of these Ukrainians are said to have been thrown into cauldrons of boiling water. This has been deduced from the fact that the bodies were found without skin when they were exhumed. ... ... Before leaving Dubno, the Russians, as they had done in Lvov, committed extensive mass-murder. ... Before their flight [from Tarnopol], as in Lvov and Dubno, the Russians went on a rampage there. Disinterments revealed 10 bodies of German soldiers. Almost all of them had their hands tied behind their backs with wire. The bodies revealed traces of extremely cruel mutilations such as gouged eyes, severed tongues and limbs. The number of Ukrainians who were murdered by the Russians, among them women and children, is set finally at 600. Jews and Poles were spared by the Russians. The Ukrainians estimate the total number of [Tarnopol] victims since the occupation of the Ukraine by the Russians at about 2,000. The planned deportation of the Ukrainians already started in 1939. There is hardly a family in Tarnopol from which one or several members have not disappeared. ... The entire Ukrainian intelligentsia is destroyed. Since the beginning of the war, 160 members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia were either murdered or deported. Inhabitants of the town had observed a column of about 1,000 civilians driven out of town by police and army early in the morning of July 1, 1941. As in Lvov, torture chambers were discovered in the cellars of the Court of Justice. Apparently, hot and cold showers were also used here (as in Lemberg [Lviv]) for torture, as several bodies were found, totally naked, their skin burst and torn in many places. A grate was found in another room, made of wire and set above the ground about 1m in height, traces of ashes were found underneath. A Ukrainian engineer, who was also to be murdered but saved his life by smearing the blood of a dead victim over his face, reports that one could also hear screams of pain from women and girls. (Operational Situation Report USSR No. 28, July 20, 1941, in Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, and Shmuel Spector, The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selections from the Dispatches of the Nazi Death Squads' Campaign Against the Jews July 1941-January 1943, Holocaust Library, New York, 1989, p.38-40) |
In closing this section on Jewish crimes against Ukrainians under Communism, it is important to underline two points. First, although the above quotations provide considerable detail, they are far from exhaustive — volumes of similar detail are readily available on these same events. Second, the above quotations concern events that took place within the space of a few weeks. However, similar Jewish war crimes and crimes against humanity committed against Ukrainians during the Communist reign had been taking place for decades, but are too numerous to detail here.
The Domination of the NKVD by Jews
Who was responsible for the 1941 pre-German slaughter of Ukrainians? The NKVD, obviously, and it is frequently stated in the passages above that the NKVD was dominated by Jews. But, was this claim, or this perception, of disproportionate Jewish participation in the Soviet secret police accurate? Observations such as the following suggest that perhaps it was: Yoram Sheftel, John Demjanjuk's Israeli defense attorney, reports the following in connection with his visit to the Simferopol, Ukraine, KGB headquarters in 1990:
| On the right-hand wall was a stone memorial plaque engraved with the names of about thirty KGB men from Simferopol who had fallen in the Great Patriotic War, as the Soviets call World War II. I was shocked and angry as I read the names: the first was Polonski and the last Levinstein, and all those between were ones like Zalmonowitz, Geller and Kagan — all Jews. The best of Jewish youth in Russia, the cradle of Zionism, had sold itself and its soul to the Red Devil. (Yoram Sheftel, The Demjanjuk Affair: The Rise and Fall of a Show-Trial, Victor Gollancz, London, 1994, p. 301) |
What Sheftel seems to be saying, then, is that out of thirty names of Simferopol KGB personnel who died in the war, all thirty were Jewish. Of course Sheftel's sample of 30 is not necessarily a sample that is representative of the entire NKVD; however the Jewish domination of the entire NKVD is not a rare or dubious hypothesis, but is one, rather, that is upheld from more than one direction:
| As a Jew, I'm interested in another question entirely: Why were there so many Jews among the NKVD-MVD investigators — including many of the most terrible? It's a painful question for me but I cannot evade it. (Yevgenia Albats, The State Within a State: The KGB and its Hold on Russia, Past, Present and Future, 1994, p. 147) |
| Jews abounded [also] at the lower levels of the Party machinery — especially in the Cheka and its successors, the GPU, the OGPU and the NKVD.... It is difficult to suggest a satisfactory reason for the prevalence of Jews in the Cheka. It may be that having suffered at the hand of the former Russian authorities they wanted to seize the reins of real power in the new state for themselves. (Leonard Shapiro, The Role of Jews in the Russian Revolutionary Movement, Slavonic and East European Review, 1961, 40, p. 165) |
| CONTENTS: | |
| Top Jewish Crimes Under Communism Jewish Crimes Under German Occupation | Jewish Crimes Following WW II Jewish Crimes in the Middle East Conclusions |
Jewish War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity
Under German Occupation
Much is made — in the media, and perhaps also within your Department of Justice — of the fact that numbers of Ukrainians collaborated with the occupying Germans. However, the Jews also had theirkapos (Jewish Nazi police), their Judenrat (Council of Elders administering Nazi policies), their Jewish collaborators and informers. The media make much of Ukrainian auxiliary police helping the Germans, but seem to be unaware that under threat of immediate death, collaboration was forthcoming from more than one direction:
| The Jüdische Ordnungsdienst, as the Jewish police in the ghettos were called, furnished thousands of men for seizure operations. In the Warsaw ghetto alone the Jewish police numbered approximately 2500; in Lodz they were about 1200 men strong; the Lvov ghetto had an Ordnungsdienst of 500 men; and so on. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Quadrangle Books, Chicago, 1961, p. 310) |
Given such large numbers of Jewish police as those mentioned above — we are talking aboutthousands — then for every story of Ukrainian police auxiliary coming to arrest a Jew on behalf of the Nazis, would it be hard to find a story of Jewish police auxiliary coming to do exactly the same? In the game of saving one's life by serving a ruthless master with the requisite enthusiasm, were there not a few Jews who also excelled? And has your Department of Justice placed the list of Ukrainian collaborators side by side with the list of Jewish collaborators, and impartially determined that the Ukrainian list is the longer of the two, or the more reprehensible — or, rather, does your Department of Justice not even have a Jewish list?
But to point out that Jews also provided manpower for Nazi police actions may be to understate the case. In fact, it is possible to entertain the notion that wherever feasible, anti-Jewish police actions fell within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Jewish kapos:
| The Satanic plan of the Nazis assured that the personal fate of each Jew — whether for life or death — be exclusively left up to the decisions of the "councils of elders" [Judenrat]. The Nazis, from time to time, decided upon a general quota for the work of the camps and for extermination, but the individual selection was left up to the "council of elders", with the enforcement of kidnappings and arrests also placed in the hands of the Jewish police (kapos). By this shrewd method, the Nazis were highly successful in accomplishing mass murder and poisoning the atmosphere of the ghetto through moral degeneration and corruption. (Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals, Neturei Karta of U.S.A., Brooklyn, 1977, pp. 119-120, emphasis added) |
In his moving letter to the editor below, Israel Shahak underlines that almost all the administrative tasks and policing required by the Nazis was placed in Jewish hands, that Jewish collaborators were ubiquitous, and that it was Jewish collaborators who rendered the Jewish Holocaust feasible and who stood as obstacles in the path of Jewish resistance. Note, particularly, that the children of the Warsaw ghetto were taught to fear the Jewish collaborator more than the Ukrainian collaborator:
| Falsification of the Holocaust Letter to the editor by Prof. Israel Shahak, published on 19 May 1989 in Kol Ha'ir, Jerusalem. Available online at: http://www.kaiwan.com/codoh/newsdesk/890519.HTML I disagree with the opinion of Haim Baram that the Israeli education system has managed to instil a "Holocaust awareness" in its pupils (Kol Ha'Ir 12.5.89). It's not an awareness of the Holocaust but rather the myth of the Holocaust or even a falsification of the Holocaust (in the sense that "a half-truth is worse than a lie") which has been instilled here. As one who himself lived through the Holocaust, first in Warsaw then in Bergen-Belsen, I will give an immediate example of the total ignorance of daily life during the Holocaust. In the Warsaw ghetto, even during the period of the first massive extermination (June to October 1943), one saw almost no German soldiers. Nearly all the work of administration, and later the work of transporting hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths, was carried out by Jewish collaborators. Before the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (the planning of which only started after the extermination of the majority of Jews in Warsaw), the Jewish underground killed, with perfect justification, every Jewish collaborator they could find. If they had not done so the Uprising could never have started. The majority of the population of the Ghetto hated the collaborators far more than the German Nazis. Every Jewish child was taught, and this saved the lives of some of them "if you enter a square from which there are three exits, one guarded by a German SS man, one by an Ukrainian and one by a Jewish policeman, then you should first try to pass the German, and then maybe the Ukrainian, but never the Jew". One of my own strongest memories is that, when the Jewish underground killed a despicable collaborator close to my home at the end of February 1943, I danced and sang around the still bleeding corpse together with the other children. I still do not regret this, quite the contrary. It is clear that such events were not exclusive to the Jews, the entire Nazi success in easy and continued rule over millions of people stemmed from the subtle and diabolical use of collaborators, who did most of the dirty work for them. But does anybody now know about this? This, and not what is "instilled" was the reality. Of the Yad Vashem (official state Holocaust museum in Jerusalem — Ed.) theatre, I do not wish to speak at all. It, and its vile exploiting, such as honouring South Africa collaborators with the Nazis are truly beneath contempt. Therefore, if we knew a little of the truth about the Holocaust, we would at least understand (with or without agreeing) why the Palestinians are now eliminating their collaborators. That is the only means they have if they wish to continue to struggle against our limb-breaking regime. Kind regards, [Israel Shahak] |
Here is the story of one such Jewish collaborator:
| Moldetsky, a leader of the Zionist Workers Party (Poalei Zion), who was appointed head of the council of elders in Bedzin, and who, over the course of years, chose thousands of Jews for forced labor and extermination, succeeded in remaining alive. For the mass deportations, Moldetsky published a decree which was completely fraudulent and deceiving, in which he said: "Jews, dress up in your holiday clothes and march joyfully to the gathering places mentioned above. No one is to remain at home. ..." The Jews, in their innocence, obeyed him. The result was that people with large families — as well as the elderly — a total of 8,000, were sent to Auschwitz. The babies were pushed into sacks by the Nazis. ... After the war, Moldetsky — by merit of Zionist activities — was understandably one of the first to receive an immigration certificate to Palestine. His collaboration in the murder of tens of thousands of Jews did not make him unfit in the eyes of the officials of the Jewish Agency, who were distributing the certificates. He went to Eretz Yisroel where, it has been reported, the revengeful hand of the Jews of Bedzin killed him while he was taking a trip in the mountains. (Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals, Neturei Karta of U.S.A., Brooklyn, 1977, pp. 122-123) |
The media make much of Ukrainians welcoming the invading Germans. For example, on October 24, 1993, Morley Safer stated on the 60 Minutes story The Ugly Face of Freedom that "The same square [in Lviv, Ukraine] greeted Hitler's troops fifty years ago as liberators," making this seem like a symptom of a Ukrainian sympathy for Naziism. What Mr. Safer did not specify is who were the people in that square who were welcoming Hitler's troops, and the truth was that all people — Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews — welcomed Hitler's troops. Jews welcomed Hitler's troops? Yes, so it would appear:
| The prevailing conviction [was] that bad things came from Russia and good things from Germany. The Jews were historically oriented away from Russia and toward Germany; not Russia but Germany had been their traditional place of refuge. During October and November, 1939, that conviction, among other things, drove thousands of Jews from Russian-occupied Poland to German-occupied Poland. The stream was not stopped until the Germans closed the border. Similarly, one year later, at the time of Soviet mass deportations in the newly occupied territories, [there was] widespread unrest among Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews alike. Almost everyone was waiting for the arrival of the German army. When the army finally arrived, in the summer of 1941, old Jews in particular remembered that in the First World War the Germans had come as quasi-liberators. These Jews did not expect that now the Germans would come as persecutors and killers. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Quadrangle Books, Chicago, 1961, p. 206) |
Upon experiencing the impulse to blame Ukrainians for welcoming the Germans, the impartial observer might recognize that all groups had been traumatized by their exposure to Communism, that in Western Ukraine in the first days of the war none knew whether the Germans were bringing good or ill, and that all hoped that the change of administrations would bring relief.
The media make much of Ukrainian cruelty on behalf of the Nazis, sometimes passing along the facile comment that Ukrainians were in some sense "worse than the Nazis." For example, Morley Safer, addressing himself to Simon Wiesenthal on the same 60 Minutes story disclosed that "I get the impression from people that the actions of the Ukrainians, if anything, were worse than the Germans." What Mr. Safer seemed to be unaware of is that an impartial review of history reveals a similar cruelty among Jews, and warrants a similar condemnation:
| Question survivors of the ghettoes and camps. They all certify that the beatings they received at the hands of the Jewish "golden youth" were filled with scorn. They fulfilled their tasks with a zeal and cruelty to a greater extent than that required by the German commanders. (Y. Efroiken, Sanctity and Valor of the Jews, in Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals, Neturei Karta of U.S.A., Brooklyn, 1977, p. 21) |
| He [K. Tzetnik] depicts the figure of Eliezer Greenbaum, son of Yitzchak Greenbaum, who, thanks to his tactics of acting as informant and displaying cruelty — to an extent which amazed even the Germans — was elevated to the rank of the bloc commander. (Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals, Neturei Karta of U.S.A., Brooklyn, 1977, p. 21) |
| Practically all of the kapo officers were academicians — persons with degrees — who behaved like wild beasts and at times were more cruel than the Nazis. (Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals, Neturei Karta of U.S.A., Brooklyn, 1977, p. 121) |
Is it in the interests of Canadian justice to prosecute the Ukrainian collaborators while at the same time granting immunity to the Jewish collaborators? Are the Jewish collaborators to be forgiven because they served their German masters under duress? If so, then why should Ukrainians not be accorded the same understanding? — They served under a comparable duress. The Ukrainian populace was treated by the Germans with the utmost severity and cruelty. More importantly, the bulk of the Ukrainian camp guards were conscripted from Soviet prisoners of war who had no motivation to remain loyal to the Soviets by whom they had been brutalized, who knew nothing of any future Holocaust, and whose only option was to remain in the German POW camps and perish. If collaboration with the Germans is exculpated by the defense of escape from a holocaust, then these Ukrainian POWs must receive full exculpation, as they were being exterminated in the German POW camps by the millions:
| Confident of victory and anxious to eliminate "surplus" Slavs, Nazi authorities herded the prisoners into open-air camps encircled by barbed wire and allowed them to die of exposure, disease, and hunger. Often they simply executed their captives. Consequently, by the end of the war, of the 5.8 million Soviet prisoners who had fallen into German hands, about 3.3 million had perished. About 1.3 million of these fatalities occurred in Ukraine. (Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, University of Toronto Press, Toronto Buffalo London, 1994, p. 468) |
| CONTENTS: | |
| Top Jewish Crimes Under Communism Jewish Crimes Under German Occupation | Jewish Crimes Following WW II Jewish Crimes in the Middle East Conclusions |
Jewish War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity
Immediately Following the Second World War
All evidence in this section is taken from John Sack's En Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945, Basic Books, New York, 1993.
The Author
John Sack, author of An Eye for an Eye is Jewish, and is described on the back cover of the book as follows:
| John Sack has been a journalist for fifty years. He was a newspaper reporter in North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia; a contributor to Harper's, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker; a contributing editor of Esquire; a writer, producer, and special correspondent for CBS News, and its bureau chief in Spain; a war correspondent in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq; and the author of seven nonfiction books, including M and Lieutenant Calley. |
The Post-War War Criminals Were Jews
| He was appointed chief of the Office of State Security for Silesia, opened an office in Kattowitz, put up a picture of Stalin, and put Jews in charge of Intelligence, Imprisonment, etcetera, and in three-fourths of the other officers' jobs. But still, Josef was not the good fairy. The good fairy was Stalin. Stalin's fondness for Jews wasn't strange to the Jews, who assumed that he wanted the Germans pursued by the hounds of hell: themselves. ... Why then was Stalin so partial to Jews? Stalin didn't say. ... On his orders, a Jew whose father had died at Treblinka would be chief of the Office of State Security, and Jews would be chiefs of all the departments, though from now on their names wouldn't be Jewish ones but "General Romkowski"s and "Colonel Rozanski"s. In time, these people appointed all the security chiefs for Poland — including Josef, who now would be Jozef, and who'd never wonder, Why does Stalin like Jews? (John Sack, En Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945, Basic Books, New York, 1993, pp. 52-53) |
| A friend in Prague was in Czechoslovakia's own Office of State Security, which ... Stalin had also packed with Jews. (John Sack, An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945, Basic Books, New York, 1993, p. 96) |
| On Wednesday, October 17, the President of Poland decreed that the Germans who weren't in prisons be thrown out of Poland and Poland-administered Germany, and, to the pealing of bells, the Polish police now rounded them up and herded them — ten million people — onto the trains, enforcing the biggest migration in all human history. In Kattowitz, as in Kielce, Breslau, Stettin, and some other cities, the chief of police was a Jew. Many were former partisans who, in August, 1944, had been celebrating in Lublin when the police chief of Poland, a Catholic ... made a Jew the police chief of Lublin and Jews all the precinct chiefs there. The next year, 1945, these people became the chiefs in some of Poland and Poland-administered Germany. In Breslau, the biggest city in Poland-administered Germany, with 300,000 inhabitants, the chief of police, the chief of the Office's section for Germans, the chief of the Polish army's own Office (its Corps of Internal Security) and even the mayor of Breslau were Jews. (John Sack, An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945, Basic Books, New York, 1993, p. 138) |
| In places like Gleiwitz, the Poles stood against the prison wall as [the Jewish] Implementation tied them to big iron rings, said, "Ready!" "Aim!" "Fire!" shot them, and told the Polish guards, "Don't talk about this." The guards, being Poles, weren't pleased, but the Jacobs, Josefs and Pineks, the Office's brass, stayed loyal to Stalin, for they thought of themselves as Jews, not as Polish patriots. And that's why the Good Fairy Stalin ... had hired all the Jews ... and had packed them into his Office of State Security, his instrument in the People's Republic of Poland. (John Sack, An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945, Basic Books, New York, 1993, p. 139) |
| The police chief in Kattowitz was Pinek Pakanowski, and the police chief in Breslau was Shmuel "Gross," who used the Polish name Mieczyslaw "Gross." Some other Jewish police chiefs in Poland and Poland-administered Germany were Yechiel Grynspan in Hrubieszow, Ayzer Maka in Bielsko-Biala, and an unidentified man in Zabkowice. The partisans in Lublin — two hundred men, all Jews — were in the "Chiel Group" of the Holod Battalion: the group commander was Captain Yechiel "Chiel" Grynspan and the battalion commander ... was Captain Aleksander Skotnicki, known as Zemsta. The police chief of Poland was Juzwak, known as General Witold.... "Gross" became the police chief of Lublin ... and one of his eight precinct chiefs was Sever Rubinstein. According to "Gross," eighty percent of the police officers in Lublin and fifty percent of the policemen in Lublin were Jews. (John Sack, An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945, Basic Books, New York, 1993, p. 215) |
Some of the Post-War War Crimes that Jews Committed
| Day after day, the Germans in Shlomo's cellar went to the second and third-floor offices. As many as eight interrogators, almost all Jews, stood around any one German saying, "Were you in the Nazi Party?" Sometimes a German said, "Yes," and the boys shouted, "Du schwein! You pig!" and beat him and broke his arm, perhaps before sending him to his cell.... ... But sometimes a German wouldn't confess. One such hard case was a fifty-year-old who was strolling along when a $200 informant said, "You were in the Party! I know it!" The man was brought to the gray building and to a third-floor interrogation room, and a boy asked him, "Were you in the Party?" "No, I wasn't in it." "How many people work for you?" "In the high season, thirty-five." "You must have been in the Party," the boy deduced. He asked for the German's wallet, where he found a fishing license with the stamp of the German Anglers Association. Studying it, he told the German, "It's stamped by the Party." "It's not," said the German. He'd lost his left arm in World War I and was using his right arm to gesture with, and, to the boy, he may have seemed to be Heiling Hitler. The boy became violent. He grabbed the man's collar, hit the man's body onto the floor, and, in his boots, jumped on the man's cringing chest as though jumping rope. A half dozen other interrogators, almost all Jews, pushed the man onto a couch, pulled off his trousers, and hit him with hard rubber clubs and hard rubber hoses full of stones. The sweat started running down the Jews' arms, and the blood down the man's naked legs. "Warst du in der Partei?" "Nein!" "Warst du in der Partei?" "Nein!" the German screamed — screamed, till the boys had to go to Shlomo's kitchen for a wooden spoon and to use it to cram some rags in the German's mouth. Then they resumed beating him. (John Sack, An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945, Basic Books, New York, 1993, p. 75) |
| She [Lola, the Jewish camp commandant] didn't intervene when her guards got drunk, opened the cells, pulled out the Germans, put blankets on them so the welts wouldn't embarrass the Polish courts, said, "Pigs!" and then used their guns like clubs. At Auschwitz, the Jews weren't raped (the SS men could be hanged for it) but at Gleiwitz one ardent interrogator pulled off a German girl's clothes, pulled her onto his lap, and told her, "Let's do it! I've got a Persian lamb coat for you!" but if Lola knew about it, she just ignored it. In time, the Germans' screams seemed an attribute of the prison air, but Lola said nothing, and if any inner voice told the Jewish guards, You don't know he's guilty, then the Germans' blond hair, blue eyes, and the German's own German language attested that they were Hitler's hatchet men. One day, a German in pitch-black pants, the SS's color, showed up in Lola's prison. ... Some guards, all girls, then seized the incriminating evidence: the man's black pants, pulling them off so aggressively that one of his tendons tore. The man screamed, but the girls said, "Shut up!" and they didn't recognize that the pants were part of a boy scout uniform. The "man" was fourteen years old. The girls decided to torture him. By now, the Office of State Security had 227 prisons for Germans, and each had its characteristic way of taking revenge for World War II. The boys used sticks in Breslau but splinters in Frankenstein, forcing them up a German's nails. The boys in Wunschelberg whipped a German, poured coffee into the whip-wounds, and told him, "You won't just die! You'll croak!" At the 800-person prison in Myslowitz, whose commandant was a Jew from Auschwitz, twenty years old, the boys dumped excrement on a German's head, told him, "Pick that shit up," and, when the German did, dumped it on his head again. The boys in Glatz played accordians to drown out the "Nein"s as they knocked a German's teeth out, and one Jewish boy in Neisse made a German pull out his own gold tooth.... The girls in Gleiwitz used fire. They held down the [fourteen-year-old] German boy, put out their cigarettes on him, and, using gasoline, set his curly black hair afire. ... At last released, the German went home, fell into bed, and, wrapping his arms around his head like a boxer who's on the ropes, continued screaming, "Don't do it!" His scalp was a moth-eaten rug.... In time, he was sent to a mental ward, and he never left it. (John Sack, An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945, Basic Books, New York, 1993, pp. 87-88) |
| The guards used clubs, bedboards, crowbars, and the Germans' own crutches, ... and at times blurred the distinction between corporal and capital punishment by seizing a German's arms and legs and swinging his head against the wall like a battering ram. In the center ring, Shlomo used his pet birchwood stools on the Germans, but he was unsatisfied and his guards came back again and again on many marathon nights. The dead bodies went to the morgue every morning ... and the dead people's names went to Shlomo. ... The body count was enormous.... ... They got the Germans to beat each other: to jump on each other's spines and to punch each other's noses, and hit the Germans so hard that they once knocked a German's glass eye out. The guards raped the German women — one, who was thirteen years old, got pregnant — and trained their dogs to bite off the German men's genitals at the command of "Sic!" ... ... In time, three-fourths of the Germans in Shlomo's camp were dead, and Shlomo announced, "What the Germans couldn't do in five years at Auschwitz, I've done in five months at Schwientochlowitz." (John Sack, An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945, Basic Books, New York, 1993, pp. 106-107) |
| At Potulice, more Germans died than Jews had died there during the war. ... "You pigs!" the Jews cried, whipping the Germans, and one hundred died at Myslowitz every day. At Grottkau, the Germans were buried in potato sacks, but at Hohensalza, they climbed right into the coffins, where the commandant wasted them. At Blechhammer, the Jewish commandant wouldn't even look at the Germans, and they died sight unseen. ... In that vast area, the Office of State Security ran 1,255 camps for Germans, and twenty to fifty percent of the Germans died in virtually every one. But the word got out. Taking trains to Berlin, the whistle-blowers reported this to the British and Americans.... [O]n Thursday, August 16, 1945, Winston Churchill rose in the House of Commons and said, "Enormous numbers [of Germans] are utterly unaccounted for. It is not impossible that tragedy on a prodigious scale is unfolding itself behind the Iron Curtain." Another member of the Commons said, "Is this what our soldiers died for?" and in Washington an American senator put in the Congressional Record of Friday, August 2, "One would expect that after the horrors in Nazi concentration camps, nothing like that could ever happen again. Unfortunately...." The senator then told of beatings, shootings, of water tortures, or arteries cut, of "brains splashed on the ceiling" in the Office's concentration camps. ... The loudest objection was by the Red Cross — not the International one, in Geneva, but the American one. Its people in Warsaw drove down to Kattowitz to speak with the Jewish boy who was Secretary of State Security: Pinek.... (John Sack, An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945, Basic Books, New York, 1993, pp. 110-111) |
| In the next three years, from sixty thousand to eighty thousand would die in the Office's institutions, much, much less than the number of Jews who'd died at Auschwitz but more than the number who'd died at Belsen or Buchenwald or one thousand places the Jews of the world now proclaim, "We will never forget." (John Sack, An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945, Basic Books, New York, 1993, p. 114) |
| Often the "Nazis" were well below the minimum membership age. At one of Chaim's camps in Silesia was a German who'd just been born, and at a camp near the Baltic Sea was a whole barracks of white-striped cribs and of eight-pound prisoners. They didn't have milk, for the red-headed doctor, a Jew from Auschwitz, didn't let the mothers in, telling the Polish inspectors, "It's enough if my papers say I did." Of the fifty babies there, forty-eight died. (John Sack, An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945, Basic Books, New York, 1993, p. 128) |
| One day, the [Jewish] deputy [Czeslaw] started a fire in one of the German barracks, cried, "Sabotage!" and as the German women scooped up the sand, carried it in their skirts, and dumped it on the ferocious flames, he pushed the hysterical women in. As for the guards, they once put a German's black beard in a vise, locked the vice solidly, and set the German afire. Every day the names of the Germans who'd died went to Czeslaw, who always said, "Why so few?" In time, almost all of Bielitz was dead.... The wretchedest Germans there were the women of Gruben. During the war, the SS had buried some Poles, five hundred bodies, in a wide meadow near Lamsdorf, but Czeslaw had heard there were ninety thousand, and he ordered the women of Gruben to dig them up. The women did, and they started to suffer nausea as the bodies, black as the stuff in a gutter, appeared. The faces were rotten, the flesh was glue, but the guards — who had often seemed psychopathic, making a German woman drink urine, drink blood, and eat a man's excrement, inserting an oily five-mark bill in a woman's vagina, putting a match to it — shouted at the women of Gruben, "Lie down with them!" The women did, and the guards shouted, "Hug them!" "Kiss them!" "Make love with them!" and, with their rifles, pushed the backs of the women's heads until their eyes, noses and mouths were deep in the Polish faces' slime. The women who clamped their lips couldn't scream, and the women who screamed had to taste something vile. Spitting, retching, the women at last stood up, the wet tendrils still on their chins, fingers, clothes, the wet seeping into the fibers, the stink like a mist around them as they marched back to Lamsdorf. There were no showers there, and the corpses had all had typhus, apparently, and sixty-four women of Gruben died. (John Sack, An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945, Basic Books, New York, 1993, pp. 130-131) |
| According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, in Geneva, it wasn't allowed to visit the camps for German POWs in Poland until the summer of 1946, and it was never allowed to visit the camps for German civilians. At the order of the German Parliament, a secret study was made by the German Federal Archives and was delivered to Parliament on May 28, 1974. The report concluded, "In the Polish camps and prisons, there were probably 200,000 or more people, with a death rate of twenty to fifty percent. This would mean that 40,000 to 100,000 but certainly more than 60,000 people perished there." Since at some camps the death rate was fifty percent, 40,000 would be too low, and since at some camps the death rate was twenty percent, 100,000 would be too high, and I've estimated that 60,000 to 80,000 died. The number, in fact, may be higher, for though the report doesn't say so, the death rate at some camps was eighty percent. (John Sack, An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945, Basic Books, New York, 1993, p. 206) |
| Anne O'Hare McCormick, in her column in the New York Times of February 4, 1946, compared what the Poles were doing to the Germans to Nazi cruelties, and Congressman B. Carroll Reece, of Tennessee, in the House of Representatives on May 16 1957, called it genocide. Of the Germans who'd lived in Poland and Poland-administered Germany after the war, I calculate that by 1950 approximately 1,467,700 died. (John Sack, An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945, Basic Books, New York, 1993, p. 215) |
Specificity of the Eye For an Eye Evidence
John Sack provides detailed notes and sources, and lists a large number of the Jews who were involved in the above crimes. Within Sack's documentation can be found the following note indicating the existence of vast archives testifying to Jewish war crimes and crimes against humanity following World War II, and whose analysis could keep a small army of Canadians in your Justice Department's war crimes unit employed for years:
| Just as thousands of Jews made oral and written statements about their experiences in the Holocaust, so did thousands of Germans write statements about their experiences after the war. Forty thousand of these are stored at the Bundesarchiv, the German Federal Archives, in Koblenz. Of these, 748 are published in eight volumes.... (John Sack, An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945, Basic Books, New York, 1993, p. 218) |
| CONTENTS: | |
| Top Jewish Crimes Under Communism Jewish Crimes Under German Occupation | Jewish Crimes Following WW II Jewish Crimes in the Middle East Conclusions |
Contemporary Jewish War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity
in the Middle East
Horrible as the events described in the preceding three sections above are, in one sense we are insulated from them — by time. The events are not happening now. They are history. Today, it is too late to hunt down the perpetrators, or almost too late. The victims are largely in their graves, their tormentors have largely joined them, the suffering is long ended, and even the first-hand memory of the suffering has almost been snuffed out. Although much work remains for historians to complete, the rest of us can go on with our lives.
However, this is not the case for the horrors described below. They are contemporary. Blood flows today. The screams of the tortured echo today. These horrors are within our power to stop, and within our power to punish. We cannot read about them and then simply go on with our lives.
Most relevant to the topic of Canadian prosecution of war criminals — the Israeli war criminals described below are still young and hale, nothing stops them from immigrating to Canada, and it is likely that some are living among us today. That aging Ukrainians are prosecuted for nothing worse than — under threat of death — reluctantly donning some German uniform and perfunctorily carrying out some conjectured duties, while young murderers and torturers with blood still fresh on their hands walk free and unpunished among us, is an incongruity that my present letter asks your Justice Department to explain.
The Author
The quotations below are all from Norman G. Finkelstein, mainly from his The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Years, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 1996; and one from his Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, Verso, London and New York, 1995.
Norman Finkelstein teaches international relations and political theory at City University of New York and New York University. The glowing reviews appearing on the backs of his two books are too numerous to reproduce here. Perhaps, however, the dedication in his Image and Reality provides valuable insight into his background:
| To my beloved parents, Maryla Husyt Finkelstein, survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, Maidanek concentration camp and Zacharias Finkelstein, survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, Auschwitz concentration camp. May I never forget or forgive what was done to them. |
Let us begin by noting a few statistics that Finkelstein provides concerning the birth of Israel:
| Between 1947 and 1949, some 750,000 Palestinians were expelled as Israel declared its independence, and in June 1967 some 300,000 more Palestinians fled or were driven into exile as Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza. Hundreds of villages were systematically razed and erased from the map. In the course of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza after June 1967, over 1,000 Palestinians — including women and children — were deported without charges or trial. Fully 50 percent of the land and 80 percent of the precious water reserves were confiscated by the Israeli government. And as deported Palestinians languished in exile, some 100,000 Jews settled in the West Bank and Gaza. All these measures — and many more routinely taken by Israel in the occupied territories — were, as one Israeli periodical euphemistically put it, "very far from the norms of international law" (Hotam, 4 August 1989). (Norman G. Finkelstein,The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Years, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 1996, p. 52) |
And also a few examples of the sorts of events that constituted Israel's War of Independence:
Atrocities escalated, "no doubt precipitat[ing] the flight of communities on the path of the IDF advance" (Birth, p. 230). Consider the massacre at Ad Dawayima in late October. A soldier eyewitness described how the IDF, capturing the village "without a fight," first "killed about 80-100 [male] Arabs, women and children. The children were killed by breaking their heads with sticks. There was not a house without dead." The remaining Arabs were then closed off in houses "without food and water," as the village was systematically razed.One commander ordered a sapper to put two old women in a certain house ... and to blow up the house with them. The sapper refused. ... The commander then ordered his men to put in the old women and the evil deed was done. One soldier boasted that he had raped a woman and then shot her. One woman, with a newborn baby in her arms, was employed to clear the courtyard where the soldiers ate. She worked a day or two. In the end they shot her and her baby.The soldier eyewitness concluded that "cultured officers ... had turned into base murderers and this not in the heat of battle ... but out of a system of expulsion and destruction. The less Arabs remained — the better. ... Morris reports the following (very partial) inventory of IDF atrocities committed in the October fighting, as presented to the Political Committee of Mapam: SAFSAF — "52 men tied with a rope and dropped into a well and shot. 10 were killed. Women pleaded for mercy. [There were] 3 cases of rape. ... A girl aged 14 was raped. Another 4 were killed."(Norman G. Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, Verso, London and New York, 1995, p. 76) |
Here is mention of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982:
Some two hundred Kuwaitis reportedly perished in the course of the Iraqi invasion. Approximately twenty thousand Palestinians and Lebanese perished in the course of the Israeli invasion [of Lebanon]. There was fully a hundredfold difference between the two invasions. And as the media waxed indignant over Iraq's use of horrific chemical weapons against Iran and the Kurds, they should have remembered as well Israel's use, probably illegal, of cluster bombs and phosphorus shells during the Lebanon War. In his epic memoir, Pity the Nation, veteran British correspondent Robert Fisk described two Lebanese infant victims of the phosphorus shells:Dr. Shamaa's story was a dreadful one and her voice broke as she told it. "I had to take the babies and put them in buckets of water to put out the flames," she said. "When I took them out half an hour later, they were still burning. Even in the mortuary, they smouldered for hours." Next morning, Amal Shamaa took the tiny corpses out of the mortuary for burial. To her horror, they again burst into flames.(Norman G. Finkelstein, The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Years, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 1996, pp. 45-46) |
The remaining quotations concern themselves with the intifada, to which I allocate more space because it is truly contemporary:
| In fact, every expression of Palestinian "violence" I witnessed during my stay in the occupied territories was little more than symbolic, though the same could not be said for the force used to suppress it. Once, at Jalazoun refugee camp, children were burning a tire off the main road inside the camp when a car ... pulled up next to it. The doors swung open, and four men (either settlers or the army in plainclothes) jumped out, shooting with abandon in every direction. The boy beside me was shot in the back, the bullet exiting from his navel. ... Next day the Jerusalem Post reported that the army had fired in self-defense. (Norman G. Finkelstein, The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Years, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 1996, p. 2) |
| In the afternoon, news arrived of a massacre in Bethlehem. Infiltrating a crowd of protestors, an Israeli undercover squad disguised as tourists shot five Palestinians youths point-blank. One lay dead; the four wounded were pulled by their hair along the pavement to the army depot. As the terrified crowd dispersed, the civilian-clad assassins laughed and joked with the assassins in uniform. (Norman G. Finkelstein, The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Years, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 1996, pp. 42-43) |
| A thousand-page Save the Children study, The Status of Palestinian Children during the Uprising, exhaustively documented the "indiscriminate beating, teargassing, and shooting of children." More than 150 Palestinian children have been killed since the beginning of the intifada, including at least 37 below the age of six. The average age was ten. A majority, the study found, were not even participating in a stone-throwing demonstration when shot dead, and four-fifths of the gunshot victims were "obstructed or delayed by the army" as they sought emergency medical treatment. Funerals were "violently disrupted or interfered with" by the army. More than fifty thousand Palestinian children required medical attention for tear-gas inhalation, multiple fractures, and so on, during the first two years of the intifada; nearly half were ten years old or younger. The study also found that "the vast majority of soldiers responsible for the child casualties have been neither censured nor punished." Indeed, only the few cases that received press coverage were even being investigated. A B'Tselem (Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) study, Violence against Minors in Police Detention, found that "illegal violence against minors, ... many [of whom] are innocent of any crime, ... occurs on a large scale." Severe beatings, including "slapping, punching, kicking, hair pulling, beatings with clubs or with iron rods, pushing into walls and onto floors," were said to be "very common." The study also highlighted more novel methods for interrogating minors: Beating the detainee as he is suspended in a closed sack covering the head and tied around the knees; tying the detainee in a twisted position to an outdoor pipe with hands behind the back for hours and, sometimes, in the rain, at night, and during the hot daytime hours; confining the detainee, sometimes for a few days, in the "lock-up" — a dark, smelly and suffocating cell one and a half by one and a half meters [five by five feet]; placing the detainee, sometimes for many hours, in the "closet" — a narrow cell the height of a person in which one can stand but not move; and depositing the tied-up detainee for many hours in the "grave" — a kind of box, closed by a door from the top, with only enough room to crouch and no toilet.Israeli press and human rights reports put flesh and blood on the data. The 1 April 1988 issue of Hotam reported the case of a ten-year-old beaten so black and blue during an army interrogation that he was left "looking like a steak." The soldiers "weren't bothered" even when they later learned that the boy was deaf, mute, and mentally retarded. The 13 July 1988 issue of Koteret Rashit reported the "disappearance of 25 children" and jail threats to their parents for "annoying" the army about the children's whereabouts. The 19 August 1988 issue ofHadashot featured three photos of a blindfolded six-year-old in an army jeep. The caption reported that many children his age would be held in detention until "ransoms" of several hundred dollars were paid, and that, as they were carted away, the children often urinated in their pants "from fear." Under the heading "Deliberate Murder," the August 1989 bulletin for the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights reported that the Israeli army (apparently sharpshooters from "special units") had targeted an "increasing" number of Palestinian children in leadership roles. "Carefully chosen," the victim was usually shot in the head or heart and died almost instantaneously. Dr. Haim Gordon of the Israeli Association for Human Rights reported the case of an eight-year-old tortured by soldiers after refusing to reveal which of his friends had thrown stones. Stripped naked, hung by his legs and brutally beaten, the boy was then pushed to the edge of a rooftop before being released (cited in the January 1990 bulletin of the Israeli League). The 15 January 1990 issue of Hadashot reported the case of a thirteen-year-old who was thrown into detention after his fingers were deliberately broken and who was then left without any medical treatment or food because his father was unable to pay the ransom of 750 dollars. The 26 January 1990 issue of Davarreported the case of a sixteen-year-old girl who was beaten by a club-wielding policeman ("He even tried to push the club between my legs") and then thrashed in prison for refusing to sign a confession. The 29 June 1990 issue of Hotamreported the case of a thirteen-year-old detainee who, refusing to supply incriminating evidence against his brother, was "smashed" in the face, had "bruise marks on his entire body," was not allowed to drink or eat "for hours," and was forced to "urinate and defecate in his pants." Reporting on the grisly fate of Palestinians as young as fourteen arrested on "suspicion of stone-throwing," the 24 February 1992 issue of Hadashot quoted an inside source at the Hebron detention center: What happened there ... was plain horror: they would break their clubs on the prisoners' bodies, hit them in the genitals, tie a prisoner up on the cold floor and play soccer with him — literally kick and roll him around. Then they'd give him electric shocks, using the generator of a field telephone, and then push him out to stand for hours in the cold and rain.... They would crush the prisoners, ... turning them into lumps of meat.Another source inside the center was quoted to the effect that the "tortures recall what is being inflicted in the cellars of Damascus's prisons." (Norman G. Finkelstein, The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Years, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 1996, pp. 47-49) |
| Israel's High Court proved to be a willing accomplice of the conquest regime in the West Bank and Gaza. The Fourth Geneva Convention explicitly prohibited the destruction of private property except "where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations" and also explicitly forbade collective punishment. Yet the High Court ruled that house demolitions in the occupied territories were permissible, even claiming that "there is no basis to the claim that house demolition is a collective punishment." The Fourth Geneva Convention explicitly prohibited an occupying power from resettling its "own civilian population in territory it occupies." Yet the High Court either ruled that Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza were legal or refused to hear challenges to their legality. International law stipulated that an occupier could not institute new taxes in the territory under its control. Yet the High Court ruled that the arbitrary value-added tax imposed on the occupied territories in 1976 was permissible. ... Israeli military courts had jurisdiction over all "security-related" (and most significant civil) cases involving Palestinians in the occupied territories. Suspects could be detained without trial for a period of eighteen days. The decision to renew detention was typically based on information supplied by the military prosecutor. Applications for release on bail were "almost never accepted." Suspects had "absolutely no right of legal representation." When representation was allowed, the lawyer was not permitted to visit his client until the interrogation had been completed. Trial proceedings barely rose to the level of farce. The "overwhelming majority" of convictions were decided on the basis of confessions "usually obtained under duress" and "almost invariably written in Hebrew," a language "few Palestinians could speak or read." Administrative detention allowed for imprisonment without charge, evidence, or trial for as much as a year. Official Israeli rules of engagement allowed for the killing of a Palestinian simply for wearing a mask, hoisting a flag, erecting a barricade (which often consisted of no more than a few rocks and overturned garbage bins), or ignoring an order to halt. They also allowed for the virtually unrestricted use of lethal plastic bullets and the summary execution of "wanted" Palestinians. All these orders were in contravention of international law that sanctioned the use of lethal force only in life-threatening situations and then only if there was no recourse except to lethal force. As Middle East Watch concluded, official Israeli policies and practices "effectively condone [] the unjustified killing of Palestinians." The guidelines just cited on the use of lethal force were the official ones. The unofficial or de facto rules of engagement were yet more lax, as was evident from the record on investigations and convictions of Israelis accused of killings. More than seven hundred Palestinians had been, in the course of the intifada through December 1989, shot dead by Israeli security forces. Yet not one Israeli soldier was indicted on a murder charge, and only two were indicted on manslaughter charges. A tiny handful were indicted on lesser charges such as illegal use of weapons. The fewer than ten soldiers convicted in connection with killings of Palestinians received punishments ranging from an official reprimand to eighteen months' imprisonment. ... By way of contrast, Amnesty International reported that Palestinians received sentences of up to five years' imprisonment for simply throwing a stone. Reviewing the notorious case of a Gazan brutally beaten to death by Israeli soldiers (none of the accused was indicted on a major criminal charge or served more than five months in prison), the prominent Israeli advocate Avigdor Feldman concluded: "The illegality in the Territories is total. Everyone — regardless of echelon, regardless of disagreement on every other conceivable topic — is of a mind on one matter: the value of an Arab's life is equal to zero." (Norman G. Finkelstein, The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Years, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 1996, pp. 51-52) |
Recalling his stint as a guard in Gaza Beach, "one of the best" Israeli internment camps for Palestinians, Israeli journalist Ari Shavit expatiated on [his experiences] with rare candor and insight:Most [Palestinians] are awaiting trial; most were arrested because they were throwing stones or were said to be members of illegal organizations. Many are in their teens. Among them, here and there, are some boys who are small and appear to be very young.... The prison has twelve guard towers. Some Israeli soldiers are struck — and deeply shaken — by the similarity between these and certain other towers, about which they have learned at school.... ... Maybe the Shin Bet [secret police] is to blame for this — for the arrests it makes and what it does to those arrested. For almost every night, after it has managed, in its interrogations, to "break" a certain number of young men, the Shin Bet delivers to the [soldiers] a list with the names of friends of the young men.... [Then] the soldiers ... go out almost every night to the city and ... come back with children of fifteen or sixteen years of age. The children grit their teeth. Their eyes bulge from their sockets. In not a few cases they have already been beaten.... And soldiers crowd together in the "reception room" to look at them when they undress. To look at them in their underwear, to look at them as they tremble with fear. And sometimes they kick them — one kick more, before they put on their new prison clothes.... Or maybe the doctor is to blame. You wake him up in the middle of the night to treat one of those just brought in — a young man, barefoot, wounded, who looks as if he's having an epileptic fit, who tells you that they beat him just now on the back and stomach and over the heart. There are ugly red marks all over his body. The doctor turns to the young man and shouts at him. In a loud, raging voice he says: May you die! And then he turns to me with a laugh: May they all die! Or maybe the screams are to blame. At the end of the watch, ... you sometimes hear terrible screams ... from the other side of the ... fence of the interrogation section, ... hair-raising human screams. Literally hair-raising.... In Gaza our General Security Services therefore amount to a Secret Police, our internment facilities are cleanly run Gulags. Our soldiers are jailers, our interrogators torturers. ... Thus in the forty months of the intifada, more than ten thousand Israeli citizens in uniform have walked between the fences, have heard the screams, have seen the young being led in and out. ... And the country has been quiet. Has flourished.... Ten thousand (if not fifteen thousand, if not twenty thousand) Israelis have done their work faithfully — have opened the heavy iron doors of the isolation cell and then closed it. Have led the man from the interrogation chamber to the clinic, from the clinic back to the interrogation chamber. They have looked close up at people shitting in terror, pissing in fear. And not one among them has begun a hunger strike in front of the house of the prime minister. Not one among them that I know of has said, This will not happen. Not in a Jewish state.(Norman G. Finkelstein, The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Years, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 1996, pp. 71-73) |
| Just as Germans for generations to come would have to bear the burden of Nazism, so Jews for many generations to come would have to bear the burden of Israel's merciless assault against the Palestinian people. Just as Germany's name was now inextricably linked, not just with Beethoven and Brecht, but with Hitler and Himmler, so the Jewish people's name would now be inextricably linked, not just with Marx and Menuhin, but with Sharon and Shamir. Israel's terroristic war against the Palestinians had also besmirched the memory of the six million Jewish martyrs. (Norman G. Finkelstein, The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Years, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 1996, p. 16) |
| CONTENTS: | |
| Top Jewish Crimes Under Communism Jewish Crimes Under German Occupation | Jewish Crimes Following WW II Jewish Crimes in the Middle East Conclusions |
The above material taken together points to at least the following three conclusions:
First, if one attempts to understand either history or contemporary events by relying on the mass media, one will be given an incomplete and distorted picture. The media are dominated by considerations of political correctness, and can be relied upon only conditionally and guardedly.
Second, the war crimes committed by Jews under Communism, during the Second World War, immediately after the Second World War, and today in the Middle East dwarf any crimes that can be ascribed to Ukrainians during these same intervals. Therefore, in electing to target Ukrainians in your current war crimes prosecutions, your Department of Justice demonstrates that it is not in fact motivated by a desire to punish the guilty, but is rather carrying out a political agenda.
Third, the above materials suggest a motive for this political agenda — namely, that one reason that Jewish interests want to keep the issue of East European war crimes in general, and Ukrainian war crimes in particular, alive before the public eye is to mask the much greater war crimes that were committed by Jews in those same years, and — more importantly — that are being committed by Jews today.
Yours truly,
Lubomyr Prytulak
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