The Nazi fetish of Human Rights Watch’s anti-Israeli ‘military expert’

Human Rights Watch’s credibility on Israel has taken a further nosedive with the latest exposé by NGO Monitor, detailing the Nazi fetish of a leading HRW researcher. Following recent revelations that the group had been hawking its anti-Israeli credentials in a fund-raising tour of unsavory Arab states, Human Rights Watch now defends the Nazi obsession of its “senior military expert” as a mere enthusiasm for military history:

On September 8, Omri Ceren (MereRhetoric) published a detailed report showing that Human Rights Watch’s “senior military expert” and coauthor of numerous reports condemning Israel, Marc Garlasco, is an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia.  This revelation follows NGO Monitor’s research report on HRW’s pattern of false and unsupported claims used to condemn Israel, and a history of anti-Israel ideology among HRW officials.

HRW’s response falsely characterizes Garlasco as a serious “student of military history” and ignores the obvious moral implications of his central role in serial condemnations of Israel. 

NGO Monitor’s analysis of HRW’s defense shows that: 

• Obsessive collecting of Nazi memorabilia is not an innocuous hobby. Susan Sontag likens this to pornography and the Simon Wiesenthal Center notes it “glorifies the horrors of Nazi Germany”.
• Garlasco has posted thousands of comments on Nazi memorabilia sites including Germancombatawards (981 posts) and Wehrmacht-awards (7735 posts). 
• Garlasco’s “historical research” is a 430-page tome on swastika-adorned Nazi-era medals; its publisher’s website is ironcross1939.
• In a 2005 comment, responding to a posting of a photo of a leather SS jacket, Garlasco wrote, “That is so cool! The leather SS jacket makes my blood go cold it is so COOL!”  The jacket owner replies, “Great feedback mein Freund! . . . Gott mit uns [God is with us]!].

Click here to read the rest of the report 

Remember him?

…. the delightful Rev. Jeremiah Wright on, presumably, Rahm Emmanuel and David Axelrod:

Asked if he had spoken to the president, Wright said: “Them Jews aren’t going to let him talk to me. I told my baby daughter, that he’ll talk to me in five years when he’s a lame duck, or in eight years when he’s out of office. …”

Becoming conservative by accident

Der Spiegel has an amusing excerpt from Jan Fleischhauer’s book, “Unter Linken. Von einem, der aus Versehen konservativ wurde” (Among Liberals: How to Become a Conservative by Accident). Shades of Nick Cohen’s litany of disillusion:

Oranges were such a rare commodity for us because — for a period that unfortunately coincided with our childhood — the world’s citrus fruit-producing countries had fallen into the hands of Latin American strongmen or otherwise questionable autocratic rulers. We couldn’t buy Spanish oranges as long as General Francisco Franco was in power, because every purchase would have signified indirect support for his dictatorship. South Africa was out of the question, because of its apartheid regime, and Jaffa oranges from Israel seemed politically incorrect for as long as the Palestinians had to suffer. We still had oranges from Florida at first, but that ended when Richard Nixon was elected president. Franco’s death in November 1975, at 82, was the only reason my brother and I did not succumb to scurvy.

Check it out.

Michael Oren

 

Must-view: Michael Oren, recently appointed Israeli ambassador to the United States, on defending the founding ideas and ideals of both countries.

Unions Linking Israel and Palestine

Excellent op-ed today to mark the launch of TULIP – Trade Unions Linking Israel and Palestine. Trade unions in South Africa, Ireland, Britain and Norway are supporting calls to boycott, divesting from and impose sanctions against Israel.

The trend “seems unstoppable. But we intend to stop it,” write Paul Howes, national secretary of the Australian Workers Union, Michael J. Leahy, general secretary of Britain’s Community union, and Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union in the US and Canada.

Read the whole thing - and send it around.

Hitler’s Holocaust Helpers

As Ivan Demjanjuk faces trial, Der Spiegel runs a must-read article on Hitler’s European Holocaust Helpers.

Demjanjuk was one of an estimated 200,000 non-German accomplices – “Ukrainian gendarmes and Latvian auxiliary police, Romanian soldiers or Hungarian railway workers, Polish farmers, Dutch land registry officials, French mayors, Norwegian ministers, Italian soldiers” – who aided and abetted the Holocaust.

Just for example, on June 27, 1941, a colonel in the staff of the Germany’s Northern Army Group in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas passed a petrol station surrounded by a crowd of people. There were shouts of bravo and clapping, mothers raised their children to give them a better view. The officer stepped closer and later wrote down what he had seen. ….

Read and circulate – and recall next time you see a headline about the ‘Holocaust’ in Gaza, Jenin, the West Bank…..

No two-state solution

The consensus, it would seem, is overwhelming. As Henri Guaino, a senior adviser to French President Nicolas Sarkozy, put it on Sunday: “Everyone wants peace. The whole world wants a Palestinian state.”

It isn’t going to happen.

International consensus or no, the two-state solution is a chimera.

The Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby explains why.

TULIP blooms

Next Thursday sees the New York launch of TULIP – Trade Unions Linking Israel and Palestine – an important new initiative to counter the anti-Israeli drift in the labor movement and the left.

TULIP is the brainchild of Paul Howes, a young and dynamic Australian trade unionist, national secretary of the Australian Workers Union. He served his political apprenticeship on the Trotskyist left, in the Socialist Workers’ Party, until a trip to Cuba burst that ideological bubble. The outfit’s co-leaders are Stuart Appelbaum,  President of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (USA), and Michael J. Leahy, OBE, General Secretary of Community (United Kingdom).

As TULIP’s founding statement notes, it aims to unite those unions and NGOs which are fighting within the labour movement against the boycott of Israel and for genuine peace, justice and reconciliation. It continues:

At the moment, the opponents of a two-state solution are on the offensive, working hard to promote their destructive agenda of boycotts and sanctions targetting Israel.

It’s time for trade unionists in all countries to go on the offensive ourselves, to challenge the apologists for Hamas and Hizbollah in the labour movement.

We have no illusions that this will be anything other than a long and difficult process.  But we also know that we have no choice.  We cannot abandon the field to those whose goal is the destruction of any chance for a real Israeli-Palestinian peace.

TULIP is supported by Israel’s Histadrut union confederation, Kav LaOved, and Workers Advice Center ; the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions and Democracy and Workers’ Rights Center ; the UK’s Engage and Trade Union Friends of Israel ; the US Jewish Labor Committee; and Canada’s Union Members for Israel.

Please circulate to colleagues and comrades.

Fool me once…..a different take on the ‘peace process’

Those incredible folks at MEMRI keep churning out these nuggets. In this must-view clip from Al-Quds TV, Sultan Abu Al-Einen, Fatah’s leader in Lebanon brags of how the PLO exploited the cover of the peace process and Israeli concessions on the re-arming of Palestinian security forces to staff and arm ‘martyrdom’ operations

Very few people realize that during the Oslo peace process era, from 1994 to 2000, Israel admitted more than 200,000 Palestinians to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This includes Palestinian Authority (PA) personnel and their families and many others. This was an extraordinary humanitarian gesture and confidence-building measure for peace.

Who knew? Barry Rubin goes on to remind us that the leadership of Fatah and the PA today is exactly the same as it was in the 1990s.

Israel Today, the West Tomorrow

One day the U.N. Secretary General proposes that, in the interest of global peace and harmony, the world’s soccer players should come together and form one United Nations global soccer team.

“Great idea,” says his deputy. “Er, but who would we play?”

“Israel, of course.”

Jokes aside, check out Mark Steyn’s must-read Israel Today, the West Tomorrow for a disturbing account of the growing conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli sentiment in Europe. He makes the all-too-credible suggestion that changing demographics entail shifting political allegiances:

There are about 150,000 Jews in London today—it’s the thirteenth biggest Jewish city in the world. But there are approximately one million Muslims. The highest number of Jews is found in the 50-54 age group; the highest number of Muslims are found in the four-years-and-under category.

Read the whole thing