Israeli Prime Minister, President in Europe for Holocaust Remembrance Day
Commemoration a Week after German Company Signs $1.4 Billion Gas Deal with Iran
To commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Wednesday (Jan 27), Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will travel to Poland for ceremonies to mark the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the site of the largest Nazi death camp. In the meantime, Israeli President Shimon Peres left for Germany today (Jan. 25) for a three-day state trip during which he will deliver a speech in Hebrew to the German parliament.
On the eve of his trip, Netanyahu spoke today (Jan. 25) at Israel' s Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, about the ongoing problem of anti-Semitism and those who promulgate it. There is evil in the world; if it is unstopped, it expands; it is expanding and it is threatening the same people, the Jewish people, but we know that it only starts with the Jews and then it consumes the rest of mankind, Netanyahu said.
There is now a test, a test for humanity. There is new Jew hatred in our midst& This is certainly our concern but it is not only our concern. Just as what is displayed here is not only a crime against the Jews, it was a crime against humanity and I think the international community is tested as seldom before in the decades that are past since the fateful defeat of Nazi Germany 65 years ago.
Peres, during his Germany visit, will lead a delegation including German-born Holocaust survivors, Israeli youth movement representatives and leaders of Jewish organizations. In addition to his speech to the German parliament, he will also hold a joint press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel; participate in state ceremonies; hold meetings with German President Horst Koehler and German youth; and take part in a memorial service at the Platform 17 memorial at the Grunewald Railway Station. Peres also will receive an award from German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle that honors Walther Rathenau, a Jewish businessman and former German foreign minister who was murdered by extremists in 1922.
The trips come a week after Iran reportedly signed a $1.4 billion, five-year gas deal with a German company. This new deal follows other significant German business deals with Iran by German companies such as BASF, Bayer, RWE, Daimler, Herrenknecht, ThyssenKrupp and MAN Forrestaal.
In all, approximately six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, about half of them in Nazi-built labor and death camps. Several million non-Jews were killed in the Holocaust, or Shoah (Hebrew for calamity ). The term refers to the German state-sponsored campaign to systematically exterminate the Jewish population of Nazi-occupied Europe from 1933-1945.
This year' s commemoration activities take on special significance as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad continues to call the Holocaust a myth.
History has shown us time and again that what starts with attacks on the Jews eventually ends up engulfing many others, Netanyahu said Sept. 24, 2009 as he spoke to the UN General Assembly, holding up a copy of detailed notes of a meeting among senior Nazi officials on how to exterminate the Jewish people.
Added Netanyahu, The greatest threat facing the world today is the marriage between religious fanaticism and the weapons of mass destruction, and the most urgent challenge facing this body is to prevent the tyrants of Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Although Merkel has been vocal in supporting tougher sanctions against Iran, last weeks deal between Iran and German would provide the Islamic Republic technology for creating and transporting natural gas. The name of the German company hasn t been made public and Irans national gas company has denied the deal took place. Germany also remains one of Irans biggest trading partners.
A new poll commissioned by The Israel Project showed that 80 percent of Germans believe the international community should prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons and 85 percent of Germans say it is important for their country to do more to stop anti-Semitic attacks. The survey of 1,001 Germans was conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research in early January and has +/- 3.1 percent margin of error.
Following Adolf Hitlers rise to power as chancellor, Germany enacted and spread anti-Jewish laws in Europe, such as stripping Jews of their citizenship and preventing them from holding office, intermarrying or attending public schools.
After the start of World War II, Hitler created labor and death camps throughout Europe in order to execute the final solution of the Jewish question. Other groups deemed racially inferior by Nazis were also persecuted, including Gypsies, physically and mentally disabled, gays and lesbians, Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, communists and numerous minority groups.
The Nazi regime initially constructed forced-labor camps to imprison Jews, but as early as 1941 built extermination camps designed solely for the quick and effective mass murder of Jews and others.
All extermination camps were located in Nazi-controlled Poland where the use of gas chambers, electrocutions, and gas vans were used to asphyxiate Jews and others. The largest of the camps was Auschwitz-Birkenau, where Nazis killed about 12,000 people a day. For the gas vans, the Nazi German regime rigged vehicles so that the exhaust pumped directly inside, suffocating all inside.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day falls annually on Jan. 27 to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau by Soviet troops on Jan. 27, 1945. Events for International Holocaust Remembrance Day are held at the United Nations in New York, Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
Nazi camps built specifically for extermination (all were located in Nazi-occupied Poland):
Auschwitz-Birkenau
o Largest extermination camp, approximately 1.1 million people were murdered
in gas chambers, shootings and hangings, and by disease and starvation
o Nazis carried out medical experiments on inmates
o Established by Heinrich Himmler, Chief of the German Police and Minister of the
Interior]
Treblinka
o Estimated 750,000 - 870,000 murdered in gas chambers
Chemno
o Estimated 340,000 murdered in gas chambers and by diesel asphyxiation
Belzec
o Estimated 400,000 murdered by diesel asphyxiation and electrocution.
Majdanek
o Estimated 360,000 murdered, mainly youth under 26 years of age by the use of gas
chambers
Sobibor
o Estimated 250,000 murdered in gas chambers and various medical experiments.
Jan. 25 Address by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Yad Vashem Holocaust museum
This is an opportunity to express a basic truth. It is this: that in defining culpability in an historic crime, the educing of evidence is the same as in a judicial investigation of a regular crime. You have to produce evidence. The evidence consists of testimony; it consists of documentation, preferably original documentation; it must have cross reference; it must have cross verification. It may seem to some that because there are remaining witnesses to a crime, that the historical memory is preserved. That is not true. In history it can be twisted out of shape a lot faster than you think and certainly over a slow period of time it can be destroyed beyond recognition. Therefore the value of what is being done here is first of all to preserve historical truth and the action that has been done here over the years by Yad Vashem has been important first of all for tabulating the basic evidence of the greatest crime in history.
The additions of these documents, courtesy of the Axel Springer Group, is an important bulwark of this historical truth because it shows in, shall we say, in graphic detail; it shows the design of murder; the premeditation of mass murder; the execution of mass murder according to a deliberate plan and this is a very important contribution to the body of evidence.
Now, what are we to make of all of this? Well, the first thing is that there is evil in the world. What you see in this exhibit, what you see in these testimonies is the testimony of great evil; pure unadulterated evil. From there flows basically two other things: one is that unopposed; evil expands and devours the innocent, so the second conclusion is opstreprinskiby , which means, stops bad things when they are small. And the third: given that we have all this testimony, all this evidence, all this truth and yet still what Primo Levy warned about was, you read Avner Shalev, they still deny and they spread the lie. So from this follows the third logical conclusion: there is evil in the world; if it is unstopped, it expands; it is expanding and it is threatening the same people, the Jewish people, but we know that it only starts with the Jews and then it consumes the rest of mankind.
There is now a test, a test for humanity. There is new Jew hatred in our midst. There are new calls for the extermination of the Jewish State. This is certainly our concern but it is not only our concern. Just as what is displayed here is not only a crime against the Jews, it was a crime against humanity and I think the international community is tested as seldom before in the decades that are past since the fateful defeat of Nazi Germany 65 years ago. It is tested today whether it will stand up to the truth, to the evidence of evil, to the design of mass murder. This is a test of humanity. This is a test of mankind and we shall see in the coming weeks and months how the international community lives up to its responsibility to stop evil before it spreads further.
Thank you very much.
Toename van Anti-semitisme:
http://www.cidi.nl/dossiers/an/an.html
Britse socioloog: antisemitisme in Europa groeit
Bron: 29 januari 2009 door Marc Leijendekker
http://weblogs.nrc.nl/wereld/2009/01/29/furedi-antisemitisme-in-europa-groeit/
De Britse socioloog Frank Furedi weet dat hij zich op gevoelig terrein waagt en begint daarom met een waarschuwing: het is moeilijk een volwassen discussie te hebben over antisemitisme. Maar in een afgewogen artikel doet hij daar toch een poging toe. En na een analyse van ontwikkelingen in Denemarken, Nederland, Frankrijk, Spanje en Italië komt Furedi tot de conclusie dat het antisemitisme in Europa aan het toenemen is.
Hij maakt zich daarbij vooral zorgen om de achteloosheid waarmee wordt gereageerd op antisemitische uitlatingen. ,,The most worrying dynamic in Europe today is not the explicit vitriol directed against Jews by radical Muslim groups or far-right parties, but the new culture of accommodation to anti-Semitism. We can see the emergence of a slightly embarrassed ‘see nothing, hear nothing’ attitude that shows far too much ‘understanding’ towards expressions of anti-Semitism.”
Steeds vaker en makkelijker verandert legitieme kritiek op Israël in onaanvaardbare uitingen van antisemitisme, vindt Furedi. Die tendens wordt in zijn ogen ook zichtbaar in een andere omgang met de holocaust. ,, The metamorphosis of anti-Israel feeling into anti-Jewish feeling has been paralleled by a growing tendency to detach the Holocaust from its historical context. Increasingly, the Holocaust is discussed not as a specific historic incident in which Jews were the victims, but as a recurring phenomenon – we now have many ‘holocausts’ – which crops up again and again in human history, from Auschwitz to Bosnia to Darfur. This not only disassociates the Holocaust from its Jewish victims; it also means that the Holocaust can be recycled as a moral condemnation of Israel itself, and of the people associated with Israel.”
De reden dat Furedi naar Nederland verwijst, is de aanwezigheid van SP-Kamerlid Harry van Bommel bij een anti-Israël demonstratie waarop antisemitisme leuzen werden geroepen – hier een stukje over de ophef daarover op Van Bommels weblog. In Denemarken hebben scholen volgens Furedi geweigerd joodse leerlingen toe te laten omdat dit spanningen zou kunnen geven met moslim-leerlingen.
Furedi heeft op zijn website links staan naar artikelen waarin hij varieert op dit thema, waaronder een recent artikel in Trouw.