Jews Must Convert or Die; The anti-Semitic Face of Christian Zionism

CUFI Leader John Hagee confirms Christian Zionism is anti-Semitic

Ben Norton

CUFI leader John Hagee speaks to Israel supporters at a rally at the Jerusalem convention center in 2008 (Photo: AP)

Evangelical pastor John Hagee, the leader of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), the US’ largest pro-Israel organization and the most powerful group in the Christian Zionist movement, has adamantly insisted that Christian Zionism is anti-Semitic.

WorldNetDaily (WND), a far-right website published an article in March 2015 about the “Blood Moon Prophecy,” an end-of-times theory that lunar eclipses are a sign that the world is on the brink of destruction and that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ is near. The lengthy piece is about Hagee’s film Four Blood Moons, which endorses the eschatological theory. Toward the end of the article, WND quotes a spokesperson for Hagee:

“WND falsely claimed that Hagee does not believe that Jews need Jesus to be saved. In fact, Hagee never made such a claim and years ago directly denied assertions that he holds a dual-covenant theology,” he wrote. “In addition, while WND acknowledges that Hagee rewrote sections of ‘In Defense of Israel’ to clarify his relevant position, WND failed to note that the associated video promotion was also changed to accurately reflect his theology.”

Translated: WND claimed that Hagee believed the Jewish people could be saved by God without abandoning Judaism and converting to Christianity. Apocalyptic Christian Zionist John Hagee censured the publication for spreading a lie and defensively clarified that he does indeed believe that the Jewish people are going to burn in Hell for all of eternity unless they abandon Judaism and convert to Christianity.

In short, Hagee firmly insisted that Christian Zionism is anti-Semitic, and that the reason CUFI so obsessively and blindly defends Israel is not because they care about Jews (who, in their mind, will face eternal damnation unless they renounce their religion and become Christians) but rather because they genuinely believe the world is on the verge of total annihilation and the Bible supposedly tells them they must do so.

Christian Zionism

Christian Zionism is the belief that God gave the Jewish people the land of Israel in historic Palestine. Christian Zionists hold that this is part of a biblical prophecy, and is a necessary prerequisite before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and the ensuing Day of Judgment.

This is not a view shared by all Christians, yet is very common among Evangelicals and conservative Protestants. In recent years, it has gained prominence in the US, particularly in the Bible Belt. A late 2013 Pew Research study found 82% of white evangelical Christians in the US believed God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people, while only 40% of US Jews believed the same.

John Hagee is the leader of CUFI, the most powerful Christian Zionist organization in the US, and likely in the entire world.

Some Jewish and Zionist organizations have criticized Hagee and the Christian Zionist movement. Eric Yoffie, former president of the Union for Reform Judaism, publicly proclaimed that, vis-à-vis “Israeli-Palestinian politics, John Hagee and the CUFI are extremists.” Yoffie “called for Reform congregations to not participate in CUFI’s events and to continue to call for public condemnation of inflammatory and bigoted statements from Christian Zionist leadership.”

Many Jewish and Zionist organizations, however, see Hagee and CUFI as important allies. At the CUFI 2013 Summit, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations—a coalition of 51 US Jewish groups, including some of the most prominent—voiced support of biblical Christian Zionist prophecies. “The prophets were not prophets of doom but prophets of hope; you just have to read it right,” he told them. “Here’s my advice: Don’t bet against the Jews. And the ‘Jewish lobby’ is a myth, but it’s our job to make it a legend.”

Israel itself has been more than happy to support CUFI. Ron Dermer, Israeli Ambassador to the US, spoke glowingly of the organization at its 2014 summit. Prime Minister Netanyahu has also enthusiastically supported the group, and has spoken at several of their annual summits.

Hagee’s History of Extreme Views

Hagee, who thinks we are the last generation of humans, is no stranger to controversy. In late 2014, he claimed that Ebola (along with the civil rights protests in Ferguson and elsewhere) was God’s way of “punishing” America, because Obama was trying to “divide” Israel.

The pastor has even gone so far as to essentially defend Adolf Hitler.  In a 2005 sermon, Hagee asserted that God sent Hitler as a “hunter,” in order to “hunt them [Jews] from every mountain and from every hill and out of the holes of the rocks … to get them to come back to the land of Israel.”

Once again, these are the views of the leader of, in CUFI’s own words, “the largest pro-Israel organization in the United States with over two million members and one of the leading Christian grassroots movements in the world.”

The Washington Post indicates that CUFI “can boast that it has members from every congressional district in America.” Foreign Policy included John Hagee in its list of the 50 Republicans with the most influence on foreign policy. The evangelical Christian Zionist was a much sought-after figure by the Republican Party in the 2008 presidential election. He ended up endorsing John McCain.

WND’s founder and CEO Joseph Farah responded positively to Hagee’s firm insistence on his Christianity-rooted anti-Semitism. “I’m happy to hear that Hagee no longer subscribes to those anti-biblical positions,” he said. “But we never asserted what Hagee believes, only what he said on videotape. I’m gratified he has repudiated all of that. It’s time for him to clean up another mess.”

Like Hagee, Farah resolutely maintains that Christian Zionism is, in its very essence, an anti-Semitic ideology, as, in his view, it is an “anti-biblical position” to claim that Jews are not automatically damned to eternal suffering in a lake of fire merely by virtue of their being Jewish.

 

‘Half-Breed Jew’ Committed Holocaust, Claims Netanyahu Ally John Hagee

[Comment:- someone please tell the Israeli government that the only reason this porcine toad is a Christian Zionist is because he’s praying for God to kill all the Jews, so that the Christians can have the land Israel stolen from the Palestinians.  And that by doing so, he is objectively pro-death, pro-sabotage and pro-theft. With genocidal “friends” like Hagee, does Israel need enemies?!]

Main article by Bruce Wilson

‘Half-Breed Jew’ Committed Holocaust, Claims Netanyahu Ally John Hagee

Who committed the Holocaust?

For the overwhelming majority of historians and, needless to say, Jews it’s a settled question: Hitler, and his Nazis. But Christians United For Israel (CUFI) head John Hagee, one of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s closest American allies, has a different answer: “half-breed Jews.” Netanyahu meets frequently with Hagee, endorses CUFI, has spoken at numerous CUFI events, and lavishes Hagee and his organization with praise. Prime Minister Netanyahu is currently scheduled to speak at CUFI’s annual Washington summit, July 13-14 2015. Hagee’s Christians United For Israel organization currently sells a book by pastor John Hagee, Jerusalem Countdown: A warning To The World, which on page 149 (2006 “revised and updated” paperback edition) claims Adolf Hitler was a “half-breed Jew” and states (p. 97) that Hitler was sent by God, as a “hunter,” to persecute Europe’s Jews and drive them towards “the only home God ever intended for the Jews to have-Israel.” In 2008 media uproar over Hagee’s “hunter” claim (as made in a 2005 sermon that was exposed by this author) led presidential candidate John McCain to renounce his long-sought endorsement from pastor Hagee. Hagee’s claim that Hitler was Jewish is not new. In a 2003 sermon broadcast internationally and marketed as a VHS cassette, John Hagee claimed [link to video of sermon] the Antichrist would be “partially Jewish, as was Adolf Hitler, as was Karl Marx.” CUFI head John Hagee also blames anti-Semitism on Jews themselves, writing in Jerusalem Countdown (p. 56) that “It was the disobedience and rebellion of the Jews… that gave rise to the opposition and persecution that they experienced beginning in Canaan and continuing to this very day.” Hagee’s book then traces (p. 57) the birth of anti-Semitism to Jewish idol worship:

How utterly repulsive, insulting, and heartbreaking to God for his chosen people to credit idols with bringing blessings he had showered upon the chosen people. Their own rebellion had birthed the seed of anti-Semitism that would arise and bring destruction to them for centuries to come.

In Hagee’s account “half-breed Jews,” Hitler included, have served as the human agents by which God implements a divine curse placed upon the racially pure (non-miscegenated) Jewish people. On page 149 of Hagee’s book Jerusalem Countdown, in a chapter with the ominous title “Who Is a Jew,” Hagee writes,

Esau’s descendants would produce a lineage that would attack and slaughter the Jews for centuries. Esau’s descendants included Haman, whose diabolical mind conceived the “final solution” of the Old Testament — the extermination of all Jews living in Persia. It was Esau’s descendants who produced the half-breed Jews of history who have persecuted and murdered the Jews beyond human comprehension. Adolf Hitler was a distant descendant of Esau.

In his next sentence, Hagee goes on to make the false claim that in the 1976 book Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography, noted Hitler biographer John Toland “records that Hitler was part Jewish.” What Toland actually stated in his Hitler biography was “There is the slight possibility that Hitler’s grandfather was a wealthy Jew named Frankenberger or Frankenreither.” Hagee’s identification of a miscegenated race of “half-breed Jews” tracing back to Esau seems to originate in theological ideas from the fringe, virulently racist white supremacist Christian Identity movement, as described in books such as Religion and The Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement, by leading authority Dr. Michael Barkun. While John Hagee has for decades loudly and publicly condemned anti-Semitism, his writings and sermons have nonetheless promoted some of the most influential and inflammatory anti-Jewish tropes of the modern era, such as the claim that predatory Jewish bankers control international finance and prey upon the masses of humankind.

John Hagee, giving March 23, 2003 sermon

In a March 23, 2003 sermon broadcast internationally, Hagee claimed European Rothschild bankers, along with David Rockefeller, controlled the U.S. economy through the Federal Reserve — which according to Hagee was bankrupting average Americans by devaluing the dollar. The Jewish Anti-Defamation League identifies this type of Federal Reserve conspiracy theory, that places Jewish bankers at the center of the proposed grand financial conspiracy, as a “classic anti-Semitic myth”

Promotional poster for Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda film “Der Ewige Jude” (“The Eternal Jew”)

Hagee’s Jewish banker conspiracy theory was astonishingly similar to claims showcased in the 1940 anti-Jewish Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew, said to have been produced under supervision of Hitler’s propagandist Joseph Goebbels [link to video footage] . The Nazi film claimed (see link, above) that Jewish bankers, led by European Rothschilds, had “spread their net of financial influence over the working man” and were using their influence over global finance to “terrorize world [money] markets, world opinion, and world politics.” In his March 23, 2003 sermon, that was marketed by John Hagee Ministries as a 3-VHS cassette tape series, Hagee explained [video link], to his megachurch members and to audiences viewing Hagee’s sermon on evangelical radio and TV networks across the globe:

It may be shocking to you but I believe that America’s economic problems are not created by market conditions, they are planned and orchestrated to devalue and to destroy the value of the dollar. It was done by an unseen government that I’ll discuss later in this message. [..] Our economic destiny is controlled by the Federal Reserve system that is now headed by Alan Greenspan. Think about this. It is not a government institution. It is controlled by a group of Class A stockholders including the Rothschilds of Europe and the David Rockefellers of America… So get this one thought. The value of the dollar is controlled by an agency which is not controlled by America. You don’t have to have a Ph.D. in finance to understand that. The value of your dollar is controlled by an organization, the Federal Reserve that is not controlled by America. That’s a fact.

Packaging of John Hagee’s 2003 3-sermon VHS set Iraq: The Final War, that contained Hagee’s March 23, 2003 sermon

Hagee also aired his Jewish banker conspiracy theory in his 1996 book Day of Deception that was reprinted in 2000 in an edition billed as having sold “over 1.1 million copies.” Hagee’s Day of Deception is still sold, by Thomas Nelson publishers. In the book, Hagee makes clear that European Rothschilds (not Rockefellers) have majority shareholder control of the Federal Reserve. In his March 23, 2003 sermon, Hagee predicted that Jewish financiers were behind a satanic Illuminati plot, based in Europe, that would bring the Antichrist to power. This Antichrist, who in a prior sermon Hagee had predicted would be both partially Jewish and homosexual, would according to Hagee [video link] slaughter up to 1/3 of the world’s population and “make Hitler look like a choirboy”. Hagee’s claim that Hitler was “partially Jewish” fits into an emerging American right-wing revisionist genre, with both evangelical and secular expressions, that is rewriting the Holocaust by recasting the victims of Nazi persecution, such as Jews, liberals, communists, and homosexuals, as having been themselves the architects of Nazi persecution and the Holocaust. John Hagee’s pro-Israel form of Christian Zionism is an extremely complex phenomenon which over the past several decades has come to play a significant role in Israel politics. (see this analysis, from Boston-based think tank Political Research Associates, by PRA Fellow Rachel Tabachnick, on the tortured admixture of philo-Semitism and anti-Semitism that characterizes the movement). But Christian Zionism is not new. In the early 1920s, a leading American industrialist — one of the giants of his age, wrote,

Every Jew ought to know also that in every Christian church where the ancient prophecies are received and studied, there is a great revival of interest in the future of the Ancient People. It is not forgotten that certain promises were made to them regarding their position in the world, and it is held that these prophesies will be fulfilled. The future of the Jew, as prophetically outlined, is intimately bound up with the future of this planet, and the Christian church in large part-at least by the evangelical wing, which most Jews condemn-sees a Restoration of the Chosen People yet to come. If the mass of Jews knew how understandingly and sympathetically all the prophecies will find fulfillment and that they will result in great Jewish service to society at large, they would probably regard the church with another mind.

 The author was Henry Ford, who in the 1920s commissioned the writing of the infamous anti-Jewish tract series The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem that expanded upon anti-Jewish conspiracy theories outlined in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious anti-Jewish propaganda document forged by the Russian Tzarist secret police.

Henry Ford placed blame for the start of World War One squarely on Jewish finance. “I know who caused the war: German-Jewish bankers,” declared Ford in 1915. In his 1920 tract series, articles such as “Jewish Power and America’s Money Famine” attributed the economic misfortunes of average Americans, such as farmers, to alleged Jewish control of gold supplies. Henry Ford paid for The International Jew to be translated into German and distributed in mass quantities in Germany. In post-WW2 testimony at the Nuremberg War Crime Tribunals, it emerged that Ford’s anti-Jewish tract had deeply influenced leading Nazis such as Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach. The extended quote above, by Henry Ford, was originally published in Ford’s tract series The International Jew. As may be the case with some contemporary Christian Zionists, Ford did not believe himself to be an anti-Semite. For years the automaker annually gave a new Model T Ford to Rabbi Leo M. Franklin, who lived in Ford’s former Detroit neighborhood.

After Ford began publishing his series The International Jew, Franklin began to refuse Ford’s annual Model T gifts. When Ford questioned the rabbi about it, Franklin replied, “you’re attacking Jews. I can’t accept anything from you.” Ford replied, “No, I’m not attacking Jews, I’m attacking bad Jews. I would think you’d be supportive of that.”

Rabbi Franklin went on to become a co-founder of the Anti-Defamation League.

In Europe, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia go hand in hand

In Europe, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia go hand in hand

Both scourges are projections of the illiberal mind

 

by Paul Hockenos

Paris — The spate of anti-Semitic violence in Europe might appear to justify Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s call for European Jews to move to Israel where, he claims, Jews can be safe.

“Of course, Jews deserve protection in every country,” Netanyahu said on Feb. 15, “but we say to Jews, to our brothers and sisters, ‘Israel is your home.’ We are preparing and calling for the absorption of mass immigration from Europe.”

Europe’s Jewry should nevertheless reject Netanyahu’s call. It’s a populist ploy ahead of Israel’s March 17 election. Jewish citizens in Europe should instead be active participants in the societies in which they live, continuing to promote democracy, civil liberties and tolerance of diversity as they have done energetically in the past, to Europe’s enormous benefit.

Nowhere, even in long-established democracies such as France, can the liberal order be taken for granted. Every generation has to fight anew to maintain (or even, in a best case scenario, improve on) the quality of democracy as its circumstances change. Anti-Semitism is one challenge to this struggle, Islamophobia another. The two illiberal ideologies and their implications for open societies are more closely linked than they appear.

Anti-Semitism in Europe

Anti-Semitism is on the rise across Europe, propelled by familiar and new antagonists. The Jan. 9 shooting of four Jewish shoppers at a kosher supermarket in Paris followed a string of lethal assaults on Jews across the continent in 2014. Last month an attack on a synagogue in Copenhagen, Denmark, left one man dead and two police officers wounded. The incident forced Jewish schools in Belgium and France to close temporarily. Last year the Jewish Museum in Brussels was bombed. At least eight synagogues were attacked in Europe in July 2014. In Germany, Jewish men wearing the skullcap, or kippa, were harassed, cursed and beaten up on the street.

A 2012 European Union survey of 6,000 Jews in eight European nations, which together account for 90 percent of Europe’s Jewish population, found that 66 percent believed anti-Semitism was on the rise in Europe; 76 percent said anti-Jewish sentiment increased in their country since 2007. In a survey a year later, almost half of the respondents said they were concerned about being verbally insulted or attacked in public. Seventy years after Auschwitz’s liberation, which is being commemorated across Europe, Jewish graves have been desecrated, and Jewish citizens are uncomfortable in certain neighborhoods, particularly those with high proportions of Muslims.

Anti-Semitism is not a new phenomenon in postwar Europe. But its usual standard bearers were Europe’s far-right groups. Far-right and populist groups still propagate hatred toward Jews, although in its more muted form than in recent decades. (There’s an anti-Semitic stripe in the far left as well, closely linked with anti-Americanism and sympathy for the Palestinian quest for statehood.) Parties such as the National Front in France, Austria’s Freedom Party and Belgium’s Vlaams Bok have long traded in anti-Semitism. Opinion polls show residual anti-Semitism in most European populations, which is largely understood as a reaction to globalization, modernity and urban values. In Central and Eastern Europe, where there was no postwar reconciliation, anti-Semitism burns hotter as part and parcel of old-school volkish nationalism.

Muslim leaders have to fight anti-Jewish mindsets as actively as Europe’s Jews must help dispel the falsehoods fueling the anti-Islam discourse.

But the far-right anti-Semites now have a more opportune target: Islam. The same tools and tropes that were once used to create fear of and resentment toward Jews have been turned against Muslims. They claim that Muslims are swamping their countries and diluting their national cultures — claims once made against Jews. Whereas Jews were claimed to partake in blood rituals, Islam is cast as an inherently violent religion and all Muslims as threats to European security and identity.

Germany’s PEGIDA movement, which took to the streets in Dresden and elsewhere in Germany in late 2014 and early 2015, offers a perfect example. While PEGIDA’s foremost target was the Muslim community, its closeness to neo-Nazi groups and anti-Israel currents was manifest. One man with an Israeli flag was chased from a PEGIDA demonstration, and marchers carried posters reading “Just say no to Israel” and “Let Germany finally be Germany,” the latter a resentful reference to Germany’s war guilt and coming to grips with the Holocaust. Just as contemporary anti-Semitism is often strongest in places with no Jews, PEGIDA support was the highest in Dresden, a city with a population less than 0.5 percent Muslim. In other words, as with anti-Semitism, Islamophobia is highly irrational.

Muslim anti-Semitism

The chief perpetrators of anti-Semitic violence and terrorist attacks, however, are not the far right ideologues but radicalized elements in Europe’s Muslim community. It goes without saying that not all Muslims are anti-Semitic. (Collective guilt is almost always wrong-headed.) But polls show that anti-Semitism is strikingly high among European Muslims, particularly younger Muslim men and women.

A recent French survey found that 74 percent of French Muslims said they believe Jews have too much influence over the nation’s economy. (The figure among non-Muslim French was 25 percent.) Seventy percent of French Muslims said that Jews control the country’s media. A 2013 study by the EU found that Jews in Europe felt most threatened by Muslims in their societies. Günther Jikeli in his new book, “European Muslim Antisemitism,” corroborates these findings and argues that anti-Semitism is pervasive in the beliefs of young European Muslims.

The reasons for the new anti-Semitism are part socioeconomic, part political. So far, the young Muslims involved in the recent attacks against Jews have almost always been the kind of poor, disenfranchised young men whose circumstances breed resentment and anger. In Islam they find a home and identity. The politics of Israel in the Middle East have thrown fuel on the fire consistently over the last two decades; the ongoing violence against the Palestinians in Gaza is only the most recent agony. The emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant has facilitated the mix of a toxic cocktail that targets Jews across Europe.

But Jews are not necessarily safer in Israel than they are on the streets of Paris or Berlin. Europe is facing an enormous challenge in reacting to this new element in its midst and defeating it without encouraging more converts to radical Islam. We saw this happen in the aftermath of United States’ wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in response to the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the Central Intelligence Agency’s black sites and the drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

On Feb. 14, the European Jewish Congress called for enhancing existing anti-racism legislation, which is enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights. It envisions prohibiting the wearing of the full-face veil everywhere in Europe, punishing denial of the Holocaust and hate speech and outlawing praise for a terrorist act. But the proposal is not constructive in the long run. Such measures cast suspicion on all Muslims and would work to alienate rather than integrate.

European countries must devise a way to make Muslims feel part of their societies. Here in Paris it is stunning to experience firsthand how abruptly the City of Light ends at the banlieues, the tenement housing on Paris’ periphery where much of the migrant population lives. Here one leaves the urban wonderland of museums, fine restaurants, graceful apartment buildings and good jobs and enters the underworld of poverty, marginalization, unemployment and ugliness.

There are many ways that French and other European societies can reach out to their Muslim neighbors. This could mean interfaith dialogue, common civic initiatives, integrated schooling and more inclusive governance structures. Projects such as Germany’s Schule Ohne Rassismus, a nonprofit that fights racial bias against Jews, Muslims and others in secondary schools across the country should be replicated elsewhere in Europe. Ultimately, all Europeans, including Muslim communities, must insist on more democracy, civic culture and tolerance. Muslim leaders have to fight anti-Jewish mindsets as actively as Europe’s Jews must help dispel the falsehoods fueling the anti-Islam discourse. This is the way to beat the twin menaces of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

Paul Hockenos is a journalist living in Berlin. He has covered the transformations of the EU for over 25 years.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.

The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity

The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, by Richard Steigmann-Gall

A popular belief is that Nazism was the polar opposite of Christianity: in Germany, the Nazis planned to eliminate Christian churches while devout Christians opposed the Nazi agenda. Is this perception accurate? No. Some Nazis were anti-Christian and some Christians were anti-Nazi, but the majority were equally at home in both camps.

Book Review

Traditional evaluation of Christian complicity in the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes focuses on the degree to which Christians allowed themselves to be used for Nazi purposes, but this presupposes a distinction between Nazis and Christians which did not entirely exist. Many Christians actively supported the Nazi agenda. Many Nazis were not only devout Christians, but also believed that Nazi philosophy was animated by Christian doctrine.

The Christianity promoted by the Nazis was labeled “positive Christianity,” a perspective that focused on the relationship between Christian promises of salvation and the German Volk as a special race of people. Point 24 of the NSDAP Party Program, created in 1920 and never rescinded, reads:

“We demand freedom for all religious confessions in the state, insofar as they do not endanger its existence or conflict with the customs and moral sentiments of the Germanic race. The party as such represents the standpoint of a positive Christianity, without owing itself to a particular confession. It fights the spirit of Jewish materialism within us and without us, and is convinced that a lasting recovery of our Volk can only take place from within, on the basis of the principle: public need comes before private greed.”How is all of this possible? How can the reality of the relationship between Nazism and Christianity be so far removed from popular perception? The truth about all this is detailed in Richard Steigmann-Gall’s book The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945.

Christians avert their faces from the true relationship between their religion and Nazism in part because the truth is difficult to bear, but also in part because they simply don’t understand what Christianity was like in Germany at the time.

“Positive Christians may have said little or nothing about the Augsburg Confession or other signifiers of theological orthodoxy, but they nonetheless regarded Christian social theories — “practical Christianity” as it was also known — as a linchpin of their worldview. Although generally unconcerned with dogma, many of these Nazis nonetheless adhered to basic precepts of Christian doctrine — most importantly the divinity of Christ as the son of God. Although they clearly departed from conventional theology in their rejection of the Old Testament and insistence on Christ’s Aryanhood, they were not simply distorting Christianity for their own ends or engaging in idiosyncratic religious meandering. Only by ignoring the intellectual precedents for these ideas can we argue that positive Christianity was an “infection” of an otherwise pristine faith. Rather. These ideas found expression among bona fide voices of Kulturprotestantismus before the Nazi Party ever existed.”

The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, by Richard Steigmann-Gall

Although Christians today may find it implausible that religion as they practice it could have anything in common with Nazism, they need to recognize that Christianity — including their own — is always conditioned by the culture where one finds it. For Germans at the beginning of the 20th century, this meant that Christianity was often profoundly anti-Semitic and nationalistic. This was the same ground which the Nazis found so fertile for their own ideology — it would have been amazing had the two systems not found a great deal in common and been unable to find a way to work together.

Germany after World War I was regarded as a godless, secular, materialistic republic which had betrayed all of Germany’s traditional morals, values, and religious beliefs. An important aspect of the Nazis’ appeal to the great mass of religiously conservative Germans was the fact that they said all the right things about the evils of atheism, materialism, greed, corruption, law and order, communism, and religious values.

Alongside the Christian Nazis were a number of anti-Christian Nazis who sought to create a new, neo-pagan religion for the German people. These were, however, relatively few in number and their views were never officially endorsed by the Party or by Hitler. Slightly more common were anti-clerical Nazis who continued to accept basic theistic and Christian doctrines, but who repudiated churches and priests. This seems to have been a view gradually adopted by Hitler himself.

Isn’t it true, though, that Hitler sought to eliminate churches and Christianity from Germany? It’s been said that Hitler only spoke positively about Christianity in public because he had to in order to maintain support from the German people; in private, he admitted to his true hatred of all things Christian. This view is based upon allegedly private comments recorded in the book Hitler Speaks, but Steigmann-Gall argues that the balance of evidence indicates that these statements are probably forgeries and are regarded as such by many scholars.

“The conspiratorial tone of this account of the “private” Hitler has convinced many church historians that Hitler was “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” anti-Christian to the core and from the outset of his career. The caricature Rauschning presents of Hitler’s ranting should alone have raised questions as to its authenticity; but the more troubling fact remains that Rauschning’s book stands completely alone in handing down sayings of this nature from this period.”“It is not for nothing that these factors should raise questions: Hitler Speaks is now considered to be fraudulent. As a recent biographer has put it, “Especially the chapter ‘Hitler in private’ …‘is untrustworthy through and through — a product of war propaganda… [Rauschning’s] ‘conversations with Hitler’ are far-off fantasies.” Moreover…Rauschning was too peripheral to the movement to have been part of Hitler’s inner circle of confidants, as he consistently maintained.”

Sometimes people use passages from Hitler’s Table Talks to argue that Hitler was really anti-Christian, but even if the authenticity of this entire collection of reminiscences is acknowledged, there is far more ambiguity and pro-Christian commentary than is usually acknowledged. It would be surprising if Hitler had never said anything critical of churches, priests, and Christianity and so the existence of some negative quotes is expected. What matters most is the overall balance of his commentary — and that is indisputably pro-Christian and pro-religion.

The deliberate promotion of pagan beliefs was a minority within the Nazi Party. Alfred Rosenberg favored the creation of a new religion, but Hitler went so far as to threaten to take action against his book Mythus, and it was banned by some lower-ranking party organizations. Himmler was obsessed with ancient Germans, but Hitler dismissed this as ridiculous — and even Himmler insisted that Christian viewpoints be respected within the SS. At times he admitted that he was less anti-Christian than anti-clerical.

The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, by Richard Steigmann-Gall

One important point about all this which may be missed is the fact that these and other pagan Nazis never pretended to be anything else — they never affected a pro-Christian stance in public in order to win over the approval of the German people. When Nazis were pagan, it appears that they were unabashedly and enthusiastically pagan, without apology.

This makes it difficult to argue that other leading Nazis, like Goebbels, Goering, and Hitler himself, only pretended to be pro-Christian for the sake of public relations. If they had wanted to endorse a new paganism in Germany, they had ample opportunity. Instead, what we have are a few Nazis publicly endorsing paganism, but most Nazis publicly endorsing Christianity and all official party organs endorsing Christianity, right up to the official party platform.

Reviewed by Austin Cline

Related articles

• Hitler’s Christianity, by J.P. Holding: A Brief Response (arizonaatheist.blogspot.com)
• On Hitler’s Christianity: Another Factless Reply From J.P. Holding & My Response (arizonaatheist.blogspot.com)
• Does the Munich hoard turn the story of art and the Nazis on its head? (theguardian.com)
• Nazi Germany: A Christian Nation Run Amok? (atheistrev.com)
• “Hitler’s Furies” Reveals Nazi Women Who Were as Evil as the Men (warhistoryonline.com)
• Goebbels, Reich and Art (artlark.org)

Nazism, Zionism and The Arab World | Countering Myths

Nazism, Zionism, and the Arab World: Countering myths

By Cecilie Surasky

Holocaust survivor Annette Herskovits has written an important article— Nazism, Zionism, and the Arab World: Countering the myths spread by pro-Israel ideologues.

She describes the tactics and goals of pro-Israel campus watchdogs and the harm wrought by their unabashed falsification of history and of current realities in Palestine/Israel.

Conquerors have always justified seizing another people’s land on “moral” grounds, to ward off the world’s disapproval as well as the burden of a bad conscience. And while the world’s support for the creation of Israel was fueled in large part by the plight of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust–the fact remains that the taking of land already occupied by Palestinians in order to create a refuge was (and still is) justified using false histories and slogans like “A land with no people for people with no land.”

The process of removing Palestinians from their land—which goes on to this day– requires a literally never-ending production of moral justification, and pro-Israel zealots are only too happy to oblige.

Most damaging? People like Alan Dershowitz paint Arabs and Muslims as heirs to Nazism, bent on exterminating the Jews. The sparse history of Arab collaboration with the Nazis—nothing like what took place in most European countries—is used to “explain” Arab hostility to Israel and obscure Israel’s crimes.

This “nazification” of Arabs and Muslims has been debunked by historian Gilbert Achcar in his book, “The Arabs and the Holocaust: the Arab-Israeli War of Narratives.” Campus Watch then launched a smear campaign against Achcar.

From Herskovits’ article:

About hasbara:

Propaganda produced by Israel and the American Jewish establishment inverts reality. This is crude stuff, manifestly false to anyone who would look up information published by a multitude of respected media and human rights organizations. But omissions and outright lies are probably a deliberate tactic: deny, deny … confuse, confuse… Like Israel’s building of “facts on the ground” (settlements, roads, etc.), it gains time; the hope is that Israeli power will eventually be so entrenched in the land of “Greater Israel” that nobody will remember Palestinians ever lived there.

About pro-Israel zealotry:

As someone whose mother and father were murdered in Auschwitz, and who herself survived the Nazis’ barbarous nationalism thanks to the courage of a group of Catholics, Protestants, Communists, and Jews, I find the idea that defending the “Jewish state” supersedes all other human obligations both immoral and senseless. Nothing, not even the Holocaust, justifies Israel’s treatment of Palestinians or the continuing efforts of pro-Israel zealots to show Arabs and Muslims as less than human.

Annette Herskovits, a holocaust survivor and the daughter of holocaust victims, holds a PhD from Stanford University and is the author of Language and Spatial Cognition (Cambridge University Press, 1987, 2009). She has written more than a dozen published articles on Palestine/Israel and is a Palestinian rights activist.

Related articles

• A Short History of Israel (robertlindsay.wordpress.com)
• Silencing Judith Butler (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)

Right Wing Hungarian Pol Wanted Lists of ‘Risky’ Jews

Hungarian Pol Wanted Lists of ‘Risky’ Jews

MARTON GYONGYOSI STIRS OUTRAGE

Via:- Evann Gastaldo

(NEWSER) – A Hungarian politician has sparked outrage with his call for lists of Jews who pose a risk to national security, Reuters reports. Marton Gyongyosi, a leader in the far-right Jobbik party, asked the government to compile such lists because of increased tensions in the wake of Israel-Gaza violence. Of course, opponents see echoes of the same policies that resulted in the Holocaust, when 500,000 to 600,000 Hungarian Jews died.

“I think such a conflict makes it timely to tally up people of Jewish ancestry who live here, especially in the Hungarian Parliament and the Hungarian government, who, indeed, pose a national security risk to Hungary,” said Gyongyosi. The Hungarian government quickly responded that it “rejects extremist, racist, anti-Semitic voices of any kind.” Gyongyosi later offered a semi-apology, and claimed he was referring only to those with dual citizenship in both Israel and Hungary.

Related articles

• Hungary far-right leader demands lists of Jews who pose ‘national security risk’ (news.nationalpost.com)
• Anger as Hungary far-right leader demands lists of Jews (news.yahoo.com)
• Hungarian Leader Asks His Government for a List of Jews (theatlanticwire.com)
• Hungarian Parliamentarian Wants Government to Draw up List of Dangerous Jews (reason.com)
• Hungarian Pol Wanted Lists of ‘Risky’ Jews (newser.com)
• Hungarian politician calls for lists of Jews (thejc.com)

Jewish Rabbi Gets Prison For Holocaust Torah Fraud

Haredi “Indiana Jones” Sentenced To Prison For Holocaust Torah Fraud

Rabbi Menachem Youlus was sentenced to 51 months in federal prison today – the maximum sentence recommended under the US Sentencing Commission’s guidelines.

Rabbi Menachem Youlus

Haredi “Indiana Jones” Sentenced To Prison For Holocaust Torah Fraud
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com

U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon sentenced Rabbi Menachem Youlus to 51 months in federal prison today – the maximum sentence recommended under the US Sentencing Commission’s guidelines.

Youlus pleaded guilty in February to defrauding donors who gave his charity hundreds of thousands of dollars to recover and restore ‘lost’ Torah scrolls that survived the Holocaust. But the supposed Holocaust Torahs were fakes, scrolls purchased by Youlus on the black market or from synagogues.

Actual Torah scrolls and fragments of Torah scrolls that survived the Holocaust do exist, but Youlus’s scrolls were not among them.

Youlus, who also owns a Jewish bookstore in Wheaton, Maryland, told donors he traveled the world to recover Torah scrolls lost or hidden during the Holocaust, including one he claimed to have recovered at Auschwitz and another from Bergen-Belsen.

“I guess you could call me the Jewish Indiana Jones,” Youlus once claimed.

But Youlus almost never traveled overseas during the years he said he was scouring Europe for Holocaust Torahs. Instead, he bought old Torah scrolls in North America, refurbished them, and then sold then as Holocaust Torahs to synagogues across America.

Some of the money Youlus raised from donors to support the “rescue” of the “Holocaust Torahs” was actually used to pay his children’s private school tuition and for personal expenses like his meals and health care.

Youlus’s attorney Ben Brafman told the Associated Press that Youlus had actually “squirreled away” most of the money he stole, and claimed that the victims would get back all of their money.

“I will carry that shame and dishonor with me for the rest of my life,” Youlus reportedly told the court today. “… I know I have lifetime of atonement ahead of me.”

Much of the next five years of that will be spent in a federal prison that is yet to be determined.

Related articles

• ‘Jewish Indiana Jones’ who peddled fake Holocaust torahs gets four-plus years in jail (windowintopalestine.blogspot.com)
• ‘Jewish Indiana Jones’ sentenced to federal prison term (jta.org)
• Maryland man headed to prison in Torah fraud case (timesofisrael.com)
• Thou shalt not run Torah scam (privateinvesigations.blogspot.com)
• ‘Jewish Indiana Jones’ sentenced to prison for fraud (thejc.com)
• rabbinical scam time (niqnaq.wordpress.com)
• Rabbi Menachem Youlus sentenced to four years in prison in $1 million scam (privateinvesigations.blogspot.com)
• Rabbi who Sold Phony Holocaust Torahs Gets Four Years in Jail (jewishpress.com)
• Haredi “Indiana Jones” Sentenced To Prison For Holocaust Torah Fraud (failedmessiah.typepad.com)

Jewish Zealot’s Outrageous Holocaust Lies – AGAIN!

Updated: Haredi Rabbi Lies About The Holocaust – Again

“According to some experts, between 50%-70% of those murdered by the  Nazis, were “traditionally religious Jews.” There is no reason to assume  the percentage of survivors who were religious was any less.”

Rabbi Meir Wikler

Yad Vashem only honors Holocaust’s secular victims Haredim have authored their own Holocaust history books, developed their own curricula to teach it to their children and are building their own museums to memorialize the martyrs.

By Meir Wikler • Ha’aretz

When Yad Vashem in Jerusalem opened its new wing, known as The Holocaust History Museum, in 2005, it was much ballyhooed as a state of the art, multi-million dollar Holocaust museum to top all others. While praise for the new museum wing has poured forth from dignitaries and laymen, the unified opposition of so-called ultra-orthodox, or Haredi Jewry, has stuck out like a sore thumb. Why have Haredim been so upset?

While Jewish religious life before World War II is illustrated at the museum, the testimony of haredi survivors is largely missing.

According to some experts, between 50%-70% of those murdered by the Nazis, were “traditionally religious Jews.” There is no reason to assume the percentage of survivors who were religious was any less. But in the rooms of Yad Vashem only one of the 50-60 video monitors playing taped testimonies of Holocaust survivors shows a Haredi Jew. By choosing to record and display taped testimonies of mostly secular Jews, Yad Vashem is giving a distorted picture of the religious affiliations of the survivors. This gives the false impression that few ultra-orthodox Jews survived the Shoah.

The spiritual heroism of the Holocaust is almost completely overlooked. The abundant examples of incredible courage to study Torah and perform mitzvot despite unspeakable suffering and incredible hardships are relegated to footnote status and all but eliminated from the museum. The clandestine yeshivot and Torah study groups in the ghettos, the lighting of candles on Channuka, the blowing of the shofar on Rosh Hashana and the daily donning of tefillin in the concentration camps – all under the penalty of death – are not mentioned at all.

The massive rescue work of Haredi Jewry has effectively been purged from the historical record of the Holocaust as presented by Yad Vashem. Rabbi Michoel Ber Weissmandl, for example, and the heroic efforts of his Working Group, are impugned and dishonored. Instead of crediting them with successfully delaying the transports from Czechoslovakia by bribing and outsmarting the Nazis, the paragraph written about them makes it sound as if they were the ones who had been duped.

Yad Vashem’s responses to queries on this subject have been disappointing. At one meeting, the Yad Vashem representative requested that the discussion be kept “off the record.” The institution’s written responses to published critiques have attempted to obfuscate the issue. The spokesperson cited, for example, the online services available to the Haredi community. They also pointed to the special Orthodox division of their tour guide training school and they emphasized how many Orthodox students make use of Yad Vashem archives for research purposes.

Yad Vashem’s underlying motives for all of this are open to speculation. Some Herdim believe that Yad Vashem feels that dealing more favorably with ultra-Orthodox Jews is antithetical to their secular, Zionist agenda. Others see this as a reflection of the anti-Haredi bias of some segments of secular Israeli society. And still others suspect that Yad Vashem simply suffers from the, “We know best,” mentality, so prevalent today in Jewish establishment circles.

However, there have been a few improvements made to the new Museum wing. For example, the immodest pictures of victims which were originally on display when the museum opened have since been removed. In addition, while the new building opened with no videotaped testimonies from any Haredi survivors, now there is one.

Unfortunately, these changes fall far short of what is needed. As the premier Holocaust museum under Jewish auspices, Yad Vashem dishonors the memory of the six million by continuing to present a distorted and incomplete record of the Shoah. No, not all those who perished in or survived the Shoah were Haredim. But many more Haredim did survive than the 2% represented by the one videotaped testimony currently on display.

In spite of the extremely rare but highly publicized Haredi use of Holocaust imagery against the State, the overwhelming majority of Haredim today take Shoah remembrance seriously. Yad Vashem, however, is seen by many as irrelevant. As a result, Haredim have authored their own Holocaust history books, developed their own curricula to teach it to their children and are building their own museums to memorialize the martyrs.

If many ultra-Orthodox Jews see Yad Vashem as irrelevant, why are some so outspoken in their criticism of the new Holocaust History Museum? Millions of visitors, both Jew and non-Jew, stream through Yad Vashem each year. The vast majority of them would never visit a Holocaust museum under Haredi auspices. Yad Vashem needs, therefore, to make further corrections to the new building for those visitors. And world Jewry must insist on it.
Yom HaShoah observances are designed to memorialize the martyrs. Nothing would honor their memory more, however, than being remembered as they would have wanted. We cannot save a single life that was lost in the Holocaust. We can, however, protest the distortions at Yad Vashem that dishonor the memory of religious victims because they can no longer do that for themselves.

Dr. Meir Wikler is a Brooklyn based psychotherapist, author and lecturer.

Meir Wikler is dishonest. He’s also a fool.

As I noted in May of last year in response to an ‘interview’ of Wikler in The Jewish Week [the quotes are from that ‘interview’ but are similar to what he wrote now above]:

1. “At least half, if not more, of all survivors were haredi.” This is complete hogwash. At the dawn of WW2, 2/3 of Warsaw’s Jews were  secular. The number of secular Jews was even higher in Paris, Amsterdam  and Denmark. And most of Budapest’s Jews were secular, as well. Even  smaller cities like Munkatch had large secular populations. And all  these areas had large populations of what we would call Modern Orthodox  or Zionist Orthodox Jews, as well. The vast majority of Europe’s Jews in  1939 were secular or non-haredi Orthodox. There are to my knowledge no  studies, no academic research, and no evidence to back up Wikler’s  claim. But there is much evidence against Wikler. Satmar, Bobov,  Klausenberg, Chabad and other American hasidic groups were broken by the  Holocaust. Most of the people who today call themselves hasidim are  descended from people who were secular or non-haredi-Orthodox after the  Holocaust, but who were recruited by hasidic leaders, many of whom had  difficulty getting a quorum for prayer in 1946.

2. “The description of Harav [Rabbi] Michoel Dov Weissmandel,  of blessed memory, [who led an effort to save Jews from the Holocaust]  depicts him as having been naïve and duped by the Nazis. The truth is  just the opposite. He was a brilliant rabbinic leader who outwitted the  Nazis at every turn.” All available evidence shows Rabbi  Weissmandl – the Slovakian rabbi who was courageous and tireless as he  tried to save Jews from the Nazis – was, in fact, duped by the Nazis and  achieved little. The only way to interpret the evidence differently  (besides lying, of course) is to say that the Allies would have allowed  American and Palestinian Jews to give the Germans tens of thousands of  trucks and other war supplies in exchange for Jews in the middle of war  they were fighting against those Germans

3. “There are videotaped testimonies of only two haredi  survivors in the New  Wing of the museum. Compared with the 50 or 60  testimonies of  non-haredi survivors, it gives the mistaken impression  that hardly any  haredi Jews survived, and by extension, that haredi  Judaism did not  survive the Holocaust.” I’ve known dozens of  Holocaust survivors on three continents. They include parents of  friends, Jewish communal leaders, Holocaust educators, simple Jews, and  even a Nazi hunter. Only one or two could be honestly described as being  haredi after the war. Before the war that number would be four or five,  at best. What Wikler does is define haredi in terms so broad the word  no longer has meaning. Therefore anyone with a onetime connection to the  haredi community, no matter how tenuous it may be – even if that  ‘connection’ comes from grandparent’s affiliation only, or even if that  ‘affiliation’ comes from Wikler defining non-haredi Orthodoxy as haredi  for the purpose of his argument – is defined by Wikler as haredi. That  pumps up his numbers and allows him to  lambaste Yad Vashem for, in  effect, following the normative definition of the word and then acting  on it. On top of Wikler’s behavior, there is the overall behavior of the  haredi community that did survive the war. Their leaders generally  refused to cooperate with Yad Vashem, which means haredim are  underrepresented there – but not to the degree Wikler claims. The fault  is not Yad Vashem’s – it is Yoel Teitelbaum’s and the other haredi  leaders who refused to cooperate with it.

4. It isn’t just that haredim do not commemorate Yom HaShoah. For  years, they did things that flew in the face of it, just as for years  haredim refused to stand still and be silent for the one minute of  silence observed for Israel’s fallen soldiers.

Past all this, Wikler ignores key facts that surely influenced and continue to influence Yad Vashem:

A. Haredim propagated and continue to propagate the most base and  bizarre conspiracy theories to ‘prove’ Zionists collaborated with the  Nazis and to delegitimize Israel. The ‘facts’ these conspiracy theories  are based on are largely false, and the little that is true is taken out  of context. They do this because the existence and success of the State  of Israel is an existential threat to the validity of their theology.

B. Any fair representation of haredi behavior during the Holocaust  must include the behavior of hasidic rebbes who ordered their flocks to  stay in Europe and then fled, leaving their followers to die horrible  deaths. The Satmar Rebbe did this. So did the Belzer Rebbe and his  brother. So did the Lubavitcher Rebbe.  And then there was Rabbi Elchanon Wasserman, a non-hasidic haredi  leader who forbade his followers from fleeing Europe, even telling  students not to accept offers to study at Yeshiva University in New  York. Wasserman hated YU because it was Zionist and because it was  Modern Orthodox. On a visit to New York, Wasserman himself turned down a  teaching position there and went back to Lithuania. He and many of his  students were killed by the Nazis shortly after.

C. There were rabbis – some haredi, some hasidic, some Modern or  Zionist Orthodox – who refused to leave their followers and accompanied  them to the killing fields and death camps. Most of them who survived  came out of that hell as Zionist or Zionist leaning.

D. Scholars who study the haredi reaction to the Holocaust –  including at least one haredi academic, Esther Farbstein – note that  haredi rabbis’ strong opposition to Zionism before the war, coupled with  Israel’s subsequent success and the poor behavior of the rabbis noted  in section B above, largely account for the haredi community’s rejection  of Holocaust studies and Holocaust memorials and its ambivalent and  sometimes hostile relationship with Yad Vashem. And, as I noted in  section A above, it is this cognitive dissonance that is the foundation  for the bizarre anti-Israel and anti-Zionist conspiracy theories common  in haredi communities.

Wikler lies with appalling regularity.

The sad thing is that haredi leadership and the haredi rank and file don’t even care.

Update 12:22 pm CDT – Here’s Yad Vashem’s response to Wikler’s lies:

Yad Vashem responds: We do pay tribute to Holocaust’s ultra-Orthodox victims Meir Wikler’s op-ed that the museum is biased toward the secular Jews who perished in the Holocaust is full of misinformation, writes Yad Vashem spokeswoman. By Iris Rosenberg • Ha’aretz

Meir Wikler’s latest article on what he perceives as bias against Haredim at Yad Vashem is replete with misinformation.

For example, Wikler says there is only one testimony of a Haredi survivor in the Holocaust History Museum; this is not true. He claims that blowing the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, donning tefillin, lighting candles on Hannukah “are not mentioned at all”. Again, this is false.

Rabbi Weissmandl and the Working Group’s efforts, under impossible circumstances, to rescue Jews are respected by Yad Vashem and all the guides trained here. It’s unfortunate that Wikler chooses to see insults and slights where none exist.

To state that “spiritual heroism of the Holocaust is almost completely overlooked” is wrong and misleading, demonstrating a perception unrelated to reality. Yad Vashem seeks to meaningfully impart the story of the Shoah in all its complexity and variety with a special emphasis on spiritual heroism. The activities of Yad Vashem – its museums, exhibitions, online material (viewed by over 12 million people last year), educational approaches, publications, and more – prove the contrary.

Wikler says that Haredim have authored their own Holocaust history books, developed curricula and teach their children. Indeed, for nearly a decade, an ultra-Orthodox department in Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies has been working closely with Haredi educators and leaders to prepare educational material such as the multi-volume textbooks Years Wherein We Have Seen Evil in Hebrew and English and seminars – at Yad Vashem and elsewhere – serving Haredi educators and students throughout Israel.

Sincere dialogue between Yad Vashem and the leadership of Haredi Jewry and their representatives over the years has resulted in productive educational activity with the Bais Yaacov and other Haredi educational systems, and many Haredim participate in seminars at Yad Vashem, in genuine partnerships with Agudath Israel of America and the Belz community in Israel, to name just a few.

To claim, as his headline does, that “Yad Vashem honors only Holocaust’s secular victims” is outrageous and can only be a result of an unfounded bias.

I invite Haaretz readers to join the hundreds of thousands of people, including Haredim and other Jews and non-Jews of all backgrounds, who visit the Holocaust History Museum, and other sites at Yad Vashem, and experience it for themselves.

Iris Rosenberg is the Spokesperson at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem.

Related articles

• ‘Silent Holocaust’ finds its voice: Wartime documents tell story of lost Soviet community (haaretz.com)
• Germany donates $13 million to Yad Vashem (jta.org)
• Jewish Zealots Busted For Holocaust Fraud (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)
• Memo From Jerusalem: Lessons From the Holocaust Are Widespread and Varied (nytimes.com)

Jewish Zealots Busted For Holocaust Fraud

Haredi Charity Heads Busted For Holocaust Fraud

The heads of Hazon Yeshaya, a charity that claimed to run many soup kitchens and other services for the poor – especially for elderly Holocaust survivors – allegedly stole millions of dollars of donations – including large donations from the Conference of Material Claims Against Germany (for Holocaust survivors) – by using the money to buy food, and then selling that food to haredi schools and other haredi institutions in a type of money laundering. Hazon Yeshaya was originally a part of (and is probably still a part of) Shuva Israel, the charity of Rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto, the Sefardi ‘kabbalist’ who is embroiled in several financial and other scandals. The Canadian and British Friends of Hazon Yeshaya shut down during the past year after each separately detected widespread fraud in the Israeli operation, including grossly inflated numbers of the soup kitchens it claimed to run and for the people it claimed to serve. So far, 10 Hazon Yeshaya employees have been arrested.

Above: Official name change from Mosdot Hazon Yeshaya Shuva Yisrael to Mossdot Hazon Yeshaya.

Israel Scandal:

Times of Israel.

Jerusalem Post.

Ynet.

British Scandal:

The Jewish Chronicle.

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Jewish Con Man Admits Torah Fraud | He’s Only Sorry Because He Got Caught

‘Jewish Indiana Jones’ admits NY Torah fraud

By LARRY NEUMEISTER | Associated Press

Enlarge Photo

• FILE- In this Aug. 24, 2011 file photo, Menachem Youlus leaves federal court in New …

NEW YORK (AP) — A Jewish charity co-founder who claimed he traveled the world as a “Jewish Indiana Jones” to rescue Torahs pleaded guilty to fraud charges Thursday, saying he lied when he claimed he had personally obtained vintage Torah scrolls in Europe and Israel for six years.

Menachem Youlus entered the plea to mail and wire fraud charges in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. Youlus is the owner of the Jewish Bookstore in Wheaton, Md., where he lives. A plea deal with prosecutors called for him to serve up to five years and three months in prison.

“I know what I did was wrong, and I deeply regret my conduct,” Youlus, 50, said as he described the lies he told between 2004 and 2010 to obtain funds from his Save a Torah charity and some of its contributors.

Prosecutors said he defrauded the charity he founded and its donors out of $862,000.

The government said he fabricated detailed accounts of exploits to recover Torahs lost or hidden during the Holocaust, including at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.

During his plea, he said his lies included telling prospective buyers that he had personally retrieved parts of one scroll from a metal box at Auschwitz.

A criminal complaint said Youlus had distributed Torahs he bought from U.S. dealers to synagogues and congregations nationwide, sometimes at inflated rates. It said he put nearly a third of $1.2 million collected by the charity into his personal accounts, spending some of it on private school tuition for his children and on personal expenses, including meals and health care.

The publicly stated mission of the charity was to locate and acquire Torahs that survived the Holocaust or had been taken from Jewish communities worldwide and repair them so they could be used in communities that need them. But authorities said Youlus rarely traveled abroad during the years he had claimed to go Torah hunting.

At a 2004 Torah dedication, Youlus wrote: “I guess you could call me the Jewish Indiana Jones,” the complaint said, referencing the action-adventure hero played by Harrison Ford in the 1981 Stephen Spielberg classic “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

In a statement, attorney Benjamin Brafman said he will seek leniency at a June 21 sentencing for Youlus, “a good man with the best of intentions who ultimately strayed into fraudulent conduct that he now accepts full responsibility for.”

Related articles

• ‘Jewish Indiana Jones’ admits to Torah fraud (telegraph.co.uk)
• ‘Jewish Indiana Jones’: I Made My Exploits Up (news.sky.com)
• ‘Jewish Indiana Jones’ admits NY Torah fraud (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• ‘Indiana Jones’ rabbi admits to $400k fraud (thejc.com)
• ‘Jewish Indiana Jones’ pleads guilty in Torah fraud case (jta.org)
• Rabbi Menachem Youlus Says He Lied About Saving Torahs (nytimes.com)
• ‘Jewish Indiana Jones’ admits lie (bbc.co.uk)
• ‘Jewish Indiana Jones’ Rabbi Youlus Admits to Torah Fraud (ibtimes.com)
• NYT: Rabbi admits Torah tales were a fraud (msnbc.msn.com)
• More Rabbinic Misconduct: He’s No Indy! (zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com)

Neo-Nazi Authour Released for Being Old

Neo-Nazi Authour Released for Being Old

‎Sunday, ‎11 ‎September ‎2011

[Bizarre – a country apparently wishing to rehabilitate a Fascist scrawler, whilst itself behaving like a Fascist State in denying free speech to its citizens?!]

A fascist writer who has denied the Holocaust has been released from jail early for being advanced in years. Viennese newspapers reported yesterday (Thurs) that Gerd Honsik was allowed to travel to Spain where he has lived with his family for years. The High Court of Vienna (OGH) argued the 69-year-old integrated well into society there. It cited his age as another reason for the early release on probation. The Austrian was sentenced to five years behind bars in 2009 for extreme-right statements he had made in articles in a magazine he published. His prison term was reduced by one year in an appeal hearing a few months later before he was ordered to spend an extra two years in jail in another trial last September.

Honsik was convicted of breaking Austria’s law against spreading Nazi propaganda and ideology in his book “Freispruch für Hitler?” (Acquittal for Hitler?) and sentenced to one and a half years in prison in 1992. He fled to Spain, a country criticised as a safe haven for neo-Nazis and alleged World War Two (WWII) criminals by many anti-fascism groups. Honsik was arrested in Malaga and eventually extradited to his homeland in 2007. Honsik has been in court over various disputed statements many times over the years. He doubted the existence of gas chambers at Nazi death camps in WWII in his books “Der Juden Drittes Reich” (The Jews’s Third Reich) and “Schelm und Scheusal” (Prankster and Monster). The infamous fascist claimed the Nazis’ mass murder could be doubted and called for a “forensic examination” of the “alleged Holocaust.”

Austrian Times