Just an Anti-Semitic Laugh? Hardly.

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, November 24, 2006; A41

"Borat" is many things: a sidesplitting triumph of slapstick and scatology, a runaway moneymaker
and budding franchise, the worst thing to happen to Kazakhstan since the Mongol hordes, and, as
columnist David Brooks astutely points out, a supreme display of elite snobbery reveling in the
humiliation of the hoaxed hillbilly.

But it is one thing more, something Brooks alluded to in passing but that requires at least one
elaboration: an unintentionally revealing demonstration of the unfortunate attitude many liberal

Jews have toward working-class American Christians, especially evangelicals.

You know the shtick. Borat goes around America making anti-Semitic remarks in order to elicit a
nodding anti-Semitic response. And with enough liquor and cajoling, he succeeds. In the most
notorious such scene (on "Da Ali G Show," where the character was born), Borat sings
"Throw the Jew Down the Well" in an Arizona bar as the local rubes join in.

Sacha Baron Cohen, the creator of Borat, revealed his purpose for doing that in a rare
out-of-character interview he granted Rolling Stone in part to counter charges that he was
promoting anti-Semitism. On the face of it, this would be odd, given that Cohen is himself a
Sabbath-observing Jew. His defense is that he is using Borat's anti-Semitism as a "tool" to
expose it in others. And that his Arizona bar stunt revealed, if not anti-Semitism, then
"indifference" to anti-Semitism. And that, he maintains, was the path to the Holocaust.

Whoaaaa. Does he really believe such rubbish? Can a man that smart (Cambridge, investment
banker and now brilliant filmmaker) really believe that indifference to anti-Semitism and the road
to the Holocaust are to be found in a country-and-western bar in Tucson?
Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world.

With anti-Semitism reemerging in Europe and rampant in the Islamic world; with Iran acquiring
the ultimate weapon of genocide and proclaiming its intention to wipe out the world's largest
Jewish community (Israel); with America and, in particular, its Christian evangelicals the only
remaining Gentile constituency anywhere willing to defend that besieged Jewish outpost --
is the American heartland really the locus of anti-Semitism? Is this the one place to go to find it?

In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez says that the "descendants of the same ones that crucified Christ" have "taken possession of all the wealth in the world." Just this month, Tehran hosted an international festival of Holocaust cartoons featuring enough hooked noses and horns to give Goebbels a posthumous smile. Throughout the Islamic world, newspapers and television, schoolbooks and sermons are filled with the most vile anti-Semitism.

Baron Cohen could easily have found what he seeks closer to home. He is, after all, from Europe, where synagogues are torched and cemeteries desecrated in a revival of anti-Semitism -- not "indifference" to but active -- unseen since the Holocaust. Where a Jew is singled out for torture and death by French-African thugs. Where a leading Norwegian intellectual -- et tu, Norway? -- mocks "God's Chosen People" ("We laugh at this people's capriciousness and weep at its misdeeds") and calls for the destruction of Israel, the "state founded . . . on the ruins of an archaic national and warlike religion."

Yet, amid this gathering darkness, an alarming number of liberal Jews are seized with the notion that the real threat lurks deep in the hearts of American Protestants, most specifically Southern evangelicals. Some fear that their children are going to be converted; others, that below the surface lies a pogrom waiting to happen; still others, that the evangelicals will take power in Washington and enact their own sharia law.

This is all quite crazy. America is the most welcoming, religiously tolerant, philo-Semitic country
in the world. No nation since Cyrus the Great's Persia has done more for the Jews. And its reward is to be exposed as latently anti-Semitic by an itinerant Jew looking for laughs and, he solemnly assures us, for the path to the Holocaust?

Look. Harry Truman used to tell derisive Jewish jokes. Richard Nixon said nasty things about Jews in government and elsewhere. Who cares? Truman and Nixon were the two greatest friends of the Jews in the entire postwar period: Truman secured them a refuge in the state of Israel, and Nixon saved it from extinction during the Yom Kippur War.

It is very hard to be a Jew today, particularly in Baron Cohen's Europe, where Jew-baiting is once again becoming acceptable. But it is a sign of the disorientation of a distressed and confused people that we should find it so difficult to distinguish our friends from our enemies.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

© Copyright 1996-2006 The Washington Post Company

Holocaust survivor meets Lithuanian savior 61 years later

November 26, 2006

NEW YORK (AP) -- Lea Ingel was not sure what she would say when she was reunited with the Catholic woman whose family sheltered her on its Lithuania farm during the Holocaust.
    The women had not seen each other in 61 years, and both knew their long-delayed reunion Friday at John F. Kennedy International Airport might be their last.
    Awaiting Giedrute Ramanauskiene's flight, Mrs. Ingel wondered how she would greet her rescuer.
    "I'm not so good with the talking, with the language, because I haven't been there for so long," she said.
    When they finally met, Mrs. Ingel, 84, and Mrs. Ramanauskiene, 77, embraced and cried.
    "They had wanted to do this for the last five years," said Marshall Ingel, 54, who accompanied his mother from Tamarac, Fla. "She kept saying, 'No, it was too emotional.' "
    With the help of Mrs. Ramanauskiene's family, Mrs. Ingel became part of a small percentage of Lithuanian Jews who survived the Holocaust. When the Soviet army ousted the Germans from Lithuania in August 1944, about 9,000 Jews remained from a prewar population of about 235,000, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
    Mrs. Ingel left in 1945 and never returned. Mrs. Ramanauskiene still lives on the same farm in Simnas, Lithuania. The Jewish Foundation for the Righteous brought the two together on Friday.
    The women remained in contact over the years, but Mrs. Ingel said communicating had become increasingly difficult because Mrs. Ramanauskiene struggles to read their correspondences.
    "Her vision is very bad," Mrs. Ingel said. "I would like somebody here to see her, an eye doctor."
    During World War II, Mrs. Ingel, then Lea Port, and her future husband, Samuel Ingel, were living in the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania. Both had joined a Jewish group that resisted the Germans.
    They fled Kovno separately in 1943. After 10 days of wandering in the forest miles from home, they realized they were the only members of the group who were still alive.
    They were near the village of Simnas, and a communist man in hiding brought Mrs. Ingel to his sister, Elena Ivanauskai, who agreed to care for her because she could pass as a gentile. Mr. Ingel could not, so at first he remained living in the forest.
    Mrs. Ingel stayed with Mrs. Ivanauskai and her husband, Petras, on their farm. After she pleaded with the family, Samuel Ingel stayed in the barn. The two later became close with the Ivanauskais' children, Giedrute and Gintautas.
    The couple remained at the farm until the Soviets arrived in August 1944 and married that December. They moved to Boston, then New York.
    Mrs. Ingel said she could never return to Lithuania. "It's hard for me to even talk about it," she said.
    Her husband did go back, in 1995. Upon his return, he became ill with lymphoma and later died, their son said.
    In August, Mrs. Ingel was taken to the hospital with a heart condition.
    "I think she's just realizing that if she doesn't do [the reunion] now, she may never do it," her son said.
   
All site contents copyright © 2006 The Washington Times, LLC.

French Jews Attacked After HaPoel Tel Aviv Beats French Team 19:43 Nov 26, '06 / 5 Kislev 5767 by Ezra HaLevi

All rights reserved IsraelNationalNews ©

Arutz Sheva Israel Broadcasting Network  webmaster@israelnationalnews.com

A Jewish fan of the HaPoel Tel Aviv soccer team was attacked by French fans in Paris Thursday, resulting in a police shooting that left one dead and one injured.

The incident took place at 11 PM at a McDonald’s restaurant near Paris’s Parc des Princes stadium following Tel Aviv’s 4-2 victory over Paris Saint-Germain in a UEFA Cup match. Paris fans attacked four French Jewish fans after members of the mob identified them as “Jews”. The Jews fled in different directions and a mob formed chasing after one of them, Yaniv Hazout. A plain-clothes policeman tossed tear gas grenades in an attempt to disperse the mob and eventual fired two live bullets into the crowd, “after being driven into the corner,” according to the French police. Two French rioters were injured by the shooting. One, 24-year-old Julien Quemener, later died of his wounds. Initial reports indicated that the attacked fans were Israelis who came to France to support the Israeli team. It turned out, though, that the attacked fans were local French Jews who came out in support of the Israeli team. Israeli fans were actually kept in the stadium for more than an hour after the game to prevent them from becoming targets of the angry mob, after they insisted on coming onto the field to celebrate the victory. The spokesman for Hapoel Tel Aviv, Amir Lubin, told Army Radio that French fans were extremely hostile toward the Israelis who came to support their team. "We could hear the chants of the French crowd, which were in no way connected to soccer," he said. "It was obvious that the Paris supporters were enraged by the result of the game, but we didn't imagine it would come to this," he said. French prosecutors have opened an inquiry into the incident, and placed the officer who fired the shots, Antoine Granomort, in police custody. Witnesses told police that the Paris fans were shouting “filthy Jews” and other anti-Semitic slogans at the Jewish fans and would have truly killed them had Granomort, an immigrant from the Caribbean, not fired into the crowd. French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said many of the Paris fans were chanting “Death to the Jews” during the attack. Five fans are in police custody and may face charges of racism and anti-Semitism.

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Published: 19:09 November 26, 2006 Last Update: 19:43 November 26, 2006

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UN HUMAN RIGHTS: ISRAELIS NEED NOT APPLY
By Abraham Cooper, Leo Adler and Harold Brackman*
© Copyright 2005, Simon Wiesenthal Center, 1399 South Roxbury, Los Angeles, California 90035,  information@wiesenthal.net

Touring Sderot, UN Human Rights High Commissioner Louise Arbour had to duck as Kassam rockets, which killed an Israeli woman a few days ago, again bombarded the southern Israeli hamlet. Arbour had just visited the Kassam’s Gaza launching pad—the Palestinian village of Beit Hanoun—where she called Israel’s anti-terror defensive measures “a human rights catastrophe.” Would being under bombardment herself refocus her indignation on the perpetrators of the terror—not just Israeli response? Unlikely, as Arbour’s employer—the new UN Human Rights Council—continues to pass one-sided anti-Israel resolutions and authorize anti-Israel investigatory witch hunts for which a recent New York Times gave the new Council “a failing midterm grade.”

For over five years, Palestinian terrorists have intentionally targeted, with 1000+ Kassam rockets, Jewish children on the way to school in Sderot and adjacent Kibbutzim.  Israel struck back at rocket launching sites with artillery. When an errant shell killed 19 Palestinian civilians, Israel apologized, but the Palestinian Hamas-led government promised more suicide attacks in order “to wipe Israelis off the map.” The story was all too familiar, as was the response from the UN where French ambassador Jean Marc de La Sabliere drafted a biased anti-Israel resolution for the Security Council that piously demanded “an independent inquiry” into the death of the Palestinian civilians.

In September, a delegation from the Simon Wiesenthal Center and its Canadian affiliate met with Commissioner Arbour in Geneva. (See photo). The former Canadian Supreme Court Justice courteously listened as the Mayor of the twin Jewish and Arab towns of Maalot-Tarshiha described the 34-day hell of Katyusha rocket barrages last summer that brought death and destruction to his beautiful municipality six miles south of the Lebanese border. Dr. Norman Loberant, a physician at a civilian hospital in Nahariya, then spoke of the physical and psychic damage suffered from a direct hit on the hospital. In response, Ms. Arbour admitted for the first time that Hezbollah had “violated international humanitarian law” by bombarding Israel’s civilian neighborhoods with Katyusha rockets laden with 40,000 ball bearings. But in the human rights arena, actions speak louder than words. Despite invitations from these Israelis, Arbour has apparently refused to add Northern Israel to her upcoming tour of the Holy Land, to see for herself the physical damage and psychological trauma that civilians sustained from the Hezbollah terrorist onslaught. During our meeting in Geneva, she had left open the possibility of visiting the children of Sderot a town that lies less than 5 kilometers from Gaza City. Today, the people of Sderot, which lies in Israel proper, watch with increasing dread as Palestinians rush to create a Hezbollah-styled ‘Hamastan’ replete with massive underground tunnels and stockpiled with increasingly sophisticated smuggled weaponry including rockets with more deadly payloads that are targeting an ever-widening range of Israeli civilian centers, schools, and synagogues.

Now, comes word from the CBC of a Palestinian attack on Sderot while Arbour was paying a short visit to the town.  Yet despite this scary incident, it is business as usual back at the office in Geneva where Arbour takes her orders from the “new” UN Human Rights Council. Supposedly, the old UN Human Rights Commission was reconstituted this year to diminish the influence of terrorism-friendly states like Syria, Sudan, and Cuba. Yet today, the newly named cesspool is back filled to the brim with old-style, veto-proof UN hypocrisy. Convening its first “emergency session” only days after the beginning of the Lebanon war, the Human Rights Council ignored Muslim-on-Muslim mass murder in Sudan in order to unleash a witch hunt against alleged Israeli “war crimes” committed in the struggle against Hezbollah. That resolution, introduced by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, passed 29 to 16 with 2 abstentions. The US, the European Union, and Canada voted “no.” The UN General Assembly has now also given aid and comfort to the terrorists by passing yet another one-sided anti-Israel resolution.

So the same old Arab-Muslim Third World Bloc is back in the saddle at the UN. US Permanent Representative to the UN Warren Tichenor called the Human Rights Committee resolution “an unbalanced effort to single out and focus on Israel alone.” But his words carried less force in UN corridors than Secretary General Kofi Annan’s condemnation of Israel last summer for “disproportionate use of force and collective punishment of the Lebanese people.”

So even as Israelis dodge female Palestinian suicide bombers at border crossings, Jerusalem ensures the free flow of food and medical supplies into Gaza, for which she is rewarded with incessant, one-sided criticism for causing the “humanitarian crisis” there. And as for resolutions condemning Hamas and Hezbollah; or demands for independent investigation as to how weaponry pours into Gaza and who’s paying for it; or the sight of a top human rights official offering comfort to Jewish victims of terror? Don’t count on it any time soon, Israelis surely aren’t.

The roots of the tragedy in the Mideast and the roots of the travesty at the UN are one-and-the same: the refusal to stand up to organized, international evil and crimes against humanity perpetrated by terrorist movements.

It’s just over a year since the death of famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who warned that the world’s silence only encourages the enemies of civilization and tolerance. Like the League of Nations before it, the United Nations is largely mute in the face of crimes against humanity, today, committed primarily by Islamic terrorists. Its silence may prove the death rattle for the international body. As Wiesenthal Center’s Rabbi Marvin Hier lamented, “There is no price to pay for the initiators of terrorism in the Middle East . . . It is only the responders who face international criticism.”

*Rabbi Abraham Cooper is Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center
*Leo Adler is Director of National Affairs of Canadian Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center
*Dr. Harold Brackman, a historian, is a consultant to the Wiesenthal Center

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Fake relics sold on eBay 'funding terrorism'

Forged archaeological artefacts traded on internet auction sites such as eBay are helping to fund international terrorism, it was disclosed today.

The faked historical relics, purporting to be genuine, Middle Eastern artefacts dating from as far back as 2000 BC, are being sold to innocent collectors and tourists for up to £2,000 each.

Police believe the profits are flowing back into criminal networks in the Middle East and that some is helping to fund insurgency in places like Iraq.

Some of the seized artefacts were on display at an exhibition of fake and forged works of art at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London today.

The exhibition is being held by the Metropolitan Police's specialist Arts and Antiques unit to raise awareness of the increasingly sophisticated fraud, estimated to worth up to £200 million a year in Britain alone.

Detective Constable Ian Lawson said of the artefacts: "We know for a fact that there is a terrorism link. Archaeological stuff is being exported by the tonne load from Middle Eastern countries. If the money goes back into criminality, some will inevitably end up in the hands of terrorists."

The event also showcased the work of master forger Robert Thwaites.

Thwaites, 54, duped respected gallery owner and TV art specialist Rupert Maas into parting with £20,000 for a worthless painting he claimed was by fairyland painter John Anster Fitzgerald (1823-1906).

The forgery, entitled The Miser, was so convincing that the dealer was able to sell it on for a 300 per cent mark-up.

Thwaites also tricked gallery proprietor Dr Christopher Beetles out of more than £100,000 with another creation called Going To The Masked Ball, also said to be by the Victorian artist. He was jailed for two years at Middlesex Guildhall Crown Court earlier this year.

The paintings were displayed today as an example of the lengths to which forgers will go to pass off their work as genuine.

It was only when Thwaites attempted to sell a third painting entitled Poppy with Imps and Fairies and Foliage with his brother Brian Thwaites, 50, that a would-be client became suspicious and the pair were arrested.

At the exhibition today, a series of scanned-in preliminary drawings of the painting, that police officers found on a laptop, were on display to demonstrate how a forgery is created.

He began with a photograph of a poppy from his garden and then worked up through a series of pencil tracings and then paintings to produce the finished work on the style of Fitzgerald.

Julian Radcliffe, chairman of the Art Loss Register, the exhibition's sponsors, said that up to £200 million worth of fakes and forgeries were traded in Britain every year.

A small proportion of these were bought and sold legitimately, but the majority were traded fraudulently, he said.

In Britain, police do not have the power to destroy fakes and forgeries as they do in other European countries.

"Many things that were fakes 500 years ago are now considered works of art in their own right," Mr Radcliffe explained.

However, he said it would be a "very good idea" to give police the discretion to destroy or confiscate forgeries in some cases, to remove them from the market.

The Met's special one-off exhibition has been designed to raise awareness of art fraud, which is becoming increasingly sophisticated and popular with gangs.

If they were genuine, the artworks on display would be worth around £10 million.

Detectives are hoping the exhibition will help demonstrate to industry figures the extreme lengths to which forgers are now going in order to fool the experts.

Police say art forgery is used increasingly by organised criminal gangs as an easy way of making money. They are even using faked copies of priceless stolen works in drug deals, duping other criminals.

Detective Sergeant Vernon Rapley, head of the Arts and Antiques Unit, said: "This is a unique opportunity for the Met's unit to bring together key players in the arts and antiques industry to see the types of crime being committed.

"The greatest weapon we have in combating this type of crime is the knowledge and know-how of our partners and as quickly as criminals are adapting their techniques we are also developing ways to eliminate this type of crime."

Scotland Yard is considering opening the exhibition publicly next year.

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Nov. 16, 2006 19:00 | Updated Nov. 16, 2006 19:21
Germany refuses to alter Israel ties
By HILARY LEILA KRIEGER

© 1995 - 2006 The Jerusalem Post. All rights reserved.

The German Embassy rejected on Thursday a call made by 25 German academics for the country to abandon its "special relationship" with Israel in favor of a stance recognizing Palestinian suffering as an outcome of the Holocaust.

In a lengthy petition published in the Frankfurter Rundschau regional newspaper Wednesday, the scholars said that, "The roots of this bloody 60-year confrontation in the Middle East are German and European. The Palestinian population doesn't have the responsibility to take on European problems in the Middle East," according to translations in English-language media.

The signers also questioned whether German backing for Israel was causing tension within German society, and objected to German sales of hi-tech weaponry to Israel despite its actions against the Palestinians.

In addition, the petition also requests a "friendship free from past burdens" between the two countries, in which Israel could be criticized, and, according to news accounts, states that "a large part of the German society has turned the shame and grief of the Holocaust into a ceremonial matter. That is how a problematic philo-Semitism has developed in Germany."

A German Embassy spokesman in Tel Aviv, however, dismissed the petition. "It in no way reflects the position of the German government. The position of the German government regarding the special relationship with Israel will not change."

He described that relationship as stemming from German behavior in the Holocaust.

"We accept fully that because of the Shoah, the German people and [government] have a special responsibility to the State of Israel," he said, emphasizing that all of Germany's top leaders have stressed their support for this policy in recent years.

"There's no way Germany can be a new Germany if we cannot accept this special relationship," he continued. "Our special relationship with Israel is one of the pillars of our foreign policy."

Despite media references to the professors who signed the petition as respected and employed by the state - as faculty of public universities - the spokesman said they didn't reflect the views of a majority of German academics, let alone the government that pays their salaries.

The Central Council of German Jews would not comment on the petition, saying that it was holding a consultation with all of its representatives over the weekend in order to adopt a unified position, which it would announce on Monday.

German Memorial to Holocaust Victims Desecrated 15:40 Nov 14, '06 / 23 Cheshvan 5767

(IsraelNN.com) Vandals desecrated a Holocaust victim memorial in eastern Germany Monday night, The Associated Press reported. Nazi swastikas were painted on the memorial, and Berlin police said five gravestones were stolen from a nearby cemetery. The anti-Semitic act came several days after right wing extremists desecrated a similar memorial shortly after a service marking Kristallnacht, when Nazis burned down a synagogue in 1938, among much other violence against Jews. Kristallnacht earned its name because of how much shattered glass littered the streets after Germans broke the windows and otherwise damaged the property of Jewish stores and homes.