Above and Beyond

Voter turnout exceeded expectations in Iraq's first free election of the post-Saddam era, according to news reports.

A'ash al-Iraq!

"Brave Voters Defy Rebels" was the gratifying headline on my AOL news screen just now. Nice! I hope the MSM begins to (FINALLY!) catch on to the idea that this is a GOOD thing.

Boxer for President?

I'm going to puke.

Iraq to Become a Democracy

Today - at 7:00AM Baghdad time - the Iraqi people will begin voting.

I don't have anything insightful to say, and I don't have any inside information that you can't get from Friends of Democracy or Iraq the Model. But I do know that I'll be glued epoxied to the computer tonight and tomorrow, watching the big event.

To the Iraqi people: a big l'chaim. And, in honor of the occasion, a she'hechiyanu.

G-d bless America and a free Iraq!

BBC Apologizes for Iraq "Mistakes"

Al-Jazeera-on-the-Thames has offered an apology for misrepresenting the number of civilian deaths in Iraq:

The BBC's Panorama programme reported coalition and Iraqi security forces were responsible for most civilian conflict deaths in the past six months.

But the health ministry says that its figures were misinterpreted.

"The BBC regrets mistakes in its published and broadcast reports," said a BBC spokesman.

This BBC item goes on to explain:

"The BBC regrets mistakes in its published and broadcast reports," said a BBC spokesman.

The Iraqi figures said that 3,274 people died in conflict situations in the period July-December 2004.

Of these, 2,041 of those were categorised as the result of "military operations" while 1,233 were blamed on "terrorist operations".

But the health ministry says those recorded as dying in military action included people killed by insurgents, not just those killed by troops from the multinational force or Iraqi security bodies.

The deaths recorded included those of militants as well as civilians, officials said.

Please

go read this post by Ocean Guy. In commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Chapter 3 of "Pacific Memories" is up ...

... in which our narrator misses a pig hunt, participates in a rat race, and encounters a fayuntile.

The Great Rotorua Pig Hunt

The Holocaust

This post is part of a Blogburst commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army in 1945.

The Holocaust, symbolized by Auschwitz, the worst of the death camps, occurred in the wake of consistent, systematic, unrelenting anti-Jewish propaganda campaigns. As a result, the elimination of the Jews from German society was accepted as axiomatic, leaving open only two questions: when and how.

As Germany expanded its domination and occupation of Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, the Low Countries, Yugoslavia, Poland, parts of the USSR, Greece, Romania, Hungary, Italy and others countries, the way was open for Hitler to realize his well-publicized plan of destroying the Jewish people.

After experimentation, the use of Zyklon B on unsuspecting victim was adopted by the Nazis as the means of choice, and Auschwitz was selected as the main factory of death (more accurately, one should refer to the “Auschwitz-Birkenau complex”). The green light for mass annihilation was given at the Wannsee Conference, January 20, 1942.

The Wannsee Conference formalized "the final solution" - the plan to transport Europe's Jews to eastern labour and death camps. Ever efficient and bureaucratic, the Nazi kept a record of the meeting, which were discovered in 1947 in the files of the German Foreign Office. The record represents a summary made by Adolf Eichmann at the time, even though they are sometime referred to as "minutes".

Several of the Conference participants survived the war to be convicted at Nuremberg. One notorious participant, Adolf Eichmann, was tried and convicted in Jerusalem, and executed in 1962 in Ramlah prison.

The mass gassings of Europe's took place in Auschwitz between 1942 and the end of 1944, when the Nazis retreated before the advancing Red Army. Jews were transported to Auschwitz from all over Nazi-occupied or Nazi-dominated Europe and most were slaughtered in Auschwitz upon arrival, sometimes as many as 12,000 in one day. Some victims were selected for slave labour or “medical” experimentation before they were murdered or allowed to die. All were subject to brutal treatment.

In all, between three and four million people, mostly Jews, but also Poles and Red Army POWs, were slaughtered in Auschwitz alone (though some authors put the number at 1.3 million). Other death camps were located at Sobibor, Chelmno, Belzec (Belzek), Majdanek and Treblinka. Adding the toll of these and other camps, as well as the mass executions and the starvation im the Ghettos, six million Jews, men, women, the elderly and children lost their lives as a consequence of the Nazi atrocities.

Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army on 27 January 1945, sixty years ago, after most of the prisoners were forced into a Death March westwards. The Red Army found in Auschwitz about 7,600 survivors, but not all could be saved.

For a long time, the Allies were well aware of the mass murder, but deliberately refused to bomb the camp or the railways leading to it. Ironically, during the Polish uprising, the Allies had no hesitation in flying aid to Warsaw, sometimes flying right over Auschwitz.

There are troubling parallels between the systematic vilification of Jews before the Holocaust and the current vilification of the Jewish people and Israel. Suffice it to note the annual flood of anti-Israel resolutions at the UN; or the public opinion polls taken in Europe, which single out Israel as a danger to world peace; or the divestment campaigns being waged in the US against Israel; or the attempts to delegitimize Israel’s very existence. The complicity of the Allies in WW II is mirrored by the support the PLO has been receiving from Europe, China and Russia to this very day.

If remembering Auschwitz should teach us anything, it is that we must all support Israel and the Jewish people against the vilification and the complicity we are witnessing, knowing where it inevitably leads.

For more information, see Israpundit blogburst info.

See also this special edition of Morning Report.

New York Times: No Religious Motive in Killings

According to the New York Times, this was not a hate crime.

Writing in the Sulzberger-owned Boston Globe, James Carroll tells us:

THIS WEEK marks the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. When news eventually came to America of what the Red Army found at that death camp in January 1945, the report was remarkably detailed.

The headline of a first New York Times story about Auschwitz, filed from Moscow on May 8, 1945, read, "Oswiecim Killings Placed at 4,000,000." This number overstated by a factor of two the total of those murdered at Auschwitz, yet the account seemed closely observed in most other respects. The remains of the victims were described -- the charnel pits and piles of ashes, the corpses. The mechanized death process was explained, with a careful description of the gas chambers, down, even, to the name of the manufacturer of the crematoria -- Topf and Son. The identities of the victims were given as "more than 4,000,000 citizens" of a list of European nations -- Poland, Hungary, Netherlands, France. But what is most remarkable about the Times story -- apart from the fact that it was buried on page 12 -- is that in defining the identities of those victims, the story never used the word "Jew."

Many non-Jewish Poles were murdered at Auschwitz, but the vast majority of the dead were Jews -- killed for being Jewish. Indeed, of all the death camps, Auschwitz was most expressly commissioned to murder of Jews. Yet the New York Times reporter apparently saw nothing untoward in passing along a Soviet report that made no mention of Jews at Auschwitz. The murdered were Dutch, or French. They were men, women and children. They were old. They were Italian. Nothing about their being Jewish, which for the Nazis was the only thing that counted. The Times reporter was C. L. Sulzberger.

(Hat tip: DFME.)

The editorial goes on to note: "The New York Times index did not cite stories about concentration camps under the category "Jews" until 1950. It was not until 1975 that the index category "Nazi Policies Toward Jews" appeared."

As we approach the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, we must take a long, hard look at ourselves, and at the culture of denial that continues to enable religious hate crimes and other atrocities, even in our own day.

Indestructible

Go check out this new Volkswagen ad. It'll make your day.

Hat tip to Iraq the Model.

New Reports on Armanious - Garas Killings

The New York Post reports that a "bloody vendetta" pre-dating the family's immigration to the United States may have led to the murders of Hossam Armanious, Amal Garas, and their two daughters in New Jersey, in this article. "We're trying to develop their history right now," Hudson County Prosecutor Edward DeFazio said yesterday of the brutal quadruple slaying. Read the whole article at the link.

"Nothing indicates" that religion was the prime motive, DeFazio says in this article at NorthJersey.com.

Shortly after the bound and gagged bodies were found on |Jan. 14, friends of the family circulated word that Armanious had angered Muslims with Internet postings in a religious chat room.

The claims resulted in widespread tension between Christians and Muslims in Jersey City, which led to numerous scuffles at the family's funeral. But authorities said nothing so far supports the theory.

"Is it possible? Yes," DeFazio said. "Do we have anything that gives us reason to believe this is what it was, factually? No. Nothing indicates that was the prime motivation for this. That we can clearly say."

This appears to be a significant development. DeFazio is now saying that "nothing indicates" a religious hate crime, which is different from the "no proof" line the big media have been giving us all along.

DeFazio said no motive has been established in the case.

In addition to the Internet theory, investigators continue to look at robbery as a possible motive, because the home was ransacked and money was taken from the victims. Detectives are reviewing the family's finances to see if there are any obvious motives.

Hudson authorities have enlisted the FBI to scrutinize the family's activities in Egypt before they came to this country in 1997.

"It could be that it's a vendetta that might go back to the old country," DeFazio said. "We're going to try to look into that."

Update: 1/26, 6AM Pacific:

Michaelangelo Conte of the Jersey Journal gives a good roundup of developments in this Wednesday article at NJ.com. DeFazio, quoted in the article:

"We have more work to do, including on the computer angle, the financial profile and history of the family, including any information on the family or associated people in Egypt. All of that is being done, but it's taking time."

Joseph Farah speaks out in a column carried by Assyrian International News Agency and WorldNetDaily:

Yet, the media's focus hasn't been the horror of this kind of centuries-old anti-Christian persecution apparently coming to America. Instead, there has been a concerted effort, it seems, to downplay this gruesome slaughter as some kind of anomaly, to search desperately for motives other than religious hatred -- in effect, to ignore the kind of oppression that Christians and Jews in the Middle East have been experiencing since Islam became dominant in that part of the world more than 1,300 years ago.

I don't like it.

As an Arab-American, Christian journalist, it reminds me of the way law enforcement officials and the news media discarded any evidence that the Washington-area "Beltway snipers" had an Islamic terrorist motive. This mindset almost certainly resulted in more deaths as vital information -- the kind of descriptions that ultimately led to the capture of John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo -- was withheld from the public to avoid "hysteria," "panic" and, worst of all, "racial or ethnic profiling."

Let me add a strong second to Farah's comments. I disagree with the headline "Jihad in Jersey City" simply because we do not yet know for a fact that "jihad" was involved - a point I have continually stressed here at Dreams Into Lightning. We do, however, have evidence that allows us to entertain that as a plausible theory - and we have a Big Media that wants to steer us away from that theory by withholding relevant facts (as CNN and NYT ignored reports of death threats against Armanious).

I don't like it either.




Note to readers. As promised, I will continue to follow this case. Some of you will recall that I'm in light-posting mode this week (due to an exam this Thursday), so coverage may not be as prompt or as thorough as I'd like, but I will post as much as I can. If you become aware of any new developments, please send a link. I'll post my own thoughts on this when time permits.

Quote of the Day

The Austrian Green Party's Peter Pilz on California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, for allowing the execution of a convicted killer in California:

"Schwarzenegger is possibly the most prominent Austrian abroad, and he shapes the picture of Austria," Mr Pilz said.

"I don't want that picture shaped by someone who commits state murder. That does not correspond to the political culture of this country."

BBC News