Morning Report: January 30, 2005

Iraqis vote in free elections. Iraq the Model declares, "The people have won." Free Iraqi writes, "It's like the Eid but only a thousand times better." Iraqi Bloggers Central has all the latest updates from the Iraqi blogosphere. Kat at The Middle Ground rates media coverage. (Can you say "big fat F"?) Roger L. Simon takes on the reactionaries.

"This is Iraq's army, not Allawi's."

A soldier gets a lesson in democracy in this election day post at Iraq the Model.

"I felt like a king walking in his own kingdom." Ali writes about his feelings on voting for the first time in a REAL election. I don't think any of us born and raised in the US can imagine what it's like to fear for one's life because of having voted "NO" to a dictator. Ali doesn't have to imagine.

Some hard questions. Reader warriorjason posts this comment:

Where are all the Human sheild that went to Iraq to protect the Ba'ath Party before the invasion? Why have they not come out to protect the Iraqi voter from the terrorists? Why aren't American feminist organizations holding a rally in support of their sisters in Iraq who voted for the first time? These are serious questions that need to be answered by the world and American left.

Indeed.

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.