Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Gilad Shalit

Most Australians would be hard pressed to name more than a couple of Israelis - and one of them is sure to be Gilad Shalit. The young armoured tanks corps corporal was captured in 2006 on the southern border of Gaza by members of the Palestinian armed resistance. Since then he has been held captive in a secret location somewhere in the Gaza Strip, while efforts to gain his release in a prisoner swap have come to nothing.

Israel currently incarcerates over 11,000 Palestinians in prisons within Israel, in harsh conditions and frequently subject to torture and medical deprivation. Many are imprisoned without charge, almost all are political prisoners. They include women, the elderly, community leaders, politicians and elected members of parliament (the moderate Marwan Barghouti, widely seen as a successor to Yasser Arafat, has been imprisoned since 2002 on trumped-up charges). More disturbing is Israel's practice of jailing children for demonstrating against the occupation, usually by throwing stones at Israeli tanks and armoured personnel vehicles.

The children of Bil'in are particularly at risk. Twelve of them have been imprisoned this summer alone. Stepping up their efforts to crush the popular resistance by villagers to the theft of their lands, the Israeli occupation forces now raid the village nightly, destroying property, terrorising the inhabitants and carting away the children and young men.

So, while I hope for Gilad Shalit's safe release, let's forget about him for a while - after all, he was a soldier on active duty, patrolling the open-air prison that is Gaza. Let's devote our thoughts and our sympathy for the 11,000 faceless and nameless Palestinians now rotting in Israeli jails.

7 comments:

Patrick Muldowney said...

I don't think you are being alert to the current state of the war for greater Israel. Ask yourself 'How goes the war for Greater Israel?' It ought to be apparent by now that it is ending in defeat for the Zionists. A Palestinian State is coming and is coming a lot faster than most supporters of the Palestinian people realize.

I think MB will be released soon (because if he is not the Israelis will be negotiating with the jailed leader of the Palestinian peoples and that is not a very good look. Remember South Africa?

Just try to remember the Christmas bombing of Nth Vietnam just prior to the Paris surrender. Nixon already new the war was lost and that the terms of the US defeat were set. The same applies now.

The terms and procedure for ending the failed war for Greater Israel are well known. And G W Bush made it clear when he became the first US President to declare the West Bank occupied territory rather than disputed territory as every other US president had done that the US has an interest in no longer supporting a 40+ year failed war.

Barack Obama has absolutely no choice but to follow (and just claim the glory of being the president that brought a peace settlement.) It may well drag on for another two years until a Livni government emerges but the end is now quite clearly in site!

Anonymous said...

Elie Wiesel vs Encyclopaedia Britannica

Wiesel has been a prominent spokesman for the very sizeable group of people known as Holocaust survivors. [According to Norman Finkelstein of the City University of New York in his book The Holocaust Industry published in 2000, ‘The Israeli Prime Minister’s office recently put the number of "living Holocaust survivors" at nearly a million’ (p.83)]. Wiesel has chaired the US Holocaust Memorial Council and has been the recipient of a Congressional Gold Medal and Nobel Peace Prize (sic).

Time Magazine, March 18 1985:

‘How had he survived two of the most notorious killing fields [Auschwitz and Buchenwald] of the century? "I will never know" he says. "I was always weak. I never ate. The slightest wind would turn me over. In Buchenwald they sent 10,000 to their deaths every day. I was always in the last hundred near the gate. They stopped. Why?"

Compare this with Encyclopaedia Britannica (1993), under ‘Buchenwald’:

"In World War II it held about 20,000 prisoners.. Although there were no gas chambers, hundreds perished monthly through disease, malnutrition, exhaustion, beatings and executions."

Anonymous said...

Interesting arithmetic - the astronomical numbers

Have a look at a typical account by one of the seemingly endless number of survivors: Olga Lengyel’s Five Chimneys: a woman survivor’s true story of Auschwitz (Granada/ Ziff-Davis, 1947, 1972).

The blurb on the cover of the book quotes the New York Herald-Tribune: "Passionate, tormenting". Albert Einstein, the promoter of the US construction of the bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is quoted as offering "You have done a real service by letting the ones who are now silent and most forgotten speak."

According to Lengyel, ‘After June, 1943, the gas chamber was reserved exclusively for Jews and Gypsies.. Three hundred and sixty corpses every half-hour, which was all the time it took to reduce human flesh to ashes, made 720 per hour, or 17,280 corpses per twenty-four hour shift. And the ovens, with murderous efficiency, functioned day and night. However, one must also reckon the death pits, which could destroy another 8,000 cadavers a day. In round numbers, about 24,000 corpses were handled each day. An admirable production record, one that speaks well for German industry.’ (Paperback edition, pp80-81). [No trace of any remains of or in ‘death pits’ has been found.]

This implies almost 100,000 corpses per four working days, or a million in 40 days, or six million in 240 days (eight months).

Could this claim be a misprint?

Kitty Hart, in spite of her name a Jewish survivor born in Poland, fully confirms these figures:

‘Working around the clock, the four units together could dispose of about 18,000 bodies every twenty-four hours, while the open pits coped with a further 8,000 in the same period.’ (p 118; Return to Auschwitz - paperback edition by Granada (1981, 1983).

According to the cover blurb, ‘The subject of the award-winning Yorkshire television documentary of the same name.’ ‘Both engaging and harrowing…an important addition to the growing holocaust literature, very little of which conveys so courageously both the daily torment and the will to survive’ – Martin Gilbert, The Times.

Martin Gilbert, indefatigable Jewish campaigner on behalf of the ‘Holocaust’ and biographer of Winston Churchill, adds to the rich flavour and makes his own numerical claims, certainly not without chutzpah:

In his book Auschwitz and the Allies (1981) he states

‘The deliberate attempt to destroy systematically all of Europe’s Jews was unsuspected in the spring and early summer of 1942: the very period during which it was at its most intense, and during which hundreds of thousands of Jews were being gassed every day at Belzec, Chelmo, Sobibor and Treblinka.’ (p.26).

If we assume a minimum figure of 200,000 per day, this amounts to say a million a five-day working week, or 6 million in six weeks, and this does not include the truly awe-inspiring claims for Auschwitz put forward by Hart and Lengyel with Gilbert’s blessing.

Anonymous said...

It's now official - there's no actual shortage of Holocaust survivors:

'The Israeli Prime Minister's office recently put the number of "living Holocaust survivors" at nearly a million' (extract from The Holocaust Industry by Norman G. Finkelstein of the City University of New York, published by Verso, London and New York, 2000, p.83).

Statement by Richard Lynn, Professor Emeritus
University of Ulster, December 5, 2005:

"I've checked out the six volumes of Churchill's Second World War and the statement is quite correct - not a single mention of Nazi 'gas chambers,' a 'genocide' of the Jews, or of 'six million' Jewish victims of the war.

Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe is a book of 559 pages; Churchill's Second World War totals 4,448 pages; and De Gaulle's three-volume Mémoires de guerre is 2,054 pages.

In this mass of writing, which altogether totals 7,061 pages (not including the introductory parts), published from 1948 to 1959, one will find no mention either of Nazi 'gas chambers,' a 'genocide' of the Jews, or of 'six million' Jewish victims of the war."

Anonymous said...

A detailed forensic examination of the site of the wartime Treblinka camp, using sophisticated electronic ground radar, has found no evidence of mass graves there.

For six days in October 1999, an Australian team headed by Richard Krege, a qualified electronics engineer, carried out an examination of the soil at the site of the former Treblinka II camp in Poland, where, Holocaust historians say, more than half a million Jews were put to death in gas chambers and then buried in mass graves.

According to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (1997), for example, "a total of 870,000 people" were killed and buried at Treblinka between July 1942 and April 1943. Then, between April and July 1943, the hundreds of thousands of corpses were allegedly dug up and burned in batches of 2,000 or 2,500 on large grids made of railway ties.

Krege's team used an $80,000 Ground Penetration Radar (GPR) device, which sends out vertical radar signals that are visible on a computer monitor. GPR detects any large-scale disturbances in the soil structure to a normal effective depth of four or five meters, and sometimes up to ten meters. (GPR devices are routinely used around the world by geologists, archeologists, and police.) In its Treblinka investigation, Krege's team also carried out visual soil inspections, and used an auger to take numerous soil core samples.

The team carefully examined the entire Treblinka II site, especially the alleged "mass graves" portion, and carried out control examinations of the surrounding area. They found no soil disturbance consistent with the burial of hundreds of thousands of bodies, or even evidence that the ground had ever been disturbed. In addition, Krege and his team found no evidence of individual graves, bone remains, human ashes, or wood ashes.

"From these scans we could clearly identify the largely undisturbed horizontal stratigraphic layering, better known as horizons, of the soil under the camp site," says the 30-year old Krege, who lives in Canberra. "We know from scans of grave sites, and other sites with known soil disturbances, such as quarries, when this natural layering is massively disrupted or missing altogether." Because normal geological processes are very slow acting, disruption of the soil structure would have been detectable even after 60 years, Krege noted.

While his initial investigation suggests that there were never any mass graves at the Treblinka camp site, Krege believes that further work is still called for.

"Historians say that the bodies were exhumed and cremated toward the end of the Treblinka camp's use in 1943, but we found no indication that any mass graves ever existed," he says. "Personally, I don't think there was a mass extermination camp there at all."

Krege prepared a detailed report on his Treblinka investigation. He says that he would welcome the formation, possibly under United Nations auspices, of an international team of neutral, qualified specialists, to carry out similar investigations at the sites of all the wartime German camps.

Haj said...

I seem to be missing the point with most of these comments. Where did this debate over Holocaust statistics come from? Not from me! Endlessly debating the topic falls into the hands of the Zionists. They have saturated public debate with everything Holocaust in order to turn it to their own ends. Get over it! My interest lies with the sufferings of and denial of human rights to the Palestinians, past and present.
Try and stay on track. Please.

Anonymous said...

"stay on track... PEACE"
"Lets forget about Gilad Shalit"
doesn't peace need 2 sides??

You spent one trip here and you think you an expert on the 'facts' and on human suffering.
Please, if I'm going to take this abti-zionist hate blog serious (which I'm willing to do)
come join us here, and then u can talk.
Peace