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May 18, 2011

The son of Holocaust survivors: Benjamin Brafman: Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s Orthodox Jewish attorney

 



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May 16, 2011

Benjamin Brafman: Dominique Strauss-Kahn's Orthodox Jewish attorney

http://www.jewishjournal.com/hollywoodjew/item/benjamin_brafman_dominique_strauss-kahns_orthodox_jewish_attorney_20110516/

brafman_190.jpg

Attorney Benjamin Brafman, lead counsel for IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn who is currently awaiting trial in New York

His image may be in permanent ruin, but whether or not the disgraced IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn will set his sights on the Eiffel Tower anytime soon is largely up to one man: his attorney, Benjamin Brafman.

No stranger to celebrity scandal, the New York-based Brafman has represented stars from all over the famous/infamous continuum, from the rappers Sean "Diddy" Combs and Jay-Z, to pop icon Michael Jackson to various reputed members of the mafia. New York Magazine dubbed him "the man to have on speed-dial when you're in really big trouble."

According to that same 1998 New York profile, Brafman's wife Lynda, a librarian, had nicknamed him H.P. for "high profile". At the time, he was representing "a Talmudic scholar-businessman accused of laundering money for the Cali drug cartel; a retired cop charged with murder; a rabbi charged, with Assemblyman Dov Hikind, of misusing federal funds; and the nightclub impresario Peter Gatien, who [was charged with] running his popular nightspots…as anything-goes drug supermarkets."

The son of Holocaust survivors, Brafman grew up in Brooklyn and Queens and put himself through Brooklyn College night school and then Ohio Northern University Law School, before getting an additional Master of Laws degree from New York University: "Okay, so it's not Harvard," reported New York writer Meryl Gordon, "but Brafman uses his down-to-earth pedigree to put people at ease. He'll even joke about his equally down-to-earth stature (he boldly claims five feet six) to score points with juries. 'He's short, and he uses it well,'" she quotes criminal-defense lawyer Fred Hafetz as saying of Brafman.

Fortunately for Strauss-Kahn, Brafman doesn't cower from the lurid, the depraved, or the perverse. He defended Michael Jackson against those unforgettable child molestation allegations, as well as an alleged member of the Gambino crime family accused of car theft and murder (Brafman got this guy acquitted on 21 of 22 counts, according to The Financial Times). He also got Sean Combs out of a sticky spot, after that infamous nightclub shooting back in 1999, clearing Combs of the illegal weapons and bribery charges that could have marred his career. Despite eyewitness reports that claimed Combs culpable, the incident is a footnote in the bad memories department.

Now all eyes are on Brafman to see what he can do for Strauss-Kahn, the would-be French Socialist party presidential candidate who is now embroiled in an ugly sex scandal that threatens his ruin. Strauss-Kahn is currently awaiting trial on allegations of sexual assault, attempted rape and unlawful imprisonment of a hotel chambermaid. According to ABC News, the complaint filed with the Manhattan District Attorney's Office says "he forcibly touched the housekeeper's breasts, attempted to pull off her panty hose, twice, 'forcibly made contact with his penis and the informant's mouth' and that 'the defendant engaged in oral sexual conduct and anal sexual conduct with another person by forcible compulsion.'"  Earlier today, Strauss-Kahn was denied bail because he is considered a potential flight risk.

It's tough enough pitting a lowly chambermaid against a powerful international politico, but with Brafman in the mix, it seems even more unlikely the housekeeper will get a fair shake. In addition to legal skills, Brafman has a reputation for being charismatic, verily persuasive, and "imaginative and clever," as Brafman's colleague, L.A. attorney Mark Geragos put it to The Financial Times. He is, by many accounts, something of a star himself, a guy with real Hollywood style—and a background in performance.

The Financial Times notes:

Mr. Brafman's wit, honed during a youthful stint as a stand-up comedian, has become a hallmark of his courtroom style.

Brafman is also known to be an observant Jew whose father rescued an endangered Torah on Kristallnacht, which Brafman wrote about for the Jewish press in 2007.

When earlier today prosecutors suggested Strauss-Kahn be denied bail because he might flee "like Roman Polanski", Brafman vowed to appeal the ruling.

"This battle has just begun," he told reporters.

And apparently, Brafman knows how to fight. According to New York Magazine:

His detractors see a darker side, accusing Brafman of using underhanded, albeit legal, courtroom tactics to win, and cynically manipulating the press with carefully orchestrated leaks. It's fair to say that Perry Mason had a gentler style. But Brafman is effective, even if he doesn't always play by Marquess of Queensbury rules. So fearsome is his reputation that critics, talking on the phone, sound a lot like Brafman's Mafia clients fearing a wiretap. "I could trash him," sniffs one antagonist, "but I'd rather take the high road."

Despite his track record, Brafman has a tough road ahead. He acknowledged as much in 1998: "The baggage that comes with a remarkable track record," he told New York, "is that people feel that you can pull off an acquittal despite what seems overwhelming evidence. But you can't do it every time."

Read more on Brafman's Jewish background and the rest of the New York profile here:

Brafman was the class clown, a lazy, directionless student who dozed through yeshiva classes. Aaron Brafman, Ben's studious older brother, now an Orthodox rabbi in Far Rockaway, says, "Our mother always worried: What's Ben going to turn into? I was the goody-goody; he used to always be in my shadow."

The two boys and their sisters, Malkie and Shevy, grew up in a house with shadows, the impermeable sadness of a family shattered by the losses of the Holocaust. Their mother, Rose, who died in 1996, fled Czechoslovakia for New York in 1938 at 16, the only one in her family to get papers to leave; her parents and sister were later killed in concentration camps. Ben recalls that he said in her eulogy, "This is the first day my mother is not afraid." Their father, Sol, escaped Vienna with his parents after Kristallnacht in 1939. Shortly after meeting and marrying Rose, he was drafted into the U.S. Army.

After the war, the Brafmans settled first in Williamsburg, then in Crown Heights, and finally in the more upscale Belle Harbor. Sol made a modest living as a production manager for a lingerie company. This was a strict, deeply religious Orthodox household with a classic immigrant work-hard-my-child ethos. To this day, Brafman remains observant, scheduling trial dates around Jewish holidays, taking Saturdays off from work, and leaving the office early on Fridays to try to get home before sundown. "I figure God will understand if I'm trying to save someone's life and I'm home five minutes late," he says.

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Peace.
Michael Santomauro
253 West 72nd St
New York, NY 10023
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Russia's Winter Olympics slips into controversy over 'Nazi images'

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/16/russia-winter-olympics-nazi-images

Russia's Winter Olympics slips into controversy over 'Nazi images'

Billboard adverts for elite housing complex at Sochi 2014 games uses 'neo-Hitlerite' imagery from infamous design agency, say critics

  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 16 May 2011 19.00 BST
  • Article history
  • Winter Olympics 2014 fascist signs
    An advert for the Gorky Gorod elite housing complex near Sochi, for the 2014 Winter Olympics, viewed by critics as 'openly fascist' in style Photograph: Tom Parfitt for the Guardian


    A promotional campaign linked to the 2014 Winter Olympics is stirring debate inRussia because of its use of allegedly "fascist" imagery.

    The campaign employs images of blue-eyed, blond sportsmen and women which have been described by critics as "neo-Hitlerite" and "like something from a Leni Riefenstahl film".

    Images of an Aryan-looking snowboarder and an ice-skater gazing into the middle distance dominate giant billboards in Moscow and feature on the cover of brochures to advertise Gorky Gorod, an elite housing complex being built at Krasnaya Polyana near Sochi on Russia's Black Sea coast. The complex is a private-public partnership which will be the Olympic media village at the 2014 Games.

    "Without doubt the authors of this advertising were inspired by Nazi art," said Ekaterina Degot, a well-known art historian and former curator at the State Tretyakov Gallery.

    When the billboards were put up, the Russian art collective Voina, itself known for its controversial painting of a 65-metre penis on a drawbridge in St Petersburg, tweeted: "On Pushkinskaya Square opposite Gap, there is a huge advertisement, openly fascist in style, for elite housing in Sochi."

    Degot and others said the style and pose of the subjects in the images was heavily suggestive of Nazi art which stresses racial purity and superiority.

    The Guardian has learned that the images of the sportsmen were produced by Doping-Pong, a St Petersburg-based design company which uses a swastika as one of its online "banners".

    One of the company's recent projects is a series of erotic photographs of two young women, one called a "fa" (fascist), the other an "antifa" (anti-fascist activist), who grapple with each other in a wrestling ring and tear off each other's clothes. The "fa" appears to win the fight and triumphantly wraps herself in a Nazi flag.

    Doping-Pong also works closely with Katya Zashtopik, a Russian artist in her 20s who is known for her sympathies with the ultra-right, and who uses the online avatar Dopingirl.

    On 20 April, Adolf Hitler's birthday, she published a yellow "smiley" on her blog embellished with a toothbrush moustache and a slick of black hair. The caption read: "Happy Birthday."

    Dima Mishenin, one of the designers at Doping-Pong, denied a report that Zashtopik was personally involved with producing the Gorky Gorod images. "It's our work, not hers," he said.

    Mishenin claimed he had no sympathy with far-right ideas, but said he believed "the Olympic aesthetic starts in Berlin in 1936 and is created by Leni Riefenstahl".

    He added: "For me this is about the aesthetics of beauty."

    Asked about the use of Nazi iconography in his other work, he said: "When I use a symbol of culture of Nazi Germany like a swastika then, of course, I use it as a representative of the victor nation."

    In an earlier interview with Russian media he said: "These symbols are trophies, like skulls on our Slavic fence."

    Some observers said criticism of the Gorky Gorod images was overblown.

    Artemy Lebedev, one of Russia's most famous young designers, wrote a blogpost calling the billboards "neo-Hitlerite, neo-Stalinist" but praised Mishenin for his creativity.

    One 26-year-old web designer told the Guardian: "What's fascist and Aryan about it? Just because the snowboarder doesn't have a potato nose doesn't mean he couldn't be a Russian."

    Mikhail Fedotov, Dmitry Medvedev's adviser on civil society and human rights, said he was troubled that a company which "played games with Nazi symbols" had been employed.

    Gorky Gorod issued a statement from its creative director, Dmitry Leshchinsky, who hinted at a conspiracy to discredit the project.

    "Any association with fascism is very unpleasant to us, and the opinions and methods of several 'critics' provoke exactly those kinds of associations," he said.

    "The publishing of disgusting labels and the promotion of 'pasquinades' in the media; destroying and pouring dirt on everything that stands out, even by the smallest margin, from the grey mass of advertising: that is real fascism, in my opinion."

    Degot said: "In itself, there is nothing forbidden about working with Nazi aesthetics if it is the basis of critical intellectual activity. However, I don't see that reflex in these compositions [on the billboards].

    "This is a commercial project, openly exploring the seductive potential that the new rich see in Nazi style.

    "I think that must be a reflection of the pretensions wealthy young people have to aristocracy and tradition."

    A spokesman for Sochi 2014 declined to comment.



-- 
Heinz 

 "If my heart could do my thinking And my head begin to feel, I would look upon the world anew And know what's truly real." Van Morrison

REAL EYES REALIZE REAL LIES






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Fun stuff to read, tell and watch:

Now FREE to watch all 91 minutes: "Defamation," from Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir. LINK: http://tinyurl.com/3rvhdvc

Some of His Best Friends Are Jewish: The Saga of a Holocaust Revisionist By Nathaniel Popper. Link: http://tinyurl.com/3v6m88c

...an Israeli lawyer has filed a class-action lawsuit against former President Jimmy Carter, seeking $5 million in damages because his book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" allegedly defamed Israel. Link: http://tinyurl.com/3pltqg2

"...when you have laws against questioning the Holocaust narrative, you are screaming at the other person to stop thinking!!!" ---Mike Santomauro. *Anthony Lawson's Holocaust Video "were the Germans so stupid"... Link: http://tinyurl.com/44nsrco

An anti-Semite condemns people for being Jews, I am not an anti-Semite.--Mike Santomauro. Link: http://tinyurl.com/42z9p8o

Peace.

Mike Santomauro
253 West 72nd St
New York, NY 10023
Call anytime: 917-974-6367




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Our very own Allison Weir has received death threats from a rabid, zionist non-Gentile. Pass this around, let it go VIRAL. Peter

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spXA7GrOcLU  Important.  Our very own Allison Weir has received death threats from a rabid, Zionist non-Gentile.  Pass this around, let it go VIRAL.  ---Peter



+++



Fun stuff to read, tell and watch:

Now FREE to watch all 91 minutes: "Defamation," from Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir. LINK: http://tinyurl.com/3rvhdvc

Some of His Best Friends Are Jewish: The Saga of a Holocaust Revisionist By Nathaniel Popper. Link: http://tinyurl.com/3v6m88c

...an Israeli lawyer has filed a class-action lawsuit against former President Jimmy Carter, seeking $5 million in damages because his book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" allegedly defamed Israel. Link: http://tinyurl.com/3pltqg2

"...when you have laws against questioning the Holocaust narrative, you are screaming at the other person to stop thinking!!!" ---Mike Santomauro. *Anthony Lawson's Holocaust Video "were the Germans so stupid"... Link: http://tinyurl.com/44nsrco

An anti-Semite condemns people for being Jews, I am not an anti-Semite.--Mike Santomauro. Link: http://tinyurl.com/42z9p8o

Peace.

Mike Santomauro
253 West 72nd St
New York, NY 10023
Call anytime: 917-974-6367




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The Jewish Problem: How To Solve It by Louis D. Brandeis | The Louis D. Brandeis Collection

 

http://www.law.louisville.edu/library/collections/brandeis/node/234

+++

Fun stuff to read, tell and watch:

Now FREE to watch all 91 minutes: "Defamation," from Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir. LINK: http://tinyurl.com/3rvhdvc

Some of His Best Friends Are Jewish: The Saga of a Holocaust Revisionist By Nathaniel Popper. Link: http://tinyurl.com/3v6m88c

...an Israeli lawyer has filed a class-action lawsuit against former President Jimmy Carter, seeking $5 million in damages because his book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" allegedly defamed Israel. Link: http://tinyurl.com/3pltqg2

"...when you have laws against questioning the Holocaust narrative, you are screaming at the other person to stop thinking!!!" ---Mike Santomauro. *Anthony Lawson's Holocaust Video "were the Germans so stupid"... Link: http://tinyurl.com/44nsrco

An anti-Semite condemns people for being Jews, I am not an anti-Semite.--Mike Santomauro. Link: http://tinyurl.com/42z9p8o

Peace.

Mike Santomauro
253 West 72nd St
New York, NY 10023
Call anytime: 917-974-6367

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Recent Activity:
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The Jewish Problem

 

http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/imbild1.htm

+++

Fun stuff to read, tell and watch:

Now FREE to watch all 91 minutes: "Defamation," from Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir. LINK: http://tinyurl.com/3rvhdvc

Some of His Best Friends Are Jewish: The Saga of a Holocaust Revisionist By Nathaniel Popper. Link: http://tinyurl.com/3v6m88c

...an Israeli lawyer has filed a class-action lawsuit against former President Jimmy Carter, seeking $5 million in damages because his book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" allegedly defamed Israel. Link: http://tinyurl.com/3pltqg2

"...when you have laws against questioning the Holocaust narrative, you are screaming at the other person to stop thinking!!!" ---Mike Santomauro. *Anthony Lawson's Holocaust Video "were the Germans so stupid"... Link: http://tinyurl.com/44nsrco

An anti-Semite condemns people for being Jews, I am not an anti-Semite.--Mike Santomauro. Link: http://tinyurl.com/42z9p8o

Peace.

Mike Santomauro
253 West 72nd St
New York, NY 10023
Call anytime: 917-974-6367

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David Turner: Anti-Judaism and the origins of Christianity: Part 1

 

Dear freinds, I today decidede to try something different, and I hope you will participate in the adventure. For an indefinite period, possibly as long as a year, I will be sending out in serial form a book I am in the process of writing. As of today I am writing on antisemitism in the United States during the years of the Holocaust. But the story begins much earlier, in the first century actually. What appears below is a revised introduction to what began today as its on-line serialization on the Jerusalem Post. I have provided a link for anyone interested in accessing it there. 

My hope is that you, as you read these materials, will critique and otherwise provide me with feedback and suggestions. Or, for that matter, refer me to sources I may not have discovered.

I thank you in advance,
David

Text Box:

Antisemitism and Jewish Survival

 

 


Anti-Judaism and the origins of Christianity: Part 1

 

Preface

 

With this submission I begin an experiment: For some time I have been writing what, until recently, I would euphemistically refer to as a "book." In recent months I have found myself increasingly engaged in research and writing and now realize that my efforts are indeed coming together as that book which, for the time being takes the title of my blog, Antisemitism and Jewish Survival. Following this introductory offering I will begin to send out the present draft of the book in serial form, start to finish (a goal as yet not arrived at!).

 

Some form of anti-Jewish animus has plagued Jewish life in the Diaspora since at least the 4th century, with Constantine's adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. The Holocaust should have represented for us a wake-up call, a loud and clear statement that Jew-hatred is more virile in secular society than ever it had been even in the centuries of religion-inspired persecution. Instead we Jews, in our Diaspora and in Israel, have grown complacent. We seem to be aware of a continuing threat because as I write these lines today headlines remind us that antisemitism on the European sub-continent is at a level not seen since the Holocaust. Antisemitism and Jewish Survival is first and last a call for a renewed focus and return to the original purpose and intent of Zionism.

 

Since Ben-Gurion declared statehood just three years after the ovens of Auschwitzcooled, the meaning and purpose of Zionism has focused on developing the state of the Jews. And this was inevitable: one-third of all Jews had been murdered for the crime of having been born Jews, and Israel was the symbol of our defiance, our rise from the ashes. Then followed decades of threat, provocation and war against the fledgling state, and a people only recently emerged from the death camps seemed on the verge of yet another Holocaust. Decades of threat against the state of the Jews shifted attention away from the now quiescent but continuing threat to our Diaspora; and Zionism, long focused on the creation of a refuge for the Diaspora was now fixed instead on the survival of Israel. And our Diaspora communities, of the United States, of Jews who somehow chose to return to and make their homes in Germany andEurope, continued our lives as if the Holocaust was but a momentary blip in a fast receding history.

 

My project, should it achieve completion and emerge as a published book, will argue that the Holocaust, far from being just another of the countless tragedies to befall the Jewish people in our Diaspora, is but the most recent, the most nearly successful effort by one religious tradition to eradicate another. I will demonstrate by examples from 2,000 years of history a pattern of behavior based on a consistent development of a theology born in the most revered documents of Christianity, come to be embedded in the very sinews of western history and culture that followed. Theological anti-Judaism found easy passage from religious autocracy to secular democracy, integrated unquestioningly into the social revolution that swept the west with Voltaire and the Enlightenment.

 

The Holocaust is not just another tragedy in the long history of persecution meted out to the Jewish dispersion in Christendom. Neither is it an event "too mysterious to comprehend." The Holocaust is but the most recent if nearly successful effort by the West to resolve its self-invented Jewish Problem. Hitler, as the solution's  most recent advocate and instrument, nearly achieved his stated goal of "exterminating each and every Jew the Reich could lay hands on" because, for the first time in history, the 20th century provided the technological means to achieve it.

 

As those technologies, particularly relating to computing and military hardware, have continued to develop exponentially so, I suggest, have the instruments available to a future project aimed at finally solving this millennial and as yet unsolved Western Jewish Problem.

 

Zionism, far from having achieved its goal in creating a state of the Jews has lost none of its immediacy and urgency as first expressed by those young Jews in late 19thcentury Russia, and defined by Herzl in early 20th Switzerland. Both felt impending disaster "in their bones" but could not possibly have imagined the form and magnitude it would take. We alive today are witness to that which for previous generations had been unimaginable.

 

 

Introduction (to the first chapter)

 

The Holocaust is usually understood as referring to the six million Jews murdered between 1940 and1945 in death camps created specifically for that purpose. But as horrendous and frightening as that is, Hitler's blueprint encompassed far more than the destruction of Europe's Jews. In Mein Kampf, begun in 1923, he clearly stated that his goal was not just the extermination of Europe's Jews, but of all Jews, wherever the Reich could get its hands on them. Hitler intended a full and finalsolution to the West's Jewish Problem. It was only by chance, Germany's defeat in a war that Roosevelt and Churchill still doubted success in the war's final year that Hitler's ambition was only partly realized.

 

It takes little imagination to appreciate that, had Germany emerged victorious that your parents and mine, in the United States or elsewhere in the Christian world; that few Jews would have survived.

 

But what is the "Jewish Problem," how would Hitler have come by the idea that the Jews were not just a threat, but a threat so severe as to demand its full and final eradication? The Jewish Problem and its solution are not a creation of the 20thcentury, nor even of the nineteenth. In fact "the problem" came into existence in the first century, in the earliest documents which were eventually collected by the Church as its "New Testament." From that seed would sprout 2000 years of theological development and expansion at the hands of some of west's most famous thinkers, from Augustine in the 4th century to Luther in the 15th; and absorbed seamlessly into secular scientific thought by the Enlightenment, by Voltaire and the Philosophes in the 18th; and political philosophy from the 19th century to the present.

 

It is not my purpose to critique all relevant historical documents since scriptural anti-Judaism is the common early thread and focus of the present chapter. Instead I will provide examples I consider typical and representative of what, for Christianity represents a barrier to that religion's self-representation as "loving" and "forgiving;" but for Jews was and remains a matter of life and death for person and people.

 

This, as with all previous submissions, was first sent to the Jerusalem Post and appears today on-line. My editor wisely limited what went up to my (earlier version)Introduction and (unchanged) Preface, where I had included also part of my first chapter. As the above title suggests, the story begins with a discussion of the father of Christianity, Paul, then on to the gospels and the early Church Fathers. From there through the Middle Ages, the Crusades and Inquisition and on to Luther; then on to the Enlightenment and the secular revolution, scientific and political antisemitism. Approximately half the volume, which I am now working on, involves the Jewish experience in die goldene medina, the United States and the State of Israel. Both are illustrative of the achievements, and the failures of Zionism. The final chapter will bring us back to the Hoveivei Zion and Herzl, and the continuing Zionist imperative.

 

An earlier version of Anti-Judaism and the origins of Christianity: Part 1 is just a click away. Previous writings on topic are accessible through my JPost presence at, Antisemitism and Jewish Survival.

 





+++



Fun stuff to read, tell and watch:

Now FREE to watch all 91 minutes: "Defamation," from Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir. LINK: http://tinyurl.com/3rvhdvc

Some of His Best Friends Are Jewish: The Saga of a Holocaust Revisionist By Nathaniel Popper. Link: http://tinyurl.com/3v6m88c

...an Israeli lawyer has filed a class-action lawsuit against former President Jimmy Carter, seeking $5 million in damages because his book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" allegedly defamed Israel. Link: http://tinyurl.com/3pltqg2

"...when you have laws against questioning the Holocaust narrative, you are screaming at the other person to stop thinking!!!" ---Mike Santomauro. *Anthony Lawson's Holocaust Video "were the Germans so stupid"... Link: http://tinyurl.com/44nsrco

An anti-Semite condemns people for being Jews, I am not an anti-Semite.--Mike Santomauro. Link: http://tinyurl.com/42z9p8o

Peace.

Mike Santomauro
253 West 72nd St
New York, NY 10023
Call anytime: 917-974-6367




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Belgium Senate proposal accepts amnesty for Nazi collaborators

 

http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/05/17/3087745/belgium-senate-accepts-amnesty-for-nazi-collaborators

Belgium Senate proposal accepts amnesty for Nazi collaborators

May 17, 2011

(JTA) -- Belgium's Senate voted to accept draft legislation that would give amnesty to Nazi collaborators.

The legislation initiated by the far-right Flemish Vlaams Belang party was approved last week. 

In debating the legislation, Belgian Justice Minister Stefaan De Clerck of the ruling Christian Democratic Party reportedly voiced support for amnesty for Nazi collaborators and suggested that the country should "maybe also forget because this is in the past."

The country's Jewish community reportedly was shocked and dismayed by De Clerck's suggestion.

"Holocaust survivors condemn Minister De Clerck's proposal as a disgraceful abandonment of the demands of justice and the rule of law," said Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, in a statement. "His shameful suggestion is offensive and an insult to the memory of all victims of the brutal Nazi occupation of Belgium -- Jew and non-Jew.  It constitutes a shocking expression of 'moral amnesia.' 

"We call on all parties and institutions in Belgium to reject this objectionable proposal."
 





+++



Fun stuff to read, tell and watch:

Now FREE to watch all 91 minutes: "Defamation," from Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir. LINK: http://tinyurl.com/3rvhdvc

Some of His Best Friends Are Jewish: The Saga of a Holocaust Revisionist By Nathaniel Popper. Link: http://tinyurl.com/3v6m88c

...an Israeli lawyer has filed a class-action lawsuit against former President Jimmy Carter, seeking $5 million in damages because his book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" allegedly defamed Israel. Link: http://tinyurl.com/3pltqg2

"...when you have laws against questioning the Holocaust narrative, you are screaming at the other person to stop thinking!!!" ---Mike Santomauro. *Anthony Lawson's Holocaust Video "were the Germans so stupid"... Link: http://tinyurl.com/44nsrco

An anti-Semite condemns people for being Jews, I am not an anti-Semite.--Mike Santomauro. Link: http://tinyurl.com/42z9p8o

Peace.

Mike Santomauro
253 West 72nd St
New York, NY 10023
Call anytime: 917-974-6367




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Director Von Trier at Cannes calls himself a Nazi

 

http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/05/18/3087758/director-von-trier-self-identifies-as-nazi-at-cannes

Director Von Trier at Cannes calls himself a Nazi

May 18, 2011

(JTA) -- Danish film director Lars Von Trier described himself as a Nazi who is not against Jews during the Cannes Film Festival.

Von Trier, who was at the festival to promote his film "Meloncholia," reportedly made the comments in jest. During a news conference Wednesday he said that "I am a Nazi," and called Israel "a pain in the ass."

"I really wanted to be a Jew, and then I found out that I was really a Nazi because, you know, my family was German, which also gave me some pleasure," he said.

"What can I say? I understand Hitler, but I think he did some wrong things, yes, absolutely. But I can see him sitting in his bunker in the end. He's not what you would call a good guy, but I understand much about him, and I sympathize with him a little bit. But come on, I'm not for the Second World War, and I'm not against Jews. I am very much for Jews. No, not too much, because Israel is a pain in the ass."

Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, in a statement said that "Holocaust survivors condemn Von Trier's repulsive comments as an insensitive exploitation of victims' suffering for self-serving promotion and publicity.

"His vulgar comments may have been made in jest and for shock, but those subjected to the brutalities of the Nazi regime cannot find amusement in recalling the torture and deaths of those terrible times. We cannot give a review of his film, but as a person Von Trier is a moral failure."

Journalists and critics have called Von Trier's new film a triumph and said it is in the running for the Palme d'Or prize in Cannes for best picture. His politically charged comments could harm his film's chances, according to reports. 
 





+++



Fun stuff to read, tell and watch:

Now FREE to watch all 91 minutes: "Defamation," from Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir. LINK: http://tinyurl.com/3rvhdvc

Some of His Best Friends Are Jewish: The Saga of a Holocaust Revisionist By Nathaniel Popper. Link: http://tinyurl.com/3v6m88c

...an Israeli lawyer has filed a class-action lawsuit against former President Jimmy Carter, seeking $5 million in damages because his book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" allegedly defamed Israel. Link: http://tinyurl.com/3pltqg2

"...when you have laws against questioning the Holocaust narrative, you are screaming at the other person to stop thinking!!!" ---Mike Santomauro. *Anthony Lawson's Holocaust Video "were the Germans so stupid"... Link: http://tinyurl.com/44nsrco

An anti-Semite condemns people for being Jews, I am not an anti-Semite.--Mike Santomauro. Link: http://tinyurl.com/42z9p8o

Peace.

Mike Santomauro
253 West 72nd St
New York, NY 10023
Call anytime: 917-974-6367




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