Last month, Hess posted the following on the Foreskin Man Facebook page:

He’s referring to this:

A ceremony in honor of Holocaust days of Remembrance was held at Nelson Chapel aboard Naval Weapons Station Yorktown April 8.

The Holocaust days of Remembrance is an annual observance, and was led by Navy chaplain Lt. Aaron Kleinman.

Kleinman began by reflecting on the history of the Holocaust.

“In 1933 the Germans needed to find a solution to exterminate the Jewish people,” said Kleinman. “So they put their scientists, engineers, and the people who ran the train stations on this project.”

The Germans created a whole infrastructure of death to exterminate the Jews, Romans, Gypsies, homosexuals, and mentally disabled people from society.

“How did they do this,” asked Kleinman. “They start propaganda, and they take over the media. Then they start legislating and passing laws.”

Kleinman referenced pictures of big beak nose Jews with fangs, sucking the blood of German children produced by Germany.

These photographs dehumanized Jews, and made it more justifiable to commit genocide. Killing Jews was seen as freeing society of an evil species, instead of murder of human beings, said Kleinman.

Anti-Semitism still exists today. As part of the ceremony, a photo of a cartoon from 2013 of an evil villain called “foreskin man” was shown to the audience. The propaganda was an attempt to ban the Jewish practice of circumcision similar to bans imposed by Nazi Germany.

Hess seems surprised his creation would be mentioned, but it’s spot on.

Unless I am mistaking surprise for pride.

Although this year’s official Holocaust Memorial Day has passed, remembrance events and activities continue to take place on a regular basis including the Irena Sendler presentation.

Irena Sendler has been called the female Oskar Schindler, evoking the story of the German factory owner who saved over one thousand Jews during the Second World War. Sendler, however, is credited with saving almost 3000 people, most of whom were children.

When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 Sendler began to help Jews escape from the Nazi dragnet. It is estimated that during those first months she helped as many as 500 Jews evade the Nazis and go into hiding. Sendler then joined the Zagota, a Polish underground which was devoted to helping Jewish children. She obtained false papers that identified her as a nurse and allowed her to enter the Warsaw ghetto where she brought food and medicines.

Sendler quickly identified ways in which she could smuggle children out of the ghetto and she began to do so, often drugging the children as she hid them in suitcases, toolboxes and coffins to bring them out. One ruse involved placing a sedated child in a bag with a barking dog on top of the sack. Many of the children had been orphaned in the ghetto and had no parents or guardians but Sendler also approached ghetto parents to convince them to allow her to remove their children and give them a chance of survival. As Sendler later described it, “I talked the mothers out of their children.”

In addition to the children she personally smuggled out of the ghetto, Sendler also worked with her comrades in the Zagota to remove children through underground passages, sewer pipes and via the abandoned courthouse on the ghetto’s edge. All in all it is estimated that Sendler was responsible for taking 2500 children out of the ghetto.

Sendler identified safe hiding places where the smuggled children could be placed. Most children were placed in convents, Catholic orphanages or with Polish families. Sendler recorded the children’s names and hiding places on strips of tissue paper which she then enclosed in jars and buried in her friend’s garden. She hoped that after the war, she would be able to reunite the children with their families or, if not, at least with the Jewish community.

In 1943 Sendler was picked up by the Gestapo and imprisoned. The Nazis tortured her and broke her feet but she did not reveal anything about “her children”. Zagota comrades succeeded in bribing a prison guard to release Sendler and she spent the rest of the war in hiding.

After the war Sendler dug up her jars and tried to facilitate reunifications between the children and surviving family members but in almost all cases, no family members were left and the children were either adopted into their Polish families or sent to Israel.

The Irena Sendler story was uncovered in 1999 by a group of schoolgirls who with the help of a Jewish businessman turned it into a play that is, today, performed throughout the world. In addition the story has been retold in book form and appears on a project website.

The truth is I generally have had less time to blog due to my personal circumstances, so my Silverstein posts are but one casualty of the situation.

But not to worry. As long as he continues to publish lies, half-truths and general garbage about Israel, I’ll take him to task. Despite his constant libels against me.

The latest example is a post where he invokes the memory of Anne Frank and other victims of the Holocaust to criticize Israel.

http://www.richardsilverstein.com/2013/02/11/anne-frank-dear-diary/

Of course, not only is Silverstein not bothered he has offended many, but he’s actually glad. After all, it’s one of the way he gets attention (besides spreading lies).

@ntarnopolsky @adl_national @yadvashem Calling out the Holocaust police on me? I hope it makes ‘em made as Hell.

— Tikun Olam (@richards1052) February 11, 2013

Meanwhile, I had to laugh at this tweet of his, which was generated automatically from his blog post. It was clearly stopped mid-sentence because of the character limit, but still makes sense.

Anne Frank: Dear Diary: “Dear Diary: If I had a grave I’d be turning over in it.” I just came… goo.gl/fb/kTs8t

— Tikun Olam (@richards1052) February 11, 2013

He certainly does seem to get his jollies by demonizing Israel.

David Ward MP with a Swastika from his own website – Guido Fawkes Blog

Today is Holocaust Memorial day in the UK and elsewhere (we commemorate this on a completely different day here in Israel).

And as regular as a German rail service, along comes another member of the UK’s Liberal Democrat party (remember Jenny Tonge) espousing rabidly Jew-hating views and thinking he’s just bashing “Israeli government policy”. Well he’s not. David Ward MP, who’s constituancy covers Bradford which is basically a Sharia enclave in Britain’s increasingly restive Muslim north, is just keeping his deeply indoctrinated constituents happy.

As I said yesterday on twitter, only someone who hates Jews can believe the lie that Jews are trying to exterminate Arabs (or for that matter anyone else). It really is as simple as that.

Needless to say his party leadership is making signs of being embarrassed but it’s mostly a fig leaf. Polite UK society widely believes that Israel oppresses and mistreats Arabs and does so without any reason. David Ward is just doing us a favour by making that clear again.

Melanie Phillips has a great post on this. I suggest you read all of it for links and more background but here is just the last part where she, yet again, skewers this nonsense.

The really chilling thing is this. Leave aside Ward’s particular offensiveness and idiocies. The insane belief that Israel is trying to wipe out the Palestinians or at the very least that it behaves savagely towards them, subjects them to ‘apartheid’ and ensures through its behaviour that there is no peace in the Middle East is now common currency in British progressive circles. While most would not use the Holocaust analogy and are careful to damn Israelis rather than ‘the Jews’, the entirely false belief that the Israelis have supplanted the indigenous people of Palestine and towards whom they are now behaving in an unconscionable way is now the default position amongst liberals and the left, and has also made serious inroads amongst the more isolationist and ignorant British conservatives.

The belief that, in Israel, the victims of one of the greatest crimes against humanity are themselves now guilty of crimes against humanity is the collective libel that has become the default position amongst the British intelligentsia. And as Ward suggested in his remarks on Sky, only those Jews who themselves endorse this libel by denouncing Israel are to be considered free of this taint. British Jews who support Israel and try to counter these Big Lies are quite simply treated as pariahs by baying mobs whose obsession with Israel has brought about nothing less than a mass derangement in British public debate.

The full, monstrous obscenity of both Ward’s remarks and the widespread British attitude to which he has given voice is no less than this: accusing the people who were the victims of genocide entirely falsely of committing crimes against humanity — simply because they are trying to defend themselves from being wiped out again by those for whom the Holocaust is unfinished business. Self-defence against extermination is now considered a crime against humanity.

David Ward may have been particularly clumsy – but he has merely given voice to Britain’s national sickness and shame.

Triple J breakfast hosts Tom and Alex, came under fire today from The Age for a joke they made on air during yesterday’s program pertaining to the Holocaust.

The pair of Tom Ballard and Alex Dyson played a game on their show yesterday with guest, former Spicks & Specks captain Alan Brough, in which they got listeners to call in and play a game of ‘six degrees of Hitler.’ Listeners were given a random topic – in this case wind farms – and asked to link them to Hitler.

What followed sparked the ire of many listeners, who were upset and offended when Ballard made a joke that linked wind-farms to the infamous dictator, saying “wind farms, fan-forced ovens, let’s not go there…” Though he didn’t connect the dots, the damage was already done.

Dvir Abramovich wrote in his piece for The Age today, “Why a wind farm you ask? Because it contains fans, which is linked to fan-forced ovens, which in turn connect to the Holocaust and Hitler.”

“Got it?” he writes, “fan-forced ovens were the ovens in which the corpses were burned after the victims were led into the gas chambers where they were told they were going to have a shower,” says Abramovich, who is the director of the Centre for Jewish History and Culture at the University of Melbourne.

Abramovich criticised the pair for their “truly appalling and bizarre” sense of humour, calling it a “beyond distasteful episode.” Adding, “It seems that there is no aspect or symbol of the darkest chapter in human history that is not subject to perverse abuse and cheap trivialisation.”

His incendiary Age piece goes on to flame the radio hosts for their insensitivity and the production crew at Triple J for allowing their segment to be approved, “Triple J may think that any publicity is good publicity and will lure listeners. But yesterday’s hurtful and sickening prank showcases a disturbing abdication of responsible judgment.”

Abramovich wasn’t the only one incensed by Ballard’s distasteful comedy, with the Facebook pages of both Triple J and Tom & Alex lighting up with criticisms of the pair’s Hitler ‘game.’

The youth radio station were quick to respond to the negative backlash and began damage control, issuing a statement today that reads:

“Triple J takes all complaints seriously. We recognise the concerns regarding the comments are serious. Triple J agrees the comments made were inappropriate. The matter has been followed up with the Breakfast team. Triple J regrets the matter and apologises unreservedly for any offence caused.”

Tom Ballard himself also took to social media to formally apologise for his Holocaust reference in a statement that reads:

“I’m very sorry that on my breakfast radio program, I offended and upset a lot of people. That’s not what I like doing; I like making people laugh and I like making people happy.

I never set out to vindictively offend or belittle anyone or any group with my comedy, that’s not what I’m about. I sincerely apologize that’s how I came across in this instance. (Tom)”

What the above report does not mention is before the apology, Ballard  was anything but repentant:

@jeremyengy Dude, if you don’t like the show, just don’t listen. It’s profoundly easy.

— Tom Ballard (@TomCBallard) August 9, 2012

And even compared himself to some comedy greats:

@jeremyengy As cheap as Monty Python, John Cleese, Mel Brooks, Charlie Chaplin, et al

— Tom Ballard (@TomCBallard) August 9, 2012

I guess Ballard fails to realize the difference is these greats were making fun of the Nazis, and not the victims.

And they are actually funny.

Reuters

Passengers on a train in Belgium got a shock this week as the following announcement came over the speaker, “Welcome to the train to Auschwitz. The Jews are asked to get off at Buchenwald.”

More than 55,000 were murdered at the Buchenwald concentration camp during the Holocaust.

A railroad employee who heard the announcement ran to the room with the microphone, but found it empty. A short time later a second employee took to the sound system to apologize for the “unsuccessful joke.”

The Belgian national railroad, SNCB, denounced the incident, which took place on the Brussels-Namur line.

The employee has been found and fired, SNCB officials stated.

European Jewish Congress President Dr. Moshe Kantor recently warned that anti-Israel sentiment in Europe could lead to a “tsunami of hate” being unleashed against European Jews. The European Jewish Parliament has reported a “surge in anti-Semitism” as well.

A recent Anti-Defamation League (ADL) poll found “disturbingly high” levels of anti-Semitism among European respondents

Meanwhile, people will argue antisemitic acts like these are the result of Israel.

I’d argue Israel is the reason Jews won’t really be getting off at Buchenwald again.

This should give you an idea (footage taken from this morning)

Thankfully, that’s not footage taken from here.

This year, Yad VaShem hosted a competition for artists to design posters that captured the essence of Yom HaShoah. The winning poster was the below, created by Doriel Rimmer.

You can see some of the other entries here.

Meanwhile, here’s a contribution from my son.

A price quote Dr. Lande received for sending the doctorate from Nazi Germany to Tel Aviv, signed with a blessing of ‘Heil Hitler.’ Ha'aretz via Alon Ron

A new exhibition on Jewish attorneys practicing in Nazi Germany led to a startling discovery – of a lawyer from Palestine who was awarded his degree in Leipzig just three days after Kristallnacht, in 1938.

The story of Saul Lande has been included in an exhibition in Leipzig called “Lawyers without Rights.”

On November 12, 1938, Lande was awarded his doctoral degree in law. The Nazis had already been in power for five years by that time, but the University of Leipzig did not attempt to deprive Lande of his degree, as happened to dozens of other Jews. Just the opposite. In an act that is almost impossible to understand in retrospect, the university even invited Lande to come from Palestine for the graduation ceremony in Germany.

The invitation to the ceremony made its way from Nazi Germany all the way to Ahad Ha’am Street in Tel Aviv. “Lande, in a show of chutzpah, bravery or stupidity, came by boat to Europe and then took a train directly to Leipzig,” said Joel Levi, a lawyer who is in charge of relations between Israel and Germany for the Israel Bar Association.

Stories told by Lande’s family say he reached Leipzig and met a friend from his studies at the university, who reprimanded him for risking his life just to receive his degree. To protect him, his friend quickly arranged for his German wife to accompany Lande around, hoping the Jew from Israel would not arouse any suspicions in the heart of Nazi Germany. “He arrived at the ceremony, received his diploma, left the city and returned to Israel safely,” said Levi.

For decades, Lande’s doctoral diploma lay in the attic in the Tel Aviv home of Lande’s daughter, Rina Gross, who is also a lawyer and married to retired Judge Yehoshua Gross. “We had a box with family documents, but we never bothered to open it,” said Rina Gross as she leafed through the box. Nine months ago, after receiving a request from Germany, she looked around in the attic and found the box after years.

“We were shocked. My father never talked about it,” said Gross. She was particularly shocked by the swastika adorning her father’s diploma. Among the other documents she found in the family archive were his doctoral dissertation, in German; correspondence between her father and his adviser in preparation for receiving his degree; and price quotes from printers in Germany with whom he negotiated for the printing of his dissertation. One of the letters, which was also sent from Nazi Germany to Tel Aviv, ended with the salutation “Heil Hitler.”

Read the whole thing.

Photo credit: ICCS Screenshot

The Islamic Central Council of Switzerland (ICCS), a conservative Muslim group, has chosen a symbol reminiscent of the Jewish Star of David for a planned protest against Islamophobia this weekend.

Around 2,000 people are expected to participate in the ‘Day against Islamophobia and racism’, a mini-festival organized by ICCS in the capital Bern that will run from 2 to 5pm on Saturday.

In an attempt to draw parallels between the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany and Muslims in the Switzerland of today, many participants will wear t-shirts and stickers with the word ‘Muslim’ framed by a yellow star.

The Bern-based ICCS was founded by young Swiss converts to Islam shortly before the political initiative to ban minarets. Some in the Swiss media have labeled its president Nicholas Blancho ‘the Bin Laden of Biel’, a reference to his home town.

—-

Seemingly unperturbed by the criticism, Blancho says there are distinct similarities between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

“We want to trigger a debate and show that the discrimination of Muslims in Switzerland is a fact,” he told Tages Anzeiger. “Muslims are treated as second-class citizens and are discriminated against, for example because they wear a headscarf or because of their name when they look for an apprenticeship or are looking for an apartment,” he added.

The symbol has outraged Swiss Jews. Edith Bino, president of the Jewish community in Bern, told the Zurich newspaper that the idea of the star is so wrong that they could not take it seriously.

Of course, we are already used to Muslim groups actively working towards a new Holocaust, so I guess this is lightweight.