Irving Hacker Caught?

David Irving arranged his November 23 meeting near Chicago with his fans with all the discretion of a witch assembling her coven for a private toad-boil. Despite this, a group of eight (young, male) witch-hunters invaded the Edelweiss Restaurant in suburban Norridge and proceeded with a maximum of noise and destruction to the back room in which Irving was conducting his oh-so-quiet, by-invitation-only gathering, throwing furniture and some red fluid they had brought with them.

Quick action by Irving's team and the local police department resulted in the collaring of one of the two carloads of troublemakers involved, and out of it tumbled one miscreant of very special interest in view of the criminal destruction of Irving's Web sites mere days before this incident: one young cybercriminal named Jeremy Hammond, described in some detail on Irving's Web site, which continues its struggle to get back on its feet.

Hammond completed two years in the federal pen in late 2008 after his conviction of stealing 5,000 credit-card numbers from another Web site. The possible connection to the far more-damaging attack on Irving's sites is tantalizing.

For their Chicago caper, Hammond and four accomplices have been charged with disorderly conduct. Hammond, still on parole from his earlier offense, may be expected to muster an especially spirited defense in order to avoid being sent back into the slammer for violation of the terms of his parole at their trial scheduled for January 6.

Should be interesting, especially if any evidence can be developed linking Hammond to the destruction of Irving's Web sites.

Elie Wiesel's Hope for America

Elie Wiesel fails Holocaust lesson

News on December 10th coming from Hungary announced Holocaust spokeman Elie Wiesel's urging of the Hungarian government to outlaw Holocaust denial. Although a holder of the Nobel Peace Prize Wiesel thinks that Hungary should follow the example of France and Germany where skepticism about the orthodox Holocaust story results in imprisonment.

Wiesel's anti-free speech and anti-freedom stand demonstrates his complete failure to understand the true lesson of the Holocaust. Lucy Dawidowicz in her War Against the Jews explained how post World War I anxiety and insecurities produced "an emotional milieu in which irrationality and hysteria became routine and illusions became transformed into delusions." She describes the mass proportions of a "delusional disorder" where otherwise rational people - the Germans - gave into pathological fantasies about the Jews. During the National Socialist period there can be no doubt that many regarded the Jews as a source of evil and disaster.

Dawidowicz explains further, "...the mass psychosis of anti-Semitism deranged a whole people. According to their system of beliefs, elimination of the Jews resembled medieval exorcism of the Devil. The accomplishment of both... would restore grace to the world."

Today power sits around the world not with anti-Semitic National Socialists but largely with those who continue to prop up a long gone "devil" as a method of demonstrating their own morality. Those who question the Holocaust - revisionists, or as their detractors, like Wiesel, prefer "deniers" are today's Jews.

Wiesel and others who support draconian anti-revisionist laws have developed pathological fantasies about those who seek to correct the record of the Holocaust story. Wiesel's delusion allows him to believe that the elimination of Holocaust deniers would indeed exorcise a Devil and restore grace to the world.

Wiesel, like those who passed Holocaust revisionist criminalization laws throughout Europe, has learned nothing from the Holocaust. In Wiesel's case he has gone from victim to victor, from powerless to powerful. In his transformation, he continues to make all the same mistakes as his enemies of years gone by.

Elie Wiesel doesn't even realize that today, it is he who has become the "Nazi." In his new found role he exacts his hatred and pathological fantasies on the powerless. As a spokesman for the Holocaust, Wiesel has proven to be a complete failure.

John Demjanjuk: What does the Guardian judge offensive?

This is the letter that offended the ideals of good journalism at the Guardian

"What kind of justice is it that proscribes the normally accepted right of the accused to challenge the assumption that a crime had, in fact, occurred? Normally the prosecution is obliged to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the crime of murder had taken place. This is not the case in the trial of Demjanjuk. The court will, without proof, arbitrarily accept that the crime took place. Being stripped of his most powerful defence, the accused is reduced to pleading mistaken identity or that he had nothing to do with an unproved murder."

John Mortl

***

The Guardian issued this fearless statement explaining its principled stand:

"We published a letter by John Mortl in the Guardian of 3 December [page 37, and guardian.co.uk] relating to the case of John Demjanjuk, who is accused of assisting in the murder of 27,900 people in Poland. Unfortunately, we misread the letter. The underlying meaning, we now realise, implied Holocaust denial. As soon as we realised our mistake, we removed the letter from the website. It should never have been published and we apologise unreservedly that it was."

The State, the University, the Press. It's a hard row to hoe.

Never Forget ... to Pay ... and Pay ... and Pay

The Alamo. Pearl Harbor. 9/11. The Holocaust. Never forget! Actually, we won't get the chance to forget - at least not for a hundred years or more. Because the open palm is always outstretched. "Victims" - in this case of 9/11 - are virtually always in a position to collect pensions if they survive, or their heirs collect if they don't, and today this very much includes not only Holocaust survivors, but millions more who have managed to pass themselves off credibly or otherwise as being one.

The linked article has nothing to do with the Holocaust - it has to do with 9/11, barely eight years ago. As with the Holocaust and all other affronts to people's sense of decency and safety, this eleemosynary project is displaying "mission creep." Initially for "first responders" killed or injured at the site, we see from this brief article that two additional groups have gotten on board: (a) people who die years later from conditions said somehow to have been contracted from the aftermath of the crisis; and (b) those who sustain injuries not from first responding, but from the cleanup that went on for over a year after the mess was made.

And these projects aren't just slow to die - they spring to life very fast, too. The morning after the recent massacre at Fort Hood Army Base in Texas, I encountered uniformed "soldiers" rattling cans at motorists stopped at traffic lights right here in my home town. I, of course, drove on, confident in the feeling that I had already paid full compensation for the victims at Fort Hood, 9/11, and, 64 years after the last concentration camp was liberated, the Holocaust.

And confident, too, that I would keep paying for all these.

And paying.

And paying.

Nazi victims' families testify at Demjanjuk trial

AP reporter David Rising writes that Rudolf Salomon Cortissos sobbed as he told a Munich court about the letter his mother had written on May 17, 1943 — four days before she was gassed in the Nazis' Sobibor death camp with some 2,300 other Dutch Jews.

David Rising does not reflect on how this letter is shown to be what Cortissos claims it to be.

Cortissos says he found the letter in 1959 after his father died. Presumably, it was in the father’s possessions. David Rising doesn’t tell us. How did the father get possession of the letter? AP reporter David Rising only tells us that Cortissos’ mother had “tossed if from the train that was taking her from Holland before it crossed the German border.”

I can see the senior Cortissos now, racing on foot along the railroad track, keeping up with the train, waiting for his wife to toss her farewell letter to him. How far did her husband have to run before he saw the letter? Did he see the letter flutter out a window of the train? In his mad race to keep up with the train, was he able to keep one eye on the train windows, or doors, and one eye on the ground at the same time so he didn't fall on his face?

How did he know from which side of the train his wife would throw her missive to him, or to the world? Was it mere luck that he was running along the side of the train that his wife was occupying? Could she see him out there? Were there other husbands running along with Cortissos, each hoping, waiting, for a missive from their wives or mistresses?

Or was it just this one guy? Cortissos the elder?

AP reporter David Rising is not inclined to express any wonderment about any of this, or whether this letter contributes, or does not contribute, to proving that John Demjanjuk helped murder 29,000 Jews, or that there were gassing chambers at Sobibor

But then that is not the work of AP reporters when they treat with the Holocaust story. Their work is to forward the orthodox story, whatever Holocaust Inc. says it is on any given day, always emphasizing the “unique” monstrosity of the Germans. That’s where the money is for Holocaust Inc., and it’s one way that AP reporters advance their careers.

Coffee with Bradley Smith : Elie Wiesel, a ludicrously unreliable survivor

Me and the H-Bomb Part Two: The Gas Chamber of Samuel Crowell

By Chip Smith

PREFACE

In 2010, Nine-Banded Books will publish a newly and finally revised edition of Samuel Crowell's long-developed monograph, The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes. In addition to the text of "Sherlock," the book will include a revised and updated restatement of Crowell's empirical research on German civil defense architecture (largely an expansion of his other major work, Bomb Shelters in Birkenau) as well as a new closing essay appraising a number of revisionist and counter-revisionist texts that have appeared over the last decade.

I mention this first by way of disclosure, but I will say up front that I feel a special obligation about this one. To state it plainly, I think Crowell's book is important. I think it will be read. And I am perhaps naively hopeful that it will be taken seriously by people -- even some few public intellectuals -- who are understandably skeptical of revisionist challenges to the consensus historiography regarding the Holocaust. I don't expect that an encounter with Samuel Crowell will change many minds, but I do think there is a real possibility that some readers will come away with an understanding that, as Crowell puts it, "the revisionist interpretation on the subject of mass gassing [is] possible, and since possible, a particularly unworthy candidate for censorship."

What follows, the second in a three-part series devoted to the Holocaust controversy, is my digressive introduction to Crowell's major theoretical work, The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes. Though I believe that Crowell's other contributions to the literature of revisionism are just as relevant, I have chosen to focus on Sherlock because its central argument is so shockingly novel, and so seldom engaged. I also think the argument will be vindicated, at least in broad form.I've been wrong before. Time will tell.

The third and final installment in this series (part one is here) will be broadly devoted to "Skepticism, Epistemology, and 'Belief in Belief'." In that post, I will respond to a number of points raised in reader commentary and correspondence. I will also revisit the curious case of Irène Némirovsky and Michel Epstein, with a few surprises.

My apologies for the delay.