Newsletter No 338

                                                                               ISSN 1440-9828
                                                                    July 2007
                                                                  No 338

Launceston Conservative Speakers’ Club

Wednesday 27 June, 2007 at 7.30 pm

Max Fry Hall, Trevallyn, Launceston, Tasmania

>>The Holocaust has no reality in Space and Time, only in Memory<<

Our Speaker is Dr Fredrick Töben of the Adelaide Institute

Dr Töben has already spent seven months in a German gaol for his efforts in defending the honour of his homeland against malicious but profitable slander known as >The Holocaust<. He now faces the real possibility of being gaoled in Australia. At our meeting he will give us an update on his case currently before the Federal Court and on the plight of other revisionists. His talk will centre on Treblinka where it is claimed that 870,000 bodies were buried, then exhumed and then burned! The time needed for such enormous but useless tasks point to the whole Holocaust story of 6 million being a farce. Dr Töben says we have won the argument on paper but we do not have the political power to force truth to emerge.

_________________________________

A pleasing group of individuals braved the cold Launceston winter’s night to hear Fredrick Töben talk about the things listed above.

Focus also fell in Iran’s December 2006 Holocaust Conference and, again, a copy of the Alan Goldberg letter written to Mrs Joyce Steele, OBE, was distributed because it illustrates so well how individuals are threatened into submission by Jewish leaders, but then if such individuals have moral and intellectual integrity, they simply refuse to bend to Jewish pressure – and all too often threats then become mere >puffery<.

Mrs Steele’s response to the Goldberg letter – it is now Justice Alan Goldberg of the Federal Court of Australia – was a short reply wherein she thanked him for his letter and stated that she had noted its contents. No more, no less.

- while waiting for the speaker - reading The Ball Report

From right to left:

President of Launceston's CSC, Mr David Murray, Mrs Olga Scully, Dr Fredrick Töben

- Launceston's cold nights are spent in bed working wearing an Olga Scully special beanie - cost $5.-

The return flight home

An almost empty Jetstream 32 preparing for take-off

It was a special treat to fly as if I was in a private plane

because there was only me to worry about, well, almost!

Low flying is real flying - don't worry about the zero visibility in

clouds because you can see the road below

____________________________________________________________________________________

Germar Rudolf’s tortuous moments

The Second World War has always been overshadowed by the First. Now, as the war aptly named 'the great' merges with the titanic conflicts of the past, its infinitely more destructive, and more global, successor begins to attract the renewed scrutiny of historians. Ian Kershaw is the latest and most scholarly to re-examine some of the turning points in the war he describes as 'the most awful in history'.

Specifically, Kershaw looks at the 10 interconnected military-political decisions taken between May 1940 and January 1942 that transformed two quite separate wars on different continents into 'one truly global conflagration'. These include Britain's decision to fight on, alone, after the fall of France in May 1940; Hitler's decision to launch an unprovoked attack (Operation Barbarossa) on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941; and Japan's decision to launch its attack on Pearl Harbor.

Some of this book, perforce, is hardly original. The circumstances surrounding Churchill's bull-headed decision to defy Hitler in 1940 have already been brilliantly anatomised by John Lukacs in Five Days in London, May 1940. Kershaw's important contribution, however, lies in his succinct summaries of well-known material and the narrative bonus he gets from juxtaposing the decision-making processes of Roosevelt, Churchill, Hitler and Mussolini. Perhaps it is in its extraordinary cast that this second instalment of world war outstrips its bloody curtain-raiser.

Kershaw is at pains to locate many crucial decisions in the complex processes of state bureaucracies, chancelleries and government departments. But one conclusion that jumps off these pages is that with characters such as Himmler, Goering, Stalin and Matsuoka, the drama of the Second World War was never going to be predictable, whatever we might think in hindsight.

Also woven into Kershaw's narrative is the sense of the war as, in the Duke of Wellington's words, 'a damn close-run thing'. Certainly, in mid-1941 with the Axis powers rampaging across Europe, many well-placed observers in London concluded that the game was up. Although much of this book derives from secondary sources, it is none the worse for that. On almost every page, it sparkles with nice details: Roosevelt, as much as Churchill, conducting his presidential business from his bedroom over breakfast each morning; Mussolini boasting to his foreign minister: 'Hitler will find out from the newspapers that I have occupied Greece'; and Stalin raging at his staff in the week after Barbarossa: 'Lenin left us with a great legacy, but we, his heirs, have fucked it up.'

Despite the focus on the Second, it's the First World War that shaped the 20th century. Even Kershaw must describe the Second World War as the 'unfinished business' of the First. Nowhere does the malign influence of 1914-18 emerge more starkly than in Hitler's decision to exterminate the Jews. Hitler's anti-semitism had many sources, as Kershaw acknowledges, but it was the humiliating catastrophe of the Great War for which the Jews had to be held responsible. In Hitler's demonology, Germany had not only to fight the second war to undo the calamity of the first, but the Fatherland had also to seize its historic opportunity to reverse the course of history in the 'Final Solution'.

The climax to this narrative, a catalogue of destructive evil almost beyond comprehension, is the one 'fateful choice' that no one, not even the Führer, could bring themselves to commit to paper. There is no memorandum authorising the destruction of European Jewry, but with or without it, the Holocaust is no less historical, whatever its deniers might argue [–emphasis added, ed AI].

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/history/0,,2109848,00.html

Fateful Choices: 10 Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941

by Ian Kershaw, Allen Lane £30, pp624

The BBC's enemies enjoy unearthing evidence of the organisation's allegedly liberal bias, so they must have been delighted when their own executives appeared to concede on Monday that just such a prejudice exists.

Last week's report into BBC impartiality, overseen by the BBC Trust and written by an independent producer who began his career at the corporation, took over a year to complete. It paints a picture of an organisation that goes to huge lengths to be fair, but simply cannot shake off a deep-seated liberalism that colours huge parts of its output.

'Individuals exercise on occasion a largely unconscious self-censorship out of a misguided attempt to be "correct" in their thinking,' it said. One of the most pressing concerns, the report added, is the increasing sophistication of pressure groups and non-governmental organisations who have learned to influence public opinion by targeting entertainment shows as well as news and current affairs programmes. That means some shows can be 'hijacked' by household names such as Bono or Bob Geldof, whose celebrity status allows them to promote an overtly political agenda.

It can also mean BBC coverage of national events such as the Make Poverty History campaign and Live8 concert falls short of the corporation's own exacting standards on fairness and impartiality.

However, even the BBC's most vehement critics might concede that Dawn French is hardly a serious offender. The comedian was cited in the report, entitled 'From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel', because she starred in a Christmas episode of The Vicar of Dibley that promoted the Make Poverty History campaign, urging fictional parishioners to back the cause. The programme, written by campaign supporter and Four Weddings and a Funeral writer Richard Curtis, even included a promotional video.

French has not responded publicly to the criticism, and Curtis has maintained a dignified silence. But the Girl in the Cafe, another BBC programme criticised in the report, was also written by Curtis and he is said to be unhappy about being singled out, a reaction shared by some in the BBC drama and entertainment arm.

'The drama people are saying: "Surely you want writers to engage with the real world?",' says one senior BBC source. They are also asking, perhaps not unreasonably: 'Where are the right-wing dramatists or the right-wing comedians?' and strongly deny that, in the words of the BBC source: 'The authorial voice can be used as propaganda tool.' Polemical pieces are powerful and thought-provoking, they say. Suggesting that art can ever be 'fair' or 'balanced' displays a lack of understanding bordering on ignorance: it should be neither.

The corporation's news operation is, for the most part, sanguine about the report's conclusions, but it is more accustomed to being scrutinised. The BBC governors, replaced by a board of trustees at the start of the year, regularly examined areas of its output, including its European, Middle East and business coverage, and were often critical.

That process will continue, but even some in BBC news baulk at allegations of unfairness. Newsnight, edited by the highly-regarded Peter Barron, has taken a sceptical view of the debt relief campaign for many years, insiders say, repeatedly pointing out that other problems, including corruption, explain the malaise afflicting some African nations. It has given hours of airtime to those who argue a market-based approach is more likely to solve the continent's problems.

More pertinently, perhaps, they point out that Curtis himself was interviewed on BBC Breakfast about his support for the Drop the Debt campaign, and interrogated about the logic behind it, fielding questions about whether Zimbabwe's President Mugabe should benefit from the programme.

Attitudes at the BBC have changed. Had it been screened a decade ago, a series about immigration might have focused on the tough treatment meted out to asylum seekers or economic migrants, but a recent series focused instead on the government's failure to keep tabs on the number of people entering the country and the shambolic state of the immigration system. Equally, programme-makers who might once have been cautious about casting members of ethnic minorities as villains in dramas are less likely to be paralysed by political correctness than they once were.

Even the Live8 coverage featured a sceptical George Alagiah, who was raised in Ghana, warning that we should not swallow the cliche of a desperate Africa whose problems could be easily solved by allowing it to forgo debt repayments.

News executives recognise that opinions must be sought from a far wider range of sources. The hot new phrase is 'radical impartiality', reflecting a drive to elicit views from extreme organisations such as radical Islamic groups and the BNP, which would not have been sought previously. As the mainstream political parties increasingly occupy the centre ground, and divisions between the political 'left' and 'right' appear to be disappearing, even divisive issues, such as the war on terror or global warming, can unite rather than divide those at opposite ends of the political spectrum.

However, there are limits to this approach. The Holocaust is a historical fact, so Holocaust-deniers are unlikely to be invited on to news programmes. Many scientists also claim global warming does not exist, but they remain in a minority, so editors and journalists will continue to use their common sense, and assume it is a likelihood rather than an inevitability. 'If you were told you were about to get in a car that had an 80 per cent chance of crashing you might not get in it,' explains one BBC journalist. These examples merely demonstrate that each case should be taken on its merits, which is hardly the stuff of controversy [-emphasis added, ed AI].

There are some who wonder about the wisdom of self-flagellation on the BBC's colossal scale. 'If there is a liberal bias, it isn't for lack of people gazing at their navels worrying about it,' says one BBC presenter. 'BBC staff are a bit left-leaning in a woolly sort of way. We're rather right-on when it comes to things like gay rights. But it's never a conspiracy, only ever a cock-up. It's just too big an organisation to be pushed in one direction'.

He concedes, however, that 'news is generally fine, but when you put your thumb in the dyke a leak springs up somewhere else. That can lead to politicisation "by the back door".'

Perhaps the Drop the Debt and Live8 events needed to be placed in a wider context, possibly by running programmes examining the issues they raised in a more sceptical light. The BBC will be tested again next month, when it screens the Live Earth concert at Wembley Stadium. Its critics will be watching closely to see whether it has absorbed the 81-page lecture handed down by the trust last week.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,,2109734,00.html

Ayoon wa Azan – The University President is a Coward

Jihad el-Khazen Al-Hayat, 24 June 2007

The Catholic DePaul University has denied political science professor Norman Finkelstein tenure under the claim that he waged personal battles against his adversaries.

Is this true? The university's president, Reverend Dennis Holtschneider, acknowledged while refusing the tenure of Finkelstein that he agrees with the tenure and promotion board's decision that Norman is "a nationally known scholar and public intellectual, considered provocative, challenging, and intellectually interesting." However, the president then focused on what he considered personal attacks made by Finkelstein on those who oppose his views in order not to grant him tenure.

I believe that the university president is a coward. He retreated in the face of the lobby's campaigns and the Israeli apologist Alan Dershowitz and chose to sacrifice the Jewish professor who was probably the most famous intellectual to work at DePaul.

Norman Finkelstein, as readers know, authored 'The Holocaust Industry' which revealed those trading in the victims of the Holocaust among whom were Finkelstein's parents. This column recently reviewed his 'Beyond Chutzpah' in which he exposed Alan Dershowitz, a law professor at Harvard University, and disclosed his lies, plagiarism and mistakes in defending Israel in his book 'The Case for Israel'.

The Israeli government has committed Nazi crimes against Palestinians and those who defend it are accomplices in these crimes. Here lies the difference between Finkelstein and Dershowitz, as the former stands up for what is right whereas the latter stands up for Nazi-type crime, occupation and starvation.

The political science departmental committee at DePaul voted nine to three in favor of granting Finkelstein tenure, and the university's personnel committee unanimously voted in support of tenure. The university president could not find fault with both decisions, so he relied on personal campaigns which have been targeting Finkelstein for years as the Israeli cabal does not want the Americans or the world to hear the truth. Of course, Father Holtschneider overlooked the fact that Alan Dershowitz, who is heading the campaign against Finkelstein's tenure, had sent DePaul faculty members a 50-page "dossier" including what he claims to be Finkelstein's "most egregious academic sins". He did this in the audacity for which pro-Israel advocates are known, which is transferring the accusation on another, as everything mentioned in the dossier is applicable for its author more than anyone else.

I said the university's president is a coward, and my opinion of his decision is much worse than mere cowardice, however he is a man of religion, so I will leave him to God to hold him accountable. I say that Finkelstein has always received the highest assessment of competence from his students. Also, his academic level surpasses the limits set by the university. His books have been translated into 46 languages, in other words, he is more popular than all the members of the faculty of arts at DePaul. In a nutshell, he is a scholar and intellectual star, a controversial author who provokes interest wherever he goes. Perhaps some of the readers might remember my reference to a televised confrontation between him and Shlomo Bin Ami. The former Israeli Foreign Minister had published a book about the history of Israel which I found moderate, though I later heard him in a debate with Finkelstein, who referred to mistakes, and overlooking of information and points I had missed in 'Scars of War, Wounds of Peace.'

Finkelstein's fame started at the outset of his academic life when he dared criticize the authors of 'From Time Immemorial'. He exposed the lies of writer Joan Peters who claimed that Israel's existence dated back to the earliest of eras, and denied stealing Palestinian lands. It is remarkable that Dershowitz relied on Peters' book and used much of its content. Accordingly, in 'Beyond Chutzpah,' Finkelstein was able to hold a comparison between both books which included quoting several excerpts side by side to prove Dershowitz's plagiarism.

While my personal stance on Finkelstein versus Dershowitz is determined, there are objective researchers who compared the mutual accusations and arbitrated between the two. The best study I have come across was Frank Menetrez's 26-page 'Dershowitz v. Finkelstein: Who's Right and Who's Wrong?' Menetrez clearly ruled in favor of Finkelstein as he examined evidence provided by the latter to prove the falseness of the claims made in 'The Case for Israel' in which the author had the audacity to speak of Israel's good record in the field of human rights although all human rights organizations have condemned time after time Israeli violation of the rights of Palestinians in the occupied territories.

Menetrez also tried to get comments from both authors on their points of disagreement. Finkelstein replied by providing him with additional information which he incorporated in his study, however Dershowitz's response was a campaign against Menetrez, accusing him of bias as he had nothing to say to historical facts condemning him.

Finally, the Israeli cabal in the United States joined forces against a Jew from the aftermath of the Holocaust who dared to speak the truth in public and condemn Israel's crimes, and who refuted the alleged history of its original existence in Palestine.

The Israeli cabal targets every university professor who dares tell the truth. The well known Israeli apologist Daniel Pipes founded the Campus Watch organization to monitor the university campus to resist any professor telling the truth and threaten his work. Perhaps some of the readers may remember my exposition of the campaign against Joseph Massad, which was not the first and the campaign against Finkelstein won't be the last.

I hope Finkelstein will find a better university than DePaul, for he alone is more famous and worthier than the university.

http://www.j-khazen.blogspot.com/

http://english.daralhayat.com/opinion/OPED/06-2007/Article-20070624-5d1e7e13-c0a8-10ed-0082 a494f27281f2/story.html

***

25 June 2007

Dear Editor:

Congratulations on your columnist addressing an issue that in >western democracies< is a taboo topic. For me it is interesting that such freedom impulses come not from the traditional European-controlled democracies but from so-called >lesser developed< countries. Iran looms large in this respect because its president, Dr Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had the courage to host the first truly international conference where aspects of the >Holocaust< were being reviewed. Now I wonder who will re-invigorate, no - liberate the world from such cowardly impulses as the Finkelstein affair has highlighted. That De Paul University bent to Jewish pressure re-inforces my maxim: >>Don't blame the Jews, blame those that bend to Jewish pressure<<.

Fredrick Töben

______________________________________

University of Colorado considering dismissal of Professor Ward Churchill for 9/11 statements

Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2007 09:37:06 -0700; From: Jeff Blankfort - jblankfort@earthlink.net

What is not mentioned in this letter but has no doubt been one of the factors behind the censoring of Prof. Ward Churchill is that he has been an outspoken supporter of the Palestinian struggle and an unstinting critic of Israel and its domestic lobbyists.-JB

Now is the Time to Speak Out! The Regents and Ward Churchill

By NATSU SAITO , CounterPunch

In the next few weeks, the Board of Regents of the University of Colorado (CU) will vote on the dismissal of Professor Ward Churchill. This is the final opportunity for public input in this process.

Over the past two and a half years, many of you have opposed CU's attempts to fire Ward. Ward and I have engaged in this struggle not for the sake of his job (he will always write, speak and teach), nor because we enjoy battling bureaucracy, but because it has become emblematic of contemporary efforts to silence those who insist on discussing uncomfortable truths.

Since February 2005, CU administrators have been under intense political and financial pressure to fire Ward for his statements about the 9/11 attacks. To avoid blatantly violating the First Amendment, they have resorted to a pretextual investigation of his scholarship.

After combing through a media barrage of unfounded allegations and his more than 20 books, 100 articles, and over 12,000 footnotes, CU has settled for firing Ward Churchill, a tenured full professor, for six instances of alleged improper footnoting or author attribution (see details below).

Predictably, this has provided sufficient excuse for those who wish to distance themselves from this "controversy" and still believe they support academic freedom. For organizations like Lynne Cheney's neoconservative American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), it is a major victory for the corporatization of higher education.

However, those who look beyond the headlines and CU's self-serving pronouncements have recognized it as a charade.

First, the evidence has established that all of the charges investigated were solicited or invented by University administrators. None were filed by the allegedly aggrieved parties.

The specific charges against Ward have been debunked. Recently, fifteen professors and two attorneys filed two sets of formal research misconduct allegations against the investigative committee which wrote the report used to justify sanctions. These illustrate that the committee members were so determined to convict Ward that they engaged in falsification and fabrication of evidence, twisting the facts to fit their conclusions. In addition, CU Professor Tom Mayer has exposed the pretextual nature of the so-called plagiarism charges.

More generally, Indigenous scholar/activists and their allies have recognized that this is an attack on those who challenge mainstream >>truths<< about U.S. history, as well as an attempt to eliminate ethnic and gender studies. Public intellectuals including Derrick Bell, Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk, Howard Zinn, and Immanuel Wallerstein published an open letter in the NY Review of Books denouncing CU's actions as part of the repressive post-9/11 "militarist reflex." A petition opposing Ward's dismissal was signed by nearly 500 scholars and activists with Teachers for a Democratic Society. Many other groups have submitted letters and petitions denouncing CU's tactics and calling for Ward's reinstatement.

What has meant the most to us, however, has been the support of elders like Carrie Dann of the Western Shoshone and Japanese American activist Yuri Kochiyama, young people who are searching for a way to cope with an uncertain future, and regular people on the street--parking lot attendants, baggage handlers, homeless people--who consistently express their appreciation that Ward refuses to be silenced. They know this is not about footnotes.

I hope you will take the time to e-mail the CU Regents and urge them not to fire Ward Churchill. They can be reached c/o Millie.Cortez@cu.edu, or individually at: Steve.Ludwig@cu.edu; Cindy.Carlisle@cu.edu; Patricia.Hayes@cu.edu; Michael.Carrigan@cu.edu; Tom.Lucero@cu.edu; Steve.Bosley@cu.edu; Kyle.Hybl@cu.edu; Paul.Schauer@cu.edu; Tillie.Bishop@cu.edu.

For maximum effectiveness, please cc: wcsn@gmail.com.

We have no illusions that the Regents will suddenly wake up and decide to take academic freedom seriously. However, the resistance they encounter in firing Ward Churchill will determine how readily others will be subjected to similar treatment. Resistance is never futile, for it defines the terms of the next struggle. In solidarity, Natsu Taylor Saito, Boulder, Colorado, June 20, 2007

http://www.counterpunch.org/saito06212007.html

See also http://www.wardchurchill.net and http://www.defendcriticalthinking.org

Iran jails activists and gags dissent.

Correspondents in Washington,

AFP - The Australian, June 25 2007

Iranian authorities have launched a ferocious crackdown on dissent, targeting labour leaders, universities, the press, women’s rights advocates and Iranian-Americans.

Analysts yesterday described the crackdown as a >>cultural revolution<<, and attempt to roll the clock back to the time of the 1979 revolution, when the newly formed Islamic Republic combined religious zeal and anti-imperialist rhetoric to try to assert itself.

Reports on the crackdown said the shift was happening against the backdrop of an economy so stressed that although Iran is the world’s second-largest oil exporter, it was on the verge of rationing petrol.

Analysts told The New York Times the hardline administration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad faced rising pressure for failing to deliver on promises of greater prosperity from soaring oil revenue.

Dr Ahmadinejad has been using US support for regime change in Iran as well as threats of a military attack as a pretext to hound his opposition.

The administration in Teheran had focused on Dr Ahmadinejad’s political enemies, such as former president Mohammed Khatami and the controversy over his presumed violation of Islamic morals when he shook hands with an unfamiliar woman after a speech in Rome.

Young men wearing T-shirts deemed to tight or with haircuts seen as too Western have been paraded bleeding through Teheran streets.

The country’s police chief boasted that b150,000 people were detained in the annual spring sweep against clothing considered not Islamic.

More than 30 women’s rights advocates were arrested in one day, according to Human Rights Watch, and five of them had been sentenced to prison terms of up to four years, the New York Times report said. They were charged with endangering national security for organizing an internet campaign to collect signatures supporting the removal of laws discriminating against women.

Eight student leaders at Teheran’s Amir Kabir University have disappeared into Evin Prison since early May.

The Iranian National Security Council has sent a three-page warning to newspaper editors detailing banned topics, including the rise in petrol prices and other economic woes.

At least three prominent non-government organizations that pushed for broader legal rights or civil society have been shut down and hundreds more have gone underground.

Professors have been warned against attending overseas conferences or having any contact with foreign governments, lest they be recruited as spies.

Analysts told The New York Times they had traced the changes to a speech in March by Ayatollah Khamenei, whose pronouncements carry the weight of law.

He warned that no one should damage national unity when the West was waging psychological war on Iran.

The newspaper said three Iranian-Americans were being held in the notorious Section 209 of Evin Prison, the wing controlled by the Intelligence Ministry, and had been denied visits by lawyers and relatives.

It named them as Haleh Esfandiari, the director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars; Kian Tajbakhsh, an urban planning consultant with the Open Society Institute, and Ali Shakeri, of the Centre for Citizen Peacebuilding at the University of California, Irvine.

A fourth, Parnaz Azima, a journalist who works for Radio Farda, an American-financed station based in Europe, has been barred from leaving the country.

Most analysts ascribe Dr Ahmadinejad’s motives to blocking what could become a formidable alliance between the camps of Mr Khatami and Hashemi Rafsanjani, both former presidents.

Parliamentary elections are scheduled for early next year, and the next presidential vote in 2009.

*********

The Australian

Letters@theaustralian.com.au

27 June 2007

Sir

With interest I read the above article because it is evidence that a massive psychological attack on Iranian institutions is well under way, and it is only natural that Iranians, who still wish to remain masters in their own homes - rather than be enslaved to the Anglo-American-Zionist world of international predatory capitalism/consumerism - are doing everything possible to resist such forces.

It does not surprise me to note the >Open Society Institute< gets a mention because in Iran it is well-known that international financier George Sorros runs these institutes in countries that are being prepared for regime change, i.e. if they refuse to submit to international financial controls.

You may remember that Malaysia, but not Russia, successfully resisted the financial exploits of Sorros, something that upset your Greg Sheridan because he felt the whole international financial system would crash. Russia did not resist the Sorros plunder, and in the Russian province of Kaliningrad, formerly Germany's Königsberg, after Sorros destroyed the Russian Rubel, the local university received sizeable grants from one of Sorros's foundations that always come in to help clean up the destruction initiated by his activities. It is the same old pattern of establishing destructive facts on the ground, as was done in Iraq, for example, then after the destruction follows US re-construction.

The Iranian people are resisting this merciless senseless process of establishing a mindset that thrives only on militarism-hedonism-consumerism.

As you may be aware, I was one of the Revisionists who attended the December 2006 Teheran Holocaust Conference, on which your paper reported in some detail.

Permit me to remind you that even in Australia these evil forces are at work. Your paper’s report on the Teheran Holocaust Conference, wherein you took a photograph from our Adelaide Institute website that featured me standing next to the Iranian president, has had a devastating effect on the second of three Australian attendees, Richard Krege. Upon his return to Australia he was sacked from his job at Air Services in Canberra where he had been working for almost ten years. Your reporter did not have to mention Mr Krege’s place of work, but did so, knowing full-well that this would have serious consequences for a man just in the prime of his career.

Fredrick Töben

toben@adelaideinstitute.org

From: Mohammed A. Hegazi

mehegazi@yahoo.com

Sent: Wednesday, 27 June 2007

To:letters@theaustralian.com.au
Subject: Your false propaganda

Sir,

Your unfounded report about an imaginary crackdown on dissidents in Iran apparently follows your line of fabricating news.

It brings to memory your false reporting about a fictitious meeting between your reporter "Richard Sproull" and myself in December 2006.

--------------

Socialite meets the stars of Holocaust denial, Richard Sproull,18 December 2006

SHE is a one-time Newcastle beauty queen, the daughter of a truckie, a London socialite and former wife to the late Kiwi tycoon Frank Renouf.

But so-called historian Michele Renouf now commands prominence for her controversial views on the Holocaust, meeting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the gathering of revisionists he sponsored in Tehran last week. "I have come with great pleasure to see this expose," she told the BBC on Monday, the first day of the two-day conference, called The Holocaust: A Global Vision. "I don't know too many things about Iran but certainly I think we must celebrate that we can come to this country and speak in the way that we cannot in the free world."

Speakers included Adelaide's Frederick Töben, who has described as "mere puffery" otherwise undisputed evidence - provided by the Nazis themselves - that Zyklon-B gas was used to murder Jews in their millions.

Another Australian, Richard Krege, an electrical engineer for Airservices Australia in Canberra, described the gas chambers as an "outright lie", a claim he thought was supported by a model he built of the Treblinka extermination camp.

The conference continued to cause outrage in Britain yesterday as Ahron Cohen, an Orthodox rabbi from Greater Manchester and a leading member of the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta movement, told The Sunday Times that God would have saved the Nazis' victims if they had deserved to live.

Cohen's trip to Tehran - along with four American rabbis from the same sect - was paid for by the Iranian Foreign Ministry, which organised the conference. They were also warmly greeted by Ahmadinejad, who has a PhD in traffic lights.

Renouf and another Australian attendee, Mohammed Hegazi of Melbourne, were so eager to meet the bogeyman of the West they pushed through a crowd to present him with their papers after he told the conference Israel would soon "disappear".

She reportedly called Ahmadinejad "a hero" for opening debate about the Holocaust. Wearing a green robe and Islamic headscarf, she addressed the conference. However Hegazi refused to comment about her address, saying it would be published next year. "If this is going to be part of a newspaper article then I can't divulge any information from her speech," he said. Attempts by The Australian to contact Renouf have been unsuccessful. [-emphasis added, ed. AI]

Töben - an amateur historian who set up the Adelaide Institute in 1994 to pursue his cause and spent seven months in a German prison in 1999 for inciting racism - describes Renouf as "once a commoner but lifted in the sophisticated set because of her own inner strength and convictions".

Renouf, who still uses the honorific lady from her knighted former husband, claims to be a media representative for David Irving, the British historian serving three years in an Austrian jail for denying the Holocaust.

Members tried to have her expelled from London's exclusive Reform Club for inviting Irving to a function.

Irving is said to have been the catalyst for Renouf's sudden interest in anti-Semitism, having claimed she had no interest in World War II or the Holocaust until reading about his libel trial.

Irving in 2000 unsuccessfully sued American academic Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier. Renouf attended the hearing and endeared herself to Irving, who was bankrupted by the legal costs.

Renouf was born Michelle Mainwaring and crowned Miss Newcastle in 1968. She was Sir Frank's third wife - after his divorce from Susan Renouf - and they married in 1991 when the banking tycoon was 72.

Frank knew her as Countess Griaznoff, the ex-wife of a Russian count. She reportedly stated on her marriage certificate that her father was dead. But the story disintegrated when Frank learned - while the couple were on a six-week honeymoon in Australia - that his father-in-law was a truck driver called Arthur living at The Entrance on the NSW Central Coast. They divorced a month later.

At the end of the Tehran conference, Renouf was included among members of a >>Truthseeking<< committee. Among the committee's >>tasks<< is to organise the next conference.

============

Keep up your propaganda trash, the Internet will choke it.

Mohammed Hegazi

Melbourne

From: bocage@club-internet.fr

Sent: Thursday, 28 June 2007 1:56 AM

To: letters@theaustralian.com.au

Subject: The Australian, June 25: Iran jails activists and gags dissent

Dear Sirs,

Following the article you published on June 25, 2007, titled >>Iran jails activists and gags dissent<<, with, unfortunately, no particular name, I would like you to take the trouble to go to: http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=2035 >>Setting the Stage for Turmoil in Caracas Washington¹s New Imperial Strategy In Venezuela<<, which will prove you that what is supposedly happening in Iran is the result of the American policy put in place in any country in which they want to set >>democracy<<: just like in Venezuela they are setting the stage for turmoil in Iran. No more, no less.

Yvonne Schleiter, Paris, France.

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Spanish Jews to protest Iranian anti-Israel comments

June 26, 2007,

http://www.metimes.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20070626-062219-8369r

MADRID -- Spain's Jewish confederation said Monday that it would hold protests Wednesday outside the Iranian embassy in Madrid to protest against repeated anti-Israeli comments by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The confederation said that following Ahmadinejad's threats to seek the destruction of Israel, Spanish-based Jews would gather outside the Iranian embassy at 7.00 p.m. (1700 GMT). Three weeks ago, Ahmadinejad launched the latest in a series of verbal attacks on Israel and said that a "countdown" had begun that would end with Lebanese and Palestinian militants destroying the Jewish state. In a speech to mark the 18th anniversary of the death of revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the president said that last summer's war between Israel and Lebanese militant group Hezbollah had started this process. Ahmadinejad sparked outrage abroad shortly after coming to power in 2005 for saying that Israel should be "wiped from the map" and then repeatedly predicting that the state would disappear. He also labeled the Holocaust as a "myth" and invited several researchers who have played down the mass slaughter of Jews in World War II to a Tehran conference. The confederation of Spanish Jews said that they intended to protest and underline Israel's right to exist while demanding an end to Iranian "aggression."

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Indonesian meet slams denial of Holocaust 6/13/2007, Reuters jimbaran

• Indonesia's former president denounced Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad yesterday for branding the Holocaust a myth

Abdurrahman Wahid was speaking at a meeting on the Indonesian island of Bali which was partly aimed at countering an Iranian-backed conference last year where the mass slaughter of Jews in World War II was questioned.

>>I visited Auschwitz's Museum of Holocaust and I saw many shoes of the dead people in Auschwitz. Because of this, I believe Holocaust happened,<< said Wahid. >>Although I am a good friend of Ahmadinejad ... I have to say that he is wrong,<< said the former president, who led the world's most populous Muslim nation from 1999 to 2001.

The privately backed meeting was sponsored by the US-based LibForAll organisation, which aims to counter Muslim extremism, and the Wiesenthal Centre's Museum of Tolerance. It brought together leaders from various religions, as well as Holocaust survivors and victims of terrorist attacks. Ahmadinejad's government hosted a conference in December saying it wanted to allow researchers from nations where it is a crime to question the killing of six million Jews by the Nazis to speak freely.

Security for the Bali event in a five-star hotel was tight. Bali is a Hindu enclave in Indonesia, but has suffered attacks by Islamic militants, including the 2002 nightclub bombings that killed more than 200 people, mostly foreign tourists. About 85 percent of Indonesia's 220 million people are Muslims. Most are moderates, although there is an increasingly vocal radical fringe.

http://www.thepeninsulaqatar.com/Display_news.asp?section=World_News&subsection=Rest+of+the+World&month=June2007&file=World_News2007061382736.xml

Finkelstein case: Academic freedom loses to Israeli lobby

Matthew Abraham, June 25, 2007, The Electronic Intifada

DePaul University's Promotion and Tenure Board's 8 June 2007 decision to deny tenure to professors Norman G. Finkelstein and Mehrene Laurdee has placed DePaul University on the brink of a legitimacy crisis that threatens to irrevocably harm the very fabric of a university that has placed social justice and activism at the heart of its Vincentian mission since 1898. What does it mean that this Vincentian University has denied tenure to two passionate advocates of social justice who not only met the tenure requirements of their departments and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences but clearly surpassed them? What would St. Vincent de Paul have made of this year's tenure and promotion decisions? Would he have agreed with them? From what I know of St. Vincent de Paul's life and work, I'm almost certain he would be distressed by what has transpired under the name of "Vincentian tenure standards," which are transparent code words for "proving one's ideological serviceability to the interests of the powerful," in this case DePaul's would-be patrons. Finkelstein and Larudee apparently failed that test.

Norman Finkelstein has written passionately about the plight of the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, indicting powerful elites who capitalize upon the moral capital of the Holocaust for financial gain while demonstrating indifference toward the suffering of those on the receiving end of US high-tech weaponry in the Palestinian occupied territories and south Lebanon. Larudee, the sister of International Solidarity Movement leader Paul Larudee who was jailed in Israel for a brief time, is a specialist on international organizations and developing countries. During their time at DePaul, Finkelstein and Larudee have inspired numerous students to create a better world, sparked vigorous debate on the issues of our age, and dared to speak truth to power, which is an era of clichés and political correctness is the minimum intellectual responsibility requires.

As an untenured assistant professor on this campus, who thought serious scholarship would find a site of articulation within the university named after St. Vincent de Paul, I have questioned not only my DePaul colleagues' commitment to academic freedom, but the motivations and rationalizations of many of my colleagues who remain silent in the wake of the grave injustice that took place on 8 June 2007, when Finkelstein and Larudee received their denial letters from President Dennis Holtschneider.

Outside the student center at the Lincoln Park, Chicago campus stands a giant statue of the famous 20th century priest, Monsieur John Egan, who asks, "What are you doing for justice?" At DePaul these days, it seems the students are doing more by way of affirmatively answering Egan's question than the faculty. Students have staged protests of some sort every day since the tenure denials were made official. At this moment, a handful of these students are staging a hunger protest outside the Lincoln Park student center. DePaul's students are standing on principle, and as one protester's rally sign declared, "You can silence our professors, but you can't silence their ideas."

Professional decorum dictates that administrative decisions, whatever they may be and regardless of whether or not they make sense, should be accepted with grace and without undue skepticism, and certainly without resistance, by the faculty. This situation, however, demands fierce resistance. I am calling on all of my DePaul colleagues to launch an intellectual revolt against the suppression of academic freedom on our campus. Although President Holtschneider maintains that academic freedom is alive and well at DePaul, and Provost Epps insists that the denial of tenure to Larudee and Finelstein were "faculty decisions," it is high time to call out these PR strategies for what they are: convenient smokescreens designed to appease, obfuscate and confuse.

Over the last three months, I have provoked, teased, begged, and cajoled tenured faculty at DePaul to be vigilant about the Finkelstein case, stating quite clearly that it was a test case that would have wide ranging implications for the future of academic freedom and academic freedom protections in the United States. Regrettably, only about four faculty members at DePaul took this warning seriously, with most believing the tenure processes at DePaul have essentially been fair and would, over time, weed out any early expressions of bias and unfairness. Indeed, some faculty members stated unequivocally that they would lead the charge if the University Board denied Finkelstein tenure. As one senior faculty member proudly proclaimed, "The faculty will revolt if Finkelstein is denied."

Now that the results are final and Finkelstein and Larudee have been the victims of egregious violations of academic freedom and due process per the faculty handbook, faculty members at DePaul must stand up, speak out, and not settle for a summer of fun, relaxation, and a convenient amnesia. It is high time for the faculty to identify and mobilize against the forces within DePaul university that conspired to deny Finkelstein and Larudee what they rightfully earned; organize in support of academic freedom by creating a solid lobbying effort against illegitimate external influences in DePaul's tenure and promotion processes; and perhaps most importantly, insist upon a thorough investigation of what happened at the University Promotion and Tenure Board (UPTB) hearings in May that led to majority votes against Finkelstein and Larudee's tenure and promotion to associate professor.

If a task force were formed to interrogate the faculty members who served on this year's committee, there is the possibility that someone would emerge to tell the truth about what influence, if any, was placed on the faculty members who served to vote in a particular way. This needs to happen not just to answer the questions that have emerged over the last two weeks about how the UPTB arrived at its decisions, but to prove that DePaul's administration has absolutely nothing to hide. If there is nothing to hide, there is no reason why those who served on the UPTB would object to being interviewed by the task force. The administration's insistence that there is no appeals process only contributes to an already tense situation filled with suspicion about the UPTB's deliberations from last April and May.

That Finkelstein and Larudee received overwhelming support from their respective departments and unanimous support from the Liberal Arts & Sciences College personnel committee that heard their cases, only to have the UPTB reach entirely different conclusions about their scholarship than the lower levels in what essentially amounts to a retrying each case, suggests that the seven voting members of the UPTB either learned a great deal about the U.S.-Israel-Palestine conflict and international studies in a month's time, were denied crucial pieces of information, or were coerced to vote a certain way to produce a desired outcome. In any event, all three scenarios are extremely troubling.

One thing is clear: US supporters of Israel, who have not hesitated in the past to use psych-op smear tactics against individuals committed to upholding international law and the international consensus on the Israel-Palestine conflict, may very well have successfully corrupted DePaul University's tenure and promotion processes through DePaul's Board of Trustees in a blatant attempt to remove political opponents from the largest Catholic university in the United States.

Matthew Abraham is an assistant professor of English at DePaul University in Chicago, IL. He is guest editor of a forthcoming issue of Cultural Critique on the life and legacy of Edward Said. He was the 2005 winner of the Rachel Corrie Courage in the Teaching of Writing Award.

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The Teheran Holocaust Conference caused quite a storm in the world media. One might ask: what’s so special about that? There are so many holocaust events and holocaust museums and holocaust festivals, sometimes attracting presidents and prime ministers galore, so why did the Teheran (or Tehran) conference draw so much attention and criticism; why were the White House, Frau Merkel, the Vatican and the EC willing to take some valuable time to condemn this small gathering in far-away Iranian capital?

The difference is that all other gatherings were amen-sayers accepting the official version provided by Jewish organisations as the Holy Writ given to Moses on Mt Sinai. The official version of the Holocaust goes even farther than Writ: you may deny Immaculate Conception and Resurrection of Christ, you may besmirch Muhammad, but if you have any doubt that six million of Jews were executed by Germans in gas chambers within the framework of a total annihilation project you may find yourself in a jail in Germany, Austria, France, Switzerland and other ‘free’ countries. The Teheran Conference is the first one ever to deal critically with the sad events of the World War Two.

One does not have to be a fan of Hitler to approve of the conference.

What is a sauce for a goose is sauce for a gander. The Jews do not hesitate to deny their atrocities. The Guardian reported that they targeted “the respected French TV correspondent, Charles Enderlin, whose Palestinian cameraman filmed 12-year-old Mohammed al-Dura being shot and killed, as his father tried to shield him at the start of the second intifada. Enderlin accused Israeli troops of shooting and killing the boy. French supporters of Israel went online to claim the report was a distortion based on faked footage. His network, France 2, responded with legal action and, last month, in the first of four individual cases, a French court found the organiser of a self-styled media watchdog website guilty of libel.

“Another online target has been the TV footage of bloodshed on a Gaza beach earlier this year. A Palestinian girl was seen screaming as she saw the bodies of dead family members killed by what Palestinians allege was Israeli shellfire. When [Stewart Purvis, the editor-in-chief of ITN] mentioned the impact of these pictures at last week’s conference, members of the audience shouted “staged”. One person came up to him afterwards to suggest that the family had somehow died somewhere else and that their bodies had been moved to the beach to be filmed. Where, for instance, was all the blood? He pointed out that he had seen everything that the cameraman had shot and that some pictures were too gruesome to be shown.”

More importantly, every freedom-of-speech loving liberal should regret that even important historians are not free to express their views on the Holocaust issue. David Irving is in jail, and this week Germar Rudolf was taken to a German court chained hand and foot after he was deported from the US for publishing his book doubting the official Holocaust dogma. Such a taboo clamours to be broken. I wrote of it at length in 2001, as the first conference scheduled to take place in Beirut was cancelled by the Lebanese yielding to severe pressure of the US. Then as now, the revisionists had much hope that their case would finally be heard.

It did not happen. If the conference organisers believed they could break the taboo and reach millions, they were mistaken. Though the world media has churned out thousands of news items connected to the Conference, they were practically identical, containing local official condemnation and the predictable Jewish reaction.

Practically none of the reports and talks given in Tehran ever made it to the mass media. The conference participants were smeared as ‘racist antisemites’ though there were quite a few Jews, venerable Rabbis in their black hats and long coats, revolted by the Zionist privatisation of the World War tragedy.

If anything, the conference proved that the holocaust dogma is a basic tenet in the great world-embracing brainwashing machine of mass media described by Noam Chomsky as “the manufacture of consent Stalin could only dream of Š whose discipline, and uniformity, are really impressive”.

This media syndicate is the enemy of free people everywhere, and it carries on a relentless war against Iran and other independently-minded nations.

Just one case: a Jewish-owned Canadian paper, The National Post claimed that “in a move reminiscent of the Nazis forcing Jews to wear a Star of David insignia, Iran’s parliament has reportedly passed a law requiring Jews to wear colour-coded badges”. This was a sheer lie: Iran is home to 30,000 Jews who are doing fine, and do not plan to emigrate to Israel. They receive preferential treatment, and nobody forces them to wear a badge or anything else. The Post withdrew the canard a few days later, and apologised, but this news item was repeated ad nauseam in thousands of papers and blogs, while the apology remained on its sixth page.

Our friend and my countryman Gabriel Ash wrote in the Dissident Voice:

>>The Holocaust is the most effective weapon in the hands of those bent on manufacturing a “clash of civilizations.” The “lesson” of the holocaust is good enough to justify the NATO bombing of civilian targets in Yugoslavia, the genocidal U.S. occupation of Iraq, Israel’s massive bombing of Beirut, a future nuclear war against Iran, etc. The Holocaust is the ideology par excellence of Global Apartheid. The Holocaust acts like a quirky and capricious divinity, rejecting one comparison here, accepting an equally valid or invalid one there. It is a partisan divinity, a god that always blesses ‘us’ and curses ‘them,’ even as it simultaneously demands to be worshipped by all humanity and in the name of all humanity.<<

So far so good. Ash understands that “under such circumstances, the denial of the holocaust is rooted in the desire to pin down the Holocaust”. But then he opens the second front against the conference:

>>The most charitable thing that can be said about the organizers of this pathetic holocaust conference is that they are fools. The message of Holocaust hawkers is only amplified by such idiocies as the Iranian conference.<<

And here we part ways. Iranians had a good reason for organising the conference. The Holocaust is indeed well integrated in the prevalent discourse as a justification of [rich and powerful] minority rights over [oppressed] majority needs. But its success and its integration show that the mass media machine is well integrated and concentrated in philosemitic, mostly Jewish hands. The occupation of Palestine by Jews is painful, but it is not more harmful than this captivity of free discourse.

These men can wield their lethal machine with the ease of a Jedi wielding his sword. They compare Ahmadinejad to Hitler, and forbid comparison of Israel to the Nazis, they besmirch Vladimir Putin as a KGB assassin and do not even report that Israeli courts of law consider assassinations legitimate, they made a spot on Monica Lewinsky’s dress more important than the rivers of blood poured by George Bush, they turned respectable American scholars Mearsheimer and Walt into skinheads, and now they ferociously attack James Baker for his disengagement plan. They can bloody well do anything. They are almost omnipotent.

Our friend James Petras recently published an impressive book on Israel’s Power in the US. But Israel’s power is just a mere reflection of real Jewish power in the West, which is based - not on Israeli tanks, but on Jewish think-tanks; not on Israeli nukes, but on Jewish news. Unless the Jewish hold on discourse is broken, the West will keep sending its sons to follow the Pied Piper of Hamelin to the streets of Baghdad and to the hills of Lebanon.

Iranians came to conclusion that there is no chance to come to agreement with this world-wide Jewish media syndicate. There is no way to get to peace terms. One has to fight back, attacking the deepest sacral dogmas of their control. If this dogma were to collapse, the Jewish hold on discourse would be broken and the Jewish state would disappear just as the USSR did, said President Ahmadinejad.

This comparison calls for exegesis: the USSR was ‘one state’, a state where various peoples lived together as equals; the Jewish state is essentially ‘two states’, a rich state of Jews controlling the poor state of natives. Its dissolution will create ‘one state’ in Palestine; it will reverse the trend started with the Soviet Union’s dissolution. Then Iran, and all of the East, will be able to dwell safely without fear of American and Israeli nukes.

This is the reason why Iran hosted the conference. Nobody - and I do mean nobody, including British, French, American, German, Russian leaders - really cares about the victims of a war long past, Jewish or otherwise; they pay tribute to the Holocaust as nations pay tribute to their vanquisher. Iran has refused to pay this tribute; when will the rest of you follow their courageous example?

Ayoon wa Azan – The University President is a Coward

Jihad el-Khazen Al-Hayat, 24 June 2007

Finkelstein case: Academic freedom loses to Israeli lobby

Matthew Abraham, June 25, 2007, The Electronic Intifada

Matthew Abraham is an assistant professor of English at DePaul University in Chicago, IL. He is guest editor of a forthcoming issue of Cultural Critique on the life and legacy of Edward Said. He was the 2005 winner of the Rachel Corrie Courage in the Teaching of Writing Award.

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