                                                                               ISSN 1440-9828
                                                                                                      December 2008
                                                                    No 424

My self-accusation trial continued on 18 November 2008, and let me begin by saying that it was the best trial ay so far!

Court resumed shortly after 1 pm, at which time I continued submitting my evidentiary motions, namely the body of facts establishing the scientific validity of Germar Rudolf’s analyses of the so-called “gas chambers” at Auschwitz.

Today I submitted the Rudolf Expert Report on the ‘Gas Chambers of Auschwitz,’” making clear to the Court that Rudolf’s critics have been unable to disprove it. For this reason, it is particularly well suited to disprove the lies and atrocity propaganda concerning the alleged murders of millions of Jews and other races.

In order to emphasize the scientific validity of the Report, I also read the opposing report of the court-appointed expert Prof. Dr. Henri Ramuz, which he forwarded to the Third District Court in Châtel-St. Denis on 18 May 1997. The Ramuz report further establishes the scientific validity of Rudolf’s work.

The Berlin District Attorney has said that he considers Rudolf’s conclusion in his Lectures on the Holocaust to be a criminal act.

It is a quotation from Prof. Norman Finkelstein’s book The Holocaust Industry: “Certain Jews falsify and exaggerate the Holocaust for financial and political advantage.”

[Prof. Finkelstein has familiarity with the subject of Auschwitz Concentration Camp that is unexcelled among members of his generation, since both his parents were interned there during World War II. He grew up hearing his parents discuss Auschwitz with each other as well as with numerous friends who had also been interned there.]

In order to establish that Rudolf is correct in his evaluation, and that I too am convinced of its validity, I submitted Finkelstein’s book with the legal motion that it be read by the Court in Selbstleseverfahren – in which members of the Court read the evidence for themselves.)

My next point was to describe the origins of the Allied legal doctrine of “Manifest Obviousness” – of “Holocaust.” I pointed out that the source and basis of “Manifest Obviousness” cannot even be mentioned in German courts today.

[The Allies borrowed this infamous propaganda concept from the Soviet show trials staged in Moscow during the 1930s, in order to avoid the burden of having to prove that the crimes with which the German defendants were charged had actually occurred.]

The “Manifest Obviousness” of “Holocaust” was constructed on the phoney “determination of facts” presented at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg and the subsequent Auschwitz show trials staged at Frankfurt by the vassal BRD – Bundesrepublik or Federal Republic of Germany).

I made clear to the Court that the “determinations of fact” made by the Allied military tribunal could not be used in a legitimate court of law because, as has been definitively proven, they were based upon on or obtained through extortion, falsification of documents, suppression of exonerating evidence, torture, false testimony and lying under oath.

In a legitimate court, these “determinations of fact” could not possibly be used to support “Manifest Obviousness.”

As supporting evidence for my presentation of facts I submitted Carlos Porter’s book Not Guilty at Nuremberg, which is particularly informative and well documented. I made the legal motion that the Court also take his book into consideration through Selbstleseferfahren.

Along with this motion, I also requested an expert witness in the field of contemporary history, who will explain Porter’s findings concerning the following.

1. Carlos Porter’s study Not Guilty in Nuremberg is a historiographical work of highest quality that adheres to professional standards of historical research in its academic development as well as its determination and evaluation of reliable sources.

2. The International Military Tribune was not a legitimate court of law, but rather a vehicle for vindictive “victor’s justice” in legal disguise, which acted in defiance of international law and was therefore criminal in nature.

3. The accused German prisoners and their defenders were not allowed to present exonerating evidence and, in addition, the defense was hindered, bullied and harassed by monstrous stipulations that made defense impossible.

4. The defendants were subject to torture, as described by the National Socialist author and publisher Julius Streicher, before being forced to sign statements that had already been prepared by the victors.

5. The Allied prosecutors committed widespread falsification of documents, while burning tons of documents that would have exonerated the defendants against charges of “war crimes.”

6. Disguised as a “commission,” the Prosecution had interviewed and coached the witnesses in the absence of the Defense, previous to their appearance before the Tribunal.

7. The charges made during the Nuremberg Show Trials of boiling and roasting Jews were total fabrications made by biased witnesses.

8. The charges made during the Nuremberg Show Trials of making soap from the corpses of Jews were likewise total fabrications made by biased witnesses.

9. The charges made during the Nuremberg Show Trials of murdering Jews with steam were total fabrications made by biased witnesses..

10. The charges made during the Nuremberg Show Trials of tanning human skins and making lampshades of them were total fabrications made by biased witnesses.

11. The charges made during the Nuremberg Show Trials of weaving stockings of human hair were fabrications made by biased witnesses.

12. The charges made during the Nuremberg Show Trials of murdering Jews with electricity were fabrications made by biased witnesses.

13. The charges made during the Nuremberg Show Trials of murdering Jews by means of a vacuum were fabrications made by biased witnesses.

14. The charges made at the Nuremberg Show Trials of evaporating mountains of corpses with atomic bombs were fabrications made by biased witnesses.

15. Therefore, these claims of the “Manifest Obviousness” of the genocidal murders of millions of Jews could never be accepted by a legitimate court of constitutional law.

My next submission was a comprehensive evidentiary motion 105 pages long, covering all the relevant facts about “Holocaust” with reference to an expert witness for every fact. This motion included 89 factual determinations that relegate the mendacious ploy of “Manifest Obviousness” to the dustbin of history where it belongs.

The only obvious thing about “Manifest Obviousness” is that it is used by unscrupulous prosecutors and courts to suppress empirical truth and to imprison seekers after the truth.

If the gentlemen who employ it should be punished for their lies in the way that Pinoccho was punished, they would need bedchambers with ceilings 20 feet high, just to accommodate their noses!

The last evidentiary motion I submitted was rather startling and original, if I do say so myself. Perhaps a brief explanation would be in order here. During my readings, I happened to come across the number of reparation suits filed by alleged victims of “Holocaust.”

According to the Finance Ministry, this number comes to 5,360,710. This brings up an interesting question: if we go along with the number of 6 million murdered Jews, how can 5,360,710 of them be demanding compensation?

This absurd situation inspired the following motion: In my Show Trial AG Berlin – 275 Ds) 81 Js 3604/07 (157/08) – I hereby move to call an expert witness in Pathology.

My Reason for this Motion:

According to a written notification by the Federal German Finance Ministry of 10 Jan 1980 – VI 6 -01478-P27/79 – 5,360,710 claims for “Holocaust” reparations had been approved as of 1 July 1979.

This figure gives rise to extremely serious doubts about the number of six million Jewish victims.

It has prompted the mother of Prof. Finkelstein, a Jewish woman who with her husband was interned at Auschwitz, to ask this question: If everyone who claims to be a survivor of Auschwitz really is one, then whom did Hitler kill?” Source: The Holocaust Industry, p. 85.

By paying these 5,360,710 claims for indemnity, didn’t the Finance Ministry deny its own official version of “Holocaust?”

The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from this is that the story of the attempted extermination of European Jews by the National Socialists is a lie.

Any expert witness in the science of Pathology will explain to the Court that the dead are unable to file claims for reparations.

Berlin, 18 November 2008, Kevin Käther.

To: Mr. John Dauth, LVO

High Commissioner to the UK,

Australian High Commission

Strand, London,

WC2B 4LA

FAX: 0207 240 5333

Re: Arrest/Extradition/ Dr. Fredrick Töben

Your Excellency:

It comes as a total disgrace, to learn that the British have arrested Historian, Dr. Fredrick Töben as he traveled through England to his final destination in search of historical knowledge of Napoleon. Seeking historical facts and knowledge has been the work of historians since the recording of history. It had never been considered a ”hate crime” or ”thought crime” to question, or to seek answers to certain historical eras of time. Historians seek truth and factual events in past history in order that following generations can learn and not repeat the same disasters. How can this be a crime? Is it not time to leave questions of the second World War to the historians to find the truth?

By what legal authority has the law become useful to those for their own interests, without having absolute facts? And by what legality is it a crime if others seek and question? What gives legal rights do these special interest groups to determine what is a crime, except by whatever expedience they can use to protect their interests at stake without question...The courts’ valuable time, and the taxpayers' money are being squandered on a question of fact that should be left to history to decide, not the courts. Wars have been continuously fought throughout the centuries, as many history books that have been written about them, there are as many opinions.

Opinion is powerful, and the opinion makers in their image-making role, can make a criminal look like he's the victim and make the victim look like he's the criminal, having one hating the innocent who are being oppressed and suppressed, while terrorists and political criminals who commit treason, are free to travel the world to create more chaos and wars – these are the ones the international courts should be seeking.

A.P. Aremia

__________________

From: Amy Aremia

To: lordspeaker@parliament.uk

Sent: Friday, October 10, 2008 11:06 AM

Subject: the release of Dr. Töben

To the Honorable Lord Speaker,

Baroness Hayman

Dr Fredrick Töben must be released---he is not a criminal but a caring, sincere human being who has made personal sacrifices in seeking truth….

In our complex, high-pressure “modern” society, world events move so rapidly that a representative government, under the traditional political system, at times, is made inadequate. The kaleidoscope of domestic and foreign crises can start as a small cloud on the horizon and whirl into hurricane proportions with lightning speed, the race belongs to the swift--- critical problems become “solved” by a dangerously few. A government that must first formulate policy through the process of Congressional debate out of which is hammered a consensus of opinion, no longer exists. A Republic must seek a meeting of the minds on any issue affecting its people. The assumption underlying this procedure is that out of the free interplay of many different viewpoints comes solutions or answers closest to the truth.

The collective minds of a truly representative society can hit upon the correct line of action---this principle has grown out of centuries of Anglo-Saxon experience and is now under fire by the enemies of freedom who argue that in times of desperate peril, nations must cope with highly efficient dictatorships that can move with the speed of missiles, for in times of tremendous crises people must look to the utilization of dictatorial powers.

Because it gives political freedom, respects the wishes and opinions of all individuals, the Constitution, the American tradition of self-government has been under attack by a large percentage of malcontents around the world, and encouraged by the power elite who cannot allow such freedom to exist.

Because the world has been in constant dangerous crises the assumption has become that a Free Republic is too slow when the crisis fully materializes, extraordinary powers were conferred on the Chief Executives as speedily as legislative mechanism could grind out the needed laws; which are never repealed and become mostly unfair to freedoms.

Dictatorship is not a suit of armor that can be donned and doffed at will, It is a philosophy of life and government in its own right, and once utilized, it may not be discarded without residual effects that are permanent and cumulative, developing in time a new mode of thought and a mental atmosphere conducive to an ever-easier assumption of authoritarian techniques, which, in turn, discredits the republican process and creates an ineffective, valueless, self-sacrificing support for its causes.

Acknowledgement of this fact is in the proof that there has been no true peace since the Second World War, only military crises after crisis of wars. None the least of the crises is the war on hate that grew out of the Holocaust questioning.

Under the so-called “Hate Crimes Laws” political freedoms, and that of free speech is withering along with the destruction of independent nations. Any form of discontent, which is not antagonistic to political liberty may be worked out within the boundaries of a Constitutional Republic---this kept the United States the freest, greatest country that soon became the envy of tyranny.

The more violent is the storm that rages without, the more necessary becomes calmness of judgment within. Let the people rise up against the radicals in dignity. Muzzled, broken, humiliated, they still teach by example.

There is no finer proof that where moral ideals have been deeply planted, the mind cannot be enslaved; nor can the enemies of humanity gain possession of an unimpaired brain. These are the men and women who must serve as warrior-teachers for the benefit of a majority presently unable to realize how much the fight is really theirs.

*********

First letter to the High Commissioner from Lady Renouf

2nd October 2008

High Commissioner to the UK,

Mr. John Dauth LVO,

Australian High Commission,

Strand, London, WC2B 4LA.

Fax: 0207 240 5333

Your Excellency,

As you will be aware the British police and Crown Prosecution Service have executed a Mannheim-originating warrant on an Australian national, the historian Dr. Fredrick Töben, who was arrested onboard an aeroplane at Heathrow while simply in transit from the USA to Dubai.

Even as he had no intention of entering Britain, he was seized off the aeroplane and brought into this country where his alleged crimes do not even constitute an offence.

For the first time, therefore, the European Arrest Warrant is being used in a manner that we in Britain were assured would not be applied in Britain, which has declined to adopt a “Holocaust denial” law, because it is contrary to British traditions of freedom of enquiry and expression.

The situation is summed up in today’s Times http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article4863800.ece under the headline: “Extradition bid raises fears of 'thought crime' offences”.

I trust that the High Commission will provide consular assistance to Dr. Töben and will monitor this disturbing and unprecedented development so as to keep our fellow Australians informed of what they can expect from the UK legal system when travelling or in transit.

Yours truly

Michèle Renouf

_____________________

Second letter to the High Commissioner from Lady Renouf

3rd October 2008

High Commissioner to the UK,

Mr. John Dauth, LVO,

Australian High Commission,

Strand, London, WC2B 4LA.

Fax: 0207 240 5333

Your Excellency,

It may be helpful for me to provide the following additional information further to my fax yesterday explaining the case of historian Dr. Fredrick Töben, the Australian national arrested at Heathrow Airport, while in transit abroad an aeroplane, following German demands for his extradition under a European Arrest Warrant.

Dr. Töben is currently being held at Wandsworth Prison. He will appear at the City of London Magistrates Court at 2 pm on Friday 3rd October.

The respected independent organisation Index on Censorship currently features the Töben case as the lead case study on its website, headlined ‘Does Britain have a Holocaust denial law’. The final paragraph of Index on Censorship’s story reads as follows:

If Töben is extradited after his hearing on Friday at City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court, it may put us in the peculiar position where Holocaust denial is acknowledged as a crime by the UK courts, without actually being a crime under UK law. Index on Censorship will be following the story.

http://www.indexoncensorship.org/?p=646

I trust that the Australian High Commission will also be following the story, and doing what it can to protect the rights of this Australian national.

Yours truly,

Michèle Renouf

After my 1 October 2008 arrest at Heathrow Airport I was taken to the Heathrow Police Station for processing, then transported to the City of Westminster – COW – Magistrates’ Court where Judge Evans ordered me detained. From there it was to Wing D, Landing 3, Cell 38 at HMP Her Majesty’s Prison – Wandsworth. The next day, Thursday 2 October, I saw on the landing notice board the following:

GUEST SPEAKER

On 2nd October at 2pm we have Dr Eva Schloss giving a talk in the Orison.

She is a holocaust survivor and Anne Frank’s sister.

If you are interested in hearing her talk and asking questions about her experiences please put your name on the list below:

Name Prison Number Cell Location

Fredrick Töben XF9993 D- 3 - 38

– which I did.

The well-known 32-panel exhibition titled ‘A history for today: Anne Frank’ was set up in the prison church and about 55 of the 1600 prisoners at Wandsworth attended.

I recall that some years ago this very same exhibition had been shown in Adelaide, but there the panels ended with Anne Frank’s Auschwitz stay. The current exhibition clearly states that Anne died at Bergen-Belsen, and is then augmented by panels that deal with current ‘racist’ issues and the ‘Holocaust’.

For example:

“In 2006 there were 50,000 hate crimes reported nationwide. An estimated 260,000 were not reported to the police.”

“Today I can say it ‘Gassed’” - Ruth Wallage-Birheim

“… the goal is to kill all seven million Jews in Europe.”

“It is not true that six million Jews were murdered: one Jew was murdered six million times over.” - Abel Herzberg

“The Holocaust is a major stumbling block in the neo-Nazi attempts to obtain support for their ideas. Publications denying the holocaust appear regularly. In many countries there has been a sharp increase in extreme nationalism in the last few years, often accompanies by hatred of foreigners.”

Eva Schloss began with a biographical sketch of Anne Frank’s life, interspersing it with many asides, such as:

“Hitler decided to kill all Jews in the world. Of the 50 million Jews Hitler killed 6 million.”

She asked: “What is a Jewish look? A pure race does not exist. There are blue-eyed Jews in Israel. Now everybody is mixed, intermarry and have sex with each other.”

She also stated that Hitler at first did not want to kill all Jews. Up to 1936, if you had money and a visa to Palestine it was possible to get out of Germany. Then the Wannsee Conference was planned “ by 20 heads how to kill 6 million people cheap”.

The Frank family escaped to then safe-haven Holland, and a well-constructed model of the house made by ‘Staff and offenders at HMP Wakefield’ forms part of the exhibition.

Dr Schloss said that England did not want a war but “Churchill saw danger of Hitler, and when the Americans came in things changed. They declared war on Japan and Germany declared war on the USA”.

Anne’s family was betrayed in Holland and deported to Auschwitz, one of 300 camps: work – concentration and death camps.

Killing was done by gas – the gas chambers worked 24-hours a day … “People from all over Europe were selected, then straight away to be gassed”.

In June 1944 Hungarians immediately sent to gas chambers – “100 people in one go – peephole in door – within 3 weeks we were told this”.

Schloss then admits that while she was at Auschwitz, “ours was a real shower – little water – smelly body – lice – starvation – death. I realize every day I’m divine, I’m lucky. I’m 79, I survived … I started to speak after 40 years – suppressed it. During the 70s not ready”.

She concluded by giving the prisoners a message:

“Anne wrote and did something with her life. You do something with your life. It has so much to offer. Open your eyes and make something of it.”

Question time also brought interesting responses. She admitted: “I have never met a German who knew what was going on.”

“Hitler was in prison for two years and wrote Mein Kampf, which contains the exact plans of killing Jews and to conquer the world … creating A German empire … He was only an uneducated housepainter.”

Question: “Was Hitler mad?”

Answer: “A mad person could not go so far. Evil? Yes. Luckily he made many mistakes.”

Question: “Was Hitler part Jewish?”

Answer: “One doesn’t really know.”

She stated: “Hitler was fighting communism. He was gassed in World War One. German people are proud – they were defeated – wanted revenge – all goes back to World War One ….Eichmann planned the final solution – he was found in South America by Simon Wiesenthal.”

On Judaism and Christianity: “Judaism and Christianity are similar. On 30 September we had new year 5273 … we are an old race. Jesus was a Jew but he started to preach different things … the apostles created Christianity.

At the end of question time Eva Schloss was standing in front of me, and I stood up and said that the circle had now closed and I was in prison because I seek a dialogue on the matters she raised. She smiled and firmly shook my hand and wished me luck! I left it at that. Prior to my attending the talk some of the prison officers felt that owing to my own views on the Holocaust-Shoah my presence at this event may upset Eva Schloss, if she found out who I was. I re-assured the officers that I know how to behave and still get my point across.

Fredrick Töben, HMP Wandsworth, London, UK

2 October 2008

________________________________________

How the world learned of the good news

- please note that there is never a total victory in human endeavour!

_________________

BREAKING NEWS FROM FREEDOM'S FRONT LINE

Total victory in Töben case

On the afternoon of 19th November 2008, while the British Parliament debased itself in an act of homage to the President of a bandit state http://www.tellingfilms.co.uk/peres.htm , a small group of campaigners won a major victory for freedom of debate with the release of a jailed historian.

Australian academic Dr. Fredrick Töben had been held in London’s Wandsworth Prison since his arrest at Heathrow Airport on 1st October. Though not accused of any offence against English law, he was detained under a European Arrest Warrant issued by the German authorities, who sought to put him on trial in Mannheim District Court for the “crime” of publishing historical source critical opinions on the internet. Such opinions are criminalised by the notorious “Section 130” of the German Criminal Code, and Dr. Töben was facing a five year prison sentence. A few weeks ago the Mannheim prosecutor Andreas Grossmann boasted to the press that he expected Dr. Töben to be in a German prison by early next year. http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24478370-5006787,00.html

Grossmann also indicated his inquisitorial pride in the fact that those incarcerated for their opinions in Germany “have little chance of getting out before the end of their full sentence,” because of their refusal to recant.

Dr Toben and Lady Renouf celebrating his legal victory

Dr Fredrick Töben and Lady Renouf

Happily Mr. Grossmann’s hubris met Nemesis in the Miss Marple form of District Judge Daphne Wickham at the City of London Magistrates Court in Horseferry Road, who ruled that the German warrant was invalid. http://www.tellingfilms.co.uk/toben-291008.htm

Judge Wickham upheld the argument of Dr. Töben’s defence barrister Ben Watson that the German authorities had not given sufficient detail in their warrant as to the exact nature of Dr. Töben’s “crime” – a deficiency which proved impossible to rectify, perhaps because of the vagueness of the very concept of ‘Holocaust’ in the German law, which itself does not specify what may or may not be “denied” and does not even mention the supposedly “obvious” method of industrial mass murder by gassing. The authorities had referred merely to “worldwide internet publication” of historical arguments forbidden under Section 130, without specifying exactly which web page or email was concerned, or when it was published, or exactly where it was published. The warrant failed even to specify the manner in which Dr. Töben had infringed Section 130, which refers vaguely to arguments which approve, deny or minimise the extent of what are asserted to be the “manifestly obvious” historical facts about National Socialist Germany. Clearly the prosecutors had presumed that Dr. Töben would defend himself, and that his amateur legal resources would be insufficient against the might and expertise of the combined British and German governments,

British Crown prosecutors, acting on behalf of their German counterparts, appealed to London’s High Court in an effort to reinstate the warrant and resume the extradition process – but on 19th November this appeal was dramatically abandoned with an executive order made for his immediate release in a comprehensive victory for Dr. Töben’s extradition experts.

Having begun the day in a Wandsworth prison cell, Dr. Töben spent the evening at a champagne reception in St. James’s as a guest of Michèle, Lady Renouf, who had coordinated his defence campaign and recruited the specialist legal team of Kevin Lowry-Mullins of Dass Solicitors and barrister Ben Watson of 3 Raymond Buildings.

Dr Toben and Lady Renouf celebrate victory

Dr Töben and Lady Renouf at a champagne reception on the evening of his release

Lady Renouf believes that with Dr. Töben now fully vindicated, the Germany’s oppressive laws are now in the dock. The court of international opinion now charges 21st century Germany with crimes against traditional European standards of justice and free scientific enquiry. These standards were inherited from Classical Greece, which valued the inseparable four virtues of wisdom (with scientific attitude), temperance, courage and justice.

Joining the German state in the dock is the U.K.’s Attorney General Baroness Scotland, who supervises the Crown Prosecution Service which unjustly imprisoned Dr. Töben for fifty days on a warrant which failed even to meet the minimum standards required to allow an extradition hearing to proceed.

Baroness Scotland herself (in an earlier role as Home Office Minister) was responsible for piloting the Extradition Act through the House of Lords. She specifically assured Parliament in 2003 that revisionist historians such as Dr. Töben would not be subject to extradition under European Arrest Warrants for publishing their views on the internet. Yet five years later she allowed her senior officials to proceed with exactly the type of extradition which she had promised Parliament could never take place. If she has any sense of personal honour or political responsibility, Baroness Scotland will submit her resignation forthwith.

Meanwhile Dr. Töben will proceed with his historical work, secure in the knowledge that despite the perfidy of British politicians, the London courts have rescued their country’s honour and preserved the proud heritage of Magna Carta.

Let this victory for traditional freedom lead to the rolling back of tyranny from those European countries which jail opinions and increasingly jail lawyers for defending them. Dr. Töben’s defeat of the seemingly invincible should lead to a renewed offensive against oppressive European laws, winning long overdue freedom for Ernst Zündel, Germar Rudolf, Sylvia Stolz, Gerd Honsik and Wolfgang Fröhlich – and the removal of legal threats to Vincent Reynouard, Jürgen Graf, Robert Faurisson and many fearless scientists and other scholars who insist there should be no exceptions to the normal revisionist method http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,24484456-5001021,00.html .

They stand in defence of “debate and rational argument”, in defiance of the anti-educational edict of the Stockholm International Forum 2000, which attempts to prescribe “guidelines for teaching about the Holocaust”. These guidelines are about to be enshrined in the U.K.’s education policy, backed by a multimillion-pound propaganda industry promoting a one-sided approach to what should be a democratically debateable, multifaceted subject. The sudden halt to the extradition process against Dr. Töben has already prompted diverse commentators, including the Jewish Chronicle http://www.thejc.com/articles/denial-not-a-criminal-matter and Jerusalem Post

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1225715329900&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull , to call for revisionism to be combated in the classroom rather than the courtroom. Dr. Töben and his fellow scholars, freed from the Damoclean shadow of 21st century German “justice”, stand ready to take open debate of historical truth onto this new front.

Dr. Töben’s European spokesman Lady Renouf wishes to thank all those wellwishers who have helped to keep up Dr. Töben’s spirits during his incarceration and who indicated their willingness to contribute towards his £100,000 bail security, happily no longer required.

Further information can be obtained from Lady Renouf, Tel/Fax 0208 460 7453, email:

ladymrenouf@tellingfilms.co.uk

Avraham Burg was a pillar of the Israeli establishment but his new book is causing a sensation. It argues that his country is an "abused child" which has become a "violent parent". And his solutions are radical, as he explains to Donald Macintyre

Saturday, 1 November 2008

In shorts, T-shirt and cotton kippa, Avraham Burg is sitting in his sukka, the temporary booth that every observant Jewish family in Israel builds outside their home for the joyous religious holiday of Sukkot, and talking with some disdain about the holocaust "industry".

The sunlight is filtered through the roof of palm leaves, the decorative strings of apples, coloured balls and paper streamers almost motionless on this still October morning. Nearby the autumn desert flowers are blooming and a ladder up against a tree indicates that someone has recently been picking olives. Here in Nataf, the select, upper-middle-class community idyllically set in the Jerusalem Hills where Burg lives with his wife Yael, just 1,000 metres from the border with the West Bank, it's momentarily hard to focus on the sombre subject matter of his latest, explosive book, one which by his own – if anything understated – account "singlehandedly shook the foundations of the Zionist establishment overnight".

It isn't long since Burg was a blue-chip member of that same Zionist establishment. The son of a long-serving government minister, from the time of David Ben-Gurion's government, he has a classic top-drawer Israeli profile. True, he was on the left: after army service as a paratroop officer and graduating from Hebrew University he was a star of the movement against the first Lebanon war – his charisma if anything enhanced by the fact than unlike many of his comrades he was religious. He was injured in the grenade attack by a right-wing fanatic on a Peace Now protest in 1983 which killed another demonstrator, Emil Grunzweig. But he was quickly swept into mainstream public life, becoming first an adviser to the then Prime minister Shimon Peres, then a Knesset member, then Speaker of the Knesset, head of the Jewish agency and the World Zionist Organisation and the almost-victorious candidate for the Labour Party leadership in 2001.

It was not until his last year as a Knesset member that he began to build a reputation as something of an enfant terrible in Israeli intellectual and political life. In 2003 he wrote a widely publicised and much argued-over piece in Israel's mass circulation Yedhiot Ahronot in which he said that Israel had to choose between "racist oppression and democracy" and that "having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centres of Israeli escapism".

But his book The Holocaust is Over: We Must Rise from its Ashes – published this week in Britain – caused a much bigger sensation when it came out last year in Israel, at once becoming a best-seller and provoking a furious reaction not only from the right but from many of Burg's former colleagues on the political centre-left. In the book – a compelling mix of polemic, personal memoir, homage to his parents and meditation on Judaism – Burg argues that Israel has been too long imprisoned by its obsessive and cheapening use – or abuse – of the Holocaust as "a theological pillar of Jewish identity". He argues that the living role played by the Holocaust – Burg uses the regular Hebrew word Shoah or "catastrophe" for the extermination of six million Jews in the Second World War – in everyday Israeli discourse, has left Israel with a persistent self-image of a "nation of victims", in stark variance with its actual present-day power. Instead, the book argues, Israel needs finally to abandon the "Judaism of the ghetto" for a humanistic, "universal Judaism".

The implication of Burg's analysis, one that perhaps only an Israeli would have dared promote, is that the fostered memory of the Holocaust hovers destructively over every aspect of Israeli political life – including its relations with the Palestinians since the 1967 Six Day War and the subsequent occupation. "We have pulled the Shoah out of its historical context," he writes, "and turned it into a plea and generator for every deed. All is compared to the Shoah, dwarfed by the Shoah and therefore all is allowed – be it fences , sieges ... curfews, food and water deprivation or unexplained killings. All is permitted because we have been through the Shoah and you will not tell us how to behave."

For Burg, whose own father Yosef was a German Jew, and for many years leader of Israel's National Religious Party, the "real watershed moment" in this deforming process was the trial and subsequent execution in 1962 of Adolf Eichmann, which Yosef Burg vainly opposed from inside the Cabinet. Instead of Eichmann's death symbolising, as it was meant to do, "the end of the Shoah and the beginning of the post-Shoah period," he says, in reality "the opposite happened... The Shoah discourse had begun." I put it to Burg that for many Israeli holocaust survivors who during the late Forties and Fifties had had to brave the indifference, sometimes even contempt, of those of their fellow citizens who had already left Europe by the time the Shoah began – a painful phenomenon vividly covered in the book itself – the Eichmann trial was actually a liberation, a positive rather than negative, after which Israelis who had not lived through the Holocaust at last began to understand the pain of those who had.

Burg's answer is that recognition and sympathy for the victims and survivors of the Holocaust are indeed essential components of "any kind of progress from the departure point of trauma to the final destination of trust". On the other hand "what I criticise in the Eichmann trial and the entire Shoah industry is the contempt, the cheapening attititude of the public system; everything is Shoah. It legitimises everything, it explains everything, it is used by everybody." Here he cites two everyday examples – the first an interview about the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad given last month by Benjamin [Bibi] Netanyahu, the right-wing former – and possibly soon to be again – Prime Minister: "Ahmadinejad is no doubt a problem," says Burg. "He is an issue in the Western world and for Israel's sense of confidence in particular. So what is Bibi's soundbite? 'It is [19]38 all over again.' Do me a favour. Did we have such a powerful state in '38? Did we have this onmipotent army in '38? Did we have the most important superpowers siding with us in '38? It's not '38 however you look at it. And even Ahmadinejad, when you compare him with Hitler, you diminish Hitler." But because the "Holocaustic language is so common, so well understood," says Burg, the reflex attitude is: "Why not use it?"

Last year, he adds, Jerusalem's gay and lesbian community wanted to have a parade in the city. "Immediately all the gut juices of Jerusalem erupted like a wellspring. Immediately the ultra-orthodox in masses went out on the streets. So the police went out to separate the supporters of the parade from their ultra-orthodox opponents ... so one of the ultra-orthodox shouts at a policeman (who happens to be a Druze [Arab]): 'You are a Nazi. You are worse than the Germans, blah blah blah...' The Shoah was privatised, so to say. All of these people who exploit it, violate the sacred memory of the individual [victims] and the collective."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Burg's paternal origins, Israel's multidimensional relationship with Germany, past and present, looms large in this book. In a notably striking – and for many Israelis highly provocative – passage, Burg points out that Israel actually reached – arguably "too soon" – a "hasty reconciliation" with Germany after the Second World War, before saying:

"We will never forgive the Arabs for they are allegedly just like the Nazis, worse than the Germans. We have displaced our anger and revenge from one people to another, from an old foe to a new adversary, and so we allow ourselves to live comfortably with the heirs of the German enemy – representing convenience, wealth and high quality, while treating the Palestinians as whipping boys to release our aggression, anger and hysteria, of which we have plenty."

Yet Burg believes that Germany remains also "traumatised" by the Holocaust. "We are both along the same ocean of suffering," he told me. As evidence he points out that so far – and unlike in France, Britain, the US, and Italy – no edition of his book is yet planned in Germany where the publishers warily wait to see what its impact will now be on "world Jewry". In the book Burg, who admires the cultural and artistic milieu of modern Berlin – where he recently ran the marathon (in just under four hours) – argues that in the "day we leave Auschwitz and establish the new state of Israel, we also have to set Germany free".

In the meantime, however, one of his most controversial themes is what he himself calls a "both embarrassing and frightening" analogy with Germany's Second Reich. In drawing attention to the importance of the military – and the lack of "any alternative, civilian school of thought" – in the political life of Israel as in Bismarck's Germany, or of the parallels between the lack of representation of Israeli Arabs in many key tiers of public life and the exclusion of Jews from the officer class of the pre-Hitler German Army, or the impunity with which the extreme right can make racist statements about "the other", Burg is emphatically not seeking comparison with the Nazi era, but "of the long incubation period that preceded Nazism and that gave rise to a public mindset that enabled the Nazis to take power".

On the one hand, Burg asserts his strong admiration for "my teacher and mentor" Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who thunderously prophesied almost immediately after the Six Day War – in a passage quoted with warm approval in Burg's book – that the "inclusion of one and half million Arabs within Jewish jurisdiction means undermining the Jewish and human essence of the state" and that the occupier will be "a state that is not worthy of being and will not be worth to let exist". Burg reinforces his own comparison with pre-Nazi Germany by referring to Israelis being "locked off" in denial of the ominous stirrings of the extreme right in their midst. And he does not shrink from a reference, in his discussion of the Holocaust's legacy in Israel, to the "pathological circle of the abused child becoming a violent parent". On the other hand he parts company with Leibowitz's depiction of the occupying Israeli forces as "Judaeo-Nazis", which he also regards as "cheapening the conversation... an act of contempt for the lesson of the Holocaust".

The German comparison nevertheless fuelled the outrage felt about the book by one of Israel's leading journalists and commentators, Ari Shavit. Last year, in an ultra-combative interview with Burg in the newspaper Haaretz that certainly helped to publicise the book but also to demonise its author among his enemies, Shavit, once an ally of Burg in the campaign against the Lebanon war, wrote that he found the book "anti-Israeli, in the deepest sense" and a "one-dimensional and unempathetic attack on the Israeli experience" that unjustly depicted its citizens as "psychic cripples". In one of many acerbic exchanges, Shavit took issue with Burg's description of the occupation of the West Bank and the Golan Heights as an "Israeli Anschluss". "What do you want me to say about what we're doing there?" Burg retorted. "That it's humanism? The Red Cross?"

The reaction was predictable. Otniel Schneller, a Knesset member in the ruling Kadima Party, said portentously that when Burg dies he should be refused burial in the part of Jerusalem's Mount Herzl National Cemetery allotted to national figures, declaring: "He had better search for a grave in another country." Yossi Klein Halevi, a writer, and professed friend of Burg said: "That interview really destroyed him, or he destroyed himself." True, Burg gave as good as he got in the interview. "I told him, Ari, you are the best insight writer in Israel; the problem is that your insights are lousy," he says now. But what it really exposed was the chasm that, at least for now, separates Burg even from many of his own mainstream centre-left generation in an Israel whose future he believes is increasingly being steered by the ultra-orthodox on the one hand and the religious Zionist settlers in the occupied West Bank on the other.

"Now Ari represents Mr Israel," says Burg. "He is the camp fire. He is the virtual tribe. He was a kibbutznik, in the middle of the road, a bit of security, a bit of social conscience and a bit of secularism, a bit European, a bit Middle Eastern. Along comes Avrum [his much used nickname] Burg and tells him: 'Ari it is hollow, your Mr Israel: you abandoned the two links to the past to the hands of your enemies. You surrendered the responsibilities for the rituals and traditions to the hands of the ultra-orthodox who bitterly oppose your modernity; and you abandoned the responsibility for the connection to the place to the hands of messianic eschatological settlers. Both are fundamentalists. One is redemptive. And the other is just religious. [You are neither] but you need them in order to feel you are hooked into your past. Can't you create a different, independent, renewed approach to your past and to your future?'" Burg who frequently states his affinity, as a modern observant Jew, with the liberal B'nai Jeshurun synagogue in New York, well known for a strong commitment to social justice, continues: "I told him maybe there's a another world out there. What about Jews in the diaspora, those who worked in the past 200 years to renew Judaism, to make it compatible with humanism and universalism which is part of your secular modern attitude? Don't you want to bring that in? And abandon your pathological relations with the ultra-orthodox and ultra-messianic?' Then he says: 'Are you a Zionist?' The ultimate punch! 'Are you a Zionist, Mr Burg?'"

So what is the answer to this undoubtedly relevant question? "For me, Zionism was the scaffolding that enabled the Jewish people to move from the previous exilic reality into sovereign responsibility. The Zionists succeeded two-fold: we have sovereignty and, second, even exile was redeemed and became 'diaspora'. We have the most impressive diaspora, politically, culturally, economically. Never did Jews have so much influence on so many superpowers round the world and we have unbelievable sovereignty, stronger than King David's. So isn't it about time to remove the scaffolding and see the beauty of the structure? I am a human being. I belong to humanity. My middle name is 'I'm Jewish' and my given name is 'I'm Israeli'. I do not need a fourth definition unless this fourth, artificial definition is a tool to discriminate in Israel against some elements that are not necessarily Jewish, in a very inhuman way."

Shavit was also agitated by Burg's enthusiasm for the European Union, reinforced by his startling assertion that Israel "from my point of view is part of Europe". In particular Shavit highlighted Burg's French second passport (Burg's wife is French-born) and his "far-reaching" and "pre-Zionist" act in voting in last year's French presidential election. (Burg, who told Shavit that he had done so as a Jewish "citizen of the world" explained to me that he had voted for Ségolène Royal in protest at Sarkozy's 2005 condemnation of Paris's mainly Muslim banlieu residents after the 2005 riots as "scum".) Certainly Burg sees the EU as a potential lever for a solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which the parties cannot, in his view reach without external help and – here Burg is striking out, for an Israeli, in unusual territory – the prospect of belonging to something bigger than this perpetually fought-over land.

Fearing that the days of the conventionally envisaged two-state solution may be "numbered" Burg says both societies have been "abducted" by fundamentalist religious elements who believe in their competing versions of a single state. "We are abducted by the settlers; they are abducted by Hamas. If Bibi Netanyahu comes back to power and Hamas stays in power there will be an awful clash between our one-state-solution vision and their one-state-solution vision. None of these religious zealots really expresses the real will of the people and one of the only ways I know how to redeem the people from being hostage is to offer an alternative background."

Europe is a model, he says, because of its success, after centuries of war, in achieving peace and a "kind of biblical process of unification". Much more ambitiously, however, he argues that if the EU were to hold the prospect as it has, however ambivalently, to Turkey, in a decade's time or more, of actually admitting Israel and an infant Palestinian state to membership, this would itself be an irresistible incentive to reach an agreement. Experience suggests that Israel reacts to mere rhetorical demands to give by saying "But we've got gonish" – Burg uses the Yiddish word for nothing – in return. "Nobody buys it. But if you say that at the end of the process Israel will have borders to the East and openness to the West, Israel will say, you know what, that's a deal. The entire Europe for the West Bank? That's not bad." And, he adds, "just imagine what that would do for a Palestinian in the West Bank or in Gaza. His children might get the best education in France or Italy and then come back again. It's free. It's open. The minute you see a process beginning like this the killing will stop or will be reduced. The minute you don't have a vision, you don't have an outlet. Killing is the outlet."

Given Israel's strong tendency to be as suspicious of Europe as it is attached to its alliance with the US, isn't this too much to expect? Burg – who does not even rule out the EU also making similar offers to, say, Lebanon and Syria in return for a full panoply of democratic institutions and universal human rights – accepts that it is a "challenge". But Burg argues that whereas the US expects to "meld the previous identities of its members in an American oneness" the European model creates a "civil political entity" that preserves "all the previous identities of its various members". Which is better for the Jews, he asks? "Is it getting lost into the American melting pot or is it being a stone in the ongoing beautiful mosaic of Europe?"

To be fair, Burg is anything but starry-eyed about the EU's ability to play the much more important role in the Middle East he is clear he wants it to. "The problem is that in the past 60 years too many politicians in Europe owe their tranquility to being guaranteed by American rifles," he says. "They won't jump in and assume responsibility." The international Quartet, in which the EU is supposed to be an equal partner with the US, is "not functioning". He is scornful of the EMU inability to persuade the US to join in a determined new policy that would say: "We can't tolerate a nuclear arms race in the Middle East; we can't tolerate fundamentalism here; we cannot tolerate the suffering in Gaza, we cannot tolerate the road blocks, the settlements. But we say stop this and we offer you something in return. That's a new conversation."

The failure to achieve this so far especially rankles because "even with Obama in the White House, America is too far away to hear what's going on here. It doesn't hear the knocks on the door. Europe hears the knocks on the door. Europe sees the shadows passing under the window." For Burg's vision of an EU stretching out to the eastern Mediterranean – in its own interest – has a much bigger goal: dealing with the growing presence of Islam in its midst. Burg says ominously that far-right Europeans such as the late Jörg Haider , Jean Marie Le Pen, or the Swiss anti-immigration politician Christoph Blocher "have a solution. We've tried it a couple of times in the past. Let's do it again. They're nicer. They dress OK. They don't have a funny moustache but at the end of the day they have the formula."

The alternative, he argues, is the long-term development of a democratic, "European Islam". "What happened to Judaism when it encountered Christian democracy? What happened to Christianity that was so violent only a couple of centuries ago when it met and merged with democracy? It was changed. Now imagine in 50, 75, 100 years' time you have a European Islam [in which people are told] we respect you for respecting your roots and origins and traditions and rights. And we would love it if you internalised the value systems of our world as well – equality and liberties and so on. And now imagine this 100 million people, or 50 per cent of them, saying: you know what? This big devil is not so diabolic. All of a sudden from the Noah's Ark of Europe the harbinger sends a message: Islam and democracy can function together. And it's not one individual, it's the masses of European Islam, like European Jewry, like European Christianity."

For Burg this is impressively personal. As a representative of European Jewry that was "kicked out and expelled from Europe because of [its] otherness I have to give my utmost to prevent the late Mr Haider and other fascist semi-racists making the Muslims in Europe the new Jews." Which brings us back to the book. Utopian or not, his alternative vision for Israel, laid out with especial eloquence in the final chapter, is for it to become a beacon of liberty and racial tolerance, its humanistic values drawn on centuries of Jewish existence preceding the Holocaust and "with the acceptance of the other as an equal to be appreciated". Part of this process, he argues, is for Israel to replace the Holocaust as a memory exclusively for Jews and use it instead to become the vanguard of the "struggle against racism and violence against the persecuted" throughout the world. "There are two kinds of people coming out of Auschwitz," he told me. "Those who said never again for the Jews and those like me who say never again for any human beings."

Burg remains what he has always been: a vehement opponent of the post-1967 occupation. One of the reasons for right-wing fury at the book was its repeated references to the misery it inflicts on the Palestinians. But he says that while "until recently" he was sure that if that "primary reality" was solved "you solve everything", he now believes that "even the occupation is the outcome of something earlier and this is the mentality of trauma, be it 2,000 years of trauma or the intensifying of it in the six years of the Second World War. In order to solve these traumas I have to address my fears, my ghosts, my genies. And that's what I'm trying to do here." He says he wrote the book partly because "Israel became a very efficient kingdom with no prophecy. You don't have real political thinking here. You have academia living in their ivory towers or politics that has no brain whatever. What I tried to offer is some alternative political thinking."

What has most encouraged him about the book's reception is its impact on younger Israelis, groups of whom he is still invited to address 18 months after its publication. "All those who wanted to kill me are Labour centrists, 50-plus, secular, well-off economically, and they said, 'Well Avraham now that we've made it, you come with your stupid questions. Stop it immediately.' I lost many of my classical supporters in the centre. On the other hand I gained very interesting new ground among the younger generation who understand that something is not working in this kingdom."

So would the politician-turned-prophet, who was once the great Prime Ministerial hope of the Israeli left, turn back to politician again? Burg, who at 53 is currently a partner in running a labour-intensive agriculture business, acknowledges there is pressure – "I won't say a lot, but some" – to do so. He is, he says, no longer "obsessed" by the idea as he once was. But "if the situation happens, maybe I'll say yes." What's more important, he insists, is that "if people today ask me, Avrum, why don't you come back to politics, for me it's a huge, encouraging statement that the day will come when my views might be represented in the Knesset, that someone who was only a year ago the national pariah is perceived as an alternative to so many problems here. That's amazing."

'The Holocaust is Over: We Must Rise from its Ashes' is published by Palgrave Macmillan. To buy this book at a special price (with free p&p) call 08700 798 897

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/avraham-burg-israels-new-prophet-979732.html

Freedom of expression divides into two: free speech and hate speech – Professor Alan Dershowitz

What is hate speech today in our politically correct world? Hate speech is nothing but truth-telling and freedom of speech never existed – David Brockschmidt

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free – John 8:23

I therefore become your enemy because I tell you the truth? – Galations 4:16

Wherever some evil thou findest, thou shouldst say evil it is and thou should give the enemy no rest – the Good Book

She’ll be right mate means: Blessed are the meek in heart and the poor of spirit, for they stand not the slightest chance of inheriting the earth but will slave on to the end like faithful sleep – David Brockschmidt

Roses are reddish, violets are bluish, if it wasn’t for Jesus, we’d all be Jewish – Shalom!

Total victory in Töben case

Avraham Burg: Israel's new prophet