The original blueprints for the Auschwitz death camp went on display in late January after being discovered in November 2008. They were found by chance behind a wall in a Berlin apartment during renovation work, yet the exact location of their discovery is being kept secret. No one will say whose apartment it was.

There are numerous bits of evidence, however, that point to a possible location where Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, lived during World War II. And in the course of investigating this, I have found that the Mufti was involved in and may even have created the Final Solution for European Jews – and yet his central participation in the Holocaust has been covered up and forgotten.

The Mufti, whom his nephew Yasser Arafat called “our hero,” is famous for his fanatical Jew-hatred. During World War II, the Mufti lived in Berlin, where he met Hitler and traveled in top Nazi circles (he even stayed in Hitler’s bunker toward the end of the war). Among his close friends was Adolf Eichmann, who is commonly thought to be the architect of the Holocaust. Journalist Maurice Pearlman, author of the 1947 book The Mufti of Jerusalem, said that the Mufti advised Eichmann on the best ways to persecute Jews. (more…)

Andrew Breitbart has already welcomed you all to Big Journalism. Now I’d like to add my voice to his.

As you can see from our logo, Big Journalism will be a throwback in spirit to the freewheeling moxie of the glory days of American newspapers, long before a “school of journalism” was a gleam in some college provost’s eye, and before reporters got hired more for their telegenic qualities than their writing, reporting or critical-thinking skills.

So let me be blunt:  we’re not here to compete for Pulitzer Prizes, to sit on committees, to scratch each other’s backs on the weekend television wagfests or to conform to some arbitrary code of ethics cooked up in the days when the mainstream media was the only game in town, and had already begun to cozy up to the government and the establishment, thus abandoning its constitutional mission of keeping a finger on the pulse of America, and an eye on the crooks:

Listen, I spent 25 years working in the MSM, beginning at the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, where a young pianist fresh out of the Eastman School of Music was turned into a pretty good police reporter in three months flat.  I made friendships there that have lasted a lifetime, worked with colleagues who went on to become important editors at outfits like Knight-Ridder, the AP and USA Today, as well as national sports columnists and star magazine writers.  I moved on to the San Francisco Examiner where, even as the paper’s classical music critic, I had a front-row seat for some of the biggest stories in recent American history, including the Peoples Temple disaster and the murders of George Moscone and Harvey Milk.  And then I moved to Time Magazine in New York City, where I spent 16 years writing about music and reporting from locations all over the world, particularly Berlin, Eastern Europe and the old Soviet Union.  It was a great life, and I don’t regret a minute of it.

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