Hitler represents of one of the most atrocious periods in the history of the entire world.  His twelve year reign had a profound impact on the lives of many.  Throughout the years of 1933 and 1945, Hitler invaded ten countries , including Poland, where one side of my stepfather’s family lived until 1940, when they were forcefully removed and put into concentration camps.  The first husband of his mother was a Polish officer, and shortly after Hitler and Stalin signed the Nazi Soviet Non-Aggression pact, he and other Polish officers were taken from their families, brought into the Katyn Forest, and summarily executed – simply for being Polish officers.

Under the Nazi regime, it is estimated that as many as between 11 million and 17 million civilians were killed – nearly 6 million of those exterminated solely for being Jewish.  It’s been only 78 years since Hitler and the Nazi regime’s rise to power, and their reign remains an open wound  – in the context of history, this is still a very recent occurrence.  Survivors of this period are still with us today, as are first and second generation family members , many of whom are right here in the United States.

That’s why on May 18^{th ,} when I saw a post in the Guardian titled Andrew Breitbart’s ‘Electronic Brownshirts’, my hair stood on end.  Who could write such a title?  The author turned out to be none other than Amy Goodman, who hosts the famously popular daily progressive news program “Democracy Now“, and is also frequently referred to as a respected “progressive journalist“, investigative reporter and peace advocate.  It was a post in defense of the controversial labor studies course that was the recent focus of a BigGovernment expose.

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From the Associated Press:

In a radio interview, former White House correspondent Helen Thomas acknowledges she touched a nerve with remarks about Israel that led to her retirement. But she says the comments were “exactly what I thought,” even though she realized soon afterward that it was the end of her job.

“I hit the third rail. You cannot criticize Israel in this country and survive,” Thomas told Ohio station WMRN-AM in a sometimes emotional 35-minute interview that aired Tuesday. It was recorded a week earlier by WMRN reporter Scott Spears at Thomas’ Washington, D.C., condominium.

Thomas, 90, stepped down from her job as a columnist for Hearst News Service in June after a rabbi and independent filmmaker videotaped her outside the White House calling on Israelis to get “out of Palestine.” She gave up her front row seat in the White House press room, where she had aimed often pointed questions at 10 presidents, going back to Dwight D. Eisenhower.

She has kept a low profile since then. (more…)

I spent much time during the past few weeks helping my son study for the state-wide World History test he took a few days ago. Working with him through his studies, I learned his class presented a brand new version of history, a version that never occurred. Some can argue different versions/interpretations of events that happened centuries ago, but his text book and curriculum distorted events I saw with my own eyes.

The text-book in question is called World History Patterns of Interaction, and is published by McDougal Littell.  Particularly upsetting was the section of the book covering the period from the end of WWII through the 1980s. It sets up the Cold War period with the mistaken politically correct explanation that both sides were aggressors. On page 983 it says:

Both sides believed that they needed to stop the other side from extending its power.”  What it should have said was that the Cold War was a battle between the Soviet side wanting to expand its communist philosophy across the world, and the west trying to prevent the takeover.

The book also whitewashes the tyranny of Castro’s communist Cuba. Page 985 says “Soviet aid to Cuba ended abruptly with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. This dealt a crippling blow to the Cuban economy.”  There was no mention of the brutality of the Cuban regime; the fact that all opposition newspapers had been closed down, all radio and television stations were in state control, or that moderates, teachers and professors were purged. Nor was there any mention of the torture and inhumane treatment in Cuban prisons that is still happening today. (more…)

Much has happened since Rabbi Nesenoff emailed me his video interview of Helen Thomas containing her now-famous declaration that Jews should get the hell out of Palestine and go back to their homes in Germany and Poland.  Upon first watching the interview, I saw it a big story and was determined to make it go viral. The objective was not to go after the 89-year-old newswoman per se, as a teaching opportunity, showing that anti-Semitism still permeated through normal American society. That teaching moment didn’t really happen; instead I was the one who did the learning, and the lesson was all about how the media really worked.

The White House Press corps seemed very reluctant to touch the story. On one hand it was understandable as Thomas was a respected colleague.  Most of them had worked with her for a very long time.  On the other hand it was big news, and if the Rabbi’s interview subject were a senior member of the Administration those same reporters would have been all over the story.

When they got around to covering the story, media got the “facts” of the incident wrong.  I am not talking about Rosie O’Donnell’s idiotic statement dismissing the anti-Semitism displayed by Thomas’s call for Israeli Jews to return to the scene of the concentration camps, or her ignorant belief that no Jews lived in the Holy Land before 1948.  The traditional media’s biggest factual mistake was reporting that the controversy surrounded Thomas making an anti-Israel comment. (more…)

Dear Helen Thomas:

With a great deal of disappointment I watched your interview, replayed over and over on television, in which you said that Jews should “go back home to Poland and Germany.” I find it both appalling and unsettling that someone with your level of journalistic accomplishment would lack a basic knowledge of Middle Eastern history.

So please allow me to make the case as to why Israel has a historical, legal and moral right to exist as a Jewish state in the Middle East.

According to the Arab-Palestinian-Muslim narrative, Israel is an alien colony recently planted in the Arab world by American and European imperialism. This narrative recognizes no history prior to the arrival of the first Zionist pioneers in the 1880’s, and emphatically denies any ancient historical connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. This is the central lie, offered to justify uncompromising opposition to Jewish national rights. It’s almost as if they actually expect people to think the word “Israel” was invented in modern times. What is alarming is that their increasingly successful rewrite of history has taken hold in minds supposedly as informed as yours.

The Temple of Solomon

The historical truth is carved in Egyptian stone. According to a well-known hieroglyphic inscription, the tribes of Israel were a significant, established presence in Canaan no later than 1212 BCE. There is a vast body of archaeological evidence that demonstrates the ancient Israelite/Jewish presence in Israel/Judea as far back as 925 BCE. This historical presence is verified in the ancient records of the Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Moslem Empires. The Arab conquest did not occur until 638 CE (AD). An exercise in elementary arithmetic reveals that the Jewish people were there eighteen and one-half centuries before the arrival of the Muslim Arabs. (more…)

Helen Thomas is as fair and open minded as she is good looking. The most senior (she turns 90 this summer) of White-House correspondents has given up being a real reporter and instead spends her time spewing venom at America’s war on terror and/or anything Israel does. For example during the 2008/09 Israeli battle with Hamas in Gaza, Thomas was interviewed by NPR and compared the IDF action to Nazi Germany

I mean, you can’t remain neutral. I remember the rabbi who spoke at the Martin Luther King march on Washington. Heschel had a cameo appearance, and he said, “The greatest sin of all in the Nazi era was silence.” When you remain silent to the suffering and the incredible aggression against a people, then you are culpable.

Just two days ago Thomas berated Robert Gibbs for America’s initial reaction to the violence created by the Guerrilla Flotilla; she said Israel committed a deliberate massacre, international crime, and called Israel a terrorist state.

I used to attribute Thomas’ venom to the combination of her liberal leanings and Lebanese heritage, but the video below indicates that her intentions are more nefarious than that: Thomas is just not a big fan of the Jewish people. (more…)

The modus operandi of the 1939 “Gleiwitz incident” is a popular tactic of those legacy journalists who, like Frank Rich of the New York Times, distort the facts of an event to fit their pre-determined storyline. Now it’s happening again with regard to J. Patrick Bedell and the Pentagon shooting incident.

The Gleiwitz incident is a matter of historical record, so it’s beyond media spin. Here’s what happened:

On August 31, 1939, German SS soldiers dressed in Polish uniforms and took over a radio station near the German border with Poland. From there they broadcast an anti-German rant in Polish.

To make the ruse convincing, the Germans dressed a dead civilian German named Franciszek Honiok, reputed to be sympathetic to Poland, in a Polish soldier’s uniform and shot up his body to make it look like he was killed in a gun fight. Along with Honiok, they littered the scene with several other bodies of dead prisoners from Dachau concentration camp, also dressed as Polish soldiers. (more…)