Hate Crimes, Zionist Terrorism, and Jews in Hitler’s Army
Doug Collins, an award-winning journalist, has worked for several Canadian daily newspapers, and is the author of several books. He served with the British army during the Second World War, and then with the British control commission in postwar occupied Germany. For more about Collins, see the Nov.-Dec. 1994 Journal, pp. 43-46, and, “Canadian Jewish Congress Threatens Journalist for Holocaust Heresy,” in the Jan.-Feb. 1996 Journal, pp. 36-38.
The three essays published here are reprinted with permission from his columns in the North Shore News (North Vancouver, British Columbia) of November 15, 1995, March 10, 1996, and February 2, 1997.
Book Looks at Hate Crimes and Hoaxes
A couple of months ago, anti-Semitic graffiti were scrawled on a synagogue construction site in West Vancouver [British Columbia]. Right away, it became front-page news. It was big on the TV screens, too.
Who did it? No one knows. But that kind of coverage is automatic. The media invariably accept such incidents as gospel. (“West Van Jews face Nazi threat” was the News' headline.) But I will stick my neck out (Hello, there, Press Council!) and say that the chances of the incident having been a hoax are far greater than its having been genuine.
The “message” included the term “Juden raus!” which means “Jews out!” Not many Canadians would know that. Germans would, but today's Germans would be the very last to risk doing such a dumb thing.
One has to ask the classic question: who gains? Not the alleged anti-Semites, because such idiocies are counterproductive. A hoaxer on the Jewish side would, though, because it keeps the right pot boiling.
In a previous incident four years ago a “cross-burning” took place in the front yard of a house in which Iranians were living. More panic stations. The KKK are upon us! A couple of years later it turned out that the deed had been “artificial,” and that left-wing Iranians had used it to show evidence of “racism” on the North Shore [Vancouver]. That, at any rate, was what the editor of the Iranian newspaper told the Vancouver Sun.
A fascinating book has now been published on the subject of such tricks. It's called Crying Wolf: Hate Crime Hoaxes in America, by Laird Wilcox. The author documents hundreds of hoaxes. And he isn't some wild-eyed right-winger. On the contrary, he has written about Nazis, the KKK and others on the extreme right.
Here are a couple of examples from his book.
In West Hartford, Connecticut, the Jewish community was terrorized by fires set at two synagogues, and by another set at the home of a rabbi. The home of a State Representative, a Jewess, was also set on fire. Nationwide media attention followed. A $50,000 reward was posted for information leading to a conviction, and dozens of policemen were put on the case.
But the fires had been set by 17-year-old Barry Dov Schuss, himself Jewish. He was charged with second-degree arson, and told the court that a “possible reason” for his actions was to show the vulnerability of the police to anti-Semitic violence. He got off with probation, but if he had been a skinhead he would have been put away for years.
White gentiles are sometimes involved in these capers but usually it is minorities. In New York State, a black teenager by the name of Tawana Brawley became a cause celebre. She claimed to have been kidnapped and raped by white men, smeared with dog feces, stuffed into a plastic garbage bag, and marked with racial slurs. The incident “fuelled support for hate crime legislation around the nation.”
There were flaws in her tale from the start. But as Wilcox puts it, “an incredible media feeding frenzy took place.” A grand jury concluded the woman had fabricated the story.
William Kunstler, the radical lawyer offered a thought on the matter. He said it made no difference whether the attack really happened. “A lot of black women are treated the way she says she was treated.”
Another famous hoax was perpetrated by Laurie A. Recht in Yonkers, New York. Recht was supposed to have received death threats, and claimed she was the target of anti-Semitic graffiti in her apartment block. As a result of another media feeding frenzy she was given an honorary doctorate, was offered a scholarship, and became “a very important lady.”
It was proved, though, that she had received no threatening calls. And a hidden police camera showed she was painting graffiti on the wall herself. She too got probation.
These incidents work well for the perpetrators. And nothing will change as long as minorities are seen as permanent victims. Which, of course, is all part of political correctness.
The book costs $19.95 [available through the IHR].
An Inequitable Silence
Strange that the House of Commons should sanction a minute's silence for those killed in Israel by the bombs of Islamic fanatics. I too deplore those deaths. But the double standard is flying again.
The Israelis are themselves no strangers to the practice of terrorism, beginning with the British Mandate in Palestine. And men who have headed the Jewish state have been its most expert practitioners.
In 1946 the King David Hotel was blown up and 95 people were killed. Most of the victims were British and Arab, but a dozen Jews who happened to be in the wrong place also died.
The organizer of that atrocity was Menachem Begin of the terrorist Irgun gang. He later became [Israel's] prime minister.
Two years later he ordered the attack on Deir Yassin, a small village near Jerusalem in which 254 defenseless old men, women and children were killed and thrown into a well, a crime that compares with the Nazi murder of Czechs at Lidice – except that the children of Lidice were spared.
The purpose was to terrify Arabs into leaving their land. Jewish author Alfred Lilienthal has described how loudspeaker vans cruised Jerusalem informing Arabs that unless they left, “the fate of Deir Yassin will be your fate.”
In his book The Zionist Connection Lilienthal states [pp. 52, 156]: “A concentration of bomb outrages in which many were killed or wounded and all communications in Palestine came to a halt was carried out throughout the mandate territory by 3,000 Jews under the combined operations of the Irgun, the Stern Gang and the Haganah.”
Count Bernadotte, nephew of the King of Sweden, was assassinated in 1948. He was a UN mediator of whose views Stern & Co. did not approve. Yitzhak Shamir, who also became a prime minister, planned the murder of Lord Moyne in 1944, when the British were fighting Hitler.
Another Yitzhak – Rabin – sanctified last year by the West after his murder by a Jew, was a general in the Israeli Defense Force when 700,000 Arabs were turfed out of their homeland. And he was probably responsible for the attack on the unarmed USS Liberty in 1967 that killed 34 American sailors and wounded 171. Sorry about that, said the Israelis. The matter was quickly hushed up. And US aid to Israel went on as if nothing had happened.
In the end Rabin recognized that brute force was not going to defeat the Palestinians' demands for a homeland. Hence the peace process. But that was after years of brute force had been used against the Intifada – the revolt by Arab kids who were armed only with stones.
Israeli response to the Islamic terrorists is natural, but worthy of note: the security forces have been given a free hand to destroy them. Can you imagine what the reaction would be if the British gave the SAS [“special forces” military unit] a free hand to destroy the IRA? Ottawa would be the first to cry foul.
Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy promised before the minute's silence that terrorists would find no place here. Even as he was speaking, a former IRA man convicted of trying to assassinate a Belfast policeman was working as a stonemason on the parliamentary Peace Tower, no less. The RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] had given him clearance, and he is fighting deportation on “humanitarian” grounds.
Even more grotesque was that in the 1970s Begin made a fund-raising tour here [in Canada]. And he toured the US as if he owned it.
The Palestinian case is not often told. But after Rabin's death the Sydney Morning Herald ran an article in which a Palestinian official stated: “Jewish settlers and extremists are responsible for the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians and have committed a number of massacres [such as] the Al Aqsa mosque massacre in 1990, and the Hebron mosque massacre in 1994 … Despite all this, the Israeli government did not take their crimes and the danger they posed seriously, nor disarm them.” He could also have mentioned the wholesale bombing of refugee camps suspected of hiding terrorists.
Yes, terrorism is wrong. But terror breeds terror. And if our politicians were even-handed, their minute of silence would last for a long time.
Insights From Abroad
Traveling has its uses. You get all kinds of interesting information that is ignored at home. When I was in England the papers were filled with news about Jews who served in Hitler's forces as high ranking officers.
The story broke in The [London Daily] Telegraph [Dec. 2, 1996], which had a headline across two pages about “Jews who wore Nazi uniforms.” There were many of them. They included two field marshals, one of whom was Erhard Milch, who “masterminded German aircraft production and transformed the Luftwaffe.” His father was Jewish.
At least 77 senior officers were Jewish, or “of mixed Jewish race or married to Jews.” They included eight lieutenant generals, five major generals, and 23 colonels. Seventeen “Jews in Nazi uniform” were awarded the Knights Cross, Germany's highest military honor. In all probability there were many more. The research is continuing.
Some of the stories are bizarre. One Jew got to German-occupied France in 1940 and later joined the Waffen SS under a new name. He is still alive. Another visited the Sachsenhausen concentration camp to visit his father, “wearing the Iron Cross he had earned in battle.” Another lost his mother in Auschwitz. He and others are now asking whether they were “victims or perpetrators.” A Jewish filmmaker and holder of the Iron Cross First Class worked in the German propaganda office in Paris in 1941.
The one who discovered all this was Bryan Rigg, a Texan studying at Cambridge University. Some of his remote forebears were German Jews, and he became interested in their story. So he did a year-long investigation and stumbled across this material, accumulating 30,000 supporting documents in the process.
The British press got excited over it because everyone had assumed that Jews were totally unacceptable in Hitler's Germany; also that no Jew could ever have fought for Hitler. A leading historian at Cambridge has been quoted as saying, “It makes the reality of the Nazi state more complicated.” He stated, too, that Rigg's research would “inform both the argument about Hitler's role in shaping the holocaust and the debate about anti-Semitism among ordinary Germans.”
Precisely. It worries holocaust enthusiasts that Rigg's research may be used by “deniers.” But most “deniers” do not deny that large numbers of Jews met their end in the camps and elsewhere. What they question is what they see as the greatly inflated six million story.
British historian David Irving has gone further. He made himself into an international pariah by offering a financial reward for anyone who can produce documentary proof that Hitler ordered the extermination of the Jews. Whatever the truth, no one has yet collected.
Rigg turned up some fascinating tidbits. Former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt was an officer in the Luftwaffe even though his grandfather was a Jew. Schmidt kept his background secret. And fought for Hitler.
As the Telegraph articles explained, the Nazi race laws defined as a full Jew anyone with three Jewish grandparents. Those with two or even one were seen as “mixed race” and were also denied full citizenship. But there were all kinds of contradictions and exceptions. Hermann Göring once stated, for instance, that he would decide who was Jewish.
As Rigg showed, Hitler himself signed papers decreeing that many whom he knew had Jewish ancestors were of “Aryan descent.” Milch, sentenced to a term of imprisonment at Nuremberg, was one of them. A Jewish Nazi war criminal?
After the conquest of Poland the Americans even asked for, and obtained, the release of a rabbi who was leader of the ultra-orthodox Lubavitcher Jews in Warsaw. It was done on instructions from Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of military intelligence who was executed in 1944 for plotting against Hitler. The rabbi and a group of his followers were sent to the US via Latvia, and the man in charge of the operation was Lt. Col. Bloch, himself a Jew and an Iron Cross holder. Late in the war, though, Heinrich Himmler saw to it that he was discharged from the army.
All of which is very strange. And just as strange is that I have been able to find no mention of it in our media. Not even in Time magazine. I wonder why?
“No true philosophy is possible where the fear of consequences inhibits the pursuit of truth.”
—John Stuart Mill
Bibliographic information about this document: The Journal of Historical Review, vol. 16, no. 5 (September/October 1997), pp. 19-21; reprinted from North Shore News, November 15, 1995, March 10, 1996, and February 2, 1997, respectively.
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