Yom HaShoah

Yesterday I went to two events for Yom HaShoah (Holocaust remembrance day). My synagogue, Temple Beth El of Ithaca, hosted a speaker, Professor Marc Dennis (who teaches art at Elmira College). The topic of his presentation was "Under the Floorboards – Hidden Art from the Holocaust." (The image at left is one that he showed; it is a drawing by Josef Szajna, “Waiting to be Called for Execution," 1944, Buchenwald, pencil on paper, 8 x 12).

To quote from the Temple website:

Inmates of concentration camps made thousands of clandestine drawings and paintings. In fact some 5,000 drawings and paintings survived the war – each one revealing a human dimension – providing us with a rare glimpse of the daily existence in the camps.... It reveals the little-known work of artists who left expressive evidence of what they witnessed. Mr. Dennis states, "We cannot understand it and appreciate it say in the same way we might a Rembrandt…. Victims of the Holocaust risked their lives to make art so that others may understand what they had to endure. There are very few situations where so much art can offer this unique perspective on history. It should always be a priority to study how others have suffered and survived, sacrificed and endured, and left their creative mark on history." Marc Dennis is an award winning professor and nationally recognized artist and Holocaust researcher. He teaches drawing, painting and digital imaging, as well as a course on the history of the Holocaust with a specific focus on the art of Europe from 1933-1945.

In the evening, I went to a staged reading of the play "Kindertransport," written by Diane Samuels. It was performed by On the Verge, a joint effort by the English and Theater Departments at Ithaca College, which puts on staged readings once or twice a year. The New York Times review of the performance in New York City in 1994 said of the play:

Yet another investigation of the Holocaust and its continuing reverberations, "Kindertransport," which opened last night, approaches the subject from the unusual perspective of a child who escaped the immediate horrors but paid a heavy price anyway. Kindertransport was the plan formed in 1938, in reaction to Kristallnacht and the rising Nazi threat, to evacuate children from Germany and Eastern Europe. Before World War II erupted, nearly 10,000 youngsters, most of them Jewish, had made it to England.

Ms. Samuels, an Englishwoman, has set her play in the attic of a suburban London house in the 1980's. Evelyn (Dana Ivey), a brusque middle-aged housewife, and her daughter, Faith (Mary Mara), are sorting through the cardboard boxes and steamer trunks. Theirs is a touchy relationship, although we're not to find out why for a while, and the air is charged with animosity.

At the same time, in a series of flashbacks, we follow the progress of Eva, a frightened 9-year-old Jewish girl (Alanna Ubach). Tagged like a piece of luggage, she leaves her mother in Hamburg and travels to England, where the well-meaning Lil (Patricia Kilgarriff) takes over her upbringing. Little by little, the distraught child grows into a reserved young woman. Her accent fades. And so, presumably, do the old traumas.

The performance was excellent, I thought - even though the actors had only rehearsed twice, they did very well, and I found it moving.

When I got home from the performance, I watched the latest staging of the life of Anne Frank, produced in Britain and broadcast on Masterpiece Theater (PBS). The show had the same effect that the story always does on me - it makes the life of Anne Frank vivid and real, and then at the end we discover what happened to her - she died in Bergen Belsen only two months before the war ended.

Tonight I'll be watching another PBS production - Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust in Arab Lands. From the website:

Did any Arabs save Jews during the Holocaust? That's the question author Robert Satloff had in mind when he set out to discover the lost, true stories of survival, courage and betrayal in Arab lands during World War II. The history of the Holocaust in Europe is well-documented, but the history of what happened to the Jewish people of North Africa has been mostly forgotten, even in the very towns and cities where it occurred. The truth is remarkable: not only did Jews in Arab lands suffer many of the same elements of persecution as Jews in Europe -- arrests, deportations, confiscations and forced labor -- but there were also hopeful stories of "righteous" Arabs reaching out to protect them.

I'm glad that this film has been made - most American Jews (or for that matter, American non-Jews) don't know anything about what happened to the Jews in North Africa during WWII. I think it's important for people to know this history, so that they don't imagine the Holocaust was simply a European story. If the Germans had succeeded in holding North Africa and then conquering Palestine, the Jews there would also have been killed like those in Europe. (The Nazi advance towards Egypt was halted at the first battle of El Alamein in July, 1942; the second battle of El Alamein in October-November 1942 was the first significant Allied victory against Axis forces and the beginning of the retaking of North Africa). We can see from how thoroughly the Nazis killed the Sephardic Jews of Greece, the Greek islands, and the Balkans, how they would also have killed the Sephardic and Middle Eastern Jews.

Secret Agents and the Rule of Law

Further on Anat Kam - see Haim Watzman of South Jerusalem on Secret Agents and the Rule of Law.

Hanan Eshel has passed away

I just learned from Paleojudaica (Jim Davila's blog) that Hanan Eshel, the great Israeli scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other early Jewish literature, has just died. I saw him last summer when I was in Jerusalem and learned then that he was ill with cancer. He and his wife Esti spoke about his hopes at that point that he would recover from the disease. I first met him, I think, in 1987 or 1988 when I was a graduate student studying at the Hebrew University. I can't remember if we took a class together or not (or if he was already teaching at that point). He was always gracious, helpful, and often quite funny. May his memory be for a blessing.

An obituary on him can be found at: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/136903

Gila Swirsky on the Anat Kam story

Gila Swirsky, whom I first met in Israel in 1987 as we were both protesting against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in the weekly "Women in Black" demonstrations at Paris Square in Jerusalem, has sent a letter to her mailing list about the latest big scandal to hit Israel, which you can read about in all of the Israeli newspapers today.

Friends,

This story is a testament to the Internet. And to Anat Kam, the whistleblower, who is widely regarded in Israeli security circles as a traitor and will probably soon be charged with treason.

Anat (I’ll use her first name, though I don’t know her) is a 23-year old journalist who wrote for the popular Israeli portal Walla. Some months ago, Anat did the unthinkable: she passed on information that was decidedly newsworthy, but that the Shin Bet – Israel’s security services – did not want outsiders to have. It was a”hit list” – the names of Palestinians living in the West Bank who were on the Shin Bet’s “wanted” list. And it was a copy of the Shin Bet protocol stating that if these “wanted” figures are identified during the course of a military action, permission is granted to carry out “an interception”. Nice language for execution without trial. Reports are that Anat photocopied this classified information while serving in the IDF.

Anat allegedly passed on this classified information to Uri Blau, a journalist, who published it months ago as a major scoop in Ha’aretz. Now Ha’aretz has whisked Uri away to London to protect him from the Israeli authorities, who would love to interrogate him about his informant. Meanwhile, Anat has been under house arrest and held incommunicado for at least three months.

This is a big story, but until today no Israeli newspapers could publish it because a judge issued a gag order at the Shin Bet’s request. But go ask Henry Miller about banned books. Thanks to the ban and Israel’s inability to control cyberspace, the story has taken on vastly greater proportions. Every news outlet in Israel – newspapers, radio, TV, news portals – has front-paged the story now that the gag order was lifted. It would never have received such widespread attention had the Israeli authorities not tried to hide it in the first place. And had the Internet not cloned the story through every webpage eager to expose state secrets.

This is not the first time the Israeli authorities have arrested suspects and held them incommunicado for extended periods. It happens to Palestinians all the time. The best known case of an Israeli is Mordechai Vanunu, who blew the whistle on Israel’s nuclear warfare capabilities 24 years ago and was tried behind closed doors. More recently, Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Yaakov, an Israeli citizen now living in the U.S., was arrested on a visit to Israel in 2002, and a gag order placed on news of his month-long detention and interrogation. Yaakov, a key scientist in the development of Israel’s nuclear weapons program, was suspected of divulging some of Israel’s secrets, but eventually released without charge.

So Israel has managed to draw widespread international attention to a story it wanted to hush up. But why conceal the fact that the Shin Bet has a “hit list” and gives license to its commando units to carry out field executions? After all, doesn’t the U.S. do the same thing in its own so-called war against terror?

Israel, in my view, wanted to hide this information to avoid the legal and diplomatic ramifications of disclosures that its soldiers were once again breaking international law. Israel has been playing defense ever since the Gaza Campaign, trying to keep its senior politicians and officers out of European courts on charges of war crimes. Most recently (December 2009), opposition leader Zipi Livni cancelled a trip to London out of fear she would be arrested, thanks to universal jurisdiction of human rights violations. Similar arrest orders were deflected by other senior Israelis (Barak, Mofaz, and Almog). Publicity about a hit list and hit squads could only add fuel to the growing criticism of Israel and the fear among its leaders of being arrested on a visit to Europe. Not to mention the fact that Israel’s own Supreme Court outlawed such unprovoked assassinations just months ago.

But really, isn’t Israel still the “only democracy in the Middle East”? Concealing someone’s arrest and the charges against her are clearly pages from the annals of dark regimes. And the broader context is the growing McCarthyite culture inside Israel – the silencing of its critics, the squirreling away of its whistleblowers. We see this in the hate campaign against Israeli human rights organizations, which has now reached a new peak – a bill before the Knesset that would severely hamper these organizations from receiving funds from foreign states, one of their only sources of support as the Israeli government is not about to fund human rights activity.

What’s not to love about secrecy, lies, and human rights violations? Praise the whistleblowers and all those who turned on the Internet lights, making it impossible for the authorities to turn them off again.

Gila Svirsky
Jerusalem / Nahariya

___________________
Gila Svirsky

http://www.GilaSvirsky.com

New York Times on the establishment of Dachau, March, 1933.

In my Jews in the Contemporary World course we are discussing the Holocaust this week, and I took a look at some New York Times articles, first about the establishment of Dachau as a concentration camp for political prisoners in March 1933, then about how it was freed by the American Seventh Army on April 30, 1945, and then another article which seems to give one of the first estimates of the numbers of Jews killed in the Holocaust. I think it would be appropriate to reproduce these articles, as Yom Ha'Shoah is coming up in a week.

The first one is a report by a Times reporter about Dachau a couple of months after it had been established, when most of the prisoners were Communists who had been rounded up by the Nazis soon after their takeover of Germany. When compared with the article about the liberation of the camp in 1945, the camp seems to have become a much more harsh and dreadful place in the ensuing twelve years.

TIMES WRITER VISITS REICH PRISON CAMP

Taken through entire place at Dachau in Bavaria except possibly disciplinary cells

2,000 inmates gloomy

Incautious word has landed many there – machine guns and rifles bar escape

From a special correspondent
Wireless to the NEW YORK TIMES

DACHAU, Bavaria, July 25. The name of this idyllic little town, situated about a half-hour’s automobile ride from Munich, has become a word of dread throughout Bavaria.

All the Bavarians, noted for their racy unreservedness of speech, pray these days with a mock drollery designed to beguile genuine apprehension:
“Please, Lord, make me dumb,
So I won’t to Dachau come.”

For high on the edge of Dachau is the big Bavarian concentration camp for political prisoners. Many a man has landed there, because of an incautious word or too much confidence in supposed comrades or friends. The Nazi Secret State Police, like the Cheka of Russia, has agents everywhere, and any criticism of the new regime and even lack of proper enthusiasm for it are punished as “sabotage” of the Nazi up-building program.

Sentences Indefinite

Such “saboteurs and killjoys” are sentenced to an indefinite period of training and education in the new and only true dogma of national salvation and for this purpose are sent to what are euphemistically called “educational camps,” where in rigid discipline and hard labor they are converted from egotistical Marxists or liberals to good Nazis who place service to the State above service to themselves.

Your correspondent spent a day at the “educational camp” at Dachau, where there is a steady coming and going, but where the average number of prisoners remains around 2,000. He inspected the whole camp, except possibly the disciplinary cells, of which he got a hint; he talked with them and heard their grievances, at least in so far as they dared express them in the presence of the camp’s deputy commander, who showed the correspondent around.

It is necessary to distinguish between a system that imprisons men for their political opinions and the methods with which the imprisonment is administered. In the latter respect the prisoners might have repeated the famous saying of the man about to be hanged that he was as well off as could be expected under the circumstances.

Clashes at the outset

This, both the prisoners and the camp’s commander, Herr Eicke, agreed, was truer now than before; when the concentration camps were first opened, the political passions still aflame led to numerous clashes between the prisoners and guards in which the guards naturally had the advantage.

Now camp life has settled into the organized routine of any penal institution, the guards consist of approximately 275 men, and Chancellor Hitler’s black-uniformed elite guards and not the ordinary brown-shirted storm troops perform this duty. It is somewhat boring but not much different from regular army life.

The prisoners accept their confinement as a blow of revolutionary fate against which it is futile to rave. The older prisoners and “trusties” soon break in the new ones and the latter quickly learn that, in view of the indefiniteness of their stay, good behavior and the quickest possible conversion to Nazism are their only chance of release. The intellectually honest are out of luck.

The camp is located on the site of huge war-time munition works. The machine shops and machinery were blown up on the orders of the Allies. Scattered remnants of these are mute testimony of Germany’s defeat and additional confirmation to the Nazis that they are right.

Assails destruction of works

“The senseless destruction of such tremendous values belonging to the German people is a shame,” exclaimed Deputy Commander Michael Lippert, the correspondent’s guide. “It is an object lesson for our Communists which they quickly comprehend.”

Some of the sheds of the administration building, especially the concrete one-story barracks which formerly housed the munition workers, were left standing and they constitute the concentration camp. In this respect the Dachau prisoners are probably better off than in most camps.

Surrounding the camp is a seen-foot wall topped off with barbed wire and a short distance beyond have been placed barbed-wire entanglements. Between the wall and the entanglements there are patrols of guards clad in gray green service denim. They are armed with rifles while machine guns are strategically placed and manned by alert crews with fingers at the triggers ready to mow down the rebellious or check any flight.

Asked whether there had been many escapes the guide said: “No, only one that was staged from a workshop outside the camp.”

Labor gangs repair road

Dachau is ruled by both prison regulations and rules of military discipline. That is apparent on every hand. On approaching the camp, after satisfying the challenging patrols with a pass obtained from the secret State Police, the correspondent saw labor gangs at work repairing a road under the supervision of armed guards and under the muzzles of machine guns. It was a blazing hot day and the men were stripped to the waist. Most of them were sunburned a dark brown, but the red of some betrayed recent arrivals.

They seemed to work with a sort of fury within them, betrayed in part by the vehemence with which they dug up the earth, but most of all by the tortured looks on their faces, which ranged all the way from rage and bitterness to bewildered hopelessness.

Later your correspondent learned that most of them had been put to work under the burning sun as a disciplinary measure, for the day was so hot that most of the prisoners had been relieved of all outside work. This was evident as soon as the camp gates were passed. Stretched out over the entire campground were about 1,500 idling men. They ranged from boys of 17 to white-haired old men.

All types were represented – sturdy peasants, manual laborers and bespectacled intellectuals, and there were also faces usually attributed to a city’s underworld. All were clad only in grey trousers or just in bathing suits, having taken off as much of the grey prison uniform as possible.

Most Do Nothing

Most of them were lying in the grass and some were in the shade of the few available trees. A few were bathing in a makeshift swimming pool. The rest were visible between the rows of barracks, some playing chess, a few reading books, most simply doing nothing. It was an almost idyllic picture of a rest camp. That it was not a rest camp, however, was evident very soon.

The disillusioning thing, besides the grim, efficient-looking guards and their rifles, was in the faces of the prisoners. Under a smiling sky, there was not a smile in the 2,000. They looked sour, grim, sullen, sad or merely apathetic. Thoughts of other things than the beauty of nature and the peacefulness of scene obviously engaged their minds. And dark were the looks which greeted the Deputy Commander accompanying the correspondent.

Nevertheless, as soon as they were approached, all groups quickly sprang to attention. Caps were whipped off the many heads and heels clicked. When the correspondent and his guide entered a barracks room, corporals bawled out, just as in the army, “Attention!” Then reported “Corporalship So-and-So. Twelve men. Everything in order.”

Herr Lippert explained that the prisoners were organized in companies and corporalships, each under a leader selected among the prisoners themselves, who were responsible for the order of the men and the cleanliness of the barracks.

“For their own comfort, the men see that any pig among them is cleaned up and stays clean,” Herr Lippert asserted.

Barracks are clean

Indeed, the barracks were as clean as a whistle. Each room contained four tiers of three bunks each, one atop another, crude wooden affairs filled with straw, but covered by clean, blue-white bedclothes neatly folded.

The correspondent found the guards had precisely the same accommodations. In fact, their quarters were more cramped, the rooms smaller and lower, allowing only two bunks atop each other.

Both prisoners and guards eat the same kind of food. That is a principle Chancellor Hitler is enforcing for himself as well as his men, namely, that all Germans are comrades, even if political enemies, and should live more or less alike. Some of Herr Hitler’s lieutenants are less meticulous than others in carrying out the principle, but it is certainly enforced at Dachau.

All was not idleness within the camp. Some sheds had been converted into artisan shops, and here the skilled prisoners worked. Tailors sewed grey prisoners uniforms, bootmakers built boots, carpenters made doors and windows and locksmiths made the necessary fastenings. Even an arts shop was created where woodcarvers and sculptors were busy and a studio with a proper skylight housed an artist making crayon sketches. But all the art work had reference to the Nazi movement – there were Hitler and Goering medallions, swastika cross emblems and Hitler and Goering pictures, sold at fifty pfennings apiece. Other art work apparently is prohibited as contrary to Nazi pedagogics. Yet the artist was among the most satisfied-looking in the entire camp.

The Order of the Day

Following is the order of the day: 5 A.M. arising time, 5:30 coffee, 7 to 10:30 work, including a twenty-minute pause; then the midday meal and a rest; 2 P.M. to 5 work, including a twenty-minute pause; 6 supper, 8 counting assembly when every prisoner must be accounted for, and 9 lights out and bed.

The prisoners may write two letters a month, although there is no limit on letters addressed to the prisoners and they may receive two parcels a month, but only clothes and laundry. Food shipments, except sweets, are prohibited because of the danger of smuggling arms. The prisoners may also receive money from home, but only up to 5 marks a week, with which they may buy additional food from the canteen. This sells everything, including near beer, but no alcohol. Finally, good work is rewarded by an additional allotment of bread.

April 30, 1945 - liberation of Dachau (New York Times)

This second New York Times article is about the liberation of Dachau.

Dachau captured by Americans who kill guards, liberate 32,000

DACHAU, Germany, April 30 - Dachau, Germany's most dreaded extermination camp, has been captured and its surviving 32,000 tortured inmates have been freed by outraged American troops who killed or captured its brutal garrison in a furious battle....

Prisoners with access to records said that 9,000 captives had died of hunger and disease or been shot in the past three months, and 14,000 more had perished during the winter. Typhus was prevalent in the camp and the city's water supply was reported to have been contaminated by drainage from 6,000 graves near the prison.

39 Cars Full of Bodies

A short time after the battle there was a train of thirty-nine coal cars on a siding. The cars were loaded with hundreds of bodies and from them was removed at least one pitiful human wreck that still clung to life. These victims were mostly Poles and most of them had starved to death as the train stood there idle for several days. Lying alongside a busy road near by were the murdered bodies of those who had tried to escape.

Bavarian peasants - who traveled this road daily - ignored both the bodies and the horrors inside the camp to turn the American seizure of their city into an orgy of looting. Even German children rode by the bodies without a glance, carrying stolen clothing....

The camp held 32,000 emaciated, unshaven men and 350 women, jammed in the wooden barracks. Prisoners said that 7,000 others had been marched away on foot during the past few days. The survivors went wild with joy as the Americans broke open their pens, smothering their liberators with embraces.

Bodies were found in many places. Here also were the gas chambers - camouflaged as "showers" into which prisoners were herded under the pretext of bathing - and the cremation ovens. Huge stacks of clothing bore mute testimony to the fate of their owners.

A French general was slain last week as he walked toward a truck, believing that he was to be evacuated, prisoners reported. They said that Elite Guards [SS] had shot him in the back.

The Americans stormed through the camp with tornadic fury. Not a stone's throw from a trainload of corpses lay the bleeding bodies of sixteen guards shot down as they fled....

When Lieut. Col. Will Cowling of Leavenworth, Kan., slipped the lock in the main gate, there was still no sign of life inside this area. He looked around for a few seconds and then a tremendous human cry roared forth. A flood of humanity poured across the flat yard - which would hold a half dozen baseball diamonds - and Colonel Cowling was all but mobbed.

Rescued by soldiers

He was hoisted to the shoulders of the seething, swaying crowd of Russians, Poles, Frenchmen, Czechs, and Austrians, cheering the Americans in their native tongues. The American colonel was rescued by soldiers, but the din kept up.

Flags appeared and waved from the barracks. There was even an American flag, although only one American was held there. He is a major from Chicago captured behind the German lines when he was on special assignment for the Office of Strategic Services [predecessor of the CIA during WWII - RL].

New York Times, June 10, 1945 - Estimate of number of Jews murdered

The New York Times reported on June 10, 1945, about the number of Jews killed by the Nazis. Since this is such an early report, some of the information in this article was later known to be inaccurate, but this is the first version of what happened to the Jews of Europe under the Nazis.

80% OF REICH JEWS MURDERED BY NAZIS
All Those Left in Europe were Marked for Death by 1946, AMG [Allied Military Government] Investigation Shows
Only 150,000 Survived
Extermination Plan Revealed - Russians Estimate Several Million Died in East

FRANKFURT ON MAIN, Germany, June 8 (Delayed) (U.P.) - The Nazis exterminated at least 80 percent of Germany's Jews, and every remaining Jew in occupied Europe was marked for murder before the summer of 1946, it was revealed today.

It now is possible to give the full story of the Nazis' plan to wipe out all of Europe's 12,000,000 Jews. Allied Military Government authorities, after a painstaking study, reported that a majority of the Jews in Germany met death between 1939 and 1942. Russian officials estimate several million Jews were exterminated at concentration camps in Poland and White Russia during the German occupation.

On the basis of this information, it is believed that less than 20 percent, or about 150,000 of the original group in the Reich, survived the reign of terror. These survivors are being returned to their homes as soon as possible. Germans who dispossessed them are being ousted. In most cases, this is done without serious friction, despite the years of intensive anti-Semitic propaganda.

Synagogues Reopened

In several cities, including Aachen, Cologne, and Frankfort on Main, synagogues have been reopened and Jewish services conducted for the first time since November, 1938.

Some homeless Jews are cared for by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. Included are 500 Jewish children, mostly between the ages of 15 and 17, but some as young as 10. They were rescued from the Buchenwald camp and now are at Thionville in Lorraine, in the French zone.

The Nazis' master plan was engineered by Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, reportedly an Allied prisoner. He was aided by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and Gestapo Chief Heinrich Himmler. The plan originally called for a "Jew-free Reich" by April 1, 1942, as a birthday present to Adolf Hitler, but it was slowed down by transportation difficulties.

Its first stage began after Poland fell in 1939. Jews were to be used as slave laborers in war factories built in that country. They were to die gradually of starvation,  disease and cold. The first contingent of Jews from Germany was rounded up in Stettin, Cologne and Frankfort on Main - about 50,000 in all. They were shipped to Lublin in October and November, 1939. Transportation trouble set in and only a few thousand were deported eastward during the next two years.

Few left unmolested

The drive began in earnest in September, 1941. It continued full blast until scarcely a Jew was left unmolested in Germany or any occupied country. In Berlin the Nazis began in 1941 to deport about 20,000 persons eastward each month. They were stripped, searched, robbed and then packed in trucks and rail cars. Some worked in airplane and textile plants. Others were thrown into ghettos. Thousands went straight to extermination camps.

Relatives and friends in the Reich seldom if ever heard of them again. More than once the trains were stopped and all Jews were ordered out and massacred.

The third stage of the program was launched early in 1943, well after the original deadline for the whole plan. The Nazis rounded up and deported Jews from France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Some were sent to Poland and others to concentration camps in Germany. Tens of thousands were killed monthly in these camps. The Nazis in 1943 began emptying the ghettos of Warsaw, Riga, Lublin and other large cities, and started systematic extermination by gas.

UNRRA officials expressed the belief that if the war had lasted another year, the Nazis might have come very close to their objective of wiping out all Jews in Europe.

Starvation Still Reported

The Vaad Hatzala Emergency Committee, with headquarters at 32 Nassau Street, disclosed yesterday that Jewish survivors of Nazi horror camps, freed but temporarily residing there until they can be repatriated or emigrated, "are living under conditions bordering upon starvation." The committee said that it had received word of the plight of the Jewish survivors from Isaac Sternbuch, its representative in Switzerland, who made a cabled plea for relief funds.

Mr. Sternbuch said all available food stocks purchased abroad with Vaad Hatzala funds already had been dispatched on International Red Cross trucks to concentration camps at Landsberg, Dachau, Mauthausen and Theresienstadt.

Human Rights Watch - Obsession with Israel

The Sunday Times (London) has just published an article on Human Rights Watch's most controversial ex-employee, Marc Garlasco (whose hobby was collecting Nazi memorabilia). The article also nails HRW on their obsession with Israel/Palestine above other conflict zones in the world.

Every year, Human Rights Watch puts out up to 100 glossy reports — essentially mini books — and 600-700 press releases, according to Daly, a former journalist for The Independent.

Some conflict zones get much more coverage than others. For instance, HRW has published five heavily publicised reports on Israel and the Palestinian territories since the January 2009 war.

In 20 years they have published only four reports on the conflict in Indian-controlled Kashmir, for example, even though the conflict has taken at least 80,000 lives in these two decades, and torture and extrajudicial murder have taken place on a vast scale. Perhaps even more tellingly, HRW has not published any report on the postelection violence and repression in Iran more than six months after the event.

When I asked the Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson if HRW was ever going to release one, she said: “We have a draft, but I’m not sure I want to put one out.” Asked the same question, executive director Kenneth Roth told me that the problem with doing a report on Iran was the difficulty of getting into the country.

I interviewed a human-rights expert at a competing organisation in Washington who did not wish to be named because “we operate in a very small world and t’s not done to criticise other human-rights organisations”. He told me he was “not surprised” that HRW has still not produced a report on the violence in Iran: “They are thinking about how it’s going to be used politically in Washington. And it’s not a priority for them because Iran is just not a bad guy that they are interested in highlighting. Their hearts are not in it. Let’s face it, the thing that really excites them is Israel.”

Noah Pollak, a New York writer who has led some of the criticisms against HRW, points out that it cares about Palestinians when maltreated by Israelis, but is less concerned if perpetrators are fellow Arabs. For instance, in 2007 the Lebanese army shelled the Nahr al Bared refugee camp near Tripoli (then under the control of Fatah al Islam radicals), killing more than 100 civilians and displacing 30,000. HRW put out a press release — but it never produced a report.

Such imbalance was at the heart of a public dressing-down that shook HRW in October. It came from the organisation’s own founder and chairman emeritus, the renowned publisher Robert Bernstein, who took it to task in The New York Times for devoting its resources to open and democratic societies rather than closed ones. (Originally set up as Helsinki Watch, the group’s original brief was to expose abuses of human rights behind the iron curtain.)

“Nowhere is this more evident than its work in the Middle East,” he wrote. “The region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human-rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel… than of any other country in the region.”

Bernstein pointed out that Israel has “a population of 7.4m, is home to at least 80 human-rights organisations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government…and probably more journalists per capita than any other country in the world… Meanwhile the Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350m people and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic”.

Bernstein concluded that if HRW did not “return to its founding mission and the spirit of humility that animated it… its credibility will be seriously undermined and its important role in the world significantly diminished”. HRW’s response was ferocious — and disingenuous. In their letters to the paper, Roth and others made it sound as if Bernstein had said that open societies and democracies should not be monitored at all.

It turns out that even Garlasco was not as enthused about the anti-Israel line of HRW as his bosses in New York wanted him to be:

Associates of Garlasco have told me that there had long been tensions between Garlasco and HRW’s Middle East Division in New York — perhaps because he sometimes stuck his neck out and did not follow the HRW line. Garlasco himself apparently resented what he felt was pressure to sex up claims of Israeli violations of laws of war in Gaza and Lebanon, or to stick by initial assessments even when they turned out to be incorrect.

In June 2006, Garlasco had alleged that an explosion on a Gaza beach that killed seven people had been caused by Israeli shelling. However, after seeing the details of an Israeli army investigation that closely examined the relevant ballistics and blast patterns, he subsequently told the Jerusalem Post that he had been wrong and that the deaths were probably caused by an unexploded munition in the sand. But this went down badly at Human Rights Watch HQ in New York, and the admission was retracted by an HRW press release the next day.

Emphasis mine.

Israel - the "faith homeland" of Jews?

A columnist for the Dallas Morning News, Mark Davis, has written an article where he also presumes to tell American Jews what we should think about Israel and the Obama administration - American Jews and the Israel conundrum.

His article reveals a deep misunderstanding about the nature of Israel and what it means to most American Jews.

He writes:

There is something fundamentally wrong when I care more about Israel than the American Jewish community.

As a Christian, I have the most fundamental of differences with my Jewish brothers and sisters. I believe Jesus is the Son of God, and they don't. But when it comes to the precious value of Israel as an ally that needs protection and support, we have another disagreement. I am passionate about it, and they are not. 

I mean that collectively. To the Jewish readers who truly care about their faith homeland: I know you exist. And I ask you: Why aren't you in the majority?

The basis for my observation is the whopping 77 percent of the Jewish vote garnered by Barack Obama in 2008. This is roughly the same percentage won by Democratic presidential nominees John Kerry and Al Gore. 

I have no problem absorbing the apparent fact that America's Jewish population leans sharply liberal. Fine. So do America's black community and its Hispanic community. But in siding with Democrats– and this president in particular – Jewish voters placed a leftist agenda above the interests of the nation that is their faith homeland.

Mr. Davis appears to be unaware that the Democratic Party has, historically, been just as supportive of Israel as the Republican Party. President Harry Truman recognized the state of Israel minutes after its founding in 1948. It was President Dwight Eisenhower (Republican) who in 1956 told the Israelis that they had to leave the Sinai Peninsula (after they seized it in collusion with the British and the French). Richard Nixon, who seems to have been an anti-semite, airlifted arms to Israel after the Yom Kippur War broke out. President George H.W. Bush threatened to withhold loan guarantees from Israel in order to get Prime Minister Shamir to the negotiating table. President Bill Clinton tried to make peace between Israel and the Palestinians at the end of his term in 2000. President George W. Bush supported almost everything the Israeli government wanted, but refused Israel permission to fly over Iraq on the way to bomb the Iranian nuclear installations. But all of these presidents, and the U.S. Congress, have for many decades supported Israel, regardless of their party affiliations.

Barack Obama may be more liberal than the current crop of hard-right Republicans, but that doesn't make him any less supportive of Israel. And unlike them, he recognizes that the settlements are an obstacle to peace negotiations with the Palestinians. (On their side, the Palestinians also have many obstacles to peace negotiations with Israel, including the fact that they are split into Hamas and Fatah).

The second problem with his essay is his reference to Israel as the "faith homeland" of American Jews. I must admit this is the first time I have heard this curious phrase. In all of my reading about Zionism, Israel is referred to as, among other things, the national homeland of the Jewish people, or as the state of the Jewish people. That is, all the Jewish people, regardless of whether they are religious or not. Being Jewish does not mean that one belongs to a particular "faith." There are Jewish atheists and agnostics who are Zionists. Being Jewish may mean that one practices the Jewish religion - but unlike Christianity, Judaism as a religion is not centered around faith. From the Protestant standpoint, in fact, Judaism is centered around works, which classic Protestant theology has a lot of problems with.

By calling Israel the "faith homeland" of the American Jewish community, Mr. Davis is denying the way that many Jews define themselves - as members of a worldwide people, as members of the Jewish nation. He is trying to force Jewish identity into a Protestant model. There are some Jews who probably would agree with him - this was certainly the model of the classic Reform movement in the United States - but I suspect that most Jews would find this term as strange as I do.

Obama not an insult to all Jews

Zionist Organization of America: Obama's Israel stance 'an insult' to all Jews.

Well, no. Maybe an insult to very right wing Jews who don't want to compromise at all to make peace, but not an insult to all Jews.

I'm going to Tartu!

I just made my plane reservations for my summer journeys this year. I'm going to Israel for a little over a month, and then I'll be heading north - very far north - to Latvia, Estonia, and Denmark. The reason I'm traveling there is because the international Society of Biblical Literature conference is in Tartu, Estonia, in the last week of July. My paper proposal was accepted and I decided to go. I haven't been to the international SBL yet and thought it would be interesting.

When I called my travel agent yesterday, she had quite a job on her hands, trying to figure out a reasonable itinerary for me that wouldn't break the bank. When I leave Israel on July 21, I'll be flying on Air Baltic to Riga (there's a direct flight from Tel Aviv, who knew), staying there for a couple of days, and then flying to Tartu, where I'll be spending about a week. After the conference, I'll be taking another Air Baltic flight to Copenhagen, where I'll spend another couple of days, and then back to Ithaca, New York.

I was looking online for some interesting photo of Tartu to include in this post, and stumbled across an amusing blog about Estonia written by Justin Petrone, an American who lives there and is married to an Estonian - Itching for Eestimaa. He's also written a book about his experiences in Estonia - My Estonia: Passport forgery, meat jelly eaters, and other stories.

Malkin Award Nominees - Hagai Ben-Artzi and Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan gives Netanyahu's brother-in-law the Malkin Award nomination, which he richly deserves for his idiotic statement that Obama is an anti-semite. But Sullivan himself equally deserves it for his own idiotic statement about the fact that Hagai Ben Artzi's interview was on Army Radio. He says: "Army Radio? Not good. But it's only a matter of time, I have learned, between anyone actually criticizing the policies of Israel and being deemed a you-know-what."

What does Ben-Artzi's interview being on Army Radio have to do with anything? Sullivan is revealing his abysmal ignorance of Israeli society with this remark. Army Radio (Galei Zahal) is staffed by young draftees who are often challenging to authority and by no means always follows the government "line" on an issue. It is not a rigidly government-run radio station that interviews people like Ben-Artzi in order to covertly express government policies or opinions, which seems to be what Sullivan is implying.

I wouldn't accuse Sullivan of being anti-semitic, but I do hold him responsible for his headlong run into the right-wing/left-wing convergence that believes that Israel can do no right. I wonder when he'll start blogging about the U.S.S. Liberty - when he does, we'll know he's disappeared into the black hole of reflexive anti-Israelism.

He is increasingly revealing his real ignorance of Israel, Israeli society, and the complex history of Palestine/Israel in the 20th century. Before he shoots off his mouth more, he needs to sit down and do some serious reading for a few months. He should take a hint from his fellow Atlantic blogger, Ta-Nehisi Coates, who when he wants to write about something serious, like the Civil War, sits down, reads a lot, visits Civil War sites, talks to people who know a lot, and then writes very insightful and thoughtful posts about contentious topics.

Day of Rage over the Hurva?

Apparently there's something truly offensive about Israel rebuilding a synagogue in the Jewish Quarter: Jerusalem on high alert after Hamas announces 'day of rage.'

Warnings of widespread violence in Jerusalem on Monday proved to be unneeded, but police say the real test will be Tuesday.

Hamas announced a "day of rage" in response to the dedication of the restored Hurva synagogue in the Old City's Jewish Quarter, police said. Large forces will continue to be deployed throughout the city, with 3,000 police and border police officers stationed in East Jerusalem and neighboring villages.

Police on Monday attributed the relative quiet to the limitations placed on entry to Temple Mount and to the extensive police work. Palestinian commentators said Monday the general Palestinian public seems to disapprove of the leadership's attempts to fan the flames.

The quiet does not appear to have been affected by attempts of senior Hamas and Fatah officials to ratchet up the violence. On Sunday, Fatah's Mahmoud Dahlan and Hatem Abdelkader called on residents of East Jerusalem and Israeli Arabs to arrive and defend the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount.

Palestinian Liberation Organization Executive Committee chairman Yasser Abed Rabo called on Israel to refrain from dedicating the Hurva synagogue. Hamas, too, warned of bloodshed if the synagogue is dedicated, and similar warnings have been made by Egyptian and Jordanian diplomats.

So let me get this - Hamas, Fatah, Egypt, and Jordan all say that if a synagogue is dedicated, it will lead to bloodshed. Why? Nobody pretends that the Hurva was anything but a synagogue, and that it was destroyed in the fighting in 1948. Why should its rebuilding and rededication cause anyone a problem? It's nowhere near Al-Aqsa, it's in the middle of the Jewish Quarter. Any final status agreement, regardless of what else it says, will give the Jewish Quarter to Israel. It won't be under Palestinian sovereignty.

I think that Jeffrey Goldberg is right:

The fact that Hamas -- and even some in Fatah -- are protesting this rededication means that we might still be at square one, which is to say, where Arafat was in 2000, when he denied the historical Jewish connection to Jerusalem. This is not about building apartments for Jews near Arab villages on the outskirts of Jerusalem. I think Arab East Jerusalem should be the capital of Palestine, and if the price of peace is turning over those apartment buildings to the Palestinian Authority, then so be it. But this is about denying the right of Judaism to exist in its holiest city.

Rededication of Hurva Synagogue

One of the striking architectural elements of the Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem for many years was the remnant of the curving arch of the Hurva Synagogue, which was destroyed in 1948. The synagogue has now been rebuilt and it was rededicated today. The Palestinian Authority and the Islamic Movement in Israel have, as is their wont when it comes to the Jewish presence in the Old City, claimed that this is a threat to Al-Aqsa mosque. The Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi of Israel, Yona Metzger (whom I otherwise do not particularly like) did his best at today's ceremony to soothe anxieties.



Chief Rabbi: Talk about new temple a lie

Chief Rabbi of Israel Yona Metzger sent a calming message to the Muslim world Monday, amid tensions over the inauguration of the Hurva Synagogue in Jerusalem.

Metzger and Western Wall Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz both set the mezuzah at the synagogue jambs earlier in the afternoon.

"Pay no attention to malicious slander. All we are doing is resurrecting the 'Hurva,' which was destroyed 60 years ago. We have no intention of rebuilding the temple, not this week – unless the Almighty God descends it from the heavens," said the chief rabbi during the inauguration ceremony.

"All the rumors that suggest we will later march on Temple Mount are just that – rumors. A media spin by anti-Semites that wish us harm."

Torah scrolls were brought to the building yesterday in preparation for today's rededication, and the Palestinian Authority seized the opportunity to raise tensions.

Hundreds of people took part in a ceremony bringing a new Torah scroll into the restored Hurva Synagogue in the Old City's Jewish Quarter on Sunday. The ceremony in east Jerusalem was held under heavy security after the Palestinian Authority joined the Islamic Movement in its calls for Muslims to flock to the al-Aqsa Mosque in response to extremist Jews' plans to lay a cornerstone at the Temple Mount.

Extreme rightists Itamar Ben-Gvir and Baruch Marzel were also on hand for the ceremony, during which a Torah scroll was placed in the restored synagogue.

Earlier Sunday, Hatem Abdel Kader, the Fatah official in charge of the Jerusalem portfolio, urged Palestinians in Jerusalem and Israel to declare their plans to travel to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in the Old City and barricade themselves there starting Monday.

Meanwhile, police have declared they will not allow the Israeli rightists to go through with their plans to lay a cornerstone at the site.

Right-wingers were apparently planning a march around the Old City tomorrow, but the police have now banned the march.

In order to minimize friction between the two religions on the Temple Mount, the police decided to cancel a right-wing marched "around the gates of the Temple Mount" planned for Tuesday. Thousands of people were slated to partake in the march. Rightist officials were outraged by the cancellation. Similar marches, during which participants sing and dance around the complex and stop to pray at each gate, have been held on the first of the Hebrew month for nine years running.

Trolling the racist right

Steve Sailer of VDare.com gives us his words of wisdom: Thoughts On America’s Jewish Ruling Class And Noblesse Oblige

Mr. Sailer is also the movie critic for the American Conservative, Pat Buchanan's paleoconservative rag which looks fondly back on Lindburgh and the America Firsters.

For more on him, see a SPLC Hatewatch article on on how he became a source for CNN's "Black in America" series.

Correction: Netanyahu did not know about announcement of new housing

I guess Sullivan was right: PM demanded no surprises from Yishai during Biden visit.

US Vice President Joe Biden left Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "hanging" for no less than an hour and a half, as the latter, along with his wife Sara, were waiting for him at the dinner table. The sole explanation for such extreme tardiness in American diplomacy is that it was an expression of discontent over the Ministry of Interior's approval of 1,600 new housing units in disputed east Jerusalem earlier Tuesday – and the harsh condemnation that followed.

The embarrassment proved even bigger, as the prime minister was not informed of the decision. Ynet learned Tuesday evening that although Interior Minister Eli Yishai's claimed the decision's timing was coincidental, Netanyahu requested to be informed about construction permits in Jerusalem and the West Bank on several occasions in the past.

Despite Netanyahu's repeated requests, he was not updated vis-à-vis the latest plan, and the government was unable to avoid a last minute rift with the Palestinian Authority, just before renewing negotiations.

After several past incidents relating to construction in Jerusalem and the West Bank, the prime minister instructed the ministers supervising construction in "sensitive areas" to remain alert and avoid political embarrassments that could severely damage future relations with the US and the Palestinians.

Netanyahu asked Yishai and Housing and Construction Minister Ariel Atias to be involved in decision making, in order to prevent "surprises".

The prime minister assured the US vice president that the timing was coincidental, and was not meant to impede the political process with the Palestinians. "The prime minister is not ashamed of the construction in Jerusalem," said a source close to Netanyahu,

"However, he certainly is not interested in creating a political debacle. It is important to create a good atmosphere, and avoid disagreements with Washington – especially during the vice president's important visit."

Senior cabinet ministers said on Tuesday that they were uncertain whether the step was a mistake on the part of the Interior Ministry or an intentional move. "If it was intentional, this is very serious," said one Labor minister.

Minister Isaac Herzog said, "This is a serious failure. Netanyahu must make sure it is not repeated. It is not clear who is responsible for this, but what is certain is that this will cause harm to anyone seeking the peace process."

Elements in the political establishment criticized Netanyahu's conduct and one source said, "If Netanyahu and his ministers don't know about their ministries, this is a joke. Time after time scandals occur that harm the State. This should raise questions as to Netanyahu's conduct and his ability to control the ministers and the government."

MK Yoel Hasson (Kadima) said, "It seems the Netanyahu government has its sights set on getting Israel in trouble with one of our biggest friends in the world. Humiliating the vice president of the US, Joe Bidden, is far worse than the humiliation of the Turkish ambassador by Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon.

"They humiliated the Turkish ambassador with a low chair, but the US vice president they humiliated with 1,600 housing units. Netanyahu runs the government amateurishly, in a way that is reminiscent of the way a Likud branch is run in some godforsaken town."

Israel Humiliates Biden - Andrew Sullivan

Sullivan writes today -

It appears Netanyahu was blindsided by this as well [the announcement of 1600 new housing units in east Jerusalem]. As I have pointed out, Netanyahu is now the Israeli center, but Netanyahu still openly backs new settlements in East Jerusalem for Israeli Jews and Israeli Jews alone. And he would not be prime minister without the support of his religious right. And they believe that the West Bank is God's land - for them alone. And in that, they have the full backing of the Christianist right in the US.

I'm not so sure that Netanyahu was blindsided by this, given what he was doing the night before Biden arrived in Israel - participating in a rally with John Hagee and Christians United for Israel. Sullivan above cites Palin as a representative of the Christian right, but Hagee is a more salient figure here.

The virtual peace process between Israelis and Palestinians

Israel and the Palestinians are supposed to be starting "proximity talks" mediated by the U.S. and Vice President Biden has just arrived in Israel to kick them off.

Do we think these talks will go anywhere? Two indications that the Israelis mean them to be pure window-dressing:

1. On the eve of Biden's visit, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and John Hagee Share Stage as Biden Arrives in Israel.

Prime Minister Netanyahu and John Hagee have again spit in the eye of peace process attempts. There was no doubt about the significance of the timing and the message of the event. The messages were blatant and brazen, including a number of coded references to the eventual Christian supremacy over Israel which were included in both Hagee's speech and more shockingly in the invocation of Rabbi Shlomo Riskin. Whether Riskin understands the implications of his words to that particular audience is unclear.

Netanyahu and Hagee did this before, when he was prime minister in 1998:

In 1998 Netanyahu had traveled to the U.S. to meet with President Bill Clinton concerning peace efforts. However, before meeting with Clinton, Netanyahu spoke to hundreds of Christian Zionists assembled by Jerry Falwell and John Hagee at the Mayflower Hotel. In a blatant snub of Clinton and the peace efforts, John Hagee led the crowd in chants of "not one inch," referring to no withdrawal from the West Bank settlements. With little fanfare and almost no press coverage, Netanyahu and Hagee have pulled the same stunt again.

2. The Israeli Interior Ministry's Regional Planning and Building Commission just approved today the building of 1600 more homes in Ramat Shlomo, a haredi neighborhood in East Jerusalem. This is of course on top of other announcements of continued Israeli building in Jerusalem neighborhoods over the Green Line (an announcement of additional housing units in Beitar Illit was made yesterday), and the large-scale entry of Jewish settlers into Sheikh Jarrah and other nearby neighborhoods of Arab east Jerusalem.

In reaction, "Palestinian Authority negotiator Saeb Erekat slammed the move, saying it was destroying trust needed to go forward with the new round of indirect peace talks, which the two sides agreed this week would take place under the mediation of US envoy George Mitchell. 'With such an announcement, how can you build trust? This is destroying our efforts to work with Mr. Mitchell," Erekat said. "It's a really disastrous situation. I hope that this will be an eye-opener for all in the international community about the need to have the Israeli government stop such futile exercises.'"

For a thoroughly depressing report on the recent developments, see today's New York Times article: As Biden visits, Israel unveils plan for new settlements.

Armenian genocide denial

The Southern Poverty Law Center two years ago (summer 2008) reported on the Turkish propaganda campaign in the United States to deny the Armenian genocide. The Turkish government has spent millions of dollars supporting scholars and members of Congress alike to "prove" that the genocide did not occur during WWI.

Early this year [2008], the Toronto District School Board voted to require all public high school students in Canada's largest city to complete a new course titled "Genocide: Historical and Contemporary Implications." It includes a unit on the Armenian genocide, in which more than a million Armenians perished in a methodical and premeditated scheme of annihilation orchestrated by the rulers of Turkey during and just after World War I.

The school board members each soon received a letter from Guenter Lewy, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, rebuking them for classifying the Armenian genocide in the same category as the Holocaust. "The tragic fate of the Armenian community during World War I," Lewy wrote, is best understood as "a badly mismanaged war-time security measure," rather than a carefully plotted genocide.

Lewy is one of the most active members of a network of American scholars, influence peddlers and website operators, financed by hundreds of thousands of dollars each year from the government of Turkey, who promote the denial of the Armenian genocide — a network so influential that it was able last fall to defy both historical truth and enormous political pressure to convince America's lawmakers and even its president to reverse long-held policy positions.

And the same thing has just happened this year. The House Foreign Relations Committee just passed a resolution by a 23-22 vote declaring that the killing of Armenians was genocide. This resolution was opposed by the Obama administration even though both Secretary of State Clinton and President Obama supported such a resolution when they were Senators.

In 2007, Clinton was co-sponsor with Senator Harry Reid of a Senate resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide. A press release of 4/18/2007 from the Armenian National Committee of America also refers to Obama's position:

Last week, during remarks at a Washington, DC breakfast for Illinois constituents, Senator Barak Obama, fielded a question from ANCA Eastern U.S. Executive Director Karine Birazian about his support for the Armenian Genocide Resolution. In his response, he explained to the audience the basic facts about the Genocide and promised to give careful consideration to cosponsoring the measure.

See Harry's Place for a longer discussion of this issue - Obama's failure to acknowledge Armenian genocide.

See also a good discussion by David Schraub on Jewish American lobbyists who in 2007 lobbied on the Turkish side against the genocide resolution: Genocide Denial. (Guenter Lewy, mentioned above in the SPLC report, is Jewish - he was born in Germany in 1923 and fled with his family to Palestine in 1939).

Sen. Roy Ashburn: 'I'm gay'

This is sad. California Republican state senator Roy Ashburn, was arrested for drunk driving last week when he was leaving a gay bar. He consistently voted against any and all gay rights measures in the California legislature, and rallied with the "Traditional Values Coalition" in 2005 to oppose gay marriage and domestic partnerships. He has now come out as gay.

He said, "I'm gay. Those are the words that have been so difficult for me for so long." So why has it been so difficult for him? His erstwhile ally from the Traditional Values Coalition provides the reason:

Benjamin Lopez, lobbyist for the Traditional Values Coalition, said, "I don't know why Roy strayed."...

Lopez stood with Ashburn at a rally in Bakersfield in 2005 to support a state proposal to block gay marriage as well as to get rid of domestic partnerships with any benefits of marriage.

"I think it's sad more than hypocritical," Lopez said. "We're not in Roy's head. We don't know what is he thinking. We hope he comes to terms with whatever is making him make a choice to be a gay man."

Making a choice to be a gay man?! Is this guy crazy? Clearly Ashburn would love not to be a gay man. If he had any choice about it, he wouldn't be gay. He is gay, and he's just been outed by his own actions. I think that Ashburn is actually uncommonly courageous. Ted Haggard never was willing to admit that he is gay.

People like Lopez have a lot of responsibility for the suffering of gay people on their heads.