soc.culture.usa
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa
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Today's topics:

* TURKS DISCOVERED AMERICA LONG BEFORE Christopher Columbus - 2 messages, 2
authors
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/5c9c10fd0d5c020d
* Jorge Mas Canosa=Terrorist - 2 messages, 2 authors
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/679dbccfae7a85d
* ISRAELI LOBBY CRUSHING DISSENT IN AMERICA - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/c1f2f8c6e51cf048
* SHEEN'S CHALLENGE TO GUARDIAN - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/fae840661deb788a
* yet another book on Mohd - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/8d50ca0b7ee8e5c0
* The Endgame in Iraq - New York Times Edit'l - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/108a3d7ac0136ea2
* BRUTAL TACTICS OF THE U.S. WARS - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/c588db6cdd4fdb42
* do you agree or disagree? Holocaust extortion - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/21aa5d8be8c71d53
* Whining about Debra LeFave "double standard" - 2 messages, 2 authors
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/75a648f72ed7c92
* MORE BULLSHIT BY ELIE WIESEL-THE LIAR! - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/992da07741be86cf
* Hindus best at managing money - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/55410c7c7fa8b182
* ARMS MERCHANT6S OF DEATH... - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/280941053b7a35ef
* CALL THEM BY THEIR NAME: TERRORISTS - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/b81a9ba554aa50b0
* RACISM AGAINST PALESTINIANS - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/532de907afa12545
* Gogala's AMERIKA - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/e5847649fda182f9
* Fascist NAZI German bastards attacked the Kurdish Protestors! - 1 messages,
1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/85ab53a658ddaaa0
* Illegal immigration video - You might want to watch this... - 1 messages, 1
author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/c5e24c6d841e71ee
* Lobbyist Abramoff Gets Nearly 6 Years in Prison - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/c458767acc3b3beb
* Ali Baba BUSH Is Bringing DEMONCRAZY To The World - 1 messages, 1 author
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/a767c833edf7788e

==============================================================================
TOPIC: TURKS DISCOVERED AMERICA LONG BEFORE Christopher Columbus
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/5c9c10fd0d5c020d
==============================================================================

== 1 of 2 ==
Date: Mon, Apr 3 2006 1:38 am
From: vjp2.at@at.BioStrategist.dot.dot.com

A lot of folks "discovered" America before Columbus,
big deal (see recent book 1491 by C C Mann)

AmerIndians of North America are Turkic

I've heard Ainu music in Northern Japan and it sounds just like AmerIndian

Except those AmerIndians who WERE civilised (ie, Maya, Aztec.. weren't Turkic)

Scyths sound like Apache scalp-hunters to me:

Herodotus Persian Wars TranslGeoRawlinson

D64 In what concerns war, their customs are the following. The Scythian
soldier drinks the blood of the first man he overthrows in battle. Whatever
number he slays, he cuts off all their heads, and carries them to the king;
since he is thus entitled to a share of the booty, whereto he forfeits all
claim if he does not produce a head. In order to strip the skull of its
covering, he makes a cut round the head above the ears, and, laying hold of
the scalp, shakes the skull out; then with the rib of an ox he scrapes the
scalp clean of flesh, and softening it by rubbing between the hands, uses it
thenceforth as a napkin. The Scyth is proud of these scalps, and hangs them
from his bridle-rein; the greater the number of such napkins that a man can
show, the more highly is he esteemed among them. Many make themselves cloaks,
like the capotes of our peasants, by sewing a quantity of these scalps
together. Others flay the right arms of their dead enemies, and make of the
skin, which stripped off with the nails hanging to it, a covering for their
quivers. Now the skin of a man is thick and glossy, and would in whiteness
surpass almost all other hides. Some even flay the entire body of their
enemy, and stretching it upon a frame carry it about with them wherever they
ride. Such are the Scythian customs with respect to scalps and skins.

== 2 of 2 ==
Date: Mon, Apr 3 2006 1:40 am
From: "James A. Doemer"

In News e0pua8$o2u$4@reader1.panix.com,,
vjp2.at@at.BioStrategist.dot.dot.com at
vjp2.at@at.BioStrategist.dot.dot.com, typed this:

> A lot of folks "discovered" America before Columbus,
>

Yeah, like 19,000 years ago.

==============================================================================
TOPIC: Jorge Mas Canosa=Terrorist
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/679dbccfae7a85d
==============================================================================

== 1 of 2 ==
Date: Sun, Apr 2 2006 6:39 pm
From: "Miguel"

torresD wrote:
> http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB153/19650713.pdf

Dorotea,

Estas mas loca que una chiva.

Jorge Mas Canosa fue un gran cubano. Que Dios lo tenga en la gloria!

La Fundacion Cubano-Americana sigue adelante hasta la victoria.

Para mis hermanos latinos:

http://www.canf.org/2005/principal.htm

== 2 of 2 ==
Date: Mon, Apr 3 2006 1:54 am
From: " torresD"

"Miguel" <michaelgayoso1948@msn.com> wrote in message
news:1144028342.951172.231050@v46g2000cwv.googlegroups.com...
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB153/19650713.pdf

> Dorotea,

> Estas mas loca que una chiva.
Como exlicas ese documento, Miguelito?

> Jorge Mas Canosa fue un gran cubano. Que Dios lo tenga en la gloria!
>
> La Fundacion Cubano-Americana sigue adelante hasta la victoria.
>
> Para mis hermanos latinos:
>
> http://www.canf.org/2005/principal.htm

Jorge Mas Canosa fue el fundador financiero de Luis Posada Carriles
y Orlando Bosch.

Quiere que te de la lista de las bombas que los Cubanos/Terrorista
explotaron en los EE.UU?

Yo se que te la sabes de memoria.

==============================================================================
TOPIC: ISRAELI LOBBY CRUSHING DISSENT IN AMERICA
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/c1f2f8c6e51cf048
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sun, Apr 2 2006 9:43 pm
From: "serwad"

"BernardZ" <DontBother@NOSPAM.com> wrote in message
news:MPG.1e9a9f9cd44677af9896d4@west.Usenet-News.net...
> In article <vqJXf.4974$L7.763@bignews2.bellsouth.net>,
> serwad@bellsouth.net says...
>> The first weapon of choice for the Israeli lobby when someone with
>> prestige
>> publishes a soundly researched paper or book critical of Israel or its
>> powerful lobby is silence. If it's a book, it rarely gets reviewed; its
>> author doesn't get interviewed. If it's a paper, there are no news
>> stories
>> in the big corporate press, no interviews with the authors, no television
>> appearances.
>>
>
> Which book are you thinking of ALEX?
We do not need a book here in USA, we are living the Zionazi dictatorship!

==============================================================================
TOPIC: SHEEN'S CHALLENGE TO GUARDIAN
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/fae840661deb788a
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sun, Apr 2 2006 9:46 pm
From: "serwad"

"BernardZ" <DontBother@NOSPAM.com> wrote in message
news:MPG.1e9a9f221ce4d1459896d3@west.Usenet-News.net...
> In article <ejJXf.4973$L7.2210@bignews2.bellsouth.net>,
> serwad@bellsouth.net says...
>>
>>
>> SHEEN CHALLENGES GUARDIAN
>> Tuesday, March 28, 2006 - FreeMarketNews.com
>>
>> Charlie Sheen sent a statement to The Australian regarding a column in
>> the
>> London Guardian, which was syndicated all over the British commonwealth,
>> slamming the actor for his declarations about the unexplained
>> inconsistencies in official accounts of the bombings at the World Trade
>> Center towers in September 2001.
>>
>> According to an online news site, Sheen begins with a challenge: "I dare
>> you
>> to print this email in its entirety," and goes on to decry the "cut and
>> paste job" he says the Guardian column did. "[This] speaks volumes about
>> your credibility as a major media entity," he declares.
>>
>> He terms the use of personal attacks on his own checkered background,
>> rather
>> than addressing the subject itself, "transparent sandbox propaganda." He
>> urges the Guardian to "[d]o a little research on Building Seven, [which]
>> lives at the epicenter of my entire debate. Prove yourself worthy of
>> genuine
>> investigative journalism. Look at the video evidence. Observe the same
>> data
>> I have. Submit a formal request to the Pentagon or the DOD to release
>> video
>> proof that flight 77 did exactly as they claim. You will be stonewalled.
>> You
>> will be dismissed unconditionally. If there is nothing to hide - why are
>> they hiding it?"
>>
>>
>>
>
>
> Are we to believe that all the many air traffic controllers, who
> followed the flights on the three planes that struck the World Trade
> Center and Pentagon, along with the fourth that crashed short of its
> target, were in on the plot, along with the thousands of plain, ordinary
> citizens who witnessed the planes strike?

You are really stupid, aren't you. Has nothing to with the controllers when
the tapes are locked away in the vault!

==============================================================================
TOPIC: yet another book on Mohd
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/8d50ca0b7ee8e5c0
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sun, Apr 2 2006 9:47 pm
From: "rkusenet"

The Life and Religion of Mohammed
by J.L. Menezes
Fr. J.L. Menezes knew Islam up close: as a priest in India, he devoted his priestly life to
introducing that nation's tens of millions of Muslims to Christianity. With this life of Mohammed,
he left us the record of his appeals: a frank, honest, and exhaustively researched exploration of
the life of the "prophet" of Islam, the development and contents of the Koran, and an introduction
to various Muslim sects.

Working from the earliest Islamic sources, Fr. Menezes provides a complete account of Mohammed's
life, from his days as a simple merchant to his triumphs as a leader of armies and revered
prophet. Menezes delved so deeply into his subject that he was even able to describe Mohammed's
physical appearance. He explains why Mohammed couldn't possibly be a true prophet, and reveals the
true sources of his "revelations."

Fr. Menezes could be writing about today's Muslim terrorists when he explains that "Mohammed posed
as the apostle of God, the seal of the prophets; as the destroyer of idolatry; as preacher of one
true God, and the reformer of morals: while his life is marked by innumerable marriages; and great
licentiousness, deeds of rapine, warfare, conquests, unmerciful butcheries, all the time invoking
God's holy name to sanction his evil deeds, ordering prayers and alms deeds and at the same time
propagating Islam everywhere by fire and sword."

Turning to the Koran, Fr. Menezes delineates the distinctive teachings of Islam, explaining the
elements of the Muslim holy book that make it so difficult for Muslims to convert to
Christianity -- and showing how the Koran, when read honestly and without Islamic preconceptions,
nonetheless depends upon and leads to Christianity.

Fr. Menezes concludes with an "appeal to candor and common sense," inviting Muslims to think
critically about their religion, and to embrace Christ instead. With Islam on the march everywhere
and Muslims streaming into the U.S. in record numbers, the candor, common sense, and solid
Christian faith of this book are needed more than ever.

Your guide into the dark mind of Mohammed:

a.. The bizarre circumstances of Mohammed's "revelations": "it was a painful sight to behold the
nervousness of his features, the distortion of his countenance and the anxiety of mind portrayed
on his face"

b.. How worldly ambition gradually blinded Mohammed's mind and overwhelmed his early searches
for the true God

c.. How Mohammed borrowed many of his ideas of Paradise from contemporary Jews and Christians --
and mixed them with base and lewd imaginings

d.. How Mohammed again and again justified his rapine and licentiousness with new "divine
revelations"

e.. Why Mohammed grew so bitter against both Jews and Christians, after initially courting their
favor

f.. Mohammed's fateful order that all churches and synagogues in his domains be demolished

g.. How Mohammed ordered the assassinations of several of his chief opponents

h.. How even Mohammed's replies to his critics in the Koran are insufficient to refute the
charge that he was a false prophet who fabricated revelations

i.. Why Mohammed adopted -- and later discarded -- many Jewish customs and ritual observances

j.. Islamic tolerance: Mohammed let Jews and Christians live in his domains -- if they paid
tribute and accepted second-class status

k.. What the Koran really teaches about Christianity and Christ

l.. What Mohammed learned from heretical Christian sects -- and incorporated into the Koran

m.. The early history of Islam: just as bloody as the life of its founder

n.. How the Koran doesn't limit Muslims to four wives, as is widely believed, but actually sets
no real limit

o.. Why the new religion Mohammed taught became so commonly identified with war and politics

p.. The crisis caused in Islam by the death of Mohammed's only son -- which continues to this
day

q.. Sunnis, Shiites, Sufis, Motazalites and more: the differences between the various Muslim
sects

http://www.wndbookservice.com/products/BookPage.asp?prod_cd=c6614#continue

==============================================================================
TOPIC: The Endgame in Iraq - New York Times Edit'l
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/108a3d7ac0136ea2
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Mon, Apr 3 2006 1:48 am
From: vjp2.at@at.BioStrategist.dot.dot.com

It's always darkest before the dawn.

The Golden Mosque attrocity scared Iraqis into working together.

The terrorists are cracking, and releasing hostages.

In ten years Iraq will be a booming democracy like 1960s Germany.

As Iraq was 1920-1950.

The problem wasn't Islam, but Nasser.

- = -
Vasos-Peter John Panagiotopoulos II, Columbia'81+, Bio$trategist
BachMozart ReaganQuayle EvrytanoKastorian
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/vjp2/vasos.htm
---{Nothing herein constitutes advice. Everything fully disclaimed.}---
[Urb sprawl confounds terror] [Remorse begets zeal] [Windows is for Bimbos]
[Homeland Security means private firearms not lazy obstructive guards]

==============================================================================
TOPIC: BRUTAL TACTICS OF THE U.S. WARS
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/c588db6cdd4fdb42
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sun, Apr 2 2006 9:48 pm
From: "serwad"

"BernardZ" <DontBother@NOSPAM.com> wrote in message
news:MPG.1e9a9e56656f27869896d2@west.Usenet-News.net...
> In article <p9JXf.4971$L7.284@bignews2.bellsouth.net>,
> serwad@bellsouth.net says...
>> A small block of C-4
>> plastique is fixed to the front door of a house, the door is blown in,
>> and
>> several armored giants rush through the shock and smoke with their
>> automatic
>> weapons at the ready. Women and children are held to one side at
>> gunpoint,
>> while any men are taken roughly for questioning
>>
>
>
> Does not look like they are trying to kill anyone.
Is that how police enter homes in Australia? By blasting through the doors?
>
>
> Now Alex what do you think of Muslim fundamentalist that put C4 in the
> Spanish railway and killed hundreds of people?

You probably did not read about it but Spanish Court has exonerated AlQaeda
or any muslim organization for that crime!

==============================================================================
TOPIC: do you agree or disagree? Holocaust extortion
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/21aa5d8be8c71d53
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sun, Apr 2 2006 9:48 pm
From: "Tim Rogers"

Jake,
Liberator sucks, but you don't help those of us who have him Killfiled when
you cross post your less than witty reply to 5 usegroups, genius.

Tim

"Jake Blues" <5htp@bellsouth.net> wrote in message
news:XiuXf.17523$g6.2759@bignews8.bellsouth.net...
> Fuck you, you Anti-Semitist asshole.

==============================================================================
TOPIC: Whining about Debra LeFave "double standard"
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/75a648f72ed7c92
==============================================================================

== 1 of 2 ==
Date: Sun, Apr 2 2006 6:51 pm
From: obbzerver@yahoo.com

Bo Raxo wrote:
> <obbzerver@yahoo.com> wrote in message

> *She* says she is sick. *She* says she has been diagnosed as bi-polar.

Yeah, I saw that and dismissed it as the bullshit legal ploy it was
about 2 nanoseconds later. Apparently one that worked.

But of course, you know better. Of course you do.

== 2 of 2 ==
Date: Sun, Apr 2 2006 7:09 pm
From: "Bo Raxo"

<obbzerver@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1144029061.845814.303470@i40g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
>
> Bo Raxo wrote:
> > <obbzerver@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>
> > *She* says she is sick. *She* says she has been diagnosed as bi-polar.
>
> Yeah, I saw that and dismissed it as the bullshit legal ploy it was
> about 2 nanoseconds later. Apparently one that worked.
>
> But of course, you know better. Of course you do.
>

I'm the one taking her word at face value.

You're the one who claims to know better.

Pretty funny you claim just the opposite.

==============================================================================
TOPIC: MORE BULLSHIT BY ELIE WIESEL-THE LIAR!
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/992da07741be86cf
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sun, Apr 2 2006 9:51 pm
From: "serwad"

"BernardZ" <DontBother@NOSPAM.com> wrote in message
news:MPG.1e9a9de1adb9b18c9896d1@west.Usenet-News.net...
In article <8WIXf.4968$L7.3888@bignews2.bellsouth.net>,
serwad@bellsouth.net says...
> When in trouble, head for Auschwitz, preferably in the company of Elie
> Wiesel. It's as foolproof a character reference as is available today, at
> least within the Judeo-Christian sphere of moral influence. One can easily
> see why Oprah Winfrey and her advisers saw an Auschwitz excursion in the
> company of Wiesel as a sure-fire antidote to salve the wounds sustained by
> Oprah's Book Club when it turned out that James Frey had faked significant
> slabs of his own supposedly autobiographical saga of moral regeneration, A
> Million Little Pieces.
>
> Published in 2003, Frey's irksome book swiftly became a cult classic. (The
> present author was offered it in the summer of 2004 by a young relative,
> presumably to assist in his moral regeneration, but after glancing through
> a
> few pages returned it, on the grounds that it wasn't his kind of thing.)
> Winfrey picked it for her Book Club in September 2005, and it rocketed to
> the top of the bestseller lists.
>
> For Frey the sky fell in when, on January 7, 2006, the Smoking Gun website
> published documents showing that Frey had fabricated many facts about
> himself, including a criminal record. There were later charges of
> plagiarism. Frey ran through a benign gauntlet of trial-by-Larry King on
> January 11, and Oprah called in to stand by her Pick of the Month. She
> said
> that what mattered was not whether Frey's book was true (the
> Fundamentalist
> claim for the Holy Bible) but its value as a therapeutic tool (the modern
> Anglican position on the Good Book).
>
> But by now every columnist and books page editor in America was wrestling
> the truth-or-fiction issue to the ground. Oprah turned on Frey. On her
> show
> on January 26, he clung to the ropes, offering the excuse that the
> "demons"
> that had driven him to drink and drugs had also driven him into claiming
> that everything he wrote about himself was true. Publishers including
> Random
> House, which has made millions off him, had rejected the book when he'd
> initially offered it as a "fiction novel". Oprah brushed this aside.
>
> "Say it's all true" is what demons often whisper in an author's ear. Ask
> T.E. Lawrence. Did the Bey of Deraa really rape him? Lawrence suggests it
> in
> the Seven Pillars of Wisdom in paragraphs of fervent masochistic
> reminiscence. This and other adventures in Lawrence's account of British
> scheming in Mesopotamia against the Ottomans met with the ecstatic
> admiration of the Oxford-based equivalent of Oprah's Book Club back in the
> early 1920s, after Lawrence had the 350,000-word "memoir" privately
> printed
> and circulated. He'd written an earlier version in 1919 but claimed this
> had
> been stolen while he was changing trains in Reading, on the way to Oxford
> from London. (Reading has surely been the site of more supposed thefts and
> losses of "completed manuscripts" and PhD dissertations -- "I didn't make
> a
> copy!" -- than any railway station in the world.)
>
> Half a century later it occurred to Colin Simpson and Phillip Knightley of
> the London Sunday Times to ask the supposed rapist for his side of the
> story. They hurried off to Turkey and tracked down the town to which the
> Bey
> had retired, arriving at his home only to learn he'd died not long before.
> Relatives told the British reporters that the Bey would not have found
> Lawrence appetizing prey. The Turk was a noted womanizer, and when in
> Mesopotamia was always getting the clap from consorting with whores on his
> excursions to Damascus.
>
> It's fun to think of Oprah grilling Lawrence about his claims, freshly
> exposed on Smoking Gun, telling him she felt "really duped" but that,
> "more
> importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of Orientalizing masochists
> who believed you".
>
> But hardly had Frey been cast down from the eminence of Amazon.com's top
> bestseller before he was replaced at number one by the new pick of Oprah's
> Book Club, Elie Wiesel's Night, which had the good fortune to see
> republication at this fraught moment in Oprah's literary affairs.
> Simultaneous with the Night selection came news that Oprah Winfrey and
> Elie
> Wiesel would shortly be visiting Auschwitz together, from which vantage
> point Oprah, with the lugubrious Wiesel at her side, could emphasize for
> her
> ABC-TV audience that there is truth and there is fiction, that Auschwitz
> is
> historical truth at its bleakest and most terrifying, that Night is a
> truthful account and that Wiesel is the human embodiment of truthful
> witness.
>
> The trouble here is that in its central, most crucial scene, Night isn't
> historically true, and at least two other important episodes are almost
> certainly fiction. Below, I cite views, vigorously expressed to me in
> recent
> weeks by a concentration camp survivor, Eli Pfefferkorn, who worked with
> Wiesel for many years; also by Raul Hilberg. Hilberg is the world's
> leading
> authority on the Nazi Holocaust. An expanded version of his classic
> three-volume study, The Destruction of the European Jews, was recently
> reissued by Yale University Press. Wiesel personally enlisted Hilberg to
> be
> the historical expert on the United States Holocaust Commission.
>
> If absolute truth to history is the standard, Pfefferkorn says, then Night
> doesn't make the grade. Wiesel made things up, in a way that his many
> subsequent detractors could identify as not untypical of his modus
> operandi:
> grasping with deft assurance what people important to his future would
> want
> to hear and, by the same token, would not want to hear.
>
> The book that became Night was originally a much longer account, published
> in Yiddish in 1956, under the title Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (And the World
> Remained Silent). Wiesel was living in Paris at the time. By 1958 he had
> translated his book from Yiddish into French, publishing it in that year
> under the title La Nuit. Wiesel says it was severely cut down in length by
> Jerome Lindon, the chief editor at Editions de Minuit. In 1960 came the
> English translation, Night, published by Hill & Wang. The 2006 edition of
> Night is translated from the 1958 French version by Wiesel's wife, Marion,
> and in the introduction Wiesel says he has "been able to correct and
> revise
> a number of important details".
>
> In the New York Times for January 17, Michiko Kakutani wrote in her usual
> plodding prose, with her usual aversion to any unconventional thought,
> that
> "Mr. Frey's embellishments of the truth, his cavalier assertion that the
> 'writer of a memoir is retailing a subjective story,' his casual attitude
> about how people remember the past -- all stand in shocking contrast to
> the
> apprehension of memory as a sacred act that is embodied in Oprah Winfrey's
> new selection for her book club, announced yesterday: Night, Elie Wiesel's
> devastating 1960 account of his experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald."
>
> Amazon.com got the message quickly enough. The site had been categorizing
> the new edition of Night under "fiction and literature" but, under the
> categorical imperative of Kakutani's "memory as a sacred act" or a phone
> call from Wiesel's publisher, hastily switched it to "biography and
> memoir".
> Within hours it had reached number 3 on Amazon's bestseller list. That
> same
> evening, January 17, Night topped both the "biography" and "fiction"
> bestseller lists on BarnesandNoble.com.
>
> Nonetheless, over the next few days there were articles in the Jewish
> Forward and in the New York Times, also a piece on NPR, saying that Night
> should not be taken as unvarnished documentary. In the Forward article,
> published January 20, challengingly titled "Six Million Little Pieces?",
> Joshua Cohen reminded Forward readers that in 1996, Naomi Seidman, a
> Jewish
> Studies professor at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley,
> California,
> had compared the original 1956 Yiddish version of the book with the
> subsequent, drastically edited translation.
>
> "According to Seidman's account, published in the scholarly journal Jewish
> Social Studies", Cohen wrote, "Wiesel substantially rewrote the work
> between
> editions -- suggesting that the strident and vengeful tone of the Yiddish
> original was converted into a continental, angst-ridden existentialism
> more
> fitting to Wiesel's emerging role as an ambassador of culture and
> conscience. Most important, Seidman wrote that Wiesel altered several
> facts
> in the later edition, in some cases offering accounts of pivotal moments
> that conflicted with the earlier version. (For example, in the French, the
> young Wiesel, having been liberated from Buchenwald, is recuperating in a
> hospital; he looks into a mirror and writes that he saw a corpse staring
> back at him. In the earlier Yiddish, Wiesel holds that upon seeing his
> reflection he smashed the mirror and then passed out, after which 'my
> health
> began to improve.')"
>
> That said, Cohen emphasized that whereas "Frey, for one, seems to have
> falsified the facts of his life in order to satisfy ego and the demands of
> the market, Wiesel's liberties seem more like reconsiderations, his
> process
> less revision than interpretation. Reading Night, one encounters the birth
> of thought about the Holocaust - the future of history, concomitant with
> its
> study. In both versions, the book's intent is to engage not the
> undeniability of the Holocaust, but the man who has undeniably emerged
> from
> its horror."
>
> This reverent tone about Wiesel and his work is customary. People mostly
> write about him and his work with the muted awe of British tourists
> reading
> guidebooks to each other in a French cathedral. In The Jewish Press for
> February 1, Andrew Silow Carroll was a bit friskier. He cited Wiesel as
> declaring to the New York Times that Night "is not a novel at all. All the
> people I describe were with me there. I object angrily if someone mentions
> it as a novel." And yet, Silow Carroll went on, "in the past, Wiesel
> hasn't
> helped matters in this regard. In 1972, Hill & Wang packaged Night with
> two
> other books, Dawn and The Accident, which Wiesel clearly identified as
> novels. The set's cover refers to the works as 'Three Tales by Elie
> Wiesel.'
> In a later edition of the same volume, Wiesel refers to all three books as
> 'narratives,' although he calls Night a 'testimony,' and the other two
> 'commentaries.'"
>
> There are some rather comical instances of Wiesel's relaxed attitude to
> autobiographical truth, as excavated in Norman Finkelstein's book, The
> Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth. Wiesel was one of Goldhagen's main
> supporters. In his 1995 memoir, All Rivers Run to the Sea Wiesel writes
> that
> at the age of 18, recently liberated from Auschwitz, "I read The Critique
> of
> Pure Reason--don't laugh!--in Yiddish." Finkelstein comments, "Leaving
> aside
> Wiesel's acknowledgement that at the time ''I was wholly ignorant of
> Yiddish
> grammar' The Critique of Pure Reason was never translated into Yiddish."
> Imagine the lacerations Frey would have endured for making that sort of
> boast.
>
> Though sales have now soared, I'm not sure how many people will read Night
> now, beyond buying the new edition as a gesture of solidarity with Oprah
> and
> survivors of the Holocaust. It doesn't take a background in literary
> criticism to see that Night is artfully fashioned as a kind of symbolic
> narrative about the relationship between sons and fathers (there are four
> such portraits in the short book) and, crucially, between the Christian
> God
> (the Father) and his Son. The style seems influenced by Albert Camus,
> particularly L'Etranger. Camus won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957,
> one of the youngest recipients ever. This was the time during which Wiesel
> was reworking his Yiddish narrative into the far more terse, Camusian
> work,
> with its Camusian title.
>
> As a piece of historical witness to the experience of the inmates, the
> doomed and those who survived inside Auschwitz and Buchenwald, there are
> books far superior to Night, starting with Primo Levi's writings, or the
> late Ella Lingens-Reiner's extraordinary memoir of Auschwitz, Prisoners of
> Fear, published in 1948. Night's focus is extremely narrow, primarily on
> the
> main character, Eliezer, and his father. One learns with a certain
> surprise
> that though Wiesel's sister Tzipora died in the camps, two other sisters
> survived. In the new edition, Wiesel doesn't mention them.
>
> Night certainly contains none of the context offered by Levi or
> Lingens-Reiner, or much more rfecently, by Kenneth Waltzer, professor of
> Jewish Studies at Michigan State University, who is writing a book called
> The Rescue of Children at Buchenwald and whose interesting letter was
> published in Forward at the end of February:
>
> "The January 20 article on Oprah Winfrey's selection of Elie Wiesel's
> Night for her Book Club was on the mark ('Six Million Little Pieces?').
> Any
> memoir is a reconstruction shaped by purpose and audience rather than a
> direct statement of memory -- and even Wiesel's Night is not an exception.
>
> "Night focuses primarily on the relation of father and son in Auschwitz
> and in Buchenwald. When Wiesel loses his father in January 1945 at
> Buchenwald, he drifts into a listlessness and fog from which he emerged
> only
> after liberation. He recalls in Night only the terrible final days of the
> camp, in April 1945, when the Nazis sought to evacuate Jewish prisoners
> and
> then all prisoners.
>
> "Wiesel writes of his relation with his father, the presence of God, and
> his own survival and its meaning. He does not describe the social context
> in
> which he existed during the final months. The barracks, his place in the
> camp, his relation to others -- other prisoners, Jews, boys -- remain
> murky.
>
> "What is omitted in Night is that the 16-year-old was placed in a
> special
> barracks created by the clandestine underground as part of a strategy of
> saving youth. Block 66 was located in the deepest part of the
> disease-infested little camp and beyond the normal Nazi S.S. gaze. It was
> overseen by Czech Communist Antonin Kalina and by his deputy, Gustav
> Schiller, a Polish Jewish Communist.
>
> "Schiller, who appears briefly in Night, was a rough father figure and
> mentor, especially for the Polish-Jewish boys and many Czech-Jewish boys;
> but he was less liked, and even feared, by Hungarian- and Romanian-Jewish
> boys, especially religious boys, including Wiesel. He appears in Night as
> a
> distant figure, armed with a truncheon.
>
> "After January 1945, the underground concentrated all children and youth
> that could be fit into this windowless barracks -- more than 600 in total.
> Younger children were protected elsewhere. When the U.S. Third Army
> arrived
> April 11, 1945, more than 900 children and youth were found among 21,000
> remaining prisoners.
>
> "Wiesel since has acknowledged the role played by the clandestine
> underground but did not attend to it in Night. Fellow barracks members
> recall being protected from work and getting extra food. They recall
> efforts
> by their mentors to raise their horizons. They also recall heroic
> intervention by Kalina or by Schiller during the final days to protect
> them.
>
> "Even then, many boys were lined up at the gate, to be led out April 10.
> However, American planes flew overhead, sirens sounded, the guards ran and
> Kalina, who was with them, ordered the boys back to the barracks. They
> were
> still in the barracks the next day when units of the U.S. Third Army broke
> through the barbed-wire fences.
>
> "Wiesel's Night is about becoming alone. But Wiesel was also among
> hundreds of children and youth aided by a purposeful effort at rescue
> inside
> a concentration camp."
>
> Forward slightly trimmed Waltzer's contribution, from an article to a
> letter. In the fuller version, which he has kindly supplied, Professor
> Waltzer wrote his last paragraph as follows:
>
> "In Night, Wiesel writes about viewing himself in the mirror after
> liberation and seeing a corpse gazing back at him. But another picture
> taken
> after liberation shows Wiesel marching out of the camp, fourth on the
> left,
> among a phalanx of youth, moving together, heads high, a group guided by
> prisoners who had helped save them."
>
> A photograph accompanying Waltzer's text, credited to Jack Werber, of
> Great
> Neck, New York, shows exactly that. The young Wiesel's head is high, like
> the others'. But this parable of a triumph for human solidarity was
> absolutely contrary to the parable Wiesel was set on rewriting in French
> from the Yiddish volume. In the late 1950s a man with instincts as finely
> tuned as Wiesel's to useful frequencies on the political dial probably
> would
> not have thought it advantageous to dwell on the heroic role of Communists
> in the death camps. All the more is this true in recent years, when
> Wiesel's
> most celebrated moments have come when hunkering down for sessions of
> amiable moral counsel with Ronald Reagan (who wanted to pretend that the
> SS
> should be retrospectively forgiven because, after all, they weren't
> Communists and fought the Great Satan) and George Bush, on whom Wiesel
> urged
> the war on Iraq as a necessary moral act, declaring that "the world faced
> a
> moral crisis similar to 1938" and "the choice is simple".
>
> This is not the first time bombing has elicited an endorsement from the
> great moral standard-bearer. In 1999, as NATO's bombs descended on
> Yugoslavia, blowing up civilians on train or bus, as well as journalists
> in
> their broadcasting studio, Wiesel was questioned by Wolf Blitzer on CNN's
> Larry King Live. Declared one government toady to another: "I think it
> [the
> bombing] had to be done, because all the other options had been explored."
> This balderdash put Wiesel, morally speaking, on a par with Cardinal
> Spellman, blessing the B-52s as they set off to drop napalm on children in
> the Vietnam era.
>
> For a decidedly irreverent assessment of Night's merits On February 10,
> 2006, Candian tv viewers were able, in February, to watch and hear the
> former editor of Harper's magazine, Lewis Lapham, delivering a lecture at
> the University of Ottawa, on the invitation of the university's Graduate
> Students Association. Lapham's lecture, entitled "The Politicization of
> Research," was carried on C-PAC, Canada's parliamentary TV channel,
> several
> times in the days that followed. In the Q and A session after the lecture,
> in response to an enquiry about the decline in the quality of ediucation,
> Lapham replied:
>
> "I have had three children; my youngest is now 25, my eldest is 32. They
> all went through a very high-end American both secondary schools and
> colleges. And the syllabus of books that they were given in the English
> courses were terrible. I mean, they were all tracts
>
> "There was a big fuss about Oprah Winfrey and the James Frey book, and
> she's now going to put on [her TV show] Elie Wiesel's Night. This is
> really
> one of the worst books I have ever read, and I've had to read it three
> times
> to my three children; and it's junk. But it's the kind of junk that has
> become very de rigeur in American universities. It's a propaganda poster.
> With the kind of books the kids are given to read, I mean, it would turn
> them off books forever. No wonder! Because they are being given tracts.
> And,
> the big subject of course is victimology."
>
> One of the perennially fascinating things about Wiesel is the
> preternatural
> alertness of his antennae for the opportune audience, his sense of what
> will, so to speak, "play" usefully for him. This brings us, by way of Eli
> Pfefferkorn, to Francois Mauriac.
>
> These days Eli Pfefferkorn, age 77, lives in Toronto. A man, on the
> evidence
> of several phone conversations, of alert intelligence and charm, he too is
> a
> concentration camp survivor. Originally from Poland, he spent seven weeks
> in
> Maidanek, then in three labor camps, then in Buchenwald, then in
> Rehmsdorf.
> Near the end of the war he endured a death march to Theresienstadt in
> Moravia, where the surviving inmates were liberated by the Red Army on May
> 8, 1945. Pfefferkorn's parents perished in other camps, and he tells me he
> owes his life to his mother, who shook his hand loose from hers when the
> family was about to be deported, and told the 13-year-old boy to scram.
>
> Pfefferkorn eventually came to the United States, taught, and spent some
> time working with Wiesel on the conceptual design of the Holocaust museum.
> Once an uncritical admirer, his present estimate of Wiesel is not
> favorable,
> and he sets his views forth at length in a fascinating manuscript he is
> preparing to submit to publishers. He was kind enough to send me some
> chapters. By no means short-changing Wiesel on what he regards as his
> genuine achievements, Pfefferkorn can be unsparing: "He's become a
> eulogist
> of the dead but he doesn't raise his mellifluous voice against the wrong
> done to survivors, 35 per cent of them below the poverty line in the US."
>
> There are piercing passages in Pfefferkorn's memoir concerning Wiesel's
> opportunism and betrayals in the murky battles over the design of the
> Holocaust Museum, and above all in his artful pursuit of the Nobel Peace
> Prize, which he was awarded in 1986. "Would Wiesel, Pfefferkorn asks,
> "ever
> have received this prize for his work as a journalist?" Pfefferkorn
> answers
> his question, "It's hard to imagine. No. Wiesel got the prize because he
> elevated himself as the spokesman for the survivors. His mostly absurd
> pretensions to be a 'peace missionary', had nothing to do with it."
>
> Then, once he had the prize he so fiercely pursued, Wiesel gradually, but
> consistently--so Pfefferkorn stresses--"alienated himself from the
> survivors".
>
> In Night, Pfefferkorn isolates a number of episodes in which he makes a
> convincing case that Wiesel dumped truth in favor of fiction. The two I
> cite
> here involve a boy playing a violin amidst a death march, and the second
> is
> one of Night's most famous scenes, the hanging of three inmates.
>
> Of the first episode, Pfefferkorn writes:
>
> "The story of the 'violin episode' takes place during the death march
> from
> Auschwitz to Buchenwald with a short gap at Gleiwitz in January of 1945.
> Mercilessly driven by the SS guards, stragglers were shot at and shoved to
> the side road. The columns of inmates arrived in Gleiwitz, after having
> dragged themselves through the snow-swept roads in freezing temperatures
> for
> about fifty kilometers. Immediately upon arrival, they were herded into
> barns. Drained, they dropped to the floor -- the dead, the dying and the
> partially living piled one on the other.
>
> "Under this heap of crushed humanity laid Juliek, cradling a violin,
> which
> he has carried all the way from Auschwitz to Gleiwitz. Eliezer, somehow,
> stumbles on Juliek, "...the boy from Warsaw who played in the band at
> Buna... 'How do you feel, Juliek?' I asked, less to know the answer than
> to
> hear that he could speak, that he was alive. 'All right, Eliezer ... I'm
> getting on all right ... hardly any air ... worn out. My feet are swollen.
> It's good to rest, but my violin...'
>
> "Eliezer -- the inmate -- wonders, 'What use was the violin here?'
> Wiesel -- the memoirist -- does not find it necessary to give an answer to
> the question. Such an answer, I assume, should be of interest to the
> reader
> for if Wiesel were to provide an answer, the veracity of the story would
> dissolve like the morning mist in the Sinai desert. Maintaining hold on a
> violin as one marched the March of Death is highly improbable. However, a
> violin in the midst of human debris strains the imagination and questions
> memory. How did Juliek hold on to the violin on the death journey?
> Deprived
> of food and drink, when each step stubbornly refused to follow the next
> one,
> how did Juliek manage to clutch the violin in his numb fingers, let alone
> play Beethoven on it? Would the SS escorts have let him keep it?
>
> "And from this anus mundi, suddenly the melody of a Beethoven concerto
> is
> heard, wafting through the corpses, the groans of the dying, the stench of
> the dead. Eliezer had never heard sounds so pure. 'In such a silence. It
> was
> pitch dark. I could only hear the violin, it was though Juliek's soul were
> the bow. He was playing his life. The whole life was gliding on his
> strings -- his lost hopes, his charred past, his extinguished future. He
> played as he would never play again.' This powerful and emotionally moving
> scene, celebrating the triumph of the human spirit over the grinding SS
> machinery is the very stuff that heroic fiction is made of. But is it a
> memoir factually recorded? Obviously, Wiesel's putative memoir, written
> while on a boat to Brazil, is but a recollection of experiences seen
> through
> the eye of his creative imagination. And yet, the melancholy melodies that
> came out of Juliek's violin were the first strains of a myth orchestrated
> by
> Wiesel and his disciples, over a period of thirty years."
>
> A major scene in Night, one that contributed hugely to the book's success
> in
> the West, and its impact on many Christians starting with Francois
> Mauriac,
> was the execution of three inmates in the Buna work camp. As Pfefferkorn
> writes, "The fascination of Christian theologians with the Wiesel
> phenomenon
> must be traced back to a hanging that the 16-year-old Eliezer witnessed in
> Auschwitz."
>
> In the incident, two adults and a little boy are being led to the gallows.
> The little boy refused to betray fellow inmates who have been involved in
> an
> act of sabotage; to protect his fellow inmates, the boy is willing to pay
> with his life. Each one climbs to his chair and his neck is slipped into
> the
> rope's noose. The scene continues as follows in the 1960 English version
> of
> Night:
>
> "The three victims mounted together onto the chairs. The three necks
> were
> placed at the same moment within the nooses. 'Long live Liberty!' cried
> the
> adults. But the child was silent.
>
> "'Where is God? Where is He?' someone behind me asked. At a sign from
> the
> head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over. Total silence throughout
> the
> camp. On the horizon, the sun was setting.
>
> "'Bare your heads!' yelled the head of the camp. His voice was raucous.
> We
> were weeping. 'Cover your heads!' Then the march past began. The two
> adults
> were no longer alive. Their tongues hung swollen, blue tinged. But the
> third
> rope was still moving; being so light, the child was still alive.... For
> more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death,
> dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the
> face.
> He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still
> red,
> his eyes not yet glazed. Behind me, I heard the same man asking: 'Where is
> God now?' And I heard a voice within me answer him: 'Where is He? Here He
> is -- He is hanging here on this gallows'"
>
> Not surprisingly, the graphically described hanging scene has been etched
> into the imagination of the Christian theologians because of the numerous
> parallels to the Crucifixion of Jesus.
>
> Now, while he was working on the memoir, La Nuit, Wiesel had cause, on
> behalf of an Israeli newspaper, to visit and interview Francois Mauriac,
> the
> Catholic writer and Nobel Laureate in literature. They got on well. Then
> Wiesel gave him the manuscript of La Nuit. Mauriac found in it an answer
> to
> his own anguish at descriptions of the mass slaughters in the death camps,
> particularly of children.
>
> Mauriac fastened instantly on, in Pfefferkorn's words, "a resemblance
> between the crucifixion and Wiesel's description of the young boy's
> hanging.
> In response to Wiesel's questioning of God's benevolence and man's
> humanness, Mauriac writes the following in his Foreword to Night: 'And I,
> who believe that God is love, what answer could I give my young
> questioner,
> whose dark eyes still held the reflection of that angelic sadness which
> had
> appeared one day upon the face of the hanged child? What did I say to him?
> Did I speak of that other Israeli, his brother, who may have resembled
> him -- the Crucified, whose Cross has conquered the world?'"
>
> Pfefferkorn continues:
>
> "The hanged child dangling on the rope is reflected in Eliezer's eyes,
> whose image resembles that of the crucified Jesus. Thus in one stroke,
> Mauriac has drawn a triptych reminiscent of the medieval paintings, making
> young Eliezer the link connecting the two watershed events in the history
> of
> Western civilization, namely the Crucifixion and the Holocaust. Mauriac
> leaves no doubt as to his Christological interpretation of the Auschwitz
> hanging. In the year 1960, he published a biography of Christ entitled The
> Son of Man dedicated to 'E.W. who was a crucified Jewish child, who stands
> for many others.'
>
> "Mauriac explains what it was in his interview with Wiesel that drew him
> so powerfully to the young Israeli: 'That look, as if a Lazarus risen from
> the dead, yet still a prisoner within the grim confines where he had
> strayed, stumbling among the shameful corpses.' Wiesel's painfully gaunt
> demeanor set against the backdrop of the concentration camps' corpses have
> inspired a generation of Christian theologians to view Wiesel as a latter
> day Lazarus.
>
> "It is highly speculative to suggest that from the very inception of his
> writing, Wiesel consciously laboured to present himself to the Christian
> world as a composite of a Christ Lazarus figure. However, once the seeds
> of
> the myth were sown in Paris at Mauriac's instigation, and took roots in
> the
> soil of Christian America, Wiesel has done his share to encourage the
> 'Lazarus risen from the dead parallel.' But Wiesel has done so more by
> gesture than act, silence than utterance, indirection than direct
> statement.
> The unspoken, the mute, the covert are his metier; albeit an ambiguity
> laced
> through with shrewd intelligence that would make many a professional
> diplomat envious."
>
> In a letter to David Hirsch dated October 6, 1994, Alfred Kazin writes
> that
> at the beginning of their friendship, "I liked him [Wiesel] enormously,
> and
> I was in awe of him because of his suffering in Auschwitz." But at the
> same
> time "... it was impossible, when he expanded at length about his
> experiences under the Nazis, it was impossible to miss the fact that he
> was
> a mystifier".
>
> One who says he directly observed the hanging scene described by Wiesel
> was
> Zygfryd Halbereich, who testified at the Auschwitz State Museum on October
> 19, 1973. Halbereich's testimony was matter-of-fact, clear and direct. He
> was acquainted with the three inmates and knew about their escape plans.
>
> "On the whole," Pfefferkorn writes, "Halbereich's testimony is in
> agreement
> with Wiesel's narrative, and differs only in one minor detail. But this is
> an inconsequential disagreement that does not change the substance of the
> hanging story. What does affect it, however, is the age of one of the
> condemned, as given by Wiesel. And the age of the condemned is the crux of
> the matter.
>
> "In the original Yiddish Un di Velt Hot Geshvign and in the French and the
> English translations, one of the three condemned is frequently referred to
> as a child or a young boy. Halbereich is silent about the ages of the
> condemned, and this omission is surprising. For in Wiesel's painfully
> elaborate description of the hanging, the young boy's execution stirred up
> deep emotions among the inmates standing on the roll call. The Kapo who
> was
> assigned to administer the hanging ' excused himself from serving as a
> hangman. He did not want to hang a child.' A Kapo's refusal to obey an SS
> order was tantamount to a death sentence. His extraordinary behaviour
> would
> have certainly registered with Halbereich, whose testimony is meticulously
> detailed. Halbereich's silence on the Kappo's courage calls into question
> Wiesel's account of the hanging. One of the skeptics is the known
> Holocaust
> scholar Raul Hilberg, who is, in his own words, a seeker of truth.
>
> "Cautious by temperament and scholarly discipline, Hilberg gingerly raises
> the issue related to the hanging scene. In a review written for the Boston
> Globe about Wiesel's autobiographical book All Rivers Run to the Sea,
> Hilberg makes mention of the three hangings. 'Describing the incident in
> his
> [Wiesel's] book Night,' Hilberg notes, 'he recalled someone behind him
> asking: Where is God? At that moment Wiesel believed that one of the three
> was a boy, and in his mind identified the child with God.' Citing Kazin's
> contention that the entire event is fiction, Hilberg concludes, 'To be
> sure,
> the doubters may claim a concession.'"
>
> Pfefferkorn's considered judgement is harsh on Wiesel's claims for the
> absolute truth to life of Night:
>
> "If the hanging scene turns out contrary to Wiesel's description in his
> purported memoir Night, a fictionalized episode as Kazin claimed and
> surmised from Halbereich's testimony, then Wiesel's entire moral and
> theological edifice collapses, bringing down with it the 'Suffering
> Servant'
> theology, which first gave him recognition and eventually led him to fame.
>
> "Though it is virtually impossible to verify the exact ages of the
> condemned, it must be noted, as Hilberg observed, that in Wiesel's recent
> autobiography 'the suffering body is no longer that of a boy.'"
>
> Quite aside from the theological questions, part of the impact of the
> scene
> derives from Wiesel's description of this boy whose weight was too
> insubstantial for the noose to swiftly strangle him. Does this, in the
> last
> analysis, really matter? It does if you are disobligingly contrasting Frey
> to Wiesel's "apprehension of memory as a sacred act". All the same, I
> don't
> suppose Smoking Gun would ever gleefully feature the third victim's birth
> certificate.
>
> After talking to Eli Pfferkorn and reading chapters from his memoir, I
> called Raul Hilberg, now 80, at his home in Burlington, Vermont.
>
> "From a purely academic viewpoint", Hilberg began, "it would be
> interesting
> to have a scholarly edition, comparing the Yiddish version with subsequent
> translations and editions, with appropriate footnotes, Wiesel's comments
> etc. He was addressing two entirely different audiences, the first being
> the
> Yiddish-speaking Jews, members of the world of his youth whom he addressed
> in nineteenth-century terms. There's more detail, more comment. I made
> that
> suggestion to Wiesel and he didn't react favorably."
>
> Hilberg turned to the crucial scene: "I have a version of the hanging from
> an old survivor with the names of all three adults." That survivor had
> said
> that there was no boy among the three. Hilberg mentioned this in a review
> of
> Night, in which, he told me, "I made no secret of our differences. But
> whereas it [the age of the central figure in the hanging] may seem
> somewhat
> small, it makes a very big difference to Christians, particularly
> Catholics,
> because it's very clear that mystics are intensely interested in the scene
> because it seems to replicate the crucifixion. It made a considerable
> impact. So the fact that this figure may not have been a boy at all is
> disturbing."
>
> "It would appear", Hilberg went on, "from the record I have, that some
> witnesses have questioned whether this scene took place at all. I have a
> long statement by an older man, a man whom I judge to be quite
> trustworthy,
> though one must always remember that things are sometimes observed or
> heard
> about later. I talked recently to a survivor of that section of the camp
> who
> said it [the hanging of the three] didn't take place, but maybe it took
> place earlier. I don't know. Dating these tings is hard for survivors.
> Some
> have doubted this would have taken place. Buna was a work camp, so this
> other survivor, a PhD in history and a very intelligent man, didn't
> believe
> it. I said to him, 'How do you know this didn't happen?' I consider it not
> only a possibility but plausible. But age is a big issue to some people.
> That's something he did not discuss in the new edition of the book."
>
> "Wiesel's is the most read of all Auschwitz memoirs", Hilberg remarked,
> "not
> only because of its brevity but because it has something mystic,
> surrealistic in it." He mentioned the episode of the little boy playing
> the
> violin, and said how it evoked images from the Russian-Jewish mystic
> painter
> Chagall, also of Fiddler on the Roof.
>
> "Wiesel comes from Sighet, a city in Romania. In Sighet there were many
> religious Jews, also Ukrainians. Much of Sighet was rather primitive at
> the
> time Wiesel was growing up. Most roads were not paved. It was shtetl life.
> However an assimilated group of Jews was emerging. I went there when I was
> 11, in 1937, and spent the summer. There was a tennis court, very
> middle-class. My aunt and her husband, a Sigheti, manufactured violins in
> Sighet where there was a major tradition of violin playing. I heard
> quartets
> in our garden. Wiesel's parents had a store. So in some respects Sighet
> was
> very nineteenth century, and in others there were all the earmarks of a
> group of Jews emerging into the twentieth century who were evidently wide
> awake to modern civilization. So was the violin scene realistic, or was it
> a
> fantasy? Certainly, for Jews the violin was the instrument of choice. It
> was
> portable.
>
> "So I would not say that the violin scene is impossible, even though I
> know
> someone from the death march who said it was utterly impossible. He was in
> Auschwitz, also Wiesel's age. But that still doesn't mean it didn't
> happen.
> Nothing is inconceivable.
>
> "The model of all survivor accounts is of an idyllic childhood, then the
> hell of the Holocaust, then since they survived they underline the fact
> that
> it was only by luck they survived. With Wiesel, his original title was And
> the World Was Silent. It's accusatory. Night is more surreal and mystic.
> It
> goes back to Middle Ages. Wiesel fits right into that style. It's not a
> novel, but what it does have is the imprint of someone who wants to leave
> behind the impression that if you weren't there, you cannot know what it
> was
> like, but then that dooms trying to write what it was like."
>
> I asked Hilberg what accounts of the death camps and the Holocaust did he
> admire most. "That really depends on the reader. I don't have that kind of
> favorite. For my purposes, obviously they have to be correct. There's an
> account by Filip Mueller, who was on the gas chamber detail in Auschwitz
> in
> 1942, written in collaboration with two people: Eyewitness Auschwitz. It
> has
> to be read with care. Another book is Rudolf Vrba's I Cannot Forgive,
> written with Alan Bestic. Vrba escaped from Auschwitz. He became professor
> of pharmacology at the University of British Columbia. This is the most
> remarkable of survivors, a man of absolutely incredible energy and
> abilities. In sheer ability to cope with the situation, this man is beyond
> belief."
>
> I didn't press the point, but Hilberg, who stressed to me that he admires
> Wiesel, did not include Night in this little list. A clue to this omission
> may be found in Hilberg's often acrid memoir, The Politics of Memory,
> published in 1996. In the chapter "Questionable Practices", notable for a
> devastating account of underhand behavior by Hannah Arendt, Hilberg
> discusses "areas of inappropriateness or illegitimacy". "I try to nod
> wisely
> when when poets or novelists step forward with their art, which in its
> very
> nature is much less disguised than mine. Nor am I disturbed when
> popularizers of history excavate the monographs of the footnote writers
> [among whom Hilberg included himself] and, distilling the contents,
> highlight story and drama for a large reading public.There are, however,
> limits Among the practices that give me discomfort is the creation of a
> story in which historical facts are altered deliberately for the sake of
> plot and adventure"
>
> Then a page later Hilberg continues, "If counterfactual stories are
> frequent
> enough, kitsch is truly rampant The philistines in my field are truly
> everywhere. I am surrounded by the commonplace, platitudes, and
> clichés.The
> first German publisher of a small volume, containing my introduction and
> documents about the railroads [viz. their role in the destruction of the
> Jews] inserted a poem for which, he said, he had paid good money,
> describing
> human beings in freight cars including children whose eyes glowed like
> coal
> . The manipulation of history is a kind of spoilage and kitsch is
> debasement."
>
> Reading those lines, my mind did go at once to some of the scenes in
> Night--Juliek playing his violin on the death march for example--which
> hover
> on the edge of kitsch or, to take a less forgiving view, plunge into it.
>
> "In 1981", Pfefferkorn remembers, "Wiesel invited me to give a talk to his
> seminar students at Boston University. In the course of my talk, I
> discussed
> the relationship between memory and imagination in a number of literary
> works. I then pointed out the literary devices he used in Night, devices,
> I
> stressed, that make the memoir a compelling read. Wiesel's reaction to my
> comments were swift as lightning. I had never seen him as angry before or
> since. In the presence of John Silber, the then President of Boston
> University, and my own Brown University students whom I invited, he lost
> his
> composure, lashing out at me for daring to question the literalness of the
> memoir. In Wiesel's eyes, as in the eyes of his disciples, Night assumed a
> level of sacrosanctity, next in importance to the giving of the Torah at
> Mt.
> Sinai. In terms of veracity, it is a factually recorded work, virtually
> meeting Leopold von Ranke's benchmark of historical accounts: Wie es
> eigentlich gewessen, how it really was."
>
> As he roosts on his pile of gold amid the abuse of Oprah and the literary
> world, Frey can comfort himself with the thought that Night is not how "it
> really was", and that even though there is a vast gulf between what Wiesel
> actually endured and Frey's lies about his own life, when it comes making
> literature he and Wiesel were both in the business of artistic and
> emotional
> manipulation, of dressing fiction up as truth.
>
> As Pfefferkorn stresses, you didn't survive in the death camps just by
> luck.
> "Securing a spot in a desirable labor detail, for instance, involved
> shoving
> to the head of the line, seen as a risk worth taking. Upon encountering
> opposition, however, one had to know when to retreat into the
> chameleon-pyjama-like background of the concentration camp. This was also
> true about lining up for soup. Finding the right spot in the line could
> mean
> a thicker bowl of soup -which may add a week's longevity, but this
> entailed
> rough elbowing, as well as timing."
>
> Pfefferkorn says now that one of the greatest disappointments of his life
> was Wiesel's "betrayal"--Pfefferkorn's word" of the survivors. Looking at
> the man's career overall, I'd say that as a moral fabulist, Wiesel has far
> more than Frey to answer for. Should not Oprah ask him about the millions
> he
> could have helped with the moral stature won by the Nobel peace prize he
> so
> unrelentingly campaigned for wsith his rough elbows, but whom he has
> betrayed for reasons of base political calculation?
>
> Although the Nobel committee extolled him as a "messenger to mankind" it
> is
> difficult to find examples of Wiesel sending any message on behalf of
> those
> victimized by the policies of the United States, and virtually impossible
> when it comes to victims of Israel.
>
> Wiesel's pusillanimity was well illustrated in an interview with The
> National Jewish Post & Opinion for November 19, 1982. Asked about the
> massacre of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila, he said he felt "sad". Lest
> anyone leap to the erroneous conclusion that Wiesel was at last expressing
> sadness for the victims of Israel's invasion -- he remained silent
> throughout the bombing of Beirut -- Wiesel added that this sadness was
> "with
> Israel, and not against Israel". As he put it, "After all, the Israeli
> soldiers did not kill". He also writes, in Against Silence, vol 2, "Would
> it
> not have been better to have offered Israel unreserved support, regardless
> of the suffering endured by the population of Beirut."
>
> In 1985, Wiesel was asked by a reporter from Ha'aretz about Israel's aid
> to
> the military junta in Guatemala. By way of response Wiesel remarked that
> he
> had received a letter from a Nobel laureate (Salvador Luria of M.I.T. had
> written to him on this subject a month earlier) documenting Israel's
> contributions to mass murder in Guatemala and urging Wiesel to act
> privately
> to pressure Israel. Wiesel "sighed", the Ha'aretz reporter wrote, and
> said,
> "I usually answer at once, but what can I answer him."
>
> Wiesel could, I suppose, argue that a sigh constitutes a technical breach
> of
> silence, but why did he not go further?
>
> In an interview published in the second volume of Against Silence, Wiesel
> says that, as a Diaspora Jew, the "price I chose to pay for not living in
> Israel . . . is not to criticize Israel from outside its borders." In
> another interview, published in the London Jewish Chronicle for September
> 10, 1982, he lamented criticism of Israel during the Lebanon invasion and
> asked these rhetorical questions:
>
> "Was it necessary to criticize the Israeli government, notwithstanding the
> spate of lies disseminated in the press? Or would it not have been better
> to
> have offered Israel unreserved support, regardless of the suffering
> endured
> by the population of Beirut? In the face of hatred, our love for Israel
> ought to have deepened, become more whole-hearted, and our faith in Israel
> more compelling, more true."
>
> It's unclear how many times, if any, Wiesel has ventured criticism inside
> Israel's borders. Wiesel himself mentions one occasion on which he exerted
> what is usually called quiet pressure.
>
> Commentary on Wiesel in the Hebrew-language press in Israel following the
> award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 was been more robust than the
> statutory honorifics printed in the United States. In Davar, for example,
> a
> reporter named Miri Paz discussed the troubled course of a conference on
> holocaust and genocide held in Israel in the summer of 1982. Responding to
> the urgings of the Turkish government, the Israeli Foreign Ministry
> demanded
> the removal of six items on the agenda concerning the Armenian genocide.
> Several people on the conference's organizing committee, including its
> chair, Professor Israel Charny, refused to bend to such interference. But
> Wiesel, who headed the conference, did weaken. He pulled out of the
> conference, explaining, in Paz's words, that "as a Jew he cannot act
> against
> the government of Israel".
>
> In Koteret Rashit, a liberal weekly, the Israeli journalist Tom Segev
> wrote
> of Wiesel:
>
> "He is always careful not to criticize his nation. . . . What does he
> have
> to say about the situation in the territories? When people from Peace Now
> asked him to criticize the Lebanese War he evaded the request. He's never
> been in the habit of standing up seriously against Israeli leaders. . . .
> What in fact has he done to realize his fine intentions? Bob Geldof has
> done
> more. . . . How nice it would have been if they had divided the prize
> among
> those truly good people of the world, those still alive, those people who
> endangered their lives at the time of the Holocaust in order to save Jews.
>
> "Who symbolizes the lesson of the Holocaust as they do?
>
> "Who is as worthy of the respect of the world as they are?"
>
> Footnote: An earlier version of this article appeared in the CounterPunch
> newsletter, #3/4, in February of this year.
>
>
>

Alex I would have thought that you would be the last person to criticize
someone for lying about their personal history!

Tell us again Alex how you fought in WW1, WW2 and severed with the
Australians in Timor a few years ago. Did I forget about your experience
fighting with Napoleon in Holland.
My RAAF regimental number is A314243, go and check you fucking jew bastard

--
Never met a women so mechanically inept that she could not use a
flexiteller or a heater.

Observations of Bernard - No 98

==============================================================================
TOPIC: Hindus best at managing money
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/55410c7c7fa8b182
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sun, Apr 2 2006 6:51 pm
From: "fruitella"

Got to give due credit as well to western society which is based on
meritocracy and rewards people who are willing to work hard. Its also
true that western society is full of second chances - e..g. those who
work hard but despite their efforts fail are not treated as failures as
they can once again come up if they keep trying and trying until
another door opens.

imemind@comcast.net wrote:
> Call it an Indian trait. I have seen too many people from India who
> immigrated abroad with handful of money that could not have lasted them
> even a day eventually make it big by sheer hard work, sacrifices,
> frugal living and cooperative spirit. They make opportunities where
> none exist. They remain uneffected by ups or downs, riches or poverty.
> They renew their bonds with their communities in times of need, in
> times of their opulence. Community that stays togather, propspers
> togather. Family and community remain their focus. They always think of
> their future needs and readily sacrifice present needs for it. This is
> a typical Indian cultural mindset inhertited by most indian immigrants
> - You can call it money management - but it is essentially a cultural
> mindset.
>
>
> habshi wrote:
> > Because their multiple gods and godesses teach them to be
> > flexible . While the rigidity imposed by cruel non existent Allah
> > causes Muslims to fall into poverty.
> > excerpt
> > guardian.co.uk
> > Money management
> >
> > Hindus and Sikhs are the best at managing money, an official study
> > into Britain's personal finances said this week. Puzzled researchers
> > said it was 'for reasons that are hard to explain.' So we asked
> > residents of one of Britain's biggest Hindu communities for the answer
> >
> >
> > Tony Levene
> > Saturday April 1, 2006
> > The Guardian
> >
> >
> > it was billed as the biggest ever survey of consumer attitudes to
> > money. But while the headlines generated by the publication earlier
> > this week of the Financial services Authority's massive research on
> > "financial capability "focused on the problems of the 18-40 age group,
> > the smaller print on the 6,000-person quiz generated a wealth of
> > fascinating facts.
> > The results show that among Britain's major faith groups, Hindus and
> > Sikhs come out tops on "making ends meet" - they are better than
> > others at managing their money.
> >
> > Hinduism stresses that increasing the family's wealth is a duty and a
> > blessing from the goddess Lakshmi, the consort or wife of Lord Vishnu.
> > She is the goddess whose four hands represent prosperity, purity,
> > chastity and generosity.
> >
> > As two of her four virtues are to do with money, every family tries to
> > manage with care and to be more prosperous than the previous
> > generation without compromising spiritual virtues.
> >
> > But when Money Guardian talked to residents of Harrow, northwest
> > London, home to the UK's biggest Hindu community, we found more
> > emphasis on the practical than the spiritual.
> >
> > Rita Patel owns a newsagent's shop, working long hours.
> >
> > "It was a real struggle when I came here as a little girl over 30
> > years ago. My family emphasised that you paid cash and did not borrow
> > - except for the mortgage. I have to be a good money manager both for
> > my business and for my two children," she says.
> >
> > "I've already planned for their higher education with a series of
> > investments that will pay out lump sums when they reach 18 to 21. I've
> > told them that I don't like borrowing but if I have to - for a
> > mortgage or the business - I pay it back as soon as possible even if
> > it means going without other things."
> >
> > Geeta Nanda, a housing association director says:"I've inherited a
> > different ethos to my contemporaries. My parents were immigrants who
> > came here with very little but had a real will to succeed. And part of
> > that was to ensure their children did better than they did. In turn, I
> > want my children - both at primary school - to do even better. I'm
> > putting money aside for their university education so they will be
> > debt-free when they graduate and they won't have to interrupt their
> > studies with working.

==============================================================================
TOPIC: ARMS MERCHANT6S OF DEATH...
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/280941053b7a35ef
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sun, Apr 2 2006 9:52 pm
From: "serwad"

"BernardZ" <DontBother@NOSPAM.com> wrote in message
news:MPG.1e9a9d5d982b9ae69896d0@west.Usenet-News.net...
> In article <_IIXf.4966$L7.4314@bignews2.bellsouth.net>,
> serwad@bellsouth.net says...
>> SEMYON MOGILEVICH AND VICTOR BOUT, ONE ISRAELI ANOTHER WANNABE. SUDAN WAR
>> WILL NEVER END BECAUSE BILLIONS ARE POURING INTO ZIONZI COFFERS FROM THE
>> SALE OF DEATH.
>>
>>
>>
>
> What is the figure now in deaths of 2 million mostly Christian Sudanese?
That war will never stop, so long as Jews are making millions!

==============================================================================
TOPIC: CALL THEM BY THEIR NAME: TERRORISTS
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/b81a9ba554aa50b0
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sun, Apr 2 2006 9:54 pm
From: "serwad"

"Jim E" <YD653126@sea.edu> wrote in message
news:49a89iFn9pngU1@individual.net...
>
> "serwad" <serwad@bellsouth.net> wrote in message
> news:6dIXf.4953$L7.2134@bignews2.bellsouth.net...
>> WHITE TERRORISTS THAT IS
>>
>> Whites Blow Up Spanish Radio Station In Phoenix
>> Four Broadcast Towers Downed; Millions In Damage; Station Helped Organize
>> Immigrants
>>
>> 3/31/2006 2:19:42 PM
>>
>> Phoenix, Arizona -- White militants blew up a Spanish language radio
>> station in Phoenix, Arizona, destroying four radio broadcast towers and
>> causing millions of dollars in damages, after the station encouraged
>> illegal Mexicans to rise up against white people.
>>
>> KMIA-AM 710 in Phoenix, Arizona will be off the air "for weeks" after its
>> four 197-foot radio towers were taken down by white activists whom the
>> station is denouncing as "terrorists".
>>
>>
>
> I suggest a bounty on illegals, and mining the border.
> At $100 per illegal alien it shouldn't take long.
>
Maybe we should have bounty on the fucking Jews!
>
> Jim E
>

==============================================================================
TOPIC: RACISM AGAINST PALESTINIANS
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/532de907afa12545
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sun, Apr 2 2006 9:55 pm
From: "serwad"

"Jim E" <YD653126@sea.edu> wrote in message
news:49a8jhFn99o7U1@individual.net...
>
> "serwad" <serwad@bellsouth.net> wrote in message
> news:z7IXf.4950$L7.449@bignews2.bellsouth.net...
>>
>> LONDON - New Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya said Palestinians
>> were "sick and tired of the West's racist approach" to the Middle East
>> conflict in an article published in a British newspaper on Friday.
>>
Civilized world does not exist outside of Palestine, kike!

==============================================================================
TOPIC: Gogala's AMERIKA
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/e5847649fda182f9
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sun, Apr 2 2006 6:57 pm
From: "bmarjanovich@iprimus.ca"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4859948.stm
http://tinyurl.com/gvxgl

==============================================================================
TOPIC: Fascist NAZI German bastards attacked the Kurdish Protestors!
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/85ab53a658ddaaa0
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Mon, Apr 3 2006 2:00 am
From: "choro-nik"

So because the Kurdish demonstrators burned down a Turkish restaurant
happened somewhere else and was covered by another news item and therefore
the German police should have given the Kurdish demonstrators a helping hand
presumably to set fire to another Turkish restaurant.

Now, that is what I call democracy. Ain't that right Ali Asker, you
terrorism supporter?

--
choro-nik
*******
"Ali Asker" <pasa_asker@kurdistan.kd> wrote in message
news:93%Xf.10971$NN4.9212@newsfe7-win.ntli.net...
>
> "choro-nik" <choro-nik@tvcom.net> wrote in message
> news:kgYXf.46969$wl.25680@text.news.blueyonder.co.uk...
>> So, not it is the German police who are "Fascist NAZI German bastards",
>> Alibaba? Boy oh boy.............
>>
>> So you expect Kurdish terrorists to go around setting fire to a Turkish
>> restaurant in Berlin and the German police to give them a hand. Some
>> strange notion of democracy you have got, Alibaba.
>
> Read the news firest you fucken Mongloid Asian monkey called a *tURk*!
> Where the fuck in the news it says Kurds burned a reastaurant. That
> incident happened some where else not in this news!
>
> Now FUCK OFF AND GO BACK TO YOUR CAVE!!!
>
>> --
>> choro-nik
>> *******
>> "Ali Asker" <pasa_asker@kurdistan.kd> wrote in message
>> news:GrzXf.1117$8o.938@newsfe6-win.ntli.net...
>>> Fascist NAZI German bastards attacked the Kurdish Protestors!
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> German police intervened the Kurdish protestors who were protesting
>>> against the Turkish states brutal dictatorship regime who killed by
>>> using chemical weapons 14 Kurdish freedom fighters (PKK) and the
>>> protests that has been taking in Kurdistan with the interventation of
>>> barbarian Turkish police and turned in to a massacre.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> German fascist NAZI police asked from protestors to windrow PKK and the
>>> pictures of the 14 killed freedom fighters. Protestors refused to obey
>>> German fascist NAZI police demands and police used force to dismantle
>>> crowed and arrested many of the protestors including 5 Germans.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Demonstration ended at 20.00pm with the pictures of the Guerrilla
>>> fighters killed by using chemical weapons and the PKK flags.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Fascist NAZI German Police should be condemned by the International
>>> media and human right organisations.
>>>
>>> NEWSAROUND
>>>
>>
>>
>
>

==============================================================================
TOPIC: Illegal immigration video - You might want to watch this...
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/c5e24c6d841e71ee
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sun, Apr 2 2006 7:02 pm
From: "GeekBoy"

"£***Gnostic Archon" <xamazzz@no.mo.bush.net> wrote in message
news:e0omjb$auh2$1@news3.infoave.net...
>
> "Just another American" <abc@def.net> wrote in message
> news:tm9v22dfr7q05ih2ce5ta0s5ui79ad8gd4@4ax.com...
>>
>> Illegal immigration video - You might want to watch this...
>
> No thanks, I'm not a racist nor am I a phobe.
>

But those illegal Mexicans sure are, hence the reason to watch it.

==============================================================================
TOPIC: Lobbyist Abramoff Gets Nearly 6 Years in Prison
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/c458767acc3b3beb
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Mon, Apr 3 2006 2:02 am
From: "Marc"

We have too many people in the "Big House". The Us has more criminals in
prisons and penitentiaries, on a per capita basis, than any other country.
It cost us at least $ 40 000 per inmate. Our government needs to negotiate a
deal with Mr. Putin. Russia could incarcerate these prisoners probably for $
10 000 at a profit, in northern Siberia. This would save tax payers a lot of
money and help Bush balance the budget. This would be very effective for
illegal immigrants. It woul chill them out at 40 bellow. -40 degrees is the
same on the Fahrenhet as well as Centergrade. What a deal for the USA.

<NY.Transfer.News@blythe.org> wrote in message
news:1143780659.1700100155.2219001115@blythe.org...
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Lobbyist Abramoff Gets Nearly 6 Years in Prison
>
> Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
>
> Radio Havana Cuba
> http://www.radiohc.cu
>
> Former Lobbyist Jack Abramoff Gets Nearly Six Years in Prison
>
> Miami, March 30 (RHC)-- Disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff and a
> business partner were sentenced Wednesday to five years and 10 months
> in federal prison, the minimum they faced for fraud related to their
> 2000 purchase of the SunCruz Casinos gambling fleet.
>
> Abramoff and Adam Kidan both pleaded guilty to conspiracy and wire
> fraud, but they won't have to report to prison right away. The judge
> postponed their reporting date for at least 90 days so the two can
> continue cooperating in a Washington corruption investigation and a
> Florida probe into the killing of former SunCruz owner Konstantinos
> Boulis. Both deny roles in the killing. Abramoff pleaded guilty in
> connection with the corruption probe but has yet to be sentenced.
>
> Under their plea agreement, both men had faced a sentence of between
> five years, 10 months, and seven years, three months in federal
> prison. U.S. District Judge Paul C. Huck also ordered them Wednesday
> to pay restitution of more than $21 million.
>
> Abramoff and Kidan admitted concocting a fake $23 million wire
> transfer to make it appear they had made a large cash contribution to
> the $147.5 million purchase of SunCruz Casinos. Based on that fake
> transfer, lenders provided the pair with $60 million in financing.
>
> The same week Abramoff pleaded guilty to the SunCruz fraud, he entered
> guilty pleas to three federal charges as part of a wide-ranging
> corruption probe that could involve up to 20 members of Congress and
> aides, including former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Republican
> from Texas. In addition to assisting in that investigation, Abramoff
> and Kidan are expected to give statements in the investigation into
> the February 6, 2001, slaying of Boulis, who was gunned down at the
> wheel of his car amid a power struggle over the gambling fleet. Three
> men face murder charges, including one who worked for Kidan as a
> consultant at SunCruz and who allegedly has ties to New York's Gambino
> crime family.
>
> Both Abramoff and Kidan have repeatedly denied any role in or
> knowledge of the Boulis murder. But prosecutors say Kidan has not been
> ruled out as a suspect and defense attorneys say Abramoff could
> provide critical inside information about the dispute with Boulis, who
> also founded the Miami Subs restaurant chain.
>
> *
> ================================================================
> NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems
> Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us
> 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org
> List Archives: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/
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> iD8DBQFELLUyiz2i76ou9wQRAkKiAKCTJ9TIMaCR20px4SozsJcAXXnJawCeIaRJ
> 6DWSWgpNABtmfA5EO9NTbQE=
> =vk8d
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>

==============================================================================
TOPIC: Ali Baba BUSH Is Bringing DEMONCRAZY To The World
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.usa/browse_thread/thread/a767c833edf7788e
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sun, Apr 2 2006 7:07 pm
From: "bmarjanovich@iprimus.ca"

http://www.sundayherald.com/54975

http://tinyurl.com/ppb8f

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