Killing International Law. Normalizing Genocide

Now what?

In recent years informal observations have been running rampant about the pervasiveness of lawlessness in the exercise of power. Now its official! The US and Israeli governments have made it so. There is no rule of law at the pinnacle of the global pyramid of wealth and political influence. Might is right. Period.

In the process of maintaining the steadily accelerating pace of the many-faceted genocide in Gaza, both the World Court and the world’s premier legislative body, the UN’s Security Council, have been pushed from the main stage of international affairs. Recent developments show their pronouncements count for little when it comes to the need to put on the breaks in the most flagrant case of high-tech mass extermination ever presented in real time to a global media audience.

The implications are enormous of this spectacular international failure to respect, enforce and adhere to The Law even in the face of such a glaring case of lethal criminality on steroids. As French diplomat, Arnaud Bertrand, observed,

“There's no overstating how consequential this is for the integrity of international relations. By doing so, the US effectively destroys the world order it largely created after WW2 because it effectively tells everyone that the set of institutions, rules and norms that underpin it are meaningless. We're effectively now in a world system where everyone realizes the police, the government, the basic set of beliefs, have become completely corrupted. This changes everything.

https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1772818294363521429

The American government issued the death sentence on the international system it created after World War II when the USA emerged as the world’s pre-eminent polity. After abstaining in late March from the Security Council’s vote demanding a ceasefire, the Biden administration’s representatives described as “non-binding” the unanimous decision of all other 14 member countries in the world’s top legislative body.

As the key “winners” of WWII, five of these national delegations, Britain, France, Russia, the USA and China, retain a veto over any motion put to the Security Council. Since October 7 the USA has repeatedly used its veto to give “diplomatic” cover and support to the continuation of the Israeli mass slaughter of Palestinians.

Then on March 25 the Biden administration demeaned the whole UN system. The US delegation seemed to go along at the Security Council with the “demand” for a ceasefire. The SC members all clapped with a sense of relief that Resolution 2728 had been adopted.

Then immediately the US Ambassador to the UN threw lethal acid onto the process by declaring the United States and its Israeli partner to be unbound by the requirements of international law.

Click here to view

The effect of the US announcement that the Security Council’s ruling is not “binding,
was to give, yet again, the government of Israel the green light to continue its campaign to eliminate the Palestinian population of Israel under the cover of “eradicating Hamas.” This recent round of duplicitous US manoeuvring at the UN can be seen as chucking a spear into the heart of that already ailing international organization.

One effect of this spear to the UN’s heart, is to clarify that the United States is not only complicit in genocide. The USA must be considered a full-fledged partner with Israel in the genocide of the Palestinian people of Gaza and the West Bank. This understanding should help clarify the insincerity of the platitudes uttered by US officials like Antony Blinken and Shabbosgoy Joe Biden when they make positive suggestions concerning the need to overcome Israeli blocks in supplying the humanitarians needs of Palestinian survivors.

Again and again US officials give lip service to the notion that their Israeli partners should stop blocking the flow of food, water, oil, medicine and much more into Gaza. The emptiness of these suggestions are exposed by the continuing unimpeded flows of massive amounts of high-tech weaponry from the United States to Israel.

The arms exports, especially of giant bunker bombs designed to blast into smithereens whole city blocks, indicates there will be no slowing down in the indiscriminate assault on Palestinian civilians. The bombing campaign continues as the other lethal screws of genocidal extermination, like forced starvation, are tightened.

The maintenance and apparent acceleration of the bombardment campaign was accompanied by the mass murder of many hundreds of people, staff and patients during a two-week siege of the Al-Shifa Hospital. This episode constitutes a distinct war crime within the larger genocide. The IDF has made a specialty of making hospitals into key sites of their mass murder campaigns. The IDF has also become the world’s champion killers of journalists, humanitarian aid workers, and UN officials.

With the knowledge of the seemingly limitless nature of the Biden administration’s backing, Israel’s actions are becoming increasingly audacious across many frontiers of aggression including the lethal missile strike on April 1st on the Iranian Embassy in Damascus. Hours later the IDF bombed a vehicle killing seven humanitarian aid workers employed by the World Central Kitchen.

Genocide as a Marker of Israel’s Publicly-Flaunted Place in the Global Community?

The same Jewish Supremacist clique in charge of Israel, is also in charge of most facets of the US government. A main geopolitical role of the US government these days is to serve and supply Israel in its genocidal mission.

There are many implications arising from the open-armed embrace by the Jewish state of genocidal atrocities directed especially at women and children. It is almost as if the Israeli leadership has chosen to make multi-faceted genocide a publicly-flaunted trade mark of its unique place in the global community.

One indicator of this decision can be seen in the implicit consent of the Israeli Supreme Court for the perpetration of genocide. The Israeli jurists in the court signal their consent for genocidal abominations with their silence and inaction.

The pursuit of this genocidal agenda is tied to the growth of a megalomaniacal scheme for world conquest. The symbolic core of this radical scheme is the plan to transform the site of the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem into the locale of the Third Temple as conceived by the advocates of the most radical branch of Jewish eschatology. The spearhead of the plan is being led by the most extreme faction of West Bank settlers known as the Jewish Power Party of Religious Zionists. Its leader is Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Israeli National Security Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, Patrols the Site of the Al Aqsa Mosque, the Second Most Sacred Site in the Islamic World.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/ben-gvir-visits-temple-mount-on-tisha-bav-drawing-fury-from-palestinians-and-jordan/

Ben-Gvir is Netanyahu’s Minister of National Security. Netanyahu’s current coalition can be understood as an elaborate extension of Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Kach Party that espoused the goal of erasing all Arabs from any presence whatsoever in the Jewish state.

Kahanism

Netanyahu’s government is by far the most lunatic coalition ever to dominate the Israeli legislature known as the Knesset.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/kach-political-party

The messianic plan of the extremist clique that has taken control of the Israeli government, is to eliminate the al Asqa mosque and to raise on the same site the Third Temple. This Third Temple is conceived by its proponents as a replacement for the Temple of David and Solomon, an edifice eliminated by soldiers of the Roman Empire in 70 AD.

The Third Temple would host a new kind of World Court modelled on the Jewish Sanhedrin brought forward from the era of the Second Temple. This messianic scheme is being integrated into the teachings being fed to about 80 million Christian Zionists in North America, many of whom have perversely embraced the accelerated Israeli genocide of Palestinians as an expression of God’s divine will.

https://www.jewishvoice.org/read/article/update-building-third-temple

The most recent spurts of genocidal activity since October 7 in the treatment of Palestinians hold menacing implications for the treatment of other marginalized and dissenting groups the world over. For many decades now the Israeli military, police, and corporate sectors have viewed the Palestinians, including children, as human lab rats.

The Israelis are constantly experimenting in various techniques of “pacification,” torture, subordination, elimination and mental manipulation through a constantly-changing spectrum of invasive methods.

The outgrowths of these experiments have resulted in the Israeli production of much hardware, software, and supposed experts devoted to repression and elimination of unwanted people and ideas. Military, police and intelligence officials from many countries regularly gather in Israel to draw lessons from Israeli techniques for dealing with a population group who are treated as natural-born criminals from birth.

The subjugation of the Palestinians has therefore created the basis of a lucrative business that thrives from exploiting the denial of human rights to targeted Palestinians. Now that many forms of full-fledged, industrial-scale genocide are being openly practised by Israel with US approval, what comes next?

Will Israeli experience and knowhow in the commission of this international crime be packaged and marketed globally? Can we expect to see the amplified Israeli export of expertise in applied genocide? Will the pattern continue of exporting Israeli tactics for the subjugation and elimination of Palestinians to other regions where vested interests seek to repress other sorts of dissidents?

Israeli techniques of policing Palestinians have effected policing styles in the United States, Canada and many other countries. This propensity has deep roots in many of the most authoritarian US-backed regimes in Latin America, where Israeli experts in torture and repression have long played leading roles in maintaining Zio-American power.

See, for instance, Tony Greenstein, Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponization of Memory in the Service of the State and Nation (New Generation Publishing, 2022)

Everything is indeed changed by the unmistakable demonstration of the limitations of even the core institutions of the UN to stand in the way of the Israeli and US deployment of very overt forms of genocide. In spite of all the elaborate word play in the January 26 ruling of the International Court of Justice, can there be any doubt about the obvious ongoing character of the unrestrained genocide taking place in Gaza and the West Bank.

Can there be any doubt that the daily broadcasts of, for instance, Al Jazeera, easily demonstrates that regular violations of the UN’s Genocide Convention are taking place? Genocide involves the following:

(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group

Can there be any doubt these actions are being “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”?

In the history of efforts to prove the violation of the Genocide Convention, problems tend to arise in trying to prove the genocidal intent of the alleged perpetrators. In this case, however, the evidence is overwhelming that the leadership of Israel fully intends to realize genocidal objectives.

Moreover in this case various polls indicate that the vast majority of Jewish Israelis, in spite of their overwhelming dislike of Netanyahu, stand fully behind the IDF’s campaign to eliminate Palestinians in Gaza and to obliterate all infrastructure and life support systems in the Strip.

In one Time poll found that almost 60% of Israelis surveyed indicated that they believe the assault on the Palestinians should be pushed forward with more fire power.

https://time.com/6333781/israel-hamas-poll-palestine/

Kevin Barrett draws on a wide array of stats to justify his thesis that “90% of Israeli Jews Support Genocide.”

https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/03/do-90-of-israeli-jews-support-genocide/

Has there ever been a case where genocidal intent so permeates the thinking of by far the largest proportion of the entire predator population?

Try as the Israeli government has done to murder many dozens of indigenous journalists in Palestine and prohibit the international media from covering the Gazan genocide on the ground, the messages and imagery of the viciousness of the IDF’s military campaign in Gaza has gained much worldwide attention. Indeed, social media is alive with illustrations of the self-applauding savagery of some IDF members as well as of Israeli civilians making malicious fun of the mass murder of the Palestinians.

This demonization and ridiculing of a subjugated people marks a clear expression by some Israeli Chosenites that they are not subject to the usual constraints of civilized behaviour. Many groups and individuals are complicit in this phenomenon. Christian Zionists and many other groups in the West give Jewish Israelis good cause to view themselves in an especially-entitled people not subject to prevailing laws and rules of civil conduct.

The lethal Israeli war on many hundreds of health care practitioners, humanitarian aid workers, UN officials, and media organizations is growing increasingly ferocious with many new and unexpected twists. For instance the Knesset passed into law Netanyahu’s pronouncement that Al Jazeera is a “terror channel”— this after the Israeli Armed Forces have already bombed Al Jazeera’s Gazan Office and killed several of the broadcaster’s journalists along with several members of their families.

Al Jazeera forms one part in the development of a media system where the Palestinian victims of genocide engage in documenting and publicizing their own demise as the massacres and ethnic cleansing go unrelentingly forward. Netanyahu’s decision to ban Al Jazeera in Israel will further transform the Jewish country’s mainstream media into a “horror show” that must bear some of the responsibility for the continuing incitement of genocide.

The genocidal elimination of Gazan inhabitants together with the destruction of all means of sustaining human life in the enclosed Strip, is meant to culminate in mass evictions. The aim is to de-Palestinianize Israel in a culminating act of ethnic cleansing through forced relocation.

As Arnaud Bertrand indicated, the still unobstructed and ongoing genocidal onslaught pushed forward by Israel and its US partner “effectively tells everyone about the obsolescence of the set of institutions, rules and norms” that used to prohibit such criminality. Bertrand adds, “We're effectively now in a world system where everyone realizes the police, the government, the basic set of beliefs, have become completely corrupted.”

Part 2

Israel as an Outgrowth and as a Deliverer of Genocide

After six months of witnessing the course of a twenty-first century massacre aimed at more than two million people trapped inside a prison cage, there is much incentive to address the altered meanings and implications of genocide in light of the recent history shaping current events.

One of the most striking features of the new situation is that the very country widely seen and understood as the primary national outgrowth of genocide, is the same country now on the delivering side of a new variety of highly-industrialized genocide.

The new round of genocide has become a kind of horrific work-in-progress. This genocide may go on for a long time. The prediction comes about because of the failure of the puppet regimes put nominally in charge of the international community to stand up to the combined power of the Zionist Lobby dominating the US-Israeli partnership.

The complex of genocidal attachments that cling to Israel’s past and present inevitably puts a spotlight on controversies permeating the phenomenon that has come to be known as The Holocaust. Until the appearance in 1993 of of Deborah Lipstadt’s book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, the many controversies surrounding the most memorialized event of the twentieth century were the subject of lively revisionist discourse.

Various aspects of a huge and complex subject were discussed and debated in spite of the increasing coercion of a growing lobby that sought to declare the Holocaust subject to be out of bounds to all but those approved by the self-regulating network of Zionist thought police. The negative consequences of this invasive assault on public discourse have been considerable.

Basically the intention of Lipstadt and those behind her book project, was to constrain the expression of the unauthorized many. The multitudes would be allowed only a thumbs up or a thumbs down vote on the Holocaust’s official interpretation.

An authorized few can tell the story but the vast majority of people must accept it or face the possibility of dire consequences including incarceration. In my experience, even to indicate that the Holocaust like all subjects should be subject to “open debate,” was enough to become branded as a Holocaust Denier.

https://archive.org/details/WhyDoYOUSupportOpenDebateOnTheHolocaust_201805

Nevertheless some critical discourse has continued in spite of the coercive imposition of obstructions. Such discourse must continue especially in light of the plunge into genocidal conduct by many of the same parties who have been most zealous in their efforts to police discussion concerning “The Holocaust.”

Is there one holocaust or are there many? Why treat genocide as the basis for some sort of contest demanding the designation of a supreme example to be highlighted above all others? Shouldn’t we avoid an approach to the study of genocide that leads to the designation of one group as the most victimized of all the victims?

In Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponization of Memory in the Service of the State and Nation (New Generation Publishing, 2022), Tony Greenstein has written a penetrating critique of Zionists before, during and after World War II.

This well-documented text explains that Zionists after the coming to power of Adolf Hitler in 1933 saw an opportunity to be exploited. They were so committed to creating a Jewish nation in Palestine, that they obstructed any strategy for saving Jews that did not point towards the creation and peopling of a Jewish State.

The event now remembered as the Holocaust was understood by Zionist strategists as the essential step along the way in the creation of Israel. Zionists often led the local Jewish Councils (Judenräte) who in many instances assisted the German government in apprehending Jewish groups and sending them off to camps. Of all Jews, the National Socialist preferred working with Zionists. Both partners shared a parallel conception of nation building through dual visions of racial solidarity.

In emphasizing the collaboration between German Zionists and the National Socialist government led by Adolf Hitler, Greenstein goes over some of the same topical ground as did Lenny Brenner in several books including Zionism in the Age of Dictators (1983). Much of this early collaboration with the Hitlerian reich resulted in a shared plan that was implemented to help German Jews migrate to Palestine with much of their wealth.

As Greenstein sees it, Brenner never tackled Zionist historiography. Brenner stands accused of not dealing with how historians like Yehuda Brauer have written revisionist accounts of the past to favour Zionist interests by covering over the extent of Zionist collaboration with the agendas of National Socialism.

Greenstein emphasizes the consistent Zionist exploitation of Anti-Semitism by Zionists. They needed to treat Anti-Semitism as a permanent and inevitable condition throughout the world in order to advance the supposed need for a distinct Jewish nation. The creation of Israel was presented as the answer to Anti-Semitism.

During the early stages of the founding of Israel, David Ben- Gurion, the founding Prime Minister, was typical of many Zionists. Ben-Gurion apparently steered clear of the genocide subject because it seemed to emphasize Jewish victimhood rather than Jewish strength, resourcefulness and resolve. He never in his life visited Yad Veshem which Greenstein labels as Israel’s Zionist propaganda museum. According to Greenstein, the Zionist leadership were already planning for Yad Veshem’s displays as early as 1943-44.

Greenstein highlights the Zionist insistence that there is a unique relationship between Jews and the Holocaust. He emphasizes that the German assault on, for instance, gypsies was well integrated with the assault on Jews. Gypsies, however, lacked an influential lobby to derive political advantage from what befell them.

Greenstein lends his support to the Palestinians who he sees as the primary victims of a very imperialistic interpretation of the Holocaust’s meaning. The author lauds the strategy adopted by the Palestinian leadership and their allies of advocating Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) policies directed at undermining Israel’s economy. Greenstein points out that this same strategy was adopted in 1933 to boycott German exports when the National Socialist German Workers Party, including Adolf Hitler, came to power.

Denying Common Sense and Ruining the Conditions for Good Historical Writing

Tony Greenstein is no fan of Deborah Lipstadt. As he sees it, Lipstadt’s “one claim to fame” is that historian David Irving sued her for describing him as “a Nazi apologist and admirer of Hitler.” Hollywood mogul Stephen Spielberg funded Lipstadt’s defence.

Greenstein points out that “Lipstadt played no part in the trial and genuine historians of the holocaust such as Richard Evans were hired as expert witnesses.” Hollywood made up for Lipstadt’s marginalized role in the real trial by featuring the actress that portrayed the Holocaust Professor in the Hollywood drama, Denial.

How will Hollywood handle the dramatization of the genocide underway in Gaza? If the past is any indication, Palestinians will be caricatured as natural-born terrorists preoccupied with doing acts of violence for no good reason whatsoever.

Will members of the IDF be depicted like John Wayne intent on pushing aside the native obstacles to the spread of higher civilization. If there are any villains who are not Palestinians, will they be envisaged along the lines of woke stereotypes of Christian White Supremacists who happen to wander into the dramatized plot.

Greenstein sees “the dim-witted Lipstadt” as “a genuinely stupid American professor of holocaust studies.” Looking at her position that only Israel should be allowed restrictive immigration policies, Greenstein deems her to be “a common and garden variety racist who dresses up her bigotry and callousness with academic cliches and the title of a Holocaust Professor.”

https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2015/10/deborah-lipstadt-holocaust-historian.html

There has been a crackdown on open debate and on discussion of any scenario that deviates from the idealized narrative highlighted in the world’s many Holocaust Museums. These museums are meant to tell the story of the heroic emergence of Israel from the ashes of the genocidal treatment of Jews during WWII.

This crackdown has been instrumental in the fast deterioration of public discourse across a wide array of topics. Once the right to deplatform and outlaw one sort of “denier” was afforded to a very powerful group, this same right was subsequently claimed by lobbyists promoting many causes.

The invention of a uniform category of humanity said to be “Holocaust Deniers”— as if such a reductionist category makes any sense at all—- opened the door to many other absurdities. Suddenly Zionist-appointed arbiters of “hate speech” on the Internet, came up with concepts like COVID deniers, climate change deniers, or trans-gender deniers. In Canada those who argued for more nuanced interpretations of what transpired throughout a century of Indian education, came to be maligned as “residential school deniers.”

The spread of the application of “denialism” to a widening array of independent thinkers is coming to constitute a major embarrassment especially for the diminishing number of conscientious scholars who continue to be active at institutions of higher learning. Academic freedom at universities is being stifled by a process that gained momentum with the decision to constrain the study of Israel’s origins to a yes/no dichotomy that eschews the subtleties, nuances and complexities of history.

Before Lipstadt and her cronies appointed themselves judge and jury on Holocaust studies, the process of revisionism was well established when it came to research and publication on that topic. In fact the concept of “revisionism” explains the essence of most historical writing.

Often new sources for old topics come to light requiring the revision of texts to incorporate the added information. Sometimes new connections are drawn between topics that previously seemed unconnected. Moreover, as new people come into the study of old topics, sometimes novel interpretations inject new vitality into the study of the past.

Professor Deborah Lipstadt

Deborah Lipstadt’s Denying the Holocaust was written to short circuit the process of revisionism by simply dismissing as “Holocaust Deniers” the likes of historian David Irving. A prolific self-trained scholar who became an essential and extremely popular interpreter of World War II history, Irving stands in a category all his own.

Irving’s significant scholarly achievement grew from his preoccupation with drawing almost exclusively from original primary sources. Many of these original sources he tracked down and read before any other researcher had eyed them. Lipstadt’s “dim-witted” and anti-intellectual approach, where she dismissively heaves aside the totality of Irving’s large body of work, constitutes an affront to credible scholarly enterprise.

In spite of the imposition of censorship by the most powerful lobby in the world, the process of historical revisionism has continued in spite of the grotesque invention and manipulation of hate speech laws by the likes of the censorious Anti-Defamation League in the United States as well B’nai Brith Canada and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs in my own country.

In Canada the Israel Lobby is behind the Trudeau government’s so-called Online Harms Act. This Bolshevik-style abomination would, if adopted, impose life sentences on those whose ideas threaten to disrupt the official narrative narrative to be exploited by those in power. It would also impose the institution of house arrest on many innocent people caught up in absurd processes.

These processes would quickly transform Canada into a polity where snitches, plants, and limited hangout entrepreneurs would thrive while genuine whistle blowers would be shut up and locked away to be tortured or worse.

In and Around the Great Holocaust Trial

The study of the events of World War II look quite different outside the framework of Jewish Anti-Zionism where the revisionist work of Tony Greenstein is having quite an impact on what Norman Finkelstein has labelled as the Holocaust Industry.

One of the sites of significant investigation into the highly contested and politicized realm of Holocaust History is the Committee on Open Debate on the Holocaust. Those who have worked on protecting the terrain of “open debate” face many grave occupational hazards.

One of those that have been targeted by the Israel Lobby is Germar Rudolf, a chemist who was drawn to study in the late 1980s “the formation and verifiability of cyanide compounds in the Auschwitz gas chambers.” From there he started to become aware of the extensive body of literature examining many issues and topics from a position of skepticism towards official narratives.

Rudolf made it his task to make available some of the most significant books challenging various aspects of the chief Zionist interpreters of holocaust history. Bringing together 100 titles, Rudolf created Castle Hill Publications, a company that was able to sell books readily in a variety of venues including Amazon.com.

Then in 1998 the concept of a free press began to give way of the digital equivalent to book burning. Rudolf described this process briefly in 2018 in the promotional text of one of his own works, The Day Amazon Murdered History.

Pivotal events in Holocaust Studies took place in my home town of Toronto in 1985 and 1988 when Ernst Zundel faced charges accusing him of violating an old law prohibiting the dissemination “false news.” The question effectively posed to the Ontario court that decided to hear the case was… Who is telling a credible version of what did or did not transpire in the holocaust?

A former candidate for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada, Zundel was a dynamo committed to making headway for the advancement of his cause. Zundel was sincerely devoted to forcing some reckoning with what he viewed as the unjustified and unfair demonization of German-Canadians like himself.

Zundel sought to bring a more balanced view to how the events of World War II have been interpreted and depicted. Zundel was engaged in the quest for a more sensible strategy in building a New World country where diverse peoples embodying many historical interpretations and understandings must learn to live together

Ernst Zundel

Zundel faced criminal charges pressed on him in 1985 originally by the Israel Lobby whose officials had convinced the government to do its bidding. Zundel welcomed the charges which he perceived as presenting an opening to put forward the case he had been developing for many years.

With his team of carefully-assembled expert witnesses, Zundel believed he could prove many aspects of the official narrative of the Holocaust were not supported by the available evidence. Zundel’s expert witnesses included David Irving and Prof. Robert Faurisson.

https://robert-faurisson.com/history/the-zundel-trials-1985-and-1988/

Faurisson has been described as “Europe’s foremost Holocaust revisionist scholar.” He became an extremely important figure in the trial. He helped Zundel’s lawyer, the free speech advocate Doug Christie, in preparing for the cross examinations of eye witnesses with their first-hand accounts from Auschwitz and other camps. He also was instrumental in helping Christie prepare for the cross examination of the plaintiff’s main expert witness, Raoul Hilberg, author of The Destruction of the European Jews.

Robert Faurisson

Faurisson began his academic career as a professor of literature at the University of Lyon. His entry into the Holocaust studies began with his discovery in 1975-76 that the crematory structure (Krema) at Auschwitz was not the original structure but rather a “replica” built after World War II.

https://www.unz.com/pub/jhr__the-gas-chamber-of-auschwitz-i/

The reconstructed Krema is said to have contained the gas chamber around which much contestation has unfolded, including in the course of the Toronto litigation which its chronicler, Michael Hoffman, has described as The Great Holocaust Trial.

As it would turn out, the two Toronto trials of Ernst Zundel form one of the primary procedures where contending interpretations of the Holocaust were afforded a chance to be heard in judicial environment. The proceedings were not a cartoon confrontation between Deniers and Affirmers. The contenders zeroed in on sets of very distinct issues, the primary one being whether or not Jews were gassed and burned in factory-like procedures of industrialized genocide.

Both sides had wins and loses in the proceedings. In Doug Christie’s cross examination of the eye-witnesses, the inconsistencies in their testimonies negated their credibility. Henceforth there has been a wariness to depend on eye-witnesses in Holocaust trials, including in the case in 2001 of Deborah Lipstadt’s defence against her being sued by David Irving.

Similarly in Christie’s cross-examination of Raoul Hilberg, the Holocaust historian was forced to admit he could not provide evidence for some of his most important contentions.

The trial was generally considered something of a draw. Neither side was completely humiliated or vindicated on every point. There was a similar outcome in the follow up trial in 1988. Of course there is a proper written record of the trial unlike similar proceedings in Germany where no transcript of the proceedings are made. In fact it is illegal in Germany to present a defence in a Holocaust trial because that would be denying what must not be denied.

In both of the Toronto cases the jury decided against Zundel but the convictions were overturned as the free speech provisions of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms pre-empted the false news laws.

The Israel Lobby perceived of the Zundel trials as a disaster that had brought much public attention to the substance of very real contentions about how the German treatment of the Jews of Europe should be interpreted and understood. The result of this setback for the Israel Lobby was that the procedures for the kind of trials that took place in Toronto, have been widely altered and so there can never be a repeat of what Hoffman dubbed “The Great Holocaust Trial.”

After the Toronto Trials Zundel moved to Tennessee with his wife to settle down with her and engage in his love of painting. In 2003, however, it was connived by his detractors to steal Zundel away from the United States and plunge him into solitary confinement in a Toronto jail. He was not charged with any crime but was instead incarcerated on the basis of the new post-9/11 terrorist laws used to declare him as a security threat. Mark Weber has written of Zundel as follows:

“Zündel is in prison not because his views are unpopular, or because he’s a “security risk.” He’s in prison because Jewish groups want him there. He’s a prisoner because he promotes views that the Jewish-Zionist lobby considers harmful to its interests.

This lobby is the decisive, critical factor in the decades-old campaign to silence him. The only sustained and institutionalized effort to imprison him has come from this lobby, which includes the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Canadian Jewish Congress, the Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Association, and the League for Human Rights of B’nai B’rith (with the Anti-Defamation League, its counterpart in the US).”

https://ihr.org/article_news/030923zundel-shtml/

A Canadian court opened the way to deport Zundel to face prosecution in Germany for his unacceptable interpretations of history. His lawyer in Germany, Sylvia Stolz. faced criminal charges and then jail time for attempting to represent her client who served a five year sentence.

These obscene abuses of power are on clear display in the contentious circumstances surrounding current controversies over the nature of the genocide from which Israel emerged in 1947-48.

International Crimes in the Making

When I faced sharp accusations for standing up for the position that there should be “open debate” on the Holocaust and every other subject, I was moved to think about the nature of the sensitivities surrounding the subject.

I found myself asking if all genocides constitute a holocaust or just some of them. When an event is described as The Holocaust, does it mean that one monumental genocide is meant to tower above all other genocides, all other holocausts? Who gets to decide such things? What are the criteria?

As a Native American Studies Prof. for 20 twenty of my 36 years of teaching university courses, I came to conceive of an inter-generational genocide of Native American peoples unfolding throughout the Western Hemisphere from 1492 until the present.

I’m aware that many of the deaths that occurred especially during the earlier stages of this period, are the result of plagues brought from Europe for which the Indigenous peoples had no immunity.

That consideration, however, does not close the subject. Generally speaking the intention was made very clear from the time of Christopher Columbus to the time of the conquistadors, the missionaries, the miners, the pioneer farmers, the railway builders and the real estate agents.

The Western Hemisphere was to be developed as a New World for immigrants who were to displace the Old World societies of the Native peoples. As I see it, the genocide that began in 1492 has never really ended.

Does the genocide of Native American peoples since 1492 deserve to be memorialized by something like the many Holocaust Museums to commemorate an event whose still-contested substance unfolded for, at most, twelve years? How should one conceive of a memorial to commemorate the genocide of Native Americans since 1492?

I have found that the idea of a museum to mark the Holocaust of Native American Peoples in the Western Hemisphere since 1492, is often conceived as a worthwhile and exciting project.

Where should such a museum or such museums be situated? What numbers of those eliminated should be proclaimed? What should be done with those who refuse to subscribe to the official interpretation? Should the “deniers” be deplatformed, criminalized, and incarcerated?

My work as a Native American Studies Prof. led me to start to consider the treatment of the Palestinians that have been facing genocidal treatment by incoming waves of European Jews who collectively gained some kind of standing in international law from the United Nations in 1947-48. Who can deny the links of continuity connecting the inter-generational genocide of Native Americans to the current acceleration of the genocide directed at the Palestinians?

Along with the Lipstadtian crime of what the Holocaust Professor describes as “holocaust denial,” the other major crimes hunted out by Zionist thought police are those that explain that the current plight of the Palestinians runs far beyond apartheid.

It seems that the Zionist thought police are especially vigilant in hunting out the supposed crimes of university professors. Those of us who notice the systematic torture, subjugation and elimination of Palestinian people by IDF soldiers and by the Wild West settlers of the West Bank, are especially prone to be on the receiving end of recriminations and punishments.

What is to be said of those us who see Israel’s genocide as a natural outgrowth of the New World genocide that began in 1492? Both Israel and its US partner in genocide are founded on the principle that they are inheritors of a divinely-ordained Manifest Destiny to displace Native peoples and own their lands.

Some of us faced harsh attacks on our academic posts for raising the alarm of what we now can see was a major genocidal crime in the making. We were the whistle blowers foreseeing a major international crime in the making? The Zionist thought police keep upping the ante by engaging in larger and larger crimes against humanity in ways that cannot be denied.

Tony Lipstadt blog

https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2015/10/deborah-lipstadt-holocaust-historian.html