OpEdNews - Page 2 of Article: Countering Benjamin Netanyahu's Orwellian Spin at the UN

N: Last month, I went to a villa in a suburb of Berlin called Wannsee. There, on January 20, 1942, after a hearty meal, senior Nazi officials met and decided how to exterminate the Jewish people. The detailed minutes of that meeting have been preserved by successive German governments. Here is a copy of those minutes, in which the Nazis issued precise instructions on how to carry out the extermination of the Jews. Is this a lie?

A day before I was in Wannsee, I was given in Berlin the original construction plans for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Those plans are signed by Hitler's deputy, Heinrich Himmler himself. Here is a copy of the plans for Auschwitz-Birkenau, where one million Jews were murdered. Is this too a lie?

E: I cannot see that copy, but here is NO lie:

In Tel Aviv "on March 10, 1948, eleven men had a meeting in the Red House headed by Ben Gurion. The eleven decided to expel one million Palestinians from historical Palestine. No minutes were taken, but many memoirs were written about that fateful meeting. A systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestine began and within seven months the Zionists managed to expel one half of all the Palestinian people from their villages and towns."- Dr. Ilan Pappe, Israeli born and a graduate of Hebrew University and Oxford is the author of "A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples" which documents the expulsion of Palestinians as an orchestrated crime of ethnic cleansing. [5]

N: This June, President Obama visited the Buchenwald concentration camp. Did President Obama pay tribute to a lie? And what of the Auschwitz survivors whose arms still bear the tattooed numbers branded on them by the Nazis? Are those tattoos a lie?

E: Scars are tattoos with deeper stories and "Jewish scholar, Marc Ellis, called [it] the ecumenical deal: you Christians look the other way while we bludgeon the Palestinians and build our Jewish state and we won't remind you that Hitler was a good Catholic, a confirmed 'soldier of Christ,' long before he was a bad Nazi." [6]

N: One-third of all Jews perished in the conflagration. Nearly every Jewish family was affected, including my own. My wife's grandparents, her father's two sisters and three brothers, and all the aunts, uncles and cousins were all murdered by the Nazis. Is that also a lie?

E: While my spirituality, love of story-telling and temper are inherited from my Irish, not so good Catholic grandmother, her husband was a Polish Jew and my other two grandparents were from the Ukraine and they all died before I could learn how many of my relatives may have been murdered by the Nazis because good people looked the other way for too very long and did nothing at all.

N: Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this podium. To those who refused to come here and to those who left this room in protest, I commend you. You stood up for moral clarity and you brought honor to your countries.

E: "Always be ready to speak your mind and a base man will avoid you. Opposition is True Friendship."-William Blake, "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" 1796

N: But to those who gave this Holocaust-denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame? Have you no decency? A mere six decades after the Holocaust, you give legitimacy to a man who denies that the murder of six million Jews took place and pledges to wipe out the Jewish state. What a disgrace! What a mockery of the charter of the United Nations!

E: Have you no shame? Have you no decency? What a disgrace! What a mockery you make of the United Nations as I stated above! And what a lie you perpetuate by denying the facts regarding Israel's Dec-Jan. attack on Gaza!

One example: The rocket fire directed at Israel was practically "zero in the months preceding the attacks, [and] Hamas [made] repeated efforts to extend the ceasefire indefinitely provided Israel lifted its unlawful blockade of Gaza. Further it was Israel that had seemed to provoke the breakdown of the ceasefire when it launched a lethal attack on Hamas militants in Gaza on November 4, 2008. Israel disregarded this seemingly available diplomatic alternative to war to achieve security on its borders. Recourse to war, even if the facts justify self-defense, is according to international law, a last resort." [7]

N: Perhaps some of you think that this man and his odious regime threaten only the Jews. You're wrong. History has shown us time and again that what starts with attacks on the Jews eventually ends up engulfing many others.

E: What about Israel's Samson Option? The term coined by Israeli leaders like David Ben-Gurion, Shimon Peres, Levi Eshkol and Moshe Dayan in the mid-1960s to describe Israel's deterrence strategy of massive retaliation with nuclear weapons against nations whose military attacks threaten its existence, and possibly against other targets as well?

N: This Iranian regime is fueled by an extreme fundamentalism that burst onto the world scene three decades ago after lying dormant for centuries. In the past thirty years, this fanaticism has swept the globe with a murderous violence and cold-blooded impartiality in its choice of victims. It has callously slaughtered Muslims and Christians, Jews and Hindus, and many others. Though it is comprised of different offshoots, the adherents of this unforgiving creed seek to return humanity to medieval times. Wherever they can, they impose a backward regimented society where women, minorities, gays or anyone not deemed to be a true believer is brutally subjugated.

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