Por Bernard Lewis, historiador británico y profesor Cleveland E. Dodge de Estudios de Oriente Medio de la Universidad de Princeton (GEES, 09/03/06):
Existe un tópico bastante manido que todos hemos escuchado antes muchas veces: criticar las acciones y políticas del estado de Israel o las doctrinas del Sionismo es perfectamente legítimo sin estar motivado necesariamente por el antisemitismo. El hecho de que esto haya sido repetido ad nauseam no minimiza su verdad. No sólo lo acepto, sino que incluso lo llevaría un paso más allá con otra formulación que tal vez provoque sorpresa, por no decir asombro: es perfectamente posible odiar y hasta perseguir a los judíos sin ser antisemita necesariamente [...]
By David Clark, a former Labour government adviser (THE GUARDIAN, 06/03/06):
If the past few weeks have demonstrated anything, it is the frequency with which allegations of anti-semitism surface in modern political debate. Ken Livingstone, the Church of England and the Guardian (over articles comparing Israel and apartheid) are the most recent to find themselves in the firing line. This is the backdrop against which an unofficial parliamentary inquiry on anti-semitism under former Foreign Office minister Denis McShane concludes its hearings in Westminster today.
A sober reflection on the nature of the problem is badly needed to take the sting out of the issue and establish groundrules that everyone can respect.… Seguir leyendo »
By Anne Applebaum (THE WASHINGTON POST, 01/03/06):
It was unusual -- tape recorders not being de rigueur in Britain -- but this time there was a transcript of what was said. Just as unusual: It all began politely. The journalist, Oliver Finegold of the Evening Standard, asked Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, "How did tonight go?" Not so unusually, the mayor, who was emerging from a reception, responded with an insult: "What did you do before? Were you a German war criminal?"
"No, I'm Jewish, I wasn't a German war criminal and actually I'm quite offended by that. So, how did tonight go?"… Seguir leyendo »
By Ken Livingston, mayor of London (THE GUARDIAN, 01/03/06):
At least one thing can be said about my possible suspension from office, which was put on hold by the high court yesterday: people from across the political spectrum have come to the defence of the basic democratic principle that those elected by the people should only be removed by the voters. Last week, an adjudication tribunal found that some of my comments to an Evening Standard journalist had been "unnecessarily insensitive" and "offensive". But those are not grounds for overturning the decision of the voters of London. As far as I am aware, there is no law against "unnecessary insensitivity" or even "offensiveness" to journalists questioning you as you try to go home.… Seguir leyendo »
By Tony Bayfield. Rabbi Tony Bayfield is the head of the Movement for Reform Judaism in Britain and a co-president of the Council of Christians and Jews (THE GUARDIAN, 28/02/06):
We Jews are a thundering nuisance. Our persistence has always been a problem for Christianity, but we've really excelled ourselves over the last 60 years. Though Auschwitz was liberated back in 1944, a Christian still can't speak to a Jew without having the Holocaust waved reproachfully in their face. Criticise the state of Israel and the poor innocent is accused of anti-semitism. And Israel itself, positioned as it is right where the tectonic plates of the post-Christian West and the Muslim world meet, is clearly an anachronistic obstacle to global peace.… Seguir leyendo »
You know what? I don’t think I believe in freedom of speech. This isn’t, you understand, a subject I’ve considered at any great length. No gigantic research has gone on here. I’m speaking almost entirely as an idiot. Indeed, I’ll go farther. I’m convinced there are good reasons why we should all be allowed to say whatever we want — which I shall feel hugely ashamed about when I’m subsequently chastised. I shall surely regret just gobbing off without a second’s thought on a very serious subject. But then, that’s the point. I haven’t had time to consider the full implications of freedom of speech.… Seguir leyendo »
Why Ken Livingstone? Who is David Laverick? These are the questions to which the press has been giving answers — often wrong ones — in the past week.
There is a mystery about Ken Livingstone. It is that he has twice been elected Mayor of London although he is a militant dinosaur of the old Left, with views that have been rejected by the national electorate at every general election since 1979. If he were a national party he would win only a single seat — his own. Like George Galloway, another one-man band of the Left, he is professionally out of tune.… Seguir leyendo »
How has the most racially attuned man in Britain wound up in the same category as David Irving, Abu Hamza and Nick Griffin?:
Oh, if only they’d sent Ken Livingstone on a racial sensitivities counselling course, instead of suspending him from office for four weeks. Can you imagine it? Ken, the most racially attuned man in Britain, a chap so implacably pro-Muslim, pro-Irish, right-on, anti the imperialist white hegemony, forced to sit on a blond wooden chair in some corporate hellhole while a lecturer, with the use of an overhead projector, attempted to address his inner core of racism.… Seguir leyendo »
By George F. Will (THE WASHINGTON POST, 26/02/06):
In some recess of David Irving's reptile brain, he knows that his indefensible imprisonment is helping his side. His side consists of all the enemies of open societies.
Irving, born in England in 1938, was a prodigy of perversity, asking for a copy of "Mein Kampf" as a school prize. He grew up to be a "moderate fascist" -- his description -- historian who has made a career of arguing, in many books and incessant speeches, that although many Jews died of disease and hardship during World War II, nothing like the Holocaust -- 6 million victims of industrialized murder -- occurred.… Seguir leyendo »
IT’S A SATURDAY, and no time for droning on any more about David Irving. We are here, we Saturday columnists, to provide a bit of light relief from the weightier witterings of the working week. But the thing is, David Irving has gone down, he is news, and I have a long letter from him on my lavatory wall which has been waiting for just such an opportunity as this to get a public airing. And let’s face it, after nigh on five years in my downstairs khazi I think you’d want an airing too.… Seguir leyendo »
Last winter, on a cold and black night, I went to hear the Holocaust denier David Irving speak at the University of Colorado. I arrived early to get a good seat and soon after me came five huge young men, all of them looking like skinheads. I glared at them and they glared at me and for a moment I feared there and then I was going to meet my maker, but it turned out that when Irving himself started to speak, the skinheads of my fertile imagination rose as one, unfurled an Israeli flag and announced themselves as Jewish protesters -- a near case of me being a casualty of friendly fire.… Seguir leyendo »
The Austrian courts have done the world a favour in exposing David Irving as a noxious opportunist and a coward.
By David Cesarani (THE GUARDIAN, 22/02/06):
The sentence handed down on David Irving by a Viennese court for denying that the Nazis used gas chambers to murder Jews at Auschwitz, and for declaring Hitler innocent of that crime, evidently left him stunned. It also stirred something of a "backlash" in this country, where sections of the media and the intelligentsia persist in seeing Irving as a harmless eccentric with a wayward, if despicable, interpretation of the past.
In the studios and editorial columns there were echoes of a bygone era when clubmen routinely harrumphed at news of damned continentals trampling the freedoms of an Englishman.… Seguir leyendo »
THIS IS HOW you play Juden Raus. Just throw the dice and move your smiling Aryan piece round the board. As quickly as you can, start rounding up the Jewish pieces. You can’t miss them — they are the nasty, snarling counters that can be found at squares such as Gorstein Furs and Saloman Money Lenders. Pick up six ugly Jews, bring them to the collection point and you are the winner! It’s board-game fun for the entire family to enjoy!
You can find this 1938 game among a vast number of Nazi books, cuttings, posters and artefacts that reside, along with the eyewitness accounts of Nazi victims and the signed confessions of the Nuremburg defendants, in a town house in Devonshire Street, London.… Seguir leyendo »
Por José Antonio Zarazalejos. Director de ABC (29/01/06):
HUBO un tiempo en que, al concluir la obra, caía el telón y en sincronía con el descenso del cortinaje el público irrumpía en aplausos más o menos enfervorizados. Ahora, por lo general, cuando termina la función teatral las luces del escenario se apagan y, a veces, suena una musiquilla que se comporta a modo de epílogo. Median así unos segundos -apenas un par- en los que el espectador tiene un tiempo para pensarse si aplaude la representación -en general siempre lo hace- y, especialmente, para calcular el énfasis con el que debe hacerlo.… Seguir leyendo »
Por Ramin Jahanbegloo, filósofo iraní, es director del Departamento de Estudios Contemporáneos en el Cultural Research Bureau de Teherán (EL PAÍS, 28/01/06):
Auschwitz no es un nombre desconocido en Irán. La mayoría de los iraníes cultos han oído hablar de él y saben claramente que representa un lugar infame. Pero no demasiados iraníes sienten la necesidad histórica de visitarlo. Ni siquiera aquellos que viajan a Polonia por razones de estudios o de negocios suelen volver a Irán con la experiencia personal de Auschwitz. Yo visité Auschwitz en febrero de 2004, con ocasión de un viaje a Polonia para hablar con diversos intelectuales y artistas polacos para una edición especial de una revista iraní.… Seguir leyendo »
Por Reyes Mate, es profesor de investigación en el Instituto de Filosofía del CSIC (EL PAÍS, 27/01/06):
A la pregunta de qué le preocupa del porvenir, responde Jorge Semprún: "La memoria. Están desapareciendo los testigos del exterminio". Y esa preocupación se tiñe de angustia ante la posibilidad de ser el último superviviente. Ni él ni su interlocutor en la ocasión, Elie Wiesel, quieren serlo, porque eso significaría tener que aprovechar los minutos de descuento para que la memoria gane la partida histórica que va perdiendo. Llevan 60 años diciendo que sin memoria, la catástrofe se repetirá fatalmente, y nadie les hace caso.… Seguir leyendo »
Por Víctor Harel. Embajador de Israel en España (ABC, 27/01/06):
MIENTRAS el presidente de Irán, Ahmadineyad, continúa a diario martilleando sus vociferantes llamadas «a borrar a Israel del mapa», ante una comunidad internacional que lo tolera (¿1933?), la España oficial marca hoy (27 de enero), por segundo año consecutivo, el Día de la Memoria del Holocausto. Solemnemente, en el Congreso y en el Paraninfo de la Complutense, a 61 años de la liberación de Auschwitz, funesto campo de exterminio y símbolo de la sistemática aniquilación de un tercio del pueblo judío, España se une a un buen número de países europeos, en una jornada de recuerdo y reflexión sobre la Shoá, la página más monstruosa de la historia moderna.… Seguir leyendo »
I am writing these words on a train, travelling through Germany. And yet, it hardly feels strange at all. There was a time when a journey like this would have felt like the breaking of a taboo: the associations with the wartime past - trains, Germany - were too obvious to ignore.
I remember my first trip to this country, as a student nearly 20 years ago. Some relatives wished me luck, as if I was entering a danger zone; others wondered if it was right to go at all, as if my mere presence in Germany was an act of unwarranted, premature forgiveness.… Seguir leyendo »
