NYC principal denies request for Holocaust survivor to speak at school: ‘Given his messages’: New York Post

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Left-wing antisemitism in a meme

 

Poland summons Israeli ambassador over Yad Vashem post: Reuters

 "WARSAW, Nov 24 (Reuters) - Poland summoned Israel's ambassador on Monday over a tweet from a Holocaust memorial institute that Warsaw said did not make clear that occupying Nazi German forces, and not Polish authorities, made Jews wear star badges during World War Two.

Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski was protesting against a social media post in which Yad Vashem, Israel's memorial institution to the victims of the Holocaust, wrote that Poland was the first country where Jews were forced to wear "a distinctive badge to isolate them from the surrounding population".

The problem is, of course, that "Poland" did not force Jews to wear a badge. Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. These powers crucified Poland. Occupying Nazis, not Poles, forced the Jews to wear a badge. 

Full Reuters story here. 

Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski on Antisemitic Stereotypes of Jewish Omnipotence

Source

 Antisemites, including those who send me mail, are convinced that Jews are omnipotent and secretly run the world. This idea is so stupid it's hard to argue against it. If Jews ran the world, the Holocaust would not have happened. October 7 would not have happened. Jews would not fear for their safety in New York City, in Paris, in London. 

The antisemites who send me messages are convinced that there is a stereotype of Brute Polaks because Jews control the world. 

This is false. The stereotype flourishes and will continue to flourish because of various factors, including Poles' failure to educate themselves, to organize and to act strategically. 

Jews are not responsible for Polish failures. Poles are. Saying this is not about blame or shame. It's a helpful comment. Things will improve when Poles improve their approach. 

One of the most powerful arguments against the antisemitic stereotype of Jewish omnipotence came from an unlikely but very well informed source. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski was a Nazi war criminal with much blood on his hands. He lead massacres of Poles, Jews, and others. Under his command, hundreds of thousands of innocents died horrible deaths. 

Weirdly, as his name suggests, he was of Kashubian -- Polish -- ancestry and his ancestors were members of the szlachta. They spoke Polish at home and were devout Catholics. Von dem Bach Zelewski eventually changed his name to hide this ancestry and to sound more German. He also left the Catholic church. At first he became Protestant, and, good Nazi that he was, he dropped that association and declared himself Gottgläubig. 

The Jewish virtual library reports that "In late 1939, he proposed that a concentration camp for the non-German inhabitants of the region be created in the vicinity of the town of Oswiecim. After initial reluctancy, Heinrich Himmler agreed to von dem Bachs pleas and in May 1940 the Auschwitz concentration camp was created."

Wikipedia reports on von dem Bach Zelewski's ethnic cleansing of Poles. 

Action Saybusch (German: Aktion Saybusch, Polish: Akcja Żywiec) was the mass expulsion of some 18,000–20,000 ethnic Polish Gorals[2] from the territory of Żywiec Region (part of the region of Lesser Poland) in the area annexed to the German Province of Upper Silesia, conducted by the Wehrmacht and German police during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. The main purpose of the forcible displacement of Polish nationals was to create space for ethnically German colonists from across Eastern Europe, after the annexation of western Poland into the Third Reich in 1939.[3] 

The Action was part of the Adolf Hitler's plan known as Lebensraum which involved Germanization of all Polish areas west of the territory allocated to the General Government. The name of the Action came from the German name of the city of Żywiec – Saybusch.[3] Displacements of the Poles from Żywiec and surrounding villages and towns was led by the occupation authorities under SS-Obersturmbannführer Fritz Arlt, who replaced Bruno Müller from RKF.[4][5] 

Aktion Saybusch lasted from September to December 1940, with some 3,200 Volksdeutsche brought in Heim ins Reich (Home into the Empire) from Romanian Bukovina. The process of expulsions continued thereafter. In total, between 1940 and 1944, around 50,000 Poles were forcibly removed from the region and replaced with about 4,000 settlers from Eastern Galicia and Volhynia who were given new latifundia. Before the German attack on the Soviet Union, their transfer was agreed upon by both invaders at the Gestapo–NKVD Conferences. The expulsions from eastern Silesia were the direct responsibility of the SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, who was also responsible for instigating them

Von dem Bach Zelewski went on to oversee Einsatzgruppen's mass murder of tens of thousands of Jews. 

He was hospitalized for opium abuse, intestinal disorders, and "hallucinations connected with the shooting of Jews"

Von dem Bach Zelewski went on to attempts to suppress partisans. Though he oversaw the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews, Slavs, Asians, Communists, and other victims, his methods were not very successful. Wikipedia reports,

Bach-Zelewski's methods produced a high civilian death toll and relatively minor military gains. In fighting irregular battles with the partisans, his units slaughtered civilians in order to inflate the figures of "enemy losses"; indeed, far more fatalities were usually reported than weapons captured. The German troops would encircle areas controlled by the partisans in a time-consuming manner, allowing real partisans to slip away. After an operation was completed, no permanent military presence was maintained, which gave the partisans a chance to resume where they had left off. Even when successful in pacification actions, Bach-Zelewski usually accomplished little more than to force the real enemy to relocate and multiply their numbers with civilians enraged by the massacres.

 Von dem Bach Zelewski participated in the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising. Germans murdered and drove into exile hundreds of thousands of Poles. 

In August, 1945, Americans arrested von dem Bach Zelewski. In exchange for Nuremberg trial testimony, he was not among the accused. In his testimony, he stated, 

"When, for years, for decades, the doctrine is preached that the Slav is a member of an inferior race and that the Jew is not even human, then such an explosion is inevitable."

Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, says that von dem Bach Zelewski, in 1952, "denounced himself publicly for mass murder." 

This mass murderer of Jews produced one of the strongest condemnations of the stereotype that Jews are all powerful. Von dem Bach Zelewski's statement is in Raul Hilberg's "The Destruction of the European Jews." 

 

Polish minister vows ‘swift action’ against far-right MEP over antisemitic rant outside Auschwitz: TVP World

 

Full story HERE

Nuremberg movie review

 

Nuremberg 2025

A good movie for grownups about important historical events

Nuremberg is a 2025 historical drama written, directed, and co-produced by James Vanderbilt. Nuremberg is a misnomer; the film is not an exhaustive treatment of the thirteen trials of Nazi war criminals that took place in Nuremberg, Germany, between 1945 and 1949. A more accurate title for the film would be Five Men at Nuremberg, those five men being SCOTUS Justice Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon), psychiatrist Dr. Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), Hermann Goering (Russell Crowe), Sergeant Howard Triest (Leo Woodall), and Colonel Burton C. Andrus (John Slattery). Jackson played a key role in initiating the Nuremberg trials. Goering was a top Nazi defendant. Kelley was a thirty-two-year-old Army psychiatrist and lieutenant colonel tasked with assessing the Nazi defendants' mental fitness to stand trial. Triest was a US Army interpreter, and Andrus was the commandant of the Nuremberg prison. Richard E. Grant stars as British prosecutor Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, and Colin Hanks plays a US Army psychologist, Dr. Gustave Gilbert. Nuremberg is roughly two and a half hours long. Nuremberg opened in the US on November 7, 2025.

Please go see this movie. Buy a ticket; see it in a theater. It's a good movie, and it's for grown-ups. If we want movies like this, we have to support them with our ticket purchases.

"After the Hunt" "Blue Moon" and "Good Boy" movie reviews

 

After the Hunt, Good Boy, and Blue Moon

And filmmaking so inept that it transcends sexual politics

After the Hunt is a 2025 psychological thriller. Luca Guadagnino directs. His previous films include Call Me By Your Name and Queer. The title After the Hunt is an allusion to a quote attributed to Otto von Bismarck. "People never lie so much as before an election, during a war, or after the hunt." Nora Garrett, a first-time screenwriter, wrote the screenplay in a workshop. Garrett was intrigued by the disconnect between a person's interior life and the persona that one must present in order to be successful. The main character, Alma, a Yale professor pursuing tenure, has "has spent her whole life cordoning off pieces of herself in order to reach this apex … as soon as she's there … circumstances … occur that would make it so that she could no longer successfully keep those other parts of her away from the identity that she projects out into the world."