Genocide on The Huffington Post

EasyJet Causes Controversy With Holocaust Memorial Fashion Shoot

2009-11-20T16:46:48Z

Budget European airline EasyJet has apologized for publishing fashion photographs in its in-flight magazine that were taken at, of all places, a Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.

The photos were discovered by the New Statesmen, a British magazine, on Friday. After the magazine brought them to the airline's attention, EasyJet withdrew all copies of the magazine. The airline also appears to have pulled them from the in-flight magazine's website, although you can see one of the photos archived here.

The two offending photos appeared in the November issue of the airline's in-flight magazine as part of a feature marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The photos featured models posing at what is known as the "Field of Stelae," which opened in 2005 and was designed by American architect Peter Eisenman.

A spokesman for the airline said in a statement published by the Telegraph:

EasyJet profusely apologises to anyone who may be offended by the inappropriate fashion photo shoot at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin featured in this month's issue of the in-flight magazine. The magazine is produced by INK - an external publishing house, and easyJet were not aware of the images until they appeared in print.

According to the BBC, INK did not seek permission from the Foundation for the Memorial of the Murdered Jews of Europe to take the photographs.

Here is one of the photos:

Alex Storozynski: U.S. Honors Stalin on Hallowed Ground, Will Saddam Hussein Be Next?

2009-11-18T20:43:22Z

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russians began taking down their statues of Josef Stalin, the mass murderer who killed millions of people. Astonishingly, in America, the National D-Day Memorial is honoring Stalin by placing his bust on a pedestal at its museum in Bedford, Virginia.

This misguided move will haunt millions of Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Jews, etc. whose families were massacred by this Soviet tyrant. Stalin's killing machine slaughtered more people than Adolf Hitler and the Nazis did.

Hitler and Stalin were allies and started World War II in 1939 by both attacking Poland at the same time. But William McIntosh, the D-Day Memorial's president says that because Stalin became a U.S. ally after Germany invaded Russia, he deserves to be acknowledged along with Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

McIntosh is wrong. Stalin only gave lip service to the allies so that they would attack Nazi Germany on the Western front. Stalin did not liberate Eastern Europe from the Nazis in 1945; he sent in Soviet troops that occupied half of Europe until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Stalin the communist barely hid his disdain for capitalist America during WWII, and once the war ended, he began the Cold War and ordered his scientists to work on missiles and nuclear weapons that could destroy the United States.

Given McIntosh's logic, should America put up a statue of Saddam Hussein because he was an ally of the U.S. in the 1980s when we supported Iraq in a war against Iran?

Congress authorized the D-Day Memorial and private donors raised $19 million to honor soldiers that fought in the invasion of Normandy. Now McIntosh is lobbying Congress to make his museum part of the National Park Service so that it can receive federal tax dollars.

By placing a bust of Stalin on hallowed ground, McIntosh disrespects veterans, including my father who took part in the Normandy invasion. When the war began, Dionysius Storozynski was 17 and living in Lvov, Poland. He fought in the underground against Stalin's army that invaded Poland and later joined the Polish troops in France that fought the Germans in the West. When France surrendered, he was evacuated to England and trained for the allied invasion of Normandy.

In 1944, when the beachhead was taken, Corporal Storozynski rode a motorcycle off a transport from England as part of the 24th Lancers Regiment of the 1st Polish Armored Division. It was lead by Major Jan Kanski with 47 officers, 634 men, 52 Sherman tanks, 11 Stuart tanks and six anti-aircraft tanks. My father sped ahead of these troops, and scoured the French countryside with his binoculars. He radioed the coordinates of the Germans to Polish tank commanders. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower inspected my father's regiment, which saw heavy action in Caen, Falaise and Aberville in France. They helped liberate Belgium and Holland.

During the campaign, my father lost part of his hearing when he drove over a land mine. Major Kanski lost his life.

My maternal grandfather, Sgt. Wladslaw Krzyzanowski, also fought in the Polish Army against Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. In 1939 he was tortured and sentenced to death by Stalin's NKVD, forerunner of the KGB. His crime? He fought against Stalin's ally at the time, Hitler. My grandfather's sentence was commuted to life, and he was one of 1.5 million Poles sent to Stalin's forced labor gulags in Siberia in the years 1939-1941. He escaped and joined the army of Polish Gen. Wladyslaw Anders that fought alongside British General Bernard Montgomery. The Brits and the Poles pushed the Germans across North Africa and together with the American military liberated Italy. My grandfather won medals at the Battle of Monte Cassino.

Other Polish soldiers were not as lucky. The NKVD took 22,000 Polish officers into the Katyn Forest, tied their hands behind their backs, and one by one shot them in the back of their heads. The bodies were dumped into mass graves. Many have yet to be recovered for proper burial.

That's how Stalin treated prisoners of war. He wasn't much better to his own people. Before World War II began, the NKVD killed millions of Russians during the "great purge" of Stalin's political enemies. Stalin forced collectivization, stole farmland from peasants, and starved to death 10 million Ukrainians in a vengeful act of genocide. And it was Stalin's 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with Hitler that split Poland in half, allowing the Germans to carry out the Holocaust that murdered six million Jews.

Stalin enslaved the Russian people. That's why Russia has taken down most of the statues of Stalin and Russian President Dimitri Medvedev is critical of those who gloss over Stalin's image. "From the point of view of the law, killing of a huge number of compatriots for political or unsubstantiated economic motives is a crime," Medvedev recently told Der Spiegel magazine. "The rehabilitation of those involved in these crimes is impossible."

In addition to the civilians that Stalin murdered, he sent Russian soldiers to their death by using them as cannon fodder, marching them directly into the line of German gunfire without a cohesive battle plan. Medvedev said recently on his web site, "Stalin's crimes cannot diminish the heroic deeds of the people who triumphed in the Great Patriotic war."

If McIntosh wants to honor Russia's contribution to the victory over Nazi Germany, he should put up a statue of the Unknown Russian Soldier. That would make more sense than a bust of Stalin.

It took the people of the former Soviet Empire five decades to right the wrongs of Stalin's "evil empire," as Ronald Reagan called it. These days, the Poles are planning to put up a statue of Reagan in Warsaw to acknowledge his role in ending Soviet Communism. How ironic that in Virginia, America is putting up a bust of Stalin.

David A. Love: Will Obama Help Change Asia's Racism?

2009-11-18T14:39:22Z

For the
nations that were a part of President Obama’s recent Asian tour, surely this
was a new experience for them. For the first time, they greeted and hosted the
most powerful person in the world, one of the most brilliant people they’ve
ever met. And for the first time, that
person is a man of African descent. It
has been a long journey since the 1955 Bandung Conference, that historic
meeting of African and Asian states striving for self-determination and against
colonialism. Meanwhile, black people today are often stereotyped in Asian
countries as dirty, violent, mentally deficient and otherwise inferior—not
unlike the ways in which the West has portrayed people of color for years.

Although
symbolism has its limits, surely, it means a lot for international relations to
have a fresh face on the scene in the form of Obama, a leader of the world who
has lived in the world. Obama was born
in Hawaii and lived in Indonesia. His
half sister is Asian American, and one of his half brothers is an African American
living in China. No other president has had such an international background,
or such potential to make a difference on the world stage.

But for
Asian nations, white skin was the traditional standard of beauty and
prosperity. In the old days, the poorer folks were darker because they had to
work in the fields, where they were exposed to the sun.

As China
welcomes Obama, the nation is forced to deal with its long-standing
prejudices toward black people. But the discrimination is
internal as well. The Chinese government
has been heavy-handed in its treatment of the country’s aggrieved Uighur Muslim
minority, and has waged cultural genocide against the people of Tibet.

In India,
the caste system, although officially banned, still lives on. Brown and black faces predominate in this
nation of over 1 billion people.
However, white skin is desirable, and skin
whitening creams are popular.

And Japan
has had a longstanding problem with racism and xenophobia. Even today, one can find signs that say “No
Foreigners Allowed” and “Japanese Only”, or a recent TV commercial depicting
President Obama as a monkey. In 2005, Doudou
Diene, special rapporteur of the UN Commission on Human Rights, found that
discrimination in Japan is “deep and
profound.” He added
that “This xenophobic drive is expressed by associating minorities, certain
minorities, to crime, to violence, to dirt.”

These
Japanese sentiments do not apply solely to foreigners and foreign workers. Despite its self-portrayal as a homogeneous
society, Japan has its own minority groups that historically have been regarded
as inferior. For example, the Ainu, an
indigenous ethnic group, has suffered from displacement and cultural
assimilation, higher levels of poverty and unemployment, and lower levels of
health and education. Over 1 million Japanese
of Korean descent— products of Japanese wartime colonization and forced
labor—are treated as foreigners in the country of their birth. They face a “hidden apartheid”, in which they
face discrimination in housing and employment, and feel pressure to change
their Korean names and blend in society.
Further, the Burakumin are an
outcaste group similar to the untouchable caste in India. They face discrimination because their feudal
ancestors held occupations such as butchers, tanners and gravediggers—
death-related jobs that were considered tainted and unclean under Buddhist and
Shinto practices.

The topic
of racial attitudes in Asia has fascinated me for a long time. In
high school, I traveled to Japan as an exchange student and lived with a family
in Tokyo. I majored in East Asian
Studies in college, and wrote my thesis on Japanese perceptions of foreigners. After
college, I worked as one of a handful of gaijin
(foreigners) in a Japanese bank, and later for the Tokyo office of a major U.S.
advertising agency. Living in Japan was
a life-altering experience for me, and in a good way. Being a true foreigner in another culture
provided me with a broader world perspective, and helped me deal with
adversity.

Overall,
my Japan experience was positive. It took some time to get used to the stares,
or the occasional child who wanted to touch my skin or hair. Then there were
the people who assumed I was a hip-hop entertainer, or a baseball player, or
some other racial stereotype of a black man in Japan. Clearly, there was an
embrace of black culture in Japan. The music and swagger of black people
permeate international popular culture.
And as I went to work in my business suit on the Tokyo subway, I
couldn’t help but laugh to myself as I passed by Japanese teenagers sporting
their dreads, hip-hop gear and Afrocentric t-shirts. But at the same time, I
had to endure my fellow employees at the company dormitory. Some employees at the bank had the idea to
throw a party, in which everyone would come dressed in blackface. After I protested, they cancelled their
plans, but only after lecturing me about the need for foreigners to understand
Japanese culture.

I believe
that as time passes and the world shrinks, it becomes more difficult for
discrimination to find a safe harbor.
Modern technology serves to eliminate borders and expose our activities
before the light of day. The nations of
Asia, like the U.S., have a long way to go before they eradicate racism. And yet, despite its legacy of slavery and
institutionalized racism, America elected a man by the name of Barack Obama as
president. The leaders of Asia now must
deal with a man of African descent as the leader of the American empire. And he isn’t a racial stereotype, for
whatever that is worth. Certainly, that
alone must give them pause.

David A. Love is an Editorial Board member of BlackCommentator.com, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and theGrio. He is a writer and human rights advocate based in Philadelphia, and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. His blog is davidalove.com.

Jerry Fowler: Presidential Silence in Beijing

2009-11-18T10:56:41Z

Less than a month after his Administration proclaimed in its new strategy for Sudan that "American leadership is essential to a more effective multilateral approach," President Obama left China early this morning without any public reference to having brought up Sudan with his hosts. There were background statements to journalists that it was on a list of things discussed. Such low-key treatment was a huge missed opportunity to enlist the support for the new strategy from a crucial country. It also was a rejection of the recent, bipartisan plea by 44 Members of Congress:

As you prepare to visit China, we strongly urge you to make Sudan a priority in your bilateral discussions. As you are well aware, China is a major arms supplier and source of economic strength to the regime in Khartoum, and has a vital role to play in any ultimate resolution of the multiple crises in Sudan.

The Congressional letter echoed a petition signed by tens of thousands of citizen-activists who asked for President Obama to call on the Chinese to work with the U.S. and:

Use their economic and political influence with Sudan to support the Darfur peace process, full implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), and significant structural, political and judicial reforms to Sudan.

The President's public silence on Sudan in Beijing follows on a similar silence by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on her recent visit to Egypt - another country that is crucial to bringing peace to Sudan. Their failure to raise Sudan publicly in bilateral meetings with key countries sends an unfortunate message to the Sudanese government and other key actors: The United States is not leading for peace in Sudan.

Michael Gerson recently summed up the urgent need for leadership:

Only a president and his secretary of state can insist on boldness.

Absent that insistence, America's Sudan policy is in a holding pattern, waiting for the next crisis to refocus global attention. Meanwhile, women are raped, with impunity. Weapons are illegally imported, with impunity. Civilians are attacked, with impunity. And at some point, impunity becomes permission.

The "unstinting resolve" that Candidates Obama and Clinton pledged last year is needed now more than ever.

Jerry Fowler is the president of the Save Darfur Coalition, an alliance of more than 180 faith-based, advocacy and human rights organizations committed to raising public awareness about the genocide in Darfur.

Cross posted on Save Darfur's blog.

Craig Crawford: Remembering Patton's Liberators

2009-11-11T11:27:47Z

This Veterans Day is a fine time to visit Soapbox Alert and help urge formal recognition for some WWII soldiers who liberated a prison camp. The Alert on congress.org was posted by
one of my blog readers whose father and many others were in the Boston regiment of Gen. George Patton's army who, until their families began this effort, never sought the formal "liberator" status that places their names and deeds in historical records, includes them in annual Capitol Hill ceremonies and displays their unit flag at the National Holocaust museum.

Go to Soap Box Alert
"Honor our WWII Vets & the Victims of the Holocaust"
(Follow instructions for registering, provide your zip code -- and automatically generate messages to your lawmakers)

More information on Patton's Liberators

Liberator Campaign Blog

Sign the Petition

Why Congress Prefers Your Emails

Stefan Sirucek: Remembering Kristallnacht in Berlin: The Story of Hans Riess

2009-11-09T08:35:51Z

November 9th is an important date in German history. It marks the day that the Berlin Wall fell, 20 years ago this month, physically and symbolically uniting a dissevered nation.

The reason it's not a national holiday in Germany, is that November 9th - specifically the night of November 9th - also marks a much darker anniversary: Kristallnacht, the so-called "Night of Broken Glass."

On that night in 1938 thousands of Jewish storefronts across Germany were smashed, hundreds of synagogues burnt, and roughly 30,000 Jews arrested and taken to concentration camps in a coordinated government action, while some 90 people were killed. Though preceded by a series of repressive laws, as the first large-scale campaign of violence and internment against Jews by the Nazi government it is often considered to be the beginning of the Holocaust.

Hans Riess, an 88 year-old resident of Wesley Hills, NY remembers the date well. He was born in Berlin in 1921. On November 9th, 1938 he was 17 years old.

"I was in school and I was the only Jew in the class,'' recalls Mr. Riess with a light German accent. "The other kids didn't know I was Jewish - blond, blue eyes and everything else.''

His teacher did know, however, and that day he asked the boy to see him after class.

He warned him to be careful and not to go home if he noticed anything strange. "He said he didn't know what would happen to Jews that night, but he'd heard something terrible would happen to Jews all over the country," says Mr. Riess.

That afternoon, Mr. Riess rode his bicycle to the family home in the Charlottenburg district, which doubled as his father's dental practice.

Normally a blue light outside the office signaled that his father was in his practice. Yet as he drew near, Mr. Riess saw that the light was out, which struck him as unusual.

"I noticed it and I didn't stop,'' he says.

What he didn't know at the time was that the Gestapo had already arrested his father. The Nazi officer had entered the dental practice and posed as a new patient, sitting in the waiting room until the last patient left, and then arresting Mr. Riess' father on the spot. In a remark that was either deeply cynical or surprisingly sympathetic the man instructed his father to "take a heavy coat and have a good dinner."

He was going to Sachsenhausen.

Instead of stopping, the young Mr. Riess cycled on until he reached a local grocery store owned by family friends. The family had a list of Germans willing to take in Jews for a week and Mr. Riess went to one these families to avoid arrest.

However that night, unable to contain his curiosity, he slipped out with his trusty bicycle and rode into the city.

"I was curious," he says simply.

"It was a full moon in November, a very nice night to walk around," recalls Mr. Riess, remembering a scene that in its grim context made for "a very strange picture of the city."

By that time most of the damage had been done. In the moonlight he saw the shattered windows of Jewish shops.

"They were broken with big bricks by the brownshirts," says Mr. Riess firmly, referring to the uniforms of the Nazi SA officers.

"It was so bad that a lot of glass went into the street and the cars couldn't go anywhere," says Mr. Riess. "They were afraid to damage their tires."

Yet on his bicycle the 17 year-old was able to go where cars couldn't and he cycled on through the strangely silent, moonlit streets. People had come outside to see what was happening, he recalls.

"Lots of people were out there. Not doing anything. Simply looking - like I was.''

Everyone was very quiet.

The Nazi government claimed that Kristallnacht was a spontaneous eruption of violence against Jews in reaction to the assassination of a Nazi officer by a Jewish youth - in Goebbels' words the nation "followed its healthy instincts." Yet in truth it was a carefully staged and executed event, with specific orders given to the Nazi troops carrying out the attacks. In his account, Mr. Riess describes neither anger nor hatred, but shock and uncertainty as the prevailing emotions among those present.

"What I saw were people walking around, not throwing any bricks but just being surprised by what was happening," says Mr. Riess. "They were just civilians - German citizens. I looked at their faces and I could tell they really didn't know."

In the distance beyond the questioning faces, Riess saw the synagogue that his family belonged to - a distinctive building with three domes. "I could see it burning," he remembers.
Police and firemen stood nearby making sure the fire didn't spread to other buildings, but did nothing to quench the blaze. It was one of some 267 synagogues that would burn or be ransacked across the country that night.

It's difficult to capture an event like Kristallnacht. Mere numbers are too cold and while personal accounts convey the heartbeat of the moment they are by their nature incomplete - the information gathered by one set of eyes in one place at one time.

Mr. Riess' story is just that - his own. It is the story of a person who experienced a critical, terrible moment in history and escaped with his life and his optimism intact. Miraculously, his father would later get out of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and flee with his wife to Shanghai and Mr. Riess himself would escape Germany as part of the famous Kindertransport to England.

Yet despite the remarkable nature of the events in his life, in the foreword to his 2001 memoir - My Middle Name Is Israel - Mr. Riess stresses the shared nature of the experience.

"Yet I am sure that my story and the story of my parents is not that unusual. It is certainly not unique," he writes.

"There were many Jews like us."

(Hans Riess)

Rabbi David Wolpe: 3 Short Books To Live By (And They're Not On Any Bestseller List)

2009-11-03T15:45:56Z

Yes, highly successful people have habits -- seven apparently -- and the bookshelves offer you advice based on the words of everyone from Napoleon to Moses. But there are some books that really can change your life. They are not written to the demands of the bestseller list. They are short, borne out of deep experience, and filled with wisdom. Each is a companion for a lifetime.

There is no single wisdom to life. These books sometimes contradict each other. When they do, they are still right. When dealing with the human soul things can be contradictory and still true.

Man's Search for Meaning: Viktor Frankl

Frankl lived through Auschwitz and did not return from hell with empty hands. He brought us this great gift. Frankl concludes that the secret to the possibility of survival is meaning -- a life that is organized around some purpose. Yet to unravel or construct a meaning to life requires insight not just into life, but into how we create meaning.

We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life -- daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct.

Frankl teaches that there are three ways we make meaning: by creating work or doing a deed; by experiencing something or encountering someone; by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering. Each requires explanation and we follow Frankl as he helps us understand the meaning of suffering, and the meaning of love.

Frankl vividly, in swift strokes, recounts his experience of the camp. He divides the world into two classes of human beings -- the decent and the indecent. And reminds us, powerfully and repeatedly, that life asks something of us, and the one who can hear the question, who can as Rilke says (see below) "live in the questions" will be filled up by life. A book that is the distillation of truths by a wise man who suffered.

The Sabbath: Abraham Joshua Heschel

You need have no religious faith to find yourself enchanted and enriched by this short, poetic book. Heschel explains the paradox of technology: it is a conquest of space, but we mistakenly believe it conquers time. Just because we can traverse the world in an instant we think we are using time wisely. "We are more harassed than supported by the Frankensteins of spatial things." The world is instantly available; you can call from anywhere, see pictures and twitters and posts from the reaches of the globe. Yet as Heschel wrote in this book published in 1951, what we need is not the conquest of space, but the sanctification of time.

The Sabbath is a day to reclaim time. "In regard to external gifts, to outward possessions, there is only one proper attitude -- to have them and to be able to do without them." If you are tied to your cellphone, if you cannot stop checking your blackberry, you need Heschel.

Although couched in Jewish religious language, the majesty of Heschel's message comes through in the majesty of his prose: "All our life should be a pilgrimage to the seventh day...Nothing is as hard to suppress as the will to be a slave to one's own pettiness. Gallantly, ceaselessly, quietly, man must fight for inner liberty."

Frankl offers purpose. Heschel offers freedom.

Letters to a Young Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke

Rilke wrote these letters to a young correspondent who published them in later years. Rilke speaks to the artist inside us -- the solitary, soaring spirit that we feel in habits us in our best moments.

Rilke's voice is that of a poet and intensely personal. He expresses "always the wish that you may find patience in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe."

Rilke understands the subtle currents of the human heart. Again and again he pinpoints what we knew at some deep level about ourselves but could never express: "all emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you."

Rilke exhorts his friend to be an individual, but the very act of writing is also an act of generous giving. It is right action, right conduct; it is sanctifying time by giving it to what matters; it is tossing a bridge of truth and poetry across to another soul.

For Rilke expresses again and again the reality that we are alone, but desperately in need of each other. "So you must not be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen."

Out of sadness, solitude and wonder, the great spirits of humanity speak to us. Yes, you can turn to the bestseller list and get the thing gruel of nourishment it provides. Or you can link arms with some of the great, soul-stirring spirits of humanity. Which do you suppose will change your life?

Muhammad Movie Planned: Film Brings Together Hollywood Producer Barrie Osborne And Banned Muslim Cleric Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi

2009-11-02T11:32:03Z

A movie about the prophet Muhammad is in the works, according to Reuters. According to reports, the $150 million film will bring together a major hollywood producer and a Sunni imam banned from entering Britian.

Producer Barrie Osborne, a producer of both The Matrix and The Lord Of The Rings is organizing the film. The Times reports that Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi will work as the film's theological consultant. Al-Qaradawi hosts a show on the Arab-language network al Jazeera. According to the BBC, Al-Qaradawi was denied entry to Britain in February 2008. The UK's Home Office said that it would not tolerate those who sought to justify acts of terrorist violence.

The Times:

[Al-Qaradawi] is also a highly controversial figure who was refused entry to Britain last year because of his views. He has reportedly condoned the Holocaust, supported the stoning of homosexuals and praised suicide bombers in Iraq, not to mention telling an interviewer that he considered Shia Islam a heretical branch of the faith.

According to the Gulf Times newspaper he told journalists in Doha that the film was a response to "the crusader-styled distortion of Islam [that] continues to influence [the] world population today."

Osborne hopes to "bridge cultures" with the film, telling Reuters that "the film will educate people about the true meaning of Islam."

Production on the film is slated to begin in 2011. The Qatari firm Alnoor Holdings will finance the English-language film.

The film will not include any physical depictions of Muhammad. Such depictions are banned in the Islamic faith.

A cartoon depicting Muhammad sparked protests worldwide after it was published by a Danish newspaper in 2006. Two Chicago men were arrested last week for planning attacks on the newspaper.

Monroe Price: Nursing a Memoir to Publication: Finding a Niche, Defining a Life

2009-10-29T17:02:32Z

The publishing of a book -- especially one that's personal and not a footnoted artifact -- is still worth celebrating, even if it's being published in the traditional format of pages between covers. This is particularly true if you're the author and the book is primarily about you.

So here's a bit of self-promotion for which I apologize in advance.

The book -- out this month from Central European University Press -- is called Objects of Remembrance: A Memoir of American Opportunities and Viennese Dreams. It's about an arc of life that starts in pre-War Vienna, but quickly shifts to the United States. It's a book in the shadow of the Holocaust, but also about the amazing and complicated process of becoming American in the 1950s.

My mother was pregnant at the time of the Anschluss, and we left Vienna in 1939 when I was seven months old. I became a refugee, of sorts, and the book tries to discover what that could possibly mean. I was hardly a "Survivor." And our family did not have to traipse through woods to get to freedom. But no family of the time was unscathed and there was abundant and tragic damage to ours. My mother was separated from her parents. We left for America and they stayed and perished.

The word "Jewish" doesn't appear in the title, but that's something of an oversight. The book could have been called Rootedness and Rootlessness since it is illustrative of the religious and social fates that confronted so many people as they were distributed, or they distributed themselves, around the world. We, for example, did stints in Macon, Georgia (three years) and Cincinnnati, Ohio (close to 15 years) before finally, late in our migration, returning to New York City. How these exile communities in the South and the Midwest sought to educate and hold on to its young charges is a tale in itself.

Indeed, for me as author, one of the most interesting aspects was learning how the national Jewish organizations worked to expand opportunities for refugees and immigrants by encouraging them to move from the major ports of entry to other places, other towns and cities, where jobs (hard to find in a Depression) might be located. That's how we got to Macon.

When I wrote this book, one question involved genre. Was this a Holocaust book -- even though I (who was born in Vienna and left as a seven month old refugee in 1939) was hardly a Survivor? Was this a book about universalizing the refugee experience -- trying to show, directly or indirectly, that the lives and patterns of families of the 1930s are echoed in the lives of refugees of the 21st century?

Or, was this predominantly a book about Vienna and Austrian Jews who tried to recreate their life in a new world? My desire to write the book was triggered after -- owing to reparations and restoration-related legislation -- Austria was providing citizenship to people who left in fear and terror. I applied and received Austrian citizenship and, I think, wanted to explore my motives and feelings in doing so. In this period, my working title for the book was How Austrian Am I?

But could I write, authentically, about myself and Vienna, a place I had studiously avoided?

I compensated for my own lack of direct observation by reading such memoirs or recollections as George Clare's Last Waltz in Vienna, David Weiss's Reluctant Return, Lore Segal's Other People's Houses, Richard Berczeller's A Trip into the Blue and Peter Gay's My German Question to find voices that would educate me and with whom I can, in my mind, converse. I tried to learn from such stories what life in the critical days of the 1930s was like for my mother and father.

And I talked to Austrians who remained Austrians. I wanted to maintain my distance from my Viennese past while writing about it. This proved tricky. I wanted to capture how I felt about Vienna growing up while, all the while, new friendships, new experiences were altering my prism of attention. I became a more frequent visitor to the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York. I went to Vienna on the earlier publication of the German language version of the book.

I'm not sure I achieved the balance that would have been appropriate. My dichotomy is captured by the subtitle (that's what subtitles are for). It could be a book about my complex relationship to Vienna and my process of becoming an American at one and the same time.

You can find the book on Amazon.com.

You can see some of the book's photos and find out about upcoming book talks on the Facebook fan page.

Jerry Fowler: Now We Need Presidential Leadership

2009-10-29T16:31:43Z

Now that the dust is settling from the release of the Obama administration's Sudan strategy we can begin to assess the landscape. The greatest virtues of the strategy are that it lays out the path the administration intends to follow and provides a basis for the advocacy community to hold the administration accountable. At the same time, it makes clear that the U.S. policy can take different paths depending on the actions of the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) and other actors. Although it provides principles for deciding what path to take, the decisions themselves have yet to be made. Our advocacy role will be to push President Obama and the administration to make the right decisions.

The basic guidelines for deciding which path to take seem right. In U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice's words, the focus will be on "concrete and tangible progress" before any incentives are provided. Moreover, the new U.S. policy provides clarity that not only will there be no rewards for the status quo, there will be consequences if it does not change for the better.

A huge open question is how engaged the President will be in implementing this new policy. His absence from the public roll-out was not encouraging. It sent a message to Khartoum and key heads of state around the world that he has delegated Sudan to others and that he does not plan to personally lead the effort to end the crisis in Darfur and promote peace in all of Sudan. A critical test of his commitment will be whether he makes Sudan a priority when he meets with Chinese President Hu Jintao in a few weeks. I for one will be watching closely, and calling him out if he doesn't.

As for the new strategy, one thing we should be clear about is that the issue has never been engagement or non-engagement with the NCP. Rather, it has been the terms of engagement, which for nine months have been totally unclear, even worrisome. Now the terms are clearer on paper; we will have to see in practice.

Another misunderstood issue has been the role of Special Envoy Scott Gration. Before release of the strategy, there was an understandable tendency to try to infer the terms of engagement from his public statements. Because many of those statements expressed optimism about Khartoum's responsiveness to incentives, the public was left to wonder if the Obama administration was focused only on incentives without requiring real change on the ground. We now know the store will not be given away unilaterally; the U.S. will "verify, then trust."

Although General Gration will play a leading role in implementing this strategy, it is clear that he does not have carte blanche. The strategy is a product of the interagency process and reflects the policy views of a range of officials. Going forward, progress on the ground (or lack thereof) and decisions on incentives and disincentives will be reviewed quarterly at a senior level.

Within that context, General Gration should be given the chance to implement this policy. Having heard him explain his views in greater detail than is conveyed in the media, I believe he has the potential to succeed in what is an enormously difficult mission. That is not to suggest that we always see eye-to-eye - we definitely do not. But he is clear-eyed about the dangerous characters he is dealing with. And he is committed to pursuing the policy set by the President.

Some have called for General Gration to be fired. The reality is that if he were suddenly dismissed, it could be months before a new special envoy took his place. A void in the special envoy position would hobble any implementation of U.S. policy, and Sudan would hurtle toward the scheduled elections and the southern referendum with little diplomatic involvement or influence from the United States.

While the new administration policy has many of the right elements, there are concerns, many of which were recently raised on the Save Darfur blog. The biggest strategic level concern is that those elements of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) focused on opening up political space in Sudan not be traded away for conflict resolution in Darfur or conflict prevention in southern Sudan.

The most important long-term need facing Sudan is the creation of a political space in which Sudanese can resolve the country's issues without the use of extreme violence. The CPA presents a framework for creating that space, but the CPA elements crucial to that framework are the ones whose implementation is most seriously lacking. Now, elections are six months away and there have been no meaningful steps toward permitting freedom of the press, freedom of association, and freedom of movement or curbing the arbitrary powers of the security services. Judging from the travesty of the census, the ruling NCP does not intend to fulfill its CPA obligation to open up political space. This is a status quo that must be changed if peace is to be promoted.

Tactically, the biggest concern is how much of a priority Sudan is for President Obama. He said all the right things while he was in the Senate and during the campaign, including pledging to bring "unstinting resolve" to Sudan policy if elected.

For the new policy to work, General Gration can't go it alone. The President must lead in creating a real coalition of key heads of state to support the strategy laid out last week and push for concrete and lasting change in Sudan. Now is the time for him to show the resolve he promised.

Jerry Fowler is the president of the Save Darfur Coalition, an alliance of more than 180 faith-based, advocacy and human rights organizations committed to raising public awareness about the genocide in Darfur.

Cross posted from Save Darfur's blog.

Josh Ruxin: Forgiveness: Human or Divine?

2009-10-28T16:52:32Z

Earlier this month the film As We Forgive, a documentary about Rwanda, was released on DVD (check out the trailer here). It does not chronicle the 1994 genocide, but what has come after: Rwanda's struggle to rebuild itself.

Rwanda's President, Paul Kagame, is following a path of reconciliation, not punishment, to make his country whole: In 2005, he released nearly 60,000 genocide prisoners who admitted their crimes and apologized to their communities. Within that context, this film focuses on the theme of forgiveness. Can a woman not only forgive the man who killed her husband, her child, her mother, but accept him as her friend and neighbor? Can a man forgive himself for the brutal act he committed when neither the state nor his victim is asking for payment? Is closure possible here? As We Forgive, which won the 2008 Student Academy Award for best documentary, grapples with these complex issues.

The filmmaker, Laura Waters Hinson, took an impromptu trip to Rwanda while pursuing a master in filmmaking at American University. She expected to find stories of devastation, and found stories of hope instead. As We Forgive has since been shown in Congress, at the State Department and in dozens of universities, churches and communities nationwide. In July, Hinson premiered As We Forgive in Rwanda's capital, Kigali, in commemoration of the 15th anniversary of the genocide. To her surprise, more than 5,000 Rwandans packed into the stadium to view the film. Since then, every major Rwandan government and non-profit agency working on reconciliation has partnered with Hinson and her team.

Additionally, Hinson has launched the Living Bricks Campaign, a practical reconciliation project to help repentant ex-genocide prisoners construct much-needed housing for the survivors in their community. She also began the 4GIVE campaign to encourage audiences to be a voice of reconciliation in their communities. Viewing "giving" as a central feature of "forgiveness," the 4GIVE campaign guides audiences to discuss the power of the 4 "gives": (give) truth + (give) mercy + (give) hope + (give) back (find more information here.

As We Forgive does not present a story of guilt and pity, but of absolution and rebirth. Forgiveness might be divine, but in Rwanda, it is also human.

Writer Eli Tauber Tells Stories Of Jews Saved In Bosnia

2009-10-26T16:45:27Z

By Nicole Itano

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- In 1941, when Sarajevo's Jews were being rounded up and sent to concentration camps, Dr. Muhamed Kundurovic, a Bosnian Muslim, reported to a military camp where Jewish women and children were being held and declared they were carriers of an infectious disease. It was a lie, but a well-intentioned one, intended to get the prisoners out of the camp so he could help them escape.

Among those saved that day was Albert Musafia, age 11. Over the weeks and months that followed, non-Jewish friends and neighbors repeatedly helped the boy and his family. For a while, they lived hidden in an apartment in the center of Sarajevo; their neighbors all knew but no one turned them in to the authorities.

In a nation whose painful recent history gave birth to the term "ethnic cleansing," Eli Tauber wants Bosnians to remember that even in the darkest of times, many risked their own lives to protect others from the forces of ethnic and religious hatred. A leader of Bosnia's dwindling Jewish community, Tauber is leading an exhaustive effort to document the story of Musafia's family and other cases when Bosnians saved Jews.

"This was something I needed to do," said Tauber, who has written a book about his research and created an exhibit that he hopes to bring to communities around Bosnia. "This is something that Bosnians need to hear about. People from many nations, many religions saved Jews."

Before World War II, Bosnia had a thriving Jewish community of about 14,000 that dated to the 16th century. Many were Sephardic Jews who had fled Spain during the Inquisition and eventually settled in Bosnia, then part of the Ottoman Empire. An estimated 12,000 members of that community did not survive the war. Much of the country's Jewish history was erased too, its synagogues looted and destroyed.

The Bosnia war in the early 1990s further decimated the country's Jewish community, sending many of the country's remaining Jews fleeing to Israel. In Sarajevo, the Jews who remained helped feed and provide medicine to besieged residents of the city and organized some of the most successful humanitarian evacuations of the war.

Today there are only about 700 Jews left in Bosnia. Tauber fled to Israel in the early 1990s, but never forgot his homeland or the stories of how his parents survived the Holocaust. About 70 other members of his family perished, many of them in the notorious Croatian concentration camp Jasenovac, where Serbs, Jews, Roma and communists were killed.

"People said that after Auschwitz, after the Holocaust, it's impossible for something like that to happen again. But it has happened," said Tauber, referring to ethnic cleansing in Bosnia during the war and particularly the massacres at Srebrenica, where an estimated 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed. "And it's terrible that it happened in Europe, so close to the European Union. And no one made any reaction."

Working with the Institute for Research of Crimes Against Humanity at Sarajevo University, Tauber began by trying to document the stories of people who had already been recognized by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial organization known in Israel, as "Righteous Among the Nations" for their help saving Jews during the World War II. He tracked down relatives and collected photographs and documents, trying to turn the names into narratives with faces and histories.

But over the course of his research Tauber realized there were many other stories that remained untold. In 2007 he made a nationwide appeal and began to document about 100 more cases of people, like Kundurovic, who he believes deserve recognition for their actions during World War II.

The project is currently stalled due to lack of funding, but Tauber believes the stories show that despite its troubled recent history, Bosnia also has a long history of people of different faiths living together. Among those who saved Jews are Croats, Serbs and Muslims. Acknowledging that past, he thinks, can help the path toward reconciliation.

In some cases, the debt was later repaid and the families of those who saved Jews during World War II were themselves helped by Jews during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.

One story that received widespread attention in Israel is that of Dervis Korkut, the Muslim chief librarian of Bosnia's national museum who helped save the priceless Sarajevo Haggadah -- a 14th century illustrated Jewish holy book from Barcelona -- from Nazi officials.

Korkut smuggled the Haggadah to a Muslim cleric, who hid it underneath the floor of mosque. But he and his wife Servet also took in a young Jewish girl, Mira Papo, hiding her in their house as their Muslim servant until she could escape the city.

Nearly 60 years later, when war erupted in Kosovo in 1999, the Korkut's daughter Lamija found herself among the flood of refugees fleeing to Macedonia. With a photocopy of testimony from Papo, Lamija and her husband went to the Jewish community in the Macedonian capital of Skopje, who helped them flee to Israel. There, Lamija was greeted by Papo's son, Davor Bakovic.

"In Bosnia, we have this problem," said Tauber, after relating the story of the Dervis and Servet Korkut. "Many people are not willing to reconcile with each other because of the political situation."

"We need to talk about people who saved Jews in World War II and who saved people in this recent war. People have told me, these stories would help, but no one talks about them."

Read more from GlobalPost.com.

Benjamin Netanyahu On Iranian Threat: "The Issue Is Not The Security Of Israel But Of The World"

2009-10-24T16:23:33Z

NEWSWEEK's Lally Weymouth spoke to Netanyahu in Jerusalem last week. Excerpts:

WEYMOUTH: What did you think of the Goldstone report?
NETANYAHU: I thought there were limits to hypocrisy, but I was obviously wrong. The so-called human-rights commission accuses Israel--which legitimately defended itself against Hamas--of war crimes.

John Norris: Sudan's Interlocking Crises (VIDEO)

2009-10-24T13:14:29Z

Days after the release of the Obama administration's new Sudan policy, I appeared on Aljazeera yesterday afternoon with Tahir el-Faky of the Darfuri rebel group Justice and Equality Movement and Mahmood Mamdani, director of Columbia University's Institute of African Studies. We discussed the new "carrots and sticks" policy, the use of the word genocide, and the arrest warrant for Sudanese President Bashir issued by International Criminal Court for crimes in Darfur. Here's Part I:

Part II is here, in which we take questions from viewers.

John Norris is Executive Director of Enough, the anti-genocide project at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C.

Seattle Teen Gives Rwandan Girls The Gift of Education

2009-10-22T18:29:23Z

You are never too young to change the world, and Jessica Markowitz is living proof. The Seattle Times reports that Markowitz was just a sixth grader when she learned about Rwandan children who were orphaned by genocide and war. She rallied her classmates to raise money to support Rwandan girls, and three years later, has raised nearly $40,000. By the way, she's only 14 years old.

Markowitz is the founder of a charity called IMPUWE -- the Rwandan word for compassion -- that currently sends 22 needy Rwandan girls to school. IMPUWE, which also stands for "inspire and motivate powerful, undiscovered women with education," is expanding with five more chapters at Seattle high schools.

On Nov. 5, the Garfield High School freshman will receive the 2009 World of Children Founders Award at UNICEF in New York. The award honors people around the world who are creating innovative programs for children in need. With the $15,000 prize, Markowitz plans to help build a library in Rwanda focused on girls.

She has gone on to partner with a local girls school in Rwanda and spent the past summer teaching English to Rwandan schoolchildren. These experiences have clearly given her a wisdom beyond her years:

"I just think it's really crazy at this age how much you can make a difference," she said. "I guess what's really changed me is just being thankful for everything and never forgetting or giving up, no matter hard it gets sometimes."

Jessica is just one young social entrepreneur working to change the world. Check out our youth activists slideshow to see even more fresh-faced world-changers.

John Prendergast: Will Obama Finally Pay Attention to Sudan?

2009-10-22T09:13:23Z

For the past seven months, U.S. diplomacy toward Sudan has veered dangerously in the direction of appeasing Sudan's ruling National Congress Party (NCP). Since taking power in a 1989 coup, the NCP has engaged in a systematic assault on the Sudanese people. The use of starvation as a weapon in Southern Sudan and the genocide in Darfur have killed nearly two and a half million people. Omar al-Bashir, the country's president, is the first sitting head of state indicted by the International Criminal Court. Under his rule, the body count continues to climb.

Some of the Obama administration's recent lowlights have included public and private rhetoric favoring incentives over pressure, talk of lifting longstanding sanctions without demanding anything in return, and a disconcerting lack of emphasis on the need to hold this heinous regime accountable for what this and the previous U.S. administration have declared genocide. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden talked tough when they were presidential candidates, but this administration's day-to-day diplomacy on Sudan has been troubling.

This has emboldened the ruling NCP to harden its positions at the negotiating table, continue military operations in Darfur, crack down on independent voices throughout the country, stir trouble in the South, and shut down efforts by international entities to independently monitor key developments on the ground. Engagement by the Obama administration with Robert McFarlane and others lobbying on Sudan's behalf only furthered the impression that Khartoum was on a fast track to normalization.

Finally, a ray of hope emerged on Monday. After months of delay due to internal disagreements, the administration unfurled its new Sudan policy. On paper, the new approach seems to have an appropriate balance of carrots and sticks that would only take effect, according to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, based on "verifiable changes on the ground."

This opinion piece originally appeared in this morning's Wall Street Journal.

Click here to continue reading.

John Prendergast is Co-Founder of Enough, the anti-genocide project at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C.

Josh Ruxin: Famine and Plenty, Both in Times of Drought

2009-10-16T14:03:09Z

Rwanda: The first rains of the season are falling in this part of Africa. The rain is part of a weather cycle that can make or break life in this region of the world, depending on several factors. Prominent among these is health - not just people's health, but also the health of agricultural, governmental and economic systems.

Today is World Food Day. A couple of days ago, on October 14th, the UN released its annual report on global food security. Their figures confirm that more than one billion people - a sixth of the world - are undernourished, and that the number of hungry people had been growing even before the economic crisis hit, which has only made the situation worse. But the report also noted that while some poor nations are struggling to survive, other poor nations are helping to feed them. Despite their relative poverty, some countries, like Rwanda, are exporting food, while others are desperate consumers.

Rwanda's current growing season is shaping up to be better than the last. The past several years have seen drought and erratic rainfall, but tens of thousands of Rwandans have adapted with simple and effective techniques that deliver both nutritional, and economic, stability. Mayange, a community of 25,000 located one hour south of the Rwandan capital of Kigali, recently became a net exporter of food for the first time in decades. It may serve as a crucible for understanding the environmental and cultural challenges facing Sub-Saharan Africa, and provide insights into what can be done to combat the rising storm of food insecurity and economic instability in the region.

In contrast, right now an estimated 20 million Kenyans are at risk of severe malnutrition and starvation. Because their situation is so dire - and because droughts like the one Kenya is experiencing could happen to any nation in the region at any given time, it's critical to closely examine projects that are bearing fruit. These need scaling up to serve the hundreds of millions in Africa who desperately need them - and the food security they provide - right now, today.

Just four years ago, Mayange was synonymous with abject poverty. Located at the very epicenter of the 1994 genocide, its people were hardened, uncooperative, and when I began working there in October 2005, starving to death. Back in the 1960s, the government of Rwanda forcefully relocated mainly Tutsis to Mayange and its environs due to the unwelcoming rainforest conditions. The resourceful inhabitants chopped down nearly all the trees and provided Kigali with charcoal for decades. After the trees fell, they productively produced maize and beans until the soil fell down the hillsides into the valleys. The stage was set for the 1990s, which saw both murder and decreasing rainfall (a condition seen across East Africa). By 2005, Mayange was a backwater - a favorite for charity involvement given the food needs, but an apparently hopeless case.

The government of Rwanda recognized radical approaches were needed. They identified Mayange as the site of the Millennium Villages project for Rwanda and gave the team a tall order: prove your methods and we'll adopt them at national scale. Our initial work involved basics: distributing emergency food, improving health facilities, and working with local government on agriculture plans. We worked alongside the national government which was expanding its efforts to get basic services to people - roads, electricity, water, education and health.

During the first two years, the community banded together. They transformed the landscape with progressive terraces along the hillside, where tens of thousands of nitrogen-fixing trees and new, drought-resistant crops were planted. Field trials determined which crops would have the kind of staying power needed in dry, lean times. In the end, a diversified mix of beans, maize, cassava, home vegetables, and fast-growing fruit trees provided steady and dependable food sources, which led the way to real stability for the first time in decades.

The start of the rainy season is usually one of the hungriest times of the year. Yet in the formerly hopeless enclave of Mayange, there are 50-80 metric tons of maize and beans for every 5,000 people, stored by the local government. This surpasses the wildest estimates of local officials, who three years ago dreamt of splitting that same quantity among 25,000 people.

Across Africa, the Millennium Villages project has demonstrated that food scarcity can be all but vanquished if the required resource management, investment and political will are available. On this World Food Day, the lesson for Kenya and others is simple: get the basics right. Only in this way can agricultural communities attain the food stability and security that maintains people's health. Just as drought can destroy health, economic, and even political systems, an abundant amount of crops and accompanying wealth can take communities beyond mere subsistence, enabling them to build long-term prosperity.

Auschwitz Memorial Launches Facebook Page To Reach Young People

2009-10-15T08:19:40Z

WARSAW, Poland — To try to reach young people around the world, the memorial museum at Auschwitz has launched a page on Facebook, the social networking site usually home to news and photos about friends, funny videos and the minutiae of modern life.

The page aims to be a forum for discussion, reflection and learning about the Nazi death camp, and many people have left a simple message in English, Hebrew and Polish: "Never again."

Michael Kaplan: Columbus: Blundering into Immortality

2009-10-14T12:21:58Z

Four sculpted kings bear his tomb in the cathedral at Seville. Pompous marble proclaims his titles: Admiral of the Ocean, Governor of the New World. The man who, today in 1492, spotted the faint green sliver of the Bahamas on the horizon now rests in a style appropriate to his self-belief.

It is as well that Christopher Columbus was so sure of himself, because he was in many respects staggeringly incompetent. The very basis of his journey to the New World was a miscalculation. For, despite the schoolroom myth, contemporary navigators knew perfectly well that the world was round - and what's more, knew exactly how big it was. They judged, correctly, that Europe, Asia, and Africa covered roughly one-half the globe's circumference; to reach the East by sailing West would involve a journey far beyond the range at which a ship's supplies would run out. Columbus, less experienced but more widely read, chose to believe the (incorrect) Marinus of Tyre, who postulated a bigger proportion for the known continents - and then compounded Marinus' error by assuming his sources referred to Italian miles (a little over a kilometer) when they actually meant Arabic miles, which are half again as long. Put together, these errors made Columbus believe that Japan would be nearer to Western Europe than North America actually is; he was proposing to circumnavigate, not a planet, but a pumpkin. Only a country desperate for recognition, as Spain then was, would bankroll such a crank. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella granted Columbus vast powers over any discoveries and an equally vast share of any profits - but that was on the plausible assumption that he wasn't coming back.

The three ships departed into the unknown, their Admiral sneakily falsifying the logbook so that the sailors would not know how far they were from home and optimistically spotting signs of nearby land when they were scarce halfway across. When at length they came to those golden sands, though, he remained essentially at sea. He'd set sail for the Spice Islands, but Columbus didn't know what spice plants looked like, nor had he any idea which of the many unfamiliar trees and fruits he found might be valuable. It was with great relief that he recognized and gathered some aloes - that at least was something. He was sure that he was in Asia, and thus decided that Cuba must be the island of Zipangu (Japan) - so he sailed thither in search of someone important to whom he could deliver the letter from Their Most Catholic Majesties. Finding no cities and no officials, he sent one of his sailors into the hinterland - a converted Jew who usefully spoke Hebrew and Aramaic - but to no avail. There was no Great Khan, no pepper groves, no gold mines ... nothing.

There were people, though: the peaceful, welcoming Taíno (the word itself means "good"), whose round houses dotted the islands. Columbus could not make up his mind about them; on the one hand, he said, "in all the world there can be no better people ... they love their neighbors as themselves, and they have the sweetest talk in the world, and are gentle and always laughing." On the other, he calmly proposed to enslave them all. When he later returned as governor of Hispaniola, his ways with the natives were so vicious that the Spanish noblemen in his service, not normally a soft-hearted bunch, had him removed. In fifteen years, nine-tenths of the Indian population was wiped out - by disease, starvation, overwork, suicide, and that hallmark of newly empowered little men, wanton, pointless cruelty.

So on this day, whether you are in Columbia, South Carolina or Columbus, Ohio - on the banks of the Columbia or at Columbia University - you might do well to forget the man whom all the fuss is about and remember instead those friendly graceful copper-colored people who welcomed him as a god and left us only their land and the memory of a terrible injustice. Oh, and some words particularly appropriate to a holiday weekend: canoe; hammock; tobacco; barbecue... and, more ominously, hurricane.

If you enjoy such sketches of human fallibility, you will find a new one every day at my sister site, Bozo Sapiens. See you there.

Glenn Beck Compares Fox News To Jews During Holocaust (AUDIO)

2009-10-13T13:28:14Z

Leave it to Glenn Beck to take things too far. On his radio show Tuesday Beck drew a rather over-the-top analogy between, of all things, Fox News and Jewish persecution during the Holocaust. The basis for this comparison was the White House's recent criticism of Fox News' reporting, in which it called the network "the communications arm of the Republican Party" and said that its reporting style is more opinion than straight news. Beck suggested that the campaign against Fox was only the beginning of a full on assault by the Obama administration against the press.

When they're done with Fox, and you decide to speak out on something. The old, "first they came for the Jews, and I wasn't Jewish." When you have a question, and you believe that something should be asked, they're a -- totally fine with you right now; they have no problem with you.

Beck then made a plea to other news organizations to not stand by and let this media genocide happen.

Casual comparisons to the Holocaust are probably never a good idea, but Beck hasn't been afraid to go there in the past -- i.e. Beck's claim that Al Gore was creating another "Hitler Youth".

LISTEN to a segment of Beck's rant from Media Matters for America.:

Robert Fuller: On the Road: Why Do We Want To Travel?

2009-10-10T18:11:09Z

"Ever let the fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home...
Open wide the mind's cage-door,
She'll dart forth, and cloudward soar."
- John Keats

Most kids visit their grandparents by car. Not me. Mine lived on Puget Sound and to see them my mother, baby brother, and I (at age five, and on a return visit, at nine) rode the train for a week--from New Jersey to Seattle. We had a roomette to ourselves, but roamed the train under the watchful eyes of "porters," all of whom belonged to The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the vanguard union for African-American labor.

No African-Americans lived in my town. None went to my school. As a child, I didn't notice, let alone understand, that blacks were effectively excluded from many Northern towns by gentlemen's agreements that barred them from owning or renting property. Sleeping car porters were the first African-Americans I ever spoke to. Of course, they were not then identified as "African-American," but as "Negroes."

By the time these men had served us breakfast of sliced oranges and blueberry pancakes in five states, daily made up our little room, and hovered helpfully from sea to shining sea, they were like fond uncles. The contrast between the prevailing racist stereotype and my personal experience of these kindly protectors could hardly have been starker.

A decade later, when I met blacks at college, my experience of the porters helped me bridge what might otherwise have felt like a chasm.

Travel breaks stereotypes. We get to see for ourselves, form our own impressions.

Like many who read Jack Kerouac's bible for trans-continental pilgrims--On the Road--I spent several summers exploring America in old cars fueled by 35 cent per gallon gasoline.

Why did I go? To devour my country. To swallow it whole. Like a gerbil exploring its cage, I was driven to give my confines a once over and probe the limits of the Americentric vision I'd been raised on. In Of Time and the River, Thomas Wolfe writes of someone who consumed not books, but libraries. That rang a bell. The generation that came of age as America took its place on the world stage was voracious for experience.

Shortly after chalking up my forty-eighth state, I sailed to France for a year of graduate study. Within days of landing, I took off for Germany on a rented scooter to see if it lay in ruins as depicted in wartime newsreels.

Not a stone seemed out of place in Munich, but on the outskirts of the city lay a mountain of rubble that was all that remained of the prewar site of the legendary Oktoberfest. And just down the road was the death camp of Dachau, which left me with a life-long question, one I plan to address in a subsequent blogpost: How could the Holocaust have happened?

In the late sixties, travel brought me another life-shaping revelation, this time in the Soviet Union. Celebrated as our ally against Hitler in World War II, the USSR was now regarded as a treacherous Cold War enemy. By this time my compulsion to explore whatever cage I found myself in had resulted in multiple forays through Western Europe and South America. But Russia, the Pacific countries, and Africa remained virgin territory.

My immediate goal was to find out if the USSR was indeed a workers' paradise, as some claimed, or a police state with an agenda of world conquest, as others insisted. An exchange with the Russian guide assigned to "mind" me, planted a question that would drive me for decades. After several days of fervent lectures on the unparalleled achievements of Soviet communism, I asked the guide how mental illness was treated in the USSR. I remember her answer verbatim: "There is no mental illness in the Soviet Union. Mental illness is a by-product of capitalism."

I suspected otherwise, and for years I wondered if behind their official masks, Russians were not just like us. It was, of course, logically possible that they inhabited a parallel universe; that truth for them was different than truth for us. I facetiously called this the "Martian hypothesis," and vowed to put it to the empirical test, in the manner of my youth, by riding the trans-Siberian railroad across Russia.

Ten years would pass before I could get it together to make the journey. Six years after riding from the Baltic to the Pacific in search of common ground with the Russians, I took the "trans-Sib" in the reverse direction--from Beijing to Budapest. Travel-writer Paul Theroux speaks for me when he notes, "I sought trains; I found passengers."

I've since traveled to Russia many times, and every trip has been an adventure. During the Cold War, there was uncertainty about getting a visa, clearing passport control, even finding an edible meal. Foreigners and Soviet citizens alike feared arbitrary arrest. Getting anything done, felt like a small victory. I was anxious the whole time, even in my sleep.

Fear is part of what makes travel so enlivening and revelatory. You're perpetually off-balance and on guard. After a while one yearns for the mindlessness of familiar routines. And when you do return home, old pleasures are much the sweeter for having been suspended.

Travel is like truth serum. Whether snaking across the American prairie or the Siberian taiga, crossing the Rockies, Urals, or Karakorams, or cycling through Beijing or Berlin, travel makes us porous to new customs, beauties, ideas, and dreams. I can't think of a better vaccine against dogmatism or a quicker cure for self-satisfaction. As we struggle to reconcile what we're experiencing with what we take for granted, we strip away what's arbitrary in cultural practice and approach what is universal.

Non-travelers are more susceptible to habitual seeing and thinking. Traveling, jolts us awake. Even to cross the street we must cease our sleepwalking...or die. It must be admitted, however, that travel may simply confirm some in the superiority of their own ways. As Thomas Fuller observed in 1732, "Travel makes a wise man better, but a fool worse."

Travel not only invites us to see the world anew, it gives us an unaccustomed look at who is doing the seeing. None of the benefits of travel compares to the oblique glance it allows us of our selves. By placing us outside ourselves, travel provides us with the distance required to see what it is we are habitually doing and the anonymity to risk new ways of being in the world.

So, we do not travel to get away from it all. Alas, as the bumper sticker says, "Wherever you go, there you are." Travel fails as escape but it succeeds as confrontation--confrontation with our old selves that, deprived of their usual confirmatory surroundings, may yield to a new one.

Lately, as I head to the airport, I'm starting to feel like one of Pavlov's dogs. The self-renewal so reliably delivered, by making myself a stranger in a strange land, seems to be triggered by merely climbing into the airport van. By the time I disembark an hour later, it feels like there are enough new ideas coursing through me to justify turning around and going straight home where I can sort them out in comfort.

Once your travels have shown you what it means to see freshly, you discover that you can almost do so without leaving home. Almost, but not quite, at least not forever. There seems to be nothing like immersion in another culture for staving off the mind's tendency to calcification. We travel to grow up, wake up, and stay on our toes.

"The object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country... ."
- G. K. Chesterton

Turkey And Armenia Sign Historic Accord, Establishing Diplomatic Relations

2009-10-10T14:54:29Z

ZURICH — Turkey and Armenia signed a landmark agreement Saturday to establish diplomatic relations and open their sealed border after a century of enmity, as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton helped the two sides clear a last-minute snag.

The contentious issue of whether the killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians during the final days of the Ottoman Empire amounted to genocide is only hinted at in the agreement.

Katie Halper: Leaked Ahmadinejad Diary Proves Iran Prez Is Jewish

2009-10-08T12:21:57Z

A
controversy has erupted recently about whether Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad is actually a Jew.
Pundits and professors alike are divided
over whether his original last name, which his family changed when he was 4,
is exclusively Jewish. I attended Camp
Havanagila, a Zionist summer camp in the
Catskill Mountains, when I was young—and so,
it seems did MA. For decades ago, as a young camper, I happened to come across
his diary when I was cleaning up under my bunk bed. I didn't know who MA was
then, but kept it because it offered such a novel perspective. Now, I am
presenting it to the public—to settle the matter of his background once and for
all.

The following excerpts from are Ahmadinejad's childhood years.The first entry
was written when Ahmadinejad was 6, two years after the family converted.

March 1,1962

Dear diary,

I had a playdate with Ali and asked him what he got for Hanukkah and he
had no idea what I was talking about. At first I thought it was that his
parents were mean and didn't give him any presents. But then I realized he actually
didn't even know the holiday existed. He's so stupid. Who doesn't know what
Hanukkah is?

March 3, 1962

Dear diary,

I was telling my mom I don't want anymore playdates with Ali because he's
too stupid for me to associate with. I thought my mom would agree since she and
my dad put such a premium on education and intelligence. But then my mom told
me that actually most people don't know about Hanukkah because most people
don't celebrate it. She told me to keep it a secret that we do. I asked her why
and she said she'd tell me later. I wonder what it could be. I'm very curious,
skeptical and analytical by nature, so it's driving me meshuggah.

March 7, 1962

Dear diary,

My mom told me that a few years ago my parents did this thing called
conversion where they stopped being Jewish, kind of and started being Muslim,
kind of. But I'm not supposed to tell anyone because I could get the family in
trouble. It's a family secret, so that's why I'm only telling you, dear diary.
Other family secrets are Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, Passover, Purim and the
fact that we eat hamantashen which I thought was a national delicacy since the
whole Purim thing takes place in Persia, which is, of course, present-day Iran
anyway.

March 20, 1962

Dear diary,

I just found out that we even changed our name to cover up being Jewish. It
used to be Saborjhian which means cloth-weavers, a traditionally non Muslim
profession considered religiously impure. Now our name is Ahmadinejad
which means prayer mat seller. I also learned my name wasn't always
Mahmoud. It was originally Moishe.

April 1, 1962

Dear diary,

today I offered my friend Mohammed some whitefish salad because his lamb
sandwich looked really good and I was hoping he would trade half with me.
But he didn't want to because he said he'd never heard of white fish and it
looked weird. Who doesn't know what white fish is? I thought to myself this guy
is almost as dumb as Ali. But then I went home and my mom told me that white
fish is a secret food, along with borscht, blintzes and danishes. I feel bad
for the people who didn't start out Jewish. They don't ever get to eat a danish
and those are good.

April 2, 1962

Dear diary,

I wish my mom wasn't such a bargain hunter. She refuses to buy me a soccer
ball at the local bazaar because she says she can find it cheaper. And
she says if she can't find it cheaper, I need to wait for it go on sale. Oy. So
annoying. I'm already the worst soccer player and my asthma doesn't help so I
need all the extra practice I can get.

April 20, 1962

Dear diary,

My mom got me a soccer ball and it's pink! And has a barbie on it! And it's
all banged up. Oy, how embarassing!

April 23, 1962

Dear diary,

Happy Passover. My aunt Frieda is soooooo annoying. First of all,
she makes
me eat her gefilte fish, which stinks. And she makes me down the jelly
which
makes me gag and wheaze. And she won't shut up about the holocaust. She
spent
the whole seder talking about it. Forget the slaves in Egypt, Frieda
just cares about the Jews in Europe. It's like enough already. She
keeps saying, Never
again. She really needs to learn how to live in the moment. But Frieda
does
make excellent charoses I'll give her that much.

April 24, 1962

Dear diary,

today I told my parents aunt Frieda shouldn't come over anymore because all
she talks about is that whole depressing holocaust thing and it's depressing
and old fashioned. My parents got all angry and sensitive and said the
holocaust was very important and very tragic and that I needed to take it
seriously. But the holocaust was, like, so twenty five years ago. Come on
people. Get over it.

The following excerpts are from Ahmadinejad's teenage years

December 2, 1969

Dear diary,

My parents are trying to force me to go to this Jewish summer camp. I
really don't want to go.

July 3, 1969

Dear diary,

This camp is so terrible. First of all it is co-ed which was weird and
uncomfortable. All the kids had long hair. And playing the guitar is like a
sharia/ talmudic law, for crying out loud. All the kids do all day is talk
about revolution and sing The Times They are a Changing and Blowing in the
Wind. My friend Hasaan goes to a regular camp that regular Iranians go to and
there are no girls or hippies or talk of politics or guitars. They spend most
of the time playing soccer and camping and hiking.

July 15, 1969

Dear diary,

Camp still sucks. And you won't believe this! Remember that Barbie soccer
ball? Well my cousin Jessica who lives in Great Neck is also at camp, which she
loves. Today she asked me how I liked the soccer ball. Turns out it was a
hand-me-down from Jessica. How embarrassing.

August 10, 1973

Dear diary,

I am writing to you from a cruise on the Caspian sea
with my parents, my siblings, aunt Frieda, Uncle Saul, and my cousins Sheldon
and Rivkah. Once again, my aunt Frieda will not stop talking about the
Holocaust. The whole family gets in on it. I thought I was going to throw up.
The unlimited buffet didn't help either.

August 17, 1973

Dear diary,

I'm back from the cruise. I think the whole family gained 15 pounds each. I
didn't like the cruise at all. I was sea sick the whole time and the moisture
is bad for my asthma. Plus I didn't enjoy the entertainment, which was a bunch
of self deprecating comedians. My family loved them, but I hated them. I really
can't relate to my family at all. It's gets worse and worse as I get older.

April 19, 1974

Dear diary,

Today at the Bazaar I stumbled across this book called The
Forced War by American David Hoggan. It was published in Germany but
thanks to my familiarity with Yiddish, I was able to get the gist of it. It
questions the atrocities allegedly committed against the Jews. Maybe I'll give
it to Aunt Frieda.

April 22 1974

Dear diary,

Happy Passover. Not! I hate this holiday even more than I used to. I
presented Aunt Frieda with The Forced War and the whole family went messhuga.
Frieda called Hoggan and anti-semite putz. The whole family got in on it and
when I tried to defend Hogan's argument they told me to "sha, you
vantz!" They are so closed minded.

July 13, 1974

Dear diary,

Here I am back at camp as a counselor. I hate it here but my parents made
me go so I could learn the value of a rial. I have a brilliant idea. I've been
trying to get fired so I can go home so I've been speaking truth to power and
telling my campers that the
Holocaust never happened. Each night instead of singing them to sleep with Joani
Mitchel songs or reading them Shalom Aleichem
stories, I read them a chapter from one of the my several Holocaust denial
books. I have quite an extensive collection now, from Hoggan to David Irving to Pat
Buchanan.

July 15, 1974

Dear diary,

I think my plan is working. I gotta run to a meeting with the director of
the camp and I'm pretty sure I'm getting fired. Yes! I'm kind of sad because I
won't be able to spread the truth about the myth of the holocaust. But one day,
if I'm ever president, which I would love to be, I will use my voice and power
to show people the truth about the holocaust. Maybe I could even host a conference denying the Holocaust
ever happened. That would be so great. OK. Gotta run... more later. I better
hide you, diary. I'll put you under the bed.

John Prendergast: The War in Darfur Is Not Over

2009-10-07T13:06:35Z

The latest news out of Darfur of a government offensive launched against civilians in North Darfur demonstrates how shamefully self-serving the recent comments are from top U.N., A.U., and U.S. diplomats. They've claimed: "no war as of now," "it is over," and that Darfur is plagued by a mere "law enforcement issue." Of course the war is not over in Darfur. Yes, there are ebbs and flows to conflict in Sudan, just as there were in the 20 year war in the South and transitional areas. But the suffering of Darfur's civilian population continues, and any assessment that distorts the reality of Darfur's continuing strife does a disservice to the ongoing efforts to keep this issue burning brightly for the policymakers and diplomats who have so far failed to help end the crisis.

Despite the distortion of the Sudan advocacy movement that some analysts continue to perpetuate, the answer we activists continue to propose is a more credible peace process in Darfur that lays down a serious peace proposal which addresses the root causes of Darfur's conflict and builds internal and international support for the proposal. Carrots and sticks would be deployed in the service of resolving the conflict in Darfur, along with the equally important effort to fully implement the Comprehensive Peace Agreement which ended the 20-year war with southern-based rebels.

There is an answer to Sudan's agony. It is effective diplomacy in support of a just peace throughout the country. The biggest key to unlocking this outcome is held by the Obama administration. Let us keep demanding that it deploy that key properly and use its influence to help bring peace to all of Sudan.

John Prendergast is Co-Founder of Enough, the anti-genocide project at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C.