He Who Tells the Truth Gets Chased out of Nine Vil­lages, Part II
Recorded August 20, 2006
REALAUDIO

After a brief rant on the nature of the Israeli/Palestinian con­flict (which will be sum­ma­rized in FTR#569), Mr. Emory high­lighted the fac­tual exis­tence of Islamic fas­cism, a rhetor­i­cal foot­ball in the wake of George W. Bush’s use of the term. After review­ing some of the his­tory of the Grand Mufti (a major Third Reich oper­a­tive in the Mid­dle East before, dur­ing, and after World War II), the pro­gram notes his deep involve­ment with Iran. That coun­try was specif­i­cally renamed from its long-held name “Per­sia” in order to empha­size its alliance with the Third Reich. Iran means “Aryan.” Iran became a hot bed of Nazi activ­ity, until the British and Sovi­ets invaded and put a half to Nazi activ­ity there. After the rise of the Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ists in Iran, that coun­try became a hotbed of Holo­caust denial. A Holo­caust denier, the pres­i­dent of con­tem­po­rary Iran has crafted a gov­ern­ment that has been com­pared to that of 1930’s Ger­many by Ger­man chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel. In addi­tion, offi­cials of the Ger­man gov­ern­ment have com­pared Iran­ian pres­i­dent Ahmadi-Nejad’s views to those of the Ger­man extreme right. The pro­gram reviews some of the his­tory of the post­war col­lab­o­ra­tion of SS ele­ments with Arab regimes intent on anni­hi­lat­ing Israel, as well as intro­duc­ing the sub­ject of media bias against Israel dur­ing the recent con­flict in Lebanon.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: The Nazi and SS influ­ence on the polit­i­cal gen­e­sis of Pales­tin­ian leader Yasser Arafat; a vitu­per­a­tive e-mail sent to Mr. Emory about his recent inter­view with John Lof­tus; links between Nazi émigrés who landed in Egypt after World War II and the Bank al Taqwa (an alleged fund­ing source for Al Qaeda; Hezbollah’s stage man­age­ment of news com­ing out of the war in Lebanon.

1. High­light­ing the sub­ject of the Israeli/Palestinian issue, Mr. Emory com­pared the venal­ity that per­vades the issue with that sur­round­ing the OJ Simp­son case. Mr. Emory also feels that peo­ple are as fun­da­men­tally mis­in­formed about the Israeli/Arab con­flict as they were about the OJ Simp­son case. (For more about the OJ case, use the search func­tion. In par­tic­u­lar, check out FTR#’s 39, 40.) Mr. Emory read an e-mail from a lis­tener that embod­ies the hys­te­ria that sur­rounds the issue of Israel. The guest that he is refer­ring to is John Lof­tus, inter­viewed in FTR#564. Note that the e-mail is pre­sented in unedited form. “ ‘Dave: I have lis­tened to your show for years, and last night I was really upset that you had this obvi­ous Bush apol­o­gist and Israeli Jew­ish Extrem­ist Nazi Likud Party (Ben­jamin Netanyahu is a Jew­ish Nazi, as he hates Arabs just as much as the Arab Extrem­ists hate Jews, and you know it! And I’d like to remind you what Mae Brus­sel [sic] said about Ellioit Abrahms [sic], Michael Ludeen [sic], and Richarl Pearl [sic]: ‘Jew­ish Nazis’) sup­porter spout­ing off his views on the lat­est Lev­anon [sic] inva­sion. Fist off [sic], I think you need to have some­one on who has an oppos­ing view­point, and who actu­ally might have been on the ground there see­ing what really hap­pened . . . . L.D. Fre­itas, Aptos, California.’”

2. In order to under­stand the recent Lebanon war, it is impor­tant to grasp the Islam­o­fas­cism of the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment. That gov­ern­ment is the focal point of admi­ra­tion by Ger­man neo-Nazis. “Rightwing extrem­ists and neo-Nazis posed a secu­rity threat secu­rity threat to the soc­cer World Cup in Ger­many this sum­mer, the Ger­man gov­ern­ment admit­ted for the first time yes­ter­day. . . . The extrem­ist protests are aimed in part at express­ing sup­port for Mah­moud Ahmadi-Nejad, the Iran­ian pres­i­dent, who caused out­rage last year by call­ing for Israel’s abo­li­tion and by deny­ing the Holo­caust, accord­ing to intel­li­gence offi­cials. . . .”
(“‘Neo-Nazis Pose Threat to World Cup’” by Hugh Williamson; Finan­cial Times; 3/31/2006; p. 5.)

3. Fur­ther illus­trat­ing the Islamic fas­cist char­ac­ter of the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment, the pro­gram sets forth the Holocaust-denying pres­i­dent Ahmadi-Nejad’s cor­re­spon­dence with Ger­man chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel. The Ger­man gov­ern­ment com­pared his state­ments to the views of the Ger­man extreme right. Merkel com­pared Iran to Ger­many in the 1930’s. In this con­text, it is impor­tant to remem­ber the close rela­tion­ship between the Iran­ian fun­da­men­tal­ists and Nazis asso­ci­ated with the Bank Al Taqwa milieu, such as Ahmed Huber and Fran­cois Genoud. (For more about this, see—among other programs—FTR#’s 343, 352, 354, 456.) Be sure, also, to view the pic­tures of Hezbol­lah in Para­graph 1 of FTR#564. “The Ger­man gov­ern­ment said yes­ter­day it would ignore a let­ter sent this week by Pres­i­dent Mah­moud Ahmadi-Nejad of Iran to Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel, as it addressed nei­ther the dis­pute over Tehran’s nuclear pro­gram nor the cri­sis in Lebanon. The let­ter from Mr. Ahmadi-Nejad, handed to the Ger­man embassy in Tehran on Wednes­day, con­tained ‘many asser­tions that are not accept­able to us, par­tic­u­larly about Israel, its legit­i­macy and the Holo­caust,’ said Ulrich Wil­helm, Ms. Merkel’s spokesman. Mr. Wil­helm said the chan­cel­lor had no inten­tion of reply­ing and would not pub­lish the let­ter, although offi­cials said they expected Tehran to do so, as it did with a let­ter sent by Mr. Ahmadi-Nejad to Pres­i­dent George W. Bush ear­lier this year.”
(“Ger­rmany Intends to Ignore ‘Bizarre’ Note from Tehran” by Bertrand Benoit; Finan­cial Times; 7/22–23/2006; p. 2.)

4. “One Berlin offi­cial described he 10-page let­ter as ‘bizarre,’ draw­ing par­al­lels between Iran­ian and Ger­man his­tory since 1945 and the two coun­tries’ alleged oppres­sion by Zion­ism, the ‘inter­na­tional Jew­ish con­spir­acy’ and the world’s great pow­ers. Although the Iran­ian pres­i­dent calls for co-operation between the coun­tries, ‘his argu­ment is sur­pris­ingly iden­ti­cal to that made by the Ger­man extreme-right,’ the offi­cial said. [Ital­ics are Mr. Emory’s.] ‘There is not a sin­gle line about the nuclear pro­gram or about Lebanon or Hezbol­lah.’ As in his 18-page let­ter to Mr. Bush, Mr. Ahmadi-Nejad also elab­o­rates exten­sively on the sim­i­lar­i­ties between the three monothe­ist reli­gions of Islam, Chris­tian­ity and Judaism.” (Idem.)

5. “Defend­ing the Ger­man government’s deci­sion not to pub­lish the let­ter, the offi­cial said Berlin had no inter­est in help­ing dis­sem­i­nate the views expressed by the Iran­ian pres­i­dent. Ms. Merkel has been extremely crit­i­cal of Mr. Ahmadi-Nejad’s anti-Semitic com­ments in the past. Speak­ing at a secu­rity con­fer­ence in Munich this year, she com­pared his admin­is­tra­tion to that of the Nazis in 1930’s Ger­many. [Ital­ics are Mr. Emory’s.] Israel and the West have accused Iran and Syria of pro­vid­ing direct mil­i­tary and finan­cial sup­port to Hezbol­lah that has helped the Lebanon-based mili­tia launch destruc­tive rocket attacks on Israeli towns, an accu­sa­tion that Tehran denies.” (Idem.)

6. “Ger­many said it would con­tinue to sup­port efforts by the five per­ma­nent mem­bers of the United Nations Secu­rity Coun­cil to draft a res­o­lu­tion that would force Iran to sus­pend its nuclear enrich­ment pro­gram, which they believe is geared towards build­ing arms as a nuclear deter­rent. The Ger­man offi­cial said Mr. Ahmadi-Nejad’s offer to co-operate with Ger­many in his let­ter was ‘strange’ and seemed disin­gen­u­ous, given that ‘such an offer of coop­er­a­tion is part of the incen­tives included in the offer of nego­ti­a­tions.” (Idem.)

7. It is fas­ci­nat­ing to note that Ahmadi-Nejad wrote that Iran and Ger­many should work together to restruc­ture inter­na­tional rela­tions in a man­ner fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent from the one deter­mined by the out­come of the Sec­ond World War. “Iran­ian Pres­i­dent Mah­moud Ahmadi-Nejad told Ger­man Chan­cel­lor Angela that their coun­tries had been sub­jected to tyranny from World War II vic­tors and that they should coop­er­ate to end he imposed world order. Ahmadi-Nejad made the remarks in a let­ter to Merkel in July. A copy of it, the details of which were not made pub­lic at the time, was obtained from a diplo­mat who asked not to be iden­ti­fied. In the let­ter, the Iran­ian pres­i­dent did not repeat his pre­vi­ous claim that the Holo­caust, in which the Nazis killed 6 mil­lion Jews, was a myth. But he railed against Zion­ism.” (“Leader of Iran Saw an Ally in Ger­many” [Reuters]; The Los Ange­les Times; 8/25/2006; p. A12.)

8. “Merkel rejected the let­ter at the time as ‘totally unac­cept­able to Ger­many’ and said it did not deserve a reply. ‘I have no inten­tion of argu­ing about the Holo­caust,’ Ahmadi-Nejad wrote. ‘But . . . some vic­to­ri­ous coun­tries of World War II intended to cre­ate an alibi on the basis of which they could con­tinue keep­ing the defeated nations of World War II indebted to them,’ the Eng­lish ver­sion of the let­ter says. ‘I believe we and you have been the sub­ject of tyranny. They do not respect your rights and want us also to forgo our rights,’ Ahmadi-Nejad wrote ‘Together we must end the present abnor­mal­i­ties in inter­na­tional rela­tions, the type of order and rela­tions that are based on the impo­si­tions of the vic­tors of the World War II on the defeated nations,’ he wrote. [Ital­ics are Mr. Emory’s.]. . .” (Idem.)

9. In order to help the lis­tener to bet­ter under­stand the his­tor­i­cal rela­tion­ship between Iran and Nazi Ger­many, Mr. Emory presents an arti­cle by Edwin Black, the author of The War Against the Weak, IBM and the Holo­caust, and The Trans­fer Agree­ment. “Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad has shot to the fore­front of Holo­caust denial with his rabble-rousing remarks last month. But it’s more like self-denial. The pres­i­dent of Iran need only look to his country’s Hitler-era past to dis­cover that Iran and Ira­ni­ans were strongly con­nected to the Holo­caust and the Hitler regime, as was the entire Islamic world under the lead­er­ship of the mufti of Jerusalem. Iran’s axis with the Third Reich began dur­ing the pre­war years, when it wel­comed Nazi Gestapo agents and other oper­a­tives to Tehran, allow­ing them to use the city as a base for Mid­dle East agi­ta­tion against the British and the region’s Jews. Key among these Ger­man agents was Fritz Grobba, Berlin’s envoy to the Mid­dle East, who was often called ‘the Ger­man Lawrence,’ because he promised a Pan-Islamic state stretch­ing from Casablanca to Tehran. Rela­tions between Berlin and Tehran were strong from the moment Hitler came to power in 1933. At that time, Reza Shah Pahlavi’s nation was known as Per­sia. The shah became a stal­wart admirer of Hitler, Nazism and the con­cept of the Aryan mas­ter race. He also sought the Reich’s help in reduc­ing British petro-political dom­i­na­tion.” (“Denial of Holo­caust Noth­ing New in Iran Ties to Hitler Led to Plots Against British and Jews” by Edwin Black; San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle; 1/8/2006; accessed at: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/01/08/INGODGH99Q1.DTL.)

10. “So intense was the shah’s iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the Third Reich that in 1935 he renamed his ancient coun­try ‘Iran,’ which in Farsi means Aryan and refers to the Proto-Indo-European lin­eage that Nazi racial the­o­rists and Per­sian eth­nol­o­gists cher­ished. The idea for the name change was sug­gested by the Iran­ian ambas­sador to Ger­many, who came under the influ­ence of Hitler’s trusted banker, Hjal­mar Schacht. From that point, all Ira­ni­ans were con­stantly reminded that their coun­try shared a com­mon bond with the Nazi regime.” (Idem.)

11. Note the pres­ence in this sequence of events of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The Grand Mufti was the first leader of the Pales­tin­ian move­ment and an indi­vid­ual whose pres­ence fig­ures promi­nently in the his­tory of World War II, the Mid­dle East, inter­na­tional fas­cism and the events in and around 9/11. (For more about the Grand Mufti, see—among other programs—FTR#’s 354, 414, 416, 456.) “Shortly after World War II broke out in 1939, the Mufti of Jerusalem crafted a strate­gic alliance with Hitler to exchange Iraqi oil for active Arab and Islamic par­tic­i­pa­tion in the mur­der of Jews in the Mideast and East­ern Europe. This was pred­i­cated on sup­port for a pan-Arab state and Arab con­trol over Pales­tine. Dur­ing the war years, Iran became a haven for Gestapo agents. It was from Iran that the seeds of the abortive 1941 pro-Nazi coup in Bagh­dad were planted. After Churchill’s forces booted the Nazis out of Iraq in June 1941, Ger­man air­crews sup­port­ing Nazi bombers escaped across Iraq’s north­ern bor­der back into Iran. Like­wise, the mufti of Jerusalem was spir­ited across the bor­der to Tehran, where he con­tin­ued to call for the destruc­tion of the Jews and the defeat of the British.” (Idem.)

12. “His ven­omous rhetoric filled the news­pa­pers and radio broad­casts in Tehran. The mufti was a vocal oppo­nent of allow­ing Jew­ish refugees to be trans­ported or ran­somed into Jew­ish Pales­tine. Instead, he wanted them shipped to the gas cham­bers of Poland. In the sum­mer of 1941, the mufti, with the sup­port of key Iran­ian mil­i­tary and gov­ern­ment lead­ers, advo­cated imple­ment­ing in Iran what had failed months ear­lier in Iraq. The plan once again was for a total diver­sion of oil from the Allies to the Nazis, in exchange for the accel­er­ated destruc­tion of the Jews in East­ern Europe and the Nazis’ sup­port for an Arab state. Through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co., Iran had already been sup­ply­ing Hitler’s forces in occu­pied Czecho­slo­va­kia and Aus­tria. Now, the mufti agi­tated to cut off the British and the Allies com­pletely and sup­ply Ger­many in its push against Rus­sia.” (Idem.)

13. “In Octo­ber 1941, British, USSR other allied forces invaded Iran to break up the Iran-Nazi alliance. Pro-Nazi gen­er­als and min­is­ters were arrested, and the shah’s son was installed in power. The mufti scam­pered into the Ital­ian embassy, where he shaved his beard and dyed his hair. In this dis­guise, he was allowed to leave the coun­try along with the rest of the Ital­ian del­e­ga­tion. Once the mufti relo­cated per­ma­nently to Berlin, where he estab­lished his own Reich-supported ‘bureau,’ he was given air­time on Radio Berlin. From Berlin and other fas­cist cap­i­tals in Europe, the mufti con­tin­ued to agi­tate for inter­na­tional Jew­ish destruc­tion, as well as a pan-Islamic alliance with the Nazi regime.” (Idem.)

14. “He called upon all Mus­lims to ‘kill the Jews wher­ever you see them.’ In Tehran’s mar­ket­place, it was com­mon to see plac­ards that declared, ‘In heaven, Allah is your mas­ter. On Earth, it is Adolf Hitler.’ When the mufti raised three divi­sions of Islamic Waf­fen SS to under­take cruel oper­a­tions in Bosnia, among the 30,000 killers were some vol­un­teer con­tin­gents from Iran. Iran­ian Nazis, along with the other Mus­lim Waf­fen SS, oper­ated under the direct super­vi­sion of Hein­rich Himm­ler and were respon­si­ble for bar­barous actions against Jews and oth­ers in Bosnia. Recruit­ment for the mur­der­ous ‘Hand­schar Divi­sions’ was done openly in Iran. Iran and its lead­ers were not only aware of the Holo­caust, they played both sides. The coun­try offered over­land escape routes for refugee Jews flee­ing Nazi per­se­cu­tion to Israel — and later flee­ing post­war Iraqi fas­cist per­se­cu­tion — but only in exchange for extor­tion­ate pas­sage fees.” (Idem.)

15. Since the rise of the Islamist gov­ern­ment in Iran, that coun­try has become an epi­cen­ter of the Holo­caust denial move­ment. “Thou­sands of Jews jour­neyed to Israel via Iran both dur­ing the Holo­caust and dur­ing the years after the fall of Hitler, when Arab lead­ers, espe­cially in Iraq, tried to con­tinue Germany’s anti-Jewish pro­gram. Iran prof­ited hand­somely. Since the shah’s down­fall, Iran has become a cen­ter for orga­nized inter­na­tional Holo­caust denial and has helped ele­vate the endeavor from fringe hate speech to a state-approved pseudo-intellectual debate. In inter­na­tional forums and on state-controlled radio, Iran­ian uni­ver­sity experts and jour­nal­ists help val­i­date the revi­sion­ist views that Jews were never gassed or mur­dered in great num­bers dur­ing the Holo­caust. Indeed, Iran has become a refuge for the biggest names in Euro­pean Holo­caust denial. When in 2000, revi­sion­ist author Jür­gen Graf was sen­tenced in Switzer­land to 15 months in prison for Holo­caust fal­si­fi­ca­tion, Graf fled to Tehran ‘at the invi­ta­tion of a group of Iran­ian schol­ars and uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sors who are sym­pa­thetic to Holo­caust revi­sion­ism,’ accord­ing to the Insti­tute for His­tor­i­cal Review, a denial clear­ing­house.” (Idem.)

16. “What’s more, in May 2000, Iran’s embassy in Vienna granted asy­lum to Aus­trian Holo­caust denier Wolf­gang Fröh­lich, who tes­ti­fied as a so-called expert wit­ness dur­ing Graf’s 1998 trial. This saved Fröh­lich from Austria’s severe anti-Holocaust denial statutes. Fröh­lich argued that evi­dence proved no Jews were killed by Zyk­lon B gassing. Ear­lier, about 600 jour­nal­ists and 160 mem­bers of the Iran­ian par­lia­ment signed peti­tions sup­port­ing French revi­sion­ist Roger Garaudy, who was fined $40,000 by French author­i­ties for his book claim­ing the Holo­caust was a myth. When Garaudy landed in Iran, the country’s supreme spir­i­tual leader, Aya­tol­lah Sayyad Khamenei, granted him an audi­ence and lauded his work. Iran has played a lead­ing role in the Holo­caust drama and now tries to deny it. That should be very hard in a nation that was named for Hitler’s mas­ter race.” (Idem.)

17. Since George W. Bush opined about the U.S. bat­tling Islamic fas­cists, the media have been rife with stu­pid com­ments from all quar­ters, most of them deny­ing the very exis­tence of Islamic fas­cism. Mr. Emory has done a great deal of work on the sub­ject, includ­ing FTR#’s 414, 416, 453, 456, 473, 537. For peo­ple who don’t believe in the exis­tence of Islamic fas­cism, take a look at the pho­tos of Hezbol­lah in para­graph 1 of the descrip­tion for FTR#564. Mr. Emory stressed that Islamic fas­cism must be under­stood as part of inter­na­tional fas­cism, and set forth some of the back­ground to the Nazi/Arab alliance in the post World War II world. After the rise of Nasser in Egypt, many Third Reich alumni relo­cated to Egypt, con­verted to Islam and con­tin­ued their cam­paign to erad­i­cate the Jews. In FTR#558, Mr. Emory set forth the details of a CIA-sponsored mis­sion to rebuild the Egypt­ian intel­li­gence ser­vice and gen­eral staff. To do this, for­mer Nazi gen­eral and CIA oper­a­tive gen­eral Rein­hard Gehlen recruited a bevy of Nazi war crim­i­nals, under the direc­tion of SS colonel Otto Skorzeny–a favorite of Hitler’s and a leader of the ODESSA, the post-war SS under­ground. In Egypt, Sko­rzeny reunited with the Grand Mufti, as well as many other SS com­rades, includ­ing Otto Ernst Remer, another ODESSA leader. It was this con­cate­na­tion that saw the gen­e­sis of Yasser Arafat as the leader of the Pales­tin­ian national move­ment. In eval­u­at­ing the Israeli/Palestinian con­flict, it is impor­tant to under­stand that the Israelis are very aware of this Nazi/Arab con­nec­tion, as well as its dire impli­ca­tions for them. “ . . . Dur­ing the post-Farouk era, the Grand Mufti held court at a closely guarded villa on Sharia Assuit Street in Heliopo­lis, a sub­urb of Cairo. There he enter­tained del­e­ga­tions from through­out the Arab world while main­tain­ing close con­tact with rad­i­cal nation­al­ists from Ger­many and other coun­tries. Among those who gath­ered at the Mufti’s home dur­ing the mid-1950’s was his dis­tant cousin, Yasser Arafat, then an engi­neer­ing stu­dent at the Uni­ver­sity of Cairo. [Otto Ernst] Remer, who would col­lab­o­rate with Arafat in the years ahead, also vis­ited the esteemed Gross­mufti on sev­eral occa­sions. Over cups of strong Ara­bian cof­fee, they shared fond rec­ol­lec­tions of Adolf Hitler and indulged in the usual talk of dri­ving Jews into the sea. The Grand Mufti’s net­work of sym­pa­thiz­ers extended far and wide. ‘I did a cou­ple of jobs for him, get­ting some doc­u­ments from files that were oth­er­wise unavail­able,’ recalled [Nazi spy] H. Keith Thomp­son. Otto Sko­rzeny also col­lab­o­rated with the Mus­lim leader. Accord­ing to A.F.X. Baron, a promi­nent British fas­cist, Sko­rzeny was instru­men­tal in fun­nel­ing more than a mil­lion dol­lars, which the Mufti had raised for anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish pro­pa­ganda, to var­i­ous neo-Nazi groups around the world.” (The Beast Reawak­ens by Mar­tin A. Lee; Lit­tle Brown & Co. [HC]; Copy­right 1997 by Mar­tin A. Lee; ISBN 0–316; p. 128.)

18. Among the Nazis who emi­grated to Egypt, changed their names and con­verted to Islam were Johann von Leers, in charge of anti-Semitic pro­pa­ganda for the Third Reich. Bank al Taqwa direc­tor Ahmed Huber was a pro­tégé of von Leers. (See, among other pro­grams, FTR#354.) “Sev­eral Ger­man pro­pa­ganda experts adopted Ara­bic names when they emi­grated to Egypt. Johann von Leers, one of the Third Reich’s most pro­lific Jew-baiters, con­verted to Islam and became Omar Amin [von Leers]. He got a job with the Egypt­ian Infor­ma­tion Min­istry, thanks to the good offices of the Gross­mufti. With von Leers in charge, Cairo’s anti-Israeli pro­pa­ganda machine churned out hate lit­er­a­ture and inflam­ma­tory broad­casts on a reg­u­lar basis. Assist­ing von Leers were dozens of Euro­pean Nazis who wel­comed a fresh oppor­tu­nity to con­tinue their vendetta against the Jews. They had reg­u­lar access to Radio Cairo, which uti­lized a pow­er­ful CIA-constructed trans­mit­ter to spread the mes­sage through­out much of the Arab world. Tak­ing a cue from von Leers, Hans Appler, another Goebbels pro­tégé, changed his name to Salah Sha­far when he started prepar­ing anti-Semitic for the Nasser regime. And Louis Hei­den alias Louis Al-Hadj, a wartime employee of the Ger­man Press Agency, pitched in by trans­lat­ing Hitler’s Mein Kampf into Ara­bic. The Egypt­ian gov­ern­ment also pub­lished an Ara­bic ver­sion of The Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion (the infa­mous forgery con­cocted by the czarist secret police), which Nasser rec­om­mended to a vis­it­ing Indian jour­nal­ist in 1958. ‘It is very impor­tant that you should read it,’ the Egypt­ian pres­i­dent explained. ‘I will give you a copy. It proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that three hun­dred Zion­ists, each of whom knows all the oth­ers, gov­ern the fate of the Euro­pean con­ti­nent.’” (Ibid.; pp. 128–129.)

19. Among the Nazi/SS émigrés who worked for Nasser (and the Sovi­ets) against the Israelis was Bern­hardt Ben­der, who headed Nasser’s police. “ . . . In par­tic­u­lar, [East Ger­man secu­rity offi­cial] Ernst Woll­we­ber had his eye on Bern­hardt Ben­der, a Mid­dle East expert who once held the rank of lieu­tenant colonel on Himmler’s per­sonal staff. After the war, Ben­der resur­faced in Cairo, where he served as chief of the polit­i­cal depart­ment of Nasser’s police. In this capac­ity, Ben­der (aka Colonel Ben Salem) dis­pensed funds to a whole gang of SS émigrés that two-timed for the Sovi­ets. . . .” (Ibid.; p. 133.)

20. The late Yasser Arafat, was a pro­tégé of Otto Sko­rzeny. “ . . . Sev­eral young Pales­tin­ian refugees, includ­ing Yasser Arafat, joined the Egypt­ian sol­diers who were learn­ing the ways and means of uncon­ven­tional war­fare. Although ini­tially the intended tar­get was the British, the future PLO chief real­ized that rig­or­ous com­mando exer­cises would help pre­pare the Pales­tin­ian mil­i­tants who were eager to renew the bat­tle for their lost home­land. A grate­ful Arafat rec­og­nized Skorzeny’s abun­dant skills in this area, and the two men struck up a rela­tion­ship that lasted for many ears. Appar­ently, the Pales­tin­ian leader was quite fond of the scar­faced pal­adin. ‘Arafat would have done any­thing for Otto!’ remarked Ilse Sko­rzeny. . . .” (Ibid.; pp. 129–130.)

21. The pro­gram closed with the open­ing para­graphs of an arti­cle that was read into the record in its entirety in FTR#566. The issue of media dis­tor­tion of the events sur­round­ing the war in Lebanon couldn’t be exag­ger­ated. In FTR#564, we touched on some of the fal­si­fi­ca­tion of pho­to­graphic evi­dence in the Lebanon war, as well as the stag­ing or embell­ish­ment of civil­ian casu­al­ties. As noted here, among the fac­tors skew­ing the media cov­er­age of the war is the fact that Hezbol­lah very care­fully restricted media access to the bat­tle­field. In fair­ness to the jour­nal­ists who cov­ered the war, most of them saw only what Hezbol­lah allowed them to see. Nonethe­less, the facile and inap­pro­pri­ate com­par­isons of Israel to the Nazis are out­ra­geous, as well as pre­pos­ter­ous. For exam­ple, one brigade of the Leib­stan­darte Adolph Hitler (a Waf­fen SS divi­sion) burned 200 vil­lages in the Soviet Union with the peo­ple locked in the build­ings, earn­ing the nick­name “the Blow­torch Brigade.” [A brigade usu­ally con­sists of approx­i­mately 3,500 men, although this num­ber can vary greatly from one army to the next.] “Large sec­tions of the inter­na­tional media are not only mis­re­port­ing the cur­rent con­flict in Lebanon. They are actively fan­ning the flames. The BBC world ser­vice has a strong claim to be the number-one vil­lain. It has come to sound like a vir­tual pro­pa­ganda tool for Hezbol­lah. As it attempts to prove that Israel is guilty of com­mit­ting ‘war crimes’ and ‘crimes against human­ity,’ it has intro­duced a new charge — one which I have heard sev­eral times on-air in recent days. The news­caster reads out care­fully selected ‘audi­ence com­ments.’ Among these are invari­ably con­tained some ver­sion of the claim that ‘Israel’s attack on Lebanon’ will serve as a ‘recruit­ment’ drive for al-Qaeda. But if any­thing is going to win new recruits for Osama bin Laden and his like, it will not be Israel’s defen­sive actions, which are far less dam­ag­ing than West­ern TV sta­tions would have us believe, but the inflam­ma­tory and one-sided way in which they are being reported by those very same news orga­ni­za­tions.” (“The Media War Against Israel” by Tom Gross; National Post; 8/2/2006; accessed at: http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/issuesideas/story.html?id=b0d85941-2565-4b47-b853-4041944114ee.)

22. “While the slanted com­ments and inter­views are bad enough, the degree of pic­to­r­ial dis­tor­tion is even worse. From the way many TV sta­tions world­wide are por­tray­ing it, you would think Beirut has begun to resem­ble Dres­den and Ham­burg in the after­math of Sec­ond World War air raids. Inter­na­tional tele­vi­sion chan­nels have used the same footage of Beirut over and over, show­ing the destruc­tion of a few indi­vid­ual build­ings in a man­ner which sug­gests half the city has been razed. A care­ful look at aer­ial satel­lite pho­tos of the areas tar­geted by Israel in Beirut shows that cer­tain spe­cific build­ings hous­ing Hezbol­lah com­mand cen­ters in the city’s south­ern sub­urbs have been sin­gled out. Most of the rest of Beirut, apart from strate­gic sites such as air­port run­ways used to ferry Hezbol­lah weapons in and out of Lebanon, has been left pretty much untouched. From the dis­torted imagery, selec­tive wit­ness accounts, and almost round-the-clock empha­sis on casu­al­ties, you would be for­given for think­ing that the level of death and destruc­tion in Lebanon is on par with that in Dar­fur, where Arab mili­tias are slaugh­ter­ing hun­dreds of thou­sands of non-Arabs, or with the 2004 tsunami that killed half a mil­lion in South­east Asia.” (Idem.)

23. “In fact, Israel has taken great care to avoid killing civil­ians — even though this has proven extremely dif­fi­cult and often trag­i­cally impos­si­ble, since mem­bers of Hezbol­lah, the self-styled ‘Party of God,’ have delib­er­ately ensconced them­selves in civil­ian homes. Nev­er­the­less the civil­ian death toll has been mer­ci­fully low com­pared to other inter­na­tional con­flicts in recent years. Last week, a senior jour­nal­ist let slip how the news media allows its Mideast cov­er­age to be dis­torted. CNN ‘senior inter­na­tional cor­re­spon­dent’ Nic Robert­son admit­ted that his anti-Israel report from Beirut on July 18 about civil­ian casu­al­ties in Lebanon was stage-managed from start to fin­ish by Hezbol­lah. In par­tic­u­lar, he revealed that his story was heav­ily influ­enced by the group’s ‘press offi­cer,’ and that Hezbol­lah have ‘very, very sophis­ti­cated and slick media oper­a­tions.’ When pressed a few days later about his report­ing on the CNN pro­gram Reli­able Sources, Robert­son acknowl­edged that Hezbol­lah mil­i­tants had instructed the CNN cam­era team where and what to film. Hezbol­lah ‘had con­trol of the sit­u­a­tion,’ Robert­son said. ‘They des­ig­nated the places that we went to, and we cer­tainly didn’t have time to go into the houses or lift up the rub­ble to see what was under­neath.’” (Idem.)

24. “Robert­son added that Hezbol­lah has ‘very, very good con­trol over its areas in the south of Beirut. They deny jour­nal­ists access to those areas. You don’t get in there with­out their per­mis­sion. We didn’t have enough time to see if per­haps there was some­body there who was, you know, a taxi dri­ver by day, and a Hezbol­lah fighter by night.’ Yet Reli­able Sources, pre­sented by Wash­ing­ton Post writer Howard Kurtz, is broad­cast only on the Amer­i­can ver­sion of CNN. So CNN Inter­na­tional view­ers around the world will not have had the oppor­tu­nity to learn that the pic­tures they saw from Beirut were care­fully selected for them by Hezbol­lah. Another jour­nal­ist let the cat out of the bag last week. Writ­ing on his blog while report­ing from south­ern Lebanon, Time mag­a­zine con­trib­u­tor Christo­pher Allbrit­ton casu­ally men­tioned in the mid­dle of a post­ing: ‘To the south, along the curve of the coast, Hezbol­lah is launch­ing Katyushas, but I’m loath to say too much about them. The Party of God has a copy of every journalist’s pass­port, and they’ve already has­sled a num­ber of us and threat­ened one.’” (Idem.)

25. “Robert­son is not the only for­eign jour­nal­ist to have mis­led view­ers with selected footage from Beirut. NBC’s Richard Engel, CBS’s Eliz­a­beth Palmer, and a host of Euro­pean and other net­works, were also taken around the dam­aged areas by Hezbol­lah min­ders. Palmer com­mented on her report that ‘Hezbol­lah is also deter­mined that out­siders will only see what it wants them to see.’ Palmer’s hon­esty is help­ful. But it doesn’t pre­vent the dam­age being done by orga­ni­za­tions such as the BBC, whose bias is obvi­ous to those who know the facts. First, the BBC gave the impres­sion that Israel had flat­tened the greater part of Beirut. Then to fol­low up its lop­sided cov­er­age, its Web site help­fully car­ried full details of the assem­bly points for an anti-Israel march due to take place in Lon­don, but did not give any details about a rally in sup­port of Israel also held in Lon­don a short time later. Indeed, the BBC’s cov­er­age of the present war has been so extra­or­di­nary that even staunch BBC sup­port­ers in Lon­don seem rather embar­rassed — in con­ver­sa­tion, not on the air, unfor­tu­nately. If the BBC were just a British prob­lem, that would be one thing, but it is not. Thanks to British tax­pay­ers, it is the world’s biggest and most lav­ishly funded news orga­ni­za­tion. No other sta­tion broad­casts so exten­sively in dozens of lan­guages, on TV, radio and online.” (Idem.)

26. “The BBC’s radio ser­vice alone attracts over 163 mil­lion lis­ten­ers. It pours forth its world view in almost every lan­guage of the Mid­dle East: Pashto, Per­sian, Ara­bic and Turk­ish. (Need­less to say, it declines to broad­cast in Hebrew, even though it does broad­cast in the lan­guages of other small nations: Mace­don­ian and Alban­ian, Azeri and Uzbek, Kin­yarwanda and Kyr­gyz, and so on.) It is not just that the sup­posed crimes of Israel are com­pletely over­played, but the fact that this is a two-sided war (started, of course, by Hezbol­lah) is all but obscured. As a result, in spite of hun­dreds of hours of broad­cast by dozens of BBC reporters and stu­dio anchors, you wouldn’t really know that hun­dreds of thou­sands of Israelis have been liv­ing in bomb shel­ters for weeks now, tired, afraid, but resilient; that a grand­mother and her seven-year old grand­son were killed by a Katyusha rocket dur­ing a Fri­day night Sab­bath din­ner; that sev­eral other Israeli chil­dren have died. You wouldn’t have any real under­stand­ing of what it is like to have over 2,000 Iran­ian and Syr­ian rock­ets rain down indis­crim­i­nately on towns, vil­lages and farms across one third of your coun­try, aimed at killing civil­ians.” (Idem.)

27. “You wouldn’t really appre­ci­ate that Hezbol­lah, far from being some rag­tag mili­tia, is in effect a divi­sion of the Iran­ian rev­o­lu­tion­ary guards, with rel­a­tively advanced weapons (unmanned aer­ial vehi­cles that have flown over north­ern Israel, extended-range artillery rock­ets, anti-ship cruise mis­siles), and that it has a global ter­ror reach, hav­ing already killed 114 peo­ple in Argentina dur­ing the 1990s. The BBC and other media have car­ried report after report on the dam­aged Lebanese tourist indus­try, but none on its dam­aged Israeli coun­ter­part, even though at least one hotel in Tiberias, on the Sea of Galilee, was hit by a Hezbol­lah rocket. There are reports on Lebanese chil­dren who don’t know where they will be going to school, but none on Israeli chil­dren. Many have grown accus­tomed to left-wing papers such as Britain’s Guardian allow­ing their Mideast cov­er­age to spill over into some­thing akin to anti-Semitism. For exam­ple, last month a car­toon by the Guardian’s Mar­tin Row­son depicted Stars of David being used as knuckle dusters on a bloody fist.” (Idem.)

28. “Now the Conservative-leaning Daily Tele­graph, Britain’s best-selling qual­ity daily, and pre­vi­ously one of the only papers in Europe to give Israel a fair hear­ing, has got in on the act. The car­toon at the top of the Tele­graph com­ment page last Sat­ur­day showed two iden­ti­cal scenes of dev­as­ta­tion, exactly the same in every detail. One was labeled: ‘War­saw 1943’; the other: ‘Tyre, 2006.’ The sug­ges­tion, of course, is that mod­ern Israel is no dif­fer­ent from Nazi Ger­many. A politi­cian had already given the cue for this hor­ren­dous libel. Con­ser­v­a­tive MP Sir Peter Tapsell told the House of Com­mons that British Prime Min­is­ter Tony Blair was ‘col­lud­ing’ with U.S. Pres­i­dent George W. Bush in giv­ing Israel the okay to wage a war crime ‘gravely rem­i­nis­cent of the Nazi atroc­ity on the Jew­ish quar­ter of War­saw.’ Of course, there was no ‘Jew­ish quar­ter’ of War­saw. In case any­one needs remind­ing (Sir Peter obvi­ously does) the ghetto in the Pol­ish cap­i­tal, estab­lished in Octo­ber 1940, con­sti­tuted less than three square miles. Over 400,000 Jews were then crammed into it, about 30% of the pop­u­la­tion of War­saw. 254,000 were sent to Tre­blinka where they were exter­mi­nated. Most of the rest were mur­dered in other ways. The ghetto was com­pletely cleared of Jews by the end of May 1943.” (Idem.)

29. “The pic­ture isn’t entirely bleak. Some British and Euro­pean politi­cians, on both the left and right, have been sup­port­ive of Israel. So have some mag­a­zines, such as Britain’s Spec­ta­tor. So have a num­ber of indi­vid­ual news­pa­per com­men­ta­tors. But mean­while, anti-Semitic cov­er­age and car­toons are spread­ing across the globe. Norway’s third largest paper, the Oslo daily Dag­bladet, ran a car­toon com­par­ing Israeli Prime Min­is­ter Ehud Olmert to the infa­mous Nazi com­man­der SS Major Amon Goeth, who indis­crim­i­nately mur­dered Jews by fir­ing at them from his bal­cony — as depicted by Ralph Fiennes in Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List. (A month ear­lier, Dag­bladet pub­lished an arti­cle, ‘The Third Tower’, which ques­tioned whether Mus­lims were really respon­si­ble for the Sep­tem­ber 11 attacks.) Anto­nio Neri Licon of Mexico’s El Econ­o­mista drew what appeared to be a Nazi sol­dier with stars of David on his uni­form. The ‘sol­dier’ was sur­rounded by eyes that he had appar­ently gouged out.” (Idem.)

30. “A car­toon in the South African Sun­day Times depicted Ehud Olmert with a butcher’s knife cov­ered in blood. In the lead­ing Aus­tralian daily The Age, a car­toon showed a wine glass full of blood being drunk in a scene rem­i­nis­cent of a medieval blood libel. In New Zealand, vet­eran car­toon­ist Tom Stott came up with a draw­ing which equated Israel with al-Qaeda. At least one lead­ing Euro­pean politi­cian has also vented his prej­u­dice through visual sym­bol­ism. Span­ish Prime Min­is­ter Jose Luis Rodriguez Zap­a­tero wore an Arab scarf dur­ing an event at which he con­demned Israel, but not Hezbol­lah, who he pre­sum­ably thinks should not be stopped from killing Israelis. It’s entirely pre­dictable that all this vio­lent media dis­tor­tion should lead to Jews being attacked and even mur­dered, as hap­pened at a Seat­tle Jew­ish cen­ter last week. When live Jews can’t be found, dead ones are tar­geted. In Bel­gium last week, the urn that con­tained ashes from Auschwitz was des­e­crated at the Brus­sels memo­r­ial to the 25,411 Bel­gian Jews deported to Nazi death camps. It was smashed and excre­ment smeared over it. The silence from Bel­gian lead­ers fol­low­ing this des­e­cra­tion was deaf­en­ing.” (Idem.)

31. “Other Jews con­tinue to be killed in Israel itself with­out it being men­tioned in the media abroad. Last Thurs­day, for exam­ple, 60-year-old Dr. Daniel Ya’akovi was mur­dered by the Aqsa Mar­tyrs’ Brigade, the ter­ror­ist group within Fatah that Yasser Arafat set up five years ago using Euro­pean Union aid money. But this is far from being an exclu­sively Jew­ish issue. Some inter­na­tional jour­nal­ists seem to find it amus­ing or excit­ing to bait the Jews. They don’t under­stand yet that Hezbol­lah is part of a world­wide rad­i­cal Islamist move­ment that has plans, and not pleas­ant ones, for all those — Mus­lim, Chris­t­ian, Hindu and Jew — who don’t abide by its wishes.” (Idem.)