Guilty as Charged

"In the final analysis, the court does not retain the hodgepodge of explanations provided by Gabriel Sohier Chaput about his writings."

"[The court] rejects his entire account, because his explanations leave no doubt. The court finds that the explanations provided are specious, insincere, opportunistic, deceptive, far-fetched, implausible, concealers of the truth, and were cobbled together to conceal the true intention of the accused."

"[Sohier Chaput] intentionally promoted hatred, through the Daily Stormer platform, against people of Jewish faith."

"The evidence in this regard is overwhelming. In closing, allow [myself] to make the following observation: the victims [Jews and other groups] of the Holocaust and also the victims of other genocides perpetrated throughout history, as well as their families deserve to be left in peace. The suffering they have been put through is inexpressible and defies the meaning of humanity."

Quebec Court Judge Manlio Del Negro, Montreal

"We need to make sure no [social justice warrior] or Jew can remain safely untriggered."

"[2017] will be the year of action."

"Non-stop Nazism, everywhere, until the very streets are flooded with the tears of our enemies."

'Zeiger' aka Sohier Chaput, Dailu Stormer

Gabriel Sohier Chaput aka 'Zeiger'

A series of articles published by the Montreal Gazette in 2018 described Gabriel Sohier Chaput as one of North America's most prominent writers on the Daily Stormer, an infamous, race-baiting, antisemitic rag of a far-right news website. Sohier Chaput was linked in the articles to the Zeiger pseudonym he signed off with when publishing hundreds of articles on the website of the Daily Stormer where it was pointed out that he organized meetings for a local neo-Nazi group.

The publishing of the Montreal Gazette articles in a display of investigative journalism uncovering the  presence and influence of a coterie of neo-Nazis and fascists actively working to denigrate, demonize, slander and harass Jews and their institutions led B'nai Brith Canada to file a complaint to the Montreal police. This led to a warrant being issued for the man's arrest in 2018.

 

Andrew Anglin, Founder, Daily Stormer

Sohier Chaput was charged under the Criminal Code with willful promotion of hatred "by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, [that] willfully promote hatred against any identifiable group". On conviction, the charge carries a maximum penalty of a two-year sentence in prison. When the trial began a year ago, Helene Poussard, the defence lawyer, stated that while her client was guilty of having posted between 800 and 1,000 items under the Zeiger pseudonym he was within his constitutional rights.

 

His writings were repugnant, stressed the lawyer, but he had a right to post them under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Her argument failed to impress Justice Del Negro, who ordered that Sohier Chaput be taken into custody. Since the warrant was issued for his arrest in 2018 he had never been earlier detained. "There is nothing ironic in the fact that millions of Jewish people and others were exterminated during the Holocaust orchestrated by the Nazis ... it is one of the saddest events in the history of humanity."

 

Members of the Montreal Antifascist collective protested outside of the courthouse Friday, as closing arguments resumed in the hate propaganda trial of Gabriel Sohier-Chaput. The 35-year-old Montreal man appeared in court by video conference. (Radio-Canada)

 

The Shameful Conduct of the Canadian Military

"Do we have a clear expression of CAF policy toward this group [the Azov Battalion]?" 

"This may or may not prompt questions, but we need to be ready and not come across as being taken by surprise.”

Chris Henderson, then assistant deputy minister for public affair

 

"In Ukraine, the Azov Battalion has recruited foreign fighters motivated by white supremacy and neo-Nazi beliefs, including many from the West, to join its ranks and receive training, indoctrination and instruction in irregular warfare."

Soufan Report

 

“Given the fact that the [Latvian SS] fought for a victory of the Third Reich, the most genocidal regime in history, and that among those serving in it were active participants in the mass murder of Latvian Jewry, as well as of German and Austrian Jews deported by the Nazis to Riga, such comments are incomprehensible, let alone deeply offensive, coming from a senior minister of a country with full membership in the European Union and NATO."

Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center

A news broadcast by German ZDF station showed soldiers of the Ukraine Azov Battalion with nazi symbols on their helmets. Photo by Files /ZDF station

 Once again the Canadian Armed Forces' top brass has been revealed to be strangely oblivious to the fallout of matters they engage in without due thought to appropriate behaviour and their consequences. The Canadian public has been treated to a full-throated cry of desperation from female CAF members who have suffered sexual harassment and violence and when they bring the situation to the attention of military authorities, the issue is set aside, the victims of sexual violence left to steam in frustration, their abusers free to continue their upward trajectory toward leadership.

More latterly, the public has been reminded once again of the unsavoury contacts the Canadian Armed Forces leadership, along with government diplomats engage in through casual and personal contact with self-declared admirers of fascism and neo-Nazis abroad. Canada has a 'special' relationship with Ukraine through Canada's membership in NATO which has pledged to protect Ukraine from the intentions of the Kremlin to re-forge a union with Ukraine which the current government of Ukraine has no interest in and which Moscow has pursued with a vengeance.

Another factor in Canada's commitment to military partnership with Ukraine is the lobbying presence of large number of Ukrainian-Canadians urging a more firm alliance between Canada and Ukraine. An incidental but telling issue took place a few years ago when the Russian Embassy in Canada brought to the light of day, Canada's then-minister of Foreign Affairs and currently deputy Prime Minister and heir apparent to head the Liberal government's Ukrainian heritage. Chrystia Freeland's grandfather, it was revealed, was an ardent Nazi collaborator as the editor of a Ukrainian newspaper during WWII.

In his newspaper, Nazi propaganda found its place, along with vicious anti-Semitic sentiments; in no small measure doing his part in aiding and abetting fascist Germany in its dehumanization of European Jewry on their way to total genocide. So the Ukrainian community in Canada, has great influence in the country. However, since Canada is a country comprised of immigrant populations, a great congregation of people from all over the world, so too do Chinese-Canadians, Indian-Canadians, Italian-Canadians and other ethnic/cultural groups have influence, as they should, as Canadians.

In the latest revelations it would appear that Canadian officials and members of the military met with and were briefed by leaders from the Ukrainian Azov Battalion; neither the officers nor the diplomats involved voiced any objection to the meeting although they were briefed befirehand that they would be meeting with overt Nazi sympathizers. Photographs were taken of the meeting, which were used for propaganda purposes by the Azov Battalion online, stating that the Canadian delegation had expressed "hopes for further fruitful cooperation".

 

The Canadian Forces have decided, as a result of public embarrassment when an Ottawa newspaper revealing the unsavoury aspects of CAF interactions with foreign military forces, to mount a review of the issue. A review undertaken in response to the latest revelations of Canadian diplomats and military personnel meeting with Azov Battalion members while in Ukraine; a decision that arrived just as a Jewish group in Ukraine circulated a new video of Ukrainian paratroopers singing a song to honour Stepan Bandera who was an infamous anti-Semite and Nazi collaborator whose group was linked to the mass murder of over 100,000 Jews and Poles during the Second World War.

 

These new revelations fold neatly into the near past when senior Canadian Forces leaders took a pass on condemning glorification of Nazi collaborators in Latvia and Ukraine, where Canadian troops are conducting training sessions. The Latvian Minister of Defence Artis Pabriks publicly praised members of the Latvian SS who fought for the Nazis, proudly stating them to be "the pride of the Latvian people and of the state" and that his country would not "allow anyone to discredit their memory".

As a friend of Pabriks, then-defence minister Harjit Sajjan refused to comment, much less to condemn glorification of the SS unit. Canadian generals saw no reason to break their silence, at the 2019 event and declaration. The Latvian SS included personnel who took part in the wholesale murder of Jews during the Holocaust. Members of the unit were among the last defenders of the Nazi regime in Berlin.

Members of the Azov Battalion attend a protest against local elections in separatist-held areas of eastern Ukraine in Kyiv on May 20, 2016.   Reuters

 

Just coincidentally, as though underscoring the lax attitude and moral and ethical failings of the military hierarchy in Canada and government leaders disinterestedly overseeing their conduct in such matters, Canada’s training mission to Iraq was brought under scrutiny when it was revealed that Canadian soldiers complained in 2018 to their commanders that among the Iraqi troops they were training were war criminals who enjoyed sharing videos of their atrocities, including executing prisoners and raping a woman to death.

The Italian Renascence 

"Haters are people we should feel sorry for."
"I thought a committee against hatred, as a matter of principle, should be accepted by everyone. I thought it was almost banal."
"I have been worrying about our society. It made me think of a farcical and dangerous revival of the 'Gott mit uns; [alluding to the motto 'God is with us', featured on Nazi uniforms]."
"I personally experienced how easy it is to move from words of hatred to acts of hatred. I was taught that whoever saves a life saves the whole world."
"For this reason, a world where those who save lives are punished instead of honored sounds upside down to me."
"They’re serial haters who need to hate someone. Wasting time writing to wish death on a 90-year-old, anyway nature will soon take care of that."
"I don’t forgive [her experience at the hands of the Nazis]. I don’t forgive and I don’t forget, but I don’t hate."
Liliana Segre, 89 year-old Holocaust survivor, Rome

Italian Holocaust survivor and senator for life Liliana Segre

(photo credit: DANIEL REICHEL/PAGINE EBRAICHE)

"She is not afraid."
"She is shocked by these tensions and by this entire situation."
"People who were once forced to feel ashamed of these [hateful anti-Semitic] views now express them with pride."
Luciano Belli Paci, 61, Rome, Liliana Segre's son

"Every time prominent Jews are at the center of media attention in Italy, they get subjected to online anti-Semitic abuse."
"The anti-Semitic insults come from far-right circles that have a past, and sometimes present, of violence. It's part of their radical rightwing code, this pugnacious attitude."
"Since the beginning of the year to the end of September, we recorded about 190 anti-Semitic incidents, about 70 percent online."
"The radical far-right feels more legitimized and stronger, thus they're more active."
"Twenty years ago you couldn't hang around shouting 'Viva il Duce,' there was greater resistance towards extremist themes. The dam barriers have been lowered, so people feel they can freely pour hatred towards Segre online."
Stefano Gatti, Foundation Jewish Contemporary Documentation Center, Milan

She was thirteen years old when she was packed off with her family from their home in Italy to Auschwitz, the death camp in Poland where her family was murdered, and she managed somehow to survive, one of only a few Italian-Jewish children whom fate spared from the death that overcame six million European Jews in Nazi Germany's campaign to completely eradicate Jewish life through a meticulously planned Final Solution, approached initially by dehumanizing Jews, by depriving them of every human right; ghettoizing, then shipping them to work- and death-camps, and finally annihilating them in gas chambers and reducing them to ashes in giant furnaces.

This is a woman who has spent her life reminding the world of what it would far prefer to forget. Who became a public speaker, explaining to those who were too young to know, the dehumanization campaign that allowed Nazi Germany to 'legitimize' the cleansing of the social order, rounding up Jews, political dissenters, Roma, Homosexuals, the disabled, critical clergy, as enemies whose presence within society was a threat to law and order and public decency. In the process succeeding in extinguishing millions of lives of innocents, children, women and men from all walks of life.

Holocaust memorials at a doorstep, Via del Portico d'Ottavia, Rome.

Sylvia Poggioli/NPR

The rising spectre of renascent anti-Semitism has raised its ugly head everywhere in the world, including Italy. Ms. Segre's activism to ensure that the Holocaust not be forgotten, shelved far from public scrutiny, has failed to endear her to the Axis countries that were allied with Nazi Germany. Racist language has begun to consume Italy in lock-step with the rise of far-right groups signalling a return to fascism and a renewed fascination with Italy's dictator Benito Mussolini. No fewer than 200 threats each and every day went out to warn this woman that there were ample Italians who despised her message and threatened her.

A Black Italian soccer star, Mario Balotelli, who had been adopted and raised by Jews, was the recipient of racist chants from fans of the Hellas Verona team, whose leader argued that "Hitler chants are just kidding around". Even games between ten-year-olds are not exempt from the venomous sting of racism, with a mother at a soccer game using a racial epithet on a Black child. A prominent Jewish journalist at a rally of the League party was told "You're not Italian, you are Jewish, go home!"

The country, said Noemi Di Seni, president of the Union of the Italian Jewish Community, was going through a "rise in anti-Semitism, which manifests itself in many ways". The heated atmosphere and the ongoing, copious threats have resulted in police being assigned to protect Ms.Segre when she speaks in public. Rallies have been organized by politicians and Jewish groups in Milan and Rome to show Italians there is solidarity with Ms.Segre. Italian President Sergio Mattarella, recognizing the importance of Ms.Segre's testimony on the Holocaust to Italian students, made her a lifetime senator.

Senator Segre last month called for the formation of a counteracting parliamentary commission that would be tasked with investigating hate, racism and social media in Italy. Her motion passed, despite the nationalist League Party, post-fascist Brothers of Italy and center-right Forza Italia opposing it.

Holocaust survivor Liliana Segre has been put under police protection after repeated anti-Semitic threats against her life [Luca Bruno/AP]

National Socialism : The Fascist Left

"I would go to conferences on Nazi medicine and find the scholars always talking about the Big Four -- sterilization, the Nuremberg laws, the euthanasia program and the Final Solution."
"But the irony is that in this murderous regime, you also find the world’s most progressive anti-cancer policy. This has been totally ignored."
Robert N. Proctor, Professor, History of Science, Stanford University

"[The violent, left-wing antiwar demonstration in the 1960s he witnessed reminded him] of the storm troopers that marched through my childhood."
"[Student protesters adopted from fascists] their anti-intellectualism, their anger, their street theatre, their glorification of  youth, or their mysticism."
"[There was as well their] mob psychology [and] the militant antireason impervious to argument."
Peter Berger, conservative sociologist, Austrian-born survivor of fascism 

"At the CPAC conference, there was a dust-up concerning certain persons claiming to be the 'alt-right'.  One of the organizers of the conference said the people claiming to be the alt-right were not conservatives, but were 'left-wing fascists'. He also said they had appropriated the term alt-right. The term 'alt-right' emerged to represent a form of journalism in some ways evocative of the late Hunter S. Thompson, with right-of-center views and relying on non-traditional platforms. But, the term has come to mean extreme right-wing. My focus is on the term 'left-wing fascism'."
"In real time, Benito Mussolini and his movement – fascism or national socialism – was of the left. Mussolini was a great admirer of Karl Marx and Marx’s principle of revolutionary socialism. By 'revolutionary socialism', I mean to distinguish Marxist socialism from the democratic socialists and labor unions that were emerging in Europe."
"Mussolini, like Marx and Lenin, saw the party as the vanguard of the working class, a force from without the system that would usher in change. Mussolini was in fact a member of the socialist party of Italy, although he broke with the party on the issue of neutrality during World War I. It was later that Mussolini thought to combine socialism with nationalism, and form a new party. He called the combination 'fascism'. A fasces is a bundle of rods, each individually weak while the bundle is strong. Mussolini’s counterpart in Germany called the combination 'national socialism'. In Germany, where they like long words, this became 'Nationalsozialistische'. In America, where we like short words, this became 'Nazi'."
Clifford F. Thies, Professor of Economics and Finance, Shenandoah University 

Neo Nazis, Alt-Right, and White Supremacists encircle counter protesters at the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson after marching through the University of Virginia campus with torches in Charlottesville, Va., USA on August 11, 2017. (Photo by Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

"Ideologically, the distinction between the 'Sozis' [Socialists] and Commies on the one hand and Nazis on the other, was probably only the internationalism of the Marxists and the nationalism of the Nazis."
"In every other respect they agreed on the evils of capitalism. [The connecting of Jews with capitalism fuelled the anti-Semitism of the Nazis]."
H. Pierre Secher, biographer, Bruno Kreisky Austrian socialist

Leftist 'progressives' have a good deal in common with Adolf Hitler; for he too was interested in all manner of socially progressive issues from healthful eating, to avoidance of drugs and alcohol and tobacco. He wanted the perfect society where people would be responsible for themselves and to society, where people would be law-abiding, and where science would solve all of the world's ills. That he was also a raving psychopath and felt obligated to rid the world of the presence of imperfect physical and mental human specimens, gypsies, gays, critics and Jews was a more infamous facet.

Nazis, fascists worked hard at delegitimizing those whom they considered their enemies. And their enemies were any who failed to appreciate how vital it was to the future of the world to support their fascist agenda of extreme nationalism, of conquest, of transforming the world in their image. Any who disagreed with them would be victimized by a slickly organized slander machine which derided and accused, deprived them of dignity and rights, reducing them to vulnerable elements within the larger society which became complicit in isolating them socially, then destroying them physically.

This is a tactic used almost exclusively now by the 'progressive' left whose agenda is to selectively support and defend those whom they identify as victims, while they victimize themselves any who view their programs of sanctimonious righteousness as hypocrisy. The left has made a defensive religion of climate and environment, of haven seekers, of defense of Islamists as being misunderstood and any who view them with suspicion as "Islamophobes", labelling and censoring their critics. They share, in fact, some of the rationale involved in Communism.

Universities and trade unions are now suffused with a leadership that glorifies the radical left, allowing them to fracture social cohesion and interrupt the normal flow of conversation between people with differing opinions. It is what totalitarian governments do; the only agenda feasible is their own. The anti-fascist (Antifa) movement on university campuses represents extremism in lock-step with that of white supremacists, as they adopt the same confrontational, libelous and violent mechanisms for control of public opinion.



The Antifa movement whose name is derived from 'anti-fascist' doesn't hesitate to use the very same public disruption tactics as those they say they're struggling against. They are the 'hard left' expressing an ideology that claims to support populations that are oppressed and any population where the infamous one percent representing great wealth and opportunities leaving a huge gap between the wealthy and the poor is by their definition of capitalism, oppressed; the wealth of corporations and elites impoverishing ordinary working people.

According to Antifa activists they are motivated by peace and inclusivity; government and capitalism fail both. The U.S. government's tightening of immigration is viewed as racism and rejected by Antifa. This is basically a millennial movement, a movement embraced by those who live on the fringes of society, including undocumented immigrants, transgendered, low-wage workers and individualists, a movement that has huge appeal on university campuses. Antifa leaders waste no breath in denying their willingness to use violence in response to violence or racism; their goal is to eradicate hatred while practising it themselves.





Those who balk at accepting greater numbers of immigrants overwhelming society and culture, who refuse to continue to look the other way at the presence of millions of illegal migrants present in an underground economy, who decry the anti-fossil-fuel movement, manipulate situations by demonizing the nay-sayers; in the case of the environment, all those who fail to commit to eradicating carbon emissions, the very source of life itself, become 'climate change deniers', just as those criticizing Islamist jihadis become 'Islamophobes'.

 

Fascism Lives! 

"[The annual Polish Independence Day march this year represents] a dangerous march of extreme and racist elements."
"We hope that Polish authorities will act against the organizers. History teaches us that expressions of racist hate must be dealt with swiftly and decisively."
"[The march disproved] anyone who thinks that hatred of Muslims protects the Jews."
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon

"[Polish government authority strongly condemns racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic ideas, but the  march represented an expression of patriotic values]."

"[The rally was misunderstood, it was] a great celebration of Poles, differing in their views, but united around the common values of freedom and loyalty to an independent homeland."
Poland’s Foreign Ministry 

"It's clear that these types of marginal voices are caught and send abroad by the Polish press, and this is an image problem."
"Poland is an oasis of security, peace and tolerance."
Deputy Prime Minister Mariusz Morawiecki

"[Poles must take the initiative to lead] sick Europe [to the path of] health, to fundamental values, to true freedom and to the strengthening of our civilization based on Christianity."
Law & Justice party leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski

Demonstrators burn flares and wave Polish flags during the annual march to commemorate Poland’s National Independence Day in Warsaw on November 11, 2017. (AFP PHOTO / JANEK SKARZYNSKI)

Protesters carrying poster pictures of Roman Dmowski, a leading Polish nationalist of the 1920s and 19302, a virulent anti-Semite, played homage to his vision of a Jew-free Poland, reprising his vision  to the present, where fewer than 10,000 Jews are left in Poland, after 90 percent of the three million Jews in pre-war Poland were exterminated during the Holocaust years.

Small assemblies of counter-protesters were kept separate from the main March, by police. But groups of women carrying signs saying "stop Fascism", were still kicked and pushed around by nationalists. Masked protesters shouted racist slogans, their banners reading Pure Blood, Europe will be white or uninhabited. Other expressions of pure unadulterated good will and Polish pride in patriotism read variously:

• Pure Poland, Jew-free Poland
• Jews out of Poland
• Refugees get out
• Clean Blood
• Pray for an Islamic Holocaust

Flags of Falanga, a historical nationalist group that advocated "Catholic totalitarianism" and removing civil rights from Jews were also in evidence. But the government was firm, accusing Polish media of fomenting problems for the country through its focus on "fringe incidents" and "provocateurs" among those in the 60,000-strong march whom one organizer described as 70% patriots, and 30% right-wing supremacists. Adding that it was the voice of the 70% that mattered; every country had its disgruntled 30%.

The ruling Law & Justice party has rallied Poles to the embrace of their national heritage. With that rallying came a vow that the country's traditional conservative Catholic roots were destined to be returned to their place of honour, and Poland was embarking on a path of "pride, independence and strength". Eastern Europe altogether has rejected diluting its culture and heritage by the acceptance, as the EU demands, of millions of Muslim refugees.

Life has been made dangerously intolerable for Jews in Belgium, France, Germany, Sweden and Britain by the introduction of millions of Muslim immigrants, refugees and migrants bringing their special brand of Islamist anti-Semitism with them. The irony is that in Eastern Europe which has rejected the EU call for all member-states to acquiesce to the demands of acceptance of the Muslim refugees and migrants, right-wing nationalists have taken to openly decrying the presence of Jews who have traditionally lived there.

Demonstrators burn flares and wave Polish flags in Warsaw on November 11, 2017.

JANEK SKARZYNSKI/AFP/Getty Images

An Uncertain Germany, An Enfeebled Government

"This is a great night. We did it. We are in parliament."
We will change this country. We will hunt Merkel, and reclaim our country and our people."

Alexander Gauland, chancellor candidate, Alternative for  Germany party [AfD]

"Today we must be open that there is internal dissent within the AfD,"
"We must not be silent about this. The community needs to know that we have controversial debates."
Frauke Petry AfD chairwoman

"We lost the election. We are the bulwark of democracy."
"Mrs. Merkel fought a scandalous campaign. She ducked away from debate, and prevented any contrast between the democratic left and the democratic right. This systematic refusal of political debate created a vacuum that the AfD was able to fill. I believe Mrs. Merkel bears a great responsibility for this."
Martin Schulz, Social Democrats party [SPD]

"It was a bad night for Schulz and the Socialists, but also for Mrs Merkel and the Christian Democrats. She still heads the largest party, but she enters these coalition negotiations with a weakened hand."
Christian Odendahl, Centre for European Reform, Berlin

"Forming a three-party government is going to be very difficult."
"The Greens and the FDP will feel emboldened by the result and given their traditional animosity it's in no way certain that the three parties will be able to strike a coalition agreement."
Dan Hough, professor of politics, University of Sussex

Angela Merkel addresses supporters in Berlin Sunday night   CNN

Chancellor Merkel fought an uphill battle, but her popularity with the German voting public remained strong, as a tough leader who took Germany through years of EU destabilization as a result of its faltering economy and financial failures of some of its members. She took the lead in communicating with and standing against Russian President Vladimir Putin when the EU censured Russia for its seizure of the Crimea and support of ethnic Russian Ukrainians revolting in eastern Ukraine.

She has been the equal of any world leader and has indeed surpassed most with the steadfastness of her vision of the new Germany and its place in the world order of democratic nations. Her stumble came when she responded, as the daughter of a Lutheran minister who had lived under Communist rule and before that had experienced Nazi fascism, which led her to open Germany's borders to a million refugees and economic migrants from the Middle East and North Africa.

The flood of foreigners into a Germany, united and prosperous, willing according to the government and able, to share with outsiders what made the country a beacon of freedom and stability, was first welcomed by the German population -- which had already absorbed about four million Muslims through immigration -- and then second thoughts intruded as many of the newcomers were unattached young men, unruly and with a penchant for unlawful behaviour trending toward violence. Her popularity plummeted, but saw resurrection with the election call.

Those who remained disaffected responded to the siren call of nationalism, wanting to ensure that their beloved Germany would not fall victim to Islamization, its heritage and culture strained beyond endurance by the massive foreign influx. The party that arose  in response to their alarmed discomfiture in the presence of so many strangers whose customs, values and religion ensured that integration would be problematical, attracted those who resented their presence.

Now, the Alternative for Germany's chairwoman, an energetic and determined young woman struggling to make certain that her party did not descend to the fascistic past in the presence among its leaders of those promoting pride in Nazi Germany's wartime military, has decided to leave the party, to sit in the Bundestag, but not with her party, until and unless it sheds its shift hard right and re-centers itself. Her failure to remove a regional AfD leader who had disparaged a Holocaust memorial spurred her to action.

Mrs. Merkel is prepared to make the sacrifices she sees ahead as her diminished party attempts to form a government with one or two of the also-rans. Her Social Democrats partners in the past government have refused to rejoin the CDU in its "Grand Coalition". "Her "biggest challenge", she stated, was to win back those who decided to back the nationalist challengers on their anti-immigration, nationalist party.

"We have a mandate to form a government. And no one can form a government against us", she assured her supporters.

"Until now, I had hoped this wasn't going to happen", said a neurology student, who had voted for the Christian Democrats. "But we are here and the extreme right is back", she mourned, among the hundreds of protesters, mostly young people in their 20s, who gathered in Berlin once initial results were announced, outside the AfD headquarters.



.

Speaking Ill of The Departed

"Following a request I made to consider the cancellation of this event, I was informed that the library has received legal advice that it cannot reject this room booking request."
"My office will be asking the library board to review its room rental policies in the wake of this event."
Toronto Mayor John Tory

"[The book Did Six Million Really Die by Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel] ensures that both sides of this ethnic dispute are at least available to the general reader."
"[Zundel's departure from Canada to the U.S. represents part of a] brain drain."
Barbara Kulaszka, Polish-Canadian lawyer

Barbara Kulaszka, seen here in 1990 at Imre Finta's trial. She acted as co-counsel for Finta, who was found not guilty of war crimes. Kulaszka died in June. (CBC)

"[As a lawyer defending fascist racists Kulaszka realized many successes] to the detriment of Canadian society."
"Any contact I had with her was always negative, there was no humour in it. There was nothing. It was clear to me that she embraced the philosophy of the people she represented, and she did this for a very long time."
Bernie Farber, former  head, Canadian Jewish Congress

It is telling that Barbara Kulaszka, dead at age 64 from cancer, spoke of an "ethnic dispute" possibly at the heart of her legal defence of Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites over the years. She posed as a legal professional whose morals in defence of justice  and the rights attendant on free speech extended to any kind of speech or the printed word denigrating to others in society, going so far as to incite to violence on the basis of racial bigotry, aided by slanderous depictions of Jews, reminiscent of the racist propaganda of the Third Reich.

She edited the publication written by the infamous Ernst Zundel, fascist extraordinaire, Did Six Million Really Die? and in her claims that the book made available "both sides of this ethnic dispute" clearly refers to the unapologetic assistance given by Poles and Ukrainians in the general population where anti-Semitism was rife and deadly, to the Final Solution plans of the German occupation during the Second World War when Germany led its Axis partners against the response by the Allies in conflict, while taking the time and using stretched resources and personnel to achieve genocide.

She and her ilk brought through their emigration to Canada the traditional viral enmity against Jews to Canada, and while integrating into Canadian society continued to nurse that aggravating animus, in the process minimizing the extent and ferocity of the deadly horrors we know as the Holocaust. A public outcry has been occasioned by her death; there is no public remorse or compassion for the miserable death she suffered, but there is a reaction by those she affronted to plans for a memorial in her honour.

The organizer of Wednesday night's memorial, Paul Fromm, says he and all attendees are taxpayers of the city of Toronto, and that they paid for the library. (Betsy Trumpener/CBC)

Simply because that memorial event was scheduled to take place in a public library of the Toronto Public Library group, which rented out accommodation to those wishing to honour her memory. This woman was a colleague of the notorious Doug Christie who took it upon himself to represent the interests in criminal trials of inciting to hatred and violence of a series of neo-Nazis in Canada, as well as a member of the Hungarian WWII military, Imre Finta, who had rounded up Jews for deportation to Nazi death camps.

She herself honoured Christie on the occasion of his death by asserting how unfair it was to assume he made common cause with his clients. She claimed that his defence of his clients reflected the principles of law "which in the end protect all of us from the power of the state. That type of courage is very rare". Obviously, then, she considered  herself courageous for her support of fascist denial and hate-mongering. While she herself defended the speech of Holocaust denial itself, as much as the freedom to air it.

Aside from editing the Zundel publication she wrote an essay defending Holocaust revisionism. While those she defended will mourn her passing and will miss their champion, the world is a better place for her absence.

"How about paying $400 a head to the Nazi regime? Too much? How about $200?"

Gangs of thugs in brown shirts owned the streets. They drove around in trucks, flashing their guns and their swastika armbands, hooting at the pretty girls. If they wanted to pick you up or beat you up, they did so with impunity. Anybody who resisted was beaten or killed or taken away to Dachau or Buchenwald or some other concentration camp. (You must understand that at that time, the concentration camps were prisons where opponents of the Nazi regime were detained . . . The inmates were made to work at hard labor and lived in dreadful conditions, but the words 'concentration camp' came to stand for monstrous cruelty and almost certain death. Nobody even imagined there would one day be a death camp like Auschwitz.)

Cheering crowds greet Hitler as he enters Vienna. Austria, March 1938.

— Wide World Photo

How can I describe to you our confusion and terror when the Nazis took over? We had lived until yesterday in a rational world. Now everyone around us -- our schoolmates, neighbours, and teachers; our tradesmen, policemen, and bureaucrats -- had all gone mad. They had been harboring a hatred for us which we had grown accustomed to calling 'prejudice'. What a gentle word that was! What a euphemism! In fact they hated us with a hatred as old as their religion; they were born hating us, raised hating us; and now with the Anschluss, the veneer of civilization which had protected us from their hatred was stripped away.

Jews in Vienna forced to scrub Schuschnigg's slogans off the sidewalk --
www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

On the pavements, protesters had written anti-Nazi slogans. The SS grabbed Jews and forced them at gunpoint to scrub off the graffiti while crowds of Austrians stood around jeering and laughing.

The Nazi radio blamed us for every filthy evil thing in this world. The Nazis called us subhuman and, in the next breath, superhuman; accused us of plotting to murder them, to rob them blind; declared that they had to conquer the world to prevent us from conquering the world. The radio said that we must be dispossessed of all we owned; that my father, who had dropped dead while working, had not really worked for our pleasant flat -- the leather chairs in the dining room, the earrings in my mother's ears -- that he had somehow stolen them from Christian Austria, which now had every right to take them back.

Members of the League of German Girls wave Nazi flags in support of the German annexation of Austria. Vienna, Austria, March 1938.   — Dokumentationsarchiv des Oesterreichischen Widerstandes

Did our friends and our neighbors really believe this? Of course they didn't believe it. They were not stupid. But they had suffered depression, inflation, and joblessness. They wanted to be well-to-do again, and the fastest way to accomplish that was to steal. Cultivating a belief in the greed of the Jews gave them an excuse to steal everything the Jews possessed.

We sat in our flats, paralyzed with fear, waiting for the madness to end. Rational, charming, witty, dancing, generous Vienna must surely rebel against such insanity We waited and we waited and it didn't end and it didn't end and still we waited and we waited.

The restrictions against Jews spread into every corner of our lives. We couldn't go to movies or concerts. We couldn't walk on certain streets. The Nazis put up signs on Jewish shop windows warning the population not to buy there. Mimi was fired from her job at the dry cleaners because it had become illegal for Christians to employ Jews. Hansi was no longer allowed to go to school.

SS men supervise the confiscation of goods belonging to Jews deported from Vienna --
www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

Uncle Richard went to the cafe where he had been going for twenty years. It now had a Jewish side and an Aryan side, and he sat on the Jewish side. Because he had fair hair and didn't look Jewish, a waiter, who did not know him, said he had to move to the Aryan side. But on the Aryan side, a waiter who did know him said that he had to go back to the Jewish side. He finally gave up and went home.

Baron Louis de Rothschild, one of the wealthiest Jewish men in Vienna, tried to leave the city. The Nazis stopped him at the airport and put him in prison, and whatever they did to him there convinced him that he ought to sign over everything to the Nazi regime. Then they let him leave. The SS took over the Rothschild Palace on Prinz Eugenstrasse and renamed it the Center for Jewish Emigration.

Right after Grandmother died, the world held a conference at Evian-les-Bains, a luxurious spa in the French Alps near Lake Geneva, at which the fate of the Austrian Jews was up for discussion. Eichmann sent representatives of our community to plead with other countries to pay the Nazi ransom and take us in. "Don't you want to save the urbane, well-educated, fun-loving, cultured Jews of Austria?" they asked. "How about paying $400 a head to the Nazi regime? Too much? How about $200?"

They couldn't get a cent.

No country wanted to pay for our rescue, including the United States. The dictator of the Dominican Republic, Trujillo, took a few Jews, thinking they might help bring some prosperity to the tiny, impoverished country. I have heard that they did.

Transport list of Viennese Jews -- www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

From the NAZI Officer's WIFE -- Edith Hahn Beer, c.1999

Criminal Entitlement and Meek Justice

"The prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment represents a fundamental value in a democratic society. This applies no matter what -- also in the treatment of terrorists and killers."
"It's a completely locked world with very little human contact even though Breivik has behaved in an exemplary manner during his time in prison". 
Justice Helen Andenaes Sekulic, Oslo District court

"I was surprised, and then angry and upset."
"To be honest, it was like being punched in the gut that the perpetrator won such a public victory." 
Eskil Pedersen, Utoya island attack survivor

"I don't think personally the prison conditions [are too strict] in relation to what he did. He killed 77 people,"
"But I am very happy that the state has won on Article 8 and that he cannot contact other far-right extremists and spread his message."
Lisbeth Kristine Roeyneland, head, victims support group 

"I think it is very probably [sic] that they [lawyers for the state] will appeal."
"I think it's unlikely that they will simply accept this."
Kjetil Larsen, professor of law, Oslo University

Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik gestures as he arrives for his terrorism and murder trial in a courtroom in Oslo, Norway, April 16, 2012.   Reuters/Fabrizio Bensch/File Photo

A mass murderer who doesn't mind stating that he would do it all over again, and second time around be determined to exact greater deaths, is still a human being deserving of all due consideration for his mental and physical health. At least in Norway. Where any measure of capital punishment that is deemed to be too exacting in consequence of a psychopath's humanity is forbidden under the law.

And so, a court has ruled that 23 hours a day of isolation represents cruel and unusual punishment for a glowering, unrepentant mass murderer.

Norwegians doubtless consider themselves morally superior to nations where less concern for the perceived 'rights' of a brutal, conscienceless mass murderer leads to less congenial surroundings in incarceration than that provided for this monster. But even they, or at least some among them, seem to be outraged at the conclusion of the court, upholding most of the man's contentions that his human rights have been violated.

That he chose to violate the lives of 77 people to the extent that he viciously deprived them entirely of their lives was simply an expression of his nationalistic pride as a fascist inclined to slaughter those whose politics he didn't agree with, mostly young people who will never have an opportunity to distinguish themselves as proud citizens of Norway. Norway instead has one single proud citizen who knows his rights and demands they be honoured.

As far as the Oslo district court finding was concerned the manner in which Breivik's punishment has been carried out is shameful, breaching the European Convention on Human Rights' specific prohibition on inhuman treatment. Norway has inhumanly built a special three-room complex for this distinguished man, with his own television and video games, exercise room and other fine conveniences.

His ability to reach out to other inmates and impress them with his brand of neo-Nazi fascism has been denied him, and this he claims to be outrageous, clamouring for his rights to be restored. Norwegian taxpayers must, according to the ruling, also see their government pay Breivik's legal costs of $50,000.

Apart from handsomely housing and entertaining the man who slaughtered young men and women at the Utoya island preserve where the Labour Party's youth wing was enjoying summer, and taking the lives through bombing others in Oslo, this monster is outraged that Norway has failed to respect his private life.

The judge's assertion that this monster has behaved in an exemplary manner while in enforced custody is a pitiful statement lacking any measure of comprehension of the magnitude of his crime.

Unintended Consequences

"If there's one simple lesson we can take away from U.S. involvement in conflicts overseas, it's this: Beware of unintended consequences."
Democratic Congressman John Conyers Jr., Washington

"The first instalment of trainees will be members of the Ukrainian Armed Forces (Land Division), which falls under the Ministry of Defence."
"We have been assured that this group will not include members of the Azov Battalion as this battalion is not integrated into the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence."
Department of National Defence spokeswoman, Ashley Lemire, Ottawa

AP Photo/Sergei Chuzavkov   Volunteers from the Azov volunteer battalion read a prayer after a training session in Kiev, Ukraine, June 13, 2015.

 

Canada's support for Ukraine in its conflict with Russia is unqualified. Moscow's annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, its incitement and arming of ethnic Russian Ukrainian rebels against the government of Ukraine in Kyiv and its blatant efforts to bring eastern Ukraine and cities like Mariupol into the greater Russian geographic orbit defies all international norms of states' sovereignty being respected by their neighbours.

Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives have expressed concern over American troops training Ukrainian military forces that have absorbed neo-Nazi members of the infamous right-wing Azov battalion. The United States aims to steer clear of any relationship with the Azov battalion members, despite their alignment with the Ukrainian military fighting on the frontline against the separatists in view of the presence of neo-Nazis among them.

Canadian military leaders have discussed how best to ensure that no Canadian trainers will be mentoring fascist extremists during the Ukraine mission set to take place in the near future. No ad hoc militias are meant to be trained by Canadian soldiers; only units of the Ukrainian National Guard and the army. The problem lies in the fact that the one-thousand member Azov Battalion has been absorbed into the Ukrainian National Guard.

A spokesman for the battalion informed USA Today that 'only' ten to twenty percent of the unit are neo-Nazis. It cannot have been helpful for their reputation that last year battalion members appeared on German television shown wearing helmets complete with Nazi insignia. For the purposes of training by American and Canadian military, Ukraine is responsible for screening the troops.


^{The Azov battalion uses the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel (Wolf''s Hook) symbol on its banner (Tom Parfitt)}

Congressman Conyers helpfully pointed out that Ukraine's Interior Minister Arsen Avakov announced recently that among the first to be trained by the United States would be Azov troops. Obviously not everyone is singing from the same hymnal. Up to 200 Canadian soldiers are slated to train Ukraine's military. The problem is overstated, as far as some Canadian Ukrainians are concerned.

Pointing out that the Azov Battalion's link to fascism has been an issue fabricated by propaganda straight out of Russia, in the hopes that support for Ukraine in the West would be undermined as a result. The battalion itself claims to be outraged by the statements of its neo-Nazi connections; stressing that the unit is patriotic in its ideology, nothing more, nothing less.

Canada has provided over $570 million in aid to Ukraine as an expression of its commitment. Portable shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles would be withheld from Ukrainian troops through the amendments put forward by U.S. Congressman Conyers and Congressman Ted Yoho, to prevent yet another instance where, as in Iraq, U.S.-supplied weapons and vehicles have fallen into the hands of Islamic State jihadis when they were abandoned by Iraqi troops.

And then there is the additional issue that some American supplies that were provided to the government of Ukraine have been seen to have ended up on the black market. Not the most auspicious instance of ensuring confidence.

Truth Does Not Require Apologies

"To those who don’t know the historical truth, I would like to say today, Poland was not an aggressor but a victim during the Second World War." 
"We would expect officials discussing these matters to know this."
Polish Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz 
 
"In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn't do something evil."
"They convinced themselves it was the right thing to do, the thing they had to do. That's what people do. And that should truly frighten us." 
James Comey, FBI director

James B. Comey, director of the F.B.I., in March. In a speech last week at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, he said,  Evan Vucci/Associated Press 

Poland would like to re-write history. They're not alone. Germany, whose Third Reich history is so indelibly etched in documents, in still-living memory, in first-hand accounts, in historical interpretation wedded to accuracy and truth, cannot re-write the barbarity it wrought when it sought to refashion the world in its Nordic Aryan conquering image, along with its dedication to a side-issue that systematically, and carefully-annotated in official accounts, destroyed the lives of six million Jews.

When Germany planned its extermination camps it had no wish to unduly soil German territory so it looked abroad for placement of these death-dealing places set to operate with maximum efficiency resulting in macro-deliveries to the Angel of Death. Where else but places where anti-Semitism was well entrenched, historically part of the culture, where regular pogroms targeting Jews were not unknown and where perpetrators were unlikely to find it repulsive that a technically-proficient extermination program would be set up to rid them of those eternal pests?

So Poland was chosen to host the greatest number of Nazi concentration camps, and it was also the country that had the greatest number of Jews living within it, so it was all very convenient. Poland was not alone, since Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany itself, Holland, Italy Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Russia and Yugoslavia were also distinguished by the presence of these death camps many of which were originally built to concentrate in one place political prisoners.

Poland protests, and always has, that the most notorious of the death camps that existed on its territory were not Polish death camps, they were German Nazi death camps designed to accomplish the Final Solution. They just happened to be on Polish soil because Poland was an occupied country under the yoke of the Third Reich; unwillingly occupied. But facts are always uncomfortable, and it is a fact that police and soldiers in Poland didn't at all mind delivering their Jews to the death camps.

On the other hand, France was a collaborationist country and there too, as in Hungary and elsewhere, the national police and armed forces became adept at rounding up Jews, placing them on transports and railcars and sending them off to the concentration camps where work made them feel as though they were free, until their souls accompanied their ashes in black detritus that emanated from those huge smokestacks to ultimately nourish the soil below.

And it was in Poland that Jews liberated from death camps returned to their former villages with a mind to resuming occupation in their homes, only to find them occupied by Poles, former neighbours who had availed themselves of whatever the Germans didn't take. And in their rage at the return of their former neighbours, mounted a pogrom to finish what the Germans clumsily left undone.

As the last German to be placed on trial, 93-year-old Oskar Gröning has stated, he was 'morally culpable', but not 'criminally responsible', for his part in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews while working as an 'accountant' in the Auschwitz death camp, counting up and accounting for the money taken from those same Jews before they were gassed to death by Zyklon B showers, or simply summarily shot, and their bodies reduced to ashes.

Justice Evaded

"He was a notorious anti-Semite, sadist, fanatic Nazi. The only known interview we have with him was to a German news magazine in 1985, in which he was asked if he had any regrets, and he said, 'My only regret is I didn't murder more Jews."
"The significance is only that one very prime target can no longer be brought to justice. And that's very sad, because it just underlines the failure of the world community to see to it that the primary movers and shakers of the Final Solution were forced to pay for their crimes."
Efraim Zuroff, director, Simon Wiesenthal Centre Israel office

• Jewish prisoners were treated like cattle; packed tightly into cattle trucks and locked inside for days as the trains travelled to camps across Europe.  © 2011 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Alois Brunner was born in Austria, just like Adolf Hitler. In 1931 he joined the Nazi party and the year before the outbreak of the Second World War he joined the SS (Schutz Staffeinel -- Nazi storm troopers). He distinguished himself by leading the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna in 1939-43, information reflected by the Holocaust museum and memorial of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

In July 1943 he assumed command of the Drancy detention camp in the northeastern suburb of Paris: "the inmates' condition deteriorated rapidly, and deportations to Auschwitz were stepped up." He saw to it personally that 47,000 Jews were deported from Austria, 44,000 from Greece, 23,500 from France, and 14,000 from Slovakia. He was a dedicated servant to the Third Reich.

When the war was over he used a fake Red Cross passport in 1954 to travel to Rome and from there across the Mediterranean to Egypt, working there as a weapons dealer. Until he crossed into Syria and became part of the government apparatus, known there as Dr. Georg Fischer. Foreigners had "spoken with him and occasionally photographed him" at his home at 7 Rue Haddad, according to A.M. Rosenthal, former executive editor of The New York Times, in 1991.

He was an adviser to Hafez al-Assad, the current president Bashar's father. With his vast experience as a tormentor and facilitator of a massive Jew-killing machine, he was in an unique position to lavish his knowledge upon the regime's fixation on torture and repression techniques. Just as the current president of Syria speaks continually of security and terrorism so too did his father, and Dr. Georg Fischer's knowledge was of immeasurable value to the Syrian Baathist regime.

The issue of security and terrorism apparently also encompassed "the mistreatment of the Syrian Jewish community", at which Alois Brunner/Georg Fischer excelled. Known as Adolf Eichmann's 'right-hand man', he had a reputation to uphold, and uphold it he did. He had been tried in absentia and sentenced to death by France in 1954, but in Syria he was perfectly safe, his expertise of immense value, according him respect and position.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre had been informed some four years ago that Alois Brunner had died of natural causes. The information provided by a reputable German intelligence official experienced in the Middle East situation. Unfortunately the 'situation' was such that because of the Syrian civil war "we were never able to confirm it forensically", explained Mr. Zuroff with regret.