Face-To-Face : Holocaust Enabler and Holocaust Survivor

Irmgard Furchner (pictured in white), a typist who has been dubbed the 'secretary of evil', heard from the first Holocaust survivor (Josef Salomonovic, shown left) to testify at the trial in Itzehoe, northern Germany

 

"Maybe she has trouble sleeping at night. I know I do."

"It is not easy to go over all this again. It's a moral duty. It's not pleasant." 

"I was classified as a parasite. Everyone who couldn't work was a parasite."

"The worst was the hunger and the cold."

Josef Salomonovic, Holocaust survivor

In this file photo taken on July 21, 2020 a woman is seen next to a gas chamber at the museum of the former Nazi Death Camp Stutthof, in Sztutowo, July 21, 2020. (Wojtek RADWANSKI / AFP)

 

The 83-year-old was given the opportunity to cast his mind back a lifetime at the trial of a 96-year-old German woman being prosecuted as guilty, however indirectly of atrocities perpetrated at a Nazi concentration camp where she was employed at age 18, as a typist. The court in Itzehoe, near Hamburg, heard the testimony of a man who at age 6, was interned in one camp after another. Too young to be of use as a slave labourer, he nonetheless managed to survive his years of death-camp deprivation.

Speaking to the court while facing Irmgard Furchner who had attempted to flee to avoid appearing at trial, Josef Salomonovic detailed his memory of his father kissing him goodbye for the final time and then he was no more, his life taken with a lethal injection to the heart in Stutthof concentration camp, Poland. The six-year-old boy within the 83-year-old man, deprived of his father, acutely recalls the event and his subsequent aching loss.

There will be others to testify at the trial. Others prepared to give their accounts, condemning the woman accused of being an accessory to the murder of 11,412 people between 1943 and 1945 at Stutthof, one of a myriad of slave labour, concentration, and death camps operated by Nazi Germany in its campaign-within-a-campaign; prosecuting a world war while tending to the business of exterminating Europe's Jewish population.

Irmgard Furchner (in 1944) was just 18

Ms.Furchner was 18 years of age when she began her work as a typist and stenographer for the camp commandant working in an office outside the main camp. Her defence is that she claims to have been completely unaware of the systematic slaughter that occurred within the camp. A claim that the testifying witness scorned dismissively. She was indirectly guilty, the defence of knowing nothing somehow not squaring with her stamping of his father's death certificate.

With him was a picture of his father which he held up to the former stenographer while testifying. As a child, he informed the court, he had witnessed his mother forced to strip off her clothing, setting aside her possessions. The Nazi attendants shaved her head, and he failed to recognize her as his mother. He had  himself been assigned to eight concentration camps, Auschwitz among them, but in his experience, Stutthof had been the direst.

It was in Stutthof that he was deprived of his father, separated from him, and sent on to Auschwitz, the death camp, in view of his youth identifying him as a body too immature to be put to hard physical labour. In the end, miraculously, through the agony and the uncertainty, pain, fear and hope, he survived. And he discovered that his mother and an older brother had also survived, after liberation. Originally from the Czech Republic, they were slated as Jews, to perish.

He described to the court how he would crouch between his mother's legs in hopes of being warmed. Toward the end of the war he was sent to work in a munitions factory in Dresden, and he thought at that time  he was about to die. "But then there was the bombing in Dresden, and that's why I'm still alive", he explained.

The 96-year-old defendant Irmgard F. sits in an ambulance chair behind a plexiglass screen in a courtroom in Itzehoe, Germany, Oct. 19, 2021 (Christian Charisius/DPA via AP, Pool)

Canadian Focus on the Arctic

"I've been asked if I'm worried about one of those Russian Arctic battalions marching in here. I am worried -- but its because if they did that we would have to launch the biggest search-and-rescue mission we've ever done."
"If that was my sovereign territory [where about 12 million Russian citizens live near or in its Arctic region] I'd do the same."
"It's not about 'fixed bayonets' in the North."
"Operation NUNALIVUT 2018 is more than winter warfare training. It is a unique opportunity for deployed members to conduct sovereignty patrols, ice diving activities and support the scientific community. Regular and Reserve members of the Canadian Armed Forces will come together with other government departments and agencies to cooperatively work on multiple objectives during the coldest period of the year in the Arctic."
Brig.-Gen. Mike Nixon, commander, Joint Task Force North, Operation Nunalivut

"We're learning a lot from the Rangers."
"It's wild here. It's a big eye-opener to see the High Arctic."
Major Jason Hudson, Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry

Canadian Forces Capt. Phillip Jones surveys the military camp established at Intrepid Bay during Operation Nunalivut. The camp was home for members of the 2nd Battalion Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, the Arctic Response Company Group from 38 Canadian Brigade Group and the 1st Canadian Ranger Patrol Group. David Pugliese/Postmedia

"The Arctic is unforgiving" says Captain Shawn Claire of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, a unit among others taking part in this year's Operation Nunalivut, a month-long annual exercise in Canada's Arctic. "She will claim lives and she will claim limbs", he stated. The Arctic Response Company Group from 38 Canadian Brigade Group and the 1st Canadian Ranger Patrol Group along with the PPCLI, some 350 members of the Canadian military in all, are at Resolute Bay conducting Arctic survival training, sovereignty patrols and scientific research.

All are also testing their ability to survive in the Arctic.

Temperatures at Resolute Bay during the months of January and February drop to around -65C to -70C at night, a temperature where it takes all of two minutes for exposed skin to succumb to frostbite. Wearing goggles and face masks the troops are equipped to withstand the extreme temperatures. At the time of their deployment from the end of February to March 22, the temperature hovered around -40C. Trucks must be kept running full time to ensure they can be operative; it is too problematic to start them in the frigid extremes.

Master Corp. Matthew Manik teaches soldiers how to build a snow wall to block the wind from their tent. David Pugliese/Postmedia

The month was spent conducting Arctic survival techniques among other concerns, and gave navy personnel the opportunity to test their ability to dive under ice. International interest in the far North has accelerated in the last few years. China released an official Arctic strategy, with plans to spend up to $1-trillion, in the development of polar regions in their eagerness to develop new trade routes as well as ports in the Arctic. It has no territorial claims, however, on the oil, gas or mineral resources known to be present in the area.

Russia does have such claims. And it is busy expanding military bases in their own northern territory to the extent of creating new battalions to operate in the Arctic. Brig.Gen. Nixon is convinced the Russian investments geared toward renewed infrastructure and bases as broad as it seems, is in reality a fraction of what it spent during the Cold War. An unsettled dispute around Russian claims to the Continental shelf just happens to coincide with Canada's claims to much of that same area.

Researchers surveyed and mapped Canada's northern continental shelf aboard CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent. (Natural Resources Canada)

Logistics represent another giant challenge to operating in the Arctic, beyond survival, but inextricably linked to survival. Giant C-17 and Boeing 737s along with C-130 Hercules aircraft are utilized in the transport of equipment and food. The Arctic Training Centre in Resolute Bay would be incapable of operating without its needs being filled where each summer ships carry in 60,000 litres of fuel to operate military snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles.

Opened in 2013, the training centre represents a major hub for northern military operations. Hugely and solely dependent on large diesel-powered generators to provide electricity needed not only for the military bases but for the 24 residential communities in Nunavut. And those generators, needless to say, require hundreds of thousands of litres of fuel. The deployment of the annual military mission takes eight months in the planning stages.

Canada's northern population is a little over 200,000, most located in a few population centres like Yellowknife and Whitehorse, the remainder in small communities. Cambridge Bay has a population base of around 1,700 while Resolute Bay's population is roughly 200 people. North of Resolute at Intrepid Bay, soldiers have established a small camp where they conduct patrols out of and test the resupply system. Patrols are carried out on snowmobiles to prevent an energetic buildup of perspiration that can result in frostbite.

Military mechanics must deal with constant mechanical breakdowns of machinery in this extreme climate. Reliance by regular troops on the Canadian Rangers cannot be overstated. The Rangers are comprised largely of Indigenous people, along with 4,000 reservists operating across the Canadian North. The Rangers teach soldiers, among other skills of northern survival techniques, how to build  wind blocks from snow, and best practices in maintaining snowmobiles running in extreme cold.

Also deployed are scientists from Defence Research and Development Canada and from Natural Resources Canada, who are examining whether batteries that can be recharged from a snowmobile could help make life less complicated for troops for the provision of light, heat and cooking. In a ten-person military tent at present, a Coleman gas stove and lantern are kept on all night so that while it is -55C outside the tent, heat from stove and lantern raise interior temperature in the tent to around freezing.

The Canadian Rangers -- like Master Corporal Matthew Manik, 36, an Inuit whose long traditions and lifestyle skills are so valuable to understanding how to survive in the North -- are regarded as the critical eyes and ears for the Canadian Forces.

Canadian troops operating in the far North rely on Canadian Rangers, such as Master Corp. Matthew Manik, who taught soldiers how to survive in the Arctic. David Pugliese/Postmedia

Concentration Camp Survivor 143450

Abraham Peck’s arm (Screengrab from YouTube)

"He saw he was in a battle with Hitler and the only way to win that battle was surviving."
"He felt if he survived, he could tell people about the horrors the Nazis perpetrated."
Jacob Peck, son of Abraham Peck, New Jersey, U.S.A.

"Living was winning."
"Abe's mission was to prevent this from ever happening again by teaching as many people as possible [about the Holocaust]."
Maya Ross, biographer

"We heard Hitler's speeches on the radio. It was a sad time. The Jewish people were depressed and worried at the time I became a bar mitzvah [13 years old/1938]."
"At first the Szadek ghetto was open, but to make sure none of the Jewish people could freely come and go, the Germans soon enclosed it with a wooden and barbed-wire fence. It was sealed in the summer of 1940. German police were ordered to shoot without warning any Jew who might approach the barbed-wire fence."
"The conditions in the working camps were terrible. Men were dying from hunger and disease. One of the men was my father."
"I settled down a lot [post-war, after liberation] when I met Helen [his future wife]. If I wanted to live, I couldn't stay the way I was. I had to go [on] with my life."
"I feel very strong[ly] that the young generation should know that there was an evil that killed six million people and that it can happen again."
Abraham Peck, deceased, age 91, kidney failure

Young Abraham Peck (Screengrab from YouTube)

Three years after Abraham Peck was bar-mitzvahed he was incarcerated within a vast European prison system that specialized in incarcerating Jews, gypsies, political dissenters, gays and other 'human and sub-human scum' that the Third Reich felt were unrepresentative of the Nazi ideal. Most would never survive the ordeal they were forced to undergo. Some were exterminated in a variety of inventive ways that sought a mass annihilation technique to rid the world of Jews. Until the advent of a deadly insecticide invented by a Jewish chemist, was utilized in gas chambers.

Zyklon B's efficiency in persuading Jewish men, women and children to surrender to death was unquestioned as the primary tool of the Final Solution. The bodies were then shunted the handy distance to the crematoria with their giant chimneys spewing the black ash of millions of human beings into the atmosphere to enrich the soil of Europe. Abraham Peck managed to survive where millions could not. His unforgettable legacy was one he was anxious to share, and this could be done only if he survived.

He lived as a child with his family in a small Polish town called Szadek with 3,500 inhabitants, of whom 500 were Jews. He recalls an idyllic childhood, his father a shop owner, and being surrounded by family and friends. His was an extended family of 90, including grandparents, parents, sister, aunts, uncles and numerous cousins. Of that total number seven of the family managed to survive the Holocaust years.

He vividly recalled the dread experienced by the Jews of Europe, as Germany's 'social democrats' became increasingly popular and their leader was voted into power. The Jews of Szadek lived for two years in a ghetto established by the Nazis in their town. In the years to follow Abraham Peck had the experience of being shunted by cattle car from Auschwitz to Jaworzno, to Blechhammer, and six other concentration camps where Jewish slave labour was seen as essential to the war effort.

Where dismal and difficult working conditions with inadequate tools kept those Jews deemed healthy enough not to slaughter immediately at work, fueled by subsistence rations, with no access to medical care, and where privation and disease and malnutrition took their inevitable toll. His father Jacob was a slave labourer at the Rawicz Working Camp, where he died in the spring of 1942 of pneumonia.

Abraham himself at age 16 contracted typhoid like so many other camp dwellers. When his father died he wanted to accompany the bodies in the camp meant to be transited to a mass grave. Every morning bodies were picked up from the camp to be buried elsewhere. The young boy asked permission to go along on the burial trip to see his father into the grave and pray over him. A guard screamed at him as he struck him with his rifle: "You goddamn dog. You go back to work!".

"But there was no work" in the conventional sense, he explained to his biographer. "We were just cleaning up the dead." Finally, after five years of concentration camp existence, he experienced liberation with other survivors at Dachau when the Americans marched in. And that is when he discovered that most of his family was gone forever. He met his future wife, another survivor of the death camps, a year after liberation, a year after the war was over.

And Abraham and his wife Helen with their baby son Jacob immigrated to the United States a few years later, where in New Jersey he was hired to work at an upholstery manufacturing company. He renamed that company Jalen Corp. when he bought it many years later, operating it for 25 years. He spoke unceasingly of the Holocaust, anxious that others should know what had happened.

"What I learned from my terrible ordeal is not ever to give up hope", he wrote to a teacher at Saddle Brook High School in New Jersey, where he would visit to speak with the students. "It is up to all of us to speak up when we encounter injustice. Do not allow yourself to become a victim or a bystander. We must love and respect our fellow human beings regardless of differences in religion, nationality or colour.

"With hope, let each of us take responsibility to build a better world. One life at a time. One day at a time." 
 

VIOREL FLORESCU/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Abraham Peck in a November 2012 photo

Surviving Auschwitz and Slave Labour

"They say that people remember where they were when Kennedy was assassinated. [In Hungary, in 1944] I went out on the street [forced to wear a yellow star]. I started to cry. So I went back and I remember, I spoke to my mother. She hugged me and looked up. She told me, 'I don't believe in God anymore'. That moment is in here [his heart]. I can never forget."
"When they marched us to the ghetto, which was about eight kilometres or so, people were applauding. That made me very, very bitter about life."
"All I remember [on arrival at Auschwitz] is I see a German officer, very well dressed, in front of me as we were lining up. He just waved with his hand, left or right. I was pushed to the right with my father and my friend."
"My duty is to maintain the memory of these people [Holocaust victims]. This is the only weapon I have against the revisionists, to be an eyewitness to the truth."
Paul Herczeg, 87, Auschwitz and Muehldorf slave labour camp survivor

Still from video; Paul Herczeg, John Kenney/Montreal Gazette

The mother who was helpless to comfort her teen-age son over his anguish at having to wear a yellow star identifying him as a Jew, perished soon after arrival when she was separated from her husband and their only child, at Auschwitz. Her faith in God was extinguished, and her obvious surrender of hope was rewarded by the inexorable machinery of genocidal intent. Her husband, assigned to a work camp constructing an underground jet factory in a forest as a slave labourer lived only weeks longer than his wife.

In memory of the 70th anniversary of the day that American troops liberated him from a satellite camp of the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, Paul Herczeg shares his thoughts on surviving the excruciating experience of being marked for death, because of his genetic heritage. A fifth-generation secular Jewish family living in a suburb of Budapest. At the age of 16, he lost his 48-year-old mother, and soon afterward, his father. The Final Solution devised by the Third Reich was implacable and it was efficient.

About 430,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz, and of that number 325,000 were gassed by Zyklon B in the death chambers, their bodies incinerated into ashes. Their journey to Auschwitz from the ghetto they were initially herded into, saw them travel in crowded cattle cars. "Everyone was in shock" on arrival at the death camp, and two lines represented either the gas chamber or a labour camp. He watched briefly as his mother helped elderly people negotiate their way trustingly to the gas chamber for "showers".

A photo of Paul Herczeg taken 3 months after he was liberated from the Muhldorf slave labour camp.   John Kenney / Montreal Gazette

And he and his father as slave labourers were given a thousand calories for daily sustenance while they laboured twelve-hour shifts, day or night hauling and mixing sacks of cement for a vast underground jet factory, where the forest canopy hid all activity from Allied bombers. When his father died within six weeks of arrival, Mr. Herczeg attempted an escape. Emerging from his hiding place, an SS officer stopped him. Then took him and brought him to the kitchen barracks.

There he joined a half-dozen other youths peeling potatoes. The SS officer informed the young Paul, that from that time forward he would be employed in the kitchen. "He saved my life", Mr. Herczeg states. As the Allies made progress, prisoners at the camp were loaded onto trains heading for the Alps where the SS planned to make their last stand. The plan went awry when American troops intercepted the train, defying the Nazi plan to kill their prisoners.

In 1947, Mr. Herczeg immigrated to Canada where he started an import-export business, after performing a variety of start-up low-wage jobs. Since then, he has spoken of the Holocaust at schools, churches and on radio, to ensure that the memory of the Holocaust through his own experiences, would be kept alive.

Speaking for the Dead

"I can speak about 300,000 dead people who are murdered, but nobody can imagine what that means -- such figures of death -- while the Holocaust, this word, it is a part of families."
"It is inside of human beings. It is something in the tears, if you wake up in the night and think about your father who was killed. That is the Holocaust. And in the second generation, in the children of survivors, those who suffer the nightmares and memories of their parents -- that is the Holocaust."
"Co-plaintiffs represent their murdered parents and siblings, and I represent the co-plaintiffs in court. And to be sure that I find the right words for them, the right feeling in a German courtroom, this is the reason I am here in Canada, interviewing them."
"My colleagues [German judges] in the past, these German prosecutors and judges, did things in the wrong way. You have to learn, and you learn it in the second term of law studies: what is aiding and abetting a crime."
Retired German judge Thomas Walther

Peter J. Thompson, National Post ... Retired German judge Thomas Walther in Toronto and Montreal interviewing Hungarian-Canadian Auschwitz survivors as co-plaintiffs in an effort to place former SS sergeant Oskar Groening behind bars.

"Guilt really has to do with actions. Because I believe that I was not an active perpetrator, I don't believe that I am guilty."
"I would describe my role as a small cog in the gears."
Oskar Groening, former SS officer, Auschwitz administrator

Hungarian Jews arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau, May 26,1944

"They asked for a translator, and because I spoke Hungarian, German and Slovak, I put my hand up And I stood beside this officer telling the people that those able and capable to walk would walk [to our barracks], and the old people and children -- he would send by truck."
"We would all be together, at the end. I translated all this to Hungarian ladies, including my aunt, with her two little children, and my Grandma. The officer told the mothers not to fuss, if they wanted to stay with their children. And he put them all together, on the side that went straight to the gas."
"We did not know where those people had gone for the first ten days. And this was my arrival to Auschwitz. Oskar Groening didn't kill with his hands. But he was part of that killing machinery."
Judy Lysy, Holocaust survivor, 86, Toronto

Famous photo of Hungarian Jews walking to the gas chamber

Oskar Groening, perhaps unsurprisingly, proffered an explanation of his enabling services to the Third Reich in its campaign to destroy the plague of Jewry in Europe, by emphasizing his minuscule role as simply someone following orders. His an unimportant job in the larger perspective of the giant machinery set in motion to eradicate the presence of a single ethnic-religious group of people from all walks of life, all ages and health conditions, rich and poor, influential and unnoticed, gifted and ordinary.

Before him, Adolf Eichmann also gave that rather unconvincing picture of himself as an obedient servant of the state, guilty of nothing more than attention to duty. In the case of Oskar Groening, the "bookkeeper" of Auschwitz, at that time an SS sergeant whose duty it was to sort and count funds taken from the murdered Jews and couriering the funds to Berlin, someone who stood guard on the train platform in Auschwitz welcoming the cattle cars delivering doomed Jews, he was merely following orders.

At the time, he informed Der Spiegel magazine in 2005, it was his understanding that destroying Jews represented a "necessary thing". Which puts him in league with the 20% of Germans invited to respond to a survey conducted in the American occupied zone of Germany following the war, who stated their agreement with Hitler's plan for the extermination of Jews.  Within a period of 57 days in 1944, 3.5 Jews per minute, 24 hours a day, seven days a week were murdered, in total 300,000 of the 437,000 Hungarian Jews who were deported to Auschwitz.

Retired German judge Thomas Walther pledged himself to hunting down as many of those involved in enabling these atrocities as he could, and to bring them to the attention of the world, and to see justice done on behalf of the dead. At age 63 in 2006 he began his long journey to achieving justice for the dead, and to see that history recorded the truth as it happened. During the Kristallnacht riots of 1938 his father sheltered two Jewish families, teaching his son by example to do the right thing.

Mr. Groening, the former SS sergeant who acted as the point man for record-keeping and money-collection, has made his own amends with his conscience. Now a widower of 93 enjoying a comfortable well-earned pension, he managed a German glass factory after the war. He admits to having been at Auschwitz, speaking openly of his experiences. He did so to counter the denials, he claims, of Holocaust disbelievers, with the truthful memories of one who witnessed it.

He was, he now claims, a brainwashed zealot who believed the Nazi propaganda. And while he was involved in expediting the master plan of the Final Solution, he did not in fact, physically murder anyone. Such being the case he is innocent of any crime. "Groening will not deny anything" explained Mr. Walther. "He will only seek to diminish." But Judy Lysy is one of the Hungarian Jews living in Canada whom Mr. Walther sought out to interview, to gather evidence by which Mr. Groening will face justice.

It rankles retired justice Thomas Walther that of the 6,500 SS members who worked in Auschwitz, 49 of their number only were convicted of a crime. Many of the judges who did sit in judgment and the lawyers who defended those accused of war crimes themselves had Nazi pasts. Most Germans were unwilling and disinterested in revealing complicity in the Holocaust. It would do to sacrifice a few high-ranking officers to face the judgement of their crimes. That's what Nuremberg was for, after all.

Aboriginal Tragedy

"The number of [aboriginal] women in the Ottawa area is the same number of native women in Canada [missing]. If you heard that 600 women were murdered or missing in Ottawa do you think we'd have to have demonstrations to get an inquiry?"
NDP Leader Tom Mulcair

Well, it depends. If they represented women who are not considered to be a blessing to society because they are street workers, society seems not to care an awful lot. And if they were both aboriginal in origin and street workers, well then, the level of interest in their well-being would be abysmally low. On the other hand, women themselves would likely become involved and howl their outrage, sex-trade workers or not. With those numbers.

The Canadian Press / Fred Chartrand

But that was a rhetorical question and no response was really expected; the question speaks for itself. And there may be another angle to this sordid, horribly sad, dreadful story of the place of women in society, even a society as socially advanced as Canada's. Violence against women is endemic. In any population, anywhere in the world  women suffer disproportionately to men. Women can behave fairly odiously but those numbers are fairly small in comparison to men who resort to violence.

And wait, there's another angle worth looking at too. Only that one is extremely sensitive; get too close and you can be burnt, badly. Because that other angle is that women in aboriginal societies are even more vulnerable and oppressed than elsewhere within the country. Simply because violence and poverty and societal backwardness prevail there more commonly in a culture of deprivation and cultural alienation.

The estimated 600 cases of missing and presumably murdered aboriginal women in the country dates back to the 1960s. It is known that young girls and women often turn to a degraded lifestyle to survive, to be able to care for themselves, or because they are drug- or alcohol-addicted, homeless and drifting in a society too busy to notice or even care. Because no other avenues seem open to them; human detritus in a horribly wanting system.

 Carol-Ann Moses was one of the hundreds taking part in a rally on Parliament Hill by the Native Women's Association of Canada on Friday honouring the lives of missing and murdered aboriginal women and girls -- Fred Chartrand/The Canadian Press

If an inquiry were to be held, it would find the entire system of balancing the needs of First Nations communities with those of the rest of Canada prepared to pay handsomely enough to alleviate the strains that First Nations tribes all too often live under on reserves with high unemployment, impaired lifestyles impacting on physical and mental health, inadequate educational opportunities and high suicide levels. Funding is high but claimed, by the recipients, to be inadequate.

Partially so because of the manner in which it is allocated and the manner in which tribal societies insist on living with the memory of their heritage which seems to restrain many from entering the current era, and wresting themselves out of the dependence syndrome of welfare entitlements. No one is happy. And women and children all too often end up being the unhappiest of all, the most vulnerable, the most stricken by ill fate.

So, have an enquiry. Yet another close peer, a diligent scrutiny into the inadequacies of attempting to cope with an intolerable situation where two 'sides' appear in constant conflict with each other, achieving in the end nothing of value, but burnishing the grievance of being hard done by. On Parliament Hill this week First Nations people came out to rally on behalf of the missing. It was the eighth such gathering.

Named the Sisters in Spirit vigil, it was one of 216 such gatherings held across the country and abroad. Similar events took place in Australia, Malaysia and Peru. For what has occurred to Canada's First Nations occurs elsewhere as well.

"Israel needs to realize that Iran and Syria may be the dogs that bark, but it is Saudi Arabia and Pakistan who are the ones most likely to bite."

June 28, 2013

Why Pakistan Is a Bigger Threat to Israel than Iran

Tarek Fatah

The Huffington Post

While the United States and Israel incessantly obsess with the possibility of a future nuclear Iran, they barely ever raise such concerns about Iran's next door Islamic neighbour Pakistan that brandishes its nuclear weapons with Islamic zeal and barely concealed contempt for the "kufaar" -- Jews, Christians, Hindus, atheists and other non-Muslims.

But there are others inside Pakistan who do not share America and Israel's myopia. The country's leading anti-nuclear activist, physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy in his book Confronting the Bomb, has this to say about Pakistan's nukes:

"The fear of loose [nuclear] weapons comes from the fact that Pakistan's armed forces harbour a hidden enemy within their ranks. Those wearing the cloak of religion freely walk in and out of top security nuclear installations every day ... The fear of the insider is ubiquitous and well-founded."

Prof. Hoodbhoy is able to see through the complexity of his country's nuclear arsenal that both the White House and Jerusalem either choose to overlook or are grossly ignorant about. Hoodbhoy maintains that there are two Pakistani armies. One led by General Pervez Ashraf Kayani and the other by Allah. "It is difficult to find another example where the defence apparatus of a modern state has been rendered so vulnerable by the threat posed by military insiders." Even non-fundamentalist elements are "soft Islamists," he says. Hoodbhoy describes the Pakistani army as "a heavily Islamicised rank-and-file brimming with seditious thoughts."

As a friend of the Jewish people as well as the Arabs, the thought of a nuclear devise exploding over Israel gives me the jitters. The fact is, millions of Arabs too will be eviscerated in a nuclear attack on the Jewish State.

In meeting with leading Jewish intellectuals and academia in North America and some in Israel itself, I am struck by the lack of knowledge they have about Pakistan, let alone its nuclear program. Few write about the internal dynamics of Pakistan that has emerged as the world's number one source of jihadi suicide bombers and ground zero for the training of Islamic terrorists.

Pakistan is not an easy subject. It is a multi-ethnic country with a multi-lingual population dominated by Punjab; a civil war in Balochistan; a disputed border with Afghanistan; hundreds of thousands of troops on war footing at the Kashmir Line of Control against India; a slow slaughter of the country's Shia population and China's strategic interests at the mouth of the Straits of Hormuz.

All of this makes the study of Pakistan a daunting task for any outsider. Even Britain and the USA who helped create the country to install a buffer state between the advancing USSR and India after the Second World War, have not been able to read the tea leaves with any degree of accuracy.

As I write this essay, Pakistan produces more nuclear bombs than any other nuclear power while developing longer-range missiles. On paper, these nuclear warheads and missiles are India-centric and pointed towards the east. However, Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is not at a static location and the warheads as well as missiles are constantly on the move, and if there is one country that the Pakistan's politicians, both on the right as well as the left, hate more than India, it is Israel.

Are Israelis aware of the vulnerabilities in Pakistan's nuclear program that make it possible for non-state jihadi actors to strike at the Jewish State? I doubt it.

Pakistan is a society based on the hatred of the "other." Since its creation, the Hindu and the Jew, ("Hanood wa Yahood" in the popular street lexicon of the Urdu language) has been cultivated as the enemy of the country and Islam.

In a culture of violence, three million fellow Muslims were killed in genocide in 1971 in Bangladesh. With the liquidation of the Hindu population and the total absence of Jews, the addiction to killing the "other" is now consuming the Pakistanis from within.

Just in the three years leading up to the 2011 capture and death of Osama Bin Laden in Abbotabad, Pakistan, there were 225 suicide bombings in the country killing over 3,900 people, and all of them in politically motivated attacks by Sunni Muslim jihadis. All the victims -- from Ahmadi Muslims to Shia Muslims -- are accused of serving the Zionist cause and thus eliminated.

Shia vs. Sunni

The irony is that while Israel considers Shia Iran as its primary enemy and nurtures a cold peace with Jordan and Egypt, the Shias of Iran are often branded as a secret Jewish sect by Sunni Muslim clerics in both Egypt and Jordan. Jews around the world seem to oblivious to this fact as they read about the slaughter of Shias in Pakistan and the open hostility towards them from places as far apart as Indonesia to Indiana (home to America's Islamist organisation ISNA ).

If one were to study the sources of Jew-hatred, they are invariably rooted in Pakistan and the Arab World. If it comes to terrorist attacks carried out around the globe, almost all of them have either originated in Pakistan, were carried out by young men of Pakistani ancestry or by jihadi terrorists who were trained on Pakistani soil. Else, they were planned and executed by Islamabad's intelligence agency, the ISI and its sponsored terrorist organizations. Yet, in the eyes of Israel and the Jewish Diaspora, it is Iran that is the anti-Semitic capital of the world, hell-bent on destroying the Jewish State.

Let me catalogue the role Pakistan has played in international terrorism, long before its territory was used by Osama Bin Laden and Khaled Sheikh Mohammed to plan and execute the 9/11 attack on the United States.

International Terrorism linked to Pakistan

1. September 1986: Armed men attempt to hijack a Pan Am jet on the tarmac of Karachi airport in which 20 people died. Among the arrested were five Palestinians belonging to the Abu Nidal group and seven Pakistanis.
2. January 1993: The CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia is attacked, killing two CIA employees and wounding three others. The perpetrator is a Pakistani, Ajmal Kansi. Four years later in 1997 he is captured by FBI agents in rendered back to the United States to stand trial and was executed by lethal injection in 2002.
3. February 1993: The World Trade Centre is attacked using a truck bomb. The mastermind of the attack, Ramzi Yousef is later arrested in 1995 in Islamabad, Pakistan.
4. August 1998: American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania are bombed, killing 223 people and wounding over 4,000 others. One of the planners of this terror attack,Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani is arrested in 2004 in Gujrat, Pakistan.
5. October 2000: Jihadi terrorists carry out a suicide attack on the United States Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Cole while it is harboured and being refuelled in the Yemen port of Aden. Seventeen American sailors are killed, and 39 injured. The Saudi mastermind behind this attack, Walid Bin Attash is later captured on April 29, 2003 in Karachi, Pakistan.
6. May 2002: A suicide bomber kills 11 French naval engineers outside The Sheraton Hotel in Karachi, Pakistan. Three years later the bomb maker, Mufti Muhammad Sabir is arrested 2005 in Karachi, Pakistan.
7. October 2002: Jihadi terrorists attack the Indonesian tourist resort of Bali killing 202 people and injuring another 240. Nine years later, the chief suspect in the bombing, Umar Patek of the militant group Jemaah Islamiah is arrested in 2011 in Abbotabad, Pakistan.
8. July 2005: Jihadi terrorists carry out the now infamous 7/7 suicide bombings in London, UK, killing 52 people and injuring 700 others. Three of the four suicide bombers are of Pakistani ancestry. In January 2009, one of the planners of the London 7/7 bombings, Saudi national Zabi uk-Taifi is arrested in a village just outside Peshawar, Pakistan.
9. December 2008: Pakistani jihadi terrorists carry out a sea-borne suicide attack on Mumbai, India, killing 166 people including a rabbi and his pregnant wife at a Jewish Centre, and injuring 308 others. The mastermind of the Mumbai attack was the Pakistani-American David Coleman Headley (born Daud Sayed Gilani). His alleged Pakistani-Canadian accomplice, Muhammad Tahwwar Rana, was acquitted in the Mumbai attacks but convicted of working for the terror group, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), long suspected of being supported by Pakistan's ISI.
10. May 2010: A bombing at New York Times Square is foiled when street vendors discover smoke coming from a vehicle and alert an NYPD patrolman. The bomb had ignited, but failed to explode, and was disarmed before it caused any casualties. Two days later federal agents arrest a man at John F. Kennedy International Airport after he tries to board an Emirate Airlines flight to Dubai. He is Faisal Shahzad, a 30-year-old Pakistani-American.

In addition to the above list of international jihadi terror attacks associated with Pakistan, the country has been home to most of the Al-Qaeda leadership, including Osama Bin Laden. They include the following five:

• Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi citizen currently held in U.S. custody, was arrested in March 2002 in Faisalabad, Pakistan.
• Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a Yemeni citizen being held by the United States as an enemy combatant detainee at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. He was captured in September 2002, in Karachi, Pakistan.
• Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is currently in U.S. military custody in Guantánamo Bay for acts of terrorism, including mass murder of civilians, as he has been identified as "the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks". He was captured in March 2003 in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
• Abu Faraj al-Libbi is the nom de guerre of a Libyan who is a senior member of al-Qaeda. [His real name is thought to be Mustafa al-'Uzayti.] Al-Labibi was arrested in May 2005 in Mardan, Pakistan.
• Mustafa Nasar, also known as Abu Musab al-Suri is a Syrian-born leader of al-Qaeda who holds Spanish citizenship. He is wanted in Spain for the 1985 El Descanso bombing that killed 18 people, and in connection with the 2004 Madrid train bombings. Nasar too ended up in Pakistan where he was captured in October 2005 in the Pakistani city of Quetta.

Not to mention the fact that the only time Britons have been involved in a suicide bombing attack inside Israel, it has involved men of Pakistan ancestry. In May 2003 a suicide bomber and his accomplice murdered three people and wounded scores at a Tel Aviv bar. The 21-year-old bomber, Asif Mohammed Hanif died in the attack while his accomplice as Omar Khan Sharif failed to detonate his bomb. Both were born to Pakistani parents in the U.K.

Hanif was not the first Pakistani-Briton to commit terror against Jews. In 2002, Omar Saeed Sheikh of London masterminded the kidnap and murder of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan.

Compared to the acts of international terror that have a Pakistani link, terrorism that originates in Iran is few and far between.

The first international atrocity that can be traced back to Iran was committed in 1994 when the Asociacion Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) Jewish Centre in Buenos Aires, Argentine was bombed, killing 85 people and wounding 300 more. There is little doubt that senior Iranian officials were behind the attack and that their Lebanese-based Hezbollah allies carried out the attack.

The only other major act of Iranian international terror was in February 2012 when a bomb explosion targeted an Israeli diplomat in New Delhi, India.

Why Iran? Why not Pakistan?

Why then is Israel so obsessed with Iran, but not Pakistan? One of the reasons may be the presence in Israel of an influential Persian Jewish community with roots in Iran, and who have a particularly nasty experience with the regime of the Ayatollahs compared to the era when a close relationship between Israel and Iran existed during the reign of The Shah until 1979.

Iranian Jews in Israel are estimated to be 200,000 to 250,000 strong and have a far greater role in the country's public policy making then their numbers suggest. From Dan Halutz , the former chief of Staff of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) to the now disgraced former president of the country Moshe Katsav, Iranian Jews in Israel pull more than their weight in the affairs of the country.

Today the former Israeli Minister of Transport Shaul Mofaz, leads the Kadima Party while Michael Ben-Ari and Mordechai Zar are members of the Knesset.

Compared to Iranian Jews in Israel, Pakistani Jews do not exceed 2,000 in number, and their claim to fame is restricted to the introduction of cricket inside Israel. They mostly live in the city of Ramla and do not have any prominent figure in the Israeli political discourse. Few of these Pakistanis have any links or even memories of Pakistan and unlike their Iranian counterparts, lack any insight into the current political nature of their former homeland.

While Israel Radio runs a daily Farsi language service since the 1950s, it has no such broadcast in Punjabi, Urdu, Balochi, Puhstu, or Sindhi, the languages of Pakistan. It is no wonder that in Israel there is such a dearth of scholarship on Pakistan and that country's involvement in international jihadi terrorism.

While the 180-million population of Pakistan and its diaspora is almost universally anti-Semitic and hostile to Israel, the ordinary Iranian is neither obsessed with Jew hatred nor seeped in convoluted theories of Jewish conspiracies that are ubiquitous among its next door Pakistani neighbours.

Israelis are justifiably worried with the rabid rhetoric that emanates from the Iranian ayatollahs. However, they need to recognise that it is Pakistan that has 100 nuclear warheads and missiles that can reach Israel, not Iran.

Obsessing with Iran while shrugging off the threats posed by Pakistan and its jihadi sponsor Saudi Arabia, may be a mistake that Jerusalem can still correct while it has a chance.

Already there are reports that Saudi Arabia's former intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal is in support of cooperating secretly with Pakistan in developing a Saudi-based nuclear program. This initiative has the backing of the current director of Saudi intelligence agency, Prince Bandar Bin Sultan.

Israel needs to realize that Iran and Syria may be the dogs that bark, but it is Saudi Arabia and Pakistan who are the ones most likely to bite.