Levitt Letter Extra News

By Daniel Pipes

www.JewishWorldReview.com

Startling developments in Gaza highlight the need for a change in Western policy toward this troubled territory of 1.3 million persons.

Gaza’s contemporary history began in 1948, when Egyptian forces overran the British-controlled area and Cairo sponsored the nominal “All-Palestine Government” while de facto ruling the territory as a protectorate. That arrangement ended in 1967, when the Israeli leadership defensively took control of Gaza, reluctantly inheriting a densely populated, poor, and hostile territory.

Nonetheless, for twenty years Gazans largely acquiesced to Israeli rule. Only with the intifada beginning in 1987 did Gazans assert themselves; its violence and political costs convinced Israelis to open a diplomatic process that culminated with the Oslo accords of 1993. The Gaza-Jericho Agreement of 1994 then off-loaded the territory to Yasir Arafat’s Fatah.

Those agreements were supposed to bring stability and prosperity to Gaza. Returning businessmen would jump-start the economy. The Palestinian Authority would repress Islamists and suppress terrorists. Yasir Arafat proclaimed he would “build a Singapore” there, actually an apt comparison, for independent Singapore began inauspiciously in 1965, poor and ethnically conflict-ridden.

Of course, Arafat was no Lee Kuan Yew. Gazan conditions deteriorated and Islamists, far from being shut out, rose to power: Hamas won the 2006 elections and in 2007 seized full control of Gaza. The economy shrunk. Rather than stop terrorism, Fatah joined in. Gazans began launching rockets over the border in 2002, increasing their frequency, range, and deadliness with time, eventually rendering the Israeli town of Sderot nearly uninhabitable.

Faced with a lethal Gaza, the Israeli government of Ehud Olmert decided to isolate it, hoping that economic hardship would cause Gazans to blame Hamas and turn against it. To an extent, the squeeze worked, for Hamas’ popularity did fall. The Israelis also conducted raids against terrorists to stop the rocket attacks. Still, the assaults continued; so, on January 17, the Israelis escalated by cutting fuel deliveries and closing the borders. “As far as I’m concerned,” Olmert announced, “Gaza residents will walk, without gas for their cars, because they have a murderous, terrorist regime that doesn’t let people in southern Israel live in peace.”

That sounded reasonable but the press reported heart-rending stories about Gazans suffering and dying due to the cutoffs that immediately swamped the Israeli position. Appeals and denunciations from around the world demanded that Israelis ease up.

Then, on January 23, Hamas took matters into its own hands with a clever surprise tactic: after months of preparation, it pulled down large segments of the 12-km long, 13-meter high border wall separating Gaza from Egypt, simultaneously winning goodwill from Gazans and dragging Cairo into the picture. Politically, Egyptian authorities had no choice but uneasily to absorb 38 wounded border guards and permit hundreds of thousands of persons temporarily to enter the far northeast of their country.

Israelis had brought themselves to this completely avoidable predicament through incompetence - signing bad agreements, turning Gaza over to the thug Arafat, expelling their own citizens, permitting premature elections, acquiescing to the Hamas conquest, and abandoning control of Gaza’s western border.

What might Western states now do? The border breaching, ironically, offers an opportunity to clean up a mess.

Washington and other capitals should declare the experiment in Gazan self-rule a failure and press President Husni Mubarak of Egypt to help, perhaps providing Gaza with additional land or even annexing it as a province. This would revert to the situation of 1948-67, except this time Cairo would not keep Gaza at arm’s length but take responsibility for it.

Culturally, this connection is a natural: Gazans speak a colloquial Arabic identical to the Egyptians of Sinai, have more family ties to Egypt than to the West Bank, and are economically more tied to Egypt (recall the many smugglers’ tunnels). Further, Hamas derives from an Egyptian organization, the Muslim Brethren. As David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen notes, calling Gazans “Palestinians” is less accurate than politically correct.

Why not formalize the Egyptian connection? Among other benefits, this would (1) end the rocket fire against Israel, (2) expose the superficiality of Palestinian nationalism, an ideology under a century old, and perhaps (3) break the Arab-Israeli logjam.

It’s hard to divine what benefit American taxpayers have received for the US$65 billion they have lavished on Egypt since 1948; but Egypt’s absorbing Gaza might justify their continuing to shell out $1.8 billion a year.

Associated Press

Iran’s nuclear project has developed its own version of an advanced centrifuge to churn out enriched uranium much faster than its previous machines, diplomats and experts recently claimed.

They said that few of the IR-2 centrifuges were operating and that testing appeared to be in an early phase, with the new machines rotating without processing any uranium gas.

More significant, the officials said, is the fact that Iran appears to have used know-how and equipment bought on the nuclear black market in combination with domestic ingenuity to overcome daunting technical difficulties and create highly advanced centrifuges.

Iran’s uranium enrichment work has raised concerns in Washington and other Western capitals because it can produce the radioactive material needed for nuclear bombs. Tehran says it is only pursuing lower-level enrichment to make fuel for atomic reactors that will generate electricity.

Iran is under two sets of U.N. Security Council sanctions for refusing to suspend uranium enrichment, which it started developing during nearly two decades of covert nuclear activity built on illicit purchases and revealed only five years ago.

That secrecy heightened suspicions about Iran’s intent, but Iranian leaders argued the country has a right to run a peaceful enrichment program and dismissed the U.N. demands, saying they planned to expand the project rather than freeze it.

Up until recent weeks, Iran had publicly focused on working with P1 centrifuges — outmoded machines that it acquired on the black market in the 1980s. Workers set up more than 3,000 of the machines in the large underground hall near Natanz, a city about 300 miles south of Tehran.

But diplomats told The Associated Press that Iranian experts now are testing a small number of more advanced IR-2 machines. They described it as a hybrid of the P-2 centrifuge once peddled on the black market by A.Q. Khan, the scientist who oversaw Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons.

The diplomats, who agreed to discuss the development only if granted anonymity because they weren’t authorized to divulge the confidential information, said it was unclear whether the new generation centrifuges were in the underground facility or an aboveground pilot site at Natanz.

The P-2 centrifuge sold by Khan can enrich uranium gas up to three times faster than a P-1, but it is made from maraged steel — a high-nickel, low-carbon steel that is difficult to manufacture and hard to smuggle through international controls.

One of the diplomats said the Iranians had circumvented that problem by making the centrifuge’s rotor tubes out of carbon fiber, presumably using machines and technology developed for Tehran’s missile sector and using a German version as a model.

A former U.N. nuclear inspector, David Albright, said the ingenuity demonstrated by such a development was impressive.

“If you learn how to make carbon fiber rotors, you are very far ahead,” said Albright, whose Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security tracks countries under nuclear suspicion. “They are much cheaper and easier to make, and you can learn to spin them very fast.”

Using a hypothetical example of the efficiency of a P-2-based centrifuge compared with the P-1, Albright said 1,200 of the more advanced machines could produce enough material for a single nuclear warhead in a year, compared to 3,000 of the older model.

Iran has stonewalled the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency for years on details of its centrifuge development program, but in recent months has shown more cooperation under a plan agreed to last year that commits Tehran to lifting the veil of secrecy on all past nuclear activities.

Last month, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, was given new information on Iran’s “new generation of centrifuges” during talks in Tehran — a priority as the agency tries to establish how far along Iran is in developing the technology.

www.washingtontimes.com

Senior al Qaeda leaders have diverted operatives from Iraq across the globe and are increasing preparations to strike the United States, senior intelligence officials told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence yesterday. They said the terrorists had plans to attack the White House as recently as 2006.

“Al Qaeda is improving the last key aspect of its ability to attack the U.S. — the identification, training and positioning of operatives for an attack in the homeland,” said Michael McConnell, director of national intelligence, which oversees all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies.

Intelligence officials also said they used a controversial interrogation tactic known as “waterboarding,” which some people regard as torture, only on three senior al Qaeda members early in the war on terror and that it has not been used in five years.

The officials added that al Qaeda is recruiting Westerners to terror camps in Pakistan.

“While increased security measures at home and abroad have caused al Qaeda to view the West, especially the U.S., as a harder target, we have seen an influx of new Western recruits into the tribal areas since mid-2006, “ Mr. McConnell said.

Mr. McConnell revealed that al Qaeda had plans to specifically target the White House.

“It [al Qaeda] probably will continue to devote some effort towards honoring bin Laden’s request in 2005 that al Qaeda attempt to strike the United States, affirmed publicly by current al Qaeda leader Abu Ayyub al-Masri in a November 2006 threat against the White House,” he said.

White House officials would not comment on specific security threats to the president or the White House.

DNI officials would not elaborate or offer details of specifics to the threat.

“The statement speaks for itself,” said Vanee Vines spokeswoman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Mr. McConnell was seated alongside CIA Director Michael V. Hayden; FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III; Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and Randall Fort, assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research.

Later in the hearing, Mr. Hayden said his agency’s use of “lawful interrogation” methods, including waterboarding, on three high-level al Qaeda members was necessary to gain critical information on the organization after the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Mr. Hayden added that waterboarding was only used those three times as a necessary measure to handle the imminent threat posed by the terrorist organization.

“We used it against these three detainees because of the circumstances at the time,” Mr. Hayden said. “There was the belief that additional catastrophic attacks against the homeland were inevitable. And we had limited knowledge about al Qaeda and its workings. Those two realities have changed.”

The three al Qaeda detainees were Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11 terrorist attacks; Abu Zubaydah, an early member of al Qaeda and close associate of bin Laden and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, behind the USS Cole bombing and who headed al Qaeda operations in the Persian Gulf before he was captured in November 2002.

The three captives were interrogated in 2002 and 2003 and waterboarding has not been used since, Mr. Hayden said.

Mr. McConnell added that although al Qaeda absorbed vast resources in “the ongoing conflict in Iraq,” the terrorist organization has leveraged broad “external networks” as far as Europe to support their goals.

Internal al Qaeda documents obtained in Iraq by U.S. intelligence suggest that “fewer than 100 [al Qaeda] terrorists have moved from Iraq to establish cells in other countries,” he said.

The most active al Qaeda affiliate in northwestern Africa is the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb, which intelligence officials said poses a “significant threat to U.S. and European interests in the region.”

Further, al Qaeda “has been able to retain a safe haven in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) that provides the organization many of the advantages it once derived from its base across the border in Afghanistan” making it a training hub for terrorists seeking to attack the United States and its allies, Mr. McConnell said.

Despite cooperation from Pakistan, Gen. Maples said the Pakistani military has not been able to disrupt al Qaeda operations in the tribal border region. He added that the U.S. military is prohibited by Pakistan from pursuing al Qaeda fighters or Taliban that flee Afghanistan across the border after conducting attacks.

Michael Craven
Author, Speaker, Founding Director of the Center for Christ & Culture
www.crosswalk.com

Recently, the Arab League reported that “nearly one-third of Arabs are illiterate, including half of Arab women.” The report also points out that “it’s not just the older generation: Three quarters of the 100 million illiterate people in 21 Arab countries are between the ages of 15 and 45.”

By contrast, 99 percent of Americans 15 years and older are literate, according to the latest government figures. Western nations have for centuries had the most literate populations and literacy rates in the US have been among the highest in the world going back as far as the 1600s when it was estimated that “the literacy rate for men in Massachusetts and Connecticut was somewhere between 89 and 95 percent…” And for “women in those colonies it is estimated to have run as high as 62 percent in the years 1681 - 1697.” (Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985) Where Christianity spreads, literacy inevitably follows. A Ugandan university study published in 2007 reveals that while “Arab Muslims were the first to introduce written information (texts) in Uganda, they did not make any effort to teach reading and writing… Literacy in the Roman alphabet was introduced into Uganda by Christian missionaries in the late 19th century.” The report goes on to add that within contemporary Ugandan culture, “Christianity provides the impetus for local literacy practices…”

Another study by the Organization of the Islamic Conference on the status of scientific research in its 57 member states reveals a similar shortcoming in the area of scientific accomplishment.

Of the more than 11.5 million scientific papers published worldwide each year, Muslim countries contribute just 2.5 percent. There are more than 1.5 billion Muslims living across the Islamic world - about a quarter of the world’s population - and yet they have generated barely more than one percent of the world’s scientific literature and produced only two scientific Nobel Prize winners.

The Islamic approach to healthcare is still largely based on the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. These sayings, in which Muhammad gave his opinions on medical practices, formed the basis for a distinctive and inadequate medical system from the ninth century onward.

There are simply no scientific innovations emerging out of the Islamic

world: no space program, no hi-tech developments, no medical breakthroughs-nothing! Islam cannot provide an adequate basis for science because Islam does not embrace the notion that the universe runs along fundamental principles or laws laid down at creation. Allah-unlike the God of Scripture who is both personal and rational-is impersonal and his intrusion upon the world is arbitrary.

In Christianity, God acts upon nature and the world in ways consistent with His special (Scripture) and natural (creation) revelation. In other words, the God of Scripture is a God of order who created according to laws that are universal and thus men could discern these laws and by theorizing based on these fixed laws, gain a greater understanding of creation. This served as the basis of Western science and its preeminence.

Economically, the Islamic world fares no better. In fact, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of all Arab countries combined stood at just $1.2 trillion in 2005-less than that of Spain. This pales in comparison to the U.S. GDP of more than $13 trillion! Unemployment among Arab nations, which hovers around 15 percent, is the highest in the world. The source of what little wealth the Arab world does generate is primarily due to oil, which without Western intervention would have remained an unrealized natural resource In the Christian West, it was the biblical principles of personal responsibility, thrift and reinvestment of profits that gave rise to free-market capitalism. This coupled with a moral vision that led people to restrain their material consumption while vigorously seeking wealth, produced the most productive economies in all of human history.

On the matter of justice, this hardly bears examination as Islamic justice is nearly an oxymoron. There is no presumption of innocence and the burden of proof does not rest with the state. This is a culture in which a woman who is the victim of rape will likely find herself executed or whipped and fathers can murder their children for associating with infidels-so called “honor killings.” Of the 48 countries with a full or near Muslim majority, none has yet evolved a stable, democratic political system.

Hisham Sharabi, the noted Palestinian-born scholar of Georgetown University wrote that the Arab world is for the most part “a culturally and politically desolate and oppressive place in which to live and to work . . . a difficult place in which to struggle to build a decent and humane society.” Clearly the Islamic worldview fails to correspond with reality at every point, producing less than adequate results in every standard by which we measure personal, social, and economic well-being.

Conversely, Christianity is more than mere religion; it is the true interpretation of reality in which individuals and societies alike fare better in every category when they live consistent with biblical truth.

Rodney Stark points out in his insightful book, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, “While other religions emphasized mystery and intuition, Christianity alone embraced reason and logic as the primary guide to religious truth.” This emphasis on “reason and logic” naturally flows from a rational God who has revealed Himself through both the written word and an orderly creation. These combine to provide a rational theology that through reason men are able to apprehend and apply to every aspect of life and culture producing humane and successful societies.

So, why does this matter? Because for one, roughly one-fifth of the world’s population suffers under the oppressive yoke of Islam and two, there are many who are determined to spread Islam at any cost until the entire world comes under its destructive control.

For American Christians, the response is simple. The Lord in His providence has brought somewhere between 6 and 10 million (exact numbers are unavailable) Muslims to our shores. Thus the Muslim is now our neighbor and we are to love our neighbors. This means we endeavor to create real and meaningful relationships with those Muslims the Lord has very intentionally brought into our lives for it is ultimately the love of Christ that will overcome the tyranny of Islam.

By Dinah Spritzer, www.jta.org

PRAGUE (JTA) — He is the only Auschwitz inmate turned counterfeiter ever to win an Academy Award.

Well, he didn’t exactly win, but Adolf Burger sure felt like he took home an Oscar on Sunday night when, as an honored guest at Hollywood’s most schmaltzy film ceremony, he heard “The Counterfeiters” announced as the winner in the Best Foreign Language Film category.

“The Counterfeiters” is based on Burger’s memoir, “The Devil’s Workshop,” published in the 1950s and again in the 1970s in Germany.

His book chronicles a little-known Nazi operation that forced 143 concentration camp prisoners in Sachsenhausen, Germany, to make vast sums of English pounds and U.S. dollars in an attempt to destabilize the Allied economies.

Photo: Thierry Caro/ Creative Commons
A memoir by Adolf Burger provided the basis for the Oscar-winning film “The Counterfeiters.”

“This is the high point of my life, the pinnacle, ” Burger told JTA by phone Monday from his room at the Le Parc Suite Hotel in West Hollywood a day after the Oscar triumph.

The 90-year-old native of Slovakia, now a resident of Prague, may not have understood all of host Jon Stewart’s goofy Oscar jokes — Burger does not speak English — but he is very clear on what the award means.

“Now more people will see this film and know that the Nazis were not just murderers, they were common criminals,” he said.

As was the case with other Holocaust survivors whose skills saved them from death in the camps, Burger, a typographer, was plucked out of Auschwitz to serve the Nazi criminal scheme.

In fact he had used his skills in Slovakia to save thousands of his fellow Jews during World War II.

Burger falsified documents that enabled Jews living in the Nazi puppet state to say they had converted to Catholicism before 1939. This proof of being “Aryan” allowed them to avoid deportation to Nazi concentration camps as part of an agreement made between Hitler and Slovakia’s wartime president, the fascist Roman Catholic priest Jozef Tiso.

Burger, caught by the Nazis in the act of falsifying papers, was shipped with his wife to Auschwitz a day before his 25th birthday on Aug. 11, 1942.

His wife was murdered at the camp and Burger was purposefully infected with typhus as part of the demonic Auschwitz medical experiments. He weighed less than 80 pounds when the Nazis sent him to Sachsenhausen.

“I thought somehow I would survive Auschwitz, but was sure I was a dead man in Sachsenhausen,” Burger said. “The Nazis planned to kill us so we would never tell anyone what they were doing.”

What they were doing was minting 134 million British pounds as part of Operation Bernhard, named after Bernhard Kruger, the Nazi major who led the counterfeiting effort.

However, the counterfeiting plan to undermine the British economy failed just like Hitler’s dream of a Teutonic Europe. Most of the currency was stolen by the Nazis or discarded.

Instead of shooting the witnesses to their crime, the Nazis were in a rush and abandoned the prisoners after moving them to the Austrian Alps ahead of advancing Soviet troops in 1945.

As the film depicts, the counterfeiters received much better treatment than other camp prisoners: They ate regularly, took showers and even had recreational time because their talents were needed.

“I played pingpong with the Nazis, but I knew underneath they were monsters,” said Burger, who recounts details of his ordeal with the clarity and crispness of a spritely young man.

He told JTA that he wrote his memoir so people would not forget what the Nazis had done. But Operation Bernhard was ignored, even by scholars, for decades.

Burger knew that would change when he was contacted six years ago by German film producers who sought to bring his memories to the cinema.

“I had an inkling that this would be big,” he said.

He was right.

“The Counterfeiters” opened to critical acclaim in Europe last year.

The film owes its drama to the prisoners’ anguish over helping those who plan to destroy them, their families and everything they hold dear.

Some inmates slow down the counterfeiting process and sabotage their own work, pitting them against others who make survival a top priority. The film is careful not to cast judgement on either side.

The film’s main character is Salomon Sorowitch, a Russian-born Jew who is Burger’s best friend in the camp and the counterfeiting mastermind.

Burger is played by German actor August Diehl, whose performance meets with Burger’s approval.

“He researched the part well and we spoke for hours,” Burger said.

As for the film Burger said it is accurate, but like a typical author notes, “The book, of course, has more detail and is grittier.” His memoir is now being translated into English.

That an Austrian descendant of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers directed the adaptation of a Holocaust memoir raised eyebrows on both sides of the Atlantic.

But Stefan Ruzowitzky won accolades by telling journalists that it was precisely because of his country’s Nazi past, and the Nazi sympathies of his own grandparents, that he felt compelled to make a film about the Holocaust.

Ruzowitky and Diehl accompanied Burger to the Academy Awards ceremony, where he was unfazed by the glitz. Burger said he has been receiving many awards and media attention since the film’s release.

There was one odd moment for him Sunday night: “The Counterfeiters” beat out the Israeli film, “Beaufort,” for best foreign-film honors.

But Burger doesn’t feel that bad. As he tries to find comforting words for the Israelis, his laughing 25-year-old granddaughter, Petra, sitting by his side in the Los Angeles hotel room, starts giggling.

She pipes in, “His film was just better.”

By Matti Friedman, Associated Press

JERUSALEM - Israel’s national museum opened two new exhibits of paintings with a tragic history: They were stolen from museums and salons by the Nazis and never reclaimed because many of the rightful owners perished during World War II.

The exhibits, which include paintings by masters like Henri Matisse, Claude Monet and Georges Seurat, are meant to bring to life the dramatic stories behind the art - and perhaps reunite the works with the owners or heirs. Visitors who recognize a painting as their own and can prove it can file a claim.

“Our feeling about them is that our job is to hold them in custody, in a way, as a kind of memorial to their loss, and when the opportunity arises to return a work we are happy to do so,” said James Snyder, the Israel Museum’s director.

Worldwide, experts say, anywhere between 250,000 and 600,000 pieces of art looted by the Nazis were never claimed and remain in the possession of museums, governments and private collectors.

Last year, an Israeli group in charge of returning the property of Holocaust survivors accused the Israel Museum of not being forthcoming enough about the looted art in its possession, and not doing enough to return the art to its owners.

The museum rejected the criticism, saying that as a national institution of the Jewish state, it was a fitting place for the art. Since then, the institution has launched an Internet database of all of the looted art in its storerooms.

Over the years, the museum has returned about 20 pieces to owners or heirs, Snyder said.

The new exhibits contain about 80 pieces. The first exhibit, “Looking for Owners,” is made up of 53 paintings on loan from French museums. Put together by a team of Israeli and French curators, it includes several works bought by prominent Nazis like Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s top diplomat.

Most paintings in that exhibit have been painstakingly researched, meaning that there is little chance that they will be claimed 60 years after the war’s end, Snyder said.

The companion exhibit, “Orphaned Art,” includes mostly lesser-known paintings and items of Judaica. It is a small sampling of some 1,200 pieces given to the Israel Museum decades ago by a group known as the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization, which was entrusted by the Allies with returning unclaimed Jewish property in postwar Europe.

The most famous painting in the “Orphaned Art” exhibit is one by the early 20th century Austrian master Egon Schiele thought to be worth more than $20 million.

In the “Looking for Owners” exhibit, nearly every painting has a story. Some were seized by the Nazis for inclusion in a museum of European art that Hitler planned to build in Linz, Austria.

Several pieces on display were returned to their owners, like “La Buveuse,” a 1658 painting by Dutch master Pieter de Hooch that hung in the salon of financier Edouard de Rothschild in Paris before the war.

“La Buveuse,” a 1658 painting by Dutch master Pieter de Hooch

“This painting was coveted by Hitler. He knew about it, he wanted it, and he made every effort to get it,” said Shlomit Steinberg, one of the exhibit’s curators.

Reclaimed after the war and returned to the Rothschilds, “Le Buveuse” was later donated to the Louvre by Edouard’s daughter.

Also on display are photographs taken after the war showing warehouses with thousands of crates of looted paintings, shelves of sculptures, and dozens of Torah scrolls stacked like logs. The exhibits include computer terminals connected to databases of looted art so visitors can research the pieces on view.

By Allan Little, www.bbc.co.uk

Nominations for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize closed on February 1, and among the entrants is a 98-year-old Briton, Sir Nicholas Winton, known as the “British Schindler,” who transported 700 Jewish children to the UK before WWII.

Photo: Sir Nicholas was nominated for the prize by the Czech government.

In a school room in southern Bohemia, a class of teenagers sit mesmerised by a film about a young Englishman who came to their country a long time ago and did something so remarkable - brave as well as honourable - that 70 years later they petitioned the authorities to rename their school.

It is, now, the Sir Nicholas Winton School.

In the spring of 1939, the young Nicholas Winton cancelled a skiing holiday in Switzerland and, at the urging of a friend, went to Prague instead.

The city was full of people who had fled their homes in the wake of the Nazi occupation of the Sudetenland.

Nicholas Winton was particularly shocked by the condition of the children: many of them he found living in squalid - and freezing - refugee camps.

He resolved to do something about it.

With a group of others he drew up a list of children whose parents would agree to send them to Britain until the emergency - however long it was to last - was over.

When his list was complete there were 5,000 names on it.

He lobbied the Home Office in London. They said he could bring as many children as he liked, provided he could find foster families for them, and provided they went home when it was safe to do so.

The Winton group then advertised for families. “It wasn’t the ideal way to place children,” he told me, 70 years later.

“But if someone wrote to say they could take, say, a girl aged seven, then we sent some pictures of girls aged seven and said ‘choose one’.

“Not ideal, but it did work and it was quick.”

Father’s tears

He then organised a series of closed trains to take the children from Prague directly to Liverpool Street station in London.

Alicie Klimova was 11 in 1939. She took me back to the platform at Prague’s Masaryk Station, where she last saw her parents two months before the outbreak of war.

Photo: Alicie Klimova was on one of the Winton trains to England

“The platform was full of children and parents” she said. “My parents did their best to keep on smiling, telling me it was so exciting that I was going to England.

“But at midnight when the train pulled out, my father couldn’t hold back his tears.

“I said ‘Daddy don’t cry - you’ll disgrace me!’ Of course I had no idea that we would never see each other again”.

When Alicie went back to Prague in 1945 she found that both her parents had died in Auschwitz.

Lost contact

The transports continued through the summer of 1939. The last one was due to leave on 1 September - the day war broke out.

There were 250 children on board, but the train never left the station. Most of them died in the Holocaust.

For 50 years Nicholas Winton, of Maidenhead in Berkshire, lost contact with the 670 children he had brought to Britain - and whose lives he had saved.

When he married he didn’t even tell his wife what he had done.

Then, when he was almost 80, some of his children began to get in touch. He found that the original group had grown to more than 5,000.

“Normally events that happened a long time ago diminish in importance as time goes on,” Sir Nicholas told me.

“This story is the opposite - it keeps on growing, because there are more and more people. They keep breeding, you see!”

By Daniel Pipes, www.FrontPageMagazine.com

Westerners opposed to the application of the Islamic law (the sha’ria) watch with dismay as it goes from strength to strength in their countries – harems increasingly accepted, a church leader endorsing Islamic law, a judge referring to the Koran, clandestine Muslim courts meting out justice. What can be done to stop the progress of this medieval legal system so deeply at odds with modern life, one that oppresses women and turns non-Muslims into second-class citizens?

A first step is for Westerners to mount a united front against the sha’ria. Facing near-unanimous hostility, Islamists back down. For one example, note the retreat last week by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in a dispute concerning guide dogs used by the blind.

Muslims traditionally consider dogs impure animals to be avoided, creating an aversion that becomes problematic when Muslim store-owners or taxi drivers deny service to blind Westerners relying on service dogs. I have collected 15 such cases on my weblog, at “Muslim Taxi Drivers vs. Seeing-Eye Dogs”: five from the United States (New Orleans, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Brooksville, Fl.; Everett, Wash.); four from Canada (Vancouver, twice in Edmonton, Fort McMurray, Alberta); three from the United Kingdom (Cambridge, twice in London); two from Australia (Melbourne, Sydney); and one from Norway (Oslo).

News accounts quote Muslim cabbies rudely rejecting blind would-be passengers, yelling at them, “No dog, No dog, Get out, get out”; “Get that dog out of here”; and “No dogs, no dogs.” The blind find themselves rejected, humiliated, abandoned, insulted, or even injured, left in the rain, dropped in the middle of nowhere, made late for an appointment, or caused to miss a flight.

Australian Human Rights Commissioner Graeme Innes and his guide dog. Innes is often denied service by taxi drivers.

Islamist organizations initially responded to this problem by supporting anti-canine cabbies. The Muslim Association of Canada pointed out how Muslims generally regard dog saliva as unclean. CAIR on one occasion echoed this assertion, claiming that “the saliva of dogs invalidates the ritual purity needed for prayer.” On another, the head of CAIR, Nihad Awad, declared that “People from the Middle East especially … have been indoctrinated with a kind of fear of dogs” and justified a driver rejecting a guide dog on the grounds that he “has a genuine fear and he acted in good faith. He acted in accordance with his religious beliefs.”

However, when the police and the courts are called in, the legal rights of the blind to their basic needs and their dignity almost always trump the Muslim dislike for dogs. The Muslim proprietor or driver invariably finds himself admonished, fined, re-educated, warned, or even jailed. The judge who found a cabby’s behavior to be “a total disgrace” spoke for many.

CAIR, realizing that its approach had failed in the courts of both law and of public opinion, suddenly and nimbly switched sides. In a cynical maneuver, for example, it organized 300 cabbies in Minneapolis to provide free rides for participants at a National Federation of the Blind conference. (Unconvinced by this obvious ploy, a federation official responded: “We really are uncomfortable … with the offer of getting free rides. We don’t think that solves anything. We believe the cabdrivers need to realize that the law says they will not turn down a blind person.”) And, finally, last week, the Canadian office of CAIR issued a statement urging Muslims to accommodate blind taxi passengers, quoting a board member that “Islam allows for dogs to be used by the visually impaired.”

CAIR’s capitulation contains an important lesson: When Westerners broadly agree on rejecting a specific Islamic law or tradition and unite against it, Western Islamists must adjust to the majority’s will. Guide dogs for the blind represent just one of many such consensus issues; others tend to involve women, such as husbands beating wives, the burqa head coverings, female genital mutilation, and “honor” killings. Western unity can also compel Islamists to denounce their preferred positions in areas such as slavery and sha’ria-compliant finances.

Other Islam-derived practices do not (yet) exist in the West but do prevail in the Muslim world. These include punishing a woman for being raped, exploiting children as suicide bombers, and executing offenders for such crimes as converting out of Islam, adultery, having a child out of wedlock, or witchcraft. Western solidarity can win concessions in these areas too.

If Westerners stick together, the sha’ria is doomed. If we do not, we are doomed.

A New Biography Seeks to Understand the Man Who Hid Anne Frank
By Cnaan Liphshiz, www.Haaretz.com

The man who hid Anne Frank would probably have had reservations about a revealing new biography of his life that is scheduled to hit the stands on Sunday, some 17 years after his death. A private, humble, religious man, Victor Kugler might have objected to being exposed as an illegitimate child.

But Rick Kardonne, compiling editor of the first English-language book on Kugler’s life, The Man Who Hid Anne Frank (Gefen Publishing House, 2008), told Anglo File during a visit to Tel Aviv on Wednesday that he thought the revelation about Kugler’s familial situation was central to understanding what made this devout Lutheran inclined to take such enormous risks.

In 1942-44, Kugler helped conceal eight Jews, including Anne Frank, in a sealed annex in an Amsterdam office. Kugler, a Sudeten German who moved to Holland in 1920, was the office’s deputy manager, working under Otto Frank - Anne’s father.

In the world-famous diary published after her death, 13-year-old Anne Frank referred to Kugler as “Mr. Kraler.” He was eventually arrested by the Gestapo and sent to forced labor in eastern Holland. He escaped weeks before the Allies liberated The Netherlands. In 1955, he relocated to Canada, where he died at the age of 81. All the people he risked his life to save died in the Holocaust except for Otto Frank.

“Victor grew up in the Sudetenland, an extremely conservative region where children who were born out of wedlock often suffered social ostracism,” Kardonne explained. “This was probably the reason for his later sympathy to Jews, who were the prime object of hostility in the very region where it would have been expressed towards him.”

In the book, Kardonne wrote that this could well explain many important aspects of Kugler’s adult personality, such as his reluctance to reveal his early life to anybody and his extreme humility and reticence.

Kardonne, a seasoned Canadian journalist, took over the biography from a Jewish resident of Toronto named Eda Shapiro, who had interviewed Kugler, but then died in 1992, before she could write a book about him. In Shapiro’s notes, Kardonne made an important find: a letter from a woman from Minnesota who, in researching Kugler’s past, had come across evidence that he was born out of wedlock.

“Victor Kugler’s birth certificate only lists his mother’s name - Emilia Kugler - because Victor was born out of wedlock,” the letter said. Research on Kugler’s early life confirmed these assertions.

Was this the reason for Kugler’s warm feelings toward Anne Frank, who spent her early teens in fear of the society in which she had been raised? Kardonne thinks that it is possible, but there is no way of knowing for certain.

“Even in those early minutes of our acquaintance, I was struck by her large, dark brown eyes; those probing, searching, questioning eyes,” Kugler told Eda Shapiro of his first encounter with Anne, when she was four years old - long before the family went into hiding.

Another, later, memory pertains to Anne’s school years: “One punishment she received was to write an essay entitled ‘Chatterbox.’ Obviously this punishment didn’t work, for it was soon followed by a second assignment, entitled ‘Incurable Chatterbox.’ Most of the time, Anne was cheerful, friendly, and brimming over with fun and laughter.”

To prevent the authorities from confiscating Otto Frank’s business - which sold a jelling agent used in jam-making - Kugler assumed nominal ownership for the duration of the war. When Frank returned from the concentration camps, Kugler gave him the business and stayed on as an employee.

Eventually, the financial woes of post-war Europe drove Kugler and his Dutch wife to move to Toronto, where he worked as an insurance salesman. But Kugler’s connection with the Jewish community did not end there.

In his extensive research, Kardonne found that Kugler made many Jewish friends in Toronto. “His post-war connection with Jews was probably both because of his personal sympathy and because by that time, the story of his bravery was beginning to come out,” Kardonne said.

In 1973, Kugler was recognized by Yad Vashem as a Righteous among the Nations. He also received other honorary titles and awards for his heroism, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation produced a documentary on his life.

Commenting on the book, Dutch Ambassador to Israel Michiel den Hond told Anglo File: “It is harsh reality that in some years, there will be no survivors left who can give evidence about the war and the atrocities of the Holocaust.” Therefore, he said, “it is all the more important that books like this continue to be written and given the necessary attention and respect, as priceless tools for passing on the memory of this history, which has affected so many people, to future generations.”

Kardonne quoted Eda Shapiro in the book as having said: “I realized that this book … is not only about one of the people who hid Anne Frank. It is also about a Righteous Gentile. Indeed, in my opinion, this book records part of the chronicle of a whole nation of Righteous Gentiles - the Dutch people.”

By Hillel Fendel, www.IsraelNN.com

Fidel Castro has stepped down after nearly a half-century as leader of Cuba. His anti-Israel stance, both diplomatically and militarily, was pronounced.

Castro, 81, seized national power in 1959, aided by his brother and designated successor, Raul, aged 76. Already then, his Nazi-like tactics were noticed by many of the estimated 20,000 Jews then in Cuba.

In college in the 1940s, he was said to have walked around the campus with a copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf under his arm. His first attempt at seizing power, in July 1953, was an attack on an isolated outpost of the Cuban army, in which 100 people were killed. It was reminiscent of Hitler’s attack on the War Ministry in Munich in 1924, both were seemingly amateurish, and both made their perpetrators national figures.

When he finally took over Cuba several years later, Castro stabilized his rule by summary executions and eliminations, and with a total take-over of the media. In addition, he created the Nazi-like Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, assigned to spy on and control neighborhood residents, as well as the Young Pioneers, in imitation of the infamous Hitler Youth.

Though the Cuban Jewish community numbered as high as 30,000 in the 1950’s, by 1967 only about 2,000 were left. This number has now dwindled to well under 1,000.

Anti-Israel
Castro led Cuba along a clearly anti-Israel path, both diplomatically and militarily. After the Six-Day War in 1967, Cuba’s ambassador in the United Nations called it an “armed aggression against the Arab people… by a most treacherous… surprise attack in the Nazi manner.”

A year earlier, the Tri-Continental Conference in Havana, featuring revolutionaries and terrorists from around the world, passed a resolution calling for the breaking of all treaties with Israel and for its expulsion from all international organizations. Later in 1966, Castro opened more than a dozen guerrilla training camps under the direction of a KGB officer, in which budding Palestinian terrorists were trained.

In October 1973, during the Yom Kippur war, not only did Castro break diplomatic relations with Israel, but he deployed thousands of Cuban soldiers, including helicopter pilots and tank crews, to fight alongside the Syrians. The next year, Castro gave the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) an expropriated Jewish community center in Havana - and awarded the visiting Yasser Arafat with Cuba’s highest award, the Bay of Pigs Medal.

Evidence of Cuban training of Palestinian terrorists continued to surface throughout the 1970’s and the ensuing decades. In 1975, Cuba sided with the UN majority that called Zionism “a form of racism” - and in 1991, when the UN finally repealed the resolution, Cuba voted against the repeal.

In 1982, it was the Cuban Embassy in Beirut that served as Arafat’s headquarters during Israel’s Peace for Galilee War in southern Lebanon.