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The Reich Chancellery meeting of 12 December 1941

On December 12, 1941, Adolf Hitler held a meeting in the Reich Chancellery during which he spoke to approximately 50 high-level Nazi party leaders about the destruction of the Jews. However, the importance of this meeting in the history of the holocaust and the Second World War was brought to light not until 1997, when on December 13, 1997 the German center-left daily Berliner Zeitung published an article by then 34-year-old German historian Götz Aly.

Alan Cowell wrote in The New York Times on January 21, 1998:

For decades, it has been the ultimate enigma among historians of what the Nazis called the final solution: how can it be proved empirically that Hitler ordered the annihilation of Europe's Jews, and when did he do so? Despite a half-century of research, no single document has provided evidence that the Nazi leader gave a written order for the Holocaust.

The December 12, 1941 meeting--five days after the Japanese empire attacked the U. S. naval base at Pearl Harbor--was likely a crucial step towards setting in motion a systematic and state-sponsored program of industrial-scale atrocities against and murder of a Jewish minority--a grotesque act of massive, paranoia-fuelled genocidal scapegoating that would claim the lives of 6,000,000 Jews.

The December 12 meeting is less well known than the January 20, 1942, Wannsee Conference at which the methods of the holocaust's implementation were announced to and discussed among various Nazi departmental heads.

The Wannsee Conference was dramatized in the 2001 BBC/HBO film Conspiracy (photo above) featuring Kenneth Branagh as Lieutenant-General (Obergruppenführer) Reinhard Heydrich, Deputy Reich-Protector (Stellvertretender Reichsprotektor) of Bohemia and Moravia, who chaired the infamous meeting, as well as Colin Firth, Stanley Tucci as Adolf Eichmann, Ian McNeice, and Ben Daniels.

Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Rememberance Day, will be on April 19 in 2012.

"That's our Michele Bachmann:" Taxing the rich isn't like the Holocaust but it sort of is like the Holocaust

Michele Bachmann opened her mouth again. She compared increasing the tax rates for the rich to the Holocaust.

She said she was shocked to hear that many Americans weren't aware that millions of Jews had died until after World War II ended.

Bachmann said the next generation will ask similar questions about what their elders did to prevent them from facing a huge tax burden.

"I tell you this story because I think in our day and time, there is no analogy to that horrific action," she said, referring to the Holocaust. "But only to say, we are seeing eclipsed in front of our eyes a similar death and a similar taking away. It is this disenfranchisement that I think we have to answer to."

Shorter Michele Bachman: "Expecting me to bear a fair share of my civic responsibility is like gassing me to death!"

via scienceblogs.com

Egyptian Muslims Throng in Thousands to Protect Christians

The Coptic Church in Egypt is one of the oldest of all Christian communities, dating back to at least 451 AD and claiming direct Apostalic foundation by St. Mark, one of Jesus' apostles. Copts are only 10% of the population of Egypt, and Muslim extremists of the group Jihad Al Uma murdered 21 of them during a Mass at Two Saints Church on January 1st. It's caused tension between Muslims and Copts in Egypt and within the Egyptian Coptic community. Amidst these events comes January 7th's below-described sign of Muslim-Christian solidarity.

Thousands of Muslims honored a promise made by their leaders and showed up at Christmas Mass or at candlelight vigils outside Egyptian churches on Friday[, Christmas Day on the Coptic calendar,] offering their bodies as human shields against any acts of terrorists. The observances were tense, in view of the New Year’s Day bombing of a cathedral in Alexandria, which killed 21.
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Father Marqus,* the Bishop of Alexandria, said that in his entire life he had never seen the degree of solidarity of Muslims with Coptic Christians that he has witnessed in recent days. He said that Muslims attending the funeral of the [Christian] victims of the New Year’s Day bombing had treated them like Muslim martyrs, pronouncing ‘God is Great!’ in mourning, and had erupted in applause at the condemnation of the terrorists.
.....
This report from Aljazeera English also shows the solidarity demonstrations and the extensive security protection offered the Christians by the Egyptian police and security forces.

via www.juancole.com

But, not all Coptic leaders are feeling entirely forgiving. One news source reports Patriarch Barnaba el Soryany, the bishop of the Coptic Orthodox Church for Rome, Turin, and Florence, Italy as welcoming Muslims' show of support, but also stating

''I shall never accept that representatives'' of Rome's Muslim community should join us for Sunday's demonstration called to commemorate the victims of the massacre in Alexandria.

*I can find no English-language reference elsewhere online to a Marqus, Bishop of Alexandria. (The link above inclusive of his name goes to an Arabic site that I can't read.) But various other reports quote a Bishop Makar (from the Latin Marcarius, I think), as "spokesman" for the church that was bombed.

From Greek myth to medieval witches: infertile women as monstrous and evil - History of the Ancient World

In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII issued a papal bull declaring “witches” as heretics. Shortly after the idea of a witch became gender-related to women and the stereotype of a witch that of an elderly and dangerous woman. The exact origin of this stereotype is not known. Yet it led to the deaths of thousands of women during the late Middle Ages; it is believed that more than 80% of executed witches were women.

via historyoftheancientworld.com

Selective evidence is a manner of untruth. Jonah Goldberg's brazen intellectual dishonesty - an example of The Big Lie?

[Jonah Goldberg's book,] Liberal Fascism has distorted and polluted the public’s understanding of the nature of fascism....

One of the more striking aspects of Goldberg’s dishonesty is how he manipulates his definitions in self-serving fashion that lets him move the goalposts at will, as though we were playing Calvinball.  John Cole calls this “the Goldberg Principle”: "You can prove any thesis to be true if you make up your own definitions of words."  For instance, his operative definition of fascism is actually just the generic definition for totalitarianism, and it omits entirely the special characteristics that distinguish fascism from other forms of totalitarianism.  One of these, for instance, is its overpowering, indeed dominant, antiliberalism – a fact that Goldberg conveniently omitted from throughout his entire 400 or so pages, and later dismissed by claiming that the “liberalism” it opposed was not modern liberalism, but classical liberalism (as though the two have no connection whatever).

Goldberg’s whole approach, for that matter, involves omitting contradictory factual information.  His thesis begins with a real fact:  fascism originally based its public appeal, like most right-wing populist movements, by claiming to represent a “neither left nor right” solution but a transcendent unifying force.  As such, it often made socialist-sounding appeals in its rhetoric, particularly in its nascent stages.  Goldberg explores this in depth by trotting out multiple examples of socialist-sounding rhetoric from fascists, as well as endorsements of fascism by gullible socialists.  As Michael Tomasky noted in his scathing review for The New Republic:

Yet for all his chapter and verse on the proletarian rhetoric that Nazis employed, Goldberg somehow forgets to mention certain other salient matters, like the fact that within three months of taking power Hitler banned trade unions--and on the day after May Day, 1933.  Their money was confiscated and their leaders imprisoned.  And the trade unions were replaced with the Nazi "union" called the German Labor Front, which took away the right to strike.  Hitler did many worse things, of course.  I single out this act because it would hardly seem to be the edict of a "man of the left." And there exist about a million nearly epileptic quotes from Hitler and Goebbels and other Nazis expressing their luminous hatreds of liberalism and of communism, none of which seem to have found their way into the pages of Liberal Fascism.

Goldberg responded by arguing that the fascists were just foreclosing on their competition:  “All that need be said is that if Hitler’s ban on independent trade unions disqualifies him as a leftist, then Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were not leftists either.”  This is, in fact, the argument that Goldberg attempts to make in his book as well:  That the fascists occupied the "political space" on the Left, and thus were simply out to compete against their fellow leftists.

But this is where Goldberg most deeply portrays a lack of respect for the historical material available to him, because any careful study of the actual details of how the fascists came to power in both Italy and Germany makes abundantly clear that they were occupying the available political space on the right -- and had charged hard in that direction from early on in their drive to power.

via www.hnn.us

The above is from David Neiwert's article on History News Network. (Hat-tip to Chip Berlet.) There is intellectual dishonesty in Jonah Goldberg's notion of "liberal fascism." It's as viable within clear-headed discourse as "chocolate stove," "fringed fart," or "glass pants." It is, in fact, close unto an oxymoron, like "dead life." It becomes strongly viable only in discourse where participants accept a strange epistemology, a worldview that allows for a statement to be taken as fact merely based on its political convenience or dependent upon all evidence against the statement's validity to be left unaired or considered to be invalid.

It may well be an example of the notion of The Big Lie: a lie so brazenly told as to seem credible, especially if it is repeated often; it is a a proposition that recklessly defines or redefines terms--or doesn't define them clearly at all and allows an intended audience to fill in the gaps with prejudicial thinking--and is based not on honest or clear reasoning, but on loudness and some manner of deceit, usually in the form of selective-only evidence and sometimes utterly invented evidence. Yet, it can become accepted, taken as  as more or less true, even in large segments of a population, just as are notions of global Jewish conspiracies in parts of the Islamic world today.

US Senate passes Matthew Shepard Act (MSA)

From the HRC e-mail announcing passage*

The [Department of Defense] bill will soon be on its way to President Obama's desk, where he'll get a chance to make good on his promise to sign it.

This vote came on the heels of tremendous pressure from radical right-wing groups that used every trick in the book.

They called the bill the "Pedophile Protection Act," among other outrageous claims. They dismissed the barbaric hate crime that took Matthew Shepard's life as a "hoax." They flooded the Senate with hundreds of thousands of letters and calls.

*On July 16, the Act had been included in the Dept. of Defense (DOD) bill before the Congress. So, the term "passage" might not be technically correct above. I just don't know the procedural terminology well enough. Adopted, perhaps? Anyway.... As HRC explained -

The DOD bill will still have to...go to a House-Senate conference committee before being sent to the President. Issues not related to hate crimes have prompted a Presidential veto threat. The White House and House and Senate Leadership have repeatedly assured [HRC] that regardless of a possible veto, the MSA will be included in the bill that is eventually signed into law later this year.

Gays and lesbians the new Jews?

(Hat-tip to Talk To Action.)

From Michelle Goldberg's article:

[The] affair between fundamentalism and homophobia has been a long and faithful one. What’s new and chilling, however, is the single-minded ideological obsession of it. This is not something one sees in every theocratic state..... [T]he rhetoric of Iran’s fundamentalist clerics doesn’t treat homosexuality as a cosmically subversive threat; instead, Jews and Zionism play that role (as they so often did in Europe before the Holocaust), a dynamic that may prove useful in deciphering the ubiquity and vehemence of anti-gay rhetoric among conservative Christians the world over.

Goldberg looks for explanations and sees at least two causes:

the globalization of the religious right a phenomenon that [Rick] Warren—with all his overseas contacts—exemplifies as well as anyone. It’s also a result of the globalization of civil rights rhetoric. [Recently,] for example, sixty-six United Nations member states signed a declaration calling for the decriminalization of homosexuality worldwide. (The United States, predictably, was the one major Western nation that refused to sign).

Fundamentalists the world over spread myths about gay people, sexual and reproductive health, and science, they do so hoping to leverage the fear they create into power and access for fundamentalist leaders and cultural influence for fundamentalism as a movement.

Mike Gallagher walkin' a mile in James Dobson's shoes . . . and lovin' it!

Jack Hafferkamp of Boston-based Edge writes that:

After a slow start, the campaign against demagogic homophobe James Dobson’s induction into the National Radio Hall of Fame appears to be gaining steam as word spreads and time counts down to the induction awards dinner in Chicago planned for Saturday, November 8, 2008.

And rightwing Mike Gallagher uses his audio Der Angriff to keep peddling irrational bigotry, as noted on PageOneQ: "Doctors in California can't use their religion to deny medical treatment to their gay patients. What next, pondered Mike Gallagher on Monday -- state-sanctioned pedophilia?"

(Image: clipping from an issue of Der Angriff attacking the "sick elements" in society, including Magnus Hirschfeld, sociologist. Hirschfeld died in exile in 1935 before the Nazis stripped all Jewish doctors of their medical licenses in 1938.)

LGBT Youth Drop-in Center Responds to Gay-Bashers' Assault on Episcopal Priest

Hat-tip to Out Astoria: In aftermath of Monday's assault on Father Braxton, Director of Carmen's Place, a homeless shelter for LGBT youth, participants gather to discuss hostility they face daily in school and in the streets of Queens, New York.

....Father Lewis Braxton, director of Carmen's Place, was attacked in front of the shelter by four teenaged boys on Monday night after stepping in to defend one of the residents of the shelter who was being harassed and threatened.

"I'm shocked that this happened on such a busy street," said Father Braxton.  "This speaks to the need for a real conversation about the safety of trans people in this city."

With somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of homeless youth identifying as LGBT and statistics showing that LGBT youth are 3 to 5 times more likely to commit suicide, this shelter meets an essential need.  These young people, many of whom have been thrown out of their homes, depend on safe havens like Carmen's Place and Generation Q to fulfill their emotional, psychological and social needs, and in the case of those without homes, their most basic needs.

[There is need for a] hate crimes law, school-based initiatives such as Dignity for All Students Act (DASA) that focus on prevention of hate crimes as well as interventions of identity-based bullying, and funding for safe havens like Carmen's Place and Generation Q.

"This attack is not isolated or an aberration" states Marisa Ragonese, the director of Generation Q.  "Our youth come in here frequently with stories of being spit on, chased, harassed, or hit as they travel from the train less than 2 full blocks away to Generation Q."

In response to the harassment that LGBT teens have been reporting for years and the city and state's failure to implement the (DASA), Generation Q facilitates workshops, free of charge, to schools, after-school programs, and community spaces on homophobia, hate speech, confronting harassment, and developing anti-slur policies.
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The Plank in Michael Gerson's Eye

Jim Naughton is the communications director of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, DC. In "The Plank in Michael Gerson's Eye," Naughton reveals that Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, the man who coined the term "axis of evil," is a member of a schismatic Episcopal churches in Virginia that has placed itself under the authority of Anglican prelate Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria.

No wonder Naughton disingenuously assaults Barack Obama over Rev. Wright's comments but writes nothing about Akinola's persecution of gay people in Nigeria and support for a  massacre of Nigerian Muslims by members of Akinola's Christian Association of Nigeria.