B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation Commission Inc.


Date:07 Apr 2008 Vol: 6.08	ADC News Digest is a weekly newsletter published by B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation Commission (ADC) and distributed electronically The ADC News Digest presents a sample of articles selected from Australian and international outlets using both mainstream media and citizen journalism sources. See www.antidef.org.au for up to date news from the ADC. The topics have been classified to illustrate social trends, opinions and minority views. These articles do not necessarily reflect the views of ADC.
	You can see more articles under the heading category by clicking the blue underlined heading on the left. You can see additional text and a link to the original article by clicking the blue underlined title in the right column. All readers are welcome to comment by selecting the �Comments� link at the bottom of each article between the posted date and the email icon.
Holocaust	03 Apr 2008, Branko Miletic, Paddy Hitler, Max Mosley and the dilemma of Nazi children, The Times/Sunday Times (UK), As the son of a concentration camp survivor I have wondered what it must be like to be the child of a leading Nazi. How does one resolve the painful conflicts that such a relationship produces? Not long ago my mother met with Hilde Schramm, the daughter of Albert Speer, their meeting being featured in a radio programme. My mother thought her a good woman who had struggled to put right her father's crimes in the best way she could. But nevertheless, my mother decided not to confront her directly about Speer. Why? Because Mum felt it would not be fair. The issue was bound to be so difficult for Schramm. "After all, he was her Daddy". In today's paper there was the fascinating (if sordid) story of Max Mosley, Oswald's son, and his Nazi sex games. Both Nicholas and Max Mosley have striven so hard to consign their family history to the past. Yet it is clearly still there in Max's case, and strongly so. Here's a review of ten Nazi children�..
	03 Apr 2008, Frank Furedi, History-as-Therapy, Spiked-Online (UK), Fake memoirs are once again hitting the headlines. Only last week, Margaret B Jones� �autobiographical� account of growing up as a mixed-race foster child on the wrong side of the tracks in Los Angeles, Love and Consequences, was celebrated as a work of inspiration. One of America�s leading literary critics, Michiko Kakutani, said it was a �humane and deeply affecting memoir�. Now, however, the author has been unveiled as a very white Margaret Seltzer, and her story has been exposed as pure fiction. At least she did not pretend to be a Holocaust survivor� Last week we witnessed the exposure of yet another Holocaust fantasy. Suddenly, everyone seemed shocked that Misha Defonseca�s memoir about being a young Belgian Jewish girl fleeing the Nazis, who managed to slip in and out of the Warsaw Ghetto and to live with wolves, turned out to be a product of her imagination. Defonseca�s book was not the first bogus best-selling Holocaust memoir. In 1999 Binjamin Wilkomirski�s Fragments was exposed as a work of fantasy. Clearly the threshold of scepticism towards victim memoirs is very low indeed. In a world where fantasies about young Jewish girls hanging out with wolves can be embraced as an inspiring account of survival, and made into a feature film, victim-history really has come into its own. Today, people who �feel Jewish�, and who claim to �feel� the pain of concentration camp prisoners, genuinely believe that their feelings give them a mandate to erode the boundary between fantasy and reality. They have joined a growing group of individuals who have reinvented themselves as everything from American prisoners of war in Vietnam to the relatives of people who died in terrorist attacks.
Anti-Semitism	05 Apr 2008, No author cited, Aussie unions accused of anti-Semitism, JTA (USA), A high-ranking Jewish American unionist accused two powerful Australian trade unions of anti-Semitism. Stuart Appelbaum, the president of the Jewish Labor Committee and of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, last week accused the Construction, Forestry, Mining, and Energy Union (CFMEU) and the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) of "anti-Semitism cloaked under the veil of anti-Zionism" following their endorsement last month of a newspaper ad accusing Israel of "ethnic cleansing."
	03 Apr 2008, No author cited, Students express concerns about UC Irvine, JTA (USA), A group of current and former University of California, Irvine students are "deeply concerned" about anti-Semitism on their campus. In a news release issued earlier this week, 20 students countered an earlier release from Jewish student leaders at UC Irvine denying anti-Semitism was a serious problem on their campus and defended the administration's handling of the matter. "We are current and former students at UC Irvine who are deeply concerned about the anti-Semitism at UCI that has been frequently couched as false and hateful attacks on Israel," the new release said. "We do not believe that UCI Chancellor Michael Drake has exercised his responsibility as an educator and university leader in response to the anti-Semitism." One of the signers of the new release says he attends California State University, Fullerton.
	05 Apr 2008, Michael Gove, Anti-Semitism is finding new allies on both Right and Left, The Times/Sunday Times (UK), If even Ed Stourton doesn't get it, there really is a problem. Stourton is not just an exceptionally civilised voice on Radio 4, he's also one of broadcasting's most thoughtful figures. As well as Today, he occasionally fronts Sunday, the religious magazine programme, has written a well-received book on Pope John Paul II and presented a fascinating documentary on the Arab/ Israeli conflict. Which is why it's so troubling that he, of all people, missed the point. Stourton was interviewing Barbet Schroeder, who has produced biopics on Idi Amin and Claus von B�low and has just made a film about the famous French lawyer Jacques Verg�s. Like many lawyers who prefer to act for the defence, Verg�s enjoys difficult cases. But he's a little bit more daring than Horace Rumpole in his client list: Verg�s has, in his time, defended the Vichy collaborator Klaus Barbie (the Butcher of Lyons), Ilich Ram�rez S�nchez (Carlos the Jackal An-Interview-With-Andrew-Wylie ), various Palestinian terrorists and members of the BaaderMeinhof gang. Oh, and we shouldn't forget Saddam Hussein's No 2, Tariq Aziz.. Stourton was curious about this gal�re of clients, and confessed to feeling perplexed about what could possibly link Klaus Barbie and Palestinian terrorists. What on earth would unite these disparate people, and what would draw Verg�s to them?
	04 Apr 2008, No author cited, Wiesel, Dershowitz want U.S. to boycott Durban conference, Ha'aretz, Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, law professor Alan Dershowitz and former CIA Director James Woolsey are urging the United States to skip next year's United Nations anti-racism conference in a full-page advertisement appearing Thursday in four newspapers. The ad, a copy of which was obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press, was signed by 25 people, including religious, academic and legal figures. They label the conference as anti-Semitic, and urge U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to announce that the United States will not participate. The ad is scheduled to run in the New York Sun and The Washington Times, as well as the Washington political newspaper Politico and Roll Call, a newspaper designed for the use of members of Congress and others who work there. The conference, known as Durban II for the South African city that will host it, follows the 2001 World Conference Against Racism. At that meeting, criticism of Israel prompted the U.S. and Israeli delegations to walk out.
Media	03 Apr 2008, Douglas Kirsner, ABC's cultural liberals shun the mainstream, The Australian, There have been new programs that increase debate, including the ill-fated, experimental Difference of Opinion, to be replaced with a new question and answer program, based on the lively and controversial BBC show Question Time. Media Watch is not as politically partisan. Paul Chadwick has been appointed as director of editorial policies to try to ensure that the ABC fulfils its statutory obligations under the ABC Act to be accurate and impartial. In terms of balance, Middle East correspondents Matt Brown and David Hardaker are marked improvements. For anybody who believes that the taxpayer-funded broadcaster needs to be impartial and accurate, balanced and fair, this is all to the good. The two main issues for the ABC are those of bias and genuine diversity. The culture of the ABC is clearly left of centre. Bias has not been so much party political as cultural. It is often not deliberate but bespeaks assumptions, mind-sets, that are far from the concerns of the mainstream Australia that pays for the ABC and that, in return, the ABC is supposed to serve and be fair to in its range and content. It is not the job of the taxpayer-funded national broadcaster to act as a counterweight to other media or mainstream ideologies perceived to be too right wing by a staff whose centre of gravity is way to the left. Why is it that the only intentionally liberal-conservative program on Radio National is titled Counterpoint?
	06 Apr 2008, No author cited, It's back to the drawing board, Sydney Morning Herald (Aust), In 2004, the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) ran a comic strip campaign against right-wing extremism starring Andi, a schoolboy who stands up against xenophobia and racism. The strip was so popular that, last October, the Government plunged Andi into a second adventure with his Muslim girlfriend, Ayshe, and her brother, Murat, who comes under the influence of a radical friend and Islamist "hate preacher". The comic aims to show young people the difference between peaceful mainstream Islam and the violent, intolerant version peddled by militants. At least 100,000 copies have been printed and distributed to every secondary school in Germany's most populous state. "We were always careful not to hurt feelings and anger people by painting a caricature of Islam," Hartwig Moeller, head of the NRW interior ministry's department for protection of the constitution, said. "We had to make clear we weren't aiming against Muslims, but only those people who want to misuse Islam for political aims." The cartoon, featuring boldly drawn Japanese manga-style figures, is designed to be used in citizenship and religion lessons for schoolchildren aged 12 to 16. "We have learned from our opponents. This is exactly the age at which the Islamists are trying, through Koranic schools and other means, to fill young people with other values," said Mr Moeller, who, despite his intelligence role, estimates half his time is spent educating the public about threats. The unusual program is one example of how countries around the world are searching for new ways to prevent young people from being drawn into Islamist violence.
	05 Apr 2008, Branko Miletic, Government To Control Facebook, MySpace, SmarterTimes, New international guidelines for safer use of social networking services, such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo were released in the UK today, in a move some say is a harbinger of things to come in Australia. The Australian Communications and Media Authority has been an important contributor to the development of the guidelines to help providers of social networking services everywhere. ACMA Chairman, Chris Chapman, said �The internet doesn't recognise geographic borders. Connecting Australian cyber safety work � such as the Internet Industry Association (IIA) development of a new online services code of practice � to parallel activities in other countries, we can start to generate globally-effective solutions to online safety issues." �I continue to be of the view that international co-operation will be increasingly the way to ensure children have a positive and safe experience of the internet and applications that utilise it � which is why the Australian Communications and Media Authority allocates a very meaningful portion of its resources to supporting practical international collaborations,' said Chapman. The guidelines recommends making social networking profiles for users under 18 private by default, and increasing reporting mechanisms for bullying or other anti-social behaviour on social networking sites. It provides recommendations for implementation by service providers to minimise the risks to users and information that can be incorporated into Australian safety campaigns targeted to parents, carers and users of services.
Opinion	01 Apr 2008, Sean Collins, The hole at the heart of the Democratic Party, Spiked-Online (UK), iin recent weeks, it has become personal: the campaigning has descended into identity-baiting and petty name-calling. People associated with either candidate � from activists to voters � are now more likely to say they won�t vote for the other come November. Not long ago the party establishment appeared to be behind Clinton, but the Washington elite has steadily abandoned her, causing bitter internal rows (1). The battle may run on to the party convention in late August, where it could get even uglier. Of course, all is not bleak for the Democrats. The primaries have seen an increase in turnout at the polls, holding out the prospect of encouraging new voter support in the general election. And there�s still a good chance that, whoever the candidate, the Democrat will defeat Republican candidate John McCain in November. But the fact that the Democrats won�t walk it is itself quite amazing: six months ago, who would have given the Republicans � with President George W Bush�s opinion ratings in the tank, and no evident candidate able to unite the party � any decent shot of winning? This turn of events alone illustrates the Democrats� ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. All the sound and fury is enough to make you wonder: what the hell is going on inside the Democratic Party?
Indigenous	05 Apr 2008, Justine Ferrari, 'Education apartheid' failing Aboriginal kids, The Australian, INDIGENOUS children in remote communities in the Northern Territory are being condemned to failure by a system of educational apartheid that offers a second-rate curriculum in make-believe schools. In a paper to be released next week by the Centre for Independent Studies, Helen Hughes, professor emeritus at the Australian National University and senior fellow at the CIS, says indigenous schooling in the Territory has "in effect not been extended to secondary education". "Because most indigenous primary school leavers, particularly in remote areas, are at Year 1 level, so-called secondary classes mostly teach elementary English, numeracy and literacy," she says. Teachers are flown in to remote schools, sometimes for as little as a few hours one day a week, and many schools are not open five days a week. Students are not taught history, geography nor science, Professor Hughes says, and she cites examples of teenagers thinking there are 100 minutes in an hour and not knowing how to divide a piece of material into two, nor how to find Canberra on a map nor what "capital of Australia" means. She calls for more than 4000 preschool teachers for indigenous children, more than 200 houses to be built for full-time resident teachers, and for remote schools to be twinned with mainstream schools to allow exchanges of students and teachers.
	05 Apr 2008, Lindsay Murdoch, Cash, drugs, free taxis sex scandal, The Age (Aust), ABORIGINAL elders at a remote Northern Territory mining town have lifted the lid on a child sex abuse scandal, accusing non-Aboriginal men of repeated offences against local indigenous teenagers. Aboriginal girls as young as 13 are receiving cash, drugs, alcohol and taxi rides in exchange for sex with non-indigenous men, according to residents in the town of Nhulunbuy, 650 kilometres east of Darwin. Now, elders at the town have asked police to investigate a group of men who they say have been abusing the girls for years. Galarrwuy Yunupingu, the territory's most powerful indigenous leader, has also intervened in the case, declaring that "everybody here knows what has been going on and the time has come for us to put an end to this once and for all". The elders are angry that teenagers are still being abused in the town eight months after the $1.5 billion intervention in the territory's remote indigenous communities. Four young women have given The Age details of abuse by men they are prepared to identify to police. They said at least three Aboriginal girls were sexually abused when aged 13.
	05 Apr 2008, No author cited, Stolen Aboriginal paintings recovered, News Corp (Aust), SEVEN valuable Aboriginal paintings stolen from a Darwin museum have been recovered, undamaged, says the Northern Territory government. The paintings, thought to be worth more than half a million dollars, were stolen early this morning after thieves smashed a window at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. However the six Papunya Tula board paintings and a central Australian watercolour were found in nearby bushland this afternoon, said a spokesman for the territory's Department of Natural Resources, Environment and the Arts. Police searching for the two thieves will examine closed circuit TV footage and carry out DNA tests Beware-the-Boom-in-Genetic-Testing on blood found near the museum's window - thought to have been left when a robber cut himself on broken glass. The dots of blood could help police catch two thieves who stole the paintings. The blood spots, as well as fingerprints and video footage, have given detectives "strong leads'' on the identity of the robbers, who used a rock to smash a rear window of the museum shortly before 4.30am (local time, 6am Melbourne time) today.
	02 Apr 2008, Natasha Robinson, Aborigines 'locked out of real economy', The Australian, ABORIGINAL people are condemned to poverty and treated as "museum pieces" by governments whose education policies have locked a generation out of the real economy. Aboriginal leader Tracker Tilmouth has called for an urgent solution to the chronic underfunding of remote community schools, where up to 4000 indigenous children each year in the Northern Territory have no access to secondary education. The former director of the Central Land Council, a member of the Stolen Generations who was educated at a mission school, backed the idea of boarding schools for remote indigenous students as one solution to the crisis. Mr Tilmouth, one of Australia's most successful indigenous leaders who now works as an adviser to the Northern Territory mining company Compass Resources, said government policies on education were driven by the belief that Aboriginal people should continue living traditional lives. This had resulted in a system that routinely produced students who could not read or write after sometimes more than 10 years of schooling. It was often left to mining companies who employed indigenous people to teach them to read and write, he said. "There should be a royal commission into the state of education in the Northern Territory of Aboriginal children, because this is an act of genocide," Mr Tilmouth said. "We've got to move away from this ridiculous socialist experiment of (treating) Aboriginal people as museum pieces, living museums. We want to be able to look after ourselves, we want the economic independence. We can't do that unless we have a very good basis of education."
Genocide	05 Apr 2008, Stephen Hutcheon, Bashing Beijing the shame game Olympics, The Age (Aust), A broad coalition of professional activists, anarchists and freelance stirrers is rolling out Academy-Awards a series of shaming campaigns intended to fuel the cacophony of complaint against China's hosting of the 2008 Olympic Games. In addition to the usual physical displays of opposition, the groups are ramping up a powerful online presence that includes the use of the big three social networking sites Most-Networked-Executives - MySpace, Facebook and YouTube - plus an array of widgets, podcasts, blogs and other web-based weapons of persuasion and subversion. The agitators include long-time China critics such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Free Tibet Campaign plus a host of smaller activist groups covering the entire gamut of anti-Beijing causes including Darfur, Burma, workers' rights, animal rights, pro-democracy and the death penalty. Their common aim is to drown out China's attempts to use the Olympics as a celebration of its coming of age as a modern economic powerhouse and refocus international attention on the many skeletons that rattle around in the regime's closets.
	01 Apr 2008, Andrew Bolt, Skewed truth puts us among the killers, News Corp (Aust), THEY'VE won. Look up Australia in the new Dictionary of Genocide and there we are. Flick past "Concentration Camps", "Darfur", "Great Terror", "Nazi Ideology", "The Nuremberg Trials" and "Pol Pot" and there, among the great killers, we star -- in a chapter of our own, "Stolen Generation of Aborigines". That sure took some doing - to liken the missionaries officers who saved Aboriginal children from abuse and neglect to genocidal killers. The truth had to be skewed, for a start. And the victims of the Holocaust - a real genocide - had to be insulted. I mention the Holocaust because one of this dictionary's two co-authors is not only an Australian but a Jew, and should have known twice over how monstrous it was to draw this analogy between saving Aboriginal children and murdering Jewish ones. But Dr Paul Bartrop, head of Bialik College's History Department and an Honorary Fellow at Deakin University, was up to this job. And he's not alone. This month, former Monash University historian Ian Cummins reviewed in The Age a book discussing Stalin's gulags, in which perhaps five million people died: "At a time when Australian opinion is exercised by the wrongs inflicted on stolen generations of Aborigines, it is sobering to be made aware of a similar phenomenon that occurred in the Soviet Union at roughly the same time ..."
Religion	05 Apr 2008, Abbott Katz, Stop calling me an "ultra-Orthodox" Jew, Forward (USA), Stop calling me an ultra-Orthodox Jew. �Ultra� � the modifier of choice for a press hawking its smudged cartography of Jewish religious life � has enjoyed a long, wearisome, dubious run, and it isn�t recusing itself from the discourse any time soon. The Jewish religious world occupies a bewilderingly disparate space, to be sure, but mapping its turf begs a measure of precision of which the media�s collective instrumentation seems largely incapable � and �ultra,� with its Latinate tinge, redolent of cultic cadres pushing their faith to mysterious extremes, badly misreads the coordinates. And foments an agenda, besides. After all, if there are ultra-Orthodox Jews, then there are merely Orthodox ones as well, and what makes the recourse to �ultra� so pernicious is its very status as prefix, a descriptive tack-on to a more primeval, integral Judaism of truer provenance. Orthodox Jews seem to be seen as marking the spiritual baseline, while the �ultras� are typed as a kind of fanatic insurgency, sparse but dangerous.
	03 Apr 2008, No author cited, UN is enemy of Islam: al-Qa'ida deputy, The Australian, AL-QA'IDA number two Ayman al-Zawahiri has launched a blistering attack on the UN, calling it the enemy of Islam and Muslims in an online audiofile. �The United Nations is an enemy of Islam and Muslims: it is the one which codified and legitimised the setting up of the state of Israel and its taking over of the Muslims' lands,� Zawahiri said. The audio released via the monitoring group the IntelCenter was the first installment in a two-part series to answer about 100 questions put to Zawahiri, known as al-Qa�ida's ideological thinker, via online militant forums.
Immigration	04 Apr 2008, Nathalie Rothschild, Immigration should be a political football, Spiked-Online (UK), It is often said that too many people treat immigration as a political football. Politicians and broadsheet newspapers warn against turning immigration into an �overly politicised� issue, and instead advise us to have calm, cool-headed, fact-driven discussions of this potentially volatile issue. In truth, the debate about immigration is not political enough. Instead, immigration is discussed in an increasingly narrow, utilitarian, economic fashion, with migrants judged as being either good for the economy or bad for the economy. This demonstrates the evacuation of political principle and morality from the immigration debate: those who are for immigration seem incapable of putting the stand-up argument for migrants� freedom of movement, while those who oppose immigration also hide behind economic �facts� in order to avoid venturing a political argument against migration. A new report on immigration from the UK House of Lords� Economic Affairs Committee, published yesterday, shows just how depoliticised immigration policies and debates have become in government circles and elsewhere. The report proposes an annual cap on immigration into the UK, an idea first promoted by the Conservative Party. It concludes that there is �no evidence for the argument, made by the government, business and many others, that net immigration � immigration minus emigration � generates significant economic benefits for the existing UK population� (1).
	01 Apr 2008, No author cited, Immigration doesn't benefit Britain, Daily Telegraph (Aust), For those of us who have felt unsettled, or even alarmed, by the exceptional scale of recent immigration to the United Kingdom, there has been one argument that has been difficult to rebut. It was, indeed, the very justification for the Government's immigration policy, if it deserves to be so described: without the foreign workers who have poured in over the past 10 years, both legally and illegally, economic growth Trillion-Dollar-Experiment would have stalled and we would be a less prosperous nation. The highest levels of immigration by far in our history may well have had other deleterious impacts, including that on the country's cultural cohesion and, self-evidently, on the public services and infrastructure, strained by the rising population, and even the reintroduction of some serious diseases, such as TB, which had all but been eradicated. But we were assured by ministers and proponents of large-scale immigration, including business leaders and union bosses, that these were more than outweighed by the economic benefits that have accrued to the nation. The problem with this argument is that it is not true, but it was difficult to prove its falsity because no authoritative study able to command widespread acceptance had been undertaken to test its veracity. Well, now one has. The economic affairs committee of the House of Lords will report tomorrow after a three-month inquiry. This committee includes Lords Lawson and Lamont, former Chancellors of the Exchequer; Lords MacGregor and Wakeham, former cabinet ministers; Lords Layard and Skidelsky, eminent economists; Lords Turner and Paul from the world of commerce and industry; and other former Labour ministers and senior politicians.
Terrorism	04 Apr 2008, David Byers, 'Plot to blow up planes using bottles', The Australian, EIGHT Islamist terrorists with the "cold-eyed certainty" of fanatics plotted to blow up several transatlantic planes in mid-air in what would have brought about a death toll of "almost unimaginable scale", a London court was told. The alleged suicide mission, �in the name of Islam�, would have involved the suspects boarding seven flights leaving London for the US and Canada with explosives disguised as soft drinks. The arrest of the eight prompted tough limits on liquids in hand baggage on planes. Once on board, homemade bombs would explode on each aircraft, killing all the passengers and causing casualties on an �almost unprecedented� scale. Peter Wright, QC, for the prosecution, said: �What these men intended to bring about was a violent and deadly statement of intent that would have truly global impact.�
	05 Apr 2008, Martin Chulov, Israeli aide shot by Gaza sniper, The Australian, A SENIOR aide to Israeli Security Minister Avi Dichter was shot last night by a possible Palestinian sniper as he stood listening to his boss address business delegates on high ground east of Gaza. The adviser, Matti Gil, was in a serious but stable condition as Israeli tanks and bulldozers entered the Gaza Strip to pursue the gunmen. Mr Dichter, who ran the internal security agency Shin Bet for five years before becoming a minister in May 2006, said the gunfire was unlikely to have targeted him. He said Palestinian militants inside Gaza had been attempting for a long time to hit anyone they could see on the Israeli side of the border�. A volley of automatic fire rang out for about 30 seconds just before midday, with at least one bullet striking Mr Gil in the groin. Mr Gil was due to accompany Mr Dichter to Australia on an official visit in early June. He was expected to undergo surgery last night. The attack marked the second time in two months that one of Mr Dichter's staff had been wounded on duty. In late February, one of his bodyguards was lightly injured when a rocket fired from Gaza landed near him in the southern Israeli town of Sderot as he prepared for a visit by his boss.

	Ian Grinblat, Finance Officer Annette Gladwin, Liaison Officer Deborah Stone, research director Edna Lipson, Executive Secretary