May 30



GERMANY:

Germany plans entry fee for concentration camps


GERMANY may be poised to break a long-standing taboo by
charging an entrance fee to concentration camp memorial sites.

Peter Dietz de Loos, president of the International Dachau Committee
named after the first concentration camp of the Nazi regime near Munich
said the camps desperately needed the money for renovations, staff and
daily upkeep.

Jewish groups, politicians and former prisoners of the Nazis have spoken
out against the plan, calling it shameless.

They point out that concentration camps, where millions were murdered, are
also cemeteries and as such should be free to everyone.

Mr Dietz de Loos, a Dutch lawyer who heads the group representing former
prisoners of Nazi camps, says government subsidies are no longer
sufficient to keep the sprawling gulag from falling apart.

The camp sites also employ caretakers, educational assistants and
curators. Educational programs at Buchenwald have already been cut back
because of a severe shortage of funds. There are fears youth exchange
programs that take in visits to the camps will also be severely cut back
unless more cash is found.

Mr Dietz de Loos said: "I don't see any other way forward than to break
this taboo. The committee will be totally broke within five years."

"This is unthinkable," said Barbara Distel, of the Dachau memorial site.

(source: The Age)






ARGENTINA:

Nazi Adolf Eichmann's passport found in Argentina, donated to Holocaust
foundation


The Red Cross-issued passport used by high-ranking Nazi Aldolf Eichmann as
he escaped to Argentina after World War II has been turned over to the
Holocaust Museum in Buenos Aires after a judge stumbled up it in a musty
court file.

Eichmann, a leader of a campaign of mass deportation of Jews to
extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe during the war, fled
to Argentina in 1950 under the alias "Ricardo Klement."

The passport was left behind when Eichmann was abducted by Israeli agents in
1960 from a Buenos Aires suburb where he lived. He was taken to Israel,
tried for crimes against humanity and hanged in 1962.

Mario Feferbaum, president of the Foundation for the Memory of the
Holocaust, said Tuesday that the passport would join an exhibit of
photographs, letters, possessions and oral testimonies of concentration camp
survivors, in a humidity-controlled display in coming weeks.

Foundation official Susy Rochwerger said she shuddered when she first saw
the passport.

"Eichmann was the one who undertook the indiscriminate killing of children,
the elderly, men and women," said Rochwerger, calling the Nazi genocide "a
cruel massacre carried out with clockwork precision."

Argentina was a haven for fugitive Nazis after World War II, including Josef
Mengele, dubbed "the Angel of Death" for his gruesome medical experiments
on Auschwitz prisoners.

At a news conference Tuesday at the foundation's Holocaust Museum, a woman
used white latex gloves to hold up the well-preserved passport, issued in
1948 by an Italian delegation of the International Committee of the Red
Cross.

The passport, on a single page of cardboard fold in three parts, bears the
photograph of Eichmann and the neatly hand-lettered alias "Ricardo Klement."
It also bears the French words "Comite International De la Croix-Rouge" and
a stamp of its Genova, Italy, delegation.

Federal Judge Maria Servini de Cubria opened the Eichmann file recently and
spotted the passport amid aged papers, according to Feferbaum. He added
Eichmann's wife had presented the passport to authorities in 1960 when she
went to them, complaining he had been abducted.

The legal file containing the passport was being kept in a courthouse
repository housing millions of documents from historical court cases.

Feferbaum thanked the judge for taking "the initiative to consider this a
document for humanity."

(source: Associated Press)





CANADA:

ACADEMIC CONTROVERSY----Professor who attended Holocaust conference blasts
critics as Islamophobes


A Canadian political scientist excoriated for attending what was widely
labelled a Holocaust-denial conference in Tehran has retaliated with a
blistering published attack on his university president and his colleagues
for being illiterate Islamophobes.

Writing in the influential Literary Review of Canada, Shiraz Dossa, a
tenured professor at Nova Scotia's St. Francis Xavier University, said
that his academic integrity and academic freedom were grossly impugned by
the university administration, an assault on his reputation that he said
has yet to be remedied.

He accused the president and chancellor of authorizing a "small Spanish
Inquisition" to denounce him - a campaign he said was initiated by two
Jewish professors and the Christian chair of the political science
department.

Prof. Dossa also wrote that the attack on his reputation was launched by
The Globe and Mail's editorial board and by columnists John Ibbitson and
Rex Murphy, whom he described as being "intellectually just a cut above
the Trailer Park Boys" and ignorant of the Middle East.

James Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University
Teachers, likened the treatment of Prof. Dossa to the 1950s McCarthy
period in the United States when academics and others were subjected to
intense pressure not to attend events that were unpopular.

This is the first time Prof. Dossa has spoken out since the storm erupted
over his attendance at the Tehran conference in mid-December.

His two-page essay appears in the issue of the LRC that will be posted
today on its website, http://www.reviewcanada.ca. Although the monthly
publication's circulation is small, it is widely read in the academic,
journalistic, political and public-service communities.

In an interview, Prof. Dossa said he wrote the essay because he wanted to
set the record straight and because he still hasn't received an apology
from either St. FX president Sean Riley or chancellor Raymond Lahey, the
Roman Catholic bishop of Antigonish where the university is located. He
also said he has refused to speak to his department chair, Prof. Yvon
Grenier, since December.

He wrote that the university administration uncritically accepted the
Holocaust-denial label "concocted by the Simon Wiesenthal Center [a Jewish
human-rights organization] and the [U.S.] Jewish Defence League and
peddled by media outlets such as The Globe and Mail."

Prof. Dossa, a Muslim, teaches political theory and comparative politics
at St. FX. His focus as a scholar has been on the Holocaust and its
aftermath. He abruptly dismisses any suggestion that he is a Holocaust
denier. Rather, he said, his interest has been in what use of the
Holocaust has been made to promote Zionism - the right of Jews to a
national homeland - and to support the Israeli occupation of Palestinian
territory.

In both his essay and in a telephone conversation, he makes a compelling
case for why he attended the two-day Tehran conference, titled "The Review
of the Holocaust: Global Vision."

It was a conference for scholars in the global South, said Prof. Dossa,
who wanted to examine the Holocaust and its significance unrestrained by
the lenses through which it is viewed by the West, and "to devise an
intellectual [and] political response to Western-Israeli intervention in
Muslim affairs."

The global South generally refers to the nations of Africa, Central and
Latin America and most of Asia.

He wrote in the LRC: "I was appalled by president Sean Riley's attack on
my reputation and his spurious comments on the conference. In his Dec, 13,
2006, statement, he insinuated that the conference was bogus and that it
revealed a 'deplorable anti-Semitism' that the 'St. FX community' found
'deeply abhorrent' and contrary to its 'traditions.' Riley left little
doubt that I was guilty of sullying my school's reputation.

"Riley and Lahey have no scholastic expertise on Islam, Iran or the
Holocaust. ... I believe they wanted to assure the white, mainstream
Canadian community, including Canadian Jews, that 'Catholic' St. FX was on
their side and that this desire far outweighed their obligation to defend
academic freedom.

"Are Riley and Lahey at the helm of a university committed to the academic
freedom of its entire faculty, which includes Muslims? Or is St. FX's
hyped 'inclusiveness' only for Christians and Jews?"

The conference became controversial the moment it was announced by Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Prof. Dossa readily concedes that the
President's rhetoric about the Holocaust - particularly his questioning of
its scale - "has been excessive and provocative."

The conference was organized by the Iranian Foreign Ministry's Institute
of Political and International Studies, which is respected internationally
and has run United Nations conferences in the past. More than 1,200 people
attended.

There were 44 speakers and 33 papers presented - five of which were given
by notorious Western Holocaust deniers.

The other presenters were scholars examining the Holocaust from a global
South perspective.

Prof. Dossa said the presenters, himself included, were invited, but he
said he had no idea in advance that Holocaust deniers were on the list. He
said that, until his arrival in Tehran, he did not see an agenda,
something he said is not uncommon for global South conferences.

He described the presentations by the Holocaust deniers as absurd. At the
session Prof. Dossa attended where one of the Holocaust deniers spoke, the
presentation was torn to shreds afterward by the largely Iranian audience.

He said he would not have attended a conference entirely of Holocaust
deniers because it would have held no scholarly or intellectual interest
for him. But a conference with five Holocaust deniers was of academic
interest for him to see what kind of reception they'd be given.

James Turk of CAUT said: "In this case, there was an aggressive attempt
based on very little information to denigrate Prof. Dossa and to vilify
him."

(source: Globe and Mail)

***********************


Deporting Nazi sends message: Justice minister


It's about sending a message to the world.

That was Justice Minister Rob Nicholsons message when asked about federal
cabinets decision Thursday to strip a 97-year-old St. Catharine's man of
his citizenship after he was found to have collaborated with Nazis during
the Second World War.

Jacob Fast also hid his German citizenship when he came to Canada in 1947.

"The message is clear that this country will not be a safe haven for
anyone involved with war crimes," said Nicholson, who was in Munich at a
conference for G-8 justice ministers Friday.

"Canada has been very clear on its policy with respect to war crimes and we
will stand up for civil rights and human rights and our international
obligations. The government believes its the right thing to do," the
Niagara Fall MP said.

But it's a message thats taken much too long to send, said David Matas,
senior honorary counsel for BNai Brith Canada.

"It's about time that it happened," Matas said.

It's also a message that Fast, who the Federal Court determined worked
with a Nazi security police unit in the Ukraine that arrested and executed
Jews, may not comprehend.

Fast suffers from Alzheimer's disease. Until a few weeks ago, he lived at
Heidehof Home for the Aged on Lake Street in St. Catharines.

The Standard was told Fast was admitted to hospital about three weeks ago.
He has since been released and moved to another nursing home.

A Jacob Fast was found at Chateau Gardens in Niagara-on-the-Lake, but
staff at there said the man, who arrived there this week, didn't have his
hearing aid and wasn't in any condition to be interviewed.

Both Matas and Stan Sadava, a Brock University psychology professor and
human rights expert, said Fast's age and condition are irrelevant to the
case.

Sadava drew the analogy between Fasts situation and that of schoolgirl
killer Paul Bernardo.

"If they hadn't found (videotapes documenting the crimes of Bernardo and
his then-wife Karla Homolka) and then they find those horrible tapes
years later and he's 70 years old or 80 years old, would you say, 'Well,
so many years have gone by. Let's let bygones be bygones' and 'What's the
point?' I'll bet most of your readers would say, 'Like hell,'" Sadava
said.

"We don't say, 'Well, you got into the country under false pretenses and
there is evidence you were involved in pretty gross abuses of human rights
but what the heck, you're sick now and you're old....' The point is to
send a message to the world and our own country about who we are."

The government first went after Fast in 1999. In 2003, a court ruled he
hid his citizenship and collaborated with Nazis.

Matas called the time its taken to get to this point - nearly 62 years
after the Second World War ended - "regrettable."

"It's a reflection of the politicization of the issue," he said. "These
cases should just have been rubber-stamped by cabinet, but what's happened
is some people who are unsympathetic to the very effort of bringing Nazi war
criminals to justice, take advantage of the fact that there is this
political step to lobby cabinet to basically stop the justice process at
this step. This lobby had the effect of slowing down the hands of justice
much too long."

Fast has 30 days to ask the Federal Court to review cabinet's decision. If
his case is turned down, he could ask it to go before the Federal Court of
Appeal, Nicholson said.

It's up to Citizenship and Immigration Canada to start the deportation
process, he added.

Citizenship and Immigration spokeswoman Marina Wilson said there is no
order to deport Fast at this time. He remains in Canada as a permanent
resident.

But Matas wants Fast deported if his health will allow it.

The Government of Canada has revoked the citizenship of 54 people. Seven
of those cases involved Second World War criminals.

(source: St. Catherines Standard)