Feb. 16



FRANCE:

Sarkozy Stirs Anger With Holocaust Curriculum


President Nicolas Sarkozy dropped an intellectual bombshell this
week, surprising the nation and touching off waves of protest with his
revision of the school curriculum: beginning next fall, he said, every
fifth grader will have to learn the life story of one of the 11,000 French
children killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust.

"Nothing is more moving, for a child, than the story of a child his own
age, who has the same games, the same joys and the same hopes as he, but
who, in the dawn of the 1940s, had the bad fortune to be defined as a
Jew," Mr. Sarkozy said at the end of a dinner speech to Frances Jewish
community on Wednesday night. He added that every French child should be
"entrusted with the memory of a French child-victim of the Holocaust."

Adding to the national fracas over the announcement, Mr. Sarkozy wrapped
his plan in the cloak of religion, placing blame for the wars and violence
of the last century on an "absence of God" and calling the Nazi belief in
a hierarchy of races "radically incompatible with Judeo-Christian
monotheism."

Education Minister Xavier Darcos explained later that the aim of the plan
was to "create an identification between a child of today and one of the
same age who was deported and gassed."

The Holocaust is already taught in French schools, but some psychiatrists
and educators predicted that requiring students to identify with a
specific victim would traumatize them.

Secularists accused Mr. Sarkozy, who is already under fire for his
frequent praise of God and religion, of subverting both the countrys
iron-clad separation of church and state and the national ideal of a
single, nonreligious identity for all.

Political opponents dismissed the plan as his latest misguided idea,
unveiled without reflection or consultation. Some historians argued that
the focus on victims could steer attention away from the Vichy
government's collaboration with the Nazis. Still others warned that the
plan could backfire, creating resentment among France's ethnic Arab and
African populations if they felt their own histories were getting short
shrift.

"Every day the president throws out a new unhappy idea with no coherence,"
said Pascal Bruckner, the philosopher. "But this last one is truly
obscene, the very opposite of spirituality. Let's judge it for what it is:
a crazy proposal of the president, not the word of the Gospel."

The initiative has also pitted some Jews against one another. "It is
unimaginable, unbearable, tragic and above all, unjust," Simone Veil, a
Holocaust survivor and honorary president of the Foundation for the Memory
of the Holocaust, told the Web site of the magazine LExpress. "You cannot
inflict this on little ones of 10 years old! You cannot ask a child to
identify with a dead child. The weight of this memory is much too heavy to
bear."

Ms. Veil was in the audience when Mr. Sarkozy spoke, and said that when
she heard his words, "My blood turned to ice."

But Serge Klarsfeld, a Jewish historian who has devoted his life to
recording the list and biographies of Frances Holocaust victims, praised
the president for his "courage."

"This is the crowning glory of long and arduous work," he said. "To those
who say it's too difficult for young children - that's not true. What they
see on television or in a horror film is much worse. This is not a morbid
mission."

Mr. Klarsfeld likened the plan to a practice by the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which gives visitors small
booklets describing the experiences of Holocaust victims and survivors.

On one level, Mr. Sarkozy's plan is a logical extension of his sometimes
sentimental and pedagogical approach to governing. Last year, he enraged
politicians on the left, the biggest union for high school teachers and
some historians and teachers when he ordered all high schools in France to
read a handwritten letter of a 17-year-old student who was executed by the
Nazis for his resistance activities.

On another level, it reflects his oft-stated declaration that as
president, he is also a "friend" as he calls himself, of Israel. By
extension, he is also a friend of France's Jews. He is, for example, the
first French president to address the annual dinner of France's Jewish
community.

But there is something else. Mr. Sarkozy is shattering another barrier in
French intellectual life: religion. His public statements on the subject
seem to reflect a deeply held belief that religious values have an
important place in everyday French society - an iconoclastic position for
a French politician.

When Mr. Sarkozy was made an Honorary Canon of the Basilica of St. John
Lateran in Rome last December, he proposed a "positive secularism" that
does not consider religions a danger, but an asset. He was even more
provocative in declaring that "the schoolteacher will never be able to
replace the priest or the pastor in teaching the difference between good
and evil."

In Saudi Arabia last month, he infused his speech with more than a dozen
references to God, who, he said, "liberates" man. He also said last month
that it was a mistake to delete the reference to "Europe's Christian
roots" from the European Constitution.

In France, a country where ones religion is typically kept private, Mr.
Sarkozy heralds his religious identity, referring publicly to his Jewish
grandfather and wearing his Roman Catholicism on his sleeve.

"I am of Catholic culture, Catholic tradition, Catholic belief, even if my
religious practice is episodic," he wrote in a book of essays in 2004. "I
consider myself as a member of the Catholic Church."

Still, Mr. Sarkozy's conduct in his personal life seems to contradict the
image of Catholic spirituality. Twice divorced, three times married, he
has alienated the country to the point that there is widespread
disapproval of his behavior in his personal life.

That level of disapproval seems to have made Mr. Sarkozy vulnerable in
almost anything he does these days, including his Holocaust initiative.

Teachers defended the current approach to the Holocaust in French schools.
Since 2002, fifth-graders have studied the Nazis' systematic destruction
of six million Jews as a crime against humanity.

Older children watch films on the Holocaust, visit Holocaust museums and
memorials and take field trips to concentration camps. Schools where
students were taken away for deportation hang plaques in their memory.

"The Holocaust has to be put in the context of the rise of the Nazis and
the war, not just emotion and dramatic spectacle," said Gilles Moindrot,
secretary-general of the largest union for primary school teachers. "If
you do this with the memory of individual Jews, youd have to do it with the
victims of slavery or the wars of religion. We can't have this approach."

Some of Mr. Sarkozy's other political foes accuse him of trying to put his
personal stamp everywhere. "One day he is giving us sermons about God,"
said Jean-Luc Mlenchon, a Socialist senator on LCI television on Friday,
adding, "Now he has suddenly turned himself into a teacher."

Other analysts blamed the confessional approach of the United States for
infecting Mr. Sarkozy's thinking. "Listen, it's in the air of the times,"
said Regis Debray, the philosopher and author, on France Inter radio
Friday. "There is a religious sentimentality, a pretty vague
religiousness, let's say, in the world of show business, in the world of
business, that comes from America. It's the neoconservative wave of the
born-agains."

MRAP, an organization that campaigns against racism, accused Mr. Sarkozy
of chauvinism by singling out French victims of the Holocaust for study
and excluding other groups, like the Gypsies.

Mr. Sarkozy's advisers acknowledged that he came up with his Holocaust
plan for schoolchildren without any formal consultation. In the face of the
criticism, however, Mr. Sarkozy vowed to proceed.

"It is ignorance - not knowledge - that leads to the repetition of
abominable situations," he said during a visit to Prigueux in central
France on Friday, adding, "You do not traumatize children by giving them
the gift of the memory of a country."

(source: New York Times)





CANADA/ITALY:


Canada extradites 'Beast of Bolzano' Nazi----Canada extradites former SS
prison guard sentenced to life in prison in Italy


An 83-year-old former SS prison guard who was sentenced to life in jail
in Italy for Nazi war crimes was being extradited from Canada to Rome on
Friday, officials said.

Michael Siefert when he was an SS prison guard.

Michael Seifert was due to arrive Saturday morning on a special military
flight from Toronto. He will be transferred to a military prison near
Naples to begin serving his sentence, said Bartolomeo Costantini, the
military prosecutor who pursued the case.

Seifert, known as the "Beast of Bolzano," was convicted in absentia in
2000 by a military tribunal in Verona on nine counts of murder, committed
while he was an SS guard at a prison transit camp in Bolzano, northern
Italy.

At his trial, people testified that Seifert starved a 15-year-old prisoner
to death, gouged out a person's eyes and tortured a woman before killing
her and her daughter.

Seifert, a Canadian citizen of Ukrainian origin, has acknowledged being a
guard at the SS-run camp but denies being involved in atrocities.

In 1944 and 1945, the Bolzano camp served as a transit point for Jews,
Italian resistance fighters, Italians drafted for factory work and German
army deserters who were being shipped north.

Seifert, who has lived in Canada since 1951, unsuccessfully fought efforts
by the Canadian government to strip him of his citizenship based on
allegations that he hid his past when he entered the country.

Canada bars former members of the SS and related units such as the Nazi SD
because of their involvement in concentration camps and with other war
crimes.

Last month Seifert lost a bid to have the Supreme Court of Canada consider
his appeal seeking to stop his extradition to Italy, clearing the way for
his deportation.

Avi Benlolo, president of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for
Holocaust Studies in Canada, said Seifert needs to face justice in Italy.

"It's critical that this happens," Benlolo said. "It sets an example for
other war criminals, not only Nazi war criminals, but war criminals
related to Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur or any other genocide, that there's no
time limit to justice."

The Italian prosecutor, Costantini, said he planned to question Seifert as
a witness to atrocities committed by other guards at the camp.

The former SS officer eventually could be allowed to serve his sentence on
house arrest because of his age, Costantini said.

"Given his age, he could ask to be detained at home, if there is someone
willing to host him," the prosecutor told The Associated Press in a
telephone interview.

(source: Associated Press)