Wars
of the Laptop Bombers
Today's
Stories
January 29
/ 30, 2005
Gabriel Kolko
Wilsonian
and Neoconservative Myths
Linn Washington, Jr.
Con Job: Bush Pledges on Racism Lack Realism
January 28,
2005
Rachard Itani
Tsunami
Aid By the Numbers: the US Really is a Miser
Jensen / Youngblood
Iraq's
Non-Election
Patrick Cockburn / Elizabeth
Davies
Attacks on Polling Places Leave 13 Dead
Dave Zirin
The Great Donovan McNabb: Proud "Black Quarterback"
Dave Lindorff
Suicide by State Execution?
Karyn Strickler
A Corporate Death Penalty Act?
Jorge Mariscal
Fighting
the Poverty Draft
January 27,
2005
Seymour Hersh
We've
Been Taken Over By a Cult
Cockburn /
Sengupta
The
US's Bloodiest Day in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
Juke Box Journalism: Shilling for Bush
Ignacio Chapela
/ John F. García
The Laws of Nature
Mike Whitney
The Widening Chasm Among Conservatives
Dr. Teresa
Whitehurst
Those Liberal Southern Baptists!
Ray McGovern
Reining In Cheney
Russ Wellen
Marginalizing Bin Laden
Christopher
Brauchli
The
FBI's Carnival of Errors
Website of
the Day
Informed Eating
January 26,
2005
Saree Makdisi
An
Iron Wall of Colonization: Fantasies and Realities About the
Prospects for Middle East Peace
Scott Fleming
In Good Conscience: an Interview with Concientious Objector Aidan
Delgado
Dave Lindorff
Filling Saddam's Shoes: the Puppet Regime Return's to Torture
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Salazar and Obama: Two Dismal Debuts
Toni Solo
The
US and Latin America: a Not-So-Magical Reality
William James Martin
Condoleezza Rice: Confused About the Middle East
William A.
Cook
Bush's Second Inaugural Address: the Lost Ur-Version
Eric Hobsbawm
Delusions
About Democracy
Alexander Cockburn
The CIA's New Campus Spies
January 25,
2005
Brian Cloughley
Iraq
as Disneyland
Mike Roselle
Satan is My Co-Pilot
Josh Frank
/ Merlin Chowkwanyun
The War on Civil Liberties
John Chuckman
Freedom on Steroids
Paul Craig
Roberts
A
Party Without Virtue
Dr. Teresa
Whitehurst
The
Intolerance of Christian Conservatives
James Petras
The
US / Colombia Plot Against Venezuela
Website of the Day
Lowbaggers for the Environment
January 24,
2005
Fred Gardner
Last
Monologue in Burbank
Lori Berenson
On the Politicization of My Case
Uri Avnery
King
George
January 22
/ 23, 2005
Jennifer Van
Bergen / Ray Del Papa
Nuclear
Incident in Montana
Alexander Cockburn
Prince
Harry's Travails
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Company That Runs the Empire: Lockheed and Loaded
Stan Goff
The Spectacle
Saul Landau
Nothing Succeeds Like Failure
Gary Leupp
Official Madness and the Coming War on Iran
Fred Gardner
Is GW Getting the Runaround?
Phil Gasper
Clemency Denied: the Politics of Death in California
Stanley Heller
A Kill-Happy Government: Connecticut Chooses Death
Greg Moses
The Heart of Texas: an Inauguration Day Betrayal on Civil Rights
Justin Taylor
The Folk-Histories of John Ross
Daniel Burton-Rose
One China; Many Problems
Elaine Cassel
Try a Little Tyranny: Questions While Watching the Inaugural
Mike Whitney
Failing Upwards: the Rise of Michael Chertoff
Mark L. Berenson
My Daughter Has Been Wrongly Imprisoned
Christopher
Brauchli
It Doesn't Compute: a $170 Million Mistake
Gilad Atzmon
Zionism and Other Marginal Thoughts
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Day of the Rats
Mark Donham
The Secret Messages of Rahm Emmanuel
Ben Tripp
Adventures in Online Dating
Walter Brasch
Hollywood's Patriots: Soulless Kooks, Mr. Bush?
Poets' Basement
Wuest, Landau, Ford, Albert & Drum
January 21,
2005
Dave Lindorff
A
Great American Journalist:
John L. Hess (1917-2005)
Sharon Smith
The
Anti-War Movement and the Iraqi Resistance
Don Santina
Baseball, Racism and Steroid Hysteria
Ron Jacobs
Locked Out and Pissed Off: Protesting the Bush Inauguration
Kurt Nimmo
The Problem with Mike Ruppert
Don Monkerud
Once They Were Cults: Bush's Faith-Based Social Services
Alan Farago
Swimming Home from the Galapagos
Derek Seidman
An
Interview with Army Medic and Anti-War Activist Patrick Resta
Read How the
Press & the CIA
Killed Gary Webb's Career
January 20,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
Dying
for Sycophants
William Cook
The
Bush Inauguration: A Mock Epic Fertility Rite
Joshua Frank
The Democrats and Iran: Look Who's Backing Bush's Next
Eric Ruder
Why Andres Raya Snapped: Another Casualty of Bush's War
Mike Whitney
Coronation in a Garrison State
Robert Jensen
A Citizens Oath of Office
Peter Rost
Bush Report on Drug Imports: Good Data, Bad Conclusions
David Underhill
Is It Torture Yet?: the Eclectic Fool Aid Torture Test
James Reiss
Adieu, Colin Powell: Pea Soup in Foggy Bottom
CounterPunch
Staff
Voices
from Abu Ghraib: the Injured Party
January 19,
2005
Marta Russell
Social
Security Privatization & Disability: 8 Million at Risk
Mike Ferner
Marines
Stretching Movement: Protesting Urban Warfare in Toledo
Nancy Oden
The
Nuremberg Principles, Iraq and Torture
Tony Paterson
A Catalogue of British Abuses in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Divide-and-Conquer Plan to Destroy Social Security
Doug Giebel
BS and CBS: When 60 Minutes Helped Promote WMD Fantasies
Alexander Cockburn
Will
Bush Quit Iraq?
January 18,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
How
Americans Were Seduced by War: Empire and Militant Christianity
Jennifer Van
Bergen
Federal
Judge: Abu Ghraib Abuses Result of Decision to Ignore Geneva
Conventions
Douglas Lummis
It's a No Brainer; Send Graner: a Rap for Our Time
Ron Jacobs
Syria Back in the Crosshairs?
Seth DeLong
Enter the Dragon: Will Washington Tolerate a Venezuelan-Chinese
Oil Pact?
Lance Selfa
Stolen Election?: Most Democrats Didn't Even Bother to Inquire
Paul D. Johnson
Mystery Meat: a Right-to-Know About Food Origins
Elisa Salasin
An Open Letter to Jenna Bush, Future Teacher
January 17,
2005
Heather Gray
Misconceptions
About King's Methods for Social Change
Robert Fisk
Hotel Room Journalism: the US Press in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
What the NYT Death Chart Omitted: Civilians Slaughtered by US
Military
Jason Leopold
Sam Bodman's Smokestacks: Bush's Choice for Energy Czar is One
of Texas's Worst Polluters
Gary Leupp
A Message from the Iraqi Resistance
Douglas Valentine
An Act of State? the Execution of Martin Luther King
Harvey Arden
Welcome to Leavenworth: My First Encounter with Leonard Peltier
Greg Moses
King
and the Christian Left: Where Lip Service is Not an Option
January 15
/ 16, 2005
James Petras
The
Kidnapping of a Revolutionary
Robert Fisk
Flying Carpet Airlines: My Return to Baghdad
Ron Jacobs
Unfit for Military Service
Brian Cloughley
Smack Daddies of the Hindu Kush: Afghanistan's Drug Bonanza
Fred Gardner
The Allowable-Quantity Expert
Dr. Susan Block
The Counter-Inaugural Ball: Eros Day, 2005
John Ross
Zapatista Literary Llife
Suzan Mazur
Unspooking Frank Carlucci
M. Shahid Alam
America's New Civilizing Mission
Frederick B. Hudson
Jack Johnson's Real Opponent: "That I Was a Man"
Mike Whitney
Bush's Grand Plan: Incite Civil War in Iraq
Tom Crumpacker
A Constitutional Right to Travel to Cuba
Bob Burton
The Other Armstrong Williams Scandal
John Callender
La Conchita and the Indomitable 82-Year Old
Lila Rajiva
Christian Zionism
Saul Landau
An Imperial Portrait: a Visit to Hearst's Castle
Doug Soderstrom
A Touch of Evil: the Morality of Neoconservatism
Poets' Basement
Davies, Louise, Landau, Albert, Collins and Laymon
January 14,
2005
Robert Fisk
"The
Tent of Occupation"
Lee Sustar
Bush's Social Security Con Job
José
M. Tirado
The Christians I Know
Dave Zirin
The Legacy of Jack Johnson
Sheldon Rampton
Calling John Rendon: a True Tale of "Military Intelligence"
Tracy McLellan
Under the Influence
Yves Engler
The Dictatorship of Debt: the World Bank and Haiti
Tom Barry
Robert
Zoellick: a Bush Family Man
Website of
the Day
Ryan for the Nobel Prize?
January 13,
2005
Mark Chmiel
/ Andrew Wimmer
Hearts
and Minds, Revisited
Joe DeRaymond
The Salvador Option: Terror,
Elections and Democracy
Greg Moses
Every Hero a Killer?...Not
Dave Lindorff
The Great WMD Fraud: Time for an Accounting
Jorge Mariscal
Dr. Galarza v. Alberto Gonzales: Which Way for Latinos?
Christopher Brauchli
Gonzales and the Death Penalty: the Executioner Never Sleeps
Gary Leupp
"Fighting
for the Work of the Lord": Christian Fascism in America
January 12,
2005
Robert Fisk
Fear
Stalks Baghdad
Josh Frank
The
Farce of the DNC Contest
Jack Random
Casualties
of War: the Untold Stories
John Roosa
Aceh's Dual Disasters: the Tsunami and Military Rule
Carol Norris
In the Wake of the Tsunami
Mike Whitney
Pink Slips at CBS
Alan Farago
Can
the Everglades be Saved?
Paul Craig
Roberts
What's
Our Biggest Problem in Iraq...the Insurgency or Bush?
January 11,
2005
Tom Barry
The
US isn't "Stingy"; It's Strategic: Aid as a Weapon
of Foreign Policy
James Hodge
and Linda Cooper
Voice
of the Voiceless: Father Roy Bourgeois and the School of the
the Americas
Linda S. Heard
Farah Radio Break Down: Joseph Farah's Messages of Hate and Homophobia
Derrick O'Keefe
Electoral Gigolo?: Richard Gere and the Occupied Vote
Gila Svirsky
A Tale of Two Elections
Harry Browne
Irish
"Peace Process", RIP
January 10,
2005
Ramzy Baroud
Faith-Based
Disasters: Tsunami Aid and War Costs
Talli Nauman
Killing
Journalists: Mexico's War on a Free Press
Uri Avnery
Sharon's Monologue
Dave Lindorff
Tucker
Carlson's Idiot Wind
Dave Zirin
Randy
Moss's Moondance
Dave Silver
Left Illusions About the Democratic Party
Charles Demers
Plan Salvador for Iraq: Death Squads Come in Waves
William A.
Cook
Causes
and Consequences: Bush, Osama and Israel
January 8 /
9, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Say,
Waiter, Where's the Blood in My Margarita Glass?
John H. Summers
Chomsky
and Academic History
Greg Moses
Getting Real About the Draft
Walter A. Davis
Bible Says: the Psychology of Christian Fundamentalism
Victor Kattan
The EU and Middle East Peace
John Bolender
The Plight of Iraq's Mandeans
Robert Fisk
The Politics of Lebanon
Fred Gardner
Situation NORML
Joe Bageant
The Politics of the Comfort Zone
Mickey Z.
I Want My DDT: Little Nicky Kristof Bugs Out
Ben Tripp
CounterClockwise Evolution
Ron Jacobs
Elvis and His Truck: Out on Highway 61
Saul Landau
Sex
and the Country
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Time to End the Blackout
Ellen Cantarow
NPR's Distortions on Palestine
Richard Oxman
Bageantry Continued
Poets' Basement
Gaffney, Landau, Albert, Collins
January 7,
2005
Omar Barghouti
Slave
Sovereignty: Elections Under Occupation
Kent Paterson
The Framing of Felipe Arreaga: Another Mexican Environmentalist
Arrested
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Old
Vijay Merchant and the Tsunami
David Krieger
Cancel the Inauguration Parties
Gideon Levy
New Year, Old Story
Dave Lindorff
Ohio Protest: First Shot Fired by Congressional Progressives
Christopher
Brauchli
Privatizing the IRS
Roger Burbach
/ Paul Cantor
Bush,
the Pentagon and the Tsunami
January 6,
2005
Brian J. Foley
Gonzales:
Supporting Torture is not His Greatest Sin
Greg Moses
Boot
Up America!: Gen. Helmly's Memo Leaks New Bush Deal
Petras / Chomsky
An
Open Letter to Hugo Chavez
Alan Maass
The Decline of the Dollar
Dave Lindorff
Colin Powell's Selective Sense of Horror
Jenna Orkin
The EPA and a Dirty Bomb: 9/11's Disastrous Precedent
P. Sainath
The
Tsunami and India's Coastal Poor
January 5,
2005
Alan Farago
2004:
An Environmental Retrospective
Winslow T.
Wheeler
Oversight
Detected?: Sen. McCain and the Boeing Tanker Scam
Jean-Guy Allard
Gary Webb: a Cuban Perspective
Fred Gardner
Strutting, Smirking, As If The Mad Plan Was Working
David Swanson
Albert Parsons on the Gallows
Richard Oxman
The Joe Bageant Interview
Bruce Jackson
Death
on the Living Room Floor
January 4,
2005
Michael Ortiz
Hill
Mainlining
Apocalypse
Elaine Cassel
They
Say They Can Lock You Up for Life Without a Trial
Yoram Gat
The
Year in Torture
Martin Khor
Tragic
Tales and Urgent Tasks from the Tsunami Disaster
Gary Leupp
Death
and Life in the Andaman Islands
January 3,
2005
Ron Jacobs
The
War Hits Home
Dave Lindorff
Is
There a Single Senator Who Will Stand Up for Black Voters?
Mike Whitney
The Guantanamo Gulag
Joshua Frank
Greens and Republicans: Strange Bedfellows
Maria Tomchick
Playing Politics with Disaster Aid
Rhoda and Mark
Berenson
Our Daughter Lori: Another Year of Grave Injustice
David Swanson
The Media and the Ohio Recount
Kathleen Christison
Patronizing
the Palestinians
January 1 /
2, 2005
Gary Leupp
Earthquakes
and End Times, Past and Present
Rev. William
E. Alberts
On "Moral Values": Code Words for Emerging Authoritarian
Tendencies
M. Shahid Alam
Testing Free Speech in America
Stan Goff
A Period for Pedagogy
Brian Cloughley
Bush and the Tsunami: the Petty and the Petulant
Sylvia Tiwon
/ Ben Terrall
The Aftermath in Aceh
Ben Tripp
Requiem for 2004
Greg Moses
A Visible Future?
Steven Sherman
The 2004 Said Awards: Books Against Empire
Sean Donahue
The Erotics of Nonviolence
James T. Phillips
The Beast's Belly
David Krieger
When Will We Ever Learn
Poets' Basement
Soderstrom, Hamod, Louise and Albert
December 23,
2004
Chad Nagle
Report
from Kiev: Yushchenko's Not Quite Ready for Sainthood
David Smith-Ferri
The
Real UN Disgrace in Iraq
Bill Quigley
Death
Watch for Human Rights in Haiti
Mickey Z.
Crumbs
from Our Table
Christopher Brauchli
Merck's Merry X-mas
Greg Moses
When
No Law Means No Law
Alan Singer
An
Encounter with Sen. Schumer: a Very Dangerous Democrat
David Price
Social
Security Pump and Dump
Website of the Day
Gabbo Gets Laid
December 22,
2004
James Petras
An
Open Letter to Saramago: Nobel Laureate Suffers from a Bizarre
Historical Amnesia
Omar Barghouti
The Case for Boycotting Israel
Patrick Cockburn / Jeremy Redmond
They Were Waiting on Chicken Tenders When the Rounds Hit
Harry Browne
Northern Ireland: No Postcards from the Edge
Richard Oxman
On the Seventh Column
Kathleen Christison
Imagining
Palestine
Website of the Day
FBI Torture Memos
December 21,
2004
Greg Moses
The
New Zeus on the Block: Unplugging Al-Manar TV
Dave Lindorff
Losing
It in America: Bunker of the Skittish
Chad Nagle
The View from Donetsk
Dragon Pierces
Truth*
Concrete
Colossus vs. the River Dragon: Dislocation and Three Gorges Dam
Patrick Cockburn
"Things Always Get Worse"
Seth DeLong
Aiding Oppression in Haiti
Ahmad Faruqui
Pakistan and the 9/11 Commission's Report
Paul Craig
Roberts
America
Locked Up: a System of Injustice
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Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
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Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
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Corrie
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Francis Boyle
Impeach
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Click
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|
Weekend Edition
January 29 / 30, 2005
Beyond the UN's Rhetoric
Holocaust
History
By
LENNI BRENNER
The United Nations' January 24th holocaust
commemoration came & went with little impact on the worldwide
public's understanding of that era's politics. The slaughter
of between 5 and 6 million Jews has become history's best known
black hats/white hats movie. Nazism has been thoroughly scrutinized
by historians. The educated public has a good grasp on what happened,
but, for the most part, they knoweth not why.
That broad public knows even
less about the white hats, the Jews. Anne Frank, to young to
have any politics, has become the best known victim. But of course
the adult generations had their sundry ideologies. These have
been studied in detail by historians. However, few beyond them,
Jew or gentile, are aware of the research.
This is understandable. WW
ll ended 59 years ago. But some of that story still has contemporary
significance. Israel's present government is based on a coalition
of Arial Sharon's Likud, & Shimon Peres and the remnants
of the 'left'
Zionist tradition. Both factions had their supporters in the
ghettoes of Nazi-occupied Europe.
Sharon was born into a family
of supporters of Vladimir (Zeev) Jabotinsky and his Zionist Revisionist
movement. When Sharon became a teenager, he abandoned Revisionism
for the Peres's Labor Zionism. He was a Laborite while he became
famous as a field general. But he subsequently returned to Revisionism,
In its latest form, the Likud.
In 2003, Moshe Arens, a former
Likud defense and foreign minister, ran an article in the 4/18/03
New York Sun, a daily that exists only to tell us of the greatness
of capitalism and Zionism. His curious essay, below, is a good
start, re getting a feel for holocaust Jewry's politics. I sent
in a critique, also below, which the Sun's editor, Seth Lipsky,
a gentile, a former editor of the Wall Street Journal, and a
featured speaker at Jabotinsky commemorations, didn't dare run.
Read them both, with the realization
that it is unlikely that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan read
Arens' article. But then ask yourself a question: If he had read
it, would he have added anything to the platitudes he uttered
on the occasion? Then ask some more important questions. What
do the grim facts about the history of Sharon's Likud tell us
about the legitimacy of the Zionist state? What can the Palestinians
expect to get in the way of their rights from today's Zionist
Revisionists?
***
Warsaw Ghetto: The Debt of
Truth
By MOSHE ARENS
This weekend will mark the
60th anniversary of the outbreak of the revolt in the Warsaw
Ghetto, dramatized recently in the film "The Pianist."
The revolt, the first major uprising against the Germans in World
War II and the most prominent act of Jewish resistance to the
German slaughter of the Jews of Europe, has become a symbol of
heroism. It was a desperate battle that pitted a small group
of Jewish fighters against the might of the German army, a battle
for the dignity of man and the honor of the Jewish people.
Two organizations of Jewish
fighters had been preparing themselves for the revolt. Best known
by the initials of their Polish names, they were: ZOB, for Zydowska
Organizacja Bojowa, a confederation of Socialist-Zionist movements,
the anti-Zionist Socialist Bund, and the Communists, led by Mordechai
Anielewicz; and ZZW, for Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowi, composed
mainly of Zionist-Revisionist Betar members, led by Pawel Frenkel,
David Apfelbaum, and Leon Rodal. Considerable rivalry and even
animosity existed between the two groups, all attempts at uniting
them having failed. Only a semblance of coordination between
them was established prior to the revolt.
Only those who are acquainted
with the fratricidal animosity that characterized the relationship,
during the years leading up to the war, between the Socialist
Zionist parties and the Revisionist Zionist Party, headed by
Zeev Jabotinsky, can begin to comprehend the inability or unwillingness
to unite the two Jewish military organizations at that desperate
time. The movements that founded ZOB considered Betar to be a
semi-fascist movement, whereas they saw themselves as representing
all the workers' parties and progressive movements in the ghetto.
The Socialist Zionist movements found it easier to bring the
anti-Zionist Bund and the Communists into their ranks than to
unite with ZZW. They all seem to have been united in their disdain
for the Revisionist youth. The initiative undertaken by senior
Revisionist leaders in the ghetto to unite the two fighting movements
was rejected by ZOB.
After more than 300,000 of
Warsaw's Jews had been sent to the gas chambers at Treblinka
in the summer of 1942, only about 60,000 Jews remained in the
Ghetto. They now lived in three unconnected Jewish sectors. The
central sector, which contained the houses inhabited by part
of the surviving Jewish population, and two German workshop areas
where Jewish slave-laborers were producing goods for the German
war machine. In each of these areas, there were units of ZOB
and ZZW fighting units. The headquarters of both organizations
were located in the central sector; ZOB headed by Anielewicz
at Mila Street 39, ZZW headed by Frenkel, at Muranowska Street
7.
Only scant documentation is
available regarding the fighting in the Ghetto. Yosef Kermish,
at the time head of the Yad Vashem archives, wrote in 1965 in
his preface to a collection of documents on the Warsaw Ghetto
revolt: "As for the revolt itself and the actual preparations
for it, the Jewish and Polish sources are regretfully not sufficiently
adequate . What is missing in the Jewish and Polish sources regarding
the revolt must necessarily be complemented from German sources
that were written by the enemy himself. The most important of
the German documents regarding the revolt are the reports of
[German General] Juergen Stroop, that were written at the time
of the events themselves." Stroop sent daily reports on
the action in the Ghetto and a summary report was written by
Stroop on May 16. It is from these reports that a picture begins
to emerge on the course of the revolt.
In examining Stroop's reports
one's attention is drawn to the following statement that appears
in his summary report: "The main Jewish combat group in
which participated also Polish bandits, retreated already on
the first or second day to a place called Muranowski Square.
There it was reinforced by a significant number of Polish bandits.
The group wanted to fortify itself in every way possible in order
to prevent us from penetrating. On the roof of a concrete building
they raised the Jewish flag and the Polish flag, as a signal
of war against us."
It was in Muranowski Square
and the neighboring houses on Muranowska Street that ZZW fighters
armed with rifles, sub-machine guns, machine guns, and Molotov
cocktails had established fortified positions and succeeded in
holding up the advance of the German forces during an entire
day's fighting on the second day of the revolt, April 20, 1943.
It was the scene of recurrent fierce battles between ZZW and
Stroop's forces in the days to come. This is corroborated by
testimony given after the war by a number of Poles who participated
in these battles. Here, heavy casualties were sustained by the
ZZW, which lost many of its leading fighters.
During the entire revolt there
was fighting throughout the Ghetto by ZOB and ZZW fighters. The
fiercest battles, which lasted several days and were possibly
the most important of the revolt, seem to have been waged by
ZZW in the area of Muranowski Square. Yet the story of the heroic
struggle in the Warsaw Ghetto, the myth of Jewish heroism that
has captured the imagination of so many, has left little room
for the participation of the fighters of the ZZW in the revolt.
Maybe this was inevitable, since none of the leaders of the underground
organized by Betar survived the revolt.
To the best of our knowledge,
Pawel Frenkel, together with some of his comrades, fell in a
battle with German troops and Polish police on May 11 in Warsaw,
after surviving the fighting at Muranowski Square. Most of the
ZZW fighters were killed in the revolt. The story of the revolt
has come down to us primarily through two ZOB leaders who survived
the fighting: Yitzhak Cukierman, who was the ZOB's liaison to
the Polish underground outside the Ghetto during the revolt,
and Marek Edelman of the Bund who fought in the Ghetto. Edelman,
in his book, "The Ghetto Fights," published shortly
after the war, makes no mention of the ZZW. Cukierman, on arriving
in Israel after the war, spoke disparagingly of the ZZW.
It seems that political considerations
colored their reports of the fighting in the Ghetto. Indicative
of this is a report sent by the Jewish National Committee in
Warsaw to the London Representation of Polish Jewry on May 24,
1944, signed by Yitzhak Cukierman and others, which contains
the following passage: "Let the Workers' Movement throughout
the world know, that the organizers of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt
and its leadership were The Workers' Movement for Labor Eretz
Yisrael and that hundreds of the fighters struggled and fell
inspired by this ideal, so that their death will be one of the
foundations for a socialist future of the Jewish masses in Eretz
Yisrael." For the ZZW there was nobody left to present their
side of the story.
Sixty years have passed since
the outbreak of the revolt in the Warsaw Ghetto. As it becomes
a legend it should be freed of political bias and made to conform
as close to the actual course of events as possible. This is
a debt we owe to the heroes of the revolt.
***
Re Moshe Arens' 4/18 "Warsaw
Ghetto - The Debt of Truth"
By LENNI BRENNER
Moshe Arens' 4/18 "Warsaw
Ghetto - The Debt of Truth" condemns the refusal of the
Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, the Socialist-Zionist, Stalinist
and Bundist underground, to unite with Betar's Zydowski Zwiazek
Wojskowi in their final battle. "ZOB considered Betar to
be a semi-fascist movement."
He blames this on "fratricidal
animosity ... between the Socialist Zionist parties and the Revisionist
Zionist Party, headed by Zeev Jabotinsky." But all ideologies,
Jewish or gentile, saw classic Revisionism as fascist.
Jabotinsky loved pre-Mussolini
Italy and condemned him as a "head buffalo." However,
he grasped that Britain wasn't going to set up a Zionist state,
and wished for Rome as a substitute Mandatory. In New York's
4/11/35 Jewish Daily Bulletin, he implored readers to stop using
"'Fascism' as a cuss word." It was
"the official doctrine
of ... one of those countries where Jews enjoy full equality....
It is very unwise to insist on antagonizing one of them by turning
to abuse a term and an idea which is so highly cherished."
Indeed, "the Permanent Mandates Commission which supervises
Palestinian affairs has an Italian chairman .... Responsible
leaders ought to take care."
The 3/36 issue of Revisionism's
L'Idea Sionistica reported the establishment of a Betar
squadron at Mussolini's naval academy:
"A triple chant ordered
by the squad's commanding officer -- 'Viva L'Italia!, Viva IL
Re!, Viva IL Duce!' resounded .... This year there are 49 cadets
.... The majority are university students and 30 of them belong
to the GUF." (Gioventù Universitaria
Fascista - University Fascist Youth- LB)
London's 6/12/36 World Jewry
reported an interview with Wolfgang von Weisl, Revisionism's
financial director: "He, personally, was a supporter of
Fascism, and he rejoiced at the victory of Fascist Italy in Abyssinia
as a triumph of the White races against the Black."
Mussolini became Hitler's ally
against the left in Spain and expelled his Betar fans. But as
late as 1/40, Ha Dagel, their Harbin magazine, had photos of
them on stage with Japanese, puppet Manchukuo and Zionist flags:
"The Third Congress of
the Jewish Communities of the Far East welcomes the Great Empire
of the Rising Sun's aspiration for the establishment of peace
and a new order in East Asia .... The Third Congress ... calls
on the Jewry of the Far East to actively participate in establishing
the new order and in building East Asia, guided by the principle
of struggle against the Comintern, in close collaboration with
all nations."
Each ZOB constituent must be
held accountable for its role in the 1930s and holocaust. But
in 1943 they faced military defeat, with or without the ZZW,
at the hands of Hitler, self-proclaimed disciple of Mussolini
and Fascism. Historians will forgive them for refusing to sully
their defense of Jewish honor, by accepting as comrades, adherents
of their murderers' ideology.
Lenni Brenner is the author of Zionism
in the Age of the Dictators, and the editor of 51
Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis . He has
also just edited Jefferson
& Madison On Separation of Church and State: Writings on
Religion and Secularism (Barricade Books). He can be reached
at BrennerL21@aol.com.
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