Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is right that “The World Ignored Our Annihilation,” but he doesn’t seem to understand that nothing has really changed.  And the lesson to learn from it is that we should remember that we can’t rely on anyone when in trouble.  We must have policies that don’t require being rescued or help by any other country.

“The leaders of the Allies knew about the Holocaust in real time. They understood exactly what was happening in the death camps. They were asked to act, they could have acted, and they did not. To we Jews the lesson is clear. We must not be complacent in the face of threats of annihilation. We must not bury our heads in the sand or allow others to do the work for us. From here, the place that attests to the desire to destroy us, I, the Prime Minister of Israel, the state of the Jewish People, say to all the nations of the world: The State of Israel will do whatever is necessary to prevent another holocaust.”

I’m just a lowly blogger; I’m not in any position to change or make policy, but Netanyahu is the Israeli Prime Minister and he can do a lot more than just tap letters on a keyboard.

The Holocaust teaches us that normal cultural and “moral” values are ignored when the victims are Jews.

Today we are victimizing ourselves by agreeing to empower Arab terrorists and given them sovereignty over our Land.  Claiming that it’s possible to make a “Palestinian state” that doesn’t endanger Israel is like claiming that 1 + 1 = 3.

The early Nazi laws which only “discriminated” against Jews in Germany were nothing compared to the laws against Jews in most Arab countries today and also in the “PA Authority.”  Yes, Jews were still safer then in Germany, than we are today in Jenin, Ramallah or Shechem.

Just like there was silence from international human rights organizations then when Jews were losing their jobs and being thrown out of schools, who is complaining about the Judenrein policies of Jordan, Dubai and the PA Authority, among others?

It’s time to learn our lesson and stop talking “peace.”  We have a country to build.  We shouldn’t expect any help from others.  Once we concentrate our energies on true sovereignty, we’ll be the “light to all nations,” strong and secure.

Last night, not for the first time, I had the unpleasant experience of listening to our Prime Minister pathetically begging our enemies to “make peace.”

Netanyahu in Poland: Stop Negotiating About Negotiations

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu calls on the Palestinian Authority to come to the negotiating table without delay.

Sorry, Charlie, but that’s not how it’s done.

There will only be peace, true peace, when we stop begging and make it clear that we don’t need any favors from anyone.  We’re perfectly fine without that sort of “peace.”

True PEACE won’t cost us land or security.  There will only be true PEACE when the Arabs are ready and want it as much as we do.  You can’t buy peace, nor can it be achieved through negotiations.  I’m only interested in true PEACE.

As long as we keep on begging for “peace” we’ll just keep on getting wars, threats and terror.  We’ll just get more pressure and dangerous “suggestions” to sweeten the “negotiations.”

True PEACE doesn’t have an expiration date like milk does; it won’t grow moldy like bread left out in plastic for a week or two.

You can’t  compromise with people who want you destroyed.  Would it have worked with Hitler?  Did it work for the countries that had made treaties with him?  No.

“I think it is time to stop squabbling over preconditions. I think it’s time to stop negotiating about the negotiations. I think we have to start peace talks immediately,” Netanyahu said during a joint press conference with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk…
Kerry phoned Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday to assure him that he was continuing to push for renewed talks.
Abbas reiterated the demand that Israel must freeze West Bank settlement activity and Jewish building in east Jerusalem.
He also asked that Israel release all Palestinian prisoners in its jails.

All these scenarios that Bibi, Peres, Obama, Kerry, Blair etc. keep proposing are unworkable, fantasies, just recipes for disaster for the State of Israel and Jewish People all over the world.

Polish and Israeli archaeologists discovered traces of an underground tunnel that apparently was never used at the site of the former death camp in Sobibor.

The tunnel ran from a barracks to outside the camp fence and may have been dug by the prisoners of the Sonderkommando who worked in the camp burning the corpses of murdered Jews.

The archaeology work at Sobibor is directed by Wojciech Mazurek of Chelm, Poland, and Yoram Haimi of Israel.

Though the tunnel would have helped the prisoners to escape, Mazurek does not believe it was used.

“The Germans found the tunnel and therefore shot and then burned the entire crew of the Sonderkommando,” Mazurek told the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper.

At the gas chambers in Sobibor, Nazis murdered about 250,000 Jews mostly from Poland, the Netherlands and Slovakia. The camp was closed following an uprising on Oct. 14, 1943; about half the remaining prisoners escaped during the uprising.

Afterwards, the Germans bulldozed the death camp and tried to disguise it by planting pine trees at the site, which now is home to the Sobibor Museum displaying a pyramid of ashes and crushed bones of the victims, collected from the cremation pits thereafter.

Before Jews were sent to the gas chambers, SS officer Oberscharführer Hermann Michel, wearing a white coat to give the impression he was a physician, told they would be sent to work after undressing and undergoing “disinfection.”

The SS then led them into the gas chambers, and Ukrainians closed the doors. After the gassing, Jewish workers removed the bodies and the SS led in the next group to meet their gruesome fate.

A Jewish underground movement at Sobibor succeeded in killing 11 SS officers and several camp guards. After the deaths were discovered, approximately 600 prisoners fled, half of them surviving the shots from Nazi fire and all but 50-70 of the others managing to escape re-capture or death on the mine fields surrounding Sobibor.

JTA contributed to this article.

The Polish Academy of Sciences has dismissed historian Prof. Krzysztof Jasiewicz following an interview in which he partly blames Jews for the Holocaust.

Jasiewicz, 61, will lose his position as head of the Department of Analysis of Eastern Issues on June 1 but announced that he will appeal the decision.

In the interview, which was published in April in a special edition of Focus magazine on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Jasiewicz said that “generations of Jews worked for centuries to bring about the Holocaust,” that “without the active participation of the Jews, the Holocaust would have been impossible.

He also stated, “It is a waste of time to dialogue with the Jews.”

Director of the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Professor Eugeniusz Cezary Krol, said in a statement that Jasiewicz was fired for violating the elementary standards of scientific rigor.

Scholars and historians at the academy protested against what Jasiewicz said in the popular scientific magazine, saying his opinions were harmful.

Jasiewicz not only did not regret his remarks but also defended them. “The Jews accuse us [Poles] of the worst of everything; they are violent and arrogant against us. Our role in this dialogue is limited to apologizing,” he told Do Rzeczy magazine in an article about the controversy.

For so many people religion is practiced out of a sense superstition. Like a furry rabbit’s foot, it wards off evil spirits. Fulfilling the word of God keeps you from experiencing bad things. So what happens when you’re religious and those bad things happen anyway? It must be because you sinned.

I continue to be amazed at how many people see God as “the great blackmailer in the sky,” a term I first heard from the atheist Oxford philosopher Jonathan Glover in a debate I moderated between him and my friend Dennis Prager. God threatens us with death and suffering unless we follow His will. Insofar as I have recently published a full length book refuting this idea, both Biblically and logically, I will not here address it, other than to focus on the most insidious permutation thereof. And that is the belief that the Holocaust was punishment for Jewish sin.

No doubt you’ve heard this argument before. It’s straightforward and it goes like this. The Jews of Germany didn’t want to be Jewish any more. They wanted to be more German than the Germans. They changed their names. They assimilated. They married out. The reform movement, which started in Germany in about 1820, expunged all mention of Zion and Jerusalem from its prayer book. Germany and Berlin were the new promised land. In short, the Jews of Germany abandoned God. Worse, they thought they could get away with it. So God decided to teach them a lesson. Just try and forget Me. Here, have a few gas chambers. Let’s see how independent you feel when you’re incarcerated behind barbed wire? Let’s see how much you love Germany when they collectively slaughter your children.

I’ve heard many variations on this theme. One is that it wasn’t assimilation and attachment to Germany that brought the Holocaust, but the exact opposite. The Jews were punished for secular Zionism and an attempt to return to the ancient homeland without divine assistance. Another variation, which I heard just recently and supposedly exists on a tape from one of the great Jewish scholars of the 20th century, was that the only way the Jews would ever give up their deep, emotional attachment to the great Torah centers of Europe, like Lithuania, was to see their neighbors shoot their own parents.

Whatever the variation on this theme of the Holocaust as punishment, let’s be clear. These theories are ignorant, repulsive, and wrong. Ignorant because no human being knows the mind of God. Repulsive because they take six million innocent martyrs – including 1.5 million children – and turn them into culprits responsible for their own deaths. Wrong because they ignore the most basic fact of all, which is this: the majority of German Jews survived Hitler, even though, of course, huge numbers perished.

In 1933 there were 522,000 Jews living in the Reich. By 1939 and the start of the Second World War, 304,000 had emigrated. Beginning in January 1933, when Hitler came to office in a torch lit parade down Unter den Linden, the Jews of Germany knew that they were in the hands of a monster. Almost immediately Jews were beaten in the streets, their businesses boycotted, their Synagogues attacked. By September, 1935 the Nuremberg race laws were enacted. By November 1938 the horrors of Kristallnacht defined the growing Nazi tyranny. And throughout, the Jews of Germany tried to get out. They knew they were otherwise doomed. And while the nations of the world closed so many doors to them, the majority managed to escape.

The people who did not escape were, among so many other millions, the Hassidim and ultra-religious Jews of Poland who had no idea that Hitler had signed a secret pact with Stalin to partition Poland. They had no inkling of Hitler’s plan to invade via blitzkrieg on 1 September, 1939 and that they would be caught in his web.

Are we to believe that these Jews who were devout and pious, with deeply sounding Jewish names, who observed the minutiae of Jewish law pertaining to kosher and the Sabbath and prayed thrice daily for the Jewish return to Zion were punished with extinction while the “sinful” culprits of German Jewry mostly survived? And what of the more than one million children who were gassed and cremated who were utterly innocent of every sin?

The opening of a music club and disco in a 19th century Jewish learning center in Krakow is sparking controversy.

The club, called Mezcal, which is also a Mexican alcoholic beverage, opened Saturday night in the former Chewra Thilim Beit Midrash in the heart of Krakow’s Jewish district, Kazimierz.

The rundown building, built in 1896, was restituted more than a decade ago to the local Jewish religious community, which has rented it out to the club’s proprietor. The building had been empty and unmaintained for years, although valuable wall paintings were discovered there in 2008.

Mezcal occupies two floors of the building, with a bar installed in the former sanctuary. Photos from the opening event showed milling party-goers and rows of bottles lined up in front of the frescoes.

An article last week in the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper drew attention to the transformation, saying Mezcal will feature hard rock music, all-night “cool dance parties with DJs and aggressive, even metal concerts.” The newspaper ran a series of pictures showing workers installing the bar and other fittings.

The news sparked outrage, with a Facebook page set up to protest the club and comments to Gazeta calling it a “scandal.”

On Friday, British Jewish scholar Jonathan Webber, who teaches at Krakow’s Jagiellonian University, wrote an open letter to the leadership of the Krakow Jewish religious community, Poland’s chief rabbi, the Jewish media and others expressing “horror” at the situation.

“I am shocked that such a decision could have been made by those responsible for the Krakow Jewish community and for its historical and cultural heritage,” he wrote. “This is a deeply disturbing abuse of our heritage.”

Webber added, “How can we ask the Polish government and the Polish people to respect our heritage if we do not do so ourselves?”

Mezcal’s owners and the Jewish community leadership rejected the criticism.

One of Mezcal’s owners told Gazeta Wyborcza that all of their activities had been “conducted under the strict control of the conservator” and that “no monuments have suffered and will not suffer.”

Taduesz Jakubowicz, the president of the Jewish religious community, justified renting the building to the club. He told Gazeta that the community could not afford to maintain the building and had had no luck in finding other tenants.

“The owners of Mezcal are serious people and we believe that they will take care of the place properly,” he said. “If some problems would arise, we will just end our cooperation.”

German police arrested on Monday one of the 10 most wanted Nazis, 93-year-old Hans Lipschis,  who is facing charges of complicity in murder as a former guard at the Auschwitz extermination camp.

State prosecutors in Stuttgart are preparing an indictment against Lipschis, a native of Lithuania who was a guard at Auschwitz from the autumn of 1941 until the Nazis abandoned the camp in January 1945, according to German news reports.

Lipschis reportedly belonged to the Totenkopf-Sturmbann, or Death’s Head Battalion, that guarded the camp, and he later became a cook for SS troops at the camp.

The Zeit online newspaper reported that Lipschis is one of the “ten most wanted Nazi war criminals.”

Lipschis told the German newspaper Die Welt am Sonntag last month that he was in Auschwitz “as a cook, the whole time.” He reportedly moved to the United States in 1956 but was expelled in 1982 after immigration authorities determined he had lied about his Nazi past in order to gain entry into the United States.

The arrest has been greeted by the SimonWiesenthalCenter’s top Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff as a positive step.

It follows the announcement last month by Germany’s Central Office for Clarification of Nazi Crimes, based in Ludwigsburg, that it had provided information about 50 former Auschwitz guards to German courts, with the aim of assisting in possible war crimes trials. All the suspects are around 90 years old.

The development was triggered by the 2011 guilty verdict in Munich against former death camp guard John Demjanjuk, as an accessory to murder of nearly 29,000 Jews at Sobibor in Poland. There were no direct witnesses to Demjanjuk having physically committed murder himself, but there was sufficient evidence that he was a guard at the camp.

Kurt Schrimm, who heads the Ludwigsburg agency, told reporters last month that, since the Demjanjuk verdict, “any job in a concentration camp is sufficient evidence towards a conviction as accessory to murder.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel will receive a top award from Europe’s mainstream Orthodox rabbinic body, the Conference of European Rabbis.

It announced Monday that Merkel will be awarded the 2013 Lord Jakobovits Prize for European Jewry for her dedication to the German Jewish community and “outspoken denunciation of anti-Semitism throughout Europe.”

The award will be presented in May at the Great Synagogue of Europe in Brussels; for security reasons the exact date has not been released.

Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of European Rabbis, or CER, and a chief rabbi of Moscow, called Merkel “a worthy recipient, in recognition of her continuing efforts of intercommunal harmony across Europe, her friendship towards the Jewish community and outstanding contributions to the promotion of tolerance and understanding.”

The CER thanked Merkel in particular for standing up for the rights of Jews and Muslims to practice ritual circumcision on boys. Last December, after months of debate following attempts to ban the practice, Germany’s Bundestag passed a law that permits such circumcisions, with minor restrictions that were acceptable to Jewish leaders. Merkel had forcefully stated her support for such a law and reassured both minority communities that she would stand up for them.

Last year’s winner of the award was former Polish Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek, who served as president of the European Parliament from 2009 to 2012.