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U.S. special envoy stirs up hatred against Canada's Ukrainians

A special envoy for U.S. President Barack Obama was in Winnipeg on Monday to reignite the hate campaign against Canada's Ukrainian community on behalf of the Asper-led Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

Hannah Rosenthal, described as Obama's envoy to "monitor and combat anti-semitism" was here as a speaker at the "first annual Shindleman Family lecture at the Canadian Institute for the Study of Anti-semitism". CISA, you'll remember, is the front group created and financed by supporters of the museum with the task of smearing as anti-semitic anyone who challenges the Asper Family's plan for the CMHR.

Rosenthal, reiterating she was here "as a representative of the United States government", praised CISA for being "one of only six institutions in the entire world dedicated to the scholarly study of anti-Semitism."

She failed to mention that CISA is a one-woman show --- director and energizer bunny Catherine Chatterley --- a sessional lecturer at the University of Manitoba who has failed to win a full professorship at any university since getting her doctorate five years ago. But she's been successful in getting a lot of academics to add their names to her institute's "distinguished academic council". Prof. Elie Wiesel tops the programme as "honorary chairman". Chairman of the Board of Directors is Sandy Shindleman, who has given his family name to the lecture series that sponsored Hannah Rosenthal.

[W.Z. See articles by David Hirsh, Rhonda Spivak and Dovid Katz on the background Ukrainophobia of Catherine Chatterley.]

Rosenthal delivered a speech that parroted word for word CISA's first official act upon its creation in 2010, an attack on the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association for daring to challenge the plan to give the Jewish Holocaust special and exalted status within the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

She did note that the museum would "have a permanent exhibit on the Holocaust and a temporary exhibit on the Holodomor -- a tragic Soviet starvation campaign that cost the lives of millions." She forgot to mention that the museum has no money to build the temporary gallery where that temporary exhibit on the Holodomor would, theoretically, be situated.

Rosenthal then accused the Ukrainian association of distributing "offensive postcards across Canada that could be construed as characterizing the supporters of the permanent Holocaust exhibit as pigs."

Uh, no.

She was right that the postcard depicted a pig whispering into the ear of a sheep and saying, “All galleries are equal but some galleries are more equal than others.” It cleverly plays off the central, anti-Communist message of the book that the Red slogan "all are equal" is perverted in practice to "but some are more equal".

http://pics.livejournal.com/ucclanews/pic/000052wz/

But the idea that the pigs were Jews was the sole interpretation of Catherine Chatterley who had to find some reason to attack the Ukrainians who had been meticulous never to mention or even to hint at the ethnicity of the family that conceived the CMHR.

And by buying into that interpretation, Rosenthal joined Chatterley in demonstrating her ignorance of literature. You see, George Orwell's novel Animal Farm was set --- wait for it --- on a farm. And the characters were -- wait -- farm animals. And the animals that made the infamous statement that all the animals were all equal, except that some were more equal than others were -- wait, wait -- pigs.

So, to claim to see the pigs as Jews is a deliberate misinterpretation by someone with an agenda --- an agenda bought into by the special envoy to U.S. President Barack Obama.

[W.Z. An illuminating background to the Ukrainian-language version of George Orwell's Animal Farm ( Колгосп Тварин ) is given in the article by Andrea Chalupa titled
How 'Animal Farm' Gave Hope to Stalin's Refugees .]

There can be no mistaking that Rosenthal came to join the smear campaign against Canada's Ukrainian community. After regurgitating Chatterley's anti-Ukrainian spin in defence of the CMHR, Rosenthal threw in a gratuitous attack on the Ukrainian Canadian Congress.

"In 2010, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress called on the government to amend Canada’s war veteran’s allowance legislation to designate Ukrainian resistance groups as allied veterans and extend benefits to their surviving members. While these groups fought against the Soviets during World War II, some members were also complicit in Nazi crimes. In response, 100 international scholars sent an open letter to the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, criticizing the proposal."

"History must be precise," she lectured.

Well.....we did some historical research of our own.

We discovered that Obama's special envoy has a biased and prejudicial definition of "precise."

While she pretends to be fair and to accuse only "some" Ukrainians of being complicit in Nazi crimes, she ignores the fact that "some" European Jews were also "complicit in Nazi crimes."

Apparently 'some' has a different meaning depending on whether you're trying to smear a national group or not.

There's still a debate over how much blame to assign to the Judenrate, the Jewish councils that administered Jewish ghettos for the Nazis. With their own Jewish police to keep order, they delivered Jews to the Nazis either for forced labour or to be deported to concentration camps and death camps. Complicity indeed.

Perhaps the most famous of these council leaders is Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the head of the Judenrat (spelling of a singular council) in the Lodz ghetto, who collaborated with the Nazis when they demanded he hand over 20,000 children and elders to certain death. His infamous chilling speech to the ghetto residents was preserved for history.

"A grievous blow has struck the ghetto. They are asking us to give up the best we possess -- the children and the elderly. I was unworthy of having a child of my own, so I gave the best years of my life to children. I've lived and breathed with children, I never imagined I would be forced to deliver this sacrifice to the altar with my own hands. In my old age, I must stretch out my hands and beg: Brothers and sisters! Hand them over to me! Fathers and mothers: Give me your children!"

The Chief Rabbi in Berlin compiled lists of Jews for deportation. Jakob Gens headed the Judenrat in Vilna. He selected people for extermination. He roused the people against the resistance. He personally arrested a resistance leader and turned him over to the Nazis. And sources say his police were the only ones known to have joined firing squads killing Jews.

“It is true that our hands are smeared with the blood of our brethren, but we had to accept this horrible task. We are innocent before history." Gens said.

Other Jews joined the Nazis as "catchers", human bait who lured out Jews who were hiding from the Nazis in Berlin and Vichy France so that they could be arrested and ultimately killed.

In Berlin alone, catchers are credited with rounding up almost all of the estimated 15,000 Jews living underground during the war. Only about 1500 survived.

"Some" Jews served as kapos in the death camps. Kapos were camp trustees who kept the other inmates of a concentration camp in line, delivering full cooperation to the Nazi commandants even when it meant the deaths of their fellow Jews.

Its fascinating, though, to see how sympathetically Jewish historians treat their collaborators. They faced a "terrible choice" and their policies were "the only one that afforded hope and some prospect of survival."

These words are never used by people like Hannah Rosenthal when discussing other victims of the Nazis like Ukrainians who also faced "terrible choices" during the war.

One person who could teach Hannah Rosenthal a lesson is Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, certainly a more knowledgable and more respected Holocaust expert than Catherine Chatterley.

Wiesenthal was interviewed by author Alan Levy for his 1993 book The Wiesenthal File, and he told the story of being attacked by a fellow Jew, David Zimmet, who had been a Kapo in Mauthausen.

"By 1946, Zimet (sic) was a DP in Austria and was recognized by several survivors from Tarnów. Wiesenthal was still collecting testimony about him in the DP camp when Zimet learned that Simon was, as he puts it, ‘occupied with his case, so at seven o’clock in the morning he is coming to my office there with a knife. He was a big, strapping healthy man back in ’46 while we were all still so thin. He had lived good in the ghetto and, in the crematorium at Mauthausen, they were all given double food … I pick up the inkwell from my desk and throw it at his face to protect myself and I shout so loud that people come running to help me and his is arrested. Zimet was four weeks in jail for this. But then, because he had worked in the crematory, they need him for the Mauthausen trial and bring him to Germany as a witness. From Germany, he emigrates to Canada.’

Years later, Wiesenthal was looking over a confidential list of cases being investigated by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, when he read:

ZIMET, David. A policeman in ghetto in Tarnów. Witnesses have attested to his brutality. ‘Zimet!’ Wiesenthal exclaimed. ‘This is my old case!’ He informed the Canadian authorities of his evidence against Zimet, but they proved unwilling to prosecute a Jew for Nazi crimes. The Canadian Jewish Committee intervened and Zimet agreed to submit to a council of arbitration established by the committee.

‘Nothing ever came of it,’ says Wiesenthal, ‘because the Jewish community was reluctant to publicize the case since Zimet was himself Jewish.’ This is so terrible! Through this false attitude that we must ignore Jewish helpers of the Nazis, we are losing credibility when we say we are acting against all people that commit crimes. If everybody could see that we are not looking only for Germans and Ukrainians, but even for our own Jewish criminals, then we would have much less opposition'."

Rosenthal no doubt thought she was being clever when she concluded her speech saying:

"Where there is hatred whipped up by irresponsible leaders, we must call them out and answer as strongly as we can -- and make their message totally unacceptable to all people of conscience."

Well, we're calling out Hannah Rosenthal for whipping up hatred against Canada's Ukrainian community. Did she make Obama proud?