A New Beginning

Things change, as was noted a long time ago by a distracted Greek. What has changed here most recently is that I have realized that while I want to talk about how my pursuit of an open debate regarding the Holocaust affects my personal life, and vice versa, this is not a matter that is uppermost in the minds of those I am inviting to join with me here. Some hardly care if my back hurts, that I have no money, or that my daughter has just given birth (this morning) to a son. And so it goes, as Kurt used to have it.

Those I initially invited to post here are serious guys and want to treat serious matters seriously, so I have created a scond blog for them where they won't get their stuff mucked up with stories about Smith's personal life. I call this new blog THE HOLOCAUST STORY. It will take a couple weeks to get it off the ground. I don't like how the present template reads on my screen, and when I can get my Webmaster over here we'll straight that out.

So--from this date forward you will find the serious news stories being addressed at THE HOLOCAUST STORY, and my journal stuff here. I'm perfectly willing to hear from you on any of these matters.

I realized only as I previewed this post that the title about a new beginning was more suggestive than I had taken it to be. A new beginning here, and a new beginning on the other side where our daughter gave birth to a new beginning at 6am this morning. A boy. She called me at 8.30 to give me the news. It was her first time. I asked her if she'd enjoyed the process. She said, "Not much." She was tired. So now I'm a grandfather. Seventy-five years old. I suppose it's about time. Did I enjoy the process? Not much. Surely it will get better.

Child Arrested For "Multiplication Denial"

Anti-Defamation League Sees New Form of Jew-Hatred in Numeric Disease

by Michael K. Smith

Hebron:

A high school student in this West Bank town has been arrested for "multiplication denial" after repeatedly insisting that a negative number multiplied by another negative number yields a negative product. A world-wide consensus of mathematicians determined long ago that two negative numbers multiplied together produces a POSITIVE product."

But it's obvious," said the 14-year-old student, Rihab Hanafi, as she was led away in chains by Uzi-toting guards. "Multiplication magnifies; therefore two negative numbers multiplied together necessarily produces a MORE NEGATIVE product."Hanafi's repeating her false claims over and over and refusing to instantly accept the word of others gave her away as a died-in-the-wool Denier right off the bat.

"This kind of superficially plausible reasoning is characteristic of Holocaust Deniers, to which Mathematics Denial is obviously related," said Abraham Foxman, Director of the Anti-Defamation League. "But the underlying motive is obviously hatred for truth and hatred for Jews, the principal bearers of truth."

According to the Anti-Defamation League, Hanafi's antics are just the latest in a series of anti-math atrocities that are making the world a perilous place for number theorists. Last year, a Belgian neo-Nazi announced he had discovered a new whole number that he claimed belonged between 3 and 4. He was arrested for trivializing the integers.

A short time later a Palestinian detainee claimed that Israel's policy of reserving 92% of the land for the Jewish people made it mathematically impossible to achieve equality with the Palestinians. He is now serving a ten-year sentence for denying the decimals.

Given the growing threat to objective numerical truth, Rihab Hanafi has been placed in solitary confinement and her website arguing her case has been removed from the world wide web. ADL officials stated yesterday that thousands of innocent victims around the world have been led astray by her multiplication deviance over the years. The Hanafi family lawyer responded that if Enron can proceed on the basis that a negative plus a negative is a positive then there is no reason his client can't bring "creative accounting" to the multiplication tables. He will soon be charged with numerical anti-Semitism.

Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel, reached for comment at an international conference on Peace Through Guilt, said that the negative numbers fiasco highlights the terrifying fragility of quantitative truth. "Numbers are the foundation of civilization. Once we allow them to be questioned, only disaster can ensue. If Mathematics Denial is left unchecked, buildings will fall, bridges collapse, cities grind to a halt. Just think where we would be if Einstein had deliberately miscalculated e=mc2. World War II might never have ended."

Asked for an estimation of how serious the current situation is, he replied: "Today negative numbers, tomorrow the extinction of world Jewry. Never again."

A spokesman for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which has spent years tracking down Nazi war criminals that escaped Allied prosecution at Nuremberg, added his opinion that, "Denying the properties of negative numbers is no different than denying that six million Jews died in the Holocaust. Next thing you know Deniers will argue that Hitler ADDED six million Jews to Europe with his death camps. Obviously, skepticism in any form is but a first step towards a repetition of the Holocaust."

michael smith

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Michael K. Smith is the author of "Portraits of Empire," "The Madness of King George" (illustrations by Matt Wuerker), and "Rise To Empire" (forthcoming), all with Common Courage Press.

The Times and Israeli Propaganda

Sat, 15 Oct 2005 06:47:01 EDT

public@nytimes.com

Dear Mr. Calame:

Your predecessor as Public Editor at the Times, Daniel Okrent, bristled at the suggestion that the Times news coverage was often slanted to favor Israel.

Well, things haven't changed. Take a look at the news story of Tuesday, October 13, 2005, by Warren Hoge headed "UN Is Gradually Becoming More Hospitable to Israel."

It isn't that the story recounts what Israeli representatives and supporters see as their advances in the United Nations or that the only real sources in the story are official Israeli government functionaries (UN Ambassador Dan Gellerman and Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom) and officers of Israeli front groups (Harold Tanner, Chairman of the Council of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations; Abe Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League; and Amy Goldstein, Director of United Nations Affairs of B'Nai B'rith); nor even that these understandably partisan individuals describe the United Nations as having an "institutional bias against Israel" (Foxman).

Perhaps given his information sources we can even understand Hoge's gratuitous "news" statement that the UN special committees dealing with Palestinian rights are considered as "forums for Israel bashing" and are considered to be candidates for elimination as having "outlived their usefulness."

No, it isn't any of these things that makes the news story an outrage. We have even sadly come to expect these things in Times stories. Actually, I was surprised that Abe Foxman didn't suggest that the United Nations was a hotbed of anti-Semitism. He came close.

What was appalling in the story was that after telling us that "antagonism between Israel and the United Nations goes back a long way" your reporter cited only the dispute over the "Zionism is racism" resolution of 1975 as an example of Israel's UN troubles. The many United Nations Resolutions and other actions critical of Israel's actions abusing the Palestinians and in violation of international law are not mentioned at all except in the non-informative context of the "39 [US] vetoes to protect Israel from Security Council censure" over many years.

The clear implication is that these vetoes were amply justified to prevent injustice to an oppressed Israel, which is a farce if one understood the substance of the subjects of the critical resolutions and the huge majorities favoring them (illegal land seizures, killing of innocents, etc.). The reality is that Israel had become a rogue state in the view of the vast majority.

The story contains not a word about the fact that every single major international human rights organization from Amnesty International to Israel's own B'Tselem has repeatedly condemned Israel's record of abuse of Palestinians under universally accepted standards and the criticisms of the United Nations by Israel and its supporters, so faithfully mirrored by Mr. Hoge in his "news" story, applies to these very same organizations and are hurled against them routinely by Israel and its fans - but discreetly is not mentioned here presumably because the UN is seen as more unpopular target in the US.

Also not mentioned is the recent decision of the International Court of Justice holding that the Israeli "settlements" - all of them - are actually illegal land seizures under international law and that the "wall" constructed in the West Bank was illegal and must be removed.

The bottom line is that this article is nothing more than a transparent propaganda piece for the government of Israel in the guise of a news story and a disgrace to a great newspaper like the New York Times. And it simply will not fly to say that sophisticated Times readers recognize the story for what it is, an interview with Israeli partisans. The Times would never run a similar "news story" presenting the views of supporters of the Palestinians and their supporters in the United Nations. It never has and I dare say it never will.

What is the Public Editor going to do about this? If you don't address this outrage then I ask, what good is the Public Editor function at the Times anyway?

Albert Regan Doyle, Esq.
224 Daniel Drive
Sanibel, FL 33957
Tel 239 395-0372

ADoyle9876@aol.com

Friends and Associates

When I began thinking about creating this blog, I thought of it as a place for me to keep a journal. Observations and recollections that are not worthy of developing into articles or opinion pieces, that do not fit into any of the book manuscripts I am working on (and off), or are not substantial enough to publish anywhere else, but stuff I still want to make note of in my daily round.

My primary form over these many years has been the journal. I have thousands of pages of journal entries that will never see the light of day. Some of them are of such a nature that I would not want them to see the light of day. This blog then would be a way for me to do a journal and not have to worry about any formalities more serious than spell-checking.

At the same time CODOHWeb > www.codoh.com < was being cleaned up by a team of volunteers. It had fallen apart around 2002. I had taken it off-line. There were some 7,000 broken links, and maybe 3,000 images that could not be accessed. In the beginning my hope was to clean up what was there and maintain it as an archive only. But the fellows working on the site are so good that I began to think that maybe I should do something more.

I would announce this blog on CODOH’s home page, and that would give CODOH a bit of life. But then that rare thing (in my case) happened—thought produced an intelligent idea. One evening sitting here at the computer I realized that most of the revisionists I know are more interesting than I am. The intelligent thing to do would be to invite them to participate in this blog.

My blog would be transformed into a group blog, a kind of revisionist center where friends and associates, who are more or less of like mind with myself, could toss their own ingredients into a community revisionist stew. Each would post whatever had his attention in the moment. Group blogs are all over the place, but it only occurred to me about ten days ago that I should make my personal blog a group blog. Autobiographers might be egomaniacs, but some of us can escape the disease occasionally.

Two days ago I began canvassing people, asking them if they were interested in joining this group, which is hardly a group at this stage of the game. Nevertheless, two have signed aboard, one has already posted. This means that from here on out you will not have to depend on me alone to provide you with revisionist entertainment, or entertainment that may not be revisionism exactly, but that will emanate from a revisionist personality.

Is this a plan—or what?