Lesson learned, for now: Hamas has stopped firing rockets. And the U.S. will be helping Israel fund more Iron Dome systems. But it’s only just the latest round in the long war.

They were open? Who knew? Wait a minute, I thought the Gaza crossings were all closed and the evil Israelis were totally isolating the Gazans. (This, despite the fact that the Egyptian border is totally controlled by, duh, Egypt.) Well, they’re still closed due to the rocket attacks. And yet, no howls from the Free Gaza flotilla fools. Go figure.

Stay tuned: The IDF is closing in on the Fogel family murderers.

The man in the glass booth: You can see the Eichmann trial—all of it—on YouTube. Watch the man lie through his teeth as he insists he was not the architect of the Holocaust. Really, I can’t believe they hanged him. They should have set him to the same conditions as the concentration camp inhabitants.

The next step in the 1949 borders: The Palestinians are about to submit a report that proves they are capable of governing themselves. The plan to force Israel to accept all the Palestinian requirements without having the Palestinians actually negotiate a peace moves forward.

Mr. Obama’s speech offered a welcome contrast to all of the posturing that passes for business in the new Republican-controlled House. On Tuesday, House Republicans pushed through a resolution calling for reducing spending on domestic programs to 2008 levels. In a fragile economy, cutting spending on transportation, education, scientific research, food safety and childhood nutrition will do huge damage.

Yes, but the Times thinks we should totally waste money on Obama’s green schemes and then raise taxes. Woot! My money is their money!

Oh, that’ll show those terrorists! The Russian president is on the case. He’s going to prevent another terrorist bombing in an airport by firing the regional chief of transport. Awesome job. He’s about as smart at American security for deciding to take away our toothpaste. If you’d been reading Jeffrey Goldberg for a while, you’ve been expecting an attack like this. Of course, in the current climate about rhetoric, the fact that Goldberg predicted an attack like this makes him responsible for it. Damn you, Jeff! All those people, and it’s on your head!

Egypt cracks down, brutally: I await the thousands of headlines from world media condemning the brutality of the Egyptian government against the protesters, many of whom may die today. And the tear gas that did not kill a Palestinian protestor? It was fired at Egyptian protestors without incident.

Google and the Holocaust: Google has partnered with Yad Vashem to make its Holocaust archives searchable via Google. This is a wonderful thing. However, count on people using more Holocaust imagery in their attacks on Israel as a result of this. (Normally, I’m an optimist. When it comes to all things Jewish, I’m a realist.)

IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenazi’s father escaped being sent to the death camps at the last moment, and his son is now charged with defending the state of Israel. Here’s what he said about defending Jews:

“In the name of my father and his family who dreamt of an independent sovereign state, and in the name of all the millions who never got to witness the realization of their dream I stand here today as the commander of the Jewish defending force, the Israel Defense Forces, and pledge on behalf of us all: We shall never again stand defenseless and in the mercy of others.

“Never again will Jewish children stare in fear begging to be spared. Never again will we let our enemies determine the fate of the Jewish people and we will able to protect our sons.”

They can say what they like about the reasons the world is against Israel. They can slam Zionism, call Israel an “apartheid” state, insist it’s the last bastion of colonialism in the world. The reality of it is this: The world still does not like the Jews. At least, not Jews that can defend themselves. They much prefer it when Jews lived—or died—at the sufferance of the people around them. This is what happens when Jews lived that way:

Never again. And since this is the most fitting day for it, here’s another look at the IAF flyover of Auschwitz.

If you want to read more, the Jewish Virtual Library is a great place to start.

Am Yisrael chai: The people of Israel live.

The Nobel Prize laureate spoke to Haaretz in Jerusalem as the organization The Elders concluded its tour of Israel and the West Bank. He said the West was consumed with guilt and regret toward Israel because of the Holocaust, “as it should be.”

“But who pays the penance? The penance is being paid by the Arabs, by the Palestinians. I once met a German ambassador who said Germany is guilty of two wrongs. One was what they did to the Jews. And now the suffering of the Palestinians.”

It’s a common refrain. When Palestinians (or Arabs generally) don’t deny the Holocaust, they claim (falsely) that Israel is committing a Holocaust against the Palestinians or claim that the Palestinians are paying the price of a European crime. But Shlomo Avineir writes that the Arabs and Palestinians were not innnocent victims:

But in the winter of 1938-39, the British changed their policy after the government of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain realized that its appeasement of Hitler had failed. Britain began to prepare for a war against the Nazis, and as part of this it changed its Middle East policy. Britain reintroduced the draft, started massive production of tanks and aircraft, and developed the radar. In light of the need to insure the Empire’s critical link to India via the Suez Canal, Britain feared that continued violent suppression of the Arab revolt in Palestine would push all Arabs in the region closer to Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. It consequently decided to move closer to the Arabs and away from the Jews and Zionism. As Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald explained to the Zionist leadership, the change was prompted not by a British conviction that Arab claims were justified, but rather by realpolitik: There were more Arabs than Jews; the Jews would support Britain against the Nazis in any case, but the Arabs have the option of joining Nazi Germany.

The cruel paradox lies in the fact that appeasement of the Arabs started just as Britain relinquished its appeasement policy vis-a-vis Hitler and was preparing for war against Germany. This was the reason for the 1939 White Paper, which drastically limited the right of Jews to buy land in Mandatory Palestine and placed a ceiling of 75,000 on Jewish immigration. The message to the Arabs was clear: The Jews would remain a minority in Palestine.

Avineri writes that these policies restricting Jewish immigration to Israel, cost hundreds of thousands of lives. This is aside from the very active collaboration between Haj Amin al-Husseini and the Nazis.

Crossposted on Yourish.

Our enemies should remember this:

And Iran, especially, should remember this:

Am Yisrael chai.

Original plans for the construction of the Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz, including a gas chamber and crematorium, have been found in a Berlin apartment, a newspaper reported Saturday.

The daily Bild published copies of some of the 28 plans, which the head of Germany’s federal archives, Hans-Dieter Krekamp, called “authentic proof of the systematically planned genocide of the Jews of Europe.”

There are dates on the plans:

It said they were dated between 1941 and 1943 and stamped, “Waffen-SS and Police Construction Directorate.” Some were signed by senior SS officials and one initialed by the head of the Nazi ideological corps, Heinrich Himmler.

Kreikamp told the newspaper the documents were “extraordinarily important.”

One plan, drawn by a detainee as early as November 1941, when experiments in eliminating prisoners were already under way, had a gas chamber clearly labeled, Bild said.

Another showed a crematorium with places for ovens marked, and storage space for bodies.

This evidence contradicts directly Patrick Buchanan’s claims that it was the intervention of Britain that caused the Germans to start murdering the Jews.

That Hitler was a rabid anti-Semite is undeniable. “Mein Kampf” is saturated in anti-Semitism. The Nuremberg Laws confirm it. But for the six years before Britain declared war, there was no Holocaust, and for two years after the war began, there was no Holocaust.

Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table.

That conference was not convened until Hitler had been halted in Russia, was at war with America and sensed doom was inevitable. Then the trains began to roll.

And why did Hitler invade Russia? This writer quotes Hitler 10 times as saying that only by knocking out Russia could he convince Britain it could not win and must end the war.

Of course, Buchanan’s insistence on ignoring evidence that proves otherwise will probably come into play. He’s a liar and a Holocaust minimizer, if not a denier, and he’s definitely an anti-Semite. He goes on neo-Nazi radio stations to promote his book, and isn’t even really bothering to hide his Jew-hatred any more. But there’s even more evidence than before that Buchanan is a lying, Jew-hating scum who should be bounced from MSNBC. Then again, MSNBC is a complete joke. It’s not like we expect real journalism out of them.

That Hitler was a rabid anti-Semite is undeniable. “Mein Kampf” is saturated in anti-Semitism. The Nuremberg Laws confirm it. But for the six years before Britain declared war, there was no Holocaust, and for two years after the war began, there was no Holocaust.

Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table.

That conference was not convened until Hitler had been halted in Russia, was at war with America and sensed doom was inevitable. Then the trains began to roll.

And why did Hitler invade Russia? This writer quotes Hitler 10 times as saying that only by knocking out Russia could he convince Britain it could not win and must end the war.

There’s a pretty big problem here for Pat. Well, there are a lot of problems with this logic. But we can start with a pretty clear indication that Hitler intended to murder the Jews. There was a group of Nazis known as the Einsatzgruppen, whose job it was to kill all of what the Nazis considered “undesirables.” They were murdering Jews before the Wannsee Conference was held.

After the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the Einsatzgruppen’s main assignment was to kill Communist officers and Jews on a much larger scale than in Poland[3]. These Einsatzgruppen were under the control of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) (Reich Security Main Office); i.e., under Reinhard Heydrich and his successor Ernst Kaltenbrunner. The original mandate set by Heydrich for the four Einsatzgruppen sent into the Soviet Union as part of Operation Barbarossa was to secure the offices and papers of the Soviet state and Communist Party; to liquidate all of the higher cadres of the Soviet state; and to instigate and encourage pogroms against all local Jewish populations. The orders that Heydrich drafted on July 2, 1941 stated that the Einsatzgruppen were to execute all Soviet officials of higher and medium rank; members of the Comintern; “extremist” Communist Party members; members of the central, provincial and district committees of the Communist Party; Red Army commissars; and all Communist Party members of Jewish origin[4]. In regards to Jewish populations in general, “No steps will be taken to interfere with any purges that may be initialed by anti-Communist or anti-Jewish elements in the newly occupied territories. On the contrary, these are to be secretly encouraged”[5].

There is much more about them at the Jewish Virtual Library. Here’s a document from 1941 that lists the numbers of Jews murdered by the Nazis—before the Wannsee conference.

EK 3 detachment in Minsk from 28.9-17.10.41:

Today I can confirm that our objective, to solve the Jewish problem for Lithuania, has been achieved by EK 3. In Lithuania there are no more Jews, apart from Jewish workers and their families.

The distance between from the assembly point to the graves was on average 4 to 5 Km.

I consider the Jewish action more or less terminated as far as Einsatzkommando 3 is concerned. Those working Jews and Jewesses still available are needed urgently and I can envisage that after the winter this workforce will be required even moe urgently. I am of the view that the strelization programme of the male worker Jews should be started immediately so that reproduction is prevented. If despite sterlization a Jewess becomes pregnant she will be liquidated.

Buchanan ignores facts like the above, and massacres like Babi Yar, which also occurred before the Wannsee Conference.

Kiev … contained a Jewish population of 175,000 on the eve of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. The Nazi forces captured the city in mid-September; within less than a fortnight, on the 29th and 30th, nearly 34,000 Jews of the ghetto were brought to a suburban ravine known as Babi Yar, near the Jewish Cemetary, where men, women, and children were systematically machine-gunned in a two-day orgy of execution. In subsequent months, most of the remaining population was exterminated.

And then there’s the sick, twisted logic to Buchanan’s claims. Hitler intended to rid Germany of all of its Jews. Here was his plan from the Wannsee Conference that Buchanan implies wouldn’t have happened without Britain’s entering the war in defense of Poland:

The purpose of the conference was to inform heads of German Government Departments that had responsibility for various policies relating to Jews of Reinhard Heydrich’s appointment as the sole executor of the “Final solution to the Jewish question”, and to obtain their agreement to subordinate their policies to him. In the course of the meeting, Heydrich presented a plan, approved by Hitler, for the deportation of the Jewish population of Europe to German-occupied areas of the Soviet Union, and the use of the Jews fit for labour on road-building projects; that plan was never fully implemented, owing to the failure to achieve final victory over the Soviet Union, and most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe were sent to extermination or concentration camps, or killed where they lived.

Let’s take Buchanan at his word. Let’s imagine that Britain never got into the war, that Germany fought Russia, and even beat Stalin. What do you think would have happened to the Jews of Europe, who were now in concentration camps, awaiting their fate? Slave labor camps at best, a quick execution at the worst? The Wannsee Conference was convened to discuss “The Jewish Question,” not to discuss “What Do We Do With the Jews Now That We Lost Russia?” Question. And “The Jewish Question” was a theme throughout Hitler’s reign. To pretend that he would not have murdered the six million if only Britain hadn’t started fighting him is the lowest Buchanan has gone yet.

Buchanan is a liar and a dissembler, who ignores inconvenient facts when they get in the way of his Hitler adoration. The fact is that with or without Britain, Germany would have run rampant over Europe, and murdered Europe’s Jews. The Nazis were already setting the plan in motion. Jews were being gassed in 1941, before the Wannsee Conference took place.

At another, later gassing — also in autumn 1941 — Grabner* ordered me to pour Zyklon B into the opening because only one medical orderly had shown up. During a gassing Zyklon B had to be poured through both openings of the gas-chamber room at the same time. This gassing was also a transport of 200-250 Jews, once again men, women and children. As the Zyklon B — as already mentioned — was in granular form, it trickled down over the people as it was being poured in.

The facts are there. Buchanan ignores them.

Buchanan is a liar, a purveyor of Jew-hatred and an admirer of Adolph Hitler. The man disgusts me more now than he has ever done before. That NBC continues to employ him is reprehensible. That Fox News brings him on as a commentator is reprehensible. That anyone pays this man a salary for anything repulses me. I used to say he was a more subtle David Duke. But he has brought himself down to Duke’s level with this latest book.

Unwilling to stand by idly while Nazi henchmen murdered the “People of the Book,” Johnson met with Jewish leaders and said simply, “We [must] do something to get Jews out of Europe.”16

Straightaway, the congressman enlarged the scope of “Operation Texas.” Using methods sometimes legal, sometimes illegal, and cash supplied by men like Jim Novy, Johnson smuggled hundreds of Jews into Texas, using Galveston as the entry port. Enough money could buy false passports and fake visas in Cuba, Mexico, and other Latin American countries. After getting to such places, Jews would then make Galveston Island their only port of call.

Johnson smuggled boatloads and planeloads of Jews into Texas. He hid them in the Texas National Youth Administration [NYA], a task made easier because LBJ’s longtime friend Jesse Kellum was the Texas State Director of the NYA. Although it was illegal to harbor and train noncitizens in the NYA programs, the refugees were nevertheless temporarily housed in various sites scattered around the Lone Star State.

Novy bankrolled the effort, reimbursing the NYA for all expenses, including room and board. He also covered the cost of classes for those who did not speak English and classes to retrain the Jews so that they could meld into American life. Johnson funneled many men into NYA welding schools because welders were in high demand both during the war-preparedness campaign of 1940-1941 and during the war itself. Johnson saved at least four or five hundred Jews, possibly more.17

Worth reading in full, and kol hakavod to Lyndon Baines Johnson, and his family that taught him so well. Via Lenny Ben-David.

Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker who organized the rescue of some 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazis and was later honored by Yad Vashem memorial, has died.

Sendler’s daughter, Janina Zgrzembska, told The Associated Press her mother died at a Warsaw hospital Monday morning. She was 98.

Records show Sendler’s team of some 20 people saved almost 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto between October 1940 and April 1943, when the Nazis burned the ghetto, shooting the residents or sending them to death camps.

In 1965, Sendler became one of the first so-called Righteous Gentiles that the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem honored for wartime heroics. Poland’s communist leaders at that time would not allow her to travel to Israel, and she collected the award only in 1983.

Despite the Yad Vashem honor, Sendler largely remained forgotten in her homeland. Only in her final years, confined to a nursing home, did she finally become one of Poland’s most respected figures, with President Lech Kaczynski and other politicians backing a campaign that put her name forward for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Funny, isn’t it, how the Nobel Peace Prize goes to thugs like Arafat and smugs like Carter, but not to true heroes of humanity like Irena Sendler?