NZ Friends of Israel Association Inc
Fighting racial intolerance in New Zealand and beyond
Rockets rising from Gaza on their way to Israel
Hamas claims responsibility for rockets; IDF intercepts 8 rockets fired toward Ashkelon; IAF strikes kill 4 Hamas members; southern local authorities cancel school.
Palestinians fired a total of 80 rockets at rural areas of southern Israel since Tuesday night, injuring five, causing damage and sending local residents fleeing for cover.
The Iron Dome missile defense system successfully intercepted two…
Arlen Specter, the irascible senator from Pennsylvania who was at the center of many of the Senate’s most divisive legal battles — from the Supreme Court nominations of Robert H. Bork and Clarence Thomas to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton — only to lose his seat in 2010 after quitting the Republican Party to become a Democrat, died Sunday morning at his home in Philadelphia. He was 82.
A one-stop destination for the latest political news — from The Times and other top sources. Plus opinion, polls, campaign data and video.
The cause was complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his son Shanin said. Mr. Specter had previously fought Hodgkin’s disease and survived a brain tumor and heart bypass surgery.
Hard-edged and tenacious yet ever the centrist, Mr. Specter was a part of American public life for more than four decades. As an ambitious young lawyer for the Warren Commission, he took credit for originating the theory that a single bullet, fired by a lone gunman, struck both President John F. Kennedy and Gov. John B. Connally of Texas. Seconds later, Kennedy was struck by a fatal shot to the head from the same gunman, the commission found.
In the Senate, where he was long regarded as its sharpest legal mind, he led the Judiciary Committee through a tumultuous period that included…
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Shlomo Venezia was one of the first Jews to climb out of the freight car when it came to the end of the line at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland on April 11, 1944, his mother crammed behind him. Two blows from a German guard’s baton struck him in the back of the neck.
Mr. Venezia’s book offers a harrowingly matter-of-fact account of his experience at Auschwitz.
“When I turned around to try to find my mother, she wasn’t there anymore,” he recalled. “I never saw her again, she wasn’t there, and neither were my two little sisters, Marica and Marta.”
Mr. Venezia, an Italian Jew who died at 88 on Oct. 1 in Rome, would enter what Primo Levi, the writer and fellow Auschwitz survivor, called “the gray zone,” where terrorized victims survived on the fringe of collaboration. A sturdy 20-year-old, he was ordered into the Sonderkommando, a unit of prisoners forced to direct thousands of other victims of the Nazis into the gas chambers and to bear their bodies into the crematories.
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Desecrated Jewish graves in Auckland
A protest was held outside an Auckland cemetery this afternoon where Jewish graves were desecrated.
Efforts to clean the graffiti from headstones in the Jewish part of the Symonds Street cemetery are continuing today.
Socialist Aotearoa spokesman Joe Carolan says many in Auckland are shocked by the attack.
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We held another scrumptious sausage sizzle at Bunnings Shirley in October.
It has been nearly 60 years since the end of WWII and the generation that lived through it have nearly passed on. Yet the Holocaust is a salient reminder that extreme racial hatred leading to genocide is exclusive to “third world uncivilised” countries and peoples.
The Holocaust shows us that highly educated, First World industrialised countries can also be caught out by this evil. The lessons are obvious for New Zealanders. We have a multiracial society with diverse cultures and views. We are also human and therefore suceptible to mindless hysteria borne from racial intolerance.
Knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust and its epidemiology can help to prevent it from happening here. This is why we raise funds to further Holocaust Education.
Many thanks to
For all their hard work which raised $450.90.
Sausage sizzles aren’t just a fundraiser for a good cause. They’re also a great opportunity for members to get to know one another at a different level and an opportunity to answer questions about Jewishness, Israel, world peace and the Holocaust from the public. If you’d like to join in, please email contact@nzfoi.org
Abdullateef al-Mulhim is a former commodore of the Saudi Navy. He writes:
“Hundreds of billions of dollars were wasted and tens of thousands of innocent lives lost fighting Israel. The Arab world, though, has many enemies and Israel should have been at the bottom of the list. The real enemies of the Arab world are corruption, lack of good education, lack of good healthcare, lack of freedom, lack of respect for human lives and, finally, the many dictators who used the Arab-Israeli conflict to suppress their own people….”
You can read more of this thought provoking article here.
You can watch the full interview here.
Read it here: Otago Daily Times
My favourite Olympian was small, short-sighted and tubby. He could not run fast, swim or jump. He smoked a pipe, and everyone called him, “Poppa.” There is no evidence he ever participated in any form of competitive sport. But he profoundly understood, and changed, the meaning of the Olympic Games. Ludwig Guttmann, a pioneering German-Jewish neurosurgeon, invented the Paralympics. Guttmann knew that sport is about overcoming limitations, extending the physically possible, and acknowledging the extraordinary psychological benefit of sporting aspiration. He applied that understanding to the bodies and minds of men broken on the battlefields of World War II and in so doing, helped to revolutionise modern attitudes towards disability.
Poppa Guttmann knew about overcoming adversity. Born in a mining town in Upper Silesia in 1899, he worked after school in a hospital where he encountered a coalminer who had fractured his spine in an accident. When Guttmann began writing up notes on the young man, he was told: “Don’t bother, he’ll be dead in a few weeks.” And so he was.
That experience fused with another. As a medical student at Freiburg, Guttmann noticed the way that Jewish fraternities dedicated to sport gave their members extraordinary confidence and self-esteem. In 1933, Guttmann was fired from the medical faculty at Breslau University after Germany’s race laws prohibited Jews from treating “Aryans.” He became director of the neurological department of Breslau Jewish Hospital, but by 1939 the Gestapo was closing in. He smuggled most of his patients out of the hospital before they were rounded up, and then fled himself. Guttmann arrived at Harwich with his wife and children in March 1939.
The British medical establishment was quick to utilise his remarkable talents. In 1943 Guttmann was made director of a new spinal injuries centre at Stoke Mandeville, a hospital created in anticipation of casualties from the opening of the Second Front. At that time, the life expectancy of spinal-injury patients was two years.
Over the next five years, Guttmann treated hundreds of wounded and paralysed soldiers. His program aimed to reintegrate these disabled men and women into normal British life and he placed particular emphasis on sport, both as physical rehabilitation and as a path to rediscovering self-discipline, self-respect and team spirit.
The London Olympics of the 1948, the first games since 1936, rehabilitated a competition gravely and almost fatally damaged by the war. Rationing was still in force, and London still bore the scars of battle, as did some competitors. Jim Halliday fought in the retreat from Dunkirk and was then captured by the Japanese. He emerged from a POW camp weighing four and a half stone. Three years later he won bronze in the weightlifting competition. The Hungarian champion marksman Karoly Takacs injured his right hand in a grenade blast: he learnt to shoot with his left and won the rapid-fire pistol gold.
But traditional attitudes to disability were still entrenched. Jack Dearlove, father of the future MI6 chief Richard Dearlove, was Cox of the British rowing eight in the 1948 Olympics. Dearlove had lost a leg in a car accident and walked on crutches. The impediment did not prevent him steering his team to a silver medal, but it was not considered the sort of thing the public would like to see. He was told not to take part in the Olympic procession.
Yet, precisely as Jack Dearlove sat in the stands on the first day of the Olympics, Ludwig Guttmann was organising the first games for people with disabilities. On July 28, 1948, 16 former soldiers (including two women) with spinal injuries gathered in wheelchairs on the lawn outside the Stoke Mandeville wards for an archery competition.
By 1950 the “Stoke Mandeville games” had 130 international competitors; in 1960 the first Paralympic games (the name was applied retrospectively) were held in Rome.
A simple, brilliant, humane idea that started on a Buckinghamshire lawn is now the second-largest sporting event in the world, with seven different classifications of athletes, in addition to the Special Olympics for athletes with intellectual disabilities and the Deaflympics.
Guttmann (by then “Sir Ludwig”) died in 1980, but the selection of Oscar Pistorius, a double amputee, to compete in the Olympic 400 m race may be the final realisation of his vision: a disabled athlete so rehabilitated biomedical science that his disability is no longer relevant.
Pistorius’ victory over amputation is the culmination of a battle started by the disabled veterans of World War II. For the Paralympics, like the Olympics of 1948, represent a conquest over war and the suffering it brings. It is still the case today: a significant number of military personnel injured in Afghanistan and Iraq have been selected for the London 2012 Paralympics, including the cyclist Jon-Allan Butterworth, who lost his left arm in a rocket attack on Iraq, and the rower Nick Beighton, who lost his legs in an explosion in Afghanistan in 2009. It is estimated that by 2016 as many as one in 20 of all Paralympics will be injured war veterans.
For Guttmann, the Paralympics was also a victory for real scientific research over Hitler’s perverted science. As Guttmann himself remarked: “since the Nazis drove out Jewish scientists, British science has got ahead of the Germans.”
Hitler not only wanted to eliminate Jews such as Guttmann, but also the disabled people he championed. In 1933, the Nazis had begun the forced sterilisation of the disabled, depicted as “useless eaters” with “lives unworthy of living.” Some 275,000 disabled people were murdered at “euthanasia centres” under the Nazi’s unspeakable T4 program.
But history has a sense of irony. By driving out this Jewish doctor, Hitler unintentionally set in train a course of events that would eventually led to the Paralympics, an institution that has done more than any other to undermine negative images of disability across the world. Poppa Guttmann ran a long, hard race against prejudice, but he won in the end.
Source: McIntyre, Ben (30 August 2012). The Press. Page 6.
A world-renowned expert on language revival says the loss of language is more damaging than the loss of land for indigenous peoples, and governments are likely to come under increasing pressure to compensate indigenous peoples for this loss too.
