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→ 18 August 2020
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Canterbury skifield pioneer and former Nazi soldier dies | Stuff

Willi Huber

Mt Hutt pioneer and former Nazi Waffen-SS soldier Willi Huber has died, aged 98.

Hailing from Austria, Huber arrived in New Zealand in 1953 on a two-year work visa. A mountain guide by trade, he was curious about the mountains and thought he would visit for just the two years to work and explore.

Just as he was set to return to Austria, he met his future wife, Edna. He stayed and the couple married and had four children. They remained together up until his death on August 9, spanning 65 years.

At 17, Huber volunteered for the Waffen-SS, the military branch of the Nazi Party’s feared SS, where he served as a machine-gunner and then as a gunner in Panzer tanks.

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→ 18 August 2020
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Nazi Hunter reacts to death of local “Hero” SS-Waffen Soldier | Holocaust Foundation

Willi Huber (left) and Dr Efraim Zuroff (right)

Former Nazi Waffen-SS soldier Willi Huber died recently, aged 96. Having lived in New Zealand since 1953, Huber made a name for himself as one of the ‘founding fathers’ of Canterbury’s Mt Hutt ski area. Hailed as a ‘heartland hero’, locals have appeared willing to ignore his Nazi past. 

In a 2017 TVNZ interview, Huber denied knowledge of the war crimes committed by the Waffen SS or German forces, or of the Nazi murder of about six million European Jews and millions of others, many of whom died in concentration camps run by the SS.

Speaking to the Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation from Jerusalem this week, renowned Nazi Hunter and Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center office in Jerusalem, Dr Efraim Zuroff commented:

As a historian, I can state unequivocally that serving in a Waffen-SS unit on the Eastern front, there is no way that Mr Huber could possibly not have been aware of the massive atrocities carried out by the SS and the Wehrmacht in the territories of the Soviet Union, where 1,500,000 “enemies of the Reich,” primarily Jews, were murdered individually during the years 1941-1943.

Huber’s statements ring incredibly hollow in the face of the historical record of the Holocaust on the Eastern front. If we add the fact that he volunteered for the SS, and his comments that Hitler was “very clever,” and that he “offered [Austrians] a way out”  of the hardships after World War I, it’s clear that Mr. Huber was an unrepentant Nazi, who doesn’t deserve any sympathy or recognition.

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→ 12 August 2020
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China And Iran Approach Massive $400 Billion Deal | Forbes

The Iranian and Chinese Foreign Ministers shake hands

NZFOI: There is much talk about a potential treaty between Iran and China that will enable Iran to circumvent US sanctions, bring respite to their economic hardships, allow Iran to pursue its nuclear programme and will give China access to oil and naval bases in the region.

China, sensing America’s internal political difficulties amidst social justice protests and a poor COVID-19 response, is taking off the gloves: Beijing is said to be in the final stages of approving a $400 billion economic and security deal with Tehran.

In addition to massive infrastructure investments, the agreement envisions closer cooperation on defense and intelligence sharing, and is rumored to include discounts for Iranian oil. If finalized, the PRC would gain massive influence in this geopolitically critical region, and simultaneously throw a lifeline to the embattled Mullah Regime.

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→ 16 July 2020
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Report: 28 Hezbollah missile launch sites aimed at Israel |Arutz Sheva

The Alma Center’s Research Department initiated a project to find the locations of missile launching sites in South Lebanon adjacent to the civilian population, as part of what is known as the “Human Shield tactic”.

In their report, Alma notes that, despite the fact that a large proportion of Hezbollah’s missiles are located in south Lebanon, the information in public sources on the subject is scarce.

The primary source of Alma‘s project was the Wikimapia.org website.

“The first locations we found were all close to civilian infrastructure”, the report states, “which drove us to further the research on the subject and thus find 28 missile launching locations and the sites connected with these locations”.

According to the report, the missiles are medium-range missiles – “The same as those subject to the Hezbollah missile precision guided missile project (PGM’s)”.

The report explains that “as part of its modus operandi, Hezbollah stores its weapons in civilian structures and in the proximity of densely populated areas throughout Lebanon, with highest concentration in the capital city of Beirut, the Beqaa Valley and southern Lebanon”.

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→ 9 July 2020
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Why Israel is seeing a coronavirus spike after initially crushing the outbreak | Stuff

A man voluntarily presents himself at an Israeli testing station

Israel’s deft handling of its coronavirus outbreak this spring won praise at home and abroad, but the virus has returned, with cases now increasing faster than ever and health officials warning that hospitals could be overwhelmed by the end of the month.

Israelis across the political spectrum are asking what’s gone wrong and demanding to know how their government could have fumbled so badly after getting it so right.

An Israeli official with knowledge of the pandemic response said government researchers have traced the bulk of new infections to a single category of activity: public gatherings, particularly weddings.

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→ 8 July 2020
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Qassem Soleimani deemed ‘unlawful’ | Stuff

Qassem Soleimani funeral procession

The drone strike that had the stamp of approval from US President Donald Trump and killed Iran’s top general Qassem Soleimani​ has been labelled “unlawful”.

A report conducted by the United Nations said the targeted drone strike near Baghdad International Airport on January 3 that killed 10 people violated a UN charter that prohibited the threat or use of force against other states.

After claiming responsibility for the attack, the US asserted it was “in response to an escalating series of armed attacks” spanning months.

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→ 8 July 2020
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Israel thought it had crushed COVID-19. Then cases surged — and restrictions were reinstated | JTA

Benjamin Netanyahu

It was just two months ago that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared victory over the new coronavirus.

Ten weeks after recording its first cases, Israel had imposed a series of draconian restrictions, causing the number of new cases to plunge. Fewer than 250 people had died. A contact tracing system was up and running.

So Netanyahu felt confident about suggesting that the danger had passed. Israel, he said in a press conference from his office on May 4, is “a model for many countries, and the world is learning from us.”

That hasn’t changed. But now, with a second wave of infections surging across the country, the world may be taking different lessons from Israel: what happens when a society relaxes its guard too early.

After recording more than 1,000 cases in 24 hours, Israel reimposed steep restrictions on its population on Monday, just a little over a month after fully lifting a nationwide lockdown that saw much of the population stuck at home.

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→ 5 July 2020
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‘Stuck’ Israeli family gives New Zealand lockdown five stars | Times of Israel

The Shabtai Family just before lockdown

Though a dream trip turned into a plague-cation with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the Shabtai family says NZ government’s response was better than anything they’d get at home

By IRA TOLCHIN IMMERGLUCK4 July 2020, 2:48 pm

This past December, Noa and Ilan Shabtai, small business owners from Ramat Gan, embarked on their dream vacation to New Zealand along with their three children. They had planned an extended trip with lots of travel, but things quickly changed with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.

Now, after spending months in New Zealand during lockdown, the family has no small appreciation for their host country. In early June New Zealand’s government announced that the virus has been effectively eradicated locally.

“So long as that last infected person hadn’t been given a certificate of health, the entire country remained under restrictions,” Noa Shabtai said on a video call from New Zealand with Zman Yisrael, The Times of Israel’s Hebrew sister site.

“Even with zero new sick people. Wherever we went, we had to first register with the COVID-19 app, so that the authorities could track us. It was incredible to see how, up until the very last minute, everyone adhered to the 2-meter [6-foot] distancing rule in public spaces and followed all of the directives,” said Shabtai.

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→ 27 June 2020
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Does Israel train America’s police forces? | Spectator

Show me who you lie about and I’ll tell you what you are. The big lie in this, our season of historical illiteracy and gratuitous destruction, is that the Jews are responsible for police killings of black Americans. How? The racist police of Amerikkka are trained by the Zionists.

That’s right. America has no history of violence against blacks and no history of anti-black policing. In the new blood libel, America was one big interracial paradise before the Jews taught Derek Chauvin to put his knee on George Floyd’s neck.

‘Israel security forces are training American cops despite history of rights abuses,’ tweeted Charlotte Greensit in 2017. Greensit, an editor at the left-conspiracist website the Intercept, was promoting a demi-literate promotion of this conspiracy theory by Alice Speri. Greensit is now the managing editor of the New York Times’s opinion page. As she slithered up the greasy pole, Greensit deleted thousands of old tweets, this one included. But the snail-trail of slander is quite clear, and not at all new.

As soon as the Ferguson, Missouri protests began in August 2014, the slogan ‘Ferguson is Palestine’ appeared on the placards. When the Movement for Black Lives, a group affiliated with Black Lives Matter, promulgated a common platform in August 2016, its only foreign policy was that Israel must be shunned and destroyed as an ‘apartheid state’ that commits ‘genocide’ against the Palestinians. Another big lie.

In the same month, Amnesty USA claimed that ‘hundreds’ of American law enforcement officials from many states had received ‘training on crowd control, use of force and surveillance’ from Israel’s ‘national police, military and intelligence services’. That’s not true.

Amnesty’s claims are routinely cited as fact by the hard left and radical black identity groups. Its report and the libel it fosters have filtered into outlets as varied as the the British communist newspaper the Morning Star, the Washington Post and the website of the New York Review of Books.

‘The Israeli military trains US police in racist and repressive policing tactics, which systematically targets Black and Brown bodies,’ tweeted the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, which rejects Israel’s existence, in late May.

This is also inaccurate. As Amnesty itself admitted, the programs that took American officers to Israel were for ‘police chiefs, assistant chiefs, and captains’. Amnesty’s report contained no evidence that American officers received any information, let alone ‘training’, from their Israeli peers on relevant matters such as the militarising of the American police, targeting minorities for traffic stops and minor violations, or using deadly force in routine encounters.

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→ 27 June 2020
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Over 40% of Jewish community now considers antisemitism a big problem in New Zealand | J-Wire

There’s been a significant increase in the amount of Jewish New Zealanders who think antisemitism is a “very big” or a “fairly big” problem, according to a new survey of New Zealand’s Jewish community.

Back in 2008 when the last such survey – Changing Jewry (Gen08) – was conducted, more than four out of five respondents (84%) thought that antisemitism was not a serious issue in New Zealand.

But in the Shifting Jewry 2019 (Gen19) survey, which was launched last weekend, 44% of respondents indicated that they thought antisemitism was either a “very big” or a “fairly big” problem.

While 50% still do not think antisemitism is a serious issue in New Zealand, the growth in the number of respondents that do is considerable.

For report co-author Jim Salinger, the change in perceptions of antisemitism is one of the big changes in this survey, as compared to three earlier community surveys.

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