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9, 2011) in five Eastern Washington counties where stagnant air continues to trap harmful smoke, according to the Washington Department of Ecology (Ecology). Ecology'sStage 1 burn bans for Chelan, Douglas, Okanogan, Ferry, and Stevens counties will ...
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7:24 AM (10 hours ago)
16,000 Holocaust victims to get German pensions
from Truth Frequency News by luckee1
By VERENA DOBNIK, AP
10 hours ago
news-national-20111206-US.Holocaust.Pensions
FILE- In this April 19, 1943 file photo, a group of Jews are escorted from th…
NEW YORK — After a year of tough negotiations, Germany has agreed to pay pensions to about 16,000 additional Holocaust victims worldwide — mostly survivors who were once starving children in Nazi ghettos, or were forced to live in hiding for fear of death.
The agreement announced Monday between the New York-based Claims Conference and the German government is “not about money — it’s about Germany’s acknowledgment of these people’s suffering,” said Greg Schneider, the conference’s executive vice president.
“They’re finally getting recognition of the horrors they endured as children,” he told The Associated Press.
Of the new beneficiaries, 5,000 live in the United States.
However, part of the agreement does not immediately cover survivors who were young Jewish children born in 1938 or later.
“We will continue to press for greater liberalizations to ensure that no Holocaust survivor is deprived of the recognition that each deserves,” Stuart Eizenstat, special negotiator for the conference, said in a statement.
“That’s why we continue to negotiate,” said Schneider, who plans another trip to Berlin in January.
Germany will now pay reparation pensions to a total of 66,000 people who survived Nazi death camps and ghettos, or had to hide or live under false identity.
Schneider said the humanitarian deal was reached because of a broadening of the criteria for payment to Holocaust survivors.
Under the new rules, which go into effect Jan. 1, any Jew who spent at least 12 months in a ghetto, in hiding or living under a false identity, is eligible for a monthly pension of 300 euros (about $375) a month. For countries in the former Soviet bloc, that amount is 260 euros.
Until now, the minimum time requirement for living under such duress was 18 months.
Julius Berman, chairman of the Claims Conference, which provides services and reparations to victims of the Holocaust around the world, said in a statement that conference officials “have long emphasized to the German government that they cannot quantify the suffering of a Holocaust survivor who lived in the hell of a ghetto.”
Living in hiding came with equally “unimaginable fear,” he said — the existence of “a Jew in Nazi Europe who survived for any period of time in hiding or by living under a false identity, when discovery would have been a death sentence.”
The Germans established more than 1,000 ghettos for Jews while the Nazi leadership in Berlin deliberated the “Final Solution” — a plan to murder all European Jews. Some ghettos existed for only a few days, others for months or years, before residents were either shot in mass graves or deported to death camps.
More than 400,000 lived in Poland’s Warsaw ghetto, and hundreds of thousands of others were squeezed into similar enclaves in Eastern European cities like Vilnius, Lodz, Minsk and Odessa — starved and often battling deadly illnesses while forced to work.
Germany also has agreed to offer pensions to those who are 75 or older and spent three months in ghettos like the one operated in Budapest, Hungary, from November 1944 to January 1945. That provision is expected to affect about 4,500 survivors next year and 3,500 more once they turn 75.
For Budapest ghetto survivors, the payments will amount to 240 euros (about $275) and 200 euros for those in Eastern Europe — to compensate for experiences that included sights like looted corpses of Jews strewn in an area that contained nearly 70,000 men, women and children.
Initially, the Jews of Budapest were protected by Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and other diplomats, who set up safe houses and issued passes.
Otto Herman, 81, and his sister Erzsebet Benedek, 78, were forced into the Budapest ghetto starting in October 1944, when he was 14 and she was 11. They were freed when the Russian army arrived in January 1945, but they lost most of their family during the war.
The siblings, who now live in neighboring apartments in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg area, said the pensions would help them financially. But though “it will help a lot,” Herman said, the money cannot compensate for the harrowing wartime experiences.
“It is not enough,” Herman told the AP by telephone, speaking in a thick accent. “I will never forget … Sometimes I don’t want to speak because of the memory.”
To reach the new accord, Schneider traveled to Berlin each month. “It was not easy to negotiate this — it took a year of hard-fought negotiations with the Germans, with many meetings and lots of documentation.”
Calls to the press office of Germany’s Ministry of Finance in Berlin, which provides the funding, went unanswered Monday. There was no immediate response to an email from the AP requesting comment on the agreement.
In all, the Claims Conference — formally called the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany — estimates that the changes will result in an additional $650 million in payments to survivors.
There is no deadline to apply for the pensions. Forms may be obtained through the conference website; help is also available by phone.
In another new development announced this week, anyone who worked in the German-run ghettos during World War II may now receive a one-time payment of 2,000 euros (about $2,600) from the German government.
___
Associated Press writers Randy Herschaft and Cristian Salazar contributed to this report.
___
Online:
Claims Conference: http://www.claimscon.org
################################
luckee1′s notes
Claims Con . Org? Really? That says alot and so does the last paragraph as an afterthought:
This whole thing reeks. Will the American Government also have to pay for the starvation they incurred for the Iraqi Children? Or will the untried Cabal in the Bush/Obama Administration get a free pass?
What of the survivors of Dresden Germany that had been bombed to oblivion even though it was far from being any kind of legitimate military target? We see no special provisions for them.
The underlying question I have is this: With all the economic turmoil and unrest throughout Europe and the world, is this new ‘pension’ designed to create more friction to make the people riot?
10 hours ago
news-national-20111206-US.Holocaust.Pensions
FILE- In this April 19, 1943 file photo, a group of Jews are escorted from th…
NEW YORK — After a year of tough negotiations, Germany has agreed to pay pensions to about 16,000 additional Holocaust victims worldwide — mostly survivors who were once starving children in Nazi ghettos, or were forced to live in hiding for fear of death.
The agreement announced Monday between the New York-based Claims Conference and the German government is “not about money — it’s about Germany’s acknowledgment of these people’s suffering,” said Greg Schneider, the conference’s executive vice president.
“They’re finally getting recognition of the horrors they endured as children,” he told The Associated Press.
Of the new beneficiaries, 5,000 live in the United States.
However, part of the agreement does not immediately cover survivors who were young Jewish children born in 1938 or later.
“We will continue to press for greater liberalizations to ensure that no Holocaust survivor is deprived of the recognition that each deserves,” Stuart Eizenstat, special negotiator for the conference, said in a statement.
“That’s why we continue to negotiate,” said Schneider, who plans another trip to Berlin in January.
Germany will now pay reparation pensions to a total of 66,000 people who survived Nazi death camps and ghettos, or had to hide or live under false identity.
Schneider said the humanitarian deal was reached because of a broadening of the criteria for payment to Holocaust survivors.
Under the new rules, which go into effect Jan. 1, any Jew who spent at least 12 months in a ghetto, in hiding or living under a false identity, is eligible for a monthly pension of 300 euros (about $375) a month. For countries in the former Soviet bloc, that amount is 260 euros.
Until now, the minimum time requirement for living under such duress was 18 months.
Julius Berman, chairman of the Claims Conference, which provides services and reparations to victims of the Holocaust around the world, said in a statement that conference officials “have long emphasized to the German government that they cannot quantify the suffering of a Holocaust survivor who lived in the hell of a ghetto.”
Living in hiding came with equally “unimaginable fear,” he said — the existence of “a Jew in Nazi Europe who survived for any period of time in hiding or by living under a false identity, when discovery would have been a death sentence.”
The Germans established more than 1,000 ghettos for Jews while the Nazi leadership in Berlin deliberated the “Final Solution” — a plan to murder all European Jews. Some ghettos existed for only a few days, others for months or years, before residents were either shot in mass graves or deported to death camps.
More than 400,000 lived in Poland’s Warsaw ghetto, and hundreds of thousands of others were squeezed into similar enclaves in Eastern European cities like Vilnius, Lodz, Minsk and Odessa — starved and often battling deadly illnesses while forced to work.
Germany also has agreed to offer pensions to those who are 75 or older and spent three months in ghettos like the one operated in Budapest, Hungary, from November 1944 to January 1945. That provision is expected to affect about 4,500 survivors next year and 3,500 more once they turn 75.
For Budapest ghetto survivors, the payments will amount to 240 euros (about $275) and 200 euros for those in Eastern Europe — to compensate for experiences that included sights like looted corpses of Jews strewn in an area that contained nearly 70,000 men, women and children.
Initially, the Jews of Budapest were protected by Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and other diplomats, who set up safe houses and issued passes.
Otto Herman, 81, and his sister Erzsebet Benedek, 78, were forced into the Budapest ghetto starting in October 1944, when he was 14 and she was 11. They were freed when the Russian army arrived in January 1945, but they lost most of their family during the war.
The siblings, who now live in neighboring apartments in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg area, said the pensions would help them financially. But though “it will help a lot,” Herman said, the money cannot compensate for the harrowing wartime experiences.
“It is not enough,” Herman told the AP by telephone, speaking in a thick accent. “I will never forget … Sometimes I don’t want to speak because of the memory.”
To reach the new accord, Schneider traveled to Berlin each month. “It was not easy to negotiate this — it took a year of hard-fought negotiations with the Germans, with many meetings and lots of documentation.”
Calls to the press office of Germany’s Ministry of Finance in Berlin, which provides the funding, went unanswered Monday. There was no immediate response to an email from the AP requesting comment on the agreement.
In all, the Claims Conference — formally called the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany — estimates that the changes will result in an additional $650 million in payments to survivors.
There is no deadline to apply for the pensions. Forms may be obtained through the conference website; help is also available by phone.
In another new development announced this week, anyone who worked in the German-run ghettos during World War II may now receive a one-time payment of 2,000 euros (about $2,600) from the German government.
___
Associated Press writers Randy Herschaft and Cristian Salazar contributed to this report.
___
Online:
Claims Conference: http://www.claimscon.org
################################
luckee1′s notes
Claims Con . Org? Really? That says alot and so does the last paragraph as an afterthought:
In another new development announced this week, anyone who worked in the German-run ghettos during World War II may now receive a one-time payment of 2,000 euros (about $2,600) from the German government.What is this? A search of potential Nazis? This makes no sense! A pension for the survivors, and those outside the camps/ghettos, and a one time payment for those who worked in them?
This whole thing reeks. Will the American Government also have to pay for the starvation they incurred for the Iraqi Children? Or will the untried Cabal in the Bush/Obama Administration get a free pass?
What of the survivors of Dresden Germany that had been bombed to oblivion even though it was far from being any kind of legitimate military target? We see no special provisions for them.
The underlying question I have is this: With all the economic turmoil and unrest throughout Europe and the world, is this new ‘pension’ designed to create more friction to make the people riot?
7:24 AM (10 hours ago)
Mordechai Vanunu: “Israel Is Only A Democracy If You Are A Jew.”
from Truth Frequency News by Nenad
Monday, December 5th,
2011 veteranstoday.com
by Eileen Fleming
Both Secretary of State Clinton and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta have now gone public with concerns over Israel’s growing isolation in the Middle East and are urging that regime to take diplomatic steps to address the issue.
Israeli Government ministers reacted to Clinton’s criticism of democracy Israeli style on Sunday at a weekly cabinet meeting.
In 2006, Israel’s Nuclear Whistleblower, Mordechai Vanunu explained why “Israel is only a democracy if you are a Jew.”
Both Secretary of State Clinton and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta have now gone public with concerns over Israel’s growing isolation in the Middle East and are urging that regime to take diplomatic steps to address the issue.
During a closed forum in Washington on Saturday, “Clinton criticized recent legislative attempts in Israel to restrict left-wing organizations and expressed shock over growing discrimination against Israeli women. She mentioned cases of IDF soldiers leaving during performances of female singers and the fact that females sit in the back of buses in certain places in Israel. Clinton said that some of these phenomena reminded her of Iran.” [1]
On Sunday at a weekly cabinet meeting, Israeli Government ministers reacted to Clinton’s criticism of democracy Israeli style.
Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz claimed Clinton’s comments were “completely exaggerated” and “Israeli democracy is alive, liberal and breathing. I don’t know many better democracies in the world. It is of course necessary to fix things sometimes. The matter of excluding and segregating women is completely unacceptable and needs to be put to a stop, but there is a great distance between this and the argument that there is a threat to Israeli democracy.” [Ibid]
Interior Minister Eli Yishai said that the Knesset passes laws after thorough checks and “Israel is the only democratic country in the Middle East. I assume that everything done here will be done within the law and I am not concerned by that.” [Ibid]
“Everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and it was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”-Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The bill divides non-governmental organizations (NGOs) into two kinds: those defined by the right as pro-Israel and those seen as “political”, or anti-Israel.
“The “political” ones – meaning those that criticize government policies, especially relating to the occupation – will be banned from receiving funds from foreign governments, their main source of income. Donations from private sources, whether Israeli or foreign, will be subject to a crippling 45 per cent tax. The grounds for being defined as a ‘political’ NGO are suitably vague: denying Israel’s right to exist or its Jewish and democratic character; inciting racism; supporting violence against Israel; supporting politicians or soldiers being put on trial in international courts; or backing boycotts of the state.
“One human rights group warned that all groups assisting the UN’s 2009 report by Judge Richard Goldstone into war crimes committed during Israel’s attack on Gaza in winter 2008 would be vulnerable to such a law. Other organizations like Breaking the Silence, which publishes the testimonies of Israeli soldiers who have committed or witnessed war crimes, will be silenced themselves. And an Israeli Arab NGO said it feared that its work demanding equality for all Israeli citizens, including the fifth who are Palestinian, and an end to Jewish privilege would count as denying Israel’s Jewish character.” [3]
Justice minister, Yaacov Neeman, has backed a bill “designed to skew the make-up of a panel-selecting judges for Israel’s supreme court. Several judicial posts are about to fall vacant, and the government hopes to stuff the court with appointees who share its ideological worldview and will not rescind its anti-democratic legislation, including its latest attack on the human rights community. Neeman’s favored candidate is a settler who has a history of ruling against human rights organizations.” [Ibid]
Other non-democratic measures include increasing government intimidation of the Israeli media and academia, a crackdown on whistleblowers and critics of the settlements and how Israel changes the rules to justify injustice.
Read about Vanunu’s first and second historic trials in BEYOND NUCLEAR: Mordechai Vanunu’s FREEDOM of SPEECH Trial and My Life as a Muckraker: 2005-2010
2011 veteranstoday.com
by Eileen Fleming
Both Secretary of State Clinton and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta have now gone public with concerns over Israel’s growing isolation in the Middle East and are urging that regime to take diplomatic steps to address the issue.Israeli Government ministers reacted to Clinton’s criticism of democracy Israeli style on Sunday at a weekly cabinet meeting.
In 2006, Israel’s Nuclear Whistleblower, Mordechai Vanunu explained why “Israel is only a democracy if you are a Jew.”
Both Secretary of State Clinton and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta have now gone public with concerns over Israel’s growing isolation in the Middle East and are urging that regime to take diplomatic steps to address the issue.
During a closed forum in Washington on Saturday, “Clinton criticized recent legislative attempts in Israel to restrict left-wing organizations and expressed shock over growing discrimination against Israeli women. She mentioned cases of IDF soldiers leaving during performances of female singers and the fact that females sit in the back of buses in certain places in Israel. Clinton said that some of these phenomena reminded her of Iran.” [1]
On Sunday at a weekly cabinet meeting, Israeli Government ministers reacted to Clinton’s criticism of democracy Israeli style.
Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz claimed Clinton’s comments were “completely exaggerated” and “Israeli democracy is alive, liberal and breathing. I don’t know many better democracies in the world. It is of course necessary to fix things sometimes. The matter of excluding and segregating women is completely unacceptable and needs to be put to a stop, but there is a great distance between this and the argument that there is a threat to Israeli democracy.” [Ibid]
Interior Minister Eli Yishai said that the Knesset passes laws after thorough checks and “Israel is the only democratic country in the Middle East. I assume that everything done here will be done within the law and I am not concerned by that.” [Ibid]
“Everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and it was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”-Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
On 28 May 1993, Ariel Sharon explained:Recently Netanyahu’s Likud faction and the Yisrael Beiteinu party of foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, proposed a new law that would censor the human rights community in Israel.
“The terms ‘democracy’ or ‘democratic’ are totally absent from the Declaration of Independence. This is not an accident. The intention of Zionism was not to bring democracy, needless to say. It was solely motivated by the creation in Eretz-Isrel of a Jewish state belonging to all the Jewish people and to the Jewish people alone. This is why any Jew of the Diaspora has the right to immigrate to Israel and to become a citizen of Israel.”
Israel is an ETHNOCRACY and “An ethnocracy is the opposite of a democracy, although it might incorporate some elements of democracy such as universal citizenship and elections. It arises when one particular group-the Jews in Israel, the Russians in Russia, the Protestants in pre-1972 Northern Ireland, the whites in apartheid South Africa, the Shi’ite Muslims in Iran, the Malay in Malaysia and, if they had their way, the white Christian fundamentalists in the US-seize control of the government and armed forces in order to enforce a regime of exclusive privilege over other groups in what is in fact a multi-ethnic or multi-religious society. Ethnocracy, or ethno-nationalism, privileges ethnos over demos, whereby one’s ethnic affiliation, be it defined by race, descent, religion, language or national origin, takes precedence over citizenship in determining to whom a county actually ‘belongs.’” [2]
The bill divides non-governmental organizations (NGOs) into two kinds: those defined by the right as pro-Israel and those seen as “political”, or anti-Israel.
“The “political” ones – meaning those that criticize government policies, especially relating to the occupation – will be banned from receiving funds from foreign governments, their main source of income. Donations from private sources, whether Israeli or foreign, will be subject to a crippling 45 per cent tax. The grounds for being defined as a ‘political’ NGO are suitably vague: denying Israel’s right to exist or its Jewish and democratic character; inciting racism; supporting violence against Israel; supporting politicians or soldiers being put on trial in international courts; or backing boycotts of the state.
“One human rights group warned that all groups assisting the UN’s 2009 report by Judge Richard Goldstone into war crimes committed during Israel’s attack on Gaza in winter 2008 would be vulnerable to such a law. Other organizations like Breaking the Silence, which publishes the testimonies of Israeli soldiers who have committed or witnessed war crimes, will be silenced themselves. And an Israeli Arab NGO said it feared that its work demanding equality for all Israeli citizens, including the fifth who are Palestinian, and an end to Jewish privilege would count as denying Israel’s Jewish character.” [3]
Justice minister, Yaacov Neeman, has backed a bill “designed to skew the make-up of a panel-selecting judges for Israel’s supreme court. Several judicial posts are about to fall vacant, and the government hopes to stuff the court with appointees who share its ideological worldview and will not rescind its anti-democratic legislation, including its latest attack on the human rights community. Neeman’s favored candidate is a settler who has a history of ruling against human rights organizations.” [Ibid]
Other non-democratic measures include increasing government intimidation of the Israeli media and academia, a crackdown on whistleblowers and critics of the settlements and how Israel changes the rules to justify injustice.
In this 2006 interview with Vanunu he explains why “Israel is only a democracy if you are a Jew”Vanunu will announce on his YouTube Channel when his third historic trial in Israel begins:www.youtube.com/user/vanunuvmjc
“30 Minutes with Vanunu” Part 1
In part two, Vanunu explains why Israel refused his appeal seeking to revoke his Israeli citizenship five years ago:
“30 Minutes with Vanunu” Part 2
On November 24th, the Israeli Government responded to Vanunu’s May 2011 appeal seeking to revoke his citizenship under their new Citizenship Revocation Law, which was targeted to rid Israel of Arab-Israelis [indigenous Palestinians who did not flee the land -and their descendents- and received Israeli citizenship] who had been convicted of treason.
In 2011, the Israeli government refuses to revoke Vanunu’s citizenship under their new law because his “case is old”
Vanunu Mordechai asking ,CANCEL,Revoking my Citizenship-M…
- Government Ministers React Sharply to Clinton’s Criticism of Israel’s Democracy
- Jeff Halper, “An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel” Page 74.
- Israels Grand Hypocrisy
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