News Articles
Hitler's non-German accomplices
May 20, 2009 "Der Spiegel"
... Experts such as Dieter Pohl of the German Institute for Contemporary History estimate that more than 200,000 non-Germans -- about as many as Germans and Austrians -- "prepared, carried out and assisted in acts of murder." And often they were every bit as cold-blooded as Hitler's henchmen....
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Book review: "The Slave Next Door"
May 18, 2009
Although the United States abolished slavery officially in 1865, it has never ended in practice. In 2009, slaves work in the homes of diplomats in Maryland and in the tomato fields of Southwest Florida. "There has never been a single day in our America, from its discovery and birth right up to the moment you are reading this sentence, without slavery," write renowned human trafficking expert Kevin Bales and respected historian Ron Soodalter. Their new book, The Slave Next Door, examines modern-day slavery in America....
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Amnesty Int'l, UN decry Sri Lankan "bloodbath"
11 May 2009
The horrific condition facing civilians in north eastern Sri Lanka has been described as a "bloodbath" by the United Nations. Amnesty International has said that it demands immediate action by the United Nations Security Council.
In the last few days, more than 400 people – including more than 100 children – are reported to have been killed in a two-day bombardment of the 2 square kilometre area designated as a "Safe Zone" by the Sri Lankan army....
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Denial of Armenian Genocide Continues
Los Angeles — This year, on Armenian Remembrance Day — when the mass killing of more than 1 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire is commemorated — Armenian-American activists had high hopes that a president who ran on a message of change would indeed change the pattern of previous administrations. That is, they hoped President Obama would use the term "genocide" to describe the human tragedy that occurred nearly a century ago.
But on April 24, their hopes were dashed. When Obama — who, during the campaign season and as a senator in the United States, pledged to describe the events of 1915 as a "genocide" — released his statement in acknowledgement of the tragedy, the term was nowhere to be found....
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"UN report on human trafficking exposes modern form of slavery"
February 2009
A Global Report on Trafficking in Persons launched today by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) provides new information on a crime that shames us all….
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New York Times, March 26, 2009
Palestinian Children Serenade Survivors in Israel
HOLON, Israel — For just over an hour on Wednesday, a club for elderly Holocaust survivors on a side street in this suburban town south of Tel Aviv came alive with an encounter of an extraordinary kind.
A youth orchestra came to play for the elderly Israelis, a good turn that might pass in other countries as routine. In this case, though, the entertainers were Palestinians, a group of musicians 12 to 17 years old from the Jenin refugee camp, once a notorious hotbed of militancy and violence in the northern reaches of the West Bank....
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"The Holocaust and the U.S. Bishops"
New York Times, Jan. 31, 2009
... Another common misconception, the bishop would also say, is that the church is an absolute monarchy, with popes as religious versions of Louis XIV declaring, "L'église c'est moi." The bishops themselves, he would add, are not just papal branch managers but descendants of the apostles, each bishop, no less than the pope himself, recognized as a "vicar of Christ."
Given that teaching, one would expect that at least one of 433 active or retired Catholic bishops in the United States might have voiced some misgivings or raised some questions about Pope Benedict XVI's recent action in revoking the excommunication of four bishops — including one who has denied the Holocaust — of an ultratraditionalist schismatic group, the Society of St. Pius X.
As of Friday afternoon, Catholic News Service knew of not one who had done so....
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Local connection to Bielski Brothers: "Seeing Her Father in a New Light," Naples Daily News, Jan. 29, 2009
Tuvia Bielski never wanted fame. He rarely talked about his life before coming to America. Even when he did speak of the old days in Belarus, he talked mostly to people who had been there before.
"We always knew there was something special about him," says daughter Ruth Bielski Ehrreich, a south Fort Myers resident. "People were always coming to visit him and saying nice things about him. But it was a long time until we knew why."...
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New film on Jewish resistance: "Defiance," based upon the story of the Bielski Brothers, who organized a Jewish partisan army as well as a rescue operation.
"Zwick's film, a true Holocaust story that most people do not know, suggests some startling new ideas about resistance, sex, and class in the doomed provinces of Jewish Eastern Europe.... After Tuvia died, in 1987, Nechama Tec rescued him from obscurity, and Edward Zwick and Daniel Craig have now sealed the case for his immortality."
full review: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2009/01/12/090112crci_cinema_denby
"Slavery Haunts America's Plantation Prisons"
August 28, 2008
On an expanse of 18,000 acres of farmland, 59 miles northwest of Baton Rouge, long rows of men, mostly African-American, till the fields under the hot Louisiana sun. The men pick cotton, wheat, soybeans and corn. They work for pennies, literally....
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Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) fights human-rights abuses in Florida
Updates on CIW campaign to force Burger King to pay decent wages to Florida workers:
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut/320200
http://www.ciw-online.org/
Amnesty Int'l releases annual report on human rights abuses
"Amnesty International's Report 2008 shows that sixty years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations, people are still tortured or ill-treated in at least 81 countries, face unfair trials in at least 54 countries and are not allowed to speak freely in at least 77 countries.
- China must live up to the human rights promises it made around the Olympic Games and allow free speech and freedom of the press and end "re-education through labour".
- The USA must close Guantánamo detention camp and secret detention centres, prosecute the detainees under fair trial standards or release them, and unequivocally reject the use of torture and ill-treatment.
- Russia must show greater tolerance for political dissent, and none for impunity on human rights abuses in Chechnya.
http://thereport.amnesty.org/eng/report-08-at-a-glance
War Crimes Go Unpunished in Guatemala
Over a decade after the end of Guatemala's armed conflict, many of those responsible for its most brutal crimes continue to evade criminal prosecution....
www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/news/war-crimes-go-unpunished-guatemala-20080131
Amnesty Int'l: "Migrants' rights are human rights"
One person in every 35 lives outside the country in which they were born. Many of those are migrant workers or their family members. Reasons for migration can vary between the need to escape poverty, inequality and conflict, the desire to pursue better work and educational opportunities, or even wanting to live in a cleaner environment or better climate....
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Making Sense of Darfur, Books and Articles Relevant to Darfur, Socio-economic Issues: Online Scholarly Resources on Darfur
by Alex de Waal
This posting is a guide to three online sources of scholarly material on Darfur (and Sudan in general) that provide different resources for the student or professor.
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Armenian Genocide
Robert Fisk: A reign of terror which history has chosen to neglect
The story of the last century's first Holocaust – Winston Churchill used this very word about the Armenian genocide years before the Nazi murder of six million Jews – is well known, despite the refusal of modern-day Turkey to acknowledge the facts. Nor are the parallels with Nazi Germany's persecution of the Jews idle ones.
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