World Jewish News

Jewish community leaders in New Zealand have asked their government to block a planned visit by a revisionist historian who call

Jewish community leaders in New Zealand have asked their government to block a planned visit by a revisionist historian who calls the Holocaust a "legend." The leaders worry that his presence may heighten anti-Jewish sentiment at a sensitive time.
The country's small Jewish community is feeling vulnerable following their government's diplomatic rift with Israel over allegations of espionage, and following the rare desecration of headstones in a historical Jewish cemetery in Wellington.
Prime Minister Helen Clark last week suspending top-level diplomatic contacts with Jerusalem and demanded an apology after two Israelis were jailed for six months or trying to fraudulently obtain a New Zealand passport.
Clark said her government strongly suspects that the two were spies. The convicted men have denied it, and Israel has neither confirmed nor denied the allegation.
The tough public censure of an ostensibly friendly country has stunned many New Zealand Jews, a community of around 5,000.
Clark's critics have noted that the government has provided no evidence that the two fraudsters had any links to Israeli intelligence services.
They were also unimpressed when the Palestinian terrorist group, Hamas, issued a statement praising Clark and urging other countries to emulate New Zealand's "daring" example and adopt "firm measures" against Israel.
Noting Hamas' stance, the head of the small New Zealand conservative ACT party, Rodney Hide, said Clark's anti-Israel sentiments were an embarrassment.
In contrast to Prime Minster John Howard's administration in neighboring Australia, Clark's liberal government has been critical of Israel and generally supportive of the Palestinian cause in world bodies.
At the U.N. General Assembly Tuesday, New Zealand voted in favor of a resolution demanding that Israel demolish its controversial security barrier in line with a world court ruling.
The U.S. and Australia voted against the measure, along with Israel and three Pacific island nations. Ten countries abstained.
Shortly after the prime minister announced the sanctions against Israel, Jewish graves in Wellington - some of them more than 100 years old - were found overturned and daubed with Nazi slogans and symbols.
Mike Regan, editor of the New Zealand Jewish Chronicle, said Wednesday the incident was the first of its kind in about three decades, and had come as a shock to many Jews.
"Helen Clark's sanctions against Israel, I think, provoked the action," Regan said. "She wasn't responsible for the action in any way whatsoever, but in the minds of these people, I guess they saw support there and jumped at the chance."
He speculated that the culprits were more likely to be white supremacist-type groups than Palestinians living in New Zealand, as some have suggested.
Regan said the grave desecration seemed to be on the minds of every Jewish person he has spoken to in recent days.
He had also been pleased to note that many non-Jewish New Zealanders had expressed their abhorrence.
Regan said there had been isolated anti-Semitic incidents over the years - bullets fired into a synagogue, a rabbi's car defaced with swastikas - but he didn't sense any "dramatic shift" in the way Jews were viewed.
"New Zealand is seen by most Jews as a little haven, and for most of the Jews in New Zealand, it is that way. We've been allowed to have our lives in the way that we want, without interference."
From some of the recent comments he had heard, however, it appeared that "this has shaken a lot of people whose image of New Zealand has now had to be changed."
Holocaust denial
Against this background, news of a planned visit to New Zealand by David Irving, the controversial British historian, has upset the Jewish Council of New Zealand, which has urged the government not to allow him in.
Irving denies charges that he is a "Holocaust denier" and does not dispute that many Jews died during World War II. But he dismisses the notion of gas chambers in Nazi extermination camps as a "legend," saying Jews who died were worked or starved to death, or shot, beaten or hanged.
His views have seen him banned from visiting Australia, Germany and Canada.
In 2000, Irving took an American author to court in Britain after she called him one of the world's most dangerous Holocaust deniers, but the High Court in London threw out his libel suit.
The judge found that the historian had "for his own ideological reasons, persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence."
Jewish Council head David Zwartz said Wednesday the government could deny Irving entry on the basis of his deportation from other countries.
On his Internet website, Irving derided those trying to stop him from visiting New Zealand as "the traditional enemies of the truth" and charged that local Jewish organizations were operating on orders from the "sinister" Anti-Defamation League, a U.S.-based Jewish rights group.
He said he would be addressing the National Press Club in Wellington in September, and had suggested the topic "The problems of writing about World War II in a free society."
There were no legal grounds to prevent him from entry, he argued.
Irving, whose website carries numerous articles critical of Israel, Jews and U.S. policies in Iraq, praised Clark for her tough stance toward Israel over the passport fraud episode.

Источник: cnsnews.com