A collection of press snippets

David Seaton's News Links

I began my journalistic endeavors by simply juxtaposing snippets from the press in an electronic collage, hoping that in the end result the total effect would be more than just the sum of the separate clippings. With the quotes below I return to my origins...

According to the Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Victims in Israel, 87 percent of Holocaust survivors who request financial aid live on less than NIS 5,000 a month, while 58 percent live on NIS 3,000 or less. Meanwhile, 70 percent of survivors who turn to the foundation cannot afford dental care, and 18 percent need financial aid to pay for eyeglasses. Haaretz

One of every five Holocaust survivors said that he or she had skipped a meal at least once over the past year for financial reasons, and five percent of the survivors said they skipped meals often for that reason. One of every eight Holocaust survivors cited financial difficulty as the reason they had gone without medication at least once over the past year.(...)  Commemorations for Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Day, or Yom Hashoah Vehagvurah, will begin next Sunday night April 7. Haaretz

As soon as next year, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., could feature holograms of elderly Holocaust survivors that answer questions from visitors.(...) When the holograms are ready for the museum, each one will be accompanied by a voice-recognition program that researchers, led by the University of Southern California, are developing. The program will recognize what museum-goers ask and provide answers, a bit like Siri does on the iPhone, except that all the answers must come from the person the hologram represents.(...) For Holocaust survivors, whose estimated average age is 79, this may be taxing work. So far, however, no one has declined to work with the project, the Associated Press reported. The technology team wants to preserve Holocaust survivors' memories and experiences for future generations, hopefully long after the survivors are gone. Tech News Daily

There is little that I could add to the total effect of the above except to say that I am sure that for the price of one (maybe two?) Cruise missiles or the cost of one museum, every single Holocaust survivor in the world could be housed for the rest of their lives in five star hotels, with full board and a personal nurse in 7/24 attendance. In fact I think that the sufferings of a group of poor, old people, who have had the hardest of lives is being “pimped” by a very cynical clique of political manipulators in order to justify apartheid and ethnic cleansing and through them the tragedy of the Jewish people is being turned into Disneyland. DS

The simplest test of hypocrisy

David Seaton's News Links
So much of what is said in defense of Israel centers around the Holocaust. Lets talk about it a little.

First let me say that I have no doubts at all that it happened just the way it is portrayed (Raul Hilberg version at least).

Furthermore when I was only seven, the aged lady doctor with a heavy accent who walked several miles through a Midwestern blizzard to give me a lifesaving penicillin shot when I had gone into coma from double pneumonia, after my own pediatrician had refused to make the house call, had one of the tattoos on her arm. The next day, when I had awakened, I asked her about the numbers on her arm and my mother told me to shut up. So I am not a negationist. I loved that old lady and I owe my life to her.

So it strikes me as incongruous that with so much concern about the Holocaust that:

"an umbrella group of Holocaust survivor organizations in Israel estimated that about one-quarter of Israel’s 250,000 survivors are living in poverty."

according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency.

With billions of dollars of American aid going to Israel every year, and all the endless hoohah about the Shoa: the monuments and memorials, the TV programs, the university endowments, the books etcetera... that these poor, old people who are actually all that is humanly left of the Holocaust are lacking in even simple comforts makes me want to puke.

I would think until those that brandish the Holocaust at every turn, to justify Israel, actually do something to help these survivors live tranquilly and in comfort for the little time they have left, they should shut up.

They are fakes, the Shoa was real, but they are fakes and everything they are selling is fake.

The next thing you are going to hear - mark my words - is that Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez are making a fund to help these old people. I'm not joking. DS