Somebody’s son:
Citizens of America, wake up. We send billions and billions of dollars to Israel every year, and this is what they are doing with it.
Murdering Palestinians.
Archive for March 1st, 2008
No Translation Required
Mar 1
The ‘Memoir’ is Fiction
Mar 1
A woman tells a story of her traumatic childhood adventures living with wolves after the Nazis killed her parents. A publisher hears the story in a synagogue and persuades the woman to write a book. She gets her a ghost writer. The book succeeds and gets translated into 18 languages and made into a movie, making the woman and her publisher rich. Whoopie!
A Jewish historian looking into the amazing story discovers that the woman made it all up. The woman was pretending to be Jewish. She pretended to be a homeless and crafty waif, but she really wasn’t homeless. Who can say how crafty she was, but it’s unlikely that even a very crafty child could survive four years and 1900 miles in a wolf pack. Just a guess. Unfortunately, the sympathy, fame and fortune she garnered along the publishing way was real. Many people were scammed out of real money to buy the book and see the movie, but they will not get their real money back. No, it’s too late for that. However, the real Jewish publisher and the pretend Jewish author are going to fight over the money. Round two. See you in court.
A Belgian writer has admitted that she made up her best-selling “memoir” depicting how, as a Jewish child, she lived with a pack of wolves in the woods during the Holocaust, her lawyers said Friday.
Misha Defonseca’s book, “Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years,” was translated into 18 languages and made into a feature film in France.Her two Brussels-based lawyers, siblings Nathalie and Marc Uyttendaele, said the author acknowledged her story was not autobiographical and that she did not trek 1,900 miles as a child across Europe with a pack of wolves in search of her deported parents during World War II.
“I ask forgiveness to all who felt betrayed,” Defonseca said, according to a written statement the lawyers gave to The Associated Press.
Defonseca, 71, now lives in Dudley, Massachusetts. Her husband, Maurice, told The Boston Globe on Thursday that she would not comment.
Defonseca wrote in her book that Nazis seized her parents when she was a child, forcing her to wander the forests and villages of Europe alone for four years. She claimed she found herself trapped in the Warsaw ghetto, killed a Nazi soldier in self-defense and was adopted by a pack of wolves that protected her.
In the statement, Defonseca acknowledged the story she wrote was a fantasy and that she never fled her home in Brussels during the war to find her parents.
Here comes her explanation.
Defonseca says her real name is Monique De Wael and that her parents were arrested and killed by Nazis as Belgian resistance fighters, the statement said.
“This story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving,” the statement said.
“I ask forgiveness to all who felt betrayed. I beg you to put yourself in my place, of a 4-year-old girl who was very lost,” the statement said.
The statement said her parents were arrested when she was 4 and she was taken care of by her grandfather and uncle. She said she was poorly treated by her adopted family, called a “daughter of a traitor” because of her parents’ role in the resistance, which she said led her to “feel Jewish.”
She said there were moments when she “found it difficult to differentiate between what was real and what was part of my imagination.”
Nathalie Uyttendaele said she and her brother contacted the author last weekend to show her material discovered by Belgian daily Le Soir, which questioned her story.
“We gave her this information and it was very difficult. She was confronted with a reality that is different from what she has been living for 70 years,” Nathalie Uyttendaele said.
Pressure on the author to defend the accuracy of her book had grown in recent weeks.
“I’m not an expert on relations between humans and wolves but I am a specialist of the persecution of Jews and they (Defonseca’s family) can’t be found in the archives,” Belgian historian Maxime Steinberg told RTL television. “The De Wael family is not Jewish nor were they registered as Jewish.”
Defonseca had been asked to write the book by U.S. publisher Jane Daniel in the 1990s, after Daniel heard the writer tell the story in a Massachusetts synagogue.
Daniel and Defonseca fell out over profits received from the best-selling book, which led to a lawsuit. In 2005, a Boston court ordered Daniel to pay Defonseca and her ghost writer Vera Lee $22.5 million.
Lee, of Newton, Massachusetts, said she was shocked to hear Defonseca made up the story.
“She always maintained that this was truth as she recalled it, and I trusted that that was the case,” Lee said.
Defonseca’s lawyers said Daniel has not yet paid the court-ordered sum.
Daniel said Friday she would try to get the judgment overturned. She said she could not fully research Defonseca’s story before it was published because the woman claimed she did not know her parents’ names, her birthday or where she was born.
“There was nothing to go on to research,” she said.
I’m sure there lies some deep psychological significance to all this. I mean, is it a crime to imitate a Jewish survivor of the holocaust so successfully or is it just personally very offensive? I do wonder how the courts will sort it all out.
Meanwhile, here’s what I think about offensive artistic license.
In the movie The Titanic, there are a many horrible scenes as the boat is sinking. Down in steerage where the people were locked in, the movie shows a mother praying with her small children before they all die. I think she was Catholic because I recall she was saying the Our Father or the Hail Mary. It also shows an elderly couple lying on their bed waiting to die. Later the movie shows mothers and babies floating in the water with their life jackets on, frozen to death.
These scenes, based on real events, made me feel that it was wrong to make the movie an entertainment blockbuster romance. Teenagers watched it over and over again to see Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, and I was horrified at their ability to blithely endure those scenes as passage to the romantic excitement of Part II.
After I saw the movie once, I knew I never wanted to see it again. I don’t need to. I resent that movie and the way it made James Cameron and other people rich. I resent how it used the suffering of real people, even if the scenes are fictionalized, as a dramatic accoutrement to an essentially romantic storyline. Those scenes burned into my brain the horrible deaths and hopelessness that real people suffered. The romance can never compensate for the painful reality that innocent people were locked in the bowels of the ship to allow the wealthy a chance to survive. For me, that is the story. That’s how it always is with me. I can’t get past the injustice.
But all this time I have yet to meet another person who felt this way about that movie. People accept it for what it is: entertainment. Was it a crime for James Cameron to make The Titanic? Shall I sue him on behalf of the poor dead people who went to a watery grave, and who knew they would die trapped like rats, praying to God for mercy and holding onto each other as the ice water overcame them? Shall I sue him because he caused me emotional distress by making entertainment out of what rightfully deserves to be a solemn documentary? Of course not. He is free to do what he will, and I am free to consider him a shit for it, which I do. That’s all the power I have, but it is enough for me.
The military has developed a heat ray gun, and 60 Minutes has done a story on it. Now pay attention because 60 Minutes is perhaps one of the last remaining vestiges of what was known as ‘investigative reporting’. I haven’t seen their story, but you can see the clip CBS has released here.
“You have to feel the ray gun to believe it,” says 60 Minutes correspondent David Martin, speaking about a non-lethal weapon the Pentagon has developed, “and there’s only one way to do that.”
Martin was reportedly “zapped” 17 times for this piece, demonstrating the effects, as well as the possibility that a person could reduce the impact with shields of various materials.
“The gun is really an antenna which shoots out this very high-frequency radio beam that penetrates the skin to a depth of 1/64 of an inch, which is just deep enough to hit the nerves,” says Martin. “And it creates this instantaneous sensation of heat which makes anyone who is hit with it try to get out of the way as fast as possible.
“And the second you do get out of the way, the pain goes away,” Martin continued. “And the point is that this gun, which has a range of roughly half a mile - the exact range is classified - can make you stop whatever it is you’re doing.”
It seems that is the intended benefit of this weapon, which Martin says causes the sensation of being scalded with hot water.
He asks, “How many innocent lives have been lost by someone approaching a check-point and not heeding the warning signs that American soldiers were giving them …? Now you have this gun. If you shoot that ray gun at someone and they keep coming you can safely assume that they have evil intent and have cleared the way to use more lethal force, which would be their rifle.”
I don’t know who was interviewing Martin for this clip, but of course they were both serious as heart attacks discussing this new weapon. When she asks Martin to discuss how this might be used, he brightens right up. It can be used in Iraq! Instead of shooting Iraqis driving their cars near checkpoints, our military can stop them with the heat ray gun. Yeah, yeah that’s it. That’s what it’s good for - stopping people with evil intentions. It will save lives. It’s good. Good. It’s all good. Let us praise military technology, Amen. The clip ends.
Let’s think through some other uses, shall we? The heat ray gun leaves no marks whatsoever on the body, but it causes tremendous pain. The second you step out of the way the pain stops. All the victim has to do is step out of the way and the pain stops.
OK. Well, what if you couldn’t step out of the way? What if you were handcuffed to a wall and some sadistic military psychopath decided to torture you with the heat ray gun? Hmmm? Has anyone thought of that?
OK. Here’s another scenario. Let’s say there’s another terrorist attack on America and the military is called in to keep order. Let’s say the government institutes martial law. Let’s say people protest. Will they use the heat ray guns on Americans? What if a group of people is surrounded by heat ray guns and can’t get out of the way? Hmmm?
Will they be allowed to use it on children? The elderly? Does anybody know? Who enforces the rules? Can we expect the same gleeful use that we see with police officers using tasers? If the heat ray gun leaves no mark, does it come down to the victim’s word against the soldier? Who do you suppose will win that contest?
It’s so typical of our corporate press to not ask questions like this. That would be impolite because it would cast aspersions on our government and on our military, and we don’t do that no matter what they do. But we should. If you think for one second that the US government would hesitate using a weapon like this which tortures without leaving a mark on American civilians, you have not been paying attention. They hit the pay-dirt with your tax dollars. This was likely a black ops technology development. You paid for it, and you will have no recourse when they use it against….You.
