[VIDEO] Most Destructive Weapon of All Time for Sale: Hitler’s Phone
Posted: February 2, 2017 Filed under: History, Mediasphere, War Room | Tags: Adolf Hitler, Associated Press, Auschwitz concentration camp, El País, Extermination camp, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany, Nazism, Pope Francis, Telephone, WW2 Leave a comment
Libby Watson reports: If you have hundreds of thousands of dollars and are extremely creepy, you can now buy a one-of-a-kind piece of history: Adolf Hitler’s personal telephone.
The phone will be sold by Alexander Historical Auctions in Maryland, and is expected to sell for between $200,000 and $300,000. It was taken from Hitler’s bunker shortly after his death by Brigadier Sir Ralph Rayner, who died in 1977; his son Ranulf inherited the phone. According to the auction listing, Rayner was given the phone by Russian officers:
Very likely the first non-Soviet victor to enter the city, Rayner went to the Chancellery where Russian officers offered him a tour. On entering Hitler’s private quarters, Rayner was first offered Eva Braun’s telephone, but politely declined claiming that his favorite color was red. His Russian hosts were pleased to hand him a red telephone – the telephone offered here.
The listing goes on to note the phone’s uniquely horrific history:
It would be impossible to find a more impactful relic than the primary tool used by the most evil man in history to annihilate countless innocents, lay waste to hundreds of thousands of square miles of land, and in the end, destroy his own country and people…with effects that still menacingly reverberate today. Read the rest of this entry »
Essential for Citizens: Propaganda Literacy
Posted: September 29, 2016 Filed under: Censorship, China, Japan, Mediasphere, Russia, Think Tank | Tags: 2014 FIFA World Cup, 2016 Summer Paralympics, Advertising, Akiyama Saneyuki, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Anti-Russian sentiment, Auschwitz concentration camp, Austria, Bashar al-Assad, BBC, Japan, RUSSIA, Russo-Japanese War, Theodore Roosevelt, Ultra high definition television, United Kingdom, United States 1 CommentTetsuo Arima Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, Waseda University
Tetsuo Arima writes: In Washington D.C., the capital of the United States, there is an attraction called the “Duck Tour.” It takes tourists on an amphibious vehicle to tourist spots on both sides of the Potomac River. As the vehicle nears the State Department building, the tour guide gives tourists a quiz. “Over there is the Voice of America, a network which broadcasts around the world. What is the only country that is not covered by this network?” When I participated in this tour, I was the first to raise my hand and answer, “America.” The tour guide made a sour face.
The U.S. government does not engage in propaganda toward Americans. Since the people choose representatives to form a government by democratic elections, the government should not lead its people to make wrong decisions by spreading propaganda. This is a basic principle of democracy. Countries such as China and North Korea, which do not practice democracy, control their populations with propaganda.
However, the U.S., which is a democracy, does engage in propaganda toward other countries. Even its allies are no exception. America, with huge “soft” power, has great influence on other countries, mainly through movies, TV programs, music and fashion, and also utilizes propaganda to the maximum extent. The tour guide must have been displeased because he realized I knew that.
Propaganda in the Information Age
We live in a highly digitized world today. The amount of information is growing exponentially, and many people believe unconditionally that more information is better. This is true if such information is true, unbiased and helps its recipients make sound judgments. But as the amount of information grows, so does the amount that is biased and false. In particular, in the borderless world of the Internet, if one continues to pursue related information, one can easily stray into propaganda sites established by various countries without knowing it.
Readers believe that such information is interesting and useful, but its creators take the trouble to translate and present it in an effort to plant certain ideas and images in the reader’s mind. They expend great time and money to do so. Even smallish businesses spend huge amounts of money on public relations and commercials, so it is natural that major countries bring together elite propagandists, organize powerful state agencies, and give them enormous budgets in order to spread propaganda.
Brilliant piece from @MZHemingway here. Machado is 2016’s Sandra Fluke: a 100% bona fide PR scam. https://t.co/6irzPyTsmi
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) September 29, 2016
VOA, mentioned above, is one of those propaganda agencies. In fact, it is modeled after the British Broadcasting Corporation. The BBC has a strong image as a reputable public broadcaster, but it is also known to spread propaganda, especially during wartime. Nonetheless, it did not spread rumors, praise its country unreservedly, or slander enemy countries, unlike state-owned media in non-democratic countries. The BBC reported news strictly based on facts, but achieved enormous impact by broadcasting only the facts that were convenient to its country and inconvenient to hostile ones.

Soviet Five-Year Plan propaganda poster.
Responsibility of the mass media
In China, a non-democratic country which controls its people with propaganda, news presented by China Central Television (CCTV), a broadcaster run by the Communist Party, should be regarded as propaganda whether it targets domestic or foreign audiences. Of course CCTV also uses language which makes its content really sound like propaganda. The problem in Japan is that the mass media frequently repeat such propaganda as part of their news. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] Jerry Lewis on ‘The Day The Clown Cried’: The Legendary Comic Speaks Out
Posted: December 17, 2015 Filed under: Art & Culture, Entertainment, Mediasphere | Tags: Auschwitz concentration camp, Emmy Award, EWTN, Extermination camp, Final Solution, Hungary, Jerry Lewis, Jews, Muscular Dystrophy Telethon, Nazism, The Bellboy, The Day the Clown Cried, The Errand Boy, The Holocaust, The Nutty Professor, United States, World War II Leave a commentOn his career, Trump, MDA, and the film that got away.
Raymond Arroyo writes:
…As writer and director of his own films, Lewis is responsible for some of the greatest slapstick gags in history. Just watch “The Nutty Professor,” “The Bellboy,” “The Errand Boy,” “Cinderfella” or “The Ladies Man,” and his particular comic genius is evident. In Europe, he has been named Best Director of the Year eight times since 1960.
He created Video Assist, a technology that allowed him to watch his on-screen performances, instantly, before the film was developed. Video Assist is still used by nearly every film and TV director to this day.
One Lewis project has been shrouded in mystery for decades: “The Day the Clown Cried.” It’s a World War II drama concerning a clown in Auschwitz. The film was mired in legal troubles, and Lewis has never allowed it to be seen.
Now, in an exclusive interview, he tells me why he has kept the film under wraps for so long.
Here’s a clip:
“That’s the problem, there was no artistry,” Lewis said. “The work was bad.”
[Read the full story here, at LifeZette]
This is just one of the many revelations he shared with me during a hilarious and moving interview that will air Thursday on “The World Over” on EWTN.
[VIDEO] EDUCATION: ‘I Want to Stab a Jew,’ Young Girl Tells Her Teacher Father
Posted: November 21, 2015 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Education, Religion, Terrorism, War Room | Tags: Auschwitz concentration camp, BBC, Extermination camp, Israel, Israel Defense Forces, Jerusalem, Jews, Palestinian people, The Times of Israel, West Bank 1 CommentA video posted by a Jordanian-Palestinian teacher on Facebook shows his young daughter holding a large knife and declaring, “I want to stab a Jew,” the watchdog group MEMRI reported, amid an ongoing surge of stabbings and other terror attacks by Palestinians on Israelis.
“Why do you want to stab the Jew?”
Abdulhaleem Abuesha, a teacher in the Madaba refugee camp in Jordan, posted the clip on Friday. MEMRI translated and highlighted it on Tuesday.
“Because he stole our land.”
After his daughter Rahf, standing in front of the refrigerator in the kitchen, declares her desire to stab a Jew, Abuesha asks, “Why do you want to stab the Jew?”
“With what do you want to stab them?”
“Because he stole our land,” she replies.
“With a knife.”
Her father confirms approvingly: “They stole our land.” He then asks, “With what do you want to stab them?” Read the rest of this entry »
A Mini Auschwitz Display at a U.K. Kids’ Attraction Has Been Slammed as ‘Bizarre’
Posted: February 23, 2015 Filed under: History | Tags: Anti-Defamation League, Auschwitz concentration camp, Holocaust victims, Jews, Nazi concentration camps, Nazism, Pink triangle, Poland, Red Army, Urban Outfitters 2 CommentsA tourist attraction geared at families and children in Birmingham, England has drawn flak for its “Railways in Wartime” Auschwitz display, depicting model trains shepherding Holocaust victims to their death in Nazi concentration camps…(read more)
Culte Morbide Antisemetic Méprisable de Haine: Hundreds of Graves Desecrated at Jewish Cemetery in Eastern France
Posted: February 16, 2015 Filed under: Global, Religion, War Room | Tags: Antisemitism, Auschwitz concentration camp, François Hollande, France, History of the Jews in France, Jews, Nazi concentration camps, Paris, President of France, Sarre-Union, The Holocaust Leave a commentTombstones Upended and Broken at Cemetery in Sarre-Union
PARIS — Sam Schechner reports: As many as 300 graves were desecrated at a Jewish cemetery in eastern France, officials said Sunday, the latest escalation in a wave of anti-Semitic violence in Europe.
“Everything will be done to make sure those responsible for the odious and barbaric act will be identified and punished. France is determined to fight relentlessly against anti-Semitism and those who would attack our values.”
— French President François Hollande
French officials are searching for an unknown number of assailants who upended or broke tombstones and headstones in roughly three quarters of the 400 graves at a historic Jewish cemetery in Sarre-Union, a small town near France’s border with Germany, a person familiar with the inquiry said.
“Everything will be done to make sure those responsible for the odious and barbaric act will be identified and punished,” said French President François Hollande. “France is determined to fight relentlessly against anti-Semitism and those who would attack our values.”
The attack is the latest in a series across Europe that has targeted Europe’s Jews, raising concerns over whether authorities are doing enough to stem a rise in anti-Semitism. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] Dr. Krauthammer: Obama Administration Looked Silly Pretending Paris Terrorist Attack Was Not Anti-Semitic
Posted: February 10, 2015 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News, War Room, White House | Tags: Antisemitism, Auschwitz concentration camp, Charles Krauthammer, Charlie Hebdo, Community Security Trust, EUROPE, Garry Shewan, Greater Manchester, Jews, Middle East 1 CommentVia The Corner
Charles Krauthammer said it was foolish for the Obama administration to pretend that the January terrorist attack on a Kosher deli in Paris was not motivated by anti-Semitism.
“The idea [here] was for terrorism, for an anti-Semitic act, not that you have a grievance against the individual, but you want to attack Jews,” Krauthammer said on Special Report. “What does it take [for a terrorist attack to be deemed anti-Semitic] and why did they spend the whole day with this ridiculous pretense that it wasn’t? Because otherwise it would have meant admitting that the president is not infallible.”
Krauthammer said…(read more)
Jonathan Sacks: The Return of Anti-Semitism
Posted: January 31, 2015 Filed under: History, Think Tank, War Room | Tags: Abraham Foxman, Anti-Defamation League, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, Antisemitism around the world, Auschwitz concentration camp, Book of Genesis, Caracas, EUROPE, Jews, Neo-Nazism, Orthodox Judaism, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Venezuela Leave a commentSeventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz, violence and hatred against Jews is on the rise, especially in the Middle East and among Muslims in Europe
Jonathan Sacks writes: Last Tuesday, a group of Holocaust survivors, by now gaunt and frail, made their way back to Auschwitz, the West’s symbol of evil—back to the slave-labor side of the vast complex, with its mocking inscription Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work makes you free”), and back to the death camp, where a million and a quarter human beings, most of them Jews, were gassed, burned and turned to ash. They were there to commemorate the day, 70 years ago, when Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz and saw, for the first time, the true dimensions of the greatest crime since human beings first set foot on Earth.
“Today Christian communities are being ravaged, terrorized and decimated throughout the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia, and scores of Muslims are killed every day by their brothers, with Sunnis arrayed against Shiites, radicals against moderates, the religious against the secular. The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.”
The moment would have been emotional at the best of times, but this year brought an especially disturbing undercurrent. The Book of Genesis says that, when God told Abraham what would happen to his descendants, a “fear of great darkness” fell over him. Something of that fear haunted the survivors this week, who have witnessed the return of anti-Semitism to Europe after 70 years of political leaders constant avowals of “Never again.” As they finished saying Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for mourners, one man cried out, “I don’t want to come here again.” Everyone knew what he meant. For once, the fear was not only about the past but also about the future.

Two Jews, kneeling at right, about to be put to death by the sword as revenge for the death of Jesus, who looks on at top left. Manuscript illumination, c1250, from a French Bible. PHOTO: THE GRANGER COLLECTION
The murder of Jewish shoppers at a Parisian kosher supermarket three weeks ago, after the killing of 12 people at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, sent shivers down the spines of many Jews, not because it was the first such event but because it has become part of a pattern. In 2014, four were killed at the Jewish Museum in Brussels. In 2012, a rabbi and three young children were murdered at a Jewish school in Toulouse.
“In 2008 in Mumbai, four terrorists separated themselves from a larger group killing people in the city’s cafes and hotels and made their way to a small Orthodox Jewish center, where they murdered its young rabbi and his pregnant wife after torturing and mutilating them.”
In 2008 in Mumbai, four terrorists separated themselves from a larger group killing people in the city’s cafes and hotels and made their way to a small Orthodox Jewish center, where they murdered its young rabbi and his pregnant wife after torturing and mutilating them. As the Sunday Times of London reported about the attack, “the terrorists would be told by their handlers in Pakistan that the lives of Jews were worth 50 times those of non-Jews.”

A copy of Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ is sold at a street shop in Cairo in 2009. PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PESSE/GETTY IMAGES
An ancient hatred has been reborn.
Some politicians around the world deny that what is happening in Europe is anti-Semitism. It is, they say, merely a reaction to the actions of the state of Israel, to the continuing conflict with the Palestinians. But the policies of the state of Israel are not made in kosher supermarkets in Paris or in Jewish cultural institutions in Brussels and Mumbai. The targets in these cities were not Israeli. They were Jewish.

The grand mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, inspects Bosnian SS members in 1944. PHOTO: ALAMY
According to the Middle East Media Research Institute, an Egyptian cleric, Muhammad Hussein Yaqub, speaking in January 2009 on Al Rahma, a popular religious TV station in Egypt, made the contours of the new hate impeccably clear: “If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not. We will never love them…They are enemies not because they occupied Palestine. They would have been enemies even if they did not occupy a thing…You must believe that we will fight, defeat and annihilate them until not a single Jew remains on the face of the Earth…You will not survive as long as a single one of us remains.”
“Anti-Semitism has existed for a very long time. One critical moment came around the end of the 1st century C.E., when the Gospel of John attributed to Jesus these words about the Jews: ‘You belong to your father, the Devil.’ From being the children of Abraham, Jews had been transformed into the children of Satan.”
Not everyone would put it so forcefully, but this is the hate in which much of the Middle East and the Muslim world has been awash for decades, and it is now seeping back into Europe. For Jews, “never again” has become “ever again.”
“If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not. We will never love them…They are enemies not because they occupied Palestine. They would have been enemies even if they did not occupy a thing…You must believe that we will fight, defeat and annihilate them until not a single Jew remains on the face of the Earth…You will not survive as long as a single one of us remains.”
— Egyptian cleric, Muhammad Hussein Yaqub, speaking in January 2009
The scope of the problem is, of course, difficult to gauge precisely. But recent polling is suggestive—and alarming. An Anti-Defamation League study released last May found “persistent and pervasive” anti-Jewish attitudes after surveying 53,100 adults in 102 countries and territories world-wide. The ADL found that 74% of those surveyed in the Middle East and North Africa held anti-Semitic attitudes; the number was 24% in Western Europe, 34% in Eastern Europe and 19% in the Americas. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] Dr. K: ‘Now what we’re getting is not a resurgence of ant-Semitism so much as a return to the European norm’
Posted: January 27, 2015 Filed under: Global, History, Mediasphere, War Room | Tags: Antisemitism, Auschwitz concentration camp, Charles Krauthammer, François Hollande, France, Israel, Jews, media, news, President of France, The Holocaust 1 Comment“There’s been an interruption in European history; there’s been a constant anti-Semitism for 2,000 years ending and culminating in the Holocaust, and as a result it was impolite in polite society to be anti-Semitic.”
On Tuesday’s Special Report, Charles Krauthammer, marking the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, said that Europe will eventually be empty of Jews, thanks to rising anti-Semitism that is merely a return to normal.
“This 70 years is an anomaly in European history and now what we’re getting is not a resurgence of ant-Semitism so much as a return to the European norm.”
The threat to the future of the Jewish people does not come from Europe, Krauthammer continued, but from enemies in the Middle East…(more)
Liberation of Auschwitz: 70 Years Ago Today
Posted: January 27, 2015 Filed under: History, War Room | Tags: Auschwitz, Auschwitz concentration camp, Auschwitz Survivors, City of Death, Concentration Camp, EUROPE, Extermination camp, Hitler, Jews, Nazi, Poland, Soviet Army, Soviet Union, The Holocaust, USA, WW2 Leave a commentIntimate Portraits Pay Tribute To Auschwitz Survivors
Ebay’s Disturbing Trade in Holocaust Souvenirs: Outrage Over Death Camp Relic Auctions
Posted: November 2, 2013 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, History, War Room | Tags: Auschwitz, Auschwitz concentration camp, eBay, Extermination camp, Holocaust, Internment, Nazi, Online auction, The Mail on Sunday 1 CommentMarc Nicol and Simon Murphy report: Online auction site eBay is facing an international storm of outrage after it was revealed to be profiting from the repulsive trade in Holocaust memorabilia.
Items for sale include the clothes of concentration camp victims. Among dozens of sick souvenirs on offer last week was a striped uniform thought to have belonged to a Polish baker who died in Auschwitz, which was on sale for £11,200.

Holocaust items being sold on Ebay
It was one of dozens of offensive items uncovered by a Mail on Sunday investigation. And within hours of being alerted to the item by this newspaper, eBay removed it from sale after conducting an ‘urgent investigation’.
The striped pyjama-style concentration camp uniform was worn by death camp inmates
Among dozens of sick souvenirs on offer last week was a striped uniform thought to have belonged to a Polish baker
The internet giant apologised and vowed to give £25,000 to a suitable charity, before removing more than 30 other death camp souvenirs which it said had evaded its strict vetting process.
eBay, the world’s largest online marketplace, admitted it had no idea how long it has been helping sell items linked to genocide, but one Nazi memorabilia dealer boasted of selling an Auschwitz victim’s uniform for thousands of pounds on the site last year.
The company receives a commission on items sold, as well as charging a listing fee.