Infamous Auschwitz sign (now recovered) was stolen to fund terror in Sweden? (now updated!)
According to the Swiss media, the five men who stole the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign that hung over the entrance gate to the Auschwitz death camp site were allegedly hired by neo-Nazis looking to finance terror attacks against the Swedish Prime Minister and Parliament, the Times of London reports.
An unnamed source told Aftonbladet, Sweden’s biggest-selling daily newspaper, that the group had a collector in France, Great Britain, or the U.S. who was willing to pay “millions” for the sign, which was found in northern Poland hacked into three pieces and wrapped in cloth.
Weird.
Update (12/27): An SFI reader in Sweden e-mails us:
One of the thieves appears to have been swedish. Likely, although unreported in the media, of Polish extraction: we have a large Polish-Swedish population. (Mostly jewish, actually, since the 1968 low-intensity pogroms.) Yes, there are continuous security threats against our gov’t ministers (as everywhere), but the linkage between those two facts is based on an unnamed source telling things to aftonbladet, a tabloid known never to check the facts behind a good story.
Comments (0) »Friday, December 25th, 2009 at 12:26 PM | Stand For Israel
Update: Police find stolen Auschwitz sign
Polish police have found the infamous sign stolen last week from the gate to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. The sign, which read “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work will set you free”), had been cut into three pieces.
AP reports that five suspects were arrested when the sign was found Sunday night in northern Poland. (The memorial that stands where the camp was–where the sign was stolen from–is in the south, on the other side of the country.) More details were expected to be announced at a press conference planned for 8 am Monday in Krakow (3 a.m. EST).
Comments (0) »Sunday, December 20th, 2009 at 8:28 PM | Stand For Israel
Infamous Auschwitz sign stolen
The infamous sign forged by concentration camp prisoners that hung over the gates to the Auschwitz concentration camp was stolen this week. The sign, which historians believe was placed by camp commandant Rudolf Hoss, read “Arbeit macht frei” — “Work will set you free.” Between 1 million and 1.6 million people died there.
Israeli President Shimon Peres met today with the Polish Prime Minister to express shock over the theft:
“The State of Israel and the entire Jewish people ask that you take the necessary steps in order to catch the criminals and return the sign to its place,” Peres said. “The sign has an extremely deep historical meaning for the Jewish people and for the whole world and it serves as a memorial monument to more than 1 million Jews who were murdered in this camp.”
An official from the Auschwitz museum said the thieves must have been familiar with the museum’s closed-circuit camera system and the nightly patrols, and that they escaped by cutting through a fence around the property.
Comments (0) »Friday, December 18th, 2009 at 11:20 AM | Stand For Israel
UK promises to change law used to harass Israeli officials, but “universal jurisdiction” isn’t limited to UK
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is promising Israel that a wacky British law that’s been used by pro-Palestinian activists to harass Israeli officials is on its way out the door. Whether or not Britain cancels its law, the issue is one that some say imperils the concept of national sovereignty but, more immediately, has become a cudgel to threaten Israel and its leaders.
This week, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni became the latest in a line of elected officials and IDF officers who had to cancel plans to visit Great Britain when they learned that warrants for their arrest for “war crimes” had been sworn out in British courts. (It’s also happened in Belgium and Spain.) These warrants are based on a strange legal concept called “universal jurisdiction,” which up-ends the traditional concept of “jurisdiction” — meaning that courts in one locality or country have oversight only over that area or country.
This means that courts in Detroit don’t try cases that happened in Miami, nor can a judge in Miami tell the populace of Detroit what their laws ought to be there. Internationally, courts in Singapore rule over cases that happen in Singapore and don’t have the right or power to make rulings about cases or laws in Holland. Each country or locality has sovereignty–control over itself; it’s the responsibility of each area to set laws and try cases for their own jurisdiction. (This is why criminals are extradited — they have to be tried in the areas in which they’re accused of committing crimes.).
Universal jurisdiction, however, allows courts in one locality to extend their jurisdiction into other areas: So that one area’s courts can claim the right to prosecute offenses that happened well outside its area of jurisdiction. Once this crosses international borders, extending jurisdiction can be said to compromise national sovereignty. (Jurist Robert Bork is one of the legal scholars who’ve explored this issue in detail.)
(Ironically, one of the first cases in which a country tried someone for offenses that occurred outside its border was Read More » Comments (2) »
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at 4:35 PM | Stand For Israel
The minister’s out to lunch
But Evelyn Gordon sure does at Commentary’s Contentions blog.
Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, showed up in Israel and publicly lamented that Israel’s vibrant “peace movement” (what, hawks are a “war movement”?) is so much less visible.
“There was a left that made itself heard and a real desire for peace,” Kouchner told French radio. “It seems to me, and I hope that I am completely wrong, that this desire has completely vanished, as though people no longer believe in it.”
Kouchner is, of course, half right: even most Israeli leftists have stopped believing peace is possible in the foreseeable future, which is precisely why the peace movement and the political Left have largely collapsed. But that is a far cry from saying that Israelis have stopped wanting peace. The desire remains as strong as ever; it’s just that most Israelis currently see no way of fulfilling it.
Nor is it really hard to see why Israelis have stopped believing. First, every territorial concession since the 1993 Oslo Accord has produced only more terror. Palestinians killed more Israelis in the first two and a half years after Oslo than in the entire preceding decade, and in 2000-04 (the height of the second intifada), Israel’s terror-related casualties exceeded those of the entire preceding 53 years. The withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 led to the Second Lebanon War, and the withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 produced daily rocket barrages on southern Israel. To most Israelis, bombs and rockets exploding in their cities don’t look much like peace.
Comments (1) »Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 10:41 AM | Stand For Israel
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