march 2005

european
news reports

CALL FOR PAPERS:
 Digital Arts & Cultures (DAC) Conference 2005:
"Digital Experience: Design, Aesthetics, Practice"
December 1st - December 3rd, Copenhagen, Denmark.

http://www.itu.dk/DAC2005/

The 6th DAC conference will be held at the IT University of Copenhagen,
Denmark, from December 1st to December 3rd 2005.
Researchers and practitioners from all related disciplines are invited to
participate in this event and to exchange ideas, theories and experiences
regarding the state of the field of digital arts, cultures, aesthetics and design
anno 2005.

ON THE THEME: DIGITAL EXPERIENCE
The DAC 2005 conference invites critical examinations of the field of digital arts and culture, which challenge existing paradigms. We call for papers which examine both theoretical and hands-on approaches to digital experiences and experience design. Since the inaugural DAC in 1998 much has happened, and research has matured from early investigations into the problematic nature of new media towards questions of emergent dynamics, user centered design and various forms of interactivity. At the same time, the realization has grown that users of digital media not only are active participants, but also have to be taken into account at all stages of the design and production of digital experiences How do practitioners (programmers, artists, designers etc.) cater for this kind of active and demanding user? What kinds of experiences can we create? How can these experiences inform us? How do we as academics analyse and evaluate digital experiences? DAC has always been interested in exploring the ways in which digital media do things that traditional media cannot. We believe that the focus on 'experience' in DAC 2005 will illuminate the possibilities of digital media beyond the functional possibilities of 'usability'. What are the aesthetic and cultural implications of digital design as experience?

For suggestions of more specific topics of the papers, see the website.
http://www.itu.dk/DAC2005/


SUBMISSIONS
We call for submission of full papers only. It is possible to submit either a full-length paper (max. 10 pages) or a short paper (max. 4 pages). We also invite invitations for self-organised preconference workshops.

All papers will be reviewed by an independant review committee, which will provide written feedback on each paper.

Submission of full paper (long & short) & workshop proposals: August 8th
Submission of camera-ready papers: October 28th

Jews and the Empire

By Israel Shamir

(A Talk given in the House of Lords, Westminster, on February 23, 2005)

Ladies and Lords, Gentlemen, Friends, 

It is a great honour for this small writer from far-away Jaffa to speak to you in this ancient abode of democracy and aristocracy intertwined, and I wish to thank my host tonight, my dear brother, his lordship Nazir Ahmed of Rotherham in the heather-bound Yorkshire. I would give much to have another dear friend present here, the late Sir Robin, Lord Phillimore for much of my love and understanding of England is due to this friendship. I was but a pup, a young journalist, who came to work at your renowned BBC, and the Lord Phillimore was my bridge and my guide to the good old England of Pickwick Papers, for his home stood in this most English swat of land near Henley-on-Thames. Thus England became a love of my youth, England of pubs serving Brakespear Old Fashioned ale, of neat green squares of Kensington where I lived, of milk bottles on doorstep, of the punchy smell of bacon-and-eggs and burned toast in the morning, of the pleasant feel of the Guardian pages, of the calm bonhomie of English people, of your lovely maidens who are able to propose and prepare a nice cup of tea in the least suitable moment, of your men with their fair play, the green sweet and somewhat parochial England of Blake, Hopkins, Waugh and G K Chesterton, England as opposed to the Empire.

Much as I love England I came to dislike the Empire. The Empire was a vile 19^th century invention. The Empire ruined Iraq and used poison gases against its citizens long before the present Bush-and Blair offensive. No land was too far or too near to be safe from the Imperial assaults: from Shimonoseki in South of Japan to Gondor in mountains of Ethiopia, from Beijing to Archangelsk, from the fishermen’ city of Oriente in Brittany to Baghdad, from Dublin to Kandagar, from Dresden in Saxony to Akka in Palestine, the Empire bombed them all. And I do not speak of some long gone days of Queen Anne, but of last hundred fifty years since the fateful accent of your first Zionist ruler, Lord Beaconsfield.

In our country, in Palestine, much of present sorrows are result of the Imperial intervention. The first Intifada, the great Arab revolt of 1936-1939, caused by the creeping Zionist takeover, was crushed by the Imperial forces with great severity. Thousands of native Palestinians were killed, executed, hanged, expelled from their land. The Arab defeat, al-Nakba of 1948 can’t be understood without the context of the previous Imperial war against the Palestinians. The Zionist armies administered the coup-de-grace to the disarmed, bleeding, powerless rural population whose elite and best fighters were eliminated by the Empire.

Oh, you say, why should we remember it now? We can’t let bygones be bygones for the Empire is not a thing of past. Like a monstrous parasite it migrated after sucking the juice of the Brits. Its capital was relocated to Washington and New York, while England remained a subservient part of Empire, a Greece to the New Rome, or rather a Tyre to the new Carthage. Not only your RAF assists the Americans, but your BBC, once a paragon of objectivity, became a propaganda tool for the New Empire.

I did not come to condemn you but to offer my condolences, for England is one of the Imperial victims. I came first time to your land some thirty years ago, and since then the Empire eats you up as much as it eats everybody else. London became a faceless cosmopolitan city, your cinema is destroyed, your streets are taken by international chains of shops, your newspapers belong to Zionists, and there is a danger the English will be turned into human dust by the Imperial burden as the Romans and Macedonians of old, to be followed by the Americans.

The Empire is not particularly good for people, including the people of the mother country. Let us consider Palestine. Thousands of young British men died in order to conquer Palestine and give it to the Jews. They committed many atrocities, killed a lot of natives, and enforced Jewish supremacy in Palestine. They received no gratitude. Elder people maybe remember the subsequent Zionist terrorist attacks on the British troops, the assassination of Lord Moyne, maybe they remember the two British sergeants who were kidnapped and hanged by the Jews, and their dead bodies were defiled, booby-trapped by the killers. Menachem Begin, our late Prime Minister, was particularly proud of it. Younger people won’t even know it, for your media, the mind and the nervous system of the nation, is hijacked by Zionists like Conrad Black and Murdock, and they won’t allow this knowledge to be remembered.

But it is vital to remember, for the new empire continues the ways of the old. Now in Iraq, the US and its British dependency continue the same old fight for ensuring Jewish supremacy in the Middle East, for England – or even English business – has no need to be in Baghdad and Basra. Indeed, in the Middle East we have just one reason for wars, terror and trouble – and that is Jewish supremacy drive. In our country, Israel or Palestine, we can have peace today, if we were to agree to equality of Jew and non-Jew. But this principle, so carefully observed in Europe, is anathema to the Jews in Israel. Like in England before the reforms of 1832, your predecessors would not agree to equality of a lord and a commoner before the law; or in Rhodesia of Ian Smith, the white settlers did not want to be equal with the blacks.

Well, so Jews do not want to be equal. But why should you assist them in their pursuit of supremacy? There is an American joke [of Jay Leno]: "If God doesn’t destroy Hollywood Boulevard, he owes Sodom and Gomorrah an apology." Indeed, if England keeps supporting the apartheid Jewish state, it owes an apology to Rhodesia and South Africa. Why, indeed, it does? This is not a rhetoric question. Why the New Empire went to war, committed itself to the vast expenses and dangers, antagonised bigger part of the world – and all that in the interests of Jewish supremacy?

In my book – that is the one I came to promote – I try to explain why the Jews have a special place in the Imperial conscience. Superficially, one can explain it by personalities, by the special position of the Neo-cons in Washington and of the Jewish media-lords in the US and elsewhere. Jews indeed own, control and edit a big share of mass media, this mainstay of Imperial thinking; just last month a Rothschild bought the French daily Liberacion, and an Israeli citizen bought a TV 4 channel in Sweden. This is a valid observation, but not sufficient.

The New Empire, even more than the old one, is infused with Judaic values on an ideological and theological level. This is the thing I try to deal with, because preoccupation with ethnic or religious origins of a person is not only improper but often misleading. Indeed, the strongest enemies of the Judaic values are often people of Jewish origin. Allow me to mention St Paul, Karl Marx and Simone Weil to make my point clear. Another example can be provided by Sir Carl Popper, a colleague of yours who referred to the Judaic concept of chosen-ness as ‘vile’. He also rejected an approach of a Jewish Year Book to have him included, for he said, he does not believe in race and has nothing to do with Jewish faith or values – despite his Jewish origin. Do not concentrate on ethnics, look for ideology. In your case, Michael Howard is less Judaic than Tony Blair, for the first objects to removal of British liberties and to sweeping anti-Muslim legislation, while the second brought this country into the Iraqi war for Israeli interests.

While a Judaic tendency is just an ideological tendency, a special feeling towards Jews is a symptom of certain pro-Imperial predisposition. For instance, Tony Blair is a great supporter of the Empire. But even if we would not know that, we would be able to guess: for he expressed unlimited support of the Jewish state. The Jewish state is the country where a Jew has more rights than a non-Jew. Three to four million of our native residents have neither right of vote nor citizenship rights for a single fault: they are not Jews. Do not forget, Rhodesia was dismantled for the equal sin of ethnic or racial supremacy.

This feeling that ‘Jews are special’ found now its expression in the story of Ken Livingstone and his sin coming hard on the heels of Prince Harry and his mishap. Actually, I have heard that at the next costume ball, Prince Harry will be dressed as Ken Livingstone. The Ken’s story is simple: the Mayor was rude to a hack. Being a journalist, I sympathise with the journalist; but being rude to is our professional hazard. However, the insult was blown well over normal proportions. If Ken would be equally insulting to a member of Royal family, he will be forgiven if not encouraged. But here – even the Students’ Union decided to ban Ken.

Your anti-racist feelings do not come into it. Some time ago I watched the Hard Talk with Tim Sebastian on the BBC. Tim was grilling a Uganda Asian businessman living in England. He told him: well, you Asians in Uganda were heavily engaged in the black market activities, smuggled hard currency abroad, despised the natives and refused to marry them. Actually the same accusations were traditionally levelled against Jews. If Tim would just try to say it to a Jew he would be kicked out of his job same day. But applied to the Muslims – they did not cause a stir. It was just a Hard Talk. So it is not ‘anti-racism’. In my view, this unbelievable out-of-proportion response to Ken’s affair shows again a mysterious connection of Jews and the new Empire.

One reason is that Jews like an Empire. If there is a choice between an England and an Empire, the Jews prefer an Empire. Benjamin Ginsberg, the Professor of Political Science at John Hopkins University, wrote a book on this subject, called Jews and the State: The Fatal Embrace and he attests to this Jewish love of Empire. Any Empire: Franz Josef, the last Emperor of Austro-Hungarian Empire, used to say that Jews are the most loyal of his subjects. In your country, Disraeli was equally proud of his Jewish ancestry and devoted to the Empire-building. 

A Jewish joke tells of two Jewish brothers in revolutionary Odessa; one of them emigrated to England and became a peer of the realm, another one remained in Russia, suffered as much as anybody, and eventually the Russian brother was invited by his British brother to London. The brother arrived, received English citizenship, had whale of time, went to Covent Garden, maybe to the Palace, at night the brothers come home, and the Russian brother began to cry. “Oh do not cry, told him the English brother, you had your life, I had mine, it could happen other way around.”  “You did not understand me, - says the Russian brother, - I weep for India we have lost”.

This love of Empire explains the easiness Jews change their allegiance – indeed, the same people who were all for the Russian or French or British Empire now became ardent supporters on the new American Empire. Simple minds call it ‘treacherous behaviour’, but it is actually love of Empire per se, and it does not matter who is the titular head of this Empire: Jews are good for an Empire, as long as they feel the Empire is good for them.

Now, there is a large and thriving Muslim community in England. In my view, Islam is a form of Christianity, even nearer to the Nicene Creed than some Pentecostals or other American denominations. What is more important, they are now on the side of freedom, against the Empire, and they are not afraid of enforcers of Judaic values, Jewish or Gentile. This community is very important in order to turn the tide. Let us hope that its introduction will be important for England’s future.

This is the right time to overcome left-right divide: if Michael Howard stands on the right –for liberties - and Blair stands on the left – and for anti-Muslim legislation, for police control and for war, the terms have little relevance today. There are friends and enemies of the Empire in all your major political parties, and equally all the parties are Zionist-infiltrated. There is a need for new realignment in order to unite anti-Imperial forces for full withdrawal of British troops from overseas, for independence of England from the American Empire.

In the Apple Cart by Bernard Shaw, the US makes a bid to take over England, and a wise monarch keeps its independence. Disentanglement of England from the US embrace is much needed, an answer to the Boston Tea Party is called for.

BRITISH-ISRAEL CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, BRIAN WHITE,IGNORES RACIAL IMPLICATIONS OF HIS OWN STATEMENT AND COLLUDES WITH CALL TO OSTRACISE RABBI

A SALFORD rabbi who met leading members of terror groups Hamas and Hezbollahin Lebanon this week should be ostracised, according to a Manchester Jewish communal leader. Neturei Karta member Rabbi Ahron Cohen, of Welbeck Grove, Salford, spoke on Wednesday at the Beirut conference of the International Union of Paliamentarians for the Defence of the Palestinian Cause in Beirut. The union is headed by Iranian Hezbollah sponsor Ali Akbar Mohtashemi. Attending were representatives of Hamas and Hezbollah.

Rabbi Cohen said he went to the conference "to demonstrate the basic wrong of the Zionist idea". Wearing a badge stating "A Jew not a Zionist", he said: "Zionists can in no way represent Jewry." Last year he told the Jewish Telegraph: "The existence of the Jewish state is a blot on the Jewish people in the eyes of the world and the Palestinians." He called for the peaceful dismantling of the state. He later distributed a leaflet, which argued: "Zionism and its deeds are the biggest threat to Jews and the biggest cause of antisemitism."

British-Israel Chamber of Commerce chairman Brian White said: "Israel is every Jew's insurance policy. "To stand against the basic right of existence of the state of Israel and publicly promote and encourage its demise is nothing other than a major threat to the future of the entire Jewish world. "While individuals have the basic fundamental right to criticise any elected government of Israel, that does not give any individual who calls himself a Jew the right to call for the termination of Israel. "Our response to such people should be ostracise them publicly."

The Truth Comes Out About the Concentration Camps

usa reports emerge

What the GIs found was used, by way of films that were mandatory viewing for the vanquished populace of Germany, to "re-educate" the German people by destroying their national pride and their will to a united, independent national state, imposing in their place overwhelming feelings of collective guilt and political impotence. And when the testimony, and the verdict, of the Nuremberg Tribunal incorporated most, if not all, of the horror stories Americans were told about Dachau, Buchenwald, and other places captured by the US Army, the Holocaust could pass for one of the most documented, one of the most authenticated, one of the most proven historical episodes in the human record.

A Different Reality

But it is known today that, very soon after the liberation of the camps, American authorities were aware that the real story of the camps was quite different from the one in which they were coaching military public information officers, government spokesmen, politicians, journalists, and other mouthpieces.

When American and British forces overran western and central Germany in the spring of 1945, they were followed by troops charged with discovering and securing any evidence of German war crimes.

Among them was Dr. Charles Larson, one of America's leading forensic pathologists, who was assigned to the US Army's Judge Advocate General's Department. As part of a US War Crimes Investigation Team, Dr. Larson performed autopsies at Dachau and some twenty other German camps, examining on some days more than 100 corpses. After his grim work at Dachau, he was questioned for three days by US Army prosecutors. [1]

Dr. Larson's findings? In an 1980 newspaper interview he said: "What we've heard is that six million Jews were exterminated. Part of that is a hoax." [2] And what part was the hoax? Dr. Larson, who told his biographer that to his knowledge he "was the only forensic pathologist on duty in the entire European Theater" of Allied military operations, [3] confirmed that "never was a case of poison gas uncovered." [4]

Typhus, Not Poison Gas

If not by gassing, how did the unfortunate victims at Dachau,
Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen perish? Were they tortured to death or deliberately starved? The answers to these questions are known as well.

As Dr. Larson and other Allied medical men discovered, the chief cause of death at Dachau, Belsen and the other camps was disease, above all typhus, an old and terrible scourge of mankind that until recently flourished in places where populations were crowded together in circumstances where public health measures were unknown or had broken down. Such was the case in the overcrowded internment camps in Germany at war's end, where, despite such measures as systematic delousing, quarantine of the sick and cremation of the dead, the virtual collapse of Germany's food, transport, and public health systems led to catastrophe.

Perhaps the most authoritative statement of the facts as to typhus and mortality in the camps has been made by Dr. John E. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of preventive medicine and epidemiology at the Harvard University School of Public Health, who was with US forces in Germany in 1945. Dr. Gordon reported in 1948 that "The outbreaks in concentration camps and prisons made up the great bulk of typhus infection encountered in Germany." Dr. Gordon summarized the causes for the outbreaks as follows: [5]

Germany in the spring months of April and May [1945] was an astounding sight, a mixture of humanity travelling this way and that, homeless, often hungry and carrying typhus with them ...

Germany was in chaos. The destruction of whole cities and the path left by advancing armies produced a disruption of living conditions contributing to the spread of the disease. Sanitation was low grade, public utilities were seriously disrupted, food supply and food distribution was poor, housing was inadequate and order and discipline were everywhere lacking. Still more important, a shifting of populations was occurring such as few countries and few times have experienced.

Dr. Gordon's findings are corroborated by Dr. Russell Barton, today a psychiatrist of international repute, who entered Bergen-Belsen with British forces as a young medical student in 1945. Barton, who volunteered to care for the diseased survivors, testified under sworn oath in a Toronto courtroom in 1985 that "Thousands of prisoners who died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during World War II weren't deliberately starved to death but died from a rash of diseases." [6]

Dr. Barton further testified that on entering the camp he had credited stories of deliberate starvation but decided such stories were untrue after inspecting the well equipped kitchens and the meticulously maintained ledgers, dating back to 1942, of food cooked and dispensed each day.

Despite noisily publicized claims and widespread popular notions to the contrary, no researcher has been able to document a German policy of extermination through starvation in the German camps.

Rense.com

Discovered Deep
Beneath The Forum
By Peter Popham in Rome
The Independent - UK
2-15-5

 

Ancient Rome has yielded its deepest secret - one that coincides with the legend of the city's foundation. Seven metres under the ruins of imperial Rome's Forum, Professor Andrea Carandini has discovered the remains of an immense building, covering 345 square metres, which he believes to be the palace of Rome's first kings.

He has dated a section of flooring near by to 753BC - when, according to legend, the city was founded by Romulus on seven hills. Until now, historians have maintained that Rome's history could not be traced further back than the 4th or 5th century BC.

Professor Carandini's discovery, trailed in Il Messaggero newspaper, will be unveiled at a conference in Florence at the weekend. He will reveal that the centrepiece of the palace was an enormous banquet hall with walls of wood and clay and a tiled roof decorated with fine ceramics. "This palace endured at least until AD64, in other words for eight centuries," Professor Carandini said.

With the end of the Roman monarchy it became the abode of the Rex sacrorum, the sacred king, surviving until the first empire.

The archaeologist also claims to have identified the house of the vestal virgins, the priestesses who attended the Roman kings, and the fireplace where they tended the sacred fire.

©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

Report shows racism in France and Austria

16.02.2005 - 10:35 CET | By Meghan Sapp

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Racism against Black Africans and Muslims as well as anti-semitism is very active in France and Austria, says a Council of Europe report released on Tuesday (15 February).

Although the report said progress had been made in both countries, anti-semitism has made a comeback in the school population in France, and is often practised by immigrants and Muslims against Jews.

Moreover, France has yet to ratify certain human rights conventions such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the European Convention on nationality and UN Convention on Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families.

Added to this, according to the report, is the fact that law enforcement and judicial officials are not adequately aware of racial aspects of offences, often leaving victims helpless.

Muslims face a consistent level of racism.

"Anti-Semitism has increased alarmingly in France, notably in the school environment," the report said.

In Austria, where racism is a part of daily life, according to the report, there is continued racism against Black Africans, Jews and Roma.

The other status reports for Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia also indicate problems with racism.

In Turkey, the report noted progress but said there were still gaps in civil, criminal and administrative law against racism especially in terms of religious freedom and tolerance of minorities.

Bosnia and Herzegovina also suffer problems of religious intolerance as a result of nationalist policies put forth by ethnically-based political parties. These aggravate problems resulting from post-war hardships, the report said.

In Macedonia, high levels of racism exist against the Roma population with many living in poor conditions and kept at an economic and social disadvantage. Problems also exist in Macedonia with regards to other minorities and asylum seekers.

The report was conducted by the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance – an expert group working for the Council of Europe – the continent’s oldest human rights monitoring body.

Enterprise in Essen, Germany

In Essen, Germany, a newspaper employs an old age pensioner to visit and to sell to young parents photographs of their new born baby that was taken at a local hospital...He is expected to persuade the young couple to take the newspaper regularly.
Painting by Antolinez 1600s in Madrid.

EU software patent rejected by MEPs

03.02.2005 - 17:23 CET | By Honor Mahony

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - MEPs have asked for an important piece of legislation to be sent back to the drawing board striking a blow to the EU's internal market commissioner, Charlie McCreevy.

The computer-implemented inventions directive, which critics say wrongly allows software to be patented, was voted down by MEPs in the legal affairs committee following a heated debate on Wednesday (2 February).

"In the debate, broad agreement prevailed over the fact that the current proposal on the Council's table was counter-productive and far from a good basis for a decision. It became clear to everybody that a way out was needed", said Italian MEP Monica Frassoni. Ms Frassoni also criticised Mr McCreevy for being "incredibly vague" about what the Commission's intentions were concerning the legislation.

"We are in danger of reaching a stage that would radically limit the patentability of inventions", said German centre-right MEP Klaus-Heiner Lehne. "A restrictive patentability would harm innovative industries especially in the areas of medicine, automotive production, technical components and household goods", added the MEP.

Latest twist
This is just the latest twist in a bumpy ride for the software patent - which is intended to offer patent protection to inventions that use software to achieve their effect. The legislation has been blocked in council twice by Poland, meaning the qualified majority needed was lacking - resulting in a deadlock. This meant that MEPs were entitled to call for a re-start of negotiations.

Florian Müller from nosoftwarepatents.com described the decision as a "spectacular victory for democracy". Whereas small and medium-sized companies fear they will be put out of business by the legislation, big companies have warned that billions in research and development spending would be wasted if they were denied access to patent protection.

Both sides have been involved in intense lobbying of MEPs. It is up to the European Commission to decide whether to withdraw the legislation.