It's Hatewatch time so go get some hating done over at Winds of Change.NET. Your other option is to go get a cooking lesson. Really, it makes no difference to me but Lewy 14 gets upset if you guys don't read us and that just makes him more hateful which means I have to be more hateful too 'cause we're a team and all and I support him and you know what happens when I get really hateful. So for your own safety, go read the briefing.

In 1943 Athens had approximately 4,000 Jewish residents as well as 5,000 Jewish refugees from Salonica, Macedonia and Thrace. During the Italian occupation, Jews were relatively safe, or at least as safe as the rest of the population since the Italians had not imposed any racial measures. But in September 1943 Italy surrendered to the Allies.

The Germans, considering this an act of betrayal, immediately arrested the Italians who were in Greece and at the same time the last stage of the 'action' against the Jews of Greece was set in motion. The largest Jewish communities outside of Salonica and Athens were in Halkis, Patra, Ioannina, Preveza, Volos, Larissa and Trikala in the mainland, and in the islands of Corfu, Zakynthos, Rhodes, Kos, and Crete. Orders were sent to every town and district to identify its Jewish citizens and put their names on a list.

Most of the Jewish quarters in the islands and the mainland were congregated around the synagogue, not as a consequence of a ghetto policy, but because people throughout the centuries tended to build their houses and their lives near a synagogue or a church. But that also meant that Jews in most Greek towns lived in small proximity to the synagogue and were easy to identify.

Athenian Jews were more integrated in the Greek community and more hellenised. They did not speak Ladino, like the Salonica community did, they had no differences in dress or speech that would distinguish them from their Christian neighbours and they did not live in a specific area. The general impression in the Athenian Jewish community was that the Jews of Salonica had been deported and were living somewhere in Poland. No one knew about the death camps yet.

Athenians considered themselves Old Greeks, part of Greece that was liberated from the Turks in the 1821 Greek War of Independence. They perceived their neighbours up north as having entered the the process of hellenisation more recently since Salonica wasn't incorporated into Greece until 1913. The general feeling in Athens was that the German racial laws had been applied to remove the "Judeo-Spanish bloc" in Salonica, which would lead to full hellenisation of the city. So in this view, the Salonica Jews were the last reminder of the hated Ottoman presence in Greece. The Athenian Jews didn't think they were in any danger at all.

Note to long-timers: if this sounds familiar, it's because it's a rerun! Since we're using zorkie's Terra Nostra posts as our weekly feature over at Winds of Change.NET we decided to start the series over from the beginning because it makes more sense that way. We don't really have to rerun it here in order to post it there, but we decided to anyway, because our traffic then was about 200 unique visitors a day and is now about 2000, so, um, that's a lot of people, and this deserves their attention.

Torturers are sadistic monsters. I mean, how else can they last for hours through screams of pain they're inflicting and then go home and kiss their wife and kids and have dinner and watch television? They can't possibly be normal, normal people could never torture anyone. Right?

During Algeria's fight for independence in the 1950s, French Resistance fighter Paul Aussaresses felt it was his duty to electrocute Arab nationalists.

Like many former torturers, he still believes it is the most effective way to gather intelligence in a so called "ticking bomb" case. He claims to have stopped Algerian bomb makers from killing French civilians by extracting confessions though electrocution and suffocation with a water saturated towel. They were methods he'd adapted from the Nazis.

The belief that torture works is justification enough for most torturers. Some experts claim that information divulged under force is always unreliable, but many who've practised torture say they have the experience to prove otherwise.

Torture, they say, is the fastest and most reliable means of forcing prisoners to divulge information.

During the apartheid era in South Africa, Gideon Nieuwoudt, one of South Africa's most notorious torturers, used a range of techniques on his ANC victims and retains a philosophical perspective.

"It's like a piano: you make use of the black notes and the white notes to make a sweet melody," he says.

He has no doubt the beatings he inflicted on detainees forced them to talk: "The people will never give you anything without torture, that I can assure you."

Former colleague Paul Van Vuuren lost count of the number of people he tortured under apartheid, but is still proud of his skills.

"There are all these movies about Rambo and stuff where they put electricity on his bodies and he's not talking. That's bullshit. There is no-one in the world; I haven't yet seen one guy that don't talk. I can take anyone on and make them talk, that's no problem."

The truth about torture

While Israel is getting ready to hand over prisoners to the PA, the PA is planning to kill Arabs who have been accused of "collaborating" with Israel. Ida Nudel, the famous refusenik, and Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, director of the Israel Law Center, are filing a petition to the Israeli Supreme Court on behalf of these Arabs. Why are there not any Palestinians joining them?

Ida Nudel Appeals to High Court to Save Arab Agents

Former Prisoner of Zion Ida Nudel, together with Shurat HaDin - the Israel Law Center, filed the petition on behalf of fifteen Arabs on death row in the PA. The law suit charges that the Israeli government has refused to act to rescue the condemned prisoners, who were convicted and sentenced to death on charges of having assisted the IDF and security services in thwarting terrorist attacks and capturing wanted terrorists.

The petitioners are demanding that Israel undertake an emergency campaign to pressure the PA to cancel the impending executions of the prisoners, or alternatively, to conduct a military operation to free the condemned men by force.

The president of the PA military courts, Saeb Al-Kidwa, announced on March 2nd that the fifteen prisoners on death row for "collaborating with the Israeli security services" would be executed in the coming weeks. Kidwa said PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) was expected to officially approve the executions soon, after the PA-appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Ekrimah Sabri endorsed the sentences. Sabri, who also administers the Islamic wakf that asserts power over the Temple Mount, recently confirmed that he had been asked by Abbas to review the files of the prisoners and has made recommendations in several of the cases.

Following the announcement, on March 7th, Ida Nudel and the Shurat HaDin organization wrote to Prime Minister Sharon demanding that he take immediate action to rescue the Arab prisoners. The Prime Minister has yet to respond to the letter.

"There is a moral obligation for the Prime Minister to rescue the prisoners," the Supreme Court petition contends. "After utilizing the vital information they provided, at great risk to their own lives, to safeguard the lives of Israeli citizens and soldiers, he cannot simply abandon them to their own fates."

Russian-born Ida Nudel became one of the founders of Soviet Jewry's "refusenik" movement in 1972 after being denied a visa to immigrate to Israel. During the next seven years, she established herself as the most defiant and outspoken of Jewish figures in the Soviet Union and was frequently arrested by the KGB. On June 21, 1978, Nudel was sentenced to four years of exile in Siberia. Finally, in 1987, after years of an international struggle to secure her freedom, the Soviet government bowed to world pressure and allowed her to make Aliyah (immigrate to Israel).

Nudel has been outspoken in the past on the issue of Israel's refusal to aid and rescue Arabs arrested by the PA on charges of assisting the IDF in its war against the PA terrorist groups.

It is believed that approximately 68 Palestinians have been sentenced to death in show trials before hastily convened PA "military tribunals" since the PA was established in 1994. In those trials, the accused prisoners were not given the opportunity to defend themselves or even provided with a defense attorney to argue on their behalf. Moreover, despite the capital punishment imposed, the defendants had no right to an appeal.

"Despite the repeated reports that the PA is going to imminently execute fifteen prisoners accused of having risked their lives on Israel's behalf, the Prime Minister is refusing to even lift a finger to rescue these Arab agents," Shurat HaDin Director Nitsana Darshan-Leitner said this morning. "We are asking the Supreme Court to compel the government to undertake every effort available to secure the freedom of these brave individuals from the PA. It defies belief that the government would be contemplating releasing another 400 Palestinian terrorists while the PA is planning to execute fifteen of our prisoners. These so called 'collaborators' are Israel's front line in the war on Palestinian terror; they have assisted the IDF in thwarting thousands of suicide bombing attempts and must not be merely thrown to the dogs."

And here's a previous post about Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, she does a wonderful job seeking justice.

Zalman Shoval, who has twice served as Israel's ambassador to the United States, takes a critical look at the Saudi-American ties: How the Saudis got to be 'special'

Sixty years ago, President Franklin Roosevelt, on his way back from the fateful Yalta conference, met King Abdulazziz, founder of Saudi Arabia, aboard the USS Quincy, in Egypt's Bitter Lake. The meeting led to a special relationship based on oil and security - but it also dealt extensively with the consequences of the Holocaust and the future of Palestine.

Roosevelt's role regarding the plight of European Jewry had been far from perfect. Though among the first to recognize the dangers of Nazism, neither he nor his administration lifted a finger to help Jews escape Germany or find safety in America. As Ted Morgan, a biographer of FDR put it, "saving Jews had not been a high priority on his agenda."

My mother had a Nanny, called Naneh. She loved her and this Naneh stayed in our family forever. Her daughter was called Khale Shokat and daughters Parvin, Zari and Mehri were our friends. Zari was crazy and would look at the stars and call them javooneh¹; I now call my cousin Shirin who is a star in my eyes "javooneh." I used to iron my white ribbon with Mehri on the samovar (tea maker) before going to school. Part of our uniform was a white ribbon (ahari).

Mother told me the story of Naneh on the day Reza Shah announced women should not wear a veil anymore. I remember mother was almost in her dying bed at my brother Farzad’s house in Reston Virginia and we were looking outside the window at the birds. She said this neighbour is getting all the birds, Farzad should buy a bird feeder and attract all the birds to his house. I was so sad and busy with washing her clothes and going 3 stories down to the basement then bringing ensure and some fruit 3 stories up to her and she not eating anything. She was in bed with cancer at almost last stages and I was driving everyday for a month or two from Falls Church to take care of her. My brother Farzad would say "we have everything for mother we just don’t have Adam!" In Iran we used to call the servants, Adam, I don’t know why!

So I was the Adam those days. I wasn’t listening and asking what do you want now? Should I bring some ice with it? would you drink it then? She said no listen to me. I want to tell you a story and I want you to write it down. I know you are a good writer and one day you will be (I repeated in my brain, president of the world!) She used to say that always, sometimes I think she used to say that to each and everyone of us! Anyway I was folding clothes and could listen. I said I will if you eat something. She said don’t say shabby dabby things (chartopart nagoo). I said o.k tell me.

She said when the radio announced that no woman should ever go outside with a chador (the cover as hijab religious women use to wear) we first had difficulty sending somebody to buy Maman (my grandma, her mother) a hat so that she would wear that from then on. Then the next day we saw Naneh sitting next to the door and crying. We said what is wrong she said I want to go to the public bath (hamam oomoomi) and I used to put my clothes in a bag under my arm and under my chador and go there, now how am I GOING TO TAKE A BATH? The whole house gathered and said what are we going to do with Naneh and how are we going to take her to hamam? It was 3 blocks away. My grandpa never drove in his life. He had a servant and a pishkar (a secretary?) called Foolad Khan. They asked Foolad khan to accompany Naneh, to take her to public bath. Naneh would not set her foot outside the house. She thought she was naked and also God would take her to hell. She was so uncomfortable and she was crying.

My mother was telling me the rest of the story but my mind was somewhere eles. She just solved a long time question I had. You see my mother never wore a chador, you saw her picture in Abadan dancing in a bashgah, but she would ALWAYS wear a chador to public bath. I used to ask myself what is so precious and MOGHADDAS about hammam that she only wears a chador there. Now I got it, since she loved Naneh so much, the way she got hurt affected her so much that she, in a subconscious revenge, always wore a chador to public bath. That is why anything mandatory is wrong. Hijab should be a choice. I will NEVER understand those who choose to have it and make their hands unavailable and make movement and life harder, but those like Naneh who want to have a choice of having it, should have it.

I don’t know if mother wanted me to write it this way but if I had to tell that story, this is the way I would write it, now my brother on behalf of my mother could write a comment and criticize me.. You see I have become zede zarbe² after what I heard on this radio and that, on this divorce and that, on this regime and that! Women of the world,unite and ask for choice not dictation of some old rules upon you.

---

Kashfe hijab refers to the mandatory removing of the veil (a law imposed to Iranian women by Reza Shah Pahlavi).

1. Javooneh - the young one.

2. Zede zarbe - nothing can bend me.

My laptop's keyboard unexpectedly died yesterday. I'd had the laptop on for about ten days straight (I rarely reboot) so I thought maybe restarting would do it. Nope.

I called tech support and the guy asked me to uninstall the keyboard driver in Windows and reinstall it (dork, I told him I couldn't get a rise out of it by trying to hit Del to get the BIOS setup either so what does Windows have to do with it? sigh...but you have to do what the tech support monkey tells you to do, even though you know more than him). So of course that forced a reboot for the uninstallation to work, and another reboot when Windows detected the keyboard again. Keyboard still no worky. He said "well, since that didn't work and you're still under warranty, I'm gonna give you an RMA. You'll pay to ship it to us, we'll fix it or replace it and pay to ship it back". Great, so I'm looking at at least 50 bucks to Fedex this thing to them, plus the loss of the use of my laptop for however long they keep it. I asked him if there's anything else we could try, such as taking it apart and checking connections (this is an Averatec; my previous laptop was a Dell and they were happy to help me take it apart on the phone when necessary). He said absolutely not, and if I took it apart it would void the warranty. I asked if they could at least guarantee to not wipe my hard drive, and to swap hard drives with the replacement machine if they decided to do that, and he said no, they'll probably wipe it.

Well fuck that!

I thought about what staying in warranty was worth to me. I've had this thing for about 6 months, meaning I have about 6 more worth of warranty (and I usually buy about 1 laptop a year). I've only had a problem that required me to ship the laptop back to the manufacturer once in all the years I've owned laptops, and that was a Dell that arrived with a bum screen. What are the odds I'll need warranty work on this thing in the next six months? It certainly wasn't worth at least $50 of shipping, plus no laptop for at least a week, plus the possibility of losing all my data unless I spent time I don't really have backing up my hard drive. I decided to bite the bullet and open the laptop, warranty be damned. Thanks to zorkie for stiffening my spine, too ;-)

I decided on two tracks: I would try to dismantle and clean my existing keyboard, and if that didn't work, I would buy a new keyboard for it on eBay. I bought an eeny-weeny screwdriver from Home Despot, a can of compressed air, and got to work. I took apart the case, took out the keyboard, and removed the keys one by one, and the fidgety plastic spring mechanism underneath them. It took ages to take apart, and even longer ages to put back together. But it worked! My keyboard works again.

If this ever happens to you, a couple of precautions I took to make my life easier might help you, too-

-before you reboot to see if your keyboard will work on reboot, if you have a password on your Windows user account, take it off! How are you going to enter your password without a keyboard? Start->Control Panel->User Accounts, click "remove my password". It will ask you to enter your password to remove it, which of course you can't do without a working keyboard. Click Start->All Programs->Accessories->Accessibility->On-Screen Keyboard to enter your password. Even better, have a spare desktop keyboard to attach to your laptop.

-make a map of your keyboard on a spare sheet of paper before taking off the keys, or you'll never remember where everything went.

In the last post I examined the role of the New Age movement as an enabler of the right-to-die movement and its links to hospice care in this country.

Based at least on media exposure, secular euthanasia advocates and bioethicists are an even greater influence.

Convicted murder Jack Kevorkian recently gave his first interview in six years on "Good Morning America".

He told the program that he was "dismayed" by the Schiavo case and opposed efforts by lawmakers to get involved.

"What bothers me is the bit of hypocrisy in all of this," said Kevorkian. "When the president and the Congress get involved because life is sacred and must be preserved at all costs, they don't say anything about the men on death row, and their lives are just as precious.

Presumably prison has only enhanced his sense of the preciousness of the lives of convicted killers.

It's kind of a smarmy aside, but I can't let this go without sharing:

Michigan authors and Kevorkian friends Neal Nicol and Harry Wylie say they have been helping Kevorkian to prepare a 300-page manuscript, tentatively titled "The Life of Dr. Death." Kevorkian has been shopping it around to publishers.

Oscar-winning director Barbara Kopple and producer Steve Jones plan to begin filming a movie version in Michigan later this year.

Jones says Oscar winner Ben Kingsley would head the short list of people he would like to play the imprisoned coroner. Kingsley is a three time Oscar nominee who won the award for best actor in 1982 for his role in the film Gandhi.

Does the media love this guy, or what?

In case you think that Dr Kevorkian is an anomaly in the medical field, consider the strange career of Dr. Philip Nitschke, an Australia "euthanasia activist".

Few advocates of euthanasia were willing to publicly support the Dutch proposal as it related to children. A notable exception, however, was Dr. Philip Nitschke, an Australian euthanasia campaigner and activist. Known as the Australian "Dr. Death," Nitschke legally practiced euthanasia in Australia during the few months in which the now defunct "Rights of the Terminally Ill Act" of the Northern Territory was in effect. He now conducts "how to commit suicide" programs in Australia and New Zealand and is often a featured speaker at right-to-die conferences in the United States.

Nitschke said he believed that Australia should move down a track similar to that of the Netherlands since he couldn't see any principled reason to preclude young children from receiving assisted suicide or euthanasia. According to Nitschke, a child has the maturity to make such a life and death decision.

This statement is rather ironic in light of Nitschke's own youth:

According to news accounts, Nitschke had a somewhat troubled childhood. As a young teen, he was deeply unhappy and, at the age of 15, he took out his frustrations by killing a neighbor's dog. He devised a plan in which he faked going to church on Sunday, then doubled back to the neighbor's house to strangle the dog. When the dog didn't die, he slit its throat with a knife.

The story has caused embarrassment to Nitschke over the years. But he has explained it by chalking it up to his immaturity. "I was very young; I just didn't have the world experience to be able to make good judgments," he told the Sydney Morning Herald. "It was the ill-considered action of a child, " he says now.

Thus, according to Nitschke's logic, a 15-year-old who kills a neighbor's dog is exhibiting the actions of a child who is too immature to make good judgments. But a child who decides to kill himself is sufficiently mature to do so.

Bioethicists like Arthur Caplan and Dr Timothy Quill had come out in favor of euthanizing Terri Schiavo. The fact that both are firmly in the right-to-die camp has generated no discussion in the Mainstream Media. Even PETA favorite, Peter Singer, who believes that animals should be considered ethically on par with human and infants may be considered "non-persons" up until the age of two, is barely seen as on the fringe. In his recent article in NRO Wesley Smith names at least six prominent bioethicists who condon at the very least Terri Schiavo's judical homocide, and in some cases, even organ harvesting.

And according to the Times Online, the situation is the same in the UK:

BRITAIN'S leading medical ethics expert has suggested that the frail and elderly should consider suicide to stop them becoming a financial burden on their families and society.

Baroness Warnock spoke on the eve of a Commons debate on the Mental Capacity Bill, which critics claim will allow "euthanasia by the back door".

In an interview with The Sunday Times, she said: "I know I'm not really allowed to say it, but one of the things that would motivate me [to die] is I couldn't bear hanging on and being such a burden on people."

In other contexts, sacrificing oneself for one's family would be considered good. I don't see what is so horrible about the motive of not wanting to be an increasing nuisance."

If I went into a nursing home it would be a terrible waste of money that my family could use far better."

Warnock, 80, a Lords' cross-bencher who helped frame Britain's legalisation on embryo research, also suggests that parents of premature babies should be charged to keep them on life support machines if doctors write off their chances of leading a healthy life.

Lest we think this is solely an academic discussion, euthanasia is being practiced in The Netherlands and for a short time in Australia as mentioned above. And according to the linked article on Dutch euthanasia, the practice is unoffically widespread throughout Europe.

In France, 73 percent of doctors in one study reported using drugs to end a newborn's life, but those cases aren't reported to authorities. Meanwhile, 43 percent of Dutch doctors surveyed and between 2 percent and 4 percent of doctors in the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Germany and Sweden reported doing so.

And of course euthanasia is now legal in Oregon, although apparently they are still working out the kinks.

Next we'll see how this burgeoning tolerance of euthanasia in the guise of the right-to-die movement has impacted the hospice industry.

I suppose this is common in every country: in the U.S. we hire illegal immigrants to harvest our crops, in Greece we hire gypsies. Does it really have to do with welfare? Can a young, able man in the U.S. even collect welfare? German farmers say locals too lazy

Germany may have more than five million unemployed for the first time since the 1930s, but they are too lazy to help bring in the springtime asparagus harvest, the country's farmers have complained.

The DBV farmers' association urged the government to continue to allow farmers to employ thousands of seasonal harvest workers from eastern Europe, despite rising joblessness.

"The willingness of German jobseekers to do physically demanding harvest work is extremely limited or totally absent," DBV head Gerd Sonnleitner said in a statement.

"There is something wrong with Germany," top-selling Bild daily said on Wednesday in reaction to his comments.

Some 300,000 seasonal foreign workers help harvest fruit and vegetables in the spring, summer and autumn but calls have grown to limit them and force more Germans to work in the fields.

But farmers say they cannot find suitable locals because Germany's generous welfare provisions make low-paid, strenuous work unattractive to most jobseekers.

Michael Totten is blogging from Lebanon

"The movement is totally led by young people," Nabil said. "Both Christians and Muslims. We are living together in the same tents. We stay up all night strategizing and getting to know each other. It's amazing, but it's also sad. We Christians and Muslims never really knew each other until now. Hariri's assasination broke down that wall. We are talking together - really talking and getting to know each other - for the first time.

"It is so important," he said, "that we heal the old wounds. We cannot go back to the past, to the civil war. We want to rebuild our country." He tapped the side of his head. "And that includes rebuilding our minds. Lebanon has been so divided. We stand not only for freedom and independence, but also national unity and a new, modern, common, tolerant Lebanese identity."

Go read all the posts, they're well worth it.