Indian Children’s Book Lists Hitler as Leader ‘Who Will Inspire You’
modi should see that the below is taught in schools in india
hindu nationalists are little different than muslim extremists isis al queda etc
Illinois Holocaust denier wins Republican nomination for Congress
Without a primary challenger in heavily Democratic district, Congressional hopeful Arthur Jones easily clinches GOP nod
WASHINGTON — A self-proclaimed Nazi and Holocaust denier officially won the Republican nomination in a Chicago-area House race on Tuesday after running unopposed in the primary.
Arthur Jones won the primary for Illinois’s Third Congressional District, where Republicans are all but guaranteed to lose a general election. No Republican has held that seat since 1975.
While his racist views have alienated him from many voters in the past, Jones was able clinch his party’s nomination because he was running unopposed. Jones, 70, has ran five times before for that position, which represents parts of Chicago and its southwestern suburbs.
In February, the retired insurance salesman made headlines when he emerged as the sole candidate to win that slot.
Arthur Jones (ArtJonesforCongress.com)
Jones is an outspoken Holocaust denier with longstanding ties to neo-Nazis. He has also routinely referred to the Jewish state as “racist criminal Zionist Israel,” and he is known to orchestrate an annual “family friendly” dinner commemorating Adolf Hitler’s birthday.
In a 2012 interview with a local news site, the Oak Lawn Patch, he accused Israel and the American Jewish lobby of masterminding the September 11 attacks and called the Holocaust “the blackest lie in history” and a Jewish “international extortion racket.”
Those views have not receded. On his current campaign website, he has a page devoted to “The Holocaust Racket,” espousing bilious anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and calling Jews “blood-thirsty criminal vampires.”
He also appeared on CNN last month and called the Holocaust “poppycock.”
The Anti-Defamation League has condemned Jones as “an anti-Semite and unrepentant bigot,” and the Republican Party has also sought to distance itself from him.
“We condemn this candidate and his hateful rhetoric in the strongest possible terms,” Republican National Committee spokesman Michael Ahrens told The Times of Israel in February.
Meanwhile, the Illinois Republican Party told the Chicago Sun-Times that the country has “no place for Nazis like Arthur Jones.”
“We strongly oppose his racist views and his candidacy for any public office, including the 3rd Congressional District,” said Tim Schneider, chairman of the Illinois GOP.
A former leader of the American Nazi Party, Jones now heads a group called the America First Committee, an homage to the white supremacist Charles Lindbergh, who was a spokesman for the original America First Committee, which advocated against US entry into World War II.
Charles Lindbergh speaking at rally of the America First Committee in 1940. (Wikimedia Commons)
Though Lindbergh’s America First message has been echoed by Donald Trump, Jones said in a recent video, filmed at a neo-Nazi retreat in Kentucky, that he had little use for the US president, who “surrounded himself with hoards of Jews including a Jew in his own family, that punk named Jared Kushner.”
He further said that Trump was beholden to the “Jewish lobby” and its interests: “He’s nothing but a puppet in their hands… this Jew-loving fool.”
The Trump administration has not responded to repeated requests for comment on Jones’s candidacy.
The Illinois general election will be held on November 6, 2018.
Anthony Acevedo, a 20-year-old Army medic, had been captured during the Battle of the Bulge when a Red Cross care package arrived in March 1945 at the Nazi slave labor camp where he was imprisoned.
It contained a diary and a fountain pen. Between the diary’s grayish-green covers, Mr. Acevedo would record a grim roster of prisoner deaths (by dysentery, heart attack, jaundice, influenza and starvation); the cruelty of the guards; and rumors of American troops closing in on the Berga camp, a part of the Buchenwald complex. It was a rare accounting of Nazi atrocities by an American prisoner of war.
March 20 — 5 more men escaped today — Goldstein’s body was returned here for burial — He was shot while attempting to re-escape. So they say but actually was recaptured and shot thru the head.
April 2 — Two more of our men died today & one last night makes 3 + 16 makes 19.
April 3 — Excellent news today — Americans are only 100 km from here. Rumors are that we are to be moved away.
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The rumors were true. Mr. Acevedo and about 280 of his fellow prisoners were soon evacuated and taken on a forced march south — “the death march from Bataan couldn’t be worse than this,” he wrote — with artillery fire exploding around them and fighters of the Army Air Forces dropping bombs. The war in Europe was near its end. But the P.O.W.s appeared no closer to freedom.
April 13 — Bad news for us. — President Roosevelt’s death — We all felt bad about it — We held a prayer service for the Repose of his Soul. — Burdeski died today.
April 19 — More of our men died — so fast that you couldn’t keep track of their numbers. We kept on marching.
Mr. Acevedo was liberated later that month but suffered for decades from night terrors and post-traumatic stress syndrome. On Feb. 11, he died at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Loma Linda, Calif., having bequeathed his written testimony to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2010. He was 93.
Mr. Acevedo appears to be the first Mexican-American registered in the museum’s database of survivors and victims.
His son Fernando, who confirmed the death, said that Mr. Acevedo had had congestive heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. But the torture he endured at Berga, he added, had left a lasting impact on his father’s health.
In December, Fernando Acevedo said, he found in his father’s military records a psychiatric evaluation that further confirmed his suffering. After an initial interrogation at Berga, he was raped while other captors laughed at him.
“I said, ‘Papi, I found this,’ ” Fernando recalled telling his father. “He looked at it and his eyes got big. He said: ‘I’m glad you did. I want you to tell everybody about it.’ ”
Anthony Claude Acevedo was born in San Bernardino, Calif., on July 31, 1924. His father, Francisco Guillermo Acevedo, was an engineer. His mother, the former Maria Louisa Contreras Limantur, a homemaker, died when Anthony was 2 years old.
Young Anthony attended a segregated school in Pasadena with other Mexican-American children until he was 13; he and his five siblings then left for the state of Durango, Mexico, when his father and stepmother, the former Maria Louisa Morgan, were deported because they had lacked the proper immigration papers.
Anthony’s father found success in Durango, where he became the director of public works. But he was physically and emotionally abusive to Anthony, Fernando Acevedo said in a telephone interview. And after a United States government representative contacted him to serve in the war, Anthony, who “wanted to get away from his father,” crossed the border and was inducted into the Army.
Interested in being a doctor, he trained as a medic at Camp Adair, near Corvallis, Ore., before shipping to Europe with the 70th Infantry Division to fight the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge. Among the “repair jobs” he performed in combat were “sewing thumbs, cutting a leg off, putting on tourniquets and sewing up the stump of a leg,” he told the Holocaust museum in a 2010 oral history interview.
On Jan. 6, 1945, he and other men from his unit were captured by German troops. “They forced us to take our shoes off — boots off — and walk down the slope, barefoot in the snow, and march for a mile to the trucks,” he told the museum.
He was taken to Stalag IX-B, an overcrowded and notoriously unhygienic P.O.W. camp near the spa town of Bad Orb, Germany. Not long after his arrival, Mr. Acevedo was among 350 Jews and so-called undesirables selected for shipment to Berga.
“They put us on a train, and we traveled six days and six nights,” he told CNN in 2008. “It was a boxcar that would fit heads of cattle. They had us 80 to a boxcar.”
They arrived at Berga on Feb. 8. The P.O.W.s were fed tiny rations of bread made of sawdust, ground glass and barley, and soup made from cats and rats. Prisoners who tried to escape were shot in their foreheads with wooden bullets. He and the other medics in the barracks were told to fill the bullet holes with wax.
Mr. Acevedo began writing in the diary on March 20 (“Yesterday our planes dropped leaflets as well as bombs”), and he alternated accounts of horrors with quotidian observations (“The weather is beautiful and it looks like spring, which has finally come to Germany”), good news (“This morning us medics got together and ate Scrambled Eggs & Sausage from our Red Cross Boxes”) and biting humor (“Lenten Fast ends at Noon today — But does not apply to us we have been fasting since December 31, 1944”).
He extended the ink in his pen by adding snow and urine. He hid the diary in his pants or under hay in the barracks.
And, as dozens of prisoners died on the terrifying three-week-long march, Mr. Acevedo continued to write.
In one entry, he wrote about Burdeski, a 41-year-old prisoner who had diphtheria. Mr. Acevedo wanted to use his pen as a tracheotomy tube to save him.
“The Germans did not let us so we got upset,” he wrote on April 13. “We said they were going to kill him and the German guard swung his rifle at me and my buddy hitting us with the butt in the face” and “cracked one of my jaw’s tooth and swung back at my buddy his glasses dropped. The German guard crushed them with his foot — Burdeski did not survive to the hospital.”
On April 23, Mr. Acevedo and other prisoners were freed; he weighed just 87 pounds. They had been in a barn, and most of the guards had fled. But one “came up to us and gave himself up and saying that we were free,” he wrote. “Boy everything looked to exciting that morning.”
And, he added, “our last death was announced.”
The diary was not a secret to his family, and neither were his struggles with PTSD. The book, with its yellowing pages, became a sort of plaything at home, with crayon scribblings by his children on the last page. But it was a major acquisition for the Holocaust museum, which has more than 200 diaries in its collection from various locations, written in 18 languages.
“It was the first written by an American citizen held in a concentration camp,” Kyra Schuster, a museum curator, said in a telephone interview. Publicity from Mr. Acevedo’s donation led three other Berga P.O.W.s, or their families, to give their wartime diaries to the museum.
“The four men had four different experiences that cover different things,” Ms. Schuster said. One was written on scraps of paper, another behind family photographs, and the other was a second diary that had arrived in the same Red Cross package as Mr. Acevedo’s.
Mr. Acevedo aspired to become a doctor after his discharge — and he sutured his children’s wounds at home with supplies from an old-fashioned black doctor’s bag — but he never did. He worked for North American Rockwell, McDonnell Douglas and Hughes Aircraft as a design engineer.
In addition to Fernando, Mr. Acevedo is survived by two other sons, Ernesto and Anthony; a daughter, Rebeca Acevedo-Carlin; six grandchildren; a sister, Estella; and two brothers, Billy and Augustin. His first marriage, to Amparo Martinez, ended in divorce. His second wife, the former Maria Dolores Lamb, died in 2014.
Mr. Acevedo risked his life by keeping his diary. But, he said, he had an obligation to maintain it.
“He said he had faith that he’d make it,” Fernando Acevedo said, “and that hopefully one day people would see what the men went through.”
NEW DELHI — An Indian publisher came under fire this week for including Hitler in a children’s book about world leaders who have “devoted their lives for the betterment of their country and people.”
“Dedicated to the betterment of countries and people? Adolf Hitler? This description would bring tears of joy to the Nazis and their racist neo-Nazi heirs,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an international Jewish human rights organization, said in a statement.
Published by the Pegasus imprint of India’s B. Jain Publishing Group, the book, called “Leaders” — but listed on the publisher’s website as “Great Leaders” — spotlights 11 leaders “who will inspire you,” according to a product description on the publisher’s website.
On the book’s cover, a stony-faced Hitler is featured alongside Barack Obama, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. Also included on the cover is Myanmar’s civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who has recently come under sharp criticism for refusing to acknowledge atrocities committed by the country’s military against the Rohingya ethnic group.
Earlier this week, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is based in Los Angeles, called for the publisher to remove “Great Leaders” from circulation and its online store, where it is sold for about $2.
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“Placing Hitler alongside truly great political and humanitarian leaders is an abomination that is made worse as it targets young people with little or no knowledge of world history and ethics,” Rabbi Cooper said in the statement.
Annshu Juneja, a publishing manager at the imprint, said by email that Hitler was featured because, like Barack Obama, Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi, “his leadership skills and speeches influenced masses.”
“We are not talking about his way of conduct or his views or whether he was a good leader or a bad leader but simply portraying how powerful he was as a leader,” he said.
The publisher had not previously received any complaints about the book, the email said, including from the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
In parts of Asia, atrocities committed in Nazi Germany are poorly understood and Hitler is sometimes glorified as a strong, effective leader.
In 2004, reports surfaced of high-school textbooks in the state of Gujarat, which was then led by Mr. Modi, that spoke glowingly of Nazism and fascism.
According to The Times of India, in a section called “Ideology of Nazism,” the textbook said Hitler had “lent dignity and prestige to the German government,” “made untiring efforts to make Germany self-reliant” and “instilled the spirit of adventure in the common people.” Only briefly does the book mention the extermination of millions of Jews and others by the end of World War II.
Dilip D’Souza, an Indian journalist, wrote in a 2012 editorialthat when 25 mostly upper-middle-class students taught by his wife at a private French school in Mumbai were asked to name the historical figure they most admired, nine of them picked Hitler.
“ ‘And what about the millions he murdered?’ asked my wife. ‘Oh, yes, that was bad,’ said the kids. ‘But you know what, some of them were traitors.’ ”
The statement from the Simon Wiesenthal Center said that “Great Leaders” had been sold this month at the Krithi International Book Fair in Kochi, a city with a long Jewish heritage. The 48-page book was originally published in 2016, according to the publisher’s website, and it was still available for sale online on Saturday. It is unclear who wrote it.
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