Netanyahu brandishes Fake blueprints of Auschwitz at the UN

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the UN General Assembly Thursday that Iran's alleged quest for nuclear weapons was the greatest danger the world faces.
Netanyahu devoted much of his speech to Iran and its President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who he did not name, instead referring to him as "this man."

He assailed the UN saying that allowing Ahmadinejad to address the assembly on Wednesday was a "disgrace," just days after the Iranian leader again denied that the Holocaust took place.
"A mere six decades after the Holocaust you give legitimacy to a man who denies the murder of six million Jews," Netanyahu said, brandishing the blueprints of the Nazi death camp, Auschwitz. "What a disgrace."

"The greatest threat facing the world today is the marriage between religious fundamentalism and the weapons of mass destruction," Netanyahu said.

"The most urgent challenge facing this body today is to prevent the tyrants of Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons," he said, speaking as the UN Security Council held a summit on nuclear proliferation.

Netanyahu also slammed nations that did not join a walkout of Ahmadinejad's speech, widely viewed as anti-Semitic.

Several nations including the United States, France, Germany and Britain, walked out
of the General Assembly Wednesday as Ahmadinejad began to assail Israel and
suggest a Jewish conspiracy to control much of the world.

"To those who refused to come and to those who left in protest, I commend you. You stood up for moral clarity, and you brought honor to your countries," Netanyahu told the assembly.

"But to those who gave this Holocaust denier a hearing, I say on behalf of
my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere, have you no shame,
have you no decency," he said, calling Ahmadinejad's speech "his latest
anti-Semitic rant."

The Israeli Prime Minister also unleashed a tirade against the findings of the UN probe into the Gaza operation in January, and warned it could affect how Israel reacts in the future towards the Palestinians.

"In condemning Israel this body would also deal a mortal blow to peace," Netanyahu said, calling the report a "perversion of justice."

"Only if we have the confidence that we can defend ourselves can we take further risks for peace," Netanyahu said, referring to Israel's 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza.
He linked Israel's willingness to make future concessions to the Palestinians, to how other nations react to the report.

While the UN investigation found that both Israel and Palestinian groups had committed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity, it reserved some of its harshest language for the actions taken by Israel against the civilian population in the Gaza Strip.
Netanyahu also addressed Israel's conflict with the Palestinians, saying again that he would accept a demilitarized Palestinian state alongside Israel.

He did not refer to calls by the Palestinians and the US to freeze Jewish settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

A lone Palestinian delegate walked out as Netanyahu defended Israel's operation on the Hamas-run Gaza Strip that Israel launched in response to rocket fire into southern Israeli towns from the Palestinian enclave.

"Israel is the one carrying out a Holocaust against the Palestinians," said Sami Abu Zahri, reacting to Netanyahu's comments on Iran.

http://www.ejpress.org/article/39353

Auschwitz expert: Blueprints found in Berlin not of death camp A leading expert on Auschwitz on Sunday denigrated the importance of the finding of plans for the construction of the extermination camp, which was reported this weekend in the German tabloid Bild. He said the documents have been known to scholars for many years and that they were not plans to build the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, but rather earlier plans for the building of a forced labor camp. Prof. Robert Jan van Pelt, a internationally acknowledged expert on the planning and construction of Auschwitz, said that based on what he had seen on the Internet, there seemed to be nothing new about the documents. He was one of several scholars who expressed doubts about the significance of the Bild story. Van Pelt, an architectural historian, said that copies of the plans of the stages of the camp's construction were also in the archive of the Polish National Museum at Auschwitz and in an archive in Moscow. He said that the source of the new copies was unclear since, according to Bild, the plans were found in an apartment in Berlin, whereas copies that were in the SS offices in Berlin were destroyed by Allied bombing in 1944. Van Pelt said he also doubted the authenticity of the signature of the SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, since such a high-ranking officer would not have signed such plans, and none of the copies he had ever seen bore such a signature. Van Pelt also said the words "gas chamber" on one of the drawings meant a room in which disinfection of clothing was done by means of gas, and that the sketch is not of an extermination camp established in 1942, but rather of earlier plans for a huge concentration camp in which a force of 130,000 slave laborers was intended to work. Van Pelt suggested the plans might be fakes, motivated by the lucrative market in Nazi memorabilia and documents. Ralf Georg Reuth, the historian who wrote the piece in Bild, told Haaretz yesterday that the existence of such plans in Russian archives was known, "but German institutions have no originals, and therefore the importance of the finding of such original material is very great." Reuth would not elaborate on where and when the plans were discovered, or whether they had been submitted to experts for study. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1035958.html