n, he sometimes said. It was a big country. Some Poles must have escaped there. Maybe they had gotten there by boat. The way Kosinski dealt with the situation reveals a great deal about the type of intimacy that existed between mother and son. In the course of her visit to New York, Elzbieta Kosinski met a good number of people - not only Mary and her friends, but the Strzetelskis and members of the Polish emigre circle. They made a day trip to Long Island, where Kosinski, Mary, and his mother spent an afternoon with Ewa Markowska and her family. Instead of shrinking from discussion of his experiences during the war, Kosinski made a point of bringing the subject up. His mother supported his story in every particular, describing the terrible fears she had felt for her son. On that point, everyone who met her in New York agreed. How did he enlist her support? It is interesting to consider what arguments he must have made, if any were needed. The family had always managed to survive by telling a lie, he might have said. Lies were an essential tool of state; not only Hitler and Stalin, but all political leaders and all governments lied. It might be Camelot in America, but the Kosinskis were Europeans. Americans could buy images like the Kennedy marriage and family (even the myth that Kennedy had produced a Pulitzer Prize-winning book); Americans were innocents, but Europeans - especially worldly Central Europeans like the Kosinskis - knew better. What was a lie anyway, and what was the truth? The minute after an event took place, it meant different things in the memory of each individual who had witnessed or experienced it. What was art but lies - enhanced "truth," nature improved upon, whether visually or in language. Even photographs chose the angle of representation; indeed, photographs, with their implication of objectivity, were the biggest liars of all. Wasn't that the most basic message of the twentieth century? The truth, whether in art or in life, was whatever worked best. Or perhaps it wasn't necessary to make excuses for himself at all. His mother knew what he had been through in actual fact. She had lived the same history; she was the wife of Moses Lewinkopf, who had survived the Holocaust at whatever cost. She may have recognized the inner necessity of her son's behavior. She may well have grasped that those half-invented wartime stories had become an important part of his personal capital. (James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 171-172) And here is an even more explicit confirmation of Elzbieta Kosinski supporting her son's lying - Sloan is describing a letter from Elzbieta Kosinski to her son, Jerzy, in which she recounts her reactions upon first reading a German translation of The Painted Bird: But then, she added, she suffered from the innocence that he was not with them at that time. Writing, of course, in Polish, she spaced the letters - Y O U W E R E N O T W I T H U S. The double-spacing might well have had the character of emphasis, but in the context of all that is knowable of the Kosinski family during the occupation, one must conclude that this most remarkable statement was, instead, delivered with a symbolic wink. As extraordinary as it might appear, the most satisfactory explanation is that Elzbieta Kosinska had agreed with her son to maintain, even in their private correspondence, the fiction that he had been separated from them. (James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 225) In fact, it would not be too much to say that Kosinski's relationship with his mother transcended her supporting his lying - it ventured into the pathological: There is, of course, a powerfully Oedipal undertone to this constellation of affinities [...]. That this is not mere conjecture is made clear by a conversation Kosinski had with Tadeusz Krauze, who was by then in New York as a graduate student in sociology. To a shocked Krauze, Kosinski unburdened himself of the revelation that he would like to have sex with his own mother. Before Krauze could respond, he added, "I would like to give her that pleasure." Near the beginning of Blind Date, there is an episode in which the protagonist has sex with his own mother. The elderly father suffers a stroke, and the relationship begins when mother and son both run nude to the telephone to take a call reporting on the father's condition. After the call, mother and son find themselves in an embrace. They remain lovers for years, the relationship bounded only by her refusal to undress specifically for her son or to allow him to kiss her on the mouth. As Blind Date is filled with transparently autobiographical material, the episode dares the reader to believe that it is literally true. (James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 129-130) Kosinski's sexual deviance is of insufficient relevance here to describe in detail. Let us glance at just one more incident, this one having to do with a first date with Joy Weiss (an incident reminiscent of Kosinski's attempt to debauch his step-son by taking him on tours of sex clubs, as is recounted in the TV documentary Sex, Lies, and Jerzy Kosinski): Toward the end of the meal he suggested that the two of them go to Chateau Nineteen, an S-M parlor with which he seemed to be quite familiar. She agreed on condition that she not be required to participate or remove her clothes. Once they were there, he moved comfortably among the patrons, chatting as if at a country-club tea. He was particularly friendly with a man who worked in the jewelry district, who was busy masturbating as they spoke. (James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 360-361) An accumulation of incidents points to the conclusion that Jerzy Kosinski was irresponsible, immature, impulsive, physically abusive toward women, and generally reckless with the welfare of others. Below are six character-revealing incidents which taken collectively might have long ago led Jews to write Jerzy Kosinski off as unfit for leadership, might have long ago led Jews to conclude that he was too unstable to be trusted as a Holocaust witness, might have long ago led Jews to conclude that he should be shunned as someone likely to bring ruin upon any who associated with him: First character-revealing incident - how Kosinski attempted to elicit a declaration of love. Meanwhile, matters had come to a crisis in the affair with Dora Militaru. He insisted that she profess her love for him, and when she refused, he hit her repeatedly. Dora broke off the affair. Their relationship soon resumed as a friendship - in January he would grant her his only TV interview, for Italian TV, undertaken within two years of the Village Voice episode - but his physical assault ended their relationship as lovers. (James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 391) Second character-revealing incident - how Kosinski had fun behind the wheel. On the long straightaway crossing the Tappan Zee Bridge, he opened it up to 120, pure exhilaration for a boy who had been told always to do things carefully, legally, and correctly. A little farther along they found themselves stuck on a two-lane road behind a slow driver. As a man who would one day drive Formula One race cars, David was astonished at the fluidity and skill with which Kosinski finally got around the recalcitrant ahead of him - and entertained mightily when Kosinski then slowed to a crawl and used those skills to prevent the car from passing him. He was more than a little shocked, however, when Kosinski persisted with the game in the face of an oncoming truck, causing the other car to run off into a ditch. (James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 150-151) Third character-revealing incident - how Kosinski played a little joke on one of his students. Kosinski looked at the young man severely. "You know, the very first time I saw you I got the feeling you were going to die young," he said. "In the past twenty years I've had the same feeling about several people and each time I've had it, they died. Of course, I could be wrong this time." The young man, who was afraid of being drafted and sent to Vietnam, started to cry. (James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 287) Fourth character-revealing incident - how Kosinski exposed Yale students to the intellectual contributions of the Neo Charles Mansonists. As part of the class, the Yale undergraduates were required to write about their own deaths. To stimulate their thinking, Kosinski brought in members of the Process Church of the Final Judgement - a group of Satanists who arrived dressed in gray. They saw themselves as having some sort of tenuous link with Charles Manson's Helter-Skelter family. Proselytizing in Kosinski's Yale classroom, they urged the students to "accept and embrace evil within themselves." This notion was uncomfortably close to Kosinski's own claim to Krystyna Iwaszkiewicz that he could achieve revenge upon his enemies because of a pact with the Devil [...]. The classroom episode took an unexpected turn when a young Jewish student went off with the Satanists, prompting an exchange with the student's parents over the pedagogical appropriateness of this classroom activity. (James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 300-301) Fifth character-revealing incident - how Kosinski entertained his dining partners. One day, when the three couples had planned to have dinner in the city, Rose Styron arrived first and was persuaded to be his accomplice in a prank. Kosinski would hide in his apartment on Seventy-ninth Street, and the others would look for him. They came, looked, failed to find, and began to grow cross; Sadri was ready for dinner, and didn't find the prank so funny. Kosinski finally unfolded himself from behind the cabinets in his darkroom. (James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 262) Sixth character-revealing incident - what Kosinski did to Marian Javits's dog - from which some might conclude that Jerzy Kosinski was not only the kind of man that you would not leave alone with your daughter, and not only the kind of man that you would not leave alone with your son - he was the kind of man that you would not leave alone with your dog. Marian Javits, in particular, was charmed by him, and she continued to be his friend even after his stories and eccentricities had become familiar - this despite the fact that one of his eccentricities had to do with her dog. Lying in bed recovering from a leg injury received while riding, she was startled when her dog ran furiously across the room, dripping urine. A moment later Kosinski appeared at the door. Later a friend told her that Kosinski had been observed abusing the dog in a way that would engender such behavior. (James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 263) HOME DISINFORMATION 60 MINUTES 866 hits since 9May98 T.R. Reid Washington Post 9May98 60 Minutes gullibility The program featured dramatic footage of a drug "mule" said to be smuggling several million dollars' worth of heroin to London for Colombia's Cali drug cartel. The Guardian reported, though, that the "mule" actually carried no drugs, that his trip to London was paid for by the documentary's producers, and that many of the report's dramatic moments were faked. The instance of 60 Minutes credulity documented in the T.R. Reid Washington Post article below occasions the following reflections, some of which demonstrate the relevance of the article to Ukrainain affairs: Successful Criminals Do Not Make Public Confessions. The 60 Minutes drug smuggling broadcast whose title I will assume was The Mule shows individuals who cooperate in a documentary exposing their own highly lucrative criminal activities - which is an incongruity. Successful criminals do not make public disclosure of their crimes because this hastens their getting caught. I have discussed this self-evident principle at length in Impossibilities of a TV documentary - whose focus is an ABC television Prime Time documentary titled Girls for Sale featuring this same incongruity of successful criminals disclosing their crimes, in this case the crime of employing Slavic girls as sex slaves in Israel. One may say, then, that television news sometimes demonstrates almost childlike insensitivity to incongruity, which is the same as saying that it demonstrates almost childlike credulity, and that one incongruity that it appears particularly insensitive to is that of successful criminals making public confession of their crimes. Television News Overlooks Many Diverse Incongruities. The earlier 60 Minutes broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom is similar in that it was loaded with palpable incongruities, though not the incongruity of criminals publicly confessing their crimes. For example, while host Morley Safer is describing a pogrom which was supposed to have taken place in Ukraine in July of 1941, the scene being shown is of bodies lying on the ground in snow. Multiply this sort of incongruity a hundredfold - I do not exaggerate - and you create the 60 Minutes broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom. The explanation may be different each time. In each case, some explanation of such incongruities is called for, and in each case the explanation may be different. In the case of the 60 Minutes story The Mule, the explanation seems to be that a fraudulent story advanced the career of a documentary filmmaker. In the case of the ABC TV Prime Time story Girls for Sale, my speculation is that the story was true and that it advanced Israeli interests. And in the case of the 60 Minutes story The Ugly Face of Freedom, it is evident that the story was false, my speculation being again that it advanced Israeli interests. North American News May be Particularly Susceptible to Corruption. We have three reasons for suspecting this, two of them coming from Reid's Washington Post article below: (i) Reid describes London journalism as "furiously competitive" where "a dozen newspapers and four TV networks regularly investigate - and savage - one another's reporting" and contrasts this with the United States where "newspapers and TV networks generally don't go on the attack against the other guy's story." (ii) The British government's Independent Commission requires TV news to demonstrate "a respect for truth," whereas in the United States, the accuracy of news reporting is not subject to any official review. (iii) We see Israel Shahak repeatedly offering the observation that North American news shows a unique degree of submission to Jewish control, as for example in the following statement: The bulk of the organized US Jewish community is totalitarian, chauvinistic and militaristic in its views. This fact remains unnoticed by other Americans due to its control of the media, but is apparent to some Israeli Jews. As long as organized US Jewry remained united, its control over the media and its political power remained unchallenged. (Israel Shahak, Open Secrets: Israeli Nuclear and Foreign Policies, Pluto Press, London and Chicago, 1997, p. 139). CBS News Does Not Investigate Itself. Although an admission from 60 Minutes seems imminent that its story of The Mule was fraudulent, CBS did not discover this fraud, and is not undertaking any investigation of its own. Rather, there appear to be a "series of investigations," possibly all British, including one by Carlton Television which originally financed and broadcast the documentary, and including a study by the British government. One may hypothesize, then, that CBS does not place high priority on the acknowledgement and correction of its own errors, and that it will do so only when forced to by public disclosure of these errors by some other agency. For this reason, the acknowledgement by 60 Minutes that its story The Mule was entirely fraudulent cannot be taken as offering hope that CBS is any closer to acknowledging that its story The Ugly Face of Freedom was entirely fraudulent. American Competence Gap? Mention has often been made in the Ukrainian Archive of the existence of competence gaps as these relate to brain drains and gains. The observation of a startling degree of credulity in the highest levels of the American Press constitutes one such competence gap, although in this case it is not a gap that leads to any brain theft from other nations, as the gap is largely hidden from the American public. Perhaps the American public has its own competence gap - one in which the people watching the news are as blind to incongruities as the people who are broadcasting it. Below are excerpts only. The complete Washington Post article is purchasable online from the Washington Post by anyone who cares to first set up an account with the Washington Post. Acclaimed Expose Questioned as Hoax British Drug Documentary Was Featured on "60 Minutes" By T.R. Reid Washington Post Foreign Service Saturday, May 9, 1998; Page A01 LONDON, May 8 - That powerful expose on "60 Minutes" last summer about Colombian drug runners was [...] quite possibly, false. After a lengthy investigation, London's Guardian newspaper has charged that the award-winning documentary "The Connection" [...] was essentially fiction. The program featured dramatic footage of a drug "mule" said to be smuggling several million dollars' worth of heroin to London for Colombia's Cali drug cartel. The Guardian reported, though, that the "mule" actually carried no drugs, that his trip to London was paid for by the documentary's producers, and that many of the report's dramatic moments were faked. [...] When the report was shown on "60 Minutes," CBS reporter Steve Kroft said that the mule had "no problem" slipping past British customs with the heroin in his stomach. "Another pound of heroin was on the British streets," the "60 Minutes" report said. But the Guardian, which says it found the "mule," reports that he actually swallowed Certs mints, not drugs. It says the flight to London took place six months later, and was paid for by the filmmaker. And it says the "mule" was actually turned back at Heathrow because he had a counterfeit passport, and thus never entered Britain. [...] The documentary included a highly dramatized segment in which reporters under armed guard were taken to a remote location for an interview with a figure described as a high-ranking member of the Cali drug cartel. "60 Minutes" reported de Beaufort had to travel blindfolded for two days by car to reach the scene of this secret rendezvous. The Guardian [...] said the secret location was actually the producer's hotel room in Colombia. [...] The British government's watchdog group, the Independent Television Commission, has launched a study of its own. Unlike the United States, where government has no power to police the content of news reporting, there are official regulations here requiring that TV news demonstrate "a respect for truth." CBS has not undertaken an investigation of its own, but will report to its viewers on the results of the British investigations [...]. HOME DISINFORMATION 60 MINUTES 1254 hits since 20Oct98 Buzz Bissinger Vanity Fair Sep 1998 Old Liars, young liar Trouble was, he made things up - sources, quotes, whole stories - in a breathtaking web of deception that emerged as the most sustained fraud in modern journalism. The topic of lying in the media is of central importance on the Ukrainian Archive because of the frequency with which the media uses the opportunity of reporting on the Slavic world in general, and on Ukraine in particular, to instead calumniate them. Three prominent examples are Jerzy Kosinski's career as Jewish-Holocaust fabulist and Grand Calumniator of Poland, TIME magazine's wallowing girl photograph of 22Feb93, and Morley Safer's 60 Minutes story The Ugly Face of Freedom, broadcast over the CBS network on 23Oct94. From such examples as the above, however, it is difficult to estimate the prevalence of misinformation and disinformation in the media. It may be the case that distortion and calumniation are limited to a few topics such as the Slavic world or Ukraine, and that otherwise the media are responsible, professional, and accurate. The value of studying the case of Stephen Glass, however, is that it suggests otherwise - that perhaps the media operate under next to no oversight, that they are rarely held accountable, and that only egregious lying over a protracted interval eventually risks discovery and exposure. Had Stephen Glass been just a little less of a liar, had he more often tempered his lies, more often redirected them from the powerful to the powerless, he would today not only still be working as a reporter, but winning prizes. Thus, the example of Stephen Glass serves to demonstrate the viability of the hypothesis that misinformation and disinformation in the media is widespread, and that the three examples mentioned above, and the many more documented throughout the Ukrainian Archive, may not be exceptional deviations at all, but rather the tip of an iceberg in an industry which is largely unregulated, which is largely lacking internal mechanisms of quality control, which is responsive not to truth, but to the dictates of ruling forces. Another question which may be asked is whether Stephen Glass is the product of some sub-culture which condones or encourages lying, or which even offers training in lying. The following excerpts, then, are from Buzz Bissinger, Shattered Glass, Vanity Fair, September, 1998, pp. 176-190. The quoted portions are in gray boxes; the headings in navy blue, however, have been introduced in the UKAR posting, and were not in the original. I now present to you Stephen Glass largely on the possibility that our new understanding of Stephen Glass will deepen our existing understanding of other record-breaking, media-manipulating liars that have been featured on the Ukrainian Archive, ones such as Yaakov Bleich, Morley Safer, Neal Sher, Elie Wiesel, and Simon Wiesenthal. One precondition of exceptional lying may be an intellectual mediocrity which puts a low ceiling on the success that can be achieved through licit means. Thus, Stephen Glass, although performing well in high school, began to perform poorly in University, and when he began work as a reporter, was discovered to not know how to write: Glass began his studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 1990 on a pre-medical curriculum. According to various accounts, he held his own at the beginning. But then his grades nose-dived. He apparently flunked one course and barely passed another, suggesting that he had simply lost interest in being on a pre-med track, or had done poorly on purpose to shut the door to any future career in medicine. Glass ultimately majored in anthropology. He reportedly did well in this area of study, but given his inconsistent performance in pre-med courses, his overall grade-point average at Penn was hardly distinguished - slightly less than a B. "His shit wasn't always as together as everyone thought it was," said Matthew Klein, who roomed with Glass at Penn when he was a senior and Glass a junior. There were indicators to Klein that Glass was not doing particularly well academically, but Glass never acknowledged it. "He always said he was doing fine, doing fine," said Klein. (pp. 185-186) Those familiar with his early work said he struggled with his writing. His original drafts were rough, the prose clunky and imprecise. (p. 186) A second precondition of exceptional lying may be growing up in a subculture which encourages lying, or merely condones it, or at least does not actively work to suppress it. The Bissinger article offers us next to no information on this topic, except for the following brief statement: Harvard educator Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot spent a good deal of time at Highland Park High School researching her 1983 book, The Good High School: Portraits of Character and Culture. She was impressed with the school's stunning academic programs but noted that values such as character and morality were sometimes little more than brushstrokes against the relentlessness of achievement. (p. 185) The first steps on the path to high achievement in lying will, of course, be timid and cautious, but when the lack of repercussions is discovered, will become bolder: At first the made-up parts were relatively small. Fictional details were melded with mostly factual stories. Quotes and vignettes were constructed to add the edge Kelly seemed to adore. But in the March 31, 1997, issue of The New Republic, Glass raised the stakes with a report about the Conservative Political Action Conference. Eight young men, Glass claimed, men with names such as Jason and Michael, were drinking beer and smoking pot. They went looking for "the ugliest and loneliest" woman they could find, lured her to their hotel room, and sexually humiliated her. The piece, almost entirely an invention, was spoken of with reverence. Subsequent to it, Glass's work began to appear in George, Rolling Stone, and Harper's. But challenges to Glass's veracity followed. David A. Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, called Glass "quite a fiction writer" and noted that the description of the Omni Shoreham room littered with empty bottles from the mini-bar had a problem. There were no mini-bars in any of the Omni's rooms. (p. 189) The young liar next discovers, to his amazement, that the exposure, scandal, and punishment that he feared do not materialize. Questions concerning the veracity of his work can simply be brushed aside. The chief consequence of his lying is dizzying success: At 25, Stephen Glass was the most sought-after young reporter in the nation's capital, producing knockout articles for magazines ranging from The New Republic to Rolling Stone. Trouble was, he made things up - sources, quotes, whole stories - in a breathtaking web of deception that emerged as the most sustained fraud in modern journalism. (p. 176) Because this, after all, was Stephen Glass, the compelling wunderkind who had seeped inside the skins of editors not only at The New Republic but also at Harper's, George, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and Mother Jones. This was the Stephen Glass who had so many different writing contracts that his income this year might well have reached $150,000 (including his $45,000 New Republic salary). This was the Stephen Glass whose stories had attracted the attention not just of Random House - his agent was trying to score a book deal - but of several screenwriters. (p. 180) There arrives a time when the young liar begins to feel himself invincible. He finds that no matter how big his lie, he is not exposed, and he extrapolates to imagine that he leads a charmed life and that his good fortune will continue forever. In view of his perceived impunity, he sees no need to moderate lying, and so he escalates it: Stephen Glass rode the fast curve of instant ordainment that encircles the celebrity age of the 90s; his reputation in the incestuous world of Washington magazine journalism exploded so exponentially after a few of his better-than-true stories that he could basically write anything and get away with it, regardless of the fact that his reporting almost always uncovered the near incredible and was laden with shoddy sourcing. His reports described events which occurred at nebulous locations, and included quotes from idiosyncratic characters (with no last names mentioned) whose language suggested the street poetry of Kerouac and the psychological acuity of Freud. He had an odd, prurient eye for a department-store Santa with an erection and evangelists who liked getting naked in the woods. And nobody called his bluff. What finally brought Stephen Glass down was himself. He kept upping the risk, enlarging the dimensions of his performance, going beyond his production of fake notes, a fake Web site, a fake business card, and memos by pulling his own brother into his fading act for a guest appearance. Clearly, he would have done anything to save himself. "He wanted desperately to save his ass at the expense of anything," said Chuck Lane. "He would have destroyed the magazine." The saga of Stephen Glass is wrenching, shameful, and sad. His actions are both destructive and self-destructive, and if there is an explanation for them, his family has chosen not to offer it. Repeated attempts to interview Stephen were rebuffed, and all his father, Jeffrey Glass, said in a phone conversation was this: "There's a lot unsaid. You can do whatever you want to do. There's no comment." (p. 182) But the result of such a course, at least in some perhaps rare cases, is discovery and discredit: Nothing in Charles Lane's 15 years of journalism, not the bitter blood of Latin America, nor war in Bosnia, nor the difficult early days of his editorship of the fractious New Republic, could compare with this surreal episode. On the second Friday in May in the lobby of the Hyatt hotel in the Maryland suburb of Bethesda, near Washington, nothing less than the most sustained fraud in the history of modern journalism was unraveling. No one in Lane's experience, no one, had affected him in the eerie manner of Stephen Glass, a 25-year-old associate editor at The New Republic and a white-hot rising star in Washington journalism. It wasn't just the relentlessness of the young reporter. Or the utter conviction with which Glass had presented work that Lane now feared was completely fabricated. It was the ingenuity of the con, the daring with which Glass had concocted his attention-getting creations, the subtle ease with which even now, as he attempted to clear himself, the strangely gifted kid created an impromptu illusion using makeshift details he had spied in the lobby just seconds earlier - a chair, a cocktail table, smoke from a cigarette. (p. 176) The New Republic, after an investigation involving a substantial portion of its editorial staff, would ultimately acknowledge fabrications in 27 of the 41 bylined pieces that Glass had written for the magazine in the two-and-a-half-year period between December 1995 and May 1998. In Manhattan, John F. Kennedy Jr., editor of George, would write a personal letter to Vernon Jordan apologizing for Glass's conjuring up two sources who had made juicy and emphatic remarks about the sexual proclivities of the presidential adviser and his boss. At Harper's, Glass would be dismissed from his contract after a story he had written about phone psychics, which contained 13 first-name sources, could not be verified. (p. 180) Post-mortems of how so much lying had succeeded in entering the media paint an image of a cunning malefactor eluding stringent quality-control mechanisms. However, perhaps it is the case that such post-mortems serve to delude the public into imagining that Stephen Glass is a rare aberration, and not the tip of an iceberg. Perhaps the reality is that right from the beginning any intelligent and critical superior could have seen - had he wanted to - that Stephen Glass was a simple and palpable fraud, and not the cunning genius depicted below: For those two and a half years, the Stephen Glass show played to a captivated audience; then the curtain abruptly fell. He got away with his mind games because of the remarkable industry he applied to the production of the false backup materials which he methodically used to deceive legions of editors and fact checkers. Glass created fake letterheads, memos, faxes, and phone numbers; he presented fake handwritten notes, fake typed notes from imaginary events written with intentional misspellings, fake diagrams of who sat where at meetings that never transpired, fake voice mails from fake sources. He even inserted fake mistakes into his fake stories so fact checkers would catch them and feel as if they were doing their jobs. He wasn't, obviously, too lazy to report. He apparently wanted to present something better, more colorful and provocative, than mere truth offered. (p. 180) HOME DISINFORMATION 60 MINUTES 1017 hits since 9Dec98 Jeffrey Goldberg Globe and Mail 6Feb93 Fabricating history Mr. McConnell, along with a Buchenwald survivor and a second member of the 761st, was flown to the camp in 1991 to film what turned out to be one of the most moving - and most fraudulent - scenes of the documentary. As the three men tour the site, the narrator speaks of their "return" to the camp. Mr. McConnell now says: "I first went to Buchenwald in 1991 with PBS, not the 761st." The Globe and Mail, Saturday, February 6, 1993, D2. FILM FRAUD The liberation that wasn't A PBS DOCUMENTARY CLAIMS A BLACK U.S. ARMY UNIT FREED JEWISH INMATES FROM GERMAN CONCENTRATION CAMPS. NICE STORY, BUT NOT TRUE, SAY THE SOLDIERS BY JEFFREY GOLDBERG THE NEW REPUBLIC NEW YORK It was a rare moment: Rev. Jesse Jackson, surrounded by white-haired Holocaust survivors, embracing Leib Glanz, a bearded Hasidic rabbi, on the stage of the Apollo Theater in Harlem. The occasion was a black-Jewish celebration of the Liberators, the PBS documentary about all-black U.S. Army units that, according to the film, helped capture Buchenwald and Dachau. The sponsors of the screening, Time Warner and a host of rich and influential New Yorkers, billed the film as an important tool in the rebuilding of a black-Jewish alliance. But the display of brotherhood turned out to be illusory. The next night Rabbi Glanz was nearly chased out of synagogue by angry Hasidim for the transgression of consorting with Mr. Jackson. More significantly, the film's backers and the press failed to point out that the unit featured most prominently in the Liberators had no hand in the capture of either Dachau or Buchenwald in Germany. "It's a lie. We were nowhere near these camps when they were liberated," says E. G. McConnell, an original member of the 761st Tank Battalion. He says he co-operated with the filmmakers until he came to believe they were faking material. Mr. McConnell, along with a Buchenwald survivor and a second member of the 761st, was flown to the camp in 1991 to film what turned out to be one of the most moving - and most fraudulent - scenes of the documentary. As the three men tour the site, the narrator speaks of their "return" to the camp. Mr. McConnell now says: "I first went to Buchenwald in 1991 with PBS, not the 761st." 'It's totally inaccurate. The men couldn't have been where they say they were because the camp was 60 miles away from where we were on the day of liberation' Nina Rosenblum, who co-produced the film with Bill Miles in association with WNET, New York's public television station, admits that the narration of the scene "may be misleading." But she says Mr. McConnell can't be trusted. "You can't speak to him because he's snapped. He was hit on the head with shrapnel and was severely brain-damaged." Mr. McConnell, a retired mechanic fro Trans World Airlines Inc., laughs when told of the statement. "If I was so disturbed, why did they use me in the film?" he asks. His claim is supported by a host of veterans of the 761st, including the battalion's commander, the president of its veterans' association, two sergeants and two company commanders, among them the black commander of C Company. Two of the company's soldiers assert in the film that they liberated Dachau. Yet a statement issued by historians at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum states they could find no evidence that the 761st Battalion helped free either camp. "It's totally inaccurate," says Charles Gates, the former captain who commanded C Company. "The men couldn't have been where they say they were because the camp was 60 miles away from where we were on the day of liberation." Paul Bates, the colonel who commanded the battalion, confirmed Mr. Gates's account. "In our after-action reports, there is no indication that we were near either one of the camps," Mr. Bates says. According to him, tanks of the 761st were assigned to the 71st Infantry Division, whose fighting path across Germany was 100 to 160 kilometres away from the two camps. "The 71st does not claim to have liberated those camps," he says. Several Holocaust survivors are quoted in the film and in the companion book published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich as saying they were liberated by blacks of these units. But Christopher Ruddy, a New York writer who has conducted extensive research on the film, says two of the survivors featured in the Liberators told him they were no longer sure when they first saw black soldiers. One of the survivors who appeared with Mr. Jackson at the Apollo confirmed that he too was unsure of what had happened at Buchenwald. "It's hard to say. I know there were black soldiers in the camp, but I don't know when exactly," says the survivor. Ms. Rosenblum angrily denounces the film's critics as Holocaust revisionists and racists. "These people are of the same mentality that says the Holocaust didn't happen," she says. In the course of a telephone interview, she declares: "There's tremendous racism in the Jewish community. How people who have been through the Holocaust can be racist is completely incomprehensible. To think that black people are less, which is what most Jewish people think, I can't understand it." She adds that racism of the type exhibited by the film's critics is what kept all-black combat units from receiving proper recognition in the first place. "The 761st fought for 33 years to get the Presidential Unit Citation. People don't want the truth of our history to come out," she says. WNET says it stands by the film's veracity. The Liberators' focus on events that appear never to have occurred seems all the more perplexing considering the true achievements of the 761st. Among other accomplishments, it played an important role in the liberation of Gunskirchen, a satellite of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, and its performance at the Battle of the Bulge was exemplary. The documentary approaches accuracy, the veterans say, when it focuses on the unit's heroic battles both against Germans and discrimination in its own Army. But the unit citation eventually awarded to the veterans by president Jimmy Carter does not list the liberation of either Buchenwald or Dachau as an achievement of the unit. "It's no great accomplishment to liberate a concentration camp, not compared to fighting the German army," says Philip Latimer, president of the 761st veterans' organization. "What we're concerned about is our combat performance. The unit has a lot to be proud of ... and I don't want to see it blamed for this documentary. I don't want the unit to be hurt." Questions have also been raised about the 183rd Combat Engineer Battalion, which the filmmakers say played a role in the liberation of Buchenwald. The unit's commander at the time, Lawrence Fuller, a former deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, says the 183rd only visited Buchenwald after its liberation, when General George Patton ordered units in the sector to see proof of German atrocities. Mr. Fuller says the documentary's producers never contacted him to discuss the unit's history. Leon Bass, a retired school principal who served in the 183rd, calls himself a liberator in the film and in the frequent lectures he gives on the Holocaust. But Mr. Bass says he does not remember exactly when he entered the camp. "I don't know whether we were first or second ... We didn't go in with guns blazing," he recalls. "There was just a handful of us. I was only there for two or three hours. The rest of the company came later." The Liberators, fuelled by the public-relations success at the Apollo, is gaining momentum. The Rainbow Coalition is sponsoring a similar gala in Los Angeles in March. Ms. Rosenblum tells of a packed calendar of showings with co-sponsors ranging from the Simon Wiesenthal Center to the American Jewish Committee. Copies of the documentary will be distributed to all New York City junior and senior high schools, according to board spokeswoman Linda Scott. The cost of the schools project, Mr. Rosenblum says, is being picked up by Elizabeth Rohatyn, the wife of investment banker Felix Rohatyn, who co-sponsored the Apollo showing, although Ms. Scott says that several philanthropists are vying for the honour of buying the tapes for the schools. According to a memorandum on the documentary circulating at school-board headquarters, the film will be used to "examine the effects of racism on African-American soldiers and on Jews who were in concentration camps ... to explain the role of African-American soldiers in liberating Jews from Nazi concentration camps and to reveal the involvement of Jews as 'soldiers' in the civil-rights movement." The documentary continues to be supported by a number of influential Jews. PR guru Howard Rubenstein, who is a vice-president of New York's Jewish Community Relations Council (and who also flacks for radio station WLIB, known for the anti-Semitic invective it regularly airs), worked pro bono on the Apollo event and continues to plug the documentary, despite having heard that it is misleading. "I have no reason to distrust Nina [Rosenblum]," he says. "She seemed very able and honest. I hope and pray it's accurate." Peggy Tishman, a former president of the JCRC and a co-host of the evening at the Apollo, is sticking by the documentary too. Ms. Tishman says the documentary is "good for the Holocaust." "Why would anybody want to exploit the idea that this is a fraud?" she says. "What we're trying to do is make New York a better place for you and me to live." She claims that the accuracy of the film is not the issue. What is important is the way it can bring Jews and blacks into "dialogue." There are a lot of truths that are very necessary," she says. "This is not a truth that's necessary." Jeffrey Goldberg is New York bureau chief for The Forward. The above Jeffrey Goldberg article was accompanied by two photographs, the captions of which were: U.S. soldiers, both high-ranking officers and enlisted men, view a scene of horror at a death camp. Concentration-camp prisoners were murdered as a last act by departing German guards. A black U.S. soldier guards German prisoners in France during the last weeks of the war. Comments on the above Jeffrey Goldberg article Where's the harm? The Liberators incident is relevant to several of the topics discussed in the Ukrainian Archive. The Liberators has been somewhat arbitrarily placed with 60 Minutes documents because it demonstrates the power of the media to fabricate history. In the case of the 23 Oct 1994 60 Minutes broadcast The Ugly Face of Freedom, the disinformation served to calumniate Ukrainians; in the case of the PBS documentary, the Liberators, the disinformation appears to be oriented toward improving relations between Jews and blacks. Thus, whereas the 60 Minutes disinformation will readily be viewed as destructive by all who learn of it, the Liberators disinformation may be viewed by some as innocuous or even benevolent. However, there are reasons for not viewing the Liberators disinformation leniently or indulgently: (1) Black grievances against Jews may be founded on genuine exploitation of Blacks by Jews, and the Liberators may be an attempt to quiet opposition to that exploitation and so allow it to continue. (2) Setting the precedent of conniving at disinformation such as that offered in the Liberators offers disseminators of disinformation the prospect of impunity for manipulating public opinion to their own ends, and these ends vary on the benevolence-malevolence continuum. Whereas inducing people who had never been at Buchenwald to simulate returning to Buchenwald for PBS cameras may seem harmless, the buildup of tolerance for such chicanery makes it easier to similarly induce people to falsely testify in war crimes proceedings concerning Holocaust events, with the result that the lives of innocent accused are disrupted, shattered, and even lost. "Capturing" and "liberating"? Referring to Allied forces "capturing" or "liberating" the camps is inflating what really happened - which is that Allied soldiers peacefully walked into camps that German forces had abandoned days previously. In the words of Philip Latimer, president of the 761st veterans' organization, "It's no great accomplishment to liberate a concentration camp." In other words, the Liberators film leaves the impression of Jews attempting to get black fighting units to falsely take credit for non-accomplishments. Unreliability of eye-witness testimony. We have already had occasion to notice on the Ukrainian Archive the unreliability of eye-witness testimony, as in the cases of falsely accused Frank Walus and John Demjanjuk. The Liberators film reminds us once again how easy it is to get some old men to say whatever you want them to. Thus, we find that "two of the company's soldiers assert in the film that they liberated Dachau," when we know that this could not have been the case, and we find that "several Holocaust survivors are quoted in the film and in the companion book published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich as saying they were liberated by blacks of these units," again when this is an impossibility. Of course upon less biased questioning, some of these old men will recant: "But Christopher Ruddy, a New York writer who has conducted extensive research on the film, says two of the survivors featured in the Liberators told him they were no longer sure when they first saw black soldiers." Responsible Jews and non-Jews oppose irresponsible Jews. It cannot escape our attention that foremost among those challenging the disinformation in the Liberators are the apparently-Jewish writer Jeffrey Goldberg, and possibly-Jewish historians at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. This reinforces a point introduced earlier in the Ukrainian Archive during the discussion of Warsaw's 1905 Alphonsenpogrom, to the effect that what may be taken at first glance to be an expression of antagonism toward Jews may in reality be an expression of opposition by responsible Jews and non-Jews alike against irresponsible elements among Jews, and that it is the responsible Jews themselves who may be in the vanguard of the attack against irresponsible Jews. We have seen this to be the case repeatedly, not only during Warsaw's Alphonsenpogrom, but in many prominent incidents - for example, Israeli defense attorney Yoram Sheftel must be given a large share of the credit for exposing the duplicity and incompetence of the Israeli justice system, and thereby saving the life of John Demjanjuk, a case in which other Jews such as Phoenix attorney William J. Wolf also played leading and heroic roles. The prominent role played by responsible Jews in opposing irresponsible Jews should not be surprising - the irresponsible Jews injure all Jews because their irresponsibility attaches in popular thinking to Jews generally, and thus serves to smear the good name of all Jews. Important to note in the Liberators case, then, is that the friction does not divide cleanly along ethnic lines. The Liberators, and the many other cases before us, do not illustrate Jews clashing with anti-Semites - rather, they illustrate the irresponsible clashing with the responsible, the disseminators of disinformation clashing with the upholders of truth. Zero repercussions. And so for having told the lies that are told on the Liberators, have any of the makers of that film suffered any repercussions? Have any of them been fired? Been demoted? Been censured? Have any of them suffered a loss of face? Do any of them find that their later work is rejected because of their earlier loss of credibility? The answer to all these questions - in all probability - is No! In American and Canadian society, there is one category of behavior that is uniquely protected from the repercussions of falsehood - and that is the category of Jews recounting stories of the Jewish Holocaust. Charges of falsehood may indeed be levelled, but these are not picked up by the media, and so make no impact. We have already examined many such cases on the Ukrainian Archive - the cases of Morley Safer, Neal Sher, Elie Wiesel, and Simon Wiesenthal standing out - egregious, bald-faced liars all of them, but never called to task for their lies, honored and even revered despite their lies. Psychiatric diagnosis of the film's critics. Co-producer of the film, Nina Rosenblum, accuses critics of the film of being "Holocaust revisionists" and "racists." But why stop there - why not follow up the two left jabs with the right-hand haymaker, "anti-Semites"? The answer perhaps is that it may appear more credible to smear all critics of the film with the same brush, and the accusation of anti-Semitism does not stick to those critics who happen to be Jewish. The deployment of terms suggestive of psychological disorder, such as "revisionist," "racist," or "anti-Semite" exemplifies the stock Jewish ploy of attempting to silence opposition by dispensing psychiatric diagnoses. Creating collaborators in disinformation. Jews who lie not only discredit Jews generally, but also discredit any whom they lure into sharing their lies. Thus, had the 761st Tank Battalion been seduced into accepting whatever momentary glory attaches to wrongly claiming to have liberated Buchenwald, then the 761st would have ultimately suffered a loss of credibility. The 761st does have genuine achievements, and foresaw only discredit in fabricating any. In the words of Philip Latimer, president of the 761st veterans' organization, "The unit has a lot to be proud of ... and I don't want to see it blamed for this documentary. I don't want the unit to be hurt." Attempts have been made to seduce Ukrainians, and others, into a similar complicity in Jewish disinformation, and in the case of Ukrainians, these attempts have been largely successful. The Ukrainians' reward has been to receive a Righteous Gentile Award for their efforts in saving Jews during the Second World War. In accepting such an award, however, such Ukrainians implicitly acquiesce and lend support to a Jewish history of the war, which is crammed with disinformation, much of it harmful to Ukrainian interests. Among the items of disinformation in this false history is that Ukrainians were eager collaborators of the Nazis (when in reality Ukrainians overwhelmingly served as opponents), that Ukrainian efforts to save Jews were rare (when in reality large numbers of Ukrainians took grave risks and even gave their lives to save Jews), that any anti-Jewish feeling on the part of Ukrainians that did exist was gratuitous and pathological (when in reality it was founded on a memory of the recent Jewish domination of the destruction of Ukraine under Communism). Thus, any Ukrainians who were offered a Righteous Gentile Award should have declined it for the same reason that the 761st declined to be honored in the Liberators. Any Ukrainians who have accepted such an award should renounce it. Ukrainians should consider withdrawing their support from the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). The PBS is portrayed by Goldberg as supportive of the Liberators even after the film had been discredited. Ukrainians may recall, furthermore, that the PBS broadcast a severely flawed anti-Demjanjuk documentary despite prior notice on the part of Ukrainian representatives specifying the nature of these flaws. Observations such as these invite the conclusion that the PBS acts in sympathy with Jewish disinformation, and in opposition to Ukrainian interests. For this reason, Ukrainians should consider withdrawing their support from the PBS. Ukrainians should consider cancelling their subscriptions to TIME magazine. The Apollo Theater showing of the Liberators was sponsored by "Time Warner and a host of rich and influential New Yorkers." Readers of the Ukrainian Archive will be reminded that TIME magazine was responsible for the calumniation of Ukraine in the Wallowing Photograph incident. From these two indications, we may wonder whether Time Warner, and TIME magazine, are not sympathetic toward Holocaust disinformation and hostile toward Ukrainian interests. After having been a more than three-decades-long reader of TIME, I recently cancelled my subscription. Proven fraud does little to lessen propaganda value. As the Liberators film has been discredited, it appears to stand little chance of being accepted as history. However, this does not make the film a failure. The film continues to be valuable as a tool for shaping public opinion, particularly for molding the minds of the young. At the time of the writing of the Goldberg article above, the film was about to be distributed to "all New York City junior and senior high schools." We may expect, then, that hundreds of thousands of impressionable students will view the Liberators and will believe it, and that the refutations of Jeffrey Goldberg, and the soldiers of the 761st Tank Battalion, and others will reach the ears of only a few. The film may never succeed as history, but it has a good chance of succeeding as popular history, and it is popular history that influences elections and that directs the allocation of government resources. Choosing between useful lies and harmful truths. One of the weapons within the armamentarium of the totalitarian controller of information - that a useful lie is better than a harmful truth - is explicitly wielded by at least one supporter of the Liberators film: She [Peggy Tishman] claims that the accuracy of the film is not the issue. What is important is the way it can bring Jews and blacks into "dialogue." There are a lot of truths that are very necessary," she says. "This [that the 761st did not liberate Buchenwald or Dachau] is not a truth that's necessary." However, wielding the weapon of the useful lie will succeed only in a context in which the flow of contrary information can be choked off. In a society that permits the free flow of information, there is no useful lie, because all lies stand in danger of being exposed and thus discrediting the liar and his cause. Thus, we may expect that an ancillary goal of the distributors of disinformation will be to strangle the free flow of information - and more specifically, we might expect that those backing efforts such as the Liberators film will simultaneously back efforts to suppress web sites such as the Ukrainian Archive. In a totalitarian society, the Liberators film constitutes a useful day's work for the manipulators of mass opinion; in a free society, the Liberators film constitutes a self-defeating miscalculation. Furthermore, such an open avowal of the utility of lying as Peggy Tishman's above brings to mind the question raised during the discussion of journalistic fraud Stephen Glass of whether there may exist subcultures which by means of their tolerance of, or support for, lying produce a disproportionate number of great liars. Consorting with Hasidim. In Goldberg's Liberators story above, Hasidic rabbi Leib Glanz embraces Rev. Jesse Jackson on the stage of the Apollo Theater. However, "the next night Rabbi Glanz was nearly chased out of synagogue by angry Hasidim for the transgression of consorting with Mr. Jackson." This brief description is puzzling, and from it alone we would be unable to arrive at any strong conclusion, were it not for our having read some of the characteristics of Hasidism in the writings of Israel Shahak. With Shahak's description in mind, we are tempted to interpret Rabbi Glanz being nearly chased out of synagogue by angry Hasidim as a further demonstration that Hasidic Jews generally are hostile to the idea of any rapprochement with any non-Jews. That is, Israel Shahak depicts Hasidic Jews as constituting a debasement of Jewish mysticism, of being superstitious, fanatical, mysogynistic, given to overindulgence in alcohol, and most importantly, of being committed to the hatred of all non-Jews. I do not venture such a description on my own initiative, as I have no personal knowledge of Hasidism - but I do pass the description along as the opinion of a reputable authority, Israel Shahak. The incident of Rabbi Glanz being almost chased out of synagogue can only remind us of the possibility that it may be one of Ukraine's many misfortunes that the branch of Judaism which appears to have taken deepest root in Ukraine is Hasidism. We see this in Hasidic Rabbi Yaakov Dov Bleich's prominence, as witnessed in his frequent appearance on the pages of the Ukrainian Weekly, and we see it as well in the central role he played - in undermining Ukraine, as it happens - during the 23 October 1994 60 Minutes broadcast, The Ugly Face of Freedom. The second-greatest calamity. And so, the second-greatest calamity to befall the Jewish people during this century - which, after the Holocaust itself, is Jewish misrepresentation of the Holocaust - deepens and broadens as a result of the Liberators film. Another blow is struck at Jewish credibility. Another burden is placed on the backs of Jews - the burden of being remembered for their leading role during the 20th century as stranglers of information, manipulators of truth, disseminators of disinformation, and corruptors of history. The consequence of numbers of Jews lying about the history of their people must be that whenever any Jew discourses upon history, he may expect to be greeted with heightened skepticism - such is the penalty that all Jews must pay for the sin of harboring fabulists in their midst. HOME DISINFORMATION 60 MINUTES 849 hits since 15-May-2000 Mark Steyn National Post 15-May-2000 CBS fabricates news "But yet again those old Soviet hardliners can only marvel: They spent decades smashing presses and jamming transmitters in an effort to shut down the flow of information. Americans achieved that happy state just by leaving it to ABC, CBS and NBC." - Mark Steyn Mark Steyn in the National Post (Toronto) of 15-May-2000 takes the position that Donna Dees-Thomases Million Mom March had its projected attendance downgraded to 100,000, though how many actually showed up is the object of varied speculation; and more importantly that contrary to the attempt to portray Donna Dees-Thomases as a suburban mother who had never organized anything larger than a car pool before, she was in reality a CBS employee. In comparison to the massive distortions of Morley Safer's Ugly Face of Freedom of 23-Oct-1994, the Million Mom March media stunt seems like a peccadillo, but does contribute to the view of the mass media as ready to deceive and manipulate, with the CBS perhaps playing a leading role. Two excerpts from the longer article: But, speaking of Casts of Idiots, what about CBS? By now, you may be curious about that "part-time job," as NBC coyly referred to it. A couple of waitressing shifts? A little secretarial work for the school district? No, Donna is a part-time publicist for David Letterman's Late Show. Before that, she was a full-time publicist for CBS news anchor Dan Rather. CBS This Morning was one of the first news shows to report the Million Mom March movement last September, when Hattie Kauffman interviewed Donna. "What," asked Hattie, "turns a mild-mannered suburban mom into an anti-gun activist?" The correct answer is: "A leave of absence from my employer, CBS, which, by remarkable coincidence, is also your employer, Hattie." But that's not what Donna said. Only in the last week has CBS News begun disclosing that she's one of theirs. Mark Steyn, Made to Measure for the Media, National Post, 15-May-2000, p. A14. Heigh-ho. The non-March is over now, and the non-Millions are relaunching themselves today as a political lobby group. Good luck to them. But yet again those old Soviet hardliners can only marvel: They spent decades smashing presses and jamming transmitters in an effort to shut down the flow of information. Americans achieved that happy state just by leaving it to ABC, CBS and NBC. Mark Steyn, Made to Measure for the Media, National Post, 15-May-2000, p. A14. HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE HILBERG Hilberg > 889 hits since 31May99 Hilberg Letter 1 15Sep97 Invitation to deny Lviv pogrom September 15, 1997 Raul Hilberg Department of History University of Vermont Burlington, VT USA 05401-3596 Dear Professor Hilberg: On October 23, 1994, Morley Safer together with Simon Wiesenthal in the 60 Minutes story The Ugly Face of Freedom drew attention to an event which I will refer to as the "Lviv pogrom": SAFER: He [Simon Wiesenthal] remembers that even before the Germans arrived, Ukrainian police went on a 3-day killing spree. WIESENTHAL: And in this 3 days in Lvov alone between 5 and 6 thousand Jews was killed. ... SAFER: But even before the Germans entered Lvov, the Ukrainian militia, the police, killed 3,000 people in 2 days here. For the moment, let us overlook that the interviewer - Morley Safer - is not citing the evidence of his own professional witness - Simon Wiesenthal - but is instead offering an unattributed lower estimate within a smaller time interval. And let us overlook as well that in another place, Simon Wiesenthal places what seems to be this same Lviv pogrom after the arrival of the Germans: Thousands of detainees were shot dead in their cells by the retreating Soviets. This gave rise to one of the craziest accusations of that period: among the strongly anti-Semitic population the rumour was spread by the Ukrainian nationalists that all Jews were Bolsheviks and all Bolsheviks were Jews. Hence it was the Jews who were really to blame for the atrocities committed by the Soviets. All the Germans needed to do was to exploit this climate of opinion. It is said that after their arrival they gave the Ukrainians free rein, for three days, to 'deal' with the Jews. (Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 36, emphasis added) What does primarily interest me here is that when I attempted to find more information on this Lviv pogrom - which I took to be either the biggest single pogrom of the War, or else at least among the biggest - in your The Destruction of the European Jews, I was unable to locate anything at all resembling such an event, and in fact, I encountered statements suggesting that such an event did not occur. Specifically, the following two passages strike me as incompatible with the massive Lviv pogrom described by Messrs Safer and Wiesenthal: From the Ukraine Einsatzkommando 6 of Einsatzgruppe C reported as follows: Almost nowhere can the population be persuaded to take active steps against the Jews. This may be explained by the fear of many people that the Red Army may return. Again and again this anxiety has been pointed out to us. Older people have remarked that they had already experienced in 1918 the sudden retreat of the Germans. In order to meet the fear psychosis, and in order to destroy the myth ... which, in the eyes of many Ukrainians, places the Jew in the position of the wielder of political power, Einsatzkommando 6 on several occasions marched Jews before their execution through the city. Also, care was taken to have Ukrainian militiamen watch the shooting of Jews. This "deflation" of the Jews in the public eye did not have the desired effect. After a few weeks, Einsatzgruppe C complained once more that the inhabitants did not betray the movements of hidden Jews. The Ukrainians were passive, benumbed by the "Bolshevist terror." Only the ethnic Germans in the area were busily working for the Einsatzgruppe. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1961, p. 202) The Slavic population stood estranged and even aghast before the unfolding spectacle of the "final solution." There was on the whole no impelling desire to cooperate in a process of such utter ruthlessness. The fact that the Soviet regime, fighting off the Germans a few hundred miles to the east, was still threatening to return, undoubtedly acted as a powerful restraint upon many a potential collaborator. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, p. 308) And most particularly, your summary of pogrom activity in Ukraine seemed to flatly rule out the possibility that such a massive, pre-German, Lviv pogrom had ever taken place: First, truly spontaneous pogroms, free from Einsatzgruppen influence, did not take place; all outbreaks were either organized or inspired by the Einsatzgruppen. Second, all pogroms were implemented within a short time after the arrival of the killing units. They were not self-perpetuating, nor could new ones be started after things had settled down. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, p. 312) Examining another work which I also happen to have in my library - Leni Yahil's The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, Oxford, New York, 1990 - for information on the Lviv pogrom, I again found nothing. In Yahil's book too I thought that I had in my hands a thoroughly researched work which could not have overlooked a massive, pre-German, Lviv pogrom, if one had ever occurred: When The Holocaust first appeared in Israel in 1987, it was hailed as the finest, most authoritative history of Hitler's war on the Jews ever published. Representing twenty years of research and reflection, Leni Yahil's book won the Shazar prize, one of Israel's highest awards for historical work. (From the dust jacket) And so, I would very much appreciate your opinion on this discrepancy. What appears to be the case to myself and to others in the Ukrainian community is that the Lviv pogrom, as described by Safer and Wiesenthal, did not take place, and we have been attempting, with no success whatever, to get 60 Minutes to issue a retraction. If you were to join your voice to ours in however simple and brief a statement, I think that a retraction might be forthcoming in short order. I should explain by way of background that my attitude to this sort of misstatement is that it is disrespectful to the memory of the Holocaust dead. I do not believe that the Holocaust dead authorized Messrs Safer and Wiesenthal to replace the real Holocaust with a grander one which would do more to advance their respective careers. I believe that by means of their fabrications, Messrs Safer and Wiesenthal do a great disservice to the perception of Jewish credibility, provide ammunition for Holocaust deniers, and at the same time harm Ukrainian-Jewish relations. Thus, if it were true that the Lviv pogrom in question did not take place, and if you were to release a statement to that effect (if only in a letter to me which I could quote), I think you would be performing an invaluable service toward enhancing the perception of Jewish credibility, toward disarming Holocaust deniers, and as well toward improving Ukrainian-Jewish relations. Sincerely yours, Lubomyr Prytulak HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE HILBERG < Hilberg Hilberg > 806 hits since 31May99 Hilberg reply to Letter 1 15Dec97 Lviv pogrom implicitly denied Raul Hilberg 236 Prospect Parkway Burlington, VT 05401 802-863 4653 December 15, 1997 Mr. Lubomyr Prytulak [...] Dear Mr. Prytulak, I have had to delay a reply to your letter of September 15, because I had an almost impossible deadline for a manuscript, plus two trips, one to Europe and one to Alberta. Now I have had a chance to reexamine some sources with respect to actions in Lviv and a few other places within eastern Galicia during the early phase of the occupation. Here then are a few more details to complement the sections you have taken from the 1961 edition of my book, The Destruction of the European Jews. The historian Philip Friedman writes on pages 246-47 of his Roads to Extinction, New York 1980: By inciteful proclamations, pamphlets, and oral propaganda, the Germans stirred up mass hatred of the Jews. Persecution and pogroms began immediately after the entry of the German army. From June 30 to July 3, German soldiers spread through the streets of the city in the company of Ukrainian nationalists and an unruly mob of the local population. They fell upon the Jews in the streets, beat them murderously, and dragged them away for "work" - especially for cleansing of prisons filled with corpses and blood. Thousands of Jews were seized and conveyed to the prisons on Zamarstynowska, Jachowicza, and Lackiego Streets; to the Brygidki prison on Kazimierzowska Street; and to the Gestapo headquarters, at 59 Pelzynska. The first mention of these events in a report of the Security Police of July 3, 1941, is a statement that angered residents had already seized 1,000 Jews. A subsequent report, dated July 16, 1941, notes that "In Lemberg [Lviv] the population rounded up about 1,000 Jews, and with mistreatment [unter Mi?handlungen] delivered them to the [German] army-occupied GPU prison." In the same report, there is mention of the shooting by the Security Police of 7,000 Jews in all of eastern Galicia. Fifty Jews were reported to have been killed by local inhabitants in Sambor. Another Security Police report, dated July 11, 1941, refers to 600 Jews "liquidated" in the course of "persecutions of Jews inspired by the Einsatzkommando" 4b in Tarnopol. In conclusion, it would seem that local inhabitants violently seized about a thousand of the Jews arrested in Lviv. Because of the German role and the presence of Ukrainian militia, I have not called these actions a pogrom, but that may be a matter of labeling. Sincerely, Raul Hilberg [signature] HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE JORDAN Jordan > 786 hits since 23May98 Jordan Letter 1 Mar 6/96 Answering 16,000 pieces of mail March 6, 1996 Michael H. Jordan Chairman, Westinghouse Electric Corporation 11 Stanwix Street Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA 15222 Dear Mr. Jordan: In the Wall Street Journal article on you of February 28, 1996, the phrase "pulling CBS from the ratings basement" caught my attention, and led me to wonder whether it would be possible to accomplish such a feat while CBS continues to be weighed down with personnel who have demonstrated such lapses of intelligence and of integrity as were requisite to broadcasting "The Ugly Face of Freedom." If you take the trouble to read the enclosed documentation, I am sure that you will be convinced that my depiction of this broadcast as requiring lapses of both intelligence and integrity is not hyperbolic, but rather is restrained. Let me right now give you just one example of the hatemongering that was offered to CBS viewers as investigative journalism in "The Ugly Face of Freedom." It is Morley Safer reading into the camera - without so much as blinking - "The Church and Government of Ukraine have tried to ease people's fears, suggesting that ... Ukrainians, despite the allegations, are not genetically anti-Semitic." One might have expected that no mainstream journalist would be able to speak such words in any public forum and still keep his job. Had someone made up the equally fantastic and inflammatory "The World Jewish Congress has tried to ease people's fears, suggesting that Jews, despite the allegations, are not genetically addicted to usury," then surely he would have been out of a job. Mr. Safer did say one of these things - does it matter which one? - and yet somehow he still works for CBS television, reading his lines into the camera just as if he is not to be held accountable for his statement, carrying on as before just as if he had not played the leading role in what may be the most concentrated fifteen minutes of disinformation and hate to come out of the mainstream media. CBS's behavior since "The Ugly Face of Freedom" continues in the same vein and encourages the suspicion that those at its helm continue to be crippled by the same deficit of intelligence and of integrity. Specifically, CBS claimed first that of the 16,000 pieces of mail which it had received objecting to "The Ugly Face of Freedom," all had been answered. On being pressed, it later revised the "all" downward to 25%. And only after the Ukrainian community beat the bushes in a vain attempt to find a single person who had received an answer did CBS revise that figure downward still another notch - to none at all having been answered. Topping that off, instead of keeping the 16,000 letters of protest on file as is required by the FCC, CBS trashed them. To date, almost one and a half years after the original broadcast, CBS remains frozen like a deer in the headlights of an onrushing car, devoid on the one hand of arguments to refute the charges levelled against the broadcast, and devoid also of the courage to admit that these charges are correct - perhaps taking the advice of its lawyers that when you find yourself unable to say anything convincing in your own defense, then the best policy is to say nothing at all. I urge you in the interests both of truth and of redeeming CBS to weed out the incompetents responsible for "The Ugly Face of Freedom," and to direct CBS to offer its viewers the retraction and apology which are long overdue. Yours truly, Lubomyr Prytulak cc: Ed Bradley, Steve Kroft, Morley Safer, Lesley Stahl, Mike Wallace HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE JORDAN < Jordan Jordan > 625 hits since 23May98 Jordan Letter 2 May 7/96 Confusion concerning the Lviv pogrom May 7, 1996 Michael H. Jordan Chairman, Westinghouse Electric Corporation 11 Stanwix Street Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA 15222 Dear Mr. Jordan: In your reply to my letter to you of March 6, 1996, I am particularly looking forward to hearing your comments on the discrepancies between the following three sets of quotations. VIEW #1: THE LVIV POGROM WAS MASSIVE AND PRE-GERMAN. SAFER: He [Simon Wiesenthal] remembers that even before the Germans arrived, Ukrainian police went on a 3-day killing spree. WIESENTHAL: And in this 3 days in Lvov alone between 5 and 6 thousand Jews was killed. ... SAFER: But even before the Germans entered Lvov, the Ukrainian militia, the police, killed 3,000 people in 2 days here. (60 Minutes, The Ugly Face of Freedom, October 23, 1994) VIEW #2: THE LVIV POGROM WAS MASSIVE AND POST-GERMAN. The Ukrainian police ... had played a disastrous role in Galicia following the entry of the German troops at the end of June and the beginning of July 1941. (Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 34, emphasis added) Thousands of detainees were shot dead in their cells by the retreating Soviets. This gave rise to one of the craziest accusations of that period: among the strongly anti-Semitic population the rumour was spread by the Ukrainian nationalists that all Jews were Bolsheviks and all Bolsheviks were Jews. Hence it was the Jews who were really to blame for the atrocities committed by the Soviets. All the Germans needed to do was to exploit this climate of opinion. It is said that after their arrival they gave the Ukrainians free rein, for three days, to 'deal' with the Jews. (Simon Wiesenthal, Justice Not Vengeance, 1989, p. 36, emphasis added) VIEW #3: THERE WAS NO LVIV POGROM. From the Ukraine Einsatzkommando 6 of Einsatzgruppe C reported as follows: Almost nowhere can the population be persuaded to take active steps against the Jews. This may be explained by the fear of many people that the Red Army may return. Again and again this anxiety has been pointed out to us. Older people have remarked that they had already experienced in 1918 the sudden retreat of the Germans. In order to meet the fear psychosis, and in order to destroy the myth ... which, in the eyes of many Ukrainians, places the Jew in the position of the wielder of political power, Einsatzkommando 6 on several occasions marched Jews before their execution through the city. Also, care was taken to have Ukrainian militiamen watch the shooting of Jews. This "deflation" of the Jews in the public eye did not have the desired effect. After a few weeks, Einsatzgruppe C complained once more that the inhabitants did not betray the movements of hidden Jews. The Ukrainians were passive, benumbed by the "Bolshevist terror." Only the ethnic Germans in the area were busily working for the Einsatzgruppe. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1961, p. 202) The Slavic population stood estranged and even aghast before the unfolding spectacle of the "final solution." There was on the whole no impelling desire to cooperate in a process of such utter ruthlessness; and the fact that the Soviet regime, fighting off the Germans a few hundred miles to the east, was still threatening to return, undoubtedly acted as a powerful restraint upon many a potential collaborator. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1961, p. 201) First, truly spontaneous pogroms, free from Einsatzgruppen influence, did not take place; all outbreaks were either organized or inspired by the Einsatzgruppen. Second, all pogroms were implemented within a short time after the arrival of the killing units; they were not self-perpetuating, nor could new ones be started after things had settled down. (Raul Hilberg summarizing anti-Jewish activity in Ukraine, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1961, p. 204) The Ukrainian violence as a whole did not come up to expectations. (Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1961, p. 204) Do you not find it disturbing, Mr. Jordan, that 60 Minutes' claim of a massive pre-German pogrom in Lviv is contradicted by Simon Wiesenthal's earlier statements that the pogrom was post-German? And do you not find it even more disturbing that when we turn from media stars like Simon Wiesenthal and television announcers like Morley Safer to respected historians - in fact, the most respected historian of the Jewish Holocaust, Raul Hilberg himself - that there is a curious lack of awareness of this most egregious of all World War II pogroms, and in fact flat denials that anything of the sort ever happened? Yours truly, Lubomyr Prytulak cc: Ed Bradley, Steve Kroft, Morley Safer, Lesley Stahl, Mike Wallace Jordan Letter 3 May 14/96 Nowhere is the SS so openly celebrated May 14, 1996 Michael H. Jordan Chairman, Westinghouse Electric Corporation 11 Stanwix Street Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA 15222 Dear Mr. Jordan: There are certain questions that keep revolving in my mind to which I can't seem to find any answers - perhaps you could help me with one of these. The particular question which I have in mind at the moment is what it was that led Morley Safer to the conclusion that the Galicia Division reunion in Lviv - scenes of which were shown on "The Ugly Face of Freedom" - was in fact the most open celebration of the SS imaginable - in Mr. Safer's own words: "Nowhere, not even in Germany, is the SS so openly celebrated." Now for what strikes Mr. Safer as being the most open of all conceivable celebrations of the SS, I would think that the corroborative scenes shown should have contained all, or most, or at least several of the following ingredients: (1) a display of photographs of Hitler, (2) a display of photographs of Himmler, head of the SS, (3) a display of swastikas, (4) a display of the lightning-bolt "SS" insignia, or any "SS" insignia, (5) the playing of Nazi songs, perhaps Nazi marching songs, (6) goose-stepping on the part of the participants, (7) participants raising their hands in the "Heil Hitler!" salute, (8) pro-Nazi literature distributed to the participants as part of the celebration, (9) pro-Nazi statements elicited from the participants by reporters, (10) pro-Nazi statements made by speakers addressing the celebrants, (10) reminiscences of Nazi successes during World War II, (12) expressions of anti-Semitism. I would think that before a summary as extreme as "Nowhere, not even in Germany, is the SS so openly celebrated," a responsible reporter would have mentally run over such a check-list to measure precisely how much corroboration was really at hand. Had Mr. Safer done this, he would have come up with a remarkable figure - and that figure is exactly zero! Zero out of a possible twelve! In other words, the scenes aired by 60 Minutes contain not a shred of evidence - not the smallest clue, not the slightest hint - that this was in any way a "celebration of the SS." To speak words as provocative and inflammatory as were Mr. Safer's, while at the same time offering as corroboration scenes which in no way support those words, perhaps demonstrates the contempt in which Mr. Safer holds the intelligence of the 60 Minutes viewer. Had Mr. Safer done just a bit of homework before he started talking, he would have discovered that the Galicia Division was a combat unit whose only role was to fight the Soviet advance on the Eastern Front. Had Mr. Safer done just a bit of reading before giving vent to his prejudices and stereotypes, he would have discovered that the Galicia Division has never been so much as accused of any war crimes or any crimes against humanity - not even by the Soviets who have always been rabidly anti-Nazi, and against whom the Galicia Division fought. Had Mr. Safer demanded from his support staff even the most superficial research prior to reading his proclamations, he would have discovered that in at least three formal investigations, the Galicia Division has been judged to have been devoid of Nazi sympathies. So, then, what was the evidence that Mr. Safer was basing his statement on? How could he have said something so strikingly at variance with what was being shown on screen? This is the riddle that I wish you would help me solve. Yours truly, Lubomyr Prytulak cc: Ed Bradley, Steve Kroft, Morley Safer, Lesley Stahl, Mike Wallace HOME DISINFORMATION PEOPLE JORDAN < Jordan Jordan > 1535 hits since 23May98 Michael Jordan Letter 4 12Jul96 Levitas letter to Za Vilnu Ukrainu July 12, 1996 Michael H. Jordan Chairman, Westinghouse Electric Corporation 11 Stanwix Street Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA 15222 Dear Mr. Jordan: I am sending you a translation from the Ukrainian of an open letter to Morley Safer and the 60 Minutes staff, written by I. M. Levitas, Head of the Jewish Council of Ukraine as well as of the Nationalities Associations of Ukraine, and published in the Lviv newspaper Za Vilnu Ukrainu (For a Free Ukraine) on December 2, 1994. In this letter, Mr. Levitas protests the 60 Minutes broadcast, "The Ugly Face of Freedom." Mr. Levitas's letter is a cry both of anguish and of outrage, but its more particular significance to us lies in its bringing to light fresh information demonstrating the bias of the 60 Minutes broadcast, and as well in showing us that Ukrainian Jews are foremost among those waiting for a corrective broadcast, and foremost also among those who are offering their cooperation in the preparation of such a corrective broadcast. Mr. Levitas suggests that the severity of the bias combined with the total suppression of contradictory information that is evident in the 60 Minutes story is Bolshevik in style. I would go on to suggest to you that just as the countries of the former Soviet Union cannot hope to thrive without first throwing off the leaders who are inherently Communist in outlook, so CBS News cannot hope to thrive under the leadership of individuals whose attitude toward broadcasting is that it is a tool placed in their hands for the totalitarian manipulation of mass opinion. Sincerely yours, Lubomyr Prytulak cc: Ed Bradley, Steve Kroft, Morley Safer, Lesley Stahl, Mike Wallace WHY DIDN'T YOU SHOW THE UKRAINIANS AND POLES WHO RESCUED JEWS? Esteemed Gentlemen! Esteemed program host, Mr. Safer! It has come to our attention that on October 23, 1994, American television broadcast a program about events in the city of Lviv and in the Western region of Ukraine. We have acquainted ourselves with the contents of this program, and have also received feedback from Jews who recently emigrated from Ukraine to the United States. Our conclusion: from isolated and insignificant facts you created a broadcast in which you overwhelmingly crammed distortions and emphasized the negative aspects of Jewish life, while at the same time hiding the positive aspects which are considerably more numerous. Everything that you reported in your broadcast unfortunately exists, but exists only as isolated events diluted in the normal flow of life in Lviv. By focussing on these isolated events, you painted an unrelievedly negative picture, and that constitutes your principal error - unless it wasn't an error at all but rather was done intentionally. We are a young democracy, and the unrestrained expression of democratic freedoms may give birth to untoward manifestations, as is bound to happen in any country, including the United States - a country of long-standing democracy. Many bad things, including attitudes toward Jews, have been bequeathed to us from the past, and it is difficult to wholly eradicate this from the consciousness of the people. In your broadcast, you mentioned streets that were renamed after Petliura and Bandera, but didn't mention that Frunze Street, which before the war was called Starozhydivska Street ["Ancient Jewish Street"], was also recently renamed Staroyevreiska Street [also "Ancient Jewish Street" but without the negative connotation that "zhyd" has in Russian and in Eastern Ukrainian] - and, please note, not to Starozhydivska Street, in deference to Jewish sensibilities. You broadcast that contemporary Ukrainians don't know about the Yanivsky concentration camp. Possibly so - but there has grown up a generation which has already forgotten about even Auschwitz and Maydanek. But in fact in Ukraine, we do know about the Yanivsky camp. Our Jewish Council has established a Yanivsky Camp Foundation. Here in Lviv, we have held conferences dedicated to the memory of this camp. Where your broadcast shows a woman carrying flowers, a stone memorial has been erected bearing the Shield of David. I was present at the unveiling of this memorial. Representatives of the Lviv City Council made presentations at this ceremony, as did representatives of the Ukrainian Orthodox and Ukrainian Catholic Churches. I have in my possession a photograph of this event which I could forward to you. Yes, the fence which you showed, and the dogs, unfortunately are there - but these are remnants of the past. In any case, a decision has been made to get rid of them and to build a memorial in the same location. You should have reported this. More to the point, the very first monument in our new Ukraine dedicated to Jewish victims was erected not far from Lviv, in the town of Chervonohrad. Following that, three other monuments were erected in our region. You reported that two Jews were robbed and beaten. This might have happened, but most likely not because they were Jews. I imagine that in Lviv, Ukrainians are also robbed (and significantly more often!), and yet nobody draws from this the sort of conclusions concerning ethnic hostility that you draw from the robbing of these two Jews. Our Jewish Council constantly receives news concerning Jews in Ukraine, but during the past five years, we have received not a single report of anyone being beaten because he was a Jew. However, it must be admitted that such a thing may have occurred without it coming to our attention - there are plenty of miscreants in every country. Because the facts selected for your broadcast were excessively biased and one-sided, it is incumbent upon me to give you a view of the other side of Jewish life. In Lviv, where seven thousand Jews live, there are thirteen Jewish organizations. There are also active organizations in the rest of the region - in Drohobych, Boryslav, Truskavets. I can send you all their addresses. Lviv was the first city in Ukraine to have a Jewish Society (1988), the first Ukraine-Israel Society (1989), and the first to publish a Jewish newspaper (1989). A Center for the Study of Jewish History is functioning in the city. Two Jewish-Ukrainian conferences have been held here. We have a Jewish ensemble, a Jewish theater, a philharmonic orchestra which recently, at the opening of the season, performed the works of Tchaikovsky and of two Jewish composers. A Jew, Kotlyk, head of the Jewish Society, was elected as a member of the City Council. Two years ago, in the center of the city, not far from "Hitler Square," a monument dedicated to the victims of the Lviv ghetto was unveiled. This is the biggest and most prominent Jewish memorial in all of Europe. Haven't you seen it? As head of the Jewish Council, I was present at all the events that I am describing, and I can document them. Your discussing these events in a future broadcast would present a wonderful balance which together with your video footage would paint an accurate picture of Jewish life in Ukraine, and not a deliberately one-sided one. One cannot indict any nation on the grounds that a few of its members were evil. Evil individuals exist in every nation. But why didn't you show those Ukrainians and Poles who rescued Jews? There are many of them. Initially, we ourselves didn't know about them, as they remained silent, and our former regime forbade them to speak on such topics. In Lviv, Simon Wiesenthal himself was rescued from death, and in Boryslav, the head of the Israeli parliament, Shevakh Weiss, with whom in 1992 I personally visited his own rescuers. We have a list of almost 2,500 Ukrainians who rescued Jews, and many of these are precisely from the Western region. We have brought these rescuers to Israel, presented them with certificates, and are now supporting them with pensions. We are presently in the process of submitting this list of rescuers to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. Concerning this I have been making particular arrangements, as I will be in the United States later this year. You broadcast that Lviv is being depopulated of Jews. However, this has been happening throughout the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), and began not recently, but even during the Bolshevik regime - but nobody is blaming this on anti-Semitism. Rather, other motives are responsible: economics, Chornobyl, the reunification of families. Anti-Semitism plays a far weaker role. Our Council interviews Jewish emigrants and has definitive information on this question. Jews, perhaps more than others, should avoid throwing blanket insults and accusations at other peoples because they themselves - as a people and not as individuals - have been blamed by the Fascists for all sins. Why do you, then, proclaim all Ukrainians to be genetic anti-Semites? Why, in addition to talking about the police did you not also talk about the rescuers of Jews, did not show a single one of them? And in Lviv, there are many of them. Is it that you couldn't find any, or that you didn't want to look? I wish to declare to you officially: in the new Ukraine, there is no state-sponsored anti-Semitism. Not long ago, a Jew fulfilled the obligations of the prime minister of Ukraine. The mayors of Odessa and Vynnytsia are Jews. The mayor of Cherkasy was a Jew. There are six Jews in parliament. Some Deputy Ministers are Jews. It is such outstanding facts as these that convey the predominant attitude of Ukrainians to Jewish rebirth, to Jewish culture. Among the CIS, Ukraine was the first to hold a Jewish Congress. The Days of Jewish Culture were celebrated this year as a National holiday, dedicated to the 135th anniversary of Shalom Aleichem. In Ukraine, there are active Jewish organisations in 89 cities. Eleven Jewish newspapers are published. Ten schools are in operation. Jewish groups have been formed within Pedagogical and Theatrical Institutes (composed of 80% Ukrainians who have mastered Hebrew). We have held a festival of children's vocal and dance ensembles in which 46 groups applied to participate. Ukrainian television broadcasts two Jewish programs. Jewish spectacles are performed on the stages of Ukraine. For the fifth year now we have honored the victims of Babyn Yar, where there has been erected the Jewish monument "Menorah," and at which have been placed wreaths both from the President of Ukraine and from the Kyiv City Council. Just this year, the Days of Babyn Yar commemorations were conducted over the period of an entire week. In all cities (in all!) in which Jews were shot during the War, annual remembrance days are observed. All this you failed to see, and so you did great harm not only to Ukrainians, but to Jews as well. In our work of res