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Letters They Wouldn't Publish
January 30, 2006
Letters to the Editor
New York Jewish Week
To the editor:
Your January 27 edition quoted Stephen Reverand, vice president of the Discovery Channel, criticizing remarks made by a former Mossad agent who was interviewed in the Discovery Channel's new documentary, Munich: The Real Assassins.
Reverand said it was "eerie" that the Mossad agent, who was involved in killing terrorists involved in the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, said, "We operated according to instructions. It was enough to be told that they were killing Israelis. In a unit like ours, you don't ask questions." Reverand commented: "We were only following orders --hearing that from an Israeli operative is no small measure of irony" --referring, as your reporter noted, "to the defense repeatedly cited by Nazi soldiers."
While it is true that Adolf Eichmann made notorious the phrase "only following orders," that does not mean anyone who ever follows orders is somehow comparable to the Nazis. The "following orders" defense used by some war criminals is rejected by reasonable people because of the assumption that a person should be able to distinguish between moral orders and immoral orders, and should not follow the latter. But that is not applicable to the case of this Mossad agent, because there is no basis for a comparison between Nazis involved in the mass murder of innocent civilians, and Israeli agents striking at mass murderers. To compare the two trivializes the Holocaust and undermines efforts to educate the public about the real nature of Hitler, Nazi Germany, and the mass murder of six million European Jews.
Sincerely,
Dr. Rafael Medoff
Director
The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
Melrose Park, PA
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Betty Friedan and the Nazis
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Civil Liberties, in Nazi Germany and the U.S.
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Paul McCloskey and the Deniers
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Holocaust Denial is Bigotry
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Not Just "Following Orders"
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Melvin Lasky and the Holocaust
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Saudi Arabian Holocaust-Denial
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Iranian Holocaust Denial
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Anti-Semitism in Jordan
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Culture of Hatred in Jordan
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German Jewish Refugee Children
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An Earlier Black-Jewish Alliance
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Treatment of Illegal Aliens Not Similar to Holocaust
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Hollywood and the Nazi Filmmaker
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Patton's Antisemitism
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Sudan, Congress, and the Holocaust
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Harvard and the Nazis
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The New York Times and the Holocaust
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Should the U.S. Have Bombed Auschwitz?
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Bigotry and Culture
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Susan Sontag and the Nazi Filmmaker
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How Moss Hart Alerted America About the Holocaust
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The Quotas That Kept Out the Refugees
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Lindbergh and Antisemitism - Then and Now
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Turning a Blind Eye to Hitler
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Truman and the Holocaust
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FDR and the Warsaw Uprising
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More on the Nazi Olympics
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Avery Brundage and the 1936 Olympics
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A Voice for Rescue
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An Unsung Hero of the Struggle for Jewish Freedom
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Mel Gibson and the Holocaust
April 18, 2004
Was Rescue Possible?
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A Play That Smashed Racism
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Hitler's Filmmaker
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New Biography Wrong About FDR
February 29, 2004
Mel Gibson's Holocaust Problem
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A Principal Who Stood Up for a Principle
February 8, 2004
Truman's Antisemitism
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Inappropriate Hitler Analogy
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George Marshall, Racism, and the Holocaust
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The Failure to Bomb Auschwitz
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