A group of 50 Jewish university students from Israel, Poland and the US received an unwanted lesson in modern European anti-Semtisim while visiting the model gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz in Poland.
Evidently incited by the presence of an Israeli flag wrapped around the shoulders of Tamar Schuri, an Israeli student from Ben Gurion University, the first assailant ran at the group while its members were being guided through a model gas chamber and crematoria and began swearing and hurling anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli insults.
"He told us to go back to Israel and said that we were stupid and should be ashamed to walk around with an Israeli flag," testifies Maya Ober, a 21-year-old Polish student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan and member of the Polish Union of Jewish Students (PUSZ), which organized the 16-day summer learning program along with the World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS).
After the initial altercation, a second assailant grabbed Ober by the arm. "One of the guys held me by the arm and wouldn't let go," says Ober, who lost several members of her family at Auschwitz. "I was afraid. I couldn't move and I didn't know what he was going to do.
Violence was narrowly averted, according to those present, and the police were not alerted about the incident.
What were those French guys doing in Auschwitz anyway?
John Kerry has stated that even knowing that Iraq did not have stockpiles of WMDs, he still would have voted toauthorisethe war.
On Friday, Bush challenged Kerry to answer whether he would support the war "knowing what we know now" about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction that U.S. and British officials were certain were there.
In response, Kerry said: "Yes, I would have voted for the authority. I believe it was the right authority for a president to have."
He went on to criticise Bush for going to war without having a plan to win the peace. Kerry also said that during his first six months in office, he will work on ways to reduce the number of troops in Iraq by bringing in more allies.
The latter is of course a total fiction. In Afghanistan, where all the US allies (and most non-allies) supported the military action and many has given some support, the number of non-US troops on the ground is ridiculous. Nato has demonstrated that apart from Britain and the US, there is no ability to project power. The only non-committed country that has any significant expeditionary military capacity, France, does not even have the will to engage in Aghanistan, so expecting them to turn up in Iraq is fiction.
Somehow Larry Smith, "a highly wired writer", was persuaded to spend 10 days in the big city, living exclusively with the technology of 50 years ago. No Internet, no mobile phone, no computer, no ATM card, and a bloody loud alarm clock.
People in Norway who follow the US election through our own media get a somewhat skewed picture of what is going on. As TV2 Nettavisen says in a headline,
Kerry crushes Bush in the USA
according to some opinion poll. The article doesn't say anything about which of the myriad conflicting polls it refers to, but only offers the information that according to this particular poll, John Kerry would have won 307 against 231 electoral votes. A Google search finds no current English language news articles giving this count.
A 307/231 victory may actually reflect a victory with a very marginal majority of the popular vote.
The latest RasmussenReports tracking poll has Bush leading Kerry by 48 to 47 per cent in two days running, but this is of course well within the margin of error, and a few days earlier the result was the opposite. I bet journalist Pål Øverseth Nisja has no clue what margin of error means and why making conclusions based on results within the error margin demonstrates ignorance.
