Murders of Jewish Women, Men, and Children--Then and Now

Nazis hurried to murder more Jews as armies arrived to liberate camps.

Today is Yom HaShoah, Israel's Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day.

Most southern Californians will not give a thought today to the slaughter of six million Jews during World War II in Nazi Germany.

Yet the Holocaust lives on among us.

One skirmish in the ongoing war against Jews occurred last Saturday when a 60-year-old woman in Poway CA was killed for being in a synagogue on the last day of Passover.  Poway is a community along Interstate 15 just north of San Diego and south of Escondido.

Another drama unfolded in a Los Angeles federal courtroom when Judge John F. Walter ruled that the painting of Paris owned by Lilly Cassirer in Berlin in the 1940s now rightfully belongs to a museum in Spain.  The Nazi government of Germany took the painting from Lilly "in exchange for an exit visa out of Berlin," explains an editorial in the Los Angeles Times today. 

That exchange saved Lilly from deportation and murder in a gas chamber.  She survived, and her granddaughter lives in La Mesa, a little closer to San Diego than Poway.  The Cassirer family has been fighting for twenty years to reclaim the painting worth $30 or more. 

Sunset at Yad VaShem, January 15, 2019

Thank you to the editorial board of the LA Times for demanding justice for the family of a Holocaust survivor and publishing this stand on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Judge Walter wrote that the museum should return the painting but that he could not require it to "comply with its moral commitments."  If not Judge Walter, who?

"The museum could offer to pay the family in order to keep the painting," the editorial concludes.  "But refusing to recognize any obligation to Cassirer’s heirs is shameful."

Israel's Holocaust Museum

Thus the atrocities of the Nazis continue in southern California today, along with surfing and traffic jams and millions of people just living their lives. 

The right to life is stolen from Jews, and a painting once stolen is not returned. 

Our Dishonest President

The Los Angeles Times printed a cautiously hopeful editorial at the time of dt's inauguration.

Today's editorial says "Still, nothing prepared us for the magnitude of this train wreck."

http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-ed-our-dishonest-president/#nt=oft02a-2la1

Thank you to this fine newspaper for being the first in the nation to take a strong, 4-part editorial stance on the unprecedented dangers of this presidency.

Here's one quote and the listed topics of the following three editorials:

It is impossible to know where his presidency will lead or how much damage he will do to our nation.

In the days ahead, The Times editorial board will look more closely at the new president, with a special attention to three troubling traits:

1Trump’s shocking lack of respect for those fundamental rules and institutions on which our government is based. 

2

His utter lack of regard for truth. 

3His scary willingness to repeat alt-right conspiracy theories, racist memes and crackpot, out-of-the-mainstream ideas. Again, it is not clear whether he believes them or merely uses them. But to cling to disproven “alternative” facts; to retweet racists; to make unverifiable or false statements about rigged elections and fraudulent voters; to buy into discredited conspiracy theories first floated on fringe websites and in supermarket tabloids — these are all of a piece with the Barack Obama birther claptrap that Trump was peddling years ago and which brought him to political prominence.

Mass murder in Saudi Arabia

How can a civilized nation--Saudi Arabia-- put 47 people to death without much negative blowback from other nations?

"Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr was one of 47 detainees put to death by sword and firing squad in the kingdom's largest such mass execution since 1980," report Amro Hassan and Ramin Mostaghim in the Los Angeles Times.

http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-saudi-arabia-executes-47-20160102-story.html

47 people at once?  

The only offense of some of these men was political protest.

I should be out demonstrating at the Saudi embassy in Los Angeles.  I should be asking my government to take a stronger stand against this bloodshed.

On the other hand, my government allows execution, a punishment sometimes committed inhumanely and erroneously.

Most civilized nations have ended capital punishment--but not the US.

Most civilized nations have strict laws controlling guns--but not the US.

Most civilized nations provide health care to all their citizens--but not the US.

So I suppose there's not much I can do, except vent in a blogpost and work on ending the death penalty in my own nation.

Thank you to the LA Times for its editorial pointing out lack of serious US comment on Saudi Arabia's execution.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-saudi-iran-20160105-story.html

See the protests elsewhere:

http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-protests-iran-saudi-arabia-execution-20160103-story.html