MORAL COURAGE OF IRENA SENDLEROWA

Phyllis Chesler writes about a brave woman who helped save Jewish children in Poland from the nazis during WW2. Sendlerowa later visited Yad Vashem in Israel to receive the righteous award in person.

And while we're on the subject, during the Holocaust Memorial ceremony, Benjamin Netanyahu thought to add the subject of Switzerland allowing Iran's Ahmedinejad to come to the Durban sequel and pile on with his sick bigotry:

After Peres, Netanyahu spoke, quoting from the Passover Haggadah: “In every generation, they rise up to destroy us.”

Netanyahu was direct in his criticism of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has vowed to “wipe Israel off the map.” Directing himself to Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz, who met with Ahmadinejad despite Israeli pleas not to grant Ahmadinjad legitimacy, Netanyahu asked “How can you, as the head of a enlightened country, meet with a Holocaust denier, or with someone who plans another Holocaust?”

Netanyahu thanked those countries that refused to attend the Durban II conference at which Ahmadinejad spoke Monday, and those who left the hall during Ahmadinejad's speech.

"We will not allow Holocaust deniers to perpetrate another Holocaust on the Jewish people,” Netanyahu said. “That is our utmost responsibility as the State of Israel.”

Netanyahu turned to the Holocaust survivors who were present, and promised that the government will do what it can to assist them and their fellow survivors.

Very good speech. I'm glad to learn that there were walkouts at the "conference" in Switzerland, but even so, those countries shouldn't have attended in the first place, even on a lower profile. What was interesting was the condemnation by spectators wearing clown wigs.

But wouldn't you know it, Norway's rep, unsurprisingly, chose to stay at that manurefest. And I don't buy any of Ban-Ki Moon's blather. He knew this was going to happen, and is a sick, stupid man indeed.

SWISS PRESIDENT INVITES IRAN TO OFFER "VARIOUS PERCEPTIONS OF THE HOLOCAUST" AT CONFERENCE

There was a time when Europeans' behavior was limited by a certain sense of taste and an aversion to the unseemly. That time is long past:

Switzerland secretly approached Iran offering to hold a conference regarding "various perceptions of the Holocaust" in Geneva, the Swiss magazine Weltwoche reported earlier this week. The proposal was made via confidential memorandum from Switzerland's President, Micheline Calmy-Rey, to Iranian deputy foreign minister Saaid Jalili, during his visit in Switzerland last December. The Swiss foreign ministry objected to the idea, annulling it. Calmy-Rey's proposal, which would have voiced anew the Iranian doubts over the very existence of the Holocaust, outraged many Jewish organizations, which demanded she apologize.

Charming, no? We wonder if they would have held the conference in a bank. Or maybe some kind of tastefully decorated conference room. "Mme. Calmy-Rey", the Iranian representative would say, "that's a lovely painting. Wherever did Switzerland acquire it?" To which she might respond: "oh that old thing? You know, we have no idea - it just turned up around here in the late 1940s."

[Cross-posted to Mere Rhetoric]