I shudder that a German was put to death for writing nasty things about Jews. Charlotte posts: “The Streicher trial was the worst travesty of the Nuremburg fiasco. Streicher published a hateful magazine. In that respect, he wasn’t much different from the Charlie Hebdo people, who also published nasty caricatures of Jews.”
A friend says: “What is also interesting about Streicher is that the other defendants at Nuremberg detested him. They thought of themselves as refined and intelligent and Streicher as crude. He wasn’t qualified to be a government functionary in the Nazi regime and at no time was Der Sturmer thought to be the press vehicle for the Nazi’s. Think of a blog devoted to crude racialist propaganda; something that has caricatures of blacks as apes and cartoons of them raping white women while calling for lynchings. That is what Der Sturmer was like and you can imagine what someone like Albert Speer thought of being in the same room with someone like Streicher, who was a gauleiter although he fell into disrepute in 1938 and was stripped of powers in 1940. Der Sturmer was never an official press vehicle for the Nazis, but it was a press vehicle for it in an unofficial capacity.”
With all due respect to the great cartoonist Ann Telnaes, it is simply not the case that Charlie Hebdo “were equal opportunity offenders.” Like Bill Maher, Sam Harris and other anti-Islam obsessives, mocking Judaism, Jews and/or Israel is something they will rarely (if ever) do. If forced, they can point to rare and isolated cases where they uttered some criticism of Judaism or Jews, but the vast bulk of their attacks are reserved for Islam and Muslims, not Judaism and Jews. Parody, free speech and secular atheism are the pretexts; anti-Muslim messaging is the primary goal and the outcome. And this messaging – this special affection for offensive anti-Islam speech – just so happens to coincide with, to feed, the militaristic foreign policy agenda of their governments and culture.
To see how true that is, consider the fact that Charlie Hebdo – the “equal opportunity” offenders and defenders of all types of offensive speech – fired one of their writers in 2009 for a writing a sentence some said was anti-Semitic (the writer was then charged with a hate crime offense, and won a judgment against the magazine for unfair termination). Does that sound like “equal opportunity” offending?
Just after 2 a.m., the man with the cold smile strode into the gallows, manacled at the wrists. He shouted at the witnesses, at the interpreter, at his executioner. He sneered. His face disappeared under a hood and a door swung open beneath his feet.
Nazi Julius Streicher never pulled a trigger in the Second World War. He never ordered anyone to die. He was a soldier in the First World War, not the second. But Nuremberg judges found him guilty of crimes against humanity and saw fit to sentence him to death for what he had written during the war. American soldiers carried out his execution in 1946…
Wartime England heard regular broadcasts from American-born fascist William Joyce, who was raised in Ireland and England. The Tokyo Rose of Europe, Joyce emigrated to Germany in 1939 and broadcast radio messages urging Britain to surrender. He was found by British forces in March 1945 and returned to England for trial.
He was found guilty by a jury of high treason, and the penalty was death by hanging.
