That yesterday’s war criminals are elderly can be no reason to shirk our duty to their victims. We ought not see them as they are today, but should remember them for the thugs and murderers they were so many years ago. To allow their crimes to go unpunished would indeed give Nazism a posthumous victory. It is time for Ladislaus Csizsik-Csatary to finally face justice.This fellow lied about who he was, entered Canada illegally post-WW2, and lived here until 1997, when he was given the choice of leaving for Hungary or of being deported. Sad to sad, the fact that he has been able to live all these years in freedom, and that it is only now that he has been arrested for his crimes--and there's no assurance that he'll ever go on trial for them--means that, in this instance at least, the Nazis have been handed a posthumous victory. And there's nothing we can do to change it.
Me? I'm not as concerned about punishing decrepit Nazis as I am in ensuring that the Nazis du jour, Iran (said to be behind yesterday's terrorist attack in Bulgaria), doesn't get to blow the Jewish state to Kingdom Come. That's the kind of posthumous victory for Hitler that no Jew who cares about Israel and the future of Jewry can live with.
Hear! Hear! If "Never again!" is to have any real meaning, it must refer to standing up to real enemies of the Jews in the here and now. Putting a 97-year-old defendant (who is quite likely to die during the proceedings in any case) on trial is worse than useless: it is ridiculous . . . somewhat like pretending to defend the modern State of Israel by demolishing the Arch of Titus in the Roman forum.
ReplyDelete(But, as I've written before, Bernie Farber strikes me as the kind of guy whose martial prowess is limited to kicking Hitler's corpse . . . and that metaphorically.)