Anne Frank at 80

Anne Frank, the Dutch teenage diarist who died at Belsen in early 1945, would have been 80 today. To commemorate this, an age progressed image of what she would have looked like has been released by the Anne Frank Trust UK.

As the Telegraph reports, however, a potential short coming is that it relies on the smiling image of a carefree girl and not the weight of years, even had she survived, of her experiences both in hiding at the Achterhuis, owned by Miep Gies who recently celebrated her 100th birthday) at then of deportation and watching friends and relations die. This reminds me of an excerpt from The Talmud and the Internet, a lovely book by Jonathan Rosen, in which he recounted one bubby who died after nine decades in New York; her last words before going to an operation from which she never regained consciousness was a request for a beef sandwich. Another bubby, who had escaped the Holocaust, died grieving for her parents and others who had not. The difference should never, ever be seen as a reproach on the bubby who lived her life in safety and whose dying wish was for more material comfort: Anne should have lived that way as well.

Elsewhere, reports continue to come in of the 89 year old American neo-Nazi, James von Brunn, who shot dead a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. The Washinton Times notes he was a supporter of the American Friends of the British National Party, who have raised considerable funds for this party. I am unsure of precise electoral law on foreign fundraising for British political parties, so maybe the BNP’s legal eagle, Lee John Barnes (LLB Hons, could help out.

In response, the stupid and unpleasant Richard Silverstein, who commits onanism at his blog, Titties Groan penned a missive at Comment is Free. Even judged against his previous brain farts – ridiculing Holocaust Survivors, claiming the killing of Jews-as-Jews at Chabad House in Bombay 2008 was not “nescessarily antisemitic” – this was a corker:

We know how the usual suspects among the Jewish leadership will line up on this … they will seek to parlay this incident into a much wider antisemitic conspiracy. People like Abe Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, live for tragedies like this. You wait. Tomorrow or the next day he’ll be holding a press conference with the security guard’s wife telling the world that African-Americans and Jews must make common cause against the vast antisemitic conspiracy. If he’s really feeling his oats that day he might even work in a reference to an evil Iranian president who denies the Holocaust as well. Mark my words, it’s coming.”

He should have waited for Foxman’s actual response, which was:

The shooting at the United States Holocaust Museum, in which a security guard was critically wounded, is a very sad and tragic event which reminds us, as the Museum itself does every day, in the starkest way, where the spread of hatred can lead. […]Brunn’s evil attack, at the very place that was created to remember and teach about evil in the world, is an immediate reminder that words of hate matter, that we can never afford to ignore hate because words of hate can easily become acts of hate, no matter the place, no matter the age of the hatemonger. […]”

Silverstein continued:

Let’s not do that now. Let’s acknowledge the danger that white supremacists and all violent forms of racism pose for our society (not just Jews). Let’s join with groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which denounced the shooting, to make common cause to fight this hatred.”

Having read some of von Brunn’s writings (and then used eye-disinfectant) I saw not one mention of allegiances with Islamist groups such as CAIR, or plain Islamic groups. It was all about Jews for him. Jews or Jewish targets are attacked with the murderous rage of a man who wishes he had fought on the loosing side in WWII, and Silverstein has to pre-emptively accuse his opponents of not caring for non-Jews as much as they do for Jews.

What a nasty little man.