In a somewhat mindboggling development, German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach’s approving retweet of a Piers Morgan interview with Douglas Murray from the Israel-Gaza border has caused a stir in Germany and even given rise to scattered calls for the minister to resign. The since-deleted tweet can be seen below with a Google translation.
Murray is one of the journalists to have been shown footage of the October 7th Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians. The supposedly incriminating passage in the interview is the following one and it refers to this footage.
The thing that struck me about seeing the October 7th footage was that even the Nazis were actually ashamed of what they did. You know, SS battalions who spent their days shooting Jews in the back of the head and pushing them into trenches had to get very, very drunk in the evening to forget what they had done… I tell you one very big difference. If you look at the footage, the raw footage… If [people] see it, they will see something that is at least as barbaric as what the Nazis did. But here’s the difference. They did it with glee. They were deeply proud. You see people taking the head off a young Israeli man with a shovel and then calling their parents back in Gaza and telling them: “Father, Father, I’ve killed 10 Jews of my own hands. Get Mother on the phone, I want to tell her.” … The Nazis… also were a genocidal anti-Semitic organisation. But they tried to cover their crimes up. Hamas are actually proud of them.
Note that in his post, Lauterbach already in fact took his distance from precisely these remarks, writing “The trivialisation of the Nazis vis-à-vis Hamas is wrong. Such crimes should not and cannot be compared.” But apparently it was not enough for Lauterbach to flag this and, in effect, accuse Murray of such “trivialisation”. Per his critics, he ought not to have reposted the video at all.
But, in any case, it is difficult to understand in what mental universe Murray’s remarks could be construed as trivialisation of Nazi crimes. Indeed, Murray explicitly says that Hamas’s actions were “at least as barbaric as what the Nazis did”, which means, needless to say, that he regards the latter as barbaric. It should be recalled, moreover, that the footage to which he refers is reported to document civilians being shot at point-blank range, families being burned alive in their homes, and even, as touched upon by Murray, decapitations. How is comparing Nazi crimes to such atrocities trivialising anything at all?
The word that Lauterbach uses in fact literally means “to make harmless” (verharmlosen). In what world are point-blank shootings, burning people alive and beheadings “harmless”?
Murray merely added that the Hamas perpetrators in the videos appeared to be proud and happy about their crimes, whereas, on his understanding, the German perpetrators of Nazi crimes felt bad about them.
Now, that is indeed a contestable claim. As the German historian Jürgen Zimmerer notes in a tweet, “There are 100s of photos of SS men and soldiers posing in front of corpses”, and even in the English-language discussion, at least since the publication of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, it is well-known that many ordinary Germans took part in the Holocaust with gusto. The grinning faces of the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in the below photo do not reflect remorse.
But what does this prove other than that the German historian knows somewhat more about Nazi crimes than the British journalist? And, in any case, how does observing the depravity of Hamas’s crimes make Murray an “Islamophobic Right-wing radical”, as Zimmerer accuses him of being? Zimmerer is not alone, moreover. Numerous of the disapproving German tweets describe Murray as “far-Right”, “racist” and the like.
The real, underlying message of the German critics of Lauterbach and indeed of Lauterbach himself, in light of his own remarks on “trivialisation”, appears to be that Nazi crimes can never be compared to contemporary acts, no matter how depraved. But what then of the famous dictum ‘never again’? Is not the whole point of the latter that it could happen again and that we have thus to be vigilant? Or are we supposed to wait for the German Minister of Health or other self-appointed German experts to tell us when the appropriate threshold has been reached and we are thus permitted to make the comparison?
For both Lauterbach and his ostensible critics, it would seem that “merely” burning Jews alive or beheading them is not sufficient. The fact of the matter is that by accusing Murray of trivialising Nazi crimes, it is they who are trivialising the crimes of Hamas.
Robert Kogon is the pen name of a widely-published journalist covering European affairs. Subscribe to his Substack and follow him on X.
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Seems like a clear case of Bad Science. Somebody should write a book about it… oh, they did, and they organised the conference.
..obviously some science is so ‘bad’ it has to be censored.!!
It’s no comfort to professional people like Norman Fenton, but the only people here censoring information, and acting like they still need to control the narrative, is the committee…. they make themselves look, unscientific, petty and weak…
Ben Goldacre also wrote Bad Pharma in which he was scathing about big pharma’s methods. No doubt naively, I would have expected to see him getting directly involved in the current debate about their testing but I can’t find anything relevant. Has he published anything recently on the subject?
I have just read the second link above What’s Behind Ben Goldacre? – AGE OF AUTISM which is very informative but was written in 2010. Indeed what has he been up to most recently?
A real pity, and a sign of the times that deserves much public investigation and push back.
Prof Fenton: will you be making your presentation available online? It sounds very intriguing.
The Government/Authorities are terrified about the truth of the Covid Lunacy and mass medical experiment filtering through to the wider population.
So they are cancelling those who have questioned the policies.
At the same time they implore us to “trust the experts” ….. when this kind of action demonstrates that their bought and paid for “experts” are the very last people you should trust.
Hilarious.
Quackcine religious fundamentalism. No open science. No inquiry. No questions tolerated. For 200 years the sheeple have been fed the quackcine lie. The origins myth, the gospel, the divinely inspired Saint Jenner, Apostle of the Vaxx to the unquacked working tirelessly, selflessly as he accrued some £15 mn by 1823 in government funding writing letters deploring his poverty, always on the hunt for money….you know the hard working lonely ‘scientist’ and all that.
Inconvenient truth – post the smallpox stabs there were massive outbreaks, epidemics and a consistent doubling of the death rate until the slums were cleared.
Would any of the promoters of “vaccines” like to try Jenner’s small pox treatment cultured on sick calves? (See Dissolving-Illusions-Disease-Vaccines-and-The-Forgotten-History-FREE-Chapters-.pdf (dissolvingillusions.com) chapter 4?
More likely to be a “spell” from Hamlet’s heathland witches Song of the Witches: “Double, double toil and… | Poetry Foundation
Well you no longer have an NHS. Listen to this 3min clip of Dr Bob Gill explaining why. There’s a link to the full interview. None of this is common knowledge but explains a hell of a lot.
https://twitter.com/james_freeman__/status/1671550953433038848
Hi Mog’s just heard the clip, and yes, it does explain a hell of a lot. The change from providing health care to promotion, explains a lot about the covid reactions of government. Where the promotion turned to direction and legal enforcement, under the auspices of providing health advise and service. Very devious, very sinister, and if you think tangentially to the promotion of the BritCoin that the BOE and Treasury are in favour of, the future is potentially darker than any dystopian science fiction writer could have dreamt up in the past.
I envisage the wealth and freedoms that have taken generations to achieve will be swept away in less than one generation; this one.
Yes I totally agree. The future does look bleak and regarding the NHS I can see more and more people seeking out private doctors for GP visits and/or treatment. You might find these graphs interesting;
”Fig 11 shows the number waiting >6 weeks for a diagnostic test, and is quite extraordinary and frightening.
It looks like there was a sharp short shock to the system during the spring 2020 lockdown, which the NHS started to reverse immediately afterwards quite rapidly and effectively.
But this progress stopped in 2021, when an inexorable rise started.
The most recent data suggests a situation nearly as bad as it was in spring 2020 (number waiting >6 weeks is ~8 x pre-pandemic levels vs ~10 fold increase in spring 2020.)
What happened in 2021 to reverse the recovery?”
https://twitter.com/jengleruk/status/1672134517887229954
It would be interesting to know precisely who pulled the plug on this and why – and I mean the real reason/s why. Are they that frightened of Dr Fenton or is it just another illustration of how far and wide the tentacles of bigpharma have spread (and they’ve been spreading for at least 100 years…).
Hopefully this has come from high up the foodchain.
Maybe they’re getting a bit worried that more in even the NHS are waking up.
AS regards the NHS don’t forget that the real reason HMG backed down from mandatory jabs for all NHS employees was because they knew full well how many medics (and by that I mean those at the sharp end) would have walked – and that would have been at least 30% of them.
FWIW almost all the bureaucrats in the NHS are jabbed.
The two ‘here’ buttons within the article… in relation to Goldacre …are very illuminating, as are the comments under the 2nd ‘here’ in the age of autism article…
….I would say they are all ‘infected’ with big Pharma money…
“FWIW almost all the bureaucrats in the NHS are jabbed.”
Thanks very much for that snippet. A bright piece of news. Marvellous.
Meanwhile…in Australia…the medical folk went along with it all, went along with the mandates…
Unbloodybelievable…these people have absolutely no clue about ‘voluntary informed consent’ – they weren’t even able to defend their own freedom to be informed and consent to any medical intervention!
And the rot starts at the top – see my notification/complaint to the (very conflicted) regulator of health practitioners here, AHPRA, re Paul Kelly, the Chief Medical Officer, violating the requirement for voluntary informed consent by recommending Covid-19 vaccination mandates: https://vaccinationispolitical.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/notification-to-ahpra-re-medical-practitioner-paul-kelly.pdf
Keep talking, Dr Fenton, and don’t bloody stop.
We’ll get the bastards.
This article also appears in today’s TCW so a good level of exposure will go a long way. Hopefully.
A few other points: The NHS is not just censoring Dr Fenton as a person, it is censoring a small part of civilization’s knowledge and expertise. Additionally, his research was largely funded by government and yet that resultant knowledge is being censored by government. Taxpayers and waste, fraud, and abuse watchdogs surely should protest the NHS’s actions here.
So – an expert on quantifying risk and uncertainty using causal, probabilistic models that combine data and knowledge is censored because – data. Aside from the nasty, vindictive, pharma-driven nature of this utterly cowardly act, the fundamental illogicality is breathtaking.
Decisions like this are being made at a supra-national level.
Ben Goldacre is part of the Praetorian Guard which has protected the vaccine industry from scrutiny for years, see for example: What’s behind Ben Goldacre?, as referenced in Norman Fenton’s article above.
Bill Gates basically runs the WHO and international vaccination policy via the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Gavi Alliance, plus CEPI, and Anthony Fauci of course, has been running the show in the NIAID/NIH in the US since the mid-80s.
Other members of the vaccine protection racket include Paul Offit, Dorit Rubinstein Reiss, Arthur Caplan and David Gorski, who’ve been working for years to suppress questioning of vaccination policy and practice.
The Vaccine Confidence Project is a major culprit in all this, established by anthropologist Heidi Larson in the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine – its role is to quash ‘vaccine hesitancy’. It’s in bed with the vaccine industry of course… See my BMJ rapid response referring to the Vaccine Confidence Project and conflicts of interest, published in February 2019: ‘Pharma-led chorus’ dominates the public narrative on vaccination.
Another organisation funded by ‘philanthropists’ to protect the vaccine industry is the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, headquartered in London, its primary aim is to shut down ‘anti-vaxxers’.
This ‘anti-vax’ labelling – IT HAS TO STOP!!! These are medical interventions, an ever-increasing number of which are being foisted upon billions of people around the world.
We must demand scrutiny of vaccination schedules which are steeped in conflicts of interest, we must demand examination of the burgeoning vaccine load being imposed upon children and adults.
I remember hearing Heidi Larson on Radio 4 a couple of years ago saying that the Queen and Prince Philip might have to be used as role models to encourage the population to get vaccinated and sure enough it came to pass. (In spite of Ainsworths having 2 royal warrants: the Queen’s and The Prince of Wales’s)
I think in her profile she says she worked for Apple and Xerox (PR rather than anthropology) and she is married to Peter Piot who is heavily interested in Ebola and is also at London School Of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Oh yes, The Firm was wheeled out for the marketing campaign – wonder if they have any pharmaceutical investments?
Quoting from an article published in February 2021:
Don’t be selfish – get a COVID shot, says UK’s Queen Elizabeth
Obviously their conference is/was of little use or import if they can casually remove important speakers.
Just proving they are a political sham.
What a surprise, autocrats who lied are scared of facing the truth
If your side or opinion is indefensible and will not stand up to scrutiny and debate then censor other opinons?