As Counterknowledge.com has already demonstrated, denier contentions relating to Operation Reinhard are immediately rejectable after even the most rudimentary analysis of sources.
This has never deterred Denierbud, the individual responsible for the One Third Of The Holocaust video.
Congratulations to the Voice of Young Science Network, a part of Sense About Science, whose open letter to the World Health Organization has received a response.
The letter, which is available here, called for the body to issue a clear international statement regarding the use of homeopathy in the developing world.
The WHO has done exactly that, and made it explicitly clear that where homeopathy is used as a preventative or treatment for HIV, TB, influenza, malaria and infant diarrhoea, lives are at risk. The office of Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the WHO, has stated that the following responses “clearly express the WHO’s position”:
Spare a thought for the 130+ individuals who lost their sense of smell after taking various zinc-containing Zicam intranasal products. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has warned users to stop using said cold remedies, and advised its manufacturer - Matrixx Initiatives - that these products cannot be marketed without FDA approval.
According to Professor David Colquhoun, yes, it is. You must read his letter to the British Medical Journal regarding the MHRA’s decision to register Nelsons Arnicare Arnica 30c homeopathic pillules as treatment for sprains and bruises:
[...] MHRA label seems to be illegal
The strap line for the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is “We enhance and safeguard the health of the public by ensuring that medicines and medical devices work and are acceptably safe.”
Yet the MHRA has made mockery of its own aims by ignoring the bit about “ensuring that medicines work” and allowing Arnica 30C pills to be labelled: “a homoeopathic medicinal product used within the homoeopathic tradition for the symptomatic relief of sprains, muscular aches, and bruising or swelling after contusions.”1
News that the NHS will offer acupuncture to back pain sufferers has delighted some. For a start, as the Guardian reports, the condition costs the UK over £5.1bn annually and leads to 5m lost working days. It affects, we are told, “one in three adults each year and leads to 2.6 million people visiting their GP”.
So it appears the NHS is attempting to cut costs. To be fair, this will be achieved: although the acupuncture services will cost the taxpayer £24.4m, money will be saved as the NHS plans to stop the dodgy practice of injecting therapeutic substances into the lower back which, doctors were saying as early as 1991, is not effective against persistent back pain.
But is government-endorsed acupuncture really a good idea? Here are three reasons why I think acupuncture on the NHS sets a dangerous precedent.
… because they’ve got no idea. According to a survey by researchers Shaun Holt and Andrew Gilbey in the latest edition of the New Zealand Medical Journal, that is.
92% of users of homeopathic remedies think that the products work according to a survey published in the latest edition of the New Zealand Medical Journal. But only 6% of those surveyed knew that homeopathic remedies did not contain any active ingredient and most thought that homeopathic remedies were either moderately or very concentrated.
The trial of a couple accused of the manslaughter of their daughter by gross criminal negligence continues before an Australian court.
Homeopath Thomas Sam, 42, and his 36-year-old wife Manju have pleaded not guilty to the death of Gloria Thomas, their 9-month-old daughter. According to the Brisbane Times:
Gloria was not taken to the emergency department of the Sydney Children’s Hospital until her skin was weeping, her body malnourished and her corneas melting, the court heard.
The Australian pseudohistorian Fredrick Toben has been sentenced to three months in prison for publishing anti-Semitic material on his website, the Adelaide Institute. According to the Daily Telegraph:
Toben had been banned in 2002 from circulating anti-Semitic material on the website of the Adelaide Institute and had promised to abide by the order.
But a civil case brought by Jeremy Jones, former president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, found Toben had breached the order 24 out of an alleged 28 times.
Take the word “exterminate”. What if I were to tell you that based on the Latin origins of ex (out of) and terminus (borders), it actually means “deport”?
Think that’s ridiculous? Welcome to the asinine world of Holocaust denial etymology, of which the above analogy (courtesy of The Holocaust History Project) is a comparable example of how deniers prefer to read part of a speech that SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler gave to a gathering of senior SS officers in occupied Posen on October 4, 1943. The section in question is as follows:
I am talking about the “Jewish evacuation”: the extermination of the Jewish people.
It is one of those things that is easily said. ‘The Jewish people is being exterminated,’ every Party member will tell you, ‘perfectly clear, it’s part of our plans, elimination of the Jews, extermination, we’re doing it…’
Needless to say, Himmler doesn’t exactly leave much to the imagination. Unless, of course, you’re a Holocaust denier.
The purveyors of conspiracy theories concerning the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 11th September 2001 try to claim that al-Qaeda was a scapegoat for “false flag” atrocities committed by the US government against its own people. One would assume that were this to be true, al-Qaeda’s own leaders and spokesmen would be quick to deny their responsibility for a barbaric act which was condemned by Quranic scholars as a violation of the tenets of Islam, and which actually caused considerable outrage in the Muslim world.
Unfortunately for the “Truthers”, this isn’t happening.
Conspiracy theorists are quick to allege that statements attributed to Osama bin Laden are faked. What they are not prepared to admit is that it is not only bin Laden and his co-leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who readily acknowledge their responsibility for - and pride in - 9/11, but a number of lower-level figures who do the same, not just in public statements released via al-Jazeera, but in messages and treatises circulated online between al-Qaeda activists and their affiliates.
This article discusses al-Qaeda’s own internal strategic debates in detail, and also includes quotes from ideologists and senior terrorists within this group on 9/11. They are worth noting in full:
In a comment on my previous post, a Holocaust denier and 9/11 “Truther” with the alias Norman Bates linked to a website bearing one of the most acrid pieces of counterknowledge I’ve seen for a while: incestuous rapist and murderer Josef Fritzl is Jewish.
On the basis of material appearing to originate from a now defunct blog, Judicial-inc.org maintains that this is due to the six-pointed stars on the wall of Fritzl’s cellar of horrors. A rudimentary Google search gives some startling results, and a search on YouTube with the same parameters reveals three videos collectively viewed over 53,000 times which cynically set out to assosciate Fritzl’s crimes with his alleged Jewishness.
Of the mere six Jews in the town of Amstetten, Fritzl is not one of them. He is Roman Catholic - like the other 91 per cent of inhabitants in the municipality of Amstetten, and 85 per cent of those in the town itself. It appears he ceased practising Catholicism, as a neighbour who knew the Fritzl family stated that he never darkened a church with his presence. In addition, the municipality is home to just eleven people identifying themselves as israelitisch. (These figures courtesy of Statistik Austria - Volkszählung 2001 Hauptergebnisse I - Niederösterreich.)
Is there really any limit to how low anti-Semitic agents of counterknowledge will go in order to further their agenda?
You simply have to read the description of Debating the Holocaust: A New Look At Both Sides by Thomas Dalton, PhD. Here is the first paragraph of the introduction, taken from the book’s website:
This is a book about the Holocaust, and about two competing views of that event. On the one hand we have the traditional, orthodox view: the six million Jewish casualties, the gas chambers, the cremation ovens and mass graves. Traditional historians have thousands of surviving witnesses and the weight of history on their side. On the other hand there is a small, renegade band of writers and researchers who refuse to accept large parts of this story. These revisionists, as they call themselves, present counter-evidence and ask tough questions. They are beginning to outline a new and different narrative.
Now I’m certainly not one to judge a book by its cover, but if the description is anything to go by… well, ladies and gentlemen, were History and Postmodernism to engage in an illicit night of passion then this book surely has to be their bastard offspring. Here’s that marvellous third sentence in all its glory again:
Traditional historians have thousands of surviving witnesses and the weight of history on their side.
Weight of history: three words which apparently escaped the author of this description, unless the intention really was a sublime parody of denial.
You see, you create your own reality, but reality also creates you, via a vacuum that, unlike other vacuums, is “crystalline”. Well done to Echan Deravy and his flagging Earth Pilgrims project for uncovering this genius.
Two months ago I addressed an attempt by a self-declared ‘investigative journalist’, a Mr Stewart Bradley, to ‘debunk the debunkers’ (http://counterknowledge.com/2009/01/more-on-15-questions-for-911-truthers-a-reply-to-stewart-bradley/). Mr Bradley’s ‘rebuttal’ was a reply to an earlier post of mine pointing out the logical fallacies and factual flaws in the conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11. In attempting his own exercise at debunking, Mr Bradley provided an account of the events leading to the 11th September 2001 attacks on Washington DC and New York which was replete with inaccuracies and factual errors, as highlighted by my rejoinders to his post here (http://911debunkers.blogspot.com/2008/12/15-answers-open-response-to-joseph.html).
Despite the fact that Mr Bradley is a supporter of the 9/11 ‘truth movement’, I had hoped that by providing a detailed explanation of his misconceptions – complete with reference to the documented record – I might perhaps have been able to engage him in a full and frank debate as to the veracity of what ‘truthers’ are pleased to call the ‘official’ story, as opposed to the varying and mutually contradictory accounts alleging US government foreknowledge or even participation in the 9/11 atrocities. For a ‘truther’, Mr Bradley gave a positive impression of himself. He could string a sentence together, spell and punctuate properly, and could also submit a comment without either ad hominem abuse or indulging in the frantic and hysterical writing style that other conspiracy theorists employ (comments in full caps, exclamation marks galore, etc). I began to wonder if Mr Bradley might be open-minded enough to acknowledge my criticisms of 9/11 conspiracy theories as being at best based on conjecture and thread-bare evidence, and at worst being based on urban myths and outright lies.
Take a look at these two statues, both from the ancient Olmec civilisation of Central America. One looks negroid, the other a bit Chinese. Plenty of other Olmec statues look as if they depict people from other parts of the world because these Native American craftsmen had lively imaginations. It really is as simple as that. Unless, of course, you are a cult archaeologist, in which case you will not be deterred by the inconvenient fact that, to quote Richard A Diehl, author of the major academic text on the Olmecs, “not a single bona fideartefact of Old World origin has ever appeared in an Olmec archaeological site, or for that matter anywhere else in Mesoamerica”.
David Hatcher Childress is just such a cult archaeologist and, like all amateurs who have “researched” Central America, is presented as “the original Indiana Jones”. Unlike Indy, however, he self-publishes his oeuvre. Fortunately, however, Graham Hancock has chosen him as author of the month. And so Childress now has a fresh opportunity to circulate his theory that… well, let me quote his exact words:
Counterknowledge.com was out of action for a day or two earlier this week. Sorry about that. But here’s a lovely e-mail from a reader to welcome you all back.
Jerome Burne is the health journalist who co-wrote ex-Professor Patrick Holford’s Food is Better Medicine than Drugs. He’s a controversial figure in his own right, and if you read this magnificent fisking of his recent Daily Mail article on chicken pox vaccines you’ll understand why.
Holdford Watch has really declared war on Burne here; a lot of work went into this piece, which claims that Burne is using the Mail as a venue for “distorted interpretations of research findings and a vaguely menacing, anti-vaccination message”.
I think we’re heading toward some sort of major confrontation here, between supporters of Patrick Holford and Andrew Wakefield on the one hand and angry sceptics on the other. Last month The Sunday Times claimed that Wakefield changed and misreported data in his results; and of course the GMC has yet to issue its ruling on the serious changes he faces. It will be interesting to see what Holford and Burne have to say if Wakefield (whom Holford supports) is found guilty.
Certain health journalists have invested very heavily in messages based on questionable research. As the questions become more persistent, their reputations are suffering.
An American cardiologist who was “drinking himself into an early grave” has told the Daily Mail about his “fairytale recovery”. Interesting choice of words, that. Dr Olivier Ameisen claims that taking a drug prescribed for muscle spasm has allowed him to quit suicidal binge drinking and enjoy the odd glass of of vodka or champagne.
The scientific evidence in his first-person account in the Mail? None, unless you count the fact that Ameisen, after self-medicating with a drug called baclofen, felt his cravings melt away. NB: Ameisen didn’t just self-medicate; he greatly exceeded the normally prescribed dose for a drug that is never normally given to alcoholics. His theory is that baclofen relaxed his “chronic muscular and nervous tension, keep it from intensifying into chronic anxiety and panic, and thereby short-circuit the craving for alcohol to resolve that extreme distress”.
But where is the research showing that (a) baclofen stops muscular and nervous tension turning into anxiety in humans, or that (b) alcoholism is caused by such tension? The last time I checked, no single cause of alcoholism had been identified. Nor is it likely to be, given that “alcoholism” is not really a disease, but shorthand for addictive drinking.
Ameisen does have supporters among psychiatrists treating alcoholics, who say preliminary trials are encouraging. But the Mail article’s breezy tone hints at something that almost certainly does not and never will exist – a cure for alcoholism. To find out more, read Dr Ameisen’s new book on the subject. Oh, didn’t I mention that? Yes, he has a book to sell.
Scientology has opened a bizarre new front in its ongoing war on psychiatry: it causes terrorism.
On two scientology chat shows prominent members of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (a Scientology front group whose overwrought website dedicated to exposing psychiatry as an “Industry of Death” can be seen here) calmly explain that bin Laden was brainwashed into committing acts of terrorism by his “psychiatrist”, Al-Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Chairman of CCHR Florida Dave Figueroa claims that terrorism is inextricably linked to psychiatry. As he puts it: “behind those individual acts of mayhem you find psychiatrists, you find psychologists and their drugs”. In bin Laden’s case it was Zawahiri: “that ideology of terror was coming from bin Laden who was influenced by a psychiatrist and that really is the bottom line.” Click here to continue reading 'Scientology: psychiatry causes terrorism' »
While apparently unwilling to resolve the situation in the manner the Vatican would like, Holocaust-denying Bishop Richard Williamson has told Germany’s Der Spiegel that he would correct himself if satisfied by the evidence, but stated that finding it will “take time”.
No surprise then, that a senior figure of the Catholic church in Germany has labelled that “almost ridiculous”. Exactly how Bishop Williamson finds himself in a position to adjudicate to historians whether the crimes committed by the Third Reich happened or not is certainly beyond me.
At any rate, he hasn’t yet updated us as to how his self-assigned history homework is going, but as both complement and compliment to the resources Deborah Lipstadt has provided, I will touch upon some of the items she mentions and draw attention to some that she doesn’t in this commentary. This is of course, not presented in a debatative context (because there is no debate), but to expose the Bishop’s error regarding the comments he made in the interview given to Swedish television, the video of which is available here in this previous Counterknowledge.com post.
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