some traditional enemies of Free Speech: Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai Brith, USA Australian B’nai Brith Anti-Defamation Commission Board of Deputies of British Jews Canadian Jewish Congress Canadian League of Human Rights of the B’nai Brith Coalition for Human Dignity, Oregon Community Security Trust of Board of Deputies Jewish Telegraph Agency Searchlight and Gerald Gable Surfwatch Internet censorship Ignatz Bubis , late Vorsitzender des Zentralrates

der Juden in Germany, was the self-appointed chief of the minuscule community of 60,000 Jews in Germany, which now includes a substantial number invited to live in Germany from the Soviet Union.

On Jan. 12, 1998 he celebrated his seventieth birthday in stately splendour in the presidential palace, Schloss Bellevue in Berlin; the next day he celebrated it again in the centre of the real power in Germany, Frankfurt am Main.

These lavish functions were attended by everybody who, as Dr Goebbels would have put it in his diary, had “power and an appetite” – the Speaker of the House, the Federal President, the Chief Justice, the heads of the parties, and the leaders of the religious and trades union communities.

They found him a worthy successor to Werner Nachmann , the former scrap-metal dealer who headed the community before him from 1967 to his probable suicide in Jan. 1988 — after which demise it turned out that he had embezzled twenty milli

on marks of German taxpayers’ hard-earned funds poured into the restitution funds, to shore up his own bankrupt empire.

Bubis himself heaped excoriation on Nachmann in his memoirs, Damit bin ich noch längst nicht fertig (1996), admitting that “between 1982 and 1988 Nachmann stole almost twenty milli

on marks of restitution funds for the victims of National Socialism,” a crime which, Bubis had to admit, damaged “not only the image of the Zentralrat [in Germany] but that of the entire religious community worldwide.” With what glee right-wingers cited the oleaginous funeral eulogies for Nachmann spoken by the then Federal president, the odious Richard von Weizsäcker , and that printed by the Allgemeine Jüdische Wochenzeitung

on Feb 5, 1988, just before Nachmann’s thieving was discovered; it was all rather reminiscent of the British establishment’s oily praise for Robert Maxwell , publishing mogul, who literally jumped overboard one night rather than face the music when his publishing empire began to collapse. Maxwell was safely buried as a hero on the Mount of Olives before it was found he had embezzled millions from his companies’ pension funds in a vain attempt to patch up the wreck. Which brings us