For his trouble the New York Times called him "indecent", "juvenile", self-righteous", "arrogant" and "stupid". The literary editor of The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier, refered to him as "poison, a self-hating Jew, smoething you find under a rock."

To date Germany has set up another $5 billion fund for compensation for those who survived the slave labor camps. Switzerland has agreed to set up a $1.25 billion dollar package to compensate those who lost accounts as a result of the Holocaust. An Italian insurance company has settled a suit and will pay $100 million. Total amount asked for stands at $20 billion but with the unwillingness of suers to close the book after these compensations are paid there remains the possibility of more class action suits. And that would increse the amounts demanded.

Those being sued include German Telekom; IBM; Barclays Bank of London; SNCF, the French Railroad company; some 45 Swiss banks; more than 80 Austrian corporations and numerous insurance companies across Europe. Sanctions and boycotts have been threatened by the American government and the state of California against some of these European firms. A suit against one firm seeks all of its assets. The Secretary-General of the World Jewish Congress told a group of European rabbis that art stolen from Austrian Jews is now worth $10 billion. In addition, he made the statement that 50% of the art in American collections was stolen Jewish art.

Europeans have balked at the large sums demanded and say they are unwilling to settle until the groups agree to close the books on further class action suits. Germany has previously paid restitution to Jewish survivors worth $60 billion. German private industry has also paid more than $40 billion in restitution. In addition, the state of Israel has received some $90 billion in aid from the United States.

Comparisons are odious but inevitably they will be made.

Asian survivors of Japanese atrocities are not faring so well. Japan has refused to pay compensation to "comfort women", of whom historians estimate there were some 200,000 Korean, Philipine, Indonesian and Dutch survivors at the end of the war. A suit on the part of 46 Philippine women against the government of Japan for $8.3 million went unrecognized. A Japanese company has agreed to pay some $4.6 million to some one thousand Chinese slave laborers from WWII, possibly precedent setting but a paltry sum in comparison.

Those on whose behalf the suits are being filed are aging. The average age is 81. The original number of Jewish Holocaust survivors was pegged at 100,000. That number has gone up to 250,000 apologists say because it includes relatives, those who spent the years hiding in the forests or were forced to flee. The Israeli government puts the number of Holocaust survivors at 960,000.

Note has been made of the fact that Laurence Eagleburger, as a chair of the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance claims, earns an annual salary of $300,000. Given that East European recipients of these new monies will receive at best only several thousand dollars it looks to some unseemly. To quote Salon magazine "Recent reports that $400 million has been paid to the U.S. accounting firms such as Arthur Andersen, KPMG and Price Waterhouse, which charged sky high fees in connection with the international investigation of Swiss banks, lends credence to those charges."

Equally discomfiting might be the fact that this investigation of over 4 million accounts turned up only 53,886 accounts with "a probable or possible connection to victims of Nazi persecution".

At the same time the State of Israel refuses to repay the Palestinians for their property losees in 1948 war. Those properties are managed by an Israeli official responsible for abandoned Palestinian property. The Israeli stance is that the funds no longer exist and the international community must create funds for the Palestinians. What is more, only a part of the international funds would go to the Palestinians. A part of those funds should go to "Jewish refugees who fled the Arab countries" after 1948 according to the Israelis.

And finally there are the other genocides of the twentieth century, which has seen more mass murder than any century other than the one inhabited by Genghis Khan.

The Armenian Genocide is estimated at between 1 and 1.5 million. The Cambodian Genocide at 2 million, a quarter of the population. Tthe Rwandan Genocide is at the million mark. Genocide inside the Soviet Union includes some 6 million Ukrainian kulaks murdered by Stalin and another 20 million in the infamous gulag slave camps of Siberia. All told 100 million people are said to have been eliminated by the Soviet State. World War II saw a total 50 million dead, the Spanish Civil War did in a million, and the Vietnames War saw the death of 2 million Vietnames, and 50,000 Americans.

Although a small number by comparison, the East Timorese lost 200,000, a third of their population, in Indonesian attacks on their island nation. War has claimed another 45 million lives since the end of World War II. These numbers do not include famine which kills another 12 million annually. Historically there are the death of 30 million in China under Mao and the current famines in Africa. And then there is disease.

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