Berlusconi defends Mussolini for backing Hitler

Berlusconi defends Mussolini for backing Hitler — Former Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi praised Benito Mussolini for "having done good" despite the Fascist dictator's anti-Jewish laws, immediately sparking expressions of outrage as Europe on Sunday held Holocaust remembrances.

Berlusconi also defended Mussolini for allying himself with Hitler, saying he likely reasoned that it would be better to be on the winning side.

The media mogul, whose conservative forces are polling second in voter surveys ahead of next month's election, spoke to reporters on the sidelines of a ceremony in Milan to commemorate the Holocaust.

Associated Press/Antonio Calanni - Former Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, foreground, sits in front of Norther League party's leader Roberto Maroni in Milan, Italy, Sunday, Jan. 27, 2013. Silvio Berlusconi says Benito Mussolini did much good, except for dictator's regime's anti-Jewish laws. Berlusconi also defended Mussolini for siding with Hitler, saying the late fascist leader likely reasoned that German power would expand so it would be better for Italy to ally itself with Germany. He was speaking to reporters Sunday on the sidelines of a ceremony in Milan to commemorate the Holocaust. When Germany's Nazi regime occupied Italy during World War II, thousands from the tiny Italian Jewish community were deported to death camps. In 1938, before the war's outbreak, Mussolini's regime passed anti-Jewish laws, barring them from universities and many professions, among other bans. Berlusconi called the laws Mussolini's "worst fault" but insisted that in many other things, "he did good." (AP Photo/Antonio Calanni)

In 1938, before the outbreak of World War II, Mussolini's regime passed the so-called "racial laws," barring Jews from Italy's universities and many professions, among other bans. When Germany's Nazi regime occupied Italy during the war, thousands from the tiny Italian Jewish community were deported to death camps.

"It is difficult now to put oneself in the shoes of who was making decisions back then," Berlusconi said of Mussolini's support for Hitler. "Certainly the (Italian) government then, fearing that German power would turn into a general victory, preferred to be allied with Hitler's Germany rather than oppose it."

Berlusconi added that "within this alliance came the imposition of the fight against, and extermination of, the Jews. Thus, the racial laws are the worst fault of Mussolini, who, in so many other aspects, did good."

More than 7,000 Jews were deported under Mussolini's regime, and nearly 6,000 of them were killed.

Outrage, along with a demand that Berlusconi be prosecuted for promoting Fascism, quickly followed his words.

Among those voicing condemnation were prominent Jewish figures abroad.

Mussolini "modeled his anti-Jewish laws after the Nazi Nuremberg Laws barring Jews from civil service," Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said in a statement.

"It is the height of revisionism to try to reinstate an Italian dictator who helped legitimize and prop up Hitler as a 'reincarnated good guy,'" said the rabbi, whose organization monitors anti-Semitic incidents worldwide.

Berlusconi's praise of Mussolini constitutes "an insult to the democratic conscience of Italy," said Rosy Bindi, a center-left leader. "Only Berlusconi's political cynicism, combined with the worst historic revisionism, could separate the shame of the racist laws from the Fascist dictatorship."

Italian laws enacted following the country's disastrous experience in the war forbid the defense of Fascism. A candidate for local elections, Gianfranco Mascia, pledged that he and his supporters will present a formal complaint on Monday to Italian prosecutors, seeking to have Berlusconi prosecuted.

Hours later, Berlusconi issued a statement saying he "regretted" that he didn't make clear in his earlier comments that his historical analyses "are always based on condemnation of dictatorships," the Italian news agency LaPresse reported.

He also contended that the political left was trying to exploit his comment about Mussolini for election campaign fodder.

Advocating aggressive nationalism, Mussolini used brutish force and populist appeal evoking ancient Rome's glories to achieve and keep his dictatorial grip on power, starting in the early '20s and lasting well into World War II. His Fascist "blackshirt" loyalists cracked down on dissidents, through beatings and jailings.

He encouraged big families to propagate the Italian population, established a sprawling state economy and erected monumental buildings and statues to evoke ancient Rome. Mussolini sought to impose order on a generally individualistic-minded people, and Italians sometimes note trains ran on time during Fascism.

With dreams of an empire, he sent Italian troops on missions to attack or occupy foreign lands, including Ethiopia and Albania. Eventually, Italian military failures in Africa and in Greece fostered rebellion among Fascist officials, and in 1943 he was placed under arrest by orders of the Italian king. His end came at the vengeful hands of partisan fighters, who shot him and his mistress, and left their bodies to hang in a Milan square in April 1945.

Berlusconi's former government allies have included political heirs to neo-fascist movements admiring Mussolini.

In 2010, he told world leaders at a Paris conference that he had been reading Mussolini's journals, and years earlier Berlusconi had claimed that Mussolini "never killed anyone."

Berlusconi is running in Feb. 24-25 Parliamentary elections and has repeatedly changed his mind on whether he is seeking a fourth term as premier. Monti is also running, but polls put him far behind front-runner Pier Luigi Bersani, a center-left leader who supported Monti's austerity measures to save Italy from the Eurozone debt crisis.

Polls show about one-third of eligible voters are undecided. ( Associated Press )

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Berlusconi defends Mussolini, draws outrage from political left

Berlusconi defends Mussolini, draws outrage from political left - Former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi triggered outrage from Italy's political left on Sunday with comments defending fascist wartime leader Benito Mussolini at a ceremony commemorating victims of the Nazi Holocaust.

Speaking at the margins of the event in Milan, Berlusconi said Mussolini had been wrong to follow Nazi Germany's lead in passing anti-Jewish laws but that he had in other respects been a good leader.

"It's difficult now to put yourself in the shoes of people who were making decisions at that time," said Berlusconi, who is campaigning for next month's election at the head of a coalition that includes far-right politicians whose roots go back to Italy's old fascist party.

"Obviously the government of that time, out of fear that German power might lead to complete victory, preferred to ally itself with Hitler's Germany rather than opposing it," he said.

"As part of this alliance, there were impositions, including combating and exterminating Jews," he told reporters. "The racial laws were the worst fault of Mussolini as a leader, who in so many other ways did well," he said, referring to laws passed by Mussolini's fascist government in 1938.

Although Mussolini is known outside Italy mostly for the alliance with Nazi Germany, his government also paid for major infrastructure projects as well as welfare for supporters.

Berlusconi's comments overshadowed Sunday's commemoration of thousands of Jews and others deported from Italy to the Nazi death camps of eastern Europe. They were condemned as "disgusting" by the center-left Democratic Party (PD), which is leading in the polls ahead of the February 24-25 election.

"Our republic is based on the struggle against Nazi fascism and these are intolerable remarks which are incompatible with leadership of democratic political forces," said Marco Meloni, the PD's spokesman for institutional affairs.

Antonio Ingroia, a former anti-mafia magistrate campaigning at the head of a separate left-wing coalition, said Berlusconi was "a disgrace to Italy".

AMBIGUOUS

Faced by the onslaught of criticism, Berlusconi later issued a statement saying he had always condemned dictatorships and regretted not having spelled that out in his earlier remarks.

"There can be no misunderstanding about the fascist dictatorship," he said, accusing the left of capitalizing on his earlier comments for cheap political gain.

However, it was not the first time Berlusconi has defended Mussolini, whose status in Italy remains deeply ambiguous 67 years after he was executed by communist partisans while trying to flee to Switzerland in April, 1945.

Many Italian politicians, including the speaker of the Lower House of parliament, Gianfranco Fini, come from the ranks of the old Italian Social Movement (MSI) which grew out of the fascist party, although Fini and others have renounced the far right.

Others, including Francesco Storace, Berlusconi's candidate for president of the Lazio region, have stayed true to what they see as the "social-right" tradition of the fascist movement.

Monuments to Mussolini, who came to power in 1922, still dot many Italian cities, including Rome, where a column to Il Duce stands close to the city's main football stadium, within a stone's throw of the foreign ministry.

Although never as fervently anti-semitic as his Nazi allies, Mussolini's government persecuted Italy's Jewish population, which was then estimated to number about 40,000, according to the Jewish Contemporary Documentation Centre in Milan.

The 1938 laws imposed oppressive restrictions on Jews and some 10,000 are estimated to have been deported from Italy between September 1943 and March 1945. Most of them died in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.

While anti-semitic behavior has not been as prominently reported in Italy in recent years as in neighboring countries such as France, acts ranging from anti-Jewish graffiti to chants at football matches occur periodically.

"We must be very careful to ensure that these sparks, which recur every now and then, cannot bring back tragedies which humanity should not suffer again," outgoing Prime Minister Mario Monti said on Sunday. ( Reuters )

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Holocaust victims mourned at Auschwitz and beyond

Holocaust victims mourned at Auschwitz and beyond — Holocaust survivors, politicians, religious leaders and others marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Sunday with solemn prayers and the now oft-repeated warnings to never let such horrors happen again.

Events took place at sites including Auschwitz-Birkenau, the former death camp where Hitler's Germany killed at least 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, in southern Poland. In Warsaw, prayers were also held at a monument to the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943.

Pope Benedict XVI, speaking from his window at St. Peter's Square at the Vatican, warned that humanity must always be on guard against a repeat of murderous racism.

"The memory of this immense tragedy, which above all struck so harshly the Jewish people, must represent for everyone a constant warning so that the horrors of the past are not repeated, so that every form of hatred and racism is overcome, and that respect for, and dignity of, every human person is encouraged," the German-born pontiff said.

Not all words spoken by dignitaries struck the right tone, however.

On the sidelines of a ceremony in Milan, former Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi sparked outrage when he praised Benito Mussolini for "having done good" despite the Fascist dictator's anti-Jewish laws. Berlusconi also defended Mussolini for allying himself with Hitler, saying he likely reasoned that it would be better to be on the winning side.

The United Nations in 2005 designated Jan. 27 as a yearly memorial day for the victims of the Holocaust — 6 million Jews and millions of other victims of Nazi Germany during World War II. The day was chosen because it falls on the anniversary of the liberation in 1945 of Auschwitz, the Nazis' most notorious death camp and a symbol of the evil inflicted across the continent.

"Those who experienced the horrors of the cattle cars, ghettos, and concentration camps have witnessed humanity at its very worst and know too well the pain of losing loved ones to senseless violence," U.S. President Barack Obama said in a statement.

Obama went on to say that like those who resisted the Nazis, "we must commit ourselves to resisting hate and persecution in all its forms. The United States, along with the international community, resolves to stand in the way of any tyrant or dictator who commits crimes against humanity, and stay true to the principle of 'Never Again.'"

As every year, Holocaust survivors gathered in the cold Polish winter at Auschwitz — but they shrink in number each year.

This year the key event in the ceremonies was the opening of an exhibition prepared by Russian experts that depicts Soviet suffering at the camp and the Soviet role in liberating it. The opening was presided over by Sergey Naryshkin, chairman of the Russian State Duma.

Several years ago, Polish officials stopped the opening of a previous exhibition. It was deemed offensive because the Russians depicted Poles, Lithuanians and others in Soviet-controlled territory as Soviet citizens. Poles and others protested this label since they were occupied against their will by the Soviets at the start of World War II.

The new exhibition — titled "Tragedy. Courage. Liberation" and prepared by the Museum of the Great Patriotic War in Moscow — removes the controversial terminology. It took years of discussions between Polish and Russian experts to finally complete it.

The exhibition narrates the Nazi crimes committed against Soviet POWS at Auschwitz, where they were the fourth largest group of prisoners, and at other sites. And it shows how the Red Army liberated the camp on Jan. 27, 1945, and helped the inmates afterward.

Also Sunday, a ceremony was held in Moscow at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, which opened in November and is Russia's first major attempt to tell the story of its Jewish community. The museum portrays Russia as a safe and welcoming place for Jews today despite its history of pogroms and discrimination.

In Serbia, survivors and officials gathered at the site of a former concentration camp in the capital, Belgrade, to remember the Jewish, Serb and Roma victims of the Nazi occupation of the country.

Parliament speaker Nebojsa Stefanovic said it is the task of the new generations never to forget the Holocaust crimes, including those against Serbs.

"Many brutal crimes have been left without punishment, redemption and commemoration," he said. "I want to believe that by remembering the death and suffering of the victims the new generations will be obliged to fight any form of prejudice, racism and chauvinism, anti-Semitism and hatred." ( Associated Press )

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French weekly publishes 'Life of Mohammed' cartoons

French weekly publishes 'Life of Mohammed' cartoons - A French weekly published Wednesday a comic book biography of the Prophet Mohammed that it says is a well-researched work by a Franco-Tunisian sociologist. Charlie Hebdo's offices were firebombed in 2011 after it published cartoons of the prophet.

A French satirical magazine, whose offices were fire-bombed after it published cartoons mocking the prophet Mohammed, on Wednesday published a comic book biography of Islam's founder.

The editor of Charlie Hebdo weekly has insisted that the new book, titled "The Life of Mohammed", was a properly researched and educational work prepared by a Franco-Tunisian sociologist.

"It is a biography authorised by Islam since it was edited by Muslims," said Stephane Charbonnier, who was also the illustrator of the book whose front page shows the prophet leading a camel through the desert.

"I don't think higher Muslim minds could find anything inappropriate," he told AFP last week.

Charbonnier said the idea for the comic book came to him in 2006 when a newspaper in Denmark published cartoons of Mohammed, later republished by Charlie Hebdo, drawing angry protests across the Muslim world.

"Before having a laugh about a character, it's better to know him. As much as we know about the life of Jesus, we know nothing about Mohammed," he said.

Satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo has on several occasions published cartoon versions of Islam's prophet in a declared effort to defend free speech, to the fury of many Muslims who believe depicting Mohammed is sacrilegious.

In September Charlie Hebdo published cartoons of a naked Mohammed as violent protests were taking place in several countries over a low-budget film made in the United States that insults the prophet.

In 2011 Charlie Hebdo's offices were hit by a firebomb and its website pirated after publishing an edition titled "Charia Hebdo" featuring several Mohammed cartoons.

Charbonnier, who has received death threats, lives under police protection.(AFP)

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How to Explain Mayan Doomsday to Your Kids

How to Explain Mayan Doomsday to Your Kids — With doomsday rumors making the rounds online and likely at the water cooler, those who aren't in the know — that a Mayan apocalypse on Dec. 21 has no scientific basis — may be understandably freaked out.

That group would include kids, who often can't distinguish TV advertisements from their favorite animated shows. That's where the U.S. government comes in. Kids.gov, a government website, is taking a stand on the side of reason — for kids' sake.

"It is up to us to reassure kids that the world is not ending and that nothing bad is going to happen," according to the site. "To be able to talk to your kids with confidence, it is important to understand what the rumors are and why they are not true."

The site follows with four tips to help parents and other caregivers help alleviate kids' fears about doomsday rumors (whether they be from the end of the Mayan Long Count calendar or so-called "rogue planet" Planet Nibiru):

Take their fears seriously: Suggesting to your children that their fears are silly and dismissing them will not help. Sit down and discuss the fear with them, making sure to take it seriously.

Educate yourself about the topic of their fears: Knowing the facts will only help to calm them. If their fear is the Mayan apocalypse, here are some things to know: The rumors stem from the Mayan Long Count calendar, one of three used by the ancient Maya of Central America. On Dec. 21, today's calendar coincides with the end of the b'ak'tun, or the 144,000-day cycle on the Mayan calendar. There is no reason to believe the calendar would not just start over, and experts point out the ancient Maya did not see the end of the b'ak'tun as a sign of the end of the world.

Furthermore, two ancient calendar carvings that reference this date do not point to any doom. One found in Tortuguero, Mexico, dates to A.D. 669 and mentions the return of a deity associated with calendar changes on that day. The second carving was found in Guatemala and dates to about A.D. 696; in that text, a struggling king attempts to bolster his rule by linking it to the 13th b'ak'tun.

Help your child research the rumor: Help your child research the Mayan apocalypse, or other fear, on the Internet, making sure to note the importance of reliable sources of information. NASA has a great resource, and LiveScience also has full coverage on the Mayan Doomsday (Not).

Take the fear off their plate: "For younger children, sit down to discuss the child's fear and then tell them, 'Okay, from now on I will worry about this for you. You don't have to worry about this anymore. I’ll look into it and I will let you know what I find out,'" according to the government website.

The doomsday post by the U.S. government is not a first. In recent weeks, the U.S. space agency NASA, the Vatican and even the Australian Prime Minister (by way of a spoof video), have urged calm and affirmed the fact that the world won't end.

The latest from NASA was a video released ahead of the Dec. 21, 2012 alleged Mayan apocalypse to say the world didn't end "yesterday." The idea, according to NASA, is that the agency is so sure the apocalypse is a farce, they're willing to call it a week in advance.

Meanwhile, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP) put out a release on 12/12/12, declaring that day Anti-Doomsday.

"While many pundits and prognosticators lament the supposed end of the world on December 21, 2012 (thanks to misinterpreting Mayan predictions), here at the ASP we encourage everyone to go in the opposite – and accurate – direction," the statement read. "Thus, we are declaring December 12, 2012 as Anti-Doomsday Day in celebration of rational thinking and reasoned discourse." ( LiveScience.com )

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