Mussolini Audio Is Italy’s No. 2 iPhone Application
BLOOMBERG.COM: A collection of speeches by fascist dictator Benito Mussolini is Italy’s second-most downloaded iPhone application on Holocaust Memorial Day.

The application, called iMussolini, is available on Apple’s online store for 79 euro cents ($1.11). It has been downloaded more than a video game based on the blockbuster film Avatar, according to Apple Inc.’s Italian iTunes store. A wallpaper application is the most downloaded item.

The Mussolini application makes 100 of the so-called Duce’s speeches available on the iPhone. Mussolini ruled Italy from 1922 until his death in 1945 at the end of World War II. His granddaughter, Alessandra Mussolini, is a politician and ally of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government. >>> Flavia Krause-Jackson | Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Netanyahu at Auschwitz: World Must Unite to Confront New Threats
HAARETZ: Holocaust teaches that murderers must be stopped before they act, says PM in apparent reference to Iran.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told dignitaries gathered at the Auschwitz extermination camp on Wednesday that the world must learn from the Holocaust to unite against new threats.

In what was apparently a thinly veiled reference to Iran, Netanyahu called on the international community to come together to confront "impending dangers".

Israel believes Iran to be building a nuclear bomb and views the Islamic Republic as an existential threat. Iran insists its nuclear program is purely for civilian purposes.

"We must warn of the impending danger to the rest of the world and at the same time to be ready to defend ourselves," Netanyahu said. "The most important lesson from the Shoah is that murderous evil must be stopped as soon as possible, before it can realize its schemes."

"We the Jewish people learned the lesson [of the Holocaust] well after we lost one-third of our people," Netanyahu said, adding that a strong state of Israel with a powerful army was the only guarantee of preventing a second Holocaust.

"I pledge as prime minister that we will never let the hand of evil harm our people and our state, never again," he said.

Netanyahu added: "All enlightened nations must absorb this lesson," pledging that as the head of the state of he would not to allow a "new Amalek" to threaten again to destroy the Jewish nation - a reference to a biblical king who waged war against the Jews.

Earlier on Wednesday, Pope Benedict XVI recalled the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz, and event which revealed "the unprecedented cruelty," of the Nazi Holocaust.

The 82-year-old pontiff made the remarks in his native German during his weekly general audience.

"On 27 January 1945, the gates of the Nazi concentration camp near the Polish city of Oswiecim, better known by its German name of Auschwitz, were opened and the few survivors freed," Benedict said.

"That event, and the testimony of those who survived, revealed to the world the horror of the crimes of unprecedented cruelty committed in the extermination camps created by Nazi Germany," added the pope, who as a teenager - like most others at the time - had been a member of the Hitler Youth in the waning days of the war.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day which is being marked in several European nations, serves, according to Benedict, to recall "the planned annihilation of the Jews, and to honor those who, at the risk of their own lives, protected the persecuted and sought to oppose the murderous insanity." >>> Cnaan Liphshiz, Haaretz Correspondent, Haaretz Service, and News Agencies | Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Julian Kossoff – Holocaust Memorial Day: Pieces of a Puzzle
Photograph: The Telegraph
THE TELEGRAPH – BLOG: I have spent the last week wondering how to mark Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) on my blog and have failed to come up with a coherent idea. It’s a subject that plays tricks with the psyche.

So please excuse me if I just spill some ideas out on the page, pieces of my unfinished Shoah jigsaw.

- Holocaust Memorial Day is commemorated internationally on 27th January each year. This date was chosen as it is the anniversary of the day in 1945 on which the Soviet Army liberated the largest Nazi concentration camp.

HMD aims to raise awareness and understanding of the events of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides as a continuing issue for all humanity, based on a recognition that it could happen again anywhere and at any time, unless we ensure that our society opposes discrimination, persecution and racism.

- If you have the opportunity, go to Auschwitz. It’s the great anti-wonder of the world. Part pilgrimage, part journey to the heart of darkness: apocalypse then. Wander its tombs, its mansions of horror.

There is the ‘room of hair’, great rotting mounds of the stuff, shaved from the 1.1m heads.

Another door opens on a pile of human spare parts. A grotesque, twisted sculpture of wooden legs, prosethic arms, trusses, metal hands, neck braces, rusting callipers, clunking fists – all hinges and brackets – that the crematoria could not devour.

There is the ‘playroom’, no nursery rhymes just ghost stories, no sweet dreams just nightmares. It stores the toys of all the ‘lost boys and girls.’

There among the broken animals and forgotten battalions tin soldiers sit forlorn teddy bears, last cuddled by tiny arms in a stinking cattle truck heading east one freezing night, while glassy eyed dollies stare into the abyss waiting for ‘mummy’ who will never return. >>> Julian Kossoff | Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Prime Minister Netanyahu at Yad Vashem: International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Peres at Bundestag: Never Again
YNET NEWS: In historic speech to German parliament on International Holocaust Day, Israeli president addresses dangers of past and future, focusing on Iranian nuclear program. ' No more ignoring blood-thirsty dictators hiding behind masks of demagogy and voicing slogans of murder,' he says, stressing that 'peace is needed to prevent another Holocaust'

President Shimon Peres delivered a historic speech to members of the German parliament in Berlin on Wednesday afternoon on the occasion of International Holocaust Day, 65 years after the end of World War II.

"No more ignoring blood-thirsty dictators hiding behind masks of demagogy and voicing slogans of murder. They are a threat to the entire world," Peres stressed.

The German parliament heard a translation of the speech, which was carried out in Hebrew. Peres said the Kadish prayer in honor of the Holocaust victims, which include his grandparents, who were burned alive in their town's synagogue.

"In the State of Israel and across the world, Holocaust survivors are slowly retiring from the world of the living. Their number is reduced every day. At the same time, those who were involved in the most despicable work on earth – genocide – are still living on German soil. Please do all you can to bring them to justice," Peres said.

The president referred to his memories from his hometown of Belarus when it was conquered by the Nazis, as well as to his grandfather's image, which has left a great mark on him to this very day. He went on to speak about the establishment of the State of Israel, saying that if the "delay in its establishment" had been prevented, the Holocaust could have been prevented as well.

"As an Israeli, I lament the tragic delay in the establishment of the Jewish state, which left my people without a haven of rest. I cannot accept the loss of a million and a half children – the biggest human and creative potential which could have changed Israel's fate. I am proud about Israel's revival, which is the moral and historic response to the attempt to wipe the Jewish people off the face of the earth," the president said.

Peres went on to direct his words at Iran. "We are now left with the crucial lesson: Never again. No more racist doctrine, no more feelings of superiority, no more so-called divine authority to incite, murder, break the law, deny God and the Shoah." >>> Roni Sofer | Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Spiegel Video anschauen: Gedenken an Holocaust-Opfer: Israels Präsident Peres im Bundestag

Netanyahu Vows Not to Allow Second Holocaust
Yom Hashoah. Images: GoogleImages
ASSOCIATED PRESS: JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed Monday not to allow Holocaust deniers to carry out a second Holocaust against the Jewish people.

Speaking at the ceremony marking Israel's annual memorial day for the 6 million Jews killed by Nazis and their collaborators during World War II, Netanyahu also described a U.N. anti-racism conference under way in Geneva as an anti-Israel event.

The hawkish prime minister, who took office about three weeks ago, criticized the president of Switzerland for meeting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the conference. Netanyahu called Ahmadinejad a Holocaust denier who wants to perpetrate another massacre of Jews.

"We will not allow the Holocaust deniers to carry out another Holocaust against the Jewish people. This is the supreme duty of the state of Israel. This is my supreme duty as prime minister of Israel," Netanyahu said. >>> By Mark Lavie | Monday, April 20, 2009