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Giuliani, Ferrer
and the Jews:
A Letter from Robert Lederman

by Robert Lederman

robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net
April 16, 2001

Considering his boss's numerous connections to Nazi Germany it's rather ironic to read Giuliani aide Bruce Teitelbaum's comment in Jewish Week that Mayoral candidate Fernando Ferrer would be bad for New York City's Jews. Ferrer is the latest person to come under attack after publicly suggesting that Giuliani's Art Decency Commission bears striking similarities to Hitler's 1937 Degenerate Art Show.

Throughout his career Rudy Giuliani has been associated by his critics with Nazism, totalitarianism, fascism and Adolf Hitler. Those making this comparison in one form or another include the NY Times, Daily News, Newsday and occasionally even the NY Post; NY State Attorney General Elliot Spitzer; former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton; Former PBA President James Savage; Tonight Show host Jay Leno; former Mayoral aide, John Miller; numerous high-profile members of the civil rights, arts and legal community; hundreds of columnists in newspapers across the U.S.; many NY City Council members; tens of thousands of New York City activists and protestors - and yours truly.

To name just a few of his many Nazi-connections:

Giuliani dined and posed for photos with the infamous Austrian neo-Nazi leader Jorg Haider who is given NYPD bodyguards whenever he visits New York. Just the other day Giuliani posed and hung out with Arnold Swartzenegger. Both of these men's fathers were in the SS.

During his 1989 Mayoral campaign a front page scandal erupted involving then Federal prosecutor Giuliani having his aides force an elderly Holocaust survivor whose family was murdered at Auschwitz to sit in front of a blackboard. On that blackboard was written Arbeit Macht Frei, the motto from the gates of Auschwitz.

Giuliani's controversial welfare chief, Jason Turner, caused an uproar in 1998 by using the same motto to describe the Mayor's forced workfare program. A coincidence or just Turner in an unguarded moment? It is worth noting that Turner made his reputation as an expert on welfare reform in Wisconsin under Gov. Tommy Thompson. Thompson's welfare reform program was based on the writings of Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve - a controversial work based in large part on eugenics and Nazi-inspired race science. Murray was a paid consultant on the Wisconsin program.

During his 1993 campaign it was revealed that Giuliani's law firm was representing the family firm of Dr. Josef Mengele, Auschwitz's Angel of Death.

Giuliani's 1998 photo show in a SoHo gallery was sponsored by Leica, a company that has admitted using Jewish slave labor in WWII.

Last year the Mayor played a very active part in promoting the Swiss government placing hundreds of fiberglass cows on public property throughout New York City. The NY Times accurately described its origin as a public relations attempt to counter bad press about Switzerland's part in aiding Hitler to carry out the Holocaust. At the time the media was filled with stories of lawsuits detailing how the Swiss had stolen hundreds of millions of dollars in Jewish bank accounts during WWII and refused to give the money back to Holocaust survivors. Giuliani had the Swiss place these cows in many of the exact spots he had previously been having artists arrested for displaying Giuliani paintings with a Hitler moustache.

In 1999 four police officers needlessly shot to death an emotionally-disturbed and unarmed Jewish man, Gidone Busch, while he was praying. Giuliani's response was that, "the police are ordered to shoot to kill". This happened in the wake of the Diallo protests. He then dispatched numerous aides and a Jewish City Council member Noach Dear (who has publicly stated he's "proud to be called a mini-Giuliani") to Jewish neighborhoods to stop angry Orthodox Jews from protesting.

Giuliani has repeatedly stated his pride about acquiring his policy ideas on policing, welfare, school privatization, race relations and a host of other issues from the Manhattan Institute (MI). MI was founded by former CIA director William Casey, who spent the years following WWII working closely with Reinhart Gehlen, Hitler's former chief of Soviet intelligence. Before founding MI Casey was active in importing hundreds of former Nazis to the U.S. while working for the IRC (International Rescue Committee). For eight years MI sponsored Charles Murray, author of the race science book, The Bell Curve, which was in large part financed by pro-Nazi eugenicists at the Pioneer Fund.

MI itself is primarily financed by Chase Manhattan Bank . Chase has publicly admitted it helped Hitler loot the gold reserves of occupied European nations and voluntarily liquidated the bank accounts of Jewish depositors, turning the money over to the Nazis. The Rockefeller family, the owners of Chase, also owned Standard Oil (now known as Exxon). Standard Oil was in turn half-owner of Nazi Germany's IG Farben chemical cartel. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the records from the Nuremberg War Crimes trials and hundreds of books on WWII such as Joseph Borkin's The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben. (New York: The Free Press; London: Macmillan Publishing Company), Standard Oil/IG Farben built and operated Auschwitz and forty other concentration/slave labor camps.

In 1999 and 2000 Giuliani ordered NY City repeatedly sprayed with Malathion, an organophosphate insecticide which causes serious negative health effects in humans. He took this unprecedented action in order to fight West Nile Virus, which the City's own press releases described as a disease that is almost impossible to become infected by and in almost all cases cures itself without the victim even knowing they were infected. While publicly insisting that Malathion was "completely safe" the Mayor neglected to mention that a chemical hazard first aid book located inside every police precinct and ambulance entitled, Mayor's Chem-bio Handbook and bearing the Mayor's name on it's cover, provided 13 pages of first-aid instructions for Malathion and stated that it was a nerve gas directly related to those used by the Nazis in WWII. Thousands of New Yorkers including many of the untrained pesticide applicators have since become ill. The CDC has advised the City not to spray again in the same manner.

My personal experience with the Mayor is that he has ordered me falsely arrested more than 40 times for daring to paint him with a Hitler moustache and for writing articles exposing his Nazi connection. In 1997 he petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to remove all First Amendment protection for visual art in order to prevent myself and other artists from showing paintings of him with a Hitler mustache on the street.

Can anyone name a single elected official in American history who has been compared to Hitler more than Rudy Giuliani? Can the elected officials and residents of this city, including thousands of Jewish New Yorkers like myself who have made this comparison, all be anti-Semitic?

Isn't it just possible that the Mayor's favors to certain Jewish communities are an attempt to obscure his connection to the Nazis - and get votes - rather than evidence of caring about Jews?

If there were a contest for which New York City elected official is worst for the Jews - and for principles like decency and social justice that Judaism stresses - Rudy Giuliani would win in a landslide.

[Every statement above is supported by quotes below from mainstream media sources. Noach Dear's statement about being proud to be a mini-Giuliani was made during a 1999 City Council Hearing on vending, which he chaired (broadcast by Crossroads on NYC cable TV). For even more damaging evidence of the Giuliani-Nazi connection see my other articles (Click Here).]

NY Post 4/13/2001

SPOUSE DIVIDED ON HUBBY'S FERRER BLAST

Democratic fund-raiser Suri Kasirer took issue with remarks her husband, Bruce Teitelbaum, made in the Jewish Week newspaper, in which he said Ferrer becoming mayor would "be of great concern to the Jewish community" because of his association with "David Dinkins retreads."

...Giuliani defended Teitelbaum, who ran the mayor's aborted Senate campaign last year, saying he was only responding to a remark Ferrer made weeks ago, comparing the mayor's "decency commission" to something out of Nazi-era Germany.

Newsday 04/13/2001 - Friday - Page A 4

Rudy Defends Teitelbaum
Says aide's remarks about Ferrer
were taken out of context

by Robert Polner

"Mayor Rudolph Giuliani defended his political aide amid an outcry over the aide's statement that Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer's mayoral bid is backed by "David Dinkins retreads" and "should be of great concern to the Jewish community." Giuliani said aide Bruce Teitelbaum's comments to The Jewish Week were "taken out of context" and actually referred to something Ferrer said in mid-February about the mayor's controversial commission on taxpayer-funded art.

At the time, Ferrer said the mayor's panel "sounds like Berlin in 1939." For the second day in a row, Teitelbaum drew a rebuke after he was quoted as saying: "An administration that contains Bill Lynch, Hazel Dukes, Ruth Messinger and Al Sharpton as part of the mayor's kitchen cabinet should be of great concern to the Jewish community." Giuliani said he spoke Wednesday night to Teitelbaum, who heads the mayor's dormant political action committee."

New York Times April 13, 2001

Criticism Grows
After Remarks of Mayoral Aide

"As reported by The Jewish Week, Mr. Teitelbaum said that if Fernando Ferrer, the Bronx borough president and the only minority candidate, won the election, his City Hall would be "stocked with David Dinkins retreads" - a reference to the former mayor - including people "who should be of great concern to the Jewish community." ...Mr. Giuliani said that Mr. Teitelbaum had been responding to a comment that Mr. Ferrer had made about the mayor's intention to convene an art decency panel. Mr. Ferrer had said, "That sounds like Berlin in 1939." The mayor said Mr. Teitelbaum felt that was "not an appropriate kind of comment."

NY Post 4/8/2001

LENO RIPPED FOR
'FASCIST' JAB AT RUDY

"William Fugazy, who heads an anti-bias group, yesterday called on NBC and comedian Jay Leno to apologize for labeling Mayor Giuliani a "fascist" on "The Tonight Show." Fugazy, head of the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations and a longtime ally of the mayor, said he was so incensed that his group will file a formal complaint with NBC tomorrow regarding the "disgraceful" remarks...Leno then went on to compare Giuliani's actions with Adolph Hitler's campaign in the first years of the Third Reich to rid German museums of "degenerate art," much of it created by the world's most respected artists."

Newsday 8/18/89

Holocaust `Reminder' Claimed

"A concentration camp survivor who witnessed the murders of his parents and five siblings at Auschwitz claimed that during questioning after his arrest on bribery charges he was placed before a blackboard bearing a Nazi slogan by former U.S. Attorney General Rudolph Giuliani's office as part of an attempt to "break" him...Written on the blackboard was the German phrase "Arbeit Macht Frei." The slogan, "Work Shall Set You Free," adopted by the Nazi party, appeared over the gates at Auschwitz."

"I take a different view of someone comparing me to Adolf Hitler than when someone calls me a jerk." Mayor Giuliani, N.Y. Daily News 10/25/1998 Newsday 8/19/89 Foes Slam Giuliani On Death Camp Slur

"Rudolph Giuliani came under attack from his political rivals yesterday for the alleged harassment of an Auschwitz death camp survivor by Giuliani's office when he was U.S. attorney."

AP 1/19/2000

Giuliani Criticized by Koch

"NEW YORK (AP) -- Former Mayor Ed Koch criticized Mayor Rudolph Giuliani on Wednesday for sharing a dais at a Martin Luther King Day event with an Austrian political leader who once praised the policies of Adolf Hitler. ``Is that a place to celebrate Martin Luther King Day, to be on the same dais as the leader of the neo-Nazi Party in Austria?'' Koch said at a news conference. ``Why didn't he denounce Joerg Haider? Why didn't he order Joerg Haider out of the hall?."

NY TIMES 6/24/98

"I don't regard associations of my people that support me as fascists as a light matter ....But it's ultimately the results that matter."Giuliani

Newsday 6/27/98

Apology For Holocaust Allusion

"City welfare chief Jason Turner apologized Friday for unwittingly using a Nazi death camp slogan to defend Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's workfare program."

N.Y. Post 10/15/98

NY State Attorney General
Eliot Spitzer

"...the current mayor thinks he's a dictator and does not have sufficient respect, not only for other branches of government, but also for the citizenry and its opportunities to speak out and be heard."

NY Times 4/14/99

If we don't strike a balance between aggressive enforcement and common sense," Savage said, "it becomes a blueprint for a police state and tyranny.
Former Policeman's Benevolent Association (the police union) President, James Savage on Giuliani's policies.

CBS News 9/9/99

There's no point in not spraying because there's no harm done in spraying, so, even if we're overdoing it, there's no risk to anyone in overdoing it, and the more dead mosquitoes the better. -Mayor Giuliani

Daily News 5/10/2000

Dangerous Skeeter Fix
Pesticide is a carcinogen

The pesticide malathion, deemed safe last year and used widely throughout New York City to fight the West Nile virus outbreak, will likely be reclassified as a low-level carcinogen, two members of Congress said yesterday.

NY Times May 31, 2000

Is Nothing Sacred?
Discontent Over a Cow Parade

It wasn't long ago that Americans, if they thought of Switzerland at all, had visions of alpine meadows, chocolate and fondue. But that was before the public relations debacle unleashed by the failure by Swiss banks to return Holocaust victims' money to their families. So the Swiss government needed something to improve its image. It embraced fiberglass cows...Chicago copied the idea. New York plans to follow suit in June, a fact noted on this page earlier this month...The first 50 cows, shipped over by a Swiss government foundation last fall to be painted by children in New York public schools, turned out to be made of a material that, when exposed to flame, transformed the glossy figures into roman candles... "The cows will be used in other countries," said Jacques Reverdin, the Swiss consul general in New York, "but certainly not in schools." The American partner in the firm set up to organize New York's cow parade, for which some 500 fiberglass cows will be on display in all five boroughs, walked out on his Swiss partners, calling the Swiss cows "junk." "They weren't actually making them in Switzerland, but in Bosnia," said Mr. Blume, a shareholder in the Cow Parade Holdings Corporation, an American company. "One smart bomb could have taken out our whole operation. The resin was of poor quality, there were no metal supports. They could fall over on people. When you flipped the reclining cow upside down it was hollow. It looked like a bathtub. Someone could get trapped inside."...The Swiss accuse Jerome D. Elbaum, a Hartford lawyer and president of Cow Parade Holdings, of stealing the international copyright for the cow parade. He responds that the Swiss were impossible to work with and owe him money. And he accuses his Swiss rivals of placing a spy in the company, and says the spy secretly formed his own company to try to steal his business. He said he discovered the espionage in April, when he hired a security officer to seize the computer used by the man he fired...Into the fray comes Roland Muller, the Swiss artist who designed the cows two years ago. He said this week he was considering a court order to halt the New York cow parade for failing to pay him for the use of his prototypes of cows grazing, walking and reclining.

POST 4/21/2000

PROTESTERS WANT RUDY BOOTED

"Throughout the rally, protesters waved Haitian flags and signs depicting Giuliani as "the new Hitler."

CBS News 9/2/99

Mayor Giuliani on the four cops
who shot to death an unarmed
Orthodox Jew, Gidone Busch

"When they make the decision to shoot they have to shoot to kill".

"An exhibition of paintings is not as communicative as speech, literature or live entertainment, and the artists' constitutional interest is thus minimal."

Giuliani appeal brief against street artists having First Amendment protection, Giuliani v Lederman et al and Giuliani v Bery et al, filed with the U.S. Supreme Court 2/24/97.

Newsday 9/27/93

Rudy's Screen Test
Informed of law firm's clients?

The last time he ran for mayor, Rudolph Giuliani quit a major Manhattan law firm when controversy erupted over the firm's representation of the government of Panamanian Gen. Manuel Noriega. Four years later, as he presses forward with his second campaign against David Dinkins, Giuliani is again aligned with a major law firm- Anderson Kill Olick & Oshinsky - and it too represents a number of controversial clients. Some of the more controversial ones, including a company that has been identified as controlled by organized crime, were already on board when the former mob-busting U.S. attorney decided to join the firm in 1990. Other clients, including two companies suspected of helping equip Iraq with materials to make chemical weapons, came later...One of the other companies listed last year as a client on Anderson Kill's "Matter File Listing" is German farm-equipment manufacturer Karl Mengele & Sons, the family firm of Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele. The U.S. Justice Department has said that the Mengele firm, founded by the father of the sadistic death-camp doctor, supplied economic support to the "Angel of Death" during the decades when he was a fugitive...

CBS News 9/2/99

"When they make the decision to shoot they have to shoot to kill".
Mayor Giuliani on the four cops who shot to death an unarmed Orthodox Jew, Gidone Busch

Newsday 2/11/95

Not a Loyal Nazi, Miller Quits
Police Spokesman Job

Saying he wouldn't be "a loyal Nazi," John Miller quit yesterday as Police Commissioner William Bratton's top spokesman, refusing to comply with what he said was Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's edict to purge his staff of loose-lipped cops."

Daily News 12/7/98

Chase Banked On Nazis - Report

"Chase Manhattan Bank _ allegedly helped the Nazis plunder Jewish property in France during World War II, according to a published report. The New York-based bank controlled by the Rockefeller family closed Jewish accounts even before the Germans ordered them to do so and did business with the Nazis while they were sending Jews to the gas chambers, Newsweek magazine reports in this week's edition. And while the U.S. was at war with the Nazis, Chase also apparently helped German banks do business with their overseas branches, the magazine reported. Chase Manhattan is now the largest bank company in the U.S. with more than $300 billion in assets..."

NY Times 4/8/2000

Demonstrators of Old Spread Their
Message in a New Era of Protest

"Robert Lederman, 49, a street artist who has protested for years against Mayor Giuliani's policies, often arrives with dozens of placards caricaturing the mayor as Hitler, complete with the Fuhrer's mustache."

NY Times 5/12/97

Manhattan Institute Has
Nudged New York Rightward

"...the institute was founded as a free-market education and research organization by William Casey, who then went off to head the Central Intelligence Agency in the Reagan Administration."

Boston Sunday Globe 2/22/98

"The Manhattan Institute clearly has become the force, and there is no progressive force to counter it. There isn't even a debate.' "The mayor has a very close working relationship with the Manhattan Institute," Giuliani's communications director, Crystine Lategano, said...
Another sign of how much New York has changed: The most influential source of political ideas is a conservative think tank that was founded by [William Casey] Margaret Thatcher's mentor and Ronald Reagan's spymaster."

From The Cultural Cold War
by Frances Stonor Saunders
New Press [pg 132]

"The fund raising arm of the Free Europe Committee was The Crusade for Freedom for which a young actor named Ronald Reagan was a leading spokeman and publicist. The Crusade for Freedom was used to launder money to support a program run by Bill Casey, the future CIA director, called the International Refugee Committee in New York, which allegedly coordinated the exfiltration of Nazis from Germany to the United States where they were expected to assist the government in fighting Communism...[pg 142]...The Ford Foundation gave $500,000 to Bill Casey's International Rescue Committee and substantial grants to another CIA front, the World Assembly of Youth...the convergence between the Rockefeller billions and the U.S. government exceeded even that of the Ford Foundation ."

UPI 9/20/2000

CIA says Nazi general
was intelligence source

"COLLEGE PARK, Md., Sept. 20 (UPI) -- The Central Intelligence Agency has for the first time confirmed that a high-ranking Nazi general placed his anti-Soviet spy ring at the disposal of the United States during the early days of the Cold War. The National Archives said in a release Wednesday that the CIA had filed an affidavit in U.S. District Court "acknowledging an intelligence relationship with German General Reinhard Gehlen that it has kept secret for 50 years." "The CIA's announcement marks the first acknowledgement by that agency that it had any relationship with Gehlen and opens the way for declassification of records about the relationship," the National Archives said Gehlen was Hitler's senior intelligence officer on the Eastern Front during the war and transferred his expertise and contacts to the U.S. as World War II reached its climax. While Gehlen's relationship with U.S. intelligence during the 1940s and 1950s has been the topic of some five books over the years, the eventual release of CIA documents pertaining to the development of his European spy ring could shed new light on the origins of the Cold War and early U.S. espionage efforts against Moscow Gehlen's network of agents in Europe - including many with Nazi backgrounds who were bailed out of prisoner of war camps by U.S. intelligence officers - was known as the Gehlen Organization and received millions of dollars in funding from the U.S."

Daily News 4/8/2001

Decency Panel Ripped
For Cloaking Meeting

"If Mayor Giuliani's decency commission is to decide what type of art is proper, then it should do so in public not behind closed doors, four civil rights groups charged.
In a letter faxed to the commission's chairman, Leonard Garment, the New York Civil Liberties Union and three other civil rights groups charge that the new group's plan to meet behind closed doors this week is illegal under state laws requiring public access to government meetings.
The groups say such an action would be illegal under the New York Open Meetings Law and several recent court decisions."

To a Directory of Mr.Lederman's Essays

Robert Lederman is an artist, writer and activist and is also the President of the street artist advocacy group, A.R.T.I.S.T.
Click here for an archive of A.R.T.I.S.T. related news articles on the Freedom Forum website

His essays and Op-Eds have appeared in hundreds of alternative publications as well as the Daily News, Penthouse, Africa Sun Times, Street News and The Shadow.
Lederman was falsely arrested 41 times for his anti-Giuliani activities and was never convicted of any of the charges. As a result of the arrests, he's won four Federal lawsuits and overturned three laws.
He is best known for having created hundreds of paintings of Mayor Giuliani as a Hitler like dictator which were carried in demonstrations throughout the eight years of the Giuliani administration. Images of his paintings and articles about his arrests and lawsuits have appeared on all of the major television networks hundreds of times as well as frequently appearing in the NY Times, Daily News, NY Post, Newsday, Newsweek, People, The Washington Post, LA Times and NY Magazine.

Robert Lederman,
President of A.R.T.I.S.T.
(Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics)
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net

For a detailed exposition on the West Nile issue
http://www.nospray.org/
For an article on the Manhattan Institute go to
http://www.konformist.com/2000/rudyg.htm

If you would like to help oppose the spraying,
please write to the
No Spray Coalition
PO Box 334
Peck Slip Station
NYC, NY 10272-0334
or call the No Spray hotline at (718) 670-7110.

Any funds you can send to help continue the lawsuit
and this work are greatly appreciated.

Important Note:
Mr. Lederman has explained that his articles posted here are not to be taken as official statements by the No-Spray Coalition of which he is a member or of the "No-Spray" lawsuit in which he is a plaintiff.

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