by Mary W Maxwell, LLB
In the Year 2000, there was an amazing custody battle played out on the TV screen. A child had been found floating in a tire offshore Florida. It is said that his Mom and her partner were on a small boat trying to escape from Cuba but it capsized.
The US Coast Guard brought the 5-year-old Elian to shore and put him in custody of his American uncle. The father sued and won the child back.
In recent years we have seen children ripped from their parents by the US government. You may think I mean at the Mexican border. No, I mean anywhere, as is alluded to in our Gumshoe series on Australia’s Family Court.
But this child removal was notable for violence. It thus caused a certain American Jew – Sherman Skolnick — to remember the family separations of Jews in Germany in the 1940s.
I am worried about the aspects of Holocaust revisionism that want to eschew any German wrongdoing. I don’t think Ursula Haverbeck is correct in her statement that all guards in the concentration camps, for example, were well behaved. If they were, they sure ought to get the Nobel Peace Prize, or maybe sainthood, as it would be extraordinary to show restraint in a war situation. Or in any prison. (Recall Gumshoe’s recent article about Cabbie Matanov’s prison torture in, of all places, Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 2014!)
OK I admit I am using the Elian Gonzalez example as a mere launching pad to show off a Jew who was a great US patriot and who fought the Federal Reserve Bank tooth and nail. My message to Holocaust Revisionists – whom I generally support – is: Stop thinking it’s black and white. An American Jew can be as anti-Rothschild as anyone else.
What follows is an article Skolnick wrote in 2000, in which you can see how stalwart he was.
THE AMERICAN GESTAPO AND
ELIAN GONZALEZ AND MEMORIES
by Sherman H. Skolnick
It was on the screen of some people who remember, with pain and fright, similar events. There it was, a heavily-armed, Gestapo-like team, without an arrest or search warrant, come to rip Elian Gonzalez away.
What some call the monopoly press have no time or inclination to find and interview those who had similar experiences. If it happened years ago to a political dissident, the press hounds are not interested. After all, so the common wisdom goes, if you have a big mouth and are anti-Establishment, you get what you deserve.
I ought to know the feeling. It happened to me, on a Thursday, in March, 1980, twenty years ago as I write this. The nation was facing a financial meltdown because of what became known as the “Silver Collapse”. Several large stock and commodity brokers were facing bankruptcy because the price of silver, pushed by rampant speculation to over 50 dollars per ounce, had fallen off the cliff.
As later admitted in print, the head of the Federal Reserve had a secret emergency meeting with bankers. The meeting was so sudden, the Fed Chief met the bankers in his bathrobe. Several large banks, tied to the silver gambling, were facing going under. There was a danger of a run on banks.
The secret police were ordered to take extra-legal, emergency measures, and to hell with the Constitution. At the time, I was a well-known college lecturer. Despite my disability from childhood, as a paraplegic from polio, I traveled around the nation including to nearby states like Indiana, in a specially-set up vehicle, giving public speeches and conducting seminars.
Advertisements had already announced that for the coming Saturday, I was scheduled to give a controversial seminar on, as I expected, the then upcoming bank collapse.
Right near my front door, I was standing on my braces and crutches. I was waiting for a woman friend who was en route to take me to the barber and then to lunch. As she backed up to my home driveway, another car pulled up near my sidewalk and two men, dressed in very dark clothes, jumped out and ran up to me.
“Are you Sherman Skolnick?” they barked at me. “Yes” I answered. “Are you armed?” they demanded to know.
I responded in the most foolish, almost fatal response of my life. “I am an Orthodox Jew. I carry no gun.” (I should have added, The Almighty Is My Rock and My Weapon.) As they rushed up to me, I could see they were heavily armed.
As they grabbed me, I cried “I must have my folding wheelchair!” which was a few feet away. They were not interested to know. They shoved me like a sack of potatoes into the front seat of their car.
I screamed, “Harriet, call the police!” (I did not know at the time that this was the secret police.) As she rushed up to their car, she put her hand into the open window. They put up the electric window, almost driving off with her arm inside.
They drove me from my residence in Chicago, Illinois, across the State line to Indiana. They knew I could not run away, so they stopped at McDonald’s, not for me but for themselves. It was right near a pay phone. I called a friend collect and blurted out, “I may be cut off any moment. I’m being kidnapped. Pray for me.”
After a long ride, they drove up through the electric truck entrance door of a distant jail. They dumped me into a jail wheelchair and rolled me over to the Warden. “You keep him here, no questions” they commanded the Warden. I was put in a solitary cell, reserved for desperate criminals.
The Warden opened the cell door and entered. “Please understand, I do not know why you are here. I have to follow orders”, he said with a sad look. “I understand your condition. I have a brother, a paraplegic, wounded from Viet Nam. Maybe I can figure out a way to send you over to the State Penitentiary that has a hospital section”, he said, visibly upset. “Look, Warden, I am not sick. I don’t need a hospital,” I answered.
A day later he again entered my jail cell. “I found out who you are, Mr. Skolnick. I am running a terrible risk to try to help you. I found out you are a friend of the former head of the Crime Commission in this part of the State. I called him. Sunday morning is a quiet time. I told him to pull up his car into the truck entrance electric door, like he is delivering something here.
I am going to roll you into a blanket and put you on the floor of the back seat of his car. He promised to take only the back roads and get you back to your home. I don’t know what they will do to me for releasing you. But you better stop doing whatever it is you are doing. Next time may be worse for you.” He said this, his face plainly filled with compassion.
“Warden, where is the arrest warrant? What am I charged with? What crime have I committed? At what trial have I been found guilty?” I pleaded with him. “Please, Mr. Skolnick, I already told you I do not know why you are here. I was ordered by the highest authority to keep you here. Promise me, you will never, never cross the State line back to Indiana,” he answered.
Smuggled out the side door into the truck entrance, I got back to my home, my Crime Commission friend driving at high speed on little used back roads, just like we had just robbed a bank.
Some of my relatives showed no understanding, condemning me with statements, like “You got what you deserve. Why don’t you shut your rotten big mouth?”
When some of my more understanding friends take me places, I always tell them, with a sarcastic sneer, “My passports to Indiana and Cuba have been revoked. Do not cross the State boundary line with me in the car.”
After I got home, I found out that the local police in my neighborhood refused to take a report from my woman friend. They showed her a copy of a bulletin on the FBI National Crime Computer Wire, “Sherman Skolnick, of Chicago, a heavily-armed, desperate, escaped criminal and fugitive from justice. Shoot on sight if necessary.”
[Wow.]
As a result of the incident, it was the only public speech and seminar I missed in forty years in the public eye. Assuming I knew or found out exactly who the secret police are and were, I decided nevertheless not to sue for false arrest. My reasoning would take too long to detail.
So the American Gestapo, without arrest or search warrants, breaking into the home where Elian Gonzalez was, brings back memories. Am I the only one with memories of the secret police in the United States, dealing with dissident and controversial persons? Probably not.
Like any banana republic, America has secret political police, nameless, faceless, heavily-armed, subject to no law. Unless we can correct this situation, our Constitution is justifiably dead. This Gestapo follows the orders of the Commissar who runs the conspiratorial, private central bank known as the Federal Reserve, or orders of a Dictator posing as the President, or the head of the Injustice Department, or secret orders not identified from whom.
Nowadays, if the secret police come again to my door, they might notice there a decal from the National Rifle Association. Stay tuned.
— Mary W Maxwell delights in playing both sides of an argument
The fact that Gestapo is referenced is enough to reveal the German hatred pervading this article.
Nazis, Gestapo etc etc. They’ve all become Hollywood words with Hollywood meanings. Real history hijacked by buzzphrases designed for instant emotional recognition and repetition.
Fredrick, I thought the word GeStaPo was the actual official word meaning the secret police, no?
And he mentions a similar secret police who took him to Indiana. I don’t see the German hatred. I see hatred for unlawful control of people.
Skolnick: “So the American Gestapo, without arrest or search warrants, breaking into the home where Elian Gonzalez was, brings back memories. Am I the only one with memories of the secret police in the United States, dealing with dissident and controversial persons? Probably not.”
Fredrick, have you been following our Court-enabled kidnappings of children? It’s horrible.
Also, note how we often say that so-and-so was bumped off (although it is reported as suicide or natural causes — Dr Jeff Bradstreet for example, the autism guy, found in the river). So there has to be secret hit men on call everyday to take care of such things. Who cares what language they speak. We want them to stop.
Geheim Staats Polizei.- definitely a German word.( Secret State Police)
Keep your shirt on Fred. It’s not about bashing Germans.It’s about bashing secret police.
There’s something about the word “secret” that makes me feel uncomfortable.
Scapegoating and secrecy are so ingrained in in a closed society that legal constraints are needed to prevent truth from emerging, e.g. the lies that make up the narratives of 9/11, Holocaust, etc.
In both of the above instances there are bundles of ideological trash attached whereby scapegoating is secured, e.g. German hatred because the Germanic mindset is opposed to the secretive. manipulative Semitic mindset.
How’s that Downunder Phil!
“Some of my relatives showed no understanding, condemning me with statements, like “You got what you deserve. Why don’t you shut your rotten big mouth?”
The most compelling part of the story for me.
The above paragraph is why these thugs get away to do what they do. This is also why those that planned and carried out the Sydney Hilton Hotel bombings and murders at Port Arthur and the Lindt Café have so far got away with their crimes. The public have been scared into accepting any crime by people in uniform or crimes by government agencies.
“playing both sides of an argument’
what argument exactly?
Well, Berry, at the end of my articles I am supposed to give a bio line, so in case any other outlet reprints it, they will know who this MM creature is. (It only rarely happens however).
Today, figuring everybody at Gumshoe is sick of hearing me say “Mary is the author of Blah Blah” I chose to say I like to take both sides. EO Wilson taught me to do this. (e.g. evolution vs creaionism).
At the bar you’re expected to tell the judge all the cases that work in favor of your client and the ones that work against.
It just turns me on to do that. In matters of WWII I can happily support the Germans or the Jews. I can also see that some of the cops in Operation Noetic may go grab the do-good Grandpa on the belief that he is a baddy.
Not that it’s a special talent. Every brain can play it both ways. Except maybe Archie Bunker.
AFP are not above abduction and torture.
I recall, during the Haneef saga, that the AFP grabbed a man as he left a building and hauled him into a van. A very heavy man then sat on his chest, preventing him from breathing. For eight hours straight he thought he would die of asphyxiation the very next second.
Eventually, the AFP morons realised they had abducted the wrong man. After he was released he was paid compensation, presumably on the condition he keep his mouth shut, because no court case was ever reported.
With sociopaths like Howard and Downer in government, nobody is safe… as David Hicks discovered; no crime committed but torture and imprisonment for seven years.
Frankly, I suspect the ALP zealots would be even more oppressive.
The problem with so-called holocaust revisionism is that it doesn’t focus on anything more than superficialties. Instead of focusing on the fact that villains are created by those who behave like victims, it’s caught up in inconsequential arguments.
The Skolnick account touches on the principle but so far as I’m concerned it’s not nearly strong enough and I fail to see the relevance of the Elián Gonzalez story
Maxwell: “But this child removal was notable for violence. It thus caused a certain American Jew – Sherman Skolnick — to remember the family separations of Jews in Germany in the 1940s.”
Berry, Dee has a bunch of my articles on her desk. I think she picked this one today for the benefit of the photo. We want readers to understand that the stuff going on in Adelaide is SERIOUS.
But now that you mention Elian, I heard that when it happened in 2000 there was saturation coverage on TV, day after day.
So that makes me suspicious. When they saturate you there is usually a reason. Could they have been trying out their TV skills? Was the Pulitzer Prize photographer standing there in the bedroom? Why on earth would an INS man hold a gun like that?
Indeed was the kid really found in a tire? If the boat capsized did Mom have a chance to arrange it? Maybe so. Maybe it is 100% true. Dunno.
The photo sure does look like a completely contrived fake to me and it’s otherwise pretty obvious that Elian was a political pawn.
The point I was trying to make about Skolnick is that he wound up in the slammer because he was stuck in a victim mindset, quote “I am an Orthodox Jew. I carry no gun” . He might just as well have said “I fear God but I fear man more”; some Torah aficionado, not!
Looks like he learned his lesson anyway.
Hardly surprising that in a disarmed society the principle is not commonly understood
I’m not a gun owner, but due to my general resistance to government terror tactics the local bovver boys are convinced I’m armed to the teeth. Quite amusing really.
Speaking of Both Sides:
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She is at best weak, and provides no real rebuttal. Pretty much all of her “arguments” are variations on “how dare you…”.