Lets use your “moral compass” then.
Not pretending to be a scholar of fifty year old vendettas, let me recap what little I know about Mr. Demjanjuk. After spending his adult life in Cleveland he was determined to be a killer called Ivan the Terrible. He was stripped of his US citizenship and sent to Israel where he was positively identified as the notorios beast and sentenced to death. At the 11th hour the highest court in the land determined that he was in fact not the person for whoms crimes he had been convicted.
Now You say, who the hell cares, he was defineitly (and this time there is no reasonable doubt of course) a Ukranian who collaborated with the Germans a prison guard etc. Remember now, the folks down there in the Ukraine were just coming off the greatest politically motivated mass murder the world has ever witnessed. The fellows who perpetrated this abomination were allied or at least at peace with every other major power on earth. If you were one of the Ukranians lucky enough to still be alive, wronged, would you not revenge? I believe Demjanuk is now what 90? He has spent the last what, twenty years in jails coutrooms and death row? He has not a pound of flesch left.
I'll continue with yours - it's interesting how your rhetorical choices (both of form and content) illustrate your ideological intentions.
Not pretending to be a scholar of fifty year old vendettas,
And so it begins. "Vendetta" - as if the sytematized slaughter of millions of innocents, and the justice required for such an atrocity, were a feud between two urban crime families like the "Castellamarese War."
let me recap what little I know about Mr. Demjanjuk.
Ah, he's "Mr." Demjanjuk - deserving of respectful address.
After spending his adult life in Cleveland
He was a child before he arrived in Cleveland? His adult life was spent there? Because he was over 40 years of age when he arrived in Cleveland and over 30 years of age when he arrived in America.
he was determined to be a killer called Ivan the Terrible. He was stripped of his US citizenship
The Justice Department did not "determine" him to be Ivan "The Terrible" Marchenko. They accurately determined that he lied extensively on his application for US citizenship and therefore obtained that citizenship fraudulently.
He was then stripped of his citizenship and when israel requested extradition of the criminal alien, the US complied.
and sent to Israel where he was positively identified as the notorios beast and sentenced to death.
He was found to be Marchenko in an Israeli Court - which, like French, Italian, Spanish, Swedish and other court systems - does not conduct its deliberations with a presumption of innocence, but a presumption of neither innocence or guilt.
At the 11th hour the highest court in the land determined that he was in fact not the person for whoms crimes he had been convicted.
He had more than a decade's worth of appeals left when new evidence was introduced that he was a different SS-trained camp guard than Ivan Marchenko. Although it was established as a fact during his trial that he was a concentration camp guard - he admitted in open court that he had been tattooed with a tattoo that the Nazis used only for identifying non-Nordic concentration camp guards - he was set free, because Israel like the USA does not permit a man to be tried twice for the same crimes.
Now You say, who the hell cares, he was defineitly (and this time there is no reasonable doubt of course) a Ukranian who collaborated with the Germans a prison guard etc.
No, what I say is that he should be held accountable for the crimes he committed.
There can be no doubt that he was a concentration camp guard at Sobibor because records which had been unavailable before 1993 are now available to prosecutors, and because Demjanjuk himself admitted in court that he bore a Nazi SS camp tattoo which he had inexpertly removed in order to conceal his status.
Remember now, the folks down there in the Ukraine were just coming off the greatest politically motivated mass murder the world has ever witnessed.
So you are arguing that because Russians starved Ukrainians, Ukrainians were justified in murdering Jews. Fascinating.
The fellows who perpetrated this abomination were allied or at least at peace with every other major power on earth.
What relevance has that to the question of Ivan Demjanjuk's crimes? Your argument is that if someone somewhere does something evil and manages to get away with it, then anyone should feel entitled to do something evil and get a free pass. Again, fascinating.
If you were one of the Ukranians lucky enough to still be alive, wronged, would you not revenge?
Now your choice of words becomes interesting again, using "revenge" as a non-modified verb in the style of Shakespeare - more specifically as in Shakespeare's Merchant Of Venice and even more specifically from the famous soliloquy therein of Shylock, the grasping, greedy and bloodthirsty Jewish stereotype character.
Is this just a coincidence? We'll see in a moment.
That's the style of the question, but what's the rhetorical content?
You are arguing that Ivan Demjanjuk should be allowed to murder other people for fun and pay because other people did that around him when he was a teenager. He has no personal accountability for his actions - in fact his actions were laudable revenge.
Again, fascinating moral perspective.
I believe Demjanuk is now what 90?
So what is the proper statute of limitations on cold blooded murder of women and children?
You are arguing that once someone lives a certain number of years they are no longer responsible for their actions. Again, fascinating moral perspective.
He has spent the last what, twenty years in jails coutrooms and death row?
Rightfully so. He is an accomplice to the murder of thousands of people. He has spent 20 years of sitting around in air conditioned prison cells and courtrooms with family visits, three square meals a day, free medical care, plenty of leisure time for reading, listening to music, watching TV, etc. His innocent victims - who did not have the luxury of individual rooms, or AC, or family time, or leisure, or medical care or even one decent meal a day - have not spent twenty years in boring earthly environs. They have spent the last 65 years dead.
Ivan Demjanjuk has never and can never pay the full price of his crimes. Justice demands that he should pay as much as he can.
He has not a pound of flesch left.
So, it was not a coincidence. We are back to the words of Shylock, a stock character to inhabit the wet dreams of every anti-Semite. And here, interestingly, nkycincinnatikid - usually a good speller - misspells the word "flesh" as "flesch". Or does he misspell? Is it not a variant of the Yiddish "fleisch"?
So we have a lot of easily exploded special pleading for a murderer couched in belittling and codedly anti-Semitic rhetoric.
I hope your hero Pat Buchanan is reading this thread, for your sake. He may have just found his new personal assistant.