Montreal – Police have asked for an in-house chemical analysis of a bar of soap with a swastika stamped on it to see whether it was made from the corpses of Second World War victims, as the vendor claimed last week.
Police seized the soap after various media visited the curio shop on St. Laurent Blvd. between Mt. Royal Ave. and Villeneuve St., operated by Abraham Botines.
No warrant was issued and the store owner cooperated with the police officer who visited his store, chief Inspector Paul Chablo said through a spokesperson.
The results of the analysis should be completed “very soon,” but Chablo said he could not be more precise.
The analysis is to determine whether human remains are part of the soap bar.
The B’nai Brith League for Human Rights complained, citing the Criminal Code ban on violating human remains.
Asked to comment on the police seizure of the soap bar, Anita Bromberg, a spokesperson for B’nai Brith in Toronto, said the organization is pleased police are continuing their investigation.
“We are also pleased that the shop owner is cooperating, which indicates a change, since before he was indicating to reporters that he had every right to sell it,” she said.
Though historians doubt the Germans made soap out of human remains, Bromberg said she was pleased police are investigating “the claim that he was making.”
If that claim turns out to be false, other legal action might be possible, she suggested.
The store vendors last week backtracked from their original claim, telling one reporter they were not certain what the soap was made of.
He first offered to sell it for $200, and later set the price at $300.
Botines, who is Jewish, has been criticized in the past by other Jews for selling Nazi memorabilia at his shop.
Historian Frank Chalk, director of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia University, says the consensus among Holocaust historians is that Germans never made soap out of human remains.
(Source: Montreal Gazette)
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4 Responses
The Wiesethal Center analyzed this stuff years ago and found no human ingredients in the soap. Why are they reviving this subject again?
I looked up the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia University on wikipedia and found the following:
On September 9, 2002, a scheduled visit from the then former (and now current) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was cancelled after protesters clashed with police inside the building.[39]
Before the speech was to take place, protesters inside the building stormed barricades which had been set up to block access to the building’s lobby from the inside and were stopped at the escalator leading to the lobby by police in riot gear. Protesters outside the building began banging on the windows. For the duration of the standoff, ticket-holders pushed their way through a thick crowd of protesters outside the building and entered through a secured access point complete with metal detectors, and were then escorted to the auditorium where the lecture was to take place.
Around one hour later, a large exterior window separating the protesters from the police inside shattered, prompting a police officer to immediately discharge pepper spray through the window. The spray entered the building’s ventilation system forcing an evacuation. At approximately the same time, a second window on the building’s first floor, on the western side and away from police was broken when protesters threw a metal barricade into it.
The immediate result of the protest and subsequent evacuation was the cancellation of the lecture. The university instituted additional measures to avert future incidents, including the banning of any events related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as enabling the use of new student disciplinary rules in case of emergency.
Five demonstrators were arrested,[40] and an additional 12 faced internal disciplinary hearings under the University’s Code of Rights and Responsibilities
Perhaps these are not the people we should be trusting our holocaust history to?
That said, I did a search for “Israel” on the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia University website (http://migs.concordia.ca/) and I did not find any of the usual “human abuse” and “war crimes” garbage that I expected. Maybe these people really are impartial.
#3 We will see if they are impartial if they ban any pro Arab or anti Israel lectures as they have banned any pro Israel lectures.