NEWS I HOLD THE DATE! r A i Y Celebrity Toast Gala April 26th Ultimate Sports Bar Downtown Pontiac 1992 Humanitarian Award: Danny Raskin Heart Awards: Jane Buell, Lomas BroWn Ken Calvert, Denny McLain Call 855-6440 for Additional Information THINKING ABOUT REMODELING? Begin now for summer completion with 23 years of Distinctive Remodeling • Additions • Kitchens • Baths • Sunrooms • Doorwalls • Decks NOW THROUGH APRIL 30 SAVE $100.00 on any remodeling project $2,500 or more. FREE in-home estimate. 669-3500 Visit our showroom. M-F 9-5, Sat. 10-3 3081 Haggerty Rd., Suite 1 • Walled Lake 34 FRIDAY, MARCH 27, 1992 Neo-Fascist Rally Staged In Slovakia Prague (JTA) — Bratislava was the scene of a neo- fas- cist rally marking the 53rd anniversary of Adolf Hitler's creation of the Nazi puppet state of Slovakia, which deported its Jews to death camps. The meeting in the Slovak capital attracted several thousand devotees of the fas- cist state, which lasted from March 14, 1939, when Czechoslovakia was oc- cupied by the German army, until the fall of the Third Reich in 1945. It was the only time in his- tory that Slovakia was nom- inally independent, though, in fact, it was controlled by Nazi Germany. That brief era exerts a nostalgic attrac- tion for present-day Slovak separatists, many of whom were born after World War II. The key speaker at the Bratislava rally was Stanislav Paths, a Holocaust denier who is a member of Czechoslovakia's federal Parliament and a former pop music drummer. Mr. Panis claimed in a Feb. 26 interview on Norwegian television that the Nazis could not possibly have killed 6 million Jews with the technology available at the time. "The ovens could simply not manage to burn all of them," he was quoted as say- ing. Newspaper columnist Karel Kovanda of the Prague daily Lidove Noviny called on the wavering forces in the Slovak political arena to say "enough is enough" to people like Stanislav Paths. Mr. Kovanda noted that "such remarks are punishable by law in France, Canada and Germany" and urged the Immunity and Mandate Committee of the federal assembly to declare that a person like Paths, who openly preaches racial in- tolerance, has no place in the supreme legislative body of the country. Mr. Kovanda said Mr. Paths insulted the memory of the 6 million dead in an apparent attempt to ex- culpate the wartime Slovak regime, which even paid the Germans to liquidate 70,000 Jews. Slovakia was headed by Father Jozef Tiso, an anti- Semitic Roman Catholic priest handpicked by Hitler, who was subsequently hanged as a war criminal. . Most of Slovakia's political parties and movements, in- cluding the separatist Slovak national party, did not take part in the neo- fascist event, which featured symbols and paraphernalia of the Nazi era and anti- Jewish, anti-Czech slogans. Some of them openly con- demned the organizers for sullying Slovakia's image in the world. But the attitude of several Slovak politicians and polit- ical parties is ambiguous as they prepare for the elec- tions in June. While condemning the deportation of Jews by the Tiso regime, Slovak Prime Minister Jan Carnogursky defended Tiso's declaration of Slovakia's independence on Hitler's order, as the only alternative to the country's occupation by the Hungarians. The Christian Democratic movement, headed by the prime minister; split recent- ly when its radically separatist wing defected to form a new party. The chairman of the Slovak National Council, who was elected in 1990 as a member of the Slovak bran- ch of President Vaclav Havel's Public Forum, has now joined Carnogursky's Christian Democratic movement. Court Rules On Satire Madrid (JTA) — A Spanish court has ruled that a Barcelona publishing house did not violate the law when it published a cartoon book satirizing the Holocaust. But the plaintiffs, who in- clude the local B'nai B'rith chapter and an organization of Holocaust survivors, plan to appeal the lower court's decision, which absolves Editorial Makoki and its di- rector, Damia Carulla. The court dismissed re- quests by B'nai B'rith and Amicale Mauthausen, a Holocaust survivors collec- tive in Barcelona, to penalize Mr. Carulla, who might have faced one to six months in jail. B'nai B'rith lawyer Dalia Levinson said he got off on grounds of freedom of ex- pression and because the court decided that no offense had been intended. The book, titled Hitler=SS, treats the Holo- caust sarcastically.