THE JEWISH NEWS p FRONT This Week's Top Stories Fighting For What? 10 11 1 1e nill a ' 77.1111 ,, A band of protesters argues against "left-wing" revisions in Israel's military ethics code. Remembering Nuremberg An international conference will discuss the modern implications of the famous post-World War II trials. JULIE EDGAR STAFF WRITER "They don't risk their lives for resents] a slippery slope, that at every opportunity they have to ad- a state; they risk their lives for dress these issues. There's now their homeland. There's nothing a Likud government in power. about love for the Jewish people," What did these people want? For- Mr. Dallen said. protester Fellow tunately, it didn't have any impact on the Major Ge n. Yoram Hymie Cutler, head of the Michigan Committee Yair arg ues with evening." The basis of the pro- Michael D alien and for a Safe Israel, said he testers' rancor is the Mike Ha rrison (in learned about the re- abandonment of Zionist cap) at t he FIDF making of the ethics code din ner. from a newspaper arti- values in the code, which cle, after he was asked to proscribes the behavior and mission of every Israeli sol- participate in the rally. It dier during peacetime and "shocked" him, he said. `The very essence of [Israel] is wartime. "The new code is largely the the fact that it is a Jewish state. product of radical, left-wing To remove that from the ethical philosophers at Tel Aviv Univer- code is a strange thing," Mr. Cut- sity who repudiate the values of ler said. Before dinner, Gen. Yair, whose our people and the values we were honoring at that gathering," said nickname is "Ya Ya," left the syn- Michael Dallen, a leader of the agogue to talk to the protesters, protest and head of the local chap- who held signs that said, "No, no, ter of Americans for a Safe Israel. Ya Ya" and referred to him as a In a flier he wrote and distributed flunky. Mr. Dallen said he re- at the rally, Mr. Dallen claims the gretted the slur, knowing the gen- code was revised to avoid offend- eral is considered a major Jewish ing Israel's Druze and Bedouin war hero. "I want to emphasize that the populations and progressive' Jews who deplore all Jewish national- general is a genuine hem, and we honor him and honor the values ism." He objects to the document's that made him such a hero. It's failure to mention the love of Is- the code that repudiates the very rael or the love of the Land of Is- values he stands for. He bowed to rael or even the fact that Israel is the political correctness that was a Jewish state. ETHICS CODE page 22 mV‘, NUREMBERG page 22 • • • C".2 1 sraeli soldiers are being asked to conform to a "po- litienlly correct' ethics code, and that rankles a group of mainly religious Jews here. About 10 people, half of them children, showed up Sept. 17 at a dinner of the Michigan chapter of the Friends of Israel Defense Forces (FIDF) at Congregation Shaarey Zedek to protest revisions in the ethics code of the Israel Defense Forces. Holding signs that de- nounced guest of honor Major General Yoram Yair as a "politi- cal flunky," they passed out fliers and argued with him when he confronted them outside the build- ing. Gen. Yair, Israel's military at- tache to the United States, head- ed the commission of politicians and academicians that revised and released the code last year. The scene, said an FIDF board member, was all the more strange because the protesters admitted to the general that they hadn't read the revised code. "I think they were slightly sheepish about the whole thing, though evidently not enough for them to leave," said FIDF board member Mark Lichterman. "Maybe they think [the code rep- enry King Jr. was a young lawyer in 1946, ready to tell a friend about his new job in New York. But the friend turned the tables with news about his new job, with the U.S. prosecuting staff at the war crimes trials in Nuremberg, Germany. The next day, Mr. King took a train to Washington to ap- ply in person for a similar position. Fifty years after the famous Nuremberg Trials, Mr. King, other prosecutors, historians and legal experts are coming to Detroit for an international conference on what Mr. King calls "the seminal legal event of the 20th century." The opening program of the conference, 7:30 p.m. Sun- day, Oct. 13, at Congregation B'nai Moshe in West Bloom- field, will feature Mr. King and fellow prosecutor Whitney Harris discussing the trials. Federal Judge Avern Cohn will chair the panel. The pro- gram is free and open to the public. On Monday, Oct. 14, the experts will participate in a day- long conference at Wayne State University's McGregor Memorial Conference Center. There is a $25 fee that in- cludes lunch. When Mr. King was growing up in Connecticut in the 1930s, his father posed questions at the dinner table. One night he asked, "How do you stop wars?" Henry Jr. always remembered his father's answer, and it led him to Nurem- berg: "People don't want wars. Their leaders start wars. To stop wars, you have to punish the leaders." Mr. King said the Nuremberg Trials af- firmed for the first time that internation- al rules were binding on individuals and su- perseded national rules. "For example," he said, "the persecu- tion of Jews was OK under German law sanctioned by Hitler. But the Nuremberg Trials said there were higher laws." An international tribunal convicted 21 German officials and high command offi- cers, and 11 were exe- cuted. The United States prosecuted 177 war criminals in "sub- Henry King: Prosecutor of Nazis. sequent proceedings." "Because of those trials," Mr. King said, "we now have some benchmarks to deal with: Leaders are not exempt [from law] because. they are leaders of a nation, and 'fol- lowing a superior's orders' is no defense." After his 18 months at Nuremberg, Mr. King and his wife returned to the United States. He subsequently served as general counsel of the U.S. Foreign Economic Aid Program, S E P TE M B ALAN HITSKY ASSOCIATE EDITOR