John Demjanjuk is now eighty-nine-years. He has spent more than 20 years fighting the most heinous of allegations for his alleged role as “a terrible Ivan.” That is, as a Ukranian who served as a Nazi concentration guard allegedly responsible for the deaths of up to 29,000 Jews. Actually, after serving in an Israeli jail from 1986 to 1993, he was released when the Jewish state’s prosecutors failed to establish that he had served at Treblinka, as originally charged. It now seems clear that he in fact was a guard at Sobibor.

All along, plodding down the path of a legal labyrinth seemed destined to follow him to the grave, he continues to declare his innocence.

Now he’s finally back in Germany. A few weeks ago U.S. authorities delivered a notice to his Cleveland-area home that he must surrender for deportation this week.  The U.S. Supreme Court then rejected without comment an appeal to stop the deportation; the Demjanjuk’s had asked for it to be halted due to the old man’s frailty. But the record already shows that Mr. Demjanjuk has lost his U.S. citizenship as he lied about his Nazi past.

Why go after an ailing Nazi who cannot have many years left on this planet? The real question that must be asked is “Why would you not do so?” In fact, were Mr. Denjanjuk to die today, researchers must continue to look into his past and those of so many others who duped U.S. and other authorities. In doing so, the message will be passed down to another generation: Justice knows no time limits, nor does the suffering caused by its perpetrators.

Yes, it might all sound like a cliché and easy to offer from afar. However, I think of the other continuing historical explorations and how they have changed what we think about who we are and the flawed humanity of our great leaders – Thomas Jefferson’s illegitimate child, Franklin Roosevelt’s reluctance to bomb the tracks to Auschwitz, H.L. Mencken’s anti-Semitism and so much more.

All of this needs to be exposed if we are with a straight face to continue to teach our kids the values that we want them to emulate.

Israel for sure has a rough and tumble political world. So it’s no surprise that with an eye toward keeping the far right of the governing coalition satisfied, Prime Minister Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu’s office announced Monday – hours before his meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama—that a new settlement was in the works on the West Bank.

Mind you, I’m a Bibi fan this time around. I think he’s been not only practical in most policies to date, but done so without the naiveté that stained his first tenure at the top from 1996-1999. But not on this one.

So it was that the government of Israel announced it would soon begin construction on 20 housing units in Maskiot, a former army outpost. Actually, plans for the settlement have been on the books for three years but then-Defense Minister Amir Peretz backed down. Back then, strong U.S. opposition led to the plans being abandoned. That should again be the case here, too. In fact, Bibi you should blame this on the U.S. That’s a good cover for you.

That’s because U.S. government officials have conceded in recent years that there will be “natural growth” of existing settlements. So one is hard pressed as to the need to start a new one, particularly as this is a well-known lightening rod issue.

Maskiot is intended to house former residents of the Gush Katif settlement bloc in the Gaza Strip. Those residences were destroyed by the Israeli army in August 2005 in a planned evacuation of the area. The Government of Israel has indeed performed poorly – to be polite—in its repeated vow to provide new residences for those former Gaza settlers. However, that is no reason to go ahead with a new settlement now, especially when other settlements have additional housing being constructed, such as around the Jerusalem suburb of Ma’aleh Adumim.

Bibi, you’re a smart guy. Now you need to act that way.

Last week Facebook – you know what it is if you’re reading this on-line – agreed to take down pages set up by Holocaust deniers, including ones called “Holocaust is a Holohoax” and “Holocaust: A Series of Lies.” As attorney Brian Cuban pointed out, Facebook has in the past removed groups based on complaints. “There is no First Amendment right to free speech in the private realm,” he told the Cable News Network. Because of that, he said, this is not a freedom-of-speech issue. Rather, Facebook can set the standard to which it wants to adhere.

That’s true. But it’s also dangerous. That is because this drives the deniers to seek yet more creative ways to spread their drivel. Rather, these sites must be monitored and combated. It is unlikely that banning them will help.

So while Facebook finally agreed to block the sites, I wish they had not done so.

I know a lot of people don’t agree and think that such vicious hate should be kept out of the public realm. Yes, I know that the journalist in me is sometimes too detached from the raw emotions of modern Jewish trauma. Still, one cannot hide from the technology revolution and the new challenges it will continually create.

Rather, incorporating strategies on confronting such issues must now be the part of Jewish defense leagues such as the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (to which the Baltimore Jewish Council belongs), the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress.

But censoring hate? I’d rather fight it than force it underground.

Welcome to the social networking revolution.

I almost fell off my chair last week when Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu announced that Dr. Michael Oren was his pick to be the next ambassador to the United States. I’m honored to know the guy a little bit.

I had last spoken with Michael in the fall when then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was finally, formally bowing out – a process that took six more months to be effective. A few years earlier Michael, now a visiting professor at Georgetown University, had stopped by our office. He was promoting his then best-selling book “Power, Faith and Fantasy: American In The Middle East, 1776 to Present.”

I also had read his other best-selling book, “Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East.” Since then we had spoken a few times and I had run his essays at http://www.jewishtimes.com .

Both of his books are fantastic scholarly works that are accessible to the general reader. Most of all, I found Michael engaging and enjoyable. I also saw in him a rare remnant of the ethos of those who crafted the Jewish state in its early years – an immigrant (this time from New Jersey) who passionately believed in both Jewish peoplehood and an independent state. More so, he was one of the few – unlike me –so moved that he went to Israel, stayed, became a paratrooper, and then a bonafide intellectual.

Michael is no slouch, for sure. He has received fellowships from the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, from the British and Canadian governments, and from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv University. In 2006, he was a visiting professor at Harvard and Yale, returning to Yale in 2007. For the past few years, he’s been a become a senior fellow at Jerusalem’s Shalem Center, which has quickly become a growing and influential think tank.

Now he moves into the political arena, where he has no formal experience. That actually does not worry me. The Michael Oren I know understands how to talk to diverse groups; if you can make it these days on college campuses with your unabashed pro-Israel agenda you have good training. And along the way, he’s had more than a few ties with leading politicians and policy makers around the world.

So the choice is truly out-of-the-box for a Prime Minister who fumbled a great deal last time in the post. In particular, Bibi first rankled the Clinton administration with his peace process policies – giving credence to style being as important as substance—and then alienated American Jewry’s non-Orthodox communities during the “conversion crisis” of 1997-98.

Now Michael –an independent thinker who calls both for attacking Iran and withdrawing from large chunks of the West Bank – will give Bibi advice from Washington. That’s very, very good. What Netanyahu does with such words of wisdom remains to be seen.

Yet with the appointment of Michael Oren in Washington, and Natan Sharansky at the Jewish Agency for Israel, I find myself in a very different position than in the late 1990s vis-a-vie Binyamin Netanyahu. That’s because, so far, I both publicly and privately like what I’m seeing and hearing.