As for the last example of grammatical errors ("aber die Stimmen drangen etc") in my previous post, it is not completely correct. That would take too many words to explain, but anybody who speaks German can listen for himself. Anyway, the fact that I didn´t get it right in this case doesn´t mean that the glass case man does (in the same case), because he certainly does not.
For the non-German speakers, I found these German language instruction sentences on an Italian site:
13. Ich betrachte ihn für einen guten Arzt.
RICHTIG: Ich betrachte ihn als einen guten Arzt.
14. Er hält ihn für einen kompletten Idioten.
DER SATZ IST RICHTIG!
http://www.viaggio-in-germania.de/prepverb-sol.html
"Richtig" means "correct"; sentence nr. 13 is incorrect. In this respect the glass case man as already mentioned has problems, because he said "betrachte für". But no native German-speakers have such problems. This is language instruction for non-Germans. The fact is that if the glass case man were to do a German test in an Italian high school, he would probably fail (and he should). That is the only conclusion possible regarding a person who says things like: "Ich muss sagen, dass ich diese Vernichtung an die Juden für eines der kapitalsten Verbrechen innerhalb der Menschheitsgeschichte betrachte."
At the same time, he is supposed to be "fluent" in Hebrew, and I don´t doubt that that actually is a difficult language, if for no other reason than being very different from German or other Indo-European languages.
All in all, I have some troubles taking this "trial" seriously. I wonder how anybody can, actually.
Breker,
There is no "hair-splitting". The point was that I had stated that that was my opinion ("I think"), and the fact that you have a different opinion is in itself really not interesting at all. You need to say why you have a different opinion. "They look the same to me" is not enough.
Nor are there any "machoisms". It seems to me you´re not interested in this topic at all, and so I naturally wondered whether you had some other kind of problem.
I don´t think this silly argument should go on forever like this, but if you have something more substantial to say, I will welcome it.