Sunday, April 14, 2013

Sunday Globe Special: Easter Insults

I suppose I really should expect nothing less of them these days.

"SHROUD ON EXHIBIT -- The Shroud of Turin was displayed in the Turin cathedral on Holy Saturday. The linen cloth imprinted with the faint brownish image of what appears to be a man's body was shown live on television by the Italian state broadcaster RAI. Though some believe the image is the body of Jesus, others dismiss the shroud as an ancient forgery (Boston Globe March 31 2013)."

Are you kidding me? I get a photograph in my printed paper implying the shroud of my God is a fraud? 

Related: Biblical Artifacts Declared Fakes

"The present day Ashkenazi are not the descendants of the Biblical Hebrews but of converted Khazars, and one need only look at their Caucasian skin to see they are not from middle eastern people. Second, the archaeological evidence shows the Hittites predate the Israelites and Palestinians, but nobody seems eager to let them come back home. Finally, the archaeological treasures held up to bolster Israel's claim that the Old Testament is real history and not just legends and myths have all been revealed as frauds! One need only stroll around Egypt, or pre-invasion Iraq, or Iran, or Turkey, or any other nation with an ancient heritage to see the vast numbers of ruins. In seeing the abundance of these ruins ( an ancient Egyptian temple was recently discovered while digging for a sewer line) it becomes clear that cities on the scale such as we are told the Kingdoms of David and Solomon were simply do not vanish without a trace." -- What Really Happened

And directly above the Shroud photo on the same day is this:

"Jewish Museum’s exhibit evokes ire, awareness" by Kirsten Grieshaber  |  Associated Press, March 31, 2013

BERLIN — ‘‘Are there still Jews in Germany?’’ “Are the Jews a chosen people?’’

Nearly 70 years after the Holocaust, there is no more sensitive an issue in German life as the role of Jews. With fewer than 200,000 Jews among the country’s 82 million people, few Germans born after World War II know any Jews or much about them.

So Hitler won World War II after all, 'eh?

To help educate postwar generations, an exhibit at the Jewish Museum features a man or woman seated inside a glass box for two hours a day to answer visitors’ questions about Jews and Jewish life....

I don't have any, thanks.

But not everybody thinks putting a Jew on display is the best way to build understanding and mutual respect.

Since the exhibit — ‘‘The Whole Truth, everything you wanted to know about Jews’’ — opened this month, the ‘‘Jew in the Box,’’ as it is popularly known, has drawn sharp criticism within the Jewish community — especially in the city where the Nazis orchestrated the slaughter of 6 million Jews until Adolf Hitler’s defeat in 1945.

There is that magic number and that man again, not that I need to be reminded. I see enough references in my Zionist-owned ma$$ media. Another batch of forgeries at worst, distortions at best regarding that issue.

‘‘Why don’t they give him a banana and a glass of water, turn up the heat and make the Jew feel really cozy in his glass box,’’ prominent Berlin Jewish community figure Stephan Kramer said. ‘‘They actually asked me if I wanted to participate. But I told them I’m not available.’’

Eran Levy, an Israeli who has lived in Berlin for years, was horrified by the idea of presenting a Jew as a museum piece, even if to answer questions about Jewish life.

‘‘It’s a horrible thing to do — completely degrading and not helpful,’’ he said. ‘‘The Jewish Museum absolutely missed the point if they wanted to do anything to improve the relations between Germans and Jews.’’

What, not enough guilt money paid out yet?

But several of the volunteers, including both German Jews and Israelis living in Berlin, said the experience in the box is little different from what they go through as Jews living in the country that produced the Nazis.

‘‘With so few of us, you almost inevitably feel like an exhibition piece,’’ volunteer Leeor Englander said. ‘‘Once you’ve been ‘outed’ as a Jew, you always have to be the expert and answer all questions regarding anything related to religion, Israel, the Holocaust, and so on.’’

Yup, poow Jews. That's the theme that runs through my paper all the time.

Museum curator Miriam Goldmann, who is Jewish, believes the exhibit’s provocative ‘‘in your face’’ approach is the best way to overcome the emotional barriers and deal with a subject that remains painful for both Jews and non-Jews.

Not me. I had NOTHING TO DO WITH IT at all!!! I WASN'T EVEN ALIVE THEN!!! Why am I and a whole lot of other people on the planet getting the guilt trip?

On a recent day, several visitors kept returning to ask questions of Ido Porat, a 33-year-old Israeli.

One woman wanted to know what to bring her hosts for a Shabbat dinner in Israel. Another asked why only Jewish men and not women wear yarmulkes. A third inquired about Judaism and homosexuality.

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Meanwhile the holiday greeting by Obama is buried. What chutzpah.

In order to give them a chance I decided to check the day before and the day after coverage:

"Christian pilgrims flock to Jerusalem to mark Holy Week events" by Tia Goldenberg  |  Associated Press, March 30, 2013

JERUSALEM — Hundreds of Christians streamed through the cobblestone alleyways of Jerusalem’s Old City on Friday, hoisting wooden crosses and chanting prayers to mark the crucifixion of Jesus.

Throngs of pilgrims walked a traditional Good Friday procession that retraces Jesus’ steps along the Via Dolorosa, Latin for the ‘‘Way of Suffering.’’ They followed his 14 stations, saying a prayer at each and ending at the ancient Holy Sepulcher church.

Along the route, Franciscan friars chanted prayers in Latin and explained the different stations. Leonard Mary, a priest from Alabama, was dressed as Jesus wearing a crown of thorns. He was flanked by men posing as Roman soldiers and he lugged a giant cross.

Good Friday events began with a service at the Holy Sepulcher, which was built on the place where tradition holds that Jesus was crucified, entombed, and resurrected.

Later Friday, a service was due in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity. Christians believe Jesus was crucified on Good Friday and resurrected on Easter Sunday.

Roman Catholic and Protestant congregations that observe the new, Gregorian calendar, are marking Holy Week. Orthodox Christians will mark Good Friday in May.

Israel’s Tourism Ministry said it expects some 150,000 visitors during Easter week and the Jewish festival of Passover.

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Yeah, Israel does such a good job protecting Christian shrines by occupying Palestinian land (and some of those Palestinians are Christian).

Also seeInquiry resumes into Easter art heist

RelatedThe Gardner Gambit

Can't really blame them for their focus anymore; they are simply serving their main audience.

"Pope makes Easter plea for world peace" by Frances D’Emilio  |  Associated Press, April 01, 2013

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis promoted the causes of peace and social justice in the Easter speech....

He urged Israelis and Palestinians to resume peace talks and end the long conflict.

And, in reflecting on the two-year-old Syrian crisis, Francis asked, ‘‘How much suffering must there still be before a political solution will be found?” The pope also expressed desire for reconciliation on the Korean peninsula, and decried warfare and terrorism in Africa....

Looks like you got one of four, Pope.

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Related: Declassified: Massive Israeli manipulation of US media exposed

And here it is again.

"Museum pays tribute to 1943 ghetto uprising; But facing past still stirs deep pain in Poland" by Vanessa Gera  |  Associated Press, April 14, 2013

WARSAW — Almost nothing remains of the old Warsaw Ghetto: a few buildings here and there, a synagogue, some fragments of a brick wall. The rest was blown up by the Germans in their onslaught against the Jews who took up arms against them.

Now this Holocaust-era prison of misery and death is undergoing a dramatic transformation in time for the April 19 anniversary of the start of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, a revolt that ended in death for most of the fighters yet gave the world an enduring symbol of resistance against the odds.

Oh, man. My chin dropped to my chest as I start to digest another heroic Jew story put forth by my newspaper. Of course, anyone that opposes the current form of fascist enslavement (not even a fair description of fascism, really) from the EUSraeli empire and engages in resistance is a "terrorist."

The change in this district of the capital and its place in Polish consciousness is embodied in the Museum of the History of Polish Jews that has risen up in a vast square in the heart of the vanished ghetto, ringed by Holocaust memorials and shabby communist-era apartment buildings.

It celebrates the Jewish life that flourished in Poland for centuries before the Holocaust, and dares to confront Poles with a truth many would once have strongly denied: that this country has had its own dark chapters of anti-Semitism.

Sigh. I'm an American of Polish descent, and I don't need the guilt trip.  So when is Israel going to come to terms with its racist apartheid?

Funded largely by Polish taxpayers, the museum’s existence is a powerful sign of how far Poland has come in embracing tolerance and its own multicultural past since toppling communism 23 years ago — a new openness bolstered by a blossoming economy.

Taxpayers paid for it? Unbelievable.

At the same time, the exhibits will emphasize that Polish acts of persecution never approached the scale of Adolf Hitler’s genocide and that the Holocaust was Germany’s crime, not a product of any local Polish-Jewish tensions.

Still, many nationalistic Poles prefer an image of their country as a model of heroic resistance to centuries of past oppression, both by Germans and Russians.

We are living in a world of illusory images, readers.

Among painful episodes that the museum will address in the permanent exhibition opening next year are pogroms in the late 19th century, boycotts of Jewish businesses in the 1920s and 1930s, and calls to deport Poland’s 3.3 million Jews, the largest per capita Jewish population in any European country.

Related: NY Times 1933 Headlines Judea Declares War on Germany

It was a call for boycott?

Its materials promise to tell the story of the Jedwabne massacre in World War II, when about 40 Poles hunted down the town’s Jews, shut them in a barn, and set it alight, killing more than 300 people. Also to be included is an account of the massacre in the city of Kielce, when 42 Jewish Holocaust survivors were slaughtered a year after the war ended, and the expulsion in 1968 of thousands of people of Jewish ancestry.

Another debate is over the idea of raising a memorial to Polish ‘‘Righteous Gentiles’’ — those who saved Jews during the war — next to the new museum. Poles protected Jews at a huge risk to their own lives and their families, and more than 6,000 are officially honored by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial — by far the largest number in any country occupied by the Nazis.

But critics say that while the Righteous Gentiles deserve a monument, putting it by the museum would be an expression of Polish nationalism that would lead some to falsely believe that most Poles acted as rescuers during World War II.

“It makes me shiver to stand on this blood-soaked land,’’ said Ori Horenstein, 55, a lawyer from Tel Aviv. ‘‘But it makes me proud to see that there were a few who decided to go down as brave heroes.’’

Those fighters will be honored during next Friday’s ceremonies, to be led by Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski.

How did he come to power?

The big celebrity, however, will be Simha Rotem, one of the very few remaining survivors of the uprising. Most were killed in the fighting, though a few dozen managed to escape through sewage canals.

The uprising broke out April 19, 1943, when about 750 young Jewish fighters armed with just pistols and other light arms attacked a German force more than three times its size.

In their last testaments they said they knew they were doomed but wanted to die at a time and place of their own choosing. In the end, the fighters held out nearly a month, longer than some German-invaded countries did.

I'm sorry, readers, but I'm just tired of the narrative.

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Related: Sunday Globe Special: Warsaw's White House

Are you seeing a pattern, or is just me?

Here's egg on your face:

"A year later, order restored to ‘crazy’ Easter egg hunt" Associated Press,  March 26, 2013

EASTHAMPTON — Extra volunteers, clearer instructions to parents, and even a couple of police officers were on hand just in case ensured that Easthampton’s annual Easter egg hunt went smoothly this year.

It is AmeriKa.

Last year’s hunt was marred by about a dozen parents who ignored organizers’ pleas and went into the hunt area to help their children.

Some were reportedly rude to volunteers and even told older children it was OK to grab eggs from an area set aside for youngsters age 4 and younger.

More than 300 children took part in this year’s hunt for 18,000 treat-filled eggs Saturday, organized by the Easthampton Community Center.

Executive director Robin ­Bialecki told The Daily Hampshire Gazette that last year’s hunt was ‘‘crazy’’ but that every­one was well behaved this year.

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