Posted on 05/03/2013 1:21:34 PM PDT by Kaslin
A wit, surveying Washington's monuments, once diagnosed the nation's capital as suffering an "edifice complex." The city's vast array of monumental buildings, housing the three branches of government, honoring the founders and heroes of the republic, and housing extraordinary temples of fine art, science, technology and history, could give an overwhelmed visitor that impression.
This week, Bill Clinton remarked how those buildings hold special meaning for visitors from around the world, celebrating the grandest accomplishments of man, and how one stands out as the nation's "conscience."
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum celebrates its 20th anniversary this week. Not everyone thought at the time that building a Holocaust Museum so close to the national mall was a good idea, but it has welcomed more than 34 million visitors since, testifying to a universally humbling recognition of a dark piece of human history and presenting a daunting challenge to the world in the phrase "never again."
In a moving ceremony in the company of a thousand survivors of the Holocaust, the former president focused on the memorial museum's relevance to our present day. Although 99.5 percent of the human DNA links every human to the others with virtually identical genes, the former president observed that the masses tend to dwell on the half of 1 percent of separation "that makes us vulnerable to the fever, the sickness that the Nazis gave to the Germans." It is that virus which we can see taking form today in our interdependent world "that is the biggest threat to our children and grandchildren."
The former president's words sound all the more menacing to anyone watching a YouTube video recorded from Iqra TV in Saudi Arabia. In it, a bright-eyed, plump-cheeked 3-and-a-half-year-old girl in a white hijab is carefully programmed to answer a female interviewer's questions:
"Are you a Muslim? " the interviewer asks.
"Yes," the little girl replies.
"Do you know the Jews?"
"Yes."
"Do you like them?"
"No."
"Why don't you like them?"
"Because they are apes and pigs."
"Who said that about them?"
"Allah."
"Where did he say it?"
"The Quran."
This is not an unusual video; others similar to it are found scattered on television networks throughout the Middle East and are well-documented by Neil J. Kressel, director of the honors program in the social sciences at William Patterson University in New Jersey. He focuses chilling attention on them in his new book, "The Sons of Pigs and Apes." Kressel is concerned that many in the West refuse to look at the way anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism have become synonymous.
His fears are echoed in Commentary magazine, which takes to task journalists and academics in the West who conceal Jew-hatred or act as though it doesn't exist.
When Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi described Zionists who return Palestinian fire as "bloodsuckers ... descendants of ape and pigs," The New York Times dismissed the remark as unimportant, that it was spoken when the Egyptians were beset with grief after a conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
The Times account erred, given the actual dates; it was an outrageous excuse in any event. Many journalists and academics similarly excuse Muslim hatred of Jews as based on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, when much closer to the truth is a remark by a prominent Egyptian cleric that Jews "aren't our enemies because they occupy Palestine, they would be our enemies even if they had not occupied anything."
Eli Wiesel, the founding chairman of the museum, calls the Holocaust a "black hole" in the collective memory. Silence easily becomes a tool of the tormentor. Silence has many guises -- in omission, on blank pages, in empty spaces between words. Only 13 years ago, museum researchers crunching the numbers in the carefully preserved arithmetic of "the final solution" were astonished to discover the staggering number of ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories the Nazis spread throughout Europe. Asks Wiesel, "Why was there no public outcry of indignation and outrage?"
"The Diary of Anne Frank" was the first major book to give the Holocaust its agonized human face. In the novel "Ghost Writer," Philip Roth imagines that Anne didn't die, but decided to keep her existence a secret. Alive, she was merely another teenager with a diary; dead, she assumed the power to teach a moral lesson. What exactly that lesson is remains a matter of dispute.
When the Holocaust Memorial Museum was opened two decades ago, on a bright spring day with the cherry blossoms in bloom nearby to mark the beginning of a glorious Washington spring, Eli Wiesel spoke of his vision, engraved in stone at the entrance to the edifice: "For the dead and the living, we must bear witness." Would we, if called on, have the will to do more?
I love Jews, but I detest phonies like the Cheshire cat grinning Schmuckie Schumer!
Because anybody who cried out was tortured to death, along with his family?
I really despise idiotic comments like this. In a totalitarian state, "crying out" not only gets you killed, it also does no good. Nobody hears you.
I really wonder what he means by this. Is there any other genocidal event in history with its own multiple museums?
Is there any other group of people that had a country dedicated to exterminating it that took the world to stop?
Is there any particular reason we should be enormously more exercised over the deaths of 6M people killed for their ethnic/racial/religious classification than over 100M+ people killed because they were “enemies of the People?” Are those killed for class reasons or just because they run afoul of the State’s minions any less dead? Did the reason they were killed matter to them?
Perhaps you’d care to point out the equivalent museums for the victims of the Communists.
For the same reasons the official and non-official elites turn a blind eye to Islam and Mau Mau anyone who doesn't today.
"Are you a Muslim? Nazi? " the interviewer asks.
"Yes," the little girl replies.
"Do you know the Jews?"
"Yes."
"Do you like them?"
"No."
"Why don't you like them?"
"Because they are apes and pigs."
"Who said that about them?"
"Allah. Der Fuehrer."
"Where did he say it?"
"The Quran. Mein Kampf"
History repeats itself.
Perhaps you’d like to point out the last time we sent the entirety of the US armed forces into China, stayed there several years and lost a city’s population.
Perhaps you’d like to make a point by point comparison between Germany annexing Europe and the conglomerate of politically unstable land that was the mid-decade orient attacking and subjugating itself.
Actually don’t bother. I am not stupid enough to argue with someone blind to the significance of the holocaust. And BTW, I’m not Jewish. Because I have a feeling that question was next.
We didn’t invade Europe to save the Jews. We invaded Europe to stop a tyranny that had a quite decent chance of conquering Eurasia and therefore eventually becoming a real threat to us.
I’m not blind to the significance of the Holocaust. I just would like someone to point out to me why the death of 6M people should be given so much more attention than the death of 100M people.
BTW, during our fight against the Nazis our #1 ally was the country that killed some multiple of the innocent people killed by Germany.
My basic question is not why the Holocaust should be remembered. It’s why should the much larger number of victims of Communism be shoved down the memory hole as they have been.
The reality is that over the years, any effort to portray communism as bad has been branded evil since McCarthy was slandered.
Liberals simply cannot allow a recognition that Communists did evil when they are working toward establishing it here. I would think that evident.
Look at the blowback Reagan got for a speech. You think the Libs would allow a holocaust museum for the Chinese?
And no we didn’t go into Europe to save the Jews. But we did and thanks to us there ARE Jews.
And that's a very good thing.
I despise Schumer, but I always first think of him as a vile, arrogant and very nasty demonic-rat, often forgetting that he is Jewish. We're those democrat Jewish politicians representative of all Jews, the Jewish people would have he// to pay.
We agree.
List of museums worldwide to the victims of Nazism. 65 in number. These are actual physical museums, with building and everything.
http://www.science.co.il/holocaust-museums.asp
AFAIK, there is only one museum to the victims of Communism, and it’s just a website.
http://www.globalmuseumoncommunism.org/museum
Which in truth is a crime in itself. But globally, the left has power. To be totally honest, I would not be surprised to see/learn that website were under fairly regular attacks from various leftist entities. Or that it has not been closed due to threats to the people running it.
Don’t hold back, onyx!
“I’m not blind to the significance of the Holocaust. I just would like someone to point out to me why the death of 6M people should be given so much more attention than the death of 100M people.”
Hmmm, if you understood the significance of the Holocaust, you wouldn’t be asking that question.
All hatred of the people of God is rooted in satanic influence. What is the motivation behind Jew-hate, other than Satan’s hatred for God?
Why don’t you explain the obvious to me, then?
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