Posted on 06/16/2011 2:33:54 PM PDT by Nachum
This confounds all human decency. Islamic Jew-hatred is the leading cause of the worldwide record levels of anti-semitism. From Europe to the Middle East to Latin America and now America. And nothing is being said or being done to address the religious mandate of Islamic Antisemitism (Khaybar, Khaybar, ya yahud!) Or retribution for the Muslim world's evil role in the Holocaust.
The Jews are allowing this to happen again. It doesn't matter who this Muslima is. What matters is the message. The first holocaust didn't happen overnight either. Israel suffers from these subversives, too. It's a drip, drip, drip, and then the unthinkable. Where are our warriors in the information battle space? This is war.
Six million dead Jews are weeping and screaming from their graves. And the Islamic supremacists are howling and rubbing their hooves together in anticipation.
Such stupidity is without equal.
Critics question credibility of Manhattan College’s pick, and a change in center’s focus as supporters come to her defense. The Jewish Week
The Jewish Week is part of the pro-holocaust mentality. They have demonized me repeatedly, here and here for example, but posit this as tolerance. Tolerance when applied to evil is a crime. How tolerant they are of this urbane atrocity. They demonize passionate Zionists while exalting the annihilationists. Pathetic tools.
Manhattan College is revamping its Holocaust Center to include the further study of other genocides, as well as interfaith activities that would include Islam alongside Judaism and Christianity — the two religions that until now have been mostly alone at the core of Holocaust interfaith issues.
Perhaps nothing accentuates the change more than the appointment of Mehnaz Afridi, 40, to be director of what will be renamed the Holocaust, Genocide and Interfaith Education Center.
Afridi, a Pakistan-born Muslim woman, has been teaching at Antioch University, and her writings have primarily focused on Muslim identity and the intersection of Islam and the Holocaust.
[...] Among her goals at Manhattan College, Afridi said, will be “to bring more diversity and interfaith events, especially with Muslim academics and Muslims [in the] nearby community. I think this will be important to Manhattan College and it’s Lasallian [Catholic] tradition.”
“I want to educate people about Muslims,” she said, “but I don’t want to [always have to] defend Islam, because I don’t think it’s the greatest religion in the world. I happen to like aspects of it; I’m a liberal Muslim. When people ask me about the Five Pillars [of Islam], I say, you know, I’m kind of like a two-pillar girl.”
Afridi, who is Muslim but not Arab, tells of a well-traveled life as the daughter of an international banker, moving from Pakistan to Switzerland to Luxemburg to Dubai, and then to high school in Westchester County’s Scarsdale, before graduating the University of Syracuse where, she says, “my interest in the Holocaust truly began when I was a teaching assistant for a post-Holocaust undergraduate course.” She then earned her doctorate in religious studies at the University of South Africa.
The Center’s expansion into interfaith projects was made to better fulfill “the spirit of Nostra Aetate,” the Vatican reformation encouraging a reconciliation of the Abrahamic religions including Islam, said Jeff Horn, the outgoing director of the center, who is Jewish and will remain on the faculty as chair of the history department. He emphasized that the changes will be a “broadening” of the Center, not a dilution. Afridi, he says, will be able to “devote far more time and energy to [the Center] than I was ever able to,” because of Horn’s other academic duties, “so when we say expansion, we mean expansion.”
The expansion, however, has aroused concern from some survivors who had become informally connected to the center, and from children of survivors, such as Borough Park’s Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who worry that the centrality and Jewish specificity of the Holocaust are being diminished. At the college’s community reception for Afridi, some of the survivors privately expressed some half-embarrassed doubts about an Islamic woman leading a Holocaust program.
“I’m not surprised” at the controversy, Afridi said. “A Muslim woman to head a Holocaust center — it’s an oxymoron, in a sense. I’m not shocked.” She added, “I would be more than happy to meet Dov Hikind. I think he’s done some wonderful things, working hard [to fight] anti-Semitism. We may have more in common than he thinks.”
[...]
Aside from her academic work, Afridi has worked extensively with organizations such as the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, “creating educational journeys,” she said, “for Palestinian, Israelis, Jordanians and Jewish-Americans, in Israel,” and the Women’s Islamic Initiative In Spirituality and Equality, a program of the American Society for Muslim Advancement.
The changes at Manhattan College prompted novelist Thane Rosenbaum, a professor at Fordham Law School and a frequent essayist on post-Holocaust themes, to wonder whether the Holocaust is becoming unmoored from its Jewish specificity.
“It hasn’t even been two generations,” said Rosenbaum, and already the message is, ‘We now have transcended the Holocaust,’ time for something else. Only with Jews, do people change the parameters like this, going from the Final Solution to exploring ‘Prejudice Around The World.’ This is Holocaust Studies for a new century: led by a Muslim, dealing with issues not exclusive or particular to the Holocaust, [issues] from Islamophobia to racism, looking for a wider appeal. They can do whatever they want, but I’m not sure that morally they have the right.”
Hikind, noting that his Brooklyn district includes “the largest contingent of Holocaust survivors,” asked Manhattan College to drop the word “Holocaust” from the center’s name because “the addition of Dr. Afridi and the expansion of the Center’s mission diminish the magnitude of the Holocaust as a defining Jewish event.”
Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, one of the pioneers in Holocaust studies in the 1970s, and the former chair of the national Holocaust Memorial Council, said that the debate over the universalistic expansion of Holocaust studies “has been an issue all along, going back decades.”
“Each case is different. In some places its worked,” protecting and underlining the distinctiveness of the Shoah, “and in other places not.”
The increased emphasis on interfaith relations is “great,” said Rabbi Greenberg. “One of the lessons of the Shoah, and part of what drove me [to Jewish-Christian] dialogue was that we have to recognize and break down the horrible poison and stereotypes [that predominated in Christian Europe] to prevent future Holocausts. That’s a legitimate application. I’m in favor of Muslim dialogue, too. The real issue is that most of the Muslim dialogue, so far, has not been very honest. That’s where the danger comes — not the concept of interfaith, but it’s how you do it, with whom, and how it’ll play out.”
Hikind’s criticism of Afridi was partially provoked by an article she wrote for Common Ground but widely circulated by the Khaleej Times (Aug. 11, 2008), an Arab newspaper. In the article, Afridi recalls an exchange at a Jerusalem bar that happened 18 years before, when she was studying archeology in Israel. An Israeli Jew at the bar, not knowing Afridi wasn’t Jewish, voiced the opinion that “surely you know, as a Jew, that this is our ancestral homeland.” She responded, “Well, no … First, I am not Jewish, and second, I am not quite sure whose land this is.”
In the Common Ground article, she goes on to write, “Jews can help Muslims navigate in a post-9/11 world by sharing with them the difficulties that they, too, faced in Europe and the United States…”
Hikind wrote to Manhattan College that Afridi’s equation was “both erroneous and offensive. It is inconceivable to me how Dr. Afridi can even begin to equate what the Jews of Europe suffered under Nazi rule with what she perceives Muslims in present-day America are enduring.”
Who is paying for this?
My only reply is that this makes me so sick that I can’t even reply.
Stupid and disgusting
Sketicism is highly understandable, but is there any chance that her appointment is actually CONFRONTING the anti-semitism among Muslims? Past directors were Christian, exploring Christian antecedents of the Holocaust... maybe now we’ll get someone exploring the Muslim “post-cedents” (if I may invent a word) of it?
Yeah, I share you skepticism... but I’m just trying to define whether we “know” something terrible is happening, or we “reasonably presume” it.
2 John 1:9 Whosoever transgresseth, and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God. He that abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he hath both the Father and the Son. 10 If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed: 11 For he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds.
Good question
From the article comes this howler: “I think this will be important to Manhattan College and it’s Lasallian [Catholic] tradition.””
Yuppers, that would be the Moslim tradition of tolerance shown at places such as Lepanto.
ISLAM DELENDA EST - because of what Islam is and what Moslims do.
At first I was thinking “Cool, let’s put a KKK grand wizard in charge of the NAACP!” But it seems that she’s a cafeteria Muslim, taking the bits she likes (most likely the bits copied from Christianity and Judaism), and discarding the rest (most likely the stuff Mohamed made up). I would have to see what her actual writings are. Does she condemn Muslim violence against Jews? What are her feelings about Palestine? Does she consider their terrorism against civilians just? What does she think about Muslim support for Hitler in WWII in their common goal to eliminate Jews?
Even if it’s all good there, it’s still strange. You’d think only a Jew would be the head of a Holocaust center, not a Muslim, or a Christian or Buddhist.
My alma mater - a former Catholic men’s college - needs to finally close its doors.
Or else some orthodox Catholic group with lots of money ought to buy out the present group of hooples and run it like it was intended more than 150 years ago.
The descending spiral away from truth continues, in order to continue to apply socialist idealism in place of the truth.
So much rhetorical emphasis is placed on “sharing our experiences” that everyone listening ignores who is saying it - Marxist academics, and, given the sources, what is really ignored is that your distinctness, your values, your identity is not what it is being sought. What is being sought is the destruction of those things in you that make for your distinctness, your values, your identity.
And Huma married Wiener.
Maybe it's time to look behind the labels, and start identifying people by what they DO in common.
Just a thought.
OK, so how about naming a Jewish scholar as the head of the Arabic Studies Dept?
Pure evil are the first words that come to mind.
“Never Again!”
Eh.....?
>> There is no such thing as a muslim “moderate” <<
Well, there is no authentically tradition of moderation; there are marginally attached Muslims who are hesitant to completely abandon the faith, but who have “heretically” adopted many moderating beliefs. This person is a self-professed “two-pillar” Muslim, meaning she (claims to have) rejected 60% of the Muslim faith.
Christianity teaches certain tolerances are virtuous, so an intensely devout Christian can be a moderate in the sense of rejecting extreme methods. What would a Christian “extremist” do? Die for our sins?
In Islam, devotedness corrolates with extremism, because the religion explicitly calls for violence, hatred, and insurrection. So you can’t have a “passionately religious moderate” because those words are antithetical within Islam. That doesn’t mean that someone who comes from an Islamic background can’t possess moderating virtues.
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