Posted on 12/19/2005 8:50:37 PM PST by churchillbuff
It was only a matter of time, wasn't it? Since George Washington's executive proclamation in 1789 establishing November 26 as the day that we should give thanks to our Lord for all the favors, kind care and protection he had offered our country, and the Long Island supervisor who objected to a local Catholic priest's religious blessing of a Christmas tree. Jon Kaiman, who is Jewish, made his displeasure known in front of a large crowd which had gathered for the annual lighting of the Manhasset township Christmas tree. Kaiman is the town's supervisor and after the Rev. Nick Zientarski blessed the tree, he grabbed the microphone from the priest's hand and hollered, "This is nonsense. We're not doing this again next year. I can't believe this. I want to make it clear that this is no way a religious ceremony..."
The priest, for his part, had this to say: "I thought about what blessing to give, and it seemed to me that because this was a Christmas tree, it would be OK to use the blessing from my Catholic tradition." To be fair, Kaiman later apologized for his harsh and aggressive manner, but the first blow against the blessing of a Christmas tree has been struck by a Jewish supervisor in an upmarket Long Island town. Now let's reverse matters. And ask ourselves what would happen if a Christian supervisor had grabbed the microphone from a rabbi who was busy blessing the lighting of a Menorah. I'll tell you. He would be arrested and brought up on hate crime charges quicker than you can say Abe Foxman, that's what.
And Kaiman is not alone. Overseas, in Britain to be exact, there are widespread efforts to remove the Christian message from Christmas, with local authorities putting up "winter" lights, schools ignoring nativity plays, and firms refusing to allow decorations in case they offend minorities. And it gets better. A millionaire, Joel Krupnik, who owns apartment buildings on the Lower East Side of New York City and in Israel, has decorated his house with a skinny Santa with a bloody head in one hand and a knife in another. He calls it freedom of expression, but again, it is freedom to insult the Christian faith, no ifs or buts about it.
In San Francisco, in the meantime, 18 police officers were suspended for appearing in homemade videos for a Christmas party parodying the Police Department. They are accused of homophobia. The New York Times gave it the full page treatment. But not a word appeared about the Manhasset supervisor. You'd think San Francisco was in New York State, and Long Island in California.
Taki is a famous Jew-hater, but sad to say he is right about everything he says here nonetheless.
Here in Boston, there is a Holocaust Memorial across the street from City Hall. It is right smack dab in the middle of town, literally feet away from Faneuil Hall, an area of historic interest to the city.
Boston was not responsible for the Holocaust. While Jews are an important part of our population, I dare to say they are no more important a part than any other ethnic or religious group. One could argue the Irish (which have a tiny statue group in front of a bookstore several blocks away) and the Italians have far, far stronger claim to being the core ethnic constituents of the city, but that's not important, because in the very heart of the city there should be no "ethnic" monuments--and there haven't been until now.
Yet this towering structure--six transparent columns about 50+ feet each--dominates the already crowded strip where it's been erected.
It's an absolute eyesore. I can say I loathe this piece of garbage.
I cannot say this openly here in Boston, because I'd be called a racist.
My point is that as an agnostic, I can say that certain things cannot be said without being instantly construed as being anti-one religion or another.
Yet in all these cases of people who don't want trees blessed, or creches put in public spaces, the suggestion that the anti-Christmas folks are somehow anti-Christian is seen as ludicrous.
So explain, how come one is considered anti-Semitic for objecting to a massive, ugly sculpture that's up all year round, yet someone who can't let a tree go up for one month is considered a civil rights champion?
I am Roman Catholic and Irish. I don't have a problem with the Memorial. The Holocaust is part of history. God forbid we should lose the lessons of history.
I don't like the memorial where it is because it's ugly as sin. But if you want to claim I am denying the Holocaust and that we should forget it, I can't stop you. (sigh)
I agree. I have heard enough about the Holocaust. America is not responsible for the Holocaust. It is not our creation and we did not do anything to encourage or implement it.
"So explain, how come one is considered anti-Semitic for objecting to a massive, ugly sculpture that's up all year round, yet someone who can't let a tree go up for one month is considered a civil rights champion?"
It's called hypocrisy and selective outrage. Combined with a paranoia over the slightest bit of Antisemitism and we have a Christian-less Christmas.
"While Jews are an important part of our population, I dare to say they are no more important a part than any other ethnic or religious group."
You're right.
"One could argue the Irish (which have a tiny statue group in front of a bookstore several blocks away) and the Italians have far, far stronger claim to being the core ethnic constituents of the city, but that's not important, because in the very heart of the city there should be no "ethnic" monuments--and there haven't been until now.
Yet this towering structure--six transparent columns about 50+ feet each--dominates the already crowded strip where it's been erected."
I also feel that the Irish and Italians suffered more by way of flagerant discrimination. And they've contributed to the very culture of the city.
My point in bringing all this up in this context is that it's just funny to me how people can find--as a previous poster did--anti-whatever rhetoric even in positions having to do with matters of taste and logic (that memorial in that place). Yet when it comes to eradicating a Christian symbol around a Christian holiday (which those same people gladly take off from work, with pay), you don't DARE suggest there's an anti-religious angle there.
The police officer who took most of the punishment for this was a Jew but Theodocrapoulos is careful not to mention that. That would make the Jews look good. Can't have that. Jews can only be villians in Takis Theodocrapoulos' world.
I haven't been to Boston in a decade. If you say the memorial is ugly, then you may be right. I wouldn't know. But I don't think I proved any point for you. If you're arguing asthetics, go for it. I won't stop you.
And don't worry, you can't stop me. ;)
You are right. It's a crappy memorial, mostly because it's designed to make you feel crappy right smack dab in the "fun" part of Boston, the "Irish Riviera." It's like putting a massive outdoor holocaust memorial on Main Street in Disneyworld just to scare the kids. You're having a good time having a couple of beers with some out of town friends at the Bell in Hand Tavern, and then you have to walk through a massive sculpture intended to evoke the smokestacks of Auschwitz to get back to the Government Center subway, and everyone wants to kill themselves by the time they get there. I don't object to a holocaust memorial at all, but taste would dictate that one should not design it to weigh heavily on the drunken lighthearted revelers of Faneuil Hall, who after all are just trying to take a break for a couple of hours from thinking about how crappy life can be.
If it weren't so damned ugly (and unavoidable) I would have no problem with those other issues I mentioned (it being a Holocaust memorial). But it's like that ugly "Arch" that was in front of some building--in NYC?--a few years back, which forced people who used to cut across an open mall to detour around the horrible thing.
This memorial is intended to bring you down. Can anyone say that about a Christmas tree? Not this non-believer.
Kind of a mirror image of Abe Foxman, for whom Christians and Christianity are villains.
I don't buy that. Birthday parties are always festive - and commercial - because they involve giving gifts and having a high old time. Christmas is a birthday party. Christmas has always been a party-hearty time - going back centuries. THat's why the Puritans didn't like it. Now it's the Left that is using a fake concern over the "commercialization of Christmas" as cover for their drive to push Christmas into the shadows and to censor the word, "Christmas."
Amen.
Why would I want to stop you? You're on a roll. Go for it.
How long has the Holocaust Memorial been there? I haven't been in Boston for about 3 years, and we were near Faneuil
Hall, but don't remember anything that ugly or that much of an eyesore. Public "momuments" or even outdoor sculpture (like the famous Picasso that went up in downtown Chicago when I still lived there) are ALWAYS controversial, but, yes, there is something of particular interest when something like this Holocaust Memorial almost seems to be agressively, provocatively ugly, inappropriately placed, and an affront to civic planning or urban landscaping, which may just be what its creators had in mind, as if part of its purpose was to provoke the kind of reactions they could call "anti-Semitic". I would love to see a study of the whole history of public monuments and the stories behind them. Wouldn't be pretty, I think.
... I disagree though, with the assertion that commercialization was the real battle. The commercialization of Christmas was lamented throughout the 1900's and was a phenomenon completely contained within Christendom and its celebration of Christmas.
The expulsion of Christmas from the civic realm that we are witnessing in these days is attendant on the insidious and pervasive ideology of cultural diversity. Blaming commercialization is nothing but a variation on the theme of "we deserved it."
I like your comments on public art, but I don't want to get away from the real point: There are aesthetic disputes, and there are disputes over meaning. I just want to show the difference between an "attack" on a Holocaust memorial for aesthetic reasons is considered a matter of bigotry, but shouldn't be, and an attack (no quotations) on a Christian symbol for secular reasons is not, but should be.
The ACLU and their ilk are against Christmas trees for no other reason than their MEANING, their inherent value as a symbol. That's obvious to everyone.
But when you attack a symbol not for its aesthetic worth (for how ugly it is) but for what it MEANS, you can't just walk away and say "Oh, it's all about the establishment clause."
I am suggesting that the ACLU and company are full of it because of a very obvious position that's usually overlooked. They wouldn't be protesting these trees if they were symbols of "holidays". They can claim that's all-inclusive, but that's bull--Hanukah and Christmas are not equally important in their respective religions, and Kwanzaa...well...
That position is that their secular position is an anti-religion that isn't touched on by the equal representation rules they worship. But it IS a religios-oriented position, just as being a Democrat because you're against Republicans is a political one.
Simply put, if you were anti-semetic, you would not be allowed to set up on public property a display defiling Judaism. Yet, the ACLU is clearly attempting to negate Christianity in the name of "fairness". It would be the same as setting up a pro-UBL display on July4.
I consider commercialism a root problem, although for completely different reasons than the left. They are simply using it as a convenient fig leaf in their battle against Christianity. In short, Christmas is under assault from many different directions, the love of money and the hatred of Christianity. It has become a retail orgy. Retailers, perhaps mistakenly, thought they could increase profits, or at least not jeapardize profits, by divorcing the buying season from its origins and thus convince even more people to spend money in their stores.
And Christmas is a far more important part of history for we Christians than are the holocaust indoctrination museums all over the country. Museums are not needed to remind us of Hitler's butchery and WWII. The birth of our Lord and Savour, (Christmas), represents the Incarnation of God Almighty, and His Son was born to save the world. So 'God forbid we should lose the lessons of Christian history', which many Jews protest while their museums fly in everyone's face all year round.
There is strong historical evidence that Christians as far back as the 3rd century celebrated the birth of The Saviour with festive lights, ornamentations, and gatherings of Christians singing hymns.
Charity and giving gifts (gelt - money) is an ancient Jewish tradition at Hanukah, which is celebrated near the Christian Christmas season; so it's very likely that the tradition of exchanging gifts at Christmas is an ancient Christian practice stemming from Jewish tradition.
Gift giving here in America took off when the English took over New York adopted the Dutch holiday as their own, although moving Saint Nick to December 25th instead of his earlier day of the month. While gift giving has always been associated with the holiday in some form, the commercialization is a recent (150 years ago) phenomenon that took hold when stores began emphasizing the holiday in the nineteenth century. I'm not against giving gifts for Christmas, but against giving giving as the primary reason for celebrating the holiday.
This is a proof that this anti-Christmas campaign has nothing to do with the so called separation of church and state. In Britain there cannot be such separation since the Church of England is the ESTABLISHED church!
That makes about as much sense as me writing:
"Pharmboy, a famous left-wing troll and Christian-hater."
IOW, its makes no sense at all.
Stop smearing people.
The war on Christmas if just another battle to drive Christianity and Religion in general out of the public square.
When we win this battle, we start worrying about the extent of commercialization.
Or we just give up, and let the ACLU and the liberals win.
That would George Will and Cal Thomas happy.
Jewish left wing being led around by their neo nazi socialist masters again? Just like the national socialist Adolf Hitler led the deceived jews about by the nose in his rise to power and bloodshed thereafter.
Lefty, leave the Christian's alone!
The New England Holocaust Memorial
Nope...not smearing anyone, just calling it as it is. Do some research and you will not make your ignorance so transparent.
We've lost them. Every year we remember the Holocaust and we say never again. Yet it keeps happening again, in Cambodia, in Kosovo, in Bosnia, in Iraq, in Darfur, etc ...
I'd rather just stop the hypocrisy.
The leftists fight to kill God and Islam is their foot soldiers, except they'll never control them as much as they might think they will.
Not only an anti-semite, Taki also spent time in the pokey for snorting coke, I believe. He has no moral authority whatsoever, on any subject.
Not the point. The US and Israel have a special relationship. The US, as the most free and powerful nation in the world is charged with making sure another genocide against the Jews never happens, and to remind the world what can happen when savagery is allowed to rule. What the hell do you think the US war on terror is all about? Certainly the late great Pope would not agree with you about the importance of continuing to remember the 6 million.
Holocaust in Bosnia?!!! What are you talking about?
My Friend Taki Has Gone Too Far
Conrad Black
( prominent figure in media circles in both Canada and the UK)
March 3, 2001, Spectator
The Spectator’s social writer, Taki Theodoracopulos, has often graciously referred to me as an indulgent proprietor. Our relations have been cordial for 15 years and we have frequently been each other’s guests, have been friendly with each other’s spouses and have many mutual friends. Long before I knew him I was aware of his penchant, sometimes entertaining but sometimes excessive, to denigrate certain ethnic groups, most often the Jews. With such a bonhomous character there is a natural tendency to overlook his lapses of judgment and give him the benefit of the doubt that he is only railing against the prissy hypersensitivities of political correctness. It is hard to imagine that a person with whom you are friendly and have had many memorably agreeable times is a racist who wishes and incites violence against innocent people because of their ethnicity or religion.
I defended Taki when he was attacked by the Mayor of New York for a very insulting column about Puerto Ricans in 1997. His remarks were outrageous but, as the Puerto Ricans did make a mess on Fifth Avenue, they contained a kernel of truth and did not incite violence against Puerto Ricans. Nor are Puerto Ricans under any particular external threat. Nor do they have a history of being savagely oppressed. In the same spirit I defended one of our other writers, William Cash, against the wrath of the entire US film industry in 1994, when he published an article about the leading Jewish figures in that industry which was somewhat insulting but well short of an incitement to racial hatred.
These were not among my most enjoyable moments as a publisher, but it is the duty of a publisher to defend his writers unless they are, for whatever reason, indefensible. Writers, like everyone else, have the right to dislike individuals and whole nationalities and ethnic groups. They have the right to express their dislike if they do so rationally, are not legally defamatory, and if they are within the bounds of civilised taste. Our publications will never be hounded into politically correct avoidance of any forceful opinion touching ethnicity, sectarianism, gender or sexual orientation. To do so would be to accept a muzzle on freedom of expression and to prevent comment on large and interesting aspects of life. My associates and I would shut down our publications rather than submit to such restrictions.
Unfortunately, last week in this magazine, Taki’s reflections were indefensible. He expressed a hatred for Israel and a contempt for the United States and its political institutions that were irrational and an offence to civilised taste. In the process, I am afraid he uttered a blood libel on the Jewish people wherever they may be.
He wrote that the United States had intended to invade French air space to force down fugitive financier Marc Rich’s aeroplane (on orders ultimately from the same commander-in-chief who has now pardoned Rich); that Israeli intelligence knew more of US Air Force activities than the Pentagon did and shared this information with Rich because Israel’s favour had been bought by Rich. For Taki, the United States was not yet ‘Israel-occupied territory’; that is, occupied by ‘those nice guys who attack rock-throwing youth with armour-piercing missiles’. He acknowledged his anti-Semitism but implicitly defined it as ‘daring to protest about soldiers shooting at kids’, and he asserted that ‘the way to Uncle Sam’s heart runs through Tel Aviv and Israeli-occupied territory’.
In both its venomous character and its unfathomable absurdity, this farrago of lies is almost worthy of Goebbels or the authors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Jews, according to Taki, have suborned the US government, direct that country’s military like a docile attack dog, and glory in the murder of innocent or mischievous children. He presents the universal Jewish ethos as brutish, vulgar, grasping and cunningly wicked.
It is a fearful thing to contemplate that someone with whom I have had such long and cordial relations should use a publication of ours for such malignant purposes, however veiled in his familiar recourse to harmless excess, or even amplified by his frequent and publicly confessed intake of intoxicating substances.
I wouldn’t suspect Taki of co-ordinating his views with anyone else’s. But his opinions are not greatly more extreme than those of large sections of the British media which habitually apply a double standard when judging the Israelis and Palestinians. Behind the spurious defence of merely seeking justice for the Palestinians, most of the relevant sections of the BBC, Independent, Guardian, Evening Standard and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office are rabidly anti-Israel. I doubt that most of the people involved would be hostile to someone merely because that person was Jewish, though some would, but they are almost all, wittingly or not, stoking the inferno of anti-Semitism.
The origins of the Arab–Israeli problem are too complicated for easy summary, but among the points normally overlooked by most of the British media is that the government of the United Kingdom bears a unique responsibility for the problem. It sold the same real estate twice. In the direst moments of the first world war Britain promised the same territory to the Jews and to the Arabs.
Israel, after an unconscionable length of time, and with the exact borders still in dispute, has accepted the principle of two states in the territory it once hoped to occupy itself. The Palestinians have not accepted the right of the state of Israel to survive. They do not accept the Israelis as an indigenous people and still think of them as foreign colonial occupiers like the British, the Turks and the Romans. This and the implosion of Arafat’s authority among his own people, and not the actions of the Israelis, are the sources of the present impasse, and every knowledgable observer of the Middle East knows it.
The West Bank is now governed by groups of thugs, and Arafat has been afraid to go there for several months. The Palestinian Authority is a brutal dictatorship and one of the most financially corrupt regimes in the world. The PLO has not lived up to any of its significant obligations under the Oslo Accords, including expunging the anti-Israel clauses of the Palestine National Charter. Barak went as far as any Israeli leader could possibly go at Camp David and was rewarded with rejection by Arafat and the unleashing of a new insurrection. Large numbers of Palestinians have been persuaded that glorious eternity awaits them if they manage to die at the hands of the Israelis. Fortified by this belief, mobs of stone-throwers have been pushed forward with snipers interspersed among them and children in the vanguard to take the brunt of the Israeli response. Sharon gave the Muslim leaders plenty of notice of his now famous ten-minute walk on the Temple Mount, and did nothing on it that was disrespectful of Islam or of the Palestinian people. Arafat has declared that he requires an almost unlimited right of return of designated Palestinians, including millions born after the initial departure in 1948, and the demographic inundation of Israel with Arabs. It is as if the UK were asked to receive 60 million people of a foreign nationality with which we had been at war for more than 50 years. Apart from Adolf Eichmann, Israel has never executed anyone, including terrorists — a refreshing contrast to the peremptory executions routinely conducted by the Palestinians and some other neighbouring regimes.
We hear almost nothing of any of this from most of the British media or the Foreign Office. We hear only shrill orchestrated solicitude for the supposed underdog and relentless antagonism against Israel — ostensibly the Israeli government but, inevitably and implicitly, the Jews.
These Jews are the same people whom Pope John Paul II has recognised as ‘not the cousins but the brothers and sisters of all Christians, the chosen people of the Old Testament’, to whom the world should repent, as he did, for millennia of oppression. The Pope’s own record in these matters is exemplary, but he repented for his one billion co-religionists and for the 2,000-year history of the world’s foremost Church.
Israel has many failings, and of course the treatment of the Palestinians by the Israelis, by the Arab powers who keep them in the camps (breeding grounds for their terrorist cannon fodder), and by the United Nations is a crime in which we are all complicit. Of course the world must put this right.
But we will not put it right by returning to the ancient and evil practice of persecuting the Jewish people, to whom we owe so much for its genius in almost every field and its courage in heroic circumstances for nearly 6,000 years. The Jews, as much as any other people, have shown the world what human bravery and perseverance can achieve. It was pathetic and shaming that many of the distinguished leaders of London’s Jewish community felt the need to tell me last week, after local performances of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra, that they hoped that ‘people will realise that Israel doesn’t just quell Palestinian riots’.
All Israel really wants is to be like other countries, to be accepted in the world as a people with dignity and a right to a state. Israel has that right. It is a sophisticated democracy and a society of laws. Those neurotic racists who dispute that right should be forced to come out from behind the skirts of legitimate differences of opinion in Middle Eastern controversies. They should be made to face those who would be their victims.
And those who have assisted them, through lassitude or negligence or malice, should follow the Pope’s inspiring example: they should repent. The Pharisees and hypocrites in the British press should repent their calumnies. A few days after Arafat cavalierly rejected generous concessions from Israel and unleashed his latest bloodbath, the Foreign Secretary was photographed walking hand-in-hand with Arafat and caused Britain to condemn Israel at the United Nations. He should repent and exorcise the institutional bias of his department.
In our publications justice will be done.
All the above were examples of genocides, or attempted genocides.
Yeah, kind of like that. But no one around here is promoting Foxman's view. You, on the other hand, are promoting this Jew-hater's view. I wonder why. Is he even a conservative?
Did I mention he's been known to refer to blacks as Sambos? Not so bad I guess, he's a defender of Christianity after all.
There were various genocides throughout the last century and the US let the savagery go on. The Jews are not more or less valuable than any other group of people. The crime in Darfur counts 70,000 villagers so far. These acts are horrible but the US is not "charged" with preventing any savagery unless it affects our own security.
11 million, possibly as high as 26 million.
Get off it. Everything in the article I posted is true. I have a problem with the Christmas censors -- and I'm going to post every article that exposes them. IF you have a problem with that, that's your problem.
If Abe Foxman wrote something sensible, I'd post it, even though he is just as much a bigot as David Duke - or just as much a bigot as the supervisor in Long Island who yelled at the priest.
If you expect me to be quiet while Christmas and Christians are shouted down in incidents like that, sorry I won't oblige. I wouldn't expect you to be quiet - I'd be ashamed of you if you were -- if some antisemite bigots did that to a rabbi.
In Bosnia there was no genocide or attempt to commit one.
But the one of the greatest genocides, going on now with our permission, is the mass killing of unborn babies.
Public monument/sculptures/"memorials", then, like the one in question, are the physical "civic" equivalent of the inescapability of the same kinds of things the MSM foists upon us, the ubiquity of Al Sharpton, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Jesse Jackson, and on and on, and more appropriately in the case of the Holocaust Memorial, the late and not terribly lamented Rabbi Meir Kahane.( In this connection, my 9 year old daughter came home from School #6 in Cliffside Park New Jersey breathlessly telling us "You remember meeting Nora Nossair and her mother and father at the Parent' Night right after school started? It was her father who shot that guy, that Rabbi, in the City!")
I am not suggesting that death or vandalism is or should be the preferred method of dealing with obnoxious or offensive entities, just that it is sometimes inevitable.
I am going to make it my business to learn more about this, and more about the (obviously) political impetus that
is the active ingredient in the erection of "monuments" of this type. Why could the thing not be erected in some relatively obscure corner of the city, or in an open field, or even on the grounds on or near a cemetery, where people ALSO come to pay their respects to the dead. Why couild it not have been more subtle and tastefull , like Mai Lin's Vietnam Wall Memorial, which time has proven to be the PERFECT memorial/ I know, I spent an hour which ended in tears in front of that one,tears of gladness, at searching for the names of everyone in my Basic Training Unit, and could find not a single one.
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