Emunah Magazine

Considering Adolf Hitler’s global name recognition – after all, politicians from Barack Obama to Hugo Chavez are compared to the Austrian-born Fuehrer every day – it’s surprising more companies haven’t discovered him as an advertising draw. Well, it’s not really that surprising, considering the issues of taste and basic common sense, let alone laws banishing his image and symbols from the public arena in many countries. But it’s springtime for Hitler again, because now the island of Sicily is testing the Fuehrer’s viability as a poster child – for jeans!

Last week in Palermo, the Sicilian “New Form” fashion chain store hung a series of new 18-foot posters displaying the dictator wearing a pink uniform and a heart-shaped symbol on the armband in place of the Fuehrer’s trademark Swastika. The slogan? “Change your style. Don’t follow your leader.”

As cited in the Corriere della sierra over the weekend, Daniele Manno, who is the head of Zerocento, the advertising agency responsible for the posters,explained his new campaign by saying “we have ridiculed Hitler in a way that invites young people to create their own style and not to be influenced by their peers.” The campaign, which began weekend before last and has been gaining notoriety ever since, is aimed at twenty-somethings, who have already finished school and supposedly know all about Hitler and his policies. Manno points out that his agency is an equal opportunity offense-giver, since it intends to unveil a set of new posters bearing the face of Chinese leader Mao Zedong.

But not everyone on this island, which endured both Mussolini’s Fascists and Hitler’s Nazis, is laughing. Rosario Filoramo, a city councillor for the centre-Left Democratic Party, has lodged a formal protest with Palermo’s mayor,Diego Cammarata: "The use of an image of a person responsible for the worst chapters of the last century is offensive to our country's constitutional principles and to the sensitivities of citizens," he said. Italy’s partisan movement has protested, and ordinary citizens have appealed directly to Italian President Giorgio Napolitano to have the offending posters removed – all to no avail.

Now I’ve been to Sicily, and the day I stepped off the plane in Palermo I couldn’t help noticing the Hitler beer and the Mussolini T-shirts they sell in the town’s many tourist traps. I also discovered pretty quickly that there were two kinds of shops: the ones where the owners had icons of the Virgin Mary and/or Italian saint Padre Pio in a place of honor on a shelf above the counter, and those with a lovingly polished bust of Il Duce himself. (Many Sicilians recall how Mussolini suppressed the Mafia during his long rule, for which they remain forever grateful to the dictator's memory.)

But that’s Sicily for you. Somehow I doubt the posters – and the jeans – will catch on in many places in the USA. Until they do, I’m sticking to Levis. You might want to do the same.

Today CNN broadcast an intriguing feature about Zablon Simintov, the last Jew living in Afghanistan. The report had a lot to say about Judaism, Afghanistan…and CNN itself.

Afghan Jewry may go back as far as the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian Captivity 2,700 years ago, and several of the country’s main tribes claim descent from King Saul. Afghanistan’s Jewish community can look back upon at least 800 years of tradition, including both happy and downright terrifying times. In the late 19th century it counted some 40,000 members, a number that dropped to a mere 5,000 by the mid-20th century due to the Afghan government’s anti-Semitic policies. Most Afghan Jews headed for Israel after 1948 and nearly all of the remainder fled when the Soviets invaded in 1979. The last families dribbled away steadily until now only Levin is left. He returned to Kabul during Taliban rule in the 1990s and has been living in Kabul’s sole local synagogue ever since.

Simintov, a former carpet merchant whom his neighbors simply call “the Jew,” has been something of a global celebrity since the start of the US/NATO occupation of Afghanistan and particularly since the death of eighty-year-old Ishaq Levin, Afghanistan’s second-last Jew, with whom the younger man had uneasily shared quarters in the dilapidated synagogue. “He was a very bad man who tried to get me killed,” Mr Simintov told the London Times upon the hated Levin’s death in 2005. “Now I am the Jew here, I am the boss.” Part of the conflict between the two men concerned the synagogue’s Torah. Levin supposedly told the Taliban that it was 400 years old and worth a fortune. The Taliban promptly confiscated it, and Simintov has been trying to get it back ever since. “They should cut his hand off,” he says of the Taliban official, whom he now suspects is being held at Guantanamo Bay. Among other tiffs, Levin and Simintov denounced each other to the Taliban authorities as Mossad spies, which got them beaten with rifle butts and landed them in jail for a time.

The hard-drinking Simintov has been the subject of several newspaper stories and a British play. Despite his rough exterior, he considers himself religious. He prays everyday and keeps kosher, slaughtering animals himself with special permission granted by the nearest rabbi, who resides in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. So far he has no intention of moving to Israel to rejoin his wife and two daughters in Holon, whom he hasn’t seen since his last visit there over a decade ago.

It’s easy to see why an infotainment operation like CNN would feature an anecdote like this. It’s the sort of human interest story that warms the heart of every Afghan War supporter. Doesn’t it prove that the US Army has once more brought the blessings of liberty to a benighted corner of the globe? But the pugnacious Simintov is anything but a pro-war poster child – a fact that CNN just so happened to leave out of its report. In fact, in a 2007 interview he said he preferred both the communist and Taliban regimes to the Karzai government, which he calls a “mafia regime.” It seems that agents of the American-sponsored Karzai administration confiscated $40,000 in carpets, leaving the once-wealthy merchant “poor as a dog” and dependent on handouts from Jewish groups abroad and from his Muslim neighbors. Still, he isn’t budging from his synagogue. It sounds like you gotta be pretty tough to be the last Jew in Afghanistan – and breathtakingly uncurious to work for CNN.

Below is the CNN Video

All the media attention swirling around supposed death threats against the makers of South Park over a caricature of the prophet Mohammed overshadowed another press story last week that might have a lot more to tell us about relations between the Muslim world and the West.

Back in 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten famously published a series of cartoons poking fun at Mohammed, which led to a global backlash resulting in the boycott and destruction of Danish products and over a hundred lost lives. A few months later a Pan-Arabist and anti-Zionist organization in Holland calling itself the Arab European League published its own set of cartoons ridiculing the Holocaust on its website in order to illustrate “the double morals of the West during the Danish cartoon affair.” The group wrote among other things:

1- The issue for us is not about depicting the prophet or any other theological consideration. It’s about stigmatizing a whole population of more than one billion Muslims through portraying their symbol as being a terrorist, megalomaniac, misogynic and a psychopath. This is Racist, xenophobic and calling for hatred against Muslims.

2- We do believe in Freedom of speech but we think that respecting sensitivities and being constructive is also an added value to a democratic society. We are against laws oppressing any form of expression no matter how appalling it is. Nevertheless, we condemn the selective indignation of Europe’s intellectual elite and population. When anti-Muslim stances are made or published this is perceived as freedom of speech and cheered and supported but when other sensitive issues to Europe like the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, homosexuality, sexism and more are touched, Europe’s elite is scandalized.

(…)

5- Arabs and Muslims are facing occupation on the hand of the west, oppression on the hand of the dictators often supported by the west and aggressive colonization by the Zionist and appartheid state of Israel. Adding symbolic offence to factual aggression is responsible for the tension that we are witnessing today. Any attempt to understand the cartoon’s issue out of the current international context is completely missing the point.

A Hague-based group calling itself the “Center for Information and Documentation Israel” then filed a formal complaint in Amsterdam, saying that the publication of the Holocaust cartoons was “a nightmare for the thousands of Jewish victims of the Holocaust who are still alive.” The AEL in turn argued it was merely going after the West’s own “sacred cows,” referring to a disclaimer it had posted stating that “in our cartoon campaign we do not endorse any anti-Semitic, homophobic or sexist stands. All we are trying to do is to confront Europe with its own hypocrisy using sarcasm and cartoons.”

Last Thursday a Dutch court ruled in the AEL’s favor, stating that “The context in which this cartoon was published takes away from its criminally offensive nature.” So that appears to be that.

So, are you shocked and appalled and already heading out the door for the nearest courtroom? Or, like me, are you merely surprised at how weak and downright incomprehensible they are? I mean, I’ve seen far better on the pages of (junior) high school newspapers! It beats me why anyone would bother taking these guys to court – couldn’t the money be better spent on giving them a couple of drawing lessons?

And yet – that’s also how I felt about the original Mohammed caricatures. While I will always support a free press as far as I have to go to protect it, it’s a totally non-negotiable issue, the Danish campaign – which was intended as a deliberate provocation – always seemed petty and mean-spirited to me, and the global reaction was a foregone conclusion. There was certainly nothing about those spectacularly unfunny drawings that could ever deserve the name “comics,” and the same goes for the AEL’s trashy Holocaust caricatures. You see, genuine comics charm and delight us. They make us laugh as they teach us about human nature. Thoughtful strips like Doonesbury and Peanuts, and clever political cartoons by such skilful artists as Pat Oliphant and Tom Toles – as hard-hitting as they sometimes are – enrich our lives while exercising our smile muscles. And then there’s the kind of toilet graffiti that tears down and demeans – and no one so much as the “artist” who sprays his or her message out into the world like an unpleasant body odor. And that’s the kind of “comics” I’m talking about here. They just aren’t funny.

Okay, I’m going into utopian mode now. Be sure to close the skylight before I head off through the roof! But it seems to me that if we could somehow harness the power of comics to laugh at our own foibles and take the occasional jab at our respective holy cows – just as Daniel Barenboim is using the power of classical music to bring Israeli and Palestinian young people together in his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra – we would all be a lot farther ahead than we are at the moment.

A while back an old comedian explained to me the difference between German humor and Jewish humor. In German humor, he said, you always need a victim. Whether it’s Jews or Poles or blondes, somebody has to bleed. In Jewish humor, by contrast, you always make fun of yourself. Guess which kind is funnier…?

In a disturbing reversal of symbolism, Israeli extremists are defacing Palestinian property with the Jewish symbol
By Judy Mandelbaum

Time was when Nazis used to slather swastikas on synagogues and Jewish businesses to prepare the local population for expulsion or much worse. It’s sad that this sort of behavior persists around the world, as a new study by Tel Aviv University shows. But it’s even sadder to see Israelis regularly defacing Palestinian property with Stars of David with equal glee and with what appears to be the same brain-dead mindset.

Star Of David Is New Swastika?

Your local paper might not have covered it, but in the wee hours of Wednesday morning a gang of Israeli settlers attacked the West Bank village of Hawara. “Palestinians reported two torched cars on the village’s central road early yesterday,” Haaretz writes. “A small village mosque, used only on the weekend, had the word ‘Muhammad’ sprayed in Hebrew and a Star of David. Haaretz also found graffiti with the Jewish prayer ‘Praise be onto him for not making me a gentile.’” The attackers also took the opportunity to destroy some three hundred olive trees, a major source of local income.

In February of 2009, a Canadian writer by the name of Marcello Di Cintio witnessed how “earlier this week, the IDF raided Jayyous. Soldiers entered the village at night, seized about a hundred young men and penned them in the school gymnasium. The troops also occupied several village houses and spray-painted a Star of David over a pro-freedom mural on a school wall. The IDF took about a dozen men with them when they left, and the men are still in custody somewhere in Israel.”

According to the Maan News Agency, in December 2008, “Israeli settlers rampaged through five villages in the northern West Bank early on Tuesday, vandalizing mosques, attacking farms and harassing residents. In the villages of Yatma, Qabalan and As-Sawiya, south of Nablus, settlers slashed the tires of more than 20 cars and also set fire to thousands of shekels worth of straw bales, used as animal feed. In As-Sawiya, settlers wrote slogans insulting Islam and the prophet Mohammad on the walls of a local mosque. [S]ettlers painted a star of David and slogans such as ‘Death to Arabs’ on the village mosque.”

“On 19 March 2007, Israeli settlers illegally occupied an empty four-story Palestinian building,” the Electronic Intifada reported. “This multi-unit Hebron building is close to the Kiryat Arba settlement of 7000 residents and is strategically located to link Kiryat Arba to the smaller enclaves inside Hebron’s Old City. … Palestinians say that another settlement will lead to yet another checkpoint and tighter curfews, further isolating this part of the city. Already settlers have placed a wire at the entrance of the Palestinian house across the street to trip residents as they exit their home. They have stoned the house and spray painted a Star of David on the front door.”

Also in 2007, Tim McGirk blogged about his own experiences in the West Bank for Time Magazine:

Not long ago, I ventured into Hebron … I wanted to see what [the Palestinians] thought of their Jewish neighbors. On this street, winding up a hill, it was easy to spot the Arab houses. Their windows and doors were covered in metal grills to protect them from stones, rotten fruit and the occasional gunshot coming from settlers living across the road. Over the years, a few Jewish settlers had also been shot by Palestinian militants, and Israeli soldiers had cordoned off this section, emptying life from the heart of old Hebron. The Arab houses were easy to spot for another reason. The settler kids had spray-painted a Star of David on walls of all the Arab houses. A religious symbol used for intimidation. I found this disturbing, like seeing the Klu Klux Klan’s cross blazing on a black man’s lawn.

Blogging for the Madison Times, George Arida described a visit to Nablus in 2003:

We stopped at Joseph’s Tomb, a site of archaeological and religious significance. It also had military significance; the Israelis had bombed it over a year ago (the dome and outside walls were damaged) and then had later used it as a base of operations. The soldiers had left a spray-painted Star of David on the ancient stone wall. This spray-painted souvenir was left by the Israelis on the walls of many buildings in Nablus.

Israeli troops pulled out of the West Bank city of Ramallah in 2002. “The home of Hamdi Flaifer, 35, was in ruins after an Israeli search,” the New York Times reported. “Windows were broken, furniture was smashed, sofa cushions slashed, closets and cabinets were emptied onto the floor. Just outside his front door, Israelis had spray-painted a Star of David and a number, indicating to other Israelis that his house had been searched.”

The Mogen Dovid is a symbol that has experienced a roller coaster of shifting meanings over the centuries. The six-pointed star was a symbol known to many religious and spiritual traditions and only became firmly associated with Judaism and Zionism in the late nineteenth century. But its power as a Jewish symbol derives less from what Jews have done with it than from what anti-Semites have tried in vain to make it into. Storm troopers painted Stars of David on Jewish businesses during their boycott of Jewish shops in 1933. In September, 1941, SS leader Reinhard Heydrich signed a decree demanding that all Jews in German-occupied Europe wear a yellow star – first to shut them up as potential defeatists, and later to mark them for extermination. After the war the new State of Israel chose the Star of David as its national emblem. Thus it has gone from a symbol of pride to a symbol of shame and fear and then back again to a symbol of pride and endurance against impossible odds.

Will it return to being a symbol of shame and fear — perhaps permanently? With attacks like the ones I described above on the increase, and now that the Israeli military has approved plans that could lead to the mass deportation of tens of thousands of West Bank residents on short notice, Palestinians are increasingly experiencing the Star of David as a threat to their very existence. This should be a scandal to everyone who remembers what the star has meant in the past. My message to Israelis is simple: Stop doing this. NOW.

Source: Salon

We’re living in the Age of Globalization, and it seems that chutzpah, like latkes, isn’t just for Jews any longer. Last week, retired Bishop Giacomo Babini of the Italian town of Grosseto told the Catholic Pontifex website that the Catholic pedophile scandal is being orchestrated by the “eternal enemies of Catholicism, namely the freemasons and the Jews, whose mutual entanglements are not always easy to see through. … I think that it is primarily a Zionist attack, in view of its power and refinement. They do not want the church, they are its natural enemies. Deep down, historically speaking, the Jews are God-killers.”

Giacomo Babini - Italian Bishop

You might think that the 81 year-old Babini had already said more than enough for one day, but once some people “pop,” they just can’t stop. “The Holocaust was a disgrace for all of humanity,” the good bishop told the world, “but now we have to look at it without rhetoric and with open eyes. Don’t believe that Hitler was merely crazy. The truth is that the Nazis’ criminal fury was provoked by the Jews’ economic embezzlement, by which they choked the German economy.” He concluded that the Jews’ “guilt is graver than what Christ predicted would happen to them, saying ‘do not cry for me, but for your own children.’”

Bishop Babini made the comments on Friday, but the story has only started hitting the fan (a.k.a. the global press) today. The American Jewish Committee already lodged a protest against the bishop’s statements over the weekend. Rabbi David Rosen said: “The high level of mutual trust and solidarity that binds our two communities today demands that there be zero-tolerance for such defamatory statements by religious representatives.” Babini himself now denies ever having made them. The bishop seems to relish controversy, by the way. In January he hit the headlines when he opined that the Church should refuse communion to gay people.

Now I may be woefully misinformed, but the last I heard the Catholic pedophilia victims were abused by ordained Catholic clergy, not by Jews. And while the Jewish community is hardly immune to sexual abuse, shoving the blame onto “the Jews” is just a little too convenient. But the Chosen People are just the latest in a growing laundry list of scapegoats for the Church’s own in-house meltdown. Other usual suspects include the Devil, gays, the “sexual revolution,” the media (particularly the New York Times), and finally the Church’s eternal persecution at the hands of an evil world – a persecution matching only that of (don’t tell me you didn’t see this coming!) – the Jews. (“The use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt, remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism,” a senior Vatican clergyman proclaimed on Good Friday) Anyone but the actual perpetrators and the people who have been shielding them for generations.
This latest scapegoating attempt came out not only in the days around Holocaust Remembrance Day but also on the heels of the latest alarmist report by Tel Aviv University announcing a drastic increase in anti-Semitic activity around the globe, and with historian Robert Wistrich saying that “We are in an era once again where the Jews are facing genocidal threats as a people.”

The report does indeed make for disturbing reading (particularly when it’s a matter of individual persons who happen to be of Jewish faith being targeted for violence by anti-Israeli protesters in their home countries). Even so, I always get a laugh when I hear the fantasies of Jewish power conjured up by Bishop Babini and old school anti-Semites of his ilk. I mean, if “the Jews” and their friends the freemasons could single-handedly pull off a massive worldwide sex scandal, what will we turn to next? Global warming?

Bishop Babini’s comments remind me of this tragicomic Jewish joke from the 1930s:

A German Jew in Berlin sees a Jewish friend sitting on a park bench reading the anti-Semitic Nazi rag, Der Stürmer. “Yitzak,” he says, “how can you read such a thing?”

“Well, David,” Yitzak replies, “I find reading the ordinary newspaper to be terribly depressing: it’s full of stories about gangs attacking synagogues, old Jews getting beaten to a pulp in the street, anti-Semitic slogans painted on Jewish shops. But here in this newspaper, the news is all excellent. It says here that we Jews own all the banks and newspapers and run all the world’s governments!”

( reprinted with permission from Salon.com )