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And, yes, I DO take it personally

Friday, December 18, 2009

Aw, fer corn's sake...

it was only a little over a month ago that i visited auschwitz, took these photos and put up this post...

Photobucket
Poland: Auschwitz 'Arbeit Macht Frei' sign stolen

The Nazis' infamous iron sign declaring "Arbeit Macht Frei" — German for "Work Sets You Free" — was stolen Friday from the entrance of the former Auschwitz death camp, Polish police said.

The 5-meter-long (16-foot-long), 40-kilogram (90-pound) iron sign at the Holocaust memorial site in southern Poland was unscrewed on one side and torn off on the other, police spokeswoman Katarzyna Padlo said.

The theft from the entrance to the camp — where more than 1 million people, mostly Jews, died during World War II — brought condemnation worldwide.

i don't know what goes on in some people's heads...

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Saturday, May 24, 2008

Will the condemnation of the Holocaust by Hamas get any media coverage and, if not, why not?

PhotobucketPhotobucketPhotobucketPhotobucket

now, goddamit, THIS is news, or at least it SHOULD be...
[I]t should be made clear that neither Hamas nor the Palestinian government in Gaza denies the Nazi Holocaust. The Holocaust was not only a crime against humanity but one of the most abhorrent crimes in modern history. We condemn it as we condemn every abuse of humanity and all forms of discrimination on the basis of religion, race, gender or nationality.

And at the same time as we unreservedly condemn the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews of Europe, we categorically reject the exploitation of the Holocaust by the Zionists to justify their crimes and harness international acceptance of the campaign of ethnic cleansing and subjection they have been waging against us - to the point where in February the Israeli deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai threatened the people of Gaza with a "holocaust".

Within 24 hours, 61 Palestinians - more than half of them civilians and a quarter children - were killed in a series of air raids. Meanwhile, a horrible crime against humanity continues to be perpetrated against the people of Gaza: the two-year-old siege imposed after Hamas won the legislative elections in January 2006, which is causing great suffering. Due to severe shortages of medicines and food, scores of Palestinians have lost their lives.

It cannot be right that Europeans in general and the British in particular maintain a virtual silence toward what the Zionists are doing to the Palestinians, let alone supporting or justifying their oppressive policies, under the pretext of showing sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust.

The Palestinian people aspire to freedom, independence and peaceful coexistence with all their neighbours. There are, today, more than six million Palestinian refugees. No less than 700,000 Palestinians have been detained at least once by the Israeli occupation authorities since 1967. Hundreds of thousands have so far been killed or wounded. Little concern seems to be caused by all of this or by the erection of an apartheid wall that swallows more than 20% of the West Bank land or the heavily armed colonies that devour Palestinian land in a blatant violation of international law.

The plight of our people is not the product of a religious conflict between us and the Jews in Palestine or anywhere else: the aims and positions of today's Hamas have been repeatedly spelled out by its leadership, for example in Hamas's 2006 programme for government. The conflict is of a purely political nature: it is between a people who have come under occupation and an oppressive occupying power.

needless to say, this appeared in the guardian... if anybody sees this in u.s. media, please post the link in the comments...

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Friday, January 11, 2008

Spinning into nausea: why should BUSH'S tears be any different?

stress...? exhaustion...? weakness...? overwhelming emotions...? calculated political ploy...? you won't see ANY of THOSE questions in ANY media stories on THIS event...
President Bush had tears in his eyes during an hour-long tour of Israel's Holocaust memorial Friday and told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the U.S. should have bombed Auschwitz to halt the killing, the memorial's chairman said.

also not mentioned is the fact that this is bush's FIRST visit to israel in his 7+ years as president... instead, we get this carefully crafted piece of camouflage...
It was Bush's second visit to the Holocaust memorial, a regular stop on the visits of foreign dignitaries. His first was in 1998, as governor of Texas. The last U.S. president to visit was Bill Clinton in 1994.

Bush, making the most extensive Mideast trip of his presidency, was accompanied on his tour by a small party that included Rice and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

jeebus... the spin is absolutely nauseating...

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Saturday, October 27, 2007

Some of the most heart-rending photos I've ever seen

i have to confess, these really got to me...
Inmates at the notorious Tuol Sleng prison, where at least 14,000 people were tortured to death or sent to killing fields. Before killing the prisoners, the Khmer Rouge photographed, tortured and extracted written confessions from their victims.


Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide


Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide


Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide
He had a job to do, and he did it supremely well, under threat of death, within earshot of screams of torture: methodically photographing Khmer Rouge prisoners and producing a haunting collection of mug shots that has become the visual symbol of Cambodia’s mass killings.

“I’m just a photographer; I don’t know anything,” he said he told the newly arrived prisoners as he removed their blindfolds and adjusted the angles of their heads. But he knew, as they did not, that every one of them would be killed.

“I had my job, and I had to take care of my job,” he said in a recent interview. “Each of us had our own responsibilities. I wasn’t allowed to speak with prisoners.”

[...]

In the interview, Mr. Nhem En spoke with pride of living up to the exacting standards of a boss who was a master of negative reinforcement.

“It was really hard, my job,” he said. “I had to clean, develop and dry the pictures on my own and take them to Duch [his commandant at the prison, Kaing Geuk Eav, known as Duch] by my own hand. I couldn’t make a mistake. If one of the pictures was lost I would be killed.”

looking at those innocent, haunted faces is almost overwhelming... we must dedicate ourselves to insuring that horrors like this, whether in the killing fields of cambodia, the slaughtering fields of darfur, the concentration camps of germany, or the neighborhoods of baghdad, are halted, now and forever...

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