Saturday, August 18, 2007

Making Monsters at Beth Israel

Sometime after I posted them on this blog, those Zionist Orwellians (but I repeat myself) at Beth Israel Congregation (BIC) sent two incriminating photos "down the memory hole". The two photos showed a child and an adult posing in front of an Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) armored vehicle while on BIC's triumphalist tour of occupied Palestine this summer. Not unexpectedly, these photos are now missing from BIC's online photo gallery.

Well, Winston, you missed one. Below is a screen shot showing an even more incriminating (and heartwrenching) photo from part one of their trip photo album and below that is the same photo alone. The child in the center foreground--clothed in red and wearing a white ball cap--is the same child who posed in front of the Israeli armored vehicle, apparently, pointing an imaginary gun. This time he is with an entire group of young children and they are posed in front of a group of armed Israeli soldiers. Weapons are visible on the right sides of the kneeling soldier and the soldier standing second from the left. Rifle shoulder straps are visible on at least three of the other soldiers.



This is what Rabbi Dobrusin and the other leaders at BIC think is appropriate for young children to do on their summer vacation. Here's part of what Dobrusin wrote about the trip:

Through it all, there was the sense that what we were seeing and what we were experiencing had not only a historical dimension but a spiritual dimension as well. ... And through it all, there were the kids. Our group included more than a dozen children who played and sang and hiked and swam their way through Israel, building a stronger connection with the land and laying the foundation for future high school or college trips to deepen their connection with Israel further.

Nice little Jewish girls and boys aren't born as monsters, they are turned into monsters by their parents and rabbis, who inculcate in them Judaism's culture of death. Posing children in front of soldiers and their war machines is only part of this process of indoctrination--Jewish holidays such as Passover help make the deaths of others holy, justified, and, in the case of Purim, fun. Of course, not every Jewish child emerges from this process ready to slaughter or cheer on the slaughter of hundreds of people--as Israel did, indiscriminately, in Lebanon just last year--but far too many do.

See also: "Summer Camp Teaches U.S. Teens To Fight Israeli Style" by Chris Hedges on Alternet

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Comments:
I viewed the photos of well-fed, well-dressed, gleeful Jewish children and adults. Photos of azure pools fed by rushing waterfalls, breath-taking vistas of hills and desert landscapes. Photos of lovely homes and perfectly-manicured gardens and of plentifully stocked markets overflowing with lucious fruit of the earth. Photos of little boys clustered in front of armored tanks and surrounded by grinning soldiers armed with state-of-the-art weaponry probably from the U.S. And all I could think about was the juxtaposition in my mind of images of the rubble of bull-dozed and bombed Palestinian homes. Images of malnourished and maimed Palestinian children. Images of those same Israeli soldiers pointing high-powered automatic weapons at stone-throwing Palestinians. Images of the same tank plowing through and over Palestinian villages and olive groves. Images of sorrow rather than glee, of suffering rather than celebration. And poised above those images the glaring truth--that all those photos taken by the Jewish tourists were of land that they stole from the Palestinians. That all that beauty and wealth were stolen at the point of a gun or under the tread of a tank. And that all those relishing what they stole will someday have to face up to that awful truth. That is if there is any justice
 
This is why it's really important to target children directly, especially Jewish children, with educational material about the occupation, the true history of Zionism and so on. The best way to do this is direct mail. All high school students read their mail. If any of you have a student in school you probably have a directory of students. A direct mail to 100 kids will cost $41 and it cause far more uproar than any protest on the street. A lot of these kids realize on some level that they are being lied to, but they don't always have the other side. Another approach is to heavily flyer an area near a high school.
 
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