Wish I could say I was shocked about this
http://first-draft.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2875&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0
Less than two years after it was plunged into a rape scandal, the Air Force Academy is scrambling to address complaints that evangelical Christians wield so much influence at the school that anti-Semitism and other forms of religious harassment have become pervasive.
There have been 55 complaints of religious discrimination at the academy in the past four years, including cases in which a Jewish cadet was told the Holocaust was revenge for the death of Jesus and another was called a Christ killer by a fellow cadet.
which was posted on Atrios today,
http://atrios.blogspot.com/
but I'm not.
I think I've posted here before about the guy in my Bible As Lit class who, calm as pie, stated one afternoon that, since the Jews did kill Christ, after all, they needed to start taking some responsibility for it (this was when he was arguing that I really needed to go see Mel's Passion, which wasn't, no matter what I thought, a piece of anti-Semitic crucifixtion porn) and do some repenting.
Since then, of course, we've had the incident where the kid was harassed for weeks by her fundamentalist classmate, because she was a Jew and Jews are going to hell.
We've had Bill O'Reilly and his buds, claiming (all a fat lie, of course) that they're being persectuted, PERSECUTED, I TELL YOU, because some clerk at some store (they claim, and even this turns out to be a fucking lie) says Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas to you. (They're being persecuted? That's persecution?)
We've had the little incident where I was volunteering at the school yard sale and the bright and chipper mother who was volunteering with me took up a fistful of dollars and told me, in a bright and chipper voice, "I'm going to go on out there and see if I can Jew some of them down!" and darted out among the tables before I could get my breath back.
We've got a kid in one of my fellow instructor's classes last fall who called Shylock "that kike," and was bewildered when some of the other students objected. What could be wrong with the word kike, after all?
We've got some folk on the Right Wing musing that now might be the time to start shutting Mosques down. We've got Far-Right Christians using Stevens Creek Elementary to try to convince that country that evil liberals really are persecuting Christians and trying to destroy our Christian heritage. We've got the Frist declaring half the country -- all us Democrats -- to be "enemies of people of the faith."
And we've got David Limbaugh, yesterday on TownHall, declaring it's all just words, and words never did a damn thing to anyone, ever.
I love the Bushoverse. Except for the 24/7 vomiting, of course.
3 hours ago
2 comments:
The Air Force Academy is located in a very conservative (pity that "conservative" means what it means now) area of the country. And now that Christianity is tied with the military in this country, anyone perceived as not being part of "the mission" will be persecuted. No matter how good a soldier you are, it is not helpful to be Jewish, female, or gay.
I am doing a paper about one of my favorite characters in Literature and some of my research has taken me through paper after paper and book after book about Jewish stereotyping, persecution, and of course the "Blood Libel" and in all of my research it has made me ill to know that human beings can lose sight of their humanity in a second and kill. It's like what happened in America during the lynching of African Americans. My God, the lynchers turned the event into a picnic, taking pictures, letting their children watch the torture, burning, and ultimate death of the accused man or woman or child. What happens to humans when they allow these things to happen. And all of those people who think words don't matter, they need to go back and read what set these acts of inhumanity against the Jewish people and the African American people off. Words.
Post a Comment