How wonderful it would be if our communities could find ways to work together. Is there an opportunity for the leadership of the LGBT community to participate in a mission with Jewish leaders to Israel? Or perhaps an art exhibit featuring Jewish and gay artists that show how they grappled with their sense of “otherness”? Or perhaps we can find a meaningful day to say a prayer for those who have been lost to our communities because of hatreds past and present.Um, I'm not sure that the LGBT community has a designated "leadership," at least, not in the Official Jewry sense, and certainly not the sort that could be feted a la the United Church of Canada leadership. Not that shlepping them to Israel--Bernie's cure-all for die-hard, endemic Zionhass--would make the least bit of difference. (Who would you take on such a mission, Bernie--Susan G. Cole and her ilk?)
That said, at least this time around Bernie is quoting Robert Frost (yes, Robert Frost) and not "Fanny Brice."
4 comments:
Er, no, the Nazis did _not_ persecute homosexuals during the _Nazizeit_. That is one of those myths--like the fairy tale that a large proportion of the French population was involved in the Resistance--that has been invented long after the fact, for reasons of political expediency. The reality is that the Nazi party _attracted_ a disproportionate number of homosexuals (especially the predatory kind; e.g., Erns Röhm, the head of the SA, who eventually lost his power struggle with the SS and was shot in prison). William Shirer, who wrote the magisterial _The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich_, as well as a fascinating first-hand account, _Berlin Diary_, of his time as an American correspondent in Nazi Germany before U. S. involvement in the War, attests to it; He was there, he knew these people.
While it is true that some political prisoners in the concentration camps were made to wear the infamous "pink triangles," this was done to humiliate them (not least by marking them--and other male inmates who were deemed attractive--as targets for sexual assault by the "butch" homosexuals who were also disproportionately found among SS concentration camp guards and their auxiliaries. The novelist Leon Uris alludes to this disgusting footnote of Nazi history in _Exodus_.
The horrors visited upon the Jewish people by the Nazis were _sui generis_. Mr. Farber dishonors their memory by conflating them with a demographic that, when one cuts through the rhetorical camouflage of political correctness, is defined by their predilection for a repellent sexual perversion.
Bernie is out to lunch on this one.
That's a pretty astonishing non-sequitur, Carlos - as well as a seriously lie about German history. However, given that you characterize homosexuality as a "repellent sexual perversion", I can understand your need to distance worthy victims from victims you consider unfit.
I'll point out that your two actual citations are a novelist and a reporter (and yes, Carlos, they wrote Very Thick Books, but that doesn't really qualify them as "magisterial"), neither of whom denies the targeted internment and murder of homosexuals. A somewhat more "magisterial" historian, Martin Gilbert, details the process in considerable detail in both "The Holocaust" and his subsequent "Atlas of the Holocaust."
But it's certainly fascinating hearing the kind of lies I usually associate with Zundl and other vile specimens from the Shaidles of this world.
.... featuring Jewish and gay artists that show how they grappled with their sense of “otherness”?
No doubt about it. Faber has some severe mental problems.
[but we've all known that for a long time now.]
As Faber in his own words put it; he's a "known commodity". Mud.
Post a Comment