President Obama awarded a posthumous Medal of Freedom to a Polish war hero on Tuesday, but nonetheless managed to upset much of Poland in the process.
Yiddishe Lebn; Hasidus: Wissenschaft des Judentums; Zionismus des Geistes; Folk Music--even some shoutouts to my brothers and sisters and non-binary kin of all Jewish ethnicities
Poland Angered By Obama's "Death Camp" Reference
The president’s poor choice of words during a medal ceremony has upset Polish politicians.
| Posted Wednesday, May 30, 2012, at 11:11 AM ET
The incident in question occurred when the president was honoring Jan Karski, a resistance fighter in Poland against Nazi occupation during World War II. “Before one trip across enemy lines,” Obama recounted of Karski, who died in 2000, “resistance fighters told him that Jews were being murdered on a massive scale, and smuggled him into the Warsaw Ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself.”
The problem? Poland doesn’t take too kindly to anyone referring to WWII concentration camps as “Poland death camps.” (This has been an issue before.)
After Polish politicians quickly expressed their displeasure with the president’s choice of words, the White House said that Obama meant no offense and merely misspoke, CBS News reports.
Still, that wasn’t enough to quell Polish anger. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusks responded to the White House correction on Wednesday, saying in a statement that Obama’s remarks were “painful” and a “distortion of history,” adding “I am convinced that today, our American friends are capable of a stronger reaction.”
In other news, Poland can go suck a fuck.
wow shut up poland
oh wow it’s like the holocaust is a touchy subject in a country that was invaded, occupied for years, and had its citizens subjected to death camps, some of which citizens are still alive today
you know what country that doesn’t sound like? america
perhaps the white house, with its shitty faux-apologies, is in fact the party involved here that can go suck a fuck
WHOA I KNOW THIS IS GOING TO BLOW YOUR MIND BUT THE POLISH PEOPLE ACTIVELY PERPETUATED THE ANTISEMITISM THAT FUELLED THE HOLOCAUST
By the time of the German invasion in 1939, antisemitism was escalating, and hostility towards Jews was a mainstay of the right-wing political forces post-Piłsudski regime and also the Catholic Church. Discrimination and violence against Jews had rendered the Polish Jewish population increasingly destitute, as was the case throughout much of Central and Eastern Europe. Despite the impending threat to the Polish Republic from Nazi Germany, there was little effort seen in the way of reconciliation with Poland’s Jewish population. In July 1939 the pro-government Gazeta Polska wrote, “The fact that our relations with the Reich are worsening does not in the least deactivate our program in the Jewish question—there is not and cannot be any common ground between our internal Jewish problem and Poland’s relations with the Hitlerite Reich.”[87][88] Escalating hostility towards Polish Jews and an official Polish government desire to remove Jews from Poland continued until the German invasion of Poland.[89]
AND MURDERED LOTS OF JEWS BEFORE, DURING, AND AFTER AND THE LARGE MAJORITY CARED ONLY ABOUT THEIR OWN HIDES AND NOT THE KIKES’
SO I KIND OF HAVE NO SYMPATHY SORRY GOY
Gonna need some Polish Water Ice for that burn
Machistado: A homeless man gets his face eaten by another man. Who cares if his...
A homeless man gets his face eaten by another man. Who cares if his life is effectively ruined? Who cares about what a difficult life he must have been forced to endure? Who cares if he can’t afford medical treatment and the best hope he has is that some doctor somewhere in the country volunteers to help him? Who cares if he’ll probably end up back on the street if he survives without a face?
What’s really important is making crude jokes and obnoxiously talking about zombies. What is wrong with you people? I see nothing humorous about the situation at all. What a tragedy. It was just a homeless guy though, right? Who gives a shit?
Also: police brutality. Cops need to learn to reach for tasers, not berettas.
Re: jokes: coping mechanism. I am from Florida. Most of my friends and family down there are scared/take this seriously; yet they still crack jokes. These are not mutually exclusive.
applying for a job at CBST
which is in the meatpacking district
so i’m trying not to giggle
(they shouldn’t hire me)
The Curse of Millhaven: Dear community and everyone:
We’re never allowed to make a terms or words.
Clearly we must use the all-mighty dictionary for the source of all our problems! Oh wait lol the dictionary doesn’t have them 8’)
Time to…
Asexuals are oppressed like atheists are; i.e. they aren’t.
“The Gays” Contest: Runner-Up #1
By Ella German
The overwhelming outpouring of love after Maurice Sendak’s death makes any remembrance of him poignant. Maurice Sendak wasn’t closeted but neither was he a gay activist. We had to talk about whether it would be fair to use his characters to represent gay marriage. But he was, after all, always an advocate for being true to yourself.
Wild Things under a chuppah!
Mando, you’re way too generous to that sorry shitpile of an argument. Harris’s brand of consequentialism is nothing novel or compelling. And if I recall you’ve previously acknowledged his complete disregard for the cumulative work in ethics and the theoretical and terminological distinctions (pretty sure he just flat-out describes the frightful prospect of engaging with philosophy “boring” - VERBATIM - in a FOOTNOTE). He’s a liberal shithead reading his liberal shitheadedness into his work and maybe we should all collectively ignore the douche until he goes away.
I can’t speak to the logic here, but this man is indeed an Islamophobe and a self-hating Jew (but really more of an anti-Semite).
Fallacious as it is, I’m tempted to condemn Sam Harris to guilt by association, seeing as how he’s friends with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Too bad he’s completely ignorant of her life, and in so describing it reveals his Islamophobia: “She was barefoot in a Somali village, and as a teenager she was someone who thought she herself would put Salman Rushdie to death if she could only find him. And then she became this unbelievable enlightenment success story based purely on her own wits.” This completely ignores the fact that she grew up middle class in Mogadishu, a very cosmopolitan city, speaking English. That anyone uses the term “Enlightenment” seriously? Just…yuck.
I’m ashamed of this Jewish site giving him a platform. But they’re complacent liberals themselves who like to rack up the page hits.
“sorry shitpile of an argument” doesn’t begin to cover it. the idea that science is, in and of itself, an ethical and moral system that can make philosophical and religious thought obsolete is beyond reductive. there is also a pervasive ethnocentrism in all of harris’ comments regarding the role of religion in people’s lives, and it doesn’t surprise me at all that the content of this interview focuses primarily on judaism and islam — the former of which is a minority religion, and the latter, while being a major world religion, is still considered a minority religion in the West. for harris, religion is culture, rather than one component of a given culture. such religion-cultures are imposed upon groups, rather than chosen by them; and, because nuance is useless for someone like harris, religion-cultures are general and universal. in the case of judaism, jews are “religiously empty” because of the lack of requirement of a belief in god in the more liberal denominations but simultaneously exploit jewish history and culture to “spit on schoolgirls who are not properly veiled”; meanwhile, muslims are all potential terrorists waiting to strike, with the qu’ran’s explicit approval. particularities of culture and religious practice falls to the wayside, but even a critical practice of religion is suspect, because all religion is inherently false and irrational. for harris, the only route to moral, ethical, and intellectual freedom is to reject religion in all its permutations and practices in favor of an equally dogmatic faith in the power of science and rationality and a radically individualist standpoint.
it’s…really problematic, to say the least. i don’t currently have time to pick apart the racism, ethnocentrism, misogyny, and islamophobia that infect this piece as well, but all of it is absolutely there and they are absolutely facets of New Atheist thought that those communities of thinkers seem to have no interest in weeding out.
Reblogging again because the commentary is good and i despise this mamzer.
A Jew does not believe alone; he or she believes with the community of Israel; and shares an insight of three thousand years of Jewish history. All generations are present in every generation. The community of Israel lives in every Jew. Every Jew, and the individual Jew, can survive only through intimate attachment to involvement in the community.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Insecurity of Freedom (via hjordis)
Lane I have a question, do you honestly believe this
idk that I do
Idk. I have read a lot of Heschel, and he always speaks so damn metaphorically. Is this spiritual Israel, we were all at Sinai, etc etc? Or are we all chillin’ at the jcc? He also speaks historically, both with knowledge of history and for his historical moment; Heschel knows that the community (kehilla) has been our mainstay, but things are rapidly changing. Do Jews, as a minority, even have voices as individuals? Blessing and a curse.
(via lazersilberstein)
I usually love Heschel 5ever but you’re right, he’s ridiculously metaphorical. idk what I make of it. The Jewish community makes me want to vomit from my eyeballs sometimes but I wouldn’t trade getting closer to it and further away from the Soviet-bred contempt for Jewishness for the world. Idk how romanticized this is though, it reminds me of that Edmund Fleg “I am a Jew” piece where he’s like, “I am a Jew because in every place where suffering weeps, the Jew weeps” and I’m like, oh is that why I thought it was because I had Jewish parentage tbh
Well that just sounds cheesey as all hell.
A Jew does not believe alone; he or she believes with the community of Israel; and shares an insight of three thousand years of Jewish history. All generations are present in every generation. The community of Israel lives in every Jew. Every Jew, and the individual Jew, can survive only through intimate attachment to involvement in the community.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Insecurity of Freedom (via hjordis)
Lane I have a question, do you honestly believe this
idk that I do
Idk. I have read a lot of Heschel, and he always speaks so damn metaphorically. Is this spiritual Israel, we were all at Sinai, etc etc? Or are we all chillin’ at the jcc? He also speaks historically, both with knowledge of history and for his historical moment; Heschel knows that the community (kehilla) has been our mainstay, but things are rapidly changing. Do Jews, as a minority, even have voices as individuals? Blessing and a curse.
“The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.”
- Franz Kafka, The Trial
A Jew does not believe alone; he or she believes with the community of Israel; and shares an insight of three thousand years of Jewish history. All generations are present in every generation. The community of Israel lives in every Jew. Every Jew, and the individual Jew, can survive only through intimate attachment to involvement in the community.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Insecurity of Freedom (via hjordis)
:(
(via vladislava)
He’s not talking about the state
