Posts Tagged ‘holocaust’

Holocaust denier removed as head of Argentine seminary

Monday, February 9th, 2009

CNN) — A Holocaust denier Pope Benedict XVI welcomed back into the Roman Catholic Church last month has been removed from his position as head of a seminary in Argentina.

Bishop Richard Williamson, shown in a recent Swedish interview, says he'll recant  "if I find this proof."

Bishop Richard Williamson, shown in a recent Swedish interview, says he’ll recant “if I find this proof.”

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The views of Bishop Richard Williamson, who has led the seminary in La Reja since 2003, do not reflect those of The Society of St. Pius X, said Christian Bouchacourt, head of its Latin American chapter.

“It’s obvious that a Catholic bishop cannot talk with the ecclesiastical authority, but to things related to faith and morality,” Bouchacourt said in a written statement.

Williamson, shortly before the pope lifted his excommunication, denied the Nazis had systematically murdered 6 million Jews during World War II.

In his blog Saturday, Williamson, referring to himself, posted a note, saying, “His Excellency is neither dead, dying, nor retired.”

Earlier Sunday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel phoned Pope Benedict about the issue, though neither side seemed to have shifted its position over Williamson.

“It was a very constructive conversation,” the German government and the Vatican said in a joint statement about the call. Merkel and the pope expressed respect for each other’s opinion, the release said — diplomatic-speak for saying neither side budged.

Merkel demanded Tuesday that the pope firmly reject Holocaust denial.

“The pope and the Vatican must make absolutely clear that there can be no denial of the Holocaust,” Merkel said.

The Vatican has pointed to several statements by Pope Benedict in the past few years condemning the destruction of European Jewry, including his visits to concentration camps. He has also said he did not know of Williamson’s views on the Holocaust when he lifted the excommunication.

“I believe that the historical evidence is strongly against — is hugely against — 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler,” Williamson said recently in an interview with a Swedish television station, which also appeared on various Web sites after its broadcast. “I believe there were no gas chambers.”

Germany’s Catholic bishops Saturday called for the expulsion of Williamson, a member of an ultra-conservative group expelled from the Church by Pope John Paul II in 1988.

Read Complete article….

Holocaust denier removed as head of Argentine seminary – CNN.com.

The Bergen-Belsen Memorial Museum Views the Holocaust Not From Then but From the Here and Now

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

BERGEN-BELSEN, Germany — Habbo Knoch, who runs the new Bergen-Belsen Memorial at the former concentration camp, invited various scholars and museum directors to a four-day conference here last week called “Witnessing: Sites of Destruction and the Representation of the Holocaust.” He asked a question one evening during a break: “Will people in 20 years look back and say we built a museum that focuses on Nazi genocide while Darfur was happening? Will they ask whether anyone raised this issue?”

Consider it raised.

The new memorial is an immense concrete and glass museum emerging from a copse of trees beside the cemetery of mass graves (there are more than 70,000 bodies buried there), which had been the camp site. The permanent exhibition is a model of its kind, focused on the meticulous and sober reconstruction of the past. From time to time the present literally intrudes with a bang, though, when practice rounds of tank fire from the British military base next door boom over the treetops.

VIEW COMPLETE STORY HERE:

Abroad – The Bergen-Belsen Memorial Museum Views the Holocaust Not From Then but From the Here and Now – NYTimes.com.

The Diary of Anne Frank, Nicholas Crane’s Britannia, Antiques Roadshow, The Antiques Rogue Show

Sunday, January 18th, 2009

Anne Frank

Amsterdam has three main attractions: Rembrandt in the Rijksmuseum; hookers in windows; and Anne Frank in the attic. It’s a contradictory cultural compendium in a contradictory city. You walk past the office on the canal, above and behind which are the secret rooms the Frank family silently lived in for two years; beneath it is a long, silent line of American-Jewish students waiting to get in for half an hour’s empathy. And you know that somewhere down this street or the next one is the house of the person who betrayed the Franks. Unknown, unremarked, still secret, there is a room where someone sat and thought: “After lunch, I must pop down to the Gestapo and hand in that family in the attic.” The Dutch hid 30,000 Jews, most of whom survived the war, but handed over more than 100,000, most of whom didn’t.

The English translation of Anne Frank’s diary was published here in the 1950s. It made a modest impact and went out of print. It was in America and, oddly, Japan that it became iconic. In Germany, it was regularly accused of being a forgery; too well written for an adolescent, they said. Anne did rewrite it. She wanted to be a novelist, dreamt of it being published; after the war, her father censored it to take out the critical things she had said about her mother. After he died, they went back in.

The Diary of Anne Frank, Nicholas Crane’s Britannia, Antiques Roadshow, The Antiques Rogue Show – Times Online.

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  • February 6
    “Imagine a gathering of worldly-minded, timorous people whose highest law in everything is a slavish regard for what others, what ‘they’ will say and judge, whose sole concern is that unchristian concern that ‘everywhere they speak well’ of them, whose admired goal is to be just like the others, whose sole inspiring and whose sole […]
  • February 5
    “And are there not many people who are like that, who own nothing except in the moment when they show it to others, who grasp only the surface, not the essence, who lose everything if this appears…” ——————————————————– ~Source: Either/Or (1843) Author: Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Victor Eremita Filed under: Blooms Tagged: Either/Or, Victor […]
  • February 4
    “All ironical observations depend upon paying attention to the ‘how,’ whereas the gentleman with whom the ironist has the honor to converse is attentive only to the ‘what.’ A man protests loudly and solemnly, ‘This is my opinion.’ However, he does not confine himself to delivering this formula verbatim, he explains himself further, he ventures […]
  • February 3
    “It is not impossible that it might occur to man to imagine himself the equal of God, or to imagine God the equal of man, but not to imagine that God would make himself into the likeness of man; for if God gave no sign, how could it enter into the mind of man that […]
  • February 2
    “So they sat in their quiet sorrow: they did not harden themselves against the consolation of the world; they were humble enough to acknowledge that life is a dark saying, and as in their thought they were swift to listen to see if there might be an explanatory word, so were they also slow to […]
  • February 1
    “But when it is a duty to love, there no test is needed and the insulting stupidity of wishing to test is superfluous; since love is higher than any proof, it has already more than met the test, in the same sense that faith ‘more than conquers.’ The very fact of testing always presupposes a […]
  • January 31
    “Why did Kant begin with quantity, Hegel with quality?” ——————————————————– ~Source: The Journals (1842) Author: Søren Kierkegaard Filed under: Blooms Tagged: The Journals (1842) […]
  • January 30
    “Oh, the sins of passion and of the heart — how much nearer to salvation than the sins of reason!” ——————————————————– ~Source: The Journals (18??) Author: Søren Kierkegaard Filed under: Blooms Tagged: The Journals […]
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