Mia Shem, Freed From Hamas Captivity, Talks About That It Was Like Being Kidnapped By Hamas In Gaza.

Mia Shem, freed from Hamas captivity, talks about that it was like being kidnapped by Hamas in Gaza.

Maybe a little wake up call for all the bleeding hearts in the West. Hope yall will be ashamed of yourselves by the end of the interview.

Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald

“Arbeit macht frei” = “work sets you free”

“Jedem das Seine” = “to each what he deserves”

Gaudir d'una posta de sol a l'ermita de la Mare de Déu de la Pertusa, Corçà, et fa sentir la persona més especial del món, per ser en aquest mirador excepcional sobre l'embassament de Canelles i la Serra del Montsec! Puesta de sol desde la ermita de la Mare de Déu de la Pertusa, Corçà. Este mirador excepcional sobre el embalse de Canelles y la Serra del Montsec te hace sentir la persona más especial del mundo… 

https://www.facebook.com/catalunyaexperience

amyisraelchai

Happening now: a march in solidarity with Israel near The Hague. Thank you to each and every one of you for coming out in support of the hostages and their families.

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I’m thinking about the documentary, Shoah. What I linked below is only part one, and I think part two is also right on YouTube. It is 9.5 hours long and is essentially nothing but witness testimony.

I understand why people wouldn’t have time to watch it, but I at least want to tell you about it. Roger Ebert actually wrote a great review of it, and I’ll include some excerpts here:

“There is no proper response to this film. It is an enormous fact, a 550-minute howl of pain and anger in the face of genocide. It is one of the noblest films ever made.”

There is a part where a Czech Jewish man named Filip Muller is interviewed. He had to work the door of the gas chambers. I won’t put his descriptions of the dead bodies here, but Ebert said:

“The images evoked by his words are unutterably painful. What is remarkable, on reflection, is that Muller is describing an event that neither he nor anyone else now alive ever saw. I realized, at the end of his words, that a fundamental change had taken place in the way I personally visualized the gas chambers. Always before, in reading about them or hearing about them, my point of view was outside, looking in. Muller put me inside. That is what this whole movie does, and it is probably the most important thing it does. It changes our point of view about the Holocaust. After nine hours of ‘Shoah,’ the Holocaust is no longer a subject, a chapter of history, a phenomenon. It is an environment. It is around us. Ordinary people speak in ordinary voices of days that had become ordinary to them.”

He talks about the calm and really unsettling interviews with former Nazis:

“Some of the strangest passages in the film are the interviews with the officials who were actually responsible for running the camps and making the ‘Final Solution’ work smoothly and efficiently. None of them, at least by their testimony, seem to have witnessed the whole picture. They only participated in a small part of it, doing their little jobs in their little corners; if they are to be believed, they didn't personally kill anybody, they just did small portions of larger tasks, and somehow all of the tasks, when added up and completed, resulted in people dying…The message of this film (if we believe in the brotherhood of man) is that these crimes were committed by people like us, against people like us.”

Filip Muller, mentioned earlier, shared his moment of despair when he heard the group of Czech Jews entering the gas chamber sing the Czech national anthem and “Hatikva.” He wanted to go inside and die with them:

“Q. You were inside the gas chamber?

A. Yes. One of them said: ‘So you want to die. But that's senseless. Your death won't give us back our lives. That's no way. You must get out of here alive, you must bear witness to our suffering and to the injustice done to us.’”

If you ever possibly have the time, please watch this, even just some of it. I can’t remember why I decided to watch this a few years ago, but I’m glad I did.

“Auch Adorno hat sein Buch, auf seine Weise, in Fragmenten geschrieben. Ohne offenkundigen Willen zur Fragmentierung, vielmehr, wie mir scheint, infolge einer extrem und beinahe bis zur Unerträglichkeit gespannten Aufmerksamkeit gegenüber dem harte Widerspruch innerhalb jener Dialektik ‘vom Standpunkt des Bewußtseins’ bei Hegel, die alles das ihrer Identität vindiziert, was von ihr differiert. Adorno versucht (ich sage nicht, es gelingt ihm, das gäbe keinen Sinn) nicht etwa, den Widerspruch zu erhalten, sondern den Bruch auszuhalten. Das Negative bei ihm und das Fragment bei Blanchot stellen den Versuch dar, aus dem Meistern eine Probe zu machen.”

— Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe und Jean-Luc Nancy: Noli me tangere, in: Fragment und Totalität, Frankfurt am Main 1984, S. 70.