Report: Mormons Posthumously Baptize Anne Frank (this past Saturday)

[jsmirman]

87. As a Jew, I am disgusted by these critiques of my outrage

I don't even know how to respond to this without getting a post hidden, because I am angry enough reading these replies that a great deal of profanity is straining to fly from my fingertips.

The best I can do is keep it simple -

If you are not a Jew:

- You may not belong to a religion/race that had 6 million people EXTERMINATED with the acquiescence of a large swath of the world simply because they belonged to your religion/race.

- If you are of African heritage, and therefore share a similarly tragic history, you might just be offended, by, let's just say, the Catholic Church putting out a press release claiming Frederick Douglass owned slaves.

- If you are gay, you might just be offended by someone's claim that Matthew Shepard was self-hating and an avowed hater of homosexuals.

I use these examples, because I ask that people understand that the very reason that Anne Frank was killed is because she was a Jew, and any act (and no, I don't care to understand any esoteric distinctions regarding precisely what the Mormons thought they were doing - she has nothing to do with them, and they should stay the fuck away from her) that in any way suggests a negation of that Jewishness is mortally offensive.

Anne Frank, as I mentioned in another post, is of precious memory to most Jews, be we religious or overwhelmingly secular. Her voice, against impossible odds, managed to escape from under the crushing force of the Nazi jackboot, to be heard by the world even after that jackboot had snuffed out her young life.

If you are not Jewish, I'm not sure that you can understand what it is like to be raised with the knowledge that people tried to exterminate your entire race - to, for many of us, be raised around people who lived through that time, as it was not so long ago that huge swaths of this very same world either participated in this atrocity or stood by with their thumbs up their rear ends while the Nazis and their enablers tried to wipe us from the face of the Earth.

I find many of the comments here shocking, and I will leave it at that, except to say that over-intellectualization is not an excuse for cultural insensitivity.

And I certainly don't appreciate it being attached to a reference to Martin Luther, who hated Jews, and died and was buried by the hand of natural causes and according to his own wishes (or at least the wishes of his close friends), respectively, as best I understand.

The temerity of people telling me and other Jews what we should feel (and this is just what "why should anyone care" is a statement of) is stunning.