Exhibit comparing Ahmadinejad to Hitler banned. Jewish groups not happy

[Starr]

A decision by Toronto's city council to ban an exhibit comparing anti-Semitic and anti-Israel statements of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with those of Adolf Hitler has drawn fire from Canadian Jewish groups.


The traveling four-part exhibit, of which the Ahmadinejad presentation makes up one part, has been banned by an ad-hoc committee within the council for being too controversial and inflammatory.

"The exhibit talks about the Holocaust cartoon contest and [Holocaust denial] conferences [Ahmadinejad] has held and his statements against the Jewish people," explained Avi Benlolo, president of the Toronto-based Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies.

"If this was Toronto in 1933 and we had an exhibit on Hitler and his danger to the Jews, that exhibit would be denied" based on the city's criteria, Benlolo believes.

"It is a shocking exhibit, but it's the reality. This guy is threatening to wipe Israel off the map, which is tantamount to genocide."

B'nai B'rith Canada's Frank Dimant called the city's decision "flawed," since Ahmadinejad "has repeatedly engaged in incitement to genocide against the Jewish people, all the while aggressively pursuing a nuclear build-up. The comparison to Adolf Hitler, with his genocidal agenda of annihilating the Jewish people, is an obvious one."

The exhibit "speaks to the importance of learning history's lessons," said Dimant, adding that he was hopeful the city council would reverse its decision.

The Toronto municipality's response could not be obtained by press time.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1222017383866&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

[Angler]

I still don't understand how the Jews can claim that Ahmadinejad wants to commit genocide against Jews when there are plenty of Jews living unmolested in Iran.

Then again, this IS the Jews we're talking about here. They are not ashamed of lying even when the truth is completely obvious.

[harjit]

There might be a conundrum here for the Jews.

On one hand, Hitler is supposed to represent ultimate evil, nobody can be mentioned as being in his league.

On the other hand, Almondine represents a clear and present danger so expediency would dictate that he be discredited to the fullest extent possible.

Hmmm, what to do....

[delete]

I still don't understand how the Jews can claim that Ahmadinejad wants to commit genocide against Jews when there are plenty of Jews living unmolested in Iran.

Then again, this IS the Jews we're talking about here. They are not ashamed of lying even when the truth is completely obvious.

According to jewish religion the persians are amalek, and they must be exterminated and have their memory blotted out:
Reflections on Purim and Peacemaking
Despite the Purim's story's message of revenge against our enemies, we'll all be far safer if we seek higher spiritual ground.
By Rabbi Arthur Waskow


Purim approaches. A giddy, hilarious, tipsy holiday, when Jews are masked to hide our ordinary faces and reveal some hidden facet for a flashing moment. We read a crazy story--the Megillah, the Scroll of Esther--under the injunction that we must hear every word, and shatter the reading with noisemaking "groggers" to drown out the name of Haman, an archenemy of the Jews we are obligated to hear.

How shall we approach the lessons of the Purim story this year, at a moment when Israelis and Palestinians are taking new steps toward peace?

It's a story in which foreboding is forestalled, and all has a happy ending. And God does not appear to wag a monitory finger.

Happy, unless we remove the mask of willed amnesia and remember that this Purim is the eleventh since Baruch Goldstein walked into the mosque at the tomb of Abraham our Father in Hebron and gunned down 29 Muslims who were prostrate in prayer, praising the God of Abraham.

Unless we peep through the mask of willed amnesia to realize that Goldstein was probably writing a midrash with his gun. That he probably chose Purim because he was responding to the passage late in the Scroll of Esther when the fantasy of armed and principled resistance to a band of murderous Persians becomes a Jewish fantasy of indiscriminate revenge. After the Persian king grants the Jews the right to defend themselves, they take revenge on their would-be killers by slaughtering 75,000 Persians. Goldstein's Purim slaughter admonishes us to reject a literal interpretation of the Purim story's coda.

At one level, the story that we read on Purim is about a genocidal threat aimed at the Jews, a threat that draws on the archetype of the genocidal tribe of Amalek, grandson of Esau. The Torah tells us that the Amalekites attacked the Israelites from behind, where the sick, the children, and the women were straggling as they fled from Egypt.

In a Torah passage read on the Shabbat before Purim, God admonishes the people of Israel: "Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey, after you left Egypt: how, undeterred by fear of God, he surprised you on the march, when you were famished and weary, and cut down all the stragglers in your rear. Therefore, when the Lord your God grants you safety from all your enemies around you, in the land that the Lord your God is giving you as a hereditary portion, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget! (Deuteronomy 25:17-19)

At another level, the story is a joke: What you intend to do to me, that's what happens to you. The wicked prime minister would hang the Jews? He ends up swinging from the gallows that he built for them. The pompous king refuses to take orders from a woman? He ends up doing exactly what Queen Esther tells him to.

But remembering Amalek has a much darker side. Goldstein killed his Palestinian cousins, children of Ishmael, out of his conviction they were out to kill the Jews. Out of his obedience to a very old command: Blot out the name of Amalek.

The Scroll of Esther hooks its little novella to Haman; his murderous agenda is clear when we learn that he is a descendant of Amalek. To this threat, as we retell the tale each Purim, the Jews respond first with diplomatic wisdom and then with a delicious, bitter soup of hot revenge that ultimately spills over into violence.


http://www.beliefnet.com/story/161/story_16186_1.html

I guess Goldstein should have killed persians instead.