Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Real Nazis

While Americans celebrated Independence Day,
German neo-Nazis tore up and burned a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank after hijacking a traditional gala...
The book-burning, which has chilling parallels to the 1930s when Nazi supporters made pyres of books written by Jews, follows a string of high-profile attacks by racist gangs on blacks.
The neo-Nazis descended on a field in the village of Pretzien, Saxony, where local people were re-enacting a pagan rite celebrating midsummer. A bonfire was lit and the book and flag destroyed. Before they burned the book, the extremists used it as a football in a drunken kick-around...
I draw your attention to this article because so many District 214 teachers, parents, and students saw fit to draw a comparison between Hitler/Nazis and today's conservative Christian community. The analogy is not only egregiously offensive, but is just dead wrong - and it demonstrates a void of appreciation for the utterly evil motives of Hitler and other Nazi leaders, an ignorance of the violence and suffering they perpetrated on millions.

Consider this recent episode. What kind of person tears up and burns a book written by a little girl who spent three years of her short life in an attic, who was betrayed into the hands of murderers, who died in a concentration camp? Who cheers and chants over that? Think about the heart of such a man - the venom, the sheer idiocy. That is the kind of person to which we Christians were likened; those are the motives that were imputed!

Did you see Leslie Pinney and all her supporters kicking and destroying and burning books? Did they chant and dance? Do they hate - literally desire the deaths of - the authors?

Such an insulting comparison demands only disrespect for the one who draws it...especially where that person purports to teach school children.