nazism
t’s more than likely that you have asked yourself in the early parts of this new year, “What am I supposed to do?” As we watch the country slip further into the abyss of “papers please,” and witness Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents operating as though they are a death squad, it’s fair to feel overwhelmed; it’s fair to wonder if anything can be done at all.
Sometimes, the best thing to do during times of authoritarian rule is to pause and reflect. When we do this, we realize two things: First, there are many ways, both materially and emotionally, to support those who are being targeted by a regime. Second, although we, like the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, may wonder if we are “one untimely born,” our existence is perfectly timed for this moment.
A resource to help those of us looking to pause and reflect so that we can take action is Hanna Reichel’s new book, For Such a Time as This: An Emergency Devotional.
New York City Comptroller Brad Lander was arrested by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on June 17. At a lower Manhattan courtroom, Lander and his staff were attempting to escort a migrant after his court hearing. Seen repeatedly asking ICE agents to produce a judicial warrant, and asserting that they couldn’t arrest an American citizen, Lander was roughly detained and later released, the most recent in a string of Democratic politicians arrested by federal authorities.
IN MAY 1933, Nazi-influenced student groups publicly burned more than 25,000 books by Jewish authors and those deemed liberal or leftist in 34 university towns across Germany. Newspapers supported it as “action against the un-German spirit,” and Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, said to a crowd of 40,000 that “the era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end. ... The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character.”
This antisemitic act of censorship and intolerance is memorialized at the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem, where a display about book burnings sets the tone for the rest of the museum. Before you enter the display on the rise of Nazism, you must first consider the gravity of book burnings. A prophetic quote from 19th century German poet Heinrich Heine concludes the display: “Where books are burned, human beings are destined to be burned too.”
Across the city, in East Jerusalem, is the Palestinian-run Educational Bookshop. It consists of an English store, which doubles as a coffee shop, workspace, and community hub, and an Arabic store across the road. This family-owned business, which opened in 1984, sells all sorts of titles related to Palestine. There are Palestinian books on cooking, art, and history; there are novels, textbooks, and children’s books. The Educational Bookshop carries titles that are hard to find within Israel, and on a Sunday afternoon in February, this popular bookstore was raided by undercover Israeli police for the first time.
“They came into the shop with a search warrant,” Ahmad Muna, assistant manager of the shop, told me. “They demanded a search that happened over the course of two hours. The officers were aggressive, brutal, were not polite.” According to Muna, the officers didn’t speak Arabic or English; at first they used Google Translate to figure out book titles.
“At some point they had enough of Google Translate,” Muna said, “It was getting too tedious. So, they started to judge the books by their covers, by the design, by the picture on the cover, any book that had the flag of Palestine, any book that had a picture of a prisoner, of a boy being arrested, a picture of the wall, a picture of a Palestinian flag, it was confiscated.”
Police took away about 300 books in trash bags. Muna and his uncle were arrested and detained for two nights. After release, both were put under house arrest for five days and banned from entering their shop for more than two weeks.
A 94-year-old former SS guard at Auschwitz was convicted in a German court of complicity in the murder of 170,000 people at the Nazi death camp and sentenced to five years in jail, according to media reports.
The verdict in the case against Reinhold Hanning was announced June 17 by the judge presiding over what is likely Germany’s last Holocaust trials, Reuters reported. Hanning, who could have faced a 15-year sentence, will remain free pending any appeals.
It was announced today that Glenn Beck will end his program on the Fox News Channel later this year in order to create a "variety of television projects for air on the Fox News Channe
I thought Glenn Beck must have moved on to other things, but the other night, he went back to his attack on social justice churches. This time the issue was climate change.
I got up at 4:30 a.m. on Tuesday morning to fly to Phoenix, Arizona, to speak at a press conference and rally at the State Capitol at the invitation of the state's clergy and other leaders in the immigration reform movement.
By now, most of you have heard the brouhaha regarding what Glenn Beck said on his radio and TV show recently:
Recently Glenn Beck made some comments about leaving a church if the priest or pastor speaks about "social justice." He instructed his listeners to "look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church Web site" and then, should they find those words, told t