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eretzyisrael · 4 years

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Lies Palestinians Tell at Christmas. Great piece by Barry Shaw.

When Israel relinquished control of Bethlehem to Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority as part of the Oslo Accord agreement in 1995, 85% of this prosperous town were middle class Christians. Business and life was good when it was part of Israel.

By Christmas 2019, Christians are less than 10% of the population in an economically stricken town.

How did this come about?

In 1995, Elias Freij was that the last Christian mayor of Bethlehem. He appealed to Israeli Prime Minister, Yizchak Rabin, not to withdraw from the city as part of the Accords due to his fear for the future of Christians in Bethlehem. Rabin wanted an official and public statement from the mayor to that effect to take into his negotiations. Freij and the church authorities refused Rabin’s request, and the rest is a tragic page in Christian history.

The Palestinian leadership blame the “security wall” for the current situation. They talk of Israel turning Bethlehem into “a prison.”

The British artist, Banksy, has advanced his reputation in left-wing circles by promoting propaganda graffiti scrawled on walls throughout Bethlehem. He has even built a hotel in Bethlehem called the Walled-Off Hotel which is full of imagery of Israeli negativity such as a nativity scene in front of a section of security wall with a shattered bullet hole which he calls “The Scar of Bethlehem.”

All this propaganda scandalizes Israel and projects Palestinians as oppressed victims.

Nowhere in Banksy’s work is there a mention of Palestinian terror promoted and rewarded by the Palestinian Authority, a prolonged terror campaign that has murdered hundreds of Israel and made the security barrier a necessity, or the threatening behavior of Palestinian Muslims that has driven out most of the town’s Christians.

Today, at Christmas 2019, Bethlehem is a once Christian town, with important churches, holy relics and sanctuaries, and a few Christians that live in fear not of Israel, but of Muslim Arabs.

The Christians I once knew had businesses such as tourist shops selling olive wood carvings and religious symbolism to tourists. They are gone. Their homes and the shops now occupied by their Muslim neighbors.

The Palestinians will tell you it’s all Israel’s fault. They are, after all, the perennial victim. It’s become and industry for them. This image sells as much as Banksy’s souvenirs in Bethlehem.

But is this the truth?

The Palestinians wanted a separation from Israel and when Israel gave it to them, they used the vacated territories to relaunch their terror campaign against Israeli civilians, killing thousands.

In the name of peace, Bethlehem was the sixth town that Israel vacated and put under Palestinian rule following its withdrawal from Jericho, Jenin, Tulkarm, Nablus and Kalkilya.

Initially, there was a free flow of people. Palestinian Arabs worked in Israel. Israelis visited the Arab towns to buy and enjoy the services of the local Arabs. Everything was cheaper than in Israel and the interchange was buoyant and good for everyone.

That was until Arafat commanded his troops to engage in what they called “the Second Intifada,” a brutal terror campaign. This was a repeat of an earlier Arafat-inspired killing spree against Israelis civilians that killed and injured many thousands of Israeli Jews.

The Oslo Accords was but a way-station on the road to the total destruction of Israel according to the Palestinian plan of Jewish elimination by stages.

After the slaughter, Palestinians complain when Israel put up barriers to prevent the incursion into Israel of Palestinian suicide bombers, gunmen, and other forms of crude terrorism.

I am witness to the change, the division, between Israelis and Arabs who want to call themselves Palestinian. In the past, we also enjoyed visiting Tulkarm to buy household goods and enjoy their cafes. I even had Palestinian Arabs work on upgrades to my apartment. That was before Tulkarm became a hotbed of competing Palestinian terrorism.

Killers representing the PLO, Tanzim, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, even Lebanese Hezbollah have emerged from the hellhole that once was peaceful Arab Tulkarm to kill Israelis, including women and children. I know. I became the co-founder of the Netanya Terror Victims Organization. Over 50 Netanya victims were killed, many more injured, some badly, in my small hometown.

Since Israel constructed a security wall bordering Tulkarm, no Israeli has been blown up by Palestinian suicide bombers.

The Palestinians of Tulkarm, Nablus, Hebron, and Bethlehem can complain about restrictions as much as they want. They have only themselves to blame.

Peace was once an option. They killed it. Deliberately. Let them blame their leaders, not ours.

One deceptive fable Palestinians tell the world is that they are trapped in Bethlehem behind oppressive walls and checkpoints, that it is a prison with no exit, that it is a form of apartheid, ethnic cleansing. Yet, it is a strange sort of ethnic cleansing prison in which the Christian population has fallen dramatically while the Muslim population has increased exponentially! It’s a checkpoint where Christians leave and Muslims enter.

Some ethnic cleansing! Some apartheid!

Christians are not trapped in Bethlehem. Neither are Muslims. They can go through checkpoints after an obligatory security clearance. Israelis, on the other hand, are advised not to enter Bethlehem. Road signs warn Israeli drivers that it is dangerous to travel on certain roads under Palestinian control, and are prevented from doing so in certain sensitive areas.

Contrary to Palestinian claims of Israeli “oppression,” in Bethlehem the major problem still facing the few remaining Christians is the duress posed by Islamic extremists and Palestinian bullies. They are the ones that are driving them out of that town.

The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, reported a few years back, “I have spent two days with fellow Christian leaders in Bethlehem. There are signs of disturbing anti-Christian feeling among parts of the Muslim population, despite the constant traditions of co-existence. But their plight is made more intolerable by the tragic conditions mads by the security fence.”

Both of these tragedies are the responsibility of the brutal and uncaring oppression of the Palestinian leadership and the emboldened Muslim population who have exploited the Palestinian-inspired turmoil.

In a televised report for Fox News by Pete Hegseth called “The Battle in Bethlehem,” Hegseth found it difficult to find a Christian willing to go on camera to tell him what they told him privately. He had several booked to appear. They all backed out at the last minute, even after he promised to hide their identity.

When Hegseth mentioned this to law professor, Eugene Kontorovich, the professor smilingly told him, “They are not going to tell you they live in danger, because they live in danger.”

Among the Palestinian Christians there are a radical minority that perpetuate an anti-Semitic Kairos doctrine of replacement theology. They help generate a relatively new Palestinian lie – that Jesus is a Palestinian.

Jesus has been hijacked by the Palestinian cause. Obscene conferences are held in Bethlehem including ‘Christ at the Checkpoint’ in which Jesus is presented as a Palestinian messenger.

In my role helping our terror victims I sadly recognize a Palestinian messenger when I see one. They usually come attached to an explosive belt, carrying a rifle or a hatchet. They also have a penchant for sending their messages attached to a rocket or mortar shell. We are still waiting for them to come with a message of peace. These Palestinian messengers are the antithesis of Jesus.

Hegseth went in search of what is going on with Jesus in Bethlehem.

He sat with Adnan, owner of the StarB Coffee shop. “Jesus is a Balestinian.” Most Palestinian Arabs cannot pronounce the letter “P.” “If you study all three books,” referring to the Old and New Testaments and the Koran, “he is a Balestinian.”

When Hegseth protested by saying, “But, for Christians, Jesus in the New Testament is a Jew and he went to the holy temple,” Adnan smiled and said, “He was born here and the Jews tried to kill him.”

Hoping for a more intelligent answer, Hegseth went to speak with Bethlehem University professor, Mazin Qumsiyah. According to the professor, “the word ‘Jew’ and the religion came in the 3rd Century AD, long after Jesus. I am Judaic,” said this Palestinian academic explaining it thus, “The Judaic people came from Judea. This is Judea. Jesus is not from Judea. He came from Nazareth two thousand years ago which was not a religious place.”

Continuing the myth, and contradicting himself in the process, Qumsiyah told Fox News, “If you are asking if Jesus was a Jew from a geographic designation, the answer is no. If you talk from a religion, only in the 3rd century AD does Judaism as a religion come.”

Astonishingly, or maybe not, this is what professors are teaching students in Palestinian universities.

Hegseth took this anecdote to Dr. Naim Khoury from the First Baptist Church of Bethlehem who shook his head.

“That is not true. You cannot find this anywhere in the Bible. How can you deny that Jesus is born from Mary of Nazareth and that her family was known as Jewish people?”

Everyone knows the pastor is right. Everyone except the Palestinians and their obsessed supporters. And maybe UNESCO and the majority of the UN General Assembly.

This then is part of the Palestinian conflict.

Hegseth asked Dr. Khoury why they deny the truth.

“Politics. It’s a very dirty game. When bad people play politics they can say what they want.”

Dr. Khoury is a courageous Christian. According to his bio, he has been shot four times and the Palestinian Authority refuse to grant his church authority to function as a religious institution, but the brave pastor continues to care for his dwindling congregation. His church has been firebombed and defaced, his members attacked, not by Israelis but by Palestinian Muslims.

The pastor’s son, Steven, told the 700 Club, “Christians are leaving because they are seeing that nobody is standing with them. They are seeing that extremism is growing, that an anti-Christian agenda is growing. Their ultimate goal is to put fear and submission into the heart of every Christian in the Middle East.”

First they came for the Saturday people. Then they came for the Sunday people. And shockingly, they are supported by radical elements among the Sunday people and a few of the Saturday people.

In a hundred-year conflict, ever since the anti-Semite Haj Amin al-Husseini set out on an incitement rampage exhorting Muslims to kill Jews. He was followed by Mahmoud Abbas his “Pay to Slay” incentive to kill Jews, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

We cannot build a path to peace, or a future, on the assumption that the Palestinians will stop their lies, their hate campaign, and their obsessive desire to kill Jews, and persecute Christians.

In Bethlehem, they are doing to the Christians what they did to the Jews. They are driving them out.

The lies that Palestinian tell at Christmas is an indication of the root cause of the conflict.

Likud-Herut UK

#Bethlehem #Palestinian lies #Christian #Israel

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arlingtonpark · 5 years

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Attack on Titan and the Myth that Won’t Die

Sigh, I really don’t want to be a rain cloud. I’m very caustic and critical in my posts and don’t want to come off as a sourpuss. Attack on Titan is a very political series in a time when the series’ politics is particularly relevant. It’s been fascinating to follow along, to say the least.

But I can’t really let this one go. This is a travesty. I can’t describe it any other way. If I learned I made a mistake as awful as Isayama’s made, I’d be crushed.

So it seems Isayama named, or even flat out based, Erwin’s character after Erwin Rommel.

Why?

And he made Erwin’s birthday the same day as when Rommel killed himself!

Goddamn it!

Damn it!

You know, people say SNK is Nazi propaganda, and they’re wrong, but Isayama himself isn’t helping.

Here are the facts: Rommel was an OP tactician. His tactics were cunning, clever, and he wasn’t like the others. He was a good man, not a Nazi.

He defied inhumane orders from his superiors, didn’t believe in Nazism, and, in fact, was directly involved in an assassination attempt on Hitler’s life.

LOL, not!

As World War II was coming to a close, the US military’s historical division began the work of creating an account of the war. Part of those efforts involved interviewing high-ranking members of the Nazi military. Those members did not have access to archival records (and neither did the historical division; those records were in the hands of war crimes prosecutors) and were speaking entirely from memory. As you can imagine, their accounts were rather rosy.

Not helping things was the person who oversaw the project: Franz Halder, a Nazi general who was thrown into a concentration camp after getting on Hitler’s bad side. When the camp was liberated, he proclaimed his desire to aid the Allies, which he did. Halder served as a star witness in the Nuremberg Trials. However, while he may have been willing to testify against members of the Nazi high command, he was also involved in white washing the actions of the Nazi military in general. Halder would use his position to help formulate this narrative of an apolitical Nazi military victimized by Hitler.

This would form the foundation.

After World War II and as the Cold War was beginning, Germany was split in two: an East, allied with the Soviet Union, and a West, allied with the United States. The West German government needed to remilitarize in order to deal with the threat of the Soviet Union and its allies, including East Germany, which was literally across the border from them.

To sell the public on remilitarization, Konrad Adenauer, Chancellor of West Germany, directed a PR campaign to convince people that the German military of the Nazi era, the Wehrmacht, was clean of any Nazi taint.

To this end, the Adenauer government worked to influence how the history of the war was written to cast the Wehrmacht in as positive a light as possible. They even enlisted former Nazis to write autobiographies that fudged the facts and pushed the government’s narrative.

The United States was partly complicit in this, since Adenauer demanded that the Western powers stop “defaming” former Wehrmacht troops and that soldiers charged with war crimes be released. The western powers accepted this, though not completely.

The German people were also partly complicit in this. Many Germans either served in the Wehrmacht or knew someone who did, so to taint the Wehrmacht was to taint yourself or someone you knew. Thus, the German people were largely receptive to this narrative.

And thus, one of the most enduring myths of history was born: the Myth of the Clean Wehrmacht.

The Nazi military was separate from the Nazi government!

The Wehrmacht was OP as fuck! They lost because it was all Hitler’s fault!

Wehrmacht soldiers had nothing to do with the Holocaust!

Erwin Rommel was a brilliant general and a good man!

The truth is far less rosy.

When the Nazi’s invaded the Soviet Union, Wehrmacht soldiers were informed that if they committed rape, murder, theft, or any other war crime, they would not be prosecuted.

The Nazi’s saw the war with the Soviet Union in ideological terms. The Soviet Union was a communist country and in the Nazi ideology, communism and Judaism are the same. Thus, the USSR was a branch of the globalist Jewish conspiracy to destroy the Aryan race.

With this in mind, the Nazi high command issued the Commissar Order. In the Soviet Union, commissars were agents of the communist party who supervised the rank and file troops. Their job was to enforce the communist party line. To the Nazis, this made them targets; they were the enforcers of the globalist conspiracy. Wehrmacht troops were ordered to kill any and all Commissars on the spot.

Wehrmacht troops were also ordered to kill all Jews immediately upon capture.

The general policy towards Soviet POWs for the first year of the war was to corral them behind fencing and leave them to starve. That policy was changed and afterwards, captured Soviet troops were used as slave labor instead. Over 3 million Soviet troops died while in Wehrmacht hands.

The Wehrmacht actively aided and abetted the Final Solution. They helped transport Jews to the camps and even took part in killing them.

Captured Wehrmacht soldiers, while living in Allied POW camps, would talk about their actions amongst themselves when no one was listening.

Except people were listening and their conversations were recorded, so we actually have a good idea about how much the rank and file knew of the Nazi war crimes.

They all knew. They knew because many of them perpetrated it. And in general, they supported it.

People will do many awful things when they think their race’s existence is on the line.

So that’s the Clean Wehrmacht Myth in general. What about Rommel?

The Good Guy Rommel Thing is the product of both the German government and the other western powers, especially the British. The two strains are separate, but there’s a strong interplay between them.

The short of it is that Rommel was elevated because everyone needed a “good German” to contrast with the “bad Germans” like the ones on trial at Nuremberg.

West Germany was remilitarizing and would eventually join NATO, and there was a push by some elements of British society to make Rommel the face of the Wehrmacht to soothe any anxieties from the general public. Several bestselling books about Rommel by British historians, all of them gravely inaccurate, were published shortly after the war ended.

The same was true on the German side of things. Adenauer made Rommel a point of focus in his PR campaign to soften the Wehrmacht’s image in the public conscious.

By this point in time, Rommel had already garnered a reputation for being a brilliant general not just from the Nazi’s (duh, for propaganda reasons) but even from the Allies (who wanted to save face after suffering some embarrassing loses at Rommel’s hands).

Rommel also supposedly played a role in Operation Valkyrie, which if you remember the movie from 2006, was a plot by a group of Wehrmacht troops to kill Hitler and end the war. Rommel committed suicide and this was lionized as an honorable act of defiance, an act memorialized in SNK with Erwin’s birthday being the same day as Rommel’s suicide.

In reality, while Rommel was indeed a talented tactician, he was also heavily criticized for being a rash leader who’d sweat the details too much. In any event, Rommel was far from the best the Nazis had to offer. That would probably be Guderian or Manstein. He was a respectable general, but not particularly praiseworthy.

Rommel committed many war crimes throughout his career. The Afrika Corps that Rommel commanded was not chivalrous. Like, seriously, is that a joke? They committed pogroms against Jews and utilized Jewish slave labor.

But it didn’t stop with that. Rommel gave license to acts of brutality in general. His troops would execute enemy soldiers summarily, sometimes via hanging. Those that weren’t killed had a good chance at being enslaved.

Rommel was also directly involved in the Holocaust. He used Jewish slaves to build concentration camps, which those slaves were then sent to die in.

The most famous vehicle for how the Nazi’s implemented the Final Solution were the camps, but less well known are the kill squads the Nazis employed, the einsatzgruppen. Rommel worked closely with the einsatzgruppen and even said that when the Nazis captured Palestine, it would be the job of the einsatzgruppen to kill the Jews there.

(A major reason why Rommel is so fondly remembered is because the first major biography of him was written by David Irving, who we now know to be a neo-Nazi and a holocaust denier.)

And as for Operation Valkyrie?

Rommel was charged with aiding the conspiracy but there is no proof that he did. None. At all.

Rommel’s suicide was sacrificial, but it was not an act of defiance. The Nazi’s had previously praised Rommel for propaganda purposes and that left them unable to put on a show trial and execute him. So instead they coerced him into killing himself lest his wife and kids be punished.

Rommel was a Nazi. He believed in the Nazi ideology. This was attested to by Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, who literally wrote that Rommel “…[I]s a national socialist.” Read: Nazi.

In fact, Rommel wrote to his wife saying he was shocked about the assassination attempt and was happy Hitler survived.

You see, he was a close personal friend of Hitler’s.

Soooooooooooooooooo………..

I knew the Good Guy Rommel Thing was popular, but God, wading through posts online about it was unbearable. I almost wanted to throw up.

Forget teaching financial literacy to high schoolers. We need to make information literacy a part of the curriculum. People need to learn how to gather information and evaluate its authenticity.

And maybe some education on logic would help. People admit Rommel fought for the Nazis but say he only did it out of loyalty to his country as if that makes him a good guy!! I am embarrassed for these people for saying something so ridiculous!

If there is an institution whose existence is unambiguously a problem and you are part of that institution, then you are part of the problem. If you are being coerced then that’s potentially exculpatory, but that’s a moot point because Rommel wasn’t coerced.

He. Believed. In Hitler.

I am completely dumbfounded by this! Rommel fought with full faith and conviction for the Third Reich. Does it matter that he loved his wife and kids?

No.

Loving your family is a given; you don’t get credit for that.

The Rommel Thing is a lot like how it is with Robert E. Lee in the United States.

For any non-American readers out there, the US once allowed slavery within its borders. But a movement to abolish slavery increasingly gained momentum and in the 1860s several states, wanting to preserve slavery, basically conspired with each other to destroy the country. War broke out and the rebellion was crushed.

The American Civil War was a momentous occasion in human history because it marked the first time a government was founded specifically on the ideology of racism. The Confederate States of America was an abomination. It was unlike anything that had ever come before. The people who gave their lives to defeat it truly are heroes.

Robert E. Lee was no such hero. He fought for the Confederacy. For slavery. For racism. Like Rommel, Lee is mythologized as a brilliant tactician who had an aura of nobility to him. It’s all bullshit.

And just like Lee, Rommel. Fought. For racism. Isayama, in his ignorance, has chosen to honor this man.

Let’s just take a moment to appreciate how incredible this is. A bestselling manga has a character based on a Nazi because the author cares enough about history to pepper his story with references, but not enough to do actual research! This can’t be happening!

If Isayama weren’t successful, famous, and popular, I’d feel bad for him.

I mean, it’s like, “Hey, check out this character I created. He’s a brilliant general who fights for his people over his government. I based him on Erwin Rommel.”

“Didn’t Rommel use Jewish slave labor?”

“...”

*cue sad trombone*

It’s not as if Isayama thought to himself “I want to name this brilliant general-type character after a similarly brilliant general from Germany” and just settled on Rommel because that the first person he thought of.

No.

Erwin’s birthday is the anniversary of Rommel’s suicide. Isayama is specifically choosing to honor the memory of this man. He could have chosen other generals to honor. Helmuth von Moltke. Carl von Clausewitz. Frederick the Great.

Or hell, it didn’t have to be a Germanic general. The Germanic setting isn’t a hard rule. He could have chosen Charles De Gaulle. Or Bernard Montgomery. The Duke of Wellington. Or maybe Horatio Nelson.

But no, it just had to be Rommel. Why?

My guess is that Isayama saw something in the Good Guy Rommel Thing that lined up with the story he wanted to tell. In the myth, Rommel is something of a freedom fighter. He was a good man who tried to do good in spite of the bad system he was embedded in, and ultimately died trying to overthrow that bad system.

If SNK in any way reflects Isayama’s own values, then it makes sense he would be enraptured by that accursed myth. There are elements of it all over SNK.

SNK is all about people living under oppression and trying to either overthrow it or work within it. There’s the oppression of the titans, of King Fritz and the Reisses, the oppression of the Marleyans, and hanging over all of this is the oppression of Ymir’s curse.

In the myth, Rommel is a good guy in a bad place who dies trying to change the world for the better. No wonder Isayama loves this tale so much.

But shit like this reeks of an annoying thing I see sometimes. One thing I’ve feared about SNK is that the author is the kind of guy who thinks he’s a Civil War buff because he read Shelby Foote. By that, I mean I fear Isayama only cares about history in a superficial way.

Attack on Titan is about freedom and what’s so cool about it is that it’s not about any one particular kind of freedom, but just freedom in general. SNK’s conception of freedom is very well developed.

Attack on Titan embraces a pluralistic view of freedom. Freedom means different things to different people, but at its core is self-actualization. Achieving some level of happiness or accessing the potential to be happy.

Having a loving family. Seeing the ocean. Being able to say you saw the ocean. All of these things mean freedom in some way to some one. They are each of them a different path up the same mountain.

The problems start to arise when the series tries to be more than a story with an interesting theme. Whenever the story pointedly tries to impart wisdom to the reader, it fails.

I can think of a number of examples of SNK trying to be smart and failing miserably.

Like when Armin said the people “have a screw loose” for thinking the titans won’t breach the wall after 100 years of trying.

Or when Armin said that Erwin being a bad person was a good thing.

Or when Armin said good people are just people who do things you like.

(Armin is supposed to be the smart one, which unfortunately means he ends up saying a lot of silly stuff whenever the author uses him as a mouthpiece.)

There have been some exceptions to this. Return to Shighanshina tackled themes of rising above nihilism well. I’m not sure it stuck the landing, but it handled things well enough.

And things are a bit interesting now that the story is tackling the theme of nationalism more explicitly. The way the series deals with nationalism is actually kind of nuanced and that’s appreciated. I guess.

My sense is that the Good Guy Rommel Thing is an example of this. He didn’t just base Erwin on Rommel. He apparently also based Pixis on a Japanese general. Mikasa is apparently named for a Japanese warship from the imperial era. Isayama clearly has a passion for history.

But if you’re ignorant enough to buy the Rommel Thing, then do you really care enough?

Isayama cared enough about Rommel that he knew the day of his suicide and he cared enough to mark that day in his story. But he doesn’t care enough to look deeper and see the myth for what it is. And if you haven’t reached that threshold, you can’t really call yourself a history buff; you’re just reading Shelby Foote.

It’s the difference between pop history and real history.

Pop history is history that’s been crafted for mass consumption. It is simplified, often times to the point of being misleading, and it’s not particularly rigorous with the facts, again often times to the point of being misleading. Pop history is often tempted to go with the more dramatic interpretation of events just to get more viewers. It’s history as reality tv.

Real history is both much more rigorous and much more messier. It involves work with primary sources and it involves heavy analysis of those sources. And if no definitive answer can be drawn from those sources, then so be it. Most people don’t think of history in this way, and that’s a shame, but the truth is that a lot of the historical record is murky or even completely blank. There’s a lot we don’t know.

But from a pop history perspective, that’s a problem. People pick up history books to learn about history, usually by being told a story; history is taught to people with a storytelling format. They don’t want to hear shit like “We don’t know what happened.” It’s bad storytelling, which is why you don’t see stuff like that in most pop history. In the world of pop history, it’s style over substance.

The Good Guy Rommel Thing is (bad) pop history, not real history. It’s awful that so many people believe in it.

I don’t want people who like reading pop history to feel diminished though. There’s good pop history out there. The Oxford History of the United States is excellent. Anything by David McCullough, Ron Chernow, Eric Foner, and Robert Caro is great.

Basically everything on the r/AskHistorians book list is worth seeing, if you’re into the subject matter. Those are real historians overseeing that sub. They’re professionals. You can trust them.

There’s nothing wrong with preferring pop history over real history. *I* prefer it over real history.

Have you ever seen what historians do? They wade through mountains and mountains of firsthand accounts and try to make sense of what’s happening. There’s a certain sherlockian aspect to it all, trying to piece together what happened from what clues we have left, but mostly it seems like trying to draw meaning out of a lot of noise; I’d rather read the final report.

Isayama may have a thing for history, but he seems almost glib about it. You’d have to be to buy into the Good Guy Rommel Thing. I mean, yeah, Japanese schools don’t go into detail about the European theater of World War II, but you’d think if a man cared enough about Rommel to base a character after him, he’d care enough to read a book about him.

So in closing:

One of the most important things about Erwin’s character is the fate of his father, who died for rejecting the government’s official account of history. It’s an important little side story, because it’s true. Governments can and do try to push certain narratives. It’s usually not for nefarious purposes, but it does happen, and it’s great that SNK highlights this fact.

Ironically, Isayama himself seems to have fallen hook, line, and sinker for just that sort of thing.

#shingeki no kyojin #attack on titan #erwin smith #hajime isayama

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animalistauntamedblog · 6 years

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If I said to you, “You are invited inside an animal research lab, free to venture where you will on an open access, 360-degree, street-view-style virtual tour,” what would you think?

Would you even want to – even in the interests of arming yourself with the facts? What if I added, “Don’t worry, there is absolutely nothing here to upset you”? Would you be ready to believe me and give it a go?

Well, it’s for real – times 4. Four animal testing facilities in the UK opened up their doors and welcomed in the film crew of the Lab Animal Tour. And so with this groundbreaking initiative, you and I, anyone and his aunt can now nosey around inside the labs to our heart’s content. Just click on the link.

I promise you will be impressed and reassured. It’s all gleaming and spotless and the animals are so well looked after – not that you will see that much of them. But when you do, they are looking healthy and well-fed, with clean dry bedding and constant access to water. Their pens or cages for the most part are of a ‘decent’ size, you might think. And they are not being kept in isolation. The very worst I saw was an apparently willing and calm rhesus macaque monkey placed in some contraption designed to keep him/her immobilised while being slid into an MRI machine. Not too terrible, one might consider.

What’s more, there are little videos embedded in the tour, with researchers or animal-carers explaining what they are doing and why. And it’s all very nice, clean and reasonable, and entirely devoid of anything remotely cruel or bloody.

Except….

Notably and significantly, certain rooms on our virtual tour such as the operating theatre, the post-mortem suite and the intensive care unit are displayed with no animal presence. We only get to view these rooms empty, in all their nice, shiny, glass and steel clinical cleanliness. But just the names of those rooms must surely sound alarm bells.

The Lab Animal Tour, a commendable project in open access and transparency? Open access yes. Transparency no. As you may have worked out by now, my take on the Lab Animal Tour is more than a little sceptical. The Lab Animal Tour is no better than a PR exercise, a carefully sanitised piece of propaganda on behalf of those who have no interest in animal testing coming to an end.

So who created the tour? And how is it funded?

It’s all the work of an organisation called Understanding Animal Research (UAR), a misleadingly innocuous title. Who are they? “A not-for-profit organisation that explains why animals are used in medical and scientific research. We aim to achieve a broad understanding of the humane use of animals in medical, veterinary, scientific and environmental research in the UK. We are funded by our members who include universities, professional societies, industry and charities.”

In other words, the force behind the Lab Animal Tour is none other than the designated spokesbody for the researchers themselves. Faultless PR is UAR’s remit, not impartiality.

Understanding Animal Research’s website purports to tell you everything you need to know about animal research in the UK. This is a flavour of their list of ‘Myths’ we the public have ‘erroneously’ swallowed about the use of animals in medical research – which they are at pains to debunk:

Research on animals is not relevant to people because animals are different from people

Systematic reviews demonstrate that animal studies are meaningless for human health

There is an endless list of drugs that have to be withdrawn because of side effects, and these side effects are a major cause of hospital deaths

Many pointless, unnecessary experiments are carried out

Researchers do not care about the wellbeing of laboratory animals

Laboratory animals suffer great pain and distress

How could we be so stupid as to believe such nonsense! There are lots more supposed ‘myths’ listed on this page. If you want to look at them and see the ‘facts’ with which the organisation puts us straight on our delusions, click here

Animal Aid though, paints a very different picture

The difference is that Animal Aid (with assistance from PETA) is courageously uncovering the truth animal researchers are at such pains to conceal. UAR’s carefully-edited version of life in the lab is designed to reassure a public only too happy to believe that testing on animals is both necessary and humane. After all, which would you prefer to be true: that animals suffer, or that everything is fine?

According to Animal Aid,“Each year inside British laboratories, around 4 million animals are experimented on. Every 8 seconds, one animal dies.” No mention of that in the Lab Animal Tour. And these are just some of the unhappy animals making up that number, everyone a person not a statistic

There’s a short video on Animal Aid’s website, “This will make you rethink animal experiments”, which I chose not to watch. So just to warn you, I can’t vouch for how graphic it is. Their Animal Experiments section is packed with impeccably resourced information. And another important fact you won’t discover on the Lab Animal Tour is that animals are being abused daily, not just for ‘vital’ medical research, but also for testing:-

Product safety – agricultural and industrial chemicals, food additives, paints, and household cleaning products

Warfare – effects of injury, shooting, radiation, chemical poisoning and gases

Pain analysis I won’t list the tortures animals are subjected to for this purpose. Refer to the Animal Aid website if you really want to know

Psychology – sounds innocent enough, but ditto the above

Animal Aid also tells us that hundreds of thousands of genetically modified animals are specially bred every year, mostly mice. “And for every GM mouse used in an experiment, hundreds more die or are killed, either because they are surplus to requirements, because they fail to exhibit the desired genetic alteration or because they are born with other, unintended malformations.” Another unpalatable fact that the Lab Animal Tour and UAR avoid mentioning.

UAR and their Lab Animal Tour/Animal Aid – diametrically apposed to one another

‘Have no truck with Animal Aid; it is the same lunatic animal rights brigade in a new package. Society must leave these dangerous fools behind’

That strongly worded statement appears on UAR’s website, on a page called Life Stories – ordinary people bearing witness to how animal testing “has changed their lives for the better.”

It’s unlikely any of us have ever heard of David Dade, the man who made that statement, and one whose ‘Life Story’ is featured. This unfortunate man has both parents suffering from cancer, and his son from diabetes. Understandable then that he’s willing to provide a testimonial for a website promoting the use of nonhuman animals in medical research.

He’s possibly unaware of what a glance at Animal Aid’s website would tell him: the large and growing number of reliable alternative methods – such as organs on a chip, and the use of human tissue – that can make animal testing a bad dream of the past.

The moral of the story?

It has to be, looking out for what we are not shown, not told. People who have something to gain by using animals, in whatever way, are always expert at putting a gloss on their activities. Think McDonald’s and their ads with kids and animals frolicking happily together on a picture-perfect farm.

Compared with other users of nonhuman animals though, the Lab Animal Tour, UAR and lab animal researchers in general have an additional and potent weapon up their sleeve. They claim to have moral right on their side. No-one is morally obliged to eat meat, or take a trip to the zoo. But who, they say, could be so callous as to deny those suffering from crippling diseases the hope of a cure? That is the way subjecting unwilling victims to horrific, and sometimes fatal procedures is justified.

What we can do

Click here for Animal Aid’s useful pdf document about human tissue donation (to donate your tissue you don’t have to die first!)

To ensure your charitable giving does not help fund research on animals click here for a comprehensive list of testing and non-testing charities.

Check out the Humane Research Trust

And Animal Free Research UK

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Because THEY Are Worth It

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#AnimalRights #AnimalTesting #Birds #Cats #Chickens #Dogs #Ethics #Health&Medicine #Hens #Horses&Donkeys #PersonsnotProperty #Primates #Rabbits

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