Oppenheimer, the Christopher Nolan biopic about the Manhattan Project’s creation and challenge to beat Germany to the punch of developing a usable atomic weapon, had a very good opening weekend – $80.5 million in the States, $174 million globally.
At the time the Manhattan Project got started, our intelligence feared that the Germans were at least a year, maybe a year and a half ahead of where we were in the understanding of fission reactions and how to harness and weaponize them. Since the U.S. was convinced it was playing catch-up, part of the Project’s mission was not only to develop a bomb, or series of bombs, but to develop countermeasures for what they expected to be radioactive booby traps set at the D-Day landing sites, as well as conducting targeted bombing raids on support sites for the German nuclear program. They also captured and interned several Nazi scientists.
While it turned out our intelligence overestimated Germany, that the Nazis were not that far along in their nuclear development as we feared by the time the European theater of World War II ended, our intelligence had also underestimated the degree to which the Holocaust was taking place, killing upwards of six million Jews.
80-some years later, this past weekend in Berlin, a Pride parade and rally took place. This is not something that should surprise anyone. Germany has had somewhat of a hot and cold view of gay culture over the last 150 years or so. Germany pre-1900 was the home to the first gay movement in Europe. There was a flourishing gay culture in German cities, including Berlin, well into the 20’s. Once the Nazis took control of Germany, gay people were arrested, prosecuted, and by the thousands, sent to concentrations camps. Some stats show that there was a 60% death rate among gays who were sent to camps. Medical experiments, including reactions to phosphorous burns, were conducted on gays and Jews at Sachsenhausen. Jews and gays were given experimental treatments for typhus at Buchenwald. And many gay men sent to camps were simply castrated. It was beyond brutal and inhumane.
With each successive generation since the liberation of East Berlin and the unification of Germany as a free nation, gay culture has continued to bloom. In free societies, what people choose to be and who they are should be up to them. But that’s not where this pride parade and rally went. Not at all.
The lack of self-awareness and history here are staggering, and that’s if you’re not just shaking your head at the openness of the anti-Semitism on display.
The phrase ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ fantasizes about a world in which Israel and Jews simply do not exist. There is no peace accord, no two-state solution. Equality bumper stickers with every religious symbol representing a letter are not tolerated. This is blatant, naked hatred against one particularly race of human beings. But it goes well beyond that.
Gays and Jews were both persecuted en masse in Nazi Germany. Certainly, Jews were killed in much higher numbers, and Nazis certainly had their own fair share of gays serving in the Nazi ranks and wrestled for what behavior and how many times one participated in it constituted being gay. But if you were Jewish or if you were openly gay, to the Fuhrer, there really wasn’t a dime’s bit of difference in what should be your fate. For a crowd of German gays to essentially call for the extermination of Jews, who were killed right alongside people just like them 80 years ago, is unreal.
Next, what is it that these people in Berlin over the weekend are calling for? A free Palestine. I don’t suppose any of these parade attendees, most, if not all, embracing an alternative lifestyle to what’s taught in Islam, know what a free Palestine would mean for people who are gay today.
In Palestinian territories, a person’s sexual preference is used as a form of blackmail. Authorities use that information to coerce gay Palestinians to be spies or informants. In 2016, Hamas executed Mahmoud Ishtiwi, one of their top commanders, for being gay. Amnesty International reported in 2020 that in Gaza, same sex activity is punishment by up to 10 years imprisonment, and nowhere in Palestinian territories are there anything resembling civil rights or liberties for gay people.
According to The Aguda, Israel’s LGBT task force, there are upwards of 2,000 gay Palestinians living in Tel Aviv at any one time. Gay Palestinians have fled persecution in Gaza and the West Bank into Israel by the tens of thousands since Israel’s founding. There is one nation in the Middle East that actually is a safe haven for gays, and it’s not the free state of Palestine.
Either the paradegoers in Berlin are ignorant of their own history of what happened to gays in a society that also sought to exterminate the Jews, they’re too uneducated to understand what they’re calling for today would mean for their gay Palestinian brethren, or a third, more depressing option.
It may be the case that who they’re mad at is God, and they’re taking it out on His chosen people. Part of the problem that’s consumed the LGBT progressive movement of late is their continued, relentless attack against people of faith. Whether it’s continuing persecution of Masterpiece Cake baker Jack Phillips, attempting to force pastors to perform same sex ceremonies, forcing Sister of the Poor to provide contraceptive care as part of the Obamacare mandate, or dozens of other instances of religious persecutions internationally all in the name of tolerance, what may be happening here in Germany is that these people going to a pride event have an enemy. I believe their enemy is God and what He has to say about their lifestyle. They may even know about their country’s evil history with and treatment of gay people. But that’s secondary to the importance of publicly rejecting God, even if the result of that flies against their own professed self-interest.
Look at the current membership of the Squad, the hard-left progressive caucus within the House Democratic Caucus. They’re among the biggest supporters of the LGBT community in the United States Congress.
Last week, Kevin McCarthy and the Republicans, specifically because of an anti-Semitic outburst by Rep. Pramila Japayal, put forward a resolution supporting Israel and condemning anti-Semitism. You’d think condemning anti-Semitism and supporting the state of Israel in the Middle East would be a unanimous vote. It wasn’t.
Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman, Summer Lee, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, Andre Carson, Delia Ramirez, and Ayanna Pressley voted no. They literally opposed Israel and supported anti-Semitism. That’s what a no vote meant. Betty McCollum voted present. She’s neither for nor against anti-Semitism. She’s just there to cast a vote that she was there.
Every one of them is a Democrat.
