With the overlap of the American holiday Halloween and the endless memorial services for Yitzchak Rabin, it is hard to miss just how much they have in common.
Like Halloween, the Rabin Memorial is a festival dedicated to the dead and to death. Halloween celebrates the culture of death and the memorialization of Rabin celebrates the culture of death he created by making deals and concessions with terrorists.
On Halloween people celebrated by dressing in costumes. In Rabin memorials politicians celebrate too by dressing up in costumes, except they all wear the same costume, that of Rabin the peacemaker. After all Rabin as peacemaker has killed far more people than Dracula, Frankenstein and all the other monsters combined.
Halloween is a series of pagan festivities and so too the Rabin memorials are pagan festivities. Halloween reaches back to Pre-Christian times and the Rabin memorials reach back to pre-state and pre-religious times creating a cult of personality around one man, Yitzchak Rabin. Halloween is full of ghosts, the Rabin memorials are filled with only one ghost, that of Rabin presiding over everything.
Schools often work to involve children in their Halloween festivities. Rabin memorials in Israel now focus heavily on schools, even interrupting a strike by teachers, dragging them back to school for a few hours to spend a few hours brainwashing kids with the following. "Yitzchak Rabin wanted peace. The arabs wanted peace. But a certain Jew did not want peace and that is why we are at war today." Then everyone sings Shir LeShalom, when Monster Mash would be far more appropriate. After all the peace process did catch on in a flash and it is hard to deny that it was a graveyard smash.
Halloween focuses on the fantastic and the unreal. The Rabin memorials also focus on the entirely fantastic premise that Yitzchak Rabin had created and that only his assassination had somehow thwarted peace.
Halloween is all about terror and so are the Rabin memorials, yet where Halloween enables terror for one night, the Rabin memorials help enable terror for 365 days out of the year.
Finally on Halloween people do their best to ignore the fact that monsters are not real. On the Rabin memorials people do their best to ignore the fact the monsters are real and are among us.
Comments
Surely Yitzchak Rabin must have had someone to do his bidding.
ReplyDeleteDr. Victor Frankenstein had Igor. Count Dracula had R.M. Renfield, and the Phantom of the Opera was protected by Madame Giry.
"The opera ghost existed. He was not, as was long believed, a creature of the imagination of the artists, the superstition of the managers, or the absurd and impressionable brains of the young ladies of the ballet. No, he existed in flesh and blood, though he assumed all the outward characteristics of a real phantom; that is to say, of a ghost--Gaston Leroux.
Strange how Gaston Leroux's Phantom was the grotesque monster as portrayed by genuis Lon Chaney. But by the time The Phantom of the Opera was set to music much much later the phantom was more human than monster, a subject of pity rather than terror.
But he true character was eventially revealed in a simply way. Not with flaming torches or garlic but by removing his mask.
To quote from the musical:
"Some of you may recall the strange affair of the Phantom of the Opera; a mystery never fully explained. We are told ladies and gentleman that this is the very chandelier which figures in the famous disaster...Perhaps we may frighten the ghost of so many years ago with a little illumination...GENTLEMAN!"
That's what's needed with Rabin. He needs to be unmasked and his actions illuminated.
What accounts for the many memorials of Rabin? I'm not really sure. All I can figure is that when people are murdered they somehow assume more good qualities and the bad are brushed from the memory.
shimon peres would be the ghost of course
ReplyDeleteperes who set oslo into motion, rabin's former enemy who crawled in as his ally and took his place on his death and who has continued to supervise the ghost of rabin and use him to promote the surrender process
Which just goes to prove - it's better to have fun eating lots of candy and dressing up like a goon, then being anywhere in the vacinity of the rabin memorial. :]
ReplyDeleteOr it's better to watch Ghost Hunters live special, then to be near a rabin memorial. :]
(yo drinks pumpkin juice and spits a seed at rabin's memorial.)
It's a cruel and unforgiveable trick Peres and Olmert are playing upon an entire generation of Israeli children. It teaches them to become human sacrifices in the cause of the elusive peace the Palestinians will bring--if only they are accomodating enough, forgiving enough, nice enough; if they would only give up enough land.
ReplyDeleteBut this Palestinian peace has about as much chance of materializing as The Great Pumpkin, no matter how sincere little Linus Van Pelt's pumpkin patch was.
How much land must Israel give away to terrorists to show it's sincerity without getting anything in return? How much bloodshed? How many rockets?
This land for peace is the biggest and most cruel lie of them all.
Peres and Olmert need to stop haunting Israel's pumpkin patches and find somewhere else to rattle their chains.
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