by Rabbi Benjamin Blech To remember Kristallnacht properly, we must first renounce its German-given name.


Seventy years ago, on the nights of November 9 and 10, 1938, rampaging mobs throughout Germany, Austria and Sudetenland freely attacked Jews in the street, in their homes and at their places of work and worship in a carefully orchestrated outbreak of government sponsored violence. At least 96 Jews were killed and hundreds more injured, hundreds of synagogues were burned, almost 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed, cemeteries and schools were vandalized, and 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps -- many of them never to return alive to their loved ones.

Many historians consider that as the real beginning of the Holocaust, the first step in the planned extermination of the Jewish people leading to the eventual deaths of six million victims of the Nazi program of genocide.

For that reason it is certainly proper to commemorate this harbinger of horror, the infamous dates that mark the onset of the spiral of unimaginable hatred unloosed among a supposedly civilized people.

What is unfathomable to me, though, is the name by which this commemoration continues to be known.

This November Jewish communities throughout the world will again gather to recall Kristallnacht -- and will unwittingly allow themselves, in some measure, to verbally embrace the very heresy that abetted the Holocaust.

Kristallnacht is German for "the night of crystal." And 70 years after the horrible events of 1938 should have given us by now sufficient perspective to expose the lie of a horrible WMD -- Word of Mass Deception -- that epitomizes the key to the most powerful methodology for murder perfected by the Nazis.

How, after all, were the Nazis able to commit their crimes under the veneer of civilized respectability? Upon analysis, the answer is obvious. They glorified the principle of murder by euphemism

:-(

death by euphemism...politically correct speaking...


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism