Suek: As you were saying….”too incredible”

Normally I would say that this can’t be right. I can easily imagine how a glitch might wipe out geotagged Israeli locations from a mediocre British LCC’s electronic display. But the “so as not to offend Islam” explanation gets a little too close to “too bad to check” territory.

This is a country, though, where teachers erase the Holocaust from their lessons because Muslim parents complain when it gets taught. It’s a country where the Israeli flag is functionally illegal because it provokes Muslim rioters. And so – naturally – it turns out that this is totally true:

Cheap British carrier BMI, which launched lines flying to Tel Aviv in March, deleted Israel from electronic maps presented to passengers on its flights so as not to offend Islam,… However, the orientation of Mecca, the direction to which Muslim face when they pray, is shown on the electronic screens. In the electronic maps presented on BMI flights to Tel Aviv, neither Israel nor any of its cities are marked, except for Haifa, which is spelled ‘Khefa,’ a transliteration of the Arab name of the city as it was called before 1948. BMI operates many lines to Muslim destinations and presents the ‘Mecca Compass’ as a service to its many Muslim passengers.

What apparently happened is that BMI has two kinds of maps. One kind is a map of the world as it actually is, which they use on flights bound for Israel. One is a map as their Muslim passengers presumably want it to be, after Israel has been wiped out in a genocidal conflict. That’s the map BMI uses for all of their other Middle Eastern destinations:

A “logistic failure” caused the map to be presented on the flight to Tel Aviv, a company statement said, adding that it will be removed from the Tel-Aviv bound planes. The company was making every effort not to hurt passengers’ feelings by adopting a nonpolitical position, the statement added.

Because imagining a fantasy world in which century-old dreams of an ethnically cleansed Middle East – that’s the inoffensive, nonpolitical position.

I will follow the attached story, the torture and murder of a French Jew over a period of three weeks, last year. The death penalty could not and would not be sufficient in this case, but doing unto others as they do unto us, appears to be justice in this case.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090429/ap_on_re_eu/eu_france_anti_semitism_3

Too incredible. England is doomed – and damned. They have lost their souls.

http://www.mererhetoric.com/archives/11275569.html

You do not cry alone.
I cry for those that never lived to sing it and I cry for those that lived to sing it.

The chances of this happy ending to a harrowing story are slim to none today. The Christian Arab population has declined from 80% to about 20% today.

Mom remembers little (though I’m going to ask her for more details this weekend), but seeing that door open, arms reach in toward where they cowered in the middle of the back seat, and then a hand coming out of the crowd and slamming the door shut! THAT one sticks in her mind.

The other time was when they approached a different town, and a guy was hitchhiking alongside the road. Papa said “Drive on!”, but the driver (a Christian arab) insisted on stopping to pick the guy up. The man rode on the running board, and as they entered the outskirts, they could see a mob on the road in the center of the town…..the hitchhiker took over, leaning down and telling the driver where to turn, guiding them on a circuitous route through the back streets until the rejoined the main road on the OTHER side of the milling crowd of people. Once out of town on the far side, the hitchhiker called for a stop, got down and began walking down the open road, back toward the town they’d just left. Mom has never forgotten turning around to look out the back window — and seeing no one! She always believed that the hitchhiker was an angel, sent to direct them safely around the deadly mob, and who then disappeared.

http://switchboard.real.com/player/email.html?PV=6.0.12&&title=BergenBelsenHatikva&link=http%3A%2F%2Fgenealogy.org.il%2FBergenBelsenHatikva.mp3

Earl:

I wonder if our families crossed paths?
My mother’s side of the family was living in the Tel Aviv-Jaffa area when the riots broke out. My grandmother was terrified and until the day she died was unable to talk about it (My Nana passed away in August 2001 at the age of 100).

It was the straw that broke the camel’s back for her. My grandmother took my mother and herself and immigrated to America.