***
***
Saturday, June 2, 2012
Bullied NYC Teen Hangs Himself
***
'Happy kid' kills himself over bullying at two NYC
schools
by NBCNewYork.com
June 1, 2012
NEW YORK
CITY -- A 12-year-old boy
harassed by school bullies about his intelligence, his height and his deceased
father killed himself in the New York
City apartment he shared with his mother, according to
relatives and those who knew him, NBCNewYork.com
reported.
"I want to remember
him as a happy kid," his anguished sister told NBC 4 New York on Thursday.
Joel Morales, of East Harlem, moved to a different school after enduring
incessant taunting for months, but the bullying persisted, the fifth-grader’s
family said.
Kids chased Morales, threw
sticks and pipes at him and teased him for his smarts and his 4-foot-9 stature,
his family said.
Morales’ anguish reached a
breaking point when bullies taunted him about his father, who died when he was
four years old, according to relatives.
His mother, Lisbeth
Babilonia, found him hanging in their apartment at about 11:30 p.m. Tuesday,
hours after she had organized a search party when he didn’t return home on time
from an after-school club.
An occupational therapist who
worked with Morales at one of the schools because of his diminutive size told
NBC 4 New York the boy only reluctantly talked about his problems.
"It was very difficult,
especially with a child like Joel who wants so badly to please everyone, to see
that he was really in pain, that he was struggling," said Maria Ubiles.
Arlene Gago, a youth minister
from a church group, said she spoke with Morales regularly at the
Jefferson Houses where he lived but never knew of his distress.
"I always asked him,
'How you doing? How's school?'" she said. "We talked but he'd
never tell me what was going on."
A classmate told Morales’ family that the boy had said he
was tired of the bullying and told them the details of the remark about his
father that sent him over the edge.
School officials declined to
comment on the alleged bullying, citing privacy issues.
Police said Morales left no
suicide note.
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Christopher Columbus Secretly Jewish
***
[A hat tip to my nephew Dustin for sending this article.]
Was Columbus
secretly a Jew?
By Charles Garcia, Special to
CNN
May 20, 2012
Christopher Columbus bids farewell to his son Diego at Palos, Spain, before
embarking on his first voyage on August 3, 1492.
Editor’s
note: Charles Garcia is the CEO of Garcia Trujillo, a business focused on the
Hispanic market, and the author of “Leadership
Lessons of the White House Fellows.” A native of Panama, he now lives in Florida. Follow him on Twitter: @charlespgarcia. Lea este artículo en español/Read this article in
Spanish.
(CNN) – Today [May 20, 2012]
marks the 508th anniversary of the death of Christopher
Columbus.
Everybody knows the story of
Columbus, right? He was an Italian explorer from Genoa who set sail in 1492 to enrich the
Spanish monarchs with gold and spices from the orient. Not quite.
For too long, scholars have
ignored Columbus’s grand passion: the quest to
liberate Jerusalem
from the Muslims.
During Columbus’s lifetime, Jews became the target
of fanatical religious persecution. On March 31, 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen
Isabella proclaimed that all Jews were to be expelled from Spain. The
edict especially targeted the 800,000 Jews who had never converted, and gave
them four months to pack up and get out.
The Jews who were forced to
renounce Judaism and embrace Catholicism were known as “Conversos,” or
converts. There were also those who feigned conversion, practicing Catholicism
outwardly while covertly practicing Judaism, the so-called “Marranos,” or
swine.
Tens of thousands of Marranos
were tortured by the Spanish Inquisition. They were pressured to offer names of
friends and family members, who were ultimately paraded in front of crowds,
tied to stakes and burned alive. Their land and personal possessions were then
divvied up by the church and crown.
Recently, a number of Spanish
scholars, such as Jose Erugo, Celso Garcia de la Riega, Otero Sanchez and
Nicholas Dias Perez, have concluded that Columbus
was a Marrano, whose survival depended upon the suppression of all evidence of
his Jewish background in face of the brutal, systematic ethnic cleansing.
Columbus, who was known in
Spain as Cristóbal Colón and didn’t speak Italian, signed his last will and
testament on May 19, 1506, and made five curious – and revealing – provisions.
Two of his wishes – tithe
one-tenth of his income to the poor and provide an anonymous dowry for poor
girls – are part of Jewish customs. He also decreed to give money to a Jew who
lived at the entrance of the Lisbon Jewish Quarter.
On those documents, Columbus used a triangular signature of dots and letters
that resembled inscriptions found on gravestones of Jewish cemeteries in Spain. He
ordered his heirs to use the signature in perpetuity.
According to British
historian Cecil Roth’s “The History of the Marranos,” the anagram was a cryptic
substitute for the Kaddish, a prayer recited in the synagogue by mourners after
the death of a close relative. Thus, Columbus’s
subterfuge allowed his sons to say Kaddish for their crypto-Jewish father when
he died. Finally, Columbus left money to support
the crusade he hoped his successors would take up to liberate the Holy Land.
Estelle Irizarry, a
linguistics professor at Georgetown University, has analyzed the language and syntax of
hundreds of handwritten letters, diaries and documents of Columbus and concluded that the explorer’s
primary written and spoken language was Castilian Spanish. Irizarry explains
that 15th-century Castilian Spanish was the “Yiddish” of Spanish Jewry, known
as “Ladino.” At the top left-hand corner of all but one of the 13 letters
written by Columbus
to his son Diego contained the handwritten Hebrew letters bet-hei, meaning b’ezrat
Hashem (with God’s help). Observant Jews have for centuries customarily added
this blessing to their letters. No letters to outsiders bear this mark, and the
one letter to Diego in which this was omitted was one meant for King Ferdinand.
In Simon Weisenthal’s book, “Sails
of Hope,” he argues that Columbus’s voyage was
motivated by a desire to find a safe haven for the Jews in light of their
expulsion from Spain.
Likewise, Carol Delaney, a cultural anthropologist at Stanford
University, concludes that Columbus was a deeply religious man whose purpose was to
sail to Asia to obtain gold in order to finance a crusade to take back Jerusalem and rebuild the Jews’ holy Temple.
In Columbus’s
day, Jews widely believed that Jerusalem had to
be liberated and the Temple
rebuilt for the Messiah to return.
Scholars point to the date on
which Columbus
set sail as further evidence of his true motives. He was originally going to
sail on August 2, 1492, a day that happened to coincide with the Jewish holiday
of Tisha B’Av, marking the destruction of the First and Second
Holy Temples
of Jerusalem. Columbus postponed this
original sail date by one day to avoid embarking on the holiday, which would
have been considered by Jews to be an unlucky day to set sail. (Coincidentally
or significantly, the day he set forth was the very day that Jews were, by law,
given the choice of converting, leaving Spain, or being killed.)
Columbus’s voyage was not, as is commonly believed, funded by
the deep pockets of Queen Isabella, but rather by two Jewish Conversos and
another prominent Jew. Louis de Santangel and Gabriel Sanchez advanced an
interest free loan of 17,000 ducats from their own pockets to help pay for the
voyage, as did Don Isaac Abrabanel, rabbi and Jewish statesman.
Indeed, the first two letters
Columbus sent
back from his journey were not to Ferdinand and Isabella, but to Santangel and
Sanchez, thanking them for their support and telling them what he had found.
The evidence seem to bear out
a far more complicated picture of the man for whom our nation now celebrates a
national holiday and has named its capital.
As we witness bloodshed the
world over in the name of religious freedom, it is valuable to take another
look at the man who sailed the seas in search of such freedoms – landing in a
place that would eventually come to hold such an ideal at its very core. [emphasis added]
***
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Australian Teen’s Final Goodbye
***
“My Final Goodbye”
^^^
Skeptics never rest. Shaun
was besieged by doubters prompting him to strip off his shirt revealing the
torso-long scar from his 2 transplants.
“I Am Not a Fake”
^^^
Australia teen dies
after YouTube 'Final Goodbye' video goes viral
by Jim Gold, msnbc.com
May 26, 2012
Australia teenager Shaun Wilson-Miller died Saturday, just
weeks after posting his emotional "My Final
Goodbye" message that went viral on YouTube.
In the 17-year-old's video,
intended for family and friends but seen by 1.9 million people by Sunday
morning, the Melbourne
schoolboy revealed he was suffering chronic heart rejection after his second
transplant and that there could not be a third.
"I won't be here for as
long as I thought,'' he said in the video.
"This has been an
awesome ride. I have no regrets,” he said. “Live life to the fullest because
you never know what's going to happen.''
Dad Cameron Miller said his
son's positive outlook had never faltered, with Shaun giving him constant hugs
in recent days, the Herald Sun reported Sunday.
"He passed peacefully
with me holding his hand; that is something the family will hold with us,'' he
told the Herald Sun.
Tributes immediately began
flowing in from around the world and from his beloved Essendon Football Club,
the newspaper said.
He had also found love with a
fellow heart patient, the Herald Sun reported.
Shaun had sighed: "The
hardest thing for me is leaving her, knowing that I won't get to marry her. To
have kids together. To grow old together. That is what makes me sad.''
He recently filmed a guest
appearance on the Australian TV show “The Neighbors” and met Essendon captain
Jobe Watson.
Condolences message on his parents Facebook pages include, "You showed so much courage for so long,'' ninemsn TV reported. "Fly high sweet angel. A June 15 fundraiser Shaun was planning for Heartkids has now been turned into a tribute for the teen, ninemsn reported.
***
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
LGBT Equality: “Smug Derision Is a Kind of Stupidity”
***
Marriage Equality and Humanist Evolution
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
May 14, 2012
Applauding the president for endorsing same-sex marriage last week,
the rapper said, “I think it’s the right thing to do ... whether it costs him
votes or not.”
“I’ve always thought it as something that was still, um, holding
the country back,” Jay-Z explained. “What people do in their own homes is their
business and you can choose to love whoever you love. That’s their business. It’s
no different than discriminating against blacks. It’s discrimination plain and
simple.”
It’s aways [sic] wild seeing rappers come out
against homophobia. I’ve got more than my share of songs I can’t really enjoy
like I once did.
But it’s good to see, and I
can’t even say I live outside of it. I can remember coming out of Baltimore and viewing
every interaction with someone who was gay with a kind of smug derision. It’s
the closest I’ve come to a kind of deep, unstated pride in ignorance—not so
much a violent hostility, but a meanness based almost entirely on not
understanding. And frankly not even believing there was anything worth
understanding.
When I write with some
curiosity about the racist mind, this is really place I’m pulling from. I know
how easy it is to believe that people have nothing to contribute, and to hold
that belief not out of evidence of their lives, but out of ignorance of them.
Still it’s one thing for people to tell you why that’s wrong—and that’s
important. But it’s only philosophy. For the facts, I needed real world contact
with actual people. I could not simply be told that “diversity is good.” I had
to see it.
It was a really nice day in New York yesterday. I
took my wife and son out for brunch, then roamed a bit with Kenyatta. We ended
up in West Village
and I was suddenly struck by how thankful I was to gay America. There
is probably a more agile way to say that. But the fact is this. You can’t
really do my job, and live where I have lived, and live how I lived and not
deal with the LGBT world. I would go so far as to say that if you are a writer
with aspiration, homophobia is bad for business.
But less cynically, if you
are a curious person homophobia is bad for business. I was lucky. I got
schooled on that as a young man. And, as always—in the spirit of selfishness—it
was not good for LGBT world that that happened. It was good for me. Smug
derision is a kind of stupidity. And people who know better
are embarrassed for you, because you are not wise enough to be
embarrassed for yourself. The city saved me from that. And I’m happy.
The funny thing is I’m pretty
sure even in my other life I would have supported marriage equality. Whatever,
my ignorance—“an offense against God” didn’t factor in. And the notion that
consenting adults could live as they willed would have disturbed me. But that
isn’t actual enlightenment. Surely there are racists who voted for Obama.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/05/marriage-equality-and-humanist-evolution/257175/
***
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Having a Gay Friend or Relative Can Make Marriage Equality Personal
***
[Ed. Note: Since coming out
in 1970 it has been my mission to open people’s minds to gay people being just
like regular folks except for sexual preference. For some that was (and still
is) a revelation. I accomplish my mission one person at a time hoping that each
opened mind will open others. Personal experience with gay people as ordinary
folks is the most powerful means of enlightenment.]
^^^
For Some, Same-Sex Marriage Is Not Politics, It’s
Personal
by helene cooper and jeremy
w. peters
May 15, 2012
WASHINGTON — Some of their best friends turned out to be gay.
Or a daughter (Dick Cheney).
Or a close pal (Jon
M. Huntsman Jr.). Or a couple seated close by
(the Maryland
lawmaker Wade Kach).
President Obama’s embrace of same-sex marriage rights last week instantly touched off speculation
about the possible political implications, but that misses a more nuanced
point. Like so many other Americans in recent years, politicians are less
influenced by party, faith or color on the question of favoring greater legal
protections for gays, both liberals and conservatives say.
Instead, it’s more personal.
“If you don’t know anyone
who’s gay, then it’s an alien lifestyle,” said Theodore Olson, the former
solicitor general for President George W. Bush who supports same-sex marriage.
But, he added, when “you realize that that’s Mary from down the street, she’s a
lesbian and she’s with Sally, what would it be like if they couldn’t be
together?” people come around.
During the civil rights
movement, many white Northerners — including some who had never before
interacted with black people — joined African-Americans to fight for the
principle of equal rights, often opposing white Southerners who had lived among
blacks all their lives yet saw nothing wrong with the separate but equal
statutes. Principle seemed to come before the personal in many cases.
With the gay rights movement,
it often seems that the opposite applies. While there are many people who
support gay rights because it is in line with their personal or political
views, for many others, their approach on the issue is experiential, and comes
down to a simple issue: knowing an openly gay couple. In fact, it can seem as
if there are two Americas
when it comes to gay rights: one in which same-sex couples interact regularly
with their straight counterparts, helping to soften impressions of
homosexuality, and another in which being gay or lesbian remains largely
unspoken.
Read full article here:
***
Monday, May 14, 2012
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