Prominent Saudi cleric Salman Al-Odeh is reportedly shown in this video not just questioning the scope of the Holocaust but repeating the ancient anti-Semitic “blood libel” claim that Jews drink the blood of children. This story is based on a translation supplied by a couple of sites and cannot be verified by this blog. Perhaps one of our readers can address its accuracy.
Salman Al-Odeh a leading “scholar” reportedly explains how “the role of the Jews is to wreak destruction, to wage war, and to practice deception and extortion.” He is then translated saying that
“It is well known that the Jews celebrate several holidays, one of which is the Passover, or the matzos holiday. I read once about a doctor who was working in a laboratory. This doctor lived with a Jewish family. One day, they said to him: ‘We want blood. Get us some human blood.’ He was confused. He didn’t know what this was all about,” Al-Odeh says as the interviewer nods along. “He found that they were making matzos with human blood. They eat it, believing that this brings them close to their false god, Yahweh.”
He is quoted as adding that the Jewish people “would lure a child in order to sacrifice him in the religious rite that they perform during that holiday.” Here is an idea. Why not identify the doctor who can identify the alleged perpetrators? Clearly, neither the cleric nor the doctor want to protect the alleged culprit. We can then prove to the world that this blood libel is nothing more than a knowing falsehood perpetrated by anti-Semites.
If the translation is accurate, it is a truly shocking display of raw anti-Semitism and ignorance — even for part of the world known for extremism.
Source: Times of Israel
Curious,
I think you’re better qualified to plan it.
Well THAT’s a relief. You’ve kicked somebody’s ass, so you are obviously well qualified to plan our war against Iran.
And fix the dead count (ours) in Iraq and Afghanistan while you are kicking ass. Dreams. Roar on testerone jackarsse.
Use your intelligent brain half, ol’ buddy. You promised to try. Don’t get spooked. You should have seen my dreams last night. I stood on a molehill which was jealous of the hill beside it and it grew up to be a small alp. Precipitous! I clung to it and said: “Now I know I’m dreaming.” Are you experiencing those at times?
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I haven’t kicked anybody’s a**. Well maybe I have, but that’s a different story.
What do you do when you walk up to the top of Mount Everest? You walk back down.
idealist707 1, August 19, 2012 at 3:13 am
Matt,
Better count on the air force in which case. ’cause the ships are just hostages standing with nooses around their necks. Iran has missiles aimed at them.
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Forget about the rules of war. There aren’t any rules. If the noose is off, the Navy will kill you.
Malisha,
I just listened to Ryan talking about saving Medicare. A psycho-story if there ever was one.
Rafflaw, you said, “Disgusting nonsense. This so-called man of God can’t seem to treasure telling the truth.”
I found the sentence a little bit disorienting. First, I went through my mind for my impressions of a “Saudi Cleric” in general. My impressions have nothing to do with any generalized description of Saudi clerics, mind you, but I can only see things from my own perspective so that’s a good enough place to start. My impressions of a Saudi Cleric:
1. He has come to believe (probably over a very long period of time) that he is entitled to tell other people how to think;
2. He has come to believe that this entitlement is so proper and unshakable that those who believe differently, or those who do not accept his instruction on how to think, are not only WRONG but actually EVIL.
From that, I am presuming that he is sincere in his beliefs, regardless of how he came to them, and regardless of how insane they are. He is not doing “reality testing” for any of his beliefs; HE BELIEVES THEM.
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This led me even farther back into a memory from my own small and well-lived but globally insignificant past. Picture this: I’m in a child psychiatrist’s office and he is telling me that he has heard, from my estranged husband, about an incident that purports to show very bad parenting on my part (the baby was six months old at the time of the alleged incident). He gives my ex-husband’s version:
It was a sunny summer weekend day and my husband and I went out to the back yard and rested on a blanket on the grass, with the baby. Idyllic scene. The baby fell asleep on its tummy on my torso, and I was half asleep myself. My mother-in-law, who lived with us, came up to us, reached down, took the baby off me, for safety’s sake, because I was nodding off to sleep and the baby could be smothered. I then screamed at my mother-in-law, which horrible sound awoke the poor baby who commenced a terrified screaming because his mother’s strident screech so scared him. My mother-in-law then had to rapidly rescue the baby from this fright, so she placed him gently in the baby carriage and rushed down the street with him so calm him and to assure him she would not let his frightening, screeching mother get at him. Not satisfied that I had terrified the baby and insulted his grandmother, I pursued her down the street, overtook her, forcibly commandeered the baby carriage, and vanished, so that she and my then husband worried for a full half hour about the fate of the poor baby and where I would kidnap him to.
I sat there in shock as I listened to this narration. He then asked me if the incident had occurred. I said, “AN incident occurred; not THAT one.” He said, “Why don’t you tell me your version.”
I answered:
It was a sunny summer weekend day and my husband and I went out to the back yard and rested on a blanket on the grass, with the baby. Idyllic scene. The baby fell asleep on its tummy on my torso, and I was half asleep myself. My mother-in-law, who lived with us, came up to us, reached down, took the baby off me, in a sudden motion, while saying something I could not hear because the instant the baby felt himself pulled up in the air with his arms and legs hanging down, he let out a piercing scream. I reached up for the baby instinctively and popped my eyes open and saw my mother-in-law rushing off while vocalizing “shh shh shh” to the baby. My husband sat up and grabbed my shoulder, saying, “STOP IT, she wants to take baby for walk.” I scrambled to my feet and said, “He’s crying!” and then tried to say to my mother-in-law, “Dai m’ne ribionek!” [Give me the baby] but my husband grabbed me by the arm and pulled me back down, telling me “SHUT UP YOU ARE SCARING BABY; GRANDMOTHER ONLY WANTS TO TAKE HIM FOR WALK!” By then my mother-in-law was gone from view, around the side of the house but I could still hear vigorous screaming (with that kind of catch-in-the-throat vibration-screams that babies are so good at) and I got up again, shook my husband’s hands off me and ran after my mother-in-law, who had gotten about a quarter of a block down by then. The screams were still audible. I commandeered the baby carriage and rolled the baby about a block more before stopping to pick him up so I could calm him back down; he took several minutes to calm down and it took me even more.
(Although I didn’t mention this to the psychiatrist, I couldn’t understand how my mother-in-law, who had raised three children, would not understand that when you pick up a baby and don’t support him from underneath, he feels terrified and babies do this jerking thing with their hands and feet and scream. To me, doing that to an infant is so dumb and so irritating to the baby, and of course grabbing a baby from a sleeping position right off his mother — she belonged in a nut-house! But of course, she had her version and it was different from mine; she and my husband decided together that I had done something terrible to the baby and to HER. Then my husband and mother-in-law did not speak to me for four days, which was actually not so bad. I didn’t mention all this part to the psychiatrist either.)
The psychiatrist was just sitting there impassive, jotting down notes. I finished telling my story. Much later (I couldn’t ask him then because he was doing an evaluation for court, so asking would be inappropriate), I asked whose version of that story he had believed.
He said, “the obvious version, yours.”
I added, “My husband could not stop telling that story in his own version, and each time he told it, the baby got scareder and scareder from my louder and louder screaming, and the rescue performed by his mother became more and more heroic, and the lengths I went to in order to kidnap the child became more and more grotesque.”
He was unimpressed.
I kept pursuing the thing: “Do you think he actually BELIEVES his version of it?”
This is when he said something that has stayed with me all these years and that comes back to me whenever I read something (or experience it) like this Saudi Cleric’s ranting:
“Who cares? He’s nuts.”
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Although I believe that, and I believe the Saudi Cleric is “nuts,” by this same definition, the real issue is: Can the psycho-story become a resource for people who want to do something very bad to someone else?
All psycho-stories contain this dreadful possibility within them.
People believe psycho-stories because they help people find the justification for things they want to do anyway. Psycho-stories about the Holocaust and the blood libel have helped people rob and kill whole communities of Jews. They also help in the less spectacular ways. I know someone who owns a valuable piece of art because a pscyho-story helped his mother-in-law’s mother smuggle stuff out of Germany during wartime. A psycho-story has helped George Zimmerman raise over $250,000. A psycho-story helped mobilize hundreds of thousands of Americans into uniform to go invade Iraq and lay it waste. On and on. Do the purveyors of the psycho-stories believe them?
They’d use them even if they didn’t accord them a milligram of credibility themselves. They’re the Atom Bomb of wrongdoing, and they are buttons that can always be pushed.
Apparently “psycho-stories” are easy to come by and everyone has their own.