Raoul Wallenberg monument in Montreal
This week, I was contacted by Peter Lancz, who is the director of the Raoul Wallenberg World Wide Campaign Against Racism.
http://www.lancz.com/wallenberg/
Mr. Lancz is the son of the world famous sculptor of the same name, a Jewish refugee from Hungary. In the closing days of World War II, the elder Lancz was one of thousands of Hungarian Jews who were saved from deportation by the Nazis to Auschwitz due to the efforts of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. When the Red Army occupied Budapest, they arrested Wallenberg. He was never seen again after disappearing into the Soviet gulags.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raoul_Wallenberg
In gratitude, the elder Lancz made a sculpture of Wallenberg in Montreal. Now it is the dream of his son to produce more statues of Wallenberg, many of which would appear on US university campuses to educate students as to the chronic and once again growing issue of anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and how one Gentile put his life on the line to defend Jews.
More specifically, Mr Lancz has written to University of California president Mark Yudof to propose that a statue be erected on the UC-Irvine campus, which has been at the forefront of controversy and complaints of anti-Semitic hate speech over the past few years. Mr Lancz states that Yudof has forwarded the proposal to UCI Chancellor Michael Drake, who has sent it on to the Arts Committee for consideration.
I fully support this idea. First of all, I would venture that the vast majority of American university students have never heard of Raoul Wallenberg. That is a shame which needs to be corrected. Today, as we witness a world-wide resurgence in anti-Semitism, which in North America, has its focal point on university campuses largely due to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, it is imperative that our young people learn about true heroes like Wallenberg.
Therefore, I will follow the progress of this idea and support it any way I can. In addition, I am establishing a permanent link on this site under "Worthy of our support". Please visit this site to find out more.
6 comments:
The Arts Committee will now pass it along to the Cultural Correctness Committee who will, in turn, pass it along to the Euphemistics Society and on and on until the proposal finally dies of old age. That is unless the MSU steps in and vetoes it sooner.
Michael Drake could have given authorization in an instant without having to answer to anyone and yet he still passed on the opportunity.
He is somewhere on the scale between disaster and non-entity.
I wonder if the polically-correct Cross Cultural Center will support this venture.
Nah.
I doubt that the all-powerful Women's Studies Department or the Black History Division will sanction a statute to anyone they don't honor because they had the wrong gender or race or even an insufficient sensitivity and support for THEIR cause.
When you consider the same orientation from the GLTG (or whatever) and Chicano Studies Department, it is clear that not only will there be no statue of Raul Wallenberg at UCI, there is more likely to be a protest against him by all the Departments and faculty who thrive in all these (oh so useful in the job market) disciplines.
It is even unlikely that he could give an address on campus today without at least the MSU disrupting it.
Now, if you wanted to put up a statue to a real hero, like Malcom X, it would not even go to committee.
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How about the high school that inspired "Freedom Writers"?
Yeah! How about that?
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I believe this is the second time Miggie and I agree on something... we both agree on at least one suitable location for a Raoul Wallenberg monument.
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