Got Hypocrisy?

Conditions: Wet

Standing (Hopefully) Awkwardly

It seems every week there's a commemoration of something horrible, and this week it's the atomic bomb drop on Hiroshima, the event that most history books seem to think ended the second world war. This year there's a subtle difference in the normal proceedings

The US ambassador to Japan, John Roos, today became the first US representative to attend an annual ceremony to honour the victims of the bombing of Hiroshima.

Roos's presence at an event to mark 65 years since a US bomb left Hiroshima in ruins has raised hopes that president Barack Obama will visit the city when he attends a meeting of Apec leaders in Japan in November.

It seems there's very little in the world that the Americans can be shut out of for very long, and I for one get a weird drunk-driver-attending-victims-funeral kind of vibe when I read about this.

The mayor of Hiroshima, Tadatoshi Akiba, welcomed Washington's decision to send Roos, after it had previously turned down invitations to mark the moment a B-29 bomber dropped an atomic bomb on the city on the morning of 6 August 1945.

"We need to communicate to every corner of the globe the intense yearning of the survivors for the abolition of nuclear weapons," Akiba said. "I offer my prayers to those who died. We will not make you wait for much longer [for nuclear disarmament]."

And that's a good point, but in pursuit of a fruitless goal. In reality, no obe is ever going to completely disarm their nuclear arsenals. Not the U.S, not Russia, not Israel, not India or Pakistan, not even the secret Atlantean deep sea research facility. It's not going to happen. So if that was what the invite was for, then I think all that uncomfortableness you and Roos must have had to endure during the event was all for nothing.

Conservatives in the US have criticised the decision to send Roos, saying it would be misinterpreted as an act of contrition. The son of a member of the Enola Gay crew said the ambassador's visit to Hiroshima amounted to an "unspoken apology".

Gene Tibbets, whose deceased father, Brig Gen Paul Tibbets, piloted the bomber, told Fox News: "It's making the Japanese look like they're the poor people, like they didn't do anything. They hit Pearl Harbor, they struck us. We didn't slaughter the Japanese. We stopped the war."

- guardian.co.uk/

And then of course there's the peanut gallery, where anything that is not full and total America The Beautiful is seen as traitorous and evil.




So Much For Tolerance

Another big story this week is the horror being expressed in America over the news that a Mosque is going to be built on Ground Zero, home of the 9/11 attack. Well, not on Ground Zero, more like a few blocks away from it. But still. The horror.

To critics, the centre's proximity to the site of the atrocity would be an affront to the dead and to the feelings of families and firefighting colleagues who have survived them.

Some relatives have said that a building representative of the religion in whose name their loved ones were killed is too painful to countenance.

The Anti-Defamation League, a venerable Jewish civil rights group, came out against, arguing that "this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right".

In a Quinnipiac University poll, a narrow majority of New Yorkers disapproved of the plan, though a majority of Manhattans approved.

- telegraph.co.uk/

I'm pretty sure Americans understand Irony, but maybe the stakes here are too high for that kind of subtlety to penetrate. That it's ok for America, which really did unnecessarily drop two nuclear bombs on Japanese cities, to officially attend ceremonies for the victims while it's totally wrong for a Mosque to be built in a city for a religion that was not responsible for an attack in that same city, is something that I'm sure passes completely over the heads of most of these angry protesters. How fun it is to be the crusader.

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- Peace out