Identificational repentance hits a new low as U.S. and Swiss Amish go to Israel to apologize for their silence during the Holocaust

Here's more evidence that you can't be a satirist anymore. To quote Winston Churchill out of context, "Here, surely, is the world's record in the domain of the ridiculous and the contemptible..."

A particularly ludicrous example of what I addressed in my posts Identificational Repentance and Grovelling Christianity was reported by Jonah Mandel in the Jerusalem Post on November 28, 2010:

Representatives of the Amish community from the United States and Switzerland paid a visit to the Western Wall on Saturday night, where they asked the Jewish people’s forgiveness for their group’s silence during the Nazi extermination of Jews in the Holocaust.

Part of what made the visit special was that the Amish, a sect of the Mennonite Church that largely rejects modern technology, do not normally use contemporary forms of transportation such as the aircraft on which they made the journey to the Holy Land. It is likely that this delegation does not represent the Amish at large, rather their faction of the larger church.

But according to an announcement issued by the office of Western Wall Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch, with whom the group met, the Amish delegates saw great importance in coming to Israel and expressing their contrition, as well as declaring their unreserved support of the Jewish people and the State of Israel.

The delegation members stressed that they were neither seeking any kind of gesture from the Jewish people nor looking to proselytize – only to support Israel for the simple reason that in the past they hadn’t.

Rabinovitch was presented with various tokens at a ceremony in the Hasmonean chamber, including a parchment with a request for forgiveness in the name of the entire Amish community, along with a commitment that from now on, it would loudly voice its support of the Jewish people, especially in the wake of the expressions of hatred by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his extensions.

The delegation left Israel on Sunday.

I suppose the lives of millions of Jews in Europe could have been saved in World War II if only the Amish had spoken up for them. Just how many Amish--especially in the United States--were aware of what was happening to the Jews under Hitler? I suspect they were barely aware there was a war going on. As far as I know, the Inuit (or, to use a label now out of fashion, "Eskimos") of the Canadian Arctic also didn't speak up for the Jews during World War II, so maybe they should now go to Israel to issue an apology (which would actually be a refreshing change, since in the last 20 years, the Inuit have been successful at demanding--and getting--apologies for wrongs that were never done to them; but that's a subject that may be addressed in a future post).