Sifting the Shuttle Debris for the Hand of God

Feb. 2, 2003

Sifting the Shuttle Debris for the Hand of God

Copyright(c)2003 by Michael A. Hoffman II

There is more space shuttle debris to report, but of the cloyingly sentimenta, mawkish kind retailed in the tidal wave of treacle that calls itself "the news." Today the world has another saint to commemorate, and he just happens to be an Israeli. NASA astronaut Ilan Ramon was a scientist, conducting dust particle experiments under the supervision of Yehoyahin Yosef, professor of planetary physics at Tel Aviv University.

Ramon was also a colonel in the Israeli air force, a war hero according to the Washington Post, "...who took part in Israel's famed 1981 bombing of Iraq's nuclear reactor...Ramon clocked more than 3,000 hours as a combat pilot in A-4, Mirage III-C and F-4 Phantom fighter planes, and he logged more than 1,000 in the U.S.-built F-16....He fought in the 1982 war in Lebanon."

But what burnishes Ramon's image more than any other of his dazzling accomplishments, is his hallowed niche in the pantheon of Holocaustianity, the West's state religion. In an interview published by Israel's Foreign Ministry, Col. Ramon declared, "I'm the son of a Holocaust survivor. I carry on the suffering of the Holocaust generation..."

In an interview with NASA, he noted that his mother had been imprisoned in Auschwitz and held the exalted status of "Holocaust Survivor." The Washington Post reported, "Like many astronauts, Ramon took a variety of personal effects with him into space...He...took a pencil drawing entitled 'Moon Landscape' by a 14-year-old Jewish boy, Peter Ginz, who was killed at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II."

And thus a legend is born, Ilan Ramon, patron saint of astronauts and that lofty class of congenital sufferers, the Children of Holocaust Survivors. To this pious category must be added another in the taxonomy of victimhood, the Survivors of Dead Zionist Astronauts. Prior to Ramon there was Resnick, one of seven astronauts killed in the January 28, 1986 Challenger shuttle explosion.

One hesitates to raise puckish questions during a funerary rite, but perhaps we might be forgiven if we pause in the midst of Col. Ramon's hagiography just long enough to burn a requiem candle to the memory of the French scientist and the two other people Ramon killed when he bombed the Iraqi reactor in 1981. Back then, Col. Ramon's bombing was infamous rather than "famed." Even the NY Times characterized it as "a sneak attack...an act of inexcusable and short-sighted aggression." The celebrated Israeli scientist-astronaut is thus guilty of the murder of a scientist, but the life of the French scientist and the status of his survivors is, under the circumstances, not worth the faintest mention.

Moreover, our hero "fought" in the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, logging thousands of hours in military aircraft. The use of the word "fought" with regard to Lebanon smacks of some slight hyperbole, in that the Israeli air force was unopposed over Beirut's skies, as Ramon and his fellow heroes dropped wave after wave of napalm and cluster bombs on schools, hospitals and apartment buildings, culminating in the around-the-clock terror-bombing of downtown Beirut in August, 1982. The Israelis killed an estimated 20,000 civilians in Lebanon. Would it be opportune to light a candle for those Arab victims of this Israeli holocaust, or is Arab blood undeserving of recollection?

When Col. Ramon made his final, explosive descent on Feb. 1, "Don Redfern, who lives in Palestine, Texas, said he saw the explosion out his car window. Mr. Redfern said he saw a glare first and thought nothing of it. Then he started to hear repeated sonic booms. 'It was flopping back and forth across the sky, so I knew it was something out of the ordinary,' Mr. Redfern said."

As Israeli newscasters reported that the shuttle catastrophe had been visible over a town in Texas named Palestine, it was, said Reuters Jerusalem correspondent Michele Gershberg,"a bitter irony lost on no one."

The medium is the message. The symbolism of the Israeli "combat air force" pilot blowing up in the approximate vicinity of Palestine, Texas requires no embellishment or explication. This is sunrise language rather than twilight language, telegraphing a message as unmistakable as a left hook to the jaw. Rarely does what we might call "the hand of God" move so dramatically in world affairs, but when it does there are no excuses for ignorance; it is "a bitter irony lost on no one."

Human beings are often muttering, "Why is God silent?" On the morning of Feb. 1, He fairly shouted at a deaf, dumb and blind western world, which, until then, had been content to celebrate NASA's selection of an Israeli astronaut in the midst of the ongoing collective punishment of the Palestinian people.

When this writer learned that an Israeli was in orbit on NASA's shuttle, the first image that came to my mind was of all the dead and dying in Palestine, and of how America had lost all sense of shame. Now there are other dead strewn across the landscape of an alternate Palestine. It remains to be seen whether from this disaster we learn the sobering message that the Supreme Power wishes to impart, or if we submit ourselves instead to the beguiling electronic spectacle generated by the rulers of this world, who are not yet, for all their space age gizmos and gadgets, masters of the heavens.

Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Symbolism and happenstance are His as well, and of a far higher and more sublime type than anything the Cryptocracy can ape. A few people will glimpse the awful truth at the core of the explosion, while the majority will sink deeper into the inhibiting awe and petrifying idolatry that characterizes American subservience toward all things Israeli and Judaic. But God is not mocked. Dare we say it? In this case, He would appear to be the mocker.

Sources:

"Israelis in Shock Over Loss of Astronaut Hero." By John Ward Anderson and Molly Moore. Washington Post Feb. 1, 2003

"Israelis, in Shock, Pray for Their First Astronaut." By Michele Gershberg. Reuters, Updated 12:50 PM ET February 1, 2003

"The Air Shook With Sound, Then Debris Rained Down." New York Times, Feb. 2, 2003

http://www.hoffman-info.com/wire.html

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