Rutgers United against hate vs. westboro baptist church - repost this and make it Viral

[wolf_nd_shadows]

On October 28th 2009, The Westboro Baptist Church, owners of the website godhatesfags.com targeted the Rutgers Hillel Center for a demonstration of intolerance and hate. Upon hear of this, Rutgers Hillel scheduled a counter protest event called Rutgers United against Hate.
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/event.php?eid=180289130906&index=1
Instead

Comments

[thegreyeminence]

“WBBC moved down to the next street corner, where they were barely in view of Hillel.”

That explains why I couldn't find the Westboro people in most of the photos.
I'd been wondering.

I've known about Phelps and his crew for a long time, but the hate of Jews is new to me. I'm not exactly surprised, more puzzled. It kind of detracts from their “God hates fags” brand. So I looked up their (NSFW) web site, and yes, that's clearly their new focus.

The closest I could find to an explanation was on their (NSFW)
tour schedule.
It's hard to make out, because these people clearly have no idea how HTML works, but even if the formatting were legible, it would still read like the Timecube Testament, 4chan Edition.
No shit, they cite the Urban Dictionary… lots.

The article you linked to quoted the Rutgers section in it's entirety.
I've read the rest of it, but I still have no idea how they chose their seven half-hour stops of the day.
(God hates fags Jews in thirty-minute increments.)
It looks like they just buzzed every site they could squeeze into a day's tour of north Jersey.

The highlight comes from their Meadowlands stop, titled “Are Babies Kosher?”
because The Beast Obama is going to end the world. (I'm not making this up.)

We have a message from your maker, evil Jews now we're here to deliver.
God has cursed you, since your Golden Calf (Exodus 32).
The holocaust you suffered, you haven't seen the half.
Filthy Jews, God Hates YOU.

Since it's not a Godwin if they went there first…

I remember around 1990 or so seeing part of a propaganda video from an actual South American Nazi.
As in, survived the fall of the Reich, escaped to Argentina, and 40 years later was still hiding out in the hills somewhere.
(I wish I could remember his name.)
This feeble old man was still preaching how they could restore the Reich if only the troops kept their faith and were strong for National Socialism… as if his comeback was happening any day now.

It wasn't scary.
It was just sad.
He was living in a pathetic fantasy world where the Reich would rise again if only they all tried hard enough.
He thought he would be big, but he was a nobody.
And I don't just just mean that Nazi Germany had been reduced to a bad memory by 1980-some-odd, I mean that all the Nazis of any significance had been captured or had died of old age by that point.
Even when Nazi Germany was threatening the entire planet, this guy still hadn't been half as important as he thought he was.
For all his talk, he was zero threat to anyone.

The thing is, it wasn't all in his mind…
Once upon a time, people had flocked to exactly that rhetoric, and decades later he was dutifully repeating the ritual that used to work, and wondering where the magic had gone.
I don't doubt for an instant that, if he had somehow gained the power he wanted, he would have started the nightmare all over again.
So, laughable though he was, you couldn't just ignore him.

Back to Westboro Baptist…

Yes, they're a joke, but they're not harmless.
It's hard to imagine how they could possibly get the kind of power they clearly want, but it's not hard at all to imagine what they'd do with it.
So while my instinct is to ignore them, to not give them the attention they want, they still have to be opposed.
I'd rather just mock them (as I did above), but that's not the right answer, or at least not the whole answer.

There's an argument that Fred Phelps and his pests are a distraction from bigger and more immediate problems.
That's true, but they also serve as a useful if unwelcome reminder that we're never really done with the old problems.
Counter-protests in turn remind the people who might otherwise join them that the rest of us are not on their side - something silence wouldn't do.
Thanks for standing up to them.