Bin Laden

[Albert Rolls]

Other quotes would have served.

Religious leaders of different faiths say no one should rejoice in the death of a person, even a hated enemy.

Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld says that when people hear about the downfall of an enemy, rabbis often remind them of a verse from Proverbs: “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles.”

Herzfeld - who is the rabbi of Ohev Sholom, The National Synagogue, the oldest and largest Orthodox synagogue in Washington, D.C. - says that according to the Talmud, “God does not rejoice with the fall of the wicked.”

“As the rabbinic teaching goes, as the children of Israel were crossing the sea and the army of Pharaoh was drowning, God rebuked the angels for showing excessive joy,” Herzfeld says.


How the story keeps getting modified seems the most interesting. In a few years, various versions will show up in different forms in textbooks and reference works as lazy researchers and their editors will not follow the thread, taking whatever articles they read first as fact. The textbook story, even assuming the various books are told from the same cultural perspective, i.e., that of the West, will exists in dozens and dozens  of versions, even before the readers mistaken memories of what they read multiply those versions even more. Is that what we call history?






-----Original Message-----
>From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
>Sent: May 3, 2011 3:42 PM
>To: kelber at mindspring.com
>Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: Bin Laden
>
>http://thedailywh.at/2011/05/03/follow-up-of-the-day-fake-mlk-quote-origin-found-on-facebook/
>
>Follow Up of the Day: Fake MLK Quote Origin Found On Facebook
>
>It seems the whole thing started innocently enough, when an
>American-born, Japanese-based English teacher named Jessica Dovey
>amended an actual Dr. King quote from his 1963 sermon compilation The
>Strength to Love with her own personal sentiments (see above).
>
>Dovey’s words, clearly marked in the original post as being separate
>from the King quote, were then copied wholesale by her Facebook
>friends, and quickly spread throughout the web as a single, solitary
>quote attributed to MLK.
>
>So now you know