If that's not hateful, I don't know what is. And for a city like San Francisco to allow hate crime like the above to go on is shocking!
While it remains to be determined what actual crime was committed, the victims clearly were selected because of their race and/or nationality:
SAN FRANCISCO - An exhibit showing Chinese bodies and organs is drawing protests from Chinese-Americans who say the display of corpses is offensive to their culture.
Fiona Ma, a Chinese-American San Francisco supervisor, said Friday she is working with city attorneys to draft legislation that will keep exhibits like "The Universe Within" out of the city unless organizers can verify the consent of people who donated the bodies or their families.
"Chinese culture has very strong beliefs about death," said Ma, who represents a heavily Chinese district. "Chinese people are very private and wouldn't want to have their bodies displayed for commercial purposes."
The "Universe Within" — now on display in San Francisco — is among a string of exhibits touring the country that have been wildly successful. The collection of bodies and organs was once used to instruct medical students in Beijing.
The corpses were preserved through "plastination," which replaces body fluids with liquid plastic. The plastic is hardened, leaving tissues intact. The bodies can then be displayed without formaldehyde or glass containers.
A recent visit showed bodies propped up like department store mannequins, and individual organs displayed with veins and capillaries intact.
Francisco Hsieh, a retired Chinese-American who visited the exhibit, is advising his friends and family to stay away.
"Chinese people want to keep their whole body when they pass away and no one would want their bodies displayed," he said. "I feel disgusted and terrible ... some parts look like cuts of meat."
Ma is asking the district attorney's office to investigate the promoter, Gerhard Perner of Austria. The city's Department of Public Health also is investigating.
Chinese corpses, of course, were selected deliberately by the plastinators. As I pointed out before, human remains for sale these days are of Chinese origin.
It is a hate crime if the perpetrator "intentionally selects a victim, or in the case of a property crime, the property that is the object of the crime, because of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender, disability, or sexual orientation of any person." While I'll leave it to better minds than my own whether a corpse could be considered a "person," [or whether death is a form of, um, disability] a corpse is certainly property! And in the event that any crime is found to have been committed with that property, it's certainly because of the race and national origin -- for the simple reason that only China allows easy trafficking in human remains. It's simple logic, really. If trafficking in live humans because of their race and national origin is hate crime, then so is trafficking in their remains.
All that needs to be shown is that some kind of crime occurred. In San Francisco, they're looking into public health violations.
Archaeologists should think twice before digging! And so should purchasers of ethnic artifacts.
Illegal purchasers of Indian arrowheads beware!
posted by Eric on 05.29.05 at 10:28 AM
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That'sa pretty macabre picture, doesn't look like somebody I'd like to go on a date with. The Chinese Communists have no respect for human life -- or human death. Men and women have always taken care to honor their sacred dead, from Stone Age burials to the pyramids of Egypt to the legend of Antigone, from the great tombs of the Shang dynasty to later Chinese ancestor-worship. It is ancient. It is eternal.
Funny. I had a dream about meeting you last night in a restaurant or cafe somewhere, maybe a pizza parlor*. You remind me very much of my other good friend, Robin Georg Olsen, whom I have known since 1st grade back in 1961. But, it was not a good dream. Problem is that, while I would certainly like to meet you, I'm just as certain you wouldn't like to meet me. That's just the way it is.
(*A young lady who works at the Papazzi Pizzeria where I eat often is very beautiful.)
I must continue reading my favorite warblogger, the first and greatest of all the warbloggers, who was blogging about War long before blogs were even invented, before computers were invented -- Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who fisked and refuted the fallacies and lies of the Prussians and of the pacifists during the First World War.
A few years after that War, he predicted that a Second World War would begin with an attack on Catholic Poland by both Bolshevist Russia and Nazi Prussia. He died in 1936, 3 years before his prophecy came true. I often think about that Second World War, the most cataclysmic War in human history: Chesterton predicted it. My Dad fought in it. And then it was 10 years history when I was born in 1955. History. Those who will not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.... The Ominous Parallels....
I've been having a lot of problems with my e-mail. I'll let you know when it all gets fixed, somehow, have no idea when. Until then, my on-line communications are restricted to comments here in Classical Values and in Dean's World (the Queen's realm also). Glad I still have your snail-mail address.
I must also mention that my friend Robin Georg Olsen is also of Norweigian descent. Germany got Hungary, took Turkey, and fried it in Greece.
The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler
Don?t bang your head!
That'sa pretty macabre picture, doesn't look like somebody I'd like to go on a date with. The Chinese Communists have no respect for human life -- or human death. Men and women have always taken care to honor their sacred dead, from Stone Age burials to the pyramids of Egypt to the legend of Antigone, from the great tombs of the Shang dynasty to later Chinese ancestor-worship. It is ancient. It is eternal.
Funny. I had a dream about meeting you last night in a restaurant or cafe somewhere, maybe a pizza parlor*. You remind me very much of my other good friend, Robin Georg Olsen, whom I have known since 1st grade back in 1961. But, it was not a good dream. Problem is that, while I would certainly like to meet you, I'm just as certain you wouldn't like to meet me. That's just the way it is.
(*A young lady who works at the Papazzi Pizzeria where I eat often is very beautiful.)
I must continue reading my favorite warblogger, the first and greatest of all the warbloggers, who was blogging about War long before blogs were even invented, before computers were invented -- Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who fisked and refuted the fallacies and lies of the Prussians and of the pacifists during the First World War.
A few years after that War, he predicted that a Second World War would begin with an attack on Catholic Poland by both Bolshevist Russia and Nazi Prussia. He died in 1936, 3 years before his prophecy came true. I often think about that Second World War, the most cataclysmic War in human history: Chesterton predicted it. My Dad fought in it. And then it was 10 years history when I was born in 1955. History. Those who will not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.... The Ominous Parallels....