http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2007/10/halloween-and-yitzchak-rabin-memorials.htmlWith the overlap of the American holiday Halloween and the endless memorial services for Yitzchak Rabin, it is hard to miss just how much they have in common.
Like Halloween, the Rabin Memorial is a festival dedicated to the dead and to death. Halloween celebrates the culture of death and the memorialization of Rabin celebrates the culture of death he created by making deals and concessions with terrorists.
On Halloween people celebrated by dressing in costumes. In Rabin memorials politicians celebrate too by dressing up in costumes, except they all wear the same costume, that of Rabin the peacemaker. After all Rabin as peacemaker has killed far more people than Dracula, Frankenstein and all the other monsters combined.
Halloween is a series of pagan festivities and so too the Rabin memorials are pagan festivities. Halloween reaches back to Pre-Christian times and the Rabin memorials reach back to pre-state and pre-religious times creating a cult of personality around one man, Yitzchak Rabin. Halloween is full of ghosts, the Rabin memorials are filled with only one ghost, that of Rabin presiding over everything.
Schools often work to involve children in their Halloween festivities. Rabin memorials in Israel now focus heavily on schools, even interrupting a strike by teachers, dragging them back to school for a few hours to spend a few hours brainwashing kids with the following. "Yitzchak Rabin wanted peace. The arabs wanted peace. But a certain Jew did not want peace and that is why we are at war today." Then everyone sings Shir LeShalom, when Monster Mash would be far more appropriate. After all the peace process did catch on in a flash and it is hard to deny that it was a graveyard smash.
Halloween focuses on the fantastic and the unreal. The Rabin memorials also focus on the entirely fantastic premise that Yitzchak Rabin had created and that only his assassination had somehow thwarted peace.
Halloween is all about terror and so are the Rabin memorials, yet where Halloween enables terror for one night, the Rabin memorials help enable terror for 365 days out of the year.
Finally on Halloween people do their best to ignore the fact that monsters are not real. On the Rabin memorials people do their best to ignore the fact the monsters are real and are among us.