If you see a coin lying on top of a veteran’s gravestone, don’t touch it. The coins left by visitors — pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters — all have meaning, and reflect the thoughts and prayers of the visitors, especially those from the veterans’ families and circles of friends. More from Did You Know?
ARVE error: need id and provider
It’s just the dead rumbling in their graves at Arlington National Cemetery, reacting to last Tuesday’s election. In this week’s edition of The Great Eight, Ben Crystal also goes dress shopping with Michelle Obama, checks in with Massachusetts’ Princess Liawatha and makes a mad dash for Twinkies and Dorito’s, hoping the grocery shelves haven’t all been stripped bare of munchies by Colorado’s stoners.
ARVE error: need id and provider
Zabno, a small town in southern Poland, was a haven for Jewish families until WWII broke out. In this report, we hear the disturbing stories of people who experienced Nazi cruelty first hand and see just how fresh the wounds left by the Final Solution still are.
Although many Jewish people from Zabno were transported to concentration camps such as Belzec, this moving film focuses on those who were left behind — murdered in their own gardens and buried in unmarked graves, and the lucky few that managed to escape. But were they really lucky? Through startling and frank accounts of their experiences, a small group of surviving women recount how they suffered terrible beatings at German hands and watched with horror as their families were taken away to their deaths. H/T Journeyman Pictures
ARVE error: need id and provider
Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Spring, has sunken into chaos since the toppling of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on Jan. 14, 2011. Before the revolution, Muslims, Christians, Jews and atheists lived in relative peace. But in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, radical Islamists have terrorized the nation’s minorities. Roving bands of jihadists and Salafists have desecrated churches, destroyed graves and chanted anti-Jewish slogans outside El Ghriba, Tunisia’s last functioning synagogue. The extremists spread feces on the walls of a Russian Orthodox Church, ordering the priest to remove all Christian symbols. “And if we didn’t do it, they’d resort to force,” the frightened priest says.
The moderate Ennahda party, which is now running the Tunisian government, insists these are the actions of rogue elements. “We have to convince them. It is a country for all citizens, whether Islamists or not,” says Rachid Ghannouchi, Ennahda’s leader. But his party faces an uphill struggle. Thamina Thabet from the Society for the Support of Minorities notes the Salafists have “taken control of 400 mosques and now they are teaching a new generation the way they think.” Bill Code reports from Tunisia and asks, “As religious minorities watch with unease the growing strength of puritanical Islamist groups, can a country with a proud secular tradition find its democracy?” H/T Journeyman Pictures
ARVE error: need id and provider
