Well, the grinch certainly stole Christmas at the Seattle airport this year. The question is: who's the grinch?
(AP) All nine Christmas trees have been removed from the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport instead of adding a giant Jewish menorah to the holiday display as a rabbi had requested.
Maintenance workers boxed up the trees during the graveyard shift early Saturday, when airport bosses believed few people would notice.
"We decided to take the trees down because we didn't want to be exclusive," said airport spokeswoman Terri-Ann Betancourt. "We're trying to be thoughtful and respectful, and will review policies after the first of the year."
This article is so full of mind bending brain twisting equivocation and evasion on the part of the Seattle airport authorities it could make your head hurt. Here's another dose.
After consulting with lawyers, port staff believed that adding the menorah would have required adding symbols for other religions and cultures in the Northwest. The holidays are the busiest season at the airport, Betancourt said, and staff didn't have time to play cultural anthropologists.
Uh huh. Putting up nine Christmas trees: no problem. They're not a religious symbol, after all. Or so said the airport spokesobfuscator on Fox News this morning. But putting up a menorah (hanukkiya, actually, but that's a different issue), no, they can't do that because then they'd risk offending all of those other religions and cultures that predominate in the Northwest.
Are we clear yet?
Just to add a little dazzle to this story, the airport is blaming a threatened lawsuit by a local Lubavitch rabbi.
Craig Watson, the port's chief lawyer, said Bogomilsky had threatened to file the lawsuit if the port didn't make a decision by the end of last week.
"It just wasn't going to get done before the threatened lawsuit was filed. They said they were on their way to the courthouse," Watson said. "We're not in the business of offending anyone, and we're not eager to get into a federal lawsuit with anyone."
They're making it sound as if the rabbi held their feet to the fire. In fact, the spokesobfuscator on Fox said that he gave them less than twelve hours' notice. But then she admitted that discussions over the matter had been ongoing "for weeks." For weeks, the airport just couldn't figure out a way to add all of those other symbols for all of those other cultures and religions. Perhaps they would have figured it out after Hanukkah was over, but the rabbi, for some reason, wouldn't wait.
And the rabbi's comment on this disgrace?
"Everyone should have their spirit of the holiday. For many people the trees are the spirit of the holidays, and adding a menorah adds light to the season," said Bogomilsky, who works in Seattle at the regional headquarters for Chabad Lubavitch, a Jewish education foundation.
Check out the comments. Big surprise. They're blaming the Jooooos.
