Catholic youth crusade against Madonna in Poland
(AFP) – 7/17/12
WARSAW — Singer Madonna is courting controversy again ahead of an August 1 gig in Warsaw, having already been threatened with legal action in France for projecting a swastika on an image of far-right party leader Marine Le Pen.
A group of young Catholics has launched an online petition to have the concert cancelled as it coincides with the Polish capital’s annual World War II commemoration of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising against the city’s Nazi’s occupiers.
As of Tuesday, the petition had gathered 31,000 supporters for the “Material Girl’s” concert to be called off out of respect for the estimated 200,000 people who died in the doomed 63-day uprising by Polish partisans.
Every year at 5 pm (1500 GMT) on August 1 sirens wail as Warsaw residents observe a minute’s silence across the capital to remember the loss of life in the largest single rebellion against Nazi Germany during WWII.
“August 1 is a day of remembrance in Poland. We pay our respects to those who survived and those who perished in the uprising. We won’t allow the desecration of our hallowed symbols,” reads the Internet petition launched by a group calling itself the Youth Crusade.
It also slams the 53-year-old Queen of Pop’s on-stage antics as “attacking the Catholic faith… offending Jesus Christ by burning crosses and wearing a crown of thorns” as well as promoting homosexuality and pornography.
A spokesperson for tour promoter LiveNation, Anna Pietrzak, declined comment on both the protest and ticket sales when contacted by AFP on Tuesday.
Warsaw city authorities have proposed holding a minute’s silence and airing WWII-era news chronicles of the uprising ahead of the concert at Warsaw’s new National Stadium, which has a capacity of nearly 73,000.
Having hosted the June 8 kick-off of the Euro 2012 football championships, the venue itself is on the east bank of the Vistula river, cutting though the Polish capital, where Soviet forces waited for the Nazis to decimate the Polish resistance during the uprising.
The protest comes as Madonna faces a lawsuit in France brought by the far-right National Front for screening a video showing party leader Marine Le Pen with a Nazi swastika on her forehead at a weekend concert at the Stade de France near Paris.
The failed French presidential candidate warned the US superstar in June she was mulling legal action after the video was shown at a Tel Aviv gig in May kicking off the “MDNA” world tour, covering about 30 countries and wrapping up in Australia in 2013.
MADONNA LIBELS THE POPE
July 16, 2012
www.catholicleague.org/madonna-libels-the-pope/
Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on pop-star Madonna’s latest anti-Catholic stunt:
Madonna is back in the news, this time for offending concert-goers in France. In her latest video that accompanies the song, “Nobody Knows Me,” French National Front party leader Marine Le Pen is shown sporting a swastika on her head. After the video was played during Madonna’s performance in Paris on Saturday, the National Front said it was going to sue her. Not attracting much attention is Madonna’s vile attack on Pope Benedict XVI.
The full video of “Nobody Knows Me,” which is part of Madonna’s MDNA Tour, is replete with religious symbolism. The most offensive part for Catholics occurs when anti-gay protesters are shown just before Madonna’s face morphs into that of the pope; at the point where the pope’s face appears, protesters holding gay-bashing signs are shown on both sides of him. The accompanying lyrics, which include the refrain, “Won’t let a stranger give me a social disease,” ties the pope to hate speech directed at homosexuals. Moreover, photos of gay youths who recently committed suicide are also shown during this sequence.
What is particularly sick about this attack is that the protesters are not only not Catholic, they are anti-Catholic! Anyone who doubts this to be true only needs go to the website of the Westboro Baptist Church [click here] and find pictures of these church members holding signs that read “God Hates Fags”—the exact signs shown in the video. To demonstrate how relentlessly anti-Catholic these people are, they are going to picket St. Joseph Catholic Church in Shawnee, Kansas on July 22: the church is called a “whorehouse” and the priests are labeled “rapists.”
Madonna not only libeled the pope, she attributed to Catholicism the hate speech of those who hate Catholics, as well as homosexuals. That the media are giving scant coverage to this part of her bigoted performance is also disturbing.