Originally published at: An American tourist in Israel destroyed Roman statues, his lawyer blames "Jerusalem Syndrome" | Boing Boing
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Murica Man is the new Florida Man
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Is there a risk that Jerusalem Syndrome might be comorbid with Spanish Restoration Flu?
waits impatiently for a well-meaning but completely unqualified art lover the vandal to come along return and attempt some repairs
Edit - comorbidity implies… oh, never mind
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I’ve never been, but I understand Jerusalem probably is not a city that you should visit if you do not like seeing things associated with other people’s religions.
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The gang fights are the worst.
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Jerusalem Syndrome does not exist in the DSM. So I’m calling it Asshole Criminal Syndrome. The treatment is 25 years in prison and restitution.
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Yeah, that lawyer has some work to do to prove that it is “a well-recognized condition.” Then again, affluenza worked as a defense, so why not?
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The Old City is remarkable and the different religious sects that inhabit each of the quadrants are quite tolerable of each other. Outside the city walls though is where it gets interesting.
Ironically, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is the worst demonstration of religious intolerance in Jerusalem. The case of the ‘Immovable ladder’ is a prime example of the ridiculous Status Quo and in-fighting among the 6 different Christian sects that claim ownership of the ‘final resting place of Jesus’.
The famous immovable ladder is a bizarre outcome of this religious stubbornness pushed to extremes. Sometime in the first half of the 18th century, someone placed a ladder up against the wall of the church. No one is sure who he was, or more importantly, to which sect he belonged. The ladder remains there to this date. No one dares touch it, lest they disturb the status quo, and provoke the wrath of others. The exact date when the ladder was placed is not known but the first evidence of it comes from a 1728 engraving by Elzearius Horn. It hasn’t moved since.
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Any chance we can relocate everything important out of Jerusalem, then just turn it into a flat desert religious groups can turn into their own “Burning Man” villages at intervals throughout the year?
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The Israeli government would prefer you to focus on the amusing antics of Christian monks fighting each other.
Harassment by Israelis against Christians, including spitting, is not new. However, it has spiked under the new government, which took office late last year and has been described as the most right-wing in the country’s history.
The attacks - committed mostly by ultranationalists or settlers, including soldiers - range from trespassing on churches and spitting on churchgoers to destruction of Christian symbols and vandalising graves, among other acts.
Police have reportedly not been taking the attacks seriously, refusing to treat the incidents as part of a trend and downplaying the culprits’ motives by saying they are carried out due to “mental illness”.
Turns out that the man’s lawyer is simply taking his lead from the Israeli police.
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Are we sure the alleged vandal didn’t just really really hate the Romans?
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I had forgotten about that…
Removing artifacts from their context is a bad idea, as it erases the context. Doubly so since these are not just historical artifacts, but are locations and items in real time usage.
What needs to happen is that each group needs to recognize the rights of the others, and work together to make that happen… And don’t give me the “but they can’t get along, because reasons” nonsense… the Ottomans somehow managed to not have the Levant a raging dumpster fire of religious intolerance for literally centuries. Despite living under Muslim rule, Jews and Christians were given certain rights and privileges within the millet system. In fact when the old system was changed to the new, “modern” system, there were riots against the loss of these privileges.
So, yes, and it can and has been done.
Or on the Muslims who are just being so unreasonable about being pushed out of their homes…
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There’s the clinical horse vs. zebra decision tree. If you hear hoofbeats, think horse before zebra, as horses or more common (in any places) than zebra. Since entitled asshole tourist syndrome is more common than Jerusalem syndrome…
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I can only assume because the Ottomans threw anyone that didn’t play nice with their neighbors into a fire?
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Paris syndrome is a sense of extreme disappointment exhibited by some individuals when visiting Paris
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Yes, there were actually serious consequences for breaching the peace via religious oppression, in fact. The central government would come down hard on those who forcibly converted non-Muslims, often times, because it would intertupt their tax revenue from non-Muslims, which the central government depended on.
At the same time that Europeans were violently expelling people who were not of the right faith, the Ottomans were writing texts on their religious tolerance, which was a bit of propaganda, but like most good propaganda, it was based on some real facts. There was quite a bit of autonomy there for religious minorities, more so than in the rest of Europe at the same historical period. 
I guess it disrupts our notions of Europeans being more enlightened than those “oriental” despots, but hey… it’s also the truth of the matter.
Often times, our understanding of the Ottomans comes almost entirely from the European sources, which are often just based on anti-Muslim, terrible turk BS that has not grounding in reality of life in the empire. It lasted for as long as it did not because of only brute force, because of it being a highly diverse, complex empire that managed to balance exerting power outward with keeping the peace inward.
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So I guess that 2-day hangover was just a case of
“Las Vegas Syndrome”
…oh wait…yeah, actually that tracks
Maybe 30 years back I did some disk swapping with a guy in my user group… went to his place and he looked like shit. He said he was suffering from Jerusalem Syndrome… he had been a few months earlier and since getting back couldn’t adjust to the local time zone and was hearing whispers all the time.
Like, that was HIS explanation for it, the one he felt comfortable believing in. I saw it as mid-20’s onset schizophrenia or some form of bi-polar disorder. But the concept stuck with me, enough that I had to look it up in detail before I went to Jerusalem - just in case.
Jerusalem was awesome, the Old City was awesome. I came back changed, but for the better… if you come back all screwed up then likely this was festering inside you for some time already.
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Except when they did it.
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