…but even if he were, what difference would it make? This is a ridiculous syllogism: Hitler was an atheist, therefore atheism = Hitlerism. One might as well point out that Hitler was a heterosexual, or a homo- or bisexual and come to a similar conclusion. On the other hand, it is just as unwarranted to point to all these pious Hitler quotes about God and the Saviour in order to construct another syllogism: Hitler was a believing Christian (or at least able to fake it passingly well), therefore Christianity = Hitlerism.
Atheism is not a theology or even a worldview. Atheism cannot bring society to its knees because it is not a totalitarian system. There is no danger that society will be taken over by reasonable people who test their ideas to see whether they stand up on their own or fall down flat on their face. We should be so lucky.
I just wanted to get that black on white because it is a recurring piece of nonsense when watching debates on YouTube such as this. Surprisingly,the Conservapedia(it is what it says) entry “atheism and mass murder” makes no mention of Hitler or Nazism. So go figure, even these people can’t keep it straight.
For those who persist in the unhappy illusion that people of no faith are some kind of evil muck clinging to the otherwise pristine bumper of believers on their long ride toward heaven, only to be chiseled off on the Day of Reckoning while the faithful march happily through the pearly gates to the great Cocktail Party in the Sky, I post the following video for your enjoyment.
Even if you’re a Christian apologist, how can you not cringe at Dinesh D’Souza’s howler: “If you think Bin Laden is bad, in his wildest imagination he couldn’t begin to match the crimes of atheism that have occurred within our lifetime. It is atheism, not religion, which is responsible for the mass murders of history.” But when was the last time you saw atheists doing this?
Here is a revealing comment to my recent post about anti-Obama hate speech. In fact, it is so perfectly blind in its sheer disgust of him that I felt it deserved a place of its own in a post instead of getting lost in the comments.The author calls herself The Mad Jewess, and mad she is. At what, it’s hard to say.
“I stood up to the excrement on Youtube, and advised them to REPENT: Rabbis4Obama, Jews4Obama, the list is ENDLESS of the sheep that voted in the Marxist, Fascist, Muslim Usurper in Chief..but remember, we dont make up a whole heckuva lot of the populace, and those that did NOT vote for the pig, NEED to get blogs and head almost far right, with a little balance.
As much as people dont want to admit it, MADOFF got rid of the JINOs; ACLU, and MANY, believe you me.”
Elsewhere, she decries feminism, blacks, abortion, divorce, the anti-christ, racism (against “white people”), Latinos, gun control, Bolsheviks…an this is all on the first page of her blog! If this is any indication of the general attitudes of the anti-Obama hate-clans, it’s a lethal cocktail of far-right xenophobia and the inability to distinguish one thing from another in order to make a cesspool of one’s personal hatreds. These people are not out to debate policy, they are out to offend by any means necessary.
Israelis need all the friends they can get to combat prejudice. But are Jewish xenophobes who court right-wing American bigots (the Left Behind people) the answer to Islamist death squads and anti-Zionist xenophobia on the far left?
The propaganda is essentially the same all around. Change the names, or melt them all together into a Zionist-Muslim-Commie-Fascist-Abortion-loving-Negro-hugging-Feminist hatefest to suit your own personal woes. There is nothing constructive about any of this, however. And it remains a mystery exactly why they think Obama’s policy on Israeli settlements is so unique. It may be ‘displacement’, but is is not really divergent or particularly original.
If you haven’t seen this week’s Economist yet, it has an excellent cover. Just one of the many reasons we still enjoy opening the mail in the Age of Twitter:
In less than 10 years time, say the cyber engineers, the Web will connect every aspect of our digital lives to every other aspect of our nondigital lives – e.g., when typing an e-mail the Web will already know what the subject is and will suggest Web sites and books, as well as documents, photos and videos that are pertinent, and anything you have saved in the past that is still relevant today. It will be known as the Web’s “inherent intelligence.”
“One hundred years ago, our fathers retired the gods from politics.
The Declaration of Independence is the grandest, the bravest, and the profoundest political document that was ever signed by the representatives of a people. It is the embodiment of physical and moral courage and of political wisdom.
I say of physical courage, because it was a declaration of war against the most powerful nation then on the globe; a declaration of war by thirteen weak, unorganized colonies; a declaration of war by a few people, without military stores, without wealth, without strength, against the most powerful kingdom on the earth; a declaration of war made when the British navy, at that day the mistress of every sea, was hovering along the coast of America, looking after defenseless towns and villages to ravage and destroy. It was made when thousands of English soldiers were upon our soil, and when the principal cities of America were in the substantial possession of the enemy. And so, I say, all things considered, it was the bravest political document ever signed by man. And if it was physically brave, the moral courage of the document is almost infinitely beyond the physical. They had the courage not only, but they had the almost infinite wisdom, to declare that all men are created equal.
Such things had occasionally been said by some political enthusiast in the olden time, but, for the first time in the history of the world, the representatives of a nation, the representatives of a real, living, breathing, hoping people, declared that all men are created equal. With one blow, with one stroke of the pen, they struck down all the cruel, heartless barriers that aristocracy, that priestcraft, that king-craft had raised between man and man. They struck down with one immortal blow that infamous spirit of caste that makes a God almost a beast, and a beast almost a god. With one word, with one blow, they wiped away and utterly destroyed, all that had been done by centuries of war — centuries of hypocrisy — centuries of injustice.
What more did they do? They then declared that each man has a right to live. And what does that mean? It means that he has the right to make his living. It means that he has the right to breathe the air, to work the land, that he stands the equal of every other human being beneath the shining stars; entitled to the product of his labor — the labor of his hand and of his brain.
What more? That every man has the right to pursue his own happiness in his own way. Grander words than. these have never been spoken by man.”
Thousands of haredim took to the streets of Jerusalem on Saturday evening, in violent protests against the Karta parking lot in the capital opening on Shabbat to accommodate Old City tourists.
According to initial reports, rocks were thrown and policemen trying to disperse crowds were pushed and shoved. Crowds of haredim also tried to break into the parking lot.
The protesters, demonstrating in the main haredi neighborhood of Jerusalem, Mea She’arim, claim to be pained by the desecration of Shabbat. Many of the ultra-orthodox Jews were apparently chanting, “Shabbat desecrators will die,” and vowed to hold further demonstrations next week.
Eyewitnesses said that protesters had formed a human chain to prevent police from dispersing crowds, while police set up road blocks around the area.
In similar protests last weekend, 57 haredim were arrested for disturbing the peace, according to Jerusalem Police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby. The detainees were taken to the city’s Russian Compound jail, where they were held overnight until their remand hearing the following day.
I hope God doesn’t read my blog. It’s still shabbos in Rome.
p.s. It’s hard to tell from the article if “Saturday evening” is still technically shabbos.The article was updated at 8:05 (Israeli time) this evening, which is less than one hour ago by my watch.It’s still light out in Rome. So weren’t the haredi themselves desecrating the sanctity of shabbat with their inane rock-throwing? Or did they find some talmudic loophole through which to crawl?
Some 70% of American Jews voted for Barack Obama in the last elections. Now, we find out we voted for Hitler? This is something I can’t quite digest, this pro-Israeli Obama-bashing. How did the conservatives hijack Zionism?
“The dhimmi in the White House” has increasingly become a sort of anti-Obama rallying cry. The scope is not to discuss or criticize Obama’s ideas on Israel (entirely debatable,as ever) but to dirty him with the dhimmi brush. He has been tarred and feathered as an enemy of Israel and the Jewish people and a lackey of Islamic rejectionism. As my blogger friend Jew With a View posted recently (quoting Joseph Farah):
I hope my Jewish friends remember this well. Many of them voted for Barack Obama. Many of them voted for Hillary Clinton. These are not your friends. These are the same kinds of people who turned away ships of Jewish refugees from Germany in the 1940s. These are the same kinds of people who appeased Adolf Hitler at Munich. These are the same kinds of people who made the reformation of the modern state of Israel so difficult.
We have gone from understandable criticism of Obama-administration pressure on Israel to stop existing settlement growth to a mischaracterization of Obama as–what? Hitler? Ahmadinejad? Appeasement incarnate, apparently. Farah goes so far as to call this “ethnic cleansing”, perhaps borrowing his human-rights jargon from the anti-Zionist hard left. My baloney detector is going haywire.
Is Barack Obama a cosmically-charged enemy of the Jewish people? Was he sent by God (or the Adversary) to beguile and destroy Jewish continuity in the guise of the president of the USA? Is he, as we are expected to believe, completely subservient to the Islamist lobby? Is he ransoming the State of Israel to appease the likes of Osama bin Laden and the Iranian regime? Does any of this sound familiar?? It sounds like the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis turned on its head. If only everything in politics were so black and white.
I’m all for crticism where it is due, and Obama is no exception. I used to feel disgusted at the hatred against Dubya, though I’ve never felt close to the Republican party or kinship with American conservative causes. I even stood up to fellow liberals when they crossed the line from criticism to hate speech. And there was a lot of that back then. Now it’s back–with a vengeance.
I love reading Ron Rosenbaum’s blog. He is unafraid to confront both the idiots on the left and the dorkbots (my humble attempt at a Rosenbaumism) on the right. Besides, he wrote one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read. I wrote about it here.
What infuriates me is that he is a rampant misspeller. I admit this gives me pause at times, although I know no one in perfekt and blogging is often done at high velocity: in cars, trains, helicopters etc…but can there be any excuse for the followingwaterfall of mangled orthography?
I did something I hadn’ t done for a million years. I listened to Dylan’s first album Bob Dylan, from beginning to end. Thirteen songs, 12 or them negligable material–and one song, if not immortal than at least awe-inspiring, awesome. It’s the next the last song on the album, which makes it all the more surprizing since you have to put up with 11 ho-hum imersonations of blues singers, impersonaltions of other folkies, covers of old chesnuts.
I mean, can’t you read it over just once, Ron, before striking the “publish” key?
In a publishing universe saturated with an onslaught of books arguing vociferously both for and against religion, Harris’s view stands out because it rails not just against God, but against faith itself. And not only against the faith of extremists, but that of religious moderates, who Harris snubs as unfaithful yet unwilling to abandon faith.
So-called moderates actually function, according to Harris, as padding for religious extremists, making the latter untouchable by the tenets of modern critical discourse. We live in a world where everything is debatable and deflatable except religious belief. Sam Harris asks why.
A belief, Harris argues, is “a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person’s life.” Thus one who believes that 72 virgins await him in heaven if he murders a bunch of Israelis in a pizzeria is propelled by his belief to do what for a skeptic in his position would be unthinkable. Harris follows this logic to its natural conclusion, outlining many of the familiar proofs along the way: the inconsistency of scripture with itself, the incompatibility of “revealed religions” with each other in an increasingly volatile world, the societal evolution of morality and the pursuit of happiness as humankind’s ultimate goal.
Harris lets nobody off the hook, except perhaps the Jain, as they are extremists only in non-violent tendencies. Christianity and Islam are the primary culprits, as both are religions based on revelation, ultimate truth and the promise of heaven (and hell). Judaism receives a lighter treatment, partially due to its historical inability to inflict much damage on its self-declared taskmasters.
The writing throughout is precise, the book is well-sourced and the arguments are convincing. The last chapter examines whether spiritual experiences are attainable in ways divorced from dogma. Hint: read the footnotes.
I used to think that the punkabbestia — dubiously dubbed “gutter punk” in English — were an Italian phenomenon. Strolling across Ponte Sisto, one of Rome’s most attractive old bridges, I would lament their occupation of the bridge (occupation is the perfect word in many ways) and its subsequent transformation into a kennel.
They were everywhere in Rome, and if one asked you for a euro and you didn’t hand it over, the first word to slip past the pierced lower lip was nearly always stronzo, or Fascist (at least ideologically). To not support their cause — inasmuch as there was one —was to be the automatic enemy, the political other, the bourgeois-Fascist so despised by the radical European left.
(Note: If Wikipedia is to be believed, there is even a debate over the etymology of the term punkabbestia, basically over whether or not the “bestia” in question is a reference to their pets or just some Tuscan slang meaning “superpunk.” There is nothing really punk about them, however, in the sense that I or anyone who has ever read Lester Bangs understands as “punk.” There isn’t even the slightest intellectual pretense about these punks, and Sontagism was key to the original formation of what became punk in the mid-70s. I bet none of these ardent young radicals has ever read “Notes on Camp,” or even Rimbaud.)
Rather, the punkabbestia resembled the Deadheads, an aesthetic relic of something that lost its sense long ago, a throwback to some vague, perpetual revolution that never was more than a flash in the pan of popular culture.
I think what bothered me most about them, however, wasn’t their self-inflicted griminess or even their rottener-than-thou snottitude. I was a retro-punk once, too. I understood that stuff, and I understood that most healthy people grow out of it after the brief flirt fizzles out. Even Johnny Rotten became John Lydon again within a year of the Sex Pistols’ first — and only — album.
What bothered me most about them were their dogs: starved, lactating and working on shabbos. Animals without which nobody would fork over a thin dime to these angry street youths, all of who probably had families and a clean pillow on which to lay their heads. They may have been slumming, but their animals were suffering acute humiliation and degradation. Where were the animal rights activists on Ponte Sisto?
The truth is that, after six years, they had become as much a part of my Roman landscape as the Pantheon. I hardly even noticed them anymore. Until I went to Spain, that is.
The Spanish city of Granada, in Andalusia, is heavy punkabbestia stomping ground. In fact, it’s difficult to enjoy the delights of the Albayzin — Granada’s historic Moorish quarter facing the Alhambra — without running into hoards of dreadlocked street musicians plucking out chords for change. The plazas after dark are strewn with groups huddled together on the pavement, their dogs humping and whining. You have to step over them, as if they were cadavers after a massacre. The graffiti is so thick that my wife quipped, “I feel like we’re in the Bronx.”
One Moroccan restaurateur told us that he is moving his restaurant to another part of the city because he has lost most of his business. He said that the tourist board of Granada tells the city’s visitors that the Albayzin is dangerous. “No one wants to come through here at night. The restaurants are all suffering.” The punkabbestia have taken over.
Even our trusty guidebook had this to say about the caves of Sacromonte, near the Albayzin: “…a few [Gypsies] still live here, as do a number of cave-squatters whose bohemian lifestyle is legendary in the city. The zone is now UNESCO protected…and law requires that all caves must be fit to live in.”
Does this mean that the squatters and their “bohemian lifestyle” are actually protected by law? No wonder they proliferate. I remember reading, back in the mid-1990s, of the squatter wars on New York’s Lower East Side. The city was trying very hard to root them out of the old tenements that they had turned into illegal outposts, complete with water and electricity that no one was willing to pay for. Today, in Granada, they are state-funded.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to suggest these good-natured young people should be rooted out of our beautiful European cities. But I do question the sagacity of such laissez-faire. There is real homelessness in the world, so why bend over backwards to accommodate such homeless-chic? Does the choice to live like a bum really constitute an “alternative lifestyle?”
If they wish for independence, they should know it has a price tag. If you want your freedom, you must pay for it. Most of us work and pay rent (or a mutuo), which isn’t exactly an illustrious lifestyle by punkabbestia standards. Nobody will hire you with piercings covering most available lobes and orifices, and unwashed hair grown knotty with time. But those are the breaks, kids. You can’t live off free beer forever.
The sobering conclusion is that this is, at the very least, a pan-European phenomenon. Many of us are quick to blame Italy as a kind of “capital of the Third World,” but for all I know similar phenomena exist in far-away places like Japan and Israel. A recent film, “Someone to Run With,” opens a window on Jerusalem’s punkabbestia subculture. We may not like them much, but they are here to stay. I just wish someone would take care of their dogs.
Marc Di Martino 
