TPM Cafe | Talking Points Memo | The Lying Despicable Campaign To Turn Jews Against Obama

The reason I refer to chickens coming home to roost is because I believe that Russert would not have mentioned Farrakhan if segments of the Jewish community had not raised this rather insignificant Muslim preacher into prominence. They did that by publicizing every nasty comment about Jews or Israel the man ever made, as if he had a huge following, was a candidate for high office, or was successfully instigating pogroms.

But that is what some segments of the community enjoy doing. It is as if our identity is only secure when we can point to enemies. Unfortunately, and predictably, our well-publicized responses to Farrakhan's attacks gave him national prominence he does not deserve.

In that sense, it is our own fault that Tim Russert asked Barack Obama about his non-existent relationship with Farrakhan. But it is Russert who asked the question and he is the one who needs to be called out for it. It is also worth noting that Farrakhan is seriously ill with cancer and has been out of the limelight for years -- at least until Russert decided to make him a story when he no longer is one.

exactly. i've received some of the hate mail being circulated by jews against obama, and all i can say is: the crap is ridiculous, self-destructive and ultimately self-hating.

from the american prospect (via the poorman) comes the following fun facts and comments of american talibanical fascist vermin mike "nice lunatic" huckabee:

3. Huckabee Compares America to Nazi Germany

In a speech to the Florida Renewal Project Monday night, which in an unprecedented move was live streamed on the American Family Association's Web site, Huckabee compared America to Nazi Germany. He first implored the audience to renew their "commitment to Christ" and "to our nation, to its heritage, as well as to its future," adding "do we expect the seculars [sic] to do it? Do we expect the unbelievers to lead us, and if so, how will they lead us and where?" He then engaged in an extended description of his visit to the Israeli Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem with his 11- year-old daughter, who asked, "why didn't somebody do something?" Huckabee, who has called abortion a "holocaust," then issued a dire warning:

... I pray that no father ever stands over the shoulder of his own daughter and after her witnessing the decline and the fall of a great nation, writes, and sees her write these words, "why didn't somebody do something?" You see, I believe the reason we're here is because we are the somebodies. And we're to do the something and if we don't, who will? And if we don't act now, when will it happen, and will it be too late? You leave this conference with this haunting question, and pray that no one would ever ask of you or of me, why didn't somebody do something.

You read that right. Huckabee thinks if the "seculars" are allowed to rule America, our country could suffer the same fate as Nazi Germany. A resounding insult all around from this "Christian leader."

4. Huckabee's Christian Constitution

Huckabee has been consistently cagey about answering questions about his views on biblical law and Christian Reconstructionism. In the Times this weekend, Oran Smith, a conservative Christian activist in South Carolina, portrayed Huckabee as "Houdini," but he really is more like Zelig, adapting his answers to particular audiences to satisfy his radical fans while assuaging his critics.

Huckabee has offered his view that the Bible prohibits marriage between people of the same gender, and hell, between humans and animals, and hence the Constitution should be clear on that point, too. He slaps his opponents around for their lack of support for a federal marriage amendment and a human life amendment. Many supporters of a human life amendment believe that birth control pills cause abortions, and therefore should be outlawed under such an amendment. In a meeting with the editorial board of the Des Moines Register last year, Huckabee sidestepped answering the question directly but strongly suggested he thinks at least certain types of birth control pills should made illegal. In his Renewal Project speech Monday night, on the eve of the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Huckabee made yet another inappropriate and insulting comparison, maintaining that overturning Roe is "not good enough," and that letting the states "handle something that is a moral issue is the logic of the civil war."

given how often "secularists" (whatever the hell that mean) are accused of having some sort of specifically "anti-religious" agenda, i would like to throw one out there:

i propose the following:

1. those bastards have to start paying taxes. period.
2. no more blue laws--they should be unconstitutional.
3. hammer the living fuck out of any preacher who ever says anything about politics. they should never be allowed to preach again.
4. absolutely no religious schools of any sort should be allowed, and there should be an even greater attempt to stamp out any religious influence in public school.
5. no allowance for religions such as lubavitch "judaism" or mennonites and so on to separate themselves from their surrounding societies.
6. all televangelists to be non-profit, and to be audited on an ongoing basis. any televangelists who make any money in excess of a living wage (set at the same level as the local living wage and not a penny more.
7. all religions must open their "spiritual" books to the scrutiny of neutral scholars, and must be put on the internet for the perusal of all at any time. no more bullshit secrets.
8. no special privileges for any prelates or officers of any religion. they must be treated like regular citizens, not like doctors or lawyers. or people who actually deserve respect, like janitors or laborers.
9. US to become an asylum for anyone trying to escape religious persecution anywhere in the world.

i'm sure i can think of more, or feel free to e-mail some other ideas of your own. given how often we are being told on right-wing and evangelical websites that there is a "war" coming, it's time for our side to actually give a shit.

also, as usual, where is the ADL when this creep uses the holocaust in such a perverse matter? nowhere, of course, because huckabee may be psychotic but at least he's pro-israel!

Los Angeles Times: Painter Said to Be Focus of FBI Probe

now this is what abuse looks like in the art world. yucky. and add in thomas kinkade (super-yucky) and fake christianity (ultra-yucky with a side of yuck sauce) and you have...below:

Painter Said to Be Focus of FBI Probe
By Kim Christensen
Times Staff Writer

August 29, 2006

The FBI is investigating allegations that self-styled "Painter of Light" Thomas Kinkade and some of his top executives fraudulently induced investors to open galleries and then ruined them financially, former dealers contacted by federal agents said.

Investigators are focusing on issues raised in civil litigation by at least six former Thomas Kinkade Signature Gallery owners, people who have been contacted by the FBI said.

The ex-owners allege in arbitration claims that, among other things, the artist known for his dreamily luminous landscapes and street scenes used his Christian faith to persuade them to invest in the independently owned stores, which sell only Kinkade's work.

"They really knew how to bait the hook," said one former dealer who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the case. "They certainly used the Christian hook."

Kinkade has denied the allegations in the civil litigation.

Two former dealers told the Los Angeles Times that they had been asked to provide documentation of their business relationships with Kinkade's company. They said agents asked for copies of dealer agreements, retail sales policies, training materials from "Thomas Kinkade University" and correspondence, including e-mail.

Kinkade Co. spokesman Jim Bryant said Monday that the Morgan Hill, Calif.-based company was unaware of a criminal investigation and had not been contacted by the FBI or federal prosecutors.

"The Thomas Kinkade Co. asserts that there is no legitimate grounds for a federal investigation of any kind," Bryant wrote by e-mail.

FBI Special Agent Brian Wickham declined to comment Monday, citing the bureau's policy of neither confirming nor denying the existence of investigations in progress.

The joys of life without God | Salon Books

worth sitting through the salon ad--this is a guy who makes excellent arguments about not just the uselessness of religion, but about the fact that being an atheist isn't at all a big deal--it just...is.

a quote from the article:

It's not why there is no God, it's why there's not compelling evidence to believe in God. That's a better way to put it. And from my perspective, it's just not there for me. With training in science, I have high standards of evidence. If you said God is real, and you sent your evidence to the journals Science or Nature for publication, you'd be laughed out of the room; you wouldn't get past the first reviewer.
On the other side, the best evidence that there probably isn't a God is that belief in God is so deeply culturally embedded. When you study world religions, it's obvious that, throughout time, all of these different people are making up their own stories about God. If you lived 1,000 years ago, hardly anybody would be a Christian. If you were born in India, you'd likely be a Hindu. What does that tell you? From a Christian perspective, it means we need to get more missionaries over there to tell them the truth! From an anthropological perspective, it's another case. Christians today might say, I don't believe in Zeus, that was a silly superstition. Yet for many people that was a real god.
So it turns out there are 10,000 gods and yet only one right one. That means we're all atheists on 9,999 gods. The only difference between me and the believers is I'm an atheist on one more god.

in case you were wondering where i get it,

i get it from dad.

his essay on religion (printed on some dead trees somewhere) below:

NOTES ON RELIGIOUS BULLSHIT

I.

“Film ignites the wrath of Hindu fundamentalists,” says the NY Times. No it doesn’t, not for a moment. This headline mindlessly concedes to “religious” belief the status always claims but never earns–of being an excuse, even a justification, for any variety of stupidity or depravity that is available to small-minded people. There are certainly (partial) explanations of this kind of bad behavior, but there are no excuses for it–or everyone would be engaging in it, instead of just witless mobs. What ignited the wrath etc. in fact was not the film (Water) but a fanatical desire of men to maintain the criminal institutions of male tyranny, to go on justifying the oppression of women, and to find apparent excuses for unleashing their impulse to violence. All this is then called “our religious beliefs” by the people who act out ignorance and depravity; and the media of discussion, not to mention occasional, self-styled multi-culturalists, reproduce this self-exculpation as though it had an actual intellectual or “cultural” content. This is pure blather. Hindu “culture” doesn’t demand the oppression of women, Hindu men do that. One might as well say that Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner, and Violet Liuzzo “ignited the wrath of white racists,” or that Emmet Till “ignited the wrath of defenders of Southern womanhood” by (allegedly) whistling at a white woman. No, the racists and oppressors and fanatics wilfully ignite their own uncontrolled wrath, and they always find an excuse to do so when it becomes too much for them to keep in check. They need no actual ignition, but just any visible instance of what they have learned to treat as a self-justifying spark; their combustion is wholly internal. If they were not ignorant and depraved persons, they would respond as any version of reason would tell them to respond to a serious communication, with their own serious counter-communication. Of course, religious belief can make room for such seriousness, as for example many post-Aquinas Catholic theologians have done by carving out a place for secular reason within the overall framework of their theology. But it’s not the theology that helps them to do that, it’s rather Aristotle’s very secular (and for intelligent persons, necessary) account of what constitutes a reasoned argument. (He’s not the only one who did that, but he is the one Aquinas relied on to find his own escape hatch to secular rationality.) Religion, fatally, provides plentiful alleged justifications for intellectual and moral defectiveness to those who need them. It provides no independent justifications of its own for intellectual and moral reason.

II.

Religion is harmless only when it makes no serious truth claims on its own behalf. To clarify: I have a friend who believes that there is a realm in which the souls of the departed still exist in some way or other, and that she has witnessed communication with that realm. I doubt the validity of that evidence; it’s all too easy to fake, and has been faked over and over again. Still, there are no grounds on which I can assert the falsity of her claim–how could I possibly know–and it would be churlish of me to do so. Nothing depends on truth or falsity here, after all. There’s no way in which her conviction can lead to repressive demands on my own behavior, nor does the possibility exist that she will behave in a way I would consider unethical because of that conviction. That kind of spiritual belief is truly private, truly harmless, and truly (assuming against the odds that fakery is not involved) unimpeachable.

But that is not the case with, especially, universalistic religions: i.e., the great monotheisms. They pose no problem as long as their claims remain in the realm of purely mystical, personal, experience (but then they aren’t really universalistic). But the generalized truth claims of, say, Christianity and Mohammedanism can’t both be accepted: one or the other has to go. Either Christ came to redeem all of us, or some of us, or didn’t actually do anything of the kind. And if he wasn’t a redeemer but just a persuasive guy, then there’s no reason to take anything he said seriously unless it happens to comport with something I believe on other grounds; the same with Mohammed. (This is why the Sermon on the Mount is such a favorite with Leftists, among whom it possesses as much as but no more authority than say the Gettysburg Address does with Unionists.) More crucially, if I am given as a reason for doing or not doing something I might or might not want to do, that it is or is not the Christian thing to do–that’s simply a non-reason as far as I am concerned. Sure there’s a lot of Christians in the world, but there’s a lot of people who believe all sorts of stupid or wicked things, and it simply isn’t possible to reason from the firmness or generality of someone else’s belief to the validity or invalidity of my own. This is not an inconsequential conclusion, in that if I am correct then religious belief ought to remain an absolutely private affair (not individual, but private: the two words do not at all mean the same thing). So the belief of some–many--Christians or Muslims that the truth of their convictions gives them either a duty or a right to legislate rules that might apply to me, or to anyone, Christian or otherwise, who does not believe as they do, is a recipe for tyranny. Nothing else. That coincidentally one or more of those religiously based convictions might be in my estimation defensible is beside the point. I have many beliefs to which I am sincerely and firmly wedded that I would never dream of legislating for other people (e.g. that in our society general utility can be maximized only if individuals practice birth control; that racist and anti-Semitic beliefs are morally noxious; that “substance abuse” is potentially both self-destructive and socially harmful; that the world would be much better off in the absence of Christianity and Islam and Hindu nationalism; and so on). We can believe in the rightness of some path and yet have absolutely no intention of legislating it for others. Only beliefs about truly public matters ought to be treated as legitimate subjects for legislation, and by the same token no religious belief can be truly public: widespread, perhaps, but not public. And what makes the belief about some matter “public” is that reasons can be given for it that don’t depend on my acceding to or adopting someone else’s special system of belief; they are reasons accessible to any member of the public. Some distinctions between “public” and “private” are debatable (see my parenthesis), but this isn’t one of them.

III.

When you hear the word “blasphemy” used in any context whatsoever--except approvingly, as in “I try never to let too much time pass without blaspheming against at least one religion”--you know you are in the presence of a committed enemy of free speech and free thought. There’s never enough blasphemy to go around, it is in fact the original source of all free speech.

IV.


There’s a common confusion that comes about when we invoke the example of some allegedly good person who was, or good behavior that was, apparently inspired by religious belief. But it’s a fallacy (the “genetic fallacy”) to judge a belief by its genesis; we judge it by its outcomes. Anyhow, those religious persons who find reasons for good behavior have usually done so in spite of or in addition to, not because of, their religious commitment. Martin Luther King, e.g., is often invoked as an example of the value of religious conviction in addressing public matters--though one would do much better with the example of Joan of Lorraine, who certainly would never have liberated Orleans if she hadn’t thought herself to be the Sword of The Lord . But anyhow examples like King are self-destructive, because they’re not about truth but about utility–precisely the ground on which a true believer wishes never to stand! Make utility your argument and the next thing people will be giving you the counter-example of Son of Sam, or the Crusades. Bayard Rustin, an atheist, a homosexual, and an early Freedom Rider, had exactly the same political beliefs as King but a lot less success in communicating them to the world at large. That’s either a testimony to King’s charisma or to the American people’s general inattention, but not to his Christian beliefs, since more Americans who shared those beliefs were opposed to or indifferent about racial integration than not. What King did was make his version of Christianity compatible with American constitutionalism, thus having it both ways. If he hadn’t been able to do so, then all the good Christian intentions in the world wouldn’t have produced whatever success the Civil Rights Movement ultimately had. And if the actual truth of Christianity, rather than merely King’s own upbringing, was truly the ultimate cause of King’s behavior, that’s a pretty poor recommendation for Christianity, given the continued malodorous state of race relations in the U.S. forty years after his death. Perhaps God likes racial discrimination after all?

V.


My own belief is that the violence and oppression attendant upon the expansion of Christianity’s claims (or Islam’s) are worse than its alleged benefits; but the argument started when I make that statement cannot be settled by any so-called empirical data. In fact, all serious theologians have the same method for dealing with that argument, which is that a truly serious concept of “god” is not about a god who’s into details, like who wins which war, or makes a million, or gets a bases-loaded triple in the 8th inning of a playoff game, or any of that ridiculous nonsense that is a sure hallmark of imbecility whenever you find anyone who believes it. Serious theology (all of it, regardless of particular religion) is about the nature of the universe, and right or wrong serious theologians are not going to try to kill anyone or take over a government on its behalf. It’s the ones who think their god has rules that you and I have to live by or we must be punished for our sins, who would leave the world better off if they all just popped out of existence. And note that what I say here doesn’t apply to the conscientious objectors like say the anti-Nazi Pastor Martin Niemoller (“First they came for the Jews and I said nothing...”), who refuse to collaborate with horrendous wrongdoing, always a defensible stance on any ground; but don’t dogmatically try to run people’s lives. Niemoller didn’t reject the Nazis because they weren’t good Christians, but because they were murderers. Being his own kind of Christian may have helped him to be able to make that distinction, but lots of people who weren’t any kind of Christian were able to make it, and some earlier than he did. Famously the Huguenot descendants in the village of Le Chambon sheltered thousands of Jews from the Nazis under the leadership of their pastor and his wife, but that wasn’t because they were believing Protestants–just ask the remnants of German Jewry about believing Protestants. It was because they’d endured hundreds of years of persecution themselves and understood what it was all about and that it must be resisted. Same thing about the Black churches in the US--most of them, anyhow. They’re about adapting white Christianity to the experience of the descendants of slaves–not vice versa.


VI.

Another pernicious confusion: Of course secularism turned into an ideology may also be dogmatic (though hardly ever, in our society, punitive), but ordinary, honest, science is not in any sense “dogmatic,” no matter how authoritative it makes itself sound, because it’s always open to counter-demonstration. It’s not dogmatic to insist absolutely that Boyle’s Law, or the law of entropy or gravity, or evolutionary theory, are “true,” in the sense that though testing them whenever a reasoned suggestion is made about a need for testing is called for, simply denying them is dogmatically and wilfully ignorant. Scientists may be dogmatic (“science” never is) in the sense of not listening to possible alternatives, but since they’re always challengeable by other scientists, that doesn’t last long. Religious dogma, however, is not testable, therefore not challengeable in that sense. You can only disagree with it, and not have a moral leg to stand on in its terms, until and unless you make a theological revolution and reverse the terms. Whereas the scientist always has a leg to stand on as long as she follows agreed-on procedures; and there’s no problem about what those are, since even her most dogmatic opponent will insist that he too followed those same procedures, and this can be checked. Someone is not morally errant, but wrong, and over time it’s possible to find out who (could be both, of course, or even neither, as with quantum vs. wave theory). Dogma, however, always denies not just the other person’s conclusions, but the other person’s very way of seeing as invalid. Also, we have to avoid a phony symmetry here. Creationism, e.g., is not just “another way of seeing;” that claim is typical of the homage irrationalism pays to rationalism even while pretending to scorn it. Instead that kind of religious dogmatism is a refusal to engage in the kind of acts of seeing that are open to everyone, not just to the true believer. Such comprehensive doctrines that invalidate the non-believer’s way of thinking, and are punitive etc. on top of that, are incompatible with democracy, since the justification of democracy is that people can reason together to find the best alternative for themselves, without being subject to exclusion. The creationists, e.g, withdraw from the democratic community, perhaps in only a small way, but ultimately perhaps in a very large way–the possibility of good faith debate on anything has been undermined by them. None of this is to say that some religious Americans don’t have genuine grievances, but simply that not every response to a grievance, religious or otherwise, can be justified sensibly or is compatible with democratic civility. And a grievance is not any more deserving of respect because it’s religiously based (cf World Trade Center!), and a lot of the time less. Because what you’re dying to say is, Give me a reason, not this mindless bullshit!

VII.

If you can go an entire week without being enraged by at least one loathsome hypocritical oppressive execrescence of organized religion somewhere in the world, you seriously need to see a psychoanalyst or an A-list neurologist.

posted over at sadly! no in response to LGF post response.

just want to point out--in general, that whole LGF list is pretty non-controversial, right?

1. Stop stoning women to death

i agree, one hundred percent. it's a western liberal value that is being promulgated here. fuck any religion that would deny women basic rights.

2. Stop forcibly removing women's genitilia.

right on. women's rights are fundamental to our core beliefs--especially as liberals.

3. Stop forcing women to wear black trash can liners.

well, complicated, because lots of women in the islamic world actually will defend their "subjagation" and their removal of sex from the public square. i think it's fucked up, myself, and agree with this as well, as does any pro-western non-asshole, but it is a tad complicated.

4. Stop blowing up buildings, subways, and such.

yes, it is true, many of these acts have been commited around the world lately by islamisists of various stripes. their level of aposotasy in so doing is beyond my knowledge, but in general, that seems like a good idea, however righteous they may feel their cause is. killing civilians is teh l4m3.

5. Stop attacking Israel.

here things get interesting. i think it is safe to say people who call for the genocide of other people based on their religious persuasion are assholes and all right thinking people should hate them right back for it. but protesting israel's various land grabs, inhumane treatment of palestinians etc.--that's a tougher call. i'm split on this myself, though again, if you are saying israelis should die for existing, you are a shitbag.

6. Stop killing Jews in France.

sure. we agree with that as well. is a bad thing.

7. Stop suing anyone who says things you don't want to hear.

here we start to go off the rails a bit. ever been to the UK? they sue each other over saying things every day. i don't see what this has to do with islam.

8. Stop throwing juvenile hissyfits over silly cartoons.

i agree wholeheartedly with this. if your religion is so fucking weak and pathetic it can't take a bit of ribbing, may i suggest secular humanism as an alternative? i mean, seriously, can anyone disagree here at S!N that parody is a good thing and that the world needs more, not less, of it?

9. Stop trying to kill apostates.

it does in fact say that this is what one is supposed to do with apostates in the quran. verbatim. kind of fucked up for a "holy book".

10. And generally stop being a bunck of jerk-offs.

But then again, if they did that, they wouldn't be muslims, now would they?

now this stuff strikes me as racist, or religionist, or whatever. but here's the crux of the thing. religion does in fact suck. my religion--judaism--sucks ass. lame with the women, bad with the lessons taught, violent and vindictive, pro-slavery and incest etc.. christianity suuu uuu uu cccks. the last 2000 years of history, sanguinary as they are, will attest to that. and yes, it is true, islam suuu huuu hhuuuuuu ccccks. it does. i know the quran has a lot of beautiful stuff in it (as does the new testament) about helping the poor, the golden rule and so on. but the bad stuff in the quran is so fricking bad it is astounding, and i don't believe anyone who is a s!n reader would disagree with that analysis. really, you think the whole "kill or convert the infidel" thing is cool? you're down with women being treated like fucking dirt?

so, cognitive dissonance--i think most people here agree with 90% of what the LGF poster says, if you look at it objectively. we've just all been taught to kiss the ass of everyone else's religion--me, i'm not willing to do that. religion is the worst thing on our earth right now, and islam shouldn't get a free pass, even if it means agreeing with horrible LGFers.

just to clarify, i agree with the angle that the person who wrote the above doesn't realize how much he or she has not noticed all sorts of things about the world--while many islamic terrorists blow up subways, many american bombs fall on wedding parties, for instance. but that's not the point i'm trying to make--of course you should expect shallow analysis from LGF. you should just point out areas of agreement as well, whomever (and however invidious) the messenger may be.