OK, it’s an easy target. We all know that Joseph Farah is a man without integrity or decency, a desperate huckster who proclaims to be a Christian while churning out the most egregious lies on his pseudo-news site WorldNetDaily. His crude bias and bad faith are of course long-standing and perennial; but in recent weeks – perhaps in competition with the increasingly hysterical Fox – his discourse has become so unhinged that WND now more resembles a site like Prison Planet than anything that can be taken with any kind of seriousness.
A few days ago he was pushing the idea that Obama created Swine Flu; but now we’ve reached the very bottom of the barrel, a point so low that only his good friend Michael Savage could possibly compete in the self-degradation that putting your name to such a vile piece of writing must entail.
Here it is, as Farah ponders a recent speech that Obama made in a former concentration camp:
The speech was delivered at Buchenwald, one of the most notorious concentration camps operated by Nazis, a place where some 56,000 people, mostly Jews, were murdered in what Adolf Hitler hoped would be the “final solution” to the “Jewish problem.”
This is the shockingly unbelievable line that struck my attention – one that was in such poor taste that it couldn’t possibly have survived scrutiny by competent speechwriters and editors unless there was some intention behind it: “We are here today because we know this work is not yet finished.”
Now, don’t tell me I am taking this line out of context. I know I am. I understand the context – that the fight continues against those who deny the Holocaust.
However, Farah has compared that to a quote from the Koran Obama used elsewhere, which he cross-references with an adjacent more militant verse:
In his major address to the Muslim world last week, Obama seemed to be speaking in code – whether he or his speechwriters knew it.
…That is the context of this seemingly innocuous quotation that is actually revered by jihadists worldwide.
So, I ask you, am I really taking Obama’s words at Buchenwald out of context? Or am I the only one seeing them in context?
Farah is suggesting that Obama made a speech at Buchenwald in which he sent out a coded message promising to continue Hitler’s genocide. Make no mistake – his question-marks and “don’t tell me I am taking this line out of context” sentence are no more than vacuous rhetorical devices which he hopes will deflect criticism for a posture that would make a British tabloid editor choke on his own puke. All they mean is that he’s too cowardly to take full ownership for what he’s saying.
So, Farah is happy to undermine an uncontroversial speech opposing Holocaust denial, a speech presented at a location which for most people represents both a memorial to Holocaust victims and a place for the most serious moral reflection, just to score a point that’s not even cheap. There’s no way he can believe what he’s writing, so he’s simply pumping out inflammatory and tasteless lies in order to whip up paranoia and hate. I’m sure he’d love to be accused of potentially inciting violence, just so he could bleat about how there’s a conspiracy to “silence” him. But just who is he writing this for, besides some lone nutjob with a cabin in the hills, an internet connection, and a collection of guns?
This is not the first time that Farah has used the Holocaust in a way that shows him up as a vulgar clown lacking in any semblance of character – he uses a picture of skeletal Holocaust victims to sell a video attacking Charles Darwin and evolutionary biology. That video was actually condemned by the ADL.
(Hat tip: Dispatches from the Culture Wars; Right Wing Watch. Image snagged from ConWebWatch)
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