Bartholomew's Notes

It’s 350 years since Oliver Cromwell re-admitted Jews to England, and this week BBC Radio 4’s religious news programme Sunday consists of a special edition about Jews in Britain. The programme has some interesting material, and includes input from a wide range of British Jews – secular, religious, gay, pro- and anti-Zionist. The show also includes discussions about anti-Semitism and Zionism, and features a short interview with Denis MacShane, the former Labour cabinet member who currently chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into anti-Semitism. The Inquiry has been underway for ten months now, but MacShane manages only a curiously vague assessment of the problem. Presenter Edward Stourton begins by asking him how anti-Semitism expresses itself in Britain today; MacShane responds:

Just the way that anti-Semitism has always been expressed in the past: direct assaults on Jews as they were going to their synagogues; on Jewish children from Jewish schools; desecration of cemeteries; spray-painting; insults; remarks. They had to spend millions of their own money to protect their synagogues, their community centres, their schools. That’s not right, I think, that any British citizen of any faith has to dig into his or her own pocket because they feel there isn’t adequate protection for their right to express themselves as Jews.

It would have been nice to have had some indication as to the extent of this kind of thing, and how it compares with other forms of prejudice, but Stourton moves on:

To what extent do you think that the phenomenon that you observed is a consequence of people’s views about what’s happening in the Middle East?

Undoubtedly there was a read-across. Some of the vilest anti-Semitic propaganda we saw came from ultra-Islamist groups. One only has to read some of the official policies of some of the organisations active in the Middle East, listen to the President of Iran calling for the eradication of the State of Israel from the map of the world, not to see that there is a direct connection.

I’m thinking, I suppose, more, of the views of ordinary citizens, really.

There’s obviously every right to be critical of Israel. That’s a normal democratic response in any country. People who criticise Israel are not anti-Semitic. On the other hand I haven’t met, or I haven’t seen, during the year’s work we’ve done, an anti-Semite was wasn’t viscerally anti-Israeli. So in that sense there is a connection, but I think anti-Semitism is there. It’s always been there. There was the post-1945 sense of “never again”, and that anti-Semitism had to be absolutely eradicated from everybody’s thinking, but it’s there. Look at the work of the [British Nationalist Party], look at some of the slogans and the placards carried by some of the Islamic fundamentalists, the ultra-left groups. The kind of sneering anti-Semitism that you find in clubs and the old joke of Harold Macmillan that Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet was more Old Estonian than Old Etonian. All those little remarks are there, they come together and they can turn quite ugly quite quickly.

This last part is a bit weak; these days the BNP is more interested in whipping up anti-Muslim hatred than pursuing anti-Semitism. While in 1997 BNP leader Nick Griffin was churning out an anti-Semitic screed entitled Who are the Mind-Benders?, now he prefers Jared Taylor’s strategy of including Jews among “white nationalists” (as was reported in the Forward back in March, and which Max Blumenthal followed up in the Nation); and regarding the Lebanon conflict, the BNP took the line that it was none of their business. [UPDATE: However, the report does also quote a 2005 BNP publication that blamed “filthy-rich Zionist businessmen” for leading the UK into war in Iraq]. And just how prevalent are these supposedly “sneering” comments in clubs? We need a bit more than one dodgy quip made by an ancient politician 25 years ago by way of evidence.

Some of those who are concerned about it do say that it’s a particular problem of the Left, that the Left tends to be concerned about how Israel is acting and how that quite often slips over into anti-Semitism. Do you accept that?

Yes and no. I think that very many people were very surprised at the position that William Hague of the Conservative Party took on the recent conflict where he was so obviously condemning Israel and not condemning equally Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria and so on.

That wasn’t anti-Semitic, though

It wasn’t anti…no, no, no, no…but when you say it comes from the Left it creates a culture of saying that we’re not going to look at this in an even-handed way. And of course, here the problem comes again. I don’t think I know a single person, single MP, a single journalist on the Left or the Right who expounds on these problems who I think for a nano-second I would say is anti-Semitic. But when Jewish people feel and they read stuff that is so aggressive, comparing Israel to Nazis, comparing Israel to those responsible for the Holocaust, and they shudder inwardly. And I think they’re right to be concerned.

Well yes, that kind of “Israel=Hitler” stuff is stupid and nasty (although “Nazi” accusations are thrown about fairly commonly in Israel), but what’s that got to do with William Hague and “even-handedness”? Must every criticism of Israel be preceded with a checklist of repudiations of anti-Israel extremists in order to be taken seriously? MacShane concludes:

But there is a Left problem certainly, the coming together of ultra-Islamist fundamentalist groups and fanatically anti-American, anti-British government, anti-any idea of a democratic solution for the Middle East that is based on the right of Israel fully and openly to exist. Then yes, I’m afraid there is a kind of “witches’ brew” and it’s an old politics we’ve also seen before of the ultra-left coming together with people that really they should have nothing to do with in terms of respect for women, respect for human rights, respect for gays, in some of the Islamist organisations. But that’s modern politics.

I’ve also noted this unhappy trend, and recently I blogged on British anti-war protestors cheering on a pro-Hezbollah and pro-Hamas rant from Azzam Tamimi.

The interview is followed by a more general discussion of anti-Semitism in the UK, in which various Jewish contributors complain of “tensions” which were not in evidence a few decades ago. Stourton tries to pin down where exactly criticism of Israel becomes anti-Semitic, but the answers remain vague, focusing mainly on Israel’s “right to exist” – although what that means in practical terms (are supporters of a bi-national solution beyond the pale, for instance?) was left unspecified. This is a complaint I’ve made previously.

UPDATE: The report is out, and I’ve discussed it here.

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SZ at World O’Crap draws attention to the latest gem from conservative demagogue (see my blog post here) and academic Mike S Adams, in which he ponders what might have been:

Just how many Muslim terrorists could I kill if the military would ignore my age and let me serve as a sniper?

According to Adams’s profile, he was born on 30 October 1964. And according to this report, there’s some good news:

Older soldiers…are showing up more often at Army training bases across the country since Congress gave the service approval earlier this year to raise its enlistee age limit, which had been 35, to just under 42 years.

Gosh, Adams, you just might make the deadline…

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Buddhist leader: Scientists “make discoveries after we did them”

From Interfax (link added):

Sanjey-Lama of the Buddhist Traditional Sangha in Moscow has stated that the decision of the International Astronomic Union to demote Pluto down from the category of planet will not affect the Buddhist astrology in any way.

He says the Buddhist astrological system has never given Pluto the importance it has attached to other planets; it has always considered it ‘rather a gasiform entity or a comet’.

The representative of the Russian Buddhists stressed that it often happened in the history of the world science that scientists ‘make discoveries after we did them’.

How “gasiform entity or a comet” in any way relates to “dwarf planet” is not explained.

Western astrologers, however, apparently disagree with the Buddhist perspective; the WSJ has a quote:

“Whether he’s a planet, an asteroid, or a radioactive matzo ball, Pluto has proven himself worthy of a permanent place in all horoscopes,” says Shelley Ackerman, columnist for the spirituality Web site Beliefnet.com. Ms. Ackerman criticized the [International Astronomical Union] for not including astrologers in its decision.

Believers in the Fungi from Yuggoth were also unfairly excluded from discussions.

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Meanwhile, an evangelist invokes Islamic astrology in a new warning about Iran:

A former Muslim Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) terrorist says that while August 22 passed without Iran attacking Israel…

(Yes, I did notice that)

…this is still a religiously significant and dangerous time. Kamal Saleem, who became a Christian in 1985 and now lectures about the dangers of militant Islam, believes Iran is still likely to attack this month, during the present rare alignment of the crescent moon and Mars as seen on the Islamic flag.

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John Gorenfeld (who else?) notes recent developments in South Korea, where followers of Rev Moon have expressed their displeasure with certain elements of the media. Gorenfeld cites two newspapers; firstly, the JoongAng Daily:

About 700 Unification Church members sat in at the Dong-A Ilbo building in central Seoul yesterday to complain about Shindonga magazine’s coverage of their religion. The Dong-A Ilbo’s monthly magazine featured the religion in its September issue in articles the church members said was malicious.

The Dong-A Ilbo adds:

The [Family Federation for World Peace and Unification] worshippers destroyed the computers and office fixtures of the Shindonga journalists and stole the coverage documents of journalist Cho Seong-sik, the one who wrote the report concerned. They threatened to “throw sand on the rotary press of Dong-A Ilbo” and even sent more than 200 text messages to Cho’s cell phone, saying, “We’ll kill you.” Also, a photojournalist of this newspaper company Gang Byeong-gi and a CBS reporter Kim Jae-pyeong were attacked with violence and threats by the worshippers.

This kind of strategy is not unique to the Unification Church – back in 1999 followers of the neo-Pentecostal faith healer Lee Jae-Rock tried to suppress a critical documentary by invading a TV studio.

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Meanwhile, Kurt Easterwood blogs from across the water, where Moon has long-standing links with Japanese rightist politicians. These connections go back to the 1960s, when Moon ally Ryoichi Sasakawa was close to Japanese PM (and former war criminal) Nobusuke Kishi; now Kishi’s powerful grandson Shinzo Abe maintains the family tradition (links in original; alas, the video links are dead):

As reported on some blogs in June, this YouTube video shows two Unification Church wedding ceremony events in May to which Shinzo Abe apparently sent congratulatory telegrams…Not surprisingly, TBS was the only TV network I know of that ran a story about the Abe/Unification Church connection. I say not surprisingly because TBS has often been linked to Soka Gakkai, a Buddhist organization (cult?) that is rather powerful here in Japan, and therefore perhaps a media outfit with some sort of axe to grind against the Unification Church and Abe.

Abe – who provoked criticism in Korea back in April after visiting the controversial Yasukuni Shrine – is a strong contender to succeed Junichiro Koizumi as PM next month.

Easterwood also notes a second link:

In this YouTube video clip, you can see the same Katsumi Otsuka who was presiding over the wedding ceremonies in the other YouTube video here opening a meeting of the UPF (Universal Peace Federation) Rally for the Restoration of the Homeland held in Yokohama (this year?). What’s interesting about this clip is that one of the dignitaries introduced is one Tadashi Kobayashi, Chairman of the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform (Wikipedia link), a group that authored a controversial revisionist textbook on Japanese history that was published last year, and which predictably drew the ire of South Korea and China. The clip ends with some dignitaries, including the aforementioned Kobayashi, on stage being blessed rather strangely by two Koreans.

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Boing Boing makes merry at the expense of Bernard Lewis:

A couple of weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal published Mideast Scholar Bernard Lewis’s op-ed piece suggesting that Iranian President Ahmadinejad might commit some kind of catastrophic mischief, such as launching nuclear weapons, on August 22.

Lewis said this might be so because that’s the anniversary of Mohammed’s journey from Mecca to Jerusalem. (Makes sense, doesn’t it?)

As it turns out, instead of attacking anyone, Iran announced it was going to “resume negotiations with the group of 5+1,”

Lewis’s comments were widely reported, with other conservatives sounding a chorus. One “expert” who concurred was Joseph Kickasola of Pat Robertson’s Regent University. Agape reported:

Some Islamic scholars worry that Iran’s president may launch an attack on Jerusalem, perhaps with a nuclear missile, a week from Tuesday. That is the date when Muslims believe Muhammad ascended to heaven from Jerusalem. It is also the date Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has picked to reply to Western demands that he renounce efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Professor Joseph Kickasola, an Islamic scholar at Regent University, says Ahmadinejad believes he has a God-given mission to prepare the way for the Muslim messiah, or mahdi, who will arise from end-times chaos to convert the world to Islam. Kickasola says that while a nuclear strike on Jerusalem would kill Muslims as well as Jews and Christians, Iran’s president believes the Muslims would be ushered into paradise.

And naturally, obliterating a holy site dedicated to Muhammad’s night journey would be the most obvious way for a Muslim to commemorate the event.

However, as much as one might have fun with Lewis and Kickasola, let’s not forget what kind of a place Iran under Ahmadinejad is: Direland has comprehensive coverage of the country’s persecution of homosexuals; I’ve done a few entries on the country’s sponsorship of Holocaust denial and assaults on independent higher education. The situation for religious minorities remains difficult – especially for Baha’is – and Teheran’s sinister Evin jail recently saw the suspicious death of one of the political prisoners held there. Ahmadinejad’s statements about Israel give the likes of Lewis just what they need while failing to do anything useful for the Palestinians.

Meanwhile, the US political right shows that it has nothing in common with the sanguinary worldview of Islamic extremists (from a site linked from Townhall):

UPDATE: Robert Spencer has stern words for the mockers and the scoffers:

…all those who are crowing about “right-wing hysteria” should not lose sight of the real problem: the continuing threat from Iran.

Well, Robert, we can try not to – but you don’t make it easy for us.

Meanwhile, an interesting picture of life in Iran today is provided by this Guardian article from Nasrin Alavi:

…Ahmadinejad is not the whole story. Among ordinary Iranians, the talk is not about Israel, Palestine or even the nuclear crisis. Most conversations on buses and in taxis are about inflation, economic stagnation, unemployment, corruption, poverty and drugs. To them, Ahmadinejad is not an all-powerful head of a monolithic regime but a toothless president who can be overruled at any time by figures and institutions that constitute a fracturing elite…

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WorldNetDaily has a follow-up to its report highlighting a new show that blames science for the Holocaust:

Darwin-Hitler connection sparks attacks
Bloggers try to discredit experts on evolution’s connection to bloodshed

…Author and Christian broadcaster D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries said the new “Darwin’s Deadly Legacy” is a ground-breaking inquiry into Darwin’s “chilling” social impact, and it will air nationwide on Aug. 26-27 on “The Coral Ridge Hour.”

But yesterday comments appeared on the Pharyngula website, among others, offering stinging criticism of those on the show…One of those targeted was Human Genome Project Director Francis Collins, whose book, “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,” was published only a few months ago.

…The program, according to producer Jerry Newcomb, is about the social effects of Darwinism, and the bloodshed that can be attributed to those beliefs. He said before Darwin, the basic concept was that man was made in the image of God, and was therefore valuable. But Darwin changed all that.

Alas, WND makes no mention of my own modest contribution to the discussion – if they had seen it, perhaps they might have at least learnt to spell the name of the show’s producer correctly (“Newcombe”, not “Newcomb”).

WND also includes the following tasteful photo and caption:

I’m sure that not one of those emaciated figures imagined that sixty years later their iconic suffering would be put to service as part of a fundamentalist campaign to whip up hate against scientists. And I suspect that Jews who care about using science to improve human welfare will find this crass misappropriation to be particularly painful and offensive.

UPDATE: It ooks as though my instincts were right. Pharyngula has the details:

ADL National Director Abraham H. Foxman said in a statement: “This is an outrageous and shoddy attempt by D. James Kennedy to trivialize the horrors of the Holocaust. Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people. Trivializing the Holocaust comes from either ignorance at best or, at worst, a mendacious attempt to score political points in the culture war on the backs of six million Jewish victims and others who died at the hands of the Nazis…”

Collins, meanwhile, is

absolutely appalled by what Coral Ridge Ministries is doing. I had NO knowledge that Coral Ridge Ministries was planning a TV special on Darwin and Hitler, and I find the thesis of Dr. Kennedy’s program utterly misguided and inflammatory,”

PZ notes that publicity for the show has now removed all mention of Collins (and, more weirdly, of Ann Coulter).

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From Pharyngula:

A reader wrote to Francis Collins about the use of his name to promote D. James Kennedy’s upcoming ahistorical anti-evolution program, and Collins wrote right back. He’s doing exactly the right thing.

Collins did not wish for his written response to become public, but

…He’s unambiguous in stating that he was interviewed about his book, and that was then inserted into the video without his knowledge.

…I apologize to Dr Collins for assuming he was a party to this creationist video, and I hope he sues those frauds.

Ditto.

UPDATE: Collins is “appalled”; the ADL condemn “trivialization of the Holocaust”. See this entry.

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D. James Kennedy’s Coral Ridge Ministries is preparing its latest volley in the war against science: a new TV programme which will show that Charles Darwin was responsible for Adolf Hitler. WND reports (link added):

“This show basically is about the social effects of Darwinism, and shows this idea, which is scientifically bankrupt, has probably been responsible for more bloodshed than anything else in the history of humanity,” Jerry Newcomb[e], one of two co-producers, told WorldNetDaily.

…Co-producer Jerry Newcomb[e] said before the advent of Darwinian beliefs, the basic concept was that man was made in the image of God, and was therefore valuable. But Darwin changed all that.

Newcombe’s co-producer is John Rabe, who has a blog here. The TV show was inspired by book by Richard Weikart, who lays out his case in a trailer:

Adolf Hitler was clearly trying to speed evolution along, and he wasn’t the only one. He was drawing on what many other scholars, biologists, geneticists, in Germany were also preaching and teaching in the early twentieth century. Natural selection was a guiding idea for Hitler and the Nazis, in fact if you read just about any books about the Holocaust, you come across the word “selection”, because in the camps that’s exactly what they did, they used the term, and the term was related directly to Darwinian terminology, that when you went to the camps you went through a selection process. They were selecting this person to survive, and this person to go to the gas chambers.

However, Weikart does not tell us whether the idea of the fittest organism being the most likely to survive in a given environment is in fact a myth created by proto-Nazis, or whether it is true but immoral and wicked for us to make such an observation. PZ Myers at Pharyngula responds:

How absurd can you get? Racism, anti-semitism, and ethnic cleansing long preceded Darwin, and the idea of selection was common to anyone who had domesticated and bred plants and animals. They might as well have claimed, “no farming, no Nazis” (although I think even that would be dubious—hunter-gatherers also have enemy tribes, and will kill to get rid of the competition.).

PZ also draws attention to the programme’s line-up (his emphasis, links added):

The one-hour program features Ann Coulter, author of Godless; Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler; Lee Strobel, author of The Case for a Creator; Jonathan Wells, author of Icons of Evolution; Phillip Johnson, author of Darwin on Trial; Michael Behe, author of Darwin’s Black Box; Ian Taylor, author of In the Minds of Men, and Francis Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project.

Collins has recently become a religious believer, and his book The Language of God is to be published in September. However, Collins’ new Christian faith is somewhat mystical, and he is not a proponent of either “Intelligent Design” or of the Young Earth Creationism promoted by Kennedy and his allies. So why is he now apparently lending support to a fundamentalist project which, judging from the trailer, is concerned purely with using hysterical and slanderous rhetoric to promote fear and hatred of science and scientists?

UPDATE: Answer: he’s not – see here.

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Christian Retailing (1) reports from July’s International Christian Retail Show in Denver, where the new Left Behind video game was demonstrated. The game has been the subject of a great deal of controversy due to its violent content, and some conservative evangelicals have repudiated it. However, the game’s developers have come out, er, fighting (brackets in original):

“Left Behind” series co-author Jerry Jenkins said he welcomed the controversy surrounding complaints about the game’s content that made headlines.

“(The controversy) makes you examine your motives, success (and) what you’re doing,” he said. “I looked at the violence for the game to be in the (Christian retail) market. It’s not more violent than the Old Testament,” Jenkins added.

Some might say that sets the bar pretty low (and what about the New Testament, given that the Book of Revelation is one of Jenkins’ inspirations?

…The premise of the post-rapture game–classified as “real time strategy” because players direct multiple characters’ actions from a bird’s-eye view of the New York City streets–is that “you are on the Antichrist’s shoot-to-kill list, and you must defend your own life and the lives of those around you–with violence if necessary,” said Dereck Wong, vice president of sales.

The anti-Christ’s agents, whom the Christian “Tribulation Forces” have to kill, are “Global Community Peacekeepers” – an obvious reference to the United Nations. However, according to marketing manager Greg Bauman,

…more is achieved “with prayer (and) influence, not violence,”

Characters can boost their “spirit rating” by finding scripture scrolls. There are also marketing tie-ins; the game includes

…Christian music from artists such as Fighting Instinct, Toby Mac and Jeremy Camp. A “buy it” button directs players to iTunes to purchase each artist’s album.

“Evangelism is the key of this video game,” said Wong, who noted that each game will include a wristband made by Campus Crusade and that players are linked throughout the fame to DontBeLeftBehind.com, and evangelical Web site operated by the ministry.

Wong said the three goals of the game are “to entertain, to make people think about God, and to make people talk about God.”

Plus:

Left Behind Games will offer a Christian-market exclusive by bundling the game with Tyndale House Publishers’ New Living Translation Metal Bible.

The report makes no mention of the other controversy surrounding the game: that it installs spyware which cannot be deleted.

Talk to Action has a series of articles on the game, by Jonathan Hutson; the first one, with links to those that follow, can be seen here. I charted the rather weird corporate origins of Left Behind Games with a mining company here.

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(1) 7 August 2006, pages 1 and 18

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Links to the book here.

Just for a change, today’s blog entry is something different from my usual fare: a link to Iraq: A Tourist Guidebook, published in Baghdad in 1966. I found it at a bookstall in Doncaster (in the north of England) a few years ago, going for 20 pence or so, and I’ve just scanned it in. Of course, the book presents a rosy picture of the country – while it boasts of the “4,906” Jews in Iraq, there’s no indication that the number had been much bigger a few years before – but it’s a fascinating glimpse not only of Iraq’s past, but of how the country might have developed in some alternative reality.

Journalist Peter Hermann used a copy for a short 2003 piece that appeared in the Baltimore Sun.

(The book has been uploaded into Photobucket; I avoided Flikr as part of the boycott against Yahoo. Shi Tao remains in a Chinese prison)

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