I don’t normally read WorldNetDaily except when I follow a link for some Obama eligibility-related story. However, for some reason, I just went to WorldNetDaily’s front page, and I was stunned to find it packed with so many anti-Muslim stories. It looks like the “world” to Joseph Farah consists of Barack Obama’s eligibility and the Middle East. This is a partial list of the articles I saw:
- HOMELAND INSECURITY: WND Exclusive Dozens of ‘incubators’ for jihad found in U.S.
- How ‘moderate’ Muslims are Islamizing America
- Warning issued that Islam is coming
- Muslim says chopping off hands is ‘compassionate’
- Terrorist: What happens when Allah doesn’t answer
- Why Beck is concerned about ‘Islamic Antichrist’
- Iran taking crash course in uranium-hunting
- Iran: Advanced centrifuges to be set up soon at Qom site
- Iran pushing for Mideast war?
- Iran sends submarines to Red Sea
- [Fatah] Politician arrested for planning wave of terror
- Bill denies U.S. aid to U.N. if Palestinian state recognized
- Syria: Thousands of troops march on border town
- In Egypt, Muslim Brotherhood becomes legitimate party
- Al-Qaida deputy vows jihad in bin Laden eulogy
Farah has to keep people hitting that Paypal button. He’s smart enough to know that the average Obama hater also is, in all likelihood, a Muslim hater as well. So if the birther donations slow, he’s set for the anti-Muslim money.
Yup. Based on my observations of the WND comments section, by now at least every 2nd birther has the opinion “even if he turns out to be eligible, he is a Muslim agent yadda yadda”.
So it’s a promising second leg to stand on – and he might even get those people who think birthers are loons or “just don’t get all that legal stuff”.
Then again, anti-Muslim sites are plenty, so I don’t think he’ll give up on his birther followers just yet.
According to WND, an Obama is ineligible story IS an anti-Muslim story.
It seems as if there is something about having a group of people to call the other. These are the folks responsible for danger to the social order, danger to the nations existence and danger to the morals of the nation. Some people just have to have a group to blame it on, a group who are inferior and dangerous. This notion is foreign to me and I really don’t get it. I believe that African Americans have always been in this category and Jews have shared this distinction. I believe Eastern and Southern Europeans shared it to an extent at one time. Can someone explain it to me? What I do know is that there are always those who use this notion to enrich and empower themselves. Joseph Farah wants to be powerful and rich. He knows how to take advantage of the situation.
You should read Elaine Pagel’s “The Origin of Satan”.
It seems Leo Donfrio has finally given up on the birther side of his focus. I don’t think that he was ever a strong birther, just a two-fer. In any case, his latest posting cites some of the more obvious reasons why Obama had to be born in Hawaii. The latest being the checks on that fact by the US government.
http://naturalborncitizen.wordpress.com/
Leo is likely to continue to argue the two-fer side, however. In fact, he is promising a whole new “insight.”
Donofrio always said he thought Obama was born in Hawaii.
To wingnuts, Muslim is the new communist, ‘N’ word, and Antichrist, all in one swarthy package. It’s the trifecta of hate.
in orher News (wnd failed)
President Obama retains a big lead over possible Republican rivals in the presidential election despite anxiety about the economy and the country’s future, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll. Obama leads all potential Republican challengers by double-digit margins. He is ahead of his closest Republican rival, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, by 13 percentage points — 51 percent to 38 percent.
Dunno why you would call those people islamonazis. But why would they not be entitled to this distention. Extremists are extremists no matter how much they use the other side to minimise their own crimes and to justify their own existence, See the IRA using “loyalist death squads” to justify blowing up school busses, Isrealis and palistinians using one another crimes to justify their own crimes, and American right wing extremists using left wing idiots in Stuttgart to justify leaving a bomb at a Martin Luther King parade and sending bombs.through the mail.
Hitandrun, I make no distinction politically. I don’t name call. I prefer definitions that mean something. Please defne your term if you can. I meant what I said. The need of people to label others be it using the term infidel or Islamonazi. These are loaded words meant to produce emotion not genuine discussion or thought.
Jews have always had this distinction. See this Tom Lehrer – National Brotherhood Week
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgASBVMyVFI&feature=iv&annotation_id=annotation_112497
Farah is a Phalangist, and that explains everything: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalange
When Kennedy was shot, my math teacher was in tears, and almost beside herself in anguish that everybody needed somebody to stomp on. I’ll paraphrase what she said:
“We Mexicans stomp on the Blacks in this town, the Blacks Stomp on the Asians, everybody is stomped on by the Whites, who then get a backlash from everybody else. This is all just so stupid and self-destructive and it just goes round and round and round”.
For the record, that math teacher was the wife of Raul Castro, who was, a few years later appointed Ambassador to El Salvador (64 to 68) and Bolivia(68 to 69), then Governor of Arizona (74 to 77), then Ambassador to Argentina. It hadn’t occurred to me before, but Castro would have been Ambassador to Argentina during the height of the ‘Dirty War’. I know him to be an highly moral and principled man and it must have been an extremely difficult posting for him. Somebody should ask him about it before he is gone – I bet it would make a great book.
from my own scuttlings around the web, i´d be inclined to agree that islam has become the new communism for the more conservative and mouth-breathing elements.
here in spain we have a muslim population that would give your average islamophobe apoplexy.as a result, we come into regular contact with muslims in all parts of spanish society.
i get a lot of police coming through my shop every day (i run a motorcycle repair and construction business) who drop in for a coffee and a smoke. all without exception have said that muslims are the most courtious and respectful when dealing with them. likewise, a frein who works for the tax office said that tax returns sent in by muslims are generally spot of with no figure fudging, with less exceptions than most other groups.
on the american bike sites i frequent (bikers are traditionally a conservative bunch) the level of islamophobia is high, and there is a great belief in the idea of a global jihad and the plan of world domination of islam. i have explained that when i´ve visited my muslim freinds with my wife, they have fed us, shown us hospitality, not tried to blow us up nor forceably circumcise my wife and i. we sit down and shoot the shit about work and the kids, and any other stuff that comes around each day.
just like normal people do.
in reality, we´re just normal people with a different imaginary freind getting on with our lives. it is the extremist elements that (that pretty much all religions have with few exceptions) cause the problems.
personally, i refuse to live in fear and wave the flag.
Religion is the #1 divide when it comes to fostering hate. Better than race even. Religion is the only thing that allows blond white men to hate other blond white men.
And it’s the best thing to create an atmosphere of paranoia. After all, if you’re racist towards blacks, you can easily spot those you hate. But if you hate other religions, you simply cannot tell who’s a Jew, a Muslim or a Buddhist just by looking at them.
And while racism is pretty much one-dimensional, religious hatred can take forms no Hollywood writer on LSD would come up with.
(I was having an argument on WND with one special example who claimed to be a Tantric Buddhist, yet was talking about the Antichrist, Judgment Day and “burning in hell” like a true-blooded Christian. He obviously didn’t even find that strange.)
And that’s why I always say, if you think the birthers are crazy, better stay away from the religious zealots. And those are not just crazy, they’re scary, because contrary to birthers, there’s an awful lot of them.
Magic M, There you go. Your “the others” are people who are religious in daily life. I would fit into that category. I am a practicing Evangelical Lutheran who belongs to the Missour Synod. My point is that we all need to examine ourselves and see which group we label as “the other.” When we do that we give ourselves permission to avoid those folks and thus never get to know them. It makes life easier. Living in a diverse society means we have to be doubly concious of our own mental labels. We all can give reasons for them.
You would be left breathless by the way Settlers have screamed and cursed at me. The way Settlers and Arabs are fighting over a worthless scrap of real estate can only be called clinical insanity.
The worst I have been called is “Quisling,” by other Jews. Whenever I am told the land was promised to us, and is rightfully ours, I always say “an offer letter has not arrived in the mail. When will it be sent?”
Hitchens is right.
Like the schmucks who followed Harold Camping.
Anyone notice the Obama stuff is now at the *bottom* of the WND home page? I suppose even Farah knows when repetition adds nothing new…
(OTOH the Pest and eFail is cranking it up a notch, pun intended.)
Wise words.
Really, what you’ve said is EXACTLY what our Constitution is designed to support and protect.
The label issue goes two ways – not only should we not seek to judge those we don’t know but also we should not seek to “give a free pass” to those who act badly, just because they “seem” to be part of a group we identify with, nor to gut-react in defensiveness and take an attack personally, when it is really directed against the zealots in a group and not the group as a whole.
If we can just find a way to agree that the term zealot or extremist is used as an adjective to specifically single out those that are dangerous within a certain population and that doesn’t apply to that population as a whole… I dunno, just trying to find a way to improve the conversation by getting some common ground on dealing with real world distinctions.
I do not know of any single religious denomination (except maybe certain small cults, such as the Westboro Baptist group), where the entire membership qualifies as zealots or extremists. There are many sane and reasonable Evangelicals just as there are many sane and reasonable Muslims, etc. No sane/reasonable person should self-identify with the term zealot/extremist and realize that such an qualfying adjective is intented only for specifying the smaller numbers of irrational and obsessively hate-driven amongst any group.
I bet you read world net daily. Go visit Pakistan and tell us what you think if you come back.
Only for it’s comedic value
I know you decry Pakistan’s backwardness. Let me run this by you:
Edgardo Mortara was a Jewish boy who became the center of an international controversy when he was kidnapped from his Jewish parents by authorities of the Papal States and raised as a Roman Catholic. He later became a Roman Catholic priest. The boy was seized after the Church authorities received a report that he had been given emergency baptism by a domestic servant during a serious infantile illness.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgardo_Mortara
What would have happened if the Muslim armies had won the Crusades? There would not have been the Holocaust.
Also, check out this similarity: http://newyorkleftist.blogspot.com/2010/08/coincidence.html
Haven’t you noticed the pattern? They take turns.
I’ve always been under the impression that they did, in the end. Saladin commanded a real army, not a ragtag bunch poor farmers trying to buy indulgences.
The Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem lasted maybe 100 years (and Acre a bit longer). The rebound saw the destruction of Byzantium (by the Crusaders themselves), Eastern Europe dominated by the Turks until the end of 18th century, the entire Mediterranean dominated until the 16th Century, Iberia and parts of Italy until the 15th Century, and all of North Africa until the present day.
The Inquisition and pogroms against the Jews were going on in Europe before the Crusades and while the Muslims ruled in Iberia and Southern Italy. It is true that the Jews were positively encouraged in Moorish Spain, and after the reconquista was completed in 1492 the Inquisition got really busy, but the Inquisition was originally created to persecute fellow Christians (the Cathars) not Jews.
I think it is a real stretch to blame the Holocaust on the success or failure of the Crusades. The Crusades, the pograms, the Inquisition and the Holocaust both came out the the same mindset, the same dirty pigs-wallow of bigotry and insanity.
Extra points history lesson – the Office of the Inquisition still exists to this day:
1542: Pope Paul III establishes the “Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition”
1904:Pope Saint Pius X renames it the “Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office”
1965:Renamed “Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith” at the end of the Vatican Council
1981:Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger appointed “Prefect” (head) of the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith” (the word “Sacred” having been dropped from the title).
2005Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger elected Pope Benedict XVI
The current Pope was the “Grand Inquisitor” for 24 years before being elected Pope.