JABbering Stooge

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
- Blaise Pascal

We have lobbed verses of Scripture, like hand grenades, into the camps of others, convinced we only have truth.
- Rev. George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury, at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, 1997

Hindus, Moslems, Christians, Jews, all taking turns killing one another, because God told them it was a good idea. The Sword of God, The Blood of the Lamb, Vengeance Is Mine, Onward Christian Soldiers. Millions of dead people. All because they gave the wrong answer to the God Question…For thousands of years all the bloodiest and most brutal wars have been based on religious hatred.
- George Carlin, Back In Town HBO special

No, I don’t know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.
- 41st President George H. W. Bush, Aug. 27, 1987

One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.
- Rabbi Ya’acov Perin

If you are a Serb, you go to church, and a person who doesn’t go to church is by definition not a Serb. They are a Moslem, or one of those American sensitive new-age faggot types, or some other form of low life.
- Anonymous Serb in Australia

If we do not take this road of dialogue and understanding then I fear for the next generation. There are enough people preaching hatred, which encourages violence. We are living in times when technology, biology and chemistry have created the possibility of killing in large numbers. And, unfortunately, the cruelty and killing are often justified through a distorted interpretation of religion.
- Akbar Ahmed, Muslim scholar, addressing an interfaith group in the National Cathedral (What was that about Muslims not condemning Al Qaeda’s ideology?)

I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good…Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a Biblical duty, we are called by God, to conquer this country. We don’t want equal time. We don’t want pluralism.
- Randall Terry, Founder of anti-abortion terrorist group Operation Rescue, public advocate for Terri Schiavo’s parents

I wanted to make one last comment on the code brown alert earlier this summer before I move on. The very reason British authorities even discovered the plot in the first place was because someone in the Muslim community saw or heard something that creeped them out and went to the authorities. You see, unlike their American counterparts, the Brits have taken great pains to make the Muslim community feel, if not welcome, like human beings. This is all part of the “Flies, Honey, Vinegar Principle” that conservatives love to disparage - pissing off a segment of the population merely because some of the members of that segment are causing problems will make the other members of that segment less inclined to help you against the individuals causing the problem. It’s that simple.

And yet, conservatives don’t get it. Spurred on by the foiled plot (that the Bushies, in their eagerness to use the issue as a club against Democrats, rolled up the plot too quickly to create an open-and-shut case against the plotters in a court of law), anti-Muslim bigotry has reached new heights here and in Europe. Shortly after the code brown alert, this appeared in the comments section of Michael Barone’s piece of excrement entitled “Our covert enemies” over at TownHall.com, attributed to a user named PearlGirl:

We need to be MEAN. We need to HATE. We NEED strong, DEADLY emotions- and we NEED to act on them. We are dealing with a thought system - IS-SLIME - (not “Islam” - because this is a proper noun. The correct name. This betokens respect. I do NOT respect sand n!ggers. I HATE them - and I want them DEAD. ALL of them - as I’ve stated before - any little sand n!glet blown to bits, today, means some little human child - Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Rastafari, whatever - gets to NOT be blown to bits, tomorrow) - a thought system that is PURE hatred, and annihilation.

Oh, but that’s not all! There were no less than four incidents of anti-Muslim bigotry in the wake of the code brown alert (incidentally, type “code brown alert” without the quotes into a Google search and see what comes up first).

Incident Number One: a family from Dubai was stopped from riding the London Eye for the crime of speaking Arabic in line.

Incident Number Two: Conservative Nazi radio host Mike Gallagher, in a debate with constitutional law attorney Michael Gross on the Faux “News” show Dayside, declared that it was time for a Muslims-only checkpoint at airports. Sadly, that seems to have inspired the following two incidents.

Incident Number Three: British vacationers waiting for a flight departing from Costa del Sol in Spain mutinied, refusing to allow the flight to take off until two men of southwest Asian appearance were booted from the flight. And what, pray tell, was the crime the men in question were committing? Speaking Arabic and checking their watches!

Incident Number Four: Three Canadian doctors were booted from their connecting flight out of Denver because one of the doctors had committed the <sarcasm>horrible</sarcasm> crime of being openly Muslim. Never mind that the passenger accusing them of being involved in terrorist-related-program-activities was allegedly drunk, we can’t have MUSLIMS on our flights! No More Mister Nice Blog has the best comment on the sordid situation:

[T]hat’s just wonderful - we now take the word of a drunk over the word of three doctors, if one of the doctors is a dirty filthy Mooooslim.

But wait, it gets worse! Pope Benedict Arnold I, in his <sarcasm>infinite wisdom and Godlike infallibility</sarcasm>, presented a quote from Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus in a lecture on the relationship between faith and reason at the University of Regensburg in Germany. The quote, “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached,” naturally outraged Muslims, who staged a series of protests, some of them violent. Responding to the backlash, the Pontiff declared “These in fact were a quotation from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought.” Excuse me, Your Holier-than-thou-ness, but if the quote didn’t represent your personal opinion, why the hell did you cite it as an example of unreason?! Frankly, this sounds like the same buck passing that the GOP has been engaging in with regard to the Mark Foley Page Scandal™. Even worse for the Pope, the director of the Vatican press office confirmed that “they were not an aberration. On the contrary, they stem from his thinking about Islam and the West in the one and a half years since he became Pope.” (Of course, said press office director also used the occasion to accuse the Pope’s critics of harboring “the contempt for God and the cynicism that considers mockery of the sacred to be an exercise of freedom.” Gee, way to be attuned to the sensibilities of non-believers, you fucking hypocrite!)

Oh, and Chancellor Merkel, just how exactly is accusing Muslims of being incurably violent reprobates “an invitation to dialogue between religions?”

And Prime Minister Howard, do you really think Muslims should just bend over and take it up the @$$ every five seconds (which seems to be the frequency with which you right-wingers keep smearing Muslims as incurably violent reprobates)? Has age so addled your brain that you forgot the IRA?

This demonization of Muslims by prominent right-wingers has gone on for years. It’s Pat Robertson and Jerry Fallwel’s fundraising shakedown bread and butter. Charles Johnson and the knuckleheads at LGF hate Muslims so much that the selfless sacrifice of a Palestinian Muslim to save the lives of four Israeli teenagers doesn’t merit mention because the Palestinian committed the blood-crime of being born. And Michelle MalKKKin? Well, we already know how she feels:

Incidentally, I (unfortunately) don’t have any hard data to work with, but if I had to guess, I’d say that the Random Muslim Butchery Algorithm would have to run in O(nln n) time in order to bring MalKKKin to orgasm. But that’s just me.

Frankly, all this Muslim-bashing by right-wingers gives me a headache:

Alright, enough of that. Let’s finish this up with some positive thoughts.

Tolerance is the posture and cordial effort to understand another’s beliefs, practices, and habits without necessarily sharing or accepting them.
- Joshua Liebman, social critic

Without tolerance there is no religious liberty, no freedom of conscience and no freedom of thought.
- the late Dr. Thomas Klestil, former President of Austria

When the dust settles and the pages of history are written, it will not be the angry defenders of intolerance who have made the difference. The reward will go to those who dared to step outside the safety of their privacy in order to expose and rout the prevailing prejudices.
- John Shelby Spong, Episcopal Bishop

Religions are many and diverse, but reason and goodness are one.
- Elbert Hubbard, The Roycroft Dictionary and Book of Epigrams, 1923

Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.
- Thomas Jefferson