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Tuesday 16th April

Politicians with principles?: Following a report that the Dutch government was partly to blame for the death of 7,500 people in Srebrenica in 1995, the entire Dutch cabinet has resigned.

Another Al Qaeda videotape, this time featuring one of the September 11th hijackers saying that it’s time to kill Americans in their heartlands — while standing in front of a picture showing the World Trade Centre with a superimposed fireball. The US will be closely scrutinising the tape to see what it can reveal about the terrorists planning the attacks.

The trial in Frankfurt of five men linked to Al Qaeda who are accused of planning to bomb the Strasbourg Christmas market opened with one of the defendants being ejected from court for launching an anti-semitic tirade.

After the dangerously wrong-headed article in The New York Times I spoke about the other day, sanity returns with an article explaining that Israeli and American experts agree that the Israeli military action will not end the suicide bombings.

Fundie fuckwit update, Part 1: Jerry Fallwell — remember him, the genius who said that the September 11th attacks were the fault of pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians…, the ACLU, People for the American Way (just about anyone he doesn’t agree with, in fact) — is getting hot under the collar about a parody site, jerryfalwell.com. Frankly, it serves him right for not thinking to register that domain name; it’s not as though he’s never been ridiculed before.

Falwell is so upset over this site (which provides links to lots of fun stuff about him — for example, a quiz to test whether you can differentiate quotes by Falwell and his mate Pat Robertson from quotes by Osama bin Laden) that he’s trying to have it shut down and the domain names transferred to him. What was it that Harry S Truman said about the heat and the kitchen?

Fundie fuckwit update, Part 2: As I said above, Falwell got himself into hot water by blaming the september 11th attacks on Pagans, liberals, feminists and other groups he can’t stand, and suggested America deserved something like this. (See the weblog entries for September 18th and September 29th; if you haven’t heard about this before, the whole story, including Falwell and Robertson’s apologies for apologies, is summarised at about.com and snopes.com.)

Well, having said something so crassly stupid and insensitive, having been roundly condemned by just about everyone, having had to "apologise" a few times and been again roundly condemned for not having actually apologised at all, he now wants money for suffering the ordure his own cretinous stupidity brought down on himself:

Although TV preacher Jerry Falwell claims to have apologized for his infamous remarks about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, his ministry has sent a fund-raising letter to donors recasting his statements in a positive light and depicting him as a victim of the news media "wolf pack" and "liberal lies."

In an Oct. 4 appeal for funds, Jerry Falwell Ministries accuses "liberals, and especially gay activists" of launching "a vicious smear campaign to discredit him." It says Falwell is "being roundly vilified by the news media for remarks he made in a TV interview while calling for spiritual revival in America."…

"It seems that Satan has launched a hail of fiery darts at dad recently," writes Jonathan Falwell. "He needs to know you still support him. Please return the enclosed Vote of Confidence Reply Card right away in the envelope I have provided within the next 5 days.…And with your card, please remember to include a special Vote of Confidence gift for Jerry Falwell of at least $50 or even $100 along with your signed card."

Doesn’t he just make you long for the moral rectitude of Richard Nixon?

Fundie fuckwit update, Part 3: Here’s a piece in Salon which really does give you an idea of the sort of guy Falwell is. The article explains how he has links to an organisation which paid over $200,000 to people who would make damaging allegations about President Clinton. He was also involved in the distribution of a throroughly discredited video, The Clinton Chronicles, which alleged Clinton trafficked in cocaince and had had people murdered. It also hinted that a mysterious doom might await the makers of the video:

The video ends with former Republican Rep. William Dannemeyer urging that President Clinton be impeached, while a message flashes across the screen warning: "If any additional harm comes to anyone connected to this film or their families, the people of America will hold Bill Clinton personally responsible."

Falwell clearly thought this suggestion was worth following up during an "infomercial" for the video:

During the infomercial, Falwell interviews a silhouetted individual whom he identifies only as an "investigative reporter."

"Could you please tell me and the American people why you think that your life and the lives of the others on this video are in danger?" Falwell asks the man.

"Jerry, two weeks ago we had an interview with a man who was an insider," the mystery man replies. "His plane crashed and he was killed an hour before the interview. You may say this is just a coincidence, but there was another fellow that we were also going to interview, and he was killed in a plane crash. Jerry, are these coincidences? I don’t think so." …

During Salon’s interview with Matrisciana, a reporter told him that his voice sounded familiar. When the reporter told Matrisciana that he sounded like the man in silhouette, Matrisciana acknowledged that he was the mystery man.

"Obviously, I’m not an investigative reporter," Matrisciana admitted, "and I doubt our lives were actually ever in any real danger. That was Jerry’s idea to do that … He thought that would be dramatic."

Fundie fuckwit update, Part 4 — a cautionary tale: Everyone apart from the epsilon semi-morons among us knows that Falwell’s an idiot, so it’s easy to assume that everything he says must be wrong and that anyone arguing with him must be right. But, as Lord Peter Wimsey once observed, Even idiots occasionally speak the truth accidentally.

On an episode of the American TV programme, Politically Incorrect, Falwell made the statement that Hitler claimed to be a Roman Catholic. He seemed to be trying to point out that you couldn’t draw any conclusions from that, that a person’s faith didn’t determine whether they did good or bad things. That sounds much too sensible, I know, but we have to give him the benefit of the doubt because he had barely made that statement when someone else on the programme jumped on it:

That was very kind of you, Reverend, for throwing that religion in there. The party which was the Catholic party in Germany fought Hitler all the way. This is nonsense. He never claimed to be a Catholic.…

Chris: He hated the Catholic church. Every time he went into Poland, he arrested all the priests and killed them. Where do you get this Catholic nonsense?

…Hitler was not a Catholic

Well, I don’t know where he got it, but somehow or other some knowledge got embedded in Falwell’s brain. No doubt it’s something Catholics wish were not the case, but the fact is Hitler was a Catholic; in fact, his parents had to get the dispensation of the Church in order to marry as they were related. Hitler remained a member of the Catholic Church until he died.

Of course, he wasn’t a practising Catholic, and yes, he did loathe Christianity and all it stood for. But dealing with the Church was not a priority — everything was subordinated to finding Lebensraum for the German Volk and, above all, dealing with "the Jewish question". When he needed the support of Catholics, Hitler was quite prepared to play up his Catholic upbringing — he was, if nothing else, a consummate politician.

It’s a small matter, but salutary: just because Falwell says something it doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s false.

Fundie fuckwit update, Part 5: Falwell is widely recognised as something of a fool, at best; for some reason, though, Billy Graham is generally viewed with approval and respect and has been Protestant father-confessor to every President from Eisenhower to Clinton, and … has achieved the status of America’s mainstream cleric. I’ve never really understood why that should be the case.

Something of the real character of Billy Graham is revealed, though, by the Nixon tapes recently released. This is what Christopher Hitchens says:

H.R. Haldeman’s diaries of the Watergate years, published in 1994, gave an account of a conversation between Nixon and Graham that included some heated talk about "Satanic Jews," and what to do about them. This elegant exchange followed a "prayer breakfast" that the two men had graced in February 1972.… Now we have the tapes, first made public in an excellent piece by James Warren in the Chicago Tribune, and despite their many deletions they show Graham to be an avid bigot as well as a cheap liar.

Nixon initiates the conversation but Graham can’t wait to join in. Jewish control over the media is assumed, of course, and Graham says, "This stranglehold has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain." "You believe that?" asks Nixon and, when the preacher-man says, "Yes, sir," responds, "Oh, boy, so do I. I can’t ever say that but I believe it." (This seems to me to take care, at long last, of the excuse peddled by Nixon’s defenders that he liked to talk dirty about Jews only in order to seem tough to his gruesome subordinates.) Yet it is, admittedly, Graham who makes most of the running. The key excerpt is this: "But I have to lean a little bit, you know. I go and keep friends with Mr. Rosenthal at the New York Times, and people of that sort. And all—not all the Jews, but a lot of the Jews are great friends of mine. They swarm around me and are friendly to me. Because they know I am friendly to Israel and so forth. They don’t know how I really feel about what they’re doing to this country."

Or, more succinctly: The country’s senior Protestant is a gaping and mendacious anti-Jewish peasant.

That piece by Hitchens, incidentally, was in response to an earlier article by Katha Pollitt which he considered too lenient to religious leaders. It begins like this:

Let’s say there was a school system or a chain of clinics on whose professional staff were a certain number of men who molested the children in their care and who, whenever this behavior came to the attention of their superiors, were shifted to another school or clinic, with parents and colleagues, not to mention the justice system, kept in the dark whenever possible. Imagine that this practice continued for thirty years… Don’t you think that when the story finally broke, the men who had made and implemented the policy would be held legally responsible—for something? Certainly they would lose their jobs.

Bring God into the picture, though, and everything changes.