It’s practically a cartoon of far right idiocy, but it’s popular, and no one ever seems to stop and wonder that they can promote such hatefulness and ignorance and still maintain a readership. But then, this is the country of Trump and Carson, where a race towards stupidity has become a successful strategy for running for the presidency. And that scares me. We’ve got loons promoting murder and fascism, and we shrug our shoulders and say it’s just a fringe, don’t worry.
But look at what that fringe is saying.
My own politically incorrect suggestion is that we remove ISIS from the face of the earth, hopefully as a joint effort with every other nation it has threatened or attacked, and that we then bomb Mecca off the face of the earth, not concerning ourselves in the least with collateral damage, letting the Muslims know once and for all that our God is far more powerful and, yes, vengeful than their own puny deity.
It’s harsh, but they’ve been asking for it for over 1,400 years, and it’s time they got it. I, for one, am sick and tired of seeing the Islamic bullies demand our lunch money and, like a bunch of scrawny wimps afraid of our own shadow, we hand it over. What’s even more appalling, we then pretend we did it because we’re good guys who realized that they’re human beings just like us, and who just happen to be a little bit hungrier than we are.
not concerning ourselves in the least with collateral damage
means killing innocent civilians. And that is OK to this fellow, because the important thing is destroying a religious center (yeah, that’ll win us friends and allies), and demonstrating that our god is more vengeful, barbaric, and murderous than their god.
I’m also baffled by the resentful claim that somehow, we are the weak country that’s getting taken advantage of by bullies, as if Iran is the bad guy sending drone strikes against outdoor weddings in Poughkeepsie, Scranton, and Walla Walla. As if Kuwait is forcing Americans to buy their oil at gunpoint. As if our little dribble of foreign aid is going to countries that are faking their poverty.
That guy, you can be sure, gets out and votes in every election, and he votes angrily against those damn liberals on the basis of that kind of bigotry and ignorance. And that’s why we’ve got the representatives we do.
We should be terrified not by terrorism, but by the lunatics in our own country.
World Net Daily is a perfect example of how the “information superhighway” touted by Al Gore in the 20th century has also become the “misinformation sluice” of the 21st century that feeds right-wing paranoia and has sunk parasitical fangs into its exploiters (like the GOP, which the movement conservatives of the sixties would recognize as a resurgence of the Bircher nut fringe they once exiled). Joseph Farah could not make a go of it in traditional media when his rantings firmly placed the Sacramento Union on the path to oblivion, but he and his minions have been able to achieve critical mass with an on-line audience of extremists. The escalation of WND’s absurdity is mirrored in Donald Trump’s willingness to go full-fascist when the occasion arises. It’s going to be a nasty spectacle when the boil finally bursts, but let’s hope it’s soon and before the White House is occupied by a bomb-thrower who would meet with WND’s approval.
So, this idiot suggests responding to the horror of indiscriminate terrorist violence with… the even worse horror of religiously motivated genocidal violence? He really wants to have some kind of weird god-off with Islamic religious extremists, with victory going to the side prepared to slaughter more innocent people?
I take it that Prelutsky is too blinkered by his bigotry to consider that a major plank of the propaganda of groups like Islamic State is the claim that the Western Powers are engaged in a ‘crusader war’ against Islam itself, and that his bloodthirsty blather, and that of his fellow ranting islamophobic bigots, plays directly into that narrative? Ironically, people like him act as recruiting sergeants for the very militant groups they claim they are the only ones with the courage to oppose, and are too stupid to see it.
Christofascists – determined to prove that no stinkin’ Islamofascists are going to out-evil them…
PZ, you scared the bejezzus out of me with your introduction to that piece!
And then all the way through reading the quoted section, I kept waiting for the punch line, to find out which presidential candidate had seriously proposed this, in addition to sequestration camps, religious tests, and destruction of mosques.
Then it became clear that this guy is a World-Class Nuts Daily writer, and I was a bit relieved; until I realized that it was completely within the realm of my own expectations that Trump, Huckabee, Cruise, or almost any of the rest might actually have said all of that since I went to bed last night.
I’m running out of bejezzuses.
I doubt the Christian god is more powerful than the deity who created the universe by merely thinking it so or more vengeful than the deity who sent a global flood to punish the wrongdoings of a few. And definitely not as loving as the one who sent Jesus to Earth to guide mankind onto the righteous path.
Square bullets.
Bu this is impossible. Only Muslims fight for their religion, because their religion is vile. American Christians couldn’t possibly be religiously motivated, they only fight for Justice, Good and Unicorns.
I’ve even read this kind of reasoning from atheists so it must be true.
Wait a minute, Prelutsky is admitting the existence of deities other than his own? How blasphemous! There is (supposedly) only “ONE GAWD!”
Whew!
Thank goodness I’ve been assured by certain Rational Thinkers that there’s simply no such thing as Islamaphobia, and therefore – presumably – this type of thinking must be completely appropriate. Otherwise, this guy would sound like a dangerous loon, and those Rational Thinkers would look like idiots for denying his existence.
And let’s face it, that’s just plain unpossible.
Rancid peanuts (Huckabee), rabid dogs (Carson)… and now we have rattlesnakes courtesy of Sid Miller, Texas agricultural commissioner. All of the Republican comparisons of Syrian refugees to … something, all of them are demeaning, insulting.
Millers comment was accompanied by two photos, one of a nest of rattlesnakes (too many to count), and one of a line of refugees walking. Among the refugees are women, children, old people, families, and men young and old.
Link
Which stage is this? 3 or 4?
http://www.genocidewatch.org/genocide/tenstagesofgenocide.html
PZ, even YOU must admit that it is frustrating to live in the world’s greatest country and be so weak and powerless. I mean, we outspend the entire rest of the world of heavy artillery, which we can’t even use. So this makes complete sense in light of those facts.
Oooops, my “grin” got left off of the above.
Akira MacKenzie @ 7:
No, the bible never states there is only one god, there are many instances where other gods are referenced. The big thing is “you shall have no other gods before me” yadda, yadda, yadda. In this case though, the idiot is doing his best to ignore the fact that his case of “my god can beat up your god” is about the same god.
How convenient that the writer doesn’t realize that most of the people the Islamic State has hurt are… wait for it… other Muslims in Muslim majority areas. The Islamic State just wants to turn us into their boogeyman*; they actually want to run the parts of the world that Muslims live in (hence calling themselves ‘the Islamic State’, and not ‘Death to Westerners’ or something).
We can either have allies in dealing with the Islamic State, or we can bomb Mecca; we cannot have both. Choose wisely.
* They don’t really need to do much for this, to be honest.
Uh huh. The guy who apparently thinks this will work is probably a member of the same group which reacts with righteous fury and calls for retaliation whenever a Ten Commandments monument is removed from government property by court order.
Where’s your god now?
Boy oh boy, that sure is a lotta cock-waving. How about we track these loudmouths down, arm them, and drop them into the middle of Daesh territory? That way we get rid of TWO bunches of insane, genocidal maniacs in one smooth action…
Becca Stareyes @ 14;
The ranting Right wingers always seem to forget that, don’t they? They talk about the alleged evils of ‘Muslim terrorists’ as if all Mulisms everywhere are some unitary monolith – a hive mind, one might say (now, where have I heard that term before?). Islamic State are very quick to write off the majority of Muslims as ‘no true Muslims’ because they don’t conform to the extreme and very specific doctrines of IS. They seem to hate Shia Muslims in particular even more than non-Muslims, not that little things like reality ever disturb the delusions of Christofascists overmuch.
While I agree that Islamic State likes to try to use the idiotic foreign policy of Western nations in recent years to caste those countries as the implacable, eternal enemies of Islam itself (their tendency to drone on about the the whole ‘crusader’ thing is a dead giveaway), I wouldn’t sell their ambitions quite so short. The leadership may well intend to create their own little fiefdom out of the carved up remains of Syria and Iraq and other parts of the Muslim majority counties of the world and go no further, which would be quite bad enough for the innocent people living in those countries, but that is not the agenda they sell their followers; the official line is very much the Middle East today, tomorrow the World!
Whatever the leadership may ultimately intend, the pitch they have sold to their followers is that the creation of the Caliphate is step one, the establishment of the true Dar el-Islam. Step two is supposed to be the total destruction of the Dar el-Harb, with a lot of old school convert-or-die ultimatums and a side order of genocide. They have made the same mistake as religious extremists and ultra-nationalists everywhere – they whip up their followers by quite literally promising them the world and creating a simple division between their ‘noble’ warrior culture and the ‘degenerates’ who make up the rest of the global population. Since they represent the ultimate in religious piety and supposed ‘moral superiority’ (that concept can easily be replaced with ‘master race ethnic purity’ or a similar rallying cry for other types of fascist) there can be no compromise or coexistence with ‘corrupt’, ‘inferior’ peoples – subjugation or extermination is the only fate fit for the ‘lesser races’ (any of this sounding nauseatingly familiar yet?).
Having planted their standard on such totalising soil, there really isn’t much room left to the IS leadership for maneuver or nuance – even if they wanted to just set up their state in the ruins of Syria and Iraq and call it a day, the movement they have helped to create would never settle for such an outcome. They would demand ever more ambitious terrorist attacks on foreign targets, further territorial expansion, the creation of a renewed form of colonial Islam – in short, the world wide conquest they have been promised. Trying to deny them would leave the IS leadership vulnerable to accusations that they lack the will and strength to carry out their own vision; that they are not ‘pure’ enough for their own revolution. The end of that path would probably be starring in their own IS beheading video, or at the very least a splintering of the movement into even more extreme sub factions who would probably promptly declare war on the originating organisation for ‘betraying the mission’. That is, after all, how Islamic State itself came to be after breaking away from the broader Al Qaeda network
Like the leaderships of so many other extremist movements of various stripes throughout history, those at the top of IS are now well and truly riding the tiger, and to try to get off is to risk being mauled themselves. They couldn’t stop even if they wanted to, which further complicates the issue of how to deal with IS – it is very hard to negotiate with your adversary when they dare not risk negotiation lest their own movement kills them for it.
It horrifies me that anyone would even suggest bombing Mecca. Not only would that kill countless innocent people, but collective punishment of Muslims is wholly pointless, counterproductive, and grossly unethical, doubly so when IS doesn’t even substantively reflect mainstream Islam at all and the majority of its victims are Muslims. It would also play directly into the long standing claim among many extremist Muslim groups that the West is engaged in a war of annihilation against Islam itself – there is nothing like trying to destroy the holiest site in the entirety of the Islamic world to lend credibility to those claims.
I have also noted an interesting element in the wording from the quote in the OP;
(Emphasis added)
In my experience, when Right wingers talk about ‘bombing’ or ‘wiping’ the adversary of the day ‘off the face of the Earth’ this is a dog whistle; a euphemism for the use of nuclear weapons – they want to just come straight and say ‘nuke ’em, let’s nuke the bastards’, but most of them realize that such an honest statement of their intent would not go over well with people who object to the notion of nuclear Armageddon in pursuit of a Right wing revenge fantasy, and so we get placeholder language like ‘wipe them from the face of the earth’ instead. The words may be different, but the intent is the same.
I guess this is the 21st century version of Deus vult.
Dear ranting Christian nutjobs,
You and Islam both share the same “puny deity”. Get the fuck over yourselves already.
there is no comment I could make concerning wnd or the christian fascists or what ever they want to call themselves that would add anything at all or even express my feelings and thoughts. appalling
uncle frogy
So to sum it up, “My god has a bigger dick than your god!”
The thing about admitting they mean nukes is that some of their readers/supporters would be smart enough to wonder about fallout and what’s downwind.
Of course, from the logic of MAD, it wouldn’t matter whether they used hydrogen bombs or conventional explosives: the likely outcome would be Pakistan trying to decide whether to (try to) use all their nukes on the United States or save some of them for India. I’m sure there are people in the Pentagon who have worked through various scenarios here, along the lines of “if they nuke DC, we have to take out Karachi and Islamabad, and then the Russians do X. and how sure are we that Kazakhstan doesn’t retain nuclear capabilities?”
Part of the problem is that there are people who would be more likely to nuke Mecca if they thought it might lead to Armageddon.
Caine @ 13
I’m well aware of the henotheistic nature of ancient Judaism. However, growing up Christian, it was made abundantly clear to me that there was only one “God.”
Sometimes collateral damage is unavoidable and I feel for people in difficult situations who have to decide matters such as “should we storm the building to save the hostages?” But saying we should not care in the least about collateral damage is…just, umm, indefensible.
@Caine:
This is false.
Isaiah 45:5-6 :
I am the Lord, and there is none else, there is no God beside me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me:
That they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the Lord, and there is none else. (KJV)
This, however, is true. The point, of course, being that the bible is full of claims, and their explicit or implicit opposites.
Being a former history major who avoided the hard sciences as much as possible, but that is for another thread, I noticed the 1,400 year thing. I would guess then that the Crusades don’t really count because they insisted that we come to their land and kill as many of them as we could. I guess it is all their fault then.
How the phoof do you know how to correctly spell Poughkeepsie!?