April 13, 2007

Two weeks ago, the man synonymous with carefree adverturism, someone who lept the fountain at Caesar’s Palace (right), told a Palm Sunday crowd at the Crystal Cathedral in Orange County that he had taken a leap of faith.

“I don’t know what in the world happened,” Robert “Evel” Knievel said. “I don’t know if it was the power of the prayer or God himself, but it just reached out, either while I was driving or walking down the sidewalk or sleeping, and it just—the power of God in Jesus just grabbed me. … All of a sudden, I just believed in Jesus Christ. I did, I believed in him! … I rose up in bed and, I was by myself, and I said, ‘Devil, Devil, you bastard you, get away from me. I cast you out of my life.’ … I just got on my knees and prayed that God would put his arms around me and never, ever, ever let me go.”

Evel’s testimony reportedly resulted in hundreds of people being baptized on the spot. From an article I submitted to Christianity Today last night, online now.

Why are Jews so smart? (Or dumb, depending on your point of reference.) Well, in this month’s Commentary Magazine, controversial scholar Charles Murray, a self-described “Scots-Irish Gentile,” has a piece titled “Jewish Genius” in which he writes that “going back to the time of Moses, Judaism was intertwined with intellectual complexity.”

In the first half of the 20th century, despite pervasive and continuing social discrimination against Jews throughout the Western world, despite the retraction of legal rights, and despite the Holocaust, Jews won 14 percent of Nobel Prizes in literature, chemistry, physics, and medicine/physiology. In the second half of the 20th century, when Nobel Prizes began to be awarded to people from all over the world, that figure rose to 29 percent. So far, in the 21st century, it has been 32 percent. Jews constitute about two-tenths of one percent of the world’s population. You do the math.

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New York City’s public-school system used to administer a pencil-and-paper IQ test to its entire school population. In 1954, a psychologist used those test results to identify all 28 children in the New York public-school system with measured IQ’s of 170 or higher. Of those 28, 24 were Jews.

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Nothing that I have presented up to this point is scientifically controversial. The profile of disproportionately high Jewish accomplishment in the arts and sciences since the 18th century, the reality of elevated Jewish IQ, and the connection between the two are not to be denied by means of data. And so we come to the great question: how and when did this elevated Jewish IQ come about?

Murray, of the American Enterprise Institute, tries to answer that question here. He refutes research published last year in the Journal of Biosocial Science that reported Ashkenazi Jews had heightened intelligence, but not Sephardic or Oriental Jews. Gregory Cochran, an author of that study, snaps back in The Forward.

“I would call it pure speculation,” said Cochran, who is a researcher in Utah. “I don’t think there’s any evidence he’s right.”

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Murray acknowledges that his work is based more on historical impressions than on rigorous science, but it is already provoking debate in a corner of the intellectual world that tends to make Jews very uncomfortable: genetics.

Cochran’s work was widely panned by geneticists, and Murray makes even less of an effort to placate these experts with scientifically grounded evidence. The assumption from which both researchers work — that intelligence has a genetic basis — is still disputed by many scientists. Harry Ostrer, a leading Jewish geneticist, said that Murray’s work was “speculation” and that both Murray and Cochran trade in a “love of group typology — Jews are smart and blacks are great athletes.”

I’ve been getting a lot of response to my article in today’s Daily News about Islamophobia. Here is another gem, with added emphasis in bold:

Why do so many Jews in the U.S., continue to apologize and making excuses for radical Islam. Here’s a group of people who want to marginalize and destroy Jews all over the world, yet you and many others of the Jewish faith, defend them and push their propaganda. 

There is NO such thing as Islamophobia! when is the last time you heard of a Muslim being beaten, raped or murdered in the U.S.???? They are allowed to work where they want, preach when they want and say what they want. nearly the complete opposite of their home country. What there is, is a realization that there are millions of Muslims both here and around the world, who want to impose their backwards, totalitarian beliefs on the rest of us. WHY IS IT THAT LIBERALS LIKE YOU DON’T GET THIS!!!!

So as long as you’re giving University teachers a pass on their hate speech against the U.S. and Israel, how about you talk about how:

Muslims burn and loot cars and homes in Paris every night!

a Muslim shot and killed Jewish women at a Synagogue in Seattle

Schools in the U.K. are now BANNING any teaching of the holocaust so they don’t offend Muslims.

this list is endless but those are recent examples.

Brad, you’re on the wrong side. So while you push your politically correct – multicultural drivel, I’ll choose to fight to keep this country strong and safe.

While you’re waiting in line with your prayer rug on the way to the ovens

, I’ll continue to shine a light on the hate speech that Imams are spewing in Mosque’s.

I should note that based on this man’s last name, which is the same way he misidentified my faith—I am culturally though not religiously Jewish—he might be Jewish.