March 14, 2008

Yes, that really is J.K. Simmons. No, this is not as funny as the actual “Juno.” And, man, am I glad they cast Ellen Page over this girl.

Rising global anti–Semitism has been an ongoing issue. Seriously. I could link to much more. Yesterday the State Department gave Congress a report on the matter.

It says that although Nazism and fascism are rejected by the West “and beyond,” blatant forms of anti-Semitism are “embraced and employed by the extreme fringe.”

“Traditional forms of anti-Semitism persist and can be found across the globe. Classic anti-Semitic screeds, such as ‘The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion’ and ‘Mein Kampf’ remain commonplace.

“Jews continue to be accused of blood libel, dual loyalty, and undue influence on government policy and the media, and the symbols and images associated with age-old forms of anti-Semitism endure.”

New forms of anti-Semitism are reflected in rhetoric that compares Israel to the Nazis and attributes “Israel’s perceived faults to its Jewish character.”

This kind of anti-Semitism, the report says, “is common throughout the Middle East and in Muslim communities in Europe, but it is not confined to these populations.”

In fact, such vitriolic rhetoric can be found at UC Irvine, on LA college campuses and even outside the Israeli consulate.

A megachurch pastor and supporter of John McCain has called on Christians to wage “war” against the “false religion” of Islam. Liberals are calling on the presidential candidate to distance himself from an important ally. And guess what: It’s not John Hagee.

Mother Jones takes on the Rev. Rod Parsley.

Parsley is not shy about his desire to obliterate Islam. In Silent No More, he notes—approvingly—that Christopher Columbus shared the same goal: “It was to defeat Islam, among other dreams, that Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World in 1492…Columbus dreamed of defeating the armies of Islam with the armies of Europe made mighty by the wealth of the New World. It was this dream that, in part, began America.” He urges his readers to realize that a confrontation between Christianity and Islam is unavoidable: “We find now we have no choice. The time has come.” And he has bad news: “We may already be losing the battle. As I scan the world, I find that Islam is responsible for more pain, more bloodshed, and more devastation than nearly any other force on earth at this moment.”

Parsley claims that Islam is an “anti-Christ religion” predicated on “deception.” The Muslim prophet Muhammad, he writes, “received revelations from demons and not from the true God.” And he emphasizes this point: “Allah was a demon spirit.” Parsley does not differentiate between violent Islamic extremists and other followers of the religion:

There are some, of course, who will say that the violence I cite is the exception and not the rule. I beg to differ. I will counter, respectfully, that what some call “extremists” are instead mainstream believers who are drawing from the well at the very heart of Islam.

The spirit of Islam, he maintains, is one of hostility. He asserts that the religion “inspired” the 9/11 attacks. He bemoans the fact that in the years after 9/11, 34,000 Americans “have become Muslim” and that there are “some 1,209 mosques” in America. Islam, he declares, is a “faith that fully intends to conquer the world” through violence. The United States, he insists, “has historically understood herself as a bastion against Islam,” but “history is crashing in upon us.”

In light of his new book, “I Don’t Believe in Atheists,” Salon spoke with journalist Chris Hedges, who shares a common frustration with The New Atheists.

While speaking out against the Christian fundamentalist movement and its political agenda, Hedges noticed another group—this one on the left—conspicuously allied with the neocons on the subject of America’s role in world politics. The New Atheists, as they have been called, include Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and bestselling author and journalist Christopher Hitchens—outspoken secularists who depict religious structures and the belief in God as backward and anti-democratic.

Though Hedges, a Harvard seminary graduate and the son of a Presbyterian minister, considers himself a religious man, his quarrel with the New Atheists goes beyond theological concerns. In “I Don’t Believe in Atheists,” he accuses Hitchens and the others of preaching a fundamentalism as dangerous as the religious fundamentalist belief systems they attack. Strange bedfellows indeed—according to Hedges, the New Atheists and the Christian right pose the greatest threat facing American democratic society today.

Hedges spoke to Salon by phone from his home in New Jersey.

You say that “I Don’t Believe in Atheists” is a product of confrontations you had with Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. How did those debates inspire the book?

In May of 2007 I went to L.A. to debate Sam Harris, and then two days later I went to San Francisco to debate Christopher Hitchens. Up until that point, I hadn’t paid much attention to the work of the New Atheists. After reading what they had written and walking away from these debates, I was appalled at how what they had done for the secular left was to embrace the same kind of bigotry and chauvinism and intolerance that marks the radical Christian right. I found that in many ways they were little more than secular fundamentalists.

In December, I interviewed Sam Harris for UCLA Magazine about some graduate research he had done on belief and the brain. He said his hope was that eventually belief in God will carry the same social stigma as, say, being a racist, that it will “be embarrassing for somebody to know something he obviously does not know.”

“You can be called a fundamentalist atheist. When you unpack the statments, they are entirely vacuous,” he told me. “You don’t have to presume anything on insufficient evidence to reject somebody’‘s claims about magic books. We cannot prove the absence of Zeus from this universe. And the burden has never been on us to prove the absence of Zeus.

“We have done that with 1,000s and 1,000s of “dead gods” who are no longer a part of religious mythology. We don’t apply the same scrutiny to the God of Abraham, even though he has exactly the same status, which is not to say he doesn’t have value as literature or philosophical thought.”