Category Archives: Anti-semitism

Hot Air

Save Our Land, Join The Klan

Yup. That’s the message attached to bags of candy being thrown into yards in Abbeville, South Carolina, these days. It seems the Ku Klux Klan is trying to recruit kids and, golly gee, we ought to do something about it! That is, after we go out dancing the Charleston tonight and then after we vote for Herbert Hoover for president tomorrow morning.

Jeez, have we been transported back to the year 1932 while we slept?

A chap named Charles Murray IDs himself as “the Imperial Wizard of the New Empire Knights” of Abbeville. The group, Murray has written, is to “build a legit pro-white organization and become the voice of White America.”

Al Jazeera America tells the tale of this regressive, antediluvian, retro-in-the-worst-possible-way development.

Here’s a pic of a recent cross-buring I found on the New Empire Knights website:

KKK

Campfire Boys

The site also carries news like the “fake” cross-burning a “Negro” pastor in Tennessee staged in front of his church not long ago. The author of the post, presumably the Imperial Wizard Murray himself, writes:

Negroes and Jews are known to hoax hate crimes daily. The Jewish Defense League for example, would bomb synagogues.

Betcha didn’t know that.

Bet you also didn’t know that, acc’d’g to Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a lot of guys start klaverns (KKK-speak for local groups) as a way to make a living — as in, they don’t want to do something as prosaic as work, so they crank up a new group of cranks and then live off the monthly dues.

Hey, it’s a tough job market out there.

Evil By Degrees?

I’m asking for help from female Pencillistas again. I’ve been trying to understand how women feel about rape. Oh sure, that’s easy; they hate it. I don’t mean that, though. I mean what are the nuances, is there any moral relativism re: rape, and can men ever “get it” about the crime? While we’re at it, let’s get Pencil-loving lads to pitch in as well — but I’m really more interested in Double X feedback here.

Please answer this Q: Are some rapes less, well, rape-y than others? That is, does date rape, for instance, constitute less of a violation of a woman’s body and mind than rape at gunpoint or knifepoint?

I bring this up because an erstwhile hero of the secular, progressive gang (me, me, me!) has recently found himself in very hot — perhaps boiling — water for suggesting such a thing. Richard Dawkins, the planet’s premier spokesguy for evolution and non-theism, has Tweeted the following thought:

Dawkins Tweet

Got that? Okay, Dawkins then wrote:

Dawkins Tweet

Let’s put aside the pedophilia bit just now and concentrate on rape. That Dawkins observation stirred an Australian woman named Eleanor Robertson to pen a guest column in The Guardian asking, “Richard Dawkins, What On Earth Happened To You?”

She suggests Dawkins should have “retired from public speech when he had the chance to bow out before embarrassing himself.” She goes on to rip Dawkins as a “figure of mockery,” “an old man who shouts at clouds,” an Islamophobe, arrogant, bigoted, and narrow-minded. What she doesn’t do is explain why his statement is offensive to her.

She hints, of course, that women know instinctively why. Sadly, I wasn’t born with the proper genes so I need help getting this.

Ergo, I’m going to run two polls here, one for women and the other for men. If you count yourself a Q in the LGBTQ equation, fill out both polls. Here you go:

As always, feel free to explain yourself in the comments section. Now, make us all smarter.

Hot Air

Gotcha Covered

So, now its closer to 15 million* people who’ve signed up for health insurance under the provisions of the ACA.

That’s no failure, folks. The combined 2012 US Census bureau population estimates for the three largest cities in this holy land — New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago — is 14,909,352. Let’s call it a draw; there are now as many people insured under ACA guidelines as live in the three most prominent American cities.

Anti-Obamacare

Really?

And the “fiasco” online rollout of the ACA exchange is only some six months on. The Republicans are hanging on to this issue by their fingernails. ACA works, even though the GOP has stood on its head to sabotage it.

Do I love ACA? Hell no. I want single-payer, universal health care like every other civilized country in the world has. But, I’ll say it again, ACA is better than what we had and it’s the best we can do right now as long as the social Darwinists of the Right have the legislative votes.

[*You’ve been seeing the 8 million figure that the corporate media is throwing around, but that only includes people who’ve become insured via the federal exchange. Some 6 million more are now covered under their parents policies, who have pre-existing conditions, had reached some arbitrary liftetime benefits limit, or qualified under Medicare and Medicaid expansion. All of them have benefitted from the ACA.]

Politics?

So, perhaps Mark Kruzan is running for yet another term as mayor of this sprawling metrop.

Yesterday he vetoed the plan to allow hunters to cull the deer population around Griffy Lake. Believe it or not, it’s the first time he’s vetoed a city council bill since he became Boss in Chief in January, 2004.

Can it be that he weighed the votes of those who hate deer eating their roses against those who hate the idea of Bambi being shot up like Sonny Corleone on the causeway?

From "The Godfather"

This may be bad news for any of those hoping to grab Kruzan’s chair in 2015.

In any case, the council can override Kruzan’s veto simply by re-voting on the bill — as long they vote 6-2 again. Council rules call for a two-third vote to negate a mayoral veto. My guess? At least one of those six is going to get cold feet.

The Jews Lose

And so, now we learn that virulent anti-semites constitute at least some fraction of both sides in the Ukraine dust-up.

This despite the strong possibility that those flyers demanding Jews register their families and property being circulated in the city of Donetsk may have been created by Ukraine nationalists trying to smear the Russian partisans there.

The New Republic magazine quotes Russian expert Fyodr Lukyanov, who believes the flyers are fakes: “I have no doubt that there is a sizable community of anti-Semites on both sides of the barricades, but for one of them to do something this stupid — this is done to compromise the pro-Russian groups in the east.”

Just a reminder that anti-semitism is ingrained in much of the pop. of Europe. It existed when England expelled the Jews in 1290. It existed when Spain threw its Jews out in 1492. It existed when mobs attacked Jews on Kristallnacht. And it exists today.

Anti-semitism

Why? Simple: There exists within every society a capacity to hate. It’s part of our genetic make-up. And it’s the greatest challenge we as a species face.