Alan Dershowitz gives non-confrontational talk on Israel at Berkeley, then called a Nazi and anti-Semitically caricatured

October 27, 2017 • 9:00 am

The line between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is nearly invisible—if it exists at all—but was surely crossed by the behavior of students at the University of California at Berkeley (UCB), where Harvard emeritus law professor Alan Dershowitz, a liberal Democrat, recently spoke on Israel. His October 11 talk was called “The liberal case for Israel,” and was sponsored on campus by Berkeley Law, Bears for Israel, and the Chabad Jewish Center.

As Dershowitz reported yesterday at the Gatestone Institute, his talk was not a one-sided pro-Israel talk, but called for an end to occupation as well as a two state solution:

I was recently invited to present the liberal case for Israel at Berkeley. In my remarks I advocated the establishment of a Palestinian state and a negotiated end of the conflict. I encouraged hostile questions from protestors and answered all of them. The audience responded positively to the dialogue. . . I advocated a Palestinian state; an end to the occupation and opposition to Israeli settlement policies.

But on campuses like Berkeley, that doesn’t matter, for Dershowitz is associated with defending Israel against its enemies, most famously in his book The Case for Israel (even if you’re pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel, you should read it). So, right after his talk, a poster was put up outside the Berkeley Law school with a swastika drawn over his face. Yes, a swastika—on the face of a Jew. (I can’t make out the wording or the circled bit, but perhaps a reader can help.) There’s no end to who can be called a Nazi these days, even someone like Dershowitz:

Erwin Cherwinsky, the Dean of the UCB Law School condemned the swastika, but the disapprobation kept on coming. The next day, according to Dershowitz, the cartoon shown below appeared in the Daily Californian, the UCB student newspaper. Dershowitz describes the cartoon as:

. . . an ugly caricature of me sticking my head through a cardboard cut-out. Behind the cardboard I am portrayed stomping on a Palestinian child with my foot, while holding in my hand an Israeli soldier who is shooting an unarmed Palestinian youth. Above the cardboard cut-out the title of my speech – The Liberal Case for Israel – is scrawled in capital letters.”

. . . It is shocking that this vile caricature – which would fit comfortably in a Nazi publication – was published in “the official paper of record of the City of Berkeley” (according to the Editor.) The cartoon resembles the grotesque anti-Semitic blood libel propaganda splashed across Der Sturmer in the 1930’s, which depicted Jews drinking the blood of gentile children. Canards about Jews as predators – prominently promulgated by the Tzarist forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – were anti-Semitic back then and are still anti-Semitic today, whether espoused by the extreme left or the extreme right.

There’s little doubt that this is in the genre of anti-Semitic tropes common in not only much of Middle Eastern media, but, long ago, in Nazi Germany itself as well as in modern neo-Nazi propaganda. How dare the editor of the paper print such filth this at the same time that others call Dershowitz a Nazi? If you think this is simply anti-Zionist and not anti-Semitic, you’re deceiving yourself. In fact, the Chancellor of UCB, Carol Christ (the UC system’s equivalent of the campus President), wrote a letter to the paper saying just that:

Your recent editorial cartoon targeting Alan Dershowitz was offensive, appalling and deeply disappointing. I condemn its publication. Are you aware that its anti-Semitic imagery connects directly to the centuries-old “blood libel” that falsely accused Jews of engaging in ritual murder? I cannot recall anything similar in The Daily Californian, and I call on the paper’s editors to reflect on whether they would sanction a similar assault on other ethnic or religious groups. We cannot build a campus community where everyone feels safe, respected and welcome if hatred and the perpetuation of harmful stereotypes become an acceptable part of our discourse.

Indeed, and good for her! Had a similar cartoon been published mocking a speaker who was anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian, it would have been universally condemned by the Left; indeed, the cartoonists and editors would have faced threats and physical harm. But it’s okay if it’s a Jew!

There were other letters to the paper as well, including a temperate and rational one sent by Dershowitz himself. According to him, the editors tried to censor his letter by taking out his description of the cartoon as “anti-Semitic”. But, as he notes,

As far as I know they did not edit the offending cartoon. Also, the editor claimed that the intent of the cartoon was to expose the “hypocrisy” of my talk. Yet, the newspaper never even reported on the content of my talk and I don’t know whether the cartoonist was even at my talk. The cartoon was clearly based on a stereotype not on the content of my talk.

Dershowitz is a civil liberties as well as criminal lawyer, and so he emphasizes that he’s not calling for removal of the cartoon. Rather, he takes a pretty straightforward First Amendment stand:

Nonetheless, just as I defended the rights of Nazis to march in Skokie, I defend the right of hard-left bigots to produce this sort of anti-Semitic material, despite it being hate speech. Those who condemn hate speech when it comes from the Right should also speak up when hate speech comes from the Left. The silence from those on the Left is steeped in hypocrisy. It reflects the old adage: free speech for me but not for thee.

To be sure, the students had the right to publish this cartoon, but they also had the right not to publish it. I am confident that if the shoe were on the other foot – if a cartoon of comparable hate directed against women, gays, blacks or Muslims were proposed – they would not have published it. There is one word for this double standard. It’s called bigotry.

The best response to bigotry is the opposite of censorship: it is exposure and shaming in the court of public opinion. The offensive cartoon should not be removed, as some have suggested. It should be widely circulated along with the names prominently displayed of the anti-Semite who drew it and the bigoted editors who decided to publish it. Every potential employer or admissions officer should ask them to justify their bigotry.

In his Gatestone piece (very similar to his letter to the Daily Cal), Dershowitz names the students responsible for the editorial and cartoon, including the cartoonist, the editor in chief, the managing editor, and the opinion editor, and “challenges them to justify their bigotry”.

Finally the Daily Cal editors saw reason—probably after getting a bunch of hard criticism from both the UCB chancellor and many other students and alums. The have now have withdrawn the cartoon (and apparently the editorial) and apologized, with a redaction by Karim Doumar (editor in chief and president of the paper) appearing on the page that carried the original editorial. The new piece says, among other things, this:

The editorial cartoon that ran in our opinion page Oct. 13 failed to meet our editorial standards and has been retracted.

The cartoon hearkened to clearly anti-Semitic tropes. It should not have been published, and we sincerely apologize that it was.

. . . We apologize to our readers and members of our staff who were hurt by the cartoon. We especially apologize to Alan Dershowitz for the ways it negatively impacted him both personally and professionally.

Covering a community means listening to that community and reflecting its beliefs, feelings, fears and opinions. As part of our ongoing education, we will be meeting with local religious leaders and experts to improve our understanding of the historical context behind these types of images and contemporary manifestations of anti-Semitism.

Additionally, we are ensuring that a detailed knowledge of the history of harmful visual propaganda becomes an integral part of how we train our staff.

We understand and take responsibility for the harm we have caused our readers and our staff. We hear you, we accept your criticism, and we will learn from our errors.

Well, at least they didn’t make excuses.

The cartoon, now vanished, will be preserved on my page. But what still bothers me, despite the retraction, is the atmosphere of double-standard bigotry at UCB that would make students print such a vile cartoon without a second thought, despite the fact they wouldn’t show a pro-Palestinian speaker stabbing Israeli citizens (with blood!) or shooting rockets at Israel. This double standard, in which Jews are demonized while the Left gives a pass to Muslims whose behavior is as vile—or worse—is what we face on many American campuses today. Had the Chancellor not written a letter, I doubt the paper would have retracted its editorial and the cartoon. I don’t think this episode will herald a sea change among UCB students.

It’s time that the Left abandon its double standard of demonizing Israel and Jews while giving Palestine and Muslims not just a pass, but approbation—simply because they’re perceived as oppressed people of color. (Tell that to the Saudis!).  If the Left decries “Islamophobia” as bigotry against Muslims, it must do the same with anti-Semitism (remember, on per capita basis, the rate of anti-Jewish hate crime in the U.S. is twice that of anti-Muslim hate crime). The Left is acting like the group it most demonizes: Nazis. Should we now “punch a Daily Cal editor”?

Dershowitz, of course, sees the wider political implications:

This sequence of events – by hard-left students who originally protested my right to speak at Berkeley– confirmed what I’ve long believed: that there is very little difference between the Nazis of the hard right and the anti-Semites of the hard left. There is little doubt that this abhorrent caricature was a hard-left Neo-Nazi expression.

These anti-Semitic displays against me were in reaction to a speech in which I advocated a Palestinian state; an end to the occupation and opposition to Israeli settlement policies. Many on the hard-left refuse to acknowledge this sort of nuanced positioning. That is because their hostility towards Israel does not stem from any particular Israeli actions or policies. Even if Israel were to withdraw from the West Bank, destroy the security barrier, and recognize Hamas as a legitimate political organization, it would still not be enough. For these radicals, it is not about what Israel does; it is about what Israel is: the nation state of the Jewish people. To many on the hard left, Israel is an imperialistic, apartheid, genocidal, and colonialist enterprise that must be destroyed.

His last sentence shows that much of what masquerades as anti-Zionism is really anti-Semitism.

You can read more details about this episode, along with the reaction of various people, at The Washington Post. I can almost guarantee you won’t see anything about this at The Huffington Post (imagine what that odious site would have written had it been a Muslim speaker!) and I see nothing about it at the New York Times. There is, of course, plenty about it on right-wing sites like Breitbart and Fox News, which shows how this kind of anti-Semitism makes the Left look bad.

And it should. As Dershowitz said, “The silence from those on the Left is steeped in hypocrisy.”

h/t: cessar

Readers’ wildlife photos (and video)

October 27, 2017 • 7:30 am

We have a new contributor today, Christian Allesandro Perez, who takes terrific photos and videos that you can see only on his flickr site and his website, alephrocco.  He’s lately been in Costa Rica, but today gives us photos from Australia. Please give him a warm welcome to inspire him to keep contributing here!  Christian’s notes and IDs are indented:

Unless you have a preference for organisms for the neotropics, I think I’ll start with some arthropods from my first weeks in Australia.

Green lacewing (Neuroptera: Chrysopidae) ovipositing. Lacewing eggs are like no other. They look like small elliptical neon green pellets (~1.5 mm long) attached to a stem by long wire-like filaments for protection against scavenging insects. Although I see them frequently, this night was the first time I watched a lacewing oviposit. Both the lacewing and her eggs shone brilliantly from the light of my head torch, not to mention the classic galaxy-like neuropteran eyeshine.
Aquatic spiders such as the Giant Water Spider (Pisauridae: Megadolomedes australianus) are covered in hydrophobic hairs, allowing them to sit on top of and move along the water’s surface. In Peru, I found my first Pisaurid in a stream, and when I approached the spider, it hopped along the water’s surface to safety with a fast jellyfish-like motion. I have not observed that behavior again in any aquatic spiders. Megadolomedes can attain a legspan of more than 18 cm, but this individual had a legspan of around 13 to 15 cm (5-6 inches).
An elephant weevil (Curculionidae: Orthorhinus cylindrirostris) during take-off in a superman pose. This weevil feeds on a variety of woody plants including grapevine, and they are major pests for wine companies.
Centipedes are often hard to photograph, especially during the day. As soon as I flip a rock they usually bolt immediately. This centipede (Scolopendridae: Cormocephalus cf. aurantiipes, ~15 cm long) scurried on top of a rock, and I cupped my hands over it. Sensing that it was now in a dark safe space, the centipede let me snap a few quick photos.
Lifting a rock and finding gold… well golden abdomens; a colony of Dolichoderus cf. doriae, a mimic of the bull ant Myrmecia fulvipes. [JAC: the species below is also an ant]
Hangingfly (Mecoptera: Bittacidae: Harpobittacus australis) with its beak ready to pierce the exoskeleton of an unsuspecting prey and inject a tissue-dissolving enzyme to liquify its interior.
This red and gray Hercules robber fly (Asilidae: Neoaratus hercules) landed on a tree a few meters in front of me, happily cannibalizing a more regular-sized robber fly.
I spotted this large wasp flying around a bush, constantly entering from different angles. After waiting for several minutes, the wasp finally emerged with a huntsman spider, scurrying across the ground in search of its burrow. It was an orange spider wasp (Pompilidae: Cryptocheilus bicolor) parasitizing a Huntsman spider (Sparassidae).  Below is a short video:

Friday: Hili dialogue

October 27, 2017 • 6:30 am

Well, it’s Friday, October 27, 2017, and precisely the 300th day of the year. What better way to celebrate by having a spud on National Potato Day? More important, in the UK it’s Black Cat Appreciation Day. Matthew sent the official tweet from Cats Protection:

By the way, this is one difference between UK and American English: in the U.S. it would be called “Cat Protection”, with a singular.  Similarly, a cocktail party in the U.S. would be called a “drink party” (though it isn’t, it’s a “cocktail party”) rather than the UK “drinks party.”

In honor of Black Cat Appreciation Day, here’s a beloved black cat from the U.K. (London, to be precise): Theo, staffed by readers Gethyn and Laurie. As you may remember, Theo loves to drink espresso. (On her website A Classicist Writes, Laurie put up a special post this morning, “It’s National Black Cat Day!“, dedicated to yours truly and featuring other photos of Theo.

Theo

To see dozens—to be exact, 6 dozen—of our readers’ black cats, have a look at the post “Halloween Black Cat Parade” from two years ago. Maybe we’ll do another this year, so get your black cat photos ready (don’t send them yet, and make sure I haven’t posted them before_.

On this day in 1682, William Penn founded the city of Philadelphia in what was then the Colonial American Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In 1904, the first segment of the New York City subway opened, now the biggest underground system in the U.S. On October 27, 1936, Wallis Simpson got a divorce decree from her husband, freeing her to marry King Edward VIII of the UK. That of course led to his abdication from the throne for having married a two-time divorcée, and the couple lived afterwards as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. On this day in 1992, the U.S. sailor Allen R. Schindler, Jr. was murdered by shipmate Terry M. Helvey for being gay; that eventually led to a new policy in the military, the famous “Don’t ask, don’t tell” practice. Finally, on this day in 1997, there was a global stock market crash, with the Dow dropping 554 points from about 7700, or roughly 7%. But Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus) just kept investing periodically as usual, and of course now the Dow is at about 23,400. If you’re investing, such “dollar cost” averaging is what I recommend.

Notables born on this day include  Niccolò Paganini (1782), Theodore Roosevelt (1858), Dylan Thomas, one of my favorite poets (1914), Nanette Fabray (1920, still alive), Roy Lichtenstein (1923), H. R. Haldeman (1926), Sylvia Plath (1932), John Cleese (1939), Carrie Snodgrass (1945; as Neil Young’s partner for a time, she was featured in his song “A Man Needs a Maid”: “I fell in love with the actress; she was playing a part that I could understand.”), and Darwin-basher A. N. Wilson (1950).

And here’s a lovely painting of our favorite animal by Roy Lichtenstein: “Laughing Cat” (1961)

Those who died on October 27 include the Mughal emperor Aksbar (1605), Aussie criminal Squizzy Taylor (1927; I like the name), physicists Lise Meitner (1968) and David Bohm (1992), and Lou Reed (2013).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has had her preprandial reading and is off for noms:

Hili: I will just have a brush with great literature and off I go.
A: Where to?
Hili: To the kitchen.
In Polish:
Hili: Jeszcze tylko otrę się o wielką literaturę i spadam.
Ja: Dokąd?
Hili: Do kuchni.

Yesterday in Winnipeg, Gus’s staff member Taskin had nearly finished knitting a new shawl when Gus decided it belonged to him. The data:

I finished knitting my shawl and was literally sewing in the last loose ends when this happened.
Taskin needs to learn that all shawls must be white.
Here are two tw**ts stolen from Heather Hastie. The first is a cat rescuer:

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb, who is wasting time when he’s supposed to be writing his new book:

And a superb natural history illustrator.  Be sure to turn up the volume:

Finally, here’s a brave Iranian woman who has doffed her required hijab in public (ignore the stuff about her being small and cute; I don’t know why “My Stealthy Freedom” put that in there). People threaten to call the morality police, and she just laughs at them: “Bring it on!”

For your evening’s entertainment, one evolutionary biologist extols another

October 26, 2017 • 4:00 pm

W. D. “Bill” Hamilton is regarded by many as the greatest evolutionary theorist of his generation. Although he had some wonky ideas, he also had some great ones as well. (He was a fount of ideas!) Rather than read me telling you about him, listen to this 30-minute “Great Lives” show on the BBC,  in which Richard Dawkins talks about Hamilton and his achievements. Dr. Mary Bliss, Hamilton’s sister, adds her perspective.  Click on the screenshot to go to the free audio:

Many of my contemporaries, and those of Richard’s slightly older cohort, knew or worked with Bill, and to a person they praised his kindness, humility, generosity (especially toward young people) and his brilliance. Sadly, he’s one of the greats I never met. He died in 2000 at only 63, perhaps of complications from malaria—it’s not clear—and I somehow never crossed paths with him. That was my loss.

Do read this post, written largely by my friend Latha Menon, who knew him well, describing a visit to his grave. And have a look at his tombstone and the stone bench erected in his memory. It’s very touching—and biological.  This man had an intense love of nature, and his theory was always directed toward explaining real phenomena in the wild.

h/t: Kevin

Once again: Is New Atheism dead?

October 26, 2017 • 12:30 pm

Reader Diane G. (and later a few others; thanks to all) called my attention to a piece by Scott Alexander in Slate Star Codex called “How did new atheism fail so miserably?” It’s the usual stuff about Dawkins and the rest of us alienating the Left, and cites an even weirder article in The Baffler called “Village atheists, village idiots,” by Sam Kriss, a journalist who just got into trouble—and suspended from the Labour Party—for sexual harassment.

Kriss’s piece is simply unhinged, spewing out invective and then atheistsplaining that the New Atheists—among whom he wrongly includes Neil deGrasse Tyson, who doesn’t even like being called an atheist—have literally been driven insane by repeating their godless litany over and over again. Get a load of Kriss’s style and contentions:

SOMETHING HAS GONE BADLY WRONG with our atheists. All these self-styled intellectual titans, scientists, and philosophers have fallen horribly ill. Evolutionist faith-flayer Richard Dawkins is a wheeling lunatic, dizzy in his private world of old-fashioned whimsy and bitter neofascism. Superstar astrophysicist and pop-science impresario Neil deGrasse Tyson is catatonic, mumbling in a packed cinema that the lasers wouldn’t make any sound in space, that a spider that big would collapse under its own weight, that everything you see is just images on a screen and none of it is real. Islam-baiting philosopher Sam Harris is paranoid, his flailing hands gesticulating murderously at the spectral Saracen hordes. Free-thinking biologist PZ Myers is psychotic, screeching death from a gently listing hot air balloon. And the late Christopher Hitchens, blinded by his fug of rhetoric, fell headlong into the Euphrates.

Critics have pointed out this clutch of appalling polemic and intellectual failings on a case-by-case basis, as if they all sprang from a randomized array of personal idiosyncrasies. But while one eccentric atheist might be explicable, for all of the world’s self-appointed smartest people to be so utterly deranged suggests some kind of pattern. We need, urgently, a complete theory of what it is about atheism that drives its most prominent high priests mad.

His explanation, which is just plain dumb:

These New Atheists and their many fellow travelers all share an unpleasant obsessive tic: they mouth some obvious banality—there is no God, the holy books were all written by human beings—and then act as if it is some kind of profound insight. This repetition-compulsion seems to be baked right into their dogma.

Under the correspondence model of truth—the one favored by scientific rationality—a true statement is a thought-image that mirrors actual events; truth is just a repetition of the world. But as anyone who’s spent time with the mad knows, there’s something dangerous to one’s sanity about doing the same thing over and over again.

It would be hard to maintain, I think, that Dawkins, Tyson (not a New Atheist) and Sam Harris are mad, much less people like Anthony Grayling, Dan Dennett, or even me (I’ll pass by Myers without comment). But let it be said that everyone mentioned is engaged in other activities, and hardly spends even 15% of their time promoting atheism. Richard is promoting his books and lecturing about evolution, as well as answering people’s questions (often about atheism) in public lectures, Tyson is popularizing astronomy and cosmology, Sam has largely given up talking about atheism in favor of his podcasts that cover a huge diversity of subject, Dan is writing popular philosophy books, and I’m back to writing books about science as well as a children’s book, and am more interested in free will than in atheism.  Kriss’s piece can be ignored largely as simple raving by someone who, for unspecified reasons, doesn’t like New Atheism.

Alexander’s piece is at least sane, but he makes the same accusation as does Kriss: the Left doesn’t like New Atheism. I’m not sure that’s true in general, since those who like it aren’t going to write articles about it, but it’s clear that many Leftists not only criticize New Atheists (see Salon, for instance), but also assert that New Atheism is a failure.  The former bit is true, but the latter is not. First the reasons for our failure:

According to Alexander, New Atheism has failed because

  • New Atheists were right, “but in a loud, boring and pointless way.”

Nope. The “Four Horsemen’s” books were all big best-sellers, and they continue to attract crowds wherever they go.  When Dawkins (or even I) give a talk, even about evolution, most of the questions are about religion, whether it comports with evolution, or simply about atheism itself. When I go online to answer questions from college classes about Why Evolution is True, about 70% of the questions are about religion and atheism, even though I don’t bring it up! Maybe Alexander was bored, but a lot of other people weren’t—and aren’t.

  • Other progressive causes, like feminism, environmentalism, and anti-Trumpism were, says Alexander, are guilty of the same thing, but New Atheism is special in that it alone has been demonized by the Left. According to Alexander, that might be because it “failed to make the case that New Atheism was socially important”, or maybe because we “just didn’t know how to stay relevant”:

“Trump resistance always has new tweets to keep its attention. Social justice always has a new sexist celebrity to be angry about. Sure, a few New Atheists tried to keep up with the latest secretly-gay televangelist, but most of them kept going about intricacies of the kalam argument that had been done to death by 1400 AD. This is just an example – maybe there are other asymmetries that are more important?”

There may be some truth here, as the New Atheists have had their say and there isn’t much more to add. I myself have argued that, over the next 15 years or so, until the next generation needs educating, we don’t really need more atheist conferences. But, as I’ll argue below, New Atheists did achieve their goals, and, knowing this, and knowing that it will take time for society to change, have moved on to other things.

  • And Alexander adds this: “Maybe the New Atheists accidentally got on board just before a nascent Grey Tribe/Blue Tribe* split and tried to get Blue Tribe credibility by sending Grey Tribe signals. At some point there was a cultural fissure between Acela Corridor thinkfluencers with humanities degrees and Silicon Valley bloggers with STEM degrees, and the former got a head start on hating the latter while the latter still thought everybody was on the same anti-Republican side.” [See bottom for the definition of these “tribes”.]

That I don’t get, as New Atheist books and talks were attended by members of both tribes.

Finally, Alexander hits on one point that, I think, does account for some pushback against New Atheism: the fact that even liberal nonbelievers have a sneaking sympathy for religion, and don’t like people going after it. Or that there are more liberal feminists than liberal atheists, so success for New Atheism was bound to be smaller than for other liberal causes:

  • “And the cynic in me wonders whether New Atheism wasn’t pointless and obvious enough. There are more church-goers in educated liberal circles than Trump supporters, climate deniers, or self-identified racists. Maybe that made the “repeat platitudes to people who already believe them” game a little less fun, caused some friction – ‘You’re talking about my dear grandmother!’”

The thing is, I don’t much care about these articles that demonize New Atheists (except insofar as they slander my friends), for in the main we won. New Atheist books (especially The God Delusion) were huge best sellers, thousands of people wrote in to people like Harris and Dawkins thanking them for helping them give up their faith. And who can argue persuasively that New Atheism didn’t play any role in the increasing secularization of America? To paraphrase Dawkins on Darwin, the New Atheists made it intellectually respectable to be a nonbeliever.

There’s little more to say now: the arguments against God, never really “new”, have been made, and will need to be reprised for the next generation, and America continues to lose its religion. In most places save the South you are no longer ostracized for saying you’re an atheist. The only problem that remains is one that Diane G. raised: “Why is a movement that has been so successful also been so hated by the very people who should adhere to its claims?” Why do so many Leftists, including nonbelievers, rail and fulminate against not just the famous New Atheists, but against New Atheism itself?

Jealousy is one reason, I think, and so is a secret softness for religion—perhaps the view that society needs belief in God to remain cohesive (the “Little People’s Argument”). In the end, articles like Kriss’s and Alexander’s may raise questions about psychology, but what they haven’t demonstrated is their main premise: that New Atheism has failed. Hatred of a movement’s proponents is no sign that it has failed. Were that true, you could argue that the Civil Rights movement failed in the American South.

_________

*The Blue Tribe is most classically typified by liberal political beliefs, vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinking guns are barbaric, eating arugula, drinking fancy bottled water, driving Priuses, reading lots of books, being highly educated, mocking American football, feeling vaguely like they should like soccer but never really being able to get into it, getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots, marrying later, constantly pointing out how much more civilized European countries are than America, and listening to “everything except country”.

(There is a partly-formed attempt to spin off a Grey Tribe typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk – but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time)

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ whitewashing

October 26, 2017 • 11:00 am

The new Jesus and Mo strip, called “ahead” came with an email apology:

Sorry this is a day late. More Qasim Rashid inspired nonsense today.

So this, like the one on October 18, based on a Rashid article from HuffPo I discussed ten days ago, in whch Rashid claimed that “The teachings of Islam could help us prevent more sexual abuse scandals.” It was simply cherry-picking of the Qur’an to demonstrate how enlightened it was towards women, and how hard it tried to prevent the abuse of women.  Here’s what Rashid said about the “equality verse” (which is really chapter four, verse one):

In a recent internationally broadcast lecture given live before roughly 6,000 Muslim women, the Khalifa of Islam said, “Chapter four, verse two of the Holy Quran…clarifies that women were not created out of the body of a man or from his rib. Rather, the Quran testifies to the fact that men and women were created from a single soul and are of the same kind and species.”

Thus, the Quran 4:2 first establishes men and women as equal beings.

That’s the cherry Rashid picked to show how enlightened Islam was towards women. And here’s Quran 4:1, the verse that Rashid should have cited:

O mankind, fear your Lord, who created you from one soul and created from it its mate and dispersed from both of them many men and women. And fear Allah, through whom you ask one another, and the wombs. Indeed Allah is ever, over you, an Observer.

But then here’s the verse that Jesus cites (4:3):

And if you fear that you will not deal justly with the orphan girls, then marry those that please you of [other] women, two or three or four. But if you fear that you will not be just, then [marry only] one or those your right hand possesses. That is more suitable that you may not incline [to injustice].

Women whom “your right hand possesses” are universally acknowledged to be your female slaves.