C. Hitchens: "Jefferson's Quran"

[Totenkopf]

What the founder really thought about Islam.

By Christopher Hitchens


"""It was quite witty of Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., to short-circuit the hostility of those who criticized him for taking his oath on the Quran and to ask the Library of Congress for the loan of Thomas Jefferson's copy of that holy book. But the irony of this, which certainly made his stupid Christian fundamentalist critics look even stupider, ought to be partly at his own expense as well.

In the first place, concern over Ellison's political and religious background has little to do with his formal adherence to Islam. In his student days and subsequently, he was a supporter of Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, a racist and crackpot cult organization that is in schism with the Muslim faith and even with the Sunni orthodoxy now preached by the son of the NOI's popularizer Elijah Muhammad. Farrakhan's sect explicitly describes a large part of the human species—the so-called white part—as an invention of the devil and has issued tirades against the Jews that exceed what even the most fanatical Islamists have said. Farrakhan himself has boasted of the "punishment" meted out to Malcolm X by armed gangsters of the NOI (see the brilliant documentary Brother Minister: The Assassination of Malcolm X, which catches him in the act of doing this). If Ellison now wants to use his faith to justify an appeal to pluralism and inclusiveness and diversity, he needs to repudiate the Nation of Islam, and in much more unambivalent terms than any I have yet heard from him."""

Bravo, Chris. But better would be to eliminate the oath via Bible or Koran, and ask the politicos to swear on the Constitution (and honestly, anyone swearing on a text which basically asks followers to off the infidels should alarm us, as much as if it were a fundie baptist swearing on the Good Book). Other oath texts might be imagined: The Origin of Species, or a periodic table, maybe a logic text, or the Story of O, R. Crumb, etc...,

http://www.slate.com/id/2157314/?nav=tap3

[mnaz]

Good point. Let's get serious about building Jefferson's "wall of separation".... I'm all for it.

[stilltrucking]

Hitchens' Battle: Narcissus vs. Onan
The Empire Advances
By Tariq Ali *
Counterpunch
May 19, 2003

Paste:
Q. How do you explain the position of certain left-wing intellectuals on the war in Iraq, such as Christopher Hitchens? To what degree they influence common opinion?

Ali: Hitchens now supports George Bush and has said he will vote for him. So I suggest we stop referring to him as a 'leftwing' intellectual. He has broken with the Left after 9/11 and he will continue to move rightwards. I think his influence will decrease as a result. What gave him a certain purchase was that he was a maverick on the Left, but capable of developing his own independent position and performing a balancing act so that he could write in Vanity Fair and The Nation. The fact that he is now yet another defender of the American Empire makes him one of many. It will not be easy to find a brand new readership. The two ancients from your country's mythology who battled for his soul were Narcissus and Onan. They have now united and won him. His narcissism has now reached such a stage that he fondles himself even in his sleep.

http://www.globalpolicy.org/wtc/fundame ... battle.htm

[Totenkopf]

Yeah, ST, that's been known for some time. Hitchens could have supported Kerry, perhaps (whether there was much of a choice is another issue--and Hitchens doesn't care for catholics). He might have addressed the iraqi civilian casualties a bit more in detail. Either way, he produces some powerful prose, and unlike most American journalists sticks to his secular guns. Anyone who values the secular principles of the Constitution should peruse his book on Jefferson.

[e_dog]

who's Onan, st?

Hitchens is a traitor.

Why should we demand that people repudiate their past even if its the Nation of Islam. All must take a loyalty oath to Christopher Hitchens. Repent ye sinners against secularism.

Swear on the Constitution? you mean that document that justified slavery?

How about swear on the Communist Manifesto?

[Totenkopf]

Jefferson or Nation of Islam? Hmm. Let me give it 2 seconds of thought: I'll take TJ, dankeschoen.

Hitchens, however flawed or arrogant, knows all about the BS, lies, and treachery of marxists and muslims. And he winds up the jackbooted moralists of Cafe Bukharin to no end. And orthodox marxism, however f-ed up, was secularist (as CH probably realizes), until the multiculturalists, stalinists, parisians, etc. took it over.

[stilltrucking]

Onan was Dorothy Parker’s parakeet

This is a subject of/where I am even more ignorant than I am about poetry or quantum mechanics. I only posted the bit on Hitchens cause I liked that line about fondling himself in his sleep. A subject that I am not the least bit ignorant of.

I don’t know jack shit about Marxism. Only quote by him I liked was about everything happening twice, farce/tragedy. I found out a little while back that he was quoting Hegel who I also know nothing about.

I suppose my anarchist hero is Red Emma..Anyone who could get herself exiled from the USA and the USSR is a hero to me.

But to mainstream Americans Emma was known to as a demonic, "dynamite-eating anarchist". Goldman was hounded for much of her life by two of the most notorious law enforcement officials in American history: Anthony Comstock and J Edgar Hoover. As a result of this image, she was jailed in 1893, 1901, 1916, 1918, 1919 and in 1921 -- from charges ranging from inciting to riot to advocating the use of birth control to opposition to World War I

She was exiled by the United States, Soviet Russia, Holland, France and was denied entry into many more.

http://www.spunk.org/texts/people/goldm ... mabio.html

Lenin thought she was a pain in the ass too. She criticized him for not allowing free speech. He told her free speech was a bourgeois notion.

[Totenkopf]

Emma. Hmm.

Another sometimes anarchist, though rather bitter and nihilistic one, Ambrose Bierce wrote this:

Slang: the grunt of the human hog.

[stilltrucking]

of course
she was a woman

there is only one revolution
feminism

Everything else is just bullshit
worse than bullshit

[Totenkopf]

VI Lenin thought otherwise, at least until Fanny Kaplan--possibly a pal of EmmaChek-- put a few slugs in him (he survived, barely), thus bringing about the beginning of the Terror.

[stilltrucking]

Goldman left Russian in 1886 to come to America. She did not return until 1919, Kaplan was born in 1883 and killed in 1918. I doubt if they knew each other.
But you know a jew is a jew is a jew




Totenkopf

[Totenkopf]

Oy vey! So true, man. I don't care for Wehrmacht thugs, either, btw: but the boys had some cool gear, and what fashion sense.

FannyChek was part of the Socialist Revolutionaries, and there were european anarchist types in the SRs. So Emma might have had some aquaintance with her, or her cronies. Lenin and the Bolsheviki detested the SRs (and anarchos) nearly as much as they did the booj-wah; and after Fannys' lil' temper tantrum (well after the Cheka tossed her around for a few days and then shot her), VI and the boys proceeded to liquidate the Russian left: approx. 10,000 people killed, supposedly on ol VI's direct orders, without trials of any sort. That of course was just a prelude to Uncle Joe's death-carnival of what 30+ million (and he was probably involved in the purges at that stage).

[stilltrucking]

I don't know


Emma Goldman was a kind woman eight thousand years ahead of her time.

Would you be offended if I called you Totenputz?

Its okay you can say anything to me
Even lick my poor dead mother's anus

[stilltrucking]

Thanks for reminding me where I am not.

Still trying to let that remark go.

You just having a good time.

[Totenkopf]

Lick? More like....................stick.

Enjoyed the link, too Doc ST: even better than your fave Moe Howard links. Swazis are a bit much, but a tasteful EisenKreuz. Ja. And some Eva Braun stationery! Whoa. Imagine scrawling your epic poems on that, Doc.