Richard Dawkins
Open letter to Richard Dawkins
Other people
People who let me down after Sept 11th
I don't feel I have really changed since Sept 11th.
I still believe in human rights, free speech and freedom of religion
for the whole planet
(not just for westerners).
And now we are in a war against the fascist enemies of human rights,
of course I support that war, just as I would have supported the 1939-45 war.
The left,
it seems to me, has betrayed me.
I always thought they hated fascism, and would support any war against it.
And yet the test came and most of them failed it.
It makes me doubt that these people would have supported the Allies
in the 1939-45 war either.
There are many people who are against the war
who I never really admired.
This page is about the people I really admired
who let me down.
Richard Dawkins
is a significant thinker.
He has the best definition in history of what religions are
- powerful memes.
He has the best explanation
of why the ideas of Islam, for example,
can gain millions of followers.
And his first reaction to Sept 11th
made me think he was going
to stand up against Islamic religious fascism.
And yet he's still a Guardian reader.
Here he is, 1 year later,
attacking Bush
and praising Robert Fisk.
He is
anti-Israel,
following the unthinking line of the left.
Both of us are atheists and evolutionists,
but he stood with
Pope John Paul II
and
the Archbishop of Canterbury
in opposing the war on Iraq
- while I stood with the atheist Christopher Hitchens,
the Christian Tony Blair
and the creationist George W. Bush.
These are interesting times.
The collective madness of 2003
-
Stephen Hawking unwisely strays into politics,
2 Nov 2004, calling the liberation of Iraq
"a war crime",
"based on .. lies":
- The mathematician
Sir Michael Atiyah,
President of the Royal Society,
marched against the liberation of Iraq, and
idiotically believes that Israel, rather than
the sick ideology of Islamism,
is
the root cause of terror:
"The real fundamental cause of these things arises out of the Israeli-Palestinian problem.
...
the Israeli-Palestinian thing is at the core of that.
As long as that's not stopped in a satisfactory way, the problem will continue.
It is the terrible irony of the world that the Jews suffered terribly during the war
in the Holocaust, and now are in some senses the cause of the next Holocaust."
-
Physics and Politics:
The embarrassing but mostly harmless leftism of Albert Einstein
(also here)
by Ronald Radosh
- On Einstein's hopelessly naive left-wing politics,
which at times bordered on apology for the Soviet Union.
"The unfortunate truth
is that Albert Einstein was as gullible on the Cold War
as the average college leftist."
-
Criticism of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
(and their Doomsday Clock).
- Noam Chomsky
- The Lancet
- The atheist and "humanist"
Ted Honderich
is an open apologist for Islamic religious terror:
-
The Real Friends Of Terror, TV program, 2006:
-
"It strikes me that the Palestinian's only hope is terrorism.
That was their only means, which I absolutely believe without the slightest hesitation.
...
The Palestinians are up against what is said to be the fourth largest military power in the world.
Do they have much choice in how they respond to it?
...
It could be that the Palestinian people do have reason to resort to the terrible weapon
that is the suicide bomber.
...
Yes, the Palestinians do indeed have a moral right to their terrorism
against [neo-Zionism] in all of historic Palestine.
...
It seems to me clear that the Palestinians have had and continue to have a moral right
to their terrorism against the ethnic cleansing of Neo-Zionism.
...
It seems to me that the Palestinians have a moral right to their terrorism
against the ethnic cleansing of Neo Zionism
in taking from them the last fifth of historic Palestine."
-
He idiotically believes that Israel
is the main cause of the modern Islamist religious jihad.
- Incredibly, he believes 9/11 was somehow
about Israel and "support of the Palestinians":
"The attack on America on 9/11 was monstrously wrong.
It was wrong, according to the Principle of Humanity, because it was a monstrously irrational means
to an end that was partly defensible.
I mean support of the Palestinians and resistance to neo-Zionism."
-
His previous mad theory
in After the Terror, 2002,
was that 9/11 was somehow about fighting global poverty:
"Is it possible to suppose that the September 11 attacks
had nothing at all to do with ... Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Sierra Leone?"
As if Bin Laden gives a shit about infidel black Africans!
(*)
- (*)
Sierra Leone
is 60 percent Muslim.
But Malawi
and
Mozambique
are 80 percent
kafir,
who Bin Laden regards as vermin.
While
Zambia
is 99 percent kafir
- the whole country could be exterminated as far as Bin Laden could care.
-
An even funnier theory than Ted Honderich's
idea that Bin Laden is angered by African poverty!
-
At a London conference, scientists identify
one of the root causes of terrorism:
global warming!
Apparently this angers Bin Laden, or something.
-
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, June 2007, says climate change, not Islamism, is the cause of
the 25 year Islamist genocide in Sudan.
Funny how the "climate change"
seems to have started in 1983.
-
Too Smart To Be So Dumb
by Joel Engel
- on the mysterious relationship between intelligence
and politics.
Reagan and George W. Bush
appear (to me too, who supports them!)
not to be as "intelligent"
(in the sense of being well-read, etc.)
as say Clinton. [1] [2]
-
Yet on foreign policy, Reagan killed the Soviet Empire
and liberated Europe,
while Bush is liberating the Middle East.
Bush hates tyrants and wants to destroy them,
while Dawkins and other
western intellectuals who should know better
are in effect on the side of tyranny.
It's all very mysterious.
-
[1] Let me be clear on
Reagan
and George W. Bush.
I'm not at all saying I buy the general stereotype of their stupidity.
Both are/were very intelligent politically, for example.
Both understand human nature.
Both have a good moral compass, and recognise evil when they see it.
But still, both are disappointing men to support.
Both are religious fundamentalists.
Both drag God into everything
- see Reagan's speech in Orlando.
Both are creationists
- a belief that can only be held by the truly ignorant
and incurious.
Reagan believed in prophecies, and Armageddon.
Reagan allowed astrology
to influence his decisions.
And so on.
So yes, I do find them "not intelligent" in many ways.
And yet they both did the right thing.
- [2] I used to say "Carter and Clinton".
But it turns out
Carter was a creationist too.
-
"The argument .. that George W. Bush is unfit for the Presidency
because he does not
believe in the theory of evolution
.. leaves me utterly unimpressed."
says John Derbyshire,
in an interesting article
(also here).
-
Hollywood vs. Our Leaders
by Cindy Osborne
- lists the education records of members of the Bush administration,
and the education records of some of the
celebrity "anti-war" left.
These are interesting times.
Many formerly sensible people have gone mad:
- In the UK:
- Richard Dawkins
(doesn't seem to care that
we are at war with Islamist religious lunatics
who want to kill all atheists).
- Stephen Hawking
- Michael Atiyah
- Christian Aid
- The Liberal Democrats.
- The Lancet
- Robin Cook
- Now that America is abandoning realpolitik
and adopting
an ethical foreign policy,
he's suddenly against it!
-
Help, I'm a pro-war leftie
by Oliver Kamm
- "Long before 9/11, [Blair] abandoned the conservative "realism"
- more accurately, amoral quietism - that had characterised John Major's foreign policies.
Rather than acquiescing in Serb aggression, Mr Blair confronted it.
...
Contrary to the Liberal Democrats' depiction of it as the biggest foreign policy error since Suez,
Iraq was the most far-sighted and noble act of British foreign policy since the founding of Nato.
Mr Blair's record exemplifies foreign policy "with an ethical dimension"."
- In the US:
- In Ireland:
- Elsewhere:
- Nelson Mandela
(doesn't seem to care that
Islamists are the main slave-traders of black Africans today).
- Amnesty International
(doesn't seem to recognise that
America's "Axis of Evil" Islamist and communist enemies
are by far the major abusers of human rights
in the world today).
- Reporters Sans Frontieres
allows trendy left-wing politics to dictate
which countries they get worked up about,
rather than examining the actual state of press freedom.
- Human Rights Watch
- Index on Censorship
- Pope John Paul II
(a great defender of the West against the Soviets,
today he doesn't seem to
recognise that the Islamists want to end Christian Italy).
-
Open letters to George W. Bush,
November 18, 2003,
The Guardian -
for lots of rubbish by people such as:
- Richard Dawkins
(see above)
- Salam Pax
- Norman Davies, the historian
- John Mortimer
- "Mickey (12)",
whose arguments are no more infantile
than the rest of the "anti-war" brigade.
-
Verdicts on the war,
March 14, 2004,
The Observer -
for more rubbish by:
- John Mortimer
- The Bishop of Oxford
- Richard Dawkins again
Fiction writers
- John le Carré
is another person who lets me down.
I never liked his novels,
but at least he
supported the West in the Cold War.
Now, sadly, he has become
just another anti-American, anti-Israeli crackpot:
- Kurt Vonnegut
praises jihadi suicide killers of women and children.
- In contrast,
Orson Scott Card is someone who
surprised me with his sanity.
I love his science fiction.
Now it turns out he has great politics too.
Comedy
- Terry Jones of
Monty Python lets me down.
Instead of doing something actually
daring, heroic and much-needed,
like making a Life of Brian
about Muhammad,
he outputs a constant stream of ignorant anti-American
"humour":
-
The heroically brave
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
says she
wants to film the Muslim "Life of Brian".
- Scott Adams of "Dilbert" fame
wrote a
hard-to-understand "comical" piece about Iran and Israel
that does make him look like a left-wing nut.
- I certainly agree with
this comment:
"Without reference to earlier work, it would be impossible to see if Scott Adams was a member of ANSWER, CAIR, a follower of David Duke or some college friend of Dylan Avery."
-
But see this
clarification:
"While I think it's highly unlikely that Iran would ever nuke Israel ... the odds are not zero. In my opinion, Ahmadinejad's speech at Columbia, plus Iran's support for Hezbollah give Israel a legitimate reason to attack Iran in self defense.
...
Likewise, Ahmadinejad didn't deny Iran is helping Iraqi insurgents kill Americans. That's a legitimate reason for the United States to support an attack on Iran. It's a separate question as to whether an attack on Iran is in America's best interest."
More here.
- Adams isn't a left-wing nut.
He's just a bad writer (when he writes about politics).
Other people
- Free Inquiry
let me down by
taking an editorial line
against the Iraq War.
This is not an issue on which taking an editorial line
is appropriate.
This seriously damages the credibility of their magazine.
-
John Perry Barlow
was a prominent Internet libertarian of the 1990s,
expressing the excitement of this new world.
- But now he is just another 1990s Rip van Winkle.
The 90s are over, John.
It's a shame, but they are.
There's a war on, and starry eyed young men
who want to kill us.
It's a pain.
I wish we were back in the 90s too.
Nobody wants to deal with these bastards.
But history didn't end.
We've got to destroy these people if we want to
have another 90s again.
-
Letter To John Perry Barlow From A Pot-Smoking Deadhead Bush Voter
by Dean Esmay, speaks for me too
- "from where folks like me stand,
it's your ideas that need to be questioned,
and it's you guys who have been on the wrong side of human rights and progress these last couple of years.
It's you guys who are the reactionaries."
- In contrast,
Louis Rossetto
of Wired gets it:
"Bush may be wrong about everything else, but he is right about the issue
that matters most for my children's future: stopping Islamic fascism.
And [Kerry and the Democrats] are just a joke,
preferring to act as though this probably generation-spanning war is about politics,
not the survival of the West."
-
Steve Biddulph
is great
when he writes on the importance of
families, men and fathers.
-
Yet listen to this when he wanders off topic
in the Foreword to the UK edition of
Manhood, 2004:
"We are still a civilisation going to hell in a handbasket of materialistic greed.
Our current almost hysterical obsession with terrorism seems rather ingenuous,
given that our relationship with the undeveloped world is almost entirely
one of theft. Fair trade, debt reduction, no longer propping up vicious regimes
because they are someone we can do business with
are the only real solutions to the eternal risk of terrorism.".
- A mish-mash of nonsense ideas leading up to
one gloriously mad sentence in which he combines two of the most common stupid ideas
in politics and economics - the
idea that poverty is the cause of terrorism,
and the idea that the solution to poverty is fair trade and debt relief.
So fair trade and debt relief are supposed to stop the jihad now?
-
And this is said for no apparent reason at all!
It has nothing to do with the book!
This is only page 3 and he is trying to repel the reader, saying "If you want to read this book,
you need to buy into my crackpot economic and political ideas".
Why doesn't he stick to the topic?
Why has even someone as smart as Biddulph been infected by the craziness of the times?
Tainted awards
-
The Plain English Campaign
lose all credibility by
allowing trendy politics to dictate their
award for bad English to Donald Rumsfeld.
-
Even
The Guardian
is unimpressed.
-
Rummy speaks the truth, not gobbledygook
by Mark Steyn.
He expresses my thoughts exactly:
- "Whatever credibility the Plain English Campaign might
once have had, they have blown.
They sound, to put it in
plain English, like a bunch of smug tossers."
- Many other awards, that supposedly have a reputation for objectivity,
have revealed themselves to be awards with an agenda:
- The Nobel Peace Prize
- OK, well after
Gorbachev but not Reagan in 1990,
does anybody really think the Nobel Peace Prize is objective?
- But even so, the award to
Jimmy Carter in 2002
was so obviously a pathetic political statement against Bush.
- Other dodgy winners
- The unelected tyrant and terrorist
Yasser Arafat
received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994
along with some civilized Israeli democrats.
The Nobel people sure love their moral equivalence.
- The tyrants' club the UN, and the appalling Kofi Annan,
received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2001.
For their work in making sure nothing would stop
the Rwanda, Bosnia, Sudan, North Korea and Zimbabwe
democides.
- Desmond Tutu
received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.
- The unelected dictator of Egypt
Anwar Sadat,
who tried to carry out a final Holocaust of the Jews of Israel in 1973,
received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978.
- Betty Williams
received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976.
In 2006
she said:
"Right now, I would love to kill George Bush."
In
2007
she said:
"Right now, I could kill George Bush. No, I don't mean that. How could you nonviolently kill somebody? I would love to be able to do that."
"The Muslim world right now is suffering beyond belief",
said this idiot.
And apparently it is Bush's fault,
rather than the fault of Islamism.
- "All we are saying .. is give jihad a chance"
-
Michelle Malkin and Bryan Preston
on some of the above Nobel Peace Prize winners.
-
Mussolini was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935
(and again).
-
Stalin was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1945
(and 1948).
- Apparently
the nomination of
Hitler for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1939
was not serious but was a protest at the nomination of
Chamberlain.
-
The Pulitzer Prize
- Walter Duranty, Pulitzer Prize, 1932
-
Analysis
(and here)
of the
2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning photos for Breaking News Photography.
All have a spin: To make the US army look bad,
and to make the Iraqi fascist resistance look good.
The Pulitzer is not about good photos.
It is about good photos that conform to a particular agenda.
As the author says:
- Number of photos showing US forces looking heroic: 0
- Number of photos showing US forces helping Iraqi civilians: 0
- Number of photos showing Iraqis expressing support for US forces: 0
- Number of photos showing Iraqis expressing opposition to insurgents: 0
-
Bilal Hussein,
an Iraqi photojournalist
who was one of the Associated Press team that won the 2005 Pulitzer above,
is detained by the U.S. military and
accused of working with the Iraqi fascist resistance.
- 2007 Pulitzer Prize
for
Andrea Elliott
for a puff piece on an Islamist mosque in New York.
Strangely enough, this 11,000-word, three-part story
failed to mention the most famous event connected to the mosque
- the sermon in 1994
that inspired a man to go out and shoot Jewish children.
"Halberstam's mother, Devorah, related that she called Elliot to ask why she had omitted the story of her son's murder from the feature on the mosque. Elliot replied that
"she knew nothing about it".
...
The result is not only shoddy journalism; it is a politically inspired muddle that leaves us knowing only those elements of the life of Shata and his mosque that he wishes to present to us.
...
That a travesty such as Elliot's "imam" would bring a Pulitzer is a disgrace that again taints the reputation of both the prizes and the Times."
The Irish Times and the Guardian let me down
-
I Bought The Guardian Today - So You Don't Have To,
a blogger writes in November 2003
- "As a public service, I gritted my teeth and actually bought a copy of
The Grauniad this morning,
for the first time since the autumn of 2001."
-
This is also my relationship with
The Guardian,
The Independent
and The Irish Times
since Sept 11th.
Before Sept 11th, I read them all the time.
I had been reading The Guardian and
The Independent
for 10 years,
and The Irish Times
for 20 years.
Since Sept 11th, I tend to buy other papers.
-
The Guardian,
The Independent
and The Irish Times
are like old friends who have gone mad
and I hardly recognise them any more.
If they want me to buy them again,
they need to change.
After Dawkins' offensively rude letter to Bush,
I feel the need to quote a far more pleasant letter from a man who,
unlike
John le Carré,
has not changed since the
epic, heroic struggle of the Cold War:
|
Dear Mr President,
Today you arrive in my country for the first state visit by an American
president for many decades, and I bid you welcome.
You will find yourself assailed on every hand by some pretty pretentious
characters collectively known as the British left. They traditionally believe
they have a monopoly on morality and that your recent actions preclude
you from the club. You opposed and destroyed the world's most
blood-encrusted dictator. This is quite unforgivable.
I beg you to take no notice. The British left intermittently erupts like a
pustule upon the buttock of a rather good country. Seventy years ago it
opposed mobilisation against Adolf Hitler and worshipped the other
genocide, Josef Stalin.
It has marched for Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and
Andropov. It has slobbered over Ceausescu and Mugabe. It has
demonstrated against everything and everyone American for a century.
Broadly speaking, it hates your country first, mine second.
Eleven years ago something dreadful happened. Maggie was ousted,
Ronald retired, the Berlin wall fell and Gorby abolished communism. All
the left's idols fell and its demons retired. For a decade there was nothing
really to hate. But thank the Lord for his limitless mercy. Now they can
applaud Saddam, Bin Laden, Kim Jong-Il... and hate a God-fearing Texan.
So hallelujah and have a good time.
Frederick Forsyth
Novelist
|
and a stunning, and totally unexpected, letter:
|
Dear George,
It is a universal truth that those born with democratic spoons in their
mouths will rail against the ruthless removal of a barbaric tyranny. Most
of the people demonstrating against you will be the latte-rati - people
whose experience of oppression is having to wait four hours for the cable
guy to come round.
I am the child of two refugees from totalitarian regimes; (*)
for this reason, you need not fear a comedy terrorist attack
against your intervention in Iraq.
I don't care why you got rid of Saddam, and neither does any Iraqi I know.
Aaron Barschak
The "Comedy Terrorist" who gatecrashed Prince William's birthday party
at Windsor Castle
|
(*) His mother is a Jew who fled the genocide-state of
Croatia.
His father a Jew who fled the genocide-state of
Austria.
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