As pesky facts continue to be unkind to those trying to polish the ugly face of Islam, they keep turning to newer and newer logical fallacies. However, useful as this method has proven to be, it has its limitations. Aside from being easily taken to pieces by anyone familiar with the basics of logic, they have the potential to backfire: the fallacies can be just as easily turned against those using them.
Case in point: the recent cheap shot against New Atheists on Alternet for being (allegedly) too friendly to Israel, which I recently critiqued. As you remember, author CJ Werlman, himself an atheist, had quite a few pearls of wisdom for us.
Politics is a funny game, for wedge issues often make for strange bedfellows. NSA overreach unites the far left with the far right. Libertarianism unites neo-confederates with black evangelicals. If you’re looking for an even stranger ideological matrimony, try this one on for size: mention the Middle East peace talks, and voila, you have atheists singing from the same song sheet as the Christian Right.
He does have a point: politics does make for strange bedfellows. Why, would you believe an ultra-leftist liberal like Werlman himself “singing from the same song sheet” as an ultra-right Neo-Nazi standard bearer?
No doubt, Harris (neuroscience) and Dawkins (evolutionary biology) are leaders in their respective fields. What they’re not is experts on terrorism and the Middle East. So movement atheism needs to stop pretending like they are, because the words of Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens serve only to make movement atheists sound like neo-conservatives, Zionists and the Christian Right, which ultimately makes seeking peace even harder to attain.
One minor problem here: blanket condemnation of “Zionism” is simply politically-correct antisemitism. Conspiracy theories blaming Jews for every problem under the sun have remained fairly prevalent during the decades since the Holocaust, most of all in the Islamic world, except that the words “Jews” and “International Jewry” (the latter beings a particularly popular term among the Nazis) have been replaced by “Zionists” and “Zionism”. And yet, the latter words are also favorites straw men among Holocaust denying Neo-Nazis. To wit:
The Myrtle Beach International Film Festival, to be held in South Carolina April 23–26, 2014, is featuring a film about German-born Holocaust denier and anti-Semite Ernst Zundel.
Ingrid Rimland, Zundel’s wife and a fellow Holocaust denier, produced “Off Your Knees, Germany!” around 2011. The film portrays Zundel as a victim of Jewish interests that allegedly conspired to deprive him of his right to express his views on Germany’s actions during World War II. In the film, Zundel denies that the Holocaust ever took place and claims that Germany has been maligned by Jews. He asserts that he is trying to reclaim Germany’s honor.
Zundel argues in the film, “If I was a member of the Zionist lobby that has conned itself to a pinnacle of influence and power in this society based on victimhood that they were hardened by, by my German people in the Second World War, I maybe would also hate a guy like the Paul Revere of the Germans to come along and ring the bells of freedom.”
Since the mid-1990s, Rimland has been promoting Zundel’s writings and philosophy through Zundelsite, one of the earliest websites devoted to the rehabilitation of Adolf Hitler and the denial of the genocide of European Jews during World War II.
In other words, the Jews made up a massive lie to win sympathy…and the public face of the conspiracy to make this lie mainstream has been the “Zionist lobby”.
But crazy Islamists and historical revisionists such as Zundel have more in common than obsession with the evil “Zionists”. They actually have been collaborating on shared goals for some time (even though at times they have tried to cover their tracks) and hence this goes beyond guilt by association, or, as apologist Werlman puts it, “singing from the same song sheet”: they are real bedfellows, not imagined ones, such as atheists and the Christian Right.
Hence the question for Werlman becomes: what if his own “logic” is applied to HIM? Does he want to be in the same boat as a liar like Zundel? Personally, I don’t consider him a Holocaust denier, for simply knocking down the same straw man the Holocaust deniers do; rather, just an idiot using bad logic.
