Religious Hatred Goes Mainstream
I want to point out that the campaign to demonize the proposed Islamic cultural center a couple of blocks from the World Trade Center site has been, as is pointed out in this post from Charles Johnson, been largely generated by the sick, perverted hatemonger, Pam Geller, who readers of this blog will be familiar with from my reporting of her endless, vicious lies about Muslims, Obama and others. Pam sunk so far into her hatred a few months ago that I found it too painful to cover her, and have stopped giving her even the minimal publicity she gets from my fringe blog.
The reason I bring this up is to point out a perfect example of a phenomenon that I have talked about a number of times. Here we have ideas that should be as tolerable to decent Americans as the writings of Hitler, and yet the conservative machine is walking them step by step into common discourse, so that now these hateful views can be spoken aloud by the likes of Newt Gingrich, Peter King, Tim Pawlenty and other elected Republican officials.
It is frightening how the Republican party has perfected the art of making the most disgusting views acceptable to large numbers of people, and how easily they are able to induce Americans to indulge in orgies of hatred. Having followed these people for decades, I am stunned by the momentum they have generated, and by the willingness of people in the teabag movement and in the Republican party to openly advocate things that should fill them with shame and self-loathing; and their willingness to embrace people like Pam Geller, who are truly Hitlerian, in their hearts if not in their effect.
The reason I bring this up is to point out a perfect example of a phenomenon that I have talked about a number of times. Here we have ideas that should be as tolerable to decent Americans as the writings of Hitler, and yet the conservative machine is walking them step by step into common discourse, so that now these hateful views can be spoken aloud by the likes of Newt Gingrich, Peter King, Tim Pawlenty and other elected Republican officials.
It is frightening how the Republican party has perfected the art of making the most disgusting views acceptable to large numbers of people, and how easily they are able to induce Americans to indulge in orgies of hatred. Having followed these people for decades, I am stunned by the momentum they have generated, and by the willingness of people in the teabag movement and in the Republican party to openly advocate things that should fill them with shame and self-loathing; and their willingness to embrace people like Pam Geller, who are truly Hitlerian, in their hearts if not in their effect.
Comments
It was that the genocidal killers, the mass murderers, the soulless thugs who committed the most evil crimes on the most colossal scale... didn't look like monsters. They looked so ordinary. So unremarkable.
And that's the most dreadful kind of human evil, the one that comes through your front door, wearing every mark of mundane normality.
And may I add... that there are many who would read what I have just written here...and rant that I have done some kind of terrible Leftist inversion and turned Muslims into Jews, when I have done no such thing. I could be talking about homophobia, or about prejudice against black people, or against oriental people.
Hatred knows no home. It does not care if you're Muslim, Jew, Christian, straight, gay, bi-sexual, dark skinned, light skinned, rich or poor.
It comes out of the dark fearful places in every man and woman, of any persuasion, who has never bothered to confront their own cowardice. Never bothered to temper their own disregard for the rights of anyone that does not resemble themselves. An infantile tantrum of total selfishness drawn out and made continuous by the persistence of an adult's mind into a blather of hate, fear, threat and childish credulity.
I just want to say to the haters..."when are you going to grow up?".
And as with the Nazis, so with these people today- they don't just look banal and empty, they are that way. They commit these monstrous crimes not in some sort of monumental Satanic rage, but just as a part of business as usual- just out of an utter lack of empathy for others that is in a way the mother of all evil acts.