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"Tradition?? The only good traditions are food traditions. The rest are repressive."

"There are two ways to think. The first is to trust to your ancestors, your religious leaders, or your charismatic professors. The second is to question, to challenge, to explore history for meanings, and to analyze issues. This latter is called Critical Thinking, and it is this that is the mission of my web site. "

Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman  

July 2012

Facts Have Nothing to Do With Righteous Belief!


Our society is in the throes of irrational movements on both ends of the political spectrum. The far right attack science and the far left deny the dangers of Militant Islam. Lewis Carroll made fun of this sort of mindset in Alice In Wonderland:

“Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said 'one can't believe impossible things.'

'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'”

I hear regularly from my friends on the right that global warming is a Commie plot to destroy our economy, despite the obvious scientific verification of continuing rising temperatures. Rather than making a reasonable argument that while global warming is real, some of the overwrought plans to reverse it are nuts, these deniers trash the very science that has given us our modern world.

The denial continues when the religious right trashes the theory of evolution because it contradicts Biblical accounts. And to make things even worse, there are still believers that our biracial president is not a "real American," denying the authenticity of his Hawaiian birth certificate, despite all evidence to the contrary.

My friends on the far left mock deniers on the right as idiots for holding such irrational beliefs. Yet they too are in the grip of denial of another sort: denying that our country and Europe are under assault by a neo-fascist Muslim cabal (Muslim Brotherhood) with a clear program of terrorism and its legal arm bringing law suits against “Islamophobia” (anybody who criticizes Islam or Islamists).

The fear of being called an Islamophobe has intimidated both the Bush and Obama governments into avoiding any mention of Islamist terror, calling it only “terror.” A number of respected news sources are likewise intimidated. The British arrested several terror groups in London early in July, but as yet these attempted terrorists have not been named in the press. Is this a politically correct attempt to hide that they are British Muslims? This is not journalism.

When Congressman Peter King holds hearings about terror threats with such brave witnesses as Zudhi Jasser, a Muslim opponent of Islamists, both are attacked by far-left deniers as Islamophobes. But it doesn't help when Michelle Bachman spews out hate speech about Muslims in the Obama government. She undoes all the good of Peter King's hearings.

The FBI is now investigating 100 dangerous Islamists in our military, but it took the horror of one terrorist (Captain Nidal Hasan) who murdered 13 of his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, to take this threat seriously. No one wanted to touch Hasan before his rampage for fear of being considered an Islamophobe.

In France, there are 751 “no-go zones” where French police do not go. They range from two zones in medieval Carcassone to twelve in Marseilles, with almost every town in France having such Muslim neighborhoods ruled under violent Sharia law. These zones are the result of decades of irrational multicultural policies that have encouraged Muslim immigrants to create parallel societies and remain segregated from European society. Sweden has this problem, as do Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the UK. What were their governments thinking?

And where is the critical thinking of the Presbyterian Church, which has just lost by a single vote a boycott against cucumber farmers who sell to Israel to make kosher dills? Their reasoning: “The consumption of these pickles by members of Mossad, the Israeli Military, and their sale by Israeli merchants …directly supports the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians.” Pickles?

Why are they never indignant over the suicide bombers and honor killings committed by their “Palestinian brothers?” Their position gives them a free shot at anti-Semitism, a bias that has new life among people pretending to be human rights believers. In a world full of tyranny and injustice, it is a stretch to get indignant over Israelis. To do so, these Presbyterians must be believing “six impossible things before breakfast.”

673 words

Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman is a historian, lecturer, and author of How Do You Know That? You may contact her at Lfarhat102@aol.com or www.globalthink.net.

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