Get Off My Toe, Chris

The secular fundamentalists have a new charge:

religious morality is antithetical to true morality.

Indeed, according to Christopher Hitchens:

How Orwell.

Frankly, we never thought we'd find anything that ranks with Freud's Moses and Monotheism for pairing an accomplished mind with an embarrassing display of ignorance. But this little flatulence from Hitchens about the events in Alabama knocked us, well.. flat.

A little background for anyone who, like Hitchens, stands a better chance of reciting the names of the seven dwarfs than remembering the Ten Commandments. Millions of Americans seek Sanctity above all else. Millions more, turned off by the excesses of liberalism, are starting to get curious. Define sanctity? A relationship with the indwelling presence of God. That's right. That's what they want. Not big cars or fancy clothes, nor grand titles (as is common in Britian) or giant wads of capital (as is also common there), but Sanctity. Not quite your stereotype of Cadillacs, gold spurs and ten-gallon hats, eh Chris? For traditional Jews, of course, this relationship is definitive; and the fact that the Infinite in His loving generosity chose to dwell amidst us is embodied in the two inscribed tablets that were given to Moses at Mount Sinai. That this ancient, distant and distinctly Hebraic event outstripped the French Revolution in its impact upon our founders surely falls under the category only in America, and as any Brit that ever paid to get on a subway can tell you, most of us still "trust" in Him. Lucky too for Mr. Hitchens. His England still shelters the remains of the trusting boys we sent there to save his bottom.

Would that the stink of the Hitchens piece was limited to his facile and uninformed deconstruction of the individual commandments. Echoing Voltaire and the Palestinian propagandist Edward Said, the unabashedly racist essayist sets off by characterizing American Protestants as a "primitive sect" and Judaism as a "vague pre-Christian desert morality." Looks like Hitchens has taken note of the buzz around Diana Mosley, the once forgotten and recently deceased British muse of Adolph Hitler. In what must be a page out of an early draft of "The Producers", Mosley is suddenly the rage in London now that anti-Semitism is fashionable again. As to the question of who, exactly. the primitive is, we'll let the President speak for himself. But in as much as we're proud members of the inspiring little group of desert dwellers and thus all too familiar with the shamefully inadequate responses marshalled in response to previous European attacks on the Torah, we'd like to share these fine words from a Muslim-American who successfully confronted racism:

Home . Posted by Editor at August 28, 2003 02:57 PM . DFME's new internet address is www.dfme.org

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