The Big Lie

“Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.” 
― George Carlin

As in so many other things, George Carlin had the best insight. If you proclaim, confidently, something so vast--"Illegal Hispanic immigrants are murderers and rapists" you have shot out of the atmosphere and there is no earthly way to refute what you have said, at least not without resorting to numbers and statistics and explanations of methodology and all those dull, tedious things which make eyes glaze over. It's much more fun to just shout, "U-S-A Number One!"

When you look at your crowd and say "There's something going on with these Muslims! I don't know, but I have to say, we ought to think about this. You know, they're beheading people, shooting people, and when FDR rounded people up and put them into internment camps, well maybe that's something we ought to think about"--you are not citing evidence; you are "just saying."

When you say there were thousand of cheering Muslims on the New Jersey rooftops watching the Twin Towers go down, you don't need evidence if you are telling people what they want to hear.

In "God Is Not Great" Christopher Hitchens marshalls a long list of items which add up to a convincing indictment of the religion of Islam, and make it appear quite vile. Of course, Hitchens has no special animus toward Islam: He compiles  lists for Christianity and Judiasm which are just as horrific.  What he is saying is reilgion, or at least organized religions are by nature perverse, corrupted and harmful.

He does not allow for the possibility that Islam may enrich many lives, provide a sense of meaning and a direction toward virtue. He focuses only on the vile.  Pointing to the idea that sex is depraved outside of marriage for the devout Muslim but eternal sex with virgins in Paradise as a reward for detonating a suicide vest may cause one to question.  That instant marriage licenses for men who wish to have sex with women in a brothel followed by instant divorces tends to taint the idea of the sanctity of marriage is not a difficult argument to win.  That the religious leader of Iran can command murder of an author who has offended Islamic sensibilities, that murder of cartoonists for depicting the Prophet in a derogatory way, that words, disagreement which an Iman finds objectionable should rightly be followed by violence, that disagreement with what one group of Muslim thinkers should not be allowed, that free speech is thought to be an anathema whereas passive obedience is high virtue are all attributes of a "religion" which tend to support Hitchens's view.

On the other hand, as he notes, when Catholic priests forbid the use of condoms even when one spouse has AIDS because this would thwart "God's will," we begin to see he is not inveighing against Muslims so much as against the whole idea of religious authority. Of course, he points to the sexual abuse by priests which was dealt with by transferring troublesome priests to new venues where they could resume their depredations unimpaired. 

Jews have their own problems. Mohels, the men who perform ritual circumcisions will suck the foreskins of the infant boys they are circumcising, a repellent idea, but part of the tradition which, once you get past the image becomes even more of a problem when you learn some of these men had Herpes simplex infections on their lips which quickly resulted in Herpes meningitis in the infants and yet the practice continues to be defended by the religious sect within Judiasm which perpetuates this. 

What Hitchens does not say is this whole story horrifies the vast majority of Jews, just as the overwhelming majority of Catholics is outraged by pedophile priests. 

Can it be that the overwhelming majority of Muslims feel the same way about the things Hitchens depicts about Islam?