Judaism in the Year of Darwin (a MUST read!)

BN via Discovery Institute ^ | April 5, 2009 | David Klinghoffer

[GodGunsGuts]

Judaism in the Year of Darwin

David Klinghoffer BeliefNet April 5, 2009

Link to Original Article

Welcome to the year of Charles Darwin. In coming months, the secular world will be celebrating two anniversaries relating to the originator of evolutionary theory. February 12 marks what would have been his 200th birthday and November 24, the 150th year since the publication of his book On the Origin of Species.

The cultural and political battle over evolution in the United States will intensify. Yet I believe many Orthodox Jews feel that it somehow isn't "our fight." Darwin argued that a purposeless, unguided process--natural selection operating on random genetic variation--explains the whole history of life's development. But frum Jews have no doubt that life was purposefully designed by our Creator.

Though I'm a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, the think tank best known for advancing intelligent-design theory, I can appreciate this response. However, permit me to argue that the Darwin wars are very much our fight, as Jews, or should be.

Begin with the fact that Hitlerism was no less than an exercise in applied Darwinism. To whip up his fellow citizens in the service of a race war against the Jews, Hitler relied on the language of Darwinian biology.

In the coming year's celebrations, you can bet that the nastier parts of Darwin's writing will be safely ignored. As a young man, during his adventures as a naturalist aboard the Beagle exploring the coasts of South America, Darwin had his eyes opened to the good points associated, as he came to see it, with genocide.

In 1833 he made the acquaintance of General Juan Manual de Rosas, who was busy liquidating the Indian population of southern Argentina. "This war of extermination," Darwin wrote in a cheerful letter home, "although carried on with the most shocking barbarity, will certainly produce great benefits; it will at once throw open four or 500 miles in length of fine country for the produce of cattle." The "extermination" (a favorite word of Darwin in his writings) of failed races, whether animal or human, is a great theme in his books and a key feature in the advance of the evolutionary process as he conceived it.

In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin prophesied: "At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races."

Evolutionary theory was embraced and championed in Germany faster even than in England, Darwin's native country. Hitler felt its influence, as the important biographers of him agree. In Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Alan Bullock writes: "The basis of Hitler's political beliefs was a crude Darwinism." Joachim C. Fest, in Hitler, describes how the Nazi tyrant "extract[ed] the elements of his world view" from various influences including "popular treatments of Darwinism."

The key chapter in Mein Kampf is Chapter 9, "Nation and Race," where he discusses the obligation to defend the Aryan race from the Jewish menace. His argument is couched from the start in Darwinian terms. He writes: "In the struggle for daily bread all those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of the males for the female grants the right of opportunity to propagate only to the healthiest. And struggle is always a mean for improving a species' health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of higher development." He praises "the iron logic of Nature" with its "right to victory of the best and stronger in this world."

But what if the strong (Aryans) choose not to dominate and exterminate the weak (Jews)? "Eternal Nature," he writes, "inexorably avenges the infringement of her commands." He means those iron laws of Nature, Darwin's laws.

Hitler calculated that an appeal to the Germans against the Jews would be most likely to succeed if framed in scientific-sounding evolutionary terms. Mein Kampf was hugely popular and influential, selling six million copies by 1940.

Nazi propaganda hardly sought to hide the Darwin connection. In a 1937 German propaganda film, Victims of the Past, the audience is shown a retarded person as the narrator intones, "In the last few decades, mankind has sinned terribly against the law of natural selection. We haven't just maintained life unworthy of life, we have even allowed it to multiply." Between 1939 and 1941, German physicians empowered by the state under the Action T4 plan murdered 70,273 children and adults who had been observed to suffer from debilitating mental or physical conditions.

It should not have been surprising that Hitler under Darwin's influence would follow up by seeking to destroy the Jews. Not because Darwin was an anti-Semite (he wasn't), but because his worldview is all about explaining life and its mysteries in purely natural, material terms, leaving no room for God. In Mein Kampf, when his use of Darwinist rhetoric is most pronounced, Hitler decries the Jews for their "effrontery": "Millions thoughtlessly parrot this Jewish nonsense and end up by really imagining that they themselves represent a kind of conqueror of Nature." In Darwinism, Nature sweeps all before her.

Judaism says just the opposite. Torah is marked by the call to defy Nature, to do the hard work of bending our personal natures to God's will. It is almost as if Hitler, following the logic of Darwinism, sensed that Torah and thus the Jews who uphold it must be his ultimate, eternal foes.

Today, the skinhead and Neo-Nazi subculture is full of Darwinian chatter. Whether on aggressively Hitlerian web sites like Stormfront.com or in the writings of the racist and anti-Semitic Louisiana politician David Duke, discussions of evolution as a proof of white supremacy are common.

Darwinian science has otherwise mostly lost its anti-Semitic edge, but its leading contemporary spokesman, Oxford University biologist Richard Dawkins, can't be matched for his hatred of the God of Israel and for his attack on the intelligent design of life. His latest bestselling book, The God Delusion, rails blasphemously at the Creator that he denies.

But it's not our fight, as Torah-believing Jews? Historically our rabbis have certainly indicated that it is. Long before Charles Darwin was born in 1809, similar debates were being fought in Europe over scientific challenges to the belief that God created and designed the world. In medieval Spain, the science of the day was carried on by Aristotelian philosophers who denied that the universe had a beginning. So there could be no Creator in any sense recognizable to a Torah Jew.

Rabbi Yehudah HaLevi, among other Jewish philosophers, knew it was necessary to directly address the challenge of this scientific doctrine. In the story he tells in the Kuzari, the religiously searching Khazar king stages a debate between a rabbi and an Aristotelian scientist-philosopher. (A Christian and a Muslim also participate briefly.) The philosopher denies that God intentionally created the world but instead argues that a series of natural causes explains the existence of everything. That is Darwinism in a nutshell. Yehudah HaLevi saw it as totally normal and desirable that a rabbi should engage in an extended and very well informed disputation over such issues.

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch lived to see Darwin's influence spread rapidly across Europe after the Origin of Species appeared in 1859. In his Torah commentary, Rav Hirsch was scathing on the morally disastrous effects of Darwinian thought. Ideas, he knew, have consequences for the way we all live. Commenting on the idol Baal Peor, worshipped in the most grotesquely animalistic fashion, Hirsch wrote that it illustrates precisely "the kind of Darwinism that revels in the conception of man sinking to the level of beast and stripping itself of its divine nobility, learning to consider itself just a 'higher' class of animal" (Numbers 25:3).

Western culture has since become widely convinced that human beings, just like animals, lack moral choice and responsibility. Applied Darwinism results in the widespread, easily observable failure to distinguish between people and animals, a moral disease we may call animalism.

Both the elite and mass media are rife with it. So the rights of animals become a sacred cause, justifying even violence in their defense, while ascribing a unique dignity or worth to men and women is increasingly suspect. If human beings lack such a dignity unique to them and transcending whatever condition their body may be in at a given moment--fetus, child, or adult, sick or well, conscious or "vegetative"--then extinguishing a human life when it seems convenient to us becomes very easy to justify.

The social consequences range from animal-liberation terrorism to modern eugenics, right-to-die initiatives, euthanasia, abortion and more. In the state where I live, Washington, voters just this past November overwhelmingly approved an assisted-suicide law, the second in the nation (after Oregon). It permits doctors to help patients identified as "terminally ill" to take their own lives.

And this is not our fight? The Darwin-Hitler connection would be enough reason to acknowledge the evolution debate as one in which religious Jews have a profound stake. The moral and hashkafic aspects of the fight make it, without any doubt at all, ours, perhaps more than it is anyone else's.

[GodGunsGuts]

Question #2 from your ignorant quiz: In 1972, 11 Israeli athletes were killed at the Munich Olympics by: (a) Your grandmother (b) A Midwest auto-parts dealer (c) A mom and her 6-year-old son visiting from Indiana (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

My answer:

“Probably the second largest organization and certainly the key to the story of the Black September hijackings was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Unlike Fatah, it was highly ideological, calling not only for the liberation of Palestine but also for the creation of a Marxist-Leninist Arab society. Formed in January 1968 by 41-year-old Dr. George Habash and his second in command, 43-year-old Dr. Wadia Haddad, the PFLP was fiercely independent although it did receive extensive funding from Iraq and had close ties with Red China. The group was militant and radical. “If [it] is the only way to destroy Israel, Zionism, and Arab reaction,” Habash asserted in a 1970 interview, “then we want World War III to come.” In another he warned, “America is our enemy,” and the PFLP was about to “teach the United States a lesson.”

http://www.meforum.org/1768/terror-in-black-september-an-eyewitness-account

[tpanther]

Some will repeat the same debunked tripe over and over but rarely do you find someone who will regurgitate ALL of it, on pretty much a daily basis.

It reminds me of Matt Damon talking about Sarah Palin being qualified for VP based solely on if she believes men and dinosaurs co-existed (oblivious to the fact that zero and biden couldn’t tie a shoe together).

Is it a cult?

A mental illness?

Both?

I’m watching the news last night and a black lady with an Obama ‘08 baseball cap is going on and on about being worried about her Lockheed Martin job here in Marietta!

I see another black lady with an Obama sticker on one end of her bumper with “pro-life” on the other!

I’ve heard many times that liberalism is a disease, now I wonder if there’s actually something to it.

A viral brain-eating disease?

[GodGunsGuts]

Question #3 from you ignorant quiz: In 1979, the U.S. embassy in Iran was taken over by: (a) A bluegrass band (b) Dallas Cowboy fans (c) A tour group of 80-year-old women (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

“Among the closest associates of Khomeini, there were many Communists who had conveniently grown beards. Mustafa Ali Chamran had studied in California and Egypt before he founded a Red Shi’ite secret society. His pupils included later foreign minister Ibrahim Yazdi, oil minister Mohammed Gharazi, and a Lebanese fellow student in Berkeley University, Hussein Shaikh al-Islam, who led the occupation of the US Embassy in Tehran. This occupation, shortly before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, focused Iranian radicalism into anti-Americanism. (Taheri, p. 78 and 139-140) Mohammed Beheshti, whose death at a bombing on June 28th, 1981, remained a mystery, had resided in East Germany. Khomeini’s early companion and foreign minister, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, was a link to Syria. Most left-wing radicals were repressed only after summer 1981, by which time many former Communists had successfully accommodated with the new regime. Both Ghotbzadeh and Chamran had received Palestinian terrorist training. As a student in the USA, Ghotbzadeh had been recruited by the GRU. (Livingston & Halevy, p. 153-154; Kuzichkin, p. 302)”

http://users.jyu.fi/~aphamala/pe/issue5/roots.htm

[GodGunsGuts]

Question #5 from your ignorant quiz: In 1985 the cruise ship Achille Lauro was hijacked, and a 70-year-old disabled American passenger was murdered and thrown overboard by: (a) A girls’ choir (b) A hardware store owner (c) A secretary (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

My answer:

This was carried out by the Palestine Liberation Front

Description: Under a five-pointed red star, from left to right, is a green map of Israel and the territories, an AK-47 rifle and a crescent. At bottom, in a semi-circle, are the words "Palestinian Liberation Front."

Explanation: The star symbolizes the group's Marxist-Leninist beginnings. The green map of Israel denotes the aim of eliminating what the group believes to be wrongful rule of Israel. The rifle symbolizes and affirms a commitment to armed struggle. The combination of red, green and black echoes the Palestinian flag and evokes Palestinian nationalism.

http://www.adl.org/terrorism/symbols/palestinian_liberation_front.asp

[GodGunsGuts]

I could go on and on. Bottom line: you are even more ignorant on this subject than you are on the Creation/Evo debate.

[the invisib1e hand]

Therefore Darwinism has to be evil.

Just ignorant of first principles. That alone, with enough energy behind it, will lead to some grotesquely inhuman consequences.

[GodGunsGuts]

I think I will go on and on...

Question #6 from your ignorant quiz: In 1983, the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut was blown up by: (a) A pizza delivery boy (b) The UPS guy (c) Geraldo Rivera making up for a slow news day (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

My answer:

The organization Islamic Jihad took responsibility for the bombing, but that organization is thought to have been a nom de guerre for Hezbollah —- or a group that would later become part of Hezbollah[1] —- receiving help from the Islamic Republic of Iran.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Beirut_barracks_bombing

The terrorist group Hezballah, and its official sponsor, the government of Iran, provide a case in point.

Because of media distortion, the Ayatollah Khomeini was seen in the West as a fanatic religious leader. But the Iraqi family of the Grand Ayatollah Muhsen Hakim-Tabataba’i, which in the 1960s and 1970s exercised leadership over the Shi’ite movement of Islam, opposed Khomeini so thoroughly that they worked closely with the Shah of Iran. Saddam Hussein, the Soviet-backed dictator of Iraq, murdered the family at his first opportunity, thereby eliminating Shi’ite opposition to Khomeini.5

Khomeini’s revolutionary movement was known as “Islamic Marxism,” a movement begun from within the Russian Bolshevik Party in 1916.6 During the 1970s, the Soviet Union mobilized its resources to organize a revolution in Iran, with Khomeini as its official leader. Khomeini’s brother was serving time in prison as a member of the Tudeh Party — the Communist Party of Iran; Khomeini’s intimate advisor, Sadegh Ghothzadeh, was an affiliate of the French and Italian Communist Parties. Soon the Soviets were broadcasting pro-Khomeini propaganda into Iran, while they began publishing a well-funded revolutionary magazine entitled Navid, meaning “Good News.” KGB agents working among the 4,000 Soviet personnel in Iran coordinated the protests and riots, and the Tudeh Party, acting on Soviet orders, openly backed the “Islamic” revolution and created a broad coalition of the Left to support Khomeini.7

Moscow also mobilized the PLO to back Khomeini. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, led by self-proclaimed Marxist Leninist George Habash, supplied training and weapons to the Feda’iyin-e Khalq, the Iranian Islamic-Marxist terrorist group that began the revolution to overthrow the Shah. Meanwhile, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah organization trained and armed the Mujahedin-e Khalq, another main pillar of Khomeini’s revolution, and it trained future members of the Revolutionary Guards of Iran, including the Minister of the Guards later appointed by Khomeini.8

Once Khomeini seized power in Iran, Arafat brought a large delegation of PLO officials into the country, where “he was formally given the Israeli consulate building and, raising the Palestinian flag over it, opened the first PLO office, also appointing a PLO ‘ambassador’ to Iran.”9 The Soviet Union and Communist China have since continued to arm Iran with weapons.

Khomeini immediately created Hezballah as an international terrorist wing of the PLO-trained Revolutionary Guards. Inside Iran, Hezballah worked closely with Iranian Communist organizations in consolidating the regime’s power. The terrorist training camps in Iran have been supervised by Mostafa Chamran Savehi, a follower of Trotskyite Communism who, as a student in Berkeley, California during the 1960s, founded such Islamic-Marxist groups as Red Shi’ism and the Muslim Students’ Association of America. The instructors at the Iranian terrorist camps have been Communist experts from North Korea and Syria, as well as Iranians trained by the PLO and the Communist government of Iraq.10

The organizer of Hezballah in Pakistan and Lebanon, Abbas Zamani, was also trained by the PLO and has been identified as a probable agent of the KGB.11

http://www.attacreport.com/ar_archives/art_iswr2_muslim.htm

[GodGunsGuts]

Another question from your ignorant quiz: During the 1980’s numerous Americans were kidnapped in Lebanon by: (a) A family on their way to Disney World (b) Jesse Ventura (c) A Boy Scout Troop (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

My answer:

These were carried out by Hezballah. See last reply.

[GodGunsGuts]

Another question from your ignorant quiz: In 1985 TWA flight 847 was hijacked at Athens, and a U.S. Navy diver was murdered by: (a) A Marine officer with two weeks leave (b) A plumber going to visit his mom (c) A Catholic nun (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

My answer:

This was carried out by Hezballah. See above.

[GodGunsGuts]

Another question from you ignorant quiz: In 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was bombed by: (a) A college-bound freshman (b) A cardiac surgeon on his way to Houston (c) A waitress (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.

My answer:

In 2003, Libya accepted responsibility for the attacks and agreed to pay victims’ families compensation.

http://terrorism.about.com/od/originshistory/p/PanAmBombing.htm

“I would like the people to vanquish the government, the armies, the police, the parties, and the parliaments,” he said in explanation of his notion of direct democracy in which people rule themselves without the mediation of traditional governmental institutions. “I am the prophet of the revolution and not the prophet of Allah,” Qadhafi declared in the same interview, “for what interests me in this century is that The Green Book become the bible of the modern world.”

The secular basis of Qadhafi’s philosophy was emphasized further by the Libyan adoption of the Baath Party slogan of unity, freedom, and socialism.

http://www.country-studies.com/libya/political-ideology.html

Griffin: As the Soviet connection with international terrorism became increasingly obvious, the KGB made a tactical decision to establish training centers in countries that, generally, are not regarded as Communist. In this way, the Soviets could disclaim responsibility.

An example is Libya, under the dictatorship of Muammar Quadafi. Quadafi’s army and air force are almost entirely supplied by the Soviet Union.

Altogether, there are 5,000 military personnel from the Eastern Communist Bloc and from Cuba.[6] Libya received $2.5 billion worth of arms from the Soviets between 1974 and 1981, an amount far in excess of its own internal needs. Most of these arms have moved through Libya and into the terrorist network.

The Provisional IRA in Ireland has been receiving weapons from Libya at the race of over $5 million per year. They received their first Russian helicopter and rocket launchers as early as 1972.

Quadafi has maintained three separate training camps which are staffed by personnel from the Soviet Union and East Germany. He has provided instructions, money, or weapons to practically every terrorist group in the world. He has been one of the primary financial sponsors of the PLO, and he openly has called for the death of any Arab leader who is friendly to the United States.

http://www.realityzone.com/noplacetohide1.html

As chief of Romanian foreign intelligence, I worked closely with Libya’s Muammar Khaddafi before I became, in 1978, the highest-ranking spy from the Soviet bloc to defect to America. I was Khaddafi’s handler as he was gearing up these same weapons programs. Moscow had decided in 1972 to use three leftist Arab governments — Libya, Iraq, and Syria — plus Arafat’s PLO, to wreak terror against our prime enemy, “American imperial-Zionism.” Yuri Andropov, then head of the KGB and soon to be the Soviet leader, assigned Libya to Romania because we already had close intelligence connections with Khaddafi, who, along with Kim Il Sung, had long been eager for chemical weapons, and to acquire Romanian technology for “dirty” suitcase-sized radioactive bombs. Moscow kept charge of Iraq for itself. Andropov told me then that Syria would be next, if our Libyan experiment proved successful; President Hafez Assad’s brother was already our well-paid agent.

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/pacepa200312290001.asp

[GodGunsGuts]

I know you guys are more expert than I on this subject. I was just wondering if you have anything to add to the above replies? Allmendream, atlaw, and a few others seem to think that Christian creationism is = to Islamist terror, and that revolutionary materialism has nothing to do with modern Islamist terror. Any comments???

[GodGunsGuts]

FYI: Allmendream, atlaw and a few other Evos like to equate Christian Creation with Muslim terror, while at the same time trying to absolve the revolutionary materialist roots of the same. If you are sick and tired of this obvious canard, I thought you might be interested in some of the above links I dug up that demonstrate clear links between Islamist terrorism and revolutionary materialism.

[GodGunsGuts]

Thought you guys might be interested in the above series of replies as well. All the best—GGG

[dennisw]

Thanks I read it. I like Dawkins and Darwin in measured doses. Dawkins is so funny he said there might have been divine intervention in the form of space aliens stirring up the DNA pool. While Chris Hitchens concedes the deist God might exist

[GodGunsGuts]

I wasn’t referring to the OP...although it is quite excellent...I was referring to the series of replies directly above. All the best—GGG

[GodGunsGuts]

i.e. that Christian creationists, who count as some of the greatest friends of Israel on the planet, are somehow linked to Islamist terror (an obvious canard!)...whereas, revolutionary materialism is defended by the above Evos as having nothing to do with modern Islamist terror, when in reality they are intimately linked to the explosion of the same!

[dennisw]

Some of your comments are very good... About Muslim socialists going religious ever since Khomeini. Even Arafat did this. This is a very real and analogous to a dog going back to its own shite

Muslim socialism was at its peak when Nasser ran Egypt and Saddam Hussein was a young Baathist assassin

[MrB]

What I noticed was that “atlaw” insisted that my assertion about the evolutionary influence on law being the root of anti-constitutionalist judicial activism was absurd,

but then completely ignored my backup material 2 posts later that detailed how law was considered before Darwin and after.

Maybe he has “ping vision”.

[GodGunsGuts]

The Nazis...yet another revolutionary, environmentalist, materialist monstrosity!

[editor-surveyor]

Bizzare only to those lacking the understanding of the issue.