Religion Dispatches
…nkers” controlling the economy, theories with anti-Semitic roots (replace “international” with “Jewish” — although the film doesn’t describe any of its villains as being Jewish). At one point the film flashes a scare quote attributed to Mayer Amschel Rothschild, “Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes the laws”— oft recycled on right-wing conspiracy websites, even though there’s no proof that Rothschild ever said it. Simple G…
Read More…o Uganda by American conservatives.” “Kato’s murder is a heavy blow to the international human rights community,” said Rev. Kapya Kaoma, the director of PRA’s Project on Religion and Sexuality. “Those U.S conservatives who have lit the brushfire of homophobia in Africa have to bear some responsibility for this tragic death and for the conflagration that now threatens to consume all gay Ugandans.” Those U.S. evangelicals include Scott Lively, the f…
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…e fall of 1979, Sister Hysterectoria and Reverend Mother went to the first International Faerie gathering and encountered even more men with the calling. Named the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in 1980, the group is much more than the gender-bending, clone-challenging threesome of its origin both in numbers and in intent. As many living in San Francisco know (or in the various locations around the globe to which the order has spread), the Sister…
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…is revival. But after the war that followed so tragically and so soon, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) needed to detach the flame from its historical origins if they wanted to maintain it as a potent symbol of peace. And it remains such a symbol today, which is precisely why it became a focus of social protest. But a symbol of what? Tellingly, Coubertin could never say with clarity, whereas he was wonderfully eloquent about most other as…
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…ches—such as his variation on a classical conspiracy theory alleging that “international financial power brokers based in Europe” seek to control the world. That class of conspiricism derives from the Protocols of The Elders of Zion and also from Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic tract, deeply influential in Germany in the years preceding the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich, “The International Jew”—a document that, by one account, was for a period placed in…
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…closed down if he remained at the helm. Responses in the English-language international press to this American media event were quite predictable. The Jerusalem Post titled its article “Gandhi Resigns after Blasting Jews,” while the Tehran Times offered the headline “Gandhi Grandson Falls Victim to Zionist Lobby.” The press response in India, where each of the five Gandhi grandsons is a public figure, was more varied and complex. The Telegraph of…
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…tment droppedprecipitously at the beginning of the intifada and increasing numbers of young Israeli professionals have already begun leaving for the calmer pastures of Europe or Silicon Valley. In many ways, Avishai’s vision is something like Thomas Friedman’s in his work The Lexus and the Olive Tree. The biggest difference is that, where Friedman sees the changing marketplace as a global dynamic that needs to be shaped to bring balance between mo…
Read More…as Republicans. Non-Christians overwhelmingly voted Obama/Biden—62% to 36%—numbers that surpassed the group’s 20-point margin for John Kerry in 2004 and the 15-point margin for Al Gore in 2000. Other findings: • Protestant voters, evenly divided between being registered as Democrats and Republicans, sided with Sen. McCain by a 53% to 46% margin, which was just half the margin accorded to George W. Bush in 2004 (57% to 42%), but within range of the…
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…new distortion of Christianity and its deleterious impact on national and international health policy. I wanted to make sense of how the religious right had succeeded in redirecting the national terms of conversation about sex: spouting ugly homophobia, reshaming women’s sexuality in particular, increasingly going after contraception and not just abortion, insisting that sex before marriage would have horrible consequences (even though 95 percent…
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…ed the West Bank village of Jenin during the second intifada, at first the international media alleged that hundreds of innocent Palestinians had been massacred, and that bulldozers had crushed houses and destroyed property for no discernible reason. Later, a UN report demonstrated that there had been no “massacre” and that most of the Palestinian casualties were armed combatants. One could almost hear the sounds of Israel’s friends around the wor…
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