Kennedy responds to ADL

Abe Foxman National Director of the Anti Defamation League (a group quickly gaining ground on the NAACP as more of a laughing stock than serious) is quoted on the ADL site as saying, among other things...

"It must be remembered that D. James Kennedy is a leader among the distinct group of 'Christian Supremacists' who seek to "reclaim America for Christ" and turn the U.S. into a Christian nation guided by their strange notions of biblical law."

The height of irony is when Foxman, who accused Kennedy of being a "Supremacist" (thus ignoring what real Supremacists are and do) also said...

"This is an outrageous and shoddy attempt by D. James Kennedy to trivialize the horrors of the Holocaust. Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people. Trivializing the Holocaust comes from either ignorance at best or, at worst, a mendacious attempt to score political points in the culture war on the backs of six million Jewish victims and others who died at the hands of the Nazis."

The ADL, as most organization taken over by Liberals, function primarily to espouse Liberalism, and will occasionally do what they were formed to do as long as it doesn't interfere with their leftist agenda. Evolution (as Ann Coulter thoroughly explains in her latest book) is the religion of Liberalism, and therefore the frothing animosity from the ADL. In Germany Hitler's attack on the Jews began by accusing them of things they didn't do, but which had been the urban myths of the time. Foxman uses the same tactic. It seems he's the one who's trivializing Hitler's evil, by copying his tactics.

Kennedy responded to the ADL with...

“Among German historians, there’s really not much debate about whether or not Hitler was a social Darwinist,” according to historian Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler and a featured guest on the Coral Ridge Ministries television special. “He clearly was drawing on Darwinian ideas,” said Weikart.

British evolutionist Sir Arthur Keith wrote in the 1940s: “The German Führer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist. He has consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution.”

Even leading evolutionist Niles Eldredge freely admits the link between Darwin and Hitler. Eldredge, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, has written that “social Darwinism,” which he regards as an illegitimate offspring of Darwin’s theory, “has given us the eugenics movement and some of its darker outgrowths, such as the genocidal practices of the Nazis in World War II—where eugenics was invoked as a scientific rationale to go along with whatever other ‘reasons’ Hitler and his fellow Nazis had for the Holocaust.”

But evolution was not incidental to Hitler’s thought. It was a “central aspect of his worldview,” according to Weikart, a leading scholar on the Darwin-Hitler nexus. “It drove pretty much everything that he did. It was not just a peripheral part of his ideology.”

The argument for evolution’s impact on Hitler is strengthened by the fact that Darwinian thought heavily influenced Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hitler was hardly alone in his racist ideas fueled by Darwin and his intellectual progeny, who include Ernst Haeckel and Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics which was a critical component of the Nazi killing machine. Hitler, according to Weikart, “was drawing on what many other scholars, biologists, and geneticists in Germany were preaching and teaching in the early twentieth century.”

As for Collins' response. Initially it was to simply acknowledge that he wasn't aware that his interview would be used in the documentary. But the response to his participation was vitriolic to say the least. Under such circumstances, especially faced with the apparent maniacal outrage the leftists at the ADL are displaying, the response they quote is questionable. So far I haven't heard him give his opinion in a neutral settings. It's only been at the behest of rabid, Evolutionist zealots who act as if his inclusion in the documentary is the equivalent to wearing a white pointy hood and sheets. Yet so far ,neither he, nor the film's critics have actually seen the film, so they cannot judge what his inclusion implies about his own thought regarding the film's ultimate premise.

Posted by Danny Carlton at August 23, 2006 12:15 PM