Red State Rabble

Fascist is not the sort of word RSR uses lightly. We thought long and hard before using it in the headline of this post. We think explosive terms such as this are used far more often than is warranted -- and many times, quite unfairly. RSR, although deeply concerned about the potential consequences of injecting religious fervor and fundamentalist certitude into politics, has never used it before to refer to anyone in the intelligent design or creationist movements.

We'll let our readers judge whether that term might fairly be applied to William Dembski, an intelligent design activist, fellow of the Discovery Institute, and director of the Center for Science and Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Take a look at this post about the Paris riots on William Dembski's website, and make up your own mind.

For now, here's an excerpt from Dembski's blog, Uncommon Descent that approvingly quotes from this statement, "The Bells of Ys" by Wretchard writing on the The Belmont Club blog (see note below):

Policies which deprecated European culture, frowned on a national identity, lowered the birthrate, created a welfare state, imported ‘guest workers’, promoted mindless multiculturalism and relied on ‘international’ treaties for protection — all articles of Leftist faith — are now facing the judgment of history; and worse, the verdict of Islam. It would be supremely ironical if the European Left, the ‘vanguard of history’, required for its future survival the very things it had set out to destroy.

Compare, for example, the similarities between the anti-immigrant rant Dembski chose to feature on his blog (above) with the xenophobic sentiments expressed by French Neo-fascist Jean Marie Le Pen of the National Front (below):

“Massive immigration has only just begun. It is the biggest problem facing France, Europe and probably the world. We risk being submerged,” he said in 2002. "He would send most immigrants 'home', build 200,000 jail cells to control crime, withdraw France from the European Union and give the country, he claims, back to the 'French,'" according to The Economist.

You can hear the echoes of the ugly post on Dembski's blog in this piece, "Jean-Marie Le Pen, Jörg Haider, and other xenophobes," by Chris Suellentrop writing in Slate, as well:

"Ugly Europeans are adamantly opposed to multicultural, multiethnic societies, and they employ a neat rhetorical trick: framing their racist anti-Muslim sentiment as a defense of the multicultural value of diversity—a way to protect their own national culture, which they see as threatened... They're fiercely opposed to the European Union, which they see as leveling the distinctions among the Continent's distinct nations. And most assail America for its globalizing culture and its multiethnic
society."

RSR readers -- effete leftists that you are -- assumed the riots were a product of poverty and despair among immigrant workers. You may even have thought that racial and ethnic discrimination -- not rampant multiculturalism -- against those workers by the dominant culture played a role.

You poor fools.

You see, the real cause of the riots is the failure of the French to maintain the purity of their national identity. Yes, they let Arabs and Africans come into the country. What were they thinking?

Perhaps Dembski's reasons for objecting to common descent run deeper -- and darker -- than even we suspected.

Is this an aberration? Remember that not long ago, while victims of Katrina were still being plucked from rooftops and people were wandering -- without food, water, or the other necessities of life -- past the uncollected bodies of the dead, Dembski, the Christian, published a post titled, "How to deal with looters," that approvingly reproduced a news clipping from the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco where mayor E.E. Schmitz ordered the police to shoot to kill, on his blog.

BTW: Red State Rabble particularly likes the "verdict of Islam" part -- does this signal that Muslims are, somehow, not included under the big ID tent now?

Note: an early version of this post did not make sufficiently clear that the post cited above while published on Dembski's Uncommon Descent blog was excerpted from a post by Wretchard writing on the The Belmont Club blog. RSR regrets the error.

RSR has received a note from CWP, who believes we owe Dembski a public apology for not being clear about the attribution in our first post. While RSR does regret the error, we stand by our comments.

William Dembski is notorious for deleting comments from his blog that he disagrees with. As of this writing, he has yet to delete these comments from the post in question:

"I’ve lived in some of those [truly “multicultural” regions of the U.S] and many of their Christian residents, especially the caucasian ones, are under the impression that they’re no safer at home than they’d be in Paris right now. They also know that if they become victims of “multiculturalism”, it’s even less likely to hit the papers, since here in the U.S., “bias crimes” are often deemed newsworthy only when the victim is of fashionable ethnicity."

Here's another, late addition:

Islam is a cancer growing on the planet. It needs to be killed not accomodated. It’s an ugly, dysfunctional belief system even in milder forms, that subjugates the female half of the population. However, since we can’t just kill them all (we can kill the worst offenders though)...