While I'm on the topic of the Holocaust again...

Since I've been on the topic of the Holocaust again today in giving a victim of the Hitler Zombie a well and truly deserved taste of not-so-Respectful Insolence, before I get back to medicine and science tomorrow I can't help but note that it's been brought to my attention that a brand, spankin' new Jack Chick tract has made an appearance to darken the Internet for critical thinkers and skeptics everywhere. Heck, Chick's fundamentalist religious craziness is so toxic that rational believers (and even many not-so-rational believers) undergo a wave of neuronal apoptosis any time he appears.

This time around, God is back, and He's pissed! He's so pissed that he's sending a huge hurricane against the Gulf Coast and a bunch of tornadoes elsewhere. Why? Because we're not nice enough to Israel and are "dividing His Land." Of course, it's a bit inconsistent in that apparently the Holocaust occurred because the Jews rejected Jesus as the Son of God:

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If you want an amazingly overwrought example of confusing correlation with causation taken to hypernova levels of stupidity, click on the preview above and read this latest Chick tract. Just be careful. Your brain might explode. I've become inured to Chick tracts to the point where they now cause me extreme amusement (yes, they are a guilty pleasure of mine), but not everyone is as warped (or immune) as I am.

More like this

As an Englishman, I'd like to apologise for my country's pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic stance during World War II. Apparently.

By Der Bruno Stroszek (not verified) on 11 Nov 2008 #permalink

God sure does love killing people.

I'm pretty much immune to head explosions from this sort of nonsense since it's so common here, so I kinda read these for entertainment as well. The guilty feeling I get from reading and giggling at the idiocy is probably the closest I'll ever get to understanding the concept of "sin". ;)

I get the feeling Chick is mighty confused in his feelings for the Jewish people.
"They're Gawd's chosen people! We must not mess with them or we'll anger Gawd! Even if they are dirty j00z that rejected Jesus, only worthy of scorn and being flayed alive for our amusement!"

By JThompson (not verified) on 11 Nov 2008 #permalink

The reason the Chicks of the world have a love-hate relationship with Israel has a clear scripture origin, in the Revelations somewhere. In order to achieve rapture, they need the final battle to take place. And the final battle is supposed to happen between the Israelis and the forces of evil. So while they hate the Jews for what they did to Christ they need the Israelis to beat the hordes of Satan. Which is also why they are so positively inclined to send military goods into that neck of the woods - anything to hasten HIS coming.

The amusing thing about Chick's tract is that Muslims in Bosnia spoke out against the mass murder of Jews even before the Final Solution began. In the NDH, the Ustashi were given power by Hitler in April 1941 and almost immediately massacring Jews and Serbs with a fearsomeness that appalled the even the Nazis.

And almost immediately, Bosnian Muslim leaders spoke out against it. They protested to the Ustashi, to the Nazis, and even demanded Hitler that they given their own state. The Muslims eventually became key contributors in the Partisan movement. A Muslim brigade liberated Sarajevo and several other major Bosnian cities.

Marko Attila Hoare's The History of Bosnia has a good accounting of it.

Damn that UN... hating Israel so much. Wait a second... wasn't one of the first acts of the UN the creation and recognition of the state of Israel?

As for tornados AND hurricanes appearing at the same time, it is actually quite common. Hurricanes supply one of the nesseacary ingredients for tornadogenisis (namly strong vertical wid shear). Tornado have often been observed forming in outer spiral bands of hurricanes... even at great distances from the hurricane centre.

Oh wait... satan must be within me.

That comic has magneto and harry potter in it, but they're supposed to be in separate universes!

Normally, Jack chick is so stupid he's funny, but not this time. I clearly think he's invoked Godwin's law in so many ways in this strip. And when you Godwinize your argument, you're frequently (but not always) not worth listening to anymore.

And where did Chick get the idea that England hated the Jews during WW2? In my universe, the Brits were virulently opposed to the Nazis.

Here are a couple more "they're cutting up live people for parts!" rants, for those who want to see how transplanters are about to get the abortion-provider treatment.

Note that the first may possibly have some merit, in that it's based on an article from NEJM; the second is clearly without error, since it features The Pope.

By Pierce R. Butler (not verified) on 12 Nov 2008 #permalink

Oops - that was s'pozed to go in the following post... mea culpa, to the max!

By Pierce R. Butler (not verified) on 12 Nov 2008 #permalink

There is another Promise that God made that was even earlier, the founding Covenent of the Abrahamic Religions. It happened when Abraham went along with God's command that he sacrifice his only son Isaac, then God Promised that Abraham would have as many descendants as there are stars in the sky and grains of sand on the seashore.

These are both very large numbers, ~10^22 or so. So far there have only been ~10^11 humans. If we assume the carryiing capacity of the Earth is something like 100 billion humans per generation (assume 30 years), it will take at least 10^11 generations or about 3 trillion years and God will have to replace the Sun about 300 times (stars like the Sun only have a lifetime of about 10 billion years on the main sequence).

On a side issue that has raised eyebrows and hackles: The relation between Jews and English people in the 30s and 40s is a complicated and uncomfortable matter, certainly not one to be treated by Jack Chick. But the history can be quite upsetting to good decent Anglophilic Americans, and no more pleasing to good decent English persons, of course.

The brilliant detective writer Dorothy L Sayers, whose novels in the 20s and 30s treated Jewish characters with much more sympathy than bigots including anti-Semites, wrote an essay for inclusion in a book callet The Future of the Jews, which was published in 1944 (edited by J. J. Lynx, available on the used book market). Her piece was accepted, put in galleys, and then suddenly rejected; so the text is not easy to get. When you do, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

Shorter Sayers: We utterly hate what the Germans are doing to the Jews, but the widespread hostility to Jews in England is based on the way they behave, which also has contributed to the exaggerated and demented hatred that Germans and others are showing.

This thesis is accompanied by many examples from everyday wartime life -- of hostility to Jews and the things that supposedly create it. How bad is it? There's a not unfriendly citation of T S Eliot's rather ghastly anti-semitic caricature (Bleistein with a cigar) from the 20s. And a spirited anti-PC defense of singing an old folk song that lovingly describes the murder of a boy (Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln, an imaginary figure, of course) by Jews in their evil ritual.

Trying not to belabor this further -- but I started with a false dichotomy of Jews and English. The falsity was not a generally accepted fact at the time. And, believe it or not, the question whether a Jew could be an Englishman was raised in a couple of serious, sober letters in the Guardian in 2005. One No, one Yes, both authors Jewish.

Messy subject, as I say. Chick is demented, as goes without saying, but here's where his notion that England was hostile to Jews comes from, sort of.

By Porlock Junior (not verified) on 15 Nov 2008 #permalink

Doesn't make you all warm and righteous inside when God smites people and you get to watch from his right-hand side?

The Smitin' God is fun! And entertaining! Better than UFC!
WooHooo! Go God!!! Kick their heathen asses!!!

I'm glad I got in on the Early-Rapture Special so I got a front-row seat!
(It sure cost an arm and a leg in donations to the preacher at my Mega-Church, though!)

Who said Heaven was boring? With all these smitin's going on, it's never a dull moment!

Posted by: yogi-one | November 19, 2008 11:29 PM