soap opera

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Mon Mar 25 11:23:52 PST 2002


[sent to me rather than list]

From: "Daniel Davies" <dsquared at al-islam.com> Subject: Re:lbo-talk-digest V1 #5879 Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2002 01:08:39 -0600

Justin wrote:


>Farrakhan said "Judaisim is a gutter religion."

which, as fans of Jude Wanninski will be aware, he actually didn't. This is one from the Michael Caine "not a lot of people know that" dept, but Farrakhan has never used the phrase "gutter religion" to describe Judaism and has extracted a fair few corrections from newspapers which said he has.

The actual phrase in context is a bit more ambiguous; he was talking about the Palestine situation and said (from memory; this may not be exactly right) "and then they try to justify this with their dirty religion", which fails the smell test as far as I'm concerned, but which does leave him a bit of wriggle room (which he in fact used) to claim that he was not referring to Judaism per se, but rather to a nationalistic perversion of it.

Farrakhan is squarely on the hook for "Hitler was a great man", though, in fairly damning circumstances, and people like Professor Griff have said enough things which were straight up anti-Semitic, so I'm not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. But I think this is an interesting piece of trivia, both for its possibility for winning bets in certain kinds of pub, and for the fact that its taken on an urban legend quality which has survived corrections.

dd

PS: With reference to the four or five current threads devoted to people calling each other fuckers, I'd note that LBO-talk is an altogether better experience once you realise it's meant to be a soap opera.



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