Surprise!

The news came out yesterday that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran and holocaust denier, might in fact be of Jewish descent. This should not come as a major shock if it turns out to be true, since some of the most adamant anti-Semites in history have had Jewish heritage, from Louis B. Mayer, the producer of the pro-Klan documentary Birth of a Nation, to Harold von Braunhut, the inventor of sea monkeys and member of white supremacist group Aryan Nations. Even Adolph Hitler may have been a quarter Jewish, as his grandfather was unknown but his grandmother conceived his father while living with an upper-class Jewish family in Austria.

Ryan Gosling starred in a great film about Jewish antisemitism called The Believer, based on the life of an ethnically Jewish neo-Nazi. As we have seen in anti-gay pastors who turn out to be homosexual or segregationist politicians who actually have African-American relatives, The Believer demonstrated that the most common source of vitriolic hate speech is in fact self-hatred. Like homophobia among gays, Jewish anti-Semitism comes from a desperate desire to assimilate in a culture that distrusts and discriminates those who are different.

Links:
1.Ahmadinejad's Jewish Past on the Telegraph.co.uk
2. Jewish anti-Semitism on the SPLC Intelligence Report website

PS: While I'm at it, here's a BBC report on how Ahmadinejad may have been one of the terrorists who took Americans hostage in the 1979 capture of the US Embassy in Tehran.

This American Life

I've been listening to a lot of This American Life lately, ever since I watched the first season of the HBO TV show. For those who don't know, This American Life is a documentary show on public radio about- what else?- life in America. They have a lot of famous left-wing authors and journalists doing segments for them, from Sarah Vowell to Chuck Klosterman, and they're generally pretty good. However, my favorite segments are the ones where the liberal employees of public radio try to make sense of, and often end up empathizing with, right-wing Christian America. Here are two of the best shows, available for free at NPR.com:

My personal favorite show, called "Pray," first aired in the late 90s but is still relevant today. It explores how Christians and non-Christians speak in different dialects and often live in radically different worlds. Also, it features the always entertaining Pastor Ted Haggard, notorious for preaching a clean Christian life by day and sleeping with a male prostitute while smoking meth by night.

I have a soft spot for ol' Teddy H, as would anybody who watched him deal with his world collapse under him in Alexandra Pelosi's documentary The Trials of Ted Haggard. His 2006 confession to his congregation included some of the truly Christian statements I have ever heard from an evangelical pastor. For example: "Please forgive my accuser...actually, thank God for him. I am trusting that his actions will make me, my wife and family, and ultimately all of you, stronger. He didn’t violate you; I did."

The second and more recent show that I feel is worth sharing, "Heretics," details the life of a Pentecostal preacher who abandoned his belief in Hell and the idea that only Christians are going to be saved. Far from abandoning these ideas just to gain popularity, Rev. Carlton Pearson actually saw himself cut off from the evangelical community and his followers ostracized by their communities. He claims that his decision was based in a combination of deep, scholarly study of the Bible and divine revelation about the true nature of a loving God.