It was from an obsessive Darwin-defender that I learned of the Anti-Defamation League's attack on the theatrical documentary Expelled, for "misappropriat[ing] the Holocaust." This guy is constantly emailing me. He warned that the ADL had just "issued a terse press release today condemning the equation of ‘Darwinism' with Nazism in Expelled. How can you call yourself a religious Jew and still believe in such Fundamentalist Protestant Christian nonsense like Intelligent Design?"

I thanked my email correspondent for a good laugh. The idea that, having defended Expelled's thesis concerning Hitler's intellectual debt to Charles Darwin, I would now feel chastised and repentant because of a statement from the ADL, an organization for which I have not a feather's weight of respect! This was rich stuff.

Just to be clear, however: Expelled doesn't equate Darwinism and Hitler. That basic point was also missed by Professor Sahotra Sarkar, who published a confused attack piece on me here on Jewcy. Sarkar attributed to me the view, "If you believe in the theory of evolution, you are an anti-Semite" -- something that, obviously, I would have to be a fool to write or believe.

Dealing primarily with the academic suppression of Darwin-doubting scientists on campuses around the country, Expelled only spends about 10 minutes on the Hitler-Darwin connection. But it draws upon a solid, mainstream body of scholarship by the chief Hitler biographers and others.

Undeterred, the ADL wailed that "Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler's genocidal madness."

Much the same view has been propounded elsewhere. Once again here at Jewcy, Jay Michaelson seemed to argue that all science is by definition value-neutral: "Last I checked, Hitler also made use of automobiles. Indeed, he based a lot of ideas on militarism and machines; does that mean technology is morally wrong? Should you turn off your computer right now?"

No, Jay, there are obvious differences between Darwinian theory and auto and computer technology. Most important, the latter make no claims to answering ultimate questions, like how life originated, from which ethical corollaries are naturally drawn.

Auto and computer technology are also proved reliable every day by our experience. But no one has ever reported seeing a species originate in the manner described in Darwin's Origin of Species - not now, not in the fossil record, not ever.

More interesting than these observations is the hypocrisy of the ADL's outburst: "Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan."

It's funny how when the subject of conversation is Darwinism, then Hitler needed no one particular inspiration. But when the conversation shifts from Darwinism to - oh, I don't know - Christianity? Ah, then suddenly the genealogy of Nazism becomes eminently traceable.

One of the ADL's main fundraising technique has long been to scare Jews by demonizing Christianity. The group accordingly isn't shy about tracing the genealogy of the Holocaust back to the New Testament. In an essay on the 40^th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, for example, Rabbi Gary Bretton-Granatoor, director of interfaith affairs wrote:

"The anti-Judaism that begins in the New Testament was transformed through the admixture of political, economic and sociological prejudice into the anti-Semitism of modernity. This reached its ugly and inhuman nadir during World War II with Hitler's Final Solution for the Jewish people."

Blaming the earliest Christian writings for setting off a chain of influences resulting in the Holocaust evokes little outrage in the liberal Jewish community. Visitors to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, for instance, are greeted by a film, Anti-Semitism, purporting to uncover the "religious root of this phenomenon, the pervasive anti-Jewish teachings that evolved from overly literal readings and misreadings of New Testament texts."

Yet when Hitler successfully sold his ideology of hate to the German people in his bestselling tract Mein Kampf, he phrased his argument not in Christian terms but in biological, Darwinian ones.

Ignoring Hitler's evolutionary rhetoric, of course, some commentators brandish a famous quote from the same book -- "by defending myself against the Jews, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." They don't realize that Hitler was referring not to the God of the Bible but to Nature and her iron laws, as his preceding sentence clearly indicates.

In a curious irony, the modern paperback edition of Mein Kampf, available in any Barnes & Noble, includes an Introduction by - guess who? None other than the ADL's national director, Abraham Foxman. Did he, I wonder, even read the book?

To be the first African-American president, Barack Obama needs to be seen as a uniter and not a divider on race. Much of the public excitement over Obama is rooted in the hope that a black president will propel the U.S. to a new era of racial harmony and color blindness. The controversy over Obama’s longtime pastor, Reverend Wright, has threatened to dampen that excitement, and therefore derail Obama's candidacy.

Yesterday, Obama sought to alleviate these concerns in his “race speech.” This may be his most important speech since his endorsement of John Kerry for president at the last Democratic national convention. And Obama delivered it with all his eloquence and grand vision. He expressed the need to focus on issues that indeed unite Americans of all races and socio-economic classes. Obama is correct that,

“We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies. We can do that. But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.”

Yes, this can happen, but it should be avoided. Obama is uniquely positioned to help us move past the “distractions,” to move past race as the divisive issue. And yet, as far as I can tell, he has no interest intention of making that happen if it requires anything more than pretty words.

Obama talked about those issues that affect all of us. He talked about the issues affecting the black community. He addressed anti-Zionism. But he avoided explication of those issues that affect only some others: whites. The fact is, Obama tolerated a man who is racist as his spiritual mentor. For a very long time. Until the public made him stop.

If this is causing him problems in the Democratic primary, how much more so will it be a problem in the general election if he is the Democratic candidate? He can’t merely explain himself by expatiating on the history of discontent and suffering that afflicted and still afflicts the American black community. That will simply not suffice. Not now. Obama tried to play one race card to knock out another race card, noting,

“I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

Bullshit. We don’t choose our grandmother. But we do choose our spiritual leaders. Now Obama needs to offer something substantial. He needs to prove that his disagreement with his pastor is not mere sentiment and phrasing, but real policy differences. He needs to prove he truly wants to move America past its racial divisions.

To do that, Obama—at least once he has the Democratic nomination—needs to categorically reject racially based affirmative action programs. He needs to give that to whites if he is to defeat McCain. He needs to prove to whites that he feels for them not only as Americans, but also as white Americans. White Americans who are so overwhelmingly against affirmative action that the social left is resorting to devious machinations to knock referendums on the matter off state ballots rather than submit to the will of the voters . For good reason. Heck, even the famously liberal Jewish community swerves right on affirmative action.

Obama needs to be whites’ champion too—specifically against the discriminatory policies against them. Anything less will fail to dispel the shadow of racism and contempt cast onto his campaign by his pastor. Anything less will prove insufficient to win the trust of enough whites to win the presidency.

Obama and Wright: BFFs?The solutions offered by conservative commentators to Barack Obama’s existential crisis have been conspicuous in their shallowness. Unlike Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Victor Davis Hanson is no fake scholar; Hanson has intellectual heft. Yet he proposed that "all Obama would have to do is apologize, quit the church, and begin talking about the issues."

How about admitting himself to rehab, or, even better, expiating on Oprah? (I read on the Los Angeles Times’ blog that Oprah, wise woman that she is, had long ago quit Trinity United Church of Christ for reasons that evaded Obama, her protégé.)

No, I give Obama credit. His reaction to the nation-wide reaction to Rev. Wright’s fulminating—everywhere on full display—was anything but shallow. It was, however, profoundly disturbing.

Obama began his “More Perfect Union” oration with perfunctory praise for the American founding, before moving on to the issue that looms largest for him and for Rev. Wright: the sin of slavery.

Accused of decontextualizing the message uttered by Obama’s mentor, rightist critics of the Rev. Wright have been subjected to a coruscating critique—Wright’s vile, vociferous, overwhelming hatred of whites did not, apparently, reflect the man’s mission.

I hereby accuse the man who may become president of reducing the greatest revolution in history—politically and philosophically—to the eternal Mark of Cain all whites must seemingly bear: slavery.

Obama situated his own mission firmly on the civil war and civil rights continuum—in this respect, he would be continuing “the long march of those who came before us.” This is not the universal philosophical route carved by the American Founders, the followers of the Lockean tradition of natural rights. Obama may be more gentrified than the vulgar Rev. Wright. However, by harking back to slavery, he has expressed the very particularism that is so disturbing about his mentor’s mindset.

Crime-related fears: A line no one should cross? Leveled at innocent white Americans, race is like stigmata. Lest modern-day whites fail to welt up and bleed at the mention of slavery, Obama, like other custodians of consensus in our culture, hammered home that he is “married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters.” White Americans who’ve come out in droves for Obama deserve better.

So does Obama’s (white) grandma. He tells us he loves her with all his rather intense being. But he considers that she too is marred by racism for “once confessing her fear of black men who passed by her on the street.”

It is a fear rooted in fact, but Obama conflates it with racism. FBI and Justice surveys repeatedly show that, as Patrick J. Buchanan has written, “violent interracial assault, rape and murder [are] to be found not in the white community, but the African-American community. In almost all interracial attacks, whites are the victims, not the victimizers.”

It is, moreover, not racist to consider aggregate group characteristics—provided they are substantiated by hard evidence, not hunches—in how one invests precious scarce resources, to wit, one’s life and property. Science relies on the ability to generalize to the larger population observations drawn from a representative sample. People make prudent decision in their daily lives based on probabilities and generalities.

Obama’s grandmother was no different. Had she failed to treat individual blacks on their merit, he’d be justified in labeling her a racist. More material, if Obama brands his own grandmother a racist for failing to suppress a visceral reaction borne of the reality of crime, one hates to think of how he’d view ordinary Americans who “transgress” in this manner.

In Obama’s America, you had better button up about the “color of crime.”

Cool hunter: Ferraro In this context, Obama’s indirect swipe at Geraldine Ferraro rates a mention. The former vice presidential candidate suggested that the Senator would not be where he is if he were white. Indulgently, Obama has taken this to mean that Ferraro implied his “candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action.” Wrong. Ferraro was pointing to the coolness of being black in America and the considerable leverage that identity affords those who cultivate it. What better proof of that than Obama’s cult like following? Obama’s “More Perfect Union” address perfectly demonstrates that he has embraced this politicized racial identity, because to do so is smart; because in America, black is beautiful.

Obama continued in this fashion to expound on the defining issue that distorts his perspective as it does Rev. Wright’s: the alleged “racial injustice in this country.” “[S]o many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today,” he intoned, “can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.”

My family tree was truncated by an event far more fatal than was slavery: the Holocaust. I do not carry this legacy with me. I blame only those who planned and executed the Final Solution, mostly long dead. Members of my family have never ascribed their misfortunes and misdeeds to that contemporary calamity. They’ve owned their failings. Ditto most Jews I know.

Speaking of whom, Obama further minimized Wright’s wickedness by postulating that many of us “have heard remarks from [our] pastors, priests, or rabbis with which [we] strongly disagreed.” I have never attended a synagogue in which the rabbi boiled with racial bile as does Rev. Wright. In fact, my favorite rabbi, my father, Rabbi Ben Isaacson, was an anti-apartheid activist.

Obama did concede that “the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial.” But since he stopped there, allowing only that some of Wright’s vitriol was “wrong, distorted and divisive,” let me dilate on what’s missing from Obama’s formulation: what Americans need to take away from Rev. Wright’s words is not this or the other political message. Some of the pastor’s statements have a core of truth; others are purely phantasmagoric. Wright’s words are not isolated expressions; they constitute a worldview, a belief system—a rank racist belief system.

Americans need to ponder this: How and why did Obama become spiritually enmeshed with an impious pastor who adheres to such a philosophy? Obama’s Speech From Slavery explains it all.

Until today, black America's excitement about Barack Obama reminded me of an old Eddie Murphy skit: everyone was falling for the Obama in the tailpipe. Obama's served as a lovely symbol of racial transcendance, but until today's speech he hadn't said anything white politicians haven't said. And how many black people in jail = one Obama?

Because if Obama's relevancy is tied to disavowing his candidacy as "The Black President," then he sacrifices his relevance to the black community.

But today Obama threw on his du-rag, gold fronts, and dookie gold-rope chain to keep it real and say, "YO! F this 'race doesn't matter' bullish. I'm black and I'm proud, bidges!"

Fact is when anyone says race doesn't matter, a black person somewhere loses a piece of fried chicken. And it hurts a little. The bottom line is: there is a black experience. And a white experience. And an Asian experience. And so on. For a black person, race is a matter of permanent importance the same as if you had a pig's foot growing out of your forehead. It is impossible to ignore.

When people choose to be "politically correct" and act like you don't have an appendage on your forehead, it doesn't feel right. It feels patronizing. Yes, there are harsh truths related to having a pig's foot growing out of your head. Cops might beat you up. Snooty white girls might not sleep with you on principle. Snooty black girls too! And Asians (disclosure: no one sleeps with me). But would the pig's foots on your head make you a lesser person? Well, in terms of having the respect of the populace at large, yes.

So, ok, luckily being black isn't quite like a pig's foot in your head. But sometimes it's close! And the conversation on race in America often plays like our political system: a chess game not about divining the truth, but about not saying the wrong thing. A war of passive-aggression, where people sidestep and play defense until someone passes out from exhaustion and in so doing crosses the line.

But Obama's speech today was an aggressive move to checkmate:

Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity's services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

This is not "postracial." Or at least not the kind of "postracial" everyone is trying to sell. Obama is not a "transcendent" candidate, there is no such thing as "transcendence" in government.

As Hillary likes to point out—and this is why, until today's speech, I had supported her—there are problems, and there are solutions. Race is a problem, and someone who deals with race everyday is needed to deal with it.

Obama is the Black candidate, and is now trusting that such a distinction matters to the people of America. In today's speech he didn't try to placate the political mainstream—and that might make all the difference.

For Black people, anyway, there's no more Obama in the tailpipe. This is the moment of truth. We either matter or we don't.

So here's the promised update on the panel discussion on genocide denial that took place Thursday night at UCLA. Commenter Micromike wonders whether anything was accomplished. I frankly don't know.

The discussion was interesting. Professor David Myers drew incisive connections between the experience of the Armenian and Jewish communities; Professor Richard Hovanessian gave a fascinating talk on the rhetorical moves deployed by genocide deniers; I argued that while issues such as those are complex enough to support endless academic study, the moral contours of this situation are very stark—one needn't consult scholars to know that Jewish orgs ought not support a campaign of genocide denial. Then Aram Hamparian placed all this in the context of his work as head of the Armenian National Committee, and also made some very kind and encouraging comments about Jewcy.

Phantom says he hopes the experience was meaningful for me, and yes, absolutely it was. Having a chance to sit next to, and engage with, David Myers, Richard Hovanessian, and Aram Hamparian, was as edifying as it was flattering.

But of course that's entirely irrelevant. There are cheaper and easier ways to edify and flatter ourselves than to hold a genocide denial panel discussion at UCLA. There were people who flew across the country for this discussion (afterward, one person came up to me and said she flew in from Chicago, and another said that he came from Arizona; Mr. Hamparian flew in from DC): presumably, they weren't there just to hear interesting or stirring things. They must have hoped that something significant was actually going to come out of it.

On my end, there's one preeminent criterion by which I'll judge whether the event was a success: did it do anything at all that will make genocide denial a less acceptable political manuever to leaders of Jewish-American orgs such as the AJC (David Harris) and the ADL (Abraham Foxman). Will it cause anything to happen that in turn causes people lower down in these organizations to say to these men, "I understand how simple-minded and Polyanna-ish this sounds, but I really think we need to consider the idea that supporting a genocide denial campaign is really just deeply problematic, political considerations aside."

If that's too much to hope, then I'd be satisfied if supporters came to them and said, "listen, this isn't just some bullshit about 'morality' or 'the memory of the Holocaust'—it's actually serious. People out there are saying all kinds of damnfool things about our supporting Turkey's campaign of 'genocide denial,' and it could turn out to have very negatives consequences for this organization."

If that happens--if one person in either of those organizations can muster up the conviction to say either of those things to Abraham Foxman or David Harris--I'd call the event a success. But maybe I'm more easily satisfied than people who flew across the country hoping to witness some progress in ending denial of their family/community's systematic murder, I don't know.