Guest Post by Morbo
I’ll admit that my search for the most offensive thing said by a right-winger about Hurricane Katrina has become a bit obsessive.
I just can’t help myself. Most people have enough common sense not to say insensitive and stupid things in the wake of a natural disaster of this scale. They might think them, but they don’t say them out loud.
Some members of the kook right, by contrast, not only say insane things, they want everyone to know they are saying them. So they write columns and send them out to the newspapers. Such deeply twisted individuals cannot fail to fascinate any student of human nature.
Consider Don Feder. This sad case was, for many years, a columnist for a major daily newspaper, The Boston Herald. Apparently, since retiring, Feder has had to tighten his belt financially and can no longer afford his medication.
What else could explain the utterly raving column he distributed nationwide through e-mail recently?
Read the following except, if you can manage to get through it without throwing up:
“Katrina hit New Orleans one week to the day after the Sharon government carried out the forced removal of some 9,500 Jewish residents of Gaza and parts of Samaria. This was done under pressure from Washington. (“I will curse those who curse you.”) On the day Katrina made landfall, bodies were being removed from Jewish cemeteries in Gaza, to prevent Palestinians from desecrating the remains. Israeli bodies were disinterred; American bodies floated in the streets of New Orleans.
“9,500 Jews were driven from Gaza. Most are still homeless. Roughly half-a-million Americans were displaced by Katrina. Based on America’s population ratio with Israel (about 50-to-1) this is roughly equivalent.
“Numerology is important in traditional Judaism. Each Hebrew letter is assigned a number value. Many scholars believe the Bible has hidden codes that can be unlocked by this device. Written in Hebrew, Katrina has a numerical equivalent of 374. There are two relevant passages that share this number – ‘They did unto thee evil’ (Genesis, 50:17) and ‘The sea upon land’ (Exodus 14:15).
“‘Katrina’ comes from the Greek meaning ‘to purify.’ New Orleans City Council President Oliver Thomas observed, ‘Maybe God is going to cleanse us.'”
For good measure, Feder also blamed the hurricane on “Southern Decadence,” a gay-right festival that had been planned for New Orleans. He describes it as “an annual orgy celebrating alternative death-styles, characterized by nudity and public copulation” and calls it a “freak-fest.”
And what of all the innocent people who died? What about all of the babies and senior citizens? What about the mentally incapacitated who never heard of Gaza? What about those people who opposed what happened in Gaza and were bothered by “Southern Decadence”? Why did they have to die too?
Feder dismisses them all in a few words: During the Civil War, he writes, Abraham Lincoln “acknowledged that when God punishes a nation, the guiltless suffer along with the guilty.”
So there you have it: homophobia, twisted theology, “Bible Code” pseudoscientific numerology claptrap and victim blaming — all crammed into one 1,514-word column. Quite an accomplishment.
When I first saw this monstrosity, I actually doubted its parentage. I thought perhaps that wacky gang from The Onion was at it again. So I called the public relations contact who sent it out, and he assured me that it’s real. Feder means it.
And here’s the rub: This guy thinks he’s better than you and me. Make no mistake, Feder believes he subscribes to a superior ethical and moral system.
My guess is, since you’re reading this blog, you probably hew to a secular ethic or one derived from a liberal or moderate religious tradition. To Feder and his crowd, that makes you morally deficient. He feels certain his ultra-orthodox religious view is superior.
Yet look where Feder’s superior system has led him: to a place of no compassion, a place of name-calling, a place of sneering arrogance, a place of hateful diatribes. It is, I would submit, a cold and lonely place lorded over by a scary god, a god to be fled from the way a primitive man must have huddled, terrified, during a thunderstorm. This is a god of vengeance only, not a god of love. And Feder can have him, as far as I’m concerned. If such a god truly rules the universe and smiles upon an attitude like Feder’s, he’s the last person I want to spend eternity with.
One more thing: Feder now works handing media relations for the Rev. Rick Scarborough, a Texas Baptist pastor I wrote about a few weeks ago. Scarborough was apparently the first member of the kook right to float the theory that Katrina was God’s punishment for the Gaza resettlement.
Scarborough planned to hold a conference in Washington next month on “judicial tyranny.” He has now pushed it back to March of 2006. U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) is still listed as a speaker.
Does Brownback agree with Feder and Scarborough that the victims of Hurricane Katrina had it coming? It would be interesting to know.