Last updated on February 8th, 2013 at 12:50 pm
Glenn Beck is famous for his explosive emotions, succumbing to frequent fits of uncontrollable verbal diarrhea at almost a moment’s notice. We have seen tears and ranting and raving and nearly had Beck frothing at the mouth over events he himself has made up, demanding to know why nobody is talking about it.
That he is upset that we are not talking about something that exists only inside his head, should probably see him put into a padded room and out of our collective misery for many years. Sure is no longer with Fox News, but he is still busy stirring up the masses with his bizarre tirades.
Yesterday’s was triggered by vote of the United Nations General Assembly. According to the Washington Post, “The General Assembly voted overwhelmingly Thursday to grant Palestinians limited recognition of statehood, prompting exuberant celebrations across the West Bank and Gaza Strip and immediate condemnations from the United States and Israel.”
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The vote to recognize Palestine as a “non-member observer stat,” was 138 to 9. There were 41 abstentions. ” The vote, as the Post points out, grants a status “that falls well short of independence.”
So what is Beck so upset about? After all, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said,
“We did not come here to delegitimize a state established years ago, and that is Israel. Rather we came to affirm the legitimacy of a state that must now achieve its independence, and that is Palestine.”
Is he angry because he agrees with Benjamin Netanyahu, who said in response to the vote, “The decision at the U.N. today will change nothing on the ground. It will not advance the establishment of a Palestinian state; it will push it off.” True to his words, within a day, Israel is punishing Palestinians for the UN vote.
Does he agree with U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton, who called the vote “unfortunate and counterproductive”?
Both Netanyahu and Clinton are insisting that only direct negotiations between the two parties will succeed.
No. Beck isn’t concerned about Netanyahu’s facts on the ground, or in any facts anywhere. Beck is upset about his favorite topics these days, the Muslim Brotherhood and the UN.
Sure the vote represents in Beck’s mind the world ganging up on Israel, but what really gets his goat is that “now we have a Sharia-loving dictator in Egypt and the world says nothing about it.”
It is true that pro-democracy, liberal Eygptians are protesting president, Mohamed Morsi’s “Muslim Brotherhood constitution,” which, as the Washington Post observes, ” does not contain explicit protections for minority religions or women’s rights.”
Beck says he is upset about these omissions and sides with the protestors. But interestingly, the party Beck affiliates with on these shores, also attacks religious pluralism and women’s rights, on a literally daily basis. Beck sides with those who say that only Christianity deserves First Amendment protections. Beck sides with those who say, in essence, that not being Christian is the same thing as being anti-Christian.
Beck sides with those who stand for the imposition of Mosaic Law. Yet here he is complaining about Sharia Law.
There is no discernible difference between the two law codes, which are directed at the same God, the God of Abraham, whether you call him YHWH or Allah. The consequences for non-believers, under either code, are unpleasant and contrary to the precepts of the secular U.S. Constitution, which protects us from the abuses of state-sponsored religion.
In fact, the “Muslim Brotherhood constitution” affirms, says the Post, that Egyptian law stems from “the principles of Islam.”
How is this any different to what Beck’s good friend and fellow conspirator David Barton says about the relationship of the U.S. Constitution and U.S. law to Biblical principles?
There is not a whit of different between what Morsi says and what Barton says. But Morsi is Muslim, and Barton is a Christian.
The message? It is okay for a Christian to say these things. If a Muslim says them, it means the end of civilization.
All these facts fly right by Beck’s incensed nose and myopic, self-righteous eyes.
Beck says Obama is letting down the pro-democracy Egyptians, but it is unclear what Beck expects Obama to do. Land the Marines? “On Friday,” the Post reports, “the State Department weighed in on the deepening political crisis, expressing concern over the ‘apparent lack of consensus during the drafting process.'”
This apparent lack of consensus is reflected in the fact that the Constitution was drafted by 85 people – all Islamists.
It is not as if President Obama is happy about the course events followed.
Beck says he warned us at the time the demonstrations began against Mubarak that the Muslim Brotherhood “are the most well-organized, and they will seize power.”
Obama, he says, is not standing with the people who want real freedom, who will be crushed. What is happening there is what will happen here.
As a result, Beck claims, “Mark my words, in the next five years you will see this very thing, somebody seizing power [and a] real democracy movement standing up, but who will stand up for them? No one!”
Well, he is sorta right. We did have Occupy Wall Street, a real democracy movement standing up, and nobody stood up for them, including Beck and all his religious-bigot friends. In fact, Beck’s pals and compatriots roundly condemned the Occupy movement.
Beck himself, you might recall, had some very negative things to say about Occupy, calling it a communist plot or Maxist revolution. He claimed that Occupy was anti-Semitic and that the Occupy protesters represented a modern-day “Night of Long Knives. It will be a purging of this country,” referencing Hitler’s purse of extreme elements within his party.
To be a workable historical analogy of course, Obama would have to be purging the Occupy protestors, not supporting them, but never mind facts having any bearing on anything Glenn Beck says. That didn’t stop Beck from saying, at the time,
“Capitalists, if you think that you can play footsies with these people, you’re wrong. They will come for you and drag you into the streets and kill you…they’re Marxist radicals…these guys are worse than Robespierre from the French Revolution…they’ll kill everybody.”
So that’s how Beck really feels about real democracy movements. He doesn’t like them. He pretends to like them now, in Egypt, because he hates the Muslim Brotherhood and he hates the UN and perhaps most of all, because he is trying to sell a book he wrote with Harriet Parke, called Agenda 21, a dystopically Beckian foray into alternate realities where all Beck’s dark fantasies come true.
You can find the actual Agenda 21 here, a non-binding and voluntary plan about sustainable environmental issues. Beck’s Agenda 21, however, posits a future where,
Just a generation ago, this place was called America. Now, after the worldwide implementation of a UN-led program called Agenda 21, it’s simply known as “the Republic.” There is no president. No Congress. No Supreme Court. No freedom.
There are only the Authorities.
The authorities, of course, are likely to be, in all actuality, Beck’s Evangelical Taliban, or Talibangelicals, who will turn every American street into that dismal, lifeless, overly-regulated place known as Kabul, where American law is informed by the Bible and where America will be everything he complains Egypt is about to become, the only difference being Mosaic Law instead of Sharia Law.
Beck, like all his freaky fundamentalist friends, is afraid somebody will beat them to it, that other authoritarians will somehow impose their own dictatorship on America. Since there are no other likely candidates, Beck’s fantasy conjures up conservatism’s old self-imagined nemesis, the UN, and throws in some icky brown Muslims to spice things up.
The self-masturbatory stew which results is a lurid cauldron of broiling hate and parochial bigotry, the same sort of Santorum that comes from a misinformed, below-average mind like that of Alfred Rosenberg, who penned a similar paean to hate called The Myth of the Twentieth Century.
And there is something else Back and Rosenberg have in common. Beck’s Agenda 21 conspiracy theories are, as Joseph Göbbels said of Rosenberg’s own, nothing but a “philosophical belch.”
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
