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The Telegraph

Al-Qaida leader: Don’t give Israel credit for 9/11

By Ami Eden · April 22, 2008

Don't expect him to get honored at an ADL dinner, but Al-Qaida's second-in-command wants the world to know – Israel is not responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Check out the report from the Associated Press:

Ayman al-Zawahri accused Hezbollah's Al-Manar television of starting the rumor [about Israel]. "The purpose of this lie is clear — (to suggest) that there are no heroes among the Sunnis who can hurt America as no else did in history. Iranian media snapped up this lie and repeated it," he said.

In an audiotape last week, according to the AP report, the Al-Qaida leader had plenty of negative to say about the regime in Tehran:

Al-Zawahri denounced what he called Iran's expansionist plans, saying Tehran aims to annex southern Iraq and Shiite areas of the eastern Arabian Peninsula as well as stre ngthen ties to its followers in southern Lebanon. He warned that if Iran achieves its goals, it will "explode the situation in an already exploding region.

The rhetoric is a stark change for al-Zawahri, who in the past did not seek to exploit Shiite-Sunni tensions. When the former head of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was waging a campaign of suicide bombings against Shiites in Iraq, al-Zawahri sent messages telling him to stop, fearing it would hurt al-Qaida's image.

Gunaratna said the change in tone could be because of al-Qaida's failure to win the release of al-Qaida figures detained by Iran since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, including al-Qaida security chief Saif al-Adel and two of bin Laden's sons.

Gunaratna said that up to 200 al-Qaida figures and their families are under house arrest in Iran and that Tehran has rejected al-Qaida attempts to negotiate their release.

Al-Qaida doesn't have the strength to launch attacks in Iran, but it intends to do so "in the future," he said. "If al-Qaida becomes strong in Iraq ... Iran believes al-Qaida in Iraq could become a major threat."

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Ben Stein’s anti-evolution film raises hackles

By Daniel Sieradski · April 22, 2008

Ben Stein in Expelled

Did Darwin's theory of evolution provoke the Holocaust? That's the claim being advanced by actor/economist Ben Stein in his new film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

Called "one of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time" by the New York Times, the film, which debuted last week to ~~dismal~~ modest* box office response, proposes a direct correlation between evolutionary science, Social Darwinism, "godlessness," and Nazism.

Stein's assertions about the evil intentions of evolutionary biologists have some in the scientific community crying foul.

"Unfortunately," John Rennie wrote recently in Scientific American, "Expelled is a movie not quite harmless enough to be ignored. Shrugging off most of the film's attacks—all recycled from previous pro-[Intelligent Design] works—would be easy, but its heavy-handed linkage of modern biology to the Holocaust demands a response for the sake of simple human decency."

Indeed, by Stein's logic, Reb Gedalia Nadel z"tl, an esteemed pupil of the Hazon Ish who advocated reconciling Torah with modern scientific knowledge – particularly on the subject of creation and evolution, would have been a Nazi sympathizer.

Such absurdities aren't preventing Jews from taking the bait, however. On Friday, April 18, the day of Expelled's premier, Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and a vocal opponent of Intelligent Design theory, received a hostile email from a Jewish viewer of Stein's film, stating: "You people believe that it was okay for my great-grandparents to die in the Holocaust! How disgusting. [...] We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States!"

Shermer forwarded the email to famed geneticist and author of the 2006 atheist manifesto The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, who penned a public response to the email, refuting Expelled's claims and informing the email's angry author that "you have been cruelly duped by Ben Stein and his unscrupulous colleagues. It is a wicked, evil thing they have done to you, and potentially to many others."

Likewise, in an op-ed published by MSNBC, Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, called the film "immoral," adding that,

To lay blame for the Holocaust upon Charles Darwin is to engage in a form of Holocaust denial that should forever make Ben Stein the subject of scorn not because of his nudnik concern that evolution somehow undermines morality but because in this contemptible movie he is willing to subvert the key reason why the Holocaust took place — racism — to serve his own ideological end.

*[Update] The article I had cited for box office figures has been updated since my initial writing of this entry and now shows that the film performed better than originally anticipated.