The War on Christmas

If you've been watching much Fox News this holiday season then you "know" that liberals and secular humanists are at war with Christmas.

The Green Knight has written an excellent rebuttal of this ridiculous meme.

As I've noted before, the denigration of "liberals" is a form of out-group politics in which all of societies ills are projected onto a particular group. The textbook example of this phenomena is the anti-Semitic propaganda of the Nazis. To bring this point round full circle, the folks over at News Hounds have noticed that at one point, the Jewish were accused of plotting a conspiracy against Christmas, too.

Bill O'Reilly has joined the chorus of FOX commentators who bemoan the fact that poor old Christmas is under attack. The following words, I believe, sum up his position pretty well, even though they are not his:

"And it has become pretty general. Last Christmas most people had a hard time finding Christmas cards that indicated in any way that Christmas commemorated Someone's Birth. Easter they will have the same difficulty in finding Easter cards that contain any suggestion that Easter commemorates a certain event. There will be rabbits and eggs and spring flowers, but a hint of the Resurrection will be hard to find. Now, all this begins with the designers of the cards."

To whom do these words belong?

Sean Hannity? John Gibson? Jerry Falwell? Pat Robertson? Ann Coulter? Michelle Malkin? Newt Gingrich? Brent Bozell? Mark Hyman? Rush Limbaugh? Davis Asman? John Kasich?

None of the above.

They were penned by Henry Ford in 1921 in his tract "The International Jew," a vile piece of anti-semitic garbage written by someone who blamed the International Jew Conspiracy for every ill that has ever befallen mankind.

And its also interesting to see that the author of that blog entry states that the pundits at Fox remind her of the John Birch Society. Its interesting because in the 1960's the John Birch Society was the group that was claiming Christmas was under attack (it was the Communists who were doing the attacking, of course.) The only significant difference was that back then it was rightfully considered conspiracy nonsense.