ADL Slaps Down Ben Stein's "Darwin = Holocaust" claim

Want your head to explode? Here's how, in two easy steps.

1. Go to your local theater complex and buy a ticket to any movie except "Expelled: No Intelligent Audience."

2. Go into the theater playing "Expelled" instead of which ever one you paid for -- (I chose "Baby Mama" because the world needs more Tina Fey movies) -- and watch as much of it as you can stand.

3. Kablam!

"Expelled" has been diaried here several times; it's a terrible, and terribly duplicitous, movie from the creationists of the Intelligent Design movement -- that is, creationists who are pretending they're not creationists because they know that lying about that basic fact is the only way they're going to get any of their crap into the classroom.

Well, I'm perversely fascinated by nonsense that tries to dress itself up as sense, and so yesterday I caught an afternoon matinee of "Baby Mama" "Expelled" and stuck with it as long as I could. But about an hour into it -- groaning and gnashing my teeth at the garbage the movie was feeding an ignorant, largely receptive, but very tiny audience -- the movie goes from crummy and silly to, frankly, evil.

And that's when Ol' Ben Stein -- hired for the movie because he's a Jew and the ID movement is trying its damnedest to disguise its deep, wide, long fundamentalist Christian roots -- says it was Darwinian thinking that led to the Holocaust. I cursed semi-audibly, grabbed my stuff and walked out.

Well, my head isn't the only one that's exploded about this. Here is the Anti-Defamation League on the very same topic:

The film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed misappropriates the Holocaust and its imagery as a part of its political effort to discredit the scientific community which rejects so-called intelligent design theory.

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.

Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry.

The ADL gets it right -- including the fact that the Intelligent Design movement is political, not scientific, and the more important fact that the movie's argument is not only wrong but scabrously wrong.

The movie, incidentally, tanked; it cost $4M to make and at least twice that much to publicize -- and isn't it just typical of the IDers to spend more on the publicity than the product? -- but did less than $6M in its first two weeks, and it's already dropped out of a third of the theaters that had been playing it.

That means that it's very likely they're not going to make enough of a profit to pay Yoko Ono for their unauthorized use of John Lennon's "Imagine."

Which sounds to me like Ben Stein and his group of charlatans have caught a bad case of Instant Karma.

Edit: Reminder that the National Center for Science Education has put up a good site showing just how duplicitous the makers of "Expelled" were.

http://www.expelledexposed.com

And while I'm at it, here's a link from Scientific American tearing the movie apart.