Again, Pat Condell boldly tells the truth about Palestinians and their supporters, including the intensely racist governments of Norway and Sweden:

Zombie lists the “Occupy Wall Street” protest supporters, sponsors and sympathizers:

Communist Party USA. Sources: Communist Party USA, OWS speech, The Daily Caller

American Nazi Party. Sources: Media Matters, American Nazi Party, White Honor, Sunshine State News

Ayatollah Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran. Sources: The Guardian, Tehran Times, CBS News

Barack Obama. Sources: ABC News, CBS News, ForexTV, NBC New York

The government of North Korea. Sources: Korean Central News Agency (North Korean state-controlled news outlet), The Marxist-Leninist, Wall Street Journal, Times of India

Louis Farrakhan, Nation of Islam. Sources: video statement (starting at 8:28), Black in America, Weasel Zippers, Philadelphia Weekly

Revolutionary Communist Party. Sources: Revolutionary Communist Party, Revolution newspaper, in-person appearance

David Duke. Sources: Talking Points Memo, video statement, davidduke.com

Joe Biden. Sources: Talking Points Memo, video statement, Mother Jones

Hugo Chavez. Sources: Mother Jones, Reuters, Examiner.com

Revolutionary Guards of Iran. Sources: Associated Press, FARS News Agency, UPI

Black Panthers (original). Sources: in-person appearance, Occupy Oakland, Oakland Tribune

Socialist Party USA. Sources: Socialist Party USA, IndyMedia, The Daily Caller

US Border Guard. Sources: White Reference, www.usborderguard.com, Gateway Pundit, Just Another Day blog

Industrial Workers of the World. Sources: IWW web site, iww.org, in-person appearances

CAIR [the terrorism-supporting Council on American-Islamic Relations].  Sources: in-person appearance, Washington Post, CAIR, CAIR New York

Nancy Pelosi. Sources: Talking Points Memo, video statement, ABC News, The Weekly Standard

Communist Party of China. Sources: People’s Daily (Communist Party organ), Reuters, chinataiwan.org, The Telegraph

Hezbollah. Sources: almoqawama.org, almoqawama.org (2), almoqawama.org (3), wikipedia

9/11Truth.org. Sources: 911truth.org (1), 911truth.org (2), 911truth.org (3)

International Bolshevik Tendency. Sources: bolshevik.org, Wire Magazine

Anonymous. Sources: Adbusters, The Guardian, video statement

White Revolution. Source: whiterevolution.com

International Socialist Organization. Sources: Socialist Worker, socialistworker.org, in-person appearance

PressTV (Iranian government outlet). Sources: PressTV, wikipedia

Marxist Student Union. Sources: Marxist Student Union, Big Government, marxiststudentunion.blogspot.com

Freedom Road Socialist Organization. Sources: FightBack News, fightbacknews.org

ANSWER [Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, an anti-war umbrella protest group]. Sources: ANSWER press release, ANSWER web site, Xinhua

Party for Socialism and Liberation. Sources: Liberation News (1), pslweb.org, The Daily Free Press, Liberation News (2)

The list is far from complete. It doesn’t include George Soros or his front organizations, for instance.

But Zombie is not finished –

UPDATE: Thanks to the hundreds of readers who have made suggestions for additional entries on this list. I now have a large pile of potential new OWS supporters to investigate, and will work on updating this list over the upcoming weeks. When I’ve made it more thorough, I will re-launch an updated list that will be much more “official” in its comprehensiveness, sometime later this month.

We’ll be watching for it.

We like this article by Andrew Klavan, both what he says and how he says it:

The true test of a philosophy is not what it promises to make of the world but what it makes, in fact, of its adherents. Human nature is remarkably recalcitrant, but ideas do affect people over time, for good or ill, and the societies people make will ultimately bear the image of those effects and thus of the ideas. … Our beliefs arise from who we are and we become what we believe …

Leftism is bad for people. It makes them awful. The unwashed, ill-mannered, anti-Semitic, entitled, and now violent mobs littering various parts of the nation under the banner “Occupy” believe their ideas will lead to a better society — but they actually are the society their ideas lead to. Their behavior when compared to the polite, law-abiding, non-racist demonstrations of so-called tea partiers tells you everything you need to know about the end results of statism on the one hand and constitutional liberty on the other.

This is not, of course, to say that every left-winger is a miscreant but rather that the natural, indeed inevitable, result of statism is to produce nations of miscreants. When the state is permitted to make the individual’s moral choices, the individual is forced to become either a slave or a criminal; when the state is permitted to redistribute wealth, it chains the citizen into a rigid, two-tiered hierarchy of power rather than freedom’s fluid, multi-layered rankings of merit and chance; when the people are taught to be dependent on entitlements, they are reduced to violence when, inevitably, the entitlement well runs dry; when belief in the state usurps every higher creed, the people become apathetic, hedonistic, and uncreative and their culture slouches into oblivion. I need hardly expend the energy required to lift my finger and point to Europe where cities burn because the unemployable are unemployed or because the hard-working won’t fund the debts of the indolent; where violent and despicable Islamism eats away portions of municipalities like a cancer while the authorities do nothing; where nations that once produced history’s greatest achievements in science and the arts can now no longer produce even enough human beings to sustain themselves. 

Why wait to see such results come home? Leftism is an ignoble creed on the surface of it. Its followers display their awareness of its shamefulness by projecting its evils onto their opposition. Leftists accuse conservatives of avarice, but which is greedier in a person: to seek to hold on to what is his own, or to seek, as the leftists do, to plunder what belongs to others? Leftists call conservatives racist and sexist, but who is it who wants race and gender enshrined in law? Who penalizes white or male babies for sins they never committed on the long-exploded theory that evil can undo evil? Leftists call conservatives hateful… I would answer “Read the papers!” but the papers lie because our journalists are leftists and they know down deep what they’re like, who they are. Compare instead the rhetoric and honesty — not of those selected by the media, or those quotes they’ve selected — but of those in equivalent positions at equivalent times. The gracious and open-hearted George W. Bush versus the divisive, self-serving, and dishonest Barack Obama, just to take one example.

Every one who sympathizes with the Occupy movement should take a good look at them — not as they will be in the paradise of their aspirations but as they truly are this minute. Look at them, and understand that that’s what tomorrow will look like if they have their way today. 

As a perfect illustration of what Andrew Klavan is talking about, here’s Roseanne Barr:

Muslim women are passed – often while they are still children – by their fathers to their husbands, whose religion teaches them: “Your wives are a tilth unto you; so go to your tilth when or how you will.”(Koran 2.223)

The wives are exploited in every way imaginable. Their lives could not be more wretched. And on top of it all – the bride’s family has to pay her exploiters and tormentors to subject her to unending misery.  

The husbands not only  get slaves, they also get money to enslave them. If they don’t think they’re paid enough, they burn the wife.

This report,  which tells a common story, comes from yesterday’s issue of the Pakistani paper the Tribune:

Seventeen-year-old Fauzia, a resident of 72 NP, was taken to Shaikh Zayed Hospital where doctors described her condition as critical. They said she had suffered severe burns on more than 60 per cent of her body and that she was unlikely to survive.

Police …  had registered a case against Zeeshan Ahmed, Fauzia’s husband, and his brother Imran Ahmed.

Fauzia’s parents said she had been complaining about her in-laws’ behaviour ever since she got married to Zeeshan a year ago. They said her in-laws were not satisfied with the dowry and insisted that she ask her parents for more. They said her in-laws also beat her up a couple of times.

On Tuesday, they said, a neighbour called them and informed them that Fauzia had been burnt…. He had heard a woman crying for help and rushed to the house next door along with his other family members.

He said they found Fauzia rolling on the floor trying to put out the flames. “We poured several buckets of water and later took her to the hospital,” he said. He said there was no one else in the house and suggested that her in-laws had fled.

Fauzia’s brother Sajid Ali said he and his father were both daily-wage workers and that they could not afford to purchase more items for her dowry. He said both he and his father made between Rs400 and Rs500 a day which was just enough to provide two meals to their family.

Our special source, who speaks on condition of anonymity in order to avoid being tortured to death, tells us that the voice of Allah Muhammad replied to that outburst, sneering down from Paradise: “Excuses, excuses! You should have made do with one meal a day and paid the men more to use your daughter and sister how they will. Now reimburse them the cost of the fuel and matches, or else!”

This is from Investor’s Business Daily:

Earth now has 7 billion people. Are we overcrowded? About to outstrip our resources? Should we prepare for the catastrophic population bomb we’ve been warned about? No, no and no.

In 1968, a Stanford biologist named Paul R. Ehrlich wrote “The Population Bomb,” an unnecessary alarmist book that warned of famines in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation.

Ehrlich, still honored and respected for reasons we don’t understand, likened humans to a cancer that must be cut out using “brutal and heartless decisions.”

Ehrlich, of course, advised governments to impose population growth limits. One solution included “the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food,” doses of which “would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired family size.” …

Despite it being a tome of gloom and barbarism, Ehrlich’s book became a best-seller, which is odd since he did nothing but repeat the false theme that Thomas Malthus and the rest of the doomsayers have been saying for centuries.

It makes no sense to us why so many want to believe predictions of mass human tragedy, especially when the end-of-the-worlders such as Ehrlich have always been wrong and spectacularly so. 

Naturally, the misanthropes, environmentalists and gaia worshippers have latched onto the anti-humanity message to support their Earth-first, people-are-invaders radicalism. …

Humans are in fact a resource, an infinite form of capital. We have had an uncanny way of using our minds to overcome all of the environmental challenges we’ve faced and there’s no reason to think that won’t continue as long as the Ehrlichs don’t succeed in stamping out large portions of the population.

No one honest or decent person can say what the right number of people is for this planet. But overpopulation at 7 billion isn’t a concern. …

Population growth is no plague. It is an opportunity.More people mean more minds able to solve problems and sustain human progress. …

In contrast with the academic and left-wing pessimism about population growth, there exists a cogent argument that our planet is actually underpopulated. We are headed toward a world with a population that’s growing old — and peaking in 25 years.

We will be looking for help that won’t be there as birth rates fall and life spans increase. Under these conditions, who’ll pay taxes to fund the aging population’s pensions? …

How will a shrinking labor force provide the goods and services the older population demands in its extended retirement years?

And how will it pay off the staggering debt that keeps growing in so many nations?  …

While 7 billion might seem like a teeming crowd ready to devour the Earth, it’s not. There’s no population bomb to worry about. Worry instead about how population bombers, so wrong for so long, get into academe and other places of influence — and stay there.

*

Free enterprise, meanwhile, responds to the demands of the “misanthropes, environmentalists and gaia worshippers”, the back-to-nature cultists, the apostles of anorexia, the role-playing children of the prosperous West, catering to their faddish tastes by opening a stone-age restaurant.

This report is from the MailOnline:

At first glance, Berlin’s Sauvage restaurant looks much like many of the German capital’s other trendy eateries.

But take a closer look at the chalkboard out front and you’ll discover they are embarking on a culinary shake-up that takes its inspiration from the Stone Age.

Proudly announcing a “Real Food Revolution – Paleolithic cuisine!“, there is no cheese, bread or sugar available, only fare accessible to our hunter-gatherer ancestors more than two million years ago.

Sauvage claims to be the first restaurant in Europe to solely serve a Caveman diet.

The restaurant menu shows a stereotypical image of modern humanity’s forbearer, the jutting profile of a hirsute caveman.

Inside, diners eat at candle-lit tables [wax candles are too mod-con for cavemen, actually – JB] with a contemporary cave painting hanging in the background …

Sauvage, which is the French word for “savage” or “wild”, is part of the Paleolithic diet movement and claims to be first of its kind in Europe.

Probably only the first of many. And they’re unlikely to be cheap.

That means serving only organic, unprocessed fruit and vegetables, meat, fish, eggs, nuts, seeds, and herbs.

The truly obsessed build an entire lifestyle around the concept, mimicking caveman-era exercise.

This can involve lifting boulders and running barefoot, with some even emulating the blood loss they believe Stone Age hunters might have experienced in pursuit of their dinner by donating blood every few months. …

Sauvage’s Boris Leite-Poço … said: “Many people think the Paleolithic diet is just some hipster trend, but it’s a worldwide phenomenon, with an online community that spans the globe. The trend is probably strongest in the United States …”

We wish the enterprising Boris Leite-Poço success. He should do well until the food fashion changes, and the play-boys and play-girls of the free capitalist world move on to indulge their next modish whim.

Unless socialism-induced, global economic collapse plunges them – and all of us – into the real thing: the life that Thomas Hobbes accurately described as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short“.

We quote from a column by Walter Williams at Townhall, which can be read in full here.

I believe that there’s little prospect for Arabs ever being free and that Western encouragement and hopes for democracy are doomed to failure and disappointment. Most nations in the Middle East do not share the philosophical foundations of the West. It’s not likely liberty-oriented values will ever emerge in cultures that have disdain for the rule of law and private property rights and that sanction barbaric practices such as the stoning of women for adultery, the severing of hands or beheading as a form of punishment, and imprisonment for criticizing or speaking ill of the government.

What should the West do about the gross violations of human rights so prevalent in North Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere? My short answer is to mind our own business. The only case in which we should interfere with Middle Eastern affairs is when our national defense or economic interests are directly threatened. That is, for example, if Iran were to meddle with Middle Eastern oil shipments or if we discovered good evidence of its building nuclear weapons, then we should militarily intervene. What they want to do to one another is none of our business.

We agree with him. Certainly the West should not be so culturally insensitive as to interfere with the Arabs’ colorful customs, such as oppressing and mutilating women, stoning adulterers, hanging homosexuals, amputating the limbs of thieves, routinely torturing prisoners, keeping and trafficking slaves, using children as living bombs and training them to saw people’s heads off.

But we shouldn’t hesitate to act when our national defense or economic interests are under threat. If an Arab tyrant blows up an American plane in flight, he should be punished. Arab states that train terrorists pose a threat to every nation, with the US top of their wish list, so they should be promptly discouraged by fleets of well-aimed drones. And as the West needs the oil that lies under Arab feet, the despots must not be allowed to price it at extortionist levels. (To prevent that, the oil fields of the Middle East should have been taken under American control decades ago.) The best policy would be to keep them in constant fear that America might strike them without warning at any moment. Only an occasional salutary demonstration of American wrath would be necessary. Bring back that old Shock-and-Awe. Judiciously but zealously inflicted, it could obviate the need for long and costly wars.

And the UN must be destroyed.

The offices of French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo have been destroyed by a petrol bomb, a day after it named the Prophet Mohammed as its “editor-in-chief” for this week’s issue.

We quote from the report in the Telegraph:

The publication, historically famous for pillorying Catholic clericalism, was criticised by Muslims in 2007 after reprinting the Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammad that caused outrage around the Islamic world.

It was let off lightly that time with mere criticism. Did the editors think they could get away with expressing themselves freely against Islam again, in Islam-infected France?

If so, for satirists they are strangely naive.

They announced that their next issue was to “fittingly celebrate the victory of the Islamist Ennahda party in Tunisia” by asking Mohammed “to be the special editor-in-chief.”

“The prophet of Islam didn’t have to be asked twice and we thank him for it,” the statement said.

The cover of this week’s issue, out on Wednesday, shows Mohammed saying: “100 lashes if you don’t die of laughter”.

It also includes an editorial by the Prophet entitled Halal Aperitif and a women’s supplement called Madam Sharia.

Behind the humour, the editorial’s message is serious: “No religion is compatible with democracy from the moment a political party representing it wants to take power in the name of God”.

The Ennahda party pretends it can and will preserve freedom and democracy  – under sharia law. It deserves mockery.

“What would be the point of a religious party taking power if it didn’t apply its ideas,” it goes on. “Hello, we are the Bolchevik party and if you vote for us we promise never to speak of Communism… Come on.”

We are surprised that they were surprised by the firebomb attack.

We are surprised that politicians were shocked (if they really were).

Xavier Bertrand, the labour minister, said he was “deeply shocked” while Jean-François Copé, head of the ruling conservative UMP party said if the fire was linked to this week’s issue, “it serves as a reminder of what kind of acts can be committed by fundamentalists who manipulate religion for political ends”.

But some hastened yet again to exonerate Islam itself – that “vast majority of peace-loving Muslims” we hear so much about but never hear from: –

Jean-Luc Melenchon, presidential candidate for the leftist Front de Gauche party called the attack “repulsive”, and called on the French “to the have the intellectual discipline not to confuse a handful of imbeciles, numbskulls who will severely punished, I hope, with the vast majority of our Muslim compatriots who practice their faith perfectly calmly“.

They sure are letting themselves in for many more shocking surprises!

This article by Leo Igwe is from the secularist paper, the Daily Times of Nigeria:

There are concerns that the Arab Spring could be hijacked by parties with islamic agenda, and politicians who want to impose sharia law on the states.

There are clear indications that politicians in the region are campaigning and mobilising on the basis of Islam. They are playing the islamic religious political card to gain power. They have mistaken the secular wind of  Arab Spring to an Islamic revolution. Many parties and politicians are seeking to win votes by promising to implement sharia law and enthrone islamic theocracy in furtherance of ‘the revolution’.

For instance, many secularists, feminists and human rights campaigners were shocked by the pronouncements of the leader of the National Transitional Council in Libya, Mustapha Abdul Jalil. Shortly after the death of Col Gaddaffi, Jalil declared that sharia would be the basic source of the laws in ‘Free Libya’. That all laws that were not consistent with the teachings of Islam would be repealed. He voided the law against polygamy and lifted restrictions imposed by the Gaddaffi regime on the number of women that men could marry.

In Tunisia, where it all started, the country’s main Islamic party has emerged victorious in the Arab Spring’s first elections, taking 90 of 217 seats in the new assembly. There are fears that this party could use its position to roll back the gains the country had made in steering the state away from religion and in protecting the rights of women. The party leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, has pledged that the rights of every Tunisian would be protected by the new authorities.

“We will continue this revolution to realise its aims of a Tunisia that is free, independent, developing and prosperous; in which the rights of God, the Prophet, women, men, the religious and the non-religious are assured because Tunisia is for everyone,” he was quoted to have recently told party supporters at a press conference.

An emulsion of  incompatibles!

Personally I tried to understand what he meant by the ‘rights of God’. Afterall, God is not a human being. Or the rights of ‘the Prophet’ – obviously referring to Mohammad. And Mohammad died centuries ago. Anyway, that is a clear sign of the enormous influence religion, particularly Islam, wields in the country’s politics. That is a clear sign of the struggles ahead of all lovers of freedom, democracy and human rights in the region in the years ahead.

Also in Egypt, the islamist party is expected to emerge victorious whenever the country holds elections. The party of the influential Islamist group – the Muslim Brotherhood  [calling itself] the Freedom and Justice Party – is the party to beat in the parliamentary elections coming up soon.

Throughout the Middle East and North Africa, the spectre of political Islam and its opposition to universal human rights and progressive values is haunting and threatening to undo the Arab Spring.

While we are not at ease  with the concept of “human rights” or “natural rights”, and prefer to say that  people “should be free to …” rather than “have a right to …”, we understand that freedom is what the  secularists of the “Arab Spring” desire. And Islam is freedom’s opposite: an ideology of subjugation and enslavement.

Secularists and human rights campaigners are calling for –

Complete separation of religion from the state;

Abolition of religious laws in the family, civil and criminal codes;

A separation of religion from the educational system;

Freedom of religion and atheism as private beliefs;

Prohibition of sex apartheid and compulsory veiling.

And he ends by saying:

Politicians should strive and uphold the ideals of freedom, secularism, democracy and human rights in contemporary Middle East and North Africa. These are the values people fought and died for. These are the values at the heart of the Arab Spring.

We accept that these are the ideals some people are striving for in the Arab revolutions, and some people have fought and died for. We applaud those brave idealists. We agree that their values should be the values at the heart of the Arab Spring, and the politicians and parties that uphold them should form the post-revolution governments.

But, as the writer observes, Islam is in the ascendancy. The vast and ignorant army of the dead Muhammad is intent on imposing sharia law.

The people of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya are more than likely to find themselves even worse off than they were before the revolutions.

… and are snubbed by Godists. 

Walter Hudson writes an article about this, telling the religious members who object to atheists joining them, why they are wrong:

It began without controversy. At a routine board meeting of the North Star Tea Party Patriots (NSTPP), a coalition of activist groups in Minnesota which this author chairs, a vote was taken to admit a new member organization. The new group was the Minnesota Objectivist Association (MOA) which advocates the philosophy of Ayn Rand …  Though not a Tea Party organization in name, MOA was nonetheless supportive of the movement’s mission and principles. Signs reading “Who is John Galt?” in reference to Rand’s novel [Atlas Shrugged] had been a staple at Tea Party rallies since the movement began.

Within days, word got around to the broader NSTPP membership that MOA had been admitted. Pushback began. Some complained that MOA did not have “Tea Party” in their name. Others noted that MOA was not listed on Tea Party Patriots’ national directory. The concern over these relatively minor points seemed disproportionate. Provision had been made in the NSTPP constitution to include organizations which predated the Tea Party movement yet sought the same ends. A group without “Tea Party” in its name had been admitted before.

After some beating around the bush, the crux of the matter emerged. Ayn Rand was an atheist, and her philosophy of Objectivism did not acknowledge the existence of God. Thus was alleged an irreconcilable difference between the Tea Party and Ayn Rand.

As the controversy progressed, MOA ultimately withdrew from the coalition, citing the episode as a needless distraction to all parties concerned. Precluding debate left some important questions unresolved. What role does religion play within the Tea Party? Must one be a theist in order to be philosophically aligned with the movement?

These questions are important because their answers define what the movement is really about. Is it solely an effort to affect fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government, and free markets? Or is it something more which goes unsaid? Is the movement on a mission from God? Or are its principles applicable to the religious and the non-religious alike? The answers to those questions could affect the integrity of the movement. …

Unfortunately, attacks upon religious expression by a relentless secular minority have placed many religious people on the defensive.

While we appreciate Walter Hudson’s intention, we interrupt him here to murmur  that complaints about crosses in public places and “the ten commandments” being displayed on the walls of government and judicial buildings, or grumbles about public prayer, are not “relentless” as the Inquisition and Witch Trials of the religious once were, or the jihad is now.

The result is an inherent suspicion of anyone without faith, the assumption that atheists are necessarily antagonistic toward religion, or worse – inherently anti-American.

Speaking for ourselves, we are antagonistic towards religion, though not aggressive towards religious people – unless in self-defense.

But inherently anti-American, atheism is not. Patriotism and atheism do not have any bearing on each other. There is nothing about atheism that makes it necessarily anti anything except religion.

As Hudson rightly says –

Nothing could be further from the truth. Ayn Rand is perhaps the best example of an atheist whose unrelenting Americanism has been established beyond question. Rand was an anti-communist long before it was cool. More than that, she escaped the Soviet Union and took great effort under blistering criticism to warn Americans about the horrors behind the Iron Curtain. Her first book, We the Living, was panned by critics who claimed she didn’t understand the noble Soviet experiment. Aversion to Objectivism among religious conservatives seems to ignore this history, along with Rand’s fundamental arguments.

It is popular among theists to assert that belief in God is an essential prerequisite to a morality which recognizes natural law and the rights of the individual. The Soviet Union is cited among other tyrannical regimes as an example of atheistic thought manifest in government. However, if atheism leads inexorably to progressivism and communism, why did the atheist Rand spend her entire life decrying collectivism and advocating individual rights more aggressively than most of her American contemporaries? The answer is worth pursuing, and can be found in her work. …

And he concludes:

The line which divides friend from foe within the Tea Party ought not be belief in God, but recognition of individual rights. In a world where government acted only to secure those rights, religious freedom would be assured for the theist and atheist alike.

Agreeing with an atheist like Rand about individual rights, and working in tandem to affect their protection, in no way compromises religious conviction. Atheism is not contagious. Why then vet political relationships with a religous test? What end does that serve? We don’t expect religious cohesion with our mechanics, co-workers, grocers, or in other incidential relationships. Why expect it in our political coalitions?

The Tea Party’s wise focus on economic and legal concerns ought to exclude religious affiliation as it excludes social issues.  The goal of affecting public policy consistent with the principles of fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government, and free markets is explicitly secular. … In the face of statist opponents who are strengthened by division in the movement, Tea Partiers ought to unite on principles of civil government and leave religious distinction to religious forums.

We like to think most Tea Party members would agree with that.

The Last Testament: A Memoir by God (with David Javerbaum), Simon and Schuster, New York,  383 pages

God is a happily married divinity. He and his wife, Ruth (yes, she of the Book) have three children, Zach, Jesus, and Kathy.

Zach’s nickname is “the Holy Ghost”, H.G. for short.

Kathy begged for a sojourn on earth to enjoy some martyrdom, so God sent her to be Joan of Arc.

Jesus is “a classic middle child”. His frequent weeping irritates his father (“the kid was a pussy”). When Jesus wanted to be born as a human being, God was strongly against it.

“My son, a person?” I screamed at him.

However, after much cajoling by Ruth (“It might just be the best thing that’s ever happened to our little Jeez. Would you think about it, dear? For me?” ), God “softened somewhat”. He explains to the human reader:

At least insofar as accepting that Jesus was my son; and that as his father it was my duty to support him in whatever career path he chose to follow; even one as patently silly as dying for thy sins.

So for his sake, and Ruth’s, I swallowed my fury; and told him that whatever help he needed, I would provide; and whatever trials and tribulations he would face on his mission, I would help see him through. So that when it was all over, if Jesus’s time on earth ended (as I was sure it would) in some kind of nightmarish ordeal,

At least he could not accuse me of forsaking him, or leaving him hanging.

As we know from a previous Testament, he didn’t keep that promise. By his own account – confirming the information provided in two previous Testaments – he is a mischievous deceiver.

Far worse, he is a sadist. He candidly admits that he likes watching human beings suffer.

For lo, I had destroyed the world in a Flood; I had razed the Tower of Babel; I had leveled Sodom and Gomorrah [not for being gay-friendly cities but for being “the twin hubs of a massive international money-laundering operation”]; all manner of catastrophe had I already visited upon you, in the name of righteousness;

Yet it was only then – after finding myself enthralled by the slow silent agony of one I greatly loved [Abraham as he prepared to sacrifice his son];

I say, it was only then, that I first began to consider the possibility, that there was something seriously wrong with me.

He confesses the “real reason” why he allowed Job “to be so horribly afflicted”.

“It was not to test Job, but to test me.

I wanted to see if I could watch him endure his agonies without experiencing any of that same unnameable thrill I had derived from watching the binding of Isaac … and the countless other atrocities and tragedies that I had over the centuries allowed – or, sometimes, caused – to happen.

Such as the Crusades:

For pure spiritual entertainment, nothing compared to the Crusades …

There is nothing more gratifying than watching tens of thousands of people express their undying love for thee by running through tens of thousands of other people who possess equally undying love for thee with a pike.

(Especially knowing that in the end, the theological problems of two great faiths amounteth not to a hill of beans in thy crazy world.)

He’s also politically correct, and like any lefty he will boast of his compassion without minding that his deeds contradict his words.

How he feels for Goliath!  The giant had to be killed by David  – God guided the killing stone himself  – but the poor guy’s death caused the King of the Universe more than a pang or two. “Never have I felt more sadness about ending a life,” he says, because:

Goliath was a faithful husband; Goliath was a trusted friend; Goliath was a community activist; Goliath worked with troubled youth in inner-city Gaza; Goliath was cofounder of the Philistine Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

He’s no deep thinker. He offers no profound analysis of why he created the universe or the way he’s run it. His tastes are not refined.

“No anecdote or commentary I provide [of the story of Joseph in Egypt] could ever improve upon Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”

And when he effects, with difficulty, the conception of Jesus through a “miraculous act of asexual reproduction”, in order to show the world “from the start that he was both Word and flesh; Man and God; a subtle concept we knew would be difficult of comprehension”, he adds: “Indeed, I myself have never really figured it out.”

His Testament is a tell-all book that doesn’t quite tell all. He will not divulge the secrets of the afterlife. He doesn’t offer the least illumination of his “mysterious ways”. In  fact, he couldn’t do that if he wanted to:

I move in mysterious ways; and my reason for doing so is even more mysterious; and the reason for that reason’s mysteriousness is so mysterious, even I forget what it is.

Yet he craves understanding and sympathy (in addition to burnt offerings). After much boasting and gloating and wisecracking, a cri de coeur of existential doubt bursts from him:

For 6,000 years I have tried to be the kind of God people could believe in; but recently I have come to question the very nature of my divinity. …

What is wrong with me, me? …

I feel useless.

I feel like there’s no point in going on.

Maybe humanity would be better off without me …

So I’m turning to me.

I’m putting it all in my hands.

Yea, I made the universe; I made mankind; out of me spools the totality of all that ever was and is and ever will be.

But who am I?

Why am I here?

Do I even exist?

God knows.

I am the Lord everyone’s God, King of the Universe. …

I am he to whom people turn for comfort after being devastated by acts of me.

And I am he in whose name  hundreds of millions of people have given their lives, or taken others’; and they would not do that for just anybody. …

But I am the entity without whose constant presence all of humanity would plummet into reason. …

And I … am … back!!!!

Still he needs to go into rehab, spending “a few months in a secluded fractal of the tenth dimension getting my head together”.

He returns with “a new self-acceptance”, in time for the run-up to Armageddon which he and H.G. and Jesus have definitely scheduled for December 21, 2012 – unless The Last Testament sells well enough to justify “a little wiggle room to leave time for a sequel”.

Unaccountably, he cannot foretell if his book will be a success.

He fears it may cause offense to Muslims, although he treats Muhammad gingerly, feeling “great apprehension concerning the writing of this section”.

I am Allah, the Wise, the All-Powerful, yet these days even I get a little nervous talking about Islam.

He indemnifies his publishers “from any and all outrage, fatwa, or all-out jihad that may result from the contents of the portions of this book pertaining to Islam.”

No doubt the old rogue savors the irony that the most appreciative readers of his Last Testament are likely to be atheists. He might even have written it specially for them.

Jillian Becker    November 1, 2011

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Note to our readers:  The publishers of The Last Testament have let us know that “God could not be more thrilled” with our review.