Posted 2:54 PM by Gene

Okay, CURLEY'S (Nyuk! Nyuk! Nyuk!) STOOGES, we get the message. No one wants war. War is hell. War is a catastrophe. But consider this, QUAKERS: If we hadn't fought World War II Americans would probably be saluting a SWASTIKA, or the HAMMER and SICKLE. And while you might have become an APPROVED STATE RELIGION under the latter, would it have been worth the cost -- which would probably have entailed millions of dead anyway, and whole races and RELIGIONS wiped out?

There is probably not a way of reporting a stunt like this dispassionately, but NEWS HACKS don't help by almost NEVER being DISPASSIONATE.

P. S. We operate under the suspicion you FRIENDS kept your BOUCHES FERMEZED during the HOLOCAUST -- just as we know the SUPER-LIBERAL SOCIAL CLUBS kept a LONG DISTANCE from CAMBODIA under POL POT. SHUT UP, QUAKERS. You speak with NO MORAL AUTHORITY.

AN UPDATE ON 3/15/2005: This article from the Holocaust Encyclopedia clarifies the Quakers' role in those Final Solution days. To their credit the leading Friends organizations did provide relief and refugee services to European Jews. But they were close with the Nazis (ostensibly because they had a good rep in Germany after WWI), and

[s]uch activities were, however, inhibited by the refusal of the Quaker rank and file to assist actively in relief, either financially or by taking in refugee families.

At best, then, the Quakers provided the humanitarian equivalent of what Jeanne Kirkpatrick once called "quiet diplomacy." At best.