Rabbi Shmuley Responds to Richard Dawkins Comparing Him to Hitler

Has Dawkins lost his marbles? Read Rabbi Shmuley's letter to Dawkins (his one-time friend) after Dawkins compared him to Hitler.

Dear Richard,

I am in receipt of your open letter of May 2.

An ancient Rabbinical teaching says that one should respond to points in the order in which they are made. And that was my plan until I came across the part of your letter where you compare my speech at the IdeaCity convention to Hitler and say he would be proud of me.

Perhaps it was providence that your letter was posted on your website on World Holocaust Remembrance Day. Are you really so callous? Have you developed such uncontrollable loathing to people of faith that you would equate a Rabbi who was your friend and who hosted you at his home and at so many public forums and debates to a monster who killed six million Jews and bombed the people of England mercilessly?

Surely, you are aware that British academia has become a world epicenter of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment. You are familiar, I am sure, with the shameful story of your colleague, Oxford Pathology Professor Andrew Wilkie, refusing to accept an Israeli doctoral applicant because he served in the Israeli army, or the shocking and disgraceful decision by the British Academics Union to bar fellow Israeli academics from academic conferences in the UK.

And now you would add to this infamy by comparing me to Hitler? Really Richard, I mean no disrespect and once knew you to be a very genial and decent man, but Hitler? Have you lost your mind? Your loathsome comment brings you, Oxford University, and Charles Simonyi who endowed your chair into disrepute and you should issue an immediate apology.

Time for a reality check. The forum of which you speak, The IdeaCity Convention in Toronto, is one of the world’s leading media forums. They invited us to argue our ideas about atheism and religion on a stage in which I spoke directly after you. I sat right next to you. When you saw me you barely said hello, and then, just before you spoke, you gave me a card explaining that you would not be staying for my response to your comments. Amid your casual dismissal of me, I started my presentation by referring to you as ‘”a true intellectual, a very fine man, and extremely humble.” I added that we had been friends at Oxford and had debated on religion and evolution. You claim my rebuttal was “a ranting attack,” yet anyone who watched the video will see that the audience laughed over a dozen times – go and count them – during a twenty minute presentation. While you listened to me and heard Hitler, the celebrated convener of the conference, Moses Znaimer, wrote to me on July 23, 2007, “With your terrific contribution to [the conference] still ringing in my ears, I’d like to send you my formal thanks… We’ve had great feedback about the conference as a whole and you are certainly one of the top reasons why.” Press reports of my speech which are available online were similarly laudatory. Indeed, when it was over two Canadian TV companies were so enamored of my presentation that they approached me to discuss hosting a TV series. And contrary to your comments that I decided to attack you after I had learned that you were leaving to the airport, I was actually quite disappointed that you did not stay, and was relieved to hear from the conference organizers that you had stood glued to my comments on the outside speaker.

I consider the speech I gave at IdeaCity to have been a fine rebuttal of your dismissal of faith and encourage the readers of this open letter to please view it on YouTube, or my website home page, where it has been available for close to a year. Perhaps, as a scientist who respects fact over fiction, you too should have viewed it, Richard, before you decided to take the incomprehensible step of comparing a Rabbi whom Newsweek just chose as one of the ten most influential in the United States to Hitler. I am well aware of the fact that you believe religious people to be “know-nothings,” weak-minded illiterates who require a myth to get through the travails of life. Some would regard such condescension as elitist arrogance. You have a right to be egotistical. But you have no right to compare a Rabbi who refutes your arguments to the most demonic murderer that ever lived.

As to your point that the video of the Oxford debate, which you denied ever happened and which your atheism side lost, is not on my website, please look on the left-hand column of my home page. Significant portions of the debate have also been posted on YouTube.

Read the entire letter at Rabbi Shmuley Boteach's website.