Anti-Defamation League Press Release re: Expelled

If Ben Stein was trying to prevent future genocide with his ridiculous propaganda, some of the people whose families were most affected by it wouldn't seem to want his "help."

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.

— Anti-Evolution Film Misappropriates the Holocaust
Anti-Defamation League press release
April 29, 2008

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency continues the story, including a statement by the National Center for Science Education's Susan Spath:

We are concerned about the long-term impact of this film and its irresponsible misrepresentation of a terrible history. It propagates the message that Nazis were Darwinist, with the implication that today's Darwinists are proto-Nazis, and that's not OK.

— Groups rap film's Holocaust linkage
April 30, 2008

As someone whose family was decimated by the Holocaust, I have no hesitation about adding my very small voice to the growing chorus that is rightly pointing out Stein's misappropriation of the lives of the victims of a man who used religious imagery and the misplaced faith of those who followed him to create one of the most horrible episodes in the history of modern man. My maternal grandfather fled Eastern Europe shortly before Germany invaded. The village in which he and my great-grandparents lived was so thoroughly wiped off the map that today we can't determine what country it was in. Shortly after he gained American citizenship, my grandfather enlisted in the army and returned to Europe to fight in the war, enduring a good deal of anti-Semitism from those with whom he served, many of whom had never met a Jew before and, as he told the story, "expected me to have horns."

In my experience with biologists, I have not encountered intolerance. One of the basic ideas we learn from Darwin's theories, in fact, is that diverse populations are the most likely to survive. Humanity does, and should, come in all phenotypes. Racial purity, if such a thing could even be said to exist, would be a regrettable situation. Phenotypic and genotypic variety is a positive situation. It's the exact opposite of what Hitler and all those who follow his twisted and brutal ideals today preach.

Stein's attempt to equate evolutionary biology to genocide is deplorable and, in fact, is deplored by those sensible enough to see it for what it is. I find it vile that this third-rate comedian, fourth-rate economist and fifth-rate speech writer felt that he was justified in using the suffering of families like mine in fomenting ignorance and division in America.

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