DAWKINS THE UNHOLY HYPOCRITE
PROFESSOR Richard Dawkins (pictured), the nearest thing that atheists have to a prophet, gave a lengthy interview to The Times on Saturday to promote his appearance at a festival of astronomy.
Nothing wrong with promoting oneself. Yet Dawkins rarely misses an opportunity on his Twitter stream to tell his followers he would never buy The Times, because, he says, its owner Rupert Murdoch is ‘so evil’.
Dawkins is not alone in that opinion, but his reasoning might be very different from many on the Left who share it. You see, Murdoch is a Papal Knight, awarded the Pontifical Order of St Gregory by Pope John Paul II for ‘promoting the Church and the Holy See’: the media magnate had donated $10 million to a new cathedral in Los Angeles.
I can understand how this horrified Dawkins — he regards the Catholic Church as irredeemably wicked. He is probably also aware that Murdoch’s empire includes HarperCollins Christian Publishing, which prints the New International Version of the Bible.
Yet which company was sold equally exclusive rights to Richard Dawkins’s autobiography, the cover of which is emblazoned across the Professor’s Twitter site? Yup, Rupert Murdoch’s very own HarperCollins.
There we have it: Richard Dawkins stigmatises Rupert Murdoch as ‘evil’, refuses to buy his products — but uses them for his self-promotion and for his own profit as author. PRESIDENT Vladimir Putin declares on state TV that the attacks on pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine ‘remind me of World War II when German forces encircled Russian cities like Leningrad’. This is all of a piece with the Kremlin’s lies that the Ukraine parliament is under the sway of ‘Nazis’. It also conveniently overlooks the fact that while Germany invaded Russia in 1941, in the Ukraine of 2014 it is Russian troops which are the invader. Here’s another historical fact: Western Ukraine was forcibly incorporated into Mr Putin’s beloved Soviet Union following the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. And it was the same unholy compact between Stalin and Hitler that led to Russia’s invasion of Poland. No wonder Poland is terrified of what Putin is doing and has closed its airspace to Russian government flights.