So, this weekend, Mr. Butterfly and I joined my friend and her husband for dinner at their place. Over the years that they’ve been together, I’ve known that the husband is into conspiracy theories. He actually gave me a copy of Loose Change. The conspiracies that he has always talked about seemed to be innocuous ramblings about the Illuminati and whatnot, so I listen with half my brain, then forget it. Lately, however, he seems to have fallen hook, line, and sinker for the idea that certain prominent newsmakers from the British royal family to Angelina Jolie are shape-shifting reptilian humanoids that he likes to refer to as “lizard people.” If I casually comment that I like Natalie Portman, for example, he counters with the following comment: “she’s a lizard.”
It’s annoying at most, but I was nevertheless curious about this lizard thing so I googled it. It turns out that this is only one of the wacky theories of David Icke. As I read more and more of Icke’s conspiracy theories, I realized that my friend’s husband has been formulating all of his ideas based on this one man’s delusional rantings.
Back to the dinner: While I couldn’t care less about most of the stuff my friend’s husband talks about, I was all ears when right in the middle of dessert, he unabashedly expressed his contempt for the public school system for including Holocaust history in his son’s 3rd grade curriculum because he is against the recognition of the State of Isreal and believes that Holocaust sympathy is the sole purpose for U.S. military involvement in the Middle East. If you read enough about Icke, you’ll see that he espouses the idea that the Jewish elite backed the Holocaust financially and all the other anti-semitic “Jews are evil, money-grubbers” garbage. I was shocked that he actually said any of this because I never knew that he thought this way, but it also made me very uncomfortable because Mr. Butterfly is Jewish. As in: his grandparents were lucky enough to get out of Europe before being snared by the Nazis so the topic is near and dear to him (as it is for every Jewish person, I’m sure).
Afterward, when Mr. Butterfly and I talked about it, he told me that he was torn between two options: (1) don’t say anything because we are guests in their home, the wife is my friend and not my husband’s, and it’s probably better not to be antagonistic when it’s rare that my husband and this guy ever see each other, or (2) speak up and defend the facts about the Holocaust including that there were cultures besides the Jews who were persecuted against, blah blah blah. In the end, he had decided not to say anything, provided that my friend’s husband didn’t get too out of hand, at which point he might’ve felt compelled to say something. Honestly, the guy wasn’t prepared to debate any of these opinions. We could both tell that he was merely repeating what he had read on the internet and wouldn’t be able to defend any of the information without talking in circles. We’re also not sure if it ever occured to him that Mr. Butterfly (or for that matter anyone he spews this crap to) is or might be Jewish. Not that it makes it less offensive, of course.
I’m of two minds on this. One part of me thinks that it was prudent for my husband to stay silent and wait for the subject to change because once someone whole-heartedly believes a conspiracy theory there is no way to argue with them; but the other part of me, while I was too stunned at that moment to say anything coherent, thought these ideas needed to be challenged. If nothing else, to bring to his attention that the person he was talking to belonged to the very group that he was disparaging. So what would you have done in this situation?
