Burt Prelutsky writes:

Liberals are so intolerant they often can’t even bear to have people say “Merry Christmas” in their presence. In fact, they can’t even bring themselves to recognize it as a celebration of a specific event. Instead, they dismiss it as the holiday season or the winter solstice. Isn’t it funny how nobody feels the compulsion to exchange gifts or attend church services or decorate their homes for the summer solstice? Well, in spite of Kwanzaa and Chanukah, this is Christmas season because most Americans are celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ. Even though I’m Jewish, even I have to acknowledge it’s a special occasion, and those who feel entitled to disparage it are worse than Scrooge. They are bigoted, intolerant, ignoramuses.

We entirely agree with him. 

And we think that the Jewish mother who complained about the singing of ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ at her kid’s school was being narrow, intolerant, stupid, and wrong.  

However, concerning that atheist statement next to a Christmas Nativity scene in Washington State’s Capitol in Olympia, and the comments being bandied about that Christianity should be treated with respect, we have this to say: No religion has to be treated with respect. While it is good to treat people with respect as a general rule, there isn’t an idea ever conceived that should not be criticized, with whatever emotion the critic feels, including contempt and disgust. Religious ideas are only ideas like any others, and trying to protect them by law (as the UN is now trying to protect the horrid ideas of Islam) is narrow, intolerant, stupid and wrong. 

 Could you imagine a worse life to be born into - such that many millions are born into - than that of a Muslim woman somewhere in – say - North Africa?  

 Genitally-mutilated, secluded, wrapped in a black tent, forced into marriage, illiterate, frequently beaten, liable to lose her children at any time, not permitted to go out to work, and not allowed to have medical treatment because doctors are male and may not even see her, let alone examine her. If ever a life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short – and full of pain and sorrow - it is the life of this woman. 

She can be divorced by her husband at his whim, and if she has no family to return to, can be abandoned to starvation.   

Because of her clitorectomy and infibulation, it is agony to menstruate and copulate, and childbirth for her is even more excruciating than it is for most women.

Her children can be taken from her at any time. Her boys, even when they are little, can be sold into slavery, made to fight and kill, or to walk over minefields. Her daughters too can be taken as slaves, for a life of perpetual labour and sexual exploitation; or forced into marriage well before puberty, to endure the same sort of life that she endures.

If she is raped she will be killed by her own male relatives in an ‘honor killing’; or, if condemned to be executed by the state, she will be buried in earth up to her shoulders and stoned to death. 

Of course feminists of the free world are up in arms about this, making a huge fuss about it at the United Nations, doing everything they can with passionate zeal and dedication to help their Muslim sisters – aren’t they?

Actually, no. One hardly hears a peep from them about it.  Even to notice it, they pretend, would be ‘racism’. Because, you see, they are almost all on the political left. Leftism, for its devotees, trumps all; and the left, though it brags of caring about the oppressed – indeed, that is it’s very raison d’etre - is in reality compassionless, deliberately blind and ignorant, and universally actively or passively cruel.  

Jillian Becker  December 2008

 Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion edited by Paul Marshall, Lela Gilbert, Roberta Green Ahmanson,  OUP  New York  220 pages

Notable for ignorance of religion are the atheist authors of several recent books (Richard Dawkins is one of the crop) who have written against it at length with less knowledge than they’d dare bring to any other topic. Their justifiable disdain for belief in the supernatural blinds them to the importance of this set of ideas that has  helped to shape history.  But a critic’s scorn is valuable only if he knows what he’s scorning.  (If you wanted advice on wines, would you consult a teetotaler?)  Atheists can make a perfectly good case for rejecting the idea of a deity without immersing themselves in theology; but if they want to criticize actual religions, they should study them.

Now comes a book by religious authors objecting, with justice, to the ignorance of journalists who fail to see the importance of religion in current world affairs. It is true that journalists don’t know enough about religion. But very few people do, actually, including the religious. Besides, most journalists don’t know much about anything, especially the stories they cover. 

One of the essays, Religion and Terrorism: Misreading al Qaeda by Paul Marshall of the Hudson Institute, concerns the essentially religious motivation of al Qaeda. It is true and clear. Every reporter and commentator on world affairs should know what it teaches.   

Very different is God is Winning by Timothy Samuel Shah and Monica Duffy Toft. It contains a message so at odds with Paul Marshall’s that I wonder why he, as one of the editors of the collection, included it.

Here we are told that religion has become increasingly influential of late in global politics. Well, yes and no. It is true of one religion only, Islam: and wherever the authors cite a true instance of what they are trying to prove, it is an example of Islamic activity. What they don’t say – or see? – is that this religious surge is a terrible aggression.

The attack of 9/11 was a profoundly religious act. It was perpetrated in the name of Islam, the religion that is steadily, determinedly, and all too successfully advancing through the world with the intention of dominating it. This dark threat by one of the old established ‘revealed’ religions  (which is the sort of religion the authors are talking about rather than the new kind such as Socialism or Global-Warmism) is a force that needs to be confronted and defeated. What makes it formidable is that it’s engaged in a victory-or-death struggle for survival. It is itself under existential threat because its time has long since ended. The plain truth is that this is not an age of religion. Religion is not a fertile field any more, nor has been for a long time.  The last ‘new’ idea in religion that affected the course of events on any significant scale was eighteenth-century Methodism, which was a revivalist movement rather than a real innovation. Religion now is sterile.  What characterizes our time chiefly, and in terms of its achievements uniquely, is scientific enquiry. This is the Age of Science. It makes no difference how many people believe in a god or gods, worship in temples, perform rites and ceremonies, or declare their faith to be important to them; or that certain creeds are gaining converts; the fact remains that religion is no longer a fertile field.  In such a time as this a set of irrational beliefs claiming to encapsulate all truth and knowledge, conceived in the Dark Ages, which is what Islam is, cannot but be engaged in an existential struggle; and unless it is totally victorious, so that it can impose its darkness on the whole earth, stop Science in its tracks, destroy all that Science has achieved along with the technologies it has fathered, and utterly expunge scientific discovery from memory and record (as the Catholic Church once tried to do), Islam is doomed to be a fossil in the museum of  archaic ideas.  

To the authors of God is Winning, religion is evergreen and intrinsically good: and any religion is better than none. This can only mean that they would rather Islam predominated over the whole globe than a religion-free secularism. Yet they do not declare themselves to be against freedom and democracy - which a triumphant Islam would certainly snuff out – but insist that ‘as the world has become more free, more enlightened, and more prosperous, it has also become more religious’; that ‘democracy and democratization have empowered religion’; that ‘believers in a “march by history” toward some secular end-state are headed for more disappointment than most’; and that ‘modernization, democratization, and globalization have made [God] stronger’. Yet the only examples of world-affecting religious acts that they refer to are Islamic, and to the danger of Islam they seem as blind as any journalist.

How informed are they in general about the world we live in? Has it become more free? It’s hard to see that it has. Most Africans are not free. The North Koreans cannot be described as free; nor the majority of nations under Islamic rule; nor China, the biggest nation, where the religious are persecuted. And as for Europe, it blatantly disproves the authors’ thesis, though they do not seem to understand this. They note that as Europeans have become increasingly enlightened and prosperous they have become not more but less religious. They also notice that Europe’s native populations are shrinking, which brings them to declare (with a touch of Schadenfreude?) that ‘secularization is its own gravedigger’. But their observation of the fact that a lethal secularism arose from freedom and democracy, not a fresh bloom of religious belief, does not negate, alter, or even qualify their wistful conviction.

Among the Western, educated, prosperous nations, the United States of America is an exception that the authors happily cite. Most people here (we are told authoritatively by pollsters and statisticians) are and always have been religious to some degree at least, and here - perhaps as a result - the birthrate is stable (so it’s not digging its own grave). Yet not even the US proves the author’s case: for the US, though shaped by the influence of Christian values, remains a secular state. Its past and present can be said to demonstrate that free people may continue to be religious in the Age of Science, but not that religion naturally arises out of freedom, democracy, enlightenment and prosperity. Archaisms, like antiques, can be enjoyed. They can be freshened up and displayed as ‘neo-orthodoxies’, to use an oxymoronic expression of Shah’s and Toft’s. What they cannot do is reverse the arrow of time.    

Shah and Toft repeatedly speak of  ‘vitality’ in contemporary religion, and claim that it has given rise to a ‘resurgence in prophetic politics’. What they mean by ‘prophetic politics’, it emerges, is any political movement with a moral cause, or a jumble of causes, some of them familiar as pretexts for left-wing activism. Certain nationalist movements are counted as ‘prophetic politics’ if the people concerned share a religion. ‘Hindu nationalism’ is mentioned. (Mentioning is deemed sufficient, discursive argument is lacking.)  They are probably referring to the territorial dispute over Kashmir that mainly-Hindu India, growing in wealth and power, has with its Muslim neighbor Pakistan. This dispute is certainly national, with origins in old and persistent religious conflict, but no new religious fervor is driving it.  ‘Jewish Zionism’ (is there any other kind?) is also thrown in. But Zionism has nothing to do with religion. It was conceived as, and continues to be, an entirely secular movement, concerned with the recovery of the ancestral homeland of the Jews as a people, albeit a people uniquely defined by a specific religion.

Even localized revolutionary movements that notoriously claim to be Christian but are actually Marxist, are adduced by Shah and Toft as proof of religious resurgence. Indeed many terrorist organizations, particularly in South America, have been encouraged and even led by priests and pastors, who sanctify their incitement to murder by calling their ideology ‘liberation theology’ (if they’re Catholic) or ‘liberal theology’ (if they’re Protestant). The authors of God is Winning imply, whether they mean to or not, that this is fine with them because anything done in the name of religion is a good thing. Logically then - contrary to Paul Marshall’s judgment – al Qaeda is a good thing! But no: it is part of the worst political evil of our time. A nod to God is not worth any price.

Jillian Becker  December 2008

 Two books we recommend are CRY WOLF by Paul Drake and STEALTH JIHAD by Robert Spencer. 

They are both about the extreme danger to our civilization of infiltration by uncivilized aliens.  

‘Cry Wolf’ is modeled on George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ but tells a new story for a new political era. The farm animals keep the farm going after the human owners have died. Fences, vigilance, and guard dogs keep the wild animals out.  But first an act of compassion - temporary shelter for a wounded deer - and then a professorial owl’s lectures on the merits of ‘Multi-Animalism’ and the sin of xenophobia induce them to let in more and more feral beasts, to their ultimate doom.

‘Stealth Jihad’ is about the step-by-step advance of Islam within the United States, towards the political end of transforming the country into an Islamic tyranny.  

The allegory and the factual account reinforce each other.  

Scene from the Chabad Jewish center in Mumbai  

 

 Jaded Haven condemns Islam uncompromisingly: 

I find myself increasingly repulsed by Muslim practices and beliefs. Middle Eastern, African, Asian, American, the country of origin makes no difference. Women and children treated as chattel, genital mutilation, child brides, honor killings, culturally accepted pedophilia, the black drapes and head coverings, no rights, no votes, little to non-existent educational opportunities, no voice, no choices, no recourse. Persecution of homosexuals. Imprisonment, stoning and whipping for morality crimes. Lack of free speech. The foul treatment of non-Muslims in Islamic countries. The demented hatred of Jews. Sharia Law. Wahhabism. Madrasas. Blind obedience to Mullahs. Praying towards Mecca - a place on the map few will ever see. Individuality is shut down, originality and freedom of the mind discouraged. Islam pisses on human talents that fall outside the dark walls of its faith. Hell, I even dislike their dislike of dogs.

I don’t believe Mohamed was holy or a prophet. I think he was evil incarnate carrying the words of Satan himself to a crew of desert simpletons. Islam is a barbaric, unpeaceful, vile, unthinking distortion of worship. The fact that the majority of its adherents can’t even read the Koran smacks of mindless ignorance. I see no enlightenment elevating individual singularity or acknowledging gifted greatness in this corner of archaic darkness. My lip curls at their love of theocracies, a willingness to subjugate themselves to the whims of dissolute rulers along side an ancient text they can’t even begin to comprehend, subsuming their divine individuality to a tide of dogmatic mandates. I have no use, or respect, for the people who follow this religion. I’m past tired of their bombing, shooting, acid throwing, coup d’etat loving, rioting asses and it looks like the rest of the world could stand a break from these murdering bastards, too. According to a website that does nothing but track worldwide Islamic terrorism, there have been 12,328 [more - see our left margin] Islamic terrorist attacks since 9/11. Don’t tell me this isn’t an Islamic issue, the rest of us aren’t practicing murder on a worldwide scale in the name of religion.

 Dennis Prager has an excellent column at Townhall on the murder of the Jews in Mumbai. It is all worth reading. Here is an extract:

No one seems to find it odd that that Pakistani Muslim terrorists who hate India and want it to give up control of Indian Kashmir would send two of its 10 terrorists to kill perhaps the only rabbi in Mumbai. As Newsweek reported during the siege, Given that Orthodox Jews were being held at gunpoint by mujahideen (sic), it seemed unlikely there would be survivors. Newsweek, like just about everyone else, simply assumes Islamists will murder Jews whenever and wherever possible.

They are right.

For years I have warned that great evils often begin with the murder of Jews, and therefore non-Jews who dismiss Jew-hatred (aka anti-Semitism, aka anti-Zionism), will learn too late that Jew- and Israel-haters only begin with Jews but never end with them. When Israeli Jews were almost the only targets of Muslim terrorists, the world dismissed it as a Jewish or Israeli problem. Then it became an American and European and Filipino and Thai and Indonesian and Hindu problem…

It is exquisitely fitting that the same week the murders in Mumbai were taking place, the United Nations General Assembly passed six more anti-Israel resolutions. As it has for decades, the U.N. has again sanctioned hatred for a good and decent country as small on the map of the world as the Chabad House is on the map of Mumbai.

 Mark Steyn writes:

We’re in danger of missing the forest for the trees. The forest is the ideology. It’s the ideology that determines whether you can find enough young hotshot guys in the neighborhood willing to strap on a suicide belt or (rather more promising as a long-term career) at least grab an AK-47 and shoot up a hotel lobby. Or, if active terrorists are a bit thin on the ground, whether you can count at least on some degree of broader support on the ground. You’re sitting in some distant foreign capital but you’re of a mind to pull off a Mumbai-style operation in, say, Amsterdam or Manchester or Toronto. Where would you start? Easy. You know the radical mosques, and the other ideological front organizations. You’ve already made landfall.

It’s missing the point to get into debates about whether this is the "Deccan Mujahideen" or the ISI or al-Qaida or Lashkar-e-Taiba. That’s a reductive argument. It could be all or none of them. The ideology has been so successfully seeded around the world that nobody needs a memo from corporate HQ to act: There are so many of these subgroups and individuals that they intersect across the planet in a million different ways. It’s not the Cold War, with a small network of deep sleepers being directly controlled by Moscow. There are no membership cards, only an ideology. That’s what has radicalized hitherto moderate Muslim communities from Indonesia to the central Asian ‘stans to Yorkshire, and co-opted what started out as more or less conventional nationalist struggles in the Caucasus and the Balkans into mere tentacles of the global jihad.

And the name of the ideology is Islamism. Or simply Islam. How does Islamism differ from Islam if at all?  

What should we do about it? Inform ourselves about it thoroughly. Examine it critically. Argue against it insistently. Make it as unacceptable to the civilized world as Nazism, which it closely resembles.  

When its ideologues use violence, fight them actively.

Be aware of their encroachment by stealth, and resist, every step of the way, their continual efforts to subvert our system of law and government. 

 ‘Conscience,’ Hamlet says, ‘does make cowards of us all.’

Or does cowardice claim the name of conscience – steal its identity – in order to excuse itself? 

Conscience should drive us, as individuals, to do what we believe to be morally right. But it may be a self-flattering word we use to explain why we do certain things that we actually do out of craven cowardice itself, or the sort of moral vanity that makes us want to appear virtuous rather than to act virtuously.

Governments, nations, and crowds also cover their actions with the same deceptive claim, attributing to conscience what they really do out of weakness, fear, stupidity,  hypocrisy and ideological romanticism.  

False conscience calls itself by many other names, among them these: political correctness; respect for multiculturalism or ‘diversity’; a striving for ‘social justice’ or economic equality or ‘fairness’;  remorse for (largely imaginary) historical sins. Under such names all kinds of idiotic, unjust, destructive and evil things are done.    

Exempli gratia from the real world: 

In the US millions of voters elect an unqualified candidate to political office because he is black.

Navies refrain from capturing pirates, or (even better) summarily killing them, because ‘they have human rights’.

Liberal democratic welfare states keep and protect alien Islamic preachers of terrorism and sedition, lavishly house, feed, educate and medically treat them (and their pluralities of wives and families) at the expense of their intended victims, the indigenous population, because if they’re returned to their own countries they may be tortured or executed – or even because some witness at their possible trials might be tortured.

Western governments abrogate freedom because citizens use it to criticize Muslims and their beliefs. 

European police refrain from enforcing the law against Muslim offenders.  

In Britain the rule of a single Law of the Land, the very thing that makes it possible for people of different provenance to live together in harmony, is arbitrarily abandoned by the acceptance of Sharia as a second system of law, although it is incompatible with and contradictory to the enchorial system. 

Western nations reduce their defensive power to the point of ineffectiveness while vicious tyrannical regimes, inimical to the West and motivated by a declared intention of aggression, acquire arsenals of nuclear weapons. 

Governments interfere in markets and impoverish the people.  

Jillian Becker  November 21, 2008

The US victory in Iraq is bigger than even President Bush and his outgoing administration seem to realize. 

First, it can now be proclaimed as victory: 

 If Barack Obama had gotten his way, Iraq would now be in the hands of Islamists, and America’s image would have suffered a crushing blow. He voted to cut off funding for the troops, just when they needed it most, and still refuses to admit he was wrong.

Well, he was wrong, and George W. Bush deserves credit for refusing to back down when all around him were losing heart: “The war is over and we won.” [Quotations from Little Green Footballs]

And, secondly, how big and important the victory is can be best be understood from a study published by the Hudson Institute’s Center on Islam, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World. It tells how the jihadists in Iraq, Zarqawi and his successors, prepared to re-establish the caliphate. They even had the caliph chosen and ready. They saw this as a step to Islamic world domination. After Zarqawi himself was killed in June 2006, his followers ‘determined to turn Iraq into a battleground [and] the incubator for their grand vision of a unified Islamic empire under the aegis of a ruling caliph.’ This vision enthralled a new generation of jihadists. As  a winning ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq’ (assuming, as it were, the al-Qaeda franchise) they could have drawn thousands more fighters. They declared an ‘Islamic State of Iraq’ which was to be the center of victorious Islam, with Baghdad as its capital. Had the surge not take place, had it not turned the local tribal leaders against the jihadis, the triumph of militant Islam over the United States would have been seen throughout the Islamic world as a victory of historic proportions, ‘a victorious Islamic regeneration’; a caliphate might well have been established, and the non-Muslim world subjected to an onslaught of terrorism - possibly nuclear terrorism - without precedent.

The study is long, but very interesting and well worth reading. Here are two riveting passages from it:

The American public was uncurious as to the identity, nature, and goals of its enemy in Iraq. And, unfortunately, U.S. leaders and commanders were mostly complicit in such willful unawareness. The lack of interest on the part of the public was partly due to bitter partisan recriminations over the Bush administration’s policy in waging the Iraq war, and over who in Washington was to blame for the insurgency that ensued. Consequently, the doctrines of the Bush administration regarding preemptive strikes and democracy in the Middle East came under incessant scrutiny from the administration’s domestic political foes. Meanwhile, the doctrines of the jihadists were overlooked or, in the few cases where they were considered, dismissed as esoteric. Fantastical as they may be, these doctrines do indeed motivate and inform the enemy’s actions and strategy, and their significance was not recognized…

The corollary to the military defeat now being experienced by the jihadists is the even more agonizing prospect of doctrinal collapse: the heralded caliphate is stillborn, and the glorious vision of a reinvigorated Islamic state has been smashed. The anguish and demoralization brought about by this byproduct of battlefield victory cannot be overstated. To smash the dreams of a man who lives for a cause, who endures cruel deserts and damp caves while awaiting martyrdom, is a fate far worse than death. In a battle of wills, young men are able to summon the necessary willpower to press a button and to detonate themselves among innocent bystanders. They do so for the cause of jihad, and for the deferred utopia of a resurrected and avenging Islamic world power. Nothing breaks the will of the individual jihadist more than to see his ideology begin to bear fruit, only to watch that fruit rot away right before his eyes. Such has been the impact of the Zarqawist Islamic State of Iraq—the caliphate-to-be, under the Commander of the Faithful Abu Umar al-Baghdadi the Qurayshite—and such the bitter aftertaste of its ruinous downfall.