In the middle ages an Anchoress was a woman who lived in a small, sealed room inside a church;she would have visual access to the Sanctuary and to Holy Communion. Usually there was also a small side window at which she could converse with visitors, receive foods, etc. As a shy sort of person who prefers to hang in the background, the persona suits.
Consider this my window. Instead of passing me food, comments will do! I ask only that you be civil, because I do believe that decent people can disagree and still be decent people.
All posts are copyrighted, 2007 The Anchoress. Blog administrator is not responsible for content of comments. Note: All emails are considered fair game for publication, unless you specifically tell me not to quote you or use your name, in which case I am happy to comply.
I think I can count on my hands the number of times I have revisited a past post specifically to discuss a response to it, but my post on generated a great deal of email (very little of it the usual hate mail, which surprised me), and a few interesting blogger responses. Nate of blog took some issue with me, from a Catholic perspective and wondered if I have lost sight of the supernatural componants of this war:
If we fail to identify our enemies in a spiritual manner, and only see their material acts of violence, then our response with be on that material level and fail to address the underlying enemy - evil itself. For isn’t that what we are truly at war with - evil?
The Christ-like and Christian response to evil is merciful sacrifice - love to the end. We must entrust ourselves to this new form of divine warfare - a spiritual battle for the heart of mankind.
Back during the Great Big Benedict/Muslim Debacle of 06, I wrote a piece for Pajamas Media on and said therein:
“Let’s keep God out of this and talk as men,” has been the tactic of governments and nations for decades, and it has not worked.
Ultimately it cannot work for the plain and simple reason that Islamists are not secular-thinking people living in what is thought of as a “natural” world. In fact, much of Islamic thinking - much of Islamic perspective - is utterly given over to the supernatural, to those things “seen and unseen.” And while governments “think as human beings,” Benedict, the Bishop of Rome, the man who sits on the Throne of Peter (whom Jesus advised to “think as God does,”) is perhaps uniquely qualified to deliver to these supernaturally-focused people something they cannot fail to understand, a supernatural challenge.
And he does so while fully understanding that within the supernatural realm there are forces for the light, and for the darkness.
Clearly, I have been thinking not just materially but spiritually. I take Nate s point, and love, love, love is certainly the perfect solution to any problem, but it is never an expedient one; we re living in a reality that involves nuclear weapons, so expediency (at least in clearing away the underbrush of incessant Jihad so we can get to that love part) has some value, here.
In this case, I think I might take a line through , the eloquent Paragraph Farmer, when he makes an excellent paraphrase in Nate s comments section: “military force is regrettably necessary in this case because it buys the time we need to wage successful ideological and spiritual campaigns against Islamic jihadism.”
Kevin from sent this bit of wisdom from G. K.
Chesterton and his book, The Everlasting Man, in which Gilbert says it all so much better than I ever could. As usual.
[A] man reading the Gospel sayings would not find a word of all that obvious rhetoric against war which has filled countless books and odes and orations; not a word about the wickedness of war, the wastefulness of war, the appalling scale of the slaughter in war and all the rest of the familiar frenzy; indeed not a word about war at all.
There is nothing that throws any particular light on Christ s attitude toward organized warfare, except that he seems to have been rather fond of Roman soldiers.
Writes Kevin: When discussing the power of Christ s use of the comparative in several degrees (the comparing of a lower thing to a higher and yet that higher with a higher still; of thinking on three planes all at once. ), Chesterton observes that this faculty is not one that commonly belongs to these simplifiers of the Gospel; those who insist on what they call a simple morality and others call a sentimental morality.
It is not at all covered by those who are content to tell everybody to remain at peace. On the contrary, there is a very striking example of it in the apparent inconsistency between Christ s sayings about peace and about a sword. It is precisely this power which perceives that while a good peace is better than a good war, even a good war is better than a bad peace.
As I wrote last week. No sane person wants war. But sometimes war comes.
Islamofascist terrorism has been rising for the past thirty years and it shows no signs of abating. Inexorable evil needs an .
I also got an email from a member of the military, D.
R., and I am reprinting most of his email, because we can never hear too much from our soldiers:
Many of us in the military know about the political chatter swirling about. We just shrug and say, what else is new.
The stakes in Iraq, Afghanistan, HOA, and elsewhere are enormous. We would rather fight here than in our own streets. And, this is the point many Americans do not believe will happen if we leave this fight early.
They see this as an abstraction, or more as fear-mongering. It is not. The assumption that a Minuteman response would occur is like believing that a snowball won t melt in 100-deg weather.
The Minuteman response would not happen simply because of fear and the terrible loss of life we ll see.
The terrorists we face over here are stone-cold killers. They would kill their own if it means they get to propagate their hate and evil.
And, they are evil in every sense of the word. They are not misunderstood, they are not the misforgotten, etc. They do know who they are.
Many terrorists come from a world of privilege, more privilege than many of their kinfolk.
President Bush has done his absolute best. He s the right man for the time.
This is not an easy war by any means a stretch of the imagination. We do put in very long days and very, very short nights. Sometimes we see very good results, sometimes the results aren t so good.
War by nature is very messy. While we do our best to plan for contingencies, we adjust accordingly. With regard to the Vice President and former SecDef Rumsfeld, they ve been the best to us.
They understand the stakes, and this is most important not the political usefulness. You want people in leadership positions who understand the stakes, willing to make the hard decisions, and take responsibility regardless of the situation. The Vice President and Rumsfeld are such people.
But, this is a point that can be argued at another time and by others.
For your son, keep him close. If he wants to join, encourage and support him.
Military life can be difficult at times, but there s no other experience that is better. If he wants to go another route, encourage and support him. Not everyone should see the face of war.
Thank you, D, and God bless you and your fellows.
Gerald at , which is always an interesting stop for Catholics, has two particularly interesting posts up this week.
The first discusses a recent South Park episode (the infamous Steve Irwin/Satan s Party in Hell episode) which also skewered Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles, his abomination of a Cathedral, and the whole gay priest posse that seems to have been associated with him (fairly or not )
Some Catholics are furious about it.
I m not. You ll want to check out Gerald s post and the comments yourself.
Miss Kelly is and if everyone feels as she does, then it s no wonder the churches are being re-outfitted as mosques.
C mon, Rome, reform some reforms and restore some things, pronto! Let s get the VCII implemented the way it was supposed to be implemented that would be a nice change.
UPDATE: Gerald has a new podcast up so if you are interested in liturgy and like podcasts, it should be right up your alley.
As a long-time fan of Mark Steyn I looked forward to reading out of Human Events, just as I have long-anticipated his book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.
One of Steyn s consistant themes over the past few years is a warning that Europe was not merely the sick patient of the West - that she was actively transitioning from life unto death, and death will bring no victory, only only backward momentum:
Basically the European nations are dying and the populations in them are turning into relatively hostile Muslim populations, not all of them terrorists, but all of them, almost all of those people not sympathetic to America and American interests. And I feel that the great assumption that we all have, that the present tense is somehow permanent, or that it’s like technological progress.
You know, it’s like, cars don’t go backwards. You don’t suddenly have a Cadillac Escalade and you go out into the yard one morning and it’s turned into a Ford Model T and it’s got a rumble seat and all kinds of other stuff in it. You take the view that—we think that social progress is like technological progress, that it can never be reversed, but I think it can be reversed and I think a lot of the world is going to be re-primitivized in the decades ahead and America has to change.
For as long as I have been reading Steyn, he has used demographics to powerfully make his point. He does so in this book as well, and the numbers are sobering. America Alone is a book you will want to read, and I urge you to.
The world is going to look very, very different in another generation, and your children will be dealing with it. You need to anticipate it.
As if to whet your appetite, Brussels Journal has today a piece , and just as sobering and demonstrative:
The German author Henryk M.
Broder recently told the that young Europeans who love freedom, better emigrate. Europe as we know it will no longer exist 20 years from now. Whilst sitting on a terrace in Berlin, Broder pointed to the other customers and the passers-by and said melancholically: “We are watching the world of yesterday.
”
Europe is turning Muslim. As Broder is sixty years old he is not going to emigrate himself. “I am too old,” he said.
However, he urged young people to get out and “move to Australia or New Zealand. That is the only option they have if they want to avoid the plagues that will turn the old continent uninhabitable.”
Many Germans and Dutch, apparently, did not wait for Broder’s advice.
The number of emigrants leaving the and has already surpassed the number of immigrants moving in. [emphasis mine - anchoress] One does not have to be prophetic to predict, like Henryk Broder, that Europe is becoming Islamic. Just consider the demographics.
The number of Muslims in contemporary Europe is estimated to be 50 million. It is expected to double in twenty years. By 2025, one third of all European children will be born to Muslim families.
Today Mohammed is already the most popular name for new-born boys in Brussels, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and other major European cities.
This article also addresses the inability and disinterest of secularist cultures (not, mind you secular governments, but the culture of the secular elite) to fight to keep what they have: In a recent op-ed piece in the Brussels newspaper De Standaard (23 October) the Dutch (gay and self-declared “humanist”) author Oscar Van den Boogaard refers to Broder’s interview. Van den Boogaard says that to him coping with the islamization of Europe is like “a process of mourning.
” He is overwhelmed by a “feeling of sadness.” “I am not a warrior,” he says, “but who is? I have never learned to fight for my freedom.
I was only good at enjoying it.”
We are in for an interesting few decades. The last few weeks have seen releases of books like Damon Linker s The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege, which sound the warning bell that American liberty is in danger from the Christian people - you know, the ones who built the Europe which now lies gasping and moribund under secularism.
Linker and his ilk take the extreme view that Christians in America are the equivalent of the Taliban.
But in worrying about what they perceive to be a turn toward religious governance in America (which would not be a particularly good thing, btw, but which I am also quite sure Americans would never ascent to) the fearful secularists are missing an important truth that is going to be meaningful to our own survival: eventually it is going to come down to America and Islamic regimes. If America is going to effectively fight people who have sensibilities which are locked not only into the here-and-now, but into the supernatural side, as well then we d damn well better not lose touch with our own supernatural sensibilities, with our own disposition of faith.
The Brussels Journal piece ends thusly: “If faith collapses, civilization goes with it,” says [Tom] Bethell. That is the real cause of the . Islamization is simply the consequence.
The very word Islam means “submission” and the secularists have submitted already. Many Europeans have already become Muslims, though they do not realize it or do not want to admit it.
People, particularly the hardline secularists, do not want to admit it but America is going to be forced to play things out on both a secular and supernatural stage, if she is going to stay alive, and not just alive but comprehensively American.
Those, like Rosie O Donnell, who would into the same boat do not realize that in doing so they are consigning themselves to Europe s fate. And Europe is dying. Europe will not fight.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, . Coverage of the turmoil , and the obit is being prepared. And Michelle Malkin .
Interestingly, the Washington Post is carrying three op-ed pieces today touching on women and Islam, , by Asra Q. Nomani, by Yvonne Ridley and by Farzaneh Milani.
In Nomani s piece, the veil is incidental to the rest of the article, which focuses on the problem of domestic violence within Islamic houses, and how that permitted violence can be extrapolated as permissable violence within the world:
Western leaders, including British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi, have recently focused on Muslim women s veils as an obstacle to integration in the West.
But to me, it is 4:34 that poses the much deeper challenge of integration. How the Muslim world interprets this passage will reveal whether Islam can be compatible with life in the 21st century. As Hadayai Majeed, an African American Muslim who had opened a shelter in Atlanta to serve Muslim women, put it, If it s okay for me to be a savage in my home, it s okay for me to be a savage in the world.
Not long after Mahmoud Shalash, an imam from Lexington, Ky., stood at the pulpit of my mosque and offered marital advice to the 100 or so men sitting before him. He repeated the three-step plan, with beat them as his final suggestion.
Upstairs, in the women s balcony, sat a Muslim friend who had recently left her husband, who she said had abused her; her spouse sat among the men in the main hall.
At the sermon s end, I approached Shalash. This is America, I protested.
How can you tell men to beat their wives?
They should beat them lightly, he explained. It s in the Koran.
Nomani also writes: As long as the beating of women is acceptable in Islam, the problem of suicide bombers, jihadists and others who espouse violence will not go away; to me, they form part of a continuum.
Interestingly, she ends her piece with some anecdotal evidence: should a woman make it clear to her husband that she would tolerate nothing so much as a crack with a rolled-up newspaper, this whole question of wife-beating would disappear.
Which suggests that if target countries and civilizations were to make it clear that they will not tolerate terrorism ah, well.
You can finish that sentence.
looks at the ancient and recent history of the veil and points out that there have always been Islamic women who loved the veil, and who hated it.
The most interesting, passionate and defensive of these three pieces is Yvonne Ridley s .
Ridley s conversion to Islam came after briefly being held captive by the Taliban in Afghanistan, during which time she promised her captives she would study Islam when set free:
Back home in London, I kept my word about studying Islam and was amazed by what I discovered. I d been expecting Koran chapters on how to beat your wife and oppress your daughters; instead, I found passages promoting the liberation of women. Two-and-a-half years after my capture, I converted to Islam
Having been on both sides of the veil, I can tell you that most Western male politicians and journalists who lament the oppression of women in the Islamic world have no idea what they are talking about.
Riley makes a heady defense for the veil and - in fine Western feminist fashion - she lashes out at the Western men who dare to critique the mandatory wearing of it. She conveniently forgets to mention that Western men have been trained over decades - by women like herself - to find this Muslim garb objectionable. She also seems not to realize that one of the first Western voices raised against enforced coverage was a woman s voice, as Mavis Leno, wife of Jay Leno, worked for years to bring attention to the subjegation of Muslim women.
Her piece is a fascinating hodgepodge of past and present prejudices all jumbling about as Riley works to justify her conversion from a feminist standpoint. Whether intending to or not, she demonstrates the mystery of voluntary surrender and the Pauline paradox, when I am weak, then I am strong. In this case, the paradox is the often true one that with (voluntary, I reiterate) subjugation comes freedom:
A careful reading of the Koran shows that just about everything that Western feminists fought for in the 1970s was available to Muslim women 1,400 years ago.
Women in Islam are considered equal to men in spirituality, education and worth, and a woman s gift for childbirth and child-rearing is regarded as a positive attribute.
Hmph. I think I could say precisely the same thing about Catholicism - in fact - but I somehow doubt a woman like Riley would concur with my assertions.
I doubt very much that she would look at, for instance, a Catholic nun in a traditional habit and see a woman who has been freed from social conformities (no fretting over hair, clothing, boob size) and is thus able to be reckoned with simply as and for herself, as a woman in full, and yet this is what she now declares she finds under the veil:
I was a Western feminist for many years, but I ve discovered that Muslim feminists are more radical than their secular counterparts. We hate those ghastly beauty pageants, and tried to stop laughing in 2003 when judges of the Miss Earth competition hailed the emergence of a bikini-clad Miss Afghanistan, Vida Samadzai, as a giant leap for women s liberation
Some young Muslim feminists consider the hijab and the nikab political symbols, too, a way of rejecting Western excesses such as binge drinking, casual sex and drug use. What is more liberating: being judged on the length of your skirt and the size of your surgically enhanced breasts, or being judged on your character and intelligence?
In Islam, superiority is achieved through piety not beauty, wealth, power, position or sex.
Under Islam, I am respected. It tells me that I have a right to an education and that it is my duty to seek out knowledge, regardless of whether I am single or married.
Nowhere in the framework of Islam are we told that women must wash, clean or cook for men. As for how Muslim men are allowed to beat their wives it s simply not true. Critics of Islam will quote random Koranic verses or hadith, but usually out of context.
If a man does raise a finger against his wife, he is not allowed to leave a mark on her body, which is the Koran s way of saying, Don t beat your wife, stupid.
Clearly, as demonstrated in the other two featured op-eds, Riley s interpretation of that Koranic verse is not everyone s. Further, I would argue that under any religious system, not merely Islam, all of the things she is claiming for herself would be equally available to her.
Riley probably doesn t realize this because very likely her previous religion was the religion of PC secularism, which is all about rhetoric and illusion. Having fully embraced its illusions, she can never again claim for herself a Western religion without losing her feminist face. Hence she has turned Eastward, and covered it.
In some ways, Riley certainly does make it sound attractive. I have spoken with nuns who wear traditional or near-traditional habits and they tell me they appreciate the freedom of the garb, that it unshackles them from concerns of hair-dressing and wardrobe fussing, leaving them free to do what they think of as their proper work, so I can appreciate Riley s sense of liberation under the veil. But some of what she has written here sounds like protesting too much.
It would not surprise me, though, to see other feminist women decide to take the veil of Islam in order to declare themselves liberated, partly because so many feminists, particularly radical feminists, are all about rejection of Western norms, extreme action and, yes, trendy thought. I ve wondered for a year or more whether we might see a number of Western women go undercover because it seems glamorous, rebellious and edgy, and I wonder if this Sunday Hajib Edition of the Washington Post is not going to be the catalyst for such a trend. Perhaps.
And perhaps the feminist embrasure of head coverings and veils might be a boon and a saving adjustment to Islam depending, I suppose, on just how tightly rolled is the newspaper.
Over at Deans World, someone has asked ?
The writer asks first if he is the only one who remembers history, and brings up the Crusades, yadda, yadda.
Yes, yes, yes, Crusades, Christians killed people, blah, blah, blah, got that all out of the way? That is HISTORY and it is not what is happening today. Today, there is only one religion still bringing the sword to the discussion table, so can we stick to today, please?
Now to the question asked at Dean s place: Do Muslims have a right to be annoyed with Benedict, so long as they do not become violent about it? I think that s a fair question, don t you?
I can give you a fair answer.
In our house, we have a rule: You have the right to disagree with and be annoyed by anything someone else says, just as soon as you can accurately repeat back to your opponent the thing they said.
I would say that holds true for these fundamentalist Muslims, too. Can they first repeat Benedict s arguement back to him, accurately?
It means reading the speech though, with an honest attempt to comprehend his meaning, and then saying, this is what you said, Benedict - do we have the right of it?
If they can do that, then yes..
they have a right to be annoyed, if they like. Annoyed. Just like Catholics get annoyed when they feel they have been treated obnoxiously at the hands of, say, Hollywood.
Annoyed does not mean killing, burning, calling for blood and death or converting people under a sword.
Those sound like okay rules to me. Anyone else?
Oh, excuse me, the press is only speculating on that connection, - they re not sure this woman wasn t simply cut down by her pimp, for holding out. Or, you know, maybe this was just a drug deal gone bad. They ll get to the bottom of it, soon.
The cowardly shooting-from-behind of a sixty-something nun might actually have something to do with Muslims rampaging because Benedict dared to address issues of faith and reason, and to suggest that Muslims might better dialogue with the rest of the world if they d put down their swords, but the mediating intelligences in the fourth estate can t make that connection just yet. They ll get back to you on that.
UPDATE: has his own words for Islam, and they are much harsher than Benedicts, but just as straight up:
Many Christians on the Black Continent (Africa) suffer from fanatic Islamists.
The example of Roman Catholic monks who were slaughtered last year because they wore the cross and believed in our crucified Lord is still recent, said Christodoulos.
The demand to “convert or die” is not a thinking demand, it is not born of reason. It is culled forth from a dark heart given over to something larger than a human sense or sensibility.
It is an unnatural requirement; it is Supernatural. As such, it can only be properly answered through Supernatural means, through a heart that is not dark but which is equally given over to something larger than our rational and reductive imaginings. Can you reduce the response to a forced conversion into whether one “meant it” or not?
Yes, you can, but in doing so you have taken your eyes off of something hugely in play but easy to miss - that the greatest feats of heroism written in the annals of human history have come about through a combination of faith and reason, but with reason bringing up the rear.[ ]
Am I urging the West toward martyrdom, here? No, I am not urging it.
But I am suggesting throughout history, martyrs have spilled blood and it has made a difference. I am suggesting that down the line some may well be called to martyrdom, and we might be wise to anticipate it and understand its use. I am suggesting that when one is caught in a fight between darkness and light - a fight that is more super than natural - such blood might well be required.
It always has been, before.
Perhaps I was just a week or so ahead of the curve?
Meanwhile, everyone is writing Benedict, today, and there is lots to read.
Start with :
All this has shown is that Muslims missed the point of the speech, and in fact have endeavored to fulfill Benedict s warnings rather than prove him wrong. If one reads the speech at Regensburg, the entire speech, one understands that the entire point was to reject violence in pursuing religion in any form, be it Islam, Christianity, Judaism, or Bahai. The focal point of the speech was not the recounting of the debate between Manuel II and the unnamed Persian, but rather the rejection of reason and of God that violence brings.
[ ]
The Muslims are not interested in a Socratic dialogue, such as the kind proposed by Benedict in his speech, if one actually bothered to read it. They completely reject any notion of critical thinking when it comes to their doctrines, their laws, and their beliefs. They can make all the comments they want about Jews being descended from pigs and monkeys and the polytheism of Christians, but if anyone utters a word of scholarly criticism about Islam, the murders begin until someone admits that Islam is better than any other faith.
This drips with irony because Benedict spoke about precisely this impulse in his speech. It s conversion or submission by the sword all over again. UPDATE: See Ed s .
Do not apologize for speaking the truth. Stand up to the threats and violence and make the world understand that no one of any faith or of no faith at all has to be cowed or intimidated into silence. Your predecessor, John Paul the Great, risked his life by providing a beacon of courage against the might and will of Communism, and he outlived it in the end.
We won t outlive the violent nature of radical Islam, but we can provide the basis for Christianity s survival by standing against it now.
Speaking of dialogue, which was - in the end - what Benedict was inviting Islamists to, and in which they are clearly not interested, ( Dialogue this, seems to be the basic message of murdered nuns and molotov cocktails). Do go read by Andrew Bostom at The American Thinker, which gives you some historical background on Manuel, and the habit of forced conversions to Islam which has continued unabated through the 20th century, to our present time.
It is very interesting reading. And it begs to differ with the NY Times editorial fops and kneejerks to the rest of us knuckle-dragging neanderthals:
For many Muslims, holy war — jihad — is a spiritual struggle, and not a call to violence. And they denounce its perversion by extremists, who use jihad to justify murder and terrorism.
Would the many Muslims who feel that way please stand up? Do they constitute a majority? If so, why doesn t the Times give them more exposure?
How come we only see these more moderate Muslims ?
I guess this is part of the extreme minority.
The pope says .
I don t know if I agree with Rick that he is trying to . Benedict is not groveling.
Meanwhile what was waiting outside of Mass, today:
As we came out about 100 Islamists were chanting slogans such as Pope Benedict go to Hell Pope Benedict you will pay, the Muja Hadeen are coming your way Pope Benedict watch your back and other hateful things.
Check out the pictures. Check out the signs.
I m sure it will escape the attention of these Islamists (and the press) that the Catholics do not stand outside of Mosques doing crap like this.
But then, Christians (Rosie O Donnell s idiotic assertions aside) do not live each day with a mentality that embraces intimidation and terror tactics. H/T .
Pajamas Media , Sister Leonella Sgorbati.
I m quite certain she will not be the last slain Catholic we read about in the coming weeks. Keep scrolling down, PJM has a great running roundup, as does . As does
In Australia, reads Muslims the riot act:
The Howard Government s multicultural spokesman, Andrew Robb, yesterday told an audience of 100 imams who address Australia s mosques that these were tough times requiring great personal resolve.
Mr Robb also called on them to shun a victim mentality that branded any criticism as discrimination.
We live in a world of terrorism where evil acts are being regularly perpetrated in the name of your faith, Mr Robb said at the Sydney conference.
And because it is your faith that is being invoked as justification for these evil acts, it is your problem.
You can t wish it away, or ignore it, just because it has been caused by others.
Instead, speak up and condemn terrorism, defend your role in the way of life that we all share here in Australia.
Mr Robb said unless Muslims took responsibility for their destiny and tackled the causes of terrorism, Australia would become divided.
Isn t it funny how easily the NY Times can Pope Benedict XVI. Look at how fearless they are! They re scolding the pope!
But then, it s always easier to shake a finger at someone you know won t come after you for it.
Brave, brave NY Times. Such a history of , you know.
Because they just want a better and more tolerant world for all of us.
If only those damn Christians would stop causing all this trouble!
What the Heck was I Thinking!
? :: The Pope’s Words as Heard by the New York Times :: September :: 2006 pinged back with What a difference 25 years can make or not.
Pope Benedict XVI has, appropriately, to the perpetually offended and angry Islamists, for daring to remind the world that violence is not the perfect means to effect conversion and promote faith, and that Islam has not progressed markedly away from the sword in some hundreds of years.
An apology would be useless, of course, because one could never be crafted to placate them, short of Benedict s bloody head on a silver platter.
Proving Benedict s point, of course, radical Islamists have decided that introspection is unappetizing, and thus they have, quite predictably, begun to , pillage, and otherwise carry on pretty much the way people do when they feel trapped and want to change the subject.
I m going to write more on that later, but what has struck me today is this talk of .
There is a best-selling book , and it is apparently the big topic of conversation in certain chat rooms.
I can t remember a time when the and popes was so openly discussed by so many, and so clearly considered a by people who have lost their moral compasses.
All I can say to these folks is: be careful what you wish for.
In March of 1981 an attempt was made on the life of Ronald Reagan. Only a few months later, in May of 81, an attempt was made on the life of Pope John Paul II. Payback was a bitch.
Even though the attempt on Reagan s life was born from a sick celebrity-obsession (quite unlike the attempt on John Paul s life, which was political), those two very hated men, once recovered, ended up being enormously effective tools in the beating back of an evil ideology whose tentacles were vastly flung. Who knows if those two seemingly unrelated assasssination attempts, and the fortitude and courage with which the targets endured them, didn t create a cosmic shift of sorts.
Hey, I m entertaining a notion here - there are things seen and unseen.
There have only been 43 American Presidents in 230 years. There have only been 267 popes in 2000 years. There have been billions of other people.
Greatness is not an illusion.
By greatness, I don t mean a quality of goodness, but that aspect of a public person which raises them above the ordinary. Popes and Presidents, by definition, crowd that category and, you know, I don t think the universe likes it when its great men are targeted like this, or struck down.
Call it Karma. Call it God, or Cosmic energy or whatever you like. I don t think it liked those assassination attempts in 1981, for things certainly (and quickly) doubled back and bit the asses of those who applauded the violence (I recall reading somewhere about cheers in a newsroom when Reagan was shot, but the specifics of that anecdote have long since left my brain, so it will have to remain an anecdote.
But I do clearly remember reading that a few on the left )
Today, were attempts made on the lives of President Bush or Pope Benedict XVI, I have no doubt that there would be cheers in some newsrooms (hello, NYT) and hopes that either (or both) would die. I have no doubt that some would pop their corks in gleeful anticipation.
And funnily enough, they d mostly be the same people who did so in 1981.
If you re one of those pathetic people intrigued with the idea of someone, or some entity, assassinating Bush or Benedict, heed my warning - be careful what you wish for. Payback will be a bitch. And you won t see it coming.
You didn t last time.
Instapundit has (thanks for the link, Glenn) and he keeps adding to it. He includes a pst from Q O which wonders if the press is on this issue.
(Ummm ).
John Hinderaker discreetly points out between Muslims and Benedict.
Hugh Hewitt , because so much is being lost or ignored while this latest tantrum is being focused upon.
He is correct.
Flopping Aces has a you ll want to read, and he points out some .
Please check back, as I ll be writing more on this over the weekend as will many of us, I think.
at age 76, after a long battle with cancer which inspired her , but which never silenced her furiously working brain.
Fallaci was an unapologetic woman of the left who - like Christopher Hitchens - had the brains, moral courage and obstinacy to depart from leftist orthodoxy when intellectual honesty demanded it. She was no one to simply fall in line with the prevailing thought-of-the-day.
She dared the left to honor its pretensions to liberalism and open-mindedness by speaking her mind in dissent. And the left never forgave her for it, either. In fact, .
(As you know, .)
The WaPo piece linked to above does not do her justice. Given her provocative last books, The Rage and the Pride and The Strength of Reason, which brought her up on charges for -essentially - daring to call Europe Eurabia and freely criticizing Islam, I would imagine they dare not go into just how solidly leftist were her views.
(Both books are available via ). This does a better job of it, and you ll really want to print it out and read it to get a sense of this woman:
As a teen-ager, during WWII, Fallaci did clandestine work for the anti-Fascist underground—she had her own nom de guerre, Emilia, and she carried explosives and delivered messages.[ ]
For two decades, from the mid-nineteen-sixties to the mid-nineteen-eighties, Fallaci was one of the sharpest political interviewers in the world.
Her subjects were among the world’s most powerful figures: Yasir Arafat, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Haile Selassie, Deng Xiaoping. Henry Kissinger, who later wrote that his 1972 interview with her was “the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press,” said that he had been flattered into granting it by the company he’d be keeping as part of Fallaci’s “journalistic pantheon.” It was more like a collection of pelts: Fallaci never left her subjects unskinned.
In 1968 she was shot while covering student demonstrations in Mexico. Forced to wear a chador while interviewing the Ayotollah Khomeini, Fallaci asked a more insolent question: “How do you swim in a chador?” Khomeini snapped, “Our customs are none of your business.
If you do not like Islamic dress you are not obliged to wear it. Because Islamic dress is for good and proper young women.” Fallaci saw an opening, and charged in.
“That’s very kind of you, Imam. And since you said so, I’m going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now.” She yanked off her chador.
I think, too, she probably got what President Bush has been trying to say: Fallaci sees the threat of Islamic fundamentalism as a revival of the Fascism that she and her sisters grew up fighting. She told me, “I am convinced that the situation is politically substantially the same as in 1938, with the pact in Munich, when England and France did not understand a thing. With the Muslims, we have done the same thing.
”
Fallaci, an avowed atheist, nevertheless said she had to the papal throne, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal: I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger. I had asked Ms. Fallaci whether there was any contemporary leader she admired, and Pope Benedict XVI was evidently a man in whom she reposed some trust.
I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. It s that simple! There must be some human truth here that is beyond religion.
Writes Tunku Varadarajan [ ]The scant hopes that she has for the West she rests on [Benedict] Last year, he wrote an essay titled If Europe Hates Itself, from which Ms. Fallaci reads this to me: The West reveals . .
. a hatred of itself, which is strange and can only be considered pathological; the West . .
. no longer loves itself; in its own history, it now sees only what is deplorable and destructive, while it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure.
Ecco!
she says. A man after her own heart. Ecco!
Oriana Fallaci was no standard-issue leftist. This was a great woman who had put her life on the line to work against fascism, who personified much of the revolutionary mindset of the 1960 s, but who dared to think a thing through and come to her own conclusions. As she got older, she became more extreme in her views, but she never, never succumbed to the intellectual laziness of moral equivalence.
It is a privilege to salute Fallaci, regardless of where one might disagree with her, because she was a woman of integrity, tenacity, foolish courage, humor, spirit and vigor and rigorous intellect. We will not see her like again, and we ll be poorer for it.
So great is my respect for Fallaci, that to mention Rosie O Donnell in the same post feels like dipping roses into a land-fill.
Both are fragrant but one rises in graceful beauty and the other simply emits noxious gas.
But I must mention O Donnell, because while she claims herself a woman of the left, she is the polar opposite of Fallaci, and I cannot let Fallaci go without focusing for a second on how far the left as devolved. Where resistance-member Fallaci was intelligently confrontational, trendy-cause committed O Donnell is merely shrill.
Where Fallaci dared to look at the effects of Christianity and Islam on civilizations and see real differences and moral distinctions, O Donnell , declaring: Radical Christianity Is Just As Threatening As Radical Islam.
After all, she doesn t have to think. The thinking has been done for her by her co-ideologues.
All she has to do is fall in line and parrot.
I gag. I barely want to waste the energy to respond to it, because she s really not worth it.
So, I ll simply leave it to Ms. O Donnell to point out to the rest of us the buildings that have been flown into, the throats that have been slit, the genitals which have been mutiliated, the raped women who have been killed for their victimhood, the countless suicide bombers who have died screaming Jesus is Lord as they blew themselves up, the for being gay, the raging Catholics who rampaged through the streets burning Andres Serrano in effegy when he submerged a crucifix in urine and called it art, the Christian who have for making less-than-flattering films about their faith
Come on, Rosie, make your case and justify that moral equivalence you so easily, lazily, thoughtlessly burp out to the assured applause of your Upper West Side audience. Don t point to a few sick extremists who have killed abortionists, unless you are willing to admit that the Christians themselves have condemned such violence.
Show us the justification for your statement that Radical Christianity Is Just As Threatening As Radical Islam.
The truth is, Ms. O Donnell, radical anything is unappetizing, whether that be radical judges creating laws out of whole cloth, just because they want to, or radical gays storming (hmmmm, musta missed it when the radical Christians stormed the Lilith festivals!
). Can you admit that? Do you have that much intellectual honesty?
When you are done justifying that incredibly prejudiced, stupid and unfounded statement, Ms. O Donnell, you might then (to compound the moral strength of your own superior ideology) point out the hospitals and soup kitchens and crisis centers you and your leftist pals have built around the world, and you can reassure us that they treat anyone in need, even if they don t belong to your club. I m sure they can be found in every city.
You can display the you and your friends have built in Haiti and in Africa, and in Appalachia. You can show us who choose to keep their babies (because you re pro-choice, right?) and which teach them to become independent.
Please make your case, Ms. O Donnell. We ll wait.
While we wait, we ll raise a glass to Oriana Fallaci, a leftist woman whose shoes you are not fit to shine. She embodied all that leftism was, and you are all it has become.
And, ummm only 17 months ago:
Having a clear faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism.
Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and “swept along by every wind of teaching”, looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today’s standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.
Pajamas Media has and Michael Ledeen, who knew Oriana .
Tammy Bruce, another intellectually honest woman of the left ; Wretchard s personal memory
, who also covers O Donnell,
This is, perhaps, on the 5th anniversary of 9/11:
The leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, recently issued a decree to its supporters: Kill at least one American in the next two weeks using a sniper rifle, explosive or whatever the battle may require.
Well, Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, I am an American too. Count me as the one of those you have asked your supporters to kill.
I am not alone, there are thousands of Muslims with me in Las Vegas, and many more millions in America, who are proud Americans and who are ready to face your challenge. You hide in your caves and behind the faces of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq. You don t show your faces and you have no guts to face Muslims.
You thrive on the misery of thousands of Muslim youth and children who are victims of despotism, poverty and ignorance.
During the past two decades, you have brought nothing but shame and disaster to your religion and your world.
We feel totally disgusted with your action and we condemn you without any reservation.
Don t come to our mosques to preach this hatred. Don t visit our Islamic centers to spill the blood of innocents. Don t think that just because we share the same religion, we would show some sympathy to you.
You are not of us. You don t belong to the religion whose followers are trying to live a peaceful life for themselves and others serving the divine according to their understanding. In our understanding of faith, you appear as anti-divine and anti-human.
We reject you now as we rejected you yesterday.
There is nothing common between you and us.
We stand for life, you want to destroy it.
We accept the divine scheme of diversity in the world and you want to impose conformity.
We respect every human being simply because he or she is a creation of the divine, and you hate people based on their religion and ethnicity.
We support freedom and liberty and justice, and you promote bigotry, murder and strangulation.
You will never be able to find a sympathetic voice amidst us. Our differences with others will never lead us to do things that are fundamentally wrong in our faith, i. e.
taking the lives of innocent people and killing others because they are different.
So on Sept. 11, when you will be hiding in your caves, we will be out in the streets paying tribute to those who you killed because you failed to see the beauty of life.
We will condemn you once again the same way we have been doing ever since 9/11 because we are Muslim Americans.
Aslam Abdullah is director of the Islamic Soceity of Nevada. You ll want to read the whole thing.
Seems Clinton would be smarter to let this lie than invite more scrutiny: That would be the opinion of many, including who reports that the Clintonistas are trying mightily to force a do-over on ABC s . This is an interesting problem. Supposedly the Clintons are concerned that they come off as a bit negligent in the 1990 s (!
) if they can t get an edit to a more comfortable truth their only recourse will be do send the usual talking heads out to discredit the entire film. Which will be difficult, and since from the film is not exactly a love song George W. Bush (it shows both president s making mistakes), it would put the Clintonistas in an odd position of trying to say, all the negatives about US are untrue but those negatives about Bush those are okay.
Yeah, they screwed up a lot, but we didn t! Or something.
Doesn t it seem to you that the grown-up, mature and statesmanlike thing to do would be to say, every president makes mistakes, and move on?
Oh but that would first admit that a Clinton is capable of being less-than-perfect, and it would also admit that GW Bush is simply a man in a difficult job. Talk about destroying narratives! No they can t and won t make that simple statement.
One honest line like that would undo all these years of propaganda.
Limbaugh would have some credibility on this since one of the producers of the movie is . He saw the film and describes the scenes that are upsetting the Clintons.
You ll want to read it all. The film has lots of reviewers glowing, including the very credible , and there are DVD s out there that reviewers can use to take issue with any edits - so it might be smarter for the Clinton folks to just pipe down and let the thing play.
Possibly the Clintonistas are simply not used to not being able to control something media-related.
They and their pals have pretty much owned history for a while, now.
writes: Listen closely for the roar of millions of liberals compaining of Clinton s thuggish attempt to chill the free speech rights of artists. Can you hear it?
Well, no, of course not. Hugh Hewitt . As does .
Also, read all of which is chock-full of details.
Ed Morrissey has the story, and he writes: Their rationalization for breaking the law is laughable. Their contractor, Grassroots Campaigns, argues that special rules apply to canvassers that allow them to pay commission-based compensation.
GC also acknowledges that they do not pay for employee time spent during orientation, claiming another exemption. Neither exist, and even if they did, Democrats still would need to explain why they would support any system that paid $56 in wages for 45 hours of work.
I won t hold my breath waiting for an explanation - would you?
Pajamas Media has some more news about and wonders why it s so difficult to come by/report or get this information disseminated.
David Limbaugh takes the gloves off and simply calls the Democrats (H/T ):They claim Bush asserted a connection between Saddam and 9/11, when he explicitly said otherwise. He said Saddam had close ties to terrorists, including Al Qaeda and the Taliban, which is undeniably true and which Democrats also persist in falsely denying.
Indeed, Iraq was on Clinton s watch list of terrorist nations. And so forth.
Hezbollah is nearer than you think: In VENEZUELA, actually.
That s what is reporting. It s not all the way over there, somewhere, anymore. Gateway also has some news on rare criticism of , which is worth reading.
Speaking of Islamists, some Muslims leaders are becrying America s since 9/11. It s a legitimate worry, I guess, although I can t help but notice that Americans are not messing with Mosques or harrassing Muslims - if we were, surely it would be in the news. I know there are plenty of decent Muslims out there, but if they want to blame someone for Islamophobia (I d call it ), they should perhaps look to their co-religionists who are the ones responsible for making people feel nervous about with whom they might be flying, etc, or .
If you want to fix how you are perceived, start with those in the news who are creating all those negative perceptions that s alls I m saying.
:::UPDATE II::: A reader graciously sent me a link to which really lays out the path of the perp. Clearly the neighborhood was not Jewish, and although I did qualify my remarks (saying it appeared to be a somewhat Jewish neighborhood on the basis of the first input of readers), on further examination, one cannot conclude that the perp was targeting Jews.
Whether this can rightly be called terrorism at this point is debatable. I don t mind saying it when I am wrong, and I feel this time that I was too quick to write while angry. This fellow sounds like he and it made him nuts.
Those of you who have read about my birth family know I can sympathize! 
Maxed Out Mama has wherein she looks beyond the sputterings of some who (like me) wrote angry last night or in the wee small hours. As usual she is clear-thinking and wise, and she bounces an important idea off of my comment, below, that the press and powers-that-be are - by their reactions - fomenting distrust and prejudice toward much moreso than are these violent acts by Islamic Fundies.
When people see a thing happening and are told, no, that s not happening, it s something else and if you think otherwise, you re an immoral person, it creates enormous resentment, a sense of disorientation and a further sense that someone, either me or thee is nuts and must be guarded against. She writes:
I think there is a war here, but it is not a war between religions, but as Ali says, between Violence and Reason. Violence has a theology, but so does Reason.
And coming back to the Anchoress point, I think that failure to confront and examine the war within the Law of God will leave people in the US with the impression that this is a different war, and that all Muslims are prone to go off like popguns in Jewish neighborhoods. I think it s time to come to grips with what Violence is truly saying in order to let Reason prevail.
I want to reiterate this: for every act of violence in the west, there are ten in the Muslim world.
The ideology of Violence must be defeated, because it will never surrender - but that need not mean that Muslims must be outcast, or that being Muslim is at all incompatible within being humane and just. What we should do is speak and live reason, even if we have to carry a gun to do this. I must, in the end, have a radical addiction to freedom, because I would rather live in an armed society than in one which carried out pograms against innocent Muslims.
Our society doesn t fail to criticize and examine the violent Christian teachings which occasionally arise, and I think we now must confront openly the violent Muslim teachings without fear or favor. Unless we do this, it will end in pograms. H/T .
That s the crux of all of this. When I read about these sorts of events, be they the synagogue shooting, the LAX incident, the Tarheel SUV attack or this new one, and see how quickly there is movement to make excuses for that behavior, I get an image in my head of an American, looking around at all of it, and feeling like it s all happening under water, in ripples of distortion. If the American does not feel like he or she can get a clear sense of what is going on, the frustration is going to ratchet up.
Not good.
This is becoming an appalling habit in the press and by politicians. An Islamic fundamentalist , and it s some sort of .
An Islamic fundamentalist partly in front of a Synagogue, and in what would appear to be a somewhat Jewish neighborhood and the press to cover the story (probably looking for the appropriate frame, ) and until someone in authority can be found to sing out, ROAD RAGE ! Yeah, that s the ticket! Road rage!
Mayor Newsom sees no problem, here a relatively young person, obviously confused! Yes, that s the ticket!
Omeed Aziz Popal, the poor confused youngster, is 29 years old.
Can you imagine, if someone had (God forbid!) driven a car into 14 gay people, how quickly the press would have managed to cover the story? Can you imagine that Mayor Newsom would call it road rage and suggest that there really probably wasn t a attached to the action?
What the hell is wrong with the press, what the hell is wrong with the leadership? Why are they so incapable of calling anti-semitism what it is, of calling a terrorist action what it is? Newsflash, folks, when someone decides to drive his car into people as they re crossing the street, it s the same as tossing a molotov cocktail at them, it s the same as tossing a grenade.
It is destructive, it kills people and terrifies communities, that is called t-e-r-r-o-r-i-s-m! Hey, guess what, fellas, we don t need no stinking anthrax to kill and terrify we can use our cars.
I swear, these people are tempting me to some vile language.
I know this is rather an intemperate post for me, and I ll probably regret some of these words, later but I m getting weary of watching the press and the people in charge go out of their way to downplay it anytime someone with an Islamic sort of name drives a car into people on a city street, or on a campus, or starts shooting people in a synagogue, or raises cain at an El Al counter at LAX. I know that somewhere in the minds of these movers and shakers they think they are protecting Muslims-in-general from reactionary prejudice, distrust and bias from us unruly, racist, mouth-breathing Americans (because we went nuts and burned down mosques after 9/11, right? We took to the streets and rampaged and lynched anyone named Abdul back then, right?
) but the truth is, by their incessant downplaying, their knee-jerk move to protect-and-explain perps like this, they re just making some people very resentful, and in the end, I think that s going to do more to foment prejudice and bias, distrust and hate toward decent Muslim persons than would simply acknowledging the fact that when these Fundamentalists DO this crap, it is what it is - an act of aggression, hate and terror - and not some mistake that can be cooed away.
Gateway Pundit shows , and lots of photos and updates. He says three people have been taken in for questioning.
LGF had and lots of updates in the comments thread.
Apparently he perp to arresting officers. I wonder if they were anything like Mel Gibson s comments?
We d hear about them, then, certainly, wouldn t we? UPDATE: LGF has video with a reporter saying the perp referred to himself . I ll take it with a grain of salt, only because a year ago reporters were telling us babies were being raped in the Superdome they re not really good with breaking news anymore, so who knows what is known?
One of writes: The 3500 California St hit was a 1/2 mile from the main Jewish temple, Temple Emanu-El and 41 miles from his starting point in Fremont.
It will be very interesting to see how the reports go.
Hey, that Spanish Inquisition, that was pretty bad, what with forcing folks to convert to Catholicism or die, huh?
Good thing or, you know, if it does It s not like they re burning people at the stake or anything, right? It s not like during the Crusades when a captured Christian soldier might have his feet boiled in oil unless he claimed There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet
It s all so civilized, now. Sure, you might get kidnapped and terrorized a little they might point a gun at a guy s head and videotape him with his face in the dirt, but really, ?
LaShawn observes the weirdness of our time: that one might be forcibly converted and from the very Islamofascists who taught it to him at gunpoint.
It is easy to say I would not be so confused were my head under the sword the terrorists would like to hold over me (and you). I think I would make the right choice, I believe I would de-capitate before I d capitulate.
But if they held the sword over my one of my son s necks, then what?
This war is either going to be won, in a long hard slog, or it s going to be lost. It s as simple as that.
I m voting for winning it. .
March Hare has on the subject.
And the four shrinks of the are talking about it in their podcast.
CaNN :: We started it. pinged back with Explosives based on nitrogen, including nitroglycerin, can also be detected with a technique called neutron activation analysis, which is used at many airports.
A more subtle approach would be to combine two or more liquids that are stable by themselves, but which form a powerful explosive when mixed together.
A prime candidate for this would be triacetone triperoxide (TATP), the explosive used by the July 7 bombers. Its two raw ingredients are both liquids, which could potentially be carried on board in sufficient quantities in containers such as bottles of shampoo or contact lens solution.
These could then be mixed in a toilet to make TATP, which is a crystalline white powder. The problem here is that the solid has to be dried before it becomes a reliable explosive. It can also be difficult to detonate, as attested by the failure of the attempted suicide attacks on London on July 21 last year.
To no one s surprise, says there is no terror threat, and all of this is about taking attention off of Lamont s win over Lieberman. Got that? Let people know that this is what they think.
It s important to get that info out there. Mary Katharine Ham dares to go read the crap they re writing.
Harry Reid wastes no time in .
That s leadership for you.
I can t wait to see what the NY Times will do to tip off terrorists within the next few days, how bout you? Broadcast news is relating that Bush and Blair have known about this ongoing investigation for a while and that Blair s biggest worry was someone leaking and tipping off the terrorists.
Which, let s face it, is something to worry about, these days. Siggy is worrying whether the news industry can . It s a question worth asking.
Pajamas Media . Malkin, of course .
I don t know why but bothers me more than anything - perhaps because it is here, and on the ground.
And, like others, I am reminded of .
Although they are convinced of their moral and intellectual superiority over Republicans and conservatives, the Dems are nevertheless splintering into factions; they are in need of unity. The only thing the varying factions within the party have in common is utter hatred of George W.
Bush and anyone who supports him or his policys, or even just SOME of his policys.
We’ve seen this before, in history. Berlin.
1931. Germany is feeling neglected and demoralized and impotent.
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