The Hole at the Heart of Our Strategy by Mark Steyn on National Review Online
That’s true, in a very narrow sense: Major Hasan is not a card-carrying member of the Texas branch of al-Qaeda reporting to a control officer in Yemen or Waziristan. If he were, things would be a lot easier. But the pathologies that drive al-Qaeda beat within Major Hasan too, and in the end his Islamic impulses trumped his expensive Western education, his psychiatric training, his military discipline — his entire American identity. One might say the same about Faleh Hassan Almaleki of Glendale, Ariz., arrested last week after fatally running over his “too Westernized” daughter Noor in the latest American honor killing. Or the two U.S. residents — one American, one Canadian — arrested a few days earlier for plotting to fly to Denmark for the purposes of murdering the editor who commissioned the famous Mohammed cartoons. But Noor Almaleki’s brother shrugs that’s just the way it is. “One thing to one culture doesn’t make sense to another culture,” he says.
Indeed. To infidels, Islam is in a certain sense unknowable, and most of us are content to leave it at that. The vast majority of Muslims don’t conspire to kill cartoonists or murder their daughters or shoot dozens of their fellow soldiers. But Islam inspires enough of this behavior to make it a legitimate topic of analysis. Don’t hold your breath. We’d rather talk about anything else — even in the Army.
The vast majority don’t actually try to kill cartoonists…or shoot dozens of their fellow soldiers. However, the vast majority do remain silent, or launch approving street riots in support of such acts, or bless them from mosques, or send their would-be perpetrators money through various “charities,” or read and post on web sites glorifying them, or otherwise do nothing to rid their religion of those whom many (but not necessarily many Muslims) claim have no role or justification in their shared religion.
Submit to Stumbled Upon!
It’s been pointed out elsewhere, in times past, that a big part of the reason for the apparent lack of repudiation, publicly, by the bulk of Muslims to the bombings and killings and other violence perpetrated by Islamofascists and other extremists professing belief in Islam, has its origin in the simple fact that most of them covertly approve of what has been done.
The thinking is that, while (if asked) they may say that they do not condone such violence and killing, they are secretly (or among themselves) grimly pleased by the events, being resentful of Western, “corrupt” cultures that are more successful than theirs. This resentment translates into covert approval of the destruction and violent maiming or death of “infidels” and/or “dhimmi”, as the victims obviously richly deserved what was done to them.
People like that, of course, are the ultimate in cowardice. They are, despite the teachings of Islam about the glorious afterlife for jihadis, much too cowardly to follow the violent tenets of their religion themselves (perhaps they actually have doubts about that “afterlife of glory”?); they are also too cowardly to openly defend the jihadis’ actions. Instead, they silently, secretly approve - even exult - and do all they can, covertly, to support and augment the violence.
Violence and death by proxy.
The vast majority of christians don’t conspire to kill abortionists or bomb buildings or shoot dozens of federal agents. But Christianity inspires enough of this behavior to make it a legitimate topic of analysis.
And when, Judson, the less than a handful of Christians - the tiniest fraction of a percent of the number of Muslims who do such things every year - do kill an abortionist or bomb a building, Christians all over the world don’t hit the streets in celebration, or take up collections in their churches to support more of them.
So, now that you’ve beclowned yourself once again, do you have any legitimate point to make, or do you just want to defend our sworn enemies some more?
Jesus, Judson, You are effing weird.
First of all this is bullshit, and also unlike Islam, where, when the aberration of an abortionist assassination takes place, there is no dancing around the churches, or celebrating. It is criticized from one end of Christianity to the other, precisely because it is contrary to most Christian theology.
When a small sect of asshole fundamentalists start picketing soldiers funerals or making homophobic proclamations, Churches object strongly.
Also, Judson, nice to see you confirming my prediction. You lefties are so easy.
I’m not justifying any act of fundamentalist terrorism. I’m condemning all religious fundamentalism. Islamist terrorism is rearing it’s head now but act’s of christian and other religious terrorism have dominated the history of humanity.
I’m sick of it all.
No, you brought up Christianity. How about you unequivocally condemn Muslim terrorism, which is the only significant source of religious-based terrorism in the world today, without dragging in irrelevant references to a problem that hasn’t much existed since the fucking Reformation?
Or is your sympathy for America’s enemies so great you can’t even bring yourself to do that much?
I know the editors sometimes toy with the comments of fools for our own amusement around here; did one such person add the necessary apostrophes?
I didn’t touch it, Cayley.
Sure you are. Why else would you bring up some other example. It’s what all lefties do. Support the enemy, because the USA is not perfect.
There is no justification in Christianity for terrorism at all. Christianity may justify a belief that abortion is wrong, but it does not follow from a belief that something is wrong that people should be killed in order to stop it.
I’m talking about a formal failure of logic in your expressed thinking here. Logic doesn’t work that way, period.
You owe all Christians an apology for lumping Christianity with Islam, as sources of terrorism, for no better reason than that some loon, who was not in any conceivable way following the teaching of Christ when the loon murdered, was a Christian.
Islam, whether or not it corresponds with your ideologically predetermined stance about it (actual facts not to be considered because they are ‘hateful’), was founded by a terrorist who preached terrorism and led in terrorism.
You lump Christianity with this for one reason only. You are a coward who finds denouncing your own safer than denouncing the dangerous, actual enemy. Meanwhile, you must denounce somebody, because this makes you feel that you are playing some kind of leadership role.
I was going to put into that last comment that using Judson’s reasoning he could denounce being American as a source of any kind of wrong whatsoever, from raping the recently murdered bodies of children to throwing live dogs off bridges, but then I thought he’d probably actually like the idea that being American is a source of all evil and wouldn’t get the point.
One must differentiate between what the text of any sacred-text-based religion actually says and how it is being interpreted and applied at any point in history. The murderous doctrines of the koran are taken seriously by many Muslims; the murderous doctrines of the Bible (in which God is the mass-murderer-in-chief) are not taken so seriously by most contemporary Christians. Can’t look at the texts in isolation.
I’m sorry, Sarah, but you’re being facile without being accurate. First, the Jews who follow the Old Testament religion have not been “following the path of a mass murdering god” (which mass murder, precisely, are you talking about - and keep in mind that murder has a specific meaning when you respond) for at least 2000 years. Second, whatever mass murdering you may be worried about was reformed via Christianity and the New Testament.
Sure, there was an excess of deadly zeal in which Christians slaughtered other Christians over questions of doctrine, but even that has not been a significant issue for centuries.
Islam, however, has as its basic tenet that nothing can change. It is, by its scripture and history, fundamentalist to the core. Non-fundamentalist Moslems are, as has been pointed out, also known as apostates.
You can only look at the Islamic texts in isolation, because that is the only way the religion permits them to be regarded.
Sarah:
With respect to Islam, you must look at the texts in isolation. Not only that, you must look at them not in the order usually presented in the Koran. Rather you must rearrange them into chronological order so as to honor the concept of abrogation which is unique to Islamic texts. With abrogation in play, you will learn that the popular “peaceful” passages so often quoted are abrogated, that is, inoperative.