Why fantasy literature appeals to us today

In addition to the entertainment value, part of the enormous popularity of fantasy literature such as the Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and the Narnia books of C. S. Lewis is because they provide us with a refuge from the suffocating anti-Western self-loathing of our age. In real life, we are taught that there is no such thing as "evil," just different perspectives, which are equally valid as our own. Defending your country against invasion is "racism and xenophobia." Terrorists murder people because they have suffered injustice in the past or "Islamophobia" in the present.

In this age of Multiculturalism and cultural relativism, the only places we can identify evil and fight it are in fictional worlds, be that the Middle Earth of Tolkien or the Hogwarts of JK Rowling. Maybe that's why it's such a relief to visit them, if only for a few hours. In the real West, our Universities would advice us to negotiate with Sauron and identify his legitimate grievances. Our media would say that the real reason why the Orcs kill people is because they suffer from institutionalized racism and Orcophobia. We would all get sensitivity training, invite Orcs to settle in our major cities by the millions and teach our children about the richness of Orc culture.

Dr. Sanity on the manipulation of truth

Read her whole post and the links in her updates. She nails it as usual.

The memes that are coming out of this latest conflict have been developing and transforming people's perception of reality for several years now. The old-fashioned ideas of good and evil that used to be the foundation of "law and order" don't seem to exist anymore for them. Now the "law" part only applies to one side and not the other. It is no longer "order" that is the objective, but the perception of order--our hands are always tied for morality's--for "the sake of the children!"--but the enemy is free to do as it pleases to the children without the concomitant anger and rage.

There used to be outrage at the manipulation of truth and some degree of repugnance at a moral relativism that equated good and evil. In those good old days, debate could have closure because there was agreement on what was true and what was false. Our underlying shared values were deemed worth fighting for.

But not today.

Today, we are constantly told that our values of life are not any different than the enemy's cult of death. That the children who die are all our fault. Not the fault of a sick ideology that values them only as fighters in a jihad and which worships death.

They only win when they hide behind baby carriages

My son spoke to his friend yesterday, and this is how he described it: "The village looked empty, and then we heard noises coming from one of the houses, so we opened fire. But when we went inside, we found two women and a child huddled in the corner of the room. We were so relieved we hadn't hurt them. We took up base in one of the empty houses. And then all of a sudden, we came under intense fire. Three rockets were fired at the house we were in. Only one managed to destroy a wall, which fell on one of us, covering him in white dust, but otherwise not hurting him.

"I spent the whole time feeding bullets to my friend who was shooting nonstop. We managed to kill 26 terrorists. Not one of us was hurt. Our commanding officer kept walking around, touching everybody on the shoulder, smiling and encouraging us: 'We're are better than they are. Don't worry.' It calmed us all down. And really, we were much better than them. They are a lousy army. They only win when they hide behind baby carriages."

My take on Mel Gibson's drunken antisemitic remarks

I post today over at The Masters Artist.

Mel Gibson got caught last week driving drunk. When arrested he made a number of antisemitic slurs. Now many who defended his movie The Passion of the Christ against criticisms of antisemitism feel betrayed. He has since apologized and described the things he said as despicable, but now a debate goes on about whether a drunk really does mean what he says or not. This story interests me because it raises some serious questions about how important the character of the artist is in relation to their art. Especially in the Christian publishing and music world, revelations of serious character flaws or moral breaches can sink a career in no time. How many of the Christians who touted The Passion of the Christ as a work of art are going to look at it differently now?

Meet Gatewaypundit

A profile of one of my favorite bloggers here.

Some reviews of The Defilers

"Deals head on with tough issues in a dignified way. In-depth characters, edge-of-your-seat plot, and a page turner to the very end. Bravo Deborah!"
Darilyn Sephton, Winnipeg, Manitoba.

"The Defilers gripped me with all elements of a good read: believable characters, skilful writing, and strong plot. I read it within 24 hours. The difficult topics of child abuse and demonic possession are handled with excellent skill and sensitivity, all told through the main character's eyes, Linda Donner, a RCMP constable. I became Linda, experiencing the strange community she found herself in, yet found the characters believable in spite of their eccentricities. Author, Deborah Gyapong, successfully depicts the potential relationship between abuse and spiritual activities, yet leaves the reader feeling uplifted and positive. Far from being depressed, I was left with a feeling of satisfaction and hope. Gyapong wrote realistically, yet with great care. The Defilers is a fascinating read. I highly recommend it."
Marianne Foscarini, Markham, Ontario

Why wasn't Andrea's husband held responsible for anything?

Interesting post by Mona Charen that reveals a number of things I didn't know about Andrea Yeats and her husband.

How could he leave her alone when he knew she was, at the very least, suicidal -- and when her failure to care for the children (and feeding is pretty elemental) revealed a clear case of endangering the welfare of a child? What was he thinking when he urged Andrea to home school all four of their children (the fifth came later) in the converted school bus they were living in?

Krauthammer on the Israel-Hezbollah war

Hearing the world pass judgment on the Israel-Hezbollah war as it unfolds is to live in an Orwellian moral universe. With a few significant exceptions (the leadership of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and a very few others), the world -- governments, the media, U.N. bureaucrats -- has completely lost its moral bearings.

Christians report how Hezbollah is shooting rockets in between their houses

But for some of the Christians who had made it out in this convoy, it was not just privations they wanted to talk about, but their ordeal at the hands of Hezbollah — a contrast to the Shiites, who make up a vast majority of the population in southern Lebanon and broadly support the militia.

“Hezbollah came to Ain Ebel to shoot its rockets,” said Fayad Hanna Amar, a young Christian man, referring to his village. “They are shooting from between our houses.”

“Please,’’ he added, “write that in your newspaper.”

The evacuation — more than 100 cars that followed an International Committee for the Red Cross rescue convoy to Tyre — included Lebanese from several Christian villages. In past wars, Christian militias were close to Israelis, and animosity between Christians and Shiites lingers.

Throngs of refugees are now common in this southern coastal town, the gateway to the war that is booming just miles away. The United Nations has estimated that 700,000 Lebanese, mostly from the southern third of the country, have been displaced by the war.

But thousands of people have been left behind, residents and the Red Cross say.

What has prevented many from fleeing is a critical shortage of fuel. Roland Huguenin-Benjamin, a spokesman for the Red Cross who accompanied the convoy to Tyre, said Red Cross officials had offered to lead out any people who wanted to drive behind, but many did not have enough gasoline for the trip.

Those who did get out were visibly upset. Some carried sick children. A number broke down it tears when they emerged from their cars here.

“People are dying under bombs and crushed under houses,” Nahab Aman said, sobbing and hugging her young son. “We’re not dogs! Why aren’t they taking the people out?”

Many Christians from Ramesh and Ain Ebel considered Hezbollah’s fighting methods as much of an outrage as the Israeli strikes. Mr. Amar said Hezbollah fighters in groups of two and three had come into Ain Ebel, less than a mile from Bint Jbail, where most of the fighting has occurred. They were using it as a base to shoot rockets, he said, and the Israelis fired back.

Thanks to Dhimmiwatch for the link.

Paul Belien on the myths of the West's debt to Islam

The roots of Western civilization are primarily Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman. If you want to create a new entity, Eurabia, encompassing Europe, Turkey and the Arab world, you need first to establish that this cultural entity isn’t “new” at all, but has always existed. The way to do this is to establish that Islam is a natural and integral part of Western civilization. You need to imprint in the minds of the people that yes, Muslims and Christians can indeed live peacefully together, as we did in the glorious days of Andalusia. Not only can we live with Muslims, we actually owe Muslims gratitude for helping us create the scientific achievements of the modern West. Thus we have the twin foundational myths of Eurabia. This is why French President Jacques Chirac can claim that “Islam has contributed just as much to Western civilization as Christianity,” thus echoing Tariq Ramadan. Muslims believe that all people are born as Muslims. Jews and Christians share the same message as Muslims. If they disagree on something, this is because Jews or Christians have “misinterpreted” or “perverted” the true, Islamic message. All good things are essentially Islamic, as Mr Ramadan points out. It is thus an illusion to claim that there is such as thing as a separate, “Judeo-Christian” civilization. All Western achievements are Islamic, as they are the result of a civilization Muslims gave to us. Muslims should thus feel no gratitude for enjoying the benefits of the West, they are merely enjoying the legitimate benefits of their own civilization. In fact, Westerners should feel gratitude towards Muslims.

It is a time-tested Islamic tradition: If you cannot show significant historical achievements of your own, you can always steal somebody else’s.

The EU elites see themselves as Julius Caesar or Octavian, but end up being Brutus, stabbing their own peoples in the back. They want to recreate the Roman Empire on both sides of the Mediterranean, bound together by some vague references to a “shared Greek heritage.” Instead, they are creating a civilizational breakdown across much of Western Europe as the barbarians are overrunning the continent. The EU wants to recreate the Roman Empire and ends up creating the second fall of Rome.

It has been said that those who do not have a history also do not have a future. If so, maybe the reverse is true as well. Westerners have lost sense of much of our own cultural heritage. We have forgotten who we once were. Perhaps if we start reclaiming our past, we will discover that we have also gained a future, as an added bonus.

The news is not good but I fear worse news is to come

The Anchoress:

Realize that there is an enemy out there that doesn’t want anything from us, not land, not money, not concessions…they simply want us dead. It is an enemy that will kill 300,000 and feel only bloodlust for even more, an enemy that does not mind dying to achieve this goal. When your enemy does not care whether he lives or dies, you cannot pussyfoot around him, you cannot make concessions, you cannot appease, you cannot fight a “nice” war.

I confess, I could not bear to even click on the video or audio tape she links to.
I don't need any more convincing about the nature of the evil we face. I fear we are going to look back at these days with nostalgia, because they are still relatively peaceful in this part of the world.

Mark Steyn tells Hugh Hewitt:

The problem with that there is, there is no stability. We're in a race against time, against very seriously and fast-lengthening demographic, economic, geopolitical and technological odds. And you know, any one of those are serious. Demographic...the Islamification of Europe means you're not going to be getting any useful support ten or twenty years down the line from France and the Netherlands, and these countries. The technological thing is where we're in a world where an immensely powerful, dangerous technology is going freelance. And in a sense, Hezbollah is the wave of the future, non-state actors that in fact have more military might than most state actors do. And so I feel this kind of bland kind of foreign policy establishment, basically 21st Century Congress of Vienna routine, is absurd.

HH: And it strikes me as not just sort of very dangerous, because it continues to obscure those critical elements you just mentioned, including, I think, the near certainty that in a very short period of time, a WMD is going to be used somewhere in this world. And the theater most likely is probably against Israel, because of the freelancing of terror, and the freelancing and the portability of WMD. Mark Steyn, are you surprised by what we've found about Hezbollah's capacities?

MS: Yes, and I think what's interesting is that Israel was surprised, too, that in fact, a nation that has no illusions, compared to most of North America and Europe and the rest of the civilized world, has no illusions about the enemy that it faces. Even they didn't have up to date information on what had been managed in a very small corner of the world, to be smuggled through to them. And I think this is really the reality that you're talking now about...and nobody's saying that 1.3 billion Muslims all want to fly planes into buildings, or nuke Chicago, or anything. But what we are saying is that there is a pan-Islamist identity that is impervious to normal immigration assimilation techniques, and spreads beyond the borders, is very good at taking over failing states, whether we're talking about Afghanistan, Somalia, or Southern Lebanon, and that this is a situation where the old complacency, the sort of Joe Wilson go to, fly in, sip mint tea with the guys in your address book, that whole approach is not going to...is only going to make things worse five or ten years down the road.

Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin, Jihadwatch and Dr. Sanity are all following the story of the Seattle Muslim who opened fire at a Jewish community centre, injuring several women and killing one.

People creating "second lives" for themselves on line

Fascinating story in today's Globe and Mail about what people are up to in cyberspace in the virtual reality world Second Life. Had never heard of this.

Each night, with her daughters tucked into their beds in their three-bedroom suburban Burnaby, B.C., home, Airdrie Miller takes off for her second life. While her two girls are sound asleep, the 37-year-old math teacher “lets it rip.”

As in rip the night away — in cyberspace, as Anna Mandelbrot, her on-screen character, or “avatar,” in the virtual-reality world called Second Life.

Technically, Second Life is a gigantic multiplayer on-line role-playing game, but Second Lifers become quite indignant when you suggest what they are doing is merely playing a game. And indeed, SL is really nothing like a game, insofar as nobody wins, nobody loses and there is no endgame. Players don't join Second Life to slay dragons, speed around racetracks or shoot down enemy soldiers; there are no warlords, warriors or witches to battle. Instead, players do the things they might enjoy doing in real life, except they do them in cyberspace.

In all, more than 350,000 Second Lifers sit at their computer screens around the world, living out parallel fantasy lives through their avatars. For Miller, that involves Anna going dancing most nights in clubs, attending rock concerts, and making the meetings of a depression support group — while Airdrie stays at home and looks after her children.

Los Angeles Times circulation figures dip after 9/11

Even though the population of Los Angeles has grown by about 70 per cent in the last 35 years, the circulation figures of Los Angeles Times have actually decreased in that time.

Hugh Hewitt has several graphs that gives me great pleasure to see, especially this bit of analysis. Thank God for the blogosphere.

You know what I like about this graph? After that little dead cat bounce during the election of 2000, the strongest slide, the steepest part of the downslope, is from 9/11 forward. That's especially when the Los Angeles Times collectively decided to not face the war seriously, or report the war responsibly, and the public responded appropriately. Angelinos simply do not trust the Times on its war coverage.

Advocate of animal-human interbreeding wants to offend

Barash says he advocates interbreeding humans with animals not because it would be a good idea in itself, but because it would offend believers. “In these dark days of know-nothing anti-evolutionism,” he writes, “with religious fundamentalists occupying the White House, controlling Congress and attempting to distort the teaching of science in our schools, a powerful dose of biological reality would be healthy indeed.”

Barash says that creating animal/human hybrids would effectively quash the belief that “the human species, unlike all others, possesses a spark of the divine and that we therefore stand outside nature.”

“Should geneticists and developmental biologists succeed once again in joining human and nonhuman animals in a viable organism,” Barash writes, “it would be difficult and perhaps impossible for the special pleaders to maintain the fallacy that Homo sapiens is uniquely disconnected from the rest of life.”

One of the ideological offshoots of Darwinsim is radical environmentalism, advocates of which hold that human beings are a kind of virus threatening the earth’s ecosystems. According to the pure materialist philosophy, the environmental threat is directly the fault of “a bogus ‘faith based’ worldview,” the “Judeo-Christian proclamation of radical discontinuity between people and the rest of ‘creation.’”

Two views on Updike's book "Terrorist"

Theodore Dalrymple:

All in all, then, Updike has produced a more convincing and subtle, and, in my view, accurate portrait of a young Islamist terrorist than he has generally received credit for—even for all his book’s literary faults. He rightly sees Islamism in the West as culturally hybrid, rather than as a pure product of Islam: a reaction, albeit one consonant with certain Islamic traditions, to a very severe and, indeed, overwhelming cultural challenge from without rather than as something arising purely or spontaneously from within Islam itself. He understands the deeply human, but also deeply destructive, desire for a simple solution to all existential and practical problems at once. He is sufficiently imaginative to understand that our imperfect societies have more than enough within them to appall sensitive outsiders and marginals (as surely all conservatives should appreciate). He also realizes that violent repulsion can be the consequence of illicit attraction. And all this without for a moment suggesting that Islamic terrorism is other than a terrible scourge.

Please read the whole essay over at City Journal, because it is chock full of Dalrymple's usual insight.

And here's Mark Steyn's take.

What else, indeed? It's doubtful anyone could write "the" novel about Islam today -- it is a faiWth, after all, that can seduce everyone from Ontario welfare deadbeats like Steven Chand to the Prince of Wales. Yet it seems to me Updike has gone awry from the very first word. If Muslims were simply über-devout loners, this whole clash-of-civilizations rigmarole would be a lot easier. But the London Tube bombers were perfectly assimilated: they ate fish 'n' chips, loved cricket, sported hideous Brit leisure wear. Updike's absurdly alienated misfit is a lot less shocking than the video that aired recently on British television of July 7 jihadist Shehzad Tanweer: he's spouting all the usual suicide-bomber claptrap, but in a Yorkshire accent. Imagine threatening "Death to the Great Satan!" in Cockney or Brooklynese. Or Canadian: "Death to the Great Satan, eh?" That's far creepier and novelistic than Updike's opening: it's someone who appears perfectly normal until he gets in the subway car and self-detonates. As for the revulsion at navel studs, compare Ahmad with Assem Hammoud, recently arrested in a real-life plot to blow up another New York tunnel -- the Holland. Mr. Hammoud said he had been ordered by Osama bin Laden to "live the life of a playboy . . . live a life of fun and indulgence." That way he would avoid detection. Pretty cunning, huh? Just to show how seriously he took his assignment, there was a picture of Assem with three hot babes (all burka-less) on a "mission" in Canada. "I was proud," declared Mr. Hammoud, "to carry out my orders" -- even though they required him to booze it up and bed beautiful infidels all week long. But it's okay, because he was nailing chicks for Allah. So he gamely put on a brave show of partying like it's 1999 even though, as a devout Muslim, he'd obviously much rather party like it's 799.

Mark Bertrand on evangelical art

The relationship of truth to a sermon, or to a logical argument, is pretty simple to comprehend. The relationship of truth to art is more complex. Fiction has been called "a lie that tells the truth," a paradox that goes to the heart of the difficulty -- and explains why, historically, evangelicals have been suspicious of art and its makers. Many evangelical artists have internalized their community's critique of art, which has led them to seek ways of doing art that evade the 'evils' their fellow believers have articulated. This desire not to be tainted by the criticism has, I think, contributed to the mediocrity problem. Some have been quick to dismiss what they didn't understand, just to remain in solidarity with other evangelical critics.

In It Was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God, Edward Knippers writes: "In the Christian community there are many people who love to talk about art theory, but far fewer who love to look at what artists make." To be artists, we must be open to and involved in art. To be artists, we must approach the question of creativity as acolytes, not critics.

Why did God create Michael Moore?

Ann Coulter interview on Beliefnet via Kathy Shaidle at Relapsed Catholic.

Your question is incomprehensible. I assume you are trying to ask me: "Why would God create tapeworms?"

My answer is: God also created mosquitoes, which I hate. But purple martins love mosquitoes and would probably all starve without them. It's kind of a “big picture” thing. Of course that doesn't explain why He created Michael Moore. For that, I have no explanation. My guess is that disease, pestilence, and Michael Moore are all perversions of the good that God created, a result of sin entering the world through Adam and Eve.

1972 Oliphant cartoon on the U.N. vs. terrorism

1972 Oliphant cartoon via Michelle Malkin

Jeanne Damoff on Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea

No, the power is in images. The Old Man's bleeding hands. His unquestioning acceptance that he was born for this purpose. His stumbling under the weight of his ship's mast as he tries to carry it uphill after, ahem, three exhausting days at sea. The way he collapses across his bed, his arms outstretched to the sides, his wounded palms facing up. His young apprentice, a disciple who loved the Old Man enough to share his shame if only he might sit at his feet and become like the master. Only once does Hemingway use an obvious metaphor, comparing the pain in the man's hands to nails being driven through flesh into wood. The rest is much more subtle than my concise list makes it seem. It's inherent to the narrative like scent is to a rose. It's there for any who care to notice. For those who have noses to smell, if you will.

Indeed, one could miss the Christian symbolism entirely. Some who listened that night heard only a story about an old fisherman, down on his luck, who sailed out alone and both won and lost a battle with a fish of mythological size and the sea. They laughed at his quirks, winced at his pain, and marveled at his endurance. They admired the love and respect the boy showed him. And they probably assumed that when the Old Man collapsed under the weight of his mast, George's voice broke out of sympathy for the character, not his Lord.

Pro-Israel rally photos and video

Photos of pro-Israel rally in Toronto here.

Video here.

What goes around comes around

Using moonbattery to fight moonbattery, Rev. George Hargreaves of Operation Christian Vote has filed a complaint against Britain's Gay Police Association for placing a propagandistic advertisement blaming Christianity for violence against homosexuals.

Take a look at the comments section while you're there

Lewis MacKenzie interview on CBC radio about Middle East

CBC interview with General Lewis MacKenzie on Hezbollah and attack on UN post via Little Green Footballs.

How neutral is the UN when it comes to Hezbollah?

This picture is featured on page 155 of Jed Babbin's 2004 book, Inside the Assylum. This a photo taken around January, 2004, at a facility on the Lebanese-Israeli border, not too far from near a town called Metullah.

The United Nations flag is flying a couple of feet away from the Hezbollah flag. Now I do not believe Israel intentionally targeted U.N. earlier today. But if the U.N. has personnel sharing facilities with Hezbollah, how can Israel possibly be blamed? Precision weapons can do a lot, but they can't only blow up the Hezbollah side of the building.

I'm also told this isn't the only place where the two flags fly side by side. How can anyone expect the U.N. to broker or keep the peace? How can anyone believe the U.N. has not already taken sides once you see a picture like this? Kofi Annan can give us his righteous anger about the errant attack this morning all he wants, but maybe if his people weren't so closely associated with terrorists, they wouldn't get hurt.

"The brilliance of the new barbarism"

With Hezbollah's use of human shields; with their hiding in the midst of populated areas;with their sophisticated use of propaganda ("children are DYING!"); and with their reportedly preventing any civilians--including children-- from escaping areas where they are likely to be hurt; we see the beginning of a new conundrum that the forces of civilization must resolve as they fight the onslaught of these barbarians, whose nihilism and fanatacism knows no bounds.

In a comment on this thread at The Belmont Club, Wretchard notes:

The brilliance of the new barbarism is that you cannot fight it without destroying your own value system into the bargain.

Why doesn't this story get bigger play?

OTTAWA - The words of a Canadian United Nations observer written just days before he was killed in an Israeli bombing of a UN post in Lebanon are evidence Hezbollah was using the post as a ''shield'' to fire rockets into Israel, says a former UN commander in Bosnia.

Those words, written in an e-mail dated just nine days ago, offer a possible explanation as to why the post which according to UN officials was clearly marked and known to Israeli forces was hit by Israel Tuesday night, said retired major general Lewis MacKenzie Wednesday.

The strike hit the UN observation post in the southern Lebanese village of El Khiam, killing Maj. Paeta Hess-von Kruedner, a Canadian serving at the post as an unarmed UN military observer, and three other UN observers.

Just last week, Hess-von Kruedner wrote an e-mail about his experiences after nine months in the area, words MacKenzie said are an obvious allusion to Hezbollah tactics.

''What I can tell you is this,'' he wrote in an e-mail to CTV dated July 18. ''We have on a daily basis had numerous occasions where our position has come under direct or indirect fire from both (Israeli) artillery and aerial bombing.

''The closest artillery has landed within 2 meters (sic) of our position and the closest 1000 lb aerial bomb has landed 100 meters (sic) from our patrol base. This has not been deliberate targeting, but rather due to tactical necessity.''

Those words, particularly the last sentence, are not-so-veiled language indicating Israeli strikes were aimed at Hezbollah targets near the post, said MacKenzie.

''What that means is, in plain English, 'We've got Hezbollah fighters running around in our positions, taking our positions here and then using us for shields and then engaging the (Israeli Defence Forces),'' he said.

Israel's claim to the land vs. America's claim to its land

Mark Twain visited the Holy Land in 1867, shortly before the commencement of modern Jewish resettlement, and described it as “a desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds—a silent, mournful expanse… A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action.” According to the careful population figures of the Ottoman Empire, in 1882 (at the very beginning of the modern, organized Jewish immigration back to the ancestral home), the total population of land between the Jordan and the Sea was less than 250,000 – in an area that today supports ten million people, Israelis and Palestinians.

The resettlement of the sparsely populated Holy Land by the descendants of its ancient inhabitants, however, did not take place solely in the modern era. Throughout Jewish history, waves of returnees came back to the sacred soil of their ancestors. In the 8th and 9th centuries, A.D., Jewish immigrants re-established major communities in Jerusalem and Tiberias; by the 11th Century, they had built new communities in Jaffa, Ashkelon, Caesarea and Rafah. In the 16th Century, more Jewish immigrants developed the famous center of mysticism in Safed and beginning in the 1700’s religious scholars and pilgrims intensely repopulated Jerusalem.

The Jewish connection to Israel, in other words, remained impassioned and unbroken for some three thousand years, while the British connection with North American began only in 1607 (with Jamestown) and 1620 (with the Pilgrims at Plymouth). No European settlers to the New World claimed an ancient connection to the land they discovered, developed, and gradually populated. Moreover, the Native Americans who preceded them came to the Western Hemisphere across the land bridge from Asia at the very latest some 13,000 years before the White Men arrived, while the Arabs appeared in Israel for the first time in the 7th Century.

If opponents of the modern Jewish State argue that Israelis have no meaningful claim on the land they occupy then on what basis do today’s Americans have a stake in the vast continent once inhabited by millions of members of hundreds of Indian tribes?

Ancient manuscript find in Ireland open to Psalm 83

The National Museum of Ireland issued a statement saying, "In discovery terms, this Irish equivalent to the Dead Sea Scrolls is being hailed by the museum's experts as the greatest find ever from a European bog."

"It is not so much the fragments themselves, but what they represent, that is of such staggering importance," said the museum's director, Pat Wallace. "In my wildest hopes, I could only have dreamed of a discovery as fragile and rare as this. It testifies to the incredible richness of the Early Christian civilization of this island and to the greatness of ancient Ireland."

Wallace called it a "miracle find," telling the Associated Press, "it's unlikely that something this fragile could survive buried in a bog at all, and then for it to be unearthed and spotted before it was destroyed is incalculably more amazing."

But it's the fact the book was discovered opened to Psalm 83 that is attracting attention across the globe.

The ancient psalm deals with a plea to God not to let the enemies of Israel eradicate God's chosen nation.

Keep not thou silence, O God: hold not thy peace, and be not still, O God. For, lo, thine enemies make a tumult: and they that hate thee have lifted up the head. They have taken crafty counsel against thy people, and consulted against thy hidden ones. They have said, Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance. (Psalm 83:1-4)

It then lists a number of Israel's ancient enemies bent on its destruction.

Who says the LA Times and the NY Times can't keep a secret?

WHO SAYS the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times can't keep a secret? Oh sure, once in a while they casually divulge some government spy program designed to thwart terrorism, but when it comes to issues that really matter, mum's the word.

Does anybody remember "The Crying Game"? Vincent Canby wrote in his New York Times review: "The film's producers have pleaded with reviewers not to reveal important plot twists…. More from me you will not get." True to his word, Canby took that secret to his grave. Only he and the millions of people who saw the movie knew that the female lead was actually a guy.

The Sheepcat writes about his visit to Auschwitz

Still, as a Catholic I eventually can't help but relate, in my own limited way, the suffering at Auschwitz to the Passion and death of Christ at Golgotha, the divine self-sacrifice through which all other suffering in the universe is transformed and given new meaning. Even the historical suffering of the Jews as unjustly targeted scapegoats for this cataclysmic crime cannot lie outside this transformative power. It cannot--although how God's steadfast love remained active and manifest even during the monstrosities of the Holocaust is a question that should humble any Christian who attempts to answer it.

It's not about occupied land

Finally, the world is accepting that the Middle East problem was never about so-called occupied land — but only about the existence of Israel itself. Hezbollah and Hamas, and those in their midst who tolerate them (or vote for them), didn't so much want Israel out of Lebanon and Gaza as pushed into the Mediterranean altogether. And since there will be no second Holocaust, the Israelis may well soon transform a perennial terrorist war that they can't easily win into a conventional aerial one against a terrorist-sponsoring Syria that they can.

For its part, the United States has spent thousands of lives and billions in treasure trying to birth democracy in Iraq . We wished to end our old cynical support for Middle East dictators that earned us such scorn and instead give liberated Iraqis a choice other than either theocracy or autocracy.

In multilateral fashion, America has also welcomed the help of the European Union, the United Nations, China and Russia in convincing the Iranians of the folly of producing nuclear weapons. But like Hezbollah and Hamas , Iran does not wish to parley -— just as the beheaders and kidnappers in Iraq don't, either.

The two most liberal societies in Europe — Denmark and the Netherlands — welcomed almost anyone to their shores from the Middle East . Their multicultural hospitality was supposed to have led to a utopian "diverse" nation of various races, nationalities and religions.

Instead, such liberality has earned both small nations pariah status in the Muslim world for the supposed indiscretions of a few freewheeling filmmakers and cartoonists.

The root causes of the conflict

As for the “occupation” and “nationalist aspirations,” these are smokescreens used to obscure this existential threat to Israel , the camouflage made necessary after three military attempts to destroy Israel ended in defeat and humiliation. And both excuses for violence against Israel depend on historical lies. When Rashid Khalid, a professor at Columbia and a notorious apologist for terrorism, writes in the Times that the “underlying problems” are “the denial of rights to Palestinians and the occupation of Arab lands,” he indulges a monstrous distortion of history.

How did Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem , documented in history as the traditional Jewish homeland and capital, become the “occupied West Bank ” and “Arab lands”? Through violent conquest, of course. The true “occupation” is the Muslim continuing occupation of lands that were Jewish and Christian for centuries. That occupation ended in Palestine when the Ottoman Empire went to war on the side of Germany and, having lost, paid the price that aggressors always pay when they lose. The victors carved up the caliphate and created the states of the modern Middle East, including Israel. The failure of the Arabs to recognize a legitimate state created by the same historical process that created their own nations, and their continuing failure to recognize Israel in deeds rather than in words, are the root cause of the ongoing crisis.

and

Once again, Israel is compelled to be the Dirty Harry of the Middle East , the one nation with the nerve and skills to do the nasty work everybody else knows must be done but do not have stomach to do themselves.

Hitchens slams the door on Plamegate

So, after almost three years and an exhaustive investigation by a fairly serious and renowned prosecutor involving the jailing of a distinguished reporter, it has been concluded that there was never any breach of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act to begin with. One official at the White House has allegedly been caught in a secondary or even tertiary conflict of evidence. And the hapless Wilsons have been obliged to file their own civil suit, as if the "discovery" it might afford will surpass what Fitzgerald, armed with a quiver of subpoenas and waivers, has been able to accomplish. Meanwhile, the evidence continues to mount (see my Slate columns on the Zahawie case: here, here, and here) that the original British intelligence on the Niger connection was genuine, and that Wilson missed it. And I have some more material on that, which I shall be sharing with you soon.

Interesting also how much the MSM was doggedly pursuing this nonstory about the so-called outing of Valerie Plame, but is virtually ignoring a much more serious breach of national security by the New York Times.

God will give you the strength to obey His commands

What we need to remember to balance all of this, I think, is that God’s commands are His enablings. We need to trust, as Augustine prayed, that God will grant what He commands. When we see commandments and moral teachings in Scripture, we don’t need to ask, “Gee, am I really cut out for all that?” If He commands it, by His grace He will strengthen us to do it if we seek to obey. It may not be pretty, but it will be possible. We need to embrace strenuous spiritual struggle as part of life. I do not believe that God will call someone to celibacy if they are absolutely incapable of it. But I think we all far underestimate what we are capable of with the grace of God working in us. It’s kind of like exercising, when you’re running or doing situps or whatever and you’re feeling like you’re at your limit, and you think, “I absolutely cannot do any more!” But if you have a friend encouraging you and pushing you onward, you find that you can often do a lot more than you thought you could. Our limits are rarely where we think they are.

Thanks to the Sheepcat who has a number of links to interesting posts about the ex-gay movement.

I believe heterosexuals do not get a free pass in this arena. We have as much dying to self to do and as impossible commands to meet on loving chastely whether single or married. But God does enable us in our weakness.

Barbara Nicolosi on why stories need to be better than real lifef

The real is not entertaining to people. If it was, they would sit in their living rooms at night and stare at each other instead of turning on the television.

It's sad actually that people would rather watch TV than be with their spouses, their children, their friends, their church communities.

It's a great story that would lead us to turn off the TV and start appreciating all of the above because that story helps us find ourselves in God's Story.

When you can't trust the mainstream media

If I were covering the misnamed war on terrorism, I would consider carefully the effect my reporting had on the course of the war. It would be important that everything I did, from story selection, to how stories played that I did not become a propaganda organ for Islamofascist terrorists.

Unfortunately, I find when I open the newspapers I see a focus on civilian casualties i Lebanon, and suicide bombings and "civil war" in Iraq. That's why I am so thankful that bloggers like Gatewaypundit offer a different perspective.


Gateway Pundit writes:

When historians look back, the bombing of Shia Golden Dome Mosque may be the turning point in the formation of the democratic Iraq.

Read the whole thing and follow the links, especially if you are discouraged by the Mainstream Media reporting on the Middle East. He links to a report from National Review online that shows some positive statistics from Iraq despite the headlines about suicide bombings.

By the way, I tuned into CNN's Larry King Live last night. Did I hear it right that he said a Hezbollah spokesman was not available to be part of their discussion? Did he actually invite someone? I seldom watch CNN anymore and I could scarcely believe my ears.

Could you imagine during World War II, journalists inviting Goering or Goebbels to be part of a discussion about whether the response of the Allies to Nazi aggression was proportionate and measured?

As a journalist, it distresses me whenever I see this kind of moral relativism masking as objectivity.

David Warren has it right in this column on the way journalists are covering the battle in Lebanon and how it plays right into Hezbollah's hands.

Yet even when this is conceded, we are inundated daily with media reports that focus almost exclusively on the number of civilian casualties, and on the tribulations of everyone else around the war zone.

It will not do for journalists to justify behaviour by the standards of the pack. It will not do for them to assume that only soldiers must answer difficult moral questions. In this case, they must ask or be asked: Who benefits from such reporting?

For the answer, obviously, is Hezbollah. The very reason they take such trouble to ensure a high body-count among non-combatants -- by for instance preventing civilians from fleeing the territory they control -- is to use their corpses as weapons against Israel. The western and Arab media oblige by building this body count into a drumbeat against Israel's attempts to take the battle to the enemy.

Let me sharpen this point further. The value of civilian corpses to Hezbollah, and allied terrorist forces, depends on the media's willingness to make an issue of them -- thereby inferentially blaming Israel for disasters that Hezbollah's methods have contrived. Quite plainly: the more obsessively the media focus on this body count, the higher it is going to be.

What it feels like to be a writer

Claudia Mair Burney, the Ragamuffin Diva, sends my fellow Master's Artist Dee Stewart a blast of exhortation and describes well what it feels like to be a writer, especially a Christian writer.

Claudia writes:

I never write feeling good, or even confident. I battle shame and bad housework daily. I write from all that weakness. I WRITE. And then I send it out. Or I blog it out. I never know at the time that I'm writing what is going to happen. Sometimes the work fails, but I didn't fail because I wrote.

So say a prayer for help, and then ACT like God answered it. Sit down, and write and don't think about how good or bad you are--don't think about anything but the story before you. Get all up in it. We can tell if you've lived in your story world, so live there while you are writing.

Dr. Sanity on the victim scam

They have figured out a fundamental flaw in the supposedly adult west's thinking process. And it is this: The political correctness of western society has deified the state of victimhood to such an extent, that, if the Islamists can discover a way to make the foolish among us believe that they are the poor, helpless victims and not the aggressive, murdering thugs they are; then they will achieve true omnipotence. All will be forgiven, and any atrocity they commit will be acceptable and thus excused. The extremely and suicidally foolish will themselves accept responsibility for the Islamists' atrocities (root causes and all, you know)and their "mea culpas" will echo like the wails of the muezzin call to prayer.

Wait for it. Hezbollah and Hamas will make a last ditch effort to snatch victory from military defeat by exploiting the victimhood scenario. If the forces of civilization do not stand firm; if the west refuses to take off those PC sunglasses so the light can illuminate these type of shenanigans--then the victim scam can still work for Hezbollah and Hamas and their handlers.

Members of terrorist groups won't be banned from flying

Like Red Rose Tea. Only in Canada?

OTTAWA (CP) - Being a member of a terrorist organization won't necessarily land someone on Canada's no-fly list, The Canadian Press has learned.

Proposed criteria would limit inclusion on the roster to those who pose "an immediate threat to aviation security," say internal briefing notes prepared by Transport Canada.

Draft regulations, disclosed by a source familiar with details of the plan, confirm the no-fly list will be tightly focused and reviewed every 30 days to keep it up to date.

"You cannot be put on the list on the sole basis that you're a member of a 'terrorist group'," said the source. "In addition, you have to be a demonstrable threat to aviation safety."

The no-fly initiative, known as Passenger Protect, will also feature an independent appeal process - but it won't provide financial compensation to those improperly placed on the list, said the source, who asked not be named.

I guess we wouldn't want to interfere with the rights of those members of terrorist groups, now would we?

Thanks to Dhimmiwatch for the link.

Another positive review of Stone's World Trade Center

It would be enough simply to plumb the story of the extraordinary rescue of these poor men, buried up to their necks for almost a day in broken concrete, twisted metal, dust and crushed glass -- the shattered, smoldering remains of what once were two proud skyscrapers, and now had become a shocking testimony to the reality that a worldwide terrorist enterprise successfully had attacked America. Add some awesome special effects -- ever wondered what it must sound, look and even feel like having a 110-story building come crashing down on you? -- and you'd have a box-office hit.

snip

What keeps them alive are the very footers of civilized society that our cynical, enlightened popular culture is seemingly so desperate to discard: fraternal love, devotion to family, allegiance to country and faith in God. Each element is powerfully developed, not just in the officers' dialogue, but also in the cutaways to the battered co-workers and the two anguished families anxiously praying for a miracle, in the quiet resolve of the former Marine who dons his uniform and enters Ground Zero, ultimately to make the discovery, and most poignantly in Jimeno's visions as he teeters on the brink of death. A Catholic, Jimeno sees not an ambiguous Hollywood representation of a higher power, but the sacred heart of Jesus.

Thanks to Kathy Shaidle at Relapsed Catholic for the link.

John Patrick interview in The Anglican Planet

Here's an interview with Dr. John Patrick, president of Augustine College, in the Anglican Planet.

TAP: How did Augustine College come about?

John Patrick: It started with my reading Bernard de Clairvaux’s work on knowledge -- that some people seek knowledge for its own sake and that is curiosity, some for the sake of being known and that is vanity, some so they can sell it and that is exploitive, and some so they can edify others and that is love.

and

TAP: Why does the temperature drop when you talk about Jesus at university?

JP: First of all, the cross is foolishness to the rational Greek mind (which is the university mind). G.K. Chesterton declared that taking history seriously can make you very cross – his view was that the eastern Mediterranean world of 2000 years ago was not a backwater but a place where all cultures met. Into that environment came a fisherman and a man with a seizure and convinced them that a dead Jewish carpenter was God. If you see how foolish it is, then you see how amazing it is. Secondly, most of us are unable to talk about our faith because we don’t have the vocabulary that makes it meaningful to those around us. We try to fit the gospel into the university model, rather than vice versa, and so we end up with a propositional gospel and tick off the items of the creed. Jesus told us it didn’t work that way. And it doesn’t. What Einstein did was to know the answer first, then do the experiment to prove it. Therefore, let us start with an understanding that our conversion story is non-explanatory and applies to us and no one else. C.S. Lewis could only describe his conversion in terms of what he now believed -- the proof was the rest of his life trying to work out and explain what God had done to him.


TAP: What’s a schizophrenic Christian?

JP: Schizophrenic Christians are those who believe the story is true, but it doesn’t control their lives or give them much joy, and is reserved for Sundays only. I was an invisible Christian, well trained at keeping faith apart from work. For 17 years, I sat in church so my children would go.

TAP: So how does one inhabit the story?

JP: I was in Zaire where my wife was working with refugees from Rwanda. She arranged for me to teach refugees who wanted to understand why they, who called themselves Christian, kill each other. I taught for three to six hours a day. They cried; I cried. And I ended up giving back to God the talent of teaching and expounding the Scriptures which I had denied for so long. It was the happiest day of my life. The Jewish insight is that you lay the story in their memory so that later it will serve as a moral reference guide when they face moral dilemmas. Children inhabit the wrong story because they watch too much TV – that’s where they’re getting their stories from and the ethics in those stories are libertarian -- have what you want and get it by whatever means – that’s not going to produce a good society. Above all, Jesus wants you and me to be a lover. That’s how you inhabit this Christian story – accept the invitation to love and be loved.

Edith Humphrey writes on communion

“True mysticism is to discover the extraordinary in the ordinary,” is the insight of the French theologian Olivier Clément. After all, are we not always remarking upon the oddness of our encounters with other persons— “How wise that baby’s eyes look!” “Doesn’t she look strangely like her father?” “It is bizarre, as though we have always known each other...” “ I never knew he had it in him!” Moreover, just when we feel that we have understood someone, or ‘nailed down’ their personality in our mind, we discover some new strength, weakness, endearing quality or frustrating quirk that we never expected. We might have anticipated what the God-seer has discovered, that God’s essence exceeds the bounds of human understanding, yet this Mysterious One calls us to share in communion with him. What we may not have accounted for is the depth of mystery implanted within those who bear his image, with whom we naturally expect to have concourse.



This means that though we share together in the human mode of existence, there is a definite sense in which every human being I know is remarkably and pleasingly “other” to me. Indeed, because I am ultimately God’s creature, and not my own, there is also a sense in which I remain, so to speak, bracingly “other” even to myself. As one who is in the process of becoming, I can hardly understand all that I am to be. As a complex being in which God has brought together spirit, soul and body, I am continually startled to find, within myself, things that bind me to other creatures.


We are not speaking here only about the estrangement between human beings, or the barrier to self-understanding, that comes as a result of the Fall. Certainly prejudice and blindness regarding other human beings, and even within our own psyche, mark our fallen existence. The answer to such human walls comes when we acknowledge those sort of humanitarian truths uttered by, among others, the Latin poet Terence: “I consider nothing human alien to me.” Rather, we are considering here that delightful “otherness,” that intriguing depth in the mate which is an essential ingredient of true human communion –as anyone who has been in love, or had their first baby, or joined a church, or found their “kindred spirit” discovers. There are whole worlds, then, made even more complex by our fallen condition, to discover within any one whom we love, and within ourselves, too.

Mark Steyn on the Middle East

Suppose every last Jew in Israel were dead or fled, what would rise in place of the Zionist Entity? It would be something like the Hamas-Hezbollah terror squats in Gaza and Lebanon writ large. Hamas won a landslide in the Palestinian elections, and Hezbollah similarly won formal control of key Lebanese Cabinet ministries. But they're not Mussolini: They have no interest in making the trains run on time. And to be honest, who can blame them? If you're a big-time terrorist mastermind, it's frankly a bit of a bore to find yourself Deputy Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Pensions, particularly when you're no good at it and no matter how lavishly the European Union throws money at you there never seems to be any in the kitty when it comes to making payroll. So, like a business that's over-diversified, both Hamas and Hezbollah retreated to their core activity: Jew-killing.

In Causeries du Lundi, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve recalls a Parisian dramatist watching the revolutionary mob rampaging through the street below and beaming: "See my pageant passing!" That's how opportunist Arabs and indulgent Europeans looked on the intifada and the terrorists and the schoolgirl suicide bombers: as a kind of uber-authentic piece of performance art with which to torment the Jews and the Americans. They never paused to ask themselves: Hey, what if it doesn't stop there?

Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise is a masterpiece

I'm reading Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise now and loving it. The Ottawa Citizen carried a great review of the book today by Sherie Posesorski.

For decades, Denise Epstein held on to the notebooks of her mother, Irene Nemirovsky. Born in 1903, into a wealthy, influential Russian Jewish family that settled in France, by the late 1930s Nemirovsky had authored nine popular novels in French. Her career ended abruptly with the German occupation when it became illegal to publish the work of Jews. While Nemirovosky, her banker husband and her two daughters had converted to Catholicism in 1939, they were still considered Jews under German race laws.

On July 13, 1942, Nemirovsky was arrested by the French gendarmes and deported to Auschwitz death camp where she died a month later of typhus. When the gendarmes came to arrest her husband, one of them took pity on Epstein and her sister, telling her to pack up what she could and escape. She grabbed her mother's notebooks and carried them around with her in a suitcase from one hiding place to another.

Assuming that the notebooks contained her mother's journals, Epstein found it too painful to read them, not doing so until the '70s when she discovered they actually consisted of two novellas. Deciding to donate them in the 1990s to a French war museum, Epstein began transcribing them.

Since paper was hard to come by during the war, Nemirovsky had written the novellas in such minute handwriting (a single page could contain three chapters) that Epstein needed to use a magnifying glass. The novellas, under the title Suite Francaise, were published in France in 2004, to great acclaim and awards, and have been translated in 30 languages. The English version, agilely and gracefully translated by Sandra Smith, has hit the bestseller lists.

In her notes, Nemirovsky, a deliberate, analytical writer, wrote she was modelling her epic novel (which she envisioned as five interconnected novellas) after War and Peace and Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. She sought to capture French life under the German occupation, writing, "the historical, revolutionary facts etc. must be only lightly touched upon, while daily life, the emotional life and especially the comedy it provides, must be described in detail ... Since (this country) is rejecting me, let me consider it coldly, let us watch as it loses its honour and life."

Victor Davis Hansen on the Mid East

Interesting analysis from Victor Davis Hansen on why this Mid East conflict might play differently than previous ones. Please read the whole thing for the context.

For their part, the terrorist killers hope to kidnap, ransom, and send off missiles, and then, when caught and hit, play the usual victim card of racism, colonialism, Zionism, and about every other -ism that they think will win a bailout from some guilt-ridden, terrorist-frightened, Jew-hating, or otherwise oil-hungry Western nation.

The only difference from the usual scripted Middle East war is that this time, privately at least, most of the West, and perhaps some in the Arab world as well, want Israel to wipe out Hezbollah, and perhaps hit Syria or Iran .

and

So after 9/11, the London bombings, the Madrid murders, the French riots, the Beslan atrocities, the killings in India, the Danish cartoon debacle, Theo Van Gogh, and the daily arrests of Islamic terrorists trying to blow up, behead, or shoot innocent people around the globe, the world is sick of the jihadist ilk. And for all the efforts of the BBC, Reuters, Western academics, and the horde of appeasers and apologists that usually bail these terrorist killers out when their rhetoric finally outruns their muscle, this time they can’t.

Instead, a disgusted world secretly wants these terrorists to get what they deserve.

The real threat to Arab countries in the Middle East

Suddenly, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia see that there's a real threat, not a pseudo-threat to the region, that they are going to be living per force under an Iranian-dominated region. That in fact, the last 50 years will just have been a brief interlude of Arab independence between living as subjects of the Ottoman Empire, and now being subject to a kind of de facto apocalyptic Iranian Empire.

HH: Do you think that's clicking in, Mark Steyn?

MS: I think that's absolutely what is prompted the extraordinary Arab League statement, and the circumspection of the European leaders. They both understand that if Tehran, in a year's time, Tehran could have missiles that can hit any European capitol. And they don't want to do anything about it, but if Israel wants to set back that program, they're not going to complain.

Oliver Stone's World Trade Center gets

Jack Yoest writes:

It was not a conspiracy movie.
It did not bash Bush.
It was not sappy.
It was not about stupid, church-going nuts.
It did not mock marriage.
It did not blame America.
It did not support radical Islam.
It did not mock Marines.
It did not mock Jesus.
It did not mock cops.

It did not mock family, faith or freedom.

and

This is a movie that you will see in a few weeks and you will be glad you did. After the viewing, there was no applause, little talking. At the end, the crowd audibly exhaled, as one.

People moved out as if leaving a wake. Tony Blankley and his significant other were the last, the very last to leave. They were moved.

Laura Ingram moved out quick; she was among the first out. Dr. Land, President of the Southern Baptist Convention expected to walk out early and didn't.

We spoke to Blankley. He was surprised at Stone's movie, "Good, True, Patriotic, Religious."

Kate O'Beirne from Nation Review was a bit more skeptical about Oliver Stone, "His other movies don't sell, nobody goes to them. So he made this to appeal -- to sell. He wants to make money."

And so he will. You must see how Stone can make a movie with Jesus, yes Him, without a smirk. Mel Gibson can do Passion, sure. But Oliver Stone?

Better check the temperature in Hell. The impossible has happened. Oliver is redeemed.

Michelle Malkin writes:

Is Hell freezing over? Could the movie be as good as these advance reviewers say it is? I haven't been invited to any screenings, so I'll be reserving skeptical judgement with the rest of you. The movie opens August 9.

Michelle has a good round up of reviews at her site.

How far can you go in depicting sin without sinning yourself?

My fellow Master's Artist Mark Bertrand as usual has a thought-provoking entry today on the site. Be sure as well to check out Mike Synder's highly imaginative post from Thursday. What a privilege to be part of this group.

Mark also has some posts over at his personal website about the onging debate whether Christian writers can go to far or not far enough in how they depict sin in their work.

He writes:

I've just finished one of Mauriac's early novels, The Desert of Love, and I found it refreshing that a Christian author could engage intelligently with the experiences he re-creates on the page. Sadly, the critics finally wore Mauriac down, and in the late 1920s he published a couple of mea culpa essays, committing to "write fiction that would not be contaminated by the sin it described." Of the novels that followed, only one -- Viper's Tangle -- is classed among Mauriac's masterpieces. Lodge suggests that this is "partly, perhaps, because the moral focus of the book, the 'sin' with which it is primarily concerned, is avarice rather than lust." In other words, he'd hit upon a sin he could dramatize without giving offense to the pious.

I don't know enough yet about Mauriac's history to say for certain, but I wonder if his self-censoring determination proved to be a detriment to his influence. It seems that Christian artists are forced to choose between making honest art for the world or making selective art for the church.

Mark also reposted today an old essay on edgy Christian fiction that bears rereading.

Folks have been talking about "edgy" fiction again, and it's got me thinking about a way to address the issue in specifics. It seems to me that there is a lot of equivocation in these conversations. On the one hand, you have Christian writers asking, "Why should any aspect of this created, fallen world be taboo or off limits to the light of truth?" On the other, you have Christian writers asking, "Why do you want to push the envelope?" In each case, there's an implication of moral failing on the part of the opponent. If you're for "edgy," it must be because you're a juvenile who gets his kicks from shocking your elders. If you're against "edgy," it must be because you have a defective theological view that encourages cultural retreat and moralism instead of true Christian engagement and transformation of culture. There may be some truth -- in some cases -- to both critiques, but they don't really address the specific contours of the issue. What can a Christian author write about? What can't he write about? Why and why not? Those are the issues.

How do you kill an idea with a gun?

Some thoughts from Egyptian blogger Rantings of a Sandmonkey

This is what this feels like: A never-ending war. The Battle that will never end, mainly because the Israelis are willing to Kill to stay alive, and because the arabs are willing to die to kill them. I don't think Peace is possible, mainly because you need a common ground for peace, and a level of acceptable losses. The Israelis will always reach a point where their losses become unacceptable, and they will push for Peace. Not for our side. Our acceptable losses are limitless, as long as we win. When your acceptable loss is your own death, what is there to compromise on?

The Israelis want to destroy Hezbollah, but they can't, because it's a culture and a nation. You want to destroy Hezbollah? You have to kill every single person who supports Hezbollah and its Ideology. You have to eleiminate almost all of the Shia in Lebanon. You have to engage in ethnic cleansing, and you can't do that! Now, since YOU CAN'T DO THAT, you will lose. It is inevitable. In order for the gun to kill the idea, it has to kill everyone who holds the idea. Since you can't do that, the idea will always win. The cause will always survive. The Israelis maybe willing to kill for Israel, but the arabs are willing to die for the cause. There is no winning for the israelis. Only degrees of losing!

Bush's stem cell veto

Joseph Farah on President Bush's veto of the embryonic stem cell research bill.

Imposition of moral values is a two-way street. The only question is whether good values or bad values will prevail. The only question is whether we walk in the light or darkness. The only question is whether we speak the truth or accept a lie.

Would Aussie Nobel winner get published today?

The Sheepcat sent me the link to the story below.

HE is the nation's most lauded novelist, our only Nobel prize-winning writer, twice a winner of the Miles Franklin award and three times the Australian Literature Society's Gold Medallist. Yet without his name on the cover, Patrick White's work is apparently of little value to Australia's publishing industry.

Inquirer submitted, under a pseudonym, chapter three of White's The Eye of the Storm to 12 publishers and agents. This novel clinched his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973, with the judges describing it as one of his most accomplished works.

Not one reader recognised its literary genius, and 10 wrote polite and vaguely encouraging rejection letters. The highest praise was "clever". A low point was a referral to a "how to" book on writing fiction.

Dave Long on Ariel Gore's book

Over at Faith in Fiction, an excellent online community for fiction writers who are Christian, Bethany House editor Dave Long raises some interesting questions based on his read of Ariel Gore's novel The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show.

It underscores--if it needed highlighting yet again--the particular way that modern American evangelicals have somehow rid themselves of any sort of lasting mythology. And not even mythology, but really any link to the historical church. The liturgies, the hymns, the Holy days that passed unchanged through generations fell out of favor in recent decades, replaced with, really, nothing tangible.

Dissection of the current church feels more like poking fun at old yearbook photos, (ie, Wasn't it funny when we all thought Carmen's "The Champion" was the coolest thing out there? Wasn't it neat when we all said that prayer with Jabez in it?) than some confrontation with anything of much lasting power. Like much of the culture around it, church tried to be relevant by simultaneously being disposable. "Don't like it this week? Don't worry, you'll find something that resonates."

In either scenario, believers are left with the same difficult question: What's real? What's True?

Is it better to have 2000-years worth of jerry-rigged tradition that sometimes seems to be held together with little more than a string of beads or a vacuum in which apparently waits the gleaming Son of God, but which often seems more like the void of space--boundless, silent, cold, and intimidating?

As good post-modernists I know we're not supposed to read author intent into anything, but within literary critique post-modernism had it's fifteen minutes of fame. We're an interactive world and more than ever writers are saying something to us, whether they want to or not. And more than ever we're able to talk back.

Thank you for the Hezbollah view

Interesting exchange between Bush's press secretary Tony Snow and journalist Helen Thomas.

Dr. Sanity on when you can trust your feelings

This is a fascinating read. Be sure to check out the whole thing.

Some years ago I used to moonlight and perform psychiatric evaluations for the prosecutors and public defenders in the county where I lived. Personality disorders have always been an interest of mine, and you can find many examples in the jails and prisons.

One particular case stands out in my mind. I was asked by the public defender to evaluate a young man who was accused of murdering his girlfriend. The man was adamant that he was innocent and his lawyer wanted to believe him, but something didn't seem quite right to him, so he decided to ask me for my psychiatric opinion of his client and evaluate the possibility that there might be a psychiatric defense.

Steve was, to all intents and purposes, a model citizen in many ways. He held a responsible job; had no prior legal problems. He had been going with his girlfriend for about 3 months when her body was found in a wooded area--not too far from the apartment complex where he lived. Naturally, he was the prime suspect in her murder (she was strangled). There was also some physical evidence present that linked him to her death, but he insisted that she had left his apartment earlier that morning to go to work after spending the night with him and he had not seen her after that.

When I met with him, I experienced what we used to call in my medical school a "positive Gorney's sign"--meaning that the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. It is a "gut feeling" that something very strange is going on--something that may not be readily obvious to a casual observer, or on first inspection.

In my career, I have learned to respect such feelings. It almost always means that I need to look more closely at a patient and pay more attention to what they are saying or doing that might be stimulating my instinctive emotional response.

Occasionally, I find no corroborating evidence in their behavior for such feelings, and in those cases I simply file the emotional data away and make a conscious decision not to act on it for the time being. Sometimes I find negative evidence that contradicts my primal emotional response. Both situations are cues to me that I must try to figure out what it was that triggered my emotion, and the first step is to look within myself for an explanation. Does the patient remind me of someone I have ambivalent feelings about? Am I upset at something going on in my life? Am I having a bad day? Because it is important to realize that gut feelings can be communicating false data about others, but correct data about one's self.

National House of Prayer

I'm working on a story about the National House of Prayer, an former convent in Ottawa that has been converted to a place where prayer warriors and intercessors from across the country come to pray for our political leaders.

A year ago, the NHOP was a dream that looked nearly impossible. Fran and Rob Parker knew what property they believed God wanted them to have, but they had no money. By this time last year, money started coming in from across the country and they managed somehow to swing a deal for the $900,000 property.

Many people might look at lots of time spent in prayer as a waste of time but I'm not one of them. In fact, I would not be surprised if the election result last January had something to do with the coordinated prayer being sent up ahead of time. Not that the NHOP is partisan. Not at all, they bless rather than curse, they pray for God's will, for righteous dealing by politicians. Under the previous Liberal governments, however, we had the sponsorship scandal, the forcing of same-sex marriage through Parliament and anti-Christian rhetoric coming from our leaders. Now we have a new crop of Liberals vying for the leadership and the NHOP team are praying for God's will to be done in that race.

Real prayer is in line with God's will. The impulse to pray begins with Him. It's not some kind of magic way of getting what we want, but a way of aligning ourselves with what God wants and playing the role He created us to play in partnering with Him in bringing it to pass.

Most of all prayer changes us, makes our hearts more tender and us more sensitive to the leadings of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes what He tells us seems crazy and impossible---like buying an old convent in Ottawa when you have no money but full of vision for an Ottawa changed from the inside out and established in righteousness and godliness. But if God is genuinely behind the impulse, then the impossible happens.

Cry 2 Him rallies Christian youth on Parliament Hill

Last Saturday I attended a rally that gathered Christian youth from across Canada on Parliament Hill. They prayed for the nation, for revival, for political leaders and for specific pieces of legislation now before the House of Commons. They also prayed for MPs deciding over the summer how they will vote this fall when Prime Minister Stephen Harper asks Parliament whether or not to reopen the debate about marriage.

Faytene Kryskow was one of the organizers of this event and coordinated the prayer and worship on the stage, somehow managing to stay fresh and full of unstoppable energy despite sweltering heat and humidity. Faytene has uploaded pictures from the event here. Find out more about Faytene and her ministry here and here.

One of the things that I found especially interesting about the event was the use of banners and dancers both from First Nations and from a well-trained dance-worship team that were doing far more than mere entertainment. There was something sacramental taking place, of visible signs of something transpiring in the invisible realm. The dancers easily moved from Gospel-jazz inspired moves to Irish dancing. They were wonderful.

Another thing that was cool was hearing prayers for Canada in many different languages, from Cree and Inuktitut to Spanish and Hebrew. An Israeli flag was planted up on the steps. Hearing a blessing for Canada sung in Hebrew was spine-tingling.

Faytene has written a book called Stand on Guard: A prophetic call & research into the righteous foundations of Canada.

Barbara Nicolosi on Facing the Giants

Having said that, I did find the film mildly offensive. And I mean for more than the usual sins against artistry that we have come to expect in movies written, produced, directed and starred in by Christians outside of Hollywood. And though I did see some talent in the directing here, the movie is uneven in acting, it's production value is low, and the script is pedestrian. But, honestly, more offensive was the on-the-nose, born-again languagey, prosperity Gospel stuff in the movie. I brought a young Catholic intern with me to the screening and he described the experience of watching the film as "awkward and embarrassing." It's a very particular strain of Christianity being spotlighted in this film, and, unfortunately, the filmmakers either aren't aware that they will be watched by most viewers as an anthropological phenomenon, or else they don't care.

The people behind Facing the Giants had every right to make a movie for the few hundred thousand folks in their sub-culture. Understanding that they made a movie they and their friends at church want to see, the critique of the film should be limited to how well they executed the kind of movie they made -- not whether they should have made that movie. Dissing Facing the Giants for Christianese is like attacking a porn film for having nudity in it. Or attacking the Food Channel for having too many cooking shows. That's what they do. Now, the question should be how well the Food Channel does cooking shows. My sense is that many of the secular reviewers who get a look at Facing the Giants will fall into this trap. Of course, if the filmmakers behind the film put their film into the mainstream, they have it coming.

Maybe not as scary as it looks?

Mark Helprin tells Hugh Hewitt:

I don't think that it's going to erupt into the full-scale regional war that people talk about, because there aren't any state actors, at this point anyway, willing to go in, or really even able to.

Read the whole thing. Lots of interesting analysis.

The Sheepcat mentions me in his blog roundup

The Defilers is a very good read, by the way, with well-drawn characters and a compelling plot. Check it out.

Thanks Sheepcat. By the way, he has some great pictures on his blog from his trip to Eastern Europe.

What a role model, eh?

In his appearance on the television station Canal Plus, Zidane apologized to his fans and to the children who watched him receive a red card and get expelled from the game, but said he does not regret his actions.

"I know it happened 10 minutes before the end of my career during the final of the World Cup and that it shouldn't have happened," he said. "But I cannot regret what I did because that would mean that [Materazzi] was right to say what he said.

"There was a serious provocation," added Zidane, who said he had never had any tension with Materazzi before. "My act is not forgivable. But they must also punish the true guilty party, and the guilty party is the one who provokes."

Zidane said the incident started when Materazzi pulled on his shirt. He said he told Materazzi they could exchange shirts later. Things escalated and led to the insult that inspired the head butt that shocked the world.

"They were very hard words, words which touched me very deeply," the 34-year-old midfielder said. "They were very serious and very personal. It concerned my mother and my sister. At first, I tried not to listen, but he kept repeating them two or three times, and then things happened very swiftly. I am a man before anything else.

The new definition of manhood.

Sounds to me like the same sort of justification wife beaters use. "She burnt the toast! It's her fault I broke her jaw."

Sounds to me like the same justification for the riots, embassy burnings and murders after the Mohammed cartoons and the fact that much of the Western world seemed to think printing the cartoons was more of a crime than the barbaric response.

Very troubling that 61 per cent of French people agree with Zidane.

The new dark age is upon us folks.

This is the barbaric mentality that would shut down freedom of speech because it hurts feelings and use violence and threats to do so. And while I don't think the Italian player was right to insult the player, a head butt could have stopped his heart. It's a disproportionate response.

No, I still believe a real man responds in a measured way to insults. A real man stands up for what's right, defends the weak, and doesn't react like a puppet on a string when people try to get his goat.

Flannery O'Connor on dark grace

My fellow Master's Artist Jeanne Damoff has posted a link to a wonderful essay about Flannery O'Connor. Check it out.

She also posts a link to an essay "Why Evangelicals Can't Write."


Peter Leithart writes:

My own feeling is that writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable. In some cases, these writers may be unconsciously infected with the Manichaean spirit of the times and suffer the much discussed disjunction between sensibility and belief, but I think that more often the reason for this attention to the perverse is the difference between their beliefs and the beliefs of their audience. Redemption is meaningless unless there is case for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause.

The safe vs. good debate heats up

Relapsed Catholic Kathy Shaidle has not only raised the ire of Protestants, she seems to have a number of Catholics incensed over this post and that one.

Some responses to her posts here led to a vintage tirade this morning about how people are missing the point.

Your obsession with making the world immaculately safe for your children is (ironically) ruining civil society by raising up a generation of risk averse, hyperallergic, conformist dimwits who've never been allowed to simply daydream or scrape their (heavily padded) kneecaps. We are living in a "Fun Toy Banned Because of Three Stupid Dead Kids" world. Aren't you satisfied yet?

For the millionth time: Make your own damn movies and music if you don't like Hollywood's. Stop boycotting and criticizing movies and books you'll never read anyway.

If you think of the cinema as nothing more than the source of 90 minutes or two hours of respite in the warm glow of (someone else's) fantasy; if it is nothing more to you than "a good story" (hopefully one with a cute dog and a happy ending and no swearing)...

You DO NOT deserve the movies. You are beneath them. Amuse yourselves with bingo or bake sales or some other intellectually undemanding pastime. If you can't understand the concept of the physical integrity of another person's creative work, an artifact that embodies a part of themselves in some metaphysical sense, that may even be touched with Spirit, whether you like it or understand it or not... oh, forget it. I'm guessing you bought the Thomas Kincaide that matched your couch, right?

Yes, yes, I know: raising children is the most important job in the whole wide world. When you present yourselves to God at the End of Days, you are getting straight into heaven, while I, the childless arrogant artiste, is going straight to hell, shouting out, "'Ode to a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of little old ladies" as I tumble into the sulfur.

On that we are all agreed.

Now: back slowly away from the moviola or I will kill you with my pudgy little hands.

Now, given the humorlessness of some of the people who prefer what is safe over what is good, (though granted there are books like Gilead by Marilynne Robinson that are both safe and good) I fear that some might think Kathy is actually making death threats.

She's joking folks!

But to the point she's making---there is a big difference if I as an artist decide to cut some scenes from a movie or a book for wider distribution and family viewing vs. having some third party do it without permission.

And the other point is this: what is perceived as safe may be far more pernicious than the odd profane word or graphic sex scene in a more theologically sound work of art.

"Christian art? Art is art; painting is painting; music is music; a story is a story. If it's bad art, it's bad religion, no matter how pious the subject."
—Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water

I think the Left Behind series is bad art and consequently bad religion, though perhaps many people find they're prompted to say the Sinner's Prayer after reading one of these books about the End Times. And maybe some of those people are genuinely repenting. God can even make a donkey speak if He has to in order to reach someone, but that doesn't make the donkey anything other than a donkey.

God chose a book with some pretty mediocre writing aimed at junior high school level readers to turn my life around, so I can't deny that He sometimes uses the strangest means as a Shepherd's crook to hook someone.

I think there is great art that is also good but unsafe in the sense that it is disquieting, haunting, challenging, upsetting and illusion-busting.

Flannery O'Connor falls into that category. This is from an interesting essay about her I found online this morning.

She was writing for an audience to whom the incarnation had little meaning, and yet her fiction repeatedly showed common people encountering the terror, mystery and beauty of the Word made flesh. She might have predicted that many of her readers would be mildly puzzled, if not completely confounded.

That fiction contained truth was the conviction she lived with every day. The fact that this truth was sometimes odd or uncomfortable or violent, that it led often to the grotesque, O’ Connor faced unflinchingly. Quoting Robert Fitzgerald, she wrote, "It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth" (p. 343). What could be stranger than a God who decides to suffer with us? What could be more uncomfortable or more violent than the cross? What could be more comically grotesque than an individual trying to escape his own identity as God’s child and in his rush out the temple door smacking straight into the incarnation?

I believe there is also bad art that is unsafe and great art that has great merit in terms of skill, vision of the artist, but is inherently evil and decadent. Ideas do have consequences and artists' visions have consequences.

Unfortunately, too often a lack of discernment will push what is good, great and unsafe into the great but evil category. So often that happens to the best writers who are not received as the prophets they are in their own times. That's why I believe we must exercise caution before we decide to cut or alter works of art. Shoot, how often would people like to get rid of the various inconvenient bits in the Bible?

Barbara Nicolosi's take on Superman Returns

Barbara Nicolosi has seen the Superman Returns movie and you can find her thoughts at Church of the Masses. Here's a sample.

Cutting to the chase... from a Christian standpoint, the movie fails on two levels. The lesser problem - but certainly the more amusing one - was the laboring the film did to set up as a Christ-figure a fellow whose choices establish him as a basically angst-ridden small town guy who is obsessed with a girl, knocks her up and then becomes a deadbeat dad. I'm thinking that these things - lusting, loving and leaving are really "the American Way" for contemporary global audiences. I'm glad the script here didn't have the courage to call it that though. Here, after "Truth" (what is that anyway?) and "Justice" (like skipping out on your kid and on the court date that would keep a super-criminal behind bars?) , the third part of Superman's vocation is murmured out as "all that other stuff." Rich. Perfect. Anyway, the problem is the biggie for this culture: separating the personal misdeeds from the public heroism as though they are unrelated. Remember the Clinton-Monica mantra that it is possible to be a great good leader and a private cad all at the same time?

Secondly, and more devastating to the picture as a work of art, the triumphant climax of the good in the film never emotionally overcame the shockingly brutal evil in it. It's what I call The Horse Whisperer Problem. That movie opened with a horrific and shocking accident. And then, the ultimate victory in the film was only gentle and subtle. Maybe that is more like real life. Certainly it is. But stories are supposed to be better than real life. In the same way, Superman Returns never felt as good at the end as the middle felt horrible. The stabbing with a piece of sharp Kryptonite was just too much. It wasn't the stuff of a comic book movie. It was the stuff of Reservoir Dogs.

Interesting. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm following the debate about it since some are saying that Superman is a Christ figure, while others are saying he's an Antichrist figure.

Sanitizing films not allowed says court

Kathy Shaidle over at Relapsed Catholic responds to this story at LifeSiteNews.com about a court decision that will prevent third parties from cutting nudity or other offensive scenes from films before selling them.

Christians have to choose. Do they want their own counterculture, with its Veggie Tales and end times video games, or do they want to be able to sample "what normal people are watching" as well? Because you can't have it both ways. Then again, I doubt they are quite clever enough to even be bothered by the contradiction.

I'm guessing most of the clientele for these bowlderized films are a certain species of Ned Flanders Protestant, whose big concerns are swearing and nudity. My objection to Titanic, on the other hand, was the morbid romanticization of the drowning deaths of 2,000 people. Probably too "deep" a concern for the average CleanFlick's customer. They should stick to their Left Behind sequels and Davey & Goliath, and leave the making of and thinking about film to the Catholics and Jews who've been at it since the beginning.

I share some of Kathy's concerns about the sanitized subculture, especially as it pertains to so-called Christian fiction.

This review of The Defilers does not recommend the book because of its disturbing subject matter, despite the fact that it concedes the novel has a positive Christian message.

There were many disturbing scenes in The Defilers. Although there weren't graphic descriptions, the images were very clear. The town where the story took place was rife with people who indulged in child molestation.

Then the reviewer goes on to describe several disturbing scenes from the novel. Warning, some of her descriptions are plot spoilers. Hmmmm. Maybe her review should have been sanitized.

She writes:

All in all, I would not recommend The Defilers. Despite the Christian message, the images were too disquieting. This is not a book I would allow my teenagers to read, or that I would share with others.

Well--if a novel that deals with issues of child pornography, and demonic oppression is not disquieting, then I have failed as an artist. Readers who want to lull themselves to sleep with sanitized entertainment can read another book. There is lots of product out there for them. I hope people will be disturbed. I hope that the novel will make them think about how their own heart is a battleground between good and evil and that ultimately they will choose the good, but not without their eyes wide open.

This speaks to discussions we have had over at The Master's Artist about safe fiction vs. good fiction.

I'd rather be good than safe.

Death cult child abuse by Dr. Sanity

Dr. Sanity has a must read post on how children in parts of the Islamic world are inculcated at a tender age to become suicide bombers. She and others call it child abuse. I find these pictures make me want to pray for these beautiful children, who are brutalized by the surrounding culture.

Those who willingly follow this cult of death meet many of the psychiatric criteria for an antisocial personality including: (1) A glib, superficial charm (especially the leaders) (2) A grandiose sense of self-worth; (3) Pathological lying; (4) Manipulative behavior; (5) Lack of remorse or guilt for their behavior; (6) Lack of the usual behavioral controls; (7) Deviant sexual behavior and attitudes (this has repeatedly been reported on in the Arab and Islamic culture and would not be surprising considering the distortion and denigration of females in the society); (8) Jealousy and envy; (9) A sense of entitlement; and (10) A failure to accept responsibility for one's own actions.

Why isn't the Times breaking stories about what Al Qaeda is up to?

Mark Steyn talks with Hugh Hewitt about the New York Times and the fact that it has failed to expose enemy strategies.

Ann Coulter had a very good...she just said it as a throwaway line, really just en passant, and I'm not sure she realized actually quite what a good question it is. She said at some point in a column the other day, how many big al Qaeda secret plans has the New York Times revealed? And I think that's actually an interesting question. You know, when you go into a New York Times planning meeting, how much of their editorial resources are being devoted to getting inside the enemy? The British press is pretty anti-American, they're pretty anti-Israeli, they're anti-all kinds of things. But they still have journalistic instincts. Every week, I read a fascinating story in the London Times or some other paper, in which some guy has gone undercover as a Muslim among the radical Muslims in Yorkshire towns in England, where the July 7th bombers came from. And he's got all this fascinating material. A guy went undercover at some mosque at Brighton, in England, and came out with all kinds of material. How come nobody at the New York Times seems to be interesting in devoting any editorial energy to exposing what the enemy's up to? That's an important question.

Krauthammer on the violence in Gaza

What is so remarkable about the current wave of violence in Gaza is that the event at the origin of the "cycle" is not at all historical, but very contemporary. The event is not buried in the mists of history. It occurred less than one year ago. Before the eyes of the whole world, Israel left Gaza. Every Jew, every soldier, every military installation, every remnant of Israeli occupation was uprooted and taken away.

How do the Palestinians respond? What have they done with Gaza, the first Palestinian territory in history to be independent, something neither the Ottomans nor the British nor the Egyptians nor the Jordanians, all of whom ruled Palestinians before the Israelis, ever permitted? On the very day of Israel's final pullout, the Palestinians began firing rockets out of Gaza into Israeli towns on the other side of the border.

H/T The Anchoress

Not the 71 virgins Zarqawi expected

The jihadist thug Zarqawi has met his 71 virgins in paradise, according to this hilarious post, and they are not what he expected.

Canada needs to listen to this prophetic warning from Europe

Paul Belien captures essential truths about America and Europe in this essay. (H/T Gates of Vienna). Please read the whole thing. Canadians, who are far more likely to opt for the secularist totalitarianism of Europe, will I hope wake up and understand the importance of freedom of conscience, human rights understood as inherent in a transcendent Judeo-Christian understanding of the human person, and a limited role for government that does not usurp institutions like the family, the Church, universities, and so on.

Belien writes:

The different historical evolution of Americans and Europeans has greatly influenced them. American society is a society whose culture and view of mankind resembles that of the old mediaeval Europe from which it organically evolved. It puts man before the state because it accepts that man should come to God as a free being. Europe, having lived through the perversions of the Modern Age, has absorbed much of the absolutist and totalitarian spirit.

-snip

Americans have never lost the vital understanding that freedom has to be indivisible in order that man may lead a virtuous life. Democracy and freedom of expression represent only the political and moral-cultural fields of life. There is a third important field of social life: economics. In this field the Americans have adopted a system that allows citizens the greatest possible economic freedom and severely restricts the power of the government. It is called capitalism, which to most Americans is something positive, while to most Europeans it appears deeply repulsive.

-snip-

In “welfare state” Europe, capitalism is a dirty word, as despicable as communism. Its euphemistic equivalent is “free-market liberalism.” But many West Europeans aren't even in favour of that. Economic freedom in Western Europe is severely restricted by a multitude of regulations and laws. Although these are designed to protect the citizen against risks, they discourage him from taking risks altogether and thwart his prosperity.

Hence Western Europe's economy stagnates while America’s keeps growing. This causes jealousy, which reinforces the political frustration Western Europe already has towards its Atlantic partner. Many Europeans compensate for their frustration by feeling culturally and morally superior to the Americans, whom they regard as backward. Though the Americans live in the so-called new continent, they represent the old, pre-modern Europe: They believe in God, they refuse to realise that the state can be a benevolent institution and subsequently distrust it. Large parts of the West European population consider Americans to be naive, simple, unsophisticated, even dumb – a nation without any real culture or significant history. Such views are held not only by ordinary West Europeans (who get their political education in state run schools and from state run and/or state controlled media), but also by many intellectuals who ought to know better.

Europe, however, is being overrun by barbarians. Its populations are dwindling, its welfare systems are collapsing and its old religion, Christianity, which the Europeans had cast aside, is being replaced by another one: Islam. If Europe is to be saved it must return to its old heritage which has survived in the land across the Ocean. We need to bring America’s values to Europe. These values are our own lost heritage. To survive as Europeans we have to become Americans. It is time to save ourselves by establishing a Society for American Values in Europe.

Please read the whole thing and understand that here in the West we are creating our own class of barbarians through the welfare state, through the evisceration of Western Civilization, through a loss of our cultural memory and a lack of understanding about the importance of fatherhood and motherhood in the long task of inculcating character and virtue into children. In Canada, we're not having children. We're much closer to being like Europe.

The quagmire of Guantanamo

Camp Delta has become an iconic symbol worldwide of American hypocrisy in the War on Terror. The name “Guantanamo” will go down in history with other notorious prisons such as the French nightmare penitentiary on Devil’s Island and the North Vietnamese disreputable POW camp known as “The Hanoi Hilton.”

Regardless of whether or not Guantanamo matched those two facilities in sheer brutality and horror, the fact remains that the narrative supplied by western media to describe Guantanamo to the rest of the world has made it so. And in propaganda, perception is everything. There are no starving skeletons or daily beatings as there were on Devil’s Island and the Hanoi Hilton. But the brutality that has been confirmed by independent observers, including our own military and the FBI, is real enough and has brought shame to the United States and damaged our reputation as a champion of justice and human rights among friend and foe alike.

H/T Dr. Sanity and the Watcher's Council.

Europe's crime rate is higher than the U.S.'s

Everyone knows Europe is more evolved than America, more sophisticated, more law-abiding – they sure have plenty of laws to abide by, don’t they? The European species is more restrained, civilized, blah blah, than the crude Homo americanus vulgaris.

Heh. Orléans’ crime rate is 109.24 per thousand people. In our terms, that translates to 10,100 per hundred thousand. So, extrapolating further, Orléans, France, has roughly sixty seven percent more crime than Mayor Nagin’s soggy fair city.

H/T Dr. Sanity and the Watcher's council.

Creativity is no mere bystander

In fact, he’s a cynical twit, winking and nodding and nudging when he should be listening. A savvy-less clod, it disrupts conversations with in-laws and milkmen and paying customers. He makes bunny ears and waves placards.

Creativity is a petulant child. Tireless, but still in need of a nap. Time Out is all whining and squirming, a bladderful of Kool-Aid. Sometimes she could use a spanking.

An artist spends countless hours tapping dried-up veins. And as soon as his head hits the pillow, the pointy-toed devil fritters and jigs across the macaroni lumps of brain. And she’s hidden all the pens.

Another plot foiled--how many more?

Read about it here.

H/T Gatewaypundit, who points out news of the investigation was leaked to the news media before all the suspects were in custody.

Great links at Gateway's site for more.

And, one of the suspects has links to Canada.

Father Cantalamessa: "He might, in fact, pass without my realizing it."

Father Cantalamessa on a Prophet Without Honor
Pontifical Household Preacher on This Sunday's Gospel

ROME, JULY 7, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of a commentary by Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher to the Pontifical Household, on the liturgical readings for this Sunday, the 14th of Ordinary Time.

* * *

And they took offense at him

When Jesus was already popular and famous because of his miracles and teaching, he returned one day to his place of origin, Nazareth, and as usual, he began to teach in the synagogue. However, this time there was no enthusiasm, no Hosanna!

More than listening to what he was saying and judging him accordingly, the people began to engage in inappropriate considerations. "Whence did he get this wisdom? He has not studied; we know him well; he is the carpenter, the son of Mary!" "And they took offense at him," that is, they had a problem in believing him because they knew him well.

Jesus commented bitterly: "A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house." This phrase has become proverbial in the abbreviated form: Nemo propheta in patria, no one is a prophet in his country. But this in only a curiosity. The evangelical passage also gives us an implicit warning which we can summarize thus: be careful not to commit the same mistake as the Nazarenes! In a certain sense, Jesus returns to his country every time his Gospel is proclaimed in the countries which were, at one time, the cradle of Christianity.

Our Italy, and Europe in general, are, for Christianity, what Nazareth was for Jesus: "the place where he was raised" (Christianity was born in Asia, but grew up in Europe, a bit like Jesus who was born in Bethlehem but was raised in Nazareth!) Today they run the same risk as the Nazarenes: not to recognize Jesus. The Constitutional Charter of the new united Europe is not the only place from which he is "expelled" at present.

The episode of the Gospel teaches us something important. Jesus leaves us free; he proposes his gifts, he does not impose them. That day, in face of the rejection of his fellow countrymen, Jesus did not give way to threats and invectives. He did not say, indignant, as it is said the African Publius Scipio did, when leaving Rome: "Ungrateful country, you will not have my bones!" He simply went to another place.

Once he was not received in a certain village. The indignant disciples suggested that fire be brought down from heaven, but Jesus turned and rebuked them (Luke 9:54).

That is how he acts also today. "God is timid." He has far more respect for our freedom than we ourselves have for one another's. This creates a great responsibility. St. Augustine said: "I am afraid of Jesus passing" (Timeo Jesum transeuntem). He might, in fact, pass without my realizing it, pass without my being ready to receive him.

His passing is always a passing of grace. Mark says succinctly that, having arrived in Nazareth on the Sabbath, Jesus "began to teach in the synagogue." However, the Gospel of Luke specifies also what he taught and said that Sabbath. He said he had come "to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord" (Luke 4:18-19).

What Jesus proclaimed in the synagogue of Nazareth was, therefore, the first Christian jubilee of history, the first great "year of grace," of which all jubilees and "holy years" are a commemoration.

The relativism of the Left props up Islamofascism

Victor Davis Hansen has an interesting essay about how both the Right and the Left have given Islamofascism a free pass in the West. H/T Dr. Sanity. While the Right was guilty of using the jihadis as a bulwark against communism, now it is the Left's multiculturalism, relativism and appeasement.

Multiculturalism (no culture is worse than the West’s) and its twin of cultural relativism (those with power have no right or ability to judge others) gave a wide pass to radical Islam and its 7th-century primitivism. Apparently most Leftists thought the dearth of women in the clubhouse at the Masters Tournament at Augusta National was far worse than the Arab world’s honor killings, burqas, and coerced female circumcision.

Indeed, a radical Leftist always faces a dilemma when a fellow anti-American sounds fascistic. The usual course, as we have seen since September 11, is either to keep silent about such embarrassing kindred spirits, or to weasel out by suggesting our own hegemonic tendencies pushed a once reasonable “Other” in lamentable directions.

The result? Killers and terrorists have been able to operate openly in European capitals. Here in North America, in the 58 months after the Twin Towers fell, numerous cadres of terrorists still continue to be rounded up — without a peep of condemnation from mainstream Muslim groups, who have instead crafted an ingenious cult of victimization, predicated on sympathy from the Left. Ask yourself: In the fifth year since September 11, is it more likely that Islamic associations in Canada or the United States will condemn global Islamic extremism or complain about purported Islamophobia and the sins of “Zionism”?

Dr. Sanity responds:

I wrote in "A Pure and Perfect Poison" about this new alliance that has developed between the left and Islamofascism; and how the precepts of postmodernism have dovetailed nicely into the appeasement and enabling we see today from that side of the political spectrum:

Dr. Sanity's analysis in "A pure and perfect poison" bears repeating again and again. It is brilliant.

If you can convince people that objective reality is an illusion; that A does not equal A; that black is white; and that good is bad; if you can make them accept that everything is subjective and relative; then you can breath new life into doctrines that by all objective measures and standards have led to the death and misery of millions of people. Through the manipulation of language, everything can be distorted, without the messy need to resort to facts, logic, or reason.

We see the results of this new alliance in the postmodern rhetoric and behavior that assaults us on a daily basis.

What matters is not truth or falsity--only the effectiveness of the language used. Lies, distortions, ad hominem attacks; attempts to silence opposing views--all are strategies that are perfectly satisfactory if they achieve the desired effect. Ideas and reason must make way for reification of feelings; and freedom is replaced by thought control.

The postmodern assault as it is used by the new totalitarians of the 21st century is a four-pronged attack to undermine
- Objective reality
- Reason and the rational debate of ideas
- Individual freedom and freedom of thought and speech
- Progress and capitalism

The strategies used are:
- The distortion of language and meaning to undermine the individual's perception of reality;
- The use of direct or threatened physical violence to suppress speech and individual freedom;
- Politically "correct" thought control and cultural relativism to undermine reason and rational debate;
- The promotion of environmental hysteria to undermine progress, industrialization and capitalism

That squish you hear---more on St. George

In other words, St. George's example is that of faith and bravery in the face of evil and dire difficulty, and in the service of innocence - and that appeasement doesn't work. This is the truth behind this latest bout with the wobbles. The C of E is so much in thrall to zeitgeist that it no longer feels brave enough to identify with Christ Himself half the time, so the example of St. George may well be too much for them to emulate. The question is, if they simply surrender unbidden to imaginary and unrealistic complaints, can whatever example they choose to follow ever be enough to stand fast against real evil?

See here for more on the Church of England possibly turning its back on St. George because he is deemed too offensive.

Interesting post about the prophetic movement

“Psychics move by demons, which are fallen angels,” says Jansen, over his breakfast at Cracker Barrel. He stresses that prophets get their information from God and angels, whereas Satan and demons are informing psychics and other New Age mediums.

“They don’t do it in the name of the holy spirit,” he says of psychics. He cites the example of John Edward, the popular TV clairvoyant who claims to speak to the dead loved ones of audience members on his show Crossing Over. “He contacts familiar spirits, but he doesn’t do it by the holy spirit. He calls them departed spirits,” Jansen says, leaning across the table and raising his eyebrows for emphasis. “Well, he’s got demons talking to him. He gets his information from demons.”

Jansen admits that Edward is “getting good information,” but he says, “it isn’t coming from God. It’s from demons. His gift from God is being used by a demon.”

The prophets interviewed for this article never dispute that psychics possess powerful gifts and the ability to predict the future. It’s the source of those powers that the prophets question.

As Powell says, “Jesus must be the source”—otherwise, you may be fooling with the dark lord.

In the face of this wave of prophecy, there’s at least one man who isn’t buying it. His name is Professor Volney P. Gay, chair of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University. He is a professor of religion, psychiatry and anthropology, the director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Culture and sits on the editorial board of The Journal of Ritual Studies.

Gay, who has done some research on the prophetic gifting movement, says that it’s “a kind of occult religion…. It sounds a lot like popular psychology,” he continues, voicing particular concern that these prophets are claiming they can tell the future.

“Jewish and Christian prophets do not tell people their fortunes—who will die and who will prosper, or which mutual fund to buy. Rather, they warn us about the consequences of our moral and ethical choices…. I’m not saying that there are no gifts of the spirit,” he says, citing the examples of Martin Luther King Jr. and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German and Lutheran minister who helped lead the resistance movement in Nazi Germany. “[They] did not predict future events…. In his great speeches, King did not predict when black and white children would join together. He predicted that the beloved community would emerge if we dedicated ourselves to the truths of the Christian witness: love, forgiveness, charity and hope. He did not say that he had magical powers.”

As for the theological Christian grounding of the movement, Gay is unimpressed. “The passages from Joel can be wrenched from their contexts and used to warrant any manner of claims. But these are not relevant to Biblical thought…. In Joel, you have a brilliant but very traditional anxiety about the future, about imminent collapse,” the professor says, his voice rising. “The reason those things are in there is because they did happen! In those days there were invasions, there were catastrophes and vastly larger states that could crush the Jews and make them slaves. [These] prophecies were driven by political realities of the period.”

Asked to explain the near-accurate predictions of some of these modern day prophets, Gay says, “A stopped clock is right twice a day.”

Sandy Powell is unmoved by Gay’s highfalutin opinions. “I can’t deny what I hear, who I am and what He’s called me to do.” She compares the professor to the Pharisees who mocked Jesus, adding “the skeptics and the stalkers that are within the church or outside of the church, you know, God will deal with us each in our own way.”

Jeff Jansen says that he’d been dealing with resistance to the prophetic movement for some time, though it came primarily from established church leaders. “Take the word ‘supernatural’ and try and put it in a church and people freak out, because people don’t understand it.”

J. Mark Bertrand and the peripatetic novel

If the writing comes too easily, if a chapter seems to be “writing itself,” that’s often a sign that the author is channeling stale ideas, plugging in scenes and characters she’s seen a thousand times before. That’s not so difficult. Most people can jumble the familiar pieces and reassemble them in a reasonable way. Some make a living at it.

Good for them.

The test of a peripatetic novelist, though, is that she works things out for herself. She doesn’t borrow from the public domain if she can help it.

“Begin with the end in mind.”

You can write without taking such chances, of course. To borrow a phrase from Stephen Covey, you can “begin with the end in mind,” skipping over the process of testing. Maybe the result will be didactic, and maybe it won’t. But it will never be peripatetic, because the peripatetic novel must be worked out. It must be packed and unpacked, layered and fractured and puttied over. It is a disarmingly complex thing, because it involves the whole engagement of a human mind—the author’s. Which is why peripatetic novels often require the whole engagement of the reader’s mind to appreciate—something many novels simply do not require.

You can find Mark blogging every Friday at The Master's Artist.

St. George too warlike and offensive? Sigh.

Sigh. The Church of England is thinking of downgrading St. George because he is too warlike and possibly offensive to Muslims. I have a poster of St. George slaying the dragon over the fireplace in my livingroom. The Church of England is abandoning any robust sense of Christianity. So sad, as I am a Traditional Anglican, but thankfully not part of the Canterbury Communion. Thanks to Gateway Pundit for the link: Gateway Pundit: England's Patron Saint May Get Boot, St. George Offends Muslims

His dragon-slaying heroics have kept his legend alive through the centuries.

But the Church of England is considering rejecting England's patron saint St George on the grounds that his image is too warlike and may offend Muslims.

Clergy have started a campaign to replace George with St Alban, a Christian martyr in Roman Britain.

The scheme, to be considered by the Church's parliament, the General Synod, has met a cautious but sympathetic response from senior bishops.

-snip-

The saint became an English hero during the crusades against the Muslim armies that captured Jerusalem in the 11th century.

An apparition of George is said to have appeared to the crusader army at the Battle of Antioch in 1098.

This is such a sad story, more evidence of the fact that we don't really have a problem with Muslim extremism, we have a problem with the collapse and decay of Christian institutions and the whole foundation of Western Civilization. Without renewal of those foundations and a rediscovery of a robust, masculine, loving, virtuous Christian faith, our culture is toast. Onward Christian soldiers. But we must remember that our battle is not against flesh and blood and the first dragon that we must slay --with God's help--is the our own sinful nature.

Frederick William Faber on the habitual sinner

An habitual sinner always has the look of a jaded and disappointed man. There is weariness in the very light of his eyes, vexation in the very sound of his voice. Why is he so cross with others, if he is so happy with himself? Then are there also dreadful times, private times when no one but God sees him, when he is chilled through and through with fear, when he is weary of life because he is so miserable, when the past weighs upon him like a nightmare, and the future terrifies him like a coming wildbeast?

H/T The Sheepcat, who has an expanded quote from Faber here.

Intellectual roots of Al Qaeda

Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna has an interesting history of the Muslim Brotherhood, intellectual forerunners of Al Qaeda. It shows how utopian the thinking is and how antithetical movements like it are to mediating institutions such as governments or activities like politics where imperfect people arrive at imperfect solutions. It is either direct rule by God and Shariah or else.

According to the Muslim Brotherhood, the duty of the believer was to resist subjugation by the infidel, follow the tenets of the Prophet, and return to the true practice of Islam. Al-Banna was not the first ardent Muslim to formulate such ideals, but his organizational skills made the Brotherhood into a formidable political force.

Bodissey writes about the importance for the Brotherhood of throwing off the corrupting effects of colonialism. Interesting parallels, it would seem, with some Aboriginal Canadian groups that believe in decolonization, as if one can return to some pure state before the white man came in and corrupted everything.

Shades of utopianism and Marx's "state withering away," no?

The David Jeffrey Article

For those looking for links to Jennifer Green's article about David Jeffrey, click here.

Make sure you click on the "continue reading" link to see the comments.

If I had my dream writing life

I have sometimes mused that if I had my ideal writing life, I'd be able to pace back and forth and talk stories into being and a team of scribes with better stylistic ability would actually write them. Then I would tweak what they wrote, then they would do all the polishing to make a finished product.

Well, wasn't it intersting then to open my Ottawa Citizen on the weekend and find this CP story about James Patterson, a bestselling author who writes something like four books a year.

A few years ago, Patterson began using collaborators to produce at this pace.

"I do have a big imagination," he says, the slit of his left eye closing to a near wink.

It began with Miracle on the 17th Green, a story of a middle-aged man seeking the extraordinary from his ordinary life, written with de Jonge.

"Peter is a better stylist than I am, and I'm a better storyteller than he is," Patterson says. He's since worked with five co-authors.

Patterson writes the story outline. The co-author pens a first draft. After a series of back-forths, a new book is produced in about half the time it would take one author alone.

"If you commit to my style, it's very doable for a collaborator," he says.

Patterson's editor at Little Brown and Company said a bit of nervousness followed the first collaboration.

"We were very careful and watched it very closely," said Michael Pietsch, also Little Brown's publisher. The books have sold just as well, Pietsch said.

Actually, I have mixed feelings about this. But I do find I prefer to tell stories more than I enjoy writing them because of the endless work involved.

The role of Iran in the terror campaign against Iraq

The picture in Iraq is far more complex than most of us realize. Here's an excerpt from a column by Michael Ledeen, H/T the comments section of The Belmont Club.

The single greatest distortion of reality in the war is that old chestnut about the profound hatred and total incompatibility between Sunnis and Shiites. The truth is that Sunnis and Shiites happily cooperate when it comes to killing Americans, Europeans, Jews, Christians, Suffis, Bahais, and anyone else who can be defined as an infidel and/or crusader. This has been going on for a very long time. In the early Seventies, for example, the (Shiite) Revolutionary Guards were trained in Lebanon by the (Sunni) Fatah of Yasser Arafat.

Obsessed by this great distortion, our analysts have lost sight of the profound internal war under way within Shiite Islam, the two contending forces being the Najaf (Iraqi, traditional) and the Qom (Iranian, heretical, theocratic) versions. Tehran fears ideological enemies inspired either by democracy or by Ayatollah Sistani’s (Najaf) view of the world, which is that civil society should be governed by politicians, not mullahs.

Thus it is a mistake to assume–as it is so often—that Shiites in Iraq are automatically pro-Iranian. No matter how many times smart people such as Reuel Gerecht detail the intra-Shiite civil war, it just goes in one ear and out the other of the intelligence community and the policymakers.

WHAT’S THE IRANIAN THREAT?
The Iranian threat is both religious and murderous. Yes, they want to spread their doctrine, they do indeed want to create (Qom-version) Islamic republics all over the world, but that can come later. The main mission is to drive us out of the Middle East, above all from their eastern (Afghanistan) and western (Iraq) borders. The prime instrument for this mission is terrorism, and they do not care at all about the ethos of the terrorists. Indeed, as I reported some months back, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei told his closest advisers late last year that Iran now controlled all the major terror groups, religious or Marxist, Sunni or Shiite.

We are wrongly focused on the Iranian nuclear threat, which is obviously worth worrying about, but this excessively narrow focus has distracted us from the main threat, which is terrorism. The mullahs are not going to nuke our fighters in Iraq; they are going to kill as many as they can on the ground with IEDs, suicide terrorists, and assassins. And we have given them a free hand in this murderous campaign instead of unleashing political war against them in their own country.

Iraq the Spanish Civil War of our times

Important post over at The Belmont Club by Wretchard. H/T Dr. Sanity. Please read it all.

Terrorism is extortion in the service of politics. Attacks on civilian targets are whole-page advertisements taken out to flog these wares on a reluctant public. The military power of terrorists is negligable. Despite the fantasies of those who imagine Iraq to be Vietnam, with divisions of NVA sending tanks down the road to Saigon; with legions of laborers dragging artillery pieces across the mountains to pound surrounded French garrisons into submission -- it is not that. Rather, it is a development of the techniques pioneered in the Algerian conflict against the French. It is the political and media power of terror which is important, not their military strength. And in a takeoff from Omar's riff on Maliki's email anecdote,
style="font-weight:bold;">I would venture to say that terror would have won against the US and the West already despite the vast power of America were it not for the Internet, which has ironically made it possible for neutralize the propaganda power of terror. The Internet makes it possible to show terror up for the murder that it is. To strip it of supposed justification. To remind people of what is never mentioned in the papers: that Osama like all men goes and takes a shit. Made it possible to answer back. In a way, the Internet and the blogosphere is the sole remaining voice the victims; whether of terror or counter-terror.

and

If you read the re-read Omar's post in conjunction with the Management of Savagery and Stealing al-Qaeda's Playbook it is clear that a democratic, or even semi-democratic Iraqi government represents a direct challenge to the Jihadi Grand Strategy. An existential challenge. Omar understood that the war in Iraq, far from being the optional extra John Murtha thinks it might be, is the central theater in a global conflict. It is the Spanish Civil War of our time. The Jihadis themselves understand the centrality of politics within that war; the importance of the "media halo" and have a clear idea of what happens after they drive the US from Iraq. A better idea perhaps then many Western politicians have themselves.

The interesting thing is how Naji's playbook has and has not worked out as planned. True, the US accepted battle in the Middle East, but I think to the Jihad's surprise, the US fight in Iraq was not predominantly conventional, but largely an intelligence war fought by local, not European allies. Those tactics have largely defeated or al-Qaeda's organization to the point where the second factor now gains prominence. That second factor is the emergence of a large Shi'a component within the fight, a direct consequence of elections, through which the US can exploit the fracture lines within the enemy ranks, not just locally, but globally. Those factors underlie the negotiations now taking place in Iraq. Think of it: this has never happened to the Jihad before. Not in Algeria, Afghanistan or anywhere else. They are fighting for their political lives in a country which hates them, though the same cannot be said of Western intellectual circles. But this is where the Internet comes in.

You'll need to read the whole post for all the references. Great links.

Important post over at The Belmont Club by Wretchard. H/T Dr. Sanity. Please read it all.

Terrorism is extortion in the service of politics. Attacks on civilian targets are whole-page advertisements taken out to flog these wares on a reluctant public. The military power of terrorists is negligable. Despite the fantasies of those who imagine Iraq to be Vietnam, with divisions of NVA sending tanks down the road to Saigon; with legions of laborers dragging artillery pieces across the mountains to pound surrounded French garrisons into submission -- it is not that. Rather, it is a development of the techniques pioneered in the Algerian conflict against the French. It is the political and media power of terror which is important, not their military strength. And in a takeoff from Omar's riff on Maliki's email anecdote, I would venture to say that terror would have won against the US and the West already despite the vast power of America were it not for the Internet, which has ironically made it possible for neutralize the propaganda power of terror. The Internet makes it possible to show terror up for the murder that it is. To strip it of supposed justification. To remind people of what is never mentioned in the papers: that Osama like all men goes and takes a shit. Made it possible to answer back. In a way, the Internet and the blogosphere is the sole remaining voice the victims; whether of terror or counter-terror.

U.S. army sergeant interviews Iraqi general

Qayyarah is a model for other Iraqi cities because it was once a haven for terrorists but is now safe enough for anyone to travel around in without fear of terrorists. The main reason for the safety of Qayyarah lies with one man: General Ali. He is a myth-like figure around our base and everyone knows his name. He is a strict military man but is the type of man Iraq needs so desperately right now. I hope people the world over will read this interview and learn just what kind of men are in Iraq right now willing to take control of their own country.

General Ali tells 24-year-old Sergeant T.F. Boggs:

You see those two sheiks? They came to thank me because I made their area secure. They are very happy when they see the work being done in their area. When they see people working at night, people driving. Basra and Baghdad are dangerous but my area now is very safe. In my area the security is excellent. Now I can guarantee that you can go by yourself in your uniform with no armor, no helmet, no weapon, and I’ll give you my vehicle so that you can go to Qayyarah to shop in the market and come back to here and you will be safe. This happened because before the terrorists were in control there was no trust between the Iraqi army and the people. They just believed the terrorists but when I came I controlled this area and I had a meeting with all the sheiks and all the people and all the doctors and I made clear to them that all the terrorists and all the criminals were killers against Islam and they believed me and helped me. They gave me information and even caught terrorists and brought them to me. This is excellent. I told them that it was their job, that it was their country. All Iraqi people must fight the terrorists because it was not just the job of the Iraqi army. The terrorists were killing civilians and because of it the people believed me and they came to work with me.

H/T Gateway Pundit

Catholic priest stabbed in Turkey

A French Roman Catholic priest has been stabbed by a knife-carrying attacker in the Turkish Black Sea port of Samsun.

The attack on Father Pierre Brunissen, 74, is the third assault on a Catholic priest in Turkey in recent months.

Fr Brunissen was stabbed in the hip and leg and rushed to hospital, but a church official said his condition was not life-threatening.

Police detained an unnamed 47-year-old man who they described as suffering from mental illness.

The man had allegedly made complaints about Fr Brunissen trying to convert people to his faith.

Reports said he was attacked in a busy street about 1km from his church.

"I hope this has nothing to with Islamic fundamentalism," Monsignor Luigi Padovese, the apostolic vicar for Anatolia, told the Associated Press news agency.

Dr. Sanity nails the chicken doves

In case you wonder what kind of a perverse fantasy world such people live in--it is one where they are so aghast at their own rageful and violent nature that they refuse to acknowledge they even possess such feelings. This enables them to wrap themselves in moral virtue and project those unacceptable impulses onto convenient targets so that they can remain morally pure and untainted. They see themselves as the anti-war movement, but they are truly the repositories of an unconscious cesspool of violence and hatred that breaks through quite regularly in their speech and behavior.

Belgium authorities going after Paul Belien

I'm a big fan of Paul Belien and his Brussels Journal. I'm deeply concerned that his voice may soon be silenced.

Gates of Vienna has a recent post that shows how Belgium authorities are persecuting him. Now they're investigating his family for homeschooling their children and threatening to force the one boy still living at home to go to a drug-infested school.

Dymphna writes:

What is increasingly clear is that Belgium is not a safe place for children. The state is not content to take over parental authority, they then transfer that authority to a supra-national organization — the United Nations — one whose record on the care of children is scandalous, to put it charitably.

Canada, in legalizing gay marriage, also undid the natural biological bonds of mothers and fathers to their children, and created a legal construct called "legal parenthood." Thus, with the stroke of a legislators pen, the biological family no longer has any natural status and one is only a parent because the state says you are.

That is a recipe for totalitarianism. The state can decide if you are a parent or not, and totally overlook whether you have a right to your child or your child has a right to you.

So...what's happening to the Belien's may be horrifying, but the legal groundwork is already laid for it to happen in Canada.

The frog is getting pretty hot to the point of langour here, too.

Roger Scruton on the harm of prostitution

As part of hosting the World Cup, the German government is preparing to ship in prostitutes for the use of the spectators, building special huts around the stadium, and — it seems — not asking too many questions about who obtains the women, by what method, and from where. This is one small but significant instance of a shift in attitude that has recently occurred in Europe. The oldest profession, which has survived for millennia without the benefit of public approval, is now officially endorsed — not merely legalized, but welcomed into the fold of the “inclusive society.” It is even politically incorrect to use the term “prostitute”: People on the left prefer “sex worker,” implying that the hint of disapproval contained in the old name is a mark of discrimination that has no place in a postmodern society. Proposals to introduce trade-union rights and pension funds for these newly discovered “workers” have been debated in France and Germany, and the implication — that the state should tax their earnings — is accepted as entirely unproblematic. Visitors to Amsterdam have long been familiar with the market in female flesh that surrounds the Old Church. This church, the oldest in Amsterdam, is a symbol of Calvinist piety and famous for its music. On their way to the lesser business of worship, the choirboys now pass a window display of nudes, performing like sluggish snakes in their heated cages of glass. And, although the Dutch themselves have awoken, somewhat late, to the consequences of a demoralized public culture, the rest of Europe is intent on following their example, and sanitizing this last dark corner where the puritan conscience reigns.

The power of hypnosis?

Interesting video from YouTube. Is this for real? It's an improvisational gag with audience plants. Some didn't find it so funny after all.

Chinese piracy keeping so-called economic powerhouse as the lowcost factory of the world.

Heh heh heh. Rampant Chinese piracy is hurting China most of all. If I were to develop a slogan for politics, in China or elsewhere, it would be "It's character, stupid!" H/T Gay and Right via Blogging Tories.

"Piracy has had a big impact on us, making it so we can't get powerful and compete with Microsoft," said Ren Jian, a former Microsoft manager who is Kingsoft's chief operating officer.

Kingsoft is far from alone. Rampant Chinese piracy of music, movies and software that raises howls of protest from the United States, Europe and elsewhere is hitting China's fledgling creative industries hardest of all. Robbed of sales in their key home market, companies are short of money to develop new products to compete with foreign rivals.

Losses to piracy are especially damaging at a time when communist leaders want China to transform itself from the world's low-cost factory into an "innovation society" that makes its own profitable technology and brand names.

China has long been the world's leading source of illegally copied music, movies, designer clothes and other goods. U.S. officials say its exports cost legitimate producers worldwide up to $50 billion a year in lost potential sales.

Was the information useless to terrorists or not?

David Frum unpacks the details in the New York Times story and lists what the terrorists might not have known before the Swift program was revealed on the Times' front page.

The Times should have the courage of its convictions. Instead of pretending that the information revealed was useless, it should forthrightly admit: Yes we may possibly have helped the terrorists - but we believe that any risks to security were more than worth it. Then we could argue that latter point. Their current line of defense is disingenuous and cowardly.

Slavery in Los Angeles

An Irvine man and his former wife pleaded guilty Thursday to forcing a
12-year-old illegal immigrant from Egypt to work as their domestic
slave.

Under terms of a plea deal with federal prosecutors, Abdel Nasser Eid Youssef
Ibrahim, 45, and his former wife, Amal Ahmed Ewis-abd Motelib, 43, each
face up to three years in prison.

The girl, whose name was not released, was brought to the United States
in 2000. Every morning she helped the couple's youngest children get
ready for school, washed clothes, cleaned the house and prepared food.
Following up on an anonymous tip, police in 2002 found the girl living
in squalor in a 12-by-8-foot converted area of the family's garage.

The three year prison term is woefully short in my opinion.

Nine family members sentenced for honor killing

This week, for the very first time, a court in Europe sentenced nine members of the same family for the honour killing of a female relative. Honour killings, where a woman is murdered for the shame that she is said to have brought on her family, are a growing phenomenon in Western Europe.

Who died and left you president of the United States?

David Reinhard of the Oregonian gives New York Times editor-in-chief Bill Keller a piece of his mind. H/T Dr. Sanity.

Dear Bill Keller:

Remember me? We met in the elevator here at The Oregonian recently. Your decision to expose a secret program to track terrorist funding got me to thinking I had better write and apologize. I don't think I was sufficiently deferential on our brief ride together. I treated you like the executive editor of The New York Times who used to work for The Oregonian. I had no idea I was riding with the man who decides what classified programs will be made public during a war on terror. I had no idea the American people had elected you president and commander in chief.

Yes, I'm being sarcastic. What's that they say -- sarcasm is anger's ugly cousin? I'm angry, Bill.

I get angry when a few unauthorized individuals take it upon themselves to undermine an anti-terror program that even your own paper deems legal and successful. I get angry when the same people decide to blow the lid on a secret program designed to keep Islamic terrorists from killing Americans en masse.

Mark Steyn on the Geneva Convention and the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision

There are several ways to fight a war. On the one hand, you can put on a uniform, climb into a tank, rumble across a field and fire on the other fellows' tank. On the other, you can find a 12-year-old girl, persuade her to try on your new suicide-bomber belt and send her waddling off into the nearest pizza parlor.

The Geneva Conventions were designed to encourage the former and discourage the latter. The thinking behind them was that, if one had to have wars, it's best if they're fought by soldiers and armies. In return for having a rank and serial number and dressing the part, you'll be treated as a lawful combatant should you fall into the hands of the other side. There'll always be a bit of skulking around in street garb among civilian populations, but the idea was to ensure that it would not be rewarded --that there would, in fact, be a downside for going that route.

The U.S. Supreme Court has now blown a hole in the animating principle behind the Geneva Conventions by choosing to elevate an enemy that disdains the laws of war in order to facilitate the bombing of civilian targets and the beheading of individuals.

H/T Dr. Sanity.

Anti-Christ superman vs. the suffering servant

***UPDATE My fellow Master's Artist Dee Stewart is just back from watching the Superman Returns movie has has posted her thoughts here.

Dee asks what if she were Lois and writes:

What are we doing to show Christ that we don’t need him? What can we do to show him that despite what he sees and hears we do love him? What part of our lives are we keeping him from? And what will it take for us to decide to love him back without condition?

Some churches like to use clips from the latest movie or TV program in sermons to make Christian teaching relevant. Here's an interesting warning about not going too far in comparing the Superman character in the new Superman Returns movie to Jesus Christ. (H/T The Catholic Educator's Resource Centre, CERC)

Some things point us to God in rather direct ways, others more indirectly, and still others show us divine truths by opposition and contrast rather than by similarity. Superman is a figure who is striking not so much for his similarity to Christ, but rather for his dissimilarity. We might say that the typological relation between Jesus and Superman is that of Christ and anti-Christ. Indeed, those looking for a more direct analogue to the comic hero Superman would do well to look at the writings of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose intellectual influence was in full bloom on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1930s, the decade when the Superman comic was born.

Many Christians embraced the Superman hero when a trailer for the new movie was released using the words of Superman’s father Jor-El, voiced by Marlon Brando: “Even though you’ve been raised as a human being you’re not one of them. They can be a great people, Kal-El. They wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I sent them you... my only son.”

The superficial similarities between Jesus and Superman are clear. Both are sons sent to Earth to save humankind. But it is here that the likeness ends and the more fundamental differences appear. What the preceding quote illustrates is that Superman is supposed to lead humankind into a future in which we realize our own innate potential.

The title character in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra teaches the people about the coming of the Superman, and speaks of this potential: “It is time for man to fix his goal. It is time for man to plant the germ of his highest hope.” Humans are “something that is to be surpassed,” and “a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman.”

This goal is the Superman, who is “the sense of their existence” and “the lightning out of the dark cloud.” In a posthumously published book, aptly titled The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche makes the explicit case for his opposition of the Superman to the Christian, whom he calls “the sick human animal.”

Nietzsche’s Superman is a being who embodies the will to power, for “Life itself is to my mind the instinct for growth, for durability, for an accumulation of forces, for power: where the will to power is lacking, there is decline.” Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound: The comic book figure Superman is the embodiment of such invincibility and power.

The antithesis of power and strength is weakness and suffering. The apostle Paul writes of Jesus Christ, who “humbled himself and became obedient to death — even death on a cross.” Christ the suffering servant, who sacrifices himself and endures the ignominious death of crucifixion for the sins of the world, is the scandal of Christianity, the stumbling block opposing the wisdom of the world. And this is why Nietzsche, who captures worldly wisdom so well, writes so disparagingly about “the death of the Nazarene.”

Pop music and liturgy

The Catholic Educators' Resource Centre (CERC) has done a great job of providing resources on what the Pope really said about guitar music in the Church. No, he did not "ban" it as some news reports have suggested. He does, however, want us to think about what music best lifts the soul to a contemplation of God's holiness.

Here's an excerpt from the Pope's teaching on the liturgy, written when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

On the one hand, there is pop music, which is certainly no longer supported by the people in the ancient sense (populus). It is aimed at the phenomenon of the masses, is industrially produced, and ultimately has to be described as a cult of the banal. "Rock", on the other hand, is the expression of elemental passions, and at rock festivals it assumes a cultic character, a form of worship, in fact, in opposition to Christian worship. People are, so to speak, released from themselves by the experience of being part of a crowd and by the emotional shock of rhythm, noise, and special lighting effects. However, in the ecstasy of having all their defenses torn down, the participants sink, as it were, beneath the elemental force of the universe. The music of the Holy Spirit's sober inebriation seems to have little chance when self has become a prison, the mind is a shackle, and breaking out from both appears as a true promise of redemption that can be tasted at least for a few moments.

DeMuth is on the cutting edge of Christian fiction

My fellow Master's Artist author Mary DeMuth got a great review in today's Dallas Morning News for her wonderful first novel Watching the Tree Limbs.

Ms. DeMuth treads where other Christian authors have feared to tread. She reveals both good and evil in her characters and veils them in mystery. Her imagery and lyrical metaphors compel readers to turn each page as she pulls them into Mara's seemingly lost childhood and leads them to a redemptive conclusion.

Mary is on the cutting edge of a new kind of Christian fiction writing that elevates the art of fiction and story back to where it belongs, as important in its own right, and not merely a disguised sermon masquerading as fiction.


Watching the Tree Limbs is a poignant, lyrical book reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird in the deft way Mary captures the point of view of her child protagonist, Mara.

But Mara is not Scout. She is totally distinct and so is the Texas town Mary portrays in all its sweltering heat and oppression. This is a fabulous book, a great read, but full of meaning. I loved it.

I do hope to interview Mary about the novel here some time soon.

In the meantime, here's a link to an interview I did with her on her recently released parenting book "Building the CHristian Family You Never Had".

You can visit Mary's blog and website here.

Michael D. O'Brien on the anti-Christ

Michael D. O'Brien, the author of Father Elijah, has given an interview about the anti-Christ here.

It certainly is looking more and more possible, even probable. The climate of world opinion has become so conditioned by new media culture, which is continuously pumping into the consciousness of modern man moral values and ideas that are completely at odds with the teachings of Christ and the Church. That spirit of Antichrist is growing, spreading throughout the world. And the proponents of the New World Order recognize–you can read it in their writings and interviews–that the Catholic Church is the single major stumbling block to their agenda. Only the Church, the Body of Christ in the world, stands as a bulwark against the emergence of this New World Order, which embodies many of the ideas of the Antichrist. But I should say that it is not only anti-Christ, it is anti-human, it is anti-person. It is collectivist and totalitarian, although it speaks endlessly of the beauty of democracy.

Michael Coren on Canada's soul sickness

Wave the flag. Wave a cloth adorned with a piece of vegetation in the colours of the Liberal Party, one with little tradition and less meaning.

No. Many Canadians remember the great emblem that once adorned our dominion, containing the cross, the symbol of ancient and eternal wisdom and truth.

Do what the government tells you, allow your rights to be expunged and smile as the norms that made the country great are parodied while at the same time a stew of twisted realities are paraded.

No. Many Canadians are tired of the intrusions of the state and the relentless attacks from alleged "alternative" lifestyles.

Protect children but destroy childhood, make a fetish of equality but allow elites to impose their ways and rule our country. Claim to respect diversity but be horribly intolerant of anybody who resists the liberal status quo.

No. Many Canadians are tired of the twin monsters of materialism and decadence. They have had enough of public educators telling young people how to live but not how to read and write. Nor will they remain silent when told to do so by the princes of political correctness.

Park in a handicapped parking spot and you'll be charged and fined. Abort a handicapped baby or kill a terminally ill handicapped person and you'll be applauded.

No. Many Canadians are waking up to this country's tolerance of destruction of generations of the unborn and the growing obsession with euthanasia and killing those who are no longer bold and beautiful.

Have perverse sex, take your clothes off in public, swear on television and insult people's deeply held beliefs, but you don't dare do it while smoking a cigarette or not wearing a seat belt.

No. Many Canadians are repulsed by the hypocrisy. They know there are moral as well as physical ills that plague our country and that it is pointless to save a body if the soul is destroyed.

Amen. Canada needs a revival and renewal from the inside out. Otherwise, like the rest of the west, it is heading into a new dark age.

Victor Davis Hanson on the many fronts of the war

Finally, we are witnessing a larger existential war, in which Iraq is the central, but not the only, theater. Put simply: will the spreading affluence and liberality of Westernization undermine the 8th-century mentality of the Islamists more quickly than their terrorists, armed with Western weapons, prey on the ennui of a postmodern Europe and America — with our large gullible populations that either don’t believe we are in a real war, or think that we should not be?

Americans know exactly the creed of the Islamists and what they have in store for us nonbelievers. Yet if we are not infidels, can we at least be fideles? That is, can we any longer articulate what we believe in, and whether it is worth defending?

That last sentence sums up the problem. We don't know if what we have is worth defending. As Mark Steyn talks about in the post below, we have lost our memory and our history.

We must renew our minds and our memories.

Mark Steyn's Canada Day offering

A nation's collective memory is the unseen seven-eighths of the iceberg. When you sever that, what's left just bobs around on the surface, unmoored in every sense. Orwell understood that an assault on history is an assault on memory, and thus a totalitarian act. What, after all, does it really mean when Mme. Robillard and Mr. Martin twitter about how "young" we are? Obviously, it's a way of denigrating the past. Revolutionary regimes routinely act this way: thus, in Libya, the national holiday of Revolution Day explicitly draws a line between the discredited and illegitimate regimes predating December 1st, 1969, and the Gadaffi utopia that's prevailed since. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge literally reset the clock, to "Year Zero."

Why does the MSM seem to be at war with the Bush administration?

Why publish maps and specific street names and photographs of the private (not anymore) homes where the Vice President and Defense Secretary and their families spend their vacations?

Why?

Because blabbermouth Bill Keller feels like it, right? (Interesting timing, no?)

Because the "people" (you know: Code Pink, Fred Phelps, jihadis) have a "right to know," right?

-snip-

I wonder how Pinch Sulzberger would react to citizen photographers trampling his driveway, snapping pics of his vacation home, and splashing them all over their blogs?

Condi Rice speaks her mind to Russian foreign minister

** Iraqis know they have a friend in Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice...
Condi blasts her Russian counterpart Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in defense of the fledgling Iraqi Government! **

The whole conversation was recorded when a reporter "mistakenly" left a microphone on during the private lunch session between the two officials.

Read the whole thing. It includes a link to the Washington Post article.