More on Marci McDonald's bigoted anti-Christian book

Ezra Levant hasn't finished with Marci McDonald's Armageddon Factor yet:

Marci McDonald's semi-literate book claims that the Christian Right controls Canada under Stephen Harper.

Right. That explains why Henry Morgentaler received the Order of Canada.

But McDonald does do something fun: she makes an enemies list, Richard Nixon-style.

But seriously: if you're going to make a conspiracy theory, how on Earth do you exclude the Jews?

They're disproportionately represented in Ottawa.

But that's creepy -- and smacks of racism.

Much safer to beat up Christians, and make up blacklists naming them, right?

And you know you really have a bigoted book when the usually gracious, cultured and moderate conservative David Frum calls it not only anti-Christian but anti-Israel in the National Post.

McDonald’s breathless The Armageddon Factor purports to describe a sinister conspiracy by militant evangelicals to reach into the very centre of Canadian government. Like the boy in Roth’s story, McDonald uses “evangelical” in the broadest sense, to include not only Catholics, but also Jews, Korean Pentecostals, Ismaili Muslims, and the editorial board of this newspaper.

To anyone familiar with the personalities targeted by McDonald, the effect is freakishly disorienting. Everything seems misshapen, upside down, disconnected from reality.

-Snip-

But, unfortunately, The Armageddon Factor is not merely silly. Despite its subtitle (The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada), Christians are not Marci McDonald’s most detested target. That target is the state of Israel, and those who support Israel.

“So unflinching has Harper’s backing of Israel been that some have questioned ... to what extent is this country’s role in the Middle East being influenced by ... the idea that the end of the world is at hand?” (p. 312)

Okay, I’ll bite: Zero?

Not so, says McDonald. Why, just look at the sinister chain of causation: The Prime Minister’s Office has sent Rosh Hashanah greeting cards to Jewish supporters (p. 321). Conservative party campaign literature attacked Michael Ignatieff for having accused Israel of war crimes in the 2006 campaign in Lebanon (p 322). B’Nai Brith’s Frank Dimant has had meetings with pro-Israel Christians. It all adds up to one inescapable conclusion: “At a time when Left Behind followers can check the proximity of the end times on the Rapture Index at raptureready.com, the worry is that a government that has aligned itself with the most belligerent voices in Israel -- and is riddled with biblical literalists certain of the inevitiability [sic] of an end-times conflagration in the Middle East -- could, wittingly or not, hasten that apocalyptic scenario” (p. 336).

The “wittingly or not” is a nice touch: It leaves open the possibility that Stephen Harper’s contribution to the imminent destruction of life on earth is at least unintentional.

It especially enrages McDonald that “opponents of [the Harper government’s] pro-Israel policy are routinely branded as anti-Semites” (pp. 358-359). But if this branding occurs (and McDonald offers no instances or examples), it certainly has not deterred those opponents, very much including McDonald herself.

Read the whole thing.

And then, leave it up to McGill University's Margaret Somerville, in today's Ottawa Citizen, to break it down slowly and patiently for those too stupid to understand the difference between freedom from religion---which is what Marci and her ilk seem to think is desirable---and freedom for and freedom of religion.

Here is the summary. Print it off. Read. It. Slowly. Marci. This is why we have every right to be here in the public square, just as you do. We, however, don't want you using the power of the state to impose your dogma on us as you and your ilk have been doing since Trudeau launched his version of hopenchange. We are not "going away."

Those using "separation of church and state" to justify excluding religion from the public square have created confusion among: Freedom of religion; freedom for religion; and freedom from religion.

Freedom of religion: The state does not impose a religion on its citizens and there is no state religion. Freedom for religion: The state does not restrict the free practice of religion by its citizens. Freedom from religion: The state excludes religion and religious voices from the public square, in particular, in relation to law and public policy making. The first two freedoms are valid expressions of the doctrine. The third is not.

This mistaken interpretation of the doctrine of "separation of church and state" has been used by secularists in order to win a victory for their values in the culture wars by eliminating consideration of the values of their opponents on the basis they're religiously based. But for many people, their moral reasoning is connected with their religious beliefs. To exclude them and their moral views from the public square, because of the source of their beliefs, would be to disenfranchise them.