Posts Tagged ‘religion’

Cuba, Christians and Haiti the world keeps turning

Posted: January 17, 2011 by datechguy in opinion/news
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If you followed the blogs you likely didn’t think that anything else was going on except for blaming Sarah Palin for Arizona but there are a few things going on that you should know:

Item: Europe continues it’s post Christian Path:

If you think Pope Benedict XVI and other Christian denominations are lying about how Europe is secularizing, as well as shunning specifically Christianity, this should be proof.

The three million copies of the 2011-2012 school calendar published by the European Union has omitted Christian holidays, while continuing to note important Jewish and Muslim celebrations.

While Christian holidays such as Christmas and Easter are missing from the calendar’s pages, days commemorating “Sikh Baisakhi-Day, the Jewish Yom Kippur holiday, the Muslim holiday Aid-el-Kebir,” remain in place,”

Europe is still stung by Anti-Semitic slaughter and Muslims are the fastest growing population in the area so they can’t be offended. Christians, who cares.

Item: Iraq continues its own “post Christian era” that being more of a Post Christian being alive” era: (warning very graphic photos of slaughter)

This Assyrian Catholic church was taken over by jihadis, and during the course of the several hours during which they controlled the church, the insurgents killed many of the worshippers, until the Iraqi army forces finally stormed the building.

I have been viewing reports from survivors of the massacre, posted on YouTube (here, here and here). From these, and earlier published reports (e.g. here), a picture emerges of the jihadis as religiously motivated people who engaged their victims in theological conversations about Islam, and justified their actions based on the Islamic sharia.

And the fun for Christians continues in Pakistan too:

A day after the two got into an argument, the Muslim woman walked out onto the street and started shouting that her sister-in-law had abused the Holy Prophet (pbuh).

A short while later, a group of men forced their way into the house and started slapping the Christian woman, said another of her brothers.

“Other men and women from the neighbourhood started gathering at the house too and they beat up my sister and mother. They were the only people in the house,” he added.

A participant in the beating said that the women’s faces were blackened, and that they were made to wear necklaces of shoes and paraded around the locality on donkeys to humiliate them. The women denied blaspheming and repeatedly touched their feet, seeking mercy, he added.

I’m sure feminists in the west will make strong objections to this kind of thing someday before I die. Of course when they do the shock will likely kill me.
Item: Don’t call him a socialist but Obama is trying to bail out the Castro’s in Cuba.

A senior Obama official told The Miami Herald the much-expected move to expand cultural, religious and educational travel to Cuba is part of the administration’s continuing “effort to support the Cuban people’s desire to freely determine their own future.

President Barack Obama is also restoring the amount of money ($2,000) that can be sent to nonfamily members to the level they were at during part of the Clinton and Bush administrations.

As Val Prieto said Cuba’s #1 export is people generating money to send back. This is getting very little notice outside of Babalu Blog, but now you know about it.

Item: In the middle of a post whose real point is faith The Anchoress informs us the UN shows how it’s (not) done in Haiti:

The UN complied. As it turns out, the local aid organizations took the free food that came in from all over the world and were not selling it; they were hoarding it in order to sell it. But the people, for the most part, had no money to buy it with. The Haitian government is so corrupt and I’m sure they’re in cahoots with the local distribution organizations. Someone will get rich off the backs of the poor, and many will die for someone else’s greed.

The day that actual honest people are in charge in Haiti it will be a gift from God.

The world keeps turning no matter what we’re focusing on.

The media tells us who they fear

Posted: January 12, 2011 by datechguy in culture, media
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One of Rush Limbaugh’s favorite lines about the media and the democrats is they will tell you who they fear by their reactions.

One of the reason’s why the media has no problem “calling out” the Tea Party without evidence and why they have no problem going after the Catholic Church is not only do they disagree with their positions, but they understand and no they actually have no physical reason to fear them.

At No Paesran via Glenn we see the difference between reporting on people you fear vs people you don’t. First the shooting in Arizona and the Conservatives in Le Monde:

The shooting in which a Democrat was seriously wounded in Arizona has appalled the American Left, which denounces the “poisoned rhetoric” of the ultraconservatives…

He continues illustrating the comparative nonsense within the paper itself and their willingness to post blames, Yet not two weeks after the attack in Alexandra against Coptic Christians that was international news (prompting a rare positive reaction) we have this story out of Egypt:

An off-duty policeman has opened fire on a train in Egypt, killing a Christian man, but it is unclear whether the attack was sectarian.

At least another five people were reported to have been injured in the shooting on a train between Assiut and Cairo.

Officials said at least four of those hurt were Coptic Christians.

That’s just the fact but note how the story ends:

The BBC’s Jon Leyne reports from Cairo that it is difficult to see how the gunmen would have known he could target Christians by boarding the train.

Here you have the media making it a point to say it’s hard to see a direct religious connection the lack of evidence to make a connection to radical Islam vs the Coptic.

Although he approves of that last statement No Paesran’s head spins:

It is unclear whether the attack was sectarian! We learn that “Officials said at least four of those hurt [there were five wounded altogether] were Coptic Christians” and we learn that “Witnesses said hundreds of Christians later clashed with police outside the hospital where the wounded were taken” and we are reminded that “Tensions between Muslims and Christians in Egypt have been high following a bomb attack on a Coptic church in Alexandria at the new year that killed 23 people.” But! It is unclear whether the attack was sectarian!

All of this speaks volumes. I think it’s not just bias, I think it is the knowledge that if the BBC suggests islamic violence they may have to deal with repercussions personally.

Restraint is easy when your skin is at stake.

Sad to say they sound alike

Posted: January 10, 2011 by datechguy in opinion/news
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I took an unexpectedly long nap and ended up awake at midnight, looking around the net I saw this via Lisa Graas:

Is it just me, or is there an incredible lack of reason on the Left?

Incidentally, the way I found out about the shooting was through an avalanche of tweets calling Sarah Palin a ‘murderer’. I was even called a murderer for asking people not to point fingers of blame. There is certainly ‘vitriol’…..but it’s not coming from the direction the Left claims.

For two days I’ve been seeing people hurling the vilest accusations at the Tea party in general and Sarah Palin in particular without any factual basis. And if that isn’t enough everyone’s favorite Democratic Pastor Fred Phelps plans on jumping into the fray..

Phelps praises Loughner’s violent acts in this video, where he announces he will be taking his sick protest to the funerals of the victims of the Arizona shooting spree. He also refers to Loughner as an Afghanistan war veteran, even though initial reports of Loughner being a veteran turned out to be false.

It’s pretty bad, almost as bad as this reaction to the murder of another poll half a world away:

Tens of thousands of demonstrators marched in Pakistan’s largest city on Sunday to oppose any change to national blasphemy laws and to praise a man charged with murdering a provincial governor who had campaigned against the divisive legislation.

The rally of up to 50,000 people in downtown Karachi was one of the largest demonstrations of support for the laws, which make insulting Islam a capital offense. It was organized before the governor of Punjab province, Salman Taseer, was shot dead on Tuesday in Islamabad by a bodyguard who told a court he considered Taseer a blasphemer.

Muslim groups have praised the bodyguard, Mumtaz Qadri, and have used Taseer’s death to warn others not to speak out against the much-derided laws.

Now what does a group of religions fanatics Pious Muslims marching have to do with the left?

Simply this. The Governor of Punjab by challenging his fellow Muslim’s belief was a threat to their mind-set. It’s much easier to eliminate people who challenge your religious beliefs than to defend those beliefs, much less thinking involved.

When I look at the left willing to blame Sarah Palin, Andrew Breitbart, the Tea Party and even Lisa Graas for inciting violence while both using violent rhetoric and ignoring their own violent rhetoric in the past the pieces fit together.

The left secular political beliefs have essentially morphed into a religion. The right feelings and opinions are the sacraments (much easier than having to follow actual commandments like traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs) if you have them you are considered righteous.

Conversely if you don’t share those beliefs you are outside, you are the devil and evil, and since you are evil any level of vitriolic rhetoric or action is permissible. Rather than praying for your enemies as Christianity commands one can hate them openly and feel good about it.

This is why above all Sarah Palin is their Anti-Christ. She symbolizes all that they hate, she is a person of action who lives her beliefs and does so publicly and unabashedly. She is a reminder of a reality that their religion needs to suppress. Screwtape 13 had it pegged:

The characteristic of Pains and Pleasures is that they are unmistakably real, and therefore, as far as they go, give the man who feels them a touchstone of reality. Thus if you had been trying to damn your man by the Romantic method—by making him a kind of Childe Harold or Werther submerged in self-pity for imaginary distresses—you would try to protect him at all costs from any real pain; because, of course, five minutes’ genuine toothache would reveal the romantic sorrows for the nonsense they were and unmask your whole stratagem.
But you were trying to damn your patient by the World, that is by palming off vanity, bustle, irony, and expensive tedium as pleasures. How can you have
failed to see that a real pleasure was the last thing you ought to have let him meet? Didn’t you foresee that it would just kill by contrast all the trumpery which you have been so laboriously teaching him to value?

This is why the right in general and Sarah Palin in particular must be attacked here. Every moment that she is not brings the possibility that realization might strike, that the superficial might be replaced by a foundation in reality and that reality is anathema to all that has come before.

Today Elizabeth Scalia asks the question what is wrong with the world. Chesterton’s spectacular Catholic Answer was “I am” and thus stove to change and improve himself. A great example to all Christians in general and Catholics in particular but self-realization is a tough and painful process and many don’t want to face it. Much easier to carry on confident in one perfection.

Until those on the left can come to Chesterton’s answer and work to correct it we will see more of the same. Remember screwtapes final warning:

The great thing is to prevent his doing anything. As long as he does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance. Let the little brute wallow in it. Let him, if he has any bent that way, write a book about it; that is often an excellent way of sterilizing the seeds which the Enemy plants in a human soul. Let him do anything but act. No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will. As one of the humans has said, active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel,

Sit Down Pam Geller Light might be dawning on Marblehead MSNBC

Posted: January 5, 2011 by datechguy in Afghanistan war, middle east, opinion/news, war
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As a person who follows the war on terror and radical Islam, I have read many stories like this:

In the weeks before the New Year’s Day suicide bombing of an Egyptian church, al-Qaida-linked websites carried a how-to manual on “destroying the cross,” complete with videos on how to build a bomb and the locations of churches to target — including the one that was attacked.

They may have found a receptive audience in Alexandria, where increasingly radicalized Islamic hard-liners have been holding weekly anti-Christian demonstrations, filled with venomous slogans against the minority community.

This is not news to me, but the fact is this story didn’t come from my normal haunts. This story comes from MSNBC. What a shocker. I don’t know how much they are promoting this story but it is quite a change.

Of course to us old hands this news is as unsurprising as this story from Palestinian Media Watch:

A glimpse of the world of education in Sur Baher in East Jerusalem was recently made available by Hamas TV. A broadcast showed how the Jerusalem children in the Islamic Riyad (Gardens of) Al-Aqsa School were taught to sing about desiring death: “May our blood be shed.”

They also sang the following in front of the cameras:
“How strong is the army of Al-Aqsa.
I am a soldier, defending its protected area.
How precious is the land of Al-Aqsa.
I shall give up my life for its sake.”

This footage of young children singing and being taught these lines in the Islamic Riyad Al-Aqsa School in Sur Baher appeared in a documentary program entitled “The Shahids’ (Martyrs’) Wedding” on Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV.

This is the same thing people like Pam Geller and Robert Spencer have been trying to warn folks about for years

Of course maybe these “Palestinians” have a point they have to defend against the evils of Israeli spy vultures and Sharks and Squirrels (yes those are real stories).

Then again yesterday’s news out of Pakistan of the murder of the Governor of Punjab by his own bodyguard makes it impossible to pretend that radical Islam is not the driving force here.

Taseer’s apparent killer cited his boss’s stance against a controversial anti-blasphemy law in justifying his actions.

And the reaction of to the killings has been frankly disgusting:

Hundreds of Facebook users welcomed the killing of liberal Pakistani politician Salman Taseer as a strike against reformers of the country’s tight blasphemy laws. The Punjab governor was shot on Tuesday by one of his guards, 26-year-old Mumtaz Qadri, who confessed to the murder because of Taseer’s vocal opposition to the law that was recently used to sentence a Christian woman to death.

You might remember that story, the woman got water for a group of people who refused to drink from the bucket because it was fetched by a Christian and therefore unclean. After the woman’s objection she was arrested and sentenced to death for blasphemy.

But that’s only facebook, it’s not as if the papers were backing this guy up:

Pakistan’s leading Urdu-language newspaper, Jang, ran a front-page story declaring: “There should be no funeral for Salman Taseer and no condemnation for his death.”

“A supporter of a blasphemer is also a blasphemer,” said a sub-heading, reporting that 500 religious scholars and clerics had paid tribute to Qadri.

and remember the murdered man was a Muslim! Sarah Memom is confused:

Islam never preaches for one Muslim to kill another Muslim, then why are all these atrocities happening?

The worst part is that his own guard killed him, after seeing this, how is one suppose to trust another, how is one suppose to have a sense of security.

Apparently Sarah hasn’t been paying attention. These guys have a history of going after their fellow Muslim’s if they preach peace:

Taseer lamented the power of the religious mob in an interview last summer following bombings of mosques belonging to the Ahmadi sect, whose members identify themselves as Muslims but are barred by the constitution from “posing” as such.

The Ahmadi sect has a mosque in Fitchburg, I’ve interviewed the Iman and visited his Mosque, he is a good man and they are a credit to both the city, their religion. Then again I suspect they would be targeted for the very things we celebrate about them.

While commentators opine I suspect this man is next on the list so to speak:

Pakistan’s Federal Minister for Minorities Affairs Shahbaz Bhatti condemned Saturday the recent announcement of a reward for killing the jailed Christian woman on death row for blasphemy.

Bhatti said the call is unjust and irresponsible and should be discouraged in the strongest possible manner because no one has the right to issue a decree to kill someone else, according to Pakistan’s Daily Times newspaper. He also added that Pakistan is a civilized country and violation of the rule of law is not allowed.

“Every legal and constitutional means will be adopted in the Asia Bibi case,” assured Bhatti, who was in charge of investigating the case and reported that Bibi was innocent to President Asif Ali Zadari.

If the media is starting to notice this then there is hope, now if they can only make the connection between this stuff and the people we are fighting (and the voices in Islam we should support such as the Ahmadiyya Muslim community) then the worm may finally be turning!

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