September 11, 2006
Party's over...
The story about the journos who were forced to pretend to convert to Islam has been much in my mind. What does it mean? Somehow this doesn't seem like just another terrorist outrage.
Kathy Shaidel has some thoughts, (here and here). And she picked up and quoted this, that Andrea wrote in a comment thread:
The fact that makes so many educated, secular, “my religious beliefs are private” (not even God knows what they are?), fun-loving Westerners uncomfortable is the growing realization that the party may be over, and we may have to (ugh) actually stand up for what we believe in, and in doing so we may actually find that the things we thought we believed in were nothing but froth and fairy-dust....
Party's over. Yes. Lotsa people been playing make-believe. It wasn't just two men who adopted an inimical faith at gun-point, and renounced the underpinnings of their own civilization. They were proxies for hundreds of millions of other westerners who would do the same. Our hollowness is being exposed for all to see. ("Froth and fairy-dust." Yeah, I live here.)
(And even ignoring the religious aspect, we need to realize that our whole culture of "do what the person with the gun tells you to" may have been a huge mistake. It encourages, like all pacifism, more violence. You can bet those turkeys will be doing this again. Next time it may be a hundred people. Our weakness draws this kind of thing forth. And the next incident will be partly the responsibility of those journalists, who are encouraging this by their choice. One can hardly blame them, since no one in our culture is taught to think that yielding to threats is going to mean someone else gets threatened. Those two guys may be brave men who would dive into a torrent to save a drowning child, but it would not occur to them to defy a terrorist to save a future victim!)
Kathy at least is thinking clearly....
...Are there any Christians on this thread? Because like it or not, Christ told his followers again and again to be prepared to suffer for his sake. "He who saves his own life will lose it..." ...
....I pray for the grace not to renounce Christ for any reason, under any circumstances. And the power of grace is the only thing that can give you that courage. Those who rely solely on will power or mental fortitude can't be expected to understand that....
....I'd add that a well brought up, commited Christian does in fact know what he or she should aspire to do in the face of martyrdom, or when faced with an incurable disease or the murder of a child, just as a well trained fireman knows he will run into, rather than away from, a burning building. Such a Christian, having practiced spiritual disciplines such as prayer and fasting, and therefore being more receptive to supernatural grace, may be surprised herself by the relative ease of "doing the right thing."....
There are plenty of people who call themselves Christians who think that martyrdom, like miracles, is something that belongs in picture books about long ago. We may have some wake-ups coming...
Posted by John Weidner at September 11, 2006 05:43 AMJohn
I think you're going a little over board on this. What is really exposed is the hollowness of the Islamic fanatics who seem to think a religious conversion at gun point is in the same class as a mugger demanding a wallet. Just give him the wallet and get out of there. I see no issue of renouncing the "underpinnings of our civilization."
Kathy, there are quite a few of us, but our society is geared to Sunday attendance and no great sacrifice. What happened with these two journalists is significant. In spite of what Frank said whole nations have converted under that same threat, and their descendants are now part of the enemy. Like you, I pray that I would be able to accept true martyrdom, like my namesake, the first Christian martyr. (google it, Frank)
You might be interested in this poem by Robert W. Service, of "Cremation of Sam Magee" fame, http://www.artdamage.com/service/rolstone/soldier.htm
I don't think the journalists' captors would have granted mercy, but they would then have at least some respect for their victims. How many times have we read their words, describing us as weak, and not having any commitment to our own faith? As John says, many future victims will come from this ill-advised convenience.
The future of our civilization turns on how well we step up to the plate on this question.
Posted by: Stephen Lassey at September 11, 2006 11:23 AMBut Stephen, you're assuming some kind of meaningful conversion/renunciation actually took place. I don't think it did. These were a bunch of free lance nutjobs for whom Islam has morphed into some perverted excuse to bully people around. It has nothing to do with religion–neither theirs nor the journalists. In the school yard one kid puts a hammerlock on another and says "cry uncle." The other kid says "uncle', walks away and says "didn't count, I had my fingers crossed." To me it's about on that level.
Posted by: Frank at September 11, 2006 12:29 PMFrank,
I think you're missing the point. Everyone knows they didn't really convert. The point is that this is being used as propoganda in the muslim world - evidence that the west can be intimidated into submission. I'll pull a quote from the original that John linked to:
"But that's not how the al-Jazeera audience sees it. If you're a Muslim, the video is anything but meaningless. Not even the dumbest jihadist believes these infidels are suddenly true believers. Rather, it confirms the central truth Osama and the mullahs have been peddling -- that the West is weak, that there's nothing -- no core, no bedrock -- nothing it's not willing to trade."
Posted by: Mike Plaiss at September 11, 2006 12:38 PMFrank,
I think the "recipe" for our civilization was Jerusalem+Athens+Rome+barbarian tribes, simmered in Origen, Augustine and Aquinas.
But even if you don't agree, even if you think we just invented ourselves over the last two centuries, think of any of the "inventors," and imagine what they would say. Would George Washington "see no issue" here? Or Davy Crockett or Jonathan Edwards or Abigail Adams?
You know they'd all say it's better to die on your feet than live on your knees. That very thought is one of the underpinnings of our civilization.
Posted by: John Weidner at September 11, 2006 12:38 PMEveryone knows they didn't really convert. The point is that this is being used as propoganda in the muslim world - evidence that the west can be intimidated into submission.You can't have it both ways — either everyone knows, or it's useful propaganda. It can't be both.
I think Ms. Harris had the better of it originally, which is not that the original "conversion" was so wrong, but that there was no follow up. You say what you have now, so you can go back, get your buddies, and explain forcefully why bullying was a bad idea. It is the lack of the latter that marks the wuss.
No. Has anyone read the actual links. It IS both. It doesn't matter (to the jihadis) if they actually converted. The mere fact that they would even pretend to convert serves their purpose just as well.
The point is the audience. Westerners see this as two guys trying to save their own lives - no big deal. The people watching al Jazera see it as a very big deal that anyone would even pretend to convert. What kind of a perseon would even pretend to convert - a weak one. THAT is the propoganda message.
Posted by: Mike Plaiss at September 11, 2006 03:08 PMMike, Stephen and John
Do YOU believe that the journalists' behavior comfirms the central truth OBL has been peddling;that the west is weak, that there's nothing–no core, no bedrock–nothing it's not willing to trade? Or is it just the grist it provides the al-Jazeera propaganda mill that concerns you?
At the time of the pseudo-conversions, I wanted to get mad, really mad at the journalists. But then I realised for the rest of their lives they have to live with the fact that at the moment it counted most for them personally, they were cowards. There were kids at Columbine who had a rifle pointed at their head and still said yes when asked if they believed in God. Their heads were blown off.
The fact that the journalists were then put in dresses - I know kaftans- and forced to say their Arabic names with video running, just adds more to their shame.
Posted by: Mrs. Peperium at September 11, 2006 03:52 PMFrank,
The first.
I think that the spiritual vacuum in the West has caused this war, or rather, pulled it out of the shadows and backwaters of the Arab/Muslim world and expanded it into a worldwide problem.
If the West had one tenth of the pugnacity and civilizational morale it had 100 years ago, we would have smacked down the terrorists decades ago, and they would not have even started to get the seemingly crazy idea that they could confront powers a thousand times more strong and advanced than they.
Posted by: John Weidner at September 11, 2006 04:52 PMFrank,
I was simply trying to clarify a specific point that I thought you had missed. Actually I agree with you - people are taking this a bit too far.
Yes, this is a piece of propaganda that probably plays well to the audience that the terrorists are trying to spin it to. But life isn't that simple. It is one many conflicting messages that they are receiving.
The West is not weak, at least America isn't, and the people of the Middle East are going to learn that. They have already learned a great deal. Our best teachers are our soldiers. With their effectiveness in Afghanistan, their staying power in Iraq, and even in the restraint they show in going about their job they have sent a message of our strength loud and clear.
Posted by: Mike Plaiss at September 11, 2006 05:28 PMThe last sentence of the second paragraph above is supposed to read, "It is one of many conflicting messages that they are receiving."
Sorry about that.
Posted by: Mike Plaiss at September 11, 2006 05:34 PMJohn and Mrs. Peperium,
I think Frank has the better of it in this one.
The journalists' conversion was not sincere, and everyone with half a brain knows it. Where the journalists err is not in their agreement to convert; it's that, having won their freedom, they haven't publicly and emphatically repudiated that forced conversion and come to the aid of those trying to put their captors and the other Islamofascists out of business. It's like Annoying Old Guy says: they're wusses.
As for Columbine, what good did affirming their faith in Jesus Christ do those kids? Nothing. All they got was a bullet in the head. If they'd had any sense, they would have denied their faith, and once the creep's back was turned, charged them and done their best to beat the crap out of him. MUCH more effective in attaining the desired end-state of incapacitated attackers and minimum loss-of-life. I think God can live with a false denial in exchange for not having to welcome too many people into Heaven before their time.
Posted by: Hale Adams at September 11, 2006 06:53 PMJohn - was it the spiritual vacuum in Israel that caused it to be attacked so consistently over the last 60 years?
"I think that the spiritual vacuum in the West has caused this war"
Umm, not quite. I think, rather, that the perceived spiritual vacuum (the depth and breadth of which is under dispute) has encouraged these people to ratchet up their long war against the non-Muslim world. Now, it could be that they misjudged us (I prefer to think that they misjudged a large portion of the West -- that unknown portion that doesn't get teevee soundbites) and have bitten off more than they can chew. It all depends upon just how deep that spiritual vacuum goes. If it just mainly affects the intellectual "elite" that mostly haunts our news media and the halls of academe, then we can overcome it. (There is a fine tradition of anti-"eggheaded professors" and anti-newspapermen that has never really gone away from American life that will help.) If it has permeated the common people of the West, who are in general its backbone, then we've got a problem.
Hale, you say: "As for Columbine, what good did affirming their faith in Jesus Christ do those kids? Nothing. All they got was a bullet in the head."
Well, there you have the viewpoint of a materialist atheist, to whom none of the above conversation, including John's post, can make real sense. You're like Ayn Rand, who decided not to write a clergyman character into her novel Atlas Shrugged because she couldn't make such a character "believable." I can tell you that the by their own belief what the Christian kids got from a "bullet in the head" was not nothing, but the ultimate Something -- a place in heaven with God. But you wouldn't understand me.
And this brings me to my final point: we will never truly beat our enemy until we learn to fight them on their own ground. Like most atheists (I call you that because I've never heard of a religion that declares that being killed for your belief is "dying for nothing") you have contempt not just for the religion of your enemies, but that of your own countrymen and allies as well. You imagine that you are on some sort of (non-god-occupied) Mount Olympus looking down at the stupid people who haven't accepted your own belief (no more provable than that of the religious in a supreme being) in the supremacy of human reason. If a terrorist put a bullet in your brain if you didn't renounce this belief of yours, by your own statement you will have "died for nothing." Never mind that even one's manner of dying may hearten others, the way the example of the kids who were killed at Columbine (whether the stories were true or not) have heartened many other teenagers - and surely you know how important psychological things like being able to stand up for yourself, not giving into bullies, and so on, are to kids at that age, before they become cynical and jaded and descend to the state of being willing to sell their souls for a few more minutes of air.
Posted by: Andrea Harris at September 11, 2006 08:46 PM"was it the spiritual vacuum in Israel that caused it to be attacked so consistently over the last 60 years?"
I suspect that's part of it. Part of why they have not punished terrorism with the necessary savagery (which would have saved lives in the long run.)
But much more important is the vacuum in Europe (and to a lesser extent America) where Palestinian terrorists have been lionized and subsidized, and where leftism and anti-semitsm (and anti-Americanism) are almost synonymous. America and Israel are both symbols of the self-confident, self-made and still religious side of western civilization, and for westerners to hate either is an act of self-hatred. Same goes for encouraging swamp creatures like Arafat and his thugs.
Posted by: John Weidner at September 11, 2006 09:36 PMAndrea nails it (thanks for clarifying). It is the perceived weakness of the West that the islamic extremists are responding to. In my not-so-humble opinion anyone who thinks that this weakness is anything other than perceived simply hasn't been paying attention for the last five years.
Your typical islamo-fascist believes THEY are the ones who brought down the Soviet Union, not us. According to Bernard Lewis the snake oil that the islamists were selling was that the U.S. would be even easier to bring down (because of that perceived weakness thing). Does anyone think the audience of al Jazera still believes that?
Posted by: Mike Plaiss at September 12, 2006 06:07 AMBut "bringing us down" was not al Qaeda's goal for 9-11. It was to cause us to flinch away from the Middle East/Muslim world. Or, alternatively, to make us lash out hastily and unite that world on their side. (And the big goal, I'm sure, was to make them look like giant-killers favored by God, and so generate unstoppable momentum.)
Bin Laden publicly boasted that the pull-out from Somalia showed that we were weak, because we were not willing to take casualties. Al Qaeda's strategy in Iraq is based on the same thing. Are they wrong?
It hasn't worked out as they hoped, but it's been a "damn near-run thing." An entire political party here has bet its future on bin Laden being right. And he's clearly right about western Europe, and Canada is iffy.
And this is entirely a matter of the spirit. Losses in the War have been trifling (compare to 40,000 Americans a year dying in car accidents) and the cost has not even strained our economy.
The weakness is real. If a few more votes had been stolen in Florida "recounts," bin Laden would have won his bet.
Posted by: John Weidner at September 12, 2006 06:39 AMOk – one last (and unfortunately long) diatribe and then I’ll let you have the last word if you want it. John, it amazes me that you can be so right, and genuinely insightful, about so many things and yet so completely wrong about this. You’re not just a little off – you have it all exactly backwards.
The whole reason this war was launched (by them, not by us) was not our weakness, but theirs. This is not just wishful thinking on my part. I am just parroting what I have read from the best thinkers on the Middle East I can find – Lewis, Ajami, and, yes Tom Friedman.
Put yourself in the shoes, for a minute, of an Islamic fanatic living in Cairo in the year 2000. As he looks around at his fellow Muslims and tries to contemplate the larger world, he immediately sees a really big problem – his way of life is dying. Everywhere he looks he sees young Muslims wearing jeans, listening to western music, reading books written in English, etc. Even beyond superficial things like clothes and music, he has cause to worry. When the authorities aren’t around these same young Muslims may still curse America and Israel but they openly envy their democracy and their affluence. And they laugh at jokes like, “Yankee go home – and take me with you.”
From all this he knows that the world will never be ordered the way he thinks it should be, the way he KNOWS it should be – with Islam at the center, and pious muslims shunning worldly goods. In his heart he knows that his worldview (think Taliban-lite, at best) can never compete with what the West has to offer.
He has chosen to fight this war because he knows he is LOSING the battle of ideas. “The attack on the West by Islamism was not a function of the West's weakness, but a nihilistic, embittered swipe at a success that cast the dreary failure of so much of the Muslim Middle East into a shaming shade. It turned out our flaw was not our softness, but our strength.” I got that from Andrew Sullivan http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/2006/09/the_wests_endur.html – he writes better than I do so I just quoted him.
Again I’ll cite Lewis. He says that we have been drawn into what is effectively a Muslim Civil War between fundamentalists and modernists. The modernists have no real game-plan for victory and no unity, so they appear ineffective, but in fact they are winning. They are winning by sheer numbers – most Muslims want some form of modernity in their lives and in their culture.
As for the Democrats, what can I say? I feel your pain. They are certainly weasels, but I’ll make the following argument (that is thoroughly unprovable). If the Democrats were elected to power tomorrow, little would change. We’d still be fighting the war on terror, we’d still be wiretapping phone calls with suspicious foreigners, and I even think we would stay in Iraq. The difference would be the media’s reaction to it all. This would annoy the hell out of people like you and me, but if I’m right, then yes, Al Qaeda’s strategy in Iraq is completely wrong.
And finally John, I have to say that you and others here, are greatly overemphasizing the role of religion in evaluating our strength. I consider myself a religious person, but people find strength in things other than religion. Many nonreligious people have very solid cores, and can be just as willing to fight and die for their country as you or I.
I have two uncles who fought in WWII (one right along side Patton, or so he always claimed) and a grandfather and a great-uncle who fought in WWI. I think we can all agree that these were strong people who did their duty. Never once did I hear any of them say anything even remotely Christian. In fact, three of the four were hard-drinking, foul-mouthed men who, I’m pretty sure, believed that just about every religion was a crock of shit. Yet there they were, putting their lives on the line, ready to die for their country, their buddies, their families, or whatever it was they believed the were fighting for (I never got around to asking them).
Mike, I totally agree with you that the Islamic crazies are fighting out of a sense of weakness. This may be their last chance to stem the influx of Western ideas before globalization eats up their cultures like cupcakes.
BUT, that just emphasizes my point, that something's deeply wrong if we hesitate to defend ourselves and our ideals.
As for religion, that's just my suspicion. It's nothing I can prove. (But then, the word "prove" used to mean "to test," as in "proving grounds." I'm testing my ideas by putting them forth, and I love having you disagree with them.)
My hunch is that your uncles were steeped in Christian and Roman values without knowing it. They were knights, legionaries, Maccabes, Merovingians, all unaware. And that those values are our real resources, more valuable than gold or oil or Uranium. So the mere possibility that they may be oozing away seems like an issue of the very highest importance...
Posted by: John Weidner at September 12, 2006 12:10 PMJeez, Andrea. Do you want to reconsider your words?
No, I'm not a materialist atheist, and no, I don't see myself as being on some moral Mount Olympus. It's true enough that I'm probably best described as an agnostic-- maybe God exists, maybe He doesn't. I don't get too excited about it because I'll be finding out for certain one of these days, just like everyone else does.
In the meantime, I think actions speak louder than words. You and I know that, and I think God does too, being as how He's smarter than you and me.
And that's why I have to shake my head at those kids who did (for all we know, as opposed to believe) die for nothing by refusing to renounce their belief in God. Maybe they are in Heaven. I hope they are. But they aren't doing godly things here, and there's a lot of things that need doing here, but they can't do those things here, because they're dead. Instruments of His Will in this world we may be, but we're pretty useless to Him if we're six feet under.
Get my point?
Now, if the devout want to score "moral victories" (in the sense that the Kos Kidz use the phrase) by insisting on martyrdom, well, they can suit themselves. Yes, it's better to be a dead lion than a live jackal.
But it's better still to be a live lion. So dissemble, and then pound the crap out of your persecutors when they turn their backs.
Live to win real victories. It beats dying to win a "moral victory".
Posted by: Hale Adams at September 12, 2006 08:26 PMHale, you say you are agnostic but all your statements are atheist. You start from the assumption that this world and what you can easily perceive is the whole shebang, and that martyrs are fools and the dead are dead, period.
That's not your fault, it's the way the modern world thinks. It's the sea of thought we all swim in. But if you want to call yourself an agnostic, and to say "maybe God exists," then you will need to also say that maybe things that believers believe are true. (Or also, to be logical, that maybe all the believers have it wrong but that other things we can't see or touch are true.)
Posted by: John Weidner at September 13, 2006 05:56 AMJohn,
I think you're putting words in my mouth, John, words I didn't say.
Martyrs aren't fools, merely foolish. And God may exist, and maybe what the believers believe is true. But we have no proof that those beliefs are true. We have only hopes and dreams, nothing more.
And God, if He exists, no doubt arranged things that way, for obvious reasons.
My point was only this:
If God exists, then the martyrdom of His believers is merely part of His Plan, which will come to fruition whether those martyrs do in fact die or not. That being the case, wouldn't it be better to live?
If God does not exist, then the martyrdom of those who believe in (a non-existent) God may actually be counter-productive. I suppose they do provide a good example to the rest of us, but if too many people choose to be martyrs, then there may not be enough of us left to actually, you know, fight the enemy.
Maybe I merely have my head up my tailpipe, but I can't help thinking of that short story I mentioned a while back (by Harry Turtledove, I think), something along the lines of "Field Marshal Keitel meets Gandhi", set in a 1942 that has gone very badly for the Allies. Needless to say, the encounter is not very pretty when Gandhi's piety proves no match for Nazi war-machinery.
Likewise in our very real present, martyrdom is all very nice, but wouldn't it be better to live to fight another day? It's like General Patton is supposed to have said, "The idea is not to die for your country. It's to make the other poor bastard die for his."
And (to digress a bit) that's where I think this whole business about how renouncing one's faith in God being beyond-the-Pale came about. I think that attitude or belief is a hold-over from the days when church and state were firmly linked, and to renounce one's belief in God was effectively the same as renouncing one's allegiance to the monarch. Apostasy was equivalent to, and interchangable with, treason.
As mosque and state are inextricably yoked together in Islam, and as that yoking-together is the source of much of its ills and the misery Islam is inflicting on much of the world, do we really want to emulate a Muslim attitude towards apostasy?
Granted, a belief that is easily renounced is not much of a belief. But how does an observer know if the renounced belief is truly renounced? Can he read minds? Can he look into the renouncer's heart? No, and neither can you or I, John. Only God can do that, and He isn't talking.
Like I keep saying, actions speak louder than words. Dissemble if you must, and then pound the crap out of your persecutor at the first opportunity.
If you want a bit of intellectual exercise, John, research how Roman Catholicism survived in Japan in the wake of the hideous slaughter of believers and thorough-going suppression of kirishitan after about 1635. After Japan began opening up to the world in the wake of Perry's expedition and Christian missionaries were let in circa 1865, Catholic priests were shocked to find whole villages turning out for Mass, grateful for the opportunity to openly practice their faith (if slightly garbled after over two centuries with no priests). Those villagers and their ancestors for generations had made routine renunciations of any connection with Christianity, with death as the penalty for discovery. Publicly, they were Buddhists or Shinto. Did their renunciations and dissembling make them any less Christian? And do you think that God turned His back on them for their "disloyalty"? I certainly don't think so.
Your mileage may vary, of course.
Posted by: Hale Adams at September 13, 2006 06:24 PMThat's very interesting about Japan. I'll have to hit some learned Dominican with it if the chance ever presents itself. I don't actually know much about the subject of martyrdom; it's the "Decline of the West" that grabs my interest. I should learn more ...in my abundant spare time :-(
But I think your reasoning contains a fatal logical flaw. You are analyzing God with human logic, but logic tells us that if the god posited by Christians and Jews exists, he is certainly NOT going to be understandable by our logic, any more than I could be comprehended by an ant.
Which is not to say that Christianity is "illogical." It is very logical (try Aquinas) but many of the "building blocks" in its logical structure are "mysteries." Think of Saint Augustine's vision of a small child using a shell to pour the sea into a little hole, thus revealing to him the unfathomable magnitude of God and the absurdity of attempting to confine Him...
Posted by: John Weidner at September 13, 2006 09:11 PMCan we get back to the John's original proposition (or at least inference). Should Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig have let a group of renegade dune-monkeys blow their heads off rather than submit to an obviously contrived Islamic conversion forced by people too ignorant to even understand Islam in the first place? Forget about the cosmic significance of this for western civilization. Does anybody in this chain still believe that's what Steve and Olaf should have done?
Posted by: Frank at September 14, 2006 04:41 AMI don't think that that was the point I was trying to make, or at least ramble towards.
Rather that this is an example of certain different ways in which the West has seemingly been coasting along on the momentum given us by past generations, and assuming that there's still a working engine in the car, and that we can step on the gas and accelerate whenever we need to. (Other examples come to mind. The EU is, on paper, a mighty military power. But is it really? One wonders.)
And "the party's over" when you come to a hill and are forced to admit that there's nothing under the hood. Is this such a moment? I don't know--just speculating.
I don't think life can be divided into big-and-important things and little-and-not-important things. Every little thing is some sort of canary in one sort of coal mine or another. Of course these fellows can't be expected to die for beliefs they never held and don't understand. But those beliefs made us what we collectively are, and we, collectively, have now been tested and failed. (Yes, yes, it's all armchair speculation. But I think of this blog as a bull session, where friends can toss out ideas and get shot down.)
Now, about those uncles that Mike mentioned. Tough fighters who thought religion was a crock of shit. I wonder what they would done if in the same situation as Centanni and Wiig?
"renegade dune-monkeys" I like that!
Posted by: John Weidner at September 14, 2006 06:38 AMI should add "canaries," yes, but also "mustard seeds," or "crocuses."
Posted by: John Weidner at September 14, 2006 07:15 AMFrank,
You're an economist. Imagine you are advising some Third World country, or former communist country, on economic development, and you see them making obvious bonehead mistakes. Like trying to create a high-tech economic sector by government fiat or five-year-plan, with no underlying strength to build on.
You might say, "They not only got the wrong answer, they don't even realize there's a question!" You'd say they were like children playing in a mine-field.
That's what a believer thinks when he looks at Centanni and Wiig. It's not that we would necessarily come up with a better answer, but at least we'd see the question....
Posted by: John Weidner at September 14, 2006 09:56 AM
