… of Christians now, the cause for which they must suffer martydom, is – Political Correctness.  

This is from American Thinker, by Bill Warner:

If you are even slightly awake about the world news today, it is no surprise that Christians are being killed, raped, and brutalized throughout the Islamic world. However, there is a place where you can go to escape the dreadful and relentless details of Christian annihilation by Islam. You can go to church.

Never mind the details; for the most part, Christians in the First World won’t mention the persecution and massacre of Christians in the Third World at all. In our experience, if they ever raise the subject it is to revel mawkishly in the patient endurance of their martyrs, never to accuse the persecutors and killers, never to pour out righteous anger against them. That’s the Christian way. “Resist not evil'” commanded the authors of the “Sermon on the Mount”. But we say, not to resist evil is to permit it; to permit it is to connive at it; and to connive at it is to co-author it. Christians cannot see that. Their indignation is reserved for their own heretics – and the Jews, of course.  In fact, they manage to find ingenious ways of blaming Jews for the Muslim persecution of Christians when they’re absolutely forced to admit that it’s happening. But at present they’re obstinately ignoring it. (See our post, Speaking of persecution: Christians as victims and victimizers, July 28, 2012.)

For example, Christians were killed this week in Nigeria. Nothing out of the ordinary – indeed, in the world of Christian persecution, this is routine.

And so the response found in nearly every church to the murder of Christians is…wait for it…complete silence. Not a mention or reference to it, or to the brutality against Christians that happens almost every day in the Islamic world.

This is not a passive silence, because if you try to change it, you will fail. The silence is an active, working conspiracy that goes throughout nearly all of Christendom.

Take a simple example: prayer for the persecuted. From a Christian perspective, this falls under the heading of obvious. Try taking the idea of prayer for the routinely murdered Christians in Nigeria or Egypt to ministers, boards, and any part of the structure of the church, and see how far you will get. You will get rejection with a myriad of lame and evasive excuses, since the people in power fear to recognize the suffering of Christians around the world.

If you acknowledge the suffering, you might wind up asking the question: why are these Christians suffering? Ah, there is the rub. The suffering is caused by Muslim jihadists who are following the Islamic doctrine of jihad against the Christian as found in Koran, Sira, and Hadith. Islam is the cause of suffering of Christians, as well as of Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and atheists.

But stop! We cannot say those things! Facts are the new hate speech, so we cannot speak about the jihad against Christians. Therefore, we get no prayers for the persecuted, because it would lead to talk about why the murder of Christians keeps happening. And that truth would lead to being called an Islamophobe, so we are not going there. Result: silence. …

Absurd as it is to believe that prayer – ie. talking to nothing – will have any effect, the point is they do believe it; so their withholding prayer means that they observe political correctness more conscientiously than their religion. Political Correctness is now their highest cause.     

In reality we all have pulpits. Are we using the suffering of Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, women, gays, and intellectuals caused by Islam as a topic of conversation with those around us? Who is comfortable with bringing up anything negative about Islam? To tell those facts about Islam is a social crime, and you will be accused of being a hater/Islamophobe. So most of us remain silent about the evils of political Islam, and we are just like the ministers – silent in our own pulpits. Christians and non-Christians share the fear of being insulted as bigots and Islamophobes.

We don’t understand why. The “Islamophobe” label should be worn as a badge of honor.

It turns out that all of those who oppose any social evil will be hated. Think about it. It takes a massive amount of power to put into place any societal doctrine, such as multiculturalism and political correctness. The government, universities, many churches, synagogues, and the media have become enforcers of multiculturalism and political correctness. They are very powerful and believe that their dogma rules all peoples.

They are also full-throated apologists for Islam. Now it turns out that their actual knowledge about the doctrine and history of political Islam is close to zero and Muslim Brotherhood-approved, but that is no problem. The Establishment just says that those who find fault with Islam are bigots and that they hate us.

The silence of the pulpits is the greatest aider and abettor of Islam in the U.S. No one serves and advances Islam better than the silent ministers. They have abandoned their duty of courage in the face of persecution, but the rest of the flock still looks for moral leadership from them. Islam triumphs when Christian leaders do not condemn the murderous evil of political Islam.

Even worse than the silent ministers are those who go to “interfaith dialogs” and smile while the Muslims assert religious and political dominance over them. The nice, oh so nice Christians and Jews show up to tie, while the Muslims are there to win, and they do.

Oh yes. The Muslims are winning. Every time a new mosque is built in the West, they win. Every time an employer agrees to let them have time off to pray, they win. Every time a Muslim woman is allowed to keep on her hijab by an organization that allows no variance of uniform to any other member, they win. And so on.

The pulpits must become a source of courage and knowledge and stand up for Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and all others who suffer under Islam’s persecution today and who have suffered for the last 1,400 years.

It isn’t just about religion; it is about the survival of our civilization.

Religion itself is the disease that makes Western civilization vulnerable. But we agree that the cowardice of the churches faced with the rise of Islam is despicable.

We are partly in agreement and partly in disagreement with leftist atheists. Obviously we share their atheism. Equally obviously we do not share their political opinions. “American Atheists” seemed to us to have a leftist bent (as Richard Dawkins certainly has), but we may be wrong. (Visit their website and see what you think.) In any case, we like their  activism against religion.

This article comes from USA Today, by Cathy Lynn Grossman.

Hey, President Obama and contender Mitt Romney, the American Atheists want your attention. They’re unveiling a new in-your-face-to-the-faithful billboard campaign, timed to the national presidential nominating conventions.

The billboard ads do not seem to be carrying a political message.

Today’s press conference revealed signs that call God “sadistic” and Jesus “useless” as a savior (his image is shown as toast, literally) and conclude that Atheism, by contrast, is “simply reasonable.”

The Gods depicted in the bible are sadistic. The “Old Testament” tyrant punishes five generations of descendants of anyone who offends him. The vague “Father” of the “New Testament” has his “Son” condemn countless millions to burn forever in hellfire on sheer whim.

And why should people need a “savior” of any stripe?

Presumably, Catholics such as Vice President Biden and Romney’s running mate choice Paul Ryan, are covered in this hit on Christians such as Obama, a mainline Protestant.

Obama “a mainline Protestant”? You reckon, Ms Grossman? Why is he so partial to Islam then?

But evidently the American Atheists don’t consider Mormons to be Christians, since they prepared a separate billboard attack on their faith. …

What can it matter whether they are Christians or not? They are as irrational in their belief as any self-styled Christians are. Are there better and worse systems of irrationality?

But GOP delegates won’t see the attack on their faith on their way to nominate Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan in Tampa. Spokeswoman Teresa MacBain says no one in Tampa would rent them billboard space. So watch for both texts in Charlotte, N.C., where the Democrats will gather in September.

American Atheists is the group that created and produced the Reason Rally in March on the National Mall – an event president David Silverman billed as a fun gathering starring raging atheists such as Richard Dawkins. …

So atheists who do not believe the unbelievable “rage” about it?  Whereas believers sweetly keep their farfetched opinions to themselves?

The same group flew a banner over New York City on the Fourth of July proclaiming, “Atheism is patriotic.”

Now … the billboards are aimed at mocking the “silliness” of religion. In an email before today’s press conference, [Teresa MacBain] wrote that questioning the religious views of men who want to lead the free world is essential because,

“If a person believes stupid things, then we have every right to question his or her judgment, and that directly impacts how the non-religious voter votes.”

She’s right. The amazing fact is that people can be highly intelligent, well-educated, sensible, and yet believe in the supernatural! It is something we find very hard to understand. But as every candidate for the presidency has to avow some religious belief, we see no point in making too much of his religion unless he does.

More demands – like non-religious people to be appointed to the Cabinet and the Supreme Court – are at their website.

We concur with those demands

Interestingly, for all the increasing public presence of unbelievers – billboards, rallies, conventions, etc. – the attention has not boosted their percentage of the U.S. population significantly in the last decade.

How does Grossman or anyone know that?

Most people who say they have no religious identity also call themselves spiritual but not religious …

Whatever that might mean, it does suggest more people may be atheist than get counted as such …

… and many give the entire topic a big “so what” shrug.

That’s atheism too, by default.

But the billboards planned for Charlotte, N.C., may not be well received. In 2010, when free thinkers posted an edited version of the line from the Pledge of Allegiance without the phrase “under God,” vandals added it with spray paint.

Grossman asks:

Do you think … the billboards will convert anyone away from religion? Is it “simply reasonable” to mock belief?

We reply: yes, they may turn some away from religion. We only hope they will not turn some away from voting for Romney.

And yes, of course it is reasonable to mock religious belief. It’s an urgent and perpetual necessity. Religious belief is absurd yet lethally dangerous to the well-being of humanity.

The persecution Christians are suffering in Islamic countries is apparently of little or no concern to the ever-bleeding hearts of the American Left.

The Obama administration is positively ignoring it.

We quote from an article by Raymond Ibrahim at Front Page:

The Obama administration’s support for its Islamist allies means lack of U.S. support for their enemies, or, more properly, victims — the Christian and other non-Muslim minorities of the Muslim world. …

On May 24 this year the US State department released the Country Reports on Human Rights.

For the first time ever, the State Department simply eliminated the section of religious freedom …

The State Department “refused to list Egypt as ‘a country of particular concern,’ even as [Coptic] Christians … were being murdered, churches destroyed, and girls kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam. ”

Legislation to create a special envoy for religious minorities in the Near East and South Central Asia … has been stalled by Sen. James Webb (D-Va). In a letter sent to Webb Wednesday night, Rep. Frank Wolf [R-Va, who introduced the envoy bill] said he “cannot understand why” the hold had been placed on a bill that might help Coptic Christians and other groups “who face daily persecution, hardship, violence, instability and even death.” … Webb spokesman Will Jenkins explained the hold by saying that “after considering the legislation, Senator Webb asked the State Department for its analysis.” In a position paper issued in response, State Department officials said “we oppose the bill as it infringes on the Secretary’s [Hillary Clinton’s] flexibility to make appropriate staffing decisions …  The new special envoy position is unnecessary, duplicative, and likely counterproductive”.

The word “flexibility” has a special meaning when used by the Obama gang. Obama quietly informed the Russians that after he’d won the election in November he would have more “flexibility” – presumably to meet Putin’s demands more fully than he can before it. So the word may be taken to mean “ability to accommodate the wishes of America’s enemies”.

Once this reasonable deduction is made it is easy to see that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s need for “flexibility to make appropriate staffing decisions” means she does not want to have a pro-Christian or anti-Muslim envoy. (The same thing in the circumstances.)

In regard to which it should be recalled that among Hillary Clinton’s closest advisers – possibly standing alone as her closest adviser – is Huma Abedin, a Muslim with close ties (see here and here) to the Muslim Brotherhood.

With that fact in mind, no one should be surprised when “flexible” decisions are  seen to be implemented.

The administration … had nothing to say when Islamic terrorists bombed Nigerian churches on Easter Sunday, killing some 50 Christians and wounding hundreds. And when the Egyptian military indiscriminately massacred dozens of unarmed Christians for protesting the nonstop attacks on their churches, all the White House could say is, “Now is a time for restraint on all sides”—as if Egypt’s beleaguered Christian minority needs to “restrain” itself against the nation’s military, a military that intentionally ran armored-vehicles over them at Maspero.

In light of all this, naturally the Obama administration, in the guise of the State Department, would oppose a bill to create an envoy who will only expose more religious persecution for the administration to suppress or obfuscate.

Such is the current state of affairs. In its attempts to empower its Islamist allies, the current U.S. administration has taken up their cause by waging a war of silence on their despised minorities — the Christians and other non-Muslims of the Islamic world.

The Obama administration cannot allow Islam to be guilty of anything, even of deeds carried out insistently in its name. It will have America and the world know that Islam is irreproachably innocent of any aggression, persecution,  intolerance, or terrorism.

As an example of the administration’s campaign to “suppress knowledge” both of “the sufferings of religious minorities under Islam”  and of “knowledge concerning Islam itself” in connection with them, Raymond Ibrahim provides a link to this instructive video clip:

John Adams said:

The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.

Thomas Paine said:

The study of theology, as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on nothing; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing and admits of no conclusion.

The Bible: a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalise mankind.

The Christian system of religion is an outrage on common sense.

The Church was resolved to have a New Testament, and out of the loads of rubbish that were presented it voted four to be Gospels, and others to be Epistles, as we now find them arranged.

This is the rubbish called Revealed Religion!

Thomas Jefferson said:

I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.

Religions are all alike – founded upon fables and mythologies.

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.

In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.

Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man.

George Washington said:

Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause. I had hoped that liberal and enlightened thought would have reconciled the Christians so that their religious fights would not endanger the peace of Society.

James Madison said:

During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.

In no instance have the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.

Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.

Benjamin Franklin said:

I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absented myself from Christian assemblies.

Theodore Roosevelt said:

To discriminate against a thoroughly upright citizen because he belongs to some particular church, or because, like Abraham Lincoln, he has not avowed his allegiance to any church, is an outrage against that liberty of conscience which is one of the foundations of American life.

“We are living in a time of Christian persecution unparalleled since the days of Hitler and the Soviet Gulag,” Ken Blackwell writes at Townhall.

It is true that Christians are being persecuted with a persistence and viciousness that may in fact be wholly unparalleled in the history of Christendom. The persecutors are Muslims, chiefly in the Islamic states.

Yet the few Christian leaders who can bring themselves to speak out against the discrimination, threats, violence, forced conversions and murders, blame the Jews. (See here and here and here.)

Are any Muslims being persecuted, tortured, murdered? Yes – not by Christians or Jews, but by other Muslims.

The European once-Christian nations grovel before Islam. Muslims carry out terrorist attacks against the indigenous people, rape insult assault and murder them – and cowardly European governments protect them, even from justified criticism. [See our posts:  The West on trial (December 16, 2009); Freedom versus Islam (January 20, 2010); Civilization on trial (October 11, 2010); An honest confession of hypocrisy (October 23, 2010); The new heresy (January 11, 2011); Darkness descending – again (February 7, 2011);  Protecting Islam from criticism (December 18, 2011); Sharia is the law in Austria (December 25, 2011); Only the gagged may speak freely (December 26, 2011); Darkness imminent (January 8, 2012); The most important struggle of our time (April16, 2012); Marked for death (May 10, 2012); The last days of Europe, (June 9, 2012)]

But the Jews … They may be unjustly criticized, condemned, and reviled. For what? The Jews may have given more (see here and here) to the world proportionate to their numbers than any other nation, but in Europe they are not to be endured. Why? For no other reason (though many more are concocted) than that they have continued maddeningly to exist ever since and despite the advent of Christianity.* Christian belief may fade, but its savage hatred of the Jews lives on. The once-Christian states of Europe, keeping up the venerable tradition even though they have largely given up the faith, continue to persecute them.

This is from Front Page by Giulio Meotti:

While the U.S. is home to many Christian supporters of Israel, the Christian groups more closely linked to global public opinion, bureaucracy, media and legal forums are all violently anti-Israel and anti-Jewish. This month, for example, the Church of England voted to support the boycott movement against Israel.

A special report by the Israeli watchdog NGO Monitor, revealed the huge flux of money that is being provided by European governments for the Church-based efforts to destroy Israel. This development is paving the way for a new Jewish bloodbath through the vehicle of excluding Israel’s Jews from the family of nations.

The Dutch government, for example, grants millions of euros to organizations such as Kerk in Aktie and the Interchurch Organization for Development Cooperation, which support a “general boycott” of Israeli products as per the policy of the Protestant Church of the Netherlands. The Interchurch Organization also received money from the European Union (€5.3 million).

Diakonia, Sweden’s largest humanitarian NGO founded by five Swedish churches (the Alliance Mission, the Baptist Union, InterAct, the Methodist Church and Mission Covenant Church), financed programs “to commemorate the Nakba,” the Palestinian term for “catastrophe” which indicates Israel’s foundation in 1948.

The UK’s Christian Aid and Finland’s FinnChurchAid received millions from the EU to propagate the worst anti-Israel blood libels, including starving, torture, dispossession and siege.

The World Council of Churches, which plays a pivotal role in mobilizing churches in the boycott against Israel, gets annually millions from European taxpayers.

European taxes are used in several ways to fund anti-Semitism of an intensity unseen since Nazi Germany. …

The Palestinian Authority has reported that the EU (41.4 million euros), France (19 million euros) Ireland (5 million euros), Norway (53 million dollars) and the World Bank (40 million dollars) have all given funds to the Palestinian budget, used to pay the families of the “martyrs” (read: suicide bombers) and the 5.500 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

Europe is financing Israel’s destruction also by channeling millions of euros to secular and leftist NGOs. These are just some: Addameer (207.000 $ from Sweden), Al Haq (426.000 $ from Holland, 88.000 $ from bailout-needing Ireland and 156.000 $ from Norway), Al Mezan (105.000 $ from Sweden), Applied Research Institute (374.000 $ from the European Union and 98.000$ from bankrupt Spain), Coalition of Women for Peace (247.000 $ from the European Union) and Troicare (2.000.000 $ from Brussels and 640.000 $ from UK).

There is a fourth way Europe funds Palestinian terrorism and anti-Semitism: books, school textbooks, documentaries, tv channels. This is a kind of “software” of the holy war against the Jews.

According to a report by the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, the Palestinian textbooks funded by the European Union incite hatred against Israel: “Palestine” is shown to encompass all the Jewish State, Judaism’s most holy sites (such as the Temple Mount and Rachel’s Tomb) have been erased, the Jews are demonized and Arab “martyrdom” is praised. In these texts, Jews are described as “cunning,” “locusts” and “wild animals.”

Thanks to Arab satellite channels, Hizbullah’s al-Manar and Hamas’s al-Aqsa TV stations can beam their hatred into European living rooms, radicalizing Muslim immigrants throughout the continent. Brussels has never tried to stop this European Jihad TV, ignoring even the massacre of four Jews in southern France last spring by a French Muslim. …

Seventy years ago the Europeans had to round up the Jews and take them to the nearest railway station. Now they just need to finance a textbook, fund a television show and draw a check at a distance of 3.299 km (that between Brussels and Jerusalem). It’s a cleaner and more comfortable anti-Jewish policy that resists any rational exorcism.

We will not be surprised if one day, under the Eurabian banner, the new Europeans will try to expel the descendants of the Holocaust from the land of Israel. This second Shoah will be called “Peace and Love for Palestine.”

*There are Christians who are fully aware that Christianity itself is the root cause of the persistent irrational hatred which came eventually, in the late 19th century, to be called “anti-Semitism”. For example, Professor William Nicholls, an Anglican minister and founder of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of British Columbia, wrote in his book Christian Antisemitism: A History of Hate:

No amount of tolerance and goodwill can obscure the fundamental threat to the Jewish people contained in the heart of traditional Christian belief … [Because] the very presence of the Jewish people in the world… puts a great question mark against Christian belief in a new covenant …

A reviewer of the book, Dave Turner, writes that Nicholls could see no remedy:

Even were all branches of Christianity to agree to somehow moderate the anti-Judaism of the gospels and Paul, is this even possible? These documents … are, after all, considered the inerrant word of God. Unanimity over violating God’s inspired words just for the sake of saving the Jews yet another Holocaust? And assuming a wave of remorse, a universal need to express penance, what then would remain of Christianity if indeed it did agree to do so? According to Nicholls, “Once all the anti-Jewish elements have been removed from Christianity, what is left turns out to be Judaism.”

Which strangely adds up to mean that Christianity is Judaism plus hatred of the Jews!

Dave Turner concludes:

Dr. Nicholls’ book is unrelentingly honest and powerful, a carefully constructed and well-written indictment of a religion that sees itself as embodying the high ideals of “Love, Charity and Forgiveness.” … These ideals … as Dr. Nicholls describes in this volume, clearly … do not apply to the Jews.

Has Russia forever to be cursed with a tsar?  Tsar, Starlin, Putin … whatever he’s called.

The following extracts and the picture are from Front Page, by Jacob Laksin:

The past year has seen an inspired stirring of political opposition in Russia, as thousands of young and middle-class Russians have poured out onto the streets to protest the country’s regressive slide into authoritarianism under Vladimir Putin. For sheer novelty and provocation, however, no protest action quite matched the spectacle that took place this past February, when the members of all-female punk rock band Pussy Riot commandeered the altar of Moscow’s main cathedral and, clad in multicolored balaclava masks, proceeded to belt out a protest song titled “Virgin Mary, Redeem Us of Putin.”  …

An increasingly rare piece of political blasphemy, the song assailed the Russian Orthodox Church for its uncomfortably close ties to the Russian president. That subservience was exemplified by the Church patriarch’s devout assessment prior to the presidential election this spring that Putin’s democracy-trampling 12-year rule represented nothing less than a ”miracle of God.”

In mocking the Church, Pussy Riot’s lyrics proclaimed that the “head of the KGB is their chief saint.”

The church was not amused, the Russian government even less so. After their performance, the three members of Pussy Riot were arrested and charged with “hooliganism.” That was in March. Since then, they have been held without trial in extended custody. Last Friday, their detention was extended by another six months until next January. If the band members are found guilty, they could be imprisoned for seven years. …

The message seems to be that such limited license as the government was prepared to extend to opposition and protest views has now been totally revoked. Plainly discomfited by this winter’s mass anti-government protests, the powers that be have decided that enough is enough. Thus, Putin marked his swearing-in ceremony in Moscow this May with a citywide crackdown on demonstrators in which some 400 were arrested. Some reports suggested that young demonstrators were issued military draft notices in reprisal. The trumped-up prosecution of Pussy Riot is only the latest sign that the government is taking a zero-tolerance approach to political dissent.

On the legal front, too, there is a burgeoning government effort to outlaw opposition. Last month, the Russian legislature, dominated by Putin’s United Russia party, passed a law that would impose ruinous fines of up to $9,300 for those who participate in unsanctioned demonstrations and double that for protest organizers. Since few Russians could afford to pay such penalties, and since the government is not eager to sanction opposition protests, the law amounted to a de facto ban on opposition protests and demonstrations.

And the government was just getting started. Last week it passed a raft of new and vaguely worded laws whose overall effect would be to undermine criticism of the government officials. Among the laws was one criminalizing libel that included a special provision for libel “against judges, jurors, prosecutors, and law enforcement officials,” — in short, those responsible for upholding the country’s corrupt security state. Another law would create a blacklist of websites that all Russian Internet search engines would have to block. The government claimed that such a blacklist was intended to protect children from harmful content, but given the virtually limitless discretion to decide which websites qualify as harmful it is easy to see how the notoriously censorship-prone Russian authorities could use the law to quash disfavored speech. Each of the laws, in short, is ripe for abuse, and that seems to be the point: Having concluded that it can’t suppress all opposition openly, the government wants to force critics into silence. …

The case against Pussy Riot rests on the dubious charge that they incited “religious hatred.” The government has even found ten witnesses who have come forward to claim that they have suffered “moral damage” as a result of the band’s performance. Interestingly, the Russian Orthodox Church was prepared to forgive the band, initially calling for merciful treatment for the arrested members. But as soon as Putin’s press secretary called their protest “despicable” and vowed to pursue the band “with all the necessary consequences,” the church fell into line. It too is now urging harsh punishment, inadvertently proving Pussy Riot’s point about the church’s obeisance to Putin.

Could it happen in America? Yes, we think it could, if Obama is re-elected in November.

Obama has tried hard to cozy up to Putin, star of the KGB. We suspect he would like to emulate him.

Here’s Pat Condell, our fellow atheist, indignant about things that ought to rouse indignation in everyone, and as eloquent as always, protesting against (inter alia) the persecution of Christians in Arab countries.

It would be nice if someone could get Janet Napolitano (see the video immediately below) to watch this one.

“I’m not to blame for any wrong I’ve done, because I’m a victim.”

It’s a statement often implied in defense of criminals. The accused may have murdered in cold blood, but he or she was maltreated as a child, subjected to sexual abuse perhaps, so is more to be pitied than blamed. It has proved to be an effective defense.

To ask “Can a victim not also be a villain?” is to ask an unintelligible question. What would be the use of a victim in our value scheme if he or she were also a villain? A victim, the prevailing sentiment implies, is innocent. Is pure. He or she is Pure Innocence personified.

It is not difficult to explain why being a victim has become a popular choice. Victimhood, even if entirely spurious, is commonly regarded now as a qualification for privileged treatment; routinely when it is claimed by persons identifying themselves with groups genuinely victimized in the past – certain ethnic minorities, homosexuals, or (ever less credibly) women. Victims are held in higher regard than achievers.

Besides which, it is a logical accompaniment to the popularity of compassion. In the West, nowadays, compassion is generally held to be the highest moral good.

Why? Well, to feel it is a quick fix, a drug for the ego. Little else makes one feel as good as immediately and reliably. And it can be bestowed in vast quantities without the bestower becoming any the poorer. Compassion is a supremely selfish emotion – which would be fine if only the selfishness of it were frankly acknowledged.

As it makes people feel good to show they are compassionate – by saying so, or in some cases by acting compassionately, gifting their energy, time, or possessions to their neighbors or even to remote strangers – it also makes people crave it. The need to give it stimulates the need to receive it. It’s abundant availability is a powerful inducement to neighbors and strangers to demand it; to put out their hands to receive it; to plead their superior neediness; to insist that they are pitiable; that they are victims.

Not that Western populations are divided into the pitying and the pitied; not at all – everyone can be both: everyone compassionate and charitable, everyone a victim. Everyone can have the kudos of being a pitier and at the same time the innocence of being pitiable. And with everyone getting double satisfaction, being most good and most innocent, the pitiable-pitying society is surely the happiest.

And surely, you might say, it is a truly good society? Everyone being nice to everyone, and no sufferer going unaided. A utopian Gemüthlichkeit. A mutually supportive community. Isn’t it the ideal, and hasn’t it been the ideal ever since St. Paul invented Christian morality? A universal economy of “love”?

Well, yes, it could make for pleasantness – if it were true; if the well-preened ego could rest with its philanthropy; if there were no evil in the human heart.

But because there is evil in the human heart, a feeling that everyone should be nice to everyone, however widespread, however popular and praised, will not in real life be quite enough to make it happen. In fact it seems that whenever and wherever compassion, pity, charity are most piously preached, just there are cruelty, humiliation, oppression most mercilessly practiced.

Christianity taps deep into the sentiment of pity with a God who (so the Christian myth runs) had himself tortured to death as a man in order to save mankind from innate sin, thus (the Christian myth fails to notice) planting harrowing guilt in its devotees. To cover if not to expiate that guilt, Christians are adjured to love their fellow human beings. Yet have any institutions inflicted as much mental anguish and physical agony on as many people for as many centuries as have the Christian Churches? Islam is a candidate, but Islam doesn’t preach universal love: it preaches mass murder, enslavement, and sadistic vengeance, so it escapes the charge of hypocrisy, at least in this regard.

What happens when victimization is idolized; when, as a result, there is competition in being more-victimized-than-thou; and when as a result of that, a perverted envy is born if someone is perceived as being the more victimized?

Let’s examine an actual case. I’ve said that Islam does not preach compassion. But Islam is intent on conquering the West, and to do so it is using all the opportunities that the West affords it. The very values, freedom and tolerance, that the West most esteems and embodies in its law, and that Islam would destroy, provide Islam with the means to destroy them. Muslims move into European countries and live freely. (Freely in more ways than one, as disproportionately large numbers of Muslim immigrants live on welfare handouts that the indigenous population pay for with their taxes.) They set up their mosques to preach, and their madrassas to teach their children, to hate the values of their host countries, and to love submission and intolerance. They can do so because the host countries are tolerant. If any of the indigenous people protest that Islam is manifestly incompatible with their values, their own law-courts in the name of tolerance punish them and not the Muslim immigrants. Much encouraged by this policy, some of the newcomers kill their new neighbors in acts of terrorism, intending to instill fear of Islam. But if any of the indigenous people consequently express fear and dislike of Islam, the Muslims cry that they are being subjected to irrational “Islamophobia”. Which is to say, they draw on Western compassion.

The starkest instance of this is what has happened in America since the destruction on September 9, 2001, in a profoundly religious act of hatred, of the World Trade Center in New York, when Muslims piloted two airplanes into the Twin Towers and killed close on 3000 people.

Time passes. The scar remains on the face of the city. For most Americans it is a place of tragedy. But for Muslims it is a place of victory. And certain Muslims propose to build a mosque as close to it as they can. While many on the political Left are in favor of the project – citing freedom and tolerance to support their view – there is an outcry of passionate opposition from many more.

Daisy Khan, the wife of the imam who is the front man of the plan to build the mosque and Islamic Center on the sacred site, was interviewed on ABC TV (22 August, 2010) about the mounting opposition to the project. She ascribed it to hate of Muslims which, she said, went “beyond Islamophobia”, and was ““like a metastasized anti-Semitism”.

By “metastasized” she meant, presumably, that hatred for Muslims in America was more widespread, more threatening, more potentially lethal than the hatred for Jews (the existence of which her declaration acknowledged). “Islamophobia” is a lie that reveals a twisted envy of anti-Semitism.

There is in fact little evidence of “Islamophobia”. FBI reports of recent years show that hate crimes against Muslims are rare; that there are more hate crimes against Christians than against Muslims; and there are about nine times as many against Jews as against Muslims. (See here and here.)

Regardless of the facts of the matter, Ms Khan wanted to make the point that Muslims were the victims of prejudice and bigotry. As the terms “Islamophobia” and “anti-Semitism” carry connotations of irrationality, her words implied that any feeling against Muslims is wholly irrational. But is it?

Antagonism towards Islam since 9/11, however emotional much of it may be, is not reasonless. Reasons for it abound. The attack on the World Trade Center was carried out in the name of Islam, as many other violent attacks, murders, and plans for murderous attacks have been, both before 9/11 and after. Muslims fit the role of victimizers far better than that of victims. So while anti-Islam feeling may be felt as unfair by many Muslims, it is not irrational; and Ms Khan’s analogy with anti-Semitism is wide of the mark. Tactically, however, claiming victimhood to bolster her cause was a shrewd move. Building permission for the mosque and Islamic Center has been granted by the authorizing bodies, including the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

I wonder … Are these authorizing bodies dominated by the Left? And were their arguments legal or emotional? If emotional, did they appeal to tolerance and compassion? If so, why no compassion for the feelings of those who were outraged by the very idea of the mosque in that place? I wonder about these questions because the Left in general claims moral superiority and asks for political power on the grounds that compassion is its highest value and the guiding principle of its policies. As with Christianity – from which this piety derives – it proves over and over again, wherever the Left is in power, to be an empty ideal.

Earlier in this essay I asked, rhetorically, “has any institution inflicted as much mental anguish and physical agony on as many people for as many centuries as have the Christian Churches?” The answer must be, “none over as many centuries”, but take out that phrase and even the Christian establishments are out-matched by the collectivist/leftist regimes of the twentieth century, some of which are still extant. To elect a collectivist government, to trust the Left’s claim to be the guardian of victims, to believe that voting for the Left proves your compassion, is to fall for the Great Political Lie.

Jillian Becker   July 21, 2012

This post is about “the false and dangerous morality of pity”

The quoted words are those of Bret Stephens, deputy editorial page editor and foreign-affairs columnist for the Wall Street Journal. He delivered a speech at Commentary’s annual dinner on June 4 at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City, from which these  extracts, from an adaptation of the speech at the Commentary website, are taken:

On the fourth of June, 1967, there were excellent reasons to side with Israel. It was a democracy besieged and assaulted by tyrannies. Its maritime rights had been violated by Egypt’s closure of the Straits of Tiran; international law was on its side. It had compelling reasons to believe it was under mortal threat. It made no territorial demands on its neighbors, much less call for their destruction. It was a net contributor, scientifically and culturally, to the march of civilization. Simply put, the Israelis were the good guys.

Yet the reason usually cited for sympathizing with Israel that fourth of June is that it was the underdog — the proverbial 98-pound weakling versus its big bullying neighbors. And this was true, albeit only partially true, because Israel quickly demonstrated that it wasn’t such a weakling after all.

And from the moment Israel won that war, thus securing its survival, it lost the sympathy of the world. We know that some newspapers had prepared Crocodile-tear editorials regretting the demise of a short-lived state of Israel. To feel for Jews suffering flattered the “feelers”; to feel for Jews triumphant did not.

It is to this deplorable weakness, this eroticism of the ego, that Christian morality and “social justice” advocacy – which means the entire ideology of the Left – pander.

Bret Stephens reasons:

But it’s hard to make a defensible case for siding with the underdog based on underdog-status alone. Was Saddam Hussein hiding in his spider hole a better man than he was in his palaces? Were the allies in 1945 less deserving of victory than they were in 1942? Was Israel’s cause less right on June 12, right after the war, than it had been on June 4? These are the kind of nonsense propositions you are bound to wind up with if you make moral judgments based on underdog – or overdog – status alone.

The instinct to side with the underdog arises, at least in part, from the guilty pleasure of pity — the feeling of superiority that the sensation of pity almost automatically confers. Pity, it turns out, is not a form of sympathy, or empathy, or a genuinely humane concern for the misfortunes of others. On the contrary, pity is really a form of self-congratulation, an act of condescension, a sublimated type of narcissism. Little wonder, then, that the politics of pity should thrive in … our culture of narcissism.

Consider the ways these politics plays out in our lives today. Remember that headline in Le Monde from September 12, 2001—“Nous Sommes Tous Américains”—“We Are All Americans”? Le Monde’s editorial pity lasted just so long as the wreckage of the Twin Towers smoldered in the ground, and then it was straight back to bashing the hyperpuissance. Or take the condemnation of the United States, by outfits such as Amnesty International, for the killing of Osama bin Laden. Poor Osama, defenseless before those marauding SEALs!

Yet nowhere do the politics of pity play out more vividly than when it comes to the Palestinians. How is it that, at least on the left, the Palestinians have become the new Chosen People? Part of the answer surely lies in the fact that Palestinians, uniquely, are the perceived victims of the Jewish state, and therefore another vehicle for castigating Jews. If you believe that Jews can do no right, you’re probably disposed to think that Palestinians can do no wrong — especially when they are attacking Jews.

But that’s not the whole answer. People who really aren’t anti-Semites or knee-jerk enemies of Israel nonetheless are disposed to make all kinds of allowances for Palestinians that can only be explained by the politics of pity. How many billions in international aid have been given to the Palestinians, and what percentage of those monies has been squandered or stolen? How often have Palestinians made atrocious political choices without ever paying a price for them in terms of international regard?

The reason Palestinians don’t have to earn global sympathy by showing themselves worthy of it is that they are the perceived underdogs and are therefore automatically entitled to the benefit of every doubt. And it is because “caring” for the Palestinians flatters the vanity of their sympathizers. I don’t think the world really loves the Palestinians. But … it does “love to love” them. Being pro-Palestinian, as that term is typically used, is not a testament to compassion. It is, more often than not, an act of self-love. It’s moral onanism.

Competing for the title of who is the most pitiable is shameful. Competing for the title of who is the more pitying is despicable. 

Bret Stephens warns mistaken friends of Israel from entering the pity-stakes:

In recent years, friends of Israel, and many Israelis as well, have sought to reengage the world’s affections by trying to portray Israel as the real underdog — in other words, to enter a contest of victimhood with the Palestinians.

Israel was not founded to serve as another vehicle for showcasing Jewish victimhood, but for ending it.

Right, right, right!

In order for one to deal effectively with the world, whether as individual or statesman, it is necessary to know the world as it is. It is a world full of danger, evil, and cruelty. Sentimentalizing it into something other than it is, pretending that human nature is “fundamentally good”, or can be changed by ideology, is to make a dumb mistake. Every human being suffers, and every human being inflicts suffering. The moral thing to do is to try not to harm others – a hard, if not impossible, task. 

Bret Stephens looks at what is happening in the world now with clear sight:

The world as we would wish it to be is not a world in which Syria is bleeding, the Chinese are increasing the rate of annual military spending by a double-digit percentage, the Arab Spring is turning to an Islamist winter, Europe is imploding economically, and Iran is brazening its way to a nuclear bomb. That world is the real world, and it is the world the rest of us inhabit: the world of the concrete fact, the world of the worsening circumstance. It is the world in which decisions are made harder, not easier, by delay, in which delay increases the chances of failure, and of death.

It is a world choked with pity, yet pitiless.

The whole speech as it appears in Commentary is well worth reading.

A report by Naijaurban (Nigeria):

Security agents said they discovered the bodies of at least 50 people, mostly women and children, who were burnt to death in the house of a pastor of the Church of Christ in Nigeria in Matse village.

Family members of the victims said the people burnt at the pastor’s home were people who ran into the home for safety after fulani herdsmen invaded their village on Saturday morning, killing over 20 people.

“Fulani herdsmen” is a phrase reporters in Nigeria like to use to refer to Muslim murderers. But Muslim murderers they are. They kill Christians not because they are herdsmen but because they are Muslims.

The killers followed these people to the church house, set the house ablaze and prevented people from leaving by standing at the exit and shooting at people who came out through the door.

For more on such acts of religion in Nigeria see our posts:

Christians murdered by Muslims, March 9, 2010

Muhammad’s command, March 30, 2010

Suffering children, May 11, 2011

Victims of religion, October 16, 2011

Acts of religion in Nigeria revisited, October  16, 2011

Christians slaughtered by Muslims in Nigeria, October 17, 2011

Boko Haram, the Muslim terrorists of Nigeria, November 10, 2011

More acts of religion in Nigeria, January 19, 2012