Here is essential reading if you want to understand the nature of Islam and its threat to the West and its values. If Schall is right, the Obama administration understands nothing about either and is putting us in grave danger in consequence of its (willful?) misunderstanding. Schall is of course too 'measured' and 'gentlemanly' in his use of language to put things as plainly as I just did, which is why he needs the assistance of bloggers like me. Excerpt:
The Islamic State and the broader jihadist movements throughout the world that agree with it are, I think, correct in their basic understanding of Islam. Plenty of evidence is found, both in the long history of early Muslim military expansion and in its theoretical interpretation of the Qur’an itself, to conclude that the Islamic State and its sympathizers have it basically right. The purpose of Islam, with the often violent means it can and does use to accomplish it, is to extend its rule, in the name of Allah, to all the world. The world cannot be at “peace” until it is all Muslim. The “terror” we see does not primarily arise from modern totalitarian theories, nationalism, or from anywhere else but what is considered, on objective evidence, to be a faithful reading of a mission assigned by Allah to the Islamic world, which has been itself largely procrastinating about fulfilling its assigned mission.
It is important that people read the entire piece.
In Terrorism and Other Religions, Cole argues that "Contrary to what is alleged by bigots like Bill Maher, Muslims are not more violent than people of other religions." Although we conservatives don't think all that highly of Bill Maher, we cheered when he pointed out the obvious, namely, that Islam, and Islam alone at the present time, is the faith whose doctrines drive most of the world's terrorism, and that the Left's moral equivalency 'argument' is "bullshit" to employ Maher's terminus technicus. Why should pointing out what is plainly true get Maher labeled a bigot by Cole?
So I thought I must be missing something and that I needed to be set straight by Professor Cole. So I read his piece carefully numerous times. Cole's main argument is that, while people of "European Christian heritage" killed over 100 million people in the 20th century, Muslims have killed only about two million during that same period. But what does this show? Does it show that Islamic doctrine does not drive most of the world's terrorism at the present time? Of course not.
That is precisely the issue given that Cole is contesting what "the bigot" Maher claimed. What Cole has given us is a text-book example of ignoratio elenchi. This is an informal fallacy of reasoning committed by a person who launches into the refutation of some thesis that is other than the one being forwarded by the dialectical opponent. If the thesis is that Muslims who take Islam seriously are the cause of most of the world's terrorism at the present time, this thesis cannot be refuted by pointing out that people of "European Christian heritage" have killed more people than Muslims. For this is simply irrelevant to the issue in dispute. (I note en passant that this is why ignoratio elenchi is classifed as a fallacy of relevance.)
Someone born and raised in a Christian land can be called a Christian. But it doesn't follow that such a person is a Christian in anything more than a sociological sense. In this loose and external sense the author of The Anti-Christ was a Christian. Nietzsche was raised in a Christian home in a Christian land by a father, Karl Ludwig Nietzsche, who was a Lutheran pastor. Similarly, Hitler was a Christian. And Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Republic of Turkey, was a Muslim. But were Ataturk's actions guided and inspired by Islamic doctrine? As little as Hitler's actions were guided and inspired by the Sermon on the Mount. Here is a list of some of Ataturk's anti-Islamic actions.
Having exposed the fundamental fallacy in Cole's article, there is no need to go through the rest of his distortions such as the one about the Zionist terrorists during the time of the British Mandate.
Why do leftists deny reality? A good part of the answer is that they deny it because reality does not fit their scheme. Leftists confuse the world with their view of the world. In their view of the world, people are all equal and religions are all equal – equally good or equally bad depending on the stripe of the leftist. They want it to be that way and so they fool themselves into thinking that it is that way. Moral equivalency reigns. If you point out that Muhammad Atta was an Islamic terrorist, they shoot back that Timothy McVeigh was a Christian terrorist — willfully ignoring the crucial difference that the murderous actions of the former derive from Islamic/Islamist doctrine whereas the actions of the latter do not derive from Christian doctrine.
And then these leftists like Cole compound their willful ignorance of reality by denouncing those who speak the truth as 'Islamophobes.'
That would have been like hurling the epithet 'Nazi-phobe' at a person who, in 1938, warned of the National Socialist threat to civilized values.
A reader asks whether Israel's actions against Hamas are defensible according to the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE).
According to the New Catholic Encylopedia, an action is defensible according to DDE if all four of the following conditions are met:
(1) The act itself must be morally good or at least indifferent.
(2) The agent may not positively will the bad effect but may merely permit it. If he could attain the good effect without the bad effect, he should do so. The bad effect is sometimes said to be indirectly voluntary.
(3) The good effect must flow from the action at least as immediately (in the order of causality, though not necessarily in the order of time) as the bad effect. In other words, the good effect must be produced directly by the action, not by the bad effect. Otherwise the agent would be using a bad means to a good end, which is never allowed.
(4) The good effect must be sufficiently desirable to compensate for the allowing of the bad effect.
My example. An obviously hostile knife-wielding intruder breaks into my house. I grab a gun and shoot him, killing him. My intention is not to kill him but to stop his deadly attack against me and my family. The only effective means at my disposal for stopping the assailant is by shooting him. But I know that if I shoot him, there is a good chance that I will kill him.
There are two effects, a good one and a bad one. The good one is that I stop a deadly attack. The bad one is that I kill a man. My shooting is justified by DDE. Or so say I. As for condition (1), the act of defending myself and my family is morally good. As for (2), I do not positively will the bad effect, but I do permit it. My intention is not to kill a man, but to stop him from killing me. As for (3), the good effect and the bad effect are achieved simultaneously with both effects being directly caused by my shooting. So I am not employing an evil means to a good effect. As for (4), I think it is obvious that the goodness of my living compensates for the evil of the miscreant's dying.
In the case of the Israeli actions, the removal of rocket launchers and other weaponry trained upon Israeli citizens is a morally good effect. So condition (1) is satisfied. Condition (2) is also satisfied. The IDF do not target civilians, but military personnel and their weapons. Civilians deaths are to be expected since Hamas uses noncombatants as human shields. Civilian deaths cannot be avoided for the same reason.
Condition (3) is also satisfied. The good effect (the defense of the Israeli populace) is not achieved by means of the bad effect (the killing of civilians). Both are direct effects of the destruction of the Hamas weaponry.
But what about condition (4)? Is the good effect sufficiently desirable to compensate for the allowing of the bad effect? The good effect is the protection of the Israeli populace. But the cost is high in human lives given that Hamas employs human shields.
Are numbers relevant? Suppose that 1000 Gazan noncombatants are killed as 'collateral damage' for every 100 Israeli noncombatants. Is the 'disproportionality' morally relevant? I don't think so. For one thing, note that Hamas intends to kill Israeli noncombatants while the IDF does not intend to kill Gazan noncombatants. There is no moral equivalence between the terrorist entity, Hamas, and the state of Israel.
It would be the same if were talking about fighters as opposed to noncombatants. If 1000 Hamas terrorists are killed for every 100 IDF members, the numbers are morally irrelevant. They merely reflect the military superiority of the Israelis. No one thinks that in the WWII struggle of the Allies against the Axis, the Allies should have stopped fighting when the total number of Axis dead equalled the total number of Allied dead.
My tentative judgment, then, is that condition (4) of DDE is satisfied along with the others.
I was actually impressed by Obama's speech last night. The greatness of the office he occupies, together with the external pressure of events and advisors, has resulted in a non-vacuous speech and wise decision, a two-fold decision: to launch air strikes against the advancing terrorist ISIS (or ISIL) forces and to drop supplies to the beleagured religious minorities under dire existential threat, the Christians and the Yazidi.
Learn Ralph Peters' lessons of Boston, or there may be a pressure cooker in your future.
As for the moral equivalency of Christianity and Islam, Bill Maher, certainly no friend of religion, achieves the right tone, "That's liberal bullshit." When some academic leftist says something that is plainly false, his pronouncement should not be treated with respect as if worthy of calm consideration. Call it what it is.
Are all Muslims terrorists? Of course not, and no one said so. Most are not. But most terrorists are Muslims. That is the point.
There an important distinction that ought to be observed. Someone who is a 'Christian' in a merely sociological sense of the term might commit a terrorist act such as blowing up a federal building, it being quite clear that no support for such a deed is forthcoming from Christian doctrine. But your typical Muslim terrorist is not just a punk from a Muslim land; he is someone whose actions flow from Islamist doctrine.
I have been told that there are a few 'Buddhists' who are also terrorists. But if you know anything about Buddhism, you know that there is no support for terrorism in the Buddhist sutras and shastras. So a 'Buddhist' who is also a terrorist is only a Buddhist in some loose and accidental sense of the term — he happens to be a native of a Buddhist land or has acquired some Buddhist acculturation — but there is no connection between his terrorist activities and Buddhist teaching.
Islam is unique among the great faiths in that it is as much a political ideology as it is a religion. In respect of the former, it is like communism, and, like communism, bent on world domination. Islam is the communism of the 21st century.
This is an entry from the old blog, first posted 28 December 2005. It makes an important point worth repeating.
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In an age of terrorism, enhanced security measures are reasonable (See Liberty and Security) But in response to increased government surveillance and the civil-libertarian objections thereto, far too many people are repeating the stock phrase, "I have nothing to hide."
What they mean is that, since they are innocent of any crime, they have nothing to hide and nothing to fear, and so there cannot be any reasonable objection to removing standard protections. But these people are making a false assumption. They are assuming that the agents of the state will always behave properly, an assumption that is spectacularly false.
Most of the state's agents will behave properly most of the time, but there are plenty of rogue agents who will abuse their authority for all sorts of reasons. The O'Reilly Factor has been following a case in which an elderly black gentleman sauntering down a street in New Orlean's French Quarter was set upon by cops who proceeded to use his head as a punching bag. The video clip showed the poor guy's head bouncing off a brick wall from the blows. It looked as if the thuggish cops had found an opportunity to brutalize a fellow human being under cover of law, and were taking it. And that is just one minor incident.
We conservatives are law-and-order types. One of the reasons we loathe contemporary liberals is because of their casual attitude toward criminal behavior. But our support for law and order is tempered by a healthy skepticism about the state and its agents. This is one of the reasons why we advocate limited government and Second Amendment rights.
As conservatives know, power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We have no illusions about human nature such as are cherished by liberals in their Rousseauean innocence. Give a man a badge and a gun and the power will go to his head. And mutatis mutandis for anyone with any kind of authority over anyone. This is the main reason why checks on government power are essential.
The trick is to avoid the absurdities of the ACLU-extremists while also avoiding the extremism of the "I have nothing to hide" types who are willing to sell their birthright for a mess of secure pottage.
Perhaps you have heard of taqiyya, the Muslim doctrine that allows lying in certain circumstances, primarily when Muslim minorities live under infidel authority. Now meet tawriya, a doctrine that allows lying in virtually all circumstances—including to fellow Muslims and by swearing to Allah—provided the liar is creative enough to articulate his deceit in a way that is true to him.
[. . .]
As a doctrine, "double-entendre" best describes tawriya's function. According to past and present Muslim scholars (several documented below), tawriya is when a speaker says something that means one thing to the listener, though the speaker means something else, and his words technically support this alternate meaning.
For example, if someone declares "I don't have a penny in my pocket," most listeners will assume the speaker has no money on him—though he might have dollar bills, just literally no pennies. Likewise, say a friend asks you, "Do you know where Mike is?" You do, but prefer not to divulge. So you say "No, I don't know"—but you keep in mind another Mike, whose whereabouts you really do not know.
One question about waterboarding is whether it is torture. Liberals, who are generally sloppy and inflationary in their use of language, say it is. These are the same people who think that ID checks at polling places 'disenfranchise' those without identification. (See this contemptibly idiotic NYT editorial.) But on any responsible use of terms, waterboarding cannot be called torture. (If that is what you call it, what do you call a Saddam-style red-hot poker 'colonoscopy'?)
Waterboarding led to the Bin Laden capture as Peter King (R-NY) revealed last night on the O' Reilly Factor.
Suppose we acquiesce for a moment in the liberal-left misuse of 'torture' whereby it subsumes waterboarding. Even under this concession, could anyone in his right mind think that it is always and everywhere wrong to use torture? That is the kind of extremism that characterizes liberals and libertarians. They cannot seem to realize that otherwise excellent principles often admit of exceptions.
It's been an interesting morning. At 10:30 AM I noticed that my traffic was way up for the day. And then at 11:12 AM I heard Dennis Prager reading on the air the first paragraph of a post of mine from yesterday in which I express my disappointment at Prager for rejoicing over Osama bin Laden's death when the appropriate response, as it seems to me, is to be glad that the al-Qaeda head is out of commission, but without gleeful expressions of pleasure. That's Schadenfreude and to my mind morally dubious.
(Even more strange is that before Prager read from my blog, I had a precognitive sense that he was going to do so.)
In his response, Prager pointed out that the Jews rejoiced when the Red Sea closed around the Egyptians, and that this rejoicing was pleasing to God. (See Exodus 15) Apparently that settled the matter for Prager.
And then it dawned on me. Prager was brought up a Jew, I was brought up a Christian. I had a similar problem with my Jewish friend Peter Lupu. In a carefully crafted post, Can Mere Thoughts be Morally Wrong?, I argued for a thesis that I consider well-nigh self-evident and not in need of argument, namely, that some mere thoughts are morally objectionable. The exact sense of this thesis is explained and qualified in the post. But to my amazement, I couldn't get Peter to accept it despite my four arguments. And he still doesn't accept it.
Later on, it was Prager who got me to see what was going on in my discussion with Peter. He said something about how, in Judaism, it is the action that counts, not the thought or intention. Aha! But now a certain skepticism rears its head: is Peter trapped in his childhood training, and me in mine? Are our arguments nothing but ex post facto rationalizations of what we believe, not for good reasons, but on the basis of inculcation? (The etymology of 'inculcation' is telling: the beliefs that were inculcated in us were stamped into us as if by a heel, L. calx, when we were impressionable youths.)
The text that so impressed me as a boy and impresses me even more now is Matt. 5: 27-28: "You have heard that it was said, You shall not commit adultery. [Ex. 20:14, Deut. 5:18] But I say to you that anyone who so much as looks with lust at a woman has already committed adultery with her in his heart."
Not that I think that Prager or Peter are right. No, I think I'm right. I think Christianity is morally superior to Judaism: it supersedes Judaism, preserving what is good in it while correcting what is bad. Christianity goes to the heart of the matter. Our hearts are foul, which is why our words and deeds are foul. Of course I have a right to my opinion and I can back it with arguments. And you would have to be a liberal of the worst sort to think that there is anything 'hateful' in what I just wrote about Christianity being morally superior to Judaism.
But still there is the specter of skepticism which is not easy to lay. I think we just have to admit that reason is weak and that the moral and other intuitions from which we reason are frail reeds indeed. This should make us tolerant of differences.
But toleration has limits. We cannot tolerate the fanatically intolerant. So, while not rejoicing over any man's death or presuming to know — what chutzpah! – where any man stands in the judgment of God, I am glad that Osama has been removed from our midst.
I was a bit disappointed with Dennis Prager this morning. He said he was "certain" that bin Laden is in hell. No one can be (objectively) certain that there even is a hell, let alone that any particular person has landed there. (Is Prager so en rapport with the divine nature that he understands the exact relation of justice and mercy in God and the exact mechanisms of reward and punishment?) And although there is call for some celebration at the closure this killing brings, I can't approve of Prager's joy at this event. This attitude of Prager's plays right in the hands of leftists and pacifists who confuse retributive justice with revenge and oppose capital punishment and the killing of human beings on that ground.
Anyone who doesn't see that capital punishment is precisely what justice demands in certain circumstances is morally obtuse. I agree with Prager on that. I also agree with his statement this morning that pacifism is "immoral" though I would withhold his "by definition." (I've got a nice post on the illicit use of 'by definition.') And of course I agree that terrorists need to be hunted down and killed. But there should be no joy at the killing of any human being no matter who he is. It would be better to feel sad that we live in a world in which such extreme measures are necessary.
The administration of justice ought to be a dispassionate affair.
I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I first of heard about the acts of 9/11 Islamoterrorism. It was a cool and bright Arizona morning, dry and delightful as only the desert can be. I had just returned from a long hard bike ride. Preliminary to some after-ride calisthenics I switched on the TV only to see one of the planes enter one of the Trade Towers.
I suspected correctly what was up and I remarked to my wife, "Well, two good things will come of this: Gary Condit will be out of the news forever, and finally something will be done about the porosity of the southern border." I turned out to be right on one count. Gary Condit, who had come to national prominence because of his adulterous affair with Chandra Levy, and who had dominated the news that summer of aught-one, dropped out of sight. And good riddance.
But I was sadly mistaken on the second count. So here we are, nine years later, with such abominations Obaminations as Department of Justice lawsuits against the State of Arizona for attempting to do what the Feds ought to do yet refuse to do while Mexican drug cartels control some portions of the state.
