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Friday, April 19, 2013

"An Entire City - and One Muslim" by Laura Wood, "The Thinking Housewife"

In the wake of Boston's Marathon Bombing, Cardinal O'Malley chastised Congress for its inability to pass stricter gun control laws, calling it “emblematic of the pathology of our violent culture." (Franciscan O'Malley, Archbishop of Boston, also reaffirmed his opposition -- "as a Catholic" -- to capital punishment.)

Dear Fred,

Have you read Laura Wood's "An Entire City - and One Muslim." If not, I've pasted it below.

"Most Muslims are not terrorists," she writes, "but most terrorists are Muslims." 

Surely Laura knows that the United States -- using tax dollars from a complicit citizenry -- is the only nation to have dropped an atomic bomb and deliberately dropped it on a civilian population.

Uncle Sam engaged this holocaustal brutality not once, but twice.

 Both times, "he" targeted civilians living in densely populated urban areas.

These bombings qualify as acts of terror -- egregiously monstrous acts paid for by a hundred and fifty million Americans.

The jaw-dropping horror of these atomic vaporizations is without precedent or parallel.

In 1996, the military tactic known as "shock and awe" was named by Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, and is a product of the National Defense University of the United States. According to Ullman and Wade, Hiroshima and Nagasaki comprised "instant, nearly incomprehensible levels of massive destruction directed at influencing society writ large, meaning its leadership and public, rather than targeting directly against military or strategic objectives even with relatively few numbers or systems." 

The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki dwarf other acts of terror as a nuclear fireball dwarfs the flare of a struck match.

The difference between Uncle Sam's state-sponsored terror and jihadist terror is roughly equivalent to the difference between Satan Himself and a garden variety thug. 

More recently...

During the run-up to Bush-Cheney's Whimsy War, anyone with a folded cortex and an internet connection knew that Smirk/Snarl had designed an unjust war riddled with fabricated rationale. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYBA9JD5oW4

In that unjust, unnecessary and counterproductive war -- a war whose enduring legacy is Iran's emergence as the dominant regional power -- over half a million Iraqi civilians were killed or maimed. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/03/iran-won-iraq-war.html

To maintain a sense of proportion, two thousand seven hundred Americans were killed in The Twin Towers.

Even Cardinal Ratzinger -- an extraordinarily conservative Catholic in an age of Catholic Conservatism  --realized the injustice of The Iraq War, and flabbergasted by its moral perversity, referred supporters of America's state-sponsored terror to clearly stated principles in The Catholic Catechism. 

Over centuries, "Christendom" has perpetrated many acts of terror, including George W. Bush's declared "crusade" against Islamic terrorists, a categorization which his handlers quickly re-characterized. 

Even Tony Blair -- Bush's closest ally in "the war on terror" -- went  "out of his way to make clear that the battle against terrorists is a battle not between Christians and Muslims, but between civilized values and fanaticism." http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/0919/p12s2-woeu.html

One of life's hardest lessons is the need to do what is right, but also to do it rightly. 

To pit "fundamental Christian values" against "Islamist jihad" is to inflame hateful sentiments that foster mutual reactivity between two parties whose religious absolutism will not be satisfied until Armageddon, or "the return of the 12th Imam." 

Both "sides" are eager to "duke it out" in a culminating cosmic battle between "Absolute Good" and "Absolute Evil." (Revealingly, both sides are unshakably convinced that God Himself endorses their positions, and endorses them absolutely!) 

An aside... 

 It occurs to me that Islam is 600 years younger than Christianity and that 600 years ago, a long lineage of popes promoted the Inquisition, a central church office that was not definitively abolished until 1834.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition

 Those jihadists who have put Americans' knickers in a knot are not, by any measure, central to the religious practice of a billion and a half Islamics. If we allow Islam another 600 years of development to "catch up with Rome," Mohammad's faithful may leave Christianity in "the dustbin of history."

For all "fundamentalism's" talk of "biblical literalism," I marvel that fundamentalists, evangelicals and other professed "Christians" ignore the unmistakable intent of Yeshua's core teaching.

Matthew 5:43-48 - "The Message" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Message_(Bible)

“You’re familiar with the old written law, ‘Love your friend,’ and its unwritten companion, ‘Hate your enemy.’ I’m challenging that. I’m telling you to love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst. When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the energies of prayer, for then you are working out of your true selves, your God-created selves. This is what God does. He gives his best—the sun to warm and the rain to nourish—to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and nasty. If all you do is love the lovable, do you expect a bonus? Anybody can do that. If you simply say hello to those who greet you, do you expect a medal? Any run-of-the-mill sinner does that. “In a word, what I’m saying is, Grow up. You’re kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you.”

(For those who prefer more traditional translation, please see http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%205:43-48&version=YLT  To understand why this passage refers to "tax collectors" not once but twice, it is important to know what tax collectors represented in Jewish society at the time of Christ.  http://www.allaboutjesuschrist.org/tax-collector-faq.htm)

What can Christian conservatives be thinking? 

What Gospel passages justify their bloodlust? 

I see no hint of "taking up arms" in the entire span of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.  http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/05/mistakes-in-scripture-when-bible-gets.html

Am I missing something?

Or is "this generation of Pharisees" "making it up" as they go? 

Or worse, do they assume their self-righteousness is so blessed-by-God that "justifying verses" must be numerous and written-in-red.

Canadian statesman Brian Mulroney noted: "In politics you need two things, Madame: friends, but above all an enemy."

Psychologically, Christian conservatives need enemies more than they need the teaching of Christ. 

They are well aware of the political advantage deriving from diabolical enemies and are delighted by the practical results of conjuring images of "absolute evil." Blinded by self-certainty, they never question their existential need for enemies. Without them, however, conservatives' obsession with vengeance would  reduce to smoke and mirrors.

Christian "conservatives" -- and Islamist jihadists -- are conjoined partners in a longstanding love affair, an intimate bond as close as coitus.

Ever since Ronald Reagan - and more so since 9/11 - "conservatives" have been reflexive alarmists, espousing extreme ideology while shunning proportion and perspective - twin qualities Aquinas attached to virtue; qualities whose absence The Dumb Ox saw as inevitable preconditions of sin.

Thus deprived of prudence, "conservatives" don blinkers that let one eye see how "Obama is taking ALL our guns away," while with the other they perceive perpetual need for more guns, more weaponry, more firepower, more "throw weight," more capacity for slaughter. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/07/gun-cartoons.html

"Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Resist not evil."

Regardless America's unprecedented rate of firearm ownership --- one gun per man, woman and child --- conservatism's self-imposed blindness never asks the crucial question: "If more guns make us safe, why haven't the existing guns made us safe?"

This question is unanswerable. Due to the pervasive belief that Americans will only be safe when every man, woman and child packs a concealed weapon and builds an armory in the basement, this question is also un-askable.

America's unrestrained quest for "killing capacity" is not only lunatic, but satanic.

"Swords into plowshares?" 

Put you ear to the ground, my friend, and hear cackling laughter from sea to shining sea. 

We are an unprecedentedly unsafe society, home to 80% of all firearm deaths in the world. 

We have reaped the whirlwind... live in bedlam... and like every addict before us, deem another dose of the drug the only way to "get straight."


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I marvel that "conservatives" still pay lip service to the United States as "The Greatest Country in The World." 

The actual behavior of "conservatives" - coupled with their bitter ideology - bespeaks the faithless belief that Evil is already dominant (and mostly embodied by dark-skinned people).

Consider.

Here in The Homeland, Islamic terrorists have killed 21 Americans since 9/11 - thirteen of them in a single event at Fort Hood. 

During this same interval, Americans have taken up firearms to kill 360,000 Americans.

21 dead. 

360,000 dead.

What does this mean?

Since 9/11, Americans have shot to death the population of Pittsburg.

Or, the population of St. Louis.

New Orleans.

Tampa.

Corpus Christi.

Honolulu.

Anaheim.

Toledo.

Newark.

St. Paul.

Anchorage.

Since 9/11 Americans have shot to death the combined populations of West Palm Beach and New Haven.

Charleston and Hartford.

Billings and Green Bay.

Gainsville and Waco.

Fargo and Berkeley.

Not a single survivor.

Lamentably, tens of millions of Americans -- most of them "conservatives" -- are unable, in the absence of glass belly buttons, to see "the writing on the wall."

Gun violence in America -- certainly as it relates to mass murder -- is properly defined as terrorism. 

Any single killing seems, on the surface at least, an isolated event, an occurrence that Americans "should" accept and absorb as "understandable" aberrations committed by crazed individuals.

But just as individual "points of light" gather and consolidate the whole strength of a community, so do individual acts of firearm carnage join together to create an "atmosphere of terror."

This "tapestry of terror" - comprised of individual "stitches' sewed one at a time - is, at bottom, more disintegrating than acts of political terror. The latter are rare while the accumulated effect of the former have become our daily bread; have become the degenerate warp and weft of our "society." (See "In Fact We Have Been Winning The War On Terror" - http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/04/fact-us-has-been-winning-war-terror/64281/)

Until we get a grip on the "social terrorization of firearms," until we declare the credal truth that largely unregulated weaponry is destructive of civilization itself, American society will continue its bloody decline. (Again, I cite Boston's Cardinal O'Malley who faults congress for nixing the recent gun control bill as "emblematic of the pathology of our violent culture." 




American gun violence is terrible and terrifying. 

It is an unspoken truth that every American avoids large swathes of national territory to forfend the armed menace that lurks there - be it real or imagined. 

In any event, the terror is real, even if self-imposed. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/04/americas-national-pastime-is-self.html (By all accounts, Adam Lanza's mother was prone to self-terrorization... and paid with her life. Immediately he put a bullet in her head, Adam Lanza used Mom's "paranoid weapons" to gun down 20 six year olds.)

Despite the manifest lunacy of ubiquitous weaponry, "conservatives" are aghast that the words --- "Civilian gun violence is terrorism" --- might mean what they say.

All those whose lives depend on fearfulness and the propagation of fearfulness fall under the rubric of John's First Epistle: "There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love." 

See "Religion That Requires Fear In Order To Thrive Is Bad Religion"




“Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do.” 

Pope John XXIII


American "conservatives" -- equally at odds with John XXIII's encouragement of "hopes and dreams" and Lincoln's invocation of our "better angels" http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres31.html -- are committed to encouraging "the fallen angels of our nature." 

Pax on both houses,

Alan

PS In "One Muslim" Laura proclaims "the idiocy of leftist gun control." She goes on to say, "I wonder how many (Americans) cowering in their homes because a terrorist with bombs is on the loose wish they were armed." Ms. Wood's opposition to light-weight legislative attempts to qualify the Second Amendment according to the criteria of a "well regulated militia" insults "The Common Good (and) the good that is common." Before the Tsarnaev brothers were removed from Boston's streets, I listened to long stretches of "Rush Radio" and marveled that every talking head chortled over the sorry state of 'Watertown's disarmed citizens,' who, in light of the manhunt, must surely wish they were armed to the teeth. Setting aside the incontinent passions of "Good Americans," we confront the plain fact that no Watertown resident was killed or injured in the dragnet, and that if every home did contain a gun, some of those guns would be used eventually in crimes of violence, or by children taking their own lives. See "Gun Cartoons and Gun Violence Bibliography"

PPS "Thinking Housewife" reader, Sage McLaughlin, logged a comment concerning "An Entire City - and One Muslim," in which she described Sean Hannity as a "liberal ignoramus." Next we'll learn there's a conspiracy to keep "conservatives" unaware of the straight face test. 


Some of The Good Christians who make America possible.

***

An Entire City — and One Muslim
A MAJOR American city is now in a state of complete lockdown — its subways, offices and schools closed — as police engage in a massive manhunt for a single Muslim from Chechnya. They are looking for a man who has done what Muslims from Chechnya have done for many years: slaughtered innocent civilians.
It wasn’t as if this 19-year-old from a region bristling with Muslim terrorists had to crawl across our borders in the middle of the night to get here. It appears that he was freely admitted, his nationality and religion well known. This is not surprising. There is no accepted principle under which we could exclude him. It would be mean and unfair to exclude Muslims from Chechnya, or Saudi Arabia or Iran. That’s the normal thinking. It would be as mean and unfair to exclude them as it is mean and unfair for Muslims to kill and maim people.
Most Muslims are not terrorists, but most terrorists are Muslims.
The doctrines of Islam lead to mass murder. It is a very simple reality. We can exclude the good Muslims to protect ourselves from the bad ones, or we can be willing victims of one of the oldest, most well-understood and well-documented forms of hatred in history.
As an aside, the residents of Watertown, Massachusetts have received a valuable lesson in the idiocy of leftist gun control. I wonder how many of them cowering in their homes because a terrorist with bombs is on the loose wish they were armed.
— Comments —
Sage McLaughlin writes:
Your post reminded me of a somewhat tangential point.  Look at the show of force the Boston Police Department mustered in those photographs.  How is it possible that a free, self-governing society could be maintained in the face of such martial power on the part of the local constabulary, while the government systematically forbids the keeping of any serious arms by the general public?  It is not, and leftists know it is not, being hostile to self-government except insofar as universal suffrage is concerned — the role of universal suffrage also being to make any rational self-government impossible.
Here is a concrete expression of Sam Francis’s concept of “anarcho-tyranny:” the citizenry is not only disarmed, but is prohibited by a web of laws and punitive measures from taking any steps to protect itself from lawless, malevolent foreigners, who are permitted access to the country and allowed to roam at will, often even receiving preferential accommodations.
The American people, by doing nothing about this situation beyond listening to inane talk radio programs from the likes of basically liberal ignoramuses like Sean Hannity, show themselves worthy of the contempt in which their rulers hold them.
This was written by Laura Wood. Posted on Friday, April 19, 2013, at 9:28 am. Filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Comments are closed, but you can leave a trackback.
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