The Mob Tears at the Foundations of Civilization in London and America

By J. Christian Adams

Watching London burn, one cannot help but sense something has gone awry in the west. London, the cradle of our law, spins toward lawlessness.

The law, the steady framework of our civilization, seems incapable of response. Americans don’t have the luxury anymore of watching the anarchy on television, assuming distance insulates us from the Mob-prowling neighborhoods like Camberwell and Tottenham. The howling rage has even come to our own Midwest.

Hopefully time and wisdom will reveal what has fractured, but for now, we are certain of some things.

We know that the House of Reeves in Croydon, South London, is a pile of ash and rubble. This furniture business had been in the Reeves family for 141 years, surviving even Hitler’s blitz. But the Mob burned it down. “I'm the fifth generation to run this place,” said owner Graham Reeves, “I have two daughters. They would have been the sixth.” It was a fixture in Croydon, which may have been its doom. The Mob loves to devour the fixtures of civilization. The Mob also delights in the destruction of a father’s dream for his daughter. We’ll return shortly to why this may be.

We know that the Mob is forcing victims to undress, to turn over family heirlooms such as wedding rings. We know the weapon of choice for this British Mob is fire.

We now sense that the British government is hopeless. A government that as recently as 1970 made “arson in a royal dockyard” a hanging offense dithers over whether to employ water cannons against the Mob. Americans who, for generations endearingly considered England a model of civility and decorum, know something must have failed catastrophically, but what?

We also now know the Mob has visited America in recent days and years.

Consider the Wisconsin State Fair last week. The 911 tapes reveal a nightmare. “We’re outside the Wisconsin State Fair and there’s a white guy being beaten up by about 100 black people,” the panicked caller cries. “They’re jumping on our cars. . . . My mom just got attacked by a black mob.” Multiple eyewitnesses describe white fairgoers being pulled from cars and beaten by the Mob, all black. The evidence establishes a strong presumption that race was a motivating factor in the attacks. This is America?

Like in England, the law is also failing the victims in Wisconsin. “My wife comes home with a fricking black eye, and you guys ain't doin' (expletive) about it?” another 911 caller complains. “You need to get the (expletive) riot squad over there and haul them off to jail.”

We know that something similar happened in the town of California, Pennsylvania this year. We know that Darnell Harding, a linebacker for the local college football team, and Toni Whiteleather, a defensive back, were charged with attacking Michael Chambers. Chambers was an innocent bystander who had the misfortune of running into the two athletes just before Harding, the linebacker, said he was going to “hit the first white person he saw.”

As in London, the law has failed Chambers. Prosecutors dropped the state hate crimes charges in June after they failed to subpoena the victim to give evidence for a preliminary hearing. The Obama administration has also failed Chambers, as we shall see.

The law has failed Marty Marshall and his Akron, Ohio, family. On the Fourth of July in 2009, he was watching fireworks in his front yard with his wife and children. A mob of 30 to 50 black teenagers went onto his property and beat up Marshall, his wife, his children and two adult male friends. “This is our world. This is a black world,” they taunted the injured victims. Marshall spent five nights hospitalized in critical care.

Of course there are federal hate crimes laws designed for these violent racially motivated attacks, right? But a law is only as good as the people enforcing it. The Justice Department under Eric Holder has little interest in bringing hate crimes charges to protect white victims. The corrupt dismissal of the New Black Panther voter intimidation case, which I brought, made that plain.

The criminal section of the civil rights division has the responsibility to prosecute racially motivated violence. But Mark Kappelhoff, the chief of the criminal section of the civil rights division, is unlikely to act if the victims are white. He was angry that the DOJ enforced the law on behalf of white victims in the voting rights case of United States v. Ike Brown. According to the sworn testimony of former voting section chief Christopher Coates, Kappelhoff complained equal enforcement of the law to protect whites was causing problems with “its relations with civil rights groups.” He placed greater importance on political relations with civil rights groups than ending discrimination against white voters.

Through Kappelhoff’s attitude, we gain insight into a worldview that excuses wrongdoers because of whom they victimize. We glimpse the opening passages of a rotted storyline with tragic final chapters.

The Mob thrives off such moral equivocation. The Mob is decisive when the law is not.

To some, the Mob is a symptom of disenfranchisement, urban malaise or institutional hurt feelings. The Mob, after all, only awoke after a questionable police shooting in London. Excuses all, of course. Nothing justifies this behavior in nations built on the rule of law. Excuses are paralyzing those with the responsibility of enforcing the law, both in England and the United States.

Let’s return to the question of why. Many have absolute confidence about what we are witnessing. They can surely imagine the whispers of Wormwood to a thousand Patients. Delighted that the Mob has bypassed the gradual path toward evil, they can imagine him basking in the heat of burning double deckers in Peckham. They know who delights in a father’s dream for his daughter destroyed. Others perhaps imagine Legion, who admits in the Gospel of Mark, “We are many,” before being cast into the maniacal herd of pigs by Christ. No longer simply pigs, the maniacal herd for our times now roams London and stalks families in Milwaukee and Akron.

Whatever has fractured, whatever has failed, we need to discover and right it. Law, informed by a reverence for human dignity, has lifted our nation, our civilization, out of the darkness of history. The mayhem and violence we are witnessing provides a glimpse of an uncivilized age beyond our memory, before law ruled.

Perhaps the civilized will outnumber the uncivilized. Or, perhaps the burning and looting provides instead a preview of our future.

Sir Winston Churchill understood this. “Civilization will not last,” he said at the University of Bristol in 1938, “freedom will not survive, peace will not be kept, unless a very large majority of mankind unite together to defend them and show themselves possessed of a constabulary power before which barbaric and atavistic forces will stand in awe.”

That we have a President that contemptuously expelled this great man’s bust from the Oval Office only increases our task.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor J. Christian Adams is an election lawyer who served in the Voting Rights Section at the U.S. Department of Justice. His forthcoming book Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department (Regnery) releases in October. His website is www.electionlawcenter.com.

How the Liberals ruined Britain

By Melanie Phillips

So now the chickens have well and truly come home terrifyingly to roost. The violent anarchy that has taken hold of British cities is the all-too-predictable outcome of a three-decade liberal experiment which tore up virtually every basic social value.

The married two-parent family, educational meritocracy, punishment of criminals, national identity, enforcement of the drugs laws and many more fundamental conventions were all smashed by a liberal intelligentsia hell-bent on a revolutionary transformation of society.

Those of us who warned over the years that they were playing with fire were sneered at and smeared as right-wing nutters who wanted to turn the clock back to some mythical golden age.

Now we can see what they have brought about in the unprecedented and horrific scenes of mob violence, with homes and businesses going up in flames, and epidemic looting.

Clearly, there is some as yet unidentified direction and co-ordination behind the anarchy. But what is so notable and distressing is that, after the first day when adults were clearly involved, this mayhem has been carried out in the main by teenagers and children, some as young as eight.

The idea that they should not steal other people’s property, or beat up and rob passers-by, appears to be as weird and outlandish to them as the suggestion that they should fly to the moon.

These youths feel absolutely entitled to go ‘on the rob’ and steal whatever they want. Indeed, they are incredulous that anyone should suggest they might pass up such an opportunity.

What has been fuelling all this is not poverty, as has so predictably been claimed, but moral collapse. What we have been experiencing is a complete breakdown of civilised behaviour among children and young people straight out of William Golding’s seminal novel about childhood savagery, Lord Of The Flies.

There has been much bewildered talk about ‘feral’ children, and desperate calls upon their parents to keep them in at night and to ask them about any stolen goods they are bringing home.

As if there were responsible parents in such homes! We are not merely up against feral children, but feral parents.

Of course these parents know their children are out on the streets. Of course they see them staggering back with what they have looted. But either they are too drunk or drugged or otherwise out of it to care, or else they are helping themselves to the proceeds, too.

As David Cameron observed yesterday, there are clearly pockets of society that are not just broken, but sick.

The causes of this sickness are many and complex. But three things can be said with certainty: every one of them is the fault of the liberal intelligentsia; every one of them was instituted or exacerbated by the Labour government; and at the very heart of these problems lies the breakdown of the family.

For most of these children come from lone-mother households. And the single most crucial factor behind all this mayhem is the willed removal of the most important thing that socialises children and turns them from feral savages into civilised citizens: a father who is a fully committed member of the family unit.

Of course there are many lone parents who do a tremendous job. But we’re talking here about widespread social collapse. And there are whole areas of Britain, white as well as black, where committed fathers are a wholly unknown phenomenon.

In such areas, successive generations are being brought up only by mothers, through whose houses pass transitory males by whom these women have yet more children — and who inevitably repeat the pattern of lone and dysfunctional parenting.

The result is fatherless boys who are consumed by an existential rage and desperate emotional need, and who take out the damage done to them by lashing out from infancy at everyone around them.

Such children inhabit what is effectively a different world from the rest of society. It’s a world without any boundaries or rules. A world of emotional and physical chaos.

A world where a child responds to the slightest setback or disagreement by resorting to violence. A world where the parent is unwilling or incapable of providing the loving and disciplined framework that a child needs in order to thrive.

Yet instead of lone parenthood being regarded as a tragedy for individuals, and a catastrophe for society, it has been redefined as a ‘right’.

When Labour came to power in 1997, it set about systematically destroying not just the traditional family but the very idea that married parents were better for children than any other arrangement.

Instead, it introduced the sexual free-for-all of ‘lifestyle choice’; claimed that the idea of the male breadwinner was a sexist anachronism; and told girls that they could, and should, go it alone as mothers.

This was the outcome of the shattering defeat of Tony Blair, in the two years or so after he came to power, at the hands of the ultra-feminists and apostles of non-judgmentalism in his Cabinet and party who were determined, above all, to destroy the traditional nuclear family.

Blair stood virtually alone against them, and lost.

One of these ultra-feminist wreckers was Harriet Harman. The other night, she was on TV preposterously suggesting that cuts in educational allowances or youth workers had something to do with young people torching and looting shops, robbing and leaving people for dead in the streets.

But Harman was one of the principal forces in the Labour government behind the promotion of lone parenthood and the marginalisation of fathers. If anyone should be blamed for bringing about the conditions which have led to these appalling scenes in our cities, it is surely Ms Harman.

And this breaking of the family was further condoned, rewarded and encouraged by the Welfare State, which conceives of need solely in terms of absence of money, and which accordingly subsidises lone parenthood and the destructive behaviour that fatherlessness brings in its train.

Welfare dependency further created the entitlement culture that the looters so egregiously display. It taught them that the world owed them a living. It taught them that their actions had no consequences. And it taught them that the world revolved around themselves.

The result of this toxic combination of welfare and non-judgmentalism was an explosion of elective lone parenthood and dysfunctional behaviour transmitted down through the generations at the very bottom of the social heap — creating, in effect, a class apart.

Once, children would have been rescued from their disadvantaged backgrounds by schools which gave them not just an education but structure and purpose to their lives.

But the liberal intelligentsia destroyed that escape route, too. For its onslaught upon marriage — the bedrock institution of society — with a tax system that penalises married couples with a wife who doesn’t work, was replicated by an onslaught upon the understanding and very identity of that society. Instead of transmitting knowledge to children, teaching was deemed to be an attack upon a child’s autonomy and self-esteem.

Thus it was that teachers adopted the ‘child-centred’ approach, which expected children not only to learn for themselves but also to decide for themselves about behaviour such as sexual morality or drug-taking.

The outcome was that children were left illiterate and innumerate and unable to think. Abandoned to wander through the world without any guidance, they predictably ended up without any moral compass.

All of this was compounded still further by the disaster of multiculturalism — the doctrine which held that no culture could be considered superior to any other because that was ‘racist’.

That meant children were no longer taught about the nation in which they lived, and about its culture. So not only were they left in ignorance of their own society, but any attachment to a shared and over-arching culture was deliberately shattered.

Instead of forging social bonds, multiculturalism dissolved them — and introduced instead a primitive war of all against all, in which the strongest groups would destroy the weak.

Closely related to this was ‘victim culture’, in which all minority groups were regarded as victims of the majority. So any bad behaviour by them was excused and blamed on the majority.

In similar vein, all criminal wrongdoing was excused on the basis that the criminal couldn’t help himself, as he was the victim of circumstances such as poverty, unemployment, or as yet illusory cuts in public spending.

The human rights of the criminal became seen as more important than the safety and security of his victims. Punishment became a dirty word. So the entire criminal justice system turned into a sick joke, with young hoodlums walking off with community sentences or Asbos (antisocial behaviour orders) which they held in total contempt.

Mr Cameron has declared that all those convicted of violent disorder in these riots will go to prison.

Really? Isn’t it more likely that they will end up on some community penalty which will see them taken on trips to Alton Towers to make up for their disadvantaged upbringing? This is the normal response of our sentimentalised and addle-brained criminal justice officials.

In short, what we have seen unfolding before our horrified gaze over the past four days in Britain is the true legacy of the Labour years.

The social and moral breakdown behind the riots was deliberately willed upon Britain by left-wing politicians and other middle-class ideologues who wrap their utter contempt for the poor in the mantle of ‘progressive’ non-judgmentalism.

These are the people who — against the evidence of a mountain of empirical research — hurl execrations at anyone who suggests that lone parenthood is, in general, a catastrophe for children (and a disaster for women); who promote drug liberalisation, oppose selective education (while paying for private tutors for their own children) and call those who oppose unlimited immigration and multiculturalism ‘racists’.

And the real victims of these people ‘who know best’ are always those at the bottom of the social heap, who possess neither the money nor the social or intellectual resources to cushion them against the most catastrophic effects of such nonsense.

Britain was once an ordered society that was the envy of the world — the most civilised, the most gentle and law-abiding.

Can Broken Britain be put together again? David Cameron is commendably talking tough: but will he have the stomach for tough action?

Will he, for example, remove the incentives to girls and women to have babies outside marriage? Will he dismantle the concept of entitlement from the Welfare State?

Will he vigorously enforce the drug laws? Will he end the kid-glove treatment of ‘victim groups’, and hold them to account for their behaviour in exactly the same way as everyone else?

Repairing this terrible damage also means, dare I say it, a return to the energetic transmission of Biblical morality.

Anyone heard from the Archbishop of Canterbury about the riots? Anyone care to guess what he will eventually say about them? Quite.

When church leaders stop prattling like soft-headed social workers and start preaching, once again, the moral concepts that underlie our civilisation, and when our political leaders decide to oppose the culture war that has been waged against that civilisation rather than supinely acquiescing in its destruction, then — and only then — will we start to get to grips with this terrible problem.

Until then, within the smouldering embers of our smashed and burned-out cities, we can only look upon the ruins of the Britain we have so dearly loved: the Britain that once led the world towards civilisation, but is now so tragically leading the way out.

Meltdown--But Why?

By Ben Stein

"What the heck is happening?" That keeps racing through my head as the world's markets crash and a staggering wave of fear races through the world's financial centers.

Why are we having this meltdown? Why right now?

The real economy is not doing great, but corporate profits are extremely strong. The nation's large corporations are loaded with liquidity. The luxury retail sector is powerful. Autos are excellent. The agricultural sector is stupendously strong. High tech and biotech are doing well, sometimes amazingly well.

The stock market is a barometer of corporate profits and somehow the barometer is now telling us corporate profits will fall far and fast -- yet the evidence for this is thus far faint. It may come, but markets, as the old saw goes, forecast ten out of every five recessions.

For pitiful, grizzled old me, when I see markets falling this fast, I smell "speculator." Economists and statisticians are not trading stocks. TRADERS are trading stocks and if they see a way to make money by selling or using options or instruments that are like a sale, they will make money that way. It has very little to do with the larger economy.

I offer as the world prize exhibit the Crash of '87. It was the biggest Crash ever in history before or since, was done entirely to make money off a trade between the cash and the futures of stocks prompted automatically by something laughably called "portfolio insurance." Within a few months, the market completely recovered and there was no recession.

That is, falls are often -- not always -- an epiphenomenon, if I have the right word, made by a small group of willful men within the markets and not connected with the larger economies.

Yes, Italy has problems. Yes, the USA has problems. Yes, our debt was just downgraded and rightly so since the federal debt is just a massive Ponzi where the earlier investors are paid by the later investors. But the Ponzi can go on a long time and Italy can be bailed out by the ECB -- and in the meantime corporate profits are brisk.

To my old and possibly failing eyes, we seem to be in a panic manufactured by speculators, fed by the media, poisoning the hopes and plans of the whole world.

The leading clue is the stupefying rise of gold, which simply bears no relation to any traditional metric. Gold buying panics are sometimes -- not always -- signs of a manufactured panic, just as any buying panic in a commodity is.

But the most astonishing part of the whole dreary tableau is the utter irrelevance of President Obama. He cannot do anything about anything. He might as well be on the moon. The gunslingers on Wall Street and in London and Hong Kong and Tokyo have made him absolutely outer planetary. It's almost sad. He's flailing his arms around, and no one is listening. He might as well be President of The Off World Colonies. "Yes, we can....we can be utterly irrelevant."

These are strange times. Up here at Lake Pendoreille though, it's paradise. The moon shines on the water. The osprey slide through the air, and the freight trains shake the walls. Far from Broad Street, all is well.

Clockwork Orange 2011

As I watched videos and reports about the riots in London and other English cities, I couldn't help but think of the hooligans in Clockwork Orange.  Here we have a video of one of the victims being robbed by a mob.  The police is nowhere to be seen.

Melanie Phillips looks at the causes for the riots:

...various elements that have contributed to this collapse of order: family breakdown and mass fatherlessness; the toleration and even encouragement of grossly inadequate parenting; educational collapse which damages most those at the bottom of the social heap; welfare dependency; political correctness and the vicious injustices and moral inversion of victim culture; the grossly irresponsible toleration of soft drug-taking; the shuddering distaste at the notion of punishment and the consequent collapse of authority in the entire criminal justice system; the implosion of the policing ethic and the police retreat from the streets; the increasing organisation and boldness of anarchist and left-wing subversive activity; and the growth of irrationality, narcissistic self-centredness and mob rule and the near-certainty of a fundamental breakdown of morality and order.

From James Taranto's Best of the Web

Weisberg vs. the People

He is smiling, but is very unhappy with you.

America, you've been a bad, bad country. And Jacob Weisberg is very cross with you.

"It is hard to remember a more dismal moment in American politics," Weisberg moans in a column originally written for the Financial Times. It starts out as a standard partisan attack on Republicans for failing to fall into line with liberal dogma--excuse us, "science":

President Obama is trying to push a jobs agenda. But for the federal government to spur growth or create jobs, it has to spend additional money. The antediluvian Republicans who control Congress do not think that demand can be expanded in this way. They believe that the 2009 stimulus bill, which has prevented an even worse economy over the past two years, is actually responsible for the current weakness. . . .

Some of the congressional Republicans who are preventing action to help the economy are simply intellectual primitives who reject modern economics on the same basis that they reject Darwin and climate science.

Darwin is a red herring here. Although disparaging people for holding harmless religious beliefs as "intellectual primitives" is awfully uncivil, we agree with Weisberg that people who "reject" the theory of natural selection are mistaken.

But the comparison between Keynesian economics and global warmism is on target. Both are liberal dogmas disguised, increasingly thinly, as science. Both are supported by circular logic, and thus lack falsifiability, a necessary characteristic of a scientific theory. If the weather gets warmer, that's because of global warming; if it gets colder, that's "climate change" and proves the theory too. Had unemployment stayed below 8%, as the Obama administration promised it would, that would have proved the "stimulus" worked; since it peaked at 10% and has held steady above 9%, that proves the stimulus wasn't big enough. Heads I win, tails you lose.

To Weisberg, the failures of the Obama administration prove not only that Republicans are "intellectual primitives" but that you are stupid: Among the "sobering lessons" that "we" have "learned," he writes, is "that there's no point trying to explain complicated matters to the American people."

The FT, by the way, is a London-based newspaper with a far-flung world-wide circulation (though it is smaller than The Wall Street Journal's by an order of magnitude). So when Weisberg says you're stupid, he isn't exactly saying it to your face. Remember when dissent was the highest form of patriotism? We suppose the definitions are flexible here. Bad-mouthing the American people--for dissenting!--is the highest form of patriotism, at least this week.

Weisberg criticizes Obama, too, but only in a backhanded way. "The president has tried reasonableness and he has failed," Weisberg sobs. "A Congress dominated by mindless cannibals is now feasting on a supine president." (News you can use: Always sleep on your side and you'll wake up uneaten.)

This all reminded us of another Weisberg piece, published in 2008. Back then, he was much more enthusiastic about the "handsome, brilliant, and cool" Sen. Obama, whose policies, Weisberg claimed, even those who disagreed with them were obliged to acknowledge constituted "serious attempts to deal with the biggest issues we face."

But Weisberg's attitude toward the American people, if not as openly hostile as it is today, was characterized by a deep suspicion. Obama was not doing as well in the polls as Weisberg thought he should have been, given the all-around awesomeness of the junior senator from Illinois. If Obama lost to John McCain, it could mean only one thing: America was irredeemably racist. (As we noted at the time, in reaching this conclusion Weisberg committed a rookie error of logic, which makes today's pompous pronouncements about "science" all the more hilarious.)

Weisberg's latest amounts to a lament for democracy. Even if the American people aren't as racist as he suspected you were back in 2008, you aren't up to the challenge of being governed by the handsome, brilliant and cool Barack Obama.

We would offer an alternative hypothesis: The American people, while imperfect, are basically OK. You just made a mistake in choosing a president. Oh, there were any number of reasons why Obama seemed better than Hillary Clinton or John McCain, and who knows? Maybe either of them would have been even worse. But the point is, Obama was never all that, or even nearly what, he was cracked up to be.

It takes an authoritarian mindset to look at a failed leader and fault the people for failing to follow him. This is not just an ideological authoritarianism, although it does have that element, as evidenced by Weisberg's peremptory dismissal of opposing viewpoints. But he treats Obama not as what he actually is--a human being and a politician--but as a sort of religious figure--a potential savior in 2008, a martyr in 2011.

This is the Cult of Obama. Many of the then-candidate's supporters--especially highly educated ones who pride themselves on their superior rationality--saw Obama as a sort of idealized version of themselves. The classic of the genre was a June 2008 column by Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle's website, who, citing unidentified "spiritually advanced people" (we are not making this up), described Obama as "a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being . . . who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment."

Slightly closer to Earth was a February 2008 essay for the Christian Science Monitor by Warren Bennis and Andy Zelleke, professors at the University of Southern California and Harvard, respectively. Obama, they claimed, has "the edge when it comes to that magical quality known as charisma," a "unique capacity to inspire" that "should not be undervalued." Oh sure, there are some dangers. Bennis and Zelleke pre-empt a ludicrously weak counterargument by conceding that Hitler was charismatic. Then they note:

A far more mundane disappointment in charismatic individuals is that they sometimes reveal themselves to have been smooth-tongued empty suits without the capacity to deliver results.

Say what you will about Obama, he certainly isn't smooth-tongued. But Bennis and Zelleke credited him with "unusually strong character and good temperament" and wrote:

A president with charisma and good character--and, of course, sound policy ideas--would be an invaluable national resource, with the transformational capacity to lift the malaise that is paralyzing so many Americans today.

Obama seems to have "good character," at least in the everyday sense of being a good husband and father. Then again, so did Richard Nixon and so does Jimmy Carter. But sound policy ideas and charisma? He's no steak and no sizzle.

And Obama shares Weisberg's frustration with you, the American people. As he said at a Wednesday fund-raiser in Chicago:

It's been a long, tough journey. But we have made some incredible strides together. Yes, we have. But the thing that we all ought to remember is that as much good as we have done, precisely because the challenges were so daunting, precisely because we we were inheriting so many challenges, that we're not even halfway there yet. When I said "change we can believe in" I didn't say "change we can believe in tomorrow." Not "change we can believe in next week." We knew this was going to take time because we've got this big, messy, tough democracy.

We could've sworn we heard something about "the fierce urgency of now," but maybe we were just dreaming. Lots of people were. Reader Kevin Johnson argues that Obama's despairing tone is the antithesis of leadership:

I served three combat tours in the U.S. Marine Corps and never once heard a leader explain the challenges of command by noting that his unit and its Marines were flawed or not perfect. Can one imagine a commander declaring, "I'd have done a better job if the situation I had to deal with were better. Let's face it, I'd be a better commander if I didn't have to deal with you Marines. And, by the way, that includes the organization and character of the Marine Corps itself"?

For every commander I dealt with--some outstanding, others less so--both his command and even the "fog of war" were always givens for that situation. The commander always took personal responsibility.

Obama refuses to accept personal responsibility, and Cult of Obama die-hards like Weisberg refuse to assign it to him. Too much of their own identity is bound up with their idealized vision of him, so they lash out at those who are not part of the cult. They lash out at you. But try not to take it personally. Anger is depression turned outward.

The Chicago Tribune notes with understatement that Obama "probably will be forced to run on something other than his economic record." That something is the fierce urgency of ferocity:

"It's not going to be 2008 'Yes, we can' anymore. I think it's going to be slash-and-burn," said Democratic pollster Paul Maslin. "We have an embattled incumbent who doesn't have much hope of improving his standing except by point of comparison with his Republican opponent. It's going to be a very different kind of election that's going to be brutal, to be honest."

"It is hard to remember a more dismal moment in American politics," Weisberg writes. If Maslin is right, things are going to get more dismal still. And we won't be surprised if a year from now Weisberg is defending the handsome, brilliant and cool incumbent's vicious campaign on the ground that it's just what stupid, racist Americans deserve.

They've Lost That Lovin' Feeling, by Peggy Noonan

They've Lost That Lovin' Feeling: Obama still has supporters, but theirs is a grim support.

The Republican establishment reasserted itself this week, and good thing, too, because the establishment was right. It said Republicans in the House should back and pass the Boehner bill on the debt ceiling because it goes in the right directions, contains spending cuts but not taxes, and is viable. So accept victory, avert crisis, and get it to the Senate.

The establishment was being conservative in the Burkean sense: acknowledges reality, respect it, and make the most progress possible within it. This has not always been true of them. They spent the first decade of this century backing things a truly conservative party would not have dreamed of—careless wars, huge spending and, most scandalously, a dreamy and unconservative assumption that it would all work out because life is sweet and the best thing always happens. They were mostly led by men and women who had never been foreclosed on and who assumed good luck, especially unearned good luck, would continue. They were fools, and they lost control of their party when the tea party rose up, rebuking and embarrassing them. Then the tea party saved them by not going third party in 2009-10. And now the establishment has come forward to save the tea party, by inching it away from the cliff and reminding it the true battles are in 2012, and after. Let's hope the tea party takes the opportunity.

As this is written the White House seems desperate to be seen as consequential. They're trotting out Press Secretary Jay Carney, who stands there looking like a ferret with flop sweat as he insists President Obama is still at the table, still manning the phones and calling shots. Much is uncertain, but the Republicans have made great strides on policy. If they emerge victorious, they had better not crow. The nation is in a continuing crisis, our credit rating is not secure, and no one's interested in he-man gangster dialogue from "The Town." What might thrill America would be a little modesty: "We know we helped get America into some of this trouble, and we hope we've made some progress today in getting us out of it."

***

But that actually is not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about something that started to become apparent to me during the debt negotiations. It's something I've never seen in national politics.

It is that nobody loves Obama. This is amazing because every president has people who love him, who feel deep personal affection or connection, who have a stubborn, even beautiful refusal to let what they know are just criticisms affect their feelings of regard. At the height of Bill Clinton's troubles there were always people who'd say, "Look, I love the guy." They'd often be smiling—a wry smile, a shrugging smile. Nobody smiles when they talk about Mr. Obama. There were people who loved George W. Bush when he was at his most unpopular, and they meant it and would say it. But people aren't that way about Mr. Obama. He has supporters and bundlers and contributors, he has voters, he may win. But his support is grim support. And surely this has implications.

The past few weeks I've asked Democrats who supported him how they feel about him. I got back nothing that showed personal investment. Here are the words of a hard-line progressive and wise veteran of the political wars: "I never loved Barack Obama. That said, among my crowd who did 'love' him, I can't think of anyone who still does." Why is Mr. Obama different from Messrs. Clinton and Bush? "Clinton radiated personality. As angry as folks got with him about Nafta or Monica, there was always a sense of genuine, generous caring." With Bush, "if folks were upset with him, he still had this goofy kind of personality that folks could relate to. You might think he was totally misguided but he seemed genuinely so. . . . Maybe the most important word that described Clinton and Bush but not Obama is 'genuine.'" He "doesn't exude any feeling that what he says and does is genuine."

Maybe Mr. Obama is living proof of the political maxim that they don't care what you know unless they know that you care. But the idea that he is aloof and so inspires aloofness may be too pat. No one was colder than FDR, deep down. But he loved the game and did a wonderful daily impersonation of jut-jawed joy. And people loved him.

The secret of Mr. Obama is that he isn't really very good at politics, and he isn't good at politics because he doesn't really get people. The other day a Republican political veteran forwarded me a hiring notice from the Obama 2012 campaign. It read like politics as done by Martians. The "Analytics Department" is looking for "predictive Modeling/Data Mining" specialists to join the campaign's "multi-disciplinary team of statisticians," which will use "predictive modeling" to anticipate the behavior of the electorate. "We will analyze millions of interactions a day, learning from terabytes of historical data, running thousands of experiments, to inform campaign strategy and critical decisions."

This wasn't the passionate, take-no-prisoners Clinton War Room of '92, it was high-tech and bloodless. Is that what politics is now? Or does the Obama re-election effort reflect the candidate and his flaws?

Mr. Obama seemed brilliant at politics when he first emerged in 2004. He understood the nation's longing for unity. We're not divided into red states and blue, he said, we're Big Purple, we can solve our problems together. Four years later he read the lay of the land perfectly—really, perfectly. The nation and the Democratic Party were tired of the Clinton machine. He came from nowhere and dismantled it. It was breathtaking. He went into the 2008 general election with a miraculously unified party and took down another machine, bundling up all the accrued resentment of eight years with one message: "You know the two losing wars and the economic collapse we've been dealing with? I won't do that. I'm not Bush."

The fact is, he's good at dismantling. He's good at critiquing. He's good at not being the last guy, the one you didn't like. But he's not good at building, creating, calling into being. He was good at summoning hope, but he's not good at directing it and turning it into something concrete that answers a broad public desire.

And so his failures in the debt ceiling fight. He wasn't serious, he was only shrewd—and shrewdness wasn't enough. He demagogued the issue—no Social Security checks—until he was called out, and then went on the hustings spouting inanities. He left conservatives scratching their heads: They could have made a better, more moving case for the liberal ideal as translated into the modern moment, than he did. He never offered a plan. In a crisis he was merely sly. And no one likes sly, no one respects it.

So he is losing a battle in which he had superior forces—the presidency, the U.S. senate. In the process he revealed that his foes have given him too much mystique. He is not a devil, an alien, a socialist. He is a loser. And this is America, where nobody loves a loser.

The Quislings of Norway: By Joseph Klein

“We no longer recognize the State of Israel. We could not recognize the apartheid regime of South Africa, nor did we recognize the Afghani Taliban regime. Then there were many who did not recognize Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or the Serbs’ ethnic cleansing. We need to get used to the idea: The State of Israel, in its current form, is history.The State of Israel has raped the recognition of the world and shall have no peace until it lays down its arms.”….FOREIGN MINISTER OF NORWAY

The infamous Norwegian Vidkun Quisling, who assisted Nazi Germany as it conquered his own country, must be applauding in his grave.

In the latest example of Norwegian collaboration with the enemies of the Jews, Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere declared during a press conference this week, alongside Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, that “Norway believes it is perfectly legitimate for the Palestinian president to turn to the United Nations” to seek recognition of an independent Palestinian state.

Despite Abbas’s decision to throw his lot in with the Hamas terrorists as part of some sort of “unity” government, Stoere signed an agreement with Abbas on upgrading Palestinian representation in Norway. Under the agreement, which effectively rewards Abbas for joining forces with Hamas, the Palestinian representative will have the full diplomatic rank of ambassador.

The foreign minister of Norway, which chairs a group of Palestinian donor nations, also used the occasion to hold the tin cup out for Abbas. Foreign Minister Stoere chided those who have decided to hold back on their contributions. “All donors should make an extra effort to support the Palestinians this summer and autumn,” he said.

None of this should come as a surprise. Let’s not forget, for example, that Foreign Minister Stoere is in charge of the same Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in which Socialist Ingrid Fiskaa — who said in April 2008 that she sometimes wished the United Nations would send “precision-guided missiles against selected Israeli targets” — so proudly serves as a state secretary.

During the Nazi occupation of Norway, nearly all Jews were either deported to death camps or fled to Sweden and beyond. Today, Norway is effectively under the occupation of anti-Semitic leftists and radical Muslims, and appears willing to help enable the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel.

For example, one of Norway’s leading intellectuals, Jostein Gaarder, published an op-ed article in a major Norwegian daily newspaper in 2006 arguing against recognizing the state of Israel in its current form and claiming that Judaism is “an archaic national and warlike religion.”

Gaarder equated the Jewish state of Israel’s attempts to defend itself against Islamic terrorists with apartheid and ethnic cleansing:

We no longer recognize the State of Israel. We could not recognize the apartheid regime of South Africa, nor did we recognize the Afghani Taliban regime. Then there were many who did not recognize Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or the Serbs’ ethnic cleansing. We need to get used to the idea: The State of Israel, in its current form, is history.

The State of Israel has raped the recognition of the world and shall have no peace until it lays down its arms.

Norway’s Labor Party lawmaker Anders Mathisen has gone even further and publicly denied the Holocaust. He said that Jews “exaggerated their stories” and “there is no evidence the gas chambers and or mass graves existed.” While the Norwegian political establishment and opinion-maker elite may not have reached that point of lunacy just yet, they do tend to treat Muslims as the victims of Israeli oppression – as if today’s Muslims are filling the shoes of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust and today’s Nazis are the Israelis.

Thorbjørn Jagland, former prime minister of Norway, the president of the Norwegian Parliament, and the head of the Nobel Prize committee that gave President Obama the Nobel Peace Prize, sided with Turkey and condemned Israel for the defensive actions it took last year against the so-called Free Gaza flotilla.

Socialist leader Kristin Halvorsen has been leading the boycott Israel campaign. While serving as Norway’s finance minister, she was amongst the demonstrators at an anti-Israel protest, in which a poster read (translated): “The greatest axis of evil: USA and Israel.” Among the slogans repeatedly shouted at the demonstration was (as translated) “Death to the Jews!”

Halvorsen has recently supported a measure calling for military action against Israel if it decides to act against Hamas in Gaza, based on the reasoning that the world community’s credibility in confronting the Qaddafi regime would be undermined if it does nothing to help Hamas repel Israeli air attacks in Gaza.

Last year, the Norwegian government decided to divest from two Israeli entities working in the West Bank. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund divested from the Israeli company Elbit, because it has worked on the Israeli security fence that keeps out Palestinian suicide bombers. Israel has also been blocked from bidding for Norwegian defense contracts.

The state-owned TV NRK aired the one-sided movie “Tears over Gaza,” photographed by several Palestinian cameramen during and after Israel’s Operation Cast Lead. Its film director Vibeke Løkkeberg had the gall to compare Israel’s defensive military actions in Gaza, which protect Israeli civilians from Hamas bombs, to “the massacres Qaddafi is conducting against Libyan insurgents.”

As explained by Bruce Bawer, an American literary critic, writer and poet who lives in Norway and has criticized European anti-Semitism and radical Islam, in an interview with the Jerusalem Post, contemporary Norwegian anti-Semitism is alive and well in Norway especially amongst “the cultural elite – the academics, intellectuals, writers, journalists, politicians, and technocrats.”

It is such anti-Semitic tripe and moral equivalency that embolden the Muslims living in Norway to legitimize their own anti-Semitic conduct, which Norwegian officials have been tolerating in the name of multiculturalism.

As Bawer explained:

Part of the motivation for this anti-Semitism is the influx into Norway in recent decades of masses of Muslims from Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia and elsewhere. Multiculturalism has taught Norway’s cultural elite to take an uncritical, even obsequious, posture toward every aspect of Muslim culture and belief. When Muslim leaders rant against Israel and the Jews, the reflexive response of the multiculturalist elite is to join them in their rantings. This is called solidarity.

In 2009, when Muslims rioted violently in downtown Oslo to protest Israel’s actions against Hamas, resulting in extensive damage, there were few consequences for those responsible.

Teachers at schools with large shares of Muslims reported that Muslim students often “praise or admire Adolf Hitler for his killing of Jews,” that “Jew-hate is legitimate within vast groups of Muslim students” and that “Muslims laugh or command [teachers] to stop when trying to educate about the Holocaust.”

Norway is repeating its Quisling treachery of the Nazi era, this time in league with a growing radical Muslim population. And once again the Jews are the victims.

Joseph Klein is the author of a recent book entitled Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations and Radical Islam.



Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com

On Cartoons, Propaganda and Foreskins

Sometimes even paranoids have enemies.

Being Jewish, a supporter of Israel and conservative, I tend to ask myself frequently whether sometimes I am not being overly zealous in seeing anti-Semitism in what perhaps is valid criticism. Then I read something like this entry in Daniel Hannan’s blog and end up confirming that my fears are not groundless. 
The entry in question deals with a cartoon published in Brussels by the European Union. Ah, leave it to bureaucrats to find ways of spending your money. 

The cartoons are designed to reach parents through their children. And so we have cartoons such as “The Raspberry Ice Cream War, which tells the tale of a group of intrepid youngsters who travel back in time to a barbarous age where there are still sovereign states, and teach the inhabitants to scrap their borders. Older ones prefer Troubled Waters, a Tintin-style cartoon strip, whose heroine is a foxy MEP. Among the lines of dialogue are: “You can laugh! Wait until you’ve seen my amendments to the Commission proposal!” and, “I seem to spend my whole life on the train between Brussels and Strasbourg, but I’d hate to have to choose between mussels and chips and Strasbourg onion tart!”

But the cartoon that caught Hannan’s eye was the one on the super villain D. Vider. Look at the picture above, which shows the baddie, Dr D Vider, surrounded by his henchmen. “What, I wonder, asks Hannan, prompted the creators to give him a hooked nose and a goatee beard, like some anti-Semitic caricature from the Völkischer Beobachter? Am I being over-sensitive? Well, read the way he is described by the authors”:

Ruthless speculator, curator and collector of ancient curiosities, DAVID VIDERIUS is a former financier. He is a multi-millionaire, used to making money no matter if it might involve the suffering of others. Banned and ostracized from the financial world for unprofessional conduct he managed to escape arrest despite his involvement in financial scandal. Having disappeared for many years, he reappeared as DR D VIDER. He manages a holding company, DIVIDEX, controlling hundreds of different businesses across Europe and beyond...

Imagine however if this cartoon had been created by some reactionaries rather than the politically correct bureaucrat in Brussels. A villain named David with a hooked nose who made his money as a speculator.

What is the EU’s agenda here? Well, a few years ago, Daniel Hannan stumbled across an internal Commission report that concluded as follows: “Children can perform a messenger function in conveying the message to the home environment. Young people will often in practice act as go-betweens with the older generations, helping them embrace the euro.”

The notion that the government should get at parents through their children is a characteristic of authoritarian states, not liberal democracies. One thinks of Orwell’s fictional youth organization, the Spies; or of the revolting Pavel Morozov, who became a hero of the Soviet Union when he was murdered after shopping his father for hoarding grain. (Having decreed a state funeral for the boy, Stalin privately remarked: “He was a rotten little shit, ratting on his parents like that.”)

Not that the EU’s kiddieprop seems to be having much effect: in every country, younger voters are more Eurosceptic than their elders. Perhaps no amount of publicity can convince people of a bad idea.

***

In the meantime, another cartoon has emerged, with a new hero: Foreskin Man. 

The San Diego-based group that is laboring to get circumcision banned in San Francisco has perpetrated a comic book. In it, a superhero named Foreskin Man saves a baby boy from being circumcised by the evil Monster Mohel, a vicious-looking Orthodox Jewish rabbi who could have been drawn by an acolyte of Joseph Goebbels.

Indeed, Foreskin Man has a distinctly Hitlerian “Aryan” look to him.

It’s crystal clear from the dialogue that the perpetrator of this literary opus intends to depict the Judaic religious view of circumcision as evil and repulsive. The “comic” hauls out every theme of Jew hatred in the arsenal.

Note that these circumcision-haters could have addressed the issue as one of science, medicine, personal autonomy, or even just a social issue on which reasonable people can disagree.

But they didn’t. The case they’re making is that circumcision is evil because Jews do it as a religious observance.

The Anti-Defamation League is right. The attempt to ban circumcision in San Francisco is driven by anti-Semitism. The case could have been made without depicting a scary rabbi named Monster Mohel slavering over a naked infant – but it wasn’t.

Actually, this group is not insane. It’s evil.


Click Here For More on Foreskin Man

FOUAD AJAMI : The U.N. Can’t Deliver a Palestinian State – WSJ.com

It had been quite a scramble, the prelude to the vote on Nov. 29, 1947, on the question of the partition of Palestine. The United Nations itself was only two years old and had just 56 member states; the Cold War was gathering force, and no one was exactly sure how the two pre-eminent powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, would vote. The Arab and Muslim states were of course unalterably opposed, for partition was a warrant for a Jewish state.

In the end, the vote broke for partition, the U.S. backed the resolution, and two days later the Soviet Union followed suit. It was a close call: 10 states had abstained, 13 had voted against, 33 were in favor, only two votes over the required two-thirds majority.

Now, some six decades later, the Palestinians are calling for a vote in the next session of the General Assembly, in September, to ratify a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood. In part, this is an appropriation by the Palestinians of the narrative of Zionism. The vote in 1947 was viewed as Israel’s basic title to independence and statehood. The Palestinians and the Arab powers had rejected partition and chosen the path of war. Their choice was to prove calamitous.

By the time the guns had fallen silent, the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, had held its ground against the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq. Its forces stood on the shores of the Red Sea in the south, and at the foot of the Golan Heights in the north. Palestinian society had collapsed under the pressure of war. The elites had made their way to neighboring lands. Rural communities had been left atomized and leaderless. The cities had fought, and fallen, alone.

Palestine had become a great Arab shame. Few Arabs were willing to tell the story truthfully, to face its harsh verdict. Henceforth the Palestinians would live on a vague idea of restoration and return. No leader had the courage to tell the refugees who had left Acre and Jaffa and Haifa that they could not recover the homes and orchards of their imagination.

Some had taken the keys to their houses with them to Syria and Lebanon and across the river to Jordan. They were no more likely to find political satisfaction than the Jews who had been banished from Baghdad and Beirut and Cairo, and Casablanca and Fez, but the idea of return, enshrined into a “right of return,” would persist. (Wadi Abu Jamil, the Jewish quarter of the Beirut of my boyhood, is now a Hezbollah stronghold, and no narrative exalts or recalls that old presence.)

History hadn’t stood still. The world was remade. In 1947-48, when the Zionists had secured their statehood, empires were coming apart, borders were fluid, the international system of states as we know it quite new. India and Pakistan had emerged as independent, hostile states out of the partition of the subcontinent in 1947, and Israel had secured its place in the order of nations a year later. Many of the Arab states were still in their infancy.

But the world is a vastly different place today. The odds might favor the Palestinians in the General Assembly, but any victory would be hollow.

The Palestinians have misread what transpired at the General Assembly in 1947. True, the cause of Jewish statehood had been served by the vote on partition, but the Zionist project had already prevailed on the ground. Jewish statehood was a fait accompli perhaps a decade before that vote. All the ingredients had been secured by Labor Zionism. There was a military formation powerful enough to defeat the Arab armies, there were political institutions in place, and there were gifted leaders, David Ben-Gurion pre-eminent among them, who knew what can be had in the world of nations.
The vote at the General Assembly was of immense help, but it wasn’t the decisive factor in the founding of the Jewish state. The hard work had been done in the three decades between the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the vote on partition. Realism had guided the Zionist project. We will take a state even if it is the size of a tablecloth, said Chaim Weizmann, one of the founding fathers of the Zionist endeavor.

Sadly, the Palestinian national movement has known a different kind of leadership, unique in its mix of maximalism and sense of entitlement, in its refusal to accept what can and can’t be had in the world of nations. Leadership is often about luck, the kind of individuals a people’s history brings forth. It was the distinct misfortune of the Palestinians that when it truly mattered, and for nearly four decades, they were led by a juggler, Yasser Arafat, a man fated to waste his people’s chances.

Arafat was neither a Ben-Gurion leading his people to statehood, nor an Anwar Sadat accepting the logic of peace and compromise. He had been an enemy of Israel, but Israel had reached an accord with him in 1993, made room for him, and for a regime of his choice in Gaza. He had warred against the United States, but American diplomacy had fallen under his spell, and the years of the Clinton presidency were devoted to the delusion that the man could summon the courage to accept a practical peace.

But Arafat would do nothing of the kind. Until his death in 2004, he refrained from telling the Palestinians the harsh truths they needed to hear about the urgency of practicality and compromise. Instead, he held out the illusion that the Palestinians can have it all, from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean. His real constituents were in the refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria and Jordan, and among the Palestinians in Kuwait. So he peddled the dream that history’s verdict could be overturned, that the “right of return” was theirs.

There was hope that the Arafat legacy would go with him to the grave.  The new Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas had been a lieutenant of Arafat’s, but there were hints of a break with the Arafat legacy. The alliance between Fatah and Hamas that Mr. Abbas has opted for put these hopes to rest. And the illusion that the U.N. can break the stalemate in the Holy Land is vintage Arafat. It was Arafat who turned up at the General Assembly in 1974 with a holster on his hip, and who proclaimed that he had come bearing a freedom fighter’s gun and an olive branch, and that it was up to the U.N. not to let the olive branch fall from his hand.

For the Palestinians there can be no escape from negotiations with Israel. The other Arabs shall not redeem Palestinian rights. They have their own burdens to bear. In this Arab Spring, this season of popular uprisings, little has been said in Tunis and Cairo and Damascus and Sanaa about Palestine.
The General Assembly may, in September, vote to ratify a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood. But true Palestinian statehood requires convincing a decisive Israeli majority that statehood is a herald for normalcy in that contested land, for Arabs and Jews alike.

This article was originally published in the Wall Street Journal on June 1, 2011

Have Christians Gone Overboard in Outreach to Muslims?

Posted In Islamist Watch

In the Muslim world, Islamists increasingly target Christians for persecution; in the Western world, Christians increasingly target Muslims for outreach. Extending a hand to followers of Islam can be praiseworthy, but the lengths to which some Christians have gone may come as a shock. Consider a few recent cases on the congregational level:

• Muslims using churches for prayer. Last year, Muslims awaiting construction of their mosque accepted a neighborly offer to pray at Heartsong Church in Cordova, Tennessee. An analogous arrangement exists at Aldersgate United Methodist Church in Alexandria, Virginia. (Interestingly, each of the two Islamic communities is stained by radicalism: the first via Yasir Qadhi and the second via ICNA.) Opposition has grown rapidly, with Anglican priest Mark Durie contending that Muslim worship has "no place in a Christian church" due to Islam's differing view of Jesus and prayers that chide Christianity.
• Christians distributing Korans. In response to Christian pastor Terry Jones burning the Islamic holy book on March 20, leaders of Salt Lake City's Wasatch Presbyterian Church pooled their money to purchase Korans, which later were passed out for free at an area store. This was done to help "push back against the lunatic fringe," said Russell Fericks of the church's governing board. "We're not afraid of the truth," he added.
• Joint Christian-Muslim worship. On May 22, St. John's Episcopal Church in Montclair, New Jersey, held an interfaith service that reportedly began with the Muslim call to prayer and incorporated readings from the Koran — even during Communion. "I've grown concerned about the demonization of Muslims. I want Montclair to develop an understanding of the religion," Rev. Andrew Butler explained.
• Half church, half mosque. A project in the Stockholm suburbs aims to graft a mosque onto an existing church. Bishop Bengt Wadensjö of the Church of Sweden, which owns the property, recently described this as a way to "demonstrate how people can get along together regardless of culture, language, or faith." The plan is to renovate the current facility, expand space rented by Catholics, sell land to a Muslim group, build an adjacent mosque, and link the structures through a "communal foyer" to create "God's House."

In addition, peculiar examples of individual Christian leaders reaching out to Muslims by mixing their faith with Islam include a Belgian Catholic bishop urging everyone to call God "Allah" in 2007, an American emergent church pastor joining the Ramadan fast in 2009, and an Episcopal minister in Missouri practicing aspects of Islam during this year's Lent.

There is nothing wrong with outreach to Muslims. However, when pursued in ways that come off as highly deferential and spiritually confused, it can embolden Islamists by suggesting that Christians are uncertain and weak. Encouraging tolerance of Muslims is laudable, but the unreciprocated trend of Christians effectively promoting Islam is troubling.