Mark Steyn is the Canadian born, British educated author who in 2006 published a book that I suggested a You Tube phenomenon was taken from. Steyn now lives in the USA because his hate filled writing is no longer welcome in Canada. Steyn has found an audience here and that should be troubling.
A few days ago I posted a blog entitled “Spreading Fear about the faith of Islam- who’s responsible” which I described as having the potentially to incite hatred for Muslims. I made a comment related to the video about Mark Steyn on Twitter that caught the interest of tweeter @jason_hart. Jason is a devoted supporter of all things conservative, Republican and of Chuck Devore for Senator in the 2010 CA race against Barbara Boxer. I didn’t realize it then but Jason is also a big Mark Steyn supporter (Tweet May 13 “Mark Steyn at his best http://ow.ly/6C8G”). In my comment I suggested that Steyn was inciting hatred for Muslims and had been quoted as referring to President Obama as a Muslim on more than one occaision. Jason asked me to conjure up “one- only one” quote from Steyn that could be described as racist.
@BaltimoreTom got into the debate on Twitter and Jason replied to Tom
@BaltimoreTom @dmooney9 I was pointing out that 1) Obama is not a muslim but sympathizes via dad & 2) comments were in 2007 b4 hubub
@dmooney His book, “America Alone” is a must read. Very little that people can refute there.
The “hubub” Jason refers to occurred in 2007 after the publication of the book that put Steyn on every conservatives faves five list.
For those who have not read Steyns book “America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It ” let me spare you the Amazon $11.53 paperback cost and the waste of time. Here is his own summary from a book excerpt that appeared in the Oct 20 2006 issue of Macleans Magazine in Canada.
“The Muslim world has youth, numbers and global ambitions. The West is growing old and enfeebled, and lacks the will to rebuff those who would supplant it. It’s the end of the world as we’ve known it.”
While Jason thinks there is little to refute in what the book claims as fact, there is much to question in terms of the conclusion to which it leads the reader. Steyn, having had to deal with Canadian court and the Canadian Human Rights Commission that deals with racism and race inspired hate in Canada, is an expert at playing with words, getting close but not specifically saying anything directly racist.
Anyone who reads Steyn’s book and follows it to its intended conclusion will decide that most Muslims are bad people and that American needs to change its demographic direction in terms of Muslim immigration, that Islam is basically a religion that has been co-opted by radicals and so is the enemy religion to American basic religious beliefs and is not to be tolerated in the USA. And finally, that Muslim young people, as demonstrated frequently in European cities, are not to be trusted and are bent on creating an Islamic state in America.
Here are some of Steyn’s claims, you draw the conclusions
“Islam…has serious global ambitions, and it forms the primal, core identity of most of its adherents — in the Middle East, South Asia and elsewhere”
“In the old days, the white man settled the Indian territory. Now the followers of the badland’s radical imams settle the metropolis….In the old days, the Injuns had bows and arrows and the cavalry had rifles. In today’s Indian territory, countries that can’t feed their own people have nuclear weapons.”
“On the Continent and elsewhere in the West, native populations are aging and fading and being supplanted remorselessly by a young Muslim demographic.”
“Of course, not all Muslims support terrorists — though enough of them share their basic objectives (the wish to live under Islamic law in Europe and North America) to function wittingly or otherwise as the “good cop” end of an Islamic good cop/bad cop routine.”
There was outrage in Canada over Macleans’ printing of the book excerpt. A court case ensued and a letter followed from Jennifer Lynch, Q.C., chief commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, whose department investigated Mr. Steyn. In her letter she wrote that Steyn “provides no substantiation for these claims”. She concluded
“Steyn would have us believe that words, however hateful, should be given free rein. History has shown us that hateful words sometimes lead to hurtful actions that undermine freedom and have led to unspeakable crimes. That is why Canada and most other democracies have enacted legislation to place reasonable limits on the expression of hatred.”
Lynch herself became the object of criticism from one Canadian government official and some media who accused her department of being too vigilant in attacking “hate crimes”.
This lead The National Review to comment “So an attack on Steyn in Canada is an attack on America”.
So you get the idea? Due to his writing style and anti-Islamic content, Steyn has become a favorite on the Hewitt Show and appears on and sometimes substitutes for Rush Limbaugh.
Michelle Malkin wrote of Steyn’s book that it is “high velocity assault…. over the threat of Islamic imperialism”
And Hugh Hewitt wrote “Mark Steyn is the world’s funniest and wittiest observer of Islamic fascism”.
In January 2007 Steyn referring to then candidate Obama said
“He’s young, gifted and black, and white, and Hawaiian, and Kansan, and charismatic, and Congregationalist, and Muslim….He was raised in an Indonesian madrassah by radical imams”
Referring to the left he says
“it seemed bizarre to find the progressive left making common cause with radical Islam. One half of the alliance profess to be pro-gay, pro-feminist secularists; the other
half are homophobic, misogynist theocrats”.
Steyn now lives in the USA but continues to try to knock the chip off his shoulder left there when Canada didnt make him feel welcome anymore. Many of his recent website blogs and speeches reference Canada and its intolerance for his style of writing.
Its interesting to see what Amazon says other people who bought Steyns book also bought-
“Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto by Mark R. Levin”
“While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within” and
“The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media’s Favorite Candidate “.
I am not alone in my opinion that Steyn’s writings incite fear and hatred of Muslims. His popularity among conservatives like Malkin, Hewitt, Pat Buchanan and Limbaugh place him in a category of people who have shown intolerance for other cultures. His claim that Obama is Muslim means he is prepared to lie outright to those willing to believe anything he says.
Canada gave him the cold shoulder, America should send him back there before his twisted ideas about Muslims and the Islamic faith cause more harm then they might have already.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=06ea756a-5c70-47a4-bb12-638062c13c94)
{ 144 comments… read them below or add one }
← Previous Comments
Thanks, Mooney, for keeping the line open. I hope your notify is still working. Sorry for the radio silence, but as I inferred in another of your threads, I too am “busy” — in my case I’ve been dealing with a serious health matter in my family that has consumed my attention.
As the issue is very old now I’ll only raise one further point about your comment #103 above. Perhaps I’ll join you on a few later threads and we can cross swords on related things.
It is just this: aside from the false equivalence you made between nasty verses in the Old Testament (OT) and nasty verses in the Qur’an (thoroughly dissected in my prior comment), I should like to object to this use of old OT quotations as if they somehow characterize Christian doctrine and teaching.
While it is quite true that the OT is part of, as you say, “the Christian Bible”, this is not because the OT provides the basis for the Christian faith. If this were so then every believing Jew would be a Christian.
The OT canon was established by a Jewish council late in the first century AD, after much discussion about what was “in” and what was “out”. In the Jewish, and also the Christian view, God speaks to mankind in what is sometimes referred to as “relational revelation” — that is, through his ongoing interaction with his people. Thus the history and inspired writings of the Israelites from the time of Abraham, are the fundamentals of the Jewish faith.
(In contrast, you should know, the Muslim faith teaches a form of revelation called “tanzil”, which means “sent down”. It is literally the words of god, with no intervention. When we see, say, the poetic, visceral hand of David in the Psalms and the Bold, declarative pronouncements of the prophet Isaiah we have no problem in accepting that each of the many writers has left his own imprint on the text — the human spirit is not regarded as a sterile vessel, but an essential part of the message; it is organic, earthy and real. The histories breath history, the poetry poetry, and honest human emotions are evident throughout. To a muslim, however, it would be sheer blasphemy to suggest that Mohammed has left even an iota of his own imprint upon the Qur’an.)
For the Christian faith, things are a little different. For, as Paul writes, “there is no other foundation than Jesus Christ” (I Cor 3:11). The Christian church is built upon the person and teaching of Jesus, and that of the “apostles” (a term that refers to those who saw the risen christ and have been commissioned by him as messengers of his gospel to the world). Thus we arrived at the NT (which took a couple of centuries of debating over what was a valid inclusion and what was not, which documents could most reliably be attributed to the apostles and so on).
But the “relational revelation” part doesn’t work very well if limited to the NT, because Jesus mission, life and teaching are so integrated into the Jewish story. Indeed, we regard it as the culmination of that story. To tell ONLY the gospel without the two-thousand-year lead-in would be like ripping out the last chapter of a Sherlock Holmes book so we learn that the butler did it, and not bothering with the rest of the story.
And so the Jewish OT was incorporated, wholesale, into the Christian canon. (A slight simplification…) It gives a frame of reference for the NT, but it does not supplant it or take priority. Rather the reverse. Consider Jesus’ repeated words “As of OLD it was said … BUT I SAY unto you …”
So just because something, like the command you quoted to avoid idolatry, is in the Old Testament, this does not characterize Christianity, and may at best only provide a useful contrast for it. When a christian reads it we say, “Hmmm, this is how God was dealing with the Jews before the coming of the Messiah”. We look for ways in which these precursor elements of our faith are “worked out” in Jesus’ life, teaching, example, and commands, and the teaching of the apostles.
As I pointed out the passage you picked isn’t particularly sinister if read carefully, you could have done much worse. How about the OT commands to stone those caught in adultery? See, for example, Deut. 22:24. Nasty stuff!
So how does the NT deal with this? in John 8:1-11 we see Jesus confronted by the Jewish leaders asking him to pronounce judgement on a woman caught in adultery. Jesus professes to uphold the Jewish law, but they believe that he hasn’t got the guts to do so, and hope to catch him up and expose him as a phony prophet.
You know the story. “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone…woman where are your accusers?…Neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more.”
In the New Testament the “Law” is not written on stones, but on human hearts, breathed into life by the Holy Spirit. Jesus provides the example. The above story, as you know, is fundamental to our culture. We regard it as trite, the stuff of sundayschool, milk for babes. But so it is — we raise our children on this!
Incidentally, there is a similar story in the Islamic canon about a Jewish woman caught in adultery. Mohammed asks the Jews to pronounce judgement by reading from their own law. He observes the Rabbi’s hand over part of the passage…it is the part about stoning. He forces them to read that part of the passage against their will, and then has the woman stoned “according to your own Law!”
Interesting contrast between the two “prophets”, wouldn’t you say?
In Palestine, small children are taught in public schools to hate the Jews with an undying hatred, to desire to become a “shaheed” (suicide bomber) as their highest ambition in life. They memorize Qur’an verses that are so holy, down to the letter, their meaning must not be tampered with or interpreted. No progression of revelation here, the Qur’an is valid for all times! “Slay the unbelievers wherever you find them!”; “The Jews are those who have earned Allah’s wrath, and the Christians are those who have gone astray…”; “Strike terror into the hearts of your enemy and the enemy of Allah!” etc.
In publicly funded Islamic schools throughout North America and Europe small, impressionable Muslim babes are taught that one of the most important aspects of the good muslim life, most pleasing to Allah, is called “al Wala’ wal Bara’”, which is loosely translated “the love and the hate”. Read about it in detail at an islamic site here. Briefly, it is a strict formulation that muslims may BEHAVE in loving, collegial ways toward unbelievers but must inwardly harbor hatred to them, love everything of Islam and Muslims, and hate everything that is not Islam and non-Muslims.
If you wish to compare Christian teaching to Islamic, then I challenge you to find anything like this in the NT.
Try in the OT too. You will find some time-limited commands to slaughter PARTICULAR people, but nothing about hating people simply because they don’t believe the Jewish faith. Indeed, in the OT there is no dichotomy between “believers” and “unbelievers”. It is an idea foreign to the book. The dichotomy occurs often in the NT, but you won’t find commands about hating the unbelievers. You will find commands to “love your enemies”; creedal formulations like “For God so loved THE WORLD” (i.e., EVERYONE, regardless of faith, race, gender, etc.); “In Christ there is no Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free…”; and “God demonstrates his love for us in this, that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us”.
Naj– You think we may be converting these folks? I don’t see any substantive rebuttals. Maybe they appreciate some truth detectors!
In #23 kevfors wrote: “DMooney, there will come a day when you realize the information that you have been consuming lo these many years has been wholly managed and packaged to keep your opinions about reality conforming to the requirements of certain mass populist ideologies. … And you will wonder how your mind had gotten so clouded and who was responsible. And it will make you angry.”
Hopefully. But either way:
“When I say that the Obamanauts are about to enter a world of pain, I mean that they will eventually know the dark side of the wave of fantasy upon which they are riding. ..
“…it has been estimated that fewer than ten percent of the American public are reliably in Piaget’s highest cognitive developmental stage of formal operations thinking. And even then, one cannot escape the cosmic law of bs in –> bs out. ..”
Fewer than 10% of the American puplic are reliably in the Formal operational stage:
The formal operational period is the fourth and final of the periods of cognitive development in Piaget’s theory. This stage, which follows the Concrete Operational stage, commences at around 12 years of age (puberty) and continues into adulthood. It is characterized by acquisition of the ability to think abstractly, reason logically and draw conclusions from the information available. During this stage the young adult is able to understand such things as love, “shades of gray”, logical proofs, and values.
…The important point is that the fantasy precedes the reality, and will look for conditions in external reality to support it, identical to the manner in which the paranoid mind operates. According to deMause, the state of the group fantasy is what national opinion polls actually capture. That is, they take a snapshot of the “mood of the country,” which mostly consists of “gut feelings” that have varying degrees of connection to actual conditions, and more to do with the shifting nature of the group fantasy.
Remember, the bulk of the population is not thinking logically, so it doesn’t matter how many cognitively mature individuals there are at the margins of a poll. That the economic downturn was largely caused by Democrat regulation (the Community Reinvestment Act), that we have won the war in Iraq, and that President Bush kept us safe for seven years, are inconsequential. In contrast, FDR was able to sustain a unifying group fantasy despite economic polices that aggravated and extended the Great Depression for years.
Likewise, job one for Obama will be to forge and sustain a unifying fantasy, not to deal with reality. This is one of the reasons the Democrats will be unable to let go of President Bush, because they desperately need him as a “poison container” in order to keep the toxins out of Obama (more on which below).
To continue reading, click “show original post” HERE
I have never understood the propensity for the left (liberals) to defend and literally promote the rights of Islam over and above other religions (Christianity, I am not a Christian) and cultural values of Western Society. Islam is by far the most bigoted, demeaning, and intolerant religion ever seen in modern times. Yet, the left embraces this bazaar and intolerant religion as if it is no threat and deserves a place in our society. It’s amazing—Almost every concept Liberalism (I guess not Progressivism), supports Islam not only condemns the concept but would kill the perpetrator, i.e. homosexuality. How do Liberals justify this.
← Previous Comments