Beware the Unteachable

One of the reasons that participation on a message board like Steve Ray's can be very frustrating is that some of the participants are simply unteachable. An anti-Catholic fundamentalist Protestant may spout some slanderous error about Catholic faith, or practice, or history. He is then corrected. And corrected. And corrected. He may go on to some other topic. And another. And yet another. Eventually, though, he will make his way back to the issue on which he had been repeatedly corrected, as if the episode had never occurred at all.

The Weekly Standard published the other day a review of an upcoming book by Daniel Goldhagen, A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair. The reviewer spends some time pointing out the numerous factual errors in the book. And he notes that Goldhagen has already been corrected about most of them, to no avail:

.... Goldhagen took a first swipe at this material in an unbearably long essay in the New Republic earlier this year, and Ronald Rychlak (author of "Hitler, the War and the Pope") wrote an almost equally long indictment of Goldhagen's allegations in the June/July issue of First Things. As near as I can tell, the only one of the errors Rychlak pointed out that Goldhagen has corrected is his identification of the Danish king as Christian II instead of Christian X.

As I say, no one is going to have trouble finding Goldhagen's mistakes. And that's exactly the problem. By writing such an error-filled, anti-Catholic diatribe as "A Moral Reckoning," Goldhagen makes what used to be the extreme of public discourse look like middle ground -- the middle ground that, on any historical question, most of diffident, well-mannered America wants to inhabit.

(Thanks Dale.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 10/25/02 02:17:21 PM
Categorized as Religious.

The Forty Martyrs of England and Wales

Today, the Roman Martyrology remembers the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, which I did not know until today. See The Tyburn Tree, and English Confessors and Martyrs, and Volume II of History of the Catholic Church: From the Renaissance to the French Revolution @ ELCore.Net.

(Thanks Amy.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 10/25/02 12:19:48 PM
Categorized as Religious.

Lee Malvo is Not African American!

He's Jamaican, you numbskulls!

Back when Bernie Goldberg's book Bias was coming out, I read somewhere a complaint by a reporter whose editor would not publish an article as he had written it, but required that one individual in the article be called "African American" instead of "black". The reporter balked. You see, the individual was from... Jamaica. The article, however, was published calling him "African American".

That's the kind of story you can hardly believe, yet you know it has to be true.

Lee Malvo, "ward" of John Allen Muhammed, is a Jamaican national in this country illegally. Jamaican. Jamaican! Jamaican!

That does not, however, keep The Washington Post today — in what is otherwise a very good article — from calling Malvo... "African American":

.... Dietl said in an interview yesterday that he "never in a million years" would have guessed that the two people arrested would turn out to be African American. But he made no apologies, saying instead, "I feel like I was part of the case, because I was on TV so much. I wanted people to feel that they could be a detective and that they could be the one who captures these parasites." ....

AAAaaaaarrrrgggghhhhh!!!!!!!!

Update: I had thought Malvo's first name is James, but I have also seen him called John Lee Malvo. So, I have changed the references to Lee Malvo. Also, I have seen John Allen's current last name spelled various ways, and I don't know which is correct.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 10/25/02 12:06:04 PM
Categorized as Media.

Mainstream TV's Politically Correct Bias

"Snipers an 'Army Veteran' & 'Jamaican Teenager'"

Here's some documentation from MRC about how mainstream TV news programs were far more vague and ambiguous than known facts warrant last night when reporting on the arrest of the two suspects in the Beltway Sniper case:

The two suspects arrested as the Washington, DC area snipers were a Muslim tied to the Nation of Islam and an illegal alien juvenile, but that’s not how the networks on Thursday night described the two suspected of terrorism.

Instead, the networks either avoided offering a description of either man or labeled John Allen Mohammad a “Gulf War veteran” and only implied that his sidekick, John Lee Malvo, was not a U.S. citizen by calling him “a Jamaican,” a “Jamaica native” or referred to how he’s “from Jamaica.” ....

What I want to know is this: why do they bother to filter reality like this? We have round-the-clock cable news networks that give all the facts as they get them (and some before they really know they're facts). Newspapers from all around the country are available on the Internet, and they too tend to give a more complete account of what's going on. Why do Dan and Tom and Peter even bother to try to focus everything through their very narrow lenses? And why don't they stop to think that doing so is what has been causing their ratings to plummet over the past years?

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 10/25/02 11:40:07 AM
Categorized as Media.

Bat Ye'or on Jihad and Dhimmitude

A couple of blogs yesterday at The Corner by Rod Dreher.

Dhimmitude in America:

I went to hear historian Bat Ye'or speak today. She's on a short tour of the U.S., speaking about jihad and dhimmitude, which is the oppressive, second-class state under which Jews and Christians conquered by Islamic forces are forced to live. Bat Ye'or, who has been addressing groups on American college campuses, said she was so stunned by what she'd observed at universities that she decided to alter her remarks. "We are facing today a jihad against America," she said, because "America is a fortress of Judeo-Christian values, which Europe is no more." The jihadis intend to Islamize the West, but they are not only doing it by violent means. She said that they are doing so by splitting America from Europe, and by using multiculturalism and Western notions of tolerance to immobilize resistance to its demands. In Bat Ye'or's view, universities and naive Jewish and Christian religious leaders are carrying water for Islamists, as is the political Left ("The leftists were educated with hate of America and rejection of Judeo-Christian values," she said, and this perversely leads them to view Islamofascism uncritically). "We have to understand the cultural war we're in," Bat Ye'or said. "The war is not only a terrorist war, but a cultural war on our values and on our integrity."

Dhimmitude in America, Part 2:

Bat Ye'or was stunned to see how far the self-dhimmitization of Americans has already progressed, at least on elite American college campuses. Speaking at Georgetown the other day, she said about three-quarters of the students who turned up to hear her speech were Muslims, and they responded abusively. All they could say was that she was defaming Islam; they couldn't argue the facts with her. But that didn't surprise her. Said her husband, David Littman, who was there to speak on human rights under Islam, "The amazing thing is the local Jewish group [at the university] had become dhimmis. Their leader was absolutely panicked when he saw the shouting of the Muslims. He told me he'd rather I not speak. I refused." Added Bat Ye'or: "There were Jews and Christians present who totally agreed with what we said, but when they came up after to thank us, we said, 'Why did you not speak? Why did you let us stand alone?' ... [Muslims] have such self-assurance." Jews and Christians, alas, do not. And the historian warns this is going to be our downfall. "I spoke to many Americans here, important clergymen, bishops and others. They didn't even know that in the Muslim tradition, Jesus is a prophet who paved the way to Islam. How can they meet this challenge when they don't understand the nature of it?" The historian is proposing a Washington-based institute for the study of dhimmitude, to help fight the cultural war against jihad by simply telling the truth. "We must not transform America into a racist, xenophobic, anti-Islamic society. This is very important," she said. "In Europe, there is so much politically correct censorship that one cannot say anything [negative about Islam] So the criticism of Muslims, when it comes out, is fanatical and violent. People like that because it's the only way they can express their rejection of Islamization. That's why we need this institute: so people can express their resistance through rational argument."

And a follow-up, The Ivory Tower as Minaret:

A theologian friend saw my Bat Ye'or comments and sent the following: "This week, the world religions class I'm attending at [a university divinity school] covered Islam. The kind professor spent the class whitewashing well-known beliefs and practices of Islamic Middle Eastern nations. The students, who are almost all Christian, and none Muslim, mostly shared his view. The students angrily denounced any suggestion that the Koran advocated violence any more than the Bible. Most disturbingly, they and the professor passionately defended Islamic culture's treatment of women. The professor gently explained that the women performed genital mutilation on each other, so it couldn't be about men controlling women. The female students, who thought it so bigoted to question Islamic culture's view of women, probably wouldn't toe that line if it was there own tender labia being hacked off. A couple of us raised critical points that were met with stares and mau-mauing. One student asked why only Islamic cultures were practicing suicide bombing. The professor gave the standard Palestinian rationalization that they're the poor, and don't have rich Israel's weapons. ...The clear dominant value in that class group is that the U.S. is evil. No approved victim group may be criticized, since all sensitive and compassionate people show solidarity with these groups. I think these people are out of touch with reality."

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 10/25/02 08:55:06 AM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.

The Word from Lex Communis

"As Robert Heinlein said 'It doesn't pay for a prophet to be too precise.'"

From Peter Sean Bradley yesterday:

I hope you all remember when the media was profiling the sniper as a white male between 20 and 40 with conservative political leanings who it was that said it would turn out to be an African-American male convert to Islam.

Nah, it wasn't me.

But it wasn't the professionals either.

Which reminds me to add this to my earlier blogs on the topic. Why was the terrorism possibility dismissed so easily, so eagerly, so resolutely? It was implied that, if you thought the Beltway Sniper might be a terrorist, you might as well have yourself locked up as a paranoid schizophrenic. Around Friday and Saturday last week, if memory serves, some folks started to bring up the possibility of terrorism, again, after it had been sloughed off at the beginning. Some quarters ridiculed the idea. Why? Because this isn't how terrorists act.

Thinking this way, we should conclude that no terrorists hijacked planes and used them as missiles to crash into buildings: terrorists hadn't acted that way before, either.

How long is it going to take before we all — even the supposed experts, for heaven's sake! — realize we are living in a different world than the one we lived in before September the Eleventh?

Why do I get this sinking feeling that al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations are sitting back, watching us, and busting a gut laughing at our ridiculous antics? They hijack planes, and we turn ourselves upside down and inside out to prevent more hijackings.

Were I a terrorist, I would be planning something quite different for the future: let the stupid Americans waste their money, and time, and energy trying to prevent what we have no intention of doing again. And let them stand on their heads, close their eyes, and stop their ears while they deny, any way they can, that a kind of serial killing they have never seen before just might possibly be terrorism: we can use a laugh once in a while.

(See also Jihad@Work: Behind the Moscow-theater attack. Thanks Mark.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 10/25/02 08:26:21 AM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.

Some Good News from Detroit

Well, probably.

Sirman on the Mount has blogged a reply from one of Detroit's Gang of Four, The Rev. Dr. Kenneth Kaucheck Pastor, St. Anastasia, Troy, who says the letter was butchered before publication, that he accepts the Church's teaching, and that Cardinal Maida is not ignoring this matter.

Of course, I am left wondering why any letter was thought to be appropriate in the first place. And it is difficult to see how editing on the part of Freep could have managed to turn an unobjectionable letter into what was actually published. I would like to see the original, before the alleged editing.

(Thanks Mark.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 10/25/02 08:18:56 AM
Categorized as Religious.