"Rev. Canon John L. Peterson, director of its Center for Global Justice and Reconciliation..." -- from this article
The very words "Global Justice" and "Reconciliation" reek of self-righteousness, and reek too of what we have come to realize such words, and the men who employ them approvingly, will always reek of: an attitude of sweet reason that goes beyond reason, a belief that "everyone has a point" and that if only we "listen to one another," "if only we engage in dialogue," "if only this" and "if only that" then all manner of things shall be well. In the mental universe of such people, it is inconceivable that hatred could be embraced, hatred could be taught, hatred could be sacred, and that there can be no compromise with those who uncompromisingly divide the world between Them and Us.
There was no negotiation, no treaty, no forum to which Hitler or more likely Goebbels could have been invited, which would have meant a thing. It would only have offered yet one more way for the terminally naive to believe that somehow it was all based on a misunderstanding, or still worse, of the wicked. (Wicked: do such words still come up, not in the Biblical quotes, but in the their own words, the words of these Canons to the left and so seldom to the right of us?) All of these people refuse to make distinctions based on such silly ideas as Good and Evil.
"Global Justice" means, of course, that wherever there is economic backwardness then there must be a reason. The reason must always be sought in the advanced, wealthy West. (Yet some of us in that world are not wealthy at all. We are far less wealthy than, say, Canon John L. Peterson, whose cathedral for the busy rich and influential fittingly boasts gargoyles with briefcases.) The reason is never found or even sought in, for example, the inshallah-fatalism of Islam that explains, like nothing else does, the failure of Muslims to create wealthy societies, despite the fact that so many of them (and why don't they share that loot with other Muslims?) have been the recipients of the greatest unearned transfer of wealth in human history, some ten trillion dollars since 1973. That won't be part of any hint of "Social Justice" from Canon John L. Peterson.
And "Reconciliation" -- here we go again: the "Fellowship of Reconciliation," and all the rest, and the seizure of official Quaker organizations by the professional anti-Israel brigade, with Joe Gerson's name leading all the rest. There is so much of this, so much that makes no sense in a world where some people rant like Azzam Tamimi or Ahmadinejad (whose regime has enjoyed killing all kinds of people, including nice Iranian intellectuals, such as that elderly couple who bravely continued their opposition, and for their pains were both decapitated, husband and wife, and their heads left on either side of what passed for a mantelpiece in their house).
What is it about the atmosphere at the National Cathedral? Instead of being a place of common sense and common decency, ever since Dean Francis B Sayre first started expressing his support for those conducting the Lesser Jihad against Israel more than 30 years ago (in one speech describing Jerusalem as "the capital of the religion of the Arabs" which must have startled the Guardians of the Two Holy Places, and at various times equating the Israeli victims of terrorism with Arab terrorists or those who supported them), it has been a place of -- well, a place like so many soft-headed places where the clergymen themselves have lost their faith, and replaced it, so often, by becoming Defenders of another Faith -- the faith of "everyone is the same" and "why can't we get along," the faith of the Church of Diversity and Tolerance, or even more to the point, Defenders of the Faith with that Faith being not Christianity but Islam. So it is not surprising to discover Canon John L. Peterson treating Khatami as a respectable interlocutor, as if some kind of useful "dialogue" could conceivably ensue, and not merely a boost to Iranian prestige, and repetition, in a softer vein, of the same sentiments that Ahmadinejad expresses every day. One cannot help wondering: if such people had been around in the 1930s, would they have invited, if not a big-shot Nazi, then at least Harvard-educated Putzi Hanfstaengl, the one sent over to convince the American ruling class that Hitler and the Nazis were their sort, or perhaps Fritz Kuhn of the Bund (no, he would have been too crude)?
Give us that old-time religion. Give us Holy Living and Holy Dying. Give us Magnalia Christi Americana. Give us Donne in St. Paul's. Give us anything, but not this etiolated Christianity that would spend some of whatever moral capital it may still possess or claim to possess on offering a forum for those who would not, for one minute, ever permit such tolerance for non-Muslims. Nor, furthermore, would he permit any works of art -- including those gargoyles with briefcases -- or of science, or the freedom to choose various means of artistic expression, or to engage in the free and skeptical inquiry that make science possible and which form much of our civilizational legacy. That legacy, one has reason to suspect, is one which Canon John L. Peterson has not carefully considered, is insufficiently grateful for. He will not allow himself to consider the proposition that just possibly Khatami, his putative guest, has no interest in that legacy either. He will not consider the spread throughout the Western world and elsewhere of the belief-system (not "religion") of which Khatami’s colleague and successor Ahmadinejad is the fanatical embodiment, Islam, and what that spread will mean for that art, that science, that essential mental freedom.
Long ago Peter De Vries wrote a funny book, "The Mackerel Plaza," about a thoroughly-modern minister, the kind who combines Updikeian adulterous liaisons with a non-belief in God. This book was written long before the Are-You-Running-With-Me-Jesus with-it boys, the harvey-coxes of the age, came on the scene, the ones who would prefer that they not be embarrassed by too much talk about God.
Well, here we are. Hold the God. Hold the Christianity. Hold the defense of Christians. Hold the defense of the Holy Land from Muslims who, were they to gain control, would certainly kill or expel every last Jewish resident, and probably the Christians as well. Skip it. Give us "Social Justice." Give us "Reconciliation." Give us the man known to have murdered other Iranians not quite as fanatical as he -- the smiling and sinister Khatami, once official head and splendid exemplar of that hideous regime, the Islamic Republic of Iran.
I really like the idea of the Catholic Church pushing for a series of religious debates throughout the world; in the name of "Global Justice" and "Reconciliation", of course. I’ll bet that the average layman on the ‘Western Street’ has no idea that the discussion of alternate religions in Islamic countries is punishable by death.
[5.33] The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His apostle and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter they shall have a grievous chastisement
It would be enlightening (and entertaining) to watch the other side refuse to agree to an exchange of ideas. The recent web-site problems make it evident that somebody’s getting pretty hot and bothered by the fact that even this forum exists.
It sickens to know that churchmen have become so softheaded as to invite masters of taqiyya and kitman into our houses of worship. Unfortunately this practice is happening all over the Western world ... and European churches, now empty of worshipers, are becoming squat places for homeless, wandering Muslims that deface the artwork... an outrage!
There's a Template out there, no longer a Temple.
At some point the West will achieve "understanding" all right. And then, all will look back on the outspoken, PC-inflicted of this age and shake their heads in disappointment and dispair - hindsight being 20/20.
There are only three questions:
When will the West reject the PC Gospels?
How much Western blood will have been spilt by then?
Will the West still be in a position to defend itself?
We are our own worst enemy; Islam is merely a close second. Islam didn't start attacking us on our own soil until we started hating ourselves and announcing to the world that we considered ourselves unworthy of self defense - the 1960s.
So in a sense, the Leftist, PC-devout, suicidal peaceniks are correct: It is all our fault; we have been "asking for it".
Here is one thing that has changed. Muslims may have made massive slaughter at times in the past, but there seems also to have been a wish to maintain subject populations to provide skills they were short of and to pay taxes. This is why the Ottomans wanted Sephardic Jews to arrive and settle.
Not this time round one senses. Not when Muslim spokesmen are openly speaking of the demographic weapon in television interviews, knowing the infidel can be told about the weapons that will be, that are being, used against him and that he is, like Canon Peterson, so tied up in his attitudes and his self-importance that he will do nothing to counter them.
On the one side, perfected scientific technologies of contraception and abortion; on the other, deliberate over-breeding. I guess they'd better just hope the Russians or the Chinese don't get alarmed and release genetically-targeted plagues on them, if such be possible.
Long ago, a lot of us Christias sickened of the churchmen Hugh describes and their ilk. Unfortunately, we got called "fundamentalist" for our pains, and now are assumed to be bomb-throwers like the Muslims.
Hugh, this is the message that I am sending to the Washington Cathedral (Episcopalian Church in the USA) over the Khatami visit. Other DW'ers are also invited to use similar language:
(message below line of asterisks)
************************
Your Disgrace:
In deepest sorrow, from a fellow Christian:
How can you possibly invite to a place of Christian worship the reprehensible Khatami, on whose savage, bigoted hands is the blood of many Christians, including your fellow Anglicans the Deqhani-Taftis (the assualt on Bishop Hassan and murder of his wife Margaret, the murder of his son Bahrain; the murder of Vicar Aristo Sayeh)? What of present-day Iran, where it is a capital offense to convert from Islam to Christianity?
Does the Episcopalian Church so hate Christianity that it favors the maker of martyrs who denies that God became incarnate; denies that Jesus died on the cross (so what becomes of the eucharist, which is nonsense if Christ did not die sacrificially for our sins?), bears false witness against the Jews by saying that they see Uzair as the Son of God the same way as Christians view Isa-al-Masih, and ignores the ignominious record of the Islamic Republic of Iran towards ALL of its religious minorities?
Has Episcopalianism come to the point where the denial of human sinfulness leads it to condone not only private sexual transgression, but also to politely join with utter hatred against the Gospel of Peace--that message of God taking on our flesh, dying for our sins, and rising in triumph over sins and death; against which Islam has railed for 1400 years; and without which all your eucharistic celebrations are a sham and a lie?
For shame! The noble army of the martyrs looks down on heaven from you and says "tsk! tsk!"
In mourning for what was once a great church,
(signed, Kepha)
**************************8
This guy turns my stomach. I'm sure he views himself as a paragon of enlightenment and virtue. What a schmuck!
As a matter of fact, there was a "peace" outfit operating in the United States during World War 2, called the Peace Now Committee. They believed in negotiating a reasonable peace with Hitler. This was in the middle of the war, in 1943 and 1944, after all the conquests and murders, etc.
On Peace Now, see: New York Times index for 1942 through 1944; John Roy Carlson, The Plotters; Sayers and Kahn, The Plot against the Peace, etc., and this link:
http://www.netanyahu.org/peacmovthena.html
Here's a summary of the article linked to just above:
The peace movement phenomenon has stalked the twentieth century like a macabre specter, typically emerging to call for concessions to aggressors, tyrants, terrorists and mass murderers. The phenomenon was particularly catastrophic before and during the Second World War. Today's peace movement manifestations in Israel had their counterpart predecessors in that era. Then too mothers' anti-war groups were active, as was a group specifically called "The Peace Now Movement" (in the USA). The groups active in Britain, France, and the United States believed that it was possible and desirable to make peace with Hitler. Government officials, journalists, intellectuals ("right" and "left"), politicians ("right" and "left"), and peace movement leaders claimed that complying with Hitler's territorial demands would bring peace, at least for their own countries (although the slogan "territory for peace" was not yet in vogue). Thinking along these lines and corresponding policies helped lead to the Munich Pact (1938) which called for giving Hitler strategically vital parts of Czechoslovakia inhabited mainly by ethnic Germans. Thus the self-determination slogan came into play too.
At the time and since, the Munich concession has been widely recognized as an essential step in Hitler's preparations for making WWII a year later. Hence, the pre-war "peace movements" defeated their own ostensible goal. In France, many pre-war advocates of peace through concessions to Nazi Germany became officials of the pro-Nazi Vichy government and its supporting parties and militias. In America, groups favoring peace with Nazi Germany (including Communists from 1939 to 1941) were active before and after US entry into the war, when information about Nazi mass murders had already received some publicity in the US.
END---originally published in the Israeli bi-monthly Nativ------
By the way, Goebbels came to the League of Nations meeting in Geneva in 1933 and explained that Nazi Germany was all in favor of democracy and liberty and all other Good Things...
On this, check out books by Genevieve Tabouis: I think that this episode is reported in They Called Her Cassandra [Ils l'ont appelee Cassandre, in French and English editions], or in Vingt Ans de Suspense Diplomatique.