Time to Rethink the Defense of Reason

Real Clear Politics | David Warren | Julu 15, 2007

For the great atheist-socialist ideologies of the 20th century worked against the grain of the societies upon which they preyed, and were for that reason easier to throw off. The deep Christian traditions of e.g. Germany, Italy, and Russia were against them from the beginning, and the claims they made on behalf of a new moral order — inverted from the old — struck the European mind as false and finally, uninspiring.

Lee Harris is among the few living writers who do not, as the saying goes, “subtract from the sum total of human knowledge” with each new essay. I’ve puffed him before, and will puff him again, the more shamelessly in the knowledge that his new book, The Suicide of Reason, is probably not even available in Canada.

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Dispatches: Undercover Mosque

Hear what is being preached in the UK mosques. From Channel 4 in the United Kingdom. A Dispatches reporter attends mosques run by organizations whose public faces are presented as moderate and finds preachers condemning integration into British society, condemning democracy and praising the Taliban for killing British soldiers.

http://hotair.com/archives/2007/01/15/video-dispatches-undercover-mosque

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Europe – Thy Name is Cowardice

Matthias Dapfner, Chief Executive of the huge German publisher Axel Springer AG, has written a blistering attack in DIE WELT, Germany ‘s largest daily paper, against the timid reaction of Europe in the face of the Islamic Threat. This is a must read by all Americans.

(Commentary by Mathias Dapfner CEO, Axel Springer, AG)

A few days ago Henry Broder wrote in Welt am Sonntag, ” Europe — your family name is appeasement.” It’s a phrase you can’t get out of your head because it’s so terribly true.

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Jefferson’s Quran

Christopher Hitchens Slate Magazine Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2007

What the founder really thought about Islam.

It was quite witty of Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., to short-circuit the hostility of those who criticized him for taking his oath on the Quran and to ask the Library of Congress for the loan of Thomas Jefferson’s copy of that holy book. But the irony of this, which certainly made his stupid Christian fundamentalist critics look even stupider, ought to be partly at his own expense as well.

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Which One God?

National Review Online Bat Yeor December 4, 2006

Comparing the Muslim and Christian conceptions of God.

With the passing of time, hidden challenges, which for a long time had been growing unnoticed and unaddressed, can suddenly emerge into the full-blown light of current events with a force which seems quite overwhelming. Today the Western world, or Judeo-Christian civilization, shaken by jihadist terror, is being rudely awakened to theological realities blurred for decades. From clashes of civilizations to the jihad that is declaring to the planet its genocidal intentions, rational discourse concerning faith is becoming increasingly fraught.

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Islam gets concessions; infidels get conquered

LA Times Raymond Ibrahim December 5, 2006

What they capture, they keep. When they lose, they complain to the U.N.

IN THE DAYS before Pope Benedict XVI’s visit last Thursday to the Hagia Sophia complex in Istanbul, Muslims and Turks expressed fear, apprehension and rage. “The risk,” according to Turkey’s independent newspaper Vatan, “is that Benedict will send Turkey’s Muslims and much of the Islamic world into paroxysms of fury if there is any perception that the pope is trying to re-appropriate a Christian center that fell to Muslims.” Apparently making the sign of the cross or any other gesture of Christian worship in Hagia Sophia constitutes such a sacrilege.

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Orthodox Priest Beheading and Recent White House Omission

Religious News Service October 13, 2006

Lead to Call for American Protection of Pope and Ecumenical Patriarch Meeting in Turkey

Yesterday’s reported beheading of an Orthodox Priest and a recent White House omission during a meeting between President George W. Bush and Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan increased concerns about protecting the spiritual heads of the two largest Christian denominations, while in Turkey together. Catholicism’s Pope Benedict XVI and Orthodoxy’s Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew will be meeting in Turkey in late November. Turkey is the first Muslim country that Pope Benedict will visit. Until the year 1054, the Pope and Ecumenical Patriarch were presiding Patriarchs of the then-undivided Christian Church, in Rome and Constantinople.

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On 9/11, an inter-faith reality check

Jewish World Review Ira Rifkin September 11, 2006

He polished the prose of Muslim leaders so their views would be marketable. He invited them home to break bread. He even attacked his co-religionists in print for not being more realistic. No more.

In January 1985, the Los Angeles newspaper I worked for assigned me to the religion beat. My first story was a feature on what was then a new phenomenon in Southern California, a fully licensed Muslim parochial school.

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Suicide of the West

National Review Online Melanie Phillips August 18, 2006

When America was attacked on 9/11 by Islamic jihadis, it was said that this was a doomsday wake-up call for the West. Within a short while, however, much of Britain decided that 9/11 was actually America’s fault and that Israel was at the core of the problem.

When Britain was attacked last year on 7/7 by Islamic jihadis, it was said that this was a doomsday wake-up call for the U.K. Within a short time, however, much of the country decided that it was Britain’s own fault on account of “Islamophobia” and the war in Iraq.

Now 25 British Muslims have been arrested for an alleged plot to blast up to ten trans-Atlantic airliners out of the sky. This vast alleged conspiracy, thought to encompass many dozens more plotters from Germany to Pakistan, bears all the monstrous hallmarks of a classic al Qaeda operation. In addition, security sources say that dozens more al Qaeda-linked terrorist cells are at large in the U.K.

From the evidence of one opinion poll this week, the British public has at least woken up to the fact that we are in the throes of a world war. Not so, however, the British establishment and chattering classes. Denial is no longer a river in Egypt but a British pathology.
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