Archive for the 'Religion' Category

From Sharia is Coming!, I outlined or posed a question concerning the nature of those who advocate Sharia law.  You can read it (or re-read it) for yourself, but more important at the moment is what happened afterward.  Steven Metz made the following statement in response (in the comments section): “Should we worry about the creeping influence of the Boy Scout laws? More people follow that in the United States than sharia.”

Note well.  Steven Metz is a professor at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.  And note full well.  He is comparing Boy Scout law with Sharia law.  This Boy Scout law – compared to this sharia law.  It’s all just hysterical rantings, this idea that those who advocate sharia law actually want it to be mandatory.  Next, consider Andrew McCarthy at NRO’s Corner.

Read it and weep — and you will want to weep. In Bangladesh a 14-year-old girl named Hena was raped by a 40-year-old man, Mahbub, who is described in a report as her “relative.” [Thanks to John Hinderaker for highlighting this story.] Apparently — the report is not clear on how this happened — the matter was brought to the attention of the sharia authorities in her village of Shariatpur. You’d think this was a good thing … except, in Islam, rape cannot be proved absent four witnesses — i.e., it’s virtually impossible to establish that what happened happened. That’s a dangerous thing for the victim — deadly dangerous in this instance — because if she has had sexual relations outside marriage but cannot prove she has been raped, she is deemed to have committed a grave sin. In Hena’s case, the sharia authorities ordered that she be given 100 lashes. The young girl never made it through 80; she fell unconscious and died from the whipping.

When I catalogue the horrors of sharia, I frequently hear in response that I am oversimplifying it, that I am relying on incorrect interpretations (oddly said to be inaccurate because they construe Islamic doctrine “too literally”), or that I fail to appreciate the richness and nuances of sharia jurisprudence that have made it possible for moderate Muslims to evolve away from the law’s harshness. Some even claim sharia is not a concrete body of law, just a set of  aspirational guidelines — as if Sakineh Ashtiani, the woman sentenced by an Iranian court to death by stoning, will merely be having advice, rather than rocks, thrown at her.

These criticisms miss the point. I don’t purport to have apodictic knowledge of what the “true” Islam holds — or even to know whether there is a single true Islam (as I’ve said a number of times, I doubt that there is). But that’s irrelevant. It should by now be undeniable that there is an interpretation of sharia that affirms all its atrocious elements, and that this interpretation is not a fringe construction. It is mainstream and backed by very influential scholars who know a hell of a lot more about Islam than we in the West do. That makes it extremely unlikely that this interpretation will be marginalized any time soon. There is no agreed-upon hierarchical authority in Islam that can authoritatively pronounce that various beliefs and practices are heretical.

Stop.  This last point is extremely important.  Now consider a point I made directly to Steven Metz at the Small Wars Journal after he said the following:

Claiming that all of Islam wants to “impose” its faith on others is not “being clear,” its being fantastic and ideological. There is a fringe in Islam who claims to want this (just as there is in Christianity). But claiming this is some inherent element of Islam is just nonsense. I don’t know any nicer way to put it.

And my response (a bit dry, but necessary).

Definitions are indispensable. When you say “impose its faith,” let’s delineate between voting your conscience and promulgating your faith by the power of force or violence. Laws are by their very definition legislated morality. A law against theft is society’s way of saying that it is morally wrong to steal and we won’t tolerate it. Our society has as its basis a system of laws that itself has a basis, just as all nation-states do. I assume that you are not arguing against a vote of conscience and representative government, so it makes sense to jump to the next possibility.

Now to the use of force or violence to promulgate a faith. Again, for the sake of argument, let’s define Christianity nominally as something like the following: adherence to the basic Trinitarian creeds (Nicene and Chalcedonian), with the soteriological skeleton filled out by a later creed such as Trent (for Roman Catholics, maybe plus Vatican I and II, or maybe not) or the Westminster Confession of Faith (for Protestants). The point is that one defining characteristic of Christianity is that it has throughout history been creedal and confessional. We aren’t left to wonder what Christianity teaches. It is all put forward for us is clear terms, with the fundamentals similar in all sects or denominations, and agreed to by the councils in church history.

I am trained in religion / theology at the graduate level. I am extremely well read, and fairly well-travelled in these circles. I know of not a single group of people who meet the nominal definition of Christianity we have given above that either believes or claims to believe that they have the authority or right to promulgate the faith through violence or force. It would be directly contrary to the very nature of Christianity. I could line up the Biblical data for a week, but it would save time simply to trust me on this point. If you feel that you have contrary examples, then I would like to correspond off line to ascertain just who these people are and what exactly they might believe. It would be interesting.

Now. With Islam it just isn’t that clear. Islam is not now and has never been creedal and confessional. It is loosely coupled and very diverse. A search of history for such creeds yields no fruit like the history of Christianity (if it did I would gladly spent much time in study). I am not making a value judgment here, simply an observation. The point of this observation is that when answering the question “What does Islam believe?” we have reversion only to (a) original source literature, and (b) its interpretation and application today (plus the history that can be determined to be accurate).

Here is what we know. We know that there is a large group of Muslims worldwide who do not believe that they have the right to hurt of kill you or your family in order to promulgate their faith, and they are quite happy with this hermeneutic. How large this group is is unknown. It might be the vast majority of all Muslims, or it may not be quite that big. We also know that based on the original source literature (quotes which I can line up a long time for you) there are ideas and quotes that are apparently amenable to a hermeneutic which interprets them to give Muslims the right and duty to promulgate their faith by violence and force. As best as I can tell, both hermeneutics live side by side every day in Muslim countries, with some aspects of each rubbing off on the other, and with this also being a source of controversy and tension in these countries.

So what I have said now is that their are competing hermeneutics within Islam, and that creedalism and confessionalism has not been and is not now a defining characteristic of Islam. These things present problems for us, as you can well imagine. To understand what Islam believes, you cannot refer to a confession. There is none. You can read the source literature and you can listen to its professed adherents as they speak.

The professed adherents who are of the Salafist / Wahhabist stripes, based on indisputable evidence, believe the later hermeneutic discussed above (and can point to numerous citations in the original source literature). While I understand that it is unfashionable to be religious in academia, and fashionable to make moral equivalency arguments comparing all religions to each other, it just isn’t correct. There is no sect or denomination of Christianity comparable to the Salafists or Wahhabists. It doesn’t help your argument to make the comparison.

This goes directly to the hearts of what McCarthy is saying.  Now that you have finished the dry part, let’s get to the basics – and I will make value judgments this time.  I believe that many parts of the Qu’ran are inherently contradictory.  Some Muslims deal with this problem by aligning themselves with the more or less non-violent hermeneutic, and simply ignore the logical problems.  In the words of Professor Alvin Plantinga, their “noetic structure” contains deeply rooted, logically problematic propositions, but they don’t know it (or have simply accepted it).  Others in Islam deal with this problem by choosing the violent hermeneutic, and the fundamental problem is that Islam is not now nor has it ever been a creedal religion (nor does it lend itself to such rigorous systematization).

McCarthy’s point is both well taken and important.  Continuing with his thoughts:

The closest thing Muslims have is the faculty at al-Azhar University in Egypt, and it is a big part of the problem. Whether this fundamentalist interpretation is accepted by only 20 or 30 percent of Muslims — or whether, as I believe, the percentage is higher, perhaps much higher — that still makes it the belief system of almost half a billion people worldwide. That’s not a fringe.

Sharia is not a myth or an invention of overwrought Islamophobes. It is very real. And that some Saudi-endowed Georgetown prof will inevitably come up with some elegant explanation of how the village authorities got it wrong will have absolutely zero influence over the way sharia is understood in Shariatpur. Nor will not make this tormented 14-year-old girl any less dead.

Just so.  Fundamentalist Islam, if it represents 20% – 30%, isn’t a “fringe element.”  This represents a whole lot of people, and the problem isn’t made any better by supposed “scholars” at the U.S. Army War College who think that Boy Scout law and Sharia law represent the same threat.  Dr. Metz is just shouting uneducated nonsense, but he has a willing audience among a very important element in our armed forces.  I am in fact as worried about that as I am either Sharia law or Boy Scout law.

From AJC:

A gun rights group filed a notice Wednesday that it will appeal a federal judge’s dismissal of a suit challenging a state law banning weapons in churches, mosques and synagogues.

John Monroe, the attorney for GeorgiaCarry.org, filed a notice that he plans to ask the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to review U.S. District Judge Ashley Royal’s decision. Royal ruled Monday that a 2010 law that lists places of worship among locations where guns are not allowed did not violate the First Amendment right to freedom of religion or the Second Amendment guarantee of a right to bear arms.

The lawsuit — brought by GeorgiaCarry.org, the organization’s past president and  the minister at the Baptist Tabernacle of Thomaston — challenged the inclusion of places of worship on a list of places where guns are not allowed —  government buildings, courthouses, jails and prisons, state mental hospitals, nuclear power plants, bars without the owner’s permission and polling places.

The suit called the handgun “the quintessential self-defense weapon in the United States.” Former GeorgiaCarry.org president Ed Stone and other worshipers argued that they should be able to arm themselves “for the protection of their families and themselves” without fear of arrest and prosecution on a misdemeanor charge. The Rev. Jonathan Wilkins of the Baptist Tabernacle said he wanted to have a gun for his protection while working in his church office.

The church claimed members’ efforts to practice their faith had been “impermissibly burdened” because they felt they needed to be armed but feared being arrested if they brought their guns to services.

And Stone wrote in a filing that his  “motivation to carry a firearm as a matter of habit derives from one of my Lord’s last recorded statements at the ‘last supper,’ that ‘whoever has no sword is to sell his coat and buy one … I believe that this injunction requires me to obtain, keep and carry a firearm wherever I happen to be.”

Jesus told us that “The things that proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and those defile the man” (Matt 15:18).  Man is no tabula rasa, but guns are what theologians call adiaphorous, or morally neutral.  Christ knew that his people would need protection, and thus he commanded that self preservation come even before clothing.

That’s the key, isn’t it?  It’s something the pro-gun control lobby doesn’t get.  Ownership of firearms has nothing to do with wishing others harm or even in inflicting harm.  It’s always best if a weapon works as a deterrent.  But a man’s life is worth so much that God expects us to do our utmost to preserve and protect it.

Unfortunately, Judge Royal’s decision isn’t based on the idea self preservation.  This church (along with others like it) is now the most vulnerable place around for a perpetrator of a crime to cause carnage and take innocent lives.  The Judge doesn’t intend it, but she has made those parishioner’s time at worship much more dangerous.

Christ said “let him who has no sword sell his robe and buy one” (Luke 22:36).  Judge Royal has now come in between these men and their God-given duty to protect their families.

Prior:

Obama Administration to Press for Gun Control

Second Amendment Challenge

UPDATE: Thanks to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit for the link.

Allawi has apparently made a deal with Maliki to form a unity government in Iraq.  This is good news, good to the extent that Allawi will be involved, and Maliki – good friend of Iran – will apparently be somewhat neutered.  But actions and decisions have consequences.  In fact, some decisions have effects that come calling on our conscience years after they are made.  Supporting Maliki, leaving Sadr alive and the pitiful SOFA under which U.S. troops labor are such decisions.

There is an increase in foreign fighters flowing into Iraq, and it isn’t apparent that the ISF are any match for them.

Despite the fact that the U.S. military insists Iraqi security forces are ready to handle their own security as American troops withdraw from Iraq, one U.S. commander says glaring mistakes were made by Iraqis during a recent battle.

Lt. Col. Bob Molinari of the 25th Infantry Division based in Hawaii says the fight in the eastern Iraqi province of Diyala, now being called the Battle of the Palm Grove, involved hundreds of Iraqi soldiers, U.S. ground troops and American fighter planes dropping two 500-pound bombs — all to combat just a handful of insurgents. And in the end, the enemy got away.

Molinari says the troubles in the palm grove started when local residents reported that insurgents affiliated with al-Qaida had assembled there to build bombs. An Iraqi commander led a unit of Iraqi soldiers in to investigate.

Molinari says Iraqi commanders from a total of seven different units showed up at the scene. Even the minister of defense was there. Molinari says too many commanders meant no coherent plan of action.

Iraqi soldiers were sent into the grove, in single file, each headed by an officer, Molinari says. The insurgent snipers would simply take aim at the officer who was leading each column.

“It was a matter of, as soon as the officers went down, the [Iraqi soldiers] went to ground. They didn’t know what to do next,” Molinari says.

The Iraqi soldiers fled from the palm grove and requested American firepower, Molinari says. So the Americans employed bombs, mortars, grenades and special forces. But the enemy only hid in drainage ditches, waited, then came out again, shooting.

In all, five Iraqis were killed and 13 were wounded. Two Americans were wounded as well. By the second night of battle, the Iraqis had ordered a full retreat from the palm grove.

After the battle, Molinari and the Iraqi commander in Diyala decided to set up a monthlong training session based on what went wrong in the Battle of the Palm Grove. The training is taking place in another palm grove that was once a vacation home for a commander in former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s army.

On the first day of training, Molinari’s men draw diagrams of how soldiers should move in diagonals, not straight lines.

Iraqi Lt. Gen. Tariq Abdul Wahab Jassim acknowledges that Iraqi soldiers made mistakes in the Battle of the Palm Grove and asks what to do differently next time.

Molinari responds that the Iraqis should have sent in just one platoon with one commander. And, he says, the Iraqis should never have given up their ground.

“Once the firefight starts, you do not break contact with the enemy,” Molinari says. “You continue to focus on him, and if you cannot maneuver, other forces come in — until he’s dead.”

After the question-and-answer session, Molinari’s men move into the trees to demonstrate how it’s done. A loudspeaker simulates how a message would be sent to civilians to evacuate the area before the fight begins.

American soldiers fire blanks at a simulated enemy target. The unit’s spokesman, Maj. Gabe Zinni, says this is the kind of training that any American soldier would receive before going into combat.

“These are … fundamentals,” he says. “Absolutely.”

In other words, if the enemy is hiding in a densely wooded area and shooting at you, advance on him and keep firing at him, while more of your men sneak around and attack him from the side or from behind.

In the end, it turns out that only four or five insurgents were fighting in the Battle of the Palm Grove.

And despite the efforts of hundreds of Iraqi soldiers, about 50 American soldiers, and massive firepower, the insurgents eventually managed to escape from the palm grove.

In the wake of Islamic militancy on the part of not only the foreign fighters coming into Iraq, but also the militant, pro-Iranian elements within Iraq, Iraqi Christians are fleeing North.

At a time when Christians in various parts of the Muslim world are feeling pressured, Iraqi Christians are approaching their grimmest Christmas since the U.S.-led invasion of 2003 and wondering if they have any future in their native land.

They have suffered repeated violence and harassment since 2003, when the interreligious peace rigidly enforced by Saddam Hussein fell apart. But the attack on Our Lady of Salvation in which 68 people died appears to have been a tipping point that has driven many to flee northward to the Kurdish enclave while seeking asylum in the U.S. and elsewhere.

What seemed different this time was the way the gunmen brazenly barged onto sacred ground, the subsequent targeting of homes by bombers who clearly knew every Christian address, and the Internet posting in which al-Qaida-linked militants took responsibility for the church attack and vowed a campaign of violence against Christians wherever they are.

Moqtada al Sadr continues to make trouble, but this time he is beclowing himself.  He has banned his followers from accepting work from foreign oil companies.  This will likely only do harm to his standing and that is a good thing.  But it does go to show that Sadr is nothing if not persistent in his anti-Americanism.

Whether getting in bed with criminals like Ahmed Chalabi, supporting Iranian lackey Maliki, laboring under a Status of Forces Agreement that has U.S. troops locked down as if under house arrest, allowing Iranian influence to go relatively unchecked in Iraq, or leaving Sadr alive after he was actually in the custody of the 3/2 Marines in 2004 and released in a tip of the hat to the British notion of soft counterinsurgency tactics, the situation in Iraq today can be directly traced, at least to some extent, to decisions made during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

To say like so many Americans do that “We have given them a chance at freedom and if they screw it up it’s on them” simply doesn’t work.  We stacked the deck against them by leaving al Qaeda intact enough to cause regime destabilization, allowing Iran unmolested access to Iraq, leaving Sadr alive to cause regime destabilization, and leaving the Christians to the designs of the Islamic militants.

Thus do we bear at least some of the moral responsibility for the suffering today, in spite of the fact that we didn’t actively perpetrate the evils.  Pay close attention to these things.  History may be very hard on our decisions, and we should learn from this example for all such counterinsurgency efforts in the future.

Now comes the worst Afghanistan analysis I have ever read.  Quoth Michael Hughes:

General David Petraeus, in a rare public show of indecorum, last week suggested that corruption has been a part of Afghan culture since the country came into existence, which is a sentiment that is not only, from a historical and anthropological perspective, wholly ignorant, but one that exposes intentions on the General’s part that seem both dubious as well as misplaced.

Reason being is that Petraeus is a smart guy – one doubts he seriously subscribes to the notion that corruption is some inherently Afghan deformity, especially considering a cursory reading of history informs that prior to the Soviet invasion in 1979 jobbery was no worse in Afghanistan than it was in the United States (when, odds are, graft was worse in Chicago than Kabul). Most embarrassing for Petraeus to look at is the direct role the U.S. played in corrupting Afghan society. So, not only is it false that the country was always this way, the reality is the U.S. has helped transform Afghanistan into one of the most corrupt places on the planet.

Unfortunately, it seems Petraeus was simply trying to protect the good name of Afghanistan’s top criminal, President Hamid Karzai – subtly painting Mr. Karzai as a victim awash in a culture of venality when the truth is that the Karzai family has sunk Afghan society to unparalleled depths of libidinous fraud, nepotism and extortion.

The General apparently believes he needs Karzai intact so he can execute a more seamless exit strategy, which doesn’t make sense because Petraeus’s counterinsurgency doctrine depends on winning the support of the local populace, which is mission impossible with Karzai as head of state.

For surely Petraeus must realize, as outlined in a new white paper by the New World Strategies Coalition, that not only was Afghanistan less corrupt during the forty-year reign of King Zahir Shah, a run that began in the 1930s and ended in the early 1970s, but the Afghan people also enjoyed unprecedented peace, stability, prosperity and progressive social reform. That type of society seems like ancient folklore in light of today’s conditions.

The before and after snapshots are mind-blowing, illustrating a near incogitable contrast between an Afghanistan that was free from external interventions versus an Afghanistan that is occupied and manipulated by foreign powers that have marginalized, weakened and corrupted centuries-old indigenous tribal institutions and value systems. One is challenged to find another example of a society that has experienced such dramatic economic, political, technological and cultural regression in such a short time period.

The state had been erected upon lessons learned through centuries trying to maintain peace within an insular acephalous tribal society with a penchant for infighting and was most functional when it resembled a “loose” confederation in which legislative and judicial powers were pushed down to the local level – a concept analogous to America’s states’ rights.

Good Lord!  Good Lord!  So much to cover, so little time.  I cannot possibly address all of the misconceptions and concept and word twisting.  Let me briefly address only a few.

Here we see the blame game at work.  Evil has to have an origin, a nexus, and is so bad that it must have someone to blame.  Enter evil American imperialism.  We have discussed American imperialism before, and Robert Kaplan’s first chapter to “Imperial Grunts” (Injun Nation), which all educated analysts must read.  There are deeper issues concerning the ethics and morality of defending the homeland abroad that should be considered in order to be complete and responsible in our analysis, such as the notion of Good Wars.  There is so much to consider, and so little time. Alas.

But dumbing this down to finding a boogie man that makes everything else bad is silly and ludicrous.  Mankind – all mankind – has fallen short of the glory of God.  All mankind is fallen, all mankind is sinful.  There is no noble savage, no such thing as the pristine, unmolested man who is corrupted by outside influences, whether American or Afghani.

The heart of man is the wellspring of death.  It cannot be attributed to a state, a plan, a person, a persona, or a place.  No amount of money causes good or bad.  Money can be used to provide medical care, or largesse to corrupt.  Guns can be used to defend women and children, or kill them.  Military materiel can be used to eject evil Soviet aggression against a hapless state, or cut off the heads of women who refuse to cooperate in their own abuse and subjugation.  Things are what the theologians call adiaphourous.  They are neither good nor bad.  Man is what puts them to use.

Genesis 8:21, Jeremiah 17:9, Ecclesiastes 9:3, Romans 3:11 and many other passages show that it is man who is the nexus and conduit of evil in the world.  Michael Hughes doth imagine a devil around every corner, or at least, the corner of America.  Michael needs only to look at the hearts of the people who perpetrate evil against others.  They’re everywhere, Michael, not just in America.

The father of Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder (the Lance Corporal perished in Iraq) has been ordered by the Fourth Circuit to pay the legal fees of Westboro Baptist Church.

Outraged that the father of a dead Marine was ordered to pay some court costs incurred by a group he had sued for picketing his son’s funeral, people from across the country have launched a grass-roots fundraising effort to help the grieving family.

“I was appalled,” said Sally Giannini, a 72-year-old retired bookkeeper from Spokane, Wash., who had called The Baltimore Sun after seeing an article about the court decision against Albert Snyder. “I believe in free speech, but this goes too far.”

Living on a fixed income, Giannini said she could send only $10 toward the $16,510.80 that the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Snyder to pay to Fred Phelps, leader of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., an anti-gay group that travels the country picketing military funerals. The group says military deaths are God’s punishment for America’s tolerance of homosexuality.

Strange way indeed to make ones views known.

Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew A. Snyder, 20, was killed in a Humvee accident in Iraq on March 3, 2006. A week later, church members stood outside his funeral at St. John’s Roman Catholic Church in Westminster waving signs that said “Thank God for dead soldiers” and “God hates fags” while mourners grieved inside. Later, they posted a diatribe on their Web site claiming that Matthew’s divorced parents raised him “to commit adultery” and to support “satanic Catholicism.”

The Westboro church members had never met Matthew, who wasn’t gay, nor his family. Yet seven of them – adults and children – traveled 1,100 miles across a half-dozen states to celebrate the young Marine’s death …

The report is remarkable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the extremely poor theology which underlies the whole approach.  God has revealed Himself – past tense – and He no more has told the pastor or members of Westboro Baptist Church about His eternal plans for Iraq or why any individual has perished than He has told Pat Robertson why an earthquake struck Haiti (Deuteronomy 29:29).

More remarkable still is the ex nihilo fabrication of a “constitutional right” to desecrate funerals by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.  The idea that the our founding fathers had this in mind under the rubric of the first amendment is preposterous.  There is no reason to believe that the administration of righteousness will be spared the gaze of God; to the contrary (1 Kings 3:9).  There will be a day of reckoning for those who make a joke of their public oaths and vows and a laughingstock of justice.

Finally, Westboro Baptist Church does indeed have the right to promulgate their views at the right time and location (funerals is not one of them).  The scholarly approach is to behave as Paul did on Mars Hill (Acts 17).  Westboro Baptist Church displayed the reciprocal behavior.  When a warrior perished on the field of battle, they profaned his funeral.  When a parent grieved, they insulted the memory of his son.  When a young man’s memory was being honored, they lied about his past and used his life in a cheap attempt to gain attention to themselves.

Many churches have as their vision statement “To know Christ and make Him known.”  I won’t fall into the same trap as Westboro Baptist Church and claim to know the hearts of members whom I have never met.  I have no problem, however, claiming that they have failed at making Christ known.  And a day of reckoning awaits them too.

“So I can hear it now – the First Sergeant says, ‘Okay.  Instead of practicing room clearing exercises, today and tomorrow we have a work party at the armory to remove certain inscriptions on your ACOGs.’  Rather than training to do your job and save your life, you spend your time making somebody happy who has nothing to do with any of this.  The dude who is worried about this needs to find something else to do with his life”  –  A certain Marine

“I foresee ACLU involvement.

I also can foresee the Troops being told to remove the offending ‘codes’ and several filing through the outer casing of their sights causing a subsequent blanket order to cease filing and directing Cdrs to turn all the sights in to DS Maintenance for removal of the offending characters IAW MWO 9-236-10 followed by a GAO audit to determine how much the whole drill cost.

Oh. And the media report of J Troop, 10-73d Cav taking excess casualties due to the lack of optical sights, all having been in Maintenance for over three months, in the big fire fight at Fetterman’s Sangar…

All for something that doesn’t approach, much less pass the ‘so what’ test” – Ken White, Small Wars Council

So by now you are all aware of the Biblical inscriptions on ACOGs sights sold by Trijicon to the U.S. Marines and Army.  Without rehearing the details, the owner of the company who makes the ACOGs sights for the U.S. Marines is a Christian, and he has found a unique way to take pride in his work.  He has tooled his factories to inscribe certain Biblical passages on the ACOGs sights.

General Petraeus is disturbed over the inscriptions.  The U.S. Marine Corps is concerned, and Trijicon has agreed to remove them.  Even the washed up, burned out, pacifist hippies at Creative Loafing have weighed in with indignation over the inscriptions (and Muslims with faux outrage after this was hyped in the American media).  The Huffington Post has their usual knee jerk reaction.  Kits have been distributed to remove the inscriptions from those sights which are currently in service (even though, rather surprisingly, the British Ministry of Defence has refused this remedy because it will remove weapons from the field where they are needed).  They’ve taken a pass.

Now, I would never have included the inscriptions on the sights, but not because I disagree with the inscriptions.  In general, I’m a boring kind of guy and just not creative enough to have come up with the idea.  With General Petraeus, I am “disturbed” about a great many things: that we initiated Operation Iraqi Freedom with fewer troops than necessary to maintain the peace once the regime fell – that we have too few troops now in Afghanistan – that we may be losing our conventional capabilities as we necessarily focus on irregular warfare – that our warriors need an entirely new generation of  weapons that won’t be funded – and so on the list could go.  But “disturbed” over these inscriptions?  Not even nearly.  Generals should worry over things that warrant worry, such as micromanaging the campaign.

As for Trijicon, they have behaved admirably throughout this silly ordeal.  If it had been me, I would have let the Marine Corps explain to parents and spouses of Marines why they rejected the best optical sights on the planet because someone who wasn’t involved in this objected to my world view.  I would have responded, ‘Oh, go blow it out your …..,”  well, never mind, that wouldn’t be very Christian.

From the Weekly Standard:

While we should be thankful that various individuals at Fort Hood acted in a “prompt and courageous” manner thereby preventing “greater losses,” it should never have gotten to that point. The Defense Department’s system is not working if it is left to first responders to stop a terrorist. A traitor within the military’s ranks, with compromised loyalties that had been known about for years—as was the case with Hasan—should be stopped before his finger is on the trigger.

Therein lies the central problem with the Pentagon’s report. It says nothing of consequence about Hasan or how to stop individuals like him in the future. Hasan is not even named in the report, but instead referred to as the “alleged perpetrator.” The report’s authors contend that the sanctity of the criminal investigation into the shooting needs to be upheld. But this is not an excuse for failing to name the attacker. The whole world knows that Major Nidal Malik Hasan did it.

Nor is the ongoing criminal investigation a valid reason for avoiding a serious discussion of Hasan’s ideological disposition. The report’s authors instead go to lengths to whitewash Hasan’s beliefs.

The report lumps all sorts of deviant and problematic behaviors together as if they have the same relevance to the events of November 5. Thus, we find a discussion of alcohol and drug abuse, sexual violence, elder abuse, and the disgusting methods employed by child molesters. We also learn of the deleterious effects of events “such as divorce, loss of a job, or death of a loved one,” all of which “may trigger suicide in those who are already vulnerable.”

Was Major Nidal Malik Hasan a child molester, a drug addict, or suicidal because of a recent divorce? No. So what does any of this have to do with the attack at Fort Hood? Absolutely nothing.

What is relevant is Hasan’s religious and political beliefs. He is a jihadist, although you would never know it by reading the Pentagon’s report. Instead in the report’s “literature review of risk factors for violence,” one comes across this sentence:

Religious fundamentalism alone is not a risk factor; most fundamentalist groups are not violent, and religious-based violence is not confined to members of fundamentalist groups.

This is a true statement; it is also completely meaningless in respect to the Fort Hood massacre. The brand of religious fundamentalism practiced by Hasan is specifically devoted to violence.

This article by Thomas Joscelyn rehearses some of the things we discussed in Radicalized Christian Terrorism.  On a complex topic it’s easy to misunderstand truncated prose.  This is the kind of topic that is better carried out as a series of conversations.

A number of readers / commenters conflated boundary conditions.  This comment comes to us from Aristekrat:

I think it would certainly be fair to name any abortion bombing or killing as Christian terrorism. Admittedly, that is not near the problem that exists in Islam, but I disagree that is because Christianity is inherently peaceful and Islam is violent. At one time Christianity was not at all peaceful; surprisingly no one has mentioned the reformation and the wars of religion that lasted an extraordinarily long time, tore Europe apart, and were monstrously violent. That violence ultimately exhausted Europe and led to the Peace of Westphalia, the first harbinger of secularism. As secularism (and nationalism) ascended so religious violence in Europe dropped. Are you comfortable with the idea that the greater prevalence of religious violence in Islam might not be due to Islam being a more violent religion but because western civilization has embraced the (now) leftist doctrine of secularism and Islamic countries have not?

This is a very far reaching and broad comment and we will have to deal with aspects of it in later conversations.  Suffice it to say that the proposition that secularism is related to a reduction in violence is incorrect from my vantage point, and the author of the comment is advised to study the following two texts:

Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers

Douglas F. Kelly, The Emergence of Liberty in the Modern World: The Influence of Calvin on Five Governments from the 16th Through 18th Centuries

Any conversation on this that begins without these two texts as a backdrop is a waste of time.  So moving back to the issue of  “any abortion bombing or killing as Christian terrorism,” this is once again a conflation of issues, a confusion of boundary conditions for my thought experiment.

We absolutely must get definitions and boundaries right for the conversation to have a common language.  Without rehearsing the boundaries I laid down in the original article, let’s approach this from a different perspective, i.e., the perspective of Islamic terrorism.

A quick survey of my articles on Iraq and counterinsurgency shows without equivocation that I did not believe during the height of the insurgency, and do not believe now, that all insurgents in Iraq fought for religious motivation.  In fact, most of them didn’t.  To be sure, the several hundred per month who crossed the Syrian border coming from Somalia, Chechnya, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other locales, included many who did fight predominately for religious motivation.  But the indigenous insurgency primarily did not.

During Operation Alljah loud speakers were used by U.S. forces to address the public at Mosques, and even though this is a religious gathering, per se, I do not include this as religious-based insurgency or counterinsurgency.  The Mosques were targeted as being the center of public activity and philosophy.

Again, a survey of my posts reminds the reader of just how involved we have been in attempting to understand how to separate an indigenous insurgency – who fights for many reasons, including money, youthful exuberance, boredom, etc. – from the religiously- based leadership.

Not all shootings in Iraq were a result of jihad.  Nor have I categorized religious-on-religious violence (e.g., Shi’a on Sunni and vice versa) within the rubric of jihad or religiously-based violence.  My definitions were very specific, and included the notion that one believes that his specific religious views warranted propagation via violence or subjugation of unbelievers.

Wars of power, convenience, tribe, family, wealth-seeking, and so on, do not qualify under this rubric.  As for Islam, I have dealt with the competing hermeneutics within the Muslim world before by addressing stolid comments by Professor Steve Metz of the U.S. Army War College.  Feel free to go study them in some detail.

I am left in this thought experiment without any compelling evidence whatsoever that anyone can come up with a single example of Christian terrorism that meets my definition – a definition, by the way, that I have consistently applied to Islamic terrorism as well.

You may disagree, you may respond with fury and fist.  But what you cannot do is charge me with inconsistency.  I have treated both Islam and Christianity with the same standards.  In the mean time, I continue to be amused at the felt-need to legitimize moral-equivalency arguments, and even if you can find an example of Christian inspired terrorism, I have made you search hard.  The search is hard because Christian Biblical hermeneutics doesn’t support terrorism.

The report on Hasan and the Fort Hood shootings has been released, and without rehearsing the pitiful whitewash that it was, one comment by intellectual lightweight Togo West bears a little unpacking.

Mr. West, at a second Pentagon news conference with Admiral Clark, said the problem with “self-radicalization” in the military was not rooted in Islam. “Suppose it were fundamentalist-Christian-inspired,” Mr. West said. “Our concern is not with the religion. It is with the potential effect on our soldiers’ ability to do their job.”

Hmmm.  Not rooted in Islam.  “Fundamentalist-Christian-inspired” terrorism.  So.  Let’s have a test question after we set some boundary conditions.  First, let’s loosely define Christian as anyone who believes in the Trinitarian formula outlined in the Council Of Nicea and the Council of Chalcedon (and perhaps also who holds to basic Christian soteriology as taught in the historical confessions such as the Westminster Confession of Faith, Canons of Dort, Heidelberg Catechism, or for my Roman Catholic readers, the Council of Trent).

Next, let’s define religiously inspired terrorism as the belief that God has commanded that one’s faith must be promulgated by violence.  Now that these basic stipulations have been made our house is in order for the test question.  Can anyone name an instance of “fundamentalist-Christian-inspired” terrorism?  Anyone?  Even a single instance?

For the more stolid readers, leave the Crusades out of this.  They were primarily a defensive operation as a result of Muslim aggression.  Besides, give me something in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, please.  And please don’t chime in with Timothy McVeigh.  In his last interview the day before his execution, he made sure everyone knew that he was an atheist.

We can begin.  Now that the test question has been posed, are there any takers?  Give me one instance of Christian-inspired terrorism.  Just one.  Maybe intellectual lightweight Togo West can give me his data.  I’m waiting.

It’s a wonderful thing to give thanks to those around you for their blessings upon you.  Family, friends and coworkers rarely get enough thanks from you – and vice versa.  But in the end, Thanksgiving is not really about thanking those around us.  It’s one of the truly unique Christian holidays, unencumbered by tainted and confused history.

Thanksgiving, as conceived by the settlers to the new world, was about thanking God for His kind providence.  Contrary to the idiotic Wikipedia entry, it is not now and will never be a secular holiday.  One cannot truly know thankfulness without knowing the creator of the universe personally.  So watch your football, eat until you are sick, and thank those around you.  But this is only a shadow of its intent and purpose.

As a Christian and thoroughgoing Calvinist I have no problem knowing that our lives and times are in God’s hands, and I give Him thanks for all of His lovingkindness and blessings.  I wish you well on this Thanksgiving and hope that you and yours not only give thanks to our creator, but know him personally.  Leave aside rumblings of war, and focus on something else for a few days.

God has not made any normative promises to keep everyone safe in war, any more than He has given normative promises that no one will lose their jobs in a bad economy.  He has given us a firm and fixed promise that He will be with His people no matter what they go through.

Religious symbols don’t convey some sort of magical powers, and thus the symbols taken into war by this Marine is more a statement of who he is and what he stands for than it is of anything else.  It’s a statement of his religious belief and character.  His gun makes him feel safe.