Merry Christmas

From Gary Varvel:

Merry Christmas people. Some Christmasy links for your edification:

1. Walt Harrah on Christmas Carols on Hugh Hewitt
2. David Allen White on Handel's Messiah again on Hugh Hewitt (Three parts)
3. Mark D. Roberts on Dicken's 'A Christmas Carol' again on Hugh Hewitt
4. Christ the Contrarian: Who was Christ really? Cuddly babe? Postmodern, touchy feely bloke? Or the most unabashed Contrarian of his time? (A trilemma of sorts)
   
5. Give with a cheerful heart to those being oppressed this Christmas.
   

Iraq: Children being cooked

Just when you thought the bloodshed in Iraq could not be worse. I think, hope and pray we've hit rock-bottom. From the Barnabas Fund's email newsletter:

...Christians like the thousands of frightened Iraqis who face Christmas in the context of escalating anti-Christian violence. In the most shocking report from Iraq we have received, a toddler was kidnapped in Baghdad in October 2006. The mother could not afford to pay the ransom, and so the kidnappers killed the child. They returned the body to the mother. The little child had been beheaded, roasted and was served on a mound of rice. In another incident a 14-year-old Christian boy was held down by his limbs and beheaded, or, as Iraqi Christians have described it, “crucified”. His Muslim attackers called him a “dirty Christian sinner” and chanted “Allahu akbar” (Allah is great).

This is the most barbaric of the events that the email discusses.

Stunned by the viciousness of this attack, earlier this evening, I called Patrick Sookhdeo, director of the Barnabas Fund. He is a world expert on political Islam and his organisation clearly understands the Eurabia and Dhimmitude concepts seeking to assist Christians in the Dar-al-Islam (from Dhimmitude) and Dar-al-Harb (from Suicidialism).

He personally confirmed the veracity and accuracy of this information. There seems to be a complete and total media blackout of these massacres. Patrick is not sure why this is the case. He also seems to be circumspect about the nature of blogs to help him get his message out saying, in his usual self-effacing manner, that they are not nice to him. So brilliant bloggers, unite. Bring this catastrophe to light and make people aware of the suffering of Christians in Iraq. Let's not have another Armenia/Aramean genocide on our hands.

For those with the means, please donate some money to the Barnabas Fund's Christmas Appeal 2006 - Iraq. For those that are not able to contribute financially, please pray, and pray ceaselessly for justice to be served on those driving the violence and pray for the protection of those on the receiving end of the violence.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Update: Here is the newsletter and the email in full.

Update II: Healing Iraq has spot reports from around Iraq regarding the upsurge in violence. Mohammed @ Iraq the Model on the same. This is not surprising and should have been expected. The US is flailing around trying to find someone to "help" them reduce the violence. Think Iran, Think Syria. Well, it would be at precisely this time that Iran and Syria would push the US's head under the water, by instructing their Iraqi proxies to increase their attacks, increasing pressure on the US to acquiesce to their demands. (H/T: LittleGreenFootballs). Interestingly, no mention of the suffering the Christians are facing. This probably reflects how marginalised they have become, even in the eyes of supporters of peace and stability in Iraq.

Update III: I have been provided further information by the Barnabas Fund supporting the claims made above. Understandably, due to the security of the eyewitnesses, I have been asked to preserve confidentiality.

Steyn: Secular Humanism Dooms West

In his fabulous book, "America Alone: The End of the World as we know it", gives him opinion of whether a society based on secular humanism can survive the Islamist virus:

Pre-modern Islam beats post-modern Christianity. In 2006, a dozen intellectuals published a manifesto against Islamism and in defense of "secular values for all." The signatories included Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch parliamentarian; Irshad Manji, the Canadian writer; and Salman Rushdie, the British novelist. All three are brave figures and important allies in the campaign against the Islamist tide. But they're making a mistake: secular humanism is an insufficient rallying cry. As another Canadian, Kathy Shaidle, wrote in response: "It is secularism itself which is part of the problem, not the solution, since secularism is precisely what created the Euro spiritual/moral vacuum into which Islamism has rushed headlong."

This is point is also emphasised by Ravi Zacharias many a time in his numerous lectures and talks:

I'll say this as kindly as I can: the last 22 years of my life have been spent in the West. The equal amount in the beginning was spent in the East. And Western civilisation is being rocked to its foundations because Western man does not know the point of reference for the value system that he wants to espouse right now. See the Middle East still espouses Islam: there is some transcedent leverage to the culture. We in modern times are daring the lines in the West and we actually think we can survive without the espousing of a Moral Law. History cries out against the experiment.

Here's a more abstract contrarian view from Nick Gillespie at Reason:

With the collapse of socialism as a viable alternative social system (as Christopher Hitchens pointed out in a great interview in the November Reason), it only makes sense that conservatives and libertarians would start to line up on different sides of the barricades that surround the battleground of individual choice and autonomy. Why? In part, because the libertarian doesn't fear change or blindly respect "established authority" the way conservatives tend to.

More fundamentally, though, it's because, pace Goldberg, libertarians do believe devoutly in something. They believe, writes Hayek, that "to live and work successfully with others requires more than faithfulness to one's concrete aims. It requires an intellectual commitment to a type of order in which, even on issues which to one are fundamental, others are allowed to pursue different ends. It is for this reason that to the liberal [libertarian] neither moral nor religious ideals are proper objects of coercion, while both conservatives and socialists recognize no such limits."

Goldberg sniffs that such a world leads to--horrors!--"individualized, designer cultures" as opposed to, one presumes, mandated mass cultures that are forced on people whether they like it or not (substitute "religion" for "culture" to get a sense of whether more choice in human affairs is a good thing). He even quotes G.K. Chesterton ripping off Dostoevsky: "Chesterton pointed out that when a man stops believing in God, he won't believe in nothing, he'll believe in anything" and then neatly underscores his own flight from such a rigid, old-style world by adding, "God isn't necessarily the issue here." What a personalized reading of Chesterton.

So which position can assure West's ability to endure and survive? Well, from Gillespie et al. we should infer that, "reason will come riding on a horse" and save the day. The problem is that if Reason is riding the horse, who or what is the horse? Theists such as Steyn, Zacharias and Shaidle (and C.S. Lewis) answer that the horse is the Judeo-Christian God. His Moral Law is, pace Gillespie et al., the brighest light for the post-Christian world.

Christians and the Middle East

Two good pieces of reading:

1. Robert Spencer gives us an update on Abdul Rahman and the jihadist attempt to have him repatriated to Afghanistan to a death sentence.
2. Tom Bethell @ Spectator on Middle East demographics and the waning Christian presence there and the weaking influence of Judeo-Christian values on Western Society.
   

Iraq: Syrian-Orthodox Clergyman Decapitated

No-one promised that being a dhimmi will protect your life [H/T: The Jawa Report via AINA]:

The Syriac-Orhtodox [sic] priest Paulos Iskandar was kidnapped this Monday, October 9, and beheaded today Wednesday October 11.

Christians are living a terrified life in Mosul and Baghdad. Several priests have been kidnapped, girls are being raped and murdered and a couple of days ago a fourteen year old boy was crucified in the Christian neighborhood Albasra.

Corroborated by Persection.org. Also being reported by The International Herald Tribune:

Relatives of an Orthodox priest who was kidnapped and found beheaded three days later said Thursday that his captors had demanded his church condemn the pope's recent comments about Islam and pay a US$350,000 (€280,000) ransom.

The Persecution.org piece linked above states that the motives for the kidnapping and murder are unknown. However, the AINA piece and IHT story linked above purport that the motive kidnapping and murder of Father Iskandar was in response to Pope Benedict XVI's infamous Regensburg address titled "Faith, Reason and Uncertainty".

In this speech, the Pope assailed the West's redundant approach to debate and discussion and challenged for other "cultures" to engage with the West with "logos" (or knowledge/reason):

The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur - this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. "Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God", said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.

This was his main point. It had nothing to do with slandering Islam. I will not do his fine speech the injustice of reproducing his quote of a quote of a Christian Byzantine Emperor that was widely quoted in the MSM and drew ironic angry and violent responses from the Ummah. Indeed, far from attacking Islam or inciting hatred of it, he was challenging the Ummah to engage in meaningful (ie. reasonable) dialogue with the West.

Note however, that being a dhimmi, did not spare Father Iskandar's life:

Before Iskender was kidnapped, his relatives said, the church already had put up signs condemning the statement and calling for good relations between Christians and Muslims. The message was posted again, they said, after the priest's kidnappers made their demand.

Since Saddam's regime fell, Christians of all stripes in Iraq, dhimmi and non-dhimmi, Catholic, Syrian-Orthodox or Reformed, have been attacked and harrassed. This has been covered in drips and draps in the MSM and other outlets:

1. The Guardian (6 October 2006)
2. ABC Lateline (2 October 2006)
3. ABC Lateline - again (3 December 2004)
4. Fox News (13 November 2004)
5. Al-Jazeera (2 August 2004)
6. The Christian Science Monitor (21 April 2003)
7. GlobalSecurity.org (Undated)

Clarity & Resolve states that:

This is the vicious, ancient religious behavior that Saddam kept in check with his vicious modern secular behavior.

Correct in that Saddam didn't annihilate Christian Iraqi villages, very incorrect in that he annihilated Kurdish Iraqi ones and was responsible for the murder of thousands Iraqi dissidents. That's why he is in the dock in Baghdad.

The irony of the coverage of the poor plight of Iraqi Christians is that the stories are published by a media that lusts for a withdrawal from Iraq. This will only serve to worsen their situation. This sort of logic was that which the Pope assailed in his Regensburg address. However, it is also this part of the Pope's speech that was stubbornly ignored by the West and the Ummah.

It has been my opinion for some time that Iraq was a major strategic blunder in the WIF.

But if this incident (and many others like it) demonstrates anything, it is this: the West should redouble its efforts in targeting and killing Islamofascists running amok in Iraq, not cut-and-run.

Disclaimer: I am a Christian with close (and friendly) links to the Syrian-Orthodox Church.

Merry Christmas

From Gary Varvel:

Merry Christmas people. Some Christmasy links for your edification:

1. Walt Harrah on Christmas Carols on Hugh Hewitt
2. David Allen White on Handel's Messiah again on Hugh Hewitt (Three parts)
3. Mark D. Roberts on Dicken's 'A Christmas Carol' again on Hugh Hewitt
4. Christ the Contrarian: Who was Christ really? Cuddly babe? Postmodern, touchy feely bloke? Or the most unabashed Contrarian of his time? (A trilemma of sorts)
   
5. Give with a cheerful heart to those being oppressed this Christmas.
   

Iraq: Children being cooked

Just when you thought the bloodshed in Iraq could not be worse. I think, hope and pray we've hit rock-bottom. From the Barnabas Fund's email newsletter:

...Christians like the thousands of frightened Iraqis who face Christmas in the context of escalating anti-Christian violence. In the most shocking report from Iraq we have received, a toddler was kidnapped in Baghdad in October 2006. The mother could not afford to pay the ransom, and so the kidnappers killed the child. They returned the body to the mother. The little child had been beheaded, roasted and was served on a mound of rice. In another incident a 14-year-old Christian boy was held down by his limbs and beheaded, or, as Iraqi Christians have described it, “crucified”. His Muslim attackers called him a “dirty Christian sinner” and chanted “Allahu akbar” (Allah is great).

This is the most barbaric of the events that the email discusses.

Stunned by the viciousness of this attack, earlier this evening, I called Patrick Sookhdeo, director of the Barnabas Fund. He is a world expert on political Islam and his organisation clearly understands the Eurabia and Dhimmitude concepts seeking to assist Christians in the Dar-al-Islam (from Dhimmitude) and Dar-al-Harb (from Suicidialism).

He personally confirmed the veracity and accuracy of this information. There seems to be a complete and total media blackout of these massacres. Patrick is not sure why this is the case. He also seems to be circumspect about the nature of blogs to help him get his message out saying, in his usual self-effacing manner, that they are not nice to him. So brilliant bloggers, unite. Bring this catastrophe to light and make people aware of the suffering of Christians in Iraq. Let's not have another Armenia/Aramean genocide on our hands.

For those with the means, please donate some money to the Barnabas Fund's Christmas Appeal 2006 - Iraq. For those that are not able to contribute financially, please pray, and pray ceaselessly for justice to be served on those driving the violence and pray for the protection of those on the receiving end of the violence.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Update: Here is the newsletter and the email in full.

Update II: Healing Iraq has spot reports from around Iraq regarding the upsurge in violence. Mohammed @ Iraq the Model on the same. This is not surprising and should have been expected. The US is flailing around trying to find someone to "help" them reduce the violence. Think Iran, Think Syria. Well, it would be at precisely this time that Iran and Syria would push the US's head under the water, by instructing their Iraqi proxies to increase their attacks, increasing pressure on the US to acquiesce to their demands. (H/T: LittleGreenFootballs). Interestingly, no mention of the suffering the Christians are facing. This probably reflects how marginalised they have become, even in the eyes of supporters of peace and stability in Iraq.

Update III: I have been provided further information by the Barnabas Fund supporting the claims made above. Understandably, due to the security of the eyewitnesses, I have been asked to preserve confidentiality.

Steyn: Secular Humanism Dooms West

In his fabulous book, "America Alone: The End of the World as we know it", gives him opinion of whether a society based on secular humanism can survive the Islamist virus:

Pre-modern Islam beats post-modern Christianity. In 2006, a dozen intellectuals published a manifesto against Islamism and in defense of "secular values for all." The signatories included Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch parliamentarian; Irshad Manji, the Canadian writer; and Salman Rushdie, the British novelist. All three are brave figures and important allies in the campaign against the Islamist tide. But they're making a mistake: secular humanism is an insufficient rallying cry. As another Canadian, Kathy Shaidle, wrote in response: "It is secularism itself which is part of the problem, not the solution, since secularism is precisely what created the Euro spiritual/moral vacuum into which Islamism has rushed headlong."

This is point is also emphasised by Ravi Zacharias many a time in his numerous lectures and talks:

I'll say this as kindly as I can: the last 22 years of my life have been spent in the West. The equal amount in the beginning was spent in the East. And Western civilisation is being rocked to its foundations because Western man does not know the point of reference for the value system that he wants to espouse right now. See the Middle East still espouses Islam: there is some transcedent leverage to the culture. We in modern times are daring the lines in the West and we actually think we can survive without the espousing of a Moral Law. History cries out against the experiment.

Here's a more abstract contrarian view from Nick Gillespie at Reason:

With the collapse of socialism as a viable alternative social system (as Christopher Hitchens pointed out in a great interview in the November Reason), it only makes sense that conservatives and libertarians would start to line up on different sides of the barricades that surround the battleground of individual choice and autonomy. Why? In part, because the libertarian doesn't fear change or blindly respect "established authority" the way conservatives tend to.

More fundamentally, though, it's because, pace Goldberg, libertarians do believe devoutly in something. They believe, writes Hayek, that "to live and work successfully with others requires more than faithfulness to one's concrete aims. It requires an intellectual commitment to a type of order in which, even on issues which to one are fundamental, others are allowed to pursue different ends. It is for this reason that to the liberal [libertarian] neither moral nor religious ideals are proper objects of coercion, while both conservatives and socialists recognize no such limits."

Goldberg sniffs that such a world leads to--horrors!--"individualized, designer cultures" as opposed to, one presumes, mandated mass cultures that are forced on people whether they like it or not (substitute "religion" for "culture" to get a sense of whether more choice in human affairs is a good thing). He even quotes G.K. Chesterton ripping off Dostoevsky: "Chesterton pointed out that when a man stops believing in God, he won't believe in nothing, he'll believe in anything" and then neatly underscores his own flight from such a rigid, old-style world by adding, "God isn't necessarily the issue here." What a personalized reading of Chesterton.

So which position can assure West's ability to endure and survive? Well, from Gillespie et al. we should infer that, "reason will come riding on a horse" and save the day. The problem is that if Reason is riding the horse, who or what is the horse? Theists such as Steyn, Zacharias and Shaidle (and C.S. Lewis) answer that the horse is the Judeo-Christian God. His Moral Law is, pace Gillespie et al., the brighest light for the post-Christian world.

Christians and the Middle East

Two good pieces of reading:

1. Robert Spencer gives us an update on Abdul Rahman and the jihadist attempt to have him repatriated to Afghanistan to a death sentence.
2. Tom Bethell @ Spectator on Middle East demographics and the waning Christian presence there and the weaking influence of Judeo-Christian values on Western Society.
   

Iraq: Syrian-Orthodox Clergyman Decapitated

No-one promised that being a dhimmi will protect your life [H/T: The Jawa Report via AINA]:

The Syriac-Orhtodox [sic] priest Paulos Iskandar was kidnapped this Monday, October 9, and beheaded today Wednesday October 11.

Christians are living a terrified life in Mosul and Baghdad. Several priests have been kidnapped, girls are being raped and murdered and a couple of days ago a fourteen year old boy was crucified in the Christian neighborhood Albasra.

Corroborated by Persection.org. Also being reported by The International Herald Tribune:

Relatives of an Orthodox priest who was kidnapped and found beheaded three days later said Thursday that his captors had demanded his church condemn the pope's recent comments about Islam and pay a US$350,000 (€280,000) ransom.

The Persecution.org piece linked above states that the motives for the kidnapping and murder are unknown. However, the AINA piece and IHT story linked above purport that the motive kidnapping and murder of Father Iskandar was in response to Pope Benedict XVI's infamous Regensburg address titled "Faith, Reason and Uncertainty".

In this speech, the Pope assailed the West's redundant approach to debate and discussion and challenged for other "cultures" to engage with the West with "logos" (or knowledge/reason):

The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur - this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. "Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God", said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.

This was his main point. It had nothing to do with slandering Islam. I will not do his fine speech the injustice of reproducing his quote of a quote of a Christian Byzantine Emperor that was widely quoted in the MSM and drew ironic angry and violent responses from the Ummah. Indeed, far from attacking Islam or inciting hatred of it, he was challenging the Ummah to engage in meaningful (ie. reasonable) dialogue with the West.

Note however, that being a dhimmi, did not spare Father Iskandar's life:

Before Iskender was kidnapped, his relatives said, the church already had put up signs condemning the statement and calling for good relations between Christians and Muslims. The message was posted again, they said, after the priest's kidnappers made their demand.

Since Saddam's regime fell, Christians of all stripes in Iraq, dhimmi and non-dhimmi, Catholic, Syrian-Orthodox or Reformed, have been attacked and harrassed. This has been covered in drips and draps in the MSM and other outlets:

1. The Guardian (6 October 2006)
2. ABC Lateline (2 October 2006)
3. ABC Lateline - again (3 December 2004)
4. Fox News (13 November 2004)
5. Al-Jazeera (2 August 2004)
6. The Christian Science Monitor (21 April 2003)
7. GlobalSecurity.org (Undated)

Clarity & Resolve states that:

This is the vicious, ancient religious behavior that Saddam kept in check with his vicious modern secular behavior.

Correct in that Saddam didn't annihilate Christian Iraqi villages, very incorrect in that he annihilated Kurdish Iraqi ones and was responsible for the murder of thousands Iraqi dissidents. That's why he is in the dock in Baghdad.

The irony of the coverage of the poor plight of Iraqi Christians is that the stories are published by a media that lusts for a withdrawal from Iraq. This will only serve to worsen their situation. This sort of logic was that which the Pope assailed in his Regensburg address. However, it is also this part of the Pope's speech that was stubbornly ignored by the West and the Ummah.

It has been my opinion for some time that Iraq was a major strategic blunder in the WIF.

But if this incident (and many others like it) demonstrates anything, it is this: the West should redouble its efforts in targeting and killing Islamofascists running amok in Iraq, not cut-and-run.

Disclaimer: I am a Christian with close (and friendly) links to the Syrian-Orthodox Church.