RUTHFULLY YOURS

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Mark Durie is an Anglican vicar in Melbourne, Australia, author of The Third Choice, and an Associate Fellow at the Middle Eastern Forum.

This is the second in a four part series of posts written in response to Geert Wilders’ visit to Australia in early 2013.

In a previous post I contrasted Geert Wilders’ view that ‘Islam is the problem’ with the claims of many Muslims who preach with equal conviction that ‘Islam is the solution’, and examined evidence of the negative characteristics associated with belief in Islam, including disadvantaged human development outcomes.

These days many leaders in the West find it convenient to sweep the ‘problem’ of Islam under the carpet. Long gone are the days of Theodore Roosevelt, Wilders’ hero, who declared in Fear God and take your own part that values such as freedom and equality only existed in Europe because it had the military capacity to ‘beat back the Moslem invader’.

However, given the negative outcomes associated with Islam, one of which is Geert Wilders’ need for constant armed guards (some others were enumerated in the previous post), the question whether Islam is the problem or the solution is not something to be just swept under the carpet.

In the fourth and final post of this series we will consider Wilders’ policies for managing ‘the problem’. The third post, the next after this, will review an on-going dispute between critics of Islam as to whether there can be a moderate, tolerable form of Islam. On one side stand those, like Wafa Sultan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Robert Spencer, who consider Islam to be essentially irredeemable. On the other side stand those, like Daniel Pipes and Barry Rubin, who argue that there are different Islams and the ‘solution’ to radical Islam is moderate Islam.

Of course there are many opinions about Islam. In this, the second post in this series, we consider two widely-held secular – and positive – perspectives on Islam which have been influential in shaping the response of secular-minded westerners to Islam. These are universalism and relativism.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/05/nbc_newss_new_president_has_history_of_israel-bashing.html Deborah Turness, the British journalist who has been editor of Independent Television’s ITV News since 2004 and was named the president of NBC News on May 20, 2013, has a history of involvement with anti-Israel media bias.   Most alarmingly, Turness and two ITV colleagues won an Amnesty International UK Media Award in 2008 […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/reflections-on-my-ex-muslim-friends/ Some of my best friends are Muslims. Or rather, some of my best friends were Muslims—not that they are no longer Muslims but that they are no longer my friends. The problem I had over years of friendship had to do with certain personal attributes which I value highly, namely, consistency and the ability […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/349513/obamas-words-and-his-actions Experts in Washington, D.C., have been shocked lately by the grand canyon that has ripped through the heart of the nation’s capital. On one side of this massive rift stand the words of President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. On the other ridge, far in the distance, one barely can detect their actual […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/349447/western-cultural-suicide We are blind to the contradictions in welcoming an immigrant but not making him one of us. Multiculturalism — as opposed to the notion of a multiracial society united by a single culture — has become an abject contradiction in the modern Western world. Romance for a culture in the abstract that one has […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
Getting an early start on primary season, Rand Paul stopped by New Hampshire and offered some sage advice for winning elections. According to the article, “Senator Paul Rand urged New Hampshire Republicans to become more diversified.”

New Hampshire is 94.6% white, 2.9% Latino and 1.3% Black. I don’t know the exact diversity
statistics for New Hampshire Republicans, but if they get a half-black and half-Latino guy in a wheelchair to run for something, they will probably have covered all the statistical bases.

“We need to grow bigger,” Rand Paul said. “If you want to be the party of white people, we’re winning all the white votes. We’re a diverse nation. We’re going to win when we look like America.”

Looking like America is common advice these days. What does America look like? For now it still looks more like New Hampshire than like California. And despite that, Democrats scored some big wins in New Hampshire in the last election.

Obama won New Hampshire 52 to 46 and it probably wasn’t the black vote that put him over the top. He picked up over 100,000 votes in Hillsborough County, which is 90 percent white. Clearly, despite Rand Paul’s optimism, Republicans aren’t winning all the white votes in New Hampshire. Or in Kentucky.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/05/islamodupes_and_the_clinton-bush-obama_doctrine.html

One underlying common theme in the various versions of the three presidents’ foreign policy doctrines is that Terrorism is un-Islamic.

President Clinton. Address to the Nation, August 20, 1998:

Islam [is] the faith of hundreds of millions of good, peace-loving people all around the world, including the United States. No religion condones the murder of innocent men, women and children. But our actions were aimed at fanatics and killers who wrap murder in the cloak of righteousness; and in so doing, profane the great religion in whose name they claim to act.

President Bush. Address before the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C. September 17, 2001:

The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war. When we think of Islam we think of a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world. Billions of people find comfort and solace and peace. And that’s made brothers and sisters out of every race — out of every race.

President Obama. Responding to a question after his address at Mumbai’s St. Xavier’s college. November 7, 2010.

” … Islam is one of the world’s great religions. More than a billion people practice Islam and an overwhelming majority view their obligations to a religion that reaffirms peace, fairness, tolerance. I think all of us recognize that this great religion in the hands of a few extremists has been distorted by violence,”

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/why-liberals-love-islam?f=puball In my spare moments, which are few and far between, I have often imagined what the ideal socialist-communist utopia envisioned by Progressives and their ilk would be like and how it would function. Over the years I have read various collectivist utopian novels, particularly those that envisioned ideal communist or socialist societies, and dismissed […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obama-runs-away-from-the-war-on-terrorism?f=puball You may not be interested in war, but war may be interested in you.” — Leon Trotsky If you think about the presidents who we remember and honor the most, it is those who faced war and rallied the nation to victory. Our first president, George Washington, sustained the Revolutionary War for eight long […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-university-resistance-movement It was bound to happen. The professoriate has risen in opposition to online education. Philosophy professors at San Jose State University said they refuse to use material from an on-line course taught by Harvard professor, Michael Sandel, for fear administrators were angling to cut departmental expenses. Duke University professors voted against on-line courses by […]