Bookworm Room

Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

@MuslimIQ mis-schools “white supremacist” on question about “Christian ISIS”

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Fifty years of mis-education in American schools culminates when a lawyer provides a laundry list of myths to justify claiming the existence of a Christian ISIS.

Alleged proof of a Christian ISISA couple of days ago, the internet was abuzz with excitement because Qasim Rashid (Twitter name @MuslimIQ), an attorney and Muslim, claiming to have received a Direct Message from a “white supremacist” about the absence of a “Christian ISIS,” gave him a purported laundry list of Christian sins. It’s an impressive list of sins . . . if, as to many of the claims, one is ignorant about history and can be bamboozled with sophistry. Otherwise, well, not so much.

Because Rashid is not alone in his ignorance and, indeed, comes by it quite honestly considering the misinformation floating about, I thought it would be useful to go through the list of his accusations against Christians to correct out-and-out errors and to put factual statements in their proper context. One of the most important contextual points is that ISIS defiantly makes clear that Islam drives its conduct. That is, we’re not talking about bad actors who happen to be Muslim. Instead, we’re talking about Muslims who march under the banner of their faith to justify their bad acts.

Given the ISIS context, for Rashid to have properly rebutted the question about a “Christian ISIS,” he should have returned with examples of Christians who use their faith directly to justify their acts. It’s cheating to identify bad actors who happen to be Christian but whose conduct is not justified by, or in fealty to, their faith.

I’m not trying here to attack Rashid personally. I’m sure he’s a perfectly nice man and a good lawyer. It’s just that he summed up in a small space so many misrepresentations and misunderstandings about Christianity that he provides a perfect framework within which to challenge those errors. Also, I’m not trying to defend horrible things such as the world’s slave trade, the deaths of aboriginal populations around the world, white supremacy, or anything else. I’m just saying that, subject to a few exceptions that can be roughly analogized to Christian versions of ISIS, most of Rashid’s comparisons are inapt.

Having said that, here’s Rashid’s Twitter list, which I’ve broken into segments so as to address each assertion separately. First, to give context, here is Rashid’s own introduction to his DM conversation:

And here’s the subject-by-subject breakdown:

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The Bookworm Beat 9/8/16 — the “my dog is crazy” edition and open thread

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Woman-writing-300x265The older of my two dogs is very high-strung and she got so frightened by the wind that carried the fog in tonight that I’ve had to sequester her and me in my home office so that Mr. Bookworm, who needs to get up for work tomorrow, can sleep. She shows no signs of settling, so I’m blogging.

No matter how you slice it, Trump is the less risky gamble. Writing in the Claremont Review of Books, Publius Decius Mus quite graphically presents the issue that I have been arguing all summer:

2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.

Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

Precisely. Trump, with all his flaws, is better than Hillary. Up until a few months ago, one could argue that Hillary is just another garden-variety Leftist and that the American republic will survive despite her.

That’s all changed now. Knowing as we do of her extraordinary corruption — whether in running the State Department as a Pay-for-Play profit center for herself, her husband, and her daughter, or deliberately exposing all of America’s state secrets to try to hide her gross malfeasance — electing her to the presidency means that America has fully embraced banana republic status.

In the wake of a Hillary victory, thanks to Comey and the American voters (including all those #NeverTrumpers), there will no longer be a rule of law in America that applies equally to all citizens. We will in one fell swoop have destroyed a legal system that goes back 1215 when England first put into writing in the Magna Carta a policy saying that no one, not even a king, is above the law. As of now, Hillary and her cronies are above the law and it will be a disaster if the American people put their imprimatur on that utterly corrupt, anti-democratic principle.

One more thing: As Publius Decius Mus explains, Hillary’s been wrong about every single policy stance she’s ever taken (including the ones where she’s changed her stance repeatedly according to the latest poll data), while Trump, in his fumbling, bumbling way, has been right about all of the most important policy issues facing America. So maybe he’s not so bad after all.

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On taking a stand — when it’s a good thing to the Left and when it’s a bad thing

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To the Left, this is a BAD protest.

To the Left, this is a BAD protest.

Cliven Bundy and his cohorts took a stand against the federal government for its land grabbing behavior in Nevada.  (The federal government controls 81% of Nevada land.) Bundy was and is extremely hostile to the Bureau of Land Management, which he sees as antithetical to state and individual rights under the Constitution. A lot of Americans resonated to the tone he struck in his battle against the government. The Leftist hive, however, was appalled. Mother Jones compared him to Ted Bundy, the infamous serial killer. Harry Reid, who has apparently never come across an actual Islamic terrorist was quick to label Bundy a “domestic terrorist.” Slate castigated him as reckless, lawless, and racist.

Apropos the racism charge, Bundy looks at today’s African-Americans on the Democrat welfare plantation and says that, while they may not work much, the social ills of welfare — the crime, the abortion, the relentless poverty — mean that they’re not necessarily better off than they were when they were actual slaves on physical Democrat-owned plantations. Bundy’s phrasing is infelicitous, but I’ve said much the same; that is, not that slavery was better, but that the Democrats are still destroying black lives in America.

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Stuck on Stupid: Progressive Facebook edition (Part 2)

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facebook-thumbs-downIt’s not a very deep dive to plumb the depths of Leftist intellectual positions on most issues, but it’s still a worthwhile exercise to expose the fallacies that they use to try to dominate the debate on pressing issues — with the most pressing issue being whether to admit Syrian refugees.  The easiest place for me to find examples of Leftist thought is my Facebook feed. Because I’ve spent my life in Blue enclaves, almost all of my friends — and they are really nice people in day-to-day interactions — are Progressives.  It gives me pleasure to deconstruct some of their more foolish or vicious posters:

I have to admit that these first two posters are my favorite “stupid Progressive Facebook” posts.  Because Thanksgiving is coming up, both chide anti-refugee conservatives for forgetting that the first Thanksgiving came about because the indigenous people in North America extended a welcoming hand to European immigrants.

Whenever I’ve seen one of these posters pop up on my Facebook feed, I’ve left a polite comment to the effect that we all learned in public school (thanks to Howard Zinn and others) that the Europeans, once having gotten a foothold in North America, promptly turned around and murdered as many Native Americans as possible. If they couldn’t murder them, they dispossessed them of their land and otherwise marginalized them.  There’s certainly a lesson to be learned here but the lesson isn’t to welcome refugees, it’s to cry out “For God’s sake, don’t let them in!”

Indians refusing pilgrims

Pilgrims should be supportive of immigration

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Two stupid questions in need of intelligent answers

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Question 1: Yesterday, I heard a radio commercial asking listeners to support a college fund for America’s indigenous people (aka American Indians; aka Native Americans). The commercial made the point that most Indians on reservations live in poverty. If the reservations are so poor, why don’t the residents leave? Is it really more important to them to score points against the U.S. government by living on guilt-land than it is to thrive? It’s the same with the Palestinians — the leaders are making a point and the followers are living in squalor. Is there something I’m missing here?

Question 2: Putting aside the fact that there’s nothing to celebrate about having coerced 7 or so million people to buy insurance, why does the Left now claim that Obamacare can no longer be repealed? How complicated is repeal? Isn’t repeal simply the absence of force? You’d be saying “The government won’t force people to buy a product; employers can decide whether it’s to their benefit to offer insurance benefits to their employees; and the insurance companies will once again be able to shape insurance policies according to their company values and profit goals, not according to government diktat. It seems to me that, while implementing has taken years and will take constant effort, undoing it will take no energy at all. It’s like physics. It takes energy to hold the thing together, and entropy will allow it readily to fall apart. Again, is there something I’m missing here?

Is it racist to remind people that the American government first disarmed Native Americans and then decimated them?

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A week or two ago, I put this poster on my site:

Guns in government hands

I think it’s an un-racist poster.  It reminds people that government will always be a minority’s worst enemies.

What I didn’t know was that, in Greeley, Colorado, someone put up a billboard echoing that sentiment:

The friend who sent me this video said exactly the right thing about those who are now crying foul:

I love the premise here: “Pay no attention to history, it may offend someone!”

The appearance of “Indigenous Muslims” at the DNC offends America’s true indigenous people

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Identity politics worked very well for the Democrats for a long time, provided that they played the various little groups off against “white men.”  Barring some in-fighting in academia amongst various “victim” subgroups — a spectacle that Christina Hoff Sommers described to hilarious effect in Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women — Democrats mostly managed adroitly to hide from their interest groups that, if you define the economy as a finite, government-controlled pie, eventually there will not be enough pieces to go around.

Or maybe the Democrats shouldn’t get even that credit.  Because the obsession with identity politics didn’t gain traction until the Reagan years (although it existed before), there was usually enough pie to go around once one had successfully dispossessed those poor white males.  Now, however, despite or because of 3.7 years of Obamanomics, the pie is small and crumbly.  And with that small pie, the allegiances are getting frayed as well.

A friend Servo1969 sent me a link to an interesting post contending that Native Americans have had it up to here and beyond with the Democrat team’s game-playing.  They were offended when it turned out that Elizabeth Warren had parlayed a false (or, at least, incredibly attenuated) Native American heritage into a well-paid legal career.  Now, some are even more peeved, and rightfully so, by the fact that the Democrats are pandering to a Muslim group that identifies itself as representative of “indigenous Muslims”:

Native Americans are very angry to learn that Muslims in the United States of America are being touted as “indigenous”, a complete falsehood.

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Twenty-thousand Islamists and their sympathizers are expected to attend the opening of the Democratic National Convention on August 31 [BW:  It’s actually September 4 to September 6] to focus on Islam with Jumah[sic], the Friday prayer, to draw in Muslims to the DNC. The important prayer and two days of events are being coordinated by the Bureau of Indigenous Muslim Affairs (BIMA), a national Muslim non-profit claiming that the event is non-political. Being a part of the actual convention makes it pretty hard to claim that it isn’t a political event. The initials BIMA quickly caught my attention because I’m keyed in to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the agency that my husband works closely with in his capacity as Director of Security for an Indian casino. I was appalled when I went to the BIMA website and saw the words “Indigenous Muslim.”

The word “indigenous” is a term of art.  It does not mean that someone is born within a country’s borders.  Instead, it refers, always, to the original people who populated a country before an imperialist force (Western or Eastern) took over.  One can have American-born Muslims, but there are no “indigenous Muslims.”  It’s either foolish, disingenuous, or dishonest for Muslims to try to parlay their non-white status into a simulacrum of the United States’ true Native American population.

Lesson to Democrats:  You can successfully complain about pie allocation when there’s lots of pie.  If you destroy the pie, however, you may regret trying to slice it into so many different pieces.

UPDATE:  As you can see, I substituted “Servo1969” for “A friend.”  I mention that here because, if people send me emails with information, I always ask people’s permission before using their name in a post.  When I wrote the post, I hadn’t yet confirmed that Servo1969 wouldn’t mind showing up in here.

Elizabeth Warren’s “minority status” certainly goes a long way to explaining her career trajectory

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I had some brilliant teachers when I was at law school in Texas.  Elizabeth Warren was not among their number.  While she knew her stuff, her disjointed, elliptical communication style made her one of the poorer teachers I’ve had during my 20 years as student (from kindergarten through my J.D.).  I’ve always said that she was a nice lady (never mean or cutting to students), but teaching was not her skill.

I didn’t follow Warren’s career after she left Texas, so I was unaware that she had moved on to Harvard.  I learned that only recently, when the Obama election caused her to become a player on the national scene.  By then, I was so focused on what she was saying or doing, that it didn’t occur to me to ask how the heck she got to Harvard.  After all, she really wasn’t “all that.”

Now that the news has broken that she falsely claimed minority status based upon her alleged 3% (or may 1.5%) drop of Native American, her Harvard employment makes sense.  Harvard needed a Native American law professor — and there Warren was.

I realize that Warren’s coming out as a race hustler is somewhat stale news, but my history with her popped into my mind when I read Alana Goodman’s little summary of the effect Warren’s lies are having on her campaign:

The growing narrative about Warren, on the other hand, is that she’s an ivory tower liberal with some shady character flaws. This latest Trail of Tears development also makes her something of a punchline, similar to how Coakley became a running joke after she cluelessly claimed former Red Sox pitcher and Brown supporter Curt Schilling was a Yankee fan. While the Coakley’s meltdown happened shortly before Election Day, Warren still has time to repair her image. But her window of opportunity is quickly closing, and the drip-drip of details like this will make it difficult for her to turn things around.

Reading that made me realize that her shady days go back a long time, and have propelled her forward on a body of lies.

How America’s classrooms celebrate Columbus Day

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We used to view ourselves as a shining City on the Hill, a nation that hadn’t always done right but that, more than any other nation, had changed the world’s concept of liberty — and that in the last century had saved more people from tyranny than any other nation in the history of human kind.

Our children, however, are simply taught that Western culture is an evil that destroyed perfect indigenous people.  Columbus is the perfect scapegoat for this world view.

I’m all for a nuanced view of history.  Teaching that humans are saints is always a mistake — and that’s true whether you’re trying to create plaster saints out of explorer’s or Native Americans.  Yes, the explorer’s were often brutal by today’s lights and they were certainly avaricious.  They were also brave, creative, innovative, ignorant of the dangers they carried with them in terms of disease, and many, especially the priests, acted out of a genuine belief that they were bringing a light around the world.  And yes, the Indians suffered an invasion of their enclosed world; yes, they lost their land; and yes, diseases decimated them.  But that overlooks the fact that they couldn’t have lived in a hermetically sealed bubble forever, and that no one understood germ theory in those days.  As to land loss, yes, that was a tragedy, although perhaps inevitable with a 90% decimation rate from the bacteria the Westerners never knew they carried with them.

But the Indians were also real people.  Some were helpless, hapless souls, but these souls had long been victims of other Native American tribes, even before the explorers came.  Indeed, many were delighted that the explorers had come, because they saw these armed men on horseback as a way to level the playing field.  Some tribes were vicious killers (even cannibals), some were just go-along-to-get-along people.  Their reverence for nature sprang in part because they lived closely with nature and in part because, as stone age people, they were unable to dominate nature as the westerners did.  When they had the ability to destroy, they did (as many of the Plains tribes did with their overwhelmingly wasteful buffalo hunts, which saw them drive hundreds and thousands off of cliffs).

When cultures clash, it’s rare for them to integrate and live in harmony.  One wins, and one loses.  Some cultures and conquerors are more evil than others, and some are simply more powerful.  All are products of their time.  And it’s utterly stupid for our school systems to try to pretend that the explorers were the respositories of all the world’s evil, while the Native Americans were saints on earth — pretty much virgin souls waiting to be sacrificed.  That’s a stupid and boring way to teach.