Columnist.
This past Saturday, the New York Times published an article, "Behind Flurry of Killing, Potency of Hate," on the roots of monstrous evil. The article largely concerned a former paramilitary member of the Irish Republican Army, and as such was informative. But when it ventured into a larger discussion of evil, the moral confusion and contempt for America that characterize leftism were on display.
The latest left-wing tactic to discredit conservative views is to dismiss the age and race of conservatives. "Old white males" and "old white people" are the left's latest favored negative epithets for those holding conservative views. Chris Matthews of MSNBC, Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman of the New York Times, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid ("angry old white men") are among the many on the left who have used this epithet.
This past Friday CNN conducted an interview with Richard Dawkins, the British biologist most widely known for his polemics against religion and on behalf of atheism. Asked "whether an absence of religion would leave us without a moral compass," Dawkins responded: "The very idea that we get a moral compass from religion is horrible." This is the crux of the issue for Dawkins and other anti-religion activists -- that not only do we not need religion or God for morality, but we would have a considerably more moral world without them.
With this weekend's massacre by Muslim terrorists at a mall in Nairobi, Kenya, and Muslim terrorists killing about 80 Christians at a Christian church in Pakistan, most people wonder what, if anything in addition to a continuing war on terror, can be done to minimize the scourge of Islamic terror. The answer lies with Muslims themselves. Specifically, it means that Muslim religious leaders around the world must announce that any Muslim who deliberately targets non-combatants for death goes to hell.
In his speech to the nation on Syria last week, the president twice emphasized that America is not the "world's policeman." According to polls, most Americans agree. Unfortunately, however, relinquishing this role assures catastrophe, both for the world and for America. This is easy to demonstrate. Imagine that because of the great financial and human price the mayors and city councils of some major American cities decide that they no longer want to police their cities. Individuals simply have to protect themselves.
Readers are undoubtedly familiar with the various "doctrines" named after American presidents. Those named after James Monroe, Harry Truman and George W. Bush are among the best known. Well, we have a new one, announced this week by Secretary of State John Kerry. It is a new doctrine of war -- so new, in fact, that it is not only new to America; it is new in the annals of military history.
I cannot count the number of times I heard liberal professors and liberal writers quote the phrase: "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." The phrase is brilliant. There is actually no threat to America of fascism coming from the right. The essence of the American right, after all, is less government; and fascism, by definition, demands ever larger government.
A few weeks ago a human-interest story from South Africa was reported internationally. As described in the Wall Street Journal this past Friday: "On Aug. 4, Graham and Sheryl Anley, while yachting off the coast of South Africa, hit a reef, capsizing their boat. As the boat threatened to sink and they scrambled to get off, Sheryl's safety line snagged on something, trapping her there. Instead of freeing his wife and getting her to shore, Graham grabbed Rosie, their Jack Russell terrier. (One media account reported that Sheryl had insisted that the dog go first). With Rosie safe and sound, Graham returned for Sheryl. All are doing fine."
The online magazine Slate announced last week that it will never again refer to the Washington's National Football League team, the Redskins, by its name. The name, according to Slate, offends American Indians, and therefore should be dropped. And until such time, Slate will never mention it. It will become, in effect, the R-word.
In August 2002, a homo sapien known as Ariel Castro abducted 21-year-old Michelle Knight, the mother of a two-year-old boy. In April 2003, he abducted Amanda Berry, a day before her 17th birthday. And in April 2004, he abducted 14-year-old Gina DeJesus. For the next ten years, these girls were regularly raped, kept in chains, beaten, humiliated and almost never allowed to see the light of day. When Michelle Knight became pregnant, Castro starved her for two weeks and kicked and punched her in the stomach to induce an abortion. He repeated this method of pregnancy termination on Knight four additional times.
The George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin issue has been manufactured by the left -- the black left and the white left -- and by the left-wing (mainstream) media. For most Americans, their entire informational and intellectual universe is shaped by the left -- from elementary school through graduate school, and of course, in the news media. They rarely, if ever, encounter non-left viewpoints. As Diana Mutz, a professor of communication and political science at the University of Pennsylvania, has written: "Those with the highest levels of education have the lowest exposure to people with conflicting points of view."
The greatest hope most Americans -- including Republicans -- had when Barack Obama was elected president was that the election of a black person as the country's president would reduce, if not come close to eliminating, the racial tensions that have plagued America for generations. This has not happened. The election, and even the re-election, of a black man as president, in a country that is 87 percent non-black -- a first in human history -- has had no impact on what are called "racial tensions."
Here is what Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution had to say about Egypt's coup in a New York Times op-ed: "Now supporters of the Brotherhood will ask, with good reason, whether democracy still has anything to offer them." As much as I loathe the Muslim Brotherhood and the whole Islamist enterprise, it is difficult to imagine any other response among Islamists than this: Our votes don't count. They were voted into office; many Egyptians and the army didn't like the results, so the vote was overthrown.
If a Martian were to observe the human condition, he would have to conclude that the left has an agenda to deprive children of their innocence. The Martian would have no other explanation for the premature sexualizing of children that the left has engaged in for decades, and which seems to increases almost weekly. The most recent example is the cover of the current issue of the New Yorker, which depicts the Sesame Street characters Bert and Ernie. They are seated on a couch snuggling with Bert's head on Ernie's shoulder watching television. The TV features a picture of the U.S. Supreme Court.
When I was in high school, I went without lunch for a month in order to pay for my first stereo system. When I was in college and graduate school (late '60s and early '70s), my friends and I would brag to each other about the stereo systems we had just purchased. Friends would come over to hear our latest amps, preamps, speakers, record players, and even cartridges and needles.
Last week, in Nice, France, I was privileged to participate, along with 30 scholars, mostly scientists and mathematicians, in a conference on the question of whether the universe was designed, or at least fine-tuned, to make life, especially intelligent life. Participants -- from Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Berkeley and Columbia among other American and European universities -- included believers in God, agonistics and atheists. But it was clear that the scientific consensus was that, at the very least, the universe is exquisitely fine-tuned to allow for the possibility of life. It appears that we live in a "Goldilocks Universe," in which both the arrangement of matter at the cosmic beginning and the values of various physical parameters -- such as the speed of light, the strength of gravitational attraction and the expansion rate of the universe - are just right. And unless one is frightened of the term, it also appears the universe is *designed* for biogenesis and human life.
If you were a Christian minister who was given the opportunity to write an op-ed piece for the Washington Post, what subject would you choose? War and peace? The decline in faith among America's young people? The increasingly empty pews in mainstream Protestant churches? The ethical decline in society? Or any of myriad other morally and religiously troubling issues? Well, not if you were a Methodist minister named James P. Marsh, Jr. For this man of the cloth, the issue troubling him so much that he had to write about in the Washington Post was ... people standing and singing "God Bless America" at Washington National baseball games.
Here is a contemporary political truth: Every time you think that the left and its political party have hit moral bottom, they will eventually prove you wrong. The most recent example occurred last week in Louisiana. The head of the Louisiana Democratic Party, State Senator Karen Carter Peterson, D-New Orleans, stood before her colleagues in the state Senate and announced the reason people oppose Obamacare. "You ready?" she asked three times. It is President Obama's color.
The alleged butcher of the off-duty British soldier, Drummer Lee Rigby, defended his carving up of a living human being by claiming that he was engaging in "an eye for an eye" because the British army is killing Muslims in Afghanistan. Normally there is no reason to respond to the justifications offered by terrorists and other murderers of the innocent. But in this case it is important to do so because much of the Muslim world resonates to this argument and because much of the world's left offers this argument.
