In Search of the ‘Moderate Islamists’

The Muslim Brotherhood is the best Obama can do. 

By Andrew C. McCarthy

http://www.nationalreview.com/

September 15, 2014

Fighters with Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is not out of ignorance that President Obama and Secretary Kerry are denying the Islamic roots of the Islamic State jihadists. As I argued in a column here last week, we should stop scoffing as if this were a blunder and understand the destructive strategy behind it. The Obama administration is quite intentionally promoting the progressive illusion that “moderateIslamists” are the solution to the woes of the Middle East, and thus that working cooperatively with “moderate Islamists” is the solution to America’s security challenges.

I wrote a book a few years ago called The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America that addressed this partnership between Islamists and progressives. The terms “grand jihad” and “sabotage” are lifted from an internal Muslim Brotherhood memorandum that lays bare the Brotherhood’s overarching plan to destroy the West from within by having their component organizations collude with credulous Western governments and opinion elites.

The plan is going well.

As long as the news media and even conservative commentators continue to let them get away with it, the term “moderate Islamist” will remain useful to transnational progressives. It enables them to avoid admitting that the Muslim Brotherhood is what they have in mind.

As my recent column explained, the term “moderate Islamist” is an oxymoron. AnIslamist is a Muslim who wants repressive sharia imposed. There is nothing moderate about sharia even if the Muslim in question does not advocate imposing it by violence.

Most people do not know what the term “Islamist” means, so the contradiction is not apparent to them. If they think about it at all, they figure “moderate Islamist” must be just another way of saying “moderate Muslim,” and since everyone acknowledges that there are millions of moderate Muslims, it seems logical enough. Yet, all Muslims are not Islamists. In particular, all Muslims who support the Western principles of liberty and reason are not Islamists.

If you want to say that some Islamists are not violent, that is certainly true. But that does not make them moderate. There is, moreover, less to their nonviolence than meets the eye. Many Islamists who do not personally participate in jihadist aggression support violent jihadists financially and morally — often while feigning objection to their methods or playing semantic games (e.g., “I oppose terrorism but I support resistance,” or “I oppose the killing of innocent people . . . but don’t press me on who is an innocent”).

Understandably, the public is inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to people the government describes as “moderates” and portrays as our “allies.” If transnational progressives were grilled on these vaporous terms, though, and forced to concede, say, that the Muslim Brotherhood was the purportedly “moderate opposition” our government wants to support in Syria, the public would object. While not expert in the subject, many Americans are generally aware that the Brotherhood supports terrorism, that its ideology leads young Muslims to graduate to notorious terrorist organizations, and that it endorses oppressive Islamic law while opposing the West. Better for progressives to avoid all that by one of their dizzying, internally nonsensical word games — hence, “moderate Islamist.”

I rehearse all that because last week, right on cue, representatives of Brotherhood-tied Islamist organizations appeared with Obama-administration officials and other apologists for Islamic supremacism to ostentatiously “condemn” the Islamic State as “not Islamic.”

As I recount with numerous examples in The Grand Jihad, this is the manipulative double game the Brotherhood has mastered in the West, aided and abetted by progressives of both parties. While speaking to credulous Western audiences desperate to believe Islam is innately moderate, the Brothers pretend to abhor terrorism, claim that terrorism is actually “anti-Islamic,” and threaten to brand you as an “Islamophobe” racist — to demagogue you in the media, ban you from the campus, and bankrupt you in court — if you dare to notice the nexus between Islamic doctrine and systematic terrorism committed by Muslims. Then, on their Arabic sites and in the privacy of their mosques and community centers, they go back to preaching jihad, championing Hamas, calling for Israel’s destruction, damning America, inveighing against Muslim assimilation in the West, and calling for society’s acceptance of sharia mores.

The Investigative Project’s John Rossomando reports on last Wednesday’s shenanigans at the National Press Club. The Islamist leaders who “urged the public to ignore [the Islamic State’s] theological motivations,” included “former Council on American-Islamic Affairs (CAIR) Tampa director Ahmed Bedier, [who] later wrote on Twitter that IS [the Islamic State] ‘is not a product of Islam,’ and blamed the United States for its emergence.”

Also on hand were moderate moderator Haris Tarin, Washington director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC); Imam Mohamed Magid, former president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA); and Johari Abdul-Malik, an imam at the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Va. All of these Islamists are consultants to the Obama administration on policy matters; Magid is actually a member Obama’s Homeland Security Advisory Council.

Where to begin? CAIR, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out, is a Muslim Brotherhood creation conceived to be a Western-media-savvy shill for Islamic supremacism in general, and Hamas in particular. At the 2007–08 terrorism-financing prosecution of Hamas operatives in the Holy Land Foundation case — involving a Brotherhood conspiracy that funneled millions of dollars to Palestinian jihadists — CAIR was proven to be a co-conspirator, albeit unindicted. Mr. Bedier, who is profiled by the Investigative Project here, is a notorious apologist for Hamas — the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, which is formally designated as a terrorist organization under U.S. law. He also vigorously championed such terrorists as Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s Sami al-Arian (who pled guilty in 2006 to conspiring to provide material support to terrorism).

I’ve profiled MPAC here. It was founded by disciples of Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna and champions of both Hezbollah and the Sudanese Islamists who gave safe-haven to al-Qaeda during the mid Nineties. After the atrocities of September 11, 2001, MPAC’s executive director, Salam al-Marayati, immediately urged that “we should put the state of Israel on the suspect list.” Without a hint of irony, MPAC’s main business is condemning irrational suspicion . . . the “Islamophobia” it claims Muslims are systematically subjected to. Like many CAIR operatives and other purveyors of victim politics, MPAC officials tend to double as Democratic-party activists.

Magid’s organization, ISNA, is the most important Muslim Brotherhood organization in the United States. I have profiled it in these pages a number oftimes. As detailed in The Grand Jihad, it is the Islamist umbrella organization that traces its origins to the Muslim Students Association, the foundation of the Brotherhood’s American infrastructure.

The MSA, which indoctrinates students in the jihadist-lauding works of Banna and Sayid Qutb, has not surprisingly been the launch point for several prominent terrorists — Patrick Poole provides the scorecard here, which includes al-Qaeda founder Wael Julaidan; al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki; al Qaeda financier and Hamas/Hezbollah champion Abdurrahman Alamoudi; and Aafia Siddiqui, the notorious “Lady al-Qaeda” who was captured apparently plotting a terror rampage targeting New York City, who attempted to murder as U.S. Army captain while in custody, and whose release the Islamic State has been demanding. (Other MSA alumni include ousted Egyptian president and Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi, and top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin.)

I profiled the Dar al-Hijrah mosque and Johari Abdul-Malik, one of its very interesting imams, in both The Grand Jihad and a 2010 column. At a 2001 conference hosted by the Islamic Association of Palestine — an organization the Muslim Brotherhood established to promote Hamas in the United States — Abdul Malik advised that Muslims could “blow up bridges” and “do all forms of sabotage” as long as they avoided “kill[ing] people who are innocent on their way to work.” As he works to make Islam “the dominant way of life” in America (as he put it in a Friday “sermon” in 2004), he shrugs off the mosque’s history of praising violent jihad, comparing jihadist “martyrs” to the United States Marines.

One of the founders of Dar al-Hijrah was Ismail Elbarasse, a Muslim Brotherhood operative who was a friend and business partner of Mousa abu Marzook — a high Hamas official who, before being deported, actually ran that terrorist organization from his Virginia home. It was from Elbarasse’s home that the FBI seized the 1991 Brotherhood memo from which I derived the title of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America — a document in which the Brotherhood described its “work in America” as

a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers, so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions. 

Dar al-Hijrah’s imams and board members have included a who’s who of the jihad:

Anwar al-Awlaki, the aforementioned al-Qaeda operative;

Mohammed al-Hanooti, a former Islamic Association of Palestine leader and major Hamas fundraiser;

Mohammed Adam El-Sheikh, a founder of the Muslim American Society (the Brotherhood’s quasi-official presence in the U.S.) who ran the Baltimore office of the Islamic American Relief Agency until that charity was shut down by the Treasury Department for supporting al-Qaeda;

Abdelhaleem Asquar, serving a federal prison sentence for obstructing an investigation of Hamas’s American support network;

Samir Salah, who helped Osama bin Laden’s nephew set up another charity (Taiba International Aid Association) that was shut down for bankrolling terrorism;

Esam Omeish, a Democrat who was forced to resign from a state-government immigration panel after the emergence of videos showing his praise for “the jihad way” against Israel.

With such a cast of characters, the mosque has predictably attracted some notorious attendees, including the aforementioned terrorists Marzook and Alamoudi; Nidal Hasan, the jihadist who murdered 13 American soldiers at Fort Hood; Omar Abu Ali, the one-time valedictorian at Virginia’s Islamic Saudi Academy who is now serving a life sentence after joining al-Qaeda and conspiring to murder President George W. Bush; and 9/11 suicide hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Hani Hanjour — Awlaki’s ofttimes companions whose presence cannot be all that surprising since an al-Hijrah Islamic Center phone number was found in the Hamburg apartment shared by 9/11 ringleaders Mohammed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shibh.

By appearing with leaders of Dar al-Hijrah, ISNA, MPAC, and CAIR, the Obama administration and its allies are telling us that these purportedly “moderate Islamists” are the allies America needs to defeat the Islamic State.

Seriously?

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book is Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.

The War at Home

Posted By Robert Spencer On September 15, 2014 @ 12:24 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 1 Comment

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

Ali Muhammad Brown pleads not guilty in the murder of Brendan Tevlin at the Essex County Court House in Newark, N.J., on Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2014. Brown is one of three suspects charged in the death of Brendan Tevlin on the night of June 25. Tevlin was a student at the University of Richmond. Brown was wanted by police in Seattle in the shooting deaths of two young men. He faces aggravated murder charges there and could face the death penalty if convicted. (Frances Micklow)


As the Islamic State beheads a third hostage and the world recoils in horror and reassures itself that all this has nothing to do with Islam, it is useful to remember that jihad activity continues in the United States – although hardly anyone notices amid the rush to dissociate Islam from the mounting violence committed in its name and in accord with its literal teachings.

Take, for example, a Muslim from Seattle, Ali Muhammad Brown. KING 5 News reported that Brown is “currently in jail on $5 million bail for the alleged murder of a college student in late June.” He has “already been charged with gunning down two men at 29th and King Street in Seattle’s Leschi neighborhood on June 1.” And he is “now the prime suspect in a fourth homicide.”

The report noted laconically in its fifth paragraph, without elaboration, that “multiple sources with knowledge of the investigation say Brown told police he carried out the murders because he was on a jihad to kill Americans.” NJ.com added, also deep in its story on Brown’s murders: “Prosecutors say Brown is a devout Muslim who had become angered by U.S. military intervention in the Islamic world, which he referred to as ‘evil.”

That report also noted: “Ali Muhammad Brown said he considered it his mission to murder 19-year-old Brendan Tevlin as an act of ‘vengeance’ for innocent lives lost in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Iran. ‘All these lives are taken every single day by America, by this government. So a life for a life.’” This is a reference to the Qur’an: “We ordained therein for them: ‘Life for life, eye for eye, nose or nose, ear for ear, tooth for tooth, and wounds equal for equal’” (5:45).

New York radio host Todd Pettengill, host of WPLJ’s “The Todd Show,” said that Brown’s murder of Tevlin was evidence that “domestic terrorism is already here.” Pettengill declared: “It was in fact an act of jihad, perpetrated by a fellow American who sympathized more with those who want to annihilate us than with his own country and its people.”

Pettengill is right. Domestic terrorism is indeed already here. And it was here before Ali Muhammad Brown went on his killing spree. Another Muslim from Seattle, Musab Mohamed Masmari, was sentenced on July 31 to ten years in prison for pouring gasoline onto a stairway in a famous gay nightclub, Neighbours, and setting the stairway on fire last New Year’s Eve, when the club was crowded. If the fire had not been put out – the carnage would have been great.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Todd Greenberg said: “One of Masmari’s close associates was interviewed by investigators and reported that Masmari confided in him that he ‘burned a gay club’ and that he did it because ‘what these people are doing is wrong.’” In another report from February, we learn that an informant told the FBI before this attack that Masmari could be planning “terrorist activity,” and that he had “opined that homosexuals should be exterminated.”

This incident should have been the impetus for a national discussion of violent Sharia enforcement in the U.S., and an examination of what could be done to stop Sharia vigilantism. Instead, the mainstream media largely ignored the obvious motive; in this report, it is discussed as “homophobia,” with no hint that this was one of the first incidents of violent Sharia enforcement in the U.S.

There are many more recent domestic terrorism cases as well. In mid-June, a Tampa Muslim named Sami Osmakac was convicted of plotting to bomb a Tampa bar and then blow himself up in a jihad-martyrdom suicide attack in another crowded area of the city. Osmakac said of non-Muslims: “We will go after every one of them, their kindergartens, their shopping centers, their nightclubs, their police stations, their courthouses and everything until we have an Islamic state the whole world.” Shades of “slay them wherever you find them” (cf. Qur’an 2:191; 4:89; 9:5).

Then there was Ahmed Abassi, who, according to the New York Post, wanted to derail a New York-to-Toronto Amtrak train. He also discussed with another jihad terrorist “a plot to release bacteria in the air or water to kill up to 100,000 people.” He was also, according to Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara, plotting to “commit acts of terror and develop a network of terrorists here” in the U.S.

Abassi could have gotten fifty years in prison, but he “avoided terrorism charges by pleading guilty in Manhattan federal court to lying on his visa application and to immigration officials when asked why he flew to the United States in 2013.” Consequently, he could soon be a free man. What could possibly go wrong?

And let’s not forget Mufid Elfgeeh, a Muslim businessman from Rochester, New York. AP reported on June 2 that Mufid Elfgeeh “bought two handguns and the silencers as part of a plan to kill members of the U.S. armed forces returning from war as well as Shiite Muslims in western New York.”
AP, as anxious as Barack Obama or David Cameron to absolve Islam of responsibility for the evils done in its name, explained that Elfgeeh (like Ali Muhammad Brown) was plotting to kill troops “as vengeance for American actions overseas.” So why did he want to kill Shi’ites as well? As vengeance for Iran being a bitter enemy of his bitter enemy, the U.S.? Obviously Elfgeeh is a Sunni Islamic jihadist who wants to kill members of groups that he considers to be enemies of Islam. But AP will never tell you that.

The war is not just in Iraq and Syria (and Nigeria, and Thailand, and the Philippines, and Afghanistan, and Israel, and Egypt, and on and on). It is in the United States already. That war is the Islamic jihad against the West and the free world. There will be many more men like Ali Muhammad Brown and Musab Mohamed Masmari in the United States in the coming years. Actions like theirs will one day, not too long from now, be a more or less daily occurrence in the United States. But no need to be concerned: just remember, when things get really hot, that all this has nothing to do with Islam.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.

Subscribe to Frontpage’s TV show, The Glazov Gang, and LIKE it on Facebook.

---

Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://www.frontpagemag.com

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/robert-spencer/the-war-at-home/

Scotland’s epic vote on independence from the United Kingdom

By George F. Will

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions

September 12, 2014

'Yes' campaign activist Lloyd Quinan paints campaign posters in an office in Edinburgh September 11, 2014.The referendum on Scottish independence will take place on September 18, when Scotland will vote whether or not to end the 307-year-old union with the rest of the United Kingdom. (Paul Hackett/Reuters)

Tucking into a dish of Scottish haggis is not a task for the fainthearted. There are various haggis recipes, but basically it is sheep’s pluck — the heart, lungs and liver — cooked together, then mixed with suet and oatmeal and boiled in a sheep’s stomach, then served, sometimes drenched with Scotch. People who pour whisky on oatmeal are not shrinking violets. Remember this on Thursday when Scotland votes on independence from the United Kingdom.

There are economic reasons for and (mostly) against Scotland disassociating from the queen’s realm. This issue, however, touches chords of memory more interesting than money.

In “The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century,” Cambridge University historian David Reynolds notes that World War I, a breaker of empires and maker of nations, quickened interest in nationalism and the nature of nationhood, especially the distinction between a civic nation and an ethnic nation: The former is “a community of laws, institutions, and citizenship,” whereas an ethnic nation is “a community of shared descent, rooted in language, ethnicity, and culture.” France embodied civic nationalism, forged by its revolution; Germany, “steeped in Romantic conceptions of the Volk ,” exemplified ethnic nationalism.

The United States is a civic nation because it is a creedal nation — founded, as Jefferson said, on “truths” deemed “self-evident,” and dedicated, as Lincoln said, to a “proposition” (that all are created equal). Scotland is largely an ethnic nation, and whether Scots opt for or against independence, the continued vitality of their national sentiments testifies to the ability of differences to resist homogenization by the commercial and cultural forces of modernity.

Even after its parliament was dissolved in 1707, Reynolds writes, Scotland retained its separate educational and legal systems and an established Presbyterian church. Reynolds says that “to subsume conflicting ethnicities” and foster national unity among Britain’s components — the English (three-quarters of the U.K.’s 1910 population), Welsh, Irish and Scots — an ideology of “Britishness” was cultivated by means such as the cult of Lord Nelson and adoption of “God Save the King” as the national anthem.

But by the end of the 19th century, Reynolds says, there was a “backlash against Britishness.” In Scotland, the poet Robert Burns and the medieval warrior William Wallace became cult figures, and in May 1913 a Scottish home-rule bill was introduced in the House of Commons. Then the war came.

And what Reynolds calls “the crisis of Britishness” receded. Scotland boomed (its coal, steel and shipbuilding) and bled: It had, Reynolds says, the U.K.’s “highest rate of army volunteering” — one in six British soldiers was a Scot — and “the highest death rate among those who enlisted.” The war that followed the war to end war kept Scottish nationalism tamped down. “Only from the late 1960s,” writes Reynolds, “when Germany was no longer a threat, did the English Other become a bogey again and Scottish and Welsh nationalism start to revive as serious political movements.”

The 19th was a century of national consolidations — in the United States, Italy (the Risorgimento under Cavour), Germany (Bismarck hammered together numerous principalities and other entities) and Belgium, which was invented from various odds and ends. The 20th century, however, brought the breakup of empires — the British, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian and then Soviet empires. The disintegrative impulse continues in, among other places, Spain, where Catalonians are asserting their particularities as Basques have long done.

Were Scotland now to become a sovereign nation, as it was until 1603, it would have a GDP ranking 16th among what would then be the 29 nations of the European Union (just behind Ireland and ahead of the Czech Republic) and would be the 20th-most populous. And the United Kingdom would have to redesign its flag, the Union Jack.

It is a composite of three crosses of the nations united under one sovereign — Scotland, Ireland (since 1921, Northern Ireland) and the united kingdoms of England and Wales. The cross of St. George, England’s patron saint (the Catholic Church has demoted him, perhaps partly because of doubts about the dragon-slaying), is a red cross on a white ground. The cross of St. Patrick, Ireland’s patron saint, is a diagonal red cross on a white ground. The cross of St. Andrew, Scotland’s patron saint, is a diagonal white cross on a blue ground.

Scotland’s Royal Arms banner, emblazoned with a lion rampant, flies over Balmoral Castle when the queen is not there. Which means it could be usedeven more after Thursday.

Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.

Read more about this topic:

Fareed Zakaria: Identity, not ideology, is moving the world

George Robertson: Scotland secession could lead to re-Balkanization of Europe

The Post’s View: Scottish independence vote is part of worrying trend

Alex Salmond: Why an independent Scotland deserves U.S. support

Today's Tune: U2 - The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone) - Live Apple 2014

On first take, the latest U2 album still offers grace

The band’s latest release is theologically rich, though subtler than its earlier work.

By Steven Harmon

http://www.abpnews.com/

September 11, 2014

I’d told myself I wouldn’t do it this time.

Writing a theological review of the latest U2 album has been de rigueur for me since offering my two cents on How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. With increasingly credible rumors pointing to the release of the next album this fall (while I’m deep in the midst of a writing project about the “pilgrim church” character of the Baptist ecclesiological vision in relation to the ecumenical future), I’d decided to enjoy listening to whatever the band released but excuse myself from the self-imposed expectation to publish something about it.

Then I made the mistake of intermittently watching the live stream of Apple’s Sept. 9 product launch for its iPhone 6 and Apple Watch to see how the rumored U2 involvement in that event would unfold. After my son’s annual well-child appointment with his pediatrician that day, I checked back just in time to hear Bono sing “... and we were pilgrims on our way ….”

Here I go again, the morning after Bono announced that I and a half-billion other iTunes account holders had freely received U2’s 13th studio album Songs of Innocence among our recent “purchases.”

“The Miracle (of Joey Ramone),” the opening track and the single U2 debuted at the Apple product launch, segues thematically from the previous album’s integrative motif of the divine song. Grace is still to be found inside a sound on Songs of Innocence, but stylistically there’s a lot more loose electricity running around this time.

And that’s a good thing. Given the nature of the album release and the band’s expressions of disappointment that the previous album’s songs hadn’t gained much traction on the charts and airwaves, I was worried that the new songs might sacrifice creativity to the constraints of commercially successful pop. Halfway through the second track I did remark to my wife that so far this was the most radio-friendly thing they’ve done in a while. But that judgment was premature. The first four songs are obvious candidates for release as singles and service as stadium sing-alongs, but even in those songs there’s a sophisticated complexity well beyond ordinary radio fare.

It’s theologically rich as well, though in some more subtle ways than much of their other work.

This time we still get the occasional overt biblical allusion (e.g., “your Hill of Calvary” in “Song for Someone”). But the Songs of Innocence are more broadly rooted in the presupposed narrative of the Christian story with which the band had a transformative encounter during the volcanic collision of adolescence with adult awareness.

This isn’t new thematic material for the band. U2’s first album Boy (1980) was the firsthand document of those years. How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (2004) was the nostalgic, more pop-friendly take on their innocence from the perspective of maturity a quarter-century later. Despite what the title might suggest, Songs of Innocence is actually the nittier, grittier account of its subject matter.

It begins with a multivalent song about this intersection of narratives. At one level, “The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)” recounts the joyous discovery of the music of the Ramones and the life-changing new world it opened up for these Mount Temple Comprehensive School students. Or is it about another sort of miracle? Or both?

I woke up at the moment when the miracle occurred / Heard a song that made some sense out of the world / Everything I ever lost, now has been returned / In the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard

We hear more about that other sort of miracle on “Cedarwood Road,” a reference to the street of Bono’s boyhood home. A cherry blossom tree stood in front of another house on the street belonging to the family of a friend that belonged to a Plymouth Brethren fellowship that attracted Bono, The Edge and Larry Mullen Jr. to its Bible studies. In the digital liner notes for the album, Bono writes, “In their company I saw some great preachers who opened up these scary black Bibles and made the word of God dance for them, and us. … One minute you’re reading it, next minute you’re in it” (HT to Beth Maynard for calling attention to that on day one).

You can’t return to where you’ve never left / Blossoms falling from a tree they cover you and cover me / Symbols clashing, bibles smashing / Paint the world you need to see

The vision of the world this album paints isn’t all sweetness and light. “The Miracle” recognized that the God-given-but-fallen human religious impulse can yield both “love and hate,” and “Raised by Wolves” observes regarding an act of religious terrorism in 1974 Dublin that “the worst things in the world are justified by belief.”

Another song, “Sleep Like a Baby Tonight,” is directly aimed at ecclesiastical officials responsible for the Irish chapter in the clergy sex abuse scandal (highlighted coincidentally by the recently released Irish film Calvary). Yet the darkness of that song is set within a broader narrative that offers possibilities for redemption:

Hope is where the door is / When the church is where the war is / Where no one can feel no one else’s pain

In other words: when there is openness and transparency instead of secrecy and control, when the church joins God in solidarity with those who suffer the world’s many forms of violence (liberation theology, anyone?), and when the church joins God in sympathetic recognition of victims’ pain (in contrast to an ecclesiastical response of apatheia modeled by an impassible deity), then there is hope for another order of things.

There are many more lyrics that I’m going to pondering for some time to come, like this one from “California”:

There’s no end to grief / That’s how I know … that there is no end to love

Others will discover and write about the theological nuggets scattered throughout the album and will do so more perceptively, completely and eloquently than I have in this quickly-written account of my first impressions. After all, there are at least a half-billion other pilgrims on their way out there who now have the opportunity to hear the same things.

OPINION: Views expressed in ABPnews/Herald columns and commentaries are solely those of the authors.

Tagged under: Steven R. Harmon U2 Music

print this storyemail this story

Steven Harmon

Steven Harmon is Adjunct Professor of Christian Theology at the Gardner-Webb University School of Divinity in Boiling Springs, N.C. He is the author of Ecumenism Means You, Too: Ordinary Christians and the Quest for Christian Unity (Cascade Books) and a contributor to the ABPNews Blog.

Indoctrination by ESPN

For the Left, the Ray Rice episode is an opportunity to “reprogram the way we raise men.” 

By Andrew C. McCarthy

http://www.nationalreview.com/

September 13, 2014

Ray Rice #27 of the Baltimore Ravens runs the ball against linebacker James Harrison #92 and cornerback Bryant McFadden #20 of the Pittsburgh Steelers during the AFC championship game on January 18, 2009 at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images) 

If conservatives want to know why we are losing the culture and the country, it is important to understand that while very few kids and young adults are watching Fox News (or news programs of any kind, for that matter), they inhale sports programming. It’s ubiquitous — television, radio, the Internet. And thus equally unavoidable is sports commentary, more and more of which has less and less to do with sports. Tendentious “sports journalists,” the majority of whom are decidedly left of center, are much less guarded about their hostility to conservatives than their fellow progressives on the political beat. It is a hostility that takes for granted the chummy agreement of its viewers and is designed to make Millennials want to be part of the fun.

This week, the big national news is a sports story. It involves Ray Rice. The star running-back was cut by the Baltimore Ravens after video surfaced showing him punching his now-wife’s lights out in an Atlantic City casino elevator. The National Football League and its commissioner, Roger Goodell, are in the hot seat because, some allege, the NFL had the video before suspending Rice for a measly two games. Logically, the video shouldn’t matter: The commissioner clearly knew Rice had knocked Janay Palmer out cold before issuing the trifling suspension. But graphic video has a way of overrunning logic.

My purpose here is less to wade into the Rice mess than to consider how radical ideas — like the Left’s war on boys — get mainstreamed.

Let’s say the New York Times published, or CNN aired, a fawning news story about tribal politics and Alinsky-style community organizing — how the Left uses (and often manufactures) crises to shake down big corporations, the payoffs from which pour into the coffers of “grass-roots community groups” (i.e., left-wing grievance activists such as ACORN and Al Sharpton’s National Action Network), underwriting their promotion of the “social justice” agenda in schools and the media. Big deal, right? Such stories are standard mainstream-media fare, and very few impressionable young people see them.

But what if the news story was not ostensibly political? And what if it was not published in news media but in entertainment programming — say, a hip sports show, slipped into the mix between the top plays of last night’s ballgames?

On Friday, after highlights of the previous night’s game between the hometown Ravens and the Pittsburgh Steelers, ESPN’s Sports Center reported, incredulously, that many female Ravens fans proudly wore their No. 27 jerseys in homage to Rice. Although this week’s coverage made him Public Enemy No. 1, it turns out that Rice is still quite popular among fans in Baltimore. One woman, clad in her Rice jersey, explained that while she did not condone his behavior, Rice had said he was sorry and was deserving of a second chance, just like other people who have done abominable things. It was a mitigating factor, in her view, that Ms. Palmer (now Mrs. Rice) had started the fight, and that the muscular professional football player was simply retaliating.

A second female Rice fan conceded that there was no excuse for the running back’s violent aggression, but contended that it was for the legal system, not the NFL, to punish him. Since prosecutors allowed Rice to enter a rehab program in anticipation of dismissing the case, rather than face a criminal conviction and prison sentence, she reasoned that the NFL should have let it go at that.

Is she right? Personally, I think a private organization like the Ravens or the NFL should have its own, loftier standards of conduct. A business is well within its rights to demand more of its employees than that they merely avoid criminality.

That said, however, the common assumption that Rice got a comparative slap on the wrist from the legal system is dubious. State prosecutors insist that he got the same deal any first-offender would have gotten. As a former federal prosecutor, I suspect that is true. Rice expressed contrition; the victim married him and ardently supports him; he is apparently complying with the rehab terms; and, unlike the vast majority of similarly situated defendants, his offense is going to cost him millions of dollars in lost salary and advertising income. Am I trivializing domestic violence? Are the state prosecutors? I don’t think so. Police and prosecutors must assess Rice’s case in the context of all domestic-violence cases involving men beating women. Unfortunately, many of them are far worse than Rice’s offense and involve serious recidivist offenders. It is certainly possible that he got special treatment because he is a celebrity, but that can also cut the other way.

In any event, I was surprised that ESPN gave airtime to the Rice supporters. The progressive soap-opera storyline of the Rice coverage is that our aggressive, competitive culture, which has made the NFL so popular, desensitizes men to the gravity of domestic violence; that women are uniformly outraged by this state of affairs; and that football and the men who play it must be tamed. ESPN is a prominent author of this particular narrative, so one wouldn’t expect coverage of women who dissent from it.

I should have figured, though, that the segment was just a set-up for what followed: a lengthy editorial interview with Kate Fagan. A former college basketball player, Ms. Fagan is now, yes, a sports journalist. Author of a memoir The Reappearing Act: Coming Out as Gay on a College Basketball Team Led by Born-Again Christians, she is a staple at ESPN-W. That’s where the network focuses on women in sports and, seamlessly, on political and social matters that the Left has successfully branded “women’s issues.”

For the politically aware, listening to Kate Fagan is a lot like listening to President Obama or any other deft community organizer. She first invoked tribal politics in refusing — or at least making a show of refusing — to rebut the female Ravens fans who sympathize with Rice. That, she said, would be “pitting women against women” — a no-no. She then skillfully lowered the boom: The problem is not Rice’s cheerleaders; it is our “culture.”

Those women, you see, are really victims of insidious bourgeois attitudes inculcated by the education system. Our task, therefore, is not to condemn them for being so wrong but to ask ourselves, “Why is this issue not as black and white as it should be?” Translation: Why is something so obvious to thoughtful progressives like Ms. Fagan so elusive to the riff-raff in their Rice jerseys?

So what’s the answer? Ms. Fagan opined that people should stop focusing so much on whether Commissioner Roger Goodell should get fired or how long Rice’s suspension should be. That’s too “reactive,” and Fagan says it’s time to be “pro-active.”

How? By working to undo our “culture” of “raising men to want to not be like women,” a culture that tolerates the teasing of boys who “throw like a girl.” The way to do that, she said, was to “hold the NFL’s feet to the fire” until the league ponies up “millions of dollars” for a domestic-violence fund. The extorted treasure would then be doled out to grass-roots community organizations, who could then send their trained experts to middle schools, high schools, and colleges. Boys would be instructed that differentiating men from women breeds domestic violence.

As Fagan put it, the goal must be“reprogramming how we raise men.” That, she said, is how we’re finally going to get — all together now — “change.”

Through all of this, the ESPN anchor played the role of amen-corner, not interviewer. There was no suggestion that the women clad in Rice jerseys might have some valid points — it was simply accepted that they were well-meaning simpletons who, like schoolboys, need “deprogramming.” There was no hint that football as a sport, and the NFL as an institution, might not be drivers of domestic violence — that while the culture bears responsibility, the problem might have a lot more to do with the breakdown of the family, the scorn heaped on chivalry, the disappearance of manners, and the general coarsening of our society that result from relentless progressive attacks on traditional values and institutions.

No, it was instead presented as incontestable fact that (a) there was a crisis involving violence, (b) the NFL and its violent sport must be responsible for it, (c) the NFL has deep pockets, and (d) the NFL should thus be coerced to fund bien pensant activists to perform progressive social-engineering on schoolboys.

Kids who tuned in to ESPN Friday morning to see the highlights of Thursday night’s game were treated to political indoctrination masquerading as sports commentary. Come to think of it, that’s exactly what football fans were treated to during the coverage of the game itself. And it happens pretty much every day.

Conservatives complain incessantly, and not without cause, about Republican fecklessness in confronting the Obama Left’s agenda, about the news media’s becoming an adjunct of the White House press office. But Washington’s political arena is just where the score is tallied. The game is being played, and lost, in the popular culture.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book is Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.