Christianity, Culture, Vocation
Three diplomats on the scene in Libya when Islamists killed the American ambassador and torched the embassy facility in Benghazi testified before a Congressional committee that the official State Department account of the incident is not exactly correct. The three also told of pressure they received not to tell the whole story. [Read more...]
Israeli missiles hit Syria, which is stirring up talk of a broader war. The Washington Post reports that the attacks may hasten the Obama administration’s decision about intervening on behalf of Syrian rebels (not with troops, but with weapons and possibly air support). Should we? [Read more...]
Here is something we can thank the Islamic world for: coffee. BBC gives an interesting account of the history of that beverage and how it came to the West:
Although a beverage made from the wild coffee plant seems to have been first drunk by a legendary shepherd on the Ethiopian plateau, the earliest cultivation of coffee was in Yemen and Yemenis gave it the Arabic name qahwa, from which our words coffee and cafe both derive.
Qahwa originally meant wine, and Sufi mystics in Yemen used coffee as an aid to concentration and even spiritual intoxication when they chanted the name of God. [Read more...]
From Fox News:
BREAKING: A day-long dragnet for the second of two brothers believed to be behind Monday’s Boston Marathon bombing ended Friday night, with police capturing the suspect covered in blood and hiding in a boat in the backyard of a man who called 911 after become suspicious of activity on his property. [Read more...]
James Holmes, who dressed up like the Joker and killed 12 people at the Batman movie (and who faces the death penalty if he is convicted), has converted to Islam. Robert Spencer explores what that means as opposed to a conversion to Christianity:
The debate over James Holmes’s sanity has raged hotly ever since he murdered twelve people and wounded 58 in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, in July 2012. But now the controversy can be laid to rest: Holmes is sane. The clearest indication of his sanity came last week, when the Daily Mail reported that he had converted to Islam.
The Mail reported that Holmes is apparently quite devout: he has grown a lavish beard, eats only halal food, prays the obligatory five daily prayers, and studies the Qur’an for hours every day.
Holmes’s conversion reveals that instead of being unaware of what he did, or utterly remorseless, as one might expect of a psychotic or a sociopath, the murders must trouble him a great deal. For it is souls that are troubled — intellectually, morally, spiritually, psychologically — who cast about for some solution to what troubles them, and often find it in religious conversion.
But it is what Holmes converted to that is significant. [Read more...]
David Forsmark makes a point made by our own loyal reader, author, and Nordic expert Lars Walker, speaking of the Norse deities. Forsmark writes:
Americans have a naïve view of religion. The religious freedom that is so ingrained in our tradition — and our Constitution — has morphed beyond tolerance to a sort of anthropomorphic acceptance of pretty much anything.
In other words, in order to prove how tolerant we are, we take our basically Judeo-Christian view of what religion and God should be, and assume all other religions share the same goals, have the same values, and are just differing manifestation of the same loving and just God.
Nothing could be further from the truth. [Read more...]
Al-Qaeda is back. And, according to David Ignatius, the new version is going to be even harder to battle, particularly since our former Arab allies in the war on terrorism have now been taken over by Islamists. He uses the metaphor of a metastasizing cancer:
The Obama administration is working with its allies to frame a strategy to combat what might be called “al-Qaeda 2.0” — an evolving, morphing terrorist threat that lacks a coherent center but is causing growing trouble in chaotic, poorly governed areas such as Libya, Yemen, Syria and Mali.
Islamic terrorism and al-Qaeda in particular seemed to be in the doldrums, what with military defeats and drone attacks. But now that an al-Qaeda franchise took over that natural gas installation in Algeria–at last count, 38 hostages killed, including 3 Americans–its stock is reportedly soaring in the radical Islamic world and more young people are getting excited about terrorism again. So reports Joby Warrick in the Washington Post:
A week of violence in Algeria and Mali has transformed al-Qaeda’s North Africa branch into a cause celebre for militant Islamists around the globe, boosting recruitment and fundraising for the jihadists and spurring fears of further terrorist attacks in the region and beyond. [Read more...]
Information and details about the hostage situation in Mali are uncertain and contradictory. But it seems that Algerian forces have stormed the natural gas facility. Reuters reports that 30 hostages were killed (more than we were told there were), though some escaped. The fate of the Americans was not known. From Reuters:
Thirty hostages and at least 11 Islamist militants were killed on Thursday when Algerian forces stormed a desert gas plant in a bid to free many dozens of Western and local captives, an Algerian security source said. [Read more...]
The French intervention into Mali spilled over to other countries, as Islamic radicals in Algeria attacked a natural gas facility and seized at least 20 hostages, including 7 Americans, as well as French, British, and Japanese nationals. From Reuters:
Islamist fighters seized dozens of Western and Algerian hostages in a dawn raid on a natural gas facility deep in the Sahara on Wednesday and demanded France halt a new offensive against rebels in neighboring Mali.
Three people, among them one British and one French, were reported killed, but details were sketchy and numbers of those held at Tigantourine ranged from 41 foreigners – including perhaps seven Americans as well as Japanese and Europeans – to over 100 local staff, held separately and less closely watched. [Read more...]
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