God and the Machine
You don’t get to choose the guy in the trench next to you. The nasty miscreants of Charlie Hebdo would not be my choice for allies, nor would the objectivist idiot Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs. Unfortunately, they seem to be the only people placing themselves in the line of fire in the cultural war against radical Islam.
I don’t like this type of cheap provocation. I don’t particularly care when people mock my religion because I know they do so out of hate and ignorance, which reflects poorly on them, not me or my faith. What I wrote about Charlie Hebdo applies to Pamela Geller:
There’s nothing gained by sloppy sentimentality at moments like this. Charlie Hebdo and its staff were no friends to anyone of belief. They were cynical, nihilistic, and blasphemous, as is their right in our post-Enlightenment, pluralistic world. This relativistic individuality may or not be a good and healthy thing, but now isn’t the time for that debate.
There’s no difference between Charlie and Geller, so I know Art Spiegelman is just making a fool of himself when he says stupid things like this:
What’s the difference between Charlie Hebdo and Pamela Geller’s organization?
I think that’s when my brain short-circuited. Because superficially, it seems like, well, the same thing is happening in Texas. But it’s not. It’s the anti-matter, Bizarro World, flipside, mirror-logic version of what Charlie Hebdo is about.
The American Freedom Defense Initiative is racist organization. It’s exactly the nightmare version that the writers who were protesting the PEN award thought Charlie was. But Charlie is an anti-racist, political magazine that does not have an agenda that consists of wanting to bait or trouble Muslims.
Bull. Charlie Hebdo did nothing more than put a thin political gloss over what progressives like to call a “hate group.” But Spiegelman is a man of the left, and pas d’ennemis à gauche, right Art?
Remember, kiddies: Proper ideology taketh away the sins of the world, amen and amen.
But bad taste isn’t a death sentence, at least not in America. The self-selecting elites like to pretend that it is, so we get a lot of sneering at Geller from the same people who applaud every juvenile anti-Christian work that comes down the pike. It’s sickening.
A foreign enemy attempted to commit an act of violence against law-abiding American citizens on American soil. This was the reaction Pamela Geller expected and wanted, and this was the one she got. She is now a marked woman. That is a direct and predictable consequence of a freely chosen action. She owns that now and for the rest of her life.
There was no point to the action, but then again there’s no point to Corpus Christi or the Vagina Monologues or other works of hate and foolishness. They’re simply the emotional spasms of a dying culture. I don’t choose to communicate that way, and I think it’s wrong. I respond by ignoring it. They exercise their rights to free speech, and I exercise my right to ignore them. The vast majority of Muslims do the same.
Geller’s problem is that she’ll cheerfully kick 99% of the Muslims in the face in order to find the two guys who will kick back. That’s not really much of a strategy for winning a culture war, but right now it’s all anybody seems willing to do. You don’t stir a hornet’s nest and walk away without a few stings, even in America, even under the protection of the First Amendment. What you have to do is find a better way to deal with hornets than poking their nest.
This is a war the jihadists will win. If Western civilization hadn’t already committed suicide, we wouldn’t be facing defeat. Secularism, socialism, political correctness, sexual insanity, and demographic freefall have already written the final chapter of Europe, and I don’t see America recovering from its current death spiral. Only a healthy religion can drive out a diseased one. We’re too weak and fractured to resist for long.
We had a healthy religion, and we traded it for cheap goods, easy sex, and mindless distractions. We had the Gospel, and we gave it up for dollar stores, gay “marriage” and no-fault divorce, and reality TV. Worst of all, the people of Christ gave up the core of their faith in a sad attempt to fit in with a culture that will always hate them. Hell, at least the Indians got some beads for Manhattan. What do Christians have to show for their craven capitulation?
So, no: we’re not coming back from this. The most we can do is spit in the eye of the enemy as he bayonets us.
UPDATED HERE: Blasphemy and Desecration: Keeping the Peace in a Pluralistic World
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