Officially Secular Holland's Surprise

Just when you thought you knew what was going on in Holland, seemingly a country on the way to a total rejection of faith or its primary values, a story slips through to illuminate your ignorance:

But as the authors of a recently published study called De Toekomst van God (The Future of God) point out, organized prayer in the workplace is just one among several pieces of evidence suggesting that Holland is on the threshold of a new era--one we might call the age of "post-secularization."...Holland's Post-Secular Future, Joshua Livestro, The Weekly Standard, 1/1/2007 issue

Frederick Turner, in Natural Religion (Transaction Publishers, 2006), presents arguments and evidence to suggest that such trends are unlikely to be some new invented structure, some fashion, but that they are part of our evolutionary heritage. The urge to faith, Turner argues, is as natural for us as the will to speak the language of the group we are born into. And he presents compelling evidence that in societies where faith has been rejected as a part of life that birth rates drop so low that such societies, over time, are doomed.

In a recent newspaper interview, a head teacher at a Catholic secondary school in Rotterdam observed, "For years, pupils were embarrassed about attending Mass. Now, they volunteer to read poems or prayers, and the auditorium is packed."...Holland's Post-Secular Future, continued....

One has to be careful about received opinion, such as that of MSM that religion in America is either an organizing method for reactionaries or is otherwise dead. That such a revival would be led by the young is no surprise. Who looks harder for meaning to a life they are just entering into than the young? If you can remember back a year or two, recall the steadily consistent images from the Pope's outdoor masses. The vast proportion of those attending were young adults and children. And many young adults are involved in the creation of wholly new kinds of churches.

The doyen of the Dutch youth churches movement is Henk Jan Kamsteeg. He is a member of the pastoral team...at the Heartbeat youth church, founded three years ago in the medieval market town of Amersfoort...The church, which has a congregation of around 1,200, meets once a month in a Christian cultural center in one of the town's modern suburbs. Kamsteeg witnessed firsthand a phenomenon that, according to the old secularization thesis, was virtually unheard of: large numbers of young people deciding of their own free will to attend church services--and coming back for more. When he announced the first service three years ago, he hired a hall that seated a maximum of 500 people. On the night, 850 turned up--though nothing special had been done to advertise the event. "I've long since ceased to be amazed about the amount of interest in youth churches," says Kamsteeg. "Twelve-hundred people showing up, two services a night, you almost take it for granted. But deep down I still know how remarkable it really is."..."Holland's Post-Secular Future," continued....

Some of the organizing methods are startlingly similar to the early days of Christianity. It is unlikely that John Paul II would have objected. As Malachi Martin reported in several books, including his remarkable roman a clef titled Vatican (1991), Karel Wojtyla felt that the version of the Roman Catholic Church founded by the unification of secular power and sacred values under Sylvester and the Emperor Constantine in the 4th century was disintegrating. He assumed, Martin said again again, that something would emerge, a new Church without the tragic design of becoming a secular power. Papa Wojtyla did almost nothing to straighten out the mess in the Vatican hierarchy. Instead, he went out and preached to the young, hoping they would come to faith, if not to Rome.

Youth churches seem to meet anywhere but in traditional church buildings...The idea is that something that less resembles a traditional church might prove more welcoming to potential new believers...According to Kamsteeg, if Christianity in Holland is to have a future, it has to develop a new way of doing things, possibly also in new locations: "Young people are genuinely interested in Christ. They're just not into two-hour sermons, dreary music, and drafty old buildings." The ultimate consequence of this approach is yet another new phenomenon: that of the house churches...In his living room in the old university town of Leiden, Kees Westhuis, 41, explains the essence of the house church idea: "We don't want to go to church, we want to be a church."...The answer to Westhuis's concerns came to him in the form of a book that has inspired the founding of most house churches in the Netherlands: German author Wolfgang Simson's Houses that Change the World (first published as Häuser, die Welt verändern in 1999). The most appealing aspect of the house church, according to Westhuis, is its simplicity. At its core, the house church is based on the practice of the earliest Christian communities of the first century: small groups of people meeting in each other's houses, sharing a meal and worshipping God. Westhuis: "The idea is that you don't just share a meal once a week, you actually share your lives. It's a radical departure from modern life, which leaves most people feeling increasingly lonely."..."Holland's Non-Secular Future," continued....

Paul of Tarsus would have recognized this; one can imagine him walking house church to house church, exchanging e-mail addresses with people he met instead of dispatching a letter in a scroll by horseback. That was the original Church, before the agreement that led St. Peter's Church into alliance with a series of secular powers, and ultimately to catastrophic defeat, defeat that not only removed any illusion of secular power from the Vatican but severely, if not fatally, undercut its claim as the true and only representative of the faith of Christianity.

This is an astonishing and beautiful development. Read the whole article. Follow up. A house can be God's home.

Luther

Not Science Fiction: Stem Cell Farming in the Ukraine

The Drudge Report recently highlighted a shocking story from the BBC that centered on "disturbing video footage" of "dismembered tiny bodies." "Healthy new-born babies" in the Ukraine, "the self-styled stem cell capital of the world," have allegedly been killed "to feed a flourishing international trade in stem cells."..., Murdered to Order, Ryan T. Anderson, The Weekly Standard

Just when you'd had enough of 2006, the old year brings another sickness to light, the harvesting in the Ukraine of purchased, stolen, or aborted infants to provide stem cell resources for researchers. Amazing but true -- among the strongest supporters, yes, supporters, of this kind of thing are pro-abortion organizations.

stem cell research can not appeal to any of these claims of women's welfare, privacy, or "the right to choose." Though the case of embryonic stem cells doesn't pose a direct competition of rights or interests--unborn embryos do not pose a threat to anyone--public arguments were made about competing interests of patients: "You pro-lifers are favoring embryos over Parkinson's victims." When these arguments prove ineffective, defenders of embryo-destructive research turn to a utilitarian one: embryos can be put to better use as raw material for biomedical research...."Murdered to Order," continued....

And it's happening here, not just in the Ukraine.

'My suspicions and sense of urgency have been heightened by the fact that my home state of New Jersey has passed a bill that specifically authorizes and encourages human cloning for, among other purposes, the harvesting of 'cadaveric fetal tissue.' A 'cadaver,' of course, is a dead body. The bodies in question are those of fetuses created by cloning specifically to be gestated and killed as sources of tissues and organs. What the bill envisages and promotes, in other words, is fetus farming.' Robert P. George, Princeton Philopher, cited in "Murdered to Order"

The late John Paul II lamented often that in an increasingly post-Christian Europe and America that what had been considered primary human values for thousands of years, especially compassion and the sanctity of life, were now held as sentimental affects by a majority of the adult population. It appears that he was right, that people without belief in anything beyond this life will murder for any hope of extending that life, and any hope of avoiding inconvenient impositions on their manner of living.

Luther

Fiery Scrooge Trashes Christmas in CA

As Wonker was getting ready to leave on his Christmas week sojourn to the South, he chanced to notice this story on Fox:

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — A man used flammable liquid to light himself on fire, apparently to protest a San Joaquin Valley school district's decision to change the names of winter and spring breaks to Christmas and Easter vacation.

The man, who was not immediately identified, on Friday also set fire to a Christmas tree, an American flag and a revolutionary flag replica, said Fire Captain Garth Milam....

Kern County Sheriff's Deputy John Leyendecker said the man had a sign that read: "(expletive) the religious establishment and KHSD."

On Thursday, the Kern High School Board of Trustees voted to use the names Christmas and Easter instead of winter and spring breaks.

Nice language, eh? Guess that's the way the left spreads Christmas cheer these days in out-of-control California.

Once again, we see the adolescent spirit of leftists hard at work in the never-ending attempt to destroy all vestiges of the Christian religion in the United States. The apparent goal: to replace our God with the bust of Karl Marx, all the better to assure that European intellectuals remain our friends.

Raw, unfettered anger and emotionalism; reason supplanted by the dialectic; and pure, seething hatred toward the Other. These are the hallmarks of the American left today, as amply illustrated by this intentionally theatrical act of violence and contempt, intended to further diminish our cultural connection to our Judeo-Christian heritage. No wonder the left finds the Islamofascists so sympatico. All the more reason for us to keep the pressure up to return the names of traditional holidays from their secularist transformations, thus restoring the original intent.

The lefty protestor, BTW, suffered only limited 1st degree burns. It would be interesting to see if this "flammable liquid" was gasoline, or the kind of far safer concoction Hollywood uses for movie stunts, which would indicate a greater degree of cynicism than this story is reporting.

The left never gives normal Americans a moment of peace, even at Christmas. Unbelievable.

Merry Christmas from HazZzMat!!

None of this Happy Holidays stuff for us. December 25th is Christmas and we're wishing everybody a Merry one. Here's hoping that you and yours have a wonderful long weekend. In these troubled times, the Prince of Peace offers us a joyous message during the 12 days of Christmas. Maybe 2007 will be a year where folks around the world begin to pay that message heed once more.

Mr. and Mrs. Wonker will be traveling away from the Nation's Capital next week to the wilds of North Carolina, so blogging will be light to nonexistent depending on where we can pick the net up.

But we'll be back to more sustained blogging after the turn of the New Year. See you then if not before.

Lies, and the Lying Commies Who Promote Them

Instapundit today notes an interesting thought.

ERIC SCHEIE ON JAMIL HUSSEIN: "I soon noticed that there's a downside to debunking fraudulent people or claims. The people who make them up -- and most of those who agree with them -- simply don't care. Because the characters and claims are invented to support what they already believe fervently, debunking them does not 'count.' Lies presented in furtherance of a greater 'truth' are not really considered to be lies, at least not in the moral sense. The idea is to persuade people, and if fictional people or incidents have to be used, that's OK, as long as it's in the interest of the greater truth. The problem I have with this approach is that I don't like being lied to."

The problem that Glenn (Instapundit) is really having is that he doesn't understand that the Big Lie is precisely the point and that the left doesn't regard their lies as lies.

The link provided above, which takes you to the Classical Values website, discusses at length the vicious "defense" by leftist Eric Boehlert, of the AP's phony Iraq stories, discussed for weeks, at least, in the conservative blogosphere but rarely if ever in the MSM. Schie further observes:

Boehlert's approach is to minimize the seriousness of the fictional character and reports, and mount ad hominem style ideological attacks against those who debunked them. While the debunkers' primary crime is simply that they are "warbloggers" whose pro-war ideology is wrong, he also misleadingly splices selected fragments from quotes (whether this is "Dowdifying" or Issikoffing I'm not sure) to make JunkYardBlog's SeeDubya and the Anchoress look like heinous opponents of free speech. What they actually said -- along with the context -- are as unimportant to Boehlert as whether or not Jamil Hussein exists. As Boehlert concludes, it is only the larger truth matters...

These are great observations, and true to the mark, and Schie's whole piece in Classical Values is well worth reading. But again, amazingly, neither Instapundit nor Schie note the obvious answer to their puzzlement because they are amazingly unaware of the obvious. Boehlert, AP, and all the other leftists in the MSM who refuse to pull their phony stories or recant their lies are operating right out of the old, unabridged Stalinist propaganda playbook, as updated by Antonio Gramsci, and have been doing so with remarkable effectiveness for years.

The short description of their approach: When caught in a falsehood, lie, get your leftist friends on board to amplify that lie, get the MSM on board to trumpet the lie, and, when the cacophony is at its loudest, get your entire team organized into a massive chorus that continually broadcasts a vicious and neverending stream of ad hominem attacks on the character of your opponent. The end result: that the Stalinists don't have to address theie lies, and another truth-teller is removed from the public conversation by being tarred with convenient epithet, like "racist" (always a favor, but "fascist" will do) whatever the context.

For a Communist, and most particularly a Stalinist—and Uncle Joe appears to be the main influence on writers such as Boehlert—there is no such thing as objective truth. Truth is subjective and is defined only by the Party. If the Party has not stamped its imprimatur on a "truth," it is therefore transformed into a lie.

Thus, evidence, logic, and reason have no standing, and the circular logic of the perpetual dialectic seizes hold. The actual truth is transformed into a lie, while the Party's Big Lie becomes the truth, what "everybody knows." There can be no objective proof, and thus, no objective truth. "Truth" thus becomes a malleable, protean concept, a mere, shapeshifting convenience to be defined at will during what, on the surface, appears to be an intellectual argument. This repackaged lie, which is now the universally accepted truth is used as convenient building block by the Party apparatus as it builds its alternative mythology which somehow becomes the "real world." As defined by them.

It could be argued somewhat convincingly that there isn't much of a Party apparatus left in the U.S. today. However, one must wonder where all the Party discipline we are seeing whenever the left promotes its Lie of the Day—one must wonder where it's coming from. Has the hard left somehow figured out how to create pod people by planting propaganda genes into the bodies of those who inhabit the left, thus rendering the never-ending lying and ad hominem attacks upon perceived enemies an autonomic rather than a reasoned response?

We sometimes wish our friends in the right-wing and libertarian blogosphere would link here a bit more often. The core point they continue to miss is painfully obvious to us: the hard-wiring of the left to their Stalinist heritage. That is very often what we deal with here at HazZzMat. Indeed, it's our mission. And the earlier and more often our conservative friends would point out the left's propaganda techniques, the closer we'd come to winning the culture war: a war that conservatives want to win. But the right remains supremely handicapped. Essentially creatures of logic, they never perceiving the nature of its core or its essence.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Gets Danish Brush-Back Pitch

How about those wacky Danes? Check out the following ad a Danish "art group" got placed in the English language Tehran Times:

Not funny? Look again, and note the capital letters that begin each phrase and read down. Have to say we agree! Expect a fatwah against the Danes and the paper's editors to be issued very shortly. (Hat tip to Little Green Footballs via al-Reuters.)

Hey, why not place fake ads in a Tehran paper? AP has been using fake reporters—fake Iraqi cops, actually—to trash Bush and the U.S. for quite some time now, as the blogosphere has begun to document extensively. Michelle Malkin is hot on the tail of "Jamil Hussein" and his numerous "fake but accurate" reports from the heart of Baghdad. Except that nobody in Baghdad has ever seen him. Obviously, either Al Qaeda, Sadr's thugs, or the Sunni mass-murderers have been expertly schooled in how to feed the leftists in the Western media the kind of thin, factless anti-American gruel they so love to trumpet. Except that none of it is based on fact. Just like the phony Hezbollah ambulance driver a couple of months back. Another skilled Islamofascist propagandist AP was only too happy to help out.

Has AP no shame? That's a rhetorical question, BTW.

Holocaust Deniers and the Moral Equivalency Crowd

Tigerhawk frowns on the latest Iranian anti-Israel hatefest and makes the following observation:

The Islamic Republic of Iran's campaign to deny the Holocaust is rooted in the idea that the Holocaust is the moral basis for the establishment of Israel. If the moral foundation under Israel cracks, the thinking goes, war to eradicate Israel -- to "wipe it from the map" -- is suddenly justifiable. That is why Iran is holding its conference. There is no other convincing explanation.

The thing is, the road to Tehran's denial was paved by Western chattering classes, who have recently indulged in absurd invocations of the word "genocide" and casual comparisons of the Israelis to Nazis.

Of course, the "chattering classes" are so enamored of Bush-hatred that they instinctively adopt Iran's absurdist fantasies which largely track their own, in which Amerikkka, particularly under W, and any of its allies, particularly Israel, are the cause of all world evil. They have no problem doing this, of course, because for them, everything is morally equivalent anyway.

Tigerhawk thinks about this and draws the following entirely rational, and delightfully snide conclusion (itals by HazZzMat):

The Islamic Republic, which by ideology and practice believes in moral absolutes, is exploiting Western post-modernism's unwillingness to stand and defend any single truth. Even the most basic and verifiable historical truth, which is yet within the memory of thousands of witnesses still living, is attackable because Western intellectuals no longer believe in any truth. Among the complicated people who shape the considered opinion of the Western elites, it is entirely acceptable to question all interpretations of facts (with the obvious exception of facts that bear on global climate change).

Perfect. But labeling these destructive leftist idiotarians "intellectuals" would seem to posit a new hypothetical plane of existence that thrives in a continuum (or vacuum) considerably beyond that territory once defined by the term "oxymoron."

John Lennon, Peacenik Idiotarians, and Really Bad English

Onetime NYPress owner and currently a columnist with that odd rag—which vaguely competes with the NYPost and the Village Voice—Russ Smith, who once opined under the "Mugger" moniker, has a moderately interesting piece in the current issue. Although the column doesn't really go very far in offering explanations, it riffs on the topics of John Lennon's vapid song "Give Peace a Chance," the nature of the anti-war efforts then and now, and the current cliché-ridden nature of what today passes for journalism.

Smith, vaguely right-wing except when he's not, has lost his touch since selling his rag and moving back to his native Baltimore. Somehow, it's as if his edgy NYC acidity was surgically removed from him during his move, much like the tracker device was removed from Neo's bellybutton in the original Matrix installation.

In his current column, Smith waxes wroth on all the credit that libs and lefties like to heap on rock oracle John Lennon for ending the Vietnam War. He cites a recent example in the blog version of The Nation, a dead-tree magazine which is to informed writing as Madeline Murray O'Hare was to Christianity. [Direct link to this particular blog was unfound.] Uncharacteristically, however, the writer Smith cites, takes a refreshingly acidic view on this. Smith writes:

...last week I found the reaction to The Nation’s Jon Wiener’s web-only ruminations on the anniversary of John Lennon’s murder fairly fascinating.

Wiener’s Dec. 7 blog entry, “John Lennon’s Legacy,” was a silly (although undoubtedly sincere) nugget arguing that the man who imagined “no possessions,” even as he lived in luxury, played a part in ending the Vietnam War by penning the anthem “Give Peace a Chance.” The longtime Nation contributor, in considering the flawed film The U.S. vs. John Lennon,” in which “the married Beatle” (going back to the ’64 “Ed Sullivan” appearances) has a 1969 set-to with New York Times war correspondent Gloria Emerson, who had no time for protest ditties or rallies populated by young men who were terrified by the still-existent draft.

He writes: “The film presents the exchange as an example of the mainstream media’s relentless hostility to Lennon’s peace activism, and celebrates his put-down of Emerson. But 37 years later, it’s worth reconsidering Emerson’s question: did ‘Give Peace a Chance’ save a single life? Did the anti-war protest of 1969, or any other year, save any lives?” Wiener concedes that the war continued for several more years but concludes, “It was hard to see it in 1969, but eventually the U.S. did end its war in Vietnam. And today the people who were singing ‘Give Peace a Chance’ in 1969 can be glad they sang it.”

I don’t buy Wiener’s contention that the mainstream media was overtly hostile to Lennon (save perhaps The Wall Street Journal or National Review); more likely foreign reporters didn’t give him or his various public spectacles much thought. As it happens, like millions of people worldwide, I did take Lennon’s music, if not his Amsterdam bed-in or Yoko-influenced art projects, seriously and there are few pop musicians from that era who produced an equally significant body of work.

But was Lennon even a small actor in this country’s eventual pullout from Vietnam? Of course not. That’s sort of like saying, years from now, that George Clooney or Barbra Streisand (not to mention the impotent Iraq Study Group document from James Baker, Lee Hamilton and other Beltway worthies) were instrumental in ending the current Mideast conflict.

A good point. Actually, several good points. But the important point that both Smith and Wiener miss is that that's not the point. From the heyday of John Lennon to our present vacuous decade, an increasingly lazy and very leftist media (which was not nearly that leftist in the 1960s) simply parrots the idiotically uninformed political opinions of the entertainment industry's leisure class and trumpets these observations as the received dogma of a sage or a god.

From Lennon onward, however, the vast majority of individuals working in the entertainment industry as well as the MSM have increasingly become the willing mouthpieces of the nihilist left. Egged on by all the free publicity they get (witness the apparently witless Bush-bashing of the Dixie Chicks, whose real objective is to jettison their hick country fans and establish themselves as mainstream "artists"), entertainers simply encourage MSM hacks to characterize their vapid, simplistic philosophical and political mouthings as oracular proclamations and ample evidence that the populace supports such idiotarian views.

Meanwhile, these "artists," who obviously need an increasing amount of buzz to sell concert tickets and CDs in the Age of the iPod, bask in all the free PR as well as the kudos from their fellow travelers in the industry who also appreciate the frequent boosts. Furthermore, to be seen as being "out front" (i.e., embracing the hard left) on any political issue is to attract instant and lavish praise from the media, the kind of approving hug-hug, kiss-kiss that keeps them in the public eye and robs serious intellectual commentary of the oxygen it needs in order to get established.

This is our long-winded way of saying that Weiner and Smith at least have it right in this instance, although neither really delves into the cultural implications of sexually promiscuous and drug addled celebrities forcing public policy to the far left in perilous times such as these. Both writers themselves are thus sucked into the black hole of celebrity. Fighting this whole idiotarian-MSM-entertainment monolith is becoming a lot like taking on an army of orcs with a squirt gun. It's taken on a life of its own. Smith makes some moves in this direction and we try constantly here, but things continue to go downhill. And Lennon's successors seem incapable of learning, since every cheap-shot political song they pen wins wild applause in the media, as has Bruce Springsteen's recent attraction to the Little Red Schoolhouse Conservatory of Agitprop Music.

Since Smith is riffing on the topic of cultural clichés, he finds it easy to segue into the timeworn topic of pure journalistic clichés by referencing the increasing rise of these constructs in the world of journalism:

It’s a rare writer who doesn’t fall victim to employing clichés—[Joseph] Epstein [in the Wall Street Journal] indicts himself for using the shorthand “24/7”—and I remember one upbraiding delivered to yours truly by a friend in New York Press’ art department over a decade ago. This fellow spent an hour or so reading the latest edition of the paper and found five instances of the words “So sue me” (including once in my column), circling each one in red pencil. John Strausbaugh and I got the message and were properly embarrassed.

Some of the phrases I find particularly irritating—and a few are really ancient—are “Back in the day,” “tipping point,” “incurious” (specific to George Bush), “measuring the drapes,” “shout-out,” “give it up for … ,” “no brainer,” “outside the box” and one that sportswriters use to denigrate a ballplayer, such as “the immortal Bubba Crosby.”

Recently, nothing tops the concluding paragraph a Times editorialist committed to print in a Dec. 6 short about Robert Gates headlined “The Un-Rumsfeld.” Providing more evidence that The Times opinion writers are closer to colleagues at The Nation than The Washington Post, this person says, in stingy praise for Gates’ dire assessment of Iraq, “In any other time that would all be considered pretty bland stuff. But for an aspiring member of this administration, that came close to speaking truth to power.”

Nothing new here. "In point of fact," editors actually love the use of popular clichés as a way of dumbing down a piece and, not coincidentally, shaving off column inches at a time, all the more important in an age where tired print MSM behemoths are rapidly losing ad revenue to the web—revenue that used to support longer and more thoughtful piece. Much easier, after all, to dismiss the "beleagured and highly unpopular Bush" out of hand than actually describing the nonstop efforts of the left and their MSM confreres to make him so. A couple of quick clichés will do the job, enabling the journo to hit afternoon happy hour that much more quickly then he would if he had to think or fill more column inches.

One wishes, somehow, that the aging media lefties, whose writing today just doesn't cut the mustard anymore would either make like a tree and leave or simply oblige by kicking the bucket and taking a slow train to the Pearly Gates. But they don't believe in them apples either, so maybe it's best to move on and let sleeping dogs lie.

The Truth About WWIII (or IV)

From time to time, we engage in discussions about our current conflict with the Islamofascists, and are often confronted with nomenclature issues. Specifically, what the heck do we call this conflict?

Some opt for World War III, given the global arena in which the current conflict is currently unfolding. But others claim that World War III is what we really should have called the Cold War, since a world war was precisely what it was: a roughly 40 Years War with the dark forces of international Communism with the old Soviet Union at the helm of an Evil Empire. That ideological battle was essentially won in a most unconventional way and concluded in a manner equally unconventional. By faking the Rushkies out with Star Wars, Ronald Reagan effectively spent the Evil Empire to death. The final act of this Last Battle was the fall of the Berlin Wall, once again, a most unconventional conclusion to a long, global conflict of epic proportions.

Of course, old Commies, like old Soldiers, never die. Their relativism, nihilism, and tendency to lie brazenly has found a home in the ongoing, unfolding phenomenon of Islamofascism, the adherents of which employ largely the same tactics of perpetual disinformation and slander to demonize their enemies and snooker the weak-kneed socialist wannabes who inhabit the judiciary, the arts, the media, and academia. With these willing dupes, including the old-guard commies, the Islamofascists are making it quite difficult for us to pin them down and take them out.

But just as the world eventually learned that Marxism was in the end a sham philosophical cover for creating a new and different upper class dedicated to lording it over everyone else, so, too, must the world eventually come to grips with the core of the current 40 Years War: the War Against Islamofascism, which will one day be dubbed either WW III or IV. And the following is probably the best short summary we've seen to date of what is at stake:

In the 1930s, some believed it would be possible to solve the particular problem of the Sudeten-Germans in negotiations with Hitler without considering the place of the Sudeten question in the overall strategy of the Nazis. In the 1980s, some believed it was possible to solve the particular problem represented by the seizure of the embassy in negotiations with Khomeini without considering the significance of the embassy seizure in the strategic conception of Islamism more generally. Today, with the separation of the nuclear question from the ideological dimension of the conflict, this mistake is being repeated. Although the letter made headlines around the world, Washington hesitated to confront the Iranian challenge on its own terrain: that of ideology.Policymakers focused on business as usual and thus missed the opportunity to present the real alternative facing both Muslim and non-Muslim societies: Does the world want to be oriented by life or by death? Does the world prefer individual and social self-determination or to be ruled by a clique of mullahs and their cult of death?

Bolding above is courtesy HazZzMat.

This brilliant assessment is snipped from a larger piece by Matthias Küntzel on the current fascist rulers of Iran. Well worth reading. A hat tip to Power Line, which discovered this article first.

Light Blogging Continues

Both Luther and Wonk continue to deal with family issues which always come first. But we'll stay on top of things as best we can during what is turning out to be a rather complicated Christmas Season for us.

We Interrupt Our Daily Blogging...

Light to non-existent blogging this past week due to extended family issues. Lots to blog about, however, and we'll be back in a couple of days with plenty of stuff.

Have a good weekend.

Coalition to Preserve Civilization

Although we're not sure yet just how many folks are involved with the new group called out in our headline, it's clear that at least some other bloggers, aside from HazZzMat, are starting to enter the complicated field of ideological battle, so necessary to counter the overwhelming media, political, and academic defeatism being foisted on us by the organized 5th-column left.

A post at the aptly-named Gates of Vienna describes, in great detail, the development of spinoff organizations like the "901 group" and the "Coalition to Preserve Civilization" which are attempts to battle Islamofascist ideology as well as the perverse Marxists who give these medieval thugs plenty of aid and comfort since both groups share a seeting hatred of anything springing from either the Enlightenment or Christianity. Click the link to read all about it.

Sadly, BTW, a lot of the most intelligent and stirring words in this link were provided via late-campaign remarks by soon-to-be-ex Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum. This guy will be heard from again. Frankly, and we hate to tempt enemies to fulminate, but the good folks of Pennsylvania were idiots to vote this patriot out of office. He is presidential material. Time will tell.