Recently in Matters of faith Category

I was in the Midwest yesterday, speaking to a college group about tensions between Muslims and the West, and I argued that Muslims in the U.S. tend to assimilate much more fully than in Europe. A short while later I heard about Nidal Malik Hasan at Ft. Hood. I felt horrified, angered and embarrassed.

Although I come from a Muslim background, I don't pretend to represent Islam, but I care deeply about Muslim family and friends who seek to balance their faith and their love for America. Ft. Hood mocks such attempts at balance.

A few years back, my brother and I penned a piece criticizing xenophobia directed at Muslim-Americans, but we still made it a point to argue that Muslim advocacy organizations such as CAIR "should go further [than just condemning violence], perhaps by establishing philanthropies for communities and families hurt by extremists who have hijacked Islam."

Maybe these groups can begin to put their money where their mouth is, by offering tangible support to families of the shooting victims. Some of those families may angrily reject such aid, because Hasan's act will aggravate latent xenophobia. But still, a steadfast and long-term commitment to such a healing approach represents the generous model of Muhammad at the height of his powers.

I'm touched by Gail-Tz's story about Michael Weisser and Larry Tripp, and I believe it's essential to counter the Furrows of the world.

There is an incredible amount of hatred today in the air, born of the excruciating economic and societal uncertainties of our times, and I don't think we make much headway by shaming those who think and talk and act shamefully.

Sometimes we get pulled into pointless but vicious debates about "which side" is more guilty of hate, and why we're justified in, well, hating those whom we believe hate us even more. It not only derails our efforts to become better as individuals and as a society, it accelerates us down a cliff.

The Weisser way is, with apologies for punnery, the wiser way.

Just as necessity is the mother of invention, the fear of death is the mother of religion, of the quest for transcendence and the hope of immortality. Death makes us wildly irrational. Death, especially an untimely passing, is what turns ordinary and flawed people into martyrs and what turns ordinary and flawed politicians into enduring legends. Death makes hard people soft, death makes people ashamed to remember past sins and slights by the deceased, death makes every one of its victims stand larger in our memories as being bigger and better than they were. Death makes us lose all perspective -- and in so doing, death reveals much about us as poor, fearful, mortal creatures. In a week in which we are thinking much about the deaths of famous persons, that is all I will say about death.

Social conservatives will soon tire of liberals' snickering about the latest true confessions of philandering GOP would-be presidential candidates. I think the larger problem for the conservative faithful is that they've gleefully led a divisive culture war in recent decades, condemning media and universities for warping the values of the mainstream. So I don't think they convince others when they then blame innate human weakness for their own foibles; they'd been arguing that their way is better and healthier. If they're going to maintain that position, it would be more credible if they focused less on cultural street fights and moralizing on Fox News, which then leads to a loss of credibility when "life happens."

I was having dinner with a morally conservative couple a few years back, when the wife joked about how her husband was eyeing a fetching waitress -- prompting him to bellow, "How dare you?!?!" She withered, as did our evening. I realized he was outraged by the insinuation of "wrongdoing," but he seemed too defensive.

Now Todd and Sarah Palin, the parents of at least one sexually active teen who snubbed their moral teachings, are outraged that a talk-show host would poke fun of the Palins for having family problems. That's Letterman -- always irreverent and rude, regularly poking fun of Bill Clinton for being a slut long before even Monica-gate. Like it or don't, but the indignance is tiresome. The Palin teens are not "off limits," given how the McCain campaign exploited them. At last, Levi Johnston's assessment of the Palin parents indicates they're a bigger threat to the maintenance of conservative values than Letterman is.

Shephard Smith worries that anti-Obama violence is in the air, here in a clip from Fox. This won't be popular with those who feel that Obama's administration is planning on rounding them up for daring to oppose mandatory abortions. But Frank Rich argues that, just as it took McCain's best efforts to calm down the people calling the eventual US president a treacherous terrorist, the GOP's leaders must calm down the people who are signaling their intention to "put an end to the false prophet Obama." Camille Paglia, herself a critic of Obama, shares some concerns about the threats against him here.

This is my piece today for Foreign Policy mag's online version, part of a larger debate about "the Obama effect."

I'll go back to TS's request for "evidence" of Mark Steyn's bigotry.

Before giving specifics, I'll note that Steyn's comments consistently, over time, show a strongly anti-Muslim view that stingily refuses to give Muslim civilization any credit for its past successes. While Obama is trying to tell Muslims that they should re-embrace their own best principles, Steyn says Muslims have no principles to fall back on. Um, that's not a good way to engage them. Even if you believe they should all come to Jesus, I'm sure Diane would agree that getting them all defensive and angry about their tribal identity is not a good way to "share the good news." The mission committee doesn't teach that approach -- I know, I used to chair those kinds of committees in a former life.

As Philip Jenkins has written, people like Steyn demonize Muslims in much the manner that Protestants once demonized Catholics as representing a peril to America a century ago.

Here are the passages I question:

In his Cairo speech, he congratulated Muslims on inventing algebra and quoted approvingly one of the less-bloodcurdling sections of the Quran...

That's what the president did with Islam: He added sugar and sold it...

Rich thought that the president succeeded in his principal task: "Fundamentally, Obama's goal was to tell the Muslim world, 'We respect and value you, your religion and your civilization, and only ask that you don't hate us and murder us in return.'" But those terms are too narrow. You don't have to murder a guy if he preemptively surrenders....

The nonterrorist advance of Islam is a significant challenge to Western notions of liberty and pluralism.

I've complained about Steyn before, notably here with my brother:

This "red-egghead" approach is exemplified by Mark Steyn, a hero of the religious right. "With every passing month," Steyn wrote in a recent column, there are more Muslims and fewer Episcopalians, and the Muslims export their manpower to Europe and other depopulating outposts of the West. It's the intersection of demography and Islamism that makes time a luxury we can't afford."

In his new book, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, he escalates his argument that Muslims are breeding fast enough to destroy all civilization within little Mariam's lifetime. Steyn is careful not to prescribe bombings, beatings or final solutions. He leaves that to the fertile imaginations of his rabid following. He has perfected the mixed message sent by America's leaders to Muslims: We will deliver democracy to your doorstep, and we believe that democratic institutions will speedily bring peace and enlightenment to your nations; but we so fear your irredeemable madness that we think your grandchildren will corrupt our own centuries-old democratic institutions and will bring the West to a new Taliban-like state.

If you want to read more unfiltered Steyn, try this, which strikes me as bigoted.

Again, while I write about this urgent effort on the part of Muslims to reclaim the best in their heritage, Steyn argues loudly -- against either evidence or good taste -- that they have nothing good in their heritage. That helps nothing except his own desire to be a rabble-rouser.

Finally, my brother and I concluded our piece with this: "Scratch a conservative, flag-waving intellectual, and under the surface you will see an America-basher -- one who complains that America lacks character and resolve, one who has no confidence in America 's transforming power, one who cannot trust America to defend its principles when they are truly threatened."

And Steyn proves that anew in his latest piece, with these silly words: "A wealthy nation living on the accumulated cultural capital of a glorious past can dodge its rendezvous with fate, but only for a while. That sound you heard in Cairo is the tingy ping of a hollow superpower."

I'm attempting to back away from this topic in the future. I never believed President Bush was a bigot, but I did believe he received fevered counsel from bigots. But I have no interest in giving attention to fading figures like Steyn, because I suspect they are like parasites that feed on attention and will straddle whatever line necessary to get it (which he proves by snidely citing criticisms like mine in his "Reader of the Day" section).

This New York Times piece is a fascinating look at an underreported aspect of the Mideast conflict.

We've talked a little lately about nuances as they relate to how our arguments are perceived by others.

I'd like to share two blog posts that I think are nicely nuanced, on the things that some of our readers love to spar about. Let's hear their thoughts on this one about Jesus' approach to gay marriage and this one on atheism vs. faith.