Wow....

This is one of the new attractions to our family.  Ashton Pavel Gerk, son of David and Sharan Gerk.

His smile would just melt your heart.

Today, give me your eyes....

On not banishing the dark with a book burning

Written by Tony Woodlief

September 10, 1:09 PM 

World Magazine

There are plenty of good reasons not to burn a Quran, but I’m not hearing them in the international uproar over a Pentecostal preacher’s call for a “Burn the Quran Day.” Many people are afraid that the brouhaha will incite hardcore Muslims to react in brutal violence, as if this is distinguishable from what we normally see, as if ordinarily it’s Methodists beheading people and blowing up school buses and executing missionaries. Whatever one’s point of view about civility and respect for other religions, I’m a little tired of tiptoeing around the sensitive feelings of delusional thugs who want to burn down Western civilization in service to a bloodthirsty cult.
 

In addition to fear of Muslim brutality is the belief, by many well-meaning Christians, that the faith of Muslims should be respected, that we should have an inclusive approach to faith in God, even as we disagree on the particulars. It’s a fine line, engaging someone without affirming some deeply wrong conviction that he holds. But my sense is that too many Christians advocating interfaith dialogue are keen on any civil discussion that does not involve the very heart of the matter, the irreconcilable difference, which is that one does not reach the doorway to Heaven, which is to say Jesus Christ, by way of whatever cobbled-together directions have been attributed to Muhammad.

I think a Christian ought not burn a Quran, not because it will incite violence, not because it will disrupt communion with infidels, and not even because doing so adds the waste of a match to what is already a waste of paper. The Christian ought not burn a Quran, it seems to me, simply because destruction and negation are the purview of the devil, not God. The kingdom of Heaven is not advanced by destroying the false but by embracing the true. Darkness is never erased; it is enlightened.

In contrast, the current turmoil serves the interests of all the wrong people. A publicity-seeker gets national attention. People already harboring hatred for Christianity and America get a fresh dose of righteous indignation. Journalists get a juicy story replete with eye-rolling at the rubes who call themselves Christians. The devil could hardly have cooked up something better.

Name-Calling

Andrew Klavan

Name-Calling

“Islamophobia”: the latest charge to try to stifle legitimate debate

27 August 2010 City Journal

One of the cleverest tricks of the cultural Left is demonizing perfectly reasonable actions and opinions by giving them sinister names. It is the logical go-to technique for those whose ideas have failed in every practical application but who nonetheless still dominate the media by which ideas are spread.

A favorite example of mine is the old feminist declaration that men “objectify” women when they respond to female beauty as nature decrees. This particular reframing was not successful over the long term for the same reason that health scares involving coffee have never caught on: no one was willing to give up the stimulant. A more tenacious variation of the same approach is the accusation that law enforcement officers practice “racial profiling,” which sounds as though police center their suspicions on one race over another out of simple bigotry or meanness. In fact, if criminals of a certain type or in a certain neighborhood tend to be of a specific race, then the proper term for “racial profiling” would be “good police work.” And though, fortunately for liberals and conservatives alike, police continue to do that good work, the evil-sounding sobriquet has forced them to waste a lot of time, effort, and money pretending they don’t.

Recently, in defending an imam’s proposal to build a triumphalist “Muslim Cultural Center” near Manhattan’s Ground Zero—where, we may remember, so many innocents were slaughtered in the name of Allah—the Left has outdone itself. Rather than engage in serious debate with the vast majority of New Yorkers and Americans who oppose the project, the mosque’s defenders have simply dubbed the opposing viewpoint “Islamophobia.” As ever when this naming device is used, the left-wing media seem to rally as one. Within the space of a single week, Time put the word on its cover, Maureen Dowd accused the entire nation of it in her column, and CBS News trotted out the charge in reporting on mosque opposition.

For anyone born with the gift of laughter, the term is absurd to the point of hilarity. A phobia, after all, is an irrational fear. Given that Islam is cancerous with violence in virtually every corner of the globe, given the oppressive and exclusionary nature of many Islamic governments, given the insidious Islamist inroads against long-held freedoms in western Europe, and given those aspects of sharia that seem, to an outsider at least, to prohibit democracy, free speech, and the fair treatment of the female half of our species, those who love peace and liberty would, in fact, be irrational not to harbor at least a measure of concern.

A religion is only a system of beliefs, and to say that all beliefs deserve equal respect or acceptance is to say that ideas have no moral weight, a patent absurdity. Because the human soul thirsts so for God, the sacred principle of individual liberty demands that religion be given wide latitude when it comes to internal mind-states, modes of worship, and the description of the metaphysical. But when it comes to the practical affairs of humankind, humankind may judge—and Islam, as the world stands now, has a lot to answer for.

Whether radical Islamic violence, sexism, religious bigotry, and triumphalism are the natural outgrowths of its dogma or a series of aberrations is a perfectly valid question. Likewise the question of Islamic intentions toward Western culture in general and, by extension, the intentions of those behind the Ground Zero Mosque proposal. By what outlandish moral logic does Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf call America an “accomplice to the crime” of 9/11? From whom will he acquire the $100 million required to build his center, and what will they receive in return? None of these questions will be answered by simply condemning as phobic those who bring them to the fore.

With a hostility toward Christianity second only to Dracula’s, the Left has no credibility on the subject of freedom of religion. In a representative moment in February 2006, liberalism’s flagship paper, the New York Times, refused to publish the controversial Danish cartoons of Mohammed in order to “refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbols.” The next day, it famously illustrated a story on the cartoons with an offensive image of the Virgin Mary smeared with dung. One wonders, therefore: Does the Left really cherish the rights of Islam, or is theirs but a short-sighted alliance with the enemy of their enemies?

Which is to say that perhaps opponents of the mosque should question the motives of those who question their motives. In any case, they should greet the designation of Islamophobia with the derision that it deserves.

Andrew Klavan is a contributing editor to City Journal. His new thriller, The Identity Man, is due out in November from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.