New Yorker Magazine Half-Wakes-Up From Deep Obama Slumber to Threat of Weaponized Religion
—Ace
A weaponized religious cult, I should say.
Obama has been telling the country that there is no terrorism and no threat from Islamism for six years. The country has largely chosen to believe this unbelievable horseshit because this country is no longer a great one, but rather a cowardly, lazy, and trivial one.
Also, an increasingly stupid one. Say, hasn't television gotten crazy-good lately??!!
It is MOAR FUN!!! to live in Obama's world of cuddly-stupid lies than the rough and gritty real world.
But maybe some people are having troubling dreams about a thing they once knew as "the real world," which might cause them to actually wake up to it.
The murders today in Paris are not a result of France's failure to assimilate two generations of Muslim immigrants from its former colonies. They're not about French military action against the Islamic State in the Middle East, or the American invasion of Iraq before that. They're not part of some general wave of nihilistic violence in the economically depressed, socially atomized, morally hollow West--the Paris version of Newtown or Oslo. Least of all should they be "understood" as reactions to disrespect for religion on the part of irresponsible cartoonists.
They are only the latest blows delivered by an ideology that has sought to achieve power through terror for decades. It's the same ideology that sent Salman Rushdie into hiding for a decade under a death sentence for writing a novel, then killed his Japanese translator and tried to kill his Italian translator and Norwegian publisher. The ideology that murdered three thousand people in the U.S. on September 11, 2001. The one that butchered Theo van Gogh in the streets of Amsterdam, in 2004, for making a film. The one that has brought mass rape and slaughter to the cities and deserts of Syria and Iraq. That massacred a hundred and thirty-two children and thirteen adults in a school in Peshawar last month. That regularly kills so many Nigerians, especially young ones, that hardly anyone pays attention.
Because the ideology is the product of a major world religion, a lot of painstaking pretzel logic goes into trying to explain what the violence does, or does'’t, have to do with Islam. Some well-meaning people tiptoe around the Islamic connection, claiming that the carnage has nothing to do with faith, or that Islam is a religion of peace, or that, at most, the violence represents a "distortion" of a great religion....
A religion is not just a set of texts but the living beliefs and practices of its adherents. Islam today includes a substantial minority of believers who countenance, if they don't actually carry out, a degree of violence in the application of their convictions that is currently unique.
