in The Media 77 Words

Holy Crap

I really don’t know what the New York Times’ editors are doing with Ross Douthat. Publicly pushing for a religious war between the Anglican-Catholic church and Islam is just nonsensical. It’s offensive. It’s stupid. And it’s clear that Douthat has absolutely no conception of the meaning of the words he puts to page. Calling for an escalation in the war between European Christian power bases and Islam could have real human consequences.  The Times should be embarrassed.

2 thoughts on “Holy Crap”

  1. Yeah, that would be stupid. Oh wait, that’s not what Douthat said. At all. Try this one: Republicans and Democrats are locked in conflict, mutual foes of each other. Oh no, I just advocated for civil war. Crap.

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  2. Yeah and there is a centuries old history of Democrats and Republicans waging holy war against each other, with genocide as a tool in use, that has recently been exasperated by fanatics on both sides. Oh wait, that’s not true. Come up with a better analogy, because what you’re proposing is just silly.

    Douthat writes:

    Where the European encounter is concerned, Pope Benedict has opted for public confrontation. In a controversial 2006 address in Regensburg, Germany, he explicitly challenged Islam’s compatibility with the Western way of reason — and sparked, as if in vindication of his point, a wave of Muslim riots around the world.

    By contrast, the Church of England’s leadership has opted for conciliation (some would say appeasement), with the Archbishop of Canterbury going so far as to speculate about the inevitability of some kind of sharia law in Britain.

    There are an awful lot of Anglicans, in England and Africa alike, who would prefer a leader who takes Benedict’s approach to the Islamic challenge. Now they can have one, if they want him.

    Glenn Greenwald’s response is pretty instructive:

    But the claim that Islam itself — and the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims — cannot be accommodated by, or peacefully co-exist with, Western values or Christianity specifically is bigotry in its purest and most dangerous form. It’s hard to imagine anything more inflammatory, hostile and outright threatening than a call for Christians of all denominations to unite behind the common cause of fighting against Islam as Christianity’s most “enduring and impressive foe.” No more “conciliation” or appeasement. What, exactly, does Douthat have in mind for vanquishing the Islamic menace from Europe? What weapons will this “united Anglican-Catholic front” employ against its reason-hating enemy? Which “accommodations” of Islam exactly should cease?

    Sorry I just don’t know how you read Douthat’s column and come away with anything other than the fact that he is calling for an escalation of tensions in a religious war between Islam and Christianity.

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