Letter to a Friend I received the following short comment not long ago in reply to the paper I circulated earlier with the title : Can anyone guess why the mainstream media has yet to use the word " Islam" ? The writer is an old friend of mine from Chicago who now lives in the Bay Area, near San Francisco. Unfortunately, however, as good and decent a person as he is, and usually smart as hell, he seems to be under the spell of the political Left, particularly the California variety of the Left. Anyway, to begin, here is what he said :
Adam Lanza murdered 20 beautiful young children and 6 caring adults. Apparently he did not kill enough to get some meaningful gun legislation passed. Brief as the comment is, it tells a story with several implications. It also was connected to a "slight" change he made to the title : Can anyone guess why the mainstream media has yet to use the word "Christian" ? I wrote a follow-up e-mail which is included here. The need to do so also gave me the opportunity to explain in greater depth my views of what a politically Independent view of reality is all about --which my friend now knows is directly connected with the philosophy of Radical Centrism. In the meantime, like many other people, I have been watching news coverage of the past 24 hours in which the search for the two suspects in the Boston killings and bomb blasts came to a conclusion with the death of one of the Muslim terrorists and the capture of the other just a short time ago as this is being written. So far, as of nightly news TV times, none of the major networks have identified the terrorists as Muslim. Even Fox TV has only used the phrase "radical Islam," just once, the qualifier obviously intended to separate terrorists from Muhammad's normative religion. To say the least, with acknowledgement that I may have missed something on the networks, the conduct of network news people has been irresponsible in the extreme. Islam itself is a dangerous ideology, it intrinsically promotes hatred of non-Muslims, and incites violence against them --against most of the rest of us. To say the same thing, the ideology of the Left, when the issue is religion, especially when the issue is Islam, is an absurdity. While the Left prides itself on being informed, on these questions it is ridiculously uninformed, essentially ignorant of everything basic, and is oblivious to its monumental shortcomings. And this extends to the news media which, except for Fox ( more-or-less except for Fox, which really isn't much better ), on all such issues bases their outlook on carefully cultivated ignorance, on not being informed, and on an ideology that it seeks to indoctrinate the population with --which it assumes is the only plausible viewpoint to even have. Once again, it is impossible to adequately convey my feelings of contempt and disgust for the media. While this is especially true for blowhards like Chris Matthews and Shepard Smith, included in the roster of simpletons who do not in any way deserve to even be employed in news organizations are people like Diane Sawyer, Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper, Candy Crowley, Al Sharpton, Alan Colmes, Tavis Smiley, Ann Currey, Roland S. Martin, et. al., with special mention of a beautiful but hopelessly uninformed airhead employed by Fox News, Jenna Lee. One might also mention Fox TV News reliance on one-dimensional men and women, Megyn Kelly and Bill O'Reilly as prime examples of people who think they know it all but who, on analysis, are locked into narrow worldviews, in Kelly's case an overwhelming tendency to reduce all stories to examples of civil case law, in O'Reilly's case, reducing all stories to examples of his version of "common sense" with horizons that don't seem to extend beyond the 'wisdom' of opinion polls. Which hardly exhausts the list of Fox personalities who are second tier journalists with pretensions of deep quality. Things are not really better at ABC, NBC, or CBS, only a little better at CNN and PBS ( this is not saying much to take comfort in ), and considerably worse at MSNBC. And all of this is where most of the American public gets its "hard news" and from which many of its most important public policy values derive. But this is enough editorializing about television for one e-mail. One final comment, another e-mail reached my computer today. This was from a Hindu in India, someone clearly representative of many other Hindus in their strong criticisms of Islam and of the horrible damages done to their country in recent years by Muslims, and, indeed, for over a thousand years of history. My sentiments, transposed into the context of America, are not much different. However..... Some Hindus, like that writer, seem unable to differentiate various kinds of Christians from one another, and about this I must take serious exception. Today's Evangelical Christians, for example, whatever shortcomings they may have, are nothing at all like the Portuguese who once controlled Goa, they are nothing at all like a class of narrow-minded Anglicans of the Raj who once ruled India utilizing a value system that owed more to Machiavelli than the Gospel of Matthew. For that matter, the Assyrian Christians of southern India, the so-called "Thomas Christians" of legend, are very real and have gotten along as friends of Hindus for approximately 1700 years, or at a minimum, 1500 years. Some basic distinctions are in order, especially since ( 1 ) many American Christians would like the best possible relationships with India, and speaking for myself, this is the highest priority thinkable, and ( 2 ) there actually are some Hindus who have committed terrible acts against Christians. No-one likes to admit any such thing, but even if anger sometimes is justifiable, there are far better ways to express grievances than resort to overt hostility. I think I understand the complexities involved. The unjust reality of the colonial past lives on in some places, for example. In other locations there may be collusion between Christians and Muslims. This is completely unacceptable. The point is that there are many more Christians who seek peaceful relationships with Hindus. Please, let us seek all ways possible to work together, let us really try to do so. This would serve both Hindu interests and Christian interests. For that matter, as the mass-scale killings of Buddhists in Thailand attests, Buddhists and Christians and Hindus would each benefit from co-operation against Islam, a religion that desires to eliminate all other faiths from the world. We have the same bigoted and immoral enemy, Islam, a religion that seeks the subjugation of the world and that seeks to impose the most narrow-minded and dysfunctional set of values on everyone else that is imaginable. It is long past the time when we all should have been saying exactly this, again and again, until people finally realize how badly the news media is misleading them --and how badly their governments are misleading them. People of all "good religions" --a phrase that specifically excludes Islam-- need to work together for a valued common purpose. We need to face the truth for what it actually is, nothing less. Now for the reply to my friend.......... Billy -------------------------------------------- Letter to a Friend J : You are so right. The political Right doesn't want to face reality, either. As for massacres, there was also the July 2012 slaughter in Aurora, Colorado, that left 12 dead and another 58 wounded, some very seriously. BTW, as maybe I mentioned, the gunman, James Holmes, has converted to Islam, which : (1) the mainstream media still has not reported, and (2) you would presume that the idea of Islam was something he probably was thinking about beforehand. There are virtually no religious conversions unless someone has first spent considerable time thinking about doing so. Yes, other killings are "secular," committed by crazies. Like the January 2011 murder of six people in Tucson, the near killing of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, with the wounding of another 19 or so. The perpetrator in that case was a certified nut case named as Jared Lee Loughner, a really mentally ugly sonovabitch if there ever was one In April of 2007 another whack job killed 32 at Virginia Tech. There was Columbine in 1999, with 12 dead and 21 wounded. Locally, at Thurston HS in nearby Springfield, OR, in 1998, a student named Kip Kinkel murdered his parents and killed 2 students, wounding several others. Incidentally, I know the author of a the definitive book about that event, an interesting fellow named Joe Lieberman ( his actual name ). Bottom line : I agree whole-heartedly that strong gun controls are needed, and the sooner the better. Keep ALL assault weapons out of the hands of anyone but the military and SWAT teams. Strict background checks for all gun purchasers, and you name it. On that issue I am very much on the political Left. But let's get real about the threat of Islam. About this subject, while not all of the Right sees things this way, a lot of conservatives do so, and about this I come down clearly in favor of the Right. This is typical of maybe most political Independents. Some parts of the Left make sense, some parts of the Right also make sense, but other parts of each the Left and the Right are utterly insane and immoral. Neither major political party can fathom why this sort of judgement makes the best possible sense to people. For myself, the views of the major parties make poor sense or no sense at all. ----- What I take very strong exception to is false moral equivalency. There is no such thing as Christian evils = Muslim evils. That is pure nonsense as argument. And I think you know it. It is also Left-wing rationalization by way of denial of all relevant facts. Or clinical psychological denial per se. How many abortion clinic related deaths have there been ? Eight ( 8 ) , and all of them were in the 1990s, unless there has been one or another that I don't know about. Tally of Muslim-inspired killings in the USA alone since 9 /11 ? 2, 996. Even if you subtract 9/11 itself, that still leaves about 250 killed in the past decade or so. No matter how you slice it, 8 is not the same as 250. That is more than a magnitude of difference. Worldwide the picture is MUCH worse, for which there is virtually no Christian ( or any other ) religion inspired "equivalent." The website, Religion of Peace, keeps track of the running total. As of yesterday, Jihadist attacks had killed 20, 725 since 2001, not counting casualties in wars. It really is unjustifiable to equate 8 with 250 or 2,996 as if they were the same, and completely out of bounds to think that 8 = 20, 725. The views of the Left on these matters is morally bankrupt, it denies facts for what they are, it substitutes an ideology for objectivity, and does not stand even elementary tests of truth. Which is no defense of the Right. The almost mindless defense of guns on the Right is irrational and , for one, I strongly object to any such thing. Like Jefferson, sure, we need the 2nd Amendment, but there is a world of difference between sports rifles and so forth and military weapons in the hands of criminals, or handguns owned by lunatics and gang members, and anything else along these lines. But may I ask why you seemed to assume that I automatically favored no gun restrictions and was opposed to gun control ? That happens to be the exact opposite of my actual views. Let me guess : This is what the Left assumes must be the case --no evidence required-- for anyone who takes a viewpoint different than their position on Islam. To repeat the point, I've been down that road. I've been a Lefty. I still favor everything about the Left that is rational and sane. But that is no better than maybe half of what the Left now stands for and believes in. The other half is a political disease. My humble opinion Billy . -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
