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| The Pope Battles Dhimmitude |
| 2006-09-20 |
| It is clear from the events of the last week that dhimmitude is here right now. I’d never had much time for Oriana Fallaci, the outrageous Italian interviewer and journalist, but appreciated her diatribes against Islam in the years since 9/11, and wrinkled my nose on learning that she was being sued for insulting the faith. But the head of the Italian journalists’ union marked her death last week by saying that she was a “great, courageous and scrupulous journalist but also an intellectual whose most recent views were unacceptable and in many respects dangerous.” What can you call that but dhimmitude? Then there is the flap over the Pope’s remarks at the University of Regensburg. The Christian God is a reasonable God, he asserts, the Word made flesh. “But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent,” independent of reason or anything else. Then he headed off into a learned apology for the Christian God, the union of the Hebrew prophetic tradition and the Hellenistic logos. Since it is merely a couple of weeks since two Fox News staffers were kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam—without a peep of outrage from the moderate Muslim community—I’d say that it was the Pope’s duty to raise the question of jihad with the Muslim world. If the head of the Catholic Church won’t do it who will? But the international media was united in condemning the Pope’s remarks as a gaffe, an insult to Islam. And now the Pope says he is sorry for the way people reacted, if not for what he said. That was when the scales fell off my eyes. What’s all the fuss? In fact, we have the same system here in the United States. Call it liberal dhimmitude. Every conservative lives under its oppressive yoke. Disagree with the liberal line and you better expect to be attacked and humiliated. That’s how the system works. The “progressive” left stirs up a conflict and blames the international middle class. Maybe it’s Marx blaming the bourgeoisie for the subsistence wages of the industrial working class. Maybe it’s Lenin claiming that every European is an imperialist. Maybe it’s liberals dividing black and white in the United States with racial quotas, or declaring upper-middle-class women the victim of the male of the species. Now liberals are united in protecting Muslims from insult and tossing away our tradition of free speech. The only thing that matters is to make westerners—or Christians, or Americans—take the blame, to make them into dhimmi, second-class citizens afraid to stand up for the Christian God, the rule of law, and the bounty of the market. If you read the Pope’s speech at Regensburg carefully you can appreciate the radicalism of the Christian message. The idea that God is a rational God, who invites us to discover His nature through an exploration of reason, is radical. It makes the claim that, in the end, we will find out that the universe makes sense. It is the same claim that western science makes, that we can understand the universe by discovering its laws. Both Christianity and science are grounded in the same faith, that there are indeed laws that describe the universe. But Islam and western postmodernism make a different claim. For them there is no “In the beginning was the Word,” the logos of reason. There is only power: divine power or secular power. The Chinese have a different take on the modern world. According to David Aikman in the book Jesus in Beijing, the Chinese have been wondering for generations what it is about the west that makes it so powerful. Now “Dr. Wu” of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences says that they have found us out. That is also what Pope Benedict XVI is saying in different words. |
| Posted by:Nimble Spemble |
| #4 Compared to MADONNA + Divine Power, SECULAR-MATERIAL POWER IS NO POWER AT ALL. Nice to have to pay the bills but won't stop Gabriel's Sword worth a spit. |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2006-09-20 23:39 |
| #3 Excellent read. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2006-09-20 18:28 |
| #2 Awesome and true. |
| Posted by: newc 2006-09-20 18:24 |
| #1 VERY PERCEPTIVE and very true. Thanks for this post. |
| Posted by: ex-lib 2006-09-20 11:37 |