Dawn Olsen: WWMD: What Would Mohammed Do?

I searched online for some passages from the Koran as they relate to violence, forgiveness, terror and peace in an effort to answer the trendy Christian mantra of What Would Jesus Do? As silly as that may sound, it’s a great question (if you are a Christian) to ask yourself when faced with a moral dilemma.

I love this comment from Kirk:

Jerry, why are you posting this drivel when you could be saying something like "As a Muslim, I condemn all acts of violence against innocent people caused by Muslim radicals?" That would do more good than anything else you could possibly say.

5:23:37 PM  comment []    

Goodbye, All That: How Left Idiocies Drove Me to Flee

So I went up to the antiwar demonstration in Central Park this weekend, hoping to hear some persuasive arguments. After a couple of hours there, listening to speeches, reading the hate-America literature, I still don’t know what to think about Iraq—will an attack open a Pandora’s box, or close one?—but I think I know what I feel about this antiwar movement, or at least many of the flock who showed up in the Sheep Meadow.

A movement of Marxist fringe groups and people who are unable to make moral distinctions. An inability summed up by a man holding a big poster that proudly identified him as "NYC TEACHER." The lesson "NYC TEACHER" had for the day was that "BUSH IS A DEVIL … HANDS OFF NORTH KOREA, IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN …. "

Yes, Bush is "a devil" compared to those enlightened regimes that torture and murder dissidents (like "NYC TEACHER"). Bush is certainly "a devil" compared to enlightened leaders like Kim Jong Il, who has reduced the North Korean people in his repulsive police state to eating moss on rocks; or to Saddam Hussein, who tortures and gasses opponents, and starves his people to fund his germ-war labs; or to the Taliban in Afghanistan, who beat women into burqas. Yes, surely compared to them, Bush is "a devil." Thank God New York’s schoolchildren are in such good hands.

Ron Rosenbaum nails it in these first three paragraphs, and he continues to nail it. He does a great job describing what's happened for me and many others who (still) consider themselves liberals.

I still identify myself as a contrarian, libertarian, pessimist, secular-humanist, anti-materialist liberal Democrat who distrusts the worship of "the wisdom of the market." Someone who was outraged (and outspoken in these pages) about the Bush-Baker election tactics in Florida, for instance. But not stupid enough to think we’d be better off with Al Gore as President now....

No, we wouldn't be better off. We would be worse off. We would have vacillated. We would have looked weak. It wouldn't have helped that Republicans in Congress would have questioned every positive move: "What's the exit strategy? Isn't this nation-building?" If the 2000 election were held over again today, I would.... (gasp) I. would. (sigh) vote for Bush. I hate myself for saying that, but it's the truth. John Ashcroft's depredations and a packed Supreme Court are injuries that this Republic can weather much more easily than a mushroom cloud over NYC.

Rosenbaum continues:

Goodbye to the brilliant thinkers of the Left who believe it’s the very height of wit to make fun of George W. Bush’s intelligence—thereby establishing, of course, how very, very smart they are. Mr. Bush may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer (I think he’s more ill-informed and lazy than dumb). But they are guilty of a historical stupidity on a far greater scale, in their blind spot about Marxist genocides. It’s a failure of self-knowledge and intellectual responsibility that far outweighs Bush’s, because they’re supposed to be so very smart.

Goodbye to paralysis by moral equivalence: Remind me again, was it John Ashcroft or Fidel Castro who put H.I.V. sufferers in concentration camps?

Goodbye to people who have demonstrated that what terror means to them is the terror of ever having to admit they were wrong, the terror of allowing the hideous facts of history to impinge upon their insulated ideology.

Amen to that, brother! There's more, it's all terribly cogent.

When this falls off the home page, find it here.

via Lake Effect

1:43:17 AM  comment []