Category Archives: Christianity

UPDATED (1/29): Make Jerusalem Safe Again

Christianity, Donald Trump, IMMIGRATION, Islam, Israel, Palestinian Authority

“Make Jerusalem Safe Again” is the current column, now on The Daily Caller. (And, yes, the column does briefly address the “land” issue, which libertarians can’t skirt.) An excerpt:

RELOCATING the American Embassy to Jerusalem, as President Donald Trump has pledged to do, is more than symbolic. It’s what Christians should be praying for if they value celebrating future Easter Holy Weeks, in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, located in Jerusalem’s Old City. With such a forceful gesture, the Trump Administration will be affirming, for once and for all, the undivided Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish State.

There’s a reason Muslims living in Israel proper—1.5 million of them—don’t migrate to the adjacent Palestinian Authority. They’re better off in Israel. Should Jerusalem, East and West, be recognized formally as the capital of Israel only, under Jewish control alone; Christianity’s holiest sites will be better off. Judaism’s holy sites will be safer. And so will Islam’s.

Jerusalem is no settlement to be haggled over; it’s the capital of the Jewish State. King David conquered it 1000 years Before Christ. The city’s “Muslim Period” began only in the year 638 of the Common Era. “Yerushalaim,” and not Al Quds, is the name of the city that was sacred to Jews for nearly two thousand years before Muhammad. Not once is Jerusalem mentioned in the Quran. And while Muhammad was said to have departed to the heavens from the Al Aksa Mosque, there was no mosque in Jerusalem. The Dome of the Rock and the Al Aksa Mosque were built upon the Jewish Temple Mount. Muslim theologians subsequently justified this usurpation by superimposing their own chronology—and relatively recent fondness for Jerusalem—upon the existing, ancient sanctity of the place to Jews.

Essentially, this amounts to historical identity theft.

It’s bad enough that Bethlehem—the burial site of the matriarch Rachel, birthplace to King David and Jesus and site of the Church of the Nativity—is controlled by the Palestinians. But, as one wag wondered, “How would Christians react if the Muslim theologians aforementioned had chosen to appropriate the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, rename it and declare it Muslim property?”

There is nothing Solomonic about splitting up Jerusalem, which—it bears repeating—was sacred to Jews for nearly two millennia before Muhammad and is not in the Quran. “The Muslim Claim to Jerusalem,” notes Dr. Daniel Pipes, is political, not religious or historic. As such, it’s also a recent project. “Centuries of neglect came to an abrupt end after June 1967, when the Old City came under Israeli control,” explains Pipes. “Palestinians [then] again made Jerusalem the centerpiece of their political program, [when, in fact] Mecca is the eternal city of Islam, the place from which non-Muslims are strictly forbidden. Very roughly speaking, [Mecca is to Islam] what Jerusalem is to Judaism.”

East Jerusalem was not annexed in June of 1967. Rather, Jerusalem was unified. …”

… Read the rest. “Make Jerusalem Safe Again” is now on The Daily Caller. If you’d like to feature the Mercer weekly column in your publication, print or pixels, please contact me at ilana@ilanamercer.com.

UPDATED (1/29):
Global Right of Return to US:

A Christmas Snuff Story

Christianity, Family, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Religion

“A Christmas Snuff Story” is the current column, now on The Daily Caller. An excerpt:

“We’re going to be saying Merry Christmas a lot more. And we’re going to have fewer criminal aliens to contend with,” promised President-elect Donald Trump on separate occasions.

Alas, Christmas and a criminal alien coalesced tragically, when Bob Clark, director of “A Christmas Story,” was killed by a drunk illegal alien in 2007. Clark’s son, age 22, also died on that day in April.

Like the director of that enchanting film, the family depicted in “A Christmas Story” is all but dead and buried, too—killed by Uncle Sam, the patron saint of social disorder.

Described by a critic as “one of those rare movies you can say is perfect in every way,” “A Christmas Story” debuted in 1983. Set in the 1940s, the film depicts a series of family vignettes through the eyes of 9-year-old Ralphie Parker, who yearns for that gift of all gifts: the Daisy Red Ryder BB gun.

This was boyhood before “bang-bang you’re dead” was banned; family life prior to “One Dad Two Dads Brown Dad Blue Dads,” and Christmas before Saint Nicholas was denounced for his whiteness and “Merry Christmas” condemned for its exclusivity.

If children could choose the family into which they were born, most would opt for the kind depicted in “A Christmas Story,” where mom is a happy homemaker, dad a devoted working stiff, and between them, they have no repertoire of psychobabble to rub together.

Although clearly adored, Ralphie is not encouraged to share his feelings at every turn. Nor is he, in the spirit of gender-neutral parenting, circa 2016, urged to act out like a girl if he’s feeling … girlie. Instead, Ralphie is taught restraint and self-control. And horrors: The little boy even has his mouth washed out with soap and water for uttering the “F” expletive. “My personal preference was for Lux,” reveals Ralphie, “but I found Palmolive had a nice piquant after-dinner flavor—heady but with just a touch of mellow smoothness.” Ralphie is, of course, guilt-tripped with stories about starving Biafrans when he refuses to finish his food.

The parenting practiced so successfully by Mr. and Mrs. Parker fails every progressive commandment. By today’s standards, the delightful, un-precocious protagonist of “A Christmas Story” would be doomed to a lifetime on the therapist’s chaise lounge—and certainly to daily doses of Ritalin, as punishment for unbridled boyishness and daydreaming in class …

… Read the rest and share. “A Christmas Snuff Story” is now on The Daily Caller.

Merry Christmas and happy Hanukkah to all.

ilana

A Timely Christmas Gift

Christianity, Donald Trump, Ilana Mercer, Literature

The other day, a reader asked if  “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed,” published June 29, had been “updated since the election.” The candid reply is “no. No need.” The first libertarian book of Trump is as valid and predictive as it was when it came out. And the price of both formats has been slashed. For a last minute Christmas gift, the Kindle edition is a mere $3.99; the paperback $10.99.

Historians Dr. Clyde Wilson, whose books I highly recommend, reviewed “The Trump Revolution” in Chronicles magazine, the flagship publication of principled paleoconservationism. “Sounding The Trump” is in the October 2016 issue of Chronicles (subscribe). A short excerpt:

In important ways, a revolutionary process has begun. So argues Ilana Mercer in the best extended analysis yet published of the Trump phenomenon: “Trump is getting an atrophied political system to oscillate” in “an oddly marvelous uprising.” For us revolutionaries there is still a long way to go, but we are entitled to a “modest hope” that “an utterly different political animal, Donald Trump, might actually do some good for the countrymen he genuinely seems to love.”  … It is not Trump who is transforming American politics, the author asserts; “it’s the people of America doing the transforming.” Trump is the first politician in a long, long time who has regarded America as a country rather than a “proposition” and has actually spoken to and for “the people.” Far from being “divisive,” his plain speaking has enthusiastically united large numbers of Americans. …

… “White Lives Matter Less” has been, in Mercer’s words, “the creedal pillar” of our public life. Without ungraciousness to any, Trump has shown that it is OK for white Americans to declare that they have had enough of “the pigment burden” that has been piled on their backs. This paleolibertarian author does not disguise her disgust at the fashionable statism, indistinguishable from the collectivist left and without a clue to what “free trade” really means, that passes for libertarianism today. …

… as Mercer points out with tough realism, … In this post-constitutional time, it may be that “the best liberty lovers can look to is action and counter-action, force and counterforce in the service of liberty.” A president hoping for reform will face 160,000 pages of federal laws and regulations and relentless sabotage by the Banksters, Bombers, Bureaucrats, and Busybodies who now govern us. He cannot be a moderate if he hopes to accomplish anything.

On “Mercer’s Menckenesque ability to coin memorable phrases describing the empowered fools of our time,” Professor Wilson’s asks: “Does any contemporary writer do it better?”

Finally, a reviewer with a sense of fun; someone with the good sense to have a hearty chuckle at this verbal swordplay:

Mercer on the media: “news nitworks,” the “War Street Journal,” “idiot’s lantern,” “unsharpened pencil,” “tele-tarts,” a “circle jerk of power brokers,” “one-trick donkeys,” “celebrated mediocrities,” “another banal bloviation,” the “cable commentariat as a cog in the corpulent D.C. fleshpot.”

Mercer on our rulers and would-be rulers: “parasites in waiting”; “nation-building at the point of the bayonet makes [Hillary] barking happy”; “Banana Republicans”; “dwarf-tossing” (William Kristol’s promotion of nonentities as Trump alternatives); the “quaint expectation that voters, not party operatives, would choose the nominee”; the “silent majority that dare not speak its name”; “what our crypto-leftist conservatives are ramming down our proverbial gullets are dogmas, not values”; the “master-servant relationship between Republicans and the Religious Right”; the “think tanks’ industry for the god of war”; “neoconservatives speaking like Tocqueville but acting like Robespierre”; “neoconservatives standing athwart every valid form of American conservatism yelling stop.”

What a review and what an honor!

And to all my readers: I’m honored to have had your support for all these years. Thank you!

Merry Christmas and a happy Hanukkah and New Year.

ilana

Mosque Call To Prayer A Form Of Noise Pollution, Trespass

Christianity, Islam, Israel, libertarianism, Paleolibertarianism, Private Property, Religion

In Muslim countries, the remaining Christians and Jews worship under duress. Witness the latest massacre of Coptic Christians in Egypt, where a “bomb blast has killed at least 25 people during Sunday mass inside a Cairo church near the main Coptic Christian cathedral,” reports Egyptian state TV.

All Israel wants is for mosques to turn the volume way down. What a difference. I would ask that the muezzin stop screaming from the spire, or minaret of the mosque. Surely Muslims know what time service begins? Get the mosque to text you, if you forget.

A libertarian case can be made that penetrating, amplified yelps that travel far are a form of noise pollution. Citizens can seek redress in a libertarian universe for such trespass.