Category Archives: Christianity

DRUDGE’S Source On Israel & Its Capital, United Yerushalayim

Christianity, History, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Media

DRUDGE can be overprotective in covering Israel. Today, however, the mighty Matt D. has done the opposite. The link provided on The Drudge Report, Sunday 10/11, is to a report by one Mr. Sakher Abou El Oun of Yahoo! And it is puzzling.

The Drudge headline:
“Unrest worsens as death toll rises, attack hits Jerusalem…”

Abou El Oun’s “reporting” is pockmarked with a lot of adjectives pointing toward his biases, as well as some linguistic lunacy pointing to the same thing (bias):

* “Fourteen stabbing attacks have targeted Jews since October 3, when a Palestinian murdered two Israelis in east Jerusalem’s Old City. [“Stabbing attacks” don’t “target”; men with murder on their minds do that. Moreover, if there were 14 attacks, what was the fate of the other victims? Or were the two slain Jews attacked 14 times? … Unless I don’t get this joker’s idea of a news report.]

* An Israeli husband and wife, shot dead in front of their children, are referred to as “a Jewish settler couple.”

AND:

* “… violent protests have since shaken the occupied territory as well as annexed east Jerusalem.” [We call it united Yerushalayim. An unbiased reporter would have dropped the adjectives and written “east Jerusalem.”]

“Hamas warns against ‘foolishness’…” is another Yahoo! headline on Drudge in which these terms stick out like a Muslim woman in nosebag garb:

* “… the Jewish state” [It’s Israel. However, maybe if we call America The Christian State, we’d get to keep her identity.]

* “… annexed east Jerusalem” [It’s United Yerushalayim to a good many peaceful people who know their history and want to preserve the Holy City for all peaceful visitors and inhabitants.]

Come to think of it, America’s news reporting is fast approximating the expansive style of Arabia, minus the literary beauty of “Arabian Nights.”

To my family and to the family at the Jerusalem Institute of Market Studies: Stay safe.

About Pope Francis, The Lady Di of The Papacy

Celebrity, Christianity, Federalism, Founding Fathers, Government, Islam, Reason, Religion

“About Pope Francis” is the current column, now on the Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine. An excerpt:

In the wake of America’s week-long, Pope Francis bacchanalia, a few column titles suggest themselves:

“Benedict, What Have You Wrought?”

“The Global Village Idiot.”

“Lady Di of The Papacy.”

The last hints at the trendy, pop-philosophies that animate Pope Francis’ Lady Di-like belief system. The intellectual equivalent of these papal shopworn shibboleths you’ll find in a Chinese, fortune-cookie wrapper.

Ultimately, the editor will decide which of these unflattering headings best describes the man whom one devout Catholic—libertarian jurist Andrew Napolitano—called a false prophet for overturning Catholic canon law without consulting his Bishops. Yet another reason Pope Francis is drawn to an authoritarian president who rules by presidential veto.

Intellectually, Pope Francis is no match for his predecessors.

With his 1998 encyclical, the Polish pope—how the Polish people suffered under the communists whose creed Pope Francis is inadvertently dignifying—sounded a lone voice for both “Faith and Reason” in the postmodern religious wilderness.

Who other than Pope John Paul spoke with such unhectoring clarity about the errors of relativism in modern thought? Certainly not Jorge Bergolio, who is too simple to consider such abstractions.

The anti-intellectualism evinced in the Holy See’s 2015 environmental encyclical made this pope’s “close advisers,” in all their “ill-tempered diction,” the butt of ridicule over the pages of the Catholic Crisis magazine:

From the empirical side, to prevent the disdain of more informed scientists generations from now, papal teaching must be safeguarded from attempts to exploit it as an endorsement of one hypothesis over another concerning anthropogenic causes of climate change. It is not incumbent upon a Catholic to believe, like Rex Mottram in “Brideshead Revisited,” that a pope can perfectly predict the weather. …

In the same badly written potboiler, the pope took a swipe at the richest nations, blaming them for despoiling the earth. In truth, however, the developed world has advanced the technologies (and attendant ethics) that are helping to clean up the atmosphere, the waterways, the oceans and many a landmass. It is the developing and underdeveloped nations—China and India, for one—that despoil the earth and devastate its creatures. So polluted are the waterways in former communist countries that rivers are known to catch fire. Watch. …

… Read the rest.“About Pope Francis” is now on the Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine.

UPDATED: Pope Knows Absolutely Nothing About The American Constitutional Republic (& Even Less About Catholic Canon Law)

America, Christianity, Constitution, Individual Rights

Said the scold from Rome, Pope Francis, to a joint session of Congress:

You are the face of its people, their representatives. You are called to defend and preserve the dignity of your fellow citizens in the tireless and demanding pursuit of the common good, for this is the chief aim of all politics. …

There are more papal distortions about the American constitutional scheme, but it’s too dismaying to plumb. Feel free to read on.

Even President Barack Obama recognized, these are his own words, that “the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties.” Obama has made it cleat that due to the obstacles the Constitution poses to “redistributive justice,” community organizers like him have aimed at achieving extra-constitutional change.

The Pope should be told by Republican elected representatives, who lapped up his words and shed crocodile tears—that they are bound not “to satisfy common needs,” as this ignorant Pope put it, but to uphold a limited set of negative, individual rights: LIFE, LIBERTY, AND PROPERTY.

If you care about freedom and the American way, explain to your children the principles explained so simply in “The Defunct Foundations Of The Republic,” by way of one example. (Search the Articles Archives under negative rights, individual rights, etc., for more.) Don’t raise your kids to confuse Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s general will with the American verities of republicanism and limited government.

UPDATE: Finally, our left-libertarian judge gets it Right:

… Comes now Pope Francis to use moral relativism to take the Church in two dangerous directions. The first is an assault on the family, and the second is an assault on the free market — two favorite political targets of the left.

In the past month, without consulting his fellow bishops, the pope has weakened the sacrament of matrimony by making annulments easier to obtain. The Church cannot grant divorces because Our Lord used his own words to declare valid marriages indissoluble. But it does grant annulments.

An annulment is a judicial finding that a valid marriage never existed. This generally requires a trial, at which the party seeking the annulment must prove the existence of the marital defect from the beginning.

Fair annulment trials are costly and time consuming, often taking years from the initial filing to the final appeal. Until now. Last week, Pope Francis arbitrarily ordered the entire process to be completed in 45 days or fewer. For contested matters, a fair trial in 45 days is impossible. So, to meet his deadline, more annulments will be granted administratively, not on the merits.

It gets worse.

The Church has taught for 400 years that abortion is murder. Because the victim of an abortion is always innocent, helpless and uniquely under the control of the mother, abortion removes the participants from access to the sacraments. Until now. Last week, Pope Francis, without consulting his fellow bishops, ordered that any priest may return those who have killed a baby in a womb to the communion of the faithful. He said he did this because he was moved by the anguished cries of mothers contemplating the murder of their babies.

In his papal exhortation on capitalism, Pope Francis spectacularly failed to appreciate the benefits of capitalism to the health, wealth and safety of the poor. Instead, he has reworked the Peronism of his youth to advocate government-mandated redistribution of wealth and to condemn those who work hard, employ others and achieve wealth — even when they give some of that wealth to the Church. …

A beautiful column. Read the rest.

Choir Lady Callista Gingrich (Or A Look-Alike) Killed It

Christianity, Music, The West

I’m sure I recognized Mrs. Newt Gingrich in the papal mass choir that sang so sublimely for Pope Francis (who seemed to be dozing off). The music still honored by the Catholic Church—mostly Western, J. S. Bach being the God of music—is enough to make a classical-music loving Jew convert. Callista is famous for her helmeted hair-do, and now for her devotion to music. Indeed:

A devoted Catholic, Mrs. Gingrich is a member of the Choir of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., a resident professional choir.

And:

The five groups scheduled to perform include a gospel choir, the Catholic University Chamber Choir and a “Papal Mass Choir” of 90 participants selected from more than 300 people who auditioned in the D.C. area.