Category Archives: Christianity

Updated: Missionaries Cleared (Despite Anderson Cooper's Asininity)

Christianity, Colonialism, Criminal Injustice, Free Will Vs. Determinism, History, Ilana Mercer, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Multiculturalism, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, The West

The extracts are from “Anderson Cooper’s Asininity,” the latest WND.COM column:

“The tough tenor toward the missionaries from Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, Idaho, was set by CNN alpha female Anderson Cooper. The activist anchor and his houseboys in Haiti had been exceedingly hard on the hapless group, whose aim it was to, first, whisk the children to the Dominican Republic and, next, help ‘each child find healing, hope, joy and new life in Christ,” as well as “opportunities for adoption into a loving Christian family.’ …

Thankfully—and contrary to CNN’s self-styled newsman-cum-humanitarian—one Haitian justice was not as eager to see ‘The Americans’ go down for their goodness.

As Reuters reported, the (eminently reasonable) investigating Haitian judge looked for criminal intent in his investigation. He found none. So the Haitian justice concluded that the incarcerated missionaries acted with no malice aforethought.

Mens rea : now that’s a difficult concept for Cooper to comprehend. …

Whatever were [the missionaries’] plans for the children, these were far and away better than what’s in store for them if they remain at home.

Mind you, [now that they’re staying in Haiti], the kids can hope to be caught on camera—Anderson Cooper’s—as they chase him and his crew begging for tasty morsels, while Cooper flexes his muscles, furrows his forehead, and shows just how much he feels their pain.” …

The complete column is “Anderson Cooper’s Asininity,” now on WND.COM.

And do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

Before purchasing the Second Edition, which features bonus material, ask yourself this: how many column volumes would withstand the test of time with respect to truth and predictability as Broad Sides has? “Chuckie” Krauthammer’s?

Get your copy (or copies) now!

Update (Feb. 13): Robert has verified my contention in the latest column—now on my site and better titled “Anderson Cooper’s Mission Against The Missionaries”—when he asserts: “I have never met a parent that didn’t want their children to have a better future than they did.”

Americans are insular and insulated. They truly think, contra Russell Kirk’s warning, “that all men are brothers, and that all men are equal.”

In some cultures, parents drown their newborn girls before breakfast. And no, this is not reducible to the state’s policies alone. “For the sins of man, hard leftists blame society, and hard-core libertarians saddle the state. The State made me do it’ is how such social determinism can be summed-up.”

To believe that these individuals are acting out of hopelessness or despair alone, rather than acting on their values, is to fall into the Cooper, Robinson, McCain mistake.

No, some people don’t blink before giving ownership of their girls to slave masters and mistresses. Sorry to shatter the Pollyanna perception held in the west that we are all the same under the skin.

I was just reading about an orphanage in Kerala, India, founded by … good whites, for children with cerebral palsy, down syndrome and autism, “who would normally have been killed at birth or rented out to beggars.” I guess, Robert would say that the parent who did the latter wanted more for his kid than the one who chose to off his offspring.

Americans are unable to get into their mushy skulls that indeed these discarded kids I spoke of in the last column, are not “orphanage” in the way we define an orphan. Thei parents have discarded them.

Like the Coopers, Robinsons and McCains of this world, westerners can’t conceive of a reality so removed from their internal world.

Update III: Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values (Senegal Does It Right)

America, Celebrity, Christianity, Ethics, Foreign Aid, Hollywood, Human Accomplishment, Israel, Judaism & Jews, Media, Morality, Political Economy, The West, UN

The excerpt is from my new, WND.COM column: “Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values”:

“… in all its self-serving displays, humanitarianism is, overwhelmingly, a Western affair; a Judeo-Christian thing. It’s as simple as all that. Liberals like Angelina Jolie will trace Western generosity to the founding of the United Nations, to the League of Nations, or to some other supra-national structure.

I suspect that what is at play in Haiti, and in countless locales around the undeveloped world, began with the revolutionary, universal, elaborate moral and legal injunctions encoded first in Exodus, Deuteronomy and Leviticus – and, thereafter, throughout the Hebrew Bible – to protect and do justice by the poor, the weak, the defenseless, the widow and the stranger. The people of Israel were enjoined to practice what Christians later perfected.

That stuff stuck.

A different set of beliefs animates Haitian society, and helps explain its helplessness and hopelessness. ‘Haiti is not a Catholic country, Haiti is a Voodoo country,’ Erol Josue told National Public Radio. Josue is a Voodoo priest in a country whose former president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, officially recognized Voodoo as a state religion.” …

The complete column is “Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values.”

And do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material. Get your copy (or copies) now!

Update I (Jan. 22): Martin’s comment hereunder reminded me what I clean forgot: the Obamas’ very public giving. I’m also grateful to Martin for bringing to our attention the DIRECT injunction in the New Testament against showy charity. Martin quotes the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 6: “Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them.” How has this country forgotten something as foundational as that?

Self-righteousness has replaced righteousness and self-aggrandizement has supplanted simple goodness.

Update II (Jan. 23): CHILD SLAVERY still thrives in Haiti in the form of the “Restavec system.” Children are kept in grinding poverty and worked to the bone. In the West this would be considered perverse in the extreme; in Haiti owning a Restavek is a status symbol. CNN has done stories on Restavec children, but has never connected the dots, as the favorite phrase goes. The angle is, invariably one of, “Look how good I am [Dr. Gupta here]; I’m crying.” Coupled with, “This happens in the US too.

No it doesn’t. When a slave is discovered, usually in the home of immigrants who imported their bad habit, American society shames and punishes the offenders.

Update III (Jan. 24): SENEGAL DOES IT RIGHT. Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade has offered Haitian refugees a “parcels of land – even an entire region. It all depends on how many Haitians come. If it’s just a few individuals, then we will likely offer them housing or small pieces of land. If they come en masse we are ready to give them a region,’ he said.”

Wade “insisted that if a region is handed over it should be in a fertile area – not in the country’s parched deserts.”

Wade’s got the right idea, or at least the righteous one. He is offering Haitians a most generous chance at self-sufficiency; at working the land.

“Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish philosopher and codifier of Jewish law, holds that the most praiseworthy and effective means of fulfilling the commandment of Tzedakah [charity] is through offering an impoverished person a business partnership, a business loan or a job. … the Prime Minister and [former Finance Minister] of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, apparently understood this well. Speaking on the benefits of workfare reform in Israel, Netanyahu was once quoted in the press as saying that it is not enough to be a Thatcherite, a Jew should go even further and become a Maimonidite. [Excerpted from the monograph titled Judaism, Markets, and Capitalism: Separating Myth from Reality, by Corinne and Robert Sauer of the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies, with which I am affiliated.]

[SNIP]

Will Haitians be tempted by a chance at an honest living when hand-outs abound?

Update III: Olby Sweats Haiti (Robertson Vs. The Devil)

America, Christianity, Colonialism, Foreign Aid, History, Media, Military, Race, Racism, The West

I almost felt sorry for MSNBC’s old Olby, so desperate was he to scoop at least one news story detailing Haitian agency, initiative, creativity, and, yes, altruism, in the face of the desperate realities of the quake. Alas, Olby had very little to work with. He was certainly not a happy camper when one of his houseboy reporters told of happening upon a group of Haitians desperately digging in the rubble. Olby’s enormous face softened. But not for long. It transpired that the site used to be a bank. Oh, there were people buried under the bank, but Olby’s touching scene of nobility and self-sacrifice was really a gold-digging expedition.

Goodness is glorious, and the glory belonged, mainly, to Western charitable organizations, with America in the lead.

America is clearly coordinating an awesome mission of mercy to Haiti. The US has practically taken over rescue operations. From the churches—who have storage warehouses in that blighted place; have had them for decades, just in case—to the military, the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, forced to control air traffic sans an “airport control tower or radar,” to the many private charities (Billy Graham’s Rapid Response Team commandeered at least three chartered planes)—how fabulous are the individuals involved in the rescue, recovery, and rehabilitation of Haitians, and how thankless their task.

The heartbreaking images of victims demanding help, complaining about its slow delivery (due to Haiti’s infrastructure or lack thereof), or, in the case of some young, fit, machete-wielding men, helping themselves to what little there was—all made our Olby edgy.

He did extract some comforting platitudes from one Sir John Holmes, Undersecretary of the UN. Holmes promised the pompous Olby that, considering how slow the West is moving to alleviate the suffering, some testiness among the victims is, well, understandable.

Holmes also alluded to the need to avoid being too dramatic in saying that people are going to start dying in large numbers tomorrow. Olby is very melodramatic and super sanctimonious.

Aside: What do you think of NICHOLAS KRISTOF’s new idea for Haiti? The New York Times’ columnist says “the best hope for Haiti was to encourage manufacturing (of garments, for example) aimed at the US market. How is Nic, the aid aficionado, going to get around the fact that scarce resources flow to where they are utilized most efficiently? I can just imagine.

Update I (Jan. 17): “Informed U.S. State Department sources tell WND that Washington has taken de-facto control of earthquake-ravaged Haiti.”

“USAID has now taken control [of Haiti],” said one source. “We [the U.S.] are the only ones who can get things done.”
Vice President Joe Biden told reporters at Homestead Air Force Base, Fla., where relief efforts are underway, that Haiti is a nation “that has totally collapsed.”

I was floored. After providing his viewers with a succinct and useful history of Haitian failures—and following a debate pivoting on the themes of Western culpability and the “road forward”—Zombie Zakaria ended a “FAREED ZAKARIA GPS” segment by posing this question:

“Do you think the United States ought to expend large amounts of money and resources to rebuild Haiti? How much can or should the United States do to save a country with problems as deep as Haiti’s? Will it do anything?”

To ask is to answer. Still, this is progress.

Let me end this update with the following excerpt from the Articles Archive, written about Africa, but adapted to “Hispaniola”:

Irrational superstitions, unfathomable brutality, atavistic attitudes, and self-defeating values—[Haiti’s] plight is not the West’s fault, although, Western governments have compounded its problems through foreign aid. “The Heart of Darkness” that is Haiti is a culmination of the failure of the people ‘to develop the faculties, attitudes and institutions’ (in the words of the brilliant Peter Bauer) favorable to peace and progress.

Update II (Jan. 18): A great deal of huffing and puffing has gone on in the media, lib and con, because of
Pat Robertson’s predictable take on why Haiti was struck. I say “predictable” unpredictably—not because of Robertson’s penchant for controversy, but because of his Christianity. Robertson’s “theological beliefs include the idea that one will reap God’s wrath if one defies His wishes, as Robertson construes them. So what?” Accordingly, the reverend said this on the Christian Broadcasting Network’s “700 Club”:

“Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it’s a deal.”

While conceding that “Robertson’s comments were embarrassing and offensive,” an evangelical missionary by the name of Aaron D. Taylor elaborates on their internal logic:

“When I was a student at Christ for the Nations School of Missions, I learned about the so-called ‘pact with the devil’ that the African slaves of Haiti made to free themselves from the French. Later I learned about the so-called ‘renewal of the covenant’ presumably made by Aristide in 2003 where he officially recognized Voodoo as a state religion. When the earthquake struck Haiti, I knew that it was only a matter of time before a televangelist would say something that the media would pick up and allow themselves yet another opportunity to paint evangelicals in a negative light.

… many African social systems are structured around fear of evil spirits. Unlike in the West, where the predominant salvation model centers around guilt/forgiveness, in African societies people often place their faith in Christ because they view the message of the Resurrection as a cosmic defeat over the power of demonic forces. This is why when Africans (and/ or people of African descent) read their Bibles, most don’t read through the prism of Western liberalism. They take what the Bible says about the supernatural at face value.

Witchcraft is a poor moral base to build a prosperous society. When people are afraid to succeed in their jobs or businesses because they fear their neighbor will place a deadly curse on them, that’s bad news for the economy. Most African Christian leaders recognize this.” …

I cover some of this in my forthcoming book, Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post Apartheid South Africa. In the New South Africa, “traditional” belief systems (or superstitions) are seeping like sewage into what were once western systems of law and medicine. The results are predictably horrible.

Update III: Are you wondering why I lumped what passes for conservative, these days, in the liberal camp as far as the hysteria over Pat Robertson’s predictably Christian take on Haiti?

Check out the thread on the neoconservative Breitbart site.

Once There Was 'A Christmas Story'

Christianity, Family, Hollywood, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim

From “Once There Was A Christmas Story,” Now on WND.COM:

“Set in the 1940s, ‘A Christmas Story’ 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 without the ACLU.

If children could choose their families, most would opt for the kind depicted in this film, where mother is a homemaker, father is a regular working stiff, and between them they have zero repertoire of psychobabble to rub together. …

Lucky is the little boy who has such a family. Luckier still is the lad who has both such a family and…a BB gun…”

POSTSCRIPT: Bob Clark, the director of this magical movie, and his son, were killed by an illegal alien. This says as much about modern-day America as does the dissolution of the prototypical family unit depicted so magnificently in “A Christmas Story.”

My libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society, is back in print. The Second Edition features bonus material. Get your copy (or copies) now!

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL,
ilana