Category Archives: Religion

Oriana Fallaci, RIP

Islam, Religion, The Zeitgeist

Oriana Fallaci has died after a brave battle with cancer…and Islam. This is what I wrote some months back about Fallaci on Barely a Blog:

“Here’s an interview with Oriana Fallaci in The New Yorker that doesn’t do her justice. Fallaci is unique in the annals of journalism. No superlative can properly describe the kind of irreverent grilling she subjected her interviewees to. The clubby, tête-à -têtes journalists conduct with their overlords are a disgrace—they’ll never come close to Fallaci’s skin-them-alive inquisitions.
Omitted from this interview is how Fallaci began her exchange with Qaddafi. It approximates the following paraphrase: ‘So your manifesto is so small and insignificant it fits in my powder puff. Why should anyone take you seriously…?’
When I attended journalism school, my teachers held her up as the iconic role model to emulate (of course, this would be unheard of in the left-liberal, groupthink dominated journalism schools of today). Thus one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received was Reginald Firehammer.s. In ‘The Passion of Principles,’ his review of my book for the Randian Free Radical, he likened my passion to Fallaci.s. The passion, perhaps, but never the courage, the life-force, or the capacity for adventure.
The New Yorker.s Margaret Talbot depicts Fallaci as pathologically anti-authoritarian. Is there any other way to be? Talbot, moreover, likes Fallaci’s classically liberal feminism, but flagrantly frames her crusade against Islam as a function of waning faculties. Yes, Fallaci is out of place in youth-worshipping America, where the lukewarm nonchalance of a Wonkette and her ‘Whatever’ Generation is considered the ideal intellectual and existential temperament.
It would, however, be a grave mistake not to heed Fallaci.s warnings. This [was] an immensely cultured woman, steeped in the past. She [understood] history and the forces that shape it. More material, she lived it.”

Letter of the Week: Prosecutors on the Make

America, Free Speech, Government, IMMIGRATION, Individual Rights, Religion

James Huggins writes:

David Koresh was living in peace and bothering nobody, as I recall. That family up on Ruby Ridge in Idaho was living in peace and bothering nobody. Richard Jewell down in Atlanta was living in peace and bothering nobody. What do they, and no doubt many others, have in common? They were all a little weird and a lot “different.” Therefore, all were fair game for media assassination and perfect targets for ambitious prosecutors and federal officers.

Remember, prosecutors are politicians and are usually using their jobs as stepping stones to higher elected office. Ranking police officers are political hacks who owe their jobs to politician bosses. People who are not perceived positively by the public, such as white supremacists, religious fanatics, good ol boy rednecks, or rich white boy college students in a black town are perfect grist as these elected swine grind their way upward to better things. The only trouble is that it is not against the law to be a white supremacist, religious fanatic, good ol boy redneck or a rich white boy. Aren’t they protected by the constitution just like your average Muslim Jihadist or illegal Mexican migrant?

I don’t know too much about Mr. Jeffs. I am against polygamy and against older men having their way with young girls. But, in this day and time I would have to look long and hard at the evidence before automatically condemning any person on the say-so of a prosecutor.

As far as the Muslims are concerned, if they are practicing polygamy in this country, I’m sure they won’t be hindered. The big mistake these fundamentalist Mormons made was not publicly supporting Al-Qaeda and actively demonstrating for open borders with Mexico.

—James Huggins

Further reading: “‘Mad Dog’ Sneddon Vs. Michael Jackson” And “Patricide & Prosecutorial Misconduct“

Updated Again: Job: Jewish Individualist

Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Judaism & Jews, Religion

I got thinking about the Book of Job after I heard La Coulter make fun of Howard Dean for choosing Job as his favorite New Testament reading!

Dean is an unsharpened pencil, but he’s right about Job; it’s unrivaled in Christian Holy Scriptures.

In case you wonder why I’m expounding on a book in the bible, a sidebar is in order: I’ve always thought of myself as a secular person. According to my mother, however, I’m religious. She says a person who is scrupulously just and upright is religious. (She’s biased, of course.)

According to Ann Coulter’s definition, I’m religious too. The definition is on page 266 of her book, Godless, which is the first of her books I’ve read. I bought Treason, because I think the thesis is spot on. The others—liberal this; liberal that —don’t interest me. I don’t regret reading Godless. It’s a lot of fun (the chapter about idiot environmentalists is super. With one exception perhaps (I wonder who?!), I don’t know of anyone who writes this cleverly and amusingly.

In any case, if we apply Coulter’s definition, I’m religious. It is: “Whatever your religious persuasion, if you believe we are distinct from the beasts, you’re with God. (Here are my Animals have no Rights essays, which, nevertheless, and contra Coulter, do not defer to a deity in the process of explaining why animals are without rights.)

In any event, I’m of a generation of secular Jews which knows and loves the Hebrew Bible as a tremendous literary, philosophical, and historical achievement. It’s unique. Those who have studied it (in Hebrew, as I have) know the 39 books for the vital, lively (very Jewish), earthy, pioneering, and fascinating works they are. There is nothing stuffy or pompous about the Hebrew Bible, either. In A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson writes: “The Bible is essentially a historical work from start to finish. The Jews developed the power to write terse and dramatic historical narrative half a millennium before the Greeks…

One glance at the Quran and you appreciate even more the power of the Hebrew biblical narrators. (If I were really religious, I’d believe the first five books were written by God, but that’s not what I was taught in a secular Israeli high school—that’s not where the evidence leads).

Back to the Best Book in the Bible: Is there anything in Christian Holy Scripture to rival the Book of Job? (And if there is, we know whence the inspiration came). Considering the period, it’s radical. Here goes:

A very righteous and prosperous man—in Jewish tradition, wealth acquired righteously is a blessing—is put through a succession of trials by God and victimized horribly. His kids are killed, his wealth taken, and he’s inflicted with a skin condition that makes him writhe in itching agony. Yet no matter what God throws at him, he 1) refuses to denounce God. 2) Insists, based on pure fact—and as the ultimate individualist would—that he, Job, is right and God is wrong. What’s more, in the end, God agrees with Job , confessing he was only trying him to see how deep Job’s faith was and how far he could be pushed.

Again, that’s radical. (Such a chapter in the Quran would have ended with a beheading—Job’s stiff neck would have been smitten.)

It’s hard to beat such an unorthodox concept, considering the times. Jews have a tradition of arguing with their God. Abraham haggled for the sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah and Jacob physically wrestled with the angel of God.

Still, besides libertarians, who today argues with authority? Nobody—unless that authority happens to be promoting libertarianism, Jeffersonian republicanism, or something that goes against the preordained religion of statism.

**
Update: A few readers set out to Christianize Job, in other words to reinterpret Hebrew Scriptures in accordance with Christian constructs and beliefs, alien in Judaism. They did so dogmatically too.

Well, well, scrape away the patina of piety and Christians behave like Muslim Replacement robbers; laying claim to a legacy that is first and foremost so utterly Jewish; written by Jews who, viscerally and intellectually, thought more like me than like any Christian.

Just as Christian thinking is foreign to me; Jewish thinking is manifestly foreign to my interlocutors. They evince no understanding of Judaism. When these particular Christians discuss the Hebrew Bible, they denude it of its Jewish essence and superimpose upon it the Christian articles of faith.

Don’t understand Judaism? Well and good. But just as I don’t lecture you about your scriptures; don’t pontificate about mine or rape them with Christian constructs that are to Judaism as universalism is to Islam.

Furthermore, so long as you can’t read the Hebrew Bible in the Hebrew, but rely on some stuffy King James translation, drop the authoritative tone.

Now, my particular animated take on Job—the one that so infuriated Christian literalists— happens to be an extension of my father’s thinking, an orthodox Rabbi and a brilliant scholar of Judaism. Acknowledged as such.

Job, of course, is a philosophical masterpiece. To the literalists who jumped out of their skins at my suggestion God was wrong and that the book all but implicitly concedes the point, let me say this: G-d doesn’t dispute that Job was right in his insistence he did not sin. By logical extension (deduction is something the great JEWISH sages practiced routinely), this would imply G-d was wrong to punish Job. Again: By restoring Job and admitting Job was innocent of all wrongdoing, by default, G-d (G-d of the Jews, that is) admits He was toying with Job.

Again, Job is a deeply Jewish book. Christians (and Reform rabbis) cannot be expected to have a feel for the Hebrew Bible and for Jewish theological thinking, which is very different from Christian thinking.

So how about it? Let’s see less ignorance and more of that Christian humility in your approach to scriptures not your own, about which you know so little.

**
Updated Again:

A valued writer on BAB has written in to say, in a nutshell, that the magnificent Jewish bible—all 39 explosive books is nothing but a prelude, a preparation, for the New Testament and Jesus, which Jews regard as a mere prophet.

Yeah, Christians are as chauvinistic as Muslims about reinterpreting, misinterpreting, appropriating, and diminishing this pioneering, and uniquely Jewish text, to say nothing about centuries of experience. As misguided as they are about Jews and their bible, Christians are peaceful and very dear to this writer, so far.

But don’t push it. Positions such as this one, manifestly wrong and off-putting, will have no place on this Jew’s blog.

Hang the Hangmen

Britain, History, Islam, Justice, Morality, Religion, The West

With reference to Abdul Rahman of Afghanistan who narrowly averted death for apostasy: I pointed out that the “Afghani judiciary is criminal, not—conservative,” as it had been characterized in our multicultural media. By natural law standards, to kill someone for his beliefs is a crime.

Mark Steyn dredges a delightful anecdote from a time when Englishmen were real men and knew what was naturally just. A doff of the hat to George Reisman for sending along this relic from a proud past:

“In a more culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of `suttee’ – the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Gen. Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural: `You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks, and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.'”