Ceding Values?

Mark Steyn argues that the two journalists abducted by Palestinians and then forcibly converted to Islam at gunpoint is a big political victory for Islamists since it proves that the West has no core value....

But that's not how the al-Jazeera audience sees it. If you're a Muslim, the video is anything but meaningless. Not even the dumbest jihadist believes these infidels are suddenly true believers. Rather, it confirms the central truth Osama and the mullahs have been peddling -- that the West is weak, that there's nothing -- no core, no bedrock -- nothing it's not willing to trade. In his new book The Conservative Soul, attempting to reconcile his sexual temperament and his alleged political one, Time magazine's gay Tory Andrew Sullivan enthuses, "By letting go, we become. By giving up, we gain. And we learn how to live -- now, which is the only time that matters." That's almost a literal restatement of Faust's bargain with the devil:

"When to the moment I shall say
'Linger awhile! so fair thou art!'
Then mayst thou fetter me straightway
Then to the abyss will I depart!"

In other words, if Faust becomes so enthralled by "the moment" that he wants to live in it forever, the devil will have him for all eternity. In the Muslim world, they watch the Centanni/Wiig video and see men so in love with the present, the now, that they will do or say anything to live in the moment.

I cannot agree with this concoction.

Crazy Muslims and those prone to this kind of propaganda will think that the infidels are weak and have no core beliefs irrespective of what happens. For the non-Muslim non-al-Jazerra market, the Islamists are seen as showing their own religion to be weak and shallow.

As most believe, religion is a core value, and I do not think that most Muslims desire to die for nothing either. Some will identify and see how weak the and silly these radicals are and who are actually mocking their own religion giving it the status of a temporary and convenient sanctuary from death, one that can be renounced at a moments notice.

But I do think that Mark Steyn in this piece does make a valid point, that multi-culturalism, political correctness and something similar to what I call the Oslo Syndrome have driven non-Muslim citizens to behave as if their is nothing wrong. He observes that Muslims criminals in Australia cannot be identified as Middle-Eastern looking and that news organizations have descended to a level where they publish even inept and obvious Muslim propaganda and try to pawn it off to what they think is a stupid public as news.

Some of this is the fault of weak PC liberalism and of some people that refuse to see the risk in some of Islam's most virulent supporters. Some Islamists will do anything and say anything to achieve their narrow agenda and what they want. They are the ones that do this in the name of THEIR religion. It is Islam that has become tainted. And until we realize this and all fight back, we will be marked for death by these people.