The General Manager of Al-Arabiya television, Abdul Rahman Al-Rashid, didn’t get the memo about how he should be crying victimization and bigotry. “A House of Worship or a Symbol of Destruction?,” by Abdul Rahman Al-Rashid in Asharq Alawsat, August 16 (thanks to all who sent this in):
[…] I cannot imagine that Muslims want a mosque on this particular site, because it will be turned into an arena for promoters of hatred, and a symbol of those who committed the crime. At the same time, there are no practicing Muslims in the district who need a place of worship, because it is indeed a commercial district. Is there a side that is committed to this mosque? The fact is that in the news reports there are names linked to this project that costs 100 million dollars!
The sides enthusiastic for building the mosque might be building companies, architect houses, or politicized groups that want suitable investments?! I do not know whether the building applicant wants a mosque whose aim is reconciliation, or he is an investor who wants quick profits. This is because the idea of the mosque specifically next to the destruction is not at all a clever deed. The last thing Muslims want today is to build just a religious center out of defiance to the others, or a symbolic mosque that people visit as a museum next to a cemetery….
This catch over at NewsBusters made me laugh while wagging my head, as you will see, Rachel goes through her throes of body language while weaving a capitalist and xenophobic conspiracy of a great order. Except, her own guest makes a few statements both times he is on (the second interview begins around the 1:56 mark so you know) her show that complete;y dismantles her beliefs about this whole “sorted” topic.
Here’s NewsBusters end to their post on this:
But after Maddow introduced Loew, and Loew rehashed the details of his reporting on Senseman, Coughlin and CCA, Loew mentioned this awkward fact right at the end of his interview with Maddow…
LOEW: In addition, in Arizona we have a mindset among a couple of key legislators that privatizing the prison industry is a good thing. As you mentioned, they tried to privatize the entire system last year. The governor did veto that after the state corrections director sent her a letter saying, look, we can’t imagine having death row inmates in private prison systems and having death row inmates being taken care of by the lowest common bidder.
Excuse me, did you say “the governor” — by whom you mean Jan Brewer, correct? — vetoed the bill to privatize nearly all of Arizona’s state prisons? Shortly before she signed SB 1070, the law that would create vast penal colonies of suspected illegal immigrants? Apparently Brewer missed the memo on this fine-tuned, lucrative conspiracy.
Maddow’s flimsy premise having been demolished before her eyes — by a simpatico guest, no less — she invited Loew back the next night to harrumph about links between Republican state senator Russell Pearce, a major backer of SB 1070, and the private prison industry. (full segment from Maddow show linked here). Once again, Loew served up an inconvenient fact right at the end of his discussion with Maddow (third part of embedded video, starting at 2:28) —
MADDOW: Morgan, am I also right that in thinking that Russell Pearce was the man behind the effort last year to privatize all of Arizona’s state prisons?
LOEW: He was. He sponsored that legislation and we looked through his legislative record and it looks like as far back as 2003 he was pushing legislation that was calling for the privatization of state prison beds, I think 1,000 beds back in 2003, another 1,400 before that. But the biggest one is the bill that you just referred to, which would have handed over our entire prison system to the private prison industry. Now, that bill was vetoed but another bill passed that essentially did the same thing. Last year, our prison system would have, in a sense, most of it, would have been handed over to the private prison industry, but none of those companies would come forward to bid on them.
Once again, this fine-tuned, lucrative conspiracy — thwarted by the alleged conspirators.
Just One Minute has an excellent post in regards to the Ground-Zero Mosque, here is the end to his post:
We were attacked by Muslim extremists; this mosque would be a powerful symbol of victory for extremists, it may be financed by extremists, and it may be that, regardless of the motivations of the founder, it will be one day be run by extremists.
If the imam seriously wants reconciliation and bridge-building, he should relocate. If he wants to give offense (as is his right), he should stay on his current course, and we will see how the debate unfolds.
Personally, I doubt he can raise the money. Any investor will be calling attention to himself, his family, his business associates, and all past deals, all of which will go under a microscope. If there is a hint of a whiff of a suggestion of a link to extremists, we will read about nothing else. Who needs the publicity?
THE DEBATE SO FAR: From the cacophony I hear my people from Jersey: “Yo, fool, reconcile yourself to this!” Yeah, I got something for you to tolerate right here, buddy.”
So, for years I have posted a quote from a 1995 book, The Assault: Liberalism’s Attack on Religion, Freedom, and Democracy, by Dale A. Berryhill. I recommend his other book as well, The Liberal Contradiction: How Contemporary Liberalism Violates Its Own Principles and Endangers Its Own Goals. (Both are out of print so you know.) The quote is this:
“If homosexuality is really genetic, we may soon be able to tell if a fetus is predisposed to homosexuality, in which case many parents might choose to abort it. Will gay rights activists continue to support abortion rights if this occurs?”
This quote, in my mind’s eye, hits close at the contradictions present in equal rights versus special rights. Well, the gay community has another medical procedure to contend with soon. First Things, a wonderful conservative Catholic Journal, has a great article entitle, “Gay Gene Eugenics,” by Joe Carter. In it (I recommend the entire reading of the article if you have time) this idea of special rights is in conflict with societal norms, humanity, and medical ethics. Joe Carter points out that soon homosexuality may be a thing of the past:
Ironically, such an explanation could have just the opposite effect of what they hope for. As the Los Angeles Times recently reported, a prenatal pill used to prevent ambiguous genitalia may reduce the chance that a female with the disorder will be gay. A bioethicist quoted in the story worried that the treatment could lead to “engineering in the womb for sexual orientation.”
The ability to chemically steer a child’s sexual orientation has become increasingly possible in recent years, with evidence building that homosexuality has biological roots and with advances in the treatment of babies in utero. Prenatal treatment for congenital adrenal hyperplasia is the first to test—unintentionally or not—that potential.
No one who has followed the trajectory of eugenics-oriented biotechnology will be surprised that one the first targets for manipulation would be sexual orientation. In 2002 Francis Fukuyama speculated that within twenty years we would be able to devise a way for parents to sharply reduce the likelihood that they will give birth to a gay child. Even in a society in which “social norms have become totally accepting of homosexuality,” he argues, most parents would choose the treatment.
Fukuyama is right. Even if homosexuality were considered a benign trait such as baldness or left-handedness, the majority of parents would opt to have a heterosexual child (“What if we want grandchildren?”).
WOW. of course this whole choice of orientation creates an ethical mess, Carter continues:
Although they will naturally abhor the aborting of such children, many conservative Christians will be amenable to changing sexual orientations in the womb. A prenatal treatment seems a humane solution for a moral problem, an easy way to deliver children from a particularly difficult temptation.
This acceptance of the “medicalization” of sexual orientations is misguided. Treating orientation as a malady promotes a reductionist view in which human behavior is explainable by chemical and physical laws. As we’ve seen in other areas of bioethics, reductionism inevitably undermines both moral autonomy and the dignity of the individual.
But even Christians who disagree with me should recognize that embracing the use of drugs and genetic engineering to correct for behavioral orientations opens the Pandora’s box of natal eugenics. Bioethicist Samuel Hensley also warns that rather than unconditionally accepting offspring as a gift of God, we will be tempted to redefine parenthood to include choosing the particular characteristics we want in children.
Christians should reject this cult of choice. We should be vigilant in expressing the truth that children are a blessing from God, not a product we manufacture to our specifications.
Out of the frying pan into the fire? The radical homosexual community will be in an awkward place of teaming up with Christians to not allow genetic engineering to eradicate them. Carter says that we
“need an entente [an international understanding providing for a common course of action] between Christians and gay activists to prevent the issue of homosexuality from being determined by genetic engineers and abortionists. This will not lead to an agreement about whether such behavior is benign or immoral. But at least we will be able to discuss the issue with our human dignity intact.”
Oh what a tangled web technology weaves. (read more)
“The humidity of the bathroom and the drops flowing from the body, water the mosses. This vegetation carpet procures a great feeling to your feet.The idea was to a new way of having your plants inside. Not only plants in pots quietly standing in the corner of a living room but alive plants, evolving in the house.”
A Hungarian priest who performs skateboard tricks in a bid to encourage youngsters to go to church has become an online hit. Roman Catholic Zoltan Lendvai claimsskateboarding is the ideal way in which God can communicate with young people.
Writing at the Weekly Standard, Robert Satloff takes apart a new book by John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed, both of them professional pro-Islam propagandists, published by the Gallup organization, where Mogehed is executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies. Satloff shows how, through fraudulent definition of the word “radical,” the authors make it appear that a multi-year study of Muslim opinion worldwide showed that only seven percent of Muslims are radical, when, in reality, by any fair reading of the authors’ own polling data, the correct number is 37 percent.
The authors define Muslim radicals as those who say the 9/11 attack was “completely justified,” which was seven percent of the sample. However, there were two other categories of respondents who said that the attack was at least partially justified, and they are labeled by the authors as “moderates.” The first of those groups comprises 6.5 percent of the sample, the second comprises 23.1 percent. Further, the respondents in that last category, making up 23.1 percent, also said that they hate America, want to impose Sharia law, support suicide bombing, and oppose equal rights for women. Yet Esposito and Mogahed call them “moderates.”
7 plus 6.5 plus 23.1 equals 36.6 percent of 1.2 billion Muslims, or 439 million radical Muslims in the world. Just a tiny unrepresentative minority.
The theme of the Esposito-Mogahed book is that most Muslims are just like us, a notion mocked by the title of Satloff’s article: “Just Like Us! Really?” This is most ironic, given that the Weekly Standard is a leading supporter of President Bush and his Islam democratization policy, which is founded on the assumption that Muslims are … just like us. The Standard thus happily takes apart leftists who say that Muslims are just like us, while it remains silent about and keeps supporting the president who says that Muslims are just like us.
Clearly, the right-liberal hand doesn’t know what the left-liberal hand is doing, or, more precisely, the right-liberal hand refuses to recognize that it is doing the same thing as the left-liberal hand, even as it condemns the left-liberal hand.
