Charles Krauthammer has a very interesting oped on the lack of irony [as well as tolerance] in radical Islam which is reacting with violence to a midieval passage claiming Islam is violent.
Iraq the Model says enough angry fist shaking allready.
It seems there has been a lot of this going around lately. Movie stars living like royalty and complaining to a multitude of adoring fans that America is no longer a democracy with freedom of speech.
Dictators raving on about human rights while hate mongering leftists cheer them on. You have to wonder why Jesse Jackson doesn't just move to Venezuala.
More examples of rampant irony anyone can think of?
skook:
ReplyDeleteAnd yet the leftists just go on and on about what a wonderful guy Chavez is and how much he has done for the people of Venezuala who love him so much blah blah blah.
Nor will any of those wealthy celebrity leftists invest more than a token penny in a country like Venezuela. They know Chavez has destroyed the rule of law and property rights and that a crash into economic misery will follow the present potlatch. They know it and yet they continue to hate the kind of society that has been shown to work.
ReplyDeleteI think the psychology of western self-hatred stems from a deification of the worldy ego and the abandonment of a soul in conversation with transcendent truths. Basically a guy like Jesse Jackson is just too lazy or distracted by worldly desires to do the heavy lifting that a serious Christian would. Adult ADD.
The Muslims screaming at the Pope do have a sense of irony, but it is not the same as ours.
ReplyDeleteThey feel a superior sense of irony when they see these liberal westerner Christians who think they are so superior being cowed by a rabble of peasants sure in their faith.
They feel irony when they read of how mujahideen go undercover in America, shave their beards, eat pork, and play the part of westernized folk, in order to tear down the west.
They feel irony when they watch a beheading video and the captive is begging for his life or willing to convert to Islam, the faith in which obedience even unto death is king.
Irony is something universally human. Let us not be blind to what many of our Muslim enemies are, and let's stop expecting them to think and act like us. To them, our sense of irony is only a claim to our superiority and power. Thus it is perfectly consistent for them to try and brow beat us for trying to act superior, regardless of the "irony" inherent in the Pope's words being reflected in the brow beating. What he said is not important. That he spoke is. The irrationality of rivalry is not necessarily irrational to those who think they have the stiffer spine, which is why war is sometimes necessary. Will the Pope ever say as much?
Truepeers:
ReplyDeleteI think this time even the Muslims kind of petered out on the rage thing. Maybe they are wearing themselves out, I know I am sick of it.
Terrye, perhaps the rage is petering out (but how do we know from the MSM?) or perhaps we are missing the irony that it is not supposed to be a day of rage, at least according to ABC:
ReplyDeleteWhen the Qatari Islamic scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi called for a Day of Rage this Friday in response to Pope Benedict XVI's remarks about Muslims, it might have sounded like a call for street violence.
But if there is trouble Friday, and there could well be, it will not be because of language but because of what some people choose to do after they have answered the call for "Yaum al Ghadab."...
But why do Islamic leaders use what many Westerners regard as inflammatory language?
Because it is not inflammatory, at least not in the context of Islamic culture. "We must not try to interpret Islamic terms and cultural signals by using our Western ideas," said Fawaz Gerges, a professor in the department of international affairs and Middle Eastern studies at Sarah Lawrence College, and an ABC News consultant. Gerges pointed out that in Islamic culture "ghadab" means anger or frustration. A day of rage does not mean a day of jihad (war), added Gerges.
Mimi Daher, a Muslim woman working in the ABC Jerusalem bureau, explained that the Grand Multi [sic] in Jerusalem reflected this cultural mindset today when he said, "Muslims have to express their anger. Was the pope expecting Muslims to clap their hands to him while hurting their faith and prophet? Of course not. We call on Muslims throughout the world to react in a disciplined manner, according to our Islamic faith."
"Disciplined manner" is a repeated theme among Islamic moderate leaders who encourage people to protest. As Gerges reminded me, when the cleric al-Qaradawi called for a day of rage, he stressed repeatedly that it should be civilized, urging Muslims to behave with civility and dignity. "We must show the world that we are still civilized even when we are aggrieved," he said.
Even so, shouldn't Westerners be worried about the use of words like "rage"? As an ABC News Muslim colleague of mine in Egypt, Hala Abukhatwa, put it, "'Yaum al Ghadab' means 'come to the streets,' 'protest,' maybe 'burn a flag.' But it doesn't mean hurt someone. In our culture, expressions are usually in black and white, not nuanced like in the West," she continued. "We are either happy or we are sad, glad or angry. We don't say 'come to the streets and be ambivalent.'"...
Ignore those burning Pope effigies -- no one is really angry
Consistent with the prevailing assumption among most Western analysts that when Islamic jihadists tell us they are waging a jihad, they are in fact mistaken, and what they are doing has nothing really to do with jihad at all, so now in this ABC story about today's "Day of Rage" against the Pope we are told, with Orwellian aplomb, that rage isn't really rage. It's just Islamic culture, doncha know.