We don't have doughy rednecks at CHNN, but the weather is still crappy.
When CNN hired the tubby, bigoted know-nothing Erick Erickson from Redstate, I yawned. After all, the New York Times hired Ross Douthat, the Los Angeles Times hired Jonah Goldberg, and no dying media outlet could be without its beady-eyed, teenage water-carrier for for the “kill ‘em all” faction of the right. Notably, Douthat replaced the evil but not sufficiently dumb Bill Kristol in this sad parade of affirmative action gone awry. Still, I winced for once-proud CNN when I read what its new star wrote at Redstate:
David Petraeus is right.
That church burning the korans in Florida will incite muslims to kill Americans, particularly American soldiers.
So far, so good, except that the apparent failure to capitalize “Koran” turns out to repeated later… A sure sign that the right has a new, subtle jab for the dirty Ay-rabs, and is eager to roll it out.
Why? Well, in part, because David Petraeus and the media have decided to magnify the event and guarantee it’ll be featured on the front page of every major newspaper in the Middle East.
These sorts of things are supposed to be kept quiet, you know. Just ask Rush Limbaugh.
Ramzy Kilic of the Council on American-Islamic Relations surprisingly sounds wisest here:
Because you know those murderous habibs are all kinds of things, but never wise.
“He just wants to provoke the Muslim community,” he said. “Why give him attention? No one pays attention to the drunkard walking down the street.”
Except when they’re right-wingers on CNN.
Let’s not, however, be fooled by the thinking that this act will incite Islamists in some special way. If Islamists did not have koran burnings to incite them to kill Americans, they would just find something else. Heck, they may go back to soldiers in Iraq using the koran for target practice.
Indeed, we have given them lots of reasons. Your point?
I think it is bad form for the military to start applying pressure to influence the political activities (and this is clearly a form of political speech) of American civilians. Petraeus is essentially attributing direct responsibility for American deaths to the activities of American citizens (and I hasten to point out that he made no similar public pronouncement about the activities of antiwar demonstrators who, at least arguably, caused American deaths by giving the jihadis reason to believe they could drive us out of Iraq given enough casualties).
You see, the military’s role is to propagandize Americans for permanent war, in all cases, says this semi-able-bodied service-aged young chickenhawk, who last wore a uniform in Cub Scouts, if then.
Ultimately, this issue is not about tolerance of Islam, but about fear of Islam.
Yes. Yours, you pants-wetting halfwit.
The elite in this country have no problem with American flag burnings or Bible burnings. Heck, the American military burned a pile of Bibles lest proselytizing happen.
Probably a lie, but if we’re bringing Bibles with our bombs to a Muslim country, or forcing Erickson’s brand of Christianity on our soldiers, the move was long overdue.
No Christians went out and beheaded troops or media talking heads. There were no riots in the streets of Washington, D.C. by aggrieved Christians.
No, they just blew up the federal building in Oklahoma, killed abortion doctors, cops, and IRS employees, and go to Glenn Beck’s rally mocking Martin Luther King. Totally different.
Contrast that with the Islamic world. Show a cartoon of Mohammed, you die. Burn a koran, you die. Reject the faith, you die.
Let’s count up the deaths on both sides, fatso… That is if you can count, which at this point I doubt.
Ultimately, and what is too politically incorrect for the media or David Petraeus to say, is that Islam is largely incompatible with Western values when significant portions of the religion — not just the fringe — are driven to riot over koran burnings, cartoons of Mohammed, and the like.
Switch “Islam” to, say, “Judaism,” and reread that sentence in the original German; it sounds like something on the History Channel.
More specifically, Petraeus’s actions teach the same lesson to both us and the Islamists that the Mohammed cartoon did: Islamists learned if they are sufficiently violent Western governments and elites will fold like a cheap suit and we learned that Islam, as practiced by large swaths of the muslim world, is a violent religion that apparently can’t operate in tandem with a civil society.
That is, the “civil society” for which Erickson longs is one where all Muslims have been silenced or eliminated, and have to put up with this and worse. Fuck yeah! My suits aren’t cheap! (Anymore…)
Now, all that said, I think this pastor in Florida is terribly misguided. The message of Christ is one of grace and hope. Christians are told to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything [Christ] ha[s] commanded.”
And this differs from “forcing us to obey Sharia Law” how? Good thing Christians are so darn tolerant. This pathetic passage is perhaps the most offensive part of a very offensive little diatribe. The guy is too dumb to realize that his “defense” of Christianity makes it sound a lot like the worst fears he and his ilk constantly stoke about Muslims: a world-dominating crusade to convert or kill. This jaw-dropping stupidity obviously goes over with the mouth-breathers at Redstate, but CNN is still, for the moment anyway, slightly more broad-based, and may include viewers with IQ’s above room temperature. With Erickson on board, that ought to change pretty quickly, I’d think.
Burinng (sic) korans (sic) does not accomplish that. Neither, I am certain, does it glorify God in any way, shape, or form — particularly knowing with certainty, whether we like it or not, that this act of a Christian church showing not love, but hate, will incite people to violence.
Deservedly so. And nice editing too.
I would encourage this pastor to stand down — but I’m not going to wring my hands over it. If not this, there’ll just be something else causing riots in the “Arab Street.” This is just today’s excuse.
Excuses, excuses. First it was Iraq, then it was Abu Ghraib, then Guantanamo, the the Cordoba house, then the mosque vandalism, then the slashing of a cab driver… These guys go nuts over the littlest things. And I’m sure ol’ Erick will be giving them another excuse, as he has so often before, each time he steps on the CNN set. I suppose that CNN decided that every news network needs to have somebody dumb violent, and sociopathic to attract that sought-after trailer park demographic, but I think with Erick they went a bit too far. He may not be “wringing his hands,” but CNN ought to be.