Quick Roundup 98

Indoctrination U

David Horowitz of FrontPage Magazine has written an interesting piece on a curriculum at the University of Texas that basically trains left-wing political operatives.

The following survey of courses was made through the UT online catalogue. It is only a sampling and by no means complete. It shows however, that the University of Texas, Austin, offers a fairly comprehensive undergraduate major in radical politics, with courses cross-listed in several departments. One of these courses is CMS 340K, which is offered in the Communications Studies Department. This course is taught by Professor Dana Cloud and is titled "Communications and Social Change."

...

The "Communications and Social Change" course is obviously a course designed to instill a radical political philosophy and then to recruit students to join radical organizations (including apparently a staff union at UT) that exemplify the doctrine. There are no conservative or moderate movements studied in the course and no conservative or moderate causes offered to the students to become involved in. (In our view, however, recruitment to any organizations or causes would be inappropriate for an academic program.)

There are only two required texts for the course and both were written by Marxist extremists (Howard Zinn and Robert Jensen).

Robert Jensen? Some may remember him as one of the few leftists who had the temerity to preemptively condemn any American military action pursuant to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks a mere three days after they occurred.

(Note to self: The use of the term "retaliation" in Jensen's piece is a distraction from the real issue. War is not a matter of "retaliating", but of making an enemy unable to continue posing a threat.)

Bainbridge on Benedict

At TCS Daily is an article by Stephen "Professor" Bainbridge on Pope Benedict's speech.

If Islamic leaders expect Pope Benedict to treat Islam as an "equally valid" "road to salvation," they are thus sure to be disappointed.

If rejecting the relativism constitutes a shot across Islam's bow, that shot also crosses any number of other bows. In the Regensburg speech, the Pope staked out a set of claims about the relationship of man and God that stand in opposition not only to the Islam of Ibn Hazn, but also that of the Protestant Reformers, the Jesus of History crowd, and (an area of particular concern for this pope) post-Christian Europe. The Pope renewed the claims of the Church Universal to have a truth that is transcendent....

This is, frankly, how a Pope should be speaking. It is also, as I have been saying all along, an indication that while the Pope may be an enemy of Islam, he is no friend of the secular aspects of Western culture.

Reason, in his eyes, is the handmaiden of faith. All secularism is, to him, relativism. We can thank the left for helping to make the Pope appear to be correct on that latter score.

Anchoress on Benedict

Another religious blogger sympathetic to the Pope has written a formal opinion piece that must be read to be believed. The Anchoress shows us that not everyone in the West is free from the mystical, medieval mentality that afflicts our Islamofascist foe.

It might seem odd to some that the Bishop of Rome, a preacher of peace, is the man confronting Islam. But the secular world has been appealing to Islam - and Islamic governments - in political and ideological terms, in strictly secularist fashion; a fashion they might find hard to understand.

"Let's keep God out of this and talk as men," has been the tactic of governments and nations for decades, and it has not worked. Ultimately it cannot work for the plain and simple reason that Islamists are not secular-thinking people living in what is thought of as a "natural" world. In fact, much of Islamic thinking - much of Islamic perspective - is utterly given over to the supernatural, to those things "seen and unseen." And while governments "think as human beings," Benedict, the Bishop of Rome, the man who sits on the Throne of Peter (whom Jesus advised to "think as God does,") is perhaps uniquely qualified to deliver to these supernaturally-focused people something they cannot fail to understand, a supernatural challenge. And he does so while fully understanding that within the supernatural realm there are forces for the light, and for the darkness. [bold added]

The thrust of her piece is that the Pope was inviting Moslems to "talk" in a way they might understand.

Only someone who believes in fairy tales to a similar degree as the savages who expect seventy-two virgins after blowing themselves to bits in an act of "martyrdom" would be capable of indulging in the fantasy that we can "talk" with these deluded savages.

The Anchoress credits the Pope with "thinking as God does". How the hell does anyone know how God thinks? Has the Anchoress forgotten that all the savagery we're witnessing now is supposedly being conducted on God's orders? The whole damned problem is that the Moslems basically claim to "think as God does". And when you do that, your choices when told otherwise are either to drop the pretense or respond by force. Logic and evidence will not help you.

The Islamofascists cannot "talk as men" because they have abandoned reason in favor of faith long ago, and the time has long since come to deal with them as we deal with wild animals. We cannot escape our true nature -- as rational animals. If we do not "talk as men", we have no basis for reasoning with one another or for pursuing a course of action that will increase our odds of survival.

But if you're cloisetered in a fantasy world like the Anchoress, I suppose such earthly matters as survival
take a back seat to angelic visions of lions and sheep sleeping side by side and Islamic cavemen suddenly deciding that they could, perhaps, be wrong that their plain-spoken God does not mean it when he instructs them to slay infidels.

Never underestimate the ability of someone who takes religion seriously to jettison any amount of evidence that might contradict their point of view. Watch for Moslems to choose our destruction over their own survival until we either kill them off, they give up in the face of certain destruction, or they win and what is left collapses under its own weight. ("Palestine" gives us a preview.) And watch for Christians to turn the other cheek regardless of what those of us who want to live allow the Moslems to do.

Of all the things we ought to be doing in this war, making it clear that the Moslems must learn to "think as men" or face the consequences is Job One. Why? Because this is the only way we will either cause them to eliminate themselves as a threat or do that job ourselves.

The time to talk is over. The time for ruthlessness is here. The only message we should have for the Islamofascists, their abettors, their sympathizers, and the passive in their midst is: "Put an end to this or suffer when we do." If they're not "secular-thinking" enough to figure that out, they are beyond hope.

-- CAV