Jamie Glazov & Dinesh D'Souza On Islam, 9/11, And The Radical Left (Updated)

We all hear a lot about "dialogue" and "debate"; about talking together through difficult issues. Currently we are hearing this sort of rhetoric coming from the "new" US Congress; some of us Episcopalians in New Hampshire are STILL waiting for the great dialogue promised three years ago by our controversial bishop.

I must say that the sort of dialogue exemplified between Jamie Glazov and Dinesh D'Souza in their two-part conversation at FrontPageMag is reassuring and inspiring: here are two thinkers, conservative and academic, who disagree profoundly. And yet there is a gentlemanly quailty that prevails throughout; and there is no shortage of interesting parries and thrusts. Both men score points; and I give the win to Mr. Glazov. Part of that small victory, unfortunately, comes as a result of Mr. Glazov slipping into a monologue for which, it appears, Mr. D'Souza is absent. But that hardly matters, since Glazov is amazing on his own.

This really is an excellent series. Take time to read it if you are at all interested in Mr. D'Souza's thesis that it is American liberalism, the radical leftist sort, that led to 9/11 and America's current standoff with Islam. Mr. Glazov issues a very serious and compelling challenge; Mr. D'Souza makes a few worthy rebuffs. Part 1 is here, and Part 2 is found here. From Abu Ghraib to sexual immorality, from Moses to Muhammed, this series offers key insights.

And make sure you take time to read Mr. David Forsmark's challenging review of Mr. D'Souza's new book, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left And Its Responsibility For 9/11.

Peace.

BG

"But Most Importantly, Our Sons"

He is 36 years old. He still lives at home with his parents. He lives near a ravine, Huntington Gorge. And he has had something of a sick fantasy. At least, that is my guess.

The sick fantasy is to snatch a woman, beat, rape and murder her; and then, after putting her pants back on her body, the fantasy is to wedge her between rocks at the bottom of the nearby gorge, cover her with some debris, and go home to bed. Everyone, perhaps, will think that the victim fell in the dark, perhaps too drunk to know where she was, lost in an alcohol haze having taken a ride in some taxi who-knows-where†.

The fantasy became reality for Brian L. Rooney on October 7, between the hours of 2:00 and 4:30 in the morning. And the sick, twisted fantasy became a nightmare for 21-year-old Michelle Gardner-Quinn, a University of Vermont student hailing from Arlington, VA. Her parents, who were visiting UVM for Parents' Weekend and who were with their daughter the night she disappeared while she walked down Burlington's most public street, made tearful pleas for Michelle's safe return, but to no avail. Police later found the man who assisted Michelle when her cell phone's batteries died; he had loaned her his phone as she chatted with friends, trying to hook up with them several blocks away on the same street; the man would hear that she was fully alone, and the door was open. No doubt it was kindness, capricious to the core, that he used to entrap Michelle. A store surveillance camera would capture him walking with Michelle along the sidewalk; there seems to be no tension between them. But darkness often appears as light; evil is often hidden behind goodness. A predator had his prey, and a young woman had no idea.

Hikers, six days later, would find her in a lonely ravine.

THIS IS WHAT WE NEED TO HEAR

I need not over-explain the following quote. Just know that I believe it is one of the most important statements to be uttered in a long time; the context makes it nearly over-powering. I have strained on this blog to get close to the lesson that follows, but I have merely groped in the dark towards the heart of the issue. What follows, really, IS the heart. Let me simply let you read the quote by Burlington, VT police chief Thomas R. Tremblay when he spoke at a press conference Wednesday afternoon:

"Being aware that crime can occur, anywhere, to anyone, is the first step in crime prevention. However, we cannot let these terrible crimes paralyze us in fear. We must demand our freedom from violence and crime. We must also renew our commitment to ending violence against women, violence perpetrated by men – in the form of domestic and sexual violence.

"As a community we must move beyond "victim blaming" and direct more efforts at those who are responsible for the violence. As a society we must do more to educate boys and men to stop acts of violence against women. We should talk with our friends, our families, our children – certainly our daughters, but most importantly our sons … "[emphasis added]

Our sons, indeed. We might want to pray for them as well.

Peace, at least for one day. And may mercy, peace and comfort fall on the family of Michelle Gardner-Quinn, and even on Michelle herself. Oh, how we pray there is more to life than this.

†I want it to be understood that I am not suggesting that Ms. Gardner-Quinn was drunk, or that she deserves any of this, or anything of the sort.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

[Photograph of Burlington Police Chief Thomas R. Tremblay with portrait of Michelle Gardner-Quinn taken yesterday, as Chief Tremblay made his statement quoted above. Photo by Toby Talbot, AP. Image, and story, can be found here.]

Technorati tags: Michelle Gardner-Quinn, UVM, Violence against women

Interceding On Our Behalf, With Groanings Too Deep To Be Uttered

There is a horse-and-buggy, and strange folks with black cloth and black hats, and some with beards, and a child running with flowers toward a deep blue dream. From some cold grey pasture (it was green this morning), with dirt on his boots and mud-caked cheeks, a man steps forward and, taking off his hat, bows before a weeping mother and father. He stands erect, though a little bent, and looks into their eyes, eyes filled with flowers and children and blue and dirt and the teary flash of a gun. He says, “We will forgive your son.”

A dog passes by, sniffing for a little girl whose last words of the schoolday were, “Please, shoot me first.” Mothers and fathers -- and several small girls -- collapse at such lessons.

But these strange images all look the same to us: black-and-white on a horse-and-buggy, a triangle flashing warnings. We barely slow down, unless we have friends visiting from faraway. That movie with Harrison Ford was as real as this: we are witnesses to the futility of innocence. And we drive home, thinking we got the picture.

The full moon falls from the sky with nary a word. But the internet and TV are all a-chatter. The world would do well to drape itself in black for a while, seeing in the dark fabric the brilliant tearing flash of forgiveness that cuts its way through an Amish field not far from Paradise. Forgiveness bearing glad tidings, once twitching with doubt on the tip of a trigger. The big, sad bang which started it all.

"Pray for me," he said†. We pray, irrespective of the time, or whether it's too late. And now Amish families gather coins and cans, raising funds, not for the victims, but for the murderer's own family, left shattered beyond imagination. The rest of us are just confounded by such grace.

Peace everywhere, if for just one minute.

[†"He asked the children to pray for him, and that's kind of interesting because he said he hated God," Rhoads said. "He must have recognized the faith in them, God in them." -- ABC News]

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

amish, murder, forgiveness, grace

Imitation Is Satan's Flattery

It's a bit like an infinite loop, though this one is tied around your neck. The killings of several young Amish girls tied up by a sexual predator in a one-room schoolhouse is all too reminiscent of last week's horrific sexual assaults and murders in a Colorado classroom. Reasonable people conclude that the one influenced the other; reasonable people see the causal chain between one attack and its emulation somewhere else. And astute people know that the chain which brings us such sad facts is wrought in steel as tempered as original sin.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

[A related essay, "Interceding On Our Behalf, With Groans Too Deep To Be Uttered," can be found here.]

Let Us Be Slaves No Longer: A Plea To Men

I wept last night, several times. You see, I was watching television, which is not usually my habit (particularly on a Friday night), and I found myself weeping as I watched the 2006 Winter Olympics opening ceremonies, particularly when the 9-year-old Italian girl sang the Italian national anthem; or when Pavarotti closed the show with transcendence. The pageantry and pyrotechnics were brilliant; and the Peace Dove, formed by white-clad humans scaling a vertical netted wall, was mindblowing (though the dove looked a bit hawkish, if you ask me). But I also wept when I jumped to another program, 20/20, during a segment by John Stossel that included footage of the killing of African elephants. I cannot tell you how this vulgarity slays me. It is an abuse unconscionable. (I am not referring to bonafide hunting of elephants as a vital natural resource by indigenous peoples.)

I am glad for channel-changing remote controls.

But something else really tore me up last night. Something that caused me to rend my garments; to rend my heart. It is the sort of demonic reality that should set the world afire with outrage. I am referring to slave trading, sexual slave trading. I urge my readers to watch PBS's Frontline documentary Sex Slaves; and I urge you to help fight the abuse of women (and children) in a trade that is, in fact, only a few mouse clicks away from this site. In fact, I urge you men, particularly, who, like me, struggle with even the casual visit to porn-sites on the WWW, to at least fight the darkness by refusing to click on a JPEG or MPEG that will cost a woman her soul. For it is all linked: prostitution, pornography, abuse: it is all part of the degradation of womanhood, of personhood, and, perhaps most of all, motherhood.

Men, lest we forget, are also victims of sexual degradation, in myriad ways. Battered women come in all forms: many of us are married to them, our wives having been victimized by fathers or brothers or former boyfriends (the worst culprits, usually), or the culture that begs women to throw their virtues to the wind. But we also, as men, know our own exploitation: We are told everyday in advertisments, books, magazines and porno-promos that sex is ALL we really want; that we are nothing but sex objects too, hungry with lust; that THEY know what we really, really need.

My conviction is that we men must stop the demand for the consumption of women by refusing to participate it in any form. Moreover, I believe we men must begin, perhaps in grand over-reaction, to honor women, elevating them if we must, by viewing their bodies, not as playgrounds, but as cathedrals, as sanctuaries, as temples of holy life. We must stop the tyranny, even if that tyranny turns a profit through increased ad revenue, circulation, retail sales, or web-traffic.

I confess that I am guilty. I have looked at photographs (many!) that are indeed indecent, photographs presented in ostensibly up-scale magazines like Playboy, Penthouse, or some such proper website. I apologize to the women that I've exploited, unwittingly perhaps, with each mouse click. I stand ashamed.

But I will fight nonetheless for the souls of women. I cannot express to you the horrors under which many women (and children) are living right now. As one woman said, a former sex slave, she did not know "that there could be places on this earth that could be so evil. ... I kept waiting for one of my clients (pause) to help me. ..." There are women abducted and sent to foreign soil, chained in rooms, serving up to sixteen men a day, sexually, perversely, in abject decadence worse than Dante's lowest tiers of hell. Governments and legal authorities turn blind eyes towards these obscenities; men and women participate in luring and trapping vulnerable girls in schemes that are nothing short of sick.

I weep today, and I pray my tears are not for show, are not in vain. There is no hope for this planet if we do not honor women; if the womb is reduced to a commodity. I beg you to pray for me, and all earnest men, that we will fight, genuinely, for the glory of mother, daughter, sister, wife; that we will honor our wives; that we will heal our women; that we will heal ourselves, by refusing to countenance this evil any longer. Let us stop the evil; humans are not objects for sale.

Men, wake up and repent with me. We are needed.

©Bill Gnade 2006/All Rights Reserved.

[I have written a poem addressing the struggles men face with sexuality and pornography which is available here. Please note that the poem is unflinching in its use of language. I wrote the poem several years ago, and it was presented in workshop at a writers' conference at Colgate University. The leader of the workshop skipped over it for less controversial material. It's not that bad, but it is serious.]