Perspectives; Thoughts; Comments; Opinions; Discussions

Posts tagged ‘ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT’

We Need an Immediate Ceasefire in Ukraine, Not Israel


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | DECEMBER 12, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/12/12/we-need-an-immediate-ceasefire-in-ukraine-not-israel/

helicopter in front of explosion

Author John Daniel Davidson profile

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOHNDDAVIDSON

MORE ARTICLES

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is in Washington this week, once again pressuring U.S. lawmakers to dole out tens of billions of taxpayer dollars for his war effort. At issue is a $110 billion national security supplemental the Biden administration has requested that includes about $61 billion for Ukraine, as well as more funding for Israel, humanitarian aid for Gaza, and money to secure the U.S.-Mexico border.

Senate Republicans last week sensibly blocked a vote to advance the bill because it doesn’t include changes to border policy, which is the only thing that would actually secure the border. But the border isn’t the only good reason to block the funding package. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the war in Ukraine is an unwinnable quagmire, and that for all the calls we hear for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict, what’s really needed is a ceasefire in Ukraine, where the solution today is more or less what it was before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022: a negotiated settlement.

Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio hinted at this in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper over the weekend, saying there’s no reason to think $61 billion will accomplish what $100 billion hasn’t. “The idea that Ukraine was going to throw Russia back to the 1991 borders was preposterous. Nobody actually believed it. So, what we’re saying to the president and really to the entire world is, you need to articulate what the ambition is.”

So far, neither the Biden White House nor any neocon Ukraine hawk in Washington has been able to articulate what the endgame strategy in Ukraine should be. Instead, we get platitudes about the need to shovel more money into a bloody war of attrition from the likes of Mike Pompeo, who of course doesn’t bother to elaborate on what he means by “end the war.”

At this point, nearly two years into the war, no one really believes what Pompeo and Biden administration officials have been peddling since the conflict began, that somehow Western aid to Ukraine would enable a Russian “defeat” that would send Putin running back to Moscow, where perhaps he would even be deposed. That was always a neocon fantasy.

What was obvious from the beginning, as Mario Loyola pointed out in these pages just three weeks before the Russian invasion, is that Ukraine could have territorial integrity or political independence, but not both. Because of the unique historical circumstances of Ukraine’s borders, together with what Moscow has long viewed as its core strategic interests, Ukraine should have been prepared to trade land for independence. Indeed, U.S. leaders should have insisted on it.

Instead, President Biden embarked on a desultory policy of half-measures, giving Ukraine just enough aid to keep Russia from overrunning the country but not enough to expel Russian forces and risk a potentially catastrophic escalation with a nuclear power. Biden did this, moreover, without ever even attempting to explain to the American people why funding a proxy war against Russia constituted a core national interest. Then and now, anyone who questioned our involvement was labeled a Putin apologist. Insults were traded for arguments, and this is more or less where we are today.

That’s too bad because what the goal should be now is fairly obvious: an immediate ceasefire in which Ukraine de facto accepts Russian control over some of its territory without formally ceding it to Moscow. In exchange for this, Ukraine could fairly ask for and receive the kind of formal Western support that would ensure the territory it does have, which is most of the country, would be secure.

The lazy counterargument that such an arrangement would invite Putin to invade all of Eastern Europe is, as Vance argued, preposterous. Moscow is weaker than anyone thought, and if its military could not overrun Kiev, there’s no reason to think it could so much as set a track on any NATO member territory. Any suggestion to the contrary is fearmongering designed to shut down legitimate debate about what U.S. policy should be in this conflict.

Contrast all this with the war in Israel, which vast swaths of the American left seem to think needs to end immediately even as they support endless support for the Ukraine conflict. It’s a perfect illustration of how Americans tend to view foreign policy as a proxy for domestic politics. For the left, supporting Israel is to side with the oppressor. Never mind that Israel was viciously attacked by Hamas terrorists who control the territory from which they launched the Oct. 7 attacks on Israeli civilians. Hamas has vowed it will launch more such attacks as soon as it can. Under these circumstances, a ceasefire makes zero sense.

But for Ukraine, a ceasefire and a negotiated settlement is probably as good as it was ever going to get. The Minsk ceasefire agreements of 2014 and 2015, laid out in U.N. Security Council Res. 2202, provided that the eastern Ukrainian provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk would be allowed to conduct local elections with guarantees of local autonomy and a general amnesty. In exchange, the separatists would disband their “people’s republics,” disarm, and the Ukrainian military would reassert control of all Ukrainian territory to the Russian border.

That agreement was designed to avoid war, but it was never implemented. At this point, Ukraine will almost certainly never officially cede territory to Russia, but something like the Minsk agreement could work to bring an end to the fighting. The United States isn’t going to risk World War III to guarantee Ukraine’s 1991 borders, and the sooner Senate Republicans and the Biden administration make that clear to Zelensky, the sooner we can start working out what a post-war settlement could look like for Ukraine and Russia.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

THE BEST COMMENTARY I’VE READ IN MANY YEARS: The Conversion of Ayaan Hirsi Ali to Christianity Is a Dire Warning to the West


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | NOVEMBER 14, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/11/14/the-conversion-of-ayaan-hirsi-ali-to-christianity-is-a-dire-warning-to-the-west/

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Author John Daniel Davidson profile

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOHNDDAVIDSON

MORE ARTICLES

Over the weekend, Ayaan Hirsi Ali revealed in an essay at Unherd that she has become a Christian. For Christians, this is welcome and joyous news. But it’s also instructive. A former Muslim who very publicly rejected Islam and became an avowed atheist in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Ali has been speaking and writing in defense of Western civilization and liberal values for decades. 

Now she has come to the conclusion that there is no way to maintain Western civilization and no way to preserve its liberal values apart from Christianity. Just as she came to discover the fundamentalist Islam of her youth was a dead end, she has also discovered the atheism she adopted in response to it is also a dead end.

Ali is right, of course, although the reasons she gives for her conversion might raise some eyebrows. “Part of the answer is global,” she writes. Ali says the West is under threat from three different but related forces: “the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.”

She’s also right about that but wrong to think Christianity is primarily about countering those forces or preserving a particular civilizational or political project. As great as Western civilization is, it arose as a byproduct of the Christian faith, the sole object of which is communion with Almighty God by means of salvation through Jesus Christ. Things like freedom of speech, rule of law, and human rights are fruits of the Christian faith, but they are not what Christianity is about.

Still, Ali’s conversion is instructive in an important way. As Hussein Aboubakr Mansour noted on X (formerly Twitter) over the weekend, Ali was “the poster child of what the New Atheists promised Islam.” There was a lot of discussion after 9/11 about how Islam needed its own Reformation to tame and secularize it, as Christianity had supposedly been tamed and pacified by the Protestant Reformation (never mind the century of continental war that it triggered). What the atheists promised Ali and other disillusioned Muslims was rationalism, freedom of inquiry and expression, and scientific objectivity — all of which would flourish in Muslim societies just as it had in the West, if only Muslims would set aside their backward religion and embrace the secular humanism of Western elites.

According to this theory, Christianity itself had served its purpose in the West, bestowed all its gifts, and could safely be discarded. We could live forever, drawing on its capital, which we assumed would never run out. The Islamic world needed to do likewise, and all would be well.

But something very different happened instead. It turns out, the capital was gradually spent and never replenished. Liberalism always depended for its vitality on something it cannot itself supply: the Christian faith, active and alive among the people. As the French philosopher Rémi Brague wrote back in the 1990s, “Faith produces its effects only so long as it remains faith and not calculation. We owe European civilization to people who believed in Christ, not to people who believed in Christianity.”

Ali’s conversion, which is laudable on its own (even if she doesn’t quite yet grasp the true object of her new faith), is a stark reminder that the liberal, secular West cannot survive without the Christian faith from which it emerged. Indeed, the secular elites who once promised apostate Muslims like Ali that they could have all the benefits of Christianity without Christianity itself are now abandoning the principles they once espoused.

In recent weeks, we have seen this abandonment most potently in the Red-Green alliance between the global left and the pro-Hamas crowd, who have been marching through the streets of Western cities in a show of force reminiscent of the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. The naked antisemitism of the Hamas people, together with the deafening silence of the elites of the global left, tells you everything you need to know about the durability of secular humanism.

There is no room anymore for freedom of speech, open inquiry, or rational debate among the people and institutions that once espoused these ideals. There is only the brute force of the mob. It’s easy to see this at work throughout Western society, not just on the Israel-Hamas issue. What commitment do our elites really have to liberal totems like science and rationality, after all, when they insist that a man can become a woman, or that children can consent to castration and sterilization? When a nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court insists she cannot define what a woman is because she is not a biologist, we’ve stepped firmly into what C.S. Lewis called the void, where nothing is objectively true and all that matters is will and power.

“Unless we offer something as meaningful, I fear the erosion of our civilisation will continue,” writes Ali. “And fortunately, there is no need to look for some new-age concoction of medication and mindfulness. Christianity has it all.”

Indeed it does, and it has given us all that is good in our civilization. Having first rejected the Christian faith, however, our secular elites are now rejecting all those other good things that sprang from it, and positing a very different sort of society. Instead of a society that embraces rationality and freedom and human rights, they offer something from the pagan past: a society that embraces power and violence and domination. If we’re honest with ourselves, we can already see, on the streets of London and New York and Paris, what that society will look like.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

Category:

Religion

Tagged with:

The Pro-Hamas Left Is Warming Up For Real Violence


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | NOVEMBER 02, 2023

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/the-pro-hamas-left-is-warming-up-for-real-violence-2666128386.html/

pro-hamas left waves flags at protest

Author John Daniel Davidson profile

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOHNDDAVIDSON

MORE ARTICLES

Talk about bad timing. On Wednesday, the White House announced a “National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia,” the necessity of which, according to awkwardly scripted remarks by Vice President Kamala Harris, is that Muslims endure a disproportionate number of “hate-fueled attacks and other discriminatory incidents.”

Leave it to the Biden White House to pick a moment when a wave of antisemitism is surging across America to announce this. Set aside the dearth of evidence that Muslims face persecution or discrimination in mainstream American society. Last year set a record for anti-Jewish hate crimes, breaking the previous record that was set the year before. Since the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, antisemitism has erupted in our cities and on campuses, this time with the imprimatur and cooperation of the identitarian left. The idea that now is the time to address Islamophobia is so out of touch with the reality of the moment, only the Biden-Harris administration could possibly have come up with it.

But the announcement inadvertently serves to highlight a rather disturbing development in our civic life. At this point, some three weeks removed from the Hamas slaughter of 1,400 Israelis, it’s hard to deny that we have a domestic constituency for Hamas in this country. Generally speaking, it’s comprised of a broad swath of the woke left together with a broad swath of Muslim-Americans, united in what amounts to an unstable Red-Green alliance.

It’s also easy to see that this Hamas constituency is warming up for a season of real violence.

We’ve all seen the recent videos of self-righteous Hamas sympathizers tearing down posters of missing or kidnapped Israeli children. In almost every case, their actions are accompanied by either a defiant callousness or a dead-eyed nonchalance. Pleading with them or interrogating them is pointless, as every person who has tried to do so on camera has quickly discovered. These people are antisemites, and it’s not possible to shame them out of their antisemitism. They own it gladly. 

But this week, a different sort of video appeared on social media. A group of Jews in Manhattan’s Upper East Side physically protected a bunch of posters of Israeli child hostages from an antisemite who was trying to tear them down. The man, who of course covered his face with a keffiyeh, tried to force his way through and a scuffle ensued. Eventually, a cop pulled up and appeared to arrest the man as a crowd gathered.

The incident illustrates the violence lurking just beneath the surface of the antisemitic, pro-Hamas sentiment now manifesting all across the country. The kind of people who are willing to casually rip down posters of children taken hostage by terrorists are not those who have any kind of principled commitment to nonviolence. They might or might not individually be cowards, but they clearly have no problem with violence as such — see, for example, the BLM posters celebrating Hamas paragliders who slaughtered more than 250 Israeli concertgoers on Oct. 7.

This is especially true on our nation’s college campuses. This week at Harvard, whose students have staged some of the most blatant and vile pro-Hamas demonstrations, including straightforward calls for the ethnic cleansing of Jews, a group of keffiyeh-waving students surrounded and then assaulted a Jewish student who was simply trying to get away from them.

Some of these assailants have been identified, like Ibrahim Bharmal, a student at Harvard Law School and an editor at the Harvard Law Review, as well as Elom Tettey-Tamaklo, a student of Harvard Divinity School. That a Harvard law student feels free to harass and assault Jews on campus — the opposite of what we should expect from a student of the law — suggests not only that antisemitism on campus is a real threat to Jewish students but that the pro-Hamas woke left is growing in boldness and is reasonably confident it can target individual Jews on campus with impunity.

Jon Levine called the Harvard assault a LARP pogrom, which is exactly what it was. And as we know from 2020, left-wing riot and assault LARPers eventually get around to the real thing. Indeed, all the elements are falling into place for a season of civic violence of the kind we saw during the summer of 2020. The White House’s ham-fisted campaign against Islamophobia is all the confirmation you need that Jewish Americans, not Muslims, are the ones in real danger right now.

This is something of a pattern on the left. When a dangerous or unstable element in its coalition is revealed as such, the official narrative is to pretend that element is under unique threat from the American mainstream. Look at the media and Democrat reaction to the mass shooting at a Christian school in Nashville back in March. The shooter was Audrey Hale, a 28-year-old woman who identified as a man. She killed three children and three adults before police took her out. Hale was mentally unwell and left behind a kind of trans shooter manifesto, which was suspiciously never released to the public.

In the wake of the shooting, all we heard from the corporate press and Democratic leaders was that transgender Americans were under threat. Not a word about how transgender ideology attracts mentally unstable, unwell people who need help, not affirmation. That was not the conversation they wanted to have, even after the slaughter of six innocent people.

Likewise, we’re going to hear a lot more about how Muslims and left-wing Hamas apologists are the real victims, even as Jewish students suffer escalating attacks, harassment, and threats. Make no mistake, the violent rhetoric you hear at these pro-Hamas rallies, the revolting practice of tearing down posters of Israeli children taken hostage, the targeting of individual Jewish students on campus — it’s all leading somewhere very bad.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

Category:

International Politics, Islamic News

Tagged with:

Corporate Media are Waging an Information War Regurgitating Hamas Propaganda


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | OCTOBER 18, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/10/18/corporate-media-are-waging-an-information-war-regurgitating-hamas-propaganda/

NYT Headlines

Author John Daniel Davidson profile

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOHNDDAVIDSON

MORE ARTICLES

It all happened rather quickly on Tuesday — a matter of minutes, not hours. There was an explosion at a hospital in Gaza, the Hamas-run health ministry immediately (and incredibly) claimed that some 500 people were killed and that the blast was caused by an Israeli missile, and every major media outlet took Hamas officials at their word and ran with that headline despite any corroborating evidence.

Before changing the headline (twice) The New York Times declared, “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say.” The Wall Street Journal also called it a “strike,” without any evidence beyond the say-so of a terrorist regime that 10 days earlier had butchered more than 1,000 civilians, raping women and decapitating babies. Nearly every major news organization did something similar. 

By nightfall in the Middle East, angry mobs assaulted the embassies and military bases of Israel, the United States, and other Western powers. The streets of Baghdad, Istanbul, Beirut, Amman, Doha, Tehran, Cairo, Rabat, and even some European cities like Berlin and Barcelona were filled with hordes of enraged Hamas sympathizers who believed (and now will always believe) that Israel struck the hospital. The fake news cycle even derailed President Biden’s trip to the region. Jordan abruptly canceled a planned summit with the United States, Egypt, and Palestinian leaders while Biden was en route. It also placed American lives in real danger.

By Wednesday morning, it was clear that nothing the media initially reported was true. Israel didn’t fire a missile at the hospital, and hundreds of people weren’t killed. Instead, it appears that a Palestinian rocket misfired and landed in the parking lot of the hospital complex. In the light of day, video footage of the site showed no impact crater consistent with an airstrike, and most of the nearby hospital buildings intact. 

So what happened here? This was an info op, a deliberate campaign to alter the narrative of the Israel-Hamas war and inflame the Muslim world. Perhaps a billion people or more are now convinced beyond all doubt that Israel bombed a hospital and killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians. 

We have seen this kind of op before, many times. In every case, it’s designed to serve the domestic interests of the progressive left. In this case, the purpose was to constrain Israel’s response to last weekend’s horrific Hamas attacks on innocent Israeli civilians. That, by the way, is the actual purpose of Biden’s trip to the Middle East, where he’ll be “asking tough questions as a friend of Israel,” according to the administration. Translation: Israel is to stand down now. The credible threat of unconstrained mob violence across the Middle East, directed at Western targets, will do much to advance this goal. Indeed it already has.

We saw a similar media info op in the Ukraine-Russia war last November when a missile struck a grain silo in Poland, killing two civilians. The missile strike was immediately blamed on Russia, stoking outrage across the West and bolstering calls for more military assistance to Ukraine. It wasn’t until last month that Polish experts finally confirmed that the missile was Ukrainian, not Russian.

The same thing routinely happens here in America. During the Black Lives Matter riots in the summer of 2020, hysteria and outrage preceded the collection of facts or the verification of claims. In episode after episode that summer, we saw law enforcement officers, including black officers, use justified force in the line of duty — often amid chaotic and violent rioting. Such force was then instantly used as a pretext for more rioting. Then as now, it didn’t matter what the facts were, and no one cared or even noticed when they were corrected. The misreporting by then had served its purpose of providing cover for a fresh cycle of street violence and rioting.

It’s important to understand that these media info ops only happen on issues where the reporting biases serve the domestic political priorities of the left. From Ukraine to Gaza to the streets of American cities, the reporting bias works in the same direction and serves the same set of interests. The connections and affinity between BLM activists and the pro-Palestinian crowd in the U.S. should be fairly obvious by now, and we should understand these media ops in that light.

In this case, the stakes of such ops are rather high. Instead of mere outrage on social media, or even mere riots in the streets, corporate media misreporting about the hospital fueled violent mobs across the entire Middle East, and the Israel-Hamas conflict now appears to be on the brink of triggering a wider regional war.

For those on the right, it’s long past time to understand and admit what corporate media are and how they operate. These outlets are not interested in reporting the news of what actually happened, or in shedding light on real events, and certainly not in exposing the truth and informing the public. By repeating Hamas propaganda, they are effectively waging war against Israel, but they are doing so as part of a larger information war to advance their agenda in the United States.

And if you think there will be a reckoning or any accountability for the lies they spread and the damage they cause, think again. There never has been, and there won’t be this time either.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

Category:

Media

Tagged with:

Israel And Hamas Are Embroiled in a Zero-Sum Religious War, And So is the West


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | OCTOBER 11, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/10/11/israel-and-hamas-are-embroiled-in-a-zero-sum-religious-war-and-so-is-the-west/

anti-Israel protest

Author John Daniel Davidson profile

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOHNDDAVIDSON

MORE ARTICLES

The events of the past 120 hours have made it abundantly clear that Israel can no longer coexist alongside Hamas. The violence unleashed by Hamas against unarmed civilians, including women and children and the elderly — much of it filmed and livestreamed online — has shocked the world. On Tuesday, we learned that at a kibbutz near the Gaza border called Kfar Aza, Hamas terrorists slaughtered entire families, including at least 40 babies and small children, some of whom they beheaded.

The Western world has not seen this kind of barbarity in nearly 80 years, and most of us recoil from it in horror and incomprehension. Make no mistake: Kfar Aza will take its place in history alongside Auschwitz and Treblinka. The evil of Hamas is that kind of evil, perhaps not in scale but in kind. In some ways, it is worse because while the Nazis took care to hide what they were doing from the world, Hamas has broadcast its atrocities, boasted and reveled in them. All Hamas members are guilty and deserve swift execution.

Delivering justice to Hamas is now Israel’s grim task, and they will go about it as best they can. But another, perhaps more difficult, task is confronting the Western world at large. In the immediate wake of the Hamas atrocities, demonstrations were staged all over the Western world — in support of Hamas. Those who marched in the streets, who signed pro-Hamas student statements, who posted memes online praising Hamas are not, by and large, antisemitic neo-Nazis. They are left-wing zealots, BLM and LGBT activists, the woke grandchildren of radical Baby Boomer politics, brain-washed by “anticolonialism” propaganda, which they regurgitated before a watching world.

https://twitter.com/SohrabAhmari/status/1711932941423484981?s=20

This should not surprise you. The people who cheer the beheading of babies are of course those who also cheer the slaughter of babies in the womb. They are, like Islam itself, post-Christian, and their morality, like the morality of Hamas, is decidedly pagan. That means they do not believe in universal human rights or inherent human dignity. They do not believe in the Christian doctrine of imago Dei and the moral imperatives that flow from it. They do not believe in objective morality or truth. They reject the Christian precepts that constitute the basis for Western civilization.

These are the barbarians who reside beyond the gates of the Christian West. They believe only in power, and they will do whatever they can to gain it. Once they have it, they will exercise it as they see fit, unconstrained by questions of right and wrong, or notions of justice and morality whose premises they reject. They will not have qualms about their own hypocrisy or inconsistency. Appeals to compassion and mercy will fall on deaf ears. 

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.
And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them. Romans 1:18-32

These are the same people, after all, who insist that “words are violence” and that debates and free speech and even jokes must be suppressed because of the “harm” they cause to vulnerable and marginalized people. If you say a man cannot become a woman, they want you to be fired, to be silenced, to lose everything. If you say we must not castrate and mutilate children in the name of gender ideology, they want your own kids to be taken from you. Confronted by the wholesale slaughter of women and children, the decapitation of babies by armed men, they respond with a shrug and a meme. They do not care about violence as such, they simply want to be the ones to wield it.

Do not think these people are just confused or ignorant. They are pagans, and like the Hamas terrorists whom they champion, they cannot be reasoned with or accommodated. If it is obvious that Israel and Hamas cannot coexist, it is equally obvious that these two worlds, the Christian and the pagan, also cannot coexist. We will become all one thing or all the other.

Under such circumstances, we need to recognize this struggle for what it is: a fundamentally religious struggle between two irreconcilable religious worldviews. For many centuries the Christian West was able to see this clearly. It’s why the Catholic Church worked tirelessly for centuries to stamp out paganism in northern Europe. It’s why the Spanish conquistadors, confronted by human sacrifice cults in the New World, toppled them and razed their temples. They understood that there could be no peace with such a regime. It had to be destroyed utterly.

So, the problem we confront today is old, and the solution is the same. But do we even have the ability, at this late hour, to recognize the problem and do what is necessary? Probably not. We are likely too far along in the process of dechristianization.

Just look at how we responded to 9/11. Many have been calling the Hamas attack Israel’s 9/11, which is an apt comparison. But Israel should not make the mistake America and its leaders did. We did not recognize the 9/11 attacks as a religious act. In fact, we actively denied that the massacre was religiously motivated, and so we failed to respond on religious grounds. Remember the infamous words of then-President George W. Bush immediately after the massacre of 3,000 Americans. Surrounded by Islamic leaders who more or less shared the basic worldview of the al-Qaeda terrorists, he proclaimed that Islam was a “religion of peace,” and insisted there could be no connection between the killing and the religion the killers professed.

It was incredible to behold at the time. And what followed was equally incredible. We invaded Iraq on the premise that the Iraqis were just like us, or that we could make them like us. Absurdities followed. The State Department flew political scientists to Baghdad to devise an “Islamic” basis for constitutionalism and the rule of law. In Afghanistan, we went well beyond offering education to Afghan girls and women and instead spent decades and untold billions catechizing them into gender theory and queer studies. For years our leaders repeated ad nauseum the fatuous notion that deep down all people want to be free. Never did it occur to them that some people would rather have justice or power or revenge.

All of these things were indications that we had finally severed ties with our Christian past and stepped firmly, perhaps without realizing it, into the pagan future. We never grappled with the root causes of 9/11, never entertained the notion that a people’s relationship to God shaped everything and was therefore insurmountable. All such discussion was totally absent from the public square. We bought into the lie that all religions are the same, democracy and classical liberalism are fungible and can be imposed at will on any culture, and that religious differences are mostly matters of aesthetics.

What a monstrous lie — and a dangerous one, too, as we are learning every day now. The conflict unfolding in the Middle East is fundamentally religious in ways that are fairly obvious. What is less obvious, because we are a post-Christian people, is that the conflict unfolding in America is equally religious. Hamas and the pagans stand on one side; Christians and Jews stand on the other. Only one side is going to win.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

Category:

International Politics

Tagged with:

Tag Cloud