Holy Saturday
“Security questions” were the reason so many Christian students were massacred in Kenya this week. This analysis dominates the headlines, as I write, of the BBC, CNN, and so forth. Owing to “security questions,” Christian students were separated from Muslim students at the Garissa university campus (many of the former identified because they were praying). By some strange and unaccountable coincidence, only the former were slaughtered. But wait, but wait, there were Muslim victims, too! At least four of them: wearing suicide vests, who blew themselves up at the end.
All the dead died because of these “security questions,” which are raised by liberal journalists to deflect attention from the Muslim killers to the Kenyan government. In extenuation, it must be remembered that the typical liberal journalist is also, thanks partly to environmental influences beyond his immediate control, a malicious idiot. He has no clear idea what he is doing. In this case he probably thinks he is promoting multicultural harmony. He is not: Western Christians know perfectly well who is killing whom around the “bloody borders” of the Dar al-Islam, but do not habitually retaliate against harmless and defenceless Muslims in the West.
The truth is that the “liberal” mind (I am using the term in its current sense; or if gentle reader prefers, “progressive” means the same thing) spontaneously identifies more with the perpetrator than the victim, and thus devotes most of its cruelly limited wattage, like the criminal himself, to finding someone innocent or uninvolved to blame.
Of course the Kenyan security agencies are “incompetent.” So are all security agencies, by the standard of Omniscience. They had not yet increased the number of armed guards on that particular university campus, even though they had received intelligence (mostly in the form of threats) that there would be more attacks on Christians in Kenya. As intelligence of this nature is received constantly, today, and the attacks also continue, one may pretend that the security agencies are always to blame. Constant repetition of this vicious lie has conditioned much of the public to react in that way: to blame, without thinking, anyone but the perpetrator.
The secondary level, in the media analysis — that this hit was “payback” for Kenyan government attacks on Muslim terrorists in Somalia — notably cancels the first. For the Kenyan “security questions” are indeed doing what they can. They are tracing their problem of Muslim terrorism to its root cause, which is Muslim terrorists — in this case coming mostly from Somalia.
Godspeed to them in their task, which requires courage from the least of them, along with skill in the use of firearms.
Then we get to the third and most abstract level of this analysis, which takes us out of the direct news reporting, to the cloud cuckooland of liberal pundits and White House flacks. “Poverty and unemployment” accounts for this terrorism. This is fatuous to an extreme that beggars comprehension. It is opposite to the truth at so many points that I’m tempted to write an Idlepost simply listing them. Suffice to say, terrorists seldom come from impoverished families, and even if they did this would not explain why the impoverished, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, so seldom become terrorists. Or, why the ones who do are almost always Muslim.
I find this “media selectivity” — which is to say, constant semi-conscious lying and misrepresentation — almost annoying. Honest reporting in this case would shine light on al-Shabaab, and the explicitly Muslim ideology which accounts entirely for their choice of targets. But I’ve been a journalist myself, and have many years of aggregate experience in newsrooms, and I have observed the root cause of this problem. It is the liberal ideology, or in a word, liberals. They long for destruction of what remains of Western civilization in the same way al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda long for it, but being pant-wetted cowards they restrict their activity to what is within current law. Notwithstanding, at a deeper level, they share with the murderous an allegiance to the “culture of death,” and peristent opposition to the “culture of life.”
The liberal mind naturally identifies with the criminal. This is why, for liberals, freedom of speech and press means licence for pornographers, and human rights reduce invariably to permission for “the transgressive” against civilized norms. They instinctively identify with Muslim fanatics because they share a common enemy: Christians. But when the terrorists do things so utterly repulsive that even they are appalled, they do not attack the motivating Muslim ideology, or a Shariah which is simply a rotation of their own political correctness, but instead “religious fundamentalism” — intending to tar all faithful Christians with the same stinking brush.
We are not dealing here with “another point of view.” We are dealing instead with the satanic. It takes many forms, but when “Allah” is deemed to have commanded massacres of the harmless and defenceless, it may be seen that devil-worship is directly in play. For the poisonously befogged liberal mind, demonic service is less conscious. The liberal is not so much the Devil’s worshipper, as the Devil’s plaything. But this may be rationally demonstrated, by the consistency of his support for the more evil of any two rival causes — for whichever side promises the greater reduction of human life, up to the stage where it becomes so visibly icky that natural mechanisms are triggered, and he throws up.
Jesus was not a conservative, incidentally. He was, and He remains, very purposefully, off the political chart. The true opposite of liberalism is not conservatism, but instead the apolitical — the taking personal responsibility instead of assigning it to others. The trap of liberalism is that only through politics can the political agenda be fought.
And as for Jesus: He is dead at this liturgical moment, the Nietzschean position in the Christian calendar, when one might even say that, “God is dead.” This gives us a chance to consider what is implicit in that proposition. We are in mourning for a Christ who has been judicially murdered. But, too, for a Christ who caught even His own Apostles by surprise, as we will recollect tonight.
If liberals did not love death, they would not so consistently encourage it.
If God did not hate death, He would not have defeated it.
Remember that, and remember that the latest Christian martyrs in Kenya are not dead, despite the terrorists’ best efforts. Like the good thief, they will rise with Our Lord.