GDCritter

Insulting to Islam

This is the beautiful Nadine Chandrawinata, who represented Indonesia at the Miss Universe pageant this year. Robert Spencer notes that Miss Indonesia is now the target of jihadis in her “modern, moderate” Muslim home country. Reuters reports she and her pageant aides may face jail time for “insulting” Islam:

A MILITANT Islamic group has filed a police report against Indonesia’s Miss Universe candidate, accusing her of indecency. Nadine Chandrawinata’s participation in the contest and display of her body in a swimsuit “is actually insulting for Indonesian dignity and women”, Islamic Defenders Front lawyer Sugito said yesterday. Ms Chandrawinata did not make it to the competition’s final in Los Angeles on Sunday, which was won by Miss Puerto Rico, but she had drawn heavy media coverage in Indonesia.

More from Antara News: “‘We have reported Nadine Chandrawinata as she has harassed Indonesian women by appearing in vulgar poses at the Miss Universe 2006 contest on behalf of Indonesia,’ said FPI lawyer Adnan Assegaf.” Indonesia Matters is blogging the story. Miss Indonesia says she’s not concerned.

The rest of us should be.

(Quotations from Michelle Malkin. A hat tip, too, to dhimmiwatch.)
 

My mother had two younger brothers, Charles and Robert. (Robert was the baby of the family.) Because of them, family car trips (into town or anywhere else) could be interesting. It would begin as soon as they were under way. Robert would start at Charles — poking him, pinching him, hitting him — always careful to keep his actions slightly out of sight. Finally, one would be the “last straw”, and Charles would punch Robert back. That, of course, would be observed, and Charles would be punished. Robert thought that was appropriate: “He started it. He hit me back!” (It was some time before their parents caught on.)

This true story often comes to mind when I hear somebody complaining about the Crusades. I think it is quite apt as a metaphor. After all, the purpose of the Crusades was to take back Jerusalem and the Holy Land. Allow me to restate: The purpose of the Crusades was to take BACK Jerusalem and the Holy Land, which had been taken from the Christians and the Jews by the Arab Muslims in the seventh century, and taken from them by the Seljuk Turks in the eleventh century. This history demonstrates at least three interesting points:

1. The current Islamist claim that Christianity and Islam were at peace until the Crusaders attacked is simply false. Muslim armies had been attacking Christian and Jewish lands (and other lands, too) continually since before Mohammed died.

2. The claims by the Wahhabi Sunnis and the Khomeinist Shias that their mistreatment of non-Muslims and their racism against Jews and Europeans (among others) is based in the Koran and dates back to Mohammed is another falsehood. Christian pilgrims visited the Holy Land from the seventh to the tenth centuries with little interference, and Christian and Jewish residents were apparently not terribly oppressed (by the standards of the day). It was only after the conquest of the Holy Land by the Seljuk Turks that the major interference and oppression began. THAT is what triggered the Crusades.

3. The Islamists’ claims that Muslims do not make war against other Muslims is revealed as yet another falsehood. The Seljuk Turks were Muslims more like the modern Islamists. They attacked and conquered the Arab Muslims who at that time controlled the land the Seljuk Turks coveted. And the mistreatment of pilgrims began after the conquest of Arab Muslims by the Turkestan (Seljuk) Muslims. Thus, the claim that Muslims are somehow “better” than non-Muslims, and treat other Muslims as brothers, is shown to be just a self-serving pretense.

Nor does this pretense apply only to the distant past. In World War I, the Ottoman Empire allied itself with the Germans, while the Hashemites (in Arabia) allied with the British. The two Muslim nations fought against each other. The Hashemites won, and moved north to take over Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. After the war, the Wahhabis (the house of Saud) stormed out of Arabia’s Nejd Province to take from the Hashemite monarchy — by conquest — Mecca, Medina, and the rest of what is now referred to Saudi Arabia. Self-serving pretense confirmed.

What about the Crusades themselves? A Muslim friend has asked if I separate myself from the crusaders, seeming to draw a moral equivalence between history’s crusaders and today’s jihadists. I answer his question in three ways: (1) Of course. The kinds of barbarity that were commonplace a thousand years ago have no place in the modern world. (2) No. A counterattack responding to attacks and aggression of even greater barbarity is justified. (3) I don’t need to. I am separated from the crusaders by 800-1000 years of civilizational progress. The West is proud of the progress it has made in that time, and glad to be separated from its forbears’ barbarism. The jihadis aspire to return to the tenth century — or maybe the seventh — as the pinnacle of their history, and work to continue the barbarism of that time.

Things have changed over the centuries. (Certainly they have in the West, and they should have in the East as well.) So let’s look at a few comparisons from current times. The armies of the West do not use rape as a weapon of war (as Islamists have, most recently in Lebanon, Kuwait, and Bosnia) or a technique of terror and interrogation (as Islamists did in Saddamite Iraq, and do in Iran). The West considers rapists to be criminals and punishes them; Islamist governments put them on the payroll. The West did not have to create the hijab (in 1971) to protect its own women from its own rape gangs; the Islamists did. And the West got beyond beheadings centuries ago, while jihadis revel in this barbarity today. Western armies do not, as a military policy, target civilians; Islamists constantly do, and often target only non-combatant civilians — possibly because they are afraid to attack people who can actually fight back. Islamists also consistently and routinely hide behind/among civilians in an attempt to prevent those with Western morals and standards from retaliating against them. Western soldiers are sent to prison for even slightly humiliating prisoners; jihadists are glorified for kidnapping and torturing and beheading civilians.

This comparison also holds true outside of war, in the civil and criminal realm. The West considers things like spouse abuse and statutory rape to be crimes. The jihadis’ fellow travelers consider “honor killings” a religious duty and support arranged “marriages” of pre-teen girls. (They also sanction “short term marriages” — often for just one night — providing a pretense of legitimacy for affairs and the use of prostitutes.) Another action preached by the jihadis and their imams and supporters is attacking non-Muslims (especially Christians and Jews) simply because they are not Muslims. The West has a term for such actions — they are called hate crimes. Larger and more official groups of such actions are genocides.

All this brings me back to a question I’ve had before: Is the Islamist terrorist jihadi ideology inherent in the Islamic religion and/or culture, or is it an aberration? If it is an aberration, how do we non-Muslims help the non-jihadist Muslims rid their community of this cancer and separate Islamist terrorist jihadis (the Islamic fascists) from the legitimate Muslims? How do we separate the Muslim religion from the terrorists when, generally, it seems Muslims themselves won’t? If Muslims don’t or won’t consider terrorists un-Islamic, why should anyone else? And if terrorism is inherent in Islam, what do we do about that?

Category: Religion
 

President Bush called the terrorists planning to blow up U.S.-bound passenger jets “Islamic fascists”. All the usual suspects — from CAIR to the Saudi Embassy — objected, claiming Bush tarred all Muslims as fascists. William Shawcross, in a column reprinted in the Jerusalem Post, notes his own use of the term.

In a live BBC interview recently, I called Hizbullah “Islamo-fascists.” The interviewer said nervously, “That’s a very controversial description.” I replied that it was merely accurate. She brought the interview to a swift close.

I have long objected to the term “Islamofascist,” and even moreso to Michael Medved’s new atrocity, “Islamo-Nazi”; but it’s not because I’m afraid to hurt the feelings of some poor Moslem somewhere. My objections are:

a. The term diminishes the true evil of the real Nazis and Fascists from World War II by “genericizing” their eldritch horror;

b. The term also disguises the true evil of the murderous jihadis themselves; their perfidy is not some fabricated similarity to the Italian or German national socialists, but rather their end-of-the-world fanaticism that causes them to see murder as a mitzvah and death as a promotion.

I have heard it said (and I have written) that the Islamists contracted their fascism from the Nazis. It seemed that one point of infection was when the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem visited (and allied himself with) Adolph Hitler in Berlin in 1937. Now it seems to me that different parts of the fascist infection moved both ways. Indeed, the Nazi requirement that Jews wear a yellow Jewish star reflect (among others) Persian dress requirements from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Similar requirements go back over a thousand years in some of the lands conquered by Muslims. Thus, a major part of the Nazi ideology and practice appears to be derived from earlier Islamic fascist racism. Maybe that’s why the more severe segments of Islam have consistently been most comfortable with their European totalitarian compatriots — whether Nazis, Communists, or whatever else.

You think I’m fantasizing this association? Here, as an example of that current association, is a collage of pictures from several Hezbollah gatherings (from Strategy Page). As another example, I would remind that, historically, the Ba’ath parties in both Iraq and Syria were explicitly modeled on the German Nazi party. And that’s not even counting their shared anti-Semitism, totalitarianism, and xenophobia. Draw your own conclusions.

As for the CAIR and Saudi objections that referring to Islamic fascists tars all Muslims — they make no logical sense at all. Speaking of Swiss bankers does not mean that all Swiss are bankers, or even that a large fraction of them are. Speaking of Irish fishermen does not imply that all Irish are fishermen, or even that a significant fraction are. Speaking of American soldiers or American Leftists does not imply that all Americans are either soldiers or Leftists, or even that a significant fraction are either. In each case, the terminology identifies a rather small subgroup within a larger identifiable group. Similarly, speaking of Islamic fascists does not imply that all Muslims, or even a large fraction of Muslims, are fascists — unless CAIR and the Saudis know something about their co-religionists the rest of us don’t.
 

A Muslim friend asks, “How likely are the Lutherans ... to wholly denounce the Pope and the Catholic church?” The answer is that they did. And the Catholics, at the time, responded in kind. And not just against the Lutherans, either — the first people burned at the stake, for example, were the Unitarian heretics in Transylvania. (Unitarians, as their name implies, do not believe in the doctrine of the Trinity. The persecution didn’t work — the Unitarians still exist, and founded the first church in Plymouth, Massachusetts.) They and other Western groups engage in détente now, but that took decades (and in some cases centuries) to occur.

A more recent example is the group that split off from the Catholic church after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960’s. That group’s priests (and those who followed them) condemned the Pope and the Catholic Church, saying the latter had abandoned the right path and proper Church teachings. They objected, among other things, to the Catholic Church’s move to have the Mass celebrated in each country’s common language rather than in the traditional Latin. The Catholic Church, for its part, excommunicated many of those priests.

The same thing occurs within the Ummah, the Muslim community. The Wahhabis, in particular, consider all Shiites to be polytheists or apostates. In either case, when they take over an area, they commonly insist that all Shiites in that area (and all non-Wahhabi Sunnis as well) convert or die. (They consider that Muslims not in their sect are not really Muslims. And, of course, they treat leaving Islam — or trying to — as a capital offense.) Under these conditions, I don’t think that, to quote my friend, “to expect one sect to completely denounce another is rather unreasonable”. The Wahhabis (and similar Shiite sects, etc.) are already doing so, and have done so to varying degrees for centuries; I’m just suggesting the more rational elements return the favor.
 

In discussion a while back, my friend JB asked “why would Arab leaders/societies be prone to hold on to Fascism more than other populations?” Since this propensity is marked in more than just Arab societies (Iran comes immediately to mind) I would broaden this question to ask “why would Muslim leaders and societies be more prone to fascism than other populations?” This broadens the question, but it doesn’t provide an answer.

My recent posts have concentrated on Islamists, fascism, and history. Their focus has come from observation — what has happened. That’s good, as far as it goes, but it leaves open the bigger question: Why? So I haven’t had an answer for JB’s question. Yet.

A number of things I have read suggest pieces of the puzzle. An article on a New York Muslim school, for example, describes it as teaching its pupils to memorize the Koran. And the school teaches nothing else. This is these students’ only school, but these students learn nothing else. No mathematics. No science. No history, either of their own country or of other parts of the world. Nothing of world cultures or other religions. No languages — not their “mother tongue” of English and not any foreign language. No literature but the Koran — and that not taught, but just put up only for phonetic memorization — in Arabic, which the students neither speak nor understand, and are not taught. In a school like this, the students actually learn nothing.

How many of the world’s other Muslim religious schools are like this? How many of the Madrassas’ teachers were trained like this and have little or no real understanding, even of the meaning of the words they are teaching? I was already wondering.

Then I was referred to the Pedestrian Infidel, and the “conversion epic” by Avenging Apostate. His multi-part piece is a definite must read! His story taught me a lot — in the first person, supplementing what I had learned before. From the beliefs he was taught, and considering how widespread some of those beliefs appear to be, it would seem a great many Muslim teachers are effectively unschooled and teach their students out of their own ignorance.

His story has caused an idea to gel in my mind. I now plan (hope) to do a series of items on various of the misonceptions and false ideas held by Muslims generally or by various Muslim groups or sects. (If you have a favorite Muslim misconception, please let me know — it may be one I haven’t come across.) Other items will deal with some of the consequences of these misconceptions or groups of misconceptions.

One thing, however, seems clear: Muslim groups and sects appear to be aware of how badly they have been taught. They seem to believe their faith cannot withstand questions, or to be seriously concerned that it cannot. As a direct result of this belief or fear, they make possession of another religion’s scriptures a more serious criminal offense than dealing drugs. Fearing their members may be vulnerable to hearing stories from another religion, they make prosyletizing a more serious offense than murder. And fearing or knowing their religion cannot withstand scrutiny, they make conversion from it a capital offense.

As a sentient being, I can’t think of much that is worse than succumbing to this kind of fear — and living with the sense of inferiority it produces.
 

Good news and bad news today. The good news is that Fox News reporter Steve Centanni and his cameraman Olaf Wiig were released by their kidnappers. The bad news is part of their ransom was their conversion to Islam at gunpoint.

Forced conversions are supposedly forbidden in Islamic law, and Muslim apologists are fond of quoting the passage in the Koran that says “There is no compulsion in religion.” Other authorities, however, assert that this verse is among those abrogated by “later revelations”. It certainly has been constantly and consistently violated by the Islamists.

How bad a religion must this be? It seems the only ways they can keep their membership up are

• Gaining members by
  • Coercing “conversions” at gunpoint and by other “convert or die” methods, or
  • Brainwashing children from birth, and
• Keeping members by executing (murdering) any that try to leave.

Yes, and what an appealing faith these thugs must believe Islam is, that conversions have to be effected at the point of a gun.

So much for “There is no compulsion in religion.” Evidently, that’s just another lie.

Update August 29:

Others have had similar thoughts. Shelby Steele, for example, notes that

Islamic extremists don't hate the West because they are oppressed by it. They hate it precisely because the end of oppression and colonialism — not their continuance — forced the Muslim world to compete with the West. Less oppression, not more, opened this world to the sense of defeat that turned into extremism. ... Islamic extremism is the saber-rattling of an inferiority complex.

Which means there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that Islam will soon be able to enforce submission-conversion at the point of a nuke. The good news is that any religion that needs to do that is, by definition, a weak one. More than that, the fierce faith of the 8th century Muslim warrior has been mostly replaced by a lot of hastily cobbled-together flimflam bought wholesale from clapped out European totalitarian pathologies. It would have struck almost any other ruler of Persia as absurd and unworthy to be as pitifully obsessed with Holocaust denial as President Ahmadinejad is: talk about a bad case of Europhile cultural cringe. But in today’s mosques and madrassahs there is almost as little contemplation of the divine as there is in the typical Anglican sermon. The great Canadian columnist David Warren argues that Islam is desperately weak, that it has been “idiotized” by these obsolescent imports of mid-20th century Fascism. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but, if Washington had half the psy-ops spooks the movies like to think we have, the spiritual neglect in latter-day Islam is a big Achilles’ heel just ripe for exploiting.

I ran across a group of articles last week that have brought into focus some of the things my friends and I have been trying to talk about. I’ll try to encapsulate here what I think I’ve gotten from them, including much that has come from the considerations and researches triggered by the articles.

One thing that is reinforced is that the jihadist’s ideology is not Islam, no matter how much they may claim to be the true Muslims and to speak for Islam. (I confess that I’ve been holding that as a hope as much as a belief; quite a number of others [including (ex-?)Muslims] have written quite persuasively that these doctrines are inherent in Islam.) One trigger was in a Mark Steyn column in which he said that

any religion that needs to do that (coerce “conversions”) is, by definition, a weak one. More than that, the fierce faith of the 8th century Muslim warrior has been mostly replaced by a lot of hastily cobbled-together flimflam bought wholesale from clapped out European totalitarian pathologies.

Incidentally, this may provide at least a partial answer to the question from one of my friends as to why Arab (or Muslim) societies have been more susceptible than others to the European fascist ideology. They were more susceptible because significant segments of their populations had already accepted a similar/parallel totalitarian socialist ideology. It also wouldn’t hurt that the translation of Mein Kampf is My Jihad.

That’s not to say jihad is a recent Islamic innovation. Clearly, it’s not. The term “jihad” has been used -- in its current “holy war” sense — at least since the 12th century when Saladin (Salah-ad-Din) was obsessed with jihad and issued a “call to jihad” to take Jerusalem from the Crusaders. Thus, “jihad” has been used in its current “holy war” sense since at least since the 12th century, and apparently all the way back to the days when Mohammed led his wars of conquest. The recent (20th century) innovation is the grafting of a political ideology onto the religious concept.

That leaves the problem of the Shi’ite jihadists, the other “major tree” of jihadism. Their motivation is different. Most Shi’ite jihadists are apparently members of the Hojjatieh sect, which is a Khomeinist group even though it was banned (forced underground) by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini when it opposed his political agenda. The Hojjatieh (Hojjatiyya) Society was founded in the early 1950s (some references say in 1953) by Sheikh Mahmoud Tavallai, popularly known as Sheikh Halabi, an extremist Shi’ite cleric who founded the group to eradicate members of the Baha’i faith. This millennialist sect awaits the return of the twelfth imam (the 12th grandson of prophet Mohammed), the so-called “hidden” (Savior) Imam Mahdi who disappeared as a child in 941 AD. They believe he will return only when the world contains enough oppression, misery, tyranny, and sorrow to warrant his coming. As a result, they believe in spreading evil and creating chaos as their way to hasten his return. This is the sect to which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (or Ahmadi-Nejad) belongs, along with Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah and Iraq’s Moqtada al-Sadr.

The Hojjatieh sect went down the Salafi’s religion-to-politics path much more quickly. It was banned (forced to disband) in 1983 because they opposed religious involvement in political affairs and wouldn’t go along with Ayatollah Khomeini’s “rule of the supreme jurisconsult (Vilayat-i Faqih)”. Now, however, they support the Khomeinist state — and have a shot at making their leader (Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi) the annointed successor to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As has been said before “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” So now the Hojjatieh approach absolute corruption in Iran, and do their best to spread as much evil as possible throughout the world.

All of which supports Steyn’s assertion (quoted above) that

the fierce faith of the 8th century Muslim warrior has been mostly replaced by a lot of hastily cobbled-together flimflam bought wholesale from clapped out European totalitarian pathologies.

If I were a Muslim, with the inheritance of Islamic tradition behind me, I’d be deeply ashamed of the babbling idiots who claimed to speak for me. I would be very loud in contradicting them. Their ideology is tied to Islam, and constructed largely with an Islamic vocabulary and rough grammar, but hardly with an Islamic syntax. By this I mean, that it is inconceivable that anything resembling the “blovulations” of the Salafists, and Shia revolutionists of Iran, could emerge from a purely Islamic course of reasoning. There are too many extraneous elements. In the use of Islamic terms, there is too much slapstick and self-parody.
...
But it is certainly true that Muslim authorities, in most preceding centuries, offered a view of God and man’s duties and destiny, that was a whole lot more impressive than the current lot offers. Islam has long been the West’s rival. But we could never have wished our rival to be idiotized to such a degree.

Thus, my digging seems to have produced confirmation that the modern jihadi ideology is not Islam, and not really Islamic, but is the ideology of those who would use and pervert Islam for their own evil purposes.

With that, my encapsulation is complete. But that leaves some questions for consideration. The general one to begin with is, what do we (Muslims and non-Muslims) do about it? How do the Muslims show the problem is the perverters of Islam rather than Islam itself? How do they act to take back their good name from the evildoers acting (purportedly) in that name? And what do we do to protect ourselves from these evil people — and help turn Islam back to the real Muslims?

Your thoughts?
 

Yes, I know I’m late coming to this topic, but I’ve been out.

Every person, every group, every country, every civilization has a history. And every single one has things in the past that, looked at from today’s viewpoint, can leave one less than proud. Since none of us has the power to change the past — and since doing so, if we had the power, could have really interesting consequences — the appropriate response is to (1) acknowledge the history, (2) resolve to do better, learn from history, and not make the same mistakes again, and (3) move on. Inappropriate responses would include denying the historical facts and getting angry at historians for stating them.

Whatever might be the proper doctrine, and however Muslims may want to interpret their own history, it is absolutely clear that those conquered and threatened by the Islamic jihad in Islam’s early centuries saw Islam as a religion being spread by conquest — by the sword. For the descendants of those involved to deny this — or, worse, to use comments about it as an excuse to incite mayhem — is worse than inappropriate.

Or perhaps they are simply ignorant of their own history.

I don’t know which is worse, lying about one’s own history or being totally ignorant of it.
 

I found this article interesting, particularly since I was raised as a Methodist and have a family line going back to some of the earliest members of the denomination in the U.S.

Category: Religion
 

It’s Easter time — a time to be reminded that God didn’t (and doesn’t) do things the way man expects. And that has made me remember and reflect on something that happened a few months ago.

We were part of a group on a pilgrimage to central Mexico at the end of the summer. The highlight of our trip had been a visit to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, some distance from the center of Mexico City. We visited the Basilica and climbed Tepeyac Hill, where San Juan Diego met with the appearance of Our Lady in 1531 — barely ten years after the Spanish had conquered Mexico’s Aztec kingdom.

Our group was taken out to Teotihuacan the next day. I remember being taught as a child that the pyramids there were built by the Aztecs, but that’s not so. Now we know that Teotihuacan started being built about the time of Christ, and it was in ruins when the Aztecs arrived, having been abandoned some eight centuries before.

Leaving the area of the pyramids, we ended up on a minor road heading for Tlaxcala and its nearby village of Ocotlán to see a beautiful and historic church there. It seemed to take an awful long time getting there, and some of us wondered why we were on a minor road when it seemed one of the major highways would have suited the trip better.

On the way, we were told a little about the Basilica of Our Lady of Ocotlán. This church is associated with an appearance of Our Lady to another Juan Diego, this one in 1541 — just ten years after her appearance at Tepeyac. Near the church is a miracle spring that figures in the story of this appearance. We were told we might be able to get some water from the spring while we were there — if we got there while the gates were still open.

We finally arrived in Ocotlán about 5 p.m. Mass was just starting as we came into the church. Naturally, we stayed and participated. It must have surprised the elderly priest to see such a group there for a midweek Mass. Hearing the group fully participating in the Spanish of the Mass might have surprised him a bit, too.

We noticed during the Mass that the priest never moved from where he was behind the right side of the altar at any time. The reason became evident as the Mass ended. He was in a wheelchair, and evidently not in very good shape. The priest and deacon with our group went up to talk to the older man while the rest of us were looking at (and admiring) this beautiful church and the figure of Our Lady featured there in accordance with her wishes.

And then things started to get unusual, in ways far beyond any coincidence.

It turned out the elderly priest was just returning from major surgery — an amputation. This was apparently one of his first days back in his church. Part of his leg had become infected, and he had been unable to fight the infection because of his diabetes. For that same reason, his recovery was being painfully slow.

He had been aware that we were from the United States, but only now did he learn we were from New Mexico. That was particularly striking for him because he had studied at the seminary in Montezuma, New Mexico, which was set up as a gift from the United States Council of Catholic Bishops during the time when many priests were killed and all the seminaries in Mexico were closed by the Mexican government. Our accompanying deacon attended the Montezuma seminary later, and was known to this priest by reputation. (!)

As the priest spoke with us, he became more animated; our visit was clearly giving him a lift. We all gathered around the priest and gave him a special blessing before we left. He was very moved, and we saw a tear in his eye.

After we were back on our bus, on the way out of the area, the meaning of what had just happened began to dawn on us. We began to realize how it must have been for him, at this time of personal trial, having us arrive — a pilgrim group from an area full of good memories for him — dropping in, blessing him, and almost magically disappearing again. We did a real good deed that day. That day we were angels.

And that explains why it had to take so long getting to Ocotlán — it was so we would get there at the right time.
 

Several people have noted the ill-fitting suits the British soldiers and marines were wearing — presumably so the one female sailor wouldn't be the only one out of uniform. They also noted the lack of ties on all of them.

I never knew till this week that the necktie was considered a Christian symbol.
 

Terrible events, like Monday's shootings at Virginia Tech, bring up questions like "Where was God?" The more general question is something like "If God is all-powerful, and God is (and desires) good, then why is there evil?" One of the better discussions of this question I've read was in a column written this week by Don Crawford because of the Virginia Tech shootings. That article is good despite saying Tuesday rather than Monday.

Of course, the answer the article gives is from the Christian perspective. The answers from at least some other religions are different.

From reading in Experiencing the World's Religions just this week, for example, I understand that the Jain answer is that there is no god, and the earth just is. So this question doesn't occur.

Islam has an equally simple answer -- what happened at Virginia Tech was the will of Allah. Muslim philosophy has been governed since the middle of the ninth century by Asharite doctring and al-Ghazali’s teaching Allah's unlimited power, expressed in the view that each instant exists as is does entirely because Allah wills it so.

Obviously, I prefer the Christian answer, but I think there's more to it,too. The whole issue brought to my mind an essay by Bill Whittle called "Tribes" that I ran across right after Hurricane Katrina, a little more than 18 months ago. (I used some ideas from this essay in discussing Hurricane Katrina.) Whittle's tribes are not characterized by black and white skins, but by the black and white hats the tribe's members choose (by their choices and viewpoints) to wear. To avoid unconscious overtones, he tags these tribes as the Pinks and the Greys. The Pinks just want to be left alone, feel that everyone is really much like them, and feel that any conflict can be resolved if we just understand the other side's issues. This has as a corollary that, if something bad happens, somebody made it happen. The Greys would also rather be left alone. But they also know that bad things sometimes happen, even without a malicious agency. Putting it in engineering terms, they know that "things break sometimes," and feel "please don't let it be my bridge." And the Greys know one more thing that the Pinks don't, or won't -- they know that an enemy exists that wants to destroy both Pinks and Greys. (Whittle does not give the enemy a tribe or a color.)

Whittle mixes metaphors a little to relate his tribes to the Loony Toons cartoon characters -- sheep, sheepdogs, and wolves -- featured in the introduction to The Bulletproof Mind by LtCol (Ret.) Dave Grossman, whose related essay "On Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs" was reprinted a few days ago. The sheep are the Pinks, the sheepdogs are the Greys, and the wolves are the enemy. When the wolves are actually in the flock and attacking, they fill the sheep with terror. The rest of the time, though, the sheep would rather believe wolves don't exist. The sheepdogs, when the sheep recognize them, make the sheep uncomfortable -- they are a reminder that evil exists. And some sheepdogs are always recognizable. Others, like the shaggy cartoon sheepdog, may be taken by sheep as other sheep, and so pass unnoticed -- until the wolves arrive.

And so we come back to Virginia Tech. With a wolf loose in the fold, a few people showed their grey. The heroism of Holocaust survivor Professor Liviu Librescu was outstanding, and he paid for his heroism with his life. (Update: So was that of Waleed Mohammed Shaalan, who distracted the shooter's attention from another injured student at the cost of his own life.) The grey of others was less obvious, and less deadly, like that of student Derek O'Dell. And others, like the student sitting next to O'Dell in class, never got the chance to show their color, pink or grey. There are other grey stories we may never know, in some cases possibly because the sheepdog was unsuccessful in stopping the wolf. After all, there's nothing that says the sheepdog always wins. But what's undeniable is that there are people alive today who would not be alive were it not for the protective actions of these individuals.

Note that these were not recognized protectors, recognized Greys. These were what we might call "undercover Greys" -- apparent Pinks who stepped up when they were needed, and helped save others' lives.

In a way, maybe that's an answer (though perhaps not one we'd hope for) to the original question: Perhaps it's as I was taught, that God usually works through people. And in this case the people he was working through are the ones who showed their grey.

Recommended: Read the Crawford article, the Whittle essay, and the Grossman reprint. You'll be glad you did.