Benedict XVI Baptizes a Muslim

What are we to think of the provocative act consummated by Pope Benedict XVI during Holy Week?

Here’s what the New York Times thought in a piece by Ian Fisher.

Days after Osama bin Laden issued a threat against Europe that included an accusation that the pope was involved in a “new Crusade” against Islam, Magdi Allam, an Egyptian-born writer protected by Italian bodyguards because of his criticism of radical Islam, was baptized by the pope Saturday night and received his first holy communion.

You can see the liberal line here. Osama was right! The pope is leading a “new Crusade” against Islam.

You really wonder about these liberals sometimes. It’s OK for liberals to evangelize for liberalism in the schools and universities. It’s all right for 90 percent of journalists to be liberals and to be advancing their world-view every day in the media.

But God forbid that the pope should try to advance Christianity!

Of course the mysterious writer who calls himself “Spengler” got right on the case.

A self-described revolution in world affairs has begun in the heart of one man. He is the Italian journalist and author Magdi Cristiano Allam, whom Pope Benedict XVI baptized during the Easter Vigil at St Peter’s. Allam’s renunciation of Islam as a religion of violence and his embrace of Christianity denotes the point at which the so-called global "war on terror" becomes a divergence of two irreconcilable modes of life: the Western way of faith supported by reason, against the Muslim world of fatalism and submission.

Well, you certainly wouldn’t read stuff like that in the New York Times!

Now why do you think that Magdi Cristiano decided to convert? According to Spengler, he said that:

[T]he challenge that Pope Benedict XVI offered to Islam in his September 2006 address at Regensburg was "undoubtedly the most extraordinary and important encounter in my decision to convert".

So the media campaign to discredit the pope’s Regensburg address was less than a complete success.

Spengler is naturally pleased with all this.

Before Benedict’s election, I summarized his position as "I have a mustard seed and I’m not afraid to use it." Now the mustard seed has earned pride of place in global affairs.

The thing to remember in trying to understand all this is this fact. Two-thirds of the global adherents to Christianity in the Global South are women. What, you may ask, is the particular attraction of Christianity for women? After all, it’s a patriarchal religion that wants to keep women in their place, right?

That’s the liberal line, but like most liberal notions, I suspect it is wrong. No, I think that women are attracted to Christianity because it is a religion of love. God loves you, and he wants you to love him back.

For women, we know, the most important thing in their lives is relationships. That’s a silly way of saying that women live for love: love for their children, love for their mothers, love for their “best friend,” even love for their husbands. Lord Byron:

Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,

’Tis woman’s whole existence.

And it’s not just me saying this. Go read the pope’s two encyclicals: “Deus Caritas Est,” or God is Love, and “Spe Salvi,” In Hope We are Saved. You will find they are both absolutely drenched in love and hope. Girl stuff, right?

When women are confronted by a choice between a religion of love and a religion of world conquest, what you you think they would choose?

Back in the days immediately after the Cold War wise heads recognized that the war was conducted on two fronts, the political/military front led by the United States and the religious front led by John Paul II, the Polish pope.

Now we are in the war against Islamic extremism, and we have once again the United Staes leading on the political/military front. This time there’s a new pope, Benedict XVI, the German pope, leading on the religious front.

With an alliance like that, I’d say that something’s got to give.

Obama Ain't No Jackie Robinson

Back in 1947, relates Walter Williams, Jackie Robinson became the first black player in the major leagues.

He encountered open racist taunts and slurs from fans, opposing team players and even some players on his own team. Despite that, his first year batting average was .297. He led the National League in stolen bases and won the first-ever Rookie of the Year Award.

Jackie Robinson was the best. As the “first black player, he had to be.” Today it doesn’t much matter that there are a lot of average stumble-bum black players in the major leagues. But it would have mattered with Jackie Robinson in 1947.

Unfortunately Barack Obama, writes Williams, is no Jackie Robinson.

Barack Obama has charisma and charm but in terms of character, values and understanding, he is no Jackie Robinson.

And in the view of Williams, the first black president ought to be as good as Jackie Robinson.

The fact of Obama’s successful candidacy, Williams continues, is a tribute to the goodness of Americans and that the civil rights battle is won. Yes there are problems on the discrimination front, but the battle is won. If you want to talk about the major problems confronting the black community, they are not civil rights problems.

The major problems are: family breakdown, illegitimacy, fraudulent education and a high rate of criminality. To confront these problems, that are not the fault of the larger society, requires political courage and that’s an attribute that Obama and most other politicians lack.

The message of Barack Obama’s speech a week ago was: Don’t look for me to work on those problems. I just want to be president.

Bernanke's ARM Assist

TV personality and Wall Street man Larrry Kudlow is pleased. Ben Bernanke is my man, he writes.

I just got my latest adjustable-rate mortgage statement from the bank. When I originally refinanced this loan, it was 5.75 percent. And last summer my ARM soared to 8.25 percent. But guess what? Through February it has round-tripped all the way back to 6 percent.

So I’m now saving $2,000 a month, or $24,000 a year, because Gentle Ben has slashed the fed funds target rate to 2.25 percent from 5.25 percent last fall.

Who wouldn’t be pleased with a present like that? And with house prices plunging and home sales perking up a little, maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel. The law of supply and demand to the rescue.

Larry also notes that the gold price is down from its peak at around $1,000 per ounce and the dollar is up a bit. The Treasury yield curve is now positive, with the lowest yield on the shortest term debt.

So is the Mortgage Meltdown over? Is it time to pile into the stock market, the real-estate market, and every other kind of market?

You never know. You never know untill the fear and trembling is all over, the market is up 20 percent, and all the good deals have been snapped up. But then it’s too late!

Kudlow has this good advice. Don’t try to time the market turn. All you can do is say this to yourself. Hmm. Looks like stocks, or real estate, or Miami condos are on sale right now. Maybe I should pick myself up a deal.

As the salesmen say: There’ll never be a better time to buy than right now.

Meanwhile I am kicking myself. The Dell outlet store had some dual-core Pentiums with 2GB on sale for $259 last week. Now they are up to $299.

Democrats and Race

One of the things we conservatives constantly try to do is step out of the default liberal mindset.

It’s hard to do, even as a conservative, because liberalthink defines reality in America. To think another way requires real effort, especially for a social animal like homo sapiens.

Liberals all seem to think that Barack Obama’s speech last week was at the least a fine and principled contribution to America’s conversation on race and maybe much more. Conservatives tend to be disappointed. We wonder if Obama couldn’t have seized the opportunity and really declared for a post-racist America.

But maybe the big issue is what Obama’s candidacy is doing for race relations within the Democratic Party. The Washington Post’s Krissah Williams writes about veterans hanging out at two American Legion posts in Pennsylvania, one predominantly black, and one predominantly white.

[I]n the two worlds of these veterans, Obama’s speech was one more dividing point. Rather than bringing the men in Post 733 and Post 420 closer together, it seemed to highlight the gap between them.

White Air Force veteran Dan Dowett talks about Obama backing “a preacher that to me sounds like a treasonous person.” Black Army veteran Ross Mounds says “the controversy over Wright is just the excuse some whites are looking for not to vote for a qualified black man.”

Then there’s the view from other voters. Victor Davis Hanson asked several non-black voters what they thought of Obama’s speech last week. The reaction was significant.

“Forget the speech. I would never vote for Obama after listening to Wright.” In some cases, the reaction was not mild disappointment, but unprintable outrage.

The question is whether the liberal narrative on race really matters any more. Obama’s speech, to one liberal acquaintance, was

the best from a politician on race in a generation. He dispansionately [sic] examined interiors and exteriors of both whites and blacks.

As a conservative I would say that Obama mouthed liberal pieties, trashing the white working class and excusing black racism.

It is, of course, the white working class that has been asked to pay the most for the liberal race politics of the last half century, whether it was forced busing, integration of ethnic neighborhoods, or affirmative action at the firehouse. Educated whites might get knocked around a bit by the lefty profs in university, but they could always escape from liberal race politics by going into business and living in white middle-class suburbs.

Suppose that Rev. Wright turns out to be the last straw for the white working class?

"We're Owed and They Aren't"

Writing in The American Thinker Ed Kaitz tells of how he got to know the immigrant Vietnamese shrimp fishermen of the Louisiana’s Gulf Coast.

When they arrived in Louisiana the refugees had no money (the money that they had was used to bribe their way out of Vietnam and into refugee camps in Thailand), few friends, and a mostly unfriendly and suspicious local population.



They did however have strong families, a strong work ethic, and the "Audacity of Hope." Within a generation, with little or no knowledge of English, the Vietnamese had achieved dominance in the fishing industry there and their children were already achieving the top SAT scores in the state.

So why was it, Ed asked a casual black acquaintance, that these Vietnamese had come to America and, become, without friends and influence, “within a generation, so successful?” And why was it “so difficult to convince young black men to abandon the streets” and build lives like the Vietnamese immigrants?

The answer was shocking.

"We’re owed and they aren’t."

Well, words are cheap. The trouble is that this “we’re owed” attitude is probably at the root of most black social pathology: the 70 percent of black babies born to single mothers and the abysmal performance of blacks in school. After all, what’s the point of sucking it in when “We’re owed and they aren’t?”

After the great catharsis of the civil rights movement when white America confessed its racist sins, blacks had a choice. They could forgive their white oppressors or they could torment them. Under the tutelage of white liberals and black nationalists they chose to torment.

Wrong choice.

It was wrong, of course, because forgiveness is at the center of our Christian culture. It is especially appropriate to remember this during Holy Week, when we recall how God sacrificed his Son for our sins and forgives the sins of the world.

But it is also wrong at a practical level because it destroys and retards the advancement of blacks from their status as an oppressed people.

When you come to the city you come as the member of a tribe, one of the Gentiles. Living in a tribe, scratching out a living on the land, tied to the land in serfdom or slavery, you rightly mistrusted everyone outside the tribe or outside the village. The outsiders are, after all competitors for the vital land you occupy, the land that gives you life.

But in the city, things are different. In the city you prosper not because you have the best land but because you serve your fellow citizens better with products and services that they want and need. In the city you prosper not because you prudently mistrust the brigands down the road but because you prudently enlarge and extend your circle of trust. You establish a reputation for trustworthiness and you seek out those who are trustworthy.

So long as American blacks sit in their ghetto of mistrust, so long as they cling to the motto of “We’re owed and they aren’t,” so long will they fail to journey from the wilderness of racism and rage to the Promised Land of trust and love and come at last to their great reward of full citizenship in this great America.

This week in his much noted speech, Barak Obama sent out a message loud and clear.

It’s still: “We’re owed, and you aren’t.”

And that’s a shame.

Too Big To Fail

What do we do about institutions, particularly financial institutions, that are “too big to fail?”

In the current credit crunch that becomes a big deal. The government runs around worrying about the bankers. It seems like we let the little guy go to the wall, foreclose on his mortgage, and send him out into the street.

Not one penny, you might say, for the struggling homeowner, but billions for the bankers.

Last weekend, the Federal Reserve bailed out failing investment bank Bear Stearns.

Actually, the Fed didn’t quite “bail out” Bear Stearns. They gave it to JP Morgan Chase for a couple of hundred million. That means that Bear’s stockholders got two cents on the dollar. I don’t think that’s exactly a bailout. It looks to me more like a haircut.

You can tell that the Fed probably did the right thing by reading what Larry Kudlow, an old Bear hand, had to say about it. He wonders if Bear Stearns really had to go down in flames. After noting that the Fed could have let Bear Stearns in at the discount window and telling us that he used to work at Bear, he gives us this:

All of this kind of makes me wonder whether Bear Stearns wasn’t some kind of sacrificial lamb. Did government policy makers hope to convince the public that a big Wall Street firm could indeed fail? Or wouldn’t be bailed out? Listen, they were buried, not bailed out.

The fact is, Bear shareholders got creamed with the $2 per share purchase price. The shareholders include all the men and women who’ve worked there for years, and who own roughly one-third of the firm’s equity.

After the Bear Stearns creaming, the word was that Lehman Brothers might be next. But the Lehman bears got a talking to from the Fed: Keep lending to Lehman, the Fed said. You could translate the message, if you like: If you chaps keep on down this road, the Fed seemed to say, we could end up giving all you chaps a haircut too.

So maybe the Fed isn’t crazy when it makes a sacrificial lamb out of Bear Stearns. Maybe it is sending a message to the sharks: we are loading up with harpoons here at the Fed.

Maybe the Fed is crazy like a fox.

Obama Fails the Test

Everyone agrees that Senator Barack Obama delivered a great speech in Philadelphia on Tuesday.

But not everyone agrees with the message.

Obama was forced to give this speech because of the recent flap over the racist, hateful sermons delivered by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, pastor for over 20 years of the African nationalist church in Chicago to which Obama belonged.

Everyone understands that Wright is a symbol for America’s present shameful secret, the one you are not allowed to voice: that the most racist people in the United States are African Americans.

There’s a simple reason for this. Liberals give blacks a pass. If anyone in the United States other than a black voices a single racist word that person is shamed and blamed. But when blacks talk racist or act racist liberals give them a pass. Well, they say, how can you expect blacks to observe the standards of the rest of America—after centuries of slavery and oppression. Or there’s this one. You can’t be racist unless you have power, and blacks don’t have power.

Senator Obama, who now has the fervent support of black voters, had the opportunity, for one shining moment, to lead America’s blacks out of the wilderness of black racism and into the land of milk and honey. He could have said: “I utterly reject the hateful, racist philosophy of Minister Wright. That sort of rhetoric has no place in America. Period.” With that speech he could have begun the post-racist era in America. He would have gone down in the history books as a Jefferson or a Lincoln.

But he didn’t. Instead he ducked. He didn’t have the courage to be a leader.

Instead of leadership he gave us the usual liberal guilt trip and the usual bromides about racism and the understandable rage of blacks who lived through the 1950s and 1960s.

But the story of race in the United States is not shameful. It is incandescent.

At the dawn of the modern era, within 20 years of Lord Mansfield famously ruling in Somersett’s Case that slavery was unlawful in England, the founding fathers attempted to do the same in the United States. They tried to make slavery illegal in the new constitution. But they were blocked by the southern states. So they compromised, agreeing not to outlaw the slave trade—yet.

It was a weak moment, because for the next 80 years the South reacted with purple rage whenever the subject of slavery was brought up. For a potted history of the slavery issue start at the Northwest Ordinance and follow the events leading up the the Civil War. That was the epochal event, you recall, in which America tossed an entire generation of young men and a year of national income down the toilet. But the Civil War decided the slavery issue once and for all.

Only one US war was as costly as the Civil War. Our American grandparents spend 130 percent of national income in World War II fighting fascism and Japanese expansionism. We decided that question once and for all too.

Then right after World War II Americans rolled up their sleeves and began to work on the lingering race issue, the de jure oppression of blacks in the South and the de facto oppression in the North. This struggle culminated in the great Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. Liberals were the leaders in this great work. It was liberals’ finest hour.

It was a courageous thing for liberals to do, as President Johnson is said to have recognized, because it wiped out the Democratic Party’s power in the South.

Unfortunately, courageous as they were to walk away from white racism in the South, Democrats and liberals were not courageous enough to act against black racism in the North.

And so today we have the corrupt system of affirmative action, quotas, and “diversity” that has so poisoned the relations between the races, and has so cruelly prevented American blacks from taking their rightful place as equal and honored members of the American family. You can’t really take your place at the family table until you give up your rage and your victimhood, put on a smile, and start to discuss family business without always bringing up ancient feuds and humiliations.

In the United States today there is no worse accusation for a white than to be called a “racist.” But blacks get a pass on racist speech and actions. Instead, for blacks, most likely, there is no worse accusation than to be called an “Uncle Tom,” or to sneered at for “acting white.”

This double standard, this injustice, is a cancer eating away at the heart of America. America is waiting, longing for the leader who will lead us out of the tar pits of racist recrimination to the sunny upland meadows of post-racism. Many Americans hoped that Barack Obama might be that leader.

Now we know that he is not.