 |  | | Feb. 25, 2015 |  | No. 160 | | By Jonathan V. Last | |  |  |  | | | | COLD OPEN |  | | | We talked last week about the giant Graeme Wood piece on ISIS, which really is required reading on the subject. I'll start by reiterating how important this story is: Don't miss it.
It's important to keep Wood's piece-which explains the explicitly religious underpinnings of ISIS-in mind as we look at the bear-baiting that went on over the weekend where the media tried hard to make Rudy Giuliani and Scott Walker look like they were saying shocking things about President Obama. The media succeeded, to some degree. You've probably heard by now that Giuliani said "I do not believe that the president loves America." And when Walker was asked whether or not Obama is a Christian he more or less shrugged his shoulders and said, "I don't know."
Pandemonium ensued.
Let's take these two incidents in order. First, on the question of whether or not Obama loves America, Giuliani has been pretty much vindicated by . . . wait for it . . . the new New Republic.
Writing in the "Race" section of what's essentially The Facebook Identity Politics Quarterly, Jamil Smith explains that:
Obama wasn't raised with the same kind of "love of country" that Giuliani was because the president grew up as a member of a group whose social mandate from birth, for survival's sake, is to engineer change in a society-to correct the very systemic disadvantage that Giuliani is desperate to save.
Giuliani is probably right: Obama doesn't love America, not the one Giuliani does. But the inverse is true, too: Giuliani doesn't love America, not the one Obama is trying to build.
Which, by the way, has been pretty obvious to anyone who's been paying attention since the 2008 primaries. But if you want to go on just the recent evidence, Fred Siegel has written a detailed explanation as to why people might take the Giuliani view:
Starting with his June 2009 speech in Cairo, when he apologized for American actions in the Middle East, Obama has consistently given credence to Islamic grievances against America while showing reluctance to confront Islamic terrorism. In 2009, after Major Nidal Hasan killed 13 American soldiers and wounded 40 others at Fort Hood while shouting "Allahu Akhbar," the administration labeled the killings workplace violence. In recent months, the pace of evasions has quickened. Obama was the only major Western leader absent from the massive Paris march held in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings. Worse yet, Obama referred to the killings in a Jewish supermarket in Paris as "random" acts of violence.
But this was only the beginning of a string of curious comments and loopy locutions made by the president or his spokespeople in the weeks that followed. While ISIS rampaged across the Middle East, the president told a Washington prayer breakfast that Christians shouldn't get on their "high horse," because they were guilty of the Crusades, among other crimes. Not only were the Crusades many centuries past, but they were also a complicated matter in which both sides behaved barbarically. But more important, Obama's comments reinforced the standard Muslim propaganda about how the jihad is merely defensive. Shortly thereafter, ISIS murdered 21 Coptic Christians in Libya (a country in complete chaos, thanks to an Obama-led Western intervention). The White House's response was to condemn the killing, not of Christians but rather of "Egyptian citizens," another evasive locution. The casual listener need not have knowledge of the White House's associations with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or the administration's hostility toward the anti-jihadist regime in Cairo to find Obama's words and behavior peculiar.
Which leads us into the second issue, the question of whether or not Obama is a Christian. We'll talk about that below. | | | | LOOKING BACK | | | | | "Sitting in front of an oversized HD television in the basement of the governor's residence, a relaxed Scott Walker settles in to wait for Barack Obama to begin the first State of the Union address of his second term.
"The residence is otherwise empty. Walker's wife, Tonette, is back at the family home in Wauwatosa, where he would join her later that evening. Aside from one security officer, there is no staff. Walker fetched plastic-wrapped dinner from the kitchen counter-roast-beef sandwiches on kaiser rolls, raw veggies, potato salad, and deviled eggs. The governor, on antibiotics for a sinus infection, opts for an IBC Root Beer rather than a cold (and exceptionally tasty) Spotted Cow, brewed nearby in New Glarus. One of the owners of the brewery, Walker says, is at the speech as a guest of Michelle Obama.
"Out back, beyond several feet of fresh, untrampled snow, the surface waters of Lake Mendota are frozen solid. Not long ago, during the chaos and controversy that attended Walker's budget reforms in 2011 and 2012, those waters made it possible for protesters to register their displeasure with Walker by boat. But things are quiet now, and not just because it's winter."
-Stephen F. Hayes, "Governor Walker's Play-by-Play" from our February 25, 2013, issue.
Remember you get full access to THE WEEKLY STANDARD archive when you subscribe. | | | | | | | | THE READING LIST | | | | | If this story doesn't make you conservative, then nothing will.
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Gore Vidal on the greatness of Orson Welles.
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The Devil on Paradise Road. | | | | INSTANT CLASSIC | | | | | "The New York Times reports that the Obama administration is preparing to go toe-to-toe with the Islamic State using, among other munitions, 'more than 350 State Department Twitter accounts.' According to Richard Stengel, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, 'We're getting beaten on volume, so the only way to compete is by aggregating, curating and amplifying existing content.'
"Stengel, the Times reported, 'said the new campaign against the Islamic State would carry out strategies now routinely employed by many businesses and individuals to elevate their digital footprints.' As managing editor of Time, Stengel's messaging included the 2006 Person of the Year cover featuring a mirror-like panel, with the word 'YOU' written on it, the message being that everyone was Person of the Year.
"U.S. 'countermessaging' against the Islamic State will use up to 140 characters to persuade people tempted to join in its barbarism-beheadings, crucifixions, burning people alive, etc.-that these behaviors are not nice. Stengel is upbeat about beating the Islamic State: 'These guys aren't Buzzfeed; they're not invincible in social media.'"
-George F. Will summing up the most depressing idiocy in the history of war, February 20, 2015. | | | | THE LAST WORD | | | | | Before we get to Scott Walker and Barack Obama and Christianity, a quick side note: This August, THE WEEKLY STANDARD is returning to Alaska for a cruise.
You can get all the details here at TWScruise.com, but I really can't recommend this trip highly enough. I've gone on a bunch of these cruises, and Alaska is-hands down-my favorite. It's full of adventures. Glaciers, whale watching, bald eagles everywhere. There's hiking and sea planes and salmon fishing. The last time we went, I remember sitting on the deck one afternoon while we were under sail and watching a pod of whales breaching out on the horizon, over and over. It was amazing.
So if you're free from August 14 to 21, and you've always wanted to see Alaska, this is the way to do it. And barring complications, I'll be onboard, too. So if you're one of my regular correspondents, we can finally have a drink together. Everything you need is at TWScruise.com.
Okay, so back to Scott Walker, who said (very charitably, I thought) that he had no idea whether or not President Obama was a Christian.
Being a Christian is kind of a big deal-it involves an active embrace of Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. Speculating about what truths lie deepest in a man's heart is not like trying to figure out whether he's from Chicago or Indianapolis. Scott Walker was right not to try to divine what's in Obama's heart. Writing about how men ought to be careful when speculating about the disposition of souls, Anastasius of Sinai wrote, "It would not be fitting to probe God's judgments with one's hands." I think you might say the same in regards to rendering a verdict on someone else's devotion (or lack thereof) to Christ.
That said, as with the Giuliani line, you can understand why many Americans might not automatically assume that Obama is a Christian. For starters, he doesn't seem to spend an awful lot of time at church. (Not that that's dispositive, of course.) And he doesn't seem to talk about his belief in Christ all that often. Which is certainly fine; not every Christian is eagerly evangelical. However it is worth noting that on the most significant occasion in which Obama has testified to his Christian beliefs-as the basis for his opposition to same-sex marriage-we have now been told that he was intentionally misleading the public.
So you can see why some people might be confused. And not just terrible, mean Republicans, like Scott Walker. As Byron York notes over at the Washington Examiner, in 2012 Gallup asked people whether or not Obama was a Christian, and 44 percent of all respondents-and 36 percent of Democrats-said the same thing Walker did: that they didn't know.
Which brings us back to the Fred Siegel piece I linked to up top. If you're just a casual observer of President Obama, it must seem strange that he's always working to rehabilitate Islam-denying that terrorists are "real" Muslims, worrying about the mistreatment of Muslims at home and abroad, and arguing that Islam (or at least "real" Islam) has been an integral and important part of America since the Founding. Yet at the same time he takes a dim view of Christianity, which he deems the source of many problems, from slavery to Jim Crow.
In other words, he takes the best, most charitable view of one faith, and the most derogatory, least charitable view of the other. Like I said, you can understand where people might be confused. Not that it's really any of their business. What Obama believes is between him and his God. And besides, this was never really about Obama. It was about two reporters from the Washington Post trying to trip up Scott Walker. They failed.
This is only tangentially related, but before we finish up, I wanted to point to a recent book, So Many Christians, So Few Lions, by sociologists David Williamson and George Yancey. It's a landmark look at a largely ignored phenomenon in America: anti-Christian bigotry. A few weeks ago, Yancey talked about the book with the Christian Post:
There is a lot of literature on hostility toward many different groups but just about none on hostility toward Christians. Yet when we collected qualitative data from cultural progressive activists we quickly saw some of the unnecessary vitriol and fears within many of our respondents. We also saw the social status of those who exhibited this hatred and many of them would be in positions that allowed them to at least subtly act on their anger and fears. That motivated us to take a more systematic look at Christianophobia and speculate on how this phenomenon influences certain social aspects in the United States.
Another aspect that drove me to work on this project was that while I consistently saw evidence of Christianophobia in other areas of my life and in our society, unlike other types of intolerances, those who exhibited Christianophobia do not tend to think that they are intolerant. Usually those who do not like blacks or Muslims admit that they are intolerant but simply try to justify their intolerance. Those with Christianophobia tend to deny that they are intolerant but rather that they are fairly interpreting social reality. Envisioning themselves as fair and free of intolerance allows them to blame those they detest rather than recognize how their emotions have distorted their intellectual judgments.
I suspect this explains the reporters' question to Scott Walker in the first place.
Best,
Jonathan V. Last
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