Today, a noticeable feature of the Western press (aside from the "anti-Israel" coverage of so many of the reporters in Western Europe who have found a socially acceptable outlet for antisemitism) is the indifference to, or even hostility to, Christianity. This includes the failure to recognize its significance in the history of Europe and of the West, and a hostile treatment of the activity of contemporary Christian figures. Look at how the Western press covered Pope Benedict's 2006 Regensburg speech, and misreported consistently on it.
One is not impressed, either, with the endless television joking about groping priests and altar boys, which continues even as Muslims threaten the church frescoes in Bologna with destruction. And when it comes to Evangelicals, they are presented in vicious caricatures in European magazines as a key feature of the supercilious, and often nasty and quite comically inaccurate, coverage of the United States whenever the subject is other than economics (in such a magazine as "The Economist"). In such coverage, European audiences are treated to a spectacle of America, "too-religious" America, which invites comparison with splendidly advanced post-Christian Europe and suffers by the comparison. For here, in our benighted land, the Bible belt widens with the waistlines of those waddling Americans, those gun-toting (oh, there's a machine gun in every pot, in America, don't you know?), saliva-dripping, Bible-quoting, table-thumping, troglodytic because still Christian, Americans, with their honor saved only, here and there, by the odd (very odd) Chomsky or two.
No, neither Judaism and its adherents (or those assigned to it by antisemites), for a very long time in the history of the West, nor Christianity, especially in the "post-Christian" and "post-modern" Western Europe and in much of the American press, can be described as having been covered fairly. One waits for the international media to take note of the killings of Christians in the southern Sudan, in the southern Philippines, in the Moluccas, in northern Nigeria, in Egypt (those pesky Copts who keep managing to get in the news each time one is killed or tortured), and so on and so predictably forth. Will any of that receive any attention? Any anguished comments on ABC, CBS, NBC? Will a single Senator speak about any of the attacks in Nigeria, the Philippines, the Moluccas?
One waits -- but not with bated breath. The victims of Christianity matter less, to the international media, than the imagined activities of “Christianists” who will destroy the Constitution at the first available opportunity.
But it's a different story with the coverage of Islam. The craziest assertions, the ones that are given the lie by the day's news, every single day, that Islam is a "religion of peace" and of "tolerance," or that Islam "contributed greatly to the development of Europe," are stated without hesitation in the New Duranty Times, the Bandar Beacon, and all the lesser organs. Islam did not actually contribute, greatly or in any other way, to the development of Europe, save only by driving out scholars who, fleeing the Byzantine Empire to escape the advancing Seljuk and then the Ottoman Turks, arrived in Italy with their manuscripts and helped lead to a renewed interest in classical antiquity, and to what used to be called, when the Renaissance had not yet been replaced by the chronological desiccation of the course-catalogue time-line "Early Modern Period," the Revival of Learning.
And merely by continuing to refer to Islam only as a "religion" (which confuses people, as it inaccurately describes what Islam is), many in the world's media have, by ignoring or downplaying the politics and geopolitics of Islam, further contributed to the general confusion. They continue to pretend that Islam is a "religion" like any other instead of telling us, enlightening us, as to all the ways it is different, and to all the ways in which it is indeed, rather, a Total Belief-System that, had the tools available to the modern police-states of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia been available, would in the distant past have quite naturally assumed the aspect of, and been later recognized as, a form of modern totalitarianism. It is a form of totalitarianism because it meddles in, controls, and decides what is prohibited and what is commanded, in every single area of life. Yes, a totalitarianism avant la lettre.
It is a good idea to stress the signifance of the role of christianism for the development of Europe.
However, this should not obfuscate that christianism and the church basically transported values and ideas that existed before - in greek philosophy.
We might as well talk of European values, full stop.
One of the tragic by-products of the anti-Christian bias in the West is the bias/indifference/hostility towards Christians that live as minorities in Islamic countries. Their situations are usually presented as either "another group of Christians causing trouble," or as a outside group supported and agitated on by Western Christians and deserving of whatever consequences they experience by peaceful Muslims... or as equals with Muslims, just trying to get a bigger piece of the pie. The fact that Christianity predates Islam and that these non-Western Christians are indigenous to whatever Islam country who rules them is irrelevant to Western media and academics. Christianity is the problem...where ever it rears its ugly and problem-causing head.
FreeSpeech: There are a number of ancient Greek values which Christianity failed to transmit, such as honoring pederasty. Islam did a better job of keeping that particular Greek flame alive.
Saul Bellow once observed with dismay that the West seems to be eagerly awaiting the day when it sees the last of its Christianity--and Bellow was Jewish. This is abundantly clear from the MSM. Perhaps the secularist Left hopes that once Christianity and Judaism are gone, Islam will crumble, too. My own guess, though, is that while a thriving Christianity sinks its roots into subsaharan Africa and the Far East, Western Europe will one day find that it is an Islamic slum surrounded by desert, with an open season on the Islam's erstwhile Leftist and multicultie allies in the fight against Christianity.
Hugh, while reading other materials on this site, I felt I ought to urge you to consider becoming a CHristian. Is it not uncanny that our "secular" West, which crows about its bravery in mocking the Christian God, cringes and whimpers "Uncle" every time a Muslim beardie looks crosswise at it? This pervasive secular cowardice before something truly and unrelentingly destructive has an uncanny resemblance to the outworking of the covenantal curses in the Old Testament. God is not mocked, and I often think we're seeing the outworking of this fundamental principle in our own time.
Well the press know that the Christians are not going to berserk like the Mohammedans. The Mohammedans have played into the liberal and open society of Europe very well. The press has reported atrocities committed to Muslims as though they are the victims and fail to mention at all the barbaric genocidal policies of Islamic countries on their minorities. The media and human rights organization have really missed a huge picture. Instead we see lies on how Islam is a religion of peace and so forth. It is really stupid.
So much of the media's misrepresentation of Christianity is due to the ignorance of the history of Europe and the Christian West on the part of reporters and editors, and to the similar ignorance on the part of their readers or listeners, so that the media are rarely called to account for their errors. The media are free to present things "out of context" and almost no one ever mentions, or even knows about, the context.
A few examples:
1. the Crusades. They're presented as a gratuitous, violent Christian assault on Moslem lands. Never mentioned is the unprovoked Moslem assault on, and conquest of, half of Christendom in the 600's and 700's, nor the continuing Moslem raids on Christian Europe for centuries, nor -- the proximate cause of the First Crusade -- the Seljuk conquest in the 1070's of Christian Anatolia, the heart of the Byzantine Empire.
2. the African slave trade. This is almost always presented as strictly a European-American matter, as though European raiders descended on peaceful African communities and hauled millions off to America. Never mentioned is that the Europeans were newcomers to a West African slave-trading system, run by Moslems, that had existed for five centuries or so before the first European arrived on the scene. The Europeans were simply new customers for the Moslem slave-traders. Nor is it mentioned that many times more Africans were sent as slaves to the Moslem Middle East than were ever sent across the Atlantic; nor that despite the dangers of the Middle Passage, far more survived that journey than did those transported across the Sahara; nor that it was the Christian West that put an end to slavery, first in their own countries and colonies, and then in most of the rest of the world.
3. the American Indian "genocide". The Christian Europeans were responsible only in the sense that they were the first to reach America from the Old World, and so were the ones who brought Old World epidemic diseases, like smallpox, yellow fever, and a host of others, to the New World. If another Old World people, such as the Chinese or the North Africans had been first, they would have brought much the same mix of plagues with them. And while some Christian Europeans carried out particular massacres of Amerindians, other Christian Europeans, from the earliest days in Mexico, spoke out in defense of the Indians.
4. Christians carried out the Holocaust. Only in the sense that the Nazis were Europeans, and that Europe was a Christian milieu, so that any European, unless claiming otherwise, could be called a Christian regardless of how observant he was. It's not mentioned that Nazism was almost as anti-Christian as it was anti-Jewish. Nor that it was the nominally Christian countries like the U.S., the U.K., the Commonwealth, and Russia, that fought Nazism and put an end to it. If Christians are to be given the blame for Nazism, then they must be given the credit for ending it. Would that the Moslems would do the same for the Islamo-nazis in their midst.
So the media get away with their distortions, and the educational system has so failed our citizens that few realize they are distortions.
My own guess, though, is that while a thriving Christianity sinks its roots into subsaharan Africa and the Far East, Western Europe will one day find that it is an Islamic slum surrounded by desert, with an open season on the Islam's erstwhile Leftist and multicultie allies in the fight against Christianity.
Posted by: Kepha
Kepha,
Very astute, and probably sadly prophetic. I keep asking myself "When will the Islam apologist Left ever see that they are next?" I have to say that the point at which a significant portion of the Left finally "gets it" may not come before things have degenerated to the exact scenario you describe.
The news media is full of leftists and rabid secularists who despise Christians and Christianity in general.
The leftists hate Christians because they are seen as a obstacle to power and because they hate the west in general.
Pick up most any leftist tome out there and they rant and rave how bad the west is and how it oppresses the enlightened 3rd world people.
Rabid secularists just plain hate anyone who follows any religious path period.
Why both of them give a pass to Islam? because they see Islam as weapon they can use to bash Christians here in the west and use them to tear down the government as well.
those gun-toting (oh, there's a machine gun in every pot, in America
unfortunately in most of the world that is the perception
Thank you for saying this.
I cannot tell you how many times I've heard someone completely misrepresent what Christianity teaches. (And therefore end up in a panic about it.)
But these are the same sort of people who are either silent about Islam, or continue to push forward the idea that it is a religion of peace.
The fact that these two things happen simultaneously is something I have never been able to understand.
Kepha
So pederasty counts as philosophical value to you. Well, it doesn't to me.
You might as well discard all the US did by saying deforesting countries is an american value.
Ebonystone: Excellent post! Well said.
I do think it is pretty unfair to call Islam a total control belief system. Then so is Judaism, where traditional Jewish life revolved around the Torah, Talmud $ schul or old fashioned Christianity too, especially the Orthodox kind. I mean, isn't the whole purpose of religion to give someone a framework for his life? Now that I got that out of the way, Islam's way is the worst way.
Ouch.
those gun-toting (oh, there's a machine gun in every pot, in America
unfortunately in most of the world that is the perception
Posted by: ISLAMSNOTFORME
---
Good. Invaders beware!