THE END OF THE ROAD

Somewhere near the middle of The Road, the two protagonists, a father and his son, stumble on a barn at the top of a snow swept hill.  As they tentatively open the barn door they are exposed to a frightening sight: three bodies, two adults and an adolescent, hang from the rafters.  The camera focuses on the son’s face as he registers the tragedy. 

“ You know why they are dead,” the father mutters, almost matter-of-factly.The boy doesn’t answer.  But the sorrow is clearly etched on his face. 

The three died, it is revealed, for either of two reasons:   Either to pre-empt the certainty of a slow death by starvation; or else a defiance of the resort to cannibalism – almost the only means of sustaining life in a land where nothing grows.   

Its easy to see why Cormac McCarthy’s novel, transferred to the screen, is viewed as yet another tall tale in a long line of films depicting man pitted against man and man against nature.  But that would be to miss the film’s deeper and more pointed meaning. For The Road is no mere survival film but a portrait of humanity on the brink of extinction and the immutable fact that human survival depends not only on physical nourishment but on fundamental moral choices.      

As the father and son (never identified with names in either the book or the movie) wander across the desolate American landscape, they must contend with what it means to be human and the overarching question of whether survival is worth the moral cost of abandoning all human values.   

The movie could therefore have easily have been titled The Test. 

That is because the two are driven to extremes, as their sense of human decency is repeatedly stretched to the limit by the situations they encounter and the individuals they meet.  After the father is forced to kill another man to save the boy’s life, both are visited with the deepest dread of the implications of the deed.  A starving elderly man, who asks for nothing, is given food nonetheless, after the boy implores his father to do so.  A wild child, glimpsed through a window in a deserted town, becomes the subject of  a heated exchange between father and son as the latter beseeches his father to find the child and bring him along with them; a thief who steals all their possessions is hunted down and rather than being killed, is forced to disrobe and left to stand naked in the wind and rain.  Only after hours of pleading from the boy does the father return to the spot where they first caught up with him, to deposit the items of clothing on the ground in the hope the thief will return to reclaim them.   

In the clash between the father’s drive to protect his son and the almost febrile articulation of the boy’s moral consciousness, we are given a parable of the deep tension which has afflicted western civilization for the past 100 years:  the struggle between the demand for fulfillment of individual needs and the quest for social responsibility.   

McCarthy, himself, has never sounded so assured in his defense of humanity.   While the world may well have been annihilated by human hand, he seems to believe in an ultimate goodness for which the task of regenerating mankind is made all the more worthwhile.   This is the “fire” the man urges his boy to carry, a symbol of life and goodness that separates “the good guys”  from “the bad guys” and is the clearest statement yet in a McCarthy novel of the demarcation between absolute goodness and ultimate evil .   In this way The Road is a fundamental departure from other McCarthy works such as No Country for Old Men, Suttree and Blood Meridian  – all of which display a deep ambivalence about humanity and its purpose.    

For all its inherent bleakness, The Road is a profoundly uplifting movie. While it recognizes that there are two forces of evil that prevail upon us -one from within and the other from without –  it also suggests that with sufficient vigilance and preparedness both can be defeated.    

The two main characters emerge, then, as symbols of  this drive. 

The boy comes to represent the virtues of principle and idealism.  He nudges his father’s conscience and repeatedly forces him to face the prospect of his own descent into inhumanity.   The father, on the other hand, represents deep faith tempered by experience. He presents as a model of human resilience in the face of catastrophe. It is, after all, his unflinching vision of a better life which drives the two onward toward their uncertain, obscure future. 

But even more impressive than this is the deep bond of love that binds father to son as they grapple with the exigencies of survival.  It is evident in the final moments of both book and film, in one of the most touching scenes I have ever read on a page or viewed on screen.  When everything is lost, when there seems little reason for either hope or faith, can love survive and become a source for both?  Countless anecdotes from the Holocaust have suggested that it can.   

It is a question to which The Road seems to respond resoundingly in the affirmative. 

At a time in history when man’s failures to maintain peace are wrathfully condemned by our elites and human interference with nature condemned as a blight on earth, it is good to see a film which pulls no punches in exploring the potential for human goodness and celebrates the cause of human exceptionalism.

AN AWAKENING FROM THE MULTICULTURAL SLUMBER

Anyone who wants to obtain a sense of the havoc that architecture can wreak on a nation’s identity, need only visit Moscow.  In the many churches and public buildings surviving from the 13th century onwards, you can gaze upon the ghost of the Mongol conquest of Russia, characterized by the bulbous and ubiquitous onion dome.   The prevalence of the dome has left such an eerily Asian stamp on the landscape, that looking at it you can easily forget that you are standing on European soil. Indeed, Russia’s historic defensiveness and traditional resistance to be being brought within the European ambit is at least partly attributable to its connections to Asia, cemented during the 200 years of Mongol rule.

No one can dispute that conquerors usually have the last word on architectural style in their vanquished realms.  The Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Moorish empires all left their permanent architectural mark on the nations they conquered and there is little doubt that the manner and style of their constructions also had a significant impact on the way the people of those conquered territories thought of themselves.

Perhaps that’s what the Swiss citizenry remembered when they voted November 29, so decisively, to ban the further construction of minarets in Swiss towns and cities.  One can understand the resistance to the encroachment of Muslim architecture.  It is, after all, difficult to imagine a Swiss chalet, nestled in one of those pleasantly verdant Alpine villages, forced to compete with a minaret for the domination of its skyline.  

But there is much more than aesthetics involved in the Swiss decision.  It represents a turning point in European awareness of the threat to national identity encouraged by relentless Muslim encroachment.

This was expressly recognized by a report from The Egerkinger Committee – an alliance of the conservative Swiss People’s Party and the Federal Democratic Union of Switzerland, responsible for placing the initiative on the ballot.   The committee reported that “the construction of a minaret has no religious meaning. Neither in the Qur’an, nor in any other holy scripture of Islam, is the minaret expressly mentioned. The minaret is far more a symbol of  a religious-political power claim.”

The initiators justified their point of view by quoting parts of a speech made by the would-be Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 1997: “Mosques are our barracks, domes our helmets, minarets our bayonets, believers our soldiers. This holy army guards my religion.”  Ulrich Schluer, who is one of the Egerkinger committee’s most prominent exponents, states in this respect: “A minaret has nothing to do with religion: It just symbolizes a place where Islamic law is established.”

The success of the initiative is even more startling when we appreciate the alliance of forces that were arrayed against it. The Swiss Federal Council, the seven-member executive council which serves as the Swiss collective head of state, rejected the initiative.  The Federal Assembly, (the Swiss Parliament) voted 129-50 in  the spring of this year to advise Swiss citizens to spurn it. Both the Catholic Church and the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities came out adamantly in the negative.  Advocacy groups such as the Society for Minorities in Switzerland and Amnesty International decried  it  “as an assault on human rights.” Swiss labor unions such as the influential Economiesuisse claimed it would affect Swiss foreign interests and would cause turmoil in the Islamic world.

These elites, some of whom are now plotting to have the ban overturned, see in the approval of the initiative an atavistic tribalism which threatens their multicultural ethos. They see no problems associated with the spread of Islam in Europe, have no fear of Europe becoming Islamicized, and seem full of confidence that minarets, blaring amplified calls to prayer and set in the middle of suburban streets, can only add to the blessed polyglot magic that is Switzerland.

But it is more likely fear which drives them. Perhaps they all remember the Danish cartoon riots of 2006 and its result – how the Danish government cravenly fell to its knees begging forgiveness from its Muslim population as its embassies in Muslim lands were torched and Danes the world over vigorously denounced.

With such deep seated fear driving opposition, the obvious question remains:  how did this initiative pass? If we read deeply enough into the debate and the final vote, we might arrive at the conclusion that the Swiss people have begun to recognize what the emergence of the true ‘multicultural state’ really portends:  Perhaps it means the surrender of a united national culture;  or maybe the acceptance of values that are at odds with the general thrust of Western humanism; Or, with the confirmation of Muslim power, an ultimate capitulation to Muslim intolerance and its abiding contempt for democratic values.

Awareness of this threat is growing in other parts of Europe.  This year the French were convulsed by a debate on whether the burqa, or Islamic veil, should be banned for women in public – a reaction to its ubiquity in certain parts of that country. The initiative did not pass, but the debate itself underlines the discomfort many in France feel about the insistence of Muslim leaders on social separation and their rejection of the majority culture. 

Today those who led the successful initiative are being accused of racism, bigotry and prejudice. Yet we must see it all in context.  Muslims the world over routinely declare Europe ripe for conquest. They understand that multicultural sensitivities offer them an effective tool to pry open European society, exposing the weakness and lack of self belief at its heart.

Last week, the citizens of Switzerland proved them wrong.   Despite the opposition of their elites and despite the unrelenting denunciations of human rights groups, the Swiss declared their commitment to preserving their own and Europe’s heritage.  Other European nations may quickly follow suit , confirming the growing consciousness that tolerance of the intolerant is not a recipe for integration but a prescription for the almost certain collapse of national identity.

POLITICS IN SCIENCE: RIDING THE INVIDIOUS EMAIL TRAIL

In Australia, six months ago, I had dinner with a couple whom I have known for nearly thirty years.  The husband is a renowned physicist at one of the country’s leading universities.  At a point in the dinner, somewhere over roast chicken and potatoes, the conversation drifted onto the topic of global warming.    I proceeded to state my opinion  that the whole issue is guided far more by a political agenda than good, hard science.   The husband looked at me as though I had just burst into the Ave Maria in the middle of of a Yom Kippur service.

“What are you talking about?” he growled, a chill penetrating our otherwise warm exchange.   “Politics has no bearing on science. Scientists base their observations solely on a solid methodological approach and empirical data. As for man-made warming, it has the near universal consensus of climatologists around the world and it is absurd to suggest that the evidence is cooked.”

I remembered the conversation last week when ‘Climategate’ cracked open the records of some of the world’s leading climatologists and impugned their reputations, perhaps beyond reprieve.   The climate scientists at the world famous Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the U.K were revealed as palpable hucksters with email trails leading back as far as 15 years, suggesting that they had doctored climate records, administered collective punishment to dissenters, colluded to subvert the work of climate change skeptics and sought to shut down a magazine that had begun to publish the work of climate change doubters.  

Modern science was and is meant to be the expression of all that is rational in the human mind. Flowering in the late 16th Century, in the throes of the Renaissance, it has, since that time, offered us a system for acquiring knowledge about the natural world and through observation and experimentation, describing and explaining natural phenomena.

Over the centuries we have come to expect more and more from our scientists as their discoveries and inventions have led the way to an understanding  of space and time, the building blocks of matter, the harnessing of natural forces and life-changing breakthroughs in communication, transportation, sanitation and the prolongation of human life.

Revered for their assumed devotion to the cause of human progress and the quest for truth, scientists have come to represent a standard of intellectual inquiry which is generally believed to be unsullied by politics, religion, ideology or dogma of any kind.

Most of us find it hard to accept, then, that our scientists have biases, that they can indeed display a high level of prejudice and often exhibit a chauvinism that skews their reasoning and which can drive them, in a herd mentality, toward the brink of intellectual fascism. No one expects such men and women, who are, we believe, committed to truth, to erect deliberate hurdles or barriers to others with alternative or contrarian theories which could have a bearing on the ascertainment of truth.

Yet it happens.

It certainly did  in the case of Richard Sternberg.  In 2005, Dr. Sternberg, the recipient of two Ph.Ds – one in molecular biology and the other in systems analysis – was a research associate at the Smithsonian Institute, widely acknowledged as this country’s most prominent scientific institution.  As the volunteer editor of one of the Institute’s publications The Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington,

he regularly received submissions for the journal.  Similar to any editor of a scientific journal, if he deemed a submission worthy for publication, he would send out the piece to a group of anonymous scientists for peer review.  If the returned general consensus was positive, he would publish the article.

One such paper arrived from Dr. Steven C. Meyer, an academic with high credentials (a Ph D. from Cambridge University and a host of articles published in peer review publications). The article was titled  “The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories.”

Sternberg liked the piece and therefore submitted it for review.  

The returned consensus was positive.  Thus, in August, 2005, the article appeared.

All was quiet for a month, before a storm of protest howled forth from the ranks of the Smithsonian Institute.  The events which followed were deeply reminiscent of the kind of treatment Jewish professors received from their non- Jewish colleagues following the rise of Nazi Germany.

Complaining about a paragraph at the end of the piece which offered intelligent design as  alternative theory to evolution, Sternberg was systematically demoted from his position as a Research Associate . He was thereafter became the victim of a rampant campaign of harassment by both the  Smithsonian administration and his colleagues; his religious and political views were investigated; his library privileges were revoked and he was forced to move his office. His professional reputation, his private life and his ethics, were repeatedly impugned and publicly smeared with false allegations by government employees working in tandem with a non-governmental political advocacy group, the National Center for Science Education (NCSE).

The environment became so hostile that Sternberg was unable to conduct his research and felt no other option but to resign.

Sternberg’s plight did not go unnoticed.  Articles and editorials in the Wall Street Journal and Washington Times, highlighted his case and eventually it was brought to the attention House of Representatives Commission on Government Reform which proceeded to launch an investigation.

The results of that investigation was a report with a scorching condemnation of the scientists at the Smithsonian Institute.  The email trail it uncovered produced incontrovertible evidence of group harassment, private and public humiliation and character assassination, condoned and sometimes even led by the Smithsonian administration itself. 

And all because Sternberg had allowed an article to be published in an Institute journal which challenged Darwinian orthodoxy.
This Kafkaesque drama has played out repeatedly in academic circles in recent years, but no more so than the case of Guillermo Gonzalez, denied tenure at Iowa State University in 2006.

In 2004, Gonzalez had co-authored a book The Privileged Planet The book’s thesis supported the theory that the Earth is uniquely placed in the universe for the development of life and that the emergence of such life elsewhere should be exceedingly rare to find, given the combination of factors needed to support it.   This idea rebuts the popularly accepted Principle of Mediocrity, made popular by the late Carl Sagan – that the earth has no special function or purpose and is certainly not unique in the universe in supporting life.

The implicit implication of Gonzalez’s book – that the universe itself reveals aspects of intelligent design – is anathema to many ideological astrophysicists who support Mediocrity and so it was to Gonzalez’s colleagues.  When Gonzalez’s nomination for tenure came up for review, they launched a furious campaign of denunciation and defamation, successfully derailing his application.Nothing further would have occurred if the main actors in the tenure process had not been forced to produce their email exchanges under the Freedom of Information Act.   What the email record reveals is a secret cabal of vilification and ridicule by colleagues in the Department of Physics and Astronomy who explicitly wanted Gonzalez removed because of his pro-intelligent design views. In voting to reject tenure for Dr. Gonzalez, members of the faculty at Iowa State had all but ignored recommendations made by the majority of their own outside scientific reviewers, who clearly thought Gonzalez deserved tenure.

 In October of this year, AFA itself learned first hand how this system works.  

After contracting with the California Science Center in Los Angeles to screen two films, one pro- evolution and  the other pro-Intelligent Design, as part of its event series, The Darwin Debates, our organization was informed that we had violated the contract and that the screening in the Center’s IMAX Theater was to be cancelled.

The supposed violation of the contract did not occur as alleged and a Freedom of Information Act Request (since CSC is a public institution all its email records are regarded as public domain) revealed that the allegation was merely a pretext.  The email trail shows dozens of scientists from all over the country weighing in on the issue and applying inordinate pressure upon the CSC to cancel the event.  In addition, an email from a representative of CSC, in what was almost certainly an inadvertent admission, was sent  to us claiming that the screening of the pro-ID film was likely to affect the Center’s relationship with its affiliate, the Smithsonian Institute.  That, for all appearances, seems to be the true reason for the cancellation of the contract.

In all three cases the email trail shows ideology trumping both intellectual integrity and academic freedom.  Now has it seemingly done the same thing in “Climategate.”  Information, vital to an assessment of the extent of anthropogenic global warming was dismissed and its proponents vilified and harassed for no other reason than that that they opposed the consensus view.  The whole episode has reinforced the notion that science is not immune from the pressures of either politics or ideology and that sometimes it will bend itself to accommodate both.

This has troubling implications for our society and civilization.  If we cannot rely on the integrity of our scientists to allow unfettered discussion of issues of global concern, free of ideology or politics, what value is there to the notion of open inquiry?  If scientists are revealed to be petty, vengeful antagonists who care less about the veracity of their own scientific ideas and theories than about the protection of their careers and reputations, what value are we to place on their pronouncements and claims to expertise?

The email trail of the global warming alarmists will, I predict, lead to some genuinely alarming revelations.  It will display the complicity of the scientific community in a fraud perpetrated by some of the world’s top climatologists in league with the leaders of  the U.N.’s International Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC) -  all of whom have vouchsafed the reliability of the calamitous climate figures.  In this event the whole edifice of the global warming movement is likely to collapse, revealed as a hollow shell with false, doctored science at its core.

This may well vindicate those among the climate skeptics who have railed for years against the scientific hogwash and the political gamesmanship behind claims of anthropogenic global warming.  But where will it leave humanity’s faith in the authenticity of science? 

That should be our most pressing concern in the weeks and months ahead as the reptilian carcass of ‘Climategate’ is slit open and spills forth its bundle of secrets.

WHAT IS ON YOUR AGENDA?

The word “agenda”  has left behind it something of a troubled etymological trail. Once defined as a list of things to be done or considered, ‘agenda’ today, has come to represent something more covert and sinister involving ulterior motives and driven by considerations hidden from the usual realm of common experience. The promulgation of the U.N’s Agenda 21 might have had something to do with that change in definition.  Agenda 21  was  a program first disseminated at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Earth Summit), held in Rio de Janeiro on June 14, 1992, where 178 governments voted to adopt it.  The program laid out what the gathered representatives of the world governments agreed needed to be done to reduce wasteful and inefficient consumption patterns in some parts of the world while encouraging increased but sustainable development in others.  In a 40 chapter document, Agenda 21 outlined its plan for the control of the Earth and its resources, offering no less than the complete recalibration of human society and a re-structured approach to managing over-population, over-consumption and the Earth’s life-supporting capacity. This, in turn , was built on the premises of General Assembly Resolution 44/228 of 22 December 1989, which was adopted when the nations of the world called for the commission of  the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, and on the acceptance of the need to take a balanced and integrated approach to environmental and development questions. Yet over the past 17 years the implementation and the influence of the Agenda has been neither balanced nor integrated.  Rather it has been used as a tool of an elite multinational bureaucracy to undermine national sovereignty, suppress individual rights, increase restrictions on indivudal mobility , squlech opportunity and raise the needs of the environment above that of humanity. With the stamp of a supposedly multilateral consensus, the Agenda  is now spreading throughout the world under the mantle of the Education for Sustainability Movement.  This movement, through a variety of plans and designs,  calls for an end to the structure of western civilization as we know it.    The elimination of private property, the restructuring of the family unit, the negation of national sovereignty,  a proscription on growth, increasing restrictions on mobility and access to opportunity and the control of human procreation  - are all matters addressed by the sustainability movement. Moreover, it addresses a host of features of modern society which it deems unsustainable. What are they? According to the Global Biodiversity Assessment Report, a publication of the United Nations Environment Program ( UNEP) and as reported by Freedom Advocates,  they include golf courses, ski runs, scuba diving, synthetic drugs, railroads, paved roads, consumerism, fish ponds, modern hunting  and irrigation.  All are, in one way or another, prohibited by the sustainability agenda in the interests of an earth which will be protected from the hand of human degradation. There can be few doubts of the rapid spread of  this environmental dogma throughout educated elites of the Western world. In Britain this month, sustainability and environmentalism was ruled by a UK judge a “protected religious belief” Over 650 Presidents of Colleges in the United States have signed on  to the Education for Sustainability Movement, signing the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment created by the advocacy group Second Nature and supported by several other groups. Other college administrators are creating sustainability programs in the residence life, student activities, and buildings and grounds. UNESCO has called the decade of 2005-2015 The Decade of Sustainable Development. The United States itself bought into this when the Congress passed all provisions of the Higher Education Sustainability Act (HESA) as part of the new Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (HR 4137) in July 2008  which has created pioneering “University Sustainability Grants”  offering competitive grants to institutions and associations of higher education to develop, implement and evaluate sustainability curricula, practices, and academic programs. California State University in Chico held its fifth annual  This Way to Sustainability Conference earlier this month, – the largest  international conference yet on sustainable development with over 100 speakers and 1,000 participants on subjects ranging from “ Tools for Leadership and Change” to “ Happiness.” (If anyone needs an idea of the extent to which the sustainability movement is seeking influence in education, go no further than viewing the 100 “ Green” courses” offered by the same university  at  (http://cypress.csuchico.edu/APO/Course_net1/GreenCourses.aspx) The sustainability movement is also inordinately pagan in its practices and outlook. In 1992, Maurice Strong, the Secretary-General of the Earth Conference, hinted at the overtly religious agenda proposed for a future Earth Charter, when in his opening address to the Rio delegates he said, “It is the responsibility of each human being today to choose between the force of darkness and the force of light…….We must therefore transform our attitudes and adopt a renewed respect for the superior laws of Divine Nature.”  Strong finished with unanimous applause from the crowd. In anticipation of the conference, his wife, Hanne Strong, held a three-week vigil with Wisdomkeepers, a group of “global transformationalists.” Through round-the-clock sacred fire, drumbeat, and meditation, the group helped hold the “energy pattern” for the duration of the summit. As if to prove the wild eyed ambition of  this New Age millenarianism, authors of the Earth Charter, an environmental manifesto promulgated at a UNESCO meeting held in Paris in March, 2000 commissioned the building of The Ark of Hope ,  a latter day replica of the Ark of the Covenant as a place of refuge for the Earth Charter document.The Ark was later brought on foot to New York City from Vermont (just as the Ancient Israelites had once carried their Ark) and exhibited at the United Nations. Is it any wonder that Strong would  commentafter the promulgation of the Earth Charter:  “The real goal of the Earth Charter is that it will in fact become like the Ten Commandments.”   Or that Mikhail Gorbachev, one of the  world’s leading proponents of sustainability  could state: “ Do not do unto the environment of others what you do not want done to your own environment….My hope is that this Charter will be a kind of Ten Commandments, a ‘Sermon on the Mount’, that provides a guide for human behavior toward the environment in the next century.” There is little doubt this drive towards sustainability is part and parcel of the general environmental movement – embraced by such seemingly benign NGOs as the Sierra Club, World Wildlife Fund, National Wildlife Federation and even  our own National Parks Service.  These institutions, over the past twenty years, have become wholly radicalized by environmental elites who view themselves as the guardians of  an earth pledged to protect us against human environmental degradation.  But because sustainability presents itself under the mask of environmentalism, few people question its underlying motives. They fail to understand that their “Green movement,” so apparently in keeping with responsible management of our planet and its resources, has morphed into a pseudo-religion, with its own definition of heretics and apostates and supported by communists, anarchists and New Age acolytes who, locked in an unholy alliance, want to change our lives. The movement, however, is not marching forward without its watchdogs and robust critics.  Holly Swanson, founding director of an Oregon-based organization called Operation Green Out that works “to get Green politics out in the open and out of the classroom,” and the author of Set Up and Sold Out:  What Green Really Means is a brilliant advocate within the anti-sustainability movement.  The National Association of Scholar’s Ashley Thorne reports regularly on the NAS’ website on developments in sustainability education. Today, environmentalists, academics, celebrities and even multi-national corporations are touting “going green” as synonymous with social responsibility. Yet as we enter the second decade of this century, we would be well advised to take a cynical view of this movement and understand that the “Green” they are endorsing, rarely represents the drive for environmental excellence.  Instead it is an attempt to impose a revolutionary social order upon humanity, inspiring a new form of religion observance and seeking to elevate the importance of environmental concerns well above humans needs. If you value the life you live today, then you better understand all of this – no matter what’s on your own agenda.

MULTICULTURALISM WAS THE TRUE KILLER AT FORT HOOD

Pundits, commentators, newscasters and our political class are all looking for the clues:  Who and what caused Major Nidal Malik Hasan to launch a deadly attack on his fellow soldiers in Fort Hood, Texas last week  resulting in the massacre of 14, including the life of an unborn baby?

Take your pick of the reasons:

• Hasan was bridling with indignation that the United States was carrying out military operations against fellow Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq
• Hasan cracked under the strain of dealing with trauma victims returning from overseas duty.
• Hasan was inflamed by the prejudicial treatment he had received from his colleagues and superiors.
• Hasan was infuriated that the army would not allow practicing Muslim servicemen to become conscientious objectors before shipping  them out to countries where they would be forced to shoot and  kill their co-religionists
• Hasan was the latest example of America’s love affair with guns and its fatal ambivalence in policing them.
• Hasan was simply a very disturbed individual who had exhibited paranoid, anti-social behavior at numerous times during his military career

Such reasons seem to echo the same motivations our chattering classes once ascribed to another famous killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, viz: the killer was driven by personal issues which had nothing to do with his adoption of  a hateful ideology or contempt for America and its values.

But the truth is now becoming stunningly clear.  Hasan was a confirmed jihadist, his values and ideals tied directly to the same ideology which resulted in 3,000 deaths in America on a sunny morning in September, 2001 and has been the catalyst for 14,327 individual terrorist incidents worldwide since that date.

Even at this early stage of the investigation, his emails, recorded conversations and own writings provide conclusive proof that he considered suicide bombings, the premeditated mass killings of innocents and fatal attacks against United States civilians and  military personnel as justified acts of homicide. He was deeply influenced in these views by the preachings of an imam, Anwar al-Alwaki, who, according to the 9/11 Commission, was the spiritual guide to two of the 9/11 hijackers in a San Diego mosque.  Hasan had also attended the Dar al-Hirjah mosque in Falls Church, Virgina where al-Awlaki once preached. In the month before the massacre Hasan had exchanged 10-20 emails with the imam who is now believed living in exile in Yemen. 
 
On the day following the Ft. Hood massacre, on his website,  al-Awlaki praised Hasan as a true Muslim warrior, as “a hero” and “a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people.”

How long will it take for our cognoscenti  to connect these dots? 

Perhaps we should indeed be moving beyond an examination of Hasan’s motivations, which are clear and incontrovertible, to asking ourselves these far more relevant questions: 

Why was a man of Hasan’s temperament and ideology not properly vetted before being accepted into the U.S. Army?  

Why was no one willing to pay heed to the warning signs of an impending catastrophe?

 Why is the media working so assiduously to obscure the true motivations for his crime?

The answer to the first question is that since 9/11, the U.S. military  has been under increasing pressure to embrace diversity as a governing principle for recruitment.  Military advertisements, in a range of communities, suggest that cultural affinities and religious observance are respected in the U.S. army while accommodations are made for particular aspects of appearance.  It should be no surprise then that the November 9th edition of Army Times carries a front page story headlined – Regs Make Way for Religion – Sikh, Muslim Allowed To Incorporate Customs Into Army Dress.

The story details how Captain  Kamaljeet Singh Kalsi, a practicing Sikh, was granted permission on October 22  to wear a beard and a turban with his uniform.   The decision stands in stark contrast to a 1986 Supreme Court decision (Goldman vs Weinberger), where the Court upheld a proscription on Jews wearing yarmulkes while in uniform. 

With the army displaying such giddy obeisance to diversity and multicultural sensitivities, is it any wonder that its own Chief of Staff, Gen. George Casey, in the wake of the massacres, proclaimed that, “as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”

Given such hand wringing over the necessities to produce a  true “multicultural” army, it seems fairly clear that Nidal Malik Hasan was accepted into the armed forces and then rose to the rank of major, despite his dubious associations and anti-American beliefs, because he was a Muslim.  The inescapable conclusion is that the army feels it must have Muslims within its ranks in order to prove it has no beef with Islam and that this over rides the suitability of  practicing Muslim recruits for actual army service.

The answer to the second question is even more troubling.

Hasan’s penchant for spouting anti-American rhetoric and for declaiming on the essential justice of a jihadist campaign was well known to his superiors and the FBI.   But as a Fox News report, investigators were loathe to launch an investigation of the  email trail which led from Hasan to Anwar al-Alwaki  for fear of being “ crucified” in the breach of the Major Hasan’s First Amendment rights.

But what of  Hasan’s superiors, who certainly knew of his beliefs and ideological commitments?  In 2007, as a recruit, he made a power point presentation at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington D.C. where he underlined Muslim grievances against the U.S. and supported the Jihadist justification for attacks on U.S. military personnel.  You would think that this would offer some cause for alarm. Yet no one  spoke up or complained about these outrageous views emanating from the mouth of a U.S. army officer, even though one colleague expressed reservations about “sharing a foxhole” with the man.

Why was no one willing to expose this ticking time bomb within their midst?   For the same reason the FBI resisted the urge to build a more comprehensive file on Hasan:  he is  a Muslim, and therefore, as a defamed and persecuted minority within the United States, a case to be handled with delicacy.  

The evidence unfortunately grows that multicultural sensitivities will often trump security interests, even when the lives of American citizens are directly threatened. 

Finally we come to the media.

The New York Times, in an editorial on November 6, declared that:  “It is unclear what might have motivated Major Hasan.  He seems to have been influenced by a mixture of political, religious and psychological factors.”
It followed a day later with a story suggesting  that Hasan was driven crazy by the stress of his job as a psychiatrist.

CNN’s Chris Matthews , in an interview on November 11 with Nihad Awad, a representative of  the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), focused not on the motivations for the crime but on whether Muslims in America should fear a wave of reprisals as revenge for the shootings. In the course of the interview the two men seemed to agree that we may never discover the true motivations for the killings.  
 
And here’s a doozy from The Guardian’s Michael Tomasky:

“ The fact that Hasan reportedly shouted the Allahu Akaba is meant, I suppose, to imply that he was an extremist fanatic. I’m not sure that it does. My understanding is that it’s something Arab people often shout before doing something or other.”

The fact that suicide jihadists are regularly recorded as intoning these words before committing murder and that two flight recorders from the four planes which crashed on 9/11 have the hijackers murmuring them repeatedly, seems to say nothing to Tomasky and others like him.

Why?  Why such a cognitive suspension of  one’s own powers of analysis and deduction? 

 Why such an apparent inability to parse wishful thinking from reality?

Because the members of our media are loathe to present us anything as starkly black and white as good and evil, prefering an infinitely more comfortable grey zone where no reader or listener need  be railroaded into judgement or moral distinctions.

Yet it is this murky grey zone which provides the intellectual fodder for multicultural sensitivites and cultural acceptance of deviant, asocial behavior.  It also happens to be the same swamp from which  Jihadists fish for their claims of moral equivalence  and the materials from which their protective social dome is constructed.

Expressions of Islamic extremism go unchecked in our society because no one seems  willing to trip  the wires of multicultural correctness.  Despite the events of 9/11, despite the thousands of  terrorist attacks and murders around the world which have drawn their inspiration from the Koran and Islam, our society  – from our government, to our houses  of learning to our armed forces, insists on subscribing to an utter falsehood that religion plays no role whatosever in these attacks.   Instead  they hew to multicultural tropes which deaden our acceptance of the truth.

A jihadist ideologue may well have pulled the trigger that ended 14 lives last week.  But it was multiculturalism and its inveterate partner ‘diversity’  which opened the gate and  allowed him entry  into our lives.   

We should all be questioning how much further we can allow that gate to swing open.  We should all be wondering, if the gate is to remain even a  little ajar, what barriers will exist to  prevent further expressions of hatred, acts of incitement and the perpetration of wanton, indiscriminate murder.

WHY OBAMA SHOULD HAVE GONE TO BERLIN

In  1961, Ingo Kruger was a 21- year-old champion diver who lived in East Berlin.  On the night of August 13 he realized that his life was about to change forever.  The German Democratic Republic’s decision to establish a wall dividing East and West Berlin, imposing a finality to the question of post-war German unity, weighed heavily on him.   It would mean that he would no longer have  regular access to his work place, nor, most importantly, to his fiancée who lived on the Western side of the barrier.  Although in the months ahead his fiancée was able to obtain permission to occasionally visit him, the situation was becoming increasingly intolerable.  So he decided to take matters into his own hands.  

On the night of December 10, 1961 he donned a wetsuit and breathing apparatus with a plan to  swim under the River Spree to freedom in the West.  Several people were let in on the scheme, including his fiancée who was to wait for him on the other side.  His desire was to swim under the water for 500 yards, before emerging at a spot on the Western bank which the East German border guards did not regularly patrol.  

The daring idea ended in tragedy. 

Later that night, an East German customs launch fished a body of a young man from the Spree. Ingo Kruger’s fiancée, only 200 yards away, watched in horror as his inert form was pulled onto the vessel.  The champion diver had simply miscalculated the frigidity of the water and his likely resistance to the cold. 

Episodes like this, in which separated families, lovers and work colleagues sought their freedom and reunification, occurred again and again over the next few years. Many ended in success.  But many equally ended in failure with either the death of escapee and his or her capture and subsequent imprisonment by the East Berlin border guards or the vopos. 

 As the barrier between the Eastern and Western sides of the former German capital became increasingly impenetrable, the thirst for freedom on the Eastern side only grew. The East Berliners learned to devise ingenious methods to secure their freedom, including the construction of tunnels, home made hot air balloons, forged documents or cars, retro-fitted with obscure compartments for hiding escapees.  

Yet over time, as the Wall became a fixture in the regular life of Berlin, the world soon forgot the oppression under which East Berliners lived.  It forgot the grim food shortages in the East, the lines for basic commodities, the intense censorship of opinion or the domestic surveillance practices of the notorious Stasi secret police, where brothers were encouraged to betray brothers and children to spy on their parents.  

Even the West German government itself had become so accustomed to the wall and the existence of an ‘alternative’ Germany, that it eventually surrendered its own claim to be the sole and legitimate representative of the German people. 

But the East Berliners themselves had not forgotten.   Their desire for freedom was repeatedly proven by the increasing flood of refugees who would abandon everything they owned, including cars with keys still in the ignition, to clamber over embassy walls or risk their lives in foolhardy attempts at flight.

 It took an American president to remind the world that freedom and liberty are immutable rights of humanity and that such indignity as the German Democratic Republic  had imposed on their own people could not be tolerated. 

Standing at the Brandenburg Gate in June 1987, Ronald Reagan, rejecting the counsel of his own advisers, threw down the gauntlet to the aging East German leadership and their Soviet sponsors, demanding that the Wall dividing the city be torn down.  By that time the wall had not just come to be seen as the barrier  cleaving a city in two, but the essential divide between East and West– and between two political systems which had grudgingly learned to accommodate one another. 

After 26 years of division, oppression and the tepid protests of world leaders, that voice roared over the city and then throughout the world as a demand for change.  Here was a Western leader prepared to make a stand for human liberty at a time when the world largely met such earnestness with a shrug.  It was Reagan’s gesture, at a time when the Soviet Union was exposing its own weaknesses and failures, that brought the future of the West again into focus and is one of the main reasons he is remembered with such admiration today.

Reagan’s demand was of course tied directly to the work and actions of Administrations before him, including those of Truman and Kennedy, who had taken similarly defiant stands against the cruel imposition of demagogic rule.  Both presidents had recognized that Berlin represented the battleground, not for the extension of American or NATO hegemony over Europe, but for the future of western civilization itself.  Their pronouncements and actions were statements of a resolve to maintain the onward thrust of human history toward liberty and freedom and beyond the fetid swamp of subjugation and cruelty into which humanity has always risked sinking. 

What is then one to make of the Barack Obama’s decision not to accept German president Angela Merkel (a former East German)’s invitation to join other Western leaders in celebrating the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall?  It would seem appropriate that the half century long struggle to defeat a pernicious and degrading ideology, which had ended in the triumph of truth over coercion and dignity over power, would be an event any American president would willingly lend his presence.  

Would there be a more fitting occasion for an American president, particularly one gifted with  such a widely acknowledged talent for soaring rhetoric, to reinforce his country’s fundamental beliefs in the American ( and now largely Western)  notions of the inalienable rights of human beings to life, liberty and  the pursuit of happiness?  What better occasion to do that than on the anniversary of the collapse of a symbol of oppression that had come to signify, more than any post-war icon, the devastating impact of totalitarianism on the human character and psyche? 

Yet Barack Obama did indeed once go to Berlin.  Candidate Obama, in the summer of  2008, had originally planned to deliver a Kennedy-esque address at the Brandenburg Gate, before being denied that honor by Angela Merkel, who, aware of the significance of the location, feared the accusation of influence peddling.  Still, with his nomination secured, Obama nevertheless arranged to stand before 200,000 people  in front of  the city’s Victory Column and pronounce: “ This city, of all cities, knows the dream of freedom. When you, the German people, tore down the Wall, walls came tumbling down around the world. From Kiev to Cape Town, prisoner camps were closed and the doors of democracy were opened.”  

Stirring words indeed.  It is really too bad he can’t see fit to repeat such sentiments as a president.

For President Barack Obama has chosen not to go to Berlin on the anniversary of that  city’s and  the West’s greatest triumph.  It is this decision, contra Reagan’s, Kennedy’s and Truman’s, which may well come to define his presidency.  For in his ten months in office President Obama, unlike Candidate Obama, has failed to evince much faith at all in the virtues of  human liberty and the necessity to confront tyranny wherever it is found. 

His speech before the United Nations only six weeks ago, when he had the opportunity to connect his own presidency to that of his post-War predecessors, excluded some of the most important notions on which American presidents had once been unanimously resolved. No advocacy for the benefits of democracy; no emphasis on the value of a free enterprise system;  no bolstering of nascent democratic governments struggling in the shadow of  oppressive national giants;  no willingness to identify ideologies or political movements which might threaten Western survival. 

Instead Barack Obama has transformed himself into a world citizen, given to platitudes about mutual tolerance, shared interests and world unity , all of which may sound sweet to the ears of those who have decried American unilateralism for years, but may be at odds with American resolve to promote liberty and to lead the world in defending against threats to Western ideals.  For the multilateral nostrums he so intently endorses, necessarily suggest constraints on national sovereignty and the concurrent accommodation of regimes, ideologies and political movements that may be decidedly opposed to the pursuit of human freedom. 

In all this Obama seems convinced that his personal magnetism and charisma has been enough to excite a sudden embrace of American multilateralism. But by so openly coddling regimes whose hostility to American leadership on issues of freedom and liberty is no secret, Obama has, in only ten months, surrendered the international moral leadership of the American presidency and reduced it to a shadow of its former prominence as the world’s leading proponent for human freedom.  That is a tragedy some of his 20^th century predecessors would mourn.

Berlin, on the other hand, should be remembered this week as the city where the decisions were made to launch both world wars of the 20^th Century; became the focal point of the Cold War and the only place in the history of that conflict where American and Soviet tanks faced off against one another. The city has come to symbolize the passage of modern European history from autocracy to dictatorship, through authoritarianism to freedom.  Its maintenance of a free and democratic republic for the past 20 or so years would have been reason enough for the president of the United States to travel to the city and lead the celebrations in its honor.

Perhaps he could have then stood proudly at the Brandenburg Gate and, echoing the sentiments of a previous visiting American president, declared:

“ If anyone still accepts the belief that the human quest for personal liberty and national freedom will fail to become a universal trend -   let them come to Berlin!”

 

THE HALLOWEEN GRAVE DANCE

 

It is that time of year again when I become irritatingly sanctimonious. My family readily  expects that the last day of October will arouse my deepest antipathies.   Blame it on my upbringing.  Since, as an Australian, I was not privileged to be raised with the Halloween tradition, it is difficult for me to appreciate the holiday as one of the sacrosanct rites of American childhood.  Sadly, it has always looked much more to me like a gruesome celebration of death.  Call me a curmudgeon, but no luminous jack o’lanterns, shimmering skeleton backed costumes, or enticing mounds of corn candy have ever been able to convince me that Halloween is anything other than the commercial expression of America’s obsession with a culture of death. 

That was until last week.  As I passed a home in my neighborhood, where the splayed feet of a plastic corpse poked out of the dirt, I had a revelation. I finally understood that Halloween is not a celebration of death at all. It is death’s denial.  Americans are led, by a relentless assault of media images that promote youth and health, to believe that there is no finality to life.  We trivialize death and while mocking it, treat the dead as comic book characters.    Movies, video games, books and music of the last twenty years all offer evidence of a culture dismissing death as a fiction.  From Alice Cooper (who wrote that lovely paean to necromancy, I Love the Dead) to the The Mummy, we live in world where death has acquired the teasing patina of farce.  

While it may well be easy to dismiss such raillery as over-sensitive paranoia, it can’t be forgotten that Halloween has become an important calendar event, not just among young children but also among adults. For many, Halloween is a convenient and excusable means of revealing one’s dark side, discreetly hidden away at other times of the year.

And not simply for party-goers.  To the consternation of many, necromancy, black magic and witchcraft are gaining discouraging momentum in our society, enjoying a revival as a sub-culture that propagates, among other things, orgiastic sex, animal mutilation and devil worship.   A quick search of the Internet under the words ‘witchcraft’, ‘ paganism’ and ‘occult’ unearths thousands of skillfully developed websites, devoted to the transmission of the black arts. Among these websites a researcher will find dates for regular group meetings in every State, shops that sell sacrificial knives and prayer books for worship of the devil.     

Those who so innocently celebrate Halloween as an event catering for  children should also be aware of some of its less appealing antecedents.  Many of the surviving Catholic holy days commemorating the lives of saints, long ago absorbed the rituals and even theology of their surrounding pagan cultures.   Thus, St. Patrick Day, originally designed to commemorate the teachings of its martyred namesake, has leprechauns, drunkenness and other assorted foolishness crowding out the memory of that saint’s original teachings.    The unfortunate St. Valentine sees the Roman god Cupid exalted on his feast day with nary a thought dedicated to his personal legacy. 

Similarly corrupted was All Saints Day, (which became All Hallow’s Eve), a day set aside to commemorate  the many saints and martyrs who had no special annual remembrance of their own.  It may well have been the adoption of the practices of Druids in England who went door to door on the day asking for gifts and threatening spells for the ungenerous that lent Halloween its special form of corruption. Popularized in America in the 19th Century by immigrants, trick or treating soon became so hazardous to life and property that  by the 1890s a number of States were forced to legislate against the practice.  

Today Halloween trick or treating is a custom so readily accepted  that even churches and synagogues host Halloween parties.  Dressed as goblins, ghouls, witches and demons, our children roam the streets of our suburbs not thinking of this rite as anything other than a good time costume party.  Decades ago, perhaps, this might have been so.   But then children had a cushion of comfort provided by religious faith which affirmed the value and dignity of life.   But with the general collapse of  participatory religious life and the rise of  a vacuous death culture promoted by the entertainment industry which celebrates vampires, zombies, ghosts, demons other resuscitated life forms,  children are no longer recipients of such affirmation.  Instead, they are taught to regard life, not as a privilege to be revered and exalted, but as a manifest joy ride.   In contrast, those who have passed to the beyond are transformed into figures of fun, to be ridiculed for no longer having the ability to share in the general joviality.

Why, sensible voices should be asking, can’t we leave the dead alone?    Why is it necessary for us to figuratively exhume corpses and treat them with the kind of mockery we should reserve for the real life merchants of horror and death – Islamic suicide bombers and their sponsors who daily wreak carnage around the world?.  As I walk the streets of my suburb and see the elaborate lengths parents go to festoon their homes with cobwebs, fake graves, skeletons and other assorted symbols of death, I have to wonder why the same kind of effort is not invested in demonstrating  a converse loathing for the real life forces in the world which traffick in death and would gleefully dance on our  graves.

This doesn’t happen in liberal democracies around the world today because Islamic fundamentalists are not regarded as the true grave dancers.  That distinction belongs to corporate bosses, Wall Street traders, armament manufacturers and conservatives.    According to our houses of learning, our media groups and our entertainment industry, they are the demons with ghoulish intent - plotting to destroy our environment, vandalize our wealth and prosecute war when peace is so close at hand. This peculiar world view, in which those seeking to kill and destroy us are ignored while those attempting to protect us  or ensure our  safety and prosperity are vilified- is an affliction of the West that would roil the graves of the millions who fought in many wars to protect us.  

Perhaps that is the reason Halloween, year after year, leaves me with the creeps.  I look around and see a real life enactment of Plato’s  hypothetical cave dwellers who spend their existence viewing shadows projected on a wall, believing them to represent reality – and failing entirely to recognize that real life actually goes on outside the cave.    While true evil lurks in this world, stalking us and waiting for an opportune moment to strike, we spend our time mocking death, rather than reinforcing our faith in life and its profound purpose. 

If Western civilization loses its faith in life, it will succumb to those who have a fanatical faith in death.   Maybe that is not so obvious to the young children who will innocently knock on our doors this weekend.   But without reinforcing in those same children the notion that death is not a laughing matter and simultaneously affirming the supreme beauty and uniqueness of life, our future may indeed be quite grim. 

 

 

WHY THE DARWIN DEBATES?

This is a quote from the latest issue of Rolling Stone Magazine:

“ When I ask Lemmy if he has a positive or negative view of humanity, he doesn’t hesitate: “ Oh, negative. Human nature is to blame for everything, innit?  We’re just a disease on this planet. Its going to shrug us off like crabs. Its too late anyway, with what we have done to the environment. Our kids are gone be wearing gas masks. We’re all gonna fry. “

Earlier, while discussing drugs, he expressed similar sentiments. “ There’s a lot of sh-t talked about what’s bad for you, especially in America.   Everyone wants to be safe. Well, I got news for you:  You can’t be safe. Life’s not safe. Your work isn’t safe. When you leave the house, it isn’t safe.  The air you breathe isn’t going to be safe, not for very long.  That’s why you have to enjoy the moment.” 

This little piece of ersatz existential philosophy issues from the mouth of Lemmy Kilmister, the lead guitarist of  heavy metal band Motörhead.    The 63-year -old guitarist, according to the article, drinks a bottle of Jack Daniels a day, consorts proudly with prostitutes and lives in an apartment festooned with original Nazi paraphernalia. 

Motörhead, for those who don’t know, was and is one of the original heavy metal bands, formed in 1975, playing a version of  hard core thrash metal that was the predecessor to punk rock.  Now it would come as little surprise to those who know something about rock culture, that a character of Lemmy Kilmister’s orientation and milieu would be a nihilist who has little patience for exploring purpose and meaning in life.  His sense of alienation and fatalism might be said to be typical of a world-weary rock star who has spent most of his  adult life seeking gratification from loud music, women, bottles, pills and needles.

Lemmy Klimister might be a jaded rock star, but don’t think that his negative narcissism and rejection of human exceptionalism  is restricted to his goth rock contemporaries or that his interview is a mere reflection of the magazine’s penchant for showcasing outlaw personalities.  The same issue of Rolling Stone features an article  which bombastically claims that every ocean on the planet is filled to the brim with floating plastic – the result of human degradation of our environment;  It is followed  by an interview with Madonna,  who insists, after one of the most lascivious careers in pop history,  that changing one’s identity on a regular basis is healthy recipe for human contentment;  and  then another  full length article which parades  the old trope that our real enemies are not lurking in caves on the Afghan-Pakistan border but in the Pentagon.

Well, you say,  it  IS Rolling Stone, the flagship of the counterculture.  What do you expect?

Yes, its Rolling Stone, but if you think these views and attitudes reflect only a thin current in the underground press you are wrong.   Those attitudes have, in one way or another, percolated into our social vocabulary, into our attitudes toward government, into our suspicion of religious thought and practice, into the television programs we watch , into the nightly news  we view and into our academies of learning. 

Rolling Stone, in other words, is an underground paper no longer.  It is the voice of the mainstream.

There can be little doubt that this self loathing, fatalism and nihilism has derived from the increasing distance the West has placed between itself and the foundational idea of our civilization  -  that human life has both purpose and meaning.    The rapid secularization of  our culture , which followed the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the scientific discoveries which built upon Newtonian mechanics and the increasing role that  rationalism and science have played in forming our understanding our world , have  turned us away from exploring intentionality and purpose as key matters concerning our existence.   The question of ‘why  are we here?’  posed so adamantly by Aristotle, Plato and  some of the greatest philosophical minds in history  is today so loaded with angst, so distant from the focus of  modern scientific inquiry, so dangerously pregnant with the threat of violating the boundaries between ‘Church and state’, that few dare openly contemplate it.

There is also no doubt that 150 years ago, the Darwinian intellectual revolution played a key role in this transformation.  Darwin himself knew that his theory of evolution by natural selection would spur a burgeoning atheistic movement and that if  his theory gained hold, there would be no turning back.  For if natural processes alone, devoid of an intelligent mind or force, were responsible for life on earth , then the notion of a God , responsible for the creation and management of all life forms, could be dispensed with. 

The neo- Darwinists, those who have inherited the mantle of the Darwinist thought, passed down from Thomas Huxley, via Herbert Spencer through the Scopes Trial and on toward our own time, have adopted the atheistic tradition, which has marched in step with Darwinism in its crusade to transform our understanding of the origins  and development of life.  Thus when Richard Dawkins, Darwin’s staunchest modern defender claims,
“ Darwin makes it possible to become an intellectually fulfilled atheist,”  he is really stating that he was now free of any obligation to contemplate  purpose and meaning for existence.  Darwin had fixed  it so that the question itself would have little impact on our appreciation of the mechanics of the universe – and that the investigation itself had become meaningless.

Today our magazines, television programs, scientific journals, academies and  even our political culture are suffused with notions which on the one hand, avoid entirely the question of meaning in life and on the other, deride the  attempt to grapple with it as an atavism, belonging to an age devoid of rationality.   In the process, of course,  they also castigate humanity as the source of  the earth’s problems, reject  democracy as a force for good in encouraging the spread of human liberty,  deny the absolute sanctity of human life and brazenly promote rampant sexual license.   The gradual secularization of our society has betokened a break with fundamental notions which underlie civilizational values.  Western civilization, in short, is rapidly ceasing to believe in itself. 

Did Darwin intend to wreak such a wholesale transformation of society?   Probably not.  But the consequences are nevertheless with us and they are profound.

Need examples?   Here is Peter Singer, renowned Princeton professor and philosopher:

“ The life a new born baby is of less value  than the life of a pig, dog or chimpanzee.  All we are doing is catching up with Darwin. He showed us in the 19th Century that we are simply animals. Humans assumed we were a separate part of creation and that there was some kind of magical line between Us and Them. Darwin’s theory eradicated the foundations of that entire Western way of thinking about our species.”

Or Nobel Laureate, Steven Weinberg:

              “ The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.”

Or the Texas biologist Erik Pianka

                  :” We are no better and have no more rights to life than bacteria”

 (Pianka famously advocated, at a public lecture at St. Andrews University in 2006, that over population in the world should be addressed by the deliberate spread of the ebola virus which could effectively eradicate 90% of humanity)

Or this  slice of ineluctable pop culture wisdom from the Bloodhound Gang:

               “ You and me baby ain’t nothin’ but mammals
So lets do it like the do (it) on the Discovery Channel.”

Given the shrinking acceptance of human exceptionalism and the belief  that human beings are on par with every other feature of nature,  is it really any wonder that the Spanish legislature has  recently passed a statute which extends certain human rights to apes;  that Ecuador’s new constitution extends legal rights to the environment or that Switzerland allows  biologists to be prosecuted for conducting research on plants which have been illegally harvested – the suits being brought on behalf of the plants themselves.

It is also not such a stretch to claim that the gradual erosion of  the belief in man’s uniqueness has contributed  to  the spread of a radicalism, with its roots steeped in 60s liberation politics, which has redefined culture in the direction of  emancipation,  experimentation  and the casting off of  traditional assumptions abut family, education and sex.   The social thrust of our age  is to emphasize that human beings, with no purpose nor reason for existence, should, as the Nike ad says “just do it”   – satisfying any urge for individual gratification or personal fulfillment, regardless of the social costs.

But even as the movement to debunk human purpose spreads, enormous gaps in Darwinian theory continue to be exposed.  In the field of micro-biology, the investigation of cellular structure has revealed  DNA,  the informational building block of the universe, to be so complex as to be almost beyond human understanding;   In geology and paleontology, the sudden appearance of species  without  a discovered ancestry, continues to perplex ( just as it  did Darwin in the instance of the Cambrian Explosion); in astrophysics, big bang theorists are unable to approach their subject without embracing some level of cosmology  which suggests purpose.  As science probes deeper into the origins of the universe, the questions themselves about  ultimate cause and development of life grow more confounding and complex. 

Perhaps at the root of this issue is not we know of the world and the universe, but rather what we don’t.  As humans have increasingly developed theories and tools to probe the universe’s deepest secrets, we are correspondingly confronted with the frustrating awareness that the human mind may not be capable of grasping the deepest mysteries of the universe’s beginnings.  This notion, that we simply can’t know everything, that we are too limited and too restricted by our physiognomy to appreciate the physical and metaphysical dimensions of the universe, is apostasy to the scientific community.   That is because over the past 150 years that community has elevated  the human mind as the supreme arbiter of universal knowledge and truth –  with science to be employed as its ultimate barometer.

But hubris and self reverence will never serve us humans well in advancing science or increasing our understanding of the mechanisms of the universe.  We should never forget that  Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, were among our first scientists  but, as they would have defiantly underlined themselves  – they were philosophers first,  concerned as much with why things work, as with questions of how.    The great tragedy of our age is that we have lost the desire, and perhaps even the ability, to ask why.  And that failure may leave us vulnerable to the assault of ideologies and movements that have no problem in asking that question and offering answers that are at complete odds with our views on the sanctity of human life and the necessity for human progress.  

The  AFA Darwin Debates, to be held in the month celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of the Species, is, then, an attempt to bring the question of purpose and intentionality back into public discussion.   It is not, frankly,  important to us whether  a God (or Gods) emerges from the debates as the source of  universe’s laws and their application.  Nor is it our desire to discredit evolutionary theory  which we believe has played an enormously important role in elevating our understanding and appreciation of our origins.  But we are concerned that without such a debate, without informed discussion which embraces a range of options for understanding life, we run the risk of  allowing  our civilization to slide into a swamp of intellectual and spiritual stagnation,  convinced that we are a blight on this earth and that we have no more reason for living than trees, stones or birds.   

Nothing, in the end, can be more deadly to a civilization than its own recognition that it has no reason for being. 
Yet while we struggle with these issues, we shouldn’t forget that the certainty that there is a purpose to life, is really not so far behind us.  Afterall, Lemmy Klimister’s father was a vicar.

THE HEAVY TREAD OF INTOLERANCE

Leftist academics are quite fond of proclaiming that freedom of speech in America is an illusion.  Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Ward Churchill, Tariq Ali and many of their  acolytes have consistently argued that their views are not given sufficient coverage in the press and that the doors of many institutions remain closed to the expression of their views.

The charge itself is notoriously off  the mark.   For not only are these doyens of the far left free to catapult their poisonous cocktail of anti- Americanism, anti-Semitism and general contempt for American exceptionalism into our academic institutions, they have also become campus media darlings, their pronouncements taken with the utmost seriousness and afforded standing ovations for their most prolix and incendiary comments.

Rather, it would seem that those who stand for true Western values of openness and debate have a much better case for alleging creeping censorship in the United States.

Cases in point:

• On July 9, Robert Spencer was scheduled to speak at the American Library Association convention in Chicago but was canceled at the last minute after pressure from the Council on American-Islamic.  Spencer, the editor of JihadWatch.com and an associate fellow of the American Freedom Alliance, was invited to join a panel forum at the ALA’s annual General Meeting on the topic “Perspectives on Islam: Beyond the Stereotyping.” According to his attorney, William J. Becker Jr., as he was leaving to catch a plane for the event, Spencer learned that it had been cancelled. According to reports he later read on the Internet, Ahmed Rehab, Chicago executive director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), was responsible for bringing about the cancellation. In a letter to ALA, Rehab wrote: “I ask you to rescind the invitation to Mr. Spencer in order to maintain the integrity of the panel and the reputation of the ALA.” Mr. Spencer, he argued, offered “grotesque viewpoints that lie well outside the bounds of reason and civilized debate.”

• On September 20, an appearance the Norfolk Naval Base in Virginia by Brigitte Gabriel, a Christian Lebanese advocate for the rights of Muslim women and the President of Act for America! was cancelled.   It appears that the decision was made after  pressure was exerted by members of the Naval Academy amidst concerns about offending Muslims.  It was not the first time Ms. Gabriel has been confronted by hostility to  her appearances.  In April 2006  she was invited to give a lecture sponsored by Professor David Patterson of the Judaic Studies Program. When news about of her appearance spread, the Muslim community both on and off campus launched a full-scale campaign to stop her lecture. They demanded that Dr. Patterson cancel  her speech. E-mails flooded the University of Memphis administration and Dr. Patterson from Muslim students on campus and Muslims in the community and mosques.  

• On October 8,  the well known blogger Pamela Geller was scheduled to appear on The Eddie Burke Show on WBYR, “the best news and talk in Alaska,” to debate the “freelance journalist” and anti-Semite Alison Weir.  Because Weir made known her displeasure at the appearance of Geller known, Geller’s appearance was cancelled.  Weir appeared on the show alone.

• On October 12  David Horowitz,  President of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, was scheduled to speak at St. Louis University  but because of the title of his speech,  “Islamo-Fascism Awareness and Civil Rights., he too was cancelled.  Horowitz commented: “I have spoken at 400 universities. This is the first time my speech has been censored and stopped by an administration. And they are supposed to be the guardians of intellectual discourse.” Cary Nelson, the president of the American Association of University Professors, said that with this cancellation, St. Louis University “joins the small group of campuses that are universities in name only…. The free exchange of ideas is not just a comforting offshoot of higher education; it defines the fundamental nature of the enterprise.”

All of this follows hot on the heels of another outrage, this time perpetrated at Yale University.   Just two weeks ago, on October 1,  the University hosted both Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist who had penned the notorious “Bomber turban cartoon,”  as well as Brandeis Prof. Jytte Klausen , author of  The Cartoons that Shook the World.   The latter had been subject in August to a last minute decision by Yale University Press to remove not only the reprinted 12 cartoons but also all representations of Muhammad.   What was the reaction of the Yale Faculty to the appearances?  As Peter Berkowitz recounts in Saturday’s weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, while Westergaard’s appearance prompted a small faculty-led panel, the same faculty remained entirely silent and unmoved by Yale’s censorship of Ms. Klausen’s book.  Not one word of support was spoken on her behalf.

These acts of censorship, which smack of  the violation of free speech in its most egregious form, may be endemic to the kind of  intolerance we  now see metastizing  unchecked throughout our elite institutions.

This week the American Freedom Alliance learned of the spread of this disease through first hand experience.  A  premiere screening of the documentary  Darwin’s Dilemma,  at the Californa Science Center’s IMAX Theater, which was to be the kick off to our October Darwin Debates series, was cancelled by CSC on the claim that we had issued unapproved publicity for the event.   Nothing of the sort had occured.  The alleged publicity had been distributed by a third party, and, as we soon gleaned from emails and other sources, was a mere pretext for  the cancellation of a film whose message on intelligent design neither the California Science Center nor its national afilliate, the Smithsonian Institute, approves.  

The California Science Center,  I should remind my readers, is a public institution, paid by and for with tax payer dollars.  Its mission statement claims that the Center  “aspire(s) to ……inspire science learning in everyone….. because we value science as an indispensable tool for understanding our world, accessibility and inclusiveness….”

One would that such ‘inclusiveness’ would incorporate views it does not, as an institution, necessarily embrace.

Stated baldly, this public institution had a responsibility to  a California organization to allow free and open discussion of contoversial subjects of a scientifc nature, and no more so at an event that is actually labeled ‘a debate’, with both sides of the issue represented.

Needless to say, a law suit is pending.

AFA has found an alternative venue to replace the IMAX Theater, albeit at great expense and with a tinge of bitterness at being treated in such a reprehensible manner.

But the story is not over.

Those who live in the Los Angeles area now have an opportunity now to express their outrage, not just toward  the California Sceince Center, but to the entire throng of elite institutions who demonstrate consistent denial of First Amendment rights.   Join us in attending the new location for the screening on Sunday night, October 25 at the Davidson Conference Center at USC.   Make clear your disgust with the way an elite and high profile institution handled a freedom one might have thought it was pledged to protect.

Who knows,  if we cheer those films loudly enough maybe our voices will heard over the din of traffic at the California Science Center, just a quarter of a mile away.

BARACK OBAMA’S ALBATROSS

By Avi Davis and Christian Whiton

Taken at face value, the decision by the Norwegian Nobel Committee to honor the American president with its Peace Prize would be a cause for celebration in the U.S.  But the circumstances surrounding this decision call into question not only the choice to honor President Obama, but whether the Nobel Committee is able to discern real achievements of peace from illusory ones.

In announcing its decision, the Committee noted the President’s “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”  Furthermore, it said the Committee “has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.”

What exactly are these “extraordinary efforts”?  While the announcement does not go into detail, one presumes the Nobel Committee is cheering the Obama Administration’s offer to conduct direct negotiations with Iran, its ‘reset’ of relations with Russia, and the President’s tendency to note the purported flaws of the country he represents.  Has any of this led to actual accomplishments and  has it really contributed to a material expansion of peace?

Even the President’s political supporters would probably concede it is too early to judge the outcome of these policies.  This is true today and it certainly was true when Mr. Obama was nominated, which likely had to take place by the Committee’s deadline of February 1, 2009.  On that day, the President had been in office for all of twelve days.  That is a rather amazing fortnight’s work, considering some earlier recipients of the prize, such as Lech Walesa, toiled for years and risked everything they possessed—including their lives and freedom—before being recognized.

The reality is that the President’s policies have made long-term peace in the world less likely.  Prolonged international negotiations with Iran, which started not with Mr. Obama but in fact have gone on throughout the decade, have actually given the Tehran regime time to improve its nuclear and missile capabilities while wars are fought through proxies in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.  Similarly, the rhetorical and real concessions the Obama Administration has made to Moscow have yet to yield anything tangible in return other than modest verbal praise.  The price paid for this volte face recently rose with the betrayal of two friendly governments—those of Poland and the Czech Republic – countries that had made the unpopular decision to host missile defense facilities at America’s earlier request.  They must now be content with an expanded future missile threat from Iran, and also an emboldened Russian neighbor.  It can’t be too far from the thoughts of  the Polish and Czech leadership that just last year Russia  invaded a country it borders.  Skeptics are right to wonder how any of this contributes to long-term peace and security.

Perhaps the Nobel Committee’s most unjustified claim is that because of President Obama, “[d]emocracy and human rights are to be strengthened.”  This is not even a claim typically made by the President’s most ardent supporters.  Indeed, the unapologetic promotion of human rights and democracy that has had a place in a long succession of U.S. administrations has been disavowed by the Obama Administration. Secretary of State Clinton spelled out the rationale for this in her inaugural trip to China in February: “Our pressing on [human rights] issues can’t interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crisis.”  Just this week the President refused to see the Dalai Lama during his visit to Washington, the first time in eighteen years the renowned human rights advocate has not been received by a president.  The President also refused to support pro-democracy protesters in Iran after the June elections there.  Whether one advocates or opposes these policies, it is hard to believe that one can strengthen human rights and democracy while ignoring those actually fighting for them.

What then was the Nobel Committee’s criteria, if not quantifiable achievements for peace?  Unfortunately, a look at more recent Nobel Prize recipients shows a bias toward trendy political causes and icons. 

In 2001, the award was split between the United Nations and its then-kingpin, Kofi Annan.  This was at a time when the UN was facilitating the largest instance of corruption in human history in the form of the Oil-for-Food Program, which also funneled billions of dollars to the Middle East’s most brutal and corrupt regime.  Meanwhile, the UN was continuing its traditional role of providing a prominent platform for corrupt dictators from around the world.  Did that help peace?

In 2002 it was awarded to Jimmy Carter, for  “persevering in conflict resolution on several continents, and  “ outstanding commitment to human rights.” They forgot to mention his apparently tireless coddling of dictators, tyrants and terrorists, his record of mocking the foreign policy of his own government and his avowed animus to the State of Israel.

In 2007, the awardees were Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  As a private organization, it is the Nobel Institute’s prerogative to expand its view of threats to peace to a definition broader than traditional war.  But in the year Gore won the prize, more than 800,000 people died of malaria.  How many people died of climate change?  But you can guess which issue was the zeitgeist that year.

Any true gauge of the reasons for this Award must necessarily produce some very disturbing truths:  The Norwegian parliamentarians awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama because they feel he is one of them.  His unwillingness to prosecute a vigorous American foreign policy; his apparent absence of belief in American exceptionalism and his penchant for apologizing for American actions abroad, all seem very much in keeping with a Euro-centric view of the world.  For this crowd he is the ultimate un-George Bush, less jingoistic, more calm in temperament and much more likely to act in the pacific, multicultural and appeasement vein they so appreciate.

So just as the prize went to Carter seven years ago as a “kick in the leg” to the Bush Administration and the award went to Gore in 2007 as a spur to reject the supposedly anti-environment policies of  that same gang, the Obama Award is designed as an attempt to enshrine the politics of “internationalization.”  It is aimed at isolating Obama and his Administration from the main thrust of American foreign and domestic policies since the Second World War – which has been to provide the world with vigorous leadership in the promotion of democracy, liberty and free enterprise.

Many have argued that the Award’s prestige will burnish America’s international standing and build support for American intervention in other areas of conflict in the world.  But the reverse is actually the case. Constrained by his new image as a peace maker, Barack Obama will inevitably  struggle to meet the demands of upholding America’s international standards and leadership in regions of intense conflict such as Afghanistan, Israel and Iraq and in confronting the rising menace of a nuclear Iran.  It will necessarily befuddle any attempts of his Administration to reform the United Nations and will diminish respect for America’s military clout.

It is welcome that the Nobel Committee has honored the U.S. by giving an award to its president.  Unfortunately, every indication is that it did so for the wrong reasons.  As with other once-respected institutions of Western Europe, the Nobel Committee has moved from rewarding merit and advancing classical liberalism to celebrating fashionable trends and rewarding whichever icon of the left is most active in promoting them.