Religion

Rosie O’Donnell, the newly installed co-host at "The View," observed the 9/11 anniversary by stating that America "squandered" world support and the next day she asserted that "radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam."

O’Donnell wasn’t the only media member to use September 11 as a pretext to bash America. CBS veteran Andy Rooney suggested in his "60 Minutes" commentary that America start acting in a way that "wouldn’t make so many people in the world want to kill us." MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann went further, accusing President Bush of "impeachable" offenses and "lies."

Appearing on another network, but continuing in the same vein, Sean Penn talked to CNN’s Larry King and mused about the President bringing fascism to the United States...

As hard as it might be to believe, the liberal defense of Rosie O’Donnell’s anti-theistic comments on Tuesday’s “The View” has become almost as absurd and offensive as the remarks themselves. First a media analyst on Wednesday night claimed that "Radical Christianity" is just as bad as radical Islam because abortion clinics in the past have been attacked as reported here. Then, on Thursday’s “Scarborough Country” (hat tip to Hot Air), Huffington Post media analyst Rachel Sklar suggested that Christians opposed to abortion and condom use are just as dangerous to America as Islamic extremists (video link and full transcript to follow).

So, in the course of 24 hours, the definition of "Radical Christianity" has miraculously expanded to include anyone that is pro-Life and/or is against the use of condoms. Here’s the amazing exchange:

Reporter Alan Cooperman played up Pennsylvania Democrat Bobby Casey's speech at Catholic University in Friday's Washington Post as part of an exciting new trend of Democrats speaking out on religion. (Casey is seeking to unseat Sen. Rick Santorum, who is loved -- and hated -- for his passionate faith-based politics.) His other example of the religious outreach trend was the media's Tiger Beat fanzine idol, Sen. Barack Obama.

Cooperman passes several obvious tests for a balanced article. He includes conservatives and liberals in it, and labels each side. He lets the conservatives underline that Bobby has some positions that please the libertine left, including making Plan B abortifacients available to everyone, including teenagers, and backs  "civil unions for same-sex couples." That's a fancy way of saying "gay marriage." But what about the ending?

Failing to call Islam a "religion of peace" can get you in a lot of trouble these days. Agence France Presse, a syndicated news service like the AP, says Pope Benedict XVI committed a "blunder" by saying, among other things, that Islam was a religion "spread by the sword."

By unwittingly angering Muslims with his comments on Islam, Pope Benedict XVI has shown that he has yet to shake off his academic theological roots and master the global media machine with the same deftness as his predecessor.

In clinging to theology and orthodoxy, the bookish Benedict has shown little regard for media management in getting his message across, unlike the communications-savvy John Paul II.

NY Times critic William Grimes reviews Dutch journalist Ian Buruma's "Murder in Amsterdam -- The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance." It's a favorable review of Buruma's warnings of Muslim extremism in The Netherlands that culminated in the murder of documentary filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, but includes this bizarre sentence:

"Enlightenment absolutists like Ms. Hirsi Ali and Mr. van Gogh turned apoplectic at any efforts to appease or accommodate Muslims on, say, gay rights or women’s rights, and they were not alone in their fears."

Two questions:

Today's starter: Is the term Islamofascism an appropriate one? Joe Loconte argues yes.

Rich Muslims of the world need to unite and buy up various parts of the global media in order to force them to become more friendly to Islam. That's the message coming out of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference being held in Saudi Arabia.

As you might expect, Reuters has a reporter there who couldn't help but insert an anti-Fox News remark into the story:

Muslim tycoons should buy stakes in global media outlets to help change anti-Muslim attitudes around the world, ministers from Islamic countries heard at a conference in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday.

Information ministers and officials meeting under the auspices of the 57-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the world's largest Islamic body, said Islam faced vilification after the September 11 attacks, when 19 Arabs killed nearly 3,000 people in U.S. cities in 2001.

The student newspaper of the University of Virginia, the Cavalier Daily, has gotten national attention for two cartoons lampooning Catholic beliefs.

Reports the Cavalier Daily on itself:

The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and individuals from across the country have sent nearly 2,000 letters to The Cavalier Daily and to the University administration in response to the publication of two controversial comics Aug. 23 and Aug. 24.

Both comics were drawn by third-year College student Grant Woolard. The first comic was titled "Christ on a Cartesian Plane," and depicts the Crucifixion with a parabolic graph superimposed on the figure of Christ. The second comic is titled "A Nativity Ob-scene" and features dialogue between the Virgin Mary and Joseph about an "immaculately transmitted" rash....

Another classic from Reuters:

Four gunmen shouting religious slogans attacked the U.S. embassy in Damascus on Tuesday, but failed to harm any American diplomats before all four were killed, a Syrian official said.

Of course, the news service would provide similar cover if these gunmen were Christian... (h/t Small Dead Animals)

The Washington Post has found an evangelical Christian it likes. Conveniently enough he's not a fan of the Christian right. Here are some nuggets from staff writer Caryle Murphy's September 10 profile of a "progressive" pillar of the "emerging church" movement, Brian D. McLaren.:

“When we present Jesus as a pro-war, anti-poor, anti-homosexual, anti-environment, pro-nuclear weapons authority figure draped in an American flag, I think we are making a travesty of the portrait of Jesus we find in the gospels," McLaren said in a recent interview.

[...]

Brent Bozell's column on the entertainment media culture this week addressed an amazing double standard from NBC. For Saturday mornings, they've picked up a Christian-media favorite, the cartoon "Veggie Tales" -- but is cutting out the religious angles. That's sort of sad when our media's more tolerant of Islam, the "religion of peace," than they seem to be of Christianity:

The early word from producers is that NBC has grown increasingly fierce about editing something out of “Veggie Tales” – those apparently unacceptable, insensitive references to God and the Bible.

So NBC has taken the very essence of “Veggie Tales” – and ripped it out. It’s like “Gunsmoke,” without the guns, or “Monday Night Football,” without the football.

Is the Los Angeles Times "piling on" when it comes to covering sex abuse by Christians? Have they misled their readers again?

In the front section of today's Los Angeles Times (Tuesday, September 5, 2006) is an article, "Sex Charges Shadow a Local Curiosity in Texas: Five monks at the Christ of the Hills Monastery are accused of abusing boys. Police also say the church's famous crying icon was 'a scam'" by Times staffer Lianne Hart. The piece is accompanied by three color photos and a small map of Texas (to illustrate the location of the story, Blanco, Texas (population 1505)).

In a large color photo above the article is a man dressed in black, as a priest, surrounded by several relics and icons depicting Jesus and other Christian imagery. The caption of the photo reads, "Caretaker: Christ of the Hills Monastery in Blanco, Texas, is empty now. Father Thomas Flower of a San Antonio urban mission says he is looking after the place." Another color photo shows an icon of the Virgin Mary.

"Christ of the Hills," "Monastery," "Father," "urban mission," "monks," "Virgin Mary" ... Another example of abuse in the Catholic Church, right? At first glance, it would appear so. But it isn't. Buried more than halfway through the article is the fact that the monastery was affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, and they cut ties with the monks seven years ago. Why are these facts practically hidden in the article? Deception, anyone?

First it was "asian men" behind the plot to blow up British airlines headed for America, now it seems "men under the age of 30" were plotting terrorist attacks in Denmark, at least according to the BBC where informing readers of the religious identity of fanatical Muslims seems to be taboo.

Danish police have arrested nine suspected terrorists, the country's security intelligence service says.

The suspects, believed to be all men under the age of 30, were picked up during overnight raids in Odense, Denmark's third largest city.

The country's Justice Minister, Lene Espersen, said it was likely they were planning an attack in Denmark.

According to less-timid news sources, the men arrested were Islamic fundamentalists. The BBC knows this as that information is public domain. It could easily have been included in the article linked above when it was written or updated subsequently. I guess it's about the public's right not to know. (Hat tip: LGF.)

Bill Maher on HBO’s September 1 “Real Time” went on quite an anti-theistic rant that clearly demonstrated his utter disdain for Christians as well as conservatives. To be sure, this wasn’t the first time Maher went so atheistically ballistic as reported by NewsBusters here.

In this instance, Maher suggested that, “If converting to Islam is all it takes to get the terrorists off our backs, then all I have to say is, ‘Lalalalalalala!’” He referred to Americans as “Christians in name only,” asserting that "the best part is that nothing that really matters to you will be different. It’s not like we’re asking you to change your e-mail address." And, he stated that converting to Islam would make conservative Christians happy: “You mean we can stone homosexuals instead of just bitching about them on talk-radio? Thank you Jesus…I mean, Allah.”

To fully appreciate the level of the vitriol – albeit disguised as comedy with some admittedly humorous moments – one must see the video here (go to minute two). Hat tip to our old friend Ian Schwartz who now works for Hot Air. A full transcript follows:

In a September 1 piece for the "Today" show, NBC reporter Keith Miller sought out Jerry Coyne, a University of Chicago professor, to discuss the struggle between science and religion, since it's now being debated in front of Pope Benedict XIV. NBC labeled him simply as a "evolutionary biologist." This is what he had to say about the mixing of faith and science:

Jerry Coyne: "The scientific way of looking at the world, which defends on evidence, and the religious way of looking at the world, which depends on faith, are fundamentally incompatible."

Coyne: "And if there is anything the history of the church should show, it's that if they fight scientific advances, they lose."

Who is Jerry Coyne really? He’s a leftist professor who attacked Ann Coulter for her new treatise on liberals and religion, "Godless." Writing in the "New Republic," he called her a "beached flamingo" and went on to compare Coulter to a zoo animal, saying:

"This beast draws crowds by its frequent, raucous calls, eerily resembling a human voice, and its unearthly appearance, scrawny and pallid."

Florida senatorial candidate Katherine Harris drew a voluminous amount of media attention for her recent comment that the separation of church and state is "a lie." Another Republican Senator, the liberal Lincoln Chafee from Rhode Island, made this liberal error during an August 26 debate with his conservative primary opponent:

Lincoln Chafee: "Rhode Island was founded on separation of religion, separation of church and state....‘Full liberties of religious discernment,’ I think is in our charter and, uh, when we wouldn’t sign the U.S. Constitution, 1789, until we got the same liberties, the same separation of church and state, that we had here in Rhode Island, in the federal Constitution. It took us 13 months as Rhode Islanders, until we got in the First Amendment, first words of the First Amendment in the Constitution, separation of church and state."

Not only is the phrase "separation of church and state" not the first words, it’s not in the First Amendment at all. (Presumably Mr. Chafee was attempting to refer to the Establishment Clause, which is not the same thing in word or meaning.) Keith Olbermann, host of MSNBC’s "Countdown," had this to say about Katherine Harris and her comments on August 24:

I think we now know Tucker Carlson's strategy for winning 'Dancing With the Stars': multiple partners.

That might be the only way to explain Carlson's odd defense of Warren Steed Jeffs, the polygamist leader arrested today. On his MSNBC show of this afternoon, Tucker was outraged that Jeffs had been placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list:

"His crime was wanting to enter into life-long arrangements with women, or facilitating that between a man and . . . was this guy trying to undermine America, destroy our way of life or murder our citizens? No! What the hell was he doing on the Top Ten list?"

Writer/author Christopher Hitchens on Friday night gave the finger to the Los Angeles studio audience of HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher. As he laid out the case for how it's Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who wants World War Three, not George W. Bush, Hitchens cited how Ahmadinejad “says the Messiah is about to come back.” Maher quipped: "So does George Bush, by the way.” That caused a loud eruption of audience applause and cheering, which led Maher to clarify: “That's not facetious.” The crowd continued to applaud as Hitchens remarked, about those in attendance who had earlier cheered and laughed as Maher called Bush an “idiot” repeatedly: "That's not facetious. Your audience, which will clap at apparently anything, is frivolous.” Loud oohs and groans emanated from the audience, prompting Hitchens to give them the finger as he castigated them, “Fuck you, fuck you,” while the groans continued. (Transcript follows)

Video clip (41 seconds, includes vulgarity): Real (1.2 MB) or Windows Media (1.4 MB), plus MP3 audio (250 KB)

Here's a story you're not likely to see covered by today's MSM TV: the story of a Palestinian boy band who made it big...by writing up a song praising Hezollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah. (Click here for an MP3 of it.)

The song, "Hawk of Lebanon," is mostly a 10-minute repetition of the phrase "Yallah, Nasrallah" along with other delightful lyrics such as "I hope we can destroy your life and make you worry, Zionism and Zionists are the biggest poison in Arab land."

It's taken the Palestine by storm. AP reporter Sarah El Deeb has more:

They were struggling in a boy band, working the West Bank wedding circuit and dreaming of stardom.

Now the five singers who make up the Northern Band have come a little closer to their goal, with help from an unwitting ally — Hezbollah guerrilla chief Hassan Nasrallah.

At the height of the Israel-Hezbollah war, the band wrote new lyrics, in praise of Nasrallah, for an old tune. The Hawk of Lebanon song tapped into Nasrallah's huge popularity among Palestinians and became an instant hit.

The song is being played on Arab TV networks, used as a ring tone for cell phones, passed around on e-mail and distributed on pirate CDs and tapes.

San Diego talk-radio host Mark Larson blogs on a typical newspaper fumble on religious sensitivities with the San Diego Union-Tribune. They ran an advertisement for the "GLAAD-Award-Winning Masterpiece" play called "Southern Baptist Sissies" (starring Delta Burke!) The ad features a photo of a man in some kind of skimpy black underwear with his arms outstretched in front of a cross. Might that offend a few Christians? The Union-Tribune issued a statement that they would review the decision to accept the ad. Here's the latest from Larson:  

For the second time in four days, the Los Angeles Times has reported about the illicit and invalid "ordination" of women who call themselves Catholic. The latest effort is by Times staffer Robin Fields, "Female Priest Defies the Catholic Church" (Monday, August 14, 2006). Fields profiled Jane Via, of San Diego, one of several bogus "priests" who have been falsely "ordained" and recently presided over a "Mass." Far from being a balanced piece, the article directly quoted four vocal supporters of Via (including Via herself) and not one dissenting voice of her actions. Balanced reporting at the Times? Not even close.

The subhead in this Time magazine article promises enlightenment, but fails to deliver: "Why do so many young British Muslims turn to violence against the land where they were raised?"

Unfortunately, Time's leftward slanted editorial policies don't allow an honest answer. Rather than exploring the root causes of Islamic radicalism, which is, after all, the root cause of British Muslim radicalism, Time offers a sterile hodgepodge of random observations and politically correct standbys; they actually cite "disaffection" with Britain's foreign policy, as if that were a cause rather than a symptom of the disease.

Buried within the article is the symptom that identifies the illness:

The Washington Post continues to display enthusiasm to wring the last drop out of Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic drunken rant at a cop in Malibu. But the headline over the story on the front of today's Style section is misleading: "Evangelical Clergy on Mel Gibson: Judging Not." A reader might think evangelicals excused Gibson's rant. The story which follows by religion specialist Alan Cooperman makes it very clear from the beginning that the evangelical leaders all denounced his outburst to police, but none of them had re-evaluated whether there was anti-Semitism in his movie "The Passion of the Christ." (A listing of most popular articles on washingtonpost.com suggests it used to have a more accurate headline: "Evangelicals Hate Gibson's Sin But Love His 'Passion'.")

Last week, in this NewsBusters post, we took issue with the anti-Catholicism in an August 5, 2006, column from Los Angeles Times media critic Tim Rutten. In an especially ugly and vitriolic piece, Rutten capitalized on the arrest of Mel Gibson to imply that orthodox Christians and supporters of Gibson's The Passion of the Christ film were anti-Semitic. Rutten's column builds the case that anti-Christian and anti-Catholic prejudice is alive and well at the Los Angeles Times.

Getreligion.org has a collection of postings analyzing Jon Meacham's cover story on Billy Graham in Newsweek -- by Terry Mattingly, Daniel Pulliam, Douglas LeBlanc, and Mollie Ziegler. Mattingly began by being direct, that Meacham is writing to thump the tub for religious laxity and liberalism:

Newsweek Managing Editor Jon Meacham really doesn’t do ordinary journalism anymore. Instead, he writes cover stories that are doctrinal essays that seek to guide Americans toward a more mature, nuanced, educated, intelligent approach to religious faith. This would bring us closer to Meacham’s approach, of course.

The thwarted terrorist plot to kill many Americans through smuggling explosives onto aircraft departing from the UK was apparently the work of "Asian" men, according to the local press (HT Michelle Malkin):

I misheard the annoucement on Today. What the BBC's Stephen Sackur actually said, reading an incoming report, was this: "We understand that it is now being suggested by officials that British-born ... er... men were involved in the alleged plot." Could something else have been written after "British born" that caused Sackur to pause? Whatever the case, I apologise for suggesting that Muslims might in any way have been involved in this attempted terrorist attack. What was I thinking?

Further update. Sackur's missing word? This from Sky News:

Tucker Carlson stopped short of saying that some of his best friends are Jewish. But he did let us know that "I love Israel, I think it's a wonderful place, I support it completely, I support it instinctively."

That was just before he declared that "I think this war helps Hezbollah. I think it's bad for Israel, bad for the United States. I think you can love Israel and believe this war is a disaster."

And it was just after he criticized President Bush for being too pro-Israel.

Carlson turned to Bill Press, his guest on this afternoon's Tucker show on MSNBC, observing:

"You never hear Democrats point out that Bush is not even-handed in the Middle East. You almost never hear anybody criticize the President for taking the side of Israel to the extent that he alienates the Arab world completely. Why doesn't anybody ever mention that?"

The former chairman of the California Dem party gave a response suggesting he might be a proud graduate of the Pat Buchanan 'Amen Corner' School of Foreign Policy:

Last week, I mentioned to Michelle Malkin that it was weird that several networks only made a one-day story out of a Muslim shooting up a Jewish community center in Seattle, killing one woman and wounding five, while Mel Gibson's drunken rant was the story that couldn't end. Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby did a little counting in Nexis and found the disparity was vast and wide between Gibson's drunk-driving arrest and Naveed Haq's murdering rampage:

In the first six days after his arrest, the media database Nexis logged 888 stories mentioning "Mel Gibson" and "Jews"....Yet after six days, a Nexis search turned up only 236 stories mentioning Haq -- one-fourth the number dealing with Gibson's drunken outburst.

Jacoby said celebrity and "The Passion" subtext aside, the shooting was a much bigger story: 

Subbing for reporter/columnist Dana Milbank on the Washington Post's snarky "Zeitgeist Checklist" feature in the Sunday opinion section, Post reporter Michael Grunwald goes on a tear, with every time on the ten-item list having a lame connection to Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic drunk-driving rant. Here's how it starts with the number one issue of the week, the Middle East conflict:

Fighting intensifies in Lebanon, as dozens of innocents die, but President Bush senses a "moment of opportunity." Linguists note that in Chinese, the character for "opportunity" also means "quagmire." And "Hezbollah" means "Party of Mel Gibson."

Madonna's recent glittery cross and crown of thorns during her concert tour is designed to stir outrage, but at this point in her career, it screams Desperate Housewife. But then there are always the young singers who are corrupted into imitating the routine. Probably the last one you'd expect to try Sacrilege 101 would be the girl named Charlotte Church, but obviously she's trying to live her (stage) name down. Catholic News Service reports:

The U.S. publishing company Ignatius Press has refused to sell any works by Welsh singer Charlotte Church after she called German-born Pope Benedict XVI a Nazi and mocked the Catholic Church...Church, dubbed the "Voice of an Angel" before she turned her talents to popular music, also dressed up as a nun and pretended to hallucinate while eating "communion" wafers imprinted with smiling faces signifying the drug Ecstasy. She smashed open a statue of the Virgin Mary to reveal a can of hard cider inside, said she worshipped "St. Fortified Wine," and stuck chewing gum on a statue of the child Jesus.