Politics

On Christian Persecution

Samuel HooperLeave a comment
Christians actively NOT being persecuted.
Christians actively NOT being persecuted in Britain.

 

The Telegraph’s resident Moraliser-in-Chief, Cristina Odone, has done it again.

In a short column, clearly phoned in and devoted more to promoting her “new ebook” than advancing an intellectual idea of any kind, Odone decides to directly compare the persecution of Christians in other lands – persecution often marked by violent killing – to what she sees as persecution of Christians at home here in Britain. No really, she does:

Being a Christian, in some parts of the world, carries a death sentence. It carries little weight — and attracts a lot of opprobrium — in this part of the world. Having done their best to erase God from public life, secular authorities have stealthily loosened our identity as Christians. As I have written in my ebook, “No God Zone”, traditional ceremonies, rituals and even pledges have been suppressed because of their “religiosity”. Thus, when we witness the sufferings of our “brothers and sisters in Christ”, we feel only a twinge, where once we would have felt a shock.

One poorly written ebook about how Cristina Odone is prohibited from practising her religion in that terrible place, the United Kingdom, available now on your Kindle or iPad. Check for yourself.

And let me paraphrase. Cristina Odone feels so persecuted and reviled for her faith here in Britain that when she sees fellow Christians hacked to death in the middle east it is now all she can do to give them a wry, knowing nod of the head, empathising with their pain? And she thinks that other similarly “afflicted” British Christians feel the same way?

There follow a couple more uninspired paragraph where Odone waffles and fails to express an idea, and then we end with this:

Tragedies like the ones in Nairobi and Peshawar do not make me think all Muslims want to kill Christians; the al-Shabaab guerrillas are no more representative of Islam than the suicide bombers in Pakistan are. But these atrocities do bring home, as a Spectator blog quotes the former Chief Rabbi saying, the dangerous “silence of our friends”. Sadly that silence is rooted in hostility to our faith.

Where to begin? Let’s start with the notion that nefarious “secular authorities” have “stealthily loosened our identity as Christians”.

Odone would do well to find out how many readers of her column attended a church service last Sunday. Or this year. Or in their recent memory. I suspect that when she talks of “our [shared] identity”, she is actually speaking to a minority, even if they call themselves Christian (let’s call them CINOs, people who erroneously use the word Christian interchangeably with “British” or “white”).

While we’re at it, we should also send Odone back to Citizenship 101 class, so that she can learn about our hereditary monarchy pledged to “defend the faith”, the Lords Spiritual who meddle in our laws and seek to impose their particular brand of Christianity on the nation, the fact that public holidays in Britain coincide with Christian festivals and that Christian hymns are sung in state school assemblies up and down the land. How dreadfully secular.

A walking, talking advertisement for the benefits of separation between church and state
A walking, talking advertisement for the benefits of separation between church and state

 

How huge must Odone’s white persecution complex really be, to behold these manifold examples of the Christian faith woven into the fabric of our society, and still come away feeling slighted, aggrieved and persecuted? Newsflash, Odone – denying civil rights to gay people and imposing your morality on others is not part of expressing your faith. Expressing your faith is all about what you yourself choose to say, read, write, eat or wear – not what you want other people to do.

Odone also chooses to bemoan what she perceives as a weak-willed response by western nations to [real] persecution of Christians abroad:

Why should the Foreign Office move heaven and earth to protect Christian minorities in the Middle East when this Coalition allows Christians  to lose their livelihood on account of their religious beliefs? Why should the EU get heavy with governments in the Middle East when its member states have signed up to 41 laws that discriminate against Christians?

Here we actually have the semblance of a lucid thought, but of course Odone stops at the feeling aggrieved part rather than proposing any potential solutions to this problem. The EU does not seek to use any of its economic leverage to stop persecution of Christians in the middle east – okay, so what form should this leverage take? Cristina Odone is silent on the matter.

Actual persecution of Christians.
Actual persecution of Christians might look like this.

 

As for the recent suicide bombings and mass shootings at churches in Pakistan and Kenya, Odone is similarly silent when it comes to a plan of action. Does she favour a military intervention, economic sanctions, or just harsher diplomatic words? We don’t know, because she doesn’t say. And she doesn’t say because she hasn’t given it a moment’s thought.

Because of course, to Cristina Odone, this isn’t really about those long-suffering Christians tucked away in the far corners of the world. It is all about her, the Cristina Odone show, railing against the fact that centuries of engrained bias in favour of her own religion (my religion too, incidentally) are starting to be rolled back in favour of something more slightly resembling equality before the law.

Another Reason To Dislike Gordon Brown

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

I am only allowed by my wife to rant about Gordon Brown and his toxic impact on British life and politics a maximum of three times per week. Yes, she keeps track, and yes, even I will acknowledge that this has sometimes been necessary. No such restriction applies to this blog, however, which is just as well given recent revelations made by former Labour spin-doctor Damian McBride.

Apparently, Brown’s first instinct upon realising the gravity of the situation brought about by the global economic crisis and Britain’s unique unpreparedness to deal with it (thanks to eleven years of big spending Labour government) was not to issue a heartfelt mea culpa and apology to the British people for the upcoming lost decade that he was unleashing, but instead to start plotting the implementation of martial law on the streets of Britain.

Help to engineer a global financial calamity and then propose banning people from protesting about it - that's the Gordon Brown way.
Help to engineer a global financial calamity and then propose banning people from protesting about it – that’s the Gordon Brown way.

The BBC reports:

Gordon Brown discussed deploying troops on Britain’s streets as news of the 2008 financial crisis became clear, an ex-Labour spin doctor has claimed. In extracts of a book published in the Daily Mail, Damian McBride said the former prime minister feared “anarchy” once the scale of the crisis was known. According to the book, Mr Brown said: “We’d have to think: do we have curfews, do we put the Army on the streets, how do we get order back?”

I am continually accused of being too hard on Gordon Brown. He was a good person, interlocutors on his behalf insist. His heart was in the right place, they plead. He was a simple humble methodist man who just wanted to do good for his country, they tell me. Blah, blah, blah.

This man, uniquely responsible for ensuring that Britain entered the great recession as the least well prepared of all of the major world economies, thought that the best way to deal with the potential fallout would be to deploy troops on the streets to stop us from looting and pillaging our country back to the stone age.

The article continues:

Mr Brown is quoted as saying: “If the banks are shutting their doors, and the cash points aren’t working, and people go to Tesco and their cards aren’t being accepted, the whole thing will just explode.

“If you can’t buy food or petrol or medicine for your kids, people will just start breaking the windows and helping themselves.

“And as soon as people see that on TV, that’s the end, because everyone will think that’s OK now, that’s just what we all have to do. It’ll be anarchy. That’s what could happen tomorrow.”

According to Mr McBride’s book, Power Trip, Mr Brown feared panic from other countries could spread to the UK.

I am genuinely unsure which is worse – the fact that the man brought our nation to a place where such draconian, apocalyptic scenarios even had to be considered, the fact that he thought they might be the best way of tackling the problem, or the fact that his current proteges are this very day standing giving speeches at the Labour party conference in Brighton where they are denying any responsibility for or complicity in Britain’s continuing economic malaise. There are no words or phrases critical enough of the premiership of Gordon Brown.

The book’s author, Damian McBride, does not do himself any great favours as he relates the tale. Grateful as we must be to him for shedding this additional light on the Brown terror, of course McBride was personally supportive of everything that Brown did:

“It was extraordinary to see Gordon so totally gripped by the danger of what he was about to do, but equally convinced that decisive action had to be taken immediately,” Mr McBride wrote.

He claimed the then prime minister understood the situation better than other world leaders, his UK opponents and senior bankers.

And the former spin doctor rated Mr Brown’s actions as “up with those of President Kennedy and his advisers during the Cuban Missile Crisis”.

John F. Kennedy and Gordon Brown – historical equals and political peers. Aside from the fact that they both ghost-wrote books about the meaning of courage, I’m not really feeling the similarity right now.

Labour Party Conference 2013 – Reflections

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

The economy was fine and everything was splendid until 2010 when the Tories came into power, according to Chuka Umunna, Labour's point person on Business

 

After listening to the various speeches at the 2013 Labour Party Conference this morning, I believe I have detected a theme running through almost all of them.

I don’t mean the usual Labour tunnel-vision and denial of their role in wrecking the British economy and increasing the size of the British state to freedom-crushing, unsustainable levels – that has already been well documented, on this blog and elsewhere.

Nor do I mean the incessant moralising, the endless strictures about how anyone who holds conservative views must be rich, heartless and hold the “common man” in contempt, or the assertions that skepticism about pooling national sovereignty and submitting to an ever-increasing burden of regulations emanating from the European Union somehow equates to a longing for isolationism and a desire to cut off trade and ties with with the world.

I refer instead to the mindset that for every problem, there is a government solution waiting to be proposed, seconded and carried at a Labour conference.

The smug cloud has already enveloped Brighton and is rapidly encroaching on the rest of the country.
The smug cloud has already enveloped Brighton and is rapidly encroaching on the rest of the country.

 

There has been an increase on the number of workers on zero-hour contracts in these tough economic times. Gasp! Outrage! Zero hour contracts must be inherently terrible, a product of evil British businesspeople who want to make money on the backs of the poor, and must be outlawed immediately.

A British soldier was violently beheaded in a terrorist attack on the streets of London. Outrage! We need new laws making it a specific offense to attack military personnel, because if only the general laws against beheading people had been supplemented by additional laws prohibiting the beheading of service members, this heinous crime would not have been committed.

Watching the Labour party assemble for their yearly conference is like observing a group of weary, jaded old codgers assemble in a meeting hall to bemoan the state of humanity, how far it has fallen, and what they must do to forcibly drag the rest of us back up to their lofty levels of enlightened tolerance and progressivism.

How thoroughly depressing it must be to perpetually think so little of the human capacity to do good that the only solutions you can ever imagine are found in new regulations preventing people from being themselves, and transferring agency from the free individual to the faceless, bureaucratic state.

And of course, the answer to the societal problems that Labour bemoan can never be found in reducing the power and scope of the state, or empowering individuals to take more responsibility for themselves. It is as though the Labour party is incapable of taking the laissez-faire, hands-off approach to the people that they rightly champion in the social realm and applying it to the economic realm.

And that’s a great shame, because I feel sure that increasingly, the real divide in British politics will not be between the traditional left vs right paradigm, but between people who see government as the answer to everything, and people who are heartily sick of not being able to live their lives freely without continual badgering and preachy interference. Right now, neither party is ideally positioned to capitalise on this shift, but if today’s conference speeches are anything to go by, Labour has much more ground to make up.

On Political Silly Season

Samuel HooperLeave a comment
At least it isn't every year.
At least it isn’t every year.

 

It is party conference season in the UK, with the Labour Party currently enjoying their moment in the spotlight. It is times like these that I envy the Americans, who only have to endure the spectacle of their preferred political party’s most gung-ho, swivel-eyed or greasily ambitious apparatchiks getting together to engage in collective groupthink once every four years, unlike us Brits who are treated to these traveling roadshows each year.

And as usual, we have had our fair share of silliness.

The Liberal Democrat party conference was largely dominated by the news that Sarah Teather, the current government children’s minister (because apparently that is a separate role that we need?) is throwing her toys out of the pram and standing down as an MP at the 2015 general election because the LibDems are not sufficiently like the Labour party for her liking. In a similar vein, much of the remaining press coverage was driven by continual speculation about Nick Clegg’s leadership, and Tim Farron’s (the Liberal Democrat’s party president) evident desire to serve in coalition with Labour rather than the Conservatives, and quite possibly to shack up with Ed Miliband and take romantic mini-breaks together as well.

UKIP were hoping for a successful conference to build favourable press in the long run-up to the European Parliamentary elections, where they are expected to do very well and challenge for first place. However, they came a cropper when one of their MEPs hit a journalist and made an inappropriate “slut” joke, all in view of television cameras and witnesses. This is a typical example of the pointless distraction – the actions of a silly activist then overshadow anything substantive that may have been discussed or decided at conference. UKIP’s leader, Nigel Farage, did his frank and inimitable best to salvage some small gain from the smoking wreck and lift the morale of his troops, but the damage was already done.

This man can make positive press conference disappear faster than I can finish this capt---
This man can make positive press coverage disappear faster than I can finish this capt—

 

Now we are enduring the Labour party conference, another exercise in denial as to the reasons for their 2010 general election loss and their persistent unpopularity throughout the country. Of course, no Labour conference is complete without the proposal for several new and entirely redundant laws. This time, in the wake of the horrific terrorist murder of British soldier Drummer Lee Rigby, Labour are proposing making it a specific crime to attack a member of the armed forces. Because, of course, at the moment anyone could do that and walk away entirely untouched by the criminal justice system. So we have the typical frenetic, pointless legislating that we have come to know and love from the Labour party.

Something to look forward to.
Something to look forward to.

 

As of press time we can only speculate as to the joys that await us at the Conservative party conference, but as a conservative voter I am filled with my usual apprehension that we will see more moves to make the Tories indistinguishable from Labour, and the unceasing need to try to “outnice” their main electoral rivals by embracing universal benefits for rich and poor alike whilst continuing to clobber the rich with onerous tax rates. If Osborne and Cameron manage to articulate even one original policy that stands a snowball’s chance in hell of shrinking the state and increasing personal freedom, I will not only be delighted but I will eat my hat.

So, in conference season 2013 we have a party in denial about why they were booted out of government and remain widely distrusted, a party in the midst of severe post-wedding remorse pining for the other woman that it didn’t marry, a party whose manifesto and policy announcements were entirely upstaged by an ornery old man unfamiliar with the workings of television and a party calling themselves the Conservatives but who seem to have accidentally picked up the Labour party governing playbook by mistake.

It must be groundhog day.

“Patriot” Watch, Ctd. 7 – Jim Crow Edition

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

There has not been a “Patriot” Watch post on Semi-Partisan Sam for several months now, but this does not mean that America’s true patriots (ha) have been derelict in their duties. And by “duties”, I mean their habit of saying ever more outrageous things, associating themselves with thoroughly debunked ideologies and individuals, and generally causing embarrassment to mainstream conservatives who doesn’t necessarily view every implementation of an Obama policy as a call to reach for their muskets and tri-corner hats to march to Washington.

Honoring America...
Honoring America…

Salon Magazine has been keeping tabs, and has published a list of what they call “seven crazy right wing statements” that took place in just the past seven days. It is not an edifying spectacle:

1. Ted Cruz: We need 100 more like Jesse Helms in the Senate

2. Glenn Beck: War is a progressive idea so I am now against it

3. Alex Jones: Globalist cyborgs are coming

4. Stuart Varney and Monica Crowley: EPA is trying to suffocate children

5. Minnesota archbishop: Satan is behind gay marriage

6. Texas GOP gov. candidate tweets that Wendy Davis is “too stupid to be governor.”

7. Internet advice from a nobody who wants to ruin perfect strangers’ lives: Dads, don’t educate your daughters!

Readers can delve into each of these gems at their own leisure; for the purposes of this entry I will focus on just one – Senator Ted Cruz’s unfortunate speech at a Heritage Foundation event honouring the late Senator Jesse Helms. Salon sums up Helms’ character and accomplishments thus:

For those who don’t remember, here are some of the fun-filled, wacky things Helms said and did:

  • He sang the confederate anthem “Dixie” in an elevator with Carol Moseley-Braun, the African-American senator from Illinois, and told Sen. Orrin Hatch in front of her that he was trying to make her cry.
  • He opposed integration, or “mixing of the races,” and called the University of North Carolina the “University of Negroes and Communists” because it was integrated.
  • He led a one-man, 16-day filibuster opposing the designation of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as a holiday, and threatened to lead one to save South African apartheid.
  • More comically, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he seemed unable to absorb the fact that the North Korean president’s name was Kim Jong Il, not Kim Jong 2.
  • Unlike other like-minded Southern politicians Strom Thurmond and George Wallace, Helms never disavowed his racist, segregationist views even on his deathbed in 2008.

And this is the man that Ted Cruz chose to praise. In public.

Children, never meet your heroes. Never meet them, for you are bound to be disappointed. This blog has been an unabashed supporter of the likes of former Texas congressman Ron Paul and his son, Kentucky senator Rand Paul, for some time. Frankly, their libertarian, small government message and advocacy for the “real people” as opposed to the moneyed and powerful special interest and elites is a very attractive political quality, albeit one that is dulled somewhat by their obsession with gold and abolishing the Federal Reserve.

But it seems that every time a seemingly viable libertarian-leaning politician emerges on the scene, they manage to torpedo themselves by doing something terribly naive, untoward or downright foolish. In the case of Paul Sr. we had the racist articles in the Ron Paul Newsletter, and in the case of Ted Cruz, the latest rising libertarian star, we now have recorded video footage of him praising an unrepentant racist and segregationist politician for going to Washington D.C. and “saying crazy things”.

Rachel Maddow does a good a job as any of expressing revulsion at Cruz’s decision to praise Helms in such a way:

 

With the Republican Party today, it always seems to be one step forward followed by two steps back. There were initially hopes after the 2012 election that the GOP might revise its stance on immigration reform so as to avoid demographic suicide in the coming decades, but this was swiftly followed by derogatory talk of latino “wetbacks” and children with “calves the size of cantaloupes” (from hauling drugs across the border, apparently) coming from elected Republican lawmakers.

Similarly, with the (at least partial) discrediting of the big-government, big-spending, deficits-be-damned, hawkish neo-conservative wing of the Republican party, it seemed as though an influx of new voices (such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio) might lead the GOP to a more appealing, sustainable stance in favour of protecting the rights of the average person rather than the moneyed special interest. One step forward. But, of course, this was followed by lots of shrieking about the unstoppable tide of Obamaist socialism in America, and coddling up to birthers and out-and-out racists. Two steps back.

Not enough people for the GOP to win a national majority again.
Not enough people for the GOP to win a national majority again.

Most of the reasons that this stance is so attractive to Republicans in the short term but so decisively in the medium to long terms have already been covered on this blog and elsewhere. But one angle that perhaps has not been discussed enough is the off-putting effect that these unsavoury positions have on younger voters. We have already seen the GOP reduce their opposition to gay marriage in light of its growing approval, seeming inevitability and support among young people.

Senators Cruz et al. would do well to remember that young people are also, generally speaking, not great fans of racism, segregation or Jim Crow laws, and that speaking at events honouring dead politicians who unabashedly supported all of these things is terrible, terrible PR for the party among new and future voters.

I beg the GOP, as someone who is naturally conservative and libertarian, and would have voted Republican in a previous age – courting the fringe as you are doing now is not worth the damage you are doing to the country, the two-party system or your own future political prospects.