Original here: http://www.redstate.com/erick/2011/07/23/god-and-oslo/
With Al Jazeera, international news networks, and domestic networks all raising the link to an Islamic radical Norway was deporting, I put on twitter that the odds were it wasn’t an angry Lutheran doing the bombing and shooting and noted on the radio the possible links to Islamic radicals.
Turns out, the now captured shooter, who I think we can probably say is connected to the bombing, lists himself as a conservative Christian on a Facebook page.
I was wrong. But
the reaction to me and others being wrong and to how the news is handling this event
is quite instructive.
In the Arkansas army shootings and the Ft. Hood shooting and a host of others, the media and the left have sought to downplay any possible connection to Islam the attackers or would be attackers have had.
I don't know if "downplay" is the right word, unless you mean they specifically did not report the person's faith. And when those of us on the right have pointed it out, we’ve been accused of racism and those on the left have demanded to know why it even mattered.
Contrast that with the coverage of the Oslo shooter and already the New York Times is making sure in its first few paragraphs everyone knows the guy described himself on Facebook as a “conservative Christian.”
And the NYT did not do that with other terrorist acts?
It reminds me of the left-wingers who always point out that Eric Rudolph and Timothy McVeigh were Christians. They ignore the fact that McVeigh himself described himself as at best an agnostic, though more clearly an atheist, and Rudolph’s FBI file showed he belonged to an extremist cult more Aryan than Christian.
Note that. An extremist cult more Aryan than Christian? Sounds JUST LIKE Al-Qaeda. Exactly what many of us have said for years.
But why all the angst from the left on this.
There are a few instructive points.
First, those of us on the right who point out the now fairly common ties between terrorists and Islam
Except not: http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/terrorism-2002-2005/terror02_05#terror_05sum (scroll to the bottom) do so largely because the secular left has become willfully naive. The fact of the matter is violence and Islam may not be very common among American muslims, but internationally it is extremely common and can fairly well be considered mainstream within much of Islam. Read Andy McCarthy if you suffer on the delusion that it is not mainstream.
With Christians, it is rather rare to see a self-described Christian engage in heinous terrorist acts. In fact, in as much as there is an Arab Street filled with muslims more often than not cheering on the latest terrorist act of radical Islamists, you will be very hard pressed to find a Christian who does not condemn the act regardless of the faith of the person doing the killing.
But then why is the left so gleeful that the Norwegian is a “conservative Christian” and why do they feel it so necessary to rub it in when they’re downright apathetic and hostile to the notion of radical Islam being rather mainstream within Islam when terrorist Christianity is largely nonexistent except among a few crazies?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Bible is quite on point about this.
Secular leftists and Islamists are both of this world. Christians may be traveling through, but we are most definitely not of the world. In fact, Christ commands us to throw off our ties to this world. But the things of this world love this world and hate the things of God. That’s why secular leftism can embrace both activist homosexuals and activist muslims when the latter would, when true to their faith, be happy to kill the former.
The left doesn't embrace "activist Muslims" who kill people in the GLBT community. False comparison.
All of them can pile on and condemn the Christian because the Christian is just passing through, a stranger in a strange land.
Over the next week, assuming the budget fight in Washington doesn’t over shadow it, you can expect lots more gloating that the guy in Norway described himself as a conservative Christian. Never mind that a conservative Christian would not do what the guy did. The left, however, will not be persuaded otherwise. They are of this world and this world is all that matters until the last day.
Never mind that a true Muslim would ever do that, either. Ever.
