Un-American president

President Bush, in a C-SPAN interview now (9:15 p.m.), says about immigration that you can’t enforce the borders unless you “regularize the people who are already here,” because they have “come here to feed their family,” and they’re “doing jobs Americans won’t do.” In other words, illegal aliens control the shots. Their desire to come here is our one unchangeable absolute. And so there is nothing for us to do but adjust ourselves to their wishes and their needs.

Would anyone who loved America, who cared about America, speak this way?

Oh, and that wasn’t enough. Having made illegal aliens the real boss of America, Bush goes on to tell us that he’s currently reading a book called Abraham, the theme of which is that since Abraham was the common source of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam there is no reason why those three religions cannot be reconciled. Deep stuff, man. Talk about basing yourself on syllogisms that have nothing to do with reality. It’s on the same intellectual level as saying that since all people, including all Muslims, love their children, therefore all people, including all Muslims, are ready for democracy. Bush hasn’t noticed that the source of Islam was not Abraham, but Muhammad, and that Muhammad said that Abraham was really a Muslim, and, further, that any Jew or Christian who denies that Abraham was a Muslim is an infidel who must burn in hell.

- end of initial entry -

Dana writes:

Now to an atheist like me, it seems perfectly obvious that huge swathes of the U.S. mainstream Christian population can’t really imagine that Islam really is the vile, barbaric, horror it is precisely BECAUSE it ostensibly springs from the same “Judeo-Christian Tradition” they and you believe is the heart of Western civilization. I think this misunderstanding of the nature of Islam is at the heart of the thinking that they are “just like us” and can all be turned into nice suburban sort of Methodist versions of Muslims if they just had “Freedom.” It really seems to me that the religious CAN’T imagine that the devoutly religious of any stripe could be as repellent as the Muslims, because that would undermine their own belief that it’s “religion” that makes people moral, civilized, honest and good.

LA replies:

You point out, correctly, that American Christians are under the illusion that religion itself is a good, and therefore they believe that Islam can’t be bad.

However, you are committing a fallacy as crude as that of the Christians whom you criticize. Just as their mistake is to believe that religion per se is good, your mistake is to believe that religion per se or Christianity per se tells them that religion per se is good. But European Christians for a thousand years saw Islam as their adversary and successfully (for the most part) excluded it and fought off Muslim invaders and raiders. So obviously it is not Christianity per se that leads people to the false belief that religion per se is good, but something about the particular kind of Christianity we have today, namely that it is a Christianity infused with liberal and ecumenical assumptions.

Jonathan L. writes:

I think the following phrase of yours is really the most beautiful summation of traditionalism I have ever seen, on par with “What would Jesus Do”:

“Would anyone who loved America, who cared about America, speak this way?”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 18, 2007 09:21 PM | Send