A world-wide system of lies is threatened by one man who speaks the truth

Dean Ericson writes:

Terry Jones is the most powerful man in America. As we learn from this interview at The Daily Beast, anti-Muhammad movie was going nowhere until the producers asked Jones to promote it. He did, on Tuesday. Within 24 hours the Muslim riots started. Now the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States of America, General Martin Dempsey, has had to ask the most powerful man in America, Pastor Terry Jones, to please stop promoting the movie or Obama’s entire foreign policy will be wrecked, as will Obama’s presidency. It remains to be seen if the most powerful man in America, Pastor Terry Jones, will relent. The fate of nations hangs in the balance.

(It just goes to show that when you build upon lies you’re liable to be toppled by the tiniest tintinnabulation of truth.)

LA replies:

First, Daniel Pipes in his article today makes the same point as Mr. Ericson about Terry Jones’s extraordinary power:

Jones (with his “International Judge Muhammad Day”) and Sam Bacile (who may not exist but is alleged to have created the anti-Islamic video that mainly inspired this 9/11’s violence) can not only cause deaths at will but they can also put a wrench in U.S.-Egypt relations and even become a factor in a U.S. presidential election.

Second, Jones himself—as I said of him in 2010 when unlike almost every other Islam critic and blogger in the universe I not only defended his “right” to burn the Koran but supported his actually doing it—is an impressive man. In the face of unremittingly hostile questions from The Daily Beast, he holds his ground. He explains how every point in the movie (which he says he did not make) comes from Islamic sources. As for his supposed responsibility for the deaths in the Mideast, which the interviewer keeps harping on, see this exchange:

[Question:] Aren’t there less antagonistic ways to get your message across?

[Terry Jones answers:] Absolutely. I’ve said this many times, I think the number one way is diplomacy. One way is to talk and sit down and try to logically come to some type of agreement. I think that’s the best way. I think our way is not the best way, but I think it is a way. I think once something has gotten so far that a radical movement or statement is necessary. I always think it is odd that people bring us up in relation to people getting harmed and killed. If we remember our American history of the civil rights movement, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and what he did caused many people to die. Many people were killed. Many people were beaten because he stood up. No one would ever say that he was wrong. No one would ever say that he caused people’s death and actually he did exactly the same thing. He stood up and he paid the price and unfortunately other people had to pay the price.

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Sage McLaughlin writes:

“It just goes to show that when you build upon lies you’re liable to be toppled by the tiniest tintinnabulation of truth.”

Kudos to Dean Ericson for his eloquent use of “tintinnabulation,” a word I have only seen in print one other place, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Bells (which is my favorite American poem).

LA replies:

Of course, that’s where most people learned the word. But Mr. Ericson tells me he didn’t know the poem (which I’ve now sent to him). He picked it up somewhere else.

I wrote to him:

Good word, tinntinabulation. Do you know the E.A. Poe poem that uses it? “The Bells.”

He replied:

I don’t know that poem. But the alliterative amusement of those tinkling “T’s” was appealing.

I replied:

As it was to Poe.

And you’re no mean alliterator yourself.

LA continues:

By the way, I did not read that poem in school. It was given to me as an exercise by a voice and speech teacher with whom I studied long ago. She wanted me to form and pronounce clearly the “l” sound preceding the “s” in the repeated word “bells.”

Here’s the first stanza:

HEAR the sledges with the bells,
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars, that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells—
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

David P. writes:

It seems we are back in the Carter era, when appeasing Muslims led to the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Iran.

I do not agree with the thesis that this attack was a result of an amateur video about Mohammed. The attack must have been planned, and that takes time. The attack took place on 9/11, so there has to be another motive, quite apart from the fact that it always is good for Islam to attack the Great Satan. It was planned as a way of breaking away from America, so that no gratitude need be shown to the U.S. for deposing of Gaddafi.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 13, 2012 09:53 AM | Send