How, then, when these brothers are now as well-known as Timothy McVeigh, if not Osama bin Laden, and they committed an atrocity that mesmerized America for a week, and they forced a lockdown of one of our greatest cities, can it be said that they failed—as terrorists?
…
Suicide-seekers going after soft targets such as ballgames, concerts, malls, parades or school events is something other nations have known but we have largely avoided. Our luck may have run out.
(Patrick J. Buchanan, Did the Brothers Tsarnaev Fail?)
There will be no calls by the President for prayer and fasting (can you imagine the hubbub from the Right if Obama did such a thing?). Nor would there have been by Dubya, the Real Christian® (who famously reverted to cheerleader mode and goaded us to shop till we dropped – and not to our knees – lest the terrorists win).
There will be no calls for introspection, for some possible national change of course. That would be blaming the victim.
There will be no acknowledgement by our leaders that when a drone kills a terrorist, he shatters into little pieces that reconstitute as new terrorists — approximately one new terrorist per “collateral damage” in getting a real terrorist. We’re the Real McCoys, and we’re damn sure the Hatfields fired the first shot.
There will, though, be more examinations of Islam, and more tendency to paint it as unremittingly evil and as The Enemy We Must Defeat. There will be no acknowledgement of Muslims living peaceably among others for generations in some parts of the world. Or we’ll be told they’re inferior, liberalized and secularized.
We’ve been missing an Evil Empire. In Islam, the military-industrial complex has one that will prove quite useful.
Now, it must be said that not all Muslims are bound to be murderers. That would be cruel and foolish, and demonstrably untrue. But it is also true that the Quran contains a number of verses ordering the Islamic faithful to commit violence against unbelievers (e.g., “Slay them wherever ye find them…”). You simply don’t have that in Christianity (and please don’t say, “But the Old Testament!”; you simply reveal that you’re ignorant about how mainstream historical Christianity thinks and works).
(Rod Dreher, emphasis added)
Dreher’s claim “you’re ignorant of how mainstream historical Christianity thinks and works” is not a throw-away. I have never heard an Orthodox exhortation to resist people, let alone kill them, based on Old or New Testament texts.
How can that be? Because, as Luke says near the end of his Gospel account, that “beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself.” And it is our habitual practice, perhaps most memorably in the first week of Great Lent, to find in the Old Testament spiritual, not geopolitical, meaning, e.g.:
By killing the oppressive Egyptian, Moses severed his bond to Pharaoh. But you, O my hopeless soul, have not even begun to attack the wickedness of your mind. If you have not accomplished even this much, how can you expect to pass through the time of repentance, which alone can drive away our sinful passions?
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As Joshua subdued Amalek and the lying Gibbeonites, arise, O my soul, and subdue the weakness of your flesh, conquering everything which leads your mind astray.
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Long ago the Lord rained burning sulfur on the city of Sodom to consume its flagrant wickedness. But you, O my soul, have kindled within yourself the fires of hell which now are about to consume you!
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Like Hagar the Egyptian long ago you, my soul, are by your own choice a slave and have given birth to a new Ishmael, your own stubbornness.
(Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete)
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 