“99 Percenters” — Really?
Things seldom are what they seem. Take, for instance, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) crowd:
During last year’s Occupy movement, truly seedy-looking characters camped out on the streets and in the parks of several of our cities, causing millions of dollars of property damage. They committed robberies, thefts and sex crimes. Some of their lowlife acts, such as defecating and urinating in public and on police vehicles, were filmed.
These people also portrayed themselves as 99 percenters. It turns out that they weren’t that at all. Will Rahn, deputy editor for The Daily Caller, wrote an article titled “NYC arrest records: Many Occupy Wall Street protesters live in luxury” (Nov. 2, 2011). Nearly 1,000 protesters were arrested in New York between Sept. 18 and Oct. 15. Police collected information on each arrestee’s name, age, sex, criminal charge, home address and — in most cases — race. The median value of the homes of the arrestees was $305,000 — a far higher number than the $185,400 median value of owner-occupied homes of the rest of us. Ninety-five of the arrestees lived in homes valued at more than $500,000. Those who rented paid a median rent of $1,850 per month. Of the 984 protesters arrested, at least 797 are white. One Occupy Wall Street protester arrested — presumably, if you listen to the mainstream media, penniless and from a blue-collar family — lived in an $850,000 home in the nation’s capital.
— Walter Williams, “America’s Two-Faced Leftists”, Frontpage Magazine, May 1, 2012
No Prophet in It
Did one of history’s most influential people ever actually live? Robert Spencer has his doubts:
… the questions in [my] book are not intended as any kind of attack on Muslims. Islam is a faith rooted in history. It makes historical claims. Muhammad is supposed to have lived at a certain time and preached certain doctrines that he said God had delivered to him. The veracity of those claims is open, to a certain extent, to historical analysis. Whether Muhammad really received messages from the angel Gabriel may be a faith judgment, but whether he lived at all is a historical one. Islam is not unique in staking out its claims as a historical faith or in inviting historical investigation. But it is unique in not having undergone searching historical criticism on any significant scale. Both Judaism and Christianity have been the subject of widespread scholarly investigation for more than two centuries. Why should Islam be exempt from such examination? And is it still possible in our politically correct world even to raise such questions?
Spencer’s book is for sale here.
“The Tertullians of the Modern Age”
When your politics control your religion, sooner or later you’re in for profound disillusionment:
This imperious and self-righteous tendency is part of the missionary afflatus that has come to dominate the sensibility of the West—e.g., exporting democracy to the Arabs, or instilling utopian socialism in a generation of university students, or, in the case under consideration, saving the planet through media conversion or legislative force. Political science has, in effect, become dominical theology. Too many of us tend to divert our spiritual needs from the numinous to the meretricious, and to play the God we have abandoned by believing, to quote Peter Foster, that we “can intelligently design both the global economy and the weather” …
The ginned-up environmental fright has given these quasi-religious enthusiasts, statist visionaries and power-seekers the “green light” to legislative domination of Western electorates and the projected reorganization of society along synodic or absolutist lines. The numbers, graphs, charts and formulae regularly brandished before us to buttress their machinations look impressive, at least initially. Looks, as the old adage admonishes, can be deceiving, and this is doubly so when the partisans of an ominous intention cannily affect a passionate love for the planet and a solicitude for the future of humanity. But apart from those who are in the game for the abundant perks they can reap, they are, regrettably and for the most part, ardent zealots who have mixed politics and theology to everyone’s cost—including their own.
— David Solway, “Global Warming: Half Politics, Half Religion”, Frontpage Magazine, April 26, 2012
