Random Thoughts

Israelis and Palestinians. Isn't it interesting that all those smart people at the UN, and now all those equally smart people in the Obama administration, seem to want Israel to get rid of those Jewish settlements in the West Bank in preparation for a future Palestinian state? Apparently they want to ensure that any new Palestinian state will be Jew-free. After all, we couldn't possibly allow any Jews to live among those Muslim Arabs. Having Jewish neighbors would just be too much for the Arabs to handle. And yet, there's no mention of the fact that many, many Muslim Arabs live in Israel. They vote in Israel. They have representatives in the Knesset. And they enjoy a much higher standard of living than those who live in Gaza. I don't hear the Israeli government calling for an Arab- or Muslim-free Israel.

Hmmm. An interesting double standard, don't you think? Gee, do you think that there might be a touch of anti-Semitism behind it?

Of course, there can never be a Palestinian state until the Palestinians publicly accept Israel's right to exist. So far they haven't. Their only declared goal is to toss Israel into the sea. How can anyone expect the Israelis to negotiate seriously with a people whose only goal is the destruction of Israel?

Unemployment Soars. When the new administration proposed its "recovery plan" and new spending legislation it released a graph (below) showing what unemployment would be like with and without the plan. The dark blue line is the administration's predicted unemployment with the recovery plan, the light blue line shows predicted unemployment without the plan. The red data points, however, show the reality. Source: click here.

Looks like a trend to me. Any bets on what the June figures will be? Makes you think it might have been better had the government done nothing and just given the economy the room it needed to find its own way to recovery. Active, intrusive government action in the economy is always taken with the best of intentions and always leads to unintended consequences that end up damaging people's lives.

Clueless: Next Supreme Court Justice. Apparently Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama's choice to be our next Supreme Court Justice, will be just one more pro-abortion voice on the court. This assumption is based on her reply to a questions asked by pro-life Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC).

When the Senator asked Sotomayor if the unborn child had any rights, she gave a most surprising response: She said she had never thought about it. Isn't that remarkable? She's been a judge for almost two decades and she's never thought about the core principle involved in the most contentious moral, political and legal issue facing this nation. The only conclusions one can draw from her response is that she (1) lied to provide political cover during the upcoming conformation hearings; or (2) is completely clueless, an intellectual and judicial lightweight of the first order. Certainly any pro-life judge, indeed any pro-life human being, would have thought much about the rights of the unborn child.

...not that her opinions or her intellect will make much difference. She and her future colleagues on the Supreme Court will not be the ones who stop abortion. That will come only when the American people decide in their hearts that no more unborn babies will die. When that happens, the plague of abortion will end.

Read more here.

Book Recommendation. As I prepare to teach a parish course on Church History, I've done a lot of extra reading on the subject. Among the more interesting new books is one written by Father Walter Brandmuller, the Vatican's chief historian and president of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences. The book -- Light and Shadows, Church History amid Faith, Fact and Legend -- was published just this year by Ignatius Press. It's a wonderful read and casts much needed light on many of those shadowy events and issues that have led so many people to misinterpret the history of the Church.


God's peace.

He did it again...

In a recent post I criticized our president for his undue praise of Islam and historical inaccuracies in his Cairo speech to the Muslim world. Like so many liberal relativists, the president seems to believe there is some sort of moral equivalence between Western civilization (Dare I call it "Judeo-Christian?) and the barbarians who brought us 9-11 and those who support and encourage them. It's actually a prevalent attitude among the elite, especially the inside-the-Beltway elite: you know, the attitude that these poor, sweet babies wouldn't have done those nasty things had we Christians been more diplomatic in our dealings with the Muslim world over the centuries. Anyway, what bothered me most about the speech was his apparent disregard for historical truth. And now comes another...

I didn't have an opportunity to hear the president's address at Normandy the other day, so I made a point of reading it. It actually wasn't a bad speech, and I'm sure he delivered it well. But like the Cairo speech, there was no reference to the challenge we face today -- the War on Terrorism -- which I find a bit odd. Indeed, the name of the current conflict seems to have disappeared from most Washington rhetoric in recent months. And there was one part of the Normandy speech that bothered me. It always seems to be the president's religious references that lead to questions. Here's the quote:

"The nations and leaders that joined together to defeat Hitler's Reich were not perfect. We had made our share of mistakes, and had not always agreed with one another on every issue. But whatever God we prayed to, whatever our differences, we knew that the evil we faced had to be stopped. Citizens of all faiths and no faith came to believe that we could not remain as bystanders to the savage perpetration of death and destruction. And so we joined and sent our sons to fight and often die so that men and women they never met might know what it is to be free."

I'm not sure what to make of the "But whatever God we prayed to..." line. I think I can say with a high degree of certainty that those men on the Normandy beaches in June 1944 all prayed to the same God. And the "Citizens of all faiths and no faith" phrase causes me to recall how many Muslim leaders in the Near East actually thought Adolph Hitler was a sweet guy who, coincidentally, would also remove those pesky Jews from the world stage. Hey, Eisenhower called his mission a "crusade" but I suspect we won't hear that word used again on any future June 6. Ah, well, as I've said before, a little moral confusion and hyperbole are to be expected in politicians' speeches. It's so hard to be all things to all people when there are so many different special interests and so little time to pander to them.

And did you catch the White House comment about Judge Sotomayor, confirming that she is, indeed, a Catholic: "Judge Sotomayor was raised as a Catholic and attends church for family celebrations and other important events." Hmmm, doesn't sound like that attendance is very regular.

Pray for them all: presidents, judges, terrorists, and for the conversion of all Muslims. After all, He did command us to "make disciples of all nations..."