February 7, 2008

Romney did indeed pull the trigger in a speech to CPAC a few minutes ago:

“If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and frankly I would be making it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. Frankly, in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror,” he said.

“This is not an easy decision for me. I hate to lose. My family, my friends and our supporters… many of you right here in this room have given a great deal to get me where I have a shot at becoming President. If this were only about me, I’d go on. But I entered this race because I love America, and because I love America, in this time of war, I feel I must now stand aside, for our party and for our country,” he said as the crowd exclaimed, “No, no.”

“I will continue to stand for conservative principles; I will fight alongside you for all the things we believe in. And one of those things is that we cannot allow the next President of the United States to retreat in the face of evil extremism!”

Terry Mattingly at GetReligion just posted part of a discussion he had with Andrea Useem, the freelance journalist who runs the site ReligionWriter.com (and is a proud God Blog groupie, I might add). Their discussion focused on the challenge of reporting on Islam, to which Useem is a convert.

Then, of course, there is the ultimate issue: Whether or not to link Islamic beliefs with acts of violence. How can reporters cover the facts — the terrorists themselves trumpet their faith — without implying that this interpretation of Islam is “normal” or “right” to millions of other Muslims? This was a major concern, both to me and to Useem.

It’s crucial to remember this fact — there is no one Islam.

  ReligionWriter: In Jimmy Allen’s 2007 update to Bridging the Gap (text here), Allen lamented that most editors did not see 9/11 as a religious story. But in a way I agree with the editors: Is calling 9/11 an Islam story like saying the Virginia Tech massacre is an Asian-American culture story?

Mattingly: To leave out the religious content of the lives of the bombers would be strange. Let’s look at an example in Christianity. Remember the man who lived out in the woods in North Carolina after blowing up abortion clinics? He had been thrown out of several different very conservative religious groups, and was living as a kind of Christian loner. Yet the press continued to identify him as a Presbyterian. First of all, there’s like 15 different Presbyterian churches: which the heck denomination do you mean? He doesn’t strike me as a PCUSA kind of guy; the world is not full of PCUSA bombers. But for that matter, the world isn’t full of PCA conservative bombers either. In fact, the PCA had thrown Rudolph out — the Orthodox Presbyterians had thrown him out. If you want to accurately describe Rudolph’s life, you end up saying, “Here is a man who said he acted on strong religious motivations, yet the religious groups he was involved with threw him out, and here is why they said they did.” . . .

There, once again, is a debate that has to be covered. You can’t say Eric Rudolph blew up abortion clinics because he was a conservative Christian. You can’t say the guys flew the planes into the towers because they were conservative Muslims. There are too many other conservative Muslims who disagree with them. But the question for journalists is: What are they disagreeing about? And where are the conservative Muslims who will stand up and critique Osama’s interpretation?

I know this struggle, and I’ve tried to tease out the American brand of Islam with stories like this one. But it’s difficult to separate Islam from violence when young American Muslims say their religion justifies suicide bombings or a father is accused of killing his daughter for not wearing the hijab (that was in Canada, but it’s close enough culturally).

Killing the infidel is, of course, not the chief focus of Islam. As despicable as some of the murderous Muslims of the Middle East are, they do not represent Islam to me. I’m led to believe that they are, like so many opportunists throughout history, simply using the endemic religion for political gain.

So how can journalists report the fact that there is variance in Islam—and it’s typically peaceful in the States—when media tend to focus on the dramatic over the mundane, on outrageous actions over everyday interactions? And are we giving most Americans the wrong impression?

A friend just sent me this link:

Straight talking American icon Willie Nelson today told a national radio show that he thought the twin towers were imploded like condemned Las Vegas casino buildings, as the country music superstar forcefully voiced his doubts about the official 9/11 story.

Agreeing with host Alex Jones that he questioned the official story, Nelson elaborated, “I saw those towers fall and I’ve seen an implosion in Las Vegas – there’s too much similarities between the two, and I saw a building fall that didn’t get hit by nothing,” added Nelson, referring to WTC Building 7 which collapsed in the late afternoon of September 11.

“How naive are we – what do they think we’ll go for?,” asked Nelson, pointing out that his doubts began on the very day of 9/11.

“I saw one fall and it was just so symmetrical, I said wait a minute I just saw that last week at the casino in Las Vegas and you see these implosions all the time and the next one fell and I said hell there’s another one – and they’re trying to tell me that an airplane did it and I can’t go along with that,” said Nelson.

Nelson is not the first celebrity to question the veracity of the terror attacks. As this press release notes, Ed Asner, Rosie O’Donnell, Martin Sheen, James Brolin, David Lynch and others have questioned what happened that day. There was also that Ron Paul newsletter about the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center.

But my favorite 9/11-conspiracy theory is that held by Eric Cartman, who believes the World Trade Center wasn’t generally brought down by the Jews but by one Jew, his 9-year-old pal/nemesis Kyle Broflovski. But, as Stan states at the end of that episode, 9/11 was in fact perpetrated by “a bunch of pissed-off Muslims.”

Duh.

It looks like James Dobson has a philosophical sympathizer in Rabbi Yehuda Levin, who on Monday urged Torah Jews to cast a no-vote in protest unless a pro-family presidential nominee comes forth.

Rabbi Yehuda Levin, spokesman for the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the US and Canada (UOR), also known as Agudas HaRabbanim, issued a video statement Monday in which he called for Jewish Americans to avoid voting for a candidate “whose position is in any way antithetical to our Torah based morality.”

Specifically, Rabbi Levin said, “Candidates who support abortion on demand, the toeiva agenda, liberal attitudes towards pornography of any sort – are antithetical to our way of life and it is forbidden to support or vote for them.” The “toeiva agenda” is generally understood among religious Jews to refer to the homosexual lobby’s legislative and social causes.

Adopting an uncompromising position, the UOR head advised, “If one has to vote in an election or primary where both candidates are anti-Biblical family values, G-d forbid…. let the voter cast a write-in protest vote, but do not compromise by voting for the ‘lesser evil.’ If we value the purity and holiness of our children and grandchildren, we dare not compromise.”

Levin is founder of Jews for Morality, which by its name states what he thinks of Jews on the whole. One of my colleagues has taken to calling Levin “the fatwa rabbi.”

Only two nights ago, Mitt Romney promised his presidential campaign would continue on. But it won’t.

Mitt Romney is suspending his Republican presidential bid, sources are telling CNN and Time magazine’s website.

He is to make the announcement in a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.

Romney was far behind in delegates after John McCain swept winner-take-all states in the Northeast and also won California and other big states on Super Tuesday.

But even as he huddled Wednesday with key advisers at his Boston campaign headquarters, a spokesman insisted that Romney was in the race for the long haul.

It was a rough run for the former Massachusetts governor. But is this it? Will Mike Huckabee call it quits too in hope that John McCain will extend the VP spot to him?

The Jewish Chronicle, via the Bintel Blog, has a strange story about an even odder resolution passed by Britain’s oldest debating society, the Oxford Union.

The motion last Thursday, “This House believes that the State of Israel has a right to exist”, was passed by more than 100 votes, but not before the antics of some of the participants caused raised eyebrows in the union’s debating chamber.

American academic Norman Finkelstein, fresh from a tour of Britain backed by the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, spoke in favour of the motion but voted against it, while Ted Honderich, professor of philosophy at University College, London, joined the two anti-motion speakers — Palestinian academic Ghada Karmi and Israeli professor Ilan Pappé — but voted in favour of the resolution.

One member of the audience decried the “absurdity” of the debate. “I didn’t think it was a question we asked any more,” she said.

Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors, is the author of “The Holocaust Industry” and “Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History.” He seems to generate controversy most places he visits, and next week he’ll be at Cal State Northridge.