June 25, 2012

Noteworthy

Waking from the Democratic Dream

Writing in the National Interest, Robert W. Merry calls on the US to understand that the culture of Middle Eastern Islam does not encourage the evolution of democratic norms.

Americans can’t fathom the power of the Islamic idea that there is no spiritual “I,” but only a spiritual “We” that has entered into the quickened body as a reflection of the divine light. The Arabic word for this, as Oswald Spengler points out, is Islam—submission. He adds that the Western religious sacrament of contrition “presupposes the strong and free will that can overcome itself. But it is precisely the impossibility of an Ego as a free power in the face of the divine that constitutes ‘Islam.’” He explains that the Islamic prime sacrament is Grace, which knows no such thing as free will.

Antisemitism With a Literary Glow: Alice Walker’s Ugly Caricature of Israeli Jews

Adam Levick of Algemeiner hits out at Alice Walker over her refusal to allow The Colour Purple to be translated into Hebrew, and for her vilification of Israelis.

Walker claims that her decision not to allow her book to be translated into Hebrew is part of her ongoing attempt to “rid humanity of its self-destructive habit of dehumanizing whole populations”, yet it has obviously never occurred to her that she is supremely guilty of that fault herself. A woman who would liken Israelis who live on “the “wrong” side of the green line” to the KKK is an unserious political poser – an extremist engaged in incendiary, hateful, and dehumanizing rhetoric about hundreds of thousands of Jews.

Media Digest