Easter Celebrations in a Storm of Postmodern Iconoclasm

Unless you've taken up residence on planet Vulcan (which is becoming a more attractive prospect by the day) you can't have helped noticing the Catholic Church coming under heavy assault. In the chain of events the story happens to culminate over Holy Week and Easter.

While the abuse at the hands of priests is entirely despicable and without wishing to whitewash the guilty, it must be said that some of the media exposure has been disproportionate, to put it mildly. The postmodern left have reacted true to nature: dialectically and entirely in line with the Alinsky tradition: hold them to live up to their own standards (which no human being can do all of the time), then come down on them like a ton of bricks.

The smear campaign unleashed this week affects many groups and entities: the Tea Party movement, Republicans, Conservatives, Geert Wilders, Israel, the Berlusconi government in Italy, Euroskeptics, warmist deniers, Georgia and its President Saakashvili, the US Constitution (now toilet paper), George Bush and Dick Cheney, Eric Cantor, the usual talk radio hosts, Fox News, banks, insurance companies, big oil and big pharma, Capitalism, the private sector, reason, the middle class, weapons, heterosexual marriage, the Pope and the Vatican - all dissent from the Neo Socialist line is fair game. See here what's happening in the UK, where the Tory leader turns out to be a follower of Lucifer "community organizer" Alinsky.

The Counter-Enlighteners have had their eye on religion for a very long time. But Catholicism, as the ultimate adversary, has been singled out for demolition from the get go (others get the "boring from within" treatment). They've had too much power for far too long. Now's the moment to strike and paint them as essentially evil. And that, they do. They've been ramming nails into the coffin all week long.

But Free Republic in a post just up entitled "Forgotten Study: Abuse in School 100 Times Worse than by Priests" have been summing up the figures and put them into some perspective:

"(...) the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests. After effectively disappearing from the radar, Shakeshaft’s study is now being revisited by commentators seeking to restore a sense of proportion to the mainstream coverage of the Church scandal. 

According to the 2004 study “the most accurate data available at this time” indicates that “nearly 9.6 percent of students are targets of educator sexual misconduct sometime during their school career.” (...) 

In an article published on Monday, renowned Catholic commentator George Weigel referred to the Shakeshaft study, and observed that “The sexual and physical abuse of children and young people is a global plague” in which Catholic priests constitute only a small minority of perpetrators." (...) >>>

By a chance constellation the Jewish Passover, Western Easter, and Orthodox Easter, all happen to coincide this weekend. But there's no love lost in the Christian brotherhood. While the Archbishop of Canterbury has said the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland has lost "all credibility", and "Experts offer opinions on whether the pope should be held responsible", Galveston-Houston Archbishop Cardinal Daniel DiNardo criticized the media coverage.

The Church has started pushing back: "several prominent European clergy on Thursday denounced suggestions that Pope Benedict XVI was anything but a vigorous defender of victims of priestly sexual abuse."

And at a Good Friday service, the Pope's personal preacher, Reverend Cantalamessa, likened allegations of the pope's involvement in an alleged cover-up to "some of the worst aspects of antisemitism". It didn't take long before that was viciously savaged in a fit of moral indignation. Antisemitism is on the order of the day, unless Jews can be exploited to attack Christians! Talk of bigotry! After the dust settled it transpired the cleric had been quoting from a letter he received from a Jewish friend. You can hardly expect postmodernists to understand the parallels in using a few rotten apples to tarnish the whole basket, or can you?

That is, unless their favorite religionists are involved! When it comes to Muslims, it is entirely outrageous and racist, indeed fascist to lump an entire religion of peace pieces, with a few assertive victims of Western imperialism who - in their desperation - have turned to asymmetric warfare (a.k.a. terrorism, or man-made disasters). Hold them to their own standards and then apply double standards, is the line.

The Jihad Jane case - "white Al Qaeda", home-grown hirabahism, is by now hardly unique. It provides ample proof that Islamic violence has nothing to do with race or culture, but has everything to do with Islam as an ideology. There must be something in it, that triggers its practitioners into bloodletting. While the older religions of Judeism and Christenity according to the Platonic mind/body dichotomy have separated the sacred from the secular, the younger religion of Islam permeates every aspect of life, including politics.

The test that liberal democracy has in store for Muslims will be if the Ummah will be able to break up its collective, and if it will manage subsequently to separate Mosque from State. That will be the sole hope of integration into Western culture, so as to avert the clash of civilizations that everyone fears so much.

Happy Passover, a happy and blessed Easter, Kali Anastasi kai Kalo Pascha ...

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