Tag Archives: Secular Left

News

Pew Research: 40% of millenials oppose free speech

1 Comment
Pew Research: the next generation opposes free speech
Pew Research: the next generation opposes free speech

First, let’s see the data, then we’ll talk about who made this happen, and what Christians can do about it.

This is the raw data is from the leftist Pew Research Center.

It says:

American Millennials are far more likely than older generations to say the government should be able to prevent people from saying offensive statements about minority groups, according to a new analysis of Pew Research Center survey data on free speech and media across the globe.

We asked whether people believe that citizens should be able to make public statements that are offensive to minority groups, or whether the government should be able to prevent people from saying these things. Four-in-ten Millennials say the government should be able to prevent people publicly making statements that are offensive to minority groups, while 58% said such speech is OK.

[…]In the U.S., our findings also show a racial divide on this question, with non-whites more likely (38%) to support government prevention of such speech than non-Hispanic whites (23%).

Nearly twice as many Democrats say the government should be able to stop speech against minorities (35%) compared with Republicans (18%). Independents, as is often the case, find themselves in the middle. One-third of all women say the government should be able to curtail speech that is offensive to minorities vs. 23% of men who say the same.

Furthermore, Americans who have a high school degree or less are more likely than those with at least a college degree to say that speech offensive to minority groups should be able to be restricted (a 9-percentage-point difference).

Now why is this happening? This is happening for two reasons.

First, we have a retreat from masculinity. A significant part of being a man is being able to tell the truth about good and evil, as well as telling the truth about spiritual things. That’s why whenever I list the male roles, I start with protector and provider, but I also mention moral leader and spiritual leader. It’s no accident that men are more conservative than women on issues like abortion and gay marriage, especially married men. Just look at the 75% of young, unmarried women who vote Democrat. Men are more comfortable with conflict, and more comfortable with expressing views that offend. Men are more likely to speak out for the truth regardless of how other people feel about it. Men are more likely to stick to their convictions in the face of peer-disapproval. But in a society where women dominate the education system, and discourage masculinity, the next generation is naturally going to shy away from speaking the truth on moral and spiritual issues, and everyone will focus more on feelings and compassion. One last point: we should not be supporting policies that get fathers out of their homes and away from their children, e.g. – no-fault divorce, single mother welfare benefits, sex education curriculum designed by Planned Parenthood, etc.

To illustrate this first point, recall a post that I wrote before about a day care worker who explained in the Washington Post how she teaches children, especially boys, not to make moral judgments, by shaming them.

Second, Christian parents retreated away from apologetics, and integrating Bible teaching with worldview concerns like politics, economics and current events. Parents, rather than fighting for policies and moral values that make Christianity viable, and focused on feelings and piety divorced from evidence.There is no emphasis on teaching that Christianity is true, nor that Christian teachings about morality are true. Without a focus on showing why speech is true, younger Christians start to believe that words are just things that make them feel good. They learn that speech is not true or false, but just about good feelings from the parents. And so, naturally, when someone from the secular left comes along and tells them that speech is not allowed if it makes someone feel bad, they go along with this. They don’t see that speech is supposed to be about truth and falsehood, they learned from their parents dismissal of apologetics and worldview that it is about piety and feelings and peer-approval.

To illustrate, recall a post that I wrote before about my own journey to a robust, lasting Christianity, in which I gave the example of a Christian mother who thought that apologetics was pointless, and that’s what she taught her kids.

So there are two solutions to this. First, we need to be mindful of how female-dominated schools crush the ability of men to stand up for what they believe, and second, we need to be careful to teach our children about Christianity with an emphasis on truth and evidence, not on feelings and dogma.

News

What percentage of Muslims approve of radical Islam and terrorism?

8 Comments
Muslim populations in Europe
Muslim populations in Europe

Normally, when people ask me about this question, I go straight to the 2013 Pew Research survey which I blogged about before. But now I have something even better.

Here’s a post from Ben Shapiro at Breitbart News which looks at several polls from several different countries.

Shapiro writes: (links to polls removed)

So, here is the evidence that the enemy we face is not a “tiny minority” of Muslims, let alone a rootless philosophy unconnected to Islam entirely. It’s not just the thousands of westerners now attempting to join ISIS. It’s millions of Muslims who support their general goals, even if they don’t support the group itself.

France. A new, widely-covered poll shows that a full 16% of French people have positive attitudes toward ISIS. That includes 27% of French between the ages of 18-24. Anne-Elizabeth Moutet of Newsweek wrote, “This is the ideology of young French Muslims from immigrant backgrounds…these are the same people who torch synagogues.”

Britain. In 2006, a poll for the Sunday Telegraph found that 40% of British Muslims wanted shariah law in the United Kingdom, and that 20% backed the 7/7 bombers.Another poll from that year showed that 45% of British Muslims said that 9/11 was an American/Israeli conspiracy; that poll showed that one-quarter of British Muslims believed that the 7/7 bombings were justified.

Palestinian Areas. A poll in 2011 showed that 32% of Palestinians supported the brutal murder of five Israeli family members, including a three-month-old baby. In 2009, a poll showed that 78% of Palestinians had positive or mixed feelings about Osama Bin Laden. A 2013 poll showed 40% of Palestinians supporting suicide bombings and attacks against civilians. 89% favored sharia law. Currently, 89% of Palestinians support terror attacks on Israel.

Pakistan. After the killing of Osama Bin Laden, the Gilani Foundation did a poll of Pakistanis and found that 51% of them grieved for the terrorist mastermind, with 44% of them stating that he was a martyr. In 2009, 26% of Pakistanis approved of attacks on US troops in Iraq. That number was 29% for troops in Afghanistan. Overall, 76% of Pakistanis wanted strict shariah law in every Islamic country.

Morocco. A 2009 poll showed that 68% of Moroccans approved of terrorist attacks on US troops in Iraq; 61% backed attacks on American troops in Afghanistan as of 2006. 76% said they wanted strict sharia law in every Islamic country.

Jordan. 72% of Jordanians backed terror attacks against US troops in Iraq as of 2009. In 2010, the terrorist group Hezbollah had a 55% approval rating; Hamas had a 60% approval rating.

Indonesia: In 2009, a poll demonstrated that 26% of Indonesians approved of attacks on US troops in Iraq; 22% backed attacks on American troops in Afghanistan. 65% said they agreed with Al Qaeda on pushing US troops out of the Middle East. 49% said they supported strict sharia law in every Islamic country. 70% of Indonesians blamed 9/11 on the United States, Israel, someone else, or didn’t know. Just 30% said Al Qaeda was responsible.

Egypt. As of 2009, 87% of Egyptians said they agreed with the goals of Al Qaeda in forcing the US to withdraw forces from the Middle East. 65% said they wanted strict sharia law in every Islamic country. As of that same date, 69% of Egyptians said they had either positive or mixed feelings about Osama Bin Laden. In 2010, 95% of Egyptians said it was good that Islam is playing a major role in politics.

United States. A 2013 poll from Pew showed that 13% of American Muslims said that violence against civilians is often, sometimes or rarely justified to defend Islam. A 2011 poll from Pew showed that 21 percent of Muslims are concerned about extremism among Muslim Americans. 19 percent of American Muslims as of 2011 said they were either favorable toward Al Qaeda or didn’t know.

In short, tens of millions of Muslims all over the world sympathize with the goals or tactics of terrorist groups – or both. That support is stronger outside the West, but it is present even in the West. Islamist extremism is not a passing or fading phenomenon – it is shockingly consistent over time. And the West’s attempts to brush off the ideology of fanaticism has been an overwhelming failure.

A more recent poll says that 13% of Syrian refugees support Islamic State:

A first-of-its-kind survey of the hordes of Syrian refugees entering Europe found 13% support the Islamic State. The poll should raise alarms about the risks posed by the resettlement of 10,000 refugees in the U.S.

The poll of 900 Syrian refugees by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies also found that another 10% of the displaced Syrians have a lukewarm, but not entirely negative, view of the terror group. That means 23% — or almost 1 in 4 — could be susceptible to ISIS recruitment.

It also means as many 2,500 of the 10,000 Syrian refugees that the Obama administration is resettling inside American cities are potential terrorist threats.

Now contrast those facts with the views of Barack Obama and his allies in the mainstream media.

That video is from The Weekly Standard, here’s the text:

President Obama told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that 99.9 percent of Muslims reject radical Islam. He made the comments in response to a question about the White House avoiding using the phrase “Islamic terrorists.”

“You know, I think that the way to understand this is there is an element growing out of Muslim communities in certain parts of the world that have perverted the religion, have embraced a nihilistic, violent, almost medieval interpretation of Islam, and they’re doing damage in a lot of countries around the world,” said Obama.

“But it is absolutely true that I reject a notion that somehow that creates a religious war because the overwhelming majority of Muslims reject that interpretation of Islam. They don’t even recognize it as being Islam, and I think that for us to be successful in fighting this scourge, it’s very important for us to align ourselves with the 99.9 percent of Muslims who are looking for the same thing we’re looking for–order, peace, prosperity.”

So Obama denies all of these surveys, and instead invents a view of the world that is consistent with his feelings. A true man of the secular left.

This gap between belief and reality explains why he is now bringing 200,000 Syrian Muslim refugees into America, keeping Syrian Christian refugees out of America, and generally underestimating Islamic State (ISIS / ISIL) because he cannot believe that radical Islam is anything for us to be concerned about.

Is the government capable of vetting Syrian refugees to find threats?

Not so much:

The administration argues that it’s conducting interviews with Syrians at camps in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon. But without security forces on the ground in Syria who can verify details, there is no way to back-check a refugee’s story to see if he is telling the truth and is, in fact, not a security threat.

Even when we had people on the ground in Iraq to screen refugees, terrorists got through the safety net.

In 2011, for instance, two Kentucky immigrants who had been resettled as Iraqi refugees were busted for trying to buy stinger missiles for al-Qaida.

It turned out that their fingerprints matched those linked to roadside bombs in Iraq. It was a major red flag that should have barred their entry, but U.S. screeners failed to take note. And the terrorists slipped into the U.S.

The administration’s vetting process for the massive influx of Syrian refugees is completely unreliable, admits the FBI official in charge of such security background checks.

“It’s not even close to being under control,” warned assistant FBI director Michael Steinbach.

We should not be believing the man who promised us that we could keep our doctor, keep our health plans, and that our health insurance premiums would go down $2,500. He is either lying, or he likes to speak on matters where he is not competent to know the truth of the matter.

UPDATE: ECM sends me this video from Ben Shapiro:

Awesome!

News

Vanderbilt University students try to get black conservative professor fired

5 Comments
Dr. Carol M. Swain
Dr. Carol M. Swain

This is from the Daily Signal.

Excerpt:

A black conservative professor who found herself the latest target of student protests nationwide has one thing to say to those calling for her to be suspended from the university where she teachers: “Grow up.”

Among other allegations, students accused Carol Swain, a professor of law and political science Vanderbilt University for nearly 27 years, of “unprofessional intimidation on social media” and “discriminatory practices in the classroom.”

Swain actively posts her Christian conservative view points on her public Facebook page and website called BeThePeopleTV. She has authored numerous award-winning books and has been cited by the Supreme Court,according to her resume.

But recently, her conservative values left her at odds with students on campus that started a petition demanding she be removed from the university.

[…]Swain said the students behind the protests never took any of her classes, all of which are elective.

The petition explains what exactly the black conservative has done to get herself fired: “unprofessional intimidation on social media, discriminatory practices in the classroom, and unclear representation as a Public Figure with invocations of the Vanderbilt name on her Facebook page.”

And, “Over the past few years, Professor Carol Swain has become synonymous with bigotry, intolerance, and unprofessionalism…. Swain has let her hate-filled prejudices negatively impact her work, our student body, and Vanderbilt’s reputation.”

So, this is what students are learning how to do, even in a university in one of the most conservative states in the union.

I think it’s worth recalling the last story I posted about Vanderbilt at this time.

From Public Discourse.

Excerpt:

Vanderbilt University has decided that Christian student groups that hold traditional Christian religious views are not welcome on campus. They will no longer be recognized as valid student organizations. Vanderbilt’s reason is that such groups require that their leaders be Christian—that is, that their leaders embrace certain core principles of Christianity and try to live according to these principles. In Vanderbilt’s view, religious beliefs and standards “discriminate” against those students who do not subscribe to them. Therefore, student religious groups with religious beliefs and standards are banned.

The situation would be unbelievable—were it not true. The issue came to a head this year when a student group at Vanderbilt Law School, the Christian Legal Society, submitted its “constitution” to the university. The constitution provided that the group’s leaders should believe in the Bible and in Jesus Christ as their Lord and savior; that they should be willing to lead members in worship, prayer, and Bible study; and that they should “strive to exemplify Christ-like qualities.” Vanderbilt’s Director of Religious Life, Reverend Gretchen Person, replied that such views were forbidden. Vanderbilt’s policies “do not allow” religious groups to have such an “expectation/ qualification of officers,” she wrote. Last week, the administration officially declared the policy that Vanderbilt will exclude student religious groups that “impose faith-based or belief-based requirements for membership or leadership.”

So what’s the answer?

Well, it’s important to understand that the university system, especially in non-STEM departments, is basically a place where people who cannot find work in the productive private sector get jobs indoctrinating the young in secular leftist values. They are basically secular leftist seminaries. And they often funded by taxpayers. So we need to vote for smaller government, less money for students and universities, and substitutes for higher education that are non-political, e.g. – vocational training, alternatives that focus on STEM fields like e-learning. In my case, I would recommend that young Christians try to avail themselves of free sources of learning, and learn how to program using online courses instead of attending universities like Vanderbilt. Just FYI, there are no conservative universities aside from maybe Hillsdale College and Grove City College.

You may also be interested in my earlier post about California State University professor Lopez, who is under fire from LGBT activists for promoting natural marriage. In that post I also talk about professor McAdams, who was sanctioned by Marquette University for upholding traditional marriage. Marquette is a “Catholic” university, i.e. – it’s secular leftist.

Daily Signal also had recent articles about Lopez and McAdams.