Douthat and Dreher to auction beard trimmings to support Mideast Christians

Ross Douthat and Rod Dreher, whose weekly editorial pleas in support of the Mideast's persecuted Christian minority (Dreher runs a popular photo item each week known as "View From Your Persecuted Mideast Christian") have been as relentless over the past decade as they have been admirable, have just announced plans to auction their respective beard trimmings to whoever collects such things, with all proceeds going to support the beleaguered Christians in question. I'll update as more information on this remarkable dual outpouring of selfless generosity becomes available.

Meanwhile David P. Goldman ("Spengler") has this to say:

I had to read the penultimate paragraph of Ross Douthat’s New York Times piece on “friendless Middle East Christians” before the enormity of it sunk in. Douthat wrote:

If Cruz felt that he couldn’t address an audience of persecuted Arab Christians without including a florid, “no greater ally” preamble about Israel, he could have withdrawn from the event. The fact that he preferred to do it this way says a lot–none of it good–about his priorities and instincts.

In so many words: Jew-hatred among Middle Eastern Christians is so rampant that it should be ignored in the interests of saving this oppressed minority. Never mind that it is impossible to conceive of any strategic configuration on the Middle East that might help Middle Eastern Christians without including Israel; never mind that Israel’s supporters in the United States are among the first to urge America to act on their behalf; and, above all, never mind that Israel is the only country in the Middle East where Christians can practice their religion in security and safety, and that Israel is the only country in the Middle East with a growing Christian population.

The statement is outrageous, capping a long list of inaccuracies. The problem is NOT, as Douthat argues, that “the Middle East’s Christians simply don’t have the kind of influence to matter” in American strategic calculations. The problem is that Middle East Christians threw in with (and some helped invent) a movement directly opposed to American interests in the region, namely the Arab nationalism embodied in the Ba’ath Party. I reviewed this sad history in a 2009 essay [this one] reposted on this site.

While we're all on tippy-toes waiting to see the faces of persecuted Mideast Christians weeping with joy when they receive their beard trimmings checks from D & D during the big reveal on the upcoming New York Times'-sponsored Extreme Makeover: Mideast Christians Edition, can anyone think of ways to leverage the sufferings of this oppressed minority to serve personal or partisan interests far removed from their own?

Frankly, my dear, Spengler doesn't give a damn

A forceful bit of commentary from Mr. Spengler. If you are a Neo-con(federate) it will probably make you very angry. Spengler equates the apologetic formulas used to justify the Confederacy with those used by black liberation theologians such as Barack Obama's minister, Jeremiah Wright. In making his case, he compares the narratives romanticizing the Civil War south in films such Gone with the Wind with the glamorization of drug-related crime in the urban community as evinced in gangsta rap videos and films such as Get Rich or Die Tryin'. Excerpt:

From this great suffering arise two genres of American popular culture, the Gone With the Wind ilk of Civil War epic, and the "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" brand of gangsta tale. Both try to take the edge off the revulsion and placate the dishonored dead by turning them into folk-heroes. That is understandable, but also unfortunate, for America still has a great deal of killing left to do around the world, and might as well get used to it.

"Get Rich or Die Tryin'" would have been a good epitaph for the Confederate dead, who fought for land and slaves, not for "states' rights" or the sanctity of their soil. Slave-owners along with want-to-be slave-owners had it coming. The Union general William Tecumseh Sherman who said after he burned Atlanta, "I fear the world will jump to the wrong conclusion that because I am in Atlanta the work is done. Far from it. We must kill three hundred thousand, I have told you of so often, and the further they run the harder for us to get them."

Given the sad history of racial oppression in the South for a century after the Civil War, the only thing to regret is that Sherman didn't finish the job. I stopped watching the film version of Gone With the Wind after Scarlett O'Hara saved her plantation from the tax-collector. I wanted her to pick cotton until her back broke.

I know, I know... it's a Dixie-thang and I just wouldn't understand.

The biting a few paragraphs down is worthy of Hannibal Lector.

The self-pity of the South pervades American popular culture, from Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, to The Band's bathetic song, "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down". It is best known in the cover version by Joan Baez, an old civil rights campaigner. Such is the pull of identity politics.

After reading the conclusion where he quotes one of the boldest, sanest and most clear-thinking black commentators out there, Bill Cosby, I was fairly convinced that the purpose of the rest of the article was just a two-by-four to get the attention of black racists and white racists alike, since they are all alike if not identical. Cosby is almost the anti-Wright, stressing personal responsibility as the answer to the black crime epidemic, not radical revolutionary ideology. Barack Obama was more apt to get in touch with his inner Cosby a year ago, and by most appraisals, that's what resulted in much of the support he received from moderate voters who are sick of the Jackson/Sharpton "challenger" model (Shelby Steele's word). Maybe the Illinois Senator should be asked what he thinks of Bill Cosby's message now that he's caught between the rock of personal responsibility and the hard place of black victimology.