Holy smoke! They’re Godless in the West

By Helen Ang

 

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If anyone cares to give Holy smoke! (First edition) a second reading, they’ll find that my post vis-à-vis Fitna and Schism were as much about the superficiality of mainstream media and blogs.

 

Some discerning participants managed to delve below the shallowness conditioned in Malaysian mass thinking, and pertinent input came from Paul Warren and Barry respectively: “There is a presumption here that [Geert] Wilders is a Christian; Has anyone determined of what faith Wilders is or if indeed he professes any?” and “Most angmohs I have come across are non-Christians and typically only attend church a few times in their lifetime, including the funeral service.”

 

The mistaken assumption in Malaysia that whites must be Christian is likely conditioned by our own ‘special’ fiat that Malays cannot be other than Muslim.

 

I myself have been presumed Christian because my mom chose the Anglicized name ‘Helen’ which is actually of Greek, not Christian, origin. And the Greek pantheon of gods was pagan.

 

The Malaysian stereotypical thinking led detractors to say I was writing Malaysiakini articles unfavourable of Islamization because I was Christian, which I’m not. Then in this forum, we have Singam who contributed the following comment: “Fitna and Schism are merely continuations of the Crusades. The enmity that began back then continues till today.” His reasoning is too simplistic if not flawed.

 

Unless Wilders has bared his soul to the Press and explicitly confessed to be a Christian, who is to say if he is practising and how can we assume he was motivated by religious beliefs?

 

Research bears out Barry’s observation on declining church attendance in Europe. These are the official statistics from the Netherlands census bureau. The last time they checked in 1997, some 14% of the Dutch said they worshipped in church at least once a week whereas 66% responded “hardly ever”.

 

And here’s a recent survey by Global Peace Index in cooperation with the Economist Intelligence Unit 2007 which named Norway, New Zealand and Denmark as the Top 3 most peaceful countries globally.

 

In Norway – literacy score 100, income rank second highest in the world and gender equality ranking 2nd as well – only 32% “believe there is a God”. In Denmark, only 31% say “they believe there is a God” although a majority, like Malaysians, are registered at birth to a state religion.

 

The percentages in Sweden and Finland believing in God are 23% and 41%. In New Zealand, some 35% have no religion, according to the country’s 2006 census. Yet Malaysians continue to harbour an erroneous perception of Christianity as wholly Western, when in fact the new hyper churches are mushrooming in South Korea.

 

Meanwhile, in Wilders’ homeland The Netherlands, according to the 2005 Eurobarometer Poll, 34% of Dutch citizens responded “they believe there is a god”, whereas 37% “believe there is some sort of spirit or life force” and 27% “do not believe there is any sort of spirit, god, or life force”. The CIA World Factbook records in 2002 that 41% of the Dutch have no religion.

 

Therefore is a retaliatory attack on Christianity for Fitna specifically hurtful to Wilders and the Dutch, or is it just plain misguided?

 

A similar lack of awareness led Edmund to comment: “I guess Helen Ang has never been to a bombed out abortion clinic and seen first hand what Christian fundamentalism can do.” True, I’ve not researched such attacks but I believe they occurred in the States not Europe, and the total number of murders over the last 35 years since Roe v. Wade (1973) is seven.

 

Another comment comes from Samad: “Why condemn the action [of making Schism, ‘the Bible version of Fitna’] more than the cause of it.”

 

The point I’m bringing up is poor discursive skills reflecting a lack of critical thinking, such as Edmund’s misplaced comparison of radicalism, Singam’s missing link theory of continuing Crusades or the Saudi blogger’s mistaken idea that his anti-Christian video clip is socking the Dutchman an eye for an eye. The ‘cause’ of Raed AlSaeed’s action is really a gap in logic, paralleling the one which led the War on Terror to respond to 9/11 by invading Iraq.   

 

The current scenario in Western Europe is more relevant if we are to consider Wilders’ context, and his concern expressed in Fitna is the creeping Islamization caused by immigration, a topic of considerable debate in the Netherlands and across the continent. As Parliamentarian, Wilders’ is a lawmaker and stricter immigration policies his political platform.

 

Wilders’ rhetoric is that illiberal culture imported along with the fast-growing Muslim immigrant population would undermine the Dutch way of life. The liberties that he mentions in Fitna as being threatened by Muslim mores are not supported by contemporary Christian teachings either, such as gay relationships. His friend Theo Van Gogh – whose Muslim killer shot him several times, then slit his throat from ear to ear, and after that pinned a letter to his stomach with the bloodied knife – is known to have had little regard for Christian values.

 

‘Respect for human life’ was the most frequently mentioned personal value in the Netherlands at 46% compared to the ‘important place of religion’ at 31%, reported Eurobarometer in a survey released Dec 2006 for the European Commission.

 

Holy smoke Part 1 was a Hartal MSM article arguing that Malaysian newspapers dumb down their readership through one-dimensional, sanitised writing, which precludes this sort of discussion on faith issues.

 

MSM’s politically correct propensity to invoke Tourism Malaysia-type ‘tolerance’ is bollocks, but rather than I cover old ground, please refer to an earlier post ‘Save yourself from Sun-stroke’, including my further expositions in its Comments section. http://harismibrahim.wordpress.com/2008/03/24/save-yourself-from-sun-stroke/