Crusaders are Bad; Jihadists are Good

The good folks over at Phi Beta Cons, a sub-blog of National Review Online, yesterday published a comment on, with a link to the video of, a scuffle begun between two men working for a Muslim school named Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (often called TiZA charter school). This place has apparently been in the news quite a bit because their curriculum is suspected not to stay entirely on its side of the revered wall separating Church and State. They require ritual observations, such as the removal of shoes, various washings, and prayer times. They apparently also make it hard to leave until after Muslim instruction classes end, an hour after by school, by delaying busses until that time. This obviously leads to all sorts of questions regarding charter schools, school choice, and the rest, and not all of the answers are obvious. The main point I wish to bring up, however, is this: Tarek ibn Ziyad is a Muslim warrior who led the conquest of what Wikipedia calls Hispania – in other words, the Iberian peninsula, modern day Spain and Portugal – in the days when it was apparently run by the Visigoths. I just know that I’ll catch hell (assuming anyone’s reading) when I suggest that there are no public or semi-public schools named after Crusaders (there is one named after a Viking – Leif Ericson Scholastic Academy on Chicago’s West Side, oddly enough), but I can’t imagine a modern charter school – one set up with government funds – being able to set itself up with the name of a great Crusader. Richard the Lionheart Academy? Don Juan of Austria High School? Pope Urban II Kindergarten? I’d be surprised.

A Bit of Belloc

I don’t know how well respected Hilaire Belloc is as an historian, whether he’s simply regarded as a polemicist, a mere popularizer, or whether he is deemed to have legitimate insights that historians take seriously, no matter whether they agree with them all. That said, the following passage from the opening of his Characters of the Reformation, which at the very least is eminently readable, strike me as plausible, though this part of my knowledge is deeply lacking:

The break-up of united western Christendom with the coming of the Reformation was by far the most important thing in history since the foundation of the Catholic Church fifteen hundred years before.

Men of foresight perceived at the time that if catastrophe were allowed to consummate itself, if the revolt were to be successful (and it was successful), our civilization would certainly be imperiled, and possibly, in the long run, destroyed.

That indeed is what has happened. Europe with all its culture is now seriously imperiled and stands no small chance of being destroyed by its own internal disruption; and all this is ultimately the fruit of the great religious revolution which began four hundred years ago.

This seems to me to have some truths to it, though I would wonder whether the original schism from the Eastern Church, or the rise of Islam (did one allow the other to succeed?), were more important. I also wonder whether the Reformation could have been combated effectively or not. He was certainly right about the break-up of the West, though not, perhaps, for the exact reasons he expected. The book was published in 1936, and Belloc lived to see the end of the war which so thoroughly damaged and separated Europe. The irony was that in their attempt to make World War II the war that would end all wars, since the First had failed to do so, the Europeans attempted to create an artificial unity that has been building and, it sounds like, becoming hollowed out from within by the wholesale cultural transformation enabled by multiculturalism.

Jim Geraghty Agrees

It looks like Jim Geraghty agrees with my post of April 2, that if there’s anyone who should be blamed for racism in the Clinton-Obama fracas, it’s not whites. He’s just slightly more direct in his statement than I was, which is to say, not very. He apparently feels like I do, regarding discretion and all that.

Update, 8:08PM: Let me add something on Geraghty. He’s not just being circumspect. Saying, “Complaining about voters preferring candidates who share traits with them is like complaining about the weather,” he sensibly dismisses the notion that group-oriented voting is particularly offenseive. As I’ve said before, there’s nothing particularly wrong with voting for those who are like you, and this primary is ideologically close, decreasing the policy costs of voting on the basis of likenesses alone.