Defaming Religion

“Peace is a communist plot,” Irving Kristol once declared. It’s one of my favorites of his many good lines—overstated, overheated, and overdue; forcing us to notice, in a way no softer phrasing would, that nearly every organization during the Cold War with the word peace in its title was in the service of the Soviet Union.

Something similar seems to be happening with the word religion these days, at least in the international community. Like peace , it’s a saw that cuts in only one direction. Scrinch , it bites against the West to advance Islam, then with a ssssh it slides silently back without impact on the Arab countries. Here, for example, is a recent U.N. Resolution against defamation of religion that rather proves the point. Religion is an Islamic plot.

Well, maybe that’s too much. But it helps explain the irritation of many Christians that the protests against religious defamation only seem to work in favor of Muslims. In Canada, Mark Steyn is under legal attack for defaming Islam—and this in a country in which it is taken for granted that Christianity is something that must be suppressed.