215 dead in terror attacks, Sri Lanka

[Dolan]

I guess not.

[fightinfrenchman]

Twitter is not the only way they communicate. Both Hillary and Obama are Christian

[Dolan]

Does that mean what they post there doesn't have any significance?

[fightinfrenchman]

The word choice was not significant to begin with

[Goodspeed]

dolan got jammed?

Yeah.. You can tell you're wrong when Jam is having none of your shit

[rsy]

Of these only one is expressing sympathy for an attack.

Clinton has no tweets using the word christian, but has many mentioning the word muslim: https://twitter.com/search?q=muslim%20f ... n&src=typd

Of there only one is expressing sympathy for an attack. The rest are all from the 2016 election campaign and are a response to Trump's anti-muslim rhetoric. Nothing wrong with that.

Yeah, that's what I meant. Obama shows sympathy for Muslim victims by calling them that way, but doesn't address Christians directly while showing sympathy for the victims of the Sri Lanka attacks using a similar measure. He calls them "Eastern worshippers".

Clinton does the same thing and besides that she doesn't mention Christians ever, right? How are these two American politicians representing that huge number of Christians from the USA? Really makes you wonder...

Not that I have any particular sympathy for any religion myself. But just saying that their variable attitudes show something significant.

How is calling Muslims Muslims and calling Christians Easter worshippers any indication of sympathy?

[Dolan]

Both Obama and Hillary Clinton are avoiding showing solidarity with or sympathy for Christian victims, that's what I thought it's interesting and significant. They are avoiding using that label on purpose.

And I think that's because it doesn't match their political profile in the USA, where typically it's been Republicans who have supported the interests of Christian Americans and Democrats have been supporting minority interests.

[fightinfrenchman]

Easter is a Christian holiday

[Dolan]

Don't you find it weird that Hillary Clinton's twitter account has zero mentions of Christians, while mentioning Muslims tens of times?





She doesn't send similar wishes for Christians during Easter or Christmas, though.

I mean, sure, your social media account doesn't have to be a statistical mirror of the religious composition of the population you're claiming to represent or address. She doesn't mention "Jewish" either. It could be that there simply haven't been any significant terror attacks directed only at Jewish people, so there just wasn't any need to address such exclusive messages.

But these Sri Lanka attacks were clearly directed at Christian churches. And when Muslim mosques were similarly targeted she did show sympathy and commiseration for "Muslims" not for "Ramadan worshippers". So the way she addressed Christians, in such an indirect way, says something about how she sees those communities.

[Dolan]

Look, let me put it another way. As a politician, you typically seek to maximise your audience. So normally it's in your interest to show sympathy with as many categories of people as possible. So this complete omission of Christians from her messages seems to be unusual for a mainstream politician. Unless, she was advised not to focus on this pool of voters (Christians) because it's pointless, they would never vote for her.

[fightinfrenchman]

As a politician, you typically seek to maximise your audience. So normally it's in your interest to show sympathy with as many categories of people as possible.

You're clearly not very familiar with Hillary Clinton!

[lejend]

I think Dolan's point is that the Left treats Christianity differently from other religions, which seems like a valid and non-controversial point to me. Ross Douthat, whom I'd describe as a Left-friendly Catholic columnist, has an article in the NYT about this topic.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/opin ... tians.html

How Western liberalism’s peculiar relationship to its Christian heritage leaves non-Western Christians exposed.

The murderous radicals who set off bombs and killed hundreds on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka chose their targets with ideological purpose. Three Catholic churches were bombed, and with them three hotels catering to Western tourists, because often in the jihadist imagination Western Christianity and Western liberal individualism are the conjoined enemies of their longed-for religious utopia, their religious-totalitarian version of Islam. Tourists and missionaries, Coca-Cola and the Catholic Church — it’s all the same invading Christian enemy, different brand names for the same old crusade.

Officially, the Western world’s political and cultural elite does its best to undercut and push back against this narrative. The liberal imagination reacts with discomfort to the Samuel Huntingtonian idea of a clash of civilizations, or anything that pits a unitary “West” against an Islamist or Islamic alternative. The idea of a “Christian West” is particularly forcefully rejected, but even more banal terms like “Western Civilization” and “Judeo-Christian,” once intended to offer a more ecumenical narrative of Euro-American history, are now seen as dangerous, exclusivist, chauvinist, alt-right.

You could see both those impulses at work in the discussion following the great fire at Notre-Dame. On the one hand there was a strident liberal reaction against readings of the tragedy that seemed too friendly to either medieval Catholicism or some religiously infused conception of the West. A few tweets from the conservative writer Ben Shapiro, which used phrases like “Western Civilization” and “Judeo-Christian” while lamenting the conflagration, prompted accusations that he was ignoring the awfulness of medieval-Catholic anti-Semitism, and also that his Western-civ language was just a dog-whistle for white nationalists.

But at the same time there was a palpable desire to claim the still-smoking Notre-Dame for some abstract idea of liberal modernity, a swift enlistment of various architects and chin-strokers to imagine how the cathedral (owned by the French government, thanks to an earlier liberal effort to claim authority over Christian faith) might be reconstructed to be somehow more secular and cosmopolitan, more of a cathedral for our multicultural times.

This seems strange, since as Ben Sixsmith noted for The Spectator, “it would never cross anyone’s mind to suggest that Mecca or the Golden Temple should lose their distinctively Islamic and Sikh characters to accommodate people of different faiths.” But an ancient, famous Catholic cathedral is instinctively understood as somehow the common property of an officially post-Catholic order, especially when the opportunity suddenly arises to renovate it.

As with monuments, so with beliefs. Consider the fascinating interview my colleague Nicholas Kristof conducted for Easter with Serene Jones, the president of Union Theological Seminary, long the flagship institution for liberal Protestantism. In a relatively brief conversation, Jones declines to affirm the resurrection, calls the Virgin birth “bizarre,” shrugs at the afterlife and generally treats most of traditional Christian theology as an embarrassment.

But is Jones a Richard Dawkins-esque scoffer or a would-be founder of a Gnostic alternative to Christianity? Hardly: She’s a Protestant minister and a leader and teacher for would-be Protestant ministers, who regards her project as the further reformation of Christianity, to ensure the continued use of its origin story and imagery (and its institutions, and their brands, and their endowments) for modern liberal and left-wing purposes. It’s another distilled example of the combination of repudiation and co-optation, the desire to abandon and the desire to claim and tame and redefine, that so often defines the liberal relationship to Christian faith.

If you aren’t a liberal Christian in the mode of Serene Jones, if you believe in a literal resurrection and a fully-Catholic Notre-Dame de Paris, this combination of attitudes encourages a certain paranoia, a sense that the liberal overclass is constantly gaslighting your religion. That elite will never take your side in any controversy, it will efface your beliefs and traditions in many cases and be ostentatiously ignorant of them in others … but when challenged, its apostles still always claim to be Christians themselves or at least friends and heirs of Christianity, and what’s with your persecution complex, don’t you know that (white) American Christians are wildly privileged?

This last dig is true in certain ways and false in others. It’s true that conservative Christians in the United States can fall into a narrative of martyrdom that doesn’t fit their actual position, true that the presidency of Donald Trump attests to their continued power (and their vulnerability to its corruptions!). On the other hand the marginalization of traditional faith in much of Western Europe is obvious and palpable, and the trend in the United States is in a similar direction — and residual political influence is very different from the sort of enduring cultural-economic power that a term like “privilege” invokes.

But if the equation of traditional Christianity with privilege has some relevance to the actual Euro-American situation, when applied globally it’s a gross category error. And so the main victims of Western liberalism’s peculiar relationship to its Christian heritage aren’t put-upon traditionalists in the West; they’re Christians like the murdered first communicants in Sri Lanka, or the jailed pastors in China, or the Coptic martyrs of North Africa, or any of the millions of non-Western Christians who live under constant threat of persecution.

One of the basic facts of contemporary religious history is that Christians around the world are persecuted on an extraordinary scale — by mobs and pogroms in India, jihadists and United States-allied governments in the Muslim world, secular totalitarians in China and North Korea. Yet as an era-defining reality rather than an episodic phenomenon this reality is barely visible in the Western media, and rarely called by name and addressed head-on by Western governments and humanitarian institutions. (“Islamophobia” looms large; talk of “Christophobia” is almost nonexistent.)

This absence reflects, once again, the complex combination of liberal impulses toward Christianity. There is a fear that any special focus on Christians will vindicate the jihadist narrative of a clash of civilizations. There is a certain ignorance of Christianity’s enduringly and increasingly global form, an inability to see Christianity as anything save a reactionary foe or a useful supplement to liberalism. There is a fear that narratives of global Christian persecution will somehow help the conservative side of Western culture wars. (“Sri Lanka church bombings stoke far-right anger in the West” ran the headline of a worried Washington Post “analysis,” as though the most worrying consequence of dead Christians in South Asia were angry conservatives in America.) And there is a sense of Christianity as somehow still “our” religion, the dogmas discarded but the emphasis on self-abnegation retained — albeit in a strange fashion that ends, as John O’Sullivan put it recently, by taking “the good Samaritan to be a parable of why Christians should be the last people to be helped.”

[Jam]

Of these only one is expressing sympathy for an attack.

Clinton has no tweets using the word christian, but has many mentioning the word muslim: https://twitter.com/search?q=muslim%20f ... n&src=typd

Of there only one is expressing sympathy for an attack. The rest are all from the 2016 election campaign and are a response to Trump's anti-muslim rhetoric. Nothing wrong with that.

Yeah, that's what I meant. Obama shows sympathy for Muslim victims by calling them that way, but doesn't address Christians directly while showing sympathy for the victims of the Sri Lanka attacks using a similar measure. He calls them "Eastern worshippers".

Not that I have any particular sympathy for any religion myself. But just saying that their variable attitudes show something significant.

You are assuming a hidden intention behind the term easter worshipers with no justification and ascribing a pattern of behavior based on a sample size of 1. As if "easter worshipers" somehow hides the fact that they were Christians. You realize that if they didn't want to show sympathy for Christians they could have not tweeted anything at all considering they have barely any tweets mentioning muslims or christians in the context of attacks anyhow, or if they have discussed other attacks they haven't used those words. You probably would never have noticed if they didn't.

Obama's twitter account is 12 years old. He has 3 tweets supporting muslim holidays and 3 tweets supporting christian holidays. There are multiple of these religious holidays that occur every year. He has 1 tweet showing sympathy for an attack on muslims and christians each, there have been many terrorists attacks or other atrocities against muslims, christians, or other groups over the years. Clearly he does not tweet about these things very often, same for Clinton. It's just twitter. The only reason Clinton has 10's of tweets about muslims is because she was defending a group that Trump was shitting on while running against him in the election. She also has a comparable number of tweets defending latinos (who are overwhelmingly christian), women and lgbt people also during the election. It's a very obvious motive to attract people your opponent is pushing away, nothing anti-Christian about it. It's also the right thing to do.

Clinton does the same thing and besides that she doesn't mention Christians ever, right? How are these two American politicians representing that huge number of Christians from the USA? Really makes you wonder...

Secularism is a good thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxFj4mv0rRQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2woKwr6LIU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IN05jVNBs64

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IB3z-raSOdA

[deleted_user]

Holy shit, Obama can't sing. Not even close.

[fightinfrenchman]

Holy shit, Obama can't sing. Not even close.

And guess which religion has some groups that sing during church? That's right, Christians. Obama hates Christians confirmed!

[Jam]

When my mom died my friend sent me a card saying "sorry for your loss" it was very nice of him. But when my father died he sent a card saying "wishing you the best in this difficult time". Excuse me? "Difficult Time"??? The bastard won't even acknowledge that he died! I sent him a fuck you letter in return.

[fightinfrenchman]

Ross Douthat, whom I'd describe as a Left-friendly Catholic columnist

This made me literally laugh out loud

[Dolan]

As if "easter worshipers" somehow hides the fact that they were Christians.

You realize that if they didn't want to show sympathy for Christians they could have not tweeted anything at all considering they have barely any tweets mentioning muslims or christians in the context of attacks anyhow, or if they have discussed other attacks they haven't used those words. You probably would never have noticed if they didn't.

It wouldn't have cost them anything to just say the word "Christian". But instead, they used this watered down, indirect term of "Easter worshippers", as if they were trying to avoid being seen as supporting something explicitly labelled "Christian". They're talking about Christians in such neutral terms they sound like anthropologists, it's like they're talking about "Polynesian totem pole worshippers" not about believers from their own culture.

Even if it's just 1 single instance, it's still significant. Quantitative analysis is a useful tool, but it doesn't reveal everything of significance about a phenomenon. You need some qualitative analysis too to understand social phenomena.

Clinton does the same thing and besides that she doesn't mention Christians ever, right? How are these two American politicians representing that huge number of Christians from the USA? Really makes you wonder...

Secularism is a good thing.

I don't disagree with that. It's obvious both Obama and Clinton are not really believers, they're just ticking the obligatory checkboxes of appearing Christian, since that's such a big deal in the USA. Gotta pay lip service to the majority's values. But they don't want to be typecast as "Christian" politicians either, since that would lessen their appeal to non-Christians.

[Dolan]

https://youtu.be/8-Slx7MWJVU?t=11

When the footage ends, that's when the explosion takes place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCqb_YLnB5E

One of the attackers behind the Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka studied in the UK, officials say, as further details on the bombers emerge.
The country's deputy defence minister said the bomber studied in the UK before doing a course in Australia.

Police have identified eight out of nine attackers - one of whom was a woman - with no foreigners among them
Most of the attackers were "well educated" and "middle class"
Authorities say they are looking into possible links between the locals who carried out the suicide bombings and the Islamic State group.

Sri Lanka's government has blamed the blasts on local Islamist group National Thowheed Jamath (NTJ). But Mr Wickremesinghe said the attacks "could not have been done just locally".

They had quite a few surveillance cameras installed both in one of the churches and outside. Who said there's no evidence...

[fightinfrenchman]

Video evidence is all fake