Michael Devolin New-Age Conservatism
New-age conservatives, as I label them, always, no matter how sincere their intentions, get it wrong about Islam: they obfuscate the fact that Islam does not teach tolerance, it teaches intolerance—as a virtue. Hence George Weigel's suggestion that Muslims "who seek an Islamic case for tolerance and pluralism" are deserving of our accomodation of their abstract, nonexistent brand of Islam (as opposed to the violent, veridical Islam he writes about otherwise) within a Western Judeo-Christian society is, essentially, and to his discredit, a sophisticated imprudence.
Apr 11, 2009 - 1:41:51 PM
Michael Devolin Islam the Package
In my last article to the Magic City Morning Star I pointed out, for the express sake of Haroon Siddiqui and other apologists for Islam who are wont to accuse Canadians like me of Islamophobia that the religion of Islam as evidenced in the Middle East, Indonesia, and Africa is the Islam ordinary Canadians are afraid of. Ours is not Islamophobia but common sense. The term "Islamophobia" was created by those journalists who, subjugated by the tyrannical advocates of Multiculturalism, wish to hide the stark reality that veridical Islam - the real Islam, the Islam that created the terrorism we read about in the papers every day - casts a frightening image to all honest and thinking human beings.
Oct 1, 2008 - 10:43:00 AM
Michael Devolin Islam on Trial
Myles Kantor has written, "A people's true character emerges as a majority. And when they lived as majorities over Jews, the peace-loving adherents of the Koran distinguished themselves with repeated viciousness and persecution." I have written elsewhere that a religion cannot be accurately judged by the behaviour of its exceptional personalities but only by how it manifests itself within the masses of those that adhere to its tenets.
Jun 23, 2008 - 11:53:50 AM
Michael Devolin Jimmy Carter and Democratic Anti-Jewish Hatred
It's no surprise to me that former president Jimmy Carter has met with the Muslim terrorists of Hamas. I could list the obscurantisms that come to light immediately one looks into to the views this man has recently disseminated to the world, but may it suffice here for me to say that these same views are merely indicative of a widespread phenomenon that has existed for years within Western culture.
May 5, 2008 - 2:31:54 PM
Michael Devolin Canada: A Country Deceived
"Everything that deceives may be said to enchant," wrote Plato. It was reported in Canada's National Post this week that certain Muslim terrorist suspects in this country being "monitored" by our security and intelligence service (CSIS) have had "human rights groups, celebrities and MPs" rallying behind them. It's always amazing to me that the politicians who always boast the loudest of having our country's safety as their top priority are always the same politicians attending fundraising dinners and marching down the streets of our cities in support of the Tamil Tigers or Hamas or Hezbollah, or as regards matters closer to home, in support of suspected Muslim terrorists being shadowed by CSIS. But isn't that the way of politicians? If they're going to mess up, they mess up big time.
Mar 6, 2008 - 12:07:38 PM
Michael Devolin Canada's Weakest Link
It was reported in the Globe and Mail recently that Mr. Justice Edmond Blanchard of the Federal Court of Canada refused to grant a warrant to CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) which would have enabled them to "carry out overseas electronic intercepts". Apparently the Federal Court of Canada is now become predominantly expert on the issue of Islamic terrorism abroad, as though Islamic terrorism without Canada is in no way connected to the threat of Islamic terrorism within Canada.
Feb 25, 2008 - 10:11:05 AM
Michael Devolin Islam: The Real Culprit
It is written in the Jewish Torah that Jacob, after wrestling with an angel, inquired of him, "Divulge, if you please, your name." Jacob wanted to know with whom he was wrestling. Afterward, he asked the angel to bless him, and the angel, it is recorded in the Torah, blessed Jacob. There is a lesson here for the Western world today: Know with whom you are wrestling, and know also whether your opponent, after you make peace with him, can benefit you.
Feb 7, 2008 - 12:15:41 PM
Michael Devolin Islam Is Not an Island
Immediately I read in the National Post about a young Muslim girl being strangled by her Muslim father, I anticipated the usual laboured efforts of Islam's apologists and Canada's many obtuse multiculturalists to exculpate the religion of Islam and instead blame it all on bad old human nature.
Dec 14, 2007 - 11:22:07 PM
Michael Devolin Christopher Hitchens: Secularist Fundamentalist
I used to enjoy Christopher Hitchens and his articles critical of Islam. I assumed at the time he could discern the difference between the barbarities of Islam-barbarities no different in this 21st century than they were in the 7th century-and the benignant tenets of Judaism and how these same tenets have proven to be as beneficial to mankind today as they were before, during, and after the Hellenic age. To equate the long ago defiant independence movement of the Maccabee Jews and their adherence to the nationalist aspirations of Judaism with the expansionist and anti-Jewish ideologies of both Christianity and Islam is to blame the Jews for the genocide of Adolph Hitler's Holocaust and the bloodlust and violence of Osama bin Laden's jihadist terrorism. What Hitchens fails to mention in Bah Hanukkah is that the Maccabean revolt was not the only nationalist movement the history of that era records for us.
Dec 8, 2007 - 10:48:43 PM
Michael Devolin Things About To Happen
I had no idea at the time that her political party, the Parti Quebecois, had previously marched shamelessly down the streets of Montreal waving Hezbollah flags during the recent war between this Lebanese terrorist group and the Israeli Army.
Nov 29, 2007 - 6:15:48 AM
Michael Devolin Canada's Unlikely Heroine: Pauline Marois
George Cabot Lodge pointed out that, "When you are accustomed to anything, you are estranged from it." It seems to me that Canadians, in our presumed duty of bending over and accepting the most contrary types into our society-even those whose religion demands of us that we relinquish at their behest all vestiges of our Judeo-Christian culture (except those indicants which demand the submissive act of bending over)-have become disjointed from the disturbing consequences of what has altered into, since Pierre Trudeau's pernicious gift of "multiculturalism," this nation's acquiescent behaviour toward those immigrants refusing to assimilate into what little remains of our Canadian identity.
Nov 7, 2007 - 6:59:36 PM
Michael Devolin Crazy Aunt in the Attic.
All political and military assaults on the State of Israel and the Jewish people by non-Jewish personages and nations I view as an attack on the veracity of the "choseness" of the Jewish people.
Sep 28, 2007 - 1:27:01 AM
Michael Devolin Democracy Without Islam
In her book Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes, "Shouldn't the places where Allah was worshipped and His laws obeyed have been at peace and wealthy, and the unbelievers' countries ignorant, poor, and at war." This is a point of truth Islam's apologists will not touch with a ten foot pole.
Sep 12, 2007 - 8:31:16 PM
Michael Devolin Christiane Amanpour: An Accomplice to Lies
As a rebuttal to those who questioned her professionalism after witnessing her emotional outbursts during her coverage of the siege of Sarajevo, Christiane Amanpour replied, "There are some situations one cannot be neutral about, because when you are neutral you are an accomplice."
Aug 23, 2007 - 6:28:08 AM
Michael Devolin Jihad TV
It seems Vision TV is determined to denigrate Jews and Israel, no matter the public outcry against such programming. Yet again they have given air time to another anti-Jewish bigot from Dil Dil Pakistan's dark repertory of angry Muslim clerics. I am not surprised.
Aug 13, 2007 - 10:18:50 AM
Michael Devolin There Is No Locus of Terrorism
Ajai Sahni writes, "There is no locus of terrorism. The locus of terrorism is wherever the ideologies of terrorism penetrate, wherever they find supporters and sympathizers." Since the Muslim invasion of the West and Islam’s exploitation of our accommodative culture, there is no geographical centre of operations for Islamic terrorism.
Jul 8, 2007 - 9:00:16 AM
Michael Devolin Sheep in Credulity, Wolves for Conformity
How ironic that, shortly after receiving notification from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission of Ottawa of their decision to grant McMaster University a renewal of their licence to operate a nuclear reactor on its campus for another seven years, I read in Canada's National Post that some of the British Muslims detained after the attempted car bombings in England and Scotland are doctors, one of them regarded by his colleagues as a "brilliant" neurosurgeon.
Jul 5, 2007 - 10:51:56 AM
Michael Devolin Islam in Profile
I've never understood the meaning of the term 'profiling' in the negative context as bandied about by the politically correct, especially when this same politically correct crowd is defending the millions upon millions of supersensitive Muslims of this world from those of us who, driven by conscience, voice publicly our concerns about the self-evident patterns of violence constantly associated with the religion of Islam.
Jun 29, 2007 - 7:34:09 PM
Michael Devolin Cognition
I really hate religious colloquies. I really do. Especially with Christians, who learned their sophistic art of debate from one of the best in the business, Paul of Tarsus. But when I read such simplistic drivel as that written by Mr. Swank in his recent submission to the Magic City Morning Star, I am driven by my conscience to rebut such shameless blandishment.
Jun 21, 2007 - 9:37:10 AM
Michael Devolin Gaza: Another of Islam's Reality Shows
Islam has no moderates. Islam represents only Muslims, which includes those who are transiting away from that congenital humanity they inherited through nascency-a humanity that, properly motivated, defies the insensate culture bequeathed them from the Koran-and those who have already protruded beyond that humanity, having made the journey to veridical Islam, which now includes the blood-for-blood reality show presently being played out in Gaza by Muslim terrorists belonging to Hamas and Fatah.
Jun 20, 2007 - 8:26:25 AM
Michael Devolin The Balloonist's View
I was admonished recently by a seasoned writer who told me that confessing to a friendship with Jews in my articles would surely preclude them from publication. Ironically, the article in question was all about the absurdity and imprudence of political correctness.
Jun 12, 2007 - 7:57:21 AM
Michael Devolin Soap and Education
One of my Jewish friends warns me continually that political correctness is going to kill us all. The West, that is. There is no such thing as political correctness in the Middle East. If you hate Jews, you kill Jews. Like the Jews of Sderot, Israel. The Palestinian Muslims hate Jews, as do most Muslims, whether secretly or otherwise, and so, without a word, they fire Kassam rockets into the tops of Jewish houses and schools in Sderot.
Jun 3, 2007 - 10:36:36 AM
Michael Devolin The Deification of Daniel Pipes
I remember reading the White House announcement of August 22, 2003, which stated that Daniel Pipes had been appointed by President Bush to the Board of Directors of the United States Institute of Peace, thinking then that Daniel Pipes, by virtue of this political birdlime imparted to him by an American president, was no longer in the running as a defender of Israel and an unbiased critic of Islam.
May 11, 2007 - 9:06:34 PM
Michael Devolin A Question of Civility
Charles Dickens wrote, "My ideas of civility were formed among heathens." Similarly, the Western governments now accommodating Islam’s followers are faced with the encroaching dilemma of discerning publicly and with appropriate civility between the so-called "moderates" and the "terrorists" of this loud religion. Who to condone and who to condemn?
May 8, 2007 - 10:30:59 AM
Michael Devolin To: Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission
I’m writing this letter as an ordinary Canadian citizen, to officially voice my objections to McMaster University’s application for a seven-year renewal of its operating license for its nuclear program.
Apr 22, 2007 - 1:56:35 PM
Michael Devolin The Secret Of Mastery
The Canadian poet David Solway wrote, "Not many people get to see in their lifetime a civilization coming to pieces before their very eyes, like a star going supernova." These are the words of a man who for the greater part of his life held to the views of what the journalist Barbara Kay described as his "default identification with the leftist ideology," an ideology he repudiated after the Islamic terrorist attack of 9/11 on the World Trade Centre in New York City. What I find most admirable about David Solway is the fact that he found the courage within himself to publicly oppose the intransigence of the Leftist system of rules, one of which is that once you’re in, you are not welcomed to the option of refuting their shibboleths.
Apr 17, 2007 - 10:26:41 PM
Michael Devolin What A President Believes
I've always maintained that Christianity precipitated the Holocaust. There are many Christians who are uncomfortable with this interpretation of history, but the fact remains that much of Germany hated Jews precisely because of what they had been taught for centuries by Christian clerics, long before Germany became Nazi Germany.
Apr 1, 2007 - 10:15:15 AM
Michael Devolin Islam: An Egregious Culture
Steven Stalinsky, the Executive Director of the Middle East Media Research Institute, wrote in the National Review (May 2004) that, "As the war on terror continues, the voices from the Arab and Muslim world celebrating death over life have been heard more often than those criticizing this philosophy." Judging either by the silence or the non-committal voices of the so-called "moderates" of Islam, we the inexperts-on-Islam, non-Muslims of this world can only surmise that Islam has fixed itself upon the course set out for it by the violent and bloody-minded of this religion.
Mar 18, 2007 - 9:29:09 AM
Michael Devolin Minority my Foot!
I've been reading Haroon Siddiqui's column in the Toronto Star for years, more for the laughs than for anything I might have learned from his weekly dissemination of apologia in support of Islam (and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) and his exculpation of Muslims who carry out terrorist acts. His article 'India's Muslims deemed to be in dire straits' is one of the most blatent examples of the deviousness he exercises in blaming others for the sins of Islam.
Feb 18, 2007 - 1:38:47 PM
Michael Devolin A Fear of Danger
In his illuminating book America Alone, Mark Steyn writes, "Meanwhile, we fight the symptoms - the terror plots - but not the cause: the ideology. The self-imposed constraints of this war - legalistic, multilateral, politically correct - are clearer every day."
Feb 7, 2007 - 11:13:29 AM
Michael Devolin In Defence of Hatred
It is written of Job in the Jewish Tanach that he shunned evil. The words 'shunned' and 'eschewed' have been adapted as the translation of the Hebrew word used in the original, which is pronounced "soor," which means, literally or figuratively, to "turn off". Although I am no expert on languages, this word tells me (forgive my limited intelligence) that Job, of his own volition, "turned off" any idea of evil in his heart and mind. With willpower like this, I'm thinking old Job would not have entertained nor socialized with any in his day who were given to violence and bloodshed or criminal adventure; nor would he have "dined" and been convivial with those whose ideology evinced the same. It is my opinion that to shun evil is to hate evil. How else to "turn off" in one's heart and mind the very thought of evil.
Jan 22, 2007 - 11:50:36 AM
Michael Devolin Re: A Conversation with Mr. Devolin on Islam
I would like to point out to our readers and to Mr. Bendedek that he has changed a pivotal word in a sentence of one of my letters sent to him. This was done without my consent, and it changes very much the presentation of meaning I intended in the original.
Jan 17, 2007 - 9:01:59 AM
Michael Devolin In Defence of Jewish Culture and Tradition
In his book What Went Wrong, Bernard Lewis writes, "There is therefore no specifically Jewish political and societal culture or tradition. Ancient memories are too remote, recent experience too brief, to provide them." This is, of course, an outright lie.
Jan 16, 2007 - 2:05:48 PM
