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CO085 George Marlin on Defending Persecuted Christians
George Marlin is the author of Christian Persecutions in the Middle East: A 21st Century Tragedy published by St Augustine’s Press. George also served two terms as Executive Director and CEO of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and he is chairman of Aid to the Church in Need. In our discussion I mentioned the Haska Meyna wedding party airstrike and a claim (unconnected with George) that 100,000 Christians are murdered for their faith each year, which was debunked extensively by a BBC investigation.
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I don’t normally talk about certain figures; I’ve mentioned not mentioning the T-word, or at least not mentioning it too often before. There are a few other highly polarizing figures such as Jordan Peterson and Milo Yiannopoulos that I tend to stay away from. One reason is because they are so polarizing.
As far as I can see there are some things that both of them say that are obviously correct, there are things that they say that are obvious nonsense, but they have such strong hold over their followers, not to mention over their detractors that everything they every say is parsed and analyzed to death, so there’s not much more for me left to say about it.
But recently I heard a clip of a speech by Jordan Peterson where, I think, he made a point that he hasn’t made before, at least not quite so often as the handful of points that he normally makes, and I think it’s a good point, it’s something that hadn’t occurred to me in this form before.
Leaving aside Peterson’s love of asking himself questions and then answering them as though he were a genius, and his style of shouting out statements as though someone was trying to interrupt him, this is a good point.
There are people at all points on the political spectrum. Half of them, by definition, are more right-wing than average. Only the dumbest left-winger would dispute the point that there are perfectly reasonable and intelligent people who take a conservative position; and only the dumbest right-winger would dispute the point that, at some point on the spectrum, there is a line beyond which it’s not possible to debate with people in the normal democratic way.
That doesn’t mean you can’t talk to racists or Nazis – I may have done that myself – b...
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By William CampbellGeorge Marlin is the author of Christian Persecutions in the Middle East: A 21st Century Tragedy published by St Augustine’s Press. George also served two terms as Executive Director and CEO of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and he is chairman of Aid to the Church in Need. In our discussion I mentioned the Haska Meyna wedding party airstrike and a claim (unconnected with George) that 100,000 Christians are murdered for their faith each year, which was debunked extensively by a BBC investigation.
*****
I don’t normally talk about certain figures; I’ve mentioned not mentioning the T-word, or at least not mentioning it too often before. There are a few other highly polarizing figures such as Jordan Peterson and Milo Yiannopoulos that I tend to stay away from. One reason is because they are so polarizing.
As far as I can see there are some things that both of them say that are obviously correct, there are things that they say that are obvious nonsense, but they have such strong hold over their followers, not to mention over their detractors that everything they every say is parsed and analyzed to death, so there’s not much more for me left to say about it.
But recently I heard a clip of a speech by Jordan Peterson where, I think, he made a point that he hasn’t made before, at least not quite so often as the handful of points that he normally makes, and I think it’s a good point, it’s something that hadn’t occurred to me in this form before.
Leaving aside Peterson’s love of asking himself questions and then answering them as though he were a genius, and his style of shouting out statements as though someone was trying to interrupt him, this is a good point.
There are people at all points on the political spectrum. Half of them, by definition, are more right-wing than average. Only the dumbest left-winger would dispute the point that there are perfectly reasonable and intelligent people who take a conservative position; and only the dumbest right-winger would dispute the point that, at some point on the spectrum, there is a line beyond which it’s not possible to debate with people in the normal democratic way.
That doesn’t mean you can’t talk to racists or Nazis – I may have done that myself – b...