murder and martyr (2)

This is what I get for checking in.

Malkin and her league of international watch-bloggers have reported (with some MSM outlets) that a protestant pastor has been murdered in Indonesia, and they are calling his death an "execution" and an "assassination".

There are only a few ways to read this reporting, and you can choose without my guidance which one is about right. I don't have a dog in this fight, but it's worth thinking about:

[1] Malkin & Co. read my piece on the death of Sister Leonella a few weeks ago and have rightly decided that not every death of every Christian at the hands of Muslim radicals is martyrdom, in which case we can stick to what is really happening here and not turn this into something it not.

[2] Malkin & Co. have a double standard about martyrdom, and Catholics in religious orders who are murdered are necessarily saints, but Protestants can't be called martyrs unless they are missionaries killed by anthropologically-prehistoric savages in a jungle.

[3] Malkin & Co. think people killed by rogue operatives are "martyrs", but people killed by [alleged] government conspiracies are "assassinated".

I don't think any of these are really very generous toward the other writers I'm talking about here -- but it seems to me that if one is going to change one's view about a sort of event (for example, the philosophical weight of random murder of sociologically-Christian workers), one should do more than simply change one's rhetoric: one ought to explain why, about a month ago, the shooting of a nun is "martyrdom" and now the shooting of a Protestant minister is "assassination". It's a pretty significant distinction, especially in the context of the global conflict we are talking about here.

Now I'm going off to rest and relax. You know: as if.