The Reporting of Information of Events associated with Islam

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Zvi Lando ‏@zlando 6m6 minutes ago
Zvi Lando Retweeted Md Sâmèé Khãn

Do I really need to deal with more imbeciles who act like life is a football game?

Sâmèé Khãn @sameeuddin01
Danger of Islam ? R u kidding or what ! If Islam was forcibly spreaded then u wouldn't have been non Muslim today !

Tony Bermanseder ‏@sirebard
No

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Hugh Fitzgerald: The Berbers and Islam as a Vehicle for Arab Supremacism (Part I)

July 21, 2016 2:42 pm By Hugh Fitzgerald 29 Comments



In Algeria, before the Arab invasion and conquest in the seventh century, the population was almost entirely Berber, and along with those who followed traditional Berber religious practices, a considerable Christian population (St. Augustine, he of Hippo, was a Berber) flourished. When the Arabs swept in, subjugating the Berbers, they brought with them an Islam that replaced Christianity. Even after many Berbers converted, they were treated by the Arabs as second-class Muslims, heavily taxed, and even enslaved. Islamization was accompanied by what we call “Arabization,” which was a complicated and lengthy process.

That word “Arabization” is usually used to describe the large-scale movement of ethnic Arabs into a non-Arab region, in order to change its demographic character. But there is another form of Arabization that does not involve a physical invasion; it consists, rather, in making non-Arab Muslims forget or dismiss their non-Arab identity, attempt to emulate the behavior of seventh-century Arabs, adopt Arabic at the expense of their own languages, and even assume Arab names, in order to transmute themselves into Arabs. And that is what happened over time to many Berbers, whose descendants are convinced that they are Arabs, and have always been Arabs.

The Arabs rule in Algeria with the conviction that while Muslims are, according to the Qur’an, the “best of peoples,” the Arabs are the “best of Muslims.” It’s not hard to see why they would be convinced of that. After all, the Arab sense of superiority flows naturally from the facts of Islam: Islam was made known to the world through Muhammad, an Arab, and in his language. The Qur’an itself was the setting down in Arabic of the message sent by Allah through his messenger Muhammad. The Qur’an should ideally be read, recited, memorized, in the Arabic of the seventh century original, and millions of non-Arab Muslims learn in their madrasas to memorize and recite a text whose Arabic words they cannot comprehend. When Muslims pray five times a day, prostrating themselves in zebibah-thickening prayer, they always face toward Mecca in western Arabia. Many non-Arab Muslims take on Arabic names and fake Arab pedigrees. All of this testifies to the superior position, despite the universalist claims made for the faith, of one people, the Arabs.

For the many non-Arab peoples who have suffered from this Arab supremacism, the example of the Berbers in North Africa is both instructive and heartening, and most relevant to the war of self-defense that now must be waged by the world’s Infidels.

Under the French, from 1830 to 1962, the Berbers in Algeria had actually been favored at the expense of the Arabs. Almost from the beginning of French rule, they were regarded as less fervently Islamic, and consequently as more “European,” than the Arabs. This view was fixed from early on. In the 1850s, Colonel Daumas, then head of Algerian affairs for the French government, wrote of the Berbers: “They have accepted the Koran but they have not embraced it.” And this French acknowledgement of the Berber difference continued right down to the end of the colonial period. In 1950, Eugene Guernier wrote in La Berbérie, l’Islam, et la Françe, of the Berbers: “Our [Berber] man is without contest a Mediterranean of the Occident; or better yet, he is an Occidental. The Berbers are part of the rational Occident in formal opposition to the Arabs. A French general in the 1950s wrote a well-received book arguing that the Berbers were, in fact, racially “Europeans.”

When Algeria became independent in 1962, and the French pieds noirs left en masse for France, the Berbers had much to worry about. Not only had they been favored during French rule, which meant the Arabs would now have it in for them, but simply by not being Arabs, they could expect mistreatment from their new Arab rulers, and mistreatment is what they got. The use of the Berber language, Tamazight, was suppressed, and even the most innocuous attempts made by the Berber elite to revive Berber culture were crushed by the state.
In 1980-81, open revolt began in the most heavily Berber region of Algeria, the Kabyle, the result of a decision by the Arab governor in Tizi Ouzou to ban a lecture on “Ancient Berber Poetry” by Mouloud Mammeri (a Berber linguist and author living in Paris). That was the last straw for Berber students; that the Arabs would not allow even a single lecture on ancient Berber poetry revealed the lengths to which they would go to suppress Berber culture and attempt to efface the Berber historical memory. Berber riots began in Tizi Ouzou, spread elsewhere in the country, and then even spread to France, where Berbers demonstrated in front of the Algerian Embassy. These riots showed that the Berbers were no longer going to quietly accept Arab domination. While those demonstrations eventually petered out, the rumbles of discontent continued, and one important Berber demand was finally met, after many delays, in 2002, when the Arab rulers of Algeria allowed the Berber language (Tamazight) to be taught in Berber-populated schools. And in February of this year, a further linguistic victory was announced: the Berber language was recognized as a “state language,” which means it can now be used on official documents.

Many Berbers are keenly aware that they have been subject over the centuries to forced Arabization, both in the obvious physical sense — Arabs moving into and claiming Berber lands — and, even more devastatingly, through the imposition of the Arabic language and culture, and suppression of Berber culture (language, art, music, poetry). One Berber intellectual expressed a widely shared sentiment: “It is time—long past overdue—to confront the racist arabization of the Amazigh [Berber] lands.” The suppression of the Berber language and culture and history is the most important part of this “racist Arabization.” And thus, the recent revival of Tamazight, the Berber language, is a major milestone in the attempt to undo Arabization.
Another good sign for the Berbers is the apparent willingness of the Arabs who run Algeria to finally recognize the true size of the Berber population. For decades, the Algerian government would insist that the Berbers made up somewhere between 10 and 20% of the population. But now even that government recognizes that the Berbers constitute 1/3 of the population, that is, 13 million out of the total of 39 million. There are some Berbers who claim that even this understates, and that 50% of the country is Berber. These numbers give the Berbers a firmer claim for a share of political power in Algeria.

In France, among the maghrebin immigrants, the Berbers (from both Algeria and Morocco, where the Berbers are more than 50% of the population) are said to constitute as much as 75% of the total. And their behavior in France (as in Algeria) is notably different from that of the Arabs. They are religiously much less observant; more of them have converted to Christianity or even become open freethinkers and “secularists.” And they resent the way they have, for some French government policies, been “counted as Arabs.” One example is the attempt to make Arabic the language of instruction for “children from the Maghreb” on the assumption that they are almost all Arabs, when most of them, in fact, are Berbers (in France they like to call themselves Franco-Berbers, while the Arabs call themselves “Arabs”) who, having fought so hard to obtain the right to be taught in Berber in their schools in Algeria, fail to understand why they must endure the paradox of having Arabic forced on Berber children in French schools. Here’s part of one Berber’s furious outcry:

“Une fois encore le colonialisme arabo-islamique tente de nous asservir, même en France, nous les franco-berbères. En effet, durant l’émission d’Yves Calvi c’est dans l’air sur France 5, le lundi 16 décembre 2013, comme d’habitude, Mme Dounia Bouzar, spécialiste maison de l’islam, tente de convaincre les téléspectateurs de France et de Navarre qu’il faut enseigner la langue arabe aux petits Français issus de l’immigration maghrébine. Une fois encore, avec la complicité agissante de la caste politico-médiatique, qui essaye de vendre son rapport sur l’intégration commandé par Matignon, les Franco-Berbères qui sont bien intégrés dans la patrie de Jeanne d’Arc, sont utilisés comme butin de guerre par les marchands de l’islam. Une fois de plus, l’impérialisme arabo-islamique montre ses dents pour intimider ceux qui ne sont pas d’accord avec sa vision hégémonique…”​

“Yet again Arabo-Islamic colonialism tries to subjugate us, the Franco-Berbers, even in France. During the program of Yves Calvi of Monday Dec. 16, 2013, Madame Dounia Bouzar, as usual the house expert on Islam, tries to convince her television audience that the Arabic language should be taught to those French children whose parents are from North Africa. Yet again, with the frenetic complicity of the politico-media elite which is trying to peddle its report on “integration” requested by Matignon [that is, by the President], the Franco-Berbers who are already well integrated in the land of Jeanne d’Arc, are exploited as war booty by the merchants of Islam. Yet again, the Arabo-Islamic imperialism displays its teeth to intimidate those who are not in agreement with its hegemonic vision….”​

The Berber resentment of the Arabs – and of that “Arabo-Islamic Imperialism” — reinforces, and is in turn reinforced by, antipathy for Islam. It is Berbers, not Arabs, who in France write for such anti-Islamic sites as Riposte Laique, and even make common cause with some on the so-called “far-right.” It is Berbers, not Arabs, whom the French security services have mostly relied on to help monitor the Muslim population. It is Berbers, both in the Kabyle region in Algeria, and in France, and not Arabs, who have been converting to Christianity in numbers sufficient to alarm both the Algerian government and Muslim clerics in France.

We, the world’s infidels, should recognize what more and more Berber intellectuals have come to understand: that the largest and most successful imperialism in the history of the world is that of the Muslim Arabs. In conquering many lands and peoples, the Arabs managed to convince those they conquered to acquiesce in, even to be grateful for, that conquest, and to convert to the conqueror’s faith, and many were happy to “become Arabs.” And wherever Islam took hold, Arabs enjoyed a religio-cultural superiority.
There are two types of pre-existing fissures within what can be called the Camp of Islam. We need to understand them in order to see what, if anything, we can do to widen and exploit them. One is sectarian, that which sets Sunnis against Shia, with the so-called “takfiris” – those Sunnis who have declared that the Shi’a are not even Muslims, but Infidels, with some even claiming that they are the “worst of Infidels” – being especially violent. We’ve seen the results of this 1400-year-old split in the executions of Shia in the territories controlled by ISIS, and also in the attacks on Shia markets and mosques and religious processions, in Iraq and Pakistan. In Pakistan, two Sunni terrorist groups, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Sipah-e-Sahaba, even take the Shia population as their sole target. And in Afghanistan, the Shia Hazara were in danger of being wiped out by the uber-Sunni Taliban when the American invasion in 2001 rescued them from that fate. When the Americans finally leave this time, who knows what the Sunnis will then do to the Hazara? Could it be that the Persian Shia, emboldened by the way they snookered Obama’s negotiators on the nuclear project, might intervene in Afghanistan to support fellow Shia in Afghanistan? That’s a scenario devoutly to be wished.

Non-Muslims cannot do anything to fan the flames of internecine warfare among the two main Islamic sects, but they can at least refrain from trying to prevent it. If you have been brought up to believe that blessed are the peacemakers, and lions should always be made to lie down with any number of lambs, and you display a COEXIST bumpersticker on your rear fender, then ask yourself this: was the Iran-Iraq War, from 1980 to 1988, pitting Sunni-dominated Iraq against the Shi’a of Iran, a good or a bad thing from the standpoint of Infidels? It was, we should by now all recognize, a Good Thing that weakened, and preoccupied, both sides for eight years. Khomeini was kept busy with his enantiomorph in evil, Saddam Hussein. Just imagine what terrible things he might have done – having eight years more to work on his little science project, for example — had he not had to fight off an aggressive Iraq.

Yet after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, beyond the initial goals of capturing Saddam Hussein and destroying his regime, the Americans came up with another aim: stopping the sectarian warfare that followed the release of the Sunni despot’s iron grip. The Shia were not about to yield the power, political and economic, they now possessed; the Sunnis were not about to acquiesce in their loss of such power, and each side kept attacking the other. It was wonderful to behold. But our leaders, first in the Green Zone in Baghdad, and then in the corridors of power (watch out for those banana peels!), in Washington, were all for Getting-to-Yes conflict resolution, naively hoping that the Sunni and Shia would make up (after 1400 years), when those Washington apparatchiks should have been ruthlessly rooting for the permanent discord which, thank goodness, and despite their own best efforts, is what, instead of Yes, we got.




Hugh Fitzgerald: The Berbers and Islam as a Vehicle for Arab Supremacism (Part II)

July 22, 2016 10:17 am By Hugh Fitzgerald 12 Comments



The second great fissure in Islam, after that of the Sunnis and Shia, and to which our discussion of the Berbers in Part I is obviously relevant, is that between Arab Muslims and the 80% of the world’s Muslims who are not Arabs. It bears repeating (see the first paragraph of Part I), that because Allah chose to deliver his message in Arabic to a seventh-century Arab, because Muslims should read, recite, memorize the Qur’an in Arabic, because Muslims must turn toward Mecca in prayer at least five times a day, because Muhammad the Perfect Man and Model of Conduct was Arab, because the Qur’an was written in the Arabs’ language, and they are its only true transmitters, because the earliest Muslims, whose customs and manners, written down in the Hadith, constitute the Sunnah, were all Arabs, because the Arabs were the first to conquer vast territories for Islam — all this naturally produced a feeling of superiority in the Arabs. And wherever they conquered, along with Islamization came Arabization. That word describes two different things: first, the physical movement of Arabs into what were non-Arab lands, as in northern Iraq, where the Kurds live, and Saddam Hussein moved Arabs onto lands taken from them, in an attempt to change the demographics of the area, to “Arabize” it. But the Arabization that takes place even in Muslim lands without Arabs is different, and describes the change in the non-Arab population that follows Islamization: they lose their original identity and try to become, culturally, “Arabs.”

Among the outward and visible signs of this, think of how many Muslim non-Arabs have eagerly given themselves Arab names and false Arab pedigrees, and copied Arab dress of the seventh century. (Imagine someone in the Congo wearing a suit, carrying an umbrella and wearing a homburg, and calling himself Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper.) They wanted the prestige of being thought “Arab.” In Pakistan, to take an extreme case, millions claim to be “Sayids” – that is, descendants of the Quraysh, the Prophet’s tribe.

But there were also those non-Arabs who, as with the Berbers, resented being severed from their own culture, resented Arab indifference to, or hostility towards, the languages, cultures, and histories of those whom they conquered and converted; in short, they resented this cultural imperialism. The Berbers, by and large, nowadays do not want to be Arabs, and some of them don’t even want to be Muslims, to judge by their online sites, and they identify Islam with centuries of oppressive Arab rule. The Arab attempt to efface every memory, no matter how innocuous, of Berber culture, has backfired. This anti-Arab feeling among non-Arab Muslims is not to be deplored, but encouraged by the world’s Infidels. It is one way to weaken the hold of Islam on four-fifths of the world’s Muslims.
Among non-Arab Muslims, the Kurds and the black African Muslims in Sudan are the latest victims of Arab atrocities. The Arab military of Saddam Hussein managed to kill 182,000 Kurds during the qur’anically-titled Anfal. Then more Arabs were moved into Kurdistan to Arabize the region. And not a single Arab ruler, diplomat, or intellectual, inside or outside of Iraq, protested this massacre of the Kurds. This is the memory that needs to be kept constantly fresh in Kurdish minds. We do not have a stake in Kurds remaining in Arab-ruled Iraq, as our leaders have in the past insisted. Rather, the interests of Infidels are better served by an independent Kurdistan, grateful to the West for its aid, and ideally carved out of territory that was formerly part of Arab Iraq and Arab Syria (the Kurds in Iran and Turkey will have to wait).

As for the Sudan, northern Arabs attacked and murdered, over several decades, millions of black African Christians and animists and, more recently, Arab militias (the Janjaweed) murdered, in Darfur (in the western Sudan) nearly half a million black African Muslims. Given the attempts of Muslims in the West both to find allies among blacks (CAIR with its solicitousness for “Black Lives Matter”) and the apparent attractiveness Islam holds for some blacks in Europe and North America (especially in prisons, where the conversion rate is high), there is ample reason to keep talking not only about what the Arabs did in the Sudan in the recent past, but about the longer history of the Arab slave trade in East Africa.

That Arab slave trade began earlier, and lasted longer, and claimed more victims, than the Atlantic slave trade of the Europeans. This trade was particularly hideous because the Arab slavers castrated young black boys while they were still in the bush, and only 10% survived to make it, by slave coffle to the coast and thence by dhow, to the Muslim slave markets of Egypt, Arabia, and Istanbul. For the same reasons, to create doubts among would-be black converts, we in the West ought to be discussing not only that African slave trade of the Arabs, but the continued enslavement by Arabs of blacks in the Sudan (see the testimony of the “Lost Boys”) and Mauritania. It would also be useful to remind would-be black converts that Saudi Arabia and Yemen gave up slavery, reluctantly, and only because of terrific pressure from Great Britain, as late as 1962, and that there are reports of slavery continuing to exist in the Saudi interior, just as, despite being officially outlawed, it still exists in the Sudan and Mauritania. And finally, that Muhammad himself was a slave-owner, thus legitimizing slavery in Islam, needs to be more widely known, in order to dampen Islam’s appeal among blacks.

We can keep impressing on non-Arab Muslims the facts of Arabization, of the loss of their own languages and cultures and histories, and of all the ways that Islam has created and reinforces Arab supremacism. They can try to deny that painful fact, but eventually reality will break in for many non-Muslims, and with that, resentment should built against the cultural Arabization that has accompanied Islamization. But we need leaders who are cleverer and more nimble than those who have so far been conducting, confusedly and half-heartedly, a campaign of self-defense.
Some non-Arab Muslims will need no persuading that, as the late Pakistani writer Anwar Shaikh argued in his polemical study “Islam, the Arab National Movement,” that “the prophet Mohammed subjected all non-Muslim Arabs to the cultural imperialism of Arabia…He made Arab-worship the cornerstone of Islam. Thus, those who embrace Islam naturally feel inferior to Arabia.”
Those Muslim peoples who have been most obviously mistreated by Arabs – the Berbers, the Kurds, the Sudanese blacks – have the least difficulty in accepting this observation. They have had direct experience of Arabs; they live in the same countries with them. In such places as Indonesia, or Pakistan, where there are no Arabs, Arab supremacism is maintained not through violence, but by means of cultural imperialism. Westerners can help non-Arabs to recognize this, not by attacking them, but by expressing sympathetic indignation at this state of affairs and, by dint of polemical agility, may help undermine Islam’s hold on the minds of some non-Arabs.

The most important fact to keep in mind is that 80% of the world’s Muslims are not Arab. Their ethnic identity can be made to subvert, rather than reinforce, their commitment to Islam. When they see other non-Arab Muslims stand up successfully against the Arabs, they are likely to begin to think along the same lines. The Berber recovery of Tamazight, once suppressed and now “official” and perhaps – who knows – in the future perhaps even compulsory in schools in the Berber-populated regions, is one heartening example of such success. If the Berbers can demand, and finally get, full recognition of their language as equal to Arabic, and can revive Berber music (in the past, Berber singers such as Lounes Matoub have been killed by Islamic extremists), preserve Berber art and encourage its continuation (possibly with a museum of Berber crafts?), Tamazight-language poetry (including that which predates the arrival of Islam), other non-Muslim Arabs may begin to think of what they lost culturally when they “gained” Islam. This heightened consciousness of being subject to Arabization through Islam, is a point of entry to deliver the message that Infidels need to keep repeating, again and again: Islam is a vehicle for Arab supremacism.

This statement, once heard, cannot be unheard. It is easy to prove and impossible to refute. And we Infidels, who seek to tell home truths and thereby sow discord within the Camp of Islam, will at long last have gone – not a moment too soon — on the ideological offensive.


Robert Spencer in FrontPage: The Islamic Republic of Iran: At War with the U.S.
Brooklyn: Muslim teens beaten outside mosque may have sexually assaulted man’s girlfriend


Tyrannical Erdogan to be awarded sweeping new powers after failed coup attempt
Egypt: Top Islamic institution preaches "religious freedom" to West, while supporting death penalty for apostates at home

 

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Hugh Fitzgerald: Cardinal Burke Breaks Ranks

July 25, 2016 6:26 pm By Hugh Fitzgerald 108 Comments



We have heard many disturbing statements in recent years made by Catholic clerics, from bishops and cardinals right up to Pope Francis, who seem to believe that Islam is a religion like any other, that criticism of Islam is unjustified and based on the motiveless malignity of “Islamophobia,” and that the main duty of Catholics with respect to Muslims is not to challenge or confront them both as to their ideology and as to the many acts of Muslim terrorism, but to engage, rather, in endless Catholic-Muslim Dialogue. Ever since the Second Vatican Council, the Church has had an ill-considered mandate to engage in “dialogue” with Muslims, as the Committee for Ecumenical and Religious Affairs of the United States Conference of Bishops has stated:

“The declaration has been consistently upheld by recent popes. Pope John Paul II affirmed the need for dialogue with Muslims on numerous occasions throughout his long pontificate (1978–2005). For example, in Crossing the Threshold of Hope he remarked in the chapter entitled “Muhammad?” that “believers in Allah are particularly close to us” and that “the religiosity of Muslims deserves our respect” ([New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005], 91, 93). The pope also reiterated the central mandate of Nostra Aetate by reminding the faithful that they are called to maintain “a dialogue with followers of the ‘Prophet’” and that “the Church remains always open to dialogue and cooperation” (ibid., 93, 94).

Unfortunately, while American Bishops claim that Muslims have been willing to engage in such dialogue, they report that the Christian side has not been as forthcoming:

“Sadly, in recent years, there has been a deliberate rejection of this call to engage in dialogue with our Muslim brothers and sisters by some in the Catholic Church and in other ecclesial families. We understand the confusion and deep emotions…

Not “confusion” and unspecified “deep emotions,” but rage.

…stirred by real and apparent acts of aggression and discrimination…

Not unspecified “acts of aggression and discrimination,” but mass murder, repeated again and again.

…by certain Muslims against non-Muslims, often against Christians abroad. We, and increasingly our Muslim partners in dialogue, are concerned about these very real phenomena. Along with many of our fellow Catholics and the many Muslims who themselves are targeted by radicals…

Muslims have not been “targeted” in Europe, even if some have unavoidably been among those killed when large groups have been the target. It is only Shia Muslims in the Middle East and Pakistan who have been deliberately targeted, by Sunnis, and solely because they are regarded by those Sunnis as Infidels, even the worst kind of Infidels.

…we wish to voice our sadness, indeed our outrage, over the random and sometimes systematic acts of violence and harassment—acts that for both Christians and Muslims threaten and disrupt the harmony that binds us together in mutual support, recognition, and friendship.

Translation: if we react to acts of Muslim terrorism by becoming more suspicious of Muslims, allowing attacks by Muslims to limit our “dialogue,” and rejecting that which binds us “in mutual support, recognition, and friendship”[!], why, then the terrorists will have won.”

“In the 2007 document A Common Word Between Us and You, 138 of the Islamic world’s most respected leaders asserted the following”:
“To those who nevertheless relish conflict and destruction for their own sake or reckon that ultimately they stand to gain through them, we say that our very eternal souls are all also at stake if we fail to sincerely make every effort to make peace and come together in harmony. . . . So let our differences not cause hatred and strife between us. Let us vie with each other only in righteousness and good works. Let us respect each other, be fair, just and kind to another and live in sincere peace, harmony and mutual goodwill.”

This is not Muslim-Christian dialogue, but Christians whistling in the dark.
As Robert Spencer pointed out at the time, the phrase “a common word between you and us” comes from the Qur’an, where the full context shows quite a different intent: “’a common word between us and you’ comes from beyond the Qur’an citation provided in that document’s epigraph. If they [the Catholic bishops] had looked it up in the Qur’an, they would have found that the full passage is not a call for mutual understanding and mutual respect; rather, it is an exhortation to Christians to convert to Islam.”

And Spencer provided in full that self-incriminating passage: “Say: ‘People of the Book! Come now to a word common between us and you, that we serve none but Allah, and that we associate no others with Him, and do not some of us take others as Lords, apart from Allah.’ And if they turn their backs, say: ‘Bear witness that we are Muslims’ (3:64).”

Spencer explained: “Since Muslims consider the Christian confession of the divinity of Christ to be an unacceptable association of a partner with God, this verse is saying that the ‘common word’ that Muslims and the People of the Book should agree on is that Christians should discard one of the central tenets of their faith and essentially become Muslims.”

Especially egregious among Catholic clergy, in his confused and delirious defense of Islam, has been Bishop Robert McManus of Worcester, Massachusetts, who even cancelled a scheduled talk by Robert Spencer, explaining: “Spencer’s talk about extreme, militant Islamists…might undercut the positive achievements that we Catholics have attained in our inter-religious dialogue with devout Muslims.”

At the time — February 2013 — one would have expected Bishop McManus to provide a list of those “positive achievements” that Catholics had “attained in.inter-religious dialogue.” He failed to do so. And more than three years later, after some “negative achievements” – attacks on Charlie Hebdo, and the Hyper Cacher kosher market, Bataclan and Brussels, and Orlando, and San Bernardino, and Nice among them — McManus once again was reminding us of the “positive achievements that…Catholics have attained in [their] inter-religious dialogue with devout Muslims,” achievements so obvious that they never need be described. Bishop McManus keeps repeating the same praise of “dialogue,” without allowing reality to break in: “This dialogue has produced a harvest of mutual respect, understanding and cooperation throughout the world and here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” Again, one would like Bishop McManus to provide a list of five, or three, or two, or even one example, of that bounteous harvest of “mutual respect, understanding and cooperation” throughout the world between Muslims and Christians, that he believes has been reaped thanks to clerics like himself.

Then there is Pope Francis, who back in November 2013 said that “the Koran is a book of peace” and “Islam is a peaceful religion.” In May of this year, he seemed to have awakened from that deep dream of peace, when he told the French newspaper La Croix that “the idea of conquest is inherent to the soul of Islam.” This was, from him, a welcome admission. Unfortunately, he did not stop there, but felt compelled to add a tu-quoque (or rather, a me-quoque) directed at the world’s Christians: “it is also possible to interpret the objective of Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus sends his disciples to all nations, in terms of the same idea of conquest.” But Jesus’s disciples were not engaged in warfare, qitaal, as were Muslims conquering lands for Islam, but, rather, in spreading the Gospel mostly through preaching and persuasion; the Pope seems to have been suggesting a similarity of Muslim and Christian methods where there is none.
That is where things depressingly stood when, the other day, a senior Cardinal in Rome, Raymond Burke, gave an astonishing interview to the Religion News Service. He stated that “there is no question that Islam wishes to govern the world” and “criticised Christian leaders who “simply think that Islam is a religion like the Catholic faith.” That is not true, Cardinal Burke insists, for if Muslims become a majority in any country they “have the religious obligation to govern that country.” Burke says there are already “little Muslim states” within France and Belgium that are no-go areas for the police and are run, essentially, by local Muslims for the local Muslim population. Burke insists that the only way for Europe to withstand the relentless onslaught of Islam is “to return to its Christian roots.”

I do not know if Cardinal Burke means that post-Christian Europeans must somehow persuade themselves to become Believers again, or if he means instead that Europeans must again recognize that Europe is a child of Christianity, whatever those on the wilder shores of multiculturalism may claim, and that the failure to do so has weakened Europe’s sense of itself and its ability to withstand this relentless Muslim onslaught that has no end. But it is Burke’s bold diagnosis, and not his putative cure, that matters most. His text and tone are different from what we are used to hearing from present-day Christian clerics, so few of whom are inclined to publicly recognize unpleasant truths about Islam. Surely Europeans ought not be too quick to deny the Christian roots of Western civilization or, when they don’t deny those roots outright, to accommodatingly pretend that Islam too, is owed so much. Just remember that shameful rewriting of history by Jacques Chirac, when he insisted that “Europe owes as much to Islam as it does to Christianity.”
I wonder if Cardinal Burke, so highly placed in Rome, would have made his welcome remarks without discussing the subject with others still higher up in the Vatican, perhaps even with the Pope, and whether his statements might even have received the Pope’s tacit approval, a way to have the outspoken Cardinal Burke (one of the Church’s “conservatives”) express what Pope Francis now wants expressed, but for the moment doesn’t think he should be the one to do it. This, of course, is only a hope, likely forlorn, for the Pope’s “humanitarian” insistence that European countries take in still more Muslim immigrants, and his chastising of those – like Poland, which he will be visiting this week – that don’t, seems fixed in amber. But, on the off-chance that Cardinal Burke’s statements constituted a trial balloon for a harder Catholic line on Islam, may it long remain on high to receive the attention it deserves. Let’s now see how the other clerics respond, whether they remain eager to distance themselves from such remarks, or whether Cardinal Burke’s observations embolden others, and reduce the mcmanuses to a suitable silence.


UK: Muslim hate preacher who glorifies jihad murder welcomed by Archbishop of Canterbury
As Pope heads to Poland to press it to take more Muslim migrants, Poles arrest Muslim migrant with explosives



Hugh Fitzgerald: Pope Francis and Jihad: Credo Quia Absurdum, And How

July 28, 2016 11:29 am By Hugh Fitzgerald 97 Comments



A glutton for punishment, I turned to the Vatican paper, L’Osservatore Romano, to read the Pope’s exact words, in the original Italian, about the killing of the indomitable priest in Rouvray. Here is what the Pope had to say to the journalists flying with him to Cracow:

“Quando io parlo di ‘guerra’, parlo di guerra sul serio, non di ‘guerra di religione’, no!”, ha esclamato Bergoglio. Il quale ha poi precisato: “C’è guerra di interessi, c’è guerra per i soldi, c’è guerra per le risorse della natura, c’è guerra per il dominio dei popoli: questa è la guerra. Qualcuno può pensare: ‘Sta parlando di guerra di religione’: no. Tutte le religioni, vogliamo la pace. La guerra, la vogliono gli altri. Capito?”.

È tornato poi a parlare di “guerra a pezzi”, parola che secondo lui inquadra meglio la situazione rispetto al termine “insicurezza”. A proposito di guerra, ha affermato che “c’era quella del ’14, con i suoi metodi, poi quella del ’39 – ’45, un’altra grande guerra nel mondo, e adesso c’è questa. Non è tanto organica, forse, organizzata, sì,

“When I speak of war, I’m talking about real war, not a “war of religion, no!” the Pope exclaimed. And then he extended his thought further: “There are wars over interests of all kinds, wars over money, wars over natural resources, wars fought to establish dominion over other peoples: those are all real wars. Someone might think: “You’re talking about wars of religion.” No. All religions want peace. It’s others [the non-religious] who want war. You understand?”

And he then started to talk about a ”war” being conducted piecemeal, which according to him better described the current situation than the term “insecurity,” On the question of war, he maintained that “there was the war of 1914, with its methods, then the war of 1939-45, another world war, and now there is this one. It’s an organized campaign, although not planned at every step.”

Take a minute to rub your eyes in disbelief. Apparently the Pope, like the shallowest campus Marxist-Leninist, believes that all wars are caused by conflict over resources of one kind or another: land, natural resources, populations to be plundered. Apparently the Pope, the head of the Catholic Church, cannot believe that religion can ever be the cause of wars. Apparently the Pope has never heard of the Wars of Religion with which the Papacy was deeply involved over several centuries. Apparently the Pope believes that once a set of beliefs manages to be called a “religion,” it immediately is transformed into some kind of ambulating peaceable kingdom, incapable of participating in, much less causing, a war. For Pope Francis, the apparent template for wars are the two world wars, which were indeed over such interests as land (Hitler’s lust for Lebensraum), resources (Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere), or simple military rivalry (such as that between Germany and Great Britain, for control of the seas, which was of such importance before World War I). But even if the many wars of religion in Europe have slipped his mind, let’s help him, and fish up from the Lesser Lethe, with the aid of Wikipedia, some of those wars of religion:


The German Peasants’ War (1524–1525)

• The battle of Kappelin Switzerland (1531)
• The Schmalkaldic War(1546–1547) in the Holy Roman Empire

• The Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648) in the Low Countries
• The French Wars of Religion (1562–1598)
• The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), affecting the Holy Roman Empire including Habsburg Austria and Bohemia, France, Denmark and Sweden
• The Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651), affecting England, Scotland and Ireland

• Scottish Reformation and Civil Wars
• English Reformation and Civil War
• Irish Confederate Wars and the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland

I can understand someone not being able to remember the Schmalkaldic War, but the Eighty Years’ War? The French Wars of Religion? The Thirty Years’ War? Even the most basic course on European history would cover these. Why does the Pope overlook them? Or does he assume that those “wars of religion” were really about something else, and if so, what?
Even until very recently, we could still find in Europe the smoldering embers of a “war of religion” between Catholic and Protestant in Northern Ireland. Surely the Vatican hasn’t forgotten the Rev. Ian Paisley, the intermittent firebrand behind that conflict’s flare-ups.
But why limit ourselves to the wars of religion in Europe? Does the Pope recall the Biafra War (1967-69) between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria, a war that began when Muslims – Hausa and Fulani – conducted “pogroms” against Christians in the north? And then, in response, the southern Christians attempted to declare the independent state of Biafra. It was the Biafran head of state, Colonel Ojukwu, who in his Ahiara Declaration described the Muslim campaign as nothing less than a “jihad” to Islamize the south:

“Our Biafran ancestors remained immune from the Islamic contagion. From the middle years of the last century Christianity was established in our land. In this way we came to be a predominantly Christian people. We came to stand out as a non-Muslim island in a raging Islamic sea. Throughout the period of the ill-fated Nigerian experiment, the Muslims hoped to infiltrate Biafra by peaceful means and quiet propaganda, but failed. Then the late Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto tried, by political and economic blackmail and terrorism, to convert Biafrans settled in Northern Nigeria to Islam. His hope was that these Biafrans of dispersion would then carry Islam to Biafra, and by so doing give the religion political control of the area. The crises which agitated the so-called independent Nigeria from 1962 gave these aggressive proselytizers the chance to try converting us by force.”

What about the Hindus and Muslims at each other’s throats in 1947, at the time of partition in India, when hundreds of thousands died, and many more millions, both Hindus and Muslims, sought refuge among their coreligionists on one or the other side of the lines of partition? What about the war carried on for decades by the northern Muslims against the southern Christians in Sudan, a war that ended only when the country was split in two?

And what does the Pope think explains the continuing Muslim attacks on Christian communities in Iraq and Syria, and on a smaller scale, against Christians in Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and Indonesia, on Hindus in Kashmir, on Buddhists in Bangladesh, attacks which have nothing to do with land, or natural resources or money, but only with the spread and dominance of Islam? Why does the Pope think churches are attacked? Or Christian girls kidnapped in Nigeria by Boko Haram and then either converted to Islam or used as sex slaves by Muslim fighters? How can the Pope overlook so much?
What land, money, or natural resources did the Yazidis possess that Muslims coveted? They have nothing, but they are being subject to a genocidal campaign by ISIS for one reason: because they are not Muslim. The Bamiyan Buddhas were blown up by the Taliban, because statuary is forbidden in Islam, and because the visible signs of other religions are to be vandalized or, if possible, destroyed, as part of asserting the rightful dominance of Islam. Pope Francis won’t allow himself to believe that Muslims believe in Jihad, that is, in Islamic Holy War, a war to spread Islam. A cursory search suggests that he has never even used the word. Religion, he claims, being A Good Thing, can never be the real cause of war, ever. Take it from him; he knows. As the Pope told the reporters, “Capito?” [“Understand?” or “Get it?”]. Ipse dixit.

But what about what we read in the Qur’an and Hadith? The Pope is silent on their contents. Presumably he believes they must not be taken by non-Muslims at face value. Instead, we should accept the assurances of Muslims with whom we engage in “dialogue,” who, when not managing to divert our attention from those texts, allow us to believe that terrorists rely on a “twisted” interpretation. The Pope steers clear of confronting those texts. Were he to study them, and discuss them truthfully, he would have to admit that despite all his talk about the essential peacefulness of all religions, one religion, Islam, today, as for the past 1400 years, places great importance on Jihad, a holy war to spread the faith across the globe, not for the sake of natural resources, land, or money (those “interests” the Pope insists explains all wars), but so that Islam can everywhere dominate, and Muslims rule, everywhere. And that would mean he would then have a big problem on his hands. He would have to recognize that pieties about peace, and all that “dialogue” to date with representatives of Islam, have merely been occasions for Muslims to listen to Christian mea-culpas, and that the Islamization of Europe, through demography, constitutes the greatest threat to its survival that Christianity has ever faced.

And if the reason two Muslims entered a church in Normandy, and slit the throat of a priest when he refused to kneel down at their command (according to a nun who was present) just possibly had something to do with religion, then the Pope has a lot of ‘splainin to do about quite a few things, including his lecturing Europeans on the need to let millions of Muslim migrants in, just to show how nice Christians are, and what, aside from “dialogue,” he thinks might be done to safeguard Christians and other non-Muslims. Even now, after the latest Muslim atrocity, he’s content to keep whistling in the dark and to give Islam, because it is a “religion,” what appears to be a permanent pass. “Credo quia absurdum” – I believe because it is absurd — is the famous phrase of Tertullian, a Father of the Church who came from North Africa, where Christianity once flourished and then was almost wiped out, someone should remind the Pope, when the Muslim Arabs invaded and spread Islam, as they are still spreading Islam, by terrorism, by demography, and even by “dialogue” in Europe, and everywhere else they can.


Mom says of Islamic State jihadist son who murdered priest: he's a good Frenchman, I didn't produce a devil
WaPo thought police: Anti-Islam extremists just as bad as Islamic jihadists



As Pope heads to Poland to press it to take more Muslim migrants, Poles arrest Muslim migrant with explosives

July 25, 2016 5:28 pm By Robert Spencer 114 Comments
Does Christian charity really require civilizational suicide? The Poles say no. Pope Francis differs.


Here’s the politically correct fantasy:
“Vatican statement accuses Polish politicians of whipping up fear against Muslims,” by Christopher Lamb, La Stampa, July 23, 2016:

Just days before Pope Francis’ visit to Poland a Vatican statement has denounced an “artificially created fear of Muslims” which it says is being fed by some political parties in the country.​

The press release, released by the Holy See but written by a spokesman for the Polish Bishops, describes Poland as “ethnically homogenous” and that immigration is a relatively new phenomenon seen as strange to the average Polish person.​

“For this reason, even through the official statistics relating to foreign citizens legally resident in Poland show that they make up just 0.4 per cent of the population as a whole, great fears exist”, Fr Pawel Rytel-Andrianik writes in a statement issued just before the beginning of World Youth Day in Krakow and which he stressed was a summary of the media debate in Poland.​

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These fears, Fr Rytel-Andrianik explains, are due to a lack of public debate, complicated migration procedures and no public programme of teaching people in the country Polish about diversity of religion, race and culture.​

But he writes: “Unfortunately these fears are fuelled by some political parties, and inappropriate statements made by politicians. There is an artificially created fear of Muslims understandable indeed in some ways (terrorist attacks). Poland borders Germany, which has a large Muslim population, and on the border they do not run some regular checks.” …​

“Francis and Poland differ on migrants ahead of pope’s visit,” by Frances D’Emilio, AP, July 24, 2016:

VATICAN CITY — Support for migrants is so central to Pope Francis’ vision for the church that he has made welcoming them a potential test for those seeking entry to Heaven on Judgment Day.​

The pontiff’s advocacy for refugee rights faces a diplomatic test Wednesday when he begins a five-day visit to Poland, where a populist government has slammed the door on most asylum-seekers.​

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Francis is scheduled to meet Polish President Andrzej Duda in Krakow’s millennium-old castle atop Wawel Hill where, in the neighboring cathedral, Polish national heroes for centuries have been laid to rest. He then will hold a question-and-answer session with Poland’s bishops behind closed doors.​

Ahead of the pope’s arrival, Polish Interior Minister Mariusz Blaszczak defended the ruling Law and Justice party’s opposition to immigration by citing the Bastille Day truck massacre of 84 people in Nice, France. Blaszczak argued that such violence was an inevitable consequence of multiculturalism.​

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The pope suggests that reluctance or refusal to shelter newcomers in need conflicts with the parable of the Good Samaritan, who offered aid to a robbed, wounded stranger.​

Addressing the faithful earlier this month in St. Peter’s Square, Francis said that ultimately “we will be judged on the basis of works of mercy.”​

“The Lord will be able to say to us: ‘Do you remember? That migrant, who so many wanted to kick out, was me.’”​

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Seeking to inspire by example, Francis in April brought 12 Syrians back with him to Rome after visiting a migrant camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, where tens of thousands were stranded after perilous crossings from nearby Turkey in often overcrowded boats.​

The Rev. David Hollenbach, a professor of ethics at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Affairs in Washington, said the pope’s championing of migrants is “politically important and socially important, but also religiously important to the identity of Christianity.” Hollenbach, who like Francis is a Jesuit, said in a telephone interview that the treatment of migrants and foreigners is “central in the Bible.”​

It’s also intrinsic to the pope’s definition of a Christian.​

Returning in February from a pilgrimage to Mexico, Francis told reporters aboard his plane: “I think that a person who thinks of building walls and not bridges isn’t Christian.” The pope was responding to a question about Donald Trump, the Republican U.S. presidential candidate, who says he wants to build a border wall to bar Mexicans from the United States.​

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A Polish commentator, Adam Szostkiewicz, said he expected the pope to raise Poland’s opposition to aiding refugees during this week’s visit because “this is the central theme of his pontificate in Europe. This is a European problem.”​

Szostkiewicz said he expected the pope to argue against Poland’s policy, which he compared to Pontius Pilate’s attitude to the crucifixion of Jesus: “We wash our hands. This does not concern us.” But he forecast that any papal appeal would spark only a momentary stir, not any shift in government policy.​

“It will be good if he says it, and it will be commented on, but it will soon be forgotten,” he said….​

And here’s the reality:
“Iraqi man arrested in Poland ahead of Pope Francis’ visit,” DW, July 25, 2016:

A 48-year-old Iraqi man has been arrested on charges of possessing explosives in Poland. The arrest in Lodz comes just days ahead of Pope Francis’ visit to Poland for World Youth Day.​

Small amounts of explosives, “not sufficient to make an explosion” were found on the man, according to Beata Marczak, spokeswoman for prosecutors in the central Polish city of Lodz said. He could face up to eight years in prison if convicted on charges of illegal possession of explosives, she added.​

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Explosive traces were found on the man’s luggage and clothes at hotels in Lodz and Krakow, news channel Polsat News reported. The man was reportedly arrested at a hotel in Lodz on Sunday and was reportedly in possession of notes on preparing terrorist acts against French supermarkets in Poland.​

The man was reportedly questioned by the Internal Security Agency in English and put under two months’ arrest. Marczak said there are as yet no legal grounds for categorizing this as terrorism,” Marczak said.​

Lodz court spokesman Pawel Urbaniak said on Monday that the man’s identity is being investigated as he had “very basic” documents on him. Polsat News said the man had arrived in Poland a couple of weeks ago after being expelled from Sweden and had lived in Switzerland for several years previously….​

Hugh Fitzgerald: Cardinal Burke Breaks Ranks
Islamic State claims responsibility for jihad attack in Ansbach

 

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The Rome of Old as the Rome of the New - Destined to Fall!


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS8oT3SNlC8

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