The Arab Street erupts in atavistic displays when Americans or Israelis are eliminated. The American Street is not that different. Our adversaries hand out sweets when we die; we pass the beer when one of theirs shuffles off his mortal coil. They dance the Debka (an Arabic traditional dance) and ululate at our misery; we bump and grind lasciviously when they expire ~ilana

This is who we are. Which is why President Barack Obama sounded so phony when he intoned: “That is not who we are. We don’t trot this stuff out as trophies.” The president was alluding to images of Osama bin Laden’s shattered skull. Obama had the fortitude to instruct the elite SEAL Team 6 to shoot Osama on-site, but has, ever since, been feigning daintiness about releasing the images.

According to Al Jazeera, a Pakistani security officer is rumored to have snapped shots of three others who were killed during the raid on bin Laden’s Abbottabad hideout. The pictures were purchased by Reuters and have been published. They show surfaces slick with blood. No weapons are evident.

Tellingly, Barack Obama gave a measure of presidential protection, in 2009, to some of the sadistic and slutty servicemen and women toiling in the porn theaters of Iraq. As Reuters divulged, “at least one picture showed an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.” And who can forget the pornographic pictorials to surface, in 2004, from the Abu Ghraib prison, starring the 800th Military Police Brigade and their Iraqi sex slaves?

The generic GI Joe and GI ho soon surfaced in Afghanistan too. For weeks, “The Kill Team,” a group of American infantrymen serving in Afghanistan, had been baying for blood. As Rolling Stone magazine reported, in March of this year, the “Bravo Company” had been brooding over “the ethics of bagging ‘savages’ and had debated the probability of getting caught,” before they went hunting in “an isolated farming village,” in Kandahar Province. Try as the Pentagon did, the handiwork of the men from the “Bravo Company” has survived for posterity.

Decapitation, desecration, mutilation: Click through this gallery of the grotesque to view these made-in-America, stylized murders.

“The images – more than 150 of which had been obtained by Rolling Stone – portray a front-line culture among U.S. troops in which killing innocent civilians is seen as a cause for celebration. ‘Most people within the unit disliked the Afghan people,’ one of the soldiers told Army investigators. ‘Everyone would say they’re savages.'” In striving to control and transform alien, Islamic societies, US statecraft goes against its own countrymen’s instincts and interests.

As deracinated and divided as our own society indubitably is; it is still united through the force and manufactured consensus of a highly centralized state. Not so the countries with which we meddle. Kin, clan and the Koran are what unite them. The locals, understandably, hate us for untethering them from what sustains them. And boy, do we hate them back. That too is only natural.

Take the Pashtun people we patronize in rural Afghanistan. They happen to disdain the central government we strive to strengthen. The same antagonism exists between the authoritarian protectorate we’ve established in Pakistan and its people.

In 2003, the US placed a bounty on the heads of Uday and Qusay, sons of Saddam Hussein. When the inevitable tip came in, the occupying force converged on the villa in which the two lived with their families, and shot the place up. The men resisted. The victors arranged a gothic display of the bodies of the vanquished.

That’s who we are, Mr. President.

A few of us still remember Abeer Qasim Hamza. The Iraqi girl had a mop of hair, a delicate face and big black eyes. She was only 14 when she died at the hands of the American soldiers who lusted after her. After careful planning, the servicemen murdered her parents and 5-year-old sister, and took turns with Abeer. When they were through with her, our military men summarily executed her with a shot to the head. Rest in peace Abeer. Her fate and the fate of others like her is a consequence of who we are.

There is reason to believe that many of the students who streamed into the streets of the Capital, and gathered at Ground Zero, in New York, to rejoice over the kill, may not have known who Osama bin Laden was. The average young American, after all, has never read a book, if he can help it. (Did you know that forty seven percent of Detroiters are “functionally illiterate”?)

This too is an aspect of who we are.

“Who is Osama Bin Laden and why should I care?” “Is Osama Bin Laden famous? Am I the only one who doesn’t know who he is?” Such tweets were quite common among American teens, observed the British Daily Mail. By the estimate of “Yahoo! Search Trends,” teens ages 13-17 … made up 66 percent of searches for ‘who is osama bin laden?'” “The figures give a revealing insight into the lack of current affairs and general knowledge among teenagers,” quipped the Daily Mail’s correspondent.

The twits were indeed atwitter:

Tara: I’m probably retarded for asking this, but who is Osama and why is it good that he died? Cory: Who is Osama and why is it important we killed him? Shawn: who is Osama Bin Laden? Is he in the band as well?

Reptilian brains like these took their spring-break behavior to the streets when the news about bin Laden’s demise broke. They too are who we are.Why not own our atavism? There will always be a marginalized, underbelly of genius and ingenuity in America. But for the rest, we have morphed into a militant, mindless people.

In 2001, this column wrote of putting “precision pac men—special-ops soldiers”—to good use in capturing the man who confessed to 9/11. Instead, America sent lumbering, standing armies after bin Laden. In its clodhopper’s traipse around the world, our military has caused the deaths and displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, squandered trillions of our debased dollars, destroyed at least two countries, and crippled the American economy. Had the “Pac Men Of The Universe” undertaken and achieved a precision operation after 9/11—it would be worth celebrating. But not now.

Conga lines of jubilant Americans must, by sad necessity, give way to welfare lines. If recent news reports are to be believed, one in seven Americans stands in-line for food stamps from the government. That is now the alpha and omega of American life.

©2011 By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
May 6

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November 13, 2009

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“I am just an ordinary middle-aged primary school teacher” is how the teddy-bear teacher, Gillian Gibbons, described herself.

In the age of compulsive self-actualization, and with women “doing their own thing,” far be it from me to question how ordinary Ms. Gibbons truly is. Photographs from her sojourn to Sudan show the 54-year-old riding a camel, lounging with a leopard, and getting down with the locals à la Angelina Jolie.

At least in one respect this Briton, who was arrested in Sudan for “allowing her seven-year-old pupils to name a teddy bear Mohamed,” is a garden-variety liberal gal. Remember Sidney Poitier in the role of Mr. Thackeray, the teacher who transformed the lives of his tough, East-End students, in “To Sir, With Love”? Ms. Gibbons seems to have trusted that, with a little TLC, she too could pull off an exotic version of that British classic.

But “To Sudan, With Love” bombed.

In the same humanitarian spirit, Ms. Gibbons assured her well-wishers that she “harbored no bitterness towards the country or its people,” 1000 of whom convened outside the Sudanese president’s official residence to call for her execution. Ms. Gibbons was also aghast at the thought of having offended the tender souls still clamoring for her head.

For her “crime,” she was released after only 15 days in jail. It helped that two British Muslim peers, Lord Ahmed and Lady Warsi, traveled to Khartoum to petition for her release. Under Sudan’s enlightened law, the Sharia scofflaw could have been imprisoned for much longer, publicly whipped, even murdered, if the mutinous multitudes got their way.

Equally “ordinary” were the responses from media across the pond. One intrepid writer complained that the British government didn’t do its nanny best to safeguard Citizen Gibbons. (Now that’s newsworthy: government fails its citizens.) Apparently, the adventurous Brit with the overbite ought to have been able to gamble with her life—for that’s what she did—knowing that the Labor government would gallop to the rescue.

All are scandalized that in a country dominated by Sharia law, an “infidel” would be targeted for trivia. Or, rather, for nothing at all. The indignation with which the incident has been greeted in the West is more telling than the event itself. It speaks to a hopeless, congenital stupidity about Islam.

We know what to expect from Islam’s advocates. Whenever a Muslim woman’s genitals are infibulated, when she is flogged for having been raped, killed for “honor,” or betrothed at age nine, Islam’s aficionados invariably claim these barbarisms are a manifestation of cultural peculiarities, or of the imposter, inauthentic Islam. The teddy-bear incident will be similarly rationalized.

Ms. Gibbons’ innocence about Islam reminds me of another group of half-witted women, this time American, who dominated the news some years back. Guided by hormones—and the liberal tenet according to which all people are fundamentally the same—the ladies married Saudi Arabian lads. These women were convinced they could transform their Wahhabi paramours into sensitive westerners, who share the housework and carry the newborn in a papoose.

Having entered such ill-fated relationships willingly, and had children with their Wahhabi men, the women were now ready for the next stage in the “adventure”: They followed their spouses to Saudi Arabia. What fun! There, much to their surprise, their mates turned them into inmates. The women and their daughters were now rightless prisoners. How’s that for an “unforeseen” development?!

Before relocating to Saudi Arabia, you’d have thought the ladies would’ve taken a trip first to their local library. Had they done their homework, they’d have discovered that Saudi Arabia is a medieval theocracy, where uttering a loud Hail Mary can get you into trouble with the religious police, the Mutawaa’in.

In one incident, the Saudi Mutawaa’in caused the death by fire of a number of schoolgirls. The devout deputies refused to let the girls escape because their heads were immodestly uncovered, the fire having incinerated their headgear. Suffice it to say, you’d have to be retarded—and certainly negligent—to voluntarily raise daughters in Saudi Arabia.   

When reality dawned, the American women who wed Wahhabis turned to President Bush to rectify their marital mistakes and rescue the children they’d imperiled.

Ms. Gibbons is lucky; she escaped with her life. She now continues her mea culpa—bowing and scarping to the religion of peace’s raging religionists. The adventure may be over, but the learning has yet to begin.  

©2007 By Ilana Mercer

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    December 7

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As a parent, what do you fear most? Your youngster “finding” Jesus, Jehovah, or Allah?  Faced with those choices, would you prefer that she come home one day wearing a black nose bag, and clutching a Quran and a prayer mat, or dressed in a long skirt, nose in the Hebrew or Christian Testament?

Judging by Christiane Amanpour’s documentary, “God’s Warriors,” there is a lot to be said for the black nose bag—niqab, hijab, whatever. CNN’s very own Leni Riefenstahl is at it again. The khaki clad, butch correspondent wanted badly to “bridge the gap of understanding about the Muslim world,” as she put it. How better to propagandize for Islam than to convince the viewer that the four Jewish and Christian “extremists” she’d located were every bit as menacing as the estimated 300 million salafi fundamentalists—that’s an approximation of the world’s potential pool of Jihadis.

Taking murder out of suicide bombings was hence high among Amanpour’s priorities. “Suicide martyrdom,” the honorific Amanpour conferred on these murderers, is not only noble, it’s always reactive. “Suicide martyrs” are pushed to commit their dastardly deeds by you-know-who (it begins with a “J”). And “religious historian Bruce Lawrence says suicide martyrdom has become the last resort for those who feel powerless to fight any other way.” Yada, yada, yada.

Judging by the 9365 acts of terrorism they’ve carried out since September 11, Muslims are the most powerless people in the world. Yet Amanpour implores us to recognize that “like people everywhere, [Muslims] abhor terrorism. The small minority who resort to violence is symptomatic of something many of us have failed to understand.” But as the “Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America” points out, polls have found that a substantial number of Muslims still believe terrorism is justified. Hamas has the hearts and minds of Palestinians, and if Bush democratized Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, which sanctions “martyrdom” missions against Israeli Jews, would win a majority.

Soon Amanpour was pressing flesh with members of the Muslim Brotherhood. The taqiyya-talking Brotherhood—which begat Hamas, Gama’a al-Islamiya, and Islamic Jihad—managed effortlessly to convey through Amanpour, uncritical conduit that she is, that theirs is a peaceful organization. The claim is disputed by many reliable sources: former U.S. Middle East peace envoy Dennis Ross, Newsweek reporters Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff, and Kuwaiti columnist Dr. Ahmad Al-Rabi. While denouncing “violence,” the Brotherhood officially, and openly, endorses “suicide martyrdom” against Israeli civilians. By not challenging the Brotherhood—by never once mentioning the camel in the room—Amanpour conveyed that she doesn’t count attacks on Israeli civilians as violence.

Naturally, Amanpour made hay of the Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer “half-baked folderol” about the Israeli Lobby. Did she countervail with the exploits of the mighty Saudi-backed Muslim Lobby, including “the powerful Oil Lobby operating in America and advocating for Muslim, Arab and Palestinian perspectives”? To ask is to answer. Absent from Amanpour’s poor journalistic effort were accounts of “the numerous activist Muslim/Arab organizations that lobby and propagandize to influence American public opinion and foreign policy.”

The multiplying madrasas, the infiltration of the military and the penitentiaries by Islamic chaplains, the active attempts to supply American schools with Saudi-slanted textbooks on the Middle East; ensconcing Islam-friendly Middle East Studies chairs in departments across the world, and funding student organizations to propagandize against Israel and the US—this is the handiwork of the Muslim Lobby.

Although minarets and madrasas are mushrooming across Europe and America, Amanpour and her experts encouraged Muslims to carp endlessly about discrimination. Conversely, the travails of twins from rural Kentucky, who were forbidden by a judge to offer a prayer at their graduation ceremony, made Amanpour snicker. The “religious right” claims Christianity is being expunged from the public square, when in reality, “they are playing the victim,” she snarled.

Conversely, Amanpour hung on Rehan Seyam’s every word, as the young American Muslim extolled the virtues of her Islamic attire: it allowed her to avoid being objectified. Karen Armstrong, a former Roman Catholic nun, now a fulltime apologist for Islam, vouched for how “very liberating” she found the habit. (Admittedly, Amanpour too was at her calmest when covered like a parrot in a cage.)

Indeed, Amanpour and her viziers affirmed Muslims who wanted to embrace a purer life style and get closer to their God. The youngsters were experiencing “alienation” in a lascivious, libertine society. However, young Christians seeking to palliate their pain by turning to God—with them Amanpour was impatient; they were pathological, not pious. When Ron Luce of the “Teen Mania” evangelical ministries disclosed that the kids he guides to God are required to dress modestly and are prohibited from using the Internet unsupervised, Amanpour shrieked: “Totalitarianism; the Taliban.” 

Imagine the disdain our correspondent evinced at the sound of Christian youngsters, faces beaming, reciting the Lord’s Prayer in public. What next? Executing apostates, unchaste women and gays?

©2007 By Ilana Mercer

   WorldNetDaily.com

    August 31

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For all the talk about democracy, the will of the people got little play during the presidential debate in South Carolina. Polls repeatedly show that 70 percent of the American people want out of Iraq. But no sooner does the pesky popular will intrude into the debate than the top Republican contenders begin to yammer about their obligation to demonstrate “leadership.” “Leadership,” of course, is a euphemism for overriding the will of the people.

Ron Paul is the exception. As Rudy Giuliani and his posse flap like black crows over Rep. Paul, we’d do well to remember that, unlike most of his colleagues, Paul understands that truth is timeless, not temporary. September 11 didn’t change that al-Qaida (the aggressors), not Iraq, needed to be punished for killing innocent Americans. September 11 didn’t alter the wisdom of John Quincy Adams’ counsel that America not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, but remain the well-wisher of the freedom and independence of all, but the champion and vindicator only of her own.

At this juncture in American history, in the midst of a catastrophic conflict which cannot be won, the opinions of the daft, dirigiste Dubya still carry the day with most of the presidential hopefuls. Extolling “Mr. Republican” Robert Taft can thus be dicey. Paul was mocked for “voting against authorizing President Bush to use force in Iraq,” and asked if he was “running for the nomination of the wrong party.” To which he responded by reminding his colleagues of the bygone Republican tradition of non-interventionism: Republicans were elected to end the wars in Korea and Vietnam. When confronted with “the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics,” and the loss of 241 Marines, Reagan extricated Americans from Lebanon.  

Whereas his colleagues effected a schizophrenic split between warfare and welfare spending—the first good; the last bad—Paul warned against these twin perils. “Policing the world and spending hundreds of billions of dollars on nation building,” coupled with splurging on “an entitlement system that has accumulated $60 trillion worth of obligations”—these are parts of the same statist equation. Nipping and tucking at the bureaucratic behemoth is meaningless unless we “change our philosophy about what government should do,” Paul explained.   

When asked how he could possibly consider eliminating the Department of Homeland Security in the midst of a war, Paul dared to suggest that the Department of Homeland Security doesn’t do what it purports to do. Like most government endeavors. “We were spending $40 billion on security prior to 9/11” and “had all the information [we] needed there to deal with the threat,” but didn’t. Recall, Condoleezza Rice insisted that intelligence received about suicide bombers belonging to al-Qaida crashing an aircraft into U.S. targets belonged to the realm of “analysis,” not “actionable intelligence.” Rice failed as national security adviser. The addition of a layer of government has done nothing to remedy Rice’s inability to perform the rudimentary tasks assigned to her.

Paul might have galvanized popular support had he reminded the American people that the Department of Homeland Security has been working consistently against them. This bureaucracy’s laws mandate the tormenting of the traveling public, and ensure that airlines are routinely sued for discrimination if they so much as attempt to protect their charges by screening suspicious passengers. The word “treason” comes to mind when one considers the Department’s refusal to stop the breach of the border with Mexico. Establishment Republicans don’t use the “treason” word nearly as often as they should to describe the America-hating actions of their government.

Indeed, Paul might consider taking up what is a central cause for conservatives. According to Human Events, 86 percent of its conservative readers consider illegal immigration the most pressing issue. While his Republican colleagues insist the American military’s obligation is to patrol the borders of Kosovo, Korea and Kurdistan, our own borders remain perilously porous; Americans living alongside them forsaken. What’s more, the treacherous political class and the “parrot press” is intent on retaining the status quo. Paul might have mobilized the masses had he pointed that out.

Paul is after a shift in foreign policy—away from grand, utopian schemes to compensate for deficits in democracy around the world. He needs, however, to frame this desirable, and desperately needed, change in direction as a circling of the wagons at home. To wit, the real war is on the border, not abroad. Defending and preserving the homeland, the conservative base believes, begins with beefing up the borders and reforming immigration policy. This excludes the amnesty program touted by the presidential front-runners. Paul would do well to remind Americans that Bush’s recipe for minute-made Americans will legalize the status of an estimated 300,000 individuals from Wahhabi-worshiping lands, whose customs do not preclude killing their hosts.

Paul was wrong to imply, reductively, that Islamic terrorism in general and September 11 in particular are the sole consequences of American foreign policy. Libertarians cannot persist in such unidirectional formulations. As I’ve said previously, our adventurous foreign policy is a necessary precondition for Muslim aggression but it is far from a sufficient one, given that Muslims today are at the center of practically every conflict across the world. The received leftist wisdom that the Arabs were (and remain) hapless and helpless victims of the West is false and patronizing. As scholars such as Efraim and Inari Karsh have shown, “Middle Eastern history is essentially the culmination of long-standing indigenous trends, passions, and patterns of behavior rather than an externally imposed dictate.”

Ultimately, a rational suspicion of power, upon which libertarians pride themselves, must be predicated on distrusting all power, not only American power.

©2007 By Ilana Mercer

   WorldNetDaily.com

    May 18

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Following September 11, immigration from Muslim countries tapered off, but, as the New York Times enthused, it has rebounded with a vengeance: “In 2005, more people from Muslim countries became legal permanent United States residents…than in any year in the previous two decades.” Although Bush is unlikely to allow millions of displaced Iraqis the prerogatives he bestows on illegal Mexicans, the reality is that he is responsible for rendering a Muslim country uninhabitable. This makes it harder for the US to reject Iraqi immigrants and asylum seekers. Starting this year, up to twenty thousand Iraqis will be granted asylum in the US. They will join close to 100,000 “Muslim from countries in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia,” who arrived in 2005.

Immigration (and the war in Iraq) ought to be the most crucial question in the 2008 election. It is the issue that will ultimately decide whether American values and institutions endure. Unfortunately, it’s a debate American Jews can put off no longer, although it’s too late for their European, British, and Canadian brethren. To speak plainly: a gathering danger threatens the Jews of America—to whom George Washington promised peace and goodwill in a 1790 address to a synagogue congregation in Newport, Rhode Island.

American Jewry has “lived up to the standard asked of them by Washington,” observed philosopher David Conway in his inquiry into the “Place of Nations in Classical Liberalism.” But “The stock of Abraham,” which has flourished in the New World—producing uniquely entrepreneurial, creative, and philanthropic citizens—is now threatened by what it perversely promotes: mass immigration. And in particular, immigration from Muslim countries, where anti-Semitism and extremism are imbibed with mother’s milk.

Before 1965, immigration to the US occurred in manageable ebbs and flows, ensuring the new arrivals were thoroughly assimilated and integrated. Multiculturalism was unheard of. In 1965, without voter approval, the US Congress replaced the national-origin immigration criterion, which ensured newcomers reinforced the historical majority, with a multicultural, egalitarian quota system, which divided visas between nations with an emphasis on mass importation of people from the Third World. The new influx was no longer expected to acculturate to liberal democratic Judeo-Christian values. With family reunification superseding economic or cultural requirements, every qualified immigrant would henceforth hold an entry ticket for his entire tribe.

Stephen Steinlight of the Center for Immigration Studies—in “High Noon to Midnight: Does Current Immigration Policy Doom American Jewry?”—courageously (for it runs counter to the views of most of his fellow American Jews) highlights the bizarre situation where entire villages from rural Mexico and the West Bank in Israel have US citizenship. How so? One member qualifies and then imports the entire town. In addition to having huge extended families, Muslims and Mexicans share an anti-Americanism, a tendency to crab about historical grievance and cling to a militant distinctiveness, and a predilection for aggressive identity politics (which the New York Times finds “strikingly positive”). Second only to Latinos, the relatively new (roughly 30-year-old) Muslim community is the most anti-Semitic community in the US, its members harboring the greatest propensity to act on their hatred.

Although Jews don’t benefit in the least from open-door immigration, having long since settled in the US, Israel, and other First World countries, the liberal Jewish community has continued to generously support this policy.

In Canada, Muslims now greatly outnumber Jews. In Europe, what remains of a Jewry devastated by the Holocaust comes under daily assaults and threats, mostly from the 20-million strong Muslim community. American Jewry is next. Although taqiyya-talking Muslim organizations (almost all radical) inflate the numbers, there are still only, approximately, 2 to 3 million Muslims in America to 5.3 million Jews. But mass immigration is rapidly changing that.

Allusions to the rise of a “new anti-Semitism” are misleading, because the violent assaults on Jews and their property in Europe, England, and Canada are nourished by an old hatred rooted in the Qur’an and in anti-infidel Islamic laws. Remember, Muslims invented the yellow rag with which the Nazis tagged Jews. The ghetto, “mellah” in Arabic, was a Muslim-devised gated community for the Jews of the Maghrib back in the 15th century. Not for naught did Maimonides, the 12th century Jewish philosopher and physician, write about the Arabs that, “Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they.”

As Steinlight points out, “It is virtually impossible to be reared in classical Islam and not be educated to hate Jews—based on a literalist reading of the Koran, where many of the Suras concerning Jews are monstrously hateful, murderous, [and] terrifying. …These texts also regard Jews as a spiritually fraudulent entity—all the prophets and great figures of the Hebrew Bible, according to Islamic teaching, were Muslims, not Jews. … With the exception of a tiny group of courageous American Muslims…who have spoken out and condemned … anti-Semitism, the ‘Muslim Street’ in the U.S. has yet to show its disapproval of this philosophical and political agenda.”

Ted Kennedy, the architect of the lemming’s lunacy that is American immigration policy, has hammered the administration for its apathy: “We can no longer ignore the plight of millions of [Iraqi] people… America must respond.” And so should American Jews! So far, however, the exponential growth of the Muslim community through immigration has failed to rally Jewish leaders. Listening to Abe Foxman, you would think that the chief dangers to Jewish continuity are marauding Mormons (who convert dead Jew) or Mel Gibson.  

©2007 By Ilana Mercer

   WorldNetDaily.com

    February 16

The post Jews Jeopardized By Muslim Immigration appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Those capable of following a rational argument understood the significance and purpose of Pope Benedict XVI’s words at the University of Regensburg. He did not misspeak; he was not quoted out of context; and his controversial historical reference vis-à-vis the irrationality of Islam was not randomly selected or incidental to his central thesis (faith and reason). Although very much outside the consensus, the pope was as purposeful as he was plain spoken. That he was driven to retract the analytical truth at which he had arrived is an indictment of those who menaced him into a mea culpa.

In the riot-causing address, the Holy Father spoke of reason as a filament of the Christian faith. He went on to recount how the university formed a “universe of reason,” in which, through rational inquiry, even the existence of God was questioned. Very deliberately the pope then countered with an example of unreason raised by the “erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus,” circa 1391. The emperor had “brusquely” and “forcefully” confronted the irrationality of Jihad, in debates with “an educated Persian.”

Paleologus—whose words the pope credited with serving as a “starting-point” for his meditation on “faith and reason”—proffered that “spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable, incompatible with the nature of God,” the implication being that a faith that so preaches and practices is both irrational and ungodly. “Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats,” the emperor told his Persian interlocutor. Observed Pope Benedict: “The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.”

The roots of Islamic irrationality run even deeper. In Muslim teaching, argued the pope, “God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality… God is not bound even by his own word, and … nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us.”

That Islam may be a closed and irrational system, impermeable to reform, has concerned this pope for some time. As a confidant recently put it, the issue for the Holy Father is how to deal with “a religion whose principle is based on God’s word—not on the words of men, but God’s word delivered directly to Mohammed—which can’t be interpreted, can’t be changed, can’t be adapted.”

That Islam counsels conquest, not coexistence, is ultimately what gives the pope pause.

The pope had previously expressed, also via proxy, his concerns over the survival of Christendom and the West in the face of a faith that doesn’t brook reason or reformation and is commanded to will the world to its ways. In January this year, Father Joseph Fessio, Provost of Ave Maria University in Naples, Florida, gave an interview to talk-show host Hugh Hewitt. During the exchange, he divulged that, since 1977, the pope and a close circle of companions and one-time students have been holding annual seminars of study and contemplation.

The 2005-seminar at the pope’s summer residence tackled “the Islamic concept of God and its consequences for a secular society.” In attendance were also a number of scholars of Islam.
Something quite unusual transpired when one of them, a Father Troll, offered his optimistic prescription: “Islam can enter into dialogue with modernity.” All it need do is “radically reinterpret the Qur’an”—excise legislation originating in seventh-century Arabia and still practiced there, such as cutting off a thief’s hand, keeping 4 wives, and treating half of humanity (women) as chattel.

Previously, the pope would always wait until his companions had their say. For the first time in Father Fessio’s memory, however, he interjected. According to Father Fessio’s rendition of the pope’s words, the problem with Islam was far more fundamental. As the Islamic tradition has it, the Qur’an is not Mohammed’s word; it is God’s eternal word, seen as something sent from Heaven, never to be adapted or altered.

In the Christian and Jewish texts, conversely, “God has worked through His creatures.” As a result, these texts are not just the word of God, but the words of men inspired by Him. Isaiah, Mark—and others of the “divinely appointed”—are fully authorized and adequately inspired to decipher and revive the faith.

Why does the pope worry so about Islam’s apparent theological dead-end? In Father Fessio’s telling, the answer lies in the torrential influx of North African Muslims into Europe. If current demographic and migrational trends persist, Muslims will soon form a majority on the Continent. The countries whence these Muslim immigrants come were once Christian. Now, however, Christians in Algeria, Morocco, Libya, and Egypt carry their bible on pain of death. And only one of the 98 Islamic countries in the world has religious freedom. The Holy See might not want to see the Vatican become number 99.

©2006 By Ilana Mercer
WorldNetDaily.com

September 22

The post Benedict The Brave appeared first on ILANA MERCER.