The Disappearing Middle Eastern Christians
Fourteen centuries of Islam have fatally undermined Christianity in the land of its birth. The decline of the Christian remnant in the Middle East has been accelerated in recent decades, and accompanied by the indifference of the post-Christian West to its impending demise. Once-thriving Christian communities are now tiny minorities, and in most countries of the region their percentages have been reduced to single digits. Whether they disappear completely will partly depend on Western leaders belatedly taking an interest in Christian plight and persecution. This seems most unlikely, as the examples of Iraq, Egypt and Syria demonstrate.
In Syria the Obama administration is fully committed to supporting the rebels, although it should be well aware of the ideological outlook and long-term objectives of Bashar al-Assad’s foes. They are Sunni fundamentalists. The partnerships forged thus far are ominous. The New York Times reported last June that CIA officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey, deciding which Syrian opposition fighters across the border will receive arms. The weapons are being funneled across the Turkish border “by way of a shadowy network of intermediaries including Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood.”
Syria is the region’s only remaining country where Christians live effectively as equals with their Muslim neighbors. It has the second largest Christian community in the region (after Egypt), some 2.5 million strong. Most of them are supporting President Bashar Al Assad amidst ongoing rebellion in the country because they prefer a dictator who guarantees the rights as a religious minority to the grim future that Assad’s departure might bring. According to George Ajjan, an American political strategist of Syrian origin, an existential fear about a bloody fate awaiting them—should the Assad regime fall in Syria—is the main driver behind the Christian community’s almost unanimous support of its policies:
“The secular regime of the Baath Party dominated over the past four decades by the Alawites, a heterodox Shiite sect to which the Assad family belongs, undoubtedly secured life and liberty for the Christians— although dire economic circumstances resulting from the regime’s failure to provide growth have driven many middle-class Christians to emigrate, seeking a better standard of living abroad. Taking that into account, the commonly-cited figure of 10% Christians is perhaps close to double the real number living in Syria at the start of the uprising.”
It is not to be doubted that if the Obama Administration is successful in its stated objective of bringing Assad down, the Christians in Syria will follow their Iraqi brethren into exile. The predictable consequences of Assad’s fall and the Brotherhood’s victory would be the creation of a Shari’a-based Islamic state.
According to political analyst James Jatras, it sometimes appears as if Washington’s policy toward the unrest sweeping the Middle East is impacted by a network of Muslim Brotherhood agents working in cohorts with Obama who is only pretending to have strayed from his Islamic birth (as defined by Sharia). If this scenario is even only partly correct, Jatras says, then it would be hard to see how the result would be different from the one we have:
“If the conscious goal of the policy were the final uprooting of Christ's followers from the region of His birth and earthly ministry, it could not have been better crafted. No one can doubt that should the regime of Bashar al-Assad fall, Syria's Christians (primarily Orthodox), already singled out for attack by the ‘democratic’ opposition, would be subject to a full-scale campaign of elimination that they (unlike the Alawites, who at least can try to defend themselves in mountain areas in which they predominate) are unlikely to survive as a living community. It is thus not too strong to accuse, in so many words, those bipartisan champions of ‘Free Syria’ who urge outside intervention of advocating Christian genocide, whether or not that is their conscious intention.”
That this scenario seems acceptable to the Obama Administration became obvious in October 2011 when Dalia Mogahed, Obama’s adviser on Muslim affairs, blocked a delegation of Middle Eastern Christians led by Lebanon’s Maronite Patriarch Bechara Rai from meeting with Obama and members of his national security team at the White House. Mogahed reportedly cancelled the meeting at the request of the Muslim Brotherhood in her native Egypt. Rai has warned repeatedly that a Brotherhood-led regime would be a disaster for Syria’s Christian minority, but his admonitions are unwelcome in Washington.
Last July, the Department of State vigorously lobbied against bipartisan Congressional legislation to send “protection envoys” to the Middle East to examine the position of the Christian minorities. The State Department called the protection envoy role “unnecessary, duplicative and likely counter-productive.” In the meantime, tens of thousands of Syria’s Christians have already fled rebel-controlled areas as Islamists who dominate in the rebel ranks target them for murder, extortion and kidnapping. As George Ajjan concludes, this gradual downward demographic pressure of recent years will explode with the exodus of Christians from Syria that is occurring and will accelerate without an end to the current armed conflict:
“Should the uprising continue, with the regime losing control of more and more territory to armed rebels and law and order further breaking down, Christians will increasingly become the targets of intimidation tactics, kidnapping, and overt hostility—if not ethnic cleansing from mixed areas.”
At the same time, Administration officials pressed Egyptian generals into gradual surrender to the Muslim Brotherhood’s takeover of the country. The decision to treat the Muslim Brotherhood as a strategic partner has been on the cards at least since February 10 of last year—one day before Hosni Mubarak’s resignation— when President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper made an astounding statement. He told the House of Representatives Select Committee on Intelligence that the Brotherhood “is an umbrella term for a variety of movements… a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried al-Qaida as a perversion of Islam.”
The assertion by a top-ranking member of Obama’s team that the Muslim Brotherhood is “largely secular” defies belief. It came into being in 1928 as an outright reaction against secularism, which the Egyptian elites had largely embraced during the British dominance in the country. To this day the Brotherhood’s simple credo remains the same: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” Contrary to Clapper’s assurances, the Brotherhood is an archetypical Islamic revivalist movement that opposes the ascendancy of secular ideas and advocates a return to integral Islam as a solution to the ills that had befallen Muslim societies. Today it has branches in every traditionally Muslim country and all over the world, including the United States. Its members share the same long-term goal: the establishment of a world-wide Islamic state based on Sharia law. As is to be expected, they believe that the Koran and the Tradition justify violence to overthrow un-Islamic governments, and they look upon America as a sworn enemy.
During the Cold War, Washington routinely pandered to various Islamists as a means of weakening secular Arab nationalist regimes. In the mid 1950s, the Americans even promoted the idea of forming an Islamic bloc—led by Saudi Arabia—to counter the Nasserist movement. That approach may have made some sense during the Cold War, but it certainly makes none today. The strategy of effective support for Islamic ambitions against the Soviets in Afghanistan has helped turn Islamic radicalism into a truly global phenomenon detrimental to U.S. security interests. The ridiculous notion that the Muslim Brotherhood can become America’s user-friendly partner merely proves that the architects of our Middle Eastern policy have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
Egypt’s dwindling Copts have seen their position deteriorate over the past year from precarious to perilous. Already facing discrimination and harassment from Mubarak’s secular regime, they now see that things could get a lot worse under the Islamists who are now poised to take complete power. Their annus horribilis started on New Year’s Day 2011, when a powerful car bomb targeted a Coptic church in Alexandria, killing 25 parishioners and wounding nearly 100 just as they were finishing midnight liturgy. The next turning point was the Maspero massacre on October 9, 2011, when 27 unarmed Christian protesters were killed and hundreds more injured, not by some shadowy Islamic extremists but by the military. An official commission—established by the Army—has unsurprisingly absolved the Army of all responsibility for the killings.
Egypt shows that the prospect of the end of Christianity in Syria as a direct consequence of American policy is not unique, nor limited to one party or administration. The almost complete Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt already is accompanied by an accelerating Coptic exodus, as church attacks and kidnappings (mainly of girls, who after rape and supposed “conversion” to Islam are denied return to their families).
The process is accelerating. On August 1 Sherif Gadallah, a prominent lawyer from Alexandria, submitted a report to the public prosecutor demanding the exclusion of Copts from the committee in charge of forming Egypt’s constitution. That same week a sectarian crisis escalated in the village of Dahshur, only 25 miles south of Cairo, where hundreds of Muslims torched and looted Coptic businesses and homes. “As 120 families had already fled the village … the businesses and homes were an easy game for the mob to make a complete clean-up of everything that could be looted,” said Coptic activist Wagih Jacob. “The security forces were at the scene of the crime while it was taking place and did nothing at all.” The Coptic Orthodox Church issued a statement criticizing officials “for not dealing firmly with the events, demanding the speedy arrest of the perpetrators, the provision of security to the village Copts, their return to their homes, and monetary compensation for all those affected.” Its adherents see the Dahshur incident as a continuation of the Mubarak-era policy of collective punishment of Copts. Renowned Egyptian novelist Alaa Al-Aswany said, “What if the Americans acted the same way as the extremists of Dahshur; would you accept the expulsion of Muslims of America in response to Bin Laden's terrorism?”
Egypt’s ongoing transition to what passes for democracy in the Muslim world is going to make matters far worse for the Copts, who are fearful the army and courts will not shield them from ever-greater discrimination and harassment. The Freedom and Justice Party, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Muslim Brotherhood, now controls the country’s parliament, and the president is a Brotherhood disciple. The adherents of political Islam are in charge. Their spiritual leader is Sheikh Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti of Egypt, who in a recent video reminded the faithful that Christians are infidels. The Sheikh’s position is in line with orthodox Islamic teaching, which may explain the fact that he is still hailed in the West as a moderate. Five years ago, a U.S. News article described him as “a highly promoted champion of moderate Islam.” As a result, according to an August 14 report in El Fegr, jihadi organizations openly distribute leaflets inciting for the killing of Copts and promising them “a tragic end if they do not return to the truth” (Islam). The letter even names contact points and a location, Sheikh Ahmed Mosque in Kasfrit, where those supportive of such goals should rally after Friday prayers and join forces.
“Liberation” of Iraq from Saddam Hussein’s secular dictatorship has devastated that country’s Christian community, with many taking refuge in Syria, where they are now again under threat. “At least proponents of Muslim liberation in the Middle East can claim, however implausibly, that the negative impact on local Christians is an unintended and regrettable consequence of a fundamentally humane and progressive program,” James Jatras says.
“But in the Balkans, specifically in Kosovo and in Muslim-controlled areas of Bosnia, no crocodile tears are required. The victims are Serbs, and of course they deserve everything they get. But excuses and window-dressing aside, the bottom line is the same: Washington—supposedly the great global opponent of jihad terror—in fact is the consistent supporter of militant Islamization of one country after another, with the predictable result of streams of Christian refugees, burned churches, murdered clergy, and enslaved girls. Given the collusion between our government and media, not one American in ten has a clue what our government is doing in our name and with our money.”
Iraq’s dwindling Christian population marked Christmas 2011 with bomb attacks across Baghdad that killed dozens of them. After U.S. forces completed their withdrawal from the country, Christian exodus from Iraq accelerated. “Our faithful in Iraq live in fear,” Chaldean Bishop Shlemon Warduni complained, “they feel there is no peace, no security, so they go where they can live in peace… The government cannot ensure their lives.”
The Christian community in Iraq was some two million strong before the US-led invasion of 2003. Up to four-fifths is estimated to have left the country in recent years following a series of attacks by Muslim extremists. While they were still there, the U.S. forces did little to protect them, leaving the task to the Iraqis. On October 31, 2010, an assault on a Baghdad church left 44 worshippers, two priests and seven security force members dead. According to Louis Sako, Chaldean archbishop of Kirkuk, “the security forces are not sufficiently prepared to ensure the protection of Christians.” He says that 57 churches and houses of worship in Iraq have been attacked since the invasion with a thousand Christians killed and more than 6 000 wounded.
At the outset of the Islamic conquests under Muhammad's successors all of these lands were 100 percent Christian. By the time the Ottomans took over they had a Christian plurality, and in Palestine and Lebanon the outright majority. Under the British Mandate (1919-1947), Palestine officially was a Christian country. Bethlehem, for instance, had a population that was 90 percent Christian. Today, they are disappearing: Bethlehem is now less than 10 percent Christian. Among almost three million Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, only 50,000 Christians remain. Within the pre-1967 borders of Israel there are six million people; only two percent are Christians. In the city of Jerusalem the Christian population has declined from 45,000 in 1940 to a few thousand today. At the current rate of decline, the Christian population will be a fraction of one percent in the year 2020, and there will be no living church in the land of Christ
If the Jewish or Muslim population of America or Western Europe were to start declining at a similar rate, there would be an outcry from their co-religionists all over the world. There would be government-funded programs to establish the causes and provide remedies, and heart-rendering Hollywood movies. The endangered minority would be awarded instant victim status and be celebrated as such by the media and academia. But the disappearing Middle Eastern Christians, or their remnant, remain invisible to the Western world. It is evidently hard to be “post-Christian” without becoming anti-Christian.
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While teaching a course on the Trinity, I mentioned the Christians of the Middle East, particularly those in modern-day Iraq and Syria, and noted that they had enjoyed a modicum of protection by the secular regimes of Iraq and Syria, a protection which had been in the case of Iraq and is being in the case of Syria swept away as a result of U.S. and allied actions. My audience or students were puzzled that there were even Christians in the Middle East and became irritated that I had suggested that U.S. action, directly or indirectly, could lead to the demise of these Christian communities about which they knew nothing.
With the ruling elites, motivated by hatred for everything Christian, European, or White, flooding Europe and the Anglosphere with aliens of varying alien creeds, it is not too far fetched to suspect that they also have a policy of encouraging resurgent Islam in the Middle East in the hope that one day a Caliphate or just a revived Ottoman or other Islamist state will invade and conquer Europe. In fact I think such a hope to be likely among the traitorous elites of the West, who will do anything at all that might one day lead to it's destruction.
"Whether they disappear completely will partly depend on Western leaders belatedly taking an interest in Christian plight and persecution"
Srdja,
You have got to be kidding. The last thing we need is another issue for the GOP to lie to American Christians about. In fact the Christians in Iraq are still reeling from all the help we provided them during the last decade. Post Christian must mean something I suppose, if only the obvious fact that the world is hostile to the Church, has been for some time and the person whose name is legion is not very nice afterall.
An excellent article on an important issue.
Amen.
“According to political analyst James Jatras, it sometimes appears as if Washington’s policy toward the unrest sweeping the Middle East is impacted by a network of Muslim Brotherhood agents working in cohorts with Obama who is only pretending to have strayed from his Islamic birth (as defined by Sharia).”
Would the Christians of the Middle East fare better under the devout Mormon Romney and the devout Catholic Ryan?
“If the Jewish or Muslim population of America or Western Europe were to start declining at a similar rate, there would be an outcry from their co-religionists all over the world.”
Not only from their co-religionists, but from Romney, Ryan, Biden, Clinton, etc.
Not only from their co-religionists, but from Romney, Ryan, Biden, Clinton, etc.
Joe,
So true and so funny ... but then again, not real funny. For decades this has been happening in Palestine. The only voice for Christians in Palestine has been the Othodox Church or the Vatican. Christians at one time made up almost 20 % of Palestine, now after decades of American help, they are less than 4%. Each year for the last four years, there is a Christian who visits our parish from Palestine selling little olive wood figurines from the Holy Land. Between visiting with him once a year and reading Israeli newspapers on the internet, one can learn much more about the Holy Land in a few days than one will ever learn from American news sources in years.
"If the Jewish or Muslim population of America or Western Europe were to start declining at a similar rate, there would be an outcry from their co-religionists all over the world."
But such declines have happened, and without any outcry.
The American Southern Jewry has been one of the fastest declining communities in America, even though they were once the largest Jewish community in America in the 1800s, back when one North Carolina rebbe declared America to be their Jerusalem and their promised land.
The NC rebbe was right. There is no country in the world where the Diaspora is more numerous, or where its members feel more secure and comfortable.
The Western secularists who dominate government in Europe and the America's are direct descendants of those Freemasonic ideologues and anti-Christ's whose hatred of the Catholic and Orthodox church's caused the the massacres during the revolutionary period which started with the organized executions of French Revolution to the murder of the Romanov's and millions of their fellow Russians. Their spirit survives and is stronger today, although at times more subdued and surreptitious but just as deadly. Presidents such as the Bush's and Obama may say they are 'christian' (to get elected) but their actions belie that claim when you see their deadly and anti-christian actions whether it is unprovoked war, decimation of Christian minorities in the Middle East/Serbia and the killing abortion mills which they support with tax dollars. Their allies in America are the evangelical right which cares not a wit for their fellow Christians in the Middle East or the Balkans. Why? For the simple reason that your ordinary Baptist like Hagee does not consider the Middle East Eastern Catholics, Copts or Orthodox as real Christians but heretics and idolaters whom need to be converted to the religion of Calvin and Knox or wiped out by the infidel Muslims, discriminating Israeli's or by American cluster bombs. Their more immediate focus is Israeli supremacy and hegemony in the region and their bizarre version of eschatological theology. Let's not forget the impact of significant pro-Israel dollars being funneled to these religious groups. Their Old Testament mentality and identification with ancient Israel approves of the 'might makes right' actions of the Israeli and American governments. We should also not underestimate the motivation of the secular political elites to remove ancient orthodox Christianity (Catholics and Orthodox) by using right wing evangelicals, secular Jews and radical Muslims through assassination and murder or more insidiously through their control of the decadent and materialistic media which destroys souls instead of bodies.
PJ,
You can't explain folks like Tony Alamo, Jack Chick and Rev. Hagee by stupidity, naivety,willful ignorance, heredity, environment,ideology etc... These types have always been with us and always prospered or flashed as a thread in our ancient history. Clyde Wilson knows them well in this country but it is an ancient enemy ever present in various guises since the crucifixion. Some believe Judas Iscariot was of the type, others say Peter was of this variety before Pentecost and then of course there is the oriental, the Manichean, the Albigensian there is always a lust for the "pure " about them. I do not understand it or even think it is very helpful to speak of it but it is something very close to demonic.
Mr. Reavis, thanks for your comment. I suspect a "lust for the pure" if case specific individually--(not say communally wherein necessity requires folks to be on the same page)--is spiritual pride. So I think if anything could be so tagged demonic that would be it. The design though obviously allows for the demonic. Since whether we stand under God the original source for gods and the divine and His divine world or mother Nature inclusive now of divine humanity in its ascending and descending order from where we stand. Or whether from spiritual pride we stand apart from orignal source and under the demonic. Either way in freedom we 'cause' subsequent results.
Our failure so we can remedy it is we don't generally permit ourselves to assess these opposite causes though they're both very real in their effects. We tend coming from within our metaphysics toward then the 'predisposition', oh, the world is 'fallen' and as long as I'm sufficiently moral well, that's about all I can do regarding such opposites. Though then if such metaphysics are flawed it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If everyone is on the flawed page culturally via upbringing and later re-enforcement [individually] then even collectively within a community of such individuals they'll permit the demonic to hold sway. If it does so in a unified way, which holds superior power in behalf of its cause and its subsequent effects.
In my opinion flawed this way as we are Christians tend not to realize this is our real apocalypse. Metaphysically perhaps a 'demonic' flaw or germ in the ointment for whatever the reason the Church has yet gotten around to rooting out. It also gives us Christian folks sometimes the notion there's spiritual wickedness in high places. Though if it is a demonic flaw the 'high' place in which it resides is not in heaven but in our metaphysics.
Michael,
Thank you. It is a big subject. The very name Cathars, from the greek, katharos, means "unpolluted" or "pure. This is how they often refer to themselves and in fact what they believe about themselves. It is a thread of our civilization as ancient as the poor sinner begging for mercy. The pure are often marked by a fierce anti-clericalism and a Manichean dualism like Star Wars which divides the world into good and evil principles, with material being evil and only the mind, the force, or the spirit intrinsically good.
It is not work and prayer but either/or ---all prayer or all work. It is gaining popularity again in our day as both parties ceaselessly reminded us these last two weeks " America is the greatest "force" for good in the the world the world has ever seen" If "this" (our enemies or whoever we dislike in the world ) be not evil , then evil has no name !!! It is also considered unamerican or impure to dissent from this type of Nationalist nonsense of the "pure" or "real" American. They( the real americans) plan on banishing terror from the face of the earth no matter how many they must kill, nuke, maime, etc. You get the idea.
Perhaps it is a frustration with God and his creation, perhap it is ignorant provincialism like the King of Siam who taught even the arrogant English they were small, compared to his Kingdom. Or perhaps it is the evil one we ask to be delivered from in the Lord's prayer, but the thing seems always around in every age under different guises. It hates marriage but will tolerate it , especially the marraige of matter and spirit. It is against the Incarnation and described by the historian, Christopher Dawson, as a misdirected thirst for God. A desire for utopia on earth, or a life everlasting without the willingness to pass through death.
I'm a bit of a heretic, though just personally so. The organization of the Church and what it takes to have a religion I don't oppose but favor. Sometimes metaphysical flaws if they are such aren't flaws so much at the time they occur if that's where people are at (meaning perhaps they require and in some way benefit from being imbalanced in one direction or another). But personally I do not believe there is any ground for the so-called 'word' incarnate. For example I subscribe more toward the belief in the Logos as encompassing all of reality of which words and flesh for example are parts. And all of these parts are obviously incarnate, divinely constellated hierarchically bottom up, top down; top down, bottom up and all points inbetween forming the divinely created whole. Of which only the creator is subsequently apart from and undoubtedly as he chooses a part of. Breaking off a part of the whole reality be it 'flesh' or 'word' as incarnate I suspect is a lust for the pure. Both Judaism and Christianity (Isam does it as well to my knowledge with its holy text) do this. But again even if it's a metaphysical flaw, perhaps it's the only way to do it in this world [yet] presently? So I gladly defer ostensibly while at least honestly having a personal reservation regarding my belief about the whole reality. A reality which is both personal and universal not 'purely' one or the other.
Mr. Yurick,
These are mysteries of sorts __ they can be approached through reason but not exhausted with complete understanding. so I do not think your questions and thoughts are anything but the normal response to wrestling with such things. The inspiration of the flesh, the incarnation of the spirit, or as Dante described :"the love that moves the sun and all the other stars," the divine Logos, the real presence etc..
I hear people tell me all the time that it was good thing (if not a great thing) we (Roman Catholics) dropped Latin from schools, prayers, offices, etc, so "people could understand things better." I understand the attitude but even if it were true, it is really not helpful. It takes a lifetime to make sense of some of these truths or revelations and translating them is not the problem --- catching a glimpse of their truth is. It is good to hear from someone who has even considered such things in these times when just getting by is the biggest task of each day .
Dr. Trifkovic writes:
"At the outset of the Islamic conquests under Muhammad's successors all of these lands were 100 percent Christian. By the time the Ottomans took over they had a Christian plurality, and in Palestine and Lebanon the outright majority. Under the British Mandate (1919-1947), Palestine officially was a Christian country. Bethlehem, for instance, had a population that was 90 percent Christian."
This is what is so maddening about the establishment of Israel, or more to the point, the American assistance/collusion in its birth. Here we had President Wilson, the son of a minister, steeped in the Bible, according to biographers, and he even sends the King-Crane commission to interview the Palestinians – which reports back that the Christian and muslim Arabs are unanimously opposed to Jewish immigration and that British officers on the ground believe the Zionist program can be carried out only by force – and then he goes behind the scenes with Brandeis and Balfour and does the dirty deal anyway, all the while piously trumpeting his doctrine of self-determination to the public. And as Dr. T. (and any number of Jews themselves) further notes, the Jews never had it so good as they had/have it in the good old USA. It is Zionism and the establishment of Israel that first, last, always was and always will be the greatest enemy of Christendom in the Holy Land.
Arabs may not be our friends, and they certainly have too much influence with "ex"-mohammedan Obama, but, as always, are merely being run from pillar to post by one foreign power or another. And they, at least, do not blackmail American presidents into starting wars on their behalf.
I don't think there are any government-funded programs to establish the causes and provide remedies for the complete ethnic cleansing of the Jews that used to live in all the same countries mentioned.
Kind of like the old quotation: first they came for the Jews, now you ought not be surprised that they're coming for you. And for any Christians that support the Islamist cleansings and land-thefts from the Jews: your people are only getting the policy they wished for, ethnically clean and Muslim only states.
Why would Israel have the US spend over 30 years fighting for Islam?
Athur,
Yes, I think you have it quite right. The idea is to limit political freedoms and expand social freedoms. Pat Buchanan says such strategy should be used to benefit Americans, Israel thinks it should be used to benefit Israel and nihhilsts think it should be used to benefit nihilism. For instance here is the American vision of good vs.evil in Muslim countries as described in the New York Times Book in a recent review of The Arab Spring by John Bradley:
"Tunisia, a small, literate country where abortion is legal and sex education taught in a world-class education system, all thanks to Habib Bourguiba, who led the fight for independence from France and ruled “with an iron fist” for thirty years. The still-beloved Bourguiba held power by limiting political freedoms but granting social ones and raising middle-class living standards.
Here was a “Muslim authoritarian country” that got it right. It might have continued, had Bourguiba’s successor, Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, been less greedy and arrogant, his wife less ostentatious and her family less thuggish and opportunistic. Tunisians objected, but what did they get? Bradley paints a sinister portrait of Rashid Ghannouchi, leader of the Islamist Ennahda party and head of Tunisia’s elected interim government. When Ghannouchi states “we want a system based on coalitions since only this will protect us from tyranny”, Bradley hears “a power sharing deal”, where liberals have some say in the economy while the Islamists “pursue [their] social agenda of Islamizing Tunisian society from below … [eradicating] the country’s secular inheritance [and] dragging Tunisia, chanting and ululating, back to the Middle Ages”. Far from empowering the people, the Jasmine Revolution was “the dumbest most selfdefeating uprising in history” and the Arab Spring a dismal failure that “socially and economically has put back countries like Tunisia, Yemen and Syria by decades”.
So you see, the measure of progress is how many late term abortions these Moslems are willing to allow, how sophisticated their sexual techniques for mass sterilization are taught in government run schools, etc. how receptive to more "western ideas ", open borders, open markets, etc. This is the conservative position. The left liberal types who gathered at the Big Duopoly Conventions last Month is not much different, they simply add the urgency that all this is necessary to save the entire planet.
I know you will agree with me, Mr. Reavis, but just in case anyone else has any doubt: we are not at ALL suggesting that Christians ally with orthodox Muslims in the culture war. The "social freedoms" mentioned of Tunisia are readily available in most Western countries. And yet I would not trade my Western residency for a post in Iran anytime in the near future.
I don't think there are any government-funded programs to establish the causes and provide remedies for the complete ethnic cleansing of the Jews that used to live in all the same countries mentioned.
Kind of like the old quotation: first they came for the Jews, now you ought not be surprised that they're coming for you. And for any Christians that support the Islamist cleansings and land-thefts from the Jews: your people are only getting the policy they wished for, ethnically clean and Muslim only states.
On so many levels, this does not even warrant a response.
Not that I'm not tempted to respond, but what I would be inclined to say would be reactive, would not at all make sense or be coherent and might be prosecutable in some countries.
Mr. Reavis, thanks for the excerpt. I was struck by these words from the New York Times review, which were, "limiting political freedoms but granting social ones and raising middle-class living standards"
One of the interesting elements of these Arab Spring uprisings is the criticism of the police state in those countries.
Yes, there has been a police state. What caused it to build up and tighten the way it did?
Perhaps it was the relentless terrorism by the fundamentalists, who were so well-organized in their operations, so pervasive in their presence, and so audacious in their plans that they could murder Anwar Sadat on Egyptian national television? How would any government in any part of the world react? And for some reason, the ones who claimed to be the worst victims of the police state were fundamentalists themselves, and often those fundamentalists who did plan gruesome terror attacks - Ayman al Zawahiri, for example.
Political freedoms were limited, but whose freedoms? A tiny minority of murderers who use ideology to justify criminal behaviour. And in return for this, middle class living standards were raised? A few thousand fundamentalists get tortured while several million people come out of poverty and into the middle class? This is somehow a bad thing!
Prateek,
Surely you know I could care less about what Moslems think or believe, I was illlustrating the absurdity of the New York times expounding their own belief that the only good Moslem was a pro-abortion, pro- sterilization type who hated his people, their religion and culture. Which is actually quite close to the religion and faith of the New York times. If you want to defend this principle, defend it but don't mascarade under irrelevant scenarios :"Perhaps it was the relentless terrorism by the fundamentalists, who were so well-organized in their operations, so pervasive in their presence, and so audacious in their plans that they could murder Anwar Sadat on Egyptian national television?" etc.. What if I substituted Yitzhak Rabin for Anwar Sadat, would you still defend your thesis? What if Anwar Sadat opposed abortion on demand and the use of government schools in teaching all the various sterilization techniques to his people ? (Which he did) Would this make, Anwar Sadat, a fundamentalist too? I think you miss the obvious truth that a people who hates life and its fecundity, its regeneration is a people that hates itself and a people soon to be replaced by those capable of a more sacrificial understanding for the love of life.
I think you miss the obvious truth that a people who hates life and its fecundity, its regeneration is a people that hates itself and a people soon to be replaced by those capable of a more sacrificial understanding for the love of life.
Christopher Dawson predicted as much in his essay on "The Patriarchal Family in History," when he noted that in an urbanized society the only short-term gain to be had from marriage and fecundity is social prestige and that most people are inclined to forget about the longer-term (as in, two generations away) consequences of not continuing the family/race.
And of course, comparing the fertility rates of the Westernized, anticlerical liberals and socialists in the Middle East and North Africa with those of their more devout respective compatriots, we can clearly see this playing out nicely and dramatically.
So why do we not see this playing out in the West? The answer is obvious: anticlericalism is an illness native to Christendom and not to Islam, and thus has infected a larger segment of the populations of this former (and is even more likely to reclaim the children of even devout Christian parents who attempt to inoculate their brood).
... the New York times expounding their own belief that the only good Moslem... hated... their [his people's] religion
They say even a broken clock is right twice a day...
Nick,
Thank you for your help and response. Life in American urbanized society is simply unnatural as we know it and live it ---- From the 24 hr. flourescent lighting to the surrounding concrete, it simply makes humans uncomfortable. Europeans of course have sun light, stone, better local fare to serve or be served and a surrounding architecture that is more pleaseant and less depressing but seem no longer able to afford such environments unless they are independently wealthy or else simply lucky. The suspect the modern culture in Europe is as dead there as it is here and who can blame anyone for hating it and not wanting to continue it in any form.
Prateek,
When I wrote "Surely you know I could care less about what Moslems think or believe," I meant none of my concern. That it is not appropriate for me to comment on it as I know so little about it.
Of course it is a significant religion informing and directing the lives of a significant number of human beings and I did not mean to insinuate otherwise.I have said before that the biggest impediment to understanding anothers religion is the failure to understand ones own. I hope as a frequent contributor you understood my meaning that as a christian limping towards the end with rocks in my sandals,I am not qualified to complain of the footware or bare feet of another religion I know little about. The New York Times had been attacking my faith at home long before Osama Bn Laden attacked my country.
Prateek,
"A few thousand fundamentalists get tortured while several million people come out of poverty and into the middle class? This is somehow a bad thing!"
Great stuff! Maybe here we can torture a few thousand neocons, Zionist dual-citizens, dipsy-fumbly-evangelibots and get out of perpetual warfare!
Mr. Moses,
I don't know who the "we" are in your sentence; what I'm suggesting is that Christians become aware of the insidious yoke placed around our necks when somehow the term "Christian" became inadequate, and was replaced with "Judeo-Christian".
"Arthur" has it half-right (...."the policy they wished for"...): here we had won the equivalent of a final Crusade in 1917, with the British capture of Jerusalem, and we turn it over to ..... our co-religionists? Why no, we turn it over to those who have rejected, opposed and held in contempt our religion since its founding.
Dual loyalty Jews have been tortured for years. During WWII, when Jews were being slaughtered en masse, the US State Department even imposed strict immigration quotas.
The US State Department is an Arabist organization (i.e. epitome of institutionalized antisemitism).