An Appeal from the Religious Leaders of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Armenian Catholic Church And The Armenian Evangelical Union Of The Western United States Of America on Easter and the 96th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide

Major repairs and asphalting work on a key road in Armenia’s Gegharkunik province are nearing completion. The road (Sevan-Ltchashen) linking the Yerevan-Sevan highway with the lakeside highway leading to Martuni and further to Getap has been used as an alternative to the sections submerged by the rising waters of Lake Sevan and made all but [...]

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Catholic bishops in the Middle East have called for Christians in the region to be advocates of separating faith and politics

Seldom has such dazzling headgear gathered in one place. A meeting of Catholic bishops from the Middle East has just ended in Rome. For two weeks, some 180 patriarchs, metropolitans, archbishops and bishops of six different churches – Chaldean, Coptic, Syrian, Greek-Melkite, Maronite and Armenian – discussed the challenges facing Christianity with their Latin-rite brothers, with Pope Benedict listening in.

An expanding Israel and the rise of political Islam figured heavily. So too did the emigration of Christians in the region, which has accelerated in the last 15 years to the point where there is a real prospect of Christians disappearing from some parts of the cradle of Christianity. The area known as Dora in Baghdad used to be nicknamed "the Vatican of Iraq". But the seven churches, seminary and bible college have all closed since 2003. In Iraq, almost every Catholic family knows someone who has been kidnapped or killed. Churches have been car-bombed. No wonder close to half of the 800,000 Iraqi Christians before the US occupation have fled abroad.

But Iraq is exceptional. So, too, is the West Bank, where land belonging to Christian Arabs – like other Palestinians – is seized by Israel in the name of security, then handed over to settlers; or Jerusalem, where Palestinians are being forced from their homes. Mostly, in places such as Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, or Jordan, Christians live peacefully with Muslims. Yet they keep their heads down, aware that, even though their forebears were citizens of the region long before the Muslims, the latter increasingly – at least in some parts – equate rights with religious allegiance.

That's why the Synod's call for Catholics and other Christians to be advocates in the region of a "positive secularism" – the term the bishops used was "positive laïcité", after a 2007 speech by Nicholas Sarkozy – is, at least, bold. It may also surprise Catholics in Europe and the US who criticise the secularist drive to separate faith and politics to find the church in the Middle East at the forefront of arguing that faith and politics should be, ahem, separate.

Sceptics will be quick to point out one of the basic rules of religious co-existence throughout history: secularism always looks better to religious minorities who have the most to lose from theocracies. And there's truth in that in the Middle East. Caught between Israeli expansionism and Islamic radicalism, the future of the tiny Christian minority depends, in large part, on basic rights of freedom of religion and freedom of conscience – on building, as the Synod put it, "an all-inclusive, shared civic order", in the words of its working document, that protects "human rights, human dignity and religious freedom".

But this isn't only about survival. Christianity is the religion that gave rise to secularism. Laïcité is a Christian by-product; secularism a Christian heresy. The church has always promoted a distinction between the two spheres – temporal and spiritual, civic and religious – without ever, of course, agreeing where the border between them lies. When Pope Benedict bowed to his audience of politicians at the conclusion of his Westminster Hall speech, he was deferring to the legitimate sovereignty and proper autonomy of the political sphere – while at the same time asserting the church's right to hold that sphere to a transcendent ethical horizon.

Separation, in other words, but not divorce. The principle has been clear ever since St Thomas Aquinas said that sins and crimes are different things; and at least since the second Vatican council, the Catholic church has argued that religions should not be privileged by the state, that the state cannot coerce in matters of faith, and that citizenship is not contingent on beliefs or membership of institutions. All residents of a country, whatever their faith or lack of it, are social actors with a stake in society and the legitimate right to seek to shape it.

Yet separation does not imply exclusion; it does not mean making of the state and the public square a faith-free zone, as secularists and humanists seek to. The so-called "neutral" state is, in reality, the attempt to impose an ideology – an individualist, humanist form of thinking. A secular theocracy is just as much a theocracy as an Islamic one. "Positive" secularism – as opposed to the "aggressive secularism" deplored by Pope Benedict in the UK in September – means a separation of religion from the state, but at the same time allowing faith the freedom to run schools, offer services, and build the common good, according to the principles and values that nourish it. Such a "positive secularity" allows for faiths (alongside non-religious beliefs) to seek to shape society on equal terms, benefitting from the freedom accorded to them by the state, but not depending on state sponsorship or legal privilege.

Arguing for a "positive secularity" is not easy in the Middle East, where regimes are pressurised by millenarian and fundamentalist movements – whether Zionism or radical Islam – which seek to link rights to religious allegiance. Yet the three religions of the Middle East have a long history of peaceful, respectful coexistence – the many exceptions to this story do not negate the truth of it – and a theology to underpin it. Universal human rights are not concessions of the state but intrinsic to every human being, whose dignity lies in his creation by God. That is the root of our citizenship – not our nation, tribe or religion.

They be few – and shrinking. But Christians in the Middle East, the region's "indigenous citizens", are well-placed to invite Judaism and Islam to embrace a healthy secularism.

“Catholic Church: Christ nullified God’s promises to the Jews,” reads the headline on the Israel Today website. That is not quite true: At the just-concluded Synod of Middle East Bishops, a cleric from the tiny group of Melkite Greeks, Archbishop Cyril Salim Bustros, made such a statement on behalf of the Melkites, not the Catholic Church.

The head of the same church, the Syrian-based Patriarch Gregorios III Laham, also attacked priestly celibacy before the Synod. He wasn’t speaking for Rome, either. Clerical marriage hasn’t helped the Melkites; they claim just 1.3 million members worldwide, fewer than the Korean Methodist Church or the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Papua New Guinea. Their actual numbers are much smaller.

The concerns of Greek Christians will fade before long, for in two or three generations there will be no Greek Christians in the Middle East, nor indeed Christians of any sort in the Middle East. Nor, for that matter, will there be many Greeks; with a fertility rate of only 1.37 children per female, one of the world’s lowest, Greece by mid-century will have a population two-thirds of which exceeds the age of sixty, and very little population at all by the end of the century. In a hundred years, modern Greek will be a dying language.

Israeli Jews, by contrast, have the highest fertility of any first-world population, and not only because of the fecund ultra-Orthodox; fertility among secular Israelis is far above replacement. By 2100, eighteen centuries after Constantine founded the Greek empire, more people will speak Hebrew than Greek.

Jews might well ignore the sepulchral voice of a dying ethnic church, except for one fact: The Melkite cleric in question, Archbishop Cyril Salim Bustros, headed the commission that drafted the Synod’s final statement. Speaking personally and not for the Synod he said, “The theme of the promised land cannot be used as a basis to justify the return of the Jews to Israel and the expatriation of the Palestinians. . . . For Christians one can no longer talk of the land promised to the Jewish people,” because the “promise” was “abolished by the presence of Christ . . . there is no longer a favored people, a chosen people; all men and women of every country have become the chosen people.”

Middle Eastern Christians are hostage to a hostile Muslim majority, and to Iran in particular. Lebanese Maronites, the largest surviving community, were a majority by design when France established the present Lebanese state after World War I as a Catholic enclave. Infertility and immigration have reduced Maronite numbers to perhaps 30 percent, although political sensitivities have forbid census-taking for a generation. If Iran’s proxy army, the Hezbollah, wished to, it could slaughter the Christians on any given morning. That is why the most prominent Lebanese Christian leader, Michel Aoun, is allied to Hezbollah, against the Saudi- and American-backed Sunni opposition.

It is hardly news that Middle Eastern Christians (except for the growing community of Hebrew-speaking Christians) hate Israel. They blame the Israeli-Arab conflict for the deterioration of their position. Arab Christians, moreover, played a prominent role in Arab nationalist movements; they are Arabs first, that is, and Christians second.

The ambitions of Arab Christians grew after the Turks killed or expelled close to four million Greek and Armenian Orthodox Christians between 1915 and 1923; these groups once comprised a fifth of the population of Anatolian Turkey and dominated the Christian presence in the Middle East, as I wrote last year in an essay entitled “The Closing of the Christian Womb in the Middle East.”

It seems incongruous that the leader of a tiny ethnic group that lectures Rome on the merits of priestly marriage would draft the final statement of a Vatican Synod on the Middle East. The trouble is that among the twelve million Christians left in the Middle East, it is hard to find a leader who does not reflect the rage and desperation of a community on its way to extinction.

Pope Benedict XVI, like his predecessor John Paul II, has said that the Election of Israel cannot be changed; his October 25 homily at the close of the Synod would have been a good time to reiterate this position. The pope did not take the opportunity to do so. The late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, founder of First Things, wisely argued that the Election of Israel should be incorporated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church; it remains a papal opinion rather than a Magisterial ruling, and may be repudiated by a different pope in the future.

The Church’s anguish at the catastrophic decline of Christianity in the region of its birth and first expansion is palpable. The problem, as I explained in the “Christian womb” essay, is that Middle Eastern Christians won’t have children and won’t stand their ground. Nothing that Israel might possibly do will change this; the best Israel can do, as I wrote in a recent “On the Square” article, “Israeli Christians: Uncomfortable Minority, Mutual Opportunity,” is to foster the only expanding Middle Eastern Christian community, namely Hebrew-speaking Israeli Christians.

In August 2009, a senior official at the Vatican’s Secretariat of State received me in a small conference room on the third floor of the Secretariat building, near the papal apartments. “The Holy Father,” he explained, “feels a strong pastoral responsibility toward Christian communities in the Middle East.” Benedict XVI, he added, hopes that Christians in the Middle East will provide the “leaven” for a cultural revival among some of the world’s most backward societies. Given Jewish experience, I replied, the Church would do better to get its people out while there still was time.

As we talked, we passed through the gallery that Raphael had decorated in the “grotesque” style adapted from Nero’s palace, then just excavated, and stood on the terrace overlooking St. Peter’s Basilica. The subject changed; my host mentioned that new documents showed the deep concern of Pope Pius XII over the murder of European Jews, and hoped that I, as a Jewish journalist, would write about them.

I demurred. Pius XII was a good man, not a bad one, in my view then and now; under the terrible circumstances of the Second World War, he did what he could to save Jews while avoiding an open confrontation with the Nazi regime. An open denunciation of the Nazis probably would have led to his martyrdom and a Nazi-driven schism. He had every reason to expect the Nazi regime to last for a long time and wanted the Church to continue ministering to the spiritual needs of Catholics.

Evidently he failed to appreciate the full horror of Nazi intentions until the storm was upon him, but that was true of most of the East European rabbinate as well. When the secular Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky toured Poland in the late 1930s begging Jews to get out while they still could, he found little support from religious leaders.

Walter Cardinal Kasper, who heads the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, put it very well last May when he said that the Catholic Church had weakened itself by “cutting itself off from its Jewish roots for centuries . . . a weakness that became evident in the altogether too feeble resistance against the persecution of the Jews.”

At the time, I wrote that Jews should accept this statement “in full satisfaction of their grievance against the wartime Vatican.” The “Jewish roots” of the Church, as Franz Rosenzweig argued, are the Jews themselves; without the living Jewish people, Jewish Scripture would be reduced to another Gnosis in short order. And to separate the Jewish people from the Promised Land is an absurdity. For two thousand years we prayed thrice daily for God to gather our exiles from the four corners of the world and return us to Zion.

Pius XII might have taken the heroic step of excommunicating Hitler, or ordering priests to refuse communion to German soldiers and their auxiliaries engaged in the murder of non-combatants. Instead, he chose to work behind the scenes to save lives. Ultimately, Pius XII chose not to sacrifice the Church’s ongoing care for its flock in a desperate gamble of this kind.

With hindsight, one might speculate that things would have turned out better for the Church if he had done so. Christianity is fading in all of Europe except Poland, and Poland’s startling rate of population decline does not bode well for the future. If the wartime Vatican had taken a moral stand against Nazism, the outcome might or might not have been different; the Church might have emerged from the war with the moral authority to stand against the secular tide that has swamped it. But there was no way for Pius XII to have known this in 1943.

That was 1943. In 2010, the Church should have learned better. I thought it had. When then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s interview book The Salt of the Earth appeared in 1996, I read it with wonder: the future pope wrote, “Perhaps we must take leave of the concept of a popular church.” He added that the Church might shrink to small, seemingly insignificant cells, which nonetheless work for the good:

We might have to part with the notion of a popular Church. It is possible that we are on the verge of a new era in the history of the Church, under circumstances very different from those we have faced in the past, when Christianity will resemble the mustard seed [Matthew 13:31-32], that is, will continue only in the form of small and seemingly insignificant groups, which yet will oppose evil with all their strength and bring Good into this world.

This statement provoked scandalized comment in the German media; I first learned of the book from a news article in Germany’s leading newsweekly, Der Spiegel, which considered this headline news.

A prince of the Church with the courage to abandon the shell of the institution and fight on principle, I thought, would have done better than Pius XII. Here is a German who learned the lesson that one should fight on issues of faith and trust the outcome to God. I hailed his election as Pope in my then-pseudonymous “Spengler” columns so enthusiastically that many readers mistook me for a Catholic.

When as Pope Benedict XVI he addressed irrationality in Islam at his September 2006 Regensburg address, and personally received the convert Magdi Allam into the Church in 2008, I saw in these actions hope for a rebirth of the decaying West. And I was gratified that other Jewish journalists, for example Azure magazine editor Assaf Sagiv, came to view Benedict as a friend and ally of the Jewish people.

And I still believe that Benedict XVI is our friend. It is hard to avoid the impression that he has tired after swimming so far against the tide. What remains of Middle Eastern Christian leadership is beholden to Iran. The Vatican foreign service comes from the same social strata as the bureaucrats of the European Commission, and shares their hostility to the inconvenient Jewish state. Among Western European political leaders, Israel’s best friend is the Lutheran pastor’s child Angela Merkel.

And that is why the Synod of Bishops on the Middle East is such a disappointment, including the Holy Father’s bland homily at the end of the Synod on October 25. The Jewish people face the prospect of a new Holocaust at the hands of Iran, which President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens as brazenly as ever did Hitler. If Iran acquires nuclear weapons, millions of Jews may burn, again. Iran’s proxies have ringed Israel with missiles on its northern and southern borders, the recompense Israel received for ending its occupation of Gaza and southern Lebanon.

And now the Middle Eastern bishops’ Synod demands that Israel end its “occupation” of the West Bank, which as a practical matter means that Iranian proxies would install missiles on hilltops a dozen miles from Tel Aviv.

Just as in World War II, Catholic communities are hostage to an evil power that proposes to wipe out the Jewish people. Just as in World War II, the first concern of the Church is to maintain its ministry under adverse conditions. Just as in World War II, some elements of the Church make common cause with this evil power to buy temporary security for their own communities.

The anguish of the Church, its unwillingness to let go a foothold in the Holy Land, and its pastoral concern for its beleaguered flock, all are understandable. Jews should temper their disappointment with understanding. But the facts on the ground are what they are. The Christians of the Middle East long since failed of their own infertility, and would decline even if they did not face persecution from Muslims. Giving a big voice to a little man like Archbishop Bustros will do nothing to help them. But silence in the face of evil increases the likelihood of war.

David P. Goldman is a senior editor at First Things  and the “Spengler” columnist for the Asia Times. His previous “On the Square” articles can be found here.

RESOURCES:

David Goldman's The Closing of the Christian Womb.
His Israeli Christians: Uncomforable Minority, Mutual Opportunity.
His Cardinal Kasper: Church Was “Too Feeble” to Resist the Persecution of the Jews
His reflection on then-Cardinal Ratzinger's election as pope, Ratzinger's Mustard Seed.
His Jihad, the Lord's Supper, and Eternal Life.
His report on Magdi Allam's reception into the Catholic Church, The Mustard Seed in Global Strategy.
His Azure on Coming to Terms with Christianity”.
Benedict XVI's Homily at the end of the Middle East Synod.

Hundreds of Christian pilgrims walk past Our Lady of the Spasm, the Armenian Catholic Church in Jerusalem, on a typical day. And beginning at about 4 o’clock each morning, Father Raphael, the pastor at Our Lady of the Spasm, is awakened by their singing. “The window to my bedroom is right there,” he says, pointing to a third-story window directly above the spot where Jesus is believed to have first fallen under the weight of the cross.

Reconstruction began last week on a church that was built as an Armenian Apostolic house of worship and has now become the property of the Catholic Church. The 14th century Yerevman Sourb Khach (Holy Cross Church of the Manifestation), had fallen in ruin. Possession of the church and three hectare property was transferred to the [...]

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Date : Fri, 27 Aug 2010 19:18:24 +0500 16:14 On 23 August President of the Artsakh Republic Bako Sahakyan visited Patriarchate of the Armenian Catholic Church located in Beirut where he met Armenian Catholic Patriarch Nerses Bedros XIX, supreme hierarchs of church and representatives of the Armenian community.

The hackers redirected web visitors to a website spreading anti-Armenian propaganda.

The World Zionist Organization published a book of speeches made by Zionist leaders immediately after the Balfour Declaration, called "Great Britain, Palestine and the Jews." Since the Internet is so filled with (usually bogus) statements of how Zionists were hell-bent on ethnically cleansing Arabs, I thought that it is worthwhile to publish the words of Nahum Sokolow, then secretary general of the World Zionist Congress and as mainstream and important a Zionist leader as any at the time.

We appreciate deeply the important remarks offered by our distinguished friend Sir Mark Sykes on the subject of the relations between the Jews, the Arabs, and the Armenians. My reply to these remarks is: We are Zionists—not only Zionists for ourselves, but also for the Arabs and the Armenians as well. Zionism means faithfulness to one's own old country, to one's own old home. Zionism means consciousness of a nation. Can we Jews be ignorant of the fact that the Arab nation is a noble nation which has been persecuted? Is not the co-operation between the Arabs and ourselves, the Jews, in the Middle Ages for civilisation and for true culture written in our hearts and deep-rooted in our conscience? Our membership of the Semitic race, our title to a place in the civilisation of the world and to influence the world and take our share in the development of civilisation, have always been emphasised. If racial kinship really counts, if great associations exist which must serve as a foundation for the future, these associations exist between us and the Arabs. I believe in the logic of these facts. In the principle of nationality lies the certainty of our justice. There lies also the certainty of our brotherhood with the Arabs and the Armenians. We look most hopefully to the happy days when these three nations will create—in fact they have already created in the consciousness of some of their leaders—an entente cordiale in the countries of the Near East which have been neglected for so long.

We are not going to take away anvbody's property or to prejudice anybody's rights. We are going to find the land which is available and to settle down wherever there is room, and to live in the best relations with our neighbours—to live and to let the others live. Palestine is not yet a populated, civilised, prosperous country. We are going to make it so by investing our means, our energies, and our intelligence. I was glad to hear that some of your speakers had been to Palestine. They have seen how the country looks. You may have read in The Times that one of its correspondents described the hills of Judaea as roadless, barren hills. But they were not always roadless and barren. In old times these hills were covered with terraces. Now the Jews have again gone there and have rebuilt some of these terraces. If there is anything left of civilisation, of modern agriculture, and of industry in the country it is due to the efforts of that handful of Jewish settlers working under the most difficult conditions.

I would like to say also a few words on the religious question. I had the honour to speak on this question to some representatives of the Church of England and to the head of the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope. (Applause.) I made to them a statement, which I can repeat to you here. We Zionists hate the word toleration, and Sir Mark Sykes really struck the very point when he condemned the word. We don't like mere toleration by non-Jews, and we don't want them to be tolerated. We know that Palestine is full of sanctuaries and of holy places, holy to the Christian world, holy to Islam, holy to ourselves. Are we blind not to see that there are these places of worship and of veneration? Palestine is the very place where religious conflicts should disappear. There we should meet as brethren, and there we should learn to love each other, not merely to tolerate each other. (Applause.) I declared this to the representatives of the great Churches and I can repeat it here.

Also, in an earlier rally, the crowds heard from two Arabs who felt that the Balfour Declaration would be a precursor to kickstart a similar Arab nationalist movement:

Shahk Ismail Abdul-al-akki then addressed the meeting. He spoke in Arabic, and his speech was translated by Mr. I. Sieff, who mentioned that the speaker was under sentence of death by the Turkish Government for having joined the Arab national movement. Shahk Ismail said he desired to tender deep gratitude to the British nation and the British Government for affording his countrymen and himself help and asylum in their hour of persecution. His country was held in chains by the Turks, who were supplied with German gold, and he looked with confidence to England and France to deliver them from bondage, as he believed in the ultimate good over evil, and was confident in the victory of the Allies. He not only spoke as an Arab, but as a "Moslem" Arab, having studied five years in Theological Schools and being granted a Degree, and it was the duty of every Moslem to participate in the movement for the liberation of their countrymen. The meeting was to celebrate the great act of the British Government in recognising the aspirations of the Jewish people, and he appealed to them not to forget in the days of their happiness that...

An Armenian leader echoed the same sentiments concerning an independent Armenia that could have been heralded by a similar declaration - that never came.

The article below by the Austrian scholar Harald Fiegl was posted on May 15 at EuropeNews. Many thanks to JLH for translating it from the original German.


The EU, Turkey, and the Islamization of Europe
by Dr. Harald Fiegl

A drastic change for the worse. What do Islam and full EU membership for Turkey mean for the European model of life?

The EU regards itself as a community of values, a region of security, freedom, prosperity and law and as a unique peace project. The Christian-Western value base is not considered a “settled norm,” but the moral sensibility and cultural inheritance are a condensation of Christianity and Enlightenment. As such, it is in stark contrast to Islamic and oriental-patriarchal lifestyles with their group identity.

Seen from the outside, despite its economic difficulties, the EU is still an economic partner and an immigration destination. It is also in demand as a source for financing developmental aid projects. A place where human rights receive more recognition than in other parts of the world. It is not, however, a political power, a “global player.” Furthermore, it lacks a common domestic and foreign security policy, and so a common demeanor.

The new European foreign service (EAD) with its 8,000 (?) employees and 130 delegations will only be capable of a united front when the common external and security policy (GASP) materializes.

Economic significance with political weakness makes the EU an object of desire for other political powers. At the head of the line stands the Islamization of Europe in combination with Turkey’s intent to dominate Europe — specifically the EU. This country is preparing the way for itself. There is no “give-and-take” exchange. Turkey wants a Turkish Europe!

The EU is in the same position as Byzantium before its conquest by the Turks. Then as now, an opponent fighting with all means at its disposal was facing a disunited, absolutely self destructive entity.* The

Islamization of the entire world is being pursued by Muslims with determination at all levels. As an Islamic country, Turkey strengthens this tendency by adding its own expansive nationalism.

How Can These Claims Be Perceived?

• By the structure of the EU
  
• By the structure of Turkey and the worldwide spread of Islam
  
• By the claims of hegemony in the community of nations

The Structure of the EU

At every opportunity, there is talk of commonalities and the unification, indeed re-unification of Europe and with that, the absolutely imperative expansion of the EU to a minimum of 40 members. In fact, however, these commonalities are absent and so is the prerequisite for a successful expansion. In the absence of common successes, it appears that the EU is seeking its salvation in expansion, even if the expansion finds little agreement in the European population. that is brought on by the expansion. Add to that the fact that the will of the majority of the European population has no voice in the decisions of the EU organs of governance. Is the EU just a cornucopia for skilled lobbyists and a high level employment agency?

This is especially true of the decision to accept Turkey as a full member.

In other words, the oft-mentioned “European Spirit” is moribund. But only something like it can create a self-conscious Europe which will play a decisive role in the world.

• After the fall of the Iron Curtain, the EU did not make lasting use of the possibilities for new and independent connections with Russia, and thus supported the return of the Russian mindset to its own geopolitical claims. Russia sees expansion of the EU as part of the US encirclement policy, of which Ukraine and Georgia are especially blatant examples.
  
• The independent policy of French president Sarkozy is a vivid example of national interests. Sarkozy is thinking French and not European, when he speaks of the Mediterranean Union and when he promotes French military alliances or treaties over nuclear cooperation with countries of the Mediterranean region.
  
• The new members from Eastern Europe see their foreign policy support in the USA and align their foreign policy with US wishes.
  
• Great Britain sails in the wake of the USA.

Expansion — together with globalization — has brought heightened pressure on the majority of the European population to produce, often combined with lower income to the point of financial starvation. Jobs are lost, foreign capital is decisive in European industry (China, Libya and other Arabic countries). For a large part of the European population, the EU now offers a very modest living standard.

The “Lisbon Goal” is a true declaration of bankruptcy. The EU was supposed to be the most innovative and economically significant area of the world. Now that the impossibility of this plan is obvious, the goal is being postponed by 10 years and summarily re-named Strategy 2020.

Though the EU still comes up trumps through comparatively significant economic successes in international tests of strength, disillusion has set in this area too, through accumulation of debt across the entire EU, especially in the PIGS — Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain. Dramatically rising unemployment — caused not least by outsourcing — intensifies this disenchantment.

The Special Case of Turkey

• Between US-NATO wishes and a split of interests in member states, Turkey was granted membership in the Council of Europe in 1999 in a confidential paper which was not available to the public. In December 2004, 407 representatives in the EU parliament voted for negotiations with no further delay. Only 262 voted against. On October 3, 2005, negotiations began with the goal of full membership. (This counterintuitive position has been held to this day with no regard for public opinion. The granting of asylum to Turkish citizens is not seen as a contradictory indicator.)
  
• Despite a lack of progress in meeting entry requirements, Turkey continues to receive signals of a foreseeable time for entry.
  
• In the beginning of 2010, the Turk, Mevlüt Cavusoglu was elected chair of the parliamentary assembly of the Council of European.
  
• Istanbul was chosen as the cultural capital of Europe for 2010. The festival city, Salzburg, has a sponsor from Turkey.
  
• Critical remarks in progress reports continue to have no consequences (e.g., Cyprus, religious freedom).

In its judgment of Turkey, the EU for instance, disregards the fact:
- - - - - - - - -

• That Turkey has great deficits in human rights and therefore does not fulfill the basic requirements for acceptance. (In contrast to these criteria, Turkey was granted “sufficient” fulfillment of basic requirements.)
  
• That special role of the army and religious authority, which is anchored in the constitution of the (national-religious) unity government is EU adverse and so Turkey is not and cannot become a democracy in the Western sense.
  
• That the public life of Turkey is determined by Islam, in other words, by ideological basics which are the exact opposite of the Western model of life.
  
• That a full membership for Turkey means an entry with fulfilling the requirements and, in consideration of the size and otherness of this land, plainly means the final abandonment of the feeling of togetherness and the end of the work of European integration.
  
• That the entry of Turkey brings with it an enormous financial burden for the EU and, aided by this financing, all the Turkish EU contradictions, including military ambitions, are bolstered.
  
• That the EU, in the absence of any foreign policy of its own, would stumble in the wake of Turkish interests into Turkey’s conflicts with its neighbors.

The foreign policy of the EU is a reflection of national interests and accordingly not in a position to counteract US hegemonic moves. It must eventually come to the realization that, despite all criticism of the USA. it is the only “player” in the Western world.

European Navel-Gazing Is No World Policy

Although EU deficits become ever more visible, and negative polls and warning voices of important personalities are not lacking, all EU governmental organs are celebrating the accomplishments of the work of integration with events and brochures.

The message of all these “events” is clothed in catchphrases and tranquilizer words. Take for example the following vocabulary of deception and clouding of the mind:

• Abrahamic religions: the patriarch Abraham connects all monotheistic religions. (Why are the obvious differences in the way the religions are lived and practiced not addressed? A common ancestral father does not help us live together. Common rules of play will do that.)
  
• Islam is a peace-loving religion; you must distinguish between Islam and Islamism; there is no unified Islam; the head scarf is an ordinary article of clothing; there are prejudices against Islam, even Islamophobia.
  
• Turkey is a functioning democracy; Turkey is a secular state; Erdogan and his party are “moderately Islamist.” This is per se a contradiction in terms.
  
• Negotiations open to results; in a plebiscite the people will have the last word. (President Fischer rightly noted that a plebiscite requires a law which can only be determined after completion of negotiations and ratification by parliament. Thus, the promise of a plebiscite proves to be a placebo, since no political force to speak of can nor will come through for such an illogical procedure ex post facto.)
  
• During the last Austrian presidency, there was even the slogan: “The EU ought to be fun”!

Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, the EU is moving rapidly toward its self-immolation. Criticism is declared to be prejudice and the concept of prejudice is deformed to be an advantage.

It does not escape the notice of the critically thinking citizen that all these statements from the media, the authorities and from the EU describe a fairy tale world, from which there will someday be a rude awakening.

The Islamization of Our Lives

The Islamization of Europe (and the whole world) is not only the result of Muslim immigration since WW II, but has been a declared goal of Islam since the time of Mohammed. Right from the beginning, war in Islam has been a part of spreading the faith, and is therefore “just.”

The Crusades were all concerned with the re-taking of Palestine and other Christian areas from the Muslims and were in no way imperialistic projects. They were reactions to Muslim attacks. Without the Crusades, Europe would have been subjugated by Islam centuries ago.

• The de-hellenization of Asia Minor began with the appearance of the Turks (Seljuks) in the Byzantine Empire (1071). The dream of Ottoman (Turkish) world empire led to the conquest of Constantinople and the Balkans came to a close over about three centuries with the sieges of Vienna in 1529 and 1683 and the succeeding “Turkish wars.”
  
• This dream of a Turkish world empire has become reality again at this time through acceptance into the EU — without fulfilling a single condition.
  
• The technological and consequent military superiority of Christian countries beginning in the 16th century ultimately led a counterweight to the Muslim military
  
• Finally, the Islamic world fell behind and was even occupied by Christian countries. This enabled the Christian countries to function as protective powers for Christian minorities living in Muslim countries.
  
• Weakened by two world wars, Europe lost its leadership role in the world. Today, non-European countries determine what happens.
  
• Consequently, European values and culture exist merely as one variant in a worldwide offering. European culture and values are already judged negatively in many places. There is no longer any question of being a role model.

A particular milestone in this development is the first oil crisis of the 1970s. Europe’s dependence on oil led to the Europe-Arabic Dialogue (Eurabia). This is an exchange of oil for good will toward Arabic-Islamic interests and/or values. That gave rise to “the Islam prohibition.”

The fact is that Muslim countries treat Western countries with unaccustomed disrespect, of which the conflict of Switzerland with Libya is a clear example. The indifference of Somali authorities to the piracy of mercantile shipping and the attitude of Iran in the question of nuclear armament are two further examples.

Completely unperturbed by Western criticism, Iran supports Hizbullah with modern weapons. Without any objection, the West learns of the Islamization of Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina and other regions by means of Saudi Arabian funds.

The January 2010 EU parliament resolution concerning incidents against Christians in Egypt and Malaysia as well as the proposed resolution of the Austrian parliament in July, 2008 on the worldwide discrimination, repression and persecution of Christians underline the precarious situation of Christians (non-Muslims) in Muslim countries. There were no repercussions. We are contemporary witnesses to the greatest persecution of Christians of all times. Persecution of Christians is not some reminiscence from the age of Rome.

The Islam Prohibition can be traced at the international as well as the national level. It consists of a ban on putting critical questions to Islam. In the dialogue, each and every discussion is ended by the discussion-stopping arguments “general suspicion” and “racism.” The order of the day is twisting the facts by Muslim authorities and compliant Western “helpers.”

An especially striking example is the portrayal of Islam as the “religion of peace,” even though Islam was conceived as an immutably battle-ready ideology. (Indeed, it should be noted that peace in Islamic terms means the state of the world after its total Islamization. To that extent, the designation “religion of peace” is no contradiction even if Islam — legitimately by its own standards — employs violence. The non-Muslim has the choice of conversion, emigration, or death.)

The UN human rights declaration is commemorated every year on Human Rights Day, the 10th of December. Thus, the allegedly universal validity of this socio-political accomplishment is recalled. Not commemorated is the fact that, for Muslims, the 1990 Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam applies — sharia, Islamic law.

The “Western” idea is that human rights coincide with the concept of individual freedom. That includes religious freedom, understood as the freedom of the individual to choose his religious perspective, or to reject it.

The Islamic idea is that religious freedom is the unrestricted right of Islam to expand as a collective (umma) and displace all other religions and lifestyles. Islam is an alliance of religion and politics!

In this sense, the following points should be seen as closely connected and as steps to the Islamization of Europe (the world).

• Since the 1970s — approximately contemporary with the first oil crisis — some Islamic states have been attempting to submit human rights to moral relativism by referencing cultural and religious traditions.
  
• In 1990, Pakistan proposed a ban on defamation of Islam to the UN Human rights Council. The proposal was expanded to “religions” and also accepted as well by the UN General Assembly.
  
• As a consequence, the “Viennese World Conference on Human Rights in 1963” struck a compromise. Since that time, “various historic, cultural and religious conditions are recognized.”
  
• In the human rights year 1998, at the proposal of Iran, the UN General Assembly declared 2001 the “UN year of dialogue between civilizations” and thereby introduced the process of recognizing multiplicity as enrichment in a globalized world (creative diversity). Austria was host of one of the meetings in 2001.
  
• On December 10, 2007, the speaker of the Organization of the Islamic Conference declared in the UN human rights council that the Cairo Human Rights Declaration of 1990 supplements the UN human rights declaration of 1948 since it is concerned with the cultural and religious features of Muslim countries. (Thereby, Islamic law was de facto recognized, even though it contradicts Western ideas of rights.)
  
• The speaker of the OIC declared simultaneously that discussions of sharia in the framework of the UN human rights council are an insult to Islam and therefore impermissible.
  
• Following up on this suggestion, the UN human rights council decided in June, 2008, that religious discussions could be led only by academics.

Therefore, recognition of special features, respect and tolerance is the basis for relations between civilizations. That is the opposite of integration.

• The EU agency for basic rights tracks racism and xenophobia. Combating Islamophobia is a primary concern. Christophobia is not mentioned, although the repression and persecution of Christians have grown to the point where they are impossible to miss.
  
• In 2005, Europeans made Islamophobia equal to anti-Semitism and thus made it a crime.
  
• In the Council of Europe resolution 1605 of April 15, 2008, a distinction is made between Islam and Islamic fundamentalism, whereby discussion of Islam and its ideology of war becomes taboo.
  
• The president of the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, the Turk Mevlut Cavusoglu, said in his inaugural address in January 2010 that intercultural and inter-religious dialogue must be strengthened. All kinds of racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and all other kinds of similar phobias which lead to discrimination and intolerance must be stamped out. Of hostility to Christians, which we experience daily, there was not a word.

This stress on Islamophobia is especially questionable since there is no legal definition and the following standards presumably invoke the Islam Prohibition:

The Council of Europe’s Framework Resolution 2008/913/JI of November 28, 2008 on legally enforced combating of particular forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia provides, in article 1 that the following intentional acts be made punishable by law (official crime)

“public incitement to violence or hate against a person or group of persons or member of that group defined according to race, skin color, religion, ancestry, national or ethnic origin”

As a direct result of the Islam Prohibition, we can explain why, at the demand of the Muslims, or in eager anticipation of obeying them, the majority society is considerate of alien lifestyles and ideas and thus fully accepts segregation. (The practice of sharia in British jurisprudence can be seen as abandonment of self, a submission to Islam):

• No pork or alcohol
  
• Gender separation in school and in public. Knowledge of psychoanalysis, e.g., of Sigmund Freud is not considered.
  
• Women may only appear in public in the company of their husbands or only with a head covering.
  
• Crosses removed from schools and hotel rooms.
  
• Refusal to salute the flag in the army and extensive special treatment of Muslim recruits.
  
• Consideration for the effects of the month of fasting.
  
• Consideration for the Islamic prohibition against interest (Islamic banking). Banking may not charge interest nor deal in businesses that are repugnant to Islam (alcohol, pork, gambling, etc.) All these are signs of a progressive Islamization of all aspects of life. In truth, a systematic and unconditional discrimination against all things not Muslim!

Almost exclusively, the non-Muslim’s answer to this threatening situation is dialogue. Since Vatican II, even the Vatican believes in dialogue.

In countless interrreligious/intercultural dialogues, Christianity and the West are equated and this prevents the interpretive power of our laws from being placed beyond all doubt. Anyone who feels connected to neither Christianity nor Islam (syncretists, agnostics, atheists) justifiably asks: “Who is representing me in all the interreligious dialogues and why is my philosophy of life and the separation of religion and state of less value than religious belief, especially Islamic?”

This applies, for instance, to the president. He describes himself as an agnostic. Also never heard from are those who are in contact with Muslims in the course of their everyday lives and must experience the difficulties of integration, in the police, emergency services, hospitals and schools.

In many places, Islamic ideas are fully accommodated, from Muslim work clothes in the municipality of Vienna to the complete prohibition on discussing Muslim moral concepts. Neither the ORF, the theater nor the churches ask critical questions. They are content with “playful” encounters like hiking or soccer.

The exchange of thoughts is without intellectual depth and corresponds to a wine-tasting or the exchange of recipes. Some representatives of the church even see Islam as an ally against secularization.

With respect to the proclamation “demand and encouragement,” the measures taken by the administration to further integration are content with the encouragement. By this means, the parallel society is anchored still more firmly. Even the requirement to learn German is weakened by a multitude of foreign language translations and translation services. So learning German is actually no longer necessary in many places in Austria.

The result of this attitude is the Muslim parallel society which is not integrated nor willing to integrate and frequently has no respect for the indigenous population. There is hatred for the West. The law of the state has no effect in the parallel society. The police have no reach. Justice is determined by local — mostly Muslim — patterns.

Consider too, that a society is acting “positively” in terms of racism, when it does not insist upon its own standards from immigrants and closes one eye instead of helping.

What Does All This Mean for Coexistence With the Muslims?

Can western lifestyle (secular individualism with free will, voluntary religious practice and individual identity) even persist against Islamic and oriental-patriarchal lifestyles (group identity and nationalism)?

The basic elements of this Western lifestyle are being seriously challenged by Islam, even though these elements are the result of a long, at times painful, hard fought process of consciousness raising and are regarded by Western civilization as an achievement. These are, above all

• Separation of religion and state
  
• Religious freedom, freedom of expression even to its extreme
  
• Religion and sexuality are private affairs
  
• Art is allowed anything
  
• Gender equality

Islam was recognized as a religion in Austria with the Islam Law of 1912. The requirement for recognition was “compatibility with the laws of the state.” Despite all warnings, this has not been checked for a long time. Persecution of Christians in non-Western countries, of secular immigrants, and Islamic writings (fatwas) inimical to the West could not bring an end to this turning of a blind eye.

The government is required to make clear its interpretive authority vs. Islam and to do away with Islam’s deviations from the laws on religious freedom. Put simply, the authorities must actualize the “explanatory remarks” and the “report of the special commission” concerning the law of 1912. This task has been waiting for nearly 100 years!

It is unacceptable that Islamic values have not been dealt with in the ordinary course of parliamentary discussions but has been demanded “from outside.”

The authorities must also clarify whether the concept “infidel,” by which Islam designates all non-Muslims as second-class people, is, in the sense of the above-mentioned framework resolution “public incitement to violence or hate against a group or member of a group of persons defined as a religion according to the criteria.”

The Structure of Turkey

Turkey is a regional power with a targeted domestic and foreign policy, by means of which it confronts a split EU foreign policy with great pertinacity. It pursues its own interest exclusively, often blatantly in contradiction to EU interests. Completely in tune with this foreign policy opportunism is the direction of its foreign policy with regard to the EU/Europe, but also the Islamic and central Asian area.

There is also no shortage of military interventions to effect its foreign policy goals. There have been ca. 3,000 Turkish soldiers stationed on Cyprus since 1974, although the grounds for intervention (overthrow of the Greek military regime) have been gone for years. Turkey also intervenes everywhere where it wants to assert its interests, not militarily, but with substantial political and economic pressure.

That includes diplomatic actions in the USA and the EU in regard to the Armenian genocide and the Kurdish separatist movement PKK. Still fresh in memory is the Turkish intervention against the installation of the Danish president as NATO general secretary. Freedom is not important to Turkey; Muslim sensibilities are. Nonetheless, it was rewarded for this extortion by a strengthening of US good will.

Turkey’s anti-Western positions are, of themselves, no surprise. In the OIC, Turkey appoints the general secretary and therefore functions as the important spokesman in the controversy between Islam and the West. That was true in the clash over the Mohammed cartoons and applies presently to the OIC’s efforts to subordinate the UN human rights declaration to sharia. By this means, criticism of the Islamic perception of human rights is to be stopped. Turkey has long since visibly returned to the Islamic camp. There is no question of a bridge between cultures. Atatürk and his secular orientation are nothing any more than lip service,

Turkey has a constitution adverse to the EU: political life and religious practice are under the purview of the military, even though the Islamic regime is working to reduce this influence. Religious practice and religious adherence are not a private matter as they are in the Western world.

The religious authority, Diyanet, regulates religious life for Sunni Islam, the majority faith. Other sects are disadvantaged. The once flourishing Christian community has shrunk to numerical insignificance. Even 20 million (Islamic?) Alewites are hampered in their religious practice by the Sunni majority.

Diyanet names the imams and sends them into countries with Turkish or Turkish-descended populations, for example, Germany and Austria. In both countries, Diyanet maintains branch offices like a colonial administration, to encourage the religious and national connections to Turkey — but not integration. From this grows a state within a state with the purpose of land acquisition. In Austria, this branch is called ATIB = Ayrupa-Türk Islam Birligi = Turkish Islamic Union for Cultural Cooperation (literally, European-Turkish Islamic Unification with no reference to cultural cooperation).

The Turkish laicité was decreed from above. It did not grow from the bottom up as in the West. The comparison with France is misleading. The Turkish state is not religion-neutral like France. On the contrary, it advantages Sunni Islam and discriminates against all other religions and beliefs.

The founder of the Turkish republic, Kemal Atatürk, introduced separation of religion ad state ca. 80 years ago. The military was established as the guardian of this lay establishment, which led to the more recent past and then to the ban on parties.

Despite all efforts at control, “Kemalism,” with its attempt to implant laicism in the population, has failed. To this day, there are two antagonistic groups in the population: the rural, religious people, including those who migrated to the cities and the secularly oriented city dwellers, whose numbers are dwindling.

Practically speaking, Turkey is in a culture war. Head-covering remains an ideologically highly explosive question. The ban on action for the ruling party the president and many other politicians because of misinterpretation of laicism found no majority with the constitutional judges.

Misunderstanding the facts, the EU took the side of an Islamic state and applauded the process. One resource for this cultural conflict is the influx of capital from Muslim sources. Anyone who practices Islam can count on financial support. This applies not only to residence, work, school and groceries, but also to entrepreneurs in finance and contracting.

The “moderate Islamist” government is taking Turkey step-by-step to an Islamic theocracy and in managing this is completing the necessary ideological re-orientation.

The Turkish constitution foresees not only the special role of the military and religious authorities but also the ethnic-religious centralized state. Accordingly, Turkey’s constitution recognizes no ethnic minorities, including, for instance, 12 million Kurds.

A striking nationalism is quickening in Turkey and protected by criminal laws (no insulting of Turkey, no criticism of official positions on Armenians, Cyprus). Testifying to this nationalism are the ubiquitous Atatürk posters and statues together with the country-wide motto, seen everywhere: “Everyone who is a Turk is fortunate.” This nationalism plus Islam explains the unwillingness and incapacity of Turks to integrate in Europe (Turkish organizations declared during the “Islam conference” of former interior minister Schäuble that they did not adhere to German values).

A horrifying demonstration of this religio-nationalistic attitude is the murder of three fellow employees in a bible print shop in Malatya in 2007. The perpetrators justified themselves with their battle against enemies of the faith and of the Turkish nation. SPD EU representative, Turkish-born Vural Öger, poured oil on the fire by placing the blame on the EU because of its push for reform in Turkish law.

An accommodation of the Turkish constitution to the EU would mean relinquishing these two pillars and thus the end of Atatürk’s Turkey. On the other hand, it is obvious that a similar process in the “negotiations,” would lead the EU to accept a military dictatorship or a theocracy into its ranks. In either case, it will become a plaything of Turkish politics. Reconciliation policy, which aims at an improvement in relations with neighbors, is contained within tight boundaries. The Armenian-Turkish thaw was followed quickly by a cold front.

Unperturbed by all these contradictions, Turkey steps forth with absolutely incomprehensible declarations and demands and talks about an entry date of 2013-15 in the following ways:

• We have fulfilled all entry requirements and have a right to full membership.
  
• The EU has no right to reject Turkey. Turkey reproaches the EU in the coarsest terms as being a Christian club, but is not above participating significantly in the OIC, an organization of exclusively Muslim countries. There is no Christian equivalent of the OIC.
  
• As far as the Turkish president is concerned, the Balkans extends into Turkey, when it is a question of integrating the Balkans. He interprets the continuing visa requirement for Bosnia as an example of the disadvantaging of a Muslim country, compared to Serbia, for which the requirement was lifted recently.
  
  Even in the European council, The (proposal of a) European flag with the cross — modeled on the pan-European movement — failed because of Turkey’s resistance.
  
• Turkey accuses the EU of discrimination and complains about admonitions. In truth, it is getting special treatment like no member country has gotten until now. Even Croatia was treated more harshly. Turkey is oblivious and, like an invading army, ignores the sensitivities of the population of the EU.

Turkey is blazing its trail into the EU. It extorts agreement and shows no willingness to fulfill the entry requirements. It is following its usual extortionist negotiating tactics: flatter, be insulted, threaten. It wants a Turkish Europe, as expressed clearly in February, 2008 by the Turkish president, when he appeared in Cologne. Serbia was invited to apply on the basis of a Brussels decision. Turkey made its application at the time against the recommendation of the EU.

As a result of this unfair and tenacious negotiating tactic, Turkey is well represented in the committees and PR apparatus of the EU and is shaping its “own entry requirements.” Together with Spain, it is setting the tone in the UN initiative, “Alliance of Civilizations.” A tactically feeble EU confronts this Turkish determination, backed by the hegemonic interests of the USA. This explains why

• All warning voices — no matter how high-ranking or competent — echo unheard.
  
• The organs of the EU do not recognize that a full membership for Turkey does not bring a single advantage for most of the European population. Rather, exclusively substantial disadvantages.
  
• The official organs of the EU consider their own population their greatest enemy and avoid polls and plebiscites.

All “pro” arguments are distortions of fact as, for example,

• Turkey is the realization of the union of Islam and democracy and is a bridge to the Islamic world.
  
  Based on its constitution, it is not a democracy in the Western sense of the word. It is a daily showplace of conflict between Islam and secularity. The Islamic world sees Turkey either as a lever and a part of its Islamization program or, because of its military pact with Israel, as an enemy.
  
• The geopolitical position of Turkey and its military power would enhance the role of the EU in the Western world.
  
  Quite the contrary: since the EU has no intervention policy of its own, Turkey would use the EU for its own purposes. In any case, the EU would be drawn into Turkey’s conflicts with its neighbors and destabilized along with it.
  
• With the NABUCO gas pipeline, Turkey has a key role in providing for Europe’s energy needs.
  
  Actually, it is not clear what gas will be fed into it.
  
• The EU promised entry and Turkey has been waiting 40 years.
  
  There is no democratically legitimized promise. During this time, Turkey has developed in a direction away from Europe. Indeed, in the 1970s, it expressly turned its back on the EU and/or Europe.
  
• Without entry, the reforms in Turkey will collapse.
  
  For European council charter member Turkey, the reforms are an obligation overdue for 10 years and were supposed to demonstrate Turkish self-interest. The EU has no obligation to grant a reward.
  
• The EU needs Turkey’s economic potential for further development.
  
  Entry is not based on economic special interests, especially if market potential can only be appreciated by means of financing by the investor and considerable risk and corruption exist. Turkey is one of the IMF’s biggest debtors, a developing country with typical characteristics, like greater participation in agriculture (about 30%), high unemployment (also among youth) and illegal employment, low per capita income, child labor, insufficient patent protection and unreliable law enforcement. On the basis of the existing customs union, there is already close economic linkage between the EU and Turkey. A full entry offers no additional economic possibilities.

EU — pardon me? What is that? The EU does not exist! A sacrifice of the intellect?

Hegemonic Claims Within the Community of Nations

Who determines the direction of things?

With no claim to thoroughness, and conscious of the remarks above, let the following picture apply: whoever separates from European navel-gazing and sees the world from outside, recognizes that, besides several countries active in world politics, Islam and international capital flow combined with providing energy and raw material are the hand on the tiller.

The USA as leading world power is presumably at the head. Its foreign policy is energy. China is noticeable by its securing of raw materials in Africa and elsewhere. In this race of world powers for oil and raw materials it is often unnoticed that the Islamic world is pursuing not only economic, but ideological interests — namely the Islamization of the world.

How much this Islamization has been strengthened is seen in the positive signals President Obama is sending the Muslim world. In his speech at Cairo University, he extended his hand to the Muslim world. Even the unconditional support of Israel is no longer his policy.

An international net of capital streams beyond the control of national governments, and also international organizations spans the entire world and makes its own decisions. Wall Street plays a prominent role. The motto: the financial position must remain attractive and that determines all other policies! That also applies to President Obama’s financial package.

The question arises: what the individual must and can do in this situation, especially those who feel a loyalty to European values.

The burden of our history compels us not only to reflect on what is past and vow “Never again,” but also to vigilance about the spirit of the times, the “mainstream.” In art, in many media, in the churches, in scholarship and in many political parties it is in style to turn a blind eye to the subjects Islam and Turkey. Restricted freedom of expression and fear of speaking out are dominant.

Making middle class society and Christianity — especially the Catholic Church — objects of contempt, the attack on the family, the demand for “gender mainstreaming” and equal standing for homosexual relationships are no substitute. Individual boundaries need to be set. Our civilization must not be the “show and tell” of a directionless good time society.

As in the past, so also today, looking at the truth and speaking out publicly is necessary. Especially because the past burdens our life to the present day. Whoever wants to learn the truth, will learn it. Excuses after the fact will mean nothing. Even if many people say; “My mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with facts.”

Perhaps this time, with sufficient perseverance and courage, it will be possible to create a counterweight to the spirit of the times and to explain that 2 plus 2 equals 4 and not something else.

Or mankind may follow the path of greed, betrayal and indifference to apocalyptic conditions. The worldwide economic difficulties should be a warning that it is high time for a reversal. The Rhine maidens are demanding the return of the Rhine gold.

Requests to speak, letters to the editor, commentaries in newspapers, speeches and the like can, in sufficient number, can cause change. Perhaps the above comments will be able to help with that. Whoever fights can win; whoever does not fight has already lost. If future generations are to have any respect for us, we must intervene for truth and against looking the other way — to the point of civil disobedience.

Out future will be decided not only by the achievements of the past, but by a conscious intervention of European society on behalf of it own values — especially family values and economic solidarity.

Isolation of the individual and increase of the precarious economic conditions could give impetus to a slogan like “Islam is the answer.” Unalloyed individualism will bring a swift dissolution to any society.

Famous names tell us:

• Indifference is the mildest form of intolerance. (Karl Jaspers)
  
• What you inherited from your ancestors — work to earn and possess it. (Goethe)
  
• In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. (Orwell)
  
• When tolerance becomes a one-way street, it leads to cultural suicide. (Lieutenant Colonel Allen West)
  
• Freedom is never more than one generation from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same. (Ronald Reagan)
  
• My greatest disappointment is the recognition that humanity does not learn from experience. (Doris Lessing)
  
• Difficulties are not overcome by not talking about them. (Berthold Brecht)
  
• Reason becomes nonsense, blessing becomes plague. (Goethe)
  
• Truth is the most precious thing we have. Let us deal with it frugally. (Mark Twain)

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Notes:

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Pascal Bruckner, 2008, “The Guilt Complex”: “All modern thinking can be reduced to the schematic denunciation of the West, with emphasis on hypocrisy, violence and heinousness.” ”The European bad conscience, based on imperialism, fascism and racism has gripped the continent, and is destroying its creativity, its feeling of self-worth, and is decimating its optimism.”

Catholic Stuff You Should Know is a podcast that was recently recommended to me. This came after I looked into and abandoned the Catholic Laboratory Podcast (Cathlab in short). Also The Pope Podcast is a Catholic podcast. What these have in common is that they take on their subject with an explicit Roman Catholic perspective. The issue that comes up is: does this turn up to be about facts or about doctrine?

Of course the two are in such a framework naturally intertwined, but when the doctrine part takes over, the facts tend to become stretched. Catholic Stuff You Should Know shows this in their issue about the Holy Sepulcher. The way they tell about this Jerusalem church makes it sound like it is an exclusively Catholic church and since they claim to have been there in actuality why would you check up on this? A peek at Wikipedia about the Holy Sepulcher already points in another direction. I have been to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher myself and I can see this from my own experience: what you run into in this Church is Armenian, Greek, Syriac, Coptic and only in a very limited way Roman Catholic - as opposed to many other famous churches in Israel, such as those in Nazareth, Capernaum and Mount Tabor.

More obviously is a small item about the etymology of Monday. I though: this is Moon-day and Wikipedia on Monday matches that expectation. However, this apparently is too pagan for the Catholic podcasters and so they propose two Latin, Biblical possibilities: Mandatum and Mendicare. Well, that is taking it very far from what would widely be considered factual and so, the conclusion must be: this podcast is about doctrine. As such, it is an interesting one. Find out about Arius, about the Ethiopian Church, Stylites, Indulgences and more. It is also short (no more than 10 minutes) and presented in a very free conversational style. (feed)

Once a year during the Good Friday, the compound of St. Joseph’s Church on Victoria Street is transformed into a sea of candlelight, as thousands descend on the church and its compound for the Good Friday procession, spilling over into the area of Queen Street just behind the church. The procession is held to commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus Christ on Good Friday and is part of an evening service where the events leading up to the crucifixion and immediately after the crucifixion of Christ are reenacted.

While the commemoration of the crucifixion of Christ on Good Friday at the church, referred to as the Portuguese Church, may not be as elaborate as the reenactments that take place in the barrio of San Pedro Cutud in the Philippines, during which penitents practice self-flagellation and are nailed literally to the cross, the elaborate manner in which the service and the candlelight procession is conducted is unique in Singapore, with one only other church close by, St. Peter’s Church in Malacca, where a similar (perhaps more elaborate) service is conducted.

During the reenactment of the crucifixion, a life-sized statue depicting the dead Christ is nailed to the cross, following which, the dead Christ is painstakingly lowered to a bier. The bier is then carried out the church into the compound and back into the church, accompanied by a statue depicting Our Lady of Sorrows and much of the clergy and congregation present, where thousands would be gathered in the light of their candles to witness the solemn occasion. The church, having been part of the Portuguese mission administered through the Diocese of the former Portuguese colonies of Goa (up to 1886), and then Macau (up to 1999), (the Catholic churches in Singapore were administered primarily by the French mission and later transferred to the Archdiocese of Singapore), adopted many of the elaborate traditions of the Iberian peninsula (St. Peter’s Church in Malacca was also administered by the Portuguese mission).

As a child, I was a regular and perhaps reluctant participant in the service, having to accompany my maternal grandmother, who made it a point (when she was fit enough) to attend the service. What it meant for me, then a young child, were the hours of play time I would have to give up having to arrive several hours early to be able to get a seat inside the church. Seated on the rattan mesh webbing that were fitted to serve as seats and backrests on the carved wooden pews, with the the statues of the Saints (my favourite was the one of St. Sebastian tied to a stake) high on the church wall that may have otherwise have taken my attention covered in the purple cloth of mourning, there wasn’t much else to do except to wile the hours away poking my fingers through the rattan webbing. The service would culminate in the veneration of the cross, which would follow the procession, and one of the things I have a lasting memory of was the bunga wangi, as my grandmother would refer to the packet of scented chopped pandan leaves – “bunga wangi” meaning “scented flowers” that would be given to each participant after the veneration, which my grandmother would leave under her pillow as soon as she got home.

I was certainly grateful later on in my childhood when my mother allowed me to instead, join her on Queen Street with the thousands holding lighted candles, from where she would stand to witness the procession, while my grandmother attended the service inside the church. Not only did it relieve me of sitting for hours in complete silence, it also released me from the confines of the pews to the street outside, where there certainly was more going on to distract myself. Here, I could watch the candle sellers going about their business, the smaller candles were usually sold in pairs – their wicks attached, and the longer ones supported by a splint, as well as the other goings on around me. I was also able to find amusement with the lighted candle, exchanging light with others and dripping wax onto the ground, on which a mini wax sculpture could be created. It may not sound like much fun, but as a child it was certainly a marked improvement from having to sit quietly and still in the pews!

Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Kirill and Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of all Armenians Garegin II laid a new Russian Orthodox church in Yerevan - a Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.

Russian Orthodox Church leader Patriarch Kirill I has invited his Armenian counterpart, Catholicos Karekin II, to visit Baku.

Last Sunday Anushik and I decided to attend mass at Khor Virab, which is located in the Ararat region about 20 miles from Yerevan. Unfortunately, by the time we got there just after 1:00 pm it was already over.

Khor Virab is where St. Gregory the Illuminator was tortured and imprisoned in the late third century for preaching Christianity. He was left for dead there, in his own personal hell for 13 years while nourished by a woman living nearby who took pity on him. It wasn't until King Trdat had contracted a mysterious debilitating illness that he was pulled out of the pit in order to cure the king. Trdat fully recovered, and subsequently declared Christianity as the state religion. You can actually go into the pit (there's two of them), which is protected by a chapel adjacent to the main church. The path leading to it is very narrow, and you need to climb down a ladder to get down there. I have never entered the pit and don't plan on ever doing so.

There is an excellent view of Mount Ararat from the compound as the Turkish border is only a few hundred meters away. Unfortunately the weather was overcast that day and not much was visible. Since Ararat appears as if you can reach out and touch it only about 10 days thoughout the year, it is extremely difficult to coordinate when to go to observe the full spender of the mountain up close.


The caption on this panel reads (translated from Armenian), "St. Gregory the Illuminator's Torments."

This place is one of the holiest sites in Armenia, yet the visitors that day were extremely rude and disrespectful to the overall sanctity of the compound. Many people were talking very loudly , chatting on their phones and generally clueless about the proper way to behave. People under the age of 20 generally didn't know how to control themselves. At the time I was livid, but before long I realized that people simply don't know any better.

The religious education in Armenia is lacking, and I put the blame directly on Catholicos Karekin II, who is the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church. I have seen the same ill-mannered behavior displayed by local Armenians at nearly every church I have visited  in the country. Even within the church you have people speaking loudly and even shouting to one another. This can also be attributed to a general lack of respect of people for each other and even themselves, but like I said, the education isn't there.

This Catholicos is considered by everyone I have spoken to here as being the head of his own mafia, disregarded as a supreme, pious religious figure. He owns the Nor Zovk supermarket chain in Yerevan, and one of the stores is located right up the street where I live (he keeps a very clean supermarket and offers great prices, incidentally, a great businessman). He presumably has other business interests, none of which I am informed about. The Yerevan residence on the corner of Sayat Nova and Abovyan Streets has yet to be constructed--why he needs one is anyone's guess. He also wants to build a new church at the site of the amphitheater located beside Cinema Moscow, which was ironically the location of a cathedral that was destroyed by the Soviets so that Armenians could go to the movies. But that intention is illogical since very few people have religious inclinations to begin with. Also the amphitheater is frequently used for summer concerts, and there's no alternative venue in downtown Yerevan. You hear people still rave about Catholicos Vasken I who died in the early 1990s, but when it comes to his two successors, people are generally unimpressed and very disappointed.

In any case, people who have yet to visit Khor Virab should go during the week when people are busy at work or school. That way you'll have a full appreciation of the sanctuary and how divine the area actually is.



Photos taken with my Nokia N86 8MP

Upon the invitation of His Holiness Karekin II, Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of All Armenians, His Holiness Kirill I, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, arrived in Armenia today. “Such visits are important and indicate strong relations between churches. They also encourage development,” Patriarch Kirill told journalists upon arrival in Yerevan’s Zvartnots Airport. “We belong to ancient [...]

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Vahe Gabrache, member of AGBU's Central Board of Directors and vice president of AGBU Swiss Corporation, was honored as Knight of St. Gregory the Great order by His Holiness Benedict XVI, Pope of the Roman Catholic Church, in recognition of his longtime devoted service to the Catholic Church, as member of the Holy Cross parish of the Armenian Catholic Church in Paris. The award was presented by His Beatitude Nerses Bedros XIX, Catholicos Patriarch of the Armenian Catholic Church, on Sunday, February 28, following mass at the Armenian Catholic Convent.

Openness and transparency exact a price in terms of public confidence in institutions, a price that may eventually lead to a reaction

What caught my eye in today's papers was not ex-M15 head Eliza Manningham-Buller's admission that she was ignorant of the Bush administration's 9/11 torture policy, welcome though that was. No, it was Lizzy Davies's report that light is finally being shown on a far more shameful chapter in French history.

You probably know a little about it, as most French people do – and will now know more because of the acclaimed new film, La Rafle du Vel d'Hiv – The Winter Velodrome Raid. Jacques Chirac apologised for what happened in 1995, but it has always been murky.

The film tells the story of the 1942 round-up by French police of 13,000 French Jews and their dispatch to their deaths, most of them, in German concentration camps. They were held initially at the sports site in the Paris suburbs; hence the film's name.

There's no point in being smug about this. The story of the German occupation of France is complex, full of heroism as well as shades of villainy and complicity – as director Rose Bosch shows in her film.

No, the question is one of transparency, of confronting our own uncomfortable past, collective and personal. It's never easy. France buried the occupation after the liberation of 1944, as Spain did its own civil war horrors – until very recently.

Michael White will be taking part in a live edition of our Politics Weekly podcast in Manchester on 16 March: Click here for tickets

Marcel Ophüls's The Sorrow and the Pity attempted to address crucial issues, including collaboration and antisemitism ("better Hitler than [the French Jewish politician Léon] Blum" was a slogan of the 30s), in 1969. It was banned on French TV until 1981.

Would the British have done any better if occupied? Do we sufficiently confront our own past? Tricky questions, as last night's Manningham-Buller speech to a meeting in the House of Lords underlines.

"We did lodge a protest," she said without further elaboration.

The Americans are our allies and we were facing a terrorist threat whose scope and power we could not easily judge. The Bush White House opted for the doubtful expediency of waterboarding and other practices, many of which must be regarded as torture.

What did we know and when did we know it, are questions the Guardian and others have been asking.

Similar dilemmas were agonised over the western alliance with Stalin in 1941-45. By then enough was known about the Great Terror and other horrors to make the partnership an act of uneasy expediency.

Ah yes, but what about our own crimes? 20th century dictators sometimes claimed only to be taking the racist and imperialist fantasies of the "liberal democracies" to a more robust conclusion because they were in a hurry to catch up. Alas, there is some truth in it.

Did we not learn during the Haiti earthquake that vicious reparations (for the loss of slave property and land) imposed by republican France helped cripple the island state for most of its history? What about British troops' conduct during the Mau Mau emergency in Kenya? And in the bloody retreat from Aden, now Yemen, in 1968, about which the Times has been reporting lately?

By coincidence this week has seen two stabs at important revisionism come to my attention. On Radio 4's Today programme an Indian politician and historian called Jaswant Singh discussed his book on Muhammed Ali Jinnah with expat British writer William Dalrymple. The founder of Pakistan has been "horrifyingly caricatured" by history, according to Dalrymple.

I don't know the truth of the matter, but had always gone along with the consensus that made Gandhi and Nehru the heroes of Indian independence in 1947, and the intractable Jinnah the bad guy who insisted on a separate Muslim state, now two, where federalism would have been a better solution.

Singh, who must be a Sikh (millions were forced to flee Pakistani Punjab), says otherwise, that the usual mixture of miscalculation, impatience (not least bankrupt Britain's to quit India), and personalities all played their part. Needless to say his book has been attacked in Hindu India and its author ostracised.

Our version comes from Freedom at Midnight, with which Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy, cooperated, Dalrymple explained. It is also the basis for Richard Attenborough's Oscar-winning biopic Gandhi, where General Reginald Dyer (Edward Fox) gets a kicking for his role in the 1919 Amritsar massacre.

There was a lot of trouble at home and in India about that. The official inquiry said 379 demonstrators were shot by British troops, 200 injured. Indians put the figure at 1,000 dead, 500 injured. The issue is unresolved except in the sense that it contributed to the loss of authority which was fast destroying the Raj.

The second controversy worth checking out is far vaster in scale: the Turkish massacres of Armenians within the tottering Ottoman empire in 1915 that Norman Stone, brilliant and provocative as ever, asserts was not genocide. Readers take him to task on the need to confront the past today.

Brilliant he may be, but I suspect that Stone, an ex-Oxford history professor now teaching in Ankara, is overstating his case for the defence for an ethnic cleansing policy in which an alleged 1.5 million people died.

But the issue reverberates today because the US Congress and the EU are threatening a major rift with the key Nato ally in the region by pressing genocidal guilt on the Middle East's only successful, secular Muslim state – just as it totters between east and west, Islam and modernity.

Just so Muhammed Ali Jinnah's reputation. India heads for 10% annual growth and superpower status while Pakistan is – to quote an Anglo-Asian playwright – "sodomised by religion" and other problems. Divided Kashmir, part of the legacy of 1947, remains a focus of profound tensions expressed in 2008's Mumbai bombs.

And little old us? My working assumption is that Britain has confronted its imperial demons better than France, partly because history was kinder, partly because the Anglo-Saxons have a stronger instinct for what we now call openness and transparency.

So it is hard to imagine Pontecorvo's great 1966 film The Battle of Algiers doing as well at the Cannes film festival so close to the Algerian war it brutally depicts (torture and all) as the Oscar-winning Hurt Locker and films like it have done so close to the Iraq war. Indeed, it was banned for five years.

But openness and transparency exact a price in terms of public confidence in institutions, a price that may eventually lead to a reaction. So my other hunch is that in Britain we have reached a stage where we may just be overdoing the masochism strategy, the self-flagellation, in our dissection of this and many aspects of public policy. The destruction of trust is corrosive.

In matters of knowledge, complicity and cover-ups involving sexual abuse of children, popes, past and present, have a great deal more to account for than Manningham-Buller, the current pope's brother too judging by today's reports from that Catholic boarding school in Bavaria.

But the Catholic church knows how to take the long view, keep things in perspective and play hardball when it has to. That must be why it's still standing.

Is there a difference between the Apostolic Armenian Church, Episcopal Armenian Church, and Armenian Catholic Church (If any of those are even correct branches)? Do any of them recognize the pope and does the Vatican recognize any of them in return? Are any of them simply considered Eastern rite catholic churches? Does belonging to one branch of the Armenian church, but going to one of the other churches fulfill you sabbath, or do they have different dogmas? Can you attend a catholic church (Roman or eastern) to fulfill church attendance? I realize you can't give me the entire history of the church, but some basic information would help. I've been trying to read up, but there is so much information that I have been getting confused. Thanks in advanced.

Spare a thought -- and perhaps also a prayer -- for Iraq’s beleaguered Christians, who yesterday observed the somber Feast of the Holy Innocents. Perhaps nowhere else does this particular occasion cut closer to the bone: In Iraq, Christians mourn their friends, the most recent martyrs for the faith, on the same day that Christians around the world are called to remember the Church’s very first martyrs, the infants slaughtered en masse in Bethlehem on Herod’s orders after the birth of Jesus.

Today is also an appropriate time for all Americans, believer and unbelievers alike, to consider their moral responsibilities toward an invisible minority caught up in a forgotten war. After all, one of the unintended -- and unacknowledged -- consequences of Iraq’s liberation in 2003 was the swift and ongoing demise of Iraq’s ancient Christian communities. While this tragedy was unforeseen, it was by no means unforeseeable, if only U.S. policymakers had paid due attention to Iraq’s complex religious landscape and recent history. Worse yet, U.S. officials have deliberately refused to take any steps to safeguard Iraq’s persecuted Christians -- or even to acknowledge their plight -- for fear of being seen as aiding unpopular and unfashionable religious minorities.

This policy of malign neglect helps explain why so few Americans are even aware that Iraq still remains a rich ethnic and religious mosaic beyond the simple tripartite division of all Iraqis into three warring tribes: Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds. Fewer still are aware that Christianity in Mesopotamia dates from the mid-first century, when local tradition holds that the Apostle Thomas (the same doubting Thomas who appears in John’s Gospel) founded what became the Church of the East, the only enduring Christian community formed outside the borders of the Roman empire during apostolic times. Thomas’s mission predates the arrival of Islam by six centuries and serves as a needed reminder that early Christianity was an essentially Eastern phenomenon.

Today, the vast majority of Iraqi Christians share common roots in the Church of the East, which split into two branches in the 16th century, one Roman Catholic (Chaldean) and the other essentially Orthodox (Assyrian). Both churches worship partly in Arabic and partly in Aramaic, the same language that Jesus spoke. Smaller Christian denominations include Syriac Christians (mainly Roman Catholic, but also Orthodox), Latin Rite Roman Catholics and other historic Middle Eastern churches (mainly Orthodox and Armenian), and some Protestants (mostly Anglicans) and Evangelicals.

It was not so long ago that Iraqi Christians belonging to all these churches played a unique and vital role in the common life of modern Iraq. Their contributions, both institutional and individual, once formed an irreplaceable part of the fabric of Iraqi life. And their contributions in turn played a wholly disproportionate role in relation to their actual numbers in an overwhelmingly Muslim society.

On the one hand, there was a web of church institutions -- schools, hospitals, clinics, and orphanages -- that served all Iraqis regardless of faith. Of these, none was more prominent than Baghdad College, a remarkable Jesuit preparatory school for boys that turned out a disproportionate share of Iraq’s political and cultural elite between 1931 and 1968. As with most other church schools, fully half the student body were Muslim. Even today, 40 years after the American priests and seminarians were expelled and all private schools nationalized in the wake of the Six-Day War, Baghdad College’s legacy endures.  In the December 2005 parliamentary elections, three of the four leading candidates for prime minister (all Muslims, of course) were former students. So too are many other distinguished Iraqis, such as Kanan Makiya, whose 1989 classic Republic of Fear shattered the wall of silence around the Baathist dictatorship. Yet this one school’s splendid example is by no means a strictly Iraqi or purely historical phenomenon, as Christian schools continue to educate an outsized share of local Muslim elites in places as diverse as Egypt (Gamal Mubarak) or Pakistan (the late Benazir Bhutto).

On the other hand, there was and remains individual Christian witness to values that are in notably short supply in Iraq nowadays, especially respect for one’s neighbor regardless of faith and willingness to resolve disputes without recourse to violence. These particular values are ones their Muslim neighbors most often acknowledge and admire, as I learned while living and working as a Catholic seminarian in Jordan a decade ago. And they are precisely the same ideals Pope Benedict XVI cited in his annual Christmas message on Saturday:

How can we forget the troubled situation in Iraq and the little flock of Christians which lives in the region? At times it is subject to violence and injustice, but it remains determined to make its own contribution to the building of a society opposed to the logic of conflict and the rejection of one's neighbor.

Yet these same values have made Iraqi Christians easy targets for Sunni and Shiite extremists and common criminals in the utter collapse of law and order that followed the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. Unlike their Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish neighbors, Iraqi Christians have no private militias, no powerful foreign patrons -- and no fighting ideology like the political Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood or its Shiite counterparts. They are thus the only group in Iraq without blood on their hands, holy innocents caught up in an unholy war.

Last year, I wrote about how practically every Christian neighborhood, parish, or family was repeatedly forced to pay protection money (jizya) to avoid exile, murder, or forced conversion to Islam. These evils were universally justified by their perpetrators on the basis of the same Koranic verses dealing with subject peoples, but they were seldom if ever publicly denounced as a perversion of Muslim faith by Iraq’s influential Muslim clergy.

This year, Iraq’s dwindling Christian communities are still being targeted on the basis of their faith. That is especially the case in Mosul, long the most lawless and violent place in Iraq. By an unhappy coincidence, Mosul is also located in the ancestral heartland of Iraqi Christianity, and is thus the last refuge (short of exile) for Christians fleeing targeted violence in Baghdad, Basra, and other places.

Mosul is therefore a target-rich environment. In December alone, at least seven churches, convents, and schools have been bombed, claiming dozens of lives, including the latest holy innocent, an eight-day-old baby girl. Iraq’s central government deserves credit for dispatching some 3,000 additional police after a similar spate of bombings and attacks in October, but their presence has brought little improvement as Christians continue to flee Mosul for overcrowded and underdeveloped villages such as Qaraqosh in the adjacent Nineveh plain. Meanwhile, the situation around Kirkuk, also in northern Iraq, remains nearly as dire for Christians caught up in the Arab-Kurdish struggle for control of the area’s oil fields.

While the Iraqi government has belatedly taken some modest steps to ease the suffering of Iraqi Christians, the U.S. government’s consistent policy of studied and shameful indifference forms rare common ground between the Bush and Obama administrations. It is an indelible stain on American honor that two administrations did nothing to assist, much less protect, a beleaguered religious minority. Such was not the case in the Balkans a decade ago, when the Clinton administration came to the aid of embattled Muslim minorities in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo with decisive military force in similar circumstances. In Iraq, however, America’s unmet moral obligations were and are the direct consequence of the security vacuum arising from the American-led destruction of Saddam’s Republic of Fear.

When pressed by religious-freedom advocates, Bush-administration officials invariably ducked responsibility by claiming that overall security improvements, beginning with the 2007 surge, would trickle down to Iraq’s most vulnerable and helpless minorities. The Obama administration takes the same hands-off approach in October’s annual State Department report on religious freedom: “The ‘surge’ by the Multinational Forces in Iraq, in coordination with Iraqi Security Force operations, reduced the overall level of violence in the country; however, significant effects were slow to trickle down to the country’s minority communities.” But the real reason for inaction, as several senior Bush-administration officials admitted to me off the record, was that being seen to help Christians was simply too controversial at home and in the Muslim world. It was a matter of scarce political capital better spent elsewhere, I was told.

A couple of weeks ago, a Chaldean-American friend of mine raised the issue of American responsibility for the plight of his brothers and sisters at a public forum convened by a mid-level State Department official. According to the Detroit Free Press, this official “said he couldn’t comment on whether Iraqi Christians were hurt by the U.S.-led war.” “I can’t answer that,” he said. “Let’s leave that to the historians.”

On the same day that my friend was try to get a straight answer from the State Department, more than 120 Christian leaders met in Baghdad to issue yet another urgent plea for targeted security assistance and development aid. Similar pleas for equally modest measures have long fallen on deaf ears, not least in Kurdish-controlled areas, where the treatment of Christians seeking refuges leaves a lot to be desired.

Meanwhile, the plight of Iraq’s surviving Christians worsens. In churches around the world today, Christians will hear the passage from Matthew’s Gospel (2:13-18) that recounts the slaughter of the holy innocents and ends with these words of the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah:

A voice was heard in Ramah,
sobbing and loudly lamenting:
it was Rachel weeping for her children,
refusing to be comforted because they were no more

The time is fast approaching when Iraqi Christians are no more.

-- John F. Cullinan, a regular NRO contributor, has written frequently about Iraq’s religious dynamics since 2003.

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I received a free review copy of The World's Bloodiest History - Massacres, Genocide, and the Scars They Left on Civilization last week. On the whole, I enjoyed reading it even if the subject matter was less than pleasant.

Here is a description of the book:

In a somber survey leavened by sparse but inspiring accounts of heroism, author Joseph Cummins revisits some of the most dreadful and destructive acts of violence in history—from moments of sheer madness and merciless military offensives, such as that of the Spanish conquistadors in 1521 in what is now Mexico City, to clinically orchestrated campaigns of genocide, as took place in early twentieth-century Armenia, Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, and 1970s Cambodia. Engaging, harrowing, and enlightening, his accounts convey the terror and trauma of these incidents while identifying the zealotry, prejudices, and animosities that fuelled them, and analyzing, in revealing fashion, their enduring and sometimes insidious influence on history. Handsomely illustrated with more than 100 striking, sometimes shocking, archival images gathered from around the world, The World’s Bloodiest History combines compelling depictions of momentous events with fascinating character portraits and arresting eyewitness accounts to create an absorbing, multifaceted chronicle of a sobering, all-too-human legacy.

The incidents recorded are easy to read. The historical background of each event are covered and are followed with accounts of the actual horrors. It also gives some opinion on how each event may have altered history. First hand testimony is also shared from survivors if such accounts are available. Some events are true genocides (such as the fate of Carthage and the Armenians in Turkey) while others are well known massacres (such as Calcutta in 1756 and Sharpeville, South Africa.)

The author (Joseph Cummins) has strong opinions. He clearly has big sympathies with the victims he is writing about. This is mostly good but it also appears to give him a strong anti-Mormon bias (in the chapter on the Mountain Meadows Massacre) and a strong anti-Catholic bias (in the chapter on the St. Bartholomew's Massacre). Some editing could have made these chapters less objectionable although I am sure some enjoy that tone. Despite the case that Cummins makes, I have trouble believing that either church is guilty today even if some followers and leaders in the past were responsible. What religion, ethnic group or nation is not responsible for some evil at some point in their history? Why make examples of these two churches?

Probably the most interesting chapter to me was the first which dealt with the Roman genocide of Carthage. Cummins gives a nice account of Roman-Carthage relations which ended in the destruction of Carthage in the Third Punic War. He also is willing to point out flaws in the society of Carthage such as the practice of infant sacrifice. My complaint is that there are not more ancient or even medieval history chapters. Could not the Huns, Mongols, or Mayans been included? History has accounts of questionable bloodletting from each of these for example. The tome is too heavily skewed towards the 20th Century.

If you are interested in this topic, buy this book. It is a worthy read despite some flaws which I have pointed out. I hope many libraries stock this book as well. This is an area that I wish many students learn about in hopes it may cut down on these events in the future.

The ongoing Christian flight from the Middle East was high on the agenda of the Vatican’s secretary of state, Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, when I met with him recently in Rome.

The lengthy exodus of ancient Christian congregations from the greater Middle East’s last redoubts of religious pluralism is accelerating. Terrorism, conflict, and the rise of intolerant Islamism are to blame, Vatican officials explain. There is a real fear that the light of Christian communities that was enkindled personally by the apostles of Jesus Christ could be extinguished in this vast region that includes the Holy Land.

This trend could be reversed or at least halted, but probably not without Western help. Thus far, the rapid erosion of Middle Eastern Christianity has drawn little notice from the outside world.

Pope Benedict XVI, however, is planning a special synod of Roman Catholic bishops next October to discuss this crisis and to promote greater ecumenical unity in the Middle East. The hope for the synod, as reported by the Catholic news agency Zenit, is that “new generations must come to know the great patrimony of faith and witness in the different churches” of this region.

The greater Middle East, of course, holds profound theological significance for all Christians. Broad Christian engagement may be the best hope for the survival of these ancient Middle Eastern churches -- the Copts and Chaldeans, the Maronites and Melkites, the Latin Rite Catholics, the Armenians, the Syriac Orthodox, the Assyrian Church of the East, and others.

Evangelical Christians are gaining thousands of converts in the Middle East, and millions of Christians have migrated within the region. (Asia News reports that today there are more Syriac faithful in Saudi Arabia than in Turkey and Syria combined.) However, these populations are relatively small and isolated and are usually forced to live as “catacomb Christians,” suppressed in their witness and compelled to worship in secret. The same is true of Anglicans, Presbyterians, Baptists, and other more recent arrivals, who must keep a low profile, especially since Saudi Arabia’s state textbooks started teaching that the Christians’ schools, colleges, and clinics are signs of a “new crusade.”

Encompassing the land in which the mysteries of Christian salvation were fulfilled, this region should be a particular focus of Christian reflection during this holy season. But Christians and non-Christians alike should take note for worldlier reasons as well. As citizens of the free world, whose core civilizational values bear the imprint of Christianity (even if the European Union refuses to acknowledge this fact), we should all be concerned.

The disappearance of living Christian communities would signal the disappearance of religious pluralism and a moderating influence from the heart of the Muslim world.

Christians, numbering about 15 million, are the largest non-Muslim religious minority left in the Middle East. The Jews, the ancient Zoroastrians (sometimes known as “magi,” three of whom visited the Christ Child), the Mandeans (who follow John the Baptist), the Bahai, the angel-worshipping Yazidis, and other, smaller groups -- all have joined the exodus, and for the same reasons.

Within our lifetime, the Middle East could be wholly Islamicized for the first time in history. Without the experience of living alongside Christians and other non-Muslims at home, what would prepare it to peacefully coexist with the West? This religious polarization would undoubtedly have geopolitical significance. So far, official Washington has not taken this under consideration.

However, there is something ordinary citizens can do. They can become better informed and they can give support in a variety of ways. I want to highlight three Christian leaders who desperately need and deserve our support. Each from his unique perspective is working directly to sustain Middle Eastern Christianity: a scholar promoting regional openness, human rights, and respect for women from relatively free Lebanon; a bishop reinvigorating Christian communities and culture in repressive Egypt; and a priest working just to keep Christians and others physically and spiritually alive in terror-wracked Iraq.



The first, Habib Malik, the Lebanese scholar, articulates why Middle Eastern Christianity should matter to the West. Malik, a lay Roman Catholic, exemplifies Christians’ mediating role as a cultural bridge between East and West, interpreting religion, customs, and languages from the one world to the other. (His e-mail address is info@fhhrl.org.) He is the founding director of the Foundation for Human and Humanitarian Rights—Lebanon. He also preserves the legacy of his late father, Charles Malik, one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Father and son are both prime examples of the Christians’ moderating influence, as Habib describes it:

The existence of settled, stable, prosperous, and reasonably free and secure native Christian communities in the Middle East has served in many instances as a factor encouraging Islamic openness and moderation, creating an environment of pluralism that fosters acknowledgment of the different other.#...#In Lebanon, before the outbreak of war in 1975, Muslim communities lived with their Christian counterparts in a free atmosphere of mutual respect. The fruits of this coexistence are evident today, even after so many conflicts, among educated classes of Lebanese Sunnis and Shiites, who stand out in the broader Arab Islamic context as full-fledged examples of modernity in every way. Islamic moderation is strengthened when Muslims live with confident co-national adherents of communities that respect women, do not condone suicide bombing or religious domination, are compatible with liberal democracy, defend personal and group rights, and are comfortable with many features of secular life.

The second of these men, Bishop Thomas (e-mail: usanaphora@yahoo.com) of Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church, faces personal risk because of his work to breathe vitality into his long-suppressed church. The region’s largest Christian group, Copts are under pressure from the government and from Islamist civilians. Copts inhabited Egypt before it was Arabized and Islamicized in the seventh century (the word “Copt” is derived from “Egypt”), but now Copts can’t study their language in the public schools, and they are forced to study Islam. They are generally not permitted to build churches. The government tends to withhold justice from Christians who are the victims of extremist attacks. In response, Bishop Thomas’s work includes establishing Coptic schools and educational programs. He built the Anaphora Farm and Retreat Center, north of Cairo, to preserve the dying Coptic language and the arts and traditions of the monastic communities of the Church’s desert fathers, who lived there 1,500 years ago. The following is an excerpt from Bishop Thomas’s speech at the Hudson Institute last year, which prompted over a hundred denunciations and death threats in Egypt’s government-controlled media and mosques:

I grew up memorizing the Quran, and a lot of the Hadiths, hearing the stories of the history, how the Islamic troops were victorious. And we have to study that and we have to write it in our exams and we have to praise it. Nowadays, the media has the same style and, wherever you are, you hear Quranic reciting. It shouts everywhere, and this is part of the pressure that people are living with. Even though we are facing a lot of hardship, still we are not weak because, simply, truth is strong, love is strong, hope is strong, and that enables the Christians in Egypt to continue.

The third man, Canon Andrew White, is witnessing in the most dire circumstances. The 45-year-old Anglican priest, afflicted with multiple sclerosis, voluntarily gave up his prestigious post at Coventry Cathedral to minister in Iraq. Since 2003, he has negotiated hostage releases, reconciled Sunnis and Shiites, operated free medical clinics, and supported Baghdad’s eight remaining Jews. White is the pastor of St. George’s Church, an ecumenical congregation he established for the remnants of Baghdad’s Chaldean, Syriac Orthodox, and Assyrian communities. Scores of his congregation have been murdered, and White himself was featured on a sectarian group’s “wanted” posters. He was once bound and beaten by security police.

I received a letter from him on October 25, which said in part, “I am very sorry to tell you that the two major bomb explosions in Baghdad this morning have done serious damage to the church compound.#...#Outside the church, at least 132 people were killed and over 600 injured. Destroyed fragments of their bodies have been thrown through windows of the church.#...#Many of our staff and church members remain unaccounted for. Lay Pastor Faiz and I have been trying in vain to reach them by telephone. Today was a terrible day for us. But even in the blood and trauma and turmoil, there are things for which we can, and indeed must, praise our G-d.”

To help these three leaders is to help struggling Middle Eastern Christianity -- and to help the free world while we’re at it. Please reach out to them.

-- Nina Shea is the director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom.

 

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