The Honor Of God

Robert Spencer writes: 

Last October, a Syrian Orthodox priest, Fr. Boulos Iskander, went shopping for auto parts in the Iraqi city of Mosul. He was never seen alive again. A Muslim group kidnapped him and initially demanded $350,000 in ransom; they eventually lowered this to $40,000, but added a new demand: Fr. Boulos’ parish had to denounce the remarks made the previous month by Pope Benedict XVI that caused rioting all over the Islamic world. The ransom was paid, and the church dutifully posted thirty large signs all over Mosul, but to no avail: Fr. Boulos was not only murdered but dismembered. Five hundred Christians attended his funeral, where another priest commented: “Many more wanted to come to the funeral, but they were afraid. We are in very bad circumstances now.”

That is true of Christians all over the Middle East, where safe havens for Christians are dwindling rapidly. Even in Lebanon, traditionally the Middle East’s sole Christian land, Christians suffer persecution, which leads to declining numbers and declining influence – and that in turn encourages more persecution. Christian communities that date back to the dawn of Christianity have been steadily decreasing in numbers; now the faith is on the verge of disappearing from the area altogether. In Iraq, half of the nation’s prewar 700,000 Christians have now fled the country since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Iraqi Christians today are streaming into Syria or, if they can, out of the Middle East altogether. Much of this migration can be attributed to the resurgence of Islamic militarism in recent decades. Indeed, the career trajectories of two twentieth-century regional titans, Yasir Arafat as well as Saddam, are particularly illuminating: Arafat began as a secular nationalist in the Soviet camp and ended up trying to fend off and co-opt a challenge from the Islamic jihadists of Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement) and Islamic Jihad. Saddam was never a Muslim hardliner, and was indeed notorious for his personal divergences from Islamic orthodoxy; nevertheless, in the last days of his regime he did not hesitate to cast himself as a mujahid par excellence, a defender of Islam who deserved the support of all pious believers.

The fact that both Arafat and Saddam began, broadly speaking, as secularists and ended as mujahedin, however insincere and incomplete their poses may have been, is emblematic of developments all over the Middle East. After a long period of relative quiescence that stretched through the decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent colonial period, the Islamic jihad ideology that mandates warfare against and subjugation of unbelievers is back with a vengeance. Archbishop Cyril Salim Bustros, the Melkite Greek Catholic Eparch of Newton, Massachusetts, and former Archbishop of the Hizballah stronghold Baalbeck, Lebanon, explained in a March 2006 address: “The doctrines of Islam,” he said, “dictate war against unbelievers.” Peaceful Muslims do not find strong support for their views within Islamic tradition: “the concept of nonviolence is absent from Muslim doctrine and practice.” The ultimate goal of Islamic theology, as preached by imams all over the Islamic world, is “the surrender of all people to Islam and to God’s power based on Islamic law [Sharia]. [Muslims] have to defend this peace of God even by force.”

Such ideas have come aggressively to the fore in Iraq since the people of Baghdad pulled down the giant statue of Saddam. And not only in Iraq. Around the Islamic world, Islam is newly energized; this resurgence stems from a variety of factors – most notably, Saudi oil billions made available for the spread of the global jihad, and the stimulating example of the Khomeini revolution in Iran, which showed that it could be done: Islamic jihadists could capture and rule a state. Within Iraq, Saddam brutally suppressed Islamic supremacists, but now they are the most powerful forces in the country.

Christians have been the principal victims of this. Besides dictating war against unbelievers, Islamic law mandates that Christians be subjected to a second-class status that exacts from them a special tax (jizya; cf. Qur’an 9:29) from which Muslims are exempt, not hold authority over Muslims, not build new churches or repair old ones, and submit to various other humiliating and discriminatory regulations. However, these laws have not been in force in Iraq since it was an Ottoman province – and under Western pressure, the Ottoman Empire abolished this discriminatory system, the dhimma, in the 1850s. In Saddam’s Iraq, as well as Hafez Assad’s Syria, lawmakers took their cue more from Western law than Islamic law, and Christians enjoyed relative equality with Muslims. But those days are over, at least in Iraq.

Although the laws of the dhimma are not fully enforced anywhere in the Islamic world today, both Sunni and Shi’ite Islamic jihad groups are reasserting them. Women have been threatened with kidnapping or death if they do not wear a headscarf; in accord with traditional Islamic legal restrictions on Christians “openly displaying wine or pork” (in the words of a legal manual endorsed by Cairo’s venerable Al-Azhar University), liquor store owners in Iraq have likewise been threatened. Many of their businesses have been destroyed, and the owners have fled. A onetime Iraqi liquor store owner now living in Syria lamented that “before the war there was no separation between Christian and Muslim. Under Saddam no one asked you your religion, and we used to attend each other’s religious services and weddings. After the invasion we hoped democracy would come; but instead all that came was bombs, kidnapping and killing. Now at least 75% of my Christian friends have fled. There is no future for us in Iraq.”

The Vanishing Christians of Iraq:

http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_vanishing_christians_of_iraq

 

There was a time when American Catholics understood that their Faith was not like the faith of modern evangelicals—a mere matter of “believing on the Lord Jesus” and being saved.  They understood that receiving the Eucharist is not simply an act that brings us grace but one that unites us to the Body of Christ, of which the Church here on earth is the corporate manifestation.  Yes, we’re called to pray for our enemies, but we’re also called, as Saint Paul reminds us, to build up the Body of Christ.  And we are bound to our fellow believers not simply by “values,” or even by bonds of kinship, but spiritually.

Our failure today to understand and defend the Crusades shows how fully we’ve lost this corporate sense.  European Christians sacrificed their lives for the liberation of the Holy Places in the Middle East and the survival of the Christian communities there.  They undoubtedly prayed for the souls of the enemies they fought, but they never fell into a moral equivalence between their fellow Christians and those who had attacked and subjugated them.

It all comes back, once again, to Vladimir Solovyov, and his prediction that “Days will come in Christianity in which they will try to reduce the salvific event to a mere series of values.” Too many American Catholics have placed their political values, which they have elevated to the level of “moral values,” above the corporate Body of Christ.  Like the worst of Christian Zionists, they have come to value the military might of a secular Israel above both the survival of the Christian communities of the Middle East and a sane, considered view of the American interest in the region.

What is astounding is that so few of these “conservative” American Catholics realize that the ethnic cleansing of Christians from the Middle East is not, in the long run, in the national interest of either the United States or Israel.  Blinded by American nationalism or partisan politics or maybe just bloodlust, they are supporting policies that will likely cost more American and Israeli blood in the decades to come.  Once the conflict in the Middle East is completely reduced to Judaism/Israel versus Islam/Arabs, the only way for Israel and the United States to win politically will be to lose spiritually.

“The Antichrist,” Solovyov wrote, “is the reduction of Christianity to an ideology, instead of a personal encounter with the Savior.” In those words, we find both the diagnosis of our current state and the solution to it—but knowing what that personal encounter entails, are “conservative” American Catholics and other Christians willing to put down their swords, take up their cross, and follow Him?

Scott Richert at Taki”s Top Drawer - Thoughts On The Antichrist Part III>

http://www.takimag.com/site/article/thoughts_on_the_antichrist_part_iii_breaking_the_body_of_christ