https://www.crisismagazine.com/2018/church-islam-dangerous-illusions The Church and Islam: Dangerous Illusions William Kilpatrick When I first began writing about the Church and Islam, I devoted a lot of space to describing ways that Church leaders could resist the spread of Islam. It seemed only a matter of time until they would wake up to the need to resist. As it turned out, however, that assessment was overly optimistic. The immediate task, as I soon learned, was not to find ways to counter Islam, but to convince the Church’s hierarchy that Islam ought to be resisted. There’s no use talking battle strategies to people who won’t admit that they have an ideological enemy. The enemy is not Muslims per se, but a belief system adhered to by the majority of Muslims, albeit with varying degrees of commitment. Although Islam does not easily lend itself to moderation, many Muslims manage to practice their faith in peaceful ways. Others merely give it lip service, and still others are on fire with a passionate zeal to spread it—by fire and the sword if necessary. The idea of opposing dangerous ideologies is not foreign to Americans, but the idea of opposing an ideology that is also a religion is more problematic. It has become increasingly problematic now that we live in an era in which merely disagreeing with another’s opinions is tantamount to a hate crime. So, just for the record, critiquing Islam does not mean that one hates Muslims. Criticizing Islam is not the same as criticizing Muslims, any more than criticizing communism is equivalent to criticizing Soviet-era Russians. One can acknowledge the humanity and good intentions of others without having to endorse their ideology. And if their ideology or belief system presents a grave danger to others, it would be wrong not to criticize it. Of course, one should employ tact and prudence when offering such criticism. The distinction between Citizen X and his beliefs is a simple one. You do not have to respect his beliefs, but you should try to respect him as a fellow human being. Many Catholic leaders, however, have difficulty making this distinction. Rather than try, they have, in the case of Islam, simply declared it to be an upstanding fellow religion with many similarities to Christianity. That way, no one’s feelings are hurt. The problem of Islamic terrorists and extremists is handled in the same way: they are assumed to be a small minority who have misunderstood the peaceful nature of their religion. By the same token, it stands to reason that critics of Islam have also misunderstood Islam, and need to be set straight. If they persist in their obstinacy, they are dismissed as bigots and “Islamophobes.” Likewise, Church officials assume that opponents of Muslim immigration must be poorly informed, or else racist and xenophobes. If they loved their neighbor, they would not challenge his beliefs or question his religious practices Under Pope Benedict XVI there were signs—such as his Regensburg Address—that the Church was developing a more realistic view of Islam. But whatever ground was gained by Benedict was given up by Francis. Indeed, it seems fair to say that under Francis, the Church’s understanding of Islam regressed. Perhaps the most glaring example of this regression can be found in the Pope’s assertion that “authentic Islam and a proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.” It’s hard to imagine any of his predecessors or any of their advisors making a similar claim. Unfortunately, very few churchmen have taken issue with Francis’s profoundly flawed view of Islam. Instead, many have joined the chorus—some out of naiveté, some out of misplaced sensitivity, and some, perhaps, out of cowardice. Several decades have passed since the emergence of worldwide Islamic terrorist networks, and Church leaders are still clinging to a fantasy-based view of Islam. In their defense, it must be admitted that other world leaders have also been in thrall to the cult of sensitivity, and have been equally slow in giving up their dreamy narratives. For a long time, Western leaders kept repeating the mantra that Islamic terror had nothing to do with Islam. But now their tune is beginning to change. The Austrian prime minister has threatened to close one of Vienna’s largest mosques, the French have shut down numerous mosques and deported several radical imams, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic have effectively closed their borders to Muslim migrants, and Hungary’s prime minister has unapologetically defended the Christian identity of his country. It’s strange that the Church which, because of its history, ought to be the first to know, appears to be among the last institutions to grasp that Islam is not really a religion of peace. Or, perhaps, Church leaders do understand the dangers of Islam and have adopted a strategy of silence to protect potential victims of Islam. That’s one plausible defense of their inaction. Perhaps they fear that any criticism of Islam will bring harsh reprisals against Christians living in Muslim lands. During World War II, Catholic leaders quickly learned that denunciations of Nazism brought swift and deadly reprisals against both Jews and Christians. As Nazi power increased, the Vatican developed more covert tactics for helping Jews to escape, and Catholics to resist. One might argue that today’s Catholic leaders are following a similar strategy in the hopes of mitigating the persecution of Christians and other minorities. But there’s a difference. If the Church simply maintained a prudential silence about Islamic aggressions, that argument might make sense. But Church leaders have not simply refrained from criticizing Islam. Instead, they have taken every opportunity to praise Islam, to declare their solidarity with it, and to join in various Islamic initiatives, such as the campaign against “Islamophobia.” Judging by the Church’s great solicitude for Islam, one would think it was the most persecuted faith on earth, rather than one of the chief persecutors. The Church’s current Islam policy does not look like the cautious approach of one who is dealing with a dangerous enemy. It looks more like the trusting innocence of one who thinks he has no enemies. Pius XII may have maintained a prudential silence about Nazi evils once it became apparent that many innocent people would pay the price, but he never praised Nazism as a force for peace, and he certainly never declared the Church’s solidarity with it. By contrast, Church leaders and Pope Francis in particular, have become, in effect, enablers of Islam. Pope Francis has denied that Islam sanctions violence, has drawn a moral equivalence between Islam and Catholicism (“If I speak of Islamic violence, I must speak of Catholic violence”), and has campaigned for the admittance of millions of Muslim migrants into Europe. Moreover, he has criticized those who oppose his open borders policy as hard-hearted xenophobes. In return for his efforts, he has been publicly thanked by several Muslim leaders for his “defense of Islam.” One might be tempted to use the word “collaborator” instead of “enabler.” But collaborator is too strong a word. In its World War II context, it implies a knowing consent to and cooperation with an evil enterprise. It seems clear to me that the pope and others in the hierarchy are enabling the spread of an evil ideology; however, it’s not at all clear that they understand what they’re doing. Francis, for instance, seems to sincerely believe that all religions are roughly equal in goodness. Thus for him, the spread of any religion must seem like a good thing. It’s an exceedingly naïve view, but one that seems honestly held. But one can’t plead ignorance forever. Eventually, the reality of the situation will become plain to all but the most obtuse. At that point—at the point the threat is undeniable—we assume that the people in power will wake up and take the appropriate actions. But what if the awakening comes too late? The pope, for one, has shown little evidence that he will change his views on the subject. If anything, he has doubled down—recently going so far as to say that the rights of migrants trump national security. We should not look to the pope to lead the way on this issue. He seems constitutionally incapable of entertaining doubts about his Islam policy. It looks like the impetus to change course will have to come from bishops, priests and Catholic laity. They had better get busy. There is no time to waste. Editor’s note: Pictured above, Pope Francis meets with Dr. Muhammad al-Issa, Secretary General of the Muslim World League, on September 20, 2017. (Photo credit: CNA / L’Osservatore Romano)
It baffles me. https://www.crisismagazine.com/2017/jihad-never-sleeps Jihad Never Sleeps William Kilpatrick Most Catholics in the U.S. are vaguely aware that Christians are being persecuted in the Middle East, Africa, and other parts of the Islamic world. Most are aware of the many terrorist attacks in Europe. And most are aware of the major jihad attacks here in America. But if you’re mainly focused on the occasional terror attack, you are probably underestimating the extent of the Islamic threat and the speed with which it is spreading. That’s because people have short memories. Take the recent terror attacks in Spain—in Barcelona and Cambrils. You undoubtedly saw some of the news coverage of the carnage, and you probably think you won’t forget the event. But memories fade. How many remember the much more deadly jihad attack on the Madrid train system in 2004? The nearly simultaneous bombings aboard four commuter trains killed 191 people and injured more than 1,800. But, unless you live in Spain, the Madrid train bombings passed out of your mind years ago, and if you’re under twenty-five, you likely never knew about them in the first place. When a spectacular terror attack occurs, the average person is temporarily alarmed, but then settles back into a state of complacency until the next major terror attack triggers the alarm once again. But this cycle of alarm-complacency-alarm-complacency doesn’t bring us any closer to understanding the underlying problem or solving it. Indeed, it conditions us to live with a certain level of terror. We know that the jihadists will strike again, but we also know that the odds are low that we will be among the victims. And so we manage to get on with our lives. As long as bombs are not going off in nearby subways or buses we stop thinking about jihad. Our society’s focus on acts of violent jihad makes us forget that there is another, more subtle kind of jihad that we need to worry about. Terrible as violent jihad is, cultural jihad is actually a greater threat. Violent jihad –9/11, Barcelona, London Bridge– is intermittent, but cultural jihad never sleeps. It is active 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. And though your odds of being a victim of violent jihad are quite low, your odds of being a victim of cultural jihad are exceedingly high. Cultural jihad is a long-term campaign to influence and even co-opt key social institutions such as schools, churches, media, business, and courts. For example, chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood-linked (and politically active) Muslim Student Association can be found on every major campus. And substantial grants from Gulf State kingdoms have persuaded American universities to adopt Islam-friendly policies and curriculums. Catholic colleges are no exception. Most of them present a whitewashed version of Islam to their students. And some Catholic institutions, such as Georgetown, have become little more than PR agents for the Islamic way of life. In addition, Islamists have been quite successful in penetrating federal government agencies, including security agencies. As just one example among many, consider that a gentleman named Mustafa Javed Ali was recently appointed as Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council. The problem here is not that Javed Ali is a Muslim, but that his last job was with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)—an organization with links to terror organizations. CAIR is the quintessential cultural jihad organization. It has a small army of lawyers at its disposal, and it will sue you at the drop of a hijab if you should dare to oppose its agenda. CAIR is just one of an alphabet soup-full of Islamic organizations that work tirelessly to transform American society into a sharia-compliant society. CAIR, ISNA, ICNA, MAS, MSA, USCMO—there are about 50 major cultural jihad organizations in the U.S., and hundreds of minor ones. Think of them as akin to the many leftist groups that work night and day to turn America into a utopian socialist state. The leftists will sue you if you don’t bake a cake for a gay wedding, and the cultural jihadists will sue you if you don’t make it with 100 percent halal ingredients. It is largely through cultural jihad (aka “stealth jihad”) that Islamic law and culture is spreading through the West. If you don’t worry about it, it’s because you probably don’t know much about it, and if you don’t know much about it it’s because you’re not meant to know.
Cultural jihad never sleeps, but the cultural jihadists prefer that you remain asleep to what they’re doing. In this endeavor, they receive a great deal of help from corporate America. Media giants such as PayPal, Facebook, and Google are doing their best to shut down the websites that call attentions to cultural jihad. Recently, for example, PayPal blocked the JihadWatch website in response to a spurious claim that Jihad Watch was a hate group. Not long before that Google had readjusted its search engine algorithms in order to make it difficult for searchers to find JihadWatch. And on other occasions Facebook has suspended the Jihad Watch account. Numerous other counter jihad sites in America and Europe have been censored in a similar fashion. The aim is to choke off funding to groups that are critical of Islamists or to shut them down completely. So when the terrorists strike, the giant media monopolies strike back not against the stealth jihadists who enable the terrorists, but against those who are attempting to expose the connection between cultural jihad and violent jihad. The cultural jihadists are winning the information war because the media conglomerates and the universities have sided with them and against their critics. If you try to provide accurate information about the Islamist threat, you’re not only up against CAIR’s lawyers, you’re up against the universities, the media, and much of corporate America. When violent jihadist strike we look to police and the military to protect us. But the spread of Islam is not simply a military matter, it’s also a culture war. And while soldiers are trained to resist an advancing enemy, the average citizen is not trained to resist cultural warfare. On the contrary, he has been conditioned to accept all diversities—even totalitarian systems that are out to subjugate him. That’s where the Catholic Church comes in—or, more accurately, ought to come in. Historically, the Church was a bulwark of resistance against Islamic encroachments– and not just Islam, but other totalitarian movements as well. The Church warned about the dangers of communism decades before anyone else saw the problem. Moreover, St. John Paul II played a major role in bringing an end to communism in Eastern Europe. Likewise, throughout the 1930s, while the smart set in Britain and America celebrated Hitler’s “progressive” ideas about eugenics, the Catholic Church spoke out repeatedly against Nazi racism. Pope Pius XI called Hitler “the greatest enemy of Christ and of the Church in modern times,” and in 1937, when much of Europe was still asleep, Pius issued the famous anti-Nazi encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge. Sadly, in recent years the Church has not provided any similar guidance about the totalitarian nature of the Islamic threat. Insofar as Church leaders have offered advice on the subject, it has been bad advice: calls for solidarity with Islam, reassurances that Islam is a close cousin to Catholicism, and repeated claims that Islamic terror has nothing to do with Islam. Pope Francis himself has been one of the main defenders of Islam. In Evangelii Gaudium he declared that “authentic Islam and a proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.” On another occasion, he told Muslim migrants that they could find guidance in the Koran. And, most recently, he stated that the personal safety of immigrants should always take priority over national security. That’s a high sounding sentiment, but when you think about it it’s just another way of saying that the safety of Muslim immigrants is more important than the safety of Europeans and Americans. “Always prioritize personal safety [of immigrants] over national security”? Given the proven connection between increased Muslim immigration and increased terrorism, that seems like a rather reckless thing to say. Take the twin attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils which left 14 dead and over a hundred wounded. All of the twelve terrorists were immigrants or the children of immigrants. Their leader, Imam Abdelbaki Es Satty was also an immigrant. Before becoming an imam, Es Satty was in prison for drug smuggling. After serving his sentence he should have been deported back to Morocco, but a Spanish judge decided that Imam Satty’s safety trumped the safety and security of Spanish citizens, and, thus, he was allowed to stay in Spain and plot away. The original plot was to attack the iconic Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona with vans packed with explosives. When the explosives went off prematurely at the site where they were stored, the plot was shifted to smaller car and knife attacks at Cambrils and Las Ramblas in Barcelona. But suppose the original plot had succeeded. About 10,000 visitors tour the Sagrada Familia Cathedral every day. Many hundreds would likely have been killed and hundreds more wounded. Would Pope Francis still say that the safety of immigrants should take priority over national security? Unfortunately, he probably would. Francis seems constitutionally unable to connect Islam with terrorism, and he seems unaware of the threat posed by cultural jihad—the network of Muslim enclaves, mosques, and Islamist organizations that provide the enabling environment for violent jihadists to do their work. Cultural jihad never sleeps, but many in our government, universities, and media organizations are asleep to the spread of cultural jihad. Meanwhile, the Church leadership, with Francis at the helm, is in a near comatose state. The Church was once in the vanguard of resistance to Islamic invasions. Now it is more like a sleeping giant—a powerful force for good that is asleep to the dangers posed by Islam’s stealth advance. Let us pray that Church leaders will rouse themselves awake before it is too late. Editor’s note: Pictured above is a photo of a police officer guarding the Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona on August 20
Where is the Church Militant? Who failed to sound the alarm and instead has condemned those who have? The west has been propagandized for decades about the religion of peace.
