A prime target (CNN)
Is St. Peter's safe for now? From Reuters, with thanks to Nicolei:
ROME: Italian police detained more than 100 people suspected of having links to Muslim militants in co-ordinated swoops across the country on Friday, an interior ministry spokesman said.Working with the secret service, police detained 106 people, most of them Moroccan immigrants. Fifteen of those held were to be deported because their papers were not in order, the spokesman said.
“This was a preventative operation, scrupulously conducted and based on accurate information,” Italian news agency Ansa quoted Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu as saying.
The report said in total 161 suspects were targeted, but did not say if any charges had been brought against the detainees.
One widely-known hadith is that in which Muhammad predicts the taking, by the forces of Islam, first of Constantinople, and then of Rome. That hadith has been referred to again and again in the literature of Jihad, especially in recent years. Many dream dreams: the Somnium of Scipionis; the Dream of Fair Women; the vision of Constantine vision ("in hoc signo") painted by Piero; and of course, Martin Luther King had his March-on-Washington dream. And Muslims have their dream, which did not end with their conquest of the vast territories they managed to seize in the early days of Islam. The hadith of Muhammad foresaw, that one day Muslims would lay low the mighty empire of Byzantium, so advanced, so fabulously rich, and seize Constantinople, the first city of Christendom for a thousand years. And so they did, finally, in the form of the Ottoman Turks and Mehmet Fatih, the conquering Mohammed, whose forces were helped by a Hungarian cannon-maker, and by the indifference or even enmities that paralyzed such Christian powers, as Venice, more distracted by intra-European rivalries (with Genoa, for example), by the hostility of Latin Christendom for the Greek variety, and by the desire to win commercial favor from the victors, foreseen as the Ottoman Turks. When, in 1453, they finally conquered that fabulous city, it had by then been reduced to a mere 50,000 inhabitants. But it happened – eight hundred years after the first Muslim armies were conquering Mesopotamia and Syria, Constantinople fell.
And that is why that hadith, in which Muhammad foretells the taking first of Constantinople, and then of Rome, is so important. The first part came true, reason the Muslim masses – why not the second? They have been helped, rather than hindered, by the Vatican policy of appeasement of Islam (the Koran-kissing in Damascus, the protection of the gun-running PLO operative Hilarion Cappucci (himself a Melkite Catholic, and thus not exactly an obvious candidate for Vatican solicitude), the anti-Israel sentiments expressedby Vatican operatives on every conceivable, and inconceivable, occasion) has only helped Europe to let down its guard, to fail to understand the tenets of Islam, the dangers posed by the demographic invasion, and by all the acts which further, rather than hinder, that invasion – including active encouragement of mosque-building in the ancient centers of western Christendom. And the Vatican, and Christians everywhere, and Western civilization, even in its post-Christian aspects (for the skeptics, the freethinkers, the children of Spinoza and Hume, will suffer from Islam as much as, and possibly even more than, any believer).
It was madness on the part of the pious to the point of treacliness, President Pertini, to offer 7 acres of prime real estate for the building of a mosque in Rome, financed entirely by the Gulf Arabs of Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., and Kuwait. That huge edifice, built not a mile from the Vatican, is seen by Muslims everywhere as a symbol of growing Muslim power in the very heart of what they still regard (even if post-Christian Europe merely yawns) as the heart of Western Christendom. At the opening ceremonies, the Arab ambassadors were all assembled, smiles of triumph on their lips, their eyes glittering with victory. Only those who saw that scene with their own eyes can report adequately on it. A few expressed some doubts, some reservations. But who could not believe that this sign of indulgence (the word “appeasement” never came to anyone’s mind) would not be reciprocated, somehow, somewhere, in better treatment for Christians in Muslim lands. Why, perhaps even a Christmas carol or two might be permitted to be hummed, behind closed doors, in one of the compounds for foreigners in Saudi Arabia. But such was not to be. The ambassadors understood that this event represented not so much the opening of a house of individual worship, as the establishment of a military beachhead.
First Constantinople, through the conquest of warriors. Now Rome, it is predicted -- but as the Muslim sites all say, it will take place through demographic, rather than outright military, conquest. What will be the consequences, one wonders, for the statuary and paintings in the Vatican? And what will it mean for the very idea of the West? And will the Western world decide that it has a right to do what it once thought unthinkable, but which in fact has been the practice of societies since time began (not least in the Middle East) – to engage in the large-scale expulsion of those in their midst who do not wish their peoples, or their polities, well – and, as their numbers swell, will render the lives of those indigenous inhabitants more difficult, expensive and dangerous.
Questions for study and discussion.
Hugh - Once again an informative and succinct analysis.
Book 'em Danno.....Then ship them back home...
Hugh, if the Bhuddah's in Afganistan are any indication of what the Muslims will do, then we can kiss all of that amazing artwork goodbye. It is just amazing to me how backwards these people really are.
The time of appeasement and open borders for Muslim immigrants must end in the West!