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From the ever-perceptive Sandro Magister in Chiesa, with thanks to Panos and Anthony:
ROMA - Silence and disorientation reigned among the leaders of the Roman Church during the days immediately following the slaughter of the innocents in Beslan.John Paul II remained silent for five days before dedicating passionate words to the "many defenseless little ones of Beslan, in Ossetia, the tragically massacred victims of a barbarous hostage situation," and praying for the children, "the treasure of humanity," who suffer and die throughout the world. He made the remarks during his general audience Wednesday, September 8.
As for the official organs of the Holy See, in their reaction there was an unusual obfuscation of the enemy - Islamist terrorism - and a disarming silence about the religious faith of those killed.
In the region of the Russian Caucuses, which are Muslim, Ossetia is the only Christian enclave; its 700,000 inhabitants are almost all of the Orthodox faith. And it is there that the Islamist terrorists deliberately carried out the slaughter of women, men, and even more so of children.
But “L’Osservatore Romano,” the newspaper of the Holy See directed by Mario Agnes, limited itself in its September 5 edition to showing the photo of a bloody little hand grasping a cross, with the title "Crucified Innocence," and beside it the only official Vatican pronouncement on the event up until that point: a routine telegram from the secretary of state, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, who communicated "the sorrow and prayer of the Holy Father" to the "Russian people," through the apostolic nunzio in Moscow, Antonio Mennini.
On the second page, where the account of the event was given, this was the title:
"Many of the three hundred who died in the blitz were children."
And this is how the news brief begins:
"The blitz of the Russian special forces left over three hundred dead, marking a tragic end to yesterday's seizure by a terrorist brigade of more than a thousand persons, most of them children, in a school in the north Ossetia town of Beslan."
The previous day, the orientation of the Vatican newspaper had been the same, with the responsibility for the "gory outcome" being ascribed in the first place to the authors of the "blitz"; that is, to the Russian special forces and their commanders, all the way up to president Vladimir Putin.
So much for "L’Osservatore Romano." But "Avvenire" – the newspaper, directed by Dino Boffo, that is owned by the Italian bishops' conference, headed by the pope's vicar, Cardinal Camillo Ruini – went even further. Two of its four editorials, and the two headlines dominating the Sunday, September 5 edition, concentrated their attention on Putin, as if he were the greatest danger.
Of the remaining editorials, one made reference to the human aspects of the tragedy, and the other, by Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi, archbishop of Milan, invoked interreligious dialogue to obtain peace.
* * *
Of the two political editorials published in "Avvenire" on September 5, the more unbalanced is that of Maurizio Blondet, a special correspondent and a columnist of the newspaper.
Blondet begins by charging Putin with this fault:
"Labeling nationalist combatants as Islamic terrorists has been a convenient justification for the most inhuman form of repression: one does not negotiate with terrorists or criminals. One uproots them."
But then he extends the criticism to the West. And in particular, to the heads of the United States and Israel:
"Analogous accusations can be applied to Bush and Sharon. The fair-haired Kremlin tsar is accused of capitalizing on the fear of his people, presenting himself as an iron-fisted protector, while his inflexibility has, in reality, added to the insecurity. This is true. But then why is it politically incorrect to raise the same objections about the ‘born-again Christian’ from Texas and the obese general of Tel Aviv? None of the three – if one considers well – is exempt from suspicions of having exploited collective fear for his electoral advantage, or of using the necessary restrictions of liberty brought by the 'war on terror' to silence his critics and adversaries."
Blondet's vision of the world is known. He has exhaustively exposed it in books and commentaries, for example in those compiled at www.effedieffe.com/interventi.html. He has written that George Bush invaded Iraq for the sole purpose of "eliminating a regime that threatened Israel"; that the White House "is in the hands of the neo-cons, who are almost all Zionists"; that one of the authors of the bloodbath in Madrid on March 11, 2004 "seems to have been a Jew" and that the "Islamic" network to which he belonged "had been infiltrated by Mossad," the Israeli secret service.
And on the execution by Israel of the leader of Hamas, sheikh Yassim:
"Sheikh Yassim had proposed to Israel 'a ten-year ceasefire' in exchange for the formation of a Palestinian state in the Gaza strip and the occupied territories. It was a very important sign of openness, an offer of negotiations. And this is precisely why Israel cut him down, only to complain afterward that there is no one else with whom to negotiate. Israel does not negotiate, because it considers itself the Messiah, and in Talmudic doctrine, the messianic times 'are [a time] of conquest, not of negotiation and concession.' Israel uses other human beings like flesh to be gnawed upon, because that's what its religion teaches: non-Jews 'have no place in the world to come,' if not that of servants and human fodder to be endlessly oppressed. Israel does not negotiate because it cannot become a normal state, with normal obligations and normal rights. Israel cannot integrate, because only the children of Abraham are destined for the promise. Israel wants to be the ghetto of all the Jews: it could live in peace, and it builds a wall around itself. Israel is afraid of the human race. It hates it, it despises it, it uses it, and it fears it. Nothing will ever calm Israel's fear, because it is born from within itself. It is born from its own knowledge of its radical wickedness."
It is striking that on the day following the slaughter in Beslan – an authentic September 11 of the Christian children – the newspaper of the Church of Rome and of Italy should have entrusted its principal political commentary to an analyst of such an orientation.
* * *
On Sunday, September 5, the same day on which John Paul II, in Loreto, remained silent on the slaughter at Beslan, in Milan the eparch Feofan, Orthodox bishop of Stavropol and Vladikavkaz in Ossetia, spoke out.
He spoke of it as an eyewitness. And in accents different from those used by the ecclesiastical organs cited above:
"I closed the eyes of children shot in the back by the terrorists, I carried them in my arms. Can anyone who carries out such acts be called a liberator? One does not fight for liberty by killing children. There is a lesson hear for all of humanity: terrorism is an evil that can strike anywhere, in New York, in Madrid, on a bus. And humanity has no other choice than to unite against terrorism. This struggle comes first of all; afterward we can clarify our political differences."
Feofan spoke on the first day of the meeting "Peoples and Religions," held this year September 5-7 in Milan, organized by the archdiocese and the Community of Sant'Egidio, with the participation of many Catholic proponents and those of other religious confessions.
And with his unscripted words, he touched the point on which the authorities of the Catholic Church appear most uncertain and perplexed: that of relations with Islam.
In effect, concern for protecting the Christian minorities in Islamic countries pressures Church authorities to defend the stability of the authoritarian regimes in those countries, and to adopt very permissive forms of dialogue with Muslim representatives.
In the face of the global challenge of Islamist terrorism, their illusion is that by denying the very existence of that challenge – for example, by the continual, ritual deprecation and denial of the "clash of civilizations" – they remove the Church from the list of possible targets.
Read it all.
Posted by Robert at September 8, 2004 12:57 PM
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I know the Pope has seen a lot, been thru a lot, and it has aged him badly... but wouldn't it be great if he could finish his career in a Blaze of Glory, and denounce islam to the world? I mean, he survived the Nazis, he helped bring down communism in Eastern Europe...
*sighs* being Catholic, I find the news I am reading from the Vatican depressing.
Posted by: Gary![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/nav-commenters.gif)
at September 8, 2004 1:33 PM
Oriana Fallaci has, in the same breath, denounced the Vatican and L'Unita (the Communist paper, a running-dog of Islam). The Vatican has for years accomodated islamochristians, out of fear of what might be done to Christians in the Middle East. It gave refuge to Hilarion Cappucci, the gun-runner for the PLO, a Melkite bishop, and offered Israel solemn promises that this particulr islamochristian would do no further harm -- a promise not kept. It has again and again adopted a line designed to placate the PLO and the other Arabs. It did very little to rescue the Christians of the southern Sudan. During the Biafran War it did nothing to help the Ibo (only Ghana and Israel recognized the state of Biafra, though the entire civilized world ought to have done so, as those Egyptian pilots strafed and bombed Ibo villagers and killed tens of thousands in a war with a million casualties). The low point, of course, was the visit to Damascus and that episode of Koran-kissing that only filled Muslims with a sense of triumph and victory. Or perhaps the low point, really, was handing over 7 acres of prime Rome real estate, a transaction which the Vatican facilitated, for the building of a huge mosque, in the naive hope that somehow such a gesture would be reciprocated. Anyone who saw, with his own eyes, the triumphant opening of that mosque, with all the Arab ambassadors assembled, the whole thing resembling the declaration that a triumphant beachhead had been established for Islam not a mile from the Vatican.
If memory serves (and "ich dienst" is its motto) one Italian minister, the very Catholic religious Irene Pivetti, expressed her dismay (Pivetti is no longer a pious santarellina, but has cut her hair, has traded Chanel for leather, and hosts a television program that covers such things as plastic surgery, but she remains a Catholic, and never mind about her mental makeover).
The Vatican, of course, has different currents. The black cardinals from Africa have Islam's number; they have been on the receiving end for so long that they are not about to counsel appeasement. So does Cardinal Biffi, who knows what goes on in Islam as he was posted to Turkey for years. So do others, including a number who are admirers of Bat Ye'or's work and worry about the creation of "Eurabia." They were not exactly pleased by the failure to mention "Christianity" in the EU's official documents. Nor were they impressed by Jacques Chirac, who said (and everyone in France now knows it) that "Europe owes as much to Islam as it does to Christianity." Well, that is true in roughly the same sense that the United States should be grateful to the Nazis and the Communists, for sending so many gifted refugees to American shores, just as the scholars of Byzantium fled the Ottoman Turks, and brought their learning and their manuscripts with them. And avery little bit is owed to those Arabic-language scholars (many Christians and Jews among them) who translated Aristotle and others from Greek into Syriac, from Syriac into Arabic, and thereby helped to preserve them -- for use not by the Muslims themselves, but by European Christians.
The Vatican's policy of appeasement of Islam is a complete and total failure. And right under the Vatican's nose, that financial club known as the EU (for all differences of literature, language, and culture, are being subsumed for the sake of the Big Market, the only reason, apparently, for being), Europe is islamizing. Good work, fellows. You've made the world safe for all those true Christians -- you know, like Naim Ateek and Hanan Ashrawi. Unfortunately, all the real non-islamochristians are fleeing the Palestine Authority, fleeing Iraq, getting out to wherever the getting is good. Perhaps they know something about Islam -- what the Lebanese Christians who left from 1880-1935 knew, that the Vatican's "experts" on Islam (all those Arab Christian bishops, working dutifully on behalf of Islam) don't know.
Reread the speeches of the Bishop of Beirut, Moubarac, in 1947. See if just possibly he knew what he was talking about. Some of them can be found in Bat Ye'or's "Islam and Dhimmitude." Eurabia will not be kind to the Vatican. But there is still time to change. Just.
Posted by: Hugh at September 8, 2004 2:05 PM
I thought everyone knew that the Left hates western culture? Why would these comments come as a surprise? The western culture we live in has a bedrock of law based upon the Judeo-Christian ethic. Modern liberal thought wishes to remove these influences from our culture, in order to replace them with so called secular ( i.e. “rational”) constructs. Try as you might, you cannot make headway against rationalism as the primary arbitrator of human existence. The simple fact of “garbage in – garbage out” makes no headway. How about: everything you know is wrong? If it wasn’t – we would not need progress. Almost everything we know about the physical universe has changed in the last twenty years – former experts are ridiculed. How could they (previous experts) be so blind and stupid, right? It is the same in all field of human endeavor, what we know now – is most assuredly wrong. If what we know is wrong, how can you base a rational construct of an ideal civilization on something you know is wrong? There is no underpinning to human rationality. Liberals base their ideas on what they think is right, but they are not God, and so – they do not have the slightest clue what will really happen if we go down their road. No one here walks on water anymore, not for a few thousand years at least.
I matriculated from a Jesuit university with a Masters in Teaching in the mid ninety’s. Multiculturism was really gathering steam in education at that point. I believe I was the only token neocon in the whole program. I mostly paddled upstream trying to point out the flaws of such reasoning, but to no avail. My argument was “ What happens when two cultures are toxic to each other?” was met with the assertion that “we will choose the more humane course at points of conflict “, thereby substituting their own cultural prejudices upon cultural groups. Whatever they choose is OK, the rest have to submit. This is tyranny by another name.
Look, this is too philosophical. We just have to realize that the left is doing what it does best – using the pen to disarm those stupid conservatives again. Just like the Jihadists, they lie, because it gets them what they want. I have seen no evidence to support the idea that the left is using reasoned debate for anything but obscuring the issues. They never come to a point, and are impossible to pin down. They change the subject or attack the people proposing the counter argument in a personal way – which has nothing to do with the issue at hand. I truly believe that the agenda of the elite in the USA is to destroy our country’s culture so that it can then be made over into their vision of utopia. The problem is that their vision is flawed by their reasoning – and will only result in blood and martyrs.
at September 8, 2004 2:18 PM
Blondet, an unwavering antisemite, is precisely as dangerous as were antisemites in the 1930s who deliberately underplayed, or distracted attention from, the threat of the Nazis. And for the same reasons: they had other enemies, and those enemies, "the Jews," were as they saw it likely to be the only victims, or the main victims, of the Nazis. And that is why not only should he not be published in L'Avvenire, but should be exposed on every occasion. For his pathology is no longer a private matter, however unpleasant and disturbing; it is, rather, a menace to all Infidels, for it does the work of the Jihadists for them. One does not have to be a devout Muslim to objectively further the Jihad. Antisemitism will do quite nicely, by putting up every possible phony explanation, and putting out every possible phony conpsiracy theory -- and thereby to further divert attention and sow confusion, when unhurried attention, and clarity, are needed.
Posted by: Hugh at September 8, 2004 2:42 PM
Does anyone other than Blondet recall when Sheik Yassin communicated the alleged "10 year peace deal" and to whom? It's certainly the first I've heard of it. Any utterances I've heard of attributed to him were commitments to driving every last Jew out of Israel as well as the territories.
Posted by: waterdragon52 at September 8, 2004 4:34 PM
A "ten-year peace deal" is exactly that, and no more. It is all that any Muslim can offer any Infidel people or polity, based on the model of Muhammad's "treaty of al-Hudaibiyya" (named after the village outside Mecca where he stopped, in 628 A.D.). A maximum of ten years, and then, once the Muslim side has gained sufficient strength to attack, it attacks. Of course, in case of overwhelming force, the doctrine of "overwhelming necessity" (darura) may be invokved to explain, or justify, the failure to go to war promptly upon the expiration of that ten year period. But there can not be any permanent peace between Muslim and Infidel, for that would imply accepting the notion that some parts of the world can forever remain under Infidel control. And that is absolutely impossible; it simply cannot be accepted by Believers.
Of course, until the OPEC oil money came along, which funds mosques, madrasas, arms and weapons projects, there was little hope, in recent years, of conducting the Jihad. But three things have contributed to restarting the Jihad, hither and thither and yon, and the fire can only be contained, not put out.
Those three things: 1) OPEC oil money. It is only through an accident of geology that the Muslim states, that do not have economies to speak of, and can no longer rely on exploiting the Infidels through the jizyah (few Infidels left, except for the "bumiputra" variant at work in Malaysia), and of course through somehow managing to inveigle foreign aid out of them (Egypt being the most remarkable example of this -- how stupid can Infidels be, really?). 2) the ability through technology to Spread the Word, not only through audiocassette and videocassette, but now through the Internet and satellite television (al-Jazeera). 3) the foolish behavior of Infidel states, with France in the lead, permitting millions of Muslims into the heart of Western Europe -- and still refusing to see what a terrible situation this has created, not least in rendering the lives of the indigenous non-Muslims much more unpleasant, expensive, and dangerous than they would otherwise be. Unless Europeans soon come to recognize this, given the Da'wa among the marginal (and there plenty of psychically marginal and alienated people just waiting for the right vehicle -- and Islam is now the vehicle of choice for such people), and the higher Muslim birthrates, the situation can only worsen. Unless, of course, everything is done not only to cut off such migrants, but to begin to ship them home -- and one perfectly sound reason for doing so is the argument that loyalty to the umma al-islamiyya is the only loyalty a Muslim may have. No loyalty can truly be offered any nation-state, much less an Infidel nation-state. There is no reason for this not to be grounds for stripping people of citizenship and removing them, if they are a danger. And terrorist attacks certainly are sufficiently dangerous. But until this aspect of Islam is completely assimilated, and thoroughly understood, many will react in horror from the mere raising of what is, after all, a perfectly legitimate question.
Posted by: Hugh at September 8, 2004 7:25 PM
i am an ex-catholic of many years.
the key problem with catholicism is that it preaches a work based salvation as opposed to a grace based (free) salvation.
salvation is by faith alone in Messiah alone.
catholicism is about to be swallowed up by islam.
if i was still a catholic i would be disgusted by the pope's kissing of the koran.
Posted by: forrest shalom at September 8, 2004 8:04 PM
It's amazing how far the Church has fallen in moral and temporal authority. Today's Church would be unable to launch a Crusade even if it wanted to considering the acceptance of Islamofacism and the policy of appeasement. It's sickening.
Posted by: epg at September 8, 2004 8:05 PM
I´m very agree with Sandro Magister and I hope that the church changes in this chapter, in former times Pio XII was hard with communism and later John XXIII and Paul VI weren´t so hard but the current Pope helped in the fall of communism, in the islamic chapter it will be very similar.
Greetings
at September 9, 2004 4:27 AM
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