Seems to me that the religion that has been "hijacked" is Christianity. Makes my Roman Catholic Traditionalist skin crawl to hear these leftie creeps wonder oh wonder what Hamas' intentions could be. Yes, let's give them yet another chance to "demonstate their intentions".
Jesus was no limp-wristed, panty waist fool. On earth He called these whited sepulchres what they were -- hence His fate on that Good Friday. But like poor Abdul Rahman, whom I hope is safely hiding under Pope Benedict's papal bed, I must trust in the Resurrection of Sunday.

Posted by: bevc at April 14, 2006 12:36 PM

Wherever Christian lunacy abounds, you can bet the farm that Frank Griswold will be in the middle of it. If Frank isn't groveling before Fidel Castro and mouthing the communist tyrant's agit-prop for any and all who might foolishly listen to his surreal gibberish, he's busily undermining the very organization he was elected to lead. Now we see him eagerly becoming Hamas's shoeshine boy, urging the West to fully fund this psychotic gang of Jew-hating terrorists.

These "leaders" merit whatever scorn, derision and abuse we might heap upon them. They are morally stunted, ethically bankrupt and spirtually null and void.

Posted by: Jeffersonian at April 14, 2006 12:48 PM

Dhimmis like Griswold are the reason I no longer am a practicing Episcopalian. He and his ilk are such "useful idiots."

Posted by: MP at April 14, 2006 1:09 PM

They are surrounded, what do you expect them to say?

Posted by: Ronin at April 14, 2006 1:19 PM

So by the same token, if Bin Laden is elected president by, let's say, Saudi Arabia, we'll have to deal with him? and invite him to the whitehouse and treat him as a dignitary?

Posted by: Anti-PC at April 14, 2006 1:53 PM

These guys may be Left, but they ain't Christian. A full accounting of what takes place in the buildings they claim are churches would show that they are pretty much a bunch of friendly societies for the dilettante enjoyment of random ideas. The WCC lost any credibility it had long ago - it is now known that it was manipulated by the KGB, through the Russian Orthodox Church, throughout the Cold War. Read THE MITROKHIN ARCHIVES. What I pray to God is that the dhimmi element in the European leadership - which indubitably is there and active - will not use these collaborationist cretins' views as an excuse. Unfortunately, the notoriously dhimmi government of Norway has already promised that payments will go on.

Posted by: Paolo at April 14, 2006 2:07 PM

Check this out!

"An article by one of the Jesuits of “La Civiltà Cattolica” makes an extremely critical analysis of Islam, one very similar to that of the famous author – whose work Benedict XVI reads with admiration" (referring to Oriana Fallaci)

http://www.chiesa.espressonline.it/dettaglio.jsp?id=48741&eng=y

Excerpts:

"This pan-Islamist program might make some smirk, just as many smirked at Hitler before his political ascent. But this is a real program, which is being carried out according to a clear plan, and although it is working slowly, it is producing results." ...

"There is, therefore, an objective convergence between the trend in Islamic theology and the ideology of the terrorists. Fortunately, not all the imams have the same zeal for jihad, but the problem is that there is no moderate Islam, or rather there does not exist an Islamic theology that has integrated modernity. This is why it would not only be prudent, as cardinal Giacomo Biffi has suggested, to discourage Islamic immigration in Europe, it would be masochistic to encourage it without demanding reciprocation in terms of integration."

"Unfortunately, open and liberal society becomes paralyzed when it encounters a closed and incompatible civilization. The problem of tolerance was worked out within Christian civilization in order to defuse its internal conflicts. But its introduction made sense, because tolerance was a value recognized by all parties, in that it was able to find a theological foundation. But in Islam, there is no foundation for tolerance in the broad sense that characterizes our secular societies."

As they say, read it all.

Posted by: Caroline at April 14, 2006 4:10 PM

This is nothing to do with showing "respect for the democratic mandate given" to Hamas. Not to respect this mandate would be to refuse to speak to them: that is not what the EU & US are doing. Telling Hamas (and the citizens of Palestine)that handouts cease until they civilize is simply holding Hamas (and their voters) responsible for their own behaviour.

Posted by: Obelisk1 at April 14, 2006 5:55 PM

"Jesus was no limp-wristed, panty waist fool." - bevc

Indeed He was not. And the one thing that everyone should be remembering this Easter is that He was essentially crucified for blasphemy.

John 18 (King James Version)

19The high priest then asked Jesus of his disciples, and of his doctrine.

20Jesus answered him, I spake openly to the world; I ever taught in the synagogue, and in the temple, whither the Jews always resort; and in secret have I said nothing.

21Why askest thou me? ask them which heard me, what I have said unto them: behold, they know what I said.

22And when he had thus spoken, one of the officers which stood by struck Jesus with the palm of his hand, saying, Answerest thou the high priest so?

23Jesus answered him, If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil: but if well, why smitest thou me? ...

33Then Pilate entered into the judgment hall again, and called Jesus, and said unto him, Art thou the King of the Jews?

34Jesus answered him, Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee of me?

35Pilate answered, Am I a Jew? Thine own nation and the chief priests have delivered thee unto me: what hast thou done?

36Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence.

37Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.

38Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no fault at all.

Posted by: Rebecca JW at April 14, 2006 6:26 PM

If any US citizen does deal with Hamas, they should be dealt with under the terms of the Patriot act, and tried as terrorists. Just as the US wouldn't tolderate anybody colluding with al Qaeda, they should be about as tolerant of anyone working with Hamas.

And anyone in the State Department who violates this should be tried for treason.

Posted by: Infidel Pride at April 14, 2006 8:19 PM

Rebecca jw- Thanks a lot for those valuable words of a super human being. Any ordinary 'Prophet' cannot utter such a marvelous,out of this world answers to those prickly,sarcastic questions .Though a Christian for such a long time,I missed somany gems in the Holy bible like this,Like me,millions of Name-sake Christians never bother to go through this devine revelations called the Holy Bible. The Psams,Proverbs and other chapters-they are like soothing balm to your aching heart if you read them. So many other books borrow the name 'holy',and by one reading,we can find out how 'unholy' they are.Being unable to produce a book as perfect as the Holy Bible,they just started telling the lie that the Bible is corrupted.
Such a Holy book is ragarded as a corrupted book,and Palestinian Christians are living a life of thrid class residents,fearing every moment for their very lives.Why should the Christian leaders here recommend those unworthy Jiziya payments to these Hamas ? They dont have any idea of how Christians are treated there. How I wish they get the real facts from reading J/W and D/W.

Posted by: sofia at April 14, 2006 9:33 PM

Sounds like "Please feed them so they don't come to feed on us..."

Posted by: sheik yer'mami at April 14, 2006 9:51 PM

well Hammas can go begging to iranian and saudi' big pockets! they dont need money from the west.. the tax payers of the west REVOLT NOW!

Posted by: Lulu at April 14, 2006 10:17 PM

Rebecca - 2 months ago I would have been befuddled at your post but a month ago I started attending Catholic mass again after 25 years and so recognize the excerpt you posted from the "Passion" (because I attended mass tonight).

While sitting there it occurred to me that as Christianity has faded from Europe so may have the sense of atonement for one's sins, which it occurred to me might partially explain Europe's (and the west's in general) affliction with a sense of guilt so extreme that apparently only suicide can alleviate it. Of course it is a truism by now that Europe has abandoned Christianity and is essentially committing suicide by failing to resist the Islamic invasion. But why SPECIFICALLY abandoning Christianity should coincide with passive dhimmitude in the face of the Islamic invasion isn't terribly clear. What if the lynchpin explaining the coincidence between these two events in fact centers around GUILT? It's pretty obvious that the west does in fact suffer from a pathological guilt complex. But now I'm wondering if that isn't a direct consequence of abandoning Christianity, which is essentially predicated on the idea that God sent his only son to die for our sins. Having abandoned Christianity, we're left with the sins but no way of atoning for them. So the only answer is suicide, to deal with the burden of the guilt.

Just a thought on this easter weekend...

Posted by: Caroline at April 14, 2006 10:24 PM

I should have said left with the "sense" of sins, rather than sins per se for the reason that the doctrine of original sin is, as far as I know, a Christian concept. Maybe that's a particularly hard thing to shake (we are sinners!), harder to shake than the belief in Jesus' divinity as a way of atoning for those sins. That would be a necessary assumption to explain the guilt. In other words, for many westerners, the belief in sin has remained intact even as the belief in divine salvation has eroded, leaving only a deep sense of guilt. Muslims, on the other hand, don't have a doctrine of original sin so they don't appear to be particularly afflicted by any sense of guilt. The only guilt they appear to feel is in terms of abandoning the ummah. But as long as they cling to the ummah, they appear to be pretty immune to any sense of guilt about the many heinous crimes committed in its name.

(Sorry for wandering off into this. I bring it up only in the context of trying to understand the sources of the pathological guilt that is apparently driving much of the suicide of the west.)

Posted by: Caroline at April 14, 2006 10:55 PM

Oh boy. I see that the link I posted above about the Jesuit critique of Islam was already posted several threads ago. See what happens when you miss a day or two at JW due to filling out tax forms? Oh well. May my big booboo be an inspiration to all the shy lurkers here who really and truly WANT to post something but are afraid of saying or doing something stupid :-)

Posted by: Caroline at April 14, 2006 11:25 PM

Speaking as a non-Christian infidel, I recall from European history that I read that there was a time when the Papacy was oppressive (Spanish Inquisition, French subjugation of Hugenots, et al), and the Christian dissenters against it (Martin Luthor, William of Orange, et al) were the enlightened ones trying to come up with a version of Christianity that wasn't as hostile. These days, the wheel seems to have come full circle - the Protestant groups, like the Church of England, the Episcopal church, etc, seem to be the ones advocating a meaningless dialogue with Islam (without any evidence that the clerics they are working with have any major following), while Catholic sects, like the Jesuits, are the ones making any sense.

I like all the churches, but is it too much to expect enlightenment from all churches at the same time?

P.S. Caroline, skip the taxes - your & my portion of it is just Jizia to the good folks in Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, etc. Do what el Rushbo suggested - let 50m of us who owe taxes simply refuse to file them, and let the IRS figure out how to go after 50m. After all, that's the rationale for not acting against those 11m already here illegally.

Posted by: Infidel Pride at April 15, 2006 1:27 AM

I have no problem with the Christian Left taking this stand. If Jimmy Carter and other leftists want to support Hamas and the "Palestinians" then they can go for it.It's their right to support whoever they want. However, they should support the "Palestinians" with their own "private" money and leave the US government and US taxpayer out of it.

Posted by: Roxane at April 15, 2006 2:20 AM

Infidel Pride - what you were taught as history was nothing of the sort, just the stale leftovers of ancient Protestant propaganda. I am always left astonished by people who can, in this day and age, manage to convince themselves that Luther had anything to do with liberty - his appeal was never to citizens, always to rulers, and in his "Address to the Christian nobility of the German nation" (i.e. to the hundreds of greedy, penniless little lordlings who afflicted Germany until Napoleonic times) his appeal to them was essentially to loot the Catholic Church. The whole so-called Reformation was driven largely by greed; in England, Scotland and Sweden only by greed - Henry VIII, Gustavus Vasa and the brutes who murdered Cardinal Beaton in St.Andrews had no quarrel with the Church except that it was rich and independent. And far from doing anything for liberty, they consistently served to tighten the screws of royal or lordly control of their own little states. All representative bodies, which pre-existed Lutheranism, having grown in the Catholic Middle Ages, were either suppressed or castrated - the dealings of Henry VIII with his own so-called Parliament remind one of nothing so much as those of Stalin with his followers. And Luther himself was incapable of the slightest toleration of independent thought; his reply to some people who could not find any reason for his "reading" of a certain Biblical passage has gone down in legend - "tell them that Dr.Martin Luther will have it so!" And this is only skimming the surface of what really happened. The trouble is that the successors of these men gained control of the universities in Germany, Holland and Britain, and from thence dominated historical writing for centuries. Now professional historians, by and at large, know the facts, but textbooks such as you were fed - which are always the last refuge of every stale past consensus - still, alas, see fit to connect the so-called Reformation with progress or liberty.

Posted by: Paolo at April 15, 2006 5:18 AM

Caroline, I agree. Once the concept of sin was banished, it took with it the concept of redemption as well. This has been an unmitigated disaster, in my opinion.

Posted by: Rebecca JW at April 15, 2006 10:29 AM

the notion of "an unfolding human tragedy" should be questioned. The UNRWA is still bringing food into these people. So they're getting food from that source and others. Where's the human tragedy?
The only way to make sure that the money goes to feed the population is to give food out directly, and not give money to the Hamas which will use it for terrorist purposes. What's this argument that because Hamas is the people's choice, they deserve to get big money from abroad? Didn't Hitler win an election in 1933 or 34?

Posted by: Eliyahu at April 15, 2006 5:58 PM

Paolo

Your points are well taken, but I wasn't taught anything (European history prior to WWI wasn't taught in school in India), but what I did know was what I had read in the various encyclopedias as well as various other books, none of them exhaustive, and all of them British publications, in case you're interested. I don't pretend to know much about the make-up of Church politics, be it Rome, Canterbury or anywhere else.

However, what I do know is that Spain, at around that time, had the inquisition, and the various catholic empires, be it the Habsburgs, the Bourbons of France had this policy of persecuting religious dissidents. From a geo-political, rather than a religious point, had there been no political movement, the Catholic Church would probably have evolved into an equivalent of Islam; imagine if a Catholic Britain went on to do in its vastly larger empire what Spain and Portugal did in Central and South America - enforce Catholicism down people's throats. So while the motivations behind Henry VIII may well have been his own ego - he couldn't stand a pope that was higher than him in stature, as well as his penchant for replacement wives - his breaking from the Catholic church turned out to be good for England, but even better for the inhabitants of the British empire.

I do think that reformation in the Catholic church that has happened since WWII has been for the better, and I don't have any animousity towards it. However, looking at it historically, while it may well have been quite innocuous, the fact that 4 major empires in Europe (France, Austria, Spain and Portugal) and a number of smaller ones were busy waging holy wars against their apostates in the name of the Church, does contribute to at least my having a less than charitable outlook towards it.

I'll concede that some of it may well have been bias, since the only islands of Protestantism in Europe have always been Britain, the Nordic countries (plus Estonia and Latvia), Germany (Prussia and some German states), Switzerland and Holland. Other than that, with the exception of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, Macedonia and Montenegro, it's pretty much all Catholic (if in name only)

Posted by: Infidel Pride at April 15, 2006 8:01 PM

Infidel Pride and Paolo- Catholics and Protestants -though at each other's throat,they have one common interest-The worship of Lord Jesus as the true son of God. All the other things are pure politics. More over, this is not the time to point our swords at eachother,when the real enemy is right in front of us both,to destroy us,and to establish his kingdom. He dont bother as to whether you are a catholic or Protestant. The more dividsions,and fights you have, the more happy he will be. This is the time for ALL the Christians to be united. Will the Priests and Pastors realise this,and come forward to do this?The more divided we are,it is easy for the enemy to swollow us .Will the Vatican realise this?

Posted by: sofia at April 15, 2006 9:31 PM

Infidel Pride - you read all that in old British-authored encyclopedias, hey? And, poor boy, you took them at their word, too. You still do not know propaganda even when it does bite you on the leg. Please pay attention to what I said about the British universities being taken over by the successors of those who looted the Church and mass-murdered Catholics. The trash you speak about the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru shows that you were told a pack of lies which you willingly swallowed. The natives were not forced to become Christian, although a complicated series of misunderstandings led to many of them subscribing to the conquerors's faith (which was infinitely superior to the murderous religion of the Aztecs, at least). Any persecutions that took place were against people whom the authorities regarded as already converted. What seems to have done more than anything to solidify the Catholic presence in Spanish America was the catastrophic pestilence caused by the arrival of European diseases against which the natives had no immunity; the Church, as it always does, served as a place for rescue and social cohesion, while native cults were devastated. As for the Inquisition, it was largely a reaction to Protestant assault - and far less savage than its Protestant equivalent. The Protestants deliberately exaggerated its violence in order to be justified in repressing the Catholics in the countries they had seized. Person for person, no country butchered more unbelievers than Calvinist Scotland. As for the Catholic Church "developing" into something like Islam, are you even aware that the Church's structures today are, with very few exceptions, the same as they were in the fifteenth century? You are talking nonsense so appalling that even a lot of modern Protestants would be ashamed of it. Meanwhile, have a little read of this classic of the English language: http://www.exclassics.com/protref/protcont.htm, and learn a thing or two. It contains rather less lies than the trash you have been exposed to so far.

Posted by: Paolo at April 16, 2006 6:22 AM

During the Holocaust, the National Council of Churches was called the Federal Council of Churches. That Council as a body and most of the mainstream churches did little to help the Jews being murdered in the Holocaust. There were notable exceptions among the mainstream churches and certain individual churchmen connected to them, but the Federal Council was not helpful.

See Franklin Littell's writings and a book by Hertzel[spelling?] Fishman.
So I am not impressed by Bishop Griswold.

Posted by: Eliyahu at April 17, 2006 10:47 AM