Islamic Hatred and Persecution of Christians Is Imported into European Refugee Centres

Christians persecuted by Muslims in Islamic countries who think they are escaping their fate by fleeing discover that the same treatment awaits them in Europe, which after all has simply imported Islam's barbarism by opening its doors to large numbers of Muslims.

The German daily newspaper Die Welt reports on the terrible exclusion and violence suffered by Christian refugees at the hands of Muslims in Germany's asylum centres.

Germany is the second country in the world, after the US, for number of asylum applications received, with 13% of them last year, and the first in Europe, with 23.2% last year.

The report starts with some figures:

In Iraq, there are currently 30,000 Christians fleeing. But these are only those who are currently in the main news. Worldwide suffering estimate by humanitarian organisation Open Doors is around 100 million Christians under persecution. The organisation World Watch List 2014 has particularly strict Islamic countries - such as Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan - among the ten states with the worst persecution of Christians.

An example of the discrimination suffered in German reception centres for refugees is what happened to Leyla S, an Iranian whose Christian faith compelled her to flee to Germany about three years ago with her husband and daughter.

The woman related to Die Welt her experience in the reception centre in Hessen, where about 20 of the approximately 100 other refugees cursed the family from the beginning again and again as “infidels” and “dirty dogs” and banned Leyla from the two kitchens.

"For two years", she says, "we always had to cook in our room. Once I tried to go in the communal kitchen, but the Muslim refugees from Afghanistan housed in the centre immediately chased us away, claiming that our presence rendered the food impure.

"Why then are these people coming to Germany, home to millions of Christians, who for them are unclean, although not their money?"

Die Welt also exposes the wall of silence of the authorities. In the refugee camps of Baden-Württemberg, North Rhine-Westphalia and Hesse, those responsible say that there are no cases of discrimination, while in reality they happen under the roofs of the refugee camps. The incidents take place in silence, hidden from the police.

Max Klingberg of the International Society for Human Rights (ISHR), an organisation that for 14 years has been working with refugees, explains that attacks against Christians are far from isolatd cases and that all Christians and Christian converts arriving in Germany are victims of harassment, threats, pressure.

And psychological violence sometimes leads to physical violence. In the case of an Iranian Christian convert, a woman, Muslim men urinated on her clothes and other personal effects to humiliate her.

The situation is so bad that in Bavaria, in order to stop the violence, separate accommodation for different religious groups of refugees has been requested.

Since the moment of his arrival at the reception centre Ramin, an Afghan refugee who converted to Christianity, has been threatened by three Muslim countrymen with whom he shared the room. He recounts: "They said that I belonged to the Dar al-Harb [house of war, as Islam calls all the part of the world which is non-Muslim] and not the Dar al-Islam [house of Islam]." For the three Afghan Muslims, Ramin deserved death as an infidel and apostate.

The man tells of various attacks, including one that led very close to his death: "We were in the room when my three roommates beat me in the kidneys with the remote. When I managed to wriggle out, one of them went into the kitchen and took a knife. I then attempted to flee in another room, but another had blocked the door with his foot. At that moment I was shaking, I turned to Jesus asking Him to save me. Then one of the men pointed the knife to my chest, saying that it would be impossible for me to stay alive for much longer. Fortunately, the other two reminded the man that he had to suspend for the time being his revenge, since he had yet to complete his application for political asylum."

In line with the constant denial of Muslim supremacism and Islamic persecution of Christians, authorities more often than not don't deal with these cases of hatred. An Iranian 19-year-old Christian tried to escape his Mohammedan tormentors by asking for a transfer to another city. The local council refused the application on the grounds that the dispute had nothing to do with religion but was purely personal.

Peter Ulrich, director of a free school for asylum seekers managed by the Evangelical Free Church, says that Christians are much closer to European culture and far better capable of integration than Muslims. No surprise here.

"In my work as a teacher of German language" he adds, "I have observed that many refugees from Syria, Iraq and Iran seek asylum precisely because of religious persecution. They are disappointed and irritated by how often their problem is not taken seriously by the authorities of our country, from which they instead expect understanding and support."

The solution is pretty simple not just for Germany but for all of Europe: give asylum to Christians, deny it to Muslims.

Either Europe Will Become Christian Again or It Will Become Muslim

Only a few days ago one of the best known figures of the Italian counter-jihad, Egyptian-born journalist Magdi Cristiano Allam, a former Muslim who converted to Catholicism, announced that, although he remains Christian, he has left the Catholic Church.

In his column in the daily paper Il Giornale he gave several reasons, prominent among which is "Because this Church is weak vis-à-vis Islam":

What more than anything else drove me away from the Church is its religious relativism, in particular the legitimization of Islam as true religion, of Allah as true God, of Muhammad as true prophet, of the Koran as sacred text, of mosques as places of worship. It is genuine suicidal madness that John Paul II went so far as to kiss the Koran on May 14, 1999, Benedict XVI put his hand on the Koran praying toward Mecca in the Blue Mosque in Istanbul on November 30, 2006, while Francis I began by extolling the Muslims "who worship one, living and merciful God." On the contrary I am convinced that, while respecting Muslims who, like all people, possess the inalienable rights to life, dignity and freedom, Islam is an inherently violent ideology, as it has historically been conflictual inside and belligerent outside. Even more I am increasingly convinced that Europe will eventually be submitted to Islam, as has already happened from the seventh century to the other two sides of the Mediterranean, if it does not have the vision and the courage to denounce the incompatibility of Islam with our civilization and the fundamental rights of the person, if it does not ban the Koran for apology of hatred, violence and death against non-Muslims, if it does not condemn Sharia law as a crime against humanity in that it preaches and practices the violation of the sanctity of everyone's life, the equal dignity of men and women, and religious freedom, and finally if it does not block the spread of mosques.

This news has attracted national and worldwide media attention, just as the announcement of his conversion from Islam to Catholicism on 22 March, Easter Eve night, 2008 did, when he "received Baptism, Confirmation and Communion in St Peter's Basilica from Pope Benedict XVI".

Allam's position has several Italian (and international) counter-jihad blogs sympathetic to it, carrying articles with titles like Islamic Fundamentalism and the Impossible Dialogue.

But his new decision to leave the Church has also attracted many criticisms in Italy. Journalist Filippo Savarese: "I do not know what could be worse than repudiating one's conversion for (alleged) issues which are in fact mostly 'political'." Politician Maurizio Lupi who was Allam's godfather: "I am sorry, but Christianity taught me to love the freedom of every man and to respect it even when I do not agree with his choices. In this case not even with the reasons (we are Christian for love of truth not for aversion to Islam), but I notice that, unfortunately, this is the attitude of many who say they accept Christ but not the Church".

Gabriele Satolli, candidate to the 2013 Italian general election for the party founded by Allam, Io Amo l'Italia, left the party, calling Magdi's motivations "raving, and therefore impossible to agree with".

Still, although we may dispute whether they are a good enough reason to leave the Catholic Church, Allam's arguments are grounded in reality.

"Having a dialogue" is by definition a reciprocal verb, as "being a sibling". They mean something only if what is true of the subject of the verb is also true of the object, be it a quality, relationship or activity. When a call for dialogue is not met with a response, it is a monologue.

As Raymond Ibrahim points out, the Muslim countries with some of the worst records on their treatment of Christians are also the most interested in interfaith initiatives in the West:

Few things offer surreal experiences as when Islam and the West interact—when 7th century primordialism encounters 21st century relativism. Consider the issue of “interfaith dialogue.” In principle, it is a decent thing: Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others trying to reach a common ground and professing mutual respect. But what does one make of the gross contradictions that emerge when a human-rights violating nation calls for “dialogue,” even as it enforces religious intolerance on its own turf?

Enter Saudi Arabia. Birthplace of Islam, the Arabian kingdom is also the one Muslim nation that regularly sponsors interfaith initiatives in the West—even as its official policy back home is to demonize and persecute the very faiths it claims to want to have an interfaith dialogue with.

There are different positions within the Catholic Church with regard to Islam, with a minority of voices, some of which powerful, dissenting from the official stance.

The two positions at the extreme opposites are exemplified by the late Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, who was Archbishop of Milan, and Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, Archbishop of Bologna.

The former is credited with having anticipated many bishops of Italy and Europe in stretching out an acquiescent hand towards Islam. As early as 1990 he dedicated his Saint Ambrose homely to "We and Islam". In 2001, after 9/11, his Saint Ambrose homely had a title that substituted a clear stance with a list of concepts: “Terrorism, retaliation, self-defence, war and peace”.

On Islam, the most difficult issue of the decade, as well as on many other questions, Martini's position has always been the search for a grey area, a balancing act: “We have to prevent the dramatic scenario of a clash of civilizations”, qualified by “We must not delegitimize the right to self-defence from terrorism and the need to extinguish its hotbeds”.

It is interesting how, replicating the ideological and political alliance between Islam and the Left in the Western lay world, Cardinal Martini, considered a progressive and constantly praised by the mainstream liberal media, was after his death eulogized by the leftist newspaper La Repubblica for having approved of policies ranging “from dialogue with Islam to yes to condoms” and because “he had never condemned euthanasia”.

Writer and blogger Antonio Socci thus sums him up rather unfavorably:

"Everything imposed by ideological fashions found Martini open to dialogue and to all possibilities: 'there is nothing wrong in two people, even homosexuals, having a stable relationship and in the State favouring them', he had said."

At the other end of the spectrum is Cardinal Giacomo Biffi. As early as 30 September 2000, before 9/11, when not many people in the West worried about Islam at all, he delivered a speech at the Fondazione Migrantes seminar, "On Immigration". The following is what he said on Muslim immigration to Italy and Islam:

The case of Muslims

If we do not want to evade or censor realistic attention, it is apparent that the case of Muslims should be treated separately. And it is hoped that political leaders will not be afraid to face it with open eyes and without illusions.

Muslims - in their vast majority and with few exceptions - come here determined to remain alien to our "humanity", individual and social, in its most essential, valuable, "secularly" non-renounceable aspects: more or less openly, they come here determined to remain substantially "different", waiting for us all to become substantially like them.

They have different eating habits (not in itself a big problem), a different holiday in the week, a family law incompatible with our own, a concept of women very far removed from ours (going as far as practicing polygamy). Above all, they have a strictly fundamentalist view of public life, so much so that the perfect identification between religion and politics is part of their unquestionable and inalienable faith, although they prudently wait to become predominant before imposing it. It is therefore not the Church, but modern Western states that must think carefully about this.

I shall say more than that: if our state seriously believes in the importance of civil liberties (including religious) and democratic principles, it should work to make them more widespread, accepted and practiced at all latitudes. A small tool to achieve this goal is the request of being given a not purely verbal "reciprocity" by the immigrants' countries of origin.

In this respect the Italian Bishops Conference wrote in 1993: "In many Islamic countries it is almost impossible to adhere to and freely practice Christianity. There are no places of worship, non-Islamic religious events are not allowed, not even minimal ecclesiastical organizations exist. That raises the difficult problem of reciprocity. And this is a problem that affects not only the Church, but also civil society and politics, the world of culture and even international relations. For his part, the Pope is tireless in asking everyone to respect the fundamental right to religious freedom" (n. 34). But - we say - asking does not help very much, even if the pope cannot do any more.

Although it may seem alien to our mentality and even paradoxical, the only effective and not unrealistic way to promote the "principle of reciprocity" by a really "secular" state, truly interested in propagating human freedoms, would be to allow for Muslims in Italy only the authorization of institutions which Muslim countries actually allow for others.
…

Conclusion

In an interview ten years ago, I was asked with great candor and with enviable optimism: "Are You among those who believe that Europe will either be Christian or cease to exist?". I think my answer then may well serve to conclude my speech today.

I think - I said - that either Europe will become Christian again or it will become Muslim. What I see without future is the "culture of nothing", of freedom without limits and without content, of skepticism boasted as intellectual achievement, which seems to be the attitude largely dominant among European peoples, all more or less rich of means and poor of truths. This "culture of nothingness" (sustained by hedonism and libertarian insatiability) will not be able to withstand the ideological onslaught of Islam, which will not be missing: only the rediscovery of the Christian event as the only salvation for man - and therefore only a strong resurrection of the ancient soul of Europe - will offer a different outcome to this inevitable confrontation.

Unfortunately, neither "secularists" nor "Catholics" seem to have so far realized the tragedy that is looming. "Secularists", opposing the Church in every way, do not realize that they are fighting against the strongest inspiration and the most effective defence of Western civilization and its values of rationality and freedom: they might realize it too late. "Catholics", letting the knowledge of the truth they possessed fade in themselves and replacing apostolic anxiety with pure and simple dialogue at all costs, unconsciously pave the way (humanly speaking) to their own extinction. The only hope is that the seriousness of the situation may at some point lead to an effective awakening both of reason and of the ancient faith.

It is our hope, our commitment, our prayer.

Written in 2000. All predictions confirmed. Truer, if possible, now than it was even then.

A Soviet Spring Spells Christian Persecution

There has been an increase in the persecution of Christians in the former Soviet Union, especially the central Asian republics where it looks like the collapse of the Soviet dictatorship, in a pattern maybe similar to that of the “Arab Spring”, has “liberated” the radical elements within the Muslim communities.

The above video is an interview with Sergey Rakhuba, President of Russian Ministries, an expert on mission issues related to Russia and the former Soviet Union.

It's been a long road since the revolution that swept away atheistic communism in Eastern Europe 20 years ago. The wave of religious freedom that swept the region now seems to be receding.

Citizens of the former Soviet Union are facing growing restrictions on their religious freedom. On Wednesday a panel of experts in Washington reported that governments are closing more churches, fining and arresting their religious leaders, and destroying church literature.

"Twenty years ago when the Soviet Union fell apart, collapsed, when the Berlin Wall fell, everybody was sort of excited about all the future possibilities. Twenty years later we are again talking about freedom. What happened?" Victor Ham, vice president for the Billy Graham Evangelical Association Crusades, said.

The situation might not be a return to the Soviet era, but the signs spell trouble.

"Churches are being torched, crosses are being burned. There's a lot of anti-Semitism, a lot of negative things appearing in the press about different organizations. So there's some reason for concern," Lauren Homer, with Homer International Law Group, said.

The atmosphere is thick with intolerance in these countries. Individual pastors are reluctant to speak out against abuses and restrictions.

"He's not so interested in going to the government and speaking to the ministers and so on because really it is a question of security most of all," Matti Sirvio, with Greater Grace Protestant Church, said. "Will it be used against them? Will their persecution become even worse."

In Uzbekistan, Sirvio encouraged church members to connect to the outside world as their best defense.

"I think people should all learn how to use the Internet, they should all learn the English language," he said. "And these two things will connect them in the future with the rest of the world and especially with the Body of Christ around the world."

Russian Ministries hopes that by shining a spotlight on these issues, international politicians and human rights proponents will do more to defend religious minorities in the former Soviet Union.

O'Neill Got It Wrong: Gay Activists Want More than Liberation, not Less

Brendan O'Neill totally missed the point.

He compares the gay radicals of the past who did not want marriage because they saw it as a form of oppression to the LGBT movement of today who demand same-sex wedlock, and concludes that the latter have become bourgeois and integrated, renouncing the radical ideology of the beginning, when Stonewall was young and fighting for liberation from matrimony, not enslavement by it.

The point he misses is that the homosexual activists have become more radical, not less.

What they demand from society now is a total redefinition of marriage, something that goes to the core of this institution and pierces it through the heart. They want to shape society in their own image, not just more or less politely ask society to leave them alone.

What was a negative request, "Do not interfere with our personal lives", has become a much stronger, positive demand, "Change the meaning of marriage to fit our bill".

This can be seen especially clearly when you consider the LGBT movement's request for same-sex marriage in church, when it is obvious that the people who intend to take advantage of this "right" do not believe in the precepts of the Churches whom they would require to celebrate their wedding.

It is transparent that church gay marriage is a travesty of Christian marriage, as I have written elsewhere:

We must not forget that, for believers, marriage is a sacrament; and for non-believers, what's the point of wanting to marry in church other than mocking the Church?

There was a male gay couple interviewed on the [British] TV. One of the two, in late middle age, with all the seriousness in the world said: "I want to marry in a church because this is the way I was brought up". One should ask: were you also brought up to have a homosexual relationship? And, if you can accept to depart from your background and education in one aspect, what's wrong with doing the same for the other aspect as well?

If as a gay couple you got married in church, it would not mean anything, because the creed and doctrine behind the sacrament of marriage does not include unions of this kind. It would be an empty ritual, a gesture without significance behind it.

It would confuse form with substance, appearance with reality. It would be a travesty.

It would be like thinking that a man wearing a wig and fake breasts is a woman. He may look like a woman, but he is not; similarly, a church gay marriage may look like a Christian marriage, but it is not.

Homosexual wedding in church is an insult to the people who believe, it's like an enormous joke at the expenses of Christian clergy and faithful alike. Why does a homosexual really want to marry in church knowing that, given the Christian teachings on homosexuality, that "marriage" is meaningless, if not to give Christianity the finger?

Why should gay activists want to make a mockery of other people's genuine Christian beliefs? And why should the British government want to give in to this offensive request, as it has already done to all other gay requests without exception [bar abolishing the minimum age of consent]?

Church Gay Marriage Is a Travesty of Christian Marriage

Today, during a conversation I was just about to use the word "family", when I realized that I don't know what "family" means anymore.

This is a semantic, and therefore logic, problem.

In logic, the 19th-20th century German philosopher Gottlob Frege distinguished between the two characteristics, the two dimensions of a concept: its meaning or significance and its sense.

The meaning or denotation is the class of objects to which the concept refers, which is comprised by it. You could see it as its extension.

The sense or connotation are the concept's descriptive qualities, the information it conveys.

If you say "cat", the meaning of the concept is all cats; its sense is a domestic, feline, carnivorous creature who hunts, purrs, has whiskers and ears of a certain shape etc. The concept expresses both.

There is an inverse proportion between the two: the larger the meaning the narrower the sense and vice versa.

A concept like "universe", just because it has a vast meaning of an all-including class of objects, has practically no sense, in that it has very little descriptive, or delimitative, power.

Defining a word means exactly that, giving it borders that restrict it.

If you say "everything", the meaning is infinite and therefore the sense is tiny. If you ask someone what he did today, and he answers "everything", he conveys little or no information.

So, about "family".

In this case, the reason why we don't know what it means any more is obvious. A couple of homosexuals, married or not, with or without children, is now considered a family. Even 3 people of either or any sex who had a ménage à trois and lived together would be considered a family. An unmarried (heterosexual, because we have to specify these days) couple each of whose members was married to someone else with whom they had children (living with either parent) is considered a family. The list is endless.

And again, by extending the meaning of "marriage" to the point of making it burst, we have enormously shrunk its sense, which has become very vague now. Hence, I could not use the word today when I needed it.

Many things have caused this unwelcome development. I want to focus here on the homosexuals' ever extending demands for their "rights".

It's OK for them to do what they want, as for everybody else, as long as it does not harm others.

Here we have got to the point when the gays' demands are harming others.

First, the direct victims are the children, either adopted or born through some artificial or concocted means (IVF or sex of one of the couple with a third person), that a homosexual couple can now legally call their own.

Freud was probably the first to say that a mother and a father have, among other things, the crucial task of being a model through example, showing their children what the different sexual roles are. Many things that Freud thought were wrong, but this is still considered true, this is what most psychologists think today.

Nobody denies - yet - that there are two sexes, and that they have important differences.

The children of these homosexual couples, having two mothers and no father or two fathers and no mother, will very likely grow up confused about sexual roles and differences, and this is not going to bring happiness and psychological balance but the opposite. They will probably become homosexuals in a disproportionate number of cases, compared to the others.

When in the next few years or decades the consequences on these children will become apparent (and in particular when it will be clear that they are not happy people), that may signal the start of a backlash against all this giving homosexuals whatever they ask for.

The other victim is indirect, and is society. It's all of us. The family is a vital part and foundation of society, and diluting its sense and value - obviously not just through "gay marriage" and all that, but also through many other unsavoury developments among heterosexuals - has already produced terrible outcomes (the underclass, with rise in: crime, welfare dependency, teenage pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, and others) and is going to continue doing so.

Homosexuals are not discriminated against any more. Like blacks, they are not victims anymore.

Wake up. The people discriminated against have changed, the oppressors have become oppressed.

Now, when there is a civil dispute between gay activists and people who have different views, the former will always trump the latter, as Peter and Hazelmary Bull, the Christian husband and wife owners of a B&B in Cornwall who were successfully sued by a male homosexual couple for offering them two rooms rather than one, experienced first hand.

The excuse most commonly given for this perversion of the law is to say: the B&B is a public business. There's a lot to answer to that. First of all, the couple did not send the homosexuals away, they just offered them two separate rooms. No law can oblige a hotel or B&B to offer one particular room instead of another; even reserved rooms can sometimes be replaced by others.

Second, pub landlords are entitled to throw out or refuse entry to whomever they like, they don't even need to justify that with motives. It's often said that the reason for this is because they have to maintain order in the pub, but in reality they have the power to use that right at their discretion, they may simply throw out whomever they dislike. So, why should people who run a hospitality business not have the same right? Night clubs refuse admission to people for simply wearing the wrong clothes and nobody talks about human rights violations, which would be ridiculous.

Third, I think that the law of contract should enable everybody to freely enter the contract or not. A business, public or not, should have the right to refuse to serve whomever they like. In fact, they do. Banks, for instance, may refuse to open an account without any valid reason.

I believe that the "public business" motivation is just an excuse, and the real reason is just that the gay agenda must take precedence over everything else.

If anybody has any doubt, just look at the new law about to be introduced in the UK that allows gay marriages to be celebrated in church, which Prime Minister David Cameron has yesterday backed.

Gays say that they just want to be like everybody else, but the fact is that they are not like everybody else. If you, either by choice or not (I don't think that anybody knows really) live a homosexual life, go the full length, accept your diversity and live according to it.

What's the sense of living as a gay but at the same time imitating heterosexuals and doing things which are definitely not gay, are the essence of not being gay, like having children?

In the case of the church gay marriage law, the Church of England rightly protested that clergy should not be forced to perform ceremonies that go against their beliefs and doctrines. The government's reply that they will not be forced was ridiculous, because, as the Church answered, they will be forced not by the law itself, not by democratically elected representatives of the people, but by unelected, unaccountable, undemocratic judges of European or international courts in the hands of whom the certain legal actions initiated by homosexuals will eventually end.

We must not forget that, for believers, marriage is a sacrament; and for non-believers, what's the point of wanting to marry in church other than mocking the Church?

There was a male gay couple interviewed on the TV. One of the two, in late middle age, with all the seriousness in the world said: "I want to marry in a church because this is the way I was brought up". One should ask: were you also brought up to have a homosexual relationship? And, if you can accept to depart from your background and education in one aspect, what's wrong with doing the same for the other aspect as well?

If as a gay couple you got married in church, it would not mean anything, because the creed and doctrine behind the sacrament of marriage does not include unions of this kind. It would be an empty ritual, a gesture without significance behind it.

It would confuse form with substance, appearance with reality. It would be a travesty.

It would be like thinking that a man wearing a wig and fake breasts is a woman. He may look like a woman, but he is not; similarly, a church gay marriage may look like a Christian marriage, but it is not.

Homosexual wedding in church is an insult to the people who believe, it's like an enormous joke at the expenses of Christian clergy and faithful alike. Why does a homosexual really want to marry in church knowing that, given the Christian teachings on homosexuality, that "marriage" is meaningless, if not to give Christianity the finger?

Why should gay activists want to make a mockery of other people's genuine Christian beliefs? And why should the British government want to give in to this offensive request, as it has already done to all other gay requests without exception?

Actually no, there is an exception, at least until now: the demand to lower or even abolish the minimum age of consent to sexual intercourse for homosexuals. This demand comes from associations like the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) founded in 1978 before the pederasty issue became vastly exposed, and is an activist homosexual and paedophilia coalition group whose primary stated aim is to overturn US statutory rape laws.

In short, it asks for pederasty to be made legal. Among NAMBLA advocates are well-known homosexual activist figures, like David Thorstad and the leader of the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) rights movement Harry Hay, and was part of the American gay rights movement for a long time, participating in marches and gay pride parades. It is not just an American phenomenon, though. Our own Peter Thatchell, Britain's leading gay activist, also supports underage sex.

French Minister Threatens to Expropriate Church

Showing that the socialists of today are no less totalitarian than those of Stalinist times, as they try to make us believe, or, since we are talking about France, no less authoritarian than the Jacobins during their revolutionary Reign of Terror, Cécile Duflot, French Minister of Territorial Equality and Housing - to give the woman her full title - in the government of Socialist Francois Hollande, has announced that she will carry out the requisition of properties from the Catholic Church and other institutions by the end of the year to house homeless people.

Bring back the good old times of the French Revolution, Cécile! Like in 1791, when the Jacobins decided to expropriate the Church to offset the debts of the state.

Duflot is a member of the Green Party, confirming the metaphor of environmentalists as watermelons, green outside but red inside.

Hers was not a request, but a real threat. On 3rd December, in an interview with Le Parisien, she said she found the solution to the winter cold problems faced by the homeless, adding that she would not understand if the Church did not share the government's goals of solidarity and hoping that there will be no need for a showdown: "Therefore the Church must provide its unspecified 'semi-empty properties' to accommodate the poor, or else".

The prestigious Le Figaro wrote in an editorial the next day: "It is the latest insult in the series of attacks that this minister delivers against an institution that interferes with her fight for homosexual marriage. It is irresponsible. Francois Hollande would do well to pay attention to the training of his ministers."

Duflot's attitude is not easy to understand: the French Catholic Church in effect has historically always been involved in helping and offering shelter to the homeless.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Paris, in a joint statement  with the religious organization Corref, said: "The church did not wait for the threat of requisition by the minister Madame Duflot to take initiatives”.

Someone also remarked that on November 14 of last year, when Caritas France presented its initiative to help the homeless in the winter, minister Duflot, although invited, did not attend.

And France's main national business daily, Les Echos, said that the Church is "by far the institution most committed to serving the homeless, also in terms of providing them with properties and accommodation." The same thing has been confirmed by Paris Prefecture (local authority).

Italian sociologist Massimo Introvigne, head of the Centre for Religious Freedom established by Italy's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, made some interesting observations:

The minister's threat is absurd, considering that the Catholic Church is the largest organization that provides homes for the homeless in France, and in this field its private charity is much more efficient than the state's public assistance. As the bishops have pointed out, the Church could do even more if it did not have to face bureaucratic obstacles that sometimes come from an entrenched anticlerical hostility prevalent in sectors of the French administration.

In short, for some governments all pretexts are good to attack the Church, and today targeting its real estate assets, with taxes and threats of requisitions, has become one of the main ways to attempt to silence it when its interventions are a problem.

UK: Man Demoted for His Christian Views Wins under £100 in Compensation Case

A country where you can demote an employee because he does not share your views and get away with it - Mr Smith remains in his demoted position - is getting dangerously close to a totalitarian state where there is control over what people may or may not think.

We can jokingly call it "political correctness" but it is deadly serious.

My definition of political correctness is this: the orthodoxy, namely the ideology that is dominant in both senses of the term - dominant because most widespread, and dominant because it is imposed with non-democratic means, through the use of force.

What I find most ironic is that the people who hold politically correct views and force everyone else to embrace them are the very same people who are horrified at the Counter-Reformation times' Catholic Church's use of dogma and heresy as a way of controlling ideas and hence people.

The only difference between the methods used by the masters of PC and the Inquisition is that in the intervening centuries the penal system of punishment has changed and instead of torture and burning at stake we have destructions of heretics' careers and livelihoods.

A Christian who was demoted for posting his opposition to gay marriage on Facebook will receive less than £100 compensation after winning his legal action for breach of contract.

Adrian Smith, 55, lost his managerial position, had his salary cut by 40% and was given a final written warning by Trafford Housing Trust (THT) after posting that gay weddings in churches were "an equality too far".

The comments were not visible to the general public, and were posted outside work time, but the trust said he broke its code of conduct by expressing religious or political views which might upset co-workers.

To be allowed to upset or offend is the essence of freedom of speech: there is no call for restriction on expression that does not offend anyone.

Mr Justice Briggs, in London's High Court, said the trust did not have a right to demote Mr Smith as his Facebook postings did not amount to misconduct. He added that the postings were not - viewed objectively - judgmental, disrespectful or liable to cause upset or offence, and were expressed in moderate language.

As for their content, they were widely held views frequently to be heard on radio and television, or read in the newspapers. He said he had "real disquiet" about the financial outcome for Mr Smith, whose compensation was limited to the small difference between his contractual salary and the amount actually paid to him during the 12 weeks following his assumption of his new, but reduced, role.

If Mr Smith had begun proceedings for unfair dismissal in the Employment Tribunal, rather than for breach of contract in the county court, there was every reason to suppose he would have been awarded a substantial sum - but Mr Smith had said that by the time he had raised the necessary funds, the time limit for such proceedings had expired.

The judge said: "Mr Smith was taken to task for doing nothing wrong, suspended and subjected to a disciplinary procedure which wrongly found him guilty of gross misconduct, and then demoted to a non-managerial post with an eventual 40% reduction in salary. The breach of contract which the trust thereby committed was serious and repudiatory. A conclusion that his damages are limited to less than £100 leaves the uncomfortable feeling that justice has not been done to him in the circumstances."

Later, Mr Smith said: "I'm pleased to have won my case for breach of contract today. The judge exonerated me and made clear that my comments about marriage were in no way 'misconduct'. My award of damages has been limited to less than £100. But I didn't do this for the money - I did this because there is an important principle at stake."

Matthew Gardiner, chief executive at Trafford Housing Trust said: "We fully accept the court's decision and I have made a full and sincere apology to Adrian. At the time we believed we were taking the appropriate action following discussions with our employment solicitors and taking into account his previous disciplinary record.

"We have always vigorously denied allegations that the trust had breached an employee's rights to freedom of religious expression under human rights and equalities legislation and, in a written judgment handed down on 21st March 2012, a district judge agreed that these matters should be struck out. This case has highlighted the challenges that businesses face with the increased use of social media and we have reviewed our documentation and procedures to avoid a similar situation arising in the future. Adrian remains employed by the trust and I am pleased this matter has now concluded."

Christmas for Islam is a Crime Worse than Murder

Are you already thinking and dreaming of Christmas?

Enjoy it now because it may not last long.

Watch this beautiful video (the first part is not, but it is educational).

Note: "shirk" is an Arabic term that in Islam means the sin of idolatry or polytheism, the deification or worship of anyone or anything other than Allah.

Shirk is an unforgivable crime when unpardoned before death; Allah may forgive any sin unpardoned before death except shirk.

This is why the Muslim preacher in the video calls Christmas a worse crime than fornication, drinking alcohol and even killing someone.

Islam in the UK

This is the view from Londonistan, Absurd Britannia, Eurabia.

Raymond Ibrahim, a scholar of Arab and Islam history born in the USA of Egyptian Coptic parents, often writes about the condition of Christians in Muslim-majority countries, where they are subjugated and oppressed, even when they are a sizeable minority in places like Egypt, Syria and, before the “ethnic cleansing”, Iraq.

This is the complementary view, the one from historically Christian Western Europe, where Muslims are still (although not for long) a small minority, smaller than the Christians in the aforementioned countries. Even in these entirely different situations Muslims, aided by the Left and coward governments, are still acting like masters, thinking that everything is due to them and trying to impose their ideology on everybody else.

I came to live in London from Italy in 1984, and the changes I witnessed since are earth-shattering.

When I first arrived here, the word “halal” was unknown to everybody except the people involved in animal welfare, who knew that the Islamic method of slaughter was bad news indeed for the animals. Now you only have to take a 30-minute drive around London (any part) and you’ll see dozens of Halal signs in shops and restaurants. In the area where I live in West London, which is by no means a Muslim ghetto because many non-Muslim whites and blacks reside here, in the street you see women whose attire would make the strictest Taliban happy; or at least you think they are women, since all you can see is a walking robe with no eyes.

The following are some among the myriad examples of Muslim intolerance and lack of integration, stealth jihad and creeping sharia in the United Kingdom.

A few years ago a Muslim policeman refused to wear his uniform due to the presence of a cross on it.

The typical phenomenon of Muslim men grooming white young girls, for years denounced only by right-wing groups who as a result were accused of racism and Islamophobia, turned out to be real and now the mainstream media have started covering it.

There have been instances of Muslim girls rejecting their school uniform and demanding to wear Muslim clothing, sometimes even suing the school using the European Convention on Human Rights and winning the case.

Muslim bus and taxi drivers have not allowed on their vehicle blind people with their “unclean” guide dogs and Muslim passengers have objected to them.

British legislation, bending over backwards to accommodate Sharia, has permitted conflicts and contradictions with long-established jurisprudence. Polygamy, despite being forbidden by British law, is now de facto part of it due to a change in the inheritance law which now lets multiple wives inherit from their husband.

Similarly, a loophole created by the previous Labour government allows Muslims to take a property mortgage without paying interest, which also makes it cheaper for them and has now been exploited by non-Muslims who discovered it, causing a minor uproar.

In the UK the police are afraid of Muslims. There have been cases caught on video of Muslim demonstrators pelting with sticks and traffic cones and taunting with shouts of "kuffar" (Islamic  epithet for infidels) the police, who retreated in front of them.

And then there is the classical problem of halal meat, which is being served in British schools, hospitals and other institutions to both followers and non followers of Islam, and brought to international attention when Sarkozy declared his intention to change this situation in France, which is in the same predicament as the UK but a bit less dhimmi. In addition, meat of animals slaughtered with the halal method but still discarded for Muslim consumption because considered “haram” (forbidden) in some other way is being sold to unaware non-Muslims. To their credit British ministers, though, following Sarkozy’s example, have said that they will soon change the law.

Practically, according to a familiar pattern of progression, Muslim populations in countries where they are a tiny minority or in a weak position act differently from their counterparts in countries where they are stronger or more numerous. Therefore Europe, with its policy of appeasement and its Muslim communities’ exponential growth, can expect in a few decades’ time to see the imposition of Sharia law and other effects of Islamic supremacy, unless something (hopefully, Europeans waking up from their sleep) intervenes to alter the current demographic, social and political trend.

Western Europe’s general readiness, in recent years, to discard Christianity may reveal itself a very dangerous experiment indeed for many different reasons, one of which is the fact of depriving itself of a solid bulwark against Islam, stronger than atheism, secularism or liberalism both in the American and traditional European sense.

It is no coincidence that perhaps the country that most has conceded to Muslims and most has renounced for the sake of Islam, the United Kingdom, possibly the only country in the free world where the media, with the exception of a Welsh student rag and a Welsh-language church newspaper, did not reprint the notorious Mohammed cartoons for fear of offending Muslim sensitivities, is also the country which is proudest of its secularism, the only country I know of where before his visit the Pope was threatened with arrest by various fanatical atheists, homosexual activists and assorted militant hotheads.

Germany: Whole New Neighbourhoods without Churches

In Germany, architecture is being "de-Christianized". Entire new neighbourhoods and urban areas are being built without a church in them: churches are just not planned in the projects, as if nobody even thought of them.

The German Catholic news site Kreuz reports on this phenomenon with examples from an article by architecture critic Dankwart Guratzsch in the daily Die Welt.

In Stuttgart, a large new district was built for 12,000 residents without a church.

In Hamburg, another new neighbourhood for 12,000 residents was created without a church. Not only that: to realize this project, 19 churches were closed down, probably because they were in the way. Made disappear in the blink of an eye. Under the pretext that nobody had requested them.

Some people, however, did protest, and to make them happy they were provided with a small chapel with just thirty chairs, hidden on the ground floor of a battered-facade office building.

This does not look like an accident, but a plan to make the signs of Christian faith disappear in a cold, calculated, cruel way.

Writing in Die Welt, Guratzsch quotes the son of the great philosopher Hegel, Immanuel Hegel, who advised: "Build churches!". Because, adds Guratzsch: "To build churches means to build communities. When the faithful are deprived of the visible testimony of public recognition of their values, the latter are also weakened for the believers themselves".

Guratzsch recalls how the same was happening during the time of the German Democratic Republic, communist Germany: churches were being demolished to humiliate, offend, isolate religion and inculcate atheism.

A Europe without churches and without strong Christian roots and values will be much more vulnerable to a threat similar to communism: Islamization.

Pussy Riot Are Not Supported by Ordinary Russians

These Pussy Riot women are definitely not political martyrs. The very fact that at first, advised by their lawyers, they even denied having been in the church during the concert shows that: if they were prepared to retract, what courageous political message can that be? In the UK The Times even took that denial seriously.

What will its position after thier admission, wonders in a post's comments Alexander Mercouris, who then adds and clarifies the legal case:

Also by admitting that an offence was committed the girls have confirmed that they are not adopting the defence adopted for them by Amnesty International and their western admirers that they were entitled to do what they did as an exercise of their right of free speech under Article 10(1) of the European Convention of Human Rights. Please note: any such defence of the girls you now read in the western media or on the part of assorted worthies such as Amnesty International, Sting, Madonna, Red Hot Chilli Peppers etc, is not being made by the girls themselves in their defence and never has been. They could not previously make this defence because up to now they were not admitting that they were present in the Cathedral so they could not claim a defence of free speech for actions they were not admitting they ever made. Now that they admit that they were present in the Cathedral the girls are also admitting that what they did was an offence albeit only an administrative offence. This is an admission that they were not entitled to do what they did so the defence that they were entitled to do what they did as an exercise of their right of free speech under Article 10(1) of the European Convention of Human Rights does not apply.

The only defence the girls are now making is the defence of proportionality, that the penalty prescribed under the charge of hooliganism is disproportionate to the offence committed. This is a valid defence and one to which Article 10(2) of the European Convention of Human Rights applies.

Where the defence is one of proportionality this creates the classic situation, as I have argued previously, for a plea bargain in which an admission of guilt and an apology is traded for a lower sentence. If the girls had made their admission and offered a sincere apology right at the start of this case we would have been spared all the nonsense of the last few months. The trial would by now long since be over, a lenient sentence could have been agreed and the girls would almost certainly by now be free.

There is no reason why the Court would not have agreed to impose a lenient sentence as part of a plea bargain. There are (or were) ample grounds for mitigation given that the girls are (1) young and inexperienced and therefore could argue that they did not fully understand the upset what they did would cause (2) have no previous history of serious criminal convictions (3) did not cause material damage (4) did not act for material gain (5) can validly argue that they did what they did because they were incensed by the Patriarch’s support for Putin in the election campaign and (6) because two of them are mothers with children. I understand that sentencing practice for the offensive of hooliganism is flexible so the Court has wide discretion as to the sort of sentence it can impose once it has taken the admission, apology and plea in mitigation into account.

The question is whether the outbreak of sanity we have seen this morning has come too late. The trial has now started and the apology offered is much less than fulsome and the mitigation has been seriously damaged by the arrogant and disruptive conduct of the defence up to now. Significantly there is no promise from the girls not to do the same thing again whilst a further bad sign is that the girls’ lawyers have renewed their pointless call for the Patriarch to give evidence at the trial. Since the Patriarch was not present in the Cathedral when the offence was committed he is not a witness and there is therefore no sense in calling him. I understand that the defence is also persisting in its foolish argument that the prosecution is somehow politically motivated, which makes no sense in the light of the admission made this morning and which can only further damage the girls’ mitigation and antagonise the Court.

Let us hope however that the admissions and comments made this morning do represent a sea change and a dawning realisation that the defence tactics adopted up to now whatever their political impact have been from a legal point of view disastrously counterproductive. In that case it is just possible even now that a line may be drawn under the whole affair. I am not holding my breath though.

... The Pussy Riot case shows no crisis within the Russian court system. What it shows is appalling conduct by the defence as I have discussed previously. [Emphasis added]

There are many other things that people in the West don't know, because the mainstream media don't tell them.

Russian public opinion is mostly against Pussy Riot. Maybe, partly because the Russians, speaking the language, are not so easily misinformed by the media as we in the West are, and know exactly what swear words these women were shouting while punching the air and kicking their heads off in the Cathedral's sanctuary containing the altar.

How strange that the word "hate", that so frequently and liberally is spread around by the politically correct Left, is not used by them here when it so aptly describes what the band's behaviour expresses.

This is what Zagolovki, a Russian-language news blog, says (Google translation):

Protesters [at the furst court hearing of the Pussy Riot trial] were significantly lower than during the last few sessions on the arrest of girls from Pussy Riot, - no more than two hundred persons, and opponents with posters "for morality" and "Protect Our Children" was significantly greater.

And the blog Da Russophile summarizes several opinion polls thus:

April poll, Levada: 47% of “shocked and outraged ordinary Russians” [this is what British paper The Guardian had written, which the post intelligently and mercilessly attacks] think 7 years is an adequate punishment; 32% think it is excessive; and a mere 10% do not think they should be criminally prosecuted at all.

April poll, VCIOM: How do Russians look at Pussy Riot’s “punk prayer”? Hooliganism – 46%; sacrilege – 21%; political protest – 13%; PR – 10%; 4% – encouragement of hatred towards religious groups; 1% – art. In other words, only 14% of Russians agree with The Guardian’s interpretation. 86% think Pussy Riot should be prosecuted.

July poll, Levada: 36% approve of the prosecution of Pussy Riot, 50% disapprove.

July poll, FOM: 34% of Russians think that several years in prison is a just sentence, whereas 37% disagree. If they were asked to write a sign a letter in defense of Pussy Riot, 28% say they would and 51% say they wouldn’t.

Pussy Riot Offensive, Expletive-Laden Mock Prayer

This was obviously meant to offend Christianity and the faithful, it was not a political protest with the purest, noblest, most heroic of intentions, but an act of hooliganism directed, surprise surprise, at the most vulnerable, the least politically correct of Europe's beliefs and institutions.

Double Standards: Pussy Riot Mania versus Silence on Egypt Crucifixions

Let me make a comparison.

We have on one hand a Russian punk group of three women who, under the pretense of being more intelligent than they are and staging a "political" protest against Putin, chose as the setting for their vulgar and offensive pantomime a Christian church, Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral.

If they are so brave, why not the Red Square? Why didn't they have the courage to choose a mosque, which would have put them not in danger of a few years' imprisonment but under a death threat from Muslims?

Don't give me that stuff about how the group wanted to denounce the close ties between the Russian Orthodox patriarchate and the Kremlin: Red Square is even closer to the Kremlin than any church.

The Pussy Riot later apologised, saying that their stunt was political, unrelated to the Orthodox religion. How can it be unrelated to it if it desecrates one of its churches?

As Orthodox commentators in the Russian media pointed out, the cathedral has become the symbol of Russia's Christian revival after 70 years of state-imposed atheism, and stands as a monument to all those who died for their faith under the Soviet Union.

The Pussy Riot's choice of venue for their action is inexcusable. It is just one of a long line of cases of people attacking Christianity and its symbols and justifying this in the name of "art" or now in this case "political protest".

Now all the international media and "celebrities" from Madonna (from whom I didn't expect anything better) to Paul McCartney (from whom disappointingly I did) have fallen into the trap of these who are at best clueless punks (in every sense of the word) or at worst talentless fame seekers who have got what they want: celebrity status without deserving it.

So, it seems that saving these three would-be singers from jail is one of the most important tasks in the world, a top priority, judging from the carpet media coverage and the intervention of everybody, from feminist groups to organizers of Global Pussy Riot Day protests in many cities around the world.

Politicians got in there too. The German Der Spiegel reported that 121 members of the Bundestag sent a letter to the Russian ambassador in Germany supporting the Pussy Riot.

On the other hand we have opponents of Egypt's President Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood who are killed and wounded in the streets, even literally crucified for their protests, media outlets closed down, journalists beaten up, and how much outcry does that provoke?

You can guess. Hardly anything at all.

New Archbishop of Glasgow Under Fire for Comments on Homosexuality

Or rather for telling the truth.

A conservative Catholic just appointed as archbishop of Glasgow has been condemned for appearing to link the death of a Labour MP last year with his homosexuality.

Philip Tartaglia, whose appointment as the next archbishop of Glasgow by Pope Benedict was made public on Tuesday, suggested the premature death of David Cairns, a former minister, was connected to his sexuality, when he spoke at an event this year.

Cairns, himself a former Catholic priest and a widely respected Scotland Office minister, died unexpectedly aged 44 last year from complications from acute pancreatitis, shocking his family, friends and colleagues.

Tartaglia is an outspoken critic of Scottish government proposals, due to be published imminently, to legalise gay marriage and is also tipped as a successor to Cardinal Keith O'Brien as head of the Roman Catholic church in Scotland.

Currently bishop of Paisley, Tartaglia suggested at a conference on religious freedom and equality at Oxford University in April that there may have been hidden or unexplained links between Cairns's premature death and his sexuality.

In response to a question from an audience member about the suicide of a gay author in the US, the bishop said: "If what I have heard is true about the relationship between the physical and mental health of gay men, if it is true, then society is being very quiet about it.

"Recently in Scotland there was a gay Catholic MP who died at the age of 44 or so, and nobody said anything, and why his body should just shut down at that age? Obviously he could have had a disease that would have killed anybody. But you seem to hear so many stories about this kind of thing, but society won't address it."

Tartaglia's remarks were condemned by Cairns's partner, Dermot Kehoe, and Tom Harris, the Labour MP for Glasgow South, blogger and a close friend of Cairns, who became the first former Catholic priest to sit in the Commons after winning Inverclyde in 2001. Harris said the bishop's comments were "ill-informed tripe".

Kehoe, who was Cairns's partner for nearly 15 years, told the Scotsman: "This is genuinely very upsetting and painful for David's family and friends. I can't believe that someone who claims to be a man of God and is seeking to give moral leadership should speak from such a position of ignorance.

"I don't care what his views on gay marriage are, but to bring in my dead partner to justify those views is wrong."

Harris wrote to Tartaglia, describing his remarks as "hurtful and ill-informed" and urged him to reconsider them.

His letter says: "I was privileged to be one of David's closest friends. His friends and family have spent the last year trying to come to terms with his tragic loss from complications arising from acute pancreatitis.

"Your public assertion that David's illness might in some way be connected to his sexuality and lifestyle was not only unsupported by any evidence, but was, I fear, unworthy of your position as a leader in the church."

A spokesman for Tartaglia said: "Responding to a question from an audience member, Bishop Tartaglia agreed that the health risks of same-sex behaviour were largely unreported.

"He mentioned the premature death of a young high-profile gay MP in this context. There was no intention to cause offence and he regrets that anyone may have been upset.

"In the case of the MP concerned, his funeral was conducted in the Catholic church and pastoral support offered to his family and friends." [Emphasis added]

The archbishop was addressing a real problem that the mainstream media don't want to face. Regardless of specific cases, medicine considers anal sex - when is the last time you even heard or read this expression? - to carry more risks than other sexual activities. Even the ultra PC NHS says so.

An additional problem is that many deaths related to AIDS - of which the main way of transmission is from man to man, at least in the West ("In 23 European countries, the new cases of HIV in men who have sex with men rose 86 percent between 2000 and 2006.") - are from diseases resulting from the weakening of the auto-immune system due to AIDS.

Intolerant Secularists

People like Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion (Amazon USA) , (Amazon UK) , and Christopher Hitchens, who wrote God Is Not Great (Amazon USA) , (Amazon UK) , et al, when attacking “religion”, play on various ambiguities. They create ambiguities in their choice of terms and then these ambiguities are convenient for them.

The first instance of ambiguity is the use of the term “religion”. It puts together all sorts of people and doctrines which may have very little in common.

To give an analogy, the flat earth theory is undoubtedly a theory of physics. It says something about the earth and, by extension, is a cosmology theory because the universe in which a flat earth exists would be a different universe from ours. It is scientific because it can be tested and disproved, as indeed it has.

Now, if I wanted to criticize scientific physics, I could bundle together the flat earth theory with Newton’s classical mechanics and Einstein’s relativity theory, and say about the former things which are obviously not true about the two latter.

When Dawkins and company attack “religion”, they bundle together Muslim suicide bombers (who are among the most hated figures of our times) with Catholic and other Christian missionaries who risk disease to help the poor in African and other Third World countries.

But, from their viewpoint, it’s a good ploy. If you are not interested in truth and intellectual honesty but only in scoring points (political and non), you can use generic terms which are obviously ambiguous and create confusion by mixing “il sacro e il profano” (“chalk and cheese”). Then, by attacking the obviously bad, you have achieved the effect of also attacking the obvioulsy good in the process. And if you’re good at it, it can be as in a magic trick: nobody noticed where the card, or in this case the truth, disappeared or indeed if it did disapper at all.

Men of science like Dawkins should know that, as in science different theories redefine the concepts they use (Newtonian time and space are not the same as Einsteinian time and space), so in religion the same is true: different doctrines have different concepts of God, and they may have very little in common.

In short, you cannot criticize “religion” meaningfully, especially by extending bad aspects of terrible religions to other religions which are fundamentally good.

Another ambiguity that they employ is when they say “religion is declining in the West” or something to that effect. In that case, what they mean is clearly “Christianity” and not “religion”, given that other religions professed by ethnic minorities who live in the West do not show sign of decline.

Here they got it wrong again. Christianity still permeates Western life and way of thinking profoundly. We are all Christian, as Oriana Fallaci says. I am an atheist Christian as she is, and I’m borrowing her expression because I think it explains well the condition of our “secular” societies too.

These, and we ourselves, have been shaped by two millennia of Christian thinking, luckily. An article by John Gray on secular fundamentalists in The Guardian seems to agree with this when he says that Dawkins & co. are really expressions of the Christian background from which they derive (and he does not even defend Christianity, he just attacks Dawkins and his gang). He believes that the very idea of history as progress is Christian.

I don’t know where we would be without this profound Christian influence. Britain, which is perhaps the least Christian country in Western Europe (perhaps in the West) has also some of the greatest drugs and alcohol problems, highest level of teenager pregnancy, highest rate of illegitimate births, biggest problem of an underclass, highest crime rate, highest level of debt among the population, highest spread of obesity.

This is where abandoning our Christian roots would lead: forgetting self-discipline and only thinking of immediate self-gratification have these effects. Which is also part of the reason why, whereas it may be possible for an individual to be atheist, I don’t think that it is apossible for a society to be atheist.

When Dawkins and people of his ilk say something like “hey, look, we are a secular society now and we are fine” or something similar, they systematically forget, overlook or disregard the many, profound, pervasive ways in which many centuries of Christianity have influenced our society and still do. I can see it in myself, how my Christian upbringing still has a (mostly beneficial) effect on me.

Where the intolerant secularists also got it wrong is in putting science and religion against each other. They think that they are incompatible, whereas in fact they occupy different domains, and there is no conflict or contradiction. In fact, you may say that the problems arise when one of them tries to occupy the other’s territory, and attributes to itself a role and capability which it does not possess.

Dawkins is a good case in point. When he writes as a modern evolutionary and genetic theorist and as a zoologist, he is fine and indeed very interesting. When he writes as a self-proclaimed philosopher and a “religion basher”, he writes nonsense.

Something similar happens to science when it usurps a role which is not its own. Dawkins is a good metaphor for this arrogance and its consequences: when he tries to attributes to both himself and science a role which they do not have and a power which they do not possess, they get it all wrong. Basically, biology is his profession, and philosophy of religion is his fun activity, his hobby. I would call him a religion basher by hobby. He definitely should stick to his profession, because he is rubbish at his hobby.

We have to be careful that science does not overstep its domain and role, because many bad things may easily follow from this.

Positivism was a 19th century philosophy which overstressed the power and importance of science. The French positivist sociologist August Comte thought that humanity goes through three stages: "the Theological, or fictitious; the Metaphysical, or abstract; and the Scientific, or positive."

Gray's article does not mention him but mentions the anthropologist James George Frazer instead, who slightly altered and popularized Comte’s theories His three stages are: primitive magic; religion; and science.

All this leads to scientism, the belief that the scientific method can be applied to everything and that science is the most authoritative and valuable learning activity to the exclusion of other viewpoints.

We can easily give too much power to science, as the case of animal experimentation clearly and tragically shows. Most people in the West probably are morally, instinctively opposed to vivisection, but they just accept it because “scientists say that it’s necessary” without even trying to question whether that statement by scientists is true or not.

Technocracy, government by scientists and technical experts, is just as bad as any other form of control by an elite.

Increasing Attacks on Christianity in Europe

I'm afraid that Raymond Ibrahim might in the not-so-distant future have more work to do when compiling his monthly statistics of persecution of Christians.

European countries may have to be added to his list.

Persecution of Christians in Europe takes mainly two forms. The first is the age-old type that we already know from what happens in Asia and Africa as Muslim (mostly illegal) immigrants spread across the globe.

The second is the brand-new, "liberal" kind, deriving from European elites' efforts to marginalize Christianity in its own historical home.

I'll focus in this post on a few examples of the increasing number of physical attacks on churches, Christian festivals, other symbols of Christianity and even Christian people throughout Europe. It must be noted that destroying crosses is a well-documented Islam's tradition.

In a cemetery in Pausa, Saxony, Germany, a 2-meter-tall statue of Jesus Christ was beheaded and the head smashed to pieces. Pastor Frank Pierel reported that such attacks take place rather frequently in his area.

In Strunjan, Slovenia, the "artist" Dean Verzel and others set fire to a votive cross erected by local seamen in the year 1600, replicating the gesture he had performed 10 years before in 2002 and for which he had been acquitted. Repeating an often-heard justification for all sorts of anti-Christian garbage, "it's nothing against Christianity", he said, "it's a 'work of art'".

In the cemetery of Canohès, France, four Christian graves were vandalized and covered with anti-Christian slogans.

In Bologna, Italy, a Moroccan student approached the faithful attending the procession of Corpus Domini and shouted "You're all a flock of sheep, you'll go to hell!" He was charged with offending people and a religious faith.

In Clouzeaux, France, the Church of the Bon Pasteur was set fire to in broad daylight. The fire was lit in three different places and caused immense damage. The altar was totally destroyed, electrical wires pulled out of the wall, crucifixes, pews, chairs, panels, chandeliers toppled and broken, holy water fonts, extremely precious vestments, and many other religious objects completely ruined. Apparently it was three local children, aged 14, 13 and 12, who caused damage of 50,000-70,000 euros.

Still in France, three men entered the Church of Cruseilles on Holy Saturday and set fire to leaflets, prayer and hymn books. The cloth covering an altar was also burned and the main altar damaged.

More cemetery vandalism in France, in Sussargues, where graves were covered with anti-Christian writings and crucifixes were turned upside down, and church vandalism in Paris.

In Duisburg, Germany, churches were attacked over the New Year with stones, firecrackers, rockets, causing tens of thousands of euros' worth of damage. The congregants said that this was not the first time.

The main server of the Catholic Church in France was hijacked by a Muslim Algerian hacker who took control of a total of 475 French websites, many Catholic, the content of which he replaced with the message "No God But Allah and Mohammed is Messenger Of Allah".

This tops it all. In Nimes, France, people who had attended a Catholic festival were leaving in cars and buses when young Arab-Muslims from the neighboring estate started to throw stones at their vehicles coming from the sanctuary. The event organisers were forced to arrange a diversion to a different route to protect the occupants of the vehicles from the savage attacks, which continued.

In Nice, France, the traditional, annual Catholic procession for the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, celebrated throughout the Catholic world on August 15 but by the parish of Our Lady of the Assumption in Nice on August 14 evening, is now under police protection. During the last procession the entire route, 400 meters long, was lined by police. Who the faithful need protection from can be guessed when we know that Nice has a large Muslim population, who has been holding its prayers every Friday for years, illegally occupying public streets with impunity.

To remain in Nice, one of its churches received the dubious honor of being adorned with a huge Algerian flag on the front, covering the words "Saint Peter".

Watch this video translated by Islam versus Europe (IVE) about the many attacks committed against churches and cemeteries all over France in the first half of 2011 but prepare to be upset.

In Milbertshofen, Munich, Germany, a Catholic church has been the object of a continuous aggressive campaign for more than a year, with services disrupted, walls smeared, holy water receptacles filled with urine. Things have been set on fire, and tiles torn down from the roof; consequently it rained inside, with risk of damage to the almost 500-year-old tableau. The culprits are the neighborhood's youths and even children, almost entirely from a migrant background. A local social worker says that the youths are becoming more radical and the attacks are increasingly religiously motivated. (This video was also translated by IVE)

Another video shows St Calogero Church in Agrigento, Sicily, Italy, after Ales Halid, a drunken immigrant from Ghana already known to the police for other crimes, entered the church shouting in Arabic and smashed a small black statue of the saint against a wall. The man was so agitated that it took four police officers to restrain him before arrest. Two officers got injured and Halid also damaged the police car.

"Now we have to understand what drove this man to act in such an ugly manner" the video says, but it inadvertently hints at an answer when it adds that the attack took place "during the festivities dedicated to the Monaco Turco [Turkish Monk, a reference to St Calogero] worshipped by the people of Agrigento, saint who has been acclaimed by Bishop Montenegro as a model of integration among peoples." Maybe Halid did not want "integration", and particularly objected to a Turkish Christian monk called "the black saint".

Notice that none of the Italian media reporting this called the man "Muslim". This is the usual media line, which the president of France's National Council of Muslim Faith for some reason thought in need of being reinforced when last week he asked journalists that, in case of aggressions, the religion of neither victim nor aggressor should be mentioned.

In the cemetery of Belleville-sur-Meuse, France, the bronze statue of Christ carrying the cross was broken and fifteen graves were desecrated.

In Burgos, Spain, the two statues of St Peter and St Lawrence of the 13th-century Gothic church of San Esteban were beheaded. Police were puzzled by this attack against a place of worship, which is also an architecture jewel and an important cultural and historical heritage. The main hypothesis was that it was an act of vandalism because, if it had been a robbery, the thieves would not have damaged the statues. The church's parish priest said this was "the first time" an attack on San Esteban had ever occurred in its 8 centuries of existence.

A few years ago, 57-year-old Canon Michael Ainsworth was beaten up in his own east London churchyard by three Muslim youths who caused him serious injuries. The attacks on vicars or churches were so frequent in that parish with a large Bangladeshi Muslim population that they prompted Melanie Phillips to write: "Indeed, there appear to have been many attacks by Muslims who are clearly intent on turning east London into a no-go area for Christians".

The Telegraph wrote: "A survey of London clergy by National Churchwatch, which provides personal safety advice, found that nearly half said they had been attacked in the previous 12 months. The organisation suggested that vicars should consider taking off their dog collars when they are on their own."

The two facts that France has the lion's share of these less than edifying episodes and that, with 7.5 per cent of its population being Muslim, has the highest percentage of Muslims among Western European countries seem to go hand in hand rather well.

I could go on but you've got the idea of the current trend. This is only the tip of the iceberg.