Pope's "Dialogue" with Muslims Is One-Way

Our guest writer Cassandra has written another article for this blog.

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The BBC reported that the Pope visited the Blue Mosque in Istanbul as part of a three-day visit to Turkey. According to the BBC reporter, the Pope offered a moment of “silent prayer...next to the Grand Mufti.” The BBC man said that it was, “a moment of rich symbolism in terms of the inter-faith dialogue” that the Pope is trying to promote. And it certainly was!

For some reason the BBC didn't see fit to report on the Pope's visit to the Orthodox Christian basilica of Hagia Sophia. The basilica was converted into a Mosque following the Turkish invasion and occupation of Constantinople in 1453, and is now a museum. This is a pattern that Muslims have followed throughout history after invading other peoples' land in order to show the supremacy of their religion – see also the conversion into a mosque of the Basilica of John the Baptist in Damascus, and the Dome of the Rock, located on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The rock at the heart of the Dome, called the Foundation Stone, has great significance for Jews, Christians and Muslims, and the Dome is believed to have been built on the site of the Second Jewish Temple.

Of course, as all good jihadis will tell you, the conquest of Constantinople was foretold by Muhammad, the founder of the "religion of peace", who promised the Muslims that, after stealing the Christian city of Constantinople, with Allah's help they would steal Rome as well. A promise that the Islamic State, those "hijackers of the peaceful religion of Islam", would like to realise.

The Turkish paper Hurriyet Daily News, however, did report on the Pope's visit to Hagia Sophia from which two points stand out for me. Firstly, that “the Pope left Hagia Sophia without praying,” and, secondly, that “the Islamic call of prayer from the speakers of nearby mosques was heard in the historic building.” A visit rich in symbolism indeed!

Why didn't (or couldn't) the Pope say a prayer in what was for centuries a Christian place of worship? Would it have caused the Muslim Turks offence for a Christian to make any sort of a claim on a building that they stole from Christians?

Secondly, why was the Islamic call to prayer played from the speakers while the Pope was in Hagia Sophia? Was it by coincidence that the Pope's visit to the basilica coincided with it? If so, it is a rather common coincidence. It reminded me of the Mass that the same Pope held during his visit to the Holy Land, which was similarly interrupted by the loud playing of the Islamic call to prayer. It's funny how the call to prayer always coincides with events like these. For those who don't know, these are the words of that prayer:

Allah is Greater! Allah is Greater!
Allah is Greater! Allah is Greater!
I witness that there is no god but Allah.
I witness that there is no god but Allah.
I witness that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.
I witness that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.
Come to worship. Come to worship.
Come to success. Come to success.
Allah is Greater! Allah is Greater!

[From (The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) by Mark Durie, 2010, page 17]

A visit rich in symbolism indeed! But the symbolism is probably lost on both the Pope and the BBC.

The problem with Muslim-Christian “inter-faith dialogue” is that the aim of the “dialogue” is almost always nebulous. From the Christian perspective it always seems to amount to something like “let's hang out together, and say nice things to each other so that everybody feels good.” Which is all good and well, but it does nothing to resolve the tough issues such as Muslim persecution of Christians around the world which (silly me) I would have thought was the point of “dialogue”.

Rather than tackling the root cause of such persecution - the Islamic texts – the “dialogue” revolves around deflecting blame from those texts to things like “hunger and poverty” or “Islamophobia”; or else yammering on about what Christians and Muslims have in common, for example the fact that both groups reverence Mary or that both groups believe that Jesus had a miraculous birth and performed miracles. That's all good and well but it ignores the fact that Muslim persecution of Christians does not originate from Muslim and Christian unawareness of the fact that they both share similar beliefs, nor from “Islamophobia”, hunger or poverty.

Re-read that call to prayer. The problem stems from Islamic supremacism which is writ large in Islamic law and psychology, and which in turn originates from the texts of Islam. Muhammad is told in the Qur'an: “He it is Who hath sent His messenger with the guidance and the religion of truth, that He may make it conqueror of all religions however much idolaters may be averse.” (Qur'an 61:9) While Christians are taught to be humble, Muslims are taught the supremacism of Islam over other religions, which explains why, after invading other peoples' land (which it is their divine right to do), they find it difficult not to commandeer other peoples' places of worship for Allah.

It explains why, when a Christian man has the audacity to marry a Muslim woman, the Muslim mind sees fit to punish all Christians in the area for that “crime”. Since in Islamic law Muslim men are free to marry Christian and Jewish women, why should Christian or Jewish men marrying Muslim women cause such reactions? Well, it is because the former is meant to ensure that the number of Muslims increases in a society since the children of such unions are invariably raised as Muslims. The latter cannot be allowed because it would mean that the children of such unions (following the religion of the father) would be Christians or Jews, and the number of Muslims in the society would decrease. The notion that Christians and Jews share an equality with Muslims is foreign to Islamic law.

Christians, like the Pope, following their teacher's command to be humble believe that they are building good will with their Muslims counterparts, but fail to see that Muslims, following Muhammad's teaching that they are the best people (Qur'an 3:110), while Jews and Christians are the “worst of created beings” (Qur'an 98: 6), view Christian obeisance towards them as being in the normal order of things, and not something that requires any sort of reciprocity.

The Pope's visit won't stop the Turkish government supporting the Islamic State by, for example, allowing them to use Turkish territory to launch attacks.

But none of that really matters anyway, because ending wrongdoing on the part of Muslims, through an honest examination and repudiation of certain ideas in the Islamic texts, is not the point of “inter-faith dialogue”.

UK University Rejects Pro-Abortion Bullying

Younger generations are fighting back.

Yesterday, the Cardiff University Students' Union, in Wales

voted down a motion that would have made the Students' Union officially pro-choice and effectively banned pro-life activities.

Clauses within the motion included preventing "affiliated societies and groups from taking part in anti-choice protests or rallies outside of abortion clinics and under the banner of the student’s union," with another part saying:

"Any information about abortion or contraception disseminated, distributed or presented in union or university buildings must be unbiased and not shame those who choose to have abortions, and must be academically referenced."

The motion would have also committed the Students' Union to campaigning against protests outside abortion clinics and opposing "any restrictions to abortion or contraceptive rights being passed through Parliament or the National Assembly for Wales." [Emphases mine]

The motion, clearly pro-abortion, was an attempt to prevent members of the students' union from expressing dissident views from it, prompting alarm about freedom of speech on campus.

Jonathan O’Connell, president of Cardiff Students for Life, said:

“This motion simply cannot be allowed to pass. The university environment has long been a bastion of free speech, which the proposed motion seeks to attack. There are huge implications in enforcing a single ideology or political viewpoint across the whole student populace; not least of all it restricts students’ freedom of expression as well as directly limiting the religious freedom of certain student groups.

“Declaring the university officially pro-choice is akin to declaring the university affiliated with a single political party, which obviously in the 21st century would be totally unthinkable.”

Alithea Williams, vice-chair of the Alliance of Pro-Life Students, called the motion a "censorious and illiberal attack on free speech" which “seeks to impose a uniform ideological viewpoint on the entire student body, and tramples upon the right to freedom of speech and expression of those who disagree". She added that “all views, including the pro-life voice, must be allowed to be heard.”

Those who concocted this motion are true heirs to Stalin. The motion was heavily defeated. The "Keep Cardiff Uni Free" Facebook page declares that it has been rejected by an overwhelming show of hands, with no official count needed.

This victory is particularly welcome as the the situation of UK universities is getting pretty dire.

Last week a debate about abortion at Oxford University was cancelled.

The debate would have been between journalists Tim Stanley, anti-abortion, and Brendan O'Neill, pro-abortion, debating the motion "This house believes abortion culture harms us all".

It was cancelled simply because angry feminists (when are they not angry?) didn't like the fact that the pro-life position was given a chance to be aired and not totally suppressed. So they set up a Facebook page threatening to disrupt the event.

The Wall Street Journal found this so disgusting that it published an editorial on it, "Intolerance at Oxford", mauling student leaders who can’t tolerate hearing different opinions from their own.

In September, Dundee University Students' Association banned the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) from its Freshers' Fayre, of which SPUC had been part in previous years.

And Oxford University Students' Union banned anti-abortion group Life from advertising at the university.

It's not just pro-life organisations that are under attack from student unions, it's UKIP too. Yesterday the University of East Anglia stopped an event from going ahead because it would have featured UKIP speakers. The Students' Union justified this move with claims that it would have alarmed or frightened students and caused a "breach of the peace".

Ferguson Mob Stops People Going to Work



The situation has got out of hand. The protests about the Ferguson verdict have become absurd, resembling a mental asylum, and the protesters have lost all sense of reality and proportion.

In the video above, dozens of students blocked I-5 North, a major thoroughfare near San Diego, California.

The protest blocked thousands of commuters, stuck in traffic and unable to get to work, who angrily started shouting.

One of them in particular, caught on the video, badly pushed a protester to the side of the road and stole his megaphone. Furious, he explained that if he couldn't go to work he would be fired and he had six kids to feed.

Other drivers voiced their frustration, amidst calls for the arrest of those obstructing the highway. A woman in nursing scrubs said: "We have doctors and nurses that have to save lives here."

The crowd dispersed only when the police arrived. Nobody was arrested.

A commenter, replying to the question of why no-one in the mob was arrested, said: "It's liberal democratic controlled California you really don't expect them to get arrested do you?"

Islamic Threat to UK Greater than Ever

The image above is that of a leaflet which - as part of Counter Terrorism Awareness Week - was distributed yesterday by the police at railway stations around the UK to guard people against a possible Mumbai-style attack that security forces are expecting may be attempted by Muslim extremists.

The leaflets tell the public to "run, hide and tell" in the event of such an attack.

They are part of a campaign just launched by Chief Constable of British Transport Police (BTP) Paul Crowther, who said: "More than six million people travel on our railways every single day."

He added: "Earlier this month a man was sentenced for terrorism offences after being caught in possession of information about how to make bombs.

"This was as a direct result of a rail passenger reporting suspicions to train staff. We need others to follow suit and play their part in keeping the UK's transport systems safe from terrorists."

The government has warned that the threat to Britain from Islamic radicals is "greater than ever".

Home Secretary Theresa May has just published a Counter-terrorism and Security Bill containing a range of new powers, including a legal requirement by schools, prisons and councils to put in place policies to stop would-be extremists being radicalised.

The bill, about to go before Parliament, includes a vast package of measures to tackle the threat from Muslim militants and those returning from fighting with the Islamic State.

It seems to me that much more useful than warning potential victims would be to target the would-be criminals. We know that the Muslim community in Britain harbours many terrorists, some of whom have gone to Iraq and Syria to join the ranks of the beheaders and torturers of the Islamic State and have been let back into the UK.

These home-grown jihadists have done us a favour, first by betraying where their loyalties lie and second by leaving the country. We should use both favourable conditions and not allow them to return to Britain, making them stateless if necessary.

British security services have informed that since the 2005 7/7 attacks in London, that killed 52 people, no fewer than 40 terrorist plots have been disrupted in the UK.

Home Secretary Theresa May disclosed this week: "There have been attempts to conduct marauding 'Mumbai-style' gun attacks on our streets, blow up the London Stock Exchange, bring down airliners, assassinate a British ambassador and murder serving members of our armed forces."

In the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, which security chiefs believe are inspiring the current Muslim militants, a group of Pakistani men linked to the terror group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba went to various crowded public places across the city - including a railway station, a packed restaurant, two hotels, a cinema and a hospital - armed with machine guns and bombs, slaughtering 164 people.

The attacks only ended when commandos stormed the buildings, killed the terrorists and rescued hostages. The one survivor was later executed.

Why Don't Rioters Protest Black Crime?

The very fact that people think they are justified in committing criminal acts just because they are not happy with a verdict which any person with a moderately-endowed brain can recognise as entirely reasonable and based on physical evidence shows how these people are the least capable of judging that verdict.

They are criminals. They find any excuse for their antisocial and violent behaviour. Of course they side with their fellow delinquent Michael Brown against the man who represents the law, Officer Darren Wilson.

And the race-industry leaders, the media and politicians, who have kept telling us for decades that we must be colour blind, all of a sudden discover that they can't be blind to colour. So, every time they mention the shooting's victim they have to say that he was black, and whenever they refer to the policeman who pulled the fatal trigger they must add that he is white.

The black protesters and rioters obviously go along with that, demonstrating that colour blindness is something they appeal to only when it suits them. If opening their eyes to chromatic differences is in their interest, they start seeing who's black and who's white. They never believed in this nonsense themselves.

Obama, the worst and most stupid president of the USA that ever existed, in his speech after the verdict of non-indictment described the protests as legitimate ways to express concern about real problems. But they are not legitimate, and the problems are not real. He is responsible for not trying to calm these subversives who listen to him because he's black like them. And these are the anti-racists, of course.

"13 Facts About Ferguson the Media Will Never Tell You" from Newsmax:

According to protesters who erupted in violence after a grand jury declined to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., this was the case of a white policeman shooting an unarmed black teenager with his hands in the air in a community plagued by racial tension.

That's an account promoted by many in the mainstream media as well. But here are several facts about the case that are harder to find:

1. Surveillance video showed that shortly before the confrontation, 18-year-old Brown stole cigarillos from a convenience store and shoved a clerk who tried to stop him.

2. The autopsy report showed that Brown had marijuana in his system when he died.

3. Officer Wilson, driving to the call of a medical emergency, first encountered Brown walking in the middle of a street and told Brown and his friend to walk on the sidewalk. Brown responded with an expletive.

4. Wilson chose to confront Brown only after he saw the cigarillos in his hand and recalled the radio report of a robbery at the convenience store.

5. Wilson said when he tried to open his car door, Brown slammed it back shut, then punched Wilson in the face.

6. Fearing another punch could knock him out, Wilson drew his gun, he told the grand jury, and Brown grabbed the gun, saying "you are too much of a pussy to shoot me."

7. An African-American witness confirmed that Brown and Wilson appeared to be "arm-wrestling" by the car.

8. Another witness saw Brown leaning through the car's window and said "some sort of confrontation was taking place."

9. After Wilson fired a shot that struck Brown's hand, Brown fled and Wilson gave chase. Brown suddenly stopped. An unidentified witness told the grand jury that 6-foot-4, 292-pound Brown charged at Wilson with his head down. Wilson said Brown put his hand under the waistband of his pants as he continued toward Wilson. That's when Wilson fired.

10. A witness testified that Brown never raised his hands.

11. Gunpowder found on the wound on Brown's hand indicated his hand was close to the gun when it fired. According to a report, the hand wound showed foreign matter "consistent with products that are discharged from the barrel of a firearm."

12. Judy Melinek, a forensic pathologist who reviewed the autopsy for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, said the gunpowder "supports the fact that this guy is reaching for the gun, if he has particulate matter in the wound."

13. Wilson said Brown was physically uncontrollable and "for lack of a better word, crazy." He said that during the confrontation, he was thinking: "He's gonna kill me. How do I survive?" Legal experts say police officers typically have wide latitude to use deadly force when they feel their safety is threatened.

Israel Not Such a Haven for Christians

We hear very little about the treatment of Christians in Israel.

Among the terrible persecution that Christians face in Muslim countries in the Middle East and elsewhere, Israel is usually portrayed as a beacon of tolerance where Christians are free to follow their faith without fear of being killed.

Everything is relative. Looking at what happens in Israel's neighbouring countries, where Christians are forced to convert to Islam, humiliate themselves by becoming second-class citizens and paying the extortionist jizya tax, die or flee, Israel may indeed seem a good place for them to live.

Israel has no policy of persecution against its Christian residents. They are part of a country that does not seek their physical destruction.

But, if we judge from a Western, rather than Middle Eastern, point of view, things may appear less rosy and Israel not the safe haven for Christians that it is fictionally depicted as.

Christianity is one of the recognised religions in Israel and, according to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, in 2011 over 161,000 Israeli citizens, 2.1% of the population, were Christian. About 80% of Christian residents of Israel are Arabs. Of the remainder, around 25,000 are Slavic Christians from the former Soviet Union who came to the country under the Law of Return, which has provided - at least until now - for Israeli citizenship if a person has a Jewish grandparent, and a smaller minority are Assyrians.

The Jerusalem Post and Charisma News report that Christians, despite their above-average level of education among the Israeli population, encounter major limitations when it comes to job opportunities and housing.

The employment rate for Christians is 54% : 63.8% for men and 45.3% for women. The national average is 75% and 66% respectively.

They are also victims of worse prejudice than that:

Another issue that worries the church is hate crimes against Christians, including vandalism of holy sites. Israeli police and authorities have worked with the church to reduce the number of hate crimes, but Pizzaballa says they are still prevalent.

“If you don’t denounce these issues when they happen, they will continue. We need to work on this,” he says.

The church’s concern for the “alarming level of ignorance about Christianity in Israel” is very real. Lutheran World Federation President Bishop Munib A. Youman—a Palestinian—says the Hebrew media propagates the bias and denounced travel restrictions for Christians from Bethlehem and Ramallah to Jerusalem.

“When I read in the Hebrew about Christianity, I wonder if I’m Christian,” he told The Jerusalem Post.

Messianic Jew Chaim Goldberg confirms that in Israel, where he lives, he found much ignorance about the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments, and much hostility to the very mention of the name Yeshua (Jesus).

Negative feelings towards Christianity and in extreme cases hate of Christians are not uncommon among the Jewish population of Israel.

There have been many reports, as well as videos, of the intolerance displayed towards Christians and the attacks on churches and monasteries in Israel.

Although most Israeli politicians have spoken out against the mounting attacks on non-Jewish places of worship, a senior Vatican official recently accused the government of failing to respond adequately to protect Christian sites.

Fr Pierbattista Pizzaballa, who as Custodian of the Holy Land is charged with overseeing Christian sites on behalf of the Vatican, also criticized an educational culture in Israel that he said encouraged Jewish children to treat Christians with "contempt".

Warning of a growing sense of persecution among followers of the faith, he said that life for many Christians in Israel was growing "intolerable".

Earlier this month the door of a famous Trappist monastery in the town of Latroun was set on fire, while earlier this year the 11th century Monastery of the Cross in Jerusalem was also vandalised.

In both cases anti-Christian slogans reading "Death to Christians" and "Jesus is a monkey" were daubed across the buildings.

Although such incidents are the work of a minority, Christian clergymen who walk the winding streets of Jerusalem's old city say they are spat at and taunted by ultra-Orthodox Jews and their children on an almost daily basis.

Fr Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Vatican's Custodian of the Holy Land, and fellow senior clergymen of other Christian denominations protested the failure of the police to identify the culprits behind the incidents.

But, they say, the most important issue is that Israel has failed to address the practice of some ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools that teach children it is a doctrinal obligation to abuse anyone in Christian Holy Orders they meet in public.

In an unusually outspoken interview with Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, he denounced the failure of the political system to address blatantly anti-Christian acts, particularly those carried out by prominent radical politicians.

Earlier this year, Michael Ben Ari, an Israeli legislator, publicly ripped up a copy of the New Testament in the country's parliament, the Knesset, and threw it into a rubbish bin after denouncing it as an "abhorrent" book.

A second legislator called for Bibles to be burnt.

Although Mr Ben Ari was criticised by the Knesset's speaker, he faced no official sanction despite protests from the church.

"Such a serious thing occurs and no one does anything," Fr Pizzaballa said.

"In practice, it negates our existence here."

Before and during Pope Francis' visit to the Holy Land in May this year, acts of aggression against Christian sites and symbols, abuses and threats by Jews became particularly frequent and intense.

Christians are the innocent victims of the two warring factions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: they are the only ones who don’t use violence but are caught in the crossfire.

This subject is now topical, as the Israeli government has approved a controversial new bill declaring Israel to be a "Jewish state":

Israel is poised to pass one of the most divisive laws in its 66-year history, a bill that would declare it the homeland of the Jewish people only -- and further alienate its Arab minority.

Political infighting over the measure is already threatening to tear apart Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's governing coalition.

The legislation, which is seen as compromising equality by differentiating between Jewish and non-Jewish citizens in enshrining some symbolic rights to the Jewish people, could also have long-term practical ramifications for Israeli democracy and jurisprudence.

Whether the bill might or not have negative consequences for non-Jews, including Christians, will be explored in another article.

1/4 Brits Want All Immigrants Sent Back

A new report, "How to talk about immigration", contains some interesting statistics.

It was published by British Future, that describes itself as "an independent, non-partisan thinktank engaging people’s hopes and fears about integration and migration, opportunity and identity, so that we share a confident and welcoming Britain, inclusive and fair to all."

That description belies the "non-partisan" label, as we know what the socialist-shibboleth words "welcoming, inclusive and fair" actually mean. And reading the paper, whose authors declare to be shocked by some poll results it reports, confirms its partisan nature: if you are impartial, you should refrain from emotional involvement, which in itself shows that you have something at stake.

This is what shocks them. On page 17: asked what they think about the statement “The government should insist that all immigrants should return to the countries they came from, whether they’re here legally or illegally”, 25% of all UK respondents said they agree, 52% disagree.

One out of four is an impressive proportion, especially if you consider that the repatriation would be for all immigrants, legal and illegal, and given the current climate of fear of expressing opinions that the report's authors classify as "rejectionist": much nicer to be classified "liberal", which in the deceptive lingo the Left has imposed on all of us doesn't really mean - as it should - a defender of the freedom of the individual from the power of the state (the meaning intended by the creators of the term and its general philosophy), but a socialist or communist, namely its diametrically opposite. Leftists don't like to be called by their proper names: Marxist, socialist, Trotskyist, Maoist, communist, anarchist. They prefer the stolen moniker "liberal", even though - nay, exactly because - it's totally inaccurate.

But the opinion surveys carried out by ICM, Ipsos MORI and YouGov, on which the immigration report is based, have other good, indeed better, news. On page 16: over two thirds, namely 67%, of people interviewed disagree with “In an increasingly borderless world, we should welcome anyone who wants to come to Britain and not deter them with border controls”, while 14% agree.

England Calling comments:

Public rhetoric about immigration is rapidly hardening. There will come a tipping point where the rhetoric has departed so far from the politically correct position that serious action to restrict immigration will occur because the stretch between rhetoric and action will become too great to sustain in a society where governments are elected.

A party political bidding process on the subject of immigration is already taking place and there will come a point where serious action has to follow or there will be a very real chance that either one or more of the mainstream parties will become irrelevant and be superseded, or members of the mainstream parties will wrest control of these parties from their pc indoctrinated leadership and adopt a policy on immigration closer to what the public wants.

H/t to David Brown