Silence of the Shepherds

Why is it that Catholic bishops seem to be plumping for Muslims? Why do they issue statements about Islam that are dishonest and misleading? Why do they appear to be so intent on protecting the image of Islam? If you’ve asked yourself these questions, you’re not alone. Given current events and the historical record of Islam’s aggressive campaigns against the Christian West, the rational thinker could be forgiven for believing that the leaders of the Christian world might just want to pay a bit more attention to contemporary anti-Christian violence — thousands of terror attacks, beheadings, stabbings, kidnappings, rapes, torching of churches and Christian-owned businesses — committed by Muslims, in the name of Islam.

Instead, most of the world’s Catholic bishops (with some heroic exceptions, such as Ignatius Joseph III Younan, patriarch of the Syriac Catholic Church of Antioch, and Jean-Clément Jeanbart, Melkite Greek Catholic archbishop of Aleppo), when they’re not extolling the virtues of Islam as a “religion of peace,” can be found counseling their flocks against so-called Islamophobia — anti-Islam sentiment, bias, or violence — typically in the immediate aftermath of a Muslim-perpetrated act of terror or instance of anti-Christian persecution.

For example, in May, after Muslim militants in the Philippines burned down the Cathedral of Mary Help of Christians, murdered more than a hundred Catholics, and held a dozen others hostage, Bishop Edwin de la Peña y Angot of the Marawi prelature worried out loud that the ensuing anti-Muslim sentiments might damage interreligious dialogue. “Some of the natural biases that Christians have against Muslims will be stirred up again,” he said in an interview (Zenit, June 9). “Interfaith dialogue is a very fragile process and these incidents can destroy the foundation that we have built.” About anti-Christian sentiments among Muslims, the bishop was silent.

"What makes Bach so successful among the Japanese?"

Uwe Siemon-Netto, "J. S. Bach in Japan" (First Things, June 2000). What an amazing article! Here are a few teasers ...

Twenty-five years ago when there was still a Communist East Germany, I interviewed several boys from Leipzig’s Thomanerchor, the choir once led by Johann Sebastian Bach. Many of those children came from atheistic homes. “Is it possible to sing Bach without faith?” I asked them. “Probably not,” they replied, “but we do have faith. Bach has worked as a missionary among all of us.” During a recent journey to Japan I discovered that 250 years after his death Bach is now playing a key role in evangelizing that country, one of the most secularized nations in the developed world....

... “In their frenetic pursuit of production, speculation, and consumption,” Repp said, “the older Japanese have provided their offspring exclusively with materialistic values. But the youngsters are yearning for something more. The result is an enormous gap between the generations; they are no longer able to communicate with one another.”

... ”What people need in this situation is hope in the Christian sense of the word, but hope is an alien idea here,” says the renowned organist Masaaki Suzuki, founder and conductor of the Bach Collegium Japan. He is the driving force behind the “Bach boom” sweeping Japan during its current period of spiritual impoverishment. “Our language does not even have an appropriate word for hope,” Suzuki says. “We either use ibo, meaning desire, or nozomi, which describes something unattainable.” After every one of the Bach Collegium’s performances Suzuki is crowded on the podium by non-Christian members of the audience who wish to talk to him about topics that are normally taboo in Japanese society—death, for example. “And then they inevitably ask me to explain to them what ‘hope’ means to Christians.” ...

Japan’s Bach boom does, however, have one baffling aspect: how is it possible that melodies and rhythms from eighteenth-century Germany should please people of an entirely alien culture thousands of miles to the east? Tokyo musicologists have come up with an astonishing answer: Bach’s appeal to today’s Japanese is directly linked to a Spaniard’s first attempt to evangelize their ancestors 450 years ago.

... Believers were crucified, burned at the stake, tortured to death, or hanged upside-down over cesspools to intensify their suffering. Few Japanese were aware of this sinister aspect of their history until last year, when the Tobu art gallery in Tokyo commemorated the 450th anniversary of Francis Xaviér’s arrival with a massive exhibition spread over three floors.

The enormous crowds filing through this show were horrified by the cruelties its images portrayed. But there was one thing they did not learn at the Tobu Gallery: Western music managed to survive the persecution. The Jesuits had introduced Gregorian chant to Japan and built organs from bamboo pipes.... By the time Christianity was totally outlawed in Japan in the early seventeenth century, elements of Gregorian chant had infiltrated Japan’s traditional folk music. That influence remained strong enough to help Johann Sebastian Bach’s music sweep across the island nation more than four centuries later.

This explains the amazing success of Bach’s collected works, which were published by Sogakukan, a Tokyo company, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the composer’s death. This collection of fifteen volumes, including 156 CDs accompanied by books with the original lyrics in German and Latin plus their Japanese translations, cost a staggering $3,000 each. Within weeks the first edition of five thousand copies was sold out.

The collection’s editor, Tesuo O’Hara, described himself as one of Christianity’s sympathizers, though not a believer. He could have fooled me. “What makes Bach so successful among the Japanese?” I asked him. O’Hara replied, “Bach gives us hope when we are afraid; he gives us courage when we despair; he comforts us when we are tired; he makes us pray when we are sad; and he makes us sing when we are full of joy.”

[Hat tip E. Echeverria]

We Are [Are Not] The World.

A courier pigeon from Guy Noir came flying in my open window this afternoon with a message from last October. Not sure what happened here, though the weather has been unseasonably warm of late.

So back on October 15, 2016 Noir apparently wrote this message linking to an article by James V. Schall, S.J., "On Universal Citizenship" (The Catholic Thing, October 11, 2016). Noir's handwriting was barely legible (was he back to nipping that bourbon again before breakfast?). In a scrawled hand, he wrote:

The fundamental difference in trad vs modern Catholics: is modern man at enmity with God? Fr Schall hits the nail on the head in such a single, graceful paragraph no one even notices or hears the "bam!" of impact.

Here are the key excerpts:

From high over the planet in a space capsule, all boundaries on earth disappear. It looks like one unified system below....

Why would it not be a good thing, many ask, if we discarded the political frontiers? We could all be citizens of the same world-government....

Mankind is tired of all this violence. It causes wars. Wars are caused by distinctions, by differing religions, by racism, by poverty, by genderism, by property. Let everyone have access to everything. We can eliminate evil. This is the “right” of every world citizen if given his due.

Above all, no set “doctrines” exist, no “sins,” except for the denial of world citizenship without restrictions....

Yes, we are no longer Gentiles or Jews, Romans or Greeks, barbarians or civilized, Christians or Muslims or Hindus, or Chinese. Nothing is above us. Nothing is below us. We are impatient. We have waited long enough! We are at home everywhere. Nowhere is alien to us.

I look at these claims as a reader of Augustine. He already understood most of these things in the fifth century after Christ. He thought them all mostly true – but only after this life. Here, we are in a vale of tears, a broken world. We are not asked to save the world, but to save our souls in a world mostly at odds with what it means to save our souls.

We are given commandments to keep, not to oppose. The only “universal citizenship” is in the City of God begun in this world following the plan of divine providence, but completed in the next. The meaning of our times is straightforward. We refuse to accept the world for which we were created. What we see about us is the universal citizenship of our collective refusal. [emphasis added]

"Why Saint Thomas Aquinas Opposed Open Borders"

Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D., discussing this passage from the Summa Theologiae, writes (Catholic Family News, January 31, 2017):

Every nation has the right to distinguish, by country of origin, who can migrate to it and apply appropriate immigration policies, according to the great medieval scholar and saint Thomas Aquinas.

In a surprisingly contemporary passage of his Summa Theologica, Aquinas noted that the Jewish people of Old Testament times did not admit visitors from all nations equally, since those peoples closer to them were more quickly integrated into the population than those who were not as close.

Some antagonistic peoples were not admitted at all into Israel due to their hostility toward the Jewish people.

The Law “prescribed in respect of certain nations that had close relations with the Jews,” the scholar noted, such as the Egyptians and the Idumeans, “that they should be admitted to the fellowship of the people after the third generation.”

Citizens of other nations “with whom their relations had been hostile,” such as the Ammonites and Moabites, “were never to be admitted to citizenship.”

“The Amalekites, who were yet more hostile to them, and had no fellowship of kindred with them, were to be held as foes in perpetuity,” Aquinas observed.

For the scholar, it seemed sensible to treat nations differently, depending on the affinity of their cultures with that of Israel as well as their historic relations with the Jewish people.

In his remarkably nuanced commentary, Aquinas also distinguished among three types of immigrants in the Israel of the Old Testament.

First were “the foreigners who passed through their land as travelers,” much like modern day visitors with a travel visa.

Second were those who “came to dwell in their land as newcomers,” seemingly corresponding to resident aliens, perhaps with a green card, living in the land but not with the full benefits of citizenship.

A third case involved those foreigners who wished “to be admitted entirely to their fellowship and mode of worship.” Even here, dealing with those who wished to integrate fully into the life and worship of Israel required a certain order, Aquinas observed. “For they were not at once admitted to citizenship: just as it was law with some nations that no one was deemed a citizen except after two or three generations.”

“The reason for this was that if foreigners were allowed to meddle with the affairs of a nation as soon as they settled down in its midst,” Aquinas logically reasoned, “many dangers might occur, since the foreigners not yet having the common good firmly at heart might attempt something hurtful to the people.”

In other words, Aquinas taught that total integration of immigrants into the life, language, customs and culture (including worship, in this case) was necessary for full citizenship.

It requires time for someone to learn which issues affect the nation and to make them their own, Aquinas argued. Those who know the history of their nation and have lived in it, working for the common good, are best suited to participate in decision-making about its future.

It would be dangerous and unjust to place the future of a nation in the hands of recent arrivals who do not fully understand the needs and concerns of their adoptive home.

When facing contemporary problems, modern policy makers can often benefit from the wisdom of the great saints and scholars who have dealt with versions of the same issues in ages past.

Aquinas’ reflections reveal that similar problems have existed for centuries—indeed, millennia—and that distinguishing prudently between nations and cultures doesn’t automatically imply prejudice or unfair discrimination.

Book review: Pierre Manent's Beyond Radical Secularism

Fr. John McCloskey, Review of Beyond Radical Secularism, by Pierre Manent (St. Augustine's Press, 2016) 

Beyond Radical Secularism was originally published in Europe in the fall of 2015, when it caused quite a ruckus, and became even more relevant with the Nov. 13, 2015, incident of terrorism in Paris. The author, Pierre Manent, is a Frenchman who wrote the book after the earlier terrorist attack in France the previous January.

Manent's main thesis is that radical secularism does not have the capacity to counter the challenge presented in our era by Islam.

Although he believes that the threat posed by Islamist fanatics requires a resolute response, security measures alone are insufficient to protect the French (and European) way of life and to assimilate the large numbers of Muslim immigrants in their midst.

Manent believes that the several-centuries-old Western tradition of the secular state should be maintained and cherished. However, he argues that trying to "solve" the problem of Muslim assimilation in France by attempting to turn them into model French secularists as adrift morally and religiously as many of those they find themselves among will fail. Instead, France must recognize and accept its Christian heritage and culture, as well as its small-but-significant Jewish presence, as foundational to its national identity.

So what is the solution?

Manent reaches for a way of recognizing and defending European roots while retaining religious tolerance.

In Manent's view, Muslim immigrants seeking to make a home in Europe must make their peace with having moved beyond the borders of sharia (Islamic law) and to a certain extent be willing to shift mindsets. However, the established French customs, mores and traditions that make up the structure of a healthy culture have already been rejected by the radical secularist. That's why Manent insists that France must rediscover her national form, which at some point will require secession from the European Union. Meanwhile, he recommends forbidding Muslims in France from taking money from foreign powers, whether governments or religious organizations. This would better establish their identity as French Muslims.

His second major recommendation is to invite Muslim immigrants to enter into French common life. After all, in order to enter into the fullness of French citizenship or identity, they need to contribute to the country's well-being in ways that go beyond the economic benefits of a young labor pool.

Manent's many specific observations and proposed solutions can be debated without affecting the force of his central insight.

"Without vision, the people perish," says one of those outmoded Judeo-Christian books that the French secularists — and radical secularists elsewhere — have tossed into the rubbish heap of history.

Whether the Western people perish in the near or intermediate future will likely depend a lot on what identity they embrace.

First appeared on National Catholic Register in October 2016.

[Hat tip to Sir A. S.]

'Profiling' is wrong because ...?

• In 732 A.D. a Muslim Army, which was moving on Paris, was defeated and turned back at Tours, France, by Charles Martell.
• In 1571 A.D. a Muslim Army/Navy was defeated by the Italians and Austrians as they tried to cross the Mediterranean to attack southern Europe in the Battle of Lepanto.
• In 1683 A.D. a Turkish Muslim Army, attacking Eastern Europe, was finally defeated in the Battle of Vienna by German and Polish Christian Armies.
• In 1968, Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed by a Muslim male.
• In 1972, at the Munich Olympics, Israeli athletes were kidnapped and massacred by Muslim males.
• In 1972, a Pan Am 747 was hijacked and eventually diverted to Cairo where a fuse was lit on final approach. Shortly after landing it was blown up by Muslim males.
• In 1973, a Pan Am 707 was destroyed in Rome, with 33 people killed, when it was attacked with grenades by Muslim males.
• In 1979, the US embassy in Iran was taken over by Muslim males.
• During the 1980's a number of Americans were kidnapped in Lebanon by Muslim males.
• In 1983, the US Marine barracks in Beirut was blown up by Muslim males.
• In 1985, the cruise ship Achille Lauro was hijacked and a 70-year old American passenger was murdered and thrown overboard in his wheelchair by Muslim males.
• In 1985, TWA flight 847 was hijacked at Athens , and a US Navy diver trying to rescue passengers was murdered by Muslim males.
• In 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was bombed by Muslim males.
• In 1993, the World Trade Center was bombed the first time by Muslim males.
• In 1998, the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed by Muslim males.
• On 9/11/01, four airliners were hijacked; two were used as missiles to take down the World Trade Centers and of the remaining two, one crashed into the US Pentagon and the other was diverted and crashed by the passengers. Thousands of people were killed by Muslim males.
• In 2002, the United States fought a war in Afghanistan against Muslim males.
• In 2002, reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and beheaded by - you guessed it - a Muslim male. (Plus two other American journalists who were just recently beheaded).
• In 2013, the Boston Marathon bombing resulted in 4 Innocent people, (including a child) being killed and 264 people injured by Muslim males.

The vast majority of Muslims, of course, are not terrorists but perfectly decent law-abiding and respectful citizens; regrettably, the vast majority of terrorists just happen to be professed Muslims.

And yet our TSA officers continue to conduct body cavity searches on little old nuns and grand mothers in wheelchairs in American airports, because we wouldn't dream of anyone thinking we were profiling minorities? Why? Because we are 'morally superior' to those like the Israeli's, who do profile and haven't had a single plane hijacked since 1968 (or before), the year of the infamous El Al Flight 426 hijacking in 1968, which doubled their resolve ("Never again!")?

Thomas Jefferson vs the Muslim Pirates

Back in the Spring of 2007, Christopher Hitchens published an interesting reflection entitled "Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates" in CJ - 'From the Magazine', which I believe stands for a magazine called "Conservative Judaism" (though check to be sure). More recently, Tom Henegham, an "international intelligence expert," posted a related piece entitled "History Lesson: Thomas Jefferson vs the Muslim World," which apparently came from an article entitled "History of the USA and Muslims" (NESARA - Republic Now, an 'awareness' blog, Marcy 10, 2016). I'm not sure of the ultimate source. But Snopes reports the contents are 'true' so those, at least, are apparently not controversial.

Here's the story:

When Jefferson saw there was no negotiating with Muslims, he formed what is the now the Marines (sea going soldiers). These Marines were attached to U. S. Merchant vessels. When the Muslims attacked U.S. merchant vessels, they were repulsed by armed soldiers, but there is more.

The Marines followed the Muslims back to their villages and killed every man, woman, and child in the village [This claim has no documentation, so it's accuracy may be questioned.] It didn't take long for the Muslims to leave U.S. Merchant vessels alone. English and French merchant vessels started running up our flag when entering the Mediterranean to secure safe travel.

Why the Marine Hymn Contains the Verse "… to the shores of Tripoli." This is very interesting and a must read piece of our history. It points out where we may be heading. Most Americans are unaware of the fact that over two hundred years ago, the United States had declared war on Islam and Thomas Jefferson led the charge!

At the height of the 18th century, Muslim pirates (the "Barbary Pirates") were the terror of the Mediterranean and a large area of the North Atlantic. They attacked every ship in sight and held the crews for exorbitant ransoms. Those taken hostage were subjected to barbaric treatment and wrote heart-breaking letters home, begging their government and family members to pay whatever their Mohammedan captors demanded.

These extortionists of the high seas represented the North African Islamic nations of Tripoli, Tunis, Morocco, and Algiers - collectively referred to as the Barbary Coast - and presented a dangerous and unprovoked threat to the new American Republic ..

Before the Revolutionary War, U.S. merchant ships had been under the protection of Great Britain. When the U.S. declared its independence and entered into war, the ships of the United States were protected by France. However, once the war was won, America had to protect its own fleets.

Thus, the birth of the U.S. Navy. Beginning in 1784, 17 years before he would become president, Thomas Jefferson became America's Minister to France. That same year, the U.S. Congress sought to appease its Muslim adversaries by following in the footsteps of European nations who paid bribes to the Barbary States rather than engaging them in war.

In July of 1785, Algerian pirates captured American ships, and the Dye of Algiers demanded an unheard-of ransom of $60,000. It was a plain and simple case of extortion, and Thomas Jefferson was vehemently opposed to any further payments. Instead, he proposed to Congress the formation of a coalition of allied nations who together could force the Islamic states into peace. A disinterested Congress decided to pay the ransom.

In 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams met with Tripoli's ambassador to Great Britain to ask by what right his nation attacked American ships and enslaved American citizens, and why Muslims held so much hostility towards America, a nation with which they had no previous contacts.

The two future presidents reported that Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja had answered that Islam "was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Quran that all nations who would not acknowledge their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Musselman (Muslim) who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise."

Despite this stunning admission of premeditated violence on non-Muslim nations, as well as the objections of many notable American leaders, including George Washington, who warned that caving in was both wrong and would only further embolden the enemy, for the following fifteen years the American government paid the Muslims millions of dollars for the safe passage of American ships or the return of American hostages. The payments in ransom and tribute amounted to over 20 percent of the United States government annual revenues in 1800.

Jefferson was disgusted. Shortly after his being sworn in as the third President of the United States in 1801, the Pasha of Tripoli sent him a note demanding the immediate payment of $225,000 plus $25,000 a year for every year forthcoming. That changed everything.

Jefferson let the Pasha know, in no uncertain terms, what he could do with his demand. The Pasha responded by cutting down the flagpole at the American consulate and declared war on the United States. Tunis, Morocco, and Algiers immediately followed suit. Jefferson, until now, had been against America raising a naval force for anything beyond coastal defense, but, having watched his nation be cowed by Islamic thuggery for long enough, decided that it was finally time to meet force with force.

He dispatched a squadron of frigates to the Mediterranean and taught the Muslim nations of the Barbary Coast a lesson he hoped they would never forget. Congress authorized Jefferson to empower U.S. ships to seize all vessels and goods of the Pasha of Tripoli and to "cause to be done all other acts of precaution or hostility as the state of war would justify".


When Algiers and Tunis, who were both accustomed to American cowardice and acquiescence, saw the newly independent United States had both the will and the right to strike back, they quickly abandoned their allegiance to Tripoli. The war with Tripoli lasted for four more years and raged up again in 1815. The bravery of the U.S. Marine Corps in these wars led to the line"...to the shores of Tripoli" in the Marine Hymn, and they would forever be known as "leathernecks" for the leather collars of their uniforms, designed to prevent their heads from being cut off by the Muslim scimitars when boarding enemy ships.

Islam, and what its Barbary followers justified doing in the name of their prophet and their god, disturbed Jefferson quite deeply. America had a tradition of religious tolerance. In fact Jefferson, himself, had co-authored the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, but fundamentalist Islam was like no other religion the world had ever seen. A religion based on supremacy, whose holy book not only condoned but mandated violence against unbelievers, was unacceptable to him. His greatest fear was that someday this brand of Islam would return and pose an even greater threat to the United States....

[Hat tip to J. Shepherd]

Pope Francis creates a new 'super dicastery' for "Promoting Integral Human Development"

Edward Pentin, "Pope Francis Creates New Dicastery for 'Promoting Integral Human Development'" (National Catholic Register, August 31, 2016).

A reader comments: "Despite all of the integral problems plaguing Holy Mother Church right now, Francis has decided that the most pressing of them is the need to "Promot[e] Integral Human Development" by way of creating a new Vatican organ to address it. Long story short, that Orwellian double-speak means creating a Ministry for Fugees (refugees)."

Doubtless, these are dire times.

[Hat tip to K.J.]

"The Clinton Foundation, that global laundromat for every overseas fortune."

James Pinkerton, "Globalism Hits a Brick Wall: Now, What Will Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Do?" (ValuBit News, August 30, 2016).  After providing a substantial historical lesson in Free Trade Orthodoxy and its alternatives, Pinkerton concludes:

... So now we come to a mega-question for 2016: How should we judge the sincerity of the two major-party candidates, Clinton or Trump, when they affirm their opposition to TPP? And how do we assess their attitude toward globalization, including immigration, overall? 

The future is, of course, unknown, but we can make a couple of points. 

First, it is true that many have questioned the sincerity of Hillary’s new anti-TPP stance, especially given the presence of such prominent free-traders as vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine and presidential transition-planning chief Ken Salazar. Moreover, there’s also Hillary’s own decades-long association with open-borders immigration policies, as well as past support for such trade bills as NAFTA, PNTR, and, of course, TPP. And oh yes, there’s the Clinton Foundation, that global laundromat for every overseas fortune; most of those billionaires are globalists par excellence—would a President Hillary really cross them? 

Second, since there’s still no way to see inside another person’s mind, the best we can do is look for external clues—by which we mean, external pressures. And so we might ask a basic question: Would the 45th president, whoever she or he is, feel compelled by those external pressures to keep their stated commitment to the voters? Or would they feel that they owe more to their elite friends, allies, and benefactors? 

As we have seen, Clinton has long chosen to surround herself with free traders and globalists. Moreover, she has raised money from virtually every bicoastal billionaire in America. 

So we must wonder: Will a new President Clinton really betray her own class—all those Davos Men and Davos Women—for the sake of middle-class folks she has never met, except maybe on a rope line? Would Clinton 45, who has spent her life courting the powerful, really stick her neck out for unnamed strangers—who never gave a dime to the Clinton Foundation? 

Okay, so what to make of Trump? He, too, is a fat-cat—even more of fat-cat, in fact, than Clinton. And yet for more than a year now, he has based his campaign on opposition to globalism in all its forms; it’s been the basis of his campaign—indeed, the basis of his base. And his campaign policy advisers are emphatic. According to Politico, as recently as August 30, Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro reiterated Trump’s opposition to TPP, declaring, "Any deal must increase the GDP growth rate, reduce the trade deficit, and strengthen the manufacturing base. "

So, were Trump to win the White House, he would come in with a much more solid anti-globalist mandate. 

Thus we can ask: Would a President Trump really cross his own populist-nationalist base by going over to the other side—to the globalists who voted, and donated, against him? If he did—if he repudiated his central platform plank—he would implode his presidency, the way that Bush 41 imploded his presidency in 1990 when he went back on his “read my lips, no new taxes” pledge. 

Surely Trump remembers that moment of political calamity well, and so surely, whatever mistakes he might make, he won’t make that one. 

To be sure, the future is unknowable. However, as we have seen, the past, both recent and historical, is rich with valuable clues.

[Hat tip to Sir A.S.]

Pinkerton: globalism hits a brick wall (What would Trump or Clinton do?)

James Pinkerton: Globalism Hits a Brick Wall: Now, What Will Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton Do? (ValuBit News, August 30, 2016).  After providing a substantial historical lesson in Free Trade Orthodoxy and its alternatives, Pinkerton writes:

... So now we come to a mega-question for 2016: How should we judge the sincerity of the two major-party candidates, Clinton or Trump, when they affirm their opposition to TPP? And how do we assess their attitude toward globalization, including immigration, overall? 

The future is, of course, unknown, but we can make a couple of points. 

First, it is true that many have questioned the sincerity of Hillary’s new anti-TPP stance, especially given the presence of such prominent free-traders as vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine and presidential transition-planning chief Ken Salazar. Moreover, there’s also Hillary’s own decades-long association with open-borders immigration policies, as well as past support for such trade bills as NAFTA, PNTR, and, of course, TPP. And oh yes, there’s the Clinton Foundation, that global laundromat for every overseas fortune; most of those billionaires are globalists par excellence—would a President Hillary really cross them? 

Second, since there’s still no way to see inside another person’s mind, the best we can do is look for external clues—by which we mean, external pressures. And so we might ask a basic question: Would the 45th president, whoever she or he is, feel compelled by those external pressures to keep their stated commitment to the voters? Or would they feel that they owe more to their elite friends, allies, and benefactors? 

As we have seen, Clinton has long chosen to surround herself with free traders and globalists. Moreover, she has raised money from virtually every bicoastal billionaire in America. 

So we must wonder: Will a new President Clinton really betray her own class—all those Davos Men and Davos Women—for the sake of middle-class folks she has never met, except maybe on a rope line? Would Clinton 45, who has spent her life courting the powerful, really stick her neck out for unnamed strangers—who never gave a dime to the Clinton Foundation? 

Okay, so what to make of Trump? He, too, is a fat-cat—even more of fat-cat, in fact, than Clinton. And yet for more than a year now, he has based his campaign on opposition to globalism in all its forms; it’s been the basis of his campaign—indeed, the basis of his base. And his campaign policy advisers are emphatic. According to Politico, as recently as August 30, Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro reiterated Trump’s opposition to TPP, declaring, "Any deal must increase the GDP growth rate, reduce the trade deficit, and strengthen the manufacturing base. "

So, were Trump to win the White House, he would come in with a much more solid anti-globalist mandate. 

Thus we can ask: Would a President Trump really cross his own populist-nationalist base by going over to the other side—to the globalists who voted, and donated, against him? If he did—if he repudiated his central platform plank—he would implode his presidency, the way that Bush 41 imploded his presidency in 1990 when he went back on his “read my lips, no new taxes” pledge. 

Surely Trump remembers that moment of political calamity well, and so surely, whatever mistakes he might make, he won’t make that one. 

To be sure, the future is unknowable. However, as we have seen, the past, both recent and historical, is rich with valuable clues.

[Hat tip to Sir A.S.]

Nigel Farage is now campaigning for Trump???

HERE, under the heading: "BREXIT Pioneer Destroys Hillary Clinton."

A quick look at ISIS' and al Queda's slick propaganda magazines: Dabiq and Inspire

You can download any of the first 15 issues of ISIS' magazine Dabiq [pictured above] HERE [PDF files]. Very telling. This is a serious magazine with articles on everything from Muslim theology to current events. Glossy color photos. A consistent, seamless Islam promoting terror for non-Muslims. Ugh.


Al Queda's counterpart, Inspire magazine [pictured above] features issues devoted to subjects like "assassination" outlining strategies intended to 'inspire' acts of terrorism. PDF files are also available online, and HERE is an an article by Wikipedia on the magazine.

See also Church Militant's panel discussion of these magazines and "The True Face of Islam" on their program Download HERE.

Any Muslim or non-Muslim who claims that Islam is a "religion of peace" has a major challenge on his hands in the face of these magazines and their stated views.

Putin vs. Obama: Who Occupies the High Ground?

Michael Matt, "Putin vs. Obama: Who Occupies the High Ground?" (The Remnant, August 20, 2016).


I realize this is anathema to the majority of both right- and left- wing US media. Russia is, in the public mind, the remnant of what Reagan called "the evil empire." Still, I have no idea why the U.S. is positioning its nuclear weapons increasingly closer to Russia and the Ukraine. Yes, I know about the amassing of Russian troops there. But that's hardly unprovoked. I frankly don't know what to think about Putin. I know of his nefarious KGB connections. I also know of his ostensible Christian connections and defense of public virtue. My hunch is that the chief reason he is demonized by the Western media is not because of the skeletons in his closet but because, like Trump, he is not 'owned' by the corporate interests of the international globalist financiers, like George Soros.

Non-Catholics who think Pope Francis is promoting a new world order with a one-world religion

Michael Snyder, "12 Times Pope Francis Has Openly Promoted a One World Religion or a New World Order" (INFOWARS, August 1, 2016). Certainly this needs to be taken with a grain of salt, though it is probably significant that this has become a topic so frequently touched upon by our current Pontiff that an established pattern is now able to be both illustrated and enumerated.

Jihad watch update: ascendant concerns

• Mordechai Kedar and David Yerushalmi, "Shari'a and Violence in American Mosques," Middle East Quarterly (Summer 2011), pp. 59-72:

  How great is the danger of extremist violence in the name of Islam in the United States? Recent congressional hearings into this question by Rep. Peter King (Republican of New York), chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, have generated a firestorm of controversy among his colleagues, the press, and the general public. Though similar hearings have taken place at least fourteen times since 2001.... To what extent are American Muslims, native-born as well as naturalized, being radicalized by Islamists? And what steps can those who are sworn to the protection of American citizenry take that will uncover and disrupt the plots of those willing to take up arms against others for the sake of jihad? Read more >>

• Gavin Boby, "What is a mosque?" (Video 1):

• "About Muslims and Islam" (What makes Islam so different?):

  "Don't judge the Muslims that you know by Islam and don't judge Islam by the Muslims that you know."
  
  Since we hear from so many critics who either don't take the time to read this site, or simply can't understand the distinction between Islam and Muslims, we thought it best to bring together in one place what we have said in so many others over the years.
  
  Islam is an ideology - a set of ideas. It is not defined by what any Muslim wants it to be, but by what it is. No ideology is above critique - particularly one that explicitly seeks political and social dominance over every person on the planet. Neither is it entitled to human rights, which apply to individuals.
  
  Muslims are individuals. We passionately believe that no Muslim should be harmed, harassed, stereotyped or treated any differently anywhere in the world solely on account of their status as a Muslim.
  
  As an ideology, Islam is not necessarily entitled to equal respect and acceptance. Ideas do not carry equal moral weight. The feelings or number of those who believe does not make the idea true or good. Bad ideas can and should be challenged before they produce bad consequences.

• Peter McLoughlin, Easy Meat: Inside Britain's Grooming Gang Scandal (New English Review Press, 2016):

  Peter McLoughlin spent years believing the Leftist narrative, namely it was 'a racist myth' that organised Muslim groups in Britain and the Netherlands ( grooming gangs ) were luring white schoolgirls into a life of prostitution. But in 2009 he first encountered people who said their children had been groomed like this. These informants had non-white people in their immediate and extended family, and were thus unlikely to be racists. So McLoughlin dug deeper and what he found shocked him: there were mounds of evidence that social workers, police officers, Muslim organisations, journalists and even some Members of Parliament must have known about these grooming gangs for decades, and they had turned a blind-eye to these crimes. He also came across references to incidents where any proof had since vanished. McLoughlin spent several years uncovering everything he could and documenting this scandal before the evidence disappeared. He demonstrates that the true nature of this grooming phenomenon was known about more than 20 years ago.

• David Wood, "Islamic Rape Gangs in the UK":

• "Gavin Boby: Muslim rapists - majority or minority?" (April 13, 2016):

• Gavin Boby, "Brussels 2012: Stopping Mosque Building in Europe - How & Why":

• David Wood, "Dealing with Death Threats":

[Hat tip to L.S.]

Brexit and the Decline of the West

The White Cliffs of Dover, England, as seen from Cap Gris Nez, France
Roberto de Mattei, "Brexit and the Decline of the West" (Corrispondenza Romana, June 29, 2016, via Rorate Caeli, June 30, 2016): 

The British referendum of June 23rd (Brexit) has sanctioned the definitive collapse of a myth: the dream of “a “Europe without frontiers”, built on the ruins of its national States.

The Europeanist project, launched by the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, had in itself the seeds of its own self-destruction. It was completely illusory to expect the implementation of an economic, monetary union before a political union; or, even worse, to envisage using monetary integration in order to establish political unification. The plan, though, to reach political unity by extirpating those spiritual roots that bind men together was even more illusory. The Charter of Fundamental Human Rights of the European Union approved by the European Council in Nice in December 2000, not only expunges any reference to Europe’s religious roots, but has in itself a visceral negation of the natural and Christian order. Article 21, by introducing the prohibition of any discrimination related to “sexual tendencies”, contains, in nuce, the legalization of the crime of homophobia and pseudo-homosexual marriage.

The “Constitution” project worked on by the Convention on the Future of Europe between 2002 and 2005, was rejected by two popular referendums, in France on May 29th 2005 and in Holland on June 1st of the same year. Nevertheless, the Eurocrats never gave up. After two years of “reflection”, the Lisbon Treaty, which should have been ratified exclusively through parliament, was approved by the EU Heads of State and Government on December 13th 2007. The only country called upon to voice their opinion on the referendum, Ireland, rejected the Treaty on June 13th 2008, but unanimity being necessary from the signatory States, a new referendum was imposed on the Irish, which thanks to very strong economic and media pressure, finally gave the positive result.

During its short life, the European Union, incapable of defining foreign policies and ordinary security measures, has turned itself into an ideological tribune, which churns out resolutions and directives, pushing national Governments to free themselves of traditional family values. Inside the EU, Great Britain, pressed on the brakes to slow down the Franco-German plan for a European “Super-State”, but instead, pressed-down on the accelerator by diffusing, on a European scale, it own “civic conquests” from abortion to euthanasia, from adoptions by homosexuals to genetic engineering. This moral deviation was accompanied in England by [a sort of] multicultural drunkenness, culminating in the election of the first Muslim Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan in May 2016.

However, even in 2009, the then conservative Mayor, Boris Johnson, invited all Londoners to participate, at least for a day, in the Ramadan fast and then attend the Mosque at sunset. More recently, the Prime Minister, David Cameron, contending the American presidential candidate, Donald Trump, said he was: «proud of representing a country which is one of the most successful multi-racial, multi-faith, multi-ethnic countries in the world» (Huffpost Politics, 15th May 2016).

Brexit certainly signifies a surge of pride for a nation that has a long history of antique tradition. Nevertheless, the identity and freedom of a nation are founded on respect for the Divine and natural Law and no political action can restore the freedom a country has lost on account of its own moral decadence. The ‘no’ to the European Union was a protest against the arrogance of an oligarchy which claims to decide - without the people and against the people - the interests of the people.

Even so, the strong powers which impose Brussels’ bureaucratic rules are the same ones that are undoing the West’s moral rules. Those who accept the LGTB dictatorship lose the right to claim their own Independence Day, as they have already renounced their own identity. Those who renounce defending the moral boundaries of a nation, lose the right to defend its borders, as they have already accepted the “fluid” conception of a global society. Under this aspect, Great Britain’s’ self-dissolution itinerary follows a dynamic that Brexit cannot arrest and which, rather, may be part of another stage.

Scotland is already threatening a new referendum to leave the United Kingdom, followed by Northern Ireland. Further, when the Queen, who is 90 years old, leaves the throne, it is not excluded that some countries of the Commonwealth will declare their independence. Someone said that Queen Elizabeth had been crowned the Empress of the British Empire and will die as the head of ‘a Little England’. This itinerary of political disunion though, has as its final outcome the republicanising of England.

In 2017 the three hundredth centenary of the founding of London’s Great Lodge, the mother of modern Freemasonry, will be commemorated. Yet, Freemasonry, which in the XVIII and XIX centuries used Protestant and Deist England to diffuse its revolutionary programme throughout the world, today seems determined to ditch the English Monarchy, in which it sees one of the last symbols still surviving from the Medieval order. After Brexit, scenarios of disintegration may open up in Greece as a result of the explosion of the economic and social crisis; in France, where the urban peripheries are menaced by a Jihadist civil war; in Italy as a result of the unstoppable migratory invasion; in east Europe, where Putin is ready to profit from the weakness of European institutions to take control of eastern Ukraine and exercise military pressure on the Baltic States.

The British General, Alexander Richard Shirreff, former Vice-Commander of NATO from 2011 to 2014, foresaw in the form of a novel, (2017 War with Russia. An Urgent Warning From Senior Military Command, Coronet, London 2016), the break-out of a nuclear war between Russia and the West in May 2017, a date which reminds Catholics of something. How to forget, on this first centenary of Fatima, Our Lady’s words, that many nations will be annihilated and Russia will be the instrument God will use to punish impenitent mankind?

Faced with these prospectives the conservative parties themselves are split. If Marine Le Pen in France, Geert Wilders in Holland and Matteo Salvini in Italy are asking for their Countries’ exit from the European Union and are placing their hopes in Putin, the positions of the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban and the Polish leader Jaroslaw are very different; they see in the European Union and NATO a barrier to the Russian expansion.

The Decline of the West ((Der Untergang des Abendlandes) by Oswald Spengler appeared in 1917. One hundred years later, the German writer’s prophecy seems about to be fulfilled. “The West” , before being a geographic space, is the name of a civilization. This civilization is Christian Civilization, heir to the classical Greco-Roman culture which from Europe spread to the Americas and its faraway offshoots in Asia and Africa. It had its baptism the night of St. Paul’s dream, when God gave the Apostle the order to turn his back on Asia and “go through Macedonia” to proclaim the good news (Acts, XVI, 6-18). Rome was the place of St. Peter and Paul’s martyrdom and the centre of the civilization that was emerging. Spengler, convinced of the inexorable decline of the West, recalls a sentence from Seneca: Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt (Destiny guides those who want to be guided and drags those who don’t want to be [guided]”.

We however, counter Spengler’s relativist and determinist vision with that of St. Augustine, who, while the barbarians were attacking Hippone, announced the victory in history of the City of God, continuously guided by Divine Providence. Man is the artifice of his own destiny and with the help of God the twilight of civilization can be transformed into the dawn of a resurrection. Nations are mortal, but God never dies and the Church never wanes.

[Translation: contributor, Francesca Romana] 

As one our readers observes: "Last two paragraphs are the missing pieces In the current Catholic Church's claims for its own existence. Without stressing them she has no business doling out morals. But her leaders now, overawed by multiculturalism, don't seem to get it."

[Hat tip to JM]

The common allies (and enemies) of Brexit and Vatican II

"The Theology of Brexit" (Old Life, June 30, 2016) sees Massimo Faggioli as reminding us that Vatican II and the European Union are part of the same cultural moment; that the ties between Vatican II and the EU are even closer in the minds of traditionalist Roman Catholics; and points to Damon Linker's suggestion that aspects of Angela Merkel’s responsibility for the circumstances that led to Brexit could also be applied to Pope Francis, who is perhaps the post-Vatican II pope that most embodies Vatican II.

[Hat tip to JM]

"A deep dread" - Brexit and Pope Francis's Synod

The underground correspondent we keep on retainer in an Atlantic seaboard city that knows how to keep its secrets, Guy Noir - Private Eye, just sent me an email, of all things, rather than a message by carrier pigeon. The subject line carried the words: "Crowns, halos, and 'convergence[s] around a new consensus.'" Hmmmmm ... Okay ....

Then the dreadful words: "A deep dread." What could he mean?

Farther down in his email was a link to an article about which he offered the following prefatory remarks:

This amazes me, for it seems a perfectly materialized example of the liberal reluctance/inability to grasp non-liberal thinking. And of these CRUX-type Catholics' breezy unawareness of the conflation of religion and politics.

For the liberal perspective, lack of compromise or convergence is always bad -- unless, of course, the compromise involves a cause close to the liberal heart. "You won't even discuss it!" is seen as a damning indictment, whereas it is actually an insistence that things will be put on the table, whether the other side wants to compromise or not. It is the same old, "It's the journey, not the destination' thing writ large. "Questions, not answers," versus, "The Way, the Truth, The Life." And depending on which orientation you chose, the Gospels themselves provide material for two rather different religious approaches. Which is evident listening to the homilies of the Pope.

The article Mr. Noir was referencing was a new piece by Austen Ivereigh entitled, "What Brexit Britain could have learned from Pope Francis's synod" (CRUX, June 23, 2016). Lord, have mercy; here's what he wrote (emphasis Noir's):

Now I know why I felt a deep dread when the British prime minister, David Cameron, announced an in-out European Union referendum. Britain, the third most powerful country in Europe and the fifth largest economy in the world, has voted by a thin majority to leave, dealing the EU a massive blow....

This Referendum should never have been called. Rather than enabling a solution to real problems, it has divided our nation, forcing an artificial polarization that has ended in a disastrous outcome.

Imagine if, rather than call a two-year synod to deliberate on the issue, Pope Francis back in October 2014 had simply asked the Catholic bishops to vote on Cardinal Walter Kasper’s Orthodox-inspired proposal for a pathway back to the Eucharist for the divorced and remarried.

And imagine if, after a couple of weeks of debate, they were given a ballot paper that asked for a straight “yes” or “no”.

Here’s what would have happened. Rather than leading to a majority consensus reflected in a new, more pastoral approach to marriage and family, the church hierarchy would have descended into an ugly tribal shouting-match ending in bitter division and frustration....

Fortunately for the Church, that’s not what happened. However tense the process, the synod never polarized, and a third possibility emerged that produced a new, pastoral flexibility without eroding doctrine. [Noir: But of course it did trigger erosion of doctrine, every bit as much as Vatican II. In fact, the word choice alone gives away the game. Erosion is gradual and does not happen during an event. It is not 'produced' but 'caused.' The distinction is one a liberal mind is liable to pass over.]

... Francis, the master of Ignatian spiritual discernment [Noir: LOL! Yes, and St. John Paul II "the Great," and whatever superlative admirers are currently assigned to Ronald Reagan], knew that if the synod split and both sides grew further apart, it was a sign that the Devil had the ball; but that if convergence around a new consensus were built, the Good Spirit was in play....

The Big Lie: Protestant & Secular Texbook Traditions About The Irish Rebellion of 1641

Anne Barbeau Gardiner, "The Big Lie: Ireland, 1641" (New Oxford Review, May 2016) - a book review of The Shadow of a Year: The 1641 Rebellion in Irish History and Memory, by John Gibney (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013): 

If to rob a man of his good name for a lifetime is to rob him of his most precious possession, what is it then to rob an entire people of their good name for centuries? The Big Lie about the 1641 rebellion was just such a robbery of the Irish people. It stands at the root of Irish suffering for centuries, even casting a shadow across the Irish Famine of the 1840s. John Gibney’s scholarly book The Shadow of a Year offers an illuminating account of this grave injustice.

Gibney begins by giving the Protestant version of the rebellion. In Ulster, the Irish had recently been dispossessed of their land by English and Scottish settlers, and on October 23, 1641, a mob broke out against these settlers. In the official Protestant account, religion was the reason for the uprising, and it was immediately depicted as a sectarian genocide organized by Irish Catholics. Henry Jones, Anglican dean of Kilmore, said the rebellion had been caused by the “innate bigotry and brutality” of the Irish and ordered by the Pope and Jesuits. Jones headed a commission that collected thousands of depositions about what happened — but these depositions were only from Protestants. In March 1642 he presented lurid extracts from these depositions to the English Parliament, published as A Remonstrance. Thus, says Gibney, the “atrocity propaganda” was first printed in England “for an English audience.”

The Protestant account was used to justify the Cromwellian confiscations of Irish lands from 1649 to 1653, which amounted, Gibney says, to “perhaps half of the available land in Ireland.” In 1649 Cromwell justified the atrocities his New Model Army committed against Catholics in Drogheda and Wexford as a “righteous judgment” for the rebellion of 1641. When the Catholic bishops of Ireland protested that the army seemed bent on “exterminating” the Irish, Cromwell replied that “the massacres of 1641 had yet to be avenged.”

Thus, much depended on the truth of what had taken place. Despite Catholic denials, the Protestant version of 1641 would henceforth be used to deprive Catholics of their lands and also — for the next 150 years — of religious liberty. The 1652 Act for the Settling of Ireland exempted from pardon all Catholic priests on the ground that they had abetted the “murders or massacres” of Protestants in 1641.

Only a tiny fraction of the depositions taken by Henry Jones were about atrocities, yet Sir John Temple, in his book The Irish Rebellion (1646), presented these tales as representative of the whole. Temple’s account was still being described in 1887 as “an almost infallible witness against Catholicism,” even though it was composed, Gibney says, chiefly “to bolster the case for a prospective reconquest of Ireland under the auspices of the English parliament.”

From the first, Protestant historians gave a wildly implausible death toll of those murdered by Catholics in 1641. In March 1643 the Irish Lord Justices put it at 154,000, a figure taken from the “unsubstantiated assertion of Robert Maxwell, an Armagh clergyman of Scottish extraction.” They used this number to block Parliament from coming to terms with Irish Catholics, since that might have saved their lands. Many gave a death toll of 300,000 based on Temple’s Irish Rebellion, but what Temple wrote was that 300,000 English Protestants had been murdered, died of other causes, or been “expelled out of their habitations.” There is a big difference between being forced out of your home and being murdered. Catholics denied that there had even been 100,000 Protestants in Ireland at the time. Meanwhile, in 1649 the Puritan poet John Milton — a rabid enemy of Catholics — put the number of those massacred in 1641 at 600,000.

This Big Lie became the foundational myth of colonial Ireland: It was on the basis of the 1641 rebellion that the 1662 Act of Settlement upheld the Cromwellian confiscations. Also in 1662 the Irish Parliament passed an act ordering the Anglican Church of Ireland to commemorate 1641 with an annual sermon on October 23. The state church added new prayers about 1641, incorporating them into the Irish Book of Common Prayer in 1666, where they remained until 1859, giving religious sanction to an egregious slander against the Irish people.

What can be said of a Christian worship turned into a self-righteous justification for oppression? Where was the Christian charity? In addition to a church service, the annual commemoration included public drinking, bell ringing, a gun salute, a bonfire, and a parade. By the end of the 17th century, a new colonial order prevailed in Ireland, with 800,000 Irish Catholics dispossessed and disenfranchised by 200,000 English and 100,000 Scottish Protestants — and government troops to enforce it.

Rationalists embraced the Big Lie: David Hume harped on the atrocities of 1641, and Voltaire wouldn’t listen to any arguments against the “reality” of the 1641 massacres, linking them to the 1572 St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. For Hume and Voltaire, Gibney says, 1641 was a “genocidal sadism prompted by little more than hatred based on superstition.” When religious liberty for Catholics was debated in Ireland’s House of Lords in 1793, the Anglican bishop of Cashel rose up to defend the persecution of Catholics by reading aloud a “lurid extract about 1641 from David Hume.”

On the other side, the Catholic version of 1641 remained virtually the same from the 17th to the 19th century. Catholics said that the atrocities attributed to them were “inventions” used to justify their dispossession, that the death toll for Protestants was wildly exaggerated, and that in 1641 Protestants had been the first to inflict terrible brutalities on Irish Catholics across the land.

In 1662 a certain “R.S.” published a Collection of Some of the Murthers and Massacres Committed on the Irish in Ireland Since the 23rd of October 1641. Since Catholics had no freedom of the press, this tract was quickly suppressed and publicly burned in Ireland. Yet it gives, Gibney says, “a reasonably sober account of various brutalities visited on Catholics by Protestants and, later, by parliamentary forces.” R.S. ridicules the inflated death toll given for Protestants “on the reasonable grounds that the figures commonly given far exceeded the Protestant population in Ireland.” Moreover, he recounts how in one night English and Scottish soldiers massacred all the residents of Islandmagee — 3,000 men, women, and children — though no one in County Antrim was in rebellion. R.S. follows this with reports of similar massacres conducted by government troops, county by county.

In 1668 Catholic Bishop Nicholas French said that in 1641 “four hundred English could not be found murdered in Ireland.” In 1684 the Earl of Castlehaven wrote that the rebellion of 1641 arose from legitimate grievances and that the Lord Justices were the ones intent on “exterminating” all the Irish “who would not conform to the established church.” In Ireland’s Case Briefly Stated (1695), Hugh Reily argues that the Lord Justices needed a pretext to confiscate Irish land, so they authorized the massacres at Santry, Contarf, Bullock, Islandmagee, and Carrickfergus to provoke a rebellion. While the death toll given for Protestants was “absolutely impossible,” Catholics died in “much greater numbers.”

The major spokesman for the Irish in the 18th century was John Curry, who asked in his Brief Account (1746) why 1641 was “trumped up” with so many “unjust” exaggerations against his people. He declares that they had not committed a murder in 1641 that had not been “returned upon them at least four fold,” and that the official version was a slander “deliberately and cynically adopted to blacken the name of the Catholic Irish amid the formulation of the land settlement of the 1660s, and thereby used to dispossess them.” Edmund Burke sympathized with Curry, but to save his career in England he left his most important work on the topic unpublished: His “Tracts Relating to the Popery Law” (1765) declares that the Catholic rebellions in Ireland were not “produced by toleration but by persecution” and “arose not from just and mild government but from the most unparalleled oppression.”

In 1819 Matthew Carey published Vindiciae Hibernicae in America, with later editions carrying the commendations of Presidents John Adams and James Madison. By then the Big Lie about 1641 had been spread in this country by John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. Carey laments that the slander is, in his day, “almost as thoroughly believed as the best established fact in the annals of the world.” He asserts that there was no massacre in 1641 except for what the Dublin administration “perpetrated against the Irish” to confiscate their land, and he rightly calls the “penal laws” that deprived the Irish of religious freedom for 150 years “tyranny…covered by as base a cloak of hypocrisy as the annals of the world can produce.” He also neatly dissects the various death tolls given for Protestants and shows them to be based, Gibney says, on “forgery and perjury.”

A Catholic account of 1641 was produced by Daniel O’Connell in Memoir on Ireland Native and Saxon (1843), in which he argues that all the suffering of the Irish after 1641 stemmed “largely from calculated and gross Protestant misrepresentations of Catholic conduct during the rebellion.” He sees the lies surrounding 1641 as “the demoniacal means by which Protestantism and English power achieved their ascendancy in Ireland.”

Toward the end of The Shadow of a Year, Gibney discusses the late-19th-century debate between historians James Anthony Froude and W.E.H. Lecky. In The English in Ireland (1872-1874) Froude characterizes the Irish as “a savage, turbulent, and violent people” who needed civilizing by the English. Predictably, he takes the depositions compiled by Jones at face value, gives “uncritical acceptance” to the official version of 1641, and points to the “solemn annual commemoration” in the state church. Lecky responds in his History of Ireland (1892) by saying that the fantastic stories about Catholic atrocities were due to “Protestant designs on Catholic estates” and to the fear that the Irish might otherwise save their lands by “coming to terms” with the English government. He concedes that a rebellious mob in Ulster had committed awful crimes, but these had been “grossly, absurdly, and mendaciously exaggerated…almost beyond any other tragedy on record.” He discredits Sir John Temple as the one who “bore more responsibility than any other for propagating the notion of a massacre” and calls the depositions collected by Jones “untrustworthy.”

The Big Lie continued to propagate in the 20th century. Ernest Hamilton, in Soul of Ulster (1917), a work Gibney describes as “racist and sectarian,” suggests that the death toll for Protestants in 1641 could have been over a million and that “the soul of the native Irish has not at the present day changed by the width of a hair” from that time. Maude Glasgow, in The Scotch-Irish in North America (1936), repeats Milton’s assertion “without qualification” that 600,000 Protestants had been massacred.

At a 1998 conference at the University of Notre Dame commemorating the Tyrone Rebellion of 1798, I happened to see a new book by Ian McBride among the many on display. I skimmed it and discovered that he too reasserted the Big Lie about 1641. When I pointed this out to several people who were attending the conference, I was met with weary shrugs and the response, “What else is to be expected from McBride?”

Recently, the one-sided and mendacious depositions compiled by Henry Jones have been digitized. Gibney (and Ian Paisley) thinks this is a great idea, but I’m not convinced. In Alice Curtayne’s The Trial of Oliver Plunkett (1953), we read that the same Jones, who joined Cromwell’s army in 1649 and was promoted to Anglican bishop of Meath in 1661, was busy collecting new perjurers in 1680 to testify against St. Oliver Plunkett (who was found guilty of high treason for a fictitious plot to bring in the French army and restore the Catholic Church by force of arms). The Protestant duke of Ormonde, viceroy of Ireland, referred to Jones in a letter to his son as “not only a spiteful but a false informer.” Yes, Ormonde called him a liar. It seems that Jones’s Big Lie about 1641 is like a vampire that keeps resuscitating itself every century. We can hope and pray that Gibney’s book has thrust a stake through its beastly heart.

Anne Barbeau Gardiner, a Contributing Editor of the NOR, is Professor Emerita of English at John Jay College of the City University of New York. She has published on Dryden, Milton, and Swift, as well as on Catholics of the seventeenth century.

The foregoing article, "The Big Lie: Ireland, 1641," was originally published in the May 2016 issue of the New Oxford Review and is reproduced here by kind permission of New Oxford Review, 1069 Kains Ave., Berkeley, CA 94706. 

The Bloody Hands of Islamic Terror and Orwellian Newspeak

“Islam needs to clarify two questions ... that is, the questions concerning its relation to violence and its relation to reason.”
— Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI 
"Giving an Appearance of Solidity to Pure Wind" (New Oxford Review, January-February 2016): 

Back in 1948 British novelist George Orwell penned his seminal work Nineteen Eighty-Four. Even those who haven’t read the novel will recognize Big Brother, the heavily mustachioed, Stalin-like icon who represents the ubiquitous surveillance state. But to say that the central purpose of Orwell’s work was to warn against National Security Agency-style tactics or an oppressive society under a totalitarian government is to fail to fully convey Orwell’s message. Yes, Orwell opposed all forms of tyranny, but he was more concerned with how ideologies proliferate. One of his most important insights was the role language plays in shaping our thoughts and opinions. The term Orwellian does not mean anti-authoritarian. Neither does it refer to mass surveillance by an intrusive government. Properly used, Orwellian means the deceptive and manipulative use of language.

In his essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946) Orwell observed that “political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” In other words, certain political language (propaganda) uses words and phrases to hide ugly truths. He foresaw how politicians would misstate and mislead in order to stay in power, using words to distort more than to inform, not to convey meaning but to undermine it.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell called this newspeak. And because words have the power to shape thought, newspeak is a powerful tool in the hands of a propagandist. Big Brother’s newspeak narrows citizens’ range of thought, making it difficult for them to express, or even to consider, unorthodox ideas that do not align with the state’s goals — in effect, preventing any kind of logical thinking. Taken to an extreme, the language of newspeak encourages something called doublethink, a hypnotic state of cognitive dissonance in which one is compelled to disregard one’s own perception in favor of the officially dictated narrative. In other words, people accept a distorted reality rather than reality itself and swallow the state’s distorted propositions and claims instead of considering the “ugly truths” of reality.

One ugly truth important to everyone today can be stated quite simply: Some Muslims, inspired by Islam and in the name of their religion and the prophet Muhammad, are orchestrating and executing acts of terrorism that seek to wreak devastation on those who do not submit to Islamic values. During the Obama administration, Americans have been deluged with Orwellian newspeak through the use of euphemisms that serve to sanitize ugly truths related to Islamic terrorism. In classic newspeak fashion, even the word terrorism seems to have been eliminated from official language. Janet Napolitano, Obama’s former chief of Homeland Security, preferred the term man-caused disasters because, she said, “it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear.” So, terrorism is no longer a problem; violent extremism is. And the global war on terror, after first morphing into overseas contingency operations, is now simply referred to as CVE, short for countering violent extremism. The purpose of this Orwellian newspeak is to eschew all references to Islamic extremism, jihad, Islamic radicalism, and other such overt terms that make it difficult to deny that there’s a link between Islam and terrorism.

The White House refuses to acknowledge the religious/ideological threat posed by Islam. It does not want any reference to the true motivation of these attacks: terror against the “infidel” (non-Muslims and Muslim-born unbelievers) carried out in the name of Islam as part of a global jihadi movement. In fact, shootings by radical Muslims are sometimes dismissed as “workplace violence.” President Obama, for example, failed to mention that Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who slaughtered thirteen of his fellow soldiers at the Fort Hood military base in Texas in 2009, had been in contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemen-based imam and senior recruiter for al-Qaeda. And when the first reports emerged of a terrorist attack carried out by Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California, this December, President Obama, backed by a mainstream media adhering to Muslim-related newspeak, attempted to dismiss the shootings that killed fourteen and wounded two dozen others at a Christmas party as another instance of “workplace violence.”

Using the technique of distraction and denial, Obama ignored the obvious connection to radical Islam in the latter case. Instead, he renewed his call for gun control, treating the terrorist attack as if it were another gangland drive-by. Americans were supposed to believe that it was not a carefully planned terrorist attack, that because a co-worker allegedly made fun of Farook’s Islamic-style beard and challenged him on his theology, Farook stormed out of the party, went home, picked up his wife, and returned dressed in full-body tactical gear and armed with automatic weapons to shoot up the place before speeding away in a black SUV the couple rented. Fortunately, in this case, as more and more details became available — for example, the discovery in the couple’s home of ISIS and al-Qaeda videos, homemade pipe bombs, and enough explosive material to blow up a small town — it became more difficult for the country to practice mass doublethink. That, however, did not stop the ongoing Muslim-related newspeak campaign. Despite the fact that this attack (as well as many others) was carried out by Muslims, in the name of Islam, some still refuse to link it to Islam.

Does every Muslim commit acts of terror? Of course not. And as far as we know, no one is alleging that. To be clear, we aren’t alleging that either! But there are those Muslims who believe they are carrying out the Qur’anic command to “strike terror into the hearts of infidels” (3:151; 8:12) when they commit such acts. But without overtly recognizing the obvious link between Islam and terrorism, it becomes very difficult to combat the problem. One of today’s most prolific Orwellian sayings that we’re supposed to accept uncritically is that terrorist attacks have nothing to do with Islam. “Let’s be clear,” Hillary Clinton tweeted on November 19, “Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.” But it is instructive to note that, while Islam may not be our adversary, jihadists say they are motivated by Islam. They have declared us their adversaries. They shout Allahu akbar! when they kill people. On November 20, for example, terrorists in Mali released hostages who could quote the Qur’an. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, has a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from the Islamic University of Baghdad and openly talks about restoring the caliphate, a distinctly Islamic tenet. And many of sound mind have pointed out the obvious: The Islamic State is called the Islamic State.

Those not lured into the doublethink state of cognitive dissonance can reasonably understand that some Muslims have quite a lot to do with terrorism, and that Islam has more than a little something to do with those Muslims and their barbaric actions. Like those who were led by their hardcore theology to kill three thousand people on 9/11. Or blow up trains in Spain. Or target London’s public transit system with bombs. Or slaughter students at a Kenyan university. Or devastate a nightclub in Indonesia. Or shoot up a shopping mall in Nairobi. Or lay siege to a hotel in Mumbai. Or terrorize Nigerian schoolgirls. Or, you know, take hostages in a Parisian concert hall before slaughtering one hundred and thirty of them.

We are also, in our state of doublethink, expected to accept the corollary that Muslims are peaceful and tolerant. Of course, it’s easy to prove that some — indeed, many — Muslims are peaceful, if that means they do not advocate acts of terrorism or take part in them. That’s nice. But peacefulness and tolerance are not the same concept, nor do they necessarily go hand in hand. When considering Muslim tolerance, one might inquire: Are Muslim attitudes toward drinking alcohol tolerant? (A restaurant that serves wine is said to be the embodiment of evil.) Are Muslims tolerant when it comes to homosexuality and same-sex marriage? (According to Sharia law, homosexuals are to be stoned and thrown off a cliff.) Free speech? (Consider the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper office in Paris, the assassination of filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam, or the fatwas against novelist Salman Rushdie and former Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali.) Women’s rights? (Consider honor killings, female genital mutilation, or that in Saudi Arabia women may not drive and wife-beating is culturally acceptable.) Freedom of religion? (Converts from Islam to Christianity are to receive the death penalty.) Music? (London’s Royal College of Music has been called “Satanic,” and imams have claimed that music is the way in which Jews spread “the Satanic web” to corrupt young Muslims.) Art? (Painted images are considered an insult.) Sports? (Playing chess has been compared to dipping one’s hands in the blood of pigs, and some Muslim clerics have condemned soccer as a Jewish and Christian tool to undermine Islamic culture.) It would take a great deal of denial in order to assert that Islam is a tolerant religion.

The same difficulty arises when trying to understand how Islam qualifies as a “religion of peace,” as both President George W. Bush and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have repeatedly maintained. Never mind that the belief system of radical Islam is based on violent passages from the Qur’an and Hadith, and modeled on the jihadist actions of generations of Muslims — beginning with Muhammad himself, who beheaded captives, enslaved children, and raped women captured in battle, encouraging other Muslims to act likewise. (No, Muhammad is not similar to Jesus Christ in any way, as some Western apologists maintain.) Furthermore, Muhammad directed Muslims to wage war on the members of other religions and bring them under submission to Islam. According to most estimates, approximately eighteen thousand acts of terrorism have been carried out in the name of Islam during the past decade. And there’s little that has changed in this regard through the centuries, going back to the decades immediately following the death of Muhammad when Muslims had captured land and people within the borders of over twenty-eight modern countries outside of Saudi Arabia. To this day, not a week goes by that Muslims do not attempt to kill Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists explicitly in the name of Allah. Statistics speak the truth: Pick any thirty-day period during the previous year and note the number of acts of terrorism throughout the world. Two important points come to the fore: First, nearly one hundred percent of the terrorist acts have been committed by Muslims overtly in the name of Islam. From mid-March to mid-April 2015, for example, Muslim terrorism occurred in twenty-five countries and amassed more than twenty-eight hundred fatalities. The vast majority of these jihadi acts of radical Islamic terror go unreported in the American media. On top of that, a Pew Research report reveals that ninety-nine percent of Afghan Muslims, ninety-one percent of Iraqi Muslims, and eighty-four percent of Pakistani Muslims identify themselves as “fundamentalists” who favor Sharia law. Thirty-nine percent of Afghanistan’s Muslims say they consider violent acts such as suicide bombings as always or sometimes justified “in defense of Islam.”

Another recent repeated affirmation of newspeak comes by way of the claim — made by President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and a host of primetime pundits — that jihadi attacks are inspired by the rhetoric of Republican presidential candidates who dare to speak the words radical Islamic terrorism. As such, it stands to reason that if those pesky Republican candidates would just shut their traps when it comes to jihadi terrorism and all things Muslim, the world would be a peaceful place where ISIS terrorists would lay down their scimitars and Kalashnikovs and stop talking about subjugating infidels and establishing the caliphate at the expense of non-Muslims.

The only way one could stoop to such illogic would be to exercise the principle of doublethink.

It gets worse. Not only are we expected to disregard the facts of history, both recent and ancient, in order to buy into the doublethink regarding Islam, we are expected to accept the idea that we, the American (or British or French or German) people, are responsible for acts of terror and violence committed by Muslims. We are expected to accept the idea that we are the problem, not the radical Muslim jihadists. We are expected to accuse ourselves of being hateful Islamophobes for simply pointing out the reality that terrorism is connected to Islam, that Islam inspires terrorists, and that significant chunks of Muslims hate their adopted Western nations (Sweden, Britain, France, Germany, the U.S., etc.) with their democratic laws, privileges, and recognition of human rights for all people.

As one paradoxical Orwellian aphorism states, “War is peace.” So yes, in the Orwellian sense, Islam is a religion of peace. But just as in Big Brother’s Oceania, the only way to peace is to wage war constantly on others. And woe betide those who are unwilling to play along. Woe betide those who suggest that this doublethink is a sham. They will be singled out as “racist” bigots and — egad — “Islamophobes” because, according to doublethink standards, it is a thoughtcrime even to suggest anything negative about Islam.

But aren’t those who believe that we ought not criticize any aspect of Islam or its adherents the ones who rightly ought to hold the distinction of being Islamophobes? They are the ones who truly fear Islam. They know that radical Islamic terror is a reality. But because they are under the hypnotic political spell of doublethink, they are unable to reconcile that with the liberal narrative that tells them terrorism is unrelated to Islam, that Islam is a religion of peace, and that the ultimate perpetrators of terrorism are those voices critical of Islam. They are too busy giving an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

The foregoing article, "Giving an Appearance of Solidity to Pure Wind," was originally published in the January-February 2016 issue of the New Oxford Review and is reproduced here by kind permission of New Oxford Review, 1069 Kains Ave., Berkeley, CA 94706.