Tolerance: A Two-Way Street
Friday, September 22, 2006; Page A17
Religious fanatics, regardless of what name they give their jealous god, invariably have one thing in common: no sense of humor. Particularly about themselves. It's hard to imagine Torquemada taking a joke well.
Today's Islamists seem to have not even a sense of irony. They fail to see the richness of the following sequence. The pope makes a reference to a 14th-century Byzantine emperor's remark about Islam imposing itself by the sword, and to protest this linking of Islam and violence:
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In the West Bank and Gaza, Muslims attack seven churches.
· In London, the ever-dependable radical Anjem Choudary tells demonstrators at Westminster Cathedral that the pope is now condemned to death.
· In Mogadishu, Somali religious leader Abubukar Hassan Malin calls on Muslims to "hunt down" the pope. The pope not being quite at hand, they do the next best thing: shoot dead, execution-style, an Italian nun who worked in a children's hospital.
"How dare you say Islam is a violent religion? I'll kill you for it" is not exactly the best way to go about refuting the charge. But of course, refuting is not the point here. The point is intimidation.
First Salman Rushdie. Then the false Newsweek report about Koran-flushing at Guantanamo Bay. Then the Danish cartoons. And now a line from a scholarly disquisition on rationalism and faith given in German at a German university by the pope.
And the intimidation succeeds: politicians bowing and scraping to the mob over the cartoons; Saturday's craven New York Times editorial telling the pope to apologize; the plague of self-censorship about anything remotely controversial about Islam -- this in a culture in which a half-naked pop star blithely stages a mock crucifixion as the highlight of her latest concert tour.
In today's world, religious sensitivity is a one-way street. The rules of the road are enforced by Islamic mobs and abjectly followed by Western media, politicians and religious leaders.
The fact is that all three monotheistic religions have in their long histories wielded the sword. The Book of Joshua is knee-deep in blood. The real Hanukkah story, so absurdly twinned (by calendric accident) with the Christian festival of peace, is about a savage insurgency and civil war.
Christianity more than matched that lurid history with the Crusades, an ecumenical blood bath that began with the slaughter of Jews in the Rhineland, a kind of preseason warm-up to the featured massacres to come against the Muslims, with the sacking of the capital of Byzantium (the Fourth Crusade) thrown in for good measure.
And Islam, of course, spread with great speed from Arabia across the Mediterranean and into Europe. It was not all benign persuasion. After all, what were Islamic armies doing at Poitiers in 732 and the gates of Vienna in 1683? Tourism?
However, the inconvenient truth is that after centuries of religious wars, Christendom long ago gave it up. It is a simple and undeniable fact that the violent purveyors of monotheistic religion today are self-proclaimed warriors for Islam who shout "God is great" as they slit the throats of infidels -- such as those of the flight crews on Sept. 11, 2001 -- and are then celebrated as heroes and martyrs.
Just one month ago, two journalists were kidnapped in Gaza and were released only after their forced conversion to Islam. Where were the protests in the Islamic world at that act -- rather than the charge -- of forced conversion?
Where is the protest over the constant stream of vilification of Christianity and Judaism issuing from the official newspapers, mosques and religious authorities of Arab nations? When Sheik 'Atiyyah Saqr issues a fatwa declaring Jews "apes and pigs"? When Sheik Abd al-Aziz Fawzan al-Fawzan, professor of Islamic law, says on Saudi TV that "someone who denies Allah, worships Christ, son of Mary, and claims that God is one-third of a trinity. . . . Don't you hate the faith of such a polytheist?"
Where are the demonstrations, where are the parliamentary resolutions, where are the demands for retraction when the Mufti Sheik Ali Gum'a incites readers of al-Ahram, the Egyptian government daily, against "the true and hideous face of the blood-suckers . . . who prepare [Passover] matzos from human blood"?
The pope gives offense and the Mujaheddin al-Shura Council in Iraq declares that it "will break up the cross, spill the liquor and impose the 'jizya' [head] tax; then the only thing acceptable is conversion or the sword." This to protest the accusation that Islam might be spread by the sword.
As I said. No sense of irony.
1 comment:
the protestant anglosaxon aparasites donot like pope excpet when they got one stooge one in form of the last pope,
this opope is an intelligent and nice moderate man -ofocurse anglosaxonx do nto like this geram pope . look how the paraistes are crying false tear for the sake of pope,
here is what someo=ne has said in another site..
ON THE PRESS HOAX AGAINST THE POPE:
Britain's Bernard Lewis and His Crimes
By Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
September 17, 2006
ON THE PRESS HOAX AGAINST THE POPE:
Britain's Bernard Lewis and His Crimes
By Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
September 17, 2006
Let the faithful of Islam hear my warning words, before it is too late for us to prevent a terrible consequence for all humanity!
The founder of Christianity, Jesus Christ, was born during the reign of the evil Roman Emperor Augustus, and was murdered, through crucifixion, by the order of the Pontius Pilate who was the personal agent of the frankly satanic Emperor, Tiberius, who was resident, with his retinue of Mithra-cultists, at his headquarters at the truly capriolic Isle of Capri. The chronicle of these events was supplied by the four accounts of the Christian Apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; a deeper insight into the chronicled events was supplied by the Apostle John. The deeper understanding of the Christian mission, as I share presently relevant elements of this knowledge, was supplied, to the present day, by the Testament and Letters of the Apostle John and the Letters of the Apostle Paul.
The writings of the Apostles John and Paul represent the Classical Greek science which was the highest form of scientific and related knowledge of that time, in opposition to the pro-Satanic legacy of the worship of the Olympian Zeus and other pro-reductionist excretions of that wicked Pythian cult of the Delphi Apollo from which the evil of imperial Rome had sprung in that time.
So, the Apostles Peter and Paul, among legions of other Apostles and ordinary Christians, were murdered in their martyrdom by a Roman empire which has been intrinsically evil from the time of its conception to its present incarnation in such forms as British intelligence's agent Bernard Lewis' view of the goals of the British Empire today.
So, when Rome's prolonged policy of mass murder of Christians failed to destroy Christianity, the evil Emperor Diocletian gave up the tactic of mass-murder, not because he was humane, but because he was a smart and infinitely corrupt tyrant who was shrewd enough to abandon what had been proven to be a hopeless quest. Nonetheless, despite that lesson from Roman history, a similar mass-murder against Jews was done by the German heir of the Roman Empire's tradition, Adolf Hitler. Thus, when all earlier efforts by the Roman Emperors to exterminate Christianity by Hitler-like methods had failed, Diocletian's faithful follower Constantine sought to accomplish, by corruption, what Rome had failed to effect by mass-murderous, overtly repressive force. Indeed, the current reality is that neither Christianity, nor Islam, could be extinguished from this planet, except by the destruction of the planet itself.
Thus, a would-be new Roman Empire, the heritage of Lord Shelburne's British Empire, reacted to U.S. President Abraham Lincoln's victory over Lord Palmerston's puppet, the slave-owner's Confederacy. Britain reacted to the defeat of its Confederacy puppet, by reliance on corruption deployed within, through the New York financial center's leading tools of British financier interests within the U.S.A. Where mere force had failed, Constantine's strategy for destroying Christianity was by corruption, by legalizing it as a cult of the heathen Roman Imperial Pantheon. The corruption was expressed through Constantine's effort to control the selection of the bishops of an imperially legalized church. A similar, implicitly treasonous factor within London-linked U.S. financier circles has been used, repeatedly, in the use of corruption, as against the Franklin Roosevelt tradition by President Harry Truman, as a weapon to destroy the U.S.A., by corruption, from within.
Alexander the Great and his counselors of the Platonic Academy, defeated the design for such an oligarchical "world empire" at that time; but, with the close of the Second Punic War, and the fall of Syracuse and the deaths of Eratosthenes and his collaborator Archimedes, the emergence of the Roman Empire of the Mediterranean and adjoining regions was merely a matter of time.
Since that time, the tradition of the Roman Empire has persisted in various guises, as an earlier Rome was superseded by Diocletian's adoption of what had been the post-Peloponnesian War, Babylonian design for intended oligarchical world-rule: this time, by dividing the Roman Empire between its failing western branch, Rome, and its eastern branch, Byzantium.
So, the decline of Byzantium was exploited by Venice's financier oligarchy, to create the medieval system of Europe, in partnership with the brutish Norman chivalry.
So, the rise of modern European civilization was corrupted and nearly destroyed by the replacement of the failed Norman chivalry by the bestiality of the religious warfare launched by that satanic figure, Grand Inquisitor Tomas de Torquemada, who sparked a 1492-1648 wave of Venice-steered religious warfare against modern European civilization.
This was the Torquemada who was the model chosen for crafting the synthetic personality of the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, by the leader of Martinist freemasonary, Count Joseph de Maistre. This same model of Torquemada as "The Executioner," which de Maistre crafted directly for the creation of the personality of Napoleon as Emperor, was that copied for the creation of the same type of personality in the morally putrid flesh of Adolf Hitler.
The mass murder of Jews by Hitler, was and is the legacy of Torquemada and his nominally Christian, synarchist and kindred followers of Europe and throughout the Americas to the present day.
The legacy of the Norman and Torquemada's crusades, is the root of the present-day Anglo-Dutch Liberal system's intentions to stage a global religious warfare against Islam, the religious warfare which the British Arab Bureau's Bernard Lewis has done so much to foment today.
Why The Press Fraud Against The Pope
Jesus Christ was born a Jew, and was murdered as what Rome viewed as a threat of reestablishment of a Jewish state. Christ's principal Apostles were Jews, as this is typified by the close association of the Apostle Peter with the great Jewish teacher Philo of Alexandria. The exemplary relation of Jew and Christian, alike, to Islam, is that typified by the collaboration of Christian, Muslim, and Jew which was expressed in the collaboration between Charlemagne and the Baghdad Caliphate. It should have been always, as the great theologian of Europe's Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa presented this fact in his De Pace Fidei.
However, ever since Charlemagne's leadership in ecumenicism among Christian, Jew, and Islam, the legacy of the imperial Rome which perpetrated the judicial murder of Jesus Christ and masses of Christians, has repeatedly sought to reaffirm the oligarchical system of imperial reign, through putting Christians, Jews, and Muslims against one another's throats, as we see in the press orchestration of today's widespread, fraudulent representation of the implications of an excerpt from Pope Benedict's address. The history of the British Empire, to the present day of the British Arab Bureau's Bernard Lewis, is exemplary of this use of religious warfare as an instrument of attempted global imperial reign by Venetian-style financier-oligarchy, the same attempt expressed today by the use of "globalization" to eradicate the institution of the sovereign nation-state.
The corrupt action of the international press, in this matter, has the ominous character of an effort to arrange the assassination of a Pope Benedict not much liked among Lynne Cheney's friends in Liz Symons' London, and have the Islamic world blamed for the attempt.
Indeed, the widespread, fraudulent representation of the recent address on the subject of ecumenicism, by Pope Benedict, can not be competently understood, except as a fresh expression of the malicious propaganda-effort of the British Arab Bureau's Bernard Lewis (the assigned controller of Harvard-trained British agents Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Samuel P. Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations"). So, as the Roman Empire sought to destroy Charlemagne's ecumenical collaboration among Christians, Jews, and Islam, through the Venetian-directed Norman Crusaders, the contemporary Anglo-Dutch Liberal faction of today's imperial finance has created and deployed Bernard Lewis's pro-satanic dogma of "Clash of Civilizations" using not only corrupt U.S. creatures such as Kissinger, Huntington, and their ilk, but also Bush-living fanatics whose adopted beliefs are close to the essentials of a Satanic cult.
Meanwhile, elements in the ranks of nominal Moslems who have been traditionally assets spun out of London's puppet Al-Afghani, are used by Anglo-Dutch Liberal intelligence organizations, as creatures from a drama written and directed by Bernard Lewis, to seek, thus, to bring Islam to self-destruction of its peoples from within.
Witness those abysmally immoral degenerates, the fanatical backers of a lunatic President George W. Bush, Jr., whose very presence in office defiles the name of Christianity. Witness nominal Catholics who continue the tradition of the Habsburgs and Coudenhove-Kalergi in frankly fascist guise still today, the continuing tradition of the religious warfare of 1492-1648. See the fraudulent mass-media treatment of Benedict's proffer of a dialogue of religions, as being a part of the preparations for Vice-President Dick Cheney's intended launching of a probably nuclear-armed attack on Iran at some moment of orchestrated opportunity prior to the November U.S. mid-term elections.
Such an attack on Iran would be the detonator of an unquenchable global holocaust which would not end until it had burned out the combustible material of our planet as a whole. Such an attack on Iran is the goal of those behind the fraudulent operation against Pope Benedict run on Vice-President Cheney's behalf, through a complicit European and other corrupt, and usually lying mass media, on whose rotten moral character I have remarkably expert personal experience.
Any political leader of any nation, who is not a fool, will quickly see this matter as I do. Anyone foolish enough to play into the game which an orchestrated press has played through the fraudulent treatment of an excerpt taken from the Pope's remarks, will be guilty of any Hell on Earth which continued promotion of the press-hoax is clearly intended to facilitate.
1. What Must You Believe?
The common conception of the nature of man and woman, shared among Jew, Christian, and Muslim, is that distinction emphasized in the conclusion of the first Chapter of the Book of Genesis. I can attest to the absolute, scientific validity of those verses from my personal knowledge. I can attest, to a related subject, to the absolute validity of that denunciation which was presented by Philo of Alexandria against the philosophically reductionist misconception of Creation. This is what we, all three, should believe.
The Creator of the universe must be recognized as a living personality, whose nature, as distinguished from that of all of the beasts, is reflected in the essential nature of the immortal essence of the creative powers, absent among the beasts, but which is the essential distinction of the human personality. On that account, the lives of all human individuals are sacred under the natural law of this eternal universe. So, we must see the relationship among Christian, Jew, and Muslim as Nicholas of Cusa portrays this principle in his famous dialogue De Pace Fidei. In this configuration of the social process, the individual's belief must be primarily accountable to this specific kind of personal relationship, as emphasized by Cusa, to the living Creator existing as the actively willful power within a finite, but boundlessly self-bounded universe.
So, as nations must be sovereign in their lawmaking, the community of sovereign peoples must seek constantly to come to a less imperfect common understanding of the natural law implicit in the Creator's governance of that universe. We must never overestimate the perfection of what we might consider to be our established belief. We shall always have much which is essential yet to discover, and a task of which we had not dreamed to do.
However, this needed understanding, by any person, or by any nation, or any body of religious belief, is necessarily imperfect in two ways. Firstly, we know the universe as it exists until now only imperfectly, as the Apostle Paul insists in his I Corinthians 13. Secondly, as Philo warns the Aristoteleans of his time, God the Creator never surrendered His power to change the universe which He had created. Philo's argument implies the question: Would any sane person pray to a Creator which they believed to be impotent? A wise Jewish Rabbi would say, therefore, and some whom I have known, have done, that the Messiah will not return according to some time-table, but only when the Creator chooses.
On the matter of the higher implications of the Creator's nature: the best evidence of scientific knowledge is, that as the Solar planetary system was generated, as a higher form of existence, by a young, fast-spinning Sun, God's universe is not fixed, is never entropic, but always anti-entropic, always working to develop and expand into higher states of existence. Mankind's essential mission is to act in the likeness of the Creator, and companion of that Creator, in this way.
Accordingly, we must approach the management of the affairs of the universe in a manner which is governed by a careful blending of certainties and humilities.
An Example: Modern European Science
Modern European science emerged out of the influence of the history of ancient Egypt, as in the form of what the ancient Classical Greeks, such as the Pythagoreans and Plato, knew as the scientific method of Sphaerics. Although this knowledge, as typified by the circles of Plato, was sustained by the Platonic Academy until about B.C. 212, until the deaths of Eratosthenes and Archimedes, it was largely suppressed by the influence of the Delphi Apollo cult on the ideology of ancient Rome, both before and after the imperial phase. Much of the knowledge was kept on record, in Greek, under Byzantium, and was echoed in the collected work of the Baghdad Caliphate, but this knowledge was not revived as a leading, active feature of culture until the Venetian-Norman ultramontane system of tyranny had collapsed, and the subsequent rise of the influence of the great ecumenical Council of Florence.
Modern science, and its beneficial effects on shaping mankind's conception of itself, was founded as experimental physical science by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, beginning with his De Docta Ignorantia. All of the valid currents of modern science are traced from that point through such students of Cusa as Luca Pacioli and Leonardo da Vinci. However, a systematic view of physical science as a whole was first established by Cusa follower Johannes Kepler's uniquely original discovery of universal gravitation. From that point on, science progressed along the lines marked chiefly by Fermat, Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann, in opposition to the reductionists typified by such house-lackeys and followers of Venice's Paolo Sarpi as the scurrilous Galileo Galilei, the wicked Rene Descartes, the morally perverted John Locke, and the Eighteenth-Century radical reductionists de Moivre, d'Alembert, Euler, Lagrange, and the Nineteenth-Century followers of Laplace, Cauchy, Kelvin, Helmholtz, et al.
The relevant point to be emphasized here, is that the differences between the two, principally opposing currents in modern European physical science, between the followers of Cusa and Kepler, and the reductionist schools of empiricism, positivism, and existentialism, are essentially theological, that in the specific sense that the science of the followers of Cusa, Kepler, Leibniz, and Riemann, is emphatically a Christian view of the universe consistent with the referenced identification of man and woman in Genesis 1, whereas the reductionist schools in science find their roots in the tradition of the implicitly pro-Satanic school of the Delphi Apollo and Roman imperial Pantheon.
These same issues, which appear in such forms in the domain of European physical science since ancient Classical Greece, are related to the ugly fact that organized Christianity itself is dying in North America and western and central Europe, this as a result of the induced cultural paradigm-shift which was launched by such frankly Satanic cults as the Congress for Cultural Freedom led by such deceased and still living creatures of the U.S.A. as the late Professor Sidney Hook and currently active John Train.
This decadence spread within the Christian churches, including the Catholic Church, is typified by the accelerated shrinking of the clergy, through the combined effects of aging and death of the older ranks, and the lack of renewal of those ranks from younger volunteers. This decadence is also expressed, in appropriate forms, by the wild-eyed lunatic cults associated with the political base of increasingly demented U.S. President George W. Bush, Jr. Fewer and fewer serve, because fewer and fewer believe, a fault which lies not in the belief, but in the believer.
The most important, common, practical issue of religion and science, is the issue of truth. In both cases, the issue is essentially the same. No living person has ever seen a universal physical principle with the human senses, nor has he seen the Creator. Both objects exist, but since each encompasses the entire universe, neither is an object of sense-perception. Sense-perception perceives no more than the footprints of each. So, just as we are enabled, as Cusa, Kepler, and Leibniz were, to discover universal physical principles, we are enabled, by the same quality unique to the human mind, to recognize the proof of the existence of the Creator.
The problem behind this phenomenon of decadence today, is that the alternative to truth is what is often called "democracy," but is better recognized as Sophistry. The standard here is the same which Plato's dialogues present as the evidence against the Sophistry through which a formerly triumphant Athens destroyed itself through the adoption of that Sophistry associated with that Democratic Party of Athens which perpetrated the judicial murder of the saintly Socrates.
The characteristic of Sophistry is the substitution of belief in popular opinion of some group in society for scientific evidence, just as the idea of "democracy" associated with the Athens of Pericles induced Athens to destroy itself in the Peloponnesian War. The decline and fall of European civilization now, especially since the time of the official cover-up of the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, and the earlier replacement of the policies of President Franklin Roosevelt by the corruption embodied in the Harry Truman administration, has led into the virtual bankruptcy of the U.S.A, and western and central Europe today.
Powerful cultures are never destroyed except as global civilization is being destroyed today, by the decadence spreading from the USA and Europe, the decadence typified by the role of pro-British U.S. President Harry Truman and the rise of the so-called "68ers" of Europe and the Americas today.
The problem now is that advocacy of what is induced as widely accepted mass opinion, is used as a substitute for, and even a vicious opponent of truth. That is what the term "Sophistry" means. That is what the terms "rhetoric," or "spin," mean. "You can't go against popular opinion," is the sound of the death-rattle of whole civilizations.
2. Truth Is Love of All Mankind
Do you love mankind? Is love of all mankind your highest priority in all matters, including religious belief?
Take the case of the Netherlands today. One of the ugliest problems of moral corruption seen anywhere on this planet today, is the notorious Dutch policy toward persons past the age of seventy years. Euthanasia is cheaper than Nazi death-camps as a way of ridding a nation of an unwanted population. A nation which tolerates such practice of so-called "euthanasia" should be regarded as an outlaw nation until such time as it might mend its ways.
Of course, this policy of mass murder in the name of "euthanasia," was begun by my wealthy enemies inside the U.S.A., not Nazi Germany. The Dutch gave us the Elm disease; the U.S.A. gave Hitler and today's Dutch government the euthanasia disease.
This illustrates the point, that the worst crimes against humanity are those practiced in the name of adopted policies of governments, or, simply, the spread of a certain strain of popular opinion. Thus, the greatest of all crimes is lack of a primary emphasis on love for all mankind. Religious and racial hatred, such as anti-Semitism, or hatred against Islam, or, hatred of Christians, is, on record of known history, the most evil expression of criminality to be seen on the planet today.
Return attention to Nicholas of Cusa's De Pace Fidei on this account. If you love the Creator, you must view all branches of the human family in that light, as Cusa presents that argument there. This was the stroke of genius expressed by the role of Cardinal Mazarin, in bringing the warring people of Europe to the commitment to "love one another," in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. The great danger to all humanity today, is the attempts, on the one side, of pitiably deranged minds like that of President George W. Bush, Jr., or the brutishly pro-Satanic Vice-President Dick Cheney, to launch a war against Islam, and the danger that forces within Islam would tend to react in kind. In either case, especially in the case of such responses from both sides, civilization throughout this planet would be doomed to effects to be suffered for generations yet to come.
The same forces behind the fraudulent campaigns of a corrupt international press, in using a willfully lying fallacy of composition to stir up Islamic hatreds against a Pope Benedict, are the forces behind the intention of having Vice-President Cheney launch a terrible aerial attack of about a month's duration against Iran and other targets. If you wish a session in Hell for yourself and also your descendants, if any actually live, continue the kind of pattern of action and reaction which the widespread press-hoax against Pope Benedict unleashed during this past week.
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