Guy had a way with words.
Posted on 10/31/2003 1:20:42 PM PST by Catholicguy
FACING THE MUSLIM THREAT by Thomas Fleming
A lecture given at Matica Srpksa in Novi Sad, Serbia, September 11, 2003, at a Conference on Islam and the West organized by The Rockford Institute
Sultan Suleiman had given strict orders. During Ramadan no one would drink wine, wear the color green, carry a decorated sword, or dance with women. His Serbian vassal, Marko the Prince, responds in characteristic fashion. He not only dances the kolo, carries a fancy sword, wears a green cloak and drinks wine, but he also forces the Muslim hodjas and hadjis to drink with him.
This was the historic Serbian response to Islam, the response of the bishops of Montenegro and the response of Karageorge and the leaders of the Serbian uprising. They defiantly asserted their cultural identity and were not afraid of open conflict. In their defiance, they showed themselves true heirs of the West, of the Greeks who defeated the Persians at Marathon and Salamis and of the Romans who prevented the child-murdering Carthaginians from overrunning Europe.
Most Western Europeans have lived at a long distance from the Islamic world, and their response has been more complex. The prevalent attitude for the past several centuries has been accommodation, and to justify this spirit of détente they have invented a myth. Muslim Arabs and Turks, they say, are heirs (like us) to the civilization of Greece and Rome, and Muslims preserved Greek philosophy and mathematics in a period when barbarian Christians were persecuting independent thinkers. Islam is one of three great monotheisms, and Muslims and Christians worship the same god only with different names. Therefore, the best tactic for dealing with Muslim powers is, so they claim, accommodation and diplomacy. This myth, to a great extent, defines the modern civilization, not of the West but of the Anti-West, and unlike many myths, which are a poetic means of getting at a deeper reality, there is not a particle of truth in it.
The primary effect of the Arab conquest of North Africa and the Middle East was the destruction of the civilization of the Greeks and Romans. The Muslim conquerors persecuted and impoverished the Christians of the Eastern empire and proved themselves largely incapable of maintaining the institutions of civilized life. The same might be said of the Franks and Goths who invaded the Western Empire, but those German tribes quickly accepted the religion and culture of the empire and within 500 years were recreating a brilliant “Gothic” civilization. The Muslims, however, came only to loot and to destroy, and the culture they built up out of the ruins of Persian and Greco-Roman civilization was sterile, derivative, and uncreative. In fringe areas, like Spain, Bosnia, and Persia, Islamic principles were submerged, to a considerable extent, in the dominant local culture, and they produced independent-minded Muslim thinkers and artists, who made a creative use of the classical past, but insofar as Islam had an influence on their work, it was negative.
What kind of art can there be, when human beings cannot be represented? What kind of philosophy, where thinkers must accept the crudest savage fatalism as the revealed word or an absolute first principle? What kind of social life, where women are treated, in principle, worse than slaves in Christendom? The exceptions of Spain and Persia only prove the rule that Islam, in its purer forms, is antagonistic to the forms and practices of civilized life.
Then the question is, why did Islam, when it entered the world of Christian civilization, reject humane civilization along with Christianity? After all, they did absorb some things like mathematics and techniques of construction, just as they have taken to the culture of pornography, fast food, and pop music. There may be many answers to this question, but I can give one that may be the most significant: The theology of Islam combines the fanaticism of crude monotheism with the complete submission to the divine will that was preached, 4000 years ago, by ancient Akkadians and Babylonians. For the Middle Eastern mind, the gap between man and god is unbridgeable, and man’s only recourse, in this evil world, is submission to the will of Allah or Marduk or Moloch. This was the insight of G.K. Chesterton, both in his great poem on Lepanto and in his greatest book, The Everlasting Man.
Although Muslims profess to revere Jesus Christ, it is only the caricature exhibited in the Koran they revere, not the man who claimed to be the Son of God. Jesus himself said he was the skandalon, the stumbling block on which the Jews would bark their shins and fall. Muslims were equally scandalized by the notion that God and man had anything in common. For them, Christianity was too fleshy, too pagan. They entirely rejected the teachings of the New Testament, but they incorporated many stories of the Old Testament into their mythology. Islam was only one of many heretical sects which have spurned the Incarnation and the Gospels in favor of the ruthless tribalism of the Old Testament. More recent cults, such as the Mormons and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, have made a similar regression.
Like Islam, Judaism had so emphasized the gap between man and god that when that gap was bridged many of them refused to believe it. Greek pagans, on the other hand, though they might ridicule Judaism, believed in sublime gods who were related to man. St. Paul realized that the Christian idea of the incarnation had affinities with the Greek pagans. “One is the race of gods and men,” sang the poet Pindar, and St. Paul, when he addressed the Athenians, acknowledged that “as certain also of your poets have said, ...we also are his offspring.”
It was partly this intuition that enabled Plato and Aristotle to construct philosophical systems that could later be incorporated into Christian thought and used to defeat the great heresies. In accepting the idea of the incarnation, men and women, as a result, become more humane. When men and women of the Eastern Empire saw another human being, they had the normal reaction upon seeing a friend or enemy, but they also saw—or were supposed to see—a being made in God’s image. When a Muslim saw the same person, he might be moved by friendship or compassion, but he still saw a creature closer to an insect than a being higher than the angels. This difference of perception makes Christians and Muslims antagonistic by definition; it also makes them potentially very bad neighbors and unlikely allies.
When the Muslims first invaded the Eastern Empire, responsibility for defending the Christians of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt lay with the Emperor in Constantinople. By the 10th century, the Byzantine emperors had problems of their own—many of them stemming from the decision to imitate Islam by destroying the images of the saints. Western rulers would have been incapable of helping, even if they had been willing, and it was not until the Mameluke Sultan of Egypt and the Seljuk Turks made life intolerable both for the Christians of Palestine and for the pilgrims who wished to visit the Holy Land, that the Western Church became seriously alarmed. Finally in the late 11th century, the great Emperor Alexios Komnenos—a ruler the Serbs had learned to fear—sent ambassadors to a church synod in Piacenza, asking the Pope for assistance.
The 11th century was not a Golden Age of cooperation between the eastern and western churches. It was only in 1054 that Pope Leo IX and Patriarch Michael Cerularius had excommunicated each other. But Urban II was able to rise above the differences that produced the schism and to make common cause with eastern Christians. Not too long after he received the emperor’s request, the Pope went to the Council of Clermont in 1095—within living memory of the Schism—and called for a Crusade against the Turks.
This event has been widely misrepresented in popular history. It is usually said the Pope was primarily concerned about Western pilgrims, who were denied access to the shrines of the Holy Land and that, secondarily, that he appealed to the greed of Italian merchants whose trade had been cut off and to the ambition of restless knights who wished to conquer new worlds. In fact, the Pope said something quite different. The first part of his address was directed toward curing abuses within the church and curbing the lawlessness and violence of Western Europe. Then, after the delegates agreed to accept the Peace of God, he wished to proclaim, Urban II went on to say that conditions in the East were much worse,
For your brethren who live in the east are in urgent need of your help.... For, as the most of you have heard, the Turks and Arabs have attacked them and have conquered the territory of Romania as far west as the shore of the Mediterranean and the Hellespont.... They have occupied more and more of the lands of those Christians, and have overcome them in seven battles. They have killed and captured many, and have destroyed the churches and devastated the empire.. .On this account I, or rather the Lord, beseech you as Christ's heralds... to persuade all people of whatever rank, foot-soldiers and knights, poor and rich, to carry aid promptly to those Christians and to destroy that vile race from the lands of our friends.”
The Pope then proclaimed that those who died in battle or on the journey would have “immediate remission of their sins.” There was no complaint about schism or heresy. “O what a disgrace,” declared Urban, “if such a despised and base race, which worships demons, should conquer a people which has the faith of omnipotent God and is made glorious with the name of Christ!”
And, the crusaders were not to go in a spirit of contempt or with a sense of superiority. It was precisely because they had led evil lives that they should take the cross. “Let those who have been accustomed unjustly to wage private warfare against the faithful now go against the infidels and end with victory this war which should have been begun long ago. Let those who for a long time, have been robbers, now become knights. Let those who have been fighting against their brothers and relatives now fight in a proper way against the barbarians.”
The First Crusade was, in fact, a success, though Western noblemen and knights did not get on well with the more civilized subjects of the Eastern Empire. Frictions increased on subsequent crusades, and both sides played each other false, the Byzantines almost as much as the Franks. Finally, in the catastrophic Fourth Crusade (1202-04), the Franks and Venetians actually overthrew the Empire. In the long run, they were unable to hold on to their conquest, but they had sealed the death warrant, not only for the empire but for Christians in the East.
The First Crusade is a model of how the West should behave toward Eastern Christians who are oppressed by Islam And I can point to other examples. St. John of Capistrano, willingly obeyed the Pope’s request to lead a crusade for the relief of Belgrade in 1456. The city was being besieged by Mehmet II, the conqueror of Constantinople, who had predicted, before setting out on his expedition, that in two months time he would be eating his supper in peace inside the walls. The defense of Belgrade was entrusted to Janos Hunyadi (Sibinyanin Janko to the Serbs), who had been an ally of Serbian Despot Djuradj Brankovic until 1446, when his troops, defeated in another battle at Kosovo, looted and pillaged the Serbs. The Despot actually imprisoned his former ally, and Serbs and Hungarians were no longer able to collaborate in a joint effort against the Turks—a genuine tragedy. Hunyadi had a pitifully small garrison but he was soon reinforced by an army of crusading peasants led by St. John of Capistrano, a 70 year old Italian Franciscan who had been using every means to crush the Hussite heretics—preaching and conversion, when that worked, and harsher means when it didn’t.
The defenders numbered some 10,000 Hungarian soldiers and John’s roughly 30,000 untrained volunteers—and, with other contingents of peasant volunteers, the total was about 60, 000. They were facing an invading force of more than 100,000 Turkish regulars, many of them Janissaries, who were equipped with great cannons and supported by a fleet of hundreds of ships that controlled the Danube. By July 21, the fighting was intense. The Turks had breached the walls with their cannons, and, despite desperate resistance, the end was near. Then on the 23rd, the unexpected happened. While the Turks were engaged in burying their dead, some of St. John’s undisciplined crusaders came out from behind the ruined ramparts of Belgrade castle and began insulting and attacking the Turks. This was clearly a fit of madness, and John rushed out and ordered his men to retreat back within the walls, but, finding the situation out of control, he changed his mind and led the 2,000 Crusaders who surrounded him against the Turks, crying, "The Lord who made the beginning will take care of the ending!"
Taken completely off guard, the Ottoman soldiers panicked and ran. When the sultan's bodyguard tried recapture the camp, Hunyadi's army joined in the fray, and Turks were routed. The sultan himself was badly wounded and lost consciousness.
When night fell, the Turks retreated under cover of darkness, carrying away their wounded in 140 wagons. The sultan regained consciousness, and hearing the news, he tried to kill himself by taking poison. On the long retreat, Serb guerillas harassed the demoralized Turks, inflicting 25,000 deaths in addition to the 50,000 who had been killed in the battle itself. Unfortunately, Hungarian resistance did not survive the deaths of Hunyadi and his successor Matthias Corvinus, since the Hungarian nobles preferred to kill each other in struggles for power—and to make allies, whenever possible, with the Turks.
The First Crusade and the siege of Belgrade show what was possible when Christians of the West rallied against the Muslim Empire that threatened Europe. They rallied again at Lepanto, where the cynical rulers of Venice finally realized that they could no longer betray Christendom in order to make money from their trade with the Ottoman Empire. At Lepanto, a squadron from Boka Kotorska fought bravely within the Venetian fleet. Although the Dutch Protestants wore crescents on their caps, he English celebrated Lepanto as a victory for Christendom, and there were English volunteers at Lepanto and in later wars against the TurksIn fact, the first real American, Captain John Smith, was given a coat of arms for defeating three Turkish fighters in single combat and cutting off their head. His symbol, three Turks heads, should be the coat of arms of the United States.
But on each of these great occasions, the common effort was undermined by rivalries among the great powers—Spain and Venice, the Hapsburgs and Hungarians—and by struggles for power in the very countries that were most threatened. In this, they imitated the doomed Serbs and Greeks who were also bickering on the eve of their destruction in 1389 and 1453.
The Fourth Crusade set the pattern for succeeding centuries, when European rulers took one of two approaches: 1) a pragmatic and often cynical desire to use Serbs, Romanians, and Bulgars as cannon fodder against the Turks; 2) an even more cynical and usually futile plot to use the Turks to prevent any Christian rival, whether Western or Eastern, from establishing hegemony within the Balkans. This was the policy of the French against their Hapsburg rivals, and the policy of England against Russia. Part of the motivation behind the French and English policies was Realpolitik; part of it may have simply been envy. But But French and English leaders would not have supported The Ottoman Empire, if they were not fundamentally more sympathetic to Islam than to Christianity./
We often think that the West’s tilt toward Islam began with the post-Christian English adventurers—Lawrence of Arabia, Sir John Glub—Pasha Glub, as he was known, but it is much older. Older than the explorer and pornographer Sir Richard Burton, older than Montesquieu and other Enlightenment philosophers who portrayed Muslims as representatives of a wisdom that surpassed that of Christian Europe. A typical and very influential English example of this tendency is Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the only English literary classic to take up the conflict between the Byzantine Empire and the Muslims. Gibbon makes no secret of his admiration of the Turks, and he derides both the effeminate Greeks and the crude Franks who went on the First Crusade? Why?
The simple answer is that Gibbon was a religious skeptic, and like other skeptics of the 18th century, he was irritated by Christian morality that told him to take only one wife, whom he could not divorce. The sensuality of the Muslim view of life and the afterlife and the cynicism of its politics appeals to the imagination of anti-Christian skeptics of every age and, at the very least, prepares them to take the Muslim side in very Balkan war. Was it merely Realpolitik that caused Benjamin Disraeli to support Turkey against Russia and to turn a blind eye to the sufferings of Balkan Christians? Was it merely sentimentality that caused his rival, William Gladstone, to champion the cause of the Greeks and Serbs. Perhaps it is no accident that Gladstone was a pious Christian and Disraeli was not.
One of Disraeli’s prime political objectives was the settlement of Jews in the Holy Land, and at the Congress of Berlin he made a private deal with Turkey. In exchange for his promise of opposing Russia, the Turkish government agreed to allow the establishment of Jewish settlements in Palestine. Caught in the middle, as usual, were the Orthodox Christians of the Balkans. Disraeli established a pattern: He justified his betrayal of Balkan Christians by claiming to follow a conservative foreign policy based on British national interest, and he made a Turkey the partner in his plans to expand British interest in the Middle East and to help in the creation of a Jewish state.
Such a description might easily be applied to the policies of the current American president and his two predecessors. Like Disraeli, President Bush is a Christian Zionist. According to the pre-millenialist theology of this bizarre sect, Christians have a duty to hasten the end of the world by helping Israel expand into the boundaries of Solomon’s kingdom—that is, Eretz Israel—and to rebuild the temple. This will usher in the terrible time of Tribulation and the reign of Anti-Christ. All Jews will either convert or die, and, at the last moment, Christ will return to judge what is left of the human race. They reject any and all of Christ’s moral teachings, if they are applied to the government of Israel, which has the divine right to expel or kill all of the non-Jewish inhabitants of Eretz-Israel. To the extent they know anything of the Nicene Creed—with or without the filioque—they reject it as Papist. In other words, their fundamentalist infatuation with the Old Testament has led them to the same stumbling block that caused the Muslims to fall.
These are the views of the so-called Christian Right, which holds so much influence with the Republican Party, but it is also the view of the Christian supporters of President Clinton. For decades, these Christian Zionists and their allies have seen Turkey as the essential partner in a project that has two parts: 1) expansion of Anglo-American control over strategic oil reserves in the Islamic Middle East and in the Islamic Caspian Sea basin, and 2) the protection of Israeli and support for the expansionist policies of Likkud Party extremists like Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, who will not be content until they have embroiled America in a war to purge Eretz-Israel of all Palestinians.
Caught in the middle, once again, are Balkan Christians: Greeks in Thrace and Cyprus, on which Turks still have designs; Serbs and other Christian Slavs in Macedonia, Serbs in Kosovo, Sanjak, and Montenegro—all targeted by Islamic Albanians. There is no conspiracy or plot, only an intersection of interests. The material interests are concentrated in the so-called Resource Corridors that connect the Balkans with the Middle East and with the Caspian Sea basin, while the religious interests are focused on Jerusalem, the temple, and the end of human civilization—a coalition of cynicism, greed, and insanity.
There is no solution, in the short term, for this continuing crisis, and Orthodox Serbs, Greeks, and Rumanians can expect neither sympathy nor support either from the post-Christian elites who control the multinational petrochemical and aluminum industries or from some evangelical Protestants who have gone so far into their science fiction cult that they cannot recognize Orthodoxy as a Christian Church. The only allies the Serbs can find will be among Trinitarian Christians, which includes some Lutheran and Calvinist Protestants and, most of all, in the very place where they expect to find their worst enemies—the Catholic Church. In Gorski Vijenac, Njegos condemned the rivalries among Serb leaders that caused the disaster at Kosovo. Similar rivalries have plagued every subsequent alliance formed to halt the expansion of Islam in Europe, down to and including the conflicts in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia. After only a century, the Crescent flies again over Sarajevo and Pristina, and, if it is not to fly over Novi Pazar and Skoplje, London and Paris, Catholic and Orthodox Christian leaders will have to call a halt to their 1000 year feud, work together in common cause, and keep Ramadan by drinking wine together.
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Guy had a way with words.
I hold the Christian Right with as much contempt, at times, as I do the Republican Party. This does not prevent me from holding pretty much the same views.
As for ridding Israel of all "Palestinians", the muslims themselves have proven conclusively that it is the only solution, having rid themselves of most if not all the Jews in their various countries since the 1920s, presumably unnoticed by the rest of the world.
Definitely unnoticed by Mr. Fleming.
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