An evil hatred

Those who loathe the US don't just hate their foreign policy, they hate the Christian values that civilise us. And by rejecting good, they often embrace evil.

OUR "intellectuals" hate the United States for one dangerous reason in particular. It's Christian. There is probably no more Christian nation than the US, where more than 60 per cent of people go to church at least once a month.

And the US is now led by a man who takes his Christianity more seriously than any president since Jimmy Carter. And this scares the hell out of so many of our cultural elite.

For instance, infamous "journalist" John Pilger damns the administration of President George Bush as an "unelected Christian fundamentalist regime".

Sydney broadcaster Mike Carlton denounces it as a "fearsome" regime "hell-bent on a Manichean crusade to remake an evil world in its own Christian image".

Malcolm Fraser, the former prime minister, simply calls the US Government "fundamentalist", but Age cartoonist Michael Leunig draws it as a murderous caveman, with a club in one hand and Bible in the other.

Professor Brian Costar accuses the US Government of being "infected by far-right Christian fundamentalists whose ideology is closer to that of the Taliban than mainstream American liberalism".

And Richard Neville, New Age guru and former publisher, in December raged: "Kill, torture, rip off, humiliate – this is one of the themes of Christianity 2003, as the three leading liars of the Coalition, George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard, sink into the delusional torpor of their fundamentalist Christmas pud."

Last year, the BBC's Jeremy Paxman grilled British Prime Minister Tony Blair over Iraq, and I heard this telling exchange:

Paxman: Does the fact that George Bush and you are both Christians make it easier for you to view these conflicts in terms of good and evil?

Blair: I don't think so, no. I think that whether you're a Christian or you're not a Christian, you can try to perceive what is good and what is, uh, is evil.

The sneering Paxman clearly wanted to make Bush and Blair seem like men in the grip of a murderous religious mania, but he'd actually stumbled on to a great truth.

Yes, being a Christian does indeed probably make it easier to perceive real evil, and particularly evil in a totalitarian form – and this is precisely why Christianity has been the enemy of every totalitarian movement since the French Revolution.

What's more, this is the truth about Christianity that many intellectuals – largely secular and so more likely to worship totalitarian gods – cannot forgive.

Check the history. The Jacobins in the French Revolution banned the Catholic Church and slaughtered priests and nuns.

Communist regimes have done much the same in Russia, Cambodia, Vietnam and China, where even today the Catholic church is banned and its leading Chinese bishops jailed.

And the Nazis also waged war on Christianity, as Maurice Samuel shows in his book The Great Hatred, published in 1940.

What the Nazis hated in Christianity is what all who worship totalitarian ideologies, like today's Islamists, hate, too.

The Nazis didn't dare name Christianity as their true enemy. Instead, they hoped to strip Christianity of what they condemned as its "Jewish" influence, and so turn it into a Nazi cult.

As Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg put it, Germany's youth had "no other wish than to contemplate the great personality of the founder of Christianity in his real greatness, without the falsifying addition of Jewish fanatics like Matthew, or materialistic Rabbis like Paul, or African jurists like Tertullian, or spineless mongrels like Augustine . . ."

Hitler also condemned the Jewish influence on Marxism and Christianity, and wrote:

"The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle in nature; and replaces the eternal privilege of force and strength with the mass of numbers and their dead weight . . . By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord's work."

And so, as Samuel says, the Nazis' hatred of Jews was actually a rejection of the most important Judeo-Christian message – that no person is too humble to be precious to God, and that all of us are called to the brotherly love of even strangers.

It was a rejection of the Judeo-Christian claim that the political machine exists for people, not people for the machine.

Christianity was the enemy of totalitarians then, and is so still. Ask the Islamists. Ask the Greens. Ask our university Marxists and the International Socialists; and isn't it natural that such folk also hate Israel?

Of course, Christianity, left to its doubting, hesitating, brawling and pagan-flirting bishops is a menace to no one other than its own flock.

Take Pat Power, the Catholic Archbishop of Canberra. Last October, he had a choice – would he protest against the visiting Christian president of a largely Christian democracy that upholds religious freedom and has even liberated the Muslims of Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo and Bosnia?

Or would he protest against the visiting atheist president of a communist dictatorship that bans his own church, locks up his fellow bishops, jails Buddhist lamas, tortures Falun Gong worshippers, orders forced abortions and occupied Tibet?

No contest. Power demonstrated against the Christian president, not the anti-Christian despot.

As I say, such a church worries no one but Christians. But a country soaked in Christianity and equipped with the strongest army, the biggest chequebook and most vigorous culture – now that is a threat to totalitarians everywhere.

And so it has long been. The US was the lethal enemy of Communist regimes and the Nazis last century, and is the prime enemy of the Islamists, greenshirts and neo-Marxists now.

Did you note, incidentally, the European countries that were America's firmest allies in the war in Iraq? Strongly Catholic Spain, Italy and Poland. Its worst critic was France, where secularism is the state cult.

It may seem odd that secular intellectuals, who dream of an Eden without soldiers or priests, end up effectively siding with Islamic bombers and the genocidal dictators in their war with the Christian West.

But too many intellectuals still see Christianity as a bigger threat to their dreams – and to their wilder liberties and vices – than they do Islamic terrorism and the extremist preaching that feeds it.

Last December, for instance, the chairman of Britain's Broadcasting Standards Commission, Lord Dubs, noted that Islam was given far more respect on television and radio than other religions.

Dubs, a Labour peer, added: "In portraying Muslims, they have held back, they have censored themselves, they are timid. (But) I have seen them pour scorn on Christianity more than other religions. Christianity is an easier and more acceptable target, followed, to a lesser extent, by Jews and Hindus." Same story here.

With Christianity despised by so many intellectuals, it's no wonder that the successes of the US – and the assertion of its Judeo-Christian values – inspire more hatred than do its failures.

Your enemy's failings are never frightening, and so the Left doesn't hate the US for its disaster in Vietnam. It actually rather enjoyed it.

But Leftist activists everywhere loathe the US for its success in Iraq, and to point out Iraq may now one day even become democratic just makes the insult worse.

We must recognise that it is really a hatred of the values that America best represents. We must recognise it is a hatred, above all, of the Judeo-Christian tradition that has so far been our best defence against totalitarian threats.

And that makes anti-Americanism an attack not just on America, or on the Christianity that animates it – but an attack on civilisation itself.

Islam was once "great" because it once preached an "all-inclusive" ideology, similar to communism, and like communism it too fell because it discounted human nature.

Equality for all sounds great until you realize just what equality means: You're all equal, except for me (the caliph, the sulatan, the Imam whatever you want to call him) because I derive my power directly from God. And no one can question God, can they?

Gallileo questioned God (or his representatives) and made exlporation of the cosmos possible. Newton questioned God and brought us the miracle of gravity. Martin Luther questioned God and brought us the freedom to break free from the imprisonment of an all-powerful Roman church.

What's so great about a civilization that causes people to hoarde their wealth (rather than put it in circulation) before it is arbitrarily taken by the top dog? What was so great about a civilization that preaches conformity or death? What was so great about Islam that it had to BRIBE folks to convert, when it wasn't doing so by violent invasion (it was axiomatic that only non-Muslims paid taxes, incidentally)? You tell me, what is so great about a civilization that claims descent from the very first Jew and then does it's level best to annihilate them?

Western Civilization has it's bad poins, too, to be sure, but to paraphrase Churchill it's "the least worst form of civilization yet discovered".

I submit the following for you to expend brain cells on: nearly 1,300 years after the Prophet had Scotty beam him up to the great beyond, Arabic is still the official language of Islam (even if you live in Indonesia), the printing press was banned in Islam until the 19th century and anything printed prior to then was NOT Islamic/Koranic because no one was allowed to duplicate the word of God or the Prophet by mechanistic means. The 9/11 hijackers toolkit included cell phones, airliners, flight schools, credit cards, the internet and box cutters, all Western inventions, and invented by people able to think freely without the threat of a fatwa.

And I could go on and on...

The point is that one cannot hope to build a vibrant, enriching society when every idea, every new invention, has to be viewed through the lens of religious correctness, and has to be picked apart by the arbiters of same who are really more interested in how these things affect THEIR power and status. The consequences are regarded as a threat to the established order or a threat to the whole of civilization.

Western Civilization threatens it's own established orders, it's own civilization, EVERY DAY and it continues to thrive. On the other side of the planet, people still cross deserts on camelback and live in tents, scratching a living as best they can...

Islam is a system that would make a committed communist green with envy....

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