eChurch Blog

Two very interesting articles today relating to the ongoing ‘Allah’ row in Malaysia and the subsequent attacks on churches.

Previous posts; here, here, here, here and here

Ecumenical News International

MALAYSIA: Christians flock to worship amid attacks on churches

Churches in Malaysia were full of worshipers despite attacks against Christian places of worship in recent days in a dispute about the use of the word “Allah” by non-Muslim minorities.

“People’s faith is greater than what’s happening around [them] so they continue to go to church and pray for themselves as well as for the nation,” said the Rev. Hermen Shastri, the general secretary of the Council of Churches of Malaysia, on Jan. 10, the Agence France-Presse news agency reported.

Shastri said heightened security measures had been taken following the attacks, which came after a court decision that opened the way for non-Muslim minorities to use the word “Allah” in their religious books and publications.

Nobody has so far been injured in the attacks, which by Jan. 11 were reported to have targeted nine church buildings and have raised concern among minority Christians living in the Muslim-majority southeast-Asian country.

Two churches in Taiping in northern Perak state were attacked on Jan. 10 by arsonists who threw Molotov cocktails in the early hours before Sunday services began. Four other churches were attacked in the capital Kuala Lumpur on Jan. 8, with one church sustaining serious damage to part of its building.

The fire bomb thrown at Taiping’s All Saints Anglican church caused scorch marks on the walls of the building and set off a small fire, church officials said. Another attack on a Roman Catholic church in the city caused no damage to the building.

About 60 percent of Malaysia’s 26 million-population is Muslim. The rest are Buddhists (19 percent), Christians (nine percent), Hindus (six percent), Sikhs and other faiths.

Adherents of minority religions have expressed concern in recent years that the country is becoming “Islamized” following a series of court decisions and government laws that minority groups have said impede on their freedom to worship.

The Malaysian government has appealed against a court decision to allow non-Muslims to use the word “Allah” for God after a judge earlier this month cleared the way for a Catholic newspaper to use the word in its Malay-language edition and determined that the word “Allah” was not exclusive to Muslims.

The court decision was criticized by Muslim groups, who have expressed concern that allowing the word “Allah” to be used by other religious groups would  encourage proselytizing of Muslims to convert them to Christianity and other faiths.

And the second article analysing the right of Christians to use the word “Allah” to refer to the Christian God in the Malay language:-

Islam Watch

‘Allah’ Row in Malaysia: Why Christians Have Greater Rights to Use ‘Allah’ than Muslims?

In Malaysia, Muslims are waging a raging, and potentially dangerous, campaign to own exclusive copyright to use the word ‘Allah’.

The controversy has been brewing since 2007, when Muslim fanatics protested against the use of ‘Allah’ to denote ‘God’ in Christian literature and publications. The Malaysian government, to appease the fanatics, banned the Catholic Herald, a Malaysian Catholic weekly, for using the word ‘Allah’.

Dr. Mahathir Muhammad, the longest-serving Malaysian ex-premier, under whom Malaysia underwent progressive Islamization, supported the ban. To him, the word ‘Allah’ belongs to Muslims alone.

It’s worthy noting that Christians in Malaysia have been using the word ‘Allah’ in Malay-language Bibles since the 1800s.

The Catholic Herald initiated a legal battle not only against the ban on its publication, but also on its age-old right to use the term ‘Allah’.

Authorities in Malaysia confiscated 15,000 copies of the Bible from Christians in late 2009 for containing the word ‘Allah’.

And, as of latest, Malaysian High Court overturned the ban on Catholic Herald on December 31, 2009. It also ruled that it was the constitutional right for the Herald to use the word “Allah”.

The ruling that literally allows non-Muslims to use ‘Allah’ enraged Muslims and the ruling party activists.

Dr. Mahathir, leading a backlash against the court ruling, wrote: “The solution to the controversy will not be achieved by making an appeal to the court. Such a sensitive issue cannot be solved through law.”

He added that non-Muslims “may use it on banners or write something that might not reflect Islam”, thereby, potentially inflaming Muslims’ anger.

Such statements—some inflammatory, others mixed—by the ruling party politicians and ministers, including the current Prime Minister and Home Minister, unraveled days of protests setting the stage for a huge demonstration on Friday, January 8, 2010. Surprisingly, the Home Ministry, on the one hand, overruled the High Court ruling on Wednesday, January 6, while also approved Friday’s mass demonstration on the ruling.

And, at the end of the demonstration, as generally occurs all over the Muslim world, fanatic Muslim mobs burned down three churches. On Saturday another church was attacked, while two more on Sunday, bringing the total number of churches to six. It’s probably just the beginning unless the Christians relent on their demand.

Read More

chiesa.espresso.repubblica

By Sandro Magister

ROME, January 11, 2010 – As at the beginning of every year, Pope Benedict XVI delivered his state of the world address this morning to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See.

The address has the style and prudence of Vatican diplomacy. For example, it does not mention India or China, the two emerging superpowers where the Catholic Church is for various reasons oppressed and attacked.

However, this does not change the fact that the address transmits messages that intentionally go against other tendencies. Three of them in particular.

1. ECOLOGY OF NATURE, BUT ABOVE ALL OF MAN

The first message coincides with the one previously issued by Benedict XVI for the World Day of Peace, celebrated on New Year’s Day: “If you want to cultivate peace, protect creation.” With a decisive and unconventional emphasis: the primacy given to the comprehensive safeguarding of man.

Here are three passages from the address that develop this theme:

“Twenty years ago, after the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the materialistic and atheistic regimes which had for several decades dominated a part of this continent, it was easy to assess the great harm which an economic system lacking any reference to the truth about man had done not only to the dignity and freedom of individuals and peoples, but to nature itself, by polluting soil, water and air. The denial of God distorts the freedom of the human person, yet it also devastates creation. It follows that the protection of creation is not principally a response to an aesthetic need, but much more to a moral need, in as much as nature expresses a plan of love and truth which is prior to us and which comes from God.” [...]

“If we wish to build true peace, how can we separate, or even set at odds, the protection of the environment and the protection of human life, including the life of the unborn? It is in man’s respect for himself that his sense of responsibility for creation is shown. [...]

“Creatures differ from one another and can be protected, or endangered, in different ways, as we know from daily experience. One such attack comes from laws or proposals which, in the name of fighting discrimination, strike at the biological basis of the difference between the sexes. I am thinking, for example, of certain countries in Europe or North and South America. Saint Columban stated that: ‘If you take away freedom, you take away dignity.’ Yet freedom cannot be absolute, since man is not himself God, but the image of God, God’s creation. For man, the path to be taken cannot be determined by caprice or willfulness, but must rather correspond to the structure willed by the Creator.”

2. POSITIVE SECULARITY

A second unconventional message is addressed mainly to Europe and the West. It defends the public role of the Church. In this sense:

“The causes of the situation which is now evident to everyone are of the moral order, and the question must be faced within the framework of a great programme of education aimed at promoting an effective change of thinking and at creating new lifestyles. The community of believers can and wants to take part in this, but, for it to do so, its public role must be recognized. Sadly, in certain countries, mainly in the West, one increasingly encounters in political and cultural circles, as well in the media, scarce respect and at times hostility, if not scorn, directed towards religion and towards Christianity in particular. It is clear that if relativism is considered an essential element of democracy, one risks viewing secularity solely in the sense of excluding or, more precisely, denying the social importance of religion. But such an approach creates confrontation and division, disturbs peace, harms human ecology and, by rejecting in principle approaches other than its own, finishes in a dead end.

“There is thus an urgent need to delineate a positive and open secularity which, grounded in the just autonomy of the temporal order and the spiritual order, can foster healthy cooperation and a spirit of shared responsibility. Here I think of Europe, which, now that the Lisbon Treaty has taken effect, has entered a new phase in its process of integration, a process which the Holy See will continue to follow with close attention. Noting with satisfaction that the Treaty provides for the European Union to maintain an ‘open, transparent and regular’ dialogue with the Churches (Art. 17), I express my hope that in building its future, Europe will always draw upon the wellsprings of its Christian identity.”

3. FREEDOM OF RELIGION

Finally, a third message defends freedom of religion, and denounces situations in which this freedom is violated.

Benedict XVI cites some of the examples that see Christians as the victims: Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt, Middle East. He doesn’t mention Islam, but in all of the cases cited the aggressors are Muslims:

“Out of love for the dialogue and peace which protect creation, I exhort the government leaders and the citizens of Iraq to overcome their divisions and the temptation to violence and intolerance, in order to build together the future of their country. The Christian communities also wish to make their own contribution, but if this is to happen, they need to be assured respect, security and freedom. Pakistan has been also hard hit by violence in recent months and certain episodes were directly aimed at the Christian minority. I ask that everything be done to avoid the reoccurrence of such acts of aggression, and to ensure that Christians feel fully a part of the life of their country. In speaking of acts of violence against Christians, I cannot fail to mention also the deplorable attack which the Egyptian Coptic community suffered in recent days, during its celebration of Christmas.” [...]

“The grave acts of violence to which I have just alluded, combined with the scourges of poverty, hunger, natural disasters and the destruction of the environment, have helped to swell the ranks of those who migrate from their native land. Given the extent of this exodus, I wish to exhort the various civil authorities to carry on their work with justice, solidarity and foresight. Here I wish to speak in particular of the Christians of the Middle East. Beleaguered in various ways, even in the exercise of their religious freedom, they are leaving the land of their forebears, where the Church took root during the earliest centuries. To offer them encouragement and to make them feel the closeness of their brothers and sisters in faith, I have convened for next autumn a Special Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the Middle East.”

__________

The complete text of the pope’s address to the diplomatic corps:

> “This traditional meeting at the beginning of the year…”

Cross-post from the Calvin L Smith Blog

Have you noticed how the favourite maxim (nay, mantra) of some who vociferously and pejoratively reject the view that the Jewish people somehow retain a continued special place in God’s heart claim such a theology is racist? Do a bit of research and dig a little and you’ll see it is a favourite ploy by the new supercessionists. In these New Testament times, they say, the time of the new covenant, God shows no favouritism. Therefore, any view that singles out the Jews as God’s chosen people is a racist theology. Thus they claim “God is not a racist.”

Actually, according to this flawed logic that last phrase should read, “God is no longer a racist” because, as we all know (and supercessionists freely concede) in Old Testament times biblical Israel was indeed God’s chosen people. God did choose for Himself a people – the Jews – who were special in God’s sight. So upon reflection, when someone accuses a theology of the Jews as God’s continued people of being inherently racist we are left with two logical choices. Either a) God is no longer a racist, or b) God’s choosing of a peculiar people, as He did in Old Testament times, was done in such a way which was never racist to begin with. If the latter, how then can the view today that God has not finished with His people Israel also be considered racist? It can’t. And of course we also know biblical Israel was far from racist. She practised an integrationist approach which welcomed all manner of ethnic non-Jews within the congregation of Israel. (More on this in a future post.) To be sure, a minority on the fringes of Christian Zionism may well be racist, but it simply won’t do to implicate everyone who holds to the view God has not finished with the Jewish people as somehow crossing the line into racism. Unnecessarily inflammatory language and straw man building such as this merely turns the theological debate into a political football.

So next time someone pompously asserts that a theology affirming God’s favouritism towards the Jews is somehow racist, I suggest a response (in a suitably humble manner, of course) to the effect that, “Oh, I’m glad to hear God is no longer a racist”. Then explain how, according to their logic, He used to be in Old Testament times. I’d be interested to hear their responses.

John Denham – Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government and self proclaimed secular humanist – has appointed a team of ‘faith advisers’, which has predictably upset the humanists and secularists, however, I don’t think they have too much to worry about frankly.

Here is some commentary:-

Cranmer:-

Labour shuns Roman Catholic advisers

And they may well consider it a blessing not to be associated with the bizarre ‘faith group’ which has been assembled by John Denham, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government.

But it is an awful faux pas – on the approach to a General Election, when Labour desperately needs to shore up its traditional vote – to alienate and offend further still a vociferously-faithful and electorally-sizeable community (remember Glasgow East) which is already smarting from Labour’s anti-Christian legislation, not to say distinctly anti-Catholic agenda, on faith schools, homosexual equality, abortion, euthanasia, embryo experimentation, stem-cell research…

Read More

And Harry’s Place:-

Wakkas Khan: Faithful Islamist

Here’s some news from the Department for Communities and Local Government. It has established a panel of 13 “faith advisers who will act as a ’sounding board’ to advise on effective engagement with faith communities, and the impact of Communities and Local Government policy on faith communities”. Here’s John Denham:

“This new panel brings together an unprecedented wealth of knowledge and experience that will help advise on the big issues facing society such as the economy, parenting, achieving social justice and tackling climate change.

“For millions of people the values instilled by their faith are central to shaping their behaviour. We should continually seek ways of supporting and enhancing the contribution faith makes to the decision-making process on the central issues of our time.

“Each adviser is has an outstanding track record of achievement. Together they will help inform Government on the views and values of faith communities, enabling us to learn from the unique insights that faith groups bring to contemporary issues.”

Now that’s some godawful pandering.

Let’s take a look at the “unique insights” of one of the new advisers, Wakkas Khan.

When he was president of the University of Manchester student Islamic society (ISOC), in 2001-2, he opposed the liberation of Afghanistan from the Taliban:

Read More

And Heresy Corner:-

The God Squad

In a little-noticed press release on Wednesday, the Department for Communities and Local Government announced a group of 13 “inter-faith” advisers to act as its “sounding board” on all things faith. The statement expresses the hope that the lucky thirteen will “will enhance ministerial understanding of, and engagement, with faith communities nationally.”

The Secretary of State, John Denham, claims that the panel “brings together an unprecedented wealth of knowledge and experience that will help advise on the big issues facing society such as the economy, parenting, achieving social justice and tackling climate change….We should continually seek ways of supporting and enhancing the contribution faith makes to the decision-making process on the central issues of our time.”

New Labour’s belief that connecting with “faith” is the key to building its utopia has evidently survived the departure of Tony Blair. Denham, who claims not to be religious himself, nevertheless insists that “for millions of people the values instilled by their faith are central to shaping their behaviour.” Terry Sanderson, of the National Secular Society, dismissed the claim as “insulting and patronising” to the non-religious majority. “Religious leaders are out of step with the way Britons live”, he declared, citing religious teachings on divorce, abortion, homosexuality and voluntary euthanasia. It was, he said, “inappropriate for the government to invite specifically religious people to advise it on policy-making.”

But who are these faith-advisers – each of whom, we are assured, have “an outstanding track record of achievement”? Who, if anyone, do they represent, and what qualifies them to give advice to the government? Here’s your handy guide to the thirteen people the government thinks represent the cutting-edge of faith-based community engagement in 2010.

Read More

Oh finally some good news from Malaysia as some Muslim groups are coming out in support of the church, which is seriously under attack currently.

Previous posts; here, here, here and here

Bernama

Muslim NGO Bodies Begin Church Security Patrols

KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 11 (Bernama) — Volunteers from Muslim non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have begun patrolling church areas in the Klang Valley.

Ten volunteers had begun patrolling from 11pm Sunday in church areas in Kampung Pandan and Brickfields.

Deputy chief and working secretary of Kerja Badan Tarbiah Sejagat (BATAS) Danny Azar said the patrol schedule was 11pm to 2am and 4am till dawn.

“We have started patrolling and we also meet church officials to identify ourselves,” he said.

BATAS is among 130 NGOs which have committed to be the “eyes and ears” of the government to face any threat to Christian churches.

This is being done following three incidents of fire bombing at the Metro Tabernacle Church in Desa Melawati, the Assumption Church in Petaling Jaya and the Life Chapel Church in Damansara recently.

Among NGOs involved are Persatuan Pengguna Islam Malaysia (PPIM), Persatuan Cina Muslim Malaysia (MACMA), Majlis Permuafakatan Ummah (PEWARIS), Pertubuhan Peribumi Semenanjung (PERKASA), Darussyifa, Persatuan Kebangsaan Pelajar Islam Malaysia (PKPIM), Kongres India Muslim Malaysia (KIMMA), Persatuan Ulama Malaysia (PUM) and Islamic Information and Services Foundation (IIS).

The initiative has roped in 60 volunteers.

Meanwhile, a member of the Holy Rosary Catholic Church in Brickfields, Angelina Soo, 28, said they were thankful to the Muslim NGOs and appreciated their care and sense of responsibility to ensure the security of churches.

Wonderful and what a pleasure to report…

Care

More information

Legal experts have confirmed that, under the proposed law, churches would no longer be able to insist that employees, including priests, pastors and church leaders, live according the churches teaching about marriage and sexual conduct. It also seems certain that the Catholic Church will not be able to insist that successful priestly candidates are male and celibate.

The threat to religious liberty in the UK posed by the Equality Bill is highlighted by an important new report that comes out today. Produced by Christian public policy charity CARE, A Little Bit Against Discrimination?, comes with a supporting foreword from the former Lord Chancellor, Lord Mackay of Clashfern.

The report explains that the offending part of the Bill – Schedule 9 – states that churches can only be free to insist that successful candidates must live the faith with respect to sexual ethics in relation to roles that are ‘wholly or mainly’ concerned with liturgy or ritual or promoting or explaining doctrine. Given that whilst Sundays might be concerned with liturgy, ritual and doctrine, the rest of the week is dominated by pastoral and other responsibilities, it is not clear how many churches will be able to continue with employed pastors if the Bill becomes law.

The plight of the Christian Voluntary Sector – certainly within the Evangelical and Catholic traditions – is also a major cause for concern. Given that no post within a Christian Voluntary Sector project, not even that of the CEO, would be concerned wholly or mainly with liturgy or ritual or promoting or explaining doctrine, certain Christian traditions could not be confident of their ability to insist that any member of staff lived the faith and in this context it becomes very unclear how such projects could continue.

Staying with religious liberty and faith based welfare, the Bill also consolidates the controversial sexual orientation goods and service legislation which has resulted in the closing of Catholic adoption agencies. In so-doing it presents Parliament with its first opportunity to amend this controversial law.

Report author Dan Boucher explained:

‘When the sexual orientation goods and services legislation was presented in 2007 it was as unamendable secondary legislation. Parliament simply had the choice of voting for it or against it. There could be no fine tuning. This meant that those with concerns about the impact of the legislation on faith based adoption agencies had to decide whether they were prepared to vote all the legislation down because of this problem. During Committee Stage peers will be free to affirm the good in the sexual orientation goods and services legislation but amend it so that Catholic and other faith based adoption agencies can function.’

At Report Stage in the Commons last month, Ann Widdecombe engaged with this opportunity and tabled an amendment so that Catholic agencies could continue. Co-signed by a large number of MPs from across the parties, this was clearly an issue that the democratically elected house wanted to consider. In the event, however, the Government did not provide sufficient time and Miss Widdecombe was silenced. Happily the Lords now have the opportunity to engage properly with this important issue.

Indeed the point must be made that the House of Lords has a very special constitutional responsibility as it begins its consideration of amendments tomorrow because of the lack of scrutiny provided by MPs, resulting from the government’s unwillingness to give proper time. Over 100 amendments put down by the democratically elected people’s representatives were not discussed at all, let alone voted on. Of particular concern, this number included all 37 of the disability amendments tabled for debate – a strange way to handle a Bill that is supposed to promote fairness.

More information…

To read CARE’s Report, Click HERE

Previous posts on this escalating and worrying situation in Malyasia; here, here and here.

Telegraph

No one was hurt in the latest upsurge of violence which saw two churches firebombed and a third dubbed with black paint in a row sparked by a court decision allowing non-Muslims to use the word “Allah” in place of God in their literature and worship.

Four other churches in Kuala Lumpur were firebombed on Friday and Saturday amid outrage in the Muslim-majority country over the court’s move to overturn a government prohibition on the use of Allah by Christians when using the Malay language.

Hundreds of worshippers from one of the churches that was partially destroyed last week gathered for a service at a makeshift prayer hall and urged an end to the violence.

Earlier a petrol bomb was hurled at the All Saints Church in Taping, in central Perak state, before worshippers arrived. The building was not badly damaged, but scorch marks were found in the hall.

At St Louis Catholic Church, also in Taping, a broken bottle of petrol with a wick was discovered. It failed to explode. In the southern Malacca state the outer wall of a Baptist church was splashed with paint.

The dispute follows a December 31 ruling by the High Court allowing a petition by the Roman Catholic church after a protracted struggle over the use of the word Allah.

The Church’s main publication, the Herald newspaper, often uses the word Allah instead of God in its Malay language edition. It maintains Allah has been used traditionally for centuries.

The government in Malaysia, where 9 per cent of the 28 million population is Christian, has lodged an appeal against the ruling.

Whilst the Pope denounces the machine-gun slaughter of 6 Egyptian Christian Copts, the Church of England is more concerned with the first ever ‘Thought for the Day’ hosted by Chris Evans. I haven’t heard an official murmur about these slayings from the Church of England, I guess one will come now the Pope has spoken up, this seems to be how it works. Still, they are not alone in their silence, they can join with the mainstream media and the Islamic world in saying nothing.

Merry Christmas from the World of Islam

By Joel J. Sprayregen – American Thinker

With attention focused on the flagrant security breaches around Flight 253 on Christmas Day, too little has been made of the timing of the attack. Most readers will be surprised to learn that this was not the only Christmas attack on Christians. Here is a list of other holiday attacks which I found without extensive research:

1. On December 23, a bomb was detonated near the Syrian Orthodox church of St. Thomas in Mosul, Iraq.

2. On the same day, a bomb exploded in the same city outside the Chaldean church of St. George, killing three people.

3. Fifty Muslims barred the doors of the Tafat Church in northern Algeria to stop a Christmas service. According to the Algerian newspaper El Watan, the Muslims threatened to kill the pastor.

4. On Christmas Eve, armed Muslims attacked worshipers at a church in Kalar Kahar, Pakistan, injuring 65 Christian women and children. Local police were called but refused to help.

5. On December 17, about a thousand Muslims attacked the nearly-completed church of St. Albert, which was being readied for Christmas Mass, in Bekasi Regency, near Jakarta, Indonesia. The Muslims carried tanks of kerosene with which they set the church afire.

6. In Nag Hamadi, Egypt, near Luxor, gunfire from a speeding car directed at worshipers leaving midnight mass on Coptic Christian Christmas (January 7) killed seven. The assailants escaped; Copts claimed that police sided with the Muslims who attacked them. A Coptic priest called it “a terrorist attack at a sensitive time.” The head of the interfaith committee at al-Azhar University, Egypt’s foremost  Islamic institution (where President Obama spoke last June), said the attack “wasn’t motivated by religious differences,” but out of the region’s strong “concept of revenge” over an alleged sexual crime by a Copt last year.

What the Media Ignore

I have not searched for additional instances. Isn’t it noteworthy that you did not hear about any of this from the general media? Reporting such attacks might compel the media to consider tenets of Islam which appear to mandate desecration of Christian holy days.  Understanding that the analysis ventured below will subject me to accusations of bigotry and Islamophobia, let me hasten to explain: I have spent more than a half-century as a lawyer and writer defending human rights, including a long stint as counsel for the ACLU (an agency with which I am now in considerable disagreement) at the outset of my career. I do not seek to defame hundreds of millions of Muslims who live in peace alongside Christians. But neither can it be contended that Christmas violence is an aberration confined to the distant fringes of Islam.

A look at some texts widely circulated among Muslims — with highlighting added by me –  is instructive. Sheikh Najih Ibrahim was confined until 2004 in an Egyptian prison for his role in the assassination of Anwar Sadat, apparently increasing his credibility to many followers. He explains the Jizya, the tax imposed on Christians and Jews, as “a symbol of humiliation of the infidels.” He cites as authority the 14th-century Sunni scholar Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, who wrote that the Jizya “aims at humiliating ungodliness and its followers, and insulting them.” The medieval scholar in turn quotes a notorious passage of the Koran (9:29) which says Jizya is imposed “until they give the tribute by force with humiliation.” Similarly, the 18th-century scholar Sheikh Maliki al-Adawi wrote:

There is no doubt that one of the principal conditions of equity consists in banishing infidels from any distinction and any possibility of raising their status, and reducing them to humiliation and abasement.

The Clear and Present Danger to Our Civilization

Am I selectively choosing quotations to support my thesis? Definitely, yes. I am not attacking the Muslim literature, but I am calling attention to the killings committed in its name. I am not an expert on Islam. But it is well-known that Islamic tradition divides the world between dar al-Islam, the abode of Islam, and dar al-Harb, the abode of war. While advocacy of violence can be found in the literature and history of Christianity and Judaism, there is currently no ceaseless toll of daily murders committed in the names of these faiths. There are undoubtedly many quotations in the universe of Muslim literature which advocate peace and tolerance. But the clear and present danger menacing our country — indeed, all of western civilization — is the existence of significant numbers of Muslims who are willing to act on what they believe are divine commandments to humiliate and massacre Christians. We don’t know how many of them there are or where most of them are hiding. But it appears that their numbers are increasing. And they are embedded among us. Anwar al-Awlaki, the persuasive preacher who indoctrinated both the Christmas would-be-bomber and the Ft. Hood mass murderer, was born in the United States, as were the five jihadis from northern Virginia recently arrested in Pakistan.

The Christmas attacks summarized above were committed in many countries on several continents, but the common thread is that Muslims felt they were ordained to humiliate and kill Christians. President Obama is now willing to say — seemingly begrudgingly — that we are “at war,” but only with al-Qaeda (which is preferable to his dimwitted Secretary Napolitano, who calls terrorist attacks “man-caused disasters”). But the events of Christmas 2009 show that war is being waged against us on vast fronts. Tony Blair grasped more shrewdly than our own leaders that the threat comes not only from al-Qaeda, but from all of radical Islam when he recently said, “We will defeat this terrorism when we understand that it is one battle, one struggle (against) a global movement with an ideology.” Blair knows what he is talking about because Muslim students at British universities are imbued with murderous ideology; four heads of student Islamic societies have been charged with serious terrorism.

Where Is Muslim Outrage at Mass Murder?

If there are contemporary Muslim authorities and scholars who have unambiguously condemned such murderousness and the texts claimed to justify them as repugnant to Islam, I have not seen the condemnations — and I follow such matters closely. Nor have I heard apologies from Muslim leaders akin to what President Obama felt constrained to confess in Cairo. Instead, Muslim organizations tell us it constitutes bigotry to mention Islam and terrorism in the same breath, or to profile the young Muslim males who comprise the pool from which all the murderers are recruited. I have had this discussion face-to-face with both Mubarak (who said terrorism has “nothing to do with Islam” but, in point of fact, punishes terrorists harshly) and Arafat (who of course lied by defining jihad as nothing more than “the struggle to purify the soul”). Recently, I had a rather demure (for me) debate in print with Turkey’s leading “moderate” Islamic spokesman. All he wanted to talk about was alleged Israeli crimes in Gaza, while he dismissively acknowledged that mass murders by Muslims are no more than “a problem.” The bizarre, if not masochistic, nature of the conflict comes into focus when we recall that democracies are urged to refrain (and sometimes they do) from attacking Muslim terrorists during the “holy month” of Ramadan.

Islam is not a hierarchical religion, so there is no single authority who can prohibit mass murder of innocents in the name of Allah. But why can’t a broad coalition of Muslim authorities announce that this is so instead of obsessively complaining about alleged offenses to Islam? Until this is at least attempted, the killers can continue to insist that they are acting in the name of authentic Islam. If our top intelligence gurus knew anything about the Islamic commandment to humiliate Christians, they would not have all been vacationing (and then failing to return) on Christmas Day. Nor would they have unpardonably blundered by failing to treat the bomber as an enemy combatant to be rigorously questioned before his government-provided lawyer told him to clam up. Let’s our people are more vigilant — and on the job — on Easter.

From Jihad Watch

Cross-Post from Cranmer’s Curate:-

Following Lord Carey’s recent remarks about the effect of mass immigration on our nation’s social cohesion, the question arises: how good for the gospel was the more religiously, culturally and ethnically homogeneous Britain of the 1950s?

In the wake of the former Archbishop’s intervention, Cranmer’s Curate was invited to appear on BBC Radio Sheffield to discuss ‘What are British values?’

Your curate said that because of the fragmented state of British values we need to return to a ‘broadly Christian consensus’. He sought to argue that our Parliamentary democracy developed in a substantially Christian culture and that we are now in danger of losing our democratic privileges because our culture is turning toxic.

Whilst he stands by that argument as a reasonable historical prognosis, cc is not so sure on reflection about the desirability of returning to the culturally Christian Britain of the 1950s.

Clearly, that culture spared the Church the horrors of the Equality Bill. But the problem with such a broadly Christian culture is that people think they’re automatically Christian by virtue of being born in Britain. Such people can be especially resistant to being told that they need to be born again.

Your curate is reminded of a remark he once heard from the former Rector of St Helen’s Bishopsgate, Dick Lucas, at a Proclaimation Trust preaching conference. When Dick was growing up in the south of England in the 1940s, there were hardly any gospel-preaching churches. Now he said there are many churches where you can hear the gospel clearly proclaimed.

The spread of the gospel does require social stability, which is what we are in dire danger of losing in this country because we no longer have a unifying worldview. But the thought occurs to cc that Pax Political Correcta, though it is leading to problems for Christians, could actually be a more promising culture for proclaiming our Lord Christ’s gospel than one in which people think they’re Christian by birth. Furthermore, multi-cultural Britain presents wonderful opportunities for evangelism.

The question remains, of course, whether political correctness as the ascendant worldview in Western culture can deliver social stability. One suspects that, unlike the Pax Romana, it is a recipe for social chaos.