Tagged: Christianity

In France, the religious war few wish to face

(GATESTONE INSTITUTE) — The remains of St. Denis, the patron saint of Paris, who was decapitated in the year 250 during the brutal pagan persecution of Christians, lie north of the French capital in the basilica that bears his name.

The church is historically noteworthy as the first proper work of Gothic architecture, a style influenced by the Crusades. The basilica is now a rarely visited Parisian landmark, lying as it does within the profoundly Islamized enclave of Seine-Saint-Denis.

“You Christians, you kill us,” were the words of the ISIS knifeman who slit the throat of 85-year old Father Jacques Hamel. The elderly priest officiating at the altar of the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray — a mere three kilometres from the centre of Rouen in Normandy — was slain on July 25, as the two terrorists also took nuns hostage. The terrorists were then shot by police.

On August 5, police swept down on a man shouting “Allahu Akbar” [“Allah is the Greatest”] on the Champs-Élysées, the famous central thoroughfare of the capital of France. Video of the arrest shows passers-by: veiled Muslims, tourists, and presumably indigenous French men and women.

Both of these incidents, when aligned with recent mass outrages across France, including the Bataclan Theatre slaughter on November 13, and the mass carnage caused by a jihadist plot in Nice on July 14, point to a startling reality.

Despite the rhetoric by the government of Prime Minister Manuel Valls on removing dual nationality from those guilty of terrorism offenses and closing extremist mosques (20 of France’s 2,500 alleged mosques have been closed down to date), the violent consequences of jihadism are a daily reality and concern stalking the heart of most French metropolitan districts.

At 7.5% of the population, Muslims in France make up the highest concentration of Muslims of any country in Europe, according to Pew Research.

For decades, those warning of the inevitable consequences of mass Muslim immigration, during a time in history when Islamic fundamentalist doctrine was on the rise worldwide, have been maligned, prosecuted, imprisoned or assassinated.

With the security infrastructure now proving inadequate to cope with the sheer scale of enthusiasm for religious war amongst those Islamists born in France, and those able to enter the country — thanks to the open border policies of the EU — the threat continues to increase day by day.

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Islam: A sow’s ear will never be a silk purse

ISLAM IS THE CREATION of a psychopath, so call what Muhammad started a religion at your own risk.

One of the difficulties the world faces in dealing with what he created is that it has blindly accepted Islam’s definition of itself as a religion due to superficial characteristics that make it look like an authentic religion. This erroneous idea gets repeated ad nauseam and is most harmfully enshrined in the pronouncement that Islam is a “religion of peace.”

Islam is a conundrum because appearances are so deceiving. Muslims pray, don’t they? They worship God, don’t they? Therefore they must be practicing a religion, isn’t that so? It takes some scratching to get below the hard veneer of this conceit, but when one takes the trouble to investigate the life of Muhammad, it becomes clear that Muslims don’t worship God. What they worship is a God concept and nothing more — a God concept formulated by Muhammad. And who was Muhammad? A very dangerous man, someone given to killing people who did not believe him when he told them that God talked to him. Read more »

A timeline of Islamic expansion

By Dan McLaughlin

Let me put down here some facts that are worth returning to from time to time, as arguments over the history of Islam and Islamism are back in the news with today’s beheading in London. In debates over the history of tension between Muslims and Christians, the Crusades are often cited, out of their historical context, as the original cause of such clashes, as if both sides were peaceably minding their own business before imperialist Westerners decided to go launch a religious war in Muslim lands.

This is not what actually happened, and indeed it is ahistorical to treat the fragmented feudal states of the West in the Eleventh Century as capable of any such thing as imperialism or colonialism (although, as Victor Davis Hanson has noted, even in the centuries after the fall of Rome, Western civilization retained a superior logistical ability to project force overseas due to the scientific, economic and military legacies of ancient Greece and Rome). Moreover, when Islam first arose, much of what we think of today as Islamic ‘territory’ in Anatolia, the Levant and North Africa was Christian until conquered by the heirs of Muhammad, such that speaking of one side’s incursions into the other’s territory requires you to ignore how that territory was seized in the first place. That entire region had been part of the Roman and later Byzantine empires, and was culturally part of the West until it was conquered by Muslim arms – Rome is closer geographically to Tripoli than to London, Madrid is closer to Casablanca than to Berlin, Athens is closer to Damascus than to Paris.

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