Italian political fun-fact

Italian political fun-fact: two years ago, under a government that had been forcibly imposed on Italy by the European Union, Italy slashed its defence budget by 40%. Right now, the government admits that this country is able to field no more than 4000 troops.

As a friend of mine in Rome said, the keep is undefended and the gates are open. The Italians probably figured that if they needed military help, they could call their good buddies the Americans. The only difficulty, of course, is that the Obama regime isn't interested in stopping the Islamic invasion they helped to trigger.

This year, the numbers in the final budget are lower than the preliminary budget, indicating the depth of cuts made in the five months between the publication of the two documents as the Italian government seeks to free up funds.

Meanwhile, in other news...

Catholics considering taking seriously the ... ummm... suggestion from Pope Francis to take a Syrian "refugee" into their homes and parishes might want to think about it some more...

In Fiuggi, one hour south of Rome, a Muslim “migrant” youth gang-raped and tried to kill the head of the facility. They tore up and destroyed the migrant “Welcome” facility and beat up other care workers — the people who had cared for them over the past six months.

and...(Google-translated) "migrant reception centres" are starting to turn into "powder kegs" of violence:

No injuries, but the fear was so great. For the time being against the protagonists of the episode of violence they have not been taken. What happened, however, it shows that the reception facilities are powder kegs ready to explode at any moment.

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Cheery thought for the day

Years ago, I was having a conversation with Paul Tuns of the Interim and the guy who gave me my first political lobbying job in Toronto about the future. We joked that there was no point in worrying about retirement on pro-lifer salaries since by the time we were old enough to retire, the governments of the western world would already have legalised euthanasia and would probably already be using it to get rid of people like us.

I remembered that conversation a few weeks ago when ISIS murdered those Copts about 500 km from Italian soil and started thinking maybe I wouldn't have to wait until Big Brother decided to purge his enemies.

Quite pleased with myself today for coming up with one of my better lines.

About the response to ISIS by the Vatican diplomatic mission to the UN

What doesn’t the Vatican delegate’s polite, politically correct, jargon-laden joint statement say? It does not say what Catholic prelates, including popes, used to say routinely: that Christian civilisation is better than the vigorous barbarism and the bloated and enervated classical pagan fatalism it replaced 2000 years ago. It is better than Islam, that dominates what we now call the Middle East, the ancient Christian homeland brutally conquered by Mohammed’s ruthless, salacious and bloodthirsty will to power. And it is better than the predatory relativistic secularism, spawned out of 18th century Freemasonry, that still has its venomous fangs sunk into the twitching corpse of Christendom.

Anyway, back to Big Bang Theory...



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Fight 'em until we can't

There's a problem in the West, the cultural and political mega-entity that we used to call Christendom, and that the Muslim fanatics (who clearly haven't been keeping up with the news in the last 50 years) still imagine they are fighting. I read somewhere that the savages are crowing about how they've struck a blow against the "children of the cross" with the Paris shooting. (Seriously, you freaks, if you think that Charlie Hebdo had anything to do with Christianity you've got a pretty big problem with your brains.)

Where was I? The problem in the West... Yes, it's that the people in it no longer love it, no longer care enough to fight to defend it. And, honestly, it's hard to argue against this. What about the post-Christian "West" is worth fighting and dying for? Universal health care? The European Convention on Human Rights? Secularism? The "right" to have the government pay for your gender reassignment? The perpetually open maw of Europeans who have become as helpless and dependent as baby birds waiting to get fed predigested food regurgitated by Mamma-government?


As I write this, I'm listening to a CD of Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band singing their cheery versions of Medieval English Christmas carols. The work of this group has always been to reach back into England's musical and cultural and religious past and bring it forward, to remind us of its homely greatness, the humane, the sane greatness of Christian culture.

As I was listening to it, and reading ... well... all that, all that we've all been reading in the last few days, I was thinking that there is indeed something I'm willing to fight and die for. But it has nothing to do with anything the EU or its fellow travellers think they are doing, or with Charlie Hebdo's mentally and morally disordered rants. Honestly, I've always hated that stuff since it started appearing in the 1970s.

What I love, and am willing to fight and die to protect, is what I've found still surviving in this valley I've moved to. In the middle of the Apennine mountains, a hidden and almost secret place where the ancient and good things are still honoured, remembered and kept. Will I fight and die for this? Oh, hell yes.

Will I fight and die for the disgusting, drooling, squelching anti-culture we've created since 1965? No, I'm afraid that thing is on its own.

The remnants of Christendom are hanging on by a thread, assaulted on our ancestral turf by our own traitors. In our even more ancient homeland it is shattered. Is it beyond repair? I don't know, but I think all this will require more than we are able to do to restore. It will take direct Divine Intervention, and I honestly think that is where all this... all of it, including what's going on in Rome... is going. It is what I'm praying for, almost exclusively, now. That, and that the time will be short, and that souls will not be lost along with lives, or too much that is good and beautiful and precious will be burnt, bombed and destroyed.

I can offer no advice at all to the individuals, who do email me from time to time, asking what they should do, except that we must fight. We must fight the twin threats with everything we have and all our strength. How that will manifest in your own town or parish or family I have no way of knowing. Maybe "fighting" will take the form of simply resisting the secularising trends in your schools or parishes. Maybe it will mean packing your family every Sunday into an oversize van and driving an hour each way to get to the Real Mass. Maybe it will mean standing in front of an abortion mill with a giant graphic image of aborted children and replying to the hate with reason and facts.

Maybe, and perhaps increasingly, it will mean actual fighting, as it has in Iraq and elsewhere.

But I offer this conversation from a man who has studied Islam, Andrew Bieszad, with an old Coptic woman who faced down her Islamic persecutors:

"...so I sat and had begun to eat when an elderly Coptic woman sat down next to me. I struck up a conversation with her, and when I told her a little about myself and my background, she smiled warmly and began speaking in an animated and passionate Arabic.

Over the next hour she told me her life story, about growing up in Egypt, being harassed by Muslims, the threats made against her and her family, and how she eventually came to America with her adult children and their families because the persecution was too severe. She said that she was disappointed by many of her fellow Coptic priests and parishioners. In her words, because they did not take an aggressive posture against Islam and the Muslims who habitually harassed them, they worsened their own standing. She added that because Islam has no concept of love, Muslims only respond to force. That it is the only thing they understand.

She told me that one of the last confrontations she had with the Muslims was right before her family left Egypt. She and a friend were walking home when a group of young Muslim men approached them and began verbally and physically harassing them for being Christians.

“Do you know what I told him?” the woman said.

“What?” I asked.

“I did not show him any fear. We pushed him back and punched him, and we screamed at them ‘Your god is ****, your prophet is ****, and you are **** because you believe in them!’ They ran away, because all Muslims are cowards, and they are afraid when you stand up to them.”"

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Had enough "multiculturalism" yet?

Financial Times on Parish magazine massacre:

"Some common sense would be useful at publications such as Charlie Hebdo”

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Perhaps I lack a sufficient quantity of this virtue...

I once had a brief conversation with a pretty girl in Indigo books. It was the year Ezra Levant's Western Report magazine published something or other that had "offended Muslims" and I was in Indigo (a now-defunct Canadian book chain superstore that I normally never went into) to see if I could get a copy.

Actually, I knew perfectly well that I wouldn't find a copy of it, but for some reason, I was feeling bloody-minded and I went in to see how many of the staff I could annoy by asking for it.

I said to the girl, "I couldn't see the latest edition of Western Report."

"Oh, that one's been taken down."

"Oh? Why?"

"Well, it got a lot of complaints."

"What kind of complaints?"

"Oh, you know... people found it offensive, so we took it off the shelves because we didn't want any incidents."

"Incidents? What kind of incidents? Which people were these?"

"Well, you know. We're a volatile people, so it's best not to offend us."

"Us?"

"Well, those are my people and it was insulting our religion."

"Well, that's funny because over there in what Indigo calls the 'Christianity' section, there are a bunch of books that I, as a believing Catholic, find deeply offensive and insulting, so why do you think they're not being pulled off the shelves?... Could it be it because the Vatican doesn't issue fatwas?"



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Good thing we disarmed all the law-abiding Canadians...

Oh wait...





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"Order is better than chaos...creation better than destruction..."

Here is Sir Kenneth Clarke's message for the ignorant savages who have, apparently, briefly taken time out of their busy days of beheading Syrian Christian children, to break into the museums and smash to powder the some of the planet's most precious cultural treasures and antiquities.





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Ora pro nobis

Sometimes something big and important, and terrifying, that's really far away is brought to one's own doorstep.


This is a photo of Father Ragheed Ganni, a Chaldean rite priest who was murdered outside of his parish church in Mosul, Iraq, in 2007 for refusing to acquiesce to armed thugs who demanded he accept Islam.

He was the friend and classmate of a good friend of mine who lived here until a few years ago.

Today, John tells us, would have been Fr. Ragheed's 41st birthday.

Nicest guy you'd ever want to meet. Three of his subdeacons were killed with him. One of the gunmen demanded to know why he didn't close the church as he had been ordered. Fr. Ragheed replied quietly, "How can I close the house of God?" Ragheed had been secretary to Archbishop Rahho of Mosul who was murdered nine months after they were.

"I understand his cause for beatification is being delayed on account of the current situation in that part of the world. But it will be introduced."

Sometimes we need to be reminded that this is real, and that these are real people this insane and evil stuff is happening to.



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Streets of London "flowing with much blood"

So, who's ready to apologise to Enoch Powell?

Anyone?


Bueller?... Bueller?



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The Real Always Wins

Catholic World Report is asking the awkward questions about Islam that NewChurch doesn't want asked...

I speak about the violence expressed in the Qur'an and practiced in Muhammad's life in order to address the idea, widespread in the West, that the violence we see today is a deformation of Islam. We must honestly admit that there are two readings of the Qur'an and the sunna (Islamic traditions connected to Muhammad): one that opts for the verses that encourage tolerance toward other believers, and one that prefers the verses that encourage conflict.

Both readings are legitimate.

Fr. Samir Khalil Samir, SJ, the Egyptian scholar of Islam who teaches in Beirut and at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome, quoted by Carl Olsen in the National Catholic Reporter.

This little point is the essence, first, of the conflict between Islam and the West, and second of the kinship between Islam and what we call "liberalism," which, as it is playing out in western countries, is really just another term for creeping irrationalism.

Both systems of thought look upon the restrictions of concrete reality as "irrelevant". Both are essentially nominalistic, saying reality is what I decide it is, that something that is true for me is not necessarily true for you, a rejection of the notion of objective reality, which results, as we have seen in a "dictatorship of relativism".

This is what Benedict was getting at in Regensburg; that religion, whose purpose is to describe The Real, must first be rational.

What does that mean?

This is one of the problems with having the profession of journalist exclusively populated with people from Modernia and Newfanglia. They aren't educated so much as indoctrinated. Thus they don't know what words mean and use them differently - for different purposes - than someone interested in conveying reality. So when it came time to report on the infamous Regensburg Address none of them had the intellectual tools to understand it.

When Benedict said that religions have to reject irrationality, he was talking about what I like to call The Laws of Rational Thought, those principles by which we can ascertain truth from falsehood, reality from illusion.

These of course weren't "invented" by the Greeks, any more than Newton could be said to have invented gravity. You don't have to be either a Greek philosopher or a pope to understand them. I'm pretty sure that these Greeks simply wrote down and systematised something that the Babylonians and Egyptians knew all about. In fact, just looking at these ideas we know that, as C.S. Lewis liked to point out, everyone knows them. Indeed, Aristotle himself said that even a man who doesn't think about philosophy at all still acts in accordance with the Principles of it: "Why does he not just get up first thing and walk into a well or, if he finds one, over a cliff? In fact, he seems rather careful about cliffs and wells."

The formal Aristotelian formulations are still the most clear and useful.

First among the Laws of Rational Thought is the Logical Principle of Non-Contradiction. As Aristotle put it in the Metaphysics: "One cannot say of something that it is and that it is not in the same respect and at the same time."

Contradictory statements cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time. One cannot both be in a room and not in a room at the same time.

This idea, and the ideas that spring from it, is the foundation of everything in our civilisation. It is our basic descriptor of the physical universe: essentially, that it is what it is, and its nature cannot be opposed to itself.

Islam's "god" contradicts itself; it says that a thing can both be and not be in the same respect and the same time. One day Allah says to be merciful and tolerant of Christians and Jews and the next day a good Muslim is to kill them, and as our Jesuit friend above said, "both are true interpretations" of the "will of Allah". Islam embraces the notion that its god, that it proposes as the creator of the universe, can encompass both itself and its contradiction. It proposes an essentially irrational god, and a universe that has no constant, universal laws. A god that changes its mind is no God.

"Liberalism" proposes something similar, that each person is a god who can decide according to his preferences what is and is not real and can change that reality to suit his immediate needs.

Christianity, however, as Judaism before it, posits first a rational God, one that never contradicts Himself. As it is put in Scripture,"For I am the Lord, I do not change. Therefore you are not consumed, O sons of Jacob." and "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever." God does not change, and proposes a moral law that is more absolute than the physical laws governing the material universe.

(This, and not even questions of the Trinity or the Incarnation, is the first reason, by the way, that I will never accept the trendy NewChurch notion that "we all worship the same God". It's rubbish because the "god" described by Islam is in many respects entirely the opposite of the God described by Christianity. In fact, it more closely resembles a demon.)

This is the kernel at the heart of Benedict's idea that true religion is first rational, and that irrationality is the enemy of everything good, of a peaceful and orderly civilisation. A thing that contradicts itself is an inherently anti-rational thing, and a society that embraces this irrationality will collapse in chaos. And this outcome is absolutely inescapable. Just as a bridge must be built according to accurate mathematics or it will come crashing down into the river, a society built on anything but accurate philosophy will tear itself apart.

The Real always wins.



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No.

Next question.



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Obstacles

“[T]he rise of the extreme right through elections has become an issue that cannot be countered.” Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

Well, the solution is obvious isn't it?

It's those damned elections we've got to get rid of...

Never fear Jihadis, the EU stands behind you in that noble effort.



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Islamic family values

This is the country where the Western powers think they're going to install a liberal democracy.



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Fundamentally unsound

Islamic person suddenly goes insane, grabs big knife and starts randomly attacking people and cars on the road.

I think I'm not the only one to point it out, but this is what happens when you try to believe logically contradictory things.

This is why I think most Islamic people are insane. Or go insane eventually, once they are taken out of the "Islamic world" where efforts are made to paper over the cracks in their universe. They come to the countries that were founded on The Real, where effect is assumed to follow cause (for example). The contrast becomes acute and they start realising that they believe things that make no sense, and go nuts.

Think I'm making it up or being facetious?

Ever read Nietzsche?

As Jeeves once warned his beloved employer, "You would not enjoy Nietzsche sir. He is fundamentally unsound."



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Christmas week

Over the next few years the Christmas week feasts are going to be increasingly appropos, I think...

The Vatican estimates that from Egypt to Iran there are just 17 million Christians left. Christianity is on the verge of extinction in the ancient lands of its birth. In short, a creeping religious genocide is taking place. Yet the West remains silent for fear of offending Muslim sensibilities.

Non pacem sed gladium.

St. Stephen, St. Thomas Becket and the Holy Innocents, orate pro nobis.



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"We wouldn't do that for money..."

"The first bishop to accept a government grant was Bishop Judas Iscariot." (starting about 1:38)

Kreeft and Spencer discuss Islam.

The video is almost two hours long, which is odd for Youtube, and it takes an age to download, but it's worth the wait.

___

...I've listened to about half of it so far, and I think I am coming to the same conclusion that I have come to before. If Dr. Kreeft were right in one of his major premises, that the god of Islam and the God of Abraham are one and the same, then his arguments would be correct. He says that the Muslims worship the same God, but they understand Him imperfectly, and therefore worship Him imperfectly, but that this imperfection is merely a lack of understanding of the true nature of God.

This would support the theory that Mohammedans who behave badly, by Christian standards of morality, are being "bad" Muslims, in that they understand the nature of God even less perfectly than their slightly more enlightened co-religionists who do not behave badly. Dr. Kreeft then goes even further and says that in the areas where the Mohammedans are correct about God, they are better "Christians" than most Christians because they are more "pious" in their behaviour towards the things about God that are true. In these areas, he posits (and bizarrely, he presents their sexual morality as an example) that we lapsed and modernist Christians have "much to learn" from our Mohammedan friends.

But the entire argument rests on the assumption that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, of Mary and John the Baptist and Jesus, is the same as the one the Mohammedans call "Allah".

But Dr. Kreeft has failed to establish the truth of his greater premise.

If we say that our pet is a mammal because it is a cat and all cats are mammals, we have started the syllogism from the bottom and worked up. In the case of Winnie's species and phylum we would be correct. But starting the syllogism upside down in the case of Islam is dangerous.

He says that the basic premise of Islam, the total submission to God is the same as that of the saints. The Catholic Church knows that total submission to the God of Abraham turns a person into a saint. The greater the submission, the greater the saint.

What we have seen from the evidence of the last 1300 years, however, is that total submission to Allah turns men into monsters. And the greater the submission the greater the monster.

How then, can this be the same god?

Islam is a heresy. One of the things it is doing for our times is re-teaching the Church just how dangerous heresy really is. It is only too easy to chastise the nasty old imperialist medieval Church for the violent opposition to heresy. But if we look back into that history with the eyes newly cleared by our contact with Islam, we will come to understand why it became necessary to stop the spread of Catharism with force of arms. If we look at the videos of men and women being beheaded, of buildings being blown up, we come to understand just how deadly a thing heresy truly is.



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A friend says he is "speechless"

I wish I could say I were even surprised.

Her Majesty doesn't look too happy about it...

I commented:

I remember once reading that the local demon worshippers in Oxford wanted to put loudspeakers on the outside of their minarets to broadcast the call to idolatry all over town. There was a big controversy about it with some people wanting it stopped and others saying we have to be "culturally sensitive".

I wrote in to the paper suggesting a solution.

There are a LOT of bell towers and more than a few still-functioning bells in the city of Oxford. At the appointed time, when the heathens started howling over their loudspeakers, coordinate all the bell-ringers in the city to ring EVERY SINGLE BELL in town for the duration of the caterwauling.

All for the glory of God, of course.

Oddly, my suggestion was not printed.

H/T to John B.

For some reason...

The Catholic archbishop has been killed. Priests have been riddled with bullets upon leaving their churches. Ordinary Christians, trying to live a quiet life, have been subject to harassment, threats and violence. Iraq in the aftermath of the American invasion has been particularly dangerous, but antiChristian violence stretches across the Islamic world.

"Christians are slaughtered in Iraq, in their homes and churches, and the so-called 'free' world is watching in complete indifference, interested only in responding in a way that is politically correct and economically opportune, but in reality is hypocritical," said Syriac Catholic Patriarch Ignace Joseph III Younan after these latest killings.

Indeed, the international community issued the usual boilerplate condemnations, most of them refusing to identify those responsible. The same statements could have been used had the Rotarians decided to massacre the Salvation Army. In the Church, too, there is often a reluctance to support vigorously Christians under attack, and to call things by name.

Really?!

And why, Fr. Ray, do you imagine that might be?

The blood on the altar makes it clear. No amount of goodwill, no amount of dialogue, no amount of circumlocutory evasions, no amount of supine prostrations – nothing will dissuade the jihadists. So let us not abnegate ourselves over the dead bodies of our fallen brethren in Christ.

Let us speak frankly of those who want to kill us.

Yes, please. Let's.

The jihadists respect neither man nor God, not even their own. They have killed their fellow Muslims and bombed mosques.

Because, really, the main point here is that it is only people who misunderstand Islam, true Islam, the Religion-of-Peace Islam, who become bombers in the name of Allah.

Yes, please. Won't SOMEone please "speak frankly" about those who want to kill us. And why.

Indeed, I agree. Let's "call things by name". Their proper name.

Close to 60 Catholics were killed. In their cathedral. At Mass. It has now come to this, where Christians are killed at prayer by Muslim fanatics.

Christians have been in Iraq from the earliest centuries, long before there was an Iraq or, one might note, there was Islam. Jihadists have launched a campaign with genocidal intent, aimed at driving out every last Christian from what they consider to be an Islamic land. It is now clear that the only place such jihadists envision for Christians in Iraq is the grave.

Maybe I can start with a question. Who, Fr. Ray, are these "Jihadists" you keep mentioning?



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Aslan is Tash, Tash is Aslan

get that through your heads!



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רק הוא אלוהים

I think the Holy Father was speaking more metaphorically, but he brought something up that needs to be talked about:

Only God is God.

Violent acts are apparently made in the name of God, but this is not God: they are false divinities that must be unmasked; they are not God.

False deities need not apply.

I have said this many times. The nature of God is to be always the same. There are a lot of things God cannot do.

God does not change. Still less does He change his mind about things. He does not, cannot, contradict Himself. He cannot be anti-rational, since rationality is one of the divine attributes given to us as His image.

I don't claim to know whether the man, Mohammed, actually had a visit from a supernatural being, but the religion he created would indicate that if he did, that being was not God or any of his holy angels.

The thing, the monster he describes in that religion, cannot be God, since it contradicts the things we know God must be.



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You keep using that word...

I do not think it means what you think it means.

"We talked about her Muslim faith and I wished her happy Ramadan," Dorsey said. "I might be wrong, but my guess is she had some people that she had issues with and a personal agenda, a score she had to settle.

"


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