THE VATICAN and prominent Christians, such as the evangelical pastor Franklin Graham, have announced that it is morally wrong to set fire to the sacred texts of any religion, even a religion considered false and dangerous by the person lighting the fire.

The World Trade Center attacks “cannot be counteracted by an outrageous and grave gesture against a book considered sacred by a religious community,” the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue said, regarding the planned burning of the Koran by Pastor Terry Jones. Every religion “has the right to respect and protection.”

“It’s never right to deface or destroy sacred texts or writings of other religions even if you don’t agree with them,” Graham said in a statement

Polytheistic paganism has “the right to respect and protection.” The Satanic cult has “the right to respect and protection.” New Age goddess sects have “the right to respect and protection.” Is that what the Vatican means? Is that what Graham argues?

No, that is not what they mean. What they really mean is that Islam has the right to respect and protection. But, logically, nothing has the right to respect unless it is worthy of respect. So what the Vatican and Graham have said is that Islam is good and true.

                                                                                                                — Comments–

Alan writes:

“No, that is not what they mean. What they really mean is that Islam has the right to respect and protection. But, logically, nothing has the right to respect unless it is worthy of respect. So what the Vatican and Graham have said is that Islam is good and true.”

Amen to that. You make a great point – today you are one few who see what is happening for what it is. I wrote to Lawrence Auster that the US is going to pay a great price for allowing this type of insanity into the core of our “approved” discourse. I guess Europe already has and is.

Brendan writes:

I generally agree with what you have written here.

It seems to me that what is happening here is mostly political, and is mostly based on fear — the kind of fear that the Islamic mob instills in politicians throughout the West. The Vatican, for example, is very concerned about the situation of its own faithful in the Middle East, of which there are quite a few. Despite some negative rhetoric about Islam a few years ago (which resulted in a furor in the Islamic world and elicited a shameful papal apology), the Vatican tries to maintain good relations with Islam in order to protect its own who live under Muslims, knowing full-well that the hot-headed elements in the Islamic world are very, very dangerous indeed.

The same holds true for Obama, Petraeus and the rest — the main issue is the fear of reprisals. The very odd thing here, of course, is that the discourse is based almost entirely on a huge contradiction. On the one hand, we are endlessly told that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance, and that only a small lunatic fringe holds views which would justify violent Jihad against the United States and other Western countries. At the same time, however, we are told that something as remote as a tiny group of 30 admittedly off-the-reservation Christians could nevertheless inspire enough followers of this peaceful, tolerant religion to engage in acts of horrific violence against our troops overseas as well as targets in the West that we should be concerned. So, we’re told that Islam is both harmless, peaceful and tolerant and that it’s violent element is a small fringe, but at the same time we’re also told that this small fringe has enough power to inflict serious violence against us that even the acts of 30 Americans out of 310 million may spark a thoroughly disproportionate and dangerous series of reprisals.

We will rue these days, I fear, at some point in the future. A watershed is happening here with respect to Islam. A watershed on only one side — ours.

Lisa writes:

Whether or not we should burn Korans, American Christians cannot possibly understand what burning the Koran means to many Muslims. If we heard about a Bible burning, we would gasp, shake our heads, and say, “That’s TERRIBLE!” and forget about it pretty quickly. Remember the British woman who was teaching in a Muslim country who named the class mascot teddy bear “Mohammed” and was nearly sentenced to death? I know of Christians who think they are getting the “message of the gospel” to Muslims by sending them a multi-colored soccer ball to kick around. I do not think they are convincing Muslims to respect the gospel. We have no true sense of reverence any more toward things our own faith holds sacred, and cannot relate to the Muslim mindset.

Charles writes:

“That is not what they mean. What they really mean is that Islam has the right to respect and protection. But, logically, nothing has the right to respect unless it is worthy of respect. So what the Vatican and Graham have said is that Islam is good and true. 

Yes. And they should be saying the opposite. For 15 centuries Islam has attacked our faith and taken territory from us. Yet, our modern leaders continue to wring their hands and make proclamations about respecting Islam. Islam will never respect us, Islam will only take from us. It is no wonder the Islamics consider the West to be weak. It is because our leaders are, IN FACT, morally and spiritually weak. Our major Christian leaders are crucial in this conflict. These are the very people who must begin to speak the truth about the nature of the threat that faces us. If they cannot do so, if they cannot speak truth about this Islamic threat, then they are unfit to lead and they must abdicate their roles as leaders in their respective churches. 

Was it morally wrong when the prophets smashed the altars of Baal? Where were Graham and the Vatican when the priests of Baal needed them?

Brendan continues:

You can’t really have that argument both ways. Either Islam is a tolerant religion of peace with a few outliers (in which case they ought to be of no great concern to us) or it is a religion with a serious anti-Western element and a violent bent. Of course, the latter is true. A simple glance at the newspaper easily confirms this. Even if only 10% of global Muslims support the idea of violent Jihad against the West, that’s something like 100 million people (!!!) who actively or passively support acts of religious violence against Western targets. More than enough to put lie to the idea that Islam is fundamentally a religion of peace — what other religion has 100 million people who support the use of violence in the name of their faith?

And the reality is that our political and cultural leaders, including the Pope, realize this well. And because of that they fear what Islam can do. That’s not a completely irrational fear, mind you, given the sheer size of the threat, but it is a pathetic, cowering and insolent kind of fear, a fear that dishonors our ancestors’ sacrifices in the face of an endlessly aggressive Islam. But the wobbliness of it all is based on this fundamental inability of elite Americans in particular and elite Westerners (and those who accept the brainwashing of the elites) to embrace reality instead of clinging to an unproven ideology of multiculturalism — a multiculturalism which welcomes as an esteemed equal a faith which has a large group that supports violence against us on the basis of its own religious beliefs. This is surely a pathologically self-destructive ideology. Some Europeans have woken up about this in the past ten years, and some have been killed by the Muslims living there for having the courage of their convictions. Our own society is very divided on this issue — with ordinary Americans intuiting quite easily that something is very wrong with the approach our government has towards Islam in general, while our leftist elite cowers behind ideology, platitudes and slogans as it firmly refuses to recognize the reality of Islam’s stance vis-a-vis the West (even as it tacitly recognizes the real threat it poses).

Our forebears fought countless, bloody wars against the standard-bearers of this voracious, militaristic, dominance-bent “religion”. Some we lost, as we ceded territories to the rising green tide, watching the Muslims advance through formerly Christian lands on rivers of our ancestors’ blood. Great cities like Constantinople and Alexandria were lost to the Muslims, probably forever. Christian Roman Spain was occupied by the Islamic invaders for centuries (Note: an occupation which is apparently the “inspiration” behind the name of the Ground Zero Mosque as the “Cordoba Center”, celebrating a time when Christians, Jews and Muslims lived together “in peace” in Islamic Spain … under the thumbs of the Islamic regime, of course, with Christians and Jews taking their (in Islamic eyes) rightfully “lesser” place as religion-tax paying “dhimmis” … the irony of the choice of this title, which is almost completely lost on most Americans, is most decidedly not lost on me!) until it was finally liberated. Our ancestors fought bravely to defend Vienna from these aggressors — militants who have always seen the dominion of Europe and the Christian West as a core goal of their religion, as Islam is the religion that is to replace and “complete” the Abrahamic traditions. All of this is plain history to anyone who cares to open a book. The reality is that Islam and the West have been at odds since the foundation of the Islamic faith, and that this confrontation continues today. Individual Muslims surely have the “right” to practice their faith in our country, but this should be done in a sense of humility and in a spirit of redressing the endless war Islam has waged against our Western culture since its inception. And when our own government peddles tendentious lies and half-truths about the nature of Islam, lies which are not only contradicted in the next breath from their own mouths, but which are easily confirmed by the perusal of any standard history book, we know something has gone badly, badly wrong.

Again, we will rue these days in the years ahead.

Kilroy writes:

I find this very concerning. The Nicean Creed is clear about the primacy of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. The Commandments are also very clear that we are to have no gods but God and not worship idols or “have” graven images. I am saddened to witness the creeping liberalism in the Church which I attribute to (a) its desire to be “relevant” in a multicultural and modernist world, (b) it’s fear of reprisals against its flock if it does not try to placate the situation, (c) the inane ideology of “nice” that seems to be dominating every parish I visit. I try to rationalise this by interpreting the Church’s comments as a disapproval of vindictiveness, provocation and intentional incitement to violence, not as a supplication before another religion in any relativistic way.

Laura writes:

This is a terrible moment in the history of the Church. I cannot find any excuse for this statement by the Vatican. 

Michael S. writes:

I am convinced that Islam is Satan’s third and last major attempt to destroy mankind. First the Temptation and Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden, then the Crucifixion of Our Lord, and finally Islam. Satan is furious that Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, in His Own flesh fulfilled and “complete[d] the Abrahamic traditions,” as Brendan put it.Since he, Satan, cannot accept that he is defeated, he has raised up a competing “religion” that aims at the destruction of the one true Faith. I suspect that the “Anti-Christ” of the final days will be a charismatic dhimmi figure.

Lamps are going out all over Europe and America. When shall we see them lit again? I don’t know. I do know that we are in for rough times. But I also know that the in the fullness of time, the Immaculate Heart of Our Lady will triumph, and crush the head of the serpent once and for all.

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us!

Reader N. writes:

I’ve been having discussions and arguments about the nature of Islam with people for, well, about nine years. One of the issues that comes up over and over again when interacting with liberals
is their unspoken premise that believers do not really believe. Please note this is an unspoken premise, liberals hardly ever come right out and say this, because it is something they
believe in an unconscious manner.

The self-anointed elites in the West do not understand Islam for a rather simple reason; they don’t believe that Moslems actually believe “all that stuff”, just as they don’t believe that Christians
do, either. If one is agnostic or atheist, if one essentially rejects God, then all religions are alike; mumbo-jumbo with some ethics mixed in. Given the success that post-Enlightment, post-
Marx liberalism has had in watering down Christianity, I wager that there is a belief that the same can be done to Islam.

We see in Europe how that is not working as expected.

Laura writes:

When Christians at the highest levels say that all sacred texts must be respected that means that they too do not believe faiths are truly contained and defined in those books. It’s as if the books are cultic objects and not expressions of ideas, not the narratives of real and mythical events, not interpretations of history. We must respect the sacred books of others in the way we would respect somebody else’s property, because it is theirs and it belongs to them. This is a perversion of the meaning and purpose of a sacred book.

Peter S. writes:

To view Islam as a political threat in the present climate is perfectly understandable and even justified. To assert that it is intrinsically false and evil is to make another kind of claim. In this regard, one might peruse the joint statement, A Common Word between Us and You.

Laura writes:

Islam is intrinsically false and evil. That does not mean Muslims are evil and, in fact, many are good and decent people. Also, their faith contains elements of truth. I do not reject Muslims but I utterly reject their faith and anyone who professes this faith, or ideology, does not belong in the West or in America, however decent or well-intentioned he may be.

John E. writes:

I frequently do not understand the ways of the Vatican, though I am Catholic, and its disposition toward the dark and engulfiing cloud of Islam appears to be a cowering appeasement. I only hope that if I were to conclude that this is indeed the Vatican’s disposition, it would prove later to be a hasty and unwise judgment of something I could not see as clearly as they could. As I see it presently, the Church is the only one with the ability and means to fight against Islam’s ominous threat, because that threat is driven with a powerful engine of faith. Though that faith may be more sinister and awful than the cool and sterile secularism that drives our Western societies, it is certainly superior in strength. The Church only has the resources to fight fire with fire in this battle, but does not seem willing to muster troops for the battle. 

I find it encouraging to read Chesterton’s poem Lepanto, which recounts a watershed battle with the same enemy we face today, but back in the sixteenth century. Chesterton recounts that while almost all of Christendom was maimed by apathy, internal fighting, or hand-wringing, Don John of Austria courageously but unceremoniously musters a force which successfully bars any further encroachment into Europe by the Muslim invaders. While I am not familiar with the psyche of Don John, I think it is safe to say that there was much more behind his motivation to fight than merely a secular belief in the ideals of universal liberty and equality. 

I believe the darkness of Islam would be blown away like so much chaff in a windstorm would the forces of truth and light represented by Christianity band together under the leadership of her divinely-ordained earthly authorities, who would draw upon the vast resources of the faith to embolden the average man to great courage, which would cause evil to cower and dissipate. Yet even if this scenario is not realized, all is not lost. There are resources for each Christian to draw upon, even absent of earthly leadership from above, by which he shows that there is never any lasting accomodation for lies, and that there are territories which evil cannot and will never encroach upon. Such fortitude is rarely recognized publicly, or reinforced with preparatory applause, but the one who is willing to stand with fortitude joins Don John at Lepanto and all others in history who did not count the cost in striving to battle for what is good and true.

Laura writes:

I had hoped that Terry Jones would remain strong. Fortunately, another pastor has stepped forward to burn the Koran. 

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

Here is a partial list of societies and civilizations that ceased to exist when Islam, a violent cult-like creed whose ethos entails absolute intolerance of all other creeds, destroyed them – 

The Jewish mercantile civilization of the Arabian Peninsula

The Polytheist Arabic mercantile civilization of the Arabian Peninsula (which coexisted with the Jewish one)

The Hellenized Egyptian-Christian Civilization of the Nile Delta

The Syriac-Christian Civilization of Cilicia and the Levant

The North African Christian Civilization

Byzantine Christendom (which once extended from Greece itself eastward all the way to Mesopotamia)

The partly Hellenized Buddhist Civilization of Central Asia (centering on what today is Afghanistan)

The Persian Zoroastrian civilization

The Brahmanic and Hindu city-states, nations, and kingdoms of the Indian subcontinent

The Visigothic Christian civilization of the Iberian Peninsula

The Gnostic-Christian Bulgarian Empire of the Balkan Peninsula

The level of cultural achievement in these societies and civilizations was high, based on traditions going back hundreds or even thousands of years. Byzantine Christendom, of which few Americans, even ones who graduated from college, have ever heard, was the eastern, Greek-speaking continuation of the Roman Empire, which survived, under relentless Islamic aggression, until the sack of Constantinople in 1453. This is a history of inveterate, brutal destruction so large in scale that it beggars the power of description.

Conquest was invariably bloody – extravagantly bloody. That is the manner of Jihad. Yet our Western leaders from Barack Obama to Pope Benedict think that our existing problem is the pastor of a small congregation in Florida who wants (or did and maybe still wants) to burn his personal copy of the Koran on his own property, for reasons of private protest protected by the laws concerning free speech.

A. writes:

Here is real error coming from the American bishop’s committies: 

      “all acts of intolerance aimed at a religious community should find no place in our world, let alone in our nation which is founded on the principle of religious freedom.”  

It is not true that “ALL ACTS OF INTOLERANCE” aimed at a religious community should find no place in the world. What about acts which refuse to tolerate the Muslim communities demands for Sharia law? What about acts deporting Muslims from France? 

I think the Church speaks about “legitimate discrimination.” To do so is the mark of a thinking person, one committed to the Truth. We should not confuse the person who errs with the error itself, but we must condemn the error.

Hurricane Betsy writes:

Whoa, horse! At least here in North America, it is not the Muslims who are shitting and pissing all over Christianity,the Christian Bible and basic Christian values of decency. Turn on your tee vee, watch for a few hours, an hour, have a look at the credits at the end of the shows, and report back to me if you see any Muslin-type (Arab) names, okay? How many Khalids and Mohammeds?

You know as well as I do that Jones is a fool, a front man for those who are looking for yet another way to rile up the hotheads in the Islamic religion and then bomb Iran.

Laura writes:

If liberals had a sacred text, Jones might have considered burning that too.

He’s not a fool, as far as I can tell, and he never said anything about bombing Muslim countries. I don’t think anyone has seriously proposed bombing Iran simply because it’s Muslim. As for riling up Muslims, here’s a clip about a Christian burned alive by Muslims in Egypt last year. Ask Israelis if Muslims are riled up already. In America, Muslims are methodically and calmly spreading their faith, always including the riled up among them, and once they reach certain numbers they will seek to change politics too. That is what they are called to do and they should be free to do it in their own part of the world. 

Here are excellent remarks by Dean E. at VFR:

 Isn’t it because if Rev. Jones burns the Koran the Moslems will rise up in an orgy of violence against Americans? Isn’t that exactly why everyone is terrified of one American burning one little Koran? We’re all frightened to death of the Moslems because of what we know they’ll do to us? And if we all know we’re in mortal danger from Islam, so much in danger that if any one nincompoop of us were to burn even one little page of the Koran we’ll be slaughtered by the Religion of Peace, wouldn’t it be best not just politely to point out the snake in the grass, but also to prod the damn thing with a stick to force it out into the open? Is Rev. Jones’s Koran burning “gratuitous” if it ultimately serves to save America from Islamic terror and bloodshed? Does keeping our heads in the sand and crucifying Rev. Jones make us safer, or does it simply hand our enemies another victory?

John writes:

I am confused because all I know of the Muslim faith goes back to the days of the Crusades. Actually even why the Crusaders had to go to the Holy Land to do battle with the Muslims.

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

The Crusades were Western Christendom’s belated response to the assault against Eastern Christendom by the Jihad.  John should imagine a map of Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East.  In the year 500 AD, all of North Africa, including Egypt, all of what today would be Turkey, Syria, and the Levant, and a good part of what is Jordan and Iraq formed part of the Christian world.  Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire during the reign of Constantine the Great (died 337).  The Roman Empire in the West broke down in the Fifth Century, to be succeeded by the Gothic kingdoms, but these were Christian states.  The Roman Empire continued to exist in the Greek- and Syriac-speaking East, where the Orthodox, as opposed to the Catholic, form of Christianity prevailed.  Beginning in the early Eighth Century, the Eastern Roman Empire began to come under attack from the Jihad, the ceaseless military campaign to subdue the world for Islam.  (The Jihad, by this time, had already swept across North Africa and was busy subduing the Iberian Peninsula.)  By the year 1100, the Muslims had conquered much of territory of Eastern Christendom, forcing the conversion of the Christian population and assigning those Christians who refused to submit to dhimmi (legally inferior) status.  Great Christian cities like Damascus and Antioch had fallen to the campaign.  Churches were made over into mosques.  Jerusalem was in the hands of the Muslims. 

Given the example of Spain, and under the influence of religious leaders like Peter the Hermit, the princes of Western European society made the decision to come to the aid of their eastern brethren and to retake the Christian lands lost to the Jihad.  There were four major crusades and numerous minor ones.  The motives of the crusaders were mixed.  Some were intent on the religious mission of rescuing fellow Christians and some saw merely an opportunity for glory and loot.  For a time, portions of the Levant were retaken in the name of Christianity.  Governed by European princes, these Crusader Kingdoms endured for a century or so before the Jihad reasserted itself.  The Christian Reconquista in Spain was also prosecuted as a crusade, and, unlike the attempt to rescue the Holy Lands, was successful. 

Eventually, Islam swallowed up all of Eastern Christendom, the Turkish sultan Mehmet II taking Constantinople in 1453.  Mehmet’s successors kept up pressure on the West until a combined Austrian and Polish and Hungarian army defeated a Turkish invasion of Austria 1683.

Youngfogey writes:

Before the whole strange story of Terry Jones and the Koran burning that wasn’t slips down the chute of our collective amnesia, I would like to make a point.

I am a Protestant. Perhaps this point applies more to evangelical leaders than to the Catholic leadership. I don’t know.

Either way, I couldn’t help but notice that this man, an aging pastor with a flock of fifty who, for all we know has been a law-abiding, moral man received in a couple of days more personal approbation from evangelical and conservative leaders than most abortionists and their cultural leaders will receive in their lifetimes. I think this is telling.

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