The Importance of being Urban

 Writer Andrew Urban, lives up to his famous namesake, Pope Urban II (1088-1099), in his warnings that evil thrives when good people look on impassively (The Spectator 1 July 2017).

The peace loving Muslims are as irrelevant to these times as they were in the time of that medieval pope.

That world of Urban II, was vastly different to the world of 2017, in so many aspects, yet there is one constant: the threat of Islam.

The Crusades, were defensive wars to halt the aggression of the Muslims and the loss of Christian lands. Recognition of that threat led a desperate Urban II to make one of history’s most important speeches in his to call to the faithful to defend the faith. His speech at Clermont, in response to a plea from the Byzantine Emperor, has not survived but five written accounts speak of its power.

Francis, the current ‘flibbertigibbet Pope,’ (to quote Hal Colebatch, in the same edition), has simply taken ‘refuge in denial,’ of the existence of Islamic terrorism.

In contrast, Pope Urban’s letter, of December 1095, following his stirring speech, called on all the faithful to rally against ‘a barbaric fury’ that had ‘deplorably afflicted and laid waste to the churches of God.’

This was a time that people in the West believed in the Church, in contrast to the era of post modernism that has rendered the inhabitants of the Lands of Plenty incapable of understanding anything longer than the latest twitter message or defending anything other than an attack by a gnat!

As Greg Sheridan, the Foreign Editor of The Australian asked, ‘how long can the west live off the moral capital of religious conviction that it is now abandoning?’ (12/3/15).

Answer: not long, unless some real political and church leadership is shown against Islam –a cult with a consistent 1400 year history of murder, mayhem and terror but as Corrine Barraclough points out, (The Spectator 1/7/17), ‘Western liberalism’s attitude towards radical Islam is insane.’

First, consider the situation that confronted Urban II and led to his call to Christendom to defend the faith.

Long before the great Protestant Reformation, the Church had split into Western and Eastern Divisions in the great schism of 1054 when the future pope was a mere 12 year old boy.

As a learned man, Urban, as pope, looked at the centuries, after the death of Mohammed (632 AD), and saw the trail of destruction that Islam had wrought, (what has changed?).

Spain had been controlled by Muslims from 711 and would remain so until 1492 –the year Columbus sailed the Blue; the mad Caliph Al-Hakim had destroyed Christendom’s most holy church in Jerusalem in 1009, after earlier attacks on Christian pilgrims, in acts that would become increasingly familiar over centuries.

 Palestine, Libya and Egypt, once great Christian centres, quickly succumbed to the new barbarism. North Africa and Spain were conquered in the eighth century; but in 732, at the Battle of Tours, the Muslims were defeated in today’s France, by an army led by Charles Martel, in an epic battle that saved Western Europe from being over-run while today Angela Merkel waves them through.

However, by the 11th century- Urban’s era – the Byzantine Empire had been reduced to little more than Greece; Asia Minor (Turkey), Christian since St Paul, was lost.

In desperation the Emperor at Constantinople appealed for help from Western brethren.

Urban could have washed his hands of the Christian ‘heretics’ of the East. However, as two-thirds of Christian territory had fallen to Islam in the preceding four centuries the 159^th Pope recognised the dangers, hence his inspired speech on 27 November 1095 when he rallied Western Christendom to action.

It was not an appeal to greed. The men who would lead the various Crusades were men of land and wealth, not vagabonds and their chief motivation was to help protect Christians in far- away places being brutalised.  These were men who were not setting out to pillage but rather to gain treasure that rusts and moths could not spoil.

There were certainly excesses by the Crusaders, abusing the stated goals of Urban who was calling on the Crusaders to bring relief to Christians being attacked and to liberate Jerusalem.

The attacks on Jews, en route, by one force led by Count Emicho of Leinegen, are as indefensible now as they were then. Church leaders of the time, like historians, condemned such atrocities.

However, to condemn the entire Crusades for that is like condemning the entire Allied War effort because of the Allied obliteration bombing of Dresden between 13-15 February 1945.

The First Crusade (1096-99) was really the only successful one. Jerusalem was taken (and later lost) but Urban died just before hearing of the success.

Little has changed with Islam over the centuries –it remains, as it has always been, a death cult that over the period has been responsible for, conservatively, 270 million deaths since its inception.

It has no restraint and the litany of horrors, since the attacks on America in 2001, make for grim reading. In 2013 nearly 18,000 people died as a result of Islamic intolerance. In 2015, of 452 suicide bombing attacks only two were not by Muslims.

William Kilpatrick, writing in Crisis Magazine (10^th August,  2016) took the current pope, Francis, to task because of his fatuous declaration that the murder and mayhem is only the work of a small group of fundamentalists.

Kilpatrick argues that such dangerous naivete is contrary to the sweeping reforms the church took in the wake of sexual abuse scandals. Why act on one and not the other?

Francis fails to look at the damning evidence of the support these murdering ‘small group’ of barbarians have in Islamic communities as documented in an extensive list of polls by The Religion of Peace and Jihad Watch, including:

*20% of UK Muslims having sympathy with the 7/7 bombers and 16% of young Belgian Muslims consider terrorism acceptable

* an Al Jazeera poll shows 81% of respondents approve ISIS;

* in Saudi Arabia 92% of Saudis say ISIS conforms with Islamic law

* 40% of of British Muslims favour Sharia law over British law

* in Denmark,   41 per cent of Somalian men were convicted of a crime in 2012

* some 62% of Muslims in Canada want Sharia law; 51% in the US

* apparently 63% of Egyptians are happy with terrorism attacks on US embassies and young Muslims living in major western countries  approve of it by margins varying from one-fifth to over 40 per cent

*Jews are legitimate targets in the UK, according to 37% of British Muslims, and 45% say that clerics preaching violence is ‘mainstream Islam’

* while two thirds of British Muslims would not report a terror plot to police

This mind set resulted in the murder of a Scottish Muslim, Ashad Shah, in Glasgow just before Easter. His ‘crime’ was wishing Christians a happy Easter?

This mind set was also revealed by the complete contempt the Saudi Arabian soccer side showed in a match, against Australia, following the murder of two lovely young Australians, Kirsty Boden and Sara Zelenak, during the London Bridge massacre in June 2017. While the Australian side lined up to pay tribute, the barbarians, they were about to beat, simply continued with their warm-up. The lack of outrage by Australian Muslims was epitomised by their deafening silence!

 In various eras Islam has been a threat. The Battle of Lepanto (1571) and the Siege of Vienna (1683) were just two further crucial battles fought against Muslim marauders.

The actions of the popes, who were in office, during those famous wars, Pius V (1566-72) and Innocent XI (1676-89) are instructive. The West owes these two pontiffs much because they certainly had the spirit and resolve of their earlier predecessor, Urban II.

Pius V promoted the Holy League and a fleet of the Catholic maritime states decisively beat the Muslims, off the coast of Greece. Innocent XI was known as the Saviour of Hungary and he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Holy League which brought together the German states and King John III of Poland, a man who hastened to relieve Vienna from marauding Turks. (Innocent XI was an interesting pope who was sensitive towards the Jews and favoured the Protestant Dutchman, William of Orange, over his father-in-law, the Catholic English king, James II).

A century ago the now forgotten Armenian Genocide of 1915 started. Yet today shallow politicians like the Australian foreign minister, Julie Bishop, choose to not just ignore it but question whether it even happened!

More importantly, it has also been forgotten by all Turkish governments – political liars who also brazenly deny the atrocity happened. In 1900 some 32% of Ottoman Turkey’s population was Christian. By 1927 the figure was down to 1.8%. 

Islam is always the problem. It has never been a religion of peace but rather one of bigotry, hatred and violence. Its holy scriptures, unlike any other religion, invokes its followers to murder non-Muslims as accepted practice.

This has been carried out to the letter in North, East and West African States. The beheading of 21 Christian workers in Libya; the Nigerian enslavement of over 219 female school children by Boko Haram while 10,000 other pupils have been prevented from schooling;  the murder of 148 Kenyan university students by cowardly Islamists is another in the long list of atrocities; and in Pakistan a Christian couple were thrown live into a furnace. It never ends.

Western secular leaders are inept and frightened of tripe words like Islamophobic. Who cares what Islamophiles label the silent majority?  Democrats, everywhere, have had enough of Muslim arrogance, crimes and demands? The age of the Popes organising the West is well and truly over but determined secularist leadership is still sorely needed, as is church leadership.

Democracies are entitled to protect themselves. Both Lincoln and FDR showed what US war time presidents were prepared to do with the suspension of habeas corpus and internment, respectively, to protect the Union.

The taxpayers in Australia are not interested in showering millions of dollars in education programs for Muslim troublemakers.

Instead, as Andrew Urban argues, there should be mandatory life sentences for all terrorism related offences, with no bail and no parole; frequent anti-radicalisation checks on Muslim schools, mosques, imans and communities; detention and interrogation of all those under ASIO investigations, cancellation of funding to Muslims organisations that transgress; and curtailing Muslim immigration. the same rules should apply to any group that may threaten security and social cohesion.

Indeed, we could even go further and contemplate the ban of Muslim migration to this country. As Law Professor Augusto Zimmermann said, “there is nothing in our Constitution which prevents a ban of individuals who pose a threat to our national security as well as the preservation of fundamental rights and freedoms. To the contrary, the escalation of global tensions may eventually force our federal government to face this extremist religion more squarely and to make the bold and courageous decision to ban the immigration of Muslims to Australia.”

Those fighters returning from the Middle East should be charged with treason; at home, the Halal certification needs to be legislated against and exposed as an outrageous preference given to a religion that has little national support; while Sharia law must be outlawed with severe penalties for those trying to circumvent Australian law.

Accordingly it is time the ‘Urbanisation,’ not the Islamisation, of Australia took place as the first duty of government is to defend its people.

The words of two Urbans, a millennium apart, should be heeded.