History
ANOTHER URBAN II WANTED
The world of
1095 was a vastly different to the world of 2015 in so many aspects.
Yet there is
one constant: the threat of Islam.
The
Crusades, from the Christian perspective, were defensive wars. Let it be clear:
it was the aggression of the Muslims that led a desperate Pope Urban II
(1088-99) to make one of history’s most important speeches in his to call
Christians to defend the faith.
It was a
time that people in the West believed in the Church, in contrast to the disease
of post modernism that has rendered the inhabitants of the Lands of Plenty mentally
challenged in understanding anything longer than the latest twitter message and
incapable of 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 heretic cult with a consistent 1400 year history of murder, mayhem and
terror.
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. Both sides accused each other of heresy and that would happen later when
some of the great reformers like John Wycliffe, Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli,
John Calvin, John Hus were similarly labelled.
Nevertheless,
Christianity’s history has led to Western society’s advancement and freedoms
–despite the sneers and jeers of today’s heirs to the mob who supported the
claims of Barabas, against Jesus.
As a learned
man, Urban looked at the centuries, after the death of Mohammed (632 AD), and
saw the trail of destruction that Islam had wrought.
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 the centuries,
including our own.
Palestine, Libya and Egypt, once great
Christian centres quickly succumbed to the new barbarism. North Africa and
Spain were conquered in the eighth century; while 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; in the
11th century- Urban’s era – the Byzantine Empire was 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 159th Pope recognised the dangers.
In an
inspired speech on 27 November 1095 Urban 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, exceeding the stated goals of Urban who
was calling on the Crusaders to bring relief to Christians being attacked and
to liberate Jerusalem.
The
anti-Jewish attacks, en route, by one force led by Count Emicho of Leinegen,
are as indefensible now as they were then. Church leaders of the period, 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 bombing of Dresden on 13 February 1945.
The First
Crusade (1096-99) was really the only successful one. Jerusalem was taken (and
later lost again) but Urban died before hearing of the success.
But 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 240 million deaths.
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.
When some
Catholic conservatives see the Q Society as being more of a problem than actual
atrocities carried out by murderous Muslims then clearly there is a moral
meltdown at the core of Western society. Patrick Byrne’s recent self indulgent
four and half page diatribe in News
Weekly (14th February) was a disgraceful piece of guilt- by-
association against an organisation, and a new conservative party, Liberty
Alliance, that unlike him, are trying to protect society against the ravages of
an alien murderous force.
There is a
lack of resolve to deal with the Islamic threat at all levels and colossal
ignorance in understanding the threat of lslam over many centuries. In every
era 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.
Byrne, a
Catholic, should indeed, look at the actions of the popes, who were in office,
during those famous wars, Pius V (1566-72) and Innocent XI (1676-89). 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.
Byrne, unfortunately,
is not the only ostrich. A century ago the now forgotten Armenian Genocide of
1915 started. It is forgotten because shallow politicians like Julie Bishop
choose to ignore it.
More
importantly it has also been forgotten by all Turkish governments – political liars
who brazenly deny the atrocity ever 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, recently, 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; while the murder of 148 Kenyan
university students by cowardly Islamist scum is the latest atrocity; 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 Reclaim Australia
people are citizens for whom real tolerance is paramount. They contrast with
the mindless cretins who parrot cheap slogans, who stand for nothing and fall
for everything!
The age of
the Popes organising the West is well and truly over but determined secularist
leadership is still sorely needed in the West.
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
charge them with treason and establish a Guantanamo style internment camp. The
closure of mosques promoting violence should be enforced and no more built
until Muslim countries give the same rights to their Christian population. The
use of repatriation processes should be used, where possible, against
undesirables. 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.
Muslims have
the right to FIT IN to Australian society, not change it, to something resembling
the image of the Golden Calf that they worship.
Footnote: the writer has never been a member of the Roman Catholic Church.
