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 159^th 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 (14^th 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.