Thoughts on the Antichrist

One of the hardest things for a citizen to understand is the objective nature of the culture he is a part of.  We in the West are as guilty of this as anyone anywhere. Outsiders observe the externalities of the culture but are rarely made intimate to the internal workings.  From that conflicts will naturally emerge that are mostly innocent.

We in the West live in a Christian culture that continues to be in formed by centuries of thinking on moral issues and related custom.  The only significant change that has occurred in the past century is that a lesser proportion of the population accepts the divinity of Christ.  Yet in terms of custom and moral codes that is irrelevant.  A divine is unnecessary to establish a natural code of conduct for our society as any Jesuit will be happy to prove.

Even communism simply adopted the code in place while attempting to make the State the divinity.  It was at its heart, a Christian heresy.

The Orient is informed by the teachings of Buddha in particular and this framework was arguably the foundation for the original teachings of Christ.  Again the divine aspect of these teachers are accepted less in our secular world while the moral teachings continue to inform social behavior.

The sole significant exception is Islam.  Its code of conduct is informed as a codification and exultation of barbarism at the heart of its scriptures.  It is no accident that the devout Taliban imposed abject slavery on all women within their society.  Our difficulty is that we cannot comprehend the warping of one’s mind that this achieves.

Recall the bright young boys in the Hitler youth who freely sacrificed their lives in the dying year of the Second War never breaking faith with their fuehrer. We know that if you are properly indoctrinated as a child that this is the natural outcome.  The majority will never rise above this.

I want my readers to understand a fundamental fact of Islam.  It eschews a moral code.  It is not a moral code at all.  It is indoctrination to submit to the authority of the prophet and his earthly minions.  Logical questioning is redirected to outright hatred of those who are infidels.  The recipient of this indoctrination may have faith in God but that was always secondary to the doctrine of submission. 

Yet the prophet in his actions is a consummate barbarian warlord whose excesses were awful and do not properly inform a civilized society.  He is the seventh century version of Hitler, Stalin and Mao, all of whom were informed by his methods.  We have yet to fully recover form the systems established by these three.

Hitler’s religion had to be extracted root and bough at the point of a gun.  Then it essentially withered in the face of economic prosperity and is today almost extinct.

Stalin’s religion collapsed economically and its remnants are presently withering in North Korea and Cuba.

Mao’s religion has expired in the face of rising overwhelming prosperity and is today an uncomfortable and brittle overlay on a society that is restoring traditional Confuciusist ethics or alternately similar doctrines including Christianity and Buddhism.

The Islamic religion merely has longevity as its raison d’être.  It is a doctrine that is a state based system as well as a presumed religion as are the other three.  Our error in the West is to write our expectations of our religious framework onto the forms of Islam.

We cannot imagine that adherents of this doctrine want to kill us and enslave our wives and children and think that this is right because we disagree with them and their right to do so.  Few may in fact be so vile, yet those that are find support in their scriptures for exactly this behavior and no one opposes them.  Once the rock starts rolling downhill, no Muslim will or can stand in its way.

The religion continues to shield abusive behavior among immigrants to the West and to indoctrinate their children with what is in our understanding immoral behavior and attitudes.

The hardest thing that Americans needed to overcome was their heritage of racism.  It is still not complete because it is difficult.  A parent has grown up believing and maintaining a set of racist beliefs.  It is in his daily language. This his child naturally adopts and unless social pressure is brought to bear, the parent will not correct his child when he parrots his parent.  Is it any wonder that these attitudes still linger?

All ethnic groups have a bit of that and parents must be careful in correcting the natural simplistic logic of these beliefs.  It is one thing to be proud of you heritage, it is quite another to hate the people living in the village down the road.

Understanding that the underlying barbarous doctrine of Islam is part of a child’s early education also informs us of what must happen to resolve these conflicts.

The victims are powerless to halt the process but the west is far from powerless.  It merely needs the will.  Explaining this need is difficult not because of the need but our own willingness to forgive.

The underlying doctrine of Christianity is remarkably simple.  It is that you must respect your neighbor to even showing love.  Many find this hard to choke down but that is what we teach our children.  It is sufficient that this is the expected conduct, even when the actions of a neighbor force a more severe response.

The opposite of this doctrine is also very simple.  You shall hate your neighbor.  That is the doctrine of barbarism and all the aforementioned ideologies. It is, to attach a mystic symbolism, the doctrine of the Antichrist.  For that reason, devotees of Islam imbibe a poisonous brew of hatred of Jews and Christians from childhood on.  Apologists attempt to cloud this reality but that is a lie from a culture that accepts that it is morally acceptable to lie to a non believer in order to get under his guard.

The great challenge faced down by the modern west has been this ideology of hatred however packaged.  In western mystical terms hatred is the true doctrine of the Antichrist.  Wherever such hatred is exposed we must confront it and root it out. 

We have had victory over both Nazism and Communism.  We have largely freed their victims.  The cost of Nazism and Fascism was the death of millions.  The cost of Communism was two generations of enslavement for tens of millions.

Islam has enslaved its populations for centuries.  Their doctrines continue to economically strangle their societies.  Yet the doctrine remains so seductive that victims continue to be entrapped by it while living in the west.  It is not changing unless it is confronted with its shame and made to adopt western liberal policies and the language of hatred is expunged from their scriptures in the same way we do not tolerate the promotion of Mein Kampf.

We today have a chronic war against radical Islam that they can sustain if nothing changes for thousands of years.  There will always be ignorant horny young boys to recruit and brainwash and send into the fight.

It can all end by confronting the Islamic States with simple demands and ensuring their imposition.

            That religious instruction be removed from the formal education process.

That the incitement of hatred be removed from all scriptural and Islamic literature.

That all children participate in the education process.

That all religions have unfettered right to teach their doctrines.

It is time to stop treating Islam like it is a religion only.  It is also a State building ideology that also promotes hatred and war.  There may be a peaceful religious life way to be discovered and honored within Islam, but it will not emerge under the flags of hate.

Michael Coren on Islam

This article is difficult reading for a person of western sensibilities, but I share it with you anyway. The globe has a major problem with a large part of the Islamic world that refuses to go away.

Keep in mind that the South East Asian portion of Islam seems to have transitioned into something a lot more secular and moderate in outlook, but I could be simply exercising wishful thinking. The most barbarous radicals have always succeeded in hijacking the historic Islamic state.

Simply put, they are not modernizing and what we see below is more tales of an ancient proud civilization continuing to operate as a barbaric society. It is my contention that Islam is a religion that rationalizes the traditional mores of the preliterate world of the barbaric tribe. It makes little attempt to teach civilization; rather it promotes the barbaric dream of Jihad in all its forms.

We have watched western civilization and culture be absorbed everywhere else and blended with the indigenous culture with great success. China and India are merely just the most recent civilizations making this transition both culturally and economically.

The Islamic world is failing because it insists on enslaving half its population and aggressively suppressing any minorities. It has been said that Hitler modeled Nazism after the Islamic experience and was heavily influenced by Islam. Almost certainly these tendencies in Islam must come to a bad end also.

The world is now preparing to transition away from oil and it will be happening over the next twenty years. The Islamic world will lose its financial crutch and will revert to the present experience of the non oil producing Islamic states. Again read the article to understand the horror of the situation.

Can we stand by? We did for the rise of Hitler and expended the lives of ten of millions.

Will they let us? Al Qaeda surely did not and hundreds of thousands have died so far.

Can they hurt us? An atomic bomb can be exploded in any convenient unguarded infidel city. The rest of the world has not figured that out yet and it is time to wake up.

Can we stop them? Certainly, but we are doomed to try every other option first. Recall how Nazism was ended. Let us hope that this is not ended after the deaths of a hundred million. And we are already at war while the rest of Islam smolders.

Michael Coren: The jihad on Egypt's Christians

Last week I was supposed to interview Father Zakaria Boutros on my television show. It would have been the second time I had spoken to this gentle, thoughtful man, one of the leading figures of the Egyptian Coptic Christian community and now obliged to live in exile in the United States after twice being arrested in his homeland. But on this occasion the interview was suddenly cancelled. A $60-million bounty had just been put on his head by Muslim extremists in Iran and Saudi Arabia, al-Qaeda were thought to be intent on fulfilling the fatwa and it was considered too dangerous to allow him to travel to Canada. The fact that the United States government bounty on Osama Bin laden is a mere $25-million rather puts the case of this disarmingly gentle and jovial priest into proportion.

Because while he is anonymous to most North Americans, Boutros is famous or notorious throughout North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, where his daily television broadcasts attract enormous audiences and his Web site millions of hits. His style is uncompromising. Speaking in Egyptian accented Arabic, and fluent in Islamic scholarship and the various sub-cultures of the Muslim world, he carefully unwraps the layers of the Koran and the life and teachings of Muhammad and presents his viewers with a virtually unprecedented critique of their faith. It’s the combination of accessibility and originality that makes him so threatening to militant Islam.

“We know people are leaving Islam because of what I say and they know people are leaving Islam because of what I say,” he explains. A long pause, then: “People in the West simply don’t understand the significance of this in a world that has not and probably will not embrace pluralism. The Islamic response is not to argue with me but to try to kill me.”

Nor is this just the sordid reaction of wealthy fanatics and terror mobs. Last month the Iranian parliament voted on a draft bill, the “Islamic Penal Code,” whereby any woman who left Islam would be punished with life in prison and any man with execution. 196 parliamentarians supported the bill, seven opposed it. The world’s reaction, including the United Nations’, to this contravention of myriad international laws has been screamingly silent.

Iran is in fact merely attempting to institutionalize what is already reality in Egypt, Pakistan, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. Even in areas of the Islamic world, such as Palestine and Iraq, where Christianity has traditionally been tolerated, conversion is still seen as socially and morally criminal.

Egypt is a particularly acute and troubling case because of the size of the Christian minority, the horror of their treatment and the systematic and cynical denial by the Egyptian government and their puppets and fellow travellers abroad. There are between eight and ten million Christians in Egypt, around 10% of the population and for the last 30 years in particular they have faced organized discrimination in the law, education, employment and housing. As a consequence they leave Egypt in disproportionately large numbers.

Beyond this now regular, degrading oppression there are numerous cases of grotesque violence. In January, 2000, for example, in El-Kosheh, Upper Egypt, 21 Christians were killed in rioting by local Muslims, aided by the police. When authorities eventually reacted, they arrested more than a thousand local Christians, many of whom were tortured. There are numerous cases of Coptic girls being kidnapped by Muslim gangs and then being forcibly converted and married to Muslim men. If they flee these marriages and try to return to Christianity they are killed as apostates.

Church desecration is common, as are public burnings of Bibles and Christian literature. There are also documented cases of Christians being ritually crucified, the rape of Christian girls and the prolonged beating of children, some of them babies. These are not isolated incidents condemned by the state, but part of a reoccurring pattern often ignored and, in some regions, actively encouraged by police and militia. Egyptian apologists will point to certain Christians in positions of influence or, more frequently, argue that these accusations are propaganda -- lies told by Christians and Jews in North America and Europe.

They are not. Spend time with an Egyptian Christian living in forced exile and the stories and the pain tumble forth as the toxins of dark experience flow from their memory. Or speak to Father Zakaria Boutros, if he is allowed to travel and manages to survive the multi-million dollar bounty on his head.

National Post

Michael Coren is an award-winning journalist, author and broadcaster. His Web site is www.michaelcoren.com.

Benazir Bhutto's Assassination

Our year ends on a sad note with the inevitable assassination of Benazir Bhutto and rising concerns over the future of Pakistan. It is hard for outsiders to judge the political winds blowing in that volatile country of over 100,000,000 except to intuit that the country's size matters unlike so many other hot spots that are small enough to be easily contained.

Pakistan is a country of grown men playing with fire who perhaps even believe that they have some right to do so. I fear that like Europe, it will take several million dead to cure this disease.

If that can be avoided then the next generation must become educated in the values of the enlightenment, rather than the values of seventh century barbarism. That would quickly release the peoples' energies to build a rich and prosperous nation of energetic people. I doubt if the will yet exists.

What this all means in a classic historic sense is that the famed Northwest frontier continues to brew up and make everyone nervous. It truly is the last sanctuary of the barbarian dream that captivated mankind for millenia. Its ending will be the end of military romance and the completion of the great enterprise of civilization begun in the Bronze age.

Yet I look at those desert hills and dream of building out woodlands wherever possible and building a rich land. It will be very difficult but done along the frontier, it will hugely improve the economic potential of the Indus valley. That is a worthy bequest. It makes politics small and beneath contempt.

The frontier and this remnant barbarism is now an ulcer on the globe that surely must be healed. It captivates and distracts the Islamic world from fulfilling their own destiny. It will not end until leadership emerges within Islam able to confront the horror.

In the meantime the Islamic world has had the benefit of oceans of global spending power through access to oil for two generations. The next generation will see this end. It has already begun.

Of course we see this world through the eyes of the wingnuts who have shaped western perceptions of Islam to date and this makes us nervous. The reality is that a large portion of the Islamic world occupies some of the most unforgiving land in the world.

It is this geography that represents one of the best opportunities to sequester carbon by the re establishment of agriculture and woodlands and their great opportunity to build the future.