Here are some assessments of Islam I recently came across:
• “totalitarian,” “barbaric”
• “Islamo-fascism”
• “fascist ideology”
• “obsessional dream of conquering the world”
• “supreme brothel” (in reference to the Islamic description of paradise)
Christian fundamentalists? Militant counter-jihadists? White supremacist Islamophobes? What’s your guess?
Actually, these statements are taken from a book of essays by former Muslims. L’Islam mis à nu par les siens: Anthologie d’auteurs arabophones post 2001 is edited by Maurice Saliba with a preface by Fr. Henri Boulad, an Egyptian Jesuit. Anne Barbeau Gardiner, who reviewed the book for the New Oxford Review says the title can be translated as Islam Laid Bare by Its Own. Professor Gardiner notes that “a number of the authors were members of the Muslim Brotherhood or were graduates of, and even teachers at, Al-Azhar University in Egypt.”
The 46 essays in the book present a picture of Islam that’s difficult to find elsewhere. Much of the online information about Islam is provided by Muslim apologists—some of whom belong to groups that are well funded by Arab states. And much of the rest is provided by non-Muslims whose first priority is not to offend Islam. Critics of Islam, on the other hand, are few and far between, and possibly getting fewer. Their sites are regularly attacked as “hate groups” by leftists. And they stand in constant danger of being de-monetized or de-platformed.
Catholics are especially likely to be exposed to the airbrushed version of Islam. Almost the whole effort of Catholic clergy and educators who deal with the subject is to find common ground between the two faiths. In recent years, some Catholic leaders have appeared to be far more worried about the dangers of “Islamophobia” than about the relentless persecution of fellow Christians by Muslims in various parts of the Middle East, Asia and Africa.
At the same time, Catholic leaders have shown little concern over the importation into Europe of the very same ideology that was being used to justify the persecution of Christians in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Somalia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and numerous other countries. In fact, some of the loudest voices in favor of mass migration into Europe were those of Catholic clergy. And very few spoke out against it.
One who did was Emil Nona, the exiled Chaldean Archbishop of Mosul. Archbishop Nona warned his fellow bishops in Europe about the dangers of “welcoming in your countries an ever-growing number of Muslims.” “Islam does not say that all men are equal,” he reminded them: “Your values are not their values. If you do not understand this soon enough, you will become the victims of the enemy you have welcomed in your home.”
While many of the European bishops saw Islam as a fellow religion, Archbishop Nona saw it as an enemy ideology—much as the West looked upon Soviet communism as an enemy ideology during the Cold War. Just as Cold-warriors warned that communist ideology was incompatible with democratic values, today’s critics of Islam warn that it also is incompatible with fundamental human rights. For example, one prominent feature of Islamic doctrine is a strident anti-Semitism. Anyone with a thorough knowledge of Islam would understand that the importation of a large number of Muslims into a country would lead to a corresponding increase in anti-Semitism.
Not only did Europe’s bien pensants fail to see this coming, they convinced themselves that Muslim migration would lead to increased tolerance all around. Muslims, they believed, would assimilate to the spirit of Western democracy while Europeans would benefit from the rich diversity of the Muslim world.
Indeed, European leaders, including European bishops, saw the migration as a golden opportunity to amend for the Holocaust. Amazingly, they designated Muslims as the “new Jews”—as the world’s pre-eminent victims of hatred, discrimination, and oppression. By showering Muslims—the “new Jews”—with tolerance, they could atone for their treatment of the real Jews during the Nazi era, while at the same time defusing Muslim suspicions and resentments.
It had to have been one of stupidest ideas ever conceived. To make amends for their past anti-Semitism, the European elites invited into their countries, large numbers of people who adhered to the most anti-Semitic ideology in history.
Indeed, there is far more anti-Semitic content in the Koran than in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. In her testimony at the 2010 trial of Geert Wilders, Wafa Sultan, a Syrian-born American psychiatrist, testified:
The Quran is worse than Mein Kampf, because Mein Kampf is a political book, the Quran is a mix of politics and religion. In my opinion, it is easier to overcome a political ideology than a political ideology that is packaged as a religious ideology.
Just so. And this religious packaging helps to explain why so many Catholic prelates are unable to understand that “your values are not their values.” To get a better idea of what “their values” really are, Catholics would do well to read Islam Laid Bare by Its Own (hopefully, we will soon have an English translation).
In his introduction to this revelatory book of essays, Fr. Boulad finds it “scandalous” that for 60 years, Catholic prelates have skirted the issues raised by these former Muslims. It might be an exaggeration to speak about a romance with Islam, but Islam has found a good friend in today’s Church leadership. Church leaders have shown an almost total reluctance to say anything critical about Islam—even when such criticism has been fully justified.
The situation is similar to the fellow-feelings that many Americans had for Soviet communism before, during, and after World War II. Some historians do indeed speak of a “romance” with communism during this period. For example, Hollywood sent several love letters to Russia in the form of pro-Soviet propaganda films such as Mission to Moscow. In Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s, Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley writes, “not a single Hollywood film has ever shown communists committing atrocities.”
One of the main ways that Americans became acquainted with the truth about communism was through the writings of ex-communists, such as Arthur Koestler, Whittaker Chambers, and Ignacio Silone. “When all is said,” Koestler told a friend, “we ex-communists are the only people on your side who know what it’s all about.”
The same is true of ex-Muslims. Unlike clerical and governmental apologists for Islam who take at face value whatever Muslim authorities tell them, they know from experience “what it’s all about.” It’s about time we paid more attention to them. And the good news is that you don’t have to wait for the English translation of L’Islam mis à nu par les siens.
The fact is, there are already a number of excellent books in English by ex-Muslims. Here, in no particular order, are six of them:
- Nonie Darwish, Wholly Different: Why I Chose Biblical Values Over Islamic Values
- Wafa Sultan, A God Who Hates
- Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel
- Derya Little, From Islam to Christ: One Woman’s Path through the Riddles of God
- Joseph Fadelle, The Price to Pay: A Muslim Risks All to Follow Christ
- Ibn Warraq, Why I am not a Muslim
- Ali Sina, Understanding Muhammad: A Psychobiography
These books help to fill in the many gaps left by those authors who would like us to believe that Islam is just a slightly exotic form of Christianity. The first five on the list are a synthesis of analysis and autobiography. They contain a number of striking and instructive anecdotes which reveal the everyday consequences of living in an Islamic society—consequences that Islamic apologists would prefer you didn’t know about. Is Islam a “religion of peace” or does it have an “obsessional dream of conquering the world”? It’s a question we can’t afford to put off indefinitely.
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Hypothetically, what if more Catholic clerics suddenly viewed Islam NOT through the lens of religious “pluralism,” or Freemason ideology, or even as a “faith”—but more accurately as a natural-religion, a culture and a “belief”?
Is Islam more correctly a subject for down-the-hall ANTHROPOLOGY than for across-the-table revelation and theology?
Hypothetically, is Islam more demonstrably a syncretic COLLAGE— of first, a foundational and not-so-altered Arabian (mega)tribalism and folk-culture, with massaged Hebrew ingredients, some truncated Christian borrowings, some homegrown monotheism (the hanifs), some Zoroastrian and even Buddhist colorings, some Syrian Christian over-lays, some later Seljug Turk bad manners, and finally post-colonial resentments?
But, the irreducible PREMISE of Islam is the belief (not really a faith?) that the chasm between a willful Allah and submissive Man is as absolute as Allah himself. Determinism.
So, is Islam a 7th-century anthropological relic? A natural-religion not to be coaxed along (or paradigm-shifted!) by either Faith in the PERSON of Jesus Christ—the self-disclosing, gratuitous, and freely-willed Incarnation of God into human history—or, therefore, by a more leavened understanding of MAN?
And, the perennial CHURCH, how is it to not be an NGO, to not be less-than-unflavored-salt within a universal “pluralism” of religions, to not be ingested by Freemasonic globalism, AND to not be an unwitting dhimmi once again within assimilative/syncretic Islam?
Gobbledegook! This high-flown nonsense hides the SIMPLE TRUTH- Islam, as defined by muhammad’s koran and his life story is the most bloodthirsty, supremacist ideology to infect humanity; sadly also the most successful brainwashing system ever devised. Including Catholicism.
Simple.
Repeal and replace Paragraph 841 of the Catechism!
Oh Lord yes remove 841, Allah is not the Creator, only a Modernist and Freemason could have wrote that.
Classic Slippery Slope principle.
From the rest of the Second Vatican Council, also this:
“Christ the Lord…by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully REVEALS MAN TO HIMSELF and makes his supreme calling clear” (The Church in the Modern World, n. 22, caps added).
The meaning, above, of my “therefore”—the Incarnation as the singular revelation who (not which!) redeems and elevates each responsible and free HUMAN PERSON toward deification. How soon we forget, drifting instead into post-Christian somnambulism, even in parts of the Church. Now to be met by a re-energized 7th-century Islam with its sectarian an internecine competitors, all of whom regard themselves as “EXECUTORS of the [pre-Christian] law basically made by God” (Farooq Hassan, The Concept of the State and Law in Islam, 1981).
An insipid mess of pottage, this so-called “pluralism” of religions:
“Equality, which is a presupposition of interreligious dialogue, refers to the EQUAL DIGNITY OF THE PARTIES in dialogue, not to doctrinal content, nor even less to the position of Jesus Christ—who is God himself made man—in relation to the founders of the other religions” (Benedict XVI, Dominus Iesus, 2000, n. 22, italics added).
For those who don’t have the CCC at hand: CCC 841: The Church’s relationship with the
Muslims.”The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the
first place amongst whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day”.
Would you recommend a book of essays by disgruntled former Catholics to get a good picture of the Catholic Church? The church I belong to has interfaith dialog with a group of Muslims, and I am both glad and proud that we do. I have never been as disgusted with someone associated with Boston College as I am with William Kilpatrick after reading your review. In your review he states of ex-Muslims, “Unlike clerical and governmental apologists for Islam who take at face value whatever Muslim authorities tell them, they know from experience ‘what it’s all about.’ It’s about time we paid more attention to them.” Is there any religion in the universe that claims more authority to tell people to park their brains and just believe and accept what church authorities tell them than Roman Catholicism? I have seen processions of bishops and processions of cardinals. Not one of them looked like Jesus ever looked. Islam’s leaders look a lot more like Jesus than the bishops and cardinals do. Yet the bishops claim the authority to tell little girls that they will never be good enough to be priests – or even deacons. And they can never lead a Vatican congregation. But don’t feel bad, little girls; when you grow up you still can have the high callings of virgin, mother, and martyr. Oh, and by the way, send us your money and don’t ever use artificial contraception.
Ah! George!
Do you dispute the passages of the Koran that Islam’s detractors cite which are literally anti-semitic and/or jihadi? Are you saying that if I look them up in my Koran, i will not find them?
Or are you saying that the fundamentalist Muslims who dedicate their lives to living out every jot and tittle of their holy book are invariably somehow going to ignore them?
Or are you perhaps, as seems more likely, a rabid Catholi-phobe?
You may be surprised to learn this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism%27s_view_of_Jesus
Wherever Muslims dominate – as in Nigeria, Egypt, Sudan and Pakistan – churches burn and Christians die. No peace, no terms, with Islam or Muslims.
You may be unaware of these things:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/radical-rabbi-says-notre-dame-fire-retribution-for-13th-century-talmud-burning/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/11786802/Burning-of-Christian-churches-in-Israel-justified-far-Right-Jewish-leader-says.html
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/12/151224-israel-jewish-terrorism-arson-christian-church-multiplication/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_the_Church_of_the_Nativity_in_Bethlehem
“When the light gets turned on, the creepy crawlers scatter”, my dear late dad said in one of his many hundreds of great sayings. If I learned something on my young-and-dumb years of rejection of Catholicism, is that Anti-Catholics convulsively hate the Light of Truth, so they invent a crazy but sentimentally appealing, total counterfeit of truth. They use the tried-and-successful technique of DISTRACTION-BY-TRANSFERENCE-PROJECTION-AND-ACCUSATION.
What this means is that what they hate the most about their very own selves, they transfer and project unto others, especially Catholics, in order to demonize them and accuse them of what THEY are the GUILTIEST. So, when you say that we Catholics “park our brain”, that is EXACTLY what you have obviously done and now project unto us with your anti-Catholic self-righteous hatred. Radical Islam, through absolutely clear historical evidence and the evidence given by its own members that have left it, is an IN-HUMAN and Anti-Human political-religious hybrid belief.
Like too many of our deluded Clergy and Laity and people around the world, you have “parked your brain” on the side of total suicidal-sentimental-blind-denial, but TRUE Catholicism is the most “WOKE” belief there is, awakening us to REALITY, both material and spiritual. “The hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The night is nearly over; the day is almost here. So, let us put aside the DEEDS OF DARKNESS and put on the ARMOR OF LIGHT”, (Romans 13:11-12). That Armor is for fighting, not for bowing to violent impostors and those in lustful love with them, come ridicule, suffering, torture or death.
Mr. Desnoyers:
Like you, other people who are Catholic know Muslim people.
Let’s stipulate that “the Church you belong to” enjoys no credibility because “it has an interfaith dialogue with a group Muslims.” Indeed, the Catholic Church (which you above disdain and imply has no credibility) and its establishment has plenty of interfaith dialogue groups with Muslims. Thus, by logical extension, your self-certification of “your own Church” can in fairness be interpreted as a token of no credibility.
Here is the difference between Islam and Christianity:
If a man claims to be a Christian and commits violence against men who are not Christians because they are not Christians, everyone who knows the Gospel knows that the violent man is disobeying The Gospel.
Conversely, if a man claims to be a Muslim and commits violence against men who are not Muslims because they are not Muslims, everyone who knows the Koran knows that the violent man is obeying the Koran.
Dialogue has no inherent value in itself. Truth has value. When dialogue involves truth, dialogue is fruitful. Without truth, dialogue means nothing. Not even “credibility,” whether done by “your church” or by “Catholics.”
Mr. Kilpatrick is trying to get people to face the truth, which is edifying. Ignoring the truth is not edifying, whether fine by “Catholics,” or people from “your church” (who apparently, if you are representative of your other brethren, disdain Catholics).
Jesus is The Way and The Truth and The Life. Islam is the engine of eternal violence and a path of darkness.
Dear Mr Desnoyers,
The only good thing in your diatribe against Mr Kilpatrick and the Catholic Church is your telling us that your church has an outreach to Muslims. That is good, and is done by many other Protestant ecclesial groups and an equal number of Catholic groups. It is well worth remembering, though, that Muslims in lands where they are a small minority are a very different kettle of fish from Muslims in lands where Islam is the majority religion. Small-minority Muslims love the Christian peace and freedom of their new lands, and endlessly and earnestly repeat that Islam is a religion of peace. Like anyone else, they do not want to lose that peace and freedom. But as their numbers increase, you can track on a graph the corresponding increase in belligerence, as belligerence is Islam’s time-honoured way of converting (ie, subjecting) people. Just as Communists believe that any evil is acceptable to more speedily bring about the utopian dictatorship of the proletariat, so Muslims seem to believe that any evil is acceptable if it more speedily subjects the whole of mankind to “the will of Allah”. In both cases the end scenario is an unknown – it could be good or it could be an unmitigated evil.
But we know that good cannot come from an evil means, as Jesus, the Way, the Truth and the Life, taught us. Jesus taught us by his life and death that the way to heaven on earth is the laborious way of purifying our own heart, and letting others catch that purity and goodness from us, even if it leads us to die as Jesus did. Unfortunately, Muhammed ran away from that martyrdom when he fled from Mecca to Medina, and forever after his mission to the world suffered grievously from that flaw in his spirituality. Up to that point it seems possible to imagine that he might have even become a Christain saint, as I believe the locutions he received up to that point were not incompatible with Christianity (but I am open to correction on this). From Medina onwards his utterances seem to have become more toxic and utilitarian, condoning evil means to achieving what his flawed mind now saw as good ends.
It is good to have a personal outreach to Muslims as you do. Perhaps Mr Kilpatrick does too, but in his writings Mr Kilpatrick is reaching out to world-wide Islam and Muslims anywhere in the world who may be struggling with the question of whether we are made in the image and likeness of a reasonable God or an unreasonable Allah. Imagine the Dar al-Islam, when the whole world is subject to a reign in which reason is missing in action.
I agree wholeheartedly with you AMinNZ
George you are comparing a headache to a brain tumor with your phony baloney equivocation.
Dr. Bill Warner’s Site politicalislam.com covers the Koran, Hadith the Sira and Sharia Law for us ‘ KAFIRS ‘ A term of derision used by them against us. His writings will make everything more clear.
It amazes me so many priests’ and prelates’ ignorance … of what Christianity is about. And yet, we declare it as a petitioning any time we recite the Lord’s preyer: “thy kingdom come”. What do they learn by the study of the Bible? It is all about the kingdom of God.
We are blinded by a word, a latin word which strangely enough has been received without translation in all European languages, even the non neo-latin ones: religion. Neither this word is translatable in the languages of other parts of the world. And scholars of religious studies have not been able to settle on a shared definition, capable of encompassing all that we classify as “religions”: Confusianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Hebraism, Christianity etc. It means that we use this word, and don’t actually know what we are talking about.
Should I go back to latin, I’d say that what “religion” meant was a reading of reality in which everything, in society and in nature, was seen as part of an all encompassing order. Together, they constitute what we call the kingdom of God.
This can give us a sense of the difference by which we date years centuries and millennia: BC and AD.
Before Christ we find a whole variety of such Kingdoms: every society conceived itself as kingdom of god, the gods, the devine. In other words, politics and religion were undifferenciated. The Bible tells us of the exodus from one such kingdom, “Egipt”, exodus which found its completion only with Christ. Let’ be careful in how we read his statement “my kingdom is not of this world”. It is not, in other words, a kingdom ampong the others making this world. No one of these can exaust it.
His kingdom, whose full manifestation we invoke, is already, though only inchoatively, the Church: supernatural realization of the natural society of humanity.
We differenciate therefore civil society and theological society (the Church), even when the members of this are also members of that. But we have also integrated in out juridical tradition the sense of universality proper of Christianity, for which “all men are equal and endwed by their Creator with certain inalianable rights …”.
No such thing with Islam, for which men ae naturally islamic, and by negating it they forfeit their nature: hence they can be killed or subjougated. Whatever we think of it on other regards, this teaching runs against the grain of our traditional political and jouridical understanding.
And I repeat: what do they teach to our seminarians destined to become priests and prelates?
I’ve also heard that read the Quran in chronological order of its composition rather than how it’s typically ordered (by length of surah), is to really see the evolution of it into the clear mix of politics/religion and to see it as more deadly.
Deepest gratitude to Prof. Kilpatrick and CWR!
It takes real courage to sound this alarm in today’s world.
We can only wish we had at least a few more leaders in the Church who, like Archbishop Nona, were more interested in protecting their flocks than in placating the ravenous, politically correct wolves in our midst.
Dr. Kilpatrick neither reads nor speaks Arabic: nor does he possess any academic degree in History, Religious History, or Islamic Studies. He was a fine professor of Education at Boston College. But he has no professional competency in the History of Islam.
So what? He has a brain. Deliver me from “experts”.
John Dempsey: LOL. Raymond Ibrahim has all or most of the credentials you criticize Dr. Kilpatrick for not having, and his views coincide with most of Dr. Kilpatrick’s views. Let me guess: to mentally challenged people like yourself, Raymond Ibrahim is just a bigot and Islamophobe, right, so in your extremely limited way of thinking, Ibrahim is also not qualified to speak authoritatively on Islam, right? Only those in favor of Islam are qualified to speak about Islam, right? Ha, ha, ha! You are busted!!!
For all those who wish to learn historical truth, I urge you to pick up a copy of Ibrahim’s excellent book “Sword and Scimitar.” It reveals part of the true history of ongoing violent jihad against the West and the rest of the World by Islam.
Meaning nothing, except that you are asking people to do what you are doing: pretending reality isn’t happening.
Knowledge of Arabic is totally unnecessary in order to understand Islam. Consider the following:
1) Nearly 3/4 of the Muslim world are not Arabs and do not speak Arabic. Is anyone prepared to say that those billion Muslims do not understand Islam?
2)All of the Islamic sacred texts, manuals of Sharia law, the writings of the most respected Islamic religious authorities are available in translations made by religious Muslims who are also native speakers of Arabic, approved and published by Islamic religious institutions.
3) Most of the Moslem terrorists are native speakers of Arabic, and their understanding of jihad does not come from translations.
The argument that we should not take critics of Islam seriously who do not speak Arabic is fraudulent, and the purpose of that argument is to prevent criticism of Islam. There is nothing wrong with using professional, approved translations of the Islamic texts. We use translations all the time when it comes to the texts of other religions including Christianity and Judaism and others.
But he is citing Muslims and people who emerge from that faith tend to say the same things. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to perceive Islam is screwed up.
One would think that Catholics and others who fall over themselves excusing Islam would be a little more sympathetic toward those who have converted or want to convert to Christianity. They experience the worst persecution, even from family members who hunt them down, prepared to wreak murderous revenge for “dishonoring” the family and Islam. They have gone into hiding, changing their names and locations, living in constant awareness of the threat to their own and their families’ lives. Appalling.
The first thing Muhammed did after his “vision” was to destroy the Jewish tribes. Next came conquest of Christians in the Middle East followed shortly by North Africa and then finally the attempt at conquering France which was stopped by Charles Martel at Tours in 732. This is less a religion than a violent expanding political movement with religion as its vehicle. It continues today using different tactics as the foolish Europeans are finding out to their sorrow.
To be historically precise, Muhammed himself conquered only Arabia. As you know, the rest came later under others. And, if Muhammed had died at the age of 53 (the end of the Mecca street-preacher period) rather than at the age 63 (his ten-year Medina warrior period) we likely might never have heard of him as a lasting piece of history.
Lawrence (T.E.) of Arabia, the First World War organizer of the Arabian tribes against a common enemy, the (also Muslim) Turks, came to understand much of the early Arab mind from the inside. Of Arabian culture he wrote:
“The fringes of their deserts were strewn with broken faith. . . .The Arabs said there had been forty thousand [!] prophets: we had record of at least some hundreds” (T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom). The Islamic scholar Mahmoud Ayoub gives a higher number of 124,000 [!!], noting that only twenty-one are named in the Qur’an (some say a few more, even including a cryptic reference to possibly Alexander the Great).
Those who defend the new mindset of Western bishops and Catholic “intellectuals” will undoubtedly appeal to Vatican II and Nostra Aetatae, even though the passages in that text dealing with Islam have nothing to do with Christian dogma (or Traedition) but are at best the opinions of those wrote them.
True.
Unlike Judaism, Islam accords Jesus status as a prophet who was born of Mary, a virgin, and proclaims that He will return to render the Last Judgment. Islam, for all its faults, is, at least, closer to Christ than Judaism.
Closer to Christ?
In a sense, but also a very mongrelized closeness…demonstrably as close to PAGAN echoes as to Christianity. Yes, the Qur’an comments on Christ directly and (always) respectfully some 22 times, and less directly countless more times in relation to ascribed ascetical and moral sayings, connected stories, and miscellaneous passages. And yet the dependence on its versions of the Jewish Pentateuch is still much more pervasive.
And when the Qur’an refers to the Trinity (that is, Christianity), the Triune Oneness is construed as a TRIAD—a familiar pagan construct—in this case meaning Allah together with the separate Jesus, and with Mary—rather than as a unity with the (dispensed-with) Holy Spirit as the third “person.” Under paganism the multiplicity of pagan gods was generated in part by liaisons between Zeus and mortals.
So, of Christ and Christianity: “How can He [Allah] have a son as He has no consort?” (Q 6:101/ 102)? With regard to BOTH the Old and the New Testaments (Incarnation and Redemption), Islam “completely reduces Divine Revelation” (John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, 1994).
I think Ronald Reagan once said something to the effect that the last time he checked, Jesus was a Jew.
That’s still the case and so are the Blessed Mother and St Joseph. Jews are our spiritual elder brothers.
A) you have an obvious dislike of Jews
B) doctrine matters less than actions. Most Jews behave closer to Christian standards than many Muslims. And by their actions it is obvious that Muslims do not follow Christ, though they cannot since they do not really know what Christ taught despite the fact he is mentioned in the Koran.
Breaking news! Our bishops are a pack of fools! I’m shocked. I thought they had the Holy Spirit to guide them. Guess not.
Mr. Desnoyers,
your critique seems at first as an attempt to offer some objective counter-arguments, without any agenda. Towards the end of your comments, however, you revealed the truth, that you DO have an agenda. That is: your deep offense at the doctrine of male-only priesthood. The tip-off of your “non-objective observer status” was your gratuitous comments about the physical appearance of Catholic clerics vs. Moslems . Are we now basing our philosophical/theological arguments on what kind of CLOTHES people wear? If you posit yourself as an “unagendized,” noble, objective analyst, you really must be more careful to not let your passions show.
The last opportunity to roll back Islam, or at least provide some moderation, was when General Allenby walked (as is the custom) into Jerusalem in 1917. Unfortunately, the western nation hunger for middle eastern oil to fuel their warships conversion from coal made them come down on the side of Arabs, titular led by the Saudis. We have paid the price since.