Author: Douglas Knight

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Imagine

After an angry, inevitably, celebrity-studded rally in Trafalgar Square, groups of Jews descended on Brick Lane to assault anyone visibly identified as a Muslim. Some burst into a curry house and attacked the diners, tugging at their beards while shouting Oi Vey. A rabbi is rumoured to have tried to strangle a waiter with a rolled up prayer shawl. Outside one of the many mosques in the area, the Jews chanted ‘Death to the Earabs’ (in emulation of the Palestinian supporter’s ‘Death to the Juices’ (sic) placard I saw last week).
Elsewhere, irate Jews rioted outside the Iranian and Syrian embassies, blaming them for the rocket attacks in Gaza, while mysterious Jewish websites published lists of prominent Muslims who they threatened to kill. In Bradford an imam was dragged from his car and beaten up by two men on a day trip from Stamford Hill.
Meanwhile, a group of well-known Jews published a letter in the newspapers warning the British government that if it didn’t adjust its pro-Arab foreign policy, there would be a corresponding radicalisation of the British Jewish community who might resume terrorist attacks on public transport.
Faced with such concerted manifestations of hysterical anger, the police decided to arrest any Muslims provocatively sporting a Palestinian keffiyah. Tantalised by Jewish violence, the BBC sent several admiring reporters to tell their story to a wider public, giving a new spin to the saw ‘Jews means News’. My God how they must have suffered to be this angry, threatening Muslims with something ominously called a ‘Holocaust’. Grovelling interviews were conducted with Israeli spokesmen because of their remote connection with these wild-eyed Anglo-Jews. The IDF became heroes over night…..
All of which is only as incredible as what we are witnessing now here in London

Michael Burleigh Imagine

This asymmetric character of the global crisis â?? the fact that the shocks were even bigger on the periphery than at the epicentre… the troubles of the rest of the world meant that in relative terms the US gained, politically as well as economically. Many commentators had warned in 2008 that the financial crisis would be the final nail in the coffin of American credibility around the world. First, neo-conservatism had been discredited in Iraq. Now the â??Washington consensusâ?? on free markets had collapsed. Yet this was to overlook two things. The first was that most other economic systems fared even worse than Americaâ??s when the crisis struck: the far larger economic problems in the rest of the world had given Obama a unique opportunity to reassert American leadership, particularly in Asia and the Middle East. The â??unipolar momentâ?? was over, no question. But power is a relative concept, as the president pointed out in his last press conference of the year: â??They warned us that America was doomed to decline. And we certainly all got poorer this year. But they forgot that if everyone else declined even further, then America would still be out in front…

Niall Ferguson An imaginary retrospective of 2009

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Impure

Civil society emerges out of altruism – small platoons of enthusiasts with the freedom and resolve to change things. Britain’s institutions and services all began with Victorian self-help groups. Schools, sewerage, charities for the blind, the sick, for orphans, lepers, stray dogs, all were pioneered by Christians. Yet, in Orissa, India’s poorest state to which we are en route, Christians are not regarded as Indian or even human. The worst massacre of Christians since Partition took place in Orissa on 23 August last year, under the orders, so it’s said, of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad – the World Hindu Movement – who claim Christians are ‘impure’, foreign. Most are dalit – literally ‘untouchable’. It is still a sin for a dalit – or outcaste’s – shadow to fall on a Brahmin. It is actually illegal in India for a dalit to convert to Christianity, and so escape this oppressive caste system. If they do, they lose numerous ‘privileges’ such as schooling, and job opportunities. In Orissa, 85 per cent of the population is officially dalit. Despite massive infrastructure development going on everywhere, India’s age-old hierarchicalism and massive, religiously-consolidated injustice is everywhere.

Jenny Taylor Real India

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Behind Western Condemnation

Why do citizens in democracies enthusiastically embrace a radical Islamist group that not only seeks the destruction of a fellow democracy but is overtly committed to the substitution of a world-wide Islamic caliphate (or umma) for the existing international order based on territorial nation states? Not because of compassion for the Palestinians, whose plight has never attracted genuine international interest, especially by the Arab states (and for that matter, the Palestinian leadership), whose decades of mistreatment of the Palestinians have gone virtually unnoticed.

Between 1949 and 1967, Egypt and Jordan ruled the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank respectively. Not only did they fail to put these populations on the road to statehood, but they showed little interest in protecting their human rights or even in improving the quality of their life – which is one of the reasons that 120,000 West Bankers moved across to the East Bank of the Jordan and about 300,000 others emigrated abroad between 1949 and 1967. Nobody in the international community paid any more attention to this than they have more recently to the ongoing abuse of Palestinians across the Arab world from Saudi Arabia to Lebanon, a country which was condemned in a June 2006 Amnesty International report for its “long-standing discrimination and abuses of fundamental economic and social rights of Palestinian refugees.” Nor has there been any international outcry when Arab countries have massacred Palestinians on a grand scale. In 1970 King Hussein of Jordan ordered the indiscriminate bombing of Palestinian refugee camps in the course of putting down the Palestinian uprising during “Black September.” This left between 3,000 and 5,000 Palestinian refugees dead. But the fact that Hussein killed more Palestinians in the course of a single month than Israel managed to do in decades was never held against him or dented the widely held perception of him as a man of peace. Again, more than two decades ago Abu Iyad, the number two man in the PLO, publicly stated that the crimes of the Syrian government against the Palestinian people “surpassed those of the Israeli enemy.” While in the wake of the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, Kuwaitis not only set about punishing the PLO for support of Saddam Hussein’s brutal occupation by cutting off their financial support for Yasir Arafat’s overblown and corrupt organization, but there was also a widespread slaughter of Palestinians living in Kuwait. This revenge against innocent Palestinian workers in the emirate was so severe that Arafat himself acknowledged: “What Kuwait did to the Palestinian people is worse than what has been done by Israel to Palestinians in the occupied territories.” Yet there was no media coverage or specially convened UN meetings because it is only when they interact with Israel that the Palestinians win the world’s attention.

Efraim Karsh

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A prejudice against the future

The current reference in legislation to a child’s need for a father is being removed because of the alleged offence such a clause is causing to single women. Removing this reference, for the sake of a tiny minority that currently does on the whole have access to assisted reproduction, sends a powerful signal to the whole population that fathers can be dispensed with in children’s lives. This is in spite of a wealth of social research showing the importance of engaged fathers for families and communities. Fathers matter to children but fatherhood itself is essential for drawing men into dependable and responsible adulthood… By ignoring the benefits fathers bring to children in order to accommodate childless adults, the [Human Fertilisation and Embryology] Bill [which has since become an Act] places the rights of adults at the centre, rather than the best interests of children.

Centre for Social Justice Fathers not included – summary

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Got monks?

Helpers of God’s Precious Infants

The next vigil at Marie Stopes abortion facility, 88 Russell Road, Buckhurst Hill, Essex IG9 5QB, will be held on 24 January 2009 From St Thomas of Canterbury Church, 557/559 High Road, Woodford Green IG8 0RB led by the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal

8.45am – Holy Sacrifice of the Mass at St Thomas of Canterbury Church
9.30am – Prayerful and peaceful procession to Marie Stopes abortion facility, processing with image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, holy rosary and hymns
11.45am – Return procession with prayers and hymns

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Our time of trial

Longtime habits of virtue, enactments of responsibility and unconscious acknowledgement of generational bonds had continued to maintain the order upon which the modern system rested and flourished, but in no way renewed or replenished. Thrift; moderation; liberality; self-sacrifice; these, and other virtues, continued for a time, but in this year were revealed to have been overthrown by the mad, even insane pursuit of temporary and fleeting gains. We discovered at once that we had passed a tipping point in our consumption of supposed infinite energy, even as we discovered as well that we had passed a tipping point in the maintenance of the virtues that might have prevented us from such abandoned consumption. We found that neither our leading citizens nor the ordinary working stiff any longer exercised prudence or forsight in making some of the basic decisions that ensures the future of a civilization…
While ours, and likely the next, will be the generation that curses its fate not to have lived during a time of plenty and excess, and we will wonder why it was our bad fortune to have lived in the aftermath of an empire’s glory, if we are capable of deeper and better perspective, we will understand the blessings of our age. From such times of trial a certain deeper wisdom has been made possible – one thinks especially Augustine’s great blessing to have lived in a time that made it possible to write The City of God – and we may yet come to know, and accept – even embrace – the knowledge that our falsity will have spawned. While for most we will despair over our losses and pains, perhaps later if not sooner we will understand the blessings of this – our – time of trial.
Patrick Deneen

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Eucharist 2

The words of eucharist remember the past event of the passion of Christ who, in the same night that he was betrayed, took bread and gave you thanks; he broke it and gave it to his disciples
In the eucharist we remember the incarnation and the passion and death of Christ. We remember the last supper in the upper room and the chain of events that followed it: supper with the disciples was followed by the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus’ arrest and trial, his being scourged, stripped, dragged out of the city and of all human society and put to death on the cross. We call all this the ‘passion’: the passion tells us what the incarnation is; it tells us how deep the incarnation is, and that the incarnation goes down all the way to the bottom. The incarnation is the meeting of God with man, and the passion is the incarnation in miniature. It shows that God really has met man and is with him, and that this is irrevocable now, for not even death can undo it. The passion is the unchangeable fact of God’s being with man and therefore of his dedicating himself and giving himself to man.
Jesus is about to be handed over. To show that in this way God is handing himself over to man, Jesus hands this bread over to his disciples. As this bread is in their hands, and their teeth, so the Son of God is in the hands of man. Christ is about to be broken and divided up, so he breaks and divides this bread. He performs this handing over and being broken up in miniature. In this way he shows us that this did not happen to him without his knowledge or consent. It looks as though it is by his own power that man is taking Christ into his hands to do something appalling to him in which Jesus is simply the victim. But, by playing this all out before hand, Jesus shows that in all this action in which man’s violence rolls out, man is not master of this event at all. It is Christ who gives the instruction to ‘go and do what you are going to do’, to Judas. In the last supper Jesus demonstrates with this bread what is going to happen so we can see he took this role in it for himself, and so that in these events in which he is entirely passive, he is also entirely willing and active. He is actively passive. It is not man who is in charge – not Judas, not the crowd, not the Sanhedrin or high priest or Pilate – but Christ.
Christ breaks open this bread, tears pieces off and so divides it and hands it over to his friends, because he is going to open, and break and divide, hand over and share. He opens, divides, hands over and shares himself. What we are getting in all this, what we are being offered, is not this or that thing – it is Christ himself. God is given to man for God places himself in our hands. Our time here and now in this eucharist, is superimposed on that moment then. All the events that follow it, the Mount of Olives, the garden, arrest, passion and crucifixion, all the events of the passion, are contained in the Last Supper. That eucharistic meal is the whole incarnation and passion of Christ brought together. These two times come into synch: our time comes into synch with the master fly-wheel which is Christ’s time. The eucharist is the events of the passion, and the eucharistic service superimposes on our time these events of Christ’s passion. As a result we are able to follow Christ, and watch this offering and giving of God to man, from a distance. His passion is the frame into which all the events of our life fit, so that included within the events of his life, the events of our lives be raised and redeemed.

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The liberal hierarchy's Pyrrhic victory

These “liberals”, as they like to be called, who constitute the hierarchy detest the Christian past and dismiss our forefathers in the faith as “primitive”. Really they are old-fashioned Whigs in new Guardianista clothing – apostles of the discredited doctrine of “progress”. And God help anyone who stands in the way of these ecclesiastical totalitarians as they bully conservative clergymen and steamroller traditional parishes into adopting their puerile new versions of the Bible and their trashy modern liturgies.
The modernisers among the bishops and in the General Synod have dominated the English church these last forty years and all but destroyed it. They have denied or distorted every cardinal doctrine of the faith. The Resurrection of Our Lord has been reduced to a subjective feeling of cheered-upness among the disciples. The Virgin Birth has been dismissed as a mistaken reading of the Book of Isaiah. They have swallowed whole the notion of secularisation
The result of all this iconoclasm is that people have voted with their feet and the congregations have diminished spectacularly. Where they have not diminished but increased and thrived is precisely in those churches so despised by A.N.Wilson: the Bible-based evangelicals and the traditional anglocatholics and high church. I must say that one of the great joys among traditional believers these days is the spectacle we can now enjoy of the liberal hierarchy’s Pyrrhic victory. At last there they sit in full control of the Church of England – except that the only meaningful parts of the church have gone their own ways, leaving the liberal bullies with no one to boss about.
I have been a priest for 35 years and watched the tyranny of apostates in high places and I know that people do not want a pale, euphemistic religion in which the gospel is reduced to a metaphor for the social policies of the soft Left. But they will come to church to be moved and stirred by words that are worth their weight in glory and to hear sound teaching.

Revd Peter Mullen at the Social Affairs Unit

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High anthropology

What makes monotheism a potential ally of humane liberalism is its high anthropology. Historically, of course, this liberal tradition grew up and out of a Christian monotheistic context; so its admiration of human dignity is no coincidence. Nor is it a coincidence, therefore, that Habermasâ?? new-found appreciation for religion comes at a time when he is struggling to articulate reasons against genetic engineering for non-therapeutic purposes, which he deems an assault on the fundamental dignity of the human individualâ??s freedom. Certain versions of monotheismâ??not least, certain versions of Christian monotheismâ?? support the idea of human dignity; which is why humane liberal philosophers on both sides of the Atlanticâ??if not yet on both sides of the English Channelâ??have been edging toward it in recent years.
Some philosophers, however, go further. They see in monotheism not only a support for equal human dignity, but perhaps the only support. In his recent study of John Locke, the legal and political philosopher, Jeremy Waldron, observes how silent modern philosophers have been in explaining the equal dignity that they assume all human persons share. He then goes on to demonstrate how Lockeâ??s understanding of such dignity is irreducibly theological; and he ends up by stating that â??I actually donâ??t think it is clear that weâ??nowâ??can shape and defend an adequate conception of basic human equality apart from some religious foundationâ??.

Niger Biggar’s Inaugural Lecture at the (Oxford) McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics and Public Life

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Family law voided of moral judgment

These cases are not aberrations. They are the outcome of a process that has been going on for the past three decades and more, in which the fundamental values of civilised society have been systematically trashed and up-ended. They are the result of the doctrine that all lifestyles must be considered equal and that no one has right to pass judgment on anyone else. Thus, women had a God-given right to bear babies out of wedlock. Stigma and shame were considered an affront to individual rights; disapproval of adultery or elective lone parenthood were dismissed as ‘Old Testament fundamentalism’.
Government policy, egged on by activist judges who deliberately voided family law of ‘moral judgments’ on the basis that there was no right or wrong in family life because it was always just too complicated to untangle, accordingly penalised marriage, rewarded adultery, further incentivised lone parenthood and systematically normalised irregular relationships.
The outcome is a shattered social landscape of lost and abandoned children, raised in households of gross emotional chaos and physical and moral squalor. Ignoring the fact that this underclass has become detached from the most basic values of civilised life, the so-called progressive intelligentsia declares that its only problem is ‘poverty’. Accordingly, it has supplied lone mothers with benefits on the basis that they were most in need. The result has been financial incentives for unmarried women to have multiple children – whose primary need was to have a committed father and stable family life, the very need government policy ensured would never be met.

Melanie Phillips The barbarism of ideologues