The Thomas Chronicles

A few commentators have suggested over the years that the only solution to the problems of the Mideast is for Islam to undergo a Reformation, much like the Christians in the early 16th century. Christianity before the Protestant Reformation was rife with corruption and greed, and, moveover, they had a total monopoly on belief. Parishners could not read the Bible. Indeed, they were told not to. The Church rendered all divine authority to itself, despite the fact that many priests were not themselves well-educated and couldn’t read Latin.

The Church asserted that they were the sole intermediary between God and Man. The Protestant Reformation, of course, insisted that no intermediary was necessary since Christ sacrificed Himself. Christ was the Intermediary between God and Man, not the Church.

Regardless whether you might agree or disagree with Protestantism, one must agree that the Reformation forced the Church and the believers in Christ to change for the better.

Certain commentators, foremost among them being Ralph Peters in his book, Beyond Terror and others, has suggested that an Islamic Reformation is overdue. He furthers states that it must happen from within Islam. Others such as Salmon Rushdie, Ibn Warraq from Frontpage Magazine, and even former Deputy Defense Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz said that Islam should undergo a Reformation.

Initially, with the start of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, I thought that perhaps external pressure could force Islam to revise itself from within. In a sense, this was one of our goals in the Iraq war, to install liberty in a region of the world that has never known it. In achieving this objective, the very existence of liberty in the Mideast would destabilize the Iranian theocracy and strike terror in the heart of the terrorists.

It was soul searching time for the Mideast.

What I failed to grasp then and what many fail to grasp now is that Islam has already undergone or is still undergoing its Reformation, and it has spread to the entire Islamic Crescent. We are seeing the fruits of it daily in Iraq, in the taunts from Tehran, and in the rubble in Lebanon. We failed to ask this vital question: Why must the Islamic Reformation be a peaceful one?

On 9/11, the image of the World Trade Center collapsing in fire and smoke was broadcast throughout the entire world. We here in America, and even in Europe, were shocked and mourned the lost of so many innocent lives. In the Islamic world, however, we caught footage of Muslims dancing in the street from Morocco to Jakarta and handing out candy. Their reaction to our tragedy was… well… gleeful and, sadly, typical.

If we wanted to reform Islam, we missed the boat.

Ironically, the Islamic Reformation can trace its origins to the Nazi’s and Adolf Hitler. As the Nazi Party developed in the 1930’s, al-Banna, who was the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, wrote admiring letters to Hitler and urged his cause. Hitler, in turn, was so impressed by The Muslim Brotherhood that they were enlisted as a secret intelligence arm of the Third Reich.

As World War II wore on, the Third Reich actively recruited and developed Nazi Arab SS divisions and based them in Croatia. They were called “Handjar”, translated as “Sword”, and their plan was the conquest of the Arab Pennisula and then on to Northern Africa. Needless to say, their plan didn’t work out.

Is it so remarkable that Hilter recruited the Muslim Brotherhood for the war effort? Hardly. Both had the same hatred of the West. Both worked tirelessly for the destruction of the Jews. Both detested freedom and liberty. They were a match in purpose and zealotry. (Hitler is just the gift that keeps on giving, ain’t he.) The significant thing about these fascist Arabs, however, was that they were secular, not religious.

After the war, these secular Nazi Arabs morphed in to the Baathist Party. Prominent among them were the Iraqi and the Syrian governments, as well as portions of the Palestinian Liberation Army, which again were secular garden-variety totalitarian governments and terrorists.

Then a strange thing occurred, which perhaps we in the West did not anticipate. During the late 1950’s early 1960’s, many of the Nazi Arabs were in Saudi Arabia, a nation which practiced the most extreme version of Islam. It was there that the Nazi Arabs found religion, and the confluence between Nazism and Wahhabism created a synergy.

And thus, the Islamic Reformation was born under the banner of Jihad.When others are calling our enemies “Islamofascists”, understand that they are being precisely accurate. Isn’t it any wonder that the best-selling book in the Mideast for years now has been Mein Kampf, or translated, My Struggle. Think of all the times Muslim commentators have corrected newsanchors as to the true translation of “jihad”. They say that it really means “struggle” rather than violent war. Indeed, Mein Kampf’s title in the Middle East is “Jihadi“, or “My Jihad“.

Well, they are absolutely right. It perfectly mirrors Adolf Hitler “struggle”. It’s a matter of semantics which the jihadists manipulate ever so well to confused the West, and yet it conveys their exact meaning if we have eyes to see it.

It is nonsensical to say that most Muslims in the Mideast aren’t advocating jihad against the West. First of all, we don’t know that this is a fact at all, and we have mountains of evidence to the contrary. And I think it is very condescending of us to urge our liberal values of tolerance and wishful thinking onto a radical religion that makes no pretense in wanting to destroy the Zionists and the “Great Satan“, America.

The point is, if moderate Muslims exist, where are they? Have we heard a single moderate Muslim stand up and oppose publicly the ideology of the Islamofascists? Is there a moderate left? Actually, we have heard a few Muslims stand up and denounce radical Islam (while simultaneously insisting that we are the source of their aggression), only to turn around and preach radical Islam to full congregations. Others who have denounced Islamofascism tend to be very secular and well-assimilated into American society.

Our political correctnessness blinds us and binds us from saying this, even though everyone knows this is true. I truly hope I am wrong about this, but the voices of the moderate Muslims are remarkably mute for the last five years…

Like in the Protestant Reformation, when Christians wanted to change their faith into a likeness more akin to the early Christian Church and Christ Himself, the Islamofascists want to change their faith to mirror the life of their Prophet Mohammed. They call it the “Method of Mohammed“. They have only brought that “method” to modernity with all its dangerous toys.

As Gary Thomas wrote in his article, “Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror“:

Many of the jihadists are adherents of Salafism, which analysts say is the fastest growing sect in Islam today…

Mary Habeck says that in Salafi view, democratic processes like elections are not only illegitimate, but must be resisted. What they’re saying is that a political process, as espoused by many Islamists, or Salafis, is wrong, and that we have to return to what they believe is the method of Mohammed, which was to struggle, or strive, through fighting. And they argue that political parties, some sort of elections, or things like this, have to be rejected entirely. And anyone who does participate in elections or who attempts to use some sort of political process is in fact sinning, if not outright an unbeliever. So they reject any kind of gradualism, any kind of compromise or any kind of political process in order to impose their vision of Islam,” says Habeck.

Commentators like Bill O’Reilly, whom I generally like and agree with most of the time, have got it wrong when they say off-handedly that the majority of Muslims don’t adhere to jihadist philosophy. We don’t know that. All we do know is the duplicity of Muslim spokesmen feeding us our liberal claptrap while endorsing jihad behind closed doors. The Mideast really isn’t populated with happy little Americans at heart.

And if it is true that the majority of Muslims don’t advocate jihad, they are doing nothing to stop it. Throughout history only a small percentage of the population decide the course of nations and peoples. The rest wait to see the outcome and follow the victorious.

It is even more nonsensical to say that we must reform Islam’s Reformation. Again as Ralph Peters and others have pointed out, it has to take place from within and we are powerless to do it.

Edmund Burke said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.“

Though this quote might have been useful to rally people into honorable action, it has an internal contradiction. If “good” men do nothing, they aren’t good, are they? Good, as with evil, is proactive in doing. You either do good or do evil. The inbetween, the fence sitters, the lukewarm are not only not good, by not actively choosing the good, they aid the evil. Half measures avail us nothing, and not choosing evil doesn’t necessarily mean that we choose good. I hope that if I was presented with such a choice, I would choose to do good. But in the end, a man doesn’t know what he will choose until the choice arrives.

The mettle of a man is decided in such moments, the sumation and culmination of his life’s actions.

We don’t choose to do the honorable thing suddenly and dramatically. We choose it day in and day out - and when the dramatic choices finally do come, it has already been decided. A forgone conclusion you might say.

This very choice has been before Muslims for over forty years, and it seems pretty clear which side they have chosen. Choices are made at the individual level as well as on the macro level. And they chose their Reformation of Jihad.

With this past election and the Democrats sweeping into power in both Houses of Congress, our choices are also becoming clear. During their campaigns, Democrats repeated over and over that the United States was not going to cut and run. Yet less than a month after their Congressional victory, Dick Durbin said:

“We have got to start moving American troops, redeploying them out of Iraq, and start bringing them home.”

Obviously, the word “redeploying” isn’t the same as “cutting and running”. It’s a fanciful semantic game, but the words mean exactly the same.

And I think it’s a very dangerous game to play.

See my previous posts:

Obsession: Islamofascism and the West
On War and Peace
Israel and Lebanon: A Lopsided War

See also:

Victor Hanson: The Waiting Game
John Loftus: The Muslim Brotherhood, Nazis, and Al-Qaeda
Michelle Malkin’s continuing watch: A terrorist mall plot
Counterterrorism Blog: EU Strikes Down Terrorist Finance Designation of Iranian…
Jawa Report: American Terror Suspect ID’d in Egypt
Allahpundit: Taliban warlord brags: We cost Republicans the election
Atlas Shrugs: Lunch and More, Avigdor Lieberman

Update 12/19/06:

Jawa Report said:

He goes on to say that such censorship did not happen in the early years of Islam. Perhaps we are going to see a Muslim Restoration movement rather than a Muslim Reformation? The latter is slightly more problematic, since Mohammed himself is said to have proclaimed, “If someone changes his deen [Islamic character] - strike his neck!” [Malik’s Muwatta Book 36, Number 36.18.15]. And, how can you have freedom of speech when it is a capital offense to question Islam? An ahistorical and literal interpretation of the Quran, though, is problematic in another way: much of the apologetics against the more violent verses are historical & contextual.

I think the difference between a Muslim Restoration Movement and a Muslim Reformation is only a matter of semantics. When we had our Protestant Reformation, it served also as a call to return to the early Christian Church, which obviously did not have the Vatican dictating doctrine since it didn’t yet exist. The Protestant Reformation focused on sola scriptura, or “the assertion that the Bible as God’s written word is self-authenticating”.

According to Wikipedia:

The Reformation did not happen in a vacuum, as there were movements for centuries calling for a return to Biblical teachings, the most famous being from Wycliffe and John Huss. It is no surprise that their teachings were later found in the Reformation, as they imbibed from the same source.

The goal of any Reformation, Restoration or Great Awakening is to return believers to the true faith. In the case of Islam, this comes in the form of Mohammed’s mandate for Muslims to conquer the world. Before this Jihadist Reformation, the Islamic Crescent was demoralized and listless following their defeat at the hands of the Spanish, being utterly ejected from Southern Spain and the Iberian peninsula. The revitalization of Islam was only a recent occurrence.

The idea of a Islamic Reformation is not problematic at all. How many religious people do you know selectively read and apply religious texts? If differences are not possible, how do you explain the animosity between the Shiites and the Sunnis, who as far as I know, are reading the same Koran?

Another thing to understand is that Muslims are absolute deductors, not inductors. The “Method of Mohammed” is evidence of this absolute linear deduction. And if one paid attention in logic class, deductions are only as true as the premises upon which the argument is built. Furthermore, even with true premises, because reality consists of more factors than the human mind can comprehend, deduction alone will often lead one to false conclusions. This is how you can have Shiites and Sunnis and have both declaring themselves a part of the true faith.

In my morning musings through the blogosphere, I came across La Shawn Barber’s post: The Apostle Paul’s Grave? Apparently, Vatican archaeologists have discovered a sarcophagus containing what they believe to be the remains of the Apostle Paul under Rome’s second largest basillica. La Shawn said, in my opinion quite rightly:

Oh…by the way, archeologists may have found Paul’s remains. Whether true or not, I don’t think it matters. The “discovery” gives me and other believers an opportunity to share the Gospel.

Personally, I don’t see the reasoning behind this. But then again, I’m not Catholic. Catholicism has a long history of raising the bodies of Saints to veneration and placing them on display for public viewing. I certainly do not deny that there are Saints with a capital “S” in this world. In fact, I believe they exist today, just as they existed since our Lord Jesus was Crucified. However, I find the need to exhume the body of St. Paul disturbing. For whatever noble purposes, I’m a bit skeptical that this adds anything to our faith and understanding in Christ and His Kingdom.

I think this entire subject should be handled and thought of with a great deal of care; or not approached at all. We, as Christians, have witnessed people’s faith’s shaken, some lost, by the heresy in the book, The Da Vinci Code. If something as disingenuous as a book, which propagated the ancient Arian heresy that our Lord Jesus was nothing more than a man, could sow doubt in the minds of believers, how much more dangerous when confronting the “historical Jesus”?

I know, for the moment, we are talking only about exhuming the body of St. Paul, but I think it is perilous to use science and/or history to examine our faith. Reason has its place… and it’s limits.

One commentor, Dan, on La Shawn’s post said:

“Paul’s bones” if that is what they, in fact, turn out to be.

Moses’ tomb has his bones in them. So does King David’s. So does Mohammed’s. Paul’s tomb (whether this is it or not) has his tangible remains, awaiting the resurrection inside.

The tomb of Yeshua of Nazareth’s is empty.

When we do discover the ossuaries or the tombs of saints and other religious figures, there is an important message left behind in their remains: Paul is dead. Abraham is dead. Solomon is dead. Zoroaster is dead. Buddha is dead. Mohammed is dead.

Christ is alive.

In the case of the 2001 movie titled, The Body, the tomb where Jesus was supposed to have been buried was not empty. Instead, there is a body there in the tomb that possessed the wounds of a crucification. The movie plays out the consequences in a priest, played by Antonio Banderas, who is losing his faith because of this “discovery”. What if this hadn’t been just a movie but the front page of today’s news? What then?

Belief is not founded on such things. I like response of the Cardinal in the movie:

I believe that Jesus Christ is God because I spoke to Him this morning in my prayers. And I’ve known that He was God since I was a boy. He has always been my best friend even though I haven’t always been His. In Him, I have peace.

Or as Christ said to Thomas upon His resurrection:

Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

If man has truly walked the Christian life, he would know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jesus is the Christ because of the peace He has given him. In a discordant world, having peace as tangible as it gets.

Update 12/8/06:

To clarify, my point is we should be careful in what we venerate… Is it to be history or the Living Christ?

Many people refer to history almost in the place of God. Such as, “History will judge us…” or “They are on the wrong side of History…” or “He’s concerned about his place in History.” As though History (with a capital “H”) is the measure and worth of our lives. What ever happened to having our sense of worth from the fact that we are all immortal beings made in God’s very own image?

My point is if we use history to prove Christianity’s truth, then our true Enemy could try to use history to disprove our faith. Once we place History in higher regard than our faith, we place our faith in peril because History is now sitting in judgment of both God and Man.

My example of the movie, The Body, is simply to illustrate a point. Does it really matter what the archaeologist unearth even if it pertains to our faith’s history throughout the ages? Should what the busy archaeologists dig up change or modify our faith?

The answer is a resounding, No.

Mr. Benm, a commentor on La Shawn Barber’s Corner said,

Just because someone makes up a fictional account doesn’t mean that there is any value in it. At the Pentecost, Peter preaches to Jerusalem and mentions that David’s bones still lie in his grave (”Brothers, I can tell you confidently that the patriarch David died and was buried, and his tomb is here to this day”) and they knew where that grave was, but Jesus’ tomb was empty. Now at that time, this was a verifiable fact. And yet we have no record of anyone saying “look, here is Jesus’ tomb and there is a corpse in it.”

With all due respect, there is a great deal of value in examining these kinds of questions. First of all, we are a society that places great stock in science and history. Secondly, historically speaking, our scientific and historical discoveries have shaped and revised our view of the world around us time and again - Ptolemy and Einstein to give a couple of examples.

The real question, I think, posed by that movie is: What if science and history were turned against Christianity whether by design or freak accident? Should these kinds of “discoveries” shape and revise our faith just as other discoveries revise our view of the world?

Again, my answer would be a resounding, No.

I do not believe in our Lord Jesus Christ because the fact that He Is can be proven empirically through facts and logical deductions, as if belief consists of evidence gathered like a court trial. That to me is silly when we are talking about God.

Last week I saw a very interesting British made-for-TV movie, called Archangel. The movie is set in Russia, and from the outset of the movie, we have a feel for what Russia has become since the “old days” of the Soviet Union. For myself, what makes this movie good is that it’s not just an interesting story, but it’s also a window into modern-day Russia. And with this window, I can imagine what it must be like from the inside Russia looking out rather than from the outside looking in.

The movie opens with Fluke Kelso, a very persistent visiting Oxford professor, describing the murderous brutality of Joseph Stalin to an auditorium of people. Kelso, who is played by Daniel Craig, said after the lecture, that what the Russian people really want is the return of the “old days” of Stalin. “ ‘Stalin,’ ” Kelso said, in the voice of the Russian Everyman, “ ‘Stalin would know what to do with these terrorists.’ ”

It gave me the chills just hearing those words spoken. Stalin was the Soviet dictator who murdered approximately ninety to a hundred million people. But I don’t think we can really fathom that sort of mind-numbing carnage. How can we? Can we imagine it by taking the worse, most tragic memory of our lives - the death of a loved one, for instance - then multiple that by horror by… well, infinity? Just the scale of the killings renders the entire subject matter incomprehensible.

Indeed, we keep shrinking the number of those dead by genocide. Why? I think it is because all of us refuse to admit to ourselves that we, too, are capable of being a little Hitler or Stalin. In the 1950’s, the number of Jews dead at the hands of the Nazi ranged around 18 to 25 million (not including the priests opposing Hitler, the homosexuals, the disabled, the retarded, etc.). Around the 1960’s and 70’s, the estimation declined to 12 to 15 million Jews killed. Then some time in the late 80’s to early 90’s, the number shrank to 6 million. (Himmler himself was irate at this number. He said he saw the actual papers and he insisted it much more than double this number. He was proud of his work after all.) Now, many people deny that the Holocaust happened at all! (Eisenhower knew what he was doing when he ordered the camps filmed. He also walked all the townspeople outside the camp through those tortured camps to burn that imagine into their memory.)

In like manner, the same is true of the entire tragedy of the Soviet era. The generally accepted number of people killed by Stalin now hovers at 20 million, even though everyone knows this is a gross underestimation. To send a person to a gulag is as good as sentencing them to death; 99% will die, or to put it another way, you had only 1% to live. Those people weren’t counted.

But this is not true for a Russian. As Zinaid, the woman to whom Kelso became involved in the movie, said, “The ‘Old Days’ are always with me.”

The story turns on Kelso’s search for Stalin’s diary, a notebook that had been buried immediately after Stalin’s death. This search leads from him from a nightclub full of casual prostitutes - which has become so common in Russia, it’s almost become a cliche - to the seedy, frozen slums of Moscow. The dangers are veiled and yet palpable at the same time. When Kelso walks past a huddled group of thugs along the stairs of an apartment, we don’t expect them to necessarily attack him. But when they do attack him, we are mildly surprised (at least I was…)

You can almost divide this movie into two parts. The part told in flashbacks and the part told in the present. By doing this, the movie virtually walks you through the history of its characters and the history of Russia itself, the past mirroring the present, the present digging back into the past. In my opinion, if anything, it deepens the mystery.

Yes, this is a mystery story with elements of the fantastic. The film, however, guides you step by step through the unraveling of this mystery without asking the audience to do too much work on their own. But throughout, there is always the shadow of Stalin draping over the story like a toxic cloth wrapping itself around all the characters and even in the buildings.

The director, Jon Jones and his cinemaphotographer, was careful to use dull colors and plenty of shadows when panning around the Russian landscape. To me, this more than anything builds up the sense that everything in Russia below the thin veneer of civilization is corroding. And fast. This is particularly disturbing since they still have a few thousand nuclear warheads pointing in our general direction.

Without spoiling the movie, by the end, Daniel Craig’s Kelso seems much more like a man who is driven by the events around him rather than an independent agent searching for the truth.

One of the reasons why this movie works well in my book is because the level of authenticity in its portrayal of modern Russia. For instance, the city of Archangel was teeming with people in the 1980’s, despite the high levels of radioactivity. Now, it’s sparsely populated with few people on the street. You can taste the futility and despair that is so rampant in many parts of Russia. It is through this level of authenticity that one can suspend one’s disbelief in the fantastic portions of the story and allow it to continue without too much difficulty.

Let me warn, however, that this movie is NOT an espionage movie in the flavor of a high-tech Tom Clancy character or a superhuman Robert Ludlum movie character. Furthermore, the movie is a bit slower to build the plot than other movies of its kind, which requires more attention than an average action movie. Kelso is a historian after all, not a spy.

If for no other reason than its entertainment value, I recommend this movie, both as a window into where Russia is currently at and where she might be heading.

For more on Russia reversion to totalitarianism:

Michelle Malkin: Who killed Anna Politkovskaya?, What does Putin Want?
Allahpundit: British cops: All signs point to KGB in Litvinenko murder
Col. Stanislav Lunev: Russia’s Secret Police: Powerful Tool for Totalitarianism

As the situation in Iraq unravels, the course of events can jump in many different directions. The most curious of these directions is the one lately espoused by Nawaf Obaid in last week’s Washington Post Article.

He wrote:

Prince Turki al-Faisal, who said in a speech last month that “since America came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave Iraq uninvited.” If it does, one of the first consequences will be massive Saudi intervention to stop Iranian-backed Shiite militias from butchering Iraqi Sunnis.

Over the past year, a chorus of voices has called for Saudi Arabia to protect the Sunni community in Iraq and thwart Iranian influence there. Senior Iraqi tribal and religious figures, along with the leaders of Egypt, Jordan and other Arab and Muslim countries, have petitioned the Saudi leadership to provide Iraqi Sunnis with weapons and financial support. Moreover, domestic pressure to intervene is intense. Major Saudi tribal confederations, which have extremely close historical and communal ties with their counterparts in Iraq, are demanding action. They are supported by a new generation of Saudi royals in strategic government positions who are eager to see the kingdom play a more muscular role in the region.

It is clear that this article was not written in a void or was simply the opinion of one man, despite the Saudi government’s denial of last Thursday’s article. Obaid is energy advisor to the Saudi US Ambassador, HRH Prince Turki Al Faisal, who as the title suggests is part of the Saudi royal family. It is not very plausible that someone of Obaid’s rank and position could write such an article without the tacit approval of the Saudi government; being an energy advisor to a nation whose very survival depends on energy is not insignificant.

A few months ago, a friend and I discussed the Iraqi situation and speculated on a very interesting possibility. To paraphrase the discussion, he said: “If our goal of installing liberty in the heart of the Mideast fails, does it hurt us to have a regional Shiite/ Sunni war? It could suit our purposes beautifully. We can withdraw to the Kurds in the north and to Kuwait in the south, fortify those positions, then flood the Sunni’s and Shiites with weapons.”

Shiite Iran can’t very well pour all their resources and capital into nuclear weapons if they are fighting the Sunni’s, now can they.