Dateline 18th September 2006
Two unreformed religions – Islam and Roman Catholicism – are at each others throats. The European Union is being pushed towards acceptance of a Roman Catholic promotion of God and the Tory Shadow Cabinet Minister Dr Liam Fox calls for the admission to the EU of 70 million Turkish Muslims. We live in dangerous times, not least because all the above seem to be speaking from extraordinary religious and historic ignorance.
Let us look first at the tensions between the Vatican and Islam. They have much in common. Each condemns all other religions or denominations as either totally wrong or heretical and both seek world wide power for their religious and political systems. (Islam encourages the march of its adherents into Europe from Africa just as the Vatican encourages the march of its faithful into the USA from South America). The Roman Catholic Church claims the Pope expresses the word of God and is infallible while Islam proclaims that the Koran is the word of God and cannot be changed. Each have bloody histories in seeking to convert the whole world, often using forced conversions and killing those who resist. The prophet Mohammed and his later followers waged bloody wars and put Christians, Jews and others to the sword. The Roman Catholic Church did the same – one of the most bloody and fanatical being the Emperor Charlemagne (in whose name the European Union is being constructed and after whom the EU’s Charlemagne Prize is named).
It is no excuse to say that Catholicism’s outrages were long ago – they were not. Forced conversions, the massacre of Orthodox Christians and the promotion of genocide in the name of the “only true faith” were characteristics of the Second World War and the recent war in the Balkans. The rantings of Alia Izetbegovic in Muslim Bosnia were matched by the rantings of Catholic Tudjman in Croatia.
The Pope was ill advised to quote a Catholic Emperor in order to condemn Islamic conquest by the sword but he could have more directly and more convincingly quoted the Koran and the Hadith (the sayings attributed to Mohammed by his contemporaries and later scholars) where the calls to kill in the name of Islam are many and gruesome. (see in particular the article The Delusions of Blair in Islam Landwww.ukconservatism.freeuk.com/news-2006-06-27.html)
But it was not long ago that the most bigoted and violent calls to wipe out another religious denomination came in the 20th century from Catholic Bishops in Europe, so the calls for holy war by Muslims and the murder of “infidels” is nothing new in the world of religious fanaticism. Pots and kettles spring to mind!
Nor is Islam’s idea of all embracing socio-political religion unique since Roman Catholicism developed a social economic theory (corporatism) which it has sought to put into governmental form. The Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community (COMECE) have just commissioned a group of mainly EU politicians to draft a report on the EU’s common values which as Roman Catholics (no other religions or denominations are represented) means Christianity and the leading role of the Vatican. They hope to include the leading role of “The Church” in a new EU treaty text.
So into this petrol of religious and social conflict we see the British Conservative Party throw an extraordinary match. Dr Liam Fox, the Shadow Defence Secretary, suggests that Turkey should become a member of the European Union. Turkey, although nominally a country of secular politics is a country of 70 million Muslims. There are already some 20 million Muslims in the European Union (mainly in France and Germany) and more will arrive with the entry of Bulgaria. Islam does not recognise nation states and refers to the “Muslim Nation”, meaning the common brotherhood of Islam throughout the world. With the entry of Turkey some 90 million Muslims would be by far the largest “nation” in the European Union, easily outvoting for example Germany.
Muslims, where they are in a minority, are supposed to practise “taqqiya”, that is a deceptive tolerance and accommodation with the host community. But when their numbers become large enough to take power that is what they should do. As Alia Izetbegovic, the former president of Muslim Bosnia wrote in The Muslim Declaration, Sarajevo 1969
There can be no peace or co-existence between the Islamic faith and
non-Islamic institutions… The Islamic movement must and can take
power as soon as it is morally and numerically strong enough, not only
to destroy the non-Islamic power but to build up a new Islamic one…
When Islam speaks of being a religion of peace it is done as Communism speaks of peace – ie peace is the condition of Communism or Islam and other conditions are of war and war is justified to bring about the peace as Communism or Islam defines it. Most Muslims, like most Catholics, probably do not accept indeed are not aware of the totalitarian nature of their own rights and scriptures but it is the totalitarian beliefs of the collective religion which are dangerous, not each individual.
Since the words of the Koran are the words of Allah a reformed Islam is extremely difficult. Those who propose a genuine Islam of peace must contend with the fundamentalists quoting the word of Allah himself. Similarly of course Roman Catholics, another unreformed religion, must obey the word of the Pope and the assertion that the Roman Church is the only true expression of the “only true faith”. So the planned visit of Pope Benedict to Turkey is, to put it mildly, interesting!
If the Pope’s difficulties are obvious then in British politics the Conservative Party’s stance on Turkish membership of the EU is catastrophic. Religions, like populations with one culture and one language, are best kept separate. Just as the whole purpose of free trade and mobility of capital is to make unnecessary the mass movement of peoples so the existence of nation states with their own dominant religions (but trading freely and peacefully with each other) makes it unnecessary to impose one religious belief system on another.
But the European Union, imposed anti democratically on the British people by the Conservative Party, seeks economic control and imperial domination, not peaceful and tolerant free trade with other belief systems. It is ironically very like the Islamic Nation itself. That is why both represent distinct war dangers.
