Islam and Logos

by E Michael Jones

  After the global powers finally reached a deal, the Vatican wasted no time in praising it. Shortly after the announcement, Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi said that the agreement “is viewed in a positive light by the Holy See.” Bishop Oscar Cantu, the head of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on International Justice and Peace, called on Congress to “support these efforts to build bridges that foster peace and greater understanding,” and he warned Congress not to “undermine” the deal. For his part, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., applauded the deal in an essay for the Washington Post. He opined that we can trust the Iranians because Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei once issued a fatwa that “declared the possession and use of nuclear weapons as incompatible with Islam.” But Iran is not like other societies, and its notion of what is rational differs substantially from what John Kerry supposes it to be.

  In Crisis, Author William Kirk Kilpatrick (whose articles on psychology, I have to declaim, have appeared in Fidelity, the predecessor to Culture Wars) makes the odd argument (for a Catholic) that Iran cannot be trusted because it “is not a rational-secular society” like the United States. Kilpatrick views Iran with suspicion because “it is a faith-based society,” which believes in “One God,” “Divine Revelation and its fundamental role in setting forth the laws” of the Islamic Republic, and “a return to God in the Hereafter.”

  The perceptive reader will have noticed that the Catholic Church believes this too. Oblivious to that fact, Kilpatrick goes on to say that you can’t trust “people whose thoughts are fixed on the next life.” His authority in this matter is the neocon ideologue Bernard Lewis, who presumably would have similarly awful things to say about Catholics, since their thoughts are also “fixed on the next life,” or at least should be.

  Not content to leave us with Bernard Lewis, Kilpatrick cites Denis MacEoin, “an expert on Iran,” who feels that Lewis “may have underestimated the extent of this preoccupation with the last days.” According to MacEoin, “The apocalyptic mindset is not something unique to Ahmadinejad and his followers. It has deep roots in Shiite belief.” This assertion is undeniably true. It also has deep roots in Christian beliefs. This may come as news to Messrs. Kilpatrick, Lewis, and MacEoin, but the term apocalyptic comes from Apocalypse, which is the title of the last book of the Bible, which predicts that all sorts of horrible things are going to happen at the end of the world. No one, as far as I know, has claimed that reading this book of the Bible would make Catholics more likely to use nuclear weapons.

  No, wait, it turns out that Kilpatrick wants to make precisely that connection. The point of Kilpatrick’s essay is very simple: people with “religious motivations” cannot be trusted. This holds for the Ayatollah Khomeini, who issued a fatwa against the use of nuclear weapons, and Cardinal McCarrick, who “notes that the Ayatollah’s (supposed) fatwa against the use of nuclear arms is ‘a teaching not dissimilar to the Catholic position that the world must rid itself of these indiscriminate weapons.’”

  “For a long time,” Kilpatrick continues:

  Catholic leaders have contented themselves with the notion that Islam and Catholicism have much in common. Well, yes, on a superficial level they do. Like Catholics, Muslims believe in prayer, fasting, charity, and pilgrimage. In addition, they revere Jesus and await his second coming. If you don’t go any deeper than that then it’s plausible to think that Iran’s religious leaders are no more likely to use nukes than the pope.

  Well, yes, that is plausible, and not just on a superficial level. In making claims like this, Kilpatrick has earned the distinction of writing one of the most incoherent, tortured, nonsensical articles ever to grace the pages of a Catholic periodical. He also goes on to prove that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Crisis may have mutated into an online version after Hudson’s demise, but it still calls itself Catholic, and it is still shilling for people behind the scenes.

  I am no fan of NASCAR auto racing, but I like the uniforms. They must be tailor made because they fit so well, but best of all are the ads plastered all over the uniforms. They give a secure feeling; you know exactly where these guys stand because you know who pays for their ride. Would that this were the case in other areas of human endeavor! Pundits, for example, should be forced by law to wear NASCAR-style uniforms when they appear on the various Washington talk shows. That way we could be spared all the trouble of having to sort through their arguments. Once a pundit had, say, American Enterprise Institute plastered across his chest, we could spare ourselves the effort of trying to sort through his twisted arguments for, say, rejecting the Iran nuclear deal because there is no Logos in any of these arguments. What we’re witnessing is money talking.

  Just to show that great minds run in the same circles, Kilpatrick evidently agrees with my position on NASCAR uniforms for pundits because at the end of his bio he writes proudly that “his work is supported in part by the Shillman Foundation.” It turns out that William Kirk Kilpatrick, the quondam Catholic journalist and contributor to Fidelity magazine, is now a shill for the appropriately named Shillman Foundation.

  For those of you who don’t know, the Shillman Foundation was created by Robert J. Shillman, who made his fortune by founding the Natick, Massachusetts-based Cognex corporation, “which makes machine vision products that help automate manufacturing.” Mr. Shillman, Reuters notes, then used his money to fund

  a number of conservative and pro-Israeli groups, including the Zionist Organization of America. The ZOA has targeted both academics it perceives have been teaching anti-Israel doctrine and Palestine student groups accused of intimidating Jewish students on U.S. campuses, including a campaign at Shillman’s alma mater, Northeastern University in Boston.

  Shillman is on the board of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, “whose Jihad Watch website helped organize the cartoon event in a Dallas suburb with activist Pamela Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative.” That “event” led to the deaths of two Muslims, in a way that was eerily similar to the attack on Charlie Hebdo, which left a number of French journalists dead after their satiric attack on the prophet. I mention all of this as a public service, in the hope that it will spare the unwary reader the effort of trying to make sense out of Kilpatrick’s tortured lucubrations on the American bishops and the nuclear deal with Iran. There is no Logos here. What we hear when we read these words is the sound of money talking — Jew money talking through the mouth of a Catholic puppet. That the majority of the American Congress did not succumb to the $150 million which AIPAC appropriated to bribe and/or intimidate them is nothing less than a miracle, given the corrupt state of politics in America. It is a small sign of hope, as well as a sign of the depths to which their Catholic neocon lackeys have descended.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Islam as the Scourge of God

  The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was the counterrevolution against modernity which should have been launched by Vatican II. The desexualization of the culture which Cardinal Ottaviani proposed in the preliminary documents of Vatican II was derailed largely as a result of the efforts of people like Joseph Ratzinger, as he himself admitted, in collaboration with the German and American bishops.

  From the Catholic perspective, Islam has always been the scourge of God, which is to say, a divinely ordained corrective punishment for the decadence of Christianity. As early as 1518, Dr. Martin Luther had identified the Islamic faith as the “scourge of God.” For the rest of his life Luther believed that the Muslims were God’s punishment upon a sinful Christendom that had, among other sins (ingratitude, toleration of wicked sects, worship of the god Mammon, drunkenness, greed, and the split of Christendom which had provoked His wrath), tolerated the papal abomination. Muslims would function as Germany’s schoolmaster who must correct and teach the German people to repent of their sins and to fear God. The Catholic antidote to decadent Jewish movies was the Philadelphia boycotts of 1933; the Islamic antidote was burning the movie the
aters down in Tehran in 1979. What could have been accomplished by the Church ended up being accomplished by the scourge of God when the Iranians drove the Shah from the Peacock Throne in 1979 and created their own Islamic counterrevolution.

  And so to answer the question proposed by our symposium, What is Islam?: Islam is the scourge of God. Islam always arrives on the scene when Christianity has failed. It burst into the world scene in the 7th century when Egypt and North Africa were riddled with Nestorianism and other heresies. It swept away the last remnants of the eastern Roman Empire in 1454 when Byzantium, riddled with Neoplatonist magic, rejected the unity achieved by the Council of Florence and fell to the Turks. Suleiman the Magnificent swept away the Hungarian army under Louis II at the Battle of Mohacs and would have taken Vienna in Luther’s day if Christendom hadn’t rediscovered its unity at the last moment.

  It is now time to stop complaining about the “Council of the media” and to admit that the arrival of Islam in the deracinated public housing projects of Bradford and the suburbs of Marseilles is a function of the failure of Christianity — the Reformation first of all, which has now played itself out as support for Gay Marriage and the on-going extinction of England, but of the Catholic Church as well, which has been more interested in dialogue with the Jews than evangelization. The arrival of Islam on the scene is the sign that God has run out of patience with lukewarm Christians who do nothing to preserve the social and moral order from soul-destroying decadence of the sort found everywhere in Europe and, mutatis mutandis, America as well. Better Islam as the scourge of God than the decadence of once Presbyterian Glasgow depicted in the movie Trainspotting. But better still is the option proposed by Majid Majidi and Hojjatoleslam Hosayni, which is to say, ecumenical cultural jihad against Hollywood and the moral corruption which it spreads as the propaganda ministry for the American Imperium.

  At the end of a short speech I gave in Iran in 2013 at the Hollywoodism conference, I pulled out my rosary and the prayer beads that Henna, a young Muslim lady, had given me. I said the fact they were tangled together was symbolic of the fate of both Catholics and Shi’as in the world today. No one objected to the sight of the cross dangling from the end of my rosary; no one objected when I mentioned the name of Jesus Christ as the antidote to Dracula, the hero of the American-Zionist Imperium and the City of Man. Instead of defeat at the hands of Hollywood, we are now being offered another option, the option of cultural jihad against the most sophisticated system of moral corruption that the world has never known. Whether we accept this challenge or let it turn into one more failure to stop the American-Jewish juggernaut depends largely on our faith, and our hope, and our charity. I concluded my little speech by waving my Islamo-Catholic beads before the crowd and claiming, “Fear is useless; what is needed is love.”

  Or is there another alternative? Do we need another Jewish-led Revolution? In his encyclical Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict XVI indicates that revolution is not the Christian way:

  Christianity did not bring a message of social revolution like that of the ill-fated Spartacus, whose struggle led to so much bloodshed. Jesus was not Spartacus; he was not engaged in a fight for political liberation like Barabbas or Bar-Kochba. Jesus himself, who died on the Cross, brought something totally different: an encounter with a hope stronger than the suffering of slavery, a hope which therefore transformed life and the world from within.

  It was Cyrus, King of Persia, who set captive Israel free. It was the three Persians whom we call the Magi who showed us that Logos, not revolution, is the source of our liberation. It is to these three Iranians that we should turn to find an alternative to the Jewish revolutionary spirit which has caused so much havoc in the world. Our model in this regard should be these three Persians, whom we call wise because they studied the Logos that God has made apparent in the sky. The three Magi from the East were different than the decadent philosophers from the West, who, St. Paul tells us, have been schooled to “keep truth imprisoned in their wickedness.” Like Michel Foucault, who was raised a Catholic and can stand as a symbol of the decadent state of philosophy in the West, “they knew God and yet refused to honor him as God or to thank him; instead they made nonsense out of logic and their empty minds were darkened. The more they called themselves philosophers,” St. Paul continues, “the more stupid they grew.” With the homosexual Foucault as their guide, the West has “turned from natural intercourse to unnatural practices ... their menfolk have given up natural intercourse to be consumed with passion for each other, men doing shameless things with men and getting an appropriate reward for their perversion.” Michel Foucault died of AIDS in 1984, after a decade of degrading himself in the bathhouses of San Francisco.

  By succumbing to the increasingly insistent pull of his own homosexual compulsions, Foucault, according to his biographer, James Miller, made “a kind of Faustian pact with the death-instinct and the hecatombs of the fascist adventure.” Foucault is less oblique in describing his own personal deal with the devil:

  The Faustian pact, whose temptation has been instilled in us by the deployment of sexuality, is now as follows: to exchange life in its entirety for sex itself, for the truth and sovereignty of sex. Sex is worth dying for. It is in this (strictly historical) sense that sex is indeed imbued with the death instinct.

  Michel Foucault is the patron saint of the decadent West. That is why “The West,” as Denethor said in The Lord of the Rings, has failed. We have come to modern day Persia with different saints in mind. We take as our model the three Persians who followed a star. Why are they our model? First, because of their intellect. They were able to discern Logos in the sky by studying God’s creation. Second, because of their will. The Magi are worthy of imitation because when the star appeared in the sky they had the courage to follow it wherever it led them. Do we have the same courage? If we don’t, we will achieve nothing. And finally, because of their cunning. They were smart enough to understand that they could not accept political discourse and political categories. After being warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they “returned to their own country by a different way” (Matt 2:12).

  Like the Magi, we are being called to return to our own country by a different way. We are being called to avoid Herod and not become accomplices in his plans to slaughter the innocent. We are being called to abandon Herod’s obsolete political categories, which have caused so much mayhem in the world. We are being called not only to eschew the Jewish revolutionary spirit but to oppose it openly and actively.

  The alternative to becoming a wise man is now clear. As one of the bishops at the recent synod on the family in Rome made clear, it is the two beasts of the Apocalypse: the homosexual agenda of the Great Satan and the Takfiri in Syria and Iraq otherwise known as DAESH or ISIS. What do homosexual revolutionaries like Michel Foucault have in common with the liver-eating Takfiri? They believe that will is superior to reason. We are wise men because we believe in the opposite. We believe in subordinating our will to the Logos. We believe in following the Star which symbolizes the Logos which is God. As the Gospel of St. John reminds us: “Verbum erat Deus.” With the Magi as our role models, we ask for the courage to follow that star wherever it leads us.

  POSTSCRIPT

  The Magi and the Apartheid Wall: The Author Explores Iran

  “Why did you Americans do that terrible thing?” she cried out. “We always loved America. To us, America was the great country, the perfect country, the country that helped us while other countries were exploiting us. But after that moment, no one in Iran ever trusted the United States again. I can tell you for sure that if you had not done that thing, you would never have had that problem of hostages being taken in your embassy in Tehran. All your trouble started in 1953. Why did you do it?” (Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (2003)).

  Shiraz is roughly 200 miles west of the hottest place on earth, the Lut desert, where the temperature has been measured at 159 degrees F. Having me
speak in Shiraz was Hamed’s idea. Hamed Ghashghavi is the flamboyant, 25-year-old son of an Iranian diplomat who grew up in Tunisia and was as a result fluent in French and Arabic. His language ability allows him to network, and his network now spreads throughout Iran and large parts of the West.

  We arrived in Shiraz shortly after 8:00 in the morning. I am scheduled to speak at 11:00 a.m. in spite of the fact that I went to bed after midnight and had to get up at 3:00 a.m. to make the flight to Shiraz. Standing in the already blazing heat, I decide that I won’t make it through my talk unless I get a decent breakfast.

  “I need to eat an omelet,” I say to Hamed.

  “Sure, Mike,” Hamed says and relays the message to Shaheen and Mohammed, who picked us up at the airport.

  Both are students at the Technological University of Shiraz. Both are even younger than Hamed. When Shaheen approached us in the heat of the airport parking lot, he looked a lot like Ben Affleck’s idea of a hostage-taking Iranian terrorist, complete with Republican Guard uniform tunic. Mohammad takes the wheel and we begin driving down the alleys of Shiraz, which are not much wider than our compact Fars car, a Peugeot knock-off produced in Iranian factories. We end up at what looks like a café next to an auto body shop, both of which share the same hole in the ground as their rest room. The walls are decorated with Iranian body builders, who got that way by practicing the traditional Iranian bodybuilding known as House of Strength or Zurkhaneh by tossing larger and larger clubs into the air.

  I look like an American businessman in my dark suit and yellow tie. Hamed, Mohammed, and Shaheen have all disappeared and the rest of the cafe’s occupants view me with mild disinterest as they puff away on their hookahs. It is the first time that I have ever seen an Iranian smoke.