Tag: Islam

CIA

CIA promoted LGBT & abortion to Muslims

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Redacted reports show how CIA analysts recommended “discrete” promotion of LGBT rights in the Middle East, increased funding for “sexual and reproductive health services” during the COVID-19 pandemic.

By Stefano Gennarini, J.D. 

CIA Director John Ratcliffe has ordered the intelligence agency to retract and revise nineteen “intelligence products” because they were determined to be highly politicized and contained substandard work. Three of the reports were published by Ratcliffe in a redacted format.

The published reports show how CIA analysts recommended “discrete” promotion of LGBT rights in the Middle East, increased funding for “sexual and reproductive health services” during the COVID-19 pandemic relying primarily on reports from abortion industry groups that stood to receive those funds, and meddling in German politics through “tailored gender-conscious approaches” to prevent the recruitment of women with traditional views of motherhood by “white extremists.”

The three products released until now may be the tip of the iceberg. They are likely the least controversial of the nineteen, the ones deemed least dangerous to national security. This raises the question of how bad the other sixteen CIA intelligence products are that have not been published.

The reports were produced while Obama, Trump, and Biden were in the White House. A CIA press release that accompanied the reports said they show how the intelligence agency failed to remain “independent from a particular audience, agenda, or policy viewpoint.”

“The intelligence products we released to the American people today — produced before my tenure as DCIA — fall short of the high standards of impartiality that CIA must uphold and do not reflect the expertise for which our analysts are renowned,” said Director Ratcliffe. “There is absolutely no room for bias in our work, and when we identify instances where analytic rigor has been compromised, we have a responsibility to correct the record.”

The reports were reviewed by the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB) alongside hundreds of other reports containing intelligence assessments and analyses produced in recent decades.

Notably, a CIA “Wire” report titled “Middle East-North Africa: LGBT Activists Under Pressure” produced in 2015 shows the inherent dangers of attempts at cultural engineering abroad, something C-Fam, publisher of the Friday Fax, has reported for many years.

This report should be understood in the context of the Obama White House designating LGBT issues a U.S. Foreign Policy Priority beginning in 2011 and expanding that commitment with several subsequent executive actions by Obama and Biden. The Trump administration revoked all those actions.

The report warns that the governments of majority-Muslim countries in the region would “almost certainly” portray U.S. efforts to advance LGBT rights as “foreign meddling” and that this in turn would undermine the U.S. goal of protecting LGBT rights abroad. It cites the reactions of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, calling this “cultural imperialism” in the context of United Nations debates, as an example of the resistance to be expected.

The report specifically warns of backlash against the very individuals intended for protection.

“Discreet international support could help avoid drawing undue attention and possibly counterproductive backlash against activists,” the report reads.

It warns that “Egyptian civil society organizations –already vulnerable to government scrutiny—have warned US officials that overt engagement puts them at risk” and that “a Lebanese activist in May 2014 stated that public outreach by the US would be counterproductive.”

Nevertheless, it calls for “community engagement with local police forces and the Ministry of Interior to limit the targeting of LGBT individuals” and “supporting gender studies in academic institutions in the Middle East and North Africa.”

By Stefano Gennarini, J.D. . C-FAM: The Centre for Family & Human Rights was founded in the summer of 1997 in order to monitor and affect the social policy debate at the United Nations and other international institutions. C-Fam is a non-partisan, non-profit research institute dedicated to reestablishing a proper understanding of international law, protecting national sovereignty and the dignity of the human person.

immigration

‘Hate speech’ crackdown will punish those who identify the real problem: Islamic immigration

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The Bondi massacre is already being exploited by the Albanese government to silence discussion of the real problems facing Australia, including Islamic immigration.

by Kurt Mahlburg

In the wake of the Bondi massacre, the Albanese government has proposed sweeping new laws to crack down on so-called “hate speech” — and I’m already picturing how these new laws will be used to make a criminal out of me and other law-abiding Australians who criticise Islam.

As reported by The Guardian:

The plan announced on Thursday includes an aggravated hate speech offence for preachers and leaders who promote violence, increased penalties for hate speech promoting violence and making hate an aggravating factor in sentencing crimes for online threats and harassment.

It would also include developing a regime for listing organisations whose leaders engage in hate speech promoting violence or racial hatred and developing a narrow federal offence for serious vilification based on race or advocating racial supremacy, he said.

Many Australians will read reports like this and feel heartened that our leaders are finally “doing something” to prevent a repeat of events like the Bondi massacre.

But further restrictions on speech are the opposite of helpful. Why? Because — mark my words — they will be used against Australians who wish to preserve our Australian way of life, and who criticise what threatens it, such as Islam.

To be clear, I love Muslims. I’ve spent years living and serving voluntarily in the world’s largest Muslim country, Indonesia. Generally speaking, I’ve found the Muslims I’ve met and befriended to be kind, sincere and hospitable. I genuinely want the best for Muslims, Australian or otherwise.

But here’s the rub: Wanting the best for Muslims means wanting them to reject Islam and put their faith in Jesus Christ.

Call me a bigot if you like, but my convictions about Islam aren’t based on prejudice. They’re based on first-hand experience, and more than a cursory understanding of Islamic history, theology and practice.

Islam, salvation and civilisation

Islam is a works-based religion that demands rigorous rule-keeping and offers no assurance of salvation. By contrast, the Christian gospel declares that Jesus Christ has perfectly fulfilled the requirements of God’s law on our behalf (Romans 10:4), offers us salvation as a free gift to be received by faith (Ephesians 2:8-9), and provides us with genuine assurance that we are loved by God and eternally secure in Him (John 10:28-29).

Islam and Christianity don’t just make entirely different claims about salvation; they produce entirely different civilisations.

Christian civilisation could hardly be described better than in the following words, often attributed to the 19th-century American poet James Russell Lowell:

Show me a place on the face of the earth ten miles square where a man may provide for his children in decency and comfort, where infancy is protected, where age is venerated, where womanhood is honoured, and where human life is held in due regard, and I will show you a place where the Gospel of Christ has gone and laid the foundation.

Islam, by contrast, has produced a civilisation — particularly in large swathes of the Middle East — marked by political instability, the subjugation of women, the suppression of dissent, and persistent poverty, among many other social woes.

That’s not to say Islamic civilisation has no redeeming features: we Westerners have much to learn from the cultures shaped by Islam about family loyalty, respect for tradition, hospitality, and the integration of faith into daily life.

That being said, by almost every metric, Western civilisation is vastly safer, freer, wealthier and more liveable than its Islamic counterpart. If you still don’t agree with me, consider global migration patterns: millions of Muslims migrate away from their home countries, yet there is no comparable movement of Westerners relocating en masse to Islamic societies.

Islam and violence

Christianity and Islam don’t just contrast markedly on questions of salvation and civilisation. As highlighted by last weekend’s events, they also diverge sharply on the question of violence.

Christians have committed violence in certain periods of history, but have done so in direct disobedience to the commands of Christ (e.g. Matthew 5:38-39, Matthew 26:52).

As I’ve written elsewhere, Christianity rejects violence as a means of spiritual or political conquest, and permits physical force only in extremely limited circumstances like self-defence. Over time, this ethic helped give rise to the Protestant Reformation’s firm distinction between church and state — a distinction that has profoundly shaped the Western world.

By contrast, most Islamic traditions even today fail to draw a clear line between the religious and political spheres. The life of Mohammad and the teachings of the Qur’an have historically furnished Muslims with a strong justification for the use of violence as a tool for conquest and the subjugation of non-Muslims.

Yes, there is a distinction to be made between Islam and Islamism:

  • Islam is a monotheistic religion, laid out in the Qur’an and exemplified in the life of Muhammad, that calls for submission to Allah in every sphere of life.
  • Islamism is a political ideology that seeks to implement Islamic law as the foundation of society and government, including by coercion or violence.

The distinction between Islam and Islamism sounds good in theory but is not always clear-cut in practice, since many Muslims themselves do not perceive a clear separation between the sacred and the secular, as do Westerners.

Thus, the clearest way to draw a line between Islam and Islamism is at the individual level — that is, by understanding what an individual Muslim believes about Islam and violence.

This is precisely the challenge Australia faces in the wake of the Bondi massacre and the growing spectre of Islamism on our shores. More than 800,000 Muslims live in Australia today and their convictions about Islam and violence differ markedly.

This was no more clearly seen than in the incredible courage of Ahmed al-Ahmed, the Muslim shop owner who risked his life to disarm Naveed Akram — a fellow Muslim and one of the Bondi terrorists — in an act that undoubtedly saved many lives.

It is also seen in the reaction to al-Ahmed’s bravery. Across Australia, al-Ahmed’s courage was rightly celebrated, including by many Australian Muslims. And yet, as reported by The Australian, al-Ahmed has been “attacked in the Arab world as a traitor and a mercenary” — with 75 per cent of hundreds of comments on the popular Palestinian Facebook page Ramallah News branding his intervention an act of treason because it saved the lives of Jewish people.

In short, the Prime Minister’s claim that the Bondi terrorist attack represents an “extreme perversion of Islam” simply does not square with the facts. And his pet mantra that “diversity is our strength” rings hollow when that diversity includes people who want us dead.

A few bad apples or an immigration pattern?

As recently highlighted by commentator Drew Pavlou, in 2014, the Lakemba-Punchbowl-Bankstown corridor — home to about 6,800 young Muslim men — produced 60–70 ISIS fighters or attempted recruits, according to open-source Australian intelligence data. In other words, roughly 1 per cent of the local male Muslim population joined or tried to join ISIS, making it one of the most concentrated ISIS recruitment zones in the entire Western world.

Crucially, that 1 per cent only counts those who were detected attempting to join ISIS; it does not include the potentially much larger number of Muslims who privately believe that Islam justifies violence but never acted on it.

Thus, it is not a stretch to suggest that Australia now harbours thousands upon thousands of Islamists and Islamist sympathisers who have no moral qualms with the carnage unleashed on Sunday night.

As many have pointed out this week, by focussing on gun reform and “hate speech” laws — and even on antisemitism as a catch-all category — the Albanese government is avoiding the real problem.

The real problem is that the Albanese government, building on previous governments, has ramped up the inflow of people who have no interest in assimilating, who despise the Australian way of life, and who use the freedoms we afford them to tear down the very civilisation that welcomed them.

Driving home this point, in a recent, widely-shared video, commentator Konstantin Kisin illustrated the danger of ignoring radical elements within the Muslim population. “To avoid offending morons,” he began, “let’s not talk about people and talk about apples instead.” His point: even if only a small minority of apples are poisonous, a government that goes on blindly importing them puts its citizens at serious risk.

Solutions: Islam, Islamism and immigration

What would it look like for the Albanese government to properly address the web of challenges posed by Islam, Islamism and immigration? Here are just a few suggestions:

  1. Deport all dual nationals with proven links to jihadist violence, attendance at extremist institutions, or travel to terror-training regions.
  2. Place a full moratorium on mass-migration programs from regions with elevated terror risk.
  3. Significantly scale back immigration from Muslim-majority countries and implement far stricter vetting for immigrants from those countries, given that a measurable proportion of arrivals to date have gone on to endorse Islamist violence.
  4. Abandon the ideology of multiculturalism and admit that Islam and Islamism often overlap in ways that hinder assimilation.
  5. Defend and publicly uphold Australia’s Christian heritage and values as the foundation of national identity and a proven force for deradicalisation.

Given Mr Albanese’s track record, I expect his government to implement precisely zero of these common-sense measures. Instead, he will push his “hate speech” reforms, which will eventually be used to punish ordinary Australians — like me — for daring to honestly name uncomfortable truths about Islam.

And why wouldn’t he? After all, Albanese has previously condemned Israel Folau’s beliefs as “reprehensible” and “rubbish”, and his Foreign Minister Penny Wong claimed that even presenting children with the Christian view on marriage during the same-sex marriage debate exposed them to “hatred”.

True to the old adage, “never let a crisis go to waste”, the Albanese government is exploiting the Bondi tragedy to impose restrictions that will deepen the very dangers that Australians face.

We need the right to speak uncomfortable truths about Islam. We need to protect Australian security and sovereignty. And most of all, we need the gospel of Jesus Christ to guide our nation back to what made it so enviable in the first place.

by Kurt Mahlburg.

Kurt Mahlburg is a husband to Angie, a father, a freelance writer, and a familiar Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He is the Senior Editor and a regular columnist at The Daily Declaration. More of his writings can be found at Mercator, Intellectual Takeout, The Spectator Australia, The American Spectator and Caldron Pool.

The Daily Declaration is Australia’s largest Christian news site. We are dedicated to providing a voice for Christian values in the public square. Our vision is to see the revitalisation of our Judeo-Christian values for the common good. We are non-profit, independent, crowdfunded, and we provide Christian news for a growing audience across Australia, Asia, and the South Pacific. 

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USCCB Islam

The U.S. Catholic bishops feed into the Moslems-as-martyrs myth

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At a time when most of the world is leaning over backward to avoid offending Moslems, Catholic bishops in the US have released a guide to ending “Anti-Islamophobia”.

In my last piece I discussed the Church’s latest act of appeasement toward Islam—namely, the U.S. bishops’ guide to Islamophobia. The guide is, to say the least, poorly timed. At a time when most of the world is leaning over backward to avoid offending Islam, the guide urges Catholics to lean even more—even to the point of joining-up with the highly politicised “Anti-Islamophobia” campaign.

One way to avoid offending Islam is to refrain from talking about the bad things that are done in the name of Islam—for instance, the genocidal massacres of African Christians by true-believing Moslems. Most of the world media, including many Catholic media have chosen to remain silent about the violent persecution of Christians in Africa and many other places.

Another way to placate the many sensitivities of Islam is to talk non-stop about the bad things that are done to Moslem—to portray Moslems as victims of widespread bigotry and persecution. This media tactic also helps to divert attention away  from persecuted Christians.

Although the mainstream media rarely reports on Moslem attacks on Christians, it jumps at the chance to cover stories about attacks on Moslems. For example, when a deranged white supremacist killed 50 Muslims in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand on March 15, 2019, the story was front page news for weeks and months afterward. In fact, anniversary specials about the event still appear on TV.

So intense was the focus on the New Zealand massacre, that several big stories about Moslem persecution of Christians got bumped out of the news.

About one month after the New Zealand shooting, nine Moslem suicide bombers attacked three Christian churches and three luxury hotels in Columbo, Sri Lanka. Two hundred seventy were killed and more than 500 were injured. Yet, although the casualties were much higher than those in New Zealand, news coverage was minimal. If you live in the U.S., it’s quite likely that you’ve never heard about the Sri Lanka massacre. Most of the world media were still fixated on the mosque attack, and seemed to have little interest in attacks on Christians at worship.

Whistling in the Dark

Another story that, in normal times, would have received wide attention was all but blotted out by the New Zealand atrocity. Five days after that attack, a Moslem school bus driver in Milan, Italy kidnapped and tried to immolate the 50 middle-school students in the bus. The driver later told police he was retaliating against Italian immigration policy which he held responsible for the deaths of “thousands” drowned in the Mediterranean crossing.

Although the event was chock full of drama and human interest—frightened handcuffed children, a high-speed chase, anxious parents, a blazing bus, and a heroic police rescue—it received little media attention outside of Europe. Coverage of the near-massacre was almost non-existent in the U.S. On the day of the incident Fox news carried a brief account at 7:30 pm but most other news sites reported nothing about the story. Google News didn’t cover the near-tragedy, but carried half a dozen headline stories about the New Zealand shooting with links to dozen more stories. I checked Google News for the next five days and found many more stories about the New Zealand attack, but nothing about the 50 children trapped in a blazing bus near Milan.

Do Non-Moslem Lives Matter?

Why the double standard? Why does the media give priority to stories of Moslems at risk while ignoring similar stories of Christians in peril?

One answer is that attacks on mosques and Islamic Centres are relatively rare both in the U.S. and abroad. But many in media are committed to the Islamophobia theory. When they come across a story that seems to confirm the Moslem-as-victim narrative, they give it extra attention and keep it alive as long as possible. Moreover, many of those who reported on the New Zealand massacre frequently used the phrase, “this has got to stop”—as though the atrocity was only one in a long line of white supremacist mosque shootings.

The Moslem-as-victim theme is, perhaps the dominant thread in the bishops’ Islamophobia guide. At one point, Dr. Jordan Duffner, the author of the guide writes: “Imagine what it would be like to have your house of worship targeted by vandalism or arson or to have your child bullied at school because of their faith.”

The implication is that this sort of thing is a common occurrence in the lives of Moslems, but that Christians could only try to imagine what it must be like. The truth is, many Christians don’t have to imagine such things. They are much more likely to happen to them than to Moslems.

A Global Crime Wave of Jihad Violence Against Christians

In Africa, Christian churches are frequently burned down, sometimes with the congregation locked inside. In Nigeria roughly one hundred churches are destroyed each month by jihadist organisations and Moslem tribal groups. In France in recent years over a thousand churches and cathedrals have been damaged or destroyed by vandals or arsonists, most likely drawn from France’s growing Moslem population. And yes, in France as well as in Austria, Sweden, and England, children are “bullied at school because of their [Christian] Faith.”

But none of this is mentioned in the U.S. Catholic bishops’ alarmist new Islamophobia guide. And dozens of other acts of violence by Moslems against Christians are omitted, including the tens of thousands of English schoolgirls who were victimised by Pakistani rape gangs in dozens of towns and cities throughout the English midlands.

Nor does the guide’s author mention the increasing number of jihad attacks here in America such as the vehicular attack in New Orleans on New Years Eve which left 14 dead and 57 injured.

Of course, Dr. Duffner is not obliged to mention all the evidence that contradicts her thesis, but surely someone at USCCB must have noticed that her guide is, to say the least, a bit lopsided.

Drunk With Love for Exotic Foreigners

The trouble is that one can’t assume that USCCB members would have noticed. Ever since Vatican II, the Catholic hierarchy has been smitten with the idea that Islam and Christianity are brother religions with shared beliefs and practices.

In their minds they have created a fantasy Islam—one based mainly on wishful thinking but not on actual acquaintance with Islamic scripture. It’s a safe bet that very few bishops have actually read the Quran. Indeed, most bishops suffer not from Islamophobia but from Islamoignorance.

Nothing displays the bishop’s ignorance of Islam better than the publication of the Islamophobia guide for U.S. Catholics. Why so? Let me outline a few of the problems with the guide:

First, it is designed to keep your mind on a secondary issue while ignoring the primary one. The secondary issue is bigotry. Dr. Duffner maintains that it is widespread but admits that it is more commonly “manifested in subtle forms” and often “without realizing it.” This may involve “mistreatment by classmates and even teachers, workplace and hiring discrimination; and name-calling and rude glances.” If true, that’s regrettable; but it’s still a secondary issue. What’s the primary problem in the area of Christian-Moslem relations? Well, to put it bluntly, Moslems are killing and torturing Christians by the millions all over the world. How come the bishops don’t talk about that?

Second, the booklet not only ignores Christian suffering, but also hijacks it with the result that the victimisers are turned into victims. Christians are asked to imagine “your house of worship targeted by vandalism or arson,” although Christians are all too familiar with this kind of persecution at the hands of Moslems. Moslems may sometimes be the victims of “rude glances,” but the main victim of “house of worship” attacks are Christians.

Third. Bishops should consider the possibility that they are being conned. Is our society really threatened by a wave of Islamophobia or is it simply a hoax designed to gain sympathy for Islam and to distract us from the possibility that Islamic ideology not Islamophobia poses the greater threat to civilization?

Some Fears Are Perfectly Rational

As you probably know, the word “Islamophobia” means an irrational fear of Islam. But the evidence suggests that, in many cases, fear of Islam is thoroughly rational. If Moslems have burned 20,000 Churches in Nigeria, is it irrational for Nigerian Christians to fear the doctrine that motivates them? If Moslem rape gangs in England have raped and prostituted tens of thousands of school-age girls, is it irrational for English parents to fear for their daughter’s safety, especially when Islamic law permits the rape of infidel women in non-Muslim territories?

It’s quite true that a lot of people in many parts of the world are afraid of Islam and Islamic teachings, but that’s because those teachings often encourage violence toward non-Moslems. Moslems themselves, not a phobic mindset, are the cause of that fear.

As evidenced by their publication of A Guide for U.S. Catholics on Anti-Moslem Bigotry, the American bishops do not have any fear of Islam. But that’s not because they are wiser than the rest of us. It’s because they are more closed minded. Their fault is not that they harbour irrational fears, but that they have no rational ones.

by William Kilpatrick

William Kilpatrick is the author of Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong: And What We Can Do About It (1993), Christianity, Islam, and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West (2015), What Catholics Need to Know about Islam (2020) and other books about culture and religion. His work is supported in part by the Shillman Foundation. The above article is reprinted, with the author’s permission, from his website, TurningPointProject.com

Post-Christian Europe heading into a new ‘Dark Age’

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One of my college history professors liked to emphasise that secularisation was the most important development in modern history. At the time, it didn’t seem quite as important to me as the Industrial Revolution, two world wars and the development of the atomic bomb; but I gradually came to see that he was right.

As Solzhenitsyn observed, secularisation and the troubles that accompany it happen when men forget God.

However, secularisation doesn’t require the kind of atheist society that Solzhenitsyn lived in. It can flourish in societies that acknowledge God but consider Him largely irrelevant.

This attitude is prevalent in most of the Western world but especially in Europe. Having just returned from a three-week European vacation which included visits to Vienna, Venice and Milan, I was struck by the degree of secularisation in places that were once solidly Catholic.

Some of the tour guides my wife and I encountered seemed to be proud of this secularisation. One pointed out that although you see churches everywhere, relatively few people actually attend church services. She seemed to think that this was a sign of progress.

Indeed, a common theme of the guides was that Europe had, after many centuries, come out of the “Dark Ages” into the light of humanism. They didn’t use the term “humanism”, but some did use words like “brotherhood” and “fraternity” to describe the higher plateau to which most of Europe had ascended. One of the reasons that Pope Francis is so popular in Europe is that he, too, subscribes to this secular religion of fraternity.

The guides admitted that, yes, there were problems in Europe, such as immigration — but not to worry because the immigrants were rapidly and smoothly assimilating. Often these platitudes were uttered as our walking tour passed clusters of Muslim women clothed in head-to-toe black burqas. Assimilation did not seem to be high on their list of priorities.

It’s not, of course, as though this secular-and-proud-ofit attitude is confined to Europeans. One of our tour groups included a well-educated and well-travelled Australian couple who casually dismissed traditional beliefs as throwbacks to the “Dark Ages”, and who looked upon the Bible as “just stories”.

But Europeans’ dismissal of the sacred sphere is more puzzling than secularisation among Australians and Americans. Why? Because Europeans are more dependent on the sacred sphere.

Religion only good for tourism

Tourism is perhaps Europe’s biggest industry. Yet many of the main tourist destinations are cathedrals and castles that were built by people who took religion very seriously.

St Peter’s Basilica and the Sistine Chapel are arguably the main attractions in Rome. St Mark’s is a high point of a trip to Venice. St Stephens Cathedral in Vienna is a focal point for tourists, and in Milan the two main attractions are the magnificent Cathedral of Milan (the third largest church in the world) and the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, which houses Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of the Last Supper. Take away da Vinci and the Duomo (as the cathedral is usually called), and you’ve lost half the incentive for visiting Milan at all.

Though Europe’s tourism industry relies on sacred spaces, Europe’s secular elites insist that the sacred is irrelevant to today’s culture. Thus, many look upon Christianity as a relic, a museum piece. The elite view is that Christianity may be useful for drawing in the tourists and also for reminding woke Europeans that they are fortunate not to live in that narrow-minded and guilt-ridden past. Otherwise, it can be safely ignored.

This attitude is reflected in the refusal to include any acknowledgment of the Christian contribution to European civilisation in the Constitution of the European Union. It’s also reflected in the self-destructive tendency to squeeze Christianity out of the public square in order to make room for the latest secular trends.

Yet, as Christianity is forced to yield more and more of the public square to secularism, the public square becomes less meaningful. It not only loses the sense of the supernatural, but also the original high intentions of secular humanism — namely, the emphasis on the dignity of man and the rights and liberties that correspond to that dignity. Eventually, the public square becomes merely a reflection of pop culture and, instead of achieving dignity, the masses become slaves to fashion.

Milan provides a rather striking example of this devolution. The two main buildings in Duomo Square are the iconic Cathedral and the impressive Galleria Vittorio Emanuelle II just a few hundred feet away. According to one guidebook to the city, the Galleria, which was begun in 1865, is “a hymn to progress” and “a place where the Milanese ‘intelligentsia’ has always liked to meet … possibly at a table in a café’ or restaurant”.

Ah, yes, “a hymn to progress” and, at the same time, a sort of cathedral to human ingenuity. The soaring glass-and-steel ceiling vaults of the Galleria seem to be inspired by the ceiling vaults in a gothic Cathedral.

Nowadays, however, this architectural masterpiece seems more like a hymn to pop culture than “a hymn to progress”. With its restaurants and trendy shops (Prada, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Dior etc.), it now presents itself as an elegant and upscale shopping mall — a mall that sells trendy ideas and lifestyles along with trendy fashions. For example, one Prada display window features three well-dressed male mannequins and a sign that asks: “What would you want your mom to know about you?” Another window displays three female mannequins and the question: “What do you hope your parents never find out about you?”

One implication of these displays seems to be that gay and lesbian sex and/or sex outside of marriage is cool. The other implication is that parents are old-fashioned and need to get with the times (although most Milanese parents likely succumbed to the religion of diversity a long time ago).

It would be inaccurate, however, to portray what is happening in Europe simply as a competition between the secular and the sacred. In many cases, the churches actually cooperate in the secularisation process.

Here’s an example. As you approach the Milan Cathedral from behind, one of the first things you notice is a billboardsized ad projected onto the side of a building right across the street from the church. The ad is for a brand of perfume, and it features a voluptuous, Madonna-like singer.

“That’s highly provocative,” I thought, “they should show more respect for Catholics.” Then, as we turned the corner, a still larger projected ad appeared on the side of the Cathedral itself. It was an ad for Prada and it was as blatantly sexy as the one for perfume.

“How do they get away with that?” I asked my wife. She pointed out that the diocese had probably given permission to use the cathedral as ad space in return for money. One imagines that the sum was quite a bit more than thirty pieces of silver.

In Italy and in much of Europe, what began as an opening of the Church to the world under Pope John XXIII has become a surrender to the world under Pope Francis and the progressive bishops he appoints.

Meanwhile, a third party has arisen in Europe which rejects both the secular world and Christian belief.

Not far from the Galleria, my wife and I sat in a bistro for coffee and a bite to eat. Through the window we could see two women in black burqas seated on the pavement with their backs against the wall. The burqas covered everything except their eyes, and they fingered prayer beads that, at first glance, looked like rosaries. Their fingers were also gloved lest any man be tempted by a show of skin.

What were they praying for? Peace on earth? Good will to men? Blessings on the Jews and other infidels? Not likely. Granted, there were other Muslims in the square who appeared to have better assimilated. They wore brightly coloured ankle-length dresses and minimalist head scarves. And they listened to pop music on their iPods.

But Islam-lite does not seem to be the future of Europe. Rather, it is the hard-line Muslims — those who keep their women in burqas and prefer to live in ghettos and no-go-zones — who seem to be setting the agenda for the continent.

Part of their agenda is to limit the free-speech rights of other Europeans. Thus, under pressure from true believing Muslims and true believing leftists, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled that criticism of Islam is now a crime.

If there is a “Dark Ages” religion in Europe, it is fundamentalist Islam, not Christianity. Yet Europeans who consider Christianity to be a “museum piece” would not dare to say the same about Islam — except, perhaps, behind closed doors.

What you have instead are tour guides who lament the Christian influence on Europe, yet welcome mass Muslim migration as a sign of enlightenment. When it comes to seeing the reality of Islam, many Europeans might as well be wearing burqas themselves.

William Kilpatrick is author of Christianity, Islam, and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West (2015) and What Catholics Need to Know about Islam (2020). The above article is reprinted, with the author’s permission, from TheStream.org (October 11, 2024). Dr Kilpatrick’s website is TurningPointProject.com