The West versus the West

In yet another step by the Catholic Church to facilitate the spread of Islam in the West, the Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano has expressed support for the use of sharia finance rules. The story is at The Brussels Journal.

Haven’t I said that much of organized Christianity as it now exists is an enemy of Western civilization? Only a revolution, only a total reversal in the current direction of the West, can save us.

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March 13

Ed writes:

Why is it that so many “religious institutions” undermine Western Civilization and identify with third world peoples and causes. Even the Pope cannot sound an alarm about Islam. In America I cannot imagine the Catholic church calling for the construction of a “wall” along the Mexican border. One of the biggest and richest churches in my city has regular visits by Moslems to explain Islam to their congregants. This simply undermines their will to resist Islam and makes them more vulnerable. Is this madness something akin to the St. Vitus dance.

Paul Weston writes from England:

You state:

“Only a revolution, only a total reversal in the current direction of the West, can save us.”

I am so glad to see you write this. You are quite right. We revolt or we submit. The era of conventional politics is drawing to a close.

The mutterings within the UK are getting louder. The next ten years will be utterly and completely different to the last sixty.

Sage McLaughlin writes:

You write that only a revolution can save the West. So it seems to me. But how far should we be willing to go in our rejection of the current liberal order and, more importantly, in our efforts to undo it? Which things should we consider synonymous with that order? These are the salient questions. Clearly the time is upon us when hard choices will have to be made.

Dimitri K. writes:

Following the same logic, we might conclude that all Catholics are enemies of the West, because some of their priests welcome Islam, and all Protestants too. That will end in the West having no friends and being empty. And it will be the end of the West.

To avoid such a sad end, we should start to discriminate between people to find at least some friends of the West.

LA replies:

Dimitri seems to be objecting to my view—namely that the current controlling beliefs of the West, represented by its leading institutions, are leading to the end of the West—because he thinks my view turns everyone into an enemy of the West and leaves the West with no supporters. But the fact is, the West as currently constituted is against the West. It is a suicidal civilization, having embraced principles that require its own disappearance. As grim as the situation is, how can we have any hope of turning it around, unless we recognize that it is happening?

A. Zarkov writes:

What you see in Nashville is nothing compared to Berkeley. A friend of mine once had his arm broken in the Berkeley Jewish Community Center for making pro-Israel remarks—nothing happened to his attacker. To sit through almost any sermon in a Berkeley reform temple is to experience the surreal.

Then we have Susanne DeWitt, a former Dachau inmate who brought the remains of the bombed out Jerusalem Bus 19 to Berkeley for an anti-terrorism rally. As one would expect, Berkeley Muslims tried to stop her. The City of Berkeley tried to stop her, by throwing one roadblock after another in her way. Berkeley leftists tried to stop her. But in Berkeley one must also expect the unexpected—the Berkeley Jewish community tried to stop her. DeWitt’s own rabbi opposed her demonstration. Abraham Miller covers this sordid story in his FrontPage magazine article.

I know people who know Susanne and they assure me that the FrontPage article is absolutely accurate. Just as Christians helped Susanne survive the Nazis, they came to her aid in Berkeley. Today Susanne is still active and publishes a newsletter, which got attacked by the Obama campaign.

Sometimes I feel that your description of American Jews as the worst of “sickly-deluded, suicidal liberal Westerners” is accurate, but my experiences with liberal Christians tells me that the problem lies more with liberalism than with the Jews. Most of the orthodox Jews I know are not like that, and they usually stand apart from the secular and Reform Jews. The older WWII Jews are also different as they appreciate what can happen to Jews when they let their guard down.

Young Jews are a another matter; let’s hope they eventually find their way out of the darkness that is liberalism.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 12, 2009 06:09 PM | Send