My last Ad Rem, “The Iran War and the Battle for the Soul of America,” garnered strong reactions, both positive and negative. Grateful as I am for the positive comments I received, the negative ones need to be addressed here.
All the negative response to the article can be reduced to this: This is an existential conflict with a militant Islam, and we must find common cause with the Israelis in this epic battle. Some have offered me lessons in the history of Islamic aggression against Christendom to bolster their claim in an effort to make me admit that we must join forces with Israel in order to save what remains of Western Christendom from Islamic domination.
We know that Islam has a militant aspect, both historical and abiding, that cannot be dismissed. Over a decade ago, I named my weekly radio show Reconquest after the 700-plus-year Reconquista of Spain from its Muslim conquerors. I deliberately “spiritualized” this military and cultural resistance as a symbol of spiritually “reconquering” souls and families and nations for Christ the King. I am more than faintly aware of the historical battles of Poitiers, Manzikert, Lepanto, Vienna, and Belgrade, as well as the Crusades, and numerous other conflicts that pitted Christian against Muslim in an existential battle for the survival of Christendom. All that is in addition to the formidable and rapid takeover of the Levant and the Maghreb within a century of the Hijrah in 622 — Muhammad’s historical “migration” from Mecca to Medina.
The Big Question
But here is the big question: Is supporting the 1948 secular state of Israel some sort of strategic countervail against the perceived Muslim threat? On its face, this would be a laughable claim. There are roughly 7.2 to 7.5 million Jews in Israel with Arab and non-Arab family members of Israelis bringing the population up to about 10 million. Shia Muslim Iran, to give the example of the most formidable enemy of Israel in West Asia, has roughly 92 or 93 million people in it. This, by the way, includes Jews and Christians who have synagogues and churches, and who serve in the Iranian armed forces. Sunni Muslim Turkey has almost the population of Iran: nearly 88 million.
Is a nation of fewer than ten million Jews supposed to protect Europe and America from roughly 400 million Muslims in the Middle East, not to mention over 760 million of Muslims in Africa? This would be an absurd claim. Globally, Jews number about 15.7 million, whereas Muslims number roughly two billion. In other words, the number of Jews in the world is 0.785% the number of Muslims. Granting for the sake of argument that all two billion Muslims are the aggressive sort (which is hardly the case), and that all 15.7 million Jews are on board with the plan to defend the West from Islam (which I doubt), it does not sound like a good plan to use the Jewish State in Palestine as a bulwark against the perceived threat of Islamic domination. Not only does the math not work; but, in attempting to use Israel as a foil against Islam, we only create more enemies.
When considering Israel, let us not be naive; the Israelis will do what is in their perceived best interest, not ours. Don’t forget the USS Liberty, the Israeli welcome of American traitor Jonathan Pollard (who gave American defense secrets to Israel, who, in turn, sold them to the Soviets during the Cold War), and a long history of Israeli anti-American espionage. American statesmen (if there are any left) are supposed to keep American interests first and foremost in mind when considering foreign policy. Perhaps General Washington’s would be a wise one to adopt. Among other bits of sage advice, our first president said, “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” He was speaking principally of Europe. What would he say about a “permanent alliance” in the Middle East that has proven so destructive of American blood and treasure?
Israeli Policy Breeds Terrorism
Our ill-advised alliance with Israel has made the United States the de facto enforcer of Oded Yinon’s strategy for Israeli hegemony across the Middle East. That strategy consists of a divide et impera approach to its neighbors. (You can read Israel Shahak‘s translation of Yinon’s essay explaining this strategy.) Yinon was an Israeli journalist who was attached to Israel’s Foreign Ministry and an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon.
This strategy was written decades before the recent atrocities committed in Syria, which appear to be an exact fulfillment of it. The horrible destabilization of Syria resulted from the US and Israel replacing the Christian-friendly Bashar al-Assad with a literal head-chopping terrorist named Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani (his nom de guerre). In 2009, well before Donald Trump called him “very good… [a] young, attractive guy… tough guy” after a cordial meeting in the White House, al-Jolani (also spelled Jawlani) was officially labeled a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist under Executive Order (E.O.) 13224.” Since the “attractive guy” got in office, there have been atrocities committed against religious minorities, including against Christians. This chaos was deliberate — not a bug, but a feature, as they say. A strong, unified Syria was not the plan. A Syria with religious strife and civil war was intended. Divide and conquer. That is the Middle East according to Israel, which is apparently still using Oded Yinon’s playbook.
Reducing all Arab and Muslim nations into warring micro-states with no cohesion may sound like a good plan for Israel, but what it necessitates is the constant destabilization of the region. And who suffers? Ask the Syrian Christians. Ask the Iraqi Christians. Ask the Lebanese Christians. They have suffered. And so have others. Creating failed states fosters the very breeding grounds that incubate terrorists and extremists.
Carrying out this plan to weaken Muslim and Arab states also makes possible the project of a “Greater Israel,” that is, Israeli hegemony over the land promised to Abraham by God — from the Nile to the Euphrates — a landmass that takes up most of the Middle East, including a large chunk of Egypt, all of Jordan and Lebanon, most of Syria, almost half of Iraq, a substantial part of northern Saudi Arabia, and a little sliver each of Turkey and of tiny Kuwait. (The former Israeli PM Neftali Bennet, on February 17 of this year, declared, “Turkey is the new Iran!”)
The Enemy of My Enemy
But Israel is the enemy of Islam, so we should support the secular Jewish state, right?
The first response to this from a Catholic should be that we are neither politically nor religiously pro-Muslim nor pro-Jewish. We are Christians and therefore fall down on the side of Jesus Christ and His interests. As He is the Eternal Logos, His interests will always be intrinsically reasonable and pro-human.
Intelligent people resist shallow logic of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” The reason is simple: It often does not work. The United States were allied with Stalin’s Soviet Union during World War II. Stalin was the enemy of Hitler (after the collapse of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in June 1941 with Operation Barbarossa). The Soviets raped their way through Germany, committing war crimes on a grand scale, and then created the German Democratic Republic (GDR, i.e., communist East Germany). They also, among other things, turned Catholic Poland into a Soviet vassal — known as the Polish People’s Republic — for forty-five years. That enemy-of-our-enemy did not prove helpful to US interests, did it?
In my lifetime, in the days of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, there were the “heroic freedom fighters” in Afghanistan, the Mujahideen (I recall them being described as such in the nightly news). These were the new friends that the United States armed, trained, and funded — even to the point of indoctrinating Afghan youth in the glories of jihad — in their campaign against the Soviets, who were then no longer our friends but our enemies. This would come back to bite us when these same “freedom fighters” we had armed and trained — then so useful for Zbigniew Brzezinski’s plan to bog the Soviets in a Vietnam-style quagmire in Afghanistan — would eventually become the Taliban and then Al-Qaeda, including the putative arch-villain of the 9-11 attacks himself, Osama bin Laden.
Invading Christendom
But let us look past the bad logic of “the enemy of my enemy” and see what a destabilized Middle East implies for Europe. Destabilizing a nation creates a humanitarian crisis in that nation, which, in turn, causes mass migration. And where do the Muslim migrants go? Many end up in Europe, where they are not assimilated, and where they become a dangerous fifth column in the rotting carcass of former Christendom. The reader is no doubt aware that this is already a tremendous problem due to the suicidal policies of European political leadership.
Some of the immigrants, of course, will end up in the US, where they will be living among us Americans, whom they will blame for killing their friends and family members in these forever wars in the Middle East. How intelligent is that? We have, in fact, already created an Islamist fifth column not only in Europe, but in America, too!
Moreover, the Christians in those nations we and the Israelis attack suffer horribly as a result of our efforts. As I wrote in “The Iran War and the Battle for the Soul of America”:
As a result of their efforts [i.e., the Christian Zionists], American blood and treasure will be wasted in an effort to expand Israeli hegemony over the Middle East. The winners will be usurious bankers and other corrupt oligarchs who profit from the flow of arms and blood. The losers will be the innocent non-combatants, many of them children, in the path of destruction — including Christians, who are so very often the biggest losers of these useless Middle-Eastern wars that President Trump promised to stop. (Examples of Christians paying the price: Historically, we may point out the results of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the net effect of which was to slash that nation’s Christian population by 80% in an effort to stop the non-existent WMD’s from being an existential threat against us. A current example is the suffering of Christians in Lebanon, another front of the US-Israeli war against Iran, where the Israelis are perpetrating actual war crimes. Lebanon has the largest Christian population in the Middle East, the highest percentage of whom are Maronite Catholics. Syrian Christians are also paying the price of US-Israeli meddling.)
One reason we need to cut ties with the Zionist regime is that it is making us like them. The Israelis do not, to put it mildly, consider themselves bound by the Catholic just war doctrine. Witness the genocide in Gaza and the current atrocities Lebanon. Simply put, they are barbaric in the way they prosecute war. Our alliance with them has seen us committing war crimes, with the president openly admitting genocidal intent to the world on Truth Social, and befouling the great Feast of Our Lord’s Resurrection with a foul-mouthed rant on that same platform on Easter Sunday. This disproportionate vengefulness must be repudiated.
The Solutions
Politically, our Republic should untether ourselves from the Zionist State in Palestine and practice genuine diplomacy with all nations — whether they be Muslim or not. Negotiating terms of peace that are economically beneficial to all parties would cut down on the immigration problem in Europe and America. This may sound naive to those propagandized by Fox News and other neocon outlets, but it is possible. Genuine negotiations employing seasoned diplomats knowledgeable in geopolitics and the cultures they are dealing with — not including the likes of the utterly unqualified über-Zionist real-estate moguls, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff — may make for positive outcomes based upon shared interests.
But, addressing Islam as a spiritual force globally is a purely religious matter that can be settled neither by bombs nor by negotiations. It requires Catholic missionaries, ones intensely formed spiritually and intellectually, and willing to be martyred. As Brother Francis put it, “The issue of salvation is faith in God — Incarnate. The Church must reach the Moslems with this message, even if it has to pay the price it paid to convert the Roman world.”
Our mentor also said that, aside from God’s grace, three things will be required to convert the Islamic world: Mary, miracles, and martyrdom. Our Lady of Fatima is a clue to the first of these three “M’s”: It is no accident that this greatest and most public of all private revelations in Church history took place in a Portuguese city named after a Muslim princess — a convert to Catholicism — who herself was named after Muhammad’s daughter.
Those interested in more on the subject are invited to read Evangelizing Moslems, an article I penned on this site a little over twenty years ago.
The Holy Father was a voice of calm and tranquility in recent days, as the world approached the precipice of World War III — and many Catholic bishops were, too. If these shepherds of Christ’s true Church would harness the intense spiritual energy at their disposal, by zealously committing themselves to evangelizing Jews and Muslims alike, even at the risk of sounding triumphalist, they could be so much more a force for good — the specific kind of good that their baptism, confirmation, and ordination to the fullness of the priesthood and the Petrine ministry calls them to: the supernatural good of the glory of God and the salvation of souls.
Our love of Jesus Christ the King and of souls redeemed by His Precious Blood demands this.
Because — let us never forget it — there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church.
