Crusader Iconography

Ed West writes:

"The IRA did not deliberately murder Ulster Protestants because they objected to Luther’s idea that salvation comes through faith, and the UFF didn’t slaughter innocent Catholics because of their disgust for the doctrine of transubstantiation, nor did Serbs kill Bosnian Muslims because they passionately believed in Christ’s divinity and rejected the notion he was merely a prophet."

The first bit is true; the IRA is in any case a Marxist organisation. But while Serbs did not kill Bosniaks precisely because the Bosniaks were Muslims, Bosniaks did kill Serbs precisely because the Serbs were Christians. The Bosniaks, while believing that Jesus was a prophet and that He was the Messiah foretold by the preceding prophets (two up on the Talmud), "passionately ... rejected the notion" that He was divine. Very "passionately" indeed, in fact.

And:

"Even if our cowardly Government were to stop immigration tomorrow, that figure will easily get closer to 10 per cent within two decades through natural increase. Are deluded liberals willing to bet that “Team Islam” will cease to exist by then? Team Christianity, in the form of the English Defence League, with its heavy use of Crusader iconography, has already come to life in response; indeed one of the reasons why anti-racist veterans don’t understand the EDL is because it is not racist as such but sectarian, a concept English people find hard to understand."

The EDL has deep roots in the "casual" subculture of Eighties and Nineties football hooliganism, and it has therefore adopted Saint George's Flag from football, which in turn adopted it in the course of the Italia 90 tournament, having previously always used the Union Flag in or on behalf of England, with Saint George's Flag confined to ecclesiastical use. "Crusader iconography"? Has Ed ever seen the EDL? That is not a term which they would ever use.

Immigration hardly enters into it. In fact, purely from that point of view (there are, of course, other considerations), the more Eastern Europeans, Afro-Caribbeans and Christian Africans, the better. The White British Muslim population is already well over 60,000. Imagine if it alone grew by an improbably small 50 per cent every 10 years: by 2100, there would be over a million. Now imagine that it grew by a possibly over-large, but nevertheless much more realistic, 100 per cent every 10 years: by 2100, there would be nearly 23 million. Yet that is only the White British section of British Muslims.

The real Islamic threat is that people disgusted with the complete collapse of all moral standards in the personal, social and economic spheres, and left helpless by the closely connected, almost total loss of collective cultural memory, will convert to Islam in droves. Look at the mosques full of disaffected young men in Afro-Caribbean areas, and at the flourishing Student Islamic Societies full of white, middle-class, deep-thinking, and often female seekers. In comparable ways did many another country begin to be Islamised. Who would have thought that present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and much of Northern India could have been Islamised? North Africa? Much of Sub-Saharan Africa, very much an ongoing process? Central Asia and much of western China? But how did it happen? And how quickly?

We need to re-learn structured daily prayer, setting aside one day in seven, fasting, almsgiving, pilgrimage, the global community of faith as the primary focus of personal allegiance and locus of personal identity, the lesser outward and greater inward struggle, the need for a comprehensive and coherent critique of both capitalism and Marxism, the coherence between faith and reason, and a consequent integrated view of art and science. The answer to the challenge of the Sunna is Sacred Tradition. The answer to the challenge of the Imamate is the Petrine Office. The answer to the challenge of Sufism is our own tradition of mysticism and monasticism. Liberal Catholics will be the last to see the point.