Photo by ~mvi~ (flickr)

Consider what your taxes buy. 

From the White House website comes this inspirational message to Muslims everywhere on the occasion of Ramadan, that holiest of times when jihadis kill while fasting from sunrise to sunset. 

Ramadan has long been known even to Muslims as “the month of jihad,” as one prominent Islamic cleric called it, when jihad terror attacks increase in numerical frequency.

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Hajj photo by Ali Mansuri (Creative Commons)

The plan of salvation also includes . . . the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God . . . (CCC, p1s2c3p4)

Today marks the ninety-first anniversary of the first apparition in the series of alleged supernatural apparitions at Fatima, Portugal in 1917, and on this day twenty-seven years ago Pope John Paul II was shot in Vatican Square by the would-be assassin Mehmet Ali Acga, a Turkish Muslim who later claimed the assassination attempt had something to do with the “third secret” of Fatima, which wasn’t released or even openly discussed much by the Vatican (in fact, no pope had ever even acknowledged the mysterious secret) until much later. The gravely wounded pontiff convalesced in the hospital for a full year, and then astonishingly his first public act on May 13th was to travel in his weakened state from Rome to the tiny village of Fatima, of all places, for the anniversary celebration of the famous apparitions at the Cova da Iria. Not coincidentally, I might add, Fatima is the name of the daughter of Mohammed, the seventh- century Arabian warlord and founder of Islam, historically the avowed enemy of the Church.

What does this have to do with anything, especially as regards defending ourselves from the global jihad? Well, that’s a fascinating (terrifying may be a better word) story if you are so inclined, but I will not elaborate on it here. In a broader sense, though, we might ask what benefit to us is a religious perspective in this ongoing war against radical Islam? I know that many of those who speak out courageously against the Islamic threat will not agree, but in my mind the short answer to that question and the question in the title of this essay is, “Quite a lot, actually.” For a long time I’ve avoided coming to this conclusion, but it’s almost inescapable, really. Admittedly some of the most illustrious voices condemning Islamic militancy and the global jihad are owned by atheists and agnostics, and all of us religionists count them as friends in opposing the Mohammedan menace. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, Hugh Fitzgerald, Wafa Sultan, and many others—even the entertaining eccentric Pat Condell of YouTube fame comes to mind—are all without faith in God. It would seem that a religious perspective is effectively unnecessary in order to criticize aspects not only of Islamic law and culture, but even of Islamic theology and scripture. Indeed, when for example canonical texts and traditional doctrine call for the forced conversion, subjugation, or slaughter of unbelievers, garden-variety secular humanism is sufficient to condemn such scriptures and doctrine out of hand without pointlessly bringing God into it. In this sense and in this regard, religion has absolutely nothing to do with it.

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This is another photo test of Windows Live Writer, celebrating one “small victory,” as a friend who put me on to it put it, for all of us and particularly for the good guys in Spain. It seems the statue of Spain’s patron saint is offensive to local Muslims, but it will nevertheless remain on display thanks to public outcry over a decision by Church bureaucrats, capitulating to the outraged Muslim minority, to remove it from its traditional place in the cathedral Santiago de Compostela.

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