Wednesday, November 08, 2006

The editorial of surrender

At www.chiesa, Sandro Magister breaks down the latest editorial from La Civiltà Cattolica, the magazine of the Rome Jesuits that 'by statute should reflect the pope’s thought and argue on its behalf'. Its content is approved by the Secretariat of State before publication. Here is one example of the editorial's content and tone as quoted by Magister [bolding is by me]:

“From this arises the necessity, for fundamentalist Islam, of the ‘armed struggle’ (al-jihad bi-l-saif) against those who attack an Islamic state with the pretext of turning it into a ‘democratic’ state. An Islamic state, according to radical interpretation, is ‘theocratic’ by nature; that is, it is ruled only according to the Qur’an and the Sunna, and thus, according to the extremists, it cannot be ’democratic’, much less ’secular’, nor can it fail to declare Islam the ‘state religion’. The Universal Islamic Declaration, approved in 1980 by the Islamic Council of Europe, says: ‘The subjection of Muslim peoples and the occupation of their lands in some parts of the world is for us a matter of grave concern. The most painful of these is the usurpation and occupation of the holy city of Jerusalem (al-Quds). It is the sacred right of the umma to mobilize all its forces and to fight ceaselessly to free Jerusalem and all the other Muslim lands. The Muslim countries consider aggression against one of them as aggression against the entire Muslim world’.

Spain, Sicily, the Balkans and a whole lot of other places had better watch out.

Magister doesn't take a stab at how this editorial that basically declares any resistance to fundamental Islam as foolhardy and counterproductive was approved. But I am going to take a guess and suggest that perhaps it was approved by the former Secretary, Cardinal Sodano, in a sort of Roman equivalent to the Midnight Judges... That's the only way I can imagine it happening. I have no idea how long before publication pieces are approved by State, but I find it hard to believe that Bertone and company would have let something like that pass, even in the name of frank discussion. If the editorial had been instead a regular article on the basic motivations of fundamentalist Islam and had left out the 'surrender' suggestions, I can see it in that light, but as an editorial...

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