Scary Jesuits go C of E

An extraordinary editorial in La Civiltà Cattolica, the magazine of the Roman Jesuits, displays the clarity and logic you expect of Jesuits with a spinelessness we have come to expect of the Church of England.

It states that any attack on a Muslim nation will be taken by fundamentalist Muslims as an attack on the Umma, and is therefore to be resisted by armed action, or Jihad. It supports this reading by quoting the Universal Islamic Declaration, approved in 1980 by the Islamic Council of Europe, thereby linking the Jihadis with that esteemed group of moderates. The editorial goes to maintain that an Islamic state cannot by definition be democratic or secular, nor can it fail to declare Islam the ‘state religion’. It notes the fear on the part of radical Islamic movements of the temptations that Western hedonism and liberty hold for the young, and that thus the West "represents a very serious – even deadly – threat against the very survival of Islam."

Little to disagree with there. But the unnamed writer then goes on to make some recommendations. The second of them is that, because of the reaction it would provoke, we must "avoid political and military gestures that could appear as actions meant to combat, humiliate, and deride the Islamic peoples." Note that "could appear as". God, it's difficult to find 5 things that don't appear as provocation to many Muslims!

Very worryingly, they follow this with

a fair solution must be sought for the volatile Israeli-Palestinian question, which, according to the viewpoint shared by the entire Islamic world, is a serious wound, because the West has appropriated and given to the Jews an Islamic territory that is ‘sacred’ to Allah and belongs to Muslims ‘by divine law’ until the end of time.

They acknowledge that some Muslims don't think this, but then quote the Hamas Charter, which, as I am sure you do not need reminding, starts off with the demand that Israel be liquidated, and lays upon every Muslim the duty to work and Jihad so that that day come. The good writer then explains

This can require, not suicide – which is prohibited by Islam – but ‘martyrdom’, which, unlike suicide (held to be an egotistical act), is an altruistic action, carried out to defend the honor of Allah and the trampled-down rights of Islam: it is a ‘religious’ action which Allah repays with paradise.”

To apply the logic of this second recommendation: since it is a religious duty to wipe out Israel, and we must avoid any act that even appears to "combat, humiliate, and deride the Islamic peoples", it therefore follows that we must do nothing to impede the rightful duty of Muslims to wipe Israel off the map.

Sandro Magister has a fuller summary and comment on this ridiculous editorial.