Bartholomew's Notes

Statement by the Ansar al-Sunnah Army and two other jihadist groups in Iraq (January 2005):

Democracy is a Greek word meaning the rule of the people, which means that the people do what they see fit…This concept is considered apostasy and defies the belief in one God — Muslims’ doctrine.

This sentiment was echoed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi around the same time:

We have declared a bitter war against democracy and all those who seek to enact it…Democracy is also based on the right to choose your religion…against the rule of God.

So, let’s compare that with an article from the website of the Israeli organisation Revava.org. The author is complaining about the Yesha Council, which is opposed to Israeli disengagement from Gaza. The author is also opposed, but he objects to the Yesha Council’s methods:

The Yesha Council and other lovers of democracy and western culture have promised to respect the will of the people and if they G-d forbid lose the referendum they will accept the results and no longer fight the Disengagement plan. G-d help a religious Jew who allows the “will of the people” to usurp the Torah and Jewish sovereignty over Eretz Yisrael. The Yesha council does NOT represent me and I will not respect any “democratic decision” that is contrary to Halacha and Judaism no matter what the self imposed Judenrat leaders proclaim in my name.

I believe in G-d and the Torah and THEY decide what I will support or oppose, not a majority of the Hellenist secular government or the corrupt Yesha Council who have always been little more than lackeys to the current regime.

Revava, of course, gets a great deal of benign publicity in the USA from WorldNetDaily’s Jerusalem correspondent Aaron Klein. Many of Klein’s reports are just cordial conversations with David Ha’ivri, Revava’s leader, and the organisation is continually described as merely “a Jewish Temple Mount activist group”. I’ve noted Klein’s failures before; the latest example of Klein’s feeble “reporting” has just appeared.

What Klein and Joseph Farah do not want their readers to know is that Ha’ivri is a hard-core Kahanist. Revava hates democracy as much as the Ansar al-Sunnah Army does, and for exactly the same theocratic reason (“Hellenist”, of course, has a particular resonance for the Jewish right, recalling struggle of the Maccabees). Ha’ivri is also a racist who makes bizarre accusations such as this:

Danger! Assimilation in Israel

…While statistics are obscured as to how many Jewish girls are being held in Arab villages, the estimation is that the number is in the tens of thousands. As part of the over-all war against the Jewish state, they systematically dispatch young Arab men to charm Jewish girls and take them back to their villages. These Arab men freely enter Jewish towns and cities where they entice Jewish girls.  Often, they pretend to be Sephardic Jews…In time, they literally become slaves, abused by the Arab husbands and families.

Any chance of some references? Nope. And just earlier this month, Ha’ivri was convicted for “incitement to racism” in an Israeli court after distributing a t-shirt with the slogan: “No Arabs, no terrorism”.

But of course, there’s no way that Klein will ever give a full account of what Revava and Ha’ivri really believe (or of their marginal status within Israel). The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is purely about Jewish democrats pitted against Muslim fundamentalists. Given how ill-informed Farah’s target audience is, any information that might undermine that narrative (moderate Palestinians, the Israeli peace movement, the racist and theocratic nature of the Israeli far-right) can just be safely ignored.

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Haaretz carries an opinion piece on the current dispute within the Greek Orthodox church by Moshe Elad (“reserve colonel and Orientalist who studies Palestinian society” according to his profile – the paper does not tell us that he is also a former military governor of Jenin and Bethlehem) entitled “The Palestinization of the church”:

Greek Orthodox Patriarch Irineos, “suspected” by the Palestinian Authority of leasing church lands to Israelis in the Jaffa Gate area, is going to be deposed through a religious putsch initiated by a group of priests led by Atallah Hanna, a Palestinian.

I’ve discussed this already here and here – and I’m no fan of Hanna, a man cited more than once in Arab sources as defending suicide bombings.

Irineos did what was done by his predecessors – Deodorus, Benedictus and Timotheus. The Greek Orthodox Church, the largest and richest of the Christian churches in our region, owning properties valued in the tens of millions of dollars, has leased and sold quite a bit of property to Israelis since 1948. Among those properties are valuable real estate like Saint Simon in Jerusalem, a large part of the Katamonim, Liberty Bell Park and the apartment houses and hotels around it, parts of Mishkenot Yamin Moshe, land in Caesarea, land around St. George’s Church in Lod, land in Nazareth, Haifa and along the banks of the Kinneret. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis live on these properties, which were leased for 99 years.

This is where Elad starts distorting the truth. All of those locations are in Israel proper. The land currently under dispute is in an Arab part of Jerusalem captured in 1967, and was bought by a shadowy group at a highly uncompetitive price. As Danny Rubenstein has argued in the same paper, the purchase appears to have been part of a (most likely government-funded) strategy to isolate Palestinian Jerusalem for the benefit of the Occupation. That’s why this purchase is so controversial, and why Irenios is so adamant he had nothing to do with it (although, bizarrely, Hanna has recently taken the line that the sale itself was not the problem, only the way it was handled).

Elad then goes on to mutter darkly about PA designs on the church:

…And since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority a decade ago, the PA has made efforts to penetrate the ranks of the church in order to prevent the transfer of property to Israeli hands.

What, the PA is not in favour of the church selling land to support the Occupation? How unsporting!

The Irineos case is evidence of the PLO’s success at enlisting even Palestinian churches in the cause of the PLO’s nationalist goals. Thanks to this “theological Tanzim,” the Christian churches in our region are going through a process of Arabization, localization and Palestinianization. Through “reeducation,” they are changing from churches with a universal character to churches with a local Arab character, meaning from religious institutions that are supposed to preach reconciliation and peace to institutions that have nationalist, pro-Palestinian positions. Under pressure from the PLO, the PA and certainly Hamas, Palestinian nationalism is being turned into the common denominator between Christian and non-Christian Palestinians.

“Theological Tanzim”? “reeducation”? Nice sinister terms, but what exactly do they signify? And why should we not take the view that “reconciliation and peace” go together with Palestinian national aspirations, rather than being opposed? You don’t usually see “reconciliation and peace” without justice, a term Elad prefers not to consider. I wonder if Elad has a similar dislike of Israel’s Jewish religious establishment making “pro-Israeli positions” rather than sticking to fluffy platitudes? And the Greek Orthodox church does not have a “universal character”: it has a Greek character, just as the Church of England has an English character.

Elad then turns to the history of the movement to give Palestinians a greater control over the local Orthodox church:

…What began in 1908 as a struggle to improve the socioeconomic standing of the Christian Orthodox in the Land of Israel, under the leadership of the Palestinian author Khalil El Sakakini, will have been turned in 2005 into a struggle by Mahmoud Abbas and the PA, via a “Christian theological Tanzim,” to end Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel.

By “Land of Israel” rather than just “Israel”, Elad means the West Bank and Gaza. So while the Orthodox church should preach “reconcilation and peace”, his own gospel is the aggressive territorial expansionism of “Greater Israel”.

This is obnoxious. Of course Palestinian Orthodox Christians object to living under Occupation, and they dislike the idea of their church hierarchy colluding in it. This has been the case for a long time; if Elad thinks it is due only to “reeducation” by the PA, then he’s a deluded fool as well as a hypocrite.

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The BBC reports on polio in Yemen:

Health authorities in Yemen say 83 children have been diagnosed with polio, nearly double the figure reported just over a week ago.

…Sixteen previously polio-free countries have reported new cases since 2003, when a polio vaccine boycott in Nigeria was blamed for spreading the disease.

…Experts suspect the strain could have been carried from Nigeria to other countries by migrant workers or pilgrims visiting Muslim holy sites in Saudi Arabia.

Hardline Islamic clerics claimed the polio vaccination was part of a plot by the US to make people infertile or give them HIV-Aids.

More details about the other countries affected can be seen at this AP report from earlier this month; the data appears to de derived from this study produced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

I wrote about the vaccine boycott back in the very early days of this blog. Lest we forget, two figures bear most responsibility for the tragedy: Ibrahim Shekarau, the governor of Kano state in Northern Nigeria; and Hussain Abdulkareem, a professor at Lagos State University Teaching Hospital.

Briefly: early last year, the Nigerian federal government sent Muslim scientists to India and South Africa to allay the fears generated by Islamist conspiracy-mongers concerning the vaccine. Their report was that the vaccine was quite safe: there was a minute amount of the female hormone estriadiol in the polio vaccines, but less than can be found in Western drinking water. Shekarau ignored the committee’s conclusion, and announced that it had in fact found contamination. He also made the bizarre and irrelevant objection that the committee was not valid because although it contained representatives of a Muslim group, it did not also feature a Christian group.

The wretched Abdulkareem then chimed in with further nonsense: the polio vaccine causes AIDS, as well as cancer. Like Shekarau, he also distorted the committee’s findings to claim that it had declared the vaccines to be “contaminated” with estriadoil, and gave a lurid account of how estriadoil can lead to genital deformation in males – omitting that this would only occur at a much higher dosage. After publishing this opinion, he then wrote a second article in which he quoted his first piece, but put his conclusions in the mouths of the committee. Clearly, as a professor in a hospital Abdulkareem’s culpability is greater than that of the Imams who spread the hysteria.

Kano resumed its vaccination programme in July, after arranging to purchase supplies from Indonesia – Abdulkareem’s response to that development is unknown to me. But this is not just a tale of religious radicalism: at the time of the boycott, President Obasanjo made the accusation that

one of the Muslim leaders opposing the immunisation programme had unsuccessfully sought a government contract to import new vaccines.

It would be interesting to know who that person was, and who exactly has profited from the supplier switch in Kano.

(My original entries on the subject can be seen here and here. Most of the links are now dead.)

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For several weeks now WorldNetDaily has been advertising Megashift, a book on church growth by James Rutz (as others have already noted). Now Rutz has his very own WND column; but first, Joseph Farah’s intro:

Rutz is the leading U.S. spokesman for a movement known as “Open Christianity,” a startling innovation on the traditional church that is laying a whole new basis for civilization. Additionally, he is chairman of Open Church Ministries and has been a full-time writer for 31 years.

According to Rutz, Open Christianity solves the three biggest problems of the church: “We’ve gotten rid of all the expensive buildings and paid pastors. Plus, you never have to listen to another sermon. This is the next step up from Protestantism.” Rutz says he and his “house-church friends are seeing lives getting straightened out, long-standing problems getting solved, wimps turning into world-changers, and everyone experiencing the strong presence of God.”

Rutz claims that the world is rapidly converting to Christianity, due to miracles. Most dramatically:

Rutz’s research has found 51 countries where God has raised people from the dead, mostly in the last 15 years (all footnoted, some with photos).

WND gives no further details, but a guest profile on CBN fills in some of the gaps:

At a Reinhard Bonnke meeting in Nigeria, Daniel Ekechukwu, dead for two days, was brought to the lower level of the meeting in his casket. He’d already been injected with preservatives when his wife brought him there. Cameras were rolling when life came back into his body, and he rose up.

…In Duad-India, Manu and other church members of the Indian Pentecostal Church in Dunger, Northern India, simply prayed in Jesus’ name and placed their Bibles on the body of a six-year-old boy who was near to being buried — whereupon he opened his eyes.

One missionary in Guatemala read all of Isaiah 53 over and over to a circle of Indians silently mourning the death of a boy until he came back.

Arjun Dass of Delhi, India, was electrocuted in April 2001. A team of five led by Savitri prayed for him, and God resurrected him 10 hours after his death.

…Chinese church leader Wang Xin Cai[‘s]…three-year-old daughter fell three stories and cracked her skull. He picked up her remains and laid her on the couch…He returned home the first day and her skull was back together; the second day she was breathing; the third day…he arrived home to a healthy, bubbling baby girl.

The first story is quite well-known, although the details are less than clear. Leo Igwe of the Nigerian Humanist Movement (that must be uphill work in the world’s most religious country) undertook his own investigation, which can be seen here, and found numerous discrepancies. I couldn’t find any commentary for the other cases. In his column, Rutz goes on to argue that because the number of Christians in the world has increased massively in the last hundred years or so,

A billion people are going to switch their loyalties to Jesus in the next 11 or 12 years and that may be just the beginning.

Rutz is of course right to note the growth of Christianity in Africa and China (although that’s hardly news), but actually this all sounds wearily familiar. New churches meeting in houses. Miracles galore, but all just out of reach of proper medical investigation. A massive religious revival around the corner. If anyone’s been raised from the grave here, it’s John Wimber. Back in the 1980s Wimber argued that “Power Evangelism” based on miracles and charismatic leadership would convert the world. Next we had the Toronto Blessing; then it was Tommy Tenney asking us to imagine shopping malls full of people suddenly weeping at the realisation of God’s presence. Rutz bolsters this charismatic message with some global church growth statistics, from which he extrapolates wildly, but it’s really the same old stuff.

Megashift is published by Empowerment Press of Colorado (not related to Empowerment Press of Texas).

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The Guardian notes that tomorrow’s Queen’s Speech to Parliament, in which the monarch runs through proposed new legislation, will include the issue of incitement to religious hatred (this detail is tucked away in an article on ID Cards):

Peers have rejected this proposal twice in the last four years on grounds of “free speech”, but ministers have told Muslim groups that as it was a manifesto commitment they would now be justified in invoking the Parliament Act to override opposition.

Unfortunately, the Guardian‘s journos go on to botch their wording a bit:

…The legislation on incitement to religious hatred would introduce a new criminal offence with a maximum penalty of seven years in prison, to close a loophole that allows criminal behaviour motivated by religious hatred.

I don’t think that’s quite the case at the moment. What they mean, of course, is that incitement to religious hatred is not currently covered by the law, while incitement to racial hatred is.

But this new development is a bit of a surprise – just before the election ASSIST Ministries reported that:

The British government has dropped plans to introduce laws banning Incitement to Religious Hatred before the election after coming under intense pressure from both opposition parties and a coalition of groups coordinated by Barnabas Fund who oppose the laws on free speech grounds.

According to the Barnabas Fund, the leader of the House of Commons Peter Hain announced April 5 that the government was dropping laws banning Incitement to Religious Hatred from its Serious Organized Crime and Police (SOCP) Bill in order to get the rest of the Bill through before parliament rises for the general election.

Many groups and individuals have problems with the legislation, which they fear will be used to stifle criticism of religion. That impression was strengthened when MP Khalid Mahmood suggested that such a law could have been used to “edit” Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. I covered the debate here.

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UPDATE (9 March 2007): The lawsuit has now been withdrawn. See here.

Nashville-based NewsChannel 5 reports on accusations against a religious club in the local Hillsboro High School and affiliated to Bethel World Outreach Center:

Thursday, two families filed a lawsuit against their daughters’ public high school because of religion. The girls claimed a school club put their lives in danger.

One girl claims that she attempted suicide after being put under severe pressure to speak in tongues, while the second girl

…became so consumed by trying to recruit and save others at the school that she had a total breakdown.

According to a lawsuit just filed against the school and church, the girl has now spent weeks in psychiatric hospitals and has been diagnosed as suffering from something called religious indoctrination.

I’m not sure about that for a diagnosis, but the mothers of the two girls also allege that the group tried to hide its activities from them:

…after the 17-year-old finally did speak in tongues she insists she was repeatedly warned by church members, including her teacher Meghan Therrell, not to tell her parents about it…Bethel’s Youth Minister, Shino Prater, said that’s just not true…But the girl’s mother claims that when she confronted Therrell about it, she didn’t deny it.

The club is known as the Victory Club, and Bethel runs around seventy of them around the USA.

NewsChannel 5 includes words from Bethel Senior Pastor Tim Johnson, who has apparently only been in the position for a short time. Over to the Bethel website:

We are pleased to announce that Tim Johnson has been appointed the Senior Pastor of Bethel’s Brentwood congregation. He has served as the Senior Associate Pastor since his move to Nashville from the Washington, D.C. area in 2000. Rice Broocks will continue with Bethel in the role of Senior Minister, overseeing the various congregations that make up Bethel World Outreach Center.

Rice Broocks yet again! Now, why does this guy keep popping up? As this blog has noted before, Broocks is the leader of the neo-Pentecostal grouping known as Every Nation (formerly Morning Star International); Bethel is the HQ, and the Victory Clubs are just one of the grouping’s many ministries. Only recently, similar accusations of abusive practices were made against another Every Nation outreach, based at the University of North Carolina (see here); and it should be remembered that Broocks was formerly a leader of Maranatha Ministries, a campus organisation that folded in the late 1980s over accusations of “cult-like” and authoritarian behaviour (see here; and various other Maranatha figures are involved with Every Nation).

I’ve posted on this topic several times before, and I’ve received a few critical emails. The problems at Maranatha were due to youthful inexperience; Broocks has learnt from the past; it’s unfair to judge the modern Every Nation grouping by what happened back then. Stephen Mansfield has also recently written a spirited defence of Broocks along much the same lines (which I critiqued here).

(Thanks to Darrell Lucus for the tip-off)

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From the UPI:

Jordanian authorities reportedly confiscated copies of the controversial bestseller, “The Da Vinci Code,” for slandering Christianity.

Amman’s daily al-Ghad said copies of the book were seized from a publishing house in the Jordanian capital and its owner, Ahmed Abou Tawk, was summoned for interrogation.

The paper quoted the president of the state’s Publication Department, Ahmed Kodat, as saying other titles were confiscated in addition to “The Da Vinci Code” for undermining religions.

“This book is largely harmful for Christianity and was banned from many countries, including Lebanon,” Kodat said, noting Christian clerics in Jordan demanded the ban.

I haven’t been able to find out what the “other titles” worthy of censorship are. But I think we can assume that one title in particular is not included. From an axt.org profile of Jordan (1996):

Until recently, a broad range of Arabic translations of antisemitic texts including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was widely available. Since the signing of the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty, however, such material has been phased out of mainstream bookshops and is available today primarily in Islamist bookshops.

Plus from the New York Times (2002):

Stay in a five-star hotel anywhere from Jordan to Iran, and you can buy the infamous forgery “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

While according to al-Jazeera:

Lebanese officials have rejected US calls to intervene with Hizb Allah over a mini-series on Zionism airing on its television station.

Government officials said doing so would be a violation of free speech.

…The State Department said on Tuesday that it had complained about the series to the governments of both Lebanon and Syria on the grounds that it incorporated elements of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an infamous 19th-century forgery.

(Tipped from Come and See)

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Things continue to look grim for Jerusalem Orthodox Christian Patriarch Irenios I. As I blogged a couple of days ago, the Patriarch has been dismissed from his position by other clerics, who accuse him of being responsible for the sale of church land in East Jerusalem to a group linked to Israeli settlers. Irenios has rejected the dismissal, but according to Haaretz:

The most important figure in the Orthodox Christian world has recognized the dismissal of Patriarch Irineos I, head of the Greek Orthodox Church in the Holy Land, according to sources in the Jerusalem Patriarchate.

The sources say that Bartholomaus, Patriarch of Constantinople, sent a letter yesterday to Irineos with the salutation “Patriarch Irineos, Jerusalem,” rather than “The Patriarch Irineos of Jerusalem,” something which constitutes a recognition of the dismissal.

…Jordan announced over the weekend that if two-thirds of the Synod were indeed in favor of the dismissal, Jordan would recognize it.

…A meeting yesterday between Irineos’ opponents and Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia (Abu Ala) seemed to indicate that the PA also favors recognizing the dismissal. However, a great deal depends of the findings of various committees of inquiry examining Irineos’ alleged sales of Patriarchate property near the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem to Jews.

Haaretz also notes that:

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon advisor Shalom Turdjeman and the cabinet secretary, Yisrael Maimon, would be meeting with the two sides to hear their versions of events. The sources stressed that Israel would not be acting as an arbitrator and was not taking a stand on an internal church matter.

That’s a bit rich, since the Israeli government is most likely behind Irineos’s woes. Danny Rubenstein had this to say in the same paper a couple of weeks ago:

…the buyer was to pay $135 million to the patriarchy to lease the properties for 99 years. This is a vast sum, not economically justified, since the properties are occupied.

…Settlers have always demonstrated an impressive ability to raise funds for their cause from government and other public bodies. It is possible therefore that the buyer is none other than the Israeli government, directly or indirectly, as was the case for another patriarchy property – Saint John’s Hospice, adjacent to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The money for that deal came from the Housing Ministry at the instruction of then-housing minister David Levy, acting under the guise of a foreign company.

The Israeli government has a clear interest in taking over properties in the Jaffa Gate area before negotiations on Jerusalem’s future. Ownership of the Jaffa Gate area and the Armenian Quarter would enable Israel to create a contiguous Jewish presence from the city’s west to the Jewish Quarter and the Western Wall. For Israel, this would be a long term strategic investment.

It is possible that an agent acting for Israel’s government is lying low for fear that exposure would lead to harsh international criticism. Many countries would see the purchase of properties at Jaffa Gate, located outside the pre-1967 borders, as a provocative step in the light of efforts to revive the peace process.

But, weirdly, that’s not the argument being made by Irineos’s detractors today:

Church spokesman Bishop Atalla Hana [or “Atallah Hanna”] said yesterday, “The Israelis may not have understood us. The problem is not the sale of lands to Jews, but rather the lack of proper management and transparency, and fraud.”

That’s an unexpected line from Hana, a man who has an unfortunate habit of being quoted in the Arab press as being in favour of suicide bombings, which he then denies (his “church spokesman” status is self-appointed, and was explicitly denied as being valid by Irenios back in 2002. See my previous posting on this). The fact that the property was bought by a Jewish group in order to strengthen Israel’s control over a Palestinian area is precisely “the problem”, surely? Is Hana saying he would have approved the sale, had it been managed better?

So, we’ve got a Greek patriarch who was originally blocked by Israel back in 2001, which saw him as too pro-Palestinian. Now this same patriarch is under fire for allegedly selling church land to a Jewish group connected to settlers. Meanwhile, we’ve got a Palestinian self-styled church spokesman who has twice been linked to extremist rhetoric which he has gone on to disavow – although the alleged smears have not come from pro-Zionist sources, as one would expect, but from Arab and Muslim news sites. This “spokesman” has been leading the charge against the Greek Irenios in the name of Palestinian Christian nationalism, but now says he doesn’t mind sales of church land in Palestinian areas to Jews in principle!

Add to this mix Irenios’s missing treasurer; a drug dealer who allegedly helped Irenios’s election; an alleged Palestinian hit-man in the pay of another of Irineos’ rivals; plus alleged death threats by Irineos’ supporters against Hana. It’s not called the Byzantine Orthodox Church for nothing…

UPDATE: More today.

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A nice bit of rhetoric from Catholic League head William Donohue, writing in the New York Post and quoted in WND. Donohue is complaining about Kingdom of Heaven:

It is a matter of historical record that Muslim violence – in the form of a jihad – was responsible for Christians striking back, hence the Crusades. Yet in the film, it is the Christians who are the bad guys. This is on the order of doing a movie on the Warsaw Ghetto and blaming the Jews for all the violence.

Yes, the Crusades were just like the Warsaw uprising. Especially this bit (via Religious Tolerance.org):

On the way to the Middle East, they..gave the Jews two choices in their slogan: “Christ-killers, embrace the Cross or die!” 12,000 Jews in the Rhine Valley alone were killed as the first Crusade passed through. Some Jewish writers refer to these events as the “first holocaust.” Once the army reached Jerusalem and broke through the city walls, they slaughtered all the inhabitants that they could find (men, women, children, newborns). After locating about 6,000 Jews holed up in the synagogue, they set the building on fire; the Jews were burned alive. The Crusaders found that about 30,000 Muslims had fled to the al Aqsa Mosque. The Muslim were also slaughtered without mercy.

How could the Crusaders possibly be called “the bad guys”? Hey, Donohue – maybe Ridley Scott is secretly one of those “secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular” whom you think control Hollywood.

Meanwhile, John Podhoretz offers a different critique in the Weekly Standard:

Director Ridley Scott and screenwriter William Monahan would have you believe that there was once a utopian moment when the city of Jerusalem was a multicultural and multiethnic paradise, run by wise men deeply suspicious of religious fanaticism…Kingdom of Heaven attributes to its heroic Christian and Muslim characters a cosmopolitan skepticism about faith, and a healthy tolerance for other cultures, that would have been literally unthinkable in the 12th century–an era in which there was absolutely no frame of intellectual, historical, hermeneutical, or philosophical reference for cultural relativism or agnosticism.

I fear Podhoretz has never heard of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, whose story would make a great sequel for the Scott film (which I haven’t seen yet). It’s 1225, almost forty years since Saladin’s victory at Jerusalem. Frederick has just married Yolande, Latin heiress of Jerusalem, and the pope wants him to head up the Sixth Crusade. However, things don’t go quite as planned. First of all, Frederick declines to go, pleading illness. The Pope excommunicates him. Then Frederick finally heads off – before having the excommunication reversed, and so making the pope look rather ridiculous.

Frederick was raised on Sicily, and was a fluent Arabic speaker. This made his Crusade rather different from the previous efforts. Bertrand Russell gives an amusing account in his History of Western Philosophy (pages 444-445):

Arrived in Palestine, Frederick made friends with the Mohammedans, explained to them that the Christians attached importance to Jerusalem although it was of little strategic value, and succeeded in inducing the peaceably to restore the city to him. This made the Pope [Gregory IX] still more furious – one should fight the infidel, not negotiate with him.

Frederick was also a bit of a sceptic – at one point he considered starting a new religion to rid himself of the Pope’s influence (he was also rumoured to have written an anti-religious work called The Three Impostors, although this story is apocryphal). But perhaps Podhoretz is thinking more about how he would like the the USA to be, rather than the medieval world as it actually was.

Weekly Standard tipped from Christianity Today Weblog)

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At the Nembutsu-ji Temple (Pure Land Buddhism), Adashino:

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