Religion and Geopolitics Review: Saturday, October 11

Religion and Geopolitics Review this week includes:

• Hong Kong's Religious Revolutionaries
• Pakistan's Lessons for Turkey
• Turkish Inaction on ISIS Advance Dismays the U.S.
• Kasper, German Bishops, and the Church Tax

Deeply embedded in Hong Kong are Christian communities and public personalities. They are playing no small role in the September protests. While we think the Christian road to the Chinese soul is filial piety, we cannot ignore the intrinsic need of Christians for liberty to worship and love God as our first loyalty.

There is a strong analogy between the support of the nation-state Pakistan for the Taliban and the nation-state Turkey for ISIS. Eventually the support of states for an ideology which aims to replace nation states with a new caliphate is untenable. The epic model of this contradiction is Saudi Arabia. Here is a clear explanation of how both Pakistan and Turkey ride the tiger of  Islamist proxies.

Although they have officially joined the fight against ISIS, Turkish troops were massed but idle as the Syrian Kurdish town of Korbana on Turkey's boarder was besieged by ISIS. The Turks have a real military which is one of the two regional Sunni powers that could fight ISIS. According to Global Firepower (GFP) it is the eighth most powerful military in the world with 400,000 active troops and 3,600 tanks. Three reasons the Turks are so reluctant: 1) The Turks are engaged in an Islamization campaign of their own. 2) They see armed Kurds as enemy insurgents who eventually will establish a breakaway Kurdistan, and as Kurds comprise Turkey's largest ethnic minority, a newly independent Kurdistan could include part of eastern Turkey. 3) Their greatest enemy in the region is Alawite (Shiite-linked) President Assad of Syria. In the past, Turkey welcomed ISIS as a force that was fighting Assad.

The Catholic bishops of Germany are known in the American press as compassionate advocates of relaxing church rules on marriage, and communion for remarried Catholics. It may not be such a simple story.  An under-reported key to this story is the government-enforced Church tax that subsidizes the richest Catholic priesthood in Christendom. The tax, often called "Hitler's tax," was actually started a century before the Fuhrer. He continued the arrangement as part of a larger bargain (the Concordat of 1933) to get laymen out of serious political opposition groups. The German bishops have taken a very hard line on the growing number of Catholics who opt out of the 8-9 % tax. While many of the German hierarchy think divorce and remarriage should not bar one from Holy Communion, their policy toward Catholics who opt out of the state tax is not quite so forgiving. No communion, no confession, no weddings, and no acting as godparents. We thought at first all these reports were wrong, especially about penance. We can't find contradictory reports, however. It does make one wonder if the relaxation of moral teaching on marriage might be a policy to shore up the tax rolls. This is a very ugly story of shepherds who care for the shepherds far more than the sheep.

Religion and Geopolitics Review: Saturday, October 4

Religion and Geopolitics Review this week includes:

• Erdogan wary of airstrikes on ISIS
• Jordan offers the US to send Jordanian ground forces to attack ISIS
• Abdullah I bin-Hussein and some Jordan history
• Ibn Saud, Wahhabis, and Oil, to 1945
• A Basket of Snakes by Pat Buchanan 
• With evangelical candidate, Brazil's politics interest European media
• Netanyahu's Speech at the United Nations
• Cardinal Dolan: Ukraine ‘Flowing With Blood’
• Senator Cruz, Israel, and Mideast Christians

Two Sunni States -- Turkey and Jordan -- border the ISIS-contested region between Shiite Iraq to the southeast, and Lebanon and Alawite Syria to the west. We think that this ISIS-controlled region will not be ruled by Syrian or Iraqi Shiites; they both must retain their own geographically limited state formation to survive.  

Turkey and Jordan have very different claims and relationships to the area. During the centuries-long reign of the Ottoman Empire, this land was contiguous with Turkey and many Islamists see a merging with present day non-Arab Turkey as a reemergence of the caliphate. There is a substantial group of Muslims inside Turkey who identify with the goals of ISIS and see the trajectory of Turkey's history as a natural return to a larger Islamic entity. They see President Erdogan as a transitional transforming force against the secular Turkey that Ataturk created following World War I. In Erdogan's speech to the UN he had hostile words against the legitimacy of Egypt's government and their suppression of the elected Muslim Brotherhood. Turkey is much more adamant in its hostility to Assad of Syria than Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of ISIS. Turkey does not want to see the Kurds of Turkey join their ethnic brethren in a new state, and some say Turkey welcomed the role of ISIS in battling the Kurds. At the same time President Erdogan is not going to subordinate his nation of 75 million to less than 100.000 fighters of a new caliphate. On Wednesday, Erdogan placed forces on the Syrian border, but expressed concerns about fighting ISIS while emphasizing his desire to remove Assad from power.

Jordan (population 6.3 million) makes a very different claim to this land and harbors a much deeper enmity against ISIS in terms of its own history as an Islamic Arabic monarchy. Jordan has welcomed refugees from all the fights of the Mideast, has made both peace and war with Israel, and has allowed Shia and Christian communities to exist and worship in peace. The Hashemites of Jordan are a major target of ISIS and, unlike the ambivalent Turks, are willing to fight with ground troops. One cannot understand the Mideast without understanding the peculiar claims of Hashemites to the Holy Cities now ruled by the Saudi Wahhabii alliance, their restorative role in Jerusalem's Holy Places as well as their leadership in the Arab nationalist movement against the Ottoman Turks. The great grandfather of the present king of Jordan envisioned himself ruling a Greater Syria that would have included most of present-day Syria and Iraq as a new Arab nation. He was betrayed by the British and French as well as the underlying Shia-Sunni differences which necessitated a smaller map for his great grandson. The story behind the Saudi Wahhabi alliance that replaced the Hashemites from ruling Mecca and Medina can be told in many ways but an excellent summary is found here.  

Setting aside who will govern the ISIS-occupied lands in Syria and Iraq, Pat Buchanan offers a realistic view of a winning combination of States against ISIS.

Meanwhile in Brazil, the possible election of Evangelical Marina Silva is an early warning sign of the emergence of Christian political movements and personalities who will drive South American political life from the exhausted Marxist vs the Generals paradigm as well as replacing the new crony elitism of  passing power to candidate wives in the name of Western feminism.

Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu, in his speech to the UN, made clear that his country sees the nuclear program of Iran as the greatest threat to Israel and the region. He has the Saudis and radical Sunnis very much with him as well as almost all of the Republican opposition to President Obama (with the notable exception of Senator Rand Paul). We do not concur with these arguments. Netanyahu is a forceful and eloquent speaker. In his best speeches he is combative and then poetic and always closes with a prophet or Biblical truth in Hebrew. The missing religious voice among the religious nations is the Christian statesman.

As the voice of the Christian statesmen remains silent, the voice of a one Christian leader - Cardinal Timothy Dolan - proves unhelpful amid the current Ukrainian crisis. Rather than addressing the geopolitical and religious situation on the ground, or the larger history surrounding Ukraine and Russia, Dolan found it easier to label Orthodox Russia as a nation of "thugs and thieves" whose "jackboots have apparently come out of storage." We would expect more from the influential Archbishop of New York.

A recent Washington DC conference to defend Mideast Christians became a dispute about Israel after the keynote speaker Senator Ted Cruz walked out of the conference  at the end of his talk because of loud booing during his comments on Israel. This article by Ross Douthat of the NYTimes describes defenders of Cruz, while referencing Douthat's original article and others who think Senator Cruz missed something essential.

The Great American Novel

                                 
                                  

Pence says the honor belongs to Miss Stowe's classic tale, written a decade before the Civil War.

Mr. Lynch, being a big fan of military histories, writes "if I had to pick out one favorite novel I'd have to opt for The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara."
                                                                 

            

To me, it has to be one of these three: Moby-Dick, Huck Finn, or The Great Gatsby.

                                                            

                                                                                                       

The dozen countries with more than 100 million people

China and India are in the stratosphere when it comes to number of people: 1.4 and 1.3 BILLION respectively.

America is third at 319 million.

Next is Indonesia and Brazil (203 million).

[More than half of Indonesians live on Java, the world's most populous island.]
                                     

Pakistan is sixth, followed by:


Nigeria

Bangladesh

Russia

Japan

Mexico

and the Philippines at 100 million.



[The world population is 7.3 Billion].

A Catholic prayer to one's Guardian Angel (no age limit on who should pray it)

“How great the dignity of the soul, since each one has from his birth an angel commissioned to guard it.”   (Saint Jerome, d. 420)

"Angel of God,
my guardian dear,
To whom God's love
commits me here,
Ever this day,
be at my side,
To light and guard,
Rule and guide.
Amen."
                     

      
Be sure to know the archangels as well.