Bin Laden deputy claims U.S. faces “jihadist renaissance” in Muslim world
Osama bin Laden’s longtime lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahri, said the United States faces rebellion throughout the Muslim world after killing the al Qaeda leader, according to a YouTube recording posted on Wednesday. In what appeared to be his first public response to bin Laden’s death in a U.S. commando raid in Pakistan last month, the Egyptian-born Zawahri warned Americans not to gloat and vowed to press ahead with al Qaeda’s campaign against the United States and its allies.
“The Sheikh has departed, may God have mercy on him, to his God as a martyr, and we must continue on his path of jihad to expel the invaders from the land of Muslims and to purify it from injustice,” Zawahri said in the 28-minute clip. “Today, and thanks be to God, America is not facing an individual or a group … but a rebelling nation which has awoken from its sleep in a jihadist renaissance challenging it wherever it is.”
While the bespectacled Zawahri has been touted as successor to bin Laden, experts on al Qaeda say that another Egyptian militant, Saif al-Adel, is in interim command of al Qaeda. In the video, Zawahri warned Americans not to rejoice at bin Laden’s death: “You should await what will befall you after every celebratio n.” He condemned U.S. forces for burying bin Laden at sea, a move opposed by senior Muslim clerics as un-Islamic. The Americans said the burial included Muslim rite and took place at sea to deny bin Laden’s followers a shrine.
“He terrified America when he was alive and is terrifying it as a dead man, to the point that they shudder at the prospect of giving him a grave because of what they know of the love of tens of millions for him,” he said.
Bin Laden, Zawahri said, would continue to “haunt America and Israel and their Crusader allies, their corrupt agents.”
.
Will Pew Muslim birth rate study finally silence the “Eurabia” claim?
One of the most wrong-headed arguments in the debate about Muslims in Europe is the shrill “Eurabia” claim that high birth rates and immigration will make Muslims the majority on the continent within a few decades. Based on sleight-of-hand statistics, this scaremongering (as The Economist called it back in 2006) paints a picture of a triumphant Islam dominating a Europe that has lost its Christian roots and is blind to its looming cultural demise.
The Egyptian-born British writer Bat Ye’or popularised the term with her 2005 book “Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis” and this argument has become the background music to much exaggerated talk about Muslims in Europe. Some examples from recent weeks can be found here, here and here.
A good example is the video “Muslim Demographics,” an anonymous diatribe on YouTube that has racked up 12,680,220 views since being posted in March 2009. Among its many dramatic but unsupported claims are that France would become an “Islamic republic” by 2048 since the average French woman had 1.8 children while French Muslim women had 8.1 children — a wildly exaggerated number that it made no serious effort to document. It also predicted that Germany would turn into a “Muslim state” by 2050 and that “in only 15 years” the Dutch population would be half Muslim. “Some studies show that, at Islam’s current rate of growth, in five to seven years, it will be the dominant religion of the world,” the video declares as it urges viewers to “share the Gospel message in a changing world.”
The BBC produced its own video entitled “Welcome to Eurabia?” that gave a point-by-point rebuttal of the video’s claims. Watching “Muslim Demographics” and “Welcome to Eurabia?” back-to-back provides a useful lesson in the dark art of twisting statistics. The image at left, shows a fictional flag of “Eurabia” created by Oren Neu Dag.
Articles defending the “Eurabia” claim have often been so shrill that they essentially discredited themselves as serious arguments. But it could be difficult to find a solid statistics that gave an overall view of what was actually happening. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has stepped up with an impressive study entitled “The Future of the Global Muslim Population” (here’s the press release, report and graphics here). As we summarised it in our report Muslim birth rate falls, slower population growth:
Falling birth rates will slow the world’s Muslim population growth over the next two decades, reducing it on average from 2.2 percent a year in 1990-2010 to 1.5 percent a year from now until 2030, a new study says.
Muslims will number 2.2 billion by 2030 compared to 1.6 billion in 2010, making up 26.4 percent of the world population compared to 23.4 percent now, according to estimates by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life…
“The declining growth rate is due primarily to falling fertility rates in many Muslim-majority countries,” it said, noting the birth rate is falling as more Muslim women are educated, living standards rise and rural people move to cities.
The proven demographic fact that birth rates have been falling among Muslim women, both in Muslim majority countries and western countries where Muslims have migrated, is not new. Nor are articles debunking the idea that Muslims will become the majority in Europe (see here and here and here). But my own experience in discussing this with non-Muslims in Europe and the United States says this message does not seem to be getting through. The fact that Muslim birth rates, while still higher than those for non-Muslims, are actually falling seems to surprise people who do not follow these issues closely.
revel224: “to show the dastardly Europeans who colonized, plundered, looted, and murdered countless souls and treasures of 3rd world many of them Muslims, what happens when a shoe is on the other foot.”
Revel- you discredit your own statement here when you lump all of “Europe” together, when in fact it was a mere handful of European nations that were largely responsible for what you’re talking about. The British in particular, and the Dutch, French and Belgians to a far lesser extent, did indeed colonise large swathes of the Muslim world. But the vast majority of Europe did not. The Scandinavians, Poles, Czechs, Greeks, Germans, Finns, Hungarians among others had absolutely nothing to do with colonisation of Muslim countries. Quite the opposite, as many of them were victims of corrupt Muslim colonisation thru e.g. the Ottoman Turks, who thrice failed to conquer Vienna and other vast regions.
In fact, the bulk of Europe largely avoided colonisation alltogether and weren’t involved in the dishonour of the slave trade. This is one reason that the Scandinavians and Germans have the most successful economies today- they have a culture that’s never relied on slave labour and thus has become adapted to doing its own manual labour and doing it well, hence their manufacturing prowess.
Ironically, this historical fact also seems to have a correspondence in the levels of Muslim settlement in the European countries that were colonisers. It’s very low in Scandinavia and Germany, which has only about 2 million Muslims (the vast majority of immigrants to Germany are east Europeans, Russians and ethnic Germans from North America, *not* Turks as often believed), somewhat higher in France and the Netherlands (not nearly as high as often claimed), but growing significantly only in Britain, which was indeed the major coloniser in the Muslim world. About 2.5-3 million Muslims reside in the UK, but that number is indeed growing quite quickly due to heavy immigration under both Labour and Tories to provide cheap Labour for businesses, and unlike Continent European countries, Britain has sharia law and courts in many districts as well as Islamic customs predominating there. See Tower Hamlets or Manchester for examples.
So the United Kingdom and England in particular are indeed taking on an increasingly Islamic character, along with a corrupt government whichever major party is leading it with a slavish devotion to the wishes of rich campaign donors (one reason why I and so many other Britons have left). But that’s not true of the rest of Europe. Don’t lump them together so.
Skateboarding Hungarian Catholic priest becomes YouTube hit
A Hungarian Roman Catholic priest has become a YouTube hit with his distinctive method of spreading the word on wheels. Rev. Zoltan Lendvai, 45, who lives and preaches in Redics, a small village on Hungary’s border with Slovenia, believes skateboarding can open the way to God for young people.
“Many times I have felt that this is the way I can bring many people a bit closer to Jesus,” he told Reuters.
Read the full story here and watch the musical “international” version of the video “Funny Priest Skateboarding” below:
For Hungarian speakers, follow his commentary on the original video here (“a pap gördeszka gyorstalpalót tart Lentiben”).
Pope on Facebook in attempt to woo young believers
You won’t get an email saying Pope Benedict added you as a friend and you can’t “poke” him or write on his wall, but the Vatican is still keen to use the networking site Facebook to woo young people back to church.
A new Vatican website, www.pope2you.net, has gone live, offering an application called “The pope meets you on Facebook,” and another allowing the faithful to see the Pope’s speeches and messages on their iPhones or iPods.
Phil Pullella looks at the Vatican’s latest bid to preach the gospel with new technologies. Read the full story here.
Amazon infanticide video and U.S. Christian missionaries
The video shows a near-naked Indian in a remote Amazon village as he digs a large hole. A terrified child is pulled out of a hut and placed in the freshly dug grave. Soon his body and face are covered in earth.
Is this a powerful indictment of the practice of infanticide by Indian tribes in the Amazon, or a distortion of the truth and an incitement to hatred by U.S. Christian missionaries?
The tribal rights group Survival International hit out this week at the “Hakani” video, which has several edited versions online, calling it faked and a dangerous exaggeration of the problem of infanticide practiced by Indian tribes. The video, made with the support of a U.S.-based evangelical missionary group Youth With A Mission, seems to be an attempt to rally support for a proposed Brazilian law that would ban infanticide and other harmful practices by indigenous tribes. When contacted by Reuters, Youth With A Mission said it wouldn’t comment on what it called baseless allegations.
Enock Freire, one of the makers of the film that was shot with members of the Suruwaha tribe, defended it when contacted by Reuters. He said it was no secret that it was fiction, acted out by local Indians, but that it was aimed at drawing attention to the very real and what he said was the common problem of infanticide by Amazon Indian tribes. He said there is a widespread belief among tribes that children with “bad souls”, including those who are disabled, need to take their last breath underground to avoid them coming back to haunt the village.
The controversy raises fundamental questions about society’s relations with indigenous people and the role of religion. Should tribes be contacted and brought into line with national laws and customs, and should foreign missionaries be the ones doing it?
Proponents of the law say that children are vulnerable to cruel traditional practices. Groups like Survival accuse some missionary groups of trying to “civilize” Indians.
Anti-Darwin speaker gagged at Vatican evolution conference
The start of a high-powered Vatican-sponsored acadmeic conference on evolution was anything but fossilized.The third STOQ International Conference, called Biological Evolution, Facts and Theories, began on Tuesday at the Pontifical Gregorian University (picture right) under the patronage of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture.The conference, which has been organised together with the University of Notre Dame to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, had barely gotten underway when charges of censorship and undemocratic and unacademic behaviour began flying.At the end of the first session Oktar Babuna, a Turkish doctor and collaborator of prominent Turkish anti-Darwin campaigner Harun Yahya,asked for the floor to put forward a question. Babuna, a proponent of the Islamic creationist campaign against evolution, spoke about his view that there were insufficient transitional forms from species to species to support the theory of evolution.After he began speaking two professors on the dias, Francisco J. Ayala of the University of California at Irvine and Douglas Futuyma of the State University of New York were visibly irritated. Someone in the hall can be heard saying “turn the microphone off” and seconds later two organisers approached Babuna. One of them abruptly took the microphone away from Babuna and another ordered him to go back to his seat. Watch it all here“After I walked back to my seat someone said “only evolutionists can ask questions,” Babuna told Reuters afterwards. “This is very anti-democratic and very unacademic. If this is a scientific meeting … if you have scientific questions to ask, they should be responded to scientifically, everybody accepts that … if you force people to shut up and don’t let them ask any question … then it is not a scientific theory but an ideology.” The spat was filmed by Babuna’s associate Dr Cihat Gundogdu, who put an edited version on the Harun Yahya website.Both men attended the conference with English and Italian versions of Harun Yahya’s super-slick mega-book Atlas of Creation (picture left) in hand. We have done numerous blogs on Islamic creationism, its proponents and its opponents. Some of the links are listed below. But what do you think about the debate and, more importantly, do you think officials at the Gregorian University were right or wrong to yank the microphone from Babuna at a scientific conference?http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2009/02/05/just-before-darwin-day-pew-reviews-faith-and-evolution-in-us/http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2008/12/24/a-one-stop-shop-for-the-latest-on-islamic-creationism/http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2008/11/25/harun-yahya-dangles-big-prizes-for-creationism-essays/http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2008/10/27/richard-dawkins-rips-into-harun-yahya-and-muslim-creationism/http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2008/06/19/harun-yahya-preaches-islam-slams-darwin-and-awaits-jesus/http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2008/04/07/harun-yahyas-islamic-creationist-book-pops-up-in-scotland/
I feel that few of your contributors can have attended a genuine scientific conference.
The delegates here were serious scientists, who came to hear presentations given by advertised speakers. They gave up considerable time and money to be there.
There was time for discussion at the end of the presentations, where delegates could pose questions to the speakers. This is usual at such conferences and Babuna tried to hijack this process, which was rude and unprofessional of him.
After a short time, Babuna was clearly and politely asked to pose his question and he simply continued with his ridiculous rant. The organizers were completely correct to remove him and I’m sure that the serious delegates were relieved when he went.
Could Williamson end up as a bishop in cyberspace?
What should be done with Bishop Richard Williamson? In the wave of protests following his denial of the Holocaust, many critics argued he should have no place in the Roman Catholic Church. He gave them more ammunition over the weekend by telling Der Spiegel that he would have to study the historical evidence before deciding whether to publicly recant, as the Vatican has demanded. But he and his three fellow rebel bishops from the ultra-traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) have already been let back into the Church thanks to Pope Benedict’s decision to lift their excommunications. They now have to find an official niche in the Church to occupy.
It’s not clear when the SSPX bishops will begin negotiating their rehabilitation with the Vatican, partly because we don’t know how long Williamson will take for his new history assignment. But whenever those talks get under way, one of their goals will be to find a role for the four men who, although illicitly ordained, are valid bishops. And if they are rehabilitated, they will have to be bishops of somewhere or something. As the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it, bishops “are appointed for the government of one portion of the faithful of the Church, under the direction and authority of the sovereign pontiff, who can determine and restrain their powers, but not annihilate them”.
The operative word here is “restrain”. SSPX leader Bishop Bernard Fellay could be made bishop of a personal prelature, on the model of Opus Dei, but that still leaves the other three without official positions. The two others — Alfonso de Galarreta and Bernard Tissier de Mallerais — haven’t received too much media attention yet and it’s not clear what they might end up doing. But Williamson looks set for the sidelines even if he pops up on YouTube doing penitential readings from Saul Friedländer‘s books.
The Vatican has a way of restraining insubordinate bishops. They can be appointed to a “titular see,” i.e. a see (diocese) in name only. These sees are normally given to bishops who don’t run a diocese, for example a bishop working in the Curia. But the case of French Bishop Jacques Gaillot shows they can also be used to sidetrack someone. Gaillot was bishop of Evreux in France from 1982 to 1995 and stood out for his left-wing political and theological views (including blessing a same-sex union in 1988).
In 1995, the Vatican told Gaillot to resign or be removed from his see. He refused to resign and was reassigned to the titular see of Partenia, a diocese now lost under the sands of the Algerian Sahara. It ceased to exist in the fifth (yes, 5th) century after Huneric, the King of the Vandals, drove its bishop Rogatus into exile.
Gaillot didn’t stop his activism, however. He created a Partenia website in seven languages that declares the extinct see a “diocese without borders” where he fields questions, comments on current events, gives Biblical interpretations, runs a forum and chat room and provides a collection of mostly left-wing links.
Despite his 68 years, Williamson is quite at home with cyberspace. He has his own blog, Dinoscopus, which has become a must-read for journalists following this saga. It features a caricature of him as a dinosaur (at left) that shows he has a good portion of self-deprecating British humour. There are so many unclaimed titular sees that the Vatican would have no problem finding him one. But no matter where they assign him, it’s a pretty good bet his new address will start with http://…
Why Cyberspace? The Bishop of Antarctica seems like a good assignment.
Pope’s secretary victim of Facebook hoax
It had to happen sooner or later.
Someone pretending to be Pope Benedict’s personal secretary Monsignor Georg Gänswein, a German priest whose good looks have made him a celebrity in his own right, has set up a false Facebook account in his name. Several journalists in Rome have received an invitation from someone claiming to be him and asking them to be his Facebook friend.
But the journalists noted something strange in the dialogue with the purported monsignor. He sprinkles his Italian with German words like gut (good) — something the real one doesn’t do since he speaks perfect Italian. The bogus monsignor also posted a video clip of the real Gänswein walking with the pope during the Benedict’s summer holidays last year in the northern Italian mountains. The video — shot by Vatican television — is readily available.
But the real Gänswein, dubbed “gorgeous George,” doesn’t really need Facebook to make friends. There already are at least four Facebook fan clubs started by swooning admirers. One of the fan clubs uses an Italian play on words that can mean both that he should leave the priesthood or take off his priestly clothes.
Another fan club, writing in English, says “The papal secretary is a very attractive older man.” Gänswein may have some problems with that. He is only 52 and looks much younger.
Gänswein has played a much more marginal role in Benedict’s pontificate compared to his predecessor Stanislaw Dziwisz, who was Pope John Paul’s private secretary for all 27 years of his papacy and had served him when Karol Wojtyla was archbishop of Krakow (where Dziwisz is now cardinal). Dziwisz was a mover and shaker who enjoyed being the gatekeeper. He kept up contacts between the pope and journalists, politicians, commentators, authors and artists.
Gänswein keeps a much lower profile, perhaps because he worked with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger only for a few years before his boss became pontiff in 2005. But his good looks have often thrust him in the limelight he tries to avoid.
Canadians fill YouTube with “Amazing Grace” videos
If “Amazing Grace” is not already the most widely sung hymn in Christianity — and cyberlists, for what they’re worth, say it is — it should be by the time the Amazing Grace Project is finished. The Anglican Church of Canada invited all its congregations to sing John Newton‘s iconic hymn last Sunday and upload a video of their efforts to the church’s national office. The plan is to edit them into “one big, amazing “Amazing Grace” video and put it up on the web for all to enjoy by Christmas,” as the project website explains.
The uploads are piling up on YouTube (here’s the playlist) and it seems some congregations in U.S. states close to the Canadian border have joined in. There are a few entries from South Africa and a clip of bishops at the Lambeth Conference (see video above) enjoying the opportunity to sing from the same songsheet. If you want to be part of the final product, upload your video here by Dec. 1.
I first realised how widely known “Amazing Grace” was in 1999, at the end of the Yugoslav wars, when I was reporting from the Kosovo town of Prizren. The Serbian army had just left the town and NATO forces controlled the province. My Muslim interpreter and I happened to pass a Catholic Church one day and we went in for a look. To my surprise, a Mass was being said and the congregation was belting out a familiar tune. When I finally realised it was “Amazing Grace” in Albanian translation, I sang along softly in English. On leaving, the interpreter asked me “How do you know an Albanian hymn?”
How about you? Have you heard this famous hymn in languages other than English? If we get enough different examples, I’ll pass them on to the Amazing Grace Project.
Thanks for this post – interesting project. I’ve heard Amazing Grace in Czech alongside what a friend we have in Jesus.
However this youtube with Wintley Phipps also provides some interesting background to Amazing Grace
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMF_24cQq T0
Catholic bishop goes YouTube to warn about Internet
If a Catholic bishop wants to warn youngsters about moral dangers lurking on the Internet, where should he go to get his message across? YouTube, of course. That’s what Bishop Peter Ingham of Wollongong , in New South Wales in Australia, has done. The four-minute clip accompanies a pastoral letter just issued by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference on the same subject.
The white-haired prelate confesses up front that he’s a newbie in cyberspace. “I wouldn’t know my Facebook from my Second Life, or a blog from a chatroom,” he admits. To show how familiar young people are with the Internet, he tells the story of how a little girl learning the Lord’s Prayer misunderstood its appeal for deliverance from evil and ended it by saying: “… lead us not into temptation, but deliver us some email , amen.”
Here’s the whole clip:
PS: Hat tip to The Religious Write.
I’m so pleased!
I’ve been saying around my parish that we really need to get out and use Electronic Evangelization!
How wonderful it is that Bishop Ingham found the time and energy to make this video for YouTube. And what better place than to go to the site where our teenagers are spending the most time?
-
Resident FaithWorld Expert
-
