FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Filth from Satan

Rant Number 467 8 December 2011

80 strokes of the lash. The had – penalty - for inebriation. According to the learned Abdur Rahman I. Doi’s text, Sharia: The Islamic Law. Four drunken Somali girls in the news for brutally attacking another girl might have rated the flogging but...were they actually Muslims? ‘Not really’, a caller said on LBC radio: ‘No Muslim would be like that.’

Leaving aside the celebrated ‘No True Scotsman’ fallacy, the question arises whether some sins are so heinous as to make the sinner ipso facto into an unbeliever. How many divine commandments do I have to break, to cease being a Christian, for example?

Islam first. The Qur’an (Surah of the Cow:219) condemns the drinking of khamr, wine: In it ‘is a grave sin’. The Book’s position is nuanced, however: it also admits that in wine is ‘some profit’. Still, the sin is ‘greater than the profit’. Surah 5, al-Maida, is more forthright: khamr is ‘filth from Satan’ – pretty stark, as well as an excellent definition of sin in general, the priest must say. But is being intoxicated technically really kabira, a big sin that makes a Muslim guilty of kufr, unbelief?

Parenthetically, the Somali girls were spared jail because, the British judge ruled, being Muslims, they were not used to wine. A Qadi, a Sharia judge, might have argued differently: exactly because of their faith they should avoided the filth from Satan. A fortiori, they merited the lash – perhaps an extra 40 strokes? Somali ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali and our sad Druid-in-Chief, the Archbishop of Canterbury, would scream ‘cruelty to women’, of course. The priest is tempted to side with the Qadi here – interfaith solidarity, eh? No, I jest, I could never countenance harm to ladies, no way. (Another line the girls’ lawyer might have taken was that it had been British yobbish youth culture that had debased them – I doubt the judge would have liked that.)

On the consequences of sin, there is a complex discussion going back to Hasan al-Basri. The rationalist school of Islam, the Mutazilis, sensibly distinguished between sins entailing infidelity or otherwise. Light sins, or peccadilloes, do not comportkufr. Grave sins involve the perpetrator in real infidelity, hence excluding him from the community, without, however, making him into a sinner in an absolute sense – a position with its own difficulties...

Will Muslims guilty of kabira suffer both in this world and in the next? I believe most authorities opine that undergoingsharia punishments here is quite enough but I seem to recall that Imam Abu Hanifa would confine them to Hell even in the Hereafter. I trust he had his own, shrewd theological reasons.

What about the Christian view? In Vino Veritas but wine can be treacherous: ‘It goes down smoothly’ but ‘at last it bites like a serpent and stings like an adder’, warns the sage in the Book of Proverbs (23:32). Still, wine is certainly not satanic – it is not forbidden in Judaism nor does the New Testament make wine-drinking illicit. Jesus was not a teetotaller – a great embarrassment to Methodists ever since. Indeed, as one of the elements of the Eucharist, wine can have a high sacramental quality. Thus, it is not drinking which is wrong but drunkenness – two quite different things. Anyhow, drunkenness is run-of-the-mill sinfulness. For the really big sins you must look elsewhere.

Where? There is the sin against the Holy Ghost, the only unforgivable sin. Unfortunately Christ never said what that is. Well, think about baptism. You become a Christian by baptism. Nothing can efface that sacrament. (Even those who renounce Christ and apostatise – a horrible thing – retain that indelible sacramental character.) The standard distinction between mortal and venial sins applies. Mortal sins are those deadly to the soul – the equivalent of eternal death. Nevertheless even a Myra Hindley and a Dr Shipman, if baptised, were still technically Christians. Heretics were anathematised, i.e. cast out of the Church, so I suppose that means they were no longer Christian? Ultimately, it is up to God to decide, surely?

Past ages knew all about sin. Not today. When I heard confessions, I quickly realised penitents did not know how to confess, because they did not know what counts as sin. ‘We hardly ever mention the word “sin” here’ calmly confessed Alastair, the Vice-Principle of Cuddesdon Theological College, where I was trained. The English people, by and large, are in the same league. The Church of England has completely given up on sin – venial or mortal, it matters not. So the subject is as dead as a dodo. No more ‘filth from Satan’. Aren’t you happy?

Long ago, when sin really haunted Christian men, priests sometimes contrived ways of making the burden lighter. The most ludicrous of all must have been the notion of ‘philosophic sin’. It claimed that you were not guilty of a sin if you were not thinking about God at the moment of committing it. The great Blaise Pascal poured scorn at it: ‘I had always thought the less a person thought of God, the more he sinned. I was wrong. Just never think of God at all and you’ll never sin. So pass your life in a constant round of sins, amuse yourself, cheat, rob, lie, fornicate and forget God. Brilliant!’

‘Philosophic sin’ was condemned in 1690 by Pope Alexander VIII – good bloke! But...you know what? I got a sneaking feeling that fraudulent idea is back with a vengeance. Because one thing is clear: our society has given up thinking or caring about God. All England today is like Cuddesdon College. The word ‘God’ is fast disappearing from public and private discourse – it remains only in swearing. Back in their original homeland, the drunken Somali girls would have been reminded of their Creator all the time – clearly, here in post-Christian UK they found it easy to forget about him. Could that be possible? Muslims are slowly getting like the Christians – they gradually forget about God and hence also about sin?

Small sins, big sin – such fine casuistry is now beside point. What remains is that old ‘filth from Satan’. It grows bigger and bigger. It destroys institutions, finance, schools, society, all men and women. Until they again start thinking of God.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Erdogan’s Hitler

Rant Number 465 24 November 2011

One distant summer in Kurdistan, Eastern Turkey. My German friend Nicolas and I bumping along and sweating on a clapped-out old banger foisted on us by a Kurdish rogue. Gun-toting Turkish commandos stop us at a road block. We show our passports and get waved on but not before a truculent young officer boasts to Nicolas in German, while fingering his submachine gun: ‘Wir toten Sie alles – We kill them all!’

He meant the Kurds.

Why does Turkish PM Erdogan’s recent warning to Syria’s President Assad remind me of that soldier’s bellicosity? Hhmmm...All about unfunny men with a funny moustache, I fear.

Erdogan has invited Assad to stop fighting against the rebels in Syria. ‘Look at Nazi Germany, Hitler...fought to death against his own people’, Erdogan preached. A five-year-old retarded child would get this: Assad is behaving like Adolf and we all know what happened to the latter...

Ya Allah! Is Erdogan really as dumb as that? Turkish history books are often a bit surreal, I know, but still...Hitler fighting to the death against his own people? I can’t believe it. Yet the Turkish daily Hurriyet reports Erdogan saying that!

That stupid? Or that ignorant? Hitler fought to the death all right, six long years of WWII, yes, but no one seems to have told Erdogan that it was not against the German people the dreadful Fuhrer fought – it was against other peoples! French, Poles, Russians, Brits, Yanks, you name them. Whatever they were, they were not Germans, and they were not Hitler’s people. They were foreign nations.

‘But in a sense Hitler also fought against the Germans’ I hear you mutter, ‘he destroyed his own people!’ Maybe so but that was because Germany catastrophically lost the war. And the Germans, unlike the crafty Italians, master turncoats of the world, stuck by their leader until the bitter end. Despite defeat after defeat and despite the Allied bombers hammering their cities into rubble, night after night, for six long years. Hitler had no need to fight his people – they fought with and for him.

Thus Erdogan’s comparison is idiotic, wrong and, I suspect, offensive. To the Germans. Because, after all, Germany has paid bitterly for her mistakes. By being pulverised and having millions of her men killed or maimed. By rebuilding herself up as an impeccably democratic nation. And by paying handsome reparations to many of Hitler’s victims. ‘Those who live in a glass house should not throw stones’ Germans might well remind the uninstructed Turkish PM. Because, as it happens, it is Erdogan’s state that has been fighting a dirty war for years against...its own people!

The people in question are the Kurds. Sure, they do not consider themselves Turks but, according to Turkish law, they are Turks. Turkish citizens. More than ten millions. In the Ottoman Empire you could be a Greek, an Armenian, a Jew, Arab, Kurd and so on but in post-Ottoman Turkey you can only be a Turk. Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey recognised only Turks in Turkey. Yet the Kurds stubbornly insist to exist. To be Kurds. It is against those Turkish Kurds that the formidable Turkish military machine has been fighting, for over 30 years now. ‘Why doesn’t Erdogan get his own house in order, before playing the old, corny Hitler card?’ peevish Germans might not unjustifiably ask. Oh, they might also mention the unmentionable – the Armenians. The genocide against them. But maybe Erdogan has never heard of Armenians? Given his peculiar idea of historical truth, it would not surprise me one little bit.

Erdogan would prefer not to fight the Kurds, I suppose. As a pan-Islamist, he stresses the religious bonds between Muslims. Muslims should not fight Muslims. Turks and Kurds are Muslims and so...why fighting?

Good question. If religion was all that mattered. Alas, it does not. I have met Kurds who told me they cared not a jot for the greatest Kurd of all time, Saladin. Kurds who believed not in the Prophet Muhammad but in Karl Marx. Kurds who never prayed. Kurds who ate pork. But even Kurds who had no problem with the Qur’an assured me they were Kurds first and Muslims second. ‘The Arabs and the Turks are our enemies’, a handsome young Kurd told me in Van, Eastern Turkey. ‘We will fight them to the death – till we are free.’ Erdogan should have been listening. Pan-Islamism is an ideal, like Christendom. Nobody believes in Christendom anymore, of course, while many do ardently advocate the Caliphate. Its resurrection, after Ataturk slew it, is not impossible. Time will tell but the priest is, ahem, a wee sceptical.

Maybe Assad, that ‘living toothbrush’, as Chris Hitchens called him, like Erdogan is fighting ‘against his own people’ – although he prefers to call them ‘militants’. He has two millions Kurds in Syria but I do not imagine they are in a hurry to be ‘liberated’ by the Turkish Army. Syrians, by the way, must have learnt – unless their history books have been ‘cooked’ like the Turkish ones – about Jamal Pasha. The ferocious Turkish Ottoman governor notorious for his crimes against Syrian Arabs during WW1. He was nicknamed ‘the blood shedder’ for a reason...

So, Hitler is not the point. Or perhaps he is, though not in the sense Erdogan’s asinine comparison suggests. Hitler wanted to conquer Europe and reshape it after his own dreams of domination. Is someone trying to reshape the Middle East? The Atlantic magazine four years ago carried an interesting article: After Iraq. What will the future Middle East look like? The maps and the speculations were intriguing. It left me with the suspicion that certain forces are at work. With certain agendas. We all know about the oil and the Neo-Cons. But what about the Illuminati, the Zurich gnomes, the Elders of Something, the Masons, the men from Atlantis, Elvis...? Are the masses rioting in Tahrir Square being manipulated? Is there a sinister, invisible hand, pulling the strings? Are the people the unwitting playthings of...whom? Is there a Wizard of Oz, a puppeteer, a demonic deceiver behind it all?

God forbid! Best to joke. As Nicolas and I drove through a Kurdish town we stopped to ask a passer-by where the post office was. ‘PTT nerde?’ I meant to ask. Instead it came out as ‘PKK nerde?’ Where are the Kurdish Freedom Fighters? I actually said.

Thank God the man, Kurd or Turk, had a sense of humour.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Three Interesting Untruths

Rant Number 461 20 October 2011

A feeble joke the Tea Party (actually, it comes from Popbitch) might have invented: ‘A Communist, a Muslim and an illegal immigrant walk into a bar in Washington D.C. The bartender looks at them and says, “What can I get you, Mr President?”’

Sigh...Low, unworthy stuff. Trading for its effect on a spurious plausibility. Not devoid of interest, though. For three reasons.

Take Barack Obama, the Muslim. His second name is Hussein. Aha! The smoking gun? But, imagine the priest’s second name was Ahmad (maybe it is...): would that make him into Muslim? Nah! Nor does the religion of the President’s father make him so. Not even that the boy Obama went to school in Indonesia. Barack Hussein is an avowed, baptised, professing Christian and that’s that.

Yes, in a famous 2009 Cairo speech, Obama began by assalamualaiking his audience. Then he referred or quoted the Qur’an four times. He swore that America and Islam ‘are not exclusive’ – indeed that Islam ‘is part of America’ - that his country was not ‘and never will be’ at war with Islam, upheld Muslim women’s right to wear the hijab – even to punish those who sought to prevent them from doing it - (a dig at France’s mini-Sarkozy...), gave hope to Palestinians, declared himself against Israeli settlements, hinted at the Gaza siege, and so fulsomely on.

Wallahi! Verily, it was like a manifestation of Imam al-Mahdi. At least many Muslims felt that way. But clear-eyed folks like the priest never bought that pie in the sky, New Jerusalem scenario. In a speech to a meeting in the House of Lords chaired by a real Muslim, Lord Ahmed, I ruthlessly punctured the starry-eyed ‘Obama the Saviour’ myth. I compared Barack not the Mahdi – that would have been disrespectful - but to Samuel Becket’s Godot. An elusive, eagerly-awaited pseudo-Messiah. The two wretched protagonists long for Godot’s coming. When the Saviour does, all their problems will be solved. Enigmatic impostors, messengers, hints reach them on stage but not Godot. The play ends with the forlorn characters still waiting, in bleak, hopeless hope. Moral: people who expect Obama-Godot to solve the Middle East conundrum are deluded. Fellow speakers Kamal el-Helbawi and Anas al-Tikriti disagreed with me. I wonder what they think now.

Actually, Obama badly misjudged Muslims. They are not that dumb. You can quote the Qur’an in every sentence (‘why doesn’t he become a Muslim then?’ some Muslims may well wonder, and they would be right...), it will not displease them but they will then expect you to deliver a bit more than that. Godot’s priceless asset of course is that he never arrives so he does not have to do a bean. But that smart way-out President Obama cannot take. He is definitely here. What has he done for Muslims?

Nothing. This Islam-loving President has not closed Guantanamo, keeps troops fighting in Afghanistan, had his marines kill Osama Bin Laden in cold blood, has ignominiously cow-towed to Netanyahu over the settlements, and now sabre-rattles towards another Islamic country, Iran. Could a third attack on a Muslim nation be in the offing?

To be fair, Obama-Godot has a home problem. It is called the pro-Israel lobby. No Us President is master of his own house on that score. Some have long considered the state of Israel an American outpost in the Arab world. Cynics may rather opine that it is America that is Israel’s outpost in the Northern hemisphere. Why that should be so is a bit of mystery. Anti-Semites rave about occult powers and bogus protocols but the priest, a friend and admirer of the Jews, a God-bearing race, will not be part of cette galere. Be that as it may, the President’s hands are tied over Palestine. Godot might rescue the poor Palestinians when and if he comes – Obama cannot and he never will.

Second, Obama the illegal immigrant. A variation on the previous theme. A canard insinuating that Barack was born outside the US and hence ineligible for the Presidency. Consider, pray: given the amount of hostility Obama generates amongst Americans, if there was any real substance to the charge, would it not have been produced, double-quick? But none ever has and that settles that one.
Third, Obama the Communist. No so surreal a claim across the pond. As my friend Leo reiterated to me, Americans are individualists. The vast geography of that nation may have something to do with it. I myself would take a Weberian line and invoke the Protestant work ethic. ‘Lift yourself up by your bootstraps, work hard, be self-reliant, God helps those who help themselves’ kind of mindset. Socialism has never thrived in the US. Just as well the Russian revolution started in time to prevent Lenin from migrating to America or he would have ended his life in obscurity in a New York slum. Anyway, many Americans resent the intrusion of the federal government into state rights and other individual affairs. Liberty matters more than anything else to them. I sympathise.

However, blow me, the priest will stick up for Obama here. That he strove to give many, poorer Americans a decent healthcare plan strikes me as meritorious. To accuse him of Communism because he tried to help the poor is wrong and loopy. You might as well, mutatis mutandis, call Jesus Christ a Communist. (My dad thought JC was a socialist but then my beloved dad, bless his soul, was no philosopher). And I cannot quite see the President leading the workers to storm Wall Street, like Lenin had the Red Guards storm the Winter Palace.

Barack, poor Barack! Not a brilliant show, on the whole, eh? Will you get a second term? Probably, because your Republican opponents are such a divided bunch. A cynic might say in the end the two parties are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, two pretty identical characters, so does it matter which one has his man in the White House? Yes, I say, but not very much.

Honestly, my best bet is on Godot.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - God is great!

Rant Number 461 bis 23 October 2011

‘How strange”, my beloved disciple observed, ‘Libyans are shouting “God is great!” and yet the TV News keeps repeating that it is all about democracy.’

Allahu Akbar! Indeed. Libyans have been crying that out ever since the rebellion began. Allahu Akbar! You don’t need a BA in classical Arabic to know what it means. Three words in English, two in Arabic but the same meaning: God is great. Akbaris actually the comparative of kabir, ‘great’, it could just as well be translated as ‘greater’ or ‘the greatest’. A concise, effective statement of faith. Islam in a nutshell. There is nothing greater than God. Wow! The priest will sign up to that any time.

Allahu Akbar! God is great. The unnamed disciple is right. A peculiar deafness affects Western media. Not God, butDemocracy is great, their reports imply. Why? Well, because they mouth the ‘D’ word endlessly, while suppressing the ‘G’ word. Surely a sign of verbal-cleansing paranoia.

A visitor from Mars might wonder: what is this thing ‘Democracy’? A craze? A disease? An actress? A pop star? Who is he/she? Invoked obsessively, all the time, surely she must be the name of some divinity, or of an awesome hero, perhaps, a saviour, a

prophet or some metaphysical entity or a primal principle of cosmic importance, like gravity, or dark matter or...what?

God is great, the Libyans are shouting. Not, note, ‘democracy is great’. Not two mutually contradictory entities, perhaps, but they are not the same. Across the whole vast world of Islam, over a billion souls, echoes this cry: Allahu Akbar! The West does not want to hear it. As if it had an allergy, a disgust, a revulsion, a phobia at the words. (Europe is God-phobic, of course, that is the whole point.) The idea of God powering men’s lives, driving them to struggle, to fight, to risk their lives, to be wounded and even die...they can’t stand it. God is something Western man mentions only in swearing or in jokes. God, in public and polite society, is strictly off limits. Fanatics, lunatics, dangerous people talk of God. Sane, respectable folks do not...

God is great. But democracy, it seems, is Europe’s god. Better, Europe’s goddess. Not just a historical political system, with merits and demerits, like any other system. Like Moloch, like Melkart, the tribal deities of the Canaanites, democracy is now an absolute, unconditional, totalitarian idol. The new tauhid. Saudi Wahabis get a lot of flak for their presumed religious intolerance but so is the West fanatical, in its unreasoning devotion to this strange goddess – Democracy. The deity isn’t working, unfortunately. Europe’s economy and finance are crumbling, yet...more democracy is the cry! Like a drowning man calling out: ‘More water!’ – amazing!

‘Oh, I am so happy! Now we can say anything we like! We are free!’ a Libyan girl called out. That is something the priest understands. Freedom of speech: being free to speak your mind. Under Qaddafi that girl could not go the Tripoli souq and say: ‘Brother Leader stinks!’ Now she can. (Conversely, there are things Brits, supposedly free, are no longer allowed to say, even in universities. Do we need a revolution?) Freedom is the real McCoy. Freedom under God. Freedom to serve Him and to obey Him. That is the highest freedom: deluded atheists, pay heed!

The new Libyan leaders have learnt their lesson. They know the West craves oil, yes, but also expects democracy jabber from them so they, in their new suits and ties – thought reassuring after Qaddafi’s camp get-ups – comply. They are playing along. But the tough young chaps who have suffered and shed their blood in fighting the tyrant are shouting Allahu Akbar. They demand something different.

Qaddafi’s bloody end has shocked Westerners. He was not quite treated according the Geneva Conventions, no. Turning up their noses, they whisper: ‘What primitive, savage, violent people, these Muslims!’ (Raining bombs safely from on high is not quite nice either...) They forget the treatment Romanians, a Christian race, dealt to their own communist dictator, Ceausescu. Or what the devoutly Catholic Italians did to the body of Mussolini – something to put the darkest barbarians to shame. Or, a bit closer to home, what sections of the hyper-civilised (post-Christian, alas) British populace got up to this summer: rioting, looting and burning down town centres, presumably inspired by their marvellous goddess, Democracy.

God is great. Does that mean theocracy? It depends. In Europe that word has actually meant clergy rule. But not even the priest would wish this country to be ruled by the likes of Carey, Sentamu and Williams, hollow men who have driven a formerly great English Church to the brink of the grave. ‘God resigns from the C of E!’ a Private Eye joke ran. In truth, he might. Great God and puny, Laodiceana Church are not compatible. Only, it is the Anglican Church which has let down Christ, not the other way around.

Allahu Akbar! Theocracy is a bogey conjured up by our God-phobes, like ‘Deluded’ Dawkins and his ilk. The world of Sunni Islam knows no such a word. The modern Church-State dichotomy is alien to Muslims but so it was to traditional Christendom. Although it is thanks to Cameron and Sarkozy that the Libyans threw off Qaddafi’s yoke, you can bet your boots that in religious fervour the new Libya will resemble neither France nor England. God swims in the Arab bloodstream, you cannot expel him out of it.

God is great but human beings are not. The West badly needs an awakening, a rebellion, a revolution. Even the lazy hippies camped around near St Paul’s Cathedral have sensed that. Nor that they are fit to deliver it. They are theatre, not reality. Nor will Anglican clergy (laughter) imitate their counterparts in Iran. Nor liberation theology in South America. Priests like the Dominican Camilo Torres, who died wielding a submachine gun, fighting for justice, for the downtrodden – where are they?

‘You are not a revolutionary’ a real revolutionary, an expert in psychology, told me long ago. Perhaps. But, along with the Libyan rebels, I can still shout out this – God is great!

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Palestine & George VI

Rant Number 425 - 19/1/11

I have not seen, nor do I intend to see that much praised movie, The King’s Speech. The weighty matter of George VI’s stammer interests me as much as Prince William’s receding hairline, or the sticking-out ears of his father, or the number of fleas on the Queen’s Welsh corgi dogs. I do not give a damn whether Colin Firth gets an Oscar for his role or not. The current hoo-hah over the King’s attitude towards Jewish immigration into British Mandate Palestine, however, raises some topical questions. Namely, was the stuttering monarch anti-Semitic or clairvoyant? Worth a think.

In December 1917 the victorious British Army in Palestine took Jerusalem from the Turks. (When a French general entered the holy city he exulted: ‘Saladin, we are back!’) Only a month before Foreign Secretary Balfour had issued a declaration – in the form of a letter to Lord Rothschild - which promised that there should be a national home (not a state) in Palestine for the Jews. In fact, most of the inhabitants of the Holy Land at the time were Arabs. Balfour had also pledged that his declaration was not to prejudice their religious and civil rights but that was at best bloody obfuscation and fudge - vile mendacity at worst. Did the lofty and very ethical British Government assume that the Arabs would willingly vacate their land to foreign immigrants and clear off to some far corner of the collapsing Ottoman empire? Jill, Duchess of Hamilton, a stately Roman Catholic Australian, suggested in a lecture at SOAS that it had something to do with Balfour and PM Lloyd George’s biblical beliefs but I don’t buy it. Practical desire to court American Zionism is more likely. A.J.P. Taylor, that king of British historians, also speculates that one purpose was ‘to put a barrier between the French in Syria and the Suez Canal.’ That too makes sense.

After WWI Jewish immigration into Palestine grew apace. Zionist funds enabled them to purchase plenty of Arab land. Clearly, the Jewish national home was gradually mutating into a national state. The Arabs could hardly be expected to like that, so riots and violence followed.

By 1930 the British Colonial Secretary was Lord Passfield, a.k.a. socialist Sidney Webb of Fabian fame. Fabianism is synonymous with temporising but even Webb must have realised it was time to halt to Jewish immigration, if Palestine was to be pacified. (N.B. Hitler’s baleful moustache had not yet appeared on the horizon.) When he announced his intention, Taylor tells us, the enlightened Webb found himself vilified by Zionists ‘as the worst enemy of the Jews since Haman’. Too bad. (Haman is one of the many bad guys in history who have sought to destroy the Jews and who in doing so have only managed to dig a pit for themselves.) The unpalatable reality was – despite all well-meaning cant – that the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine was insoluble – it still is.

Fast forward to 1939. Britain recants. Balfour was wrong. ‘His Majesty’s Government...now declares unequivocally that it is not part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish state.’ Still, as a sop to Zionists, Britain allowed 75.000 more Jews to settle in Palestine over the next five years.

By this stage of course Hitler’s inhuman persecutions of innocent Jews was creating an urgent refugee problem. President Roosevelt then concocted a plan that would have allowed a rescue programme. Read all about it in Alan Hart’s provocative Zionism: the Real Enemy of the Jews. Roosevelt envisaged Britain and America offering asylum to 300.000 Jews. Canada, Australia and South America also as many. So many lives saved! However, the plan was scuppered. It is incredible but it seems the Zionist leaders did not at like the idea of Europe’s Jewish refugees channelled away from Palestine. Indeed, according to radical Jewish writer Lenni Brenner’s Zionism in the Age of the Dictators – A Reappraisal, Zionist leaders did not scruple to deal directly with III Reich officials like Eichmann, using even Nazism to bump up numbers in Palestine.

Enough. Too harrowing a matter. One wonders: how many Jews would have been saved if President Roosevelt’s plan had not been shot down by Zionists? To be sure, it is Hitler, not Zionism, which primarily brought about the horrendous fate of many Israelites in WWII. Nonetheless, reading Hart and Brenner leaves you with a funny taste in the mouth. Something ain’t right.

The Palestinians had to pay the price for anti-Semitism - essentially a European problem – a melancholy conclusion. During the 1967 war between Israel and the Arabs, I affirmed that much in a speech to a meeting of a socialist youth party branch in Rome. (Yes, he confesses it: Fr Frank was once a young socialist!) Only one comrade voted for me. I was then so naive I was convinced that Israel was a lamb attacked by big bad Arab wolves, so I went to the Israeli embassy and volunteered – just as well they did not need a useless goy! Besides, the war was over in six days, Israel occupied some more land and the Arabs got it in the neck once more.

Back to George VI. Apparently he did not like the idea of more Jews getting illegally into Palestine. Some correspondence with Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax indicates that. Halifax, a committed Anglo-Catholic, was not quite a philo-Semite – in 1939 he objected to Hore-Belisha becoming minister of information because the man was a Jew. Groan...things have changed a bit since then.

But was the King really anti-Semitic? Or was he perhaps far-sighted? Even clairvoyant? Considering where we are now in 2011, with the stalemate in the Holy Land showing no sign of resolution, the festering conflict poisoning the atmosphere of the whole Middle East, the unending suffering of the Palestinians, the Israeli insecurity mixed with hubris, Christians who have lived in those lands for centuries being murdered daily or forced to flee, the bitterness, the oppression, the hatred – was it wise to create the Star of David state? Was it really in the best interest of the Jewish people worldwide? Discuss.

St Thomas Aquinas wrote that the only truly demonic, morally desperate situation for a man to be in is when he has made contradictory promises. Britain made promises to both Arabs and Jews. Promises she could not keep. Demonic enough. The results are there for all to see.

FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - What Women Want

Rant Number 424 12 January 2011

If Charles Martel had not defeated the Moors at the battle of Poitiers in 732, perhaps ‘the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pupils might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Muhammad’. So mused Edward Gibbon in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Pace Gibbon, in AD 2011 students may choose to study Qur’anic exegesis at Oxford. Plus, in Britain ‘record numbers embrace Muslim faith’, an Independent newspaper headline ran last week. It seems converts to the revelation of Muhammad have doubled in 10 years. A study by Faith Matters, an interfaith think-tank, suggests 5000 become Muslims each year, making maybe 100.000 altogether - though that is only a ‘guesstimate’. (Oh, getting the snip – circumcision, al Qitaan in Arabic – is not obligatory for male converts, only recommended – that must encourage recruits.) What The Independent kept mum about, however, is something even more stunning: two-thirds of the known Muslim converts are women. Wallahi! Maybe our establishment sky pilots, Church of England vicars, should take notice. What if their old ladies – a sizeable part of the flock – ‘turned Turk’, as one used to say? Who would be left to serve tea and biscuits after the service? A real logistic nightmare.

Women turning to Islam. ‘A case of turkeys voting for Christmas’, a wit commented online. But what will do as a joke won’t be good enough as an argument. After all, have you heard of many Germans embracing Judaism under the Third Reich? So masochism or self-hatred won’t do as answers. Despite a media tendency to equate Islam with terror and violence and the cacophonies of puffed-up, hysterical scribblers like Chris Hitchens who preach about the horrors of ‘Islamo-fascism’ (a contradiction in terms, surely) the religion draws. Especially, wonder of all wonders, women. The very sex allegedly discriminated against, worse, victimised by Islam, flocks to the Crescent. Presumably to be beaten by their husbands, enslaved like dogs, imprisoned in the home, chained to the kitchen sink, shut into burka, treated as non-persons, robbed of education, all that. What a slap in the face of all liberal, right-thinking folks! Of the ‘sisters’, above all. News like this must make them eat their hearts out. It militates against everything the egalitarian, ‘emancipated’ brigade hold dear. A challenge to their reason. It is impossible. It cannot be. And yet...it is.

Could it just be, on the other hand, mad though it may seem to a certain type of progressive Western mindset, that those women converts like to feel looked after by men? Protected? Cared for? That they may even freely choose to dress and behave modestly? (Huh! Modesty! It used to be a Christian virtue, was it not? When did you last hear the general Synod of the C of E commend it?) That many women may actually prefer, horribile dictu, being mothers, looking after the home and the children? That they may find more happiness and contentment not in the workforce but...in the home!?! I wonder.

My son Linus, a bit of a feminist, sounds off. ‘Dad, it’s rot! I know Muslim girls in my college who can’t stand the mullahs or the religion. You can’t pass from ‘some’ to all’. Logical mistake. Just because some women convert, it doesn’t mean all do. Look, in my church we have quite a few Muslims who have become Christians. Mostly Kurds. Some are women. There must be more around. They don’t advertise it because they don’t want to be killed but they are there. So stop being a Muslim apologist, dad, will you?’

Muslim apologist? Moi? A priest! How unfair can my lad be? However, forget about the matter of Islam. Too emotive, visceral a subject, I suppose. (I wonder what bad Dr Freud would say...) I will turn instead to sociologist Geoff Dench’s revealing short book, What Women Want. ‘Evidence from British Social Attitudes’. A real gem. Please, do get it. (Hera Trust, Gardner Books.) Geoff’s work is not doctrinaire, a priori, theoretical stuff. Rather, it is based on empirical research. It seems that our politicians – surely the most despised and despicable race under the sun – have determined not to listen to what many women really do want. Governments – Labour and Tory alike – have bent over backwards to ‘create a workforce in which men and women occupy identical positions’. But research by the Centre for Policy Studies, relying on the findings by the leading national survey, point in a different direction.

Many women, it seems, are happier in ‘the private realm’, i.e. in domestic life, the family and the community, than in paid work. And there are class differences in happiness, too. Middle class females are the chief advocates of paid work. The media devote an inordinate amount of attention to the career problems of middle class women. They have little sympathy for the lives of those women who put their efforts into, and derive their fulfilment from, family life. Working class ladies feel more contented in domestic life, it seems. And that is even true of lone mums. The latter may even be the victims of state policies which prioritise getting women into work.

Where do we go from here? Geoff has his own recommendations, and you’ll have to read the book to find out. Marriage certainly ranks high in his scale of solutions. I agree. You see, when in parish work I was privileged to prepare couples for marriage and then marry them. One thing always struck me: love. The love I could see shining through the eyes of the men and women whom I married. But note: marriage is above all a sacrament. Not just a contract. It is a holy bond, in God’s name, binding two beings for ever in His sight. Unless marriage really is that...well, we are back to Tolstoi’s terrible tale, The Kreutzer Sonata. Just check that out, too.

‘Dad, you are a man! What damned right have you got to tell women...’ explodes Linus. Well, my boy, I have the same right as Adam had with Eve.

FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - A Saint’s Prayer

Rant Number 398 20 May 2010

‘If Henry VIII is saved...it will be at the prayer of John Houghton’, preached Rowan Williams . Beautiful, spiritual words. Witnessing to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s profound piety. But not wholly unproblematic. For four reasons.

First, Henry VIII founded the Anglican Church. Second, King Henry had the monk John Houghton gruesomely executed for refusing to recognise him as supreme head of the English Church. Third, Rowan Williams heads the very church Henry promoted. Fourth, King Henry is either in Heaven (however unlikely that may be) or in Hell. If in the former, he needs no prayers. If he is in the latter, no prayer, however saintly, could save him – Hell is forever – all you who enter here, leave behind all hope, as Dante inscribes over the gate of Hades. Unless...tertium datur, there is another possibility. Henry might be in Purgatory, from which prayer could speed up his release. But a doctrinal difficulty arises. After the Reformation the Church of England rejected belief in Purgatory outright. Article 22 of the Articles of Religion states that: ‘The Romish doctrine concerning Purgatory...is a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.’ Does Rowan wish formally to repudiate that Article? If so, we Anglicans should be told.

The priest is not having a go at the good Archbishop. Actually, Purgatory makes sense. There are hints of it in Scripture. And I am spiritually certain that is where a much beloved person – my muse- now is. But I am an Anglican minister. As such, Purgatory is not a doctrine I can hold ex officio. Pity.

John Houghton was an austere, holy man. The rule of his Order, the Carthusians, demanded radical self-denial and total renunciation of the world. The monks were vowed to silence, long devotions and manual work. More mild and harmless persons are hardly imaginable. Yet John Houghton was butchered in 1535 according to the ferocious custom of the times. After grim imprisonment in the Tower of London, he was taken to Tyburn on a hurdle. There he was hung by the neck. After some time, the executioner cut him down, still alive, and began disembowelling him, fully conscious. Lastly, the victim’s body was quartered, i.e. divided into four parts, which were displayed in London. A Zurbaran painting shows the martyr, a rope round his neck, holding in his hand the heart the executioner tore out. ‘The heart of a traitor!’ the executioner would have told the crowd, showing it off.

A foul lie. John Houghton was no traitor. He suffered martyrdom like a true Christian, because he obeyed God, rather than men.

King Henry. There are in fact other holy, innocent people whose forgiveness might be necessary for saving his soul. From St Thomas More to the many religious and lay men and women whom he had tormented and then sent to the scaffold. They were ‘criminals’ whom today would be deemed prisoners of conscience. Maybe it is true, as St Just said, that no one can reign without committing some crime. So, like most earthly rulers, Henry had to dip his hands in blood. However, that bloated, syphilitic tyrant simply takes the biscuit. He was just too awful. May God forgive him – I can’t.

Waxing lyrical about forgiveness is something de rigueur for Christians. ‘Father, forgive them, because they know not what they do’ (St Luke 23:34). Jesus’ awesome prayer, as he was about to be crucified. Words usually invoked to show the extent to which his followers should go in forgiving their most bestial persecutors. I can only bow my head to the Master’s example, though doubting I would ever be able to live up to it. However, note: Jesus prayed to his Father that he would forgive the soldiers who drove the nails into his flesh. He did not say ‘I forgive you’. Why not? Was that too much even for the Messiah, the Lord’s Anointed One? A tantalising thought. But the Letter to the Hebrews teaches that Christ is now in the heavenly places, sitting at the right hand of the Majesty on high, and constantly making intercessions for humanity, so in the end that must be true.

Forgiveness and love of enemy are of course not exclusive to Christianity. A similar injunction exists in the Old Testament. Also, Muhammad’s well-known prayer at Taif springs to mind. The riff-raff of that Arabian city, near Mecca, had abused him and pelted him with stones, drawing blood. Yet Muhammad did not call down Allah’s wrath on his enemies. ‘O God, do not punish them, because they do not know I am your Prophet’, he exemplarily asked, according to the historian Tabari. Luminous words! I wish jihadists meditated on them day and night.

I possess a book entitled ‘A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life’, by the Buddhist master Shantideva. A bodhisattva is a compassionate, radically altruistic being. Someone who postpones his own enlightenment in order to help the salvation of others. To those who seek to become bodhisattvas, Shantideva recommends the following spiritual exercise: ‘Think of your bitterest, most unpleasant, hostile enemy. Perhaps, if he exists, someone who constantly haunts you, who dogs every single footstep of yours. Maybe someone who has cheated you, slandered you, ruined your life, brought you into disrepute or disgrace. Perhaps he has murdered your parents, violated your children, thrown acid into your face, blinded and disfigured you. Visualise him. Have his face before your mind’s eye. Now pray that he may be blessed. That the loveliest, most joyful and beautiful things may happen to him...’ Wallahi! I must leave that supreme heroism to bodhisattvas – such degree of selflessness is too much. Definitely beyond me, alas. Can’t even bring myself to forgive those creeps, the bishops of...So, theology or pathology? I dread to speculate.

Five centuries after St John Houghton suffered his Calvary, John Paul II proclaimed him a saint. Of course, ultimately only God knows who his saints are. But a saint is just that – a saint. His supernal world of grace is a different world from that of the mass of ordinary believers. So, perhaps...perhaps it is good news for all of us, miserable sinners. Saintly prayers do help. And even Henry VIII stands a chance after all.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - The Secret of the Name

Rant Number 396 13 May 2010

‘What’s the secret, Father? I want to know! I must know!’ So spoke the little girl. A cutie called Daisy. A parishioner’s daughter. ‘The secret’ belonged to a story I had just told her. About the hidden, sacred name of ancient Rome. A secret known only to the high priest of the Roman religion. On pain of death, he could not reveal it, or the Eternal City would have fallen to her enemies.

To date, the secret of the name is still unknown. But there are theories. It is a name of power, as Rome was powerful. Paradoxically, that power has been known all along. It consists in a universal, beautiful truth. Like the best secrets, the stupendous, powerful Name is concealed under our very noses. In fact, we all know it. We see it, alive and kicking, in our daily lives. And it always works wonders. On Press TV, the other week, I had positive proof.

We were discussing family values on ‘The Link’ programme. Three panels, in Tehran, Beirut and London. A variety of voices. Emancipated, Westernised feminists side by side with traditional, hijab-wearing girls. A secularist guy behind me scoffed at religious norms. Geoff Dench, author of ‘What Women Want’, argued that it is time for public policy to put more emphasis on public life. A feisty lady disagreed. Marriage, she claimed, can be a trap for women. I ploughed my own, lonely furrow, appealing to commonsense, as well as Scripture – what else do you expect a poor priest to do, eh?

Tempers were getting a bit hot. A note of bitterness, even anger, was in the air. The family still turns people on, that was clear, but it also turns many off – it is a fact. ‘This debate is getting nowhere’ I mused. But then I thought of Rome’s secret name. I mean, its meaning just popped into my mind. ‘That’s it!’ ‘Eureka!’ The penny dropped.

It is like this. When I was a parish priest, it was my privilege to prepare couples for marriage. Very different sets of people. Kensington’s St Mary Abbots (David Cameron’s own parish church!) does not draw only the posh. And not all were young – I once married a couple in their 80’s. But, despite the variations in class, wealth, status, age and so on, all of them had something in common. Something you could see shining on their faces, like sunlight. It was there. It was palpable. It was real. And it made you feel good to see it.

Yes, it was Rome’s secret name, working its never-ending magic. That sacred, winged thing in action. Dig it? Be ready for the shock: here it goes.

In Latin, Rome’s name is spelt ROMA. Now spell it backwards. It becomes...AMOR. The Latin word for LOVE. That was, supposedly, Rome’s secret, mysterious, magic name. The secret of its power. And that was what I saw shining on the bright eyes, the tremulous lips, the faces of the couples who came to me to be married. It was LOVE!

So, towards the end of the programme, as people squabbled and disagreed, inspiration flooded over me. To mention that simple, special, all-powerful word - love. OK, maybe it is my imagination but... it did the trick. It was the magic word. And, as ever, love worked its magic all right. ‘Yes, yes it is love!’ a young woman in Beirut enthused. Other voices echoed her. Love, it is all about love, they twittered away. An orgy of consensus broke out. ‘It’s all about love’ the show host concluded. Where there was discord, there was now unity. Love had done it. The love which of course does not work only in traditional families but also in the lives of countless other people. Like single mums struggling heroically to bring up their children, stuck in a tower block or some ghastly estate. It is love. Like people who lay down their lives for their sick, the poor and the oppressed. Yep. It is love. Even in its distorted, irregular forms. Love. ‘The power that moves the sun and the other stars’, as Dante puts it at the end of the Paradiso.

The poet got it right. Love as the supreme cosmic force. Love as the glue that binds and connects together the mighty frame of the universe. Love as the emanation and manifestation of the power of God.

Why did God create the world? Asks the Sheikh al Akbar, Ibn Arabi, ‘the greatest sheikh’, the supreme Islamic mystic from Al-Andalus. He answers, somewhat arrogantly, in the person of the Deity: ‘I wanted to be known, therefore I created a world’. God desired to be known and therefore created humanity, Ibn Arabi is saying. I, who am of course much greater than Ibn Arabi, wish to go one better. ‘I desired to be loved, therefore I created human beings.’ A mystical utterance, to be sure. Not one rationalist theologians would approve of. Isn’t God self-sufficient? He lacks nothing and needs nothing. How can he want love? But that theology is too desiccated. The God of the philosophers and the God of humanity are different things. ‘God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob – not God of the philosophers’ Pascal said.

The New Testament pushes that mind-boggling paradox of divine love to the extreme. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life’, St John says (3:16). The doctrine of the Incarnation conjoins the divine and the human in Jesus of Nazareth, a man of flesh and blood who walked the earth 2000 years ago, but whose life and power are not spent yet.

I know, the Incarnation is unacceptable, even offensive, to my Muslim friends. Sad but...here I stand, I can say no other.

The secret of the name. AMOR. Did I mislead Daisy? ‘It can’t be as easy as that’, some feel. Too simple. Perhaps. There are other hypotheses. Strictly speaking, the secret remains just that, a secret. Pliny says that Valerius Soranus, the Roman who dared disclose it to the uninitiated, was put to death. But maybe...maybe the secret is that the greatest, truest secret is also the simplest. One democratically shared into by all members of humanity. What we all need. What we all yearn for. That’s it! It’s got to be that. It must be LOVE.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - God & the British Elections

Rant Number 395 4 May 2010

‘I am from the...Party’ announced the weedy young man who had rung my doorbell.

I gave it to him straight: ‘I am opposed to your party’. ‘Why?’ he asked.

‘On theological grounds’ I informed him. He gaped at me, aghast, as if I was a Kalashnikov-toting Taleban and disappeared.

I felt really good about that. The priest little, modest contribution to ‘future civil unrest’, as Lord Ass might term it. Goody.

Lord Ass is actually Lord Justice Laws, a jolly-looking, moon-faced Englishman. The Times reports that Laws has just dismissed requests like that of Lord Carey, formerly Archbishop of Canterbury. Complaining about a series of court rulings against Christians, Carey had argued for specialist panels of judges to hear cases of conscientious religious belief. Such an idea would be ‘irrational’ and lead to a ‘theocracy’, Lord Ass affirmed. That senior religious clerics should have intervened in the debate was ‘illuminative of a future social unrest’. Would it? Really? Wow! Yippee! That’s super! Allahu Akbar! The priest’s dream ticket. Long live the theocratic revolution! Three times insh’allah to that!

The law is an ass, a Dickens character states somewhere. Fits this case like a glove. This particular Ass has particularly picked on Christianity, accusing churchmen of seeking to elevate its status above other faiths. Hardly so – ministers of other religions have concerns similar to Carey’s & conscientious exemptions are all Christians ask for - but, pray, consider. England has a Church by law established. Part of the British constitution, so much so that Anglican priests on being ordained have to swear allegiance to the Queen. 27 bishops – the Lords Spiritual – sit by right in the House of Lords. The monarch is the Anglican Church’s Supreme Governor. Every British coin bears the initials ‘FD’, Fidei Defensor, Defender of the Faith. And all the British monarchs since the XVIII century have to swear to uphold the Protestant religion. Lord Ass however doesn’t give a damn. He sets all that at nought. All subjective, outdated rubbish, he holds.

Very well. Let us then disestablish the Church of England. Toss out the bishops out of the House of Lords. Strip the Queen of the Defender of the Faith title – struck it off coins, too. Let us be thorough about it. And what are those gorgeous religious paintings, representations of saints and martyrs, doing in the lobby of the Houses of Parliament? Let us paint them over. Oh, as we are on it, let us also bin the national flag. You see, the Union Jack consists of not one but three crosses – St George’s, St Andrew’s and St Patrick’s. Let us scrap all that ‘irrational’ symbolism. Replace the crosses with the figure of a braying ass – well, why not? This is indeed the time of the idiot, the ass – the perfect icon of the spirit of our age.

The ass is now England’s hero. It figures. God – the object of theology (theos-logos) – is missing from our politics. God is the Absent One in these pseudo-historical elections. The way it ought to be, the ‘enlightened’ will gloat. Brown, Cameron and Clegg – the leaders of the three main parties – are at one on that one. They steer clear of God. True, on Sunday Brown, the scion of a Presbyterian minister, was haranguing the faithful of a black church about justice, dignity & blah, blah, blah. Why didn’t some nice black lady hit him over the head with her Bible? The sod’s party has harmed Christianity more than a horde of Red Chinese invaders would. It just shows you what a bad idea married clergy is, if creeps like Brown are the result.

Tory David Cameron has bleated a little about ‘values’. That’s bleating in the right direction but you can bet your boots it’s hot air. Values? What values? The Big Society? An inane slogan. Who’d ever want a Small Society? The Stupid Party, the Tories used to be called. And Anglicans were ‘the Tory Party at prayer’. Today they both are the bland, barely-praying air-heads. Besides, beware their dodgy tax plans...aarggh!

Nick Clegg...oh, yes. The Liberal-Democratic Messiah. (Doesn’t sound quite right, eh?) He was hailed like one, at least a few days back. The Saviour nearly bankrupt Britain is waiting for. Amazing grace. Hail, Nick, hail! Save us! Kill the Talebans for us! More popular than J.C., as the Beatles once boasted. Quite hysterical. Look, Nick, I have got a piece of advice for you. If you really want to be a Messiah, just get yourself scourged, crucified, die and then, three days later, rise again. That should do the trick. Otherwise...you are busted flush, sorry.

Even British Muslims, I have to say, have failed. I mean, Islam’s contribution to the political discourse has been nil. Constantly moaning and bewailing Islamophobia isn’t quite it. Certainly, not the caliphate. Despite the occasional rhetoric, official Muslims leaders are happy to feed on the crumbs the Establishment tosses them. One distinguished Muslim personality confided to me: ‘Oh, no, Fr Frank, we don’t want to rock the boat. Muslims must prove they are good citizens. Labour has given us quite a few perks. Any government will follow suit. We are doing very well as it is....Iraq and Afghanistan? Oh, water under the bridge, really...’ Guess the guy looks forward to a peerage. Thirty pieces of silver must have some appeal...

Dr Rowan Williams, the current Canterbury incumbent, has warned the three leaders not to play the ‘immigration card’. He could say no less. The Church must speak out for the weak and the powerless but a) none of the three parties could actually do a sausage about immigration, even if it wanted to, and b) you could argue the right of the Christian conscience not to be downtrodden by our now neo-pagan rulers should also be a high priority for Rowan. The priest prefers him to Carey – an out and out disaster when he was in office – but Rowan is too timid, alas. His remote predecessor, St Thomas Becket, should be his standard and exemplar. Stand up to the neo-pagan Moloch, Rowan, and I’ll be with you. If not, not.

‘We don’t do God’. A notorious remark. By Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s chief black arts master. One shared by our political asses. But

chaps, beware! If you don’t want to do the Living God, he will eventually do you.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli