Moral Monsters
by
Thomas A. Droleskey
Worthy Successors of Herod the Great dealt with the aftermath of the early days of the Israeli invasion of Gaza, which began on Saturday, January 3, 2009, eight days after the bloodthirsty racialist terrorists and killers of Tel Aviv began their bombing of Gaza without regard to the plight of innocent civilians, who are now being "warned" by leaflets dropped by the invaders to flee from anyone associated with the Mohammedan organization, Hamas, that has been in de facto control of Gaza since 2007. It is clear, however, the adherents of the Talmud, steeped in the ravages of Original Sin, regard those outside of their false religion to be sub-humans unworthy of respect, their lives subject to extermination at their own fiat.
As I noted in Worthy Successors of Herod the Great, the ongoing conflict in the Holy Land where Saints Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar worshiped the Infant Christ the King is fueled by the fact that the injustices wrought by the Zionists of Israel upon the Palestinians for the past sixty-one years have bred deep resentment and hatred among a Palestinian populace is three-fourths Mohammedan (and around eight percent Christian, including Maronite Rite Catholics), who, being steeped in the ravages of Original Sin themselves, respond with violence and hatred in the face of the injustices that have been visited upon their people.
The current conflict in Gaza, which was started when Israel responded to rocket firings across the Gaza border into Israel by Hamas that have killed several Israeli civilians, represents an effort on the part of the Mohammedan-based Hamas to generate support for its rule in Gaza amongst members of the late Yasser Arafat's Fatah organization, which is composed of Mohammedans and Palestinian Christian, and is the political arm of the Palestine Liberation Organization (P.L.O.). Although leaders of Hamas may hoped that the Israeli government's leaders would have permitted the resumption of food and humanitarian aid into Gaza under terms of a new cease fire that they, the leaders of Hamas, allowed to expire, Israel responded first with its massive military bombardment, following by its ongoing ground invasion.
Leaders of various Arab governments in the region, most of whom give rhetorical support to the Palestinian cause while wanting to do nothing to provoke all-out war with the nuclear-armed State of Israel (whose leaders would not have a moment's compunction about using nuclear weapons on civilian population centers), have responded to the disproportionate, immoral Israeli bombardment and invasion of Gaza with diffidence that is eerily reminiscent of the response of the leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (N.A.T.O.) when troops from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics invaded Hungary on November 4, 1956: rhetoric of disapproval coupled with total military inaction. Perhaps the singularly most outspoken supporter of the Palestinian cause in the Arab world is a man holed up somewhere in Asia right now, a chap named Osama bin Laden, who believes that his own use of terror can win the day against Israel by convincing policy-makers in the United States of America to reverse its support for the Zionist state, something that the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (A.I.P.A.C.) will never permit. (Remember, Alaska Governor Sarah Heath Palin did her obeisance before leaders of A.I.P.A.C. within days of her having selected as United States Senator John Sidney McCain's vice presidential running mate a little over four months ago now.)
Confident that their military campaign will be unopposed by the involvement of any other nation's military force (leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is Mohammedan nation but not an Arab one, knows that Israeli nuclear warheads would be headed their way if their armed forces attack Israel directly rather, as happened in southern Lebanon three years ago, than by using militias, such as Hezbollah, that have been trained and armed under its auspices), the Israeli military fires away without regard to civilian causalities. A report in yesterday's online edition of The New York Times cited the number of civilians in Gaza who have been killed thus far:
Palestinian medical workers said that another three militants were killed by airstrikes. According to Palestinian Ministry of Health figures on Sunday, nearly 900 Palestinians have died so far in the conflict, including 275 children and 93 women. The figure does not include complete figures for Hamas fighters, who have not been brought to hospitals. (Israeli Troops Push Into Gaza City in Day of Fierce Fighting.)
There is a reason for this callous disregard for civilian life of the Palestinians: adherents of the Talmud consider non-Jews to be sub-humans, meaning that civilians may be targeted most deliberately.
Consider the words of one Mordecai Elihayu, former chief rabbi of the Sephardic branch of Talmudic Judaism, that were written in 2007:
All civilians living in Gaza are collectively guilty for Kassam attacks on Sderot, former Sephardi chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu has written in a letter to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Former Sephardi chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu.
Eliyahu ruled that there was absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during a potential massive military offensive on Gaza aimed at stopping the rocket launchings.
The letter, published in Olam Katan [Small World], a weekly pamphlet to be distributed in synagogues nationwide this Friday, cited the biblical story of the Shechem massacre (Genesis 34) and Maimonides' commentary (Laws of Kings 9, 14) on the story as proof texts for his legal decision.
According to Jewish war ethics, wrote Eliyahu, an entire city holds collective responsibility for the immoral behavior of individuals. In Gaza, the entire populace is responsible because they do nothing to stop the firing of Kassam rockets.
The former chief rabbi also said it was forbidden to risk the lives of Jews in Sderot or the lives of IDF soldiers for fear of injuring or killing Palestinian noncombatants living in Gaza.
Eliyahu could not be reached for an interview. However, Eliyahu's son, Shmuel Eliyahu, who is chief rabbi of Safed, said his father opposed a ground troop incursion into Gaza that would endanger IDF soldiers. Rather, he advocated carpet bombing the general area from which the Kassams were launched, regardless of the price in Palestinian life.
"If they don't stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand," said Shmuel Eliyahu. "And if they do not stop after 1,000 then we must kill 10,000. If they still don't stop we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop."
In the letter, Eliyahu quoted from Psalms. "I will pursue my enemies and apprehend them and I will not desist until I have eradicated them."
Eliyahu wrote that "This is a message to all leaders of the Jewish people not to be compassionate with those who shoot [rockets] at civilians in their houses." (http://www.jpost.com.)
This is not an anomaly. The Chabad branch of Talmudic Judaism has posted on a website its rabbinical "teaching" on the belief that the "souls of the nation," meaning the Gentiles, emanate from the nether world and are thus capable of doing no good in this world:
For in the [case of the] Jew, this soul of kelipah is derived from the kelipah called “nogah”, which also contains good; and the good within this nefesh gives rise to these positive natural traits.
[This kelipah] is from the esoteric “Tree of Knowledge” [which is comprised] of good and evil
The souls of the nations of the world, however, emanate from the other, unclean kelipot which contain no good whatever, as is written in Etz Chayim, Portal 49, ch. 3, that all the good that the nations do, is done out of selfish motives.
Since their nefesh emanates from kelipot which contain no good, it follows that any good done by them is for selfish motives.
So the Gemara comments on the verse, “The kindness of the nations is sin” — that all the charity and kindness done by the nations of the world is only for their self-glorification...
When a Jew acts in a benevolent manner he is motivated mainly out of concern for the welfare of his fellow. The proof of this is that were his fellow not to need his help, this would give him greater pleasure than the gratification derived from his act of kindness.
Concerning the nations of the world, however, this is not so. Their motivation is not the welfare of their fellow; rather, it stems from a self-serving motive — the desire for self-glorification, a feeling of gratification, and the like.
It should be noted that among the nations of the world there are also to be found those whose souls are derived from kelipat nogah. Called “the pious ones of the nations of the world,” these righteous individuals are benevolent not out of selfish motives but out of a genuine concern for their fellow. ( http://www.chabad.org/library/article.)
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who languishes on life support three years after a massive stroke permanently incapacitated him, treat Arabs as sub-humans and was personally responsible for many cold-blooded killings of unarmed civilians:
AS ARIEL SHARON'S career comes to an end, the whitewashing is already underway. Literally overnight he was being hailed as "a man of courage and peace" who had generated "hopes for a far-reaching accord" with an electoral campaign promising "to end conflict with the Palestinians."
But even if end-of-career assessments often stretch the truth, and even if far too many people fall for the old saw about the gruff old warrior miraculously turning into a man of peace, the reality is that miracles don't happen, and only rarely have words and realities been separated by such a yawning abyss.
From the beginning to the end of his career, Sharon was a man of ruthless and often gratuitous violence. The waypoints of his career are all drenched in blood, from the massacre he directed at the village of Qibya in 1953, in which his men destroyed whole houses with their occupants — men, women and children — still inside, to the ruinous invasion of Lebanon in 1982, in which his army laid siege to Beirut, cut off water, electricity and food supplies and subjected the city's hapless residents to weeks of indiscriminate bombardment by land, sea and air.
As a purely gratuitous bonus, Sharon and his army later facilitated the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, and in all about 20,000 people — almost all innocent civilians — were killed during his Lebanon adventure.
Sharon's approach to peacemaking in recent years wasn't very different from his approach to war. Extrajudicial assassinations, mass home demolitions, the construction of hideous barriers and walls, population transfers and illegal annexations — these were his stock in trade as "a man of courage and peace."
Some may take comfort in the myth that Sharon was transformed into a peacemaker, but in fact he never deviated from his own 1998 call to "run and grab as many hilltops" in the occupied territories as possible. His plan for peace with the Palestinians involved grabbing large portions of the West Bank, ultimately annexing them to Israel, and turning over the shattered, encircled, isolated, disconnected and barren fragments of territory left behind to what only a fool would call a Palestinian state.
SHARON'S "painful sacrifices" for peace may have involved Israel keeping less, rather than more, of the territory that it captured violently and has clung to illegally for four decades, but few seem to have noticed that it's not really a sacrifice to return something that wasn't yours to begin with.
His much-ballyhooed withdrawal from Gaza left 1.4 million Palestinians in what is essentially the world's largest prison, cut off from the rest of the world and as subject to Israeli power as before. It also terminated the possibility of a two-state solution to the conflict by condemning Palestinians to whiling away their lives in a series of disconnected Bantustans, ghettos, reservations and strategic hamlets, entirely at the mercy of Israel.
That's not peace. As Crazy Horse or Sitting Bull would have recognized at a glance, it's an attempt to pacify an entire people by bludgeoning them into a subhuman irrelevance. Nothing short of actual genocide — for which Sharon's formula was merely a kind of substitute — would persuade the Palestinian people to quietly accept such an arrangement, or negate themselves in some other way. And no matter which Israeli politician now assumes Sharon's bloody mantle, such an approach to peace will always fail. (The Whitewashing of Ariel Sharon, UCLA International Institute; see also Who is Ariel Sharon? and Israeli Massacre of Palestinians--which contains some graphic photographs of injuries to Palestinians caused by the Israeli military, for an assessment of the Israeli treatment of Palestinians.)
The State of Israel was created by the shedding the blood of the innocent and by the stealing of the homes and land of the Palestinian Arabs who had been living there for centuries upon centuries as they, the Palestinian Arabs, were rounded up and sent to "detention centers" (concentration camps), all with the support of the government of the United States of America (which has its own interesting history of targeting civilians, including the members of various Indian tribes who simply wanted to retain custody of their own lands and, of course, the horrific fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, on February 13-14, 1945, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, on, respectively, August 6 and 9, 1945, to say nothing of the innocent civilians killed in the past six years in Iraq and those killed in Afghanistan since October 7, 2001), which supports today the terror campaign that has been launched by the bloodthirsty killers of Tel Aviv who have no regarded for innocent civilians in their quest to the terror of brute military force to end a conflict that will be ended only when all of those involved are converted to the Catholic Faith and see in each other the impress of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and say, "Blessed is He Who comes in the Name of the Lord."
Neither the adherents of the Talmud of those of the Koran involved in the current moral disaster in Gaza, which, quite rightly, has been called a "big concentration camp" by Renato "Cardinal" Martino, President of the "Pontifical" Council for Justice and Peace (see: Vatican cardinal calls Gaza big concentration camp | World | Reuters), comments that were pretty much disowned by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, S.J. (see Israel Condemns Vatican’s ‘Concentration Camp’), understand or accept the precepts of the Just War Theory as postulated by the Catholic Church. It was an effort to apply the precepts of the Just War Theory during the run-up to the unjust American invasion and occupation of Iraq on March 20, 2003, that I wrote the following that appeared on The Daily Catholic website:
1) There must be a real and imminent threat posed by an aggressor to a nation's security (or to the security of a neighboring nation unable to defend itself). No such threat exists from Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The Bush administration has provided zero evidence about the stockpile of chemical weapons Hussein is said to have. Even if he is trying to build nuclear weapons, he has no way of delivering them to the continental United States. Communist China and North Korea provide a more imminent and realistic threat against the security of the United States than Saddam Hussein. Saudi Arabia and Yemen are proven breeding grounds for Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda networks. The Saudi government has never cooperated with the United States to track down those who bombed a residence housing American military personnel in 1996. Why is there no talk of attacking Saudi Arabia or Yemen?
There is only the slimmest, anecdotal evidence linking Hussein to Osama bin Laden and the other al-Qaeda terrorists. It is wishful thinking on the part of Bush and his advisers to want to project such a link onto global public opinion as being so when it is not. President Bush's October 7, 2002, address did not answer these questions. The continued assertion that something is so does not make it so, no matter whether the public has been convinced to believe in such positivistic assertions.
A retired Marine lieutenant general tells me that I am wrong, that he has seen information he cannot divulge that proves Hussein is a real and imminent threat to this country. If the threat has been so imminent throughout the course of the last few months, however, why has the administration waited until after the midterm Congressional elections and until after the resolution adopted by the Security Council of the United Nations to take action. I don't get it. If a threat is truly real and imminent, then it requires an imminent response.
Doesn't Hussein pose a threat to his own people? Maybe. However, as will be demonstrated in my review of the condition of proportionality, the level of the threat Hussein poses to his own people does not justify the sort of military response under consideration by the United States. Indeed, it is possible we will kill, inadvertently, you understand, more innocent people in our crusade to oust Hussein that he has killed since he assumed power in 1969. And it is not at all clear that there is anyone in Iraq poised to succeed him without a real power struggle. How is "democracy" imposed on a country which has no experience of the wonders provided by such modern enlightenment? See Wilson, W., above.
Insofar as weapons of mass destruction are concerned, we should be more concerned about the weapons of mass destruction found in our own nation: the scissors, the scalpel, the suction machine, the saline solution bottle, the interuterine device, the birth control pill, the abortion pill, the morning after pill, and the hands of so-called physicians, trained to "murder mankind in the womb," as the pagan playwright Juvenal noted in the Second Century A.D. We kill far more people every year by means of abortion, both chemical and surgical than Saddam Hussein has killed in all of the thirty-three years of his repressive rule in Iraq. We are more of a threat to innocent life than Saddam Hussein will ever be.
2) All peaceful means to avoid armed hostilities must be exhausted. Yes, Saddam Hussein has not lived up to the terms of the post-Gulf War United Nations resolutions. He has not permitted arms inspectors to have full and unfettered access to places where nuclear and/or chemical weapons are being manufactured and warehoused. Is the next step from this to be all out war, though? There are means to deal with Hussein, including an occasional well-placed military strike upon targets that have been proven beyond question to contain weapons of mass destruction, short of full-scale war. To jump from the failure of a foreign leader, who poses no direct and immediate threat to the security of the United States, to permit weapons inspections to full-scale war is to make a jump over reason itself. If Hussein is a threat to regional peace in the Middle East, he is Israel's problem to deal with ,not ours. How long must the United States serve, as Patrick J. Buchanan noted so ably over a decade ago, the "Amen" corner for Israel, putting members of our armed forces needlessly at risk to do Israel's bidding?
3) The goals must be well-defined and have a reasonable chance of being realized. In other words, there must be a reasonable chance for success in the pursuit of narrowly defined goals. Goals are to be defined narrowly so as to limit the harm caused by a needlessly protracted war, yes, even when a nation is prosecuting a just cause.
If President Bush believes that one of the goals of a war against Iraq is to make the United States "more secure," then anyone with a modicum of common sense would have to come to the conclusion that George W. Bush is badly misled. However, even if the United States can remove Saddam Hussein from power after destroying, once again, the infrastructure of Iraq and killing thousands upon thousands of innocent Iraqis, this will do nothing to make the United States more secure. Indeed, scores of suicide bombers will be motivated to avenge our military action. American military action against Iraq at this time makes this country far less secure-and gives the Federal government the excuse it desires to put further restrictions on speech and movement within our own borders.
It is not clear what specific levels of military force will be necessary to remove Hussein from power. He has bunkers throughout the country. He has more doubles than the late Francisco Franco. Yes, the United States has the brute force to bomb Iraq into the stone age, as the late Air Force General Curtis LeMay said what we should do to North Vietnam when he was introduced as George Wallace's Vice Presidential running-mate on the American Independent Party ticket in 1968. (Lest Howard Phillips pick me apart on that one, I do know that Wallace had at least one other running-mate listed in some states. The rules for ballot access required him to list a candidate in some states before LeMay agreed to run with him. Howard will know the name.) If the use of said force does force the removal of Hussein, either by death or exile, then Iraq will be dependent upon the largesse of American taxpayers for decades so that it can be rebuilt. And there is no guarantee that someone worse than Hussein might rise to the surface in a few years to topple an American puppet regime, mobilizing a virtual guerilla jihad against American forces stationed there for years on end. What kind of success is that?
4) The good end being sought must not be outweighed by the foreseen evil to be done. This is known as the Catholic principle of proportionality, which states that a good end can be rendered unjust to pursue if a judgment is made that the amount of the foreseen evil to be done in the prosecution of a just war will cause greater evils than the one the war is being waged to eradicate. This is different than the heresy of proportionalism (heretics use Catholic sounding phrases so as to connect themselves in the minds of Catholics as understanding Catholic principles), which asserts that a preponderance of "good intentions" and of the "relative exigencies of the moment" can make a moral act that is naturally evil capable of being pursued justly on the part of one who believes the weight of the evidence in his case justifies a subjective violation of an objective moral law to do good. Thus, proportionalism, which has been propounded by Father Richard McCormick, S.J. (not to be confused with the priest from the Archdiocese of Hartford, Connecticut, who foments dissent at the University of Notre Dame and in his nationally syndicated columns, Father Richard McBrien), can be used by a woman to justify the killing of her preborn child. After all, more good will be done in her life by killing the child than if she permitted him to interfere unduly with her life's goals.
The principle of proportionality contained in the Just War Theory requires a very careful and prayerful prudential judgment to be made by a policy-maker prior to the advent of war. This is not a matter of infallibly received truth. This is a judgment that has got to be based on a clear-headed and most realistic assessment of the harm that will be caused by the onset of armed hostilities. The impending war with Iraq will cause far more harm than good, as I outlined in my previous section. Rather than making us more secure, we will be less secure. We will contribute to the furtherance of anti-American sentiment around the world, and will contribute to deteriorating, not improving, the situation within Iraq itself. How many truly innocent Iraqis must die to liberate their country of a man who is far less of a threat to them on a daily basis than American "freedom" is to unborn children every day in this country?
Mind you, I am an American. I love my country. However, as I have noted over and over again, love is an act of the will. To love another is to will his good. We must love others as God loves us. God's love for us is an act of His Divine Will to provide us with all of the supernatural helps we need to save our souls so that we will be with Him for all eternity in Heaven. Our love for others is premised upon doing or saying nothing that will in any way interfere with the salvation of their immortal souls. And our love of our nation must seek her good, the ultimate expression of which is her subordination to the Social Kingship of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as it is exercised by Holy Mother Church. Pope Pius XI noted this very clearly in Quas Primas in 1925. This is Catholic doctrine from which no one can dissent legitimately (including popes themselves, as this is the constant teaching of the Church which is beyond the ability of any pope to change).
There is enough, though, of nationalism left in my bones to say, "Ah, forget the Just War Theory. Saddam Hussein is a despot. The Iraqis are all infidels. Let's just blast 'em. They deserve it." However, that is not a sentiment in concert with the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law. Anyone, infidel or not, guilty of crimes against innocent human life must be brought to justice. A nation is not justified to engage in the use of massive military force to remove one person in a crusade for the imposition of "ideals" that themselves undermine the binding precepts of God's laws and His sovereignty over men and their nations. And it is worth noting that Iraq is a fairly secular nation in the Islamic world, and there are more than a handful of Catholics living in Iraq who trace their Catholic ancestry back to the Apostolic era. Hussein might be a despot. An application of the principle of proportionality to our imminent war with Iraq reveals once again that said war is not justified.
There is also the real possibility that war with Iraq could escalate rather quickly in the Middle East. This is not a possibility that it is out of the question.
5) As far as is possible, noncombatants must never be deliberately targeted in warfare. The United States has a mixed record when it comes to the realization of this part of the Just War Theory. Our military forces have tried to use remarkable restraint in many instances. Other times, however, they have not. William Tecumseh Sherman used raw terrorism against civilian population centers as he cut a swath of fiery destruction from the Atlantic Ocean to Atlanta during the War between the States. As noted earlier, we aided bloodthirsty revolutionaries in Mexico. Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki (the latter two of which were known to contain the highest concentrations of Catholics in Japan) were bombed during World War II. Something less than laser precision caused thousands of civilian casualties during the Gulf War and during our continued bombing in Afghanistan, which commenced on October 7, 2001. It is unclear what steps would be taken to protect noncombatants in a war with Iraq, especially in light of the fact that Hussein is not above placing forcibly his own citizens in military areas to use them as a shield against bombing. Presuming that best efforts would be made by the United States military, the injustice of the cause itself, though, renders the inadvertent bombing of civilians in a war with Iraq beyond the pale.
6) A just cessation to hostilities must be realized as soon as possible. Once again, the record of the United States in this regard is very mixed. The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done so as to force an unconditional surrender from Japan, something that the Soviets insisted on in the Potsdam Conference as their condition for entering the war against Japan (so that they could recover claims lost in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05.) Japan was willing to surrender conditionally. Those who are convinced of their absolute moral and racial superiority over others, though, cannot consider ending hostilities even if it is possible to conclude a peace that is just without having humiliated one's enemies. Not even considering in this reflection that war with Iraq could escalate regionally and globally quite quickly, the United States would likely continue hostilities until Saddam Hussein's body is found (and proved to be his by means of DNA testing) or he surrenders and is brought to a show trial in the United States. Once again, the United States might prolong a war by seeking an unconditional surrender.
President George W. Bush lives, as so many people have noted, in a Manichean world. The United States is "good." Her enemies are "bad." We are the embodiment of virtue and truth and goodness and freedom and democracy. Others are the embodiment of all that is evil. The President has the temerity to say that we value "precious life" while castigating those foreign leaders who do not. What he doesn't realize is if we lived in a Catholic world, an alliance of Catholic leaders would be asking themselves if the conditions existed to invade the United States and to overthrow a regime that permits the killing of innocent human beings under cover of law, permits the manufacture, sale, and exportation of contraceptives both domestically and internationally, exports all manner of pornographic entertainment around the world to make corporate executives (who donate mightily to both Democrat and Republican campaign war chests), and which undermines the stability of families by funding sterilization abroad and promoting special rights for sodomites at home. This nation has put to death over 40 million innocent unborn children under cover of law by surgical abortion alone in the past thirty years. The government of this nation poses a far more imminent threat to its own citizens than Saddam Hussein does to his, and we do so sanctimoniously under the guise our being a peaceful and just and freedom-loving nation.
No, I am not calling for any nation to invade the United States. Even if an alliance of Catholic nations did exist in the world today, which it does not, the just cause of seeking to end violence sanctioned by the American government upon innocent life would not be accomplished by military action from those nations or from a revolt of American citizens. The sheer force of the American regime would make a successful prosecution of such an enterprise next to impossible in human terms, thereby failing to fulfill condition three The goal must be well-defined and have a reasonable chance of being realized listed in Part One in this Just War Theory essay.
What I am pointing out, however, is that we are the embodiments of virtue no more than Iraq under its present leadership is the embodiment of Bush's "axis of evil." No causus belli exists for the United States to commence hostilities with Iraq at this time. Oh, the war might make Americans feel good for a time. But it will not make us more secure. Others will disagree with this assessment. However, history is not on their side.
As citizens, we have the obligation at all times for the safety and well-being of our troops. If war does break out, then we will pray for their mission to be successful and for the war to be short-lived. It is a fundamental requirement of the natural law to pray for the safety of those charged with the protection of a country's borders. We want every single one of our service personnel to come back home safely to their families, and we want innocent civilians kept from harm's way in Iraq. I will shed no tears if Saddam Hussein is deposed. The deposing of Saddam Hussein, however, will not make this country or the world one bit more secure than it was before. And it will not produce regional peace and security in the Middle East.
What is my alternative to making the United States more secure apart from ending baby-killing under cover of law? Well, that "apart" is a big part of making us more secure. Additionally, however, we can follow the advice of Patrick Buchanan, who has been telling us for some time how we have made ourselves less secure by our lax, politically motivated immigration laws - and by the failure of presidential administrations, both Republican and Democrat, to enforce the deportation of those persons who are here illegally and who pose a real and serious threat to the security of the citizens of this nation within our very boundaries. President Bush lacks the political will to do this as it is not popular, especially with Islamic pressure groups. The plain fact of the matter is, however, that most of the September 11 terrorists would not have been able to execute their schemes of mass murder as easily as they did if they had been denied student visas and/or deported for coming from countries hostile to the interests of the United States of America. Islam of its nature is not, as President Bush as simplistically and positivistically asserted, a "religion of peace." Its adherents should not be permitted to enter this country as anything other than temporary visitors whose deportation is immediate if they should overstay their visas. It is as though we have learned nothing from the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 and from the Battle at the Gates of Vienna in 1683. There are slews of Mohammedan sleeper agents in this country precisely because one presidential administration after another has played politics with the security of our nation by not seeking to buck the forces of political correctness. A firmly enforced immigration policy will make us far more secure than all of the bombs dropped on either Afghanistan or Iraq.
War is sometimes justified. Sometimes it is not. However, even a just war can never be truly successful unless we realize the root of all wars is found in a wounded human nature caused by Original Sin and our own Actual Sins. As long as people and their nations make war upon God and His Holy Church by means of their unrepentant sins, then all use of armed hostilities, no matter the justice of the cause at issue, will fail to provide any true security for any nation or for the world.
The United States of America can never be made secure as long as she permits the American holocaust to continue. Her claims to be an instrument of justice in the world are eroded entirely when she will not take even basic steps to stop the shedding of innocent blood in her midst.
As nasty a man as Saddam Hussein might be, as important as it is to bring those who are directly tied to al Qaeda to justice, we have to understand that the real enemies of American security are within our own borders. They are the people, both citizens and office holders, who support the destruction of innocent human life and who make war upon the rights of Christ's true Church to direct matters of fundamental justice for the realization of the common good here and the fullest measure of happiness imaginable in eternity.
There are many, if not most, Americans who will disagree with this analysis. There are some who might even put my patriotism into question, thinking that I am giving aid and comfort to the likes of former Vice President Albert Arnold Gore and Senate Majority Leader Thomas Daschle and Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and the scores of professional leftists who want to do nothing domestically or internationally to secure the safety of American citizens. I am not. As a Catholic, I am simply making a non-infallible prudential application of the standards of the Just War Theory, especially in light of how we are one of the most terroristic nations on earth.
The only calculus used by the Zionists of the State of Israel and by their Mohammedan antagonists in such organizations as Hamas and Hezbollah is realpolitik: will a particular military strategy achieve its goals even if civilians must die in the process. Trying to assess military operations in light of the Just War Theory is anathema to men who reject the Sacred Divinity of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, He Who is the Prince of Peace Incarnate. Fueled by their captivity to the devil by means of Original Sin, Mohammedans and adherents of the Talmud are content to target the innocent and condemn them to death to achieve "goals" that lead only to more violence and more killing in the future.
Future generations of Hamas fighters and recruits for Hezbollah will result from the indiscriminate bloodletting unleashed by the moral monsters of Tel Aviv, continuing a cycle of bloodshed that delights the devil no end as the very land in which Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ was conceived in His Most Blessed Mother's Virginal and Immaculate Womb, born in the cradle in the stable in the cave in Bethlehem, raised to adulthood in Nazareth, and preached before His Passion, Death and Resurrection in Jerusalem suffers yet from the consequences of the Abrahamic Jews' rejection of Him as the Messiah and from the presence of infidels who blaspheme Him as they deny His Sacred Divinity.
January 20, 2009, will mark the one hundred sixty-seventh anniversary of the apparition of Our Lady, the very Mother of God, to a Catholic-hating Jewish man, Alfonse Ratisbonne. Our Lady appeared to the twenty-seven year-old Alfonse as she did on the Miraculous Medal that had been given to him by his brother Theodore, who had already converted to the Faith. Ratisbonne was converted and became a Jesuit priest, Father Marie-Alfonse Ratisbonne, leaving the Jesuits to work with his brother, also a priest, in the Holy Land for the conversion of the Jews, a mission that was blessed quite specifically by Pope Pius IX.
We need to pray to Fathers Marie-Alfonse and Theodore Ratisbonne for the conversion of the monsters of Tel Aviv and to pray also for this intention to Father Vincent Ferrer, O.P., who was responsible for the conversion of thousands of Jews and Mohammedans in the Iberian Peninsula and southern France at the end of the Fourteenth and the beginning of the Fifteenth Centuries. There is no other peace plan for the Middle East than that to be found in a conversion of everyone there to the Catholic Faith as justice is done to the aggrieved Palestinians without vengeance and as the then former Mohammedans and Talmudic Jews forgive each other as they had been given in the Baptismal font.
As I noted two weeks ago now, we must, for our own parts, fulfill Our Lady's Fatima Peace Plan in our own lives, especially as we make reparation for our own sins and those of the whole world by offering one Rosary after another to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. All human "peace plans" to produce "peace" in the Middle East have come to naught. Only Our Lady's Fatima Peace Plan can succeed, which is why we must be earnest about fulfilling it in our own lives on a daily basis so that we will be counted as faithful disciples of Christ the King, praying as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit.
Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary turned back the Mohammedan fleet at the Battle of Lepanto and turned back the Mohammedans at the Gates of Vienna and drove the Soviets out of Austria, as well as keeping Dutch Calvinists from invading Lima, Peru, and Manila in The Philippines. Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary can help us be her Divine Son's true "peacemakers" as we pray for the conversion of the moral monsters who bomb civilians while we make reparation for our own sins at the same time that have made us, truth be told, monster in our own right in our various rebellions against the Most Holy Trinity.
Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon.
Vivat Christus Rex!
Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us!
Saint Joseph, Patron of Departing Souls, pray for us.
Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.
Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.
Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.
Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.
Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.
See also: A Litany of Saints
Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?
