Saudi Arabia Burning

News Update: Santorum has withdrawn from the race, but no endorsement yet.

Two days after Easter, it seemed appropriate to have a little chat about our “friend and ally” Saudi Arabia. We all know that Saudi Arabia is hostile to Christianity. Many of us first realized how hostile during the first Gulf War when the Saudis. ”

The beleaguered protectors of the Holy Sites reached out pleading hands to the United States, crying: “Save us from Saddam Hussein. Save us. Oh, and by the way, when you get here don’t even think of celebrating Christmas.
For decades now, the Saudis have forbidden the building of new Christian churches in Saudi Arabia, and the penalty for a Muslim who converts to Christianity remains death. But that’s simply not enough for the purveyors of the religion of peace. So the Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz al-Shaikh, chief cleric of the Saudi kingdom, has issued a fatwa that remedies that deficiency. He has called for the physical destruction of all Christian churches within the confines of the oil-rich, freedom-poor nation.

The fatwa was picked up by Islamist news stations in other parts of Jihadistan, but so far the Saudi king’s state-controlled media have not reported on the latest round of Islamic religious tolerance. Saudi king Abdullah does not want his phony interfaith “dialogue centers” in Europe endangered by the cleric’s move. He may also fear that the current robe-kissing, deep-bowing American president will be defeated in November and replaced by a new commander-in-chief with a backbone. It should also be noted that if the monarch were truly interested in interfaith dialogue he might open a center or two in his own kingdom.

On March 30, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had a private meeting with the king, in which the topic was allegedly the miserable state of women in the sand kingdom. It is also rumored that she brought up the fatwa, but that remains unconfirmed. If she did discuss the matter with the king, he must have replied “shut up, foolish woman” since nothing has been heard from State since.

The news concerning the fatwa first came out in the Kuwaiti newspapers. Kuwait’s parliament was kicking around the idea of a ban on new church construction to match Saudi Arabia’s. They invited al-Shaikh to speak on the topic, but the chief Saudi cleric figured it was a dandy time to go that one step farther and propose the destruction of existing churches as well.

The grand mufti speaks officially only for the Saudi Muslim state, and then only after consultation with the king. But al-Shaikh was taking advantage of his position as chief cleric for the home of the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina, a position which gives his words significance outside the Saudi realm. It’s likely no coincidence that he made his decree known in a neighboring Muslim state which was considering banning all Christian churches. Although he has no authority outside Saudi Arabia, this message was addressed to all Muslims. It will have an effect, even in those states where Sunni-Shiite rivalries are vicious. Even mass murderers are know to occasionally rally around a common cause such as destroying Christian places of worship. Take Egypt and Lebanon for starters.

Think of it this way. The Pope is the single most influential Christian in all of Christendom, but his secular authority does not extend beyond the territorial limits of the Vatican, and his religious doctrine cannot be enforced outside the Roman Catholic Church. Still, anything he says is going to be taken note of by his fellow Christians. If the Pope declared that the doctrine of transubstantiation must be enforced throughout the Christian world, Protestants would take little note of it.

But what if the Pope announced an official decree (called a “bull,” something very similar to an Islamic fatwa) requiring the destruction of all mosques in Italy, the home of Roman Catholicism? And what if he did so in an address to the British Parliament? You can let your imagination run wild with that. But two things are sure. The secular authorities would declare the bull to be in violation of civil law, and many Christians would be horrified.

But in theory, at least, it would be an order to Italian Catholics, an encouragement to Catholics elsewhere in the world, and a call to arms even for many Protestants. With or without the support of the majority of Christians, trouble would soon be in the offing among those who are scarcely able to tolerate Islam in their homelands now. Medieval Popes did something very similar. The generic term for it is The Crusades.

In reality, of course, the current Pope is a real man of peace, as opposed to Islam and its major clerics who are advocates of the phony religion of peace. So don’t expect any Papal calls for mosque demolitions. In Saudi Arabia and adjacent lands, religious tolerance is honored more in the breach than in the observance. But at least until this fatwa came along, there was a small pretense that Islam was not out to destroy or reduce Christianity into submission.

And let us remember, that the Arabic word “Islam” does not mean “peace.” It means “submission.” Islamists and weak-kneed non-Muslims would have you believe that the word means “voluntary submission to the will of Allah.” Would that it were true, but the words of the grand mufti prove otherwise.