~ Emma Park, Editor

In the month since Hamas attacked Israel, there have been dozens of pro-Palestine protests across the world. Where I live in Canada, a high profile rally in the city of Mississauga went viral when one of the attendees gave this interview where she claims, among other things, that Hamas would never behead babies because ‘they are a Muslim group’ and doing so would be ‘against Islam’. She says Hamas is a resistance, not a terrorist group, and everything they have done in Israel is justified. Many people who watched this clip were horrified to hear the atrocities against Israelis being so casually dismissed, and it did not help that the woman in the interview was sporting large, golden earrings made to look like machine guns while donning the hijab. So much for a ‘religion of peace’.

When I watched this interview, I was neither shocked nor surprised, but instead was reminded of my upbringing in Pakistan and what we were taught about Jews and Israel. Now, I am not an Islamic scholar, nor will I claim to know what the Quran really says about Jewish people and their history. All I know is that hatred of Jews is a very normal, accepted and even encouraged aspect of modern Islamic life and teachings. What we are seeing at these pro-Palestine rallies, I suspect, is more sinister than just fighting for the human rights of Palestinians, as so much of the mainstream media would like us to believe.

Here is a fact: on the top of every page of a Pakistani passport is the phrase, ‘This passport is valid for all countries of the world except Israel.’ Until 2021, Bangladesh’s passport also bore this text, prohibiting citizens from traveling to Israel. The Malaysian passport still has it. In total, over a dozen Muslim-majority countries do not admit those with an Israeli passport, six of which also do not admit people who have evidence of travel to Israel.

In contrast, according to Wikipedia, there are (or at least were before the present conflict) very few states, and none of the major Muslim ones, whose citizens are automatically refused entry to Israel – although citizens from most Muslim countries require confirmation from the Israeli Foreign Ministry before a visa can be issued, and it may be refused.

It is easy to assume that countries like Pakistan and Malaysia do not recognise the state of Israel because, like the hive-mind Borg from Star Trek, the Muslim ummah stands in solidarity with Palestinians and their liberation. But there is another reason why Muslim states are so opposed to the idea of Israel for Jews. Since as long as I can remember, I was taught, by my parents, teachers and faith leaders, that Jewish people were damned by God and, as punishment, they would never have their own homeland. This is what I suspect, though I cannot prove it, is driving at least some of the anti-Semitism we are seeing in Islamic communities: the idea that if Israel is made a permanent, Jewish state, then the word of God is being disobeyed, and Muslims have taken it upon themselves to make sure Jewish people are punished just as Allah intended by denying them a right to have their own country. As one Twitter user, Kaz Nejatian, put it: ‘I grew up in Iran. Every day, I was forced to chant “death to Israel”. Generations of children have been brainwashed to believe Jews are evil.’

I think back on my childhood and adolescence in Lahore, Pakistan and can clearly see how anti-Jewish sentiment was propagated through society. In history class, we never learned about the Holocaust. World War II was abstracted into a far-away conflict involving the Axis and Allies, the signing of treaties, and that was about it. Who Hitler was and what he did to millions of European Jews was never mentioned, nor was the fact that anti-Semitism was one of the driving forces behind the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany. Teaching this part of history might have had the unintended consequence of casting Jewish people in a more sympathetic light, and that could not be allowed. How else could they teach children in their Islamic Studies class that during the time of Muhammad, Jews were conniving villains who cast black magic spells on our Holy Prophet? Between world history and Islamic Studies, the word of the Quran always won out.

A few weeks ago, I was doing some research for a piece I am writing on Pakistani movies and came across a paper on black magic in Pakistani television shows. It was published in 2021 in a scientific journal for archaeology and paleontology and was written by professors working at universities in Pakistan. Its thesis was that portraying black magic on TV might lead people to think it was okay to engage in the practice. The authors were against this because they claimed that Islam prohibits the practice of black magic, so filmmakers and artists should refrain from showing it in their work. The paper then goes on to say (sic), ‘It is surprising for some folks [to] recognize about the black magic has such intense power that it had also affected our beloved Prophet Hazrat Muhammad(PBUH). The bewitching incident of Hazrat Muhammad(PBUH) is narrated as a Jew requested the famous sorcerer named Labaid bin Asim to cast spell on Hazrat Muhammad (PBUH) and offered three gold coins as a reward.’

In other words, in 2023, research papers coming out of Pakistani institutions are still casually dropping anti-Semitic tales taken from religious texts as ‘proof’ of the dangers of black magic. Even science is not sacred.

I do not have the expertise to judge whether or not the Palestinian people have legitimate grievances against the Israeli state. I do find it curious, though, that in other places around the world where Muslims are suffering, our global ummah has little to say. The Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, the Uyghurs in China, and most recently the Afghans seeking asylum in Pakistan who are forcefully being deported back to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, have not generated even a fraction of the outrage that the Palestinian cause inspires in the hearts and souls of Muslims. Thousands of people protested in the streets of Pakistan against airstrikes in Gaza after 7 October. But few are willing to fight for Afghan Muslims, including children, and their human right to seek safety in Pakistan.

It is strange that Muslim children in Gaza apparently generate more support than thousands of Afghan children born in Pakistan, who now have to go to a country they know nothing about, facing an uncertain future, including potential death due to widespread famine in Afghanistan. Not to mention the Yemeni civil war, currently in its ninth year, where more than 100,000 children have died from starvation alone. Maybe because this is a conflict between ‘brother’ Muslim nations, and therefore does not require the same amount of care and attention. The more important thing, it seems, is to make sure Jews never have a country to call their own.

An inferiority complex may also play a role in anti-Jewish sentiment. As the American economist Thomas Sowell once put it: ‘[Jews] are people who have succeeded an awful lot in the midst of other people who have not…as long as you succeed, you’re going to be hated.’

To explain away this conundrum—how can Jews be so successful if they’re damned by God?—many Muslim children are taught that only ‘true’ Muslims will be guaranteed a place in heaven on the day of judgement, and anyone who does not believe in Allah and his Prophet is going to go to hell if the good-versus-bad scale does not tip in their favour. Not Muslims though: they have a one-way ticket straight to the land of milk and honey, if they are the ‘right’ kind of Muslim. What sect that is, no one knows, and the only way to make sure you do not end up in hell with the Jews and Hindus is to devote your life to Islam and make sure you are among the lucky ones to have cracked the code. People of the book—Jews and Christians—can at least hope to make it to heaven if they are good, but bona fide heathens like Hindus and Sikhs have no chance of joining us chosen ones in the Great Beyond.

All this is to say that anti-Semitism, and discrimination against non-Muslims in general, thrives in large segments of the Muslim world across the globe. Its roots can only be understood if we are honest about how religion is being used to brainwash entire nations to get on the anti-Semitic bandwagon. The conflict in Israel and Palestine has no hope of finding a solution if Muslims around the world do not start doing some soul-searching about what exactly it is about the state of Israel that whips them into such a frenzy. Yet seeing the growing number of pro-Palestine protests, I do not see such self-reflection happening any time soon.

The post An Islamic (mis)education about Israel appeared first on The Freethinker.

The blood-soaked holy land

The Israel-Palestine conflict today involves a tangled and tragic web of disputes, but it is ultimately rooted in competing religious ideologies. So long as fanatical Jews, Muslims, and Christians see Palestine as their personal holy land, it is hard to see how the conflict will ever be resolved.

In such a politically complex dispute, with so many historic grievances and so much suffering on both sides, it is hard to understand what is really happening on the ground, let alone get any sense of how the conflict could or should be ended. Some form of the old two-state solution, moribund as it seems now, is probably still the only viable path to peace. So long as bigotry and fanaticism reign on all sides, however, that outcome is unlikely to be realised.

Even if a compromise is reached, as Kunwar Khuldune Shahid argues in his essay on Hamas and Islamist-leftist extremism, ‘the solution is still set to be as arbitrarily imposed as the problem was.’ We hope to offer further reflections on the conflict from different perspectives in the coming weeks.

A heroine honoured

In other, somewhat brighter, news, the Iranian feminist Narges Mohammadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on 6 October. Unfortunately, Mohammadi is currently languishing in a Tehran prison for her anti-regime activism, particularly her opposition to the hijab. The Iranian mullahs are the paymasters of Hamas and are almost certainly responsible for the attack in Israel – which was, coincidentally, launched the day after the Nobel was announced. But Mohammadi represents something very troubling for the mullahs: the growth in Iran of a mass movement for secular democracy and equality between the sexes. Let us hope this movement succeeds sooner rather than later.

An Islamic party pooped

An application to form a Party of Islam in the UK was rejected by the Electoral Commission last month. The application, sent just days after Hamas’s attack on Israel, seems to have been put together rather shoddily. As EU Today reported:

‘In its official application, the Party of Islam states “We are a party who has been created to help all of the minority in the land of Great Britain have a voice.”

The Party of Islam has also stated its intention to “help all of the minority in the land of Great Britain have a voice,” further stating: “We will make sure that all problems which lingure (sic) in the great country of Great Britain is defeated.”’

Everyone should be free to set up political organisations of whatever stripe they want, of course, but one does wonder what exactly the Party of Islam would stand for.

Would a PoI prime minister disestablish the Church of England? Would there be a Mosque of England in its place? Would blasphemy laws be reenacted? What stance would the party take on, say, the Batley Grammar School teacher who is still in hiding after displaying an image of Muhammad in his classroom in 2021? What would their social policies look like?

Given that another, now defunct, Islamic political party wanted to bring back the death penalty for homosexuality, is it too far-fetched to wonder whether such parties are really just Islamist outfits exploiting the language of inclusivity to further their theocratic agenda? Surely not! But who knows? Perhaps, just in case, it is time for Britain to adopt something like the First Amendment and become a properly secular country…

Christians against…sponges?

On 4 November, Freethinker contributor and National Secular Society historian Bob Forder gave a lecture at Conway Hall entitled ‘Condoms, Sponges and Syringes: The 19th century pioneers of family planning’. Curiously for a lecture unrelated to abortion, it drew the ire of an evangelical ‘pro-life’ group, who turned up to protest, parading some gruesome images.

A strange turn of events, to be sure, but the anti-spongers are entitled to their freedom of speech, and they caused no serious disruption. As Bob Forder told The Freethinker, ‘there were no interruptions apart from some raucous hymn singing when they left.’

Yet another gay orgy scandal for the Catholic Church

Finally, it is always amusing to have new additions to the ancient canon of stories about debauched and perfidious priests. Grzegorz Kaszak’s resignation from his post as bishop of the diocese of Sosnowiec, Poland, was accepted by Pope Francis late in October. No reason was given for the good bishop’s resignation, but it is curious to note that, under his reign, Sosnowiec has seen more gay sex scandals than the sweetly innocent might expect from a diocese of the Roman Catholic Church.

In 2010, the acting rector of a Sosnowiec seminary got into a fight in a gay club. This August, one of Kaszak’s priests was arrested for trying to prevent paramedics from entering his apartment after a man, having overdosed on erectile dysfunction pills during a gay orgy, collapsed. The priest later said, ‘I perceive this as an obvious attack on the church, including the clergy and the faithful, in order to humiliate its position, tasks and mission.’ Well, of course!

Sexual scandal is hardly new for the Catholic Church. Gay orgy scandals, in particular, seem to be as popular among priests as poppers are at…well, gay orgies. Or take another example, just for fun. In 2017, Luigi Capozzi, private secretary to Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, was arrested by the Vatican police for snorting cocaine during another such orgy in the cardinal’s apartment (the cardinal, it should be noted, was not present).

The church continues to claim divine authority to pronounce on morality and condemn gay people while running an organised system of child sexual abuse—another thing that would be funny if it were not true.

As for the hypocrisy of its priests, who uphold anti-gay doctrine while bedding half the men in their dioceses—well, let them have their fun. They could, after all, be doing much worse things—like preaching. Though if you need a supply of erectile dysfunction pills for your orgy, you probably have no future in the business.

Enjoy this article? Subscribe to our free fortnightly newsletter for the latest updates on free thought. Or make a donation to support our work into the future.

Further reading:

The Israel-Palestine conflict

Bloodshed in Gaza: Islamists, leftist ideologues, and the prospects of a two-state solution, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Religion and the Arab-Israeli conflict, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Islamist ideology and anti-Semitism

The radicalisation of young Muslims in the UK: an ongoing problem?, by Khadija Khan

Iranian resistance to theocracy

The ‘Women’s Revolution’: from two activists in Iran, by Rastine Mortad and Sadaf Sepiddasht

Batley Grammar School case

Blasphemy in the classroom, by Emma Park (New Humanist)

Free speech in Britain: a losing battle? – Freethinker

Abuse in the Catholic Church

The Pope’s Apology, by Ray Argyle

The post Faith Watch, November 2023 appeared first on The Freethinker.

A key element of secularism is opposing the age-old symbiosis between rulers (or governments) and state religion, each dependent on mutual legitimisation. King James I was under no illusion: ‘No bishop, no king.’ And as the American lawyer, writer, and orator Robert Green Ingersoll noted in 1881, ‘the throne and altar were twins – two vultures from the same egg.’

One of the most treacherous examples in the last century of this symbiosis was the way in which France’s Roman Catholic hierarchy propped up the Nazi puppet Maréchal Pétain during World War II.

I remind readers just how relatively recent this all is. For me it is not dusty academic history; as I will demonstrate, it is on the cusp of living memory. It is a case history of the fragility of liberty, something too many of our politicians – even those who claim to be historians – seem to be very careless about.

On 22 June 1940, Philippe Pétain signed an armistice with Hitler, conceding defeat. As a result, while the Nazis battled to overwhelm the northern half of the country, the southern half, euphemistically entitled ‘Free France’, was nominally under Pétain’s control, relieving Hitler of any need to deploy forces there. The Pétain regime was based in the spa town of Vichy, chosen for its many lavish hotels and transport links.

Pétain’s grip on power was tenuous and he needed all the support he could summon. Who better to fulfil this role than the Catholic Church, preaching to the nation from its pulpits each week? The purges against the Jews had already started, even in France, but that proved to be no impediment to the Church’s unconditionally supporting Pétain. And not just the French Church. In August 1941 Marshal Pétain enquired about the Vatican’s view of his collaborationist government’s anti-Jewish legislation. According to the report of the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission, top Vatican officials found ‘no objection to these restrictions so long as they were administered with justice and charity and did not restrict the prerogatives of the Church.’

The Church’s leaflet, addressed in 1942 to every French person, made just one point: that it was a religious obligation to support Pétain, almost as if he were a saint. He was already a national hero for his military role in World War I. The leaflet comprised sycophantic pro-Pétain statements from practically every senior cleric in the country. It is not hard to imagine devout matriarchs and other pious family members castigating detractors – for example, those in the resistance or protecting Jews – simply because anything short of unquestioning allegiance was portrayed as a sin against the diktat of the Church. In 1942, Bishop Lusaunier went as far as to direct that ‘the French should obey Pétain, not De Gaulle’ – who was leading the resistance from London.

It is not surprising that there is little or no evidence of a public backlash to the leaflet at that point. The Vichy regime was a police state, whose rules affected every single life. Even children had to sing a daily hymn to Pétain: Maréchal, nous voilà! (‘Marshal, here we come’).

The history of the Catholic Church is replete with its support for the oppressors over the oppressed, going back at least to the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores of South America in the 15th and 16th centuries. In the case of the Church’s collaboration with Pétain, its price for this Faustian pact was the reversal of laïcité, the secularist reforms of the opening years of the 20th century, from which the Church was still reeling. For example, France’s Third Republic had proscribed religious instruction or observance in publicly funded schools. On 9 July 1940, the Government of the Republic was transferred to Pétain’s control. Defeat was blamed on the Jews, Communists, atheists and Freemasons, and portrayed as divine retribution for the secularist reforms.

Religion was let back into publicly funded schools. Public funds were permitted to be used to finance religious schools. Pétain closed the teacher training establishments set up after the Revolution. From 1943, communes were required to pay for church maintenance. The Church was given back assets, particularly property, that had been sequestered by the Third Republic.

The Church will also have been delighted that the revolution’s battle cry of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ was abandoned. Pétain replaced it with travail, famille, patrie (‘work, family, fatherland’). This ushered in a new moralism, an attempt to woo ardent Catholics, for example by discouraging divorce and demanding that women dressed modestly and bore children within wedlock. Jacques Duquesne, the author of a book on French Catholics during the occupation, believed that ‘one reason for the church’s mute acquiescence was its enthusiasm for Vichy’s moralizing, family-based, traditionalist agenda.’

Nothing in this regime actually operated as it was presented to the people. Although the cornerstone of the new regime was ostensibly Catholic, there were secularists among its ranks. And life in Vichy was as libertarian as it gets. Pétain’s private life was similar: he was not a practising Catholic, married a divorcée, and had affairs but no children.

A few months after the leaflet’s release, the Church’s position unravelled a little. In July 1942, Archbishop Saliège of Toulouse, despite having supported Pétain, protested together with some other clerics, but no other prelates, about the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup and the reportedly enthusiastic arrest of over 13,000 Jews by the French police without any coercion by the Nazi authorities. By mid-1943, however, control of the notorious Drancy transit camp northeast of Paris, from which 67,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz, came under Nazi control, demonstrating conclusively that the Vichy regime was subservient to the Third Reich.

Tellingly, Saliège’s protests did not shame the Church into rethinking its collaborations. As late as February 1944 the bishops condemned the resistance army, despite the fact that the extent of Nazi atrocities was widely known by then, as was their all but certain prospect of defeat in Europe. This was just six months before the allies liberated Paris, and, soon after, France.

After the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944, the Nazis deported Pétain against his will to Germany to head a ‘government’ in exile, but Pétain refused the role. In October, however, he was brought back to France for trial.

He played the wronged victim. ‘Power was legitimately given to me and this was recognised from the Vatican to the USSR.’ He was, if nothing else, a murderous anti-Semite. However the ‘Lion of Verdun’, as he had been known for his valour during World War I, saw himself as the country’s grieving father. On 17 June 1940, he had proclaimed, ‘France is a wounded child. I hold her in my arms.’ Five days later, as told by Martin Goldsmith in Alex’s Wake, he signed the Armistice with Hitler, at the latter’s request, ‘in the very same railroad car and on the very spot where, twenty-two years earlier, the Germans had surrendered at the end of World War I.’

Pétain may well have been motivated by an attempt to avoid France’s total destruction, and it is possible that he himself was the puppet of Prime Minister Laval. One of his main accusers was Paul Reynaud, briefly prime minister before Pétain took over, who had done his utmost to oppose the Nazis. Reynaud told the court, ‘never has one man done so much damage to a nation as Maréchal Pétain has done to the French.’

De Gaulle commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment. Pétain was exiled to prison on l’Isle d’Yeu, where he died in 1951. Laval was executed.

Astonishingly, there was no wave of anticlericalism at liberation. The Church emerged unscathed from its collaboration with Vichy because the Gaullists, socialists, communists and the Christian Democrats were all united in a government that needed the support of the Church.

It was not until 1997, on the site of Drancy transit camp, that French bishops asked forgiveness ‘for the collective silence [sic] of the bishops of France during these terrible years.’

As the Guardian reported in 2002: ‘Successive French leaders have had their own reasons for perpetuating the illusion that the Vichy regime was a victim of the Nazis and not an active participant in a Germano-Franco fascism.  It was not until 1995, the year he became president, that Jacques Chirac broke the taboo of silence, admitting that “the French government had given support to the criminal madness of the occupiers”.’

Christian Eyschen, Secretary General of the secularist Federation Nationale de la Libre Pensée, cites numerous examples of Pétain’s concessions to the Church which have not been reversed, even now.

Unfortunately, my recent experiences of French justice lead me to go further. I have witnessed clerics not being held accountable under secular law for the sexual abuse of minors, nor for reporting their knowledge thereof as the law requires. In my opinion, the Church in France appears to be above the law, just as it was before the Revolution. The most spectacular example of this was the trial of the then most senior Catholic in France, Cardinal Barbarin (who had papal ambitions), for failing, as had been unlawful since 2000, to report abuse by a priest of numerous scouts over decades. Barbarin’s awareness of the abuse was not in contention, but the public prosecutor refused to initiate the case. Yet Barbarin was convicted after a private prosecution in 2019. In a bizarre development, however, the conviction was overturned by an appeals court, on the basis that Barbarin was not legally obliged to report the abuse allegations, because his victims were adults at the time when they alerted him. This decision was upheld on appeal by the Cour de Cassation, France’s highest court for civil proceedings.

As to living memory, in 2019 I stayed at a family hotel on the south side of Lac Léman (Lake Geneva) in the French spa town of Thonon les Bains in the department of Haute Savoie. It is famous for its maquisards, the guerrilla fighters opposing the Vichy regime, whose numbers included many Catholics. Some joined to avoid the ‘Compulsory Work Service’ (STO) that provided forced labour for Germany.

The patriarch of the hotel, a delightful man by then in his nineties, had been a maquisard. I shook his hand as he told me proudly of standing next to de Gaulle at the liberation of Paris.

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The post Pétain, Vichy France and the Catholic Church appeared first on The Freethinker.