Brussels Prosecutes Aramaic Priest and Fugitive for Islamophobia



One of the rare Belgian churches that is packed every weekend is the church of Saint Anthony of Padova in Montignies-sur-Sambre, one of the poorest suburbs of Charleroi, a derelict rust belt area to the south of Brussels. Holy Mass in Montignies is conducted in Latin and lasts up to four hours. Yesterday over 2,000 people attended the service by Father Samuel (Pere Samuel). The priest's sermon dealt with his persecution. The Belgian authorities are bringing the popular priest to court on charges of racism.

Father Samuel has been prosecuted for "incitement to racist hatred" by the Belgian government's inquisition agency, the so-called Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism (CEOOR), because of a remark he made in a 2002 television interview when he said:

"Every thoroughly islamized Muslim child that is born in Europe is a time bomb for Western children in the future. The latter will be persecuted when they have become a minority."

Last Thursday the Belgian judiciary decided that the priest will have to stand trial before the penal court in Charleroi. He reacted by repeating his time bomb statement and added that he would be honoured if he had to go to jail for speaking his mind. He added that Jesus, too, had been convicted. During yesterday's sermon he called upon the faithful to accompany him to court. "We will turn this into an excursion, driving there in full buses."

Father Samuel's passport gives his name as Charles-Cl‚ment Boniface. That is not entirely correct. He was born in 1942 in Midyat, Turkey, as Samuel Ozdemir. The latter is a surname the priest dislikes because, he explains, it was imposed on his family by the Turks. Samuel was a Christian: "At home we spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus." The Aramaics are a Catholic minority in Syria and Turkey. They speak an old Semitic language, which Jesus and the apostles used and which Mel Gibson had his actors use in his movie The Passion of the Christ.

Young Samuel became a Catholic priest. In the mid-1970s he fled to Belgium, claiming that the Aramaic Christians were being persecuted in Turkey. He became a Belgian and adopted the surname of Boniface - "he who does good things." He was appointed to the diocese of Tournai, but soon became caught up in the culture war between Christians and secularists. Tournai is a thoroughly secularised, modernist diocese. Father Samuel clashed with the bishop, who suspended him in 2001. He then bought the St-Antoine-de-Padoue church in Montignies-sur-Sambre. There he conducts the Mass according to the traditional rites of the Catholic Church.

Hundreds of faithful from all over the country and even from the north of France attend Sunday Mass in Montignies-sur-Sambre. The congregation includes African immigrants, a large number of young people and many young families with small children. In his sermons and on his website Father Samuel speaks out against secularism, but also fights on another front of the three-way culture war, warning against "the islamic invasion" of the West. He says he has witnessed in Turkey what the future has in store for Europe. He claims Muslims are invading Europe and warns for an impending civil war. According to Father Samuel "so-called moderate Muslims do not exist."

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The enslavement of history

The abolition of Britain's part in the slave trade was one of the most principled and inspiring events in this country's history. Yesterday's 200th anniversary of the Act that banned slavery in the British Empire should have been an occasion of national congratulation. But from the orgy of breast-beating which has marked it, you would have thought instead that this country had actually invented slavery rather than played such a historic role in stopping it.

Tony Blair said yesterday that slavery was among history's most 'shameful enterprises' and that Britain's participation was a matter of `deep sorrow and regret'. A national memorial service is to be held at Westminster Abbey tomorrow. An exhibition entitled Resistance And Remembrance is being held at the British Museum.

The church seems hardly to stop apologising for its part in the slave trade. The BBC, which has been running programmes about slavery for weeks, could barely contain its excitement at the opportunity for so much Britain-bashing. And people walked from Hull to London in chains or wooden yokes and wearing T-shirts bearing the legend `So sorry'.

But apparently Britain had not scourged itself sufficiently for its past iniquity. The Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, yesterday said the Prime Minister should make a formal apology for the slave trade and criticised him for not going far enough. The Leader of the House of Lords, Baroness Amos, told a commemorative event in Ghana that the slave trade was one of the UK's most 'shameful and uncomfortable chapters'. More perversely still, the Bishop of Liverpool, James Jones, drew a link between slavery and the murder of black teenager Anthony Walker at the hands of racist thugs. The more he studied history, said the bishop, the more he believed `that our racism is rooted in the dehumanising treatment of black people by white people'. So a country which had led the way in abolishing slavery was now being damned as racist because, 200 years previously, it had taken part in it.

Bishop Jones should surely study history a little more. Yes, slavery was and is an evil. Yes, Britain did participate in it. But so did a host of other countries for whom slavery was until then an accepted and unchallenged way of life. The whole point of this anniversary was that Britain took a historic lead in challenging and stopping it. This initiative, which sprang from Christian principles about the equality and dignity of every human being, gave the lead for other similar movements against slavery around the western world. Furthermore, it did not merely abolish the British slave trade, but provided the template for a host of other social reform movements during the 19th century, from the democratic franchise to votes for women and the abolition of child labour, along with the great campaigns against poverty, drinking and prostitution.

The anti-slavery movement was thus nothing less than the motor of social justice and decency with which Britain came to be identified. It forged a sense of collective conscience, encapsulating the belief that society could be changed for the better and evil deeds resisted - the belief which lies at the very heart of progressive politics and a civilised society.

Yet this country seems to find it impossible to celebrate its achievements; impossible to take pride in anything in its past. It seems only to want to denigrate itself at every opportunity. And to do so it rewrites history. The very mention of the term `British Empire' seems to drive certain people wild. They appear to think that the Empire produced only bad things, and that all bad things started with the Empire.

But the assumption that the slave trade started with Britain's colonial adventures is simply false, as is the related belief that it involved only black victims of white slave-traders. Slavery is as old as human history, involving many different societies. In ancient times the Greeks, the Romans and the Egyptians were all at it. Many slave-traders were in fact black and some of the slaves were white. The Arab slave trade, which stretched from Saharan Africa across the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, pre-dated and was more longstanding than the European trade across the Atlantic. There were also African slavetraders, particularly in East Africa, which was a fertile market for slaves sold to the Middle East and elsewhere.

Yet for decades, British schoolchildren have been taught that black people were only ever victims and white people only ever oppressors. Such distortion has bred division and resentment and given rise to an unending clamour for apology - and even for financial compensation. Across the world, the demand by black lobby groups for reparations for the slave trade amounts to an eyewatering $777 trillion.

But who precisely is to compensate whom, and for what? No one is alive today who profited from the transatlantic slave trade, or who personally suffered from it. Yet whole cities are being told to make amends, as indeed is the whole of Britain. Well, why stop there? Shouldn't we demand that the Greeks, Egyptians or Italians (on behalf of the Romans, who sadly are no longer with us to take their share of the blame) apologise for all the people they enslaved around the world? Shouldn't the Scandinavians say sorry to us for the rape and pillage of ancient Britain by the Vikings? Or how about the Queen making reparations to the Catholics for the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII in the 16th century? Shouldn't we all simply apologise to everyone for everything that has ever happened?

The absurdity of all this was underlined when David Pott, one of those who walked to London in chains and who has taken it upon himself to apologise to Africa for Britain's part in slavery, acknowledged on BBC Radio Four's Moral Maze that he was aware he had thus apologised to the descendants of African slave-traders as well as slaves. But this was only right and proper, he said, because unlike the colonial British, the black slave-traders had no option but to buy and sell slaves.

This attitude, which utterly demeans black people by stripping them of equal responsibility for their own actions, fuels the wider culture of victimhood which ludicrously blames slavery for absent black fathers, black gang culture or even black-on-black crime.

To their credit, many black people refuse to go along with such a grotesque excuse, realising that it traps them in a culture of resentment which prevents them from making progress. And it has taken an Asian cleric, Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali, to point out that if a civilisation is constantly denigrated in this way, its virtues will eventually be destroyed.

Slavery has not disappeared. It exists today all over the world. In the Sudan, where Africans are enslaved by the Islamic government; in Mauritania, where Muslims enslave other Muslims; and in Eastern Europe, where millions of women and children are trafficked - and from where they are sold into prostitution, shamefully, in 'slave auctions' at Britain's very own airports.

Slavery has been turned into yet another attack upon the West. But it should not divide us in this way. It is an evil that still exists throughout the world; and all decent people, of all colours and creeds, should unite to fight it - just as our ancestors did 200 years ago.

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Stupid ACLU tokenism

What does it matter if a cop uses a baton or a flashlight to slow down a suspect?

We read:

LOS ANGELES police have unveiled their latest tool in the fight against crime - a flashlight powerful enough to stun suspects but too lightweight to beat them with. The new flashlight, developed specifically for the Los Angeles Police Department and expected to be acquired by police forces around the world, replaces the heavy 13-inch (33-cm) metal flashlights controversially used by city officers to strike a car theft suspect three years ago...

The American Civil Liberties Union welcomed the new flashlights, which were purchased by the city for $1 million and will be distributed to all LAPD officers starting in June. "The LAPD's swift response shows what can happen when police seek innovative solutions to reduce misconduct. The old flashlight sent the wrong message to the community, and the new, smaller version can be a powerful symbol of the department's commitment to reform," ACLU executive director Ramona Ripston said.

Source

But I guess batons will now be forbidden too. Must make it easy for crooks!

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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