I received this most interesting email yesterday from Daniel Sexton, an American who was an eyewitness of the recent Barcelona jihad attack. Mr. Sexton is a Catholic, and he wrote an open letter to Cardinal Juan Jose Omella, Archbishop of Barcelona, lamenting Omella’s statements after the massacre, as well as the lack of any response from the Church at the scene. Whether or not you share Mr. Sexton’s faith, the import of this is clear: in Spain, jihadis are aggressively advancing, and in response, the Catholic Church is not only not being true to itself, but is actively aiding and abetting the conquest of the continent: “No priest came to give Last Rites to the dying or comfort the wounded and terrorized. But the Cardinal went to the hospital in the evening and said all religions are religions of peace.”

I have a background in Latin and ancient Greek and found your book Did Muhammad Exist? to be revelatory. How is it that the scholarly consensus that Islam was a post conquest creation of Arabs and that the Koran is actually a Nestorian liturgical book written in Syriac, not known in our universities? I tend to view you and other such as Elena Chudinova to be our Cassandras, issuing true prophecies that no one will believe.

Yet I spent ten days in Europe this summer with my sons. Europe was as I remember her from my youth when I had lived there for a year — steeped in a Christian past and lost in an epicurean present. We traveled through Catalonia, Languedoc, and Provence and the Islamic presence, from the perspective of someone who lives in Jersey City, to be almost negligible. On the last day, I was walking on Las Ramblas at 5:00 PM, reveling in my last few hours in this paradise and going over in my mind our visit. I thought perhaps Islam was not such a threat — that I should limit my exposure to Breitbart and Jihad Watch — and not be, as my newly minted Princeton politics grad says, such a hater. I saw a woman in a Burqa with a baby and pitied her for being so out of place. In the next moment, I saw the white van plowing through the crowd. I was ten yards from the Joan Miró mosaic where it came to rest. The dead and dying were all around me. I stayed and helped a grievously injured 16-year-old German girl who had been visiting with her parish. No priest came to give Last Rites to the dying or comfort the wounded and terrorized. But the Cardinal went to the hospital in the evening and said all religions are religions of peace. I wrote an open letter to the newspapers in Barcelona but no one bothered to call me back.

Here is Mr. Sexton’s open letter:

c/o La Vanguardia, elPeriodico, el PuntAvio

Cardinal Juan Jose Omella
Archbishop of Barcelona

Your Eminence:

Please accept this open letter to you and the Church in Barcelona. I, myself, probably because of my sins, happened to be at the Rambla de Sant Josep at the corner at Carrer de L’Hospital at the moment the van driven by young Islamic terrorists passed by coming to rest at the Juan Miro mosaic last Thursday. I was unable to comprehend what was happening as the idyllic scene was replaced by a nightmare. The van with its human detritus sped by and a wave of terrified citizens and tourists overwhelmed. All around me was blood, and bodies and people in torment and terror — babies, children, the old and the young.

The police and the security forces arrived almost instantaneously and were fierce and courageous and non-stinting as they sought to secure the area even while the perpetrators escaped back over their victims. Strangers offered aid to the wounded. Terrified children and babies were corralled into the adjacent stores. I saw one young guy jumping from body to body — giving CPR here, making a tourniquet there. (I have read that Lucas Digne, the fullback for Barça, had run from the safety of his luxury apartment with water and towels, and I believe that he is the guy I saw). At last, the ambulances began to arrive with medics, one by one. They addressed those in extremis first while those who were conscious had to wait. In the 45 minutes I was at the scene, several persons there on the pavement were pronounced dead as resuscitation efforts by just regular people were abandoned when the medics said there was no hope.

Yet one thing was conspicuously absent: not a single priest appeared in my sight to give Extreme Unction to the dying, to comfort those in agony, to give witness to those in shock that Christ is with us — that he has overcome the world and that we must be willing to undergo any and every trial for the sake of the kingdom. Even if he did nothing, a priest in his cassock would have born witness. Maybe a priest was there and I missed him in his jeans or shorts, and if so, then I apologize for my accusation. But the dead I saw had no minister of God to assist them. To me, this is inexplicable. There were four churches within a stone’s throw — including the Basilica of St. Maria, the parish of St. Augustin, the parish of St. Philip Neri, and your very own Cathedral. If any of the deaths on the Rambla of Sant Josep were happy, it is no thanks to the Church.

I was in Barcelona with my sons for a holiday and I wanted more than anything for them to experience the glories of a civilization built on Christ and his love — but also his judgment. My mantra was the line from Hilaire Belloc, that “the Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith.” In this vein, we marveled at Sagrada Familia and even more of the fanatical faith of Gaudi, which seems to embarrass or at least befuddle his current admirers. We made a pilgrimage to Monteserrat and ardently kissed the orb which the Black Madonna holds in her extended right hand — the world redeemed by Christ whom she had borne without corruption. We venerated the sarcophagus and the relics of the Virgin Martyr St. Eulalia in your own Cathedral.

Yet you said, after visiting the injured in the Hospital del Mar only hours after the attack, that “God is the God of life and love in all religions….”

This is false, Your Eminence! There is only one true religion and, if you, a Prince of the Church cannot say that it is the Catholic and orthodox faith that comes to us from the apostles, who can? Moreover, it is demonstrably not true that the Allah of Islam engenders life and love. Having read your comments yesterday and being familiar with Pope Francis’ denial of these truths, I was not surprised to read this morning that “at least 10,000 Catalans with links to the separatist movement have actually converted to Islam in recent years [and that] [i]t is believed that two out of every ten Catalan radicals who belong to the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), a far-left political party, are converts to Islam. The ERC, which now governs Catalonia, has vehemently refused to sign a cooperation agreement with the central government in Madrid to fight jihadist terrorism.”[1] How anomalous is this that a movement that seeks to preserve and cultivate Catalonian culture morphs into the modern-day descendant of its ancient foe? Something happens to radical movements. The IRA in the 1960s, one recalls, became hardline Marxist-Leninists trained and armed by the Soviets.

Barcelona does not need minutes of silence or shouts of “we are not afraid.” She and all of us need shepherds with testicular fortitude and faith to lead men to embrace with all of their hearts and all their minds the salvation which is from Christ alone and none other. No political movement or primitive cult of violence can compete with such a vision.

Sant Jordi pray to God to send us shepherds who will teach the truth! Santa Eulalia pray to God for us that we may not fail at the time of trial! La Morenata pray to God for us who mourn and weep!

[1] Barcelona Attack Was Preventable, Soeren Kern, Gatestone Institute, August 22, 2017

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EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of Cardenal Joan Josep Omella 21.06.2017 Fotografia Pere Virgili

Pope Francis and H.R. McMaster are on their way to Pakistan now to explain to Ayman al-Zawahiri that al-Qaeda has nothing, nothing whatsoever, to do with Islam.

“‘Dead or Alive’: President Trump Appears on Al-Qaeda Wanted Notice,” by Jack Moore, Newsweek, September 19, 2017 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

Al-Qaeda has had a resurgence online in recent months, using the heir of the group’s late leader Osama bin Laden—his son Hamza—as a propaganda pawn whose family lineage boosts its image. Now, Al-Qaeda’s supporters are using another notable name to attract attention: President Donald Trump.

On Tuesday, the Al-Hijrah media group, marked by a green logo and active for only the past several months, released a wanted notice for the U.S. president, calling for his capture “dead or alive.”

The notice, provided to Newsweek by the jihadi monitoring site Jihadoscope, says Trump should be targeted for his “crimes against Islam.” It says he is sought for “treason, murder, injustice, kidnapping, massacre, extremism, negligence, hate.”

The release came a week after the jihadi channel warned it would have “a message to Trump and the people of America coming soon.”

Tuesday’s release also includes a message that pointed to Trump’s decision to expand U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.

“Trump is talking about winning in Afghanistan. And you Americans what do you think? Do you not know history?” it reads, referring to the failure of the Bush and Obama administrations to defeat the Taliban mujahedeen, Arabic for holy warriors.

“It is clear that Trump is waging this war only for his hatred of Muslims,” it says. “You will never be victorious, you will be defeated.” The statement repeats the Taliban phrase that Afghanistan will become a “graveyard” for American troops….

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She said that “there were many fake news photographs circulating which were ‘simply the tip of a huge iceberg of misinformation calculated to create a lot of problems between different communities and with the aim of promoting the interest of the terrorists.’”

And even the relentlessly pro-jihad BBC admits that “many – but not all – of the pictures come from other crises around the world, with one tweeted by Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek dating back to the Rwandan genocide in 1994.”

Also, given the large-scale “Palestinian” industry of faking Israeli atrocities, it doesn’t strain credulity in the least that Islamic jihadis and supremacists may be fabricating atrocities against the Rohingya in order to sway public opinion. Muhammad said, “War is deceit.”

“Rohingya crisis: Suu Kyi says ‘fake news helping terrorists,’” BBC, September 6, 2017:

Myanmar’s de-facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi has claimed that the crisis in Rakhine state is being distorted by a “huge iceberg of misinformation”.

In her first comments on the latest Rohingya crisis, she said tensions were being fanned by fake news promoting the interests of terrorists.

Ms Suu Kyi made the comments in a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, her office said.

More than 123,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar for Bangladesh in two weeks.

The latest outbreak of violence has sent waves of refugees fleeing the country, which is also called Burma.
What has Suu Kyi said?

The latest government statement said Ms Suu Kyi told Mr Erdogan that her government had “already started defending all the people in Rakhine in the best way possible”.

Ms Suu Kyi is quoted as saying: “We know very well, more than most, what it means to be deprived of human rights and democratic protection.

“So we make sure that all the people in our country are entitled to protection of their rights as well as, the right to, and not just political but social and humanitarian defence.”

The statement also said there were many fake news photographs circulating which were “simply the tip of a huge iceberg of misinformation calculated to create a lot of problems between different communities and with the aim of promoting the interest of the terrorists”.
Is it ‘fake news’?

There has certainly been a large amount of “fake news” surrounding recent events.

By 5 September there had been 1.2 million tweets talking about the crisis since refugees began flooding over the border, and many contain pictures purportedly showing a glimpse of the violence which has engulfed the region.

The problem is, according to the BBC’s south-east Asia correspondent Jonathan Head, “much of it is wrong”. A closer look reveals many – but not all – of the pictures come from other crises around the world, with one tweeted by Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek dating back to the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

But the BBC Burmese Service’s Tin Htar Swe said much of the blame for Ms Suu Kyi’s “iceberg” could be laid at the government’s door.

“The fake news is generated because the government is not allowing media access to the troubled areas,” she said. What’s more, she added, “if they allowed the UN or human rights bodies to go to the place to find out what is happening then this misinformation is not going to take place”.
Where are the refugees?

As a result, all people outside the affected areas have to rely on is the conflicting accounts of the Rohingya fleeing Myanmar and the government – with the space in between ripe for “fake news”.

However, we do know the latest conflict was sparked on 25 August when Rohingya militants attacked police posts, triggering a military counter-offensive.

The military says it is fighting against Rohingya militants who are attacking civilians.

But the Rohingya families streaming north into Bangladesh have been reporting that security forces, sometimes backed by armed Buddhist civilians, burned their villages and opened fire on their inhabitants.

Their story has been contradicted by Myanmar’s Minister in charge of Border Security in Rakhine, Col Phone Tint. He told our correspondent Jonathan Head who is travelling on a government-organised visit to the border town of Maungdaw that the destruction of villages was a deliberate strategy by the militants, aimed at forcing the Muslim population to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh….

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