Post By Prof. Paul Eidelberg 

Concerning the Muslims that killed 130 men, women, and children in Paris: French President Francois Hollande finds it easy and “politically correct” to identify ISIS as the culprit, while remaining silent about the Muslims who did the killing, thus giving Muslims a free ride.

Hollande’s caution or timidity is vintage Europe. Europe has no reluctance condemning Israel in the Jewish state’s conflict with the Muslims misleadingly called “Palestinians.” But let’s stick to Europe.

European civilization is on the verge of extinction, thanks largely to the invasion of Muslim migrants from lands south of the Mediterranean. Let us probe this deeply at the risk of embarrassing some people.

Europe, the home of Christianity, is evaporating. Europe is also the home of humanism, which is nothing more than Christianity without the Christian God. Is there a subtle defect in Christianity per se, and not merely a defect Christians share with mankind in general? Is it merely accidental that Catholic countries like France collaborated with Nazi Germany?

Since Christianity’s emergence in the first century, Christians have perpetrated what today would be called terrorist acts against Jews, including decapitation and burning Jews alive. ISIS is an old story. So let’s probe further, since the pagan acts of ISIS are not unknown in Christian history.

Of course Christianity deserves enormous credit for eliminating idolatry and paganism in much of the world. However, that the rivers of blood have flowed in Christian Europe suggests that Christianity has never fully overcome its pagan origin in the Greco-Roman world.

Hence, one may surmise there remains an unnoticed tendency even among Christian judges in America to render decisions that rationalize and legitimize certain pagan acts among human beings contrary to the rationalism of Thomas Aquinas and the humanism of the European Enlightenment.

To put it in another way, does the Christian emphasis on faith conduce to the subjectivism and irrationality encouraged by the Tertullian’s adage Credo quia absurdum: “I believe because it is absurd”?

Let us therefore consult the eminent rabbi philosopher Dr. Joseph Soloveitchik, who warns in his book The Halakhic Mind (New York: Free Press, 1986), 55, that the “reduction of religion into some … subjective current is absolutely perilous”:

“It frees every dark passion and every animal impulse in man. Indeed, it is of greater urgency for religion to cultivate objectivity [i.e, rationality] than perhaps any other branch of human culture.  If G-d is not the source of the most objective norm [hence of Reason], faith in Him is nothing but an empty phrase.”

Let us also consider this passage from Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man (1944), a passage referring not to Nazis but to men of the Middle Ages: “How many noblemen bowed down before the cross in a spirit of abject submission and self-denial, confessed their sins with scalding tears and bitter cries and in the very same breath, as soon as they left the dim precincts of the cathedral, ordered that innocent people be cruelly slain.”

Now turn to Elie Wiesel, A Jew Today (1978). Dr. Wiesel, a survivor of the death camps, recalls how he had been “struck by a harsh truth: in Auschwitz all the Jews were victims, all the killers were Christians.” He apologizes, as I do, for embarrassing his Christian friends, but he is morally bound to tell the truth.  He asks:

“How is one to explain that Hitler and Himmler were never excommunicated by the Church? That Pius XII never thought it necessary, not to say indispensable, to condemn Auschwitz and Treblinka?  That among the SS, a large proportion consisted of believers, who remained faithful to their Christian ties to the end? That there were killers who went to confession between massacres?  And that all came from Christian families and had received a Christian education?”

Moreover, how is one to explain that Pope Francis recently advocated statehood for the Palestinian Authority, whose charter calls for the annihilation of Israel? The PA is the successor of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the world’s leading terrorist organization, which has murdered and maimed more than 15,000 Jews, indeed, has also murdered Christians and virtually depopulated the Christian population of Bethlehem?

Returning to the Holocaust, Wiesel does not forget the brave Christians who came to the aid of Jews. But he tacitly asks, without answering, why only a few hundred among hundreds of millions in all of Europe, the home of Christian humanism?

One possible reason is that the founder of Christianity (like the founder of Islam) is an integral part of the faith. To reject Jesus is to deny the validity of Christianity (just as rejection of Muhammad implies the invalidity of Islam). Obviously, Jewish rejection of the New Testament and the Qur’an is a basic cause of Jew-hatred – for centuries misleadingly called “anti-Semitism.”

Happily, some Christian theologians have at last traced anti-Semitism to the New Testament.  (See Alan Davies, AntiSemitism and the Foundations of the New Testament, 1979). Isn’t it time to link Islamic terrorism to Islam, to Islam without adjectives, the Islam of Muhammad, the Islam of the Qur’an?

Given such candid recognition, shouldn’t Americans worry about the teaching of Islam that takes place in hundreds of mosques across the United States? Many of these mosques preach hatred of America and of Western Civilization. By so doing, don’t they incite Muslims to attack Americans and even encourage Muslims to plan and perpetrate another 9/11?