The Gripping History of 'The Looming Tower'

The new Hulu series is a suspenseful, star-studded excavation of the failure to prevent 9/11.

By Sophie Gilbert

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/03/the-looming-tower-review-hulu/554477/

March 1, 2018

In 2017, the third most-read page on Wikipedia.org was an article on Queen Elizabeth. Out of the top 50, Queen Victoria came in at No. 13, Princess Margaret at No. 37, and Prince Philip at No. 44. This sudden surge of interest in the British royal family wasn’t just Anglophilia: It was also related to the popularity of Peter Morgan’s Netflix show The Crown and the PBS/ITV dramaVictoria. Both shows’ adaptation of historic events into modern entertainment had prompted millions of viewers to find out whether what they’d seen on TV had actually happened.

Wikimedia dubbed itself the “second screen,” pointing to a glut of recent series and TV films that re-create real-life moments with just enough latitude to spur the frantic impulse to Google the details—Paramount’s Waco, FX’s American Crime Story, and HBO’s Confirmation among them. The latest is The Looming Tower, the gripping new 10-part Hulu series adapted from Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2006 book about the origins of 9/11. Like The Crown, The Looming Tower takes some dramatic liberties with its source material, turning some characters into composites and creating others anew. But most of what it portrays is true, and all of it seems intended to spur a new engagement with its material, seen through the clearer lens of historical distance.

Produced for television by Wright with the Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney and the veteran showrunner Dan Futterman, The Looming Toweris a taut, tense restaging of the internecine squabbles between the FBI and the CIA in the lead-up to 9/11. Like Wright’s book, it makes the case that the failure of U.S. intelligence agencies to share information thwarted any chance they might have had of stopping the attacks. But where the book focused primarily on the people who conspired to orchestrate the worst terrorist attack on American soil, the series reorients itself around the people who failed to stop them.

On one side is John O’Neill (Jeff Daniels), a larger-than-life FBI counterterrorism chief grappling with the increasing threat of al-Qaeda. On the other is Martin Schmidt (Peter Sarsgaard), O’Neill’s CIA counterpart. O’Neill was a real person; Schmidt is reportedly an amalgam, although there are reasons beyond his initials to deduce whom he’s based on. From the very first episode, O’Neill and Schmidt are at each other’s throats for reasons that are hard to ascertain. Schmidt guards CIA intelligence with fanaticism, while O’Neill resorts to spewing profanities and epithets when he can’t get what he wants.

The show makes clear whose side it’s on. O’Neill might be a womanizing boor but his devotion to his job—and to thwarting attacks on the U.S.—is unmistakable.  Schmidt, by contrast, is a pompous, sneering creep whose primary motivation seems to be power. (If both characters seem somewhat implausible, it appears that they’ve been tamped down for television, if anything.) In the three episodes made available for review, al-Qaeda emerges as an increasingly critical threat to America, perpetrating the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, and gaining increasing financial and ideological support. But while Schmidt wants the president to respond by carpet-bombing Afghanistan, O’Neill argues that this will only draw more followers to the cause. And the hostilities between the two agencies mean information is hoarded rather than shared, hampering the pursuit of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

The show’s strongest scenes tend to involve good old-fashioned spycraft rather than intra-agency feuding. Bill Camp is exceptional as Robert Chesney, an FBI agent sent to Nairobi to seek out information, and a scene in the second episode where he interrogates a subject is a masterpiece in pacing, amping up the suspense for more than eight minutes. Tahar Rahim, playing the real-life FBI agent Ali Soufan, is similarly engaging, traveling to locales from Albania to London to hunt down al-Qaeda sympathizers. One of only eight agents out of 10,000 in the FBI who speak Arabic, Soufan is devoted to O’Neill and outraged by the radicals he sees as perverting the principles of Islam.

In O’Neill, Daniels has a character who’s innately charming, even if it’s hard to square the dark-haired, Mafiosi-esque character in Wright’s book, who has “a strong whiff of the Jersey streets about him,” with the actor’s patrician grace. (If Daniels falters, it’s in persuasively selling some of O’Neill’s cruder remarks.) Sarsgaard is smoothly villainous as Schmidt, running a team of mostly young, inexperienced women (the real-life CIA unit investigating bin Laden was nicknamed the Manson Family) and responding with remarkable hostility to anyone who questions him.

The action in early episodes plays out against the backdrop of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, itself apparently destined for a true-crime excavation by Ryan Murphy before too long. All of which urges the question—what do we gain from so many shows urging a new reckoning with not-so-old history? If dramas like American Crime Story seem intent on enabling a new interpretation of past events, The Looming Tower is a less grandstanding affair. Its mission seems to be simply dramatizing what happened, based on Wright’s 600 interviews and the (limited) information that’s emerged since his book was published. In the end, it’s up to viewers how they make sense of it all: assisted, as always, by Google.

The Central Park 5 Were Murderous Thugs

Despite the Left’s attempt to make them martyrs.

By John Perazzo
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273968/central-park-5-were-murderous-thugs-john-perazzo
June 11, 2019


Lawyers, in foreground, and the five defendants in the Central Park rape case of a female jogger waiting for the ruling in February 1990 in State Supreme Court in Manhattan.CreditCredit(James Estrin/The New York Times)

Filmmaker Ava DuVernay’s new Netflix series, When They See Us, is being billed as an important exposé of the American criminal-justice system's racist underbelly. As a review in the Daily Beast explains, it is the “riveting” story of how that system coerced and intimidated five innocent “teenage boys of color” into confessing to the highly publicized “rape and vicious assault of Trisha Meili, a white investment banker,” in New York's Central Park on April 19, 1989. We are told that the boys — Kharey Wise, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, Kevin Richardson, and Raymond Santana — tragically had “their youth snatched from them” by the false convictions and the subsequent prison sentences that they served. In a similar vein, a review in The Root lauds DuVernay for her success in “humanizing” these same “innocent young black and brown” victims of institutionalized “abuse, mistreatment and manipulation.” David Ewoldsen, a professor of media and information at Michigan State University, says that When They See Us “is about one of the great injustices in modern American history” against “five teenagers of color.” And a New York Times headlinedepicts DuVernay's series as “The True Story of How a City in Fear Brutalized the Central Park Five.”

It's a story we've all heard many times before. And it is a damnable, disgusting lie.

Sometime between 9:00 and 9:30 on the night of April 19, 1989, a group of more than 30 black and Hispanic teenagers — including the aforementioned “Central Park Five” — attacked 28-year-old Trisha Meili while she was jogging in the park. One of the assailants — whose identity would remain unknown for the next 13 years — raped her with vaginal penetration, leaving his DNA inside the woman's cervix. As Miss Meili screamed in agony, one or more of her attackers shut her up by fracturing her skull with a lead pipe and mutilating her face with a brick. Meili lost three-quarters of her blood in the assault, and her brain activity could scarcely be detected by medical equipment in the hospital emergency room to which she was later transported. So badly was Meili's face mangled — one of her eyeshad popped out of its socket — that even her boyfriend was able to recognize her only by a familiar ring on her finger. The District Attorney's office initially assigned Miss Meili's case to its homicide unit, because none of her doctors expected that the woman would survive for even a single night. Yet Meili did survive, though she spent nearly two weeks in a coma.

During the half-hour just prior to their attack on Miss Meili, the Central Park Five and their two-dozen-plus comrades participated in multiple random beatings of other passersby in the park. For example:

• Shortly after 9 p.m., they punched and kicked an elderly Hispanic man into unconsciousness before stealing his sandwich and pouring beer over him.
• A few minutes later, they shouted “Whitey” and “Fucking white people” while attempting to assault a white couple who were riding a tandem bicycle.
• Three minutes after that, they beat a 52-year-old male pedestrian.
• Within another five minutes, they threw rocks and sticks at a 33-year-old white man named David Good, who managed to flee the scene.
• Five minutes later, they struck a 30-year-old white banker named David Lewis, who likewise was able to flee.
• And a few minutes after that, they beat a 40-year-old white schoolteacher named John Loughlin into unconsciousness.

Then they turned their attention to Trisha Meili.

Prior to April 19, 1989, the members of the Central Park Five had already burnished their credentials as demons in their respective neighborhoods. Kharey Wise, who supplied the metal pipe that was used to bludgeon Miss Meili, was a crack cocaine user and a gang member who routinely terrorized the tenants of a local housing complex. Antron McCray was well known for his menacing behavior and violent attacks directed against teachers at his school. And Yusef Salaam, who was allegedly the first to pummel Miss Meili's head with Kharey Wise's lead pipe, was fond of robbing people in Central Park. Having been recently suspended from school for weapons possession, Salaam was described by police as the “most vicious” of the five.

When the Central Park Five stood trial the following year for the attack on Trisha Meili, local black newspapers were quick to denounce the court proceedings as a series of racist charades. Harlem pastor Calvin Butts, for his part,complained that “the first thing you do in the United States of America when a white woman is raped, is round up a bunch of black youths.” When the victim, still disfigured and unsteady, went to the courthouse to testify, groups of black demonstrators — led by Al Sharpton — taunted her, calling her a “white slut” and a “filthy white whore,” and claiming that her boyfriend was the real rapist.

Convicted unanimously by racially diverse juries, all five of the defendants went on to serve prison terms ranging from 5 to 12 years for their respective roles in the attack on Miss Meili. The convictions were based primarily on the confessions that the suspects themselves had made when questioned by detectives.

The Central Park Five’s attorneys — as well as Ava DuVernay’s new Netflix series — have tried to portray the five teens as frightened little lambs who were intimidated and coerced by law-enforcement authorities into making false confessions. But in the precinct house after their apprehension, the suspects were loudly singing the rap song “Wild Thing” for an extended period of time while they laughed uproariously about what they had just done to Trisha Meili. When a police officer suggested to Raymond Santana that he should have been out with a girlfriend rather than attacking strangers in Central Park, the boy laughed and replied, “I already got mines.” These are not the words and actions of people trembling in fear.

The coercion theory is further discredited by the fact that the interrogations of McCray, Richardson, and Santana werevideotaped and, in compliance with legal requirements for cases involving minors, were conducted in the presence of a parent or guardian. Wise, meanwhile, was already 16 at the time, thus he was unaccompanied by an adult during his videotaped interrogation. Salaam was 15 but had a fake ID listing his age as 16, so his questioning began without a parent or guardian present. But before long, his mother arrived at the precinct and requested that her son be provided with a lawyer; Salaam's confession was not videotaped.

The video footage of McCray, Richardson, Santana, and Wise was damning indeed. Some excerpts:

Antron McCray: “We charged her. We got her on the ground. Everybody started hitting her and stuff. She was on the ground. Everybody stomping and everything. Then we got, each — I grabbed one arm, some other kid grabbed one arm, and we grabbed her legs and stuff. Then we all took turns getting on her, getting on top of her.”

Kevin Richardson: “Raymond [Santana] had her arms, and Steve [Lopez, who accepted a plea bargain rather than face trial] had her legs. He spread it out. And Antron [McCray] got on top, took her panties off.”

Raymond Santana: “He was smacking her. He was saying, ‘Shut up, bitch!’ Just smacking her…. I was grabbing the lady’s tits.”

Kharey Wise: “This was my first rape.”

When  investigators at one point asked the fifth suspect, Yusef Salaam, why he had tried to smash the victim's skull, he replied, “It was fun.”

Some additional pieces of evidence also demonstrate that the Central Park Five were very much involved in the attack against Miss Meili:

• While being driven to the police precinct shortly after his apprehension, Raymond Santana blurted out: “I had nothing to do with the rape. All I did was feel the woman's tits.”
• Yusef Salaam told a detective who interviewed him: “I was there, but I didn't rape her.”
• Kevin Richardson — whose underwear was stained with semen, grass, and dirt – told an acquaintance shortly after the attack: “We just raped somebody.”
• On April 20th, both Kevin Richardson and Raymond Santana independently brought investigators to the precise location where the previous night's attack had occurred. Richardson, for his part, told the detective: “This is where we got her ... where the raping occurred.”
• In the company of his father, Richardson told investigators that the source of several scratches on his neck had been the fingernails of a desperate Trisha Meili.
• When Kharey Wise on April 20th went with a detective and an Assistant District Attorney to the scene of the previous night's attack, he said: “Damn, damn that’s a lot of blood. Damn, this is really bad, that’s a lot of blood.... I knew she was bleeding, but I didn’t know how bad she was. It was really dark. I couldn’t see how much blood there was at night.”
• Wise also told a detective that someone named  “Rudy” had fondled the jogger’s breasts and stolen her Walkman. His knowledge about the existence of the Walkman was highly significant, for at that time, not even the police were yet aware that the jogger had been carrying such a device.
• Two of Wise's friends testified that the day after the attack on Miss Meili, Wise had told them: “You heard about that woman that was beat up and raped in the park last night? That was us!”
• One of the numerous young people who were arrested for their participation in the various Central Park attacks of April 19th stated, on videotape, that he had heard Raymond Santana and another boy laughing about “how they 'made a woman bleed.'”

In short, there wasn't merely a mountain of evidence indicating that the Central Park Five had participated in the brutalization of Miss Meili. There was an Everest of evidence.

Defenders of the Five point out that the DNA of the semen inside the jogger's cervix did not match that of McCray, Richardson, Santana, Wise, or Salaam — supposedly proving the boys' innocence. But in fact, it proves only that none of those five had actually penetrated the victim's vagina. It does not negate the fact that all five provided vivid testimony proving beyond any doubt that they were part of the vicious horde that had committed one of the most brutal, barbaric attacks in living memory. Nor does it alter the fact that their mere presence in that horde made them legallycomplicit in Miss Meili's rape. The fact that their semen was not inside the victim's body is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. Authorities always knew that there were other assailants, besides the Five, who had brutalized the victim and gotten away.

Defenders of the Central Park Five likewise point out that no traces of DNA from the boys' hair, sweat, saliva, or skin had been found on the victim either. But as Ann Coulter wrote in 2018: “Today, these kids' DNA would have been found all over the crime scene. But in 1989, DNA was a primitive science. Most cops wouldn't have even bothered collecting samples for DNA tests back then.” Indeed, the development of a national DNA database enabling investigators to identify perpetrators by matching their genetic materials to those collected from other crime scenes, would not even begin until several years later.

In 2002, a convicted serial rapist named Matias Reyes — who was already serving a 33-years-to-life sentence for other felonies but had never been investigated as a suspect in the Central Park jogger case — suddenly confessed to having perpetrated Trisha Meili's April 19, 1989 rape. Authorities quickly confirmed his claim by matching his DNA with the DNA from the semen which had been collected during the original investigation thirteen years earlier. Reyes's confession had no bearing on the prison time that he was already serving, as the statute of limitations regarding the Trisha Meili case had expired.

Reyes was a violent psychopath with a long history of forcing his way into women's apartments and attacking them. In one of those cases, he had raped a then-pregnant woman named Lourdes Gonzalez before stabbing her nine times while her young children were in the next room, listening to their mother suffer and die. And yet now, not only was Reyes confessing to a crime for which he had never even been charged, but he was claiming (falsely) to have acted alone in attacking Trisha Meili in Central Park. Why? 

Reyes said he felt guilty that five innocent men had been punished for a crime that he committed. But those punishments were basically over by the time Reyes made his confession. Four members of the Central Park Five were already out of prison, and the fifth, Kharey Wise, was scheduled to be released very soon. It is simply not believable that a lifelong remorseless monster like Matias Reyes would suddenly have been motivated by a pang of guilt. A much more plausible explanation rests with the well-substantiated fact that Reyes, who had recently been moved to Kharey Wise's prison cellblock, feared Wise's gang and desperately wanted to be transferred to a more secure and hospitable prison location. And sure enough, after he confessed to the rape of Miss Meili, he quickly received the transfer that he wanted.

Reyes's confession prompted New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau to vacate the convictions against the Central Park Five. This, in turn, set the stage for the Five to bring a $250 million lawsuit against the City of New York in 2003, for malicious prosecution, racial discrimination, and emotional distress. For the next eleven years, city attorneys refused to settle the suit and repeatedly vowed that they would fight it out in court.

But when Bill de Blasio took over as Mayor of New York in 2014, his administration quickly reached a $41 million settlement with the plaintiffs. This decision to settle the case was a reflection of de Blasio's deep-seated belief that the American criminal-justice system is infested with racism, and, by logical extension, that the Central Park Five were among its many unfortunate victims. De Blasio articulated this theme with utmost clarity later that same year:

“[O]ur history, sadly, requires us to say that black lives matter.... [W]e’re not just dealing with a problem in 2014.... We are dealing with centuries of racism that have brought us to this day. That is how profound the crisis is.... We have to have an honest conversation in this country about a history of racism, we have to have an honest conversation about the problems that have caused parents to feel that their children may be in danger in their dynamics with police.... This is something systemic and we bluntly have to talk about the historical racial dynamics underlying [it].”

Eric Reynolds, a black NYPD officer who first arrested a number of the suspects in the Central Park jogger case in April 1989, was disgusted by the de Blasio administration's deal with Miss Meili's five assailants. “If we had gone to trial in their lawsuit … all the facts would have come out,” said Reynolds. “It would have been clear they [the Central Park Five] participated, and [Matias] Reyes didn’t act alone. The evidence supported it. They did not want to go to trial. They just wanted to get paid.”

Significantly, Reynolds notes that he himself had never been named as a defendant in the Central Park Five's lawsuit against New York City — most likely, he believes, because including a black officer as a target of such a suit would have contradicted the narrative of a white racist system abusing minority youngsters.

As for allegations that the suspects' confessions had been coerced by police, Reynolds says: “[Trisha Meili] was in a coma. If we’re railroading [the suspects], how do we know when she comes out of the coma what story she’s going to tell? If you are trying to pin it on someone, why would you risk that she would say something different?” Mike Sheehan, one of the detectives who investigated the attack against Miss Meili, concurs: “All of this stuff about coercion really pisses me off. Do you honestly think that we — detectives with more than 20 years in, family men with pensions — would risk all of that so we could put words in the mouth of a 15 year-old kid? Absolutely not.”

Aside from portraying the American criminal-justice system — and American society generally — as perpetual breeding grounds for white racism, Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us has yet one more noteworthy objective: to depict Donald Trump as a reprehensible racist who, like the country at large, was intent on satisfying his own personal hunger for a proverbial pound of black and brown flesh. At the time of the Central Park jogger attack, Trump, then in his early forties, spent $85,000 to purchase full-page ads in four of New York's daily newspapers, wherein he:

• characterized the type of violent criminals who were turning New York City into a veritable killing field, as “crazed misfits”;
• urged New York State to “bring back the death penalty”;
• lamented that New York's “white, black, Hispanic and Asian” families were now unable to enjoy evening walks in Central Park”;
• and said, “I no longer want to understand [violent criminals'] anger. I want them to understand our anger.... They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.”

To normal people, those sentiments very ably convey a moral sense of justice and a concern for the well-being of all law-abiding citizens, whatever their color. But Ava DuVernay’s racist propaganda film targeting whites, characterizes them as “disgusting” expressions of anti-black racism. DuVernay's interpretation of Trump's words, along with her whitewashing of the Central Park Five’s horrific crimes, demonstrate just how morally sick the modern Left has become.

John Perazzo is the managing editor of DiscoverTheNetworks.org and the author of Betrayal: The Democratic Party's Destruction of America's Cities.

Related:

5 Exonerated in Central Park Jogger Case Agree to Settle Suit for $40 Million-

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/20/nyregion/5-exonerated-in-central-park-jogger-case-are-to-settle-suit-for-40-million.html

'Break the Cross!' The Jihad on Christianity

BY RAYMOND IBRAHIM
https://pjmedia.com/faith/break-the-cross-the-jihad-on-christianity/
June 6, 2019

A 37-year-old Muslim migrant in Rome was recently arrested for homicide after he stabbed a Christian man in the throat for wearing a crucifix around his neck. “Religious hate” is cited as an “aggravating factor” in the crime.

To be sure, this is hardly the first “religious hate” crime to occur in the context of the cross in Italy. Among others,

• A Muslim boy of African origin picked on, insulted, and eventually beat a 12-year-old girl during school because she too was wearing a crucifix.
• A Muslim migrant invaded an old church in Venice and attacked its large, 300-year-old cross, breaking off one of its arms, while shouting, “All that is in a church is false!”
• After a crucifix was destroyed in close proximity to a populated mosque, the area’s mayor said concerning the identity of the culprit(s): “Before we put a show of unity with Muslims, let’s have them begin by respecting our civilization and our culture.”

The fact is, Islamic hostility to the cross is an unwavering phenomenon—one that crosses continents and centuries; one that is very much indicative of Islam’s innate hostility to Christianity.

For starters, not only is the cross the quintessential symbol of Christianity—for all denominations, including most forms of otherwise iconoclastic Protestantism—but it symbolizes the fundamental disagreement between Christians and Muslims. As Professor Sidney Griffith explains, “The cross and the icons publicly declared those very points of Christian faith which the Koran, in the Muslim view, explicitly denied: that Christ was the Son of God and that he died on the cross.” Accordingly, “the Christian practice of venerating the cross … often aroused the disdain of Muslims,” so that from the start of the Muslim conquests of Christian lands there was an ongoing “campaign to erase the public symbols of Christianity, especially the previously ubiquitous sign of the cross.”

This “campaign” traces back to the Muslim prophet Muhammad. He reportedly “had such a repugnance to the form of the cross that he broke everything brought into his house with its figure upon it,” wrote one historian (Sword and Scimitar, p. 10). Muhammad also claimed that at the end times Jesus (the Muslim ‘Isa) himself would make it a point to “break the cross.”

Modern day Muslim clerics confirm this. When asked about Islam’s ruling on whether any person—in this case, Christians—is permitted to wear or pray before the cross, Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Tarifi, a Saudi expert on Islamic law, said, “Under no circumstances is a human permitted to wear the cross” nor “is anyone permitted to pray to the cross.” Why? “Because the prophet—peace and blessings on him—commanded the breaking of it [the cross].”

Islamic history is a reflection of these sentiments. For instance, the aforementioned Sheikh al-Tarifi also explained that if it is too difficult to break the cross—for instance, a large concrete statue—Muslims should at least try to disfigure one of its four arms “so that it no longer resembles a cross.” Historic and numismatic evidence confirms that, after the Umayyad caliphate seized the Byzantine treasury in the late seventh century, it ordered that one or two arms of the cross on the coins be effaced so that the image no longer resembled a crucifix (Sword and Scimitar, p. 54).

Testimonies from the very earliest invasions into Christian Syria and Egypt of Muslims systematically breaking every crucifix they encountered abound. According to Anastasius of Sinai, who lived during the seventh-century Arab conquests, “the demons name the Saracens [Arabs/Muslims] as their companions. And it is with reason. The latter are perhaps even worse than the demons,” for whereas “the demons are frequently much afraid of the mysteries of Christ,” among which he mentions the cross, “these demons of flesh trample all that under their feet, mock it, set fire to it, destroy it” (Sword and Scimitar, p. 27).

Reminiscent of the recent drawing of a cross in fecal matter on a French church in 1147 in Portugal, Muslims displayed “with much derision the symbol of the cross. They spat upon it and wiped the feces from their posteriors with it.” Decades earlier in Jerusalem, Muslims “spat on them [crucifixes] and did not even refrain from urinating on them in the sight of all.” Even that supposedly “magnanimous” sultan, Saladin, commanded “whoever saw that the outside of a church was white, to cover it with black dirt,” and ordered “the removal of every cross from atop the dome of every church in the provinces of Egypt” (Sword and Scimitar, pp. 171, 145, 162).

Lest Muslim hostility to the cross still seem aberrant—limited to some obscure saying of Muhammad or “ancient history”—below is a very partial list of examples of how the crucifix continues to throw even “everyday” Muslims into paroxysms:

Egypt: A young Coptic Christian woman named Mary was mauled to death when her cross identified her as a Christian to Muslim Brotherhood rioters. Similarly, 17-year-old Ayman, a Coptic student, was strangled and beaten to death by his Muslim teacher and fellow students for refusing to obey the teacher’s orders to cover his cross.

Pakistan: When a Muslim man saw Julie Aftab, a Christian woman, wearing a cross around her neck, he attacked her, forced battery acid down her throat, and splashed it on her face—permanently damaging her esophagus, blinding her in one eye, and causing her to lose both eyelids and most of her teeth.

Turkey: A 12-year-old boy in Turkey wearing a silver cross necklace in class was spit on and beaten regularly by Muslim classmates and teachers.

Malaysia: A Christian cemetery was attacked and desecrated in the middle of the night by unknown persons in the Muslim-majority nation. Several crosses were destroyed, including by the use of “a heavy tool to do the damage.” Separately, a Muslim mob rioted against a small Protestant church due to the visible cross atop the building of worship. It was quickly removed.

Maldives: Authorities had to rescue a female Christian teacher after Muslim “parents threatened to tie and drag her off of the island” for “preaching Christianity.” Her crime was to draw a compass—which was mistakenly taken for a cross—as part of a geography lesson in class.

As Islam’s presence continues to grow in Europe, it should come as no surprise that attacks on crosses are also on the rise. Aside from the aforementioned attacks in Italy, the following occurred either in France and Germany, where attacks on churches and crosses have become endemic:

• A Muslim man committed major acts of vandalism at two churches, including by twisting a massive bronze cross. (Click for images.)
• Christian crosses and gravestones in a cemetery were damaged and desecrated by a Muslim (see his handiwork).
• A Muslim man who checked himself into a hospital for treatment went into a sudden frenzy because there were “too many crosses on the wall.” He called the nurse a “bitch” and “fascist” and became physically aggressive.
• After Muslims were granted their own section at a cemetery, and after being allowed to conduct distinctly Islamic ceremonies, these same Muslims began demanding that Christian symbols and crosses in the cemetery beremoved or covered up during Islamic funerals.
• A German-language report from notes that in the Alps and in Bavaria alone, some 200 churches have been attacked and many crosses broken: “The perpetrators are often youthful rioters with a migration background.”

In light of the above, it should come as no surprise that groups such as the Islamic State also make hostile references to the cross in their communiqués to the West: “We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women, by the permission of Allah[.] ... [We will cast] fear into the hearts of the cross-worshipers[.]” The Islamic State even once disseminated a video showing its members smashing crosses in and atop several churches in territories under its sway (since taken down by YouTube); it beheaded and stabbed a man with his own crucifix; and it published pictures of its members destroying Christian crosses and tombstones in cemeteries under its jurisdiction.

Similarly, in post-“Arab Spring” Libya, a video of a Muslim mob attacking a commonwealth cemetery near Benghazi appeared on the internet. As the Muslims kicked down and destroyed headstones with crosses on them, the man videotaping them urged them to “break the cross of the dogs!” while he and others cried “Allahu akbar!” Toward the end of the video, the mob congregated around the huge Cross of Sacrifice, the cemetery’s cenotaph monument, and started to hammer at it, to more cries of “Allahu akbar.” Other Christian cemeteries in Libya have suffered similarly.

In Iraq, pictures emerged from a Christian cemetery that was vandalized by the Islamic State. Broken and scattered crosses appear. In one picture, the jihadis broke into a coffin, snapped off the head of the withered corpse, and threw the crucifixes surrounding it on the ground.

Such is the history and continuity of Islamic hate for the cross—that symbol which represents the heart of the Christian faith, namely the death and resurrection of Christ, two events Islam vehemently denies.

The jihad on the cross began with Muhammad, was carried out by early caliphs, and continues to this day by the jihadis of the world, not to mention the occasional “everyday” Muslim.

Note: For more on the long history of jihad on the Christian cross, see author’s recent book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West.

When The Religious Left Is Occult

By ROD DREHER
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/religious-left-is-occult-pat-robertson-is-right/
June 7, 2019


Dakota Bracciale

Back in the day, the Reverend Pat Robertson kerfuffed the nation by making the following claim about feminism:

[I]t is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.

Today, the religion writer Tara Isabella Burton —  an Oxford PhD whom I met at Walker Percy Weekend — published a fascinating piece about the rise of occultism among Millennial progressives, that ends with this killer graf:

Back in 1992, Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson warned of the dangers of feminism, predicting that it would induce “women to leave their husbands. . . .practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” Many of today’s witches would happily agree.

Her reported piece actually justifies this surprising conclusion. She didn’t write it from a particular political point of view, let me be clear. She told me at the festival that this piece was coming. She said that she had spent a lot of time reporting it by hanging out with people in that world, and asking them what drew them to the occult, and why they believe that occult belief and practice can and should be fused with political commitment. I swear, reading this is like encountering the photonegative of the Religious Right. Excerpts:

For an increasing number of left-leaning millennials—more and more of whom do not belong to any organized religion—occult spirituality isn’t just a form of personal practice, self-care with more sage. Rather, it’s a metaphysical canvas for the American culture wars in the post-Trump era: pitting the self-identified Davids of seemingly secular progressivism against the Goliath of nationalist evangelical Christianity.

There’s the coven of Brooklyn witches who publicly hexed then-Supreme Court candidate Brett Kavanaugh to the acclamation of the thousands-strong “Magic Resistance”—anti-Trump witches (among them: pop singer Lana del Rey) who used at-home folk magic to “bind” the president in the months following his inauguration. There are organizations like The Satanic Temple —newly featured in Penny Lane’s 2019 documentary Hail Satan—a “nontheistic religion” and activist group that uses its religious status to demand for its black-robe-clad members the same protections afforded to Christians in the hopes of highlighting the ridiculousness of faith-based exceptions (Satanic prayer in schools, say). There are dozens of Trump-era how-to spellbooks that blend folk magic with activist practice: the 2018 anthology The New Arcadia: A Witch’s Handbook to MagicalResistance; Michael Hughes’s 2018 Magic for the Resistance: Rituals and Spells for Change; David Salisbury’s 2019 Witchcraft Activism: A Toolkit for Magical Resistance (Includes Spells for Social Justice, Civil Rights, the Environment, and More); and Sarah Lyons’s forthcoming Revolutionary Witchcraft: A Guide to Magical Activism.There are hundreds of thousands of users of witch-popular blogging platforms like Tumblr and Instagram, which at the moment boasts 8.5 million photographs hashtagged “#witch.”

More:

As an aesthetic, as a spiritual practice, and as a communal ideology, contemporary millennial “witch culture” defines itself as the cosmic counterbalance to Trumpian evangelicalism. It’s at once progressive and transgressive, using the language of the chaotic, the spiritually dangerous, and (at times) the diabolical to chip at the edifices of what it sees as a white, patriarchal Christianity that has become a de facto state religion.

Get this:

While New Age practitioners of the 1960s onward often characterized their practice as unfailingly benign—the karmic “Rule of Three,” which predicted that any negative energy sent into the universe would reverberate threefold on a practitioner, was ubiquitous in neo-pagan circles—contemporary witch feminism rebrands occult darkness as a legitimate, even necessary response to a structural oppression. In one Brooklyn zine, author and non-binary witch Dakota Bracciale—co-owner of Catland Books, the occult store behind the Kavanaugh hexing—celebrates the potential of traditional “dark magic” and outright devil-worship as a levying force for social justice.

“There have been too many self-elected spokespersons for all of witchcraft,” Bracciale writes, “seeking to pander to the masses and desperately conform to larger mainstream religious tenets in order to curry legitimacy. Witchcraft has largely, if not exclusively, been a tool of resilience and resistance to oppressive power structures, not a plaything for bored, affluent fools. So if one must ride into battle under the banner of the Devil himself to do so then I say so be it. The reality is that you can be a witch and worship the devil and have sex with demons and cavort through the night stealing children and burning churches. One should really have goals.” As with the denizens of The Satanic Temple, Bracciale uses the imagery of Satanism as a direct attack on what he perceives as Christian hegemony. So too Jex Blackmore, a self-proclaimed Satanic feminist (and former national spokesperson for the Satanic Temple) who appeared in the Hail Satan? documentary performing a Satanic ritual involving half-naked worshippers and pigs’ heads on spikes, announcing: “We are going to disrupt, distort, destroy. . . .We are going to storm press conferences, kidnap an executive, release snakes in the governor’s mansion, execute the president.”

You have to read the whole thing.  This is deeply informed religion journalism, not sensationalism. It’s true that the topic itself is sensational, but after spending a while talking to Tara about this story, and her experiences as a journalist and an observer of that world, I’m convinced that this is a serious phenomenon that deserves attention. If you don’t believe me, read the piece, and see how she traces its influence through popular culture. Tara has a book coming out next year about religion in a “godless” world. Check out her website here.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking since our conversation about this piece, and since reading it earlier today: we should take this as seriously as its practitioners do. 

Under liberalism, many of us have a habit of ironically distancing ourselves from taking religion — mainstream religion, or outsider religion — seriously. For example, we think of religious rites as an expression of how the practitioner feelsabout this or that. Secular unbelievers, obviously, don’t think that there is anythingreal happening with satanic rites, spell-casting, and suchlike. It is nothing more than a form of theater. They also regard Christian rituals in the same way.

If materialism is an accurate and complete account of reality, then they’re right: it’s nothing more than emotive pageantry. Still, if that’s all it is, then we should at least take seriously the fact that there are people who wish to express in ritual a desire to “disrupt, distort [and] destroy.” In writing about the believers within these circles, Tara told me that it’s not a joke or a game to them; they really do believe that what they’re doing has an effect, just as much as a Christian faith healer or exorcist does.

Holden Matthews, the young white man charged with burning down three black churches this year in south Louisiana, was reportedly deeply involved with the black metal scene, a genre of rock that celebrates satanic themes, sometimes attracts white supremacists, and whose followers have been linked to church burnings elsewhere. Maybe there’s nothing to it but expressive pageantry, but then again, Mohammed Atta and his crew hijacked airliners and flew them into buildings for religious and political reasons. My point is simply that religion is not always something nice and respectable and life-affirming. All religion might be false, but most of us would rather live next door to Ned Flanders than Holden Matthews.

But what if materialism’s account of reality is untrue? What if there really is something actual going on with religion? That is, what if people who perform religious rites — Catholics, Taoists, witches, everyone — are not simply expressing how they feel, but truly making contact with the numinous, and engaging its power?

I believe that’s what’s happening in most religious rites. Do I believe that all people who participate in them are actually contacting the god or gods they claim to be contacting? No, of course not. I am an Orthodox Christian, not a pantheist. I believe in the cosmos as described in the Bible. I believe in the Holy Trinity, in saints and angels — and I believe that the devil exists, and so do demons. I’ve seen enough with my own eyes, and heard enough testimony from those with more direct experience of malevolent spirits, to be completely assured that this world exists.

Within the Christian world, you can find a lot of diversity of opinion about the spiritual world and its mysteries. Some strict Christians would say that anyone who doesn’t pray explicitly to Jesus Christ is therefore a servant of the Evil One. Others have more complex views. It’s the same in other religions, of course. I don’t want to go into how to parse these things out. That’s an interesting topic, but beside the point I want to make here.

Which is this: what Burton writes about is not something to laugh about — though the way woke capitalism is exploiting the search for divinity via occultism is pretty eye-rolling –n is it something to affirm in that broad-minded, nitwit way in which we cheerfully Celebrate Diversity.™ The Religious Left is not merely about Unitarian Universalists and Social Justice Catholics. It includes an increasing number of people who actually hate Christianity, and wish to harm it. And, as Burton wittily observes, almost three decades after the TV evangelist made his controversial observation, Pat Robertson’s fundraising fever dream has come true.

What do we do with that?

What do you do with that if you are a materialist?

What do you do with it if you’re a liberal Christian, Jew, or Muslim? Does your shared political commitment mean you overlook the occultism? Or what?

What if you’re a conservative Abrahamic theist? How do you respond?

What if you’re someone from an established non-Abrahamic tradition? Is there a line to be drawn between, say, Hinduism and Buddhism on one side, and satanism on the other?

Can a clear and meaningful line be drawn between worshipers in various occult traditions. Wiccans, for example, are not satanists — but would Wiccans reject holding rituals with satanists, or teaming with them for political action? If so, on what grounds? I’m genuinely asking.

The one response that I reject flatly as nonsense is to laugh it off as theater. For one thing, it’s disrespectful to those who take it seriously, just as disrespectful as it would be to dismiss someone who worships in synagogue or masjid or church as nothing more than an actor or a member of the audience. Laughing the mysteries of religion off as theater is what we say when we can’t figure out what to think, and we just want to dismiss the numinous. But the numinous keeps showing up. Read this 2014 essay by Rice University religion scholar Jeffrey Kripal, who talks about how we have a foolish habit of dismissing anything that contradicts the materialist framework out of hand.

Ask yourself, if only as a thought experiment: if the people in Tara Isabella Burton’s report are in touch with actual dark spiritual forces, and trying to invoke or otherwise activate them to affect people and events in the material world, what does that mean? Can your settled pieties, secular and otherwise, afford to take them seriously? is what I’m asking.

Let’s have an interesting, respectful conversation about this, shall we? If you just want to rant, don’t bother, because I’m not going to approve it. Also, let me point out that my own views are not the same views as Tara Isabella Burton. Her piece is reported neutrally, as a work of religion journalism; you should read it before commenting. 

UPDATE: Gang, be serious in your comments.