Reflections on ISIS attacks on Paris and Beirut

As the world reels from the horrors we have read and talked about since Thursday, our only recourse remains that which is the most powerful: prayer. Across the world, peoples of all faiths are offering prayers in memory of the victims of the terrorist attacks and support for the victims and their suffering families.

God protect beautiful Paris, stalwart Beirut, and their suffering people. May Christ the Lord, who suffers with all who suffer, be with them and deliver them and His holy Mother comfort them. Memory eternal to all those poor souls who have died, and may God comfort their families in their loss!

So far, according to numerous news reports such as this, over 43 people have died in Burj al-Barajneh, Beirut in an ISIS attack against a Shia neighborhood, mosque, and market, with over 239 seriously wounded. Today Lebanon — whose government is divided between Shia, Sunni, and Christian leadership — observed a day of profound mourning.

My Muslim friends, all of whom are American citizens, took to Facebook to express their disgust, horror, and revulsion over ISIS’ attacks. One of them, a Peace Corps veteran who served in rural Kenya, is a former Resident Assistant (RA) at American University (he was my RA during my sophomore year). He wrote the following about Islam in particular. He linked to this story of a heroic Beirut citizen, Adel Termos, who lost his life defending others:

ISIS is killing our religion. It’s killing our fathers, mothers, children
Our 5 pillars
Our foundation.

A man sacrifices himself and still loses his daughter. There’s a collective sigh of sorrow in the Muslim world today. I promise that while tomorrow I’ll be hopeful, for now, I’ll grieve for those lost in Russia, Lebanon, France, Yemen, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

Peace be upon your hearts as well friends.

ISIS also claimed responsibility for the better-publicized attacks across Paris, which have left at least 129 people dead and over 350 more seriously wounded. President Obama, Prime Minister Cameron, Chancellor Merkel, and Russian President Putin all issued statements in support of the Parisian people and France.

As President Hollande’s unpopular Socialist government is likely to suffer a further decline in public support for having failed to prevent the attack, it is possible, though far from certain, that the far-right Front National party led by Marine Le Pen will win several upcoming regional elections. Ms. Le Pen has seen her popularity surge since the attacks after she made strong statements urging the “annihilation” of Islamist radicals and the deportation of such people from France. As Reuters and The Guardian reported earlier today from Paris, the Front National leader made the following comments to French reporters:

We are living the horror … yesterday evening the centre of France was struck by an exceptional barbarity. It was an escalation of Islamist terrorism and the sixth time this year that Islamists have attacked our country.

Islamist fundamentalism must be annihilated, France must ban Islamist organizations, close radical mosques and expel foreigners who preach hatred in our country as well as illegal migrants who have nothing to do here.

As this Lebanese Australian news agency reports, none of the world leaders, as of Saturday morning, had addressed the terrorist attacks in Beirut to the degree that the world was speaking about the events in Paris. God forgive us as a world, and as a society, for those in the media who perpetuate this double standard of covering the attack in Paris (where the victims were overwhelmingly European) and ignoring the earlier attack in Beirut (where the victims were overwhelmingly Arab).

French President Francois Hollande closed the French borders, declared a state of emergency, and vowed that France would issue a “merciless” response against ISIS. All major French political parties agreed to suspend their campaigns for the upcoming regional (departmental) elections, and leading mainstream French politicians including former center-right President Nicolas Sarkozy and former center-right PM Francois Fillon took to Twitter to express their support for Hollande’s decision to order the emergency decree. Sarkozy wrote emphatically that “the terrorists have declared war on France.”

Paris’ Mayor, Anne Hidalgo, wrote the following on her Facebook account at around 6:30 EST:

Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. Ces valeurs sont la langue vivante des quartiers qui ont été touchés à Paris, hier soir. Les Parisiens sont debout, unis. Les terroristes ont voulu nous faire taire, ils n’y arriveront pas. Nous ne céderons pas. La classe politique doit être à la hauteur des valeurs de la République. Les citoyens nous demandent de ne pas les décevoir. Unité.

My translation:

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. These values are the living language of the neighborhoods that were hit in Paris last night. The Parisians are standing united. The terrorists wanted to silence us, they will not succeed. We will not give. The political class must be equal to the values of the Republic. The citizens demand of us that we not disappoint them. Unity.

Mayor Hidalgo wrote the following in her initial reaction to the ISIS attacks:

C’est avec horreur que j’ai appris les attaques survenues dans notre ville. Face à ces inqualifiables actes de barbarie qui ont fait plusieurs dizaines de morts, Paris est touchée au coeur.
Au nom des Parisiens, je tiens à exprimer mes condoléances les plus vives et les plus attristées aux familles et aux proches des victimes. Je tiens également à saluer le courage sans faille des forces de police et des secours, qui ont immédiatement réagi avec un sens du devoir hors-pair. Paris les remercie. Je tiens enfin à remercier les marques de soutien internationales d’ores et déjà exprimées aux Parisiens, parmi lesquelles celles des maires de New York, Montréal et Madrid.
Je me suis rendue sur place rapidement et dès ce soir, les services municipaux parisiens sont pleinement mobilisés. La Mairie du 11e arrondissement accueille les blessés tandis qu’une cellule de crise est organisée à l’Hôtel de Ville.
Nous sommes debout, nous sommes unis. J’en appelle à l’unité de toutes et tous.

My translation:

It is with horror that I learned of the attacks in our city. Faced with these unspeakable barbarous acts which have caused dozens of deaths, Paris is touched to the heart.
In the name of the Parisians, I have to express my deepest and most heartfelt condolences to the families and relatives of the victims. I also have to equally salute the unwavering courage of police and rescue forces, who immediately responded with a sense of duty peerless. Paris thanks all of them. Finally, I want to thank the support of international brands already expressed to the Parisians, among which those of the mayors of New York, Montreal and Madrid.
I visited the site quickly and this tonight, Parisian municipal services are fully mobilized. The Mayor of the 11th arrondissement hosts the wounded while a crisis unit shall be held in the City Hall.
We are standing, we are united. I appeal to the unity of you all.

The Legitimist pretender to the French throne, Prince Louis Alphonse de Bourbon, Duc d’Anjou (King Louis XX to French Legitimists) offered this elegant, brief response to the horrors in Paris (I have translated from the original French here):

At the moment that the cowardice which caused this horror saddens all of Paris and France, I express my profound emotion.

My thoughts and my prayers are with the victims and their families. The dead and the injured innocents. The guardians of security and health.

Beyond the pain and indignation, facing this act of war, it is up to everyone to be responsible and confidant in the future. As in other troubled times, France will regain its peace and greatness by the union of that which has always been its strength and consistency, its values obtained from the sources of its history.

Here is a beautiful Latin Requiem sung by the Choeur des moines de l’Abbaye de Saint-Pierre de Solesmes (Choir of the Monks of the Abbey of Saint-Pierre), and here is a magnificent, moving Litany of the Saints of Paris (in French).

Given the Russian Federation’s ongoing bombing campaign along with the Syrian Army, Iraqi Kurdish paramilitary forces, and Iranian fighters — a campaign which has massively devastated the terrorists — it is unsurprising that ISIS released a new video announcing that they intend to begin attacking Russia itself. God protect Russia from these vicious barbarians. In the chilling video, which features gruesome images of executions, ISIS threatens that “blood will spill like an ocean” and refers to Russians as “kaffirs” (infidels).

Who is ultimately responsible for ISIS coming into existence? Certainly the United States did not help matters by creating a power gap in the heart of the Middle East by first backing (under Bush I and Clinton) Iraqi Baathist dictator Saddam Hussein and then (under Bush II) removing him from power, and encouraging Baathist President Assad’s removal in Syria with no real plausible moderate or democratic alternative to the secular dictator. Our arming of so-called “moderate” Syrian opposition was a colossal failure, as many of these “moderates” wound up in ISIS. Who is the closest power, ideologically speaking, to ISIS, and whose muftis and imams and princes have strong ties to leading ISIS figures?

The House of Saud — Saudi Arabia’s ruling royal dynasty. With British support, they usurped and drove from power an ancient, legitimate monarchical dynasty (the Hashemites) in the Hejaz, which became the core of Saudi Arabia. They give real, legitimate monarchies a bad name, slaughter hundreds of their own people and foreigners alike each year in trumped up trials and beheadings, and are extremely racist toward non-Arab, mostly African and South Asian migrant workers. In the wake of the recent tragic stampedes and crane collapses in Mecca, Islam’s holiest city, which left over 700 people dead, Saudi emergency workers were criticized for piling the bodies of African victims atop each other like trash.

In terms of providing fertile ideological and educational indoctrination in Salafism, the Saudi regime exports extremely hateful Wahhabi textbooks to Saudi-funded Wahhabi madrasas around the world which refer to Jews and Christians as apes and swine. They despise non-Wahhabi Muslims, especially Shias, as heretics and consider them non-Muslims. Here is a detailed Washington Post article which goes into more detail about these deplorable Saudi textbooks.

In March 2015 the blind Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah, the Saudi Grand Mufti, whom the Saudi King directly appoints,repeatedly called for the destruction of all churches on the Arabian Peninsula, including in neighboring Kuwait. There is not a single legal church in all of Saudi Arabia, where Christians have no freedom of worship and conversion from Islam to any other religion (“apostasy”) is punishable by death.

Saudi Arabia’s current ruling elite — all of whom espouse the same radical Wahhabi sect which ISIS does — stands to benefit more than any other state from ISIS’ presence because the terrorist group’s very existence causes anxious policymakers in Washington, London, and Brussels to think “better to deal with the devil we know than the devil we don’t know”. Instead of seeking realistic alternatives to the Saudi tyranny which directly finances religious hatred and indirectly sponsors terrorism, our leaders say that we must accept the House of Saud as “at least not as bad as ISIS”.

This is unacceptable and abhorrent. It thus comes as a great disappointment, but no surprise, that the Obama administration’s State Department is about to rightfully recognize Iraqi Yazidis as victims of attempted genocide by ISIS, but not Christians.

UPDATE (10 November 2015):

Here is an excellent article in The Economist which reflects very well my present line of thinking, and here is a superb article written by Scott Atran on why and how the West fails to understand ISIS. Here is another superb article from Graeme Wood in The Atlantic on ISIS’ real ideological motivations and why the West’s failure to understand them is so dangerous.

What can we do, as a nation and as a world, to isolate, demoralize, and above all cut all flow of money to ISIS? Charles P. Piece writes the following here for Esquire:

It is long past time for the oligarchies of the Gulf states to stop paying protection to the men in the suicide belts. Their societies are stunted and parasitic. The main job of the elites there is to find enough foreign workers to ensla…er…indenture to do all the real work. The example of Qatar and the interesting business plan through which that country is building the facilities for the 2022 World Cup is instructive here. Roughly the same labor-management relationship exists for the people who clean the hotel rooms and who serve the drinks. In Qatar, for people who come from elsewhere to work, passports have been known to disappear into thin air. These are the societies that profit from terrible and tangled web of causation and violence that played out on the streets of Paris. These are the people who buy their safety with the blood of innocents far away.

Besides ISIS, Gulf state radicalized financiers have supported Boko Haram, the ISIS-affiliate operating in Nigeria and much of west Africa. The African Salafist group has claimed responsibility for a vicious attack in the northeastern Nigerian town of Yola which killed at least 32 people and wounded 80. Meanwhile, in Baghdad, over 20 Iranian exiles living in a displaced persons camp on the edge of the city died in a nighttime bombing on Thursday, the same day as the Paris attacks. Over the weekend, more violence continued as a Saudi-led Yemeni airstrike on a Houthi separatist (Shiite Yemeni) wedding party left over 131 people dead.

With one exception — a non-practicing Shiite friend from Iran — all of my Muslim friends are Sunnis from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Palestine, Turkey, Sudan, Malaysia, and Jordan. One of my Sunni friends, whose family hail from Karachi, is a follower of the Sufi tradition (Ahl e Sunnah wal Jama’ah), a mystical and often more perennial path which has a lot of influence from non-Islamic intellectual and theological sources. Her sect’s imams and sheikhs have repeatedly taken to the internet, as well as Friday sermons, to condemn Daesh in ringing terms.

One of the leaders of her community, an internationally renowned Islamist jurist and scholar, Sheikh Muhammad al-Yaqoubi, has published this book denouncing ISIS in particular and Wahhabism generally. She also directed me to this book-length fatwa (decree or treatise) written by an eminent Pakistani jurist and scholar, Sheikh Dr Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri which seeks to demolish ISIS and other Islamist terrorist groups’ intellectual arguments and claims. I have read reviews of the book and plan to order it. Please look into whether or not the book is something you would like to purchase to learn more about opposition to ISIS and terrorism from a Sufi perspective. My Sufi friend also told me that there were prophecies made by Muhammad about the eventual rise of a group just like  ISIS, known as “khwarijites”. The Wahhabis have historically savagely persecuted Sufi orders in particular, despising their veneration of saints and martyrs (along with the Shia who also do this) and their less legalistic, more mystical approach to the divine.

One of my professors is Iranian, a descendant on her mother’s side of Muhammad himself (in Shia Islam, the majority sect in Iran, most of Iraq, and large portions of Syria and Egypt, the descendants of Muhammad may use various honorifics and are the class from whom imams are chosen). All of my American Muslim friends, and this professor, are largely theologically liberal or perennialist. Many of them pray,  most of them observe the lunar month Ramadan fast, and all of them do charitable works as their religion commands. As they themselves have told me, they recognize that their theological liberalism/perennialism is very different from the attitudes of most Muslims around the world, who are often influenced by the more puritanical, stringent Salafist interpretations through Saudi-funded madrasas and mosques.

We have seen examples of this latent radicalism and hatred most recently at, of all places, a football game in Turkey. On Tuesday, 17 November, Turkish football (soccer) fans booed and chanted ‘Allahu Akbar’ during the minuter of silence which was to be observed in commemoration of the Paris attacks. The game, between traditional enemies Greece and Turkey, was supposed to be a friendly symbol of international solidarity in the wake of the attacks across the world. Some Muslim friends of mine actually defended the barbarous behavior of the Turkish fans, saying the boos were to protest the lack of news coverage of the attacks in Beirut, Baghdad, and Yemen which left mostly Muslims dead, but one has to wonder: how does booing during a moment of silence for other people, also killed tragically, really make your point that other terrorist attacks should also be included in the commemorations? The chanting of “Allahu akbar” (takbir) speaks for itself: though most Muslim scholars would claim that this is an abuse of takbir, the reality is that sympathetic Muslim radicals across the Middle East have shouted it repeatedly after terrorist attacks launched by Islamist Wahhabis against Westerners. Unsurprisingly, many crude Turkish football spectators also booed and jeered during a moment of silence held for victims of last month’s Turkish bombing at the start of the Turkey-Iceland game.

ISIS has announced in videos plans to attack Russia, Washington DC, and New York City, since both Russia and the United States have stepped up their attacks on ISIS. While public opinion and political opinion among elites seems to be united in the need for an international coalition to destroy ISIS, there exists much more pronounced divisions among leading members of American political life as to how to deal with the human cost of the most senior American politicians seem to have mixed feelings about President Obama’s decision to open the U.S. borders to some 10,000 Syrian refugees with no additional security checks. On Monday, November 16, 23 governors — mostly Republicans — issued statements that they would not be opening their state borders to these people. One Minnesota Democratic congressional candidate, Dan Kimmel, cluelessly tweeted an astonishingly ignorant, tone-deaf comment about ISIS in the wake of the Paris attacks. Deluged with a cascade of outrage from all observers, he soon after ended his campaign.

Today, Speaker of the House and 2012 Republican Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan condemned President Obama’s promise to veto the House bill (which passed today 289-137) which would require the nation’s three top security officials — the Homeland Security secretary, FBI director, and national intelligence director — to certify to Congress that each Syrian or Iraqi refugee is not a security threat before the refugee can be admitted into the U.S. On his Facebook account, Speaker Ryan wrote the following:

If we cannot, without a shadow of a doubt, make sure and confirm that a person does not pose a threat to this country, then they shouldn’t come here. And that’s the point we’re trying to make. I don’t want this to be Republicans versus Democrats. This is Americans. This is our national security.

On the White House Facebook account, the following statement appeared late last night (the 18th):

We can welcome refugees and ensure America’s safety and security. The U.S. will provide refuge to at least 10,000 vulnerable refugees fleeing violence in Syria over the next year, after subjecting them to rigorous screening and the highest security checks of any category of traveler we allow into our country.

From Manila, Philippines, President Obama tweeted the following on his official Twitter account:

Slamming the door in the face of refugees would betray our deepest values. That’s not who we are. And it’s not what we’re going to do.

Regarding the influx of Syrian refugees/migrants (the US is planning to accept only approximately 10,000, compared to the hundreds of thousands Turkey and Germany plan to accept), President Obama recently offended Republican members of Congress and state governors who are advising caution on opening the borders to these people, whom they term “economic migrants”.

My thoughts are somewhat divided on this. I do not think refugees should be turned away simply for being Muslim. Obviously, it would violate the First Amendment to close down mosques en masse. I do think that every mosque that operates under funding that (1) largely originates from a foreign country, and (2) can be traced back to sources with radical, anti-Western agendas, must be shut down, and their imams and preachers investigated. As one of my friends observed, “Some Islamic organizations in the U.S. fall under this description, and I imagine that the number in Europe is much higher.”

In France and across the West, any mosques with proven, clear financial or personal links to radical pro-terrorism groups, or to terrorist organizations themselves, must be searched once a warrant is obtained, closed if evidence is found, and their imams put under surveillance. We must be vigilant, but we must not and cannot resort to violence against innocent Muslims. Those who are proven to be radicalized must be arrested, but we cannot justly punish one person for another person’s crimes.

We must consider that while most of the refugees coming in from Syria are sane, normal people simply seeking a new home after their lives were destroyed by horrific years of war, ISIS is also deliberately sending in some of their operatives among these refugees to in turn live among us. Besides people who are openly Muslim, this could include some ISIS operatives posing as non-Muslims. The solution is not to reject all the refugees, but to carefully screen them. We can and must be a safe country without violating the constitution. We cannot ignore the reality that the past week has seen more ISIS and Boko Haram-launched terrorist attacks in close proximity to each other than ever before. To respond with “keep the status quo” on vetting refugees when the situation is anything but the status quo reveals a tremendous dearth of leadership on the President’s part.

The White House claims to be giving priority to those refugees most threatened by violence and yet the State Department has refused to classify Christians from the region as threatened by genocide. This means that they are, in fact, not given priority. I am happy to welcome those fleeing from Syria and Iraq who are members of persecuted minority groups: Christians, Alawites, Shiites/Shia, Yazidis, etc. As for Sunni refugee-seekers, it is hardly unreasonable to ask to see evidence that they are not sympathetic to ISIS, Al-Qaeda and co. Anyone who ignores the fact that all of ISIS’ recruits come from disaffected Sunni Muslims, thousands of whom have migrated from Western countries to join the terrorists, is willfully blind. Then there is the issue of radicalized Sunni Muslims living within, for instance, France, as this poll disturbingly shows.

The US should make significant financial and material contributions to efforts to assist all refugees from the conflict. The US is largely responsible for the escalation of violence in Syria and therefore has a moral responsibility to help. However, we can and should provide financial and medical assistance, food supplies, the setting up and maintenance of refugee camps, etc. in Turkey for most of the refugees. Eventually many of these refugees will want to return to their homeland once the war is over. The US should open her borders only for those most in danger of suffering further violence and discrimination. This position has nothing to do with being ‘anti-Muslim’. The Shia are the friends and allies of the Orthodox communities across the region, and many Sunni families have been innocent victims of ISIS.

As France is now seeking a close military alliance with Russia, the main issue that has divided the West and Russia thus far– support for keeping embattled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in power (Moscow) or removing him (Washington, London, and Brussels) has come into stark relief once again. Despite strong objections from President Obama, Secretary Kerry, PM Cameron, etc., Russia has continued to stand by Assad, vesting in him — as in the brutal Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov — their hopes for long-term regional stability and stabilization. Just yesterday Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov insisted that Assad’s immediate removal from power not be an absolute precondition for an international response to drive ISIS from Syria. As The Guardian observes:

In recent weeks, the US, Britain and the other countries that had previously insisted on Assad’s immediate departure have been signalling he could stay on for a transition period of a few months but would eventually have to go. The Russians have seized on this as evidence that the debate about Syria is going their way.

The Moscow Times reports that it seems as though Moscow and Washington may at last be inching toward some degree of cooperation:

On Sunday [Putin’s] informal conversation with U.S. President Barack Obama gripped public attention. It reportedly lasted 20 minutes, and it is still unclear what was discussed, but the mere fact that it happened was interpreted by many as a positive sign of improving relations with the West.

The next day Putin stated that Russia is ready to support the opposition in Syria in its fight with the Islamic State, basically declaring resolved one of the main issues at the core of the disagreements between Russia and Western countries blaming Putin for helping Assad fight the opposition.

“Part of the armed opposition [in Syria] contemplates starting a military operation against IS with Russia’s support, and we are ready to supply that support from the air,” Putin was cited by TASS as saying Monday. “It might be grounds for later work on resolving political issues [in Syria],” the Russian leader added.

At that same time Hollande spoke at the French parliament, both chambers of which gathered at the Palace of Versailles for the first time since 2009. Among other things he called on creating a unified coalition that could include Russia.

“[It’s necessary] to gather everyone who can fight IS into one coalition,” he said, promising to meet with both Russian and U.S. presidents in the nearest future, the RBC news agency reported.

All this led to the belief that relations between Russia and the West are finally warming up, a belief that Putin mentioned during a final press conference at the G20.

“[A year ago at the G20 summit] the relations were much more tense [than now]. One can feel it, it’s true,” he said, adding that creating a joint coalition in Syria is a necessity, and “the tragic events that followed only proved our point.”

The only question that remains unanswered at this point — and probably the only thing keeping the parties from shaking hands and officially accepting Russia into the coalition — is the fate of Assad, whom the West wants out of the picture, but whom Russian officials call the only legitimate leader in Syria.

“Until there is a compromise about Assad, Russia and the coalition of the Western countries will fight in Syria in parallel, but not in tandem,” Alexei Makarkin, deputy director of the Moscow-based Center for Political Technologies, told The Moscow Times.

 

On a positive note, in a raid on a St Denis flat yesterday, French security forces killed 27-year old Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the Belgian mastermind behind the Paris attacks. A woman at the flat – reported in French media to be Abaaoud’s cousin – died during the raid after activating a suicide vest. The reality that Abaaoud, a France-hating Wahhabi terrorist, was killed in a flat in a Paris suburb where the Basilica of St Denis stands (the burial place of French kings) is almost too surreal for words.

The double-headed eagle: a symbol at once both ancient and new

This is the Roman Imperial Standard of the Byzantine Empire (AD 330-1453). The crown with the cross at the top surmounting the double-headed Imperial Eagle represents the authority of the God-anointed Emperor, who ruled with the Orthodox Church’s blessing; the double-headed eagle itself represents the symphonia/harmonia/cooperatio of the Orthodox Church and the Imperial State, governing and leading the Empire in tandem, one in politics, the other in religion. The eagle on the left, holding the sword in its talons, represents the Imperial State led by the Emperor, and the eagle on the left, holding the imperial orb and cross, represents the Imperial Orthodox Church led by the Patriarch of Constantinople.

According to A.V. Soloviev’s 1935 “Les emblèmes héraldiques de Byzance et les Slaves”, (Seminarium Kondakovianum), the interpretation of the tetragrammic “BB BB” emblem’s symbolism is as follows: The two traditional readings of the four “B”s, Βασιλεὺς βασιλέων βασιλεύων βασιλεύουσιν and Βασιλεὺς βασιλέων βασιλεύοντων βασιλεύει (both meaning “King of Kings ruling over the kings/rulers”) were demonstrated by the Greek archaeologist and numismatist Ioannis Svoronos to be later interpretations by the 17th-century historian Marcus Vulson de la Colombière. Svoronos himself proposed three alternate readings: Σταυρὲ βασιλέως βασιλέων βασιλεῖ βοήθει (“Cross of the King of Kings aid the emperor”), Σταυρὲ βασιλέως βασιλέων βασιλευούσῃ βοήθει (“Cross of the King of Kings aid the ruling city [Constantinople]”), and Σταυρὲ βασιλέως βασιλέων βασιλεύων βασίλευε.

14th century Byzantine imperial flag.

As you can recognise, this symbol did not die with the fall of Constantinople in May 1453, but was adopted by many Orthodox states positing themselves as the successor states to Byzantium; most notably, Imperial Russia (1547-1917, Russian Empire 1721-1917) as well as Serbia, Montenegro, the Holy Roman Empire, etc. Here is a magnificent gold double-headed eagle in the former Russian Imperial capital of Saint Petersburg:

Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia Seeks Abortion Ban in Russia

Under the Soviet Union, Russia became the first country in the world to decriminalize abortion, and during the Soviet period abortion was widely used as a primary form of birth control. I have known a number of older Russian woman who, tragically, had multiple abortions. In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the revitalization of Orthodoxy in the countries of the former Soviet bloc, the abortion rate remained high as the period of shock privatization saw many Russians endure terribly low wages, high unemployment, high alcohol consumption, etc. The Russian Orthodox Church steadfastly urged reforms to the adoption system, state assistance to unwed mothers, and, above all, the preservation and revitalization of marriage. His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and all Russia has addressed this issue in numerous homilies and at many conferences. In January 2015 he appeared before the Lower House of the Russian Parliament, urging lawmakers to act to reduce the number of abortions and ensure stable population growth.

Published here by RT on 22 January 2015 is the Patriarch’s address:

The head of the Russian Orthodox Church has called upon MPs to begin a campaign against abortions, starting with canceling state sponsorship for the procedure and aiming at a total nationwide ban.

“If we manage to cut the number of abortions by 50 percent we would have stable and powerful population growth,” Patriarch Kirill said, speaking before the Lower House on Thursday. This was the first ever speech of the head of the Russian Orthodox Church before the State Duma.

“The argument that a ban would cause an increase in the number of underground abortions is pure nonsense. People have to pay money for these operations and our task is to make the price of a legal infanticide the same as of the illegal one. Taxpayers must not pay for this,” the church leader told the MPs, suggesting the exclusion of abortion from the list of services covered by the obligatory medical insurance program.

However, the Patriarch acknowledged the solution to demographic problems was complex. According to him, apart from bans and restrictions, the state must help young families with money and housing and also introduce strict ethical norms in the medical sphere, giving doctors additional stimuli to care about the life of “conceived children.”

The top Russian cleric again attacked surrogacy in his parliamentary speech, urging lawmakers to take steps to completely replace it with adoption.

In mid-November last year, a large assembly formed of lawmakers, rights activists, medical experts and members of various church-related groups passed a resolution seeking legislative changes to ban all abortions, saying human life begins at the moment of conception. The authors of the document said that although Russia ratified the International Convention on Children’s Rights in 1990, the authorities still do nothing to “protect children before birth.”

The bill brands abortions as murder and completely bans them along with contraceptives “with an abortive function” – morning-after pills and intra-uterine devices.

In October 2013, an official representative of the Russian Orthodox Church attacked abortions and surrogacy as a “mutiny against God,” and less than a month later State Duma Deputy Elena Mizulina said in a speech that the community must urgently stop tolerating abortions and surrogacy, as they threaten to wipe out the population of Russia and the world as a whole.

The move gained little support from other politicians, who argued that such a ban would only lead to more illegal abortions that are much more dangerous and leave many women infertile, only aggravating Russia’s demographic problems. Eventually Mizulina had to play down her statements, saying that she merely wanted to draw attention to the problem and start a discussion, not introduce any legislative bans.

According to pro-life activists, every year about 1 million women in Russia have induced abortions with only 10 percent of them being carried out for health reasons.

Superb essay on U.S. and U.K. media’s ongoing Russophobia by Catherine Brown

I know no Russian who has any knowledge of Russia’s representation in Britain who is not strongly critical of it. I too am depressed by it, specifically because I think that it is intellectually and morally demeaning, and counter-productive to a dangerous degree.

-Dr Catherine Brown

I could not agree more with these words. They describe the sentiments held by all of my Russian friends, of all religious persuasions, and of all political persuasions. Of my Russian friends–only three of whom are from Moscow, and none of whom are active members of Putin’s political party– all of them nonetheless strongly support President Putin’s policies, believe he has had a strongly positive impact on their country’s economic development, and believe that Crimea, historically part of Russia until Nikita Khrushchev drunkenly signed it over to the Ukrainian SSR in the 1950s, is now rightfully once again part of nasha strana.

Noted British professor, author, and academic Dr Catherine Brown recently published a superb essay “Deconstructing Russophobia” on her blog. By her own admission, Dr Brown has “no ethnic, financial, professional or political ties to Russia whatsoever. It follows that I am not a Russian expert – but nor am I, on the other hand, parti pris. I am a friendly, distanced observer of the country.” This is the way I would describe my own godmother, a lifelong Russianist who has no ties to Russia save her abiding interest in the pre-Soviet Tsarist period, especially its magnificent artistic, cultural, and religious heritage.

Dr Brown, while not claiming herself to be “a Russian expert”, is nonetheless immensely qualified from her decades of direct experience with all matters Russian to write on the topic. Her academic resume is of the highest calibre:

My academic position is as Senior Lecturer and Convenor (Head of Department) of English at New College of the Humanities in London.

I took a BA in English Literature at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, then an MSc in Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at the London School of Economics. I lived in New York and Moscow, and learned Spanish and Russian, before coming back to literary academia with an MA in Comparative Literature at University College London, and a PhD at Caius College Cambridge as an Anglo-Russian comparatist.

I taught English at the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and Greenwich, before starting in my current position in London in 2012.

Dr Brown begins her essay by reeling in her readers with a gentle yet damning satire of the ongoing idiotic British and American narrative of Putin as a tyrant and thug:

Imagine that Vladimir Putin were not a murderous autocrat and kleptocrat who has spent his fourteen years in power living up to his KGB past and dragging Russia ever back towards Communist autocracy, illiberalism, and expansionism. Imagine that instead he were the one of the greatest leaders that Russia has had, whose policies have helped produce a massive rise in living standards and life expectancy, recuperation of national pride, and enforcement of the rule of law, who has tackled kleptocrats and gangsters wisely and well, whose foreign policy has on balance been realistic, diplomatic, and conducive to peace, who has presided over a country of which the human rights record is considerably better than that of the United States and in which civil rights are improving, and who richly deserves the steady support of 65% – currently at a Ukraine-related high of 83% – of the population that he possesses. It is my understanding that the reality is closer to the second scenario than the first…

Dr Brown notes that, since the early 2000s, she has noticed a steady improvement in the conditions of life for ordinary Russians under Putin’s tenure as President and then Prime Minister:

A year later, on a visit, the situation was slightly better. The most extravagant misery was no longer apparent. A year later, better still. And that has been the consistent pattern on all my visits since then. Capitalism has been getting its gloves back on. Public facilities are in a much better state. Nothing is sold in dollars and Western brands have Russian rivals. A sensible tax structure means that businesses and salaried employees can and do pay their taxes. One sees no-one drunk in public. Muscovite women no longer exaggerate their femininity in a way which testifies to financial insecurity and a strenuous imitation of a pornographically-imagined West. And most reassuringly of all, to Westerners used to this custom, people have begun to smile. Even the hardest cases – the babushki guarding the museum rooms, and the border guards at passport control – will now return a smile. Last year, for the first time, I felt that Russia was in a new phase – the post-post-Soviet, in which people are no longer waiting for normality to be re-established, or yearning to live in a ‘normal’ country. A new normality, and a new optimism, have emerged.

Dr Brown also notes how the Western condemnation of the Russian government’s prosecution of activist group Pussy Riot for their “punk prayer” on the solea of Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral was both grossly inaccurate and flagrantly hypocritical. She also observes how Pussy Riot are anything but a legitimate musical band or decent political activist group, noting that prior to their desecration of Christ the Saviour Cathedral, they had done even more offensive things in public to attract attention:

In certain respects the operation of the Russian law is more lenient than the British. Prior to their ‘punk prayer’ in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, members of Pussy Riot had performed public sex in a museum, and thrown live cats at workers in a McDonalds restaurant. In Britain such acts could have resulted in prison sentences of at least two years, whereas in Russia they were not prosecuted at all. One reason why Pussy Riot were prosecuted for their ‘punk prayer’ was that it disrupted and parodied a religious act of worship, which is specifically prohibited under Russian (as also British) law, and which is particularly comprehensible in a country with a history of state persecution of religion.

Dr Brown goes on to note how the Russian human rights record is far superior to that of the United States, with Russia incarcerating fewer prisoners, the death penalty no longer practiced at all there, and Russia not allowing its President to “authorise the kidnap, torture, and killing of domestic and foreign citizens without trial” as the United States has done since the authorization of the Patriot Act.

Let us compare Russia to the United States (China being of course much worse than both). The US has around 730 to Russia’s 598 prisoners per 100,000 of the population. It uses the death penalty, executes minors, and empowers its President to authorise the kidnap, torture, and killing of domestic and foreign citizens without trial. Russia does none of these things. The US government has significantly curtailed Americans’ civil liberties under the Patriot Act, extensively spies on the media activities of its own and other countries’ citizens, and detains hundreds of people without trial in an international network of secret prisons. Russians’ civil liberates are now more strongly guaranteed by law than are Americans’; there is no evidence or suggestion that Russia kidnaps individuals abroad or outsources torture, nor that it runs a torture camp resembling Guantanamo Bay, nor that the FSB spies on Russian citizens to anything near the extent that the NSA spies on Americans, let alone on foreigners. In this respect – the extent of spying on their own citizens – Russia and the US have changed places since the end of the Soviet Union.

Dr Brown’s essay is refreshing in that she analyses Western media’s biases against Russia from a purely secular perspective. Thus, her analysis appeals to the majority of Russian scholars in Britain and the United States who are not Orthodox. Nonetheless, I think her essay would have befitted from one additional area of analysis: religious identity. This is a core difference between American and British civilization and Russian civilization. Neither Britain nor the United States have been defined by a single unifying, common religious heritage, whereas all of Russian history is closely tied to the country’s embrace of Eastern Orthodox Christianity over a thousand years ago. Unlike the mostly non-religious country of Britain, Russia saw no inter-confessional religious wars, and large Muslim and Buddhist religious minorities continue to live in Russia today.

British history is marked by years of intermittent violence between Catholics and Protestants, with the pendulum of persecution veering from the targeting of both Catholics and Lutherans under Henry VIII, to savage persecution of Catholics under Edward VI, to the Marian persecution of Protestants under the infamous “Bloody” Mary I, to a less intense but still damning level of persecution of Catholics under Elizabeth I and James VI and I. The English Civil War was fought in large measure because Puritans despised the High Church Anglican King Charles I, whom they feared was sympathetic to Catholicism, while in 1689 the English Bill of Rights specifically disenfranchised English Catholics and made them second-class citizens under the law.

The United States is the first nation in history to have been uniquely founded without a national confession, a single, unifying religion, and so we have no concept of what it means to have a people’s national identity married to their religion. Suzanne Massie, American author, Russian expert, and President Reagan’s adviser on Russian culture and history, understood this when no one else did: that a significant factor behind the disconnect between Russia and the U.S. was the complete unfamiliarity of Americans, on a cultural level, with the notion of a nation being founded on one religion. Reagan called Massie “the greatest student I know of the Russian people.” Massie writes in her memoirs Trust But Verify: Reagan, Russia and Me that:

“There were reasons for our official blindness, among them that in the United States we have the tendency to see everything as a reflection of our own beliefs. Being “like us” is equivalent to being “right.” We in America can choose our religion as if we were shopping for a new car, changing at will, and harbor thousands of offshoots and sects. Because our history is founded on personal choice for all religions we have no experience or understanding of a religion that represents a nation, and we find this somehow disturbing. The history of Russia is the opposite, and the communist regime of the Soviet Union always understood this fact completely.” (135).

In fact, far from having “a religion that represents a nation”, our national identity is in many ways influenced by our lack of a single, unifying religion. Russian history, void of the religious wars that devastated Europe in the wake of the Reformation, is one of largely peaceful coexistence between the Orthodox majority and local religious minorities. While we have all read of the infamous anti-Jewish pogroms that occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century during the Tsarist period, the inescapable reality is that all of these tragedies occurred not in Russia proper, but in Ukraine, predominantly western (Greek Catholic) Ukraine.

I interviewed Suzanne Massie in late November 2014 after Liturgy in the Holy Archangels Chapel in Washington, DC, where my spiritual father regularly presides over the divine services. She and I share the same godmother– my godmother is a dear friend of hers– and we were both received into the Church within a year of each other. Massie told me that to know Orthodoxy is to know Russia, and to know Russian history is to begin to know Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is inextricably bound up in Russia’s national identity. The only intellectual force — if one wants to so denigrate the term “intellectual” — that ever pushed for the separation of this dual Russian and Orthodox identity was Marxist-Leninism, or, more properly, what came to be Soviet Bolshevism.

What Massie insisted that Reagan learn, and what President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron and their advisers remain sadly ignorant of to this day, is that one cannot hope to understand Russia today without first coming to understand its religious history. Russian Orthodoxy is the only cultural and religious institution that survived Soviet rule. It is the single and deepest connection Russians have to the pre-revolutionary period, to the thousand years of Russian history before the Soviet nightmare. If you dismiss Orthodoxy’s role in shaping Russian history, as both Obama and Cameron clearly have, you will remain profoundly ignorant of the most basic aspects of Russian cultural history.

The Orthodox Christian faith has influenced the very foundations of Russian society. The Russian word for ‘Sunday’ is воскресенье (voskresenie), [Christ’s] ‘Resurrection’, while the most common phrase for ‘Thank you’, спасибо (spasibo), is a compound of Spasi bog — literally ‘God saves’ («Спаси тебя/вас Бог» means, literally, “God save you” ). The Russian word for peasant–the vast majority of Russians in Russian history — is крестьянин (khrestyanin), literally, a Christian. These nuances are all tragically lost on those who rule in Washington, London, and Brussels today.

The very heart and soul of Russia — the Orthodox Church — is experiencing a steady, imperfect yet unstoppable revival, and all that this merits from senior U.S., British, and EU policymakers is cynicism. Take for example the widely circulated yet disputed figure from the Pew Forum that, as of 2008, only 7% of Russians attend Orthodox services every month. This claim merits deeper examination. Even if we take that statistic as accurate, Russia’s population is currently 144 million, so seven percent of this figure is just over 10 million people. By contrast, in England, which still has an official, state-funded Church, only 800,000 Britons attend Church of England services weekly, out of a population of 64 million.

Russia is experiencing a cultural renaissance, a rediscovery of its true identity after seventy-four years of enforced atheism and Marxist-Leninist ideology. Should we miss the opportunity to reach Russians where they are, at this moment in their history, I fear we will lose a crucial chance to genuinely come to better understand Russian society’s past, present, and future.

One cannot understand the religious revival taking place in Russia today if one does not first understand, and contrast it, with the state-sponsored suppression of and attempted extermination of religion under the Soviets. When the Bolsheviks had taken power, Massie writes, they attempted to completely destroy all vestiges of religion, considered the chief obstacle to building an ideal socialist state:

“. . . all religion was considered Enemy Number One, but Orthodoxy the most dangerous, to be eradicated with all the ruthlessness they could command. They set out to commit what can only be called a genocide of the Church. In 1918 they began to wage what they called a “war on God.” All manifestations of religion were prohibited as were all Church holidays, even Easter and Christmas. Liturgical music was banned until the mid-1980s. Sunday was made a compulsory work day. . . the word god was always to be spelled in lower case. Thousands of historic churches and all their treasures were destroyed outright. . . Millions of icons were destroyed, broken, or sold abroad along with other treasures of the Church. Multitudes of priests and believers were murdered outright, more imprisoned or sent to labor camps. (136-37).

A quarter century after the fall of the USSR, the most important national institution in Russia today, the only one to outlast the Soviet Union, remains the Russian Orthodox Church. It is impossible for anyone hoping to understand Russia to do so without first coming to understand the guiding role the Church played—and continues to play— in forming the country’s national identity.

How to cross the road in Russia

Late to work or wanting to take a shorter route home? This pious man crosses himself before embarking on a spontaneous street-crossing of dubious safety – the street appears to be a busy thoroughfare.

A lovely Russian woman I know recalled a proverb about pedestrians who cross the street in the wrong places. She wrote that there are generally three types:

1. ZOMBIE- once they start crossing, they just keep going no matter what… it is dangerous but manageable, if the driver has a clear mind..
2.KAMIKAZE – the ones that see your car coming but keep running anyway… these are manageable as well…
3.INDECISIVE – they start crossing, and when they see your car coming they stop right in the middle or start flouncing about, and you have NO idea which way they will go… this is the most dangerous type… it’s good if you have time for a full stop without someone tail-gating you…

She felt like “being philosophical”, and mused about the proverb that she didn’t “know if it’s about where you cross, or it’s about you knowing what you want and knowing what you will do… and it is definitely a different situation when you are a pedestrian and the driver is not fully conscious… then I guess running and praying is the best option!”

What do you think? Is this man a ‘zombie’ or more of a kamikaze?

I think this babushka is definitely a kamikaze! She doesn’t run, but she has such iron determination!

The extraordinary life of Bishop Basil (Rodzianko)

In the above video, my godmother reflects on her close relationship with her spiritual father, the late Bishop Basil (Rodzianko). By all accounts, Bishop Basil was a remarkably holy man whose life was truly extraordinary. Among her many activities, Marilyn served for thirty years as the parish historian at St. Nicholas Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

The young Vladimir Rodzianko grew up in Belgrade, Serbia, Yugoslavia. This photo was taken in 1926 when he was 11.

Born into an old Russian noble family as Vladimir Rodzianko, his grandfather Mikhail served as the Chairman of the last Imperial Duma prior to its dissolution in February 1917. At the age of five, the young Vladimir emigrated to Belgrade, Serbia with his family following the Bolshevik Revolution, and his family lived in greatly reduced circumstances. One of his uncles was a leading general in the White Tsarist forces during the Russian Civil War, and in a cruel twist of irony, the young Vladimir endured years of psychological and physical abuse at the hands of his cruel tutor, also a former White army officer, who took out his hatred for Vladimir’s grandfather on the young boy.

Growing up in Belgrade, young Vladimir was blessed to receive a superb religious and spiritual education from two of the shining luminaries of twentieth century Orthodoxy: his spiritual mentors were the professor and hieromonk Fr. John Maximovitch, the future St John the Wonderworker, Archbishop of San Francisco, and Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) of Kiev, the first ruling Hierarch of the Russian Church Abroad. After attending a prestigious gymnasium, Vladimir attained his undergraduate theology degree at the University of Belgrade in 1937 and in that year married Marya Kolubayeva.

Mikhail Rodzianko (1859-1924) served as Chairman of the Fourth State Duma. The head of an old noble family living in what is today Ukraine, Mikhail supported the Imperial Family but criticized the Tsar for what he perceived were failures in leadership on the part of Nicholas II during the First World War. He urged the Tsar to separate himself from Rasputin, relax censorship and institute universal suffrage. Shortly before Nicholas II’s abdication he sent the Tsar a telegram which may have influenced him to renounce the throne.

Vladimir continued his post-graduate work at the University of London before returning to Serbia where he was ordained a deacon and then a priest in 1941. After the Second World War in which his parishioners experienced numerous privations and abuses by the Nazis, he was sentenced to eight years’ hard labour by the communist authorities for spreading “religious propaganda”.

Following his release in 1949, due in part to the intercession of the Archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher, Father Vladimir and his family moved to France before settling in the United Kingdom where he continued serving as a priest in London. Always fascinated with radio technology, he began broadcasting religious programs to the faithful in the Soviet Union on the BBC. Due to the popularity of these programs, the Soviet KGB targeted the priest for assassination, and tragically one of his grandsons was killed by communist agents seeking to kill Fr. Vladimir.

Father Vladimir delivering a radio programme at the BBC in the 1950s.

Father Vladimir lectured widely on Orthodoxy at leading British religious and academic institutions and was an active member of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, an Anglican-Orthodox ecumenical society. Following the tragic death of his wife Marya in 1978, Father Vladimir was tonsured a monk the next year by his spiritual mentor, Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) of Sourozh, taking the name Basil.

In 1980, with Metropolitan Anthony’s blessing, Hieromonk Basil was received into the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) from the Moscow Patriarchate and consecrated as auxiliary bishop in Washington, D.C. to the Church’s primate Metropolitan Theodosius. In November of the same year Bishop Basil was consecrated as Bishop of San Francisco and the West, a diocese he served until his retirement in 1984.

Following his retirement, His Grace Bishop Basil spent the closing years of his life in Washington, often serving at St Nicholas Cathedral, where my godmother met him and became his spiritual daughter (his very kind niece Masha is her godmother). Following the end of communist rule in the Soviet Union, the bishop was at last free to travel to his Russian homeland and meet with many of the adoring and pious people who had come to love his radio broadcasts on all aspects of Orthodox spirituality, which he had given without interruption over four decades since leaving Serbia for the United Kingdom.

Bishop Basil continued giving regular Russian-language radio broadcasts until the end of his life. Several recordings of sermons he gave in English at St. Nicholas Cathedral have been carefully preserved.

Patriarch Aleksey II with Bishop Basil in Moscow.

In May 1991 His Holiness Patriarch Aleksey II of Russia asked Bishop Basil to journey to Jerusalem and bring back to Russia some of the fire which miraculously ignites each Pascha at the tomb of Christ in the Holy Sepulchre. En route to Moscow, Bishop Basil met the Ecumenical Patriarch Demetrios I in Istanbul and received his blessing. Upon arriving at the Kremlin’s Uspensky Sobor (Dormition Cathedral) just as the choir and bishops began singing “O Come, let us worship”, His Grace placed the sacred fire on the altar Divine Liturgy with Patriarch Aleksey. Following the Liturgy he then processed with the Patriarch and senior bishops of the Moscow Patriarchate around Moscow.

Bishop Basil in the Kremlin carrying the holy fire from Jerusalem, May 1991.

Bishop Basil fell asleep in the Lord in Septemb1999. Many Russians in the St. Nicholas community feel his close presence even today and he is considered a saint among a number of Orthodox believers across the world. May his memory be eternal! For more information about his remarkable life, please visit this website run by Holy Archangels Foundation, a group of Orthodox in Washington dedicated to preserving and honouring Bishop Basil’s memory. Here is the Holy Archangels Orthodox Foundation‘s principal website.

Friends and family of the late Bishop gather at his grave site in September 2009 to mark the tenth anniversary of his repose. Since this date, every year Metropolitan Jonah, former Primate of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) offers an annual memorial lecture in Bishop Basil’s memory usually during Great Lent. Standing to the left are his nieces, my godmother, and His Beatitude Metropolitan Jonah. On the far right are Fr. Valery (Shemchuk) and his wife Matushka Marina.

This Vimeo video was produced by Peter Vlasov in 2005.