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[ by Charles Cameron — mostly about monks vs riot police on the Holy Mountain ]
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I’ve written often enough about the black banners in Islamic iconography — here are two examples of black flags from Greece, one of them specifically Christian:

The flag in the upper image you probably know: it’s one version of the Greek nationalist Golden Dawn party flag, with its swastika echo that the party describes as a “meander”. The lower image is described thus by photojourno Nikos Pilos:

Father Paulos is holding the black flag with the white cross, Esfigmenon’s Monastery and zealots’ symbol. The meaning of this flag is “orthodoxy or death “. The monks of Esfigmenon Monastery have stopped since 1972 (time of the patriarch Athinagora, Dimitrio and Vartholomeo) to mention in their preys the name of Constantinople’s Patriarch, blaming him as a heretic because he had and he has conversations with the Pope. The last dramatic episode in the history of one of the earliest Orthodox monasteries, 1500 years after it was first built in Mt Athos, the Holy Mountain in northern Greece.

Let me offer you some angles on what’s given rise to that monk with a black banner…

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July 29th’s Vatican Insider carried an article titled Patriarchate of Constantinople wages war against rebel monks on Mount Athos, describing the most recent event with a little background:

The Greek government sent riot police to Mount Athos in Northern Greece this morning, to forcibly remove a group of monks from Esphigmenou monastery, one of the twenty monasteries that form part of this famous Eastern orthodox complex. Esphigmenou monastery is renowned for the war it has waged against the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople which it accuses of betraying the Orthodox Church by opening ecumenical dialogue with the Vatican. A war which has been going on since the 70s. According to an Associated Press report, the traditionalist monks threw stones and Molotov cocktails at police and judicial officials as they attempted to storm the building .Patriarch Bartholomew declared the monks of Esphigmenou an illegal brotherhood in 2002 and ordered their eviction. But the monks ignored this, claiming the Patriarch of Constantinople does not have the power to evict them.

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In response to news media, the monks posted a friend’s report, Correcting the Record:

I just spoke with one of the Esphigmenou monks, Father Sava, and want to correct the record about the ongoing attacks against the monastery today.

This morning, a group of around 20 large armed men armed attacked the Esphigmenou monastery building in Karyes, Mt. Athos where the monks were engaged in quiet prayer. This is the 12th day that the monastery has been under siege. The monks twice asked for the men to leave in peace after a city clerk attempted to serve them with eviction papers. Then the 20 large men attempted to smash their way into the monastery building with a construction bulldozer. As you can see in the video, uniformed Greek police stood around while a bulldozer attacked the property and attempted to smash down the front door:

This bulldozer came within 15 centimeters of killing a defenseless monk (who was behind the door and did sustain injuries) with its steel blade.

Contrary to media reports, they did NOT throw any bombs. I specifically asked Fr. Sava about these alleged “bombs” and he said that they do not have bombs and did not throw any bombs. It appears Greek government officials are trying to cover up their complicity in these lawless and criminal activities by spreading false reports to media outlet now that their nefarious activity has been exposed. The video of the attack shows that there is no evidence of bombs or aggressive action by the monks.

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Finally, here’s the Theology of the dispute, also from the monks’ site:

The fathers of Esphigmenou struggle against the heresy of ecumenism which states that there is no one church which possesses the Truth. The Orthodox Church believes, as the monks of Esphigmenou Monastery believe, that the Church has never lost the Truth or its unity. The Nicene Creed states the Orthodox Church’s dogmatic basis, “I believe in one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. I believe in one baptism.” Ecumenism rejects these fundamental truths of the church by teaching that there are many churches and many baptisms.

The beliefs of ecumenism and the beliefs of Orthodoxy are mutually exclusive. You can either believe in the Creed or you can believe in ecumenism, not both. By embracing ecumenism Patriarch Bartholomew has embraced a belief in conflict with the teachings of the Orthodox Church. This is what the monks object to and what they wish to discuss with the Patriarch. There is not a single saint of the Church, ever, who believes in what Patriarch Bartholomew teaches and practices with regards to ecumenism, and this has caused great concern on the part of the monks. The Patriarch refuses to allay those concerns and refuses to engage in constructive dialogue with the monks. He has, however, demanded an apology in writing for questioning him.

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DoubleQuote Sources:

Golden Dawn black banner: IB Times

Monks’ black banner: Nikos Pilos

[ by Charles Cameron — human beings are a whole lot more interesting than was previously thought, evidence suggests ]
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First, you should know that the English Defence League is, by its own account, “an inclusive movement dedicated to peacefully protesting against Islamic extremism.”

Now read on..

Or as Qur’an 49.13 puts it:

O mankind, We have created you male and female, and appointed you races and tribes, that you may know one another.

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The Gospel suggests, Matthew 5.44:

Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you…

and I am put in mind of this pair of images, both of which feature people I learned about for the first time in just the last couple of days:

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Rev. Will D Campbell is the one shaking hands with Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy after the MLK assassination, in the top panel of the DoubleQuote above. He was a rare man — as the NYT puts is, “one of the few white clerics with an extensive field record as a civil rights activist” — which naturally reminds me, too, of my own mentor, Fr. Trevor Huddleston.

C.P. Ellis was a Ku Klux Klan leader until he met civil rights worker Ann Atwater, with whom he is pictured immediately below Abernathy and Campbell.

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Wait, there’s more —

The first pair of images, above, comes from the UK, and the second pair from the US. So what’s the difference?

Apparently, the Brits serve tea while the Americans sip whiskey…

Abernathy’s reverend friend is the gentleman described in the lower panel here, the one who drinks whiskey with Klansmen. Go figure: love trumps hate.

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To get the full charge of these various stories, you might want to read:

Woolwich Attacks: Muslim Leaders At York Mosque Invite EDL In For Tea

EDL March With Muslims In Ipswich In Memory Of Lee Rigby

Rev. Will D. Campbell, Maverick Minister in Civil Rights Era, Dies at 88

The Ann Atwater approach

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Of course, the type of beverage you offer on these occasions must depend to some extent on the dietary habits and restrictions of both parties…

[ by Charles Cameron — a quick, minor note ]
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You may of course already know this, but in case you don’t…

May eye was caught by the words “Your leaders are assaultive, oppressive and tyrannical” in the English subtitles to Qasim al-Raymi‘s “Message to the American People” video (upper panel, below)…

I guess it was the word “assaultive” that really caught my eye… I wasn’t looking forward to transcribing the entire video, so I went to the net to see if anyone else had done the job — which was when I realized I’d seen that same phrase before, in the latest issue, #11, of Inspire magazine (lower panel, above).

So this is just a quick note to say if you want to quote al-Raymi, there’s no need to transcribe the video, he says what he says in Inspire #11 pp. 8-9.

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I suspect we could glean quite a bit if we listened with careful ears to the phrasings used by jihadist sources when writing or speaking in English or translating into it. There are some interesting characteristic turns of phrase — I haven’t been making notes as yet, but “to proceed” is one that is often used to end the scriptural prelims and turn to the message of the day… And there was that curious phrasing in the Khorasanist video Tamerlan Tsarnaev favorited, “The word Taliqan not just mentions the Taliqan region of today only, but…”

There are many interesting ways to read a text, and reading for tone and phrasing is one of them…

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Sources, h/t to Aaron Zelin at Jihadology:

Al-Raymi, al-Malahim video

Al Raymi, al-Malahim Inspire magazine

[ by Charles Cameron — with Wagner and Abu Dujana as examples, the cognitive sting here is in the tail — the power of a double image to engage both emotion and insight ]
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Love and death.

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The human mind thinks in parallelisms and oppositions.

My lords, if you would hear a high tale of love and of death, here is that of Tristan and Queen Iseult; how to their full joy, but to their sorrow also, they loved each other, and how at last they died of that love together upon one day; she by him and he by her.

Thus begins Bédier‘s version of The Romance of Tristan & Iseult as Hilaire Belloc presents it in its classic English form. The parallel there, between love and death, is found also in Freud’s binary opposition of Eros and Thanatos, which he suggests in Civilization and Its Discontents:

The name libido can again be used to denote the manifestations of the power of Eros in contradistinction to the energy of the death instinct.

and in Wagner’s Liebestod — by way of returning to Tristan and Iseult:

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Likewise, there’s a parallelism between jihad by pen (jihad bil qalam) and by sword (jihad bil saif) — shown in Abu Dujana al-Khurasani‘s move from writing on the forums to martyrdom in Khost — which al-Awlaki phrases in terms of ink and blood in eulogizing Sayyid Qutb in Constants on the Path of Jihad: