Peter Smith The Boat People of Bethlehem

The Boat People of Bethlehem

Ah, Christmas, when the air rings with sleigh bells and carols, the laughter of families gathered and the happy squeals of small children destroying their new toys. Oh, and from the left side of the Yuletide table, more nonsense about the Holy Family being the original refugees.

You may have noticed the recent propaganda in support of the West absorbing unlimited numbers of Muslim refugees. It starts with the Bible and with Matthew 2:13-23 were it is told that Joseph, Mary and their children escaped to Egypt from Bethlehem in Judaea for fear of King Herod. Only when the King was dead did they return to Israel; settling in Nazareth rather than Bethlehem, because they remained wary of Herod’s son who ruled in Judaea.

Thus, so the story goes, Jesus was for a time a time a refugee in Egypt. A tenuous and tendentious leap of logic follows: if Jesus was indeed a refugee how can anyone in good conscience not welcome all refugees with open arms and generous hearts.

As an example, here is Martin O’Malley – the ex-governor of Maryland and short-lived competitor with Bernie Sanders and Hilary Clinton for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president – talking with Fox News front man Tucker Carlson. “Remember Jesus too was a refugee child. What would you do if he came to your border?”

I liked Carlson’s reply: “That’s so stupid, it’s hard to respond.”

It’s monumentally stupid. Or, alternatively, is it part of a duplicitous plan to undo our civilisation and culture? Christianity being used to destroy Christendom. The devil quoting scripture for his purpose. But that can’t be right when the Archbishop of Canterbury is on board. Can it?

Here is an extract from Justin Welby’s Christmas sermon preached at Canterbury Cathedral on December 25.

Yet after the moments of miracles life goes on almost as before – the shepherds return to their sheep, Joseph settles back as a carpenter, Mary raises children. They flee as refugees, like over 60 million people today.

Get the point? Joseph, Mary and Jesus are just like tens of millions of Mussulmen from, say, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, or Somalia. The fact that the latter follow a poisonous creed which denies the divinity of Christ; who follow a false prophet as prophesised by Christ; and who have allegiance to a god who instructs them to disdain and kill infidels, is all by the way to the Archbishop apparently.

But let’s be practical as well as spiritual. Germans, Belgians, Swedes, Italians, the French, the British, Americans and Australians, and other Westerners, face heavy costs of providing accommodation, health, welfare, education and policing in trying to absorb millions of refugees. And that is the least of it. Their very culture and values are at stake. Their safety is at stake through additional crime and, of course, through Islamic terrorism.

In Cologne, for example, separate train carriages have been set aside for women and young children. Nothing of course to do with asylum-seekers assaulting women. God forbid the authorities would ever concede that. And, yes, don’t you know, Melbourne pedestrians allegedly were mowed down by a drug-addled madman who just happened, coincidently, to be an Afghan refugee expressing grievance at the world-wide treatment of Muslims. Obviously, we are being taken for saps by the powers that be and by Christian church leaders

Personally, as an Anglican, I find it difficult to accept the free-thinking that now appears to characterise the utterances of Archbishops of Canterbury. I suspect that Thomas Cranmer would feel the same way.

Welby was widely reported as admitting to feelings of doubt about the presence of God in 2015 after the November Islamic terrorist attacks in Paris which killed 130 people. What a complete wally is this Welby. If he needs reason to doubt why not look to Russian and German causalities on the WWII Eastern Front, the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide? For that matter, tragedies happen each and every day to feed clergymen prone to doubt.  Maybe Welby is taking a cue from his immediate predecessors.

In 2008 Rowan Williams envisaged the parallel introduction of sharia law in the UK, before smartly back-tracking, while pretending he had been misunderstood. In turn, his predecessor George Carey, in a millennium message in 1999, expressed the view “that while we can be absolutely sure that Jesus lived and that he was certainly crucified on the Cross, we cannot with the same certainty say that we know He was raised by God from the dead.” Truth is stranger than fiction when one symbolic head of the world-wide Christian community accedes to the imposition of Allah’s law and another casts doubt on the essential element of the Christian faith.

Is it any wonder then that the current Archbishop of Canterbury is so divorced both from his scripture and from practical reality? We better get our thinking straight before our poor excuses for Christian church leaders throw us all to the ravenous wolves (as per Matthew 7:15).

There is no compelling logical leap from Jesus’s childhood life; or, for that matter, from the desperate circumstances of many Jews fleeing from Hitler’s Europe, to the present inundation of Europe with millions of people with clashing, antithetical and supremacist cultural and religious values.

Let’s be clear. Some people whose values have messed up their own villages want to live in our prosperous and harmonious villages. They want to bring with them the same values responsible for creating the mess from which they are attempting to escape. They want to impose those values on us.

And the Archbishop and other Christian leaders think that’s OK? They think that the reported sojourn of Jesus in Egypt is a parallel situation? It’s funny to me, in any event, that those Christians making (specious and one-sided) inter-faith overtures to Muslims take one part of Matthew as gospel, while preferring to conveniently overlook passages referring to false prophets; among whom surely Muhammed is the doozy.

Abject appeasement and false reasoning is now the face of Christian leadership. Nothing good will come of it. It’s part of a debilitating multicultural malaise that has overtaken our politics and media.

It’s best to remember that barbarians take on a veneer of restraint when opposed by superior forces. Watch out as the balance of populations and power shifts. I doubt bishops will do too well. Beheadings in public squares? No, they’ll convert. After all, one god is as good as another when minds are conflicted by doubt, Sharia and Jesus rotting in his grave.

Peter Smith, a frequent Quadrant Online contributor, is the author of Bad Economics

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