THE RETURN OF PONTIUS PILATE
In Madrid, the bereaved mourn in shock after the awful terrorist attacks in Madrid, which left some two hundred people dead. Now they fear again, as a bomb is found on the railway track between Madrid and Seville. In France travellers tremble after the discovery of bombs on railways near the Swiss frontier. In London, commuters eye one another suspiciously, tension and fear are almost tangible. British Embassies are regularly closed after terror warnings; the UK government does not want a repeat of the bombing of its Consulate in Istanbul.
In Paris and Berlin, governments have banned the presence of religious symbols in public buildings in an effort to make their Muslim minorities invisible. In Brussels bureaucrats have banned the mention of Europe’s Christian heritage in the Preamble to a future politically-correct EU Constitution. Arrests of young Muslims, immigrants or sons of immigrants, are made in Italy, Spain and England, where half a ton of ingredients for a massive bomb have been recovered. In Iraq occupying US and Western soldiers and officials die daily at the hands of Muslim militants.
Meanwhile in Serbia, the West continues to allow the open persecution of the Orthodox Church and, aided and abetted by the massive support of the CIA, helps the terrorists and drug runners of the so-called KLA (Kosovo ‘Liberation’ Army). Only three days ago an Orthodox priest, Fr Jeremiah Starovlach and his son, Alexander, were seriously injured in an attack by some 40 NATO troops as they burst into an Orthodox Church at Pale in Bosnia in their hunt for Karadzhich. Earlier, between 17 and 20 March, KFOR troops stood idly by as Albanian mobs burnt down 35 Orthodox churches and monasteries in south-west Serbia and forced terrified Serbs to flee their age-old homes and lands.
This brings to over 150 the total number of Orthodox churches and monasteries which have been destroyed in Serbia by Albanians under Western protection. The number of Serbs murdered comes to well over three hundred and the number of Serbian refugees from the south of the country now runs into well over ten thousand. Together with the refugees expelled from Serbian territories in the north, what is now Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the total number of Serbian refugees, expelled with explicit Western permission, totals over one hundred and fifty thousand. In Serbia there has been Western permitted genocide and Western-encouraged ethnic cleansing. And the West talks of regime change? ‘Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?’ (Matt 7,3).
Yes, it is true, some Serbs are guilty of war crimes. The Yugoslav Communists, turned nationalists, inspire no sympathy at all. After all they are the ones who for fifty years persecuted and weakened the Serbian Orthodox Church. Yes, one may ask why the Orthodox Serbs have not yet simply converted the Albanians, Bosnians and Croats to Orthodoxy by setting a Christian example. Easy to say, but we should not forget that most Albanians and Bosnian Muslims are in fact descendants of apostate Orthodox. As regards the Croats, some at least of their ancestors committed genocide against Orthodox Serbs only sixty years ago. Not very promising as an Orthodox missionary field.
At the present time,
the war between the West and the Muslim world is deepening. Desperately,
the oil-greedy US and UK are trying to get out of their self-inflicted
disasters in other countries they bombed and invaded, after Serbia, Afghanistan
and Iraq. The EU is desperately trying to engage Muslim Turkey and Turkish-occupied
northern Cyprus, keeping them out of the clutches of Islamic fundamentalism.
The fact is that the West sees as its enemy Islam, but it is quite happy
to sacrifice its ‘fringes’, Palestine, southern Serbia and
Cyprus, to Islamic occupation, for its own protection. Blinded, it does
not see that its real enemy is not Islam, but its own support of the Israeli
occupiers of the Arab Holy Land.
For over fifty years Palestinians have been living in wretched conditions
in refugee camps in their own land. The Israeli occupiers, financed by
tens of billions of dollars from USA, war-guilty Germany and other Western
countries, live in comfort, while the wretched Arabs lose their own land,
their water, their freedom. This is what Al-Qaida is all about. Remove
the essence of the problem and there will no longer be any desperate,
disaffected and embittered Arab youth to commit suicide. But that would
be asking too much of the West.
In the meantime, the West sacrifices the Orthodox Church. Let the medieval monasteries and churches of Kosovo burn. Let fanatical Albanians commit their atrocities, digging up the Orthodox departed from the cemeteries by the burnt-out churches, scattering their bones until Kingdom come and the Prophecy of Ezekiel is realised. Let the Croats, the Bosnians and the Albanians expel native Orthodox populations who have lived in their territories for six hundred years. Let Orthodox Cyprus be occupied and its churches turned into public conveniences. Let Orthodox Palestine and Jerusalem emigrate to Ecuador. Anything, as long as the West can continue to live in its consumer paradise delusion.
Let the Orthodox Church be crucified: Pilate needs petrol for his car and Big Macs for his belly: the war criminals of the West are washing their hands. It is Holy Week, and the victim to be crucified, while Pilate is washing his oil-stained hands, is the Body of Christ, the Orthodox Church. Pontius Pilate has returned. You can meet him any day, for every day he walks the streets of London, Washington, Brussels, Berlin, Paris....
Fr Andrew
Lazarus Saturday 2004.
