← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · il ragno
Thread ID: 16342 | Posts: 15 | Started: 2005-01-18
2005-01-18 10:30 | User Profile
Posting this here as an adjunct to Tex's comments regarding the place and value of dark-skinned foreign Christians on the Believers Chart in his dialogue with the CI woman.
Do OD Christians see, or claim, fellowship with these Christians? Or are they, due to race or the Coptic Church, viewed as essentially interchangeable with their Muslim countrymen?
[QUOTE][[url]http://nypost.com/news/regionalnews/38891.htm[/url]
B]CHRISTIANS & MUSLIMS BRAWL [/B]
[IMG]http://nypost.com/photos/news01182005008.jpg[/IMG] [I] FUNERAL PROCESSION: The caskets of the murdered Jersey City family are marched toward the church for yesterday's funeral. [/I]
January 18, 2005 -- An emotional holy war broke out yesterday on the streets of Jersey City, where Muslims and Christians clashed and lobbed insults at the funeral for a devout family of Egyptian immigrants who may have been slain for their religious beliefs.
While mourners inside the St. George & St. Shenouda Coptic Orthodox Church prayed for peace in the wake of a murder that escalated religious tensions at home and abroad, fights erupted amid the crowd that spilled outside the church, where angry Coptic Christians pointed accusing fingers at their Muslim counterparts.
Hossam Armanious, 37, his wife, Amal Garas, 37, and their two daughters, Sylvia, 15, and Monica, 8, were found dead in their Oakland Avenue home early Friday after relatives told police nobody had heard from them in days.
Investigators said each victim was bound, gagged and stabbed in the neck, and the early focus was on anti-Muslim remarks Armanious made in a popular religious chat room after a relative said Armanious was threatened online for expressing his Christian beliefs.
Officials said the religious persecution theory is still under investigation, but said some evidence points to robbery as a motive.
Members of the city's Coptic community — many of whom left Egypt like Armanious to escape religious threats — believe there is a connection between their faith and the murders.
That sentiment was expressed loudly by one parishioner inside who began yelling at Muslims, including a sheik, who attended the service.
"Muslim is the killer," he said over and over before he was dragged from the church by five police officers who hustled him into an unmarked police car and quickly drove away.
Tensions were high even before the first copper-colored casket arrived, when, during a procession to the church from Journal Square, family members asked mourners to put away anti-Muslim protest signs.
But emotions really boiled over in the moments after the wistful service when a skirmish broke out as the four black hearses adorned with the victims' pictures were being loaded.
Punches were thrown, people were shoved and police rushed in to break up the brawl that had moved up Bergen Avenue to a nearby parking garage.
For a while, cops kept the crowd separated with a metal garage gate until they could restore order.
"I think people here have fueled it," family friend Henry Simon, 35, said of the tension.
]"The sheik came at the wrong time. It's like spitting on their graves."
Those too sad to be angry had kind words for the deeply religious family, especially young Sylvia, who died a day before her Sweet 16 party.
Jersey City Councilman Steve Lipski recalled her unselfish work to help the destitute during Thanksgiving during a program sponsored by the church.
"She was there with her big, bright beautiful smile trying to help people," said Lipski, one of several elected officials including current Mayor Jerramiah Healy and former mayor Bret Schundler.
Sunday school teacher Miriam Fam read a poem the teenager wrote:
"No more tears for me to cry. No more days where I have to lie . . . No more sadness to darken my day. No more rain to fog my daydreams. No more pain in my life. No more fear of getting killed with life's knife."
Police said more than 1,500 people were on hand, far more than could fit in the church, which was standing room only yesterday.
A reward of $100,000 is being offered by Coptic leaders for information that leads to an arrest and conviction.
"It doesn't appear to be random," said Assistant Hudson County Prosecutor Guy Gregory. "It appears to be a specific act. Someone was able to gain access without forcing entry."
Investigators learned that a relative of the victims had helped prosecutors in their case against Lynne Stewart, the lawyer charged with passing messages to followers of her client, blind Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a convicted terrorist ringleader.
But sources close to the case said there is no connection between the relative and the murders. [/QUOTE]
2005-01-18 10:32 | User Profile
[QUOTE=il ragno]Posting this here as an adjunct to Tex's comments regarding the place and value of dark-skinned foreign Christians on the Believers Chart in his dialogue with the CI woman.
Do OD Christians see, or claim, fellowship with these Christians? Or are they, due to race or the Coptic Church, viewed as essentially interchangeable with their Muslim countrymen?[/QUOTE]
They're my brothers and sisters in Christ.
2005-01-18 13:33 | User Profile
[QUOTE]They're my brothers and sisters in Christ.[/QUOTE]
Is that primarily a Catholic thing - would Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists, etc, feel similarly?
I'd thought there was bad blood of some kind between the Coptic and European churches.
2005-01-18 14:24 | User Profile
One thing about Jersey City, NJ is that it is a microcosm of the future Third Worldization of the US. The few times I've been through Jersey City, I was truly pressed to find even ONE White person on the streets. Every single damn Third World nationality is to be found in Jersey City. When I read a story like the one above, it's really nothing shocking. Christian or not, if they're from the Third World, they shouldn't be in this country. Period.
2005-01-18 16:06 | User Profile
I see xmetalhead, your family were the first ones to be born in the US and they never took a boat in order to come here, interesting...... is an honor for me to meet one of the original American.
2005-01-18 16:09 | User Profile
Somebody else can correct me if I'm wrong (I had to look it up), but I believe the Coptic Church and Rome endured a schism back around 450 AD over the Monophysite Controversy, which had to do with whether Christ had one or two natures. That schism has continued to this day.
As for American protestants, most have probably never even heard of the Coptic Church much less know who and what they're about. Speaking for myself, if I was travelling in that part of the world, lost in a desert and dying of thirst and came upon a group of Coptic Christians and some radical, fundamentalist Muslims, I think I'd first go ask the Coptic Christians for a drink of water.
But in the end xmetalhead is right. Christian or not, they shouldn't be in our country in the first place. It burns me up to no end how we import these ancient and foreign blood fueds. Haven't we always had more than our share of problems with the negroes? What do we need more for?
2005-01-18 16:52 | User Profile
[quote=Walter Yannis]They're my brothers and sisters in Christ. I agree with this. These people are Christians, and they have been persecuted for hundreds of years by the Muslims, and pretty much ignored by Christians in the West. They deserve our sympathy and help.
[QUOTE=Texas Dissident] But in the end xmetalhead is right. Christian or not, they shouldn't be in our country in the first place. It burns me up to no end how we import these ancient and foreign blood fueds. Haven't we always had more than our share of problems with the negroes? What do we need more for?[/QUOTE] I also agree with this. Ethnically heterogeneous societies lead to conflict. Christian or not, importing large numbers of Egyptians, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, etc is simply not a good idea.
2005-01-18 17:06 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Ponce]I see xmetalhead, your family were the first ones to be born in the US and they never took a boat in order to come here, interesting...... is an honor for me to meet one of the original American.[/QUOTE]
Ponce, I usually tend to sympathize with you when others object to your incoherent posts, since I can sometimes see the point you're actually trying to make with your limited command of the English language.
However, with posts like the one you wrote above, somehow I don't think your limits are only limited to language issues.
Sorry man.
2005-01-18 17:15 | User Profile
[QUOTE=il ragno]Do OD Christians see, or claim, fellowship with these Christians? Or are they, due to race or the Coptic Church, viewed as essentially interchangeable with their Muslim countrymen?[/QUOTE]
I concur with the sentiment that neither of the parties involved should have been in America in the first place.
Having said that, I have an feeling that the coptic arabs in this case might have been better for America than the average American so-called Christian. They would probably be more amiable to combating immigration.
2005-01-18 17:17 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Texas Dissident]But in the end xmetalhead is right. Christian or not, they shouldn't be in our country in the first place. It burns me up to no end how we import these ancient and foreign blood fueds. Haven't we always had more than our share of problems with the negroes? What do we need more for?[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Quantrill]I also agree with this. Ethnically heterogeneous societies lead to conflict. Christian or not, importing large numbers of Egyptians, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, etc is simply not a good idea.[/QUOTE]
This truth that you men speak of is being exposed on the world stage in Iraq. The fact that Iraq is multiethnic and the chances of civil war are very high, along with the multicultural American army showing it's weakness. I'm sure that boils the blood of every egalitarian soothsayer more than the deaths of human beings in Iraq. Multiculturalism=Adultery. Break the Commandments of God on an everyday basis and you're doomed to miserable conditions.
2005-01-18 17:25 | User Profile
I do feel bad for those Christians that have lived for centuries under Muslim rule, and their hatred for Muslims is completely understandable. I posted this in another thread a while back, but it is germane here:
In [u]The Sword of the Prophet[/u], by Srdja Trifkovic, there is a heartbreaking story about the Ottoman purge of Christians in Smyrna in 1922. They slaughtered thousands, while American, British, Italian, and French warships sat in the harbour and did nothing. Over 200, 000 Christians were huddled on the docks, trapped between the burning city and the sea. 'The pitiful throng -- huddled together, sometimes screaming for help but mostly waiting in a silent panic beyond hope -- didn't budge for days. Typhoid reduced their numbers, and there was no way to dispose of the dead. Occasionally, a person would swim from the dock to one of the anchored ships and tried to climb the ropes and chains, only to be driven off. On the American battleships, the musicians were ordered to play as loudly as they could to drown out the screams of the pleading swimmers. The English poured boiling water down on the unfortunates who reached their vessel. The harbor was so clogged with corpses that the officers of the foreign battleships were often late for their dinner appointments because bodies would get tangled in the propellors of their launches.... A cluster of women's heads bound together like coconuts by their long hair floated down a river toward the harbor.'
2005-01-18 18:10 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Quantrill]Ethnically heterogeneous societies lead to conflict. Christian or not, importing large numbers of Egyptians, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, etc is simply not a good idea.[/QUOTE]
The point that we can't seem to get across to our racist friends like the good Il Ragno is that "race" - while a very important thing - is only one component of the much more exigent concept of "nation."
A nation is a living, breathing entity that was made by God and that (1) consists of a (mostly) closed gene pool, (2) a unified language and religion (culture), and (3) a (again at least mostly) sovereign territory. This is the covenant with Noah, the "Divine economy" of mankind divided up around these indicia. God Himself created the nations, and appointed the times of their creation and dissolution. The purpose was to limit the prideful grasping of mankind, which seeks only to make itself God by building the Tower of Babel. This is the temptation of empire, which is the enemy of the nations.
There is another great truth here; i.e. that man's existence is profoundly social. Individuals are cells in a larger body, a fact that St. Paul makes explicit where he said that we are all merely members of a single body. While our individual existence is of cosmic importance, so too is this fact of our individual lives subsist in and can only be understood by reference to a larger, organic body of men. The OT per above teaches us that this organic body has a racial component, as well as having a cultural component. Nations are humans grouped into (mostly) distinct gene pools that maintain their distinct identity behind the protective wall of language and culture.
We are individualists, and distrust any talk of our being subsumed in a greater whole. We like the idea of individual salvation, and have a hard time imaginging anything other than that. But I point out that Christ Himself says that we are saved as nations. He enjoined His followers to baptize the nations. He will gather the nations and judge them on the last day. While clearly individuals are saved, there is a mysterious collective element at work as well. To paraphrase Dostoyevsky, we are all saved or damned together.
I'm a nationalist. Inasmuch as I believe that race is very real and that race is a subsidiary part of nationalism, I am a racist, at least in terms of our regnant cultural Marxism. But that doesn't mean that I reject the humanity of other nations. The Ethiopians are a nation - a Christian nation - and in that regard they are my brothers and sisters in Christ.
But there is also an American nation. That nation was always understood to be - at least until the 1960's and the triumph of alien (Jewish) propaganda - a European, Christian, and English-speaking nation that occupies the large middle section of the North American continent. That's what we are, per the Biblical indicia of nation listed above. Our historical experience proves that any European and Christian person willing to speak English could assimilate into the American nation. Ethiopans cannot assimilate, not ever, since they're black and cannot ever be members of the American nation. They couldn't become Americans without damaging the core racial identity of our American nation.
Tex has it right when he points out that Christian or otherwise, they are in the wrong place.
But I think all of us Christian Nationalists agree that the Ethiopians are fully human, and indeed our brothers and sisters in Christ.
Il Ragno: do you understand what I mean?
2005-01-18 18:17 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Texas Dissident]Somebody else can correct me if I'm wrong (I had to look it up), but I believe the Coptic Church and Rome endured a schism back around 450 AD over the Monophysite Controversy, which had to do with whether Christ had one or two natures. That schism has continued to this day.[/QUOTE]
It's complicated:
[url]http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05566a.htm[/url]
2005-01-19 00:47 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Ponce]I see xmetalhead, your family were the first ones to be born in the US and they never took a boat in order to come here, interesting...... is an honor for me to meet one of the original American.[/QUOTE]
Oh yes, we Americans of European descent came over in boats too (to a large extent ships), yet for some miraculous reason the neighborhoods and families we cultivated just seemed so different than the hordes we have today.
2005-01-19 23:06 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Ponce]I see xmetalhead, your family were the first ones to be born in the US and they never took a boat in order to come here, interesting...... is an honor for me to meet one of the original American.[/QUOTE]
Interestingly enough, many anthropologists & archaeologists presently adhere to the theory that North America was first colonized by Bronze Age Europeans from the British Isles, France and Iberia, and that the subsequent wave of Asiatic immigration via the Siberian land bridge led to the genocide of the original European-descended inhabitants. Thus, North America can reasonably be thought of as part of the traditional Euro-Atlantic living space for Euro-Caucasoids, and thus contemporary European dominance of this continent constitutes a return to normalcy, if you will, in historical terms.
In any event, there's a substantial difference in the status of the Aboriginal American population, who are innate to this land by virtue of their thousands of years in physical residence here, and even the Mestizo population associated with Latin America, who are integral to neighboring lands with which we share a lengthy border and over-lapping spheres of influence (primarily the Carribean & the Gulf of Mexico), and the various Third World populations of the Middle East, Africa and Asia, which can be easily excluded from our shores via rational immigration policies, to the benefit of virtually all who presently reside here and thus have a stake in our national stability and integrity, irrespective of their individual racial attributes, i.e. it doesn't help Black Americans for more indolent, crime-prone Somalis to come into this country and lower its quality of life.
My undestanding of Copts, however, is that they are sort of a racial gray area, in that they probably don't belong within European homelands, however, they are some of our closest biological relatives (much like the Persians), and so I'd want to see some genetic data on them before I called for their exclusion specifically.