The Muslim prayer at Rome's Coliseum was a declaration of war - Giiulio Meotti

by Giiulio Meotti

That mass prayer means that it is not possible to turn Muslims into liberal secularists. Quite the contrary.

Something dramatic happened last Friday in Rome and slowly,slowly we are starting to decipher it. A vast, silent mass of hundreds of Muslim faithful gathered to pray in front of Rome’s Coliseum.

They chose a symbol of Western culture and did so under the wise guidance of political Imams. This was not an Islam respectful of the secular and democratic nature of Italian institutions. It was the political branch of an Islam that does not separate state and mosque, the Muslim Brotherhood, whose slogan has never changed since the time of Hassan al-Banna: “Allah is our goal, the Prophet our leader, the Koran our law, the jihad our way, dying for the way of Allah is our greatest hope”.

That spectacular Islamic mass was like a refusal of the illusion of a cultural “peace” slowly being strangled and punctuated with Koranic invocations. Something similar had already happened in front of Milan’s main cathedral and Bologna’s church of San Petronio, the target of Islamic fundamentalism because of a fresco by Giovanni da Modena that depicts Mohammed among the damned, in accordance with Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Islamists aim at a pedagogy that is not afraid of using words based on strength honor, faith and war. That mass prayer means that it is not possible to turn Muslims into liberal secularists. That Muslims could be assimilated to a secular environment.

Rome’s prayer was part of the acculturation of Europe’s Muslims, understood as “dar al shaada,” a land of religious mission by Islamist organizations. The purpose of prayer was to advance loyalty to the Prophet. It was pure Islamic, their concept of “the solution”.

We lack the will and fear abounds.

Rome’s prayer was not a “peaceful” rally, although there was no violence. It was not a manifestation of freedom of conscience, it was not the modern exercise of religious freedom. It was a declaration of cultural war, the deadly encirclement of Western secularism.

The well-known preacher Yussuf al Qaradawi said that the day will come when Rome will be Islamized. It remains to decide whether it will “by the word or by the sword”. Last Friday’s prayer it was by the word, while ISIS released videos in which the Coliseum is burned and bombed.

The American philosopher Lee Harris said a most important thing: The glory of the West has been the eradication of the virus of fanaticism, but perhaps we have achieved it at the price of our defeat.

The multicultural paradox, of which Rome’s mass prayer was another manifestation, looks like this: We are afraid of each other and we try to flatter, we do not know ourselves so we don’t see our enemy’s goals.

The mass prayer in front of the Coliseum is a way of saying, “we are radically different and we say this in front of your historical nationalist monument”. But is there someone who hears them?

Prayer at Coliseum Reuters

Giiulio Meotti, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the book "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter and of "J'Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel" published by Mantua Books.. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Frontpage and Commentary.

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/19660

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