• THE SSPX DEBATE

Can We Finally Drop the SSPX Debate?

 Kennedy Hall November 27, 2023 0 Comments

It has been almost a year since the anti-SSPX crowd took yet another legalistic shot at the Priestly Fraternity of the Society of Saint Pius X, and it seems — at least for now — that the enemies of Archbishop Lefebvre and his priests have stopped with their griping. At the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023, it seemed like it was all the rage to take shots from this angle or that at the Society, with even big-name podcasters piling on for a few clicks. When I say a “few” clicks, I mean that literally.

At least on YouTube, an SSPX podcast episode with Father David Sherry — a man I am privileged to know and to call a spiritual father — received almost 300 thousand views in an attempt to tell the truth about the SSPX. That one podcast received more than triple the amount of views than Matt Fradd’s attempt to malign the SSPX in a one-sided and scripted conversation. It was a bit funny, considering the fact that Sherry recorded his talk on a laptop with no external camera or microphone with laggy video from a Zoom call, and the Pints With Aquinas grenade was filmed in 4k with a multi-cam setup and a full-staff.

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Of course — if I could give myself a shameless plug — my book, SSPX: The Defence (rightly spelled with a C) also sat atop the Amazon Catholic chart for the better part of two weeks in the Spring. I don’t say this to self-aggrandize, but it was interesting to note the phenomenon of a self-published book on the controversial topic of the SSPX sitting atop a list of books released by publishers with marketing teams and all the bells and whistles you’d expect at a real publisher.

What this showed was that no matter the effort — and money — that Catholic Inc. put into their onslaughts, the average Catholic wasn’t buying it. In addition, one only needs to look at the international interest in the new church in St. Mary’s Kansas. Upwards of fifty thousand people tuned in to watch the five-hour-long consecration of a church. I was there, and it was beautiful, but with all the things available online, I would hardly say that it was something you would consider “must-see TV.”

What does this tell us?

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Well, Catholics with a traditional mindset are not fooled by tit-for-tat legal arguments and pharisaical opining about the Society and they understand with the innate Catholic sense that the SSPX will go down in Church history as a providential gift from God in the fight against Modernism that still rages on.

The arguments from the anti-SSPX malcontents, generally speaking, centre around two things: a legalist interpretation of Canon Law, and an out-of-touch understanding of the lives of Catholics the world over.

In Father Sherry’s interview — and in my book — he made it clear that, yes, there is a robust defence to be made of the SSPX using legal principles, and one can make that defence as well as the next person. But, in this war for the heart of tradition, we do well to understand the situation of the SSPX in terms of principles and the Catholic faith.

Understanding Law

Any lawyer will tell you that you can “indict a ham sandwich” and the same is true with Canon Law. Canon Law is not a magical form of indefectible and infallible divinely revealed legal codes that emanate from divine oracles who always judge justly. No, it is a code of positive law which is of course very useful, but can be abused and used unjustly just like any code of positive law in the history of the world. Just ask any good priest who has been “cancelled” how easily it is for bishops and lawyers to use legal jiu-jitsu to condemn a good priest to the exterior darkness.

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The Church is a perfect society, meaning that she contains all she needs within herself to achieve her end. She has her priests, her doctrines, and her Sacraments, and, technically speaking, she needs nothing else. But, as she operates in the world of men and nation-states, she has to deal with human and political realities. As a result, she needs a set of legal principles in order to govern justly. But we must understand that this legal framework is at the service of the mission of the Church, which is the salvation of souls.

Any use of Canon Law that works against the express end of the Church — even if technically legal in a close framework — is unjust and if one is in a position to resist such an abuse of the law for a just reason, he can do so.

Out of Touch

In addition to this basic understand of natural justice and sound principles of just governance, Catholics are also not living in Canon Law facilities where everything is in the hypothetical. Real Catholics, with real children in real situations, have to make choices about how they will get themselves and their dependents to Heaven. Sadly, Liberals have ruined the application of nuance and common sense when it comes to conversations about theology and the nature of God. Still, we can say with confidence that God will not be quizzing Father so and so or a pater familias about how he may have misunderstood the application of epikeia in relation to the complicated question of the nature of the SSPX’s canonical mission.

This is what the anti-SSPX crowd doesn’t understand. The SSPX is more than just an “option” in a time of crisis for millions of Catholics world-wide; the SSPX is more than just the “only option” in many cases; the SSPX is a God-send for those people.

Compromise

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I have heard it said that the SSPX in some ways is a “compromise” for people who access the Sacraments at their chapels, by which they mean that it is understandable in some cases given the crisis that some people attend their Masses. The idea is that since the SSPX doesn’t enjoy normal relations with some — not all — local bishops, that attending their Masses is but a place-holder activity for people until the FSSP or the ICKSP or some other group swoops in and saves the day.

Now, I do not mean to take anything away from those groups, but this sort of mentality is historical ignorant. Simply put, if it was not for the SSPX and the actions of Lefebvre, there would be no Ecclesia Dei commission, no indult, and naturally speaking, there would be no Latin Mass available for the general public. You may disagree, and you may say that I cannot say this, but it is not I who says it, but Dom Alcuin Reid who wrote:

Let us not forget the origins of the Fraternity of St Peter or of the Institute of the Good Shepherd: they would not exist today if it were not for the conscientious disobedience of several decades ago that ensured that the Society of St Pius X continued on when it was canonically suppressed in the 1970s. People who benefit from the good work of these Institutes today… should not forget the fact that they exist today because historically their founders took conscientious decisions to ignore parts of canon law and decrees of suppression that would have otherwise brought about their death.

I have even heard other traditionalists gripe that the SSPX operates in a diocese where there is already another traditional group. The horror! I mean, why would we ever want any more good priests around? Better for the FSSP and ICKSP to be outstretched and unable to serve all the faithful in an area than to have SSPX priests helping forgive mortal sins, right? Is this really an argument that intelligent people have in an era of a priest shortage?

The man who attends the SSPX is not making a compromise in order to “get” his traditional Sacraments, and he need not jump ship when a different order rolls into town. It is the New Springtime that compromised on the Faith and Archbishop Lefebvre who said, “No!” to the revolution.

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If there is a tug-of-war for the soul of the Church with the Modernists on one side and the Catholics on the other, it is Lefebvre and his priests acting as the anchor on the Catholic side, even if the others don’t want to turn around and look. In addition, if the SSPX were to metaphorically let go, all the historical validations for their existence would vanish.

God would have found another way?

One of the more common objections I hear when making arguments like this — namely that we have the SSPX to thank at least on historical grounds for the continuation of the traditional priesthood — is that “God could have found another way.” In essence, the idea is that while it is understandable that Lefebvre believed he had to act the way that he did, God would have found a way to do it without any legal doubts.

In North America, we call this playing “armchair quarterback.” We might say that Tom Brady could have thrown a different pass, or Gretzky should have shot a puck at a different angle, or Michael Jordan could have scored more points if he did XYZ. Well, these little games are fun to play, but the reality is that noneof us were in those games, and none of us were or ever will be as good as they were.

In fact, if we look at Church history, we find that God tends to intervene by using human instruments, and we know these things to be true when we judge the fruits of their actions.

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What are the fruits of the SSPX? The preservation of the Mass of all time; the preservation of the traditional priesthood; the preservation of traditional seminaries, etc. Has the SSPX ever pushed it “too far” and set up a parallel Church? No. Has the SSPX ever said that the pope is not the pope or that bishops have no authority? No. Has the SSPX adopted some heresy? Not a chance.

On the contrary, let us judge the fruits of your average diocese… I do not need to go into it here, but if we are judging fruits, the SSPX seems like a plentiful harvest whereas the situation for most Catholic dioceses since the council has been a drought with a run of cholera.

Lefebvre wasn’t “perfect”

Some critics find this or that quote of Lefebvre — usually if not always out of context or employed with a lack of linguistic nuance — and say, “Look, he said something that I disagree with! Must be a schismatic!”

Well, let us hope that when we stand before God at our judgement, it will be a conversation about how we weren’t perfect in the eyes of men. As if any of us could have acted with such courage and prudence in those veritably insane decades of the 70s and 80s.

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When Archbishop Lefebvre is one day canonized — and he will be — he will be the first Saint in a long time who we can say is really a saint of the Old School. What I mean to say is that he will be the only Saint who really underwent a devil’s advocate, and not just in the normal sense, but an international forensic investigation into everything he ever said and did, and as Providence would have it, the Archbishop comes out every time smelling like a rose in a Church overrun with dung.

Let me say thank you to the critics of Lefebvre, as they have done a great service to the Church by allowing us to prove time and time again that Archbishop Lefebvre is one of the greatest heroes in the history of the Church.

You may think it is too strong to say that, but let me conclude with some wisdom from Dr. Kwasniewski on the sheer evil of the New Spring time. He wrote in The Once and Future Roman Rite:

The “truth” into which the Holy Spirit guides the Church includes the development of her liturgy. Hence, any significant or wholesale rejection of elements that have come to be practiced and accepted over a long period of time in the Church is, in a certain sense, a sin against the Holy Spirit, and any attempt to recast a rite from the ground up cannot but reflect a false theology of the Church and of the Trinity.

The sin against the Holy Ghost is by definition unforgivable. Is there anything more evil than a sin against the Holy Ghost? What does that say about what has happened since the Council? And, if we consider just how evil this whole operation has been, what can we say about the heroism of the man who stood against the sin contra mundum so that we could all kneel for the last Gospel, and have our sins absolved with those earth-shattering words, ego te absolvo…

Can we finally put the SSPX debate to rest and just focus on saving our souls until the fog of war is lifted?

Kennedy Hall

Kennedy Hall is a contributing editor for OnePeterFive. He is the author Terror of Demons: Reclaiming Traditional Catholic Masculinity and Lockdown with the Devil, a novel published by Our Lady of Victory Press. He is a writer at Catholic Family News, LifeSiteNews and is the host of the Conservative talk-radio show, The Kennedy Report. He is married with four children and lives in Ontario, Canada.

Election Integrity Takes Major Blow:

56% of Likely Voters Predict Cheating in 2024

By Laura Wellington

The Western Journal

November 20, 2023

The belief in election integrity has gone out the window, it seems. The majority of Americans no longer believe in an honest election system in our nation.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey verified this horrific reality.

In a poll whose results were announced in a news release on Friday, 1,029 likely U.S. voters were asked, “How likely is it that the outcome of the 2024 presidential election will be affected by cheating?”

Fifty-six percent responded that it is likely, including 31 percent who said it is very likely.

To that same end, 51 percent of respondents said they believe mail-in ballots make it easier to cheat.

The survey was conducted Nov. 13-15 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points with a 95 percent confidence level.

“How likely is it that the outcome of the 2024 presidential election will be affected by cheating?”

IT’S LIKELY – Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) November 18, 2023

Men: 54%

Women: 58%

18-39: 62%

40-64: 56%

65+: 48%

White: 55%

Black: 51%

Hispanic: 60%

DEM: 40%

IND: 55%

GOP: 73%

All Voters: 56%     https://t.co/63nHpQn2Db

Many who said voter fraud is likely in 2024 are surely among those who believe former President Donald Trump actually won the 2020 presidential election.

Their ranks seem to be growing amid numerous arrests and convictions for voter fraud.

The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database lists nearly 1,500 proven instances of voter fraud with more than 1,200 criminal convictions.

Questions around Republican Kari Lake’s defeat in the Arizona gubernatorial election last year as well as the recent reports of compromised elections in Pennsylvania and Connecticut have fueled the distrust among voters.

Stealing Americans’ voices and votes through dishonest elections is an act of aggression and terror. That is how many American citizens would define it.

Cries of injustice have moved beyond names like Trump, Lake, and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.

More and more Americans are convinced that the very instrument of our republic’s perpetuation — free and fair elections — has been corrupted.

To restore confidence in our elections, we need to: 

ü Enact a single day of voting, 

ü Require voter identification, 

ü Adopt paper ballots only, and 

ü Require that hand-tabulated results be announced within 24 hours. 

ü Acceptable exceptions for military personnel and the disabled are assumed.

Calls for anything else are calls for allowing cheating to take place.

The time to demand change is now. Fifty-six percent of us agree that it’s sorely needed.If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.Plato

Can Europe Become Western Again?

By: Victor Davis Hanson

American Greatness

November 23, 2023

For the first time in a millennium, Europe no longer plays a critical role in promoting Western civilization nor in world history at large.

Ostensibly it should. Some 750 million people live on the European subcontinent.

Europe still remains the most popular tourist spot on earth. Its hallowed architecture, art, infrastructure, and natural beauty still remind millions of visitors of the world’s once most dynamic and grandiose civilization.

Even now, European nations, in and out of the European Union, still produce a combined gross domestic product of $24 trillion, second only to the United States.

Europe’s exports are among the world’s most coveted cars, sophisticated technology, and valued industrial goods.

Yet since World War II, Europe has played an increasingly reduced role in world affairs, despite its membership in the NATO alliance and the growth of the European Union.

Why?

The twentieth-century traumas of World War I and II—in which some 70 million Europeans were killed—saw Europe commit near collective suicide. The ensuing Cold War hinged on protecting a relatively unarmed Europe from an aggressive nuclear Soviet empire on Europe’s borders.

But as World War II and the Cold War faded into memory, Europe did not snap back and assume its centuries-old role as a world leader and beacon of Western Civilization.

Instead, a weary Europe outsourced its security to the United States. It redefined itself as a postmodern, pacifist, socialist utopian project—most recently predicated on redistributionist entitlements, open borders, and radical green policies that have all inevitably ensured European decline.

Europeans grew louder and whinyier the less relevant they became.

Although Europe has large sources of untapped hydroelectrical, nuclear, coal, and natural gas power, its green religion has all but shut down new nuclear and fossil fuel generation and closed existing plants. The result is that the cost of European energy is prohibitive for both the public and industry.

Recent economic growth was essentially zero throughout the Eurozone. The European cradle-to-grave social net and its hyper-government regulations and economic activity restrictions are increasingly unsustainable.

Few European nations spend even a mere two percent of their GDP on defense. The result is that both Europe at large and its NATO members cannot defend their continent without the assistance of the United States.

Nor can Europe project power beyond its shores to preempt dangerous threats on its own horizon or to its allies.

Europe is also shrinking and aging. Its collective fertility rate of 1.5 is far below the rate of replacement. Most young people in Europe—the ancient home of Christendom—express neither belief in God nor any faith in organized religions.

In many European countries, foreign-born emigrants comprise twenty percent of the population. Most of them have arrived poor, without education, in mass, illegally, with little desire to fully integrate, from inimical countries, and holding political and religious views hostile to Europe.

The other half of the West is in little better condition.

The United States is reeling under $33 in national debt.

After embracing various bankrupt academic critical legal “theories,”major American cities are unsafe, unhealthy, and unsightly. The American southern border is wide open. Eight million illegal aliens have poured in just since January 2021, many of them hostile to the United States.

America is increasingly politically, racially, and tribally divided. It has mysteriously determined not to fully utilize its vast natural resources, especially gas, oil, and rare earth metals.

In this vacuum, the enemies of the West see only opportunity.

Russia invaded European Ukraine. Its ongoing aggression still terrifies frontline NATO nations.

China threatens periodically to storm Taiwan, as it bullies its neighbors, buzzes U.S. ships and planes, and manipulates currency, markets, and trade.

Iran has armed to the teeth anti-Western terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas.

Iran’s “Shiite Crescent” from Tehran to Damascus to Beirut to Palestine threatens both pro-Western Arab regimes and Israel.

Iran brags that its surrogates can destroy Israel and will soon be nuclear with a global reach to both the United States and Europe.

Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, presumably on the assumption that current generations of Westerners in Israel, the U.S., and Europe would not react too strongly to its precivilization barbarity if it entailed a subsequent messy war.

In sum, the world is safe only when a strong America, alongside its European partner, secures its borders, protects the world’s sea- and air spaces, supports constitutional and pro-Western nations, and deters thuggish belligerents.

Perhaps as war clouds gather and enemies multiply, Europe will rediscover its heritage and reawaken to its historical role.

Increasingly, a lonely U.S.—and the world at large—need the return of a sane and powerful European co-partner, one that emerges from its self-induced slumber, and resumes its ancient role in preserving civilization from its multiplying enemies.

Can We Save Our Universities?

By: Victor Davis Hanson

American Greatness

November 20, 2023

(Emphasis added)

It took the widely reported, repellent, and exempt wave of anti-Semitism and violent pro-Hamas protestors harassing Jews, finally to convince Americans that their own hallmark universities are illiberal centers of mediocrity and intolerance—and increasingly unsafe.

Of course, Americans had long known that something had gone wrong at their colleges. They had increasingly encountered college graduates who were poorly educated in basic skills and lacked general knowledge—and yet highly politicized and intolerant of different views and opinions. Ignorant but arrogant is a sad way to start an adult life.

College, the public knew, has certainly eroded from our cherished idea of a four-year idealized respite from adult employment. It once was intended to be a place where youth learned to be open-minded, tolerant, skilled, and eager to learn the nature and traditions of Western civilization, art, literature, languages, philosophy, and history.

Instead, all too often “college” has now descended into a six-to-seven-year misadventure that nationwide often results in only half those enrolled ever receiving degrees. Nearly all sink deeply in student debt. And yet for all the borrowed tuition money, few prove capable of writing analytically, speaking articulately, or knowing the general referents, past and present, of their very civilization.

Students, especially at the elite campuses, learn to mouth monotonously accusations of “genocide.” “apartheid,” “colonialism,” or“imperialism.” But they lack the ability to define these nouns. As a result, they so often name-drop empty slogans in the context of supposed Western sins.

Again, October 7 brought these sorry facts to national attention. Adolescent screamers on video showed no awareness that dropping leaflets and sending texts to avoid collateral deaths is not “genocide.”Most chant the “river to the sea” with no clue that it resonates the very ethos of mass murdering, mutilation, and dehumanization of Jewish elderly, women, children, and infants in the most savage fashion on October 7.

Accusatory students who scream “apartheid” seemed to have no clue that a fifth of Israel’s population is Arab, with citizenship rights that vastly exceed those in all other Middle East nations.

They have no notion of the ancient and long connections of the Jewish people to the land of Israel, or how in the world the revered Al-Aqsa Mosque found itself atop the far more ancient Herod’s Jewish Second Temple sanctuary.

As far as “colonialism” and “occupation” go, they are clueless that the longest, non-Arab colonial rule of Palestine was the more than 300 years of often brutal Ottoman/Turkish imperialistic control. Nor do they have much knowledge of the repeated and combined efforts of far larger and richer Arab nations to wipe tiny Israel out, especially during the full-scale wars of 1947-48, 1967, and 1973.

Instead, politically correct orthodoxies, not the knowledge or logic, of a student, became the hallmark of an “educated” American graduate. Students and faculty were considered “moral” for proclaiming their devotion to diversity, equity, and inclusion, without a clue that historically unity, equality, and fairness were the better aspirations. Without formal study in civics and ethics, students learned that any means were justified to advance political aims merely asserted as morally superior to others.

After October 7, it proved a small campus step from years of institutionalized racially separated graduations, dorms, and campus centers to singling out and often segregating Jewish students from campus spaces.

At Arizona State, Jewish students had to be escorted by police from a campus debate event. Even 20 years ago administrators would likely have expelled those threatening violence—or been forced to resign themselves. Today, they are terrified of mostly foreign students who abuse their visas and seem to despise the host they dare not leave to return home.

Administrators at prestigious MIT admit that some of their foreign students are openly harassing Jews. But the university will not expel such anti-Semites for fear they might lose their student visas and thus have to return to their Middle-East homes and stew about their own miscreant behavior and ingratitude to their hosts. Instead, for college administrators, entitled, and full-tuition-paying children of Middle East’s elites are seen as cash cows whose money masks their bigotry.

As a result, cynical MIT grandees now simply warn Jewish students where and where not it is safe to walk on their own campuses. And thus, they confirm the embarrassing reality that the university is either unable or does not wish to stop the systematic anti-Jewish hatred on its own turf.

Yet since when did such student guests in the United States feel empowered to shut down bridges during commute hours, tear down American flags on Veterans Day, and scout out and hunt down Jewish Americans on campus?

If universities canonize critical race theorist Ibram Kendi, who insists that “anti-racism” requires good racism to combat bad racism, then is it any wonder that professors of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and various studies courses at UC Davis or Stanford prominently harassed and threatened Jewish students, or at Cornell cheered on news of Hamas’s murder spree?

If campuses drop the SAT requirement, and no longer rank comparative high-school grade point averages, but instead rely on racial and ethnic quotas and “diversity statements” for university admissions, is it any surprise that insecure and passive-aggressive students feel entitled and exempt from any ramifications for their venom?

And if campuses are fixated on race and superficial appearances, and reward those who are supposedly not guilty of “white privilege,” it is easy to understand why anti-Semites believe they can justify their hatred by assuming Jews are guilty for being white, and they themselves exempt for being nonwhite bigots.

If the endowments of our top universities have reached record-setting multibillion-dollar levels, and if the billion-dollar annual income on those massive sums is non-taxable on the pretense campuses are apolitical and teach inductively rather than indoctrinate, then is it such a shock that exempted huge budgets lead to more staffers than students?

At Stanford, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that there were 16,938 graduate and undergraduate students, but they were outnumbered by the combined total of 15,750 administrators and their staffers and 2,288 faculty. Would it not be easier and perhaps even cheaper just to hire one tutor for each student and forgo the administrators?

If anti-Semitic and racist professors enjoy life-long tenure, and if such guaranteed lifetime employment has de facto eliminated conservative voices among the faculty, why would any bigot mouthing genocidal chants ever worry about his job security?

So again, ignorant and arrogant describe what the public has concluded of campuses in the last few weeks.

In contrast, there is little such anti-Semitic violence at community colleges or trade schools, where the majority of students attend, and must work to pay for their education, and learn skills in a world apart from therapeutic gut courses. In truth, a multiple-choice American history test at a junior college now demands more knowledge from a student than the weaponized essay requirement of an Ivy League-studies class.

Taxpayers soon will no longer wish to subsidize elite education, especially when campuses no longer can guarantee their graduates are broadly educated and their professional and graduate programs can no longer turn out top-flight experts and specialists.

So, what happened to America’s once monopoly on global excellence in higher education?

In a word, there was too much money—and too little accountability. Tuition soared faster than the rate of annual inflation. The federal government subsidizes almost $2 trillion in student loans, regardless of the quality of education the student receives, and often with the expectation there will be few if any consequences when indebted but poorly educated students default on their repayment obligations.

The professors who harass students, and rant endlessly off-topic about current politics, are often not audited or reviewed on the quality of their scholarship and teaching as much as their political views, and their racial, gender, and ethnic status. Most have little knowledge of the reality outside the academic world—having spent their entire lives as students and then faculty confined to campus. Tenure is seen as a birthright rather than an ossified privilege only accorded to a tiny fraction of the workforce on the pretense that faculty should be heterodox, independent thinkers, without ideological blinders.

So, to save us from the monsters we created, Americans must get the government out of the student loan business. We must demand that universities’ endowments back their own student loans.

The government should tax endowment income and end lifelong tenure. Universities must expel and deport foreign students who violate campus laws as they violently act out their various hatreds.

Reinstate the SAT for admissions, and end racial quotas. And require a national SAT-like exit exam to reassure the public that graduates at least know more when they leave college than when they enrolled—an increasingly dubious assumption.

But most important of all: the public should stop giving money to elite institutions. To continue such philanthropy is akin to supplying heroin to an addict, gas to a fire, or fireworks to children.

Do not consider our prestigious schools any longer necessarily prestigious. Many are not. Do not hire a graduate simply because she graduated from Yale, or attended Stanford—unless one prefers to risk dealing with an employee poorly schooled but likely to act out a pampered victim status and to disrupt a workplace.

Squeezing the World’s Vulnerable Peoples

By: Victor Davis Hanson

American Greatness

November 9, 2023

The population of Israel is about 10 million. This represents about half of the world’s Jewish people.

The founding idea of modern Israel was to offer a sanctuary for Jews in their biblical home in the Middle East, in the aftermath of Nazi Germany’s mass murder of 6 million Jews. Yet currently, 78 years after the Holocaust, anti-Israel protestors throughout the Middle East, the great cities of the Western world, and iconic American universities chant death threats and “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.” Their signature slogan is shorthand for the erasure of the Jewish state and everyone in it.

There would currently be zero chance that Jews could live peaceably under any current Middle Eastern government. In the postwar era, nearly a million Jews were persecuted, ethnically cleansed, and forcibly expelled from all the major Arab countries— Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Syria, and Yemen—despite hundreds of years of residence.

Anti-Israel hatred still remains a staple in most of the nearly-500-million-person Arab world, and indeed is commonplace among the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims and their countries at the United Nations.

And Israel is only one of several small, vulnerable states. Most of them are in the volatile Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. All are surrounded by hostile neighbors. The others have also suffered a long history of persecution and periodic genocide—catastrophes that are not necessarily permanently relegated to their ancient pasts.

Bitter proxy fighting between Armenian- and Azerbaijan-allied forces in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh corridor recently ended with the defeat of Armenian-supported forces. As a result, shortly before the Hamas massacre of Jews on October 7, some 120,000 Christian ethnic Armenians were expelled from the region by Muslim and Turkish-speaking Azerbaijan.

This current ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh comes a little more than a century after the Turkish genocide of Armenians that led to more than 1 million people being driven out of their ancestral homes and slaughtered.

Christian Armenia, with only 3 million inhabitants, is even smaller than Israel. And it is nearly surrounded by hostile Muslim states. As in the case of Israel, the world mostly either ignores the old, familiar brutal scenario, now recurring with the same aggressive players—or does not care.

Christian Greece—a NATO and European Union member—also is similar to Israel in being relatively small, with a population of 10.5 million. For more than 400 years, Greece was occupied by Ottoman Turkey. Roughly a century ago, Turkish forces ethnically cleansed Greeks from ancient Ionia and its capital of Smyrna–a homeland of Greek peoples for millennia.

Like Armenia, it shares a border with its historical aggressor Turkey. Greek islands off the coast of Asia Minor are currently subject to constant overflights by Turkish military jets. To Greece’s north are the historically volatile Balkans. Across the Mediterranean lie several often violent and unstable North African nations, the frequent source of massive, destabilizing illegal immigration into Greece.

Tiny Cyprus is another equally vulnerable nation. Cypriot history is one of constant invasion and occupation. Most recently, Cyprus was forcibly divided into Greek and Turkish states in 1974, after Turkey invaded and expelled some 200,000 Greeks from their centuries-old homes in the north of the island.

And all these small nations’ vulnerabilities are neither abstract theory nor ancient history. Turkish President Recep Erdogan, for example, has recently weighed in on the tensions currently buffeting them all.

With apprehensions rising over Turkish violations of Greek air space in the Aegean, Erdogan has threatened to send a shower of missiles into Athens: “We can come down suddenly one night when the time comes.”

Erdogan also recently bullied Israel with nearly the same warning of a preemptive nocturnal Turkish missile attack, bragging that Turkey could “come at any night unexpectedly.” He also has ominously weighed in on the October 7 massacres and the Israeli response to it in Gaza: “We will tell the whole world that Israel is a war criminal. We are making preparations for this.”

Of the recent expulsion of the Armenians and the war in Nagorno-Karabakh, Erdogan also boasted, “We will continue to fulfill this mission which our grandfathers have carried out for centuries in the Caucasus region.” Apparently, Erdogan was referring both to the Ottoman conquest of Armenia and to the later Turkish efforts in the early 20th century to ethnically cleanse Armenia of Armenians.

In all these cases, small and vulnerable countries hold transparent elections and ensure individual rights—in stark contrast to their larger and more aggressive neighbors. Their very continued existences hinge on Western alliances and support–from the European Union, from NATO, and especially from the United States.

In the past, they all suffered catastrophes because they differed from their neighbors in ethnicity, religion, and history—and were seen as either expendable or irrelevant to their supposed allies and patrons in the West.

If we are not careful, what supposedly cannot happen again, most surely will.

Pope Francis removes critic and firebrand Texas Bishop Joseph Strickland from diocese

Claire Thornton

USA TODAY

In an unusual move, Pope Francis has removed an outspoken conservative bishop from his role governing the diocese of Tyler, Texas, the Vatican’s official news site announced on Saturday.

Bishop Joseph E. Strickland was forcibly removed from his role by the pope on Saturday after he refused to resign from office, Vatican News reported.

Bishop Joe S. Vasquez of Austin, Texas, has been appointed as the apostolic administrator, or interim bishop, of the Diocese of Tyler, according to the Vatican outlet.

In recent years, Strickland blasted the pope publically, criticizing what he claimed were extreme attempts at reform by the pontiff.

Strickland, 65, accused the pope in a tweet this year of “undermining the deposit of faith.” He was particularly critical of Francis’ recent meeting on the future of the Catholic Church, in which the pope discussed ways to better welcome LGBTQ+ Catholics.

In June, Strickland left his Texas diocese to lead a protest in Los Angeles against the Dodgers for featuring the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence during Pride Night at Dodger Stadium. The pro-LGBTQ+ group is known for its members, who are drag performers dressed as nuns. The protest was sponsored by right-wing Catholic media outlets, reported the National Catholic Reporter.

The Strickland Saga

charliej373Nov 15Bishop Joseph Strickland prays outside the US Bishop’s Conference in Baltimore with friends. (The man at the far right is a mutual friend, Patrick Comiskey. Yes, I checked with him before naming him here.) -Photo by USSA NewsBy Charlie JohnstonMico, Texas – Early in his pontificate, Pope Francis said he wanted to, “make a mess,” and urged young people to do the same. With the normalization of transgenderism in the Church and the approval for blessing same sex unions, combined with the dismissal of two orthodox Bishops for vague or no reasons, all I can say to him is, “Mission accomplished!”Yet I think the hour of darkness in the Church is almost over. The Pope’s dismissal of Bishop Joseph Strickland, formerly of Tyler, Texas, while promoting various prelates who support gay marriage, intrinsically support abortion and routinely violate Church law is a sign that we have nearly reached the bottom of depravity in the disordered faction of the hierarchy…and may very well trigger the backlash that routs the depraved from our ranks.While Strickland presided over a relatively small Diocese, his unflagging public advocacy of orthodoxy and fidelity to Christ raised his stature and profile throughout the world. When it first came out that the Vatican was targeting him, top orthodox prelates around the world spoke out on his behalf.  He has become a sort of battle flag for those prelates and laity who do NOT believe the mission of the Church is to renegotiate Scripture, the Magisterium and the nature of sin with God. Detaching Strickland from his Diocese is much less likely to silence him than it is to free him to speak more powerfully throughout the world. Pope Francis wanted Strickland emasculated. He may just get Strickland unchained.A quarter of a century ago I told my Priests, who take pride in both their fidelity to the Magisterium and their loyalty to the Holy Father, that John Paul was easy to be loyal to. They should prepare themselves for a time when they had a more difficult superior – and must, at that time, balance their legitimate duty of fidelity to the Magisterium and their legitimate duty of obedience to authority over them. It would require careful thought about the extent of – and limitations on – authority. You cannot just choose one or the other, you must struggle to live both well.I have been skeptical of some of the cancelled Priests. Though some are solid, some just want to be their own Bishop, some have notably eccentric takes on doctrine, and some seem to have just fallen in love with their own celebrity. I’m not going to hitch my wagon to that kind of star. Bp. Strickland, however, has lived fidelity to the Gospels while taking care to be obedient to the legitimate authority of the Pope – while speaking candidly in criticism of those areas where the Pope has tried to exert authority he does not have either temporally nor spiritually.I have seen some of the Vatican’s clumsy efforts to justify the removal. I watched a full video of a clown (who I will not name other than to call him a clown; he was so absurd and pathetic, desperately trying to be somebody who counts) who claims to be a theologian use the most absurd arguments against Strickland. First, he argued that Strickland did not respect the “papal magisterium.” Well, neither do I – because there is no such thing, any more than there is a “Biden Constitution” or a “Trump Constitution.” The Church has one Magisterium – and the Pope is its primary guardian, not its master. This concept started being floated about five years ago as an effort to reduce the Magisterium to whatever political program a given Pope advocated for. The clown then blasted Strickland for accusing the Pope of material heresy in several cases, asking if Strickland did not know that the Pope is infallible. This only showed the clown has no understanding of infallibility and how rare its exercise is – or intentionally prostituted himself in hopes of getting a pat on the head from the Vatican. There are two forms of heresy, material and formal. Material heresy is a proposition that is objectively heretical, but unknown and unintended by the person who makes it. A very common material heresy is to think that because Christ is a man, He is a human person. He is a divine person with both a human and a divine nature. Rather than an attempt to undermine the faith, a material heresy is usually just an error, even if it can be a very damaging one. Formal heresy occurs when the author knows what he says is heresy and both intends and holds to it, anyway. That is a very difficult case to prove without a direct confession. It is widely acknowledged that both Popes Honorius and Liberius promoted material heresies, either through their actions or through their silence when they were obliged to speak in defense of the faith. The clown was just giving a lecture advocating for ultramontanism. He did trot out a couple of anonymous Priests from the Tyler Diocese who claimed that Strickland was a bad administrator and very “divisive.” Alas, those Priests used several left-wing buzz phrases in their critiques, identifying them as liberal activists. Yes, if you are a left-wing activist wearing a clerical collar; if you think it is a horrible offense that no Gay Pride flags are allowed on Church property, I can see why you would think Strickland is a bad Bishop. I visit Tyler regularly…and there is no Diocese in the country where the Bishop is as fully engaged with his flock as in Tyler. Strickland is so beloved there that part of me pities whoever is given the unenviable task of following him. In Tyler this week, they are conducting prayer vigils and consoling each other over their loss. The mood much more resembles the loss of a beloved family member than it does a change in ecclesial administration. The video was so chock full of error, malice, and palpably eager ambition I could only conclude the clown was trying to curry favor with the current Vatican establishment – after failing for several years to curry favor with traditionalists. God save us from mediocrities who are willing to parrot any line if only someone, anyone, would pay them notice!I don’t doubt that somewhere along the line Bp. Strickland has said something intemperate. All but the most slippery among us have, at times. That said, Strickland is one of the most temperate men I have ever met.The Vatican has yet to release a canonical reason for the dismissal. I am sure it will concoct one in time. But everyone already knows the actual reason: Bp. Strickland actually believes in God and that Scripture and the Magisterium are not negotiable. It is the second time in two years that Pope Francis has summarily dismissed, without stated canonical cause, a Bishop who was inconvenient to his politically-charged papacy. I have read some canon lawyers who say the Pope has this authority without condition; I have read more who say the Pope cannot do it except in the case where a serious canonical offense is involved. Canon lawyers, like their temporal counterparts, can be found on both sides of any dispute. What is beyond dispute is that, whatever he says about synodality or collegiality, this Pope is viciously ruthless in suppressing and defaming any who disagree with him. He is the most rigidly intolerant man to hold the papal seat in my lifetime. In theory, every Bishop is supposed to be the independent head of his Diocese and the Pope the first among equals. In practice, this move reveals that every Diocese is just a branch office of Vatican, Inc.Even so, this move, following on so many other idiosyncratic moves by the Pope, may be the spark that begins real renewal in the Church. Bishops, like other men, are often ambitious for promotion. There is nothing wrong with that. Ambition fuels a lot of genuine accomplishment. But every orthodox Bishop in the world now knows he has risen as high as he ever will so long as Francis is Pope. If they want to rise, they must get enthusiastic about same-sex relationships, approving of transgenderism, and tolerant of abortion. If they want bonus points, they can say nasty things about St. John Paul. Ideally, your fidelity to your calling should act in service to your ambition. Now, fidelity to Scripture and the Magisterium are impediments to ambition – at least in the short term. To adapt and amend Thomas Paine’s quote from another great crisis, “These are the times that try Bishop’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their Divine Lord; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” Once again, as I have been saying, it is decision time. If an orthodox Bishop is quiet and keeps his head down, the Vatican might not go after him. But that is the very definition of “shrinking” from service. If a Bishop speaks with bold clarity in defense of the faith, the Pope and the minions in the Vatican are likely to make his life hard. If he betrays, he might win advancement. But who trusts a betrayer from either side? Even more, with all the sketchy characters Pope Francis has surrounded himself with in the Vatican, the odds are pretty good that a gigantic scandal is going to surface sometime, perhaps one big enough to tank the Vatican’s entire progressive project, one in which orthodoxy will be the only chance to survive public revulsion and backlash. The most prudent course for any Bishop at this time is to imitate the first Apostles who gave their lives to Christ’s teaching out of love and conviction, both for Christ and their fellows. Now, more than ever, it is time to do the right thing because it is the right thing to do – and because it is the most prudent thing to do. Each Bishop will have to calibrate for himself how vocal he will be and what the priorities for his Diocese must be. Then, casting your bread of fidelity upon the water, take St. Padre Pio’s advice to “pray, hope, and don’t worry.”Bp. Strickland is not the only prominent prelate who has accused the Pope of material heresy. Some very prominent and respected theologians and scholars have done so. Cardinal Gerhard Muller, the former prefect of the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith (back when it protected and clarified, rather than bowdlerized and blurred, doctrinal integrity), has said that Pope Francis has made several statements that could be reasonably understood as material heresies. I was chuckling with a prominent theologian at the subtext of Cdl. Muller’s statement: the only way someone could be guilty of regular, serial material heresies without being guilty of formal heresy would be if they were not very bright.When God wants to clarify things He often sends controversy. In the first thousand years of the Church the great controversies were over the nature of Christ. Now, we are engaged in a great controversy over the extent and limitations of any Pope’s authority and over the relationship between the Bishops of the world and the Pope – what their legitimate obligations are and the extent of their autonomy. It is messy (to use one of Francis’ favorite words), but I have no doubt that it will bear the fruit of clarity. When all is resolved, the “do your own thing” Catholics and the “do whatever the current Pope says on all things” Catholics will clearly know their error. They will know that they have a legitimate duty of obedience to the legitimate authority of Bishop and Pope, but that submission to an illegitimate exercise of that authority will not excuse them from accountability to the Lord for their fidelity to His commands. Our God is a demanding God. He demands that we try valiantly with our whole heart, mind and soul to serve Him with fidelity. But He is also a merciful Father. He knows our hearts. When we try our very best, He fortifies us and quickly forgives our many honest errors. But He knows when we slyly try to pretend a knowing infidelity is an honest error – and that kindles His wrath. Be open-hearted, do your best, and don’t worry.Many in the Vatican establishment hope that this will be the end of Bp. Strickland’s influence in the Church. I think it is the beginning.

The Strickland Saga

charliej373Nov 15Bishop Joseph Strickland prays outside the US Bishop’s Conference in Baltimore with friends. (The man at the far right is a mutual friend, Patrick Comiskey. Yes, I checked with him before naming him here.) -Photo by USSA NewsBy Charlie JohnstonMico, Texas – Early in his pontificate, Pope Francis said he wanted to, “make a mess,” and urged young people to do the same. With the normalization of transgenderism in the Church and the approval for blessing same sex unions, combined with the dismissal of two orthodox Bishops for vague or no reasons, all I can say to him is, “Mission accomplished!”Yet I think the hour of darkness in the Church is almost over. The Pope’s dismissal of Bishop Joseph Strickland, formerly of Tyler, Texas, while promoting various prelates who support gay marriage, intrinsically support abortion and routinely violate Church law is a sign that we have nearly reached the bottom of depravity in the disordered faction of the hierarchy…and may very well trigger the backlash that routs the depraved from our ranks.While Strickland presided over a relatively small Diocese, his unflagging public advocacy of orthodoxy and fidelity to Christ raised his stature and profile throughout the world. When it first came out that the Vatican was targeting him, top orthodox prelates around the world spoke out on his behalf.  He has become a sort of battle flag for those prelates and laity who do NOT believe the mission of the Church is to renegotiate Scripture, the Magisterium and the nature of sin with God. Detaching Strickland from his Diocese is much less likely to silence him than it is to free him to speak more powerfully throughout the world. Pope Francis wanted Strickland emasculated. He may just get Strickland unchained.A quarter of a century ago I told my Priests, who take pride in both their fidelity to the Magisterium and their loyalty to the Holy Father, that John Paul was easy to be loyal to. They should prepare themselves for a time when they had a more difficult superior – and must, at that time, balance their legitimate duty of fidelity to the Magisterium and their legitimate duty of obedience to authority over them. It would require careful thought about the extent of – and limitations on – authority. You cannot just choose one or the other, you must struggle to live both well.I have been skeptical of some of the cancelled Priests. Though some are solid, some just want to be their own Bishop, some have notably eccentric takes on doctrine, and some seem to have just fallen in love with their own celebrity. I’m not going to hitch my wagon to that kind of star. Bp. Strickland, however, has lived fidelity to the Gospels while taking care to be obedient to the legitimate authority of the Pope – while speaking candidly in criticism of those areas where the Pope has tried to exert authority he does not have either temporally nor spiritually.I have seen some of the Vatican’s clumsy efforts to justify the removal. I watched a full video of a clown (who I will not name other than to call him a clown; he was so absurd and pathetic, desperately trying to be somebody who counts) who claims to be a theologian use the most absurd arguments against Strickland. First, he argued that Strickland did not respect the “papal magisterium.” Well, neither do I – because there is no such thing, any more than there is a “Biden Constitution” or a “Trump Constitution.” The Church has one Magisterium – and the Pope is its primary guardian, not its master. This concept started being floated about five years ago as an effort to reduce the Magisterium to whatever political program a given Pope advocated for. The clown then blasted Strickland for accusing the Pope of material heresy in several cases, asking if Strickland did not know that the Pope is infallible. This only showed the clown has no understanding of infallibility and how rare its exercise is – or intentionally prostituted himself in hopes of getting a pat on the head from the Vatican. There are two forms of heresy, material and formal. Material heresy is a proposition that is objectively heretical, but unknown and unintended by the person who makes it. A very common material heresy is to think that because Christ is a man, He is a human person. He is a divine person with both a human and a divine nature. Rather than an attempt to undermine the faith, a material heresy is usually just an error, even if it can be a very damaging one. Formal heresy occurs when the author knows what he says is heresy and both intends and holds to it, anyway. That is a very difficult case to prove without a direct confession. It is widely acknowledged that both Popes Honorius and Liberius promoted material heresies, either through their actions or through their silence when they were obliged to speak in defense of the faith. The clown was just giving a lecture advocating for ultramontanism. He did trot out a couple of anonymous Priests from the Tyler Diocese who claimed that Strickland was a bad administrator and very “divisive.” Alas, those Priests used several left-wing buzz phrases in their critiques, identifying them as liberal activists. Yes, if you are a left-wing activist wearing a clerical collar; if you think it is a horrible offense that no Gay Pride flags are allowed on Church property, I can see why you would think Strickland is a bad Bishop. I visit Tyler regularly…and there is no Diocese in the country where the Bishop is as fully engaged with his flock as in Tyler. Strickland is so beloved there that part of me pities whoever is given the unenviable task of following him. In Tyler this week, they are conducting prayer vigils and consoling each other over their loss. The mood much more resembles the loss of a beloved family member than it does a change in ecclesial administration. The video was so chock full of error, malice, and palpably eager ambition I could only conclude the clown was trying to curry favor with the current Vatican establishment – after failing for several years to curry favor with traditionalists. God save us from mediocrities who are willing to parrot any line if only someone, anyone, would pay them notice!I don’t doubt that somewhere along the line Bp. Strickland has said something intemperate. All but the most slippery among us have, at times. That said, Strickland is one of the most temperate men I have ever met.The Vatican has yet to release a canonical reason for the dismissal. I am sure it will concoct one in time. But everyone already knows the actual reason: Bp. Strickland actually believes in God and that Scripture and the Magisterium are not negotiable. It is the second time in two years that Pope Francis has summarily dismissed, without stated canonical cause, a Bishop who was inconvenient to his politically-charged papacy. I have read some canon lawyers who say the Pope has this authority without condition; I have read more who say the Pope cannot do it except in the case where a serious canonical offense is involved. Canon lawyers, like their temporal counterparts, can be found on both sides of any dispute. What is beyond dispute is that, whatever he says about synodality or collegiality, this Pope is viciously ruthless in suppressing and defaming any who disagree with him. He is the most rigidly intolerant man to hold the papal seat in my lifetime. In theory, every Bishop is supposed to be the independent head of his Diocese and the Pope the first among equals. In practice, this move reveals that every Diocese is just a branch office of Vatican, Inc.Even so, this move, following on so many other idiosyncratic moves by the Pope, may be the spark that begins real renewal in the Church. Bishops, like other men, are often ambitious for promotion. There is nothing wrong with that. Ambition fuels a lot of genuine accomplishment. But every orthodox Bishop in the world now knows he has risen as high as he ever will so long as Francis is Pope. If they want to rise, they must get enthusiastic about same-sex relationships, approving of transgenderism, and tolerant of abortion. If they want bonus points, they can say nasty things about St. John Paul. Ideally, your fidelity to your calling should act in service to your ambition. Now, fidelity to Scripture and the Magisterium are impediments to ambition – at least in the short term. To adapt and amend Thomas Paine’s quote from another great crisis, “These are the times that try Bishop’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their Divine Lord; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” Once again, as I have been saying, it is decision time. If an orthodox Bishop is quiet and keeps his head down, the Vatican might not go after him. But that is the very definition of “shrinking” from service. If a Bishop speaks with bold clarity in defense of the faith, the Pope and the minions in the Vatican are likely to make his life hard. If he betrays, he might win advancement. But who trusts a betrayer from either side? Even more, with all the sketchy characters Pope Francis has surrounded himself with in the Vatican, the odds are pretty good that a gigantic scandal is going to surface sometime, perhaps one big enough to tank the Vatican’s entire progressive project, one in which orthodoxy will be the only chance to survive public revulsion and backlash. The most prudent course for any Bishop at this time is to imitate the first Apostles who gave their lives to Christ’s teaching out of love and conviction, both for Christ and their fellows. Now, more than ever, it is time to do the right thing because it is the right thing to do – and because it is the most prudent thing to do. Each Bishop will have to calibrate for himself how vocal he will be and what the priorities for his Diocese must be. Then, casting your bread of fidelity upon the water, take St. Padre Pio’s advice to “pray, hope, and don’t worry.”Bp. Strickland is not the only prominent prelate who has accused the Pope of material heresy. Some very prominent and respected theologians and scholars have done so. Cardinal Gerhard Muller, the former prefect of the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith (back when it protected and clarified, rather than bowdlerized and blurred, doctrinal integrity), has said that Pope Francis has made several statements that could be reasonably understood as material heresies. I was chuckling with a prominent theologian at the subtext of Cdl. Muller’s statement: the only way someone could be guilty of regular, serial material heresies without being guilty of formal heresy would be if they were not very bright.When God wants to clarify things He often sends controversy. In the first thousand years of the Church the great controversies were over the nature of Christ. Now, we are engaged in a great controversy over the extent and limitations of any Pope’s authority and over the relationship between the Bishops of the world and the Pope – what their legitimate obligations are and the extent of their autonomy. It is messy (to use one of Francis’ favorite words), but I have no doubt that it will bear the fruit of clarity. When all is resolved, the “do your own thing” Catholics and the “do whatever the current Pope says on all things” Catholics will clearly know their error. They will know that they have a legitimate duty of obedience to the legitimate authority of Bishop and Pope, but that submission to an illegitimate exercise of that authority will not excuse them from accountability to the Lord for their fidelity to His commands. Our God is a demanding God. He demands that we try valiantly with our whole heart, mind and soul to serve Him with fidelity. But He is also a merciful Father. He knows our hearts. When we try our very best, He fortifies us and quickly forgives our many honest errors. But He knows when we slyly try to pretend a knowing infidelity is an honest error – and that kindles His wrath. Be open-hearted, do your best, and don’t worry.Many in the Vatican establishment hope that this will be the end of Bp. Strickland’s influence in the Church. I think it is the beginning.

e Gazan “War†

and Their Strategies:

Part Three: Turkey

By: Victor Davis Hanson

November 10, 2023

Then we come to the increasingly unambiguous role of Turkey.

Ostensibly, Turkey is a critical U.S. and NATO ally. It possesses NATO’s largest military aside from America’s, and its geographical location is critical for NATO security concerns—controlling the historical Bosporus with its opening to the Black Sea and situated in the heart of the Middle East.

Turkey hosts the huge U.S. Air Force base at Incirlik which is shared by several NATO and Middle Eastern allies. The U.S. has stored at least 50 nuclear bombs at Incirlik, ostensibly solely under American stewardship.

Currently, any possible nuclear target—Iran, Russia, or China—are now Turkish friends if not allies. The base has been used effectively in a variety of strategic contexts during our long history in the Middle East.

Yet, Turkey is no longer the secular state of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

Under Recep Tayyip Erdogan it has reduced elections to de facto ratifications of his dictatorship. He continues to conduct overflights over the Greek islands of the Aegean. He stirs up hostilities over occupied Cyprus and has serially threatened Greek Cyprus, Greece itself, and Israel with surprise air attacks.

During the 2016 Turkish coup, it was not always clear whether the Americans had complete access to their nuclear arsenal at Incirlik. This past week demonstrations flared up at the base, as protesters threatened to eject the U.S. and its allies from Turkey. Promises, promises, promises…

Recently, Erdogan championed Hamas and threatened to send Turkish troops into Gaza, a ploy that would tear the NATO alliance apart. Turkey tried to stop Sweden from entering NATO and it has turned on its traditional ally Germany, which pulled its troops out of Incirlik.

Erdogan split with the U.S. over the Turkish bombing of the Kurds in Syria. The ecumenical UNESCO World Heritage List site of Hagia Sophia—built by the Byzantine emperor Justinian and the greatest cathedral in Christendom for 1,000 years—has been transformed into a mosque under Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman rule.

Indeed, Erdogan has announced Islamist Turkey is returning to its ancient role as the most powerful protector of the Islamic Middle East. Westerners remember a different Ottoman and post-Ottoman Turkey—as the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide and its systematic mass murdering of Greeks throughout once Hellenic Ionia.

Ironies abound. In truth, the great imperial and colonial oppressor over the Arab Middle East was always the Ottoman Empire, which ruled the Arab world with an iron hand for over 500 years—until dethroned by the Allies in World War I.

Now in the Gaza war, Erdogan has championed Hamas, alone of his NATO partners. The Obama administration predictably sought to appease Turkey and dub it the Obama special conduit to the Islamic Middle East—a mollification that of course earned Obama utter Turkish contempt.

In sum, by any classical definition, Turkey is at best a hostile neutral and at worse a belligerent. But while NATO has rules about admitting nations to the alliance, it is vague about how to expel them. Moreover, the U.S. military feels that the Erdogan â€œaberration†will pass and Turkey will eventually return to its secular and pro-Western stance of the late 20th Century, although there is no evidence that Erdogan—or those in his party who would succeed him—lacks popular support.

So what is Turkey’s agenda? It is to remind NATO that it is a maverick and must be courted and appeased, by ostensibly gravitating toward the new China/Russia/Iran axis, while of course enjoying all the advantages that NATO membership offers.

Erdogan will threaten to attack Israel and intervene on behalf of Hamas, but probably will not, especially if Hamas is on the verge of defeat. During the last year-and-a-half of the wounded Biden administration, Turkey assumes that it has a brief window to redefine its relationship with the U.S. and NATO since an impending Republican administration would likely be far less sympathetic to Turkish triangulation, but far more receptive to reestablishing our historical close ties with our pro-American Mediterranean triad of Cyprus, Greece, and Israel.

In sum, Turkey will bluster and threaten Israel, but likely conclude that NATO membership offers more pluses than minuses, especially if it can continue to be courted even as it snubs its partners.

and Their Strategies:

By; Victor Davis Hanson

Part One: the Terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah

November 7, 2023

Hamas

Hamas was quite clever in lying to the IDF, Mossad, and the Israeli government that it was finally resigned to fostering its internal development. Its guest workers inside Israel—sometimes 20,000 a day—supposedly were emissaries of goodwill and would spike prosperity in Gaza. Hamas talked of its rivalries with the Palestinian Authority and for a bit quelled its eliminationist rhetoric—as if it was useful to Israel to play off Hamas against Abbas and the West Bank. Again, all a clever ruse as it crafted a plan to kill more Jews in any one day since the Holocaust.

So meanwhile for a year, Hamas planned and trained, likely with the Iranians, to stage a mass-murder raid into Israel—at peace, during the holidays, early in the dark of morning, and ironically to be staged 50 years almost to the date after the similar surprise attack on Israel that had started the Yom Kippur War. Hamas in other words would then brag it had done more damage to Israel in a single day than any other terrorist organization in history.

So the overall killing strategy of Hamas was clear enough. Send 2,000 gunmen through the wall, via the air, and at sea to murder unarmed Jewish civilians, and butcher and mutilate them to such a savage degree that the murderers would either so shock the Israelis by their inhumanity that the Israelis would be stunned into concessions, or the inhuman butchery would at least suggest to the world that only premodern people so oppressed could be capable of such animal-like cruelty. That is, the world would eventually blame Israel for reducing Palestinians to such a state of bestial despair.

Then the Hamas killers and their tag-along opportunistic civilian counterparts would retreat with Israeli captives, the more elderly, young, and vulnerable the better. So the second part of the strategy was to leave the mutilated behind, get safely back to subterranean Gaza to hide the captives in their network of tunnels, and then either use them as shields to deflect retaliations or to swap some children and women for Hamas killers jailed in Israel or threaten to kill them all unless the IDF relented and stood down—or all that and more.

In the unhinged Hamas mind, a stunned Israel would become so demoralized that it could xerox the murderous sprees a “million times” over until Israel was judenrein, “from the river to the sea.”

As a fallback position, if the IDF did go medieval on Hamas, then a Hamas in hiding planned to double down on its use of Israeli captives and its Palestinian human shields in hopes of greater collateral damage: show the corpses on live TV and Western campuses worldwide erupt in protest to pressure Joe Biden to call off the IDF (cf. his tepid record on the world stage since January 2021).

Biden perhaps worried about the small, but decisive, Arab vote in a purple state like Michigan, and himself inherently weak, would then pressure Israel to “pause” and “get over” their dead and not “turn the world against” them.

Barring even that, if Hamas still could not stop the Israeli response, if world opinion did not bolster the Hamas cause, then there was always Iran and Hezbollah that could up their surrogates’ attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria to demoralize a post-Kabul American military command.

Or at least that seems the current strategy, without much Hamas consideration that it may have sorely miscalculated. Their satanic brutality is galvanizing Israel and its supporters abroad to unchecked defiance and a steely determination to wipe out Hamas.

Hezbollah

Hezbollah runs Lebanon and has far more men and materiel at its disposal than does Hamas. It may have more short-range, guided rockets on hand than any force in the world. And more importantly, as a Shiite terrorist organization, Hezbollah is far closer to the reptilian brain of it all, Iran.

So as far as Hezbollah’s role: It watches and waits, blusters then denies, shoots rockets then stops, threatens then backs off, always trying to thread the needle to save its Islamic point-of-the-spear street credentials while not getting into an existential war with either Israel (cf. Beirut ca. 2006) or the U.S. Sixth and Fifth Fleets.

Yet if Israel soon ends Hamas beneath Gaza City, Hezbollah will likely keep out of the war on the rationale that an Israeli (or U.S.) response would treat Beirut to something even greater than its last conflagration of 2006.

But if Israel is forced to pause or hesitates, Hamas regroups, the media runs 24/7 with the Palestinian collateral damage videos, October 7 becomes a distant memory, the campuses and Western streets heat up, then Hezbollah may up their rockets into Israel, on the theory Israel is now shackled, the West is neutered, and there may not be a strong enough response to stop its showers of rockets on Tel Aviv.

Hezbollah could also launch 50,000 nocturnal rockets at the American carrier group off its coast; it will not, of course, unless it concludes that the U.S. is stuck permanently into the inert Kabul/Chinese balloon mode and would not retaliate to a hit on its assets.

In sum, Hezbollah sees an opportunity: its Sunni rivals in Hamas will do the dying, it will claim it relieved pressure off Hamas by lobbing daily rockets into Israel, but not enough to prompt a war that might level Beirut.

Part Two: Iran and the Arab World

November 8, 2023

Iran

Iran believes in defense-in-depth. Such a strategy puts its well-armed pawns Hezbollah and Hamas on the front lines as a buffer between Tehran and the infidels: the Arabs take the risk and casualties, and the Iranians thereby hope they inflict some damage on Israel or the U.S. while avoiding a deadly Western response on the Iranian homeland.

Iran relies on deniability of culpability—supply surrogates, egg them on to war on the West and Israel, and then in passive-aggressive fashion claim credit for empowering the Arab terrorists, but not to the degree they confess Iran is the catalyst for the entire Middle East mess.

Tehran arms the enemies of the moderate Arab regimes, Israel, and the U.S. to the teeth, by reassuring a clueless Biden administration, or any such prior administration, that it wants “peace” through an Iran deal—to rake in billions of dollars in sanction relief, ransom money, and increased trade with China and Russia.

The general idea is to hold off the U.S. and Israel long enough until Iran can ensure an arsenal of 10-15 nuclear weapons to ensure deterrence for itself and its surrogates—or if in the mood of Armageddon to hit a one-bomb Israel. The Iranian role, again, is to cause endless turmoil throughout the Middle East and insidiously erode Israel or destroy it.

As far as the U.S. goes, Iran believes its own expatriate and American idiot communities—an ex-ambassador from Iran as an American professor, pro-Iranian operatives burrowed into the Pentagon, slick apologists like Robert Malley fashioning U.S. appeasement of Iran, and useful idiots like John Kerry, Ben Rhodes, and Barack Obama—will ensure America never fully responds to Iran-backed terrorists’ enervating attacks on U.S. troops.

Over the long term, Iran thinks its strategies will work. Israel has never been more surrounded by superbly armed terrorist forces. The American administration has never been more dispirited and ready to pack it in, as it is terrified of a trifecta war in Ukraine, over Taiwan, and with Iran. Moderate Arab regimes have never been more fearful of insidious Shiite uprisings among their own volatile populations, the pressure of Iran’s satellites, and a fickle America.

The Arab Middle East

Egypt, Jordan, some of the North African states, and most of the Gulf monarchies have lots of fears: over Iran, their own volatile radical Islamists and Shiite minorities, any bullying role of big powers coming into the region and getting them dragged into some sort of Operation Iraqi Freedom misadventure—and one another.

Their real interests: see Hezbollah defanged and broken up, Hamas destroyed, and Iranian theocracy either neutered, overthrown, or denuclearized, and the U.S.—not China and Russia—still the eternal robust protector of the Persian Gulf, the sea lanes, and international trade to and from the region.

Of course, the Arab “moderate” regimes always make it clear to both Israel and the U.S. that: 

1) they will damn Israel and slur the U.S. publicly anytime there is a war in the Middle East and especially when the Arabs are losing or taking casualties—and in most cases such public invective is understood by Westerners to be ignored; 

2) they will be loyal and helpful allies of the status quo as long as they are not asked to be point nations or ahead of events; and 

3) they cannot afford to take seriously what Israel or the United States says they are going to do to radical Sunni Islamists or Iran and its Shiite surrogates because they do not wish to be left out on the pro-Western limb only to have it sawed off by a tepid administration or an equivocating mood in Israel.

Translated that means that most of the Arab Middle East wishes Hamas and Hezbollah and for that matter theocratic Iran to be destroyed. But they are terrified that if they overtly side with such agendas, then an unexpected change in government in the U.S., European timidity, or sudden American self-righteous idealism can result in the withdrawal of Westernized forces out of the theater, leaving themselves facing an angry, get-even nuclear Iran and Iran-backed terrorist rockets.