    An Island of Faith

    By Israel Shamir

    I write on a balcony overlooking the azure sea and a fresh red rose
    shares my company with a few cats. Mt Athos, this green wooded island
    stretching into Aegean Sea, an independent Christian nation under Greek
    protectorate, home to twenty massive abbeys, is a tranquil paradise; the
    place where hundreds of monks and thousands of lay pilgrims pray to
    Lord, work the land, grow heavy olives and red apples. Esoteric Orthodox
    Christianity is a well hidden secret of Greece - people are aware of
    Zorba the Greek and of sunny islands, but if they would know they would
    come here with their spiritual search - not to Sufis or Zen Buddhists -
    as, besides being wonderful, this faith is more accessible to a Westerner.
    The monks are learned men; some hail from Australia and Russia, France
    and Palestine. The abbot Vasileios studied in Lyon; he appreciates
    Pindar and Dostoyevsky.

    This is a good place to recognise an unknown victim of the Iraqi war:
    Christianity. Its reputation is besmirched by people who take the name
    of Christ - and of fundamentalism - in vain. From the NY Times to the
    FrontPage magazine, various Judaic publications provide an outlet for
    anti-Muslim rant, for calls to war in the name of Conflict of
    Civilisations. As the result, some Muslims began to answer by
    counter-attacking Christianity; and the European and American youth
    learn to think of their faith as of danger to mankind. However, this
    victim is innocent: true Orthodox Christendom, as fundamentalist as it
    can be, firmly rejects the creed of Mammon and the US war on Islam.

    A fundamentalist is one who follows the traditional teaching of the
    Church. The sacred texts have no meaning outside of tradition. The
    adversaries try to appeal to the texts by taking them out of tradition,
    but the tradition is alive and it can't be deconstructed into composite
    elements, de-contextualised and used at will; the elements can be
    understood in context only, being fully contextualised by Church
    tradition.

    There are no stricter fundamentalists than the monastic community of Mt
    Athos in Northern Greece, where I write these words. Athos is a great
    reservoir of spirit, and many people come to partake of its waters.
    (Charles, the Prince of Wales stays in an abbey, too.) The monks keep
    the fire of Christian faith as it was kindled by Christ and his
    apostles. They do not expect their salvation will come from Jews, as it
    already came in the person of Christ. They feel no need to seek Rupture
    for they were given a plan of their own: to try and bring the Second
    Coming by means of prayer and spiritual enlightenment. For them, the
    Second Coming is the mystic experience of seeing Christ in his glory,
    and it is attainable by divine grace. The church is a device that helps
    believers to see Him. She also guards the believer from being misled by
    cunning sophisms and subterfuge.

    The roots of the Greek Church go beyond the first mission of St Paul to
    Athens, for he recognised the religious zeal of the Hellenes. They did
    not need to be converted, but enlightened. Simone Weil wrote of Hellenic
    premonitions of Christ so apparent in the Iliad. In her view, the Greeks
    were Christians before Christ; and their influence on Christianity was
    paramount. Even today, Greeks are devoted to Christ, to His Mother and
    to their own Mother Church, the ancient Orthodox Church established by
    Saints John and Paul.

    Their church stays out of politics, but exercises moral influence.
    Guided by her church, Greece does not participate in the Iraqi war, her
    sons do not die on the streets of Baghdad; and this most religious, most
    Christian nation shares the view of good Muslims and ours, that the
    world including Greece is threatened - not by Islamic terrorism, but by
    the US fight against terrorism. Greece is a rare place where a Western
    dissident feels spiritually at home, as your average Greek thinks the
    thoughts known to rare Western intellectuals, readers of Chomsky and
    Baudrillard. Their immensely popular Archbishop Christodoulos correctly
    stated that terrorism is caused by the "injustice and inequality that
    pervades the world."

    In The Wall Street Journal, a Zionist Greek Takis Michas, in a piece
    called 'Is Greece a Western Nation?', complains that only 10% of Greeks
    think that Greece should give military support to the US in its attack
    "against states harbouring terrorism", and that the majority thinks that
    Osama bin Laden is a creation of CIA propaganda. This Zionist concludes
    with horror: "Such views seem to have more in common with public opinion in
    Cairo or Damascus than in Berlin or Rome." More proof that the
    conflict between Christendom and Islam is promoted by these guardians of
    the Christian faith, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times!

    As opposed to the West, the Greeks knew neither hatred nor fear of Jews.
    They saved many of their Jews during the German occupation, and treated
    them fairly. As they had their own national church, they did not
    transfer their spiritual values to Jews for safekeeping; and thus had no
    reason to bewail the loss of them. Where there is no guilt, there is no fear
    either. The renowned Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis was sarcastically
    asked by his Israeli interrogator whether, in his view, the Jews pull
    the strings from behind George Bush. He dashingly answered: "No. They
    are in the front." "America, the great superpower, is actually
    controlled today by the Jews?" - asked the inquisitor before pronouncing
    his verdict. "Yes", replied Mikis, the man who has more Jewish friends
    than an average American.

    Where is no fear of Jews, there is no automatic support for the US,
    either, and Theodorakis' view, that "the root of evil today is the policy
    of President Bush" (rather than the Muslim world), is shared by many
    Greeks. Greeks know Muslims, not from books - they lived in close
    quarters with them for a millennium. They are aware that their long and
    troubled relationship with their Turk neighbours reached its nadir under
    the anti-Islamic rule of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, while Islamic Sultan
    Selim the Grim spent a fortune restoring the monasteries of Athos.
    Muslim communities are well integrated in Greece, as the national church
    is quite tolerant to religious minorities and to its big non-religious
    population.

    Now, both the Greek Left and the Greek Right are united in their
    rejection of the Judeo-American drive to conquer the East, to enforce
    multiculturalism and to separate the Church and the State. They support
    the Palestinians and wish the Jews to come to their senses. They are a
    good example for US fundamentalists. Indeed, Greece is the proof that
    fundamentalist Christianity is not that of George Bush, and that the
    alternative to him is not monopolised by the First Lesbian Synagogue of
    New York.

    In his 'thought police' report in the Wall Street Journal, Takis Michas
    describes the sins of the Greeks: "in the 1980s, they harboured
    organizations perceived as terrorist in the West, and opposed the Reagan
    administration's deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe.
    Following the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the anti-American
    narrative came to be adopted by the political Right. American policies
    in Bosnia and Kosovo were widely seen as aiming to destroy the church,
    while the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic - celebrated all over the
    world - was seen as a CIA plot."

    Michas' report on Greeks appeared soon after the much-anticipated book
    by Diana Johnstone,
    Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions, which demolished
    the faked "evidence" of Serb atrocities in Kosovo. Today we know that
    the world had no reason to celebrate the overthrow of Milosevic - or
    indeed, of Saddam Hussein. But the Greeks understood this earlier, when
    it was the opinion of only a small enlightened minority in the West. How
    come -- why were the Greeks better than the Western intellectuals at
    recognising these media lies for what they were?

    The reason, in my view, is the traditional character of the Greek
    Orthodox Church and of its connection to the people and to their state.
    Separation of Church and state, this much vaunted accomplishment of the
    French revolution and even more of the US founding fathers, cut off the
    anchors of the Western society and it drifted straight towards the rocks.
    While in France the national Catholic Church still occupies an
    important and exclusive place, the US, the country without a state
    church, became a victim and a servant of Mammon. The small, independent
    churches of the US had no ability to form the mind of the nation; they
    competed for an outlet in the Jewish-owned media; they were forever
    threatened by tax authorities; they broke with tradition and became prey
    for the wolves.

    This absence of one church further undermines the underlying concept of
    unity-in-God, elaborated by T S Eliot in The Christian Idea of Society
    (1939). People live together united by an idea; this idea may (or indeed
    should) be their common worship and uniting communion. This need for one
    national church that unites its people by a single communion was
    manifested in Eliot's decision to remain a member of the national
    Anglican Church while adhering to the Catholic dogma. In Palestinian
    context, Eliot would prefer an 'Islamic state' to a secular one.

    The US was a first experiment of a large scale: what will happen to a
    society that is built on the pursuit of profit, instead of on the rock
    of faith. The Founding Fathers could read the story of the Chinese sage
    Mencius (372-289 BC). He went to see the King Hui who said: "Old man,
    since you dared the distance of 1000 li to come here, you may know of a
    way to profit my state." Mencius replied: "why should you ever mention
    the word 'profit'? What counts is benevolence and righteousness. If the
    King says 'How can I profit my country?' the high officials will say,
    'how can we profit our fiefs?', and the intellectuals and the commoners
    will say: 'How can we profit ourselves?' If the upper and lower classes
    strive to snatch profit one from another, the state will be endangered."

    Indeed, this is what happened in the US, and under its influence it
    increasingly happens elsewhere. While nationalist and socialist
    constructs were far from perfect, they offered some semblance of
    solidarity denied by profit-seekers. Greece has convinced me: none
    could improve on a national church, which is fully national and fully
    integrated in the ring of churches.