We are all aware of the growing number of attacks on churches, mosques and synagogues around the world, including North America. Whatever attacks are not carried out by (supposedly) lone individuals are usually attributed to, or claimed by, specific known groups: Islamicist terrorists, White Supremacists, etc. But a further question must be asked: are a percentage of these attacks actually false flags, carried out by entities with an agenda of creating conflict between the religions in order to weaken them, destroy the potential solidarity between them, and limit their social influence? To begin to ask this question more thoroughly I’ll need to give a little background.
I am associated with The Covenants Initiative, an international Muslim/Interfaith peace movement. Our movement is based on the rediscovery, by Dr. John Andrew Morrow, of the covenants or treaties concluded by the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, with Christians, Jews, and other faith communities of his time, as detailed in his groundbreaking work The Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with the Christians of the World (Angelico/Sophia Perennis, 2013). The Prophet’s numerous covenants with various Christian communities and monasteries command all Muslims not to kill or attack or rob or oppress or damage the buildings of peaceful Christians, but rather to actively defend them “until the coming of the Hour.” We knew we were having a global influence when the Pakistan Supreme Court, in their acquittal of the Christian woman Aasia Bibi on charges of blasphemy in November of 2018, extensively cited Dr. Morrow’s book as one reason for their decision.1
When the Covenants Initiative made its debut at the Christian/Muslim Dialogue hosted by the Bilal Mosque in Lexington, Kentucky in 2013, one of the members of the congregation, whose accent told us that he was from the Indian subcontinent, told a highly enlightening story: “On certain nights in my home town,” he said, “unknown parties would throw pig carcasses into mosques and slaughtered cows unto Hindu temples; this made it virtually certain that there would be Muslim/Hindu riots the next day.” It was obvious to him that the slaughtered animals had been placed in those houses of worship not by Hindus or Muslims, but by unidentified third parties.
Joachim Hagopian, in “Divide and Conquer: The Globalist Pathway to New World Order Tyranny” writes as follows of the application of the famous “divide and conquer” tactic to the creation of interreligious conflict:
The retention of power by utilizing a deliberate strategy of causing those in subordinate positions to engage in conflicts with each other that weaken and keep them from any unified effort to remove the status quo force from power…. This divide and conquer stratagem was frequently repeated by European colonial powers typically pitting competitive tribal, ethnic and religious factions against each other to ensure they would not conspire to revolt against the ruling imperialists. In Asia the British took full advantage of Moslems versus Hindus in India as well as creating conflict between Indians and Pakistanis.2
In view of the prevalence of this tactic, I propose the creation of a comprehensive dossier of instances of “divide and conquer” in the religious field (if such is found to be feasible), one designed to educate the global Interfaith Movement about this tactic and alert interfaith activists as to what to watch out for.
In our time we are seeing a sharp increase in attacks on mosques, synagogues and churches in the west, as well as concerted genocidal attacks on Christians, Muslims and other faith communities in different parts of the world. We also see the real beginnings of a “united front ecumenism” based not on seeking some abstract and idealistic unity of religions that could supposedly be created by homogenizing the teachings of different faith traditions and discarding “divisive” doctrines, but on mutual aid against real attacks. The American Muslim woman Faatimah Knight raises money to repair churches burned in the North American south3; the Shoulder-to-Shoulder Campaign organizes U.S. churches to work against Islamophobia4; Muslims raise money to help the Pittsburgh synagogue whose congregation is massacred by anti-Semites;5 the same synagogue raises money for the mosques in New Zealand whose congregations are massacred by White Supremacists, etc., etc.6
It is the position of the Covenants of the Prophet Foundation that the covenants of Muhammad, which he tells us were inspired directly by Allah, command all Muslims to engage in precisely this kind of work. These efforts are hampered, however, by the general lack of any comprehensive view as to why such attacks are taking place. It is clear that broad-spectum anti-religious ideologies are growing in dominance. The history of such ideologies, which spring from Enlightenment Deism, Nietzsche, Darwinism, Marxism, Fascism, Freudianism, Behaviorism, Freemasonry, Theosophy, militant Atheism, Aleister Crowley-style Satanism, H.G. Wells-style Technocracy, Fabian Socialism, the Frankfort School etc. can fairly easily be traced, and it would be naïve of us to believe that elements such ideologies have not been incorporated into today’s bureaucratic, advertising and social-engineering paradigms. In addition, each religion possesses a large body of theory and historical evidence relating to the identity, motivation, ideology and agendas of its enemies. Little attention has been paid, however, to the possibility that some of these attacks are being orchestrated by their common enemies, or to the work of cataloguing the many ways in which anti-religious ideologies have come to form both public policy and various social engineering agendas. This is highly unfortunate, since one of the inherent weaknesses in such admirable mutual aid efforts between the religions as those mentioned above is the ease by which various agent provocateur actions by forces working to foment interreligious conflict can act to shift believers’ attention from away from mutual help and toward mutual suspicion. If, however, it were possible to prove that one or more concerted global efforts presently exist to weaken and destroy the religions by inciting conflict between them, if we had in our hands a convincing and well-researched dossier supporting this contention, then it would be much easier to prevent the work of mutual defense on the part of different religious communities from being compromised by agents provocateurs.
In compiling such a dossier we need to move beyond isolated anecdotal accounts, like the one above about the cows and the pigs—though these will always be useful—and begin compiling data relating to the possible existence of one or more social engineering campaigns operating simultaneously on many levels and in many nations. Therefore we should begin by asking: Does a body of research already exist exposing various efforts by non-religious forces to incite interreligious conflict, on a spectrum stretching from ideological subversion to physical attack? If so, where is it? Who has compiled it? Who can suggest avenues of research we could pursue to discover what has already been learned in this area? Rather than flatly asserting the existence of such an agenda, in the manner of the conspiracy theorists, simply because it seems to make sense, explains certain events and has well-known historical precedents, we need either to uncover solid evidence that such a plan or plans are actually in operation, or else find out that compiling such evidence is likely impossible. However, as I learned in the process of editing Lee Penn’s important book False Dawn: The United Religions Initiative, Globalism and the Quest for a One-World Religion (Sophia Perennis, 2005), which deals with the sponsorship of the Interfaith Movement and its indoctrination with globalist ideologies by governments, foundations and international think tanks, we don’t have to cast such plans as “conspiracies” by this or that clandestine cabal or secret society, when there are plenty of government agencies, foundations and think-tanks, certain of their power and confident in the obliviousness of the general public, who are often quite open about their plans. These plans are often clearly laid out in published documents which, though not widely disseminated, are not strictly secret. And the great example the complacency and unguardedness of the powers that be with regard to their social engineering agendas is probably Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope. Likewise it is possible to read between the lines in documents related to the Obama administration’s Countering Violent Terrorism program to find a fairly obvious agenda of “re-integrating” ex-ISIS fighters into U.S. society, with the Federal Government openly sponsoring these international criminals—“operation paperclip” reborn.
Below is my own analysis of what I take to be some of the major strategies and goals of the global attack on religion, based on a pattern that emerges when many apparently separate incidents and bits of data are brought together. If this analysis could be more thoroughly substantiated by hard data, I believe that an accurate picture of this widespread and ongoing attack would emerge:
1) There appears to be an agenda in place on the part certain of non-religious forces, operating on a global scale, to control, and perhaps ultimately eliminate, virtually all the world’s religions, at least those that are in any sense traditional. Thus the visible interferences with religious doctrine and practice by specific governments, as well attacks by unknown terroristic or criminal elements, may therefore—at least in some cases—be subsets of a more comprehensive plan of action on the part of either clandestine governmental agencies or non-governmental power blocs controlling trillions of dollars in largely untraceable capital, forces with a long-term agenda of altering human society, psychology and biology on a global scale. Put it like this: If you were identified with interests who were attempting, often successfully, to exercise this level of political, economic and social influence, would you sit passively by and accept a situation in which the worldview, ethics and aspirations of billions of people were determined by religious authorities and institutions which you did not control?
2) There is a great deal of evidence suggesting that every world religion, plus many so-called esoteric organizations, have been infiltrated by “change agents”—not necessarily all working for the same entities, but for the most part working in roughly the same direction. At least according to anecdotal evidence, such infiltration of religious groups is apparently a common practice of many intelligence agencies.
3) One of the central strategies of these forces is to mount what I have called a “pincers movement” against the religions, especially the traditional religions. This pincers movement consists of two prongs—which, in some cases, can be proved to originate from exactly the same governmental, corporate and trans-governmental entities. These two are:
Prong one: Funding, training and arming extremist or terrorist factions within the religions for use as proxy armies in various conflicts, as well as sponsoring international mercenaries to masquerade as members of such factions, in order to pervert religious dogma, disseminate propaganda, and carry on genocidal and agent provacateur actions, not only in service to this or that military or geopolitical goal, but also—whenever possible—for the larger purpose of fomenting conflict between traditional religious communities, largely in Asia and Africa, for the purpose of weakening and ultimately destroying them. This would explain the practice of ISIS, who seems to be partly composed of international mercenaries simply masquerading as Muslims, of massacring not only Christians, but also Yezidis, Shi’a Muslims, Sunni Muslims and Sufis.7
Prong two: Funding, organizing and infiltrating the Interfaith Movement, mostly in Europe and North America, according to a paradigm of “repressive tolerance” where the religions are encouraged to weaken and undermine both themselves and each other by de-emphasizing all “divisive” doctrines, no matter how central such doctrines may be to their sacred traditions, as well as incorporating spiritually and socially subversive elements, of suspect origin, which have been identified by their purveyors with “tolerance,” “progress” and “religious unity.” The U.S. State Department, for one, has both supported anti-Christian, anti-Shi’a and anti-Sufi terrorism abroad, while at the very same time supporting the Interfaith Movement within the United States.
Taken together, these two vectors of attack are especially effective because they are mutually-reinforcing. Those appalled by interreligious violence between extremist religious factions will be easily convinced that the only way to moderate such violence would be to sacrifice all other considerations in favor of the creation of an ill-defined “unity of religions” by any means necessary. At the same time, those scandalized by the destruction of the age-old doctrines and practices of their faiths, sometimes actually in the name of such spurious unity, will be drawn into adopting an increasingly extremist stance in order to defend their sacred traditions from on-going liquidation by various secular, modern and postmodern ideologies and the forces attempting to impose them, thus narrowing down and radically editing their own teachings in a misguided attempt to eliminate supposedly extraneous elements and return their faith to its “original purity”. Thus the deconstruction of a particular religion through various reactionary attempts to “purify” it, and its deconstruction at the hands of liberal ideologies that see all dogmas, no matter how venerable, as “divisive,” work hand in hand. It is my belief that this principle is well-known, and skillfully employed on a global level, by those forces who would like to see all religion, at least all traditional religion, controlled, denatured, and ultimately destroyed. We should press forward our research into exactly who these forces are, what their ideology is, and who is funding them, with all deliberate speed. Once such research is collected and analyzed, the next step should be to organize a conference for the purpose of disseminating this research to Muslims, Jews, Christians and other religious communities, and using it as a basis for informing, expanding and consolidating the plans now being formulated on several fronts and the actions already being put into practice for the mutual defense of the traditional religions of the earth.
Notes
[1] Jayson Casper, “Covenantal Theology: Can Muhammad’s Ancient Promise Inspire Muslim-Christian Peace Today?” Christianity Today, December 21, 2018 (https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2018/december/asia-bibi-muhammad-covenant-christians-pakistan-court.html)
[2] Joachim Hagopian, “Divide and Conquer: The Globalist Pathway to New World Order Tyranny.” Global Research, October, 23, 2015 (https://www.globalresearch.ca/divide-and-conquer-the-globalist-pathway-to-new-world-order-tyranny-from-a-geopolitics-perspective/5483935 )
[3] Faatimah Knight, “Faatimah Knight Demonstrates Real Interfaith Cooperation in Parliament Keynote” (video). October 16, 2015 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbxrPjTyCao)
[4] Carol Kuruvilla, “This Christian Is Fed Up With Islamophobic Rhetoric—And she’s leading a national organization to do something about it.” Huffington Post, March 10, 2016 (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/islamophobia-catherine-orsborn-shoulder-to-shoulder_n_56df1424e4b03a40567a44be?guccounter=2 )
[5] Matthew Haag, “Muslim Groups Raise Thousands for Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting Victims.” New York Times, October 29, 2018 (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/29/us/muslims-raise-money-pittsburgh-synagogue.html)
[6] Alex Horton, “Their fellow congregants died in Pittsburgh. Now Jews are supporting Muslims in New Zealand.” The Washington Post, March 18, 2018 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2019/03/18/their-congregants-died-pittsburgh-now-jews-are-supporting-muslims-new-zealand/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.bd5d2b76e23e )
[7] The following two items support this last contention. First item: In August of 2012, a Defense Intelligence Agency document was obtained by the investigative group Judicial Watch, through a lawsuit pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act, which makes it clear that the creation of a Salafist State in Syria along the lines of ISIS is exactly what the powers supporting the anti-Assad opposition wanted. Section 8, paragraph C of that document, probably the most relevant passage, reads: “If the situation unravels there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).” The entire text is available at: http://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Pg.-291-Pgs.-287-293-JW-v-DOD-and-State-14-812-DOD-Release-2015-04-10-final-version11.pdf
Second item: In June of 2015 an article by Seumas Milne appeared in the Guardian, “Now the truth emerges: how the US fuelled June the rise of ISIS In Syria and Iraq”; it can be found at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/03/us-isis-syria-iraq?CMP=share_btn_fb
Furthermore, from my own personal experience, I can report that during the Obama administration, the Christian/Muslim Dialogue in my home town Lexington, Kentucky was hosting speakers from Homeland Security, the Federal Attorney’s Office, the State Department and the FBI, at the very same time that this administration, via the CIA and other entities, was subsidizing and directing the Arab Spring and the growth of ISIS.
Charles Upton 