I think poster ‘1389′ @ 28 is someone I may have corresponded with at one point or knows someone with whom I did talk. If he is indeed an Orthodox priest in the public square then God bless him.

I did meet the pro-Serbian activist Julia Gorin in LA once many moons ago and watched her argue with a man who happened to be Jewish but who was arguing loudly for the Albanian Kosovar and Bosniak cause against the evil Serbs. Some folks never learn who their real friends are and who still has a soft spot for the banderisti (Yuschenko), Croatian Ustashe, and Latvian SS veterans. In the end, the Jewish members of the pro-Israel lobby cannot stay in bed with anti-Russia lobby members who are willing to promote any nationalist, no matter how obnoxious, as long as they are Prometheans opposed to Moscow. Plus the whole visa free travel thing between Russia and Israel makes a mockery of the U.S. keeping Jackson Vanik on the books…

To answer a question posed at an earlier thread, no I don’t believe ‘Rurik’ and I have ever met, but he was getting warmer in terms of guessing my background. Posting under my real name at Belmont Club however is not likely to be good for my career, particularly in these dark times where Google is starting to adopt more and more of a god complex regarding its own infallibility and suggesting that everyone who has ever been smeared on Google should legally change their names rather than force the gods of Palo Alto to comply with libel laws.

I must say what brought me back to Belmont Club to comment on this is how the ignorance at best and contempt at worst St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church is getting in all of this controversy. But then again, who has cared all that much about protecting the rights of Orthodox Christians around the world since Tsar Nicholas II was overthrown and shot? The Orthodox Christians of the Middle East have largely been ethnically cleansed – first by the Turks (Symrna was a Greek center for 3,000 years – from Homeric times until the 1920s) and more recently by the PLO in Lebanon and Islamists in Iraq. They have also in the last twenty years had their livelihoods weakened or made impossible by Israeli barriers and restrictions despite being among Israel-Palestine’s most productive and law abiding citizens.

Certainly even modern Russia can only push its trading partner Turkey so far. Ankara still won’t let the Ecumenical Patriarch recruit new priests and his congregation has shrank to a few hundred faithful old people, though Vatican reporter Sandro Magister thinks there are thousands of hidden Orthodox across Anatolia, once the cradle of the Faith to whom St. Paul addressed the bulk of his epistles.

If I were in Manhattan on 9/11/2010 I certainly would be tempted to join the throngs protesting the Ground Zero mosque with a sign reading, “End the Occupation – Free Constantinople!” These folks can dish it out but they cannot take it back. In the end, I think the cultural elitny are going to have to beat a retreat before the narodni with their pitchforks. And if St. Nicholas can be rebuilt finally, then a small blessing will come out of this.

“The truth of thy deeds
hath revealed thee to thy flock as a canon of faith,
an icon of meekness,
and a teacher of abstinence;
for this cause thou hast achieved the heights by humility,
riches by poverty,
O Father and Hierarch Nicholas,
intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.”