Happy St Gregory III Day! He was born in Syria, then recently conquered by the Muslims, and became Pope in 731, the last non-European Pope until Pope Francis in 2013.
Interestingly, Gregory III is famous for resisting the Byzantine Emperor Leo III's campaign against the veneration of religious images—sometimes called "The First Iconoclasm," and a recurring feature of Byzantine life, arguably in response to the military success of Islam, which notoriously opposed all representational art.
This year, the U.S. has also seen an unprecedented outbreak of iconoclastic vandalism.
The difference, however, is that unlike the Byzantines, or the Protestants of the Reformation, who genuinely preferred simpler art, these iconoclasts clearly intend to replace the images with new, Politically Correct icons. Steve Sailer is not wrong to say, after the Falls Church VA School Board voted unanimously to rename Thomas Jefferson Elementary School and George Mason High School,
What names will replace them? I’m leaning toward Mohammed Atta Elementary School and Tokyo Rose High School, but I could see Kim Il-sung and Sirhan Sirhan.
It's the Great Replacement In action.
Oh, Hanukkah begins too on December 10. But it's now a multicultural must that no religious festival can be mentioned without also mentioning the nearest festival of some other religion, just as Christmas can no longer be mentioned without a reference to, well, Hanukkah.
Somehow, however, the MSM neglects to provide the nearest Saint's day in the Christian calendar to each year's Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Passover—and there are a lot of saints! So it has become a VDARE.com service (as so often) to fill the gap.
This year, Hannukah doesn't overlap with Christmas at all (it ends on the evening of December 18) so there's even less excuse than usual for insisting on equal time with with Christmas. For the record, here's more confirmation that it's actually a minor Jewish festival, inflated only because of its proximity to Christmas: Hanukkah 2020: When it is and what to know (no, it's not the 'Jewish Christmas'), by David Oliver, USA Today, December 10, 2020.
VDARE.com has many Jewish writers and donors (God bless them every one). And, unlike the unpleasant War On Christmas perpetrators, we wish all our readers, writers and donors a Happy. We mean it.
