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Moscow Patriarchate: Russia must do more to combat radical Islam

December 31, 2013

Amid recent terrorist attacks in Volgograd, a city of one million in southern Russia, a leading Russian Orthodox Church official has called upon the nation to do more to combat radical Islam.

The Reuters news agency reported that militants are seeking to establish an Islamist state near Volgograd.

“If the circulation of Nazi ideological clichés has been strictly limited or banned in certain cases, why not apply the same scheme to the radical interpretation of Islam rejected by most Muslims themselves?” said Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, the head of the Synodal Department for Church and Society Relations, according to an Interfax news agency report.

“By saying that some casual people without a certain face, clan, tribe, convictions, or membership of this or that organization commit something, we, on the one hand, surely try to evade tough questions, not to sow panic, and not to split society,” he added. “This is all understandable. But if we ignore the problem, it can very easily bury us in five or seven years.”

 


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  • Posted by: jacquebquique5708 - Jan. 03, 2014 12:20 PM ET USA

    I support the statements by Archpriest Chaplin. The idea of "being buried in five or seven years" is well on the minds of radicals in the West. Now that Communism has been suppressed in the Soviet Union, there are forces in the West and not just Islam which want to bring her down and destroy attempts to bring back religion. Radical Islam is only a tool to be used to not only reform the Middle East but to destroy the government of Russia in the name of modern socialism.

  • Posted by: jg23753479 - Jan. 01, 2014 9:56 PM ET USA

    I urge all to read and reread the last paragraph above. It is clear that Archpriest Chaplin has understood what is happening in a way that recommends itself to many naive prelates in the West who, when describing Islam, attribute to it an irenicism in fact totally foreign to that religion.