RUTHFULLY YOURS

SEOUL—North Korea test-fired a ballistic missile Friday that experts said put the continental U.S. firmly in range of a strike, underscoring Pyongyang’s rapid advance in technology and intensifying a standoff with Washington.

The launch emanated from North Korea’s mountainous interior, flying for more than 45 minutes before landing in the waters between Japan and the Korean Peninsula, U.S., South Korean and Japanese officials said.

Hours after the North Korea missile launch, the U.S. and South Korea carried out a live fire exercise by launching missiles into the territorial waters off South Korea’s East Coast, according to the U.S. military.

Lt. Gen. Thomas Vandal, commander of the U.S. Eighth Army in South Korea, said that the U.S. military is “ready to fight tonight, will deter North Korean provocation and if necessary defend the Republic of Korea,” using the formal name for South Korea.

North Korea’s action comes just three weeks after it surprised the world with its first ever intercontinental ballistic missile test.

But Friday’s missile was a more advanced ICBM than the one fired earlier this month, flying 620 miles and reaching a maximum altitude of 2,300 miles—far more than the July 4 missile’s 1,740 miles, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said. North Korea, in a separate media report hours later, released numbers in line with those estimates.

The significantly higher altitude of Friday’s missile suggests that it could have flown much farther than the last one.

The new missile would be able to fly more than 6,400 miles if fired at a standard trajectory, David Wright, a physicist and co-director of the Global Security Program at the Union Concerned Scientists, wrote in an analysis on Friday. That would put Los Angeles, Denver and Chicago within range.

In a report published Saturday morning by the official state mouthpiece, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said the ICBM test showed Pyongyang could make a “surprise launch of ICBM in any region and place any time, and clearly proved that the whole U.S. mainland is in the firing range of the DPRK missiles.” He used the acronym for North Korea’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. CONTINUE AT SITE

Not only does no other religion in Turkey, other than Islam, have the power, influence or financing of the Religious Affairs Directorate (Diyanet) — whose budget even surpasses that of most ministries; other religions are either not officially recognized (as in the cases of Alevism and Yazidism), or are on the verge of complete governmental elimination — as in the cases of Judaism, Greek Orthodoxy, Assyrian (Syriac) and Armenian Christianity.

“…[S]ince the creation of the world there is only one religion and it is the religion of Islam…. therefore, when Islam was not in that area before Mohammed came to it, it should have been there….So any place like this had to be freed, not to be conquered…And therefore, there is no Islamic occupation. If somebody occupies anything, it will always be somebody else, not the Muslims. So, there is no Islamic occupation. There is only Islamic liberation.” — Moshe Sharon, Professor Emeritus of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

To be effective, however, policies safeguarding religious liberty must include conducting an honest and open discussion of the history and doctrine of Islam, as well as its contemporary iteration, not as a “religion of peace” — which, in Islam, is to occur only after the entire world has accepted Allah, as well as Islamic law, Sharia — but as one of war and terror.

The debate over whether Islam has been hijacked by fundamentalists — or whether the religion itself preaches the kind of hatred that leads to terrorism — has been raging since the 9/11/2001 attacks on the United States. Although this issue has not been resolved, one thing is clear: in the Muslim world, the demonization of Jews and Christians is commonplace.

Take Turkey, for example, where anti-Semitism has been exhibited publicly for decades by prominent members of government, the religious establishment and the media. In June this year, the head of the government’s Religious Affairs Directorate — the “Diyanet” — joined the chorus.

In a speech he delivered in Gaziantep — a transcript of which was posted on the Diyanet’s official Twitter account — Prof. Dr. Mehmet Görmez announced that Islam was brought to the world by Allah to correct the “distortions” of Judaism and Christianity. At the center of Judaism, he said, was “material, money and wealth.” Christianity, he asserted, took the opposite, albeit equally “wrong,” interpretation of the divine, as it “came up with an understanding that denigrated the world and deemed property and wealth almost forbidden [haram].”

One year ago, Father Jacques Hamel was killed by two men, both of whom pledged allegiance to ISIS, while celebrating morning Mass in Normandy, France. Hamel had served as a priest for almost six decades. Pope Francis referred to him as a “martyr,” pointing out that he “accepted his martyrdom next to the martyrdom of Christ, on the altar.”

Martyrdom may seem like it is confined to the ancient past — something that Christians dealt with while under Roman dominion — but the last few years have witnessed an increasing number of Christian martyrs. Coptic Christians in Egypt, for example, have suffered numerous attacks by the Islamic State. Father Hamel joined the ranks of these martyrs, and did so with courage, in his final moments, to call the enemy by its real name, saying to the attackers, “Begone, Satan!”

Moreover, as John L. Allen Jr., the editor of Crux, observed, Hamel was “a classic exemplar of one of the most profound lessons of the martyrs”:

Beyond all the heartache and frustrations we may experience in the Church sometimes, there’s still something so precious about the faith that, when push comes to shove, ordinary people, with zero aspiration to heroism, will nevertheless pay in blood before they let it go.

While debates concerning the future direction of the Church have resulted in passionate disagreement between liberals and conservatives, Father Hamel is one subject on which Catholics of all political persuasions agree. “The extraordinary response to Hamel’s martyrdom throughout France,” writes Christopher White for Crux, “has been one of unity and an abiding belief that his sacrifice would yield a greater good for both the Church and the country.”

Besides nurturing a spirit of unity within the Church, Hamel’s death created an opportunity for a closer relationship between French Catholics and Muslims. At a Mass celebrated in honor of the one-year anniversary of his death, French president Emmanuel Macron noted that “By murdering Father Hamel at the foot of his altar, the two terrorists undoubtedly wanted to sow the thirst for vengeance and retaliation among French Catholics.” Instead, Catholic leaders refused to use tragedy to sow discord and fear, and in the days following Father Hamel’s death, Muslims across France attended Mass in solidarity with Catholics.

Father Hamel died just as inklings of a Catholic revival in France were becoming apparent. A few months ago, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote in America magazine that he had begun to notice more people seemed to be attending Mass:

A few years ago, I started to realize something. Whenever I was less than five minutes early for Mass, I had to go to the overflow room, and I would typically have to step over people sitting on the floor to get there. The church was filled to the gills every Sunday, with young families and children most of the time. . . . Then I moved. And I saw the same thing. I live in a very different neighborhood now, one that is “upwardly mobile,” as real estate agencies coyly say. But on Sunday morning the church is packed.