Italy’s Most Prominent Muslim Convert to Catholicism to Establish Party to Defend “Europe’s Christian Values”

From LifeSiteNews
By Hilary White

A well-known convert to Catholicism from Islam has announced that he will be starting a new European political party that will uphold “the sanctity of life of every human being.” Magdi Allam, an Egyptian journalist living in Italy, said that he and others will run in European Parliament elections on June 7, 2009 for a new party called Protagonists for Christian Europe.

“The party,” he said, “will be committed to promoting and defending Europe’s Christian values.” It will “fill the ethical void” that he says exists in Italy and in Europe and will be based on the “Judeo-Christian roots of Europe.” These values “must be recovered and affirmed with clarity now more than ever” in response to the threats of “savage capitalism, relativism and the spread of Islamic extremism,” Allam said.

He warned against the growing incursions of Islamic law in Europe, which, he said, represent a threat to the traditional Christian family structure, “as is occurring already in England, where decisions by private Muslim courts regarding polygamy are indirectly beginning to be legitimized.”

He wrote recently of his conversion to Catholicism: “On my first Easter as a Christian I not only discovered Jesus, I discovered for the first time the face of the true and only God, who is the God of faith and reason.” He has received numerous death threats from Islamic extremists since his baptism.

Allam, who was baptised and received into the Catholic Church in a well-publicised Easter Vigil ceremony at St. Peter’s Basilica by Pope Benedict XVI this year, is a long-time supporter of Israel and was honoured last year by the American Jewish Committee. Author of the Italian best-seller, “Long Live Israel - From the Ideology of Death to the Civilization of Life: My Story,” he has continued to defend Israel despite the fact that the Islamic Palestinian authority Hamas condemned to death in 2003.

Allam was exposed to Christianity early in life, being raised in part by a member of the Catholic religious order, the Comboni Missionary Sisters, and later sent to a Catholic boarding school in Egypt - the Institute of Don Bosco - for junior high and high school. He is a deputy editor of Milan-based Corriere della Sera newspaper, regarded in Italy as a paper with a conservative editorial position.