RUTHFULLY YOURS

We have heard many disturbing statements in recent years made by Catholic clerics, from bishops and cardinals right up to Pope Francis, who seem to believe that Islam is a religion like any other, that criticism of Islam is unjustified and based on the motiveless malignity of “Islamophobia,” and that the main duty of Catholics with respect to Muslims is not to challenge or confront them both as to their ideology and as to the many acts of Muslim terrorism, but to engage, rather, in endless Catholic-Muslim Dialogue. Ever since the Second Vatican Council, the Church has had an ill-considered mandate to engage in “dialogue” with Muslims, as the Committee for Ecumenical and Religious Affairs of the United States Conference of Bishops has stated:

“The declaration has been consistently upheld by recent popes. Pope John Paul II affirmed the need for dialogue with Muslims on numerous occasions throughout his long pontificate (1978–2005). For example, in Crossing the Threshold of Hope he remarked in the chapter entitled “Muhammad?” that “believers in Allah are particularly close to us” and that “the religiosity of Muslims deserves our respect” ([New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005], 91, 93). The pope also reiterated the central mandate of Nostra Aetate by reminding the faithful that they are called to maintain “a dialogue with followers of the ‘Prophet’” and that “the Church remains always open to dialogue and cooperation” (ibid., 93, 94).

Unfortunately, while American Bishops claim that Muslims have been willing to engage in such dialogue, they report that the Christian side has not been as forthcoming:

“Sadly, in recent years, there has been a deliberate rejection of this call to engage in dialogue with our Muslim brothers and sisters by some in the Catholic Church and in other ecclesial families. We understand the confusion and deep emotions…

Not “confusion” and unspecified “deep emotions,” but rage.

…stirred by real and apparent acts of aggression and discrimination…

Not unspecified “acts of aggression and discrimination,” but mass murder, repeated again and again.

…by certain Muslims against non-Muslims, often against Christians abroad. We, and increasingly our Muslim partners in dialogue, are concerned about these very real phenomena. Along with many of our fellow Catholics and the many Muslims who themselves are targeted by radicals…

Muslims have not been “targeted” in Europe, even if some have unavoidably been among those killed when large groups have been the target. It is only Shia Muslims in the Middle East and Pakistan who have been deliberately targeted, by Sunnis, and solely because they are regarded by those Sunnis as Infidels, even the worst kind of Infidels.

“Last year, Weigel wrote a First Things article emphasizing John Paul II’s refusal to believe that some problems in the world cannot be fixed:

Those frightened by the seeming power of the wicked in the world today can take heart from what John Paul II said to young people in Cracow in June 1979: “Be afraid only of thoughtlessness and pusillanimity.” Be not afraid: his signature phrase, lived to the end, made him John Paul the Great.”

As over 3 million young Catholics gathered in Krakow during a time of escalating violence across the world — and as the Sussers reflected on the horrific violence that affected their family decades ago — the words of the first and only Polish pope remained as timeless and important as ever.

The sun set slowly, shining its last light against the barbed-wire fences of Auschwitz, and casting a shadow on the ground where unspeakable atrocities were committed, three-quarters of a century ago. Ron Susser and his 16-year-old daughter Zoe set foot onto the former concentration camp, crossing beneath a gate that bore the infamous inscription: arbeit macht frei, or “Work sets you free.”

After traveling all day, a group of 220 people from the Arlington diocese in Virginia had arrived at the camp as part of their World Youth Day pilgrimage to Krakow, Poland. The trip to Auschwitz was an emotional one for much of the group. But it held particular significance for Ron and Zoe.

During the Nazi regime, now-notable figures such as Anne Frank and her father, Viktor Frankl, Primo Levi, Maximilian Kolbe, Edith Stein, and Elie Wiesel were imprisoned in Auschwitz. The concentration camp also detained many of Ron’s ancestors, only three of whom survived: his great aunt and his parents.

“My parents were liberated on May 1, 1945,” Susser said. “My father referred to that day as his second birthday.”

Auschwitz operated for less than five years, and yet the number of people murdered at the camp is estimated to be somewhere around 1.1 million. Only about 200,000 people who passed through the Auschwitz camps survived.

The group from the Arlington diocese arranged to visit Auschwitz on the first day of their trip to Poland for World Youth Day, a global encounter that took place all of last week and gathered 3 million Catholics in Krakow to see Pope Francis.

The Islamic State terror group has come out publicly to reject Pope Francis’ claims that the war being waged by Islamic terrorists is not religious in nature, assuring the pontiff that their sole motivation is religious and sanctioned by Allah in the Qur’an.

The Islamic State terror group has come out publicly to reject Pope Francis’ claims that the war being waged by Islamic terrorists is not religious in nature, assuring the pontiff that their sole motivation is religious and sanctioned by Allah in the Qur’an.

In the most recent issue of Dabiq, the propaganda magazine of the Islamic State, ISIS criticizes Pope Francis for his naïveté in clinging to the conviction that Muslims want peace and that acts of Islamic terror are economically motivated.

“This is a divinely-warranted war between the Muslim nation and the nations of disbelief,” the authors state in an article titled “By the Sword.”

The Islamic State directly attacks Francis for claiming that “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Quran are opposed to every form of violence,” saying that by doing this, “Francis continues to hide behind a deceptive veil of ‘good will,’ covering his actual intentions of pacifying the Muslim nation.”

Pope Francis “has struggled against reality” in his efforts to portray Islam as a religion of peace, the article insists, before going on to urge all Muslims to take up the sword of jihad, the “greatest obligation” of a true Muslim.

Despite the obviously religious nature of their attacks, the article states, “many people in Crusader countries express shock and even disgust that Islamic State leadership ‘uses religion to justify violence.’”

“Indeed, waging jihad – spreading the rule of Allah by the sword – is an obligation found in the Quran, the word of our Lord,” it reads.

“The blood of the disbelievers is obligatory to spill by default. The command is clear. Kill the disbelievers, as Allah said, ‘Then kill the polytheists wherever you find them.’”

The Islamic State also reacted to Pope Francis’s description of recent acts of Islamic terror as “senseless violence,” insisting that there is nothing senseless about it.

“The gist of the matter is that there is indeed a rhyme to our terrorism, warfare, ruthlessness, and brutality,” they declare, adding that their hatred for the Christian West is absolute and implacable.

The Ostrich in Rome’s Pope’s denial that Islam is not engaged in a religious war with the West has of course been received with delight by weaklings, quislings, and fellow-ostriches everywhere.

His assertion that

“It’s not right to identify Islam with violence. It’s not right and it’s not true. I believe that in every religion there is always a little fundamentalist group….If I speak of Islamic violence, then I have to speak of Catholic violence”

has, as the BBC reports (the approval of his remarks by the leftist broadcaster being, nonetheless, almost tangible, in its counter-examples), outraged many members of said Ostrich’s Pope’s own flock, with the hashtag #PasMonPape trending in the land where the aged Father Jacques Hamel was mercilessly done to death last week.

Unimpressed by his interpretation of the present conflict, the boys from Isis have issued a blunt message for His Holiness, though given his proclivities, it’s unlikely to stop him turning a blind eye as well as the other cheek.

This foolish, dangerous man seems unwittingly bent on making the requiem for Father Jacques the requiem for us all.

And of course the Pope is not the only opinion leader in the West, clerical or lay, who refuses to see the enemy, much less see the enemy’s designs for what they are.

French authorities shut down 20 mosques and prayer halls they found to be preaching radical Islamic ideology since December, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Monday.

“Fight against the #radicalization: since December 2015, twenty Muslim places of worship have been closed,” the Interior Ministry tweeted.

Of the country’s 2,500 mosques and prayer halls, approximately 120 of them have been suspected by French authorities of preaching radical Salafism, a fundamentalist interpretation of Sunni Islam, according to France 24.

“There is no place … in France for those who call for and incite hatred in prayer halls or in mosques … About 20 mosques have been closed, and there will be others,” Cazeneuve said.

The announcement came days after French Prime Minister Manuel Valls called for a temporary ban on foreign funding of French mosques. A Senate committee report on Islam in France published in July found that though the country’s mosques are primarily financed through individual donations, a significant portion of their funding also comes from overseas—specifically from Morocco, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia. The same report called banning foreign financing of mosques “absurd and impossible,” calling instead for more transparency.

Because of France’s 1905 law establishing the separation of church and state, or laïcité, the French government cannot finance religious institutions directly. Some experts say this rule has made many mosques reliant on foreign funding.

Cazeneuve also announced Monday that French authorities would be working with the French Muslim Council to launch a foundation to help finance mosques within France.

The West that jihadists now terrorize has allowed itself to be weakened. A combination of political correctness, fear of giving offense, fear of combat, and a reluctance to upset illusory stability has led to an incredible series of opportunities for the jihadists.

We have dropped our guard and turned away. Not because we have no security forces. We do. But because we often are not looking at the right things: the texts and sermons that prefigure radicalisation.

“[T]he Noble Quran appoints the Muslims as guardians over humanity in its minority, and grants them the rights of suzerainty and dominion over the world in order to carry out this sublime commission. … We have come to the conclusion that it is our duty to establish sovereignty over the world and to guide all of humanity to the sound precepts of Islam and to its teachings…” — Hassan al Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.

On the morning of July 26, a priest serving mass, an elderly man of 85, Father Jacques Hamel, was butchered before his altar by one of two knife-wielding devotees of the Islamic State. His killer slit his throat and might very well have proceeded to behead him, as is the wont of many jihadi executioners. The followers of a faith that honours murderers as martyrs (shuhada’) created a martyr for quite another faith.

In both Greek and Arabic, the terms “martyr” and shahid mean exactly the same thing: “a witness”. Father Hamel was the latest in a long line of Christian martyrs who have been slain by men of violence, supposedly in order to attest to the sole truth of their faith. Many Muslim martyrs have died in much that way, but even more have given their lives while waging war (jihad) to conquer territories for Islam.[1]

The flag of the Islamic State reads “la ilaha illa’llah, Muhammadun rasulu’llah”. The words mean: “There is no God but God; Muhammad is the prophet of God”. Those two phrases are known as the shahada, the bearing of witness. You see it everywhere today, now in Syria, then again in France or the UK. But shahada also means martyrdom. And martyrdom while committing violence is what the killers of an innocent man of God achieved on that day when armed police found them and shot them dead outside the church they had desecrated.

On the following day, the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis, issued a statement on the event, and for a moment it seemed that he had finally got things right. He said the world was now at war. Decades after the war started, here was a religious leader and statesman who seemed to have awakened to the fact that Western countries have been unwillingly and ineffectively failing to wage a war against Islamic radicalism. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that Islamic radicalism has been waging a war with us.

But then he blew it. What he then said was:

“It’s war, we don’t have to be afraid to say this … a war of interests, for money, resources. I am not speaking of a war of religions. Religions don’t want war. The others want war.”

What? Is slaughtering a priest at his altar linked to “interests, money, resources”? Were the killers driven by a longing for social justice, for more money, for access to greater resources? Did they think the violent death of a harmless priest would bring them any of that? They had not gone to steal any of the valuable altar table objects, the censers, the candlesticks, the crucifix, the monstrance. The killers had been shouting “Allahu akbar”, literally “God is greater” (than everything, especially, to Muslims, the supposedly non-monotheistic Christian Trinity and the Church). As we know only too well, “Allahu akbar” is a religious phrase that Muslims use often. It is the beginning of the call to prayer, the adhan, repeated six times, five times a day, preceded and followed by the shahada. It has been ringing in Western ears every time Muslims in Europe and North America carry out attacks or as a prelude to a suicide attack. It is precisely because Muslims believe that their God (named in Arabic as Allah) is superior to all other gods, because to them Islam is the greatest of all religions and lastly, because Islam is destined to conquer the world either by conversion or through violence.

“I believe in Jesus Christ who died on the cross for the sins of mankind. What did your Prophet Mohammed ever do to save mankind?” — Asia Bibi, the words for which she is on death row, for “blasphemy.”

Mobs attacking blasphemy victims in Pakistan know that nothing will happen to them.

According to a recent report, “Blasphemy Laws in Pakistan” published by the Center for Research and Security Studies, 247 blasphemy cases were registered between 1987 and 2012; 52 of the people involved were killed extrajudicially.

The history of Pakistan is filled with hatred and intolerance toward the people who raise their voices against the blasphemy laws: Salman Taseer, the former governor of Punjab Province, and Shahbaz Bhatti, the federal Minister of Minority Affairs, were murdered for supporting Asia Bibi and protesting the blasphemy laws.

For the first time since her arrest in 2009, Asia Bibi saw a sign of hope on July 22, when the Supreme Court of Pakistan gave her permission to appeal the death sentence she was served twice: first by the High Court in 2010 and again in 2014. She is, however, still waiting for justice.

Asia Bibi, 50, and a mother of five, was accused of blasphemy in June 2009 by her coworkers in a dispute over bowl of water. They told her that, as she is a Christian, she could not drink water from the same bowl as they were. The argument that ensued led to an angry mob assaulting her, and her arrest on the charge of “blasphemy” — that she allegedly had uttered derogatory remarks about the Islamic Prophet Mohammad.

Bibi became the first woman to be sentenced to death for blasphemy in Pakistan. Since her arrest, her family has also faced threats which have forced them to move to an undisclosed location.

Bibi was charged with violating section 295-C of Pakistan’s Penal Code, which states:

“Whoever by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representation, or by any imputation, innuendo, or insinuation, directly or indirectly, defiles the sacred name of the Holy Prophet (peace be upon him) shall be punished with death, or imprisonment for life, and shall also be liable to a fine.”

The words that Asia Bibi said to her coworkers, in response to their remarks against her, were: “I believe in Jesus Christ who died on the cross for the sins of mankind. What did your Prophet Mohammed ever do to save mankind?”