ROBERT SPENCER ON POPE FRANCIS: THE POPE OF ISLAM

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:

Pope Francis welcomes to the Vatican the head of a Muslim group tied to the financing of jihad terror. My latest in FrontPage:

As if he weren’t already committed enough to foolish
false charity and willful ignorance regarding the jihad threat, Pope
Francis on Wednesday met
in the Vatican with Dr. Muhammad bin Abdul Karim Al-Issa, the secretary
general of the Muslim World League (MWL), a group that has been linked
to the financing of jihad terror.

During the meeting, al-Issa thanked the Pope
for his “fair positions” on what he called the “false claims that link
extremism and violence to Islam.” In other words, he thanked the Pope
for dissembling about the motivating ideology of jihad terror, which his
group has been accused of financing, and for defaming other religions
in an effort to whitewash Islam.

I don’t object to the Pope’s meeting this man. After all, Jesus was a
friend of tax collectors and sinners. But the meeting appears to have
been a pointless feelgood session, probably featuring some sly dawah
from al-Issa. According to Breitbart News,
“the two men reportedly exchanged views on a number of ‘issues of
common interest’ including peace and global harmony, and discussed
cooperation on issues of peaceful coexistence and the spread of love.”

The spread of love. Yes, that’s what the Muslim World League is all about.

Nor is this the first time a Muslim leader has thanked the Pope for
being so very useful. Last July, Ahmed al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of
Cairo’s al-Azhar, thanked him for his “defense of Islam against the accusation of violence and terrorism.”

Has any other Pope of Rome in the history of Christianity ever been heralded as a “defender of Islam”?

Of course not. But the Catholic Church has come a long way since the
days of Pope Callixtus III, who vowed in 1455 to “exalt the true Faith,
and to extirpate the diabolical sect of the reprobate and faithless
Mahomet in the East.”

If time travel could be arranged and Pope Francis could run into
Callixtus III, Callixtus could “expect a punch,” for Francis is not just
a defender of Islam, but a defender of the Sharia death penalty for
blasphemy: after Islamic jihadists murdered the Charlie Hebdo
cartoonists who had drawn Muhammad, Francis obliquely justified the murders
by saying that “it is true that you must not react violently, but
although we are good friends if [an aide] says a curse word against my
mother, he can expect a punch, it’s normal. You can’t make a toy out of
the religions of others. These people provoke and then (something can
happen). In freedom of expression there are limits.”

So for the Pope, murdering people for violating Sharia blasphemy laws
is “normal,” and it isn’t terrorism for “Christian terrorism does not
exist, Jewish terrorism does not exist, and Muslim terrorism does not
exist. They do not exist,” he said in a speech
last February. “There are fundamentalist and violent individuals in all
peoples and religions—and with intolerant generalizations they become
stronger because they feed on hate and xenophobia.”

So there is no Islamic terrorism, but if you engage in “intolerant
generalizations,” you can “expect a punch.” The Pope, like the
Organization of Islamic Cooperation, apparently thinks that the problem
is not jihad terror, but non-Muslims talking about jihad terror; Muslims
would be peaceful if non-Muslims would simply censor themselves and
self-impose Sharia blasphemy restrictions regarding criticism of Islam.

For Pope Francis has no patience
with those who discuss such matters: “I don’t like to talk about
Islamic violence, because every day, when I read the newspaper, I see
violence.” He said, according to Crux,
that “when he reads the newspaper, he reads about an Italian who kills
his fiancé or his mother in law.” The pontiff added: “They are baptized
Catholics. They are violent Catholics.” He said that if he spoke about
“Islamic violence,” then he would have to speak about “Catholic
violence” as well.

That comparison made no sense, for Italian Catholics who killed their
fiancés or mothers in law were not acting in accord with the teachings
of their religion, while the Qur’an and Islamic teaching contain
numerous exhortations to violence.

But Pope Francis, defender of Islam, cannot concern himself with such
minutiae. Nor does he appear to be particularly concerned about the
fact that all his false statements about the motivating ideology behind
the massive Muslim persecution of Christians over the last few years
only enables and abets that persecution, for if that ideology is not
identified and confronted, it will continue to flourish.

The Pope of Rome, whom Catholics consider to be the earthly head of
the Church, should be a defender of Christianity, not a defender of
Islam, the religion that has been at war with Christianity and
Judeo-Christian civilization since its earliest days. That any Christian
leader would be called a “defender of Islam” by anyone only casts into
vivid relief the absurdity of our age and the weakness of the free
world. The creeping idolatry of the papacy that is rampant in today’s
Catholic Church, with all too many Catholics treating every word of the
Pontiff as if it were a divine oracle, only makes matters worse.

Can you imagine any Muslim leader ever being called a “defender of
Christianity”? Of course not: Muslim leaders are more aware than their
fond defender in the Vatican that Islam mandates warfare against
unbelievers, not defense of their theological views.

Pope Francis is not only disastrously wrongheaded about an obvious
fact that is reinforced by every day’s headlines; he is also deceiving
and misleading his people about a matter of utmost importance, and
keeping them ignorant and complacent about a growing and advancing
threat.

“Leave them; they are blind guides. And if a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.” (Matthew 15:14)