Month: January 2018

 

 

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

“The advertising for the new film” The Sultan and the Saint “suggests it presents revisionist history in line with the modernist ecumenical agenda,” wrote in 2016 Dr. Benjamin J. Vail (OFS), an American Secular Franciscan. The finished film, shown to this author and others last April, thoroughly vindicated Vail, and is now offering hackneyed Crusade myths to the public via PBS, which broadcast the film December 26 and now offers it for online viewing.
Focusing on the 1219 encounter between St. Francis of Assisi and Sultan Al-Malik al-Kamil during the Fifth Crusade, the film reflects popular falsehoods about the Crusades accepted even by President Barack Obama. Ignoring reality, the PBS film website declares that the “film sheds light on the crusades origins of dehumanizing rhetoric towards non-Europeans and non-Christians” that “resulted in four generations of escalating conflict.” Falsely suggesting that current global hostilities involving Muslims result from insufficient dialogue, the website declares that the film “inspires solutions for the negative atmosphere we find ourselves in today.”
PBS’ online portrayal of Fifth Crusade historical figures is equally fallacious, such as in the statement that St. Francis wanted “to oppose the bloodshed of the Fifth Crusade.” Meanwhile, crusader commander John of Brienne has base motives in PBS’ description: “Like many who were motivated to join the Crusades, John might have thought he could improve his lot and gain land, nobility and fame in the Holy Land.” At the website of the film’s pro-Islam producer, Unity Productions Foundation (UPF), Cardiff University professor and film expert Helen Nicholson cynically states that “for these people, the Crusade is a gift from God.”
Nicholson appears in the film alongside journalist Paul Moses, author of The Saint and the Sultan:  The Crusades, Islam, and Francis of Assisi’s Mission of Peace, and his prior statements clearly show his influence upon the film. In various 2013 book presentations, he presented Francis as a pacifist, as someone who “quietly opposed the Crusade,” and as someone who “never spoke in a disparaging way about Islam or Muslims.” By contrast, Francis’ era was a “time when the church had become corrupt and violent” and knew how to “cherry pick through scripture” in order to find “supposed Biblical grounds” for the Crusades.
While Francis appears in Moses’ book presentations as out of character for a crusading Christendom, supposedly al-Kamil’s “actions show him to be a good Muslim.” The sultan “reflected Islamic traditions, including respect for Christian holiness, and also his constant pursuit of alternatives to war.” Referencing Saladin, the famed Muslim leader during the Third Crusade, Moses argued in a December 20 interview that the sultan’s benign behavior “came straight out of Islamic teachings, which the sultan, a nephew of Saladin, knew well.”
The film confirms the 2016 suspicions of Vail, who noted that the “film’s advertising implies that the crusades were evil both in intent and in practice,” a “common misconception used as a slur against the Church.” Leading Crusades historian Thomas F. Madden, for example, has contradicted Nicholson.  The “crusading knights were generally wealthy men with plenty of their own land in Europe,” and the “Crusades were notoriously bad for plunder.”
As Madden elaborates, the Crusades

were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious
knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in
which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian
world.  At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to
defend itself or be subsumed by Islam.

The Crusades were a Christian reaction to centuries of Islamic jihadist aggression that directly targeted the Catholic Church and Francis’ followers. Frank M. Rega, a Secular Franciscan and author of Francis of Assisi and the Conversion of the Muslims, has noted that an army of 11,000 Muslims sacked Rome itself in 846 and desecrated the tombs of saints Peter and Paul. Rega’s fellow Secular Franciscan Vail noted that Muslims later in 1240 attacked the Franciscan Poor Clare monastery in Assisi, which the order’s founder herself, St. Clare, successfully defended.
Contrary to Moses’ claims, Rega has observed that “unreserved support of the crusade had become normative in the Order” of St. Francis. Rega’s book noted Francis’ praise for “holy martyrs died fighting for the Faith of Christ.” Vail also observed that “one leader of later crusades was St. Louis IX, the king of France, a Franciscan tertiary who is now patron saint of the Secular Franciscan Order.”
Francis personally reflected such sentiments when he crossed the front between the Christians and Muslims fighting around Damietta, Egypt, on a personal evangelization mission to the sultan. Rega noted Francis’ words to the sultan: “It is just that Christians invade the land you inhabit, for you blaspheme the name of Christ and alienate everyone you can from His worship.” Francis’ frank words reflect that he “was fully prepared for martyrdom” and initially experienced rough treatment in Muslim hands, as the film portrays. As Rega’s book has noted, al-Kamil had vowed that “anyone who brought him the head of a Christian should be awarded with a Byzantine gold piece.”
Contrary to Moses’ assertions, Francis’ behavior exemplified the common practice of his order in which friars often sought martyrdom by direct rhetorical challenges to Islam. Reflecting the negative judgment of Catholic saints upon Islam throughout history, Francis in Rega’s book tells the sultan that “if you die while holding to your law [sharia], you will be lost; God will not accept your soul.” As Notre Dame University Professor Lawrence Cunningham has observed, Francis “saw himself and his friars as Knights of the Round Table fighting a spiritual crusade.”
Meanwhile the film juxtaposes Crusader atrocities like the 1099 sack of Jerusalem with al-Kamil’s often tolerant behavior in yet another cinematic distortion of the past. Following Moses’ lead, the film presents such tolerance as the logical result of Islamic doctrine, but the biography of Moses’ hero Saladin tells a different story. As Crusades historian Andrew Holt has noted, “[o]ften Saladin could be just as brutal as the less noble minded military rulers of his era, but those actions are typically not highlighted in modern accounts.”
Saladin’s atrocities include the 1169 slaughter of 50,000 disarmed Sudanese soldiers in Cairo, Egypt, in breach of a surrender agreement after he had suppressed their rebellion. Following his 1187 decisive defeat of Crusaders in the Holy Land at the Battle of Hattin, Saladin had executed with religious ritual some 230 captured Knights Templar and Knights of St. John Hospitallers. After Hattin, Saladin considered sacking Jerusalem like the Crusaders before him, but its desperate defenders warned him that without a pardon guarantee they would fight to the bitter end and destroy the city’s Muslim holy sites. He therefore relented and ransomed the city’s population, but an estimated 8,000 could not pay and became slaves, among whom the women suffered mass rape, a practice common among armies of the era.
The film simply offers no context for its portrayal of a brutal era in which warfare rules held that besieged cities that did not surrender like Jerusalem in 1099 were subject to massacre and pillage. Muslims later repaid the Crusaders in kind during the 1291 sack of Acre, and the era’s Muslim armies often committed atrocities against surrendered city populations in violation of pledged mercy. By contrast, some evidence suggests to Holt that crusaders during the First Crusade that captured Jerusalem refrained from the common medieval practice of raping captive women.
In the midst of such violence, al-Kamil presents an appealing figure in the film, yet he might not have been an ordinary Muslim. Concurring with Moses, Cunningham has noted that when Francis went to al-Kamil, ultimately the “caliph did receive him kindly; he may have been a Sufi — a Muslim mystic — who want to identify mystically with the love of Allah.” Al-Kamil “may have had an instinctual sympathy for Francis, whom he probably saw as a holy man.” Al-Kamil also had a history of tolerance toward his Coptic Christian subjects in Egypt, although even this leniency had its limits under repressive Islamic dhimmi norms for non-Muslims.
The attention given by Catholics like Moses to Sufis like al-Kamil has a tradition, the Catholic writer and former academic William Kilpatrick has observed: “To the extent that they are interested in Islam, Catholic thinkers tend to be focused on its mystical, Sufi manifestations rather than on its mainstream, legalistic, and supremacist side.” Many Catholics like Francis’ namesake, the current Pope Francis, want “to put a Christian face on Islam.”
Yet Catholic writer John Zmirak has analyzed respectively the doctrines of Islam and Christianity’s founders to demonstrate that “ISIS Are to Muhammad What Franciscans Are to Jesus.” No celluloid interfaith, multicultural agitprop from PBS can change these facts by repackaging shopworn canards about Christianity for the Christmas season. The question remains for a forthcoming article, what is the nature of the people at UPF and its associates who helped produce the delusion of The Sultan and the Saint?
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republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:

“Respect for religious difference is a foundational ethical teaching
in the Qur’an and the Hadith sources of Islamic scripture,” states a
video caption at the website of Unity Production Foundation’s (UPF) film The Sultan and the Saint.
This statement is indicative of the naiveté and leftist, multicultural
ideologies animating the individuals involved with this previously reviewed distorted depiction of the Crusades.

Catholic University of America Professor Wilhelmus Valkenberg and others double down in the video on such dubious beliefs ignoring Islam’s oppressive dhimmitude
for non-Muslims. Islam’s “Prophet Muhammad was very aware of religious
differences” and “saw them not a as a source of contention but of joy
and of common relationship with God,” he states. St. Bonaventure
University’s Center for Arab and Islamic Studies director Michael Calabria references the hackneyed, flawed argument that a supposedly tolerant Quran 2:256
verse is “foundational for Islam.” He declares that “Christian
communities, Jewish communities continued to thrive under Islamic rule,”
notwithstanding copious modern evidence of Islamic oppression.

Valkenberg’s credibility concerning Islam is hardly serious given his close relationship with the shadowy Turkish Islamist movement of Fethullah Gülen. Overlooking the role in recent decades that Gülenists played in dismantling Turkey’s secular republic, Valkenberg has previously abetted
the Gülenists self-presentation as an interfaith humanitarian
organization. Thus the Gülen movement emphasizes “service as something
that is very basic to the Islamic faith” and is “very de-central,” “a
very personalized faith…it’s not Islamism in the political sense of the
word.”

Elsewhere Valkenberg has summarized
Gülen’s teaching as “Muslims living peacefully together with people of
other faiths; that is the normal situation.” Meanwhile, “both in
Christianity and in Islam, there is a tradition that says, well, you
should stay away from political power.”

Another online video at The Sultan and the Saint website features Imam Mohamed Magid and Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.
Magid is the former president of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB)-derived
Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), an organization whose
radicalism included his bestowing an ISNA “diversity award” upon an anti-Semitic imam. McCarrick’s presence alongside Magid is ironic, given ISNA’s opposition to homosexuality and lurid documentation of McCarrick’s homosexual past. Perhaps this is another example of the strange affinity noted by Jihad Watch’s Robert Spencer of homosexuals for Muslims as fellow “victims.”

Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah and Hamza Yusuf also have a website video
endorsing the film. Bin Bayyah has made numerous statements supporting
terrorism against Israel by groups such as Hamas, as well as violence against American forces
during the Iraq war, and supports Islamic restrictions on speech.
Although in more recent years Yusuf likes to emphasize his moderation,
he likewise has a troubling radical past.

The film website also has a video with Patrick Carolan, executive director of the Franciscan Action Network (FAN). FAN partnered with UPF in developing The Sultan and the Saint, while UPF in turn was in 2017 the recipient
of FAN’s Cardinal McCarrick Award. Perhaps reflecting the loose
doctrine of the award’s namesake, Carolan in the video says with casual
ecumenism that “there are many journeys to God, many paths we can take.”

Leftist journalist Naomi Klein has written in the New Yorker
about her Vatican meeting with Carolan. He is among the “biggest
troublemakers within the Church for years, the ones taking Christ’s
proto-socialist teachings seriously.” She records him claiming that
“Vladimir Lenin supposedly said that what the Russian Revolution had
really needed was not more Bolsheviks but ten St. Francises of Assisi.”

Carolan’s background certainly recalls Lenin more than St. Francis.
The inaugural 2014 Cardinal McCarrick Award went to the former Service
Employees International Union (SEIU) Secretary/Treasurer Eliseo Medina, an avowed socialist, while the 2016 award went to Al Gore’s daughter, Karenna. While representing the George Soros-funded “Catholic” front-group Catholics United, Carolan himself has advocated that the Knights of Columbus cease opposing same-sex “marriage.”

Leftist politics are also evident in UPF’s Sultan and the Saint Peacemaking Award. Recipients include Jacob Bender, the only Jewish leader of a chapter of the radical Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Sister Maureen Brown likewise “supports CAIR San Diego,” notwithstanding this CAIR chapter’s extensive radical history and duplicitous legal tactics.

UPF’s other “peacemakers” include the southern Illinois imam Abdul Haqq, whose deceptive presentation of Quran 5:32-33 ignores the death penalty in these verses for any “villainy in the land” against Islam. Meanwhile, media reports that the homosexuality-affirming California priest Jon Pedigo has a played a key role in making his San Jose parish the “most gay-friendly diocese in the nation.” NPR reporter Tom Ashbrook is notorious for his longstanding anti-Israel biases and more recent sexual harassment charges.

Austin, Texas, Presbyterian minister Jim Rigby combines many of the views dear to UPF and its associates. He has written
that the “Palestinian people are suffering genocide” during the
“extinction of the Palestinian people as a cultural and political entity
with a homeland of their own.” During a 2009 Austin rally
for Gaza, he spoke of Israelis who “teach people to kill and to rob
other people’s land” with “state-sponsored terrorism” while the “true
jihad is the struggle for peace and justice.” Israel, along with the
United States, also have offended
his equal opportunity sensibilities concerning nuclear weapons; he has
declared that “it’s okay for Christian and Jewish nations to have
nuclear weapons, but not Muslims” in places like Iran.

Domestically, Rigby’s church has supported same-sex “marriage” and even accepted the atheist journalism professor Robert Jensen as a member. On Christianity, he has argued
that the “core insights of the religion are basically socialist and
even, I think, anarchist.” His superficial Crusades pseudo-history has
also a similarly Marxist flavor:

I doubt very seriously that the primary motive for the
Crusades was rescuing the holy lands from Islam. I suspect the booty
captured by “pious” European kings was much more to the point.

The views of actual experts consulted by UPF for The Sultan and the Saint such as Smith College Professor Suleiman Mourad often are hardly more substantial. While condemning American “Islamophobia” and “militarism,” he has advanced the absurd claim
that around the world “Muslims, in their majority, have…established
liberal democratic constitutions.” This analysis ill comports with his past examination of the recurring role of jihad throughout Islamic history.

Meanwhile, journalist Paul Moses, who formed with his book The Saint and the Sultan: The Crusades, Islam, and Francis of Assisi’s Mission of Peace a central source for UPF’s film, seems out of his depth on matters concerning Islam. In one lecture, he has cited as an authority George Washington University Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a man whom Iranian media reported
saying that he worked to limit the influence of Jewish and Baha’i
professors in Islamic studies. Nasr has also overseen the creation of a study Quran that whitewashes the book’s more disturbing passages.

Speaking under the auspices of the Gülenist Intercultural Dialogue Institute in Canada, Moses cited also Quran 5:83
as an example of Islamic respect for Christianity. Yet the text
actually indicates Christians recognizing Islam as true, while the preceding verse
contrasts the friendship of Christians with Jews, the “most intense of
the people in animosity toward the believers” in Islam. His cited source
for this verse is, moreover, Hartford Seminary Professor Mahmoud Ayoub, a longtime associate of the MB-derived and terrorism-linked International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT).

Moses displayed similar flawed judgment in praising the New York chapter of the radical pacifist organization Pax Christi for bestowing a “Peacemaker” award on Debbie Almontaser. Her radical ties led to her losing her position as principal at an Arab-language high school.

UPF’s choice of associates becomes understandable in light of Daniel Tutt, UPF’s Director of Programs/Producer. At the European Graduate School, he obtained his doctorate under Alain Badiou and later studied under Slavoj Žižek, two communist philosophers. Amidst their almost indecipherable totalitarian tracts spiced with radical antisemitism, Badiou has described
Palestinians as “slaves” of an Israeli “colonial state” engaged in the
“project of a genocide of the Palestinians.” Meanwhile, Žižek has attributed
Al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001, attacks to the “antagonisms of global
capitalism” and described Israel as an “apartheid” state that, as in
Badiou’s view, should disappear in a single Palestinian state.

Tutt has shown the influence of his teachers while ombudsman for The Islamic Monthly (TIM). Its editorial staff includes the fanciful Islam apologist Karen Armstrong, the Panglossian believer in Islamic democracy Noah Feldman, former CAIR legal adviser Arsalan Iftikhar, and the radical professor Sherman Jackson. Tutt himself at TIM has sanitized the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS)
movement seeking Israel’s destruction. This is a “non-violent campaign
using boycotts, commercial divestments and sanctions to pressure Israel
to abide by international law and grant Palestinians their rights.”

Sana Saeed, a producer at the radical Al Jazeera network, was even more strident at TIM in her denunciation of “Faithwashing Apartheid and Occupation” by the Israeli Shalom Hartman Institute’s Muslim Leadership Initiative
(MLI). She described “Israeli occupation and ethnic cleansing of
Palestine” as a “mid-20th century Euro-American settler-colonialist
project.” Thus the MLI “normalizes Zionism – a racist ideology and
institution that is antithetical to our own Islamic traditions of social
justice.”

Saeed’s views contradict Tutt’s involvement with The Sultan and the Saint. One of the MLI organizers, Homayra Ziad from the Baltimore-based Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, appears in an online video.
Despite her treatment on TIM’s pages, she gushes that different faiths
“have significant theological and practical differences, but we harness
those differences to compete with one another, not in animosity, but
towards the common good.”

Ziad exemplifies the disjunction between those associated with UPF and not always benign Muslims and their allies. Moses has worried about President Donald Trump’s “anti-Muslim rhetoric.” UPF’s executive producer, the Muslim convert Alex Kronemer, has similarly argued
that Muslims “feel attacked by hostile rhetoric about Islam that would
never be accepted in the public square about any other faith.”

Yet the gauzy rhetoric surrounding The Sultan and the Saint
and other UPF film productions does not correspond to UPF’s reality. UPF
simply manifests the various politically correct, sometimes
contradictory shibboleths of the modern red-green alliance of leftists
and Islamists. Rather than harmonious unity, UPF’s wolves in sheep’s
clothing have far more controversial, sinister agendas.
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 CATHOLIC/MUSLIM ECUMENISM AT A NEW YORK 

CITY CATHOLIC HIGH SCHOOL, TROUGH