Below, during a papal visit to Istanbul in 2014, the Grand Mufti shared the Koran with the Pope as they prayed together. Francis has said that true Islam is not violent despite extensive evidence to the contrary.
Francis’ years of liberal pandering toward Islam has made him a figure of ridicule, at least to Spencer, who used the latest papal misadventure in multi-faith diplomacy as an opportunity for comedic mockery.
Spencer’s calling Francis the “defender of Islam” may not be entirely complementary.
The Pope of Islam, By Robert Spencer, Front Page, September 22, 2017Pope Francis welcomes to the Vatican the head of a Muslim group tied to the financing of jihad terror.
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.”
