Fitzgerald: Pope Benedict's colossal error

Jihad Watch

The Pope, as we all know, has recently been in Israel, and in Jerusalem, the city holy to Jews and to Christians, with one Muslim site -- deliberately located by an early Umayyad Caliph on top of the Temple Mount -- also holy to Muslims, though the city as a whole is not. And here is what the Pope said when he went to the Temple Mount, and appeared at the Dome of the Rock:

Dear Muslim friends,

As-salamu 'alaikum! Peace upon you!

I cordially thank the Grand Mufti, Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, together with the director of the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf, Sheikh Mohammed Azzam al-Khatib al-Tamimi, and the head of the Awquaf Council, Sheikh Abdel Azim Salhab, for the welcome they have extended to me on your behalf. I am deeply grateful for the invitation to visit this sacred place, and I willingly pay my respects to you and the leaders of the Islamic community in Jerusalem.

The Dome of the Rock draws our hearts and minds to reflect upon the mystery of creation and the faith of Abraham. Here the paths of the world's three great monotheistic religions meet, reminding us what they share in common. Each believes in One God, creator and ruler of all.[Each recognizes Abraham as a forefather, a man of faith upon whom God bestowed a special blessing. Each has gained a large following throughout the centuries and inspired a rich spiritual, intellectual and cultural patrimony.

In a world sadly torn by divisions, this sacred place serves as a stimulus, and also challenges men and women of goodwill to work to overcome misunderstandings and conflicts of the past and to set out on the path of a sincere dialogue aimed at building a world of justice and peace for coming generations. Since the teachings of religious traditions ultimately concern the reality of God, the meaning of life, and the common destiny of mankind--that is to say, all that is most sacred and dear to us-- there may be a temptation to engage in such dialogue with reluctance or ambivalence about its possibilities for success. Yet we can begin with the belief that the One God is the infinite source of justice and mercy, since in him the two exist in perfect unity. Those who confess his name are entrusted with the task of striving tirelessly for righteousness while imitating his forgiveness, for both are intrinsically oriented to the peaceful and harmonious coexistence of the human family.

For this reason, it is paramount that those who adore the One God should show themselves to be both grounded in and directed towards the unity of the entire human family. In other words, fidelity to the One God, the Creator, the Most High, leads to the recognition that human beings are fundamentally interrelated, since all owe their very existence to a single source and are pointed towards a common goal. Imprinted with the indelible image of the divine, they are called to play an active role in mending divisions and promoting human solidarity.

This places a grave responsibility upon us. Those who honor the One God believe that he will hold human beings accountable for their actions. Christians assert that the divine gifts of reason and freedom stand at the basis of this accountability. Reason opens the mind to grasp the shared nature and common destiny of the human family, while freedom moves the heart to accept the other and serve him in charity. Undivided love for the One God and charity towards ones neighbor thus become the fulcrum around which all else turns. This is why we work untiringly to safeguard human hearts from hatred, anger or vengeance. Dear friends, I have come to Jerusalem on a journey of faith. I thank God for this occasion to meet you as the Bishop of Rome and Successor of the Apostle Peter, but also as a child of Abraham, by whom "all the families of the earth find blessing" (Gen 12:3; cf. Rom 4:16-17). I assure you of the church's ardent desire to cooperate for the well-being of the human family. She firmly believes that the fulfillment of the promise made to Abraham is universal in scope, embracing all men and women regardless of provenance or social status.

As Muslims and Christians further the respectful dialogue they have already begun, I pray that they will explore how the oneness of God is inextricably tied to the unity of the human family. In submitting to his loving plan for creation, in studying the law inscribed in the cosmos and implanted in the human heart, in reflecting upon the mysterious gift of God's self-revelation, may all his followers continue to keep their gaze fixed on his absolute goodness, never losing sight of the way it is reflected in the faces of others.

With these thoughts, I humbly ask the Almighty to grant you peace and to bless all the beloved people of this region. May we strive to live in a spirit of harmony and cooperation, bearing witness to the One God by generously serving one another.

Thank you!

Thus the Pope, at the Dome of the Rock, the very place where Muslims early made their worldly claim -- a claim to the land itself -- to the holiest site in Judaism, and one of the most important sites in Jerusalem, a city holy to Christians. The Dome of the Rock is akin to the flag planted by LaSalle in the midst of the American wilderness, on the edge of the Mississippi. The Dome of the Rock, by the way, is suspiciously akin to a Byzantine martyrium, and the Arabic-language inscriptions around it, Christoph Luxenberg has argued, are Christian and not Muslim at all.

Thus the Pope, the same Pope in whom Oriana Fallaci, in her dying days, overcoming her lifelong anticlericalism and suspicion of the Vatican, appeared to prematurely place her confidence as a Defender of the West against Islam. Yet the same Pope attempted in Jerusalem to appease the Arabs and Muslims by uttering treacly nonsense about Islam and all it supposedly shares with the two other prior monotheisms. And he did this on the top of the Temple Mount, the very place which was selected by an Ummayyad caliph in nearby Damascus as the supposed site of the unnamed "furthest mosque" (al-masjid al-aksa), from which Muhammad, made his trip on his winged steed al-Buraq from earth to the Muslim Seventh Heaven and back, all within twenty-four hours. The Pope, if he were to think clearly about Islam, would consider the nature of the inculcated view toward all non-Muslims (including the Ahl al-Kitab, the "People of the Book" -- that is, Christians and Jews). He would consider the triumphalism of Islam, which explains why Muslims keep going back to and keep vividly in mind the first century of the uninterrupted Muslim conquests, and think fondly of that, and are inspired always to work towards, in whatever way possible, a new series of Muslim triumphs over non-Muslims. Such triumphs are in their view only right, only just.

Thus the Pope, in his bland appeasements, has disheartened all thinking Christians now subject to Muslim power, and all thinking Christians still living in lands not yet dominated by Muslims. They would have wished him to say something quite (if subtly) different, or at the very least, to have kept quiet if he lacked the ability to say what needed to be said.

The Pope's misstatements about the true relations between Islam and the two prior monotheisms were appalling. The adherents of those two prior monotheisms the early Muslims conquered. Then they offered Islam to the conquered Christians and Jews of the immediate Middle East and North Africa as the "true" version of their own faiths, which were described by Muslims as "distortions" of the True Faith, the one revealed to Muhammad, Messenger of God, the Seal of the Prophets. The Pope’s misstatements were indeed appalling, and will have a damaging effect, unless they are seen correctly as the result of confusion and fearfulness and a desire to appease Muslims in order, somehow, to halt or slow down the quite-reasonable exodus of Christians from Arab Muslim lands. This exodus continues despite the fact that so many Christian Arabs have internalized the Muslim agenda, and have not only been uncomplaining about Muslim mistreatments, but have also allowed themselves to be used by the Muslims in the never-to-be-ended campaign against Israel, in the vain hope that somehow that would relieve Muslim pressure on them. It didn't and it won't.

The Pope was ill-advised, in both senses of that word, to speak as he did on the Temple Mount. Whatever calculations he and his advisers and speechwriting assistants made, they were the wrong ones. They have done damage, not least to the Christians living in Muslim lands -- including those, for example, of Pakistan (the subject of this article). They have done damage also to those who, within Western Europe, are attempting -- against the vast tongue-tied and embarrassed and ignorant and most often simply stupid members of the political and media elites who everywhere try to mock or silence them -- to sound the tocsin about the islamization of the historic heart of the West through weapons of Jihad insufficiently recognized (the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, and above all, demographic conquest).

The Pope has muffled the tocsin. He needs to sit and think. Instead of him and others in the Vatican rallying around and defending his words on the Temple Mount, and his general performance, they have to read and think about the real nature of Islam and what it says about all non-Muslims, and the real nature of the relationship of Islam to the two prior monotheisms, which is one of deliberate appropriation, distortion, and inculcated malevolence. He, and many others in the Vatican, and many others in organized and disorganized Christianity and Judaism, need to put away accustomed and comforting (most temporarily comforting) pieties, and need to think clearly. They need to realize, for example, that monotheistic Christians and Jews have far less to fear from polytheists -- from Hindus, for example -- than they do from their fellow monotheists the Muslims.

Pope Benedict’s colossal error -- an error that will have consequences -- in Jerusalem, consisted both of his misleading remarks about the historical relationship of Islam to Judaism and Christianity, and his seeming endorsement of the Arab claims about a “Palestinian people” and about the “need” of that “Palestinian people” for a “homeland,” because, you see, those “Palestinians” are apparently, in the Pope’s view, a “homeless” people. There is much one could say about this statement. One might begin, for example, by noting the circumstances under which the Sudtirol was taken over and incorporated, after World War I, into the Italian state, despite the fact that the region was 98% ethnically German, and to ask Pope Benedict what he thinks of that act -- does he approve, or does he not? One might note that until the 1960s, the “Palestinian people” were somehow not noticed by any of the Arabs themselves, for whom they were merely other “Arabs,” nor by any others (see the once-celebrated statement by Elfan Rees, the Advisor on Refugees to the World Council of Churches). The Arabs themselves know this perfectly well, and sometimes have let down their guard to the odd Western interviewer, as Zuhair Mohsen did. He explained that the invention of the “Palestinian people” after the Six-Day War was done for propagandistic reasons in order to cloak or camouflage the Arab war against Israel, that is, a classic Jihad against an Infidel nation-state. That Infidel nation-state’s non-Muslim people, the once-despised Jews, managed somehow to recreate it on land that was once possessed by, and hence must forever remain, Muslim. For Islam lays claim to the whole world, so in a sense all Infidel lands are threatened. Nonetheless, on the To-Do List of Muslim Believers, the recovery of lands where Muslims once ruled, however long or short that rule, has a higher emotional priority than establishing the dominance of Islam and the rule of Muslims over lands where Muslims have not heretofore ruled.

Arabs and Muslims speak in a code that consists of allusions to Muslim history that all Muslims will immediately grasp. A good example is Arafat, just a few weeks after signing the Oslo Accords, telling a Muslim audience in Johannesburg that they needn’t worry, that he was only doing as Muhammad himself had done at Hudaibiyya. He was thus assuring them that only a useful-to-Muslims hudna had been signed, and no real peace would ever be made, for none was possible according to Islam with the Infidels of Israel.

The Pope did a great deal of damage, not least to his own image, in his trip to the Holy Land. Oriana Fallaci, were she alive, would no doubt ask back for the papers she had agreed should be entrusted to the Vatican, as the upholder -- so she thought -- of the West, against the hideousness, as she thought, of Islam. Then there is Magdi Allam, the former Egyptian, born into Islam (and still sympathetic to those who, like his humble and good parents, are through no fault of their own born into Islam but ignore large parts of it). Having decided he could no longer carry on the farce of defending an Islam that, he knew, did not correspond to the real thing, he accepted Christianity. Pope Benedict himself baptized Allam in a ceremony. Yet now Allam may wish to write about the Pope and his performance. He may wish to examine what he said about Islam and the supposed relationship of Islam to Judaism and Christianity (a link based merely on the fact, now seen by the discerning to be trivial, of a shared monotheism, while the inculcated hostility toward all non-Muslims has been ignored).

And Marcello Pera, the Italian Senator with whom Cardinal Ratzinger entered into a dialogue published as “Senza Radici” (“Without Roots”), about the dangers of moral relativism, perhaps may wonder what has happened to his old intellectual sparring-partner, for reasons as yet unclear. Possibly the Pope was doing nothing more than making a deep and wrongheaded attempt to rescue Middle Eastern Christians from the Muslim malevolence all around them.

This is wrongheaded because it makes things, in the long run, so much more confused and therefore dangerous for non-Muslims who need from their leaders, both spiritual and temporal, intelligence, knowledge, and clarity.

That the Pope has singularly failed, in Jerusalem, in many different ways, to display.