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 fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam. Even if you were to pay jizyah [tax for infidels] and live under the authority of Islam in humiliation, we would continue to hate you.
In a recent press conference, Pope Francis told journalists that the world is at war. “But it’s a real war, not a religious war,” he said.
Pope Francis said the inspiration for terrorism wasn’t Islam but a world economy that worshiped the “god of money” and drove the disenfranchised to violence.
Speaking on his flight from Krakow, the pope was responding to a question about links between Islam and recent terrorist attacks, particularly the killing on Tuesday of a priest in northern France by followers of Islamic State.
Pope Francis suggested that the social and economic marginalization of Muslim youth in Europe helped explain the actions of those who joined extremist groups. “How many youths have we Europeans left empty of ideals? They don’t have work, and they turn to drugs and alcohol. They go [abroad] and enroll in fundamentalist groups,” the pope said.
Read the whole thing. That was the WSJ’s report. They left out this Francis gem, via Crux:
“In almost all religions there is always a small group of fundamentalists,” even in the Catholic Church, the pope said, though not necessarily physically violent. “One can kill with the tongue as well as the knife.”
Pope Francis on Sunday defended his avoidance of the term “Islamic violence” by suggesting the potential for violence lies in every religion, including Catholicism.
“I don’t like to talk about Islamic violence, because every day, when I read the newspaper, I see violence,” Francis said, when asked about why he never speaks of Islamic terrorism or fundamentalism when condemning attacks such as the murder of a French priest last week, who had his throat slit by an Islamic terrorist as he was celebrating Mass.
The pope said that when he reads the newspaper, he reads about an Italian who kills his fiancé or his mother in law.
This — all of this — is not just stupid, it’s offensive. Or rather, it’s offensive because it’s so stupid, and does nothing but sow confusion.
Where to begin? Let’s start with the bit from Crux. The parallel between baptized Italian Catholics who kill family members and Muslim terrorists who slaughter Christians and others (including other Muslims they deem heretics) in the name of Allah is crazy. Guess what, Francis? All across the Islamic world, Muslim men steal, they beat their wives, they cheat their neighbor, and so on, not because Islam tells them to, but because they are human beings. Same in Christian countries, and in every society on earth. At issue is Muslim slaughtering priests at the altar, turning non-Muslim girls into sex slaves, blowing up churches, and carrying out all manner of barbaric evil explicitly and unapologetically in the name of their religion. You can call it a twisted interpretation of Islam, or condemn it for other reasons. In the cases of the baptized Catholic who kills his mother-in-law, or the believing Muslim who does the same, in neither instance is their religion a motivating factor in the crime. It is incidental to their violent acts. The terrorism that ISIS and its supporters carry out is done openly in the name of Islam, motivated by their interpretation of the religion.
I can’t decide whether it’s more disturbing if the Pope really cannot see the fallacy here, or if he is just saying what he figures is diplomatically correct.
Second, this idea of Francis’s that economics, not religion, is behind Islamic terrorism, is materialist claptrap that one would think a Pope is beyond falling for. The world is full of desperately poor people who do not slaughter priests. The world is also full of desperately poor Muslim people who do not slaughter priests, shoot up nightclubs, mow down people with trucks, and so forth. In fact, poverty is not much of a factor at all in who becomes radicalized by Salafi Islam. A decade ago, The Guardian looked at the kind of people joining al-Qaeda:
A typical volunteer is a well-educated, upwardly mobile man in his mid-to-late twenties – European volunteers are on average aged 25 – from a middle-class background and a stable family, and without a strong religious upbringing. Many spoke several languages and were technologically literate. Almost two-thirds – including Europeans – were married.
What is Francis doing? Is this just the usual progressive Catholic see-no-evil dingbattery, or is there something else happening here? Again, how very odd for a world religious leader to deny the power of religion to mold the minds of men and to motivate their behavior. You would expect a vulgar Marxist to say all things are motivated by class and economic struggle and nothing but, but you wouldn’t expect a Roman pontiff to take that ridiculous and easily disproven line.
Franklin Graham, who heads up the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and the Samaritan’s Purse relief charity, has rebuked Pope Francis for saying that while the world is at war, the conflict has nothing to do with religion.
“It most certainly is a war of religion,” Graham said in a posting on Facebook.
CNN reported Francis said the world “is at war because it has lost peace.”
“There is a war of interest, there is a war for money, a war for natural resources, a war to dominate people. Some might think it is a war of religion. It is not,” he said.
“All religions want peace. Others want war,” the pope claimed.
His statements came shortly after Islamic jihadists killed a Catholic priest in France.
Graham said: “I agree that the world is at war – but I disagree that it’s not a war of religion. It is most certainly a war of religion.”
He said religion “is behind the violence and jihad we’re seeing in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and here in this country.”
“It’s a religion that calls for the extermination of ‘infidels’ outside their faith, specifically Jews and Christians. It’s a religion that calls on its soldiers to shout ‘allahu akbar’ [“Allah is supreme” in Arabic] as they behead, rape, and murder in the name of Islam. Radical Islamists are following the teachings of the Quran,” he wrote.
“We should call it what it is.”
Some Catholics don’t agree with their leader.
Religion News Service reported U.S. Cardinal Raymond Burke, a former Vatican official who is based in Rome, said last month that Islam “wants to govern the world” and Americans must decide if they are going to reassert “the Christian origin of our own nation” to avoid submission to Muslim rule.
WND reported Graham recently called out President Obama for refusing to recognize and acknowledge the threat from Islamic radicalism and terrorism.
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