Pope Francis spoke to reporters on board the papal plane again — and that never leads to anything good. His latest comments about Islamic terrorism were doubleplusungood.
Via NBC News:
Pope Francis said he doesn’t like singling out violence carried out by Muslims because people of all religions are guilty of deadly crimes.
He told reporters the situation was like “a mixed fruit salad” and that there were “violent people in all religions.”
“I do not like to talk about Islamic violence because every day when I skim the papers … I read about violence in Italy: this one who killed the girlfriend, another killed the mother-in-law … and they are all baptized Catholics,” he said aboard a Rome-bound flight from Poland on Sunday.
“If I talk about Islamic violence, then I also have to talk of Catholic violence. Not all Muslims are violent, just like not all Catholics are violent,” the pontiff added. “It’s like a mixed fruit salad. There is a bit of everything. There are violent people in all religions.”
Yes, the pope just compared domestic violence to Islamic terror — as if a Catholic dirtbag murdering his girlfriend is the same thing as an Islamic jihadist in a truck mowing down a hundred people watching fireworks in Nice. Or Islamic State jihadists beheading 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians in Libya. Or Kenyan jihadists killing 68 people at a shopping mall. Or an Islamic terrorist gunning down dozens of people at a Christmas party in San Bernardino or a gay nightclub in Orlando. I can go on and on, obviously, because Islamic terror attacks around the world happen on a daily basis. But you get the idea — murderous Catholic boyfriends may be bad, but the damage they do is limited to one or two people and their impact on society as a whole is minimal. Islamic jihad is a threat to us all.
But stop the presses — Pope Francis had another pearl of papal wisdom for us with the stunning revelation that there are violent people in all religions. Has anyone ever suggested otherwise? The problem is there is currently only one religion where a significant number of the faithful are finding justification for murder and mayhem against unbelievers in their sacred texts. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi understands this and has called for a religious reformation of the Muslim faith. “We need to revolutionize our religion,” he proclaimed on News Year’s Day of 2015 to an audience of Muslim clerics and scholars.
We shouldn’t be surprised when an intractable ideologue like Barack Obama — the worst president in American history — ignores much-needed calls for the reform of Islam. And we’ve come to expect him to make morally and intellectually vacuous comparisons. But it is beyond disturbing to hear it coming from a pope.
But it gets worse.
Pope Francis was responding to a question about an ISIS-linked attack on a church last week in which knife-wielding attackers slit the throat of a priest.
The pontiff had been asked why he never would “talk about Islam, about how you would counter the Islamic violence.”
He responded that it was “not fair to identify Islam with violence and terrorism. It’s not fair, and it’s not true.”
The pope went on to suggest that capitalism is another form of terrorism: “When you place at the center of the world economy the ‘God of Money,’ that’s terrorism against all humanity.”
Keep in mind that a Catholic pope said this in response to an Islamic attack on a Catholic church where a priest had his throat slit and nuns were terrorized — at a time when Christians are being genocide-ed out of existence in the Middle East. The real enemy is capitalism. I’m surprised he didn’t throw in global warming for good measure. Or mention the Crusades.
Maybe the White House can have Chief Propagandist Ben Rhodes send the pontiff some of Obama’s talking points, since they seem to be ideological fellow travelers.
Next page: See the video and read what else Pope Francis said
Pope Francis also put his foot in it back in May when he compared Jesus’s call to “make disciples of all nations” to the violent Islamic conquest of nations that followed the death of Mohammed.
The pontiff reportedly received a chilly reception when he arrived in Poland for World Youth Day last Wednesday.
“The Pope, an inconvenient guest,” was the headline on an article earlier this month in Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s largest circulation newspaper.
The event, held this year in the southern Poland city from July 27 through July 31, takes place every 2 or 3 years in a different city. In 2013, the host city was Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Polish bishops circulated a letter publicizing the event that was read in churches throughout the nation on July 3. The letter praised the late Pope John Paul II three times, yet made no mention of Pope Francis.
NBC reports that Pope Francis proved to be “just as popular” as Pope John Paul the Second, with hundreds of thousands of young people from all over the world attending his final mass in Krakow.
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