It’s perfectly understandable that the Islamic State (ISIS) would want to murder the most prominent exponent of Christianity. After all, the notorious jihad terror group is trying to engulf us all in a global religious war. Yet at the same time, the Islamic State jihadis don’t seem to have thought this through. Pope Francis is one of the world’s foremost non-Muslim boosters of Islam. If the “Pope of Islam,” of all people, gets offed by Islamic jihadis, it might end up being bad for ISIS’ image — that is, outside of its fanbase of fellow bloodthirsty jihadis.
Those who were plotting to kill the pope, however, don’t seem to have been all that bright. They were only caught because they were overconfidently speaking freely online about their plot. The New York Post reported Monday that “suspects linked to ISIS plotted to attack Pope Francis during his trip to Indonesia — but were thwarted by their own online boasts.” Indonesian cops arrested seven jihad terrorists who had planned to kill the pope during his trip to that country. That trip wrapped up on Friday, and just days before that, “police seized bows and arrows, a drone and ISIS leaflets during raids of the suspects’ homes.”
And so the pope was not murdered in Indonesia, and the religion of Islam did not lose one of its best friends. The pope has a long record of whitewashing Islamic jihad violence and making moral equivalence arguments in order to downplay jihad terror. Ahmed al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Cairo’s al-Azhar, has noticed the pope’s yeoman service for the Islamic cause and has thanked him for his “defense of Islam against the accusation of violence and terrorism.”
Francis is not just a defender of Islam but also a defender of the Sharia death penalty for blasphemy. Yes, seriously. 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.”
From all this, we can conclude that for the Pope, murdering people for violating Sharia blasphemy laws is “normal,” and it isn’t terrorism. “Christian terrorism does not exist, Jewish terrorism does not exist, and Muslim terrorism does not exist. They do not exist,” he said in a 2017 speech. “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.”
So there is no Islamic terrorism, but if you engage in “intolerant generalizations,” you can “expect a punch.” The Pope, like the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, apparently thinks that the problem is not jihad terror but non-Muslims talking about jihad terror; Muslims would be peaceful if non-Muslims would simply censor themselves and self-impose Sharia blasphemy restrictions regarding criticism of Islam.
Pope Francis has no patience with those who discuss such matters, saying: “I don’t like to talk about Islamic violence, because every day, when I read the newspaper, I see violence.” He added that he often saw stories in newspapers about Italians being violent. "They are baptized Catholics," he insisted. "They are violent Catholics." He concluded: "I believe it's not fair to identify Islam with violence. It's not fair and it's not true."
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Yet the pontiff’s comparison made no sense, for Italian Catholics who behaved violently were not acting in accord with the teachings of their religion, while the Qur’an and Islamic teaching contain numerous exhortations to violence.
But Pope Francis, defender of Islam, cannot concern himself with such minutiae. Nor does he appear to be particularly concerned about the fact that all his false statements about the motivating ideology behind the massive Muslim persecution of Christians over the last few years only enable and abet that persecution, for if that ideology is not identified and confronted, it will continue to flourish.
Yet despite the pope’s long record of defending Islam from even the mildest scrutiny about how jihad violence can be stopped when it is justified in the Qur’an and by Muhammad’s example, ISIS still tried to kill him. As far as they’re concerned, an infidel is an infidel. The ingratitude, it stings.
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