Concern Noted

In this photo taken on Nov. 30, provided by Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, Pope Francis meets with refugee children in Istanbul. AP Photo

"We feel anxiety and concern for the future, that the Islamophobic paranoia that has already been spread among Western public opinion is being used as a pretext for massive pressures, intimidation, discrimination, alienation, and actual attacks against our Muslim brothers and sisters living in the West."
Mehmet Gormez, Turkish Minister of Religious Affairs, Istanbul

And thus did Pope Francis hear the riposte to his plea for peace among Muslims and Christians. Christians are being oppressed and slaughtered across the Muslim world. Muslims are being verbally slurred by those who suffer the consequences of not being Muslims, who are appalled at the violence being meted out to both nominal Muslims ('moderates') and non-Muslims alike.

In the spirit of moral equivalence so beloved of the bad actors of the world, one must equate Islamist physical violence unto death with the penchant of civilized people who deplore such violence and voice their condemnation of it in what the perpetrators take to be offensive verbiage. You murder mine and I will slander you; the former reprehensible act equal to the latter hurt feelings of censure.

How does a civil and civilized intelligence respond to such moral chicanery? Perhaps by using the more descriptive word of Islamofascism? Equally repugnant to those swift to decry the insensitivity of victims in portraying the world's self-declared foremost religion of peace by those who clearly do not understood the sacred mission of jihad which pious Muslims are meant to revere and commit to.

To jihadists, death equals martyrdom. Their own death, that is, while perpetrating atrocities taking the lives of other, innocent people who happen not to believe as they do. To non-Muslims death equals the cessation of life, of being and of loving, of worshipping a merciful god that does not command one to kill in obedience to his stricture to expand the population of the surrendered faithful.

Turks abhor Islamophobia, but the Turkish government incites its population toward anti-Semitism, a strange disconnect of the moral mind which decries one as a dread pathology, the other as a natural reaction. In Turkey, full religious liberty for any religion other than Islam is not permitted, as is the case in many if not most Islamic nations.

Pope Francis prays in Istanbul's Blue Mosque   AFP PHOTO / OSSERVATORE ROMANO/HO

To the Pope, in honour of his high station and in reflection of his numerous faithful followers in Christ, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ministers generously offered a pact of a kind that they would commit to combat jihadism in their country, if the Pope promised to condemn "Islamophobia" in his. Pope Francis may very well do so, and mean it as well.

It is highly unlikely that Turkey will do anything to dissuade jihad, since as devout Muslims sliding well into fanatical Islamism, they verily do believe in and honour jihad.