Condemning War

"[The] delusion of omnipotence [that is fuelling the U.S.-Israel war in Iran must stop]."

"Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of war!"

"[Praying for peace is a way to] break the demonic cycle of evil [to build instead the Kingdom of God where there are no swords, drones or] unjust profit."

"It is here that we find a bulwark against that delusion of omnipotence that surrounds us and is becoming increasingly unpredictable and aggressive."

"Even the holy Name of God, the God of life, is being dragged into discourses of death."

"[God] does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them. Even though you may make many prayers, I will not listen -- your hands are full of blood [Isaiah]." 

Pope Leo XIV

Pope Leo XIV presides over a prayer vigil and rosary for peace in St Peter's Basilica at the Vatican on 11 April. Photograph: Remo Casilli/Reuters

"They're two white guy boomers but they could not be any more different in their life experiences, in their values, in the way they have chosen to live those values."

"This is a very stark contrast, and I think an inflection point for American Christianity."

"There's no question about his [Pope Leo's] inflection and meaning. It removes any ambiguities."

Natalia Imperatori-Lee, theology professor, Fordham University

 

"For the last five centuries, the church has been involved in a project of helping develop strong international norms [including the Geneva Conventions in recent centuries]."

"It is a very long-standing tradition rooted in Scripture and theology and philosophy."

Professor William Barbieri, Catholic University  

The first American pope has taken to directly criticizing the American president over the war in Iran, when Pope Leo declared President Trump's "belligerence is truly unacceptable". Two polarized world views, one on the part of the 79-year-old U.S. President, the second a 70-year-old pontiff from Chicago. Coevals in time, sharing common cultural roots with distinct oppositional attitudes they bring to their positions of immense power and influence. 

 

Leo's opposition to the war in Iran, according to Catholic Church experts, reflects established church teachings, quite aside from the politics of the time. Speaking of an American administration in the 
White House with close links to conservative evangelical Protestantism which claims Trump's war on Iran is backed by heavenly endorsement. Americans were urged by U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to pray for victory "in the name of Jesus Christ". As for President Trump, asked whether he felt God approved of the war, replied: "I do, because God is good -- because God is good and God wants to see people taken care of."

 

President Trump's response alludes to the plight of the Iranian people, held in thrall to a radical, fundamental tyranny of theocratic jihadists whose goal is conquest of mind and soul packaged into a submission to Islam as the only true religion, through the Shi'ite version specifically. A theocracy that has exemplified in its foundational belief in worldwide conversion to wipe all other religious devotion out of contention. Beginning with world Jewry and Israel, then on to Christianity, and Buddhism, Hinduism and others will fall into place, and be no more with conquest completed.

 

On its way to that conquest beginning with its own Iranian population almost a half-century ago, complete restraints on civil society; all forced to adhere to the version of Islam that demanded full obeisance in faith through complete surrender of self in the interests of the idolized Ruhollah Khomeini who took up the Prophet Mohammad's scimitar and wielded it with the passion of the celestially nominated. The Ayatollah who tasked the Islamic Republican Guard Corps with stifling the spirit of Iranians, who assigned the al Quds division the task of forming, training, arming and dispatching Shia terror militias on missions abroad.

 

Investing in them the full authority, under his unquestioned own to supervise uranium enrichment for use in nuclear technology, while perfecting the range and power of ballistic missiles capable of taking warheads vast distances. This is a nation dedicated to performing its obligations to the foremost directive for the faithful in the sacred scripts demanding non-stop jihad for full transformation from false gods to the only religious devotion recognizing the sole Divine Eminence. 

 

Iranians, women in particular, forced to appear in public only garbed in black all-encompassing garb, paid dearly for their transgressions of occasional passionate rejection of the demands for absence while present in their gender-obscuring garments that offered no protection from rape and murder at the behest of the authorities. Mass demonstrations of youth demanding freedom and liberty to live as human beings earned themselves the freedom to take the lethal brunt of the regime's response. Iran's vast oil wealth failed to trickle through to improving the civilian population's lives, but flowed extravagantly in support of terror.

 

What would be the Catholic Church's solution to a population of 93 million people in thrall to terror crying out for rescue from their ill fate?  What has Pope Leo to say of a nation whose leaders continuously threaten to eradicate the Jewish State of Israel from the Middle East, and which has exported its Jew-hate propaganda throughout Europe and North America? What has Pope Leo to say of Islamists in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America targeting Christians in faith to jihad? 

The Red Cross and the Vatican both helped thousands of Nazi war criminals and collaborators to escape after the second world war, according to a book that pulls together evidence from unpublished documents.

The Red Cross has previously acknowledged that its efforts to help refugees were used by Nazis because administrators were overwhelmed, but the research suggests the numbers were much higher than thought.

Gerald Steinacher, a research fellow at Harvard University, was given access to thousands of internal documents in the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The documents include Red Cross travel documents issued mistakenly to Nazis in the postwar chaos.

They throw light on how and why mass murderers such as Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele and Klaus Barbie and thousands of others evaded capture by the allies.

By comparing lists of wanted war criminals to travel documents, Steinacher says Britain and Canada alone inadvertently took in around 8,000 former Waffen-SS members in 1947, many on the basis of valid documents issued mistakenly.

The documents – which are discussed in Steinacher's book Nazis on the Run: How Hitler's henchmen fled justice – offer a significant insight into Vatican thinking, particularly, because its own archives beyond 1939 are still closed. The Vatican has consistently refused to comment.

Steinacher believes the Vatican's help was based on a hoped-for revival of European Christianity and dread of the Soviet Union. But through the Vatican Refugee Commission, war criminals were knowingly provided with false identities.

The Red Cross, overwhelmed by millions of refugees, relied substantially on Vatican references and the often cursory Allied military checks in issuing travel papers, known as 10.100s.

The Guardian 

SS officers at Auschwitz in 1944. From left: Richard Baer, who became the commandant of Auschwitz in May 1944, Josef Mengele, commandant of Birkenau Josef Kramer, hidden, and the former commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Höss, foreground; the man on the right is unidentified. Photograph: AP

  

"What Pope Leo and Donald Trump have in common is they both lived through the postwar polarization [including the political upheaval of the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War]."

"In some ways he's [Leo] just like us, [someone] who understands where our domestic political crisis came from [unlike the Argentinian Francis] who did not fully understand the peculiarities of the United States [even as he offered implicit criticism]."

Professor Steven Millies, Catholic Theological Union, Chicago 

 

 

The Muslim Brotherhood's Influence in Canada

Parliament Hill Ottawa, Canada. Credit: Ron Przysucha

 

"The Ikhwan [Arabic for 'brethren'] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers [Muslims] so that it is eliminated and God's religion [Islam] is made victorious over all other religions."

From a 1991 memo of Muslim Brotherhood domination strategy

 

"[Canada has become] a hub for Muslim Brotherhood affiliated organizations that are exerting significant influence in Canadian civil society, academia, politics and government."

"[Many of whom have received funding from the government of Canada despite] verified ties to extremist entities, including Hamas."

"[The Muslim Brotherhood's] sabotage strategy [is clandestinely materializing in Canada]."

Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) report 

ISGAP Urges Canadian Government to Designate Muslim Brotherhood a Terrorist Organization

 

The long-lived transnational Sunni Islamist movement with its goal of creating a global caliphate based on Sharia law is widely thought of as the most influential and largest Islamist group in modern history. The network is supported by powerful states like Qatar and Turkey. Both violent and non-violent forms of jihad are championed by the Brotherhood in achievement of Islamist supremacy. Its Egyptian founder Hassan al Banna stated in 1928: "It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet."

 

Al-Banna, a dedicated antisemite, and admirer of Adolf Hitler, had a pathological hatred for the West, Israel and Jews. Thought of as the "intellectual father of modern day jihad", Brotherhood idealogue Sayyid Qutib's radical prose outlined the ideological foundation for the Salafist jihadi movement, such that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri of al-Qaeda were inspired to spawn terrorist groups such as Hamas and the Islamic State.

 

The Muslim Brotherhood is "the world's incubator of modern Islamic terrorism", "the world's most dangerous militant cult", wrote Cynthia Farahat, an Egyptian-American counterterrorism expert, in her book, The Secret Apparatus: The Muslim Brotherhood's Industry of Death. In the 1970s officially renouncing violence to achieve its aims, its support for terrorist groups and its actions in effect yet remain violence-oriented. Hamas was created in 1987 out of the Brotherhood whose international leadership directed its branches globally to support the terrorist group.  

 

The very term 'Islamophobia' was popularized by the Brotherhood for the purpose of delegitimizing criticism of its Islamist ideology, with the intention of equating it with antisemitism, according to a leading scholar on the Middle East and Islam in the West, Gilles Kepel. Its success has enabled the Muslim Brotherhood to claim the moral high ground through implicating suspicion of Islam with victimhood. At the United Nations, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation attempted to have criticism of Islam declared a universal crime.

 

Recently leaked, a French government report offered the most detailed official study of the Brotherhood's modus operandi and its European presence. The findings were ominous: the Brotherhood seeks to achieve its religio-political goal of gradual societal transformation; with plans to conquer not merely France, but the entire world of the West; findings that happen to reflect those of a similar 2015 U.K. government investigative report. Both France and the United Kingdom have effectively been flooded with a voluminous Muslim presence; the banlieus in France are unapproachable; both governments are wary of offending their Muslim demographics.

 

Canada presents as an ideal host for the Brotherhood given its permissive environment in the face of a newly fragile national identity courtesy of a decade of Liberal rule, its permissiveness of group-bloc votes, multiculturalism, wokeism and flagrantly oblivious immigration intake, including refugees and illegal migrants. The ISGAP report reveals an extensive ideological infrastructure the Brotherhood has furnished within Canada, through charities, schools and mosques, enabling it to infiltrate civil society and influence policy-generation under the mantle of religious and educational action. 

 

Marc Lebuis, the director of Point de Bascule, an organization tracking jihadist movement in Canada. testified before a 2015 Senate committee, revealing that a senior Muslim Brotherhood leader in Canada had inspired Muslims to work toward influential positions in government and the justice system and from that vantage point, put a halt to applying legal provisions incompatible with sharia law. 

 

In April, Jordan took the step of banning the Brotherhood which in effect posed a governing challenge to the Hashemite kingdom, joining Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates all of which had pre-dated Jordan's step by years previously. The sole western country to have banned the group is Austria. Designating it as a terrorist organization may yet eventuate shortly in the United States, where it is deeply engrained in the political and social fabric of the country. 

 

It is imperative that Western countries recognize the danger represented by the Brotherhood, a recognition that now prevails in the Middle East. Its ideology promotes hatred, rejecting liberal democratic values and rejecting western justice. Their corrosive world view undermines social cohesion, fomenting division and radicalization where it establishes itself. In Canada, government should begin the process by eliminating public funding to its affiliated groups, and prosecute those who commit crimes, blacklist terror-financing fronts and publicly reject the entire Brotherhood apparatus. 

 

Photo by GIANLUIGI GUERCIA/AFP