Buenos Aires Herald, Argentina
April 19 2015

A most reluctant crusader

By James Neilson
For the Herald

Pope cannot ignore Christian suffering in Muslim countries

Pope Francis would rather spend his days deploring the spiritual
emptiness of consumerism, hedonism and other contemporary ills than
feel called upon to defend Christendom against people who are
determined to annihilate what is left of it. He took the name of
Francis because he wanted to bring the papacy closer to common folk by
making it kinder and more willing to understand their troubles but,
much as he may dislike the idea, circumstances are obliging him to
change his priorities. As head of the biggest and most influential
Christian denomination, he cannot make out that what is happening in
the Middle East, Pakistan, Nigeria and other parts of the world does
not concern him. Once again, Islam is on the march and, to his evident
unease, Francis, a man who would much prefer to talk about the
blessings of peace than don the armour of a crusader, must do whatever
he can to stop it.

Almost nine years have passed since Pope Benedict XVI infuriated many
Muslims and post-Christian progressives by quoting the 14th century
Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologos on Islam. When confronted by a
believer, Manuel asked him to “Show me just what Muhammad brought that
was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as
his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” To prove
both the Byzantine monarch and the Pope channelling him were wrong
because Islam is a uniquely peaceful creed, Muslims around the world
rioted, trashed dozens of churches, beheaded at least one priest and,
in Somalia, murdered an Italian nun.

Aware that his German predecessor had committed a terrible gaffe by
suggesting in his Regensburg lecture that Islam was less than perfect,
after replacing him Jorge Bergoglio tried a gentler approach, but
events in the Middle East soon forced him to change track. There, the
remaining Christians are the target of a ferocious onslaught much like
the ones that were confronted by the Byzantine Empire before it was
finally snuffed out by the rampaging Turks. Throughout that unhappy
region, Christians are being butchered by jihadists while Western
leaders such as Barack Obama, David Cameron and the rest of them wring
their hands, express their dismay and say mass murder is terrible but,
fortunately, has “nothing to do with Islam.” To ram home that
particular point, Obama said Christians were not entitled to get on
their high horse and complain because the Spanish Inquisition and the
Ku Klux Klan had been just as bad as the holy warriors of the Islamic
State.

But the climate is changing. To the surprise of many, Pope Francis has
begun to speak out. After criticizing the “complicit silence” of
Western politicians whose indifference toward the plight of Christians
in faraway countries about which they know very little struck him as
contemptible, he dared call the systematic and carefully planned
slaughter of Armenians, alongside Greeks, Assyrians and others, by the
Turks a century ago an act of “genocide”, the first in the twentieth
century, that was fully comparable to the later ones carried out by
the Nazis and the Soviet Communists.

As might have been expected, his words greatly angered the Islamists
who are currently ruling Turkey and busily persecuting secularists.
Unlike the Germans, who have come to terms with their own equally
appalling collective past, most Turks – not all by any means – have
refused to do so. As far as they are concerned, one and a half million
Armenians and a large number of Greeks were victims of what these days
is called collateral damage, not of a genocidal pogrom by “Young Turk”
nationalists and religious fanatics determined to exterminate
non-Muslim minorities.

Until fairly recently, most Western politicians and progressive
intellectuals did their best to see in Turkey’s Islamist president
Recep Tayyip Erdogan a Middle-Eastern version of a European Christian
Democrat, a man who, rather than turn his back on his country’s
dominant religious faith, was doing his best to soften it so it could
fit into the modern democratic world just as Catholicism,
Protestantism, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Shintoism and
Confucianism have managed to do. Sceptics who said Erdogan and his
sidekicks were only interested in their own Islamist agenda got short
thrift, but the Turkish regime’s virulent reaction to Pope Francis’s
words has bolstered their case. The following day, the European
Parliament weighed in by calling for a commemoration of “the centenary
of the Armenian genocide”. By so doing, it made it clear that Turkey’s
chances, which were never very great, of joining the European Union
are quickly getting smaller.

According to a large number of opinion polls, most Europeans believe
Islam is incompatible with their way of doing things. That is a major
reason why, in country after country, political parties habitually
denounced as “extreme right-wing” keep sprouting up. The widespread
feeling that governments, along with cultural elites, are bending over
backwards to appease the increasingly aggressive Muslim communities in
Europe, plus the unlovely regimes that rule much of the Muslim world,
has provoked a backlash that could have dire consequences for a large
number of people.

The lessons of history are grim. Time and time again, relations
between large Muslim communities and others have become so strained
that population transfers, like the ones that caused so much suffering
in Greece and Turkey almost a century ago and then in Pakistan and
India after the departure of the British, seemed the least bad option.
Will we see more such disasters in the years to come? Perhaps not, but
to many the prospect no longer seems unimaginable.