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Arabic Expert Unmasks Pope Francis' Two-Faced Muslim Ally
by Jules Gomes • ChurchMilitant.com
February 3, 2021
VATICAN CITY (ChurchMilitant.com) - A top Arabic scholar is exposing the "two-facedness" of Pope Francis' Muslim dialogue partner and the failure of the pontiff's Human Fraternity pact to stem the escalating persecution of Christians in the Islamic world.
Copts protest the persecution of Christians in Egypt
Islamic historian Raymond Ibrahim is blasting grand imam of al-Azhar, Ahmed al-Tayyeb, for "repeatedly contradicting all the lofty sentiments in the document he signed with the pope," as the Holy See marks the anniversary of the Abu Dhabi deal, which was signed Feb. 4, 2019.
On Thursday, Francis and al-Tayyeb will participate in a virtual event hosted in Abu Dhabi to celebrate the International Day of Human Fraternity — a day now set apart by the United Nations General Assembly as an annual event.
United Nations secretary-general António Guterres and ruler of the United Arab Emirates Mohammed bin Zayed will lead the celebrations marking the controversial Catholic-Muslim concordat, Vatican media announced.
At his Wednesday public audience, Francis said he was pleased that "the nations of the entire world are joining in this celebration, aimed at promoting interreligious and intercultural dialogue."
In an exclusive interview with Church Militant, Ibrahim called out the "doublespeak" of Sheikh al-Tayyeb "if only when speaking in Arabic and appearing on Arabic media, as opposed to when 'dialoguing' with naïve Western leaders who are all too eager to believe what they want to hear."
"For instance, the Document on Human Fraternity signed by al-Tayyeb emphatically insists on religious freedom, stating that 'the fact that people are forced to adhere to a certain religion or culture must be rejected,'" Ibrahim noted.
Ibrahim, author of recent bestseller Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War Between Islam and the West, explained that al-Tayyeb is on record quoting "those learned in Islamic law [al-fuqaha] and the imams of the four schools of jurisprudence" saying that apostates [converts from Islam] should be punished. To underscore the point, the top Islamic cleric cited a hadith [tradition], saying, "Whoever changes his Islamic religion, kill him."
If al-Tayyeb is a wolf in sheep's clothing, Francis is a starry-eyed shepherd leading —
or at least leaving — his flock to the slaughter.
"So much for religious freedom," Ibrahim lamented, elaborating on how the grand imam "is renowned for turning a blind eye to the ongoing persecution of Egypt's most visible non-Muslim minorities, the Coptic Christians."
Despite the well-documented fact that Muslim mobs attack Christians almost "every two to three" days, al-Tayyeb told Coptic Pope Tawadros II, "Egypt represents the ultimate and supreme example of national unity" between Muslims and Christians, according to Ibrahim.
Some examples include the burning of churches and Christian homes, the coldblooded murder of a Coptic man defending his grandchild from Muslim bullies and the stripping, beating, and parading in the nude of a 70-year-old Christian woman, he added.
"The Grand Imam doesn't have a single word for the persecution and displacement of the Copts — his own Egyptian countrymen," remarked Ibrahim. "Instead, he claims that 'the Copts have been living in Egypt for over 14 centuries in safety, and there is no need for all this artificial concern over them,' adding that 'true terrorism was created by the West.'"
Ibrahim, who has acted as a consultant for the U.S. Strategic Command and the Defense Intelligence Agency, was born to Egyptian parents and has studied under renowned military historian Victor Davis Hanson.
Ibrahim told Church Militant that "far from speaking up for Egypt's Christian minorities," al-Tayyeb "has confirmed that they are 'infidels.'"
The Grand Imam is renowned for turning a blind eye to the ongoing persecution
of Egypt's most visible non-Muslim minorities, the Coptic Christians.
Ibrahim clarified:
While al-Tayyeb used the label in a technical manner — correctly saying that, as rejecters of Muhammad's prophecy, Christians are infidels [kafir] — he also knows that labeling them as such validates all the animosity they feel and experience in Egypt, since the mortal enemy of the Muslim is the infidel.
To demonstrate al-Tayyeb's duplicity, Ibrahim showed Church Militant an Arabic statement from the Cairo Institute for Human Rights, which reads: "In March 2016, before the German parliament, Sheikh al-Tayyeb made unequivocally clear that religious freedom is guaranteed by the Koran, while, in Cairo, he makes the exact opposite claims."
Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi with Pope Tawadros II
Ibrahim also named other Muslim commentators in Egypt who noted how al-Tayyeb had refused to denounce the Islamic State (ISIS) jihadists as "un-Islamic," despite al-Azhar's dogmatic position on "infidels" and "apostates."
Summing up his verdict on the futility of the Human Fraternity document, Ibrahim said: "While secular Western talking heads who don't know the first thing about Islam continue squealing about how it is being 'misunderstood,' here is arguably the Muslim world's leading authority confirming many of the cardinal points held by ISIS."
He continued:
Al-Tayyeb believes that Islam is not just a religion to be practiced privately but rather is a totalitarian system designed to govern the whole of society through the implementation of Sharia; he supports one of the most inhumane laws — punishment of the Muslim who wishes to leave Islam; he downplays the plight of Egypt's persecuted Christians, that is, when he's not inciting hatred against them by calling them "infidels" — the worst category in Islam's lexicon — even as he refuses to denounce the genocidal Islamic State likewise.
Al-Tayyeb's signature on the Human Fraternity pact "does not seem to be worth much —certainly not the fanfare surrounding it," the academic observed. "If al-Tayyeb is a wolf in sheep's clothing, Francis is a starry-eyed shepherd leading — or at least leaving — his flock to the slaughter."
"It's past high time he stopped playing 'harmless dove' and became 'wise as a serpent' — if only for the sake of millions of Christians being persecuted under Islam," Ibrahim urged.
Egypt is home to the largest Christian community in the Middle East. Officially, about 10% of the population of 95 million are Christian, although many believe the figure is significantly higher.
Islamism Is Stunting Turkish Academic Achievement
by Burak Bekdil
Algemeiner
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan attends a joint news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin (not pictured), following a meeting in Moscow, Russia, March 5, 2020. Photo: Pavel Golovkin / Pool via Reuters.
Turkey, with a population of 83 million and two Nobel Prizes won, ranks 62nd on the list of countries by Nobel laureates per capita. This score is worse than that of the Palestinian territories, Bulgaria, Guatemala, Azerbaijan, Algeria, Yemen, Ghana, Morocco, and Iraq. Israel ranks 12th. Austria, the population of which is about one-tenth that of Turkey, ranks sixth. Turkey ranks 35th on Science Capitals of the World’s scientific progress list. Israel ranks second on that list, right after the United States.
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk became the first Turkish laureate when he won the 2006 prize in literature. In 2015, Turkish molecular biologist Aziz Sancar was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry along with Tomas Lindalh (Sweden/UK) and Paul L. Modrich (American).
These days, Turks are taking great pride in the fact that a Turkish couple, Özlem Türeci and Uğur Şahin, along with their team of scientists, developed a vaccine for the coronavirus that has proved more than 90% effective in preventing the disease among trial volunteers who had no evidence of having previously been infected.
The international media have likened the Turkish couple to Marie and Pierre Curie, the French couple who won Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry in 1903 and 1911. The Financial Times declared Türeci and Şahin its People of the Year for 2020. They may be the next Turks to become Nobel laureates.
One literary prize and three in science: do these represent great successes for the Turkish nation? One Turkish professor friend said, “For decades Turkish scientific progress was underestimated … along with Turkish scientists. There cannot be an ethnic/DNA-based link between nations and scientific success or failure.”
Otherwise, Jews would be superior to Turks!
He is both right and wrong.
Who is Turkish Nobel laureate Professor Aziz Sancar? He was born into a lower-class, uneducated family in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast. (His second cousin, Mithat Sancar, is currently a pro-Kurdish member of the Turkish parliament.) Though he came from a village school in the poorest part of a poor country, Sancar miraculously completed his MD degree at Istanbul University in 1969. He won a scholarship from the Turkish state scientific institute TÜBİTAK to pursue further education in biochemistry at Johns Hopkins University in the US. He completed his PhD degree at the University of Texas at Dallas in the laboratory of Claud Stan Rupert, now a professor emeritus. Sancar has pursued his professional career and conducted his research within the American academic system.
Özlem Türeci and Uğur Şahin live in Germany. They are the founders of BioNTech, a company that until recently was little known outside the small world of European biotechnology start-ups. The original focus of BioNTech was cancer treatment. In 2019, BioNTech went public. In recent months, the company’s market value soared past $21 billion, making the couple among the richest in Germany.
Şahin, 55, was born in Iskenderun, a southern Turkish town bordering Syria. When he was four his family moved to Cologne, West Germany, where his parents worked at a Ford factory. Şahin became a physician at the University of Cologne and earned a doctorate from that university in 1993 for his work on immunotherapy in tumor cells. His wife, Türeci, 53, was born in Germany, the daughter of a Turkish physician who had immigrated from Istanbul.
What do these success stories tell us? Turks can score spectacular scientific successes — as long as they conduct their academic careers in the free world, not in a country strangled by an increasingly Islamist regime.
In an iron-fist response to a coup attempt on July 15, 2016, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan purged 15,200 Education Ministry officials along with 21,000 private school teachers. The Council of Higher Education asked the deans of the country’s state and private universities — all 1,577 of them — to resign. A total of 626 educational institutions, mostly private, were shut down. In December 2019, the Erdogan administration appointed trustees and took over Istanbul Şehir University, an elite school linked to former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu and his intellectual entourage. The university, ironically, was inaugurated by Erdogan in 2010, together with its founder, Davutoğlu, then foreign minister and now Erdogan’s political rival.
After the fall of Istanbul Şehir University, the government seized another Davutoğlu-linked institution, the Foundation for Sciences and Arts (BISAV in its Turkish acronym). This institution, founded in 1986, was home to thousands of seminars, academic workshops, and research programs on politics, history, economics, and literature.
In the meantime, Erdogan keeps bragging that his government has brought the number of imam school students to 1.3 million from only 60,000 in 2002. To borrow Shelby Foote’s famous line, with a minor addition: “A Turkish university is a group of buildings around a library and a mosque.”
In 2015, Islamic scholar Nureddin Yıldız argued that “working women paved the way for prostitution.” Associate professor Teyfur Erdogdu told state broadcaster TRT that he regularly meets with Allah and the Prophet Muhammad in his dreams. Vural Bulut, a scholar at the Çanakkale 18 Mart University and head of its media center, called Erdogan’s opponents “sons of bitches.” Another pro-government academic, Dr. Yavuz Örnek from Istanbul University’s Marine Sciences Faculty, claimed that technology was more advanced in the time of the Prophet Noah than it is today. Hosted by TRT, Örnek said Noah had talked to his son on a mobile phone to convince him to come aboard his ark, and that the ark itself was made of steel and resistant to waves as high as 400 meters. He added that Noah’s ark ran on nuclear power.
The absurdity aside, Noah's Ark had no form of locomotion, it was a rectangular box, and there were literally no waves on the ocean at the time of the flood.
In April 2018, Necdet Budak, president of Aegean University in Izmir, ordered his academic staff to line up by the road to greet President Erdogan, who wanted to visit the campus. Also in 2018, Ahmet Ağırakça, president of Artuklu University in the southeastern province of Mardin, proposed that university presidents wear the turban of an Islamic sheik. In another speech, he declared himself “President Erdogan’s representative in Mardin.”
In November 2018, Professor Ibrahim Emiroğlu, head of the research center at the 9 Eylül University in Izmir and Dean of the Faculty of Aviation and Space, told a conference that menstruation was an illness that “must be treated” and recommended that 15-year-old girls be married off. He advised all women to wear the hijab, and claimed the “greatest threat [to society] is secularism.”
In addition to all that academic insanity, Erdogan’s leadership has prompted university professors to declare that:
“Universities are houses of prostitution as they bring female and male students together.”
“In this country I trust the insight of ignorant people.”
“Shakespeare was a crypto Muslim; hence his success.”
“Shaking an unknown woman’s hand is more horrible than holding fire.”
“Women who exhibit cleavage in dress deserve to be raped.”
The same scientific institution that awarded a scholarship to Professor Sancar in the 1970s — TÜBİTAK — sponsored and exhibited in 2016 a study on the “prophecy of Muslim saints who can be seen in more than one place at the same time.”
The effect on Turkish academics of the Islamist pill the Turks have been voluntarily swallowing since 2002 is destructive. Expect worse to come.
Burak Bekdil is an Ankara-based columnist. He regularly writes for the Gatestone Institute and Defense News and is a fellow at the Middle East Forum.
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