Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA)

On January 3, 2025, the Pope met with Iranian regime cleric Abolhassan Navab. The Pope said: “We also have no problem with the Jews, and our only problem is with Benjamin Netanyahu, who regardless of International laws and human rights has created crises in the region and the world.”¹ Navab’s government and their Hamas and Hizbullah proxy militias have murderously attacked Israel both before and since October 7, 2023, dominated Syria and Iraq, and head a world narcoterrorism ring. Yet, Navab told the Pope, “the Iranian government and people are always ready to help spread peace and justice in the world.”

Since October 7, 2023, the Pope has called for Israel to cease its fire against Hamas, called for an investigation into whether the Gaza war is “genocide,”² and before Christmas, he was photographed viewing a nativity scene in which baby Jesus was draped in a keffiyeh, reflecting historical revisionism typical to the progressive left trend of “Palestinian Jesus.”³

The Pope’s reactions to Israel’s multifront war of survival against Islamists, whose ideology also reviles Christians and the West, recall the Church’s pre-Second Vatican Council and pre-Nostra Aetate Jew hatred. The Pope may claim to be concerned with human rights, but his statements excuse, justify, and encourage the Islamist source of aggression, endangering Jews and moderate Muslims, but also signaling doomsday for Western Christians.

This is because the Pope’s prostration before Islamists is symbolic of a larger European crisis that repeats the history of Eastern MENA Christians. The recent exposure of the decades-long cover-up of Muslim rape grooming gangs in England has brought to wider media attention how progressive concerns over racism and human rights have ironically led to the submission of Western society to Islamist elements and the violation of human rights. In Europe, the seat of the Vatican, Christian demographics dwindle, while Muslim populations grow,⁴ influencing progressive European politics to provide a sacred place for the Palestinian cause.⁵ Meanwhile, disturbing migration-related societal phenomena such as terrorism, violence, sexual grooming, and street anarchy are downplayed.

The Pope’s adoption of Palestinian replacement theology⁶ fits under the umbrella of Liberation Theology, a controversial Marxist stream within Christianity, popularized in the Latin American Catholic Church in the 1960s. Today, two-thirds of Catholics – clergy and laypeople – hail from the postcolonial Marxist-influenced “Global South,” including Argentine Francis.⁷

Liberation Theology preaches advocacy for the poor and oppressed, a classic Catholic theme, especially in Francis’s Jesuit tradition. However, according to Soviet-era Romanian dissident Ion Pacepa, Liberation Theology was a Soviet “active measure” formulated by the KGB to bring Latin American churches under communist influence.⁸ Liberation Theology’s evolving holistic social justice approach has been embraced by other churches, including Protestants, and Palestinian denominations.⁹

Strangely, though Liberation Theology stems from the left, its stances are echoed by America’s emerging conservative “woke right.”¹⁰ Woke right influencers regularly espouse conspiracy theories to explain both current events and history, and accuse some evangelical Protestants of kowtowing to “neoconservative” – now a code word for Jewish – Zionism, blaming Israel and Jews for starting wars.¹¹

“Woke right” conservatives popular on social media are hyper-focused on criticizing Zionism, AIPAC, and Jewish influence on American foreign policy, believing it detracts from non-interventionist “America First” objectives. For example, Tucker Carlson has hosted a Holocaust revisionist,¹² has hurled antisemitic tropes at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy,¹³ has promoted Russian talking points,¹⁴ and has interviewed a far-left Columbia professor who has demonized Netanyahu in a clip posted on social media by President Donald Trump.¹⁵

The Pope’s selective pacifism and Liberation Theology’s West-critical postcolonial bent has become a meeting point of the woke right’s classic Jew-hatred and the woke left’s Soviet-era Israel hatred, the current “antisemitic horseshoe” of the extremes. The Pope’s genocide suspicions echo the “deicide” demonization of Jews, for which they deserve eternal punishment and persecution. These conspiracies feed a narrative that Jews are out to destroy the West and Christianity, which ultimately serves the Iranian, Russian, and Chinese propaganda strategies of subverting the West and its allies.

Tragically, some Christians today are unintentionally repeating history by pandering to Islamists, as did their Christian predecessors in the Middle East and North Africa during the Islamic conquests. What began as obsequiousness and accommodation to Islamic conquerors, with the jizya tax duly paid to show inferiority, became repression, discrimination, and domination resulting in the decimation of MENA’s Christian-majority population.¹⁶ The slow, painful process of “dhimmitude” – public humiliation, discrimination, kidnappings and sexual violence toward Christian (and Jewish) women, forced conversions, and assimilation – has left today’s MENA states with single-digit demographic percentages of Christians.

The Pope’s uncritical adoption of the Palestinian cause’s rewriting of Christian and Jewish history, is a nod to Muslim Brotherhood-affiliate Hamas. Since its inception a century ago, the Muslim Brotherhood has derided the West while using Western image and rhetoric in its long-term jihad. Qatar has led both the rhetorical jihad – through Al-Jazeera and other news outlets – and the kinetic one through its support of Hamas and other extremists.

Expectedly, Jews are still being blamed for regional instability by some Christians. After the Syria takeover by Islamist-led Hayat Tahrir al-Shams, some Christians blamed Israel for endangering vulnerable Syrian Christians, while ignoring both the ills of the Assad regime and the larger global threat of Islamic extremism which rejects non-Muslim sovereignty anywhere Islam once conquered – dar al-Islam, which includes swaths of Europe.¹⁷ Jihadists still aim to expand their territory into the realm of war – dar al-harb – whether by da’wa – Islamic missionizing – or conquest – jihad.

Scapegoating Jews may be more comfortable than facing the larger threat of global Islamism, but adopting a prefabricated Marxist-Islamist (“Red-Green”) Liberation Theology narrative into conservativism leads Western Christians to undermine their survival, where in the past, Christian submission has led to their near-extinction in MENA.

* * *

Notes