The Pope's Genocide Cowardice

Pope Francis recently implied that Israel was committing “genocide” in its campaign against Hamas. While the pope was eager to apply the term to Muslims terrorists dying in the war, he has been reluctant to apply it to Christians being massacred by Muslims in the Middle East.

Over 50,000 Christians were massacred by Muslims in Nigeria. Dozens of churches were attacked, some on Christmas, without the pope ever condemning this as genocide.

In 2016, after millions of Christians had fled Islamic violence in Nigeria, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and much of the Muslim world, Pope Francis rejected calling it a genocide.

“I want to say clearly that I do not like it when people speak of a ‘genocide of Christians,’ for example in the Middle East,” Pope Francis argued, and claimed that he preferred the term “martyrdom.”

The pope’s comments were a retreat from his reaction a year earlier to the abduction and killing of priests in Syria when he declared it, “a form of genocide — I insist on the word — is taking place, and it must end.”

Over the course of a year, Pope Francis had decided to run away from calling the murder of Christians a “genocide”.

A week later he visited Armenia, on the front lines of a war with a Muslim country and used the term “genocide” as a purely historic reference, while failing to use it to describe the contemporary treatment of Christians in the Middle East where he admitted that “religious and ethnic minorities had become the target of persecution and cruel treatment, to the point that suffering for one’s religious belief has become a daily reality.” He also refused to name the Muslim perpetrators, only complaining about “a presentation of religion and religious values in a fundamentalist way, which is used to justify the spread of hatred, discrimination and violence.”

The pope’s refusal to address the subject of Islamic terrorism was an ongoing problem.

In 2014, Pope Francis met with a delegation from the World Jewish Congress to condemn the murder of Christians in the Middle East.

WJC President Ronald Lauder, a Republican donor, asked after the meeting, “Why doesn’t the world react? There has been a tremendous focus on Israel when it defended itself, as any country would, when thousands of rockets were fired on it by terrorists, but not a word for the thousands of Christians in Iraq, Syria and the Middle East.”

The strange thing was why the question was coming from a Jewish leader and not the pope.

Lauder claimed that the pope “privately” told him that “first it was your turn and now it is our turn. In other words, first Jews suffered savage attacks that were met with the world’s silence and now it is Christians who are being annihilated and the world is silent.”

Pope Francis was clearly referencing the threat often heard by Middle Eastern Christians, ““First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people”, yet he wasn’t willing to say it out loud.

Worse still, when Pope Francis met with a WJC delegation in 2016, his focus was on the sacred importance of bringing more Muslims into Europe. Earlier that year, Muslim terrorists had bombed Brussels Airport and a train station, killing 32 people and wounding hundreds more.

Pope Francis, instead of condemning the horrifying mass migration that had brought Muslims terrorists into the heart of Europe to murder Christians, claimed that, “Europe often forgets that it has been enriched by migrants” because it has a falling birth rate and is “lacking creativity” that the Muslim migrants were bringing to it.

“We need to reflect on integration, which is important. The people who committed the terrorist attacks in Belgium were not properly integrated,” he argued.

Bringing Muslim migrants to Europe became one of the pope’s great obsessions.

In 2024, Pope Francis claimed that rejecting open borders and mass migration was a “grave sin”. He had previously washed the feet of Muslim migrants and claimed that, “the presence of God today is also called Rohingya” in reference to an invasive Muslim group of migrants who had been expelled from Burma after engaging in systematic violence against Buddhists.

Some Jews have reacted to the pope’s genocide accusation by accusing him of antisemitism, but there’s no reason to think that he is bigoted against Jews in any particular way. Rather, Pope Francis has a politically correct tendency of accusing Christians and Jews, and other groups of genocide, especially when resisting Islam, while refusing to speak out against Islamic terrorism.

Much as the pope has been willing to accuse Israel of genocide, he has also been all too willing to accuse Christians of genocide. In Rwanda, Pope Francis blamed the Catholic Church for the genocide in that country and asked for forgiveness.

After a visit to Canada, Pope Francis described the alleged deaths of Indian children in church schools as genocide. “I asked forgiveness for this activity, which was genocide.” Over 80 Catholic churches have been burned in Canada over the deaths which may not have occurred.

The pope can accuse Christians and Jews of genocide, he just can’t seem to use the term to describe the actual Muslim genocide of Christians that is taking place around the world.

In Nigeria, the massacre of 50,000 Christians has not been condemned by him as a genocide.

Pope Francis is willing to describe the deaths of Muslims terrorists and their human shields as genocide, but not the mass murder of Christians praying in churches on Christmas.

Not content to sell out Christian communities around the world, he demands that Europe accept a stream of endless Muslim migrant invaders until Paris, London and Brussels are as unsafe for Christians as Nigeria.

Pope Francis has slurred Israel, but he is the one enabling a worldwide Christian genocide.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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