Pope Francis loves Erdogan: he gave him 50 minutes, not the usual 30 he accords to world leaders.

“Erdoğan discussed the plight of the Christians [sic] minorities in the Middle East and promised to mobilize Turkish support to help them in every possible way, just as the Ottomans did in their 600-year history.”

In reality, the Christians in the Ottoman Empire suffered the institutionalized discrimination and harassment of dhimmitude, punctuated with occasional open persecution. I detail this at length in my next book, The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS, which is scheduled to be out this summer.

“This of course brought the president to the issue of the rising tide of Islamophobia in the West. He asked the pontiff to help Muslims and stand up to this situation, which could turn into a disaster in most areas of Western Europe. The problem that started as xenophobia has mushroomed into enmity toward all Muslims, especially in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and France. The Vatican has also drawn attention to the problem, but Turkey wants a concerted and continuous international effort to fight Islamophobia.”

“Islamophobia” is used to refer to persecution of innocent Muslims, which is never justified, as well as to honest analysis of how jihadis use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and oppression, as I explain in my last book, Confessions of an Islamophobe. The conflation of the two acts as a tool to restrict the freedom of speech and bring the public discourse in the West into line with Sharia blasphemy laws. Pope Francis is unlikely to have any problem with this, since it has been on his watch that the falsehood that Islam is a Religion of Peace has become a superdogma in the Catholic Church: a Catholic can dissent openly and freely from every element of the Nicene Creed and any other dogma of the Catholic Church, and remain a Catholic in good standing. But if a Catholic suggests that Islam is not a Religion of Peace, he will be subjected to organized campaigns from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to make sure he has no platform in Catholic circles and, if possible, anywhere else.

Pope Francis and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops are a disgrace to the Church, to Judeo-Christian civilization, and to the free world.

“Leave them; they are blind guides. And if a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.” (Matthew 15:14)

“Turkey, Vatican agree on Jerusalem,” by İlnur Çevik, Daily Sabah, February 6, 2018: