This post serves to clarify, and hopefully answer, a most objectionable remark reputed to have been made by the Pope in describing the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as “An angel of peace”.

After a short holiday and ten days offline I caught up with events and noted one of many items in Koenig’s Eye-view from the White House. This was about the Vatican’s official recognition of the existence of the Palestinian state in a new treaty finalised last Wednesday.  The Vatican has long had diplomatic relationships with what was previously the terrorist Palestinian Liberation Organization. According to  The Independent, the PLO represents Palestine in countries that don’t yet recognise the non-existent state of Palestine.

The Vatican followed the UN General Assembly decision of 2012 to recognise that state and, in my opinion, joined the herd of lemmings heading for the cliffs to their doom!

The Times of Israel reports Jerusalem as stating this move isn’t conducive to advancing peace negotiations and criticised the Vatican announcement. Bill Koenig notes that very soon after Pope John Paul II held a peace conference in 2002 focusing on the Middle-East peace process, the Catholic Church became embroiled in huge sex scandals.

The Vatican’s endorsement of a state of Palestine on God’s covenant land of Judea and Samaria will probably lead to its endorsing East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital of Palestine, and have an enormous impact on the so-called peace process and with huge End-time repercussions internationally. Bill is of the opinion that the World Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches are likely to follow the Vatican with their own agreements. Only the God of Israel knows the full consequences of these grossly unwise actions.

True Intentions

Were The Holy See truly ‘holy’ it would have first insisted upon and ensured that Abbas repudiates and reverses his personal, public declarations of eradicating the state of Israel, as reported in my  email of September 2011.

British author, Times columnist and broadcaster Melanie Philips doesn’t mince words, as on her Facebook:

“So it would appear that what the Pope has actually recognized and endorsed is the open intention to destroy Israel and replace it by Palestine.”

The entry links to her Jerusalem Post Opinion piece in which she provides evidence for her point:

“It puts the Vatican publicly behind the Palestinian strategy of waging war against Israel by diplomatic means. 

“It is a lie first of all because there is no state of Palestine.

“However many countries proclaim recognition of this spurious state does not alter that fact. The Vatican’s “treaty” is no more than a crude propaganda stunt assisting a war of extermination.

“Recognition of a Palestine state is a ploy to bounce it into virtual existence by getting the world to agree it exists. The sole reason it does not in reality exist is that, resting on a wholesale denial of Jewish history in the land, the purpose of such a state is to create the platform for a devastating war on Israel.

“By supporting this Potemkin Palestine, the Vatican has lined up behind those who disdain international law. In supporting the recognition gambit which tears up the Palestinians’ own treaty obligations under the Oslo Accords, the pope has now openly made Catholics complicit with reneging on promises and shattering bonds of trust.

“And where exactly is this state of Palestine the pope has now recognized?”

Melanie then proceeds to cover the point I briefly referred to in 2011:

“For as PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement reiterated on its Facebook page this week (according to Palestinian Media Watch): “Palestine means the entire national land, from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea.”…And of course, the PA’s maps of Palestine include all of Israel.

“So it would appear that what the pope has actually recognized and endorsed is the open intention to destroy Israel and replace it by Palestine.”

Angel of Peace?

Working through my in-tray yesterday I came across Christian reports expressing strong objections to the terms by which Pope Francis is reported to have described President Abbas when they met over the weekend.

Associated Press (AP) had reported the Pope as calling him “an angel of peace”!!  It was sloppy journalism but had been repeated unquestionably by mainstream media.

Later in the day I received news of the error from Honest Reporting, which you can read in Media, not Pope, dub Abbas an “Angel of Peace”. It opens:

The meeting between Pope Francis and PA President Mahmoud Abbas has become a classic illustration of how a lie gets halfway across the world while the truth is still putting it’s shoes on.

The report concludes,

In other words, the Pope did not call Abbas an “angel of peace” at all. Quite the opposite. He was urging him to become an angel of peace in the future.

AP has since issued a correction and I trust this clarifies a few things regarding the Pope and Palestine.

For further clarification read media watchdog’s PA Depicts a World Without Israel.

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