The Axis of Evil is Not Mourning the Pope

Like those old "Levy's Rye Bread" billboard advertisements, saying "You do not have to be Jewish to like Levy's Rye Bread," one does not have to be Roman Catholic to feel genuine sorrow at the passing of John Paul II.

Pope John Paul II had an especially warm relationship with Jews. Among those expressing their sorrow this week were the leading Israeli newspaper, the Israeli Chief Rabbi and most of the Jewish world. Individual Jews, including Holocaust survivors whom the Pope had befriended, recalled their warm ties with the man who later became Pontifex Maximus of the Roman church.

But not everyone shared these sentiments. The Pope, along with the Catholic Church, has always been despised by the Radical Left and by its Islamafascist partners in the Axis of Evil. For instance, the Islaam.com Web site asked whether it was fitting to honor a man such as John Paul II whom it characterized as a

"human being who possibly misled more other humans than any of his contemporaries? A taghut who promoted the worst sin, declared what is lawful as unlawful and what is unlawful as lawful, while people followed him? Should one weep for him? "

It added that all Christians are tools manipulated by Satan. Similar sentiments can be found in other Islamofascist media.

The seemingly moderate Arab News grudgingly brought itself to express some regret at the passing of the Pope, but mainly because he had criticized the American invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein:

"John Paul was equally strident in his condemnation of George W. Bush plans to invade Iraq which he described as a crime against peace and a defeat for humanity. Until the very last minute, papal envoys were doing all they could to head off what he saw as not a solution but a bloody escalation of the challenge posed by Saddam."

Under the rule of the Palestinian Authority, Catholics in Bethlehem have been brutalized and the PLO is carrying out a quiet ethnic cleansing of them. As the Catholics are driven out and replaced with Palestinian Moslems, it is also timely to recall the venomous hostility which the Palestinians' most faithful ally – the far Left in the USA – has long harbored toward the Catholic Church, as exposed in this FrontPage article. There John Zmirak writes:

"One could understand how in the 18th and 19th centuries classical liberals might be suspicious of a Church that at the time allied itself to autocratic monarchies; but those monarchies are gone, even as the Church has reclaimed at Vatican II her own ancient insights into religious liberty and the rights of individuals vis-a-vis the State—renouncing all the illiberal practices that darkened the Church’s name in the Middle Ages and thereafter. (It’s important to note that Leftists long overlooked, lied about, or minimized far more oppressive practices in their own favored Marxist utopias—as they still do whitewash horrendous abuses in Cuba and even the Islamic world.)"