Putin's People Claimed Pope Francis Was With Them Supporting Assad. Nope.
The faulty premise of a supposed joint declaration was that Assad protects religious minorities. The pope gave it a pass, but the Russian Orthodox Church put his name on it.
MICHAEL WEISS
05.21.18 5:18 AM ET
The suffering of Christians in the Middle East often has been exploited to advance the agendas of authoritarian governments, particularly those claiming to fight wars on terror.
In recent years Bashar al-Assad has used such suffering as a way to discourage scrutiny of his atrocities, dispatching loyalist Christian delegations to Washington, for instance, who bear a single, uncomplicated message: Muslim extremists are the only cause for turmoil in a war-ravaged country and so, by implication, a secular dictatorship is the last line of defense for this embattled confessional minority.
It was a convenient and clever narrative, which worked only insofar as one ignored the regimes responsibility for the majority of damaged or destroyed churches in Syria, its arrest, torture and murder of Christian anti-regime activists, and its well-documented history of conniving with the very jihadists from which it now claims to be protecting vulnerable adherents of the Gospels.
Yet where the mukhabarat information warriors may have their sites on such low-hanging fruit as Tulsi Gabbard, Dana Rohrabacher and Sebastian Gorka, theyve never had the cojones to go after Christs vicar on earth. That task, it seems, was left to the former KGB.
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https://www.thedailybeast.com/putins-people-claimed-pope-francis-was-with-them-supporting-assad-nope