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DonViejo

(60,536 posts)
Mon May 21, 2018, 09:09 AM May 2018

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 regime’s 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, they’ve never had the cojones to go after Christ’s 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

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Putin's People Claimed Pope Francis Was With Them Supporting Assad. Nope. (Original Post) DonViejo May 2018 OP
The Facebook post that Pope Francis had endorsed Trump NewJeffCT May 2018 #1

NewJeffCT

(56,827 posts)
1. The Facebook post that Pope Francis had endorsed Trump
Mon May 21, 2018, 09:23 AM
May 2018

was shared over 1 million times in the months leading up to the election. The post that debunks the endorsement was shared about 1% to 2% as often.

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