By Walid Shoebat (Shoebat Exclusive)

Dear Pope Francis,

Palestinian officials hailed your decision to refer to biblical Judea as the “State of Palestine” and in the official program, the Vatican referred to President Mahmoud Abbas as the president of the “state of Palestine,” and his Bethlehem office as the “presidential palace.”

You pointedly gave Abbas a title fitting to Christ and His true followers as a “man of peace.”

Is it now a standard to have a bias against Israel and fear offending the Muslims?

Are you aware that the Palestinian Constitution states, “Sharia will be the paramount source of legislation”?And by your support of Palestine, you are granting Islamic law primacy over every other legal source, including international human rights conventions; the minorities living in the Palestinian Authority are denied proper redress via the courts.

And what about the flock? Palestinian Christian leaders who should be protecting their co-religionists are like you abandoning them to the forces of Islam.

And while the martyrs “rest yet for a little season, until their fellow servants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled”, will you speak out for the blood Ahmad El-Achwal, the convert from Islam to Christianity?

Have you walked his “Via Delarosa”?

It was the very Palestinian Authority whom you now support went after him, as the Roman torturers, went after our Lord, and without mercy. In their attempts to force El-Achwal to revert to Islam, they tortured him so severely that he required lengthy hospitalization.

His story is like Christ’s, he endured the passion, and he suffered under the pains of whips and was scourged with stripes. His Achilles tendon was cut open. Cigarettes were extinguished all over his body; he was beaten with electric cables and scalded by burning torture implements on his back and buttocks.

There was only one place for him to hide, amongst the Jewish protected city in Jerusalem.

But El-Achwal as Christ, could not abandon his flock. He had to return to your “Palestine” to visit his wife, eight children and his small flock he attended at his apartment in the Askar Refugee Camp near Nablus. El-Achwal was soon identified and beaten by a group of men whose faces were covered with the very keffeyahs that Palestinians came out to greet you with. They then threatened his life. His car was torched and his apartment firebombed.

El-Achwal was no Judas, he never sold Jesus for silver coins regardless of how many times he was promised that if he reverted to Islam, he would be freed from prison and appointed to a high-ranking Palestinian Authority job with a large office.

Like Christ, El-Achwal rejected all such temptations by the devil. His six-year ordeal ended in 2004 when masked Hamas gunmen, the very gunmen whom Abbas now partners with shot him to death.

Before you went on this God forsaken trip, have you reviewed the violence against Christians and the Holy Sites of Christianity to understand what kind of state the future Palestinian Republic may turn out to be?

In speaking at an Islamo-Christian meeting in Ramallah, Patriarch Sabbah who was pro-Palestine way before you had to finally admit, “Rapid and decisive action is needed to contrast the attempts of those who seek to exploit the situation to create further damage and destruction in this land and against its people”. “The risk is,” the Patriarch said, “that onlookers worldwide, in seeing what happens, will reach the conclusion that the Palestinian Authority is unable to protect all its citizens and therefore does not deserve to become an actual state.”

Did you read this? It “does NOT deserve to become an actual state”.

In the past, France and Italy defended the Catholics, the British protected the Protestants, and the Russians protected the Orthodox, and now they are all left helpless.

Have you forgotten what our Lord said in Matthew 25? He, the Messiah will judge us on how we treated His flock. Christ is no respecter of persons and will cast to hell the shepherds who abandoned the flock regardless if they had the title “Pope”.

Here, let me introduce myself, my rebuke, and the words of my king, the true governor of Judah:

So when will your office stop playing with the wolf and care for the sheep instead?

When Ariel Sharon announced in 2001 a ban on Arafat (before he crocked), to go to Bethlehem, the Vatican objected.

And no, I am not only picking on the Catholics, even Jews sell out on their own flock, at the time the Israeli President Moshe Katsav also like your office did, he intervened on behalf of Arafat, that ugly looking terrorist.

As soon as he took over my village of Bethlehem, Arafat unilaterally fired the city’s Christian politicians and replaced them with Muslim cronies. He appointed a Muslim governor, Muhammed Rashad A-Jabar, and deposed Bethlehem’s city council, which had nine Christians and two Muslims, reducing the number of Christians councilors to a 50-50 split.

Arafat then converted a Greek Orthodox monastery next to the Church of Nativity, the birthplace of Jesus, into his official Bethlehem residence. And now you call Mahmoud Abbas’s office the “presidential office”? Have you not read that this whole land was reserved to the King of the Jews, and not to some puppet anti-Christ?

Have you done anything about the Christians who said that one of the most significant problems facing Christians in Bethlehem is the rampant confiscation of land by Muslim gangs? Did Christ say that we must love our enemies, including the gangs who rape and pillage us? Or does the shepherd insist that the other shepherds die defending their flock while trying to kill the wolf?

Have you heard their cries?

There are many cases in which Christians have their land stolen by the Muslim mafia. Ask Samir Qumsiyeh, a Bethlehem Christian leader and owner of the Beit Sahour-based private Al-Mahd (Nativity) TV station who said “It is a regular phenomenon in Bethlehem. They go to a poor Christian person with a forged power of attorney document, and then they say we have papers proving you’re living on our land. If you confront them, many times the Christian is beaten. You can’t do anything about it. The Christian loses, and he runs away”.

Qumsiyeh himself said that Islamic gangs targeted him. He said his home was firebombed after he returned from a trip abroad during which he gave public speeches outlining the plight of Bethlehem’s Christian population.

Have you asked Abbas as to why selling property to Jews is a crime punishable by death?

I realize that for the sake of peace, we must put these old stories behind us, but the “Palestine” you supported the other day endorsed Hamas a few weeks ago. Would washing and kissing their feet constitute the Lord’s instruction to “love your enemy”? All this sounds as if kissing the feet of Ahmad El-Achwal is an acceptable thing, but only if he remained Muslim?

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