The real problem the Catholic Church has is not the spurious neologism “Islamophobia,” but a fantasy-based Islamophilia that denies obvious reality and is ruthlessly enforced, as the case of T.J. Joseph demonstrates.
Jordan Denari Duffner of Georgetown University’s Saudi-funded Bridge Initiative is either spectacularly naive or outrageously deceptive or both; in all her writings, including the article below, she completely ignores the reality of jihad violence and the violent exhortations in the Qur’an and Sunnah, and continuously writes as if Muslims were victims of widespread discrimination and harassment in the U.S., which they are not and should not be, and that any examination of the motivating ideology behind that jihad violence is tantamount to inciting violence against innocent Muslims.
In her book Finding Jesus among Muslims: How Loving Islam Makes Me a Better Catholic, Duffner even laments the “Islamophobia” of a Christian family in Jordan she stayed with as an exchange student, claiming they picked it up from Christian television channels and not from their lived experience, which she assumes would have given them a positive impression of Islam: “Despite the fact that they lived among Muslims — who are the vast majority of the population in Jordan — my Christian host family bought into these Christian TV channels’ negative portrayals of Islam.”
The article below is full of the usual nonsense, chiefly the familiar conflation of criticizing Islamic teaching or opposing jihad violence with failing to respect or esteem Muslims as human beings. The effect of this articles and the others that the Bridge Initiative churns out will be to inhibit (even more than it is already) honest discussion of the motives and goals of jihad terrorists, and of the nature of Sharia, and to stigmatize all resistance to it.
In this article Duffner also identifies me as one of the “popular voices who write about Islam for Catholics.” I don’t. I write about Islam for anyone and everyone, and am relieved and grateful to say, in this fantasy- and lie-ridden age when the likes of Pope Francis and Jordan Denari Duffner are in the ascendancy, that I am not a Catholic.
“Leave them; they are blind guides. And if a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit.” (Matthew 15:14)
“A priest’s anti-Muslim comments reveal US Catholics’ Islamophobia problem,” by Jordan Denari Duffner, Religion News Service, February 13, 2020:
(RNS) — On a day in which pastors were encouraged to remind their flocks of the Christian duty to “welcome the stranger,” a Catholic priest in Minnesota used the opportunity to sow fear and suspicion about Muslims.
Calling Islam “the greatest threat” to Christianity and to America, the Rev. Nick VanDenBroeke argued that Muslim immigration to the United States should be curtailed…
The whole incident is reflective of a deeper problem — the discrepancy between the church’s positive official teaching on Muslims and the Islamophobia that often permeates U.S. Catholic communities and discourse.
In its 1965 “Declaration on Non-Christian Religions,” issued during the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church begins by declaring its high esteem and respect for Muslims. The document continues by outlining some of the many similarities Muslims share with Christians, including belief in the one, merciful God who has spoken to humanity; reverence for common figures like Jesus and Mary; and practices like regular prayer, fasting and almsgiving. It then urges Catholics and Muslims around the world to seek mutual understanding and work together to create peace and establish justice.
The most important aspect of the church’s statement about Muslims is the first line — the teaching that we are to treat Muslims with respect and hold them in high regard. In other words, as Catholics our default attitude toward Muslims is to be a positive one. This also extends to how we are to view and engage with others’ religious traditions…
The idea that Islam is “the greatest threat” — as VanDenBroeke put it in his homily — has been promoted widely for years in Catholic publications. As I wrote in the Bridge report “Danger and Dialogue,” the description of Islam as “threat” has been one of the most consistent themes in the work of popular voices who write about Islam for Catholics, like Robert Spencer and Scott Hahn, whose publications often appear on the shelves of Catholic bookstores or in Catholic media outlets.
A nonprofit called the Turning Point Project, which supports the writing of another author, William Kilpatrick, is exclusively dedicated to “educating Catholics and other Americans about the threat from Islam.”
In 2014, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released a statement about dialogue with Muslims, noting that, “Sadly, in recent years, there has been a deliberate rejection of this call to engage in dialogue with our Muslim brothers and sisters by some in the Catholic Church and in other ecclesial families.”…