Magdi Allam: Catholicism's Neophyte, is a Fraud

By Khalid Amayreh

PIC, April 5, 2008

 

Magdi Allam, the notorious Egyptian-born Italian Islamophobe-turned-Catholic,   has been trying to create the impression that his highly-publicized  conversion to Roman Catholicism at the Vatican  last week is  a genuine spiritual transformation.

However, a plethora of anti-Islam statements and remarks by the controversial neophyte suggests that the man is an imposter  and that his conversion had more to do with morbid hatred of  Islam and Muslims and less with true spirituality.

In fact, during and immediately after the conversion ceremony, Allam took the opportunity to besmirch the religion of up to 1.5 billion human beings, lumping all Muslims, the good, the practicing, the nominal, the peaceful, the violent, the extremist-in one category.

This is obviously an expression of  morbid thinking, because a truly reasonable  person would always  seek make a careful distinction between what religion says and what some followers do? This is true with regard to Christianity, Islam and all other religions.

A few months ago, Tony Blair, who was not by all means an icon of moral excellence, also converted to Catholicism at the Vatican. However, unlike this fraudulent  Allam, he didn’t use  the conversion occasion to vilify the Anglican Church or heap calumnies on non-Catholic Christian religions.

Similarly, I have seen testimonies by numerous recent  Christian converts to Islam who spoke solemnly of the common source of monotheistic religions, and none of them would label Christianity as “evil” and “physiologically violent”  as Allam  sought to smear Islam. This is despite all the wars, genocides, holocausts, inquisitions and crusades that have been carried out in the name of the Catholic Church, rightly or wrongly.

So why is it that Allam has been a conspicuously  repugnant exception? And why has the Holy See remained silent, even acquiescent, toward this  travesty of truth?  Does offending the sensibilities of 1.5 billion human beings who hold Islam dear bring honor to Christianity?  Is Allam going to serve his new religion  by besmirching  another religion? By fostering hatred for Islam and Muslims? By showing infatuation with Zionist racism and apartheid in Palestine? By embracing a state that practices ethnic cleansing, genocide, and mass murder of men, women and children whose only crime is their enduring determination to be free from oppression and foreign occupation?

What kind of a good Catholic will this man be when he wholeheartedly embraces a state that murders school children and then claims the murder was done by mistake, a state that allow fanatical thugs to take over Arab homes, Arab farms and Arab property and then calls itself the “only true democracy in the Middle East.”?

Last year, Allam published a book  titled “Long Live Israel: From the Ideology of Death to the Civilization of Life, My story.” This work caricatured  a psychological disturbed person  who doesn’t hesitate to lie to serve his morbid thoughts, a man who ignores historically-established facts  and who readily cite obscene Zionist lies in order to vindicate and glorify the  Zio-Nazi state known as the state of Israel. What else can be said of a man who calls the destruction and obliteration of 500 Palestinian towns and villages, along with the expulsion of all their native inhabitants, “civilization of life”?

Allam is not ignorant of realities in Palestine-Israel. He knows that the Israelis are acting very much as the Third Reich did more than six decades ago. But he chooses to ignore all of this, because his entire approach is based on malice and hate, not honesty and conscience. He is a man without  moral conscience, who is sick at the heart,  because truly conscientious people wouldn’t  call genocide, racism and ethnic cleansing “ expressions of liberty and civilization.”

I really wonder what Allam would think of testimonies made by hundreds of  Catholic clergymen, including some from Italy and Germany, who have compared between Israel and Nazi Germany.

Last year, German Bishop, Gregor Maria Franz Hanke, while on a visit to the West Bank, described the Israeli policy toward the Palestinian in the following words:

“This morning we saw pictures of the Warsaw ghetto at Yad Vashem and this evening we are going to the Ramallah ghetto.”

Similarly, in 2002, Portuguese Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago, who also was on a visit to the West Bank, had this to say about Israel, which Allam believes represents light, culture and civilization.

“I didn’t know that in order to protect a few people, farmland had to be confiscated and crops had to be destroyed; I didn’t know that in order to provide security for a few people, hundreds had to be kept waiting at checkpoints and roadblocks before being allowed to return home exhausted, that is if they are not killed.”

In  truth, Allam is a pseudo-Intellectual because if he were a real, let alone  “courageous” intellectual, he would have dealt with the facts of Israeli criminality. Indeed, the fact that Allam chose to ignore these cardinal facts,  which many conscientious Israeli intellectuals have exposed and highlighted,  shows that he is a liar, a charlatan, and psychologically insecure person that is seeking to find refuge in  mendacity and hatred of Islam and Muslims on Israel’s behalf.

Christianity, a great religion, shouldn’t  court liars and messengers of hate.