Pope Rescinds Palestine Recognition: ‘Evil Terrorist Bastards’

Ben Gurion International Airport, Israel, May 26 – Pope Francis took the opportunity upon his departure from the Holy Land to retract the Vatican’s recognition of the State of Palestine this evening, calling the leaders of the Palestinian government and nationalist movements evil terrorists who deserve damnation and suffering, not legitimacy.

The normally congenial pontiff minced no words in his parting remarks for his first official visit here, though during most of the trip he had seemed to endorse, if mostly by silence, Palestinian national aspirations and grievances against Israel. Calling “every last one” of the Palestinian leaders murderers and thieves, Francis performed a complete diplomatic reversal that places the Vatican at odds with both all other European governments and its own circle of diplomats and advisers.

“I am by nature a man who grins and bears the intolerable,” noted the pope, “even to the point of smiling warmly and patiently while others continue to sin, knowing that not all offenses require an immediate, harsh response. However, I have now become convinced, after visiting both sides of the divide, that only one side seeks genuine peace while the other seeks nothing but to vilify, delegitimize, isolate, and ultimately destroy the other.”

“I therefore have no choice, as the representative of God’s revealed Truth to mankind, but to withdraw any endorsement of Palestinian statehood,” he paused to spit, “until such time as their representative leadership acknowledge the Jewish historical and spiritual attachment to the Holy Land and cease calling for their removal from it, and cease using their own people as pawns in the struggle to accomplish just that,” he added, referring to the approximately five million Palestinian refugees and their descendants who are largely denied citizenship, proper employment, and assorted civil rights in their host countries, even in the areas under full control of the Palestinian Authority itself.

Experts were both divided and surprised by the sudden turn of events. “It’s not often a pope is so brutally honest,” says Bertha Frêchère who writes about diplomatic affairs for Le Monde. The Vatican’s policy until now has been to show significant support for Palestinian aspirations in order to protect the Catholic populations in Muslim-majority countries. But the Christian population in every Middle Eastern country except Israel has been declining significantly, and it’s pretty clear where the future of Christianity in the region lies.”

Others disagreed with that assessment, saying that explicitly siding with Jews over Muslims was a grave error. “We will bury you,” explained Ayman Al-Zawahiri, a noted commentator on Islamic-Western relations for the news organization Al Qaeda. “You have opened the gates of Hell.”