Yesterday, someone forwarded to the Lepanto Institute an email from Ralph McCloud, the Executive Director for the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD).  McCloud’s email was written to address recent concerns raised by the Lepanto Institute regarding CCHD grants.  You can read McCloud’s email here.

In typical fashion, McCloud never actually addressed any specific concerns, but stressed the CCHD’s procedure for allegedly ensuring a high standard of accountability.  At the beginning of the letter, McCloud said the following:

“In years past, CCHD staff met with Mr. Hichborn of the Lepanto Institute with no positive results.  Additionally, the CCHD Subcommittee asked that we not meet with him since there seems to be no amicable resolution.“

Since McCloud decided to claim in this email that his meetings with Hichborn had no “positive results,” it’s important to put this claim into context.  In a meeting Hichborn had with McCloud in 2011, CCHD offered to provide a grant to him and a colleague … an offer they flatly refused.

Hichborn recounts what happened in this meeting:

I have a witness to this account, who can testify that what I am about to say is completely true.

In the fall of 2011, a colleague of mine and I went to the USCCB offices in Washington, DC to meet with John Carr (then the USCCB’s director of Justice and Peace) and Ralph McCloud about our recent investigation into CCHD grants.  Before discussing our findings and the report we were preparing to publish, Carr and McCloud indicated that they wanted to address a few matters first.  I expected to be met with the same old list of excuses CCHD gives every time it is caught providing grants to organizations that act against the Church’s teaching.  What I did not expect was to be told that instead of meeting and discussing our research into CCHD grants, the CCHD would rather provide us with a grant to create a group that would organize low income people against the pro-abortion and anti-family movements.

Several times throughout the conversation, we were presented with an “appeal” to take a grant from the CCHD in lieu of the research we were conducting into CCHD grantees.

In addition to telling us that they (Carr and McCloud) were “violating their own rules” by offering to provide us with a grant if we were to create such an organization, we were told that the CCHD’s definition of “low income” was more expansive than it was in the past.  The suggestion was simply that we could pay ourselves fairly well and still qualify for the grant.  Amazingly, after offering us a grant and telling us that doing so was a violation of their rules, they went on to specify that they weren’t supposed to solicit grant applications and help people through the grant process.  But this is precisely what they were offering to do.  And it was done specifically in the context of moving us away from the ongoing investigations we were conducting into CCHD grantees.

However, as the saying goes, if the carrot doesn’t work, try the stick.

Once it became clear that we weren’t going to take the bait to accept a grant from the CCHD, and that we still intended to publish our report on 54 CCHD grantees, the conversation moved from the offer to a threat.  In stating our intention to publish this report, we made it clear that the reason for publishing was simply this: we believed that pew-sitting Catholics deserved to know what sort of organizations the CCHD was funding so they could determine on their own if this was the sort of thing they wanted to contribute to.   Despite our promise not to editorialize the information, it was made abundantly clear to us in that if we published the report on those 54 grantees, the CCHD would characterize it as an “attack” and that they would spend time trying to discredit it.  In fact, we were specifically told what a shame it is that the CCHD would be forced to waste time discrediting our report instead of providing us with a grant.

Despite the failed attempt to pull Hichborn and his colleague into a financial relationship in 2011, and even though the report on CCHD grantees was subsequently published, CCHD continued to meet with them.  However, in the fall of 2012, McCloud unexpectedly canceled the last scheduled meeting they were to have just two days before the appointed time.  Though McCloud claims in the email mentioned above that the meetings ceased because “there seems to be no amicable resolution,” it is far more likely that the meetings were ended because Hichborn sent in proof that the CCHD’s largest network of grantees lied to McCloud and sent falsified information to him.

Briefly, here’s what happened.  In the summer of 2012, Hichborn submitted evidence to the CCHD that the Gamaliel Foundation was a member of an organization which took official positions in favor of homosexuality.  So, the CCHD contacted Gamaliel to ask about this membership.  Gamaliel responded by claiming to have ended its relationship with the organization in question in May of 2010.  As evidence of this, Gamaliel sent the CCHD the copy of a letter it allegedly wrote to the organization in May of 2010, terminating their relationship.  If this was true, this would have been the end of the discussion.  But not only was this claim NOT true, Hichborn subsequently discovered document files on Gamaliel’s own website which indicated that it was a member of this organization through 2011, and into 2012.  In other words, Gamaliel lied directly to the CCHD and provided them with a falsified document.

Oddly enough, seven days after Hichborn sent proof of Gamaliel’s lie to the CCHD, McCloud canceled the appointed meeting with a single-line email: “We see no reason to meet at this time.”

This video report Hichborn produced gives the details about Gamaliel’s lie to the CCHD:

While this information is six years old, it remains relevant to the current situation in the CCHD.  The attempt to persuade Michael Hichborn from conducting research into CCHD grantees by offering him a CCHD grant was not made public in 2011 because he was not at liberty to do so.  The only reason this is being made public now is to put into proper context what is meant when McCloud says that previous meetings with Hichborn yielded “no positive results.”  And while McCloud claims that he was asked to stop meeting with Hichborn because “there seems to be no amicable resolution,” the fact that their last appointed meeting was canceled just after Hichborn provided the CCHD with proof that the Gamaliel Foundation lied to them is beyond suspicious.  More to the point, the alleged “amicable resolution” would have required the CCHD to disqualify its favorite grantee network from all funding.

When President Donald Trump announced that the United States would move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the Muslim world reacted with outrage and threats. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas warned of “dangerous consequences.” The spokesman for Turkish president Erdogan warned that the move was a “grave mistake” because “Jerusalem is our red line.” Bekir Bozdag, the Deputy Prime Minister, said the move would plunge the world “into a fire with no end in sight.” And Saudi Arabia’s King Salman warned that the move “would constitute a flagrant provocation of Muslims all over the world.”

The leaders of the Western world reacted in similar fashion. Pope Francis, British Prime Minister Theresa May, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and French President Emmanuel Macron all criticized Trump’s announcement. Meanwhile, the patriarchs and heads of the local churches in Jerusalem sent a letter to President Trump warning that the transfer of the embassy “will yield increased hatred, conflict, violence, and suffering in Jerusalem.”

But there is an obvious contradiction here. As Jihad Watch editor Robert Spencer points out in a recent column, these leaders have a record of defending Islam as a religion of peace and tolerance, which is being perverted by only a handful of extremists. Pope Francis, for example, has said that “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.” On another occasion he drew a moral equivalence between Islam and Catholicism, saying, “If I speak of Islamic violence, I must speak of Catholic violence.” For over a decade now, various Church leaders and secular leaders have assured us that violence has nothing to do with Islam.

But if that’s what they really believe, why should they worry that moving an embassy would create – to quote from the letter of the church leaders in Jerusalem – “hatred, conflict, violence, and suffering.”

By assuming that Muslims would riot over the announcement, says Spencer, the pope and other leaders are inadvertently admitting the truth about Islam: “that the numerous incitements to violence and hatred in the Quran and Sunnah do tend to lead to Muslims behaving violently at the drop of a hat, or the move of an embassy.”

After all, we are not talking here about a tiny minority whose actions would be rejected by the great majority, but about widespread rioting and violence on a global scale – “plunging the region and the world into a fire with no end in sight,” as Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister put it.

And, apparently, the “fire” would be justified because, as King Salman said, the move “would constitute a flagrant provocation of Muslims all over the world.” It’s a safe bet that King Salman understands Islam better than do Merkel, Macron, May, and the Holy Father. Yet he is even more concerned than they.

He seems to assume that Muslims are highly prone to violence. He understands that they are easily provoked because their religion and their religious leaders tell them to be. Moreover, as he must know, almost anything might be considered provocative. Last July, a “day of rage” resulting in the murder of an Israeli family was called because metal detectors had been installed on the Temple Mount as a security measure. Even Pope Benedict’s measured address to an academic gathering at the University of Regensburg led to global rioting and killing.

There is no end to the number of things that offend Muslims. This, along with numerous other differences, should lay to rest the quaint notion that there is a moral equivalence between Islam and Catholicism. They are very different faiths. No one worries about global rioting should Catholics be offended by a slight to their faith. Yet if any group has cause to riot, it is Catholics and other Christians. Christians in many parts of the Islamic world face daily persecution and even extermination. They are beaten, raped, and decapitated, and their churches are burned to the ground.

So on the one hand, Muslim believers are ready to commit mayhem over an academic talk or the moving of an embassy, and on the other hand, Christians remain peaceful even though their brethren are being slaughtered and burned alive. How much longer, one wonders, will Church leaders collaborate in the false assertion that Islam and Christianity are equally peaceful faiths?

Religious and secular leaders are caught in a flagrant contradiction. They tell us that Islam is a religion of peace and justice, yet they warn us not to provoke its followers in any way. Don’t recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Don’t draw cartoons that might offend Muslims. Don’t wear religious symbols that might provoke them. Cover your women and your statutes. Don’t ring church bells in the vicinity of Muslims. Don’t criticize them for persecuting Christians because, as Ahmed al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University told Pope Francis, such criticism is a “red line” that must not be crossed.

“Just stay quiet and you’ll be okay.” That’s what Mohamed Atta told the passengers on American Airlines flight 11 shortly before it flew into the World Trade Center. It wasn’t good advice then. And it’s not good advice now. As Islam expands its global reach, it’s becoming increasingly evident that the “don’t-do-anything-to-provoke-them” policy isn’t working, and never will.

These days it’s urgent for Christians to read and understand the Koran in order to get a better handle on a religion that is so much in the headlines. But that asks a lot, because the Koran is a hodgepodge of early and later chapters, arranged in order of length from longer to shorter chapters, thus intermingling the early thoughts of Muhammad from Mecca with the very different sayings after the flight to Medina.

In A Simple Koran, Bill Warner helps to overcome the confusion by rearranging the Koran into chronological order over the twenty-three years in which Muhammad propagated his new religion. This approach, consisting almost entirely of texts from the Koran, with occasional subtitles or explanations, offers a good introduction to how Islam evolved during Muhammad’s life, as well as insights into the crucial division between whatAayan Hirsi Ali has called “Mecca Muslims” and “Medina Muslims.”

The early sections of the Koran, from Mecca, stem from Muhammad’s conversion to monotheism from the multiple polytheistic religions prevailing around the Meccan shrine of the Kaaba. Some sources say that there were as many as 360 deities worshiped in Mecca. Muhammad preached subjection to the one and only God, Allah.

But there was a slip-up: Muhammad seemed to allow three goddesses to share veneration with Allah. According to ‘Ali Dashti’s biography, Twenty-Three Years two verses in Sura 2:19-22 originally said, Have you thought about Lāt and ‘Ozzā? And Manāt, the third one, the other one? Those are the cranes aloft. So their intercession may be hoped for.

This passage seemed to recognize the divinity of the three goddesses, along with Allah. But Allah eventually reprimanded Muhammad for these “Satanic Verses,” which in later versions of the Koran were corrected. Strict monotheism was preached thereafter. (Salman Rushdie wrote a novel involving this passage and is still under the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa calling for his death.)

The early parts of the Koran re-write the Old Testament, telling stories about how Abraham, Lot, Moses, etc. were all actually Muslims, and how those who rejected Islam ended up in hell. Numerous imaginative stories about Moses appear – usually having little to do with the Biblical version.

Such Islamic revisions of Old Testament histories were accompanied with constant warnings of eternal torture in hell for Kafirs (non-Muslims) who do not convert. This begins a constant theme throughout the Koran, which contains 290 verses about Hell, and over 300 references to the fear of Allah, to whom slavish Islam (“submission”), as to a Master, is required. For example, The Kafirs among the People of the Book and the idolaters will burn for eternity in the Fire of Hell. Of all the created beings, they are the most despicable. (98:6)

In contrast, those who accepted Muhammad’s message were promised a heavenly reward in which they would be “on decorated couches,” waited on by “immortal young boys” bringing fruits and wine and the “flesh of birds,” as well as the amorous attentions of virginal houris.

Muhammed didn’t have much success in Mecca; he ended up with only 150 converts. But he had some followers in Medina, and he fled there when the situation became dangerous in Mecca.

The Hegira (emigration) of Muhammad and his disciples to Medina took place in 622. Medina was half Jewish and half Arabian. The Jews, the wealthy class, were largely farmers and craftsmen. They had allies among the Arabs, but an atmosphere of animosity and jealousy prevailed. Some Arabs believed that a prophet would come and lead them to victory over the Jews. Muhammad very soon seemed the one. They took an oath of loyalty to Muhammad, and offered to protect him with arms, if necessary.

Muhammad eventually began to function as a warlord, and started sending fighters on armed raids against trade caravans coming to Mecca. Over nine years, he carried out sixty-five raids (in twenty-seven he was personally present), as well as various assassinations, and executions.

The threats of hell for rejecting Muhammad now became graphic – Allah will “destroy your faces and twist your heads around backwards” (4:47), give unbelievers “clothing of fire,” “pour boiling water on their heads,” “scald their insides and their skin,” and beat them with “iron rods” (22:19).

For Muhammad himself, Allah began to grant special privileges: The spoils of war (limited to one-fifth of the totals), and wives and slave-girls beyond the limits applied to others (Muhammad’s amorous retinue eventually included nine wives and several slave-girls).

A new wave of violence began when the Jews of Medina and even many Arabs rejected Muhammad’s claim to be a prophet sent by Allah. Islamic jihad became essential to spreading Islam in Arabia and elsewhere. A quarter of the verses at Medina are exhortations to jihad, and promises about the rewards not only for the Muslim community but for individual warriors.

In his final years, Muhammad began acting like a prophet/king. Every aspect of life came under his control – times of prayer, food and drink prohibitions, the wearing of veils, inheritance, wills, punishments for crimes, distribution of taxes, etc. – all specified as Allah’s mandates.

In sum, a chronological/biographical reading of the Koran brings out the tremendous differences between the earlier and later parts. There is no jihad in the Meccan Koran, no anti-Semitism, only peaceful calls for conversion. But in Medina, we have the gradual formation of a veritable army, inspired to literally conquer the world for Islam.

The “religion of peace,” therefore, does have some Koranic foundation, but as Islamic history and contemporary events make clear, there is perhaps even greater Koranic justification for violent jihad.