'Allahu akbar' was never a call to violence and destruction.

First off, I believe what the Church teaches about the importance of dialogue with non-christian religions. It’s important and the ordinary teaching of the Church. It’s important to follow what Jesus-God come in the flesh, our Lord and Saviour taught and the Catholic Church teaches in His Name. But not being, by any stretch an expert on other Religions, let alone Sunni or Shite Islam and their variants., I do have an opinion... I do watch Canadian, American, Russian, French, UK, Arabic (Al Jazira) news agencies available on TV and read a few newspapers and internet sources available here in Canada. But have never heard a major news source commentator make the definitive assertion Fr. Rosica makes in the headline? I don’t ever remember a commentator giving the context, correcting the persons saying the words or highlighting the intrinsic contradiction in some cases? Let me leave it there... Seems to me, in my opinion, people like Fr Rosica would benefit by also paying attention to the secular media, and find out what people actually think after watching the news. It’s not enough to only focus on Church news sources and personal experiences stretching 25-30 years before. We live in the world, and things are happening fast! In my opinion, there is no shortage of highly placed Church people even today digging through Vatican II documents, telling us that what we have been doing day after day in the Church is somehow not in accord with abstruse documents that nobody in power in the day to day Church seem to be familiar with or have any interest in. That doctrine is not doctrine? I always was taught that we the Church is governed by Lex orandi, lex credendi… That the Bishops know what they are doing as overseers. Bottom line, we meet personally, maybe a few thousand people in our lifetimes. We have to supplement this with education, reading, news sources, etc.. to form opinion. In my opinion, Fr Rosica’s article headline and article might be misleading and somewhat out of touch with the secular lived experiences of ordinary Catholics. I allow that it could be a literary device, however question its use in this context. But that’s just my opinion...

Dear Fr. Rosica, The call for mercy and for dialogue that you ring out is Christian and vital. However, you speak much of Islamic terrorism. Do you examine its causes? (Also, what was the award you recently received from the state of israel? I am searching for it online, but have not found it yet.) In a recent interview that you conducted with Fr. Patrick Ryan, S.J., you discuss Europe’s catastrophic carving up of the Middle East in the early 20th Century. You also discuss how Isis arrived, and to paraphrase Fr. Ryan: “Isis arrived because of the American-led destroying of Iraq.” Now, who started the God-Awful War Upon the Human Beings of Iraq? The neocon zionists did. Here is a 2002 testimony of netanyahu testifying to Congress that if the U.S. wipes out Saddam Hussein, “I guarantee you that it will have enormous, positive reverberations on the region.” Well, it’s not the only destructive lie that netanyahu, that professional liar, has fed people. His most pertinent comments begin at the 3:00 mark: http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4529120/netanyahus-expert-testimony-iraq-2002 The results of that debacle were, rather, gross regional instability, the spawning of Isis, and Paris. To name just a few. Your excellent Catholic channel, from the few programs I’ve watched this afternoon, seems to be missing the truth in Palestine too. The zionist agenda there is to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians out of the land. But this is evil and most un-Christian. The zionists mock Christianity and burn our Catholic Churches. At least one of your news episodes made the Gaza slaughter of last summer seem like an even conflict, not the genocidal slaughter that it was. Also, your recent documentary on related issues at the Catholic University of Bethlehem, from what I’ve been able to find online about it in the last hour, seems to take a very mild approach to the israeli brutality, apartheid, and genocide that they inflict on the Palestinians, especially those in Gaza. However, your documentary did show the intentional bombing that the zionist israeli army inflicted on the Christian Brothers’ residential building, where the Christian Brothers who are the teachers and administrators of Bethlehem University live. The point is: Yes, the call for mercy and dialogue is absolutely necessary. However, we must also unmask the sheer destruction that political zionism has caused for the entire Middle East. And the unending sheer misery of the human beings of Palestine, who are both Muslim and Christian.

In this article you refer to "believers in Allah" when you mean Muslims. You should know that you, as a Christian, are also a believer in Allah. If you have spent time studying as you claim you would know that Allah and God are the same deity. Allah is merely the Arabic word for God, the same God that Christians and Jews worship. When you use Allah when referring to God only when talking about Muslims, you reinforce the idea among ignorant people that Muslims worship a different God than Christians do. In the Arab Catholic Church of my Lebanese heritage we say "Allah" and Arab Jews use the word, too. I'm surprised that you, an educated person phrased that sentence the way that you did. And, you only mention the ISIS attacks in Paris, not the ones in Lebanon and Kenya. Are the Lebanese people and the Kenyan people not equal victims of ISIS in the last week?