Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
We know what Pope Leo XIV thinks that the example of Lebanon teaches us: that Christians and Muslims can live together in harmony, and we in Europe should, therefore, not be alarmed by the demographic changes we are currently enduring, as Muslim numbers continue to rise. There is no reason, Pope Leo believes, to fear either the ideology of Islam or the increased presence of Muslims in our midst. Others, including Italian journalist Giulio Meotti, do not agree. More on Meotti’s view, and the sobering lessons he draws from the example of Lebanon, can be found here: “The Pope asks Europe to follow Lebanon. Good luck!,” by Giulio Meotti, Israel National News, December 4, 2025:
We hear the sound of the wall when it collapses, not the sound of the ivy as it takes over.
On the plane returning from Lebanon to Rome, Pope Leo XIV urged Catholics concerned about the West to be “less afraid” of Islam, promoting “coexistence” and “friendship” between Christians and Muslims.
All well and good so far. Look closer.
Then, referring to testimonies gathered during his visit to Lebanon, the Pope invited us to take inspiration from this experience “also in Europe and North America”. And that is exactly what worries me – that we are ending up like Lebanon, which in 1989 regularized half a million Muslim Arabs, losing its Christian and French cultural and religious identity.
Apparently, the pope does not know that there are reasons to worry about Muslims settling en masse in what they call dar al-harb, the Land of War, where Infidels live and dominate. He does not know that the Qur’an instructs Muslims “not to take Christians and Jews as friends, for they are friends only with each other.” (5:51) He does not know that Muslims are taught that they are “the best of peoples” (3:110), while non-Muslims are “the most vile of created beings” (98:6). He doesn’t know the dozens of verses in the Qur’an that instruct Muslims to subdue non-Muslims by force, as in 47:4 — “when you meet the Unbeliever, strike necks.” Nor does he know that Muhammad, the Model of Conduct (“uswa hasana”) and the Perfect Man (“al-insan al-kamil”) has said in the hadith (the record of the words and deeds of Muhammad) that “I have been made victorious through terror” and that “war is deception.” Nor does he know that Muhammad said that “Islam is to dominate and not to be dominated.”
What would it take to persuade Pope Leo to read and study the Qur’an, with an exegetical guide to each verse, such as that supplied by Robert Spencer? He needs to understand this alien creed, in order to better defend Christendom, that Muslims and their mindless collaborators on the left are now undermining.
Sometimes all it takes is a spark. The Lebanese civil war began with shots fired at a Maronite church that Phalangist leader Pierre Gemayel was inaugurating on the morning of April 13, 1975. Shots from a passing car hit Christians entering for Mass. Four dead.
That was the beginning of the end.
Like the bullet that the Serb Gavrilo Princip fired at Grand Duke Franz Josef in August 1914, that was the spark that caused the outbreak of World War I, the Muslim killing of Christian Lebanese on April 13, 1975 was the spark that led to the Muslim-Christian civil war in Lebanon that lasted from 1975 to 1990.
Arafat’s Palestinian Arab terrorists, heroes in today’s Europe, turned Beirut into a military stronghold. Christians lost the civil war – not militarily (the Phalange held out to the end), but politically and above all numerically.
But the 1975-90 civil war was not a religious war: it was a demographic referendum conducted at gunpoint.
I disagree with Meotti. The 1975-1990 war was a religious war. And it was indeed also a kind of “referendum” on Lebanese demography — would the population ratios of Christians, Sunni Muslims, and Shia Muslims remain the same, or would the war contribute to the rise in Muslim numbers relative to the Christians? We know the answer: the Maronite Christians may still claim the presidency, but power has shifted decisively to the Muslims. The Palestinian Muslims in the refugee camps are outbreeding the Christians, whose birth rates are much lower. And two decades after the Lebanese civil war had led to Christian demoralization in the country, and an outflow of Christians to Europe and North America, Lebanon allowed 1.5 million Syrian asylum seekers, almost all of them Sunni Muslims who were indeed persecuted under Assad’s rule, to settle in Lebanon. And that led more Lebanese Christians to leave the country, for they knew how they would be treated once the Muslims gained firm control of Lebanon.
