Italy’s top Muslim leader, whose organization supports Pope Francis’ pact with Islam, is causing acute embarrassment to Catholic apologists of interfaith dialogue after he insulted Jews and Christians as heretics.
Yassine Baradai, national secretary of the Union of Islamic Communities of Italy (UCOII) – the largest umbrella organization of the Islamic communities in Italy – sparked outrage after trashing Judaism and Christianity as “heresy” and a “manipulation of the original message of the prophets.”
“Indeed, both these creeds are heresy according to Islam,” and the Koran, Baradai wrote in an August 29 Facebook post-summarizing a sermon he’d delivered to mark the festival of Ashura.
“If it were otherwise, we as Muslims would be required to follow Judaism or Christianity, but Islam corrects the crippling made in the residual scriptures of the Torah and the gospel,” Baradai remarked.
“Salvation was offered to the Israelite people and not the Jewish people, who are of recent nascency” since “the children of Israel weren’t Jews,” Baradai argued.
Baradai’s statement is a slap in the face of Vatican II’s pronouncements that “Islam is among the three Abrahamic religions” and that “Muslims worship with us a single, merciful God.”