From Irene, who recently gave us a brilliant letter to Catherine Ashton, here is another:
His Holiness, Pope Francis
Apostolic Palace
00120 Città del Vaticano
Your Holiness:
Because we met some years ago when my Mercedes broke down in Assisi while you were visiting on pilgrimage, I feel emboldened to write directly to you. You may recall that I had just left my position as tenured Professor of Sharia Law and Bioethics at King Abdulaziz University Law School in Riyadh to become Senior Advisor in International Law for the European Union.
It was in the course of preparing a detailed analysis of the many legal issues related to the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, that it came to my attention that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ would be a grave violation of international law.
Although no mortal can truly foresee the time, the place, or the nature of the Second Coming, the sophisticated algorithms of modern prediction modeling software indicate that the Second Coming, like the First Coming, will be far more complex than the simple blaze of glory that some predict. Christ will most likely return to the places where He lived, worked, and preached, i.e., East Jerusalem and the West Bank (which was called Judea and Samaria until Abdullah, first king of the judenrein nation of Jordan, changed its name).
As you may recall, Abdullah successfully cleansed all Jews from those areas during the 1947-1949 Palestinian Arab and Arab League War, which attempted to annihilate the new state of Israel and expel any Jews not yet dead when the fighting stopped. The Secretary General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, clarified Arab intent: "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre that will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades."
Ever since 1967, when Jews returned to live in the places from which they had been driven, such as Hebron, international law has strenuously prohibited Jews from living in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
With respect to the rule of international law, Hebron is especially significant because that is where Arabs massacred the Jews in 1929. As you know, The Book of Genesis records Abraham’s purchase of land in Hebron and the subsequent burial there of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as well as their wives Sarah, Rebekah, and Leah. Hebron is where David was anointed King, and it served as his capital until he relocated to East Jerusalem.
If the Prince of Peace returned to Jacob’s well in the West Bank and asked a Samaritan woman to draw water for him, this would constitute Jewish theft of Palestinian water, an international felony. Such action by Jesus would interfere disastrously with the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks. Even Pax Christi, the international Catholic peace movement, is opposed to the presence of Jews in the land on which Jesus Christ, their Lord and Savior, walked.
Jesus will surely attempt to return to Jerusalem’s oldest neighborhoods and to Temple Mount, where He last preached. If He retraced His footsteps on East Jerusalem's Via Dolorosa, this would be an impediment to world peace, as well as an affront to Palestinian sovereignty. In addition, it would violate the 1907 Hague Convention respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, numerous United Nations resolutions, and the fourth Geneva Convention.
Your Holiness, this calls for the same kind of religious courage and international acumen that you exhibited this May when you canonized the Martyrs of Otranto, the 800 Christians slaughtered in 1480 by Ottoman Turks, while remaining silent on the plight of Christians in Turkish occupied Northern Cyprus.
I look forward to your encyclical exhorting the faithful to pray for a postponement of the Second Coming, as least until the European Union and the United Nations have ethnically cleansed the area and Hamas has established sharia law.
I have the honor to profess myself with the most profound respect, your Holiness' most obedient and humble servant.
Yours profoundly,
حسین بن علی
Hussein bin Ali, GCB
Senior Advisor in International Human Rights Law for the European Union
cc: Lady Catherine Ashton
