According to Alberto Rivera the Vatican had desires for dominance in the Holy Land and through Saint Augustine's monastical system manipulated people and events around Mohammed to create in him a fake prophet. Mohammed's job was to re-conquer the Middle East then turn the area back over to the Pope. Only Mohammed died and his Arab generals were too successful, thus refusing to give temporal power to the Pope. This led ultimately to the crusades and has ordered history down to the present day. Rivera claims that this account of history is locked away in the Vatican and with the "ayatollahs" of Islam and is locked away from regular people to save from detriment for both religions. Alberto Rivera insinuated that the reason that he was informed of this was due to his position as an agent of the Vatican during the time he claimed to be a Jesuit priest.

The first time I saw this story I was keenly interested in the story behind it. It had originally been sent to me in an e-mail by a religious friend of mine. I wanted to look into the background of the story right then but I couldn't because I busy with work. But months later I received the same e-mail from a friend in New Zealand. He was forwarding me this which was in a newsletter by David Icke. The story now was going out to a non-religious, secular crowd. This time I read the whole thing and decided to look into each point made in the testimony of Alberto Rivera. What resulted was my book "Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness: The Truth about the Vatican and the Birth of Islam".

This book developed out of a concern for the damage that such stories can cause. Damage to the billions of Catholics and Muslims around the world and also damage to the hundreds of millions of Protestants who might be tainted with the Jack Chick brush. In my book I have given notation on each of my refutations, which were made either by historical research or interview, which is something I believe Jack Chick hasn't done in his accusations. In the end the work is a fascinating look at the early Church and early Islam, as well as a critical look at Jack Chick and Alberto Rivera. If you like history you will find it a very interesting read!

Alberto Rivera was born in 1935 in the Canary Islands. Much of his life story has been disputed but we do know that he was very friendly with Jack Chick and his testimony inspired a number of comic books for Jack T. Chick publications in the 1970s and 1980s, generally called the "Alberto Series". Alberto spun numerous incredible stories about the "evils" of Rome and how they were behind many of the upheavals in world history. Rivera claimed that he became a "true Christian" when he began to read the Bible for himself and not allow it to be interpreted for him by the Catholic Church's hierarchy. For his later opposition to the Vatican, Rivera believes that there were several attempts made on his life by agents of the Catholic Church. Jack Chick has stated that he believed that these agents of the Vatican finally succeeded in killing Alberto Rivera by physically passing a poison on to him which caused his fatal colon cancer. Rivera died in June of 1997.

Jack Chick was born and raised in the eastern side of Los Angeles and found Christianity through his Canadian first wife's family over fifty years ago. In the 1950's Jack Chick, using savings and a loan from his boss, started Chick Publications in order to spread the gospel. At first his religious tracts were mainly used to bring people into salvation through frightening them with the prospect of going to Hell but later, particularly since the 1970's, Jack Chick has also focused on denigrating Islam, Catholicism, Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, Judaism, and many other religions and denominations that do not agree with his ideology. (Jack Chick is an Independent Baptist who supports the "King James Only Movement" and premellinial dispensationalism.) Chick blames many of the world's problems directly on the Roman Catholic Church, picturing the hierarchy of this church as a behind the scenes schemer that is responsible for the United States Civil War, the assasination of Abraham Lincoln, Nazism and the Second World War, among many other historical occurances.

Chick Publications is well known to many evangelical congregations around the world and most of their religious tracts are translated into many different languages. Most of the tracts are very basic, dealing in "Hell fire and brimstone". Each of the tracts covers a theme which is generally concerned with sinful lifestyle and what the sin leads to in the after life. The tracts mince no words (or pictures) and deal with everything from Satanism, to drug abuse, to homosexuality, to incest, to whatever disagrees with Jack Chick's theology. Some are real sins and social problems, some are debatable. But many of the later tracts and comic books that deal in Chick's many "conspiracies" are longer and have more detailed artwork.