Pope launches scathing attack on Islam

Quote:

Pope 'sorry' for offence to Islam

The Vatican said the Pope's remarks had been misinterpreted

Pope Benedict XVI has said he is sorry that a speech in which he referred to Islam has offended Muslims.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/5351988.stm

A jewish rabbi would never apologize. The pope has my utmost respect.

squinney wrote:

Did anyone else notice that the news coverage showed Muslims reacting to the Popes remarks / quote with violence, anger and burning of effigies?

Not what I've seen/heard.

The pope should have told all told them all to shove the Koran straight up their asses.

does anyone know how to say, "Shove the Koran up your ass," in arabic?

The unmistakable whiff of Christian triumphalism

This was no casual slip. Beneath his scholarly rhetoric, the Pope's logic seemed to be that Islam is dangerous and godless

Giles Fraser
Saturday September 16, 2006
The Guardian

John Paul II's pontificate was largely defined by his relationship with a global conflict between west and east. Last Tuesday evening, in a badly judged speech before a home crowd of Bavarian academics, Benedict XVI may well have set the parameters of his own period as Pope, pitching himself into a debate over Islam that has prompted outrage throughout the Muslim world.

"Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." These were not the Pope's words, but those of an obscure Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologos, back in the 14th century. And yes, the Pope did make it clear he was offering a quotation. Even so, these words fell from the lips of the spiritual leader of a billion Christians without anything like enough qualification. There was no phrase distancing himself from the claim that Muhammad was responsible for evil. It's little surprise, therefore, that the remarks have roused anger and demands for a personal apology.

Christopher Tyerman's latest book on the Crusades, God's War, argues persuasively that analogies between the Crusades and the present global conflict are often overdrawn and historically dubious. That may be so. But it's an argument that doesn't cut much ice with millions of Muslims. After all, it was one of Benedict's predecessors, Urban II, who first summoned a Christian jihad against Islam. And it's born-again Christians who have been at the forefront of support for the invasion of Iraq, the occupation of Palestinian lands by Israel, and the whole "reorganisation" of the Middle East - a catastrophe in which many thousands of Muslims have lost their lives.

Any comments by a Christian leader that touch upon this wound are bound to be interpreted from every possible angle. The Pope must have known this. If millions of Muslims were offended by the scribblings of a few unknown Danish cartoonists, it's pretty obvious the enormous potential for harm that might flow from a few ill-judged comments by the vicar of Rome.

Furthermore, the Pope has form on all of this. Just a few months before he was elected, he spoke out against Muslim Turkey joining the EU. Christian Europe must be defended, he argued. It didn't go down well at the time with Muslim leaders. But what makes his comments from Bavaria doubly insensitive is that Munich and its surrounding towns are home to thousands of Gastarbeiter, many from Turkey, who are often badly treated by local Germans and frequently subjected to racism. It won't be lost on them that Manuel II ran his Christian empire from what is now the Turkish city of Istanbul. And reference to that time, in circumstances such as these, has the unmistakable whiff of Christian triumphalism.

For the most part, the Pope's address was a scholarly exercise that sought to challenge the idea that rationality is intrinsically and necessarily secular. We must "overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable", he insisted. Most Christians would agree. But even here there was a sharp criticism of Islam buried beneath the scholarly rhetoric. For the Pope argued that in Muslim teaching, because "God is absolutely transcendent", He is "not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality". In other words, there is no reasoning in or with Islam. Which, surely, is another way of the Pope saying how dangerous he thinks Islam is.

This is why the Pope's remarks look rather more than just a slip or a casual mistake. The speech concludes with a further reference to the views of the Byzantine emperor: " 'Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God,' said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures."

Blog sites have been buzzing with the thought that the Pope may have the president of Iran in mind when he speaks of Manuel's Persian interlocutor. But we don't need to speculate upon a contemporary casting for this speech to recognise its dangers. For in claiming that Islam may be beyond reason, and then to claim that to act without reason is to act contrary to the will of God, is pretty close to the assertion that this religion is godless. And that's not how different faiths ought to speak to each other - especially when we all have each other's blood on our hands.

As it is written: "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?"

· Dr Giles Fraser is the vicar of Putney and a lecturer in philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford

[email protected]

A worm's eye view

Monday September 18, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

THE WRAP

Journalists who attacked the Pope for his remarks should be ashamed of themselves, says Andrew Brown

Pope Catholic, shock horror. There are times when I am really ashamed of my own profession, and the rumpus over the Pope's speech last week is one of them. There are three salient facts about the affair: it wouldn't have happened without malice in the media; almost no one who purports to have been outraged by his comments can have read the speech; some real and lasting damage has been done to Christian-Muslim relations, and, specifically, to Turkey's relations with the EU.

It is very easy and often profitable to practise journalism by deliberately misunderstanding the things that you are reporting to make them look either more ridiculous or more threatening than they really are.

Almost all political journalism is conducted in that way. Perhaps it's defensible there, since the people being reported are doing the same thing. But quite often the people one is reporting are trying to tell the truth. The job of the journalist then is to explain what they mean by a process of compression and translation.

In the case of the Pope's speech, there is literal translation involved. He spoke in German, of course. My impression is that the official Vatican translation into English (and it was the English text that went around the world) did not maintain all the distancing devices of the German from the quote he used. But there is also figurative translation: trying to get right the overtones and meanings of ideas. There was a ludicrous example of this in the weekend reports that the Pope was being anti-Semitic in quoting St Paul's remark that the crucifixion was a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks.

There is compression. Something will be left out of any report, but what? The first thing that struck me when I read the Pope's speech was his joke about the futility of theology. Again, he was quoting someone else - in fact, an ancient German academic joke - about the existence of both Catholic and Protestant faculties of theology at several German universities, which thus, the joke went, are unique in having two departments devoted to the study of something that doesn't exist at all. If we were to apply to his remarks on atheism the same standards as have been applied to his remarks on Islam, there would have been headlines all over the world claiming that "Pope says God does not exist".

Instead, we get headlines shocked, in effect, that the Pope should be Catholic. In particular, they are shocked that he should be a Catholic intellectual, who feels he can and should give reasons for what he believes. This reveals an odd disconnect between official truth and privately acknowledged reality. We know that in practice hardly anyone sits down and chooses their religions after carefully considering the various truths on offer. To pretend that everyone does do is one of those useful lies that makes society work better: it is part of the secularist myths of English education. But there are some people for whom it is actually true, and who do think about their beliefs in a disciplined way and try to justify them. The Pope is one of them.

That the Pope should give an occasional lecture explaining why he is not a Muslim, a protestant, or a secularist is actually part of being Pope. When the Ayatollah Khomeini wrote a long letter to Mikhail Gorbachev many years ago, telling him, in essence, that Communism was doomed, he too was doing the right thing - just as Bertrand Russell was when he wrote a book called "Why I am not a Christian". That, too, was part of his duty as an intellectual.

This isn't, as I said, the way that most people choose their religions. The arguments used by highly intelligent and well-educated people will be quite literally incomprehensible to most consumers of the media. Russell said in a slightly different context that he would rather be reported by his worst enemy among philosophers than by his best friend among the ignorant. It seems to me that the least we can do as journalists is not deliberately to seize on the bits of a speech that can be misunderstood and serve them up for misunderstanding. We should be trying to make them comprehensible, even if the results turns out not to outrage anyone.

I'm not a Catholic myself, and I'm rather shocked to find how vehemently I feel the Pope has been wronged this week. It's not the variously outraged Muslims who have wronged him either. It is the journalists who took the quote out of context. When the row over the Danish cartoons blew up, it was partly the result of two months' preparatory work by various Danish imams, who had ravelled round the Middle East outraging people. This time, we did it ourselves. We should be ashamed.

* Andrew Brown maintains a blog, the Helmintholog.

kickycan wrote:

does anyone know how to say, "Shove the Koran up your ass," in arabic?

No, but if you send an e-mail to your fellow Americans at Guantanamo Bay, I'm sure some will happily tell you how to say in Arabic: "pee on your Koran and flush it down the toilet". Is that close enough for you?

Always happy to help you spread religious tolerance.

An insufficient apology

When Pope Benedict recently delivered a lecture and managed to find the time and space to take a swipe at Islam, the Prophet Mohammed and effectively every Muslim, he must have expected the kind of reaction that followed across the Muslim world. If he hadn't, then he has either been on another planet these last few years or he shouldn't be in the high position he is.

what makes the Pope's words even more incredible is that he conveniently chose to ignore the reality that whilst the Catholic church was cementing the barbarism of Europe's dark ages for centuries, in which atrocities of unspeakable volumes within its lands and beyond were committed under its very guise and with its blessings, the Muslim world stretching from southern Europe to the far borders of China was busy writing literature, philosophy, art, architecture, medicine, chemistry, physics, biology, algebra and music.

guardian

Benedict knew precisely what kind of response his remarks would create: that's why he said what he said.

Benedict knew precisely what kind of response his remarks would create: that's why he said what he said.

Yep, and this so called religion of peace reacts how???

"The Pope must die, says Muslim
18.09.06
Add your view

A notorious Muslim extremist told a demonstration in London yesterday that the Pope should face execution.

Anjem Choudary said those who insulted Islam would be "subject to capital punishment".

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23367232-details/The+Pope+must+die%2C+says+Muslim/article.do