Pope Calls Islam Evil; Didn’t Mean to Offend

So, let me think about this. If a big mahoff in the Islam world cited an obscure 14th century text in which a Christian emperor and a Muslim scholar were having a conversation, and if the Muslim scholar called Christianity “evil and inhuman”, am I to believe that Pope Ratz would not be offended? And then if a flunky in the Islam world said, “Our leader didn’t mean to offend the sensibilities of Christians”, would Ratz say, “Okay, that’s good enough for me”? Ha! And double HA! You bet your sweet ass he would not! The Pope was making a speech about reason and faith in the West at Regensburg University in Germany last Tuesday. Before Ratz became God’s mouthpiece on earth, he taught theology at Regensburg University. By all accounts, the speech was long-winded and scholarly. Ratz began his discourse by relating a conversation that took place between a 14th-century Byzantine Christian emperor, Manuel II Paleologus, and a Persian scholar. The conversation was about the truths of Christianity and Islam. The Christian emperor says, “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.” That’s what the Pope said and that’s why Muslims are outraged. And although neither Ratz nor the Vatican has released an official comment, when Ratz returned from his six-day trip to Germany, his flunkies said he was very “upset about the reaction of Muslims to his speech”. Which is typical of the Roman Catholic Church. When pedophile priests were being protected by the Church and shunted from one diocese to another, allowing them to persist in their defiling of little children, the Vatican was upset at the reaction of the world to “a few bad apples”. It took months for the Vatican to admit that their bad applies' crime of pedophilia was a horrendous and bad thing. And it took more months for the Vatican to admit that enabling and protecting their bad apples was an equally bad thing. Now the Roman Catholic Church is upset at Muslims for taking offense when the Pope baldfacedly calls Islam “evil and inhuman”. As the Associated Press put it: “The remarks -- tucked into an address at a German university where he formerly taught theology -- were interpreted by many experts in interfaith relations as a signal that the Vatican is staking a new and more demanding stance for its dealings with the Muslim world.” You can’t call someone’s mother a whore and then get righteously indignant about the “sensibilities” of the woman’s son when he gets pissed. Somehow, the RCC and the Bush administration believe that if insults, slander, libel and calls for holy war are couched in just the right rhetoric then the poisonous vitriol becomes hypothetical questions posed by objective pedants. Which of course could not be more wrong. An insult is an insult. And an exhortation to rise up in holy fury against a religious foe is exactly that. When the Pope cites a Christian emperor who proclaimed that Islam is evil and inhuman, no matter what century the emperor said it, there is no reason for the Pope to say it other than to iterate that Islam is evil and inhuman. When the president of the United States said, "this crusade, this war on terrorism", on September 16, 2001, he really meant that the US response to 9/11 would be a crusade, in every sense of the word crusade. At best, the Vatican claiming that the Pope didn’t mean what he said is childish. At worst, the Pope took a political stance against a worldwide religious community and damned all Muslims as being evil and inhuman. Advice to Pope Ratz and the Republican Party: When you are not the biggest and strongest, watch your mouth. There are 1.3 billion adherents to Islam in the world. There are 1.1 billion Roman Catholics in the world. And 56% of the people recently polled view Bush unfavorably.