Another Muslim day of rage is scheduled for Friday to protest the Pope Bendict's speech at Regensburg.
Apparently, firebombing churches, kidnapping priests, murdering a nun, calling for the Pope's assassination, and announcing, as did Al Qaeda in Iraq, "We shall break the cross and spill the wine...God will (help) Muslims to conquer Rome...(May) God enable us to slit their throats," just didn't go far enough.
"Stop calling us violent or we'll kill you" seems to be the message being sent to us infidels by these jihadists of the Wahabbi strain.
Too many seem to be just fine with this message. Like the New York Times which editorialized,
A doctrinal conservative, his greatest fear appears to be the loss of a uniform Catholic identity, not exactly the best jumping-off point for tolerance or interfaith dialogue....It is tragic and dangerous when one sows pain, either deliberately or carelessly. He (the Pope) needs to offer a deep and persuasive apology.
The New York Times would rather not talk about the demonstrable fact that forced conversions and the use of violence in God's name hinders real dialogue between Christians and Muslims. The Times doesn't want to talk about Islamic violence and aggression because it might provoke more violence and aggression, maybe against them. They censor themselves and would censor the Pope from saying what is true. They behave, and too many Western leaders behave as if sharia law were already in effect as they submit to Muslim authority and intimidation. That's called dhimmitude.
What are people so afraid of that they can't stand up for free speech and home truths? Why are we not more outraged? Like Pope John Paul, Donald Sensing says Be Not Afraid.
We hold the high ground - we believe in individual liberty, we believe in religious tolerance, we believe in women’s rights, we believe in a narrow window for the just use of war - and we should not be afraid to stand tall and to express our outrage at the insane reactions we are seeing across the Muslim world. In fact their actions prove the point made previously in Danish cartoons and the quote from Pope Benedict.
Enough Apologies writes Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post.
None of the radical clerics accepts Western apologies, and none of their radical followers reads the Western press. Instead, Western politicians, writers, thinkers and speakers should stop apologizing -- and start uniting....
Where's the reciprocity?
nothing the pope has ever said comes even close to matching the vitriol, extremism and hatred that pour out of the mouths of radical imams and fanatical clerics every day, all across Europe and the Muslim world, almost none of which ever provokes any Western response at all. And maybe it's time that it should: When Saudi Arabia publishes textbooks commanding good Wahhabi Muslims to "hate" Christians, Jews and non-Wahhabi Muslims, for example, why shouldn't the Vatican, the Southern Baptists, Britain's chief rabbi and the Council on American-Islamic Relations all condemn them -- simultaneously?
These jihadists are bullies, gangster religionists and it's time to stand up and say so. We don't have to abide by Islamist rules and they can't make us. I pity those who are so mealy-mouthed that they can not say Enough already. They live with shriveled soul in an internal and self-imposed state of dhimmitude, swearing allegiance to multiculturalism and political correctness and scorning those who are so unsophisticated as to be religious.
The Belmont Club writes that the
aching void left by Western cultural and political leaders ... has emboldened militant Islamic preachers to cross boundaries they would have respected until recently. This erasure of cultural borders caused by the near total desertion of the frontier by the so-called opinion-leaders has invited the most reckless elements of Islam across and raised the risk of real clash of civilizations. As Lord Carey put it: "We are living in dangerous and potentially cataclysmic times". It is a time made perilous not only by the absence of moderate voices within Islam but by the even more conspicuous absence of any leadership among Western politicians.
The Pope was the first to say, using a 600 year old quotation, that violent jihad and forced conversions are inherently evil and he said it in the context of a dense and scholarly speech calling for a real, sincere dialogue between faiths using reason and abjuring violence. He later apologized for the reactions to his speech but not for what he said.
The Anchoress wrote
Any intelligent human being understands that one does not - in the 21st century - publicly touch on the subject of Islamic jihad and religious compulsion, no matter how delicately or distinctively, unless one wants to deal with a reaction that is both primitive and intimidating, by a group demonstrably closed to dialogue.
And yet Benedict, clearly an intelligent man, has done so. He has, in essence, dared to say to Islam, “Is this really what you want to be doing, in this century? The rest of the world’s religions have put away the swords…how about we talk?”
Up to now, no one has come out and said that to Islam. The Pope is the first.
She says the quintessential question of our time that the Pope put on the table is
“Okay, short of our surrender and our conversions, what is it going to take to get you folks to settle down?”
It may seem curious that the most forceful defenders of the Pope have been religious figures.
Cardinal Pell in Australia said
The violent reaction in many parts of the Islamic world justified one of Pope Benedict's main fears...They showed the link for many Islamists between religion and violence, their refusal to respond to criticism with rational arguments, but only with demonstrations, threats and actual violence.
In England, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey of Clifton defended the Pope's "extraordinarily effective and lucid" speech.
Lord Carey said that Muslims must address “with great urgency” their religion’s association with violence. He made it clear that he believed the “clash of civilisations” endangering the world was not between Islamist extremists and the West, but with Islam as a whole.
“We are living in dangerous and potentially cataclysmic times,” he said. “There will be no significant material and economic progress [in Muslim communities] until the Muslim mind is allowed to challenge the status quo of Muslim conventions and even their most cherished shibboleths.”
A close reading of the Pope's speech reveals why religious people are particularly well-qualified to speak first. They understand both Reason and Faith. Reason tempers what could be the savagery of religion. But Reason alone is not enough because it restricts the human domain to what can be proven empirically. By so doing, it narrows the scope of what it is to be human by resisting insight, understanding and the wisdom of the past. The utter cluelessness of the New York Times and much of the mainstream media when it comes to religion and faith proves my point.
George Weigel in the LA times, The Pope Was Right says
The pope's third point — which has been almost entirely ignored — was directed to the West. If the West's high culture keeps playing in the sandbox of postmodern irrationalism — in which there is "your truth" and "my truth" but nothing such as "the truth" — the West will be unable to defend itself. Why? Because the West won't be able to give reasons why its commitments to civility, tolerance, human rights and the rule of law are worth defending. A Western world stripped of convictions about the truths that make Western civilization possible cannot make a useful contribution to a genuine dialogue of civilizations, for any such dialogue must be based on a shared understanding that human beings can, however imperfectly, come to know the truth of things.
Oriana Fallaci, one of my heroes, said
The moment you give up your principles, and your values . . . the moment you laugh at those principles, and those values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period.
When asked what contemporary leader she admired, Fallaci replied.
I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger. … I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. It's that simple! There must be some human truth here that is beyond religion.
I too feel less alone with Pope Benedict as the Defender of Faith and Reason and Western civilization. "How many battalions has the Pope?" Joseph Stalin once famously asked. None of course, except for the stalwart Swiss Guards. Would that all those who believe in simple human truths stand behind him and condemn and shame all those who believe, support or excuse violent jihaadism. Thus concludes my personal day of rage for the Pope.
Posted by Jill Fallon at September 21, 2006 4:56 PM | Permalink