Pope
Benedict Not Really
All That Sorry
By Gwynne Dyer
20 September, 2006
The
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
On a scale of 1 to 10, Pope Benedict's
first attempt at apology was barely a 3. He said nothing, but on Saturday
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone told the world, "The holy father is very
sorry that some passages of his speech may have sounded offensive to
the sensibilities of Muslim believers."
That didn't stop the protests
that have been building in the Muslim world since the pope's Sept. 12
speech to an academic audience in Germany, so Sunday he tried again.
From his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome, he said:
"I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few
passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered
offensive to the sensibility of Muslims."
That won't stop the protests,
because he really isn't sorry for what he said. He's sorry for "the
reactions in some countries" to his remarks, but he implicitly
stands by what he said. So is the pope really anti-Muslim?
After the 9/11 attacks five
years ago, the Catholic leader then known as Cardinal Ratzinger told
Vatican Radio that "it is important not to attribute simplistically
what happened to Islam" -- but then he added that "the history
of Islam also contains a tendency to violence." True enough, but
Christianity has its own history of violence: the Crusades, the Inquisition
and several other detours from the path of peace and tolerance.
Just before he became pope
last year, Benedict declared that Turkey should not be allowed into
the European Union because its Islamic culture is incompatible with
Europe's "Christian" culture. But the real case for the prosecution
rests on his invitation to Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci to visit
him last September.
Fallaci (who died last week)
was an atheist, and her fame as a war correspondent and interviewer
was decades behind her. But she carved out a second career as the most
extreme anti-Muslim writer in Europe, producing two bestselling books
since 2002 that vilified Muslims as dirty subhumans who multiply "like
rats," and portraying Islam as an irrational religion that breeds
hatred.
Her next-to-last book, which
presumably inspired the pope's invitation, was "The Force of Reason,"
which argued that the West is rational and reasonable, whereas Muslims
aren't. And there was Benedict in Germany last week, saying exactly
the same thing. What a coincidence.
Benedict quoted from the
14th-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus, who told a Persian
visitor that "spreading the faith through violence is something
unreasonable ... God is not pleased by blood."
So far, so good -- but then
Manuel asked his Muslim visitor: "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." Benedict
quoted that, too, without further comment. He ended his speech, 4½
pages later, by quoting the emperor again: " '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. ... It is to this
great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners
in the dialogue of cultures." In other words, you Muslims are unreasonable,
but if you do it our way, then we'll finally get somewhere.
So now we know that the new
pope is a parochial and intolerant man -- but anybody who paid attention
to Cardinal Ratzinger's previous career knew that already. Now he is
in a position to do much more damage.
Pakistan's parliament has
unanimously passed a resolution condemning the pope's speech. Seven
Christian churches in the occupied Palestinian territories have been
bombed, set ablaze or shot at. A Catholic nun has been shot to death
in Somalia. Most Muslims are well aware that violence is an inappropriate
way to protest accusations that Islam is a violent faith, but why do
they even care what the pope says?
The real reason for the uproar
is that so many Muslims feel under attack by the West. Two Muslim countries
have been invaded by the United States and its allies since 9/11, and
another, Lebanon, has been bombed to ruins by Israel with full U.S.
and British support.
At least 20 times as many
Muslims have died in these brutal wars as the number of Americans who
died in the 9/11 attacks, and almost none of them had anything to do
with that terrorist atrocity. So the suspicion grows among Muslims that
all this is not really about 9/11 at all, and almost any minor insult
to Islam from the West is enough to trigger outrage from Morocco to
Indonesia.
We haven't achieved a full-scale
"clash of civilizations" yet, but we're making progress.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based
independent journalist.
© Copyright 2006 Star-Tribune