A
Catholic Stamp To A U.S. War
By Nicola Nasser
21 September, 2006
Countercurrents.org
No
mistake, the Successor of Saint Peter, the Vicar of Christ on Earth,
the Sovereign Pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI has erred and the damage is
done: His anti-Islam remarks are out and cannot be retracted, like bullets
that cannot be retrieved once shot, adding a Catholic stamp to the Evangelist
“Islam versus the West” justification for the U.S. neoconservative–led
“WWIII on Islam.” (1)
Coincidently the Pope and the U.S. President George W. Bush on Wednesday
expressed “a deep respect” for Islam and Muslims, but both
men failed to calm Islamic angry reactions because both of them blatantly
sounded self contradictory.
The Pope in two public apologies in less than a week cited “reason”
to justify unconvincingly his unreasonably quoted anti-Islam remarks
“to explain that not religion and violence, but religion and reason,
go together,” (2) but failed to dispel a rapidly growing impression
that he has positioned the Vatican in a role in the U.S.-led international
war on “Islamic terror” similar to its role in the U.S.-led
anti-communism war.
His self-contradiction was further highlighted by repeatedly stating
that he quoted a 14th-century dialogue to encourage interfaith dialogue,
not spark controversy, but his quotation was unquestionably at least
a “setback” for any such dialogue.
Even if His Holiness could or would take out his defamatory and inflammatory
quotation from the official text of his controversial speech at Germany’s
University of Regensburg in Bavaria on September 12, which nothing yet
indicates that he might do, the damage done is snowballing rapidly to
vindicate the rejection of the Catholic dogma of Papal Supremacy and
infallibility by the Orthodox and other mainstream Christian churches,
the secular and liberal intellectuals and the Muslims.
Were his remarks a “lapse,” a “tumble”? Even
those Muslim religious and political leaders who have wisely and ardently
taken upon themselves the difficult mission of trying to contain the
damage and control the angry reactions found insufficient the Pope’s
apologies on Sunday and Wednesday. If his slur against Islam was unintentional
he should have made a more convincing apology.
“You either have to say this 'I'm sorry' in a proper way, or not
say it at all; are you sorry for saying such a thing, or because of
its consequences?” Turkey’s cabinet minister, Mehmet Aydin,
said.
The minimum acceptable “proper way” according to the Qatar-based
Egyptian Islamic influential and prominent scholar Sheikh Yousuf Al-Qardawi
is to drop out the “insulting” quotation from the official
text of the Pope’s speech.
Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei this week charged that
Benedict's words were “the latest link in the chain of a crusade
against Islam started by America's [President George W.] Bush.”
Khamenei as well as the former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami have
been spearheading an international campaign for dialogue among civilizations,
an effort that the Pope’s quotation could not in any way be interpreted
as a helpful contribution.
Apologists may acknowledge that the Pope’s offending quotation
was insensitive but unintentional.
Islamic leaders in Indonesia and Malaysia -- the first being the world’s
largest Islamic country and both converted peacefully to Islam and easily
could be cited to refute the Pope’s quoted thesis that Islam spreads
by sword -- have accepted the Pontiff’s apology, seeing no Islamic
interest in antagonizing the largest Christian church and playing in
the hands of the Christian Zionists who have been trying to undermine
the Islamic - Christian dialogue. (3)
Similarly the world’s largest secular Islamic nations of Turkey
and India -- the second being the home to world’s largest Islamic
minority -- were swift to demand papal apology but were also interested
to contain the damage. Turkey’s Foreign Minister, Abdullah Gul,
said the Pope's planned visit to the country in November was still on.
Russia’s Christian leader Vladimir Putin, whose country is home
to more than 20 million Muslims, also indirectly warned that “religious
leaders” should be more careful in their statements.
The most internationally wide-spread and influential Islamic political
movement, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, has also accepted Pope’s
apology as “sufficient.”
However, the mainstream rank and file of an estimated one and a half
billion moderate Muslims worldwide could not swallow the fact that the
leader of the largest Christian church who is highly educated and sophisticated
and speaks about ten languages could have “lapsed.” Al-Qardawi
told the Arabic al-Jazeera satellite television station that the Pope
added insult to injury when he assumed that Muslims could not apprehend
his speech.
Sheikh Mohammed Tantawi of Egypt’s Al Azhar, the Sunni Arab world's
most powerful institution, said the Pope should have refused the Emperor’s
quotation but he did not.
Muslim and non-Muslim critics wonder why the Pope chose to quote from
a 14th century “dialogue carried on - perhaps in 1391 in the winter
barracks near Ankara - by the erudite Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus
and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and
the truth of both,” (4) and not from the 21st century inter-religious
dialogue, thus jeopardizing the future of the modern debate on religious
truth.
In Tehran the Shiite Ayatollah Mohammad Ali Taskhiri, Secretary-General
of the World Forum for Rapprochement Among Islamic Schools of Thought,
stressed that Pope's statements were a “great setback” to
the dialogue among divine religions. (5) “Instead of preaching
peaceful coexistence among the great divine religions, the pope is planting
seeds of division,” Grand Ayatollah Saafi Gholpaygani separately
added. (6)
The Vatican said it hoped the self-inflicted “wave of hate”
sweeping the world did not lead to “grave consequences”
for the church. Burning of effigies of the Pope and anti-Vatican riots
in many countries tarnished its image of tolerance and hand-stretched
initiatives for inter-religion dialogue, an image that was carefully
promoted by his predecessor.
The Pope’s quotation is also going down into Muslims’ collective
memory as fitting into the U.S.-led war on “Islamic terror,”
which is cloaked in anti-Islam terminology like President Bush’s
blunders of “crusade,” “Islamic terrorists,”
and his latest “Islamic Fascists.”
It boils down to be serving as a Catholic justification for an American
political-military anti-Islam campaign. “Many Muslims are on the
defensive in our modern world with its dominance of western secular
perspectives, backed up by brutal military force which is often indistinguishable
from the terrorism it claims to be fighting.” (7)
The Pope’s attempts to portray his speech as a scholarly and theological
matter is not convincing enough to distance the Vatican from being embroiled
in political involvement or to shadow the fact that the Pontiff is also
a politician and a head of a state, which helped to undermine communism;
no one can expect him to be happy or eager to see a U.S. defeat whether
in Iraq, Afghanistan or the overall war on terror.
“Why the pope chose to throw a hand grenade into a powder keg,
and why he chose to do it at this moment in history”? asked George
Friedman.
“Bush has been trying to portray the war against Islamist militants
as a clash of civilizations, one that will last for generations and
will determine the future of mankind. Benedict, whether he accepts Bush's
view or not, offered an intellectual foundation for Bush's position,”
Friedman added. (8)
Whether it was his intention or not, the Pope has cornered his church
in the role of providing a Catholic justification for the US-led Evangelist
WWIII on Islam. “Ironically, despite the lip service by leaders
like President Bush and Pope Benedict XVI about the need to isolate
the lunatic jihadi fringe, by word and deed they have succeeded in accomplishing
exactly the opposite.” Wrote an Indian Hindu. (9)
Nor Muslim observers can isolate the Pope’s defaming quotation
from his record of anti-Islam indications:
Benedict XVI during his 17-month papacy has been lecturing Muslims on
the need to teach their young to shun violence, suggesting that violence
is part of Islam.
In March he decided to merge the Vatican's office for dialogue with
Muslims with its culture office and to send the English prelate who
headed it, Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, - considered a top Islamic
expert - to Egypt as papal envoy.
Recent statements by senior Catholic bishops have singled out Lebanon’s
Hizbullah and the Palestinian Hamas in names as violent groups under
his papacy.
His insensitivity could not also be forgiven on the backdrop of the
latest anti-Islam cartoons blunder.
The Pope’s reported opposition to Turkey’s membership in
the European Union because of its Islamic different culture is cited
as another anti-Islam indicator.
His quotation is also viewed within the context of the Vatican’s
intolerance of other churches. How could a church be tolerant vis-à-vis
another religion when it cannot afford to accept Christian Protestants
as “sister churches” and describe them as “ecclesial
communities”? (10)
Similarly Muslims could not view positively the Vatican’s reported
anti-immigration into Europe of immigrants of different cultures, especially
Muslims, within the context of its preoccupation with a campaign to
incorporate Christian ethics and values in the constitution of the European
Union in the face of a strong secular opposition.
The Pope’s insensitivity also embroiled the decreasing Christian
minorities in the Muslim countries -- especially in the Arab countries
and particularly in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories --
in an antagonistic environment that could contribute further to the
ever shrinking Christian presence, a headache that has become a permanent
item on the agenda of the annual meetings of the Middle East Churches.
“I wish the Catholic pope had considered the reaction to his remarks,”
the head of the Egypt's Coptic Orthodox church, Pope Shenouda III, told
journalists, adding: “Being enthusiastic about one's religion
shouldn't lead to judging other peoples' religions. Criticizing others'
faith breeds enmity and divisions.” (11)
It’s a pity that the Pope has chosen to exacerbate a world divide
over religious lines that have nothing to do with the real problems
humanity faces today, and it is saddening to watch how humanity in the
post-cold war era has shifted from a real divide to absurd divides that
contribute to humanity’s deteriorating material as well as moral
and ethical tragic status quo under the U.S.-led globalization world
order.
One could not but lament the collapse of the USSR, when the times were
dominated by an international divide between the international liberation
movements and the remnants of western colonialism, and between the transcontinental
capitalist warmongers and the overwhelming majority of the tramped-to-earth
billions of people yearning for justice and peace.
*Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist in Kuwait, Jordan, UAE and
Palestine. He is based in Ramallah, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied
Palestinian territories.
Notes
(1) “WWIII on Islam” is a term used by the former Republican
Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich in a recent speech
at the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI); he was
quoted by Jim Lobe, Asia Times on September 14, 2006.
(2) Pope Benedict XVI on
Wednesday, September 20, 2006.
(3) UCANews (www.ucanews.com),
September 18, 2006, and Malaysia’s Prime Minister Abdulah Ahmad
Badawi’s statements in New York on the same day.
(4) Pope’s speech at
Germany’s University of Regensburg on September 12, 2006.
(5) SANA, September 18, 2006.
(6) UAE’s Gulf News,
September 17, 2006.
(7) Tina Beattie, Open Democracy,
September 18, 2006.
(8) George Friedman, www.stratfor.com,
September 19, 2006.
(9) Ajoy Bose, Indian “The
Pioneer,” September 18, 2006.
(10) Christian Century, 13
September 2000.
(11) AP, September 17, 2006.