"Without descending to details like the differential treatment of 'People of the Book' and 'Infidels,' [Manuel II Paleologus] quite simply addresses his interlocutor in astoundingly brusque form, surprisingly brusque for us, on the central question of the relationship between religion and force. He says, "Show me just what new things Mohammed brought, and there you will only find bad and inhumane things like his instruction to spread by the sword the faith that he preached."
Now, anyone who can read will understand that Benedict was not endorsing Paleologus' opinions. On the contrary, the word brusque, repeated twice and emphasized twice, creates a great deal of distance between Benedict and Paleologus.
Yet despite Benedict's careful attempt to distance himself from an obscure armchair theologian, radical Muslims have hit the roof-or, to be more architecturally precise, they have doused church lintel pieces with gasoline and then set them on fire. In Nablus, Molotov cocktails were thrown into Greek Orthodox and Anglican churches, neither of which, incidentally, recognizes the authority of Benedict. Muslim fanatics sprayed several other churches with bullets, and death threats against the Pope were issued by jihadist groups in Somalia and Iraq. An Italian nun was shot in the back in Somalia; The New York Times reports that anger over the Pope's speech may have motivated the murder.
I wonder: Do these people have any sense of irony at all? In Allahabad, India, student protestors, presumably upset about the damage done to interfaith relations, burned the Pope in effigy. The top Sunni cleric in Syria, Sheik Ahmad Badereddine Hassoun, sent a letter to His Holiness to express worry that his comments would hurt interfaith dialogue; on the very same day, the self-same Sheik shouted, from the pulpit, "We have heard about your extremism and hate for Arabs and Muslims. Now that you have dropped the mask from your face we see its ugliness and extremist nature." Doubtless, that too was meant to help the noble cause of interfaith dialogue-it certainly won't make it into the annals of good insults, since even third-graders consider "your face is ugly" a bit gauche.
The reaction from the West has been depressing, predictable and craven. All the right people have called on Pope Benedict to renounce an idea which he does not have and retract statements which only an illiterate could draw from the transcript. The New York Times, as usual, took the side of those who throw Molotov cocktails, insisting that Benedict has "insulted Muslims" and that he has "sowed pain." Despite repeated apologies for the offense caused issued by the Vatican, protests persisted until Benedict himself said that he was "deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg" and that "these in fact were a quotation from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought."
Unsurprisingly, that assertion of the obvious has not satisfied everyone. One Iranian cleric has said that Muslims will not forgive the Pope until he falls onto his knees and apologizes; another Iranian cleric posited that Benedict XVI is setting the stage for a new round of Crusades. It's not surprising to hear such foolishness from Iran, most recently in the news for enshrining Holocaust know-nothingism as an official position of state. What I find especially piquant, though, is the cacophony of cluck-clucking that erupted in the Western press. Here's why: We are at war with those who espouse a peculiar, radical version of Islam which claims divine mandate for acts of bloodshed. Our soldiers die daily in the hope-vain and unsuccessful as it may prove to be-that religious toleration may not remain particular to Western democracies. And yet, while we fight to extend the possibility of freedom of religion, which carries with it the potential for religiously offensive speech, it is the earnest desire of many Americans that no Muslim, nowhere, be offended. Curious, isn't it?
I suspect that those who call loudest for an apology from Benedict are acting on less topical motives. I suspect that The New York Times, and those who take its editorial page for secular gospel, would prefer that the Pope speak with the sensibilities of the West's enemies foremost in mind and keep his mouth shut about touchy theological questions, like those treating the relationship of faith and force. I suspect that most of us just want these all-encompassing religious world views, with their blunt insistence on absolute truth and the necessary wrongness of opposing views, to disappear into the pre-Enlightenment haze to which we thought we had consigned them. I suspect that, at a basic level, most of us want dangerous, angry Muslim fanatics to quiet down and stop burning things, even if poor, old, professorial Benedict has to apologize for something he didn't say. After all, how many suicide bombers has the Pope?
Montana is a junior majoring in philosophy and German. He enjoys baking, lifting, chess, whimsy and acting as unappointed advocate for the Pope now and then.