Charles at Little Green Footballs put it better than I could.
Out of the Mosque, Into the Street
On several TV news shows, I’ve heard commentators say it was odd that all this Muslim anger and rage erupted today, several days after the Pope’s statements about Islam.
What’s odd about it? Today is Friday, and the crowds in photos from around the world with signs (in English) and masks and weapons are coming out of their neighborhood mosques, after listening to sermons by representatives of the Religion of Peace™. Nothing odd here. The massive demonstrations always erupt after Friday prayers.
LGF has several pictures. Here’s one representative one:
Signs. In English, huh? Well that’s odd.
And media dutifully covering all this, huh? Strange, that.
I found this article in the Seattle Post Intelligencer to be quite interesting, inasmuch as it was one of the rare ones which tried to explain what the Pope meant rather than fixate on how many Muslims were protesting the Pope’s message.
…The speech, some say, shows the pontiff intends to carry on with his strong defense of the values of the Christian West rather than compromise for the sake of building bonds with Islam.
“They went to the speech expecting to meet Pope Benedict, but instead they met Professor Ratzinger,” said the Rev. Khalil Samir, a Vatican envoy for interfaith links in Lebanon.
In July 2005, about two months after assuming the papacy, Benedict was asked if he considered Islam a religion of peace. He said: “Certainly there are elements that favor peace. It also has other elements.”
The Rev. Robert Taft, a specialist in Islamic affairs at Rome’s Pontifical Oriental Institute, said it was unlikely the pope miscalculated how some Muslims would receive his speech.
“The message he is sending is very, very clear,” Taft said. “Violence in the name of faith is never acceptable in any religion and that (the pope) considers it his duty to challenge Islam and anyone else on this.”
Of course it’s not hard to find fairer sources that the CBC.ca web site. Another one that spelled it out more fairly was Al Jazeera.net.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has defended Pope Benedict XVI against allegations that he had attacked Islam, saying critics had misunderstood comments the Pope made this week during a visit to his native Germany.
“Whoever criticises the Pope misunderstood the aim of his speech. It was an invitation to dialogue between religions and the Pope expressedly spoke in favour of this dialogue, which is something I also support and consider urgent and necessary,” Merkel was quoted as saying by German newspaper Bild on Friday.
“What Benedict XVI emphasised was a decisive and uncompromising renunciation of all forms of violence in the name of religion,” Merkel was quoted as saying in an article to appear on Saturday.
[…] The Pope, who used the terms “jihad” and “holy war” in his lecture, added “violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul”.
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