Yearly Archives: 2006

Pope’s public scepticism of Islam’s role dates back to 1997

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Nine years before Pope Benedict XVI delivered implied criticism of Islam in a speech last week and ignited angry Muslim protests worldwide, he expressed skepticism of the religion’s commitment to tolerance. Benedict, the then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, told an interviewer in 1997 that Islam is organized in a way “that is opposed to our modern ideas about society.”

“One has to have a clear understanding that it is not simply a denomination that can be included in the free realm of a pluralistic society,” Ratzinger said in an interview contained in Salt of the Earth, a book published by Ignatius Press in 1997.

In recent years, the pope reiterated doubts about Islam’s compatibility with Western-style modernity. According to an account of a seminar he held in September 2005, Benedict told theology students that Islam can adapt to democracy only if the Koran is radically reinterpreted.

Benedict’s suggestion that Western culture, based on Christian values, differs markedly from Islam underlay his controversial opposition to Turkey’s admission to the European Union. In August 2004, he told France’s Le Figaro magazine that Turkey should be excluded because “Europe is a cultural continent, not a geographical one.”

Bloomberg, 19 September 2006

Karen Armstrong – ‘the guardian of Islamic extremism’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch denounces the author of the influential Islam: A Short History as just another apologist for Islam, covering up its violent anti-western essence:

“The time for such disingenuousness is over, as is the time, if there ever was time, for the unseemly self-recrimination to which Armstrong is calling the West. The Muslim rage against the Pope’s call to eschew religious violence reveals an Islamic world in deep denial, as irrational as it is unable to take responsibility for its own actions. And in this it has Karen Armstrong and other Leftist haters of Western civilization and culture as willing accomplices.”

Front Page Magazine, 21 September 2006

What’s right about Islam?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“This is, we are told over-often, the Information Age. So how did it happen that we know nothing of Islam? Nothing good, at any rate. At this point, we in Israel and the West can recite chapter and verse the excesses of those who speak in the name of Islam, bomb in the name of Islam, burn churches in the name of Islam, kill a nun in the name of Islam.

“We smile our thin, knowing smile when we learn that a previously unknown Muslim group calling itself ‘The Army of Guidance’ vows to attack Christian sites in Gaza in retaliation for the remarks of ‘the accursed infidel the Vatican’. We smirk inside when the ‘Lions of Monotheism’ denounce the ‘dogs of Rome’…. But we know nothing. Certainly, we in the news media are guiltier than most of spreading the image of the Muslim as terrorist, of Islam as the enemy.”

Israeli journalist Bradley Burston appeals to Israel and the West to develop a more informed understanding of Islam.

Ha’aretz, 20 September 2006

Carey backs Pope and issues warning on ‘violent’ Islam

Posted on by Bob Pitt

CareyThe former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey of Clifton has issued his own challenge to “violent” Islam in a lecture in which he defends 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.”

Times, 20 September 2006

North London Mosque attacked after Pope’s speech

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Finsbury Park MosqueThe North London Mosque witnessed an attack at 1am on Tuesday 19 September 2006 as two unknown men entered the premises breaking two windows in the process and tried to set a fire. Police were contacted immediately after the two men were spotted, but they failed to act on time. The mosque, formerly known as Finsbury Park Mosque, previously hosted Abu Hamza as its Imam.

It may be that such attacks, coming so soon after the Pope’s address at the University of Regensburg, could have been incited by his remarks condemning the Prophet Muhammad’s actions as “evil and inhuman” and Islam as a faith that he claimed was “spread by the sword”. It could be that the mosque, once home to Abu Hamza and his followers, has become a target for those determined to act on the Pope’s words by, what they believe, is ridding England of intolerance and extremism.

The attack on the Mosque itself, however, “smacks of extremism and is reminiscent of the infamous ‘wars of religion’ that plagued Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, now seen as the historical pinnacle of religious intolerance”, said Harris Bokhari, MAB spokesperson.

“The fact that the mosque is now managed by the mainstream Muslim community reflects the efforts on its part to combat its extreme elements, and is a change that should be welcomed and applauded as opposed to being subjected to hostility. In light of this crime coupled with atrocities currently taking place against Muslim innocents in other parts of the world, the Muslim Association of Britain are organising a ‘Regional Day of Commemoration’ in Manchester on Friday 22nd September.”

Red Hot Curry, 20 September 2007

Kofi Annan warns against clash of civilisations

Posted on by Bob Pitt

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called on Tuesday for sensitivity towards religious beliefs and sacred symbols, warning that mistakes – intentional or not – could trigger a global war of religion. He said the international migration movement, which brought millions of people of different creed and culture to live together, has not united them.

“The misconceptions and stereotypes underlying the idea of a clash of civilisation have come to be more and more widely shared. Insensitivity towards other people’s beliefs or sacred symbols – intentional or otherwise – is seized on by those who seem eager to foment a new war of religion, this time on a global scale,” Annan said in an address opening the political debate in the UN general assembly.

News24.com, 19 September 2006

Pope protests – part of Islamic plot to dominate West

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“… the Muslim uproar has a goal: to prohibit criticism of Islam by Christians and thereby to impose Shariah norms on the West. Should Westerners accept this central tenet of Islamic law, others will surely follow. Retaining free speech about Islam, therefore, represents a critical defense against the imposition of an Islamic order.”

Daniel Pipes offers his insights into the Pope Benedict controversy.

New York Sun, 19 September 2006

Muslims are the BNP’s new target

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Why Muslims are these men’s current target

By Geoff Brown

Morning Star, 20 September 2006

A sinister alliance has developed between far-right groups and Islamist extremists who are united in their hatred of Jews, Israel and zionism and are contributing to increasing anti-semitism in Britain.

At least that’s how Ruth Gledhill of The Times reported the findings of the all-party parliamentary inquiry into anti-semitism.

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Defend Pope against Muslim intimidation – Sean Matgamna

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Sean Matgamna“The effort to silence the head of the Catholic Church is a grim joke, but not one to laugh at. Secularist glee at the sight of the Pope being anathematised in this clash of two, mutually exclusive, ‘infallible’ religions, needs to be tempered with awareness of the seriousness of the situation which is summed up in the outcry against the Pope. (As it was in the recent Muslim outcry against the Danish cartoons.) If the spiritual absolute monarch of a billion and a quarter Catholics can be treated like that, the cause of free speech and freedom to criticise religion, is surely in a very bad way….

“The right to secular free speech, and the right to write and publish freely (under the laws against incitement to violence, and the laws of libel) is taken for granted in the western bourgeois countries. It is written into the constitution of the USA. It had to be won in centuries of struggle…. Today, militant, and even, comparatively speaking, some varieties of ‘moderate’ Islam, oppose all of that…. Now, we have reached the stage where the revelation, which should surprise nobody, that the Catholic Pope doesn’t like Muhammad, or Islam, that he thinks his own religion better, the true religion, and says so, more or less, unleashes organised, obstreperous outrage across large parts of the globe! He is forced to deny that he said what he said, and what he clearly intended to say!

“… I repeat: if political Islam can do that to the Bishop of Rome, what can it not do to secularists, male and female sexual rebels, infidels, apostates from Islam, and socialists in the countries where it is dominant, and in the communities in Western Europe where it is immensely powerful? What does it do? Everywhere it is repressive, often murderously.

“It is to give to George W Bush and Tony Blair too much credence to conclude that because they talk of a clash of civilisations, there is no problem. Yes, there is! … Political Islam exerts a relentless pressure, in part by way of its ability to intimidate and cow the invertebrate ‘liberals’. The demands that their religion, its prophet, its doctrine and its practices, should be above the criticism, mockery and contempt of non-Muslims needs to be resisted and defied.”

Workers’ Liberty, 20 September 2006

Pope pursues medieval Islamophobic fantasy

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Madeleine Bunting argues that the Pope is a dangerous bigot suffering from “a deep arrogance rooted in a blinkered Catholic triumphalism”. She writes:

“By an uncanny coincidence the legendary Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci died last week…. the Pope had already run into controversy in Italy by inviting the rabid Islamophobe to a private audience just months ago. This is the journalist who published a bestseller in 2001 which amounted to a diatribe of invective against Islam. This is the woman who was only too happy to fling out comments such as ‘Muslims breed like rats’ and ‘the increasing presence of Muslims in Italy and Europe is directly proportional to our loss of freedom’. At the time of her papal audience, Fallaci’s ranting against Islam had landed her in court and there was outrage at the Pope’s insensitive invitation. The Pope refused to backtrack and insisted the meeting was purely ‘pastoral’.

“Put last week’s lecture in Bavaria and the Fallaci audience alongside his vocal opposition to Turkish membership of the EU, and the picture isn’t pretty. On one of the biggest and most volatile issues of our day – the perceived clash between the west and the Muslim world – the Pope seems to have abdicated his papal role of arbitrator, and taken up the arms in a rerun of a medieval fantasy.”

Guardian, 19 September 2006