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Calling all defenders of ‘Western Values’ There is an interesting post on ‘Classical Values’ that people who share my view that we are indeed in a war of civilisations might want to see. I may not be a Christian or a Jew but I do know who my enemies are… and are not.
Sign me up for the Oriana Fallaci Society.
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Pope Benedict XVI’s Orwellian Address at the University of Regensburg has provoked, amongst other things, a storm of gullibility.
In an address purporting to invite dialogue between cultures is embedded a cynical guarantee that there will be no dialogue.
In an address purporting to be about the evils of ‘religious violence’ is embedded a pricking goad towards more ‘religious violence’.
In an address purporting to promote harmony between faith and reason are embedded words specifically intended to incite faith without reason.
Is the journalistic world indeed so naive as to believe that the Pope, as beneficiary of the millenial experience of the finest statesmen and strategists the earth will ever see, did not know exactly what he was doing?
Are they so naive as not to recognise that every word is meticulously weighed and measured for short and long-term efficacy before issuing from the mouth of the ‘Vicar of Christ’ on earth.
Loose words do not fly in the Vatican’s corridors of power.
In the full knowledge of the Vatican’s own long and less-than-salubrious history, the Pope guilelessly draws attention to Islamic religious violence and pretends not to have realised that this self-righteous arrogance and hypocrisy would cause Muslim outrage. Of course, one can always ‘apologise’ later, knowing full well that nothing can erase a single word from the minds of those to whom it was directed.
What is the strategy being employed here – the endgame?
What has happened to the ‘one big happy family’ policy approach to Islam? Indeed, one could be cynical enough to conclude that the past encouragement of the Muslim flooding of Europe
was just a ruse to destablise and provoke conflict to the stage where the Pope could step in as Saviour of Western Europe.
One could be even more cynical and conclude that, given his Western European heritage and his notorious intractability, Pope Benedict XV1 was chosen for that precise purpose.
We shall see…
This post has the full text of the relevant portion of the Pope’s speech, with a link to the full text. Decide for yourself if it justified churches being firebombed, and riots.
Sorry, the link was fouled up, here it is.
Oops again. It’s late and I’m tired. The foregoing is the full speech. Here is the post I referred to, with the excerpt.
Her funeral’s in Florence today, I’m planning to drop by the Evangelical Cemetery to pay respects later this morning.
Wow, that seems fairly quick for a funeral… Is it Italy’s custom to dispense with things like the viewing?
The full text might be interesting for us, but I can guarantee that the people who are supposedly so upset couldn’t begin to understand it even if it was translated into their native languages and wouldn’t care if they could.
All they care about is demonstrating group loyalties as loudly and forcefully as possible. Group loyalties are the driving social force throughout the Islamic world and require an outsider to activate. The only way to unite muslims is to pit them against another religion.
Their only goal when they demonstrate and shout and burn and riot is to show how much they support other muslims against non-muslims, no matter what.
This group loyalty system isn’t uniquely muslim, it’s the default model of human society before (roughly) industrialization, but virtually no muslim society has naturally industrialized (as opposed to having had industrialization thrust upon them).
“In an address purporting to be about the evils of ‘religious violence’ is embedded a pricking goad towards more ‘religious violence’.”
vynette, when dealing with Muslims anything approaching the truth will goad them to violence.
The object of their violent protests is to shut down real debate about islam’s agenda–the subjugation of the West.
Vynette, I am grasping for a word to describe your conspiracy theory and the only one which seems to work is… baroque.
The Pope delivers homilies and generally talks about religious perspectives… he is the Pope after all… but I doubt be runs the text of what he is going to say past a phalanx of curial politicians each time before he opens his mouth. And I very much doubt he set out to piss off Islamic opinion. That said, I very much doubt he censors himself when he lays out what he thinks… he is the Pope after all. Being opinionated is more or less what he does for a living.
No, he has long made it clear that he is not a great fan of Islam and so his remarks are probably neither an indication of a subtle and well planned psycho-political manipulation nor a reckless attempt to inflame opinions. My guess is he is just saying things the way he see them and thus pushed the pretty sensible idea that Jihad and religious wars generally are Not A Good Thing. As Keith says, saying anything about Islam that is not either utterly anodyne or a fawning example of dhimmitude can provoke Muslims to violence.
Sign me up too. May she rest in peace.
Alas Il Papa committed the sin of being Catholic. I kinda thought that was his job. This of course puts him in the same category as Mussolini and Hitler. That is from the Turkish government. That is so nuts. I’m suffering a cognitive dissonnance here. Am I dreaming this? Is this real?
The muzzies won’t be happy until Pope Abdullah is the sheik of Rome.
I thought I was jaded. I thought I’d seen it all but every few weeks Islam manages to come up with something that truly astonishes me.
Apparently (it’s over on Infidel Bloggers Alliance somewhere) some crackpot in Somalia has called upon all muslims to hunt down and behead the pope. He also cited Salman Rushdie as a precedent… Well… that was a success for Islam wasn’t it. Mr Rushdie seems to be still publishing novels while the Ayatollah is decomposing in his tomb.
I have often wondered if the Islamists are mad, bad or both. Well, they’ve transcended these categories. They’re not “Barking Moonbats”, they’re totally raving. Completely and utterly fucking bonkers, total mentalists.
The thing that bothers me is not so much that these oft cited moderate muslims should be apologising for the sometimes appalling acts of their co-religionists but aren’t they just embarrassed by the collective insanity that frequently decends on much of the Umma? I would be impressed if a muslim “spokesman” came on TV and said “This is truly embarrassing”.
I don’t know if this Islamic madness is more to be pitied or laughed at.
An elderly Italian nun has been shot dead in Somalia.
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,20429245-1702,00.html
Apparently shot three times in the back by folks who then pissed off.
Details are sketchy but I wouldn’t bet against the RoPers, would you?
Charming aren’t they?
Perry wrote:
Chuckle; but no disrespect to either Perry or the Pope.
I’m getting concerned here. Is this God’s day for giving me personal amusement?
Best regards
@ and for Nick M.
Apologies if I have disturbed a possibly important theme.
I don’t approve of killing people; that is unless there is exceptionally good cause.
Concerning elderly Italian nuns, killed by shoting them in the back, good cause would be an interesting read. Though I doubt I would be amused.
Best regards
“Is the journalistic world indeed so naive as to believe that the Pope, as beneficiary of the millenial experience of the finest statesmen and strategists the earth will ever see, did not know exactly what he was doing?”
It’s an interesting thought. The way I had read his address was as a proposal of alliance between secularists and the Church against a faith imposed by violence. His price for joining battle is that science accept the non-empirically verifiable within its domain. He does not wish for the Church to spend itself against Islam while the rest of us say religion is none of our concern, and then finish them off when it’s over – he will promote reason over violent fanaticism if we will refrain from using his new-found support for logic and reason to stab him in the back. I don’t know if that’s what he intended – it’s a stretch in the worst traditions of bad English Lit., but it might be an attempt to start a dialogue.
On the whole, though, I don’t think we could deliver on our side of such a bargain. There are far too many independent atheists unable to resist, who see any and all “non-empirically verifiable” belief as the ultimate source of the problem. These cats will not be herded.
It’s a little more likely that triggering this reaction was part of the intentional strategy though, in my opinion. The Cartoon Caper did Islam’s credibility a tremendous blow in the eyes of the Western public, more than anything else we’ve done. It has moved many from unthinking acceptance to questioning, from questioning to concern. Small things that highlight the depth of our differences do far more than bombing or stop and search. The Jyllands Posten achieved a significant victory for us, in the same sense Qana was a victory for Hezbollah. Now we have a strategy that works, we need to apply it again. Something small enough that Westerners cannot see what the fuss is about, trigger visible and vocal violence, but back down before it gets out of hand; we don’t want to kick things off now before the general public is ready. Then we look like the voice of reason and tolerance, and the multiculturalists lose all credibility. The Islamists must either come to accept free comment, which is a small victory, or be seen increasingly for what they really are, which is a necessary step.
It’s slow; but thinking about it, it is the first proposal I’ve seen for something half practical and sensible to do about Eurabia – if it really is a proposal. For obvious reasons, they won’t be admitting it. However, it will be most interesting to see in a few month’s time if anyone else of a suitable stature does the same thing.
He also cited Salman Rushdie as a precedent…
Well at least he got that right. This is much more like the Rushdie affair than the cartoon one. The “offence” caused is to people who will never read the relevant words in context, reacting to deliberately inflammatory reports attributing them as views of the writer. Rushdie’s offence was to narrate the dream of a character in a novel, the Pope’s to quote someone long dead as a theological example.
Of course it is unacceptable to me that someone should be attacked for their actual views or expression. But a world where anyone can be under a general sentence of death for an innacurate third party report of one’s words is surely not desirable to many Muslims, either, however rigid, however keen to kill actual blasphemers. I suggest therefore that the reason such appeals to the mob are launched and supported is entirely as a political act, to offer a pretext for weilding the hatred generated. – It is demagoguery, and/or a means of keeping closer opponents subdued by fear (like witchfinding in southern Africa or child protection proceedings in modern Britain).
A spokesman for the Holy See was telling the television last night that the problem will go away once an authorised translation is available in Arabic and the people now upset can read the Pope’s views. That is insanely naive: they mostly won’t read it; and if they do will distort it further in order to butress their anger. People are like that. Prof. Mona Siddiqi of Glasgow suggested on Radio 4 this morning that even established Muslim scholars have to be careful of what they say in academic discourse, lest it be ‘misinterpreted’.
I disagree… that move makes it a win either way for the Pope. If annoyed Muslims read it and realise they were prats because the Pope did not say what they thought he did, that is a win and moreover makes the agitators look like dishonest agitators. If they continue to slag the Pope off anyway because they do not actually bother to read it (or just as likely, do not understand it), it just proves they, not the Pope, are the unreasonable ones.
Either way, the Pope did not retract his remarks… Result.
I agree with the Classical Values statement.
As for the anti Catholic (and anti Western) person who started this thread of comments:
Certainly the Vatican (like every insitution that is many centuries old) has a history that includes bad things (terrible things).
However, some of the charges made against it these days are lies. For example, “Hitler’s Pope” (to quote the title of a recent book) was in charge of an institution that saved large numbers of Jews from the National Socialists – indeed thousands were hidden on Church property in Italy itself (and in the Vatican).
One speech from the Pope (giving the Germans an excuse to invade Church property – and the state of the Vatican itself) and those Jews would have been dead.
The Jews who were saved later insisted that a tree be planted in memory of Pope Pius in the avenue of the Righteous Gentiles in Israel.
As for Muslims – if it really is inevitable that they will respond with violence to even an academic lecture (given in a land that has never been part of the Islamic world) – then there is something wrong with THEM (and/or their religion), not with the person giving the lecture.
For all the crimes committed by Christians in the name of Jesus Christ, there is still a basic difference between Jesus and Mohammed (even if one rejects all the claims made for Jesus).
This difference is the LIFE of Jesus compared to the life of Mohammed.
How many cities did Jesus take by conquest? How many people did he kill? How many women did he enslave?
“The founder of our religion was a good man” is one thing.
“The founder of our relgion was a good man, and if you mention any of the bad things he taught or did we will kill you” is another.
Pa Annoyed has an interesting point. If the Pope’s speech was in fact intended as a low-key proposal for cooperation between atheists and catholics, in the cause of reason and Western values, this atheist would support the idea.
Reason applied to the catholic church can only serve in the long term to soften its rigid traditions and beliefs and render membership of it more nominal, somewhat like that of the Anglican church. I can happily live in such a society, especially if the alliance were to have the effect of curbing the miltancy of Islamists.
However, the Classical Values website leaves open to suggestions at the present time the matter of how such cooperation might in practice be brought about. Who will take the idea forward, perhaps in the name of the Fallaci society?
Anti-Western? Anti-Catholic?
How does this follow logically from a statement criticising deliberate manipulation?
Paul Marks,
The Jews who were saved later insisted that a tree be planted in memory of Pope Pius in the avenue of the Righteous Gentiles in Israel.
I never knew that. Well that seems to settle one issue. Although no doubt the Paleostinians are currently taking a little mashie to said tree.
This difference is the LIFE of Jesus compared to the life of Mohammed.
Bingo. I’m not a Christian but I could not agree more. That is the fundamental difference. Christ died an agonising death aged about 33. Mo screwed nine year olds and built an empire with fire and the sword and died in his bed. Can you think of any other religous leader who seemed to live so non-ascetically? I mean Buddha just sat under a tree having a think rather than rampaging around raping and pillaging.
It’s about time the Koranimals faced up to the fact that their religion was founded by an ace bastard.
In this case I think the enemy of my enemy is not my friend (like, for instance, the Spanish civil war). England was the first european state to throw off the dominion of Roman Catholicism, it has also been the best, and often sole, exponent of freedom. It’s not a coincidence.
It’s also not a coincidence that the U.S. and Canada became prosperous and Argentina, Brazil etc. didn’t.
+ I assume everyone can remember the bishop of Rome’s pronouncements vis a vis Israel-Hezbollah. Frankly, if he gets blown up by terrorists then I might actually start believing in karma.
It’s about time the Koranimals faced up to the fact that their religion was founded by an ace bastard.
You think they don’t know? They do, and they groove on it. That’s why they look down on Christianity: Jesus had no slaves or concubines, and never sacked a single city. What a loser.
If your religion was founded by someone who would make David Koresh look sane, what else can you expect?
“…because the Pope did not say what they thought he did…”
Oh, come on. Give the Pope some credit that he knows what he says. He said, in his learned manner, exactly what they thought he did, which also happens to be the truth, and this is why he said it !
And this is why the muslims are annoyed – they hate being told the truth in their face.
The problem with our multi-culti nonesense dominated society is that too few people dare speak the truth.
This also what kept murderous communism afloat for so long: too few people dared utter the truth about it.
“I assume everyone can remember the bishop of Rome’s pronouncements vis a vis Israel-Hezbollah.”
Yes, and I think now we see why he said it.
Problem is, nobody is standing together. It happened with Denmark. It happened with the US. It has happened with Israel for decades. There’s lots secretly agree, and sympathise, and think Something ought to be Done, but nobody is about to step forwards themselves – they all know what would happen. They all stand around staring at the ground, shuffling their feet. Hoping the alligators will pick someone else next. First they came for the Jews…
If it was an offer of alliance and token of good intent, nobody has picked it up. Nobody has staunchly defended the Pope’s right to speak as he wishes, or spoken up for free speech, or asserted the truth of what he said, or demanded apologies of Muslims in return. I haven’t seen Bush and Blair do so, although I suppose they may still be bearing grudges. Not even Denmark. Come to think of it, the only one of them I’ve seen say anything in support was Angela Merkel. Many of the ordinary people in Europe and America support him, governments dare not.
Perhaps we should ask them to, anyway?
Yes, how very strange for the Pope to call for an end to violence. Practical issues aside, it would have been the best thing. Most of us wanted Israel to pursue and kill Hezbollah because they would not back down and accept its right to exist. In a better world, they (Hezbollah) would have lain down their arms and done The Right Thing. Since when are religious figures supposed to talk realistically? At times like this one must remember that the Pope, after all, is Catholic.
Pa Annoyed’s comment is a very interesting one.
If the Islamists’ foaming-at-the-mouth jihad were truly aimed just against Christians (as it’s often described), then I might indeed be tempted to dismiss the whole thing as a fight between two God-worshiping Middle Eastern religions and nothing to do with me. But that’s not the case. It’s aimed against all non-Muslims — Christians, atheists, Jews, Hindus, Flying Spaghetti Monster worshipers, you name it. In that sense all non-Muslims have a common interest, regardless of how much or how little their ideas have in common.
It’s for precisely this reason, though, that any effort by the Pope to get “scientists” to give up their insistence on the empirically verifiable (if Pa Annoyed is right about that being the intent) is a mistake. The concept that reason and evidence are the only keys to truth is inherent in the rational, scientific view of the world, which has produced the technology that gives the West and other developed societies their economic and military superiority over cultures which have failed to master the rationalist-scientific approach. We cannot give this up just because it inherently clashes with Christian theology. One might as well ask the Catholic Church to give up its belief in God and miracles as the price of an alliance with secularists, on the grounds that those things are irreconcilable with the scientific outlook. No, if there is to be a broad alliance against Islamist aggression, our common interest in avoiding being enslaved or wiped out is all the cement it can have or needs to have.
In June of 1941, when Nazi tanks crossed the Soviet border, Britain found itself in an impromptu alliance with the Soviet Union under Stalin. An odder pair of bedfellows could hardly be imagined. Yet they managed to cooperate, if guardedly, against the common enemy, based purely on the shared desire to avoid being conquered by Hitler. Churchill and Stalin did not need to renounce their opinions of each other’s political systems.
With all due respect to Perry de Havilland (and thanks for your kind comment over at Classical Values), I think that the probability of an official Arabic translation of the Pope’s remarks making the Muslim mobs “realize they were prats” is about the same as the probability of Osama bin Laden converting to Judaism tomorrow. As you say, many won’t read it, many won’t understand it — and many won’t be able to read it (educational standards in the Arab world are abysmal), and their Pope-slagging, nun-shooting, and pyromania will continue. But that’s not much of a “win”. What more evidence of their irrationality could the world possibly need, beyond what they’ve already displayed?
Problem is, nobody is standing together. It happened with Denmark. It happened with the US. It has happened with Israel for decades. There’s lots secretly agree, and sympathise, and think Something ought to be Done.
And that is the nub of the problem. It is also the solution. On this site (and many others) I have agreed with fundamentalist Christians over this problem. I normally never used to agree with them on anything. Funny thing is I’ve also found that I can agree with them on many other matters as well. If I, a self-avowed scientific, logical positivist agnostic, can not only get on with, but find common cause with evangelic Christians then there is hope. One day we all will do something because this is becoming completely intolerable.
We’ll even get the left onside when they realise the amount of CO2 all those flag burnings generate…
Well, maybe.
The real Left is atheist and feminist. That which is currently masquerading as the Left, Livingstone and his fell ilk, is a travesty, a huge sick joke, possibly even an insult to the few elements of the Left of which even Samizdatas might approve: stalwart defence of women’s rights and implacable hostility to theocracy.
Quite so, Ysabel. It is astonishing how Livingston and the like square the circle of their ideologies with their pandering to misogynistic religious primitivists.
Still, all that collectivism inherent in the ‘left’ does rather predispose one to convoluted logic and thereby to strange bedfellows.
“The real Left is atheist and feminist.”
Heven’t you heard of the “Church of liberation” in South America, with marxist Jesuit monks ?
“Yes, how very strange for the Pope to call for an end to violence”
Well, yes, actually it is strange, and it’s a mark of how completely insane current discourse is that it is not more widely seen as such. Time was, that when a war broke out, people wanted victory, not immediate ceasefires. Indeed if the Bishop of Rome wasn’t such a crashing fool he might have realised that genuine peace will only come when one side (preferably the surrealy evil one) is comprehensively and completely defeated. Anything else is just unacknowledged war. It’s the same “peace” that sent 1,000,000 Vietnamese on home made boats, it’s the “peace” that threw 25,000,000 Chinese peasants into unmarked graves, it’s the “peace” that today, as I type this, means a North Korean mother is eating her baby.
(I had much the same thoughts yesterday at the rally for Darfur yesterday whilst surrounded by ever-so-well-meaning-but-indefensibly-clueless liberals yesterday.)
Maybe now mr Ratzinger will see that the battle Israel is fighting (and doing OK) is the same as the battle America is fighting (and doing badly) is the same as the battle the Darfurians are fighting (and getting thoroghly s**tcanned) and he’ll pick his side and start praying for immediate and crushing victory, but I doubt it.
Who would have predicted 40 years ago that religion would be still important in the year 2000 and beyond?
Indeed the world has gotten to be more religious since 1960. Now we have all the wrong types of religion and immoral society at the same time.
The US is a peculiarity: here is a country that has atheist cities and a fundamentalist Christian region down South (nicknamed the Bible Belt) but yet it is ruled by wealthy Jews and their lobby.
Nowadays, it is popular to blame one faith for all wrongs: Islam. Now, there are a whole lot of bad Muslims in the world like al Qaeda, the warlords in Somalia and the Islamic Republic of Sudan (esp. in Darfur), some of the insurgency in Iraq and so on. There are also a lot of good Muslims. Also, there are a lot of misjudged Muslims (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is one: he was one of the few Muslim leaders who was able to say he respected Pope Benedict (who Ahmadinejad realised did not mean to offend) and still gain respect of the Islamic world. Compare Ahmadinejad’s remarks to the fanatic al Qaeda in Iraq remarks and you know the difference.
Just because Ahmadinejad told the world what an oppressive regime Israel is, the US do not like it. Sure, Iran is not perfect either is the US or either is any country. However, the US focus on even the most minor things happening in Iran or Syria for that matter, they invade Iraq and Serbia for invasion and ethnic cleansing of other nations but yet let Israel invade and ethnically cleanse all they like! I know that Jews had it tough in the past but they should not use the holocaust as excuse for their own violence. That’s an insult to the Jewish victims of dictators like Hitler and Stalin. Just like the Iraq war is an insult to 9/11 victims.
Christian America certainly has shown it is not religiously biased. Jews like Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld have gained top offices in the land: however, these people do as much to harm the Jewish faith as bin Laden and Zarqawi do to harm Islam. These individual Jews and Muslims are evil people (there are/were evil Christians, too: the Spanish inquisition era comes to mind). Not the faiths themselves.
Religion should have a place in this century. Use of religion (no matter what religion: Hindus and Sikhs have also used obscene terrorism to promote their faiths in the last 30 years: the Sikh terrorists of course gave al Qaeda the blueprint for Lockerbie 4 years earlier by downing a plane with a bomb over the Atlantic) to promote violence and war is wrong.
Of course, we all tend to look at al Qaeda today. They are an evil and vile organisation responsible for terror attacks like Lockerbie, the 1998 African Embassy bombings, an attack on a US ship in Yemen, many terror attacks in Somalia, an attack against the Iranian city of Mashhad, attacks in Spain in 2004 and London in 2005 and, of course, 9/11. However, it is disturbing that all the faiths have at some stage also engineered such terror.
“Jews like Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld”
Beep. Beep. Beep. Nutbar alert.
As an interesting aside, the Bush administration has less Jews than almost any since the second world war.
Gabriel, indeed… I wrote this one off as a moonbat after:
It is astonishing that so many people cannot get their head around the idea that US support for Israel is not based on a shadowy cabal of Jewish plutocrats but rather the simple fact there is widespread support from large numbers of regular Americans.
Of course Donald Rumsfeld is not a Jew – nor is he a neoConservative (Donald Rumsfeld does not and has never believed that it is the duty of the United States to spread Social Democracy round the world – although why the supposed social democrats of the establishment are so upset with the real social democrats who are the neocons is an interesting question) or a follower of the late wicked Jewish Chicago Professor of Political Philosophy.
However, Donald Rumsfeld did once live near Chicago ( I seem to remember it may have been even in Chicago – and he was Congressman for the State of Illinois) – which is about the only point is which the reality of Donald Rumsfeld and the B.B.C. (and the rest of the establishment) story of him, touch.