Thank you for making my point for me
I don’t usually do political/current events posts because there’s not usually much point, but CNN’s coverage of (an extreme) Muslim response to the Pope’s speech in which he described Islam as a religion “spread by the sword” is too amusing to pass up:
The pope on Sunday said he was “deeply sorry” about the angry reaction to his speech last week in which he cited the words of a Byzantine emperor who characterized some of the teachings of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad as “evil and inhuman” and referred to spreading Islam “by the sword.”
This is from the story about the “al Qaeda-linked extremist group” that “warned Pope Benedict XVI on Monday that he and the West were ‘doomed,’ as protesters raged across the Muslim world to demand more of an apology”.
So in other words, the Pope quotes someone else (presumably with ample first-hand experience with the ways in which Islam was spread at the time) as saying that Islam is spread “by the sword”.
In an amazing effort to prove the late emperor correct,
- “The Mujahedeen Shura Council, an umbrella organization of Sunni Arab extremist groups that includes al Qaeda in Iraq, issued a statement on a Web forum vowing to continue its holy war against the West,” reportedly saying that “We will break up the cross, spill the liquor and impose head tax, then the only thing acceptable is a conversion (to Islam) or (killed by) the sword.”
- “People [in Indian-controlled Kashmir] burned tires and shouted ‘Down with the pope.’”
- In Iraq, “angry demonstrators burned an effigy of the pope in Basra.”
- “Muslims threw firebombs at seven churches in the West Bank and Gaza Strip over the weekend.”
(All this from the same article.)
The Pope’s response was, amazingly enough, to back pedal and say that “the remarks came from a text that didn’t reflect his own opinion.”
Do people even listen to themselves? If someone gave a speech in which they quoted someone else as saying that people who adhere to a certain set of beliefs have a tendency to bully people, does it really make sense to object by… bullying people? And does it really make sense for the person who gave the speech with the quote to claim, after seeing the bullying, that he doesn’t agree that this tendency exists?