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“Take your Sword of Islam and shove it up your…”
18 September 2006 at 14.02Some things just make you seethe with anger. Consider the recent muslim outrage over the comments of Our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, in an academic address in Regensburg, Germany, this past week:
In the seventh conversation [between the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian, in 1391,] the emperor touches on the theme of the jihad (holy war). … [H]e turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with the central question on the relationship between religion and violence in general, in these words:
Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul.
God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats… To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death….The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.
Now, remember first that this is a citation from a medieval text. Moreover, it is part of a long thesis, the conclusion of which is that violence should not be used to spread religion, and that blindly following a call to violence without use of reason is morally wrong. [For those interested, the entirety of the Pope's address at Regensburg can be found here (Catholic World News).] In truth, the Pope’s thesis is not only historically accurate, but also quite non-judgmental and unbiased.
And the reaction by muslims worldwide? “We want to make it clear that if the pope does not appear on TV and apologize for his comments, we will blow up all of Gazaâ??s churches!” [The Sword of Islam]
Actions speak louder than words, and Islam doesn’t disappoint: Automatic weapons and bombs have left their signature on many churches in the Arab world. One Catholic nun was murdered in Mogadishu, Somalia. Muslim protestors burn statues of the Pope in effigy and carry posters saying “Trinity of evil,” “Jesus is slave to Allah” and “Islam will conquer Rome.”
The Pope, shocked by the outburst, expressed regret over the muslims’ misunderstanding (and malrepresentation) of the excerpt from his treatise. But, regarding the “evil and inhuman” comment — case-in-point, quod erat demonstrandum, I say. This is all the more alarming if one considers that the Emperor, cited by the Pope, was referring to an Islam that existed in the Dark Ages; how sad (and scary) that nothing much has changed in six hundred years.
Concurrent with this madness, we mourn the recent loss of Oriana Fallaci. Andrew Cusack provides the best eulogy:
Oriana Fallaci, that indomitable and cantankerous Italian, has finally succumbed to cancer in her native land. … While an ardent leftist, she was an unrepentant foe of what she saw as the Islamic colonization of Europe. Her diatribes against the Muslim immigrants who habitually pissed on the walls of Florence cathedral [nice way to treat your host country, no?] earned her the ire of many, and legal proceedings were initiated against her in France. The liberal commentator Christopher Hitchens described her work as “an example of how not to write about Islam”. She began writing her infamous The Rage and the Pride, a book teeming with passion and righteous indignation, on September 11, 2001 at her home in New York. … Oriana Fallaci will be buried tommorrow [19 September 2006] … in Florence. There will be no funeral.
After she vented her ire in The Rage and the Pride, Fallaci responded to criticism with the more rational and eloquent The Force of Reason.
But I assure you now, if she heard and saw these muslims today, she’d tell them to take their Sword of Islam and shove it up their…
The West needs to stop trying to be so P.C. and realize that their does exist Truth. The truth here is that the Pope did nothing wrong: His comments were statement of historical fact, not accusatory or defamatory, but said to illustrate a point. The truth is that Islam has once again demonstrated itself to be violent and intolerant. The truth is that muslims seize any opportunity (e.g., political cartoons, an academic treatise, etc.) to create new violence. The truth is that it is muslims who have injured and blasphemed. They are the ones who murdered a poor, innocent 65-year-old nun. They are the ones who have bombed churches. They are the ones who hijacked planes and murdered thousands on September 11. They are the ones who continually plot to hurt and kill thousands of others, each and every day. If anyone needs to ‘apologize publicly,’ it is Islam.
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Comment by alessandro — 18 September 2006 at 22:34
Furthermore, the United States and Europe and Israel should be up-in-arms right now — not about how the Pope should’ve said things more tactfully or delicately (read: politically correctly); rather about how the muslim reaction is absolute proof of the veracity of the pope’s citation that Islam is spread by the point of the sword (or nowadays, bombs).
Shame on everyone.