Caption: Demonstrators in the Iraqi city of Basra burn a pope effigy.
Pope Benedict apologizing for quoting a medieval quotation on Islam and violence drew mixed reactions — and now an Al Qaeda group expressing outrage has vowed to conduct a holy war:
An Iraqi militant group led by al Qaeda vowed a war against the “worshipers of the cross” in response to a recent speech by Pope Benedict on Islam that sparked anger across the Muslim world.
“We tell the worshiper of the cross (the Pope) that you and the West will be defeated, as is the case in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya,” said an Internet statement by the Mujahideen Shura Council, an umbrella group led by Iraq’s branch of al Qaeda.
“We shall break the cross and spill the wine. … God will (help) Muslims to conquer Rome. … God enable us to slit their throats, and make their money and descendants the bounty of the mujahideen,” said the statement.
There’s more to this interesting proposed answer to the Pope’s quote that critics charged disparaged Islam and suggested Islam was violence-prone:
Another militant group in Iraq, Ansar al-Sunnah, also vowed to fight Christians in retaliation.
“You will only see our swords until you go back to God’s true faith Islam,” it said in a separate Internet statement.
UPDATE: A Somalian cleric has now called for the Pope to be killed:
A HARDLINE Somalian cleric has called for Muslims to “hunt down” and kill Pope Benedict for his controversial comments about Islam.
…Somali Sheik Abubukar Hassan Malin urged Muslims to find the Pope and punish him for insulting the prophet Mohammed and Allah.
The pontiff’s speech was as offensive as Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, he said.
“Whoever offends our prophet Mohammed should be killed on the spot by the nearest Muslim,” Sheik Malin, a prominent cleric in the Somali capital, said at Friday evening prayers.
“We call on all Islamic communities across the world to take revenge on the baseless critic called the Pope,” he said.
Elsewhere, Muslims and analysts see mixed lessons and fallout from the comments of a Pope who many originally felt was going to be a relatively bland one, given that he was following the highly charismatic Pope John Paul II.
For instance, Reuters reports that the Vatican is doing damage control:
The Vatican has instructed its envoys in Muslim countries to explain Pope Benedict’s words on Islam but Church experts said on Monday the furor has probably set back relations between the two faiths by decades.
Benedict’s new Secretary of State, who took office only last Friday as Muslims around the world were protesting, said the Holy See’s nuncios (ambassadors) in Muslim countries would be visiting government and religious leaders.
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone said they would illustrate parts of the Pope’s speech last week at the University of Regensburg in Germany that the Vatican believed had been “overlooked”.
Bertone was quoted by Corriere della Sera newspaper as saying there had been a “heavy manipulation of the text, which transformed it into something different than what the Holy Father intended.”
Iran has declared that the Pope’s apology is not enough.
And one report notes that Iranian newspapers blame the Pope’s remarks partly on Israel and the Jews:
The daily Jomhuri Islami said Israel and the United States — the Islamic republic’s two arch-enemies — could have dictated the comments to distract attention from the resistance of the Shiite militant group Hezbollah to Israel’s offensive on Lebanon.
The reality is that if we do not consider Pope Benedict XVI to be ignorant of Islam, then his remarks against Islam are a dictat that the Zionists and the Americans have written (for him) and have submitted to him.”
“The American and the Zionist aim is to undermine the glorious triumph of Islam’s children of Lebanese Hezbollah, which annulled the undefeatable legend of the Israeli army and foiled the Satanic and colonialist American plot,” it said.
Fellow hardline daily Kayhan, whose editor-in-chief is appointed by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said there were signs of Israeli inteference aimed at creating conflict between Islam and Christianity.
“There are many signs that show that Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks regarding the great prophet of Islam are a link in a connected chain of a Zionist-American project,” it said.
“The project, which was created and executed by the Zionist minority, aims at creating confrontation between the followers of the two great divine religions.”
Meanwhile, Morocco is mad, too:
Morocco’s King Mohammed VI has sent a private letter to the Vatican in response to Pope Benedict XVI’s comments about Islam and holy war, a Foreign Ministry official said Monday.
The official, who declined to give his name because he was not normally charged with speaking to the press, refused to give details of the letter. However, he said Morocco was still awaiting an apology from the pontiff. This weekend, Morocco withdrew its ambassador to the Vatican, Ali Achour.
Scotland’s Cardinal has asked Muslims to accept the Pope’s apology.
The firestorm continues on the pages of some newspapers and on some websites. Some who blasted the Pope claim he has become a tool of America’s “far right”:
DUBAI: Gulf newspapers continued to criticise Pope Benedict XVI on Monday, with one Saudi daily saying his remarks linking Islam to violence were beating the drum of war for the far right in the United States.
The Pope’s comments, made Tuesday in a university address in his native Germany, were not “an ordinary blunder requiring an apology”, the Saudi Arabian Al-Yom wrote in its Monday edition one day after the pontiff said he was “deeply sorry” for the outrage caused.
“These remarks belong in a current of thought that is in total accord with the ideas of the extreme right in the United States on the conflict between civilisations,” it said.
“This ideology beats the drum of war even more.”
Meanwhile, the fact that the reaction to the Pope’s comments have been met with some violence is not being overlooked by some in the church. In Australia:
SYDNEY’S Catholic Archbishop has hit out at Muslims protesting over comments by the Pope, saying their reaction shows the link in Islam between religion and violence.
Cardinal George Pell has also labelled the response of some Australian Muslim leaders to the issue as “unhelpful”….
…Cardinal Pell today backed Pope Benedict, saying the violent reaction to his comments on Islam and violence illustrated his fears.
“The violent reactions in many parts of the Islamic world justified one of Pope Benedict’s main fears,” Cardinal Pell said in a statement.
“They showed the link for many Islamists between religion and violence, their refusal to respond to criticism with rational arguments, but only with demonstrations, threats and actual violence.
“Our major priority must be to maintain peace and harmony within the Australian community, but no lasting achievements can be grounded in fantasies and evasions.”
Dr Pell said it was a “sign of hope” that no organised violence had flared in Australia following Pope Benedict’s comments.
But he said the responses of Australia’s mufti, Sheik Taj Aldin Alhilali, and of Dr Ameer Ali, of the prime minister’s Muslim reference group, were “unfortunately typical and unhelpful”.
“It is always someone else’s fault and issues touching on the nature of Islam are ignored…”
What is seemingly getting buried as this controversy rages — and the Al Qaeda group puts it up a notch or two by suggesting violence will be used to punish the Pope for quoting the text that suggested Islam is violent — is the fact that a large number of Muslims who didn’t like his comments accept his apology and are NOT reverting to violence.
For instance, in Michigan, reaction included this:
Sani Abbas, President, Islamic Center of Greater Lansing: “It’s unfortunate, because the last years, the Muslim situation has not been that great with the west.”
Sani Abbas is with the Islamic Center of East Lansing. He says, since the September 11th attacks, Muslims have been trying to build a better understanding of their religion.
Sani Abbas: “There is nowhere in our religion that encourages or promotes violence.”
He believes the pope’s statements hurt those efforts, because it leads some Muslims to act out in violence.
Sani Abbas: “It justifies their cause and rallies people behind them, that’s what we’re really trying to avoid.”
While Abbas accepts the pope’s apology, he says the pope needs to do more.
Sani Abbas: “I’d rather have a letter saying, can we talk about this?”
In New York, The New York Daily News’ story included this:
“We don’t condone the protests and the burning of churches,” said Khwaja Hassan, the president of the Jamaica Muslim Center in Queens, as the faithful arrived for Zuhr, the afternoon prayer service.
But, he added, he was saddened by the Pope’s remarks and thought his apology could have gone further.
“It’s kind of weird how he said he was sorry for the reaction and not because of what he said,” said Elkhansaa Farhane, a 15-year-old Muslim student from Brooklyn.
“An apology is a technicality if you meant the insult,” said Sama Amam, a 38-year-old Muslim from Brooklyn.
The question now being sorted out by serious analysts and newspapers is: what does the Pope really mean and feel, what does it mean for his role in the world, how will it influence thought, and what are the implications. There are positive and negative spins on this.
For instance, eitb predicts the flap could bring back the furor over anti-Muslim cartoons and reports on some of the criticism the Pope now faces.
Writing in the Turin newspaper La Stampa, Gian Enrico Rusconi, a professor at Turin University, said the consequences of the speech “signal an irreversible break not only in relations between Islam and the Catholic Church but also of the very image of the Pope in the West.”
Marco Politi, author and Vatican expert for Rome’s La Repubblica newspaper, said the Pope, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, had set back a quarter of a century of efforts by his predecessor John Paul to improve ties with Islam.
Politi said that John Paul, while making clear that using God’s name justify violence was wrong, “was respected and listened to by the Muslim world as a spiritual leader” who was never seen as an enemy of the west. “All this, tragically, has been ruptured by the Regensburg speech and it remains to be seen if the Pope and his secretary of state can manage to crawl out of this,” Politi wrote.
John Paul, who died last year, was the first Pope to visit a mosque. He travelled to a number of predominantly Muslim countries and welcomed a string of Islamic religious and political leaders to the Vatican during his 27-year-long papacy. Last February, Benedict effectively beheaded the Vatican department for dialogue with Islam by removing its president an merging the department with the Vatican’s culture ministry.
Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, one of the Church’s most experienced hands at dialogue with Muslims, was sent to Cairo in what was widely seen a demotion. Critics of the Pope called Fitzgerald’s removal from the Vatican “an exiling” and expressed concerns that the Vatican no longer had a top in-house expert on Islam to advise the Pope on Muslim affairs.
So the debate — and violence over the Pope’s comments — are likely to go on.
ADDITIONAL READING: A good roundup on breaking events on this can be found at Pajamas Media.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.