None Dare Call It Barbaric

“This picture, released [September 17] by the Vatican , shows Pope Benedict XVI giving a speech at the Regensburg University last week. Religious seminaries across Iran shut to stage protests over remarks by Benedict that linked Islam to violence, as the hardline press scented signs of an Israeli-US plot.  (AFP/HO/File).”

First they came after the writers (Rushdie), then the newspapers (the Danish cartoons), and now the head of the Catholic Church, whose life will henceforth be in danger for this:

Here is the point Pope Benedict was making, also in the words of that learned Byzantine emperor, speaking on the eve of one of the many sieges of Constantinople:

"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. . . . "

It is a point the Greek-educated and Christian emperor takes as self-evident, but which is not self-evident to a theology that holds God entirely beyond human reason, and says He may command whatever He commands, including conversion by force should He so will.

Despite his stature, and despite the self-evident truth of his words, the Pope is an easy target for the new barbaric totalitarianism.  As Joseph Stalin famously observed, the Pope does not have many divisions.

Few writers today will follow Oriana Fallaci’s lead (or even Salmon Rushdie’s), and the mainstream newspapers are long gone.  The New York Times hit a new post-Duranty low this weekend, with an editorial lecturing the Pope that he must make “a deep and persuasive apology” to those threatening his life. 

Not just an apology (where none is required, nor would any be given absent the threat of force), but a “deep” one (think bowing down); and not just a “deep apology,” but a “persuasive” one (it better sound sincere, even if forced). 

Tigerhawk called the The New York Times editorial “obscene,” which it was, but the better word is “Orwellian:”

Just about the entire world knows that that Pope Benedict XVI gave a speech on Tuesday condemning religious conversion by violence. The Muslim "street" did not respond until Friday, when the leaders of the Muslim religion called for their faithful to surge into the streets in an orgy of rage and violence. . . .  Never in the history of Christianity has a pope been proven correct so quickly and demonstrably. . . .

It is the leaders of prayers in the mosques of the Muslim world who call on their faithful to riot in the streets. It is they who sow pain and incite violence, and anybody unburdened by a loathing of Western civilization knows it. Pope Benedict has nothing to apologize for. The leading clerics of the Muslim world have a great deal to apologize for.

And spare us the lectures about “extremists” and “moderate” Muslims.  As Omri Ceren observed in one of several compelling posts:

It’s getting trite to point out that those [“moderate”] Muslims must be the silentest majority in the history of counting (how’re those forced Gaza-conversion condemnations coming?).

Already the “apology” has begun, as well as murder for an insufficiently deep and persuasive one. 

It is worth recalling that all this began, as it always does, with the vilification of the Jews.  The civilized world declined to defend Israel when terrorism first arose.  Now the world is declining to defend itself. It is so much easier to blame George W. Bush or the Pope.