Minneapolis Star-Tribune : Gwynne Dyer: Not really all that sorry

Gwynne Dyer: Not really all that sorry

Pope Benedict's comments last week about Islam should be weighed in the context of earlier statements and actions.

by Gwynne Dyer | September 19, 2006

On a scale of 1 to 10, Pope Benedict's first attempt at apology was barely a 3. He said nothing, but on Saturday Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone told the world, "The holy father is very sorry that some passages of his speech may have sounded offensive to the sensibilities of Muslim believers."

That didn't stop the protests that have been building in the Muslim world since the pope's Sept. 12 speech to an academic audience in Germany, so Sunday he tried again. From his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome, he said: "I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims."

That won't stop the protests, because he really isn't sorry for what he said. He's sorry for "the reactions in some countries" to his remarks, but he implicitly stands by what he said. So is the pope really anti-Muslim?

After the 9/11 attacks five years ago, the Catholic leader then known as Cardinal Ratzinger told Vatican Radio that "it is important not to attribute simplistically what happened to Islam" -- but then he added that "the history of Islam also contains a tendency to violence." True enough, but Christianity has its own history of violence: the Crusades, the Inquisition and several other detours from the path of peace and tolerance.

Just before he became pope last year, Benedict declared that Turkey should not be allowed into the European Union because its Islamic culture is incompatible with Europe's "Christian" culture. But the real case for the prosecution rests on his invitation to Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci to visit him last September.

Fallaci (who died last week) was an atheist, and her fame as a war correspondent and interviewer was decades behind her. But she carved out a second career as the most extreme anti-Muslim writer in Europe, producing two bestselling books since 2002 that vilified Muslims as dirty subhumans who multiply "like rats," and portraying Islam as an irrational religion that breeds hatred.

Her next-to-last book, which presumably inspired the pope's invitation, was "The Force of Reason," which argued that the West is rational and reasonable, whereas Muslims aren't. And there was Benedict in Germany last week, saying exactly the same thing. What a coincidence.

Benedict quoted from the 14th-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus, who told a Persian visitor that "spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable ... God is not pleased by blood."

So far, so good -- but then Manuel asked his Muslim visitor: "Show me just what Muhammad 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." Benedict quoted that, too, without further comment. He ended his speech, 4½ pages later, by quoting the emperor again: " 'not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God,' said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God. ... It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures." In other words, you Muslims are unreasonable, but if you do it our way, then we'll finally get somewhere.

So now we know that the new pope is a parochial and intolerant man -- but anybody who paid attention to Cardinal Ratzinger's previous career knew that already. Now he is in a position to do much more damage.

Pakistan's parliament has unanimously passed a resolution condemning the pope's speech. Seven Christian churches in the occupied Palestinian territories have been bombed, set ablaze or shot at. A Catholic nun has been shot to death in Somalia. Most Muslims are well aware that violence is an inappropriate way to protest accusations that Islam is a violent faith, but why do they even care what the pope says?

The real reason for the uproar is that so many Muslims feel under attack by the West. Two Muslim countries have been invaded by the United States and its allies since 9/11, and another, Lebanon, has been bombed to ruins by Israel with full U.S. and British support.

At least 20 times as many Muslims have died in these brutal wars as the number of Americans who died in the 9/11 attacks, and almost none of them had anything to do with that terrorist atrocity. So the suspicion grows among Muslims that all this is not really about 9/11 at all, and almost any minor insult to Islam from the West is enough to trigger outrage from Morocco to Indonesia.

We haven't achieved a full-scale "clash of civilizations" yet, but we're making progress.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist.