Last week Pope Benedict XVI made a statement enraging Muslims throughout the world. Muslim leaders are demanding an apology. In the streets of a number of countries, Muslims have marched to show their anger.
Violence was reported by the New York Times: “In the West Bank town of Nablus on Saturday, a day after street protests and grenades were thrown at a church in the Gaza Strip, two churches were lightly damaged in firebombings.”
The Pope’s actual statement, according to the Times, “recount[ed] a conversation on the truths of Christianity and Islam that took place between a 14th century Byzantine Christian emperor, Manuel II Palaeologus, and a Persian scholar. ‘He [the emperor] said, I quote, ‘Show me just what Muhammed 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 ...’”
On September 17th, the Times reported, “Pope Benedict XVI sought Sunday to extinguish days of anger and protest among Muslims by issuing an extraordinary personal apology for having caused offense with a speech last week that cited a reference to Islam as ‘evil and inhumane.’ ‘I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address,’ the pope told pilgrims at the summer papal palace of Castel Gandolfo, ‘which were considered offensive. These were in fact quotations from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought,’ the pope, 79, said.” However, using the Pope’s speech as an excuse for violence or threatened violence is unjust. According to a CNN report on September 18th, “An al-Qaeda-linked extremist group warned Pope Benedict XVI on Monday that he and the West were ‘doomed,’ as protesters returned to the streets across the Muslim world to demand more of an apology from the pontiff for his remarks about Islam and violence.”
Violent acts and calls for violence are increasingly being committed in the name of religion. Witness the case of Danny Pearl of the Wall Street Journal who was kidnapped and decapitated by Muslim terrorists in Pakistan. Before he was slaughtered, he was forced to say, as his captors held him and millions watched a TV video, “I am an American Jew, my father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish …” Then the knife severed his head. According to an October 22, 2003 CNN report, “U.S. officials say they believe Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the attacks of September 11, 2001, killed Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and slain in Pakistan. They say the hands that held the knife that slit Pearl’s throat belong to Mohammed. The killing was shown in a videotape sent to the U.S. Consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, shortly before Pearl’s body was found in 2002, but the killer’s face is not visible.”
Musab al-Zarqawi, the number one person directing al-Qaeda in Iraq before he was killed by an American bomb, stated, “Killing the infidels is our religion, slaughtering them is our religion, until they convert to Islam or pay us tribute.” The infidels alluded to are Christians (called Crusaders), Jews, Hindus and dissenting Muslims.
That there is enormous fratricide in Iraq with the Shiites and Sunnis killing one another is sadly apparent. Nearly every day, 50 or more civilians are found tortured and their mutilated bodies are dumped on the city streets of Iraq. The Shiites and Sunnis have damaged or destroyed each other’s mosques. The most horrendous example was the attack on the al-Askariya Mosque, one of the most sacred Shiite mosques in Iraq. When earlier in Afghanistan, the Taliban government destroyed the ancient Buddha statues at Bamiyan built in the third and fifth centuries, civilized countries throughout the world were horrified. Who took to the streets to protest for the Buddhists?
In response to caricatures first published in Denmark depicting Muhammed, Muslim mobs across the world took to the streets, threatening death to those who published the cartoons. People were killed by the enraged mobs. Yet, many Islamic states permit, indeed encourage in government-controlled newspapers, caricatures reviling Jews. The fury of the mobs had its intended effect. Some of the great newspapers in the United States refused to publish pictures of the caricatures. Was it because they did not want to commit blasphemy? Was it out of a sense of good taste? Was it out of fear?
The Times recently described the kidnapping of two Fox News reporters in Gaza as follows: “One Gaza kidnapping that received significant attention was of two Fox News journalists, Steve Centanni and his cameraman, Olaf Wiig. For nearly two weeks last month, they were held by a mysterious group which first demanded that all Muslim prisoners in American jails be released. In the end, the group insisted that the two men pay a ransom, convert to Islam or be murdered.” They announced their conversions to Islam on TV before being freed. They later announced it was done under duress.
There are some in Islam who are appalled by what is happening and believe those acts violate Islamic religious law. Yet few are prepared to denounce those actions publicly—marching in the streets, for example. The leaders of the world—secular and religious of all denominations—have an opportunity to stop violence. Why aren’t they calling for marches in support of respect for the religious faiths of others? At the very least there should be a day of prayer proclaimed by religious leaders of all faiths, especially the faiths of Islam, Christianity and Judaism.
Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch can be heard every Friday at 6 p.m. on Bloomberg Radio.
