No mistake, the successor of St. Peter, Pope Benedict XVI has erred and the damage is done. His anti-Islam remarks are out adding a Catholic stamp to the Evangelist “Islam versus the West” justification for the neocon-led “World War III”.
Coincidently the pope and the US President George W. Bush on Wednesday expressed “a deep respect” for Islam and Muslims, but both men failed to calm angry reactions across the Muslim world because both sounded self-contradictory.
The pope in two public apologies in less than a week cited “reason” to justify unconvincingly his unreasonably quoted anti-Islam remarks, but failed to dispel a rapidly growing impression that he has positioned the Vatican in a role in the US-led war on “Islamic terror” similar to its role in the anti-communism war earlier, also led by the US.
Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei this week charged that Benedict’s words were “the latest link in the chain of a crusade against Islam started by America’s (President George W.) Bush.” Khamenei as well as the former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami have been spearheading an international campaign for dialogue among civilizations.
Apologists may acknowledge that the pope’s quotation was insensitive but unintentional.
Islamic leaders in Indonesia and Malaysia have accepted the pontiff’s apology, seeing no purpose in antagonizing the largest Christian church and playing into the hands of the Christian Zionists.
Similarly the world’s largest secular Islamic nation of Turkey and India — home to the world’s largest Muslim minority — were swift to demand papal apology but were also interested to contain the damage. Turkey said the pope’s planned visit to the country in November was still on. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has also accepted pope’s apology as “sufficient.”
But the unfortunate fact is the pope’s quotation is going down into Muslims’ collective memory as fitting into the US-led war on “Islamic terror,” which is cloaked in anti-Islam terminology like President Bush’s blunders of “crusade,” “Islamic terrorists,” and his latest “Islamic fascists.”
It boils down to be serving as a Catholic justification for an American political-military anti-Islam campaign. The pope’s attempts to portray his speech as a scholarly and theological matter is not convincing enough to distance the Vatican from being embroiled in Bush’s war. After all the pontiff is also a politician and a head of state, which helped undermine communism; no one can expect him to be happy or eager to see a US defeat whether in Iraq, Afghanistan or in the overall war on terror.
“Why the pope chose to throw a hand grenade into a powder keg, and why he chose to do it at this moment in history”? asked George Friedman, chairman and founder of Stratfor, the world’s leading private intelligence company.
“Bush has been trying to portray the war against Islamist militants as a clash of civilizations, one that will last for generations and will determine the future of mankind. Benedict, whether he accepts Bush’s view or not, offered an intellectual foundation for Bush’s position,” Friedman, the author of numerous articles on national security, information warfare, and computer security, added.
Benedict XVI during his 17-month papacy has been lecturing Muslims on the need to teach their young to shun violence, suggesting that violence is part of Islam.
In March he decided to merge the Vatican’s office for dialogue with Muslims with its culture office and to send the English prelate who headed it, Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, considered a top Islamic expert, to Egypt as papal envoy.
Recent statements by senior Catholic bishops have singled out Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas in names as violent groups under his papacy. Added to this is the pope’s reported opposition to Turkey’s membership in the European Union because of its Islamic culture.
Similarly Muslims could not view positively the Vatican’s reported views on immigration into Europe of people of different cultures, especially Muslims.
It’s a pity that the pope has chosen to exacerbate a world divide over religious lines that have nothing to do with the real problems humanity faces today.
— Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Ramallah.
