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Addressing an academic group assembled
at his former university at Regensburg in his native Germany,
Pope Benedict XVI launched into a mystifying homily against Islam.
At the height of the diatribe, Pope Benedict quoted a medieval
monarch who insulted Islam by stating that Islam was both "evil
and inhuman."
Predictably, the pope's ill-conceived
outburst triggered outrage and protest throughout the world.
Public demonstrations have called for a formal papal apology,
and in Somalia, an aged nun became the victim of what is being
portrayed as a reprisal.
In the midst of the emerging
crisis, the pope issued yet another statement designed to quell
the outrage and stem the violence. Strangely, in his new statement
the pope chose to insult the Jews by quoting a biblical passage
blaming them for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The pope must
have had an unfortunate lapse of memory, for it would appear
that he may have forgotten that the disciples were all Jews and
so, too, were many of Jesus's myriads of followers who did not
support the crucifixion.
This latest insult was not
the first time that Pope Benedict has enraged the Jews. When
he appeared at Auschwitz earlier this year, the pope had forgotten
(deliberately, of course) to mention that the Holocaust was the
product of Anti-Semitism. Instead, Benedict air-brushed the
Anti-Semitism of Nazism and its collaborators out of history
altogether in his clumsy attempt to revise the Holocaust.
Almost immediately following
the outrage at the pope's Islamophobia, Angela Merkel, the right-wing
Prime Minister of Germany, leapt to his defence. Following swiftly
on her statement defending the Pope, election results from Merkel's
home constituency confirmed the political resurgence of the far
right in Germany.
The National Democratic Party
an extraordinary political euphemism for a party that espouses
xenophobia, anti-semitism, Islamophobia, racial superiority of
Nordic and Germanic races and Aryan supremacy - swept to victories
that will allow them to send representatives to the German Parliament,
the Bundestag. With this latest triumph of racial extremism,
three radical parties will now be represented in the Bundestag.
Merkel and her pope must be pleased.
Pope Benedict's statements
about Islam have been shameful. While no monotheistic religion
is blameless and each has committed atrocities in the name
of their divinity Christianity and Judaism have long and
atrocious records of war crimes extending back to the time of
Joshua who led the Hebrews in the massacre of the people of Ai
slaughtering twelve thousand men, women and children (Joshua
8:25). King David was a brutal warrior. Not only did he slay
Goliath; he gruesomely desecrated the corpse by severing the
head and brandished it about ghoulishly. In his poetic Book
of Psalms, David addressed the Babylonians by writing a macabre
curse, "A blessing on him who takes and dashes your babies
against the rock!" (Psalm 137).
Neither was Jesus totally non-violent.
"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came
not to send peace, but a sword." (Matthew 10:34)
More. Jesus advocates the execution of rebellious children
(Mark 7:9-10) and the amputation of limbs as punishment
(Matthew 5:29-30).
In recent Islamophobic diatribes,
the Pope and others have castigated the Muslims for their resort
to the sword to spread their religion. This tactic is outrageous
for it airbrushes the crusades, the Inquistion and the Holocaust
out of history. All of these atrocities were perpetrated by
Christians against millions of victims among the unfortunate
non-believers, pagans, Jews and Muslims who lost their lives
in wars, in courts of Inquistion or in the Nazi extermination
camps arrayed across Germany and Poland that are coincidentally
the sites of the birthplaces of the present pope and his immediate
predecessor, John Paul II.
Worse than outrageous, these
statements are lies, outright lies. The word "sword"
does not occur in the Qu'ran not even in the so-called
"Sword Verse," (at-taubah 9:5) - but it certainly does
occur in the Judaeo-Christian Bible where it appears at
least 424 times. In fact, in the Bible the word "sword"
appears more than one hundred times more frequently than the
word for "peace."
In the Mosaic book of Deuteronomy,
Chapter 20, the Lord God of Israel commands Moses to sack all
cities in his wake, but in those cities in the promised
land the Lord commands Moses to kill all of the inhabitants
utterly i.e. commit genocide. According to the writers
of Deuteronomy, the Lord God of Israel ordered the Israelites
to commit genocide by mass-murdering and massacring all of the
Hittites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites
and the Jebusites a massive conglomeration of humanity
equivalent to the populations of the Middle Eastern nations currently
occupying Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the Palestinian territories
and Iraq.
In the final book of the Christian
Bible, the Revelations of St John the Divine, after the
Rapture, Jesus Christ will return to commit genocide on all the
inhabitants of the earth. Men, women, children, animals and
plants will be convulsed, exploded, lacerated or incinerated
in a global holocaust that will eradicate every last vestige
of life on our planet.
The current Pope is not the
only holder of his office to foment wars against members of other
religions. The crusades were papal onslaughts against Jews and
Muslims. The Jewish populations in the German provinces of Europe
were the first victims of the first crusade. A long line of
papal diatribes led the way for the Nazi genocide of the Jews
in the same anti-semitic region of Europe.
In the nineteenth century,
Pope Leo XIII explicitly stated,
"The death sentence
is a necessary and efficacious means for the Church to attain
its end when rebels act against it and disturbers of the ecclesiastical
unity, especially obstinate heretics and heresiarchs, cannot
be restrained by any other penalty from continuing to derange
the ecclesiastical order and impelling others to all sorts of
crime ... When the perversity of one or several is calculated
to bring about the ruin of many of its children it is bound effectively
to remove it, in such wise that if there be no other remedy for
saving its people it can and must put these wicked men to death."
Pope Leo XIII's statement stands
as a clear and blatant call to genocide of Jews, Muslims and
non-believers. It is worth noting that in recent decades, the
number of conversions from Christianity to Islam and Buddhism
has been gaining momentum throughout the world a phenomenon
well known to the Vatican and its chief lieutenants including
Josef Ratzinger, the former Hitler Youth.
Prior to becoming pope, Josef
Ratzinger led a controversial career. Known as "God's Rottweiler,"
Ratzinger delivered numerous Islamophobic and Buddhaphobic harangues,
and he excommunicated leading reformist theologians while crushing
liberation theology and covering up the sex crimes of thousands
of Catholic pirests. Ratzinger's ecclesiastical career is predicated
on the radical reform of Roman Catholicism by returning it to
medieval levels of absolutistic-totalitarian authority.
While his predecessor made
explicit statements condemning the war in Iraq, Pope Benedict
has done no such thing. Worse. During the American presidential
election in 2004, when he was still a Cardinal, Josef Ratzinger
sent a controversial letter to America's bishops threatening
to excommunicate every Catholic who voted for Bush's opponent,
Senator John Kerry. In doing so, Ratzinger became openly and
willfully complicit in Bush's explicitly Islamophobic wars.
This pope has a well-established
record of inciting wars against Islamic peoples. To date, Benedict's
highly politicized statements have fomented wars between the
Christian West and the Islamic Middle East. Neither before nor
since assuming his papal throne has Benedict done anything worthy
of note to increase genuine understanding between the major religions.
For this reason alone, Benedict's is a failed papacy. For other
reasons especially his personal bigotry and his obstinate
preference for political prejudice Benedict's pontificate
will be remembered as a disaster for Roman Catholicism.
Writing the greatest Christian
literature of the medieval period, the Divina Comedia,
Dante Aligheri boldly attacked the treacherous political machinations
of the papacy in the fourteenth century. Seven centuries later,
the situation is no different. The papacy is in the hands of
a neoconservative political extremist, who views his personal
role as that of a religious tyrant. There can be little serious
doubt that the world will pay an extremely high price for his
outrageous vanities.
Michael Carmichael has been a professional public affairs
consultant, author and broadcaster since 1968. In 2003, he founded
The Planetary Movement Limited, a global public affairs organization
based in the United Kingdom. He has appeared as a public affairs
expert on the BBC's Today Programme, Hardtalk, PM, as well as
numerous appearances on ITN, NPR and many European broadcasts
examining politics and culture. He can be reached through his
website: www.planetarymovement.org
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