Re: POPE: FUNDAMENTALIST ISLAM CONTRADICTS MUHAMMAD
Partly, yes. And because the Pope has apologized and praised Islam. And because the hatred spewed by Pakistani clerics is enough to clog up every toilet in Rome.
Re: POPE: FUNDAMENTALIST ISLAM CONTRADICTS MUHAMMAD
:D
Re: POPE: FUNDAMENTALIST ISLAM CONTRADICTS MUHAMMAD
well clerics are on par so theres no audacity issue about it. as for pakistani clerics, i agree its an over reaction; but your generalising quite abit there. its verging on racism.
Re: POPE: FUNDAMENTALIST ISLAM CONTRADICTS MUHAMMAD
I'm sorry you see racism in everything (except your own myopic views that is). It is a known fact that there are boatloads of clerics within Pakistan that preach hatred against the west, the Jews and the infidels that incite their followers.
And no, Muslim clerics are not on par with the leader of the Roman Catholic Church. They have no say so whatsover in the inner workings of the Church. They don't even have a system within their own religion to deal with their hate mongering.
Re: POPE: FUNDAMENTALIST ISLAM CONTRADICTS MUHAMMAD
And no, Muslim clerics are not on par with the leader of the Roman Catholic Church. They have no say so whatsover in the inner workings of the Church. They don't even have a system within their own religion to deal with their hate mongering.
Its a known fact that most muslims have no access to modern news and most of their news that is recieved is from biased and propoganda based local TV stations.
And since they were never taught rational thinking in schools only the basics, its not their fault that they react with violence and riots each time some criticism is made towards Islam
The problem is education and tolerance. People need to be educated in a proper manner and need to be taught the truth about Islam that it is a peace loving and kind religion which respectes all religions and humanity and not a twisted Whabbissm that is preached in Saudi Arabia.
Re: POPE: FUNDAMENTALIST ISLAM CONTRADICTS MUHAMMAD
so? they’re still clerics. :halo:
i think ure twisting it pretty well. it was the pope who made the insulting remarks, not the other way around as you would have us believe. so he made an apology, and some folks didnt buy it, they have every right to express it, without being called every name under the sun or having other folks getting all uppity about it…
Re: POPE: FUNDAMENTALIST ISLAM CONTRADICTS MUHAMMAD
My point you are overlooking is that they have clerics within their own ranks that spew hatred and insult other religions in numbers that are exponentially higher than this one comment by the Pope. So yes it is the other way around, my myopic one. We just don’t have riots and hundreds of Christian clerics getting together to make demands and threats. The uppity ones in all this are the self righteous threatening the Pope while their own are calling for holy wars and death to the infidels. (Ironic, isn’t it? This is the very behavior they are protesting that the Pople called them on)
Since there is no hiearchy within Islam and there is no Muslim “Pope” to make ignorant, hateful statements, we can only judge comments made by individual ‘clerics’ or ‘scholars’ that call for holy war against the infidels and whatever else they want to spew without being challenged.
Re: POPE: FUNDAMENTALIST ISLAM CONTRADICTS MUHAMMAD
so seminole; tell me about cleric pat robertson? where does he stand in all of this?
Re: POPE: FUNDAMENTALIST ISLAM CONTRADICTS MUHAMMAD
I wasn't aware he was involved. Is he calling for the Pope to resign or the west face serious consequences as well?
My personal opinion of him is that he is an arrogant, ignorant man who confuses his self righteousness with righteousness.
Re: POPE: FUNDAMENTALIST ISLAM CONTRADICTS MUHAMMAD
Pat Robertson? Didn't he raise his own 50,000 man militia recently? Issue any death Fatwas? Has he tortured hundreds of Methodists and thrown them in the Tigris? Has he beheaded anybody and shown the video on the 700 Club?
You worry about one intollerant TV preacher? Why don't you worry about the warlord/clerics in Iraq who are killing hundreds every day. Last I heard Robertson has killed no one. That sort of puts them in completely different leagues. Rather than clever little retorts, really think about the daily deaths being caused by Muslims all over the world.
Listening to Guppies is like playing Pong.
Hey, there was an attack on a Synegogue in Norway today. Frikin' Norway. The crew had drawn up plans to attack the US and Israeli embassies next. Think the investigation will find Pat Roberson on their TIVO? Doubt it.
Re: POPE: FUNDAMENTALIST ISLAM CONTRADICTS MUHAMMAD
^^ See the difference to these guppies is that if a Muslim kills a Muslim, that is ok...
But is a Christian or a Jew kills a Muslim or says anything bad towards them that is worse than a 100,000 Muslims being killed....
Thats their mentality
The Best Christian or a Jew cannot be as good as the worst Muslim
Re: POPE: FUNDAMENTALIST ISLAM CONTRADICTS MUHAMMAD
Who is afraid of disussing holocaust. We will start with that committed in the name of Islam. But the problem is that moderator may not allow it. he will remove the page
Re: POPE: FUNDAMENTALIST ISLAM CONTRADICTS MUHAMMAD
Genocide committed in the name of Allah: 3,000,000 Bangladeshi Hindus Killed during the Pakistan-Bangladesh war in 1971. From 1894 to 1896 Abdul Hamid, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, killed 150,000 Armenian Christians. In India, Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur along with his disciples was burned to death by the Moghul ruler Aurangzeb in 1675. Another Sikh, Bhai Mati Das was sawn into right and left halves while he was still alive. In July 1974, 4,000 Christians living in Cyprus were killed by Fahri Koroturk, president of Turkey and his Islamic army. From 1843 to 1846 10,000 Assyrian Christians including women and children were massacred by the Muslims. From 1915 to 1918 750,000 Assyrians were killed in the name of Islamic Jihad. In 1933 thousands of Assyrian villagers were murdered by the Iraqi soldiers in Northern Iraq. Since 1990 more than 10,000 Kashmiri Hindus have been brutally murdered by Islamic fundamentalists. Over 280,000 Ugandans killed during the reign of Idi Amin from 1971 to 1979. Over 30,000 Mauritanians have been killed by the Islamic dictators since 1960. In 1980, 20,000 Syrians were murdered under the rule of Hafez Al-Assad, President of Syria. Since 1992 120,000 Algerians have been murdered by the Islamic fundamentalist army.
Re: POPE: FUNDAMENTALIST ISLAM CONTRADICTS MUHAMMAD
He is the head of catholic church who not so long ago was burning and killing people who did not conform to their version of christianity, who was doled out millions of dollars for settling child abuse cases.
I dont understand why can muslims taunt and make comments on other religions and expect their religion to be immune to all this.
Re: POPE: FUNDAMENTALIST ISLAM CONTRADICTS MUHAMMAD
^ Yes it is VERY perplexing. And hypocritical. And self righteous.
Re: POPE: FUNDAMENTALIST ISLAM CONTRADICTS MUHAMMAD
**
Tolerance: A Two-Way Street**
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, September 22, 2006; A17
Religious fanatics, regardless of what name they give their jealous god, invariably have one thing in common: no sense of humor. Particularly about themselves. It’s hard to imagine Torquemada taking a joke well.
Today’s Islamists seem to have not even a sense of irony. They fail to see the richness of the following sequence. The pope makes a reference to a 14th-century Byzantine emperor’s remark about Islam imposing itself by the sword, and to protest this linking of Islam and violence:
· In the West Bank and Gaza, Muslims attack seven churches.
· In London, the ever-dependable radical Anjem Choudary tells demonstrators at Westminster Cathedral that the pope is now condemned to death.
· In Mogadishu, Somali religious leader Abubukar Hassan Malin calls on Muslims to “hunt down” the pope. The pope not being quite at hand, they do the next best thing: shoot dead, execution-style, an Italian nun who worked in a children’s hospital.
“How dare you say Islam is a violent religion? I’ll kill you for it” is not exactly the best way to go about refuting the charge. But of course, refuting is not the point here. The point is intimidation.
First Salman Rushdie. Then the false Newsweek report about Koran-flushing at Guantanamo Bay. Then the Danish cartoons. And now a line from a scholarly disquisition on rationalism and faith given in German at a German university by the pope.
And the intimidation succeeds: politicians bowing and scraping to the mob over the cartoons; Saturday’s craven New York Times editorial telling the pope to apologize; the plague of self-censorship about anything remotely controversial about Islam – this in a culture in which a half-naked pop star blithely stages a mock crucifixion as the highlight of her latest concert tour.
In today’s world, religious sensitivity is a one-way street. The rules of the road are enforced by Islamic mobs and abjectly followed by Western media, politicians and religious leaders.
The fact is that all three monotheistic religions have in their long histories wielded the sword. The Book of Joshua is knee-deep in blood. The real Hanukkah story, so absurdly twinned (by calendric accident) with the Christian festival of peace, is about a savage insurgency and civil war.
Christianity more than matched that lurid history with the Crusades, an ecumenical blood bath that began with the slaughter of Jews in the Rhineland, a kind of preseason warm-up to the featured massacres to come against the Muslims, with the sacking of the capital of Byzantium (the Fourth Crusade) thrown in for good measure.
And Islam, of course, spread with great speed from Arabia across the Mediterranean and into Europe. It was not all benign persuasion. After all, what were Islamic armies doing at Poitiers in 732 and the gates of Vienna in 1683? Tourism?
H*owever, the inconvenient truth is that after centuries of religious wars, Christendom long ago gave it up. It is a simple and undeniable fact that the violent purveyors of monotheistic religion today ***are self-proclaimed warriors for Islam who shout “God is great” as they slit the throats of infidels – such as those of the flight crews on Sept. 11, 2001 – and are then celebrated as heroes and martyrs.
Just one month ago, two journalists were kidnapped in Gaza and were released only after their forced conversion to Islam. Where were the protests in the Islamic world at that act – rather than the charge – of forced conversion?
Where is the protest over the constant stream of vilification of Christianity and Judaism issuing from the official newspapers, mosques and religious authorities of Arab nations? When Sheik 'Atiyyah Saqr issues a fatwa declaring Jews “apes and pigs”? When Sheik Abd al-Aziz Fawzan al-Fawzan, professor of Islamic law, says on Saudi TV that “someone who denies Allah, worships Christ, son of Mary, and claims that God is one-third of a trinity. . . . Don’t you hate the faith of such a polytheist?”
Where are the demonstrations, where are the parliamentary resolutions, where are the demands for retraction when the Mufti Sheik Ali Gum’a incites readers of al-Ahram, the Egyptian government daily, against “the true and hideous face of the blood-suckers . . . who prepare [Passover] matzos from human blood”?
The pope gives offense and the Mujaheddin al-Shura Council in Iraq declares that it “will break up the cross, spill the liquor and impose the ‘jizya’ [head] tax; then the only thing acceptable is conversion or the sword.” This to protest the accusation that Islam might be spread by the sword.
As I said. No sense of irony.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/21/AR2006092101513_pf.html
Well, this pretty much hits the nail on the head.
Re: POPE: FUNDAMENTALIST ISLAM CONTRADICTS MUHAMMAD
And gosh, details of the attack in Norway come out and suprise suprise… What could the Pope be thinKing?
** Norwegian police foil plot to behead Israeli ambassador **By The Associated Press
Four men suspected in connection with an attack on an Oslo synagogue are also accused of plotting to blow up the U.S. and Israeli embassies and decapitating the Israeli ambassador to Norway, media reports said Friday.
The four were arrested Tuesday in connection with an attack on the Mosaic Religious Community synagogue. The Jewish house of worship was hit with at least 10 bullets early Sunday. No one was injured.
Police said Thursday that charges against them were being expanded to include plotting terrorism but gave no other details. They were seeking a court order Friday to continue holding the men for questioning.
Defense attorney Vegard Aaloekken confirmed to the state radio network NRK that the new charges include allegations of a terror plot against embassies.
The charges were in part based on recordings from an electronic bug in one suspect’s car, NRK and other major Norwegian news media said.
NRK and other major Norwegian news media said the suspects discussed blowing up the embassies and decapitating the Israeli ambassador to Norway, Miriam Shomrat.
“There is something about gathering weapons and that buildings were to be
blown up,” he told NRK, refusing to say more.
“We are deeply concerned about the emerging information on these planned terrorist attacks in Norway,” U.S. Ambassador Ben K. Whitney said in a statement. “We are watching developments closely.”
Police have been tightlipped about the investigation and refused to disclose names and personal details about the four suspects, other than saying they all are in their 20s.
One of the suspects, a 29-year-old Norwegian of Pakistani descent, was briefly held in Germany in June on suspicion of planning an act of terrorism against the soccer World Cup.
He was released without charges. He also was charged last week with firing gunshots at the home of a Norwegian journalist in Oslo earlier this year, reports said.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/766295.html
Re: POPE: FUNDAMENTALIST ISLAM CONTRADICTS MUHAMMAD
Most of your examples have very little to do with Islam, unless you consider the whiskey drinking Gen Yahya as a Muslim and majority of his victims were fellow Muslims. The same in the case of Turkey, where it was mostly Turkish nationalism that contributed to the killings and let’s not forget the Turks who were massacred. Also, Iraqi soldiers where under the secularist Bathist regime, nothing Islamic about that. And Idi Amin killed his own people and he was no Islamic dictator. The Syrians killed those who they thought supported the Muslim Brotherhood. In Kashmir, it started of as a freedom struggle and only then was hijacked by Islamists. Revisionist history is not nice.
Re: POPE: FUNDAMENTALIST ISLAM CONTRADICTS MUHAMMAD
Defender of the West, Scourge of Islam
The Crusade of Pope Rat
By GARY LEUPP
His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI gave a speech September 12 at the University of Regensburg in his German homeland. He discussed “the question of God through the use of reason” and the matter of getting “reason and faith [to] work together in the right way.” His basic theme was that there has been a “synthesis with Hellenism achieved in the early [Christian] church” and that this relationship between Christianity and Greek philosophy and logic has been a very good thing. He warned against those who believe this synthesis is “not binding” upon new converts from non-western traditions; this view, he declared, is “false.” The pontiff plainly intended to depict the Roman Catholic Church as supportive of modernity and science in general, and both western and tolerant.
The Pope opened his homily by referring affectionately to his years teaching at the University of Bonn (from 1959) during which the university was a “universe of reason.” He then segued into a description of some of his recent reading. "I was reminded of all this recently when I readpart of the dialogue carried
on—perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara [in modern Turkey]—by the erudite Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both. Thus he alluded to an encounter between a Byzantine (Christian) emperor and a learned Persian (that is to say, Iranian) Muslim a century after the last major Crusade. (I’m wondering if there really was a Persian involved in a dialogue with Manuel, or if the emperor simply composed a dialogue to express his views.) The emperor, as cited by Benedict, tells the Persian, "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. "BBC News reports that the Pope said “I quote” twice, stressing that these weren’t his own words. You can find the official text here. The good Emperor Manuel regarded Islam as irrational in its alleged effort to spread itself by force. Manuel declared in response: “Not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature.” “Acting reasonably,” the pope pointedly explained in his talk, means to act “with logos”*-*a term taken from Greek philosophy. The Pope did not return to the issue of Islam, but rather devoted his attention to the Church’s (reason-filled) Hellenistic heritage. He declared, interestingly, that the Septuagint (translation of the Old Testament into Greek from the third to first centuries BCE) is an “independent textual witness and distinct and important step in the history of revelation.” **The broad point, again, is that the rational Greek mind and the mind of the Church are one, the pillars of the West. **Recall that the Greeks, aside from shaping rational western thought, also shaped our ideas about geography. The Greeks first divided “Europe” from “Asia,” and opined that Greeks were unique and superior to the “Asiatics.” The Greeks, declared the Father of History, Herodotus, knew that they were “free,” whereas the Asiatics (particularly the Persians) were prone to enslavement by nature. This ideological construction derives from a century of conflicts—the Greco-Persian Wars of the fifth century—but it has been echoed by Orientalists for centuries. Repeated by the Pope, for example, who while still **Cardinal Ratzinger told the French newspaper Le Figaro that Turkey should not be admitted into the European Union “on the grounds that it is a Muslim nation” which has “always represented another continent during history, always in contrast with Europe.” **[mushie and his moderately enlightened kemalist degenerates take note]
In beginning his remarks citing that exchange between a Byzantine Greek emperor and this “learned Persian,” the pontiff was perhaps conveying a not-so-subtle political message. It may have been a response to the learned letter from Iranian President Ahmadinejad to President Bush. Ending his speech with two references to the need for a (truly reasonable, nonviolent) “dialogue of cultures” Benedict unmistakably alludes to former Iranian President Khatami’s campaign for a “dialogue of civilizations.” This is the Pope’s rejoinder to that plea, presented as the response of the western world (growing out of that remarkable Judeo-Christian Greco-Roman synthesis), to today’s Persia—the Islamic Republic of Iran. Having read the speech I just have a few questions of my own for the Vicar of Christ.
***Did the Byzantine emperors generally act according to “reason”—any more than their Persian, Turkish, or Arab contemporaries? ***Let’s look at this Manuel II character, whom the Pope calls “erudite.” Crowned co-emperor by his father, in 1373, **he lost his throne to his bother, who seized it in 1376. How’d he get it back? By calling for help from the Muslim Turks! I suppose that was reasonable. ****Back on the throne in 1379, no doubt acting in accordance with logos, he paid tribute to the Turkish Sultan and actually had to live as a vassal at the Turkish court! **But he rebelled in 1391, the very year that while in the “barracks at Ankara” mentioned by the Pope and preparing for war on the Turks, he wrote the above-quoted remark about God’s nature. **Then what happened? According to the Encyclopedia Britannica: “A treaty in 1403 kept peace with the Turks until 1421, when Manuel’s son and coemperor John VIII meddled in Turkish affairs. After the Turks besieged Constantinople (1422) and took southern Greece (1423), Manuel signed a humiliating treaty and entered a monastery.” ****Maybe it hadn’t been so reasonable that time to meddle with those Muslims. Maybe the Pope could have mentioned this in his speech. **
Here in 1391 we have an emperor in his war camp, provoking what was to be a disastrous war with Muslims while eruditely disparaging their religion.I’d like to ask the Pope: *Was there anything wrong with that? *
And: ***And when did the Byzantine Empire ever tolerate a “dialogue of cultures” or apply “reason” to religious issues? *****Seems to me that the Byzantine emperors, including the Palaeologan line from the thirteenth century, persecuted religious minorities, including Jews, Manichaeans and dissident Christians, during centuries in which the Islamic world showed relative tolerance. I’ve read the texts of anathemas that virtually everyone in some parts of the Empire was obliged to pronounce publicly in the sixth century: “I renounce Mani, Buddha his teacher,” etc. On pain of death, basically. There was no division between church and state. Many Byzantine Jews welcomed the initial Muslim Arab advances, providing relief from Christian persecution. One increasingly expects historical distortion and hypocrisy in the speeches of Bush administration officials. The effort to depict the Terror War as a war on “Islamofascism” shows their desperation. They must be delighted to hear the pope conflate Christianity, the west, and Reason explicitly while implicitly linking Islam, violence, and irrational intolerance. How sweet that His Holiness’s erudition should elliptically reference Iran, while the Bush administration prepares to attack it!
Breaking new ground for a Roman pontiff, Benedict forayed into the field of Qur’an exegesis in his talk, noting that the Muslim holy book states that “There is no compulsion in religion” (Surah 2: 256). But he notes that the “experts” say that this was composed* early* on, when “Mohammed was powerless and still under threat.” He refers obliquely to “the instructions, composed laterconcerning holy war” implying that these more accurately characterize Islamic teaching. Is he not stating that the real Muslim teachings are those advocating intolerance and violence, and that Christian teachings pose a rational nonviolent alternative? Such an interpretation, aligning the Vatican with the neocon and other Islamophobic camps, could have serious religious and political implications.
The Regensberg talk has provoked an outcry, in Pakistan, Turkey, Lebanon and Egypt. By all reports the Bishop of Rome is a very careful and deliberate man, who has just appointed a specialist in the Islamic world to serve as the Vatican’s foreign minister. Much thought must have been put into the carefully-worded talk. But what is Rome trying to accomplish?
Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch’s merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.
Re: POPE: FUNDAMENTALIST ISLAM CONTRADICTS MUHAMMAD
Now, don’t you just love this one!! I always think the protests after Friday prayers are the most vile, but this one takes the cake. What could the the nice Imam have been telling the nice Islamists at Friday prayer that makes them come out and call for the CRUCIFIXION of the Pope? Tell me again of the Relgion of Peace? Lecture me once more about how bad Pat Roberson is…
** Pakistanis protest, cleric says Pope should be crucified **
*Fri Sep 22, 8:41 AM ET*
Hundreds of Pakistani Islamists held street protests to condemn Pope Benedict XVI for remarks they regard as anti-Islamic, with one leader saying the pontiff should be crucified.
Demonstrators Friday poured out of mosques after the main weekly Muslim prayers in Pakistan’s largest city Karachi, the eastern city of Lahore, the capital Islamabad and other urban centres.
*** “If the pope comes here we will hang him on the Cross,” Hafiz Hussain Ahmed, a senior leader of Pakistan’s main alliance of radical parties, told around 200 noisy demonstrators in Islamabad.***
The alliance, called the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal or United Action Front, forms part of the parliamentary opposition and is often heavily involved in street protests in mostly Muslim Pakistan.
Ahmed also said the pope had joined US President George W. Bush’s “crusade” against Muslims, referring to Christians who fought against Muslims from the 11th through the 13th centuries.
In Karachi police said at least 100 hardliners shouted slogans demanding an apology from the pope and criticising the United States.
“Religious leaders like the pope should not use (US President George W.) Bush’s tone,” Merajul Huda, Karachi chief of the hardline Jamaat-i-Islami party, told the rally.
Witnesses said more than 300 people chanted slogans against the pope outside an Islamic school in the central city of Multan. Dozens more massed in Lahore.
Prayer leaders also condemned the pope during Friday sermons around the country.
Anger has gripped the Muslim world since the pope quoted a 14th-century Byzantine emperor who said innovations introduced by the Prophet Mohammed were “evil and inhuman.”
The pontiff later said he was “deeply sorry” for the outrage triggered by his speech early this month at a German university, and that the passages quoted by him did not express his personal opinion.
A gathering of hundreds of fundamentalists in Lahore on Thursday said Pope Benedict should be removed from his position for his “blasphemous” comments.
The Pakistani parliament has also condemned the pope’s comments and the foreign ministry summoned the Vatican’s envoy in Islamabad last week to lodge a protest.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060922/wl_sthasia_afp/vaticanpopeislampakistan_060922124129