I have been an admirer of the Pope and held out great hope that he would help undertake the grave task of fighting the jihad in a world that punishes truth tellers, particularly anyone that dares take on Islamic militantism.
I'd be lying if I didn't express my bitter disappointment and outrage when the Pope admonished Israel during the Israeli/Islamic war. Israel is fighting the very enemy he criticizes now, the very same battle he is now waging.
Yesterday the Pope did some heavy lifting. In his latest speech, the Pope says all the things desperately needing to be said and is surely taking his life into his hands.
Pope Criticizes Islamic Extremism
Pope Benedict XVI hit out at Islam and its concept of Holy War during one of the last public appearances of his six-day visit to his Bavarian homeland.
The thinly-veiled attack on extremist Islam's justification for terrorism came in a complex theological lecture to staff and students at the University of Regensburg, where the former Joseph Ratzinger taught theology in the 1970s.
Using the words, "Jihad" and "Holy War" in his lecture, the pope quoted criticisms of the Prophet Mohammed by a 14th Century Byzantine Christian emperor, Manuel II.
"Show me just what Mohammed 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 him as saying in a contemporary debate with a learned Persian.
"The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable," said Benedict, during his 32-minute lecture on the relationship between faith and reason.
"Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul," he added.
Reiterating his concerns about a modern world "deaf" to God, he warned that other religious cultures saw the West's exclusion of God "as an attack on their most profound convictions".
"A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures," he said.
What is most interesting is how the jihad media is reporting this explosive speech. The New York Crimes Times refer to the Pope's jihad remarks as a footnote, Pope Assails Secularism, Adding Footnote on Jihad , both al-Reuters and the AP (notoriously anti-West and anti-Israel, the prototype Jihad media) headlines the bombshell Pope invites dialogue with Muslims.
And of course the sheep follow like so much of the herd - Pope reaches out to Muslims (now that's rich)
UPDATE August 15: Inasmuch as the jihad media failed to barely mention it. The Muslims have gone wild. So goes the new fascism, speak at your own peril;
Across the Islamic world Friday, Benedict's remarks on Islam and jihad in a speech in Germany unleashed a torrent of rage that many fear could burst into violent protests like those that followed publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.
The last outpouring of Islamic anger at the West came in February over the prophet cartoons first published in a Danish newspaper. The drawings sparked protests — some of them deadly — in almost every Muslim nation in the world.
Some experts said the perceived provocation by the spiritual leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics could leave even deeper scars.
"The declarations from the pope are more dangerous than the cartoons, because they come from the most important Christian authority in the world — the cartoons just came from an artist," said Diaa Rashwan, an analyst in Cairo, Egypt, who studies Islamic militancy. More here
Oh yeah the cartoons were really dangerous.
Wake up people!
