You have to wonder if any of our comrades on the left of the blogosphere have ever seen the Arab media. It’s striking how quickly they’ve jumped on the Pope for his comments a few days ago. In fact, they did it with a swiftness usually matched only by their zeal to call President Bush a liar and right wing conservatives fascist neocons.

In a speech, the Pope made the following comments, and in doing so I will add something sorely lacking in the analysis of his remarks.

Context.

In the seventh conversation edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the jihad (holy war). The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: There is no compulsion in religion. It is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat.

But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the “Book” and the “infidels,” he turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with the central question on the relationship between religion and violence in general, in these words:

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.

The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul.

God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats… To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death….

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: “For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.” Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practice idolatry.

Now I ask every single one of you, critic and sympathizer alike, have you even read the remarks? I have. And they’re pretty clear. I’ve bolded the relevant sections which somehow got omitted in 99% of the articles I’ve read about the speech. In fact, the first part of the “offensive” quote from the Emperor Paleologus, most papers quoted only the part up to the word “inhuman” completely ignoring the text preceding and succeeding it. Of course they do. It changes the context of the article dramatically.

Many on the right have taken this speech and twisted it into an attack on Islam, which is convenient because most of the Islamic fundamentalist idiots have done the same thing. In fact, seeing as most of the faithful they’re passing it along to are both oppressed and illiterate, I can see how that would get spread. The right (American, Canadian, and otherwise) seem to want to turn it into a call to action for Christians against the evil boogeyman, the muslims.

Many on the left have, as expected, taken this opportunity to, yet again, go after the Catholic Church, a favorite target of theirs, with so much zeal that it’s obvious they didn’t read the text, don’t understand the text, or are clearly interested in taking cheap shots at the church regardless of the meaning of the passage the purport to have read, understood, and analyzed.

And in the middle of it all are stupid sheeple in white robes burning effigies, bombing churches, and shooting nuns, while proclaiming that they are peaceful people. Then of course there are the ones, cowering in corners, saying those that are committing these acts don’t represent the majority of the 1.5 billion muslims in the world, they’re just a whole lot louder for some reason.

People, something is wrong here, and it isn’t the words of the Pope.

It’s the manipulators.

It’s the manipulators on the right who are so desperate for a shot to prove how evil muslims are that they’ll spin anything into an attack on Islam so they can say they have higher orders from God for their hatred.

It’s the manipulators on the left who are so desperate for something they can attack Benedict with that they completely ignore the obvious text in the speech he gave and the equally obvious conclusions that can be drawn from it.

It’s the manipulators in robes with beards who feed their people a steady diet of anti-Christian (Crusaders), anti-Jewish (Pigs) hatred on a daily basis who capitalize on the illiteracy and religious fervor of their people that whip crowds into a frothing frenzy because what the Pope says is directly opposed to the “indoctrinate or kill” fundamentalist message they preach.

And throughout all this carping, yelling, and death, the one thing that has oddly gone missing is the truth. Closely following that one thing is a sense of scale.

The truth
The Pope was clearly (as evidenced by both the quoted section and the bolded text therein) explaining how one cannot be made to follow God at the tip of a sword. He couldn’t have been any clearer in his speech and any educated person with a reading level above that of a third grader should be able to comprehend that.

A sense of scale
As outraged muslims crowd the street, burning, pillaging, plundering, and murdering, and the Pope is accused of delivering a message of hatred by those with nary the comprehension required to understand the speech to begin with, while muslim schools, textbooks, and preachers preach a consistent message of killing the infidels, bringing back the Caliphate, and uniting the world under the Koran. Doesn’t it strike any of you as odd that none of the critics of the Pope have even mentioned the true hatred that’s frothing in the Middle East from every building owned by a man in a black robe and gray beard? One comment by the Pope is misinterpreted and suddenly, all things are equal, and the systematic teaching of hatred and jihad is forgotten; ironically enough, in the same manner the point of the speech (jihad and conversion by the sword) are also forgotten.

I’m sure that since the Pope has now been called on the carpet by such tolerant people as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the left will join in the chorus of “This Pope hates brown people.” The right will pound back, “You’re on the side of the terrorists.” And, finally, the undeducated folks in robes burning dolls, shredding flags, and shooting nuns will continue to be offended by something they don’t understand and shouldn’t be offended by while proclaiming their peaceful theology.

In other words, the one kind of reaction you’d expect from uneducated ideologues on all sides.

Typical.