Yes, the Pope Is Catholic - Either You Believe 'The Pope Made Them Attack Churches' Or You Know History
MR published a series of over 40 posts about Pope Benedict XVI's speech and the ensuing anti-Papal riots. These posts included an extensive unpacking of the speech itself, as well as criticism of academic and media reactions to the controversy. 39 of those posts are categorized and indexed here.
The more we think about it, the weirder it seems to us that people just assume that Europe and the Islamic world will get along. And the reason it seems weird to us is because there is zero - zero - empirical reason to believe that these two civilizations can exist without attacking each other. There are at least some reasons to think that Europeans can go more or less postnational among themselves - the cosmopolitanism of the pre-WWI era shows that a Continental culture can at least be talked about seriously. But Europe has been going at it with Middle East Muslims (who used to be the Ottoman Empire (that used to be called the Persian Empire)) for a good couple thousand years now. And the only time that stopped even for a time was when the Europeans forcefully defeated or forcibly colonized their opponents.
Europeans may not know that Muslims have been in an unceasing war with Christians, but certain Muslims seem to be aware of it. Now they're attacking churches in the Palestinian areas because Pope Benedict hurt their feelings. And of course it was a previously unknown group:
'Palestinians' rioted and set fire to a number of churches in Judea, Samaria and Gaza today, in protest over Pope Benedict's speech in Germany on Wednesday. A 'previously unknown group' (the terrorists got a new set of uniforms) called Swords of Islamic Right, threatened today to blow up all churches and Christian institutions in the Gaza Strip to protest Pope Benedict's remarks. The group also claimed responsibility for a shooting attack on a church in the Zaituon neighborhood in Gaza City and for two attacks against churches in Nablus (Shechem).
Do you think that Hamas used UN, Iranian, or EU to buy the new uniforms for this previously unknown group? We told you they're learning fast - maybe there really was something like the conversation we imagined where Abbas explained to Hamas how Arafat had stretched this out for years.
Talk about the Pope and the attacks that Catholics are suffering because the Arab Street has chosen to blow things up in response to the assertion that (a) Islamic revelation asserts the utter transcendence of Allah and (b) 14th century Europeans thought that the Muslims who had been trying to invade Europe on and off for 1,000 years were warlike. So we're expecting newspaper stories right... about... now... about how the Pope's speech triggered Muslim violence against Christian holy sites. And of course, in a very trivial news, those stories are true - the excuse that Palestinian terrorists are using this week is that the Pope's speech made them do it... caveat: how many of the ones burning things in the streets know what Pope Benedict said... or where Rome is... or who Plato and Aristotle were?
Palestinians have been attacking Churches in Gaza and the West Bank for years and years. Probably the most famous involved their invasion of the Church of the Nativity, after Sharon finally had enough and ordered the IDF into the West Bank in Operation Defensive Shield. The gunmen stayed in the Church for 38 days, using the 40-some odd priests and nuns as human shields. In a violation of every law of warfare ever, they used the building as a military installation - and the desecration that they committed to one of Christianity's most sacred sites was such that the bodily waste that they left everywhere was a footnote. Using Bibles as toilet paper, however, did get some attention. And then again a lot of people focused on the use of the Church to store weapons - but here we think there's a fair argument to be made that they were treating the Church no worse than they treat their own mosques. Israel restrained its troops almost entirely, knowing that if anything happened to the Church they'd get blamed. One morning two Palestinians took advantage of Israel's inaction, climbed to the bell tower, and shot at and wounded two Israeli border police officers. Israel returned fire and suddenly, totally by coincidence, fire broke out in an area that wasn't so much where the Israelis were shooting as near it. Eventually, the prisoners were all sent to Europe.
Yet somehow today, despite the near total absence of Israeli occupiers, Christians continue to flee areas under Palestinian control as fast as they can. They've been persecuted until they are now just 1.7 percent of the population in the Palestinian territories. This time last year, Christian Palestinians had documented - documented - 93 incidents of anti-Christian abuse and over 140 illegal land grabs. And then there's this charming trend of interfaith 'closeness':
Many mosques have mushroomed adjacent to and usually taller than churches. Loudly amplified Moslem sermons have been aired during Christian services, including the Pope's April 2000 address in Nazareth. The Moslem broadcasts were so loud, in fact, that the Pope was forced to halt his speech until Moslem call to prayer was concluded. Anti-Christian rhetoric is common in official PA broadcasts. For example, in a Friday sermon on October 13, 2000, broadcast live on official Palestinian Authority television from a Gaza mosque, Dr. Ahmad Abu Halabiya proclaimed: "Allah the almighty has called upon us not to ally with the Jews or the Christians, not to like them, not to become their partners, not to support them, and not to sign agreements with them."
It's almost like their new explanations for targeting churches this week is a pretext. But the New York Times made their "anger" seem genuine enough, so now we're not sure.
And this AP story is exactly what we're talking about:
But the statement stopped short of the apology demanded by Islamic leaders around the globe, and anger among Muslims remained intense. Palestinians attacked five churches in the West Bank and Gaza over the pope's remarks Tuesday in a speech to university professors in his native Germany.
Replace "over" with "using as an excuse" and you might be somewhere in the ballpark of the truth.
It's a lovely excuse that these people have this week:
Gunmen killed an Italian nun and her bodyguard Sunday at the entrance of the hospital where she worked, officials said - an attack some feared could be linked to Muslim anger toward Pope Benedict XVI. The nun, known as Sister Leonella, was shot in the back four times by two gunmen armed with pistols, said a doctor at the hospital, Mohamed Yusef.
But they're not violent! And you know what - if well-meaning idiots think that bringing up the Crusades is sufficient to demonstrate that Catholicism is violent then, uh, why can't people who think that Islam is more violent add in things like the "Muslim conquest of the whole Middle East and Africa". Because after those balance out, all that's left is the virtual contemporary monopoly that Islam holds on religiously-inspired political violence.
