The Pope’s word:

What bothers me is that I was going to talk about this next week, or the week before it, that was before the pope spoke and now only half of my ideas were posed which spoiled the surprise

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Wow! I had no idea what had happened; all I know was that the whole Islamic world was outrageous over what the Pope had said… What did he say?

Oh, this religious man is mad at the Pope, that one’s inviting the Arab world to take “actions”… yes… Ok, but what did he say?!

For endless minutes LBC kept talking about this one’s opinion and bla bla bla… And finally they told us what he has said, and the guy didn’t say anything. But apparently some people felt insulted with what he said, they feel that the Pope said that Islam was spread by the power of the blade, so they had to prove him wrong… They killed a nun, burnt a few churches, threatened Rome and so on.

Yes I am convinced, they are not violent; so people, next time anyone accuses you that you’re violent, and then show him some REAL violence! Then they will have to apologise and they will admit that you’re not violent… After all you could be worse!

But seriously, he shouldn’t have said that, especially not now and not like that, because he ended up looking like the bad guy. I never liked this Pope and I don’t believe his act was an act of bravery it was just... well I don’t know it wasn’t about Islam in the first place, how did they manage to stick Islam in it?! Remember that Article in a British newspaper saying that 53% of the British people believes that Islam is a threat for Europe? Now the Pope’s word’s far more insulting or something? After the Bin Laden Jihad, the Iranian example, the Danish cartoons… Hezbollah’s unification process of the Islamic world and now this, I don’t know but I think the Arab world is trying to sign a sort of divorce with the real world, that’s probably right before they will go back to the embassies begging for a visa, then a few years later they will go blow some trains and stuff… I wonder if Europe’s view isn’t way too exact about the typical Arab.

The Arab world is being really stupid and the Europeans are really fed up with this childish behaviour and the Islamic world responded really awfully to the Pope’s word… Did they disprove him? Did they invite the Christians for a dialogue? A real one?

No they did not. That’s the problem the Muslim world, it is trying to defend, with the modern methods, archaic values. It is not about anyone trying to attack Islam, it’s about the Arabs’ inability to even TRY and figure out a human way to live. Muslims (at least those who are shouting against the Pope right now) are trying to view the Europeans and Americans like some variety of the Christians that exist in here and the long centuries of connections between the Arab world and the Occident, the Arabs don’t understand the European mind, how many Orientalists and Arabists have you known and how many Occidentalists?

As a result Europe tries to understand the Arab world, they understand the specificity and the traditions of the Arab world, they respect that, see how Muslims and Arabs are treated in Europe (far better than they are treated in the Arab world). Instead of understanding this as a fair and good move from the European side, the Arabs consider it to be a sign of weakness and they demand even more.

The truth is, the Christians around here are simply a minority and share too many characteristics with the Muslim world, so we can just get along most of the time and when some radicals get upset about something we just push our heads in the sand and try to reduce the attackers’ anger. So these radicals believe that they can also intimidate Europe. I doubt it.

Now the Muslim clerics want an obvious apology, something like:

“I am sorry! Please please please forgive me I am stupid, I was wrong…”

Something like the previous Pope’s apology toward the Jews for the holocaust. But I believe there should be no apology further than the one that was given on Sunday. Anything more than this would be a submission to the Blackmail as Dr. Noujaymi said yesterday on Al-Hadath (LBC):

“We have a street that contains some extremists and they might use the Pope’s word in some bad manor.”

If this isn’t blackmail then I don’t know what could be blackmail.

But you know what? Forget about all the subconscious reasons for this attack; let’s try to listen to what the radicals want. They want Islam to be respected but let’s look the other way, let’s see how are the Non-Muslims being treated in the Arab world:
The Christians are not satisfied, don’t ask the ones that are still living here, ask those who have left and there fore no longer fear for their lives. But their situation is survivable and excellent if compared with Jews. The Jews don’t suffer from physical damage, because their population has disappeared from the whole Arab world. It’s the whole Jewish religion that’s often attacked, many religious men consider it is their right to attack Jews, the Jewish man is the evil man… Where’s the respect to all religions?

I believe the Arab world needs to learn how to hear criticism again, the Muslims (in this case) need to hear that the world won’t justify everything that was done, that non-Muslims are going to criticise the Muslim lifestyle, just as they criticise everything else. The Pope did not criticise Islam, but criticism is coming and God help us when that will happen, I worry especially for all the Christian minorities in the Muslim world. This was just the prelude.