The Pope, the Prophet, and the Peer

Civitas, 21 September 2006

In a Times op-ed on Monday of this week, William Rees-Mogg defended Pope Benedict for having spiced up a lecture last week with a quotation describing Islam as a violent religion. Despite recognising the quotation to be offensive to Muslims, Rees-Mogg defended the Pope for including the quotation in his talk on the grounds that the Koran does contain much that Muslims can and do construe to endorse, if not demand, the use of violence in the furtherance of the spread of their creed.
‘Pope Benedict will have done Islam a service’ concludes Rees-Mogg in his piece, ‘if he has started a debate within Islam and between Islam and … critics’.
Can the author of Monday’s defence of the Pope be the same William Rees-Mogg as wrote an op-ed published in the Times last February criticising on grounds of their offensiveness to Muslim sensibilities a Danish newspaper for having published cartoons of Muhammed designed to make the very same point about Islam as that which this week’s Rees-Mogg defends the Pope for having made?
If so, surely, it would have helped regular readers of the Times had Rees-Mogg given some explanation in Monday’s piece of what had led to his apparent change of mind. Or, should he consider this week’s defence of the Pope not at odds with his earlier condemnation of Jyttlands Posten for having published cartoons of Muhammed, to have explained what the morally relevant difference is between these two forms of criticism of Islam.

Given the recent protests and angry demands by Muslims throughout many parts for the world for the Pope to apologise for including the offensive quotation in his lecture, surely, the relevant difference between it and the Danish cartoons cannot possibly be that the latter violate the Muslim precept forbidding visual representations of the Prophet. The apparent indifference of the protesting Muslims to the medium through which the thesis is advanced that Islam is a violent religion suggests it is this message, rather than the medium by which it is conveyed, to which they really take exception.
Rees-Mogg owes Times readers some explanation for his apparent change of mind. But I doubt whether any of them will be demanding an apology from him for not giving one or his head, should he fail to supply one.
Surely, it could not simply have been the augustness of the more recent source of the criticism of Islam that led him to see the validity of something to which he had formerly been blind – namely, the urgent need for people world-wide, both Muslim and non-Muslim, to wake up to the grave danger posed by this so-called ‘religion of peace’ in its present form.
For a truly informed and interesting explanation of what lay behind the Pope including the offending quotation in his his lecture, see the piece by Daniel Johnson in the New York Sun published in the same day as Rees-Mogg’s.
While on the subject of the claim that Islam is a violent religion and of the need for apologies to be made in connection with this claim, the New York Post last week published a very interesting piece by a self-styled Arab-American to mark the fifth anniversary of 9/11. Entitled ‘One Arab’s Apology’, what it shows is that it is not only kaffirs who consider Islam too easily subject to being understood by its adherents as sanctioning their using violence against non-Muslims on its behalf. He writes:
‘ I’m sick of saying the truth only in private – that Arabs around the world, including Arab-Americans like myself, need to start holding our own culture accountable for the insane, violent actions that our extremists have perpetrated on the world at large. Yes, our extremists and our culture.
‘Every single 9/11 hijacker was Arab and a Muslim. The apologists (including President Bush) tried to reassure us that 9/11 had nothing to do with Islam, but was a twisting of a great and noble religion. With all due respect, read the Koran, Mr. President. There’s enough there for someone of extreme tendencies to find their way to a global jihad.
‘There’s also enough there for someone of a different mindset to find a path to enlightenment and peace. Still, Rushdie had it right back in 2001: This does have to do with Islam.…The men who killed 3,000 of our citizens on 9/11 in all likelihood died saying prayers to Allah, and that by itself is one of the most horrific things to me about that day.
‘It took me years to realise that I’d been conned into believing the generalisations and stereotypes that millions around the Arab world buy into: that Jews, America and Israel are our main problem.
‘It’s time for all Arab-Americans, and Arabs around the world, to protest against Islamic fascism, to raise our voices – and, where necessary, our arms – against these [Islamo-fascist] tyrants until their plague of terror has been driven from the face of the earth forever.’
Now, that’s what I call good and honest, fearless journalism. It is a pity one has to scour the Internet to come it, rather than find it in our own dailys… isn’t it Lord Rees-Mogg?