Bureau of Double Standards

Some time ago a Kenyan Cabinet Minister and Chair of the Parliamentary Committee on Defence was so incensed by the movie the Da Vinci Code that he threatened the President of the republic with dire consequences if the movie was shown.

Some time earlier angry mobs had attacked some churches of the Presbyterian Church, defacing them and claiming that they bore the marks of the devil. A while earlier, across the continent troops of baboons posing as Anglican Bishops threatened to walk out of the Anglican Communion if the Church of England went on to ordain gay clergy.

cross the Atlantic Ocean in the USA, Pat Robertson, a clergyman, former Presidential candidate, Presidential Adviser on Religion, Chapel Prefect of the Republican Party and purveyor of the Gospels on the CBS network called for the assassination of the Catholic President of Venezuela. Also in the United States, several clinic offering health services to women have been targeted for spiritual incendiary with bombs and targeted assassinations of abortion doctors and nurses.

The United States has its fair dose of weird cults, the most famous of which is David Koresh's. There are numerous more colourful ones, many violent and most with codes that are distinctly anti-enlightenment values. More mainstream are millennialist religious organisations that back Israel with the view that the entrenchment of the Jews in Palestine, and their subsequent conversion or annihilation will herald the rapture. So the murder of Arabs is kosher as it ushers the Second Coming. Returning home, we encounter the gory Ten Commandments movement and Joseph Kony.

What do all these groups and people share? A literalist translation of their holy book, the Bible, and an aversion for common decency that is called fundamentalism in journalistic cant. They also happen to be Christians, and so these stories do not regularly make it to the front pages. They are certainly not seen as symptomatic of a deep malaise in Christianity.

However, the murder of a 65 year old nun in war-torn, largely lawless Somalia is evidence of Islam's unique innately murderous nature. The kidnaps in the Gaza strip and the West Bank show that Muslims like their Prophet are evil, but when Nigerians capture for ransom Western oil-workers their religion is not mentioned. You heard of the Christian Phalangists in Lebanon, of Sabra and Shatilla? Not likely. Ariel Sharon is an elder statesman and uniquely was allowed to become Prime Minister in spite of the fact that Israeli institutions found him guilty of war crimes with regard to the Sabra and Shatilla massacres.

We are persuaded of the veracity of the Pope's quotes by historians who then fail to explain how the people of America were converted, or indeed the Africans and the Australasians.

The BBC and SkyNews have been broadcasting for the last 4 days endless continuous footage of the Pope's speech, misinterpreting it and asking the Muslim congregation, what are you going to do about it. They have paraded every clown available to showcase his most bigoted racist views on TV, so we can all sit back and ponder just how right the Pope was, just how right Emperor Manuel was. We live in a world where merely doubting any facet of the Holocaust narrative can land one in jail, but where it is open season on Islam.

The reactions to offence, much like non-state terrorism or the kidnaps cited above are corollaries of deeply held feelings of injustice and powerlessness. They are emblematic of societies that have despaired of fair judgement in the courts of the world's opinion, dehumanised, weak and without leadership, they resort to barbarism to express their anguish, whether on the streets of Washington DC or Paris or Warsaw or Islamabad.

In the end, unless Western society feels its spirit can take on another Holocaust, she will have to stop making a fetish of Islam and its violence and seek in homage to the last Pope to make a lasting peace with Islam, a just compromise that is respectful of an old and sometime great civilisation.

P.S Minutes after I finished typing this out a German friend pointed out to me that the Pope's words were rather different than the English translation offered up by the Anglo-Saxon Press. Schlecht or bad, mutated into boese or evil, which obviously has greater capacity to cause injury. Moreover the Pontiff went on to describe as 'brusque' or churlish, or boorish' the statement attributed to Emperor Manuel.