Sidewinder

(with apologies to the Dead Kennedys). I am not in the habit of
reading or paying any attention to papal pronouncements. However the
latest hoo-ha about possible insults to islam in his speech at
Regensburg led me to have a look at the full text.

The theme of the speech is on (christian) faith and reason - not
reason as we know it but reason "liberated" from the narrow
Cartesian/empiricist definition imposed on it by modern science. In
other words it’s utter bollocks and intellectually pretty feeble fare
a that. A further measure of the basic stupidity of this man is that
the offending quote from the long-dead byzantine emperor which has
been the spark for much emoting in the muslim world - "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" - is in fact completely irrelevant to the theme of
the speech and yet the man was too brain-dead to realise the political
impact him speaking this phrase would have. Frankly you wouldn’t trust
the guy with the TV remote.

However, despite the immense chutzpah of the Pope denouncing the
unreasonable spreading of religion by fire and sword as something only
those nasty muslims do (the words pot and kettle come to mind). The
deeper agenda of bigotry is perhaps visible in the following quote
from the same speech

"This inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek
philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only
from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of
world history - it is an event which concerns us even today. Given
this convergence, it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its
origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on
its historically decisive character in Europe. We can also express
this the other way around: this convergence, with the subsequent
addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the
foundation of what can rightly be called Europe."

Well we can certainly see where yer man’s opposition to Turkey’s
joining the EU is coming from. Europe and, by extension, "the West" is
based on an intellectual tradition exclusively grounded in
christianity. Let us remind ourselves of the real historical lessons
of El Andalus - the intellectual and technological development of
Western Europe is very much the joint historical product of the
inter-relation of "the Three Cultures" - that is Islamic, Jewish and
Christian (and even this is already an over-simplification). For this
ex-Hitler Jugend, the contributions of the other 2 cultures are to be
removed from history. This is naked historical revisionism on the
level of cultural genocide - at least the muslims are mentioned (in
the mode of being attacked) of the Jewish contribution to European
history though - nothing, nada, zip. It is as if the Pope’s former
fuhrer had been successful in entirely erasing Jewish life, history
and culture from the face of Europe.

In many ways it could be argued there’s no point getting worked up
about what is, after all, fairly traditional church positions. It’s
just that in the decades following the church’s involvement with the
Third Reich’s holocaust, some efforts were made to tone down or cover
up the cultural negationism of some of its positions. However, it now
seems that so long as the church can be seen as engaged on the "right"
side in the current neo-con led anti-Islamic crusade, the fundamental
anti-semitism of these same positions will be blythely overlooked in
the wider cause of muslim-bashing.