The Pope, with his ready smile, his obvious modesty, his refusal of every sort of pomp and his dislike of exalted solitude (he has chosen to live not in the grand Papal apartments, but in a room right next to other members of the clergy), his famous denunciation of vanity, greed, and corruption among the Vatican bigshots, made to their astonished selves — all this endears him, and should. He’s now been fixed in the world’s mind as a Certifiable Nice Guy. But that set-in-stone verdict does not exempt him from criticism, when he makes an insufficiently-thought-out remark. And he just made a dumb remark, in likening the refusal of some freethinking free-spirited light-hearted Frenchmen to stop drawing, under threat of death, cartoons of Muhammad, and talking of their subsequent murders in a jejune way, as being akin to someone making a remark about someone else’s mother and receiving a punch in return. An ideology, or “faith,” can be criticized, and its main figures mocked, whatever this or that Pope says, even the nicest-guy Pope. That has been one of the most important accompllishments of the last few centuries, of the Enlightenment, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the American Bill of Rights, as interpreted for almost 200 years. In the advanced West, we don’t accept the notion that religious faith has some special exemption from criticism or having fun made of it, mockery made of it. Good or bad taste is another matter. But the worst taste of all is shown when one likens mass-murder, just committed, to “a punch in the mouth.”
But the result of the Pope’s remarks — can you imagine what Oriana Fallaci would have replied? — will, at least in France and the rest of Europe, not be of any help to Muslims now depicting themselves as innocent victims of cruel mockery but, rather, to give a certain part of the population, leftwing, anticlerical (as if in France there was still any reason to be anticlerical) or rather heirs to the anticlerical tradition, a good reason to take what may be seen as the nothing-is-sacred-and-Muslims-had-better-get-used-to-it side, because now they are also standing up to the Vatican, which they have never been reluctant to do and, in so doing, they can also, without any etats d’ame, support Charlie-Hebdo’s martyrs to free speech, and attack the Muslims who have, all over France, shown that how little they care about the killings, which is to say how much they silently find excuses for or support them, the massacres both at Charlie-Hebdo and at the kosher market..
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3 Responses
The Pope should be asked, point blank, whether he supports the Muslim blasphemy charge against his fellow-Catholic Asia Bibi, in Pakistan. Because there is, from the Muslim POV, no difference whatsoever between the insults hurled by Charlie Hebdo and the implicit insult offered by Asia Bibi, to Mohammed, when in defence of her faith she asked her mohammedan female tormentors what Mohammed had ever done for them, and declared the superiority of Jesus. Both Asia Bibi and the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists are, in Muslim eyes, blasphemers, insulting mohammed, that ‘perfect man’.
A further twist is that westerners don’t get that the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists ‘offended Muslims by the mere act of depicting mohammed *at all*. The mere act of drawing a human form that might be construed to be a representation of mohammed, is ipso facto an ‘insult’, because a breach of the sharia ban on such representation of mohammed, as well as a breach of the sharia ban on *all* representation of *any* living being whether human, animal or mythical.
Does the Pope believe that Asia Bibi insulted mohammed and muslims and that the Muslim punishment that will most likely be imposed on her is just, and deserved? One hopes he does not…but if he justifies in any way the Muslim murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, then he shows that he doesn’t understand what Muslims mean by ‘blasphemy’, he doesn’t understand that whereas *he* might make a distinction between that pious Catholic Asia Bibi and the naughty boys of Charlie Hebdo, **Muslims do not**. Asia Bibi and Charlie Hebdo insulted Mohammed and therefore, according to the sharia, they must die.
Will Rogers once pointed out that we are all ignorant, only in different subjects. That certainly applies to the Pope and Islam.
Let us not forget that it was defiance of blasphemy laws that moved Europe from the middle ages to the enlightenment age. That this Pope, or any Pope for that matter, should come down on the side of those criticizing the Hebdo editors for “provoking” the violence should surprise no one. The Pope has a horse in this race, and doesn’t wish to see criticism of his own faith either. We would do well to remind those who criticize Charlie Hebdo that under Islamic doctrine ALL non-Muslims are subject to Islamic violence for the mere fact of being non-Muslim. Non-Muslims “provoke” attacks by their mere existence as such. I believe this is the operative point here.
“We must hang together, or surely we will hang separately.”–Benjamin Franklin.