Should the Pope have kept his mouth shut?

What is more surprising to me than the current Islamic violence directed against the Pope and Christianity is the reaction to it by the west.

Rather than aggressively defending the Pontiff's right to speak his mind and forcefully condemning the Muslim attempts at intimidation, a lot of western reaction seems to range from puzzlement to condemnation based on the fact that Pope Benedict `should have known better' or that the Catholic Church, with it's history, has no place to criticize Islam.

Obviously,anyone who has difficulty understanding the violent Muslim reaction to the Pope simply hasn't been paying attention. We can let that sort of cluelessness lie in the mud where it belongs.

But other coments I've heard - that Pope Benedict should have avoided comments he knew would antagonize Muslims and that the Catholic Church has no right to criticize Islam - bear a little in depth examination.

Just why should Pope Benedict have kept his papal trap shut?

Either we are a free society, or we aren't, and the Pope, like anyone else has the right to speak his mind without having to worry about death threats. The fact is, the Pope's remarks were totally taken out of context and distorted, much like the famous MoToons with the same purpose in mind....orchestrating violence aimed at intimidating anyone remotely critical of Islam or Islamic jihad.

As for the idea that Pope Benedict, as head of the Catholic Church had no right to criticize Islam because of the Church's history, that is ridiculous PC speech that is wrong both factually and historically.

The easy way to flush such arguments is to simply point out that we are speaking of modern times, not the 14th Century, and that the Pope's remarks were directed at the world situation today. What's more, the Catholic Church has attempted to deal with its history through Vatican II, numerous statements and as recently as last year. the mass held last year by Pope John Paul II in which he expressly apologized and did penitence for the Church's misdeeds. Cardinal Ratzinger, the present Pope had a major hand in all these developments.

I have yet to hear of substantial numbers of Muslim clerics and scholars taking responsibility for the violence done in the name of Islam...which continues in our present day, unabated. If anything the reverse has been true!

What's more, if one takes a look at the events frequently cited as evidence of the Catholic Churches' `evil' - the Inquisition, the Crusades, and the Counter reformation - one finds that the death toll of these events, compared with the Islamic conquests, the sack of Byzantium, the jihad against India and the Islamic invasion of Southern Europe, not to mention the body count of the modern Islamic war against the west are miniscule. And in Islam's case, the carnage is still going on.

Islam was spread, from Day One, almost exclusively by the sword. That's how Mohammed designed it, and nothing has changed.

So what does this mean for us in the west?

Islam, as it's constituted today is not compatible with what we would consider freedom and democracy in the West.

That's why President Bush's vaunted `Arab Democracy' policy is such a miserable failure.

These violent outbursts, like the MoToon riots and the Qu'ran flushing riots are deliberately orchestrated and designed by the Muslim clerics, leaders and jihadists with the idea of intimidating anyone who points out the inconvenient truth...as a way of softening up the west for jihad and conquest.

CAIR's army of lawyers serves the same goal.

The question is, what are we prepared to do about it?