The Pope Bends Over For Islam - But Not Far Enough

Pope Benedict made his first landfall on his Middle East Trip in Amman, Jordan, expressing his 'deep respect for Islam..and the values it proclaims."

Unfortunately, he didn't quite abase himself far enough in the eyes of Muslims:

Jordanian clerics expressed disappointment that Pope Benedict XVI in an address to Muslim leaders on Saturday failed to offer a new apology for remarks seen as targeting Islam.

"We wanted him to clearly apologise," Sheikh Yusef Abu Hussein, mufti of the southern city of Karak, told AFP after the pope's address in Amman's huge Al-Hussein Mosque.

"What the pope said (in 2006) about the Prophet Mohammed is untrue. Islam did not spread through the power of sword. It's a religion of tolerance and faith," Hussein said.

Mufti Hussein's words are highly illuminating when it comes to the unfortunate state of mind of many Muslims. They are particularly ironic in the wake of the peace and tolerance exhibited by many Muslims the world over in recent years. The events that happened after Pope Benedict made his original speech in Regensburg are an example - the violent riots, the firebombing of churches, threats to church property like the the Church of the Holy Sepulcher still in lands under Muslim control, death threats and the actual murder of several priests and nuns.

As for Islam not being spread by the sword, the Mufti and Muslims who think like him have willfully blinded themselves to the sack of Byzantium, the jihad against India and the Islamic invasion of Southern Europe, among many other events of Islam's bloody history. And that's not to mention the body count of the modern Islamist war against the west, which is still ongoing.

This Pope, as I've noted before, has already participated in a number of events designed to show his submission to Islam and Islamism. He's morphed into the classic dhimmi, indulging in appeasement out of fear.

It's interesting to contrast Pope Benedict's attitude towards Islam with his atitude towards Jews and Israel.

He started out by courageously linking the fate of the Church and the Jews, but has moved to the other end of the spectrum with astonishing speed.

During his time as Pope, there has been the movement to beatify Pope Pius XII , the head of the Church during the Holocaust and later make him a saint. There have been the Church's issues with Israel, such as the ridiculous statements from Papal officials likening Gaza to a concentration camp and the constant shilling for the Palestinians in an effort to preserve Church property even as Arab Christians are being deliberately driven out of the Holy Land by Muslims. There was the abrupt closure of the Vatican's Holocaust archives and the refusal to cooperate with both Catholic and Jewish scholars researching the Church's actions during the Holocaust, the re-instituting of the old Pre-Vatican II Latin mass calling for the conversion of the Jews.

Finally there was the clumsy attempt at rehabilitation and restoral to the Church's bosom of a bunch of unrepentant Jew haters and Holocaust deniers, and Benedict's absolute refusal to discipline or censure openly anti-Semitic Church figures like Poland's Cardinal Joseph Glemp or Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Meridiaga, the Archbishop of Honduras who, among other things blames "the Jews"for the Church's scandals involving priests and sexual abuse of young parishoners and calls for Jerusalem to be taken away from Israel as its capitol.

When Iran's Ahmadinejad made his foul speech at the UN earlier this week, virtually the only European delegation not to walk out was the one from the Vatican.

And the Pope himself recently made a fairly plain statement by accepting and wearing a Palestinian kefiyah, a symbol of Palestinian 'resistance' in Rome, the equivalent of donning a swastika armband whether he fully realized it or not.

Given Pope Benedict's superb intellect, there's no doubt in my mind that he fully understands what he's doing and what direction he's taken the Church.Like Pius XII in the 1930's, Pope Benedict appears to have made a conscious decision to avoid a battle with the Church's enemies and to focus on political expediency.

He has chosen appeasement, and it will cost the Church dearly in the future, because Islam is not a religion of tolerance and there's no amount of supplication Pope Benedict can do that will satisfy it. And as for the Jews, no amount of concilliatory, facile remarks on his part are going to change the fact that he has chosen to ignore the anti-Semitic bigotry in the Muslim world and in his own Church as part of that supplication.