Mostly Defused

The Pope finally figured out what he had to do. and his personal apology seems to have calmed things down for the moment, but the Muslims are still edgy and their version of the Religious Reich are still stirring things up around the world.

It is a sad fact that the once famous Islamic tradition of learning and scholarship has been degraded to the point that much of the Islamic world is illiterate and dependent on their Imams for their news, rather than a diverse media.

People in the West act unaware that for much of the world there is no freedom of the press and the media reflects only what the government approves. This was evident in the Danish cartoon episode. The Danish government didn’t seem to understand that the people most upset were those who assumed the cartoons were printed with the approval of the government, because that is the system in place in much of the Islamic world.

As Jack K. notes, it is unbelievable that the Pope apparently didn’t even consider how his remarks would be received in the Islamic world.

Steve M. has a list of some of the reactions against Muslims in the West that haven’t been widely reported, but are just as destructive as what the Muslims have done in response to the cartoons and the Pope’s comments.

I’ve said on a number of occasions to my students that the Russian people are xenophobic, and have plenty of history to justify it. The same holds for the Muslims. Given the history of the Crusades and colonization, there are a lot of reasons why Muslims are nervous about the intentions of the West. That distrust was only strengthened by the Shrubbery talking about his action as a crusade, and the fact that the world now knows that the Iraq war was predicated on lies.