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Don’t miss Charles Krauthammer’s excellent essay, “Tolerance: A Two-Way Street.” While many have commented on the irony of the violent response of Islamists to the Pope’s comments, Krauthammer does a particularly good job.

This just in: The absurdity continues: a Pakistani Islamist leader calls for the crucifixion of the Pope.

ISLAMABAD (AFP) – Hundreds of Pakistani Islamists held street protests to condemn Pope Benedict XVI for remarks they regard as anti-Islamic, with one leader saying the pontiff should be crucified.
…

“If the pope comes here we will hang him on the Cross,” Hafiz Hussain Ahmed, a senior leader of Pakistan’s main alliance of radical parties, told around 200 noisy demonstrators in Islamabad.

With that in mind, hear Krauthammer:

Religious fanatics, regardless of what name they give their jealous god, invariably have one thing in common: no sense of humor. Particularly about themselves. It’s hard to imagine Torquemada taking a joke well.

Today’s Islamists seem to have not even a sense of irony. They fail to see the richness of the following sequence. The pope makes a reference to a 14th-century Byzantine emperor’s remark about Islam imposing itself by the sword, and to protest this linking of Islam and violence:

— In the West Bank and Gaza, Muslims attack seven churches.

— In London, the ever-dependable radical Anjem Choudary tells a demonstration at Westminster Cathedral that the pope is now condemned to death.

— In Mogadishu, Somali religious leader Abubukar Hassan Malin calls on Muslims to “hunt down” the pope. The pope not being quite at hand, they do the next best thing: shoot dead, execution-style, an Italian nun working in a children’s hospital.

“How dare you say Islam is a violent religion? I’ll kill you for it” is not exactly the best way to go about refuting the charge. But of course, refuting is not the point here. The point is intimidation.

First, Salman Rushdie. Then the false Newsweek report about Koran-flushing at Guantanamo. Then the Danish cartoons. And now, a line from a scholarly disquisition on rationalism and faith given in German at a German university by the pope.

And the intimidation succeeds: politicians bowing and scraping to the mob over the cartoons; Saturday’s craven New York Times editorial telling the pope to apologize; the plague of self-censorship about anything remotely controversial about Islam — this in a culture in which a half-naked pop star blithely stages a mock crucifixion as the highlight of her latest concert tour.

In today’s world, religious sensitivity is a one-way street. The rules of the road are enforced by Islamic mobs and abjectly followed by Western media, politicians and religious leaders.

Krauthammer then provides a history lesson on religious violence and concludes that, regardless of the checkered, violent past of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, that torch is now carried exclusively by Islamists who kill at the mere mention of this fact.

Read the whole thing here.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 22nd, 2006 at 4:10 pm and is filed under General, islamic fascism, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.