Lebanon greets Pope Benedict with Muslim riots

 

The Pope will be lucky to get out of Lebanon unharmed. Mobs of mad Muslims have taken to the streets of Tripoli condemning Pope Benedict XVI. One person is already dead. So why haven’t we heard anything from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about this religious intolerance? Is it because she is too busy telling us what a “great religion” Islam is?

 

At a briefing with Morocco’s foreign minister at the State Department, Clinton criticized the anti-Islamic film that is being tied to Muslim violence in the Middle East. She didn’t mince words, saying, “It appears to have a deeply cynical purpose: to denigrate a great religion and to provoke rage.” To which Melinda Henneberger in today’s Washington Post says, “Amen.” Similarly, from the editorial desk of the New York Times, we have these words of wisdom from Roger Cohen: “Since when was extreme bigotry that portrays the followers of one of the world’s great religions as child molesters an American value?”

 

This kind of sick tilting to Islam, all the while feeling free to bash Catholicism, is operative on the other side of the Atlantic as well. Roger Bolton, who ran religious broadcasting for the BBC for 12 years, said this week that the BBC is afraid to mock Islam but delights in bashing Christianity.

 

Ever since 9/11, those who claim to be horrified by religious extremism have shown nothing but deference to Islam—even though the mass murderers responsible explicitly carried out their carnage in the name of their religion. Meanwhile, they have shown nothing but contempt for Christianity. When is the last time our elites called Christianity a “great religion” deserving of respect?

 

Think you’ve heard it all? On the New York Times website today there is a story about the pope’s visit to Lebanon. It says, “In a dark moment in his papacy in 2006, Benedict angered Muslims when on a visit to Germany he quoted a Byzantine emperor who had called Islam ‘evil and inhuman.’” Dark moment or moment of courage?