Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Ward Defends the Mohammedans

I just listened to left-wing kook KGO radio host Bernie Ward read this article, including this:
The Muslims who have objected so vociferously to the Pope's denigration of Islam have accused him of "hypocrisy", pointing out that the Catholic church is ill-placed to condemn violent jihad when it has itself been guilty of unholy violence in crusades, persecutions and inquisitions and, under Pope Pius XII, tacitly condoned the Nazi Holocaust. ...

We simply cannot afford this type of bigotry. The trouble is that too many people in the western world unconsciously share this prejudice, convinced that Islam and the Qur'an are addicted to violence.
This is nonsense. The Mohammedans spent 800 years trying to militarily invade Europe and destroy Christianity. Now they are trying to do it with immigration and terrorism. To the extent that the Europeans have defended themselves, they did the right and honorable thing. The Pope never condoned the Nazi Holocaust. Catholics got killed too.

Bernie Ward is a failed Catholic priest trainee who is bitter towards the Catholic Church. He says nasty things about it at every opportunity. He gets away with it because he claims to be a believer himself, but he has his own goofy theology that a lot of Catholics would not recognize. He just uses a controversy like this as an excuse to attack the Catholic Church.

The only other time I listened to B. Ward in the last 6 months, he was ranting about being caught in some traffic jam that he blamed on bicyclists. He also said that he wanted to run over some bicyclists in his Lexus, and was mad that the city was wasting money paying cops who prevented him from running over bicyclists.

The above article in the UK Guardian is followed by many thoughtful comments that rebut what the author says.

A reader sends this other UK Guardian article:
Quoting Byzantine emperor ... It was a gratuitous reawakening of the most entrenched and self-serving of western prejudices -- that Muslims have a unique proclivity to violence, a claim that has no basis in history or in current world events (a fact that still eludes too many westerners).
No basis?! Who are the terrorists and suicide bombers?
An elderly Catholic nun has already been killed in Somalia, perhaps in retaliation for the Pope's remarks; churches have been attacked in the West Bank. How is this papal stupidity going to play out in countries such as Nigeria, ...
Papal stupidity or Muslim proclivity to violence? The article says that the Pope has insulted Jews, homesexuals, and others, but they aren't murdering nuns in response.
The second is a more disturbing possibility: namely, that the Catholic church could be failing - yet again - to deal with the challenge of modernity.
Is he joking? It is the Mohammedan world that fails to deal with the challenge of modernity, not the Catholic Church.

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