Religion

Look who’s casting stones  

Accusations of a predisposition to violence in Islam conveniently overlooks the history of violence in those casting the aspersions 

by Michael Nenonen  

By Michael Nenonen

Religion’s beauty is marred by blood. Too often, religious leaders have encouraged their followers to demonize members of other religions and to treat them with murderous disdain. Jews claimed divine sanction for the genocides described in Joshua and Deuteronomy. Popes instigated the barbarous Crusades that put innumerable innocents to the sword. Catholic Inquisitors piously tortured and murdered thousands of Muslims, Jews, and Christian “heretics” throughout Medieval Europe. Catholics and Protestants alike believed they were doing God’s work by butchering and enslaving millions of Indigenous people around the world. White Supremacists still use the Bible to justify their acts of terrorism and oppression, while powerful Fundamentalist Christian organizations quote the Book of Revelation to advocate an apocalyptic war in the Middle East.

Unfortunately, many Christians are today ignoring the violence of their own faith, and assuming, without justification, the high moral ground when condemning the violence committed by Muslims. This is rather ironic, given the comparative histories of Islam and Christianity. As religious scholar Karen Armstrong has pointed out, “until the 20th century, Islam was a far more tolerant and peaceful faith than Christianity. The Qur'an strictly forbids any coercion in religion and regards all rightly guided religion as coming from God; and despite the western belief to the contrary, Muslims did not impose their faith by the sword.” (“We cannot afford to maintain these ancient prejudices against Islam,” The Guardian, September 20, 2006). Muslim violence has typically been motivated not by religion, but rather by the same kind of political ambitions that have caused so many wars among Christian states.

The hypocritical condemnation of Islam has lately become rather shrill. Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham, has called Islam a “very evil and wicked religion.” Jerry Falwell has referred to Muhammad as a “terrorist” and a “pedophile.” Pat Robertson has described Muhammad as “an absolute wild-eyed fanatic . . . a robber, a brigand, and a killer,” disparaged Islam as a “bloody, brutal type of religion,” and dismissed as “Satanic” the Muslims who protested the hatemongering Danish cartoons. And now Pope Benedict XVI, formerly known as Joseph Ratzinger, has joined the diabolical chorus. In a recent speech that selectively condemned Muslim violence, he quoted, with apparent approval, the words of the 14th-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II: "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

This isn’t the first time Ratzinger’s smeared another religion. In a 1997 interview for L’Express he said, "If Buddhism is attractive, it is because it appears as a possibility of touching the infinite and obtaining happiness without having any concrete religious obligations. A spiritual auto-eroticism of some sort." Thus, in Ratzinger’s eyes, the Vietnamese Buddhist monks who immolated themselves to protest a dictatorial regime were motivated by an amoral and masturbatory spirituality.

His contempt for Islam isn’t new, either. In 2005 he granted a personal audience to Italian journalist Oriana Fallici, an outspoken homophobic racist who has said that “The increased presence of Muslims in Italy and in Europe is directly proportional to our loss of freedom,” that Islam is “a pool that never purifies,” that “Muslims have orders to breed like rats,” and that “In the same way that the Muslims would like us all to become Muslims, they would like us all to become homosexuals.” Although she was an atheist, until her death Fallici was a great admirer or Ratzinger. His decision to meet with her suggests that the feelings were mutual.

When considering Ratzinger’s views, it’s important to keep his past in mind, as it reveals a great deal about the man’s character. For instance, Ratzinger belonged to the Hitler Youth. While his apologists claim that there was no way to avoid such membership, this is clearly untrue. Many German youngsters of good conscience refused on ethical grounds to join, and suffered the consequences, but not Ratzinger. He remained in the Hitler Youth and declined the option of joining the resistance even though he lived near a concentration camp, and even though he must have watched Jews being rounded up and driven towards their deaths. In this, he was no different than many other Germans; unlike them, however, he’s now the leader of the most powerful religious organization on Earth. This position supposedly demands a capacity for spiritual excellence that the young Ratzinger failed to demonstrate.

The truth is that Ratzinger seems to have a rather large blind spot when it comes to the Nazis. During his trip to Auschwitz earlier this year he exonerated ordinary Germans—such as himself—for the Holocaust by pinning all the blame on the Nazi ringleaders. He also said that Anti-Semitism was “born of neo-paganism.” Besides slandering Neo-Pagans, Ratzinger completely whitewashed the long and murderous history of European Christian Anti-Semitism, a history that laid the ideological foundations upon which the death camps stood. Finally, he ignored the fact that many Catholic leaders encouraged the persecution of Jews in the 1930s and 40s, even if, with some exceptions, they stopped short of supporting the Nazi’s campaign of genocide.

There are other examples of Ratzinger’s constricted moral consciousness. He was once the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—which is what the Inquisition is called these days. In this capacity he helped crush Liberation Theology in Central America. By doing so he immeasurably strengthened the hand of the region’s death squads and dictatorships in their slaughterhouse wars against the poor. And, of course, he also helped cover-up the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy.

Tragically, this ethically compromised man’s pronouncements on Islam carry profound weight among the world’s one billion Catholics. They also aggravate the now-commonplace scapegoating of Muslim people in the Western world. The viciousness of this scapegoating can’t be overstated. The anti-Muslim propaganda filling our media is now almost indistinguishable from the Anti-Semitic propaganda of the Nazi regime. Consider a statement made by Glenn Beck, a conservative pundit who has a show on CNN as well as a nationally syndicated radio program. On the August 10 2006 edition of his radio program, Beck told “Good Muslims” that it was time to prove their loyalty by lining up at the recruitment office to “shoot the Bad Muslims in the head,” because “when people become hungry, when people see that their way of life is on the edge of being over, they will put razor wire up and just based on the way you look or just based on your religion, they will round you up.” That CNN would give this man his own program says a great deal about the Western zeitgeist, a zeitgeist that provides the context in which Ratzinger’s diatribe must be understood. As flames consume the Muslim world, the Pope is supplying legions of Islamophobic pyromaniacs with all the gasoline the Vatican’s influence can buy.

Many Muslims are convinced that the West has launched a holy war against them. For all the lip-service he gives to non-violence, Ratzinger is proving them right.