Saturday, September 16, 2006

Not more Muslim over-reaction?

I'm a little confused this morning. You see, I woke up and read that the Deputy leader of Turkey's ruling AK party, has said that the Pope "has a dark mentality that comes from the darkness of the Middle Ages... [and] is going down in history in the same category as leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini." I then decided to read the speech to see what all the fuss was about, and thus I am confused.

It appears that, in a very boring and long speech about, amongst other things, rejecting religious violence, the Pope quoted an obscure 14th century Christian Emperor, Manuel II Paleologus I'm not going to quote what was said because it should be read in context to the lecture to be understood fully and I cannot cut and paste out of the pdf.

As you can imagine, the reaction over at place like MPAC is to be expected. It's quite clear that few over there have actually read the lecture and instead are simply reacting to deliberately misleading reporting of it. In fact that seems to be the case for most of the over-reaction. Frankly it's absurd.

What's more worrying though is this dominant view that freedom of thought, expression and speech is somehow not applicable to comment about a long dead man who said he was visited by an angel and told to write a book. We all know what would happen if someone did something like today don't we?

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