John Batchelor on The Apology Jihad

Theme of Jihad

BY JOHN BATCHELOR
September 20, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/39997



Pope Benedict XVI, the "Panzer pope," has done the unusual in modern discourse: he has jumped into the war on terror with armored facts from six centuries ago that refute a deal of the appeasement from 21st-century Europeans and their American fellow travelers.

You will recall that Pope Benedict recently spoke, auf Deutsch, at Regensburg University, where he once enjoyed a professorship. The speech was dry, mechanical, unappetizing, a predictable German exercise in theology, with much attention to how reason and faith are compatible. In Calvinist seminary we used to call this a Roman disquisition on epistemology. Yet in the speech, the pope chose to illustrate what is not reasonable, what is not faithful, by arguing not surprisingly that violence is both unreasonable and faithless.

For an example the Pope could have chosen any number of incidents of war-making by church-anointed Christian kings and their modern elected pretenders — the Vatican's cooperation with Hitler and Mussolini comes to mind — but instead the pope reached back to the last days of the Byzantine Empire, not only to speak of jihad but also to box Mohammed's ears.

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