And another thing…

Is it just me, or did I just watch a news cast that portrayed it as the Pope’s fault? One story, speaking of the murder of a nun in Somalia, said that “it was not clear if it was directly linked to the pope’s comments.” I’m not surprised that his remark (actually a quotation drawn from a conversation of 14th century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus) was taken as inflammatory. What’s curious is that there seems to be no responsibility whatsoever on the part of the inflamed. Besides being unfair to the Pope, this demonstrates a certain way of looking at Muslims. The only reason not to assign blame to the perpetrators of unreasonable actions is that they are not capable of reason. We have no moral indignation against a tourist-eating lion, because he’s just a lion, and the tourists should have left him alone. The same attitude seems to be hinted at in discussions of the Muslim world: Since the Pope is capable of rational thought, he should know better than to mess with Islam, which is viewed as a giant senseless beast, too stupid to react with anything but rage when someone so much as looks it in the eye. Although individual Muslims all have their own opinions, the Muslim world as a whole has not yet come to a decision about the accuracy of this brutal characterization. We ought to be reminded by these events that while many Muslims would like to speak reasonably with Christians, there are still unnumbered multitudes who would rather go about like lions, searching for one to devour.