Bush to Abdullah :'pope sincere in apology on Islam'
Bush to Abdullah :'pope sincere in apology on Islam'
President Bush said on Monday that Pope Benedict was sincere in his apology for comments on Islam that have sparked outrage in the Muslim world, a U.S. official said.
Bush gave his assessment in talks with Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi in New York ahead of a U.N. General Assembly session on Tuesday.
"The president noted that the pope had made some apologies for his remarks. The president believed the pope was sincere in those remarks," Dennis Wilder, White House senior director for East Asian affairs, told reporters. "And that's where the discussion was left."
Asked whether the Malaysian leader had been satisfied with Bush's view, Wilder said, "He accepted the president's position on the subject."
Administration officials said Malaysia was selected for one of Bush's one-on-one meetings on the fringes of the U.N. session because it is in an influential but moderate Muslim country with U.S. ties and democratic credentials.
The pontiff said on Sunday he was deeply sorry Muslims had been offended by his use of a medieval quotation on Islam and holy war. But he stopped short of retracting a speech seen as portraying Islam as a religion tainted by violence.
While some Muslims were mollified by his explanation for the speech made in Germany last week, others remained furious.
Pope’s Regrets Over Statement Fail to Quiet a Storm of Protests
Many Muslims insisted Monday that Pope Benedict XVI did not go far enough in his apology on Sunday for the offense caused by a speech he gave last week that discussed Islam and holy war.
In the southern Iraqi city of Basra, protesters burned an effigy of the pope, and an Iraqi group linked to Al Qaeda posted a warning on a Web site threatening war against “worshipers of the cross.”
The supreme leader in Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called the pope’s remarks “the latest link” in the “chain of conspiracy to set off a crusade.”
And, as a Vatican official said its ambassadors would seek to better explain the pope’s statement, a Turkish man with a fake gun tried to storm a Protestant church in Turkey’s capital, Ankara. He was arrested after worshipers trapped him in the church entryway.
Apart from the continuing anger at the pope’s speech, in which he cited a medieval passage that called Islam “evil and inhuman,” the debate on Monday seemed to turn on whether the pope had actually apologized.
Many Muslims — and some Catholics — noted that he had said only that he was sorry for the reaction that fanned out across the Muslim world. He did not say he had been wrong to have used the quotations.
“You either have to say ‘I’m sorry’ in a proper way or don’t say it at all,” said Mehmet Aydin, a state minister in Turkey, which Benedict is scheduled to visit in November in his first trip to a Muslim country.
But other Muslims either accepted the pope’s statement or called it the best they would get.
“The pope has apologized, and that’s enough, so let’s calm down,” said Hasyim Muzadi, head of Indonesia’s largest Islamic organization, Nahdlatul Ulama. “If we remain furious, then the pope will be proved correct.”
Turkey’s most senior Muslim cleric, Ali Bardakoglu, who had been among the most strident in his criticism of the pope, said, “His expression of sadness is a sign that he would work for world peace.”
The Muslim Council in Britain called the pope’s words “exactly the reassurance many Muslims were looking for.”
Benedict ignited a firestorm of protest last week in a speech he made at Regensburg University in Germany. The speech was largely a scholarly address criticizing the West for submitting itself too much to reason, and shutting belief in God out of science and philosophy.
But he began by recounting a discussion of Christianity and Islam between a 14th-century Byzantine Christian emperor, Manuel II Paleologus, and a Persian scholar.
“He said, I quote, ‘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,’ ’’ the pope said.
Benedict also briefly considered the Islamic concept of jihad, which he defined as “holy war,” and said that violence in the name of religion was contrary to God’s nature and to reason.
In the speech, Benedict did not say whether he agreed with the quotations he cited. But on Sunday he delivered a rare papal expression of regret, saying, “These were in fact quotations from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought.”
He said his address had been “an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with great mutual respect.”
Several Christian leaders were quoted Monday defending the pope, saying that his words had been misunderstood by the news media.
“We are faced with a media-driven phenomenon bordering on the absurd,” Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, the former archbishop of Paris, told Le Monde. “If the game consists in unleashing the crowd’s vindictiveness on words that it has not understood, then the conditions for dialogue with Islam are no longer met.”
The Most Rev. Rowan Williams, who as archbishop of Canterbury is the leader of the world’s Anglicans, told the BBC, “The pope has already issued an apology, and I think his views on this need to be judged against his entire record, where he has spoken very positively about dialogue” between faiths.
Vatican begins diplomatic offensive to appease Muslims
The Vatican launched a diplomatic offensive in Muslim countries to clarify Pope Benedict XVI's position on Islam following outrage over his remarks linking the religion with violence.
As the Holy See's move to appease Muslim anger got underway, the pope consulted his top diplomatic adviser, Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, in an audience at his summer palace outside Rome.
The 79-year-old head of the Roman Catholic Church also held talks with bishops from predominantly Muslim Chad, his first meeting with clergy from a largely Muslim country since a row erupted last week over his remarks linking Islam with violence.
The Vatican said the long-scheduled meeting with the six African bishops was part of their customary five-yearly visit to Rome.
Bertone earlier told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera in an interview that envoys from the Holy See had been asked to explain the full meaning of Benedict's speech to political and religious authorities in Muslim countries.
He said Vatican ambassadors, or papal nuncios, would highlight passages of the lengthy speech which would help to clarify its true meaning but which had been ignored in the furore.
In another move aimed at calming tensions, senior Vatican Cardinal Paul Poupard will meet the Imam of Rome's mosque, Sami Salem, at a ceremony on Tuesday hosted by the city's mayor, Walter Veltroni.
Salem on Monday told the ANSA news agency: "With the pope's words, we have stepped back by several years."
But he added that he was endeavouring to maintain calm in the Muslim community and to "work for dialogue, despite the difficulties".
Meanwhile Poupard, head of the Vatican council for Inter-faith dialogue, called last week on "Muslim friends of good will" to read the pope's speech in its entirety before passing judgement.
On Monday evening the Vatican's newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, encouraged them also to pay careful attention to the pope's speech on Sunday in which he said he was "deeply sorry" for the offence his words had caused: it published the full text of Sunday's statement in Arabic.
But Vatican appeasement risked being drowned out by protests which reverberated around the Muslim world, with Al-Qaeda in Iraq declaring a holy war in reaction to the remarks as protestors burned an effigy of the pope.
Italy's bishops jumped to Benedict's defence as they opened their autumn meeting.
Their leader Cardinal Camillo Ruini said it was "surprising and painful" that his speech in Germany was "misunderstood to the point of being interpreted as an offence against Islam".
Ruini said the pope's speech had been twisted into a pretext for "intimidatory acts and despicable threats", to the extent of being a possible motive for the murder of an Italian nun, Sister Leonella Sgorbati, in Somalia on Sunday.
The scale and intensity of the Muslim reaction had cast doubts on the pope's next scheduled foreign trip in November to Muslim-majority Turkey.
Bertone, who took office as the Vatican's number two official only last week, said the first meeting of the Turkish bishops' conference to organise the visit would take place on Tuesday.
"Up to now, there has been no reason for it not to go ahead," he said of the visit.
Bertone said the pope's words in Germany had been "heavily manipulated" and their true meaning distorted.
The offending speech explored the historical and philosophical differences between Islam and Christianity, and the relationship between violence and faith.
But the touchpaper for the storm of criticism came in the pope's reference to a 14th century assessment of the Prophet Mohammed in which a Byzantine Christian emperor described the influence of Islam's founder as "evil and inhuman".
Citing one example of what the papal envoys would be highlighting in their talks with Muslim officials, Bertone said the pope's description of the "startling brusqueness" of the emperor's comment went unreported in the furore.
Mixed reactions in Mideast
Muslim leaders in the Middle East gave mixed reactions on Sunday after Pope Benedict XVI said he was "deeply sorry" about the angry response sparked by his speech about Islam and the holy war.
Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood said Pope Benedict had apologised sufficiently on Sunday for remarks on Islam that angered many in the Muslim world.
"We consider that the new statements represent a retreat from what went before," Brotherhood deputy leader Mohammad Habib told reporters.
"We can consider them a sufficient apology, even if we had wanted the Pope to outline his ideas and vision of Islam," said Habib.
The leader of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood took a softer stance, saying the Islamic political group's relations with Christians should remain "good, civilised and cooperative."
"While anger over the pope's remarks was necessary, it shouldn't last for long because while he is the head of the Catholic church in the world, many Europeans are not following it. So what he said won't influence them," Mohammad Mahdi Akef said.
But Mahmoud Ashour, the former deputy of Cairo's Al Azhar, the Sunni Arab world's most powerful institution, said the pope's comments were not enough.
"He should apologise because he insulted the beliefs of Islam. He must apologize in a frank way and say he made a mistake," Ashour told Al Arabiya TV after the pope's speech that.
Earlier on Sunday in the West Bank, two churches were set afire as anger over the pope's comments grew throughout the Palestinian areas.
In the town of Tulkarem, a 170-year-old stone church built 170 years ago was torched before dawn and its interior was destroyed, local Christian officials said.
In the village of Tubas, a small church was attacked with firebombs and partially burned, Christians said. Neither church is Catholic, the officials said.
Palestinian Muslims hurled firebombs and opened fire at five churches in the West Bank and Gaza Strip Saturday to protest the Pope's comments, sparking concerns of a rift between Palestinian Muslims and Christians.
All of Iran's seminary schools were closed in protest at the pope's "outrageous remarks", state television said, and instead of regular lectures students shook their fists in anger as they listened to clerics.
Up to 400 seminarians sat in the auditorium of the Feyzieh - the main seminary school in Iran's clerical epicentre of Qom, south of Tehran - to protest against the pope's remarks last week in his native Germany.
"The pope must present his apologies and read the Koran more since it acknowledges Christianity," top cleric Ahmad Khatami, one of the leaders of Friday prayers in Tehran, told the protesting students.
"Instead of preaching peaceful coexistence among the great divine religions, the pope is planting seeds of division," Grand Ayatollah Saafi Gholpaygani said, according to state television.
The state-run IRNA agency said the order for the schools to shut had come from Qom's Grand Ayatollahs, the highest-ranking of all Shiite clerics.
(Gulf News)
Malaysia Abdullah Ahmad Badawi Mid East Pope Benedict Bush'America Bush
President Bush said on Monday that Pope Benedict was sincere in his apology for comments on Islam that have sparked outrage in the Muslim world, a U.S. official said.
Bush gave his assessment in talks with Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi in New York ahead of a U.N. General Assembly session on Tuesday.
"The president noted that the pope had made some apologies for his remarks. The president believed the pope was sincere in those remarks," Dennis Wilder, White House senior director for East Asian affairs, told reporters. "And that's where the discussion was left."
Asked whether the Malaysian leader had been satisfied with Bush's view, Wilder said, "He accepted the president's position on the subject."
Administration officials said Malaysia was selected for one of Bush's one-on-one meetings on the fringes of the U.N. session because it is in an influential but moderate Muslim country with U.S. ties and democratic credentials.
The pontiff said on Sunday he was deeply sorry Muslims had been offended by his use of a medieval quotation on Islam and holy war. But he stopped short of retracting a speech seen as portraying Islam as a religion tainted by violence.
While some Muslims were mollified by his explanation for the speech made in Germany last week, others remained furious.
**********
Pope’s Regrets Over Statement Fail to Quiet a Storm of Protests
Many Muslims insisted Monday that Pope Benedict XVI did not go far enough in his apology on Sunday for the offense caused by a speech he gave last week that discussed Islam and holy war.
In the southern Iraqi city of Basra, protesters burned an effigy of the pope, and an Iraqi group linked to Al Qaeda posted a warning on a Web site threatening war against “worshipers of the cross.”
The supreme leader in Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called the pope’s remarks “the latest link” in the “chain of conspiracy to set off a crusade.”
And, as a Vatican official said its ambassadors would seek to better explain the pope’s statement, a Turkish man with a fake gun tried to storm a Protestant church in Turkey’s capital, Ankara. He was arrested after worshipers trapped him in the church entryway.
Apart from the continuing anger at the pope’s speech, in which he cited a medieval passage that called Islam “evil and inhuman,” the debate on Monday seemed to turn on whether the pope had actually apologized.
Many Muslims — and some Catholics — noted that he had said only that he was sorry for the reaction that fanned out across the Muslim world. He did not say he had been wrong to have used the quotations.
“You either have to say ‘I’m sorry’ in a proper way or don’t say it at all,” said Mehmet Aydin, a state minister in Turkey, which Benedict is scheduled to visit in November in his first trip to a Muslim country.
But other Muslims either accepted the pope’s statement or called it the best they would get.
“The pope has apologized, and that’s enough, so let’s calm down,” said Hasyim Muzadi, head of Indonesia’s largest Islamic organization, Nahdlatul Ulama. “If we remain furious, then the pope will be proved correct.”
Turkey’s most senior Muslim cleric, Ali Bardakoglu, who had been among the most strident in his criticism of the pope, said, “His expression of sadness is a sign that he would work for world peace.”
The Muslim Council in Britain called the pope’s words “exactly the reassurance many Muslims were looking for.”
Benedict ignited a firestorm of protest last week in a speech he made at Regensburg University in Germany. The speech was largely a scholarly address criticizing the West for submitting itself too much to reason, and shutting belief in God out of science and philosophy.
But he began by recounting a discussion of Christianity and Islam between a 14th-century Byzantine Christian emperor, Manuel II Paleologus, and a Persian scholar.
“He said, I quote, ‘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,’ ’’ the pope said.
Benedict also briefly considered the Islamic concept of jihad, which he defined as “holy war,” and said that violence in the name of religion was contrary to God’s nature and to reason.
In the speech, Benedict did not say whether he agreed with the quotations he cited. But on Sunday he delivered a rare papal expression of regret, saying, “These were in fact quotations from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought.”
He said his address had been “an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with great mutual respect.”
Several Christian leaders were quoted Monday defending the pope, saying that his words had been misunderstood by the news media.
“We are faced with a media-driven phenomenon bordering on the absurd,” Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, the former archbishop of Paris, told Le Monde. “If the game consists in unleashing the crowd’s vindictiveness on words that it has not understood, then the conditions for dialogue with Islam are no longer met.”
The Most Rev. Rowan Williams, who as archbishop of Canterbury is the leader of the world’s Anglicans, told the BBC, “The pope has already issued an apology, and I think his views on this need to be judged against his entire record, where he has spoken very positively about dialogue” between faiths.
Vatican begins diplomatic offensive to appease Muslims
The Vatican launched a diplomatic offensive in Muslim countries to clarify Pope Benedict XVI's position on Islam following outrage over his remarks linking the religion with violence.
As the Holy See's move to appease Muslim anger got underway, the pope consulted his top diplomatic adviser, Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, in an audience at his summer palace outside Rome.
The 79-year-old head of the Roman Catholic Church also held talks with bishops from predominantly Muslim Chad, his first meeting with clergy from a largely Muslim country since a row erupted last week over his remarks linking Islam with violence.
The Vatican said the long-scheduled meeting with the six African bishops was part of their customary five-yearly visit to Rome.
Bertone earlier told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera in an interview that envoys from the Holy See had been asked to explain the full meaning of Benedict's speech to political and religious authorities in Muslim countries.
He said Vatican ambassadors, or papal nuncios, would highlight passages of the lengthy speech which would help to clarify its true meaning but which had been ignored in the furore.
In another move aimed at calming tensions, senior Vatican Cardinal Paul Poupard will meet the Imam of Rome's mosque, Sami Salem, at a ceremony on Tuesday hosted by the city's mayor, Walter Veltroni.
Salem on Monday told the ANSA news agency: "With the pope's words, we have stepped back by several years."
But he added that he was endeavouring to maintain calm in the Muslim community and to "work for dialogue, despite the difficulties".
Meanwhile Poupard, head of the Vatican council for Inter-faith dialogue, called last week on "Muslim friends of good will" to read the pope's speech in its entirety before passing judgement.
On Monday evening the Vatican's newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, encouraged them also to pay careful attention to the pope's speech on Sunday in which he said he was "deeply sorry" for the offence his words had caused: it published the full text of Sunday's statement in Arabic.
But Vatican appeasement risked being drowned out by protests which reverberated around the Muslim world, with Al-Qaeda in Iraq declaring a holy war in reaction to the remarks as protestors burned an effigy of the pope.
Italy's bishops jumped to Benedict's defence as they opened their autumn meeting.
Their leader Cardinal Camillo Ruini said it was "surprising and painful" that his speech in Germany was "misunderstood to the point of being interpreted as an offence against Islam".
Ruini said the pope's speech had been twisted into a pretext for "intimidatory acts and despicable threats", to the extent of being a possible motive for the murder of an Italian nun, Sister Leonella Sgorbati, in Somalia on Sunday.
The scale and intensity of the Muslim reaction had cast doubts on the pope's next scheduled foreign trip in November to Muslim-majority Turkey.
Bertone, who took office as the Vatican's number two official only last week, said the first meeting of the Turkish bishops' conference to organise the visit would take place on Tuesday.
"Up to now, there has been no reason for it not to go ahead," he said of the visit.
Bertone said the pope's words in Germany had been "heavily manipulated" and their true meaning distorted.
The offending speech explored the historical and philosophical differences between Islam and Christianity, and the relationship between violence and faith.
But the touchpaper for the storm of criticism came in the pope's reference to a 14th century assessment of the Prophet Mohammed in which a Byzantine Christian emperor described the influence of Islam's founder as "evil and inhuman".
Citing one example of what the papal envoys would be highlighting in their talks with Muslim officials, Bertone said the pope's description of the "startling brusqueness" of the emperor's comment went unreported in the furore.
Mixed reactions in Mideast
Muslim leaders in the Middle East gave mixed reactions on Sunday after Pope Benedict XVI said he was "deeply sorry" about the angry response sparked by his speech about Islam and the holy war.
Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood said Pope Benedict had apologised sufficiently on Sunday for remarks on Islam that angered many in the Muslim world.
"We consider that the new statements represent a retreat from what went before," Brotherhood deputy leader Mohammad Habib told reporters.
"We can consider them a sufficient apology, even if we had wanted the Pope to outline his ideas and vision of Islam," said Habib.
The leader of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood took a softer stance, saying the Islamic political group's relations with Christians should remain "good, civilised and cooperative."
"While anger over the pope's remarks was necessary, it shouldn't last for long because while he is the head of the Catholic church in the world, many Europeans are not following it. So what he said won't influence them," Mohammad Mahdi Akef said.
But Mahmoud Ashour, the former deputy of Cairo's Al Azhar, the Sunni Arab world's most powerful institution, said the pope's comments were not enough.
"He should apologise because he insulted the beliefs of Islam. He must apologize in a frank way and say he made a mistake," Ashour told Al Arabiya TV after the pope's speech that.
Earlier on Sunday in the West Bank, two churches were set afire as anger over the pope's comments grew throughout the Palestinian areas.
In the town of Tulkarem, a 170-year-old stone church built 170 years ago was torched before dawn and its interior was destroyed, local Christian officials said.
In the village of Tubas, a small church was attacked with firebombs and partially burned, Christians said. Neither church is Catholic, the officials said.
Palestinian Muslims hurled firebombs and opened fire at five churches in the West Bank and Gaza Strip Saturday to protest the Pope's comments, sparking concerns of a rift between Palestinian Muslims and Christians.
All of Iran's seminary schools were closed in protest at the pope's "outrageous remarks", state television said, and instead of regular lectures students shook their fists in anger as they listened to clerics.
Up to 400 seminarians sat in the auditorium of the Feyzieh - the main seminary school in Iran's clerical epicentre of Qom, south of Tehran - to protest against the pope's remarks last week in his native Germany.
"The pope must present his apologies and read the Koran more since it acknowledges Christianity," top cleric Ahmad Khatami, one of the leaders of Friday prayers in Tehran, told the protesting students.
"Instead of preaching peaceful coexistence among the great divine religions, the pope is planting seeds of division," Grand Ayatollah Saafi Gholpaygani said, according to state television.
The state-run IRNA agency said the order for the schools to shut had come from Qom's Grand Ayatollahs, the highest-ranking of all Shiite clerics.
(Gulf News)
Malaysia Abdullah Ahmad Badawi Mid East Pope Benedict Bush'America Bush
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