Pope 'deeply sorry' for Muslim outrage
Pope 'deeply sorry' for Muslim outrage
Pope Benedict XVI sought to mollify Muslim anger, saying he was "deeply sorry" for the outrage sparked by his recent remarks on Islam and stressing they did not reflect his personal opinion.
The Pope's expression of regret was welcomed by several prominent Muslim groups which said they hoped his words would calm tensions that have flared throughout the Muslim world.
But other Muslim organizations seemed to reject the Pope's statement as falling short of the full, personal apology they had demanded, with some Islamist groups issuing fresh threats of attacks against Christians.
Benedict had come under mounting pressure from Muslim leaders worldwide to retract his remarks made in Germany Tuesday in which he quoted an obscure medieval text that criticised some teachings of the Prophet Mohammed as "evil and inhuman".
"I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address ... which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims," the Pope said during the traditional Angelus blessing from the balcony of his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo outside Rome.
He stressed that the passages he quoted during a speech at Regensburg University "do not in any way express my personal thought".
"I hope that this serves to appease hearts and to clarify the true meaning of my address, which in its totality was and is an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with great mutual respect," he added.
The Pope's comments in Germany had triggered widespread condemnation across the Muslim world, amid violent protests reminiscent of those that erupted after a Danish newspaper printed cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed a year ago.
One of the most vocal critics, Egypt's opposition Muslim Brotherhood, said the Pope's expression of sorrow represented "a good step" towards an apology.
"We consider today's statement by the Pope a retraction of what he said last week," Mohammed Habib, a senior member of the group, told AFP.
The Central Council of Muslims in Germany reacted in similar vein, welcoming what it described as "an important step towards calming the unrest of the past days in many parts of the world".
Indian Muslims also welcomed what Maulana Khalid Rashid, a member of the powerful All India Muslim Personal Law Board in Lucknow, called "the apology tendered by the Pope Benedict".
The Angelus blessing marked the Pope's first public appearance since the furore broke over his university lecture, in which he also implicitly linked Islam with violence.
His words were greeted with warm applause by the Roman Catholic faithful who had braved pouring rain to receive the Pope's blessing.
The Italian interior ministry told police chiefs to raise the level of national security on Sunday, amid violent threats by Islamist groups overseas.
A hardline cleric linked to Somalia's powerful Islamist movement had called for Muslims to "hunt down" and kill the Pope, while an armed Iraqi group threatened to carry out attacks against Rome and the Vatican.
Gunmen shot and killed an elderly Italian nun Sunday at a children's hospital in the Islamist-controlled Somali capital of Mogadishu, in what Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi denounced as a "horrible act".
Two armed Iraqi groups posted statements Sunday on the Internet urging Muslims toward reprisal, though it was not clear if the threats took the Pope's most recent public expression of regret into account.
"Know that the soldiers of Mohammed will come sooner or later to shake your throne and the foundations of your state," said the group Asaeb al-Iraq al-Jihadiya (League of Jihadists in Iraq), which has in the past posted online video footage of attacks on American targets.
Jaish al-Mujahedeen (the Mujahedeen's Army) -- which on Saturday threatened to strike at Rome and the Vatican -- posted another statement saying that the group's reply "will come with deeds, not words".
And a third day of attacks on Christian places of worship in the Palestinian territories saw unknown assailants throw Molotov cocktails and a burning tire at two Catholic churches in the northern West Bank.
The head of the Hamas-led government, Ismail Haniya, denounced the attacks and called on Palestinians to exercise restraint.
And in the West Bank, the radical Islamic Jihad took steps Sunday to guard one church in Jenin against reprisals, witnesses and the group said.
In his Angelus address, the Pope said the "true meaning" of what he said in Germany had been clarified by the Vatican's Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone on Saturday.
Bertone said the Pope's words had been misinterpreted and were meant as a rejection of the religious motivation for violence, "from whatever side it may come".
That explanation had been angrily dismissed by many Muslim groups who insisted on a "clear" papal apology.
Religious seminaries across Iran shut on Sunday to stage protests over the Pope's "outrageous" remarks, while Morocco on Saturday said it was recalling its ambassador to the Holy See.
The scale and intensity of the Muslim reaction had cast doubts on the Pope's next scheduled foreign trip in November to Turkey.
However, Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said the visit would go ahead as planned.
"A change is out of the question for us right now," Gul said, while describing the Pope's comments in Germany as "really unfortunate" and a setback for efforts to promote better understanding between religions and cultures.
In Lebanon, the spiritual leader of the country's largest Christian community, the Maronites, defended the Pope Sunday against what he termed a political campaign exploiting a misunderstanding.
"The criticism of the Pope is political," Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir told AFP from the patriarchate in Bkerke, north of the Lebanese capital.
Pope Benedict XVI had "not spoken directly about Islam" in his speech which has aroused widespread anger across the Muslim world, said Sfeir, whose rite forms part of the Catholic church.
Muslim world divided over Pope's apology
While some welcome gesture, others demand act of contrition.
Pope Benedict's admission that he was "deeply sorry" for offending the sensitivities of Muslims does not necessarily mean that the worst crisis of his papacy is over yet. Speaking in Rome yesterday, the Pope said that the views of the 14th-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus that he quoted last week - describing Islam as "evil and inhuman" - were not his own.
In Britain, some senior Muslims welcomed the Pope's apologies but suggested that he would have to make a further apology to stop the row escalating.
Massoud Shadjareh, of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, said: "He needs to convince that this is a genuine apology because many people are aware of the sort of things he has been saying for a long time. Threats are not the way forward but some of the things he has said have been music to the ears of racists."
The Muslim Council of Britain welcomed the Pope's explanation. A spokesman said: "We very much welcome the Pope's statement today in which he made it clear that his own views do not in any way accord with those of the 14th century emperor. This is a very important clarification that we had been seeking. Had this caveat been included in the Pope's original speech it may have prevented this controversy in the first place."
Ahmed Versi, editor of the Muslim News, called the apology a "welcome gesture" but said the Pope must address the core of what he had said. "He said Christianity believes in reason, is more logical and doesn't believe in violence. But reason is also the cornerstone of Islamic belief. He should make it clear that Islam does not preach violence."
In Germany, representatives of the country's 3.2 million Muslims, most of them Turks,were satisfied with the Pope's remarks. There was now no reason why he should not visit Turkey in late November as planned, they added. Turkish religious leaders also struck a conciliatory tone yesterday.
In Egypt, Mahmoud Ashour, the former deputy of Cairo's Al-Azhar, the Sunni Arab world's most powerful institution, dismissed the comments as inadequate.
"He should apologise because he insulted the beliefs of Islam. He must apologise in a frank way and say he made a mistake," Mr Ashour told al-Arabiya TV.
And in a sign of how opinion is split, there appeared to be mixed messages from Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood.
The Associated Press quoted the group's leader as 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," said Mohammed Mahdi Akef, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.
But there were other reports that after initially saying the Pope's statement was "sufficient", the group felt it did "not rise to the level of a clear apology" and called for an act of contrition that would "decisively end any confusion".
In Iran, anger against the Pope was growing. As well as student protests, the Vatican's ambassador to Iran, Archbishop Angelo Mottola, was summoned "to receive Iran's strong protest against the Pope's remarks on Islam", the official Irna news agency said.
One Iranian cleric said the Pope's apology could only be accepted if the pontiff fell to his feet. Numerous other religious seminaries in Iran announced they were going on strike.
Vatican advisers will almost certainly be hoping that once the pontiff's conciliatory message filters down to the Muslim street the protests will die off.
But radical Islamist groups - or authoritarian regimes trying to deal with restive Islamist forces in their own societies - might also exploit religious misunderstanding for their own purposes.
Yesterday, two armed Iraqi groups posted threats to the Vatican and the Catholic Church on the internet.
Many still fear a repeat of the Danish cartoon row, which saw protests and violence across the Muslim world on a far greater, and more diffuse, scale than at present, after a rightwing Danish newspaper, the Jutland Post, published a series of cartoons a year ago mocking the Prophet Muhammad as a self-proclaimed exercise in free speech. It was only when, five months later, a group of incensed ultra-conservative Danish imams travelled to the Middle East with the cartoons, that the affair exploded into a cultural row.
The Pope's apology also fails to address, or acknowledge, another root problem: that sensitivities are already inflamed, and there is a widespread perception across the Muslim world that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were carried out by what many Muslims see as little more than a Christian coalition - a new Crusade.
The Vatican says it is worried about the turn events are taking. The Vatican's spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, said he hoped the death of the Italian nun shot dead while working in Somalia was "an isolated event". "We are worried about the consequences of this wave of hatred and hope it doesn't have grave consequences for the church around the world," he told Ansa news agency.
Conservative politicians in Europe, meanwhile, have made it clear whose side they are on.
Over the weekend, Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, said the Pope had been misunderstood. The general secretary of her Christian Democrat party, Ronald Pofalla, went further, declaring: "All those who attack the Pope are not interested in dialogue. They merely want to intimidate and silence the West."
Papal thriller
In the Muslim city of Istanbul, once the Christian capital of Constantinople, the Pope arrives on a huge mission: to undo the Great Schism of 1054 and reunite Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christianity. This is not to everyone's liking: reactionaries from Opus Dei, the dark operators of Turkey's security "deep state", and the evil geniuses of Italy's P-2 masonic lodge form an alliance to stop the Vatican. In Istanbul, a journalist is contracted to assassinate the pope.
Such is the plot of the potboiler racing up the bestseller lists in Turkey. Uncannily coinciding with the Vatican-Islam tension and ahead of Pope Benedict XVI's November visit to Turkey, the Turkish writer Yücel Kaya published his thriller "Attack on the Pope" in May. The pope and his coterie will require a diplomacy lacking in the Regensburg homily to negotiate this trip.
Meanwhile,Malaysia Insists On Full Apology From The Pope.Malaysia regretted that Pope Benedict XVI failed to offer a full apology and retract derogatory remarks about Islam in a speech he made which enraged Muslims around the world.
Foreign Minister Datuk Seri Syed Hamid Albar said the Pope only stated he was "deeply sorry" about the reaction to his speech but made no effort to calm Muslim anger by making a full apology.
The Pope had on Tuesday cited from a medieval text about holy wars that described Islam as "evil and inhuman" in a speech in Germany.
"Muslims have all this while felt being oppressed and the statement by the Pope saying he is sorry about the angry reaction is inadequate to calm the anger, more so because he is the highest leader of the Vatican," Syed Hamid told Malaysian journalists here at the end of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit.
Because of that, he said, Malaysia would continue to insist that the Pope give a full apology and retract his statement.
Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who is also the chairman of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), had earlier called on Pope Benedict to apologise and retract his statement.
US plot behind pope’s remarks: Iran hardline press
Iranian hardline newspapers on Sunday said there were signs of an Israeli-US plot behind remarks by Pope Benedict XVIthat linked Islam to violence and created a wave of anger across the Muslim world.
The daily Jomhuri Islami said Israel and the United States—the Islamic republic’s two arch-enemies—could have dictated the comments to distract attention from the resistance of the Shiite militant group Hezbollah to Israel’s offensive on Lebanon.
“The reality is that if we do not consider Pope Benedict XVI to be ignorant of Islam, then his remarks against Islam are a dictat that the Zionists and the Americans have written (for him) and have submitted to him.”
“The American and the Zionist aim is to undermine the glorious triumph of Islam’s children of Lebanese Hezbollah, which annulled the undefeatable legend of the Israeli army and foiled the Satanic and colonialist American plot,” it said.
Fellow hardline daily Kayhan, whose editor-in-chief is appointed by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said there were signs of Israeli inteference aimed at creating conflict between Islam and Christianity.
“There are many signs that show that Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks regarding the great prophet of Islam are a link in a connected chain of a Zionist-American project,” it said.
“The project, which was created and executed by the Zionist minority, aims at creating confrontation between the followers of the two great divine religions.”
In a speech in his native Germany on Tuesday, the pope spoke of a link between Islam and jihad, or “holy war”, and quoted a 14th-century Byzantine emperor who said innovations introduced by the Prophet Mohammed were “evil and inhuman”.
The pope on Saturday apologised for causing any offence to Muslims but did not retract his remarks, arguing they had been misinterpreted.
Iran, Malaysia to expand ties in cooperative sector
Tehran Times Economic Desk
TEHRAN – Following the agreements signed with his Iranian counterpart on joint investment, trade and education, the Malaysian Minister of Entrepreneur and Cooperative Development Mohamed Khaled bin Nordin proceeded to meet Iran Commerce Minister Seyyed Masud Mir-Kazemi on Sunday.
The talks focused and emphasized on civil and marine transportation and production of halal meat for export purposes to other Islamic countries in the region as previously set forth in the two nations’ last joint economic meeting. Bin Nordin also announced his country’s readiness to share its experiences in the field with the Islamic Republic.
Pharmaceutical, cosmetic, agriculture and banking ventures were among the other issues speculated between both sides and Mir-Kazemi welcome the expansion of cooperatives in Iran by employing Kuala Lumpur’s assistance.
Cooperative sector’s activities in Malaysia range from oil and gas business to participation in ecology and energy areas.
Malaysia Abdullah Ahmad Badawi Mid East Pope Benedict Bush'America Iran Zionist
Pope Benedict XVI sought to mollify Muslim anger, saying he was "deeply sorry" for the outrage sparked by his recent remarks on Islam and stressing they did not reflect his personal opinion.
The Pope's expression of regret was welcomed by several prominent Muslim groups which said they hoped his words would calm tensions that have flared throughout the Muslim world.
But other Muslim organizations seemed to reject the Pope's statement as falling short of the full, personal apology they had demanded, with some Islamist groups issuing fresh threats of attacks against Christians.
Benedict had come under mounting pressure from Muslim leaders worldwide to retract his remarks made in Germany Tuesday in which he quoted an obscure medieval text that criticised some teachings of the Prophet Mohammed as "evil and inhuman".
"I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address ... which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims," the Pope said during the traditional Angelus blessing from the balcony of his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo outside Rome.
He stressed that the passages he quoted during a speech at Regensburg University "do not in any way express my personal thought".
"I hope that this serves to appease hearts and to clarify the true meaning of my address, which in its totality was and is an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with great mutual respect," he added.
The Pope's comments in Germany had triggered widespread condemnation across the Muslim world, amid violent protests reminiscent of those that erupted after a Danish newspaper printed cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed a year ago.
One of the most vocal critics, Egypt's opposition Muslim Brotherhood, said the Pope's expression of sorrow represented "a good step" towards an apology.
"We consider today's statement by the Pope a retraction of what he said last week," Mohammed Habib, a senior member of the group, told AFP.
The Central Council of Muslims in Germany reacted in similar vein, welcoming what it described as "an important step towards calming the unrest of the past days in many parts of the world".
Indian Muslims also welcomed what Maulana Khalid Rashid, a member of the powerful All India Muslim Personal Law Board in Lucknow, called "the apology tendered by the Pope Benedict".
The Angelus blessing marked the Pope's first public appearance since the furore broke over his university lecture, in which he also implicitly linked Islam with violence.
His words were greeted with warm applause by the Roman Catholic faithful who had braved pouring rain to receive the Pope's blessing.
The Italian interior ministry told police chiefs to raise the level of national security on Sunday, amid violent threats by Islamist groups overseas.
A hardline cleric linked to Somalia's powerful Islamist movement had called for Muslims to "hunt down" and kill the Pope, while an armed Iraqi group threatened to carry out attacks against Rome and the Vatican.
Gunmen shot and killed an elderly Italian nun Sunday at a children's hospital in the Islamist-controlled Somali capital of Mogadishu, in what Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi denounced as a "horrible act".
Two armed Iraqi groups posted statements Sunday on the Internet urging Muslims toward reprisal, though it was not clear if the threats took the Pope's most recent public expression of regret into account.
"Know that the soldiers of Mohammed will come sooner or later to shake your throne and the foundations of your state," said the group Asaeb al-Iraq al-Jihadiya (League of Jihadists in Iraq), which has in the past posted online video footage of attacks on American targets.
Jaish al-Mujahedeen (the Mujahedeen's Army) -- which on Saturday threatened to strike at Rome and the Vatican -- posted another statement saying that the group's reply "will come with deeds, not words".
And a third day of attacks on Christian places of worship in the Palestinian territories saw unknown assailants throw Molotov cocktails and a burning tire at two Catholic churches in the northern West Bank.
The head of the Hamas-led government, Ismail Haniya, denounced the attacks and called on Palestinians to exercise restraint.
And in the West Bank, the radical Islamic Jihad took steps Sunday to guard one church in Jenin against reprisals, witnesses and the group said.
In his Angelus address, the Pope said the "true meaning" of what he said in Germany had been clarified by the Vatican's Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone on Saturday.
Bertone said the Pope's words had been misinterpreted and were meant as a rejection of the religious motivation for violence, "from whatever side it may come".
That explanation had been angrily dismissed by many Muslim groups who insisted on a "clear" papal apology.
Religious seminaries across Iran shut on Sunday to stage protests over the Pope's "outrageous" remarks, while Morocco on Saturday said it was recalling its ambassador to the Holy See.
The scale and intensity of the Muslim reaction had cast doubts on the Pope's next scheduled foreign trip in November to Turkey.
However, Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said the visit would go ahead as planned.
"A change is out of the question for us right now," Gul said, while describing the Pope's comments in Germany as "really unfortunate" and a setback for efforts to promote better understanding between religions and cultures.
In Lebanon, the spiritual leader of the country's largest Christian community, the Maronites, defended the Pope Sunday against what he termed a political campaign exploiting a misunderstanding.
"The criticism of the Pope is political," Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir told AFP from the patriarchate in Bkerke, north of the Lebanese capital.
Pope Benedict XVI had "not spoken directly about Islam" in his speech which has aroused widespread anger across the Muslim world, said Sfeir, whose rite forms part of the Catholic church.
Muslim world divided over Pope's apology
While some welcome gesture, others demand act of contrition.
Pope Benedict's admission that he was "deeply sorry" for offending the sensitivities of Muslims does not necessarily mean that the worst crisis of his papacy is over yet. Speaking in Rome yesterday, the Pope said that the views of the 14th-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus that he quoted last week - describing Islam as "evil and inhuman" - were not his own.
In Britain, some senior Muslims welcomed the Pope's apologies but suggested that he would have to make a further apology to stop the row escalating.
Massoud Shadjareh, of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, said: "He needs to convince that this is a genuine apology because many people are aware of the sort of things he has been saying for a long time. Threats are not the way forward but some of the things he has said have been music to the ears of racists."
The Muslim Council of Britain welcomed the Pope's explanation. A spokesman said: "We very much welcome the Pope's statement today in which he made it clear that his own views do not in any way accord with those of the 14th century emperor. This is a very important clarification that we had been seeking. Had this caveat been included in the Pope's original speech it may have prevented this controversy in the first place."
Ahmed Versi, editor of the Muslim News, called the apology a "welcome gesture" but said the Pope must address the core of what he had said. "He said Christianity believes in reason, is more logical and doesn't believe in violence. But reason is also the cornerstone of Islamic belief. He should make it clear that Islam does not preach violence."
In Germany, representatives of the country's 3.2 million Muslims, most of them Turks,were satisfied with the Pope's remarks. There was now no reason why he should not visit Turkey in late November as planned, they added. Turkish religious leaders also struck a conciliatory tone yesterday.
In Egypt, Mahmoud Ashour, the former deputy of Cairo's Al-Azhar, the Sunni Arab world's most powerful institution, dismissed the comments as inadequate.
"He should apologise because he insulted the beliefs of Islam. He must apologise in a frank way and say he made a mistake," Mr Ashour told al-Arabiya TV.
And in a sign of how opinion is split, there appeared to be mixed messages from Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood.
The Associated Press quoted the group's leader as 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," said Mohammed Mahdi Akef, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.
But there were other reports that after initially saying the Pope's statement was "sufficient", the group felt it did "not rise to the level of a clear apology" and called for an act of contrition that would "decisively end any confusion".
In Iran, anger against the Pope was growing. As well as student protests, the Vatican's ambassador to Iran, Archbishop Angelo Mottola, was summoned "to receive Iran's strong protest against the Pope's remarks on Islam", the official Irna news agency said.
One Iranian cleric said the Pope's apology could only be accepted if the pontiff fell to his feet. Numerous other religious seminaries in Iran announced they were going on strike.
Vatican advisers will almost certainly be hoping that once the pontiff's conciliatory message filters down to the Muslim street the protests will die off.
But radical Islamist groups - or authoritarian regimes trying to deal with restive Islamist forces in their own societies - might also exploit religious misunderstanding for their own purposes.
Yesterday, two armed Iraqi groups posted threats to the Vatican and the Catholic Church on the internet.
Many still fear a repeat of the Danish cartoon row, which saw protests and violence across the Muslim world on a far greater, and more diffuse, scale than at present, after a rightwing Danish newspaper, the Jutland Post, published a series of cartoons a year ago mocking the Prophet Muhammad as a self-proclaimed exercise in free speech. It was only when, five months later, a group of incensed ultra-conservative Danish imams travelled to the Middle East with the cartoons, that the affair exploded into a cultural row.
The Pope's apology also fails to address, or acknowledge, another root problem: that sensitivities are already inflamed, and there is a widespread perception across the Muslim world that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were carried out by what many Muslims see as little more than a Christian coalition - a new Crusade.
The Vatican says it is worried about the turn events are taking. The Vatican's spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, said he hoped the death of the Italian nun shot dead while working in Somalia was "an isolated event". "We are worried about the consequences of this wave of hatred and hope it doesn't have grave consequences for the church around the world," he told Ansa news agency.
Conservative politicians in Europe, meanwhile, have made it clear whose side they are on.
Over the weekend, Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, said the Pope had been misunderstood. The general secretary of her Christian Democrat party, Ronald Pofalla, went further, declaring: "All those who attack the Pope are not interested in dialogue. They merely want to intimidate and silence the West."
Papal thriller
In the Muslim city of Istanbul, once the Christian capital of Constantinople, the Pope arrives on a huge mission: to undo the Great Schism of 1054 and reunite Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christianity. This is not to everyone's liking: reactionaries from Opus Dei, the dark operators of Turkey's security "deep state", and the evil geniuses of Italy's P-2 masonic lodge form an alliance to stop the Vatican. In Istanbul, a journalist is contracted to assassinate the pope.
Such is the plot of the potboiler racing up the bestseller lists in Turkey. Uncannily coinciding with the Vatican-Islam tension and ahead of Pope Benedict XVI's November visit to Turkey, the Turkish writer Yücel Kaya published his thriller "Attack on the Pope" in May. The pope and his coterie will require a diplomacy lacking in the Regensburg homily to negotiate this trip.
Meanwhile,Malaysia Insists On Full Apology From The Pope.Malaysia regretted that Pope Benedict XVI failed to offer a full apology and retract derogatory remarks about Islam in a speech he made which enraged Muslims around the world.
Foreign Minister Datuk Seri Syed Hamid Albar said the Pope only stated he was "deeply sorry" about the reaction to his speech but made no effort to calm Muslim anger by making a full apology.
The Pope had on Tuesday cited from a medieval text about holy wars that described Islam as "evil and inhuman" in a speech in Germany.
"Muslims have all this while felt being oppressed and the statement by the Pope saying he is sorry about the angry reaction is inadequate to calm the anger, more so because he is the highest leader of the Vatican," Syed Hamid told Malaysian journalists here at the end of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit.
Because of that, he said, Malaysia would continue to insist that the Pope give a full apology and retract his statement.
Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who is also the chairman of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), had earlier called on Pope Benedict to apologise and retract his statement.
US plot behind pope’s remarks: Iran hardline press
Iranian hardline newspapers on Sunday said there were signs of an Israeli-US plot behind remarks by Pope Benedict XVIthat linked Islam to violence and created a wave of anger across the Muslim world.
The daily Jomhuri Islami said Israel and the United States—the Islamic republic’s two arch-enemies—could have dictated the comments to distract attention from the resistance of the Shiite militant group Hezbollah to Israel’s offensive on Lebanon.
“The reality is that if we do not consider Pope Benedict XVI to be ignorant of Islam, then his remarks against Islam are a dictat that the Zionists and the Americans have written (for him) and have submitted to him.”
“The American and the Zionist aim is to undermine the glorious triumph of Islam’s children of Lebanese Hezbollah, which annulled the undefeatable legend of the Israeli army and foiled the Satanic and colonialist American plot,” it said.
Fellow hardline daily Kayhan, whose editor-in-chief is appointed by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said there were signs of Israeli inteference aimed at creating conflict between Islam and Christianity.
“There are many signs that show that Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks regarding the great prophet of Islam are a link in a connected chain of a Zionist-American project,” it said.
“The project, which was created and executed by the Zionist minority, aims at creating confrontation between the followers of the two great divine religions.”
In a speech in his native Germany on Tuesday, the pope spoke of a link between Islam and jihad, or “holy war”, and quoted a 14th-century Byzantine emperor who said innovations introduced by the Prophet Mohammed were “evil and inhuman”.
The pope on Saturday apologised for causing any offence to Muslims but did not retract his remarks, arguing they had been misinterpreted.
**********
Iran, Malaysia to expand ties in cooperative sector
Tehran Times Economic Desk
TEHRAN – Following the agreements signed with his Iranian counterpart on joint investment, trade and education, the Malaysian Minister of Entrepreneur and Cooperative Development Mohamed Khaled bin Nordin proceeded to meet Iran Commerce Minister Seyyed Masud Mir-Kazemi on Sunday.
The talks focused and emphasized on civil and marine transportation and production of halal meat for export purposes to other Islamic countries in the region as previously set forth in the two nations’ last joint economic meeting. Bin Nordin also announced his country’s readiness to share its experiences in the field with the Islamic Republic.
Pharmaceutical, cosmetic, agriculture and banking ventures were among the other issues speculated between both sides and Mir-Kazemi welcome the expansion of cooperatives in Iran by employing Kuala Lumpur’s assistance.
Cooperative sector’s activities in Malaysia range from oil and gas business to participation in ecology and energy areas.
Malaysia Abdullah Ahmad Badawi Mid East Pope Benedict Bush'America Iran Zionist
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