NewsMax:

“Whoever criticizes the Pope misunderstood the aim of his speech. It was an invitation to dialogue between religions and the Pope [expressly] spoke in favor of this dialogue, which is something I also support and consider urgent and necessary,” Merkel was quoted as saying by German newspaper Bild.

“What Benedict XVI emphasized was a decisive and uncompromising renunciation of all forms of violence in the name of religion,” Merkel was quoted as saying in an article to appear on Saturday.

The heat is getting turned up on the Pope by the same fellows who disliked cartoons:

In Beirut, Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, one of the world’s top Shia Muslim clerics, said: “We demand that [the Pope] apologises personally, and not through [Vatican] sources, to all Muslims for such a wrong interpretation.” An influential Iranian cleric branded his remarks “absurd”. Ahmad Khatami told worshippers at Tehran University: “The Pope has insulted Islam.”

By last night the protests had not spilled over into the kind of violence seen in February in protest against the Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad. But Diaa Rashwan, a Cairo-based analyst of Islamic militancy, warned that the comments were “more dangerous than the cartoons because they come from the most important Christian authority in the world. The cartoons just came from an artist.”

Will Merkel and the Pope hang tough? For how long?

This entry was posted on Friday, September 15th, 2006 at 5:40 pm and is filed under art, culture, General, idiots!, Iran, Left of Left, Religion, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.