This video is called Gay Message to the Pope.
Dutch conservative to liberal “quality” daily NRC-Handelsblad has on today’s page 9, four criticisms of Pope Benedict XVI’s controversial speech on Islam.
(For which the pope himself has, by now, apologized … well … sort of … to an extent unique in papal history).
The editorial there has as its title “Unnecessary provocation”.
In it, the NRC‘s editorial board states:
On the eve of a visit to Turkey, to go back to a historically charged time with a quotation prone to be read out of context, is an unnecessary provocation.
Besides, the history of the Roman Catholic church is replete with coercion and violence.
So, modesty would have been better.
Veteran columnist Jan Blokker writes: “Would the Holy Father, with his unbelievable erudition, not very easily have been able to produce one hundred quotations on his pious theme [of the abuse of religion for violence], without the need to include even one mention of Muslims?”
Peter Raedts, professor in medieval history of the Roman Catholic university of Nijmegen, writes that in the relationship between faith and reason, in which the pope‘s speech favourably contrasts Christianity to Islam, the pope’s speech is historically wrong.
M.D. Koster writes: “Why put the blame solely on the supposed evil of the Other”?
Australian criticism: here.
Benedict XVI vs. Latin American liberation theology: here.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
Chronicles Online September 26, 2006
Pope Benedict and the Meaning of Words
by Srdja Trifkovic …
ISLAM AND REASON — If there is anything potentially offensive to
a Muslim ear in the lecture it is not the Pontiff’s use of the
opinion of a Byzantine emperor of Muhammad’s contribution to the
history of ideas, but rather Benedict XVI’s implied hint that Islamic
teaching is — or may be — unreasonable, and therefore at odds with
God’s nature:
“The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion
is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s
nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a
Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident.
But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is
not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.
Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R Arnaldez,
who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not
bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to
reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to
practise idolatry.”
Some Western commentators have attacked this part of Benedict’s
lecture for inaccuracy. Daniel Martin Varisco, “Chair” of
Anthropology at Hofstra University, thus argues that “Islamic
doctrine nowhere teaches that Allah can contradict his own words or
divine principles of justice. To say that Muslims worship a God so
fickle as to contradict the Quran and force people to worship idols
is, to borrow a phrase, beyond belief.”
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