The Great Thing About the Pope Controversy...

is the ridiculous quotes:

The head of Cairo’s Al-Azhar university Sheikh Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi said Saturday the pontiff’s comments “betray a clear ignorance of Islam and attribute to the faith things which have nothing to do with it”.

You mean like Mohammed's "command to spread by the sword the faith he preached"? Who's kidding whom?

"The declarations from the pope are more dangerous than the cartoons, because they come from the most important Christian authority in the world — the cartoons just came from an artist," said Diaa Rashwan, an analyst in Cairo, Egypt, who studies Islamic militancy.

The cartoons 'just came from an artist'--now they realize that?

"He has a dark mentality that comes from the darkness of the Middle Ages. He is a poor thing that has not benefited from the spirit of reform in the Christian world," Kapusuz told Turkish state media. "It looks like an effort to revive the mentality of the Crusades."

...at a time when the Moslem world is reviving the mentality of the Jihad that brought about the original Crusades in the first place.

"One would expect a religious leader such as the pope to act and speak with responsibility and repudiate the Byzantine emperor's views in the interests of truth and harmonious relations between the followers of Islam and Catholicism," said Muhammad Abdul Bari, the council's secretary-general.

And just what have Moslems been up to "in the interests of truth and harmonious relations between the followers of Islam and Catholicism" in Bethlehem?

"Anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam said.

If you say Islam is intolerant...you'll force them to be intolerant?

Even the good folks at Reuters are getting into the act. On the Muslim Brotherhood, which demanded a personal apology:

The Muslim Brotherhood is a political Islamist group founded in Egypt which has inspired movements across the Arab world.

And what kind of movements have the Moslem Brotherhood inspired?

As stated on its charter and its website, the Muslim Brotherhood seeks to install an Islamic totalitarian empire and a worldwide Caliphate, through stages designed to Islamize targeted nations by whatever means available. Although the Brotherhood itself renounced violence in the 1970s, many of its branches continue to practice violence through terrorism and assassination.

Oh, those kinds of movements.

Technorati Tag: Israel.