Turkey’s ruling party official says pope is like Hitler and Mussolini
By
Associated Press
Friday, September 15, 2006 - Updated:
08:00 AM EST
ANKARA, Turkey - Turkey’s ruling Islamic-rooted party joined a wave of criticism of Pope Benedict XVI on Friday, accusing him of trying to revive the spirit of the Crusades with remarks he made about Islam. Muslim leaders in the Middle East expressed dismay and Pakistan’s parliament unanimously condemned him.
The Vatican said the pope did not intend the remarks - made in Germany on Tuesday during an address at a university - to be offensive.
The pope quoted from a book recounting a conversation between 14th century Byzantine Christian Emperor Manuel Paleologos II and a Persian scholar on the truths of Christianity and Islam.
“The emperor comes to speak about the issue of jihad, holy war,” the pope said.
“He said, I quote, ’Show me just what Mohammed 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,”’ he quoted the emperor as saying. He did not explicitly agree with them nor repudiate them.
Turkey’s top Islamic cleric, Religious Affairs Directorate head Ali Bardakoglu, asked Benedict on Thursday to apologize about the remarks and unleashed a string of accusations against Christianity, raising tensions before the pontiff’s planned visit to Turkey in November on what would be his first papal pilgrimage in a Muslim country.
Bardakoglu said he was deeply offended and called the remarks “extraordinarily worrying, saddening and unfortunate.”
On Thursday, when the pope returned to Italy, Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said, “It certainly wasn’t the intention of the pope to carry out a deep examination of jihad (holy war) and on Muslim thought on it, much less to offend the sensibility of Muslim believers.”
Lombardi insisted the pontiff respects Islam. Benedict wants to “cultivate an attitude of respect and dialogue toward the other religions and cultures, obviously also toward Islam,” Lombardi said.
On Friday, Salih Kapusuz,
a deputy leader of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party, said Benedict’s remarks were either “the result of pitiful ignorance” about Islam and its prophet, or worse, a deliberate distortion of the truths.
“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 blurted out in comments made to the state-owned Anatolia news agency. “It looks like an effort to revive the mentality of the Crusades.”
“Benedict, the author of such unfortunate and insolent remarks is going down in history for his words. However ...
he is going down in history in the same category as leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini,” he said.
In
Beirut,
Lebanon’s most senior Shiite Muslim cleric denounced the remarks and demanded the pope personally apologize for insulting Islam.
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