The Guardian loses the plot

Of course it's a left-ish paper, but even by its standards The Guardian has had a remarkable run this week on opinion pieces attacking the Pope for his recent speech.

Apart from Karen Armstrong, whose piece I discussed a few posts ago, there has been Madeleine Bunting saying this:

In his remarks last week, the Pope re-awoke the most entrenched and self-serving of western prejudices - that Muslims have a unique proclivity to violence - a claim that has no basis in history or in current world events, a fact that still eludes too many westerners.

Does she think the word "uniquely" let's her make this claim? If so, why do we have thousands of books on all the non-Muslim violence of recent history - the legacies of Mao and Stalin, the Holocaust and Pol Pot. (Not to mention the concern about North Korea at the moment.) I think the West has a pretty good grip on the idea that it doesn't require being a Muslim nation to have tyranny and violence.

However, there is one aspect of Muslim violent behaviour that is pretty unique at the moment, namely the default riot mode for perceived criticism or insult.

Along similar lines to Bunting was the piece by Jonathan Freedland, in which he notes:

...he [the Pope] should have known, given who he is, that it would have the most calamitous results.

That's not because Muslims are somehow, as their accusers have written, uniquely touchy.

Bah...

What makes me shudder about the Pope's Regensburg lecture is that he appears to join Osama bin Laden in this effort to cast the current conflict as a clash of civilizations. Complicatedly, and dense in footnotes, he is, at bottom, trying to establish the superiority of one faith over another. His argument is that reason is intrinsic to Christianity, yet merely a contingent part of Islam. ..

There can be no happy medium in matters of core belief: Muslims cannot meet Christians halfway on their belief that God spoke to Muhammad, just as Christians cannot compromise on Jesus's status as the son of God. Most religious leaders have long recognised that, and agreed to tiptoe politely around each other, offering a warm, soapy bath of rhetoric about "shared values" and "interfaith dialogue". Of course they have known that, if pushed, they would be obliged to say their own faiths are better than the others, but they have avoided doing so. Now this Pope has broken that compact - and who knows what havoc he has unleashed.

This is moral cowardice of a high order, and just rubbish.

The upside of this is that many readers comments at the Guardian are attacking these columns with some vigor.