In an effort to defuse the controversy over his speech two weeks ago, on Monday Pope Benedict XVI met Muslim ambassadors in his summer residence near Rome. But while the Islamic world is still reeling from insult, the conservative German media used the outrage to scapegoat Islam, reports Katharina Goetze It was not the first time for Benedict XVI to be wrong. In fact, the German pope had been notorious for his verbal gaffes long before the scandal around the Byzantine Emperor's quote erupted. Yet none of the pontiff's previous slips had such dramatic consequences as that contentious speech on pilgrimage to his native Bavaria. If in the Arab world there was widespread bewilderment as to how the Catholic Church's most supreme figure could have said such a thing, this incomprehension was mirrored by the German media who largely failed to fathom what all that fuss was about. While the Germans' shock at the violent protests may have been justified, there sadly was also the well-known tendency among right-leaning publications to generalise and scapegoat Islam as a whole. "Especially since there is no reason to assume that the pope has personal feelings of hatred against Islam, it remains a mystery how such an easily exploitable passage could find its way into the speech of Regensburg," Christian Geyer wrote in the conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . Instead, though, of taking a stab at solving this "mystery" once and for all, he claimed that the scandal could have only been nurtured by a culture of bondage. Geyer admitted that the pope had made a mistake by quoting his source without making critical reference to it, but insisted that this conflict should not be seen as a clash of East and West. If the other side as a reaction to this "snippet of a quote" burns puppets of the pope -- as happened in Pakistan -- or publishes bomb threats on the Internet, so his argument runs, this asymmetrical dispute can hardly be called a "clash of cultures". Alan Posener in the right-wing conservative daily Die Welt went as far as to say that, "it would be a shame if Benedict concluded from the fiasco of Regensburg only that from now on he should be more careful with Muslim sensibilities." He went on to list Benedict's credentials as a promoter of interreligious dialogue, saying that no pope before him had criticised the Western world as sharply and tried to gain understanding of Muslim anxieties as much as he had done. "He of all popes, who in the debate about the Mohamed- cartoons reproached the West for putting freedom of religious criticism above respect for the sacred [...] now has to crouch to fanaticised mullahs and self-proclaimed defenders of Islam, who haven't even read his speech," Posener wrote with regard to the Ali Bardakoglu, the head of Turkish Religious Affairs Directorate, who had strongly criticised the pope but later admitted that he had never read the whole speech. It was left to a few, notably left-wing papers to add a critical historical perspective to this debate, polemically comparing the pope's remarks to a crusade, as the Berlin-based Tageszeitung did. While the publication of the Prophet cartoons had been bad, the papal speech was worse, because it was meant seriously, Hilal Sezgin commented. "The Danish cartoons did not really bother me, but the statements of Benedict XVI are in my view so distinctly Islamophobic, that an apology can hardly rectify the situation." Christian Esch in the daily Berliner Zeitung said the speech was as if the pope, as a sign of reconciliation, reached out his hand but had spat in it just before, and Werner Pirker wrote in the Marxist daily Junge Welt that Ratzinger had not only harmed religious dialogue but also thrown himself into politics. "You can forgive the pope for believing that he possesses the absolute truth, it is a quirk of all popes. You couldn't blame him either if maybe he was a secret admirer of Islamic piety. But unforgivable is that in his speech he dismissed Islam as an ethically inferior religion, accusing it of being violent and unreasonable," Pirker said. Yet the eruption of violent protests in the Islamic world caused many commentators to draw comparisons with the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh or the Japanese translator of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses -- and even liberal papers to take position with the pope. "Too many Muslims behaved during their protests in the last days as if to confirm what the pope did not actually say: They acted as if Islam is an aggressive, violent religion," Stefan Ulrich said in the moderate daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung. Still, the pope should have known that the Prophet Mohamed is sacrosanct for all Muslims, Tomas Avenarius wrote in the same publication. "The claim that Islam is at its core a violent religion is intolerable against the backdrop of Christian colonialism." Under the title "The hour of the radicals" Sonja Zekri said, in the online magazine Jetzt, that moderate Muslims, of which there are millions in Germany, are the main losers in the conflict. She criticised the German media for not representing the burning churches in Palestine or Al-Qaeda's death threats as the fanatical excesses that they really are, but as revelations of a religion's true character. Nightmares of an aggressive Islam trying to conquer the West by the sword had found their way into German newspaper columns. "Maybe one day," Zekri ironically wrote, "psychologists will find out that those scenes fill the threat vacuum after the end of the Cold War. For now though, one and a half billion Muslims are deemed a gigantic army of potential holy warriors."
