Manufactured outrage – II. Illustrative material

First of all, a photo from Joee Blogs

There are a number of other excellent photos of the protest on Sunday outside Westminster Cathedral. For a Very Rushed Post, it has really hit the jackpot for Joe. The post has 196 comments and he has been blogged all over the known universe.

Here is the cover of a book which is a best-seller in Turkey:

The title "Papa’ya suikast" means "Assassinating the Pope". The book predicts that Pope Benedict will be assassinated in Istanbul in a plot involving Opus Dei, the Freemasons, the Turkish Secret Service and Mehmet Ali Agca.

In a comment which may or may not help to defuse tension in the region, Salih Kapusuz, a deputy leader of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's party commented:
"Benedict, the author of such unfortunate and insolent remarks, is going down in history for his words [...] He is going down in history in the same category as leaders such as (Adolf) Hitler and (Benito) Mussolini."
The Assyrian International News Agency has a report telling of a poster that has been placed in many Baghdad mosques for the previously unknown group, "Kataab Ashbal Al Islam Al Salafi," (Islamic Salafist Boy Scout Battalions). This group threatens to kill all Christians in Iraq if the Pope does not apologize in three days in front of the whole world to Mohammed.

Everyone's favourite protest photo, of course is:

However, I always have a reservation about laughing at other
peoples' poor English. After all, I cannot speak or read Arabic or any of the other languages that are on banners in many parts of the world. I don't even know what language is on these banners in Pakistan:

Fortunately, the Curt Jester comes to the rescue here. He has done his research and found out the gist of all those arcane scripts. Here is his dynamic equivalence translation of all "them fancy words".
"I read the Pope's speech at the at University of Regensburg and I enjoyed it. I liked his reference to surah 2, 256 which reads: 'There is no compulsion in religion.' While I disagree that Jesus was more than a prophet I enjoyed Benedict's critique of the liberal theology of the 19th and 20th centuries that 'ushered in a second stage in the process of dehellenization." Also interesting is his explanation of how modernity is trying to reduce the field of theology to be not one of the "sciences." Truly as he says 'it is man himself who ends up being reduced.' I can see how the dialogue he quoted between Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and who he called an "educated" and "learned" Persian could be misconstrued by those whose source of news is only by headlines, but I really appreciated the distinctions he made about violent conversions and that God is transcendent."

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