Joe Bunting

Muslims, help me understand

I don’t want to get in to the whole story of Osama’s latest rant, which you can find here, but I do want to raise one point. Osama’s main attack is on Pope Benedict, whom he accuses of supporting a “new Crusade.”

“You went overboard in your unbelief,” he says, “and freed yourselves of the etiquettes of dispute and fighting and went to the extent of publishing these insulting drawings.”

Here are some of my concerns:

1. This is over a couple of drawings!!! I know that Muslims take images very seriously and that making a cartoon of the Prophet is worse than burning an American flag, but how does this justify violence.

Have you ever seen those bumber stickers, “An eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind?” Most people miss the point behind this ancient Jewish law. It was a limit, not a requirement. An example, if you steal my goat, I can have one of yours of equal or lesser value, but not your whole farm. Or, if you knock my tooth out, I can knock yours out (the same tooth or smaller), or I can choose to forgive you. It’s a limit, not a law. If you went beyond that limit, it wasn’t justice and there were consequences.

How is violence just retribution for a drawing, even an insult against the Prophet. The most they should do is draw a profane image of the Pope or Jesus or something. The consequence is out of sync with the offense.

2. Bin Laden is educating the Pope on the etiquettes of dispute?! Sure, there have been some really awful popes in the past, but Benedict is a white haired theologian, a scholar, not exactly a warrior or revolutionary leader. The last person to talk about the “etiquettes of dispute” is Osama bin Laden.

3. Does he really mean that it’s not good fight etiquette to draw a picture, but it is ok to fly a plane into a building full of civilians? I don’t even have words.

I must be missing something. I just can’t understand his thinking. If anyone is out there that can explain it to me, I’m very open to hearing from you.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 9:07 am and is filed under Joe Bunting the Strange. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.