This is from Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Con blog:
How to stop Muslim rage
Simple, according to Newsweek’s Christopher Dickey: for starters, Westerners should stop exercising their right to free speech, and should stop welcoming Muslims who want to convert to Christianity. It appears to Dickey, Muslims are children who cannot be expected to behave like adults when confronted with something non-violent that they find offensive or challenging.
There’s more, but I noticed something in this passage:
It does not require one to endorse the Danish cartoons, the threatened provocations of Geert Wilders, or the conversion of Magdi Allam to Catholicism (”self-hating,” Dickey calls him) to recognize that hotheaded Muslims ought to be told to grow up.
Self-hating? The column by Christopher Dickey [Send him mail] is pretty bad, but here’s the passage I was wondering about:
The most problematic event of late, however, was Pope Benedict’s decision to baptize the Egyptian journalist Magdi Allam in Saint Peter’s on the night before Easter, thus converting a famously self-hating Muslim into a self-loving Christian in the most high-profile setting possible. Perhaps Benedict really thought, as the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano opined, that the baptism was just a papal “gesture” to emphasize “in a gentle and clear way religious freedom.” But I am not prepared to believe for a second, as some around the Vatican have hinted this week, that the Holy Father did not know who Allam was or how provocative this act would appear to Muslim scholars, including and especially those who are trying to foster interfaith dialogue.
Ever since 2006, when Benedict cited a medieval Christian emperor talking about Islam as “evil and inhuman,” and the usual Muslim rabble-rousers whipped up the usual Muslim riots, more responsible members of the world’s Islamic community have hoped to restore calm and reason. And now this. “The whole spectacle, with its choreography, persona and messages provokes genuine questions about the motives, intentions and plans of some of the pope’s advisers on Islam,” said a statement issued by Aref Ali Nayed, a spokesman for 138 Muslim scholars who established the Catholic-Muslim Forum for dialogue with Rome earlier this month.
[Christian Rage and Muslim Moderation | Despite recent provocations against Islam in the West, many Muslims seem weary of the same old tit for tat. Mar 27, 2008
I blogged about “self-hatred” some time ago, writing
I’ve always felt that anyone accused of being self-hating for refusing to toe the left-wing line (Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, Ward Connerly) should simply look the critics in the eye and say, “I don’t hate me. I hate you.”
It’s obvious that Magdi Allam doesn’t hate himself–he hates Islam, and his conversion to Christianity is his way of saying he’s been wrong all these years to be a Muslim. And of course, like most Christian converts, he’s drawn not so much by hatred of himself, but by the love of Christ. Allam said he felt “great joy” at his conversion. I see that some Vatican bureaucrat felt it necessary to issue the following statement distancing the Vatican from Allam’s political opinions:
When Pope Benedict XVI welcomed into the Catholic Church a Muslim-born journalist often critical of Islam, it was not a sign that the pope accepts everything the journalist believes, said the Vatican spokesman
CNS STORY: Vatican spokesman: Muslim convert has right to express his own ideas Catholic News Service, March 27, 2008
No, of course it’s not. It’s supposed to be a sign that the convert accepts everything that the Pope believes. It’s also considered to be a sign that the convert wants to go Heaven, rather than Hell. Does Dickey think the Pope should have let Allam go to Hell to avoid “provoking” Muslims?