Palestinians protest Pope's comments
Updated: Sep. 15, 2006 - 21:43
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
About 2,000 Palestinians angrily protested Friday night against Pope Benedict XVI, accusing him of leading a new Crusade against the Muslim world.
Earlier, Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, of the Islamic Hamas group, said the pope had offended Muslims everywhere.
Speaking at a university in Germany on Tuesday, the pope quoted from a book recounting a conversation between 14th century Byzantine Christian Emperor Manuel Paleologos II and a Persian scholar on the truths of Christianity and Islam.
"The emperor comes to speak about the issue of jihad, holy war," the pope said.
"He said, I quote, 'Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached,"' he quoted the emperor as saying. He did not explicitly agree with them nor repudiate them.
The Vatican said the pope did not intend the remarks to be offensive, but Muslim leaders condemned his comments.
"In the name of the Palestinian people who live on holy Palestinian land, we express our rejection of the comments made by the holy pope about Islam as a faith, its religious law, history and way of life," Haniyeh said Friday. "These comments hide the truth and hurt its blessed essence."
"We call on the holy pope to reconsider his statement and to stop offending the Islamic religion that has a billion and a half followers," he said.
"This is a new crusade against the Arab Islamic world. It comes in different forms, in cartoons or lectures ... they hate our religion," Ismail Radwan, a local Hamas official, told the rally.
The crowd also cheered when local Greek Orthodox church leaders denounced the pope's comments.
The rally came hours after a small explosion caused minor damage in a courtyard outside a Greek Orthodox church in Gaza City, in an attack that church officials feared was a retaliation for the pope's remarks. The early morning blast appeared to have been caused by a small, homemade explosive device. No one was injured in the explosion, which caused only minor damage.
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