Why can't Islam apologize?

Catholic News Agency? 19 October 2012
By Robert R. Reilly

By now, everyone is familiar with how upset many Muslims were by the 14-minute amateur video, released on YouTube, called "The Innocence of Muslims.”

The new president ofEgypt, Mohamed Morsi, advised from the podium at the U.N. General Assembly that, "insults against the prophet of Islam, Mohammed, are not acceptable. We will not allow anyone to do this by word or by deed." At a certain level, this seems fair enough, even though the person responsible for the video was not under Morsi's legal jurisdiction -to allow or not to allow.

Regardless, one should not go about insulting other people's religion. If I were a Muslim, I would be offended, though I might not have taken the bait on such a trivial incitement (in the sense that this was some guy in his garage studio, not a government or a religious body speaking). The Obama administration did everything it could to condemn this film.

On the other hand, shouldn't this be a two-way street? If President Morsi demands that no one in the West insult Islam, how about saying something regarding the frequent insults to Judaism and Christianity in the Middle East? Why, for instance, didn't he denounce the burning of the Bible in front of the US Embassy last month?

Of course, there are many such examples, but let us focus for a moment on the Jews. The Egyptian religious station Al-Rahma TV, on May 4, 2012, presented a child preacher, who pronounced that, "Al-Qarni, once said: Jerusalem is being held captive by the brothers of the apes and the pigs.”

Sheikh Muhammad Ahsur, the deputy director of Al-Azhar University (which President Barak Obama praised to the skies in his 2009 Cairo speech), in an Al-Alam TV (Iran) broadcast, September 30, 2011, said that "jihad has become an individual duty incumbent upon each and every one of us, because our enemies have grown arrogant and have persisted in their great tyranny... they support the unjust oppressors, the offspring of pigs and apes (continue reading...)

Robert R. Reilly writes for Mercatornet.com, is a music critic for Crisis Magazine and author of The Closing of the Muslim Mind.

E-mail him at rrreilly@msn.com