“Thousands Rally Against Pope Speech,” reports Al-Jazeera, citing as evidence of worldwide protest a march by about 2,000 offended Palestinians in the Gaza strip (so what’s new?), and quoting Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya as saying “The Pope should revise his comments and stop attacking Islam, which is the religion of more than 1.5 billion people.” This kind of billing may of course whip up more street protests. But at the moment, what’s really going on with these numbers? Even assuming, just to be generous, and for ease of calculation, that it was actually 3,000 Palestinians who marched, not just 2,000, then what Al-Jazeera is actually reporting is that worldwide, out of every one million Muslims, only about two have taken to the streets — repeat, 2 out of every 1,000,000.
Maybe the headline should have been: “About .0002% of World’s Muslims Rally Against Pope Speech.”
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2 Comments
1. johnpaul:During a speech on Tuesday at a German university, 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’.”
Well, it seems to me that the global, religious leader orchestrated, muslim protests serve very well to confirm the views of the Byzantine Pope, Manuel Paleologos 11, all those hundreds of years ago.
Sep 17, 2006 - 11:32 am 2. bee:Such precience!!
Excellent point … Such a headline would suggest intellectual maturity within the MSM … It would have provided a real perspective
Sep 17, 2006 - 9:11 pm