Islamic militants vow war after pope comments

Recalls cartoon furor
The anger recalled the outrage earlier this year over cartoons depicting the prophet published by a Danish paper. The caricatures, which Muslims saw as insulting Muhammad, set off large, violent protests across the Islamic world.

So far, protests over the pope’s comments have been smaller. However, there has been some violence: Attackers hurled firebombs at seven churches in the West Bank and Gaza Strip over the weekend, and a nun was shot to death in Somalia.

Some 200 Khamenei loyalists in the Syrian capital, Damascus, held a protest Monday at an Islamic shrine, dismissing the pope’s apology. “The pope’s sorrow was equivocal,” read one banner.

Dozens protested outside the Vatican Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, and schools and shops in the Indian-controlled section of Kashmir shut their doors in protest.

“His comments really hurt Muslims all over the world,” Umar Nawawi of the radical Islamic Defenders’ Front said in Jakarta. “We should remind him not to say such things which can only fuel a holy war.”

Malaysia says apology not enough
Islamic countries also asked the U.N. Human Rights Council to examine the question of religious tolerance. Malaysia’s foreign minister, Syed Hamid Albar, said Benedict’s apology was “inadequate to calm the anger.”

In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood said the anger should not be allowed to hurt ties with the Middle East’s Christian minorities. But worries among Christians in the region are high.

Guards have been posted around some churches, and the head of Egypt’s Orthodox Coptic Church, Pope Shenouda III, disassociated himself from Benedict’s statements.

The Dominican mission in Cairo also criticized Benedict’s words, saying he chose a text for his speech that “revived the polemics of the past.”

“These comments, seen by many Muslims as hurtful, risk encouraging extremists on all sides,” it said in a statement, “and put in danger all the advances in dialogue made in recent decades.”

U.S. Muslim group counsels need to ‘move on’
In the United States, however, the leader of the largest U.S. Islamnic advocacy organization called for understanding the pope's error, if not accepting it, and the need to move on.

“The pope has now stated that the quote he used does not reflect his opinions about Islam and Muslims, and we have to take his word for it,” said Ibrahim Hooper, director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington-based Islamic civil liberies and advocacy organization.

“We want to move on from here and make sure relations aren’t further damaged between Catholics and Muslims worldwide. For many years under the previous pope, relations between Catholics and Muslims were quite strong. We would hate to see anything harm that relationship,” Hooper told MSNBC.com.

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