Sympathy / No Sympathy

Sympathy:

Today, I have sympathy for Buck O'Neil, the 94-year-old former Negro Leaguer hospitalized for exhaustion. You might recall the moving and charming address he gave this summer at the Baseball Hall of Fame induction ceremony that did not for some bizarre reason did not include inducting HIM. You can hear it here.

Get well soon, Buck.


No Sympathy:

Terrell Owens.

Irony.

So the Muslims are upset with the Pope because he characterizes a religion bent on taking over the world using violence as being evil and inhuman. And to refute the comment, they set out to prove him wrong by throwing firebombs at some Catholic churches in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Seems to me that sends out the clear message "Yep!"

According to the AP,

The Mujahedeen Shura Council, an umbrella organization of Sunni Arab extremist groups that includes al-Qaida in Iraq, issued a statement on a Web forum vowing to continue its holy war against the West. The authenticity of the statement could not be independently verified.

The group said Muslims would be victorious and addressed the pope as "the worshipper of the cross" saying "you and the West are doomed as you can see from the defeat in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya and elsewhere. ... We will break up the cross, spill the liquor and impose head tax, then the only thing acceptable is a conversion (to Islam) or (killed by) the sword."

Islam forbids drinking alcohol and requires non-Muslims to pay a head tax to safeguard their lives if conquered by Muslims. They are exempt if they convert to Islam.

Sounds like a clever idea, torture and tax non-believers into believing. Yeah, that will work. Remember the success that the Catholic Church had using that tact back in the Inquisition?

In Indian-controlled Kashmir, meanwhile, shops, businesses and schools shut down in response to a strike call by the head of a hard-line Muslim separatist leader to denounce Benedict. For the third day running, people burned tires and shouted "Down with the pope."

Uh oh, Mr Pope. They're burning tires. They're serious now. Be careful or they'll jump in their cars, drive to the Vatican, and... uh, scratch that, they don't have tires on their cars anymore.

Protests also broke out in Iraq, where angry demonstrators burned an effigy of the pope in Basra, and in Indonesia, where more than 100 people rallied in front of the heavily guarded Vatican Embassy in Jakarta, waving banners that said the "Pope is building religion on hatred."

What's the playground retort to this? Oh yes - "It takes one to know one".


On behalf of the Pope, allow me to apologize for the Church and the entirety of the West. Sorry, extremist Muslims, you're not evil and inhuman. I'm not sure how we ever thought that. Our bad. I'll be mailing my head tax check just as soon as you defeat the IRS, they bug us too.

And maybe if you were permitted to have a beer now and again, you wouldn't be quite so uptight. Ah, but not too much - as one of the worlds greatest thinkers, Socrates, once said - "Moderation in all things".

Moderation. Isn't that the polar opposite of extremism?