The Mustard Seed.
Even though I don’t know enough about him or his works I am a huge fan of Pope Benedict. I heard said that he baptized the Muslim Magdi Allam because he felt that the risk and burden posed by the action from raging loony Muslims should be borne on his shoulders and not on those of one of his priests. It’s an immensely consequential act and an in your face gesture to Muslims, if they do nothing the precedent of conversion will have been set, if they issue a fatwa against Allam as a heretic it will be as big a PR disaster as you could imagine for them, they who have been so good with the PR with the aid of the Western dhimmis.
In The Mustard Seed and Global Strategy, The Asia Times sets the background and ramifications of this conversion.
As Magdi Allam recounted, on his road to conversion the challenge that Pope Benedict XVI offered to Islam in his September 2006 address at Regensburg was “undoubtedly the most extraordinary and important encounter in my decision to convert”. Osama bin Laden recently accused Benedict of plotting a new crusade against Islam, and instead finds something far more threatening: faith the size of a mustard seed that can move mountains. Before Benedict’s election, I summarized his position as “I have a mustard seed and I’m not afraid to use it.” Now the mustard seed has earned pride of place in global affairs.
Magdi Allam tells us that he has found the true God and forsaken an Islam that he regards as inherently violent. Magdi Allam has a powerful voice as deputy editor of Italy’s newspaper of record, Corriere della Sera, and a bestselling author. For years he was the exemplar of “moderate Islam” in Europe, and now he has decided that Islam cannot be “moderate”.
Since September 2001, the would-be wizards of Western strategy have tried to conjure an “Islamic reformation”, or a “moderate Islam”, or “Islamic democracy”. None of this matters now, for as Magdi Allam tells us, the matter on the agenda is not to persuade Muslims to act like liberal Westerners, but instead to convince them to cease to be Muslims. The use of the world “revolution” is Magdi Allam’s:
His Holiness has sent an explicit and revolutionary message to a Church that until now has been too prudent in the conversion of Muslims, abstaining from proselytizing in majority Muslim countries and keeping quiet about the reality of converts in Christian countries. Out of fear. The fear of not being able to protect converts in the face of their being condemned to death for apostasy and fear of reprisals against Christians living in Islamic countries. Well, today Benedict XVI, with his witness, tells us that we must overcome fear and not be afraid to affirm the truth of Jesus even with Muslims.
More to read there.
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"Conjure magic for them and they'll be distracted. Take away their freedom, and still they'll roar. The beating heart of Rome is not the marble of the Senate. It's the sand of the Coliseum. He'll bring them death... and they will love him for it."
ligneus1 April 1st, 2008 at 12:04 am
Hi Debbie, Yes, that’s why I said I don’t know enough about him, he’s obviously formidably learned and no fool in worldly affairs so I don’t think it does him justice to try to second guess him. Unlike some of the light weight politicians who by hook and [mostly] crook get to achieve high office who don’t need a second guess, just open eyes. It’s rather encouraging how the Catholics came up with John Paul, from a Communist country and contemporaneously with Ron R. and Maggie just at the time he was needed in the battle against the Russian Mafia like institution and now Benedict from the heart of Europe, where the Muslims were defeated in 1683, just in time to do battle with the Islamic Mafia like thuggocracy. God really does move in mysterious ways.