Counterterrorism Blog

The terrible insults of the Catholic Church and Pope Benedict XVI by HBO talk show host Bill Maher reminded me of the recent mini-debate here by Farhana Ali and Jeffrey Breinholt over the reaction in the Muslim world over the re-publication of cartoons depicting Mohammed is a way that Muslims deem offensive. As a Catholic loyal to my Church and to the Pope as the Vicar of Christ on Earth, I am personally insulted by Maher's slander, and I support calls by other Catholics for HBO to fire him. His comments and my insta-reaction induce empathy for Farhana's view that the newspaper editors who re-published the cartoons could and should have shown restraint and not re-published the cartoons. But let's note the difference between the way in which the "Catholic street" treats this episode and the reaction in the "Muslim street" to the cartoons:

• We didn't riot, didn't burn effigies of Maher in the street, and didn't kill or injure innocent civilians over it;

• We didn't threaten to kill or injure Maher or any HBO employee, and didn't destroy or threaten to destroy any HBO property around the world;

• No country in which Catholics are a clear majority, nor the Vatican (the only truly "Catholic nation" left on earth), used the power of the state to protest by initiating or threatening a nationwide boycott; none recalled their ambassadors to the U.S.; none even lodged an official protest. To my knowledge, no country has cut HBO from their cable TV networks.

I'm certainly not saying Catholics are "better people" than Muslims. We have many positive lessons to learn from each other; in this case, Muslims should learn from Catholics the necessity to protest peacefully. (They could also learn that lesson from faithful adherents to Judaism, too, who don't violently protest insults to their faith in the Arab press.)

And to those Muslims in the audience who protest that their faith gets a bad rap from that tiny percentage of violent protesters, I say that no institution knows better than the Catholic Church how a small, small percentage of bad apples can harm the reputation of the entire institution, in spite of the many great accomplishments by that institution through the centures. One of the lessons of this decade, in both the terrorism and religious contexts, is that a 2% error rate is still unacceptable.