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1. Are Muslims "acting in accordance with reason" in response to Pope Benedict's remarks?
The Muslim world is outraged by Pope Benedict's criticism of "violent conversion" and references to the siege of Constantinople. A lawmaker from the Turkish ruling party said Benedict's speech on the universality of reason "looks like an effort to revive the mentality of the Crusades" and that Benedict "is going down in history in the same category as leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini." Pakistan's parliament unanimously condemned the Pope and his remarks. In Srinagar, India, a group of Muslims burned an effigy of Benedict and shouted, "Those who dare to target Islam and the Prophet will be finished!"

"This is not an effective way to argue against someone who has questioned your religion's relationship to violence," notes Catholic blogger Amy Welborn.

"Honestly, the thin-skinnedness of many Muslims is getting awfully tiresome," agrees Rod Dreher at Beliefnet's Crunchy Con. "How on earth are we ever supposed to be able to have a dialogue if the non-Muslim side has to walk on eggshells to avoid offending the wounded sensibilities of Muslim leaders, who seem very eager to take gross offense at anything critical?"

Not that Benedict's point was to criticize Islam, says National Catholic Reporter's John Allen Jr. "He brought up the dialogue between Paleologus and the Persian to make a different point. Under the influence of its Greek heritage, he said, Christianity represents a decisive choice in favor of the rationality of God. While Muslims may stress God's majesty and absolute transcendence, Christians believe it would contradict God's nature to act irrationally. He argued that the Gospel of John spoke the last word on the biblical concept of God: In the beginning was the logos, usually translated as word, but it is also the Greek term for reason."

And that's why we should be defending the pope, said Italian Mario Mauro, one of 14 vice-presidents of the European Parliament. "Let us defend the Pope without ifs or buts, let us defend reason," he said. "The monstrous attempt on the part of many Islamic leaders, even the so-called moderates, to distort the Pope's reaching out to all religions (through the lecture), in order to hit out at Christians and the West shows us the gravity of the danger we are facing."

2. Critics say TBN panders to Muslims
TBN's viewers have continued to support the broadcasting network despite charges of "plagiarism, fleecing poor viewers out of hundreds of millions of dollars while living extravagant lifestyles," and accusations of a gay tryst by president Paul Crouch. "But now Crouch must deal with the worst slur of 21st-century Christendom," OC Weekly reports. "His network, critics say, is soft on Islam."

Officials at Zola Levitt Ministries say their show was dropped because "TBN, you see, is modifying its programming to be suitable for broadcast in Arab nations." Hal Lindsey says his program was similarly dropped earlier this year over a dispute with the network over comments about Islam. "Let's be careful how we treat the Arabs and Islam," Crouch wrote to TBN programmers in 2002. "Let's not slam Mohammed and Islam. Let's reach out to them in love."

OC Weekly is certainly not the first to cover the disputes. The conservative (and often conspiratorial) site WorldNetDaily, where Lindsey is a columnist, has been covering this all year. But the OC Weekly piece may put the controversy in the spotlight, especially since it comes during conversations about the Pope's Regensburg address.

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September (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50