The protests are peaceful but it’s hard to imagine that that they’ll stay that way:
More than 20,000 Muslims in Istanbul on Sunday staged the biggest protest so far against Pope Benedict’s trip to Turkey as Islamic opposition to this week’s controversial visit gathered momentum.
Benedict, due to begin his first official visit to a Muslim country next Tuesday, angered many Muslims in September with a speech they took as an insult to Islam.
Youths wearing headbands with Islamic scripts, beating drums and waving Turkish red and white flags chanted “Allahu Akbar” (God is greatest) in the peaceful rally.
“I cannot remain silent when the Prophet Mohammed is insulted. I love him more than myself,” said Husamettin Aycan Alp, 25, a science student from Izmir in western Turkey.
Pope Benedict visit lasts four days and runs November 28th through December 1st. There are obviously security concerns:
A number of episodes have contributed to the feeling of anxiety felt in Rome ahead of the pope’s departure.
On November 2, a Turkish man fired shots in the air outside the Italian consulate in Istanbul. He was later quoted as saying he was proud of being a Muslim and that he would not hesitate to kill the pope with his bare hands.
In February, a Muslim teenager shot dead an Italian Catholic priest while he was praying in his church in the Black Sea city of Trabzon. The attacker reportedly shouted out ‘Allahu akbar’ - God is great - while intent on killing Father Andrea Santoro.
Anti-pope sentiments in Turkey peaked in September, when Benedict’s speech at the University of Regensburg - in which he appeared to criticise Islam - sparked massive protests in Istanbul and across the Muslim world.
And no one at the Vatican has forgotten that it was a Turk, Mehmet Ali Agca, who tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II in Rome’s St Peter’s Square back in 1981.
Joseph Ratzinger’s opposition to Turkish entry into the European Union - an opinion he expressed while he was still only a cardinal - is also believed to be a source of the current friction.
Appearing to criticise Islam can really make one’s life difficult as Michelle Malkin reminds us:
An editor received his punishment for “insulting Islam” in Yemen this weekend–one year in jail and a six-month newspaper shutdown (via BBC) …My friend Andy Bostom e-mails: “Well, I guess not beheading him for ‘blasphemy’ is considered ‘progress.’”
But it appears that they’d find a year in jail a little too light for Pope Benedict:
Sales of a controversial Turkish novel on a conspiracy to kill Pope Benedict XVI are on the rise ahead of the pontiff’s historical visit to Turkey beginning next Wednesday - his first to an overwhelmingly Muslim nation. ‘The Plot Against The Pope’ is a highly speculative potboiler narrating how the conservative Roman Catholic society Opus Dei, a subversive masonic lodge and the CIA collude to make the pontiff’s murder a pretext for a US attack against Iran.
Yuvel Kaya’s book, which features Benedict XVI in front of a burning cross with a bearded gunman aiming a rocket launcher at him, is on sale at major Turkish bookstores such as D&R, Kabalci, Pandora.
Despite the absence of any promotional campaign - no billboards, posters or pamphlets at bookstores - sales are rapidly picking up, according to Lale Yilmaz from Kabalci, one the country’s biggest book stores. However she told Adnkronos International (AKI) exact sales figures could not be released to the public.
“More copies of the book have been bought over the last 10 days than any other time,” Zeynep Yaman an employee with Alfa Dagitim, one of the six companies distributing the books, told AKI.
The cover of the book reads “Who Will Kill the Pope in Istanbul?”
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