Pope's Islam Comments are Hardly Unique

From a column by A. Surya Prakash in The Daily Pioneer (India):
Following the assassination of Swami Shraddhanand at the hands of a Muslim fanatic in December, 1926, Mahatma Gandhi had said: "Mussalmans have an ordeal to pass through. There can be no doubt that they are too free with the knife and the pistol. The sword is an emblem of Islam. But Islam was born in an environment where the sword was, and still remains, the supreme law. The message of Jesus has proved ineffective because the environment was unready to receive it. So with the message of the Prophet. The sword is yet too much in evidence among the Mussalmans. It must be sheathed if Islam is to be what it means - peace." This was 80 years ago

[…] Long years before Gandhi spoke his mind on Islam, Swami Vivekananda told a gathering in London in November, 1896: "In the Quran there is the doctrine that a man who does not believe these teachings should be killed. It is a mercy to kill him! Think of the bloodshed there has been in consequence of such beliefs!"

Annie Besant (theosophist and advocate of a free India – TWA) said in 1922 that the argument of the Muslim leadership that they are ordained to obey Islamic law as against laws made by the state is "subversive of civic order and stability of the state". BR Ambedkar, the author of our Constitution, too, has emphatically stated that Islam divided the world into Dar-ul Islam ( Abode of Islam) and Dar-ul Harb (Abode of War) and that it is incumbent of Muslims to wage war against any country that is not controlled by Muslims.

In recent years, Samuel Huntington, the Harvard Professor who has propagated the 'Clash of Civilisations' theory, has observed: "The Quran and other statements of Muslim belief contain few prohibitions on violence, and a concept of non-violence is absent from Muslim doctrine and practice."

So what is new in what the Pope said some days ago in Germany? Shall we now put Gandhi, Ambedkar, Annie Besant and Vivekananda in the dustbin of history and mollify the hotheads in the Islamic world, or shall we stand up and tell these radical Islamists that the liberal, democratic world has now run out of patience?

Although I am obviously not an enthusiast of Hindu theology, no one has ever accused them of being idiots. The Indians have had a lot of first-hand experience with Islam, having been occupied to varying degrees for about a thousand years, and do not harbor many illusions as to its historical nature. Since so many American libs are enthusiasts of Eastern cultures and religions, perhaps they should pay more attention to the experiences of the actual human beings of those cultures and religions.