The Real Agenda?

David Warren looks at the media circus the Pope Benedict XVI generated this week by visiting Turkey. And he points out that despite the media "framing" of the story, the trip was not at all what the press would have us all believe.

People believe what they want to believe, which is one of the reasons the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” continues to enjoy a good circulation. That, and the fact that this Russian-fabricated late 19th-century blood libel against the Jews has been big-budget dramatized on state television in Egypt and many other Muslim countries. Turkish television recently showed a massively popular dramatic series in which basic elements from the Protocols were recast, as an “exposé” of baby-eating U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

It is worth remembering such things when we consider the possibilities for “dialogue” between cultures. It is also worth considering with what great difficulty the West was raised out of the barbaric welter of superstition and paranoia, and how easily we could slump back into it. I look, for instance, at the garbage that is being studied and taught in the politically-correct English departments of our universities, and am reminded that we are ourselves on the skids. The ability to distinguish even between what is sane, and insane, is slipping away.

But let us return to Constantinople (as it was called through the centuries before it fell to the Ottoman conquest in 1453). It remains the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch, of Eastern Christendom.

The Pope’s visit to Turkey was primarily for the purpose of meeting this Patriarch, Bartholomew I. It was intended secondarily as the latest Vatican act of outreach to the Islamic world. The international media managed to frame it as an act of contrition for remarks Pope Benedict made in Bavaria, touching on Islam, which were twisted viciously out of context, at first by the BBC. Their coverage has been a kind of death-watch, in anticipation of the possibility the Pope might be assassinated.

Warren notes that the press has reported the words, yet missed the point entirely (like we've never seen that before). An outreach to heal the rift between the Eastern and Western church may very well have been what the Pope was trying to do all along. All the rest is sound and fury, signifying nothing.