Pope, Islam and Oil

As we all know by now, there was a lot of trouble about a misunderstanding in a speech held by pope Benedikt XVI in Regensburg one week ago. The relationship between Islam and Christianity was not the real topic of the speech. The topic was faith and rationality, Christian religion and Greek philosophy.
The pope quoted a medieval text in which a Byzantine emperor expressed a view that Islam was a religion of violence and therefor Christianity was superior. The pope distanced himself from this quotation and called it a "brusque" formulation that does not express his own opinion. It is a quote and has to be seen in the context.
Two days later there were a lot of protests all over the Muslim world from Indonesia to North Africa. A nun was shot, a church was destroyed and so on. Then the pope apologized for being misunderstood. He said that he did not want to offend Islam in any way and that his concern is to look for ways of interreligious dialogues.

One thing about the pope. Why did he choose this ambigious statement to put in his speech? He must realize (and surely he does) that he is not an ordinary cardinal or professor of theology who is only heard by a small audience or community, but he is the pope, head of 1 billion catholics in the world, and therefor every word of him is watched carefully by many people as an expression of a whole culture. And for some people who do not like to differentiate he represents not only the Catholic church, but Europe or let´s say "the West" as a whole. So he should watch out for his words.

And this gets me into another question: why does a 600-year-old statement quoted in a speech held in the small Bavarian town of Regensburg provoke such harsh and "brusque" reactions in the whole Muslim world? It is like a globalization of anger as we have seen early this year in the quarrel about the Danish cartoons.

I think it does not have so much to do with religion or culture, but more with politics. It is the (political, militarical, economical) presence of the western countries (often regarded as a whole), or better: the USA and its allies, in the Muslim world. It is Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine. It is the USA´s assistance to dictatorical regimes like those of Egypt, Saudi-Arabia or Pakistan. It is the strong mililtary presence of the USA in the gulf region. It is the often real arrogant behaviour of the West. Cultural misunderstandings only mix together with the political facts.
And the reason for the wars led by the USA and its allies in this region is oil, of course. The whole industrialised world is like a junkey addicted to oil.

All of it is not very new and we all know it. In my eyes, all of the American and European soldiers should leave the region. They should back out of their "interventions". Just let the people in the Muslim world do their own thing. There can be diplomacy, there can be dialogue. And if you want to buy some oil, then buy it in an ordinary way.