The Reaction to Pope Benedict as Spillover on Israel

Bruce Kesler posts today on the extremist Islamic reaction to Pope Benedict's recent speech and provides appropriate links. Pope Benedict quoted a text written by Emperor Manuel II Paleologus of Constantinople and edited by Khoury. The text recounts a dialogue between the emperor and a Muslim. In it, the emperor accuses the new in Islam to be evil because the Muslims engaged in forced or violent conversion. He argues that it is evil to spread faith by the sword. Pope Benedict's discussion focuses on the influence of Greek philosophy on the view that acting uneasonably contradicts God's nature. He asks whether that is a Greek idea or whether it is intrinsically true.

Here is a fascinating paradox: Islamic extremists' violent reaction to Pope Benedict's historically accurate statement that Islam has at times been violent. Yahoo! states that Islamic extremists bombed two churches in Palestine in response to the Pope's remarks, that the Turkish government has reacted emotionally and that there have threats of violence against Christians in Iraq. All of this is clearly aimed to prove that Muslims are non-violent.

The pattern of extremist Islamic offense at cartoons and innocuous philosophical statements suggests a bargaining posture. Negotiators cannot competently engage in win-win or integrative negotiation if they are not competent at distributive or win-lose neogtiation. The skills required for competent win-lose negotiation include the use of conflictual impasse resolution methods such as law suits, strikes or wars. Such methods are ideally not used, but the best negotators excel in them. Kennedy could not have successfully negotiated the end of the Cuban missile crisis had he not had nuclear weapons at his disposal. Ideally, win-lose (or lose-lose) methods should not be employed, but they should be viable options. Gerald Williams of Brigham Young University Law School has produced a wonderful video of two attorneys negotating. One is a hard bargainer who makes aggressive demands. The other is a cooperative bargainer who silently seems to accede to the aggressive bargainer's demands. The upshot of the silence is increasingly aggressive demands on the part of the hard bargainer. The appropriate response to hard bargaining is counter-hard bargaining. It is only through a tough response that win-win negotiation can proceed.

Israel has played a role in the extremist Islamic reaction to the cartoons last year and to Pope Benedict's statements today. It is an oft-observed phenomena that hard bargainers demand more the more successful they become. The left and Europe have been eager to accede to extremist Muslim demands with respect to Israel, much as the soft bargainer in Williams's video is eager to accede to the hard bargainer. Part of the reason is likely that the murder of Jews has not tended to trouble Europe or the left, and blaming Israeli victims of suicide bombing is but one more example of the violent prejudice that Pope Benedict denounces. But in the land of Chirac, Meersheimer and Walt, where suicide bombers who kill Jews (but not Londoners or Spaniards)are heroes, there is little concern for soft bargaining's strategic implications. Inadvertently, there may have been a spillover effect. Extremists may have psychologically linked appeasement on Israel to increasingly aggressive demands in other areas, undoubtedly much to the annoyance of Daniel Bernard, one-time French ambassador to London, who considers Israel to be a "shitty little country" and to Meersheimer and Walt, who blame the hook-nosed lobby for Islamic violence.

The result are the demands about the cartoons and Pope Benedict's academic remarks. If Europe continues its appeasement habit, the ultimate Islamic insistence will likely be that Pope Benedict require that no churches be built that are taller than mosques.

An effective bargaining posture, which the Church has adopted, would not involve any apology. More so, it would involve a demand that if extremist Muslims don't want to be characterized as violent, they must consider desisting from their violence in Israel and around the world. The West should not treat an Islam that does not denounce violence with respect.

This also suggests the underlying nature of the left's and the media's insistence that there be a surgical connection between weapons of mass destruction and the Iraqi War. The Iraqi War also has spillover effects. Of course, the left, Meersheimer and Walt would be all to happy to see those effects work against the United States.