I'm sure they'll get right on it just so soon as you & your friends shut down the "christian"[sic] fundamentalist loonies, and the Jewish fundamentalist loonies.

Yes, there's plenty of each to go around. But we all have to shut them all down: insisting "you go first" will simply mean nothing happens (or rather, it all gets worse.) And it can only be Christians shutting down Christians, Jews Jews, Islamists Islamists and so on if you want to keep cries of 'persecution' to a minimum.

As to the main topic of the thread: I would have preferred it if Pope Benedict had included both the lines that are causing the controversy and a similar quotation about the violence the Catholic Church in the past (and not necessarily such a distant example either.) The lecture was about religious attitudes as a whole and if he had restricted himself to Catholicism the lecture would have been seen as about Catholic attitudes, rather than religious attitudes in general. However by singling out Islam he has missed the target in the opposite direction. Had he included both Islam and Christianity, the Islamist would still have been furious that he identified violence within Islam, but Pope's argument would be more defensible.