Pope Better, By God, Be Sorry

By now, even God's most abhorred infidel knows that if the pope criticizes Muslim violence in a speech, his mindless remarks will only be returned with burnings and murder. I understood this perfectly, but there's a lack of sensitivity going around in Western countries, and it disturbs me. Most people I know (yes, the pope included) just don't get the Muslim mentality. In the Arab world, if someone says something untrue about you, the only way to prove them wrong is by first proving them right. It's a bit abstruse. Let me explain. In America, if someone calls me a bad person, I ignore him and then walk away to eat chocolate in my room. But in Arabland, if someone calls me a bad person, I'm allowed to shoot him in the face and burn down his house. Do you see the difference? I knew ole Pope Bumblypants XVI would screw up somehow, and I predicted this in a cartoon I drew for an early September, 2005, issue of The New Yorker. In the first panel, the pope is riding over some mountains on the back of a sheep, carrying a bucket of red paint and singing a Polish folk song. In the second panel, a group of Muslims have ripped off his skin and forced the sheep to eat his internal organs. Vindicated.