My friend told me this great joke the other day: what do The New York Times editorial board, Muslim reactionaries and Rosie O’Donnell have in common … apparently the inability to concentrate long enough to observe an oration in its entirety. At least that is what one is led to believe following their reactions to a speech given by Pope Benedict XVI at the University of Regensburg last Tuesday.

A September 16th editorial in The New York Times began with a shocking bit of news: “There is more than enough religious anger in the world.” Hold the phone, I thought, who is behind it all? Luckily enough, the Times had the answer. You guessed it … the responsibility lies with the Pope, of course. As it turns out, the Pope, in an attempt to reinvigorate the Crusades, “quoted a 14th century description of Islam as ‘evil and inhuman,’” and, for good measure, he tacked on something about Mohammed’s mother as well.

And that is where Muslims across the Globe evidently stopped reading. And who could blame them? Would any of you out there seriously waste valued minutes trying to read the words in context? The entire Religion of Peace had just been insulted—The New York Times said so. They needed to react quickly and decisively, lest the Crusaders get the jump on them.

Condemnations were issued instantaneously. Salih Kapusuz, of Turkey’s Justice and Development party — also the party of Recep Tayyid Erdogan, the country’s Prime Minister — said, “[The Pope] has a dark mentality that comes from the darkness of the Middle Ages.” The editorial led Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, Mohammed Ali Hosseini, to conclude that the Holy See was in cahoots with America and Israel. An imperialist infidel entente, unseen since World War I, was now born.

Churches worldwide were razed, vandalized and protested. Four of them were burned to the ground in the Palestinian town of Nablus. Ironically enough, Nablus is the very same Middle Eastern town that engaged in serious interfaith dialogue following the 9/11 attacks to discuss religious violence. In one particularly emotional moment of self reflection, Muslims took to the streets to dance, shoot guns in the air and sing Bin Laden’s praises.

A 60-year-old nun was murdered in war-torn Somalia: shot in the back 4 times while working as a nurse at a hospital she had served faithfully since 2002. And all of this destruction can be credited to one man: John Paul’s dogmatic enforcer, God’s Rottweiler himself … Joseph Ratzinger. You may know him by a different name now—Pope Benedict XVI.

At least that is what one would be led to believe if you stopped reading at “evil and inhuman;” a mistake that all of the Holy Father’s critics have coincidentally made.

In the scramble to instantly inflame the passion of reactionaries across the Middle East, only one man had the decency to open his critique by warning his audience that he had not heard the Pope’s exact words — an introduction every critic should have made before tearing into His Holiness. Egyptian Coptic Pope Shenouda III, an Orthodox clergyman, made note of this before saying “Any remarks which offend Islam and Muslims are against the teachings of Christ.”

Sadly for the cynics, His Holiness was directly in line with the teachings of Christ. Archbishop Charles Bo of Yangon, Myanmar was confused by the Muslim reaction to the speech. This is probably because, unlike the reactionaries, Archbishop Bo had read the “offensive” words in their full context, saying, “The Pope fully expressed the sentiment and desire of millions of Muslims who … say ‘Violence and Islam cannot be related.’”

The “evil and inhuman” acts, to which Benedict refers, are forced conversions through violent means. The Pope concludes that any religion, including Islam, should use rationality in converting non-believers. The point of the speech, as Archbishop Bo notes, is that religion, in general, is incompatible with bloodshed and war.

This begs the question: how could a speech aimed at quelling all religious violence become a catalyst for its resurgence? The answer lies in alchemy and cold fusion.

Lebanon’s Sunni leader, Grand Mufti Sheik Mohammed Rashid Kabbani, cites Benedict’s distortion of Islamic teaching as the reason for unrest. “Islam,” he explains, “prohibit[s] violence … Anyone [seeking] the truth [about Islam] must take it from … the Koran, rather than … excerpts.” It is Benedict, however, who has fallen victim to the artful game of spin.

The New York Times’ Ian Fisher was assigned to cover the speech, a rock of a story, doomed to sink to the obscurity of the paper between the headlines and op-eds. The alchemist, Fisher, somehow turned this rock into gold: a story bound to ignite emotions and grace headlines across the globe. He probably dazzled his editors when he attributed the Pope with saying “violent conversion to Islam” strayed from reason and God’s nature. He presented a call for religious dialogue as a specific call for war.

The Muslim world was not able to hear the speech. The rioters taking to the streets are not linguists, they cannot read Italian. They read the excerpts that are written in newspapers and react to them accordingly. These writers knew what they were doing. The 9/16 editorial even acknowledged that “the world listens carefully to the words of any Pope.” It is a shame the media does not; maybe they would not misquote him when it mattered most.

Hussein Shabakshy, a British pundit, predicted that the speech would fuel the “fire raging between Islam and the West.” The New York Times will probably win a Nobel Prize in the field of chemistry for their coverage, since their staff was able to do the impossible — they turned water into gasoline. Who said cold fusion was impossible?

Billy McMorris is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at wjm27@cornell.edu. John Manetta Once Told Me appears Tuesdays.