Infallible or Infidel?

Well, I'm getting a bit sick of all this religion crap, and it's distressing that the World Political Climate—which isn't ALL the west's fault—continues to be dominated by it.

The Pope was doing nothing different from all the other Popes, identifying heresy, only we live in an age of instant communication where there are enough opportunists in the islamic world who have enough time on their hands to sit around waiting to get angry at "anti-islamic" sentiments, before telling the guys out in the street who have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE TO DO to go burn flags.

And the longer we obsess about it (ie: the fear of the Fatwa; the inability to balance the right of freedom of speech, with the right of the fundamentalists to threaten death on their critics), then the less able we will be to concentrate on what really counts down here on Earth, things like Poverty, Human Rights, Environmental Decay, Universal Education etc.

Let's start by winding down any belief in al-Qaeda.
If it ever did exist, it probably perished with Bin-Laden, who probably pegged it some time ago around the time the access to his money ran out. Let's face it, all we're left with is al-Zawahiri with a video camera.
Admittedly, those fellow Saudis that perpetrated 9/11 were almost certainly bank-rolled by Bin-Laden, but that was about it. That was the big one, the place in history, but it's downhill after that. Think big night out with the stolen credit card.

The idea that all muslim fundamentalism is part of a monolithic structure with Bin-Laden at its head is erroneous and owes too much to the Dr Evil school of thought favoured by the Bush administration because a) it's easier to imagine for anyone who has been to the movies, and b) it's easier to frighten people with.

Fundamentalism, popular with young men with messianic fantasies, has many shades, coloured by national, cultural and ethnic origins. And even if some of these kids have trained in Pakistani training camps in Afghanistan, they owe their leanings to the Mujahideen concept of the Jihad, not Bin-Laden, however much they may admire him.
Yes, al-Qaeda gets cited by the new wave of subversives, but only like a form of branding, like a global franchise. They want to be associated with the 9/11 phenomena, they like the fear that the brand evokes. It's a shortcut to notoriety.

However, if you put all these groups in one place for a week and they'd develop enough animosity on national, cultural and ethnic grounds to forget the infidel and start killing each other. And that's before they start on their religious differences.

Obviously, the al-Qaeda concept is attractive because it carries the hope of a cure. America kills the bad guys at the top and the little people at the bottom run like cowards into the shadows.
But it isn't like that. Islamic fundamentalist terror is amorphous and with us for a generation. Individuals will conspire to make big statements with atrocities, as that will bring them greater glory than a lifetime of political struggle and human endevour. What the rest of us have to do is learn to live with it without it undermining our values, or sense of perspective, whilst doing everything we can to undermine the folly that is religious fervour.

Religion won't get us out of this, any more than armies will.