Sydney archbishop riles Muslims, accuses greens of hysteria
Muslim leaders and environmental groups condemned Australia's most senior Catholic clergyman yesterday after he claimed that Islam was inherently violent and compared concern over global warming to mediaeval superstition.
Cardinal George Pell, the controversial Archbishop of Sydney, warned that the Koran, the Muslim holy book, was littered with incitement to violence.
'In my own reading of the Koran, I began to note down invocations to violence. There are so many of them, however, that I abandoned this exercise after 50 or 60 or 70 pages,' he said.
He made the comments in a speech to Catholic business leaders in the United States in February, but they were only made public in Australia on Wednesday.
Cardinal Pell said the idea that Islam had historically been tolerant of Christians and Jews was largely a myth.