I understand his speech was about the relationship between faith and reason, and that his argument was against compulsion in religion.  He was nice enough to acknowledge that Mohammed has preached against compulsion in religion before he totally dismissed that teaching as due to Mohammed's early powerlessness.

He can say what he wants.  That's my point.  And we can disagree or not pay attention.  Correcting the Pope on matters of political correctness is about as pointless as correcting Bill O'Reilly.

Apparently ...'this Pope has a history' (of)

"Serious errors of both fact and judgment

EVEN his critics agree that the Pope did not intend to cause offence to the world's Muslims. (snip)

This speech, as its esoteric tone and content testifies, was an address by Professor Joseph Ratzinger, scholar, rather than by Benedict XVI, world religious leader. His mistake was his failure to distance himself from the emperor's comments -- surely inflammatory enough in their own time, but a thousand times more so when repeated today.

He can hardly complain that he has been taken out of context by thousands of enraged Muslims around the world when he is himself guilty of the same offence in regard to Manuel II Paleologus.

His address is undermined further by a serious error in regards to the Koran. "Sura 2,256 . . . is one of the suras of the early period, when Muhammad was still powerless and under threat."

"said Professor Kung. "He can of course quote what he wants, but he did this without saying the emperor was incorrect.

"This shows the limits of the theologian Joseph Ratzinger. He never studied the religions thoroughly and obviously has a unilateral view of Islam and the other religions."

(snip)

you and the Pope have something in common.

You totally dismiss the rage Muslims are feeling about what the Pope said by asserting it was "not disrespectful of Muslims at all".  Many of them certainly feel disrespected.  Why is that?  Why do you give their feelings no currency?

As for the Pope, his central argument is that far from there being some kind of alienation between reason and Christianity, the hellenic influences of Christianity are so central that the religion is itself a synthesis of religion and reason never before or since rivaled.   If so, why the need to give the speech in the first place?  

Both of you are trying to skate over a controversy by defining it away.

The Pope's speech is not without merit.  His analysis of Hellenic influences is actually rather interesting in spots.  Of course, throughout the entire speech he never actually manages to make any coherent argument for exactly how theology fits into the paradigm of a modern university.  He makes a number of points, but they lead to no conclusion.  

His only mention of Islam is to dismiss the call for no complusion, and to stress the differences between believers and infidels.  He then asserts that Islam is inherently unreasonable by virtue of the transcendence of their God and their lack of Hellenic influence.

Quite aside from the dubiousness of this relgious point, there is the historical record.  

Plato seems to have been more an icon and an inspiration than an authentic source for Islamic philosophers. So far as is known, the only works available to them in Arabic translation were the Laws, the Sophist, the Timaeus and the Republic. His name was often invoked as a sage and an exemplar of that wisdom available to humankind among the Greeks before the revelation of the Qur'an. This in itself could represent a kind of affront to orthodox Islam, which tended to view the human situation before the Qur'an's 'coming down' as one of pervasive ignorance (jahaliyya). However, the rise of humanist culture in Baghdad during the ninth and tenth centuries ad, which involved Syriac Christian translators, presupposed a gradual acceptance of Greek wisdom in which Plato figured paradigmatically, even though far fewer of his works were made available in translation than those of Aristotle.

And this.

In Arabic, Aristotle was referred to by name as Aristutalis or, more frequently, Aristu, although when quoted he was often referred to by a sobriquet such as 'the wise man'. Aristotle was also generally known as the First Teacher. Following the initial reception of Hellenistic texts into Islamic thought in al-Kindi's time, al-Farabi rediscovered a 'purer' version in the tenth century. In an allusion to his dependence on Aristotle, al-Farabi was called the Second Teacher. Ibn Rushd, known in the West as Averroes, was the last great Arabophone commentator on Aristotle, writing numerous treatises on his works. A careful examination of the Aristotelian works received by the Arabs indicates they were generally aware of the true Aristotle. Later, transmission of these works to Christian Europe allowed Aristotelianism to flourish in the scholastic period.

We should not take at face value the Islamic philosophers' claims that they were simply following Aristotle. The convention in Islamic philosophy is to state that one is repeating the wisdom of the past, thus covering over such originality as may exist. There was a tendency among Islamic philosophers to cite Aristotle as an authority in order to validate their own claims and ideas.

But that is his decision to make.  It was his sloppy scholarship and his insensitivity that led to the problem.  

And I find it stupid to expect much more from this particular man.  His record is as a defender of traditional orthodoy in religion.  As such, we should expect him to make offensive remarks pretty much every time he opens his mouth.  Usually those remarks will be offensive to liberal Catholics, but they certainly won't be the only people getting offended.  

For example:

"Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered to an intrinsic moral evil, and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder." -Joseph Ratzinger