One of the most prominent of the Pope's chief critics to be demanding apologies in the various news reports is the Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah. This Inquirer report is typical:

Muslim leaders said outreach efforts by papal emissaries were not enough.

"We do not accept the apology through Vatican channels... and ask him to offer a personal apology - not through his officials," Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Lebanon's most senior Shiite cleric, told worshipers in Beirut.

Rashwan, the analyst, feared the official condemnations could be followed by widespread protests. There had been scattered demonstrations in several Muslim countries.

"I'm not optimistic concerning the reaction from the general public," he said, "especially since we have no correction from the Vatican."

In this interview, Newsweek decribed Fadlallah as a "leading" cleric, accepted uncritically his "peace" advocacy (and didn't quibble with his insistence that Bush "regards himself as the second coming of Christ," and that "we should send him to a psychiatrist.")

I'd like to know whether the Grand Ayatollah is in fact the champion of peace he claims to be, and whether he has the moral authority to condemn the Pope for suggesting that religious violence is not good.

Here's a quote from Fadlallah on religious martyrdom:

What martyrdom is greater than making yourself a human bomb detonating it among the enemy? What spiritualism is greater than this spiritualism in which a person loses all feeling of his body and life for the sake of his cause and mission?

And the Pope has to apologize to this man?

Would it be insensitive to suggest that the Grand Ayatollah is being unreasonable?

MORE: Speaking of insensitivity, consider the following remark by the Grand Ayatollah, on the nature of the "Qu'ran":

"In the vocabulary of the Qur'an," he says, "Islamists have much of what they need to awaken the consciousness of Muslims, relying on the literal text of the Qur'an, because the Qur'an speaks about the Jews in a negative way, concerning both their historical conduct and future schemes."