A Punishing Point Of View

Buried in the middle of a pitch for Kevin Rudd on a completely different topic, journalist Samantha Maiden quotes Cardinal George Pell making an astute, if politically incorrect observation (not to mention against Roman Catholic policy):

"I think that this, capital punishment, is one of those issues ... where public opinion is quite at variance with elite opinion. I suspect, and I might be wrong, that there is clear majority approval in Australia for capital punishment in certain circumstances."

Zing!

Pell is no stranger to calling a spade a spade:

... told an American audience the Koran is punctuated with "invocations to violence"... In a speech to leading Catholic businesses in the United States, Dr Pell said the September 11 terrorist attacks had been his wake-up call to understand Islam better. He said there were inconsistencies in claims that Islam was a faith of peace with those that suggested the Koran legitimised the killings of non-Muslims... "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.

-- Nick