Jose Manuel Durao Barroso, the EU Commission president, has strongly defended Pope Benedict XVI, saying Muslim criticism was unacceptable. “Attacking the pope because he refers in a discourse to a historical document is completely unacceptable,” Barroso said in a newspaper interview on Sunday. “I was disappointed that there were not more European leaders who said: ‘Obviously the pope has the right to express his opinion’. The problem is not the comments of the pope but the reactions of the extremists … We must defend our values.”
See also Associated Press, 24 September 2006