West 'In a Slough Ignorance of Islam'
Once again the CIA and MI6 are publi****ng dire warnings of the vitality of
Al-Qaeda. Once again
the Islamic world as a whole is being tarnished by association.
US presidential contender John McCain is saying that America needs a
leader****p to confront the
transcendent challenge of our time: The threat of radical Islamic
terrorism.
And the words still ring in our ears from Samuel Huntington's treatise,
"The Clash of
Civilizations", the book that in many ways triggered this paranoia that
infects the
politicians, the press and the public discourse. "The underlying problem
for the West is not
Islamic fundamentalism, it is Islam", he wrote.
Few, if any, in the Western leader****p seem to make the point that
Al-Qaeda is a deviant
phenomenon within the Islamic world, just as Hitler was a deviant
phenomenon within the
Christian world (commentators seems to overlook Hitler's early speeches
calling on Catholic
principles). But Islam has a much better record over the ages of dealing
with its deviants who
take violence to excess. Islamic culture has never been tolerant of
Nazism, fascism or
communism. Christianity has spawned all three. Buddhism failed to resist
Japanese militarism
and Con****ianism provided hospitable to Maoism. Yes, there was Saddam
Hussein but he was an
atheistic brute without an ideology.
Of course, there have been many incidents in the long history of Islam
when there have been
large-scale losses of life. The massacres and starvation of the Armenians
in 1915 still stirs
the waters of contem****ary debate. But Islam has never spawned anything
comparable with
Hitler's systematic genocide of the Jews - indeed throughout its history
Islam has been
protective of the Jews, regarding them as "people of the book" to whom it
had a special
responsibility. Nor has it settled other parts of the world and
systematically obliterated
other civilizations as did Christian Spain with the Aztecs and Incas. Nor
have Islamic
societies created anything equivalent to South Africa's apartheid or the
racist culture of the
old American South. Unlike many Christian churches, the mosque has never
separated people by
race. Even today Americans confess that nowhere is there more segregation
in their society than
at the Sunday noon hour.
Western memories are highly selective. When at Easter time the Greek
peasants of the
Peloponnese began to kill all the Muslims in the land there was silence.
But fifty years later
when there were mass killings of Christians in Bulgaria there was a great
outpouring of moral
outrage. Delacroix immortalized the massacre in his painting, "Massacre of
Chaos", with
Christian women pursued by Turkish lancers and Gladstone wrote a
best-selling pamphlet in which
he described the Ottomans as leaving "a broad line of blood marking the
track behind them, and
as far as their domination reached civilization vanished from view".
Almost forgotten today is that it was the Ottomans who gave refuge to the
Jews when they were
expelled from Iberia, as were fleeing German, French and Czech
Protestants, but every
cultivated Westerner knows Voltaire's "Fanaticism or Muhammad the Prophet"
or Dante's ****trayal
of Muhammad in hell.
Christianity has always been led or dominated by people of European
descent. But the leader****p
of the Muslim world has been much more fragmented - between AD 661 and 750
it was the Arab
Umayyad dynasty. Between 750 and 1258 it was the multiethnic Abbasid
dynasty. And from 1453 to
1922, the Turkish-dominated Ottoman Empire. In India there was the
separate Moguls and in
Persia the Safavids. In sub-Saharan Africa there were the Muslim empires
of Mali and Songhai.
Despite their relative poverty today, with great teaming cities like
Cairo, Dakha and Jakarta,
criminal violence is much, much lower than in Christian-influenced
societies.
Muslim countries, according to the UN's annual Human Development re****t,
have the world's
lowest murder and rape rates. In Tehran, the capital of Iran, and
according to the CIA
(allegations) the most im****tant single source of terrorism today, you can
go out at 11 or 12
pm at night and find families with children picnicing in city parks. When
my daughters' friends
ask me where can they safely travel alone in an interesting Third World
city I say Cairo.
Certainly not Catholic Rio or Protestant Cape Town. Not only are murders
and muggings
comparatively rarer, there is much less prostitution and hard drug use.
Neither is there that
much AIDS.
The Western debate about Islam is frankly infantile. Even Barack Obama,
with his own personal
experience to go off, either is ignorant or just scared of going into
battle on these issues. I
have not read one speech by one Western politician who seriously attempts
to educate public
opinion. We live in a slough of ignorance.
ARAB NEWS
** Posted from http://www.teranews.com
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