Other religions: December 2004 Archives

Ah, anti-Semitism: so old, yet forever new. In the Middle Ages, many ignorant people thought that rabbis stole Christian children to use as a blood-sacrifice. They neither demanded proof nor expected any — having decided that Jews were collectively evil, they felt free to invent any malicious stories they wished.

We're past that, because the Holocaust has awakened us out of our moral stupor and in this post-modern, relativistic, multicultural world, nobody would dare make up such crude falsehoods.

Yet in our enlightened world, a state-run Iranian television channel can broadcast a TV show about Israeli doctors stealing the eyes of Palestinian children. The news media won't give this 1% of the air time they spent on examining whether "The Passion of the Christ" was anti-Semitic. This bile is hardly atypical — browse MEMRI's site and you'll see what I mean. But the Middle Eastern hate-peddlers get a pass because, of course, they don't have white skin.

I never met a Middle Easterner who was entirely free of paranoia and conspiracy theories. One example: a former co-worker, an American citizen from Palestine with whom I enjoy a warm friendship, is convinced that every time Starbucks sells a cup of coffee, they send a nickel to the Israeli stettlements in the Palestinian territories. Bewildered, I asked him for proof, but he kept insisting it was true. (If you're reading this, R.A., send me proof and I'll post it right here!) This is one of the more sensible, admirable people I know, who isn't by any means irrational or filled with hatred toward anyone.

I keep hearing some people bleet that we should get out of Iraq and the region in general (including Israel). Do you really think that if we disengage from the Middle East, it will somehow become better? As if we are the primary contagion of all these pathologies? The world will continue to buy Middle Eastern oil, the oil-fattened sociopaths in these regimes will continue to oppress their own people and promote an anti-Western and anti-Semitic ideology that encourages external, aggressive death and destruction.

We weren't doing much of anything in the region throughout the 1990s besides protecting one Muslim country (Saudi Arabia) from invasion by another Muslim country (Iraq). That and telling Israel to make generous concessions to the Palestinians in exchange for paper promises of security. In return, Israel got hundreds of its citizens blown up and a suppressed economy. The U.S. got its servicemen blown up at Khobar Towers and in the U.S.S. Cole, two embassies bombed in Africa, and the coup de grace on September 11. If we disengage, why does anyone think these outrages would cease? As if terrorists and the despots who love them are suddenly going to change their ways when we turn tail and run.

I do not contend that the Bush administration's policies sprang fully formed from the brow of God, nor do I think the execution of their policies is beyond question or critique. But if you're going to say they're wrong, it's incumbent on you to say what you would do differently. And whatever solution you come up with needs to address the deep spiritual sickness that infects a good portion of the Muslim world. The conflict between the Islamists and the West starts with the soul, not with politics.

(BBC) — A Pakistani minister has revealed hundreds of cases of alleged child sex abuse at Islamic schools, or madrassas.

There were 500 complaints this year of abuse allegedly committed by clerics, Aamer Liaquat Hussain, a minister in the religious affairs department, said.

Mark Shea is on hiatus, so I'll say it for him: If only women could be radical Islamists! If only radical Islamists could get married! Then none of this would happen.

I guess original sin is in the Muslim world, too. Some of you have been telling me that we can't trust Catholic bishops. Next thing you know, we won't be able to trust Saudi-funded anti-Semitic suicide-bombing anti-Western imams, either!

David Pryce-Jones, the insightful and often brilliant writer about the Middle East, Arabs, and Islam, has a typically trenchant article in Commentary magazine titled "The Islamization of Europe?" An excerpt:

Does this crisis amount to a “clash of civilizations”? Many people reject that notion as too sweeping or downright misleading. Yet whether or not it applies to, say, the situation in Iraq, or to the war on terror, the phrase has much to recommend it as a description of what is going on inside Europe today. As Yves Charles Zarka, a French philosopher and analyst, has written: “there is taking place in France a central phase of the more general and mutually conflicting encounter between the West and Islam, which only someone completely blind or of radical bad faith, or possibly of disconcerting naiveté, could fail to recognize.” In the opinion of Bassam Tibi, an academic of Syrian origins who lives in Germany, Europeans are facing a stark alternative: “Either Islam gets Europeanized, or Europe gets Islamized.” Going still farther, the eminent historian Bernard Lewis has speculated that the clash may well be over by the end of this century, at which time, if present demographic trends continue, Europe itself will be Muslim.

Take a look at the quotation I highlighted — kinda sounds like a president who shall remain nameless, with his lack of "nuance" and stark view of the world. Lewis — the unassailable dean of Middle Eastern scholars — underscores two things Belloc predicted in the last century, that Islam would rise again, and that if Europe ceased to be Catholic, it would cease to be at all. (Belloc said this after he stole the idol from Indiana Jones, by the way.)