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Our Prime Minister kept short of explicitly saying that our civilisation was superior to the Muslim one but I dare say the gist of his speech could not be lost on his audience. His opinion caused a furore among the Muslim community at home and abroad and among the opposition. A few days later Berlusconi received the ambassadors of Muslim countries and he had to set the record straight on the matter and recant his "heresy". And who do you think was at the head of the delegation? None other than the so-called "ambassador of Saudi Arabia" (he only represents the Saudi family in fact; I think he himself is a member of that family that have been misruling the country for the past 80 years!). Just imagine an Alice-in-Wonderland upside-,down world where the prime minister of a civilised country has to explain his conduct and apologise for his words (highly politically incorrect, one must admit!) to a self-styled ambassador of a country that has the worst possible record as far as civil rights are concerned; a country in which 15 young girls are left to burn alive inside a school engulfed in flames because they are not able to put on the whatever-they-call-it women are supposed to wear outside their homes! The horrific episode, which ironically came a few months after Beriusconi's speech, was kept hush hush (to use a colloquialism) by the Saudi press but it eventually leaked out to the newspapers and sent a chill through every sane person the world over. Now the representatives of that civilisation would have us believe in its superiority to ours and to corroborate their claim they refer us to the history of Moorish Spain. In your essay you provided ample evidence that tolerance, respect for the individual and learning were limited to a short period of time and that learning flourished, not because of but in spite of Islam.
George W. Bush and other heads of state in their public declarations are always insisting on this point: ours is not a religious war. Muslims, who know better, know that it is precisely that: a clash between religions and civilisations. The fact is that Islam is not a religion or rather it is not only a religion: it is much more than that. Muhammad wanted the various warring tribes of Arabia to leave paganism and unite politically and to that end he created a religion which was a syncretic creation between Judaism and the Christian faith. Since its very inception Islam has had this main purpose: controlling people's minds and direct them towards religious and political ends. Islam is inseparable from politics; it wants to regulate even the most insignificant everyday acts; it is an enslaving kind of religion which from day one has been Intimately connected with political power and they have been supporting each other in every possible way ever since. In a similar way the Christian faith prospered and spread rapidly after it had established a firm foothold in Rome, the centre of world political power. Luckily, Christianity has foIlowed a different path: we went through two extremely important and powerful experiences, namely the age of Learning and the age of Enlightenment which tempered and softened the most unsavoury aspect of every monotheistic religion, i.e. intolerance. The combined effects of those two experiences, together with other traumatic events which cost us blood and tears throughout the centuries, made Christianity what it is today.- a mild, fairly tolerant kind of religion and largely a private war (jihad!?), waged within our conscience, against what we consider sins or violations of a supposedly divine law.
I do not know what goes on in your churches or chapels over there in Australia. Here in Italy, at Mass, the priests of the Catholic Church never fail to invite the congregation to be tolerant, to accept and love our neighbours; and especially the new immigrants (most of them Muslims from Africa and the Middle East). What a marked contrast to what happens in mosques throughout Muslim Africa and the Middle East, where psychopathic clerics incite people to kill the infidels! In our schools children are taught the values of peace and tolerance, while in Muslim schools (in the Middle East, in the areas administered by Arafat's Palestinian Authority and also in many Muslim schools in Europe) they teach children that Jews are Nazis and must be eliminated! This is the reason why I am quite pessimistic about the survival of our western civilisation. If the theory of the survival of the fittest is anything to go by, then we must admit that, in the long run, Islam (and the political power which is behind it), with its strong, aggressive, intolerant, enslaving attitude is going to win both the battle and the war against a weak, meek, tolerant, free civilisation like ours.
Well, Bob, that's my opinion. I may be wrong and I do hope to be proved wrong. We mustn't despair, though. Perhaps the movement to reform Islam is going to have an effect upon what looks like a monolithic system not easily shaken, let alone changed, and perhaps our civilisation will be saved, after all.