The Archbishop of Cant
.jpg)
The Archbishop of Canterbury continues to demonstrate his quite extraordinary moral obtuseness when it comes to the Middle East. Not for the first time, he proclaims a moral equivalence between the perpetrators of terror and their victims. In an article in the Observer yesterday, he wrote this:
It doesn't take much imagination to see how internally divided societies find brief moments of unity when they have successfully identified some other group as the real source of their own insecurity. Look at any major conflict in the world at the moment and the mechanism is clear enough. Repressive and insecure states in the Islamic world demonise a mythical Christian 'West', and culturally confused, sceptical and frightened European and North American societies cling to the picture of a global militant Islam, determined to 'destroy our way of life.' Two fragile and intensely quarrelsome societies in the Holy Land find some security in at least knowing that there is an enemy they can all hate on the other side of the wall.Thus to the leader of the Anglican church, the global jihad is merely a figment of the frightened imagination of a west projecting its own insecurity onto the Islamic world. Yet more stomach-churningly the Israelis are said to
find some securityin knowing there’s an enemy that is unremittingly attempting to murder them. What grotesque thinking.
But it is a Muslim, no less, who has delivered the most stinging rebuke so far to this most confused and dangerous prelate. In an article in the Arab liberal e-journal Elaph, Libyan-European liberal thinker and entrepreneur Muhammad 'Abd Al-Muttalib Al-Houni wrote that the recent statements by the Archbishop on implementing shari'a law in Britain constituted a dangerous encouragement to fundamentalists in their war against the Enlightenment.
Recognizing all, or [even] some, of these laws would take European societies back to the age before the Enlightenment and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As a result, the West would revert to barbarism. While I maintain that the European countries will never accede to these catastrophic demands - for reasons more practical than humanist - the fact that they were proposed by the British archbishop sends the wrong message to the Islamic world. The gist of this message is that there is no contradiction between Islamic shari'a and Western civilization if [shari'a] applies [only] for Muslim citizens.
What is the Anglican Church trying to achieve, and what interest does it have in such cartoonish proclamations? I believe that it wants achieve the following goals: To absolve itself of responsibility in the eyes of fundamentalist Muslims, who will be persuaded [by the Church's statements] that the clash is not between Christians and their Church [on the one hand] and Muslims [on the other] but a clash between Muslims and secular states. This will create greater hostility among Muslim citizens of European countries to their [host] countries, and will lead to increased violence and terrorism in the future…
These statements [by the Archbishop of Canterbury] also mean that the Church - or at least part of it - still does not believe in human rights legislation, and takes every opportunity to cast doubt on the universality and comprehensiveness of the humanist principles [underlying] it. Lastly, it this means that the mosques that are controlled by extremist Muslims in Europe do not have a monopoly on fundamentalism and on preventing [Muslim] citizens from assimilating into public life. Rather, the Church itself has, through these statements, become a charter member in this dangerous game.
What people like in the west like the Archbishop fail to grasp is that their words can have lethal consequences. A report from Harvard says that anti-war sentiments expressed in the US lead to more violence in Iraq:
Periods of intense news media coverage in the United States of criticism about the war, or of polling about public opinion on the conflict, are followed by a small but quantifiable increases in the number of attacks on civilians and U.S. forces in Iraq, according to a study by Radha Iyengar, a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in health policy research at Harvard and Jonathan Monten of the Belfer Center at the university's Kennedy School of Government… The increase in attacks is more pronounced in areas of Iraq that have better access to international news media… ‘We find that in periods immediately after a spike in anti-resolve statements, the level of insurgent attacks increases,’ says the study…Words can kill. The west’s anti-war useful idiots have much to answer for.