3rd December 2001

The Amazing grace about the crusades, then and now, was that neither was really Christian. Both were imperialist projects. One is in the name of religion, the other in the name of civilisation so ingeniously re-invented by the celebrated Harvard academic, Sarmuel Huntington. It is high time we all look into the real motives of the new crusade on Islam to protect "civilisation."

The world has always been multi civilisational.
Civilisations represented distinction, variety and freedom of choice given by God to all the children of Adam. Civilisations coexisted in a state of creative tension, challenging, provoking, inspiring, stimulating and enriching each other, that is, until arrogance and xenophobia got into their heads. The Igth century imperialists who thought they carried the burden to 'Civilise' the non-white world suffered from just that condition. Then came Hitler trying to arrogate to the German race alone the right

The secular western civilisation is conflictual in its premises. Not at peace with God, it is incapable of being at peace with His creation - neither with the humans nor with the environment. This is what the Qur'an terms as a state of fasaad - mischief, sedition and disorder.
Almost immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Empire, a former US state department official, Francis Fukuyama, announced the 'end of History'. (End of History and the Last Man, 1992) Fukuyama's thesis was a supremacist declaration of triumph: that the collapse of Communism and disintegration of the Soviet Union had virtually brought the capitalist-liberal societies to what could be taken as the end-state of the historical process. In this respect, announcing the 'end of History' was little different from what the Pharaoh had told Moses who had gone to invite him to Truth: that it was he, the Pharaoh, and not God of Moses was 'god', the 'Lord, Most High.' (The Qur'an, AI Naaziaat 79:24)

MR BUSH 'REGRETS', MR BERLUSCONl is 'sorry',but they all mean the same. A rose is a rose and a crusade is a crusade, but as the earlier crusades were by no means Christian, this too is un- Christian, it is said to be liberal.
The good thing about President George Bush is that he is a Texan: he shoots first, thinks later, apologises thereafter, but his fingers remain on the trigger.
Even if it were a slip it was Freudian slip out of its administration inner self.
Islamophobia with ethno-centricism, and dissolving the compound into the tincture of liberal civilisation.
Hitler held no permanent copyright on his ideology. Though western statesmen may go on protesting, some truthfully and some insincerely, that they were not thinking of any war with Islamic civilisation, a low intensity but integrated war has been going on against Islam, Islamic values and Islamic sanctities.
The United Nations, the European Union, the US and the horde of think tanks have been churning out consultation papers, reports and recommendations, prepared by faceless and possibly faithless individuals most of which have a d~ ~ on questions of belief and morals, if also freedom and sovereignty.
One only has to brose through the US state department reports on human rights, issued each year in February, which make no secret or equivocation that the US wanted an Islam-free Muslim world. Indeed most governing systems in Muslim countries were generally Islam- free and the few which have some elements of Islam in their legal and political systems are told to purge their polity of any operative Islamic contents. The term Islamic Shafi'ah has been turned into a repulsive concept because they alleged that it violated ‘their’ international norms.

For they do make some hypocritical statement about violation of human rights, for example, in Palestine and Kashmir, the blame is distributed between those who are fighting to defend their rights and those who were brutalising them in order to defend their occupation.
Another example. While Washington would deign to show sympathy for the condition of women in India, the state department would also slip in a gratuitous remark that one serious impediment to improving' the condition of Muslim women was the Muslim Personal Law telling, in other words, the Indian bigots do away with the respective constitutional provision.
Pakistan happens to have two very’ obnoxious' pieces of law, according to American Islamophobes.
There is hardly a visitor from the US, Europe and even Japan who does not try to pressurise Islamabad to abolish these laws.
The fist being the law of apostate, as if Washington is the one who determines who is a Muslim and who isn’t.
The other law everyone in the so-called civilise world is so upset about is the so-called blasphemy law which criminalises sacrilege against all Abrahamic prophets of God.
But the so-called secular liberals who have profaned and vulgarised the person and teachings of Jesus in their own domain seem to hold that the right to blaspheme is also a fundamental right.
Thus it was hardly surprising that the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, asserted rather loudly that western civilsation was superior to Islam. He asked fellow Europeans to conquer and occidentalise this backward world,'1400 years behind'. Many fellow Europeans felt embarrassed by ill-timed candour as it could lose them the support of a few Muslim regimes, which they were recruiting for their crusade for the remaking of Afghanistan.

The present period in Muslim history can best be compared to that of great terror and desolation when the Tatars
(Mongols) were rampaging through Muslim lands almost unchallenged and inflicting upon them untold death and destruction.
And if there was any difference at all, it is the nauseating mainstream media armchair journalist and the muted church that compounds the brutality.
Just as we were made to hate the color of our skin, the nose of our mothers, the lips of our fathers and the hair on our bodies is the same way we have been brain washed to the dislikes of Islam/Muslims.
The irony is that Whilst Islam teaches that all men are equal and justice is the greatest virtue we find that even Islam was used to enslave and colonise the very people that needs Islam as its means to total liberation.
As a result the victims of xenophobia, greedy/Crusaders, vain Arabs, and jealous European settlers object to Islam as friendly or just in their never-ending quest for equality and liberation.

By Davy De Verteuil.