Neither Pope Nor Bush the Emperor Are Wearing Any Clothes

Reflecting for days on the Pope's recent coming out as a Bush ally in the war against "Islamofascism" has left me struggling to find an excuse for his clear and utter ignorance both of history and theology - at least anything not Catholic. It seems that both the Pope and Bush have more in common then Islamophobia. What I do find stunning is his blatant historical revisionism as though the Inquisition and the Crusades were a mere aberration worthy of naught. Or has he conveniently forgotten the expulsion of the Jews and Muslims from Spain with death to any who chose not to convert to Christianity? It is about time that the "sword" image that has dominated Euro-Western vilification of Islam since the fall of Constantinople be shown for the fiction that it is.

I came across the words of a wise man from Israel, Uri Avnery of Gush Shalom, who writes of this travesty so eloquently. Here is an excerpt:

Muhammad's Sword (excerpt)
by Uri Avnery
For many centuries, the Muslims ruled Greece. Did the Greeks become Muslims? Did anyone even try to Islamize them? On the contrary, Christian Greeks held the highest positions in the Ottoman administration. The Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians, Hungarians and other European nations lived at one time or another under Ottoman rule and clung to their Christian faith. Nobody compelled them to become Muslims and all of them remained devoutly Christian.
True, the Albanians did convert to Islam, and so did the Bosniaks. But nobody argues that they did this under duress. They adopted Islam in order to become favorites of the government and enjoy the fruits.

In 1099, the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem and massacred its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants indiscriminately, in the name of the gentle Jesus. At that time, 400 years into the occupation of Palestine by the Muslims, Christians were still the majority in the country. Throughout this long period, no effort was made to impose Islam on them. Only after the expulsion of the Crusaders from the country, did the majority of the inhabitants start to adopt the Arabic language and the Muslim faith - and they were the forefathers of most of today's Palestinians.

THERE IS no evidence whatsoever of any attempt to impose Islam on the Jews. As is well known, under Muslim rule the Jews of Spain enjoyed a bloom the like of which the Jews did not enjoy anywhere else until almost our time. Poets like Yehuda Halevy wrote in Arabic, as did the great Maimonides. In Muslim Spain, Jews were ministers, poets, scientists. In Muslim Toledo, Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars worked together and translated the ancient Greek philosophical and scientific texts. That was, indeed, the Golden Age. How would this have been possible, had the Prophet decreed the "spreading of the faith by the sword"?

What happened afterwards is even more telling. When the Catholics re-conquered Spain from the Muslims, they instituted a reign of religious terror. The Jews and the Muslims were presented with a cruel choice: to become Christians, to be massacred or to leave. And where did the hundreds of thousand of Jews, who refused to abandon their faith, escape? Almost all of them were received with open arms in the Muslim countries. The Sephardi ("Spanish") Jews settled all over the Muslim world, from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east, from Bulgaria (then part of the Ottoman Empire) in the north to Sudan in the south. Nowhere were they persecuted. They knew nothing like the tortures of the Inquisition, the flames of the auto-da-fe, the pogroms, the terrible mass-expulsions that took place in almost all Christian countries, up to the Holocaust.

WHY? Because Islam expressly prohibited any persecution of the "peoples of the book". In Islamic society, a special place was reserved for Jews and Christians. They did not enjoy completely equal rights, but almost. They had to pay a special poll-tax, but were exempted from military service - a trade-off that was quite welcome to many Jews. It has been said that Muslim rulers frowned upon any attempt to convert Jews to Islam even by gentle persuasion - because it entailed the loss of taxes.

Every honest Jew who knows the history of his people cannot but feel a deep sense of gratitude to Islam, which has protected the Jews for fifty generations, while the Christian world persecuted the Jews and tried many times "by the sword" to get them to abandon their faith.
THE STORY about "spreading the faith by the sword" is an evil legend, one of the myths that grew up in Europe during the great wars against the Muslims - the reconquista of Spain by the Christians, the Crusades and the repulsion of the Turks, who almost conquered Vienna. I suspect that the German Pope, too, honestly believes in these fables.

US National Intelligence Estimate 2006 - Short on Intelligence

As though to gain some political mileage after it had already been leaked, Bush announced that he would declassify and allow the release of some of the conclusions of the US National Intelligence Estimate 2006. More on this later. For now read it and think to yourself... Is there anything here that a casual desktop review of some media reports wouldn't offer? Where is the intelligence..... What I find staggering is how short on intelligence the National Intelligence Estimate is! Either the DNI has resorted only to open source intelligence gathering, or our "clandestine" intelligence gathering and analysis capability offers nothing not already in the public domain. Not only is there not a single "surprise" in the released conclusions, but it also shows a very shallow premise upon which to build policy initiatives. Is this what our government uses as one of its basis for engaging with the world?

More on Bush's Megalomania and Racism

The recent Bush Administration's new refrain entitled "Islamo-Fascism" can only be a new expression of their complete and utter megalomaniac ignorance, at best, and at worse, a ratcheting up of their fear-politics. The result is a policy which appears bent on creating more hate and division in the world. What is even more insidious is their persistent rally cry which aims at painting any dissenter as unpatriotic bordering on a traitor.

This new strategy once again brings to mind the sick methods which gave rise to the moral depravity of the instigators of World War II. Note the words of Hermann Goering during the Nuremberg Trials:

"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."

Recently, a dear friend of mine and a very able political commentator wrote the following article which appears as an open letter to Bush. He refreshingly voices what many of us have resigned to a falling on deaf ears.

A letter to President Bush
Before a real clash of civilisations becomes reality, Mohamed Hakki* pleads for reason -- and some comprehensive rethinking -- in Washington

Dear President Bush,

It is with my deepest regret that I write this letter to you. People throughout the Middle East have always held every president of the United States in the highest regard, but I have been driven to write this letter after hearing your thoughtless, almost racist, description of our hallowed religion as "Islamo-fascism".

When you first used this expression sometime ago, we thought it was just a slip of the tongue, a stumble. Your more mature advisors would surely soon correct you. When General Boykin used this expression, we thought he would surely be fired. And when other advisors, like Daniel Pipes, used it we ignored it as the unfortunate bigotry of misguided Likudniks, though they seemed to fill the corridors of your administration. It was heartening that you always talked about Islam with respect, considering it part of our mutual heritage of heavenly faiths sent by our one God -- the God in which we all believe, be we Christians, Muslims or Jews. Even after your actions -- all of your actions -- betrayed admiration for, alliance with, and complete support of Israel, even after the whole world watched the total destruction of Lebanon, we thought that these actions were simply the result of a broken moral compass. But when you equate Islam with fascism, you crossed all acceptable lines of behaviour.

Mr President, throughout the last 60 years no American president has ever used his pulpit to so publicly denigrate any human faith, and you, Mr President were held in high esteem because of your previous, positive statements about Islam. You even described it as a religion of peace, which it is.

Fascism, Mr President, as defined by Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language is "a system of government characterised by rigid one party dictatorship, forcible suppression of opposition, private economic enterprise under centralised governmental control, belligerent nationalism, racism and militarism, etc." Benito Mussolini was one founder of modern fascism, but no one ever accused him of being a "Christo-fascist".

The majority of your people do not agree with your policies or opinions or actions, whether in Iraq or elsewhere. But this, Mr President, is not our fight. This is your problem. This is your legacy, whatever you want to leave behind. But insulting 1.2 billion Muslims is not becoming of the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, the one that your predecessor described as the shining city on the hill. Most of us believed that description.

We thought that if you heard one of your unenlightened advisors using such language you would be a role model, rising above to stop them in their tracks. America is bigger than that. You can embrace the Israelis as much as you want. You can even support their destruction of entire towns and massacres of thousands of civilians. All of this could go under policy failures, or a broken moral compass, but attacking one of God's holiest religions is not a policy failure -- it is much worse than that. And here, Mr President, we part ways. I hope you realise the gravity of the wedge you are creating between the US and those billion Muslims in the world.

As for your call for democracy in the Middle East, the German magazine Der Speigel in an interview with your predecessor, Jimmy Carter, said, "It comes as no surprise that that had been discredited. The former president said, 'My concerns have gotten even worse now with the United States supporting and encouraging Israel in its unjustified attack on Lebanon. Israel has no moral justification for its massive bombing of the entire nation of Lebanon'."Mr President, the majority of Arab-Americans, including myself, were hoping that you would pursue your father's even-handed policies in the Middle East. But when former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil quoted you in your first National Security Council meeting as saying, "We are going to tilt US policy to Israel and we are going to be consistent," we could not believe him. Unfortunately you have tilted it completely and systematically towards Israel.

Mr President, Israel's fight with the Arabs is not your fight. Mature advisors would tell you that Israel is not America. Israel is your delinquent ally. You will spend the rest of your administration trying to clean up Israel's bloody mess. This does not have to be your fate or your destiny or your cross to bear, like a delinquent son. You don't have to pay for their ugly wars. The Arabs collectively declared that they want to live in peace with Israel. The peace proposal adopted by the Arab League in Beirut in 2002 is unequivocal. Please read it, Mr President.

When I was in Rochester, Minnesota, 6 August, I read in The Star Tribune that in 2002 Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said to you, "I think we never had such a relationship with any president of the United States." Most Arabs can say the same thing, Mr President, but with exactly the opposite meaning. The irony is that it does not have to be this way. There is no other part of the world where countries have been as consistently friendly and helpful to America as those in the Arab world, despite the long history of injustice, insults and total neglect of their hopes and aspirations. Believe me, Mr President, every Arab I know believes that it is an act of magnanimity that they accept Israel to live among them, but only if Israel accepts to live among them peacefully, forgoing expansionism, creeping annexation and continued settlement enlargement.

Mr Bush, the ball is in your court, but you have to fear God, the one God that we all believe in -- Christians, Muslims and Jews.

* The writer is a political analyst resident in Washington.