Berlusconi backs western civilization

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's comment that Western civilization is superior to Islamic culture, while obvious to all whose minds aren't locked in a prison of political correctness, took guts to say.

That Europeans reacted to Berlusconi -- a bright light on a continent of dim bulbs -- with outrage and horror is symptomatic of the malaise afflicting the West.

"We should be conscious of the superiority of our civilization, which consists of a value system that has given people widespread prosperity ... and guarantees respect for human rights and religion," Berlusconi told a group of journalists. "This respect certainly does not exist in Islamic countries."

"I can hardly believe Mr. Berlusconi made such remarks," wailed Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, who assured us the European Union "is based on values such as multiculturalism and the meeting of different civilizations."

For Europe's elite, it is a matter of faith that all cultures are created equal.

Thus, a civilization that gave the world democracy, civil liberties and the industrial revolution and computer age is judged no better than a culture where democracy is unknown, rights non-existent, tribal bloodshed the norm and a few live in palaces while most inhabit hovels.

There are one-party regimes (Syria, Libya, Iraq, the Sudan, Afghanistan), oligarchies with parliamentary facades (Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, the Palestinian Authority), military dictatorships (Pakistan) and traditional Islamic regimes (Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Gulf states).

In the West, the opposition is represented. In the East, it's interred. In 1970, Jordan's King Hussein crushed PLO forces, killing 20,000 in a week. In 1982, the late Hafez Assad of Syria liquidated the entire city of Hama, center of a Sunni revolt. In 1998, the Taliban systematically slaughtered thousands of ethnic Hasara -- some had their throats cut, others were suffocated inside metal containers. An estimated 100,000 have died in Algeria's decade-old civil war.

The Taliban judge presiding over the trail of Western aid workers accused of Christian proselytizing says they'll get a fair trial. Would that be before or after he hangs them?

In our new ally, Pakistan, a professor is on death row for contradicting orthodox Moslem teaching. In Egypt, Saad Eddin Ibrahim was sentenced to seven years hard labor for "defaming" the nation by documenting persecution of Coptic Christians. A friend of mine, a Pakistani lawyer, was asked to lecture to an American audience on religious tolerance in the Islamic world. "I told them it does not exist," he laughingly informed me.

On this point, you won't get an argument from Christians and animists in Sudan, Jews and Bahais in Iran, Serbs in Kosovo, Hindus in Afghanistan or Christians in Indonesia (subjected to a campaign of forced conversion).

Diversity and tolerance aren't the only things in short supply in this part of the world, which has little of value except oil -- a resource discovered and developed by Westerners.

Egypt doesn't give America $2 billion annually in foreign aid. Italians don't enter North Africa illegally seeking a better life. One reason fundamentalists loathe Western capitalism is the vivid contrast it provides to their backwardness.

Islam made significant contributions to science and mathematics -- roughly a millennium ago. More recently, it has enriched humanity with such concepts as jihad, fatwa, clitorectomies, "honor killings" (of female relations accused of sex outside marriage), amputating limbs as punishment for various offenses and suicide bombings. The 19 men accused of perpetrating the horrors of Sept. 11 all had names like Ahmed and Muhammad. Would you believe it, there wasn't a Shawn or Seymour among them.

If the Arab League is offended by this assessment -- well, I don't see any paeans to our culture penned by the mullahs or imams. They're too busy denouncing Western decadence, economics and political

Only the West is afflicted with self-doubt. Only we have succumbed to the doctrine of cultural equivalence.

When America went to war with Nazism and Japanese militarism, it was with the unshakeable conviction that Judeo-Christian culture was superior to these throwbacks to the Dark Ages. Those who would defend civilization must first acknowledge that it is preferable to the alternative.

SUBJECT: at least Italian Prime Minister Tells it like it Is!


			"We should be conscious of the superiority of our civilisation, which consists of a value system that has given people widespread prosperity in those countries that embrace it, and guarantees respect for human rights and religion...This respect certainly does not exist in the Islamic countries." - Silvio Berlusconi Italy's Prime Minister

Western society superior to Islam

...says Berlusconi two weeks ago 28 Sept 2001

From a story two weeks ago -
"Italy's Prime Minister, Mr Silvio Berlusconi, has gone out of his way to stress what every other leader backing America's "war on terrorism" is desperate to deny - that the looming conflict is, at bottom, a clash of civilisations.

Three times during a lightning visit to Berlin on Wednesday, Mr Berlusconi enthusiastically proclaimed views that will appal Western leaders and confirm the worst suspicions of many Muslims. He boasted of the "supremacy" and "superiority" of Western civilisation and called on Europe to recognise its "common Christian roots".

Mr Berlusconi, who has been under pressure over the handling of protests at this year's G8 summit in Genoa, also claimed a link between Islamist terrorism and the anti-globalisation movement. There was a "strange unanimity" between them, and both were enemies of Western civilisation.

Standing beside German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, at a joint press conference, he declared that he and his host considered that the September11 attacks "are attacks not only on the United States but on our civilisation, of which we are proud bearers, conscious of the supremacy of our civilisation".

He had earlier told Italian journalists: "We should be conscious of the superiority of our civilisation, which consists of a value system that has given people widespread prosperity in those countries that embrace it, and guarantees respect for human rights and religion." As if to rub salt in the wound, he added: "This respect certainly does not exist in the Islamic countries."

Mr Berlusconi began his eventful day with a surprise breakfast with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, who is also visiting Germany. The Prime Minister emerged
o tell reporters that "Europe must revive on the basis of common Christian roots".

Poster Humor: One person's Paradise can be another person's Hell - or how to make Paradise Hell for Terrorists

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Something from NR

An Arab Moment of Truth
Which way the Islamist fantasy?
By David Pryce-Jones
From the October 15, 2001, issue of National Review

he conflict that has now erupted has been gathering for a long time. Its roots lie deep in history. To be brief and blunt, the Muslim world has never known exactly how to respond to the West, whether to adopt its values or to reject them. A logic arises: The West is powerful; power is arrogant; we are proud people; therefore we must overpower and humble the West. False as the logic is, it locks in high emotion. It also raises for Muslims an existential question of identity: What sort of people do we think we are?
For the past half century and more, the Muslim world has been free and independent, with every opportunity to organize as it wishes. And this is the heart of the issue: The Muslim world is a political and social disaster for all to see. With the arguable exception of Turkey, it consists of a series of despotisms, each with an absolute ruler whose ultimate justification is his strength and will. A family or a clique gathers around the ruler under the protection of the state apparatus of secret police and military repression. To the powerful, the spoils; to the weak, submission. No rights, no freedom of expression, no loyal opposition, no rule of law, no redress except through violence, conspiracy, a coup, and ultimate civil war.

Whose fault is this? The huge majority of Muslims understand that they are responsible for themselves. They know what they have to put up with. Describing the daily corruption and injustices of despotism, they ask the aching question, "What can we do?" Muhammad Haikal was once the spokesman of Gamal Abdul Nasser, the ruler who set Egypt back for decades. Haikal was no friend of the West either, but he could write: "The Arab and Muslim world is completely naked. [None of us] can claim any more that he is independent. We have proved we are not modern. We have proved that we are not religious in the real sense of the word. We have proved that we cannot afford democracy." Today Ahmad Bishara, a prominent Kuwaiti, says that Arabs and Muslims "should engage in deep soul-searching" about their institutions and culture.

To write like that requires protection at the highest level, as well as personal courage. There are such men, and women too. It is a moving experience to sit in rooms and cafés in Cairo or Beirut, and even Gaza and Ramallah, and listen to their clear and rational analyses of the faults of their society. They are the equivalent of Soviet dissidents in the old days, and if there is hope for the Muslim and Arab world, it lies in their example. Like Soviet dissidents, they are only saying what almost everyone knows to be the truth. For most Muslims have answered the existential question for themselves the way the populations under Soviet rule did: They want what those in the Free World have.

Muslims by the millions already live in the West, wherever they can find refuge and opportunity. This in itself defies the doctrine of Islam, whereby Muslims are prohibited from living among unbelievers. Muslim publications abroad make it clear that integration is under way, bringing with it problems — all soluble — concerning dating of non-Muslims, rejection of arranged marriages, correct manners in a multicultural society. The news reaching home countries confirms that life in the West is good. With the news comes money for medicine and education. Jamia'at Ulema-e-Islam is one of the most extreme Islamic movements in Pakistan, and its leader — a ferocious old man with a white beard — is currently summoning the faithful onto the streets to overthrow the government of President Musharraf and launch a holy war. But two of his sons are studying in the United States. He says that they will be better able to understand their enemy. This humbug reveals the inner ambiguity common to his kind. He knows, and we know, that he is supplying them with a brighter future, as any father would.

In the first months of 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in Iran. He was a Muslim equivalent of Lenin. He gave a quite different answer to the existential question of Muslim identity. Muslim society was a failure, he concurred with secular critics like Haikal, and one cause of this was the people's abandonment of their faith. Islam had made its believers great and powerful in centuries past, and it would do so again. But there was another overriding cause of the general backsliding. Over the long term, Khomeini held, the West had had the cunning and deliberate intention of destroying Islam. Why the West would have such a wanton and malign ambition he did not explain. But he crystallized a mindset with revolutionary implications: Muslims were not responsible for their plight, it was all the fault of the West, to be rectified by war.

So mosques in Iran, and then elsewhere, began to resound with cries that America was the Great Satan, and crowds burned the Stars and Stripes. The emotional logic hardened into a series of syllogisms: Islam is righteous; America is imperialist; therefore unrighteous America is uprooting Islam. Or again: Good Muslims must kill Jews; America helps Jews; therefore America is killing good Muslims. Yet again: America is arrogant; Muslims are proud; therefore suicide bombers are giving America what she deserves.

A fantasy is loose in the world, the fantasy of an Islamic supremacy destined deservedly to triumph everywhere. Like Communism before it, this Islamic fantasy aims to impose its vision on others — and call it peace. In an unexpected form, here is another totalitarian movement with the usual murderous belief that the ends justify the means. Latching on to local or regional issues everywhere, Islamic supremacy has been developing its cause: condemning Salman Rushdie to death for supposed apostasy; holding Americans hostage in Teheran; killing Marines in Beirut; sponsoring suicide bombers; threatening pro-Western rulers in Muslim countries with assassination and civil war; preparing for the genocide of Jews in Israel. The false syllogisms of the Islamist mindset have hardened into axioms supporting one outrage after another. As in the old Soviet Union, everything political becomes a metaphor for war and apocalypse. If there is no room for Muslims, the extremists declare with passion, then there is no room for anybody else either. This failure of intellect could hardly be more complete.

Except for one thing: The Left throughout the West picks it up and fans it. Demonstrations against President Bush and his response to the suicide attacks have occurred in most major cities of Europe. In the media, even in the United States, people have jumped forward to blame the suicide attacks on America and its policies, rather than on the actual terrorist perpetrators. Here comes Susan Sontag, for example, to sneer that this attack on "the world's self-proclaimed superpower" was as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions." Barbara Foley of Rutgers University believes that America's "fascist foreign policy" over many decades is to blame for the attack. Harold Pinter, playwright of the absurd, writes to the press to say that it is President Bush who is fanning the flames of intolerance.

The Taliban exemplify the Islamist fantasy. They are tribalists of a medieval brutality. They forbid women to have an education or a job, and bury a woman suspected of adultery up to her shoulders before stoning her to death. They kill suspected homosexuals by collapsing walls onto them. They have driven millions of desperate fellow Afghans into exile, and leave the remainder to face destitution and starvation. Their honored accomplice is Osama bin Laden, who for the last ten years or so has been telling everyone who can listen that the United States is the source of all wickedness and he intends to destroy it.

The Left blamed the United States for the Cold War and the division of Europe, and for unrest in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere. Whatever happened, the Soviet Union was innocent and peace-loving. This same Left — in the Sontags and Pinters, these same people — follows an unbroken line in its attitude towards extremists in the Arab and Muslim world. Happy to leave millions at the mercy of Communism, they are happy to leave millions at the mercy of Islamist terror, so lining themselves up as ever on the side of oppression and lies. Their intellectual failure probably does not matter much here, where long exposure has shown that their opinions have foundations in psychopathology rather than reality. But it plays well in extremist circles, where assorted fanatics can now say, Look, the West is wicked, their intellectuals tell us so.

In the event of liberation from the general Islamist fantasy and the suicide bombers in particular, most of the Muslim world will feel a grateful relief that can only surprise and shock the Left as much as the joy of those liberated from Communism did. Should America fail to rescue them for whatever reason, though, Muslims will know that the Islamist fantasy is coming true, and they will have to endure it for a very long time to come.

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