Towers, you’ve struck on a very valid point. The parallels between Islam over the last century and the Catholic Church in the times of Galileo and the Inquisition are striking – ie, the hierarchies in both were/are in the main reactionary old men who feel/felt threatened by a (for them frightening and rapidly changing social environment.
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Let’s drop the “is/was’s” and stick with the “was” for clarity from here on, but the two tenses apply.
Both groups were made up in the main of reactionary old men who used religion to maintain the status quo. Both were more politicians than clerics, but used the power of the Church more politically than for the protection of souls. And among both were men who felt that power was slipping from the pulpit to an educated class outside the church/mosque.
Both groups also had committed young men at their disposal. Young men who, in the name of their religion, would do terrible things, believing, many of them quite sincerely, that the end justified the means, however terrible those means might be. For the Catholics, it was the Dominicans and their Inquisition, for the Muslims, it is the young zealots among the ‘fundamentalists’.
It may not be totally co-incidental that probably the two best examples of Christian, church and/or state-sponsored excess were against Muslims – the Crusades, which were little more than a series of unspeakably barbaric Viking raids on what was arguably a far more advanced and genteel civilisation. (We in the West don’t remember the Crusades in any detail, and our ‘histories’ of them until recently at least, glossed over the often truly gruesome behaviour of the ‘Christian’ armies. Let me assure anyone who isn’t aware of it, most Muslims today know all those details intimately – they are taught them in the mosque, recited by storytellers in every coffee shop.)
The second example were the Moors in Spain. For most Westerners, their total knowledge of the Christians’ removal of the Moors from Spain would have come from Charlton Heston starring in El Cid (and many younger people probably haven’t even seen that). The Moors had been established in Spain for hundreds of years, had been responsible for much of the most beautiful architecture you see there to this day. But when the Christian armies eventually defeated them, they carried out an ethnic cleansing of far more barbarity than anything the Serbs have been able to inflict on the (surprise, surprise!) - Muslims - in Jugoslavia over the last ten years. It was total – they killed or expelled EVERY Muslim (and Jew) from Spain. We in the West don’t remember this. The Muslims (and many Jews) do.
Which brings me to the really uncomfortable bit. As barbaric as the Christians undoubtedly were, the Muslims weren’t without fault either. Hollywood, along with the liberal leftist media and many of similar leanings in our universities have tried to portray a clear cut ‘good guy /bad guy’ scenario in any recent war. This is utter rubbish. Each side in any conflict has its good and its bad points, in many cases, almost in equal measure. Some will say that WW2 was an exception to this rule, but even that’s debatable - ask your average elderly German or Japanese and I’m sure few, if they were being totally honest with you, could not voice many arguments in favour of the often excessive actions of their government and be able to cite horrible excesses by the Allies (in their eyes, and possibly accurately) that we’ve probably never heard of.
The facts are, both the Germans and the Japanese governments did what they thought they had to do for national survival, and if some of those things are totally anathema to us in the West today, they weren’t necessarily so to the people doing them at official behest at the time. Pearl Harbour? The Americans and British had just cut off Japan’s oil supplies and credits. It was literally fight NOW or sink into oblivion for Japan, and the only real decision to be made was whether to take the ‘quickie’ option - attack south to secure the Dutch and British oil fields in the Dutch East Indies, or take the longer term view and go into Sibera in support of their German allies.
(It might come as a HUGE surprise to many Americans that the war in the Pacific did NOT start with Pearl Harbour and nor did the Japanese plan of attack centre on Pearl Harbour. It was very much a sideshow to the invasion of Malaya, that was carefully timed to start on the overnight (the Sunday night/Monday morning) of Dec 7th/8th.. The International Dateline always confuses people into thinking that the Japanese did not attack Malaya and the Philippines until the next day.) The invasion of Malaya (through landings in Thailand) was well under way as the bombers approached Pearl Harbour.
Enough of the history lessons. The facts are that when two cultures clash – and despite all the protestations by the Western politicians to the contrary, that is exactly the way the Muslim world sees the coming ‘war against terrorism’, as a direct attack on Islam by the West – one side is usually forced to give ground, usually very unwillingly and only after a humiliating defeat, politically or at arms. No matter how unjust the West’s position might be because of past sins and omissions, if the West loses this coming fight, life as we in the West know it is over for many of us, for should they ‘win’, the Islamic world will not, repeat not, be as accommodating to non-believers as the West has been to people who have different in beliefs or customs.
In closing, it’s probably worth reminding ourselves here who created modern day ‘state-sponsored terrorism’. It was none other Winston Spencer Churchill and a beleaguered Britain, who, when unable to meet the might of the German army on the battlefield, equipped and trained people in Occupied Europe to ‘resist’ the German invaders. We called the ‘The Resistance’. The Germans – (and the vast majority of the French people, until they saw which way the wind was blowing) – called them ( ….. )?
You guessed it - ‘terrorists’.
Just as the British called George Washington and his ‘American’ colonial revolutionaries.