An Independent Article (very interesting)

We have long ago lost our moral compass, so how can we
lecture the Islamic world?

Years of Western interference in the Middle East has
left the region heavy with injustices

By Robert Fisk

09/17/05 "The Independent" --- In an age when Lord
Blair of Kut al-Amara can identify "evil ideologies"
and al-Qa'ida can call the suicide bombing of 156
Iraqi Shias "good news" for the "nation of Islam",
thank heaven for our readers, in particular John
Shepherd, principal lecturer in religious studies at
St Martin's College, Lancaster.

Responding to a comment of mine - to the effect that
"deep down" we do, however wrongly, suspect that
religion has something to do with the London bombings
- Mr Shepherd gently admonishes me. "I wonder if there
may be more to it than that," he remarks. And I fear
he is right and I am wrong.

His arguments are contained in a brilliantly conceived
article on the roots of violence and extremism in
Judaism, Christianity and Islam - and the urgent need
to render all religions safe for "human consumption".

Put very simply, Mr Shepherd takes a wander through
some of the nastiest bits of the Bible and the Koran -
those bits we prefer not to quote or not to think
about - and finds that mass murder and ethnic
cleansing get a pretty good bill of health if we take
it all literally.

The Jewish "entry into the promised land" was clearly
accompanied by bloody conquest and would-be genocide.
The Christian tradition has absorbed this inheritance,
entering its own "promised land" with a ruthlessness
that extends to cruel anti-Semitism. The New
Testament, Mr Shepherd points out, "contains passages
that would ... be actionable under British laws
against incitement to racial hatred" were they to be
published fresh today.

The Muslim tradition - with its hatred of idolatry -
contains, in the career of the Prophet, "scenes of
bloodshed and murder which are shocking to modern
religious sensibilities".

Thus, for example, Baruch Goldstein, the Israeli
military doctor who massacred 29 Palestinians in
Hebron in 1994, committed his mass murder on Purim, a
festival celebrating the deliverance of the Jewish
communities from the Persian empire which was followed
by large-scale killing "to avenge themselves on their
enemies" (Esther 8:13).

The Palestinians, of course, were playing the role of
the Persians, at other times that of the Amalekites
("... kill man and woman, babe and suckling, ox and
sheep, camel and donkey" - 1, Samuel 15:1, 3). The
original "promised land" was largely on what is now
the West Bank - hence the Jewish colonisation of
Palestinian land - while the coastal plain was not
(although suggestions that Israel should transplant
itself further east, leaving Haifa, Tel Aviv and
Ashkelon to the Palestinians of the West Bank are
unlikely to commend themselves to Israel’s rulers).

The "chosen people" theme, meanwhile, moved into
Christianity - the Protestants of Northern Ireland,
for example, (remember the Ulster Covenant?), and
apartheid South Africa and, in some respects, the
United States.

The New Testament is laced with virulent
anti-Semitism, accusing the Jews of killing Christ.
Read Martin Luther. The Koran demanded the forced
submission of conquered peoples in the name of
religion (the Koran 9:29), and Mohammed’s successor,
the Caliph Abu Bakr, stated specifically that "we will
treat as an unbeliever whoever rejects Allah and
Mohammed, and we will make holy war upon him ... for
such there is only the sword and fire and
indiscriminate slaughter."

So there you go. And how does Mr Shepherd deal with
all this? Settlement policy should be rejected not
because it is theologically questionable but because
the dispossession of a people is morally wrong.
Anti-Semitism must be rejected not because it is
incompatible with the Gospels but because it is
incompatible with any basic morality based on shared
human values.

If Muslim violence is to be condemned, it is not
because Mohammed is misunderstood but because it
violates basic human rights. "West Bank settlements,
Christian anti-Semitism and Muslim terrorism ... are
not morally wrong because theologically questionable -
they are theologically questionable because morally
wrong."

And it is true that most Christians, Jews and Muslims
draw on the tolerant, moderate aspects of their
tradition. We prefer not to accept the fact that the
religions of the children of Abraham are inherently
flawed in respect of intolerance, discrimination,
violence and hatred. Only - if I understand Mr
Shepherd’s thesis correctly - by putting respect for
human rights above all else and by making religion
submit to universal human values can we " grasp the
nettle".

Phew. I can hear the fundamentalists roaring already.
And I have to say it will probably be the Islamic ones
who will roar loudest. Reinterpretation of the Koran
is such a quicksand, so dangerous to approach, so
slippery a subject that most Muslims will not go near.

How can we suggest that a religion based on
"submission" to God must itself "submit" to our
happy-clappy, all-too-Western " universal human
rights"? I don’t know. Especially when we "
Christians" have largely failed to condemn some of our
own atrocities - indeed, have preferred to forget
them.

Take the Christians who massacred the Muslims of
Srebrenica. Or take the Christians - Lebanese
Phalangist allies of the Israelis - who entered the
Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Beirut and
slaughtered up to 1,700 Palestinian Muslim civilians.

Do we remember that? Do we recall that the massacres
occurred between 16 and 18 September 1982? Yes, today
is the 23rd anniversary of that little genocide - and
I suspect The Independent will be one of the very few
newspapers to remember it. I was in those camps in
1982. I climbed over the corpses. Some of the
Christian Phalangists in Beirut even had illustrations
of the Virgin Mary on their gun butts, just as the
Christian Serbs did in Bosnia.

Are we therefore in a position to tell our Muslim
neighbours to "grasp the nettle"? I rather think not.
Because the condition of human rights has been so
eroded by our own folly, our illegal invasion of Iraq
and the anarchy that we have allowed to take root
there, our flagrant refusal to prevent further Israeli
settlement expansion in the West Bank, our constant,
whining demands that prominent Muslims must disown the
killers who take their religious texts too literally,
that we have long ago lost our moral compass.

A hundred years of Western interference in the Middle
East has left the region so cracked with fault lines
and artificial frontiers and heavy with injustices
that we are in no position to lecture the Islamic
world on human rights and values. Forget the
Amalekites and the Persians and Martin Luther and the
Caliph Abu Bakr. Just look at ourselves in the mirror
and we will see the most frightening text of all.

© 2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

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