No conflict of civilization” “” “

In a time of massive bombardments over Afghanistan, called “the response” by the dominant mass media, the various Western television channels are busily shaping our perception of the real. Today more than ever they make us believe, with all objectivity, that they are only a mirror of reality, when in actual fact it is they themselves who are putting reality on the stage. And, even though we take care not to admit it, Islam seems to us perfect in the role of the enemy: terrorism, violence and fanaticism are mutations almost congenital to it. The proof: some surah of the Koran extrapolated from their context and commented by learned experts on the Arabic-Moslem world invited to do the rounds of the world’s TV screens. Conquest and war are thus claimed to be the core of Islam, if not its very essence. We Christians, on the other hand, would never accept that they should turn us into a similar caricature. Since 11 September Islam and the Moslems are seen as a threat by the public at large. But the Moslems total over one billion human beings, who live for the most part in Asia (it’s there that they are more numerous, not in the Arab countries!). They also live among us, in the Western countries. The majority of those who live here in our country [Switzerland] respect the laws of the Republic, yet they still risk becoming suspects in the eyes of the population. Islamophobic prejudices exist even in the most cultivated minds! “If revenge could put an end to violence, this would have been confirmed right from the very dawn of history, when Cain killed his brother”, comments the Greek-Orthodox metropolitan of Mount Lebanon, Msgr. Khodr. The Lebanese prelate, who has devoted his life to Christian-Islamic dialogue in the Middle East, fears, however, that “this revenge could be expressed in a collective killing in which, given the impossibility of finding the real culprit, thousands of innocent lives would be sacrificed… And would this be an act of justice, or simply a gut reaction? Would it not rather encourage the forces of sedition among the disinherited peoples whose one solution to their precarious situation is terrorism? ” The Lebanese Orthodox metropolitan, author of weekly reports in the Arab-language daily An-Nahar about which a good deal has been spoken, concludes with the rhetorical question : “Can killing the disinherited be a means of achieving peace?”. Christians of West and East, who have been joined by the Moslems (their highest authorities, both Sunnis and Shiites, have condemned the suicide attacks of 11 September, without finding any great echo in the Western media…), must join with Msgr Khodr in contesting Bin Laden’s claim that the Moslem world is being exploited: there is no “crusade” of the Christian nations against Islam, no conflict of civilization. The political West – widely secularized, at times atheist, often far removed from the Christian values (the Pope denounces also a civilization of death that is opposed to the project of the civilization of love) – has nothing of the genuine “Christian West” about it. Just as the radical political Islam – synonymous for us with fanaticism and terrorism – is alien to the vast majority of the Moslem populations. It is they, besides, who were the first to suffer the various forms of totalitarianism, let’s not forget it, up till the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war. Post-11 September ought to be not an occasion for revenge, but an invitation to reflection and self-criticism. Jacques Berset