Uri Avnery on the “Clash of Civilizations”
October 13, 2007 4:53 pm Clash of Civilizations, Israeli Peace movement, War on Terror as Misguided Metaphor, Israeli-Palestinian conflictUri Avnery, The Mother of all Pretexts - Gush Shalom, October 13, 2007
The salvation came from America: a professor named Samuel Huntington wrote a book about the “Clash of Civilizations”. And so we found the mother of all pretexts.
THE ARCH-ENEMY, according to this theory, is Islam. Western Civilization, Judeo-Christian, liberal, democratic, tolerant, is under attacked from the Islamic monster, fanatical, terrorist, murderous.
Islam is murderous by nature. Actually, “Muslim” and “terrorist” are synonymous. Every Muslim is a terrorist, every terrorist a Muslim.
A sceptic might ask: How did it happen that the wonderful Western culture gave birth to the Inquisition, the pogroms, the burning of witches, the annihilation of the Native Americans, the Holocaust, the ethnic cleansings and other atrocities without number - but that was in the past. Now Western culture is the embodiment of freedom and progress.