Mohammed started successfully consolidating Islam from Medina by raiding caravans heading to Mecca. Then, he started spreading Islam from his Medina base with conquests, eventually throughout the Mediterranean world .
For a time, he tolerated “people of the book.” This, the term given to Abrahamic religions, namely Judaism and Christianity, of which Islam claims to be one. Late antiquity through medieval times to modernity the Islamic-other, religious battles and tolerance shifted to and fro. Today, the civilized norm would seem to be benign tolerance in secular, neutral or tolerant environments, certainly to minorities within Islamic dominated societies.
Not so, as set out in Clifford May’s January 21st NRO post, The War Against the Infidels. In it he enumerates this century’s minority persecutions: dynamiting of the Bamiyan buddhas, desecration of the tomb of the prophet Ezekiel, this week’s Christian killings in Nigeria, the murder of Egyptian Coptic Christians, Pakistan church bombings, and the attacks on Malaysia Christian churches.
Very little reporting from Western journalists. Silence from academics, diplomats and politicians. We are too politically correct. We don’t want to offend. Our president goes around bowing and apologizing in the Middle East, but never condemning.
Clifford May sums it up well: “When the dots are connected, the picture that emerges is not pretty: An “Islamic world” in which terrorists are regarded often with lenience, sometimes with respect, and occasionally with reverence, while minority groups face increasing intolerance, persecution, and “cleansing,” and where even their histories are erased. And we in the West are too polite, too “politically correct,” and perhaps too cowardly to say much about it.”
Don’t look for socialist Europe, the UN or the Democratic administration to raise any objections.
Tom Motherway