Opening a dialog between the West and Islam
Austin Bay
An essay by Catholic Bishop George Pell, in the Australian.
Long excerpt (but one that does justice to Pell's argument):
Dialogue among friends does not preclude public questioning and public criticism, which should be constructive, not designed to make a situation worse by threatening peace or inciting hatred, for example.
These are the fixed points: Western democracies are at war with Islamic terrorists. Security agencies, including Australia's, are working regularly to thwart terrorist attacks. These Islamic terrorists want a clash of civilisations, they want the West to overreact, to make mistakes and so bring this Armageddon closer.
I do not believe that such a clash is inevitable, but with every massive and successful terrorist attack on the West we lurch closer to such a catastrophe.
American anger if there was a succession of September 11-style events in the US does not bear contemplating. A succession of such events in Australia would produce a similar public opinion, but we would not have the military capacity to do much about it.
Knowledge of fundamental Islamic sources, for example the Koran, is useful, perhaps indispensable, as is a basic knowledge of the history of Islamic expansion. A politically correct ignorance of all this history, except for a hostile verdict on the evil Crusades, provides no basis for an adequate understanding of the crisis in which we find ourselves.
Two misleading stereotypes of religion need to be abandoned. First, that all religions are basically the same: either all good or all bad.
In fact, the great religions differ mightily one from the other in doctrine and in the societies they produce. Religions can be sources of beauty and goodness and they can be, through corruption, sources of poison and destruction. I do not exempt Christianity from this.
Second, that religions are the cause of all wars or that religion never provokes war.
The worst evils of the 20th century were provoked by anti-religious men: Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Religion is more often used as a pretext for war or as a symbol of division, for example in the IRA's armed struggle in Ireland, but religion can directly contribute to and has been used to justify armed conflict and aggression.
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