Great piece on moral relativism in the Washington Post
The wonderfully named Charles Krauthammer has taken aim under the title ''Tolerance: a two way street' at the supine Western media over our Islamic chums. He's not come up with anything particularly new, but he does have a way with words:
"In today's world, religious sensitivity is a one-way street. The rules of the road are enforced by Islamic mobs and abjectly followed by Western media, politicians and religious leaders....And Islam, of course, spread with great speed from Arabia across the Mediterranean and into Europe. It was not all benign persuasion. After all, what were Islamic armies doing at Poitiers in 732 and the gates of Vienna in 1683? Tourism? However, the inconvenient truth is that after centuries of religious wars, Christendom long ago gave it up. It is a simple and undeniable fact that the violent purveyors of monotheistic religion today are self-proclaimed warriors for Islam who shout "God is great" as they slit the throats of infidels -- such as those of the flight crews on Sept. 11, 2001 -- and are then celebrated as heroes and martyrs".
There's plenty more. All good stuff.
"In today's world, religious sensitivity is a one-way street. The rules of the road are enforced by Islamic mobs and abjectly followed by Western media, politicians and religious leaders....And Islam, of course, spread with great speed from Arabia across the Mediterranean and into Europe. It was not all benign persuasion. After all, what were Islamic armies doing at Poitiers in 732 and the gates of Vienna in 1683? Tourism? However, the inconvenient truth is that after centuries of religious wars, Christendom long ago gave it up. It is a simple and undeniable fact that the violent purveyors of monotheistic religion today are self-proclaimed warriors for Islam who shout "God is great" as they slit the throats of infidels -- such as those of the flight crews on Sept. 11, 2001 -- and are then celebrated as heroes and martyrs".
There's plenty more. All good stuff.
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Did we give it up long ago? Where are the Serbs who used to live in Croatia, or the missing Muslims from Bosnia? Perhaps you mean that Protestants gave it up some time ago?
DM - you make an interesting point.
Having mulled on it a bit, I'd draw a line between the Yugoslav wars and jihad / crusades. In the case of the latter, conversion would quite likely to save your life, whereas in Yugoslavia it was a war for territory with an additional element of ethnic cleansing. Offering to convert to Catholicism / Orthodoxy / Islam would have been no more likely to save one's life than it would have saved the victims of the Shoah.
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