From the inception of the twenty-first century there have been risings of economic discontinuities, shifting balances of power, and ever increasing cultural and religious confrontations and terrorism. We are engulfed in a state of chronic insecurity and deepening gloom. Old techniques of force and domination are still being employed to resolve problems, which belong to another, and remote age. The beneficiaries in a system of globalizing deprivation and selective accumulations of wealth do not realize the chaos which is being created by the simultaneous divisions of cultural, religious and political entities and globalization of economies by the elites. This has become a major contradiction of the twenty-first century.
All these consequences are clearly visible. Therefore one of the most important contributions by persons dedicated to civilizational issues through dialogue and peace making is to help remove (or set aside) the physical and metaphysical roadblocks which are frustrating all efforts towards a humane future.
The levels of human understanding and transformative development beyond the concept of science and Mercantile ventures is to establish ethical /moral support structures individually and collectively i.e. from material science to mental, to sacramental onto a spiritual scale. This is being increasingly recognized when the problems began to appear since there has been a disconnect between the disciplines of science and spirituality requiring to reach out for higher advances in physical sciences by taking them beyond the uncertain parameters. This leaves the uncertain sciences utterly amoral and with serious ethical constraints. The human untoward and science dictated processes continue to dominate in the twenty-first century and are thus with such limitations we are blindly and recklessly advancing towards material horizons, without resolving the uncertainties of science. We are witnessing the high-rise pyramids of affluence that are collapsing into an ever insecure and turbulent world.
Research goes on, and attempts are being made to evolve new and better concepts, which can be compatible with the present state of physics and cosmology. We must seek power of understanding through elevation of the human mind and broadening of human consciousness, to enable us to penetrate and cross the barriers of uncertainties of science and the disorderliness, violence and injustices of the processes of uncontrolled material development.
A philosophical account of the essential and inner human content remains a desperate need for better managing of today’s challenges not only in scientific and objective treatment but also in the eternal value based treatment of nature including the subjective human nature.
It is not pleasant to contemplate the thoughts that must be passing through the mind of the Owl of Minerva as the dusk falls and she undertakes the task of interpreting the present era of human civilization, which may now be approaching its inglorious period to its heights.
The era had opened almost 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, stretching from the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates, through Phoenicia on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean to the Nile Valley, and from there to Greece, Rome and beyond to the East, West, North and South. What is happening in this region today provides painful lessons on the depths to which the human species can descend. The land of the Tigris and Euphrates has been the scene of unspeakable horrors over the decades that began after the two world wars and continues to this day.
After WW1, French invasion of Syria, British occupation of IRAQ, was the final straw to destruction of the 600-year Ottoman caliphate and the French and British re-drawing borders including the establishment of Israel in the very center of Levant in 1948. The Allies had convinced Arabs to revolt against the Ottomans with the promise that after the war, the Arabs would get to rule themselves. Instead, after the war, they were betrayed and their land was carved up and split between the UK and France. This division informed the future borders of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine with imposed return of Israelites from over 2000–year exile. If we want to go back further in time about the partition of Palestine and the creation of state of Israel, the Sykes–Picot Agreement is a significant event to look into.
By mid-1948, just as quickly as circumstances had forced US president Truman to jettison his pro-partition policy for Palestine, events on the ground vindicated his original approach. The Zionists held fast, making Palestinian partition a fait accompli. President Truman, having adopted a wait-and-see stance, was primed to seize this opportunity by eventually recognizing the state of Israel under the prevailing circumstances of the time.
Even to this day, most of White House staffers working on the Middle East don’t speak the languages of the region, while some haven’t even served in the countries they are advising president Obama on. What we most certainly need in the US today instead is an NSC filled with civil servants who have developed their entire careers on the ground in the region and understand MENA and its cultures, its languages, its religions, its geography, its history and its mindset. In short, we desperately need a few dozen genuine experts in order to set our long and aberrant foreign policies straight in the troubled region and beyond and become honest brokers to achieve peace and harmony.
The George W. Bush-Tony Blair aggression in 2003, which many Iraqis compared to the Mongol invasions of the 13th century, was yet another lethal blow and disaster for the region and the world. It destroyed much of what survived the Bill Clinton-driven UN sanctions on Iraq, condemned as “genocidal” by the distinguished diplomats Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, who at the time administered them before resigning in protest. Halliday and von Sponeck’s devastating reports received the usual treatment accorded to unwanted facts.
One dreadful consequence of the US-UK invasion was depicted in a New York Times “visual guide to the crisis in Iraq and Syria”: the radical change of Baghdad from mixed neighborhoods in 2003 to today’s sectarian enclaves trapped in bitter internal hatred and conflicts. These conflicts ignited by the Iraqi invasion have spread further and are now tearing the entire region into pieces.
Much of the Tigris-Euphrates area has very recently come in the hands of ISIL and its self-proclaimed Islamic State, a grim caricature of the extremist form of radical (Wahhabi/ Salafi) Islam that has had its home in Saudi Arabia since the eighteenth century. Patrick Cockburn, a Middle East correspondent for the Independent and one of the well-informed analysts on ISIL, describes it correctly as “a very horrible, in many ways fascist organization, very sectarian, kills anybody who doesn’t believe in their particular rigorous and distorted brand of Islam.”
Cockburn also points out the contradictions in the Western reaction to the emergence of ISIL: efforts to stem its advance in Iraq along with others to undermine the group’s major opponent in Syria, Bashar Assad’s own brutal regime. Meanwhile a major barrier to the spread of the ISIL plague to Lebanon is Hezbollah, a hated enemy of both our Israeli and US ally. And to complicate the situation further, the US and Iran now share a justified concern about the rise of the Islamic State, as do almost all others in this highly conflicted very volatile region and the Muslim nations of the world.
Egypt has been plunged into some of its darkest days under an ongoing military dictatorship that continues under Assisi (a general who converted overnight into a politician) still receiving US, Saudi and Gulf Emirates backing even to this day. Egypt’s fate was not written in the stars. For centuries, alternative paths have been quite feasible, and not infrequently, a heavy imperial hand has barred the constructive and democratic path for Egypt to this day. After the renewed horrors of the recent months it should be unnecessary to comment on what emanates from Jerusalem, in remote history considered to be a moral hub.
Close to a century ago, Martin Heidegger extolled Nazi Germany as providing the best hope for rescuing the glorious civilization of the Greeks from the barbarians of the East and West. Today, German bankers are crushing Greece under an economic regime designed to maintain its own wealth and power.
The likely end of the era of civilization is further foreshadowed in a new draft report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the generally conservative monitor of what is happening to the physical and ecological world.
The report concludes that increasing greenhouse gas emissions risk “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts on peoples and ecosystems” over the coming decades. The world is nearing the temperature when loss of the vast ice sheet over Greenland will be unstoppable. Along with melting Antarctic ice, that could raise sea levels to inundate major cities as well as coastal plains and regions.
This era of civilization coincides closely with the geological epoch of the Holocene, beginning over 11,000 years ago. The previous Pleistocene epoch lasted 2.5 million years. Scientists now suggest that a new epoch began about 250 years ago, the Anthropocene, the period when human activity had begun a dramatic impact on the physical world. The rate of change of geological epochs is hard to ignore since.
According to Geologists, one index of human impact is the extinction of species, now estimated to be at about the same rate as it was 65 million years ago when an asteroid had hit the Earth. That is the presumed cause for the ending of the age of the dinosaurs, which opened the way for small mammals to proliferate, and ultimately us modern humans. Today, it is we humans who are the asteroid, condemning much of life to extinction.
The IPCC report reaffirms that the “vast majority” of known fuel reserves must be left in the ground to avert intolerable risks to our future generations. Meanwhile the major energy corporations make no secret of their goal of exploiting these reserves and discovering new ones. A day before its summary of the IPCC conclusions, The New York Times had reported that huge Midwestern grain stocks are rotting so that the products of the North Dakota oil boom can be shipped by rail to Asia and Europe.
One of the most feared consequences of anthropogenic global warming is the thawing of permafrost regions. A study in Science magazine warned us that “even slightly warmer temperatures [less than even anticipated in coming years] could start melting permafrost, which in turn threatens to trigger the release of huge amounts of greenhouse gases trapped in ice,” with possible “fatal consequences” for the global climate.
Suzanna Arundhati Roy (an Indian author, political activist and supporter of Kashmir’s freedom from Indian occupation) suggests that the “most appropriate metaphor for the insanity of our times” is the Siachen Glacier, where Indian and Pakistani soldiers, not too long ago, had killed each other on the highest battlefield in the world. The glacier is now melting and revealing “thousands of empty artillery shells, empty fuel drums, ice axes, old boots, tents and every other kind of waste that thousands of warring human beings generate” in meaningless conflict. And as the glaciers melt, India and Pakistan face indescribable disaster.
Islamic State of Iraq & Levant (ISIL) and Jewish State of Israel & Levant (JSIL) of our times
“One of the most respected mainstream US Middle East analysts, former CIA operative Graham Fuller, recently wrote, “I think the United States is one of the key creators of [ISIS]. The United States did not plan the formation of ISIS, but its destructive interventions in the Middle East and the war in Iraq were the basic causes of the birth of ISIS.”
Israeli Zionist radical state, with due respect to the Jewish masses, as described above was created by the West. Also many today believe that ISIL’s totally distorted ideological roots are one and the same as Zionists’ ideological roots. Saudi Arabia’s very first cousin is indeed the Zionist regime. Many would argue that Zionism is the most overt radical, Saudi Arabia is as well but sneakier and the US even if unintentionally comes to close third. The extremist doctrines of the Zionist regime are also promulgated in established schools, synagogues and in numerous other ways. ISIL and its criminal radicalism are the United States’ own creation in the opinion of many.
Noam Chomsky, a renowned Jewish-American academic, linguist, major analytic philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician, political commentator, writer and activist very recently during an interview said, “The appearance of ISIS and the general spread of radical jihadist is a fairly natural outgrowth of Washington wielding its sledgehammer at the fragile society of Iraq,”.
“The situation is a disaster for the US, the region and the world, but is a natural result of its hegemony & invasions (Afghanistan being another foreign policy mess in the region). One of the grim consequences of US-UK aggression was to inflame sectarian conflicts that are now tearing Iraq into pieces, and are spreading over the whole region, with awful consequences,” he added.
Chomsky also referred to the start of recent US-led attacks on ISIL in Syria, which are being carried out without the approval and collaboration of the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, saying the strikes are “undoubtedly, in violation of the UN Charter, the foundation of modern international law.”
He also said that ISIL “apparently continues to draw financial support from wealthy donors in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates,” noting that ISIL’s distorted ideological roots were in Saudi extremism.
He correctly called Saudi Arabia “the most radical” state in the world, saying that it “uses its vast oil resources to promulgate its extremist (Wahhabi/Salafi) doctrines by establishing schools, mosques, and in other ways,” and has also been the primary source for the funding of the terrorist groups.
Chomsky also went on to agree with author and former CIA officer Graham Fuller’s quoted above and in his other recent statements, referring to the US as one of the ISIL terrorist group’s “key creators” resulting from its 2003 war against Iraq.
The US-led bombing campaign against ISIL began on August 8 in Iraq, and since late September, the US and its Arab autocratic allies have been conducting air strikes against ISIL positions inside Syria as well without any authorization from Damascus or a UN mandate.
Iraq has faced brutal violence by the ISIL terrorist group across the country’s north and west since early June of this year. The ISIL terrorists have threatened all communities, including Shias, Sunnis, Kurds, Christians and Kurds, during their advances in Iraq. While Syria has also been gripped by deadly violence since 2011, the Western powers and their regional allies – especially Qatar, Saudi Arabia and even Turkey – have been reportedly supporting the militants operating in Syria.
Our Western political (and the media) establishment has clearly been and is still hopelessly fixated on the acts of small terrorist groups. It would be an understatement to say that the fascist terrorist organization ISIL, ISIS or, its Arabic acronym Daʿesh has frequented the Western news media in the past and recent months. It’s virtually impossible to read or watch a minute of the corporate media without hearing about the group’s supposed “threat to the entire Western civilization” (even though the vast majority of those ISIL kills are Middle Eastern Muslims).
For some in the West, it is a never-ending doomsday scenario, as they would desperately seek a place to hide from the so- called “jihadist” threat. This is certainly not to deny the ghastly nature of this disgustingly violent fascist death brigade. As a Muslim, I refuse to call the so-called “Islamic State” Islamic, when given the vast, and great majority of Muslims in the world do not consider ISIL Islamic, and given a wide array of the world’s Muslim leaders having staunchly and totally rejected the fascist organization and its caliphate. “Fascist,” I maintain, is actually a much more accurate description, as ISIL exhibits the main characteristics of fascism, namely violent hyper-nationalism, a mythological, fanatical vision of a supposedly “pure” idealized past that it seeks to recreate, and the desire to create a homogenous ethno-state under the control of a supreme autocrat.
Moreover, like “classical” fascist movements, ISIS takes the form of a movement built out of the sectors of the petit bourgeoisie ruined by economic crisis.” Many of ISIS’ top officials are not necessarily religious extremists, but former Ba’ath Party military officers. The US occupation (and a decade of sanctions before that) completely ravaged the Iraqi economy, and Assad’s ingratiatory neo-liberal reforms and preferential treatment of the ruling class also led to severe economic turmoil and the sufferings of the working class.
The necessary solution to this material disaster, ISIL maintains, is the “returning” to the ideal, “pure” Islamic state of a non-existent past. To ISIL, there is no oppressed working class fighting for political and economic freedom from external imperialist capitalists and internal capitalists; there are only Sunni Muslims fighting “unbelievers.” There is no class struggle; the working and ruling class unites in an ethno-religious struggle.
ISIL is nothing short of barbaric. If we wish to be morally (and politically) consistent to Jewish and Muslim masses. when speaking out against barbarism, we must however, also condemn the other equally, if not even more, horrific forms of barbarism. In more direct terms, if we are going to revile a bunch of bandits for beheading innocent people guilty of being of the “wrong” religion, we should also revile a state for bombing innocent people guilty of being of the “wrong” race and “wrong” religion. That is to say we should revile regime of Israel and certainly not the Jewish masses or the true Jewish religion.
At the end of the day, any serious, critical look at Israel’s policy toward the indigenous Palestinians it has colonized, occupied, and ethnically cleansed for decades should remind us of the ISIL mayhem that has begun very recently.
Many Palestinian and other human rights advocates have noted recently the striking similarities between this fascist organization and this fascist, ethnic, autocratic state, and have chosen a new way to approach it—calling Israel out as a “creeping apartheid” state for what it has been: The Jewish State of Israel in the Levant (or the Jewish State of Iraq and the Levant), JSIL looking at the comparison:
JSIL (Jewish State of Israel & Levant) ISIL (Islamic state of Iraq & Levant)
| 1. Significant number of Europeans | 1. Significant number of Europeans |
| 2. Illegally created State | 2. Illegally created State |
| 3. Using religion as excuse | 3. Using Religion as excuse |
| 4. Terrorizing indigenous citizens | 4. Terrorizing the indigenous citizens |
| 5. Created/funded by the West | 5. Created/funded by the West |
| 6. International community ignores crimes Ignores crimes | 6. International community ignores crimes Ignores crimes |
The above analogy and comparison is the most recent since the creation of the distorted ISIL as Khalek and Blumenthal, both of them good and actual journalists have backed up their assertions with evidence— lots of it, at that. They have highlighted countless similarities between ISIL and JSIL, decisively proving that fascist apartheid Israel and fascist ISIL is not that different from each other after all:
Like its ISIL counterpart Khalek wrote, the Jewish State in Israel and the Levant (JSIL) executes journalists,” citing a Ma’an article “Families of 16 journalists killed in Gaza demand justice.
Like ISIL,” Blumenthal responded,” the Jewish State of Israel in the Levant executes human rights workers,” citing Haaretz piece “A bullet through the heart of a Palestinian man – and an entire community,” subtitled “A social worker and father of three, Hashem Abu Maria was killed by an IDF sharpshooter during a protest against the Gaza war. Two others were also shot to death.
Blumenthal continued. “Like ISIL, the Jewish State (JSIL) executes medical workers and first responders,” citing an interview in an Alternate article he published in which an innocent Red Cross volunteer was deliberately murdered by Israeli soldiers.
The Jewish State in Israel and the Levant (JSIL) recruits foreign fighters with propaganda,” Khalek added, JSIL is ISIL, pointing to the Mondo Weiss article “‘Slate’ blames Birthright for indoctrinating American Jew who was killed fighting for Israel.
Like ISIL,” Khalek goes on, “the Jewish State (JSIL) beheads its victims, even children,” citing a chilling Electronic Intifada article “‘Wake up, my son!’ None of Gaza’s murdered children are just numbers.
Blumenthal adds “Like ISIL, the Jewish State (JSIL) recruits indoctrinated foreigners to displace indigenous people,” citing a Guardian article “How 90 Peruvians became the latest Jewish settlers.
Blumenthal writes, “ISIL targets hospitals, doctors, journalists. JSIL targets hospitals, doctors, journalists.” He includes the Mondo Weiss article “Latest from Gaza: Israel targets houses, mosques, disabled center and essential infrastructure, 14 more Palestinians killed.
Khalek concludes noting “JSIL has already imposed its jizya [the tax an Islamic state levies on non-Muslim subjects, according to ancient Islamic law] on American taxpayers forced to pay $3.1 billion per year to Israel in military aid. Scary stuff.
These parallels barely scratch the surface of Israel’s state terrorism. But they should also lay to rest criticism that Israel and ISIL are somehow categorically incomparable in their appetite for terror.
Aside from the similitude of their acts of terrorism, one might also note the similarity of the two terrorists’ expansionist policies. ISIL seeks to create a state in all of the Levant (and Iraq), not just in Syria. God granted it that land, ISIL insists, and God demands that it be under the control of caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who is supposedly a successor of the prophet Muhammad.
Another journalist Dan Cohen spoke to the expansionist nature of Israel, saying “Growing up Jewish in America, JSIL infiltrated my synagogue and actively recruited from my community to kill for its expansionist aims.”
Like ISIL, Israel too claims its acts of expansionism, foreign recruitment, and extreme violence are in service to the divine. At the heart of religious Zionism is the idea that God granted the land of Palestine to the Jews 2,000 years ago, and that, if they have to slaughter, colonize, and/or ethnically cleanse the indigenous population living there (an indigenous population that, quite ironically, as Israeli historian Shlomo Sand’s work shows, is probably more closely related to those Jews from two millennia ago anyway) to fulfill this divine promise, then so be it. (This is also, significantly, the same reasoning that motivates Christian Zionists— as they are afraid they will go to Hell if they don’t defend Israel, no matter how heinous its crimes.)
In its 1999 political platform, Likud, the dominant party in Israeli politics, in no unclear terms, dictates that the “Jordan river will be the permanent eastern border of the State of Israel,” and that the “Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river.” “Settlement of the land is a clear expression of the unassailable right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel,” Likud insists, and it “will continue to strengthen and develop these communities and will prevent their uprooting”—violently, of course.
Such a view is by no means relegated to the turn of the millennium. Moshe Feiglin, one of ten Deputy Speakers of the Israeli Knesset, while publicly calling for a “final solution” to the Palestinian “problem” (where have we heard that before?) during Operation “Protective Edge,” claimed outright that “Gaza is part of our Land and we will remain there forever.” Impose “a total siege on Gaza,” and “[a]ttack the entire ‘target bank’ throughout Gaza with the Israeli Defense Force with its maximum force (and not a tiny fraction of it) with all the conventional means at its disposal,” the Member of Knesset demanded, openly in the pages of Arutz Sheva. Destroy all “infrastructural targets … with no consideration for ‘human shields’ [i.e., civilians] or ‘environmental damage.’” The “IDF (Israeli defense force) will conquer the entire Gaza,” the influential Israeli politician hopes and speaks out loudly. And yet, still, some Zionists don’t think annexing Gaza goes far enough; they yearn to return to the day when Israel controlled the Sinai peninsula (note: it never relinquished control of Syria’s Golan Heights, in flagrant violation of the international law).
Fascism and Terrorism Go Hand-in-Hand
That numerous parallels exist between ISIL and JSIL should not be surprising. This summer, during Israel’s Operation “Protective” Edge massacre in Gaza, renowned Israeli journalist Gideon Levy admitted “fascist” is an appropriate term to describe Israel, writing, in no more than the pages of Haaretz:
All the seeds of the incitement of the past years, all the nationalistic, racist legislation and the incendiary propaganda, the scare campaigns and the subversion of democracy by the right-wing camp – all these have borne fruit, and that fruit is rotten and rank. The nationalist right has now sunk to a new level, with almost the whole country following in its wake. The word “fascism,” which I try to use as little as possible, finally has its deserved place in the Israeli political discourse.
JSIL’s commitment to creating a Jewish autocratic state by any means necessary, including the genocide and ethnic cleansing of an entire indigenous people, is ultimately not dissimilar from ISIS’s commitment to creating a Sunni/Salafi Theo-autocracy, also through genocide and ethnic cleansing. Their particular breed, if you will, of fascism is somewhat different—JSIL, a settler colonialist state, and ISIL, a loose collection of fighters from a variety of walks of life—but neither fits neatly in the model of classical European fascism, both of them doubtless constitute a new trend of 21st-century fascism. It is no surprise; therefore, that ISIL and JSIL, as hyper-nationalist, militarized, authoritarian states driven by the principle of ethno-religious supremacy, as fascist entities, naturally share many commonalities, terrorist proclivities primary among them.
Not only is the US not willing to accept these acts of terrorism for what they are, however, it is arguable whether US officials even want to stop terrorism in the first place. Pakistani Eqbal Ahmad’s work had shown us that US officials have never had really been interested in studying the root causes of terrorism. “The official approach eschews causation,” he had revealed, citing an 18 December 1985 piece, he had written, in the The New York Times. The foreign minister of Yugoslavia had asked US Secretary of State George Shultz to look into the causes of Palestinian “terrorism.” The chief US official, the official responsible for his country’s foreign affairs, in the words of the New York Times article, “went a bit red in the face. He pounded the table and told the visiting foreign minister, there is no connection with any cause. Period.”
Eqbal Ahmad, on the other hand, always opposed this doctrinaire, delusional approach to understanding such political violence. He understood the origins of terrorism and understood that terrorism begets more terrorism. Ahmad explained:
Most studies show that the majority of members of the worst terrorist groups in Israel or in Palestine, the Stern and the Irgun gangs, were people who were immigrants from the most anti-Semitic countries of Eastern Europe and Germany. Similarly, the young Shiites of Lebanon or the Palestinians from the refugee camps are battered people. They become very violent. The ghettos are violent internally. They become violent externally when there is a clear, identifiable external target, an enemy where you can say, ‘Yes, this one did it to me’. Then they can strike back.
These terrorists, these leaders of Irgun and the Stern Gang (also known as Lehi)—both of which were explicitly Zion fascist organizations that carried out atrocious acts of violence against Palestinian civilians—became some of the most powerful members of the Israeli government, even prime minister, in the cases of Begin and Shamir. Even today’s dominant Likud party, the same political party of which Prime Minister Netanyahu is a member, grew out of Irgun. It’s no wonder, then, that these fascists continued their policies of racist extermination and state terrorism. If a terrorist is willing to kill for their fascist beliefs when in a small militia, those violent tendencies are not going to magically disappear when they are in charge of a state.
State terrorism, the West’s complete destruction of Iraq, genocide of the Iraqi people, and Salvador Option Shia death squads; Assad’s brutal state terrorist campaigns of mass bombing, torture, starvation, and rape of civilians, including children; Israel’s indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians, these obscene, unforgivable forms of terrorism create more and more terrorists every single day.
In Operation “Protective” Edge, Israel’s most recent exercise in “mowing the lawn” in Gaza, the murdered over 2,000 Palestinians, 1,500 of which were civilians. In 51 days, Israel slaughtered 500 children. We must call this out for what it is: state terrorism. There is no question about it.
Viggo Mortensen, to great noise in the tabloids, has joined the group of human rights activists honest enough to call Israel’s state terrorism what it actually is: “state terrorism.”
We must be honest with our language. If we are going to refer to ISIL as the “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,” we must also refer to Israel as the “Jewish State of Israel in the Levant.” Saying it loud…. JSIL as loud as ISIL at least.
For if we ever truly wish to stop terrorism, to end terrorism in all of its forms, we must be honest about its very nature, we must heed Eqbal Ahmad’s counsel and condemn the most deadly and destructive form of terrorism of all: state terrorism as well as any group.
A New Paradigm & Harmony
Through better understanding and communication between diverse religious and cultural traditions, we need to evolve a new and humane vision. The multi-polarity of this vision must and will end discriminations between different traditions, and recognize their contributions to the eternal values as the foundation of the entire human civilization.
Each nation in terms of its physical and human resources, and the intensity of its own religious and cultural traditions, should evolve its own vision in terms of its needs and desires.
The harmonization of diversities of all nations beginning with the larger nations with the larger human vision can start a new process of globalized world diversity, peace and harmony.
