Robert Cooper in the Preface to his book The Breaking of Nations, says this:
"The worst times in European history were in the fourteenth century, during and after the Hundred Years War, in the seventeenth century at the time of the Thirty Years War, and in the first half of the twentieth century. The twenty-first century may be worse than any of these."
Daily we read things in the news that would support Cooper’s statement that our century, the only century that my grandson will ever know directly, may turn out to be worst of all.
For example, I take these three items from today's news from the Middle East, and South Asia, and I haven't even delved into the African continent where perhaps the greatest slaughter of innocents is still going on. First, Baghdad bodies. Hardly a day goes by without our hearing about them. On September 12th at least 60 bodies were found throughout the city. All had been shot in the head, had clear signs of torture, were blindfolded, bound, or gagged. This number is above last month's average body count of 50 or more a day, but not as high as the national average of 100 a day year to date. The second item concerns what I will call Muslim rage, recalling the similar Muslim anger just one year ago over the Danish cartoons. On the same day, September 12th, Muslim leaders in Britain, France, and Germany, in Morocco, Pakistan, and Kuwait, in Gaza, Iraq, Syria, and Indonesia, to mention just the first ones recognized by the ever present scandal thirsty media, registered their protest at the Pope's words while speaking at Regensburg University in Bavaria. On that occasion the Pope quoted a 14th Century Byzantine emperor as saying, "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” The third item concerns the country, Pakistan, perhaps the most ungovernable land in the world today, a country held together by not much more than the name (and perhaps the cricket team). The Pakistan government put a women’s rights bill on hold, thereby caving in to the Islamists. Under Islamist law all sex outside of marriage is criminalized. Furthermore if a rape victim fails to present four male witnesses to the rape, she herself may face punishment. According to a Pakistanian Human Rights Commission a woman is raped every two hours and gang-raped every eight hours in Pakistan, and we’re told that these figures are probably an under-estimation. Now we learn that a government reform measure that would end these practices has been stopped.
I don’t mean to single out the Muslims by my comments. There is certainly ample evidence of man’s cruelty to man among other peoples and religions. But what I find abhorrent is that while the bodies are piling up in Iraq, a Muslim country, and while in Pakistan also a Muslim country, men are raping women with impunity, the Muslim leaders’ rage is directed only at the words of a Pope, words that have hurt no one (and would probably have passed unnoticed if the “leaders” had kept silent), words that left no bodies, no rape victims. Why is this so? Would these “leaders” perhaps be seeking to distract the world’s attention from the horrors that their co-religionists, in the name of their Prophet and their religion, are raining down on their probably countless innocent victims?
