By Uri Avnery
From Media Monitors

Since the days when Roman Emperors threw Christians to the lions, the relations between the emperors and the heads of the church have undergone many changes.

Constantine the Great, who became Emperor in the year 306 – exactly 1700 years ago – encouraged the practice of Christianity in the empire, which included Palestine. Centuries later, the church split into an Eastern (Orthodox) and a Western (Catholic) part. In the West, the Bishop of Rome, who acquired the title of Pope, demanded that the Emperor accept his superiority.

The struggle between the Emperors and the Popes played a central role in European history and divided the peoples. It knew ups and downs. Some Emperors dismissed or expelled a Pope, some Popes dismissed or excommunicated an Emperor. One of the Emperors, Henry IV, ‘walked to Canossa’, standing for three days barefoot in the snow in front of the Pope’s castle, until the Pope deigned to annul his excommunication.

But there were times when Emperors and Popes lived in peace with each other. We are witnessing such a period today. Between the present Pope, Benedict XVI, and the present Emperor, George Bush II, there exists a wonderful harmony. Last week’s speech by the Pope, which aroused a world-wide storm, went well with Bush’s crusade against ‘Islamofascism’, in the context of the ‘Clash of Civilizations’.

In his lecture at a German university, the 265th Pope described what he sees as a huge difference between Christianity and Islam: while Christianity is based on reason, Islam denies it. While Christians see the logic of God’s actions, Muslims deny that there is any such logic in the actions of Allah.

As a Jewish atheist, I do not intend to enter the fray of this debate. It is much beyond my humble abilities to understand the logic of the Pope. But I cannot overlook one passage, which concerns me too, as an Israeli living near the fault-line of this ‘war of civilizations’.

In order to prove the lack of reason in Islam, the Pope asserts that the prophet Muhammad ordered his followers to spread their religion by the sword. According to the Pope, that is unreasonable, because faith is born of the soul, not of the body. How can the sword influence the soul?

To support his case, the Pope quoted – of all people – a Byzantine Emperor, who belonged, of course, to the competing Eastern Church. At the end of the 14th century, the Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus told of a debate he had – or so he said (its occurrence is in doubt) – with an unnamed Persian Muslim scholar. In the heat of the argument, the Emperor (according to himself) flung the following words at his adversary:

‘Show me just what Mohammed 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’.

These words give rise to three questions: (a) Why did the Emperor say them? (b) Are they true? (c) Why did the present Pope quote them?

When Manuel II wrote his treatise, he was the head of a dying empire. He assumed power in 1391, when only a few provinces of the once illustrious empire remained. These, too, were already under Turkish threat.

At that point in time, the Ottoman Turks had reached the banks of the Danube. They had conquered Bulgaria and the north of Greece, and had twice defeated relieving armies sent by Europe to save the Eastern Empire. On May 29, 1453, only a few years after Manuel’s death, his capital, Constantinople (the present Istanbul) fell to the Turks, putting an end to the Empire that had lasted for more than a thousand years.

During his reign, Manuel made the rounds of the capitals of Europe in an attempt to drum up support. He promised to reunite the church. There is no doubt that he wrote his religious treatise in order to incite the Christian countries against the Turks and convince them to start a new crusade. The aim was practical, theology was serving politics.

In this sense, the quote serves exactly the requirements of the present Emperor, George Bush II. He, too, wants to unite the Christian world against the mainly Muslim ‘Axis of Evil’. Moreover, the Turks are again knocking on the doors of Europe, this time peacefully. It is well known that the Pope supports the forces that object to the entry of Turkey into the European Union.

Is there any truth in Manuel’s argument?

The pope himself threw in a word of caution. As a serious and renowned theologian, he could not afford to falsify written texts. Therefore, he admitted that the Qur’an specifically forbade the spreading of the faith by force. He quoted the second Sura, verse 256 (strangely fallible, for a pope, he meant verse 257) which says: ‘There must be no coercion in matters of faith’.

How can one ignore such an unequivocal statement? The Pope simply argues that this commandment was laid down by the prophet when he was at the beginning of his career, still weak and powerless, but that later on he ordered the use of the sword in the service of the faith. Such an order does not exist in the Qur’an. True, Muhammad called for the use of the sword in his war against opposing tribes – Christian, Jewish and others – in Arabia, when he was building his state. But that was a political act, not a religious one; basically a fight for territory, not for the spreading of the faith.

Jesus said: ‘You will recognize them by their fruits.’ The treatment of other religions by Islam must be judged by a simple test: How did the Muslim rulers behave for more than a thousand years, when they had the power to ‘spread the faith by the sword’?

Well, they just did not.

For many centuries, the Muslims ruled Greece. Did the Greeks become Muslims? Did anyone even try to Islamize them? On the contrary, Christian Greeks held the highest positions in the Ottoman administration. The Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians, Hungarians and other European nations lived at one time or another under Ottoman rule and clung to their Christian faith. Nobody compelled them to become Muslims and all of them remained devoutly Christian.

True, the Albanians did convert to Islam, and so did the Bosniaks. But nobody argues that they did this under duress. They adopted Islam in order to become favorites of the government and enjoy the fruits.

In 1099, the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem and massacred its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants indiscriminately, in the name of the gentle Jesus. At that time, 400 years into the occupation of Palestine by the Muslims, Christians were still the majority in the country. Throughout this long period, no effort was made to impose Islam on them. Only after the expulsion of the Crusaders from the country, did the majority of the inhabitants start to adopt the Arabic language and the Muslim faith – and they were the forefathers of most of today’s Palestinians.

There is no evidence whatsoever of any attempt to impose Islam on the Jews. As is well known, under Muslim rule the Jews of Spain enjoyed a bloom the like of which the Jews did not enjoy anywhere else until almost our time. Poets like Yehuda Halevy wrote in Arabic, as did the great Maimonides. In Muslim Spain, Jews were ministers, poets, scientists. In Muslim Toledo, Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars worked together and translated the ancient Greek philosophical and scientific texts. That was, indeed, the Golden Age. How would this have been possible, had the Prophet decreed the ‘spreading of the faith by the sword’?

What happened afterwards is even more telling. When the Catholics re-conquered Spain from the Muslims, they instituted a reign of religious terror. The Jews and the Muslims were presented with a cruel choice: to become Christians, to be massacred or to leave. And where did the hundreds of thousand of Jews, who refused to abandon their faith, escape? Almost all of them were received with open arms in the Muslim countries. The Sephardi (‘Spanish’) Jews settled all over the Muslim world, from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east, from Bulgaria (then part of the Ottoman Empire) in the north to Sudan in the south. Nowhere were they persecuted. They knew nothing like the tortures of the Inquisition, the flames of the auto-da-fe, the pogroms, the terrible mass-expulsions that took place in almost all Christian countries, up to the Holocaust.

Why? Because Islam expressly prohibited any persecution of the ‘peoples of the book’.[1] In Islamic society, a special place was reserved for Jews and Christians. They did not enjoy completely equal rights, but almost. They had to pay a special poll-tax, but were exempted from military service – a trade-off that was quite welcome to many Jews. It has been said that Muslim rulers frowned upon any attempt to convert Jews to Islam even by gentle persuasion – because it entailed the loss of taxes.[2]

Every honest Jew who knows the history of his people cannot but feel a deep sense of gratitude to Islam, which has protected the Jews for fifty generations, while the Christian world persecuted the Jews and tried many times ‘by the sword’ to get them to abandon their faith.

The story about ‘spreading the faith by the sword’ is an evil legend, one of the myths that grew up in Europe during the great wars against the Muslims – the reconquista of Spain by the Christians, the Crusades and the repulsion of the Turks, who almost conquered Vienna. I suspect that the German Pope, too, honestly believes in these fables. That means that the leader of the Catholic world, who is a Christian theologian in his own right, did not make the effort to study the history of other religions.

Why did he utter these words in public? And why now?

There is no escape from viewing them against the background of the new Crusade of Bush and his evangelist supporters, with his slogans of ‘Islamofascism’ and the ‘Global War on Terrorism’ – when ‘terrorism’ has become a synonym for Muslims. For Bush’s handlers, this is a cynical attempt to justify the domination of the world’s oil resources. Not for the first time in history, a religious robe is spread to cover the nakedness of economic interests; not for the first time, a robbers’ expedition becomes a Crusade.

The speech of the Pope blends into this effort. Who can foretell the dire consequences?

Uri Avnery is an Israeli journalist, peace activist, former member of the Knesset, and leader of Gush Shalom.

NOTES

[1] Not only “Peoples of the Book”, but oppression of all others as well.

[2] The author is mistaken in this statement, as the tax imposed upon non-Muslims was insubstantial to other means of generating public income. Rather, all Muslims encouraged and will continue to encourage others to enter its fold .

Randeep Ramesh, The Guardian

Napoleon is said to have observed that geography is destiny. Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, will be emphasizing the truth of the emperor of France’s words in the next two days as he makes surprise appearances in Pakistan and India.

The president’s visits will last just a few hours and are likely to set in train big changes for the region. Sensing that the clock is ticking for the Bush administration, Iran wants to press ahead with a long-proposed 1,700-mile pipeline to deliver gas to Pakistan and India, at a cost $7.5bn.

Understanding that such a project would see a shared strategic interest develop between three nations straddling the world’s main oil and gas artery, the US peddles a rival scheme: The $7.6bn gas pipeline from Turkmenistan’s Dauletabad field through Herat and Kandahar in Afghanistan to Multan in Pakistan, and finally into India.

Both may go ahead but it is Iran’s proposal that has momentum. Oil ministers met in Islamabad last week and agreed to sign a bilateral agreement and to start construction of the pipeline by 2010. India also wants to put back on track a floundering $25bn deal for getting 5 million tons of liquefied gas from Iran every year for the next 25 years.

In recent months, it has become increasingly clear that the US has been unable to crack the Persian puzzle. The US’s attempts to ostracize Iran over its nuclear program have so far yielded little. Washington’s sanctions strategy has also been undone, principally by China’s announcement that it would develop oil and gas fields in southwestern Iran for $2bn late last year.

None of this has gone unnoticed in New Delhi and Islamabad. Pakistan has had a fractious relationship with Iran in recent years. India’s dealings with Iran have been bedeviled by baubles dangled by the US: Principally a deal that would legitimate Delhi as a nuclear-weapons power in return for the inspection of civilian atomic energy plants. To Tehran’s annoyance, India also voted with the US and against Iran’s nuclear program twice — in October 2005 and February 2006 — at the International Atomic Energy Agency. The Indians are likely to be seeking to make amends with President Ahmadinejad in a big way.

Nukes have long been at the center of Iranian dealings with South Asia.

India has never shared Washington’s assessments of Iran as an aggressive regional power. India’s reason is simple: My neighbor’s neighbor is my friend. Hence it sees Iran as offering a road to Central Asia — a key Indian concern — that bypasses Pakistan. To this end New Delhi has been building up Iran’s Chahbahar port and constructing roads that skirt Pakistan’s border.

India and Iran’s energy, strategic and diplomatic ties, likely to be revived this week, may also see more private sector dealings between the two nations. In the past this has led to revelations of Indian transfers to Iran of high-technology goods that could be useful for Iran’s atomic program.

The truth is that in the past few months, Tehran has emerged as the Gulf’s main power center. In Iraq, Tehran has outfoxed competitors, gaining influence at their expense. Iran’s intervention a few weeks ago to end a bloody Shiite conflict on the banks of Iraq’s Tigris did not go unnoticed in Washington.

In Afghanistan both Indian and Pakistani diplomats have noted that the West’s position is becoming seriously eroded, leaving Iran to shape the debate.

This means they have to take seriously President Ahmadinejad’s recent questioning of NATO’s legitimacy in Afghanistan. There is also a feeling that the Western alliance has become lopsided: The US has accepted it will need to airlift more troops because the Europeans will not. If America ends up as the sole defender of the Kabul regime then the attacks on the “coalition” can be construed as a resistance army fighting an occupier.

All this comes at a time when the Northern Alliance, the former rebels in Kabul over which Iran has considerable influence, have been talking to their archrivals the Taleban, something that is anathema to Washington.

However much the Americans might wish otherwise, the reality is that no one can ignore Iran. Involved in bloody imbroglios in Afghan and Iraq, Tehran calculates the US would not use force against Iran, even if it pursues its nuclear ambitions.

To reinforce this point Iran recently announced that 6,000 new advanced centrifuges were up and running at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility.

Ahmadinejad plainly enjoys the taunting the US. This is an Iranian luxury, afforded by geography and geology, that neither India and Pakistan have.

Gwynne Dyer, Arab News

You have to admire the macho instincts of Hillary Clinton. Asked on the day of the Pennsylvania primary what she would do if Iran made a nuclear attack on Israel, she replied: “If I’m the president, we will attack Iran… we would be able to totally obliterate them.” And it’s perfectly true. The United States has enough nuclear weapons to blast, irradiate, incinerate and obliterate all 75 million people in Iran many times over. All she has to do is press the button.

First she has to win the presidential election, of course, but American voters can rest easy in the knowledge that Mrs. Clinton would not hesitate to kill tens of millions of people on behalf of their friends in Israel. What a contrast with wimpy Barack Obama, who said: “Using words like ‘obliterate’ — it doesn’t actually produce good results.” What does he use for a backbone?

Tedious purists will point out that Iran doesn’t actually have any nuclear weapons. Indeed, late last year the US intelligence agencies produced a joint National Intelligence Estimate stating that Iran has not even been working to develop nuclear weapons for the past four years.

The critics and the carpers might also point out that Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons of its own, and is perfectly capable of obliterating Iran without American help. But practical politicians like Hillary Clinton know that there is always some political mileage to be gained by promising to help Israel, whether it needs help or not.

On the very same day, by coincidence, another American was revealed to be in the business of helping Israel. His name is Ben-Ami Kadish, and he appeared in a New York courtroom charged with spying on the United States for Israel.

Kadish, who worked at the US Army’s Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center in New Jersey from 1979 to 1985, allegedly gave secrets involving information about nuclear weapons, fighter jets and missiles to Israel in the 1980s. He was charged with four counts of conspiracy, including disclosing documents relating to national defense and acting as an agent of Israel.

Kadish, 84, is long retired, but he is still in touch with Israeli diplomats. When he realized on March 20 that he was going to be arrested, he called his current Israeli handler, according to the Justice Department, and was instructed: “Don’t say anything….What happened 25 years ago? You don’t remember anything.” Nor is this the first time that an American citizen has been publicly accused by the US government of spying for Israel.

In the most prominent case, Jonathan Jay Pollard was convicted in 1987 of passing thousands of secret documents to Israeli agents while working at the US Defense Department. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for spying for Israel, and ever since then Israeli governments have been trying to secure his release. He was granted Israeli citizenship in 1998.

State Department spokesman Tom Casey, asked what Washington was going to do about the Kadish case, said that Israel would be informed of his arrest. “Twenty-plus years ago, during the Pollard case, we noted that this was not the kind of behavior we would expect from friends and allies, and that would remain the case today,” he said. But there will be no diplomats expelled, none of the dramatics that you would see if the US government caught some American spying for the Russian or Chinese.

To be fair, the United States probably spies on Israel as well. This is just the normal behavior of sovereign states, but even close allies normally complain quite loudly when they catch the other party spying on them.

There is a curious asymmetry in the US-Israeli relationship. Israel is the sole beneficiary of this alliance — indeed, the US pays a significant price for it in terms of its relations with other Middle Eastern countries — and yet Israel can spy on the United States with impunity.

During the Cold War, Israel was a valuable strategic ally for the United States in the Middle East, but that ended 20 years ago. Now it is not a strategic asset at all, but Israel has persuaded the American public otherwise. So much so that Israel can brazenly spy on the United States and suffer no political penalty.

Hillary Clinton presumably knows this, but she also knows that threatening mass slaughter in defense of Israel is a vote-winner in the current political environment in the United States. Barack Obama obviously knows it, but although he is not going to commit political suicide by saying it out loud, at least he refused to echo her blood-curdling threat.