terça-feira, novembro 18, 2003
Os Atentados na Turquia
Doug Bandow na National Review Online:
Istanbul is a beautiful city sitting astride the Bosphorus. A sophisticated, tolerant city, it seamlessly mixes Occident and Orient. But now it has been stricken by the new cancer of our age: terrorism.
The attack on two Turkish synagogues is not just an instance of terrorism. It is the deliberate targeting of civilians nowhere near a war zone. And it reflects the virulent antisemitism that has despoiled our world for centuries.
It is hard for most people steeped in the humane, liberal values of Western Civilization to understand the massacre of innocents. To slaughter to make a political point. But terrorism is not likely to disappear
(...)
The Istanbul strikes — like those in Riyadh, Jakarta, Bali, and on the World Trade Center — take terrorism a step further. They are intended to kill noncombatants. The goal is not to resist foreign military power per se, but to murder and terrorize civilians. The willingness to kill, and kill indiscriminately, is expected to cow peoples and governments.
Yet the bombings of the two Turkish synagogues cap the murder of innocents with that age-old disease, antisemitism. It's been around for centuries, mixing discrimination with persecution.
That terrorists claim to kill people in the name of God may be the greatest sacrilege. The Abu-Hafs al-Masri Brigades, a group linked to al Qaeda, took credit for the Istanbul attacks: "The remaining operations are coming, God willing, and by God, Jews around the world will regret that their ancestors even thought about occupying the land of Muslims."
What kind of God urges his people to kill other people gathered to worship him? What kind of God urges people to kill other people today because of what their ancestors did years, decades, and centuries before? What kind of God urges people to kill other people, made in his image and of transcendent worth, to advance ephemeral political ends?
What kind of God is this?
If this is not the God of Islam, Muslims must speak out. Not just Islamic politicians themselves under attack — in Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, for instance. But clerics, imams, teachers, and ayatollahs. And common celebrants, those who regularly fill mosques for worship and daily drop to their prayer rugs.
Moreover, it is not enough to denounce attacks on Americans or Australians or Indonesians. It is necessary to denounce attacks on Jews. To say clearly that the God of Islam does not urge the children of Ishmael to murder the children of Isaac.
No one but the enemy gains from turning the war on terrorism into a war between civilizations. But it certainly is a war between the civilized and uncivilized. And after atrocities like that in Istanbul, it is essential that Muslims as well as Christians declare against antisemitism, the blasphemy that refuses to die.
posted by Miguel Noronha 2:25 da tarde
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