DAR AL HARB-U.K.: GUIDE TO MOSLEM INTOLERANCE BY THE ARCHBISHIP OF CANTERBURY

The Archbishop's guide to Muslim intolerance.

Problem: You are the spiritual leader of the Church of England and, by extension, some 70 million Anglicans worldwide. You have come to Bethlehem, where you will address the issue of Muslim attacks on Mideast Christians and Arab Christian institutions.

In Bethlehem, you have heard reports of incidents in which Muslims have intimidated, shaken-down, beaten, and even killed Christian Palestinian residents of the city. Some Christians have reported that Muslims issued them death threats if they failed to sign over title to Christian-owned land.

In Iraq, priests have been attacked, some of them murdered.

You are the Archbishop of Canterbury. It is time you spoke out.

In the back of your mind, however, is the Pope's September speech which, touching on Islam, touched off the murder of a nun in Somalia, and the bombing of churches in the West Bank, Gaza, and Iraq.

Solution: Blame the Christian West. And, while you're at it, blame the Jews.

Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury is no one's fool. The spiritual head of the Church of England knows a trap when he sees one. He knows what happened to the head of the Church of Rome. The archbishop wasn't about to suggest that responsibility for bloodshed committed in the name of Islam should be borne by the Muslims who commit it.

"In an extraordinary attack," the Times of London summarized the archbishop's message as stating, "Dr. Williams accuses Tony Blair and the U.S. of endangering the lives and futures of many thousands of Christians in the Middle East, who are regarded by their countrymen as supporters of the ?crusading West.'"

The Times further paraphrased the archbishop as maintaining that "Christians in the Middle East are being put at unprecedented risk by the Government?s ?shortsighted' and 'ignorant' policy in Iraq."

Radical chic? Fear of reprisals? Doctrine-grounded belief? If you're the Archbishop of Canterbury, there's no need to choose.

In Bethlehem, which, like Iraq, is a focus of an ongoing exodus of Mideast Christians, Dr. Williams turned his sights on the Holy Land landmark which has fast become a pilgrimage site for the doctrinaire Left.

Speaking after his delegation passed through an Israeli checkpoint and entered Bethlehem, Dr. Williams said "The wall which we walked through a little while ago is a sign not simply of a sign of a passing problem in the politics of one region; it is sign of some of the things that are most deeply wrong in the human heart itself."

Someday, there will be a cogent explanation for the Western left's obsession with the wall, for the left's elevation of the barrier to the status of ultimate wickedness. The Anti-Kotel. The apotheosis of evil, before which the killing of innocents pales.

Balance, after all, is overrated. In February, less than two weeks after Hamas swept to victory in Palestinian Authority elections, the Anglican Church's General Synod overwhelmingly voted to divest from "companies profiting from the illegal occupation," such as Caterpillar, makers of the IDF's D9 bulldozers.

Dr. Williams's predecessor, Lord Carey, was quoted as responding that the decision, which he said ignored the trauma of Israeli Jews subjected to terrorism, made him "ashamed to be an Anglican."

There's a pattern here, and not just the knee-jerk necessity to pin all blame for the Middle East catastrophe on the Bush-Blair-Israel axis.

There is also the racism of the politically correct.

There's a sense here that Muslims aren't really responsible for their own actions, any more than they would be if they were mischievous children or animals in the wild.

No, it's us ? the West, Tony Blair, George Bush, Israeli Jews ? we are responsible. It was our hamhanded arrogance and state terrorism that brought on 9 /11 and the cavalcade of suicide bloodletting that followed. The only role of Muslims was to position the bombs, the box cutters, the Katyushas, the Qassams, the Kalashnikovs. We had already pulled the trigger.

The archbishop is telling us that it is Christians, aided and abetted by Jews, who have brought about Muslim intolerance toward Christians.

Has the war, in fact, fueled an upsurge in Muslim attacks on Christians? Undoubtedly. Does the wall cause Bethlehem's Christians terrible hardship? No question.

But Dr. Williams' formulation, that Muslims are attacking Christians because of what other Christians have done to other Muslims, was, perhaps more than anything else, a perverse echo of Holocaust denier David Irving's remarks this week on the Jews:

"They should ask themselves the question, 'Why have they been so hated for three thousand years that there has been pogrom after pogrom in country after country?'"

In the end, the Archbishop has taught us all at least one lesson.

Muslims must take responsibility for fighting Muslim intolerance toward Christians.

Christian leaders may not be up to the task.


Archbishop of Canterbury's full statement:

In the hectic days just before the Iraq War, one prediction often made and systematically ignored was the warning that Western military action - at that point in time and in that way would put Christian populations in the whole Middle East at risk. They would be seen as supporters of the crusading West. At the very least, some were asking, shouldn't we have a strategy about how to handle this?

Well, we didn't have one. And the results are now painfully adding to what was already a difficult situation for Christian communities across the region. Iraq's own Christian population is dropping by thousands every couple of months and some of its most effective leaders have been forced to emigrate. In Istanbul, the Orthodox population is a tiny remnant, and their Patriarch is told by some of the Turkish press that it's time he left. In Egypt, where Christian-Muslim relations have been - and still are - intimate and good, extremist attacks on Christians have become notably more frequent.

As well as finding asylum itself difficult to get, it's not unknown for Arab Christian families fleeing to the UK to find that their children are told in school that 'they must be Muslims really' and so are hived off with Muslim children for special activities. And that simply illustrates that we in the UK, from government downwards, are seriously badly-informed about Middle Eastern Christians.

Yet for centuries they have played a crucial role in practically all of those nations we now regard as uniformly Muslim - even Iran. They have been a reminder for both the Arab world and the West that 'Arab' and 'Muslim' are not the same - and that Muslim nations have a history of coping hospitably with Christians on their doorstep. As Christian populations migrate, it all fuels the myth in East and West - that Islam can't live with other faiths and that the East-West collision is an irreconcilable clash of faiths and cultures.

Yet Christian populations can genuinely be part of the solution. In Lebanon, Christian communities offered the most promising schemes for lasting peace during last summer’s conflict and peace plans developed by the Maronite church are widely acknowledged as bringing the most realistic contribution to the search for peace between warring Lebanese factions.

Of course Christian communities don’t have a blameless history in the region. But in the present climate they have something special to say. To the Westerner, they say, 'Remember that Christianity didn't start in England or even Rome; it's a Middle Eastern faith.’ To the Muslim world, they say, 'Remember that Islam would not have spread as it did without the way being prepared (as the Quran itself says) by the other local religions - by Christians and Jews in the region. Remember that there are ways of being authentically Arab, non-Western, that don't have to be Islamic.'

These communities will only survive if fellow-Christians in the West decide to pay a bit of attention. This doesn't mean using clumsy political or military pressure to 'protect' them, in ways that just reinforce the idea that they're Western allies and so must be unreliable. That's happened too often in the past. It means being willing to protest when they are ill-treated; to make contact with them directly, to set up links between local churches here and in the Middle East; to remember when we visit the region that they exist and they need friends. It's not that these Christians are being actively persecuted by Muslim governments on the whole. It's a matter of rising tides of extremism which governments are as keen to check as anyone.

Speaking up for and befriending the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East is good for them and for Muslims too; it's a reminder of the healthier and saner relationship between the faiths, which existed in many parts of the Middle East for long tracts of its complicated history.

It comes home most poignantly in the Holy Land itself. I have spent the last two days with fellow Christian leaders in Bethlehem, its Christian population down to barely a quarter. There are some signs of disturbing anti-Christian feeling among parts of the Muslim population, despite the consistent traditions of coexistence. But their plight is made still more intolerable by the tragic conditions created by the "security fence" which almost chokes the shrinking town - the dramatic poverty, soaring unemployment and sheer practical hardship of travelling to school, work or hospital. The sense of desperate isolation is felt by Christians more acutely than most.

Once heavily represented among the professional and educated classes, many feel they have no choice but to leave. One Christian Palestinian friend said to me, 'I never imagined that people like us would find ourselves hungry, unemployed, facing daily violence.' Some of the people who would be most helpful in making Palestinian society stronger and more democratic feel they have no future in the Holy Land: to the zealots on one side they are potential terrorists, to the zealots on the other they may be seen as infidels. And unfortunately it's the zealots who make the running.

The first Christian believers were Middle Easterners. It's a very sobering thought that we might live to see the last native Christian believers in the region. It's not a problem we can go on ignoring if we care about the health and stability of the Middle East in general; we need to try and confront it, not by weighing in with Western firepower but by making real relationships with the communities there and working at trustful contacts with those Muslims who understand their own history and want to live in a lively and varied culture.

This Christmas, pray for the little town of Bethlehem, and spare a thought for those who have been put so much at risk by our shortsightedness and ignorance; and ask what you might do locally to raise the profile of these brave and ancient churches.

Pertinent Links:

1) The Archbishop's guide to Muslim intolerance.

2) Archbishop Rowan Williams warns of war's deadly backlash - thousands of believers in Middle East 'at risk' (The Times of London Story)

3) Archbishop of Canterbury's Full Statement (Begins at middle of page, the top of the page contains excerpts only.)