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Jordan FM calls Palestinians to stop suicide attacks
The Jordanian foreign minister has called on Palestinians to halt suicide bombing attacks during the upcoming Israeli election period. Marwan Muasher warned Palestinians that suicide attacks during the election period could contribute to the election of a far right-wing government in Israel. Speaking to the London-based Al-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper, the Jordanian minister stressed that the collapse of Sharon's government was a result of domestic issues and not of the peace process. A hundred years from now, when the world is mostly divided between agnostics and atheists, an historian will analyze why religion died en masse. Here's the reason: this man, an educated Muslim, cannot come out and say that killing innocents is wrong. The reason Christianity is on the edge of disappearing is exactly the same — Unitarians, Episcopalians, United Methodists, and the like cannot bring themselves to say "this is an abomination in the eyes of God." Even more fundamentalist branches of Protestantism spend much, much more time evoking the Glory of God than they do examining right and wrong. I put that down to ecumenism, which is fine in theory, but which ends up looking for the similarities among religions while ignoring or downplaying the differences. The resulting thin gruel is devoid of both flavor and sustenance. Chris Johnson and Mark Byron know much more about the subject than I do, but it seems to me that Islam's appeal is that it does present that "right-wrong" aspect; it just draws it out to the point of absurdity, with fatwas on everything down to how to pee correctly (Muslims are supposed to squat because The Prophet did) and how to pack the pork to the Little Woman. The one will die because it's bloodless, and the other because it's bloodthirsty. Posted by: Fred Pruitt 2002-11-09 |
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