Secretary General Kofi Annan is making an unexpected trip to Qatar this weekend to try to calm the violent reaction to cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad at a meeting to promote religious and cultural understanding. Annan decided to seize the opportunity of a long-planned meeting of the UN-sponsored Alliance of Civilisations to publicly address the issues raised by the caricatures and emphasise his opposition to the violent outbursts and the need for tolerance, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Monday. "He hopes ... to meet with a number of leaders from Europe and from the Islamic world and to discuss with them ways of calming the situation and allowing a constructive dialogue between people of different faiths and traditions based on mutual understanding and respect," Dujarric said. Annan met the ambassadors of half a dozen countries in the Organisation of Islamic Conference on Monday evening to discuss the February 26-28 meeting in Qatar's capital, Doha. They also discussed a proposal by the 57-member group of Muslim nations' to include language against "the defamation of religions and prophets" in a draft resolution that would create a new Human Rights Council.
| I wonder if that includes Ahmadis and Ba'hais? |
| Now you're talkin' crazy talk. Best leave the distictions to more, um.... discerning parties. Your glasses don't have the right prescription. |
Annan launched the Alliance of Civilisations initiative in response to a request from Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero to mobilise national and international action to overcome prejudice, misperceptions and polarisation between cultures and civilisations — especially Islam and the West.
| I wasn't aware that Zappy was a "former" prime minister. Did I miss something? Did Christians boom the Madrid underground and cause the Spaniards to vote him and his party out? More important than a single cranial methane vent is the fact that the cartoon fiasco takes the mask off Islam as a "tolerant" religion that's capable of coexisting with other religions. Sufism might maybe do it, and maybe even post-Qom Shiism, but not the Sunni flavor, and certainly not Salafism. The unrelenting series of riots, the attacks on embassies and businesses, culminating in multiple fatwahs calling for the deaths of the cartoonists, may have — emphasis on the "may," since the US public seems peculiarly insulated against what's going on — pushed the West past the tipping point. The demands to protect "religions and prophets" at the UN level is a call for world-wide imposition of blasphemy laws. We can't live with that. No civilization with a free press and freedom of religion can. We've seen a lot of fiery tempers here in the past few days, and they're traceable right back to this fundamental split. Our patience is running out as we watch the events unfold. Eventually, if the Islamists have their way, this visceral reaction is going to spread to the world at large. Probably this isn't the tipping point, though it will come. We're informed here, reading the Arab and Pak press every day. The general public isn't, not in the U.S. and not in Europe. They're still being spoon-fed their news by a press that's more concerned with domestic politix than with the survival of their nations.
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