While Rabbinical law prohibits Jews from trespassing on the sacred soil of al-Haram al-Sharif, the Zionist thugs are trampling on their own law to grab even the holy site.
CRUSADE — a word caught between the lexicon of pedestrian, every day use and the charged memories of civilizational struggle. The mixed history of the Crusades is itself caught within these contradictions...
The long history of encounters between Western civilization and Islam has produced a tradition of portraying, in largely negative and self-serving ways, the Islamic religion and Muslim cultures. There is a lot of literature cataloguing (and sometimes correcting) these stereotypes. It is not my intention to rehash this corpus here, though I do rely upon some of the more important works. What I want to do instead is focus on a particular dimension of these encounters, and examine why the West has consistently constructed and perpetuated negative images of Islam and Muslims. My focus will be on the utility of Islamic imagery in Western civilization.
US needs some one now, as it has needed in the past, to position as an "evil other" in opposition to its good self. The "evil other" in history has taken on many names and shapes, from despots, to pirates, to bandits, to terrorists. In Western civilization, which is ferociously dichotomous, there is a necessity to define through opposition, and therefore a "terrorist" or some other nefarious character -- real or imagined -- is actually necessary for the maintenance of a western self image.
As the Christian millennium looms, Muslims - rather than joining the celebrations - might fruitfully use the occasion to consider the Christian and western influence and impact on Islamic civilization.
