And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear: “A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.” ~ Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat.
Thus did Kipling, the Poet of Empire, caution the British about the Eastern world the Victorians and Edwardians believed to be theirs.
And with that world so inflamed against us, perhaps we should inspect more closely our irreconcilable conflict – what Harvard’s Michael Ignatieff calls “the fatal dialectic between Islamic rage and Western free speech.” Consider first American values, as seen from an ACLU point of view.
Our establishment holds that not only is there to be a wall of separation between church and state, all symbols of religious belief are to be expunged from public institutions and the public square.
And what do devout Muslims believe?
That there is no God but Allah, that Muhammad is his prophet, that Shariah shows the way to a moral life in this world and paradise in the next.
Many Muslims put their Islamic faith ahead of their national identity and forbid preachers from other religions from coming into their countries to convert their young. Apostasy is treason to Allah. Heresy has no rights.
[…]
