If Christian EU, Why not Muslim Union?

Writing in 1751 Voltaire described Europe as `a kind of great republic, divided into several states, some monarchical, the others mixed but all corresponding with one another. They all have the same religious foundation, even if divided into several confessions.

They all have the same principles of public law and politics unknown in other parts of the world.` But they also had a lot of war.

Fifty years ago in a way that Charlemagne, Voltaire, William Penn and William Gladstone, the early advocates of European unity, could only dream, a united Europe became a reality.

War, time and time again, has interrupted the pursuit of that objective. Continued civil war across the continent, across the centuries, has pitted French against Germans, British against kallans, Czechs against Poles, Serbs against Austrians and Spaniards against Spaniards reaching its dreadful climax in World Wars One and Two. As Jan Morris has written in her Fifty Years of Europe, `great cities lay in ruin, bridges were broken, roads and railways were in chaos.

Conquerors from East and West flew their ensigns above the seats of old authority, and proud populations would do almost anything for a pack of cigarettes or some nylon stockings. Europe was in shock, powerless, discredited and degraded.

Over the ages no other continent has been the scene of so much war.

Many, if not most, of that generation wondered in 1945 if they`d ever see Europe again in any state of grace or glory, much less unified.

The fact that the urge to bury the hatchet and forge common institutions has come so far in such a short time against such a background is arguably for the world as a whole the twentieth century`s greatest political achievement. (Following the Declaration of Independence it took the US nearly 90 years to establish a fully mature common currency; Europe has travelled the same course in 40 years.)

Yet this astonishing and triumphant success begs the question:
What is the glue that holds it all together? 
After all what is Europe?
Geographically, it is no more than a peninsula protruding from the landmass of Asia. Culturally, it has always been a potage of languages, peoples and traditions. Politically, it is a moveable feast of the 35 sovereign states in post Iron Curtain Europe nine have been created or resurrected since World War Two.

Indeed it is religion, not politics nor the single market and monetary union that through the ages has made Europe one, held it together through its vicissitudes and bloody wars (many, tragically, of religious origin) and provided the common basic morality and common identity that made the EU, makes a single currency workable, the Schengen agreement making passport-free travel possible inside most of Europe today and political union a tangible, if still hotly debated, goal tomorrow.

Broadcasting to a defeated Germany in 1945, the poet T.S.

Elliot reminded his audience that despite the war and `the closing of Europe`s mental frontiers because of an excess of nationalism it is in Christianity that our arts have developed, it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe until recently have been rooted. An individual European may not believe the Christian faith is true; and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will depend on the Christian heritage for its meaning.

Of course, today one can ask what do the contemporary European cults of finance, sports, TV, pop culture, eroticism and Ryanair flying wherever it wants have to do with a Christian heritage? Nevertheless, the fact is through changing fashions, through wars big and small, the idea of Europe that persists is essentially Christian unity of principles and peace in relationships. On its own, economic self interest never would have created the EU and, more recently, monetary union. Economic, legal, social and monetary unions have been driven all along by men and women who were essentially idealistic and visionary. From Jean Monnet, the founder of modern Europe, to Helmut Schmidt, Valery Giscard D`Estaing, Francois Mitterand and Helmut Kohl, the founders and creators of the EU and the euro, the urge to remove the causes of belligerency and to form institutions that would further the development of a common democracy has been a central purpose.

Europe is not first and foremost a political concept or a un ancial convenience. It is an ideal. Thus it will never be complete. We will work at it all our lives, as will future generations.

For the British to decide not to pull out now can only happen if the university-trained elite together with the leadership of the pro-European trade unions (most of them) educate the public on the history and the ideals of Europe.

Extracts from "Big question for UK on European Union", By Jonathan Power 
Dawn.Com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ummah

Ummah (Arabic: أمة‎) is an Arabic word meaning "community". It is distinguished from Sha'b (Arabic: شعب‎) which means a nation with common ancestry or geography. Thus, it can be said to be a supra-national community with a common history. It is a synonym for ummat al-Islamiyah (Arabic: الأمة الإسلامية‎) (the Islamic Community), and it is commonly used to mean the collective community of Islamic peoples. In the Quran the ummah typically refers to a single group that shares common religious beliefs, specifically those that are the objects of a divine plan of salvation.^[1][2] In the context of Pan-Islamism and politics, the word Ummah can be used to mean the concept of a Commonwealth of the Believers (أمة المؤمنين ummat al-mu'minīn).

www.oic-oci.org

Read:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union 
www.europa.eu
https://plus.google.com/+AftabKhan-PeaceForum/posts/Ejb2xdJoSgN
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MI5’s radar should look for the word ‘injustice’ if it wants to protect us by Robert Fisk

UI’m sure the lads and lasses at GCHQ and the “Ms” and “Qs” of our intelligence services want more and more “tools” to combat the army of world terror which confronts us. But I was very struck by one of the metaphors used by MI5’s boss Andrew Parker this month. He was waffling on to chosen journos about the dangers of accepting that privacy was “so absolute and sacrosanct that terrorists … can confidently operate behind these walls without fear of detection”. If MI5 lost the ability to identify these dastardly enemies – “if parts of the radar go dark” – then public safety is reduced.

Hear, hear. Couldn’t agree more. However, I was much struck by the image of the radar screen, into which Andy’s sleuths are no doubt staring 24 hours a day. And you can see the problem. A bit of the screen starts shading into grey, becomes a little patchy, “goes dark” – and then Isis, al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, the al-Nusrah Front, Bashar Assad’s “Mukhabarat” intelligence boys, Iranian “terrorists” (if they still exist) and all manner of other chaps will be plotting to destroy us without Andy being aware of it.

The problem with all this is not that MI5’s radar might grow dark. It’s that any sane intelligence officer in the UK knows well that the “terrorist” threat grows not in proportion to the clarity of his or her radar screen, but to the hypocrisy and brutality of British, US and other Western policies in the Middle East.

For if Mr Parker and his crew really want to protect us, they have only to look at the plight of the occupied Palestinians, the statelessness of the Kurds, the imprisoned tens of thousands of Arabs in the jails and torture chambers of the Arab world whose dictators we have supported – and in the case of Egypt and much of the Gulf – still do support and protect. The atrocities which we allow to be perpetrated – in effect, in our own name – would drive any Islamist young man or woman to violence against his or her oppressors. Indeed, there is ample proof that al-Qaeda’s original inspiration was nurtured in ex-President Hosni Mubarak’s Tora prison complex where Islamist prisoners were sometimes given female names before being forced to sodomise each other.

Read more:
Revolution is on the horizon in Saudi Arabia
We can't afford not to hold Saudi Arabia's royals to account
Flood of jihadi volunteers to Syria 'unstoppable'
Please note, I am not even mentioning the regime of torture we ourselves instituted in Afghanistan and in Guantanamo and in Iraq after our savage and illegal invasion. Nor am I writing about the slaughter of Palestinian children – more than 300 last summer – in Israel’s regular bombardments of Gaza. Yes, I know that Hamas is wicked and Isis is the most-frightening, “apocalyptic”, “end-of-the-world” enemy we have faced since Hitler, the Kaiser, Tamburlaine or Genghis Khan, that the “Muslim Brotherhood” wanted to create a caliphate in Egypt (which I don’t believe), that al-Qaeda attacked America in 2001 and Britain in 2007 and – if its apostles in Yemen were behind the killings in Paris – in France in 2015. But beyond this field of blood there is a history of massive injustice which must be recognised, and a vital need for good people to speak out about the iniquities we have unleashed or permitted in the Middle East.
What, for example, were those who have suffered so grievously at our hands – or at those of our supposed allies – to have thought when they read not many weeks ago of General Martin Dempsey’s preposterous remarks about the extraordinary restraint of the Israeli army. General Dempsey is chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest-ranking military officer in America, and – making no reference to the compelling evidence of war crimes committed by Israeli troops when they killed 2,100 Palestinians, most of them civilians last August – claimed that Israel went to “extraordinary lengths to limit collateral damage and civilian casualties… They did some extraordinary things to try and limit civilian casualties, to include … making it known that they were going to destroy a particular structure”. He dismissed Palestinian civilian casualties – to whom Human Rights Watch accused the Israeli army of showing “callous indifference” – as “tragic”.

Why, General Dempsey even packed some senior and non-commissioned officers off to Israel after the Gaza bloodbath to learn more about the operation. Let us hope that his warriors do not plan to put their knowledge into practice in the next air strikes in Syria and Iraq.

Not that Isis or al-Qaeda will care. They have long insisted that the US and Israel are essentially the same nation with the same military objectives and the same, vicious tactics. And along comes General Dempsey to help Isis with their propaganda. This is the stuff from which “terrorism” is made.

But none of this seems of much – if any – interest to the director general of the Security Services. For what must appear on any radar screen at MI5 – the “tool” to “root out” all “terror” – is the key word: injustice. But I fear this would be regarded as a technical malfunction, a sudden darkening of the screen rather than a powerful illumination which could help our security services to protect our lives. For I’m sure I know what Andy’s orders would be if that dreaded word appeared on the radar at MI5:  Switch off the screen!

The opaque language of peacemaking

I have always admired the work of the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation, housed within the grim walls of an old barracks from which 18th-century British soldiers would ensure the obedience of the people of Co Wicklow: a fit meeting place for the Northern Ireland antagonists of the 1990s, Dublin civil servants and British diplomats. The centre even managed to arrange a meeting between Peter Robinson of Paisley’s DUP, Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein and Afghan parliamentarians. Glencree was a “peacebuilder”.

But I sighed when I read the words of Wilhelm Verwoerd, the brave son of apartheid’s architect who joined the ANC and worked for the South African truth commission. It wasn’t his politics, I took exception to. It was his language. For in a book about political reconciliation, Verwoerd describes Glencree as “a residential space … guided by values of inclusivity and non-judgementalism as part of a carefully facilitated process of deepening understanding and cultivating humanising connections”. I can see why Robinson and McGuinness got on well – it was mutual linguistic self-protection.

MI5’s radar should look for the word ‘injustice’ if it wants to protect us
by Robert Fisk, independent.co.uk